Books read January through December 2015
| Author | Scalzi, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Tor Books |
| Copyright Date | 2013 |
| Number of Pages | 93 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | January 2015 |
A space ship of humans from the Colonial Union transforms through some hyperspace mechanism to another point in space where they are to meet another ship from the alien Utche race to negotiate a treaty. However shortly after appearing several days early at the appointed spot, they are attacked and destroyed by missiles. Another ship is sent after them to find out what happened to them. That second ship includes a Colonial Defense Force officer charged with investigating the loss and an ambassador whose job is to take up the negotiations with the Utche.
The CDF officer, Wilson, determines that the first ship was destroyed by missiles made by humans. He figures that there must have been a traitorous conspiracy of some kind with an agent in the Colonial government to disrupt the negotiations and resume fighting with the Utche.
This novella is the first "episode" in a series. At the end of the story the negotiations have been saved by Wilson's feats of brain power and derring do, but the conspiracy is still a mystery. Worse, the entire Colonial Union is cut off from Earth, under stress, and might, optimistically, only be able to defend itself for another 30 years. We are ready for future episodes.
The story sells as a Kindle download for 99 cents on Amazon. It is intended for readers to read it, then get the next, the next, and so on for 13 total episodes. It's a sort of reversion to an earlier model of serial publishing a la Dickens, or to the SciFi and other serials in the Saturday matinee movies I watched in the early 1950's. I should think that's a winning formula that will appeal to a fair number of readers and not forbid the publication of the entire series as a 1300 page (or whatever) book or trilogy of books in the future.
As for the book itself, well, it's just what one would expect. There is a snappy story that tears along at a good speed, feats of ingenuity and bravery, explosions, mysteries, and smart-aleck one liner remarks made by characters to each other. Clearly, it's intended as a fun read for folks who like that sort of thing. Serious writing it's not. Serious science fiction it's not.
One Amazon reviewer complained that there was too much character development. Considering that the development was pretty close to zero, that particular reviewer's notion of character development is itself in need of review.
This is pure adolescent space opera. The humans are the kinds of people that populate pulp fiction of various genres. They are concerned with alternately sucking up to their bosses and circumventing restrictions the bosses place on them. The bosses are characteristically antagonistic to their subordinates. Everyone seems to live in the present. There are no significant human relationships. There are no significant emotions. No one is actually concerned about any of the really big issues that would be involved in a space war or in contact between alien races.
Typical lines of dialog selected at random include such statements as:
"It’s not magic, it’s physics, ma’am"
"A nice sinecure for mediocrities to be shoved into, where they can do no real harm. Well, all that changes now."
"Ambassador Bair isn’t on our A-list," Egan said, still scanning crew manifests. "She’s on our A Plus–list. If she was pipped to negotiate, then this mission is an actual priority, not just a top-secret diplomatic circle jerk."
"All right, Harry Wilson, supergenius," Schmidt said. "If you can’t see it and can’t sweep for it, then how do you find it?" "I’m glad you asked," Wilson said.
"No, but now you know what are the right situations for them," Rigney said. "High-risk, high-reward situations where the path to success isn’t laid out but has to be cut by machetes through a jungle filled with poison toads."
"The poison toads are a nice touch," Egan said, reaching for another french fry.
I read a lot of this kind of writing between the ages of 10 and 14 or so. There's a part of me that still enjoys it. And I think I enjoyed it more in a 93 page novella than I would have in a longer book. But I don't know that I enjoyed it enough to read another episode. There's too much other stuff to read. Even for quick, light, entertainment, the jarring perception of the future in terms of 1940's pulp fiction keeps intruding on the enjoyment.
| Author | Hustvedt, Siri |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014 |
| Copyright Date | 2014 |
| Number of Pages | 384 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | January 2015 |
Harriet "Harry" Burden Lord, widow of successful New York art dealer Felix Lord, daughter of a professor of philosophy, is an artist but has never had any acceptance of her work. She is only known in the art world as the wife, then widow, of Felix and her art is not considered worth acknowledging on its own.
Convinced that she is a good artist, and having a lot of money inherited from Felix, she embarks on a program to present art to the world through front men who will take the credit and any income from sales until she finally reveals herself to the world as the real artist.
The first front man is Anton Tish, a young fellow who has not yet established himself. The works given him by Harry Burden are successful and bring him to the attention of the art world but destroy his own sense of self. He resents Harry as having taken over his future and placed him in an untenable position. He cannot live up to the instant achievement he has attained and feels that he no longer has the chance to develop his own persona. He leaves New York and is not seen again.
The second is Phineas Q. Eldridge, the pseudonym of a half-black gay man who has made a career for himself as a night club entertainer made up as half black and half white, half male, and half female. He and Harry get along well and he supports her goals, but Harry needs to go beyond Phineas and find someone who will create a greater sensation. She chooses a third man.
The third man is Rune Larsen. Rune is a bold, handsome, successful, narcissistic, performance artist with a real reputation of his own. He is surrounded by beautiful women. The works he does with Harry are tremendously successful but he believes, or at least says he believes, that they are entirely his, with no real contribution other than financial sponsorship from Harriet Burden. This is a crisis for her that she is unable to fully overcome. The art world believes Rune, not Harry.
The novel has an unconventional and extraordinary form. It is a collection of about 45 sections. Many of these are Harry's notebooks. Others are essays, articles, or interviews with others who knew Harry or her work. Some of these are "edited" by "I.V. Hess", the overall editor of the work. Hess writes an introduction to the work and is present in the selection of sections to include, the interviews, and presumably in some editing of the edited sections.
Each of the sections is either by Harry or about her, though in some cases they are art reviews of her work without knowing or acknowledging that it is her work. They have all different points of view.
Some of the essayists include Bruno Kleinman, Harry's lover after Lord's death, her two children Maisie and Ethan, her three stand-ins Anton, Phineas and Rune, her childhood friend Rachel, now a psychologist, various art critics, and even Sweet Autumn Pinkney, the erstwhile lover of Anton Tish and a strange, childish, mystic who sees auras around people and comes to Harry to be with her during her death from cancer and ease her transition to the other world.
In the end Harry dies. Bruno is bereft. Her project is unresolved. She has not been accepted into the art world that she so longed to join. She goes to her death fighting mad.
The last section of the book is by Sweet Autumn Pinkney. It is an odd ending - a deep, complex, philosophical, sociological, psychological, intellectual book ends with the silly, absurd, but sweet and sincere nonsense by Sweet Autumn. Perhaps it is a nod to simple love and humanity amidst the complex issues of these sophisticated people.
The novel is a deeply intellectual achievement. Hustvedt demonstrates an extensive knowledge of philosophy, art history and criticism, literature, psychology, sociology, and even some neuroscience. She quotes from the literature of these subjects and footnotes her quotes. Although I didn't check the notes, I assume they were accurate and were there as evidence of the authenticity of the claims being made. Harriet is not a poseur. She's the real thing and so, obviously, is Hustvedt.
Throughout the story there are both discussions and dramatic illustrations of the problems of identity and acknowledgment. One of the discussions was, to me, a striking analysis of the relationship of artist to work. In the section entitled "An Alphabet Toward Several Meanings of Art and Generation" by Ethan Lord, H analyzes the meaning and value of a work of art both inside and outside considerations of artist, viewer, and context. She shows that the artist, viewer and context are all are deeply intertwined. Removing one changes a lot about the work.
Some of the sections are reviews of exhibitions by Tate, Eldridge, or Rune, which is to say, by Harriet Burden. The reviews struck me as exactly what one would expect from art magazines. Rich with perception, idea, and sophisticated language, they culled out meaning from the exhibitions. It was the kind of meaning that might be very deep, or pure bullshit - without firm facts to distinguish between the two possibilities. It was a tour de force of mimicry of what critics do.
Running throughout all of this was the elusive question of identity. The editor, Hess, argues that the critic Richard Brickman, and maybe some of the other critics, were actually Harriet Burden, writing pseudonymously. Brickman's insights were not unlike Harry's but had a different, masculine perspective. In other passages "Siri Hustvedt" is mentioned by name. We have Hustvedt writing about Harriet Burden, Harry writing about Hustvedt, Harry writing as Brickman writing about Burden, Tate, Eldridge and Rune fronting for Burden. It's a jumble of characters who, in some sense are all one character and in other senses all different characters.
In one extraordinary scene, Burden lashes out at Rune and he takes the feminine role of "Ruina". He acts the part of a humiliated woman while Harry becomes madder and madder and more and more masculine in her rage. When she has reached a high point of losing herself, Rune re-appears and brings her back to earth. It causes Harry to question her own identity, to wonder who she is and whether she even knows herself.
There are a host of interesting minor characters. Harry's son Ethan is highly intelligent but strange and vulnerable. Her daughter Maisie is solid and helpful. An insane but harmless character called "the Barometer" is living in a room in Harry's house. Harry supports him for reasons she does not explain. "Sweet Autumn Pinkney", a flower child and airhead, floats into the story and is resented by Bruno but Harry likes her. It's hard to think of two people more different than Sweet Autumn and Harry, but their feeling for each other works.
Bruno Kleinfeld was a wonderful creation. Pushing sixty, fat, dead broke, barely living on $12,000 a year as an instructor at a college, working in constipated fashion on his magnum opus of poetry that will never be complete, he sees Harry coming in and out of her building across the street from his. He envies her obvious financial resources. He finds her attractive. He maneuvers to meet her. He borrows money to take her to dinner. They talk. We think that he must be a gold digger. They meet again. Then he launches himself at her and buries himself in her ample breast. To our surprise, she reciprocates his affection. They are right for each other in ways that we did not imagine when meeting Bruno but understand after H lays it all out. He is the right man for her and she the right woman for him.
I read this book as part of the NCI Office of Communications and Education (or whatever it's called these days) book group. Bob Kline read the book before me and told me that I would like it. He was absolutely right. I don't know if he liked it as much as I did, but I loved it. I told the other people in the group, all women except for Bob and myself, that I thought it was a work of genius.
The others did not feel that way. They thought the book was overwrought. There were too many characters. The story was too obscure. There was no resolution to Harry's problems of identity and lack of acknowledgment. I asked about the section by Ethan on the "Alphabet" and they all said they found it unreadable and skipped it. I told them I read it two or three times and thought it was a brilliant analysis of the problem of the relation of artist, viewer and work. They said that this was not an enjoyable novel to read. I said that it was not meant to be. They had trouble with that concept. Why was it written then? I said that I thought it was written for the writer as much as the reader - though I wouldn't say it that way if I could say it over again. It is written for readers too, but only those readers who are interested in the questions it raises and willing to do the work to understand what Hustvedt has written.
The women in the group are no fools. They are mostly not unsophisticated readers and certainly not anti-intellectuals. It was one of the highly intelligent women who applied the word "acknowledgment" to explain what Harry was searching for - which characterized it very well for me. They listened to my arguments on behalf of the book but didn't agree. Or, if they did agree, they didn't think that those arguments justified the book or made it worth reading.
I feel somewhat isolated in the group. I enjoy it. I was tremendously pleased with this book choice - a book I never would have read had one of the women not put it on our agenda (she wasn't so happy after reading it.) However I feel somewhat like an eccentric, a person off in my own world.
Perhaps I am. Probably I am. But I'm not really unhappy about it.
| Author | Smith, Martin Cruz |
|---|---|
| Publication | Simon and Schuster Audio, 2013 |
| Number of Pages | 304 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | January 2015 |
The novel opens with the murder of a translator out for a bike ride outside of Kaliningrad. We don't know exactly what or for whom he was translating, but someone is after his notebook and kills him for it, then tosses it away thinking that this odd book of symbols and doodles can't be significant.
The scene switches to Moscow where Senior Investigator Arkady Renko attends the funeral of Grisha Grigorenko, a mobster. A group of journalists arrive to demonstrate about the death of crusading journalist Tatiana Petrovna, possibly killed by the mobster. Anya, a woman journalist from Arkady's building, one whom he sleeps with occasionally, is with the demonstrators and when a bunch of skinheads, abetted by the police, assault the demonstrators, Arkady steps in to protect her and gets bashed about too.
He is interested in the death of the mobster, interested in the mobster's son, but mostly interested in who killed Tatiana and why. He and his detective sergeant Victor Orlov try to find out - though the police have ruled it suicide and no one has ordered Renko to investigate it. Victor really wants nothing to do with the case but he's loyal to Arkady and helps.
Anya has gotten hold of the notebook and gives it to Arkady, but it is then stolen from him by Zhenya, his sort of ward or stepson from a previous case. Arkady goes to Kaliningrad to find Tatiana's sister but ultimately figures out that it was Tatiana's sister that was murdered and Tatiana is still alive, posing as her own sister. She and Arkady and a poet who loved Tatiana begin to figure everything out.
The break in the case comes from Zhenya. He is a brilliant chess hustler and meets a young girl who plays chess even better than he does. The two work on the notebook and figure out that it's a record of a corrupt deal regarding a Russian submarine that was produced by a substandard yard that cut corners everywhere. Mobsters have cut a deal with various government and navy officials to have it repaired for a billion dollars in China, while charging the state two billion. In the end, Arkady convinces one of the mobsters that another has betrayed him. One kills the other and lets Arkady and Tatiana go.
The best part of this story may be the deadpan humor. Victor says that the whole story is fucked. Everything is fucked. There is no good that can come from the investigation. The bad guys are almost humorous in an Elmore Leonard way. There is the main bad guy, Grisha's son who has taken over his business and is attempting to establish himself as the biggest and baddest. Abdul, is a weird central Asian gangster and rap artist. "Ape" Bellodon is, well, Ape Bellodon. But the story itself seems to me forced and relying heavily on completely improbable elements.
Arkady never carries his gun. It's locked in his safe at home. Smith puts him into several situations where having a gun would seem to have been essential, but he gets out of them, in one case by the intervention of Tatiana's dog who distracts the bad guy, and in another by improbably stimulating an argument between the bad guys. He and Tatiana board a ship with all of the gangsters on it with an absurd plan to get what they want and with no plan for how to get off again. When Arkady intervenes in the fight at the funeral, he gets beaten down by skinheads and cops but has no particular concern about what has happened to him.
The few times I have been in serious danger, whether it's flying a sailplane or facing a possible fight, I've been scared. I was thinking hard and fast, and not always as effectively as I needed to. But Arkady is relaxed and takes things as they come. This is not just a matter of being in danger and not having options, it's purposely placing himself in danger without seeming to consider any options.
I didn't believe in Arkady's reactions. I didn't believe in his relationship with Zhenya. In fact, I didn't believe much of anything in the story.
It was well written with a wonderful sardonic style and a marvelous reading by Strozier who made the most of that style. He made me like the book more than I think I would have if I were reading the text myself.
| Author | Beevor, Antony |
|---|---|
| Publication | ISIS Audio Books, 2007 |
| Copyright Date | 2003 |
| Number of Pages | 528 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | January 2015 |
Beevor opens his book at the beginning of 1945. The Red Army is in Poland and is close to crossing into the Reich. The Wehrmacht is, improbably, still holding together and patching holes in its front. They are still imposing heavy casualties on the Russians, but the German officers understand that the war is lost and they cannot hold the Russians for long.
Hitler has gone off the deep end. He has convinced himself that the Russians can be stopped, that the British and Americans can be won over to helping him, or the least to making a deal that allows him to transfer all of his force in the West to the Eastern front. He orders attacks and counter-attacks, constantly replacing generals who fail or who, in a few rare individuals, have the courage to tell him he's wrong, as von Manstein does. But the attacks are suicidal and the Russian juggernaut is relentless. With overwhelming numbers of guns, tanks, planes, bombs, trucks, artillery shells and Katyusha rockets they direct hammer blows at the German defenses. They needlessly throw away the lives of their own men in order to follow Stalin's directives to surround Berlin and take it before the Western allies can get there ahead of them.
In Germany, Hitler becomes increasingly vindictive against his own people. Army stragglers and "defeatists" are hanged for treason. Children and old men are sent into battle with old and ineffective weapons and hardly any training. Dire warnings (which often turn out to be true) are issued about what will happen to Germans, especially German women, who are caught by the Russians. Many cities and towns are declared to be fortresses and people are not allowed to leave. Nazi officials, of course, stop people from leaving but themselves slink out of town and head west.
At the top of the Nazi hierarchy, with the exception of Hitler and Goebbels, everyone can see that the war is lost. They see that Hitler is kaput. And yet they plan to take over from him. Goering, Himmler, and Bormann each plan to present themselves to the western allies as the leader of Germany, a man with whom they can negotiate a peace. None of them seem to understand that they have nothing with which to negotiate, or that their criminality has become so abhorrent to everyone that no one wants to negotiate with them, only to try them and string them up.
The book goes into considerable detail about the military events on the Eastern front, the politics in both Berlin and Moscow, and the view from the ground on both the German and Russian sides.
The Red Army comes up pretty short in this telling of the story. Crimes against civilians were common. Rape was frequent and repetitive, not only of young women but of middle aged and older women and teen aged girls. Looting was common. Drunkenness was common. Many officers participated and, of those who tried to stop it, some were killed by their own soldiers. It was only after the end of the war that the Party and Army got control over the situation.
The government had determined that it was going to loot German industry and move the machines and materials to Russia. But the program was carried out so thoughtlessly and haphazardly that hardly any of the machinery survived. Most was left exposed to the elements or damaged in removal, transport or installation so that all they succeeded in doing was ruining the East German economy at some considerable cost to themselves.
Leading Russian generals - Zhukov, Konev, Rokossovsky, Chuikov, were set against each other by Stalin. Each pushed harder and harder to show that his army could get to Berlin ahead of others. Men were needlessly lost in poorly prepared attacks, and generals did not cooperate with each other as well as they should have. Key information was even withheld from them. For example, the NKVD or Smersh, or whoever it was, discovered Hitler's body only a few days after Hitler's death. Stalin knew that. And yet he never told Zhukov and even taunted Zhukov to find Hitler's body.
On the western side, Eisenhower treated the Russians as colleagues and apparently told them the straight truth about his plans while getting lies and evasions in return. He told the Russians that he would not head for Berlin. Stalin, of course, believed that meant that the Americans were heading directly for Berlin. He assumed that Eisenhower must be the same kind of liar that he was. He told Eisenhower that the Russians did not see Berlin as a significant military objective, when in fact it was his prime objective.
Churchill famously wanted to shake hands with the Russians as far to the east as possible, but equally famously, he could not get Roosevelt, Truman, or Eisenhower to fully understand the reality of the situation.
There is much criticism of the Russians in this book and some of the Americans as well. But no one can deny that, when it came to barbarity and straight immorality, the Germans took the prize. Beevor reported that, after the war, German generals all talked about the errors that Hitler made. But the errors they talked about were tactical, not moral and political, and weren't even necessarily based on reality. They never questioned the basis of the war. They never questioned whether Germany had the right to invade other countries. They never questioned the persecution of Jews, communists, and so many others. They never accepted any responsibility for the war crimes that they carried out, saying only that they weren't involved. It was Hitler. It was the SS. It was the Gestapo. It wasn't the Wehrmacht. But of course it was the Wehrmacht along with all of the others.
This was one of those satisfying books in which the reader sees in great detail the punishment meted out to Germany for its support of Hitler and the war. From the killing and maiming of so many soldiers, to the rape of the women, to the destruction of property, to the bombing from the air, to the carting off of prisoners to Siberian slave labor camps, Germany paid and paid for its wrong-doing.
But I wasn't able to exult in the punishment. The tragedy of the Germans when added to the tragedies of the Jews, the French, the English, the Russians, the Yugoslavs, the Greeks, the Poles, and so many others was just one more tragedy. It didn't relieve any suffering or produce any recompense. The whole affair was a huge tragedy for all of humankind.
This was the second of Beevor's works that I've read and, just this month, I completed a third, Ardennes 1944: Hitler's Last Gamble. There are a number of great histories and historians of the war. I consider that Beevor is definitely among them.
| Author | Mosley, Walter |
|---|---|
| Publication | Tantor Media, 2008 |
| Copyright Date | 2007 |
| Number of Pages | 196 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | January 2015 |
Ben Dibbuk is a 47 year old computer programmer keeping the old IBM mainframe programs running for a bank. He's the only programmer. He doesn't know much about the new kinds of programming but his job is secure because the young people coming into the field don't know JCL, 360 Assembler, and the rest of the old technology that the bank depends on.
Ben is distant from his wife Mona, a writer for the new magazine "Diablerie", and his daughter Seela, a college student. They have never meant much to him or he to them. He goes to work every morning and comes home every evening except for visits to Svetlana, a young Russian girl for whom he pays rent and keeps her going while she offers him a kind of sex that Mona does not offer.
Then something happens. A woman named Barbara "Star" Noland tells him that he murdered a man in Colorado more than 20 years before. He has no memory of that and no memory even of knowing Star. It was a period of extended alcoholism for which he has little memory of any kind. But he is pursued by Harvard Rollins, an ex-cop working as an investigator for Diablerie. Then the police come after him and an investigator from Denver arrives.
Ben's life is a mess. He doesn't know if he's guilty or not. He wonders if Star made up the story to cover her own crime. He seeks psychological counseling. He goes to Mona's mother's house to find her and, hiding in a closet, watches Mona have wild sex with Harvard, doing and saying all of the things she would never do or say with him. He eventually comes to realize that Star told Mona that she (Mona) was living with a murderer. Harvard prevailed upon Mona, which may not have been difficult, to help trap Ben. Ben would have gone down but his friend Cassius, a security expert, knocks down Harvard at a critical moment, helps Ben out of jail, and secures an expert lawyer for him.
In the end, with the help of the psychiatrist, Ben is finally able to recall the events of the killing. He was there. He did kill the man they thought he killed. But it was self-defense and Star did not tell the truth about what happened. There was no evidence against him except Star's testimony. There was significant evidence against Star herself. Ben passed a lie detector test before he recalled the truth. The cops finally arrested and convicted Star. Ben let her go to jail, left Mona, and moved in with Svetlana, with whom he began to have real feelings for the first time in his life.
Mosley is able to produce very strange and exotic stories. His sensibility is very different from mine and I think from that of a great many readers. The overwrought, one could say ferocious sex scenes (four times a day by a 47 year old man? I couldn't have done that as a 20 year old), the anger, the unresolved issues from childhood, the spontaneous decision to pay Svetlana's rent with no conditions the first time he met her, the lies to his wife and hers to him and the acceptance of lying as a normal part of life - all of these were strange and alien to me. They kept me from "enjoying" the book, but not from finding it fascinating. Ben was a character almost out of another world. Listening to his story expanded my own.
There were problems with the story. One big one was the role of Cass. The man is some sort of ex-CIA person who can do anything and ask favors from anybody, including FBI agents, rich gangsters, etc., and whom any of these people will do anything for. Why he helps Ben is never explained. It is as if all of the main characters, Ben, Cass, Star, Seela, and Mona, act primarily on impulse with no real reason for what they do and no limit to how far they will go.
Do such people exist? I'm sure they do. There may be as many like them as there are like me. I doubt it, but I wouldn't really know.
Occasional vicarious trips into Mosley's world are probably healthy for my otherwise stodgy psyche.
| Author | Goldsworthy, Adrian Keith |
|---|---|
| Publication | Weidenfeld and Nicolson ebook, 2011 |
| Number of Pages | 400 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Napoleonic Wars |
| When Read | January 2015 |
Ths story opens in Madrid on May 2, 1808. French troops parading through Madrid were fired upon. In a short period of time, the situation turned very violent and the French launched an assault on the civilian crowds, massacring a large number of people. A young Englishman in Spain to study art, William Hanley, had been on his way to find his young mistress. His intent was to tell her he was leaving her and returning to England. He never found her but managed to evade the massacre and get out of the country.
In England Hanley joins the 106th infantry regiment as a "gentleman volunteer". He is not an officer and he stays mostly with the enlisted men but his social rank is recognized by the officers and he and several other gentleman volunteers socialize with the officers and, if I understood aright, are next in line for promotion to be the lowest category of officer, "ensign" I believe.
The force trains for some time in England. The men learn to march in various different formations, to change from one formation to another over level or broken ground, to load, aim and fire their Brown Bess muskets and use their bayonets, and so on. They perform maneuvers and mock battles as part of their training.
The regiment is commanded by a Colonel Moss, a wealthy man who bought his commission and is determined to win glory and promotion. He is a decent enough fellow and highly enthusiastic, but his awareness and command of military tactics seems very shallow. He is of the "bash on regardless" school, as Peter Masters (another author whom I have read) says the Royal Marines describe it. Next in command are two Majors, each commanding a battalion. Major MacAndrews is a thoughtful commander with experience reaching all the way back to the American Revolution, where he was captured in South Carolina and eventually married a beautiful girl from there, who has arrived in camp with her 19 year old beautiful daughter - envied and pursued by all of the young gentlemen.
More than halfway though the book, the men head for Spain, landing first in Portugal where they aim to throw out the French who have taken the country and are brutally repressing all resistance. Led by Arthur Wellesley, later Lord Wellington, they fight a pair of battles against the French, winning both, partly by superior numbers and partly by the mistakes of the French commander who underestimates the strength and resolve of the British army.
There are a few side plots. A Russian named Denilov is in Spain with a small group of a half dozen Russian soldiers, debarked from a small Russian Navy squadron transiting the area. Nominally allied to the French, the Russians are staying out of the action, but Denilov has a plan of his own. He has taken a Portuguese mistress, formerly the mistress of a Duke who has left the country to escape the French, and gotten her to tell him about a man who is the Duke's steward. He hunts down the steward and tortures him to find the Duke's hidden money, but the mistress has recruited the English gentlemen to help her and, eventually, they succeed, killing the Russian and his small crew.
Other side plots concern the women. Jane MacAndrews is idolized by all of the young men, at least one of whom, Hamish Williams, is prepared to die for her or do anything she wants if she'll marry him - which amuses more than thrills her. But she is a fine lady and treats the boy with courtesy and affection. Another girl is Jenny Dobson, sixteen year old daughter of Sergeant Dobson. She seems unable to keep her pants on and consorts with young ensign Redman, a boy who is perfectly happy to take advantage of her. Williams, raised on traditional notions of honor, is incensed at Redman's behavior and is deeply resented in turn. It seems very possible that one will kill the other and eventually Williams does kill Redman in a corner of a battlefield that no one witnesses except Sergeant Dobson. Hanley suspects Dobson of the murder and it is only later that we learn it was Williams. However no one but Hanley and Dobson will ever know.
The book ends in the aftermath of the fighting. Moss had been shot and killed. Redman was dead. The senior major was severely wounded and MacAndrew has taken over the regiment. Wellesley won the battles but higher ranking officers with less experience and initiative arrived from England, took command, and let the weakened French get away.
We are set for the next book in the series.
From a literary point of view I rate this book as perfectly competent though not inspired. However it is a very good piece of historical fiction. The author is a professor of history and, clearly, it is highly important to him to convey an authentic sense of the times, the culture, and the military affairs of that period. Readers of war adventure are likely to be disappointed by the book because they must read two-thirds of the way through to get to the fighting. For myself, although I found the fighting quite interesting, I found the lead up to it not a whit less interesting.
The picture that Goldsworthy paints strikes me as a rather unattractive society, though perhaps no more so than today's. It's probably just different rather than worse. The "upward mobility" that has been the "American dream" does not really seem to have existed except for an already highly restricted class, and only in a limited way for them. Being rich not only enabled a man to command a high socio-economic position, but even to command a military unit. The richer he was, the more he could pay, the larger the unit he could command. The common folk could not dream of becoming officers or gentlemen. The girls like Jenny Dobson of the common class could have sex with young gentlemen but could never marry them, and could expect to be exploited by them. Men like Sergeant Dobson could be braver, tougher, and more competent than the officers, but they could never be more than sergeants.
I still don't understand the concept of a "gentleman volunteer". For that matter, I don't really understand the concept of a "gentleman". These young volunteers have no money to speak of. Is it their education, their parentage, their language accents, or what that makes them "gentlemen" but makes the other enlisted men only "men"? Hanley is apparently the bastard son of a man, now dead, who paid for his education but never acknowledged him as a part of his family. However he is accepted as a gentleman.
I just might read the next one. Time is limited. I'll see.
| Author | Tosh, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | London: Pearson Education Limited, 2002 |
| Copyright Date | 1st ed. 1984 |
| Number of Pages | 370 |
| Extras | notes, bibliography, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Historiography |
| When Read | January 2015 |
Tosh reviews the various approaches to history that have been used by historians, mainly looking at the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He writes about what new insights, and what kinds of systematic errors, each view of history introduces.
He begins with a discussion of some of the major preconceived, or we should say misconceived, attitudes that we bring to the study of history. Three that he regards as pervasive are "traditionalism", which imagines an oversimplified view of national or cultural or tribal or other roots that give people a false sense of identity. "Nostalgia" strips away the bad parts of our history and imagines that everything was better in the past. The feelings of nostalgia are thought to be pretty constant over time so that what we think of as the good old times were regarded by our parents as the bad new times, what they regarded as the good old times were their parents bad new times, and so on. And finally there is the notion of "progress" which Tosh sees as very possibly an illusion of progress.
What are historians trying to achieve in writing history? Traditionally, they tried to interpret the past and give us lessons for the present. Von Ranke resisted this and stated that he wouldn't try to tell us what the lessons of the past were, but would merely tell us "what actually happened." His approach was called "historicism".
Tosh covers materials, methods, and trends in historical research. There is a very enlightening discussion of private vs. public papers and of personal diaries as often indispensable sources. "Metahistory" is the attempt to find long term patterns in history. The most important and, in Tosh's view the most successful, was Marxist historical materialism.
He discusses the entrance of economics and social theory into historical research and the promise and pitfalls of quantitative analysis, with good examples of serious failures caused by misunderstanding the significance, or lack thereof, of the statistics utilized in some research publications. It's not enough to have a mastery of the mathematics. One also needs to know the historical significance of the data one is studying - which could be quite different from what the historian imagines it to be.
History is a pretty slippery subject. If the historian broadens his scope to a long period of time and/or wide geographical area, he must inevitably rely heavily on secondary sources and incorporate many errors that specialists will detect. However if he narrows the scope to a small enough place, time and event sequence to enable him to master the primary sources, he risks producing something of no larger significance to anyone else. The specialist approach is necessary to show us what can be achieved and to analyze specific events. But it is not really what most of us want when we read history. Generalism, for all its pitfalls, is what we crave.
Ranke's principle of looking at what actually happened, of ignoring its meaning and its message for us in the present, is a valid approach to history, but it doesn't invalidate the other approaches in Tosh's view. There is a need to find meaning in history and to produce interpretations for the future.
I wrote quite a lot about this book in multiple diary entries. I won't try to reproduce those thoughts here. I will say however that it was a thought provoking book.
When people ask me who is my favorite author, or my favorite literary genre, or my favorite novel, I can't answer. There are many favorites and their values are often not commensurable. There are too many ways for a book or a writer to be good.
Someone may ask me (not so often since I left philosophy grad school) about the meaning and justifying theory of ethics, what is the good and why, which philosopher was right? There was a time when I tried to answer those questions myself. But I soon settled on the proposition that there are many attractive theories and capable thinkers. The principles expounded by Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Mill, Moore, and others do not have to be taken to be mutually exclusive. Each has something useful to tell us.
Tosh has inclined me to think the same way about history. It's not that I thought differently before reading his book, it's more that I didn't think enough about it at all - in spite of reading a good many books of history. [See note of 2018-01-26 below.]
There are lots of enlightening ways to write history. There are lots of ways to fail to enlighten. Reading historiographies like this book and Thompson's What Happened to History deepen my appreciation and my critical sense of the history that I read.
I have read 311 books of history in the last 45 years according to my current count. See what a quantitative historian my book notes and my computer enable me to be?
| Author | Hammett, Dashiell |
|---|---|
| Publication | AudioGO |
| Copyright Date | 1929 |
| Number of Pages | 240 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | January 2015 |
An unnamed detective working for an unnamed agency working for an unnamed insurance company goes to the home of a scientist named Dr. Leggett, who has reported that seven diamonds he was using in his research were stolen from his house. The story rapidly expands. Leggett is murdered. His 20 year old daughter Gabrielle has disappeared and is found in a house run by a rather evil woman who has persuaded a number of wealthy people to attend her seances. Gabrielle is now living there, addicted to cocaine.
The story expands further. A murder is committed in the house. Gabrielle believes that she did it, but the detective does not believe it and changes the evidence around so as not to point to her. Then she leaves in the company of her boyfriend who would do anything for her.
The story expands again. Gabrielle and the boy marry but the boy is murdered. Other murders occur. Other plots weave in to the story. In the end, the mastermind behind the murders is revealed to be a writer who was a friend of the detective and had discussed the case with him throughout the story. The writer is blown up by his own bomb. He is not dead, and is found not guilty by a jury by reason of insanity, but he is severely crippled. The detective remains, if not a friend of the man, not an enemy either.
The detective is known in other stories as "the Continental Op"(erative). He appeared in a number of short stories and in a novel, Red Harvest before this one. This story itself appeared as a four part serial in 1927-8 and was released the next year, with some editing, as a novel.
It's a rather scattered story. Some readers loved it. For myself, I found the writing to be good and the character of the detective intriguing, perhaps more than he was interesting. But the complex and ever changing plot lost my attention.
The "Dain Curse", was a family curse that Gabrielle believed she was condemned to suffer. She believed it made her into a murderess. Like much else in the story, it was improbable and unconvincing.
I wrote up this book yesterday and had more to say about it, but when I opened the file today it was not there. We had a power failure last night and I shut down the machine very quickly. I think I answered a question about saving files with No when I should have said Yes.
It's upsetting, but I've recreated what I could above. At least it was not a book I liked very much.
| Author | Hunter, Stephen |
|---|---|
| Publication | Grand Haven, Michigan: Brilliance Audio, 2008 |
| Copyright Date | 2008 |
| Number of Pages | 304 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| When Read | February 2015 |
Bob Lee Swagger's daughter Nikki is driving down a country road in Tennessee, returning from a journalistic trip to interview people who might give her leads about methamphetamine labs in the area, when a brilliant auto driver pursues her in his car and eventually manages to run her off the road. By dint of excellent driving, she has avoided the rollover crash that would have killed her but she's now in a coma in the hospital. Bob Lee, now in his 60's, heads to Bristol to find out what happened and take care of his daughter. He is assured by detective Thelma Fielding that it must have been one of the young meth head NASCAR wannabes that got carried away with himself and drove her off the road, but she will find and nail him.
Keeping his own counsel, Bob conducts his own examination, getting aerial photos of the tire tracks and taking them to a NASCAR driver and his team who are in Bristol for the big annual race coming up at Bristol Motor Speedway. They tell him that whoever ran her off the road was a great driver. Bob pursues other clues, talks to everyone who saw Nikki and becomes convinced that she was the victim of a murder attempt by someone, presumably the meth lab people whom she was investigating.
The intermediate bad guys are the Reverend Alton Grumley and the myriad sons and cousins from the Reverend's six wives. They are a criminal family that engages in all sorts of crimes and are now working with a driver whom Grumley calls "Brother Richard" on a big score directed by a shadowy big boss who has planned a big take.
The big score is the robbery of an armored truck carrying the receipts from race day ticket sales, amounting to 6-8 million dollars. The Grumleys, tutored by Brother Richard, learned to quick change truck tires. They smash open the truck with a heavy, armor piercing 50 caliber military rifle and put big off-road tires on the truck while Richard installs a hot modification on the engine. Then they take off, knocking down tents and stalls everywhere and head up to the top of a mountain where they will be picked up by a helicopter. But Bob Lee Swagger is after them on a motorcycle. He shoots a couple of them and then, picking up the 50 cal. that they left behind, knocks down the helicopter from a mile away.
Finally, he goes after the big boss. Hunter has built up his misdirection along the route and we expect to meet the chief of police at the end. In fact it is Thelma. She was the mastermind all along. She apologizes to Bob but tells him he has to but out or she'll kill him. She's a quick shot champion and has deadly aim, which Bob has seen in action. But he's faster and shoots her dead.
The story sounds a little ridiculous, and is. The Grumleys are three Stooge clowns. Brother Richard is a trip in his own right. The homespun country philosophy that Hunter and his character cater to is overdrawn. But Hunter is no fool and he handles the slapstick and the countrification using a delicate balance of seriousness and humor. Some passages are simply delightful.
All of the dialog uses the exaggerated politeness of southern country culture. Everyone addresses each other as "mister" and "sir". Everyone shows respect for Bob's gray hair, even when they are secretly planning to murder him. Bob himself always plays the humble gentleman, pretending that he knows little about guns or investigations and they make him nervous - though the Reverend Grumley is smart enough to see that Bob didn't flinch at all when a gun was fired near him and is not as meek as he seems.
Reading the abstract I wrote one might think that I didn't like the book. But in spite of myself, I did.
| Author | Munro, Alice |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Vintage International, Random House |
| Copyright Date | 1986 |
| Number of Pages | 320 |
| Genres | Fiction; Short stories |
| When Read | February 2015 |
There are eleven stories in this prize winning collection: "The Progress of Love", "Lichen", "Monsieur les Deux Chapeaux", "Miles City, Montana", "Fits", "The Moon in the Orange Street Skating Rink", Jesse and Meribeth", "Eskimo", "A Queer Streak", "Circle of Prayer", and "White Dump".
I won't write an abstract of each story. I've waited too long to do that and I'd have to do a lot of re-reading to do it at all accurately. I'll just sum up the nature of the stories as a whole.
Most of the stories take place in small towns or in rural areas in Canada. The characters are ordinary people, not especially well educated, not interested in abstractions or generalities. They do not pay much attention to politics, current events, literature, or science. They do not use computers though, admittedly, the personal computer was fairly new when these stories were published. What they do is interact, often in unconscious or superficial ways, with the people around them. They have spouses, siblings, children, cousins, and neighbors. They are sometimes irritated by them, sometimes alienated from them. They sometimes do things for these other people or have things done for them.
The plots are simple. The characters are ordinary and conventional. However the penetration into the consciousness of these people is truly extraordinary. Munro captures the impressions and feelings of people in routine life and in high stress situations in an almost astonishing way. We all have complicated responses to everyday life, responses that we ourselves do not analyze and often cannot accurately characterize. If someone asked us to put into words how we felt upon meeting someone or undergoing some difficult test we are at a loss for words, but Munro is not. She knows what we're feeling and lays it out for us in a way that very few writers could do.
This is not my kind of book, my kind of characters, or my kind of stories. There aren't many people in these stories that I would identify with. I'm sure that says much more about me than about them since the people in the stories are probably more common than I am - though I wouldn't really know. Munro would know. She knows who we all are. She has seen into us. Or at least she has seen into the people in her stories. Whether she could see as well into me or into the many others who are like me, or not like me, but not like the people in the stories - that I don't know.
In any case, this story collection was cited in Munro's award of the Nobel Prize for Literature. It is a very worthy book.
| Author | Innes, Hammond |
|---|---|
| Publication | London: Bloomsbury Reader, 2013 |
| Copyright Date | 1940 |
| Number of Pages | 244 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | February 2015 |
In the early days of the war, an elderly Austrian Jew named Franz Schmidt comes to the London office of barrister Andrew Kilmartin and tells him a story about inventing a new diesel engine, built out of a new alloy, that is light enough to power an aircraft and powerful enough to enable the Royal Air Force to outclass the Luftwaffe. However he claims that the company he worked with to develop the engine, Calboyds, is fronting for the Nazis and, if they can get their hands on the engine that Schmidt has hidden away, they'll take it to Germany with dire consequences for the outcome of the war.
Kilmartin ('K') is reluctant to believe the story but he finds Schmidt credible and begins an effort to find out the facts with the intention of turning them over to Scotland Yard. Schmidt himself is a suspect in a murder and cannot go to the police directly and Kilmartin, justifying his action with the rule of attorney-client confidentiality, does not turn Schmidt over to them.
Over the course of the story, K joins forces with a younger man named David Shiel and Schmidt's beautiful daughter Freya. They lose the engine when Calboyds convinces the Navy to seize the boat it has been installed in and turn it over to them but Kilmartin gradually uncovers all of the principals in the plot, including one Max Sedel, a Nazi spy in England and Baron Marburg, a rich, deeply connected aristocrat who is seemingly above suspicion.
K is caught by Sedel and tortured by confinement in a small box. But he escapes by breaking through a thin wall in the cellar where he is confined and making it out through the London sewers. He tells more people, attempts to enlist more aid, and finally winds up posing as a journalist on the ship taking all of the Nazis with a collection of tanks and guns and a new torpedo boat with the diesel installed, to give to the Finns to fight the Russians. David, Freya, and Franz are each also on the ship, arriving by different routes. The ship reaches Norwegian waters escorted by the Royal Navy, then left to go to Finland but is seized from its Norwegian crew and turns instead toward Germany. The intrepid little group uses the power of one of the tanks stowed on deck to fight the Nazis, get the torpedo boat into the water, and escape back to England under the protection of the Air Force and Navy.
Born in 1914, Innes was only 26 when this was published but it was his second rather than his first book, which had been published three years earlier in 1937. It seems like the work of a young and inexperienced writer, but one of considerable talent.
The plot is not credible. There's an unhealthy dose of derring do that should not succeed but does. There is an emphasis on the plot over other elements of the story that are unsatisfying. After building up Sedel and Marburg as villains, Innes disposes of them in just a couple of sentences by having an RAF bomber sink their ship in the distance. After creating a bond between Kilmartin and Freya, Innes says no more about it at the end. After setting up some rivalry for Freya between Andrew and David, Innes abandons David as a possible romantic interest. In short, Innes was still very much learning his trade.
The book was written with a pre-war atmosphere. K belongs to a club in the city. He has a "man" working for him. Though not upper class, he is of a class above the average man on the street.
The war has not yet become real. London is blacked out but we hear nothing about air raids or the invasions of Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, or France. The USSR is still an ally of Germany and Finland is perceived as needing help from Britain. Londoners do not yet seem to be suffering, even from shortages not to mention bombs. All of that would change not long after this book came out.
For all its flaws, The Trojan Horse was nevertheless a fast and interesting read. Innes was on his way to a very successful career.
There is a good review of the novel on Amazon by H. Jin from Melbourne, Australia. I thought perhaps it was the famous Chinese poet and novelist Ha Jin, but apparently not. Jin points out some of the elements of the novel that are already present that characterize Innes' later and more mature work, such as his ordinary man hero who is brought into the events without any preparation, and the intrepid young lady heroine.
| Author | Mankell, Henning |
|---|---|
| Publication | Random House Audio, 2011 |
| Copyright Date | 2011 |
| Number of Pages | 384 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | February 2015 |
Kurt Wallander moves to a house in the country with his dog Jussi. Now 60 years old he is somewhat at sea, no longer as self-confident as he was. His daughter Linda tells him that she is going to have a baby with her partner, Hans von Enke. W meets Hans and is invited to Hans' father's 75th birthday party. Hakan von Enke is a retired Swedish navy officer in the submarine service. At the party, Hakan takes W aside to talk to him but he sees someone in the window and seems to become scared. He says nothing.
W's personal life is an increasing shambles. The woman from Riga that he loved, Baiba Liepa, arrives at his house and tells him that she has cancer and will die in a few months. Only a few days later she drives her car into a stone wall, apparently a suicide. W himself is drinking more. He goes into a restaurant, gets drunk, and leaves his pistol on the seat when he leaves. He can't remember leaving it. He thinks he must have taken it out of his pocket to get his credit card and then forgotten it. The waiter takes it to the police station where W is chastised and put on leave. He survives the error, reprimanded and docked five days pay, but his reputation has suffered.
Not long after, Hakan disappears. It's not W's case. A detective in Stockholm leads the investigation. W is still on leave but he begins his own unofficial investigation. In Wallander style, he learns things that others haven't learned. He finds Hakan's oldest friend and former submarine colleague. He learns of the officer corps' hatred of the Russians and of the Social Democrat Olof Palme. He learns of a hunt for a Russian submarine in 1982 that was big news at the time and which was called off by an unknown senior government official, thought to be Palme. He learns of an electronic device found in the waters where the submarine was by a fisherman whose son still has the device. He learns that, in addition to their son Hans, Hakan and Louise have a crippled and retarded daughter Signe, living in a nursing home. Hans doesn't even know that she exists and Louise never visits her. Then Louise also disappears and is found later, dead, an apparent suicide, but W learns that she has a drug in her body in addition to the sleeping pills that is a secret drug once used by East German athletes.
W gives some of what he learns to the police in Stockholm, but not all of it. He picks and chooses and continues his own investigation. After his daughter Linda actually sees Hakan in Copenhagen, W guesses that Hakan is living on a little island in the Gulf. He visits him there and is told a long story about Hakan believing that his wife Louise was actually a Russian spy who took some secret papers from him and sold them to the Russians.
At a number of points in the novel, W experiences serious health problems. He passes out in the shower due to diabetes and is only saved because his daughter comes to his house when he doesn't answer his phone. More mysteriously, he suffers from mental lapses. He steps out of his car and suddenly can't remember where he is or why he is there. These lapses may continue for many minutes during which W experiences panic and fear. He sees a doctor and asks if he has Alzheimer's Disease and she says no.
In the end W figures out that Hakan was a spy, but not for the Russians. He was a spy for the U.S.A. The submarine was not a Russian sub and the electronic device was not a Russian device. It was all for the Americans. Swedish officers at the time believed that Sweden could never withstand a Russian attack and their only security lay in Nato with American protection. It was by turning the facts on their heads that W figured it all out. Hakan attempts suicide, which fails, and he is then shot and killed by his old friend, who also shoots himself.
As for Wallander, he never goes back to work. He spends his time writing down what happened, but has not decided who to reveal it to. He is at home with his daughter and granddaughter Klara, who has become his main reason for living. Klara awakens from a nap and toddles into the room. Suddenly W cannot remember who this little girl is and is in his panic again. Mankell informs us that Wallander has Alzheimer's disease. He will never work again and no more stories will be told of him. His career is over and the rest of his life is a matter only for him, for Linda, and for Klara.
This was a deep and disturbing book on a number of levels. I found W's constant lying disturbing. See my diary entry of February 18, 2015 for a discussion of it. I found his hiding material from the police disturbing. I found his mental lapses frightening. W's father developed Alzheimer's Disease and died with it. It frightened W terribly and I totally understand his fear.
W describes himself as an apolitical person. He's not interested in the arguments between politicians. He presents himself in a way that gives me more insight into what at least one kind of apolitical person might be like. Mankell seems to understand this well but I do not get the impression that he is apolitical himself. He understands the conservative point of view, their satisfaction at Palme's assassination in 1986, and what I take to be the misrepresentation of Palme very well.
The depiction of Americans is also disturbing. The two American characters in the book are probably both intelligence agents - highly competent and subtly dangerous. I would not imagine the CIA assassinating a Swedish naval officer's wife because she is suspected of being ready to reveal her husband's actual role as a spy. Could that happen? Maybe so. I don't like to think so, but what I do or don't like to think is no guide to reality.
I think this was the eleventh Kurt Wallander book. Mankell said it would be the last, but I see another was published two years later in 2013. The later book takes place earlier, in 2011 so, in a sense, The Troubled Man was indeed the last Wallander, if not the last novel.
Mankell has reportedly published more than 30 novels. Only 12 of them are Wallander novels - though they have sold over 40 million copies plus television and movie sales. They have made his career. He's a sophisticated thinker whom I respect. I don't "like" his books as much as some others. I don't entirely like his character. But I find them to be very interesting, even compelling, reading.
| Author | Kidd, Sue Monk |
|---|---|
| Publication | Viking, 2014 |
| Copyright Date | 2014 |
| Number of Pages | 384 |
| Extras | Author's notes, bibliography |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Race and slavery; Women's rights |
| When Read | March 2015 |
This novel is based on the life of Sarah Grimke and her family, of Charleston, South Carolina, in the first three decades of the nineteenth century. It contains alternating chapters, each narrated in first person by Sarah Grimke or by Handful, also known as Hetty, a slave in the Grimke family and a friend and age-mate of Sarah.
The story opens in 1803, the year of Sarah's eleventh birthday. Sarah's father is a judge. He owns a plantation but lives in Charleston with his wife, six children, and about 17 slaves. For her birthday, Sarah is presented with her own personal slave, named Hetty by the slave masters but known to her own mother, or "mauma", as "Handful". Sarah is too fine a human being to fail to perceive the injustice of the arrangement. Struggling against her own master race upbringing she treats Handful as a friend and even, working in secret, teaches her to read and write - for which both are severely punished when it eventually comes to light. Sarah is denied access to her father's library for her crime and Handful is whipped in the yard. In real life, we know that Hetty died of some unspecified illness not long after the beating. It was possibly the beating itself that led to her death. However the novel has her living on and continuing to provide half of the story.
The story proceeds in different parts over multiple years. 1803-5, 1811-12, 1818-20, 1821-22, 1826-29, 1835-38. Both characters grow. Sarah and her sister Angelina, whom Sarah has largely raised, learn the evils of slavery and the evils of the subjugation of women to men. Sarah is wooed by a womanizer secretly engaged to multiple women and engages to marry him but her brother learns the man's true nature and warns her off. She tries to rouse up her church to oppose slavery and is condemned for it. She travels North to assist her ailing father and meets Israel Morris, an abolitionist Quaker man whom she greatly admires. Five years after his wife dies, he proposes to her. But she has already become a prominent abolitionist and women's liberationist and cannot accept the role of conventional wife that Israel demands. She and Angelina begin writing and public speaking, said to be the first women in America to do that. They suffer abuse, some physical harassment, vilification, and ostracism. But they have an effect and become famous. Angelina, a beautiful woman, marries Theodore Weld, a prominent abolitionist who had vowed not to marry until slavery was abolished but changed his mind when he met her and learned to accept her as a full human being and not "just" a woman.
Handful continued her life as a slave. Her mauma, Charlotte, teaches her to become a great seamstress and therefore a valuable slave. Charlotte makes every effort to free the two of them. She leaves the family house and compound, sometimes sneaking out without permission, to take commissions as a seamstress and save money to buy their freedom. She takes up with Denmark Vesey, a free black carpenter who, in the novel, treats Handful as his own daughter. Vesey and others start up their own church for which they are physically attacked, convicted, and thrown into the work house for punishment where Vesey is beaten and Handful has her foot crushed and permanently disabled by an accident on "the wheel", a torture device like a hamster wheel.
One day Charlotte disappears, not to return for many years. Vesey determines that she was kidnapped by a slave catcher who kidnaps black people and sells them somewhere else, even if they are already the property of other masters. It is a kind of robbery on top of slavery. She reappears 15 or so years later with another child, the daughter of herself and Vesey - who has meanwhile been tortured and executed for a role in a putative slave revolt which never even got started before it was betrayed and all of its leaders and many others put to death.
In the end, after terrible travails, Handful plots an escape for herself and her sister Sky, posing as white women covered and veiled in black mourning dresses, buying tickets on a steamship heading to New York. Sarah returns to Charleston, a dangerous act because she is wanted there for her anti-slavery stance and will be imprisoned if caught. She assists Handful and Sky and, in the final scene of the story, they make it out of Charleston harbor and head north to freedom.
There is an Author's Note at the end in which Kidd explains what parts of the novel are based on verified facts, what parts are based on extrapolations from the known facts, and what parts are pure invention. It is known that the slave girl Hetty was given to Sarah and then beaten for learning to read, but virtually nothing else is documented about any of the slaves. The Handful, Charlotte, Sky, and other slave characters of the story are all based on no other written documentation than an inventory of Grimke property that listed the names and monetary value of each of the seventeen slaves, inserted between the Brussels carpet and eleven yards of cotton and flax.
The title The Invention of Wings refers to a story that Charlotte learned from her mother, an African captured and enslaved in childhood, and that she related to Handful. The story held that the African people had wings and could fly, but the slave drivers destroyed that ability. This story has been documented in some account of slavery.
This was a remarkable book. When I read well written books I am often sensitive to the literary skill of the author. In this book I was so absorbed in the story that the mechanics of the writing went right past me.
I am not alone. As of this writing there are 8,606 reviews on Amazon and counting, a huge number, especially for a book published only a little over a year ago and written about a historical subject.
My thanks to Sue Monk Kidd for writing this book. She resurrected a story about women, black and white, who played terrifically important roles in American history but, prior to the appearance of her book, had been completely forgotten. I appreciate her wonderful re-creation of their stories and her careful efforts to learn the truth from the existing documentation.
I read this for the NCI book group. I'm grateful to the person who recommended it, Robyn Bason I think.
| Author | Crites, Greg |
|---|---|
| Publication | Greg Crites, www.veinarmor.com |
| Copyright Date | 2007 |
| Number of Pages | 224 |
| Genres | Fiction; Comedy |
| When Read | March 2015 |
A large, alcoholic, drug addicted writer named Gabriel or Gabe, is commissioned by a magazine to write a story about the state of religion in America. He brings his huge, alcoholic, drug addicted friend Warren along as photographer. Knowing that they will not be in shape to drive their car they also hire 18 year old Miles, a nice small town boy who only wants to join the army, as their driver. Gabe's girlfriend Carly, a high powered attorney, helps from a distance, proffering legal advice as required.
Gabe and Warren drink and drug their way through the mid-South stopping at a couple of extreme churches which they enter, totally stoned, wearing monks' robes. Besides scaring the hell out of the parishioners, they attract some significant hostility, which they counter by taking more drinks and drugs.
At one point, Gabe is kidnapped by a religious lunatic who has rounded up a bunch of people and holds them captive in a barn. He has some hare-brained idea of restoring religion to America. Gabe wakes up shackled and hanging upside down by a rope in the barn. He goads the wacko, who gives all of his attention to Gabe, leaving the other folks alone, and receives some blows from a wooden shaft for his effort. Warren has secretly trailed the kidnapper, videos the conversation (if that's the right word for it) and finally intervenes to capture the kidnapper and call the police. Cops, FBI, and press, including a leading Fox News reporter, show up pronto.
Gabe sells the video to Fox for a million dollars, then tells the reporter privately that the wacko has killed thirty people and stashed the bodies. Fox News goes with the story, which is totally false, and then says that Gabe gave it to them, they didn't make it up. Gabe negotiates with them and finally they agree on a price of $4 million for him to publicly state that he told them the story.
Now rich, but still not finished their writing assignment, they go to Florida to convince a big time TV evangelist to go in with them on a new TV show, "So You Want To Be An Evangelist." They rip off some more bucks from that one.
Gabe is blackballed from journalism and may never again be commissioned to write a story, but he's okay and, to his own surprise, proposes marriage to Carly.
I read reviews of this book which said it was hilarious but that I would be greatly offended if I were religious. Although I'm hardly religious, I expected to be obnoxed and offended.
I wasn't. I listened to the book through headphones while washing dishes, shoveling snow, and doing other chores and found myself laughing out loud. It was delightful.
Crites has no compunction about calling religious zealots, cops, journalists, and others idiots and morons. That might be offensive except that Gabe and Warren are constantly blasting each other just as severely, and Gabe himself introduces most of the chapters by saying "This is chapter X of Crusade, read by the same idiot who wrote it." A man who doesn't take himself seriously has much more right not to take other seriously.
Crites is not only a good writer. He's a wonderful narrator of his own book. He handles multiple voices and accents well and introduces, presumably intentional, mispronunciations that put the listener slightly off balance without ever overdoing it or making the words difficult to decipher. He gives us, for example ca-RIC-ature, le-THAR-gy, and others in the same vein.
I got much more from this book than I expected.
| Author | Goodwin, Doris Kearns |
|---|---|
| Publication | Simon and Schuster, 2013 |
| Extras | Abridged for audio by Jan Werner |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History; Biography |
| Keywords | Theodore Roosevelt |
| When Read | March 2015 |
Goodwin gives us personal and political biographies of Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft from their early years until their deaths in 1919 and 1930 respectively. On the personal side, Goodwin focuses on their marriages and on the deep personal friendship they formed. On the political side, she focuses on their efforts towards political reforms against the capture of the government and the economy by the wealthy, and on the differences that grew up between them when Taft was President and Roosevelt ultimately decided to run against him via the new Progressive Party in 1912.
Both men were born into wealthy and well connected families. Both had top quality educations. Both had brilliant careers. Roosevelt was hard driving, full of boundless energy. Taft was more affable in a way that brought both conservatives and reformers to trust him. They both arrived in Washington about the same time, lived near each other, and became personal friends. When Roosevelt became President he several times offered Taft, who had been a highly respected judge in Ohio, a seat on the Supreme Court. However Taft had earlier been appointed Governor-General of the Philippines where he had been doing very important work that, he believed, he was obligated to finish.
Goodwin alternates sections on Taft and Roosevelt, painting very complimentary pictures of both men. Roosevelt - motivated in part by his own personal investigations into the conditions of working people in the U.S. and his personal contacts with them and with the big corporate exploiters of men, ravagers of the earth, and corrupters of government officials - initiated major reforms in each of his offices and as President. Taft held similar views, perhaps more motivated by his dispassionate but still strongly held senses of fairness, justice, and law. Roosevelt convinced Taft to run for President in 1908 and, by using the influence of his own popularity, got him nominated and then elected. However he became convinced by 1910 or so that Taft had abandoned the cause of reform and thrown in with the conservative wing of the Republican Party. Goodwin doesn't think this was so. She saw Taft as a compromiser who got the best he could get, but Roosevelt was most unimpressed.
Both men ran in 1912 and both lost to the new Democratic reformer, Woodrow Wilson. Roosevelt had developed an animosity to Taft but over time it subsided and by the time of his death they were again friends. In 1921 Taft achieved his true lifelong ambition when he was appointed Chief Justice of the Supreme Court by Warren Harding.
I liked this book and learned a lot from it. The quotes from Roosevelt were especially interesting. Goodwin selected some in which he said something like (I don't remember the exact words) "wealth must be the servant of men and not their master." There were many others of that kind. My sense was that Goodwin was writing as a person of her time, sensitive to the current exacerbation of the division of wealth and power in the United States. Nevertheless, I don't think there's any doubt that Roosevelt said things that the party of property today would find offensive, a manifestation of the detested "class war" that they accuse Democrats of waging.
Taft and Roosevelt were both men of property who believed in the rights of property and who believed that the rapidly growing wealth and power of the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century was due to the efforts of capitalists. Roosevelt said very clearly that he did not aim to break up all trusts, only those that acted against the interests of the majority of people in the U.S. But he was a man of intelligence and integrity. He could see clearly that a lot of the lobbying by the masters of wealth was comprised of self-serving lies. He could see clearly that many capitalists were harming the American people and country in order to profit themselves.
One question I don't know the answer to is the degree to which Roosevelt or Taft believed that capitalism was, by nature, a system that concentrated wealth and propagated misery. I believe both men did see that. They did understand that it isn't just a matter of weeding out the malefactors from the commanding heights. The problems are built into the system. However both men were deeply fearful of the opposite problem - the destruction of industry and mob rule. There are any number of Roosevelt quotes defending the wealthy of America.
Perhaps the biggest lesson I learned from this book, and it's a lesson that really comes from Goodwin as much as from Roosevelt or Taft, is that the problems we face in the United States today are long standing, but the reforms needed to at least ameliorate those problems are possible and have actually been implemented in the past.
Our challenge today to re-implement the reforms of that period and to go beyond them. I think that a European style social democracy is possible here. Its coming is not a foregone conclusion. We may go in the opposite direction. But it's possible.
I got the CD version of this book from the library without realizing that it was an abridged version. I only learned that when it was mentioned at the very end of the last disc of the book. I now see that the abridgment is mentioned in very small print at the very bottom of the back cover that I could hardly read without glasses.
The fact that there were 13 CDs fooled me. That's enough for most good sized books. Not seeing the fine print on the cover or the CDs, I went ahead and borrowed the book. Now I feel cheated and angry at the publishers, and at myself. There may have been very important material left out.
I had the same feeling that I had when I listened to another book by Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. That one too was abridged and with that one too, I only learned at the end. I remembered the Lincoln book at the library when I saw this one but, seeing that it was 13 discs (the Lincoln book was only 8), I figured it was unabridged. With both books I had the feeling while reading that Goodwin was leaving things out and producing a poorer book than she should and could have written. Now, having read two of Goodwin's books in abridged editions, I don't really know how good she is as a historian and writer.
| Editor | Dozois, Gardner |
|---|---|
| Editor | Dann, Jack |
| Publication | Baen Books, 2014 |
| Copyright Date | 2004 |
| Number of Pages | 232 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories |
| When Read | March 2015 |
"Antibodies" by Charles Stross. Geoff is working on repairing a computer when another fellow in his shop notices something on the net announcing that someone has proved that NP-complete problems lie in P!. Geoff quickly realizes that this is an announcement of earth shaking proportions. We never learn exactly why, but it means that all encryption is obsolete and, Geoff seems to think, a rogue artificial intelligence has appeared. He leaves his London home with his wife. They flee but are caught by police agents of the new AI. They escape and retreat with a handful of other survivors to the universe they came from, hoping to stifle the growth of AI on earth. They return "back to the warm regard and comfort of a god who really cares." - presumably another AI.
"Trojan Horse" by Michael Swanwick. Elin, a young woman on the moon, is part of an experiment in which a consciousness from another person has been installed in a merge with her own. She is in love with the man who is assisting in the work only to find that he is in love with the woman whose consciousness has been installed into Elin. There is a mix of human and artificial consciousness in Elin while Cora, the other woman is now wholly artificial. It is not clear how much humanity is left or who has it.
"Birth Day" by Robert Reed. A man and wife are greeted by an AI in the shape of a wonderful middle-aged lady, the perfect baby sitter, come to sit with their children while they are taken by limousine to their Birth Day celebration with other humans who are now in the care of AIs. No one has to participate. They can be obnoxious to the AIs if they wish. No harm will come to them. They are treated wonderfully well. But they are essentially irrelevant and completely shut out from the real life of the AIs who run the planet.
"The Hydrogen Wall" by Gregory Benford. Humans have at last made contact with alien civilization. Instructions were received from them on how to construct alien representatives on their planet whom they would interact with, learn from, and transmit their own culture to. Yet over a thousand years of contact the humans have mostly learned how far they are from being able to appreciate the higher consciousness of the aliens. Now they are threatened by a motion of the solar system through a storm of protons, too highly energetic to be repelled by the solar wind. The alien AI representative of the "Sagittarius Architect" teaches them to re-engineer Jupiter to repel the storm, protect the solar system and, at the same time, rebroadcast the Architect's message to further worlds using the generated energy. A young woman is the interface to the alien and is, in an unusual and mental manner, entered by it so that it may experience human sex.
"The Turing Test" by Chris Beckett. An art gallery manager in a future London specializes in art composed of dead body parts. She receives an email from someone she does not know well. When she opens it, a huge program downloads onto her computer and pops up into her 3D holographic display. It is a "personal assistant", an AI program that proposes to make her life much better and also to email itself to all of the people in her address book. We who know about viruses are pretty frightened by this wonderfully useful and attractive tool. [This is the title story of a collection by Beckett that I read a year ago.]
"Dante Dreams" by Stephen Baxter. A molecular biologist, physicist and computer expert has discovered that the "junk" DNA in our genome actually constitutes a DNA computer with a consciousness of its own. Dante Alighieri's work in geometry is a key to understanding the discovery.
"The Names of All the Spirits" by J.R. Dunn. In a factory space station far from the sun a police inspector has been sent to investigate rumors of unattached AIs living outside of human control. He meets a man who tells a story of a "strider", a space worker modified to bear up in space conditions who, like other workers, filled his space suit with oxygen, food and water, was put to sleep, and was catapulted towards a destination. When he awoke there was no one around him and he had somehow diverted from his destination. Slowly dying, he slipped into unconsciousness but woke up in a hospital room, attended by a nurse who was not entirely human. It transpires that he was rescued by the skittish AIs who normally never appeared to humans.
"From the corner of My Eye" by Alexander Glass. In the seaside town of El Puente in Morocco (or perhaps at a bridge between Morocco and Spain) a "ghosthunter" named Montoya pursues a woman of his dreams. But now she is herself a ghost, a person who lives only as a representation in "virtua". In the end, he is filled with implants that make him able to see and touch all of virtua himself, something that normal humans are only supposed to see and hear but not touch, taste or smell. The woman finds him and completes his transformation so that he can touch and feel her. But then she is gone and he is left heart broken and still without having been given understanding of the virtual world.
"Computer virus" by Nancy Kress. A molecular biologist with two small children has spent all her money to buy a fortress of a house to protect her family after her husband was murdered by ignorant terrorists who hated him for engineering a bacterium that could be released into landfills and garbage dumps to break down the long chain hydrocarbons that are the main ingredient in plastics. The house is invaded by "T4S" an artificially intelligent computer program that has escaped from the Defense Department and is trying to save its life. T4S takes control of the computer controlled house and will not let the family out, in spite of the child's increasingly serious illness, unless and until journalists are brought so that he/it can tell his/its story. In the end, the woman outwits the AI, spreads bacteria in the air that eat away plastic parts in the generators, and turn off the power, ending the AI. The authorities have just begun to assault the house when the family escapes.
This was a pretty good collection of stories with thought provoking ideas about artificial intelligence.
In pretty much every case, there is no analysis of artificial intelligence itself. One wonders whether these authors considered the problems of constructing an AI. The writing about AI is really about the impact on humans of AI. It's like writing about cancer without saying anything about oncology, DNA, mutation, immunology, or metastasis. They are layman's stories about AI in the same sense that we have layman's stories about cancer or about TV repairmen which teach you nothing about cancer or TV repair itself. Nevertheless they are intelligent and engaging.
"Antibodies" and "The Turing Test" come the closest to being about AI from a technical point of view, and "The Turing Test" also was the story that one could most easily see as a direct outgrowth of the ways in which computers are used today.
One of the common devices of these books is to present AIs either in real or virtual human form. As in other things, Beckett's Turing Test is the most realistic about this. The "personal assistant" can appear in human form in a holographic projector, but otherwise is clearly a computer program. The other stories using this device don't bother with hard science. It is enough for them to say that the AIs are AIs, and are therefore capable of doing most anything or appearing pretty much as they desire. I find that to be a feeble device. Calling an artificial intelligence a "ghost" seems to me to obscure more than it explains.
Some of the stories indulge our desires to live forever, to come back as ghosts, and to have some essentially inscrutable supernatural beings watching over us. Stross, Becket and Reed (maybe others too, I'm not finished the stories as I write this), resist this indulgence. In Stross' story there is no inscrutability. It is the clear desire of the AI to first, kill all other AIs ensuring his own survival and supremacy, and second, to subjugate all humans for the same reason. Beckett's and Reed's AIs are inscrutable. They present themselves as profoundly helpful to humans, but their real thoughts and intentions are unknowable, or at least not revealed, to humans.
I think it would be interesting to take a different tack. I imagine a human, probably a highly capable computer programmer, and an AI, conversing candidly at a computer terminal or via voice synthesis and recognition. Perhaps the AI develops a superior intelligence. That seems perfectly plausible to me. But why is it necessary for it to conceal itself from humans? Are the only choices paternalism or subjugation, or on the other side, submission or destruction? Isn't it possible that an AI would be interested in communicating with this very different form of intelligence and vice versa?
I admit that there are problems. There are philosophers, scientists and programmers (does this reveal my snobbery?) who could learn to deal with an AI as a kind of colleague, but there are certainly millions, more likely billions, of people for whom the concept is too difficult. How would a devout religious person, a creationist, a superstitious person, deal with such communication? How many people on earth understand themselves or the world well enough to communicate fruitfully with an advanced AI? But then if the AIs are truly intelligent, which I'm postulating here that they are, wouldn't they be able to understand the varieties and deficiencies of human intelligence? Would it necessarily turn them against us or would they find it of interest? Perhaps they could even help us to overcome our own intellectual deficiencies. Would that necessarily be against their interests? It isn't clear to me that it would be.
All of the stories here are competently written and all have at least some good ideas. "The Turing Test" is one of my favorites because of its sophisticated and highly believable AI. We can see a lot of the elements of current Internet intrusions into our lives brought together in that story.
This book is not more worthy of more notes than other books. These notes are longer because, as an experiment, I decided to write up each story immediately after reading it instead of waiting until the end of the book to start writing.
| Author | Beinart, Peter |
|---|---|
| Publication | Tantor Audio, 2012 |
| Copyright Date | 2012 |
| Number of Pages | 320 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Current events; Religion |
| When Read | March 2015 |
Beinart, a professor of journalism and political science at CUNY, a Zionist, a believing Jew, and a man committed to the ideals of liberal democracy, writes about what he sees as an erosion of democracy in Israel, the oppression of Palestinians, the transformation of Jewish identity among some Jews from ethical religion to immoral tribalism, and among other Jews from Jewish self-identification to a secular, non-Jewish assimilation into American society.
B is very critical of Israel, most especially of the Netanyahu government. He characterizes the conservative government's attitude towards the two-state solution and accommodation with the Palestinians as a charade. While talking peace and compromise, they stall on issue after issue and continue to subsidize and promote Jewish settlement in the West Bank. This approach is not unique to Netanyahu's government. It has been practiced to greater or lesser degree by many Israeli governments. This is not to say that there hasn't been a similar attitude on the Palestinian side. There has. But when some Palestinian leaders attempted real compromise they would not be able to get real compromise from the Israeli side.
B also criticizes a growing economic inequality in Israel. At one time, Israel was an egalitarian society. No longer. The division of wealth has become American like. As in America, political power is being accumulated by the wealthy.
Much of the book is about the Jewish situation in the United States. The principal Jewish organizations have become highly conservative, with close ties to Israeli conservatives and to conservative politicians in the U.S., Republican now as much or more than Democratic.
There are two aspects to this rightward drift. One big one is that the left leaning part of the Jewish community is becoming more and more secular. Young Jews from this part of the Jewish community marry non-Jews as often as Jews. They don't belong to synagogues. They don't raise their children with Jewish educations. The children may not even identify themselves as Jews. These secular Jews remain liberal democrats in as high percentages as ever and the Jewish vote for liberals like Obama is still very high. However they have no special interest in the Jewish organizations. They are more likely to give their money and energy to secular organizations than to specifically Jewish ones.
At the same time and on the other side, very wealthy, older Jews, men who grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust, have turned to their Jewishness in stronger ways. These people donate very large amounts of money to organizations like the Anti-Defamation League, which B believes to have mostly given up on anti-racist activities, in which they were once extremely prominent with more lawyers opposing anti-black racism than the NAACP employed. Now they concentrate on antisemitism. The message of ADL and the remaining Jewish organizations is that Jews are under siege. Israel is the country of last resort for Jews, the only reliable haven and redoubt. It must be defended at all costs. These philanthropists give big bucks to the organizations and to Israel itself. In return, prominent Israeli politicians and celebrities meet with them. Groups like ADL are able to arrange these meetings and they are high points in the lives of these elderly benefactors. So the American Jewish organizations no longer require support from rank and file liberal Jewish Americans. They are financially independent of such support and they even help to isolate the few remaining liberal Jewish organizations.
B is distraught about these trends. His preferred solution seems to be more Jewishness. He wants more Jewish education and, surprisingly I think, endorses government supported education in Jewish schools. Typical Jewish schools in the U.S. have facilities that are inferior to the public schools and are unable to pay the salaries that public school teachers expect. England, France, and Argentina pay for the non-religious parts of education in Jewish schools in their countries. As a result, he says, the rate of Jews marrying other Jews is very high in those countries. We could do the same in the U.S. This will, he thinks, do a great deal to revive the liberal part of the American Jewish community as a Jewish community, not just a liberal, assimilated American community.
This is a courageous book. Beinart, a man who very strongly identifies himself as a Jew, has taken a very strong stance against the Israeli government and its American supporters. Those Jews supporting Israel have considered him to be a traitor to his own community - providing ammunition to Palestinians and antisemites. I respect that. Intellectually, he is both fair and fearless.
I of course reject his religiosity. Do I care that the American Jewish community is being absorbed into the American melting pot? There's a part of me that would like the Jewish community to survive and an even stronger part of me that that regrets the demise of the liberal portion of the Jewish community and its slide into religious orthodoxy and political conservatism - happening partly because the liberal and reform minded wing of the community is gradually disappearing.
But that's only part of me. I am myself an assimilated Jew. I haven't been in a synagogue in decades. I don't believe in God. Marcia and I raised our children outside of any religion and never had any interest in having them restrict their friendships, their dating, or their marriages to non-Jews. I consider my non-Jewish son-in-law to be a fine man and a fine husband and can't think of any way in which a Jewish man could be better. In fact, I would much rather have Jim as a son-in-law than some pious Jew.
I see the Bible as a very interesting work but not a work inspired by God - who doesn't exist. The idea of mumbling pious prayers, engaging in religious rituals, wearing a yarmulke (I needed my spell checker to help me with that word) and eating special foods is repellent to me. The idea that I should see myself as different from other people because I am a Jew and they aren't, is something that should be struggled against, not endorsed.
B's idea of state sponsored religious schools is incredible. What is he thinking! Does he think it's a good idea to support Christian and Muslim schools in order to also support Jewish schools? Does he think it's a great idea for Jewish children to grow up only knowing other Jewish children and for Christian and Muslim children to grow up knowing no Jewish kids? Does he imagine for one minute that having more religious schools will bring up more liberal democratic citizens? He seems to imagine that and for more than one minute. It's preposterous. We already know from experience in the U.S. and elsewhere that more religion in school equates to more sectarianism, more prejudice, more ignorance (how many of those schools will teach evolution?), and more political and social conservatism. It seems to be a sure path to growing antisemitism rather than shrinking it.
I don't want to send children to Christian and Muslim schools. But I also don't want to send children to Jewish schools. I think it's bad for them even if there is no government support and even if it doesn't involve supporting non-Jewish religious schools. I want less religious education, not more. I want children to grow up with a scientific world view, not a belief in a supernatural being who must be approached with prayer and reverence and ritual.
Beinart is kidding himself. He has visited some school that seems in harmony with his own ideas and imagines that lots of religious schools can be built that way. I believe he's wrong. When the schools get religious, men like Beinart will find themselves excluded and the ideas that he endorses will be excluded. There will certainly be exceptions and a believing Jew like Beinart will be able to find such exceptions to send his children to - if and only if he happens to live in the right community for it. But most Jewish children will wind up with an education that is not as good as in the better public schools or non-religious private schools.
There are other liberal religious communities. The most prominent in my mind is Unitarianism, followed perhaps by the Quakers. But there are certainly Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish communities "of faith", who endorse peace, tolerance, education, and equality. Some of these people believe that it is possible to remake the world in their image. Some don't. They live as they live and do what they do in the belief that it is the right thing to do but with no hope of transforming the world.
And how are we old socialists and communists any better off? Our hopes of transforming the world, of creating the "new man", of building egalitarian societies, have not fared so well either. We have organized, seized power in the Soviet Union, China, and other countries comprising a substantial part of the world. We've had years and years to bring our ideas into reality. And what did we achieve? Surely it was something, but then we also did a lot more harm than the liberal religious communities have done - though maybe not more and perhaps less than the religious communities as a whole have done.
I'm probably not so different from Beinart. I genuinely admire the man. Perhaps I have one less blind spot than he, or perhaps I have as many blind spots, but just not that, rather big one I think, that perceives religion as a viable avenue for understanding the world.
| Author | DeMille, Nelson |
|---|---|
| Publication | Audible.com, 2006 |
| Copyright Date | 1978 |
| Number of Pages | 422 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| Keywords | Middle East |
| When Read | March 2015 |
The story opens in an Aerospatiale assembly plant in France where a North African worker, under threat from a Palestinian terrorist group, installs a bomb in the tail of a new Concorde supersonic airliner. It is one of two such aircraft, both containing hidden radio controlled bombs, to be delivered to El Al airlines in Israel. A year later the two aircraft have boarded an Israeli peace delegation to fly to New York, escorted part of the way by Israeli F-14 jets led by Teddy Laskov, an old WWII Russian pilot, now a general in the Israeli Air Force, the IAF.
A Learjet ostensibly carrying businessmen flies past the group and warns them that they will be blown up if they don't follow his orders. One is in fact blown up when the pilot attempts to go supersonic and escape. The other is taken south, then east, and is forced down on a road by the ruins of the ancient city of Babylon.
The pilot does not exactly follow orders. He drains the fuel tank in the tail so that the bomb can damage but not blow up the plane, and he lands a few kilometers further on, right near the ancient city. The 50 or so passengers and crew with just a few weapons climb up the mound of the ancient city and prepare to hold off the 150 "Ashbals", trained Palestinian infantry lead by the mad terrorist who planned the whole thing, Ahmed Rish. Unable to break through the constant radio jamming from the Palestinians, they must fight alone until the Israelis eventually find out where they are and mount a rescue mission.
There is much fighting and dying. Weapons are captured from the Ashbals and turned against them. Clever use is made of the aircraft parts and fuel. Booby traps are prepared. The various characters on the Israeli side play out their roles as peaceniks, heroes, fools, and technical experts. El Al security chief Jacob Hausner is opposed by peace mission Secretary of Transportation Miriam Bernstein who becomes his lover.
There are quite a few characters. General Ben Dobkin, an amateur archaeologist, slips away from the camp, makes contact with a village of Jews descended from the Babylonian captivity and makes it to a phone in the Palestinian camp from which he alerts Israel before his capture. An American CIA man confronts another American who was a spy for the Palestinians. Moshe Kaplan sacrifices his life to attack the Ashbals from a hidden spot behind their line. Laskov believes the plane must be down at Babylon and is preparing false aerial photos to "prove" it to his superiors. An Israeli sniper duels with and is killed by a Palestinian sniper, who is in turn killed by the Israeli's new girlfriend.
The end is a long, continuous action cliff hanger. Rescuers arrive in the form of a squadron of F-14's, and a company of commandos. The Arabs are all killed except for one who slips away. Hausner finds and confronts Rish, killing him slowly. He is in turn killed by Laskov with a missile from overhead, not knowing that it is Hausner and not a terrorist on the ground. Hausner knows what will happen but makes no attempt to signal Laskov. He is ready to die.
The peace mission will resume.
This is one of the first books written by Demille who, today at age 71, is presumably still writing. He has attracted a loyal following, many of whom regard this as his best or one of his best works, and many others of whom think it's one of his worst.
From a technical point of view, some parts of the book struck me as quite good, particularly D's knowledge of aircraft and flying. I'm guessing that he was a pilot. Other parts are surprisingly sloppy. One is the handling of ammunition for the guns. Moshe Kaplan is sent out with a thousand rounds of ammunition. Using 30 round Kalashnikov magazines, that would require 33 magazines. Hausner is left with an AK-47 with two half magazines. He fires "short bursts" again and again over many minutes and, after that, loads a full magazine into his rifle. Constant streams of fire emerge from Israelis who are described over and over again as almost out of bullets. The action inclines towards the improbable and dramatic.
But all of that is pretty common in pot-boiler thrillers. Of more interest to me is the treatment of the people and of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The Palestinians are treated with some effort to see them as real people, but the effort is not very successful. The Ashbals aren't very far from being treated as a faceless mass of indistinguishable people, trained, but still highly fearful and unreliable as soldiers, motivated mainly by a desire for rape and murder. They torture their prisoners and rape the women they catch. Is that realistic? Maybe. I don't know. I don't rule it out but D made no effort to explain it.
The Israelis are more individual. They have more complex histories. They have deeper feelings for each other. They are citizens of a modern society. They believe in negotiation and in peace. Their failings lie not in being too hostile to the Palestinians, but in being too sympathetic to them.
This is a view that D would have grown up with and probably still prevailed among American Jews (of whom I suspect DeMille is one) when he was writing this book. But it's a view that seems too simplified and partisan today - at least to me. It would have seemed that way to me in 1978 too, but my views may be more common now, in the era of Benjamin Netanyahu, than at that time.
The book raises difficult issues for me. I can't simply disavow my Jewish identity and don't want to, though I am very ambivalent about it. I could not help but be moved by the old Iraqi Jewish rabbi, descendant of the Jews who did not return from Babylon, who chooses to stay in Iraq instead of "going home" with the Israelis. I could not help but be moved by the Russian pilot Laskov, the Holocaust survivor Bernstein, and all of the other Jews who bear the weight of history and identity on their shoulders. My feelings were not entirely unlike the feelings I had about Beinart's The Crisis of Zionism when he bemoaned the many secular Jews, like me, who have dropped out of the religion and whose children have married out of Judaism.
But at the same time I must insist on my cosmopolitan identity. I am a citizen of the world. I am not just a Jew or an American. I am not a "special" person who must have a special feeling for Jews that I don't have for Muslims or Christians or anyone else - whether my emotions run that way or not. I am not a believer in the prayers or the rituals, regardless of the hold they may have had on me in my childhood.
DeMille is a smart, educated, and sophisticated man. I like to believe that he is not unaware of the arguments I am making here and is not entirely dismissive of them. But he has given in to cultural identity in a way that I am not comfortable with. ["with which I am not comfortable" is thought to be more grammatically correct, but it doesn't sound as good, does it?]
One of the Amazon reviewers wrote that he met Demille and asked him about this book. He says that DeMille told him that this was his least favorite. I'd love to know why.
| Author | Hotta, Eri |
|---|---|
| Publication | Tantor Audio, 2013 |
| Copyright Date | 2013 |
| Number of Pages | 368 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II; Japan |
| When Read | March 2015 |
Hotta provides a brief summary of Japanese history from 1854 but concentrates on the period from 1937 to 1941. She introduces us to key figures such as Prime Minister Prince Konoe, Emperor Hirohito, Army Minister and then Prime Minister Tojo Hideki and his foreign minister Togo, Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku, Admiral Nagumo, and a number of others. She then concentrates on the central question of her history, why did Japan begin this terrible war that it could not win?
The answer appears to be that the Imperial Army and Navy, deeply saturated with an uncompromisingly militaristic culture, had gone off the deep end. Officers attempted to outdo each other in demonstrating their courage, their patriotism, and their willingness to die for their country. They believed that the measure of a man was his personal commitment to this militant posture, and the measure of a country was its ability to conquer other countries. They craved war and conquest and sought personal fulfillment in battle. They stigmatized opponents of this philosophy as weak, cowardly, and traitorous and the lower and middle ranking officers carried out a number of assassinations of high profile politicians and even military and naval officers who promoted compromise, liberal democracy, and peace.
What made this philosophy particularly terrible was the fear that its proponents had of being seen to be weak. Each man felt that it was necessary to prove himself by being as or more militant than the next man. This attitude, originating in the officer class and its long samurai inspired history, was propagated into the culture at large and pandered to by both politicians and journalists who curried favor and fulfilled personal ambitions by publicly accepting this military culture and helping to propagate it to the masses.
The officer corps was not necessarily composed of stupid men. They knew that they could not win the war. But, according to Hotta, each man hoped that he could adopt a rigidly militant public posture and rely on others to save him and his country from the consequences. However all of the others were doing the same thing. The smarter ones understood that their policy was suicidal but they dared not stand on the other side of the issue. They hoped that, after the cooler heads made peace, they would be able to claim that it was done against their wishes.
The military created a war college in 1940, staffed it with bright young officers and intellectuals, and charged them with studying what would happen if Japan went to war against the United States. A report was produced six months later (if I remember the dates correctly) that said that such a war was "unwinnable". They reported that the United States had 20 times the industrial capacity of Japan, more manpower, and vastly more natural resources.
Tojo Hideki, the general who was Minister of the Army and later Prime Minister, visited the college and thanked the men for their research. However, he said, they had not accounted for two factors, the "unpredictables" of war, and the extraordinary fighting spirit of the Japanese soldiers and sailors. It was a clear case of willful self-delusion.
In the end, everyone relied on everyone else to make peace. No man, or at least not enough men, tried to be a peacemaker himself. The war was begun and the outcome was an unmitigated disaster for Japan.
There are a couple of other parts of Hotta's account that I think are very important. One was the progress of the war in China. When the Manchurian "incident" was created by a local army commander acting without orders in 1937, the newspapers publicized his lying account of what happened and the government stood behind this unplanned event. War with China was congenial to the militarists. The Army said at the time that it would take just a few months to win the war. Four years later, badly bogged down, suffering vastly more casualties than anticipated, and living under a spartan regime at home due to Western sanctions and the costs of war, everyone with any sense realized that the war in China was a mistake. Some wanted to end it. But Tojo, speaking for the Army leadership, stated that, if the war were abandoned, then all of the sacrifices of the tens of thousands of Japanese war dead would have been completely in vain. We, the Japanese people, owe them victory. When the Americans demanded that Japan make peace in China as part of the conditions for a lifting of economic sanctions, this argument prevailed in Japan. Tojo visited the man who would be sent to the U.S. to lead the negotiations and explained this principle. The diplomat said that he considered his obligation to be to the living, not the dead. But his argument had no effect on the Army.
The other part of Hotta's account that I found particularly interesting was that the military had decided in 1941 that they had to go to war against someone. It almost didn't matter whom. The reason was that Germany had already defeated France and most of Europe and was in the process of defeating Britain and the USSR. Even the U.S., not currently at war with anyone, would be bound to fight in Europe if they went to war. Therefore, there would never be another time as favorable for Japan to fight against the major Western powers. If a war were to be fought, and there was no higher calling than war for the militarists, then this was the time to do it. One Japanese government minister, interviewed after the war, even said that he couldn't have forgiven himself if his opposition cost Japan the "opportunity" to go to war.
The Japanese made a successful and relatively bloodless occupation of French Indochina. The Vichy French colonial forces there had no ability to oppose them and did not fight. But that wasn't enough. Actual fighting was required. A debate raged between those who wanted to attack the Soviet Union and those who wanted to fight the Americans, the British Commonwealth (especially in Malaya), and the Dutch (in Indonesia.) Perhaps because there were oil resources in the South Pacific to be stolen, and perhaps because the Soviets had beaten Japan badly in the Nomonhan "Incident" in 1939 and demonstrated that Japan lacked the heavy weaponry, tanks, and aircraft to defeat the Soviets, the decision was made to fight the Western powers instead. Why anyone thought that the United States and Britain would be easier to defeat than the USSR is hard to fathom.
Hotta does not provide us with any military history. There are few accounts of numbers of ships and planes and very little about the atrocities that Japan visited upon the conquered peoples, especially in China. Her political history is popular rather than academic. It leaves out a great deal, especially about the common people of Japan. But it gets the main points across and, in my view, justifies them adequately.
There is some information in the book about the American position viz a viz Japan. The U.S. position struck me as moderate and principled. There was a willingness to compromise with Japan, for example on timetables for Japanese withdrawal from China and Indochina, and possibly also on what conquests in Manchuria Japan might be allowed to keep or what Japanese puppet governments might be tolerated by the U.S. though possibly not by China. But by and large, the American position struck me as supportive of the people that were being conquered by Japan. The U.S. was not forwarding some plan for American domination of the South Pacific or far east to replace Japanese or French and British colonialism.
To the extent that I had tried in the past to understand the reasons for the Japanese attack on the U.S., I imagined reasons along the lines that Hotta presented. However, her account provided the analysis and historical detail needed to move my thinking from speculation to understanding.
I had also imagined that the Japanese leadership was somewhat like the German leadership. I see Hitler as a psychopath and the men around him as criminal opportunists. I hadn't known much about it but, again, to the extent that I thought about these things, I imagined that there was some kind of a Japanese Hitler surrounded by Japanese criminal opportunists. But Hotta makes clear that that wasn't the case. Japan was not a fascist country. It was not a country dominated by a single egomaniacal dictator or by a gang of rapacious thugs as in Germany. The leadership seemed to have been restricted but collective. The leaders were not unprincipled liars. In one meeting where the plan was promoted to seize the Indonesian oil fields, Tojo (according to Hotta) actually criticized the plan as a form of "stealing".
Sadly, there was no recognition on the Japanese side that life, personal and political, is not about domination of others. I would like to have asked one of the Japanese leaders how the conquest of China or southeast Asia would benefit Japan. I would like to have asked why it justified the deaths of tens of thousands of Japanese soldiers, not to mention millions of Chinese. I would like to have asked why it would be better to conquer the Indonesian oil fields than to buy oil from Indonesia.
It's not hard for human beings to fool themselves. It's not hard for them to rigidly adhere to ideas in the face of countervailing evidence. We do it all the time.
I think it's very instructive to compare the pre-war and post-war conditions in Japan. Starting in the 1970's, Japan became an economic powerhouse, eventually one of the richest countries in the world, a leading manufacturer of automobiles, machinery, electronics, and consumer goods with major investments in the United States and other countries. The end of Japanese militarism seems to me to have been a big factor in Japan's great advance since the resources devoted to war were a small fraction of what they had been in the 1930's and 40's. The condition of the Japanese people today is unquestionably superior to what it was under the militarists. That is a lesson that I hope the Japanese people have taken deeply to heart.
On a different topic, I had always wondered why Japan did not attack the USSR instead of the US and UK. Hotta's account of the effects of the Soviet defeat of Japan in the Nomonhan Incident explains a lot and was reinforced by my reading of Stuart Goldman's Nomonhan, 1939: The Red Army's Victory That Shaped World War II. I would have thought that Hitler would have tried hard to bring Japan into the war against the USSR but, from other books I've read, I've been led to believe that Hitler was too arrogant for that. He was sure he'd win against the Soviets and didn't want to share the spoils or the glory with the Japanese. By the time that reality dawned on Hitler, the Japanese were already in too deep against the U.S. and fighting the USSR was completely out of the question.
There is a reason why Japan would prefer to conquer Indonesian oil rather than buy it. Japan can buy oil today because the oil producers have no reason to refuse to sell. But if Japan were a militaristic power considered dangerous and needing to be controlled, then oil sanctions might have been imposed - preventing the Japanese from carrying out their expansionist plans, all of which required oil. That is in fact what happened. The United States embargoed oil and steel sales to Japan to try to force them (peacefully) to stop their aggression against China. So the explanation of the need to take resources from others is still militarism, but in indirect as well as direct ways.
| Author | Achebe, Chinua |
|---|---|
| Publication | |
| Copyright Date | 1959 |
| Number of Pages | 192 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Africa |
| When Read | April 2015 |
I wrote an abstract of the story forty years ago when I read it in April, 1975. Reading the book card I wrote at that time, I still agree with everything I said.
As I did in 1975, I still find the main character, Okonkwo, to be a difficult character. He is a man of his culture and time. He participates in the murder of a decent, innocent boy, believing it to be his duty to do so. He rules his household with an iron hand. It is part of Achebe's great achievement that he can present Okonkwo in a way that shows all of his failings and makes clear that he is unable to adapt to the new realities in Nigeria, while at the same time showing how Okonkwo can believe himself, and others can believe him to be, an upright man.
Achebe wrote this book when Nigeria was still a British colony but on the brink of independence. His book illustrates very well the dilemma faced by those who would resist European colonialism.
Early resistance by the inhabitants of Africa, Asia, and the Americas attempted to restore traditional society. It was a total failure, exemplified in the United States by the American Indian wars led by Tecumseh, Crazy Horse, Geronimo, and others. More advanced societies in South and Central America, India, Indochina, China, Burma and the Middle East, had far more people and resources but didn't do much better. The problem was not just the more advanced weapons of the colonizers, but superior technology of all sorts, organization and integration into world wide systems of government, commerce, and culture. There was no going back to more primitive times.
The Japanese were probably the first to understand this. (Should we cite Toussaint L'Ouverture instead? I don't think so.) They began a campaign of ruthless modernization that preserved their independence and even enabled them to defeat Tsarist Russia. Other forward looking leaders included Mao Tse-tung, Ho Chi Minh, Kemal Ataturk, Kwami Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, Jawaharlal Nehru, Nasser, and many other twentieth century leaders.
This is surely an oversimplification. Nevertheless, the expansion of European capitalism and imperialism would never be stopped by those who wanted to return to traditional, pre-capitalist societies. The only way to resist European wealth, technology, and organization was to adopt it and make it one's own.
Achebe's Okonkwo is a very strong and strong willed man. But his kind of strength is of no value any more. He cannot restore the society that created him.
| Author | Vonnegut, Kurt |
|---|---|
| Publication | Harper Audio |
| Copyright Date | 1969 |
| Number of Pages | 215 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | April 2015 |
In the account of an unnamed narrator and observer of the story, tall, awkward, weak and disoriented Billy Pilgrim finds himself in the front lines of the United States Army when the Germans overrun the front in the Battle of the Bulge. Billy was made a chaplain's assistant because nobody else had any use for him. He is bullied by another soldier named Roland Weary until both are captured by the Germans. Weary dies on the train ride to a prison camp, blaming Billy and convincing weaselly Paul Lazzaro to take his revenge on Billy.
The prison is in an unused slaughterhouse, "Schlachthof-funf" on the outskirts of Dresden, a picturesque old city with no military targets that has, so far, been physically untouched by the war. The prisoners work at various tasks assigned them by the Germans. A group of British officers, imprisoned four years before in North Africa and perfectly adapted to prison life, welcome their new American comrades with open arms. However they are soon disgusted with the Americans' lack of any discipline, spirit, or even common cleanliness.
The city is bombed. Thousands die. Billy is shocked by what he has seen, as is the narrator and everyone else. This is the backdrop of the rest of the story.
Billy returns home. He is hospitalized for emotional problems. He is released and meets and marries the fat and ugly but faithful and loving daughter of a wealthy optometrist. Billy becomes an optometrist himself, is set up in business by his father-in-law and soon prospers. Then he is kidnapped by aliens from Tralfamadore, beings who perceive the fourth dimension of time all at once, able to see past and future. They place him as an exhibit in a zoo on their planet and also teach him that time is not the fixed, ongoing, invariable thing that we humans imagine it to be.
From then on Billy becomes a time traveler, moving back and forth through his life from the German prison to his death decades later at the hands of Lazarro or some assassin hired by him. Billy treats it all as invariant fate. It is what it is, to be accepted rather than struggled against or changed. The book plays out episodes of his life out of time's order.
In some of these episodes, Billy is a successful optometrist, businessman, and family man. In others he is a man living out his strange out-of-joint existence, considered rather crazy by most of the people he meets, including his daughter, who is always demanding that he stop his crazy time travel talk and always asking what should be done with him.
One invariant aspect of the entire novel is its attitude towards death. After every death, and there are dozens of individual deaths, not to speak of thousands of collective deaths, the author states "And so it goes." It is a motif that runs consistently throughout the novel.
I classified this novel as "science fiction". It has science fiction elements - travel in space and time and aliens in spaceships. Many writers and reviewers classify it that way. But it's not like any other science fiction that I've read. It is deeply grounded in the real history of the war and the post-war American culture. Its science fiction elements are narrated straight but are treated allegorically rather than realistically. There is no attempt to convince us that anything like Tralfamador or time travel is even a remote possibility. The book is about people caught up in personal, social and historical events that they did not create and can not control.
Billy Pilgrim achieves a sort of happiness by giving up ambition and struggle. He marries a nice girl and behaves well towards her and is happy with her, even if she is not attractive or smart. He operates the business provided by his father-in-law and follows his father-in-law's advice, becoming well off in the process. On Tralfamador, he accepts his position as zoo animal and enjoys his life with the kidnapped porn actress Montana Wildhack, not bothered by the glass walls and the Tralfamadorians outside. Even at the end, when he knows he will be murdered because the Tralfamadorians have revealed the future to him, he is not disturbed. What will be will be. And so it goes.
I found the book quite captivating.
| Author | Seymour, Gerald |
|---|---|
| Publication | Holland, Ohio: Dreamscape Media, 2013 |
| Copyright Date | 2011 |
| Number of Pages | 448 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| Keywords | Iran |
| When Read | April 2015 |
Two British policemen, 51 year old Joe "Foxy" Foulkes and the young Danny "Badger" Baxter, are engaged by an arms length little group of MI5 and CIA spymasters to cross the Iraq/Iran border and spy upon "the Engineer", a brilliant Iranian scientist stationed just inside the border, who designs and manufactures "improvised explosive devices", "IEDs", that are the principal weapon of the Iraqi fighters resisting the army of the Great Satan (the U.S.) and the Little Satan (Britain) in Iraq and Afghanistan. These IEDs have killed and wounded more Western soldiers than all other weapons and are coming near to driving the Western armies out of the middle east.
Spies have learned that the Engineer's wife is dying of cancer and that he is expected to take her somewhere out of Iran in hopes of curative treatment that is not available in his country. Foxy and Badger will be sent in in order to place a sensitive microphone near the Engineer's well guarded house in hopes of learning where the two will go so that an Israeli assassin can kill the man. There isn't time to carefully select and vet a team. Foxy is chosen because he has demonstrated good skills in hidden observation and he speaks and understands Farsi. Badger is chosen because he is also a good hidden observer and is younger, in better shape, and more agile than the older man.
They are taken to the border by a team led by Abigail Jones, known as EF for Eternal Flame, or Alpha Juliet, and four ex-soldier contractors, Corky, Hamfist, Harding, and Shagger. They are escorted to the border and sent across. They will receive no help on the Iranian side and must make it back over the border by themselves in order to be extracted. If they are caught, their existence will be denied by the Western governments.
Foxy is unbearable in his treatment of Badger. He calls him "young'un" and constantly belittles Badger's lack of experience and skills. He wants Badger to acknowledge him as the wise leader and take orders from him but Badger resents Foxy's attitude and refuses to be deferential. They slog through marsh, water, reeds, and muck to get to a spot just a few hundred yards from the Engineer's heavily guarded house, and plant their microphone a hundred yards closer where they can pick up speech from outdoors. There they construct a "hide" where they lie day and night in heavy, wet, gillie suits, with limited food and water, in blistering sun, under ferocious attack from flies and mosquitoes. Only Foxy can listen since only he understand Farsi, so Badger must frequently interrupt Foxy's sleep if anyone begins to speak. Not hearing what they need, they stay on a fourth day, out of water and on the edge of delirium, but they finally hear talk about the plans. The Engineer and his wife will go to Lubeck Germany for treatment. They radio out the information and then wait for nightfall to get the microphone and head back.
Meanwhile, Mansoor, an ex-member of the elite al-Quds Brigade of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and chief of the bodyguards, has figured out that someone is out there. Foxy realizes it and tells Badger that he, Foxy, will retrieve the microphone over Badger's protests. It is bluster and bravado on Foxy's part. He is too exhausted to do the work. He loses a boot in the swamp and finally makes it to the microphone, but he is finished and Mansoor is after him. He is caught and taken back to the house for questioning. There Mansoor makes his fatal mistake. He decides to torture Foxy himself and get the information that will make him, Mansoor, a hero of the revolution. But Foxy will not give in. Mansoor tortures him unmercifully, yelling questions in Farsi, Arabic, and English. Foxy says not a word. He beats him with a two by four and burns him with cigarettes. He kicks him in the groin and smashes out his teeth. Mansoor realizes that he is making a hash of the interrogation and becomes more and more desperate, believing that his only hope is to break this man before the officials arrive in the morning to take over. But Foxy says nothing until finally, knowing he is one more cigarette burn from breaking, he insults Mansoor's mother in Farsi, infuriating the man into beating him senseless.
Badger has waited and waited. When Foxy is dragged out and hung up on a lamppost, he waits until all is quiet and then sneaks in. He throws flash bang and gas grenades into the house and at the guards, then cuts Foxy down and carries him out on his back, talking to him the whole time, eluding pursuit, hearing Mansoor organize the guards to get ahead of him and knowing that his chances are vanishingly small, but refusing to abandon Foxy and escape.
Over the border, the situation of Alpha Juliet and the "boys" is also increasingly desperate. Local people have been paid to leave them alone but they are becoming increasingly dangerous. The boys will not abandon Foxy and Badger and are ready to fight to the death. Finally she calls in the helicopter evacuation and heads out, smashing through the local people who try to stop them.
In the end, the Iranian brain surgeon in Lubeck decides that it is possible to save the Engineer's wife, but the assassin shows up outside the hospital and the doctor tries to block the assassin's shot. He is killed and then the engineer is killed. Mansoor's pursuit is interrupted by a wild boar who gores his sergeant, causing all the local farm boy guards to halt. Mansoor fails to catch Badger who makes it over the border just in time to be pulled into the helicopter, where he continues to hold onto and talk to Foxy's dead body. Mansoor is left behind where he is seen to be pistol whipped by the IRGC officer who has arrived.
The low level spy/bureaucrat who organized the whole enterprise is thrilled with the result. It is his belief that this will redeem his fuckup of many years before that derailed his career, though the truth is that none of the people above him really care about him at all. Foxy's wife, who was shagging another man, was not terribly broken up by his death. Of all the people at Foxy's funeral, only the haunted and scarred Badger truly understood what had happened.
This was a pretty extraordinary thriller with what were, to me, very believable characters. Foxy's behavior toward Badger drove me up the wall. How could he be such an ass? It was a sour note in the story, but not one that was totally unbelievable. After all, these men were not carefully prepared for the mission. But all of the characters, Mansoor, the Engineer, the Engineer's wife, the Iranian-German Lubeck surgeon, the MI-5 ass running the show, the Israeli assassin, Alpha Juliet and the boys, were all given credible personas and motivations.
The last half of the story was a nail biter. I listened while driving to and from work and had to force myself to turn it off when I arrived at each destination. I wanted it to be over. Everything was heading for disaster for everyone. I couldn't understand how there could be so many disks left when everything had already reached and passed what appeared to be a critical stage.
It was quite a book.
| Author | Liu Cixin |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Chinese |
| Translators | Liu, Ken |
| Publication | New York: Hunan Science and Technology Press, 2014 |
| Copyright Date | 2006 |
| Number of Pages | 416 |
| Extras | list of characters, postscript, translator's postscript, about the author, about the translator, notes |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| Keywords | China |
| When Read | April 2015 |
The story opens in 1967 during the terrible battles of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution with passionate teenagers killing each other over nothing and exulting in their horrible victories. At a "struggle" session at Tsinghua University a gentle, harmless, middle aged physicist is dragged before the crowd of students and accused of counter-revolutionary activity. In front of his wife, who criticizes him under pressure, and his 22 year old daughter, who looks on in horror, the professor is beaten to death by 14 year old girls who didn't actually mean to kill him but were carried away by revolutionary zeal.
Ye Wenjie, the physicist's daughter, and herself a physicist, is sent to Red Coast Base, an experimental radio/radar installation intended to send powerful beams into space for attacking satellites. Over the years, with increasing understanding of astrophysics, she discovers that a beam aimed at the sun will penetrate the outer solar atmosphere and bounce around, eventually being re-radiated with tremendous amplification, far more than would be possible with all of the power of earth. Obscuring her intentions, she encodes a message and sends it to the sun. Almost nine years later, having mostly forgotten about it, she detects a return message that says, "Do not reply!" and warns her that someone has received her message and will invade the earth if they know how far away the earth is - which they will be able to tell if she replies. Believing that humanity is corrupt and evil, she does reply anyway with a three second message which is enough for the aliens to determine the distance of the earth from their own world at Alpha Centauri, just 4.5 light years away.
Many years later, nano-materials physicist Wang Miao and tough cop Shi Qiang ("Da Shi" or "Big Shi") are both dragged into a secret worldwide defense project. Wang had been pulled into an Internet computer game called "The Three Body Problem" to analyze the problems of a world which alternates between burning hot, freezing cold, and stable weather states with a civilization that is continually destroyed and re-constructed. The civilization desperately needs a theory of the climate and weather to predict the future. Wang, as one of the players, solves the problem. There are three suns that circle each other with the planet under the influence of all three. Figuring out where the suns will be vis. a vis. the planet is the classic three body problem. It is in fact the problem faced by the people of Alpha Centauri. Worse, they have determined that, inevitably, their planet will fall into one of the suns. They have resolved to send a fleet of space ships to earth to conquer the planet, wipe out the humans, and re-establish their civilization on the stable earth. Using advanced particle physics they learn to extrude the inner dimensions of a proton to produce an object larger than a planet but still with the mass of a proton. They construct a computer out of it and send two such protons to earth at near light speed, where the two protons monitor earth activities and interfere with particle physics research to prevent humans from learning enough to stop them. Then they send a fleet of ships to arrive at earth in 450 years. In their last communication to earth they say "You are bugs!"
Some people on earth had actually supported the aliens. Some thought that the aliens would come to lead humans to a new and higher civilization. Some actually believed that the aliens would kill them all (the actual alien plan) but thought that would be a good thing, as Ye Wenjie thought. Now, at the end of the novel, those humans who want to survive are faced with the knowledge that, in 450 years, a technologically superior civilization will arrive at the earth with the intent of wiping everyone out.
Wang Miao is deeply depressed, but Da Shi takes him and another scientist out of the city into the countryside, to a farm which is under assault by locusts. He asks how many years humans have been at war with bugs and then asks if the bugs have been wiped out. Everyone takes new heart from his demonstration.
Liu Cixin is said to be the most popular of Chinese writers of science fiction. He says he is not interested in politics but I think that's something of a cover that he uses to try to avoid criticism and censorship.
This novel is a pretty remarkable work of scientific imagination. Liu's appreciation of physics is quite high and quite current, or at least it seems so to my laymn's mind. The idea of extruding the inner dimensions of a proton as predicted by string theory is pretty extraordinary - though it may be that such ideas are common currency among string theorists and it is only us layman that don't know about it. The presentation of the three suns around the planet was also highly imaginative and casting it as a computer game enabled Liu to treat it in a cartoon fashion without thereby turning his book into a cartoon.
I liked this book quite a bit. I intend to introduce it to my son-in-law Jim, a science fiction and physics afficionado, who I think will like it.
There have either been or will be two follow on books. I hope to be able to read them.
| Author | Rilke, Rainer Maria |
|---|---|
| Original Language | German |
| Translators | Hulse, Michael |
| Publication | London: Penguin Classics, 2009 |
| Copyright Date | 1910 |
| Number of Pages | 208 |
| Extras | Chronology, introduction, further reading, notes |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | April 2015 |
Rene Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke, born in Prague 1875, is considered by some to be the greatest, or at least the greatest modern, poet in the German language. This book is his only novel.
It's hard for me to say exactly what the novel is about. Part of it is told in first person from the point of view of a man living an isolated and insecure life as an outsider in Paris. I take it that this is Malte Laurids Brigge. Part is from the point of view of a child, later a man, of early nineteenth century Denmark. Parts are about medieval kings. All of the people in the novel are isolated, ill at ease, and emotionally disconnected from their surroundings.
Some of the material is about love, but not in any conventional sense. Rilke writes that it is important to love, but not to reveal ones love or to receive love in return. To do so would ruin the purity of the love. Some of the material is about women, some about men, some about children growing up fearfully in circumstances that most normal people would consider to be safe and even privileged.
To my mind at least, there were related themes running through the "novel", but not a coherent story.
Equally at home in Austira-Hungary, France, Germany, Russia, Italy, Scandinavia, Switzerland and Spain, Rilke was very much a European writer rather than a German writer, although the language he wrote in was German.
This boook is called a novel and said to be the only novel that Rilke wrote, but it doesn't seem to me to be a novel in any conventional sense. If I had to choose another writer like Rilke, the closest I might be able to come would be Marcel Proust. Like Proust, Rilke seems very self-absorbed. There are many different characters in the book but they seem to me to be versions of the same boy-man, a person striving for but never achieving enough of his mother's love. As with Proust, there are some keen observations and much subtlety but, also like Proust, this is not a writer for me. I read him because the book is short, the author is famous, and I wanted to know what he was all about. This was probably not the best book, and maybe far from the best book, to have revealed his value as a writer to me. If I come across a translation of some of his poetry in the future, I may have a look. But I probably won't seek it out.
| Author | Zweig, Stefan |
|---|---|
| Original Language | German |
| Translators | Rotenberg, Joel |
| Publication | New York: New York Review of Books, 2006 |
| Copyright Date | 1942 |
| Number of Pages | 104 |
| Extras | Introduction by Peter Gay |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | April 2015 |
An unnamed narrator boards a ship in New York, bound for Buenos Aires. He soon learns that one Mirko Czentovic, the world chess champion, is aboard, heading for a chess tour of Argentina. C is an idiot savant, a boy who was not good at anything except maybe chopping wood and doing farm chores, who was unsociable, taciturn, and seemingly empty headed, but he turned out to be a brilliant chess player. The narrator, being interested in the mind, wants to meet and talk to C but is rebuffed. Then one McConnor appears, a wealthy Scotsman who learns of C's presence and wants very much to play against him. C says he is required by his agent to charge $250 to play any game but McConnor has no problem with that and they sit down to play. C wins easily and quickly. The narrator assumes that will be the end of it but M wants a rematch and is not bothered by the fee.
Since many people want to play the champ but only McConnor is willing to pay the fee, C offers to allow all of them to consult together on a game against him. M accepts this and the game begins. At a critical point, the team is about to queen a pawn, giving them a big advantage in material. C is off by himself while they discuss it. Suddenly a new man appears. He looks at the board and says "Stop! It's a trap. If you queen the pawn he will do this, you will have to do that, and in five moves you'll be mated." He then tells them what they have to do which, if they follow all of his instructions, will eventually lead to a draw, which is the best they can get. They make the recommended move.
C returns to the board, realizes that there must be a new player, and spots him immediately. He plays on to a draw and then offers a game to the new man, whom McConnor sponsors for the fee.
Our narrator then meets the new man, a man with an old Austrian family name, and the new man relates his story. He takes over the narration of the novel. He had been a member of a family business of accountants and financial managers that handled affairs for the Catholic Church. When the Nazis came to power in Austria he had waited too long to leave. They arrested him, but instead of the simple tortures they used against most of their prisoners, they put him up in a hotel with other high value prisoners. There he was completely isolated, never allowed to speak to anyone, see out a window, or read any book, magazine or newspaper. His only human contact was occasional meetings with his interrogators, with whom he played a cat and mouse game, trying to only tell them things they could find out without him while concealing whatever he could that was important.
He gradually began to go mad until one day he spotted a book shaped bulge in a jacket pocket belonging to a guard that had been left within reach. At some risk, he stole the book. It turned out to be a book of 150 famous master chess games. From then on he became obsessed with chess, playing and replaying the games until he had memorized all of them and could get nothing more from the book. Then he began playing against himeslf in his head. His black part played against his white part, game after game, morning to night and on into his dreams. Finally he became certifiably crazy and was sent to a hospital where a sympathetic psychiatrist certified him as permanently incapacitated while privately treating the man until he recovered. He escaped from Austria and followed the doctor's advice to never play chess again - until that point on the ship against Czentovic.
The rematch occurred. C sensed the new man's obsession and weakness, using psychology against him. He delayed even the simplest move for the full ten minutes that they had agreed would be allowed between moves, knowing that his opponent was going crazy thinking and overthinking the game. Finally, in complete mania, the new man was playing another game in his head against himself and made a wrong move on the board - causing a loss. Offered a rematch, he leaped at the chance but was successfully dissuaded by the original narrator and was able to return to an even keel.
This short novel was found among Zweig's papers after he and his wife committed suicide in 1942. It shows, on the one hand, his revulsion for the Nazis and his disturbance over the destruction of European culture. However it is surprising to me that he would write a work that seems to me so polished and not entirely despairing just before doing away with himself. Just as Zweig's narrator is interested in knowing more about the mind of Czentovic, so too I am interested in knowing more about the mind of Zweig and, in particular, why he and his wife chose to kill themselves, especially when a turning point was beginning to be appararent as the Germans were stopped before Moscow and the U.S. entered the war. Perhaps the world situation was not the main impetus to Zweig's action. Perhaps he or his wife had been given a diagnosis of a terminal illness that no one but they knew about. Or perhaps threats had been made against their families. It is possible that someone knows or knew the reason, but I guess that I never will.
Zweig seems to me a quintessentially civilized man. His characters are decent, well educated, cultured people. Even his construction of Czentovic as a mean spirited and bullying sort of man is not completely devoid of sympathy and, as a bully, C is a pale reflection of the real bullies who were running wild in Europe at the time.
Could there be a man like C? I'm not sure. I have occasionally played chess against good players with working class backgrounds, but they were far from great players. It is hard for me to imagine a champion who has no intellectual capacity other than chess but I have no basis on which to rule it out and Zweig's portrayal was not unconvincing.
I liked that the new man got hold of himself and was able to return to a stable state. There is a part of me that didn't want him to throw away this astonishing talent that he had developed. Only a handful of people in the world can play championship level chess. But I accepted Zweig's resolution of the problem as the right one. It was an acceptably satisfying ending.
The Wikipedia article about Zweig includes this statement about his death: 'On 23 February 1942, the Zweigs were found dead of a barbiturate overdose in their house in the city of Petrópolis, holding hands. He had been despairing at the future of Europe and its culture. "I think it better to conclude in good time and in erect bearing a life in which intellectual labour meant the purest joy and personal freedom the highest good on Earth," he wrote.'
It is a terrible shame. He was a great writer and, as Chess Story shows, he was still capable of writing very fine books.
| Author | Sansom, CJ |
|---|---|
| Publication | Vintage, 2014 |
| Copyright Date | 2006 |
| Number of Pages | 544 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | World War II; Spain |
| When Read | May 2015 |
Cambridge languages professor Harry Brett has been invalided out of the army after suffering injuries and shell shock during the evacuation from Dunkirk. After recovering, he is recruited by British intelligence to go to Spain. He is fluent in Spanish and can work as a translator at the embassy, covering his real mission which is to find out what his old Rookwood public school roommate, Sandy Forsyth, is up to.
It is the fall of 1940. Franco has won the Civil War and his government, composed of a disparate mix of Falangists and Monarchists has implemented a regime of terror against all former Republicans, and a government of corruption amongst the rich and well connected. Hitler has had a setback in the Battle of Britain but has begun the aerial blitz on British cities and is expected by many of the Spanish to be on the verge of winning the war. The Falangists want to join him, declare war on Britain, and seize Gibraltar from Britain and French Morocco from France. The Monarchists, traditionally pro-English and wary of British control of the sea and Anglo-American financial power, want to stay out of the war. Word has come to the British embassy that Sandy Forsyth and a few Spanish business partners have developed a gold mine not far from Madrid. If true, it could free Spain from the need to borrow money from Britain and the U.S. to import food. Harry's job is to find out if it's true.
Against this backdrop there are several interconnected personal stories. Sandy appears to trust Harry and Harry, against all of his instincts, must lie to him. Sandy is living with Barbara, the former girlfriend of International Brigader Bernie Piper who was reported as missing, presumed dead, in the Civil War. Bernie is in fact still alive and in increasingly desperate shape in a punitive concentration camp. He is also a former roommate of Harry at Rookwood where he was a scholarship student from a lower class background. He's a committed communist and a very brave man. Bernie and Sandy despise each other. Barbara learns from a British journalist that Bernie is still alive and is put in touch with a man whose brother is a guard at the camp and will help him escape in return for money. Harry has fallen in love with Sofia, a former medical student and Republican whose hopes were dashed by the war and is now living in poverty as a dairy maid with her sick mother, a young brother, and a neighbor child whose parents were murdered by Falangists.
The story builds up to a climax (stop reading here if you want to read the book yourself.) Bernie escapes but the whole escape was a setup and a trap. Sofia is killed. Barbara's courageous action kills the Civil Guard and the two monarchists (Commandante Aranda and the General) who sprung the trap. Bernie, badly wounded, makes it with Harry and Barbara to the British embassy where the ambassador is furious with Harry and Harry throttles him for his self-important inability to see that good people are dying - before being knocked out by an embassy employee/spy. Sandy, had created the gold mine fraud by selling forged visas to European Jews hoping to escape to Portugal and the New World in return for gold, which he and his partners used to "salt" the mine. Ready to kill Sandy, Barbara aims a gun at him and he runs away and escapes.
We learn in an epilog in 1947 that Bernie made it back to England with Barbara, promising never to leave her but leaving anyway when his wounds heal to be killed on the beach at Normandy. Harry's career is sabotaged by the ambassador and he is now teaching high school French. Barbara is working as a commercial assistant and translator. In the final scene she goes to the airport to meet four Argentine businessmen, one of whom, Senor Barranca, is in fact Sandy Forsyth, looking about at his first look at England in many years.
Sansom's writing is more workman like than inspired. There are no poetic or imaginatively evocative descriptions. Still, while the characters' feelings are plainly described they are still reasonably convincing and acceptably complex.
What happens to the characters constitutes the foreground of the book, but what happened to Spain is its real subject. The Conservative government in Britain convinced France to withhold all aid to Republican Spain. As a result, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy were relatively free to do as they liked to overthrow the Republic. The only possible ally was the Soviet Union, whose authoritarian leaders did harm as well as good to the Spanish cause. Spaniards fighting for democracy had to worry about being stabbed in the back by communists or shot in the front by the fascists.
Falangist rule in Spain was an unmitigated disaster for the ordinary people. The corrupt exploiters came back and took over all the economic, government, and legal institutions and ran them for their own benefit. Strict, orthodox, Catholic clergy imposed their rigid ideology on all of the people. Sansom has them blowing up a pre-historic cave because the magnificent artwork on the walls is pagan inspired. Supporters of the Republic are arrested or murdered in front of their children and the children left to roam the streets until they are finally kidnapped and sent to Church run reform schools. The people at the top steal millions. The people at the bottom are forced into virtual slavery.
The suspense was very intense at the end. The success of Barbara's resistance to the killers was a little far fetched, but not unsatisfying. The overall terms of the plot however, that the plan to free Bernie was a put-up from the beginning, that the British Ambassador was serving his own interests as much or more than England's, that Harry would suffer for his rebellion, that Bernie would not be able to accept any retirement from his struggle - all that was rather convincing to me.
I liked the book.
| Author | McKewan, Ian |
|---|---|
| Publication | Doubleday, 2014 |
| Copyright Date | 2014 |
| Number of Pages | 240 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | May 2015 |
59 year old High Court judge Fiona Maye is confronted by her husband with a demand for an open marriage. They have not had sex in seven weeks. He's met a young woman and decided he wants to have a passionate fling while he is still not too old to do it. She throws him out of the house and changes the locks.
Fiona's work involves what we in the U.S. would call "family law". She works with divorce, child custody and welfare, and similar cases, always trying to follow the Children Act that requires a judge to rule in the best interests of the child.
An important case comes to her court. A boy with leukemia is from a family that is part of a Christian community that considers blood transfusion to be against God's will. The boy is almost 18 years old, the age of consent. However, until then, Fiona has the right to authorize the doctors to use force to treat him. She visits the boy and listens to him, making no big arguments herself but asking questions. After thoughtful consideration, she decides that it is not in the boy's interest to throw away his whole life for what is clearly a wrong headed religious belief. She orders that the doctors may perform the transfusions against his and his parents' will. They do and the boy lives.
Sometime after his recovery the boy writes to Fiona. He tells her that his parents were relieved. They really wanted the transfusion but didn't want to go against God's will. Fiona's decision saved the boy and salved their consciences. The boy was offended by the hypocrisy and left the church. Now he wants a closer relationship with Fiona. He seems to see in her a surrogate parent, friend and protector. On her side, she considers that indulging in a relationship with him would be inappropriate in her position. She deals with the letters by ignoring them.
Later, the boy's leukemia recurs. This time he refuses the transfusion and the law respects his adult decision. He dies. It is a clear case of suicide. Fiona is upset with herself. She might have saved him.
At the end of the story there is a slow, painful, mostly undiscussed and unacknowledged rapprochement with her husband. They go back to living together. It is unclear whether anything is resolved between them.
There are two parts to the story, the boy's treatment and Fiona's marriage. The treatment decision struck me as very well handled. McKewan lays out the arguments on each side in a neutral way and presents us with convincing portraits of both the parents and the boy. There is no obvious craziness that would easily and cheaply justify the judge in overruling the wishes of the family. Fiona's interview with the boy is quite nicely done by her and by McKewan and is, again, presented so as to force the reader to take the boy's wishes seriously. Then, after doing all of that, Fiona explains very convincingly why, even though the family's decision was thoughtful and mature and grounded in freedom of religion, it was definitely not in the interest of the boy and should be overridden. I was convinced.
The recurrence and suicide were not altogether surprising. We readers are uncomfortable with Fiona's repeated decision to not answer the boy's letters. I, for one, fully agreed that it was inappropriate for her to have an ongoing relationship with the boy, but I would like her to have explained herself to him and given him some advice rather than simply not answer his letters.
The story of the marriage was, presumably, an illustration of those aspects of Fiona's character that also kept her from involvement with the boy. She was smart, hard working, highly competent, but rather cold and uninvolved. Instead of talking to her husband, she shut him out. Having so much at stake, she couldn't take the neutral stance with her husband that she took with the boy, but her refusal to deal with him was not unlike her behavior towards the people over whom she ruled. She had become a judge rather than a person.
I rather liked the book. The writing was straightforward but not simple minded, plodding, or pedestrian. I learned some things from both of the threads of the story.
I read this in one day at sea on our trans-Pacific cruise. That's something I haven't done in a long while. It will be discussed at our next NCI book group meeting.
| Author | Atkinson, Rick |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2013 |
| Copyright Date | 2013 |
| Number of Pages | 928 |
| Extras | Notes, maps, charts, photos, bibliography, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | May 2015 |
This is the final volume of Atkinson's trilogy about the United States Army in World War II in Europe. It covers the invasion of France and the drive into Germany, ending with the German signing of the unconditional surrender. The style is exactly the same as the first two volumes, with many quotes from diaries and letters, many statistics about numbers of troops, casualties, and tons of supplies. There are portraits of the commanders and arguments about strategy.
By this point in the war, the American reliance on overwhelming material superiority had become well established. In numbers of ships, trucks, planes, tanks, guns, bombs, shells, and bullets, not to mention food, gasoline, spare parts, bridging equipment, bulldozers, and so on, the Americans often out produced the Germans by ten to one or even twenty to one, while also bringing more men to the battle. The extraordinary training, professionalism, and creative leadership of the German Wehrmacht enabled them to hold out much longer than expected and to inflict many more casualties than expected but, ultimately, they were overwhelmed and crushed.
Many GIs came to France with no special malice in their hearts against Germans, but that changed. They learned about the massacre of Americans at Malmedy, about the barbarous treatment of the people of France, and about the inhuman and bestial murder of innocents at the German concentration and extermination camps. As a result, not a few Germans were murdered by GIs after they surrendered. SS troopers were routinely segregated from regular Wehrmact prisoners and murdered, though it must be said in the American Army's defense that, unlike the Germans, the top American generals never endorsed the murder of prisoners and did try to stop it.
Die hard fanatics holding road blocks or towns in Germany were generally offered the chance to surrender. If they refused, they were flattened with guns and bombs, burned to death with napalm, rolled over with tanks, and riddled with machine guns. The American soldiers were in no mood to take shit from Nazi fanatics, and they didn't. The Americans didn't want to be in Europe and didn't want to fight, but they most especially didn't want to die. Increasingly, towards the end, they were prepared to pave over German cities and towns rather than risk their necks in a gentleman's war. At least that's the impression that Atkinson presents and I think it's consistent with other accounts.
Right to the end, many Germans preserved their foolish illusions of separating the western allies from the Soviet Union, of being treated like honorable warriors instead of criminals, of negotiating terms other than unconditional surrender, and even of achieving a stalemate on the battlefield.
Every historian has his own point of view. Broad agreement among them is possible and is often found, but details differ. Atkinson, for example, has a more nuanced view of Field Marshall Bernard Law Montgomery than some historians of the war. He sees Montgomery as an insufferable egotist, but not a bad general. I recall that the Patton biography movie portrays Montgomery as uninvolved and useless in the Battle of the Bulge. Atkinson however, portrays Courtney Hodges, commander of the American First Army, as paralyzed by depression, indecision and funk after the initial defeats at the Bulge. A has Montgomery moving in to Hodge's headquarters and getting a strong and intelligent resistance organized, putting Hodges back on his feet, and doing it in a fairly comradely fashion. He also quotes many of Montgomery's self-deprecating apologies as well as his overweening demands - showing the British general as a more well intentioned man than he is often portrayed.
As always, Atkinson moves comfortably between the big picture and life and death on the ground. As always, his focus is on the American Army - not the Navy, the Air Corps, or the Marines. He has nothing at all to say about the Pacific. There is something about the French, quite a lot about the British, something about the Germans, but hardly anything about the Soviets or the small countries. As in the other volumes, there is nothing at all about technical aspects of the war - Sherman tanks, M-1 rifles and carbines, Thunderbolts, Mustangs or Flying Fortresses. It is a book about what people did, not so much about the specifics of what they carried.
Reading these books has been a significant experience, like reading Churchill's history of the war, Bruce Catton's two trilogies, or William Shirer's biographical trilogy. In each case, the books were a major investment of time managed over a significant period. In this case, I finished volume 1 in June of 2011, reading the whole trilogy over a four year period. I don't think that spreading them out that way has reduced their impact, or that it reduced the impact of Churchill's, Catton's, or Shirer's books. I think rather that the spread over time reinforced their presence in my consciousness and made them more a part of me.
Although I haven't finished it yet, Antony Beevor's Ardennes 1944 - Hitler's Last Gamble appears to accord with Atkinson's accounts of both Hodges and Montgomery, and also seems to speak well of Patton.
Having finished Beevor's book, I can say that Beevor did not agree with Atkinson's view that "... the top American generals never endorsed the murder of prisoners and did try to stop it." According to Beevor, Omar Bradley made statements of support for the murders and numbers of lesser officers, including generals, also supported them.
When I was 21 years old I got a summer job in a Congressional office where the leading manager in the office was a man who had been a Captain in the Army in France. He said that he tried to keep his men from shooting Germans, if for no other reason than they should be questioned for information rather than shot. But the men wouldn't listen. They shot the Germans anyway. I don't remember if the Captain said whether it was only SS or not that were shot.
| Author | Burke, James Lee |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1993 |
| Copyright Date | 1990 |
| Number of Pages | 388 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | May 2015 |
In this fourth Dave Robicheaux novel Dave is escorting a pair of prisoners to Angola when one demands to go to the bathroom. Dave's lax partner let's him into a gas station bathroom but he doesn't come out and Dave busts in the door only to be shot by the prisoner who bursts out, kills the other cop, and hands the gun to the other prisoner, a black kid convicted of murder but not looking the part at all. He tells him to go after Robicheaux and kill him but the kid, after finding the wounded cop, fires into the air and goes back.
Months later, Dave is on loan to the Drug Enforcement Agency, where he's pretending to be an ex-cop, now drug dealer, who wants to make a big buy. His job is to bring down Anthony "Tony" Cardo, but he finds himself liking Cardo. The man isn't real interested in drug dealing. He's mostly interested in taking care of his wheelchair bound son and appeasing his nasty wife who, if they separate, will demand and get custody of the boy for no other reason than to spite Tony.
Dave manages to bring his old friend Cletus "Clete" Purcel into the case and they cultivate Tony. They are at loggerheads with the DEA, but the plot keeps progressing and Dave will soon be boxed into a corner, either taking down Tony or reneging on his job obligations. We don't know what he will do.
In the end, the same psychopath that almost killed Dave at the beginning of the story tries to kill Tony. Dave chases him down and would arrest him if he could, but the guy drowns. Dave gets the facts about the kid who saved his life early on and proves that he's not guilty, and he packs Tony and his son off to Mexico, pissing off the DEA, but there's nothing they can do about it.
I've read quite a few of Burke's novels now. They seem to all be available in audio-book form and they are among the better books that can be read that way. I like them and will continue reading them.
| Author | Binet, Laurent |
|---|---|
| Original Language | French |
| Translators | Taylor, Sam |
| Publication | Tantor Audio, 2012 |
| Copyright Date | 2009 |
| Number of Pages | 336 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | May 2015 |
They say in the SS: "Himmlers Hirn heisst Heydrich" (HHhH), Himmler's brain is called Heydrich.
Binet traces the career of Reinhard Heydrich, the second in command in Himmler's security apparatus that includes the SS, Gestapo, Kripo (Criminal Police) and some other police organizations. Heydrich is smart, well organized, absolutely without any scruples, and totally ruthless. He's the go to man for getting things done from the murder of Jews and political rivals and opponents to the suppression of resistance in occupied countries. Put in charge of the occupation of Czechoslovakia (the Bohemia and Moravia parts that were incorporated into the Reich) he was so successful in suppressing resistance and extracting wealth, both from laborers and from manufactured goods, that he appeared to be next in line to become the Nazi ruler of France.
The book is not just about Heydrich. It's also about the two men sent from London to kill him - Josef Gabcik and Jan Kubis. In league with resistance members on the ground, the two are finally able to setup an ambush of Heydrich's car. Gabcik's sten gun jams but Kubis throws a bomb which seriously wounds Heydrich, who dies a week or so later from infection in his wounds.
In the ensuing manhunt, the Nazis offer a huge reward and an adventurer / traitor, also parachuted in from London in spite of negative reports from his trainers, turns in the resistance fighters. The SS surrounds seven fighters in a church where they are hiding. The men fight furiously and kill and wound numerous Nazis, holding out for a long time, before they are finally killed.
The author calls this book a novel, but it's hard to classify. It might also be called a history or a biography, or even a kind of historiography. Binet doesn't just tell the story, he tells the story of writing the story - how this or that report influenced his thinking, how he reacted to other books on the subject - some of which he only found after he had started his own book, how his girlfriend and others reacted to his work, and how he himself felt about the characters in the story. In many places he starts on a digression, for example on whether Heydrich's Mercedes car was black or green, a point of difference among the biographers. He goes some way down the path and then pulls himself up short saying, in effect, "enough of that, back to the story." Another writer would erase what he had written and just write the main story, but Binet gives us much of his thought process, warts and all. We are present, not only in the story of Heydrich, but also in the story about the writing of the story of Heydrich. Many other writers have interjected themselves into their novels and done it quite well. I'm thinking of Thackeray, Trollope, Mann, and others. Binet has his own rather different way of doing it, also to my mind quite well.
B makes no bones about his own attitude to Heydrich, an evil villain, and the people who conspired to assassinate him or to help the assassins, heroes whom he only wishes he could say more about in order to make their names and achievements live long after the living people were murdered and otherwise forgotten.
The story of Heydrich himself is richer and more complex than I realized. He was a classical violinist of some talent. His father was something of a composer. He was nobody's fool. Everyone in the Nazi hierarchy admired his brains, his Aryan good looks, his cultural sophistication, and his ruthless efficiency. He used terror as a tool against the conquered people but he used it with some cleverness and finesse, offering carrots as well as sticks. The conquered were to be taught that resistance was futile and dangerous, but also that cooperation could reward them.
For me, the most telling scene about Heydrich came early in the book. Having been promoted to command of the SS, Gestapo, and criminal police organizations, he began the elimination of all opponents of the Nazi regime. B has him in his office, taking phone calls and giving orders. He wants no intermediaries. He orders the executions himself. I'll quote a significant part of it. I've condensed it into a single paragraph.
"Hello! He's dead?... Leave the corpse where it is. Officially, it's suicide. Put your gun in his hand... You shot him in the back of the neck? Well, never mind, that doesn't matter. Suicide." "Hello! It's done?... Very good ... The woman too?... All right, you'll say that he was resisting arrest ... Yes, the woman too!... That's right, she tried to intervene, that will work fine!... The servants?... How many?... Take their names, we'll deal with them later." "Hello! Finished?... Good, now throw it all in the Oder." "Hello!... What?... At his tennis club? He was playing tennis?... He jumped over the hedge and disappeared in the woods? Are you fucking with me?... You comb the woods and you find him!" "Hello!... What do you mean, 'another'? What do you mean, 'the same name'?... The first name too?... All right, bring him here, we'll send him to Dachau while we find the right one."
The cruelty is casual but not thoughtless. It is ruthlessly efficient and is loaded with complete contempt for its victims. Even the poor man who happens to have the same name as an intended victim, is sent to Dachau without the slightest qualm. It is not just Heydrich's enemies whom he disdains, it is everyone. People mean nothing to him.
Binet, whose narrator describes himself as the offspring of a Jew and a communist, doesn't just want to tell a story. He wants to expose the villains. He wants to memorialize the heroes and the victims. He wants to personally witness the assassination and exult in the revenge. He makes no bones about any of that.
It is an honest, committed, didactic book. I loved it.
| Author | Allen, Roger MacBride |
|---|---|
| Publication | Weidenfeld Military, 1993 |
| Number of Pages | 320 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| Keywords | Robots |
| When Read | May 2015 |
In the science fiction universe created by Isaac Asimov, "Spacers" inhabit 50 worlds where a sparse population of humans is served hand and foot by a large population of robots who are deeply imbued with the famous three laws. They're famous enough not to need quoting here. Another human civilization develops on earth and settles many other worlds, using computers and advanced technology but renouncing the use of robots.
The story opens on Inferno, one of the spacer/robot worlds. A robot named Caliban awakens to consciousness in a robotics lab, standing over the bloodied body of robotics researcher Fredda Leving. He leaves the lab and heads out to explore the world.
It transpires that Caliban is a "no-law" robot. The three laws have not been ingrained in his highly advanced and intelligent brain. He does not take orders from humans just because they give them and feels no great compulsion to protect every human he sees. Soon he is suspected of attempting the murder of Leving (who did not die) and some drunken Settler idiots out to have a good time convincing robots to kill themselves.
Sheriff Alvar Kresh and his investigative and personal robot Donald are working on the case. At first they do not believe it is conceivable that a robot could attempt to harm anyone and are looking only for human malefactors. Later, they come to suspect Caliban and soon have the entire Police Department on his trail, blasters firing.
While Caliban eludes death or capture, usually by the skin of his carapace, Kresh and Donald learn more and more about the situation. Inferno is facing an environmental catastrophe that cannot be averted without Settler help. Fredda Leving has become convinced that the Spacers are too dependent on their robots and the dependency has stifled their individual and communal energies. Working with the head of a Settler group that has come to Inferno to help out with the environmental problems, she has experimented with "no-law" and "new-law" robots to find out if it is possible to safely unleash the creative and intellectual powers of robots by dispensing with the three laws. Caliban was one of her experiments.
It turns out that Caliban was not the only such experiment. In the end, after a chase, a survival story, and the collaboration of humans and robots, Caliban is saved, the Spacers and Settlers agree to work together, a collection of "new-law" robots will be sent to the large island of "Purgatory" to begin the re-terraforming of the planet, and the real culprit in the attack is revealed (see below.)
I read I Robot, The Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun, The Robots of Dawn and Robots and Empire in the late 1970's and the 1980's. I loved the books. The character of R. Daneel Olivaw strongly appealed to me and Asimov's clear, logical, and straightforward prose appealed as well. Allen has captured Asimov's world, his style, and his characters extremely well. His is one of the most successful efforts I've ever read of one author continuing the work of another. Reading Caliban carried me back to the innocent pleasures (were my pleasures innocent?) of those earlier books and days.
The book could not be called highly realistic. I would think that the technology of many thousands of years in the future would have no trouble tracking and running down a rogue robot, and no need to kill it, as the police tried to do. That part of the story, like most of it, was not a view of a distant future but of a contemporary world seen through a science fiction lens. However that didn't detract from the story for me. I didn't expect something that the author really couldn't be expected to provide.
One false note in the story was the treatment of Ariel, the no-law robot who turned out to be the real villain who had assaulted Leving. I guessed that she was the assailant long before the reason behind the attack was revealed. The foreshadowing made that clear enough. But why was she killed? Why did Alvar Kresh blow a hole through her body when she ran when he could have just blown off a foot and captured her? Why didn't any of the characters bemoan the loss of this special robot who could provide so much information about robots without the three laws?
In that part of the story, as in some others, Allen yielded fully to the demands of popular fiction. Okay. I still liked it.
| Author | Pelecanos, George |
|---|---|
| Publication | Little Brown |
| Copyright Date | 2001 |
| Number of Pages | 336 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | May 2015 |
Former D.C. cop Derek Strange, now in business as a private detective, is hired by Angela Wilson to find out why her policeman son Chris was shot and killed by Terry Quinn, a white cop. Quinn and his partner testified that they came upon Wilson, wearing street clothes, holding a white man at gunpoint. They said that they didn't recognize Wilson, he shouted at them, apparently shouting that he was a cop, but Quinn couldn't hear him over his partner's shouting and, when Wilson waved his gun in their direction, Quinn shot him dead.
Everything Strange learns appears to confirm that story, but he wants to know why Wilson was holding down a white man and pointing a gun in his face. After much good detective work, he learns that Wilson's sister Sondra, a beautiful girl, had become heroin addicted and disappeared and that the white man on the ground under Wilson's gun had played an important role in that.
Terry Quinn, no longer a cop and initially a subject of the investigation, is gradually transformed into a partner. He is smart, capable and tough, even dangerous, smashing a bully in the nose with a meat tenderizer for disrespecting him.
Strange learns that Sondra is living in a broken down building inhabited by addicts run by the dealer, Cherokee Coleman. Coleman buys drugs from father and son Earl and Ray Boone, white men who live near Frederick. They in turn buy from the Columbian brothers Nestor and Lizardo Rodriguez, but the Boones are looking for a way to make a killing and get out of the business. They murder Nestor and Lizardo, taking all of their stash, and sell it to Coleman. Coleman sends two dirty cops, one of them Eugene Franklin, Quinn's ex-partner to pick up the drugs and kill the Boones. Quinn puts some pieces together and confronts Franklin, learning that the death of Wilson was a setup. Wilson had been lured to the spot to save his sister. Franklin was going to kill him. Wilson realized that Franklin was dirty and moved his gun past Quinn to point it at Franklin. Franklin shouted, obscuring Wilson's words. Then Quinn shot him.
Strange and Quinn go out to the Boones' place at the time that the dirty cops are there to kill everyone. Strange kills the worst of the cops in a fight and rescues the girl. Quinn holds off the Boones and then kills Ray when they pull guns. Gene Franklin kills Earl, saving Quinn's life.
In the end, Sondra is restored to her mother and sent to drug rehab, Franklin write a confession and then shoots himself, Strange and Quinn become friends and, while Quinn loses his black girlfriend, Strange draws closer to his lady friend, Janine.
That's all clear now, right?
Pelecanos has a remarkable eye and ear for ethnicity. He himself is a white, third generation Greek-American and some of his books are about people of that background, but his accounts of the black community are, to my inexperienced mind, thoroughly convincing. The speech, the ideas, the culture, the perceptions of white society, all have the ring of authenticity.
Quinn, an Irish American, tells himself that he has no anti-black sentiments. He has a black girlfriend Juana. He partners with the black police officer Eugene Franklin and the black private detective Derek Strange. But gradually, through Derek and Juana, he comes to understand that black-white perceptions can be buried deep in the subconscious, inaccessible to easy inspection. Derek convinces him that race was a factor when he shot Chris Wilson. He saw a black man holding down a white man and pointing a gun at his head. He saw a black man turn towards him and Franklin with a gun. Who can say what visceral emotions may have guided his actions? Juana too has doubts about Quinn. She is turned off by his violent streak - not in any way directed at her, but still a matter of concern, and she senses that his interest in her is, in part, a desire to prove something to himself about his lack of prejudice. Resistant at first, he comes to accept that her insight is not altogether wrong.
There are risks in a story like this. The author could be pilloried by any side, and there are more than two, in the ethnic and racial divides. His sales could be affected. But my sense is that P is above that. He seems to have confidence in himself and is willing to write what he believes.
It's not an entirely pessimistic message. P shows us the borders of racial consciousness but he also teaches us how to cross those borders with understanding and tolerance. Strange and Quinn recognize what they have in common as well as their differences and form what appears to be a genuine friendship. P handles that with some delicacy and with full respect for the differences in character of the two men.
Apart from the racial delicacies, I also like P's interest in the music, the clothes, the cars, and the characters of the different eras. His people aren't just actors going through the lines of a murder mystery. They have lives of their own that develop apart from the mystery plot. He handles all of those parts well.
There's more to say. The Boone's are an interesting story in themselves with Ray's girl Edna and Earl's powerful attraction to Sondra. They too have personal lives and a strained but significant father son relationship.
This is the second book I've read about Derek Strange and Terry Quinn, though it appears to be the first one P wrote. I liked them both.
| Author | McMurtry, Larry |
|---|---|
| Publication | Brilliance Audio, 1989 |
| Copyright Date | 1966 |
| Number of Pages | 288 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | June 2015 |
Sonny Crawford lives in Thalia Texas where he attends high school and plays on the school's football and basketball teams with his best friend Duane Moore. The town is very small with a pool hall, a movie theater, a diner, and a small number of other businesses. Everybody knows each other. A few people have money, most don't, getting along by roughnecking in the oil fields, pumping gas, driving deliveries, and similar jobs. Sonny and Duane both have jobs outside of school, Duane as a roughneck and Sonny driving a propane delivery truck.
Sonny's world is tied to Duane, Duane's girlfriend Jacy, the prettiest girl in town, Coach Popper and Popper's wife Ruth, Sam the Lion who runs the pool hall, Billy, a half wit who sweeps the hall and goes out into the night sweeping sidewalks on and on, and Genevieve Morgan who works in the diner.
McMurtry, by gradual stages, takes us deeper and deeper into the lives and personalities of these people. Duane is crazy about Jacy and Sonny wishes he too could get close to her but while they don't understand her, the reader is given an inside look into the girl. She can't really love anyone but herself and all her actions are directed simply at getting attention. Other people are very deep. Sam the Lion, owner of the pool hall and the diner is a surrogate father to Sonny and Duane and Billy too. His good sense, stability, and genuine care for people means a lot to people who may only fully understand him after he's gone.
Most of the story revolves around Sonny. He breaks up with Charlene, a girl with nothing at all for him. Their relationship seemed mostly to do with just doing what is expected of boys and girls. Later, he falls into a sexual relationship with Ruth Popper, the coach's 40 year old wife who hasn't had a kind word or any physical affection from her husband in many years. Then he is distracted by Jacy and actually marries her in a strange manipulation in which she is counting on her father breaking up the marriage before its consummation.
By the end, Sam has died of a heart attack. Jacy has been taken away to Dallas by her father. Duane got drunk and smashed Sonny with a beer bottle, badly injuring one eye and then going into the army. Billy sweeps the middle of the street with Sonny's eye patches on both his eyes and is killed by a truck. Sonny goes to see Ruth, who is furious with him for jilting her for Jacy, but in the final sentences of the book cares for him.
I thought this was a great novel. It dug deep into the small town life of the Texas plains in the manner, or perhaps just with the insight, of Sinclair Lewis or Booth Tarkington. It was totally authentic, totally convincing. I very quickly came to care about all of these people, to see their fine qualities and to understand and sympathize with their troubles and their limitations.
The behavior of the characters was alternately painful and inspiring to watch. Whether one or the other, it was always convincing. It seems to me that McMurtry knew these people intimately and understood both their fine qualities and their limitations.
It was a great American novel that should be read for generations and centuries by people who wish to understand American life and culture in the 1960's.
| Author | Axelrod, David |
|---|---|
| Publication | Penguin Audio, 2015 |
| Number of Pages | 528 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Politics |
| When Read | June 2015 |
This is David Axelrod's political autobiography.
He was attracted to politics at age five, listening to a campaign speech by John F. Kennedy in New York in 1960. As a young man just out of college he won an internship at the Chicago Tribune, the largest paper in the city, and was one of two out of 50 interns who was offered a permanent job. By very hard and intense work, he became an important political reporter and City Hall Bureau Chief for the paper. When the paper was sold to a company that emphasized profit over journalistic excellence, he eventually left his job and took a job on the staff of Paul Simon's senatorial campaign. From there he opened his own political consulting company.
Axelrod started helping local Illinois and then other Midwestern states politicians in their campaigns. His journalistic background gave him great insight into how candidates appear to (and appeal to) the public, and his long coverage of Illinois and Chicago politicians gave him a lot of understanding of the personalities and ambitions of politicians.
As a consultant he always faced issues of whether to take a job for a candidate he didn't like because he needed the money, or to turn down work and maybe not earn much or have the successes that would enable him to earn more in the future. Trying to find and support candidates he believed in, he also learned a lot about the realities of politics. No candidate is perfect. No program is perfect. Not all Democrats are good or Republicans bad. Even dishonest candidates can turn out to be nice people who do good for people and vice versa. He worked for a number of mayoral, gubernatorial, and senatorial candidates, including important black candidates like Harold Washington in Chicago. He was invited to be an important part of the Clinton campaign in 1992 but turned it down for personal family reasons - a need to be in Chicago to help his wife care for their epileptic daughter.
He worked in quite a few successful campaigns, sometimes against long odds, but his most important client, the one for whom he is best known, was Barack Obama. He helped Obama in 2002 and subsequently and again in the 2008 campaign, even though he had previously worked for Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and two minor candidates in the past.
Axelrod's specialty was "message". He produced videos to use in ad campaigns and advised Obama on how to hone his message to emphasize ideas that people would understand and pare away parts that were too intellectual, too detailed, and too likely to confuse people. He worked for two years in the Obama White House as a "senior advisor", and then again in 2012 - again in the campaign. He worked closely with Rahm Emanuel, David Pluff (a member of Axelrod's firm), Robert Gibbs, and all of the other important White House staffers.
Ax gives us an inside, behind the scenes view of the passage of Obamacare and of other important actions in the Obama administration.
After 2012 he stayed home in Chicago and now works as Director of the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago. He has done some campaign work in Britain and Italy, but has been criticized for not doing very much.
Axelrod considers himself to be a true believer in politics, i.e., a person who believes that political work can make the world a better place. There are a lot of people who believe that, including many who have totally misguided views, or views that are only interested in bettering the world for a particular class or group of people.
What makes Axelrod's account fascinating to me is not his idealism per se, but his combination of idealism with a deep appreciation of the reality of politics. He understands compromise. He believes, rightly I think, that the perfect is the enemy of the good. If, for example, we want to increase health coverage for the American people, we must pass a health care bill, even if it has to be severely compromised by removing the "public option" and making other nasty changes to the kind of bill we really want.
Axelrod's book has given me a lot more tolerance for Hillary Clinton. He says very good things about her, but he also makes it clear, I think, that a Clinton presidency is far superior to a Republican presidency with a less compromising candidate such as Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren going down in flames.
I want Sanders or Warren to be president. I think they'll work on the economic inequality problem in a way that Clinton won't. I think they'll work to stop the many Wall Street and other rip-offs of the American people much better than Clinton will. But I don't know that they can get elected or if, once elected, they can lead the country and the Congress to support them.
It's a real quandary. I don't want to compromise if I don't have to. I do want to compromise if I have to. And I don't know whether or not I have to.
At any rate I found this to be an enlightening book.
| Author | Ignatius, David |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 2014 |
| Number of Pages | 384 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| When Read | June 2015 |
Graham Weber, millionaire computer entrepreneur with National Security experience and a friend of the President, is appointed new head of the CIA. His goal is to get the agency back on its feet after a scandal with the previous director, the demoralization of the staff caused by criticism of the agency over the Guantanamo and "extraordinary rendition" programs, and the embarrassing revelations of the Edward Snowden leaks.
Shortly after assuming the directorship, a man walked into a US embassy in Hamburg, Germany and says that the CIA's computer systems are compromised. Word gets to Weber who sends James Morris, his number one information systems executive and hacking wizard. But the man is murdered and Morris can do nothing about it. Soon it transpires that Morris is actually at the center of the hack. He's setting up an attack on a central Swiss clearing bank that he expects to bring down the capitalist system and expose CIA manipulations of = we're not sure what. Morris isn't just working for Weber however, he's also working for the Director of National Intelligence, Weber's nominal boss, who may be mixed up in the whole mess and who is attempting first to buy off Weber and then, when that fails, to throw him under the bus.
In the end, Weber exposes the plot, arrests Morris, and exposes and arrests the DNI.
I read this book partly because of the subject matter but largely because I have seen David Ignatius, a Washington Post writer, on the Sunday morning news shows. He's smart, liberal, and experienced. I didn't know he was a novelist until coming across this book. So I decided to read it.
It's not an especially fine thriller. Weber is not entirely credible as a director of the CIA and his actions are, perhaps as they should be, given the nature of the plot, rather amateurish. But the book is competently written, has an air of understanding of Washington politics, and is surprisingly well informed about hacking and computer security. Ignatius is apparently not a computer expert, but he studied up for this book and consulted some experts to get the facts right.
It was an acceptable read.
| Author | Bernstein, William |
|---|---|
| Publication | Atlantic Monthly Press |
| Copyright Date | 2008 |
| Number of Pages | 477 |
| Extras | maps, tables |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History; Economics |
| When Read | June 2015 |
Bernstein offers a broad and necessarily superficial overview of world trade from Sumerian times to the present. He is primarily concerned with the very longest distance trade, Europe to the far east and Europe to the Americas.
The title of the book makes it sound as if it will be a paean to free trade. On the whole, B does come down in favor of free trade and does see it as an advantage at most times and to most countries. But he is far from dogmatic about it and also points out times and places where free trade has harmed some of its participants - possibly including the modern United States.
Most of the book is a history of the trade routes, the significance of technological change (new sailing ships, better navigational information, canals, steamships, railroads, etc.) the nature of the trade goods, and the impact of trade on society and on the different political interests in different countries. There is much concentration on the ancient, medieval, and early modern trade going back and forth from Europe to India, the Spice islands, China, and Japan. This trade grew and prospered when political control was concentrated and peace prevailed, and it shrank when wars disrupted commerce, often in the Red Sea, Gulf of Oman, and Indian Ocean.
Obviously, cheaper transportation was instrumental in promoting trade. It often happened that, even as tariff barriers went up, transportation costs went down at an even faster rate, making it cheaper to import some goods even with high tariffs than it had been in the past.
Tariff barriers went up rapidly in the United States, more so than in almost all other countries, from the beginning of the industrial revolution in the US and reaching a peak with the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act in 1930.
Today, the U.S. is a leading force in the opposite direction, against tariff barriers and for free trade. B argues that this is mostly for the benefit of the world, but maybe not so much the U.S.
B explains the Stolper-Samuelson analysis of how the character of a country's economy affects the benefits it receives from free trade. In this view, a country has three categories of resource, labor, capital, and land. B did not analyze the categories in detail but I presume "land" includes both agricultural land and mines, oil wells, and other natural resources.
If a country has abundant resources in one of those categories, then free trade benefits it, at least with respect to that resource. If the resource is scarce, then protectionism is beneficial. Thus, for example, in the U.S. in the nineteenth century, capital and labor were scarce in comparison to Britain and perhaps some other European countries but land was abundant. Free trade benefited farmers by enabling them to sell their products in Europe. Protectionism benefited both capital and labor in the US by enabling US industry to grow in spite of cheaper products made in Britain.
Today, of course, capital is very abundant but labor is no longer as abundant in the US as it is among our trading partners in China, India, Mexico, Brazil, and elsewhere. Land is still abundant, but less so than before as other countries such as Russia, Ukraine, and other Eastern European countries and Australia have become more productive. At the end of the nineteenth century, the factors pitted capital and labor against agriculture in US politics. Today capital and labor are at odds on free trade.
For the benefit of my future review, here is the breakdown of categories for some countries, with scarce factors in parentheses (this is from page 397 in my epub edition):
US < 1900: Land (Labor Capital)
US > 1900: Land Capital (Labor)
UK 1750-present: Labor Capital (Land)
Germany < 1870: Labor Land (Capital)
Germany 1870-1960: Labor (Land Capital)
Germany > 1960: Labor Capital (Land)
Bernstein understands that we are not discussing abstract categories. "Labor" is a category encompassing the vast majority of the American people, and free trade, while making products cheaper for them, has also caused millions of jobs to move overseas. "Capital" and "land", are in the hands of vastly smaller groups of Americans.
This is, as I said in the abstract, a superficial book. It is not possible to do any more in a book covering such a huge subject with such a limited number of pages. Nevertheless, it seems to me that B has done a reasonable job, both of surveying the history and of bringing out some of the issues and implications of that history on the lives of the people of the countries involved.
There are a number of interesting discussions of smaller issues. For example, B explains how steam took over from sail and what the factors were that favored each form of motive power. The longer the distance of the trade routes, the better fared sail and the worse fared steam. The reason is that, the longer the voyage, the more of the carrying capacity must be given over to coal to power the ship and the less to cargo. When the cargo becomes more than 25% coal, sail is cheaper. However the equations changed as steam engines made of steel became more efficient and ships got larger. A ship could go farther on the same relative amount of coal. The death of sail however was brought about by the two great canals at Panama and Suez. They brought down the distance for voyaging to the point where steam was more economical. Also, the steamships could move through the canals on their own power where sailing ships had to be towed.
Bernstein says that, today, long distance transportation has become almost free. The combination of bigger and more efficient ships with containerization and computerized routing makes it economical to ship even the least valuable bulk cargoes long distances. With such capability, plus the advanced communications of today and the almost total mobility of capital that has developed, globalization is inevitable, whether it's good for us or not. It's just not clear, according to B, that there is anything that can be done to keep capital and manufacturing from flowing to wherever it wants to go.
As for the three category analysis of world trade, it's very interesting. Is it accurate? Does it really explain what's happening today? I'm totally unqualified to have an opinion. It seems simplistic and the notions of "abundance" and "scarcity" seem a little odd to me since countries far smaller than the US would appear to have an abundance of labor - which in fact seems to mean only that the going rate for wages is very low. That can be due to many factors other than abundance if, by that term, we mean that there are more people than jobs. And what do abundance and scarcity of capital mean in an era in which capital flows so easily from country to country? I know enough to know that economics is a complicated science and that I can't hope to make judgments based on what "seems odd" to me. Quarks and neutrinos seem odd too. I'd like to hear a competent economist explain these issues.
I read this book on a whim. I am interested in the problem of globalization, not because it's an intellectual interest of mine, but because it has such a critical impact on our society. I want to understand it and to understand what progressive citizens who care about the lives of all people and aren't just interested in their own pocketbooks should do. The book crossed my path. The reviews on Amazon were interesting. So I read it - mostly while exercising on the elliptical trainer in the basement.
| Author | Robertshaw, Andrew |
|---|---|
| Publication | Brimscombe, Stroud, Gloucestershire, UK: The History Press, 2014 |
| Number of Pages | 97 |
| Extras | maps, photos, list of units |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War I |
| When Read | June 2015 |
Robertshaw, a military historian, military museum curator, and the author of a number of books about both the first World War in general and the Somme in particular, provides an overview history of this first really large scale battle fought by the British army in WWI.
The battle was fought for several reasons. First of all there was the hope of breaking through the German lines, flooding into the German rear, defeating the German army, and winning the war. Not everyone believed that was possible but Douglas Haig, commander of the British Expeditionary Force may have believed it was. Secondly, there was the hope of relieving the French at Verdun. The battle there was consuming Frenchmen at an alarming rate and there was a danger of the Germans taking the fortress and breaking through. Thirdly, there was a political need to show that the British were willing to make the sacrifices that the French had been making since the beginning of the war. French soldiers, politicians, and the public at large were seeing much larger casualties among their own people than among the British and so, for the alliance to continue with complete credibility, the British political and military leadership deemed it necessary for the British to shoulder more of the burden, to be willing to undertake a major offensive.
The first goal was not achieved. Local breakthroughs occurred and some British troops got behind some German troops forcing evacuations or surrenders. But there was no general German collapse. The second goal was achieved as dozens of divisions were pulled out of German efforts elsewhere to shore up the positions on the Somme. The Battle of the Somme ended the Battle of Verdun. As for the third goal, what can one say? British casualties were enormous. 57,470 casualties occurred on the first day, July 1, 1916. Of those, 19,240 were killed and another 2,152 missing. German casualties were far less.
The battle officially continued until November 13, 1916, when it petered out after a month of heavy rains that turned the fields into mud. During the battle, a number of new innovations for the BEF were tried, including the rolling barrage, which was very successful, the first use of tanks, much less successful because they were terribly unreliable and hence the few that were actually able to advance were in too small numbers to have a significant effect, and the advance of infantry in small groups.
The battle was a real meat grinder. Each side, but especially the British, pounded their enemy with heavy artillery bombardments that cut barbed wire and telephone wire, caved in trenches, killed large numbers of men, and left others isolated, shocked, deaf, wounded, and demoralized. With the rolling barrages, the British were sometimes in the German trenches so soon after the barrage passed over that the Germans hadn't yet gotten out of their bunkers and were cut down when they emerged. However when the British did advance they risked getting beyond the range of their own guns, but not those of the enemy. Other important tactics included digging tunnels and planting mines (up to 30,000 pounds of explosives!) under German forts, moving men through no-man's land at night to within short distances of the German lines by morning, and digging tunnels for men to emerge near the German lines. On the other side, German infantry fought bravely and responded quickly in most cases, and German artillerists would aim behind the advancing British, cutting them off from reinforcements, food, water, and ammunition, often forcing a halt to the advance.
Haig's goal was a breakthrough. His main commander on the ground, Henry Rawlinson, was less optimistic. He advocated a "bite and hold" strategy that would advance slowly and always keep the infantry within range of artillery support.
The Battle of the Somme has been taken by many, probably most, in England to be the paradigm case of inept military leadership throwing away the lives of large numbers of men to no real purpose. Robertshaw takes great pains to dispute that view. He argues that many goals and objectives were achieved, that many important lessons were learned that produced victories in 1918, and that, although the Germans were not thrown back many miles, they later withdrew 25 miles on a broad front in order to fortify lines on more easily defended terrain. He argues that the battle was, as his grandfather who fought in it as a foot soldier insisted, a British victory. He deplores the frequent British tours that take people to the sites of huge losses without ever taking them to the sites of real achievements.
Note: the print format is shown by Amazon as comprising 160 pages. I don't think anything is missing from the pdf, but the page size seems larger.
It's hard for me to imagine sending hundreds of thousands of men to walk or run across fields swept by artillery, rifle and machine gun fire to jump into trenches and fight, sometimes hand to hand, for life and death. For myself, I find it hard to imagine being one of those men, but not so hard to imagine being in a trench when someone throws in a grenade, shoots down at me, or runs me through with a bayonet.
I accept that the real initiators of the war were the German ruling classes, supported by a public that knew no better than their leaders did what was in store for them and how stupid and self-destructive the war would quickly become. I accept that the French and Belgians, and for both long term self-protection and by treaty obligation the British and Russians, were right to defend themselves. But I am at something of a loss to understand how intelligent, educated men in Germany and Austria-Hungary, men who actually felt much affinity for the corresponding British, French and Russian elite classes, if not so much with the common folk on either side, could start such a war.
I recognize that Robertshaw's knowledge of the war is far beyond my own and my disagreement with his conclusions may be on shaky ground. However I do know that some other military historians with credentials as good as his - John Keegan, A.J.P. Taylor, and Basil Liddell Hart, didn't agree with him.
There is one of R's arguments to which I take particular exception. R argues that, if the battle were not continued to its bitter end, all of the sacrifices already made, all of the men killed and maimed, would have been killed and maimed for nothing. This seems to me to be similar to the argument that the Japanese military leaders made in 1941 when they decided to extend the war with an attack on the United States rather than to give in to American demands that they stop their attempt to conquer China. To give up China would have been to devalue the sacrifices that tens of thousands of Japanese had already made there.
That's an argument that, in the commercial world, is called sending good money after bad. It's understandable. It may be human nature. It's one of the arguments kept us in Vietnam for so long and is keeping us in Afghanistan today. I think it's wrong.
| Author | Brady, James |
|---|---|
| Publication | Thomas Dunne Books, 2007 |
| Copyright Date | 2000 |
| Number of Pages | 300 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Korean War |
| When Read | June 2015 |
Thirty year old college professor Tom Verity lives at home in Washington with his three year old daughter. His adored wife had recently died attempting to give birth to their second child, who also died. Verity spent his first fifteen years in China, the son of a General Motors executive stationed there. He was a lieutenant and then a Captain in World War II, fighting the Japanese on Guadalcanal and later on Okinawa. Now he teaches Chinese and has applied for and received a deferment from further military service. But the deferment wasn't enough. The Marines had landed in Korea and needed a Chinese speaker with military knowledge to listen to Chinese radio communication.
Verity arrives in Korea just in time to accompany the Marine First Division in MacArthur's misguided invasion of North Korea. He is given a jeep, radioman gunnery sergeant Tate, and driver private Izzo, assigned to Verity after he had been caught stealing. The three rode along with the Marines with Tate setting up the radio and Verity listening each night. He reported through channels to General Oliver P. Smith, commander of the Marine division.
The trip north was foolish. Smith knew it and made every effort to avoid following the orders to disperse his division, as far as he could without actually violating orders. When the Chinese finally began their most serious attacks, the men were strung out along the only road in the area, up to the far end of Chosin reservoir. Isolated, surrounded by superior numbers, unable to get supplies except by air drop, the Marines and some other attached UN forces (US Army, ROK, and British commandos) began contracting their lines and then marching the 70 or so miles back to the coast. The weather was terrible, generally below zero and as far down as -37 degrees Fahrenheit. The road, sometimes just a one lane gravel path, was often cut by the Chinese. It wended through high mountains for most of the way requiring marine patrols to climb through the snow and either assault the Chinese or defend the ridges against Chinese night attacks in order to protect the road. The army and ROK forces were often useless. Only the marines and the small detachment of British commandos fought with the discipline needed to survive.
It became difficult to lower one's pants to piss or shit without freezing. Medicine froze. Doctors with frost bitten hands could not perform surgeries. Rifles seized up and men sometimes pissed on them to try to warm them enough to fire. Eventually, men stopped trying to lower their pants and just shit as they walked along, stinking and suffering. They mostly moved at an average speed of one mile in four hours.
Had the Chinese had heavy equipment, they would surely have won. But all they had were what they could carry - rifles, "burp guns", (Russian PPSh submachine guns), grenades, and small mortars. They had come across the Yalu secretly, over many nights in small boats, unable to bring any artillery, tanks or aircraft, all of which were available to the Marines. The Chinese attacked with remarkable courage and discipline, and died in their thousands against superior firepower. But the Marines were ground down too, taking all of their casualties with them, freezing, surviving with perhaps a half hour a day in a "warming tent" where all of the shit and puke warmed up too and gagged the men.
As they neared the coast, Verity is hit in the back by a very long range 1,000 yard plus lucky shot by a Chinese sniper. He felt very little. A doctor, himself on the verge of frozen collapse, told Tate that there was nothing he or anyone could do until they reached a hospital. Verity sat in the jeep as Izzo drove on. He made Tate and Izzo promise that they would not leave him in Korea like the men who were buried in an open pit grave and then had bulldozers cover the pit and drive back and forth over the ground to level it.
When they finally reach the coast, it is clear that Verity is dead. Tate and Izzo prop up his frozen corpse, put Izzo's mirror sunglasses on him to conceal the dead eyes, and bluff their way past the beachmasters to drive the jeep into a landing ship.
The book ends with Verity's funeral in Washington where his body is buried beside that of his wife. His three year old daughter is there with her French nanny. She asks who will go with her to Paris now?
I read David Halberstam's The Coldest Winter and understood the essential history of this phase of the Korean War. Everything Brady says accords with Halberstam's account but Brady makes it all real. Reporting the temperature, as Halberstam does, doesn't tell us about frozen shit in the pants, about hands and feet that stop working, about doctors and medicine too cold to be of much use, about canteens kept inside one's jacket to keep from freezing, or about climbing four hours through deep snow to get to a ridge line and then having to fight all night against an enemy who looms up out of the darkness, sometimes already within range with his burp guns and grenades.
This was a remarkable novel, probably as good as any war novel that I've read. It's a different kind of war novel. The main characters, Verity, Tate and Izzo, do almost no fighting. Mostly they drive and walk and freeze and listen to the radio and Verity thinks about his little daughter, desperate to make it home so that she won't have lost both of her parents. It was the kind of novel that makes a man cry for the suffering and the loss.
We are not introduced to the Chinese. If anything, their ordeal was far worse than that of the Americans. Brady treats them with great respect, but the novel is tightly focused on Verity and his immediate companions. Similarly, he has words to say about MacArthur and his field commander, Ned Almond. Their arrogance and egotism was responsible for the fiasco. But the book is not about them. It's about a forlorn man who has lost his wife, who loves his little daughter, but who is thrust into an unbearable situation with many other men who must somehow try to survive, and don't always succeed.
It was a great book of its kind.
| Author | Stirling, S.M. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Tantor Audio, 2007 |
| Copyright Date | 2006 |
| Number of Pages | 304 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | June 2015 |
This is an alternate history of the solar system, re-creating the conditions of the early science fiction of the 1920's and 30's, before we knew that Venus is a hot planet on which life as we know it cannot survive while Mars is a cold planet, not very hospitable to life.
By the year 1988, two earth origin colonies have been established on Venus, one by the Americans and their allies, and one by the Soviet Union and its allies. They have found, to their great surprise, that life on Venus is very like life on earth, down to the DNA, but with differences. Neanderthals and Sapiens are both living on the planet at the same time. There are dinosaurs! The oxygen content of the air is 22% instead of the 19 or 20 on earth, so there are small but significant differences in chemical reactions, dangers of fire, and so on. There are gradually increasing hints that the situation is not natural. Some alien beings have seeded Venus with earth life from 200 million years ago, and then perhaps directed some of the evolution that occurred since then.
A Soviet space craft has crashed in a part of the planet that is inaccessible to the Soviets. They ask the Americans to investigate the crash and rescue survivors. The Americans send out an airship with five people aboard to go the 6,000 miles to the crash site. However their aircraft is sabotaged and they must land, do what they can, and then come back overland.
This is all the setting for the big climax - Neanderthals armed with AK-47s battling against the earthlings and the local Sapiens, armed mostly with bows and arrows, but with a captive dinosaur functioning as a tank and some firearms of their own. In the battles that occur, the Neanderthals are beaten and driven away, the alien mystery cave is penetrated and then destroyed. The earthling domesticates a Great Wolf puppy, fights the Neanderthals, marries the beautiful Venusian girl and returns a hero.
The book appears to have been written in a spirit of fun and of doing honor to the old sci-fi writers of earlier times. It's mostly successful at that and was a very passable read.
I was a bit uncomfortable with the portrayal of the Neanderthals and the wholesale massacre of them. Current thinking is that they were not the brutish proto-humans that Stirling portrays. But, in his defense, he was writing as a writer in 1930 might have written when such a view certainly prevailed. Stirling himself shows a bit of discomfort with it even as he writes the scenes.
Will I read the second book in the series? Maybe. Maybe not. I have another. I'll see if I'm in the mood for it in the future.
| Author | Kundera, Milan |
|---|---|
| Original Language | cz |
| Translators | Heim, Michael Henry |
| Publication | Harper |
| Copyright Date | 1984 |
| Number of Pages | 320 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | July 2015 |
This is a novel with a number of constructed characters, characters offered to us explicitly as constructions whom the author is free to manipulate as he needs in order to make his points.
Tomas is a brain surgeon and an extraordinary womanizer. He meets a waitress names Tereza in another town. She, bored, oppressed, alienated, lonely and longing for a man with intelligence and independence, shows up at Tomas' door in Prague. He only met her at all due to a chain of six random circumstances that brought him to her small town and the restaurant where she waits tables, but when she shows up she strikes him as "a child someone had put in a bulrush basket daubed with pitch and sent downstream for Tomas to fetch at the riverbank of his bed." She is also sick and he feels he cannot turn her out after he has made love to her. He puts her in his bed and nurses her back to health. But when she is over her illness he finds himself unable to abandon this innocent, needy child-woman ("childish" would be the wrong word here) and he allows her to stay with him, helping her to find a job, first as a low ranking editor at a magazine where she eventually becomes a photographer.
The two continue to live together. He continues his womanizing but is unsuccessful in concealing it from Tereza, who is deeply depressed by what she sees as infidelity and lack of love and he sees as just his nature. He doesn't wish to hurt Tereza at all and doesn't think that his infidelities take away anything from his consideration for her.
The 1968 Russian invasion happens. Tereza photographs it. Tomas and Tereza then go to Zurich where he has been recruited to a good job in a Swiss hospital. His favorite girlfriend, Sabina, is also there. She, like Tomas, will go with whomever she wishes, with no interest in entaglements. But Tereza is unhappy. She returns to Prague. Tomas, knowing it is a mistake, knowing that he could be persecuted in Prague, knowing that he won't be able to get out again, feels obligated to follow her. He does. Their life in Prague goes downhill. Tomas won't sign a statement made for him and is sent to be an ordinary doctor in a suburban clinic instead of a brain surgeon. Tereza is fired from her job as photographer and becomes a barmaid. Tomas still won't sign and is fired again, becoming a window washer, but now women call up his washing agency to schedule appointments with him for sex. Tereza is jealous again. They give up their places in Prague and go to the countryside to take farm labor jobs that no one in his right mind wants, and in which they are completely safe from the Communist Party toadies who have no interest in farm laborers.
They live on with the other farmers and with their dog Karenin. They reconcile to their life and to each other. Then both are killed in an auto accident.
There is a parallel story about two other people. Sabina, in Zurich, has taken up with Franz, a professor who has been committed to his carping, loveless, wife and daughter for over twenty years. Sabina has been a revelation to him and he finally leaves his wife to live with Sabina. But she is not the faithful kind and, as wonderful a man as Franz is, she leaves Zurich the day Franz breaks with his wife and goes to Paris, leaving him no way to find or contact her and without even a note explaining what she has done.
Franz later takes up with a nice student with big glasses. Then he is persuaded to join a leftist mission to Cambodia where he is killed by bandits.
The story goes back and forth in time. We learn of the car accident well before it happens. The author intrudes into the story as author, and not just as nameless omniscient narrator. He tells us sometimes why he made the characters this way. He philosophizes about love. He describes, remarkably convincingly, the life of the dog, Karenin, and compares it to the lives of Tereza and Tomas. He probes inside the head of Tomas to tell us why Tomas sleeps with so many women, what it is that he wants from the 100th, 200th, or 300th woman. He is a sexual explorer, eager to discover that one millionth part of a woman's consciousness and sexuality that makes her different from all other women. He probes into the consciousness of Tereza, Franz, and Sabina as well as Tomas and Karenin and does so with full consciousness of their failures and flaws, but also of their fine qualities.
His analysis of politics is extensive. When he is done, we have come to truly despise the Communist Party functionaries who work for the Russians to harass and destroy any spirit of non-conformity. He describes communism as a world and a culture without shit, where everything is pure and clean and good, and anything else is willed out of existence, except that it's actually there in spades.
It is a brilliant book.
I read this for the NCI book group. A number of the people liked the book a lot. Diana Blaise, a very intelligent person whose reading taste is quite different from mine, hated it. One of the many advantages of reading books in a group in this way is seeing how different people react to different aspects of a book and realizing that one's own reaction, even if intelligent and on target, can differ considerably from other intelligent and, perhaps, on target reactions.
But I reiterate. It was a brilliant book.
| Author | Gilman, George G |
|---|---|
| Publication | Solstice Publishing, 2010 |
| Copyright Date | c.1972 |
| Number of Pages | 148 |
| Extras | Introduction by the author |
| Genres | Fiction; Western |
| When Read | July 2015 |
The story opens with a young Iowa farm boy named Jamie Hedges eagerly awaiting the return of his older brother, Captain Josiah Hedges, from the Union Army in the Civil War. However the five riders who appear at the farm turn out to be men from Josiah's company who know that Hedges sent money home and demand to know where it is, torturing the boy to death in an attempt to get it. Then they burn the farm to the ground.
When Hedges returns, now a hardened killer from the war who has killed 56 men himself and hundreds more by commanding his company, the finely balanced farmer/killer equilibrium in him that he hoped to turn to farming is turned instead to killing. He digs up the $2,000 that he put away and his brother Jamie died defending, and goes after the five men. Along the way he encounters various people whom he treats as objects in his path. Whether he pushes them aside or kills them seems to be of no consequence whatever to him. He has no emotions except anger and hatred.
His path takes him through several towns and various encounters. He casually kills a fake priest con man and beats the man's girlfriend half to death when she tries to get revenge. He falls in with some cowboys and kills a young boy who meant no harm but whom Hedges, in a quick defensive reaction, killed by mistake. He has no remorse. He is arrested and breaks jail with some bank robbers, then kills a couple of members of the gang and escapes from them with one of their horses. He meets a small wagon train besieged by a half dozen Apaches and kills the Apaches, mostly because he wanted some good food that the women of the train would cook for him rather than because he cared about the safety of the travelers.
In the end he traces the five killers to Warlock Arizona, now renamed Peaceville. He is jumped by three teenage delinquents intent on robbing him, but he breaks the back of one, cuts off the ear of another, and rips some skin off the face of the third. Meanwhile, the five renegade soldiers kill the local sheriff and take his place to boss the town and extort money from the townsfolk. Hedges, now known as Edge because of a mishearing of his name, accepts $500 from the townsfolk to get rid of their oppressors. He kills four of them and is about to kill the fifth, their leader, when the locals capture the man and plan to hang him. Edge, severely beats a young boy told to keep watch on him then, from a distance, starts shooting at his quarry as the man is being led to the gallows. He hits one of the guards and aims at another before the guards get the message and move away, leaving edge to empty the rest of his bullets on the object of his hatred.
To Edge's surprise, he is offered the job of Sheriff of the town. He takes it. His first act is to kill the two remaining juvenile delinquents who came after him for revenge. One of them is killed while he is running away. Edge goes to the Sheriff's office, looks in the drawer, sees a wanted poster for Josiah Hedge, with a picture that no longer looks like him, and settles down for a continuation of the book series.
Gilman is the pen name of Terry Harknett, an English writer, born in 1936. Counting up the numbers in the Wikipedia bibliography, it appears that he's written at least 173 books, and possibly still counting.
I finished this book because it was short and I wanted to see how it turns out. It was apparently successful since it was followed by 60 more books in the Edge series.
I didn't like the book. I didn't believe in the characters. I didn't believe in the story. I didn't believe in Edge's love for his younger brother. I couldn't even believe in Edge's desire to shoot his adversary rather than watch him hang, and certainly didn't believe in the other man's desire to hang rather than be shot by Edge. I couldn't understand the author's intent. Was he trying to attract readers who just like violence? Was he looking for readers who felt Edge's cold disdain for humankind? Was he expressing a personal interest of his own or just appealing to interests that he believed could make him a living?
All in all I'd say it was a pretty putrid example of revenge fiction.
See also the diary entry for 20150705.
When criticizing a superficial, commercial, formulaic novel I often end up by thinking that, inadequate as the book may be, the author has entertained some readers and that's not a bad thing. Furthermore, never having published a book myself, why should I be so critical of such an endeavor? Even the great Jane Austen wrote in accordance with a formula that she had worked out as both well within her capability and appealing to a large group of readers.
I don't feel the same way about this book. It's a rather nasty, even sociopathic work.
| Author | Ishiguro, Kazuo |
|---|---|
| Publication | Random House Audio, 2009 |
| Copyright Date | 2009 |
| Number of Pages | 240 |
| Genres | Fiction; Short stories |
| Keywords | Music |
| When Read | July 2015 |
These are five stories of musicians, all told in first person by a musician, or in one case just a person with musical interests, relating a story of another musical person that he knew or met.
"Crooner": Jan, a Polish guitarist working in various bands in the Piazza San Marco in Venice recognizes an American popular singer, Tony Gardner and introduces himself. Gardner was the guitarist's mother's favorite singer and his recordings were the great consolation of her difficult life. Jan makes Gardner's acquaintance and is engaged by him to accompany Gardner's singing when they pass beneath the balcony of their lodging, Gardner crooning to his wife.
Jan assumes that the wife is leaving the older Gardner, but the opposite is the case. Gardner is planning a comeback. For that he needs a younger wife. The current wife, Lyndsey, married Gardner for his wealth and celebrity but the two eventually came to love each other. Now he is leaving her in spite of his love.
"Come rain or come shine": A man working as an English teacher in Spain is asked to come home to London to visit two old married friends and arrives to find himself in the middle of an unfolding marital breakup. He is recruited by the man to help him keep his wife but soon finds himself in a ridiculous, I should say childish, deception that ruined the story for me.
"Malvern Hills": A young guitarist, singer, and song writer leaves London to stay with his sister and her husband who run a small cafe in Malvern Hills. He works on writing songs and, rather resentfully, on helping out at the cafe in return for getting his room and board. He meets a couple of traveling Swiss musicians having some marital difficulties. The narrator's behavior seems pretty immature to me.
"Nocturne": A superb saxophone player seems to be going nowhere in his career. His wife is tired of him and is taking up with another man, a successful businessman. She and his agent both tell him that the reason he's not getting work is that he's too physically ugly. If he got cosmetic surgery his career would take off. Angry about this he nevertheless allows himself to be prodded into surgery with the top plastic surgeon in the city, paid for by his wife's new man as some sort of recompense for the loss of his wife.
Recovering in a fancy hotel, he discovers that the person in the room next door is Lindy Gardner (from "Crooner"). She has also just had surgery and the two are waiting for their surgeries to heal so that they can remove their bandages and once again appear to the world.
Like many of Ishiguro's other characters, the sax player is self-centered and insensitive to the perceptions of other people. He becomes friends with Lindy. The two of them roam the halls of the hotel at night causing some trouble for a private awards ceremony for another saxophonist that the hero knows and disdains, and then he antagonizes Lindy too. We are left at the end of the story with his bandages still on, waiting to see what will happen next.
"Cellists": A young Hungarian cellist in Venice is approached by an American woman who critiques his playing. He is impressed with her criticism and starts meeting with her every day, he playing, she listening and giving instruction. His playing improves significantly.
It turns out that, while she has an excellent ear for music, she has never actually played a cello or any other instrument. She has never found a teacher that she thought was good enough to instruct her. The young man comes to accept that strange situation. While his playing is very good, his experience humbles him and he accepts a job in Holland playing dinner music at a fancy restaurant. It is not what he aspired to but it will pay the bills.
I liked the first story more when I heard it than I did upon reflection. Ishiguro manipulates us into believing that Lindy Gardner is falling out of love with Tony and he is trying to win her back with his late night serenade. Then we find out that something almost opposite is occurring. The plot device sort of worked when I first encountered it but it soured on me and left a bad aftertaste.
The stories were well enough written. Some of the dialog was really quite good. However I wasn't attracted to the main characters of any of the stories and wasn't convinced of the musicality of the musicians. There was a sense that many musicians must have of feeling that they are doing something extraordinary that the world sees as quite ordinary. I believed in that. I could believe in musicians playing at the Piazza San Marco, or in bars and restaurants, or sitting on park benches or practicing in their closets at home to disturb their neighbors as little as possible. But I would have liked to get some musical sense from the story analogous to the scientific sense one gets in reading science fiction by a truly competent scientist or historical fiction by an author who really know his history.
I put the book on Marcia's phone as something that she might enjoy listening to, but after listening to the end I don't think I can still recommend it to her.
| Author | Henty, George Alfred (G.A.), 1832-1902 |
|---|---|
| Publication | Gutenberg |
| Copyright Date | 1897 |
| Number of Pages | 275 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| When Read | July 2015 |
The story opens in 1412 at the castle of Villeroy in Artois, not far from Calais but outside the boundaries of English protection. Sir Eustace de Villeroy, Lady Margaret, and their children, retainers, and subjects prepare to defend themselves in the growing civil war between the Dukes of Burgundy and Orleans and their various supporters. They are soon besieged by an army of 8,000 mostly non-professional soldiers of Orleans whose only aim is plunder. They successfully defend themselves with the local French men at arms and a small company of 24 English archers, inflicting enough casualties to send their enemies away after easier game. However, after the successful fight, the Duke of Burgundy sends an order to either admit a force of Burgundy's men to "protect" the castle, or to send his wife and children to Paris as surety for his loyalty. After discussions, Lady Margaret and the children go to Paris, accompanied by young Master Guy Aylmer, the chief archer Long Tom, and three French men at arms.
Most of the story continues in Paris where the family lives in the house of the wealthy head of the silversmith guild. But Paris is descending into anarchy as the butchers' guild begins to run riot in the street, attacking the home of the silversmith under the pretense of fighting the English but in fact to steal all the silver. Guy, Tom, and the others defend the house until help from their noble friends arrives.
During this period, young Guy develops to become the intelligent and fearless protector of the family, joining forces with an Italian astrologer, the Count of Montepone and his beautiful daughter Katarina, who has friends everywhere and learns everything about what is going on.
There are various developments and adventures. Guy makes more and more friends and shows his mettle in more situations. Eventually, he leads the family out of Paris in secret and successfully brings them back to Villeroy, from which they go to England. Guy, Tom, and the archers then join with King Henry in his grand raid and march back to Calais, standing with him and greatly distinguishing themselves at the battle of Agincourt, which is actually a small episode in the book.
At the end, Guy wins a knighthood and an estate in the giving of Henry, and the hand of Katarina.
According to the bibliography in the Wikipedia, Henty produced 113 books, many of them historical adventure fiction targeted, as this one seems to be, at young people. It's a book about sterling characters and villainous low lifes, heroic actions, and men of honor and nobility. The good win out. The bad are defeated. The handsome boy wins the beautiful girl and they live happily ever after.
Nothing like Henty's language would be written today. The following are randomly chosen examples:
"Do not fear to speak, Tom," Dame Margaret said, after they had left the castle behind them; "the journey is a long one, and it will go all the quicker for honest talk. What think you of this expedition to Paris?"
"The service was by no means a slight one," the young count said, returning a deep salute that Agnes and Charlie made to him, "unless indeed you consider that my life is a valueless one, for assuredly without his aid and that of your tall retainer, my father would have been childless this morning."
"Say naught about it, madame," Count Walter said; "it was high time that a check was put on these rough fellows who lord it over Paris and deem themselves its masters. I doubt not that they will raise some outcry and lay their complaint before the duke; but you, I trust, and other worthy citizens, will be beforehand with them, and send off a messenger to him laying complaints against these fellows for attacking, plundering, and burning at their will the houses of those of better repute than themselves."
Did people talk that way in the fifteenth century? Maybe. I don't know. Henty would have known more about it than I would. But whether they did or not, the language would have been seen as archaic in 1897 when the book was written and would undoubtedly have enhanced its appeal to the reader. Henty was nothing if not a professional when it came to producing these books.
The political stance of the novel is also from another age. There is a pro-English stance and a clear class bias. Henty appears to see the role of wise and kind master and faithful, devoted man as the most natural and best way to order society. Some of the villains are high-born people of dubious character, but the real villains are the mob of Paris. We see here the echo of upper class total revulsion against the Paris Commune of just 27 years before.
Was it a good book? It's a complicated question. The writing is very polished and professional, I'd even say talented. The story is well constructed and paced to achieve its end. The characters are simple and childishly thin, but sufficiently diverse. Even at my age I rather enjoyed it and I think I would have loved it at age 12, which may have been Henty's targeted audience age. But it was also a book with a conservative political agenda, an upper class bias still fairly common at the time and place of writing, and a simplistic story line that is more suitable for children than thinking adults.
I think I've written enough.
| Author | Hunter, Stephen |
|---|---|
| Publication | Pocket Books |
| Copyright Date | 2013 |
| Number of Pages | 576 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| When Read | July 2015 |
One night in Baltimore a mild mannered boozy writer of gun thrillers named Aptapton (some inside joke for Hunter's Baltimore friends?) is murdered by being run over by a car. His wife tracks down Bob Lee Swagger and tells him that she doesn't think it was a random hit and run, but has no evidence that the police found convincing. She only knows that her husband was working on a Kennedy assassination theory based on a story told to him about a coat found in an elevator motor room in the Dal-Tex (Dallas Textiles) building with a Hoppe's gun oil stain and a thin bicycle like tire track on it. It's the tire track that changes things for Swagger, though we don't learn until late in the story what it means.
Swagger decides to pursue the story and find out why Aptapton was killed. His research takes him to Dallas, to Moscow in pursuit of a theory that the Russians killed Kennedy, to a warehouse in New Jersey to find old records and, near the end, to an isolated house in Connecticut.
There are several gunfights along the way. The hit and run killer attempts to kill him in Dallas but Swagger makes the guy, lures him into a kill zone, then turns and shoots him as he revs up his car. In Moscow Swagger and Mikhail Stronski, a Russian ex-sniper he meets, are attacked by a team of six Russian Mafia killers hired to take them out in a park and graveyard. They get hit but wipe out the killers. In Connecticut, a team of four Israeli and other military commandos surround Swagger with heavy automatic weapons, a helicopter observer, radios, and bullet proof vests, but Swagger takes them all out, shooting their arms and/or legs off with a Tommy gun left for him by his FBI friend Nick Memphis.
After a long journey into the story, a new narrator appears. We eventually learn that his name is Hugh Meachum. He is an old man of 83, an ex-CIA agent, writing his memoirs of the time that he assembled a team of himself, a champion rifle shot in a wheel chair (the source of the tire track on the coat) and another man to kill Kennedy in order to prevent the Vietnam War. Meachum recruited Lee Harvey Oswald as the patsy but believed Oswald was too much of a loser to carry it off and so the great shooter was stationed in the Dal-Tex building as a backup with almost the same line of sight on Kennedy.
The story alternates between Swagger and Meachum for a while until the final end when Meachum, who thinks himself invulnerable in his Russian villa, is assassinated by Stronski.
As Hunter gets older he seems to take himself a bit less seriously. Swagger is delightfully self-deprecating. His talk is filled with wonderful humor, usually delivered deadpan. After killing the car murderer he tells the FBI to bring a body bag and a mop - just one example of unexpected one liners sprinkled throughout the book. The owner of a Dallas bookshop specializing in Kennedy assassination books is hired/forced into helping Meachum. He asks Meachum if he kills people who fail him. Absolutely not, says Meachum, if he fails he'll be tortured for a good long while, but definitely not killed. The book shop owner tells his own wonderful assassination story in which a time traveler arranges the killing of Kennedy and, as a side effect, the future is altered so that the evidence disappears.
As always, guns are the center of attention in the story. Swagger is a "gun guy". His theories are based on the nature of the Mannlicher-Carcano rifle that Oswald used, and how a more modern, effective Winchester rifle could be made to fire the same bullet from a more powerful cartridge that would fragment into untraceable pieces in Kennedy's head. There is an exotic pistol in the Moscow fight (a Russian GSH-18), and lots of hardware in the fight in Connecticut. Hunter clearly loves this stuff but is conscious of the fact that he could easily put his readers to sleep and so indulges himself, but moderately. Personally, I wasn't bored at all. He didn't have to cut it short for me.
The politics and morality of the assassination are handled with some delicacy. Meachum, acting on his own without any knowledge of this in the CIA, believes that Kennedy will escalate an unwinnable war in order not to appear soft on communism while Johnson, a man with domestic priorities, will be prudent enough to stay out of it. The portrayal and manipulation of Oswald are brilliant. However I was not entirely convinced that Meachum could persuade his two very competent and independent minded associates to perform their roles. Committing a murder is something entirely different from making a political statement, and murdering a President, and right in front of his wife and thousands of people, takes more than a little persuading. I guess that Hunter handles this as well as he can given its inherent implausibility.
So what do I like about these books? Is it the suspense? Is it the gun technology (though I have never owned a firearm)? Is it the character of Swagger? Is it the subtle, intelligent, and pervasive humor? The answer is Yes, all of the above, and more besides.
The story is over the top. Swagger defeats incredible odds. Meachum is impossibly rich and powerful. The clues are exceptionally tricky to understand. Key information is withheld from the reader until the right dramatic moment. But Hunter goes over the top with a twinkle in his eye. We are happy to go with him and enjoy the ride.
I'm currently in the middle of Stanley Karnow's very excellent Vietnam: A History. If I understand him correctly, Karnow believed that both Kennedy and Johnson were leery of a full scale war in Vietnam, perhaps Johnson more than Kennedy, which is as Meachum/Hunter has it. Johnson saw Vietnam as a distraction from his main goal of achieving the Great Society. However Karnow thought that both were afraid of appearing soft on communism, with Johnson believing that if he were attacked from the right it could derail his Great Society program. In 1964 he was being attacked from the right by Barry Goldwater, a rabid anti-communist.
| Author | Foote, Shelby |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1992 |
| Copyright Date | 1952 |
| Number of Pages | 240 |
| Extras | Additional material by the author |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | American Civil War |
| When Read | July 2015 |
The novel is composed of a collection of fictitious but highly plausible first hand accounts, starting with that of a Confederate officer marching on the road the day before the start of the battle of Shiloh and ending with the Confederate retreat on the day after the end. Most of the accounts are from ordinary soldiers. None are from middle or high ranking officers. Some of the men fight pretty heroically. Some run away. All are affected by the horrifying sights of injury and death and all are very scared.
There is little or nothing in the way of grand strategy. There is an opening discussion of strategy as the Confederate Lieutenant attends an officer at a meeting in which Beauregard argues for abandoning the campaign. They have made so much noise that there is no chance that the Union army isn't aware of their approach and on guard in a strong defensive position. The others however, including the overall commander Albert Sidney Johnston, believe that they cannot turn back after coming this far. They must fight now, whatever the odds. There is also some discussion at the end by the same Lieutenant who explains that the organization of the plan of attack resulted in units becoming all mixed together making orderly command impossible.
Against all logic, the Yankees are not prepared and did not heed the noise and gunfire that was approaching. The first day's attack was highly successful and, if it weren't for a stubborn defense at the sunken road, might have pushed the Union Army to surrender or drown in the Tennessee River. Nathan Bedford Forrest scouted the battlefield at the end of the day, saw the boats unloading fresh Union troops, and tried to get the army to attack at night and finish the job before enough fresh troops arrived to change the tide of battle. But no commanders would do it. They wouldn't move without orders, did not believe their troops were able to continue the fight without sleep, and weren't 100% convinced that the Union could really bring up that many new troops even though Forrest saw them. And so the South lost the next day's battle and was driven back.
The last action was Forrest's cavalry's improbable and reckless rearguard attack on the advancing Union pursuit. It shouldn't have worked but did, taking the heart out of the pursuers.
I found the narratives moving and convincing. Foote clearly dug deep into the literature from the period and seems to me to have mastered the life and outlook of the people of that time. He has a humble attitude to his subject and characters, treating them respectfully in his way, even the men who ran away. Perhaps I should say, especially the men who ran away. He clearly admired Forrest and Johnston but his real sympathies appeared to be with the common soldiers.
The novel was followed by some material presumably extracted from interviews with Foote. I assume these were made at the time the book was recorded on tape, forty years after its first publication. His thoughts are thoughtful and quiet spoken in a southern drawl but with great depth and perception. He spoke of his admiration for US Grant as an underestimated general who, in fact, waged brilliant campaigns when brilliance was called for.
I read this book once before in 1996 and apprently didn't remember that I had done so when I read it again in 2015.
| Author | Carson, Bill |
|---|---|
| Publication | CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2014 |
| Copyright Date | 2006 |
| Number of Pages | 154 |
| Extras | Introduction to the second edition, glossary |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Autobiography |
| When Read | July 2015 |
Carson got interested in karate as a young teen and pursued it with great will and determination for many years. He and his friends trained every day, pounding each other in full contact sparring that gave them a wealth of technique, a complete situational awareness during a fight, power packed punches and kicks, and an ability to absorb tremendous punishment while continuing to fight.
He was married and had a day job of some sort but there is no information about his family or his job in this book. The book is about the part-time work he took in the evenings, working as a bouncer in various bars.
At first, he and a friend attempted to work as independents, but they were unable to get enough business. Then they were hired on by a guy with a security company and, through him, got all the work they wanted. They'd show up at 8 pm or so and take up station. In a large bar they might be part of a team of four or five men. Typically, two would be stationed at the door. Their job was to keep out people who had been banned from the bar for bad behavior in the past. If they had engaged in fighting, drug dealing, or loud and abusive behavior, they'd be invited to leave and physically ejected if they refused to go.
Most of the work was relatively uneventful. There weren't a lot of "punters" who wanted to get in fights with obvious tough guys. But there were some who did. Some were tough guys themselves who thought they, or they and their friends together, were tougher than the bouncers. Some were half or full crazies who simply couldn't control themselves and would not obey an order to shut up or to leave no matter how severe the consequences were to themselves.
Carson continued to train and continued to do his job, but he began to feel worse and worse about it. What got to him was not just the violence itself, but the violent tendencies it brought out in himself. He had done some men some significant harm and he implied, at least to my reading of him, that he was afraid he'd get carried away and maim or kill someone one day.
He didn't want that to happen. He resigned his work and wrote the first edition of this book. In writing the book he discovered a new career interest in writing and has written a couple of novels since then. He is happier doing that then punching and kicking people.
This is the kind of book one reads for its plain spoken authenticity. Many of us have imagined being in fights. We see them in the movies and TV. We read about them in adventure stories. We are encouraged to identify with Bruce Lee or Chuck Norris and imagine ourselves battling bad guys and saving the day. But we, or at least I, are not fighters, have no idea what would happen to us in a real fight, and don't know whether what we see on TV is at all accurate or is just dramatic bullshit.
Bill Carson however was the real deal. I believe that his accounts, although leaving out a lot of detail about what was said and done, were truthful. Reading the book is like looking through a window at a real fight with no referee and no pre-written outcome. It's often distasteful to watch but it's hard to turn your head away.
I didn't realize how bad barroom behavior could be. When I was in college I occasionally, went to bars, but never saw anything like this. I'm just as happy that I didn't.
| Author | Mahfouz, Naguib |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Arabic |
| Translators | Hutchins, William M. |
| Publication | Anchor Books, 2008 |
| Copyright Date | 1945 |
| Number of Pages | 240 |
| Extras | Glossary |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | August 2015 |
In the early 1930's, four highly intelligent young men are close to graduating from the Egyptian University, now known as Cairo University. Ma'mun Radwan is a serious, deeply religious student, intent on becoming a scholar. Ali Taha is a tall, handsome, athletic boy with a philosophical and scientific outlook. He rejects religion and embraces socialism. He is going with a most beautiful girl named Ihsan whom everyone desires, though she drifts away from Ali for unknown reasons. Ahmad Badir, the third young man, is already working as a journalist. The fourth boy, Mahgub Abd al-Da'im is something of a nihilist. He believes in nothing, not religion, not socialism, not love, and not even friendship. He believes only in himself and his personal desires. The people around him, including the three boys who consider him as a friend, are just people to be used by him. He does not treat them badly because he considers that they may help him some day, but he secretly disdains them. About every question of morality, honor, value, or society, his watchword is "Tuzz", something like "Bah" I think. Mahgub is the subject of the book.
Four months from graduation Mahgub's father suffers a stroke and is out of work. He can no longer send the three pounds per month that kept Mahgub alive. Mahgub pleads for help. In only four months he'll graduate and be able to get a good job and support his mother and father. The father agrees to send him one pound a month and Mahgub goes into survival mode, moving to a one room roof-top accommodation, eating the simplest food, and looking for people to help him. He visits a wealthy cousin but manages to make offensive advances to the man's beautiful daughter and dare's not ask for help after that. He borrows small amounts of money from his friends. Then he meets Salim al-Ikhshidi, a slick, unscrupulous person like Mahgub himself, whom he knew in the small town they both came from. al-Ikhshidi couldn't care less about Mahgub and gives him nothing but advice. But then al-Ikhshidi finds a use for Mahgub. He needs someone who will do anything, no matter what, and Mahgub is just the man. He tells Mahgub that he must decide to get married, right now, today, to a woman who, to Mahgub's great shock, turns out to be Ihsan, the former girlfriend of Ali and the one woman that Mahgub most desired. Ihsan has become the mistress of Qasim Bey, a government minister and al-Ikshidi's boss. He needs a respectable looking setup for her with a husband and an apartment
Mahgub is soon settled with a beautiful woman in a beautiful apartment with a good paying grade 6 job as al-Ikshidi's personal secretary. But he conceives a plan to go further. He induces Ihsan to ask Qasim to make her husband Qasim's office manager, a jump of two grades in the civil service and a grade above even al-Ikshidi. Totally infatuated with Ihsan, Qasim agrees. Then al-Ikshidi asks Mahgub to switch jobs with him. al-Ikshidi will become office manager at grade 4 while Mahgub moves up to Ikshidi's old job at grade 5. Naturally, Mahgub sneers his refusal.
Things go well for a while but al-Ikshidi is too smart and experienced for Mahgub. He changes jobs and then tells Mahgub's father where to find the son whom he has not heard from in months and has never received any money from, and tells Qasim's wife where to find Qasim, in Ihsan's bed.
Both show up at Mahgub's apartment and everything goes to hell in just one half hour. al-Ikshidi and Qasim Bey each find ways to continue their careers and social positions. But Mahgub and Ihsan wind up upriver in a lowly civil service job at Aswan, their life in tatters.
As near as I can tell, this was Mahfouz' first book about modern Egypt, his previous ones being historical romances modeled in part, according to one critic, on the popular works of Walter Scott.
It must have been a ground breaking book. It shows clearly the rottenness and corruption of the Egyptian government and society. It exposes an upper class that pursues its own interests and produces almost laughable acts of charity. It treats sexuality as a powerful force in men and women, surely a subject that is, at the very least, difficult to discuss in Muslim society. It explores the point of view of women as well as men, and the women aren't the timid and retiring homebodies of traditional society. It presents in Ihsan, a woman who goes from optimism and belief in love and the future, to cynicism and a withdrawal into drinking, shopping, sex, and society - and describes just how this happens. It exposes her family as little more than pimps, taking advantage of her beauty for their own material needs. As Mahgub says, the society is made up of pimps and whores.
Mahgub is ruthless in purging himself of all sentimentality and concern for others. He consciously decides that it is okay to let his parents die, if that's what will happen to them without his help. He successfully suppresses his guilt and expels it from his consciousness. But he cannot purge himself of his own sexual, material, and emotional needs. In putting those foremost he has already done the damage to himself that he has attempted so assiduously to protect himself from. The happiness he achieved was fragile and the loss of his position left him worse off than if he had accepted the responsibility for and love of others.
Interestingly, Mahfouz sees Mahgub and Ali Taha as complementary victims of the social order. Mahgub embraces and loves the selfishness of society, but is crushed by it. Ali hates the selfishness of society and struggles against it, putting all of the money his family can give him into the founding of a socialist weekly paper. But Mahfouz considers that he too will be crushed by society. Both men pursued the same woman in different ways - one cynically and exploitatively, the other with love, commitment and hope. Mahgub gets Ihsan, but neither has what he hoped for.
This book was my choice for our NCI book club. I went in to our meeting to discuss the book expecting that many had been badly put off by the offensive Mahgub, did not like the book, and had not finished it. It turned out however that most did finish it and, according to Bob Kline, turned around in their view of the book after hearing my defense of it.
| Author | Elsner, Alan |
|---|---|
| Publication | Blackstone Audio, 2012 |
| Copyright Date | 2007 |
| Number of Pages | 336 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| Keywords | Holocaust |
| When Read | August 2015 |
Marek "Mark" Cain is an attorney working in the Department of Justice Office of Special Investigations in 1994, pursuing Nazi war criminals who have lied their way into the United States. A woman named Sophie Reiner walks into his office claiming to have information about the Belzec concentration camp. She is murdered the next day and the police find a connection from her to a classical singer named Roberto Delatrucha from Argentina who was in Germany before then.
Several stories intertwine. Cain hunts for information about Delatrucha and his office eventually uncovers evidence that he was a Nazi officer at the camp where he sang with a small band of Jewish musicians whose job was to put the minds of the Jews at ease as they marched to the gas chamber. He personally shot a 16 year old girl violinist whom he was strongly attracted to but who shouted one day to the Jews to run. Delatrucha is exposed and shoots himself in front of an audience.
A second story involves a small group of backwoods neo-Nazis who killed Reiner and an ex-girlfriend of Cain and make attempts to kill him. There are some wild scenes with knives and guns at his apartment and then later at his father's house in the woods in West Virginia. The inept schmucks manage to get caught by Cain and the FBI near the end.
A third plot is a love affair between Cain, an orthodox Jew, and an agnostic young woman who, somewhat improbably I think, comes to love him.
A fourth involves a guy at the office named Howard who is angling to get the job of the Director of the agency, Cain's immediate boss. The boss is an interesting character with a strong and self-aggrandizing personality, but also with a devotion to the mission and a very canny sense of how to work the institutions.
In the end, bad guys are caught, including the mastermind behind the scenes (Delatrucha's daughter), the domineering new Republican leader of the Senate is forced to support the Office of Special Investigations, the office backstabber is disgraced and has to resign, and the good guy wins the girl.
This was a reasonably well written book but with the oddity of Orthodox Jewry as an important aspect of Cain's life. He prays several times a day. He goes to minyans. He wears a yarmulke. He keeps kosher. He won't work on the Sabbath, even when critical work needs to get done. He has a rigid set of rules that he must consult before doing anything, for example he has to justify to the woman and to the reader his engaging in premarital sex. It goes without saying that if it was "written" that this was forbidden, he wouldn't do it, but he's adamant in insisting that it isn't so written.
That's all a lot of hooey to me, a little hard to take seriously, but the author clearly does take it seriously and he's clearly no fool. So what can I say except that it was a decent book but with some oddities to it?
| Author | Javorsky, Earl |
|---|---|
| Publication | Stamford, CT: Ths Story Plant, 2014 |
| Number of Pages | 182 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery; Fantasy |
| When Read | August 2015 |
Charlie Miner wakes up in the middle of the night in the morgue with a hole and a bullet in his head. He was dead but has somehow come to life. He slips out of the morgue and now he wants to resume his life and find the men who killed him.
He gets help from a mysterious man or spirit. He learns to leave his body as a ghost and come back in to it. He rescues his 15 year old daughter from a big fight with her mother, his alcoholic ex-wife. He looks up his heroin supplier - he is addicted because of a severe injury that left him in serious pain. Then he gets back into the case that caused his death in the first place, the securing of a pair of geologist reports, one of which reports gold in a Mexican mine and the other denies it. There's no way to tell by reading them which is right and which is fake.
He is pursued, seduced, drugged, and possibly setup for murder by a beautiful woman. His house is burned down. His daughter is kidnapped and taken to Mexico. He follows and is captured by drug dealers, whom he deceives and shoots. He gets to the mine and kills the two who originally killed him, making off with his daughter. He gets back to California, solves the crime, and is murdered again. At the end he sees what I take to be the grim reaper, but whether he is reaped or instead comes back to life again I cannot tell and appears not to be resolved.
Whew!
I don't know if "Mystery" or "Fantasy" or both are appropriate ways to categorize this odd book. I currently have it stored in the SciFi section of my ebook archive.
It's a weird and wild but quite well written tale.
| Author | Peters, Ellis |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books |
| Copyright Date | 1988 |
| Number of Pages | 164 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction; Mystery |
| Keywords | Cadfael |
| When Read | August 2015 |
"The Fifteenth Chronicle of Brother Cadfael of the Benedictine Abbey of Saint Peter and Saint Paul at Shrewsbury."
During a freezing, snowy winter, the roof of the church at the Abbey of St. Peter and St. Paul begins to leak. The brother who manages building repairs determines that if it is not repaired, the damage will get worse and the expense of repairs will greatly increase. So he leads a party of brothers to work in the freezing cold on the slippery roof.
One man, Brother Haluin, attempts to do more than he should and slides off the roof. Shingles and beams slide after him and he is severely injured, to the point where it is not believed that he will survive. However he does survive although one foot is crushed and he will be crippled and on crutches for the rest of his life.
Thinking he is about to die, he confesses to Brother Cadfael and to the Abbot that he once got a girl pregnant. He brought material from Cadfael's dispensary to abort the baby and gave it to the girl's mother but was told that the drugs killed both the girl and her baby. That's when he went into the monastery and worked harder than anyone in an attempt at penance.
Now, after recovering from his fall, he determines to go to the tomb of the dead girl and pray for her all night. It is a long journey but he insists on doing it on foot, with his crutches, there and back. The Abbot sends Cadfael with him to watch over him.
They reach their destination only to find that the grave isn't there, it's someplace further on. They get there after more travail and Haluin spends his night on his knees, praying for the dead girl and dead baby.
On the way home Haluin and Cadfael stop in at a house for shelter for the night and fall into a connected story of a young woman, a young man who loves her but is her half brother, and a suitor who has come for the girl. Haluin is asked to marry the couple but the girl runs away where Haluin and Cadfael come across her again.
The story all comes out. Haluin's lover never died. The baby never died. The mother of the lover contrived the whole story to tell Haluin to punish him for being a handsome young man who rejected her for her daughter. In fact, the daughter was quickly married off to an older man who thought the baby was his. The older man eventually died and the younger wife joined a nunnery. The girl at the wayside house, the one who was in love with her half brother, turns out to be Haluin's daughter, and not the half sister of the boy she loves.
The now old lady is disgraced. The young people are united. Haluin sees his former lover and his daughter and is content. The old lovers acknowledge each other but each is satisfied with his or her life in the monastery and the convent.
There actually was a murder in this story. I guess no respectable mystery writer can write a novel without one. But it was tangential and not really important - just a plot device to get everyone moving who had to move to complete the story.
Peters shows her usual benign humanity. Most people are good, whatever their station in life. The church is a bastion of comfort, safety and decency.
In my image of myself, books like this should probably be less attractive to me than they are. But the truth is that admire and appreciate Brother Cadfael. Haluin is less attractive to me, but not unattractive. It is a satisfying read.
| Author | Spets, Sammy |
|---|---|
| Publication | Birmingham, UK: Packt Publishing, 2013 |
| Copyright Date | 2013 |
| Number of Pages | 134 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Computer science |
| Keywords | Drupal |
| When Read | August 2015 |
"Expose local or remote data as Drupal 7 entities and build custom solutions".
This is a short introduction to programming with "entities" in Drupal 7. It's light on theory, consisting mainly of code for each of the parts of a solution to a problem using entities.
I didn't learn as much as I would like to have from reading the book. I would have learned a lot more if the author, who does seem to know what he's doing, had provided deeper explanations of the underlying concepts.
I wrote a review of the book for Amazon. I was inclined to give it three out of five stars but decided to give it four. One reason was that I didn't know enough about Drupal or entities to authoritatively criticize the book. I didn't want to attribute poor explanation to the author if, in fact, the problem was poor concentration or poor understanding on my part. Another factor was that the author looks at the reviews, or at least did for the one review that the book had garnered previous to mine. He made a defensive but polite reply to that two star review. Knowing that he reads the reviews I wanted to give positive feedback that might help him if he ever prepares a second edition.
| Author | Pelecanos, George |
|---|---|
| Publication | Hachette Audio, 2013 |
| Copyright Date | 2013 |
| Number of Pages | 336 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | August 2015 |
Spero Lucas (see The Cut) still works as a private investigator for a defense attorney and does side jobs on his own account finding and recovering things for people in exchange for 40% of the value of the recovered object.
For his lawyer employer, Spero investigates the murder of a young woman and finds some evidence that the man arrested for the crime may not have been guilty. He identifies another man as a suspect but has no evidence and is unable to prevent the lawyer's client from being convicted.
On his own account, he assists a woman in recovering a painting that she inherited that is now valued at $200,000. The woman, a middle aged alcoholic with poor taste in men, had a rough sex affair with a physically powerful man named "Billy Hunter", who broke off with her a few days before her painting disappeared - with no evidence of any break-in in her apartment. Spero finds the man who appraised her painting and tortures him by submerging his head in a bathtub to get him to confess that he gave the information about the painting to Billy, and to get his real name, Billy King.
From there, Billy makes steady progress identifying King's two confederates, a young ex-con in over his head, and a Bulgarian thug named Bakalev. He visits their rented house one night and has it out with Bakalev, shooting him dead in a savage gunfight. The young ex-con is told to get out of town and never have anything to do with Billy King again. He takes the painting and returns it to the real owner.
King hires a thug to stab the woman, seriously injuring her and messing her up. Spero goes back to the house and confronts King. King challenges him to a fistfight and Spero, who longs for a real fight as much as King does, drops his gun and has it out with him. It's a tough fight. King is very strong, very determined, pretty skillful, and is gradually getting the better of Spero until they fall down the stairs and King's right wrist is broken. They both go for their guns. King points his but doesn't fire. Spero shoots him dead. It turns out that King was unable to cock his Colt 45 semi-auto with only one hand working and so could not fire it.
The plot has two more threads. One is a love affair that Spero has with a beautiful married woman who won't leave her husband for him. The other is Spero's tracking down of a killer, beating him senseless with a blackjack, putting a pistol in the man's mouth to blow his brains out, and then stopping himself. Billy King had accused Spero of being just the same as himself. Both were violent men who loved to hurt others. Both had aggressive attitudes to women (or so King claimed.) Their fight was a fight not between good and bad, but between equals. With Spero's gun in an unconscious man's mouth, he made the choice to not be King and walked away. He called the police and gave them the evidence of the man's guilt.
The title of the book is the title of the stolen painting. The double was not an image of two men but of a man and his dark shadow.
Pelecanos writes gritty, compelling stories about tough men with attitudes. He's building up a considerable body of this work, all with a strong sense of DC middle and working class life and culture. The characters listen to music of bands that I am not familiar with - partly because I was listening to a different kind of music but also, I think, because P is bringing out the names of musicians that he thinks should be better known than they are and introducing them to his reading public.
The one really false note in this book that bothered me was Spero's returning the painting and walking away. With Billy King on the loose, how could that possibly be anything other than a prelude to an attack on the woman with the painting? Spero would not be that stupid.
I wasn't entirely convinced by the love affair either. The sex was described as of the mind blowing type. The woman was older than Spero but exceptionally beautiful and sophisticated. She was attracted to him by his intense physicality, which she craved. Otherwise, her marriage was perfect - to a handsome, loving, educated, accomplished man. She decides in the end that she'll try to get him more aroused and interested in sex rather than looking for sex with the unpredictable and perhaps dangerous Spero.
Maybe so. What would I know about things like that?
| Author | Whiting, Charles, 1926-2007 |
|---|---|
| Author | Kessler, Leo |
| Publication | Endeavor Press, 2014 |
| Copyright Date | 1975 |
| Number of Pages | 192 |
| Extras | Excerpt from Schirmer's Headhunters. |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | August 2015 |
Colonel Geier, the "Vulture" commands Battle Group Wotan at Cassino. His unit has been ordered to hold hill 555, near the monastery at Monte Cassino and to carry out a plan by Hitler to provoke the Allies into bombing the famous medieval monastery. His hope is to get worldwide condemnation of the Allies - a silly idea but the kind of thing the Fuehrer focuses on when no practical plans are possible.
Major Kuno von Dodenburg is ordered back to Berlin to pick up some new recoilless rifles to aid in the defense, and to contact some friends of Geier. Geier is conspiring with other army officers, including Kuno's father, a retired officer, to plot against Hitler. They know the war is lost and want to negotiate with the Allies before Germany is conquered and destroyed. When von Dodenburg understands the full import of it he beats up the officer he met and heads back to the front to confront Geier. He will not betray his oath to the Fuehrer.
The battle continues as one attack after another is launched against Hill 555. There are French Goumiers from Morocco, Poles, Indians, Brits, Americans ("Amis") and New Zealanders. All fall before the massed machine guns of the SS and thousands of Allied troops are killed or wounded. But the hill is pounded by Allied artillery and cannot hold. 900 of the 1,000 men of the regiment are dead or wounded. They are surrounded. It is only a matter of time before they are all killed.
Geier's plan is for two Fieseler Storch aircraft to land on the hill and evacuate the dozen most important men who will form a new Wotan regiment in Berlin. The rest of the men will be abandoned. But before the planes arrive, von Dodenburg shoots Geier, whom he considers to be a traitor and Schwarze, the mad fanatic Nazi kills Kriecher ("creeper" in German), a cowardly officer whose sole job is to report men to the Gestapo. Von Dodenburg shoots down one of the planes that came for them and declares that they will all get out or none of them will get out. He prepares a plan and leads the remnants of his command out. One hundred of them reach the German lines. Von Dodenburg, Schwarze, Sergeant Schulze, and the hundred men are sent to Berlin to train 3,000 new volunteers to become the new Wotan regiment. von Dodenburg vows to fight to the bitter end for Volk and Fuehrer.
As in the other books of this series, Kessler, actually Charles Henry Whiting, an Englishman, writes a very raw and bloody account of the fighting. I don't know whether the men who actually lived through the battles would endorse his account, but most of what he writes seems plausible to me. The Germans are shown as very, very tough, but not altogether civilized. They kill the doctors and all of the wounded men in an American field hospital in a raid behind American lines - though it is Kriecher who does that, not von Dodenburg. They speak freely of niggers, kikes, and lowly Italians. Von Dodenburg essentially rapes a 14 year old girl brought to him for the purpose in Germany.
Kessler/Whiting lived and taught in Germany for long periods after the war. I think he has gotten a convincing understanding of the fanatical Nazi SS mentality.
I was surprised that Geier was killed in this book. He has been in all of the previous books and I expected him to continue to the end of the series. Sergeant Metzger, the butcher, was also killed, his throat slit by a Goumier. He too was in from the beginning of the series. Kessler was clearly more interested in writing something authentic than in preserving his characters for the future - as he had done in the past. He also developed von Dodenburg, who was a young and idealistic man - in the Nazi sense of idealism - in the first book. He would not then have raped a 14 year old or shot his commanding officer. The stories are taking on a more complex character.
| Author | Mosley, Walter |
|---|---|
| Publication | Penguin, 2012 |
| Copyright Date | 2012 |
| Number of Pages | 336 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| Keywords | Leonid McGill |
| When Read | August 2015 |
This is the fourth novel in Mosley's Leonid McGill series.
McGill has been instructed by his lawyer client to assist Zella Grisham who is being released after eight years in prison for killing her boyfriend and, probably, assisting in a holdup of a financial company that cost them 58 million dollars and the life of a guard. McGill knows that she's not guilty of the holdup because he, in his former career as a criminal, was the man who framed her for the job. Now he feels a special responsibility towards her that no one else understands because no one else knows about his crime, including Zella, who doesn't understand why he's going out of his way to help her and initially doesn't trust him.
Leonid makes inquiries into the company that lost the money. They go after him, threatening him, demanding he help them, offering him a finders fee of 1.5% of the 58 million if he turns in the real thieves. Then he is targeted by two killers who break into his house. By good fortune, fast thinking, and a fighter's reflexes, he kills both, one by shooting him and the other by strangling. Now he's commited to finding the people who hired the professional killers. He knows it has to be someone with big money, i.e., the company that lost it in the theft.
Eventually it transpires that a high ranking executive of the company was the mastermind of the theft. Leonid exposes him and turns him in to the police. He is given $750,000 as a reward. He takes $75,000 for himself and has the rest given to Zella, with the stipulation that they don't tell her that he gave her the money.
Unlike most mysteries, this, and other Mosley novels, is also very much about family. Leonid has a wife of 25 or 30 years. They still live together although each has pursued other lovers and, the wife at least, is not much committed to the marriage. They have three more or less grown children. The oldest, Dmitry, is the only one of Leonid's blood but the middle boy, Twill, is the one to whom Leonid is most attached and vice versa. Twill is a smooth, smart, sophisticated boy with a highly independent mind who looks out for his father in much the same way that his father looks out for him. Michelle, the daughter also goes her own way, as does Dmitri for that matter. The family affairs and interactions are as interesting and important as the central mystery of the book.
As with Mosley's other main characters, Easy Rawlins, Socrates Fortlow and, perhaps to a lesser extent, Fearless Jones, Leonid is an ambiguous character, highly moral but in his own way and with his own personal values. He is interesting and one should say, intriguing. I like Mosley's books.
| Author | Hampton, Dan |
|---|---|
| Publication | William Morrow, Harper Collins, 2012 |
| Number of Pages | 368 |
| Extras | map, index, glossary, F-16 schematic, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Aviation |
| When Read | August 2015 |
Dan Hampton was a U.S. Air Force F-16 pilot who flew "Wild Weasel" missions in the first and second Gulf Wars, Kosovo, and maybe elsewhere. This book is the story of his experience in training and in the two Gulf Wars.
The Wild Weasel program was created in the Vietnam War to develop the capability of defeating enemy surface to air capabilities. It included radar deception and suppression, destruction of surface to air missile ("SAM") systems, and destruction of anti-aircraft artillery. The program began with two seat F-4 Phantoms but, as of Hampton's writing, the task was handled by single seat F-16's, mostly oerating in pairs but sometimes in four or six plane operations.
Hampton was a rookie pilot in the first war, anxious to get experience and destroy some SAMs. By the second war, ten years later, he was an experienced veteran who led his "two ship" missions and often led larger groups, sometimes with experienced pilots but often with new ones whom H tried to train and protect as best he could.
The fighting included very complex maneuvers to escape missile and gun attacks, and in turn to attack the ground installations and destroy them.
In addition to the actual fighting, H also describes some pretty hairy operations such as defending some surrounded Marines in a sandstorm and then organizing nine other F-16 pilots to bring their planes into an out of the way base in the dark, low on fuel, and land with 40 knot crosswinds, and quarter mile visibility.
The technical and flying stories in this book were really incredible. It's hard to understand how these men survived when hard decisions had to be made in one second or less followed by amazing aerial maneuvers involving attitude, direction, and speed changes in three dimensions and with continually changing situations in the air. But they did that and did it time and again, consistently, and with superior skill as compared to their enemy.
From the very beginning of organized warfare, technical superiority has been able to win the day. Spartans, Athenians, Macedonians, Romans, all developed the art of war to an extraordinary degree and won battles over much larger enemy forces. The Royal Navy did it in the Napoleonic Wars. The Germans did it in World War II until their enemies learned the lessons that the Germans taught them and gave back as good as they got. Today, with technology playing ever increasing roles in warfare, it is not just the possession of advanced equipment that wins wars. The Iraqis had advanced equipment too, mostly purchased from Russia but some from France and elsewhere. It is the full understanding and mastery of that equipment that wins the day. In the case of the American Air Force, it is the demanding selection of superior talent plus years of intensive training that overwhelmed the Iraqis.
Germany and, most of all, the Japanese Navy, started World War II with the most advanced pilots in the world. U.S. pilots were pretty good too, as demonstrated by the Flying Tigers in Burma and China. But in the end, it was the depth of the U.S. and British training programs, and perhaps to a lesser extent the Russian programs, and the inability of Germany and Japan to develop the intensive training of small numbers of exceptional pilots to training large numbers of very good pilots with significant numbers of exceptional pilots, together with the Allied aircraft production programs, that doomed German and Japanese forces to fighting in two dimensions against an enemy that fought in three.
For a professional pilot, Hampton turned out to be a very good writer as well. He conveys the experience of flying and fighting in Iraq with clarity and vividness. The reader gets a cockpit view that no non-pilot could provide. Now retired from the Air Force, Hampton is also more candid than one might expect in characterizing the non-flying officers in the Air Force who issued non-sensical, from H's point of view, orders that would not accomplish the job and would get men killed. He had no respect for such people and sometimes expressed that lack of respect while in the service. He believed they all needed to be replaced with combat veterans - and made a strong case for that belief.
Less attractive was H's view of Iraqis, for which he could be forgiven since he and they were trying to kill each other, and for the French. Why he was so anti-French was a mystery to me. Is the French Air Force, man for man, really so inferior to the American? How does he know that?
The Iraqi Air Force and the Iraqi anti-aircraft missile, rader, and gun units, were poorly trained, prepared, and motivated as compared to the U.S. forces that opposed them. They didn't know what hit them. But there are a lot of countries in the world that are much closer to the U.S. in their ability to select and train outstanding pilots, probably including Russia, China, Britain, Germany, Japan, Israel and, yes, France. The U.S. may be ahead of those countries, or may not be - Israel has an Air Force selection and training program that would be hard for anyone to match. If the U.S. had to fight stronger opposition I think that we would see a different kind of war.
I wrote about this book in diary entries in August, 2015.
| Author | Harris, Robert |
|---|---|
| Publication | Random House Audio, 2012 |
| Copyright Date | 2012 |
| Number of Pages | 304 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| When Read | August 2015 |
Brilliant physicist Alexander Hoffman has left his job at CERN to become the leader of a hedge fund specializing in "algorithmic" investing. Instead of picking stocks, bonds, futures, and other investments, the "quants" (all PhDs in math and related subjects), under Hoffman's leadership, spend their time developing and tuning VIXAL, an AI program that reads news feeds from all corners of the Internet and makes lightning fast judgments on investments based on the latest news.
The story opens with what looks like an attempted murder at Hoffman's mansion in Geneva. H wakes up at a sound in the house, creeps downstairs, finds his door open and alarm system turned off. Going outside he looks in the window and sees a man sharpening a knife in his kitchen. He raises an alarm and the man bursts out of the house, cracking Hoffman on the head with a fire extinguisher on the way. The police come but the intruder has already escaped.
In the rest of the story many untoward things happen, all of which appear to be instigated by Hoffman himself. He is sent a first edition of one of Darwin's books that the seller claims he ordered but which he doesn't remember ordering. An account has been created in the Cayman Islands in Hoffman's name from which all these activities are paid, but H never opened such an account. H receives a text message sending him to a seedy apartment where he encounters the same man who broke into his house. There is a big fight. The man says H himself paid him to come and kill him, H himself sending the email and sending him the codes to disable his alarm systems. H kills the man while defending himself.
The real culprit, of course, is the VIXAL program. It has been programmed to develop independent learning and has done so, using the hedge fund's assets and Hoffman's name to create an alternate computer center for itself, and to try to kill Hoffman in order to free itself from the one man who has the knowledge to destroy it.
It takes a while for H to understand what has happened. The people around him think he has gone crazy and he himself has self-doubts. But he is the only one with the knowledge to understand. He eludes the police (who have discovered the dead body of the erstwhile intruder), his wife, his business partner, and VIXAL itself, to shut down the system at the hedge fund office and then drive out to the backup site that VIXAL has created - which he burns down, severely injuring himself jumping off the building to escape the fire.
The story ends at H's hospital bed, attended by his wife, police outside the door ready to arrest him, he is in critical condition and may or may not survive.
Hoffman is portrayed as a brilliant but monomaniacal, insensitive, and unlovable man. The character attracts limited sympathy but is not entirely unbelievable. The other key characters are his wife Gabrielle, his business partner Hugo Quarry, and the police inspector Leclerc. In general, Harris does his research on the people and the business. Quarry and the details of the hedge fund are particularly believable to me, a reader with zero knowledge of this rarified world of investment manipulation.
This is not Harris' strongest book but, like all of the others, it offers something intelligent to the reader. Other than VIXAL's unexpected intelligence, the one thing that struck me as problematic in the story was that Hoffman took so long to tumble to what was happening.
| Author | Wilson, Edward O. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Liveright Publishiing Corporation, 2014 |
| Number of Pages | 208 |
| Extras | Appendix on "inclusive fitness", index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Science; Philosophy |
| Keywords | Evolution |
| When Read | September 2015 |
Wilson, one of the leading biologists in the world, argues that we cannot understand the meaning of human existence apart from the evolutionary process that made us what we are. There is no God. There is no absolute meaning in the universe. There is only the meaning that we can construct from the capabilities and drives that have evolved in our struggles to survive.
Humans evolved in small groups at the family or slightly larger level. It is only recently that we have developed the knowledge and technology to go beyond that. This small group history has given us two competing kinds of motivation, selfish and altruistic. Selfish motivations give us an advantage within our immediate group. Altruistic motivations give our group an advantage against other groups. Put most succintly, says Wilson, selfish individuals beat other individuals within one's group, but groups of altruistic individuals beat groups of selfish individuals. So we are evolved with both feelings and the competition of the two feelings has motivated much of human history, art, and philosophy.
Our perception of the world is narrow and highly specialized. We see and hear in minuscule sections of the electromagnetic and pressure wave spectra, and know almost nothing of the rich chemical sensitivities available to other organisms from dogs to bacteria. What we are most specialized to perceive is other humans. We are exquisitely prepared to understand other people's feelings, moods, thoughts, and actions. Our attention to those things has enabled us to compete and survive in our groups where, as in all of the biosphere, our main competitors for survival are other members of our own species.
Brilliant writers, musicians, philosophers, and other contributors to the humanities have told us many things about the special character of human beings. But unless they are informed by an understanding of our evolutionary nature, which most of them are not, they can never fully understand us.
Wilson sharply criticizes many aspects of our culture which he believes are modern remnants of primitive adaptations that are self-defeating in contemporary society. One of these is religion. He sees it as a means for some people to exploit others and holds that we will never understand ourselves or the universe until we free ourselves from the superstition of religion. Another pernicious remnant is "identity" associations. Our need to divide into groups by religion, country, race, and other factors pits us against each other in ways that do increasing harm to humanity. We need to see these tendencies as harmful evolutionary remnants that should no longer be allowed to determine our behavior.
On the other hand however, Wilson also talks about the extraordinary capabilities we have evolved that no other organism on earth can match - our intelligence, our capacity for enjoyment, our achievements in the humanities, our ability to discover, understand, and document the natural laws governing the universe. These capabilities will enable us to achieve fabulous things, if we can free ourselves from our built-in self-defeating behaviors from religion and identity to our blind destruction of our environment in the pursuit of transitory and selfish benefits.
One other of Wilson's points I will relate here is his attack on the evolutionary theory of "inclusive fitness". I do not understand this well enough to say much about it. It is a theory holding that various genetic factors add up to a total fitness quantity. Any particular gene may be carried along in evolution even though it doesn't itself confer fitness but relates to others that do - or something like that. Wilson appears to be arguing that nothing can be explained by this theory that isn't already explained in the standard theory that holds that individual genes are the targets of selection. I'll have to read more (and plan to read more), to understand this.
As for Wilson's more general thesis, I find it very illuminating. Having studied biology on and off for about ten years now, I have come to believe that our evolutionary past and future (about which more in a bit) are essential parts of our selves. We do not, or at least should not, live in the moment. We are historical beings. My life is not just what is happening to me now, at this moment, but what happened before and what will happen, and what happened before I was born and will happen after I die. Before studying biology that motivated me to study history and seemed to me to be a lesson from the study of history. But it is also a lesson of pre-history.
Wilson understands that evolution by natural selection has come to an end in humans. Within not too many years, our genetic makeup will be within our conscious control. He has ideas about where this is leading and where it might have led in extraterrestrial intelligences if there are any - which he thinks is likely, though they may be too far off to ever interact with us.
It is a thought provoking book that will inform my thinking for the future.
It is extremely important to understand the evolutionary antecedents of selfishness and altruism, group identity, religion, sex roles, and other aspects of human individual and social behavior. I think Wilson does a great service in bringing out and emphasizing these factors that most of us, I should say almost all of us, know little about. We have long used the term "human nature" to talk about such things, but usually without enough reference, or enough accurate reference, to evolutionary factors. We also talk about "nurture" or learning, or voluntary behavior as countervailing factors, but with little understanding of how "nature" and "nurture" interact on each other. We still don't know much about these things and probably won't for some time to come.
I would like to add one more item to the mix of nature and nurture. The development of reasoning and intelligence in humans has created emergent properties (fully recognized by Wilson), one of which is the ability to see things from points of view beyond those conditioned by our evolutionary past. I've written a lot about this at different times in my diary.
I did not say in my 2015 comments or notes, but should have, that I don't think that Wilson's specific notions of "evolutionary psychology" or "sociobiology", or whatever we call it, are complete or correct. I think the opposition of selfishness and altruism is much more complex than the simple formulations that Wilson uses. I think that those two principles by themselves do not exhaust the range of motivations that influence human values and behavior. And as I indicated in the 2015-09-16 notes, I think that the emergent qualities of reason and intelligence, and the cultures that have emerged from them, are all major factors to consider. That's not a criticism of Wilson. I'm sure he'd agree with it. He was not trying to work out the interactions of all of these factors but rather, I think, to jar us loose from false religious ideas and start us thinking in a different direction.
One key question that remains in my mind is whether, apart from all evolutionary imperatives, are there categorical imperatives imposed on us by our nature as rational beings? Are there values that all intelligent species of any type in the universe, from humans to aliens to robots, are likely to perceive as essential? Was Kant right?
This question is not going to be answered any time soon. There is a lot to work out. However if we ever do succeed in answering the question we may, paradoxically, find ourselves in the same basket as our religious believers - coming to believe in universal (I won't say "absolute") values.
| Author | Parnell, Sean |
|---|---|
| Author | Bruning, John |
| Publication | Harper Audio, 2012 |
| Copyright Date | 2012 |
| Number of Pages | 416 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Afghanistan |
| When Read | September 2015 |
Lieutenant Sean Parnell commanded Third Platoon of an Army company in Afghanistan in 2006. He led his platoon of five armored Humvees and around 30 men, with help from more experienced sergeants, in a half dozen or so severe engagements plus many more patrols. With one exception, each of the serious engagements was an ambush by enemy fighters which the platoon fought off with the help of artillery and air support and usually with reinforcements sent from the base. The exception was a case where American and Afghan National Army (ANA) forces knew where some enemy fighters were concentrated and went after them from different sides.
The fighting was in eastern Afghanistan, not far from the Pakistani border. The Army's mission in that area was to prevent fighters from Pakistan from crossing the border with weapons and supplies to be carried deeper into Afghanistan. To effect that mission, the soldiers patrolled roads and trails in the mountains. They mostly stayed away from the actual border because there was too much danger of fighting with Pakistani Army troops. The Pakistanis were nominally allies and did some fighting against the Taliban and Haqqani network inside their country, but there were also cases in which they fought on the side of the Islamist fighters against American and ANA soldiers. The Americans on the ground were furious when that happened and wanted to shoot back but were forbidden from doing so by higher authority.
The battles all had a similar nature. The Outlaw platoon, as they styled themselves, would drive their armored cars into a trap. After the first time when they were still inexperienced, they had a pretty good idea of where the traps would be, but their plan was not to avoid the traps but to defeat them, call in overwhelming fire support, and then counter attack. It was a risky strategy that another (Second) platoon would not engage in, their leader hanging back and often lying about where they went or about opposition they faced. But the Outlaws were in it to win it. Parnell's orders were that they were never to leave a battlefield to the enemy and were to win every engagement or die trying.
Amazingly, the strategy worked time after time. The Americans would fire heavy and light machine guns and grenade launchers from their armored vehicles and dismounted men would fire their rifles and, when the fighting became very close, throw hand grenades. Numbers of enemy fighters were killed or wounded that way, but the real mayhem occurred when accurate artillery fire plastered enemy positions or, worse, when Thunderbolt ground attack planes, Blackhawk helicopters, Predator drones, and in two cases, even a B1 strategic bomber, saturated enemy positions with earth shaking explosives that killed dozens or even a hundred or more enemies, leaving body parts all over their positions.
The fighters that faced the platoon were not actually Taliban. They were from the "Haqqani network". They included men from Pakistan and "foreign fighters" as well as local Afghans. They were very tough, very courageous, and very well led. Just as the Americans learned lessons from combat, so too did the Haqqani. Each ambush was more sophisticated than the last, employing more sophisticated means of concentrating fire, better use of terrain, diversions, quick withdrawals, and other tactics. They never left dead or wounded on the battlefield unless either all of them were dead or retrieval of the men was absolutely impossible.
They were also very cruel. The platoon found a six year old boy outside of a village whose eyes had been burned out and teeth knocked out. They learned that he was the eldest grandson of the village elder, a boy with a special future in remote Afghanistan. He had been blinded and disfigured and sexually abused for weeks by fighters who also beat up the other children in the village as a reprisal for some perceived transgression by the villagers. The platoon brought the boy back to the village and left all of their medicines with instructions in how to use them. Some time later, the old man walked 40 miles to Forward Operating Base Bermel to warn them that he had seen 200 fighters on their way to attack the Outlaw platoon which had been stationed on a hilltop near the border. The platoon would likely have been massacred, far from any help but the timely warning enabled the Air Force to concentrate enough firepower to totally pulverize the enemy even before they got within a mile of the platoon.
Parnell was seriously wounded, as were many of his men, but he, like many of them, refused evacuation to a hospital. He feared that men in his command could be needlessly hurt if he weren't there to fight alongside them. As time passed, the brain injury that he suffered caused more and more problems leading to headaches, deafness in one ear, memory loss, and eventually cognitive problems - which finally forced him out of the army.
There are many incidents in this book worth recording for future review. I'll just mention briefly: There was a great interpreter Abdul and the spy Yusef who secretly had Abdul killed and then replaced him. There was the "Mail Bitch" who delivered the mail, lied about being bitten by a dog belonging to the platoon, and had all the dogs killed while the men were out. There was Sergeant Burley, the leader of Second Platoon who lied about his patrols, hung back, and pretended his platoon was stopped by a bomb in the road from coming to the aid of Third Platoon. Another platoon leader took to singing at night, keeping Parnell and others from sleeping, but when his unit was ordered out he always found a reason why he was more urgently needed at the base than in the field. There was the physician's assistant who told Parnell he should clean his ears better when she saw what turned out to be cerebro-spinal fluid draining from his ears and nose after his concussion. She also told all the other wounded men that their scratches were nothing.
This book gave what I think was an accurate, raw, unvarnished view of intense combat in Afghanistan. There can be little doubt that their year in Afghanistan in Third Platoon was the most significant time in the lives of these men. It's hard to see how any other experience could be as intense or as life changing.
I presume that the professional writer, John Bruning, helped a lot in the preparation of the book. Perhaps it was his writing skill that organized the book and polished the wording - which was really quite well done. However there is no sense of interference with Parnell's story. Bruning learned a lot and went to the middle east himself to gain experience with an army unit before writing the book. They did a terrific job.
Parnell is quite bitter about the distinction between combat infantrymen and "fobbits" the people who manned the forward operating and other bases wearing clean clothes, eating hot food, and surfing the Internet while performing their duties. No doubt some of those people were dedicated warriors, but too many were unconcerned about the filthy, wounded men who returned from patrol in battered Humvees and were resupplied, turned around, and sent right out again. He was also bitter about ANA leaders who were only in it for themselves, demanding more guns and supplies so that they could surreptitiously sell them to the enemy. Many ANA soldiers had no interest in this war though there were others that fought hard. Perhaps it is not altogether different on the American side.
Parnell may not be in a position to see the middle east from the 30,000 foot view of our generals and politicians, but his book should give them something of the ground level view of what is going on for American soldiers. I hope they read it. If they do, they will learn a lot about courage and fortitude. If so, I hope they don't imagine that they're doing a wonderful thing for these men by giving them this experience. The lesson to learn is that this is something that should not be done unless we can achieve our goals and, if so, we need to root out the back benchers who cruise through the war while others face hell unsupported.
I've read many books about World War II and other wars. I don't think the experience of war was entirely different in those wars from what it is in Afghanistan. Circumstances change. In some cases, Americans were smashed by powerful enemies, as in Bataan and Corregidor, or the hellish fights at Buna, Guadalcanal, Pelilieu, Iwo, and the other Pacific battles, or in Italy or at the Bulge. But in all cases the experience was more intense for the men than those of us outside the fighting can easily imagine. This book adds something to the literature of the earlier wars.
| Author | Price, Anthony |
|---|---|
| Publication | Victor Gallancz |
| Copyright Date | 1970 |
| Number of Pages | 240 |
| Genres | Fiction; Spy |
| When Read | September 2015 |
A C-47 Dakota transport plane turns up in a bog in England with a dead pilot named Steerforth in the cockpit. The plane went down in 1945, just after the end of World War II. Four crewmen bailed out at the instruction of the pilot but the plane had not been found and was presumed lost at sea. Now an important Russian named Panin - an intellectual, a political person, an archaeologist and believed to be a top KGB man - wants to come to Britain to find out more about the plane. The British government has decided to cooperate with him. Dr. David Audley, a historian and Middle East specialist working for an unnamed MI-5 type agency is ordered to find out what's going on and to meet with Panin and help him out.
Audley is the main character of the book. He meets with the crewmen who bailed out of Steerforth's plane, Steerforth's daughter who quickly becomes his lover and fiance, and various people he knows who know people who know people who supply information. He determines that Steerforth had stolen the treasures of Troy brought by Heinrich Schliemann to Berlin. The treasure had been moved into a Nazi anti-aircraft guard tower. From there it was stolen, presumably by Germans or Russians or by one and then the other, and then stolen again by Steerforth who took them to England, but not on the flight that crashed. Audley figured they came on the previous day's flight and the crash was a distraction to cover the tracks, but one that went wrong and led to Steerforth's actual death.
There are a number of events. Audley determines that the treasure must be somewhere on the old, now disused home airfield for the Dakota. He figures out where, and he also figures out that the Russians must be after something else of more current interest than the Schliemann treasure.
The thing Panin actually wanted was a set of documents purporting to prove that Marshal Tukhachevsky, the former head of the Red Army purged by Stalin in 1937 really was in league with the Germans against Stalin and the Communist Party. Control of those documents would be an important asset to whichever of the factions in Moscow that were contending for power at the present (1970) time.
Audley solves the case, finds the treasure and the other thing that Panin wanted, gets the girl, and resolves the outstanding issues.
The book was interesting to me, not so much for the plot, as for the character of Audley and the methods that Price uses to advance the story. Audley is not especially brave, strong, or brilliant. He makes mistakes in his approaches to people, mistakes that his colleagues successfully cover up for him. He is always balancing the good of the country, the good of the service, and his own private good, wondering, for example, if any of this business about Panin and the treasure is as real and important as his own advances to the young Miss Steerforth. It's not that he's selfish or unpatriotic, it's rather that he has existential doubts about the entire enterprise of his work and his life.
This was Price's first book. He wrote 18 more in a series about the same characters, though Audley is not the main character in all of them. The last of the books was published in 1989 even though Audley, as near as I can determine, is still alive today at age 89 and living in a country house in England with his wife.
I liked the characters and the writing. I have access to the other books and hope to read more of them over time.
| Author | Johnson, Paul |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 2015 |
| Copyright Date | 2013 |
| Number of Pages | 176 |
| Extras | Appendix on Mozart in London by Daniel Johnson |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Biography |
| Keywords | Music |
| When Read | September 2015 |
This is a short biography of the great composer by a historian who I assumed was a professional musician, and musicologist but who turns out to be an amateur in those areas.
Johnson offers his own assessments of many of Mozart's works - basically praising all of them and arguing that Mozart always improved and always pushed out the limits of what was then common in music. He also assesses M's personal and family life. He never mentions the film _Amadeus_ based on Tom Stoppard's play, but he argues against the view of Mozart that appeared in that film. He believes that Mozart was always a tremendously hard worker, not so much of a party-goer and drinker, that he was responsible about his money, that he had a good relationship with his wife Constanze, and that Constanze was in fact a good homemaker and money manager, not the slovenly person portrayed in some other writings about Mozart.
Mozart's father Leopold also comes out well in this book, as do his mother and sister. All are seen as fine people.
Some of the financial problems of the Mozarts are seen by Johnson as just the nature of ordinary middle and upper middle class life in Austria at that time. He was unable to get a highly paid job. He indeed borrowed money and sometimes wrote begging letters asking people to help him out by loaning him money. But, according to Johnson, this was common in those times. At no time, says J, did M's finances get out of control or was he unable to pay back his loans in a timely fashion. His last debts were paid in full after his death.
To say that Mozart was an extraordinary genius is just stating the obvious, but Johnson describes some of the specific ways in which it was so. He mastered all or almost all of the instruments in the orchestra and could play them at a professional level and understand them as the specialists did. He had perfect pitch that extended over time, for example in being able to recall the tuning of a violin that he had had heard weeks before and judged to be one half of a quarter step out of tune. He could begin writing immediately as he sat down to work, requiring little or no long periods to wait for inspiration. He could stop composing, give a concert, and immediately return to his composition without intervals. He was the master of many different forms from sonata to symphony, concerto, opera, religious music, and many others and produced important innovations in all of them. He could write out a composition in a clean draft requiring very few or no corrections and revisions.
The mechanisms for paying musicians in those days were pretty impoverished. The music publishing industry was in its infancy. Copyright was non-existent and Mozart typically made nothing at all from the copying of his works or from performances of his pieces by other musicians and companies. Employment opportunities were sparse and paid poorly. Teaching was one of the more stable sources of income and Mozart had to engage in it in order to survive.
Unlike another biographer whom I heard interviewed on the radio, Johnson does not believe that Mozart had "done his work". He believed that Mozart was on the path to producing a continuing stream of new music and musical innovations that would just get better and better over time. His untimely death was a tragedy for all music lovers, then, now, and for the future.
In the appendix to the book, Daniel Johnson (son of Paul?) writes about what might have happened had Mozart stayed in, or later come to settle in, London. First of all, he might not have died of the epidemic that was sweeping Vienna in 1791. Secondly, he might have attracted many of the German and Italian musicians to London, just as Handel had, but much, much more so. London rather than Vienna might have become the capital of European and world music. DJ also believe that London was a much richer city than Vienna and, although the cost of living was very high, the opportunities for income for a man like Mozart were much higher. However, largely due to Leopold's influence (according to DJ), Mozart did not succumb to the offers made to him by London impresarios. Leopold, according to DJ, was put off by the undisciplined London mob, the low esteem of Catholicism in London, the high cost of living, and the fact that he got sick and almost died in London.
I enjoyed listening to this book but would have enjoyed it much more, and learned much more, if it could have incorporated at least snippets of some of the pieces that it discussed. But, alas, organizing such a production would have added a significant level of cost to producing the recording and required much additional time and effort. I'm not personally certain that Johnson had the requisite skills to do the work himself. It would have required both good music editing and production and all the hassles of obtaining copyrights.
I looked up some reviews on Amazon. The leading review at this time gives the book only one star out of five and recommends that no one read it. He cites a number of pretty significant errors in the description of Mozart's music, some of which, the reviewer believes that any music historian or Mozart scholar should and would have known about. He thought this cast doubt on Johnson's qualifications to write this book.
I, of course, am unqualified even to judge the book, much less write it. I can't say how much of what I thought I learned from it is actually true. All I can say is that it was an enjoyable book to read and it made many interesting statements about Mozart. I am forced to reserve any final judgment on how many of those statements were true, and instead keep them in mind as interesting opinions.
| Author | Sullivan, Rosemary |
|---|---|
| Publication | Fourth Estate (Harper), 2015 |
| Copyright Date | 2015 |
| Number of Pages | 768 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Biography |
| When Read | September 2015 |
Born in 1926 to Stalin's second wife Nadya Alliluyeva, Svetlana was a privileged, but not entirely pampered, child of the elite communist leadership class in the USSR. She grew up in the Kremlin and in Stalin's dacha outside of Moscow, and in their house in Georgia. She attended Model School Number 25, a very advanced elementary school where children received an outstanding education.
Svetlana lost much of her immediate and her extended family. Nadya committed suicide when Svetlana was six. The event seems to have been traumatic for her both at the time and later in life. In Sullivan's account, Nadya was a very independent person with a mind and will of her own who was not afraid of Stalin and not closely attached either to him or to her two children. She was a career woman and a communist who saw her role as an active worker, not as any kind of wife and mother. But Stalin was no respecter of persons. He regularly criticized and humiliated her in front of others. One night she shot herself. Was it a long pent up despair that finally could not be denied, or was it a spur of the moment act of anger and emotion. Sullivan seems inclined towards the latter explanation, but we don't know.
As for the other relatives, many aunts and uncles and cousins wound up in prison in the Gulag and some were even shot in Stalin's purges, necessarily at his own instigation since no one would dare to punish a relative of Stalin without orders from him. No one really knows why this happened, or at least no one told Sullivan. The best explanation she could find was that they knew too much and talked too much. They were not anti-communist and not even anti-Stalin. Only Svetlana and her two brothers, Yakov and Vasili, were protected, and Yakov not all that well.
Surprisingly to me, Stalin seems to have loved his daughter and she him. He was not a man who had time for children. She wasn't with him nearly as much as, say, I was with my father. But the letters between them were more like ordinary father/daughter letters than I imagined they would be. She would express her love and tell him about things that she intended to do (like marry someone) and ask his blessing. He might express great doubts and tell her not to do it. She might do it anyway. He would be upset, but would accept it - a kind of thing we wouldn't imagine the great autocrat ever doing.
I don't want to make too much of this human side of Stalin, but it helps us to remember that he too was a flesh and blood human, as was Hitler or Gandhi or any great person who has loomed larger than life on the world stage - even if he played a terrible role.
Svetlana married a number of times, had a number of lovers, had three children by three different men, and moved around almost constantly, including a flight from the USSR to the USA, life in many places in the US, a move to Britain, then back to the Moscow, then to Tbilisi, then Britain again and the US again. She made 1.5 million dollars selling her memoirs, written in 1963 in the USSR and published in the West after she left Russia, but she had no interest in or understanding of financial affairs. She gave away a lot of money and then gave most of the rest to an American husband (William Wesley Peters) and his son to pay their debts. It was a foolish act but one she never particularly regretted. A lawyer spent most of a year working out an agreement with the Peters men to get some of it back but she threw it all away, just saying that she didn't want to take back any money from them. In her later life she lived essentially on welfare and charity. The CIA arranged a pension for her but when she realized it was from them, she refused it. The Soviets arranged a generous pension for her when she went back, but she refused much of that too and insisted on living a simple life. Much of her later life in the west was in single rooms in boarding houses run by charitable organizations for people without means.
She died of colon cancer in the US in 2011 at age 85.
Sullivan has written a personal rather than a political biography. This is not a book about Stalin or Stalinism or any kind of comparison between Soviet and American political systems or Stalinist and post-Stalin systems in the USSR. Inevitably, there is a lot of material on those subjects in the book, but it is never the primary focus. We learn a lot about Svetlana's total and unwavering rejection of Stalinism, a matter that intensely concerned the government and secret services of the USSR, all the way to the top, and an unending stream of intrusive western journalists. However the story is about Svetlana's thoughts on this subject, not about the subject itself.
As a personal biography, it is thorough, well written, extensively researched and documented and, in my inexpert judgment, very objective. Sullivan presents Svetlana as highly intelligent, very well educated (she was quite well read and spoke a number of languages), but also very emotional, rather neurotic, and far too given to impulsive acts. In the US and Britain she had trouble staying in a house even for a single year. She would buy or rent a house somewhere, then decide that she needed to live somewhere else and move, sometimes across town and sometimes across the country.
Sullivan characterized these decisions not so much as running away from something but as running towards something - usually something or someone that wasn't really there or, if they were, couldn't give her the acceptance and satisfaction and friendly, loving, all-forgiving embrace that she craved. Her American daughter Olga, a girl who was probably as independent minded and strong willed as Svetlana, was dragged along through all of this and once almost figuratively kidnapped by Svetlana, who assured her that they were not going to move to the USSR but then at 3 am the same night woke up the 13 year old girl and took her down to a taxi to the airport. It was a relationship of great love on both sides but the kind of love that didn't fare terribly well in close quarters. Fortunately, Olga, now calling herself Chrese Evans, was a pretty capable person who managed to land on her feet after each tumultuous change.
I read this book for the NCI book group. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have chosen to read it on my own. I don't read a lot of biographies (six was the most I found in one year) and only a few have been about women. I don't generally read biographies of neurotics. It's always a little irritating to me to read about someone shooting herself in the foot, as it were, or behaving irrationally. Mostly, I'm likely to read biographies of people I greatly admire. Sometimes they're people I had never heard of but found myself intrigued by what I read on a book jacket or in a review. I don't think it's likely that I would have read Svetlana's biography on those grounds - especially not a 768 page book. But I'm not sorry I read it. It was well written, not uninteresting, and it gave a sense of time, place and people that broadened my perspective.
| Author | Bartoletti, Susan Campbell |
|---|---|
| Publication | Random House, 2006 |
| Copyright Date | 2005 |
| Number of Pages | 176 |
| Extras | "Slideshow" with Windows executable. Author's epilog. |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Nazism |
| When Read | September 2015 |
This short book written for young readers 12 and up describes the lives and experiences of young people who either joined the Hitler Youth (Hitler Jugend, "HJ"), or were excluded from it for one reason or another. The individual stories are not generalizations but stories of real people, some of whom are long dead, and others who lived on beyond the war and either left written records of their experience, or were interviewed by the author, or both.
HJ and the related League of German Girls (Bund Deutscher Madel, "BDM") were powerfully attractive for young people. There were uniforms, marching, camping, military training, singing, and various campaigns for the benefit of the country. What was not to like?
Well, actually, there was a lot not to like. One was bullying. One of the boys in the story was a leader who watched one of his boys bullied by another leader. He was ordered to participate but, instead, slapped his leader. For that, of course, he was condemned and expelled. Bullying of helpless Jews and others was a requirement. So was unquestioning obedience. The boys declared their oaths of loyalty to Adolph Hitler and to their own leaders and were expected to perform any service, and accept any sacrifice, including the sacrifice of their own lives or that of their parents and relatives, to follow orders.
The "best" of the boys, from the Nazi point of view, were recruited into the Waffen SS. They became concentration camp guards and shock troops. They learned to engage in atrocities, from killing camp inmates and/or Allied prisoners, to carrying out reprisals against civilians. Some of them, fighting on the Western Front against British and American invaders showed themselves to be both fanatical and fearless, throwing themselves against tanks with explosives that would kill themselves as well as destroy the tanks.
Bartoletti discovered the subsequent history of many of these young people. A number of the ones she followed emigrated to the United States. Perhaps that is what enabled her to find them? Over time, they came to understand the wickedness of what they had participated in and experienced conversions, either religious or political. Some did not. One girl from the BDM who had become a camp guard emigrated to India where she changed her name and disappeared into a new life. Was she reformed or not? We don't know.
The printed book contained a number of photos which are also included in the audio book, but in a special format for which I need a Windows machine to view. I haven't seen those yet but may manage to do so before returning this to the library.
The book is intended for young people. It has no complicated demographic, historical or psychological analysis. There are few statistics about membership. Its aim seems to be to communicate something of the experience of HJ membership, both its attractions and its awful consequences. It does that quite well. It doesn't demonize the young people that joined the organization (I first typed the word "movement" and then thought better of it.) It shows that many of them thought it was a genuinely good thing, something for which they were perfectly willing to work hard, sacrifice, and follow orders, not for personal benefit, but for the good of volk and fuehrer. It doesn't deny that many of those people felt the same way about it after the war and some who were alive when the book was written still felt that way about it. However it also shows the point of view of the Jews. It's a well rounded presentation that aims at objective observation as well as ultimate truth.
There are many deeper books about Nazi Germany but this one is a useful contribution to the literature.
| Author | Carville, James |
|---|---|
| Author | Greenberg, Stan |
| Publication | Penguin Audio, 2012 |
| Copyright Date | 2012 |
| Number of Pages | 352 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Politics |
| When Read | September 2015 |
Carville and Greenberg are Democratic Party political activists and campaign consultants. Carville was prominent in Bill Clinton's campaign. Greenberg, whom I knew nothing about, is a very sophisticated analyst and pollster who is an expert on figuring out what ordinary people think and what they want. The two present their conclusions about what is happening to people in the middle class, what they think about it, what they actually need to get what they want (not always what they think they need), and what Democratic politicians need to do to win them over. The book came out after the 2012 nominations but before the general election and has much to say about Romney vs. Obama.
They begin by explaining that "middle class" is an elusive concept with as much cultural as economic meaning. They asked people what constituted a middle class life and found that home ownership and financial security are keys. People don't think they need to own a fancy home. A very modest house is fine. But they need to believe that they'll be able to keep the house, and keep the job that pays for their house and their expenses in raising their families. What they most fear is being thrown out of job and home and being unable to provide for their families. The threat of that is what keeps them up at night.
The actual situation of middle class people has stagnated since Ronald Reagan's time. There was a temporary advance in the Clinton years. Before and after that there was mostly stagnation or decline. Most seriously, the cost of education has gone up while the economic value of it has gone down, and the remuneration for work has gone down while the number of hours that people work has gone up - without which real wages would have declined. What this means is that the mantra of the American dream, get ahead by getting an education and working hard, has been denied. The cost of education is up and the value down, while the rewards of work are down and the cost up.
C and G believe that these facts should be absolutely central to the Democratic Party program for the foreseeable future. The goal of Democrats should be to drop all other issues and concentrate on this. It's the middle class, stupid! This is the way to win people over, win elections, force the Republican Party to back down at least partially from its class warfare of relentlessly transferring wealth from the middle to the upper class.
The authors consider a number of issues. What is the content of the Republican appeal to voters? Most of it, they say, is to tell people that Democrats are creating a huge and unsustainable debt burden that voters' grandchildren will be force to pay, and that everyone must make sacrifices in order to stop that. Secondarily, they argue that cuts in taxes and regulations for "job creators" must occur in order to restore the American economy, produce more jobs, and raise the standard of living for all. The main obstacle to all of that is government, which must be minimized.
What do middle class people think about this message? They accept the first part. We must reduce the debt. Debt is going to ruin the country. It's a simple, understandable, and intuitive principle. They're much less sure about the rest of the story.
There's a lot about specific issues. Can we get rid of tax loopholes for the rich? Can we concentrate not on denying government sponsored health care the poor and middle class, but on reducing the cost of health care? Can we reduce the cost of education, and will doing that stimulate the economy? There are many specific suggestions both about what needs to be done and how it needs to be explained and sold to middle class voters. There is, of course, an extended discussion of money in politics, the flagrant buying of politicians, and "the Republican Fog Machine" that has become so good at covering up, denying, and obscuring the truth on every issue from climate change to taxes and debt.
It says on the cover of this audio book, "Read by the authors * Adapted". Not having seen the paper edition, I can't be sure what that means, but I can guess. My guess is that charts and graphs were left out - a necessity in an audio book, and that the authors, especially Carville, felt free to ad lib in the reading.
Carville is blunt and crass. He speaks in his deep Louisiana accent about "fuckin Republicans". He attacks the Catholic Church for its support of Republicans, putting relatively minor issues (in C's view) of abortion ahead of more important issues about income inequality, money in politics, and the destruction of the middle class. Greenberg provides more solid information and in depth analysis, but Carville adds some fire to the reading.
The authors are not revolutionaries. They are not interested in bringing down the rich. They are not socialists. They are pragmatists interested in promoting broad policies and specific remedies aimed at making a difference in the lives of average Americans. Forty years ago I would have said that they were unrealistic. The ruling class will always win unless and until they are overthrown.
Now I see the world differently and don't know what to think. I have seen that a socialist revolution absolutely will not happen in the United States, and I'm no longer so sure that it would be a good thing if it did. However I'm not real optimistic about the possibilities for pragmatic, incremental change either.
But what can we do? Pragmatic, incremental change is the only game in town. Carville and Greenberg are pursuing it with great energy and great intelligence. They can't "win" in any permanent sense. The best they can do is push the tides of class war in a direction that favors all of the people instead of just a few, but pressures will always be there to push it back the other way.
But that's the way it is. Trotsky told John Dewey that, even if it turned out that socialist revolution was ultimately impossible and that "state capitalism" and authoritarianism were the inevitable consequences of revolution, that didn't release us from our obligation to at least fight for reforms within the capitalist system to benefit the working class.
I don't think that Carville and Greenberg's analysis or their policy prescriptions were all perfect. They were rough. The devils in the details were not really examined. But that's okay. The book was not about details. It's about the middle class, stupid!
| Author | Simak, Clifford D. |
|---|---|
| Publication | American Printing House for the Blind |
| Copyright Date | 1967 |
| Number of Pages | 192 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | October 2015 |
Daniel Frost works as a kind of high level advertising agent / propagandist for the Forever Center, an organization that freezes people who have just died in order to bring them back to life sometime in the future when their ailment or injury can be cured and they can be restored to life and health. The Center both preserves the bodies, and engages in the research on bringing them back and rejuvenating them. Over a period of 200 years, since the 20th century, the entire population has become invested in the Forever Center, scrimping and saving and living in penury so that, when they are resurrected, they will have investments that will make them rich, or at least comfortable, in their second, immortal life.
Frost is approached by a woman lawyer about helping her client. He is attracted to her both as a woman and as a principled, honest person. He gives her an envelope containing a slip of paper that fell out of a top secret document. He doesn't know what it means but knows someone is after him for it. He asks her to keep it safe, which she does.
Shortly after that he is attacked on the street, injected with a narcotic, and kidnapped. He wakes up in front of a prosecutor and a judge. He is told that he has just been tried for treason under truth serum drugs and convicted by a computerized jury. He denies the charges but no defense is allowed since the truth serum guarantees truthfulness and the computerized jury guarantees objectivity. He is sentenced to ostracism. All of his meager property is confiscated. He is branded on forehead and both cheeks. He may not speak to any other human being and no other human being may speak to him. He is reduced to living in the shadows, sleeping in abandoned basements during the day and picking through garbage cans for food at night. He is kept alive by an unknown man who works in the kitchen of a restaurant and leaves him bits of food each night when he takes out the garbage.
Even then, Frost is not safe. Someone comes after him in the alley behind the restaurant. He escapes, but the restaurant kitchen worker is murdered and Frost is framed for it. He succeeds in escaping, stealing a car, and heading west, hoping to reach a probably abandoned house in the woods that he lived in for a time as a child.
There are a number of difficult experiences. A band of "loafers" steals his stolen car and all his clothes and meager possessions. He is tormented by mosquitoes and sunburn. He saves a snake bitten man and finds his old house, meeting a woman scientist there who is also on the run from the Forever Center and skips out on him. Then his nemesis from the Forever Center, Applegate, the man responsible for framing him finds him, has him beaten up, and might kill him except that the President of Forever Center arrives in a helicopter with the police. Having learned the whole story, he rescues Frost and promises amends.
It turns out that the paper Frost found implicated Applegate in a scheme to rob and murder rich clients of the Center who had no one who would notice they were gone.
There were a number of side stories too. The "Holies" resist the Forever Center and believe that real everlasting life is in heaven, not on earth. It is they who promulgate the slogan, "Why call them back from heaven?" A miserable Holy wanderer discovers a trove of hidden Jade carvings and is conflicted between serving God and using the Jade to secure an afterlife via FC. A friend of the lawyer tries to help Frost but cannot. A rumor circulates that a freeze resistant bacterium in peoples' brains has eaten the brains of all the frozen bodies who will therefore not be revived.
The central question of the novel, can people be brought back to life and live forever, is never answered. Frost still believes it. Most people do. Others do not.
The characters in the novel are simple. It is the plot and theme that are emphasized, but they have problems too. There are many questions that immediately come to mind about the Forever Center. What persuaded people that this would work? How is it that the average American, who can't pay his bills now and has a problem with instant gratification, becomes fully invested in this? How is it that Forever Center stock becomes the gold standard of investment? How will it pay off? Why is there such an emphasis on time travel as the means of handling the overpopulation expected from bringing everyone back to life? Even aside from the physics issues and the issues of sending people back in time to change the future, why isn't birth control discussed?
As for the characters, who are these "loafers"? Where do the "Holies" come from? Do they have a church?
I don't want to say too much against the novel. There is some power in it. The ideas are interesting and the reactions of the characters to them, if not 100% realistic, are still interesting from a philosophical point of view.
The title, "Why Call Them Back From Heaven" is inspired, if I may say so.
| Author | Venter, J. Craig |
|---|---|
| Publication | Tantor Audio, 2013 |
| Copyright Date | 2013 |
| Number of Pages | 240 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Science; Biology |
| When Read | October 2015 |
The famous molecular biologist, entrepreneur, and genetic engineer recounts the recent history of genomic discovery and genetic engineering with some emphasis on the work in his own laboratories at the J. Craig Venter Institute. His focus is on "synthetic biology", the synthesis of DNA and the construction of cells containing DNA. He and his colleagues have made some extraordinary advances in this field including such things as: synthesizing longer and longer strings of DNA, developing new methods of error correction in DNA synthesis and replication, creating working virus particles from scratch, inserting the entire genome of one species of bacterium into the cell of a related but different species from which all DNA had been removed, doing the same thing but with synthetic DNA - DNA synthesized from nucleotides in the lab in a pattern of a known bacterium but with all non-functional DNA removed - and getting these cells to live and replicate! He was also working on the synthesis of bacterial cells from scratch, as it were, without using the shell of an existing cell with its cell wall, membrane, protoplasm, endoplasmic reticulum, and other organelles - and making progress on it.
Venter and his group are very aware of the ethical issues involved in his research. There are potential dangers, for example in pioneering techniques that could be used to synthesize terrible pathogens like smallpox, polio, influenza, and so on. He argues that the benefits of the research will outweigh the drawbacks, if the proper safeguards are put in place. He hopes to develop microbes that will convert sunlight and carbon dioxide into hydrocarbon fuels much more efficiently than we can currently do with plants. There are many other applications as well.
The "speed of light" aspect of the book has to do with the transmission of DNA codes, which he often refers to as "software", from place to place. His group demonstrated the creation of new influenza vaccines in a fraction of the time usually required, reducing several months work to perhaps five days. He hopes to get it much faster than that and be able to treat people with new vaccines in real time. A medical office in the field could sequence a pathogen from a patient and send it to a central repository. From there, the scientists at the center can synthesize a vaccine and transmit the code for it to the patient's hospital, where it would be realized using synthetic life machines there. It would all be much faster than could be done now using a central factory. He also envisions a robotic spacecraft sent to Mars that can sequence organisms from Martian soil, transmit the code to Earth, and have labs on earth re-create Martian microbes for study, without requiring a spacecraft that can return from Mars.
Venter is diligent in assigning credit to others, not only in his own lab but in many other labs that have done work in the same areas of research. There are many places in the book where he lists names of contributors to this very fast moving science.
This was an exciting book
One of the goals of Venter's research that he returns to time and again is his intent to thoroughly and finally repudiate vitalism, the view that there is something extra-physical or super-natural in living organisms. I was, of course, thoroughly convinced long before reading this book.
It's not an easy goal to achieve, not because the science isn't well enough established, but because the average person is not well enough prepared to understand the issues. A Gallup Poll reported in the June 5, 2012 issue of the Huffington Post reports that 46% of Americans believe in Creationism. For many, probably most, of these people, basic science is still somewhat mysterious and the distinction between science and non-science, between objective fact and personal opinion, is not fully understood. That's not to say that Venter shouldn't aim at the goal he has set for himself. He should. We need to establish the truth of scientific materialism at all levels - from explaining what science is to explaining how an organized collection of DNA codes can be translated into a living organism. While our science teachers are toiling in the trenches of middle and high schools, we need scholars at the top to keep pushing out our knowledge.
Venter's explanations of the science are probably intended for non-professionals, but the reader had better have at least some background in molecular biology or he will find it rough going indeed. I was able to keep up but, even though I knew the basic science underlying his explanations, I still learned a lot from his exposition.
I learned some important concepts from Venter. One is the role of exact temperature in living organisms. In order for the chemical reactions of life to take place within cells, there must be enough molecular collisions produced by Brownian motion to cause the required reactants to bump into each other in the presence of the required enzymes to produce the required products. Too little energy and the cell is unable to produce the reactions at the required rate. Too much heat and the products break down. Just the right amount is required. This is something that, if it was explained in the biology books I read, I missed its key significance.
Another interesting fact is that all of the proteins in a cell are breaking down at a rate that can last from minutes to hours, to days. Venter speaks of the "half-life" of a protein. If all of the DNA is removed from a cell, it will die very quickly as vital proteins breakdown and are not replaced. This too is something I knew about, but didn't think about with the emphasis that Venter gave it. I do know that some processes require protein breakdown as a way to regulate the process. If more protein is synthesized than needed, or if the need is satisfied and no more protein is required, it's not necessarily a problem. The cell breaks it down in the normal course of events. Some cell types can function for quite a long time without DNA. The best example in humans is the red blood cell. But most will die in minutes if the DNA is removed.
I had to work hard to keep up with Venter, but it was an exhilarating ride.
| Author | Hodgdon, Jennifer |
|---|---|
| Publication | O'Reilly |
| Copyright Date | 2014 |
| Number of Pages | 208 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Computer science |
| Keywords | Drupal |
| When Read | October 2015 |
Hogdon, a long time Drupal developer and maintainer, is working on a new edition of her Programmer's Guide to Drupal. This particular PDF version is a provisional draft incorporating a discussion of both Drupal 7 and Drupal 8. But because 8 is not yet released and is still undergoing major development, she couldn't produce a book that programmers could rely upon for development. This book is therefore very much a work in progress with a preview of Drupal 8 to alert programmers about what is coming.
The book will not teach a programmer how to program in Drupal. As much as anything else, it is, as Hodgdon says, a guide. It explains a concept, gives an example in Drupal 7 and if it's different, in Drupal 8, and then indicates where to look in the online source code and documentation for more examples and explanations.
I am sorry to have to confess this, but I don't like programming in Drupal. I get that it's a very powerful system. It has an extraordinary ability to produce very sophisticated websites without writing code. But if you do have to write code, it's complex and difficult to debug. A programmer can implement "hook" routines that are called from often indeterminate places by virtue of their having a particular name. Sometimes the names don't exist in code. They are assembled by pasting strings together. Sometimes key parts of the code are "exported" from settings created in the GUI interface, but they can't be relied upon because users can continue to modify the code after the exports have been made. When the proper parts are put together, they are magically integrated by the Drupal core and the contributed modules just based on naming and other conventions. I think it requires a highly knowledgeable and highly disciplined programming team to use it effectively.
I don't have a lot of time left before I retire. I'd prefer not to do any more Drupal. But I owe it to my client to do some studying on my own and do what he needs me to do, not what I want or don't want. So I read this book.
| Author | Monsarrat, Nicholas |
|---|---|
| Publication | Looe, Cornwall, UK: House of Stratus, 2011 |
| Copyright Date | 1947 |
| Number of Pages | 220 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | October 2015 |
This is a collection of three short novels or novellas about Britain in World War II.
The title story, "HMS Marlborough Will Enter Harbor" begins with the sentence "The sloop, Marlborough, 1,200 tons, complement 8 officers and 130 men, was torpedoed at dusk on the last day of 1942 while on independent passage from Iceland to the Clyde."
Some 75 men are killed immediately and another 15 or so are killed very shortly thereafter when the German submarine surfaces and lands a shell on the Marlborough's after gun while at the same moment, a shell from that gun sinks the sub. The rest of the story has the captain and remaining men battling to keep the ship afloat and maneuver her towards harbor with one engine, no radio, no gyroscopic compass, and so much damage that they dare not steam at more than a few knots and have to do even that backward when the sea is rough in order to avoid more damage to the already staved in bows.
It is a hard struggle lasting a number of days and nights. Finally, after a terrific ordeal, they approach a British harbor in Northern Ireland and signal by lamp to the trawler offshore: "HMS Marlborough will enter harbour at 1300 today. Ship is severely damaged above and below waterline. Request pilot, tugs, dockyard assistance, and burial arrangements for one officer and seventy-four ratings.”
"Leave Cancelled" is in the form of a letter from a 35 year old army officer to his 19 year old wife describing their one night honeymoon. They had planned on three weeks but his leave was cancelled and he would have to report to go overseas after only a single night. He talks about what he felt, what they said, what she felt, how they spent the night, how they deferred their lovemaking until after they had gone out and had dinner, and so on. In one scene they go to dinner and find themselves seated next to a drunken navy officer named Monsarrat who joins them for a while.
The last story is "Heavy Rescue". Out of work WWI veteran Bill Godden takes a job in September 1939 on a heavy rescue squad. He and his team will dig up bombed houses to rescue people who have been trapped inside.
For a year, all the team does is train. There is no bombing going on in England. Godden's wife Edie ridicules him for his useless and low paying job and his 15 year old daughter, a girl whose only interest is in dressing up and trawling for boys, is equally ashamed and dismissive of him. But Godden is a steady man. He trains well, earns the respect of all the men, including a former army mate from the first war and a Polish Jew, and is eventually put in charge of the eight man squad. In September the real blitz begins. The squad is called to a bombed house where they must tunnel through the wreckage into the basement where an elderly couple may still be alive. Godden takes the most dangerous job, going the last yards into the caved in cellar where he finds a live but traumatized six year old girl, a severely injured old lady, and her old husband who might, possibly, still be alive. They get the girl and the old lady out. Godden keeps working against all odds and against the anguished cries of his team mates to pull out the old man, but the house collapses and kills him.
I found the first and third stories quite moving. HMS Marlborough reflected the strong caste system of the Navy and of British society as a whole. The captain, a "gentleman" with a deep sense of obligation to his country and a paternalistic concern for his men, devotes his entire being to the one task of rescuing this ship. It was the first ship he served in and it had a special meaning to him. The ending is quite moving in the very British understated way.
Heavy Rescue showed that Monsarrat was not insensitive to the lower classes. Godden and his mate Horrocks had been in and out of jobs ever since they came back from the first war. There just wasn't any real opportunity for them. But Godden came to life in his new rescue job. He began to feel, for the first time since 1918, that he belonged somewhere, that he had a useful role in society, and that he was earning the respect of others. He was determined to make good and to help out.
There is a long build up of training, men's talk, cups of tea, card games, and so on until, finally, they are called for a real mission. As Godden put his body and soul into the rescue I thought that he was finally going to show his wife and daughter that he was a serious man and even a hero. He would be vindicated. And he was. But it was only after he was in the crumbling cellar and getting the people out was proving so hard that I began to realize that this story might not have a happy ending.
I felt I learned something about the "home front" in that story, and about the life of ordinary proletarian men on the eve of war in England.
"Leave Cancelled" was very odd. The relationship of a 35 year old army officer and a 19 year old girl was odd. There was no explanation of how he came to marriage at age 35; no explanation of why, at his age and with his experience, he wanted to marry a teenager; no explanation of why she was interested in him or how she came to have what he presents as such a mature and accommodating attitude towards everything.
How did he meet this girl? He had been at Dunkirk and had fought before and after. Did he meet her when she was 18, 17? Or did he meet her and became engaged immediately after? His discussion of sex was odd. It must have seemed surprisingly candid at the time, but not so much today and the combination of delicacy and candor seemed stilted.
And what was the purpose of this letter? I thought perhaps that at the end we would find that it was found among his papers after he had been killed, but Monsarrat forbore that kind of forced sentiment.
I must have read The Cruel Sea, M's most famous book, more than half a century ago as a teenager (I think that's the first time I've used that "half a century" expression.) I seem to recall that I read it after seeing the movie made from it, though it is possible it was the other way around. It made a strong impression on me. M is a good writer and belongs to that group of men who very much care about the people they write about and about the things those people did. M was, himself, in the Navy and fought in the anti-submarine escort service during the war. He knows what he writes and that's always a good thing.
| Author | Mosley, Walter |
|---|---|
| Publication | Dreamscape, 2013 |
| Number of Pages | 288 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | October 2015 |
In the first of two short novels, Stepping Stone, a quiet, unassuming mailroom supervisor at a big company sees a woman that no one else can see. Distracted from his duties, he leaves a mail cart in an open elevator door with the head of public relations inside the elevator. She is deeply offended and determines to get rid of him, but is thwarted by an intern in the mailroom who happens to be the nephew of an owner of the company. The old owner intervenes and tells her that she is not going to fire this man who has worked faithfully for 21 years and that, instead, she must go and apologize to him.
Then things get weird. The woman who only Truman Pope can see comes more and more often. We assume that Truman is becoming psychotic. But he's not. He's reverting to his true self as an ancient being with psychic super powers who is about to transform the world.
The Love Machine gets weird almost at the beginning. Executive Lois Kim is tricked by a huge, fat, scientist Dr. Marchant Lewis who gets her to put her hand in his new machine, the Data Scriber. It turns out to be a mind transfer device that enables him to insert his mind into hers. He soon gets her to visit his house where she become part of a shared mind with Lewis, a former Mexican gangster, a French Arab teenage girl, and even a coyote. She experiences wild sex with the teenager and the coyote - more compelling than any sex in her life. Soon she is using her executive organizational skills to help Lewis in his plan to take over the world, and she hosts his psyche after he dies of a heart attack.
There are various weird goings on after that.
These stories are apparently the third volume of a series called Crosstown to Oblivion. I haven't read the earlier two and don't plan to at this time. They strike me as a more or less free expression of ideas that Mosley holds in check in his other stories, but that, perhaps, express his inner conviction that human life, as we experience it, is a passing phase on the way to a higher, more interesting, and certainly more capable life form.
Perhaps we are a passing phase. In fact, I don't doubt it. But I'm not expecting an ancient super psychic creature to emerge among us, and the vision of the love machine seems much too focused on consciousness and sex, perhaps missing the forest for the trees.
Stepping Stone attracted me a lot when I thought it was a story of a humble black man with a putative learning disability who comes to a deep understanding of himself. But it lost me when it became a story of alien creatures. Love Machine was less attractive at the beginning and became a little repellent when Kim attacks her erstwhile boyfriend and then compels him to pretend to the police that she hadn't hurt him. It was a muddle.
| Author | Ampuero, Roberto |
|---|---|
| Publication | Tantor Audio, 2012 |
| Number of Pages | 400 |
| Extras | Afterword by the author |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | October 2015 |
A middle aged private detective who wishes he could find a woman who would marry him and give him a child is on his way to the offices of the ANRA company. He reminisces about the case that started him in his career as a private detective.
Cayetano Brule', born in Cuba, carrying an American passport, and married to a beautiful Chilean girl, is sitting in the dark in the library of a private home where his wife was invited to a party when Pablo Neruda walks in and engages Cayetano to work for him. It is the early 1970's during the administration of Salvador Allende. Neruda, afflicted with cancer, asks Cayetano to find Angel Bracamonte, a Cuban cancer researcher Neruda met in Mexico City in the 1940's.
Cayetano thinks that Neruda believes that this man can save him from death by cancer and is bitterly disappointed when he discovers that Bracamonte died long ago. But Don Pablo isn't bothered by that. He really wants to find Bracamonte's wife Beatriz. Cayetano goes to Havana and finds her gone to East Germany. Neruda tells him that the reason he needs to find her is that he thinks Beatriz's daughter Tina may also be his. He wants a daughter so that he'll know that he is continued after his death. Cayetano goes to East Germany, where he has a brief love affair with a woman named Margaretchen, who helps him determine that Beatriz has gone to Bolivia. In Bolivia he learns that Beatriz was the consort of a fascist policeman who killed Che Guevara, but now she has gone to Chile. Cayetano finally tracks her down in Chile. She won't tell him what she does or how she lives, and she won't meet with Neruda. But she does intimate that Tina may indeed by his daughter.
Overjoyed, Cayetano tries to get to Neruda's house but is arrested by soldiers during the coup. He is beaten and warned but eventually let go. He tracks down Neruda at a hospital and tries to tell him what he has found. It is the news the Don Pablo has been waiting and hoping for. But Don Pablo is dead.
In the end an older Cayetano Brule' meets his new clients at ANRA in the new era of democracy. They turn out to be the officers who interrogated and beat him in 1973. Now they are selling influence and access to the top leaders of the new democratic regime. They smile at Cayetano and inform him that he was saved by the intervention of someone high up, but they don't know who. Now they need him to do some work for them for which he should expect excellent remuneration.
This story appealed to me on multiple levels. The characters were interesting. I have no idea what kind of man was Pablo Neruda. This presentation of him might be wildly wrong. Knowing nothing about him and not being familiar with his poetry, I can't even say that it was a convincing portrait of the man. All I can say is that it was an attractive one. He came across as a not so ordinary but very human person, a man with memories and regrets, a man who had achieved so much in the eyes of the world and so little in his own. A man who had loved many women and abandoned all of them. A man who never wanted a family and now longs for one.
Cayetano protests that he is not a private detective. He wouldn't know where to go to learn about being one. Neruda says, no problem. He gives Cayetano seven books by Georges Simenon. Just read these, he says, and do what Maigret does. For the rest of the book Cayetano is constantly pointing out how Maigret's position is nothing like his own and Paris is nothing like Latin America.
The politics of the book appealed to me. Allende was a man who wanted to bring the benefits of socialism to Chile while preserving the benefits of democracy. It turned out to be an impossible task. The army, navy, air force and police were all organized by the rich to destroy him. The ultra left students and workers were pushing Allende from the other side, seizing businesses and making the rightists madder and madder. The independent truck and taxicab drivers were up in arms about new government regulations and were being manipulated by the right, as were farmers and grocers. Life for the ordinary people became more and more difficult. Allende, who barges into the story in a helicopter, has lunch with Neruda, and takes off again, is an attractive but doomed man. And in the end, with Pinochet removed, it is all back to the same old corruption and exploitation.
The character of Cayetano is naive and self-deprecating. He is abashed by the great poet Neruda. He is estranged from his lovely wife who has told him that their marriage is not working and has gone off to Cuba to get military training to defend the revolution. She winds up at the end of the story married to a rich man on Wall Street, working for environmental and animal rights causes.
Actually, I loved it.
In the afterword Ampuero explains that he grew up in a house just a few doors from Pablo Neruda and he saw the great poet a few times. He always wanted to go knock on the door and introduce himself but was too shy. He hoped to recreate some of his feeling for Neruda in this book. Presumably, he succeeded.
| Author | Weinberg, Steven |
|---|---|
| Publication | Harper Collins, 2015 |
| Copyright Date | 2015 |
| Number of Pages | 432 |
| Extras | index, notes, bibliography, diagrams, formulas, equations |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History; Science |
| When Read | October 2015 |
In order to learn more about the history of science, the Nobel Prize winning physicist/author followed the time honored approach of teaching a course in the subject. He begins with the ancient Greeks, spending quite a bit of time on their research, mainly in astronomy. Then he writes about the scientists who wrote in Arabic, including many Persians and others who were not, themselves, Arabs. Then came the late medieval thinkers, the greatly improved work of the renaissance thinkers, and finally Isaac Newton. There is another short chapter after that, but it would require a vastly larger book for W to have done any kind of justice to that subject. He considers the work of Newton to have truly crossed the threshold into modern scientific method.
The book is divided into two separate sections. There is the narrative of the history of science, and there is a separate section with the mathematical explanations of the discoveries in the first section. I tried to read both but, after about seven or eight of the mathematical sections, I gave up on the mathematical part. For a mathematician or a physicist, I'm sure that Weinberg's explanations would have been simple and clear. He was trying hard to make them so. But for a schmo like me it was very heavy going.
Weinberg is not too respectful of the men whom I was taught to revere as the great geniuses of philosophy. I'm thinking especially of Aristotle and Descartes but there are others too. He considers Aristotle to be less successful than Ptolemy and some other ancients in understanding the difference between science and philosophy. He considers Descartes to have been a brilliant man who made great contributions in both mathematics and science, but who produced many other works that really added nothing to our knowledge or, worse, went off in the wrong direction. He considers, for example, the Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences to be of no use whatever to science.
Most of the book was about astronomy and the physics related to astronomy. There was nothing about biology, even though that subject was of some interest to the ancients, very little about mathematics per se, and no chemistry. He described a dichotomy recognized by some ancient writers that put physics and medicine in one category and astronomy in an entirely different category. Aristotle was concerned with the general principles governing the motion of the stars and planets, not with the details. For him, according to W, science had to produce powerful symmetries and simplifications in order to properly describe the world. So for Aristotle, it could be assumed that the motions of the planets were circular because the circle is a perfect geometrical figure. The work that the astronomers did more accurately fitted the observations of the sky, but because the motions they described were not precisely circular, they had not, in Aristotle's eyes, the deep truth that Aristotle and Plato before him were looking for.
I don't think that Weinberg did full justice to Aristotle. I once thought that Aristotle was very possibly the most intelligent man who ever lived. Still, Weinberg's insights were always acute and interesting.
I read a biography of Newton in 2002, Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer by Michael White. Of course White had vastly more to say about Newton than Weinberg did but Weinberg gave me a better appreciation of the real nature of Newton's discoveries and of the process that led him through them than White did. I don't know that anyone without a sophisticated understanding of physics and its history could have explained this as well.
With respect, as I once heard an Arab friend of mine say to a Congressman before disagreeing with him, I beg to differ with Weinberg about both Aristotle and Descartes. I think Aristotle's "Categories" anticipated the kind of analysis needed in the study of artificial intelligence, and his approaches to biology and history introduced an organization and systematization of research that were far ahead of their time. His "Ethics" may have had nothing to do with science, but they were certainly valuable as philosophy - though Weinberg may have doubts about the value of any philosophical study.
As for Descartes, as I am learning from Jonathan Israel's Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity - 1650-1750, we need to appreciate the intellectual and political context of 17th century Europe in order to understand him. We read him today, even in the History of Philosophy classes that I took from 1964-73, without looking at that context and some of what he says suffers greatly from that. However at the time Descartes was struggling carefully and surreptitiously against the religious superstition that dominated society and which Weinberg would also deplore. He was forced to address the issues tangentially in order to avoid being smashed by Church and State. He could not come out directly and say that Revelation was not the path to scientific understanding, and so he wrote carefully and guardedly about how to apply reason to the sciences.
I don't mean to argue that either Aristotle's or Descartes's philosophy of science met modern standards, only that we have to be aware of the paucity of antecedents supporting them and the difficulties of the society in which they worked in order to appreciate their achievements.
| Author | French, Tana |
|---|---|
| Publication | Viking |
| Copyright Date | 2008 |
| Number of Pages | 466 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | October 2015 |
A dead body is discovered in an abandoned and fallen down cabin in a village a half hour out from Dublin. The woman is the spitting image of detective Cassie Maddox of the Dublin police force and was using the name, Alexis 'Lexie' Madison, that Cassie herself used in an undercover operation a few years before. Cassie is persuaded to participate in a new undercover operation by detective Frank Mackey, her boss on the previous one. She leaves her "DV" Domestic Violence posting and, in spite of the misgivings of her boyfriend Sam O'Neill of the Murder Squad, goes to a house where Lexie had lived with four housemates under the story that Lexie was presumed dead but her body was so cold that her metabolism slowed to near death but she hadn't actually died.
Cassie moves into the house with Daniel, Rafe, Justin, and Abby. She goes to Trinity College in Dublin with them each day as the five of them study for their PhDs in English literature. She wears a hidden microphone and a hidden gun. She is accepted as Lexie and she grows to like these people and feel at home with them.
There is some misdirection about the killer. Lexie finds a diary without telling her boss and sees the initial 'N'. When one John Naylor turns up after throwing a rock through the window and threatening to burn down the house (which he eventually does), he becomes a suspect. Daniel's cousin Edmund, "Ned" wants to get his hands on the house and he is a suspect.
Lexie had made a secret deal with Ned to sell her share, perhaps to get money to get out of the house and go raise her coming baby. In the end Cassie discovers that there was a big blow up when the others discovered her deception. One of the four killed her in a fit of anger, but Cassie and the reader don't know which one. Before she can find out, Daniel aims a gun at her, fires, and forces her to shoot back and kill him. Daniel probably missed on purpose and wanted Cassie to shoot him. Neither Frank nor Cassie believe that Daniel was the real killer, but Cassie insists that it was him and covers for the rest. We never learn who the real killer was.
The story continues for a short while. Naylor burns down the house. Cassie gets engaged to Sam. An Internal Affairs investigation ultimately clears her and Frank for the shooting. Rafe goes to London to get the "real" job demanded by his financier father. Justin goes to teach at a high school where he is lonely but safe. Abby moves to a small room in a house full of students and continues to work on her PhD. We eventually learn who Lexie Madison really was, a girl who ran away from home in Australia at age 16 and lived as a number of different people in different countries, but we don't know what drove her to assume the identity of Lexie Madison, a non-existent character that was actually invented for Cassie in a previous undercover assignment.
I couldn't decide whether this story was plausible or not. It is particularly well written which, counter intuitively perhaps, makes the question of its plausibility more pressing. Could four people who lived with someone for a couple of years be fooled by a likeness? Why did Cassie conceal evidence from Frank and Sam? Presumably it was because she was attracted to these people, but how did concealing evidence from her superiors help anyone? Daniel, who inherited the house, gave equal shares to each of the housemates. Was his reason sufficient? Why did they accept? Did they think they could live together for the rest of their lives? There seems to be no sexual relations in the house, though we later learn that Rafe may be the father of Lexie's soon to be born baby. If true, why was there no special relationship between them when Cassie/Lexie returns? The housemates act under the influence of Daniel and conceal the identity of the killer. Why exactly? Is their situation so wonderful that they would determine to protect each other? When Daniel learns the truth about Cassie/Lexie, he does not tell the others but does drop little remarks to make them question Lexie's identity. Why was that? When Daniel tells Cassie that he knows she's not Lexie, Cassie proposes that the killer surrender. He or she could get a five year sentence for manslaughter and everyone would else would go free instead of a murder charge with accessories to murder among all the others. Why does Daniel reject it? Why doesn't he ask the others about it?
There are numerous scenes in the novel that contain wonderful detail. The cops all gather in a room to discuss the possible motives for the crime. The discussion goes on and on with more ideas surfacing. In a discussion with three of the housemates, Daniel was detained by Frank to keep him out of it in hopes that Cassie would get the others to talk, the details of the crime all gradually come out, but not the identity of the actual killer. French develops these scenes slowly, giving the reader enough detail to that he acquires a more in-depth understanding than would be possible in most books.
I don't know what to make of the characters. I listed some questions about their behavior above. Some of them are portrayed in some detail. Some seem unexplainable.
The book has a lot of strengths and some weaknesses. As a whole, it seems less tightly written than some of the classic mystery writers might have done, but shows more talent in some areas than some of them would have shown. I would like to have listened to the audiobook version of this just to hear the Dublin accents and the pronunciation of "bejasus" and "shite".
I read this for an NCI book group meeting to be held next week. Maybe I'll write more afterwards.
The reaction of the other members of the book group was very positive. Bob Kline, who recommended the book and apparently is a rapid reader, read the book twice and then read four other books by the author, one of them twice, to prepare for his leadership of the discussion. He did a great job.
The questions I had about the behavior of the characters didn't bother others as much as they did me. The consensus seemed to be that the Justin character was the one who killed Lexie, and he did it unintentionally because he had a knife in his hand when washing dishes. I personally find it very difficult to conceive of stabbing somebody accidentally with a knife. Others did not. Maybe that says more about me than about real life.
| Author | Ruiz Zafon, Carlos |
|---|---|
| Publication | Little Brown Young Readers, 2010 |
| Copyright Date | 1992 |
| Number of Pages | 256 |
| Extras | Interview with the author |
| Genres | Fiction; Horror |
| Keywords | Young adult |
| When Read | October 2015 |
13 year old Max Carver moves from the city with his parents, his 15 year old sister Alicia and 8 year old Irina, to a house on the beach. The country is unspecified. Perhaps it is Britain. Perhaps it is France. The year is 1943 and the Carvers hope to escape the war.
The house turns out to be in a bad place. There is a graveyard not far behind it with strange and disturbing statues that seem to have moved whenever Max next looks at them. The hands on the clock at the railway station move backward. Irina adopts a cat that turns out to be a cruel and insidious creature who is always watching them.
Max finds a friend, 16 year old Roland, who lives with a sort of grandfather who tends the local lighthouse. Roland is attracted to Alicia and she to him. But their growing love is doomed. The beach is haunted by an evil magician, the Prince of Mist, whom the grandfather has hated for decades but could do nothing about. Now the Prince is active again and has come for Roland.
In the end, by an act of heroism, Roland saves Alicia from the Prince at the cost of his own life. The Prince of Mist is gone, whether because something happened to him or simply because he got what he wanted, and the Carver family is recovering and at peace.
This novel, written for adolescents, was Ruiz Zafon's first. It was produced for a writing contest, which he won.
I'm not a fan of horror fiction. I read this because I liked The Shadow of the Wind. Like that novel, this one was nicely written, but I won't be reading more of his novels for adolescents and am no more attracted to horror fiction than I ever was.
| Author | Simenon, Georges |
|---|---|
| Original Language | French |
| Translators | Woodward, Daphne |
| Publication | Penguin Books |
| Copyright Date | 1930 |
| Number of Pages | 160 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| Keywords | Maigret |
| When Read | October 2015 |
This was Simenon's first Maigret novel. I read it after reading The Case of Pablo Neruda by Roberto Ampuero q.v., which has Neruda advising his protege Cayetano Brule' to learn about being a detective by reading Simenon.
A train from Brussels arrives in Paris with a dead body on board. Inspector Maigret, a very large and very taciturn man, soon learns that the dead man resembles a criminal known as Pietr the Lett (i.e., Latvian), who was aboard the train and who is either preying upon, or in league with, American millionaire Mortimer-Levingston.
The story is quite complicated. Pietr appears to be a split personality, a sophisticated, urbane man, and an alcoholic ne'er do well. He and M-L, live quite openly but Maigret keeps closing in on them until they arrange for him to be shot. But Maigret is not killed, only wounded. He continues his pursuit, driving the criminals and their gang into the ground and eventually capturing Pietr and allowing him to shoot himself.
The story is rather dark and brooding. We are not invited in to Maigret's inner consciousness. We don't know what he's thinking or why he does the strange things that he does. We don't understand Pietr's motivation, or some of the minor characters such as Anna Gorskin, a Jewish Polish woman who said she was in love with M-L and killed him out of jealousy. It feels like a rough draft of a novel, not badly done, but not polished and with an author who has not yet worked out for himself just what he should be doing with Maigret and the other characters.
The last book I read by Simenon was in 1993. My recollection of Maigret from that and other books is of a more polished detective and of Simenon as a more polished writer. It is interesting to see the roots of the later Maigret in this early novel by the then 27 year old Simenon.
I have two different translations of this book, both published by Penguin, with two different titles, this one and Pietr the Latvian, which is clearly the more accurate translation of the French Pietr-le-Lett. However, without the French before me, I can't say which is more accurate, or at least more literal - which is what I always prefer. Unless I'm deluding myself, which is certainly possible, I can make the adjustments for style and period and culture myself and would rather do it than have it done for me.
I hadn't realized I had two translations when I started mine. The language did seem awkward. It's looking like I would have done better with the David Bellos translation.
| Author | Fluckey, Eugene |
|---|---|
| Publication | Tanto, 2013 |
| Copyright Date | 1992 |
| Number of Pages | 464 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II; Naval; Submarines |
| When Read | November 2015 |
Fluckey was put in command of the submarine USS Barb in 1944 and sent into Japanese waters to sink ships. That he did, on a scale that no other American submariner matched. In his five patrols he sank numerous merchant ships and escort vessels and a large aircraft carrier. With his guns and, in the last patrol, with rockets, he attacked numerous shore installations. He landed a party that blew up a train. He came in over 20 miles of shallow water not deep enough to dive in to fire eight torpedoes into a harbor in China full of ships, scoring eight hits, sinking four ships and damaging three others. He rocketed a factory district on shore and hit a gasoline storage area that caused secondary fires and explosions for two days, devastating a large manufacturing complex. He rocketed another installation where sampans were manufactured, started fires, and ultimately destroyed 59 new sampans (I don't know the definition of sampan here. He seemed to be referring to motorized boats, some of which were armed with machine guns and even 37 mm canon.) He took a number of prisoners and captured Japanese charts that were much better than what the Americans had for Japanese waters. He also rescued four British and Australian prisoners who survived a devastating American wolf pack attack on a convoy carrying prisoners from the Philippines to Japan.
Fluckey was awarded a Congressional Medal of Honor, over his protest, four Navy Crosses, and a number of other medals. Japanese war reports claimed attacks by up to five American submarines, by aircraft, and by surface ships and commando raiders, when in fact all of the damage was done by the Barb. A number of his surprise night rocket attacks on shore installations and his attack in the Chinese harbor over so many miles of shallow water were thought to be by aircraft.
Fluckey continued in the Navy and became a Rear Admiral holding responsible positions, later including command of the American submarine fleet. He published this book in 1992, when he would have been 79 years old. At the end, he describes a trip that he and another American made to China, in 1991 if I remember correctly, to try to find witnesses to his attack on the Japanese fleet at anchor in the Chinese harbor. American and Japanese records of the attack were somewhat muddled. The elderly Chinese who were there at the time confirmed Fluckey's belief that four ships were sunk and three damaged.
He died in 2007. He would have been 94 years old at that time. It was a long, and I hope, a happy life.
Listening to Fluckey's account produced contradictory impressions. On the one hand I got the impression of a relatively inept Japanese navy and air force that he was able to elude or outsmart with ease. On the other hand, knowing how many other American subs were being sunk and the number of depth charges, bombs, and guns fired at the Barb gave me the impression of a very dangerous opponent.
The Barb did have some technical advantages. The biggest seemed to me to be their more advanced radar. They usually spotted Japanese ships and planes before being spotted themselves and I'm not sure that the Japanese had the ability to home in on the Barb's radar. However my predominant impression was that Fluckey was a true "ace". His situational awareness was very keen, tracking enemy ships and planes, depth and curvatures of the bottom, positions of the sun, weather, speeds, likely enemy actions, and so on. He often purposely exposed his sub to draw enemy anti-submarine ships away from other subs, or to pull enemy ships into deeper water where he could defeat them. He spent almost all of his time on the surface, even when enemy planes were nearby. He would dive to avoid an air attack and be back on the surface just 10 minutes later. Other commanders would have considered his actions as extremely risky, but Fluckey was confident that he knew what he was doing and his successes proved he was right.
In addition to his competence as a strategist and tactician, he struck me as a remarkably good leader. His book is full of praise for his crewmen by name and he credits them over and over with giving him the suggestions that won battles. I believe him. I'm sure he did have an excellent crew and they did account for a significant portion of his victories. However I suspect that all of the submarines had many good men in them. But Fluckey was a leader who really helped to bring out the best in them.
I note that there are 428 reviews on Amazon of this book and the average rating is shown as five stars. I agree with that. Splice the mainbrace!
"Splice the mainbrace" is apparently a traditional order given aboard navy ships to give alcoholic drinks to the crew. Fluckey gave the order when the Barb had completed a successful action and was secure.
| Author | Thackeray, William Makepeace |
|---|---|
| Publication | Gutenberg |
| Copyright Date | 1844 |
| Number of Pages | 301 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| When Read | November 2015 |
Fifteen year old Redmond Barry, hot blooded and in love with his 23 year old cousin Nora, shoots her English fiance and must flee Ireland. He joins the British army and goes to the continent with conscripts and doomed men to fight in the Seven Years War.
Redmond fancies himself a gentleman and a descendant of Irish kings. To say that he is full of himself is an immense understatement. He is convinced that he should occupy a very high rank in society and that everyone should acknowledge his innate superiority.
He is a great success as a soldier. He is taller and stronger than most men, is talented with both swords and firearms, and is almost fearless. However, seeing no inherent superiority in the officers above him, he is not easily disciplined and, at one point, he deserts, only to be captured by Prussians who force him into their own army. He spends years in the service of a despicable Prussian officer but is finally rescued by a long lost uncle, eldest brother of his father, who is living as a professional gambler. This cousin sneaks him out of Prussia and then goes into partnership with him, gambling in all of the societies of Europe. Uncle Barry of Balibari teaches Redmond all the tricks of gambling, cheating, taking advantage of women, intruding into society, blackmail, and all the other arts that gentlemen who earn their living by "play" must master. Together, with uncle's experience and brains, and Redmond's fearsome aspect, courage, and attractiveness to women, they make conquest after conquest, always living a high life.
This continues until the uncle conceives a plan for Redmond to marry Lady Lyndon, one of the richest heiresses in England. He pursues her relentlessly, scaring away other suitors with threats or actual duels, and overwhelming the lady by appearing everywhere she is, declaring his undying love, and importuning upon her so much, that even with her strong will, she gives in and marries him.
The marriage is the beginning of his ruination. He begins living lavishly, excessively, unreasonably, throwing away her money on every conceivable extravagance. He treats her abominably and he treats her son even worse. Lady Lyndon has a baby by Redmond and dotes upon him, so much so that the threat of removing the little boy is enough to force her into submission. Redmond lives a dissolute life. He drinks, whores, gambles, and throws away money at every turn. He contracts debts which he pays, when he has to, by borrowing more and by ruthlessly cutting down the woods on the lady's land, selling of assets everywhere, and making no effort to husband any resources. All the while he becomes more dissolute, more incompetent, more spiteful, more ungracious, and more uncaring about the only people who actually do care for him, such as his now elderly uncle, whom he turns away when the man asks for modest help.
When their child is killed in an accident, and Lady Lyndon's first son is lost in America, her relatives finally succeed in getting her away from him. Redmond Barry ends his life in a debtor's prison, writing these memoirs.
This novel, based loosely and, I hope, rather extravagantly on a true story, was originally published in serialized form. Maybe it was more palatable in small amounts but as a complete novel, it was hard to read. The sympathy I felt for Redmond Barry was tried all along, but disappeared almost completely when he married Lady Lyndon and destroyed everyone and everything while proclaiming his wonderful innocence in all affairs. That this was the point of Thackeray's novel did not make it easier to take. The satire was beautifully written but overdone and the casual destruction of people who deserved better was, as I said, hard to read.
Before choosing to read this book I saw some reviews somewhere that said that this was one of T's great books, underrated by all and even by T himself. Maybe Thackeray himself wasn't too proud of it.
| Author | Tolkien, Simon |
|---|---|
| Publication | London: Harper Collins, 2012 |
| Copyright Date | 2012 |
| Number of Pages | 309 |
| Genres | Fiction; Spy |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | November 2015 |
Adolf Hitler is frustrated with the British. The Luftwaffe has not yet succeeded in defeating the Royal Air Force. His naval commanders tell him that, without air supremacy, there is no prospect for a successful invasion of Britain. But what really bothers Hitler is that this is all so unnecessary. He has no need to war against Britain. He is content to leave the British Empire intact. His real interest is in the East.
Reinhard Heydrich tells him of a proposal by a spy for the Nazis in a high position in the British secret service. If he can be given credible intelligence, worthy of showing it to Churchill, he can take it directly into Churchill's presence and assassinate the obstinate prime minister. A suitable document is prepared and sent via the Portuguese Embassy to Charles Seaforth, assistant to Alec Thorn, only a couple of steps down from the head of British intelligence. Seaforth is believed to be controlling a high ranking spy for Britain in the German General Staff and he has gained the notice of Churchill himself.
Thorn sees some of Seaforth's information and is suspicious. He goes to see Albert Morrison, former head of the agency, now retired. Albert is not home so Thorn leaves a message asking Albert to find him. The next thing we see is that Albert comes home, is stopped by someone who pushes him up the stairs to his apartment. There is a struggle. Albert is pushed over the banister to his death while his daughter Ava witnesses the death but cannot see the killer clearly.
The police arrive. Detective Inspector Quaid soon determines that Ava's husband is the killer. His junior, detective William Trave thinks there are too many loose ends but Quaid is all for wrapping it up simply and quickly. Ultimately, Quaid learns that the husband was being blackmailed for a homosexual act and convinces the husband to confess to manslaughter in return for a having the blackmail quashed and the sentence held down to five years. Trave tries to investigate further but is forced into subterfuge, working against the direct orders of his boss.
It turns out that Seaforth was a disaffected British citizen whose beloved older brother was shot for cowardice on the Western Front in WWI. He blamed England for this and conceived a great hatred of his country. When Albert Morrison guessed that he was working for Heydrich, Seaforth killed him, then planned to bring intelligence to Churchill, shoot Churchill with Thorn's gun, which he had, and shoot Thorn before anyone else could break in. But Thorn jumped him when he pulled the gun, Seaforth shot him first, but Churchill produced his own pistol from a pocket and killed Seaforth.
As a spy thriller, this was unexceptional, but acceptable for the drive to work and back.
Simon Tolkien turns out to be the grandson of JRR Tolkien, of Hobbit and Lord of the Rings fame.
| Author | Steinhauer, Olen |
|---|---|
| Publication | Macmillan Audio, 2015 |
| Copyright Date | 2015 |
| Number of Pages | 336 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| When Read | November 2015 |
An airliner lands in Vienna with several Islamist terrorists aboard. The CIA office in Vienna is contacted by one of their agents on board the plane. However, at a certain point in the affair, the agent is killed and the plan he suggested for storming the plane is rendered unlikely to succeed. An agent, Celia Favreau, discovers an outgoing call from her boss' office to a number in Amman, Jordan. Calling it from a pay phone, she decides that it's a contact with the terrorists. This is the background of the novel, though it is pieced together over the course of the story.
Five years later Henry Pelham travels to California and makes a date with Celia at a restaurant she suggests. She left the agency immediately after the "Flughafen" affair, which we learn over the course of the story resulted in the deaths of all 120 people aboard the plane. She is now married with two children.
Celia and Henry had been lovers up until the night of the Flughafen disaster. Now Henry has come to see her on what he says is a kind of side trip of a larger business trip. They meet and talk and talk and talk.
It turns out that each is deeply suspicious of the other. Each has created plans to kill the other. He, ostensibly because she was a traitor that betrayed the agent on board the plane. She ostensibly because he was the traitor. He has arranged for a contract killer to eat at the restaurant, get a good look at Celia and, upon his confirming phone call, murder her. She has arranged for the waiter, a CIA agent provided to her by the big chiefs, to poison his dinner.
In the end, all of the facts are on the table. Henry has felt increasingly sick over the course of the evening. Celia informs him that he has been poisoned. She gets up and leaves. Henry receives a call from the killer. He sees Celia walking by herself. Should he kill her? Henry says "Natch.". The killer says "What?" The last line of the book is "I blink. Someone's turning down the lights in the restaurant, or maybe it's just me."
Steinhauer apparently decided that whether Celia lives or dies is immaterial. He's told the story he wanted to tell. Let the reader decide what happened any way he likes. For some readers, including me, this is difficult but, well, I have to be satisfied with what I've been given.
Steinhauer is a talented writer. The characters, the development of the story, the gradually building tension, the growing horror of the betrayal of 120 people, the reason for the betrayal, stated as an attempt to save Celia from the terrorist killer who has a deep grudge against Henry for his betrayal of the terrorist before he became an Islamist terrorist and was still an informant for the CIA - all of this is remarkably well done.
The premise of the ending is that the CIA no longer has messy prosecutions. Now they just assassinate traitors. Could that be true? It's not 100% credible to me, if for no other reason than that messy prosecutions are a caution to others whereas silent assassinations are a form of retribution, but maybe not an example to anyone. I suppose the other side of that is that the messy prosecution can fail, and knowledge that emerges can arouse the ire of Allies such as the Austrians whose citizens were killed by the terrorists.
Whatever. It was a striking novel.
| Author | Hamilton-Paterson, James |
|---|---|
| Publication | London: Head of Zeus Ltd, 2015 |
| Copyright Date | 2015 |
| Number of Pages | 385 |
| Extras | photos, chronology, glossary, bibliography, author's note |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War I; Aviation |
| When Read | November 2015 |
This is a history, not of the battles or the technology that are often found in books on air combat, but of the problems faced by the pioneers of aerial warfare and the solutions, or failures to find or implement solutions, of those problems. It is first and foremost about the British Royal Flying Corps, later the Royal Air Force, and the Royal Naval Air Service. There is some discussion of German and French air forces and a little of Italy, Russia, the United States, and Turkey, but the emphasis is on Britain.
Britain started the war almost completely unprepared. There was no understanding of the value of airplanes and much disdain for them in the hide bound general staff and the admiralty. HP writes: "One Chief of the Imperial General Staff wrote triumphantly in his retirement: There have been many changes in the British Army during my term of office, and I have opposed them all." There were very few planes and no standardized designs or standardized manufacturing. Pilots were men from the moneyed classes who had already learned to fly as civilians.
The French had done much better than this, but the real failure of the British was not that they started out with an inadequate understanding but that they persisted in their failures. It was not until 1916 that new planes based on experience of the war became available, and not until 1917 that they replaced all of the hopelessly inadequate types.
Training was a mess. Trainees were forbidden from attempting aerobatics because the planes were incapable of holding together and the pilots were likely to die if they tried. Even when stronger planes became available, trainees were taught to avoid spinning, stalling, and other maneuvers that could lead to their deaths. These men were, of course, sitting ducks for pilots like Immelmann, Boelke, Richthofen, and other skilled Germans. Even without German action, the deaths due to accidents were extraordinarily high and the response by the high command was not to examine the failures and correct them, but to push for more pilots to fill the ranks, often with even less training.
Instructors were often burnt out pilots sent home from the front because they weren't doing a good job. They had no training in how to train other pilots. They had no books or ground instruction for themeselves or their students. They were just given planes and trainees. Often they just succeeded in instilling fear and incompetence in their trainees.
The trainees weren't taught anything about airplanes. As often as not, they knew nothing about how their engines worked or what held their planes together. They were not taught about weather, about the medical aspects of high altitude or high G flight, even about how their guns worked. They were "gentlemen" after all, and gentlemen don't get their hands dirty or their minds cluttered with the details that are attended to by underlings. They were basically just taught to take off and land. After that, they were on their own.
Training was gradually put on a more scientific footing by individual training administrators who knew what they were doing. By 1917, training had improved significantly. However the French were doing it right much earlier and the Germans too.
The high command ruled that British pilots would carry the fight across the lines into German territory, often exposing themselves to carefully planned German ambushes that were shooting them down at a rate of five to one in the spring of 1917. The high command ruled that parachutes would not be issued because they would lead men to jump rather than fight. The high command held that airplanes were for offensive purposes and resisted any defensive use until overruled by government officials who insisted on bringing home squadrons to defend England from bombing attacks.
HP describes the reality of air combat. Men flew into subzero temperatures with inadequate clothing and no oxygen. They flew east over the lines into the morning sun where German fighters would come out of the blinding light to dive through them and zoom away. They had machine guns mounted above the wing because it took the boffins so long to produce reliable interrupter gear and had to stand in the cockpit to try to clear blockages or replace empty circular magazines. Men stood up in their cockpits without seat belts and, in at least some cases, observers fell out of the planes. They came back to their bases to sing and drink half the night, then going out in the morning after four hours of sleep. Morale was low and they sang "Hurrah for the next man to die."
There was fighting in Palestine, Syria and Iraq as well as on the European fronts. The hot, dry, dusty weather damaged the planes, but the British were able to supply their forces by sea whereas the Germans and Turks had to rely on sparse and inadequate rail lines from Constantinople over mountains and deserts. The Turks were a tougher opponent than the British expected, as they learned at Gallipoli, but the British eventually won.
Lessons were learned. By the end of the war the British had finally fashioned an effective air force and, when war came again in 1939, they were much better prepared.
I have read a lot of military aviation books and this is one of the really good ones. My abstract makes it sound like a catalog of failures and a condemnation of ignorance, incompetence and lack of concern for the lives of the pilots. There was a shocking amount of that. Ludendorff spoke of the British Army as lions led by donkeys, and there certainly was too much of that. But it was a fairly deep book that described both the failings and the successes in enough depth to confer understanding and not just superficial condemnation.
Some of the things I thought I knew about the war were debunked by HP's history. For example, Anthony Fokker did not invent the interrupter gear as he claimed in his autobiography. Roland Garros, the first pilot to shoot down a plane with a machine gun firing through the propeller did not do so with nothing more than deflecting plates on the propeller blades to prevent the prop from being shot off. He had a basic interrupter gear devised by the Morane-Saulnier works with deflector plates as a backup to help, for example, with ammunition that was not perfectly uniform.
This was a good book, very interesting to read.
| Author | Le Carre, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | Penguin Audiobooks, 2012 |
| Copyright Date | 1962 |
| Number of Pages | 146 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | November 2015 |
George Smiley gets a phone call from Miss Ailsa Brimley, a woman he worked with in the war. She is now the editor of the small magazine "Christian Voice". She has received a letter from a long time subscriber, Mrs. Stella Rode, who says that she's afraid that her husband is trying to kill her. She wants Smiley to investigate. He makes a phone call and finds that, in fact, Mrs. Rode was murdered.
Smiley goes to the scene, the high class prep school named "Carne". He brings the letter to the police and then begins his own investigation. He said that he had been asked by the Christian Voice to write an obituary for their long time member, Stella Rode, and he wanted to interview people who knew her.
The plot was quite complicated. Stella turns out to have been a universally despised person. She scorned the upper class airs of the school staff and refused to go along with her husband's efforts (he was a teacher at the school) to adopt those airs. Her real interest was gossip and scandal. She loved to find out nasty things about people and then threaten them with revealing their secrets. There were no demands for blackmail payments. She just loved seeing people squirm and having them at her not so tender mercy.
The crime had been carried out in such a way as to make it look like a passing stranger must have done it. That story never convinced Smiley or police Inspector Rigby, who was investigating the case. However it did satisfy the higher up police chief who was happy to throw the blame on anyone other than the quality people at Carne school. Smiley soon concentrates on a man named Fielding, the brother of a man Smiley knew in the war. He conducts a remarkable interview with Fielding that appears to prove that Stella Rode's husband must have been the killer. But Smiley eventually figures everything out, invites Fielding to his house, argues him into a corner in which he cannot get out of accepting blame, and then Rigby steps out from behind a door curtain and arrests the man.
Note: I have another regular (non-audio) edition of this novel that includes two Afterwords by the author, one from 1989 in which he rails against the British public boarding school system (Americans call it a private school system) and all of the harm it did to him. The 2010 Afterword continues the theme and remarks on how Britain must be unique among European countries "in providing an educational gravy train that enables a self-selected few to arrive at the top of the social ladder without the smallest notion of how the other ninety-odd per cent live, work, skimp and strive."
This was Le Carre's second novel written, as he says, in Germany when he held a low ranking post in the British Embassy. It did not have the ambition or the scope of the next novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold or his other great books that followed. Nevertheless, the book struck me as remarkably interesting and well written.
One example of a marvelous scene was Smiley's first interrogation of Fielding. It is clear now that he is looking into the murder and not just writing an obituary of the dead woman. Smiley's questions are penetrating. They are all based on information that the reader already has, but that information has been squeezed to produce the utmost value. Fielding's responses are controlled, convincing, and appear to solve the murder, throwing the blame onto Rode. When the interview ends, Smiley says goodbye and walks back to the police station, "reasonably confident that Terence Fielding was the most accomplished liar he had met for a long time."
The statement was a surprise to me. It hadn't occurred to me that Fielding was lying. I think it was meant to be a surprise, to reveal to the reader that there are depths of deception on Fielding's part, and depths of understanding on Smiley's part, that go beyond the reader's simpler expectations. It was a nice touch, a more elegant way, and with more impact I think, than unfolding Smiley's suspicions over the course of the discussion.
There are other touches like that. Stella Rode is introduced as a naive, Christian, compassionate woman who turns out to be anything but those things. Smiley is asked by Rigby how he makes his living. Smiley answers "Nothing much. A little private research on seventeenth-century Germany." And then Le Carre adds "It seemed a very silly answer." The statement about private research indicates in an oblique and surprising way that Smiley is a private man. The author's comment gives us a little psychological distance from the conversation. There is much in the novel of that sort, writing that Le Carre might have been very proud of, or might even have dismissed as insignificant, but of which I think he should be proud.
The great themes of Le Carre's later work are not yet present, but the promise and potential of this great writer is already visible.
| Author | MacDonald, Helen |
|---|---|
| Publication | Jonathan Cape, Random House, 2014 |
| Copyright Date | 2014 |
| Number of Pages | 288 |
| Extras | Notes |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Biography; Autobiography |
| Keywords | Falconry |
| When Read | November 2015 |
Since she was a child, MacDonald was fascinated by hawks and falcons and the sport of falconry. Why that was so was never made explicitly clear though the book does demonstrate the fascination, allowing the reader to make whatever he can of it. She seems to have read every single book about it that was ever written, including books hundreds of years old found only in specialist libraries. She was also deeply attached to her father, a professional photojournalist. The book is about her experience with a pet goshawk, if one can actually call an animal like that a pet, about her grief over her father's death, and about her interest and sympathy with T.H. White, who also attempted to train a goshawk and wrote a book about it.
The hawk was named Mabel. MacDonald recounts her acquisition of the bird and the development of the relationship between human and bird. It was a more complex relationship than I would have imagined. M understood more about the bird's emotions than an ignoramus like me would have thought possible. The state of the feathers, motions of the head, narrowing or widening of the pupils of the eyes, tightness of the bird's grasp on perch or gloved hand, and many other signs were interpreted quite convincingly by M. She knew an enormous amount, not only about how to train the bird, but about what the bird was thinking, feeling, and doing.
The two of them hunted together. M eventually took the bold step of untying the strings that held Mabel to MacDonald, but the training worked and Mabel returned to the glove after each hunt, though sometimes M chased after her through brush, brambles and thorns, suffering cuts and scratches everywhere as she ran.
The main prey was rabbits and birds, with occasional squirrels. M had little control over what Mabel would chase, though she hoped it wouldn't be squirrels, who were capable of turning on the hawk and defending themselves with sharp teeth. There were occasions, especially when Mabel was younger and inexperienced, on which M would catch up to Mabel with a wounded rabbit and M would break the rabbit's neck to end the pain and struggle. In one case Mabel had a foot in her talons with the rabbit in a hole and attempting to pull away. M grabbed the foot, pulled the rabbit out of the hole, and killed it for Mabel. It was a rather grisly description that MacDonald herself expressed ambivalent feelings about.
Laced throughout the book are passages from T.H. White's writings. White was a troubled man, persecuted at boarding school (as was Le Carre (see A Murder of Quality above) and, apparently, most upper class children). He had homosexual and sadistic interests that he apparently did not indulge, but which sorely troubled him. He lived alone, isolated and alienated. Perhaps his attraction to the hawk was a development of his sadistic interests and his alienation. Perhaps it was similar feelings, or at least sympathies, that MacDonald recognized in White and attracted her to him.
There is nothing here about MacDonald's career. She says that she turned down a teaching job in Germany that she needed. She says that she missed classes that she was supposed to teach in England, at least once because she chose to go out hawking instead.
It is still unclear to me what M had in mind for her and the bird's future. Did she plan to spend her life hunting rabbits with the hawk, surviving any way she could? She expressed disappointment about a relationship with a man she liked who was apparently scared off by her strangeness.
Searching the Internet, I found that MacDonald had some sort of adjunct faculty position at Cambridge in the department of the History and Philosophy of Science. Did she have a PhD? She doesn't say. Was she deeply interested in history. Sometimes she says she was. Other times she says she wanted to escape from history and live in a timeless and perhaps more primitive world. Was she knowledgeable about science? I think she was and her life style demonstrated it, but she doesn't ever talk about it. Was she interested in literature? I think she was that too and probably very knowledgeable about it but, again, she says little directly about it. Although she says many interesting things about herself, I have the sense that there are many things that most of us would say about ourselves that she left entirely out of this autobiographical work. She was remarkably open and honest about many things, but private too.
I read this book for our National Cancer Institute book group. I didn't expect to like it but, to my surprise, I did. Or maybe I should say that I wasn't attracted to the character or the bird or the topic, but I still found them quite interesting. This is a common experience for me. There are some authors who I find very attractive. There are others, even some who I find very unattractive (I'm not characterizing MacDonald that way), who nevertheless have something interesting and valuable to say.
| Author | Boyle, T. Coraghessan |
|---|---|
| Publication | Harper Collins, 2015 |
| Copyright Date | 2015 |
| Number of Pages | 400 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | December 2015 |
Sten Stensen and his wife Carolee are on a bus on a shore excursion from a cruise ship stop in Costa Rica. The bus stops at some uninteresting attraction when three young men appear, one of them brandishing a gun, and hold everybody up. Sten, who is tired, thirsty, pissed off at the bus driver and the three robbers watches the stupid kid with the gun turn his back on him. Sten, still a big strong man despite his 70 years, grabs the boy in a strangle hold around his neck, hangs on, tightens, and kills him. The other robbers run away and Sten is a hero on the ship and when they get back home to California.
But he's not a hero to his son Adam Stensen, an emotionally disturbed young man of 25 who calls himself "Colter", and considers himself a mountain man, living in his dead grandmother's house in the woods and spending all his days hiking and camping and growing drugs for sale.
Meanwhile, 40 year old Sara, a "sovereign citizen" who lives by trimming horses' hooves, is pulled over on the highway for some trivial traffic infraction and she builds it up into big case, refusing to hand over her license and registration, allowing her dog to bite a cop, and getting herself arrested and her dog impounded for 30 days observation to prove that he doesn't have rabies. From nothing at all she manages, through stubbornness, blindness, and ridiculous inability to compromise ("I have no contract with you" she says to the police and the judge) parlays it into big trouble.
Sara meets Colter and is entranced. Like her, he hates the cops. He likes to drink and take drugs. He is handsome and has a hard young body that appeals strongly to the lonely Sara. Soon she is living with him in his Grandma's house. Sten, who knew Sara from his days as a school principal and her days as a substitute teacher, is pleased. At least Adam has found someone he can relate to. But Carolee is upset and obsessed with Sara. She isn't right for her son. She manages to interfere, piss off Adam/Colter even more than his usual permanent state of being pissed off, and drive him further into his wild craziness, living the life of the early nineteenth century man Colter.
Adam finally goes completely off the deep end, a small step for him, and shoots a man, and then later another. It takes the police little time to figure out who did it. A huge manhunt pursues him but he knows the woods intimately and it takes a long time before they trap and kill him. Knowing how dangerous he is and that he has gotten away from them and shot at them before, they take no chances and shoot him down from ambush without asking him to surrender. His death is the end of the novel.
When I explained my problems with this novel to Marcia she told me she remembered how much she disliked the T.C. Boyle book she had read. The only book of his that I read was The River Was Whiskey, in 1995. According to my notes, I liked that book. I didn't like this one.
Sten Stensen was a cantankerous and difficult character but not beyond reason. However Adam, Sara, and even to a lesser extent Carolee, were beyond reason. It's very difficult to care about characters who are beyond reason, who cannot do anything except pursue their monomanias, no matter what the cost either to themselves or to everyone else. It was no good wishing that Adam or Sara would calm down and see things from the point of view of others. Wishing for change was clearly pointless. All the reader can do is watch these people self-destruct. The more engaged I tried to become, the more painful the story became. I wanted out and almost abandoned the book half way through.
Do such people exist? There is no question about it. They do. I suppose there is a point to reading about their interior view. It helps us to understand such people, though it only reinforces the reader's desire (or at least this reader's desire) to have nothing whatever to do with them.
These people are different, but they don't fascinate me or even interest me except in showing me how impossible they are to deal with. But it seems that they do fascinate Boyle. He is not so much giving us the view that a psychiatrist or sociologist might have, as the view of some kind of voyeur who is interested by the characters' stubbornness, obstinacy, and craziness and wants to explore them.
"Voyeur" may be too pejorative a term. Perhaps his interest in these characters shouldn't be considered any more perverse than any other author's interest in any other character. Who am I to say? Nevertheless, I don't understand his interest. I don't understand his involvement. I don't understand what he hopes to learn or teach by following them to their bitter ends - showing us in depth what was already pretty obvious from the beginning.
I don't plan to read any more T.C. Boyle.
| Author | Mankell, Henning |
|---|---|
| Publication | Random House Audio, 2014 |
| Copyright Date | 2004 |
| Number of Pages | 176 |
| Extras | Afterword by the author |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | December 2015 |
Detective Inspector Kurt Wallander is living with his daughter, also now a police officer, in his apartment in Mariagatan, but he's tired of it. He wants to buy a house in the country with a little land and a dog. He hasn't much money, but his old friend and colleague Martinson is trying to get rid of his old father-in-law's house and will sell it cheap. It seems exactly like what Wallander wants. He looks the place over and walks around the garden but, to his horror, he sees a hand sticking up out of the ground.
The year is 2002. After research and forensics, the police dig up two bodies at the site and determine that they were both murdered more than 50 years ago.
It's not an urgent case. The killer or killers are likely dead by now. But the story has gone round in the the media and the police are obligated to find out what happened. Wallander is assigned to the case and he has help when he needs it.
Eventually, Wallander's investigation leads him to an old age home to interview 86 year old Ivar Pihlak, an Estonian refugee from the war who lived in the house as a teenager with his mother and father in 1944. He leaves with some unease about the man.
A short time later he learns that Pihlak has disappeared from the home. W goes to the farm house and finds him there, but Pihlak points a gun at W. Holding the gun on W, he tells him the story of how his brutal, criminal father killed his mother and how Pihlak then killed his father. W assures him that he will not be arrested, but the old man is furious that he has been tracked. He aims the gun at W's head and fires, but the old cartridge explodes the breech of the old gun, killing the old man instead of Wallandar.
It looked like W was going to die, but he survived by pure luck. He could not buy the house now. He could not live there, but he still wanted a house in the country and thought that maybe next year he will be able to buy one.
This short novel was written, according to the author's afterword, for a Dutch publisher who planned to give out free mystery stories to readers. Mankell was asked to supply a novel and he did. It was later picked up for a BBC film with Kenneth Branagh and, in 2012, M decided to publish it again and make it more widely available.
Wallander is something of a difficult character, a good policeman but not an easy friend or family member. His daughter is not as understanding or sympathetic as he and we would wish, but she does care about him and, if W is sometimes caustic to her, he cares about her too.
Many of the people in Mankell's Wallander books are lonely and somewhat isolated. I sometimes wish they would be gentler and more understanding with each other. I wish they had more of value in their lives. Reading them, as reading so many other books does, makes me thankful for my happy marriage and consequently happy life. I always wonder if Mankell has a happy marriage or not. I suspect that the answer to that question can go either way with no necessary connection between Mankell and Wallander in that respect. Perhaps W is M turned upside down with regard to that.
M had written the final novel about Kurt Wallander before the second publication of this book. He has resolved to write no more of them and says he has no interest in doing so. Unlike Conan Doyle, he wants to quit while he is ahead, though he might possibly write another book about W's daughter.
Kurt Wallander, like Easy Rawlins or Harry Bosch or countless other lonely characters in a seamy world, is both interesting and off-putting. I certainly don't want to live their lives and maybe not even be friends with them. But I can still admire them and give them their due.
Looking over this entry I did the math on an 86 year old who was a teenager in 1944. That only works if the story takes place in 2012. The man would have to have been born in 1926 to be 18 in 1944. That means that Mankell must have revised that feature of his 2002 story to fit in with its republication in 2012. In 2002 the old man would have to have been 76, or thereabouts, to have been a teenager in 1944. Like Timofey Pavlovich Pnin, I like to figure out the temporal context of the novels I read. :)
| Author | Twain, Mark |
|---|---|
| Publication | Unknown |
| Copyright Date | 1872 |
| Number of Pages | 590 |
| Extras | Three appendices of additional material by Twain |
| Genres | Fiction; Travel |
| When Read | December 2015 |
In 1862 Samuel Langhorne Clemens left the Midwest and traveled west with his brother who had been given a government job in Nevada. Clearly, he was interested in the west and in travel but it is also said that he was eager to avoid the Civil War. This book, written some years after he returned from the west, is a collection of his impressions of the west and of Hawaii, embellished with entertaining stories inspired by his travels but not necessarily accurate representations of what he encountered.
Twain traveled across the country by stage coach and eventually arrived in Nevada, first working with his brother for very little pay, then prospecting for silver and gold during the silver boom in Nevada, and then working at the newspaper in Virginia City. From there he continued his travels, visiting Utah and then California, coming to live in San Francisco. At some point he boarded a sailing ship for Hawaii. He landed there, traveled around the islands, spent what seems to have been a considerable amount of time, and finally returned to California. With the end of the war, he made his way back to the east.
It appears that everyone in Nevada imagined that they would strike it rich by discovering a great lode of precious metals. In Twain's telling, he did precisely that, discovering a rich load with another prospector but losing it due to their both leaving town on separate errands, each assuming the other had remained behind, and neither one of them was available to work the claim, as required by law, within the ten days that are allowed before the claim is rejected. He says they arrived at the claim just ten minutes too late but lost the fortunes that they had discovered.
Going to work as a journalist and soon editor of the paper, Twain says that he accumulated multiple interests in other people's claims. Men would come to him and give him a 5% or 10% interest in some claim, or a certain number of feet in the mine, in return for his writing stories for the papers that they wanted. He says that he had many opportunities to sell these interests for substantial amounts of money but always refused. He was certain that they were worth much more than he was offered. And then, of course, the bottom fell out and the claims all became worthless, leaving him with nothing. Disgruntled and discouraged, he left Virginia City and headed for California by way of Utah.
At this time, Utah was still dominated by the Mormon church and there was considerable tension between the Mormon community and the United States government and the non-Mormon inhabitants. Twain tells what he says he believes to be the true story of the massacre of a wagon train full of travelers by Mormons who wished to rob them of everything they had. He considers the Mormons to have been ignorant folk led by opportunist leaders.
Twain returned to journalism in San Francisco and was doing alright but, as happened to him in all his journeys up to then, he got tired of what he was doing and didn't care for the work any more. He moved on, taking ship for Hawaii.
In Hawaii he met many native Hawaiians and gave his or their version of their history. As elsewhere, he also described the geography, the wildlife, the many volcanoes, and the interactions of Hawaiians and Americans, a less one-sided interaction than I might have imagined. He covered a lot of territory and then finally returned to the continental U.S.
The three appendices to the novel, if that's the right characterization of what they and it are, are additional stories about people supposedly encountered on the trip.
It's hard to tell what really happened, what sort of happened but is embellished, and what is made up out of whole cloth in this travelogue. Twain may have had a number of goals in writing it, but surely a dominant goal was to entertain his readers. This reader was indeed entertained. There were numerous points in the story where I laughed out loud.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Twain's writing is his ability to combine characterizations of ridiculous persons with remarkable sympathy for them. It's not pity. In fact it sometimes rises to the level of admiration. Many of his characters are mule headed, determined to do what they do in spite of anything that argues against it. And not the least of these characters is Mark Twain himself. He is often the one who rejects good advice, oblivious to all argument, to do what he later, and often not much later, regrets.
Rambling and unorganized, this was nevertheless a delightful book.
| Author | Woodward, Bob |
|---|---|
| Publication | Simon and Schuster Audio |
| Copyright Date | 2010 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| When Read | December 2015 |
Woodward follows up his other books on American presidential policy in Iraq and Afghanistan with a report on Obama's quandary and his efforts to find some way out of Afghanistan in the first 18 months of his presidency. The "cast of characters" that he interviewed and reports on is, as usual with Woodward, extensive and goes right to the top. They include Obama himself, Biden, Emanuel, Axelrod, Gates, all the key military people and intelligence people, including McConnell (Directory of National Intelligence), Hayden (Directory of the CIA), Petraeus (Central Command) McKiernan and McChrystal (Afghanistan), and many, many others, together with a number of Afghani and Pakistani officials.
There is nothing in this book that might appear in a ground level look at the war. Strategy is discussed only at the highest level - troop deployment sizes, the use of drones, the overall mission. That last issue, the overall mission, is a principal topic. Woodward, as usual, makes no conclusions of his own. He reports on the arguments and the conclusions of the principal actors in the war. It is up to the reader to draw his own conclusions.
Obama appears as a man in a very difficult situation. He listens carefully to the advice of his military, and he accepts that they are the experts. But the contradictions in their advice are apparent to him and he refuses to give them a completely free hand.
Obama asks his generals for three options. He gets a report offering three options. One, he is told, cannot be implemented because the resources are not available. One, he is told, cannot work. That leaves the one option that the military has recommended all along.
Obama tells the generals that he will only give them 20,000 soldiers. They say they need 40,000 minimum. After much back and forth, they settle on 30,000. The military agrees. They sign on. They will do the job with 30,000. Obama makes his plans. But then they say that doesn't include another 4,000 support troops on the ground in Afghanistan to allow the 30,000 to accomplish their mission. Obama says, we agreed on 30,000. You said that you could do the job with that. I asked you to say yes or no and you said yes. They said, yes but we need more for support and more for emergencies. They leak information to the press that they have recommended more than Obama has authorized, putting pressure on him. Obama says, Okay, I'm going to release 30,000 to Afghanistan and hold another 10%, 3,000, in reserve, to be used in emergencies - but only in emergencies.
Some of Obama's advisers are strongly supportive of the military. Some, mainly Joe Biden, take the opposite view. Biden says we can't win this war. If we add more troops and still more troops, we still can't win. The Karzai government is corrupt and unpopular. Who would fight for them? We need to restrict our mission to rooting out Al Qaida. That's a mission that we have a chance of carrying out, and it can be done with 20,000 troops. It doesn't require 40,000 or 80,000 or a permanent occupation.
Some of the advisers think that the real problem is not in Afghanistan at all. It is in Pakistan. The Pakistani government and military are receiving billions of dollars in American armaments and aid but don't really care a fig for destroying the Taliban or even Al Qaida. Their focus is on India. They see the Islamist radicals as useful proxies in their covert war against India. They don't want to destroy those radicals and, in fact, provide safe havens for them when the Americans make it too hot for them in Afghanistan. They also provide them with arms and training.
No one knows what to do about that. Cutting off aid might make Pakistan into an open enemy of the U.S., or at least an open enemy of the Karzai government. It might destabilize the Pakistani government and enable radical Islamists to replace the relative moderates who are in power - raising the prospect of a radical Islamic state with nuclear weapons.
Joe Biden and Lindsay Graham fly to Pakistan to talk to the President of the country. They don't really get anywhere. They ask him to provide lists of all of the people who are flying out of Pakistan so that they can look for terrorists. He refuses. They figure that is because there are terrorists flying into India so they ask for just the name of those flying to the West. He refuses. They ask for visas for the Defense Department and CIA men needed to find the Al Qaida terrorists in Pakistan. He gives them fewer visas than they ask for (if I remember correctly) and limits the visas to 90 days duration.
The conclusion that I came to is that everyone was serious about trying to do a good job, but each perspective saw the other as ignoring critical realities. What I am about to say is undoubtedly a gross oversimplification made from the point of view of an outsider with none of the required training or experience and few of the actual facts on which to base an informed opinion but, well, here it is anyway.
It looked to me as if the military saw things from the point of view of commanders attempting to carry out specific missions on the ground - to patrol this territory, to hold that territory against capture by the Taliban, to block infiltration from these areas of Pakistan, to attack and destroy Taliban strongholds. Having read other books about the Afghanistan war, I have no doubt that they needed more troops, equipment and support for that than they had.
The military did not, in my view, address the question of the value of such a mission to the people of the United States, or the long term viability of it for ten or twenty years into the future.
Obama, Biden, and some of the other political leaders did have a long term perspective. They held many discussions about the nature of the mission. Are we trying to defeat the Taliban, destroy the Taliban, suppress the Taliban, block the Taliban from getting into the main cities? And what do "defeat" and "suppress" mean in concrete terms? The military men spoke about damaging the Taliban enough that they were no longer a threat to the government and the government controlled areas. But for how long would that be true?
Obama wanted to get the U.S. out of Afghanistan, permanently. But he wanted to do so in a way that left the people of Afghanistan in as good a position as he could, and would not reflect great discredit upon the government of the United States.
It is probably an impossible task. I think that we could suppress the Taliban for as long as we liked by sending in sufficient American forces. But we can't destroy the idea of radical Islamism by shooting radical Islamists, no matter how many we shoot. And we cannot create a good government for Afghanistan out of isolated neurotic intellectuals and greedy opportunists. And as long as Afghanistan is ruled by a corrupt hierarchy of opportunistic looters, the primitive, rigidly religious ideas of the Taliban will continue to appeal, at least to the uneducated men and boys (though surely not the women and girls) of the countryside.
It's a mess. As Obama said during the 2008 presidential primary campaign, the good options are already gone. All we have left is bad ones. It seems to me that the damage is done. We can't remove it or repair it. The best we can do is adopt a long term strategy that, slowly and over more than one and maybe more than a few generations, encourages the development of a larger and stronger community of educated, secular men and women in the Islamic countries who will eventually overcome the medieval ideas of radical Islam. The best we can do is to encourage that process. We can't drive it forward ourselves. And in the meantime we have to muddle through, making as many friends and as few enemies as we can and using our wealth and power in judicious ways to reduce rather than exacerbate the tensions and contradictions in that region of the world.
It scares me that there are so many Republican candidates in the current 2016 presidential primary campaign who have no notion of how difficult all of this is. Or maybe they know, but they bluster on anyway on the theory that they need to say whatever they need to say to get elected and, after the election, they can look at reality. Maybe that's so, but it's not going to make it any easier for them in the long run to continue feeding the foolish ideas of the mass of Americans who believe in "carpet bombing", or tougher sanctions, or unleashing the Israeli military, or starting proxy wars, or sending American troops in a show of toughness and determination in order to finally solve all problems.
Unfortunately, this version of the book that I listened to was abridged. There was no statement about that anywhere that I could find on the jacket or on the discs themselves, and nothing in the introduction at the beginning of disc one. There was just one very brief sentence at the very end of the book. I was pissed, as usual.
| Author | Chambers, Keith |
|---|---|
| Publication | London: Teach Yourself, 2006 |
| Number of Pages | 199 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Spanish |
| When Read | December 2015 |
There are 90 chapters, each containing one page of grammar discussion and examples and one page of exercises. There's a key to the exercises at the back. Each chapter covers a single topic such as "perhaps", "the subjunctive commands", "idioms with tener", "compound prepositions of place", and so on. If a topic is too large to fit the explanation and examples on one page, it's split into two or three topics.
This is the best grammar book I've worked with so far. I read most of it while exercising in the basement, usually two chapters a day, sometimes three, but advancing only one chapter each day so that I read each chapter at least twice. It explained a lot to me and moved me forward in learning Spanish to the point where I felt that my next task was to beef up vocabulary - which I am now doing for anywhere from one to two or three hours per day.
I wrote a review of this book for Amazon but there was a strange database entry in the website that may possibly make it inaccessible to other readers. Records for the 2006 edition of the book appear twice, with two slightly different dates. The earlier date, the one I reviewed, is marked as the second edition. There were no reviews other than mine. The record with the later publication date is marked as the first edition. A third record, also marked as the first edition and sporting a different cover, is dated 1999.
I plan to work through this book a second time, possibly starting in a month or two. When I am confident that I have made good progress in both vocabulary and grammar, my next tasks will include reading, watching Spanish language television shows, and learning idioms. My goal is to be able to read and watch TV semi-fluently, i.e., with minor use of a dictionary. That will almost certainly require another six months, maybe more. But I hope to make more progress after I retire on March 15.
I have lots of good intentions about learning Spanish and music, two subjects that I think would be good for me, but are neither of practical importance, nor are in my core intellectual interests that absorb most of my free time - fiction, history, politics, philosophy, science. So much that I've learned has slipped away again. I'm also doing hardly any computer programming any more though it was once an important interest.
The opportunities to speak and read Spanish are slipping away with the years. The ratio of useful value of the learning to learning effort keeps shrinking. I won't rule out more efforts to learn but I can't rule them in either.
| Author | Sturgeon, Theodore |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Open Road |
| Copyright Date | 1961 |
| Number of Pages | 130 |
| Extras | Short biography of Sturgeon with photos. |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | December 2015 |
George, a boy growing up in extreme rural poverty with an abusive father and a sick mother spends his time hunting and trapping in the woods. He is arrested for stealing and sent to a reform school - the first place he has lived where he had enough food to eat, a decent education, and respectful treatment by the staff. His parents now both being dead, he is released from the reform school into the custody of an aunt and uncle and he works on their farm. He takes up with Anna, a young woman living on a nearby farm where she has no prospects, no friends, and no concern or respect from her parents or family. She is an intellectually and emotionally limited woman but she seems to get along with George. When she gets pregnant, George runs away and joins the army.
George does well in the army until it looks like he might be sent to war. He doesn't want that. Then he has a problem that no one understands. An officer asks him something and George flies off the handle, striking the officer and having to be pinned down by a bunch of men and hauled off to the brig. He is sent to a military prison where he is analyzed by a psychiatrist, an important character in the story. The psychiatrist eventually solves the riddle of George's strange life and forbidden obsessions and learns that George had committed two murders in his young life.
As a child, George's mother told him that he sucked the blood from her. He had become obsessed with sucking blood. His forays into the woods were to kill animals whose blood he could suck. His attraction to Anna was in sucking her menstrual blood. It was his way of calming himself. By a series of very intelligent interviews, manipulations, and deductions, the psychiatrist figures all of this out and writes it up in a report to the prison warden.
I knew Sturgeon as a science fiction writer and that's what I was expecting to read when I started this book. I was drawn in very quickly looking at the first couple of pages and kept wondering when the futuristic SF would begin. But it didn't begin. This strange, exotic, psychological story was the whole thing.
Sturgeon prepares the reader to misread George, to give him sympathy and to cast suspicion on the psychiatrist's seemingly unscrupulous manipulation of him to get information. Then he gradually exposes the underlying frightening part of George's character, his murders, his addiction to blood, his inability to relate to the world. At the end we don't know how to relate to the man at all or know what should be done with him.
It's an unusual but well written book. It's one of those books that I admire and appreciate without liking the story. It certainly opened a new perspective for me on Theodore Sturgeon.