Books read January through December 2016
| Author | Price, Anthony |
|---|---|
| Publication | |
| Copyright Date | 1974 |
| Number of Pages | 222 |
| Genres | Fiction; Spy |
| When Read | January 2016 |
Paul Mitchell, a young military historian working in a library, is approached by Dr. David Audley and Colonel Jack Butler for information about a battle that occurred in France at Hameau Ridge on the Somme more than 50 years before, in 1916. Mitchell says what he can, then goes back to work. However on the way home he is approached by two unknown men on a lonely canal path who seize him and throw him to what would appear to be certain death in the canal. But Mitchell does not die. He survives and goes home where, shortly thereafter, Audley appears again. Mitchell's academic mentor has been murdered in an event designed to look like an accident and soon other false accidents happen to other men who know something about the battle at Hameau Ridge, including two old men who were there.
Audley takes Mitchell under protection and brings him to France under a false identity to help him investigate what is going on. They work with a French security officer, but the man turns out to be a traitor. Hameau Ridge is riddled with tunnels deep underground with perfectly preserved armaments from the great war, including tons of explosives. The Frenchman, paid by who knows whom, was planning to set them off under a house on the site that was to be used as a meeting place for a secret conference of representatives of two unknown countries to discuss some unknown matter of importance.
Audley falls into the trap but Mitchell, in an act of daring, saves both of them and the beautiful French agent who works for the Frenchman but is also to be killed because she has learned too much.
After this climax, Audley reveals that he and Butler weren't actually investigating the affair. It was a French matter after all. The murders that occurred in England were matters for the police as far as Audley was concerned. What he and Butler were really doing was evaluating Mitchell as a collaborator, someone they would offer to employ in whatever shadowy British secret service Audley belongs to.
This is number 5 in the David Audley series.
The story was interesting for all it had to say about the events in World War I and the presentation of old veterans. the mechanics of historical research, and the odd characters who are attracted to it. This is apparently a hallmark of Price's David Audley series - a historical mystery whose solution plays a principal role in the solution of a current spy story.
It was all okay. Not good. Not bad. Just okay.
I would ordinarily have read number 2 after I read the first one, if I read any at all, but this was available in audio format and I gave it a try.
| Author | Longyear, Barry |
|---|---|
| Publication | Popular Library, 1989 |
| Number of Pages | 281 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | January 2016 |
In the year 2115 a collection of about 17,000 convicts deemed to be incorrigible are rounded up from an American prison, packed like sardines into a spaceship, and dumped on the inhospitable desert planet of Tartaros, a kind of prison planet where convicts from all the 100 worlds now inhabited by humans are dumped. There is no actual prison, no facilities, and no guards. The men and women prisoners are effectively free. They can do what they wish, including torment and kill each other. The only thing they can't do is get off Tartaros. There is no way out.
The story is narrated by Nicos Bando, a cynical recidivist convict whose only goal it to get along without antagonizing any of the "sharks" and "yard monsters" of the prison into hurting him. To do that he does favors for one or two really dangerous men who, in turn, protect him.
The convicts quickly realize that they are at tremendous risk. They find bodies from another ship and come to understand, mostly from information given them by a resident of the planet, that this planet is ruled by huge, contending criminal gangs with homemade guns who, among other things, live by killing and plundering the new people dropped onto the planet. After much debate and the splitting off of groups and individuals who didn't agree, the main body forms an organization to protect themselves, heading for the only area, still many days away, where they have been told that there is ample water and food. Because they are organized and know more than the gangs expect them to know, they are able to ambush and overwhelm a group of 300 convicts who came to kill them and steal their possessions. They get the guns and riding animals of this group and head for the better land.
Bando is made the policeman of the group. There is no law, no court, no rules. He doesn't want this job but it's thrust upon him and he has no choice but to accept it. He makes up what seem to be the fairest rules he can think of, on the spot, while adjudicating a fight or dealing with a murder. His goal is to solve the problem and end any conflict immediately, with no waiting. There isn't time for more. He appoints jurors, hears the arguments and, in some cases where there is a conviction, picks up his rifle and shoots dead the man who is in the wrong.
The society of criminal prisoners is evolving. They become better organized. They write down the rules that they have made up on the spot and call them laws. They impose discipline. In the end, after they have fought with, been tricked by, and in turn tricked one of the criminal gangs, they surprise and overwhelm the criminals, get all their guns, free a large bunch of women being held as sex slaves, and go on a mission to free more women. Bando visits the site of a new spaceship prisoner dump, listens to their dominant yard monster boast of his killings and threaten everyone, shoots the man dead, and recruits the new people to join his smaller group. Civilization is beginning on Tartaros.
Jim Herndon loaned me this book. He said it is a favorite of his. I think he's right about it. I told him I liked it and he asked me why. Here's what I wrote, with slight editing:
Some aspects of the story didn't strike me as entirely plausible. Questions could obviously be raised, for example about putting 17,000 people on a spaceship and sending them light years away. But that's okay, one accepts the conventions of SF in order to enjoy the freedom that they bring in imagining a society in new contexts, not limited by the reality of present surroundings.
I was interested by the character of Nicos Bando, by his characterizations of the other prisoners from "sharks" and "yard monsters" to the "cash register" lawyers, the druggies, the abused women, and so on. I was especially interested by Bando's development of a new commitment to others and a rising sense of obligation to a community after starting from a base of total isolation, alienation, and skepticism. I thought that was handled very convincingly and with considerable insight.
I liked the analysis of justice and democracy, and the juxtaposition of the idealist "Pussyface" Darrel Garoit and the realist Nance Damas. I liked the characterization of the yard monsters that Bando was forced to discipline or even kill. Longyear could have taken the easy way out and treated his characters as a group of heroes and a group of villains. But he didn't do that. Everyone remained human and the author was surprisingly sympathetic to them all.
I liked the way the author developed his ideas on all of this, not with a series of arguments, but with a series of confrontations and crises, each resolved by the application of a new rule, defined on the spot, always pared down to something immediate, pragmatic, and essential. The dialectic of action leading to new ideas that were previously unthinkable, and ideas leading to new actions that were previously unthinkable was nicely done.
It was an action novel, pared down to essentials, but with a philosophical theme, something not easy to put together in one book.
This was probably the first book I've read on actual paper in quite a long time, possibly years.
| Author | Munoz Molina, Antonio |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Spanish |
| Translators | Grossman, Edith |
| Publication | Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt, 2013 |
| Copyright Date | 2009 |
| Number of Pages | 656 |
| Extras | Extract of the novel Sepharad by Munoz Molina |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Spain; Spanish Civil War |
| When Read | January 2016 |
The architect Ignacio Abel is working on the design of the new University of Madrid in 1936. In his forties, he is married to Adela, an uneducated and slightly older woman of an old, traditional, Catholic family, with whom he has two children, a strong and self-reliant teen-aged daughter and a perhaps overly sensitive younger son. Ignacio is a highly educated man who speaks a number of languages and is a Socialist and a strong supporter of the Spanish Republic. He has no living relatives. Adela's family is his only family and, although he is from working class parents and has little in common with them, her father loves Ignacio, is proud of his accomplishments, and is pleased to treat him as another son. It is the influence of Don Francisco de Asis that, together with Ignacio's undoubted talent, has secured him his job at the University.
Ignacio is not in love with his wife. He had a brief extra marital affair with a liberated woman during his studies with Professor Rossman at the Bauhaus in Germany. This affair taught him that women are not necessarily prudish, home centered, or uneducated. He realizes, if he didn't understand already, that his pursuit of Adela was more in the way of a career opportunity than a marriage of love.
While giving a talk at the University he meets Judith Biely, a beautiful American woman in her early thirties. He is strongly attracted to her and she to him. They begin a passionate affair which quickly comes to dominate his thoughts. He cannot get enough of Judith or she of him.
Judith has a sort of protector or benefactor in Philip Van Doren, a very rich American who is a sort of voyeur in the affair of Ignacio and Judith. Van Doren procures an invitation for a job on the faculty and as the designer of a library for a college in New York State. It is an opportunity for Ignacio and Judith to be together and, also very importantly, for Ignacio to escape the coming Civil War. Ignacio accepts the offer, telling his family that they will all move to America, but actually doing nothing to plan for a complete family move. He is unable to tell Adela the truth, unable to break off with Judith, and unable to face the contradiction and impossibility of his position. All he can do is to keep working at the University, keep making every assignation that he can with Judith, and keep postponing the inevitable crisis that is of his own making.
Adela discovers the affair and attempts suicide. Judith learns of this act and breaks off with Ignacio. She feels that she is responsible for Adela's near death and she will be responsible no longer. She makes her plans to leave Madrid.
Meanwhile the tensions in Spain rise to the breaking point. The Falangist revolt and Civil War begin. Adela and the children are relatively safe with her parents on the other side of the lines. Ignacio is still in Madrid, but work is becoming impossible. Militias of every political persuasion form - anarchists, communists, socialists, splinter groups. Construction materials are carted off, ostensibly for use in defenses. Workers walk off the job, sometimes to join the militias, sometimes on strikes against whomever they see as bourgeois. More and more people carry guns in their pockets. It will not be possible for things to stay as they were and Ignacio, living in a modern apartment building in a wealthy part of town, is himself in danger from the militias. His old friend and mentor, Professor Rossman, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany who has supported himself and his daughter as best he could by selling pens in cafes, is arrested for who knows what reason. Ignacio tries desperately to find Rossman and free him but cannot. He next finds him in the morgue. Ignacio himself is arrested and would be shot by some fly by night characters who call themselves revolutionaries but really are just bullies who prey on defenseless people, but is saved by an old friend of his family who has a staunch reputation as a supporter of the revolution.
Still pursuing Judith, still unable to speak frankly to Adela or their children, unable to save Rossman from the militias and unwilling to save his brother-in-law Victor - a genuine Falangist who beats on his door and demands to be let in, and now knowing that Judith has left Spain, Ignacio finally makes his own escape - achieved only by the skin of his teeth. He makes it to New York, where we met him in Pennsylvania Station at the beginning of the novel, and makes it to the college where he is welcomed by Van Doren and the college President to his new job.
In the final scene, Judith visits Ignacio in the house where he is staying. She tells him that she is on her way to Spain. She will do whatever she can to save the Republic. He cannot do that. He has seen the horrors on the Republican side as well as on the Falangist side. He is still a Socialist and a Republican, but he has lost his faith in revolutionary change. They spend a last night together.
This was a wonderful novel with some of the most exquisite writing I have ever read. Here are some notes that I wrote for Bob Kline and Elaine Mills, who asked me about the book.
It's a book that won't appeal to everyone. The themes are rather complicated, mixing love, family obligation, personal integrity, class, nationality, and the violence and history of Spain at the outset of the Spanish Civil War. If a reader is looking for a compelling story with a plot that drives him along, he won't find it here. The story moves back and forth in time. To some degree, time itself is the subject of the story. The author is quite clear that he is writing about a time in the past and that all of these characters are now gone. The events are over and done, but have they really ceased to exist? Does this small story set in a huge national transformation, part even of a coming world war, have some independent significance? Can we go back into that night in that time and re-live, or at least re-examine, the events? Can we penetrate into them and see them more deeply with each re-examination? Time that is gone is now dark and our vision into it is limited, but maybe we can make things out if we try.
Efforts to strongly identify with a character are often frustrated by the revelations of his weaknesses, while efforts to condemn a character are often frustrated by appreciation of his humanity.
Many of my positive feelings about this book are not specifically about the story and the characters, but about the observations that the author and his main character make as the story proceeds. They may have to do with the manner of a bank clerk greeting an old customer who is still wearing a coat and tie, or a doorman who is calculating his interests in the respectable tenant who gives him tips vs. the militia militants looking for spies and reprobates, or of a child who is sensitive to the smallest looks and behaviors from a father who means well by the boy but can't really love him the way he loves his daughter, or an old man who was once a famous professor in Germany and is now selling pens on the street in Madrid - lost to salvation not just by the quirks of fate, but by his commitment to a daughter who was deluded by politics and love.
It's all complicated. If a reader likes complication, if he wants to see into the time and place and people through the eyes of an author who sees more deeply than he, the reader, does, then this book is a feast for the mind.
I have written extensively about this book in my diary. There is significantly more there than here. I began reading the book in September 2015 and wrote about it on September 27, December 17, January 8 and 13, and a very long (8 pages) entry with discussion of specific passages on January 30, a couple of weeks after I finished the book.
I consider this to be one of the finest novels I have read, very much worthy of a Nobel Prize.
| Author | Sakurazaka, Hiroshie |
|---|---|
| Publication | Simon and Schuster Audio, 2013 |
| Copyright Date | 2009 |
| Number of Pages | 230 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | January 2016 |
"Adapted by Nick Mamatas; art by Lee Ferguson"
Some time in the not too far future an alien race sends robots (if that's what they are) into the oceans of the earth where they produce a race of "Mimics", tough, armored, dangerous, adaptable, frog like creatures who emerge from the water to kill all humans with their javelins. Keiji Kiriya, a young recruit in the Japanese infantry, suits up in his armored suit to do battle.
The story involves some sort of time travel. Keiji goes into battle, is killed, then wakes up on the same day, goes in again, is killed again, and continues this for 160 rounds of dream fighting, or whatever it is, over much of the book. He meets "the full metal bitch", an American special forces soldier who wipes out hundreds of Mimics not just with her advanced weapons, but with her battle axe. She trains Keiji on his dream missions and eventually explains to him that they are in a time loop created by the Mimics to enable them to get experience fighting the earth soldiers. However only one human can be in the time loop and she attacks Keiji, forcing him to kill her. He then takes her place as the primary killer of Mimics and trainer of human soldiers in how to deal with them.
This story was originally one of the Japanese comic book style novels. I saw one statement that the book has 230 pages and another that it has 92 pages. One statement said it was mainly illustrations, another said that not all the illustrations were included. It was apparently written in Japanese but I don't know who the translator was, perhaps it was Nick Mamatas. It was also made into a Hollywood movie with Tom Cruise, which may or may not have been very faithful to the Japanese version.
In effect, without seeing and being able to read the Japanese version, I have no way to know how much of what I heard on the recording was faithful to the original Japanese and how much was re-written by American mass marketers. The story did have a surprisingly strong pro-American stance. Maybe that was a factor in enticing Hollywood to film the book, or maybe it was something added in the U.S.
It was an odd book. It was the kind of adolescent action story that draws in readers, as attested by the 630 Amazon reviews averaging 4.5 stars - though many of the readers were no doubt introduced to the story by the movie. But it was surprising too. That most of the book consisted of what are some sort of dream sequences was unusual. The mix of Japanese and American soldiers was unusual. On the other hand, the Mimics were just cartoons, in fact all of the characters were cartoons (perhaps literally so), and there was hardly any explanation of any of the premises of the story - but none of that is unusual in this sort of book.
Would I read another book by this author? Probably not, but perhaps if I got to see the cartoons ...
| Author | O'Hara, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | Penguin Classics, 2014 |
| Copyright Date | 1955 |
| Number of Pages | 464 |
| Extras | Introduction by Jonathan Dee |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | January 2016 |
The story opens at the funeral of Joe B. Chapin, an important man and pillar of his family and community who has died in April, 1945. In page after page, scene after scene, one or another of the people at his funeral talks to others about Joe and/or about the Chapin family. Finally, and almost imperceptibly, we begin the story of Joe's parents and of his birth and childhood.
Joe is born into an old and well to do family in Gibbsville, a fictional town not far from Philadelphia. His father, Joe Senior, graduated from Yale and practiced law in Gibbsvile and lived at Ten North Frederick Street, a house built by his (Joe Senior's) father, another lawyer and Lieutenant Governor of the state. Joe Senior married a cold and calculating woman whose main occupation seemed to be to promote the family's social position and punish any person who offered her any sort of slight, as often as not only a perceived slight, not a real one. She has no real love for her husband. He is someone she manipulates with some contempt. After Joe junior is born she transfers all her affection and concern to him and, after a couple of miscarriages that convince her she can have no more children, she refuses all sex with her husband. When Joe Senior dies she has no more real reason to live and she dies too - rather unexpectedly I should say since she was such an important person in the section of the book concerning Joe's early life.
Joe B. Chapin, the real main character of the book, follows in his father's footsteps. He is handsome, popular, and intelligent. He goes to Yale and becomes a lawyer. He foregoes possible opportunities in New York and Philadelphia and returns to Gibbsville, where he joins a law firm to which he is introduced, with considerable money, as a partner by his father. He marries Edith Stokes, a plain looking woman but with a good body and from a very prominent family. Edith picked him out when she was only 17 and chose him as the man she would like to own, and own him she did.
Joe had been monopolized by his mother and she caused Joe's father to be alienated from the boy. On his deathbed, his father tells Joe that he must spoil his daughter, not his son but his daughter. And Joe does. He relates to his daughter Ann in ways that Edith can never match. He imagines himself to be rich and successful, well married, a good father, popular and happy.
Mike Slattery, the local Republican Party politico offers to make him a judge. Joe declines but gets to thinking about a political career and decides that he wants to become President of the United States. It is a ridiculous ambition. Joe puts his whole soul into it, traveling around the state, making friends, helping people out, getting known in every county, planning his first move - to be elected Lieutenant Governor, a post his grandfather once held. He approaches Mike Slattery and eventually gives him $100,000 to be used by the Republican Party to promote his candidacy. But it's a scam by the Party to get his money. He and Mike are invited to a meeting in Philadelphia where the top party people ask him to withdraw his nomination. Realizing that he has been had, he withdraws immediately.
Joe goes to see Ann who is now living in New York. He falls in love with her roommate, a girl his daughter's age. They have a brief one night fling. It is his only departure from marital fidelity in all of the years of his life, but when he goes home Edith somehow senses immediately that things are different and suspects another woman. He confesses to her. She tells him of her own fling many years before, effectively severing all connection with him. Joe is left with a marriage that is not a marriage, a lost and impossible love that served only to show him that he had never had a love, a career that meant nothing to him, and a complete failure in the career he desired. He becomes a quiet but persistent and committed alcoholic. Never obviously drunk in public, never making a fool or an ass of himself, he nevertheless drinks more and more until he drinks himself to death.
O'Hara's study of small town upper class life is spare but penetrating. Much of the story is told with simple dialog - short sentences that tend to be very much to the point. People's perceptions and misperceptions come out very clearly. There are long passages of narration interspersed with fairly long dialogs.
Joe's life is full of misperception. He is wrong about Edith. He is wrong about his son Joby, who is and wants to be a jazz pianist, not an upper class lawyer. He is wrong about Ann who loves him but feels stultified in her upper class life and marries a musician, only to have the marriage destroyed by Joe and Edith using all of their money and connections. He is wrong about his political prospects. He has one long standing friend since childhood, his law partner Arthur McHenry, who cares for him and wants to help, but there is nothing to be done. Joe has come to an understanding of the hollowness and futility of his life and all that is left for him is gin and whiskey.
This is a moving book about a time before my time and a place and social group that I could never belong to. It's the kind of portrait of time, place and society that is an important component of American self-understanding.
When I came across this book I seemed to recall that my mother had a copy of it, read it, and was moved by it. That would probably have been sometime not long after 1955, when the book came out. I expect she got it from the Pimlico Branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library. It's even possible that I brought it home for her since, when I went to the library, which was often, she would ask me to ask the librarian to pick out some books for her and bring them home with me. I am glad to have shared this with her - assuming that I'm right in recalling any of this.
| Author | Brooks, Geraldine |
|---|---|
| Publication | Penguin Books |
| Copyright Date | 2001 |
| Number of Pages | 308 |
| Extras | Map of Britain. Introduction. Interview with the author. Questions for discussion. Excerpt from Caleb's Crossing. |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| When Read | January 2016 |
In 1665 the bubonic plague came to the village of Eyam (like "eem") in central England. Organized by the local rector, the village agreed that no one would leave the village. To do so would risk spreading the plague, might not guarantee the health of the escapees, and might result in persecution of the people when they reached other villages. In return the squire of the neighboring area agreed to supply food at the plague village's border to keep the people alive.
The story is narrated in first person by Anna Frith, daughter of a nasty and drunken lead miner. At fifteen she married Sam, a simple but strong and nice man who was also a lead miner. However he died in a cave-in, leaving her with two baby boys. Now she works as a maid at the big house of Colonel Bradford, the local lord, and later as a maid at the house of the Rector Michael Mompellion and his wife Elinor.
The plague comes to the village via a bolt of cloth ordered from London by a tailor, a nice young man living as a boarder in Anna's home and whom Anna has gotten interested in. It kills the tailor and then starts to kill other people, including Anna's two children. The villagers. under tremendous psychological pressure, look for scapegoats and kill a young woman who is the last remaining midwife and herbal remedy expert in the village, accusing her of witchcraft and causing the plague.
Anna and Elinor try to take the dead woman's place. They attend the births of babies and Anna becomes an experienced midwife. They go through all of the herbs in the dead woman's house and learn all they can from books - Elinor having taught Anna to read. They and Elinor's husband Michael work tirelessly to help the villagers, trying their best to relieve suffering, to minister to the dying, and to organize the funerals.
Anna's father becomes the local grave digger. Bastard that he is, he charges exorbitant fees and, at one point, attempts to kill one of the better off villagers in order to steal everything in his house after burying him. But the man survives both the plague and the grave digger and tells his story. The other villagers nail the bastard to a wall, crucifying him. Near the end, the grave digger's wife Aphra, having gone completely insane when all her children die and her husband too, kills Elinor with a knife and then kills herself.
The last 35 or so pages are a complete departure from the rest of the story. Michael Mompellion confesses to a loss of faith. He tells Anna that he never actually slept with Elinor as a punishment for her sexual transgression before she married him. But he goes after Anna. Colonel Bradford's family returns and calls upon Anna's services as a midwife to the Colonel's wife, but Anna discovers Bradford's daughter attempting to drown the baby because he is not the Colonel's son. Anna grabs the baby flees the village, makes it to a coastal town, takes the first ship out, and winds up on the Barbary Coast as a midwife, herbalist assistant, and nominal wife to a Muslim doctor.
Brooks made a sincere and significant effort to portray an earlier time in the midst of great social and physical strain. The terrible experience of these people was made at least somewhat real for the reader. Characters like Anna's father, Colonel Bradford, and others showed the nasty side of life in those times while Anna, the Mompellions, the herbalist, and some others showed the good side.
She made heavy, though to my mind only partly effective, use of words that were apparently common in the 17th century (e.g. "sennight" for "week" (a contraction of seven night?)) but are not known today. It was an intrusive decision that didn't fully capture the language of the times since the spelling is all modern and there is no use of the slang speech of the period. It's more like modern prose with small grammatical twists and funky words thrown in. Vocabulary aside however, the portrayal seemed effective to me. We get a strong sense of serious hardships and limitations of the villagers' lives, and the disaster visited upon them by the plague.
The biggest failing in my view, and in the view of quite a few Amazon reviewers, was in the remarkable departure at the end. Mompellion is portrayed almost as a saint. He is principled, brave, compassionate, understanding, hard working, and imbued with deep faith. When he is revealed as something very far from that at the end we ask, Where did this come from? Why was there no evidence of any of this during the year of life under pressure? When Elinor is killed we ask, Why did this happen at the end, when all of the tragedy appears to be over? When Colonel Bradford sends his emissaries to pursue and kill Anna we ask, Why was that necessary? Why didn't he just leave her alone or perhaps pay for her to go to America? Was murder his only option? And when Anna winds up on the Barbary Coast we ask, Why of all places did she go there? Where did she learn Arabic? Why does this Muslim physician take her in even if she is experienced? And how did he find out about her?
I read this for the NCI book group. Many of the other readers had a very similar reaction to mine.
| Author | Ruiz Zafon, Carlos |
|---|---|
| Translators | Graves, Lucia |
| Publication | Random House Audio, 2009 |
| Copyright Date | 2008 |
| Number of Pages | 544 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction; Horror |
| When Read | February 2016 |
Book 2 in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books series.
Daniel Martin grows up in Barcelona in the 1910's and 20's. His mother and father have separated and he lives with his father, his mother having abandoned them. His crude and ignorant father is murdered when Daniel is 15 years old and he supports himself by working as a dogsbody and then as a writer at "The Voice of Industry" newspaper where he makes hardly any money at all. His gruff editor, Don Basilio, gives him work and the paper's main writer, the wealthy Don Pedro Vidal, acts as a kind of protector of the boy.
Soon Martin is churning out stories at a high rate. They are so popular that the other writers at the paper resent him and treat him badly. Then Don Pedro puts him in touch with a pair of book publishing thieves for whom he churns out a whole series of books which they sell in volume, lying to him about sales and paying him a fraction of the royalties that he is due.
Then Martin is diagnosed with terminal cancer. His life collapses and his dreams of becoming a noted author collapse with them. But all is not over. He is approached by one Andreas Corelli, a strange, polite, smooth talking character who claims to be a rich Parisian publisher who wants to hire Martin to write a book for him. He offers Martin a shadowy cure for his cancer which occurs in a sort of dream and leaves Martin healthy and well. It is the first of the fantastic events in the novel, but not the last. Martin accepts the cure, accepts 100,000 francs, and quits his job.
The two publishing thieves come after him. He has a contract they say. He must keep working for them or they will take him to court. But the two are both horribly killed in a fire at the publishing house that leaves him free. The police suspect Martin of starting the fire and killing the men, but the reader has no doubt that it was Corelli. Corelli needs Martin to write his book about religion, about a great leader who will transform everyone's lives. We never learn the purpose of this book or whether Corelli intends to portray himself as humanity's savior, but it is now obvious that everything connected with Corelli is evil.
The other key characters in the book are Cristina Sagnier, a beautiful girl a bit older than Martin with whom he falls in love. She marries the much older but rich Pedro Vidal in what Martin interprets as another betrayal by Don Pedro. Isabella Gispert is a teenage would be writer who insinuates herself into Martin's life. She wants him to teach her to write but she is also in love with him. She makes herself his "assistant" though he attempts, successfully in the end, to foist her upon Barcelo Sempere, shy son of Sempere the bookseller.
In the end, Christina dies in a horrible, insane suicide, Martin is pursued by three policemen who turn out to be after him for selfish reasons but he kills them or they die pursuing him. There is an old house that is possibly haunted and that burns to the ground. There is a final meeting, many years later, with Corelli, who places a young girl in Martin's hands as a replacement for Christina, making Martin responsible for the girl's upbringing and care.
There are a number of supernatural elements injected into this book, sometimes with a light touch, sometimes not so light. I don't really know why they were needed. The book was beautifully, one might say lavishly, written. The story stood on its own. It could have been made to work just as well without them. I don't know whether they are there because Ruiz Zafon wanted to please an audience that he has developed, or more likely I think, because he loves this type of literature. He may have actually restrained himself from putting in more.
I wouldn't normally read a book with supernatural events in it but I have now read several of them by this author. He's really a wonderful writer. It's a shame for me, apparently not for many other readers, that he has this penchant for something that always scrapes against my enjoyment of the story. Marcia also read it and had the same reaction that I did.
The other irritant for me was the personality of Martin himself. He is a liar. He lies to everyone about almost everything. He appears to be digging himself into deeper and deeper holes by never explaining anything, never telling the truth, never seeking help or accepting it when it is offered. Admittedly, some of the people who look like they could be trustworthy turn out to be liars themselves, but that doesn't make Martin's behavior more understandable or acceptable to me. The continually increasing tension that builds in the plot seems more the work of Martin himself than of the circumstances imposed upon him.
The book is, as I said, beautifully written. Ruiz Zafon has a rich, romantic prose style that magnifies emotions and draws the reader in. However I don't know if I'll ever read any more of him. If I am tempted, and if I still remember this book and The Prince of Mist, I'll look up reviews and see if he's at it again before deciding to proceed.
| Author | Browne, Gerald A. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Open Road, 2014 |
| Copyright Date | 1972 |
| Number of Pages | 336 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| When Read | February 2016 |
Chesser (all of the characters in this book have only one name) is a 40 year old divorced American diamond merchant living in Europe with Maren, a gorgeous, insanely rich, 25 year old Swedish former fashion model and widow. He, along with all of the other diamond merchants in the world, purchases his diamonds from "the Consolidated Selling System", or "System" for short, that has a monopolistic lock on all diamond sales in the world. Chesser is one of the bottom feeders at the System, getting small batches of lesser diamonds, and only tolerated at all because his father was a customer. Chesser fumes at the obvious contempt in which Meecham, President of the System, treats him, but there is absolutely nothing he can do about it. He must swallow his pride and take what they give him.
Maren, besides being gorgeous and rich, is a rather childish risk taker. She loves fast cars and drives them much too fast. She always wants to do dangerous things and sees them as delightful and thrilling alternatives to boredom. She also believes in the supernatural. She visits mediums to talk to her dead husband, the multi-millionaire who left her everything on the condition that she never remarry. She is accompanied by the spirits of an Indian chief and a Chinaman. She chatters about them as if they are perfectly real and Chesser, not himself a believer in any of that, humors her. It is as if he sees it as harmless and, while skeptical, he doesn't seem to regard it as completely and ridiculously impossible.
After yet another humiliation from Meecham at the System, Chesser is invited to stay with Massey, a billionaire who happens to be interested in diamonds. Massey commissions Chesser to buy a diamond for him and gives him $1.5 million, almost half of which will be profit. Chesser buys the diamond, has it cut, and brings it to Massey. But along the way he and Maren are waylaid by robbers posing as road repairmen. They hit the two of them with tranquilizer darts and steal the diamond. Massey demands his money back, but Chesser, who had never dealt with anything so large in his life, hadn't taken the basic precautions of insuring the diamond or even photographing it, or giving it the protection it might have merited.
Then Massey offers Chesser a deal. He will forgive the debt and pay Chesser 15 million dollars to break into the vault in the basement of the system and steal the 20 million carets of diamonds stored there. Chesser thinks that's ridiculous but Maren is excited by the idea and they are soon planning an attack. To make it work they bring in Weaver, a black American revolutionary from New York who knew Chesser in high school and is now living as an expatriate in Africa, and Watts, a longtime employee of the System who has access to the vault, who is dying of cancer, and who has been shafted by the System out of the retirement money he needs to secure the future of his wife. They find a pipe containing electrical wires on the roof, one of which goes down to an outlet in the vault. They are able to fish a hose down to the outlet and attach a vacuum cleaner at the top. Watts uses the vacuum at the bottom to suck up all of the smaller diamonds, cleaning out the vault. He then commits suicide - though Chesser didn't know that would happen.
Instead of giving Massey the diamonds, Chesser, Weaver, and Maren dump them in an abandoned place and tell Massey that the plan failed. Weaver goes back to Africa with a million dollars from Chesser.
Then the diamonds disappear. Chesser doesn't know who has them.
There are various chases. We learn early on that it was Massey who robbed his own diamond from Chesser while convincing Chesser that it was the System. Massey thinks Chesser has the diamonds and sends his killers to find the pair, torture them to get the diamonds, and then kill them. Meecham is mainly concerned to somehow convince his Board of Directors that his security chief Coglin is responsible for the loss, but Coglin is too smart for that, has bugged the Boardroom, and has years of information about Meecham which he brings to the Board getting Meecham fired and himself put in his place.
Chesser and Maren continue to run around Europe. Maren insists on getting married to him, which causes all of her money, cars, plane, yacht, and even clothing to be instantly seized by her ex-husband's lawyers. The $200,000 that Chesser had hidden in a Swiss account has disappeared, the Swiss bankers, probably working for Massey, tell him that account number doesn't exist. But in the end it is neither Massey nor Coglin that get to Chesser. It was Weaver who came back and stole the diamonds to finance a revolution in the U.S. In the last sentence of the book two assassins sent by Weaver shoot Chesser and Maren dead.
I think this was Browne's first novel, though not his first piece of professional writing. It's intelligently and competently written and it has fascinating information about the diamond industry, but the story and characters are more than a little ridiculous.
There were some good scenes in the book. I liked the way that Massey, a man who was always presented as a tightly controlled iceberg, disintegrates in fury and despair when he learned that Chesser and Maren had escaped his killers. I liked the presentation of Mildred, the dwarf spirit medium who could pack away a lot of gin in her small frame and fell asleep when she was supposed to be in a trance. I liked the apparent rapport between Chesser and Weaver and thought it was a nicely done aspect of Weaver. Ultimately however, the book was a disappointment.
I had recently finished a number of long and/or serious books (In the Night of Time, Ten North Frederick, The Year of Wonders) and was looking for something light and fast reading. I had recently come across a set of books by Browne, saw good reviews of them, and decided to try one.
| Author | Beckett, Chris |
|---|---|
| Publication | Corvus, 2010 |
| Copyright Date | 2004 |
| Number of Pages | 320 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| Keywords | Artificial intelligence; Robots |
| When Read | February 2016 |
In a future society fundamentalist religions have conquered all countries of the earth. In America, Protestant sects have taken over society and waged war against atheism, evolutionary theory, and science in general. The situation is the same throughout the world with various Christian, Muslim, and other groups running the countries and periodically battling each other for superiority.
One city, "Illyria" on the Dalmation coast, is an exception to this rule. Here scientists, engineers, and their families have found refuge from the increasingly primitive society around them. Using their advanced knowledge and skills they have built powerful weapons, fighter jets flying in "discontinuous motion", laser beams, military robots, and so on that make them impervious to the rage of the surrounding Balkan states. They have to import tens of thousands of "guest workers" from the surrounding areas to do the menial jobs, but they aren't happy with these people, and the people are not happy with them, and they are planning to replace all of them with robots when it becomes possible. In the meantime they suppress religious displays as well as unrest among the guest workers. The guest workers want citizenship but the rulers of the city believe that to grant that would mean the end of the scientific city state.
22 year old George Simling is a citizen of Illyria, living with his mother Ruth. He works as a translator and has become addicted to sex with Lucy, a "syntec" robot prostitute who is unbelievably beautiful, knowledgeable and accommodating. At the same time, Ruth has quit her job and given herself over to her addiction to "SenSpace", an all enveloping virtual reality that provides her a safe, peaceful, pretty life, free of all cares. The two live with their old domestic robot, Charlie, on the 50th floor of one of the Illyrian apartment buildings.
Lonely, frustrated, alienated, addicted, obsessed, George comes to see Lucy as an object of love, essentially as a person. When he learns that she is likely to have her memories wiped clean in a program that wipes them every six months to prevent them from becoming too humanly knowledgeable, he takes action, spiriting her out of the city and into one of the nearby states. There George and Lucy keep moving from place to place, trying to avoid anyone raping Lucy, or discovering that she is actually a robot, a "demon" who must be killed, as far as the superstitious locals are concerned, while Lucy learns more and more and begins to have some understanding of the world beyond the brothel that she had always and only known.
Despite all efforts, the project cannot succeed. Lucy is discovered and seemingly burned up in a fire. George roams the area, growing poorer, sicker, and more bullied in each place he goes. Meanwhile Ruth has been trapped in her SenSpace suit without George to help her out of it and suffers horrible injuries that lead the doctors who save her to amputate her arms, legs, and sensory organs and wire her up in a permanent SenSpace environment - which is all she ever wanted anyway.
Everything comes to a climax. Beaten down, George hears of a Holy Machine, a robot prophet. It turns out to be Lucy, no longer encased in beautiful skin and just barely hanging on to life and finally losing it. Ruth has finally soured on SenSpace and hires a "vehicle", a robot who works as Ruth's surrogate body, to carry her out of the hospital to a place near the beach where the vehicle digs a shallow grave for her and lays her inside. Illyria experiences a coup and a new government that will grant citizenship to the guest workers. George returns to the city and meets with a real woman.
Beckett began publishing short stories in 1990. The Holy Machine was his first novel, published in 2004. It's a little rough and disturbingly relentless in its persecution of George and his inability to overcome his own shortcomings. Nevertheless, it is a remarkably intelligent book with an uncannily insightful depiction of both people and robots. I particularly liked George's interactions with religious people and Lucy's interaction with George and the world.
When George asks questions about religion he is treated to fairly standard responses about God, Christ, the crucifixion, the Holy Spirit, and many other things that are the everyday currency of Christianity. But when expressed baldly they come out as sounding and being ludicrous. This happens again and again. We do not penetrate to some inner fine and reasonable core of religion. In Beckett's hands, its system of beliefs is ludicrous all the way down to its core.
Lucy is spectacular. She can be any kind of sex object that George wants. But when he demands that she just be herself, thinking that she will be Lucy, her face empties of all expression and she is a simple robot.
In a brilliant tour de force, Beckett lets us observe Lucy's inner thought process as she responds to George. She goes through various finite state transitions from stimulus A16 to response H29 (I don't remember the actual state names), and so on, always gradually expanding her understanding of the world but never escaping her programming, even when she has torn off her own flesh in recognition that it is not a part of her real self.
Whatever flaws it has, this is still an extraordinary book.
| Author | Doerr, Anthony |
|---|---|
| Publication | Scribner, 2014 |
| Number of Pages | 531 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | February 2016 |
In alternating chapters we follow the growth of two children before and during World War II, blind French girl Marie-Laure LeBlanc, daughter of a locksmith at a Paris museum, and Werner Pfennig, an orphan in an orphanage in Zollverein in Germany.
Marie-Laure, the pet of the museum staff, learns about mollusks and minerals. Her attentive father builds a meticulous model in wood of their Paris neighborhood and teaches Marie-Laure to trace the streets and houses with her fingers and then learn how to follow the same paths in the streets. Eventually she is able to go anywhere within a six block radius and find her way home again, learning to count steps, curbs, storm drains, and walls, feeling, tapping and counting to learn where she is. Her father has very little money but he teaches her to read braille and buys an expensive braille copy of Jules Verne's Around the World in 80 Days and then Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. She reads the books over and over again.
The child Werner finds a broken and discarded radio in the trash in his neighborhood. He brings it home and, obsessively, learns how it works, eventually fixing it. He becomes the neighborhood radio repairman even though he is only thirteen years old. When he repairs the radio of a local Nazi Party big shot he is given a chance to try out for a Nazi military academy. He wins his chance and is soon in an environment of extreme Nazi propaganda and physical training, preparing boys to become selfless killers, willing to beat up the weakest of their own classmates and to sacrifice their lives for Volk and Fuehrer.
The school is essentially a training camp for SS storm troopers. The boys are taught to excel in physical sports and military training, to sacrifice their lives for their Fuehrer, and to sneer at and beat up the weaker and/or non-conformist members of the group. Werner's only friend at the school, Frederick, an intellectual who loves bird watching, is beaten to a pulp and permanently mentally disabled after he refuses to throw water on a freezing Russian prisoner. Werner is protected by a professor at the camp who needs the boy to help him in his radio lab, but forges his age on a document and sends him off to the Russian front when Werner crosses him.
Marie-Laure and her father have fled Paris before the Germans arrive. They make it to St. Malo in Bretagne where they live with her father's uncle Etienne Leblanc and his housekeeper Madame Malec. They have either a famous diamond, or a copy of the diamond (they don't know which), given to them by the museum director to hide from the Nazis. Later, the father is arrested and disappears in captivity, protecting it.
In the end of the main story, St. Malo is besieged by the Americans. A crazy German with cancer who has been pursuing Marie-Laure and her father to get the diamond has trapped her in Etienne's house. Werner arrives, kills the German, escorts Marie-Laurie into the street and points her at the American lines, and heads back to the Germans himself, where he is captured, is sick, and eventually walks out of the hospital into a mine field where he is killed.
The story picks up in 1974. Frederick's greedy mother who sent him to the school and who stole the apartment of a Jewess in their building is now caring for her invalid son. The giant Volkheimer, who protected Werner in the army is working as an antenna installer and repairman. He receives some old possessions of Werner's and takes them to his sister who now has a family of her own. And then it is 2014. Presumably everyone is dead except Marie-Laure, who sits in a park in Paris with her grandson and reflects upon life.
This was a very well written, well conceived story that won the Pulitzer Prize for 2015. To date (2016-03-05) it has 21,746 reviews on Amazon.com and is getting another 40 or so per day, far more than any other book I looked at on Amazon's top 100 best seller list (it's number 36.) This is one hell of a popular book.
It is really well written. It's popular in style, accessible to readers from high school age or even junior high. However it has some quite sophisticated ideas and some quite lyrical language. Doerr's appreciation of the true character of the Nazi state and its minions seemed to me deep and instructive.
I read this book as part of the NCI Book Group. I probably wouldn't have found it, or read it if I did, without that. It's good to have some outside influences in one's reading from time to time.
| Author | Brin, David |
|---|---|
| Publication | American Printing House for the Blind |
| Copyright Date | 1990 |
| Number of Pages | 704 |
| Extras | Afterward (discussion of the subject), excerpt from another novel, bibliography |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| Keywords | Ecology; Physics |
| When Read | March 2016 |
On an earth 50 years in the future from the time of writing, there are 10 billion people, lowlands near the oceans have been swamped by rising seas, the air, the lands and the oceans are depleted and polluted, millions of desperate people live on floating cities of poverty with nowhere else to go.
Physicist Alex Lustig has created a microscopic black hole that has gotten loose in the earth. He and his team in New Zealand are tracking it. They have satisfied themselves that it is decaying and is not a threat to the planet but they discover that there is another black hole, not of their devising, that is oscillating through the core of the earth and this one is big enough to be above the threshold where it will grow instead of decay as it absorbs mass from the earth. If nothing is done, Alex calculates that it will destroy the earth in two years. Frightened but determined, Alex ultimately invents the concept of a gravitational laser, a "gazer", and uses several on different parts of the earth's surface to boost the momentum of the black hole with the intent of eventually expelling it from the earth.
At first they think another, secret, possibly government sponsored, program created this black hole - bigger than anything Alex knew how to create. Later they come to believe that it was created by aliens who have decided to wipe humans off the planet before they become dangerous. This part of the story is never really resolved and, with the possible exception of the journalist Pedro Manella, who seems to show up at all the critical times, we never meet these aliens or learn anything about them. Perhaps Manella represents other aliens who are there to help humans. Perhaps the black hole did not have murderous intent. Perhaps the ending of the story is the actual goal of the aliens. Or perhaps there aren't any aliens. We don't know.
There are many other characters in the story and the narrative shifts back and forth among them. They include a 90+ year old biologist, a young gamekeeper who gathers shit from baboons for scientific studies by others who becomes a student of the biologist, an astronaut, a young man who does dangerous jobs on one of the floating cities, a number of other physicists, and Daisy, a demented computer genius who has conquered the Internet of the future and is using it to disrupt the gazer program in hopes of wiping out 99% of the earth's population and leaving just 10 or 20 thousand people in order for the earth, Mother Gaia, to recover the pristine beauty it had before humans wrecked it.
In the end, Daisy is stopped but it's a near thing and millions or billions, I'm not sure which, have died. The black hole is gotten under control and its threat removed. And most importantly, a new overmind has developed on the Net. This superorganism is made up of all the people. It neither rules them nor is subservient to them but is in some new way the creation of the people who make up its cells. We don't know what all of this means, but it appears to be a turn away from the destruction of the earth and the emergence of at least the possibility of the salvation and redemption of human kind.
At the end of the book there is an Afterward in which Brin explains his ideas about the current direction of ecology, his exaggerations of both the negative aspects of it and of the wild but not inconceivable physics that he brought to bear on it in the story.
This is said to be Brin's magnum opus. It was certainly a long book that I read on my phone over a couple of months of listening while exercising and washing dishes.
It is very much an educational book. A professor of physics himself, also seemingly quite knowledgeable about biology and other subjects, as most professional scientists are, he teaches us about what's happening to the earth and where we are heading. I think he hopes to influence people to understand that we really are on the cusp of a disaster. He says that he exaggerates it for dramatic purposes, and I suppose he does. But if the disaster doesn't happen in 2030 or 2040, I think that it will certainly happen in 2100 or 2200 if we take no steps to fix things. A professor and a fiction writer can only educate so many people and teach them so much, but he educated me and I greatly appreciate his effort.
Considered purely as a work of fiction, leaving aside its didactic character, this is still at least a decent work. Some of the scenes, like the boy's encounter and fight with the baboons, were inspired. It's got more characters and a more complex, abstruse, and incredible plot than it might have had but, when an author says something interesting and important, I cut him a lot of slack on other elements of his writing.
I liked the book.
| Author | Remarque, Erich Maria |
|---|---|
| Original Language | German |
| Translators | Stern, James |
| Publication | New York: Random House, 2014 |
| Copyright Date | 1952 |
| Number of Pages | 432 |
| Extras | Biographical information about the author |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | World War II; Holocaust |
| When Read | March 2016 |
Prisoner number 509, "skeleton 509" as he and others see him, is in the "small camp" in the Mellern concentration camp in the spring of 1945. The small camp is where the most fragile of the prisoners are sent, men who are so thin, so weak, so sick, that no one bothers sending them to work. They're just expected to die.
509, Lebenthal, Berger, Goldstein, Ahasver, and others have become friends and help keep each other alive as best they can. They do it by sharing whatever they have, by dealing fairly but firmly with the "Musselmen", the others there who are desperate but are almost certain to die, and as liberation appears to come closer, by working together to resist with others such as Werner and Lewinsky in the labor section of the camp and the very few decent men among the Germans.
One day a flight of bombers attacks the nearby town, destroying the train station and damaging many buildings. It is the first sign for these men that the Germans really are losing the war. They develop a new will to live.
On the other side we are introduced to the camp Commandant, Colonel Neubauer, fat, corrupt, he is already a wealthy man from having stolen the properties of Jews before the war and now he continues profiteering, owning several buildings and businesses in the town. His second in command, Captain Weber, is not corrupt, but he is a killer who believes in Nazism and the master race. SS Squad Leader Breuer on the other hand is just a sadist, a man who lives to kill other men by slow torture, the slower the better. And then there are the kapos, ward seniors, prisoner police, and so on who work for the Nazis and get all the food they need. Handke is one of those who, when he gets drunk, beats up prisoners, sometimes stomping them to death.
For the most part, resistance is futile. The prisoners recognize that even if ten of the skeletons from the small camp were to attack Handke at once, he would easily kill them all. The best they can do is to try to hide and hide each other, trade for tiny bits of food, abase themselves in front of their tormentors, and keep as low a profile as possible. Later however, the opportunities improve. Men are sent into the town to cleanup after the bombing radis and one finds a revolver that he sneaks back into the camp. During a subsequent raid, Handke is shot to death and the SS assumes he was a victim of the bombing. While the SS are in their bunkers, hiding from the bombs, a bomb falls on the armory and a few more pistols are stolen and hidden.
At the end, most of the SS run away. Neubauer's wife and daughter abandon the town. Political prisoners are rounded up and executed with some of them successfully hiding. Breuer enjoys torturing the last of his personal prisoners to death. Neubauer goes back to his home in town where he plans to surrender as an officer and gentleman to an American officer and gentleman if he is accosted. He practices giving a military salute instead of the automatic Heil Hitler salute that he has used these past 12 years. Weber rounds up a few diehard SS men and walks through the camp with gasoline cans and submachine guns, killing everyone they can until 509, on his last legs, carefully aims the revolver at Weber's back and shoots him. The two fall near each other and 509's final act of will is to stay alive longer than Weber and watch him die, then expiring himself.
The Americans come. They arrest Neubauer and all of the SS men they find, putting them to work carrying sick and dead men and cleaning up the camp. They provide food, medical care, and SS barrack beds and showers for the inmates - many of whom die anyway. Some people leave the camp. The young prisoners, Joseph Bucher and Ruth, walk out arm in arm. She was captured as a 17 year old girl and forced into prostitution for the soldiers, then discarded when she turned ugly, now with skin and bones and gray hair, looking like a haggard old lady. But they are together and are free.
This was a very powerful, very moving book by one of the great writers of the twentieth century. I read All Quiet On the Western Front as a teenager and read his excellent Flotsam just two years ago and may read more before I'm done.
I wrote about this in my diary entry for 20160306. I said there that, if I hadn't known better, I would have thought that Remarque had been a concentration camp prisoner himself. In fact, he escaped Germany when Hitler came to power and spent the war years in the United States. But he was a target. His sister was executed by the Nazis on trumped up charges in 1943, possibly solely as a way of punishing him, in the inhuman way that the Nazis had of doing things like that.
There is no doubt in my mind that he thought very deeply about the plight of the prisoners. I think he must have interviewed some and read accounts by survivors. His depiction of conditions in the camps and his presentation of the thoughts of the prisoners, the kapos, the SS, the Jew hiding in town, the young woman Ruth, are all remarkable. His communist is a bit extreme, but maybe not mistakenly so.
There are some books that I enjoy reading. There are some that I don't enjoy but find admirable. And there are some books that I don't enjoy but find not only admirable, but compelling. This was a book like that. As with all books about Nazis (including All the Light We Cannot See, finished just before this one) I am on edge during the whole reading, wanting one more day, one more week, one more month, one more year to go by so that the Nazis can be defeated and the people freed.
| Author | Seymour, Gerald |
|---|---|
| Publication | Dreamscape, 2014 |
| Copyright Date | 2010 |
| Number of Pages | 464 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| When Read | March 2016 |
In 1991, just outside a small village near Vukovar in Croatia, the village school teacher and three young men wait on the Cornfield Road for an arms dealer to arrive. He took all of the village's money and is to deliver some "Malyutka" wire guided anti-tank missiles, that the villagers believe can enable them to save the town and their lives from the encroaching Serbian forces besieging the village and Vukovar. The man and the missiles never arrive. The teacher, convinced that the arms dealer was honest, keeps everyone out too long. The Serbians close in and kill the four men, cutting off their genitals and shoving them in their mouths - the teacher still alive when they did it.
Nineteen years later an American pathologist working for the U.N. digs up the bodies and finds a scrap of paper with the name of the arms dealer, Harvey Gillot. The people of the village have suffered terribly. There were murders, tortures, rapes, and destruction. They work themselves up into a fury of revenge and determine that they will hire a killer to kill Harvey Gillot. They borrow money against their pensions and send it to a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy who calls on the Cairns family in London, whose boy Robbie, a cold blooded psychopath, is a contract killer for hire.
The story follows a number of characters, Harvey Gillot, Robbie Cairns and his grandfather who fronts for him, Megs Behan an anti-arms dealing activist, Detective Sergeant Mark Roscoe and Penny Laing (pronounced "Lane" by everyone) who work for a police agency that learned of the contract on Gillot's life and offer him protection that he rejects, and Benjy Cumberland Arbuthnot, a 70 year old former agent of the Secret Intelligence Service who was in fact the man who ordered Gillot not to deliver the arms and who is still the only man that Gillot trusts.
Gillot is having a tough time in his life. He has a country house in an isolated spot that's hard to get to. His wife is sleeping with their gardner. His daughter isn't close to him. His closest friend is his dog. Warned by the police and offered protection in a safe house, Gillot, pissed off at the world, refuses their help. Cairns shows up to shoot him and positions himself on the path of Gillot's usual dog walk, but happens to step into a wasps' nest and misses. Now Cairns is in trouble and must make good his contract or die trying.
The story alternates among the characters. Gillot, on Arbuthnot's advice, resolves to go to Croatia and somehow confront his past. Laing goes ahead of him to investigate and gives away the fact that he is coming. Roscoe follows to try to save him. Meg Behans follows him to shame him but winds up sympathizing with him. Cairns makes another failed attempt, foiled by a bullet proof vest that Gillot was wearing.
Finally, Gillot arrives at the village. He walks down the Cornfield Road. The villagers spit at him and harass him. Robbie is waiting for him at the end of the road. Roscoe leaps at Robbie but is pistol whipped into the ground. Robbie fires his first shot and downs Gillot. Then Arbuthnot shoots Robbie in the head just as he is about to pull the trigger on the coup de grace. There is some confusion. The reader is given to believe that Gillot was killed, but he pulls through and lives happily ever after with his wife who has come to see the error of her ways. Arbuthnot returns to his retirement in England and tells the story to his wife.
The story sounds a little silly. Why won't Gillot accept police protection and move to a safe house? Why does Robbie, the cold blooded killer, screw up three times or, looked at from the other point of view, how does Harvey Gillot manage to pull through three times on dumb luck? How is it that Arbuthnot (one wants to say, "the redoubtable Arbuthnot") manage to pull off such an improbable rescue with no serious help or plan? Seymour's characters can be over the top and his plot twists not always convincing. We are never convinced that Gillot is doing the right thing going to Croatia. We never learn what he hopes to do there, and there is no clear reason why Arbuthnot told him to go or why he went. Presumably it's explained by Gillot's emotional refusal to make any more compromises with life, but it seems forced.
Nevertheless, this is Gerald Seymour. He writes with an understanding of killers and cops, idealists and materialists, Croatian villagers and London crime families. His writing is always interesting.
In a striking scene, Robbie Cairns is sitting in his car in the town near where Gillot lives when some juvenile delinquents spot him and decide to victimize him. One approaches the car and demands money. Robbie, astonished that anyone should do such a thing to him, smashes the kid with his car door and then gets out and pulverizes him. We actually find ourselves sympathizing with Robbie in spite of our hatred of the man. It's pure Gerald Seymour.
| Author | Megargee, Geoffrey P. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Rowman and Littlefield, 2007 |
| Copyright Date | 2006 |
| Number of Pages | xvi + 167 |
| Extras | Photos, maps, notes, bibliographic essay |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II; Holocaust |
| When Read | March 2016 |
Megargee is an "applied research scholar at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Museum". His book is about Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 and the "war of annihilation" that the Germans waged against Jews, communists, intellectuals, Red Army prisoners, and others under their control as a result of the invasion.
The author gives us a broad overview of the campaign. The Germans invade in the north aiming at first to take, then failing that, to encircle Leningrad. In the center their target is the Red Army, encircling whole armies and capturing them. The generals want to press on to Moscow and believe that its fall will effectively end the war. Hitler sees relatively little importance to Moscow. His aim is to destroy the Red Army and to conquer the bread basket of the Ukraine. He, perhaps with more understanding than the generals, regards Moscow as a far target that will take more men and supplies to take than are warranted.
Behind the lines the great slaughter begins. Some generals want to be merciful to the Russians, believing that the cooperation of the conquered people will be important to winning the war. But they are a small minority. Most accept and approve the orders flowing down from Berlin. Russian cooperation is to be obtained not by good treatment but by brutality and terror. The conquered people are to be terrorized into submission. Any act of resistance is to be countered with reprisals that are ten or a hundred times worse than the resistance. The conquered people are worth nothing. Their food is, first of all, for the benefit of the army and second of all for the benefit of the people of Germany, the superior people who own the resources of this land by right of conquest. If there is any left over, it may be used by the people who are directly working for the Germans. Others are just useless mouths, not worth feeding. Anyway, the Russian is used to brutality. It is the only thing he understands.
Four Einsatzgruppen are created whose main job it becomes, to hunt and kill Jews first of all, then communists and partisans. Jews are accused of supporting partisans. The Jew hunts, the massacres, the killing of little children, are typically reported as the administration of justice to partisans or their abettors and supporters.
The treatment of captured Red Army soldiers is almost as bad as the treatment of the Jews. Of course commissars, Jews, and intellectuals are culled out of the prisoners and shot immediately. The rest are simply left in the freezing weather, robbed of their warm clothing and given hardly anything to eat. At times they die at a rate of over 6,000 per day. Later there is a recognition that these men are needed as slaves, but it's too late for most of them. Those that are still alive are already too weak to work, and their jailers are already too consumed by blood lust to revive them.
The military situation is growing increasingly unfavorable for the Germans. The more territory they conquer, the harder it is for them to occupy it all and to concentrate their forces for battle. Where they succeed in concentrating, they always win. But they can't always succeed and the Russians, counter to all expectations, refuse to give up and collapse. Neither the Red Army nor the Soviet government collapses and, in fact, it grows much stronger than the Germans realize. With every blow the Germans deliver they expect that this will break the last strength of the Russians. But somehow it never is. Just when they think the last Russian divisions have been destroyed, they find there are whole new Russian armies that no one knew about before.
The Germans cannot support their armies. By November there are fewer planes, fewer tanks, fewer trucks, and fewer men than they had at the outset in June, and not just a small amount fewer. They cannot push enough trains down the long, long tracks from sources in Germany to the front. The lack of winter clothing is not just a failure to produce it, it is also a result of inability to get it to the front. When the Russian winter offensive occurs it finally starts to dawn on the German generals that this war is not only not won, but may be unwinnable. Megargee thinks that it was actually lost well before then.
This is a short book looking at its subject from a high perspective. There are no personal stories here of any kind, no ground level view of the war, the Holocaust, or the suffering. We learn nothing about the views of conquered people except that they developed increasing hatred of their conquerors. There is nothing at all from the Russian side. Most of the photos are of German generals and most of the quotations are from them also.
Still, within its limits, it's not a bad book and not without some new insights, at least for me. Like me, Megargee believes that the Germans lost the war before it began when Hitler declared it to be a war of annihilation, when he decreed that brutality and terror were to be the order of the day, when he unleashed his murderers on the civilian population.
That was not their only mistake. They drastically underestimated the latent strength of the Soviets. The men and the industrial capacity of the USSR were much greater than the Nazis imagined. Their will to fight and their growing hatred of the Germans was also underestimated, and the German belief that the Russians would collapse under pressure was 180 degrees opposite of the truth.
They also greatly underestimated the sheer size of the task they were undertaking. They were accustomed to quick campaigns, victory by blitzkrieg. That didn't happen in Russia and was very unlikely to happen. They never had sufficient forces to occupy the vast lands. They never had sufficient transport to carry supplies and were completely unprepared for the difficult dirt roads or the rain, the mud, the snow, and the killing freeze. They didn't anticipate the strength of the Russian resistance and its power to force them to defend themselves right where they were, in the open, in the ice and snow, and not just retire to winter quarters.
One final note I'll make is that, in Megargee's account, the declaration of war against the United States is made with no understanding whatever of the danger that the U.S. posed. The Germans saw no real way for the U.S. to get armies to Europe. They had no understanding of the industrial capacity of the U.S. Hitler and his generals were not stupid men, but they were certainly overconfident, overweening, ignorant of the world beyond their own milieu, and self-deceived.
| Author | Murgatroyd, Tim |
|---|---|
| Publication | Newcastle upon Tyne: Myrmidon |
| Copyright Date | 2010 |
| Number of Pages | 512 |
| Extras | Excerpts from another book |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | China |
| When Read | March 2016 |
In the twelfth century, Yun Cai is the Lord of the little Wei village in China, far from the capital. Soldiers appear who turn out to be a force from the rebel General An-Shu, led by Yun Cai's younger son, a boy banished from the house years before for his wayward ways. Now Yun Cai and Youngest Son take each other's measure, Yun Cai hoping to protect the village from the worst depredations of the soldiers, Youngest Son wanting to lord it over his father, but to be accepted and filial too. Then the back story of how Yun Cai came to be where he is is filled in, and a forward going story of the revolt of (the fictional) General An-Shu is developed.
Yun Cai was the son of a military hero given the Lordship of Wei village for his service to the emperor. The son is no military man, but rather a poet. At age 12, the father sends him to live with an uncle in the capital and attend school, hoping that the boy will learn enough to pass the examinations to become an official of the empire. And in fact Yun Cai succeeds in passing the first level of exams and is given a sinecure post as assistant librarian while spending his time writing poetry and pursuing the lovely "singing girl" Su Lin.
Life is easy, but hard too. The Honorable Auntie with whom Yun Cai lives in the capital doesn't like him and hates that he succeeds at school where her own son Cousin Zhi does poorly in spite of hard work. Zhi and Auntie throw stumbling blocks in front of Yun Cai and Auntie even discovers Yun Cai's interest in Su Lin and manages to have her sent away. When finally grown up Yun Cai discovers Su Lin again and runs afoul of Lord Xiao, who had decided to make Su Lin one of his concubines and is outraged by Yun Cai's interference. He bring false charges against the young man and forces him to go to the front in a battle against another rebel, then go to the front of the front, then go into a tunnel into the enemy fortress, accompanied by four assassins who are ostensibly his guards but actually his would be killers. With much help from his trusty and capable semi-barbarian servant Mi Feng, whom Yun Cai had rescued from death, Yun Cai survives all, returns to the capital, and is persecuted again, banished back to Wei village - where he assumes the Lordship upon his father's death, marries, has children, and lives a provincial life, far from Su Lin, his friend P'ei Ti, and his beloved poetry.
The final installment of the novel happens when Yun Cai is taken to the fortress controlled by General An Shu, where he manages to save his friend P'ei Ti from execution and avoid his own impending execution, escape back to Wei village, save his poetry from being burned up by rebel troops sent to recapture him, and resume his life in a further impoverished but still surviving village.
The characters and events in the novel are all fictitious but the author clearly aims to give us some feel for medieval China, a subject that he is very interested in though, as near as I can tell, has no professional connection to (he teaches English, not Chinese history or literature.)
This is Murgatroyd's first novel, followed by at least two more in a series. For a first effort, it seems nicely done to me. It's not great literature though it does have a lot of Chinese style poetry. The characters are not perfectly rounded. The plot often relies on improbable events. We are looking at entertaining reading here rather than edifying litchrachur. But I was, in fact, entertained.
I'll note here that I really don't know how many pages are in this novel. I read an epub version. The Amazon web pages for the book say 512 pages in the hardback, 320 pages in the paperback, and 512 pages of "print length" in the Kindle e-book version. One of the reviewers says it's over 600 pages.
The number of pages is becoming an unreliable method of recording the length of a book. The number of bytes is no better since it is heavily influenced by encoding, images, and compression. Such is modern literature.
| Author | Hemingway, Ernest |
|---|---|
| Publication | Penguin Books, 1972 |
| Copyright Date | 1928 |
| Number of Pages | 160 |
| Genres | Fiction; Short stories |
| When Read | March 2016 |
This is a collection of 14 short stories. I won't discuss all of them here, just the ones that made the strongest impressions on me.
"The Undefeated" is about an aging bullfighter named Manuel "Manolo" Garcia. No one wants to give him work. He is thought to be over the hill. He goes to a bullfight impresario and pushes and pleads, getting a one night stand in a minor bullfight with second rate picadors. He pushes and pleads also for a quality picador, then finds "Manosduro" Zurito, a great but older and retired "pic", pushing and pleading with him to come into the ring. In the fighting, Zurito does his job and Manolo does his, but not until he is pushed around by the bull and seriously injured. But Manolo learns nothing, admits nothing, and neither knows nor wants any other work than as a bullfighter. No one can say anything about it to him.
"Hills Like White Elephants" is a very short, odd story of a man and woman in a bar at a train station. They wait for a train, drink their cervezas, and talk about what they want and don't want but without managing to actually say anything. "Do you feel better?" he asked. "I feel fine," she said. "There's nothing wrong with me. I feel fine."
"The Killers" has a couple of hired killers come into a lunch-room to ambush Ole Andreson, but Ole never shows up. After pushing around George the counterman, the cook (called the "nigger"), and a couple of diners, the killers finally leave. Nick Adams, one of the diners, goes to Ole's rented room to tell him what happened, but Ole is passive in the face of his own upcoming murder. There's nothing to be done he says, no place to go, no use calling for any help. Nick goes back to the diner and tells what happened. He says he's going to get out of town. George says that's a good thing to do. Nick says he can't stand to think about what's going to happen. George says, "Well, you better not think about it."
"Fifty Grand" is about a prize fighter named Jack training for a fight. He's a bit over the hill and facing a young, tough, talented man named Walcott who will likely beat him. Jack has bet all his money on the other guy beating him. "How can I beat him?" Jack says. "It ain't crooked. How can I beat him? Why not make money on it?" ... "I'm through with it. I got to take a beating. Why shouldn't I make money on it?" In the fight, Walcott hits Jack below the belt. If Jack goes down he'll win on a technicality, so he has to stay up and fight to lose properly. Then Jack rallied and punched Walcott hard, below the belt, right where he had been hit. The opponent went down and won on the foul. It was all a setup to beat Jack out of his 50 grand and beat other guys who bet on Walcott too. But Jack was tough and smart. "You're some boy, Jack," John says. "No," Jack says. "It was nothing."
These are Hemingway's famous, spare stories, written with short sentences and curt dialogues, about men who deal with life in their own ways, following their own lights as they see fit, and with few words and no explanations offered. H does not tell us what his characters think. He gives us their speech just as it is, without comment or interpolation. There is description of scenes and of the appearance of people. He may tell us that someone looked at the floor, or that his skin was sunburned, or that he folded his hands on his lap, or that he smiled. But only rarely will we be told that he spoke angrily or that he was upset, or that he thought this or that.
I was taught in school that Hemingway introduced a new and distinctively American style of writing. Other writers emulated him. I think that may be so, but even today, his writing is distinctive. The emulation, such as it was, has not taken over American literature, or if it did, it did so only for a time, mostly while Hemingway was still alive.
I think Hemingway found his own way to greatness as a writer.
| Author | Stern, Jessica |
|---|---|
| Author | Berger, J.M. |
| Publication | Blackstone Audio, 2015 |
| Number of Pages | 416 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Current events |
| Keywords | Terrorism |
| When Read | March 2016 |
The authors trace the history of ISIS from its roots in Al Qaeda in Iraq to its then current form as the Islamic State. Much of their research was done by reviewing ISIS Internet propaganda and ISIS public statements. I don't recall any interviews by the authors with ISIS members or leaders though there was information quoted from interviews by others.
One of the salient characteristics of ISIS propaganda was its extreme violence. They produced videos of violence - fighting, but also beheadings and punishment of infidels and opponents. Their techniques for producing this propaganda improved over time as they recruited professional or semi-professional video producers to create the videos. This extreme violence was the most successful part of all the ISIS propaganda. It brought in men who didn't necessarily know much or anything about religion, but were angry and wanted to fight and kill. In addition to these violence prone men, ISIS also explicitly requested people with particular skills from medicine, to oil well maintenance, to motor vehicle maintenance, etc. to help run their operations.
The single most important Internet platform for ISIS was Twitter. Twitter was the most tolerant of the social networks, considering censorship to be wrong and harmful to the community. They allowed blatantly violent postings and allowed various ISIS representatives to accumulate hundreds or even thousands of followers of their Twitter feeds. However ISIS went beyond the pale of civilized behavior and even Twitter acted against them when they began to post names, addresses, and photos of people who should be killed. They began taking down these postings and canceling accounts, which caused ISIS to go to war against Twitter. Soon ISIS was posting names, photos and addresses of Twitter executives and calling for their assassinations. Even the tolerant Twitter execs turned against that. In the digital war that followed, ISIS programmers created "bots" (programs masquerading as human Twitter users) to diffuse Twitter feeds so that, instead of a known terrorist disseminating "tweets" to thousands of followers, the human's tweets would be picked up by, say, 50 bots, each of which would "re-tweet" the messages to, say, 50 humans, causing 50 x 50 = 2,500 followers to receive the message. Where 2,500 followers would be spotted by filters put in place by Twitter, the apparently smaller traffic slipped under the radar.
Of course in a war between ISIS programmers and Twitter programmers, the Twitter programmers won and ISIS was gradually forced out of Twitter and had to turn to other Internet forums to get its propaganda out. Other forums were also often put under pressure by government agencies and by the common decency of the people who operate networks. So today, they are less effective on the Internet than they used to be, but they are still a significant presence.
This book did not answer all of my questions about ISIS. I'm not sure anyone working in the West has all of the answers. However it was a useful book with some history, some information about the nature of the organization and people, and a lot of information about ISIS propaganda.
There was a review of this book on Amazon (that I can't find any more) with many comments posted about it. Some were from an idiot who almost certainly did not read the book but concluded that it couldn't conceivably be truthful because it was written by Jews. Of course the guy didn't know whether or not they were Jews, but concluded that they had to be because their names sounded Jewish.
I had some interchanges with him in which I laid back and kept my cool, offering logical arguments against his statements. He said some crazy things like that, according to a great Islamic scholar, nobody could possibly understand Islam who as not himself a Muslim. This kind of statement is, of course, tailor made for rational comebacks, to which he must have produced some nasty retort since Amazon removed his postings and I never saw them.
The Internet exposes me to a lot of people that I never knew existed or, if I did, I would certainly never have encountered them.
Upon reading Jessica Stern's Denial: a Memoir of Terror, I learned that Stern was indeed the daughter of a Jewish father, though I know nothing about her step mother (her mother died when Stern was four years old), or whether she was raised in the Jewish religion. Her father was a Holocaust survivor.
| Author | Elizarov, Mikhail |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Russian |
| Translators | Bromfield, Andrew |
| Publication | London: Pushkin Press, 2015 |
| Copyright Date | 2007 |
| Number of Pages | 416 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Soviet Union |
| When Read | March 2016 |
The story begins with the writer Dimitry Alexandrovich Gromov (1910-81), who lived his life as a second rate Soviet writer whose main accomplishment was to produce politically correct novels extolling various occupations and situations in the USSR. After his death he is discovered by first one and then another reader who, when reading a complete Soviet edition, never a copy, reading it straight through with full attention, find a tremendous enhancement to their lives. Different Gromov books have different effects. There is a Book of Memory, a Book of Strength, a Book of Fury, a Book of Meaning, and so on, each conferring some powerful intellectual or psychological effect upon the reader, an effect that can last for hours, days or even weeks. Soon Gromov cults arise, fighting each other for control of the books.
Alexei Vyazintsev, at age 27, is living in his parents' home in the Ukraine. He wanted to be an actor, did poorly at it, then studied mechanical engineering, for which he had no interest, and theater production. Quarrelsome, self-centered, married and divorced, he's drifting along when news arrives that his uncle has died in Russia. He goes to the town where his uncle lived to wrap up the affairs and sell his uncle's apartment. A buyer arrives who is actually a secret emissary from one of the "libraries". He pretends to want to pay a big price for the apartment but actually only wants to get his hands on the Book of Memory sitting on the bookshelf. Alexei gives him the book and follows him outside only to see a big fight with knives and hammers, several people are killed and Alexei is spirited off by the winners to their hideout, where he learns that his uncle was the librarian of a reading room and he, Alexei, is the heir to this post.
From then on, most of the story is a collection of rather ridiculous large scale battles with readers from different groups fighting with "cold" weapons (knives, hammers, hoes, bats, bayonets, scythes, homemade armor, etc., but no firearms) over books. In the end, Alexei's little group is wiped out with Alexei himself the only survivor, taken prisoner by the victors to use for some not very comprehensible purpose and locked in a basement room where he has food and bedpans sent to him on a dumbwaiter and where he finishes writing this book.
In my Amazon review of this book I wrote that the writing was better than good but the plot was absurd, and while a good writer can sometimes make a good book with an absurd plot, I didn't think Elizarov had achieved that.
Was it an allegory criticizing Soviet socialist realism? Was it a satire on Soviet society? Was it a nostalgic look at the Soviet Union? Okay. I can accept those as worthwhile and potentially interesting themes. But I found the absurdities, the nasty characters and the obsessive, repetitive, and ridiculous cartoon violence to be mind numbing and depressing. I wrote for Amazon, "It isn't funny. It doesn't make a point. It emphasizes the absurdity of the plot more than the values of the novel."
Bearing in mind that the writing was sophisticated, I gave it three (out of five) stars.
| Author | Burke, James Lee |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1994 |
| Copyright Date | 1994 |
| Number of Pages | 352 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | March 2016 |
Dave discovers the wreck of a German submarine in the waters of the Mississippi delta and is soon beset by requests from a couple of different men, "Hippo" Bimstine, and Tommy "Bobalouba" Lonighan (aka Tommy Blue Eyes) who want him to lead them to the wreck, but without telling him why.
All the characters are present - Dave's wife Bootsie and adopted daughter Alafair, now twelve years old, Batiste the black man who works at Dave's boat and fishing shop, Dave's old partner Cletus "Clete" Purcell, and the Sheriff of New Iberia.
The principal bad guy is Will Buchalter, a large, powerful, sadistic, insane man who terrorizes Bootsie and then tortures Dave to get information about the submarine. It's not clear who he's working for, but it's looking like it's the Calucci brothers - gangsters in competition with Tommy who are alternately smashed by Dave or by Clete. He also has a sister posing as a nun who wants to be a friend to Bootsie but is actually guiding her towards alcoholism and getting info that Will will use to harm her and Dave. Finally, there are the New Orleans police: Nate Baxter, a crooked cop in the pay of the Caluccis, Sergeant Ben Motley, a black man and a decent cop, Lucinda Bergeron, a decent black woman cop, and her initially clueless but growing up fast teenage son Zoot.
With some help from Clete, Lucinda, Motley, and Zoot, Dave finally nails Buchalter on a salvage boat in the gulf. Buchalter gets the drop on them and looks like he will kill them all but Zoot shoots him dead with a spear gun.
The submarine turns out to be valuable because of a big, gold, object that would be worth a fortune. Tommy, now dying of prostate cancer, leaves it to Hippo. The two are reconciled and Hippo presumably gets the gold and gives it to one of the Jewish organizations he belongs to.
The plot is very complicated but, as always with Burke, written with a fine lyricism that is a pleasure to read.
Everyone acts in character. Clete runs wild, but with more purpose in what he does than anyone realizes. Clete saves Dave. Dave saves Clete. Dave keeps his thoughts to himself and takes no action when we readers think he should be doing more.
It disturbed me that Dave, as usual, took no serious steps to protect himself or Bootsie. He did not send her into hiding. He did not put an alarm system in his house even though it had been invaded three times by Buchalter. He did not carry his gun at all times. Why? I couldn't understand his passivity. He is rescued in one case by Clete and in two cases by Zoot - but never by his own foresight.
Still, these are special books and they're enhanced by Mark Hammer's wonderful Louisiana style narration.
| Author | Marquand, John P. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Open Road Media, 2015 |
| Copyright Date | 1935 |
| Number of Pages | 281 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| When Read | March 2016 |
This book was first published in 1935 as No Hero, republished in London 1940 as Mr. Moto Takes a Hand, and then again in the U.S. in 1963 as Your Turn Mr. Moto. Having read it, it seems to me that the original title was the most appropriate, however Marquand was treated as a business property by his publishers and by Hollywood and, I presume, that was fine with him.
American air pilot K.C. "Casey" Lee, a veteran of the World War and a pilot of renown, is in Japan for the purpose of flying a plane from Japan to California, via Hawaii, as a publicity project for an American company. But Casey acts disgracefully in public. He is a drunk. He receives a telegram from the company saying they have canceled the flight. Angry and drunk, he insults the company and the United States in front of all of the diners at a hotel restaurant. He pulls out his passport and tears it in half. The other Americans walk out on him but, later, a Japanese gentleman named Mr. Moto visits him and offers him a chance to fly a Japanese plane to America. All he wants in return is for Lee to go to Shanghai, meet with Americans there, and find out their plans for something. Casey Lee agrees. There is a beautiful Russian girl involved with Moto who helps to recruit Lee. Lee is falling in love with her. He agrees to Moto's request
Lee boards a passenger ship to Shanghai with a ticket, money, and a repaired passport supplied by Moto. He discovers Moto and the girl are also on the ship. Then one night, in his cabin, a man slips in and tells him that he will be given a note to be given to a certain American or a certain Chinese in Shanghai. Then he slips out again. The next day, the man is found dead in Lee's cabin. Moto directs a complete search of the cabin and of Lee to try to find the note that he knows would have been given to Lee, but he cannot find it and Lee doesn't know where it is.
They land in Shanghai. Moto attempts to have Lee murdered, believing that he must have memorized the note and destroyed it, but Lee, having given up his drunken ways, escapes in a fit of derring do. Then he borrows a plane from a friend, flies north into the Japanese occupied zone to find the paper. He struggles with the girl over it. It is a formula created by her scientist father for doubling the energy output from petroleum. Lee wants it for the Americans. The girl wants it for the emigre Russians. Moto arrives and wants it for the Japanese. The paper is burnt up. Moto, having neither need of Lee nor any animosity towards him, lets him go, and we are given to understand that Lee and the girl will go off and get married.
Marquand's initial popular success was as a writer of adventure stories, of which his six Moto novels and eight movies inspired by them were his big successes. However he also wrote serious, literary novels that received much recognition.
The story was well done in a very 1930s style. I could easily visualize black and white movie scenes with a slender gorgeous femme fatale, a polite but calculating Mr. Moto, and a gang of Japanese tough guys who gang up on the seemingly dissolute but actually tough and upstanding American pilot who fights them off and wins the day.
It appears that, even in 1935, the tensions between Japan and the United States were mounting. There is an interesting scene in which Moto explains the Japanese world view. They saw themselves, in Marquand's version, as minding their own business in Japan when two huge and powerful countries began expanding towards them - the USSR across the Asian landmass, and the United States encroaching over the Pacific Ocean.
It was light, easy reading, entertaining fare.
| Author | Tolstoy, Leo |
|---|---|
| Original Language | French |
| Translators | Smith, Huntington |
| Publication | London: Thomas Y. Crowell and Company, 1885 |
| Copyright Date | 1884 |
| Number of Pages | 178 |
| Extras | Translator's introduction, appendix on church doctrine, footnotes, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Religion |
| Keywords | Christianity |
| When Read | March 2016 |
Tolstoy argues for an interpretation of the teachings of Jesus that is at variance with that of the church and the state. For him, the most critical teaching is "resist not evil", "turn the other cheek", and "if a man takes your coat from you, offer him your cloak too."
He says, "What is life? and What is death? and let him try to give to life any other meaning than that revealed by Jesus and he will find that any attempt to find in life a meaning not based upon the renunciation of self, the service of humanity, of the son of man, is utterly futile. It cannot be doubted that the personal life is condemned to destruction, and that a life conformable to the will of God alone gives the possibility of salvation. It is not much in comparison with the sublime belief in the future life! It is not much, but it is sure."
He argues that the church has lost this message. The Church claims that this message is a wonderful ideal, but not practical in ordinary life. Because we are not ideal people, we cannot live without armies, police, courts, and jails - so says the church. But this, says Tolstoy, is wrong and contrary to the teaching. The church claims that the life we live on earth is just a tiny part of life. Our real life is in heaven after our deaths. If there is injustice on earth, that's bad, but not important because our real life begins after we die. Tolstoy rejects this also. Jesus, he says, didn't say anything about an afterlife and his prescriptions for how to live should be taken exactly as he said them. He meant what he said.
T offers quite a bit of textual analysis of the New Testament. He argues that much of the modern church's determination that Jesus was only showing us an ideal that he didn't intend to be practical is based on later interpolations into the Bible. He also argues that some of the translations of Greek and Hebrew are just wrong. For example, the word that we translate as "resurrection" actually means "awakening". It does not mean awakening from the dead unless it specifically says so, which it does in a few places but never in the words of Jesus himself.
T insists that his view of how we should live really is practical. If we all lived that way, evil would die out. Those men who were evil would find it impossible to sustain their evil views in a society of truly loving people and they would change.
Belief in God and in Jesus are taken for granted. There is no argument for the existence of God but, at the same time, there is no appeal to Providence. We are not enjoined to pray, to attend church, to perform any rites or rituals, or to expect anything from God. T scorns these things. "The basis of faith is the meaning that we derive from life, the meaning that determines whether we look upon life as important and good, or trivial and corrupt. Faith is the appreciation of good and evil."
T holds that this knowledge of good and evil is inside us if we would just listen to its call. "... it is easier to do as others do. But however modest may be your estimate of your powers of reason, you know that you have within you a judge that sometimes approves your acts and sometimes condemns them."
Tolstoy brings his formidable powers of expression and persuasion to this treatise, but I couldn't help thinking that the person he was trying to convince was himself. How can it be true that non-resistance to evil will banish evil from the world? How can it be true that evil men will lose their desire for evil if they are surrounded by good men? T argues that this will be the case but he offers no evidence whatsoever. It's hard to see anything other than wishful thinking behind his conclusions.
His reliance on the words of Jesus is also, to me at least, unconvincing. He has told us that our judge of right and wrong is within us. If so, then why is it so important to get the exact words of Jesus as they were written down in Greek and prove that Jesus never believed in resurrection or in an afterlife? If Jesus was a man like the rest of us, why is it so critical that he be 100% right? It is an odd appeal to an external authority when T has already told us that the authority is within us.
Ultimately, the book is probably more interesting as an autobiographical expression from a most interesting man, one of the greatest writers that humanity has ever produced, than it is as a philosophical guide for our beliefs and our behavior.
But, after all, this is Tolstoy. His passion, his articulation, his obsession to probe the human soul, is always something to behold.
| Author | Harris, Sam |
|---|---|
| Publication | Knopf, Borzoi Books |
| Copyright Date | 2006 |
| Number of Pages | 144 |
| Extras | notes, bibliography |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Religion |
| When Read | March 2016 |
Harris wrote this book as a rebuttal to the critics of his The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. I hadn't heard of that book and haven't read it (yet). I saw Letter and remembered it as a title that stirred people up and read it independently of the earlier title.
Harris, a one time student of philosophy and religion, gives us a powerful and biting attack on Christianity, or at least any version of Christianity that takes the literal Bible as a source of either truth or wisdom. He points out passage after passage after passage of Biblical quotes that contradict other passages or glorify obviously wrong and immoral thinking. He pulls no punches, even saying at one point, "Imagine the consequences if any significant component of the U.S. government actually believed that the world was about to end and that its ending would be glorious. The fact that nearly half of the American population apparently believes this, purely on the basis of religious dogma, should be considered a moral and intellectual emergency - seriously."
It is a brilliant book. It has been criticized for being too harsh, too confrontational, too unwilling to see the arguments for the other side. Personally, I think the criticism is accurate. Harris offers no concessions, for example, to people for whom religion is their only consolation for terrible lives, and no recognition to speak of of the many people (like Jimmy Carter for example) who have done their utmost to do great good in the world because of their faith.
But what that criticism really amounts to, I think, is that Letter is not the last word on the subject. Other books are needed to address the issue in a more comprehensive way. However, I wouldn't like to change Harris' text. His biting attacks on religion are clearly important and should stand with all the force that he gave them.
Another criticism leveled at Harris is that he is anti-Muslim. He denies that but does aver that, where Christianity has gotten past some of the problems of its birth in an ancient time, Islam has not. It's very hard for me to disagree with that. From a logical point of view I think it can be argued that Christianity, while overwhelming irrational, at least has some churches and denominations that have a more scientific view of life. Apparently this is not so for Islam.
It has been argued that, for the majority of Muslims, Islam is not what's written in the Koran, which they may never have read, or if they have read it, not understood. Islam is what they hear from the mullah on Fridays when they go to the mosque. If the mullah is a kind and decent man, as many are, he presents a kind and decent Islam to his congregation. I am prepared to believe that that is true, but it doesn't absolve Islam of its errors and immoral codes.
| Author | Pasolini, Pier Paulo |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Italian |
| Translators | Capouya, Emile |
| Publication | New York: Grove Press, 1968 |
| Copyright Date | 1955 |
| Number of Pages | 256 |
| Extras | Short introduction, about the author at end |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | April 2016 |
The novel opens in 1944. German soldiers are evacuating Rome and, shortly after, American troops move in. However neither the Germans nor the Americans play any role in the novel and are only mentioned in a few pages.
The central characters are boys growing up in the slums. They are petty criminals and Paolini is not shy about calling them that. They steal what they can. They'll grab the coins out of a blind beggar's cup, snatch a purse, pull up manhole covers at night or steal scrap metal to sell to a scrap metal dealer. Squirming under or over fences, "working" at night or in the day, stealing from friends, to the extent that they can be said to be friends, as well as from strangers, is their common lot in life. In this way they grow up to be teenagers and, finally, young men.
When they have money, which is not often, they spend it on food, movies, bus rides to various places, and whores - which appear to be their only sexual outlets or aspirations. When they have no money they go down to the river and swim, sometimes stealing each others clothes and money that are left on the bank. They mostly live with parents in tiny apartments, sometimes with six people from one family sleeping in a single bedroom and another similar family sleeping in the other bedroom of a tiny apartment. Drunken fathers and angry mothers abuse each other and their children and are abused in turn by them as the children get older.
None of the characters can be called a "hero" of the novel, but there are a few boys who appear over and over. Some are arrested, in one case for something the boy didn't do, and are sent to prison. It's a part of their lives. They may get honest jobs from time to time as unskilled laborers working long hours for poverty wages with no time to do anything but work and sleep, but they aren't disciplined for such a life and eventually abandon the jobs, whether or not they have anything to put in their place. Near starvation is an occasional experience and a constant threat.
Besides meeting their material needs and the limited and primitive enjoyments, they compete with each other for dominance among the other ragazzi. They lord it over the younger boys and are humiliated and exploited by older ones. It is a miserable life but it is the only one they know or perhaps can even imagine.
At the end of the story, Riccetto, the most frequently followed character in the novel, is present at the river when the oldest of three brothers attempts to swim to the other side of the river but is caught in the current and swept downstream. While the swimmer's two younger brothers cry and run along the bank, Riccetto runs ahead to intercept the swimmer at a bridge. But he sees that the swimmer is in serious trouble and that diving in to save him would be a risk. He might drown himself. Moving first to a point from which he is hidden, he puts his pants back on and slips away unobserved.
"Be better to beat it out of here," Riccetto said, almost weeping himself ... "I got to look out for Riccetto," he thought.
It is the end of the novel.
Originally published as Ragazzi di Vita.
Pasolini wrote five novels, three books of poetry, and two of criticism. Then he became a film maker. This novel is in the same genre as the starkly realistic Italian films of the period such as The Bicycle Thief and Open City. From the Wikipedia I learned that Pasolini was homosexual and suffered considerably from the homophobic mores that predominated at the time. Homosexuality appears quite frankly in the novel with a number of the ragazzi competing to prostitute themselves to gay men with money.
The book struck me as brutally honest and thoroughly objective. The point of view of the boys is portrayed with very little comment and neither false sympathy nor hypocritical condemnation. He portrays his people as they are, from their own point of view. He shows us a way of life that most readers would never perceive except from a distance, with little understanding and great distaste. The reader will still experience the distaste, but with more understanding.
As with so many important books, this is one that can be appreciated without being "enjoyed" in the common sense of that term.
I appreciated it very much.
| Author | Agawa, Hiroyuki, 1920- |
|---|---|
| Original Language | jp |
| Translators | Shimizu, Teruyo |
| Publication | North Clarendon, Vermont: Tuttle Publishing, 2006 |
| Copyright Date | 1956 |
| Number of Pages | 228 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | World War II; Aviation |
| When Read | April 2016 |
The story opens on December 12, 1943. Three friends from the University have been drafted into the Imperial Navy to be trained as carrier pilots for the war against the United States. Their training, not terribly efficient at the beginning, slows down over time as the availability of fuel decreases. It also becomes more dangerous as alcohol based fuels are adopted leading to trickier handling to prevent engine failures. Crashes on takeoff and landing are even more common than would otherwise be the case with raw recruits. Getting less and less flight time is also a threat to safety as the men's skills atrophy. All of this is recorded in the diary of one of the young men and in the letters that they write home and to their beloved professors at the university.
The young men are fed on a steady diet of abuse, pointless and sadistic physical brutality, false reports of great progress in the war, and demands that they be ready to die for their country, even to the point where they are ordered to choose death rather than life if they are in a situation where they have such a choice.
The physical abuse is astonishing to an American reader. More senior Navy men will use ridiculous excuses to justify punching their juniors in the face. In one case one of the sadists is tired of injuring his fists and orders the recruits to punch each other, beating slackers with a club until they become brutal themselves. The young men, as they advance, find excuses to then beat their own juniors as a way of venting the anger and frustration they feel in their lives.
The characters respond differently to this regime. One young man, the only one, rebels. He can do nothing to protest but he tells his comrades that this is stupid, pointless and evil. Japan has already lost the war, he insists, and further deaths can do nothing but kill their own men. The reported victories are obvious lies. The brutality to their own men and the insistence on death as a desirable outcome is counter-productive and can only help the enemy. He is not discovered by his superiors in time to punish him for this because he is killed in a training accident.
The "training" the men receive, such as it is, is re-oriented by the end of 1944 towards their becoming kamikaze pilots. One of the young men takes off on an actual mission and never returns. The last young man continues for month after month. By then, the airfields in Japan have been bombed. Most planes are out of action. Most of the remaining planes and pilots are held in reserve. He entertains faint hopes that he will survive the war. He dreams of a young woman he met near the airfield. He is visited by his father and once manages a trip back home on leave. But there is no respite. We learn that he was assigned to a mission in July, 1945. There is no description of the mission, no account of it. It is the inevitable end of the story.
I hadn't paid attention to the verso of the title page and read the novel imagining that it was written recently by a writer imagining what things must have been like during the war. In fact, however, the author would have been the same age as his characters and, like most Japanese young men of the period, was likely to have been caught up in the war. I know nothing else about him. He might possibly have been trained as a pilot himself, or had friends who were. Knowing now that he was himself of that period has changed my thinking about the novel. When reading it, I wondered how accurate it was, reserving judgment. Now, most of that reservation is removed. I am ready to credit the training, brutality, and absurd propaganda as literal truth.
Coincidentally, as I write this (on a tourist bus stopped by a traffic accident ahead of us on a highway in southern China), I have been reading Retribution by Max Hastings, which is about this exact period in the Pacific war. In the first quarter of the book, Hastings has not, yet at least, described the brutality of the Japanese military to its own in any depth but does confirm that it existed and was the rule, not the exception. Hastings confirms the propaganda absurdities giving essentially the same account of Japanese reports to the homeland about great victories off Formosa in which a dozen or so American carriers were sunk (in fact, none were sunk) that Agawa has in his novel. He also says that by early 1943 every American commander understood that the U.S. had already won the war and all that remained was figuring out how to finally convince the Japanese of this truth with the minimum number of American casualties. He also says that although some Japanese commanders fully understood this, most did not and thought that the losses so far only meant that Japan couldn't defeat the U.S., not that the U.S. was going to truly and irreversibly defeat Japan, to the extent of detaching all of Japan's overseas conquests and overthrowing the Japanese government. That was all still unthinkable.
From everything I have read, the terrible destruction wrought upon Japan may have been the best thing that could have happened to that extraordinarily wrong-headed society. However it was a great trauma for those who experienced it. I lay the responsibility for the deaths of a million Japanese, or however many there were, squarely on the heads of those militarists who brought it upon themeselves and their country.
Agawa has captured the effects of the war on his characters. It is an interesting and convincing account and one that the Japanese readers needed to read and still need to read. That is enough. We cannot demand more of him. But he has nothing in his book of the horrors that Japanese militarists inflicted on hundreds of millions of people throughout Asia, not to speak of the 103,000 American dead and many more wounded. Hastings argues the Japanese conquests of other peoples was every bit as racist, savage and inhumane as the Nazi conquests in Europe. Reading Agawa and seeing how twisted and psychopathic the treatment of their own men was, it's easy to believe that Hastings' account of Japan's behavior is accurate.
| Author | Waldman, Amy |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011 |
| Number of Pages | 352 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | April 2016 |
A year after the Al Qaida attack on Sept. 11, 2001, a commission has been setup to choose a memorial for the people killed at the site of the two World Trade towers. The commission has received thousands of proposals, all presented with no designers' names, so that they can make an objective decision based solely on the artistic and emotional quality of the submission, regardless of the fame or influence of the designer.
They make a decision, voting overwhelmingly for a peaceful garden that will be constructed on the site. But when they open the envelope to find the name of the architect they are confronted by a surprise. The designer's name is Mohammed Khan, obviously a Muslim name. They consider whether they should still go forward with the recommendation but they are too late. Someone has leaked the choice to an aggressive and unscrupulous tabloid reporter who turns it into a huge news story as a way to promote her career.
The novel portrays a growing furor from many points of view including Claire Burwell, whose wealthy husband was killed attempting to save others in the building collapse and is representing the families of the dead on the commission; Sean Gallagher, the brother of a dead man and financially unsuccessful son of a wealthy family; Alyssa Spier, the unscrupulous journalist; Paul Rubin, the governor's man on the committee; Asma Anwar, the illegal immigrant Bangladeshi wife of a Bangladeshi man working as a janitor and killed in the towers; Debbie Dawson, opportunist leader of a right wing movement to attack the submission; Mohammed Khan, the architect; and a number of lesser characters.
Burwell initially supports Kahn but she is beset from all sides. It looks first as if Khan will lose out. Then Asma Anwar makes an impassioned speech at a public meeting, causing her illegal status to be exposed and her to be expelled from the country (with a million dollar settlement for her husband's death), but she is murdered as she leaves her apartment. Sympathy for Khan swells. Then it ebbs again.
Burwell tries to argue Khan into making some concessions but Khan is proud and offended. He insists on his rights. Burwell then makes an opportunistic deal with the Muslim American Coordinating Council and they call on Kahn to withdraw his submission, which he ultimately does.
The story picks up with a kind of afterword 20 years later. Khan has had a successful and lucrative career as an architect, primarily working in the Muslim world. He's now living in the Middle East. The general opinion now seems to be that Khan was given a raw deal. Burwell's son and the son's girlfriend are making a film about the incident and come to interview him. They show him video of their interviews with other actors in the drama. Some are now dead. No one seems to be satisfied either with what happened or with their own roles, but life has moved on.
Waldman has done an extraordinary job of capturing the arguments that would be made on all sides of the issue - and the obvious opportunism, bigotry, and ignorance on one side, and the less obvious sophisticated opportunism by people in government, the press, and elsewhere who navigate the issue, careful to protect their own reputations and careers against blowback from either side. From that point of view, this is a really impressive, one should say "remarkable", book.
However it's also an unpleasant book. There are very few characters who act in simple, natural, sympathetic ways. With the possible exception of Asma, whose husband is dead and we get very little about their relationship, the people are all suspicious of each other. Claire Burwell talks about her love for her dead husband, but the relationship seems ambiguous. She engages in casual sex with a young jogger that she happened to meet, but forms no attachment to him. She meets her ex-boyfriend from before her husband with whom she is said to have had the best sex of her life, but is suspicious of him. "Mo" Khan is a handsome young man who forms relationships with several different women, but manages to drive each of them away. We don't know why any of these things happen but there is a vague feeling that this is the kind of life that Waldman envisions as real life. No doubt it is real life for some kinds of high energy, high achievement, people, though it seems rather off-putting to me.
Waldman has been a New York Times South Asia bureau chief. She's obviously a high energy, high achiever, very smart and very knowledgeable about the world. I admire her knowledge and ability but wonder how close I could ever be to a person like her - if she's like, say, Clair Burwell.
I read this for the NCI book group - the first book I've read for the group since retiring. We will meet next Tuesday. Perhaps I'll write more after that.
| Author | Hastings, Max |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008 |
| Number of Pages | 688 |
| Extras | Chronology of the Japanese War, acknowledgments, notes and sources, note about the author, also by Max Hastings |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | April 2016 |
Hastings' history covers the last year of the war against Japan. It is a very broad history, with chapters on each of the main combatants and many of the major campaigns. He has chapters on the British in Burma, the Australians, the American invasion of the Philippines, the Nationalist Chinese, the Communist Chinese, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, the strategic bombing campaign waged by Curtis LeMay, the Russian invasion of Manchuria beginning August 10, 1945, the efforts (mostly unsuccessful and brushed off by American commanders) of the British Royal Navy to join the war in the Pacific after VE day, the thinking of Japanese leaders prior to and after the catastrophic atom bombings and Russian assault, and the arguments for and against the atom bombings in the U.S. then and today.
I learned something from each of these sections. For example, although the Australians fought very bravely in the Mediterranean, they contributed hardly anything to the Pacific war after it became clear that the Allies were going to win. Strikes by dock workers and others in Australia harmed the war effort. Australian soldiers in New Guinea and elsewhere were practically in a state of mutiny. They knew that the Japanese units they were ordered to attack posed no threat to the Allies, that defeating them would contribute nothing to winning the war, and that many of their own men would be killed for nothing. As Hastings said about Americans in Italy in 1944 (see Inferno), they saw no reason to die so that some commanders and politicians could say they were acting aggressively.
Perhaps even more than in Inferno, H is deeply critical of MacArthur as an army commander. He completely ignored the advice of his intelligence service and his technical experts who told him that the island of Leyte was unsuitable for constructing airfields due to soft, muddy terrain. He maintained his allegiance to sycophantic but incompetent commanders who reported to him. His assault on Luzon probably resulted in more physical destruction, and in more American army and navy and Filipino civilian deaths, than if he had just bypassed the islands. Capturing them was of only marginal value towards winning the war. MacA is portrayed as self-willed, remarkably egocentric, dismissive of others, oblivious to contrary facts, and self-deluding - characteristics that are also highlighted in Halberstam's The Coldest Winter. However H is not 100% critical. He thinks that MacArthur was the right man to receive the surrender of the Japanese and to command the occupation forces. He was respectful of the Japanese people and did much to lead them towards a democratic future.
The treatment of Chinese nationalists is along the lines I had expected. H says that only the two divisions trained and commanded by Joe Stillwell were able to fight against the Japanese. The rest were 100% useless. Pouring arms and other resources into their ranks was just throwing good money after bad because the cowardice and corruption of the commanders guaranteed failure. For different reasons, H is not much more complementary to the Communists. They were much better motivated and disciplined but, H claims, Mao and the other leaders had no real interest in fighting Japan. Like the Nationalists, according to H, the Communists were far more interested in fighting their domestic enemies. They saw the Japanese as a dangerous distraction.
Russian behavior had, as in Europe, a very mixed effect. I knew from other books that, before August 10, the Russians had badly defeated the Japanese at Nomonhan and the air contingent that they sent to the Nationalists was, on the whole, effective against the Japanese Army air force. H describes good work that they did with Chinese communists who slipped across the border in Siberia or Mongolia and not only received food and shelter, but military training and equipment, going back to fight the Japanese or spy on them. However in August 1945, according to H, Russians not only drove out or captured the Japanese in Manchuria, they also raped the women, looted civilian property, and dismantled every bit of industrial property in Manchuria and shipped it back to the USSR (where I presume it rusted into oblivion, as did the industrial loot from Germany), all as they had done in Europe. One Russian claimed that it was Rokossovsky's troops from the European theater who did all of the looting and raping - following the practice they learned in Eastern Europe and Germany. H seems to take no position on that claim. The Russians lost 12,031 dead and 24,425 sick and wounded in the Manchuria and Kurile Island campaigns. One suspects that casualties might have been lower but for Stalin's determination to win all the territory available in the tiny amount of time open to him before the official end of the war.
Hastings believed that Japan was on its last legs, damaged first of all by the American naval blockade enforced mostly by submarines and mines, and secondly by LeMay's bombing offensive. Both of these were in play after the capture of the Marianas Islands (Saipan, Guam, Tinian) in 1944. It is not clear that any other battles or even the atom bombs were necessary to win the war. But, while H believed that to be true, it could have taken much longer to win the war if the other battles had not been waged and if the atom bombs had not been dropped. He argues that, if American ground attacks ceased the Japanese would certainly have concluded that their strategy of making the war too costly for the U.S. was successful and they would have been encouraged to hold out. Even the invasion of the Philippines might have played a significant role in this regard, and the atom bombs certainly did. I have read elsewhere that 100,000 Chinese were dying every month that the war continued and H seems to argue for similar numbers, and that doesn't include people killed in Korea, Southeast Asia, or Japan itself. H is certain, and makes a strong case, that fewer people died as a result of the atom bombs than would have died if the bombs had not been dropped - even if the U.S. never launched a ground invasion of Japan
Finally, I'll note here that Hastings directly addresses the moral questions raised by the war, including Japanese atrocities and American bombing of Japanese cities. He considers the Japanese to be just as bad as the Germans. Physically brave, the Japanese officers were moral cowards, never standing up, either for right against wrong, or even for the welfare of their own troops. He argues that, even by the time of writing of his book, Japan had not made anything like the reparations, apologies, acknowledgments, or education of the Japanese people that modern Germany has made. He considers that American bombing was severe and had questionable justification, but he doesn't blame the U.S. for it - he blames the Japanese warmongers, who brought it upon themselves.
As in Inferno, Hastings quotes from many, many sources, including ordinary soldiers, sailors, and civilians from all sides: Chinese, Russian, Filipino, and Japanese as well as British, Australian and American. There is a lot of human interest as well as larger history in this book.
I liked this book and learned a lot from it. H is a good writer as well as a good historian.
I think the great majority of books I've read about the war against Japan were either personal accounts or military or naval histories of a more conventional sort - detailed discussions of strategy and descriptions of battles and commanders. Those books are very interesting, but Retribution complements them well with its very broad history covering so many aspects of the war, or at any rate the last year of the war, and its mix of large and small scale studies.
I'll mention one personal story here that struck me as I read it and that I think is worth recording. At the end of the war, Japanese prisoners were rounded up by the Russians in Manchuria. A Chinese guerrilla met and talked to them. A Japanese officer sneered at him and said that, in ten years, they, the Japanese, would be back. The Chinese drew his pistol and shot the Japanese officer dead.
| Author | O'Brian, Patrick |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books |
| Copyright Date | 1973 |
| Number of Pages | 379 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Naval; Napoleonic Wars |
| When Read | April 2016 |
Jack Aubrey had captured a rich prize and the prize money should have been enough to pay off all his debts and marry his sweetheart, but the Admiralty has taken all of the money and left him still in debt, still unable to set foot in England without some risk of arrest. At the same time, his good friend Stephen Maturin, navy doctor and British spy, is sent to Spain on a mission but the First Lord of the Admiralty has carelessly used Maturin's name and the doctor was identified and arrested by the French.
Aubrey is assigned to the captaincy of the frigate H.M.S. Surprise. His first task is a raid on a house in Spain where Maturin is being tortured. He saves him and they head out on a voyage in the Surprise to the Indian Ocean. Along the way Maturin recuperates and carries out many scientific naturalist explorations, looking for new species and never before reported animal behaviors.
Much of the story is given to Maturin's experiences in India. Diana Villiers is there, a mistress of the wealthy Jew, Richard Canning. Maturin hasn't given up hope of getting her to marry him, though he should have. When Canning slaps him, Maturin demands satisfaction. Canning attempts to kill Maturin and wounds him severely. Maturin's shot, not meant to kill, nevertheless does and Diana loses her protector and heads for England on another ship.
None of Maturin's plans work out. He killed Canning without meaning to. His hopes to win Diana fail, even after she has lost Canning. A poverty stricken little Indian girl that he has befriended and who is destined to become a prostitute is murdered because he gave her a gift of silver bracelets, the thing she wanted most in the world, and that were taken from her by her murderer. He is a strong and independent man, but one to whom much suffering is given.
Not counting the rescue in Spain, the sea action in the story occurs in several episodes. There is a storm at sea that causes considerable damage to the frigate. She limps into India for repairs. Then she intercepts the French squadron sent to take the East India Company China fleet. By great seamanship, strategy, and fighting, Aubrey commands the largest ships of the fleet to act as if they were warships and, with his own bold attack and stratagem, he outwits the French admiral in his 74 gun ship of the line and his two frigates, brig, and corvette. The fleet is saved and Aubrey is rewarded by Canning, though I'm not certain what the status of the reward will be after Canning's death.
Aubrey heads for home with the recuperating Maturin, meeting his sweetheart, Sophie Williams, along the way and heading back to England to get married.
My son-in-law Jim told me that this was a more sophisticated book than the first two in the series. I believe he is right. I found the others satisfactory but this one is more than satisfactory. There is a depth in the Maturin character that was present in the earlier books but has come out more strongly in this one.
O'Brian was a highly educated, probably self-educated, man. His writing is full of interesting and often esoteric observations and references that are scattered through the novel without ever being emphasized or explained. Perhaps a reader notices them, perhaps not. O'Brian considers it no business of his to make them obvious. The esoterica comes from Stephen Maturin. Most of it flies past Aubrey but Stephen doesn't bother to enlighten him or us. I caught some of that flying esoterica, but I have no way of knowing how much sailed right past me.
The seamanship is magnificent, the best I've read. It is a point of honor among writers of Napoleonic naval fiction to use authentic nautical vocabulary and realistic scenes of sailing, storms, and battles at sea. Forester and Parkinson were masters of the craft but O'Brian is almost in a class by himself.
In addition to recommending the books, Jim mentioned his fondness for the audiobook versions of them. He was right about that too. Patrick Tull has done an amazing job of narrating the story.
I looked up the book on Amazon in order to get the names of the characters to put in my abstract. I usually have to do that if I want them, and I do want them. There I read a very good review by R. Albin, who turns out to be Professor of Neurology Roger Albin, an expert and a researcher on Parkinson's and other brain diseases. He's also a top Amazon reviewer. He pointed out that O'Brian made a decision to have two main characters that gave him options and possibilities that wouldn't be there with only one. I think he's right.
| Author | Sheckley, Robert |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Open Road Media, 2014 |
| Copyright Date | 1968 |
| Number of Pages | 192 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | May 2016 |
"Carmody was a quiet man, of a predominantly melancholic humour, with a face that neatly matched the elegiac contours of his disposition. He was somewhat above the average in height and self-deprecation. His posture was bad, but his intentions were good. He had a talent for depression. He was cyclothymic – tall, beagle-eyed men of vaguely Irish antecedents usually are, especially after the age of thirty."
Tom Carmody, a citizen of New York, is approached by an alien and told that he has won a prize. He must accompany the alien to the galactic center in order to claim it.
"The stranger said, still smiling: ‘It is for you, Car-Mo-Dee! Out of the effluvium of what-is you have won a small but significant portion of what-might-be. Rejoicings, not? Specifically: your name has led the rest; the fortuitous is again vindicated, and rosy-limbed Indeterminacy rejoices with drug-stained mouth as ancient Constancy is barred again within his Cave of Inevitability. Is this not a cause for? Then why do you not?’"
Carmody agrees, travels in an instant to the Galactic Centre and, after some arguments and distractions, claims his prize. The prize turns out to be some sort of an alien being who changes shape at every stage of their subsequent journey back to earth. But getting back to earth is far from easy. There are three parameters to be adjusted, Where on earth, When on earth, and Which alternate history on earth, matches the place that Carmody had occupied in his life on the planet.
He is pursed at each stage by a predator who deeply desires to eat Carmody and can take many different shapes, even including a New York subway station into which Carmody walks, unaware that it is the predator's mouth. He gets closer and closer to his destination but, in the end, rejects the world that he knows to be the where, when and which of his past, but that no longer interests him. The prize tells him that he will not be able to return to it and is destined to be eaten by his predator, but Carmody is unfazed. He's had enough. He will live in the moment and be content.
This novel exhibits Sheckley's incredible imagination and wit. Full of humor and social satire, it moves at a fast pace, skipping from world to implausible world, each of which is a kind of commentary on some aspect of our society. Carmody is, in some respects, a ridiculous character. But he is in many ways the equal of all of the super-characters he meets around the galaxy, begging pardon of those who could easily kill him, but never quite losing his independence of mind or his ability to coolly evaluate a situation.
I don't think this was one of his best books, but it does nicely exemplify his talent.
| Author | Agnon, Shmuel Yosef |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Hebrew |
| Translators | Halkin, Hillel |
| Publication | New Milford, CT: Toby Press S.Y. Agnon Library, 2014 |
| Copyright Date | 1935 |
| Number of Pages | 260 |
| Extras | Afterword by Hillel Halkin |
| Extras | New preface and an annotated bibliography by Jeffrey Saks |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | May 2016 |
Blume Nacht, the daughter of two poor Jews in Galicia, is orphaned at around age seventeen. On the advice of her late mother and her neighbors in the town, she goes to the town of Szybusz to find her relatives, Boruch Meir and Tsirl Hurvitz. They are well to do owners of a store. They take Blume in, giving her a room. She is treated well but she earns her living, and undoubtedly more besides, by replacing the maid who recently left. Blume is a fine cook and general home maker who takes care of the family better than any maid had done, and does so for no wages.
Over time, Hershl Hurvitz, the son of Boruch and Tsirl, becomes attracted to this pretty and modest girl who lives in his house. Tsirl, no fool about such things, decides that somethng must be done about that. With the help of matchmaker Yona Toyber, she helps arrange a marriage to Mina Ziemlich, the educated daughter of a well to do farmer who lives a couple of miles outside the town. Hirshl falls into this engagement without clearly understanding how it happened, but happen it did and he sees no way out. Blume also sees what is happening and, for reasons that are not fully explained in the text, decides that she must move out. Even though she is attracted to Hirshl, and maybe because of that, she leaves the household and takes the position of maid for a Jewish family that lives a couple of miles away in a Christian neighborhood of the town.
The marriage takes place. Hirshl continues his work in the store. Mina becomes pregnant. The two are generally cordial to each other but neither one is really in love. They are given an apartment of their own. The first baby is born. Life goes on. A second baby is on the way.
Then Hirshl slowly goes mad. He takes walks every night, secretly going to the house where Blume now lives and waiting out of sight, hoping for a sight of her. He can no longer sleep. He is distracted at work. He stops going to the Zionist club where, although not particularly a Zionist, he used to go to borrow books, read newspapers and play chess. He becomes angry at the shop assistant, Getzel whom he sees outside Blume's house, also looking for a sight of her.
Then Hirshl snaps. He leaves home but does not show up at the shop. He starts saying and doing crazy things. "I won't say a word," said Hirshl. "Not one. Do you know Blume Nacht? Of an evening in the marsh grass I'll sit like a froggy and go ga ga ga."
They take him to Dr. Langsam, an elderly neurologist in Lemberg. There, Dr. Langsam provides him with a comfortable and relaxing environment and, for an hour every day, talks to him, never asking a single question. He talks every day about the Jewish town that he grew up in and then left 40 years before. He talks about how he loved that little town and the people who lived there, more than any place where he has lived since.
Gradually, Hirshl gets better. The rumor in Szybusz is that Hershl was never really mad, he was feigning madness to avoid the draft. It is a rumor that suits Boruch Meir and Tsirl, who don't want it thought that their son is crazy. The rumor works because, when he gets back, he really is better. He moves back in with Mina. He takes an interest in his new baby. He resumes his work in the store and does good work. He begins inviting friends to his house again. He creates a better and more caring relationship with Mina. Maybe he continues to think about Blume, but he stops obsessing over her.
Life goes on.
Hillel Halkin, the translator of the story, wrote an afterword that is as fine an analysis of a book as any that I have ever read. He saw into the story much more deeply than I did. He begins by asking "How simple is A Simple Story?" and goes on from there to explain one complexity after another, how each scene and character can be interpreted in different ways - as realism and fairy tale, as romance and anti-romance. He explain Dr. Langsam's treatment as a brilliant and successful attempt to reconcile Hershl to his life in Szybusz by describing all of the virtues and pleasures of his own childhood environment, which is really quite similar to Hershl's. He writes about how Blume, who began the story, fades out of it, and how different the story would be if she did not. He explains the historical setting of the book. It takes place around 1905-6 (I too spotted the reference to the Russo-Japanese war), in a town at the eastern edge of the easternmost province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, at a time when Jews were treated well and fairly by the government and lived in good accommodation with their neighbors. It was a renaming of Agnon's own home town, Buczacz.
I liked the story. I like Halkin's analysis of it.
| Author | Ephron, Nora |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Vintage Books, 1996 |
| Copyright Date | 1983 |
| Number of Pages | 179 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | May 2016 |
Pregnant Rachel Samstat discovers that her husband Mark Feldman is having an affair with one Thelma Rice. The book is Rachel's first person story, one might say rant, about her life with and without Mark and her feelings about the marriage. Mark wants to keep his marriage and have his lover too. Sometimes he is open about it. Sometimes he is secretive. But it doesn't work for Rachel. After some tries, she's had enough.
Rachel is a food writer. Every few pages she gives us a recipe for some dish that was appropriate for her feelings at the time. Some of the dishes looked quite good but I'm no cook or foodie.
In addition to the main story there were some not highly related events. Rachel's father marries her worst enemy's older sister. He gets drunk and goes a little looney and is taken by her sister, "the good daughter", to a looney bin. Rachel goes to group therapy in New York. A man she saw and admired on the subway follows her, breaks in to the group session, and robs everyone. The man is caught and Rachel is now attracted to the detective who caught him.
This was a very hectic book. Rachel talks a mile a minute, comments on everyone, has good friends who become dire enemies, and I would say that she's very self-absorbed. She has a two year old child whom she hardly refers to at all, at one point she takes the child into the kitchen and "handed him over to Juanita". When she decides to leave Mark and go to New York she calls the hospital and asks if it's okay to take her new baby. Then "I called Nathaniel's baby nurse and told her we would be going to New York on the train the next day." I'm not sure whether this means that she was ordering the baby nurse to attend her with the baby, or whether she was only saying that the nurse didn't have to come in to work. My impression was the former. In any case, the brief passage is followed by her recipe for a vinaigrette, which gets a lot more space in the story than the baby does.
The scenes of the group therapy and the dinners with friends were amusing but also not amusing. Sitting in with neurotic people can be interesting, but when everyone in the story is neurotic it becomes overwhelming. I wanted to hear some serious talk about a serious situation. The talk was sort of serious. It was about a serious situation. It was about what Rachel should do in this situation. But I never felt that she managed to distance herself from her problem and think objectively about what should be done about it. It was all action and reaction.
It wasn't a badly written book. On the contrary. It was very well written, very articulate, very clever, even penetrating in its way. Some Amazon reviewers said it was their favorite book of all time and I can kind of see why. But it wasn't a book for me. I sometimes had something akin to the feeling I get in a noisy room where too many people are talking too loudly and bombarding me with talk. In this case only one person was talking, but it was tiring. It wore me out.
The story is based on Ephron's real life marriage to, and breakup with, Carl Bernstein, the Watergate reporter. It's clear to me that both of them were talented, intelligent, and sophisticated people, but I'm glad I didn't have a marriage like that or a life like that or an approach to life like that.
I read this for the NCI book group.
| Author | Didion, Joan |
|---|---|
| Publication | Audible.com |
| Copyright Date | 1968 |
| Number of Pages | 256 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Essays |
| When Read | May 2016 |
This is a collection of 20 essays, written for magazines, between 1961 and 1968, when Didion was in her late 20's and early 30's. They are mainly about the culture of the time, from New York to Los Angeles to Hawaii, from Hollywood to Haight Ashbury. The lead off essay is about a murder trial in California of a woman whose husband was killed in a car accident. She was convicted of his death though Didion herself takes no position on the woman's guilt. There is one essay about a communist "Comrade Laski, C.P.U.S.A. (M.L.)" but nothing about the war in Vietnam, the Johnson administration, or the politics or economics of the United States. There is an essay about Joan Baez, and one about weddings in Las Vegas. There is an essay about what she discovers in her own old notebooks, and about what it is like for her to go home, meaning to the home of her parents. It is all very much about what people thought and said to each other and how they lived. Quite a bit is about her own situation, or at any rate, about her mental states and fears.
"This book is called Slouching Towards Bethlehem because for several years now certain lines from the Yeats poem which appears two pages back have reverberated in my inner ear as if they were surgically implanted there."
I found this to be an interesting book, written from the perspective of a person quite unlike myself, but certainly highly intelligent and articulate. I wouldn't say that she was non-judgmental. She was alarmed, for example, by what was happening to young girls, children really, who went to Haight Ashbury and wound up raped, drug addicted, and pimped out by "boyfriends" who lived off them. Her description of Joan Baez was far less than complementary, but she was not unfair and she was open to listening to others, to hearing what they had to say, and to reporting it, at least to my ear, in an objective way.
These essays are longer than typical magazine articles. They are each substantial pieces of writing. She was not unwilling to reveal, or I should better say to hint at, her own personal problems.
The first essay in the collection, "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream" showed me that this would be an unusual book. Didion says of the San Bernardino Valley "This is the country in which a belief in the literal interpretation of Genesis has slipped imperceptibly into a belief in the literal interpretation of Double Indemnity, the country of the teased hair and the Capris and the girls for whom all life’s promise comes down to a waltz-length white wedding dress and the birth of a Kimberly or a Sherry or a Debbi and a Tijuana divorce and a return to hairdressers’ school." With this unusual and expressive style she goes on to tell the story of a woman accused of murder. It isn't clear from the description that the woman is guilty, though the police certainly have established circumstantial evidence of guilt. It is an odd ending in that the reader is waiting for the author to tell us the truth of the story. Was it an accident or was it murder? Didion won't speculate. She simply reports what was said at the trial. In this and in other essays, she seems to be a trustworthy reporter.
| Author | Malouf, David |
|---|---|
| Publication | |
| Copyright Date | 2009 |
| Number of Pages | 240 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Trojan war |
| When Read | May 2016 |
The Australian writer and poet, Malouf, expands on the story in Homer's The Iliad of Priam, the King of Troy, dressing as a poor man and going with a cart full of treasure to the Greek lines to try to purchase the body of his son Hector, whom Achilles has dragged around the city behind his chariot for many days after killing him, to express his anger that Hector killed Achilles' childhood friend Patroclus.
Terribly disturbed by the desecration of his son's body, and against the pleading of his other children and his advisors, Priam hires Somax, a cart driver from the city, and goes out at night, heading for the Greek encampment. Along the way the two are met by a young man who seems to know everything about them and Priam recognizes the young man as the God Hermes, who conducts them successfully to the Greek camp and even opens the gate for them, taking them through, perhaps magically, with no recognition by the guards.
Achilles is touched by the old man's love for his son and finds some release in treating Hector's father as if he were Achilles' own father. He sees that both are well treated, has the body washed and prepared by the women who do that work, and sends the body back with Priam.
There is some magical character in the story in the person of Hermes (if one can say "person" for a Greek God), and not all aspects of the story are realistic. Life in Troy seems much too normal for a city that has been under siege for ten years. However Malouf does a wonderful job of making his characters very human. The reader feels great sympathy for all of them - Achilles, Priam, Somax, Hecuba, and several other Greeks and Trojans. Unrealistic descriptions just don't matter. The book is not about history but about family and love and life. Malouf devotes plenty of time to Somax, a real character in his own right, and gives us a sympathetic portrait of this rough and humble man who is devoted to his last remaining family, a daughter-in-law and a granddaughter, and to his two mules, Shock, and the very attractive Beauty.
I liked the book and it's apparent from Amazon reviews that many other people did too.
| Author | Bates, H.E. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Penguin Classics |
| Copyright Date | 1944 |
| Number of Pages | 276 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | May 2016 |
Pilot John "Frankie" Franklin is flying his Wellington bomber back to England in 1942 after a night mission to Italy when a propeller breaks down and there is no longer any chance to make it back. He guides the plane down into what looks like a suitable field, but it is very muddy and the wheels sink in, severely injuring his arm in the crash landing. The other four crew members, all uninjured, bandage him as best they can, assist him to his feet, and the five men set off cross country, hoping to head for Spain and England.
They make it as far as a farmhouse, still in the German occupied zone. Frankie can go no further without medical attention. The farm folk, a grandmother, a father, a young girl, and a farm hand, hide and feed the men and take Frankie to a doctor. The treatment is not successful. Infection sets in. The doctor visits the house with his surgeon brother and they amputate the left arm above the elbow. Frankie must rest but the farmer arranges for the four sergeants to leave in two groups of two at different times, with false papers, in hopes of making it out of France.
Meanwhile, Frankie and the girl Francoise are falling in love. There is a commotion in the town and a German is shot, in reprisal, the Germans kill ten Frenchmen, including the doctor, and when the doctor's sister dies, a woman that the farmer always cared for, he commits suicide. Francoise decides to conduct Frankie out of the country and they agree to marry.
The journey is complicated and dangerous. They make it to Marseilles where they meet O'Connor, one of the sergeants, who was separated and, with no more resources and no ability to speak French, is at the end of his rope, hoping only to shoot down a French Vichy policeman when he goes. A pair of old English women living in Marseilles advise Frankie that the Allies have just landed in Algiers and they better get out immediately, that night, before repercussions occur. The three board a train for Spain. They get as far as the border. Frankie and O'Connor pass muster with the authorities but the police are holding Francoise on the train. O'Connor shoots one cop and leads the others away, leaving Francoise and Frankie to make it into Spain.
British novels written during the war seem to me to have a recognizable quality to them that I don't know how to describe. I'm thinking also of Assignment in Brittany by Helen MacInnes. They are more romantic and less raw than anything Hemingway or Mailer would have written. I would have to say that both of the Americans I named are better writers than Bates or MacInnes, with more realism in both character and story. But the Brits are still satisfying in their way.
I liked reading the book.
| Author | Dovlatov, Sergei |
|---|---|
| Editor | Dovlatov, Katherine |
| Original Language | Russian |
| Translators | Bouis, Antonina W. |
| Publication | Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2011 |
| Copyright Date | 1986 |
| Number of Pages | 145 |
| Extras | Notes |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Soviet Union |
| When Read | May 2016 |
Dovlatov published this fictionalized autobiography of the author's early adulthood in the USSR after living many years in the west. It is a collection of satirical stories about interacting with employers, the black market, women, drinking, the not so refined world of art and literature, time spent in the army as a concentration camp guard assaulted and seriously injured by another guard, and a two day career as an actor.
I read it as a novel, and the author calls it a novel, but some readers regard each of the episodes as essentially a free standing short story with Dovlatov as the main character.
D describes himself as half Jewish and writes about some Jews in his novel. He sees the situation of Jews as a bit precarious, but he made no distinction that I can see between Jews and non-Jews when it comes to being people. His story is about people in the USSR, a few of whom are Jewish and many are something else. It is not a story about Jews on the one hand and non-Jews on the other, or about Russians and non-Russians. It is a story about people.
The stories are funny. Soviet society is depicted very much as so many other dissident Soviet writers have depicted it. People drink much too much. There is a black market economy of thievery of state property and illegal imports. There is a lot of borrowing money that never gets paid back, and a lot of spending borrowed money on food and drink instead of the purpose for which it was borrowed. There is a lot of very insincere talk offered in a very sincere style. Managers in workplaces are pretty good at holding on to their jobs and for a writer working on magazine stories, the bosses are pretty certain to insist on pleasing the authorities.
I liked the writing, found the characterization of life in the USSR to be heavy handed but very acceptable in a comedy, and liked D's approach to the people in the story. D sees the human side of everyone in his past life and has no tendency to glorify himself at the expense of others. It is a shame that he only lived to age 49.
| Author | Delattre, Lucas |
|---|---|
| Publication | Tantor Audio |
| Copyright Date | 2007 |
| Number of Pages | 320 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History; Biography |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | May 2016 |
Drafted into the army as a student in 1918, Fritz Kolbe came out, studied accounting and got a job with the railroads. Bored by the work, he studied languages and managed to get a job with the Foreign Office of the Weimar Republic in 1925. He worked hard and did a good job, serving in Spain and South Africa. When the Nazis came to power he continued in his work but was deeply offended by Nazism, considering Hitler and his followers to be the promoters of bigotry and the destroyers of democracy. He would not submit to the pressure to join the NSDAP, but he remained conscientious and effective in his work and was protected by superiors who appreciated what he did for them. He also had the good fortune to work for superiors who, although they were party members, were not ideologues and had no problem with his non-participation in the party.
When the war started Kolbe was deeply disturbed by the actions of his country and became more and more radicalized to resist Nazism. He began by writing propaganda notes that were left in public places (like Otto Quangel in Every Man Dies Alone) but considered that he had to do more. He concluded that the only just outcome of the war would be for the Allies to win and overthrow the the Nazi regime. One of the main duties of his job was to receive, organize, and forward field reports arriving at the Foreign Office. He concluded that he must get the most important of these reports into the hands of the Allies.
In early 1943 he managed to get a trip to Switzerland. He approached the British in Berne, but they blew him off, considering him to be a Nazi provocateur. Then he went to the Americans and was taken to a man introduced as Douglas, who was Allen Dulles, the head of the OSS operations in Berne. Dulles was very impressed with the material that Kolbe brought and started up a long term relationship with him.
At great risk to himself, Kolbe brought mountains of documents to the Americans, including information about foreign policy, the collapse of Germany's alliances, the effects of Allied bombing, the locations of critical German weapons industries, the whereabouts of Hitler, the locations of German spies in the west, and even the disposition of Japanese forces in the Pacific as reported by German officials in Japan. The information was not nearly as well used as it could and should have been because intelligence agencies in the U.S. (though not Dulles) were more concerned about demonstrating their vigilance against false information from German agents than they were about using the information they received. But even so, the information was useful.
At the end of the war Americans to tried to help Kolbe. He came to New York to start a business but was unlucky and unhappy in the U.S. and went back to Germany. He attempted to rejoin the new Foreign Office but former Nazis still dominated the agency and black balled him as a traitor. He lived the rest of his life as a salesman for a German/Swiss anti-Nazi who had helped him before and during the war. He died of cancer in 1971.
Delattre wrote a very straightforward book, relying on the documentary sources and on interviews and being careful to differentiate known facts from speculations. There is good coverage of Kolbe's personality and personal life as well as his work for the Allies.
Kolbe was offered money by Dulles but refused it. He was motivated by a desire to do the right thing and felt that accepting any money would cheapen his effort. He was determined that no one would be able to say that he sold out his country. Delattre comments that some spy agencies (did he say that the British were in that group?) believed that only paid agents were reliable, volunteers were too likely to go their own way and do their own thing. But the Russians and the Americans both relied on volunteers, considering them to be more reliable than paid agents who would do anything, including lying to their paymasters.
Many Amazon reviewers stated that Kolbe was, in effect, betrayed by the Americans after the war, but I didn't read the story that way and I'm not convinced that Kolbe did. He asked to come to America after the war and was brought in. But he never intended that he should be supported by any except his own efforts. When his business in the U.S. failed - due to his partner absconding with the funds, Kolbe decided on his own that he didn't really like living in the U.S. and returned to Germany. That he was unable to resume a career in the German Foreign Office was not the fault of the Americans but of the old Nazis and Nazi sympathizers who dominated the office after the war. My own view is that Kolbe did not get the recognition and respect from his own countrymen that he deserved, but he has mine and he has it from many other readers of Delattre's book. That comes too late for him to know about it, but I'm hoping that, in the latter part of his life, his self-respect and self-appreciation were intact.
| Author | Zola, Emile |
|---|---|
| Original Language | French |
| Translators | Vizetelly, Ernest Alfred |
| Publication | Delphi Classics |
| Copyright Date | 1871 |
| Number of Pages | 288 |
| Extras | Preface |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | May 2016 |
This is the first novel in Zola's famous 20 novel Rougon Macquart series. We meet Adelaide Fouque the mother of Pierre Rougon and two illegitimate children Antoine and Ursule Macquart. At a young age, Pierre swindles his mother and two siblings out of their share of Adelaide's inheritance. Then he marries Felicite, the daughter of a slowly going broke oil dealer, whose business Pierre and Felicite take over. The two hope to join the successful bourgeois of Plassans, the fictional Provencal town where the story is set, but although they work hard for decades, they can't quite make it. The best they manage to do is to send all three of their sons to college. Eugene becomes a lawyer in Paris, looking for wealthy clients. Pascal becomes a doctor and scientist, treating poor people for little money and mainly interested in research. Aristide becomes a journalist, also in Plassans, writing for a Republican newspaper at the time of the Second Republic, just before the coup d'etat that brought Louis Napoleon to power.
The story opens with 17 year old Silvere, Ursule's son. He is living with his grandmother Adelaide after the deaths of both of his parents. He is attracted to 13 year old Miette living on the farm next door where she is an exploited farm hand. They are each the other's only friend. Ardent Republicans, Silvere and Miette join the insurrection that has been raised in Provence upon hearing of the coup.
Their elders are not so idealistic. Pierre and Felicite have tied their futures to the "Legitimists", those trying to bring back a Bourbon or Orleanist king (I'm not sure of the politics here - though everyone in France in those days would have known what Zola meant.) Pierre's half-brother Antoine Macquart was a Republican, not for any political reason so much as for hatred of the rich - when he is not rich. Pierre's younger son Aristide is another Republican, hoping perhaps for a position in the government and the older son Eugene aligning himself with what he perceives as the coming victory of Louis Napoleon. None of these people have any real scruples. All of them wind up as supporters of the victor - Bonaparte - in hopes of getting in on the spoils. Each of them succeeds in that ambition.
Of course the worthy people, the innocents, the idealists, the ones who genuinely hope to benefit everyone, are crushed. Miette wraps herself in a red robe and waves a red banner over the thin remaining line of Republican revolutionaries and is shot dead by the National Guard troops. Silvere is captured and taken away with other prisoners, but identified by another National Guardsman whose eye he put out in a struggle over the man's gun. The Guardsman takes him away and shoots him in the head, where he dies on the spot where he and Miette would walk and talk about the future. Old Adelaide, Silvere's grandmother, is a witness to the execution and goes into a seizure from which we expect she shall not recover.
Zola has been called a social realist and a naturalist. I think he is those things. He's also a man with an uncanny ability to paint detailed portraits of his subjects. We don't just see Pierre's or Felicite's failings, we see their emotions, their secret fears, their views of others, their elation and their guilt. Z resists the temptation to simplify these characters, to portray them as simple bastards. They aren't simple bastards, they're more complex bastards. They aren't drastically different from the people around them. It's a nasty world that Z portrays. There are probably readers who have sat down with the whole series of 20 novels and read them one after the other. That would be very hard for me to do.
The Vizetelly translation apparently dates from the 19th century and is disparaged by many of the Amazon reviewers who prefer a modern one by Brian Nelson. That often happens to me, especially with 19th century books because I get them from old, out of copyright sources. Have I missed something important? I don't know.
| Author | Dennett, Daniel |
|---|---|
| Publication | Penguin Books, 2007 |
| Copyright Date | 2006 |
| Number of Pages | 464 |
| Extras | Notes, appendices |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Religion; Philosophy |
| When Read | May 2016 |
Dennett, a professor of Philosophy at Tufts University, begins with the assumption that there is no God and, given that assumption, asks why it is that so many people believe in God and religion. He wants to consider that question in a scientific light. How did religion evolve? What were its cultural and psychological antecedents? Why has it taken such an extraordinary hold on human consciousness? In asking these questions, he makes frequent use of the question of "cui bono?", i.e., "who benefits?", as a principle that can help evaluate the answers.
D has some theories about the evolution of religion but does not hold dogmatically to any of them. He raises the theories, some his own and many from others, as possible hypotheses that must be confirmed by historical, psychological, and sociological research. He is interested in speculation, but refuses to mistake speculation for fact. He adduces evidence for his speculations but is clear about the reliability of that evidence and when it requires real confirmation before it can be accepted.
D suggests that the psychological background to religion has to do with parenthood and death. We grow up as children under the protection of our parents. We learn, or maybe are born with, a tendency to run to them for help when we are in trouble, in danger, or in need of love and reassurance. But our parents die before we do and we have a great, unfilled, need for them. We fill that need with a belief that, although they are dead, they are still somewhere, still watching over us in some way, still concerned for our futures.
It's a plausible theory and, if right, it can account for a background belief that D calls "primitive religion" that underlies the formation of what we know today as religion. He then goes on to argue that these feelings can be utilized by a class of people who ultimately evolve from wise men to shamans, to professional shamans, to priests. Who benefits from that? The priest class benefits first of all, but the people who accept the leadership of the priests derive apparent benefit in the form of consolation, resolution of difficulties, and hope for the future, including a future after death. Just as a placebo offered us by a shaman, reinforced by the rituals and hypnotic spells that the shaman uses, helps us to mobilize our inner resources and fight against our illness, so religion gives us the false but re-assuring and convincing beliefs, accompanied by powerful rituals and hypnotic spells, to console and strengthen us in our need. This hypnotic religious spell holds us tight, but we must fight against it and break the spell.
D also argues for the "meme" or "memetic" notion of the evolution of cultural characteristics in a way that is analogous to the evolution of genes in living organisms. Ideas can hop from person to person, contend with other ideas, and evolve, die or survive in a way that is like the survival of the fittest in biological evolution. Sometimes what survives in people is a virus or bacterium that harms or kills people, but survives and thrives anyway. So too, even if religion is not good for people, or no longer good for people, it can still parasitize people in the same way. Is it good for anyone? It's probably good for the priests. But even if it weren't it wouldn't necessarily disappear. Cultural manifestations can take on a life of their own, in some ways independent of humans.
One characteristic of religion, according to D, is that it has acquired protection mechanisms such as the importance of faith, the claim that God works in mysterious ways, the insistence on God's invisibility, the reliance on "witness" as something quite different from objective observation, and the inculcation of religion and even sectarianism in children. According to D, these mechanisms are common to all religions. They may be thought of as the protective memes that convergently evolve in different religions in something like the same way that no leaves and a hard waxy skin evolved in different desert plants in America and Africa that had no recent common ancestor, or the way C4 respiration evolved separately in plants with reduced access to carbon dioxide. [The examples are mine, not Dennett's, but I think he would agree with them.]
It's hard to argue with Dennett's work. He never makes unreasonable statements. He says things that may be wrong, but he also acknowledges that they may be wrong and calls for discussion and, where needed, empirical research, to investigate them. His approach, of treating religion as a natural phenomenon that can be investigated empirically, is an important one. It's not the only approach that can be taken to combat ignorance but it addresses a very important aspect of the problem and introduces a new methodology into the discussion.
It is a very academic book. I originally recommended it for our NCI book group, but after reading part way through it I realized that it is written for philosophers or sociologists, not for ordinary folk. So I changed my recommendation to a new novel by Orhan Pamuk.
I don't think the book can have a direct impact on the public but it has had an impact on me and on people like me and, through us, the ideas may reach more people.
| Author | Dick, Philip K. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Brilliance Audio, 2011 |
| Copyright Date | 1954 |
| Number of Pages | 89 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | May 2016 |
Originally published as The Adjustment Team, this long short story or novella was made into a movie where it acquired the title above.
An odd fellow introduced as a clerk visits a suburban house where he wakes up the dog sleeping in his doghouse and orders him to wake the man of the house, Ed Fletcher, exactly at 8:15 am to insure that he is ready for work early. Fletcher's workplace is going to be adjusted today and it is vital that he be at work when it occurs. The dog pledges that he will do his duty but, in fact, goes back to sleep.
Fletcher goes to work late and encounters mayhem. The building and all the people in it seem to have turned to ash. People in environment suits are doing things, see him, and chase him. He flees, calls his wife, tells her the whole story, and is in agony about what he saw and whether he is going crazy. He goes back to work to find everything back to normal, but not the same. His boss is the same boss but younger. Other people have also changed. Then he goes to a phone booth to call the police but the booth is rocketed up into the sky where he comes before a supervisor of the Adjustment Team who explains that an adjustment needed to be made for good reasons but, due to an error, Fletcher was not adjusted. It's looking like Fletcher will have to be adjusted or killed but he promises that he will say nothing about the adjustment to anyone, ever, including his wife. They let him go. He goes home. She demands to know what he did all afternoon. He hems and haws but she will not be put off. Then the doorbell rings and a pushy vacuum cleaner salesman pushes his way into the house and engages his wife. Fletcher sighs with relief. He will be able to keep his promise.
I picked up this recording thinking that it was a novel rather than a short story but, after listening to it, decided that it was worth writing up anyway - especially since I have no larger story collection within which to write it up.
It was a good story, written out of the inimitable Philip K. Dick imagination. Dick was a master of stories of the average Joe living in an average world where, suddenly, reality goes out of joint and a never suspected new reality is revealed. It is as if Dick were saying to us, You think you know what's going on around you, eh? What if you find out that you don't? What if you find out that reality isn't what you think it is? Then what will you do?
Dick's stories are wild but they never feel artificial. Maybe it's his sense of timing, catching the reader by surprise and not letting him step back and say, Whoa, this can't be happening. Maybe it's his comic sense, his deadpan presentation of the sleepy dog who mumbles promises in English and then promptly breaks his promise and goes back to sleep. Maybe it's the unexpected personality of the chief of the Adjustment Team (God?) who holds Fletcher's life in his hands and the errant clerk's too but gives each of them a break.
Dick was an influential writer. Maybe he wasn't the greatest SF writer of all time, as I have heard he thought of himself, but he was certainly one of the great ones.
| Author | Mortimer, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | Penguin Books, 2004 |
| Copyright Date | 2002 |
| Number of Pages | 224 |
| Genres | Fiction; Comedy |
| When Read | May 2016 |
Rumpole has been moved from a hospital to the Primrose Path rehabilitation home to recover from a heart attack. His office mates, encouraged by Luci Gribble, a new Director of Marketing for the Chambers, are preparing a Memorial Service to commemorate his life but he confounds all expectations by recovering, sneaking out of the home at night, and returning to his law practice and to She Who Must Be Obeyed.
There are six stories in this collection, occurring sequentially in time, all including the new character, Luci, plus the usual players - Soapy Sam Ballard, Claude Erskine-Brown, Phillida Erskine-Brown, Liz Probert, Henry the clerk, Solicitor Bonny Bernard, Judge "Raging Bull" Bullingham, Judge "Gravestone" Graves, and others.
"Rumpole and the Primrose Path" - Rumpole discovers that a death in the Primrose Path was actually the death of a different man, disguised to enable the swindler who owned the place to pretend he was dead.
"Rumpole and the New Year's Resolutions" - Hilda pushes R to be more of a gentleman and to take better care of his health. That doesn't work, but while defending an accused pickpocket, R exposes a woman who poses as a helper of juveniles in trouble but who actually runs a gang of little pickpockets.
"Rumpole and the Scales of Justice" - R is called upon to defend a police commander who slandered him on TV as a guy helping criminals by means of underhanded legal tricks. R proves that the commander didn't commit the crime he was accused of, but doesn't earn the cop's respect.
"Rumpole and the Right to Privacy" - R defends a newspaper man who is accused of publishing a photo of a wealthy man with a brassiere on his head, dancing with a topless woman at a party in the Caribbean. R discovers the presence of a government bureaucrat in the background of the photo who was supposed to be at arms length from the millionaire who was bribing him.
"Rumpole and the Vanishing Juror" - R is defending an ultra-religious creep who is accused of murdering a pole dancer whom he called a whore who should be killed. Only one juror seems to be receptive to his arguments, and then she disappears. It turns out that she is in cahoots with the real killer, the woman's ex-husband.
"Rumpole Redeemed" - "Chirpy" Molloy, a burglar known for breaking into houses of people on vacation and helping himself to their bathroom cosmetics as well as their valuables, is released from prison. Soon he is re-arrested when a burglary matching his method of operation occurs. R proves that it was really a supposedly reformed ex-convict who had become a ranking member of the Bunyan Society that attempted to reform ex-cons.
Anything I've written about Rumpole in the past still applies. This is a delightful book, full of wonderful characterizations, political satire, wit, charm, twisty plots, surprising revelations, and the endearing inner and outer life of Horace Rumpole.
There are still more Rumpole books that I haven't read. I have them now to entertain and delight me in my old age.
| Author | Qiu Xiaolong |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Soho Press |
| Copyright Date | 2000 |
| Number of Pages | 464 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| Keywords | China |
| When Read | June 2016 |
Chief Inspector Chen Cao, Communist Party member and recently appointed head of the special case squad, Homicide Division of the of the Shanghai Police Bureau, works with his assistant, Detective Yu Guangming, attempting to unravel the murder of 31 year old national model worker Guan Hongying. They eventually concentrate on Wu Xiaoming, an up and coming photographer and "HCC" - High Cadres' Child. Wu's father, now old and hospitalized, is a Communist Party big shot with a mansion and a late model Lexus. Wu is marked for advancement to become a provincial cultural director.
Chen and Yu gradually amass more and more evidence. Wu is a womanizer. Young women are attracted to him because of his glamorous job, his obvious wealth with the use of his father's mansion and car, his fancy foreign cameras, his parties, the glamour photos that he can produce of them, and the hope that he can help them get started in modeling or acting careers. He also takes photos of the women in sex acts, which Chen discovers that Wu keeps so that he can threaten any woman who threatens him.
Guan turns out to have been a decent woman who was serious about Wu, wanted him to divorce his wife and marry her, and who did not participate in the parties or make pornographic photos, at least not on purpose. We learn indirectly that when Wu finally became irritated by her seriousness and jealousies, he drugged her and made a bunch of pornographic photos to force her to back off. However she stole copies of them and was threatening him with them - which led him to kill her.
The police high officials begin to tamp down Chen's investigation. They don't like that he's going after the son of a high Party official. Chen and Yu are being leaned on. They begin to work more secretively. Threats are made and "evidence" presented to Chen that could be used to put him (Chen) in prison. Chen counters by writing to an old girlfriend who is the daughter of a Politburo member. They continue their secret investigations and, after much hard work, Chen and Yu find the proof that Wu killed Guan. They take it to their boss. By now an intra-Party struggle is in progress. Chen is under attack by the "old cadres" and is being used by reformists to attack those old cadres. Suddenly, while Chen's attention is diverted to another assignment, the Internal Security Department arrests Wu and another man. They are immediately brought to a secret trial, convicted without any right of appeal, and executed just hours later.
None of this is what Chen expected. The other man killed was guilty of helping Wu, but he had no knowledge of the murder and had been promised help by Chen in return for his testimony. In addition, two other people who had helped Chen and had no part whatsoever in the murder may be in trouble. Chen doesn't know. He returns to his job. He is in the clear. His future looks secure and will probably advance. But nothing is the same any more. His feelings are much more complex and conflicted than they were at the beginning of the story.
I thought the novel started slowly and clumsily, a lesser mystery writer handling the procedures without a good understanding of mystery novels. Chen or Yu would interview someone and ask only a few questions, failing to ask questions that seemed obvious to me. They interviewed Wu, the chief suspect, without a plan for what to ask, what to reveal and not reveal, and how to coordinate, for example with a good cop / bad cop routine.
Perhaps halfway through, it seemed to me that the story began to pick up. The introduction of politics, the Internal Security squad, the threats against Chen, all seemed to take the story to a new level, threatening Chen as much as Wu. From being a chase it turned into a battle. Whatever innocence existed in the story was turning into its opposite. China became a more complicated place. Even the police procedural element became more sophisticated as Chen figured out the motive of the crime and put pressure on Wu's friend (the one who was later executed with him) to come clean.
Throughout the story, Qiu quotes his own or what he presents (and I presume is) classical Chinese poetry. Some of the Amazon readers found that annoying and just skimmed over the poems. They thought that they had nothing to do with the story. But I think those readers were missing the point. The poems had a lot to do with the story as indications of what Chen was thinking and feeling at each stage. The right way to read the poems was to slow down, to read them carefully, to think about the images they presented. I think they were a significant enhancement.
I read this story not only as a mystery or a character study but also as a study of China. I was fascinated to see the living conditions. Chen's new apartment, assigned to him by his work unit, was a single room with a little hallway with a two burner oven range and a tiny bathroom just big enough for a toilet and a shower head. He didn't say whether the toilet was western or Asian style. Many others lived in one room apartments with no running water and no kitchen. They might have a family, maybe even a three generation family, in one room with a coal stove outside in the hallway and a common bathroom for all the residents. After Deng Xiaoping's reforms brought rapid industrialization and capitalism to China there was a massive influx of rural Chinese into the cities. That's the background for the extraordinary explosion of high rise apartment buildings that we see today - and that was one of the main efforts in the Party's and government's efforts to raise the standard of living of the people.
I've got a bunch of these Qiu Xiaolong novels and I may very well read more.
| Author | Allen, Roger MacBride |
|---|---|
| Publication | Ace |
| Copyright Date | 1994 |
| Number of Pages | 204 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| Keywords | Robots |
| When Read | June 2016 |
This is the second of Allen's robot novels inspired by Isaac Asimov's work. It is a continuation of the story in the first one. The "no law" robot, Caliban is present in this one as well as the "new law" robot Prospero, and the "three law" robot Donald 111. "No law" means that Caliban is not programmed at all with Asimov's famous three laws about what a robot can and can't do, and "new law" means that the robot still cannot harm a human being, and is expected to co-operate with humans but is not required to prevent harm from coming to humans and is allowed to pursue his own goals. However Caliban and Prospero are secondary characters in the book. The major characters are Alvar Kresh, the Sheriff of the city of Hades on the planet Inferno, and Donald, his robot assistant.
Governor Chanto Grieg is on the island of Purgatory where the Settlers (from space, as opposed to the Spacers, from Inferno) have some jurisdiction. He is negotiating with a Settler organization and a Spacer organization, each of which are proposing to sell equipment and materials to change the climate of the planet and save it from destruction. However Grieg is murdered and Alvar Kresh, ignoring his lack of jurisdiction, seals off the palace and goes to work on the investigation with Donald and Fredda Leving, the roboticist who created Caliban using the new gravitonic brain invented by Gubber Anshaw. The conspiracy appears to involve "rustbackers" who smuggle new law robots off Purgatory, where they fear they will all be killed by the Governor under pressure from the "Ironheads", humans who are demanding restoration of the three laws and who resent the conscription of their robots to work on the planetary problem.
The case is eventually solved. Kresh turns out to have been appointed by Grieg in his will to take his place as governor. Caliban and Prospero, suspected by Donald, who seems to despise the new law and no law robots, but not by any of the humans, turn out not to have been involved in the murder. Kresh calls for a new election in 100 days. The stage is set for volume 3.
As a mystery story this wasn't bad, but what absorbed me was Allen's take on the robots. It wasn't a deep view, but it was an interesting one and he explored the consequences of the various versions of the laws governing robot behavior. It's hard to say how plausible his view is. I can think of wildly varying behavior from fully autonomous robots. Allen's presentation sticks within the limits of Asimov's presentation - expanding on it in limited ways.
I enjoyed the book and will probably read the third volume at some point. In my current reading situation since retirement I'm plowing through lots of books and feel freer to read books for amusement - more like I did years ago when I didn't feel the weight of my age and limits on the number of books left to me.
| Author | Lewis, Michael |
|---|---|
| Publication | Simon and Schuster Audio |
| Copyright Date | 2014 |
| Number of Pages | 320 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Economics |
| When Read | June 2016 |
The "flash boys" are the people who create and operate the "high frequency trading" systems (HFT) that do computerized stock trading on Wall Street. Lewis attempts to explain what they do, and to follow the careers of a small group led by Brad Katsuyama, a former Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) employee, to remove some of the effects of high frequency trading from the market. The book concentrates on a small number of men including Katsuyama, Ronan Ryan, John Schwall, Rob Park, Zoran Perkov, and especially Sergey Aleynikov, a super computer programmer working for Goldman Sachs who was the only person arrested by the FBI at Goldman (or anywhere I think) after the crash of 2008-2009. His "crime" was taking a personal copy of the code he had worked on at Goldman, for which he was convicted and sentenced to eight years in prison without the possibility of parole.
Katsuyama, working at RBC, found that, all of a sudden, trading had changed. He saw stable bid and asked prices for a stock on his computer screen but, the instant he hit the Enter key to buy or sell, the price changed a bit, always against him. He launched a personal campaign to find out why. In the process he recruited many of the people named above, and others, and over a considerable period of time, they figured out what was going on.
What was going on was that stocks were being traded on (IIRC) 22 public and 45 private stock exchanges. When a buy or sell order is entered for a block of stock, that order gets divided up to find buyers or sellers on many different exchanges since no one of them may have all of the shares needed to satisfy the request. However the HFT systems pick off the first order and move faster than anyone else can, (we're talking microseconds here!) to jump in ahead of the order as it expands out through the network, buy up the shares for sale, at the lower advertised prices, and turn around and sell them microseconds later at a higher price to satisfy the complete order. This is called "front running." It works because the HFT people have installed computers and communications gear that is a fraction faster than anyone else's, and/or a fraction closer to the order source than anyone else's, and beat everyone to the punch.
Front running is only one of a great many techniques that HFT companies use to extract amounts estimated to be perhaps 8-22 billion dollars a year from the market. This extraction provides no value in return. That it can occur is due to rules put in place to protect investors that smart computer people realized could be used to screw them by gaming the rules. Programmers typically earned $200-400 thousand per year working on these systems, and their bosses made millions.
Katsuyama's group learned to defeat many of the HFT trading tricks by writing a program that sent out orders to all of the exchanges at once, building in tiny delays in such a way that the delays were longer to the exchanges that were nearer and shorter to those farther away. Eventually, he left RBC and founded a new stock exchange named "Investors Exchange (IEX)" in which banks and other big stock brokers could buy and sell at the bid and asked prices without paying the HFT tolls. It took a long time to get anyone interested in this since the HFT people had found inducements for the brokers that let them in on the deal while screwing the investors out of the dough. But eventually Goldman Sachs came in in a big way and, as of the publication of the book, IEX was a big success.
Aleynikov lost his wife and children and spent a year in jail before his lawyer, now working pro bono, won an acquittal on appeal. The prosecutor immediately re-arrested him on new but really the same charges and told the lawyer that, if he pleaded guilty, she would let him go on time served. The lawyer, Kevin Marino, told the prosecutor where she could go and the case was dropped. Much of the code that Aleynikov was accused of stealing was actually open source code with GNU licensing that required that changes be made open source, and experts agreed that none of the truly proprietary code was worth a damn to anyone since every HFT company already had much better code. And of course Aleynikov hadn't given any proprietary code to anyone.
I learned a lot from this book, but less than I would like to have learned. Part of the problem is that I listened to an audio version of it. In the technical sections that explained how the various HFT techniques worked, I really needed to see the text and read it carefully and repeatedly - not practical when driving a car, exercising, or washing dishes. However I also felt that what was being explained was right at the limit, and maybe a little beyond the limit, of Lewis' technical understanding. He struggled manfully to understand everything but we really needed someone with a mix of Lewis' and Aleynikov's experience to explain it.
I also felt some lack of context about the amounts extracted and the damage done by HFT. Part of this is because no one knows the exact amounts, or at any rate, those who do weren't talking to Michael Lewis. But assuming that the estimates Lewis published were right, 8-22 billion dollars per year paid to HFT firms, I have little sense of the cost to the investors. At one point L says that the stock market averages $225 billion in trading per day and loses $160 million to HFT. That would be $41.6 billion per year, not 8-22 billion. Assuming $20 billion, that comes to a loss of $0.00034 per dollar, or about 3.4 cents on a $100 share of stock. But I don't know if that's right either because I don't know what $225 billion per day means. Almost every share of stock traded that goes through HFT is bought and sold twice. The HFT company buys from the exchange that has the stock to sell, then sells to the real buyer, only holding the stock for microseconds. Does the $225 billion include both pairs of transactions or only one?
I can't fault Lewis too much for not having answers to these questions. It's a significant achievement that he got as far as he did. The banks, brokers, and HFT firms weren't telling anything to anyone, even to their own million and billion dollar customers, who were the ones paying this tax.
Even with this HFT "tax", computerized trading is probably cheaper than the old style trading with a guy on the floor of the exchange, but it's still money extracted from the investors that doesn't pay for anything productive. Adding any number of milliseconds under a thousand to a transaction would have no impact on investors if there were no skimming between buyer and seller. All the money spent on increasing the speed and cutting in in front of others is pure overhead.
Modern life is frighteningly complex, confusing, and unfair to the average person. Will it ever change? Is it possible to change it? Katsuyama did a service to us all. Maybe that's the best anyone can do.
| Author | Crankshaw, Edward |
|---|---|
| Publication | London: Bloomsbury Reader, 2011 |
| Copyright Date | 1956 |
| Number of Pages | 266 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | June 2016 |
Crankshaw was a journalist, fluent in German and, I think, Russian, who was drafted into the signals intelligence section of the British army during the war. Afterward, he wrote many histories of the events during and after the war.
In this book, C gives us the history of the Gestapo from the inception of its parent organization, the SS, in the 1920's, through its creation immediately after Hitler seized power. Two different political police organizations emerged, one controlled by Herman Goering in Berlin and the other by Heinrich Himmler in Munich. By 1934 (IIRC) they were merged into one organization under Himmler.
Remarkably to me, the Gestapo was never larger than about 40,000 people. However it was the tip of the spear, as it were, in the oppression of Jews, Communists, resistors, dissidents, and any other non-military enemies of Nazism in all of the countries that Germany occupied. They were able to rely on extensive help from the SS, the Wehrmacht, and other services such as the transportation services that ran trainloads of Jews to death camps (where the SS performed the actual murders.)
Here are some of the things I learned about the Gestapo:
It was not run according to any legal restrictions. The Gestapo was above the law, as were Hitler and leading Nazis in other spheres. People could be arrested, tortured, transported, or killed with no trial, no charges, no recourse, and no repercussions to the men who committed the crimes.
The organization of the Gestapo and the related organizations like the S.D., was relatively fluid. In many cases, it was not 100% clear who was above whom. A person's power depended in part on his position, but also in part, and maybe in larger part, on his personal relations with high ranking Nazis. Someone under the protection of Hitler or Goering might be able to deal with a nominal superior from a position of strength.
The creation of the Gestapo was very much a kind of Wild West contest between gunfighters. At one point for example, members of the Bavarian camp were arrested by members of the Berlin camp, and while the arrest and search was in progress, a larger group from the Bavarian camp showed up and arrested the Berliners. There were times when high ranking Gestapo members carried guns and hid out, away from their homes, when in danger from other Gestapo members.
Crankshaw considers Himmler to be a highly efficient bureaucrat but more than a little crazy. His deputy, Heydrich, was smarter, bolder, better able to command the loyalty of capable subordinates, and ultimately looking to replace Himmler with himself, but Himmler was not easily outfoxed and, in any case, Heydrich was assassinated by Allied agents/resistance fighters before any showdown could be attempted. Kaltenbrunner replaced Heydrich. He was less intelligent and less dynamic. The infamous Heinrich "Gestapo" Mueller reported to Heydrich and later Kaltenbrunner.
As of the time of writing, and even today, the fates of some important Gestapo leaders were unknown. Some were said to have been killed in the last days of the war, but no verified bodies were ever presented. At least one, Eichmann, is now known to have escaped and only discovered some years after C's book.
In addition to the history of the Gestapo's leadership and its organization and function, C gives significant attention to describing its crimes. He cannot go into any kind of exhaustive detail. There were too many crimes. Instead he concentrated on describing typical examples such as Einsatzgruppen massacres of Jews, murders of French hostages, the actions at the extermination camps, and so on. He quotes from written diaries of some of the leaders, or testimony extracted from them at Nuremberg.
I thought this was an outstanding book, not so much because of the numbers or details of the facts it presented, though I think they were adequate for a relatively short book like this, but for Crankshaw's moral stance. He focused squarely on the criminal and psychopathic nature of the Gestapo and its leadership and brought out very clearly the evil done by this organization. He wrote a lot about what happened to Jews and, in his writing, it was absolutely clear that Crankshaw saw no difference between a Jew and any other human being. He described the crimes against Jews as crimes against humanity, not as crimes against some special category of humanity about whom we can't condone what happened to them but might legitimately debate whether they merited some sort of treatment different from other people.
Am I being too sensitive to my Jewishness in saying this? Maybe I am, but I don't think so. I think rather that some others are too sensitive to my Jewishness and think me biased. It is insensitivities of this type that oppressed people can see that too many in the general population do not. It is why most black Americans understand the Black Lives Matter movement and a significantly larger number of whites do not. The whites who say that "all lives matter" are right, but saying that is not in itself enough to fully appreciate the nature of the special problems faced by blacks.
I have gone off on a tangent but I hope that I'm shedding some light on the problems of writing about the Holocaust and the Gestapo. Crankshaw gives us descriptions of children being torn from their mothers' arms, of people packed like sardines into freight cars for multiple day journeys with insufficient air to breathe, no food or water, and not even enough room to lie down. He describes doctors selecting people for life or death by giving them a quick glance, or performing sadistic "experiments" on them with no medical value, and then writing home about what they ate for dinner. He describes the selection of live people with particular shaped heads being measured and examined, and then their heads cut off for inclusion in a collection of Jewish or Slavic types. He quotes the testimony of men who performed these barbaric acts and their surprise and hurt feelings when the judges at Nuremberg failed to "understand" that they were merely following orders. He understands that a man who would never follow an order to bash in the head of his own wife and child but who has no qualms about bashing in the heads of other men's wives and children, is an evil man. And he understands that, while the evil men and the evil government and the evil army have been defeated, the evil itself is only reduced, not eliminated.
I have not read any other books by Crankshaw. There are a few at the downtown library that I could request. I have so much to read among the books immediately available to me that I'm not likely to go after those, but if one comes my way I may read it.
| Author | Mann, Thomas E. |
|---|---|
| Author | Ornstein, Norman J. |
| Publication | Blackston Audio, 2012 |
| Number of Pages | 272 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Politics |
| When Read | June 2016 |
M and O describe and analyze the movement of political parties, from containing overlapping points of view to becoming polarized into increasingly right and left political positions, together with a sharp tendency in the Republican Party to concentrate on winning elections first and implementing its agenda second, no matter the cost to the country.
Polarization is said to be the result of the changes in politics and media in the U.S., and to the Supreme Court's "Citizens United" decision that flooded the political landscape with "dark money" from the rich, i.e., money that is untraceable.
Politics changed dramatically in the 1960's as a result of the Civil Rights movement. The conservative Democrats who identified with the Democratic Party ever since the Civil War and Reconstruction were deeply opposed to the Civil Rights movement led by northern Democrats. They left the party and joined the Republicans while blacks and the relatively fewer white liberals in the South became Democrats. As the Republican Party drifted rightward, the liberal Republicans of the North were increasingly isolated in the Party and gradually shifted to the Democratic Party.
The media change was that cable TV and the Internet gradually replaced the three broadcast networks and the daily newspapers as the major sources of news and opinions. The new media, competing desperately for market share in a very crowded market, found that it could push to the front of the pack by adopting strong, partisan positions. Fox News, the principal TV beneficiary of this trend, made more money than all of the network news stations combined. They did it by stimulating their viewers to outrage with highly partisan stories and twisted news that played into and reinforced their viewers' prejudices. The same thing was happening to some extent at MSNBC (in the liberal direction - not nearly as successful as Fox), and in many online news outlets. The mainstream news abets this by insisting on spreading blame to both parties in order to demonstrate their objectivity and impartiality. So, for example, when a bill was introduced to eliminate "dark money" by forcing disclosure of donors, 59 Democratic Senators voted for it and 41 Republican Senators voted against it, killing the bill under the filibuster rules. CNN reported that, "the bill went nowhere in the Senate" without reporting who supported it and who killed it.
Meanwhile, Newt Gingrich, arriving in the House of Representatives in 1978, introduced a new style of politics, convincing his Republican colleagues to adopt a more strident, "take no prisoners" approach to competing with the Democrats. Demand the maximum. Avoid compromise. Condemn the other party as strongly as possible and stir up voters against it. According to M and O, Gingrich actually circulated a paper to Republican candidates telling them to use words like "treason" in describing Dems. In 1994 they won a House majority for the first time since 1953, ending a long period during which Democrats ran roughshod over Republican policies.
The policy kept getting stronger and further right. People were encouraged to throw the bums out, to demand lower taxes and lower spending. To see the deficits as the coming destruction of the country, overwhelming every other problem that the country faced. The result was the TEA Party (originally "Taxed Enough Already".) Things have gone further since Obama was elected. The Republicans proposed some legislation, cosponsored by prominent Republicans like John McCain. When Obama announced that he would agree with the legislation, suddenly every Republican voted against it and it was killed. That happened with the Simpson Bowles budget plan, with the immigration plan that Marco Rubio and three other Republicans hammered out with Democrats in the "Gang of Eight", and in several other cases. Obama's effort to build a "post-partisan" government was a failure because it didn't matter what legislation was proposed. If Obama approved it, the Republicans sabotaged it, even if was originally their own proposal.
So what is to be done?
M and O discuss a number of possible changes to the form of government, the development of a third party or independent candidate for President, a law requiring all citizens to vote (thus bringing in more centrists who are not tied to partisanship) and other possibilities, all of which are dismissed as impossible to implement or, in the case of a third party, making things worse by making the Republicans the plurality party every time. What they do recommend are incremental steps like changing the Senate filibuster rules (only one filibuster allowed per bill), and the rules on cloture (make 41 Senators vote against cloture instead of requiring 60 to vote for it, putting the onus on the Republicans to bring their people to Senate sessions instead of vice versa.) They made a case that these will provide at least some help. They also advocated a "shadow legislature" composed of senior ex-Senators and Congressmen who are not running for office, don't need to worry about challenges from the Tea Party zealots on the right, and are very upset about what is happening to the Republican Party. This group won't be able to legislate anything but they can make recommendations and reports that might carry weight with voters. Most importantly, they advocated working hard to make the press more responsible and truly objective. When the two parties play unequal roles, they want the press to report that. When legislators state bald-faced lies, they want that information to be put in the middle of the reports of the actions and not in separate news stories on inside pages (or the electronic equivalents) in "fact checking" stories that appear once, while the lies are published multiple times.
I think the book was excellent. I think the prescriptions for change won't be easy to implement and, in fact, are unlikely to be implemented, but I can't fault M and O for trying.
Last Saturday I was at a small Democratic thank you reception for campaign workers for Chris Van Hollen's senatorial campaign. I asked Congressman John Sarbanes what he thought could be done about Republican intransigence. He said he thought it would die down some when Obama left office. He said that they opposed Obama vociferously "for obvious reasons", by which I presume he meant racism. I also asked Chris Van Hollen and he said that he hoped that the nomination of Donald Trump would end the Republican solid block and they would have to break things up. Both men were at least aware of M and O's book.
My own view is that M and O's plan isn't bad but it won't work by itself. It will require a leader who can somehow educate the American public about the problem. I know much less about it than Sarbanes, but I'm not convinced that racism is at work here. I don't think that men like John McCain, Lindsay Graham, John Boehner, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell or Mitt Romney are motivated by racism, even if some of the "down ballot" Republicans are. I don't think they'll be more receptive to Hillary Clinton than to Barack Obama. I think Van Hollen's theory holds more hope for us.
The best thing that I can hope for is that the Democrats make a big sweep of House and Senate, overpowering Republican intransigence and casting the hard right people into disgrace, but I'm not hopeful of that happening soon. One thing I'd like to see is a charismatic Democratic President or other leader who can teach people the kinds of things they need to know - that "throwing the bums out" can't work, that "no compromise" can't work, and that people must vote for reasonable Republicans over hard right "no compromise" Republicans if what they want is a Republican policy.
I admit that I'm depressed and pessimistic about the whole thing. The U.S. is not the country that I thought it was in the 1950's. It probably never was. Things were bad then too in different ways.
Now, almost two years later and after the election of Donald Trump, I'm inclined to say that both Sarbanes and Van Hollen were engaging in wishful thinking. There have been a few Republican Senatorial defections on a few votes and some of them have been critical in the closely divided Senate. But, for the most part, the divisions in the Republican Party seem to me to have been between the Right and the far Right, not between Right and Center. A stronger and stronger left wing of the Democratic Party is developing, and I have a great attraction to that left wing. However I am not confident that it will win over a majority of Americans in the foreseeable future.
Politics are changing in America and in Europe, where right-wing anti-immigrant populism is conquering country after country. I am trying to help - mainly just by canvassing for progressive politicians here in my home city, but I remain unsettled by the current state of affairs. The innocent optimism of my childhood is long gone.
| Author | Pamuk, Orhan |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015 |
| Copyright Date | 2013 |
| Number of Pages | 624 |
| Extras | Chronology, Index of characters, Questions for reading groups |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | June 2016 |
Subtitled: "being the adventures and dreams of Mevlut Karatas, a seller of boza, and of his friends, and also a portrait of life in Istanbul between 1969 and 2012 from many different points of view: a novel."
Born in a village in 1957 in the province of Kona in Anatolia, Mevlut goes to Istanbul at age 12 (1969) to be with his father Mustafa, a street vendor of yogurt and boza. They live together in a one room house that his father built together with his uncle Hasan, Aunt Safiye, and their children - Mevlut's cousins Korkut and Suleyman. When Korkut marries Vediha, a girl from near their old village, Mevlut and the rest of the family go back for the wedding. There Mevlut happens to look at a 13 year old girl and she looks back at him. He is entranced by her beauty, especially the beauty of her eyes, which are really about all that he saw in the few seconds of his glance. But from then on he is consumed by love for her. It is the little sister of Vediha, Korkut's new wife. Suleyman tells him that her name is Rayiha.
The story opens on the night in 1982 that Mevlut comes to Rayiha's house in the middle of the night. She comes to him in the dark and he runs away with her. Only after they have gotten away and been dropped off by Suleyman at the train station does Mevlut see that it is not the girl that he saw at the wedding but another girl, a middle sister. Paralyzed with confusion, he says nothing and continues on to Istanbul. Her name is indeed Rayiha, but the girl he saw was Samiha. Now after years of writing romantic love letters addressed to Rayiha, he is unable to say anything. He proceeds to marry the girl and, over time, falls deeply in love with her.
The story follows Mevlut and all of his family and friends through his life on up to 2012, the end of the book. They live in a far suburb of the city on public land seized by squatters, in houses made by hand, with questionably legal "deeds" created by a local official when paid to do so. Mevlut's house has an earthen floor and no running water, plumbing, or electricity. He goes out with his father to peddle yogurt in the daytime and, in evenings in the fall through spring, boza, a traditional Turkish drink. Once he has learned the trade, he and his father go separate ways in order to cover more territory. They each carry a stick on their shoulders, balanced with a basket full of their wares at either end.
Many things happen over the course of his life. He finishes middle school but never finishes high school. He is drafted into the army. He sells ice cream on the street. He sells chicken and rice on the street. He is robbed at knife point of his money and the watch given him as a wedding present by the local big man, Hadji Hamit Vural. He is frightened by dogs. He puts up fascist posters at night with his cousins Korkut and Suleyman. He puts up communist posters on other nights with his friend Ferhat. He has no politics of his own and never thinks about politics or about what he is putting on the walls. He just goes along where people lead him.
Samiha grows up and comes to Istanbul. Suleyman pursues her. That is probably why he told Mevlut that the girl he saw was named Rayiha, to keep Mevlut away from Samiha, or maybe just because spiteful practical jokes came naturally to Suleyman. But Suleyman's pursuit of the girl is hopeless. She runs off with another man who, only later, the family learns is Mevlut's old communist friend, Ferhat.
Mevlut and Rayiha have two daughters and the family lives in poverty. Mevlut works days and evenings in the streets. Rayiha embroiders cloths for a business that parcels out piece work. They make just enough to keep their daughters in school, but their position is precarious and they are always subject to setbacks. Ferhat and Mevlut go into a business together as a boza shop and Rayiha and Samiha work there, but Rayiha is gradually consumed by suspicion and jealousy of her younger sister, whom Mevlut is actually very careful not to approach.
When Rayiha gets pregnant again she wants an abortion. Mevlut is not happy with the idea. Soon the legal limit of 10 weeks after conception is passed and legal abortion becomes impossible. One day Mevlut comes home early from the shop and finds Rayiha bleeding to death after her attempt to abort herself. He rushes her to the hospital but is too late. Rayiha dies and Mevlut is heartbroken.
Meanwhile Ferhat becomes a meter reader and inspector for the electric company, recruits Mevlut into a similar job, and he (Ferhat) is making money taking bribes to allow illegal tapping of the electric lines. In spite of his marriage to the beautiful Samiha, Ferhat falls for a gangster's girlfriend and joins a plot to ruin the gangster, which results in his getting killed. After quite a bit of time passes, Mevlut and Samiha finally marry. It helps them both, but Mevlut still desperately misses Rayiha and walks the streets at night calling "booozaaa".
This is a great novel. It is a compelling story of a simple man, immersed in the problems of love, family, and life in a changing Istanbul. In Marcia's and my visit to Istanbul in 2001, we saw nothing of this life, or rather, we saw some of it but knew nothing about what we saw. Only now do I feel that I have any real understanding of the country.
Mevlut is not equipped to reason his way out of his problems. He drops out of high school without ever confronting the fact that his failure to do the work has consequences. He gets conflicting advice and conflicting demands from the people close to him. He cannot figure out the best things to do. He seeks advice from "the Holy Guide" a religious man who holds classes and buys boza. He may get angry at Rayiha or later Samiha when they make demands on him that he doesn't want to fulfill. But for all that, his intentions are good and we cannot help but sympathize with him.
The people in the story are described sympathetically. Even the worst of them, Suleyman in particular, and Korkut and Korkut's boys, are presented as human beings whose humanity cannot simply be written off with a condemnation. All of the different tendencies from fascist to communist to Islamist are all treated with some understanding. The people making up these movements are, at least sometimes, sincere.
The writing is unconventional. It begins with a narration of the elopement of Mevlut and Rayiha in 1982. Then it goes back in time and works its way forward. Suddenly, part way into the book, a character (never Mevlut) steps out of the story, as it were, and speaks to us directly. Then others do it and they become a substantial part of the novel. At a certain point they not only speak to the readers but speak directly to the author, telling him to include this or exclude that from the book he is writing - though the author never speaks back, and feels free to ignore their demands.
With some writers, one feels like the author is making things up according to some plan. With Pamuk, one feels that the author is telling the truth about his characters and his city, not making things up.
I chose this book as my selection for the NCI reading group (which I am still attending in spite of my retirement), because of the Nobel Prize of the author and the very positive reviews on Amazon. I read a dozen or so pages and decided it would be a good choice. I believe it was. I'll be interested to see what the reading group members think.
| Author | Thorne, H. Leonard |
|---|---|
| Editor | Griffin, Gill and Barry |
| Publication | Stroud, Gloucestershire: The History Press, 2013 |
| Number of Pages | 256 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II; Aviation |
| When Read | June 2016 |
This unusual book is a compilation of Len Thorne's RAF logbooks interspersed with his own commentary on the material, written 60 years after the events. There are also notes on the people he met and flew with. The log books show, for each day that he flew, the flights, time in each, passengers, and a brief statement of the purpose of the flight.
Thorne came from a poor family. His father died when he was young and, although his mother eventually remarried, his stepfather also got sick and died before Thorne was grown. He lived at the mercy of others, completing the equivalent of high school by the time the war started. He was accepted into the RAF as an enlisted man pilot and entered combat service as a fighter pilot around age 21 in 1941. He was successful, credited with three enemy planes destroyed, two probably destroyed, and three damaged. Then he was taken out of combat and sent to an RAF unit as a test pilot. He spent the rest of the war testing a large number of different aircraft with different kinds of testing. The planes he flew most were various marks of Spitfires, but he also had extensive time in North American Mustangs, and significant time in Hurricanes, Typhoons, Tempests, and even the Focke-Wulf FW-190, with some time in Martlets (American Wildcat), Hellcats, Thunderbolts, Bf-109, and a number of twin engine planes and training and liaison planes.
He married while in the service but left the RAF a few years after the war, only returning to some flying late in life.
Len died on June 6, 2008, aged 88.
I never really thought much about what test pilots do. I imagined that there wasn't much call for them. A new model plane comes out of a factory and needs to be tested before it's put in service, then the next model comes out. However that view is so simple minded that it covers only the tiniest fraction of what test pilots do.
In fact, everything must be tested. How fast does this plane fly? Given a horizontal run at 300 mph, if the pilot gives it full throttle and begins a 45 degree zoom from 300 feet, how high will he get before stalling? What about a 60 degree zoom? What is the fuel consumption at different speeds and different altitudes? What is the rate of roll to left and to right? What is the optimum diving angle for dropping bombs from a fighter used as a dive bomber? When firing all the guns, how much does it slow the plane? How long can the plane fly inverted before the carburetor fails to feed fuel to the engine? What's the range of the radio? What is the best setting of the adjustable pitch propeller for various speeds and tasks? Best for fuel consumption? Best for acceleration? What are the effects on airspeed and visibility for this new style of canopy? In short, there is a virtually endless number of questions that can be asked and can only be answered by testing. The work calls for both highly competent flying skills and an ability to follow instructions very precisely and make and write down precise observations.
Thorne was quite impressed by many of the American planes, most especially the Mustang, which he believed won the air war, but also the Thunderbolt, the Hellcat, and a couple of the twin engine bombers. Everyone feared the FW-190 when it came out but, according to Thorne, the Spitfire and Mustang were continuously developed faster than the FW or the Bf-109 and ultimately became superior planes, though the German planes remained dangerous.
It seems to me that the British and Americans defeated Germany not only by massive material production and superior numbers of men and machines, but also by better science and technology. I'd like to believe that freedom and democracy created a better environment for science and technology than Nazism ever could.
Thorne was not a scientist, but I believe that he and his comrades were a part of the Allies science based efforts that won the war.
| Author | Hall, Adam (Trevor Elleston) |
|---|---|
| Publication | |
| Copyright Date | 1966 |
| Number of Pages | 226 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| When Read | June 2016 |
Quiller, a British agent whose first name is never given, is ordered by "Control" to take the place of a murdered agent in Berlin to root out a group of Nazis working in the West German government. He doesn't want to do it. He wants to go home. But he particularly hates a special Nazi that he remembers from the war and he agrees to the assignment in hopes of catching "Zossen". However he has conditions. Control must leave him entirely alone and remove his "covers", other agents who follow and protect him.
He decides to attract the attention of the Nazis and make them come to him. He succeeds by assisting in the high profile arrest of several Nazis and ensuring that his photo is in the papers after the arrests. Soon he is kidnapped, drugged, seduced, followed, but never tortured or killed because he somehow convinces his captors that he will never talk under torture and the only way they can find what they want, the location of Control's offices in Germany, is by setting him free and following him.
After many hair raising adventures, he defeats the Nazis' plot to start a war with the new German army, catches up to Zossen, perhaps beats him up (that part isn't clear), gets a full confession from him of all his Nazi contacts, and leaves him to commit suicide.
There is also a kind of love interest in the book, a young woman named Inga who was a nine year old child in the Fuhrer bunker in 1945 where Hitler was her God. She may be helping Quiller, or may be helping the Nazis. It isn't clear until the end, when she seems to be torn but is still a Nazi.
This book won an Edgar Award for best novel of 1966.
This was a surprising novel. It contained a few very convincing scenes of Nazi atrocity. In one, Zossen, then an army or SS officer, turns down a request from a Jew for the 300 Jews lined up in front of the ditch to say Kaddish before they are shot. Zossen has a luncheon engagement in another hour and doesn't have time for that. He orders the shooting to begin immediately. In another scene, a Nazi is in court. He can't remember killing the ten year old boy. He wasn't in the part of the camps that killed people. Besides, it was 20 years ago, how could he remember something that far back? The prosecutor says that the witnesses remember. The man says, well, they were only Jews.
There was a certain amount of acceptable technical description of codes, procedures, following people, and so on. But the story seemed to me, for all it's engaging thrills, to be a little ridiculous. Quiller purposely waltzes into situations that ought to be certain death but aren't. He ought to be tortured but isn't. Hall does a good job of explaining all this after the fact, but it didn't convince me and didn't seem to me to be at all convincing for Quiller to rely on these explanations during the action.
Oh well, the book was a big success and the movie even bigger.
| Author | Zweig, Stefan |
|---|---|
| Original Language | German |
| Translators | Bell, Anthea |
| Publication | London: Pushkin Press, 2011 |
| Copyright Date | 1920 |
| Number of Pages | 112 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | June 2016 |
Written in 1913 but not published until after the war, the story opens with the relatively young and beautiful Irene Wagner leaving her pianist lover's house to return to her comfortable bourgeois home in Vienna where she lives with her two children, her servants, and her husband, a prominent lawyer. She is always afraid when she leaves the young man's house. It is a generalized anxiety about being seen. But on this day, she is accosted in the foyer of the apartment house by a working class woman who accuses her of stealing her man and blocks her escape. Irene, in increasing panic and desperation, pulls the first money she finds out of her purse, gives it to the woman, and hurries home. That is the beginning of a nightmare for Irene.
The love affair, such as it was, was neither a great passion nor even a rejection of her husband, whom she still loved, or at least was content with. It was something that happened by accident after a casual meeting with the pianist at a party. Irene lived an idle and boring life. She paid no real attention to her husband's career. Her children were cared for by a nanny and her house by servants. She had no job, no money worries, and nothing to do but socialize with friends, take walks, and pass the time.
A few days pass and then Irene is confronted on the street by the same harridan, this time right in front of her house and with the woman calling Irene by name. Again panicked, she immediately forks over the money she has and, when the woman demands it, her silver purse as well. After that a messenger arrives with a letter demanding that she give the messenger 100 crowns. Then after a couple of days the demand is for 200 crowns.
Irene can't sleep at night. She fears to leave the house. She understands that this is leading to a crisis from which there is no escape. Her only thought is to somehow put it off, saving herself one day at a time. Her husband, seemingly sensing her despair, asks what is the matter and offers help. She wants to tell him. She knows it is the only way out and he will learn eventually, but she just cannot do it. The harridan actually comes to her house, demanding more money than Irene has and, when Irene can't pay, demanding and getting her engagement ring.
Irene comes to understand more about her life than ever before. She understands that her husband is actually a strong, intelligent, highly capable man who treats her well, has a high reputation in the community, and has a much stronger relationship with their children than she has. She comes to understand her own shallowness and irresponsibility. She recognizes that she has coasted along, giving very little to her husband or her children and just enjoying herself, but she is unable to face what must be done in order to overcome her dilemma. Instead she finds the little bottle of opiate given her as a painkiller in a recent illness, and the prescription she has for more. She will need to fill the prescription to ensure that there is enough drug for her purpose.
She goes to the pharmacy. She feels as if she is being watched. She thinks she sees her husband. She asks for the opiate. As she starts to pay for it, her husband suddenly appears, pays for the drug, and takes it from her. She is practically fainting. He holds her up and steers her home. He pours out the opiate and confesses to her that he knew all along. He hired the woman, a minor actress, to play the part and blackmail Irene. He is sorry. He didn't realize that it would drive her to suicide. He only wanted to bring her back. Finally she slept. She awoke the next morning with her ring back on her finger and her life ahead of her again.
This is a brilliant book with an unerring depiction of a shallow and very weak woman who learns that her shallowness and weakness, her irresponsibility, her uninvolvement with her husband and children, all have a cost and it's a cost that she cannot bear. It transforms her life. She goes through great pain but her eyes are opened to the true worth of her husband and her children, and the true meaning of her life.
Zweig describes Irene's increasing panic brilliantly. The phone or the doorbell rings. She is on tenterhooks, frightened that someone else will answer before her. She decides not to go out of the house but her attempts to play with the children or to assist in the kitchen all fail. A routine has developed in her psychological absence that is now too hard to break. She plans for ways to deal with the woman or with the next messenger but all plans go out the window at the first sign of them and all she can do is panic and turn over whatever valuables she has. It's painful to read. However, at the end, we the readers feel the same sense of relief that Irene feels, the same sense that we have learned something important about life.
This is the third novel or novella by Zweig that I have read. They have all been excellent.
| Author | O'Brien, Tim |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Broadway Books |
| Copyright Date | 1973 |
| Number of Pages | 240 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Vietnam War |
| When Read | June 2016 |
Tim O'Brien was opposed to the war when he was drafted right after college in 1968. He tried to get a conscientious objector status, considered leaving the country, and in boot camp, came very close to fleeing the country, but he wound up in the infantry in Vietnam. He arrived a year after the massacre at My Lai, but patrolled the same territory, still virtually owned by the Viet Cong. There was one patrol where he actually saw and fired a round at a Viet Cong, but mostly he and his buddies fired randomly into the bush, with no real idea of where the enemy was. They were constantly on the move, constantly taking casualties from mines, booby traps, and snipers, and constantly facing sullen civilians who never helped them but suffered in silence as the Americans burned their houses, randomly shot their animals, and called in artillery and air strikes into the areas where they lived and worked.
The men hated it. They hated their situation. They were frightened half to death. They couldn't see any point to what they were doing. They only hoped that they would survive and go home alive and in one piece. They yearned for a posting to a safe, rear area where they would be willing to do anything whatever, even shovel shit all day, if it got them out of combat. O'Brien sucked up to an officer and did finally get re-posted as a clerk in a safe area. There he did his best to fill out and type the forms given to him and do whatever he was ordered to do so that his work would be appreciated and he wouldn't have to go back into combat. He survived his year in country and made it back to the U.S. and out of the army.
I saw the title of a book recently about "Westmoreland, the man who lost Vietnam." Reading O'Brien I was forced to the conclusion that the war was lost before it began and no general could have won it. The Americans had tenuous control over the ground they walked on and the surrounding land within rifle shot of their patrols. As soon as a patrol left, the territory instantly reverted to VC control. The VC lived in the villages, worked on the land, knew all of the people personally, and either won them over or controlled them by force. They were there before the Americans trudged through or dropped from the sky. They hid, almost always successfully, while the Americans were present, and reappeared as soon as the Americans left. They couldn't be conquered because, most of the time, they couldn't even be found. And when they were found, they fought bravely before they were killed and most of their comrades got away and came back later.
Reading O'Brien I found it hard even to see the soldiers as part of an army. I didn't see anything like "patriotism", or "esprit de corps", or even simple discipline. There were many officers and perhaps even some percentage of NCOs who acted like they were part of an army and who, in at least some cases, wanted to fight. But the bulk of the men were draftees, poor suckers who got swept up into this conflict with no interest whatever in being there. They followed orders only if the orders weren't dangerous, or if they were dangerous, only if there was no way to avoid doing what they were told. Even the officers frequently lied to their superiors, telling them that they had patrolled this or that place when, in fact, they had stayed down in a safe spot. They did that without hiding their behavior from their men, probably wanting the men to understand that they, the officers, were good guys who didn't want to get anyone killed and who could be trusted. At least one NCO in the story was killed by his own troops who only planned to wound him a little but weren't upset when he died.
The officers were almost all white men. The grunts contained black men out of proportion to their percentage of the U.S. population. The blacks felt themselves to be aliens in the army and acted accordingly, increasing the total alienation on all sides.
Do American officers today read books like O'Brien's? Do they understand what went wrong? Do they see the disconnect between the theory and the reality of "search and destroy" or "clear and hold"? Or do they still write books on how to conduct successful "counter-insurgency" operations that they imagine could have won the war?
The books I've read on Iraq and Afghanistan are different from this because the men involved are all some sort of volunteers. Some enlisted for combat and others at least enlisted. There are no draftees in the Middle East. But I didn't see anything any more hopeful in those books. It is still the case that the barriers between the American troops and the local people are high and, in the circumstances, effectively unbridgeable. It is still the case that the countryside belongs to the Taliban and their allies, not to Americans who walk through, fly over, or drive through in their Humvees. It is still the case that the Americans only own the ground they stand on, and only as long as they stand on it. And it is still the case that the local allies of the Americans are distant, alien, and playing a different game to which Americans are never admitted.
O'Brien was born in the same year as me and went to college at the same time. He and I were radicalized about the war at the same time, graduated at the same time, were drafted at the same time, and considered our options at the same time. Maybe because I was in love and had married, or maybe because I was radicalized a bit more than he was, or maybe because I knew my own mind better than he did, I took my shot at a draft dodge and succeeded. It was scary. I had to put myself into an alien frame of mind and push hard to make it work. I was prepared, if necessary, to flee with Marcia to Canada. And if push came to shove, and I were caught and arrested, I think I might have gone to jail rather than to Vietnam. However I hadn't made that decision yet and, as things turned out, I didn't have to make it. I was lucky. I got to live and to go to grad school and study philosophy with a beautiful girl by my side.
Measuring by our accomplishments in the wider world, I believe that O'Brien made much more of his life than I made of mine. He went to Harvard and got a graduate degree. He wrote a number of books and briefly worked for the Washington Post. He became a professor. He is well known. However perhaps I was a luckier man.
I really don't know what to think about the effectiveness of American troops in "counter-insurgency" wars. Reading Chandrasekaran's Little America: The War Within the War for Afghanistan, I see instances where aggressive American forces were able to clear the Taliban from significant areas and kill or capture thousands of insurgents. But in the end it appears that, even though armed force is effective in specific circumstances, it may not be able to overcome the other problems of the war.
I'm sure that, in the case of Vietnam, there were many specific instances in which American forces, especially elite units such as Marines and Special Forces, were much more effective than the troops that O'Brien served with. However their successes could not be replicated or sustained countrywide, nor could they entirely compensate for the popular disgust with the corrupt and parasitic governing class in the Republic of Vietnam. That story isn't part of O'Brien's book, but it is a major part of the story of the war.
I read Stanley Karnow's Vietnam: A History last month, a book mainly about the Vietnam War. Karnow too thought that the war was unwinnable by the United States. In addition to believing that the South Vietnamese government and army were focused entirely and institutionally on pursuing the private power and riches of the people at the top, the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong were committed to winning in spite of any level of casualties. The situation in Afghanistan may be similar.
| Author | DeGeorge, Richard |
|---|---|
| Publication | Knowledge Products, Inc, 2006 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Philosophy |
| Keywords | Ethics |
| When Read | June 2016 |
Richard DeGeorge, presumably the professor of Philosophy of that name at the University of Kansas, has produced a high level but surprisingly comprehensive review of three major theories of ethics. The first is that morality is founded upon the maximization of happiness, exemplified by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill in their theory of Utilitarianism. The second, exemplified by Immanual Kant, considers that reason dictates the morality of duty, rights, and justice. The third has to do with living a good life as a virtuous man, as promulgated by Aristotle.
DeGeorge gives an explanation of each approach, examples of how it might be applied, and problems that can occur when attempting to apply any of the theories in concrete situations.
This audiobook appears to be an audio original. I don't see any text version listed at Amazon. That's unfortunate because in any book of complicated ideas it's highly useful to be able to carefully read and re-read important sections.
It's an ambitious effort. I think the author has done a very creditable job of both explaining and critiquing each of the systems he describes. He covers a fair amount of technical ground in a way that should be understandable to ordinary people with no background in philosophy. He says hardly anything about religion, apparently choosing not to get involved in the fights that writing about religion can cause.
It was clear to me that DeGeorge is familiar with and understands the standard literature. He makes no big arguments of his own but he educates his listeners in the basics of two thousand years of professional thinking about morality.
Looking up DeGeorge on the Internet I found a professor of Philosophy, Russian and East European Studies, and Business Administration at the University of Kansas. He is listed as a "University Distinguished Professor", which sounds like an understatement for a man with so many fields of expertise and the author of 200 articles and author or editor of 20 books. Whew!
For the record, my own view of philosophical ethics is that all of them are right - the utilitarians, Kant, Aristotle, and Hume and others too. There is more than one reason for leading a moral life. Each has a somewhat different appeal but I do not see them as mutually exclusive.
| Author | Goines, Donald |
|---|---|
| Publication | W.W. Norton |
| Copyright Date | 1974 |
| Number of Pages | 217 |
| Extras | Publisher's introduction |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | June 2016 |
Larry Jackson, known as "Daddy Cool" is a middle aged black man who owns a pool hall but whose real income comes from murder. He works for a gangster who runs a gambling racket, taking on the gangster's enemies or betrayers, when paid to do so. The gangster, Big Jack, is also a personal friend.
Jackson has a wife, a seventeen year old daughter Janet, and two slightly older boys, Buddy and Jimmy, who were the son's of his wife by a previous husband. He supports them all in a middle class neighborhood.
The book opens with DC's murder of a bookkeeper for the gangster's numbers racket who embezzled money from his boss. DC kills him in his characteristic way, by expertly throwing a knife into the victim's chest. He goes home and collects his $10,000 dollar fee.
The real problems for Daddy Cool come from his daughter. Janet, an educated girl whom her parents hope to send to college, has fallen in love with a street pimp named Ronald. Jackson understands that Ronald doesn't love her and that he is courting her not for marriage but in order to pimp her out and make money from her. He uses his professional skills at lovemaking and lying to women to manipulate Janet into falling in love with him. She even believes that she can get him to marry her, take an honest job, and live with and for her.
Jackson tries to explain all this to Janet but he's neither a sympathetic nor a diplomatic man. All he manages to do is to infuriate her, turn her against him, and see her commit ever more strongly to doing everything that Ronald wants. She runs away from home and, before long, is walking the streets.
Jackson wants to find his daughter but first he takes a well paying assignment in California to raise cash. He succeeds there but, with his mind on family problems, he foolishly walks into a bad situation and is robbed and severely beaten up by a gang of teenage hoodlums.
He gets back home and searches everywhere for Janet. Other people know where she is and what she's doing, but nobody wants to be the one to tell Daddy Cool. Then Big Jack calls him and insists that he come over to his house to watch a video of three men ripping off one of his numbers houses, savagely beating the people inside, including Big Jack's wife, and raping his 13 year old daughter. The attackers were Jimmy, Buddy, and a wild friend named Tiny. Tiny and Jimmy raped the little girl. Buddy wanted to but refrained, knowing that they had gone too far. Daddy Cool tracks them down and kills Tiny and his stepson Jimmy, the two rapists. He lets Buddy go.
Finally, Larry Jackson confronts his daughter. A huge friend of his who runs the pool hall for him and loves him has found and killed Ronald and is then, himself, shot by the police. Jackson tries to reason with Janet but she is furious. Her lover, the man she was convinced, or thought she was convinced, was going to marry her, was killed by an agent of her father.
Janet pulls a knife. Jackson knows that she'll be arrested for murder if she kills him. He pulls a knife of his own but he doesn't throw it. It is to make Janet's move look like self-defense. He waits for her throw to hit him in the chest. As he dies he knew that he could have saved himself if he had really wanted to.
The book says: "edited by Marc Gerald and Samuel Blumenfeld". I don't know what that means. Is it abridged? Are there typographic or other errors corrected from earlier editions? Or rather is it just that this book is one of a series of publications, the series selected by Gerald and Blumenfeld? I suspect that's it. I found an edition with 217 pages and listed that as the total. It's difficult to tell from the epub edition.
Goines was a petty criminal and drug addict who spent years in prison. It was there that he took up writing, determined to write about the life and the people that he knew. He started writing at age 30 and finished 17 books before he and his wife were murdered at age 37 in a crime that was never solved. Perhaps he cheated someone in a drug deal or perhaps he wrote about someone too accurately and identifiably.
The writing is spare and raw. The language is of the street. The emotions are hard and on the surface. There is no room in this novel for conventional middle class life. Larry Jackson lives a hard and gruesome life, tough on himself, tough on his wife, tough on his stepsons, but loving his daughter and his man at the pool hall. He isn't a monster so much as a man who has seen and done too much and cannot be other than he now is.
I have no personal knowledge of the life that Goines lived and wrote about. I don't want to learn about it in person. The book is enough for me. I have no doubt at all that it is an authentic view of that life. Reading it was an intense experience.
I have just finished George Pelecanos' The Big Blowdown, a book with some similarities to this one. Goines goes further than Pelecanos. In a sense, he lost his way, but he was a man who understood the people of whom he wrote.
| Author | Fiore, Neil |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Penguin, 2007 |
| Copyright Date | 1989 |
| Number of Pages | 224 |
| Extras | charts |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Psychology; Self-help |
| When Read | July 2016 |
Fiore is a psychologist in private practice specializing in helping clients who have procrastination problems. This book lays out his conclusions about why people procrastinate and what practical steps they can take to break out of their bad habits. He illustrates his analyses and his methods with case reports of clients he has had who suffered from one or another problem and who were helped by one or another of his techniques.
Causes of procrastination include fear of failure, low self-confidence and self-esteem, fear of criticism, perfectionism, a feeling of being overwhelmed, and poor organization. Procrastination provides temporary relief from the stress and pain that these things cause us. In some cases, the problems actually do go away by themselves when we procrastinate though in most cases everything just gets worse. We try to tell ourselves "just do it", but it provides only marginal results, if any at all.
F teaches his clients to track what they do each day, finding out how much time they waste in things that they don't care about. He also has them produce an "unschedule" in which they schedule things that they want to do for themselves - since procrastination causes people to be unable to do the things they want to do because they have no time - even though they do have time but they waste it in mindless procrastination designed to distract them from the pain of failure. Then he teaches them that it is always essential to start tasks, whether or not one knows how to finish or has a clear idea of how one will finally succeed. Each task should be pursued for at least one half hour. A person must fight through the powerful urge towards distraction that occurs within the first two minutes of starting an unpleasant task. At the end of a half hour, it's okay to take a few minutes of guilt free enjoyment if desired. Then start again. If projects are too big to do in a half hour, or however much time a person can manage, then break them down into subprojects.
He also teaches them something about themselves - why they procrastinate, what they think about themselves, their bosses, their jobs, and their procrastination, and how they can struggle through these feelings to more positive attitudes. Sometimes he tells people that they are in the wrong jobs or working for an impossible boss. But even in those cases he offers help both in how to make the best of a bad situation and how to organize themselves to get another job.
In the early pages of the book F writes about the experience of this or that particular client. My initial reactions were, "I'm not like him. I'm not like her." But I soon realized that these people weren't all like each other either. F was describing a range of different procrastinating behaviors and personalities and offering a considerable assortment of tools that all of the people could choose from.
It's a practical and useful book. I can benefit from it and it looks to me like other motivated people can too. It still requires effort. No one can overcome procrastination who isn't willing to face his failures and strive against them. There's no magic pill. However I think it has done me some good and can do good for some others.
| Author | Penny, Louise |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: St. Martin's Minotaur, 2006 |
| Copyright Date | 2004 |
| Number of Pages | 312 |
| Extras | Extract from next book in series, "Reading Group Guide Questions" |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | July 2016 |
A 76 year old retired school teacher whom everybody loves is murdered in a small village in southern Quebec. Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his team of investigators are sent out from the Surete de Quebec to investigate. His team includes a number of men and women who have worked closely with him in the past and deeply admire him, and a new young woman, Agent Yvette Nichol, who is excited to have just been assigned to the homicide squad that Gamache leads.
Gamache has a reputation for helping young agents to learn the ropes and become good policemen. He tries but, despite a good start, Agent Nichol shows herself again and again to be unable to follow instructions and to tell lies to shift blame for her missteps and failures. In a meeting with witnesses near the end of the story she again violates the order given to her to keep silent and she belittles a witness. Gamache takes her outside and orders her to get on the 6 am bus the next morning back to headquarters. He's had it with her.
As is customary in mystery stories, the reader is directed first to this suspect, then to that, and at the end, the actual killer comes out of the woodwork and is revealed as a person whom we did not suspect at all.
Penny has won a number of awards for her writing of the Inspector Gamache series. This was the first in the series. She herself lives in a village in southern Quebec. In one scene, she describes a home filled with books, almost all of them mysteries, dominated by the "village cozy" style. That's what this book is. The characters are mainly artsy types. There is a husband and wife artist couple with much love for each other but also significant doubts between them to be resolved. There is a friendly and hospitable gay couple who run the local inn and restaurant. There's a man who works for the highway service who is initially thought to be the murderer. When the evidence points to his 14 year old son, and the boy lies and blames his father, the father confesses to protect the boy. But the boy isn't the killer either. The schoolteacher's despicable niece and her despicable husband and son are the next suspects. We want them to be caught, but they aren't guilty either. Finally we find it's a local man who is heir to a good living and seems like a decent fellow but is in fact a psychopath.
It was not my style of writing. Just as Hammond Innes writes masculine stories, Penny writes feminine ones. However she is a good writer and the book achieves the goals she intended for it.
| Author | Innes, Hammond |
|---|---|
| Publication | London: Bloomsbury Reader, 2013 |
| Copyright Date | 1950 |
| Number of Pages | 320 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| When Read | July 2016 |
Dick Farrell, a one legged sales rep for a British manufacturing firm, is in Pilsen, Czechoslovakia in 1949. After doing some business, he visits his old friend Jan Tucek. The two had flown together as pilots in the Battle of Britain and later and now Tucek had returned to his native country where he was the head of Tucek Steelworks. However the meeting was stilted by the presence of an "assistant" who was obviously a Communist Party agent watching the capitalist scion of a large, previously family owned business. Tucek gives Farrell some cryptic instructions to take to a man named Maxwell. However the meetings never come off.
Farrell had flown both fighters and bombers in the war and was a pilot hero with 19 victories as a fighter pilot and 60 bombing missions. In his last mission, he crashed after dropping off two Allied spies - Alec Reece and the American Walter Shirer. But Farrell was captured by the Germans and tortured by an Italian doctor, Giovanni Sansevino who, without anesthetics, amputated Farrell's foot. After it healed he amputated higher up. When that healed he amputated above the knee and threatened to work on the other leg next, but, out of his mind with pain, Farrell told everything he knew. Reece and Shirer were picked up. When the war was about to end a few weeks later, Sansevino, who looked remarkably like Shirer, was found dead, an apparent suicide. Reece blamed Farrell for everything that happened. He told his sister Alice, who was engaged to Farrell, that F was a shit and a traitor, and she broke off with him. Now F is a depressed alcoholic traveling salesman with an aluminum leg.
The story of these people revolves around these events, and around Tucek's attempted escape from Czechoslovakia. Tucek flies out of Czechoslovakia and lands in Milan but then disappears. Maxwell was to meet him but can't find him. Tucek's daughter Hilda, also in Italy, is desperate to find her father. Reece and Maxwell, still working for British intelligence, believe that Farrell must know something that he isn't telling. Under pressure from Maxwell, Hilda, and Reece, F goes to the home of an Italian businessman who believes F knows where Tucek, or at least his papers, can be found. There, F meets the young Contessa Zina Valle, and Walter Shirer. Zina turns out to be a drug addict from a slum who used her beauty and talent to marry a Count who abuses her, and Shirer is eventually shown to in fact be Sansevino, who dressed the real Shirer in his uniform and murdered him to convince everyone that il dottore was dead.
There is a sequence of locations in Italy: Milan, Naples, Sansevino's villa in the shadow of Vesuvius, and a couple of nearby towns. Farrell is trapped in Sansevino's villa. Vesuvius erupts. Everyone closes in on the villa. Sansevino kills a man but is disarmed and runs from the house. Then everyone runs. Zina tells them that two men, one of whom must be Tucek, are being held in a nearby monastery room. They go there. Sansevino traps Maxwell and an American mining engineer who came to see Vesuvius and is now sucked into the action. There are various fights, flights, traps in lava, and a final escape of the whole group in a plane flown by Farrell. Sansevino is killed by a mule's kick. Hilda and Farrell become engaged. Reece learns the error of his ways. Tucek is rescued with his wealth and the valuable plans from his steelworks. It is a happy ending.
There were many details in this book that I thought were wrong. Why would a fighter pilot with 19 victories become a bomber pilot or a pilot taking spies behind the lines? Both Sansevino and Farrell have opportunities to kill each other, but neither does. Farrell is an apparent alcoholic, but Hilda, none of the other characters nor the author seem to recognize that and see the implications for his future or the future of the couple.
All of that was in the noise for me. A bigger problem for me was Farrell's attitude of self-pity, alcoholism, and his propensity to reflexively say that everything is fine when people offer help. Still and all, it was a compelling read, one in which I felt some sympathy for the characters and found the plot riveting.
Not a great book, but not a bad one, at least not for its type.
I write abstracts intended to refresh my memory with enough details of a story to bring it all back. Maybe it was more than I really need to bring back in this case.
| Author | Chandrasekaran, Rajiv |
|---|---|
| Publication | Books on Tape |
| Copyright Date | 2012 |
| Number of Pages | 384 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Afghanistan |
| When Read | July 2016 |
C, a prominent writer and editor for the Washington Post at the time this book was written, spent some years in the Middle East, including much time in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iraq. He gives some background on the first American foray into Afghanistan in the 1950's and later in which American contractors built a damn and hydroelectric power plant and attempted to setup a sort of "Little America" community with American style middle class homes, schools, and public services. It was hoped that this would become a model for a gradually spreading modernization of the country. Looking back on it from half a century later, we can see that it was probably a hopeless, naive, and quixotic effort.
C briefly relates the continuing history of the country, through the communist party coup, initiated when a right wing takeover threatened them, the ensuing civil war, Russian intervention, Russian evacuation, continued civil war, and the Taliban takeover of much of the country. Then came the 9-11 terrorist attack on the U.S., U.S. intervention, and the installation of the Karzai regime, which was still in power at the time the book was published.
C interviewed a large number of players in Afghan politics and the continuing civil war against the Taliban. He spoke to Afghan government, economic, military, and paramilitary officials, Pakistani officials, Americans at many levels in the State Department, Defense Department, Army, Marine Corps, AID, and other agencies. He described an American effort that was fragmented and hamstrung by internal American bureaucratic rules and agency and military rivalries. For example, when one set of experts determined that cotton was a viable alternative to opium for Afghan farmers if enough American aid were given, laws that prevented supporting competition against U.S. cotton farmers were invoked to block the required aid. When forward thinking State Department employees attempted to establish direct contacts with Afghans, security officials forbid them from leaving the American controlled compounds. When outstanding individual Americans applied for service in Afghanistan they were often blocked or severely delayed (for one or two years!) by security clearance procedures that considered their foreign contacts as suspicious, even though it was that very contact and consequent understanding of foreign peoples and cultures that made them superior candidates for the jobs. While the Army pursued a "counter-insurgency" strategy focused on building connections to local people, the Marine Corps pursued a "counter-guerrilla" strategy that focused on aggressive military campaigns to kill or capture Taliban insurgents. Economic aid programs, some with very small and even counter-productive prospects of success, were sponsored in order to fulfill the plan of pouring money into the country - the more the better.
As far as I could tell, C drew no conclusions about whether American success in Afghanistan was possible. My guess is that he thought it was. American military units were capable of driving out or destroying the Taliban in any area they chose to secure. American officials, if they understood what to do, were properly motivated, and were not hamstrung by ridiculous bureaucratic rules, could establish good working relationships with Afghans. Most Afghans themselves were not enamored of the Taliban and could have supported an anti-Taliban regime if they could trust it. There were Afghan government officials who were honest and dedicated, and more who were selfish and pursued old fashioned patron-client relationships but were not outrageously corrupt or running paramilitary outfits that stole money and raped little girls and boys (a common problem with Afghan government paramilitaries.) But for these advantages to accrue, the failures of leadership and bureaucracy in the United States would have to have been overcome, and American competence would have to have been applied to assist and pressure the Afghan government to improve its behavior. It didn't happen.
I don't know what's going to happen in Afghanistan's future but, if I had to bet, I'd probably bet on the Taliban retaking the country - probably with significant help from Pakistan. The countries of the "underdeveloped" world are not like the those of the developed world. We can't expect that American style values and lifestyles can be imposed and we can't help them by trying to remake them in our image, any more than the Soviets could so by remaking them in their image. Personally, I've never felt that we had a real plan for Afghanistan or Iraq. We opposed al-Qaida. Fair enough. We had good reason to do so. But how should we have addressed the Taliban? If our goal was to overthrow them, and it seems to me a good goal on moral grounds, what should we have tried to put in their place? Did we have a model in mind? What was it? Was it one based on the reality of Afghan history and culture? Or was it an ad hoc concoction of anything that was not Taliban?
C has written a very good and useful book. I hope that all American officials who are involved in Afghan affairs or the affairs of other countries where we have inserted ourselves into local politics, will read it.
| Author | Barnes, Julian |
|---|---|
| Publication | London: Jonathan Cape, 2016 |
| Copyright Date | 2016 |
| Number of Pages | 224 |
| Genres | Fiction; Biographical fiction |
| When Read | July 2016 |
This is a fictional biography of the Russian composer Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich. There is material on his personal life - his three wives and his two children by his first wife, but the main emphasis is on his relationship with "Power", i.e., Stalin and the Communist Party apparatus. At different times, S is universally praised by the Party music apparatus or universally condemned. As the Great Purge was underway, an article "Muddle Instead of Music" appeared in Pravda. S watched as friends, supporters, and colleagues disappeared one by one into the prisons or execution rooms. Barnes has him standing at the entrance to the elevator on his floor every night, fully dressed and with a packed bag, so that when the NKVD comes for him they will not drag him away in his pajamas in front of his wife and children. Life becomes intolerable. He is ordered to appear at the NKVD headquarters where he is interrogated about his friend Marshal Tukhachevsky, a great admirer of S and a good violinist as well as the commander of the Red Army. He is told to come back in two days with a list of all of the people he met at Tukhachevsky's house and a record of everything they said, but when he comes back he finds that his interrogator had been arrested.
S wrote his upbeat 7th Symphony in Leningrad during the siege and a somber 8th Symphony in 1943, after the tide had turned. He was later accused of writing happy music when the Germans invaded and sad music when they were beaten back. Was he a fascist? He wanted to write opera but got in trouble for the two that he wrote and gave it up, always feeling that his efforts to express his inner feelings were stymied by the authorities. He was forced to write "A Soviet artist's creative response to just criticism."
After Stalin died the threats against his life ended. He was the country's leading composer and was celebrated with honors and luxuries, but his oppression had not ended. In 1960 he was bullied into becoming General Secretary of the Composer's Union, requiring that he join the Communist Party. His tormentors would not take no for an answer. And then, as General Secretary, he was handed statement after statement and told to sign them - criticizing other musicians and promoting the Party line. He told himself, as Barnes has it, that if he signs without reading them, he is not as guilty as if he read them. But he cannot fool himself that way. He told himself that when everyone then alive is dead, and the travails of the time are ancient history, it is his music that will speak for him and these other things will pass away. That might be true but he still couldn't absolve himself. All he could do was bear it and try to concentrate on the music that he was permitted to make.
This is a very fine book. It's not about music. I've always thought that books and films about musicians should be about music because we cannot understand a musician without hearing his musical voice. But Barnes pulls it off. He has found a great story in the political and personal life of Shostakovich and he tells it with deep understanding of the times and the pressures on the man.
I read this for our NCI book group.
| Editor | Moskowitz, Sam |
|---|---|
| Publication | Cleveland: World Publishing Company |
| Copyright Date | 1968 |
| Number of Pages | 564 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories |
| When Read | July 2016 |
This anthology contains 25 short stories from the period together with introductions for each story, and an overall introduction that explains the nature of the magazine publishing world at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th. The stories are collected under various headings: Catastrophes, Marvelous Inventions, Monsters and Horrors, Future War, Man-eating Plants, Far-out Humor, Scientific Crime and Detection, Medical Miracles, and Adventures in Psychology. The only one that I recall reading in the past was the first story, "The Thames Valley Catastrophe" by Grant Allen.
I won't describe each story further.
I think that there are definite periods in science fiction, and many other genres as well, that can be recognized reasonably well even without knowing when any particular story is published. These stories are characterized by a more exacting and formal language than is found in later 20th century writing. Where most of today's sci-fi concerns the future, most of these take place in times contemporary with the writing. They make use of innovative technology but they generally make very different use of it than later writers. A writer from, say, the 1970's, may incorporate space ships, aliens, planetary transformation, prolonged or eternal life, and something like superpowers, almost without explanation. The author assumes that his readers have accepted that the future will not be like the past and technology will continue to radically transform life. I didn't see those assumptions, or the same level of those assumptions, in these earlier stories.
It was fun to read these stories. I particularly enjoyed the humorous ones - "An Experiment in Gyro-Hats" by Ellis Parker Butler, and "The Hybrid Hyperborean Ant" by Roy L. McCardell.
| Author | Sinclair, Upton |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Open Road, 2016 |
| Copyright Date | 1940 |
| Number of Pages | 740 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Lanny Budd |
| When Read | August 2016 |
Lanning "Lanny" Budd, aged 13 in 1913, is the son of American armaments tycoon Robert "Robbie" Budd, and his American one-time mistress in France, Mabel Blackless, known to all as Beauty Budd, though she was never actually married to Robbie. Lanny was born in Switzerland and lived his life up to the time of the opening of the story in a villa on the Riviera with his mother - the villa and a well-off life both financed by Robbie, who took his responsibilities seriously towards Beauty and Lanny, his eldest child. Robbie is now married and living in Connecticut with three more children. He comes to Europe periodically to sell guns and ammunition to the French, English, Russians, Germans, Romanians, Bulgarians, Italians, anyone who can pay. He competes against powerful European cartels, the largest headed by Basil Zaharoff a sophisticated competitor with government ministers, generals, and journalists on his secret payrolls. But Robbie is no slouch and he knows how, for example, to lose 10,000 francs in a card game to a Romanian general who will buy Budd machine guns. He carefully introduces Lanny to the ins and outs of his business, hoping that this intelligent, multilingual, sophisticated and highly regarded boy will carry on in his father's business.
Lanny learns to get along with his father and mother, his English friend Eric Vivian Pomeroy-Nielson, known as Rick, and his German friend Kurt Meissner, son of an official on a great estate in Silesia and a budding musician and composer. He has two love affairs at a young age, the first with the aristocratic Rosemary Codwilliger, pronounced Culliver, who chooses to marry a noble Englishman rather than the American bastard Lanny, and the poor New York girl Gracyn Phillipson who yearns to be an actress and throws Lanny over for a rich Broadway promoter who can help her career.
Lanny wishes to take no sides in the Great War. He has a close friend on each side, and his father considers all sides to be corrupt. But he is drawn in on the Allied side. Beauty's lover and Lanny's friend and mentor, the young painter Marcel Detaze, enlists in the French army and is horribly wounded and disfigured. Beauty nurses him back to health and marries him but he goes back to the army and is killed. When the U.S. enters the war Lanny's allegiance is pushed that much more to the Allied cause, but he is just young enough to stay out of the fighting. He visits the U.S. (where he meets Gracyn) and stays with his father's family for a year, going to a prep school. But the U.S. and college are not for him. He can learn more, faster, by reading on his own, and without being forced to learn subjects in which he has no interest.
At the end of the war Lanny returns to Europe and meets a professor of geography on the passenger ship who is on his way to serve in the American delegation to the peace conference. He takes Lanny on as a secretary where his intelligence, his facility with French and German, his trustworthiness, and his serious concern for an honest and just peace, all win the professor's respect. Much of the last part of the book is about the peace conference and how it sows the seeds of more wars to come.
Lanny is torn between the right-wing views of his father and the left-wing views of his uncle Jesse Blackless, Beauty's brother, an artist, an intellectual, and a committed supporter of the new Bolshevik revolution. Lanny meets Kurt on the street in Paris where Kurt is undercover, attempting to bribe people with German government money to support an ending of the murderous blockade of Germany that is continuing to kill innocent civilians by starvation. He puts Kurt in touch with Jesse and, later, is himself arrested, but is released through the efforts of both Robbie and Jesse - who hate each other but who both care for Lanny.
The story ends shortly after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. Lanny is entering upon an adult life. He doesn't want to sell arms or go into his father's new oil business, and he doesn't want to be a communist revolutionary like his Uncle Jesse. He is most attracted to the world of art and music, but he has learned that the world is a complicated place and each human being has responsibilities.
I was introduced to this book by my mother when I was about 13 or a little more. I don't recall the exact year. My mother, Sylvia Meyer nee Goldwasser, called me Lanny (I was originally taught to spell it as "Lannie") after Lanny Budd, one of her favorite characters in fiction. He became a favorite of mine too and I read at least six of the books in the series of eleven. I have a record of books that I read and I see the first six of the titles listed, though in my memory I thought perhaps that I had read more. The books had an important effect on me and, as I read this one again, there were a few scenes that came back to me, sometimes as I remembered them and sometimes not so much.
Sinclair is not a literary writer in the manner of writers like Cortazar, Vargas Llosa, Munoz Molina, Dickens, Mann, or Tolstoy. He doesn't create scenes that are full of unstated but powerfully symbolic meaning. He doesn't use poetic language. What he does do is write crystal clear, easy to understand, highly intelligent and perceptive analyses of history, society, and the people who create them. The reader won't be bowled over by Sinclair's expressive power, but he just may be bowled over by his deep understanding of history and society. I was.
Given that I first read this book somewhere around 56-57 years ago, it is surprising that I remembered anything at all, but I did remember some things. Those memories are now contaminated by my recent re-reading but I can still pick out a few things from them. At age 13 or 14, or whenever it was, I was much attracted by those aspects of the story dealing with Lanny's adolescence. I remembered the episode in which he is sent to the psychiatrist to be educated in the "facts of life". I remembered his introduction to sex with Rosemary Codwilliger. I rather wished that I too might meet a beautiful older girl who would take me in hand and teach me about sex, no doubt a common fantasy of young teenage boys. On the other hand, I have little or no memory of the meat of the book - the introduction to the politics of class and money and their effect on people and nations. But although I did not retain specific memories, I'm reasonably confident that my developing social consciousness, one that was very much in accord with that of Lanny Budd (and Sylvia Meyer), was stimulated by this book and its successors.
Sinclair would have been 62 years old when this book was published and 75 when the last one in the series appeared. Although he wrote a few other books during the period 1940-53, this series was the main body of his output during that time. Considering the entire series as a continuous novel in 11 volumes, an obviously reasonable consideration given that all of the books are about the same characters in chronological sequence, this must be one of the longest novels ever written, probably somewhere around seven thousand pages. I like to think that, given his age and the effort he devoted to this production, the Lanny Budd character and series was very close to his heart and embodied much of what he learned and believed in his long and eventful life. I liked and still like this book and learned much from it. I liked at least five more of them in the past and expect to like them again. I have placed the second one in the 11 volume series on my phone. I'll take them one at a time and not in continuous succession and see how far I get. Maybe I can get to the end. It will be the kind of intellectual adventure that I love in my reading.
| Author | Trew, Antony |
|---|---|
| Publication | London: Robert Hale, 2012 |
| Copyright Date | 1974 |
| Number of Pages | 191 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | World War II; Naval |
| When Read | August 2016 |
34 year old Lieutenant Commander Francis Redman commands the Royal Navy destroyer Vengeful in late 1944. The war is essentially won. The Battle of the Atlantic is over, but the Germans are still assembling submarine packs on the North Cape to attack Allied convoys bringing supplies to the Soviet Union. Vengeful and a relatively overwhelming force including destroyers, sloops, frigates, corvettes, and an escort aircraft carrier are escorting convoy JW137 to Murmansk. Against them, submarine "ace" Kapitan Hans Kleber has convinced the U-boat command that, under the special conditions of the arctic winter and the North Cape, it will be possible to mount a night, surfaced, wolf pack attack on the convoy - a tactic that resulted in major losses in the Atlantic but might work here. His plan is to place seven submarines to the east of the entrance to the Kola inlet and have each acknowledge a query from U-boat headquarters by reporting its position by radio, then move, then report again, simulating a total of 14 boats. Meanwhile, the main force of seven U-boats will wait in the path of the convoy, submerge to beneath one of the thermal layers common in the ocean at that time of year that will block sonar pings, then surface behind the escort screen and attack the convoy. As the commander of the first sub to spot the convoy, Kleber's name identifies the convoy to the rest of the Germans. Hence "Kleber's convoy."
It turns out that Redman and Kleber have a history. Redman was badly injured in a dangerous ski run in the Alps in 1938. Hans Kleber came across him, hoisted him onto his back, and saved his life. Redman was deeply appreciative and, to compound things, he fell in love with Kleber's beautiful 19 year old sister Marianne. Meeting her again for a rendezvous in Paris, he signed to her from across a busy street. She ran to him and was hit and killed by a bus. Now, in 1944, Redman had some reason to believe that the man who saved his life, and whose sister was now dead as a result of his own actions, was one of the U-boat commanders facing him in the arctic.
The story mainly follows Redman and Vengeful. Kleber and his U-0117 are introduced about halfway through. Kleber is bold, competent, resourceful, greatly admired and liked by his men. He is one of the few survivors from the good times of the Battle of the Atlantic, only surviving until 1944 because he was laid up or off sea duty for two years due to serious injuries. He is determined to succeed. Another German captain, Willi Schluss of U-0153 is introduced as Kleber's opposite. Frightened half to death, convinced that the war is already lost and it is pointless for any more men to die, he does his best to evade the dangerous orders issued to him but is partially defeated by his officers, who see what he is doing and act against him. It is Schluss and U-0153 that Vengeful sank when Redman feared he had killed Kleber.
The bold German attack has some success. Kleber and some other subs break into the convoy and sink some ships. There is a running battle. Vengeful sinks the sub that Redman is sure is Kleber's, though it's not, is then itself sunk by the real Kleber, and then Kleber himself is sunk by another destroyer. Redman, Kleber, Schluss, and almost all of their crews perish in the freezing ocean.
Trew was a South African with naval training who got himself posted to the Royal Navy and to sea duty, eventually commanding a destroyer that made four arctic convoy runs, among other combat missions. After the war he went back into the commercial world but he was a good writer and in 1963 turned to writing thrillers for a living. He published 17 books, the last one in 1992, four years before his death at age 90.
I was able to access some of his books. I chose to read this one because I knew from the Wikipedia article about him that he lived the life that he described in this book. I thought it would have a lot of authentic detail.
I was not disappointed. The character of Redman was difficult to like. Taciturn, hard on himself, hard on his men, unwilling to acknowledge the strain he was under or accept any help from the ship's doctor or crew, he carried out his responsibilities but grew increasingly angry and overwhelmed as nine days and nights of strain dragged on with hardly any sleep. But that doesn't mean that men like Redman didn't exist, or that he was poorly drawn by the author, or even that another commander would have been more effective. Being attractive and being real are two entirely different things. One can be the latter without being the former. And the action of the story was entirely convincing to me. We got a real feel for what it was like to be in a heaving destroyer that might suddenly drop 30 feet into the pit of a wave and roll 30 degrees to one side. We saw the scene on the open bridge of the destroyer pummeled by snow, wind, and spray while tossing this way and that. We saw the even more uncomfortable open bridge of a U-boat proceeding hull down on the surface with freezing air and waves breaking over the bulwarks onto the rubber suited men with anti-frost grease on their faces, goggles over their eyes, and steel cables holding them in the cockpit to keep from being washed overboard.
There was much technical detail about ASDIC (sonar), hydrophones, depth charges, hedgehog mortars, "talk between ships (TBS)", wireless telegraphy (W/T), "high frequency radio direction finders (huff duff)", radar and radar detectors, and the myriad pieces of specialized equipment on both the destroyers and the submarines. There was no technical engineering data but much information about the capabilities and limitations of the different devices and much enlightening description of how these things were used in actual combat. I regard the book as comparable to the novels of Alistair MacLean in HMS Ulysses, Nicholas Monsaratt in The Cruel Sea and HMS Marlborough Will Enter Harbor, and the American Edward Beach.
I liked the book and my hat is off to Trew and to all of the men that he depicts who fought the war, living and dying under terrible conditions. I even admired Kleber and many of his U-boat comrades but, of course, wished that their courage, competence, and dedication could have been offered in a more fitting cause.
Still converting old book cards to XML, I discovered that I read this book before in May of 1983. My reaction to the story then was very similar to my reading in 2016 though, of course, my write-up on a 3x5 index card left out all of the details above.
One more comment I'll add is that, even though he was a coward, I sympathized with the character of Willi Schluss. He was absolutely right. Germany had already lost the war. Every man killed, both English and German, was killed with zero hope of altering the outcome. We can't even say that, from the German point of view, slowing down the delivery of supplies to the USSR would have saved German lives. At best, it might have enabled the German army to fight another day or two, losing the lives a day or two later than they were otherwise lost, and killing some additional Russians. I wanted the other Germans to understand that and save themselves. I wanted Kleber to understand that and save so many lives. But that's not the way things were.
| Author | Stross, Charles |
|---|---|
| Publication | Ace, 2004 |
| Copyright Date | 2002 |
| Number of Pages | 352 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | August 2016 |
Sometime, in the 21st or 22nd century, humans have made far advances in physics and are on the verge of understanding time travel and alterations in the chain of causality. At that point, a powerful civilization called the "Eschaton", possibly an AI established by humans of the future, steps in. They take nine of the ten billion people on earth and scatter them in thousands of habitable worlds that may be many hundreds of light years from earth. Fearful of having someone go back in time and destroy the beginnings of the Eschaton itself, They lay down the law to humanity. No interruptions in the chain of causality will be tolerated and any violation may result in the complete death, by supernova if necessary, of the world or system in which the violation occurred.
The story takes place in a system known as the "New Republic", actually a throwback to Tsarist Russia. It is a rigid patriarchal empire ruling a number of stars and inhabited planets. Learning that their colony on the planet "New Rochard" is being invaded and disrupted by the "Festival", they send a fleet equipped with relatively modern weapons, which attempts to violate causality without seeming to in order to arrive at the same time as the Festival and wipe them out. On board the ship, Martin Springfield, an Earthman contract technician hired to maintain the complex drive system, and secretly an agent of the Eschaton, sabotages the time travel violation and Rachel Mansour, a representative of the United Nations, attempts to talk the Empire out of what they are planning to do. Both people understand that the Festival, an exotic system that travels between stars to gather information, granting all wishes in return for "entertainment", and various hangers on who follow it, is far too powerful for the Empire's puny fleet to have any chance against it. When they finally meet, the Festival puts clouds of self-replicating nano-machines in their path that eat up the Empire's ships.
Martin and Rachel fall in love. They are attacked by a cabal of officers on the ship and escape in a lifeboat that Rachel makes using the cornucopia machine hidden in her luggage. They land on New Rochard where they are too late to help anyone and, at the end, are recalled and taken off Rochard by the Eschaton.
This was a mile-a-minute story that I have only barely approximated in my abstract. There were sub-stories about Burya Rubenstein, a communist revolutionary on Rochard, an inexperienced and rather stupid secret policeman named Vassily, an old admiral in a wheel chair who has mostly lost his marbles but has them restored by the Festival's creatures, a "Critic" in the form of a giant boar named "Sister of Stratagems the Seventh", and more.
The story was more or less okay, depending on how deeply and in which direction one wishes to probe it. However the scientific imagination that Stross expresses is truly out of this world. Most SF writers talk about time travel, but not like this. Here is one of the tamer paragraphs:
"A slower-than-light freighter had spent nearly a hundred years hauling the quantum black box at the core of the causal channel out from Septagon system; a twin to it had spent eighty years in the hold of a sister ship, en route to Earth. Now they provided an instantaneous communications channel from one planet to the other; instantaneous in terms of special relativity, but not capable of violating causality, and with a total capacity limited to the number of qubits they had been created with. Once those 5 billion megabits were gone, they'd be gone for good—or until the next slower-than-light freighter arrived."
I think this actually made sense. What we have there is two boxes containing quantum entangled particles that have been separated by many light years of space and can be used for instantaneous communication by using bits in one box to modify bits in the other. Did Stross make this up, or is it something that physicists talk about from time to time? I don't know.
Here's how the ship (named Lord Vanek) operated: "Lord Vanek was, in interstellar terms, a simple beast: ninety thousand tonnes of warship and a thousand crew held in tight orbit around an electron-sized black hole as massive as a mountain range. The hole - the drive kernel - spun on its axis so rapidly that its event horizon was permeable; the drive used it to tug the ship about by tickling the singularity in a variety of ways. At nonrelativistic speeds, Lord Vanek maneuvered by dumping mass into the kernel; complex quantum tunneling interactions - jiggery-pokery within the ergosphere - transformed it into raw momentum. At higher speeds, energy pumped into the kernel could be used to generate the a jump field, collapsing the quantum well between the ship and a point some distance away." ["...the a jump..." is in the text - an OCR error?]
Or how about this, chosen at random. A Critic is explaining how she and her kind were able to accompany the Festival: "We Critics. Festival has many mindspaces spare. Brought us along, like the Fringe and other lurkers in dark. Festival must travel and learn. We travel and change. Find what is broken and Criticize, help broken things fix selves. Achieve harmonious dark and warm-fed hiveness."
I had to read slowly and still had trouble keeping up with the manic pace of Stross' imagination.
Great literature it was not. Great imagination it was - maybe as good as any that I've ever read.
| Author | Sidebottom, Harry |
|---|---|
| Publication | Blackstone Audio, 2010 |
| Copyright Date | 2009 |
| Number of Pages | 433 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Rome |
| When Read | August 2016 |
Sidebottom, an Oxford lecturer on ancient history with a PhD from the same school, has written the first volume of a series about Marcus Clodius Ballista, the child of an Anglian king, brought up in Rome as a hostage and trained as a soldier. At the opening of the story he is 19 years old and participates in the murder of the Emperor Maximinus, who haunts him for the rest of his life.
The story proper begins 15 years later in the reign of Valerian and Gallienus in the years 253-260. Ballista leads a small force of legionaries and auxiliaries to hold the town of Arete on the banks of the Euphrates River against the expected coming of Shapur, the Emperor of Sassanid Persia. He arrives in the fall and knows that the Persians cannot come until the spring when the ground will dry out and there will be grass for their horses. He has time to prepare the soldiers, the mercenaries, the stores, the townspeople, and the physical defenses of the city.
The cast includes a barbarian slave ex-gladiator and bodyguard to Ballista, who is himself a big man with much sword fighting skill. There is also a Greek boy slave clerk, some Christians, a beautiful woman who tempts Ballista who nevertheless remains faithful to his wife, a patrician officer who disdains Ballista and various other people, along with a spy for the Persians who is known to exist but whose identity is only discovered in the end, after it is too late.
Ballista and his men counter every Persian stratagem successfully - frontal assault, siege towers, battering ram, siege ramp, and mine. It looks like they have won the battle and the Persians will have to go home, but while they are celebrating their victory the Persians slip into the city via a second, undiscovered tunnel, and take the town. Ballista and his closest friends escape on horseback heading west, watching the city burn as they head home, ready for the second volume of the series. Ballista determines that he was never meant to succeed and Rome never meant to relieve him. His role was only to buy time for the Empire, much like the Alamo in Texas.
S is highly knowledgeable about Roman society and soldiery. The somewhat pedestrian story is dressed up with very accurate sounding descriptions of people, social occasions, language, and military hardware. The actual fighting occupied most of the second half of the book and was replete with the kind of scenes that men who read these kinds of books hope to find. There were clouds of arrows, 6 and 20 pound ballista stones and iron bolts that could pierce armor. There were ladders, hot oil, buckets of burning sand, sword fights in the tunnels (won by the Persians), and mines under a defensive tower and under the Persian siege ramp. Thousands of men were killed, mainly by arrows and artillery, but there was enough hand to hand combat to satisfy the readers.
I had read Gordon Doherty's The Legionary before this, a books with much less knowledge of the people and the period and wasn't expecting much from this one. In fact, I listened to the first few minutes some time ago and put it away, not thinking it was worth finishing. But I picked it up again and was more impressed. There were problems with the plot. I didn't believe in all of the battle descriptions, but there were no really egregious errors that my rudimentary knowledge enabled me to perceive. I would have to rate it as an average book of its type - readable, full of the things one reads these books for, but miles below, say, Robert Graves.
I note that the notes accompanying the mp3 and listed in the Carroll County library state that Stefan Rudnicki narrated the book, but at the end of the recording the narrator says that he is Nick Bolton. I presume the narrator knows his own name. I've credited him. He was a typically excellent narrator.
I came across a wonderful review of this book with no name attached. Searching the text on the Internet I found five putative hits, but when I went to the web pages they weren't there in three of them. I'm pretty sure that the original review was by Giles Gammage, written for Amazon on 2009-12-21 and can be found at: https://www.amazon.com/gp/review/R36U74A7NEIYL0
A word for word copy appeared at another website in 2012. The Internet is a real boon to plagiarizers, libelers, rumor mongers, racists, antisemites, and anonymous miscreants of all types.
Gammage's review is much better than mine.
I had originally cited another appearance of Gammage's review but, today, tracked it down to Amazon, where I think it originated. I fixed my earlier note to cite the Amazon source.
Looking at his reviews, I see that Gammage reads many books that interest me, including World War II histories. He's a really excellent reviewer but we disagree about some of the books, including Robert Harris' Conspirata, which he found to be only fair because of its lack of the trappings of Roman swordplay and escapist action.
| Author | Aslan, Reza |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Random House, 2011 |
| Copyright Date | 2005 |
| Number of Pages | 384 |
| Extras | chronology, maps, glossary, notes, bibliography, about the author, new introduction by the author |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History; Religion |
| Keywords | Islam |
| When Read | August 2016 |
Aslan is a Muslim and an Iranian-American professor of creative writing who is an expert on the history and philosophy of religion. Why he isn't a professor of the history and philosophy of religion, I don't know. He gives us the history of Islam, starting with the Arab culture in Mecca, with its polytheistic religions centered on the Ka'ba religious site, in the years before Muhammad's life. He then describes Muhammad's life, his receiving of the divine revelation, his expulsion from Mecca, his battles at Medina, his return to Mecca, and his death. The aftermath is described as it relates to the development of the religion, including the early Caliphs, the dispute that led to the Shi'a confession, the development of the Sufi, and the flowering of Islamic philosophy in the years leading up to the 13th century, when Sunni forces took command and suppressed further intellectual debate. He then brings the story forward, describing the rise of Wahabism, the use of Islam by political powers and vice versa, the Iranian revolution of 1979, and the state of Islam today.
Aslan makes an appeal for a reformed Islam, one that is tolerant of many branches of the religion and tolerant of other religions, one that is open, democratic, respectful of the rights of women, and at peace with the world. He argues that this is, in fact, the spirit of Muhammad's message. It is not a betrayal of Islam as the Islamists would have it, but a reawakening of its true spirit.
The text of the book is empty of footnotes, but the notes at the back are extensive and it looks pretty easy to align them with the text. It is clear that Aslan has done enormous amounts of research on all aspects of both Islam and Christianity, and significant research in Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and probably other religions.
I don't agree with Aslan that Muhammad received a divine revelation if, for no other reason, I don't believe in the existence of God. I don't believe, as he does, that religion is all interpretation and all interpretations are valid. I think that most religions make specific factual assertions, starting with the existence of a providential God, and often also containing many myths about the world. I don't believe, as he does, that the point of all myths is the story they tell, the inner meaning, not the facts they assert. I don't see how all interpretations can be valid, even if they contradict each other.
But in spite of all that I consider this to be an outstanding book. It's possible that I could write a book that would appeal to the one percent of people, of all the various religions, to convince them that God doesn't exist. He has written a book that can, conceivably, convince many times that number that, whether or not they believe in God, they don't have to believe that all people who believe differently are their enemies or are deserving of punishment. They don't have to believe that women are less competent than men. They don't have to believe (and Aslan presents evidence that most Muslims don't believe) that democracy is anti-Islamic. And if they are American Christians, they don't have to believe that Muslims are their enemies or that the Muslim religion is intolerant and insane.
I wrote a fairly short (for me) review for Amazon. However I didn't put a lot of effort into it. There were 369 reviews already and I don't expect many, if any, readers to see mine. There are better reviews including some that, like mine, were added very late in the game.
| Author | Adiga, Aravind |
|---|---|
| Publication | London: Atlantic Books, 2010 |
| Copyright Date | 2008 |
| Number of Pages | 368 |
| Genres | Fiction; Short stories |
| When Read | August 2016 |
When I started this book I assumed that it was a novel with each chapter introducing a new character - all of whom would come together towards the middle of the book into a coherent story. But they didn't. Looking at the Amazon reviews I saw that it was being described as a collection of 14 short stories, and so I read the rest with no expectation that the characters would come together. All of the stories take place in the space of a week in or around the same city of Kittur in South India. Many of the same landmarks, neighborhoods and streets are common to multiple stories, but the characters have no contact with each other.
Each story centers on a single person - a man of all work at the train station; a businessman dealing with corrupt officials; the son of a wealthy Brahman doctor and his low caste wife; the assistant headmaster of a school who tries to do the right things but is out of step with everyone; a bicycle delivery man pedaling heavy loads to furniture store customers for peanut sized tips; a recent arrival from the country who becomes the favorite of a gangster but eventually loses his position; a journalist who wants to print the truth but is forced to face the facts of life; a little girl sent with her smaller brother to beg for money and navigate miles of streets to buy drugs for her father; a communist ("Marxist, Maoist") who wants a girl to marry him but he is in his 50's and she in her 20's with zero interest in him; and more.
The stories relate the frustrations and travails of each of these people. In each case the people are confronted with the brutal reality of Indian society. Their hopes, and sometimes their lives, are crushed.
This book was apparently published after The White Tiger but written before it. Some of the same themes are present, including a story in which a drunk driving rich man kills a pedestrian and bribes a poor man to take the blame - the main event of White Tiger.
These stories are incredibly depressing. The bicycle delivery man gets three rupees for making two hard trips and his boss takes two of them - one for his dinner and one for allowing him to sleep outside near the store. He calculates that none of the delivery men can possibly save enough to buy a motorcycle or open a shop - the dreams of the other men. When a white man tips him 50 rupees, he spends it all in one night on drink.
Most pathetic of all the stories is that of the little girl. Her father comes to her and tells her to go to the harbor, ask for such and such a man, give him 10 rupees, and bring back what he has. She asks for the money but he tells her to beg for it on the way. Her mother then tells her she must take her little brother with her while the mom goes to take a nap. Against all odds, the girl actually makes it to the harbor by evening, begging money and feeding her and her brother with a bit of garbage she finds on the way, all the while listening to his continuous whining complaints. She wants to get home, please her father, and once again have him hug her and call her sweetie. When she returns and gives him the drugs, her little brother accuses her of not feeding him and says that she got 100 rupees from a rich man but still wouldn't feed him. Her father demands the money, then beats her for not turning it over. There was none of course.
If Adiga is right, and how could he not be, life is pure misery for a significant slice of the Indian population. There is no hope for them. The government is a consortium of thieves with no possibility of redress. Anyone who actually becomes a threat to the powers that be will be killed. Others, like the communist, who are so completely ineffective as to be no threat, are mostly ignored.
Adiga tells us the way things are. He offers no prescriptions for action or change. That is the most depressing aspect of all.
| Author | Picketty, Thomas |
|---|---|
| Original Language | French |
| Translators | Ackerman, Seth |
| Publication | Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016 |
| Number of Pages | 212 |
| Extras | Annotations by Seth Ackerman, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Economics |
| When Read | August 2016 |
This is a collection of 48 short essays on economics, each published in P's regular monthly column in the French newspaper Liberation. They appeared over the period 2008-2015. Most of the essays are concerned with the topics of economic inequality, recovery from the recession of 2008-9, and the problems of the Eurozone, including the debt crisis in Greece, the tax war being waged by each European economy on the others, and some warnings and prescriptions for the future.
P argues for a number of basic points. Stimulation of the economy is necessary, austerity is self-defeating and makes things worse. It is necessary to merge the economies of the separate Euro nations much more thoroughly. If each country is left to its own devices it will attempt to preserve itself at the expense of the others, leading to failure of the system as a whole. France and Germany pay 1% on debt while Greece, Italy, and Spain pay 5-6%. Speculators are free to speculate on each national debt, driving up rates in the weaker economies - which are thereby made much weaker still. Leaving debt service aside, the Italian government, for example, takes in 2.5% (IIRC) more revenue than it spends, but because it is paying such high interest on its debt, it keeps getting deeper in debt instead of coming out of the debt. The solution is some formula for converting at least some significant portion of the debt from national to Euro-wide.
The tax war is largely a war of the small countries against the large ones. Ireland and Luxembourg have very low corporate income taxes. The result is that many European [and I think American] companies move their official headquarters to those countries to escape paying taxes in the countries where they actually do business. The result of this is that taxes on corporations keep getting shifted to the middle class. P also shows that the return on capital, i.e., the amount of money that your savings return, is dramatically different depending on how much money you have. The very rich make 8-10% return by using the best professional money and tax managers. A somewhat lower standard of riches makes 6-8%, and so on down to more ordinary folk who make 2.5% or less, just above inflation. This is made worse by the fact that taxes keep going down for the wealthy, forcing taxes to go up for everyone else. The solution to this problem, according to P, is a European-wide progressive wealth tax. There should be no tax on small holders, a very small tax on those with more wealth, and so on. This is necessary for tax fairness, to provide some compensation for the extra wealth that high wealth generates, and to make the social investments in education and other areas necessary to develop the economy as a whole.
Finally, P warns that conditions for ordinary middle class people are getting worse and worse. People are turning to the left and to the right, abandoning the political middle ground. P clearly believes that the left is vastly preferable to the right, but he fears that, if the business influenced governments, including the nominally socialist governments of men like Hollande, keep pushing down hard on the Greeks, Italians, Spaniards, and others to pay their debts and be fiscally "responsible", the left governments of those countries will fail and the hard right will prevail, breaking up the European Union.
These essays, or blog entries, or whatever we call them, are a lot like those of Paul Krugman in the New York Times. They had a similar liberal point of view, considering that the growing inequality in Europe, and the even worse growing inequality in the U.S. and U.K., are damaging our society and making it steadily worse. Krugman is a bit more focused on politics and P a bit more on the underlying economics, but I think they are in much more agreement than disagreement. Although P used non-technical language and hardly any mathematics, I found the material was somewhat over my head. I am in no position to evaluate his arguments. But in spite of that, I think I was able to follow and appreciate them and to understand most of what he was arguing for.
Is he right? Is growing inequality a threat to society? Is greater economic integration necessary in Europe? Is a wealth tax part of the solution? Should there be an internationally agreed upon business tax plan and wealth tax plan to keep the rich from moving their money to anywhere that will escape taxation and to keep them from sucking up all the money in the world? I'm not qualified to say. I can't say that he proved it to me because I'm not qualified to evaluate his statements, but I certainly lean more towards supporting him than his opponents, a lot more. Assuming that he is right, he has helped me to understand the issues.
Is his plan practical? Is there a chance of its adoption?
As things currently stand I'd say that the answer is no. In the U.S., the only important politicians I know that might support it are Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Conceivably Obama would support it, but he's practical and realizes that it can't pass through Congress. I doubt very much if Hillary or Bill Clinton would support it.
If a true leftist movement gained headway in the U.S., the right would pull out a lot more stops than they have to fight it. Money would pour into the campaigns. Elected officials would be awash in it. Dirty tricks of every description would be initiated.
I don't think that means that we shouldn't advocate for Picketty's proposed changes and educate people about it. The 2016 Sanders campaign proved that there are many times more people in our country that would support such a leftist program than anyone imagined. Sanders brought it all out of the closet, and awakened the young people of the country to try to make a serious change. And what alternative do we have if we don't try?
| Author | Ambler, Eric |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Vintage Books |
| Copyright Date | 1940 |
| Number of Pages | 288 |
| Extras | About the author |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | August 2016 |
An English armaments engineer named Graham, I don't recall any first name, goes to Istanbul, presumably in early 1940, on a technical mission to help the Turks upgrade the armaments on some warships. There he meets his company's representative in Istanbul, Kopeikin, who takes him to a night club where he meets the dancers Jose and Josette. Josette is quite nice and good looking and she comes on to Graham. After a few hours at the nightclub he returns to his hotel. He opens the door to his room and is immediately shot at. One shot grazes his hand but he is otherwise unhurt while the shooter escapes out the window. When G calls Kopeikin, K calls Colonel Haki, head of the Turkish secret police. Haki explains that this was not a robber, as G keeps insisting it must have been. It was a professional killer working for a German agent named Moeller. They tried to kill him in order to prevent or slow down the upgrade of the Turkish ships. Haki insists that G cancel his planned train trip back to France and then England, and go by ship to Genoa because the Germans knew he'd be on the train and would kill him on the way.
Naturally, the German agent figures out that G must have gone on the ship and gets aboard, with the killer joining them in Athens. Over the course of the journey, G spends some time with Josette, who is also on the ship with Jose, an undercover Turkish agent named Kuvetli attempts to protect G but is himself murdered, G's gun is stolen, an elderly German on the ship is revealed as Moeller and tells G that he must come with him to a seaside resort for six weeks or else he'll be killed. Before Kuvetli dies however he explains to G that the offer is bogus. Moeller just wants to get G out of Genoa in order to murder him more privately. G procures another gun from a French passenger, goes with Moeller, the killer and a couple of others and, when they stop in the woods to kill him, pulls his gun, kills the killer, bails out of the car, and fires a shot into the gas tank, causing it to blow up in flames and kill Moeller and the other two.
In a denouement G meets Josette in Paris. We think perhaps that he will spend a week with her there. Jose tells him it will cost 2,000 francs. G gives Jose the money to mollify Josette, who was nice to him, and heads for England without staying with her.
The book must have been published before May of 1940. There was no mention of the German invasion of France or of the Italian entry into the war in June. It was still possible to board a train in Istanbul and, after several transfers, arrive in Paris and go on to England. The war still seemed rather abstract to an English writer.
The character of Graham was problematic for me for a couple of reasons. He was inordinately stubborn and pig-headed. After Haki explained that he was the victim of an attempted murder, G continues to insist that that is ridiculous. It must have been an ordinary robbery attempt. At a number of points in the book G fails to face the truth and it is not really until Kuvetli's death that he becomes fully invested in saving himself. The relationship with Josette was also problematic. There is no actual sex but there is the promise of it in Paris. Yet G is presented as a happily married man with an attractive wife and a child. There is no explanation of why he would be interested in a Hungarian dancer. Neither great literature nor very convincing, the book is nevertheless an easy and entertaining read.
Ambler was already a successful and professional writer. Later he also became a Hollywood screenwriter and this, as well as a number of his other books, was made into a movie.
| Author | Arnald, Jan |
|---|---|
| Author | Dahl, Arne |
| Original Language | se |
| Translators | Nunnally, Tiina |
| Publication | Audible.com |
| Copyright Date | 1999 |
| Number of Pages | 352 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | August 2016 |
The book opens with Detective Paul Hjelm walking into a hostage standoff in which an Albanian with a shotgun is threatening to kill hostages unless the order to deport him is revoked. Hjelm pulls a gun and shoots him in the shoulder. He is threatened with firing and legal action by his boss but the news media make him into a hero and his furious boss can't touch him. The media also brings him to the attention of a new, special crime unit being formed in Stockholm to investigate the murders of two wealthy businessmen. The rest of the book is about that investigation.
The investigators followed a number of leads based on what they can find that links the murdered men, soon including a third man. They had some unsavory sex habits but the most important connection appeared to be that all sat on boards of some of the same corporations and all were involved in finance and banking. It seemed that they might have been linked to the Russian mafia. One or more of the companies they were associated with did business in the former USSR and were now being extorted by Russian gangsters. It was thought that they did not cooperate and were now being murdered for their resistance. However in the end it turns out that a low ranking bank employee had been laid off as a result of poor business decisions by the bank, in spite of his good record. When a bank robber comes in while the employee is alone, an actual Russian mafia man, the employee, a darts champion, kills the man with a well aimed dart into the eyeball. He then takes the man's gun and, later, begins his rampage against the bank.
Hjelm and the others on the 'A' team finally crack the case, confront the killer, wound him, and arrest him. The authorities decide to keep the 'A' team together - setting the stage for sequels to the book.
The abstract above could describe a very standard, uninspired and conventional murder mystery. However it's really more than that. There are more well rounded characters than we might expect and there are unusual events. One of the characters, a real tough guy, goes to Estonia to outsmart an Estonian cop with links to the mafia. He is himself outsmarted and literally nailed to the floor by the Russians. They are careful only to cause him severe pain, not to permanently disable him, but he comes back from Estonia a changed man, no longer so tough and self-confident. Hjelm and the others live for the case and work on it around the clock. His marriage, already rocky, falls apart under the strain.
It's a complex book with very convincing police procedure and very convincing relationships among the cops. I was impressed.
"Arne Dahl" is the pen name of Jan Arnald. There is only one author but I listed both names to facilitate searching on either one.
| Author | Lamb, Harold |
|---|---|
| Publication | Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran and Company |
| Copyright Date | 1931 |
| Number of Pages | 156 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| When Read | August 2016 |
Sir Hugh, a Frankish knight, is the leader of 800 European soldiers working for Emperor Theodore of Constantinople on a crusade to Jerusalem. However Theodore has other plans. He leads them first to the town of Antioch held by the Sultan Kai-Kosru. He causes Sir Hugh to be dressed up as if he were the emperor so that any arrows would be directed at him rather than Theodore, then sends the Franks in first. The Franks are not supported by the Greeks. They fight desperately and tear the heart out of the Sultan's forces but are mostly killed with the wounded Hugh carried off and defended by another Christian soldier. Later, they see the Greeks moving up to finish off the enemy but also to kill off any still living Franks left on the field. Hugh is captured by an Arab prince and carried off with his men in hopes of ransoming him - not realizing that Theodore just wants him dead.
Hugh and the Arab chieftain begin a trip together around the Middle East. They run afoul of the Persian king and the Arab is killed but then a large detachment of Mongols arrive fresh from Genghis Khan's camp. They are pursuing the Persian king in a relentless day and night pursuit, slowly gaining on him. Hugh is helpful to them and they come to respect him and take him in tow in the pursuit right to the bitter end when they arrive at a fortified town and storm it so quickly that the defenders are overwhelmed before they realize that this is a serious attack. The king makes off in a boat and Hugh goes after him, finding him dead in the bottom of the boat, perhaps of physical and nervous exhaustion or a heart attack. Hugh is now held in very high regard by the Mongols. When they get their new orders to continue to the West to the court of Theodore, Hugh goes with them and leads a small party to negotiate with the Georgians of the Caucasus, the first Christian nation the Mongols have encountered, but they have no interest in fighting them, wishing only to go through their country.
The Georgians won't let them through. They kill a couple of the Mongols and imprison Hugh, but he has won the heart of the beautiful Georgian princess. There is a battle in which the overconfident Georgians are severely outsmarted and outfought. The Princess is carried off by the Greek ambassador to the court of Theodore, and Hugh goes in pursuit. In the end Theodore is poisoned, Hugh saves the girl in the nick of time, and the Mongols ransack the Byzantine emperor's palace in a quick raid. Hugh rides off with the girl.
Lamb was an unusual man. He devoted his youth to reading adventure stories (maybe that's not so unusual, I did too) and to learning about the East. He is said to have learned French, Latin, Persian, Arabic and some Manchu-Tartar. On the internal evidence of the story, he knew at least a little Greek as well. He became a very successful writer of adventure stories, popular histories, and later, a Hollywood screen writer.
All the elements of popular historical romance were present. My first impression was that I was reading something inspired by Walter Scott, as for example in The Talisman. Lamb had the adventure/romantic elements down pat and demonstrated the same kind of erudition that Scott had. The book was perfectly satisfying in that regard. However it was in his treatment of the Mongols that Lamb seemed to me to present something truly original. He saw them as men of incredible hardness, courage, determination, skill, and discipline. It was something of a revelation to me of how Genghis Khan was able to conquer such seemingly powerful opponents. In the storming of the town he has them basically running up the walls using ropes to get a few men on the top who held on long enough for more men to get up the wall, jump down, and open the gate - all regardless of heavy casualties that might have had other armies recoiling from the walls. In the end, of course, their casualties were much lighter than they would have been had they failed and tried multiple times. In the battle with the Georgians they use the kind of strategy that only a disciplined army with skilled leadership could have employed. They drew the Georgian cavalry to them with a feigned panicky retreat, then surrounded and destroyed them. Then they attacked the flank from across a frozen river that they knew how to test for ice strength and how to cross quickly but with minimum pressure on the ice. It was all impressive and convincing.
This is the kind of book written for adolescents. Books like these were probably more popular in the 30's when television didn't exist and the historical east appeared to be more mysterious and romantic than it is seen to be today.
There's enough of an adolescent left in me to enjoy it too, or maybe I enjoyed it in spite of my adolescence having long gone.
| Author | Sutherland, Ian |
|---|---|
| Publication | Smashwords (self-publishing) |
| Copyright Date | 2014 |
| Number of Pages | 86 |
| Extras | Excerpt from the follow-on novel, Invasion of Privacy. |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| Keywords | Computer science |
| When Read | August 2016 |
Dr. Robert Moorcroft, the chief executive of a biomedical firm, receives a phone call purporting to be from a UK government security office. The caller tells Moorcroft to just think of him as "Mr. Smith". He then tells him that his company has been penetrated by Chinese hackers who have information about the new Myosotis project underway at the company. The project is a new Alzheimer's drug upon which depends the entire future of the company. The caller recommends that the firm hire someone from outside to do a penetration test for the purpose of hardening security. The executive asks for recommendations and is given the names of three security companies that can help.
Moorcroft calls the first name on the list and gets Brody Taylor, a white hat hacker who agrees to perform the test. The company network is locked up tight but Brody succeeds in getting enough information from Linked-in, the company help desk, Facebook, and other sources to eventually get inside the offices and plant a few flash drives in bathroom stalls that contain a virus that captures userids and passwords and sends them to Brody so that he can get in and prove that it is possible to get in, in spite of the arrogant head of security who insists it's impossible, but appears most embarrassingly in Brody's video taken with a miniature camera in his hat, holding the door to the most secure zone open to him as Brody goes in with a bucket and mop.
There is a secondary story. A pretty girl, deeply engaged in an animal rights organization that is picketing the company, falls in love with Brody and he with her. However he has lied to her and manipulated her and is unable to extricate himself from the lies. When he finally tells her, she dumps him in anger and tears.
All of the steps in the social engineering needed to get into the company are explained, though the risks Brody takes are not as well considered as I expected them to be and I'm not sure how likely they were to actually work. However we do learn that the mysterious "government official" who called Moorcroft was actually Brody, and all three of the "security companies" he recommended led to Brody - a pretty effective and convincing strategy.
A story like this has to convince me that it is technically correct. Sutherland didn't overwhelmingly convince me, but he wasn't too bad. I first thought that the government official was actually himself a hacker, and that turned out to be the case, though not in the way I expected. But I was not very convinced by Moorcroft's willingness to follow the advice of the unknown "Mr. Smith" and hire a penetration tester without any investigation of the man or his company, and to not tell his own head of security, even if Smith's advice was to not tell him.
The love story was actually the hardest thing for me to deal with. I don't like lying in general. I could accept it as part of a security test, but not in a romantic relationship. That lowered my esteem for the main character who was, I think, intended to have the reader's support and sympathy. I'm always a little taken aback by authors who make lying a normal part of the lives of their heroes, but at least Brody was ashamed of what he was doing. Perhaps I'm a naive fellow, not well suited to read some kinds of stories that might actually be better than I take them to be.
| Author | Connelly, Michael |
|---|---|
| Publication | Little, Brown and Company, 2015 |
| Number of Pages | 416 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | September 2016 |
In this 18th or 20th book in the series (I've seen two orderings), Hieronymous "Harry" Bosch has been forcibly retired from the Los Angeles Police Department. He has launched a legal appeal, represented by his half brother, Mickey Haller, the "Lincoln Lawyer" of another of Connelly's books. But Mickey has another use for Harry. Mickey's regular private detective, Cisco, is hospitalized after being run off the road while riding his motorcycle. Mickey needs Harry to help him defend former gang member Da'Quan Foster who is accused of a vicious rape and murder. Harry is uninterested, even repelled. He considers working for the defense "crossing" to the dark side. He thinks that helping a rapist and murderer to go free is against every principle of his entire life. But Mickey insists that the man really is innocent and Harry, although he doesn't believe it, is eventually persuaded to at least look into the facts of the case. His justification to himself is that, if the man is innocent, then there is a rapist and murderer on the loose and Harry intends to catch him.
Harry picks up the threads of the case one by one, pulling each one carefully in and building up a more and more complete picture of the crime. Gradually, he establishes that the accused, whose semen was found on and in the dead woman, really was innocent. The real killers were two crooked cops who also killed another man (a homosexual prostitute patronized by Foster and used by the dirty cops to collect Foster's semen.) Over the course of the story, they kill three more potential witnesses against them and attempt to kill Harry, who is a little too experienced and prepared and manages to save himself, shooting and wounding one of the cops in the process. The other killer is killed by another cop and friend of Harry who saw the killer's car parked outside Harry's house and went in to check on him.
At the end of the story, even though everything has been revealed, the L.A. prosecutor still attempts to hold Foster for trial. Mickey Haller has to use his prodigious courtroom skills to prove to the judge that the dirty cops, Ellis and Long were the real killers.
I thought this was as good as any Harry Bosch novel that Connelly has produced. The story was believable, the detective and legal work both brilliant and convincing, the character of Bosch very well done. I don't know how easy it is to sustain one's interest and enthusiasm for 20 books in a single series, but it seems to me that Connelly has clearly done it.
At the end of the story Harry is at a crossroads. He has angered many of his police colleagues who treat him as a pariah who has crossed over to the side of the slimy defense lawyers who will use every trick to free their criminal clients. Will he win his case against the LAPD and return to police work, and if he does, will he be accepted? Will he continue to work for Mickey Haller, and if he does, will he help free men whom he believes to be criminals? The future is open for this detective. He may even stay in retirement and work on rebuilding the 1950 Harley Davidson that has been left to him.
| Author | Boll, Heinrich |
|---|---|
| Original Language | German |
| Translators | Bowles, Patrick |
| Publication | |
| Copyright Date | 1962 |
| Number of Pages | 304 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | September 2016 |
On September 6, 1958, Dr. Robert Faehmel, architectural estimator, calls his secretary Leonore and complains about her giving someone his location outside his short list of people allowed to contact him when he is out of the office, namely his father and mother, his son and daughter, and one Mr. Schrella. So begins Boll's masterpiece about a German family that was devastated by "the Host of the Beast" under the previous regime and, even today in 1958, is living with men in power in the town who were in power at the time and participated in the persecution of the Faehmels and other people in the town.
The grandfather, Privy Councilor Heinrich Faehmel, came to town as a young man, set himself up in an office, was polite and kind to everyone, married, worked diligently, had four children, and won the contract to build a new church and monastery for St. Anthony's. Two of his children died young and a third, Otto, joined the Beast and was killed in Kiev in the war. His wife, angry at the Beast for the persecution of her son Robert, her daughter-in-law Edith Schrella's brother, and many other fine young and older men of the town who were sometimes imprisoned or killed for petty, cruel, and self-important reasons, kept saying that she needed to get a gun, get a gun. She was taken to an asylum. Robert's wife Edith, a kind and saintly young woman, died young and left him with Joseph and Ruth. Joseph, aged 22 in 1958, also became an architect.
September 6, 1958 is grandfather Heinrich's 80th birthday. There will be a private, family celebration for him. Each person brings his own baggage to the affair - Heinrich, the builder of St. Anthony's and patriarch who hoped to have seven children and seven times seven grandchildren but only has two; his son Robert, an expert on statics and dynamics who became a demolition expert in the army but only blew up German buildings, never Russian ones, and who blew up St. Anthony's after convincing his fool of a general that they needed to clear a field of fire; Robert's son Joseph, himself now an architect involved in rebuilding St. Anthony's but planning to quit; and Heinrich's wife, Robert's mother, and Joseph and Ruth's grandmother, who stole a pistol from the gardener at the asylum and now came to the celebration with the intent of shooting the Beast at the Veterans Parade scheduled for the same day, and does indeed shoot him, wounding the guy on the next balcony of the Prince Heinrich Hotel where the celebration is occurring, where Heinrich has come every day for breakfast of "A pot of coffee, one with three cups, please. Toast, two slices of rye bread, with butter, marmalade, one boiled egg and paprika cheese," and where Robert comes every day at half-past nine to play billiards until eleven while exchanging stories with the handsome and dutiful young bellman Hugo, who is adopted into the family on that day and made an heir of grandfather Heinrich and father Robert.
It is an extraordinary story, filled with unspoken meaning. The words "Nazi" and "Hitler" never appear anywhere in the novel. There is only the Host of the Beast whose representatives, Vacano or old Wobbly, a gym teacher who persecuted the students when Robert and Schrella were in school and Netlinger, a student leader of the persecutors, are still big shots in town
The story is told in intermingling streams of narration, sometimes emanating from one character but then switching to another, with no immediate indication to the reader of who the new narrator is. The reader must pay attention and piece things together, figuring out who each person is and how he or she relates to the others. It is a sophisticated book, not easy to read but tremendously rewarding.
There are instances of violence. The boys at school throw balls at Schrella's face during a game of "rounders", and frequently catch and beat him. He and Robert are both whipped by old Wobbly and Netlinger with barbed wire whips. The two survive only by escaping to Holland from which Schrella goes on to England and Robert is permitted to come home only on condition that he go into the army where his mathematical and engineering skills are employed in demolitions. However the tone of the book is not violent and in the perspective of September 6, 1958, almost all the violence is past though never forgotten and old Mrs. Faehmel finally got a gun and released herself from the asylum to which she had retreated.
I was deeply impressed by this book. It was the story of a non-political Catholic family, much like Boll's own, oppressed and offended by the horrors of Nazi Germany, unable to resist except privately and symbolically and with no effect on reality until Robert blows up St. Anthony's and laments that the cathedral of St. Severin's escaped his attention.
This was the third of Boll's novels that I read. There are at least several more and, time permitting, I may read one or more of them.
| Author | Scott, Desmond |
|---|---|
| Publication | London: Leo Cooper |
| Copyright Date | 1982 |
| Number of Pages | 176 |
| Extras | photos, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Autobiography |
| Keywords | World War II; Aviation |
| When Read | September 2016 |
At age 26 Scott, a farmer's son from New Zealand, was the youngest Group Captain in the RAF in World War II. After training in New Zealand he arrived in England in August 1940 and was made a fighter pilot flying Hurricanes. He rose through the ranks, had a staff job and, by the winter of 1942, he was posted to a Hawker Typhoon squdron. He became squadron commander, then wing commander, then Group Captain. This book only concerns his service with Typhoons. He later wrote another short book One More Hour, about his service in Hurricanes and with more comments about the air war in general.
Scott and his pilots had a number of battles and victories against the Luftwaffe in which his men were escorting bombers or ground attack planes, or were themselves engaged in ground attack, and were attacked by the Luftwaffe. All of these battles took place at low altitudes where the Typhoon could fight Me-109's and Fw-190's on more or less equal terms. Above 10,000 feet they were too slow to compete against the (I presume) supercharged German fighters. However most of the Typhoon combat was against targets on the ground or at sea and the great majority of all losses were to ground fire. Initially, attacks against ground targets, ships, E-boats, etc., were made with the plane's four 20 mm cannons. Then came "bombphoons" - Typhoons carrying up to 2,000 total pounds of bombs, one bomb under each wing. Later still, by the time of the Normandy invasion, they were carrying eight rockets, four under each wing. Each rocket packed a 60 pound warhead (including casing and explosive) capable of destroying a tank or many other kinds of target. Even the cannons must have been pretty potent since E-boats were sunk with no other weapons.
Scott must have killed a lot of Germans and, in turn, the Germans killed many of his men. Scott believed, and offered some pretty significant evidence, that it was Allied air superiority that won the war in the west. He argued that the strategic bombing of transportation targets - petroleum refineries and tanks, railroads, supply dumps, bridges, truck parks and convoys, shipping, and so on, severely degraded German military capability. Many of the reinforcements of tanks, guns and supplies were destroyed from the air before they ever got into battle. In addition, close air support of ground troops often destroyed enemy artillery, tanks, and strongpoints of all kinds, enabling ground forces to win battles that they otherwise could not have won. By the time of the invasion, the Germans had lost all ability to move during the hours of daylight anywhere within many miles of the front. In the long hours of daylight in the summer of 1944, their mobility was severely restricted (and moving at night, on bombed roads, without lights, must have been pretty difficult too.) Surprisingly to me however, he opposed most of the use of heavy bombers in support of ground offensives, believing that they could do more good attacking targets in Germany. He was very critical of Bernard Montgomery who he, Scott, thought made too frequent use of heavy bombers and made too many decisions too far from the front, as for example in Operation Market Garden and in the assignment of RAF units to airfields, that were not practical. He even said that it was the build up of the air force in North Africa that won the North African campaign that Montgomery took the credit for.
Scott continued right up to the end of the war, flying from airfields in Germany at the end. Fine pilots were killed again and again all around him but, in spite of a huge number of missions, his only serious wound occurred in an accident while riding a horse.
Memoirs like this were written in great numbers from the 1950's up through the 1990's. The last ones are probably already done by now as only a few of the veterans of the war are still alive. This was a very fine example of this kind of book and I'm grateful to Scott for having taken the trouble to write it. I'm grateful to all of the fine men of the Allied forces who gave their youth and often their lives, to defeat Germany and Japan.
Scott commented a number of times on Americans. Mostly he was complimentary and particularly so of Dwight Eisenhower, whom he met on two occasions. He wrote of him, "Most of the British generals I met during my time in England were as stiff and unbending as the silly little sticks they carried. Eisenhower’s authority, humility and broad friendly smile made you feel when meeting him that you had made his day. He was well versed in the activities of our wing, and if there were aspects that were not quite clear to him, he would not leave the subject until it was fully explained."
Some other Americans were not as much appreciated. He and his pilots risked their lives to save a group of American airmen that they found floating on rubber rafts in the English Channel. Other rescued airmen would always send thank you notes, but not these guys. Also, he or his pilots were attacked more than once by Thunderbolts or Mustangs flown by relatively inexperienced American pilots who had not mastered the art of aircraft recognition. Some of his men were shot down. However he did say that, in general, he liked the Americans very much.
Scott briefly mentioned an incident in which he came across an Fw-190 in RAF colors and practiced dogfighting the pilot. He never learned who the pilot was. I suspect this may have been Leonard Thorne, whose book A Very Unusual Air War I read this past June.
| Author | Cook, Robin |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Signet |
| Copyright Date | 1976 |
| Number of Pages | 309 |
| Extras | Afterward by the author |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| When Read | September 2016 |
The story opens with 23 year old Nancy Greenly arriving at (fictional) Boston Memorial Hospital for a DNC to treat her persistent vaginal bleeding. The simple and routine operation appears to be going smoothly. The anesthesiologist is experienced and competent. But something goes wrong and Nancy never wakes up and is, in fact, brain dead.
Third year medical student Susan Wheeler begins her first clinical studies at Boston Memorial. She sees the comatose Nancy and is disturbed by the sight of a healthy woman the same age as herself, killed by a hospital treatment with no explanation about what happened. Later she meets a healthy 30 year old architect in the hospital for a knee operation. He asks the beautiful Susan for a date and she accepts but he too never wakes up from his operation and is declared brain dead. Susan then goes on a mission to find out what happened to these people. With zero cooperation from the chief doctors in the hospital, and explicit orders to mind her own business, which she ignores, she determines that a dozen people have died similar unexplained deaths in just the last year. After much digging, she discovers that all the deaths occurred in operating room 8, and figures out that the patients are being murdered with carbon monoxide injected into the oxygen line. With the seeming aid of Dr. Howard Stark, chief of surgery, Susan goes to another hospital specializing in intensive care where she discovers that people are being put into brain dead comas at Boston Memorial in order to fulfill illegal orders for body parts sent out from the intensive care hospital. In the process she is almost raped and killed by a professional killer, again almost killed by the staff at the intensive care hospital, and when she reports to Dr. Stark what she has learned finds him to be the head of the conspiracy who then tries to kill her. The book ends as her friend and sometime lover Dr. Mark Bellows bursts into the operating room with the police as Stark is sewing up Susan after removing her appendix. We don't know if Bellows arrived in time to save her or not.
At the end of the story, Cook, himself a doctor, explains that the book is fiction but we don't know if it has ever occurred or not. He cites an advertisement that he saw in the San Gabriel (California) Tribune, May 9, 1968 that said: "Need a Transplant? Man will sell any portion of body for financial remuneration to person needing an operation. Write box 1211-630, Covina". Cook adds: "The advertiser did not specify what organ or organs, or even whose body they were to come from."
Cook was a pretty young doctor himself at the time he wrote this, his first novel. The treatment and travails of medical students, interns, and residents must have been very fresh in his mind. He paints a picture of a very hierarchical institution in which shit rolls very decidedly downhill. Superciliousness and arrogance are routine. Big shot doctors have temper tantrums and throw stuff on the floor when a nurse or a lowly intern or resident screws up. Male chauvinism is pervasive and the young Susan Wheeler is at the receiving end of both condescension and sexual advances. The bigger shots are incensed that a medical student, and a woman at that, would ever question their judgment or presume to think that she could solve a problem that they have failed to solve. It's not a pretty picture.
The book was a best seller when it was released and was made into a big Hollywood movie. Cook was catapulted into the front rank of popular American authors.
I suspected from early on that the motive for the murders was the sale of body parts, but it's very possible that the reason for my suspicion, namely that I seemed to recall that there have been scandals about this, may actually have stemmed from this book. I think Cook was the guy who brought the concept to the attention of the public, where it acquired a life of its own.
The writing was reasonably good for a first time author. I was particularly impressed with his handling of male chauvinism in the profession, something that may or may not, I don't know which, have been popularized before this novel. I also liked his handling of Mark Bellows, a character who came off as a bit of a jerk, more concerned with his professional career than with the perspective of his patients but who, when push came to shove, nevertheless proved to be a sympathetic human being.
One thing that didn't work too well for me was Cook's misdirection about the identity of the real killer. He presents us with a couple of real asshole doctors who criticize Susan's inquiry and get her thrown out of the hospital while making Stark look like something of a good and reasonable man. Had there been one asshole and several good guys, the misdirection would have worked better. However none of this really detracts from the book. It was not great literature but it was a very fine first effort and a pretty good medical thriller.
| Author | Hirsi Ali, Ayaan, 1969- |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Harper Collins |
| Copyright Date | 2015 |
| Number of Pages | 288 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Religion |
| Keywords | Islam; Terrorism |
| When Read | September 2016 |
Hirsi Ali discusses the roots of Islamic extremism - vituperation and violence directed at anyone who doesn't agree with the religious views of the extremists. She locates those roots in Islam itself and argues for a reformation of Islam somewhat analogous to the Reformation of Catholic Christianity in 16th century Europe.
She divides the Muslim population into three broad groups. The extremists or fanatics whom she sometimes calls "Medina Muslims" because they reflect the state of Islam during Muhammad's warlike period at Medina; the reformers who want to turn Islam into a religion of tolerance; and those in the middle who lean towards personal tolerance but have no ideology other than the five main principles of Islam which push them towards the radical view. These principles are: 1) Unquestioning reverence for the holy scriptures of Quran and Haddith. 2) Belief in the afterlife and the transitory insignificance of life on earth. 3) The superiority of Sharia Law over all man made laws. 4) The necessity of commanding right and forbidding wrong, leading to each person disciplining both himself and all those around him. 5) The obligation to wage holy war, jihad, against apostates and unbelievers.
H says that these principles are baked into Islam. They aren't a "fundamentalist" interpretation that differs from mainstream interpretation, they're at the heart of the religion itself. The intolerance of other religions, and maybe other laws (I'm not sure about that), didn't get into the religion until after 622 AD, in the Medina period when Muhammad was fighting his wars against the unbelievers, but they're in there now. Islamic scholars have long (for over a thousand years) resolved the many contradictions in the Quran by saying that the later revelations "abrogated" the earlier ones. Allah revealed partial truths to Muhammad in the beginning and then revealed the full truths later, after the incipient movement had grown to the point that the people were ready to receive the full truth. It is the later, war like principles that trump the earlier peaceful and tolerant ones.
Jihad is the terrifying part of this religion, but the other principles reinforce it. The first principle forbids Muslims from questioning any of this. The second principle tells Muslims that death is not normally a significant event but death in the service of holy war is something special. It guarantees that the martyr will be admitted to heaven and is the only such guarantee. The third principle sanctions the breaking of civil laws where they conflict with Sharia law, as for example the murder of young girls who have "dishonored" their parents. The fourth principle turns, or attempts to turn, every Muslim into an enforcer of the religion, often competing to see who can punish wrongdoers.
It's not a pretty picture. H believes that this fundamentalist interpretation of Islam is fully justified by the text of the Quran and in order to escape from its clutches, Muslims are going to have to reform the religion in something like the way that Christians reformed their religion, tossing out the fire and brimstone and the intolerance, even where it is sanctioned by scripture. It's a tall order.
After reading this book I also looked through another book, Islam and Terrorism by Mark A. Gabriel, "Former professor of Islamic history at Al-Azhar University, Cairo, Egypt." It is substantially in agreement with Hirsi Ali's account. If these authors are right, which may mean that Reza Aslan is either wrong or misleading (see No god but God), then we need to modify our "politically correct" statements that Islamic extremism is an aberration of the religion, not a fundamental part of Islam.
Prior to reading the book I had thought, or at least hoped, that the violence and intolerance truly was an aberration and that groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS were collections of psychopaths, mostly young men who didn't really know much about Islam but were personally alienated to the point of wanting revenge on the entire world for their own personal misfortunes. A group like ISIS, with its propaganda videos of shootings and beheadings and images of young men with beards and guns marching in step and showing their macho prowess, and maybe too its reports of captive women and girls handed out to warriors as sex slaves, all seemed like a wonderful empowerment. If they could persuade themselves that their martyrdom would be followed by domination of 72 dark-eyed virgins per martyr in paradise, that was even better.
I should think the key idea that must be refuted is the belief in the infallible truth of the Islamic scriptures and/or the principle of abrogation that the Islamic teachers apply to resolving their many contradictions. But how do you do that? I think someone like me could do it with some young students in a classroom, but not to all, and we can't get them into a classroom if they don't want to be there. And if teachers of rationalist philosophy are not only ignored and reviled, but also threatened and murdered and their students punished, what hope is there for success?
Richard Dawkins' theory of memes applies with a vengeance here. It is as if Islam has infected the brains of millions of people and taken them over. It has evolved, at a very early stage, ironclad defense mechanisms for suppressing resistance.
Are we now, in the twenty-first century, in the age of advancing science and technology and secular democracy, condemned to re-fighting religious wars? The response that comes to my mind is, God forbid.
The Southern Poverty Law Center attacks Hirsi Ali as "an anti-Muslim activist" and "a Muslim basher". I donate $1,000 per year to SPLC. It's my favorite charity, but I think they're wrong in this case. However, there's no chance of my changing anyone's mind there.
| Author | Meyer, Michael |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Bloomsbury Press |
| Copyright Date | 2015 |
| Number of Pages | 384 |
| Extras | maps, notes, bibliography |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History; Travel |
| Keywords | China |
| When Read | September 2016 |
Meyer (no relation to me that I know of) learned Chinese and went to China in 1995 as a member of the Peace Corps. He was 23 years old. Two years later he applied for a post-Corps job in Beijing as an English teacher, was hired, and was given the Chinese name "Heroic Eastern Plumblossom", which didn't appeal to him at all. He also met a Chinese girl and brought her to the U.S. to marry her. Then they moved back to China where she went to work as some sort of well paid lawyer or business person in a multinational firm in Hong Kong while he went to Manchuria to write a book about that province, living in a town called Wasteland, the original family home of his wife. He gives no details of his mission or his sponsors on this writing project until the end of the book.
He goes everywhere, meeting everyone who will meet with him, always living in cheap places and traveling economy class via public transportation. He reports on the changing economy of the region. The farmers of Wasteland have mostly turned over the rights to their farmland (they can't actually sell it because land is not privately owned in China) to a company formed by two local guys, one of whom, not surprisingly, was the leading Communist Party or government (I'm not sure which) official in the area. They received a rental like payment each year from the company. Accepting incentives from the company, many gave up their houses for demolition and conversion to farmland and moved into the apartment building put up by the company. They were given three years of free rent and got to live in a building with central heating and indoor plumbing, both absent from the traditional one story homes that they left. I didn't see anything about what kind of rent they might be charged when the three years ran out. The great majority of farmers accepted the incentives. Young people didn't want to be farmers. Of the older people, some had had enough of the hard, backbreaking labor and others had had enough of going out to the outhouse in freezing weather, then coming back to a freezing house. The modern world was catching up to rural China and the people, even if they felt they were being exploited, were choosing modern life.
Meyer also visited historians, librarians, managers of the company, agronomy experts, and all sorts of people all over the area. He found that most people were focused on the future and few knew much of anything about the past. The historical landmarks, buildings, books, and so on of Manchuria were disappearing, most had already disappeared. It was hard work finding anyone who even cared.
Meyer's account is impressive. He is a conscientious worker, putting himself out with very little restraint to meet people who can tell him things that he didn't already know. He and his wife, each absorbed in his or her own career, gave up the intimacy of ordinary married life to pursue their work a thousand miles apart from each other and mainly communicating via Skype. They also postponed having a child until they were in their late 30's, a fact commented upon by virtually everyone Meyer met - all meddling in personal family affairs in what appears to be a typical, or perhaps "traditional" is a better term, Chinese manner.
I don't know if I have the language, writing, or interpersonal skills that Michael Meyer (or should I say "Heroic Eastern Plumblossom") had to write such a book, but I surely don't have the fortitude to give up the love, sex and companionship of married life in the way he did for the sake of writing a book about Manchuria. The Chinese became accustomed to married life apart. It was common under the communist system of work assignments. It was also common even in the new Chinese capitalist system initiated by Deng Xiao Ping for parents to leave their children in the country in the care of grandparents while they went to the city to earn money. But foregoing having a child at all was pretty alien to them and seemed like a great sacrifice.
So by most accounts in both American and Chinese culture, Meyer gave up a lot for this book, but he did a good job with it.
| Author | Burke, James Lee |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014 |
| Copyright Date | 2014 |
| Number of Pages | 448 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | September 2016 |
16 year old Weldon Holland meets Bonnie and Clyde as they camp in the woods near his house in Texas in 1936. He is much taken by Bonnie's beauty and sweetness, but when someone in their car throws something at his grandfather, he fires a shot from grandfather's pistol at their car. It is a momentous event for him and is often related in the rest of the story.
Weldon lives with his emotionally disturbed and fragile mother and his grandfather on a farm that is just large enough for them to live what we might a middle class life. His father disappeared years before, his whereabouts unknown. His grandfather, a former Texas Ranger who has apprehended or killed some important outlaws, has become the father figure in Weldon's life, but he, the grandfather, has sent his daughter for electric shock treatments - only prevented when Weldon interferes and demands that his grandfather prevent the treatment.
The tale of W's teenage years ends then and the story resumes in the Ardennes forest in 1944-5. W is now a lieutenant in the army. He and Sergeant Hershel Pine are in a unit overrun by the German offensive. They are the only survivors. They escape eastward into Germany and eventually wind up in a concentration camp just evacuated by the SS guards. Hearing something in a pile of bodies, they pull Rosita Bernstein, still alive, from under the pile and save her, hiding out in a farm house belonging to an anti-Nazi German couple who feed and house them until the Americans arrive. Rosita is taken away but W, as soon as he is free, tracks her down and pressures her into marrying him and returning to Texas with him where he and Hershel go into the welded oil pipe business, winning contract after contract to lay cross country and undersea pipelines in the booming oil fields of Texas and Louisiana. But there's a problem. Someone begins to pressure them to sell the business. It could be Roy Wiseheart, a wealthy oil man with a questionable past as a pilot / war hero of the Pacific, or it could be his father Dalton Wiseheart, a man who is known for unscrupulous dealing.
Bad things happen, one after another. Hershel's wife Linda Gail is recruited by a shady fellow to start a career as a movie actress. She turns out to be an outstanding actress, but succombs to the advances of the shady fellow, and to those from Roy, cheating on her husband, whom she deeply respects but does not really love. A crooked cop harrasses Rosita, arresting her on a trumped up traffic violation, molesting her, then falsely charging her for assaulting him, resisting arrest, and so on. W thinks Brandon Wiseheart must be behind that but he can't tell for sure. When the cop comes after Rosita at home and attempts to physically assault W's grandfather, the old man pulls a gun and may be about to murder the cop when W comes home and sends the cop packing and vowing revenge. Revenge comes in the form of an arrest of Rosita, a judgment that she is mentally ill, and spiriting her away to a mental hospital where she is scheduled to be given some nasty and life changing treatment like electric shock or maybe even lobotomy - though Weldon saves her at the last minute and they're off on the run, being run down by cops.
In the end Roy Wiseheart proves to have been the culprit all along. Lost in a kind of perverse love/hate relationship with Weldon, Roy keeps trying to subborn W in order to prove that he is not the superior, independent, incorruptible man he appears to be, always failing, and always increasing both his high regard for W and his determination to break him. In the final chase scene, Roy flies his airplane into the road blocking the police chase and allowing Weldon and Rosita to escape. He did something, I didn't catch what, that ends the authorities' harrasment of Rosita. Linda Gail leaves Hershel, Grandfather proves himself as irascible as ever and, presumably, Weldon and Rosita live happily ever after.
I found this story to be very well written with all of Burke's usual vivid characterizations and imagery. The character of Weldon seems indistinguishable from that of Dave Robicheaux, Burke's serial cop. He is upright, honorable, deeply concerned to do the right thing, but single minded, manipulative, and when pushed, violent. I sympathized with him but, as with Robicheaux, I kept wanting to tell him to stop being so damned stubborn and listen to what people are telling him. But he never listens, rarely changes his opinions, and always goes his own way. I accepted him, not because he is so acceptable, but because I'm used to his behavior from reading so many of the Robicheaux novels.
The character of Roy Wiseheart was the enigma to me. We think at first that his motivation is financial. He wants to seize the pipe welding business. But it seems that money was never the main object. Roy wanted Weldon's soul and he was willing to do grievous harm to perfectly innocent people to get it. Okay. The story is a bitch, but true stories can be like that. However Burke doesn't go very far in exploring or explaining this motivation.
It was an unsatisfying ending.
| Author | Furst, Alan |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Random House |
| Copyright Date | 1988 |
| Number of Pages | 464 |
| Extras | Reader's Guide |
| Genres | Fiction; Spy |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | September 2016 |
In 1934, Khristo Stoianev, a 19 year old Bulgarian living with his parents and younger brother and sister, is beaten by a fascist militia that kills his 15 year old brother after the boy laughs at them. In fear for his life, he is recruited by a Russian NKVD agent and escapes to Russia where he is himself trained as an NKVD agent. After extensive training with a body of other young men and women of various countries, he is sent to Spain to assist in Russia's participation in the Spanish Civil War.
Stalin's Great Purge builds to a crescendo while Khristo is in Spain. He leads a small unit of Spanish fighters but is told to kill three of them. He pretends to do so but actually lets them escape. However they are later captured and executed by the Falangists and a Soviet spy among the Falangists reports that the men supposedly killed by Khristo had been allowed by him to escape. From there it appears to be inevitable that Khristo will be recalled to the USSR at which time he can expect beatings and imprisonment or execution.
Instead of that, K escapes to France. He works for some time as a waiter but is drawn in to a British plot and later an American plot against the Nazis, and then later against the Soviets, to rescue a friend who was in the NKVD and then the Gulag. In the end, in spite of all odds, K survives the war and winds up in America.
This was Furst's first novel, or maybe just his first spy novel. It was very well done and was followed by, as of this writing, at least 13 more. I thought that this one was particularly good, deep, philosophical, existential, more concerned with Soviet than Nazi politics, but with lots of both.
The writing was very good.
| Author | Lord, Walter |
|---|---|
| Publication | Open Road |
| Copyright Date | 1982 |
| Number of Pages | 323 |
| Extras | Maps, photos, index, notes, list of contributors |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | September 2016 |
Lord offers a highly detailed, deeply documented, history of the evacuation of the British and many French soldiers from Dunkirk in 1940. He begins with the opening of the great German offensive in the Ardennes, the execution of the Anglo-French plan to counter attack in the north through Belgium, and the resultant cutoff and surrounding on three sides of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) and one of the best French armies in Belgium and northern France. Some delusionist thinking by British, and especially French, leaders called for an offensive towards the south, but the facts on the ground were such that an offensive would have been suicidal and doomed to complete failure. The British came to the realization that an evacuation of whoever they could get out was the only possible plan. Under the influence of the new Prime Minister Churchill, major efforts were also made to evacuate French troops, and tens of thousands were in fact saved.
Lord gives a very balanced perspective. He covers the war on the ground, the sea, and in the air. His major emphasis is on the BEF but he does give some information about the French, the Germans, and the Belgians. He also has valuable things to say about the many non-naval people who helped out, and the impact of the "miracle" on ordinary British citizens.
What struck me most about this book was Lord's sophistication in dealing with the many stories that have grown up about the events. He shows that many of those stories are misleading simplifications at best and serious distortions or falsehoods at worst.
Goering did indeed push for the BEF to be finished by the Luftwaffe, but he was not opposed by the armored forces. The sandy beaches of the north of France were not well suited to armor. The tanks were badly in need of repair and refitting with 50% out of service, and the tank commanders had essentially written off the BEF and had their eyes on the drive on Paris. They were very happy to leave the job to the Luftwaffe.
I recall Churchill's account of the sacrifices at Calais in his history. He was deeply affected by their sacrifice and ordered them to fight to the end with great reluctance. However the British brigades sacrificed at Calais did not stop or even slow down the German advance on Dunkirk. Churchill and the top military leaders were greatly mistaken in thinking they would. In fact, it was only German reserve and second line troops who invested Calais, troops that were not needed for the effort at Dunkirk. According to Lord, the forces at Calais could have been evacuated without affecting the larger battle.
The initial evacuation did not involve the fleet of civilian craft and small boats. They were recruited and brought across the Channel fairly late in the game, when the impossibility of solving the problem purely with Navy ships became completely apparent, and only after days of organization. Civilians did volunteer in numbers and did perform great service, but there were plenty who, after facing the Luftwaffe, tried their best to back out of the effort and were forced at gunpoint by naval officers and seamen to return to France again.
Evacuation of the French was a major bone of contention. The predominant feeling among the French was that perfidious Albion was abandoning them, and indeed there was a strong tendency among the forces on the ground to do that. However Churchill was determined to preserve the alliance and kept insisting on the evacuation of French forces, eventually succeeding in getting many thousands of them.
The RAF was outnumbered at Dunkirk but did put up a good fight. Although always threatened by anti-aircraft fire from their own ships and troops, they made many cross channel fighter sweeps and bombing attacks on German forces. In the later stages of the fight they came to believe that continuously sending small units across the Channel was ineffective and instead used large units which could only cross a few times per day but, when they did, were able to inflict serious casualties on the Luftwaffe.
The fighting qualities of British officers and men varied widely among the different units and different leaders. One of the worst displays of incompetence was by a British commander of anti-aircraft who reported that, following orders (in fact a bad misunderstanding of orders garbled by poor communications), he had spiked all his guns - leaving the BEF with nothing but small arms to defend themselves. There were many instances of boats coming to shore only to be swamped by panic stricken men who overcrowded and sank them. There were instances of fighting by different men to get aboard. But there were other units, especially the professional soldiers, who maintained strict order and discipline, working very effectively together during the evacuation.
All in all, a very impressive work of history.
I have come across a copy of Heinz Guderian's Panzer Leader. Looking up his comments on Dunkirk I found that he strongly endorsed the theory that Lord repudiates, namely that the panzer generals really wanted to attack Dunkirk. He writes the following:
"The operation would have been completed very much more quickly if Supreme Headquarters had not kept ordering XIX Army Corps to stop and thus hindered its rapid and successful advance. What the future course of the war would have been if we had succeeded at that time in taking the British Expeditionary Force prisoner at Dunkirk, it is now impossible to guess. In any event a military victory on that scale would have offered a great chance to capable diplomats. Unfortunately the opportunity was wasted owing to Hitler’s nervousness. The reason he subsequently gave for holding back my corps - that the ground in Flanders with its many ditches and canals was not suited to tanks - was a poor one."
"... Churchill assumes, quite correctly, that Hitler and above all Goering believed German air supremacy to be strong enough to prevent the evacuation of the British forces by sea. This belief was a mistake pregnant with consequence, for only the capture of the British Expeditionary Force could have influenced the English towards making peace with Hitler or could have created the conditions necessary for a successful German invasion of Great Britain."
Guderian claims to have been surprised by Hitler's decision and seems to have believed, even at the time, that the army should have continued its attacks.
It is often said that hindsight is 20/20, but even after the events it can be very hard to determine the truth.
| Author | Brown, Daniel James |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Viking |
| Copyright Date | 2013 |
| Number of Pages | 416 |
| Extras | Photos, notes, index, author's note |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History; Biography; Sports |
| When Read | October 2016 |
Brown tells the story of nine college students at the University of Washington in Seattle who won the national rowing championship and went on to win the gold medal for the sport at the 1936 Olympic games in Berlin. We learn about this mostly through the story of Joe Rantz a young man abandoned by his father and stepmother at the age of 15, who managed nevertheless to feed himself, to finish high school, to get into the University and pay for it himself, to live on the most meager income from odd jobs and, on top of it all, to win a place on this extraordinary team of athletes and help them win the medal.
Rowing was a much more popular sport in the 1930's than it is today. It was a gentleman's sport. The great British teams would not even allow manual laborers onto their teams on the grounds that the development of muscles through manual labor conferred an unfair advantage on them. The big teams in the U.S. were in the Ivy League and only in the 1920's did the University of California at Berkeley, and then the University of Washington, begin beating the Ivy League schools and winning Olympic gold.
Besides Joe, other characters in Brown's story include George Yeoman Pocock, an English boat builder who became the world's leading builder of racing shells and something of a philosopher of the sport; Al Ulbrickson, Washington's head coach, a taciturn man; Ky Ebright, California's head coach and Ulbrickson's long time rival; Bobby Moch, the little coxswain who bossed the eight giants of the team; Joyce Simdars, the girl who became Joe's girlfriend and then wife; the rest of Joe's family; and all of the other boys on the team.
In Brown's telling of the story, Joe's father Harry seemed to love Joe and get on well with him but his stepmother Thula, a sensitive woman who had hoped to become a professional violinist and seemed on the verge of succeeding before she died suddenly, somehow blamed Joe for the family's poverty and difficulties. She persuaded Harry to pack up the car and drive off with Thula's own children, leaving Joe alone in the house with no forwarding address. Joe lived by fishing and poaching salmon, performing hard manual labor for local farmers and businesses, and working any jobs he could get. At the university, he lived in a tiny room at the YMCA, eating any food he could get, and always wearing the same worn out clothes. In the school cafeteria he would eat his meal and then ask the boys around him for their uneaten food which he would then devour. In one summer, he took the hardest and most dangerous construction job at the Grand Coulee damn to earn 75 cents an hour, above the standard 50 cents, in order to make enough for school. Always feeling inferior to the other college boys, he nevertheless worked to his limits in both his engineering courses and his rowing in the hope of making something of himself.
I don't know exactly why these boys won. Clearly, they worked hard, they were physically talented, they had a very smart coxswain in Bobby Moch (who turned out to be the son of Jews who never told him they were Jewish until he was ready to go to Germany), and their coach was no dummy. Somehow, the boys all managed to pull together, to develop a "swing" of perfect synchronization, and to get the very last ounce of power and endurance from their bodies. In Germany, they beat the very good German, Italian and British teams even though the conditions of the course and the rules for allocating teams to lanes were modified at the last minute to give a substantial advantage to the Germans, second to the Italians, next to last to the Brits, and last to the Americans. But they won by a fraction of a second.
Joe went on to become a successful engineer with Boeing, and to live a happy life with Joyce and their new family.
This book has been an extraordinary success for its author who, at age 62 in 2013 published this runaway bestseller. The book was a #1 New York Times bestseller and, as of this writing, has 18,951 reader's reviews on Amazon.
For me, and presumably for Brown and for most readers, the heart of the story is the triumph of Joe Rantz over poverty, abandonment, loneliness, social inferiority, and an environment in which all the odds were against him. On a larger scale, the same was true of the University of Washington rowing team. Of all the national teams, they had the least money, the least initial respect, and the toughest conditions to overcome. Joe's victory was not a victory of spite or revenge. It was an optimistic victory, a victory of a good heart and a fine spirit over adversity. It was very inspiring.
This book was selected by our NCI book club, but Marcia and I were out of the country when it was discussed, so I don't know what the others thought of it. However I can read the 18,951 Amazon reviews if I want to know what other readers thought.
Here's an extract from the review by Wayne Crenwelge, the number one Amazon reviewer of this book as of this writing. He is explaining what he learned about winning a race from this book.
1) One of the fundamental challenges in rowing is that when any one member of a crew goes into a slump the entire crew goes with him. 2) There are certain laws of physics by which all crew coaches live and die. The speed of a racing shell is determined primarily by two factors: the power produced by the combined strokes of the oars, and the stroke rate, the number of strokes the crew takes each minute. 3) To defeat an adversary who was your equal, maybe even your superior, it wasn't necessarily enough just to give your all from start to finish. You had to master your opponent mentally. When the critical moment in a close race was upon you, you had to know something he did not- that down in your core you still had something in reserve, something you had not yet shown. 4) The things that held them together--trust in one another, mutual respect, humility, fair play, watching out for one another--those were also part of what America meant to all of them.
| Author | Simenon, Georges |
|---|---|
| Original Language | French |
| Translators | Ryan, Nigel |
| Publication | New York: Penguin Books |
| Copyright Date | 1949 |
| Number of Pages | 192 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| Keywords | Maigret |
| When Read | October 2016 |
Chief Inspector Maigret is saddled with Inspector Pyke of Scotland Yard who has been sent to Paris to learn from Maigret and bring back knowledge of the famous detective's technique to England. A phone call comes through from the Midi. A small time criminal, known to Maigret, is murdered on Porquerolles, a fishing and beach resort island three miles off the coast of France. Just before the crime, the victim had told everyone in a local hotel restaurant/cafe that he was a good friend of the famous Maigret. The local police, thinking that someone really hated Maigret to have killed his friend, inform M. He goes to Porquerolles to investigate.
M takes no notes during his investigation and doesn't really discuss the case with Pike, the local Inspector Lechat, or anyone else. He simply talks to people, all of whom were in the cafe the night of the murder. The buildup of clues gradually leads him to realize that two men are in cahoots to foist forgeries of paintings by famous painters onto a wealthy English woman whose yacht is anchored for the season off the island.
The story ends with the men denying everything, but with Maigret having them hauled off to jail on the mainland. The implication is that the weaker of the two men will be beaten by the police into a full confession.
With access to the Internet I have been able to read a bit about Simenon's life and work. He apparently wrote his stories very quickly, typically in about 10-11 days, with minimal revisions. It is said that he woke up, worked in a fever until 80 pages had been written, vomited as a result of such hard work under pressure, and then relaxed, often having sex of the two minute fully clothed variety. It's hard to believe, especially the vomiting part, but there seems to be no dispute that he was an unusual and highly driven man.
This book, like another of his that I read recently, can sometimes be hard to follow. Conversations follow each other with no discussion of what M has learned from them, why any of the talk was important, or where M is going with the information that he seems to be randomly gathering. It is only at the end that it all comes together and we see why a visit of the prostitute to the island was important, why the secretary to the old English woman was punched out, why M prevented Lechat from stopping the assault, and what role the young Dutch artist's teenage girlfriend has in the story.
Some people thought the book was crap. Others thought it was one of S's best books. For myself, I found it interesting for its presentation of Maigret. He is sly, self-contained, smart, perfectly willing to use brutality, not just to get results, but even to express his contempt for a criminal. These are not the kind of books that an English mystery writer would write, and not the kind of police inspector that could appear in an English mystery novel.
| Author | Ambler, Eric |
|---|---|
| Publication | Unknown |
| Copyright Date | 1939 |
| Number of Pages | 289 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| When Read | October 2016 |
In the late 1930's, in Istanbul, scholar and mystery writer Charles Latimer is approached by Colonel Haki of the Turkish secret police (the same man who appears in the later Journey into Fear) to offer him the outline of a crime novel that he has worked on but is unable to write. During their discussions Haki is called to a morgue to look at a body and, at Latimer's wish, brings him along. It has been identified as the body of Dimitrios Makropoulus, a man wanted since 1922 for the murder of a Jewish moneylender. His intellectual curiosity aroused, L begins an extensive inquiry into the biography of Dimitrios that takes him to Greece, Bulgaria, Italy, and France.
Originally a fig packer, D steadily graduates to become a sort of criminal mastermind involved in trafficking women and drugs, planning assassinations, stealing secret government military plans, and who knows what else. L deciphers part of this himself but is continually assisted by the honest N. Marukakis, a Greek journalist reporting from Sophia for a French newspaper, and "Mr. Peters", a not so honest, apparently religious fat man who Latimer meets on a train but who re-appears in various places, especially in Paris, where he turns out to be a criminal associate of D, then betrayed by D and sent to prison in France for drug smuggling.
The story of D is gradually uncovered as Latimer meets more and more witnesses and finds more evidence. Then the terrible truth is revealed that Dimitrios is not dead. The dead man in the Turkish morgue was Manus Visser, another one of D's men whom D had betrayed to the police and who, when he was finally released from prison, tracked D down to get money from him. D handled him carefully, ultimately murdering him, planting false papers on him to identify him as D, and dumping him in the Bosporus. Peters figures it out before L, then brings L into a scheme to trap D. The scheme appears to work but D is too smart for them. He pays them a million francs (L has refused his portion of the money, which Peters planned to steal from him anyway), and waits for them at the house that he knows Peters owns. When they come in, he shoots Peters and attempts to shoot L, but L jumps him and, in the ensuing fight, winds up with D's gun. Peters, still barely alive, gets his own gun, tells L to get the police, and when L has left the house, shoots D. L returns, wipes his own prints off everything, and leaves, sending a clue to the police that brings them to the house where they find two unknown men who appear to have shot each other.
I thought this was a masterfully written book. Ambler unravels the story slowly, each part treated as a small and interesting story on its own. There are numerous passages of very well written material, rich in subtle language and ideas, mastery of French and German, and complex plot elements. The story is built block upon block, developing the criminal character of Dimitrios until the shocking realization that he is still alive.
I will write up more about this in my diary. See the entry for October 19, 2016, which contains some quotations from the book and my comments about them.
| Author | Kalanithi, Paul |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Random House, 2016 |
| Number of Pages | 256 |
| Extras | Forward by Abraham Verghese. Epilogue by Lucy Kalanithi. |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Autobiography |
| Keywords | Cancer |
| When Read | October 2016 |
At age 36, working as chief resident in neurosurgery at a research hospital, K began to experience weight loss and back pain. The problems got worse and worse until finally he discovered that he had advanced metastatic lung cancer. It was terminal. In this book K describes first, what it was like to be a neurosurgeon and resident and then secondly, what it was like to have cancer - how it interrupted his life and how he and his family responded to it.
He continued working as long as he could. His first treatment, Tarceva, was a great success. The tumors practically disappeared and he regained weight and stamina and was able to control his pain with light medication. He went back to work. Soon he was working full time again. He even began to entertain job offers for work as a professor, researcher, and neurosurgeon. But then the Tarceva failed and the dream was over. He went through chemotherapy with limited success but, when that failed, he was out of real options. He mentions experimental treatments as part of clinical trials but he had little hope for them and in fact received little benefit. He retired from work.
K and his wife, also a doctor, had been having marital problems. However when they got the diagnosis they drew together. Before starting drugs they visited a sperm bank to preserve some pre-drug treatment sperm. They used it to create an embryo and a child that K frequently held but knew that she wouldn't remember him. He gradually went downhill, suffering a series of medical emergencies leading to death.
When K's treatment failed he began to suffer the terrible pain, debility, and medical crises that patients with advanced cancer experience. Because both he and his wife were doctors, and perhaps also because he was well known and respected at the advanced hospital where he worked, his care struck me as exceptionally good. In addition to any prolongation of life that he experienced due to his treatment, he also received emergency treatment for fevers, breathing problems, comas, and other things that might have killed him - enabling him to live on, perhaps for weeks or even a few months longer than if he didn't receive this treatment. However he himself understood when he was near the end and told Lucy that he was ready. I understood that they stopped exceptional efforts to resuscitate him.
The book that K started was unfinished. His wife Lucy K added an epilogue describing the period after which K was too tired and sick even to continue writing, on up to his death and funeral.
K studied English literature and philosophy of science as well as medicine. His ideal plan for his life was to spend 20 years doing neurosurgery and 20 more writing. After reading what he wrote I am sure that he would have been very successful at both of his intended careers. He was a superb writer as well as a superb neurosurgeon.
Neurosurgery turns out to be one of the most difficult and challenging medical specialties. K describes a case where placement of a wire in a patient's brain caused unbearable sadness. Moving it just two millimeters during the operation fixed the problem. He describes other cases where extremely delicate operations are performed with potentially disastrous consequences if the surgeon is not ultra-careful. Surgeries are always done with awake patients so that the surgeon can get immediate conscious and unconscious feedback from the patient showing the effects of any stimulation or numbing of any part of the brain.
Naturally, being the person I am, I got hung up on K's justification of religion. It was knowledgeably vague, by which I mean to say that he didn't actually say what God is or whether there is an afterlife or an immaterial soul. He avoided directly committing himself to a providential god, supernatural acts, or an immortal soul. He is cognizant of the power of science and says that he was an atheist in his 20's, but returned to religion because he believed that love, value, and meaning could only exist in a world in which God exists - or something like that. He was vague about specific metaphysics. I've explored some of this in my diary entry of October 31, 2016.
I have no doubt that K had a great deal to contribute to the world. His life was an exemplar to other doctors and really to all of us. I wish that I had his intelligence and ability, his dedication, and his wide ranging education. His death was a severe loss not only to himself and his family but also to his patients, to the medical students and doctors that he would have trained, to their patients, to neuroscience, and to readers.
I read this book for the NCI book group and will discuss it with them tomorrow. Bob Kline specifically asked me what I thought about K's statements about religion and I look forward to discussing that tomorrow with him and perhaps others.
| Author | Sinclair, Upton |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Open Road, 2016 |
| Copyright Date | 1941 |
| Number of Pages | 853 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Lanny Budd |
| When Read | October 2016 |
This is the second volume in Sinclair's Lanny Budd series. It covers the period from 1920 up through the stock market crash on Wall Street in 1929. In Sinclair's magnificent way, he manages to insinuate Lanny into a myriad of critical events from the conferences at Locarno, San Remo, and elsewhere, an early speech by Adolf Hitler in a Munich beer hall, and the stock market crash, which he witnesses from the gallery at the stock market and also in the homes of people who have gambled heavily on stocks and have been wiped out.
Lanny becomes independently well off, starting a business with Zoltan Kertezsi, an art broker who buys and sells paintings on commission. Lanny knows many wealthy people who want to buy culture, and many members of once wealthy old families who have it to sell. He studies art and the art business and eventually becomes quite expert at it, making 5% or more on sales of painting worth many thousands of dollars, acquiring far more money than he needs with very little effort.
Lanny has three adult love affairs in this novel. His first is with the married Marie de Bruyne, a woman in her late thirties with two teenage sons, married to a man who has to have young virgins but who at least has the grace to recognize that if he can transgress the marriage vows then his wife also has the right to do so. Marie is intelligent and well read. Like her husband, she is a committed French woman who will never forgive the Germans for invading France. Also like him, she has bourgeois values. For the most part, she and Lanny stay away from discussions of politics. Tragically, Marie dies of cancer.
Lanny's second "amie" is a return to his first one, Rosemary Codwilliger, "pronounced Culliver, granddaughter of an English earl, wife of another, and mother of one to be." She too is married with children, and comfortably situated in the upper class. With her too, Lanny must avoid too much discussion of politics.
The third is Irma Barnes, a 21 year old American heiress with 23 million dollars. Unlike the others, she is younger than Lanny and not married, but is thoroughly bourgeois. Beauty Budd and her friends have worked hard to maneuver Lanny into meetings with Irma, finally a presentable, marriageable, and rich girl. Lanny likes her but is put off by her money. He doesn't want to be thought of as a man who married for money and so is warm towards her but maintains some distance. She falls for a handsome, dashing, young, Italian duke, air force pilot, and thorough scoundrel, but is warned away from her by an American journalist who exposes the duca for what he is and tells her to run to Lanny Budd immediately and demand that he marry her. She does. Lanny and Irma are hardly "two peas in a pod" but they get along and, at the end of the book, she has become pregnant.
Lanny's mother, Beauty Budd also has a new love in this novel. She marries Parsifal Dingle, a sweet, innocent, benign, prayerful, American faith healer living on the Midi. Attempting to get him together with Miss Addington, the governess of her daughter Marceline Detaze (Lanny's half sister by the painter Marcel Detaze, who was killed in the war), she wound up falling for him herself. Dingle and Beauty Budd are as strange a pair as any of her friends could imagine but the marriage works and Beauty learns to love God in her own way.
The other love affair in the book is between the young Bessie Budd, Lanny's half sister, and Hansi Robin, the young Jewish violinist and son of Johannes Robin, the Jewish "Schieber" who partners with Robbie Budd to become rich selling war surplus materials and speculating in currency. Bessie asserts her determination to marry the Jew in the face of her mother Esther's horror and Esther can do nothing but give way. Lanny, Irma, Bessie, and Hansi all sail to New York on Johannes' yacht "Bessie Budd" in the fall of 1929.
Sinclair's first exploration of fascism is in this book. Lanny and his journalist friend Rick go to the beer hall to hear Hitler and are horrified by what they hear, and especially by the favorable response of the crowd to Hitler's insanity. Lanny also visits Italy a couple of times. He meets the vile Mussolini before the man's rise to power, the labor leader and socialist Barbara Pugliese, and the Socialist Party leader Giacomo Matteotti - both soon to be murdered by fascists. Lanny himself barely escapes from Italy by claiming powerful American political connections and getting himself escorted across the border instead of murdered.
The description of the stock market crash is one of the highlights of this book. Robbie has invested over his head on margin. Lanny, listening to a socialist lecturer, learns that the market has become a bubble and will crash, but he can't convince Robbie of that. When the crash comes, Lanny takes all of his and Beauty's money and immediately wires it to Robbie, imposing the sole condition that Robbie must use the money to clear himself of debt and get completely out of the margin speculation game. Robbie pleads for a chance to hold his shares just a little longer to recover his losses when the stocks inevitably bounce back, but Lanny, in spite of his fear that he is making a mistake, stands firm and Robbie sells - saving himself from complete bankruptcy and ruination when the market crashes further. Irma's uncle is not so lucky. Irma bails him out but, instead of staying out, he jumps back in and is ruined. Irma will not bail him out a second time.
The social effects of the crash are described in detail - old friends whom Irma must turn away in spite of tears and pleas; big bankers who jump in to stabilize the market, giving hope to the (relatively) little people who don't realize the bankers have only stabilized it so that they can sell and get out; rich people who are now poor and face a future that is uncertain at best; families and futures that are ruined. Irma has lost half of her fortune, but is still very rich. Lanny has saved his father and father's immediate family, a deed which will endear him to Robbie forever.
In my comment about World's End I said that Sinclair was not a literary writer. I think that was unfair to him. The writing is not full of fireworks. It's clean, clear, and readable. But the ideas are sophisticated and articulated well, and that includes the ideas about people as much as about politics and history. Here's a conversation between Esther and Bessie Budd before Bessie's marriage.
"You don’t even know the man!" exclaimed her mother.
"If you understood music, Mummy, you'd know that I know him very well indeed."
"But that is romantic nonsense!"
"Mummy, you're like a person on the witness stand who gives himself away without realizing what he's saying. You are telling me that you don't believe in music as a means of communicating. You might just as well refuse to believe that two people who are talking Chinese are communicating. Because you don't understand doesn't mean that they don't understand."
Said the daughter of the Puritans: "I suppose there were several hundred women in that audience who imagined they were in love with the violinist."
"Of course," replied the daughter of the daughter, "and they were. But only one of them is going to get him, and I’m the lucky one!"
| Author | Garcia Marquez, Gabriel |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Spanish |
| Translators | Rabassa, Gregory |
| Publication | London: Penguin Books, 2014 |
| Copyright Date | 1981 |
| Number of Pages | 112 |
| Extras | Excerpts of other books by Garcia Marquez offered by the publisher. |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | October 2016 |
"On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on." So begins this novel about the murder of a young man in a town in Columbia by twin brothers Pablo and Pedro Vicario, and of a young woman, Angela Vicario, just returned by her new husband, Bayardo San Roman, for not being a virgin. Twenty-seven years after the murder, the narrator of the story has come back to town to interview all of the people who knew the murdered man, the twins, the girl, and the circumstances in order to try to get to the truth of the affair.
It turns out that everybody knew of the intention of the twins. They were open about it. Perhaps they told everyone what they were going to do in the hope that someone would stop them. Perhaps they thought that when the word got to Santiago Nasar, and they told people to tell him they were coming, that he would run away. Perhaps no one stopped them because they thought that anyone who talked about murder wouldn't do it, or because they had already warned Santiago Nasar, or because they took the knives from the twins, or because they told someone else who they were sure would take care of the problem. But before long the twins found themselves with another pair of knives facing Santiago Nasar himself and they did the deed. They spent three years in prison awaiting trial because they could not make bail. The judge tried to find some reasonable excuse for them. They did their jail time and were released.
The story ends at Santiago Nasar's house. Horribly wounded, he picks himself up and stumbles to the back door, crosses the threshold, and dies.
We are expecting some higher truth about the story. Was Santiago Nasar in fact the man who deflowered Angela Vicario? Twenty-seven years later she still says he was. Did the murdered man do some other evil? None that emerged in the story. Did he receive poetic justice, punished for his social crime or perhaps in the punishment of his killers, or did the killers come to repent of their crime? The answers are No, No, No, and No. The story as told is all there is. It is a short story, examined from all points of view, but I don't think it's a morality tale or an allegory and I'm not sure whether to think of it as a slice of life.
There's something both innocent and unreal about the characters, similar to those in _One Hundred Years of Solitude_ and in some other of Gabo's books. Everyone has a logical reason why he didn't interfere or couldn't interfere, or why his interference should have worked but didn't. Anyone could have prevented it. The brothers could have been talked out of it. Nasar could have walked away. But there is a powerful sense of inevitability in the tale. The death was foretold. It was fated. Even though the mechanisms of the action seemed fragile and easily broken, they only seemed to be so. In fact, fate will have its way.
Or was it just that chance would have its way?
As always, I marvel at the sense of the extraordinary that Garcia Marquez perceives in ordinary life.
I liked the book.
| Author | Krauss, Lawrence M. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Blackstone Audio |
| Copyright Date | 2011 |
| Number of Pages | 368 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Biography |
| Keywords | Physics |
| When Read | October 2016 |
This is a scientific biography of Richard Feynman. It has almost nothing about his bongo drums, his safe cracking or his escapades with women. There is information about his emotional life and his two marriages, but mostly, the book is about Feynman's work in quantum physics.
The author is himself a research physicist with a deep interest in and understanding of quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics. He explains Feynman's methods and his discoveries, and the brilliance that enabled him to solve problems in hours or days that took others weeks or months. He also discusses contributions by other brilliant physicists such as Murray Gell-mann, Hans Bethe, and many others. Feynman was not the only genius in physics, but he was in the first rank.
I listened dutifully to this book, frequently rewinding the story to hear and re-hear some explanation of the physics. But in spite of that, and in spite of Krauss' impressive skill as a teacher and writer, I only understood a very small part of the science, and that very incompletely. The Feynman diagram, the method of "sum over paths", the concept of a particle moving forward in time meeting another (an anti-particle?) moving backward, pi-mesons, quarks, and many other concepts were entirely beyond me. I read in the same spirit in which I read computer hardware electronics articles - believing that even if I only understood 10% I both learned something about the subject and something about what it is that the experts in the subject do.
One particularly interesting comment by Krauss was that he wasn't sure that physics would ever be finished. He thought that perhaps there were ordered realms of larger and smaller objects and events and that the laws governing one realm, for example cats and dogs, might be quite different from the laws governing stars and black holes, or mesons and quarks, and we don't know if there are any limits to the scaling up and down and how many realms there might be. He was not optimistic that there would ever be a universal theory of everything. Perhaps there would be, but perhaps there wouldn't and couldn't be.
I learned that Feynman had many specific intellectual skills and approaches that helped him make his great contributions. I recall that in his own autobiographical book, Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman, he pretended to a self-taught and not entirely adequate understanding of mathematics. But Krauss considers him to have been one of the best and quickest mathematicians who ever lived. He also admires F's determination to figure out everything for himself. It resulted on the one hand in slowing his progress and leading him down blind alleys. But on the other hand it enabled him to discover novel ways to think about things that illuminated what others had done. In addition to his math skill, he had great physical intuition and enormous curiosity. He lived, as he famously said, for the pleasure of finding things out.
| Author | Pelecanos, George |
|---|---|
| Publication | Audible.com |
| Copyright Date | 1994 |
| Number of Pages | 200 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | October 2016 |
Constantine (no other name given), a drifter in his mid-thirties, hitches a ride with Polk to go to Florida, but Polk wants to stop at the house of Grimes near Washington DC to get $20,000 that Grimes owes him. Grimes won't pay but instead enlists Polk and Constantine in a robbery scheme to hold up two liquor stores for a total of $300,000. Six men in two cars will do the job with Constantine as driver of one car and Randolph as driver of the other. Constantine and Polk are told they will each get $30,000, plus Polk will get the $20,000 owed him. Others involved include Valdez, a Mexican tough guy who works for Grimes; Gorman, a rather addled and unstable glue sniffing drug user who works for Grimes; Jackson, another man brought in occasionally by Grimes; and Delia, Grimes young girlfriend who hits it off with Constantine. Grimes, presumably in his 60's, threatens to kill Constantine if he touches Delia.
The robberies occur. Jackson purchases the aid of a liquor store employee to murder Polk during the robbery. The man shoots both Polk and Jackson, but he and Randolph recognize each other and neither shoots the other. Randolph gets away.
In the end, Constantine arranges for Delia to get away to New Orleans, borrows a gun from Randolph, and uses it to shoot Grimes, then Gorman, then he and Valdez shoot each other. Of the six liquor store robbers and their chief, only Randolph survives.
The title of the book refers to a name given to Randolph in the shoe store where he works. He is the best and most aggressive of the salesmen. He can look at a woman's feet and tell immediately what her shoe size is. When a woman says she's a size 7-1/2, the Shoedog can tell immediately if she's actually an 8 or 8-1/2 just by looking. He also flatters the women and apparently dates some of them, although he is a married man, and has a large group of regular customers who come into the store and ask specifically for him.
Randolph warns Constantine that Grimes is a bad man who has hooks into everyone. He tells him to get out. But Constantine isn't impressed by Grimes and doesn't really care about his own future. He's done everything he wants to do. His mother is dead and he cares nothing for his father or brother. He wonders what it's like to die. And in the end he finds out.
This is one of P's early novels. It has a lot of the hallmarks of P's style: references to music of the 1970's, cars, the response "I know it" when one character tells something to another, the dead end characters, the resolution of problems by shootings and the acceptability of shooting as a problem solver even by the "good" guy, the raw, rather unemotional sex, the noir style. It's the ninth Pelecanos that I've read. Of them, only Nick's Trip was published before this one. Like that novel, this one has problems that I think are handled better in the later books.
These books are about people whose lives are far away from the life I lead. They serve, not so much as an escape, I wouldn't want to escape into the life of Constantine, but as a shift into a different but compelling reality that sort of bristles through the mind.
I think Pelecanos is a good writer with an insight into complex, somewhat desperate, edgy lives.
| Author | Whiting, Charles, 1926-2007 |
|---|---|
| Author | Kessler, Leo |
| Publication | Spellmount |
| Copyright Date | 1975 |
| Number of Pages | 192 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | November 2016 |
The title page says "The Dogs of War Series Volume 2: The Devil's Shield." I don't know whether "The Dogs of War" is a series title applied by Leo Kessler (a pseudonym for Charles Henry Whiting), or something created by Spellmount, "an imprint of the History Press". I don't know which Kessler books are part of The Dogs of War series. The enumeration I found on the Internet numbers this as book 5 of the "SS Wotan" series.
In the autumn of 1944, SS Battle Group Wotan, "Hitler's Fire Brigade", commanded by Colonel Kuno von Dodenburg, is sent to help defend Aachen, the westernmost city in Germany. It is under siege by the U.S. Army and, because it is the first German city to be attacked by the Allies, Hitler has ordered that it be defended to the death. The commander of the garrison, SS Police General Degenhardt "Devil" Donner, is a severely mutilated fanatic. Until the Wotan arrives, his main forces are Volkssturm - overage men, cripples, sick men, or Hitler Youth, all armed with whatever is available such as French rifles captured in 1940. The Americans, of course, are very well armed and equipped with overwhelming armored, air, and artillery forces and two divisions of infantry.
The book consists of a series of battles. In the first one, the Wotan mows down German "stubble hoppers" (infantry) from the Volkssturm that are running away from the front. Then they use their Royal Tiger tanks to wipe out American tanks, armored cars, and tank destroyers while mowing down American infantry with their machine guns. After that, von Dodenburg, the fanatical half-Jewish Major Schwarz, the foul mouthed one legged Sergeant Matz and big Sergeant-Major Schulze carry out one brilliant operation after another, escaping an ambush by German speaking Jewish soldiers in German uniforms who have been sent to ambush von Dodenburg, holding off attacks with tiny forces, slipping through the sewers into the American rear to massacre rear echelon troops, and finally running through a minefield and overrunning an "Ami" machine gun nest to escape from Aachen with the last hundred soldiers to get out - ordered to escape by Hitler himself, who has other plans for the Wotan. In the end, they meet the now aged and worn out Hitler who thanks them with tears in his eyes and tells von Dodenburg that soon Germany will launch a new offensive in the Ardennes to win the war, presumably setting the stage for the next book.
One new element in the book as compared to the others I have read is the introduction of Jews. A whole unit of German speaking Jews is infiltrated in a plot to kill von Dodenburg. Their leader is captured and tortured in the presence of the colonel and General Donner. He is told that his choices are to die slowly and painfully, or quickly. Under torture, the Jew gives up some information for which he is allowed to go to the bathroom, but he manages to jump through a window to his death. We learn nothing of the fate of any of the other Jews, but I detected no whiff of antisemitism in the author here.
Kessler follows the same formula as in all the other books, fast reading action; gratuitous brutality on a wide scale; smart, bold and experienced SS men against "Amis" who are soft, overfed, self-absorbed, ineffective, and led by generals who are often more concerned with glory than the survival of their men. K uses the same language as in all the other books too, from "Christ on a crutch" to "great crap on the Christmas tree", as well as much German military slang. German civilians are indiscriminately killed by Germans as well as by Americans who not only bomb and shell the city, but have no qualms about blowing up buildings with civilians in them if someone fires a shot from a window. Neither Germans nor Americans are much inclined to take prisoners. The Germans do so only for the purpose of torturing them for information. The Americans who take a position, routinely massacre the surrendering German troops.
I wasn't always convinced of the authenticity of K's battle descriptions. The extreme violence of battle was convincing, however I thought that the Wotan men were too superior to the Americans, who came from experienced infantry divisions. The total destruction of all American armor for no losses on the German side, the American incompetence in the air (and use of Mustangs for ground attack - not a common use of them) and on the ground didn't convince me, though that may be my American background rejecting reality. I couldn't help but be offended by the victories of the criminal SS over my own countrymen and the cavalier disdain that the Germans show for Americans, who are said to be inferior to the Tommies and the Ivans. Ah well, maybe the citizen soldiers of the U.S. Army were more committed to going home than to fighting in Europe as compared to the European soldiers.
Kessler/Whiting's "Bang-bang, thrills and spills" formula is fully intact. There is little new but it's a fast read to empty the mind between longer and more serious books.
| Author | Foner, Eric |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: W.W. Norton and Company |
| Copyright Date | 2010 |
| Number of Pages | 448 |
| Extras | chronology, notes |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Race and slavery; American Civil War; Abraham Lincoln |
| When Read | November 2016 |
Foner has written a political biography of Abraham Lincoln exclusively devoted to his relationship to slavery in the United States. He begins with the little that is known of his early years, his limited exposure to slavery, for example on his two flatboat trips to New Orleans and the time that he saw a dozen chained slaves on a riverboat. He continues with the little known of his years leading up to his law practice, his time in the Illinois legislature (1834-42) and the U.S. Congress (1846-48), the founding of the Republican Party, his two unsuccessful bids for the Senate and the Lincoln Douglas debates that introduced him to the whole country, his nomination and election to the Presidency, and his years in office.
There is very little about his legal or political careers except his evolving views, his public statements, and his legislative or executive actions on the issues of race and slavery. The main issues discussed are the morality of slavery, containment of slavery vs. emancipation, the social and legal status of free Negroes, "colonization" (shipping free blacks out to Africa, Central America, or the Caribbean islands), the paths to emancipation, and the pressing issue of what to do with slaves who ran into the Union lines during the war.
The focus is on Lincoln but there is a great deal of information about public and political opinion that both influenced, and was influenced by, Lincoln. Foner contends, offering compelling evidence, that Lincoln was loath to depart from a middle view within the anti-slavery movement, but that public opinion was evolving before, and especially during, the war. As the war turned into a "hard" war, a war in which many thousands were dying and the niceties of the rights of non-combatants were less and less observed, Northern opinion became more and more anti-slavery. The feeling was that all of this carnage and all of this death was the fault of the slave owners. For the privilege of stealing the labor of colored men, they were willing to ignite the flames of civil war and destroy the country. If for no other reason than that, the slaves should be freed and taken from them. However, while white racism and prejudice still prevailed in the North as well as the South, the North saw significant growth in sympathy for the Negroes. This was increased by the participation of 150,000 black soldiers in the Union army and their heroic performance in the war. There was a significant growth in the belief that blacks deserved citizenship and suffrage as well as freedom from slavery.
Foner holds that Lincoln came to believe that slavery was morally wrong quite early in his life. However he had little experience of black people and none at all of educated black men until he became President. While he was a committed opponent of slavery, he was a lawyer who was even more committed to the Constitution, the nation, the law, and rights of property. His priorities were, first, prevent the spread of slavery outside the states where it was already in force. He, and many others in the movement, came to see that slavery would naturally expand into every possible opening and had to be stopped cold in order to preserve free labor. His second priority was gradual and compensated (i.e., compensation to the slave owners, not the slaves) emancipation over a period of many years, leading to an elimination of the institution without harming the slave owning class. His third priority was to offer voluntary, financially assisted colonization of blacks outside the U.S. This seemed necessary because so many people insisted that they would not live with free Negroes.
These views placed Lincoln in the center of the Republican Party. The radicals could barely tolerate his gradualism and limited goals and the conservatives could barely tolerate his sympathy for the slaves, but more could support him than any politician to the right or left of him on the slavery issue. However the priorities that Lincoln had established in the 1850's and the early part of the war could not survive the reality of the hard war that was to come. The slaveholders that Lincoln always tried to conciliate eventually exhausted his patience. They would have to live with the consequences of their stubborn selfishness. The courage and valor of the black troops, and the intelligence and thoughtfulness of the black people like Frederick Douglass, Martin R. Delany, and Alexander Crummell, gave Lincoln a more sympathetic and understanding view of the reality of the black people in the U.S. Lincoln moved slowly but steadily towards a more enlightened view.
Whatever Lincoln's failings on the issues of race and slavery, there seems to be no doubt that his great political skill, his keen intelligence, his wonderful ability to speak and write, and his genuine sympathy for the common man, gave him a critical role in the emancipation of the slaves. His assassination jolted everyone into a deep look at him and people of all races and levels of education came to view him as the hero of freedom.
Virtually everything in the book was documented with citations to both original and secondary sources. It was a deeply researched book.
I learned more about Lincoln from other books, especially Ronald C. White's A. Lincoln, and I've learned more about slavery from other books, but this was the best book I've read about Lincoln and slavery. I thought it was very insightful, understanding the importance of public opinion, politics, the effects of the war, and so on. It also seemed to me to be highly objective. Foner is clearly an admirer of Lincoln but doesn't gloss over any of the statements he made and positions he took that would be branded as racist today and were so branded by many radical abolitionists in his own day.
Reading political biographies of presidents, whether of Lincoln, FDR, TR, John Adams, Jefferson, Obama, or others, has made me aware of the limits of both the people and the presidency in shaping American society. The President has more power and influence in shaping public opinion and in driving government action than any other person in government. But it's still limited. FDR said that he couldn't effectively order the executive departments to do things. He had to lead them, to convince the leadership of the relevant department that what he wanted them to do was the right thing to do. If he failed, they might execute the letter of his orders, but not the spirit, and they would not be effective. Lincoln was also heavily reliant on others - allies in the Congress, generals in the field, journalists, appointees that he sent, for example, to administer captured territory or to negotiate with border state politicians, and many others. He often failed to get the support or the cooperation that he hoped for and often couldn't do anything about that. His political capital was limited. His position among groups and factions that were adversarial to each other was delicate. Making demands, taking hard and fast stands, and bullying could easily backfire. He had to be a politician (something that Donald Trump and his supporters don't understand.) Lincoln was good at all of this.
I remain a believer in the fundamental goodness of Abraham Lincoln in spite of all his limitations. I think he contributed much to what is best in the American experience.
Lincoln is often attacked from the left these days, as he was during his presidency, by people who see him as abetting racism and slavery. He did not, after all, call for an immediate end of slavery and he gave in to some degree to whites who considered blacks to be intellectual and social inferiors. I can't disagree with the sentiments of these critics on race and slavery, but I can and do disagree with their view of Lincoln.
I think that a not very good but perhaps still illuminating analogy can be found in the disputes over gun control today. Not a single Republican who will ever run for office again dares to advocate strong gun control. Quite a few Democrats, probably a majority, are in the same position. That doesn't mean that they think current gun control laws are rational and in the interests of the people - or even that the majority of Americans think that. Rather they understand that their future candidacies may be driven into defense on this one single issue and their chances to win be much reduced. Even apart from the dominating concern of their own personal futures, they also understand that the candidates who rise against them on the gun control issue will be right wing demagogues and opportunists who can't be trusted to do the right thing on other issues. So while it's easy to say that instruments of death should not be freely available to any person who wants them, it's not so easy to base a campaign on that issue and, to date, only those Congressmen in the most left leaning districts will dare to do it.
That's the kind of issue that slavery was in 1860.
| Author | Rohmer, Sax, 1883-1959 |
|---|---|
| Publication | London: Titan Books, 2012 |
| Copyright Date | 1913 |
| Number of Pages | 159 |
| Extras | "About the author" |
| Extras | "Appreciating Dr. Fu-Manchu" by Leslie S. Klinger |
| Extras | notes |
| Extras | Excerpt from The Return of Fu-Manchu |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| When Read | November 2016 |
Dr. Petrie of London receives a visit from an old friend, Nayland Smith, recently returned from Burma. Smith turns out to be a very highly placed official in some British Empire security service. The credentials that he carries, never shown to the reader, require Scotland Yard and others to do his bidding. He is now chasing, and being chased by, Dr. Fu-Manchu, an evil genius from China who is in the process of assisting the yellow race to gain ascendancy over the whites. FM has plans to kill important people in the Empire and to kidnap others with special knowledge who could be forced to work for China, or to steal plans that could give the Chinese military advantages. Smith engages Dr. Petrie to assist him and Petrie is also the narrator of the story.
The book was originally published as a series of short stories. They were later amalgamated into a single novel, presumably with editing to stitch them together. It is thus a novel of episodes. Each one involves some interaction between Smith and Petrie on one side, and FM and his minions on the other. Often it is an attempt by FM to kill someone with the murder sometimes prevented and sometimes not by S and P. In the other cases it is an attempt by S and P plus Scotland Yard to apprehend FM, always without final success. The other significant characters are the stunningly beautiful Arab girl Karamaneh (with suitable accent marks) who is enslaved by FM and is afraid to flee from him while he holds the power of life and death over her younger brother Aziz, and John Weymouth, an Inspector from Scotland Yard. Karamaneh is forced to do FM's bidding but secretly assists Petrie and may be falling in love with him.
In the end, FM disappears in the blazing inferno of a burning house. He is presumed dead but no trace of him is found and the terrible suspicion that he is not dead cannot be denied. Karamaneh and her brother go to Egypt. Smith is off to Burma but invites Petrie to come along with a break at the "Ditch". "How would a run up the Nile fit your program?" he asks, "Bit early for the season but you might find something to amuse you!"
I read this book because I knew of the movies and because I was interested in experiencing popular pulp fiction from this period. The book was very racist, frequently describing the Chinese as a calculating, cunning, evil race with the white race being endangered by them. Leslie Klinger's discussion of this issue is quite good, tracing a bit of the history of the "Yellow Peril" in Western imagination, and citing also the Charlie Chan stories that attempted to break the anti-Chinese view.
Rohmer is compared to Conan Doyle with Smith playing the role of Holmes, Petrie of Watson, and Dr. Fu-Manchu of Dr. Moriarty. The attempted murders in the book are of the spectacular kind found in Doyle. There is a murder done by lowering a scorpion down a chimney on a silken thread to sting a man to death. There is chlorine gas injected into an Egyptian mummy case to kill the unsuspecting anthropologist who opens it. There are trap doors that Smith and/or Petrie fall into. There is a potion that makes Aziz appear to be dead, even to a doctor like Petrie, and another potion that revives him even after three days in a death like coma.
It's more than a bit much and I had to force myself to read to the end, but I did learn what I wanted to learn about this kind of popular fiction. I don't expect to read more of Sax Rohmer's (real name Arthur Henry Ward) work, though one never knows.
| Author | Sinclair, Upton |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Open Road, 2016 |
| Copyright Date | 1942 |
| Number of Pages | 631 |
| Extras | Excerpt from the next book in the series |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Lanny Budd |
| When Read | November 2016 |
The third volume of the series opens in a hospital in the south of France where Irma is giving birth to her and Lanny's new little daughter Frances. The child of the famous heiress is known in the press as the twenty-three million dollar baby.
Mr. and Mrs. Lanny Budd, or perhaps it is Mr. and Mrs. Irma Barnes, continue their idyllic, carefree life. They cruise with the Robin family. Lanny plays and listens to music and reads books. Irma plays bridge with Beauty and others. Baby Frances is cared for by the scientific nurse Miss Severne, with a staff of caretakers for day and night duty, as Lanny's teenage half-sister Marceline is cared for by her devoted governess, Miss Addington, now partly under the spell of Miss Severne. The parents are free to spend months in Paris or London or the English countryside, leaving the children to the professionals at Bienvenue, Beauty's villa on the Midi.
But beneath the surface of this beautiful life, tensions are building. Lanny continues to feel guilty about living such a life amidst the exploitation to the point of starvation and misery of the working class. He continues to give money to the socialist school and to various workers' representatives who are in need. He only gives money that he has himself earned in his work as an agent in the buying and selling of paintings, but Irma believes that the privileged classes are not responsible for the misery of the world and, after all, how would people eat if the privileged people did not hire them to work? And how can Lanny make even the tiniest dent in the circumstances of the people of the world by giving away money, even if he were to give away all of Irma's money, which of course even he would never do? She increasingly resents what she sees as his failure to live a proper social life, his largess that brings more and more importunate people to their door, his involvement with his English friend Rick, Eric Vivian Pomeroy-Nielson, who writes political articles and plays that Lanny helps to finance, and his alarming interest in trying to save people in Germany.
Hitler comes to power in Germany. He immediately institutes a reign of terror and of authoritarian totalitarianism. Lanny meets him in person on two occasions and listens as the seemingly soft and gentle man becomes aroused and lectures an audience of just a few people as if they were ten thousand. Lanny tries to get the Robin family out of Germany but they refuse to believe they are in trouble. Hansi and Bess and Freddi and Rahel want to keep working for the people and against tyranny. Johannes believes that his many bribes to officials on all sides and his contacts in every part of the ruling class will protect him. But all are mistaken. Lanny manages to get Hansi and Bess out for a violin concert but Johannes waits too long. He is arrested on a false charge when trying to leave the country and is tortured to sign over all of his bank accounts, not only in Germany but everywhere in the world. Lanny immediately goes to Germany to save him bringing Irma with him. They are social celebrities. They are invited to the home of Joseph "Juppchen" Goebbels and his wife Magda. He is invited to go on a hunting expedition with Goering. Goering sends him to see the broken Johannes and convince him to give up everything in exchange for his life and the lives of his family. Lanny does and Johannes agrees. Johannes, Mama Robin, Rahel, and Rahel's baby leave with Lanny and Irma, but Freddi is not to be found.
The rest of the book is the attempt to free Freddi from Dachau. Lanny gives up on getting the Nazis to let him go and goes as far as to plan an escape with the paid help of Hugo Behr, a left-wing SA officer, a holdover from those parts of the SA who took the "socialist" part of the National Socialist German Workers' Party at its word. But even as they are driving to Dachau they are stopped by a car full of SS officers who unceremoniously shoot Behr in the head and would do the same with Lanny but for his repeated assertions that he is a friend of Hitler, Goebbels and Goering. He is thrown into a foul, lightless, hard cell for four days in an SS prison, then taken to a municipal jail for ten days, then taken to another house of torture in Berlin where he is kept and made to witness the torture of a kindly old Jewish banker whom Lanny knew. Believing that he was to be tortured next, he is "rescued" by an aide to Goering who takes him to a hotel to cleanup and then brings him before Goering, who offers to release Freddi if Lanny will see the old Jew's family in Paris and tell them to cough up or lose their relative.
Freddi, a young man but with gray hair, crippled hands, starved, beaten, his internal organs a mess from the beatings and kicking, and barely alive is dumped on Lanny at the border of France and Germany. Lanny, now resolved to fight the Nazis and save the Jews and others, and full of hate for these gangsters, is with Irma again. She doesn't understand. He tells her only the easy parts of his experience in Germany to save her from the horror, but what she mainly sees is his sacrifice of her feelings for some Jews.
There the story ends.
Sinclair finished this novel in 1941, just before the U.S. entry into the war. It is clear that Sinclair had already entered it, and for the right reasons.
As in his other novels, S puts Lanny on the scene and in front of the key people in critical world events. He meets the leading Nazis and describes their bestiality in carefully constructed descriptions that stick closely to the facts and never treat these terrible men as simple or stupid. We see the takeover of power, the institution of the terror, the inside of the torture chamber, the life and death jockeying for power among the gangsters as they fight each other beneath the surface, and the betrayal of the people of Germany who placed so many hopes in these people. We see the labor unionists crushed, the left-wing SA murdered in what we now call the Night of the Long Knives, the Jews put through the wringer to wring out every last mark, ostensibly for use in the rebuilding of Germany but actually for the private fortune of Goering and his gangsters. He reads us the absurd, lying articles of Goebbels' propaganda and the bald-faced lies of Hitler in his speeches to the world and to his own people. Where Alan Furst tells us of the crimes and betrayals, Upton Sinclair shows us the naked faces of the criminals and their horrifying acts.
My admiration for Sinclair keeps increasing. The view of society that he gives us in the Lanny Budd novels is limited. It stays rooted in the life of the upper classes, though books like The Jungle, and the author's own lower class origins, show that he is also fully cognizant of the life of the lower classes. The upper class emphasis enables him to put Lanny at the scene of the historical events of the period, and also perhaps to describe a kind of life that most of his readers have never seen and knew only from tabloids in that time and from TV junk shows today. Understanding of that upper class society appears to be a part of what S aimed for in these books.
What this book added, I think, is a new determination to Lanny's anti-fascist outlook. By the end of the book, any illusions and all wishful thinking about the Nazis are gone. Lanny understands that he is dealing with unmitigated evil. Perhaps the moment comes when his fear in the Nazi torture chamber suddenly turns to rage. He remains afraid. He doesn't know how well he can trust himself once he is in the torturers hands. He knows he's only a weak human being, not some kind of super hero. But he understands now that rage is better than fear in his battle for civilization.
Lanny still loves his wife, but he is committing himself to a struggle that it appears that she can't abide. I expect that, in the next installment, Irma will either change her attitude or leave him. And if she leaves him, he will not compromise his commitment in order to keep her.
Sinclair shows us all of that very convincingly. When Lanny returns from Germany after two weeks of hell her reaction is, How could you do this to me? not What did they do to you?
I've extracted some paragraphs from the book that I thought were interesting and put them in my diary entry for November 16, 2016. As always in a long book by a good author, they are only samples from among many interesting passages.
| Author | Follett, Ken |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Island Books, Dell Publishing |
| Copyright Date | 1993 |
| Number of Pages | 576 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| When Read | November 2016 |
The story opens at an English boys' school in 1866. Two 16 year old boys, Edward Pilaster and Miguel 'Micky' Miranda sneak out of their dormitory to go swimming. Several younger boys, Hugh Pilaster, Tonio Silva, and Peter Middleton, are in the water and the two older ones harass them, throwing their clothes in the water, and then ducking Peter. Peter drowns. At the inquest, Micky tells the lie that Peter was in trouble and Edward tried unsuccessfully to save him. To Edwards mother Augusta he tells what we later learn is another lie, that after Edward's ducking of Peter, the younger boy got tired and drowned. This is our introduction to many of the key characters who will occupy the rest of the novel.
The Pilasters are a banking family headed by old Seth, an elderly man who stands in the way of unscrupulous Augusta, who wants her husband to become the Senior Partner at the bank, and unscrupulous Micky, who wants the bank to act as middleman to enable his father, the unscrupulous Papa Miranda of Cordova in South America, to buy guns with which he will conquer the neighboring landowners, capture the nitrate mines and begin an ascent to the dictatorship of his country. But neither Seth nor his elder son Samuel will finance guns.
The heroes of the story are Hugh Pilaster, a brilliant banker, and his love Maisie Robinson, with help from some other good people. The villains are Micky and Augusta, with help from the otherwise useless Edward. Augusta seeks to get Hugh discredited and out of the way so that he can't interfere in her shenanigans or learn that her darling son Edward (as she believes) killed Peter Middleton. She manages to discredit him and get him sent as a bank representative to Boston for six years. The beautiful and smart Maisie, born Miriam Rabinowicz and grown up on her own from the age of 11, convinced by Augusta that she will ruin Hugh, hides until he leaves the country and then marries Solly Greenbourne, son of a Jewish banking house, though she is pregnant with Hugh's child
Over the course of the story, Micky murders Seth, Solly, and Tonio, and we learn that he was the murderer of Peter. All of the murders were to protect himself or to advance his father's cause. Augusta uses Edward and Mickey to get what she wants, heedless of the effect on the bank and not understanding that she is ruining the family business by pushing Cordovan bonds to help Micky and by pushing Edward to become Senior Partner. In the end there is a crisis. A huge loan to Cordova, approved surreptitiously by Edward, is used by Papa Miranda to start a civil war. The value of the bonds falls to zero and the bank becomes bankrupt. Solly's father Ben gets a consortium together to save the bank's creditors and depositors. The Pilasters are all ruined and reduced to living lower middle class lives. Hugh's horrible wife Nora abandons him and his three children. Micky shoots Tonio but misses Hugh. Augusta, now the dowager countess of Whitehaven, sees her house and all her possessions seized and her servants abandoning her. She steals the collection of jeweled snuff boxes that belonged to her late husband and are now bank property and flees with them and Micky to head for Cordova. But Micky throws her over when their ship leaves England and she, thinking quickly, gets him to climb back into the trunk that he used to sneak on board, then locks it and throws him overboard. She and Edward go to France, where Edward dies of syphilis. Hugh divorces Nora and marries Maisie and all the good folks live happily ever after.
I was offended by the manipulation of the reader in this story. The evil people win and win and win. The good guys get more and more beaten down. Just when Hugh has resolved to get rid of Nora and goes to tell her, she informs him that she's pregnant and he can't, in honor, leave her. On the very day that Hugh, finally Senior Partner, settles 100,000 pounds dowry on the noble bridegroom of his beautiful sister, the bank fails and he no longer has the money to pay. As Solly heads home after informing Micky that he's going to quash the fraudulent Cordovan harbor loan Micky catches up to him and pushes him under the wheels of a speeding carriage that came at just the right time. At each point when someone can stop them, Micky manages to kill by violence or Augusta to undermine and destroy by lies and treachery, the one person who can do it. Years of torment go by with only the great courage, intelligence, and decency of the good guys (Hugh and Maisie) keeping them alive and kicking at all. And then the house of corruption created by Micky and Augusta finally collapses and each gets his or her just deserts. I kept wanting to say to the author, give these folks, and your readers, a break.
In the end, I more or less grudgingly gave Follett a break. He wasn't trying to write litrachur. He was writing entertainment and he succeeded. The number one Amazon review (not the best one, but the one most up voted) said: "The author, a masterful storyteller, weaves an intriguing and mesmerizing tapestry of events that surround the wealthy Pilaster banking family in the latter part of nineteenth century England. Its panoramic sweep will hold the reader in its thrall. This complex story tells of the ebb and flow of their individual personal fortunes and the personalities that are to profoundly affect them, for better or worse."
Follett achieved what he set out to do. By the end of the book, even I, cynical critic that I am, found myself reading compulsively to see if Hugh and Maisie could save the bank and the day and if Micky and Augusta would be punished.
Follett is three years younger than I am but seems to have done all the things I've done but more so. Like me, he studied philosophy. Like me he was married in 1968 (at age 19 I think, possibly with a pregnant girlfriend). Like me he was involved in left or center left politics. But of course unlike me, he has written and published 29 books.
| Author | Mitter, Rana |
|---|---|
| Publication | Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008 |
| Number of Pages | 153 |
| Extras | photos, notes, bibliography for further reading, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | China |
| When Read | November 2016 |
Mitter, a history professor at St. Cross College, Oxford, specializes in the history of modern China. This book is part of a series of "Very Short Introduction" titles, some 200 of which have now been published by Oxford University Press. I presume the intent is to give the reader the most concise possible overview of the subject.
The text content of the book is even smaller than its 153 pages suggest. The amount of text per page is on the low side, there are big photos, and the bibliography, index, TOC, etc., all take considerable space.
The entire focus of the book is on the concept of the modern in China. He begins with the notion of "modern" itself and then with some discussion of the end of the Qing dynasty and its transition through the Nationalists, warlords, and Japanese invaders, to the People's Republic. He progresses to discuss society, economy, culture, and other things.
The book is so small that its value is questionable. It centers around the question of what it means to be "modern", to the detriment of actual history. It is more an essay than a history. There are some interesting statistics, but they're scattered around and used only to illustrate points, not to put together any kind of quantitative picture of the country.
I can see from Mitter's resume on the web that he is a serious scholar who has published a lot about recent Chinese history. So I assume that the deficits of this book have a lot to do with a format imposed upon him by the Oxford University Press editors.
What I liked the best was M's chapter titled "Is Chinese culture modern? I had learned about "simplified Chinese" when I studied the language 45 years ago in Illinois, but I don't think I realized that the classical written and modern spoken forms diverged as much as they did. I had thought it was mainly a question of simplifying the calligraphy, the written forms, not changing the language itself. M writes about this, about the impact of printing, and the changes in literature that occurred during the early part of the 20th century. He also provides some brief analysis of the work of Lu Xun, Mao Dun, Ding Ling, and Lao She. I read Lu Xun, it might have been The True Story of Ah Q, though I was not writing book cards at that time and have no record of what it was. I have not read any of the others.
After visiting China twice, I've become interested in Chinese literature and have been reading small amounts of it. I expect to read more.
| Author | Hunter, Alan |
|---|---|
| Publication | London: Constable and Robinson, Ltd. |
| Copyright Date | 1955 |
| Number of Pages | 256 |
| Extras | about the author |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | November 2016 |
Chief Inspector George Gently of Scotland Yard, on holiday in Norchester, England (not found in Google Maps), is asked by the local police to assist in the investigation of the murder of Nicholas Huysmann, the 77 year old owner of a lumber yard found stabbed to death in front of an open safe in his home. The local police consider it an open and shut case. The killer must have been Peter Huysmann, the estranged son of the murdered man. Peter had been seen in the house shortly before the murder and had been heard arguing with his father. His father had told him years before not to marry the woman he married, had condemned him for taking 100 pounds, and had threatened to cut him out of his will. Furthermore, Peter has disappeared, a seeming confession of guilt. The local detective inspector Hansom and Superintendent Walker are convinced of Peter's guilt and start to resent and belittle Gently's interest in learning more facts about the case.
Gently probes deeper and deeper into the case. He asks questions. He moves forward, insisting that the police have not yet understood why or how the murder occurred, what it meant to all of the people involved, or what they were doing at the time of the murder. He casts more and more doubt on Huysmann's chauffeur Fisher, and when Fisher shows up as an apparent suicide, Hansom and Walker are convinced that he was in fact the killer, not Peter H. But now they are exasperated again because Gently believes that Fisher did not commit suicide but was in fact murdered. Hansom cannot contain his sneers and insults and Gently can't stop the Super from submitting his opinion to the inquest that Fisher was the killer. But Gently keeps digging and eventually determines that a Mr. Leaming, Huysmann's lumber yard manager, was the real killer. Leaming, seeing that Gently is circling him, confronts Gently but cannot throw him off the track. Gently keeps patiently turning over more facts, interviewing more people, reasoning out more of the sequences of events, and slowly amassing more evidence. Finally he goes to see Leaming at the lumber mill and makes the near fatal mistake of seeing him when no one else is around. Leaming attempts to shoot him but Gently manages to bash him with a wrench and save himself. Leaming is arrested and convicted of the murder of Huysmann and Fisher. Gently gets back to the quiet fishing vacation that he had planned.
This was Hunter's first book, published at age 33. It has lots of literary flaws. Gently eats peppermint creams in a quantity that almost makes the reader sick. The local police are a little, or perhaps a lot, more obtuse than seems reasonable - though it could be that it only seems that way to me because I have no experience of police work. Gently's escapes from two attempts to murder him, one by Fisher pushing a big chunk of concrete over a high wall at him and the other by Leaming with a gun, are not really believable - and why in the world would Gently go, alone and unarmed, to confront a convincingly able and intelligent killer at an isolated spot? He could have brought a couple of cops and left them hidden outside Leaming's office.
Nevertheless, I liked the book. What I especially liked was the patient investigation of the facts and the construction of the logic. Gently often says that he has no agenda and that his surmises of things that turn out to be true are just lucky guesses. In at least one case, finding the knife that killed Huysmann, that seemed pretty lucky to me. But for the most part, all questions about his actions and conclusions are answered by what seem to me to be very sound reasoning. It's a practical lesson, not only in police work, but in how to acquire knowledge in general. Gently always probes at any part of the investigation that is not completely understood.
The character of Gently himself is sketchy. We know nothing about his past, his family, his education, his role in the police or in the recent war. He is said to be not too far from retirement, but we don't know how far that is or how old he is. On two occasions he survives physical altercations, but we don't know much about how, or even whether he is a very big man - though we do know that he's overweight and not in good shape for climbing stairs, perhaps due to his addiction to sweets and a laziness about exercise.
I may read more of these books and will be curious to see if Gently himself is brought into clearer focus. I recently wrote that I should pick the highest rated of an author's works and read them, not just read them in chronological order. But the temptation to read the first book first, the one that introduces the characters, is very strong and that's what I've done here. There are many more if I want to read them.
| Editor | Liu, Ken |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Chinese |
| Translators | Liu, Ken |
| Publication | New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 2016 |
| Number of Pages | 384 |
| Extras | Introduction by the translator |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction; Essays |
| Keywords | China |
| When Read | November 2016 |
This is an anthology of 13 SF short stories, plus three essays on Chinese SF, all published in China between 2005 and 2014.
Unlike most SF anthologies that I've read, four of the authors have more than one story in the collection, and four of the seven authors are women. Some of the stories have elements of fantasy in them. One, "The Circle" by Liu Cixin, is a historical story in which a man organizes three million soldiers into logic gates (if input man 1 raises a black flag and input man 2 raises a white flag, then in an AND gate the output man raises black and in an OR gate the output man raises white, and so on.) He intends to calculate the value of pi to 100,000 decimal places, but also has ulterior motives. The same author also wrote the only story in the collection involving spaceships. In "Taking Care of God", two billion elderly people land on earth, prove that they seeded the earth with life 3.5 billion years before and guided its evolution, and deposit descriptions of advanced sciences in return for being taken into and cared for by earth families, a project that is soon doomed.
Most of the stories take place in a dystopian future China. In Ma Boyong's "The City of Silence", in 2046 (100 years after my birth!) ARVARDAN19842015BNKF works as a computer programmer, isolated in his small apartment, writing code that helps to enforce the policy of restricting all discourse to "healthy words", eliminating words like "movement", "tired", "annoyed", etc., which are all banned not only from the Internet, but even from ordinary speech by special listening devices that people are forced to wear. Arvardan joins a small "talking group" where people engage in free discussion and sex, shielded from the authorities, only to find that the shield was not as good as they thought.
In Hao Jingfang's "Folding Beijing", the city folds up and unfolds in three different sections. In Third Space, 55 million working class people work hard jobs for poor food and closet sized apartments. Then they go to sleep in special drug filled sleeping bags while their part of the city folds up and is replaced by Second Space, a more attractive area for 25 million middle class people, which in turn folds up to bring out First Space for 5 million in an upper class city of spacious homes and parks. Third Space garbage sorter Lao Dao undertakes a dangerous mission to sneak into Second Space and get a message from a young man to be delivered to a young woman in First Space, who turns out to have married someone else. He barely makes it back alive to Third Space, where the money he earned will be used to educate the little adopted daughter who is the apple of his eye.
One other story that I'll describe is Chen Qiufan's "Year of the Rat". A young man graduates from college with no job and no prospects and is consequently drafted into the Rodent Control Force, sent to the countryside to kill "neorats", genetically modified rats that were supposed to reduce the rat population by producing nine male rats for every female. However they mutated so that the males produce the babies, causing the rat population to explode. He becomes more and more emotionally disturbed and ends up in a battle with a giant rat, actually another member of the force who the man believes to be a killer. His drill instructor shoots the killer and sends the hero to a sanatorium. Is he crazy? Has his mind been influenced by the rats? He doesn't know and neither do we.
The essays are by three of the fiction authors in the anthology. Liu Cixin writes about the remarkable reception of his famous Three Body trilogy, and something of what he meant by the novel. Chen Qiufan writes about "The Torn Generation: Chinese Science Fiction in a Culture in Transition". He sees the young people in his web design shop severely stressed by fear of a rising cost of living and a need to care for their families and get ahead for their children. They are dividing, he says, into rebels and patriotic nationalists. Xia Jia writes about "What Makes Chinese Science Fiction Chinese?" She goes back to Lu Xun at the turn of the 20th century and discusses the changing notions of science in society in the nationalist, communist, and current capitalist periods in China.
Each author is introduced in a short description of his work by Ken Liu, the translator of all of them and an SF writer of renown in his own right. He came to the U.S. at age 11 and writes beautiful English.
This is a good collection. There are no optimistic stories here. The characters are typically trapped in unhappy lives, made unhappy by the society in which they live. That makes it harder to read and to enjoy the collection. However I have long believed that not all admirable and excellent books are fun to read. This book is an admirable collection of intelligent ideas. I liked it.
I wrote a review for Amazon in the same spirit as these notes. I wonder which will survive the longest - my BooksNNNN.xml files, or my Amazon reviews.
| Author | Lewis, Sinclair |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books |
| Copyright Date | 1924 |
| Number of Pages | 480 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | November 2016 |
Martin Arrowsmith, orphaned at a young age, inherits just enough money to see himself through college and into medical school in the early 20th century. He meets professor Max Gottlieb, from whom he learns what it really means to be a scientist - not a pursuer of money, fame, or position, but a pursuer of truth. He also meets and marries Leora, a humble and loving girl who supports whatever he wants to do.
After a tired mistake in the lab, Gottlieb harshly criticizes Martin who consequently abandons his mentor and becomes a practicing doctor, going to Wheatsylvania, North Dakota to Leora's family. He is put off by remote village life and the locals are put off by him. He next takes a job as an assistant to Dr. Almus Pickerbaugh, Director of Public Health in Nautilus Iowa and becomes Acting Director when P goes to Washington as the new representative from the district. Again he is at odds with the community, for example when he demands that a housing block be burned down to stop typhus. He also gets Leora angry when he keeps paying attention to 19 year old Orchid Pickerbaugh. Next he is in Chicago working as pathologist in the high priced, highly commercial clinic of his old medical school classmate, Angus Duer. Then he goes to New York to work in the lab directed by Gottlieb at the McGurk Institute - financed by a millionaire and led by people whose job it is to aggrandize the institute and its benefactor. There he discovers a "phage" that looks like it may work against the black plague. He is sent to the (fictional) island of St. Hubert in the Caribbean to combat an epidemic along with Dr. Gustaf Sondelius, a hard drinking, extroverted, wonderful Swedish doctor who organizes the island to kill the rats and ground squirrels that spread the infection, and gives his life in the process. Leora insists on going with him but dies of the plague while he is away from their abode. Martin is devastated. He goes back to New York, battles the McGurk leadership, later marries the rich heiress Joyce Lanyon and has a child by her but, while she greatly admires him she cannot live with a man who works all the time and is unsociable to her friends. She makes every effort to reach out to him, and he does to her, but there is just no way that he can enjoy golf and bridge and dinner parties and luxurious living, and no way he can stand to be away from his lab when he's on the trail of something - which is always. They finally separate. Martin leaves the institute to join Terry Wickett in a cabin in Vermont where they conduct the pure research that drives them both - ending the novel.
This was a formidable book, often difficult to read and assaulting the reader with it's satiric but hardly comic characterizations of the people around Martin. I kept wanting Martin to get out from under all of these people who didn't understand science, didn't understand him, wanted him to do things that he didn't want to do, didn't take advantage of his real skills, and in some cases, were exploitative of others. It wasn't that many of these things bored him, it was that he perceived serious problems with proposed approaches and offered better ways to do them but couldn't convince anyone. Politics, popularity, perception, and money trumped scientific accuracy.
Many of the people were self-serving, pursuing medicine or medical administration for private gain, buying equipment that impressed patients but had little or no medical value, working on developing their social rather than scientific credentials. They included the doctor near Wheatsylvania, Angus Duer - the top student at med school and now a fashionable doctor, and perhaps worst of all Irving Watters in Nautilus who actually interferes with Martin's public health measures that will reduce the size of his, Watters', practice. But not all are like that. The fundamentalist zealot Reverend Dr. Ira Hinkley dies among the poor in St. Hubert as does the magnificent Gustaf Sondelius, and of course there is the decent and uncomplaining Leora.
Lewis' and narrator McDonough's ear for language was superb. Martin was pure, Midwest American. The North Dakota Wheatsylvanians had their western, country, immigrant accents. The upper class New Yorkers spoke standard sophisticated American English, Max Gottlieb spoke German Jewish accented English, and the irrepressible Sondelius spoke a special and comical sort of Swedish accented English that disguised the serious power and purpose of the man. It was rather a tour de force.
Like the other Lewis books I have read, Main Street, Babbitt and maybe Elmer Gantry (or did I just see the movie?) 50 years ago, this is a book about American life and society in the early part of the 20th century. What motivates Americans? What motivates American professions and institutions? How do the institutions, in this case of medical practice and research, really work? What is the reality behind the appearance? It's truly a tour de force, showing the state of the institutions and the people, not by analysis and description, but by dialogue and action. I was tremendously impressed.
I thought the depiction of medical and biological science was quite good. It seemed as if Lewis had spent some time in laboratories and learned a lot of science himself. At one point Gottlieb and the young scientist Terry Wickett take Martin aside and tell him that they think he's got talent but he's wasting his time. He's not going to be a real scientist until he masters mathematics and physical chemistry. Martin tries to wriggle out of this but ultimately recognizes that they are right. He goes to work and spends years immersed in study along with his other work, becoming an internationally respected scientist. I liked that aspect of the novel. Too many writers pay lip service to the specialties of their characters without really paying attention to, or even fully understanding, what those specialties entail - whether it's science, music, or something else. Lewis was exceptional in this regard.
As I wrote at the beginning of this comment, the book was difficult to read. The reader feels Martin's frustration as his own. He suffers along with Martin and, like Martin, is desperate for relief. We readers have to wait until the end for that relief, but it does come. It's a severe kind of relief, coming as it did only after years of hard work and frustration, the death of a beloved wife, the failure of a second marriage, and the loss of old friends including his mentor Dr. Gottlieb, his partner in adversity Dr. Sondelius, and his onetime best friend Cliff Clawson. But it is a hardened, more self-aware, and more fulfilled Martin that emerges at the end.
Lewis was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for this book but refused to accept it, though later he was awarded a Nobel Prize, which he accepted.
I listened to an audio version of this book and did not recall all of the names or have access to the spelling of names like Sondelius, Pickerbaugh, and so on. However there is a Cliff Notes dissection of the book on the web for the use of all of those college students who want to be able to pass exams or write papers without reading the book. It had everything I needed, and a lot of useful analysis too, which I sampled but did not read extensively.
I've been putting more effort into writing up books than I used to do. This is greatly facilitated not only by access to an ever more useful Internet, but also by having electronic copies of books (not this one, but most others) that I can search for passages or names. Searching these machine readable book notes is also quite helpful. Book research gets easier and more fruitful all time.
| Author | Tyler, Anne |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015 |
| Copyright Date | 2013 |
| Number of Pages | 384 |
| Extras | Appendix with suggested questions for book clubs. |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | December 2016 |
This is a book in four parts. The same characters of a single extended family inhabit all of the parts but each part focuses on one generation at a specific time. The family is composed of Junior and Linnie Mae Whitshank, parents of Red Whitshank, husband of Abby, and they in turn parents of Denny, Amanda, Jeannie and Stem. Amanda and Jeannie are each married to men named Hugh, Stem is married to Nora, Red has a sister named Merrick.
In the first part of the book the focus is on Abby. She is a social worker and an obsessive looker into the affairs of all of her family. She handles the wayward Denny with kid gloves, a difficult child who grew into a difficult man who would disappear for months with no word and never reveal his latest phone number or address. At age 72 she is starting to have some memory problems, mainly some blackouts where she cannot recall where she was or how she got to where she is now. Although Abby is the focus of this part of the story she is killed by a car only halfway through the book.
Part II takes us back to 1959, the year that Abby chooses Red over her current boyfriend Dane, whom she had been planning to take her virginity. It is a short chapter that introduces us to the sterling qualities of Redcliffe Whitshank.
Part III is a remarkable account of Junior Whitshank and Linnie Mae Inman. He is a lumber yard man and carpenter who meets the precocious and well developed Linnie Mae, never dreaming that she is only 13 years old. When her father catches him in bed with the girl in his barn - something that only happened because Linnie Mae pushed him into it, he runs and never comes back. Five years later he has established a tiny carpentry and builder's business in Baltimore, never dreaming that he'd ever see Linnie Mae again and never wanting to. But she suddenly shows up on no other information than that someone said he heard that Junior went to Baltimore five years ago. She imposes on him as if he were madly in love with her as she is with him. He wants to get rid of her but doesn't know how and winds up married.
Junior is obsessed with building the perfect house. He does it for a family named Brill but eventually, and quite subtly, influences them to let him buy them out. Every inch of the house is exactly as he wants it - pocket doors on all rooms, transoms to let air circulate, ceiling fans, a wide wrap-around porch, beautifully stained and varnished wood. When he builds what he believes is the perfect porch swing he comes home from work one day to find it painted blue. His workman tells him that Linnie Mae told him to paint it blue. He assumed that was coming from Junior. But Junior considers the color to be evocative of all the yokels in North Carolina and totally lacking in the class that he demands for his house. At great expense, and without consulting Linnie Mae, he has the blue removed and the original finish re-applied. But when he comes home from work one day it is painted blue again, and this time something of a mess and with blotches of blue paint on the carefully sanded and finished porch and steps. It is a crisis point in their marriage and in our understanding of Junior and Linnie Mae, but Junior decides to say nothing and accept this defeat.
Part IV is back in the present. The family is dealing with Abby's death. Old grievances between the grown children are played out, mainly between Denny, who felt that his foster brother (Stem was adopted when his father died and his mother never acknowledged him) got Dad's business (originally inherited from Junior.) Stem believed that he did all the work for the business, that Denny was totally worthless as a carpenter and home builder, but Denny sucked up all of his parents attention. This was the feeling of Amanda as well. The new generation displaces Red who, at age 74, is convinced, or maybe browbeaten, into moving to an apartment. Stem and Denny have some altercations. Denny moves out yet again. The novel ends with him on a train, leaving the city.
I first thought that this was going to be a book about a difficult child and about Abby's obsessions with him and with the family. It was that, but it was much more, which began to manifest itself when Abby suddenly dies only halfway through the book.
To my surprise, it was the story of Junior and Linnie Mae that most affected me. Battling from dire poverty during the depression, working hard, denying himself everything, Junior manages build a life for himself in Baltimore only to find himself snared by the irrepressible Linnie Mae. He attempts to continue to follow his dream and fit Linnie Mae into the box he has built for her, but he finds that she is something of a force of her own and, for all her faults, she has come to be worth something to him.
Denny matures and yet remains the man that he was. He comes home and is helpful around the house. He brings a little daughter with him who later turns out not to be his biological daughter but the daughter of his estranged wife and another man. Tyler handles all this with supreme skill and insight, recognizing the part of Denny's, and everyone else's too, that is malleable and the part that is not.
I appreciated the great Jane Austen like ability of Anne Tyler to peer into the lives and family dynamics of others. She is a master at it.
I read this book for the NCI book group. I'm sure I wouldn't have read it if not for the fact that one of the women in the group selected it. I've enjoyed many other books more but I'm not at all sorry I read this one.
| Author | Lord, Walter |
|---|---|
| Publication | Open Road |
| Copyright Date | 1967 |
| Number of Pages | 333 |
| Extras | acknowledgments/sources, index, photos |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | December 2016 |
Lord opens the story on the battleship Yamato, flagship of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto as the great fleet prepares for the attack on Midway island. The plan is to seize the island, forcing the U.S. Navy to come out and fight so that the Japanese could destroy them. It was to be the battle that would drive the United States to make peace.
What the Japanese didn't know was that brilliant American cryptanalysts had been decoding parts of Japanese radio messages and, even though they could only get 15% of the content, they had enough to figure out that a major offensive was going to be launched against Midway with diversions in the Aleutians and the South Seas. The Navy prepared in ways that the Japanese couldn't possibly have anticipated, with resources such as the carrier Yorktown thought by the Japanese to be out of action for at least three more months. All available aircraft, including B-17 bombers, dive bombers, and a few Wildcat fighters to supplement the obsolete Brewster Buffaloes, were poured into Midway, Marines and guns and ammunition were landed, and everything on the tiny pair of islands was fortified as well as possible. By the date of the battle, there were "120 planes, 11 PT boats, 5 tanks, 8 mortars, 14 shore-defense guns, 32 antiaircraft guns, and 3,632 defenders", all on a tiny pair of islands. Figuring everything out, American planes began air searches for 700 miles around Midway, eventually spotting all the enemy ships and even the first air raid coming in. The fighters flew to meet it while the bombers took off to attack the enemy fleet and to be off the ground when the Japanese planes arrived to bomb the fields.
The story is well known. Three American carriers in two small battle groups hid to the northeast of Midway. Large numbers of American planes took off from Midway and from the carriers. Expert Japanese fighter pilots shot them down in droves. Expert gunners blew them out of the sky as they neared the ships. Expert ship handlers maneuvered the ships out of the way of bombs and torpedoes. Near catastrophic American losses mounted up, with 15 of 15 planes in Torpedo Squadron 8 shot down and losses nearly as bad in some other squadrons. And then, with all the chaos taking place near the surface, Wade McClusky's dive bomber group from the Enterprise and another from Hornet arrived and completely reversed the tide of battle, blasting three of the four Japanese carriers, Akagi, Kaga, and Soryu, into flaming hulks that eventually sank. The fourth, Hiryu, launched planes that found the Yorktown and delivered severe blows that were completed by a small second raid and by a Japanese submarine, but the Americans came a second time and finished the Hiryu too.
Coral Sea was the first naval battle fought entirely in the air. Midway was the second. Almost the entire Japanese fleet was still in existence. Only the four big fleet carriers and one cruiser were sunk. But it was pointless for the Japanese to continue with their plan to assault Midway or pursue the carriers. They knew they'd face heavy opposition and be picked off from the air.
It was the turning point of the war.
More than any other account I've read about the battle of Midway, this book impressed me with how strong was the material and experiential superiority of the Japanese. The fleet was much larger and much, much heavier. There were more naval aircraft, though not quite as many total aircraft. There were more ground troops, more submarines, more, and more modern, fighter planes.
As important as those advantages were, the difference in experience between the two forces was at least as important. Only a few of the American pilots had ever seen combat. Many American pilots were fresh out of flight school, not even having had much flight time, much less combat training and experience. Their bombing was brave and enthusiastic, or at least determined, but their aim was off more than it would have been had they had more time for training. The B-26 and B-17 pilots, for example, had no training at all in attacking ships. The Japanese on the other hand were highly selected and trained and, in most cases, had been flying war missions in China for years and against British, Dutch, American and Australian pilots during the last six months. As one eye witness said, he could tell that those Japanese pilots were the varsity team. When they went after American planes they caught them and shot them down. Their bomber and torpedo bomber pilots were good too. For many of the Americans however, there was an aura of fantasy about the whole experience, a sort of "this can't be happening" feeling as bullets tore into their planes and ships and into their bodies, but they still fought with determination.
One failing of the Japanese was overconfidence. They just didn't believe that Americans knew how to fight or that they had the stomach for it. They were shocked when torpedo bombers bore in through fighters and flak until every one was shot down without flinching or running away. They were shocked when Captain Richard Fleming dove his flaming aircraft into the turret of a warship. These were things that the Japanese believed that only Japanese could do.
Lord was a specialist in writing popular histories. His book is filled with first hand comments and reminiscences of men who were in the battle, both American and Japanese. The reader is given the overall picture and, as we say today, the view from 30,000 feet, but he also gets the view from the sailor in a ship, the airman in a plane, even the photographer on the island. He pieces the facts together as best he can, sometimes drawing conclusions when accounts disagreed and sometime arguing that we can't know which account was true. His writing is clear and compelling.
I've read many very fine histories of the Second World War, and quite a few of the Civil War and others too. This is a very good example of its kind.
As of this writing, all three of Lord's WWII books are collected in one epub edition by Open Road. This is the last of the three that I read.
While proof reading my XML transcriptions I discovered that I read this book in 2005. It's not the first time I've done that, but maybe it will happen less often now that I have notes in machine readable form.
| Author | Lambdin, Dewey |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Fawcett Crest |
| Copyright Date | 1989 |
| Number of Pages | 384 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Naval |
| When Read | December 2016 |
In 1780 17 year old bastard Alan Lewrie is invited to her bed by his lewd half-sister only to find it's a trap. She calls rape. Her (and his) father comes in with a half brother, a preacher, and the family lawyer. They beat him, disown him, threaten him, and force him to immediately join the Navy and leave England or face arrest and hanging. His father's real motivation is to steal an inheritance from Alan's dead mother, but Alan doesn't know that there was any money and can't figure out why all of this happened.
To his surprise, he likes the navy and is good at his job of midshipman. He's young, smart, strong, and healthy. He quickly becomes a good seaman, a good commander of men and guns in battle, a good navigator and a well liked comrade. He performs heroically in several naval combats, possibly saving his ship, though in one case he opens fire on a French ship after his useless captain has already struck the flag - which was either a smart move or a totally dishonorable one, depending on one's point of view.
By the end of the book, Alan has won important friends and important enemies in the services. He's got a lot of gold coin in his sea chest stolen from a French ship that he helped capture and not turned over to the Navy, as he is required to do by law. At the end he is in the fleet sailing towards the campaign in Virginia where the French navy will successfully isolate Cornwallis and force the surrender of the British army.
This book is different from the other age of sail seafaring adventure books I have read. The hero is much more ambiguous. Is he an honorable man or not? Do his frequent sexual escapades count for or against his honor? Is he too eager to advance his own career and his own purse? The ambiguity works against him as a hero but deepens the character in its own way. The explicit sex is surprising and out of the ordinary in novels of this genre.
The sailing lingo and descriptions are impressive, though I don't think they have the clarity and force of the great Hornblower novels, and maybe not the better Patrick O'Brian novels. Still, they're not bad.
This was Lambdin's first effort. Some Amazon reviewers say it's his worst, that he got into his stride in the later novels. This one was good enough to at least interest me in reading another.
| Author | Allen, Roger MacBride |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Ace Books |
| Copyright Date | 1996 |
| Number of Pages | 351 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| Keywords | Robots |
| When Read | December 2016 |
This is the third and final volume of Allen's continuation of the Isaac Asimov robot stories.
The characters are mostly the same as in the previous novels. The Settlers (people from an earth based culture that use computers but not robots) and the Spacers (inhabitants of the planet Inferno, heavily dependent on "three-law" robots), are attempting to re-terraform the planet to prevent its extinction, but it doesn't look like they can succeed. A rather arrogant young scientist, Davlo Lentrall, has conceived an alternate plan. He proposes to divert a comet, break it up into a dozen pieces, target each piece to impact Inferno in order to create a canal from the warm southern ocean to the frozen north pole, creating warm currents to make the weather warmer in the north and cold currents to cool the southern ocean. It is a one off plan that can only succeed if this particular comet is used at this particular time with only 55 or so days to go. It is also highly risky and poses insurmountable problems for three-law robots who must protect humans at any cost and cannot balance the danger of the comet against the danger of the coming ecological catastrophe.
There are a number of adventures. The Settlers attempt to kidnap Lentrall, who is saved by a Spacer police chief. Simcor Beddle, the Hitler like leader of the "Ironhead" anti-Settlers and anti-new-law robots, plans to kill all the new-law robots but is kidnapped by Prospero, their mad leader. Caliban saves him and shoots Prospero. The twin giant brains Dum (Settler made) and Dee (Spacer made) figure out that the problem they have been working on is not a simulation but reality, but overcome Dee's First Law objections to guide the comet to a successful conclusion.
In the end, all the good guys win, the bad guys lose, the Settlers and Spacers reconcile and adapt better to each other, the Spacers become less dependent on robots, and the planet is saved.
The story was better than it sounds in my abstract. The plot was very nicely developed. I often felt compelled to keep reading to find out what was going to happen. The observations of robot psychology were quite good. It's clear that Allen put a great deal of thought into understanding what a robot following Asimov's three laws must think and how it must behave. The science was also very impressive. Allen made many convincing observations about the comet plan and the actual appearance of the comet. Some of the characters were extremely well done. I particularly liked Kaelor, Lentrall's personal robot who kept bringing up problems in his master's oversimplified plan and who finally committed suicide in First Law conflict rather than allow his memory to be probed to recover the plans that had been stolen from the lab. When directly asked, Kaelor said outright that he didn't like Lentrall, but he continued to faithfully follow his orders until his death. Lentrall learns more about himself from Kaelor's behavior and death than he had ever admitted before.
The two Ironhead leaders, are insightfully modeled on Nazi leaders. They are pure opportunists, out for themselves and willing to lie to everyone, including each other, to achieve personal power. The main characters of the previous novels, Alvar Kresh, Fredda Leving, Kresh's robot Donald 111, and others, are all in character and quite satisfying.
I liked these books. This third and last one was at least as good as the other two.
| Author | MacInnes, Helen |
|---|---|
| Publication | London: Titan Books, 2012 |
| Copyright Date | 1944 |
| Number of Pages | 525 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | December 2016 |
Sheila Matthews is a young English woman in Poland in 1939 visiting the house of the Alexanders on the invitation of a young man of the house who met her in England. They are considering marriage. However it is August and relations with Germany are deteriorating rapidly. She delays and delays despite word from her uncle in London that she must get out right now. But she stays and is soon in Warsaw, mostly sick in bed but supporting the defense of the city as best she can.
She is drawn into the resistance. At first she is insinuated into the German Gestapo, her near perfect German language skill enabling her to pass as a German woman working for a German agent who, in fact, is a British/Polish agent. The cover only works for a short time before she must attach herself to a Polish partisan unit. There she falls in love with the dashing Captain Adam Wisniewski. After various adventures, including one in which she shoots and kills a Gestapo agent, she marries Wisniewski. However she is deemed no longer to be an asset in Poland and her connection to Wisniewski makes her a threat to W's objectivity and his acceptance by other partisans. She is given a false identity and smuggled out of the country to Austria, then Italy, then via France to England. She arrives, pregnant, and committed to her new husband and his country.
The book was published in 1944. I assume that it was written before the Polish revolt in that year, the destruction of Warsaw, and the Russian invasion. However it would have been after the initiative had passed into the hands of the Allies and a high level of confidence had been attained that the war would be won. It would also have been written at a time when resistance movements had developed and matured in all of the occupied countries. I note that because MacInnes describes the early partisan movement as being much more developed than I would have expected it to be. Perhaps her account is accurate but I think it more likely that she was projecting a later state of the movement backward to 1939.
The book has a clear feminine perspective. Many men are attracted to Sheila but she is most attracted to the handsomest, bravest, and strongest of the group. Sheila behaves as a young woman of that time would be expected to behave, rather differently I think from the way a young woman might be expected to behave after the women's liberation movement of the 1960's in western Europe and America, or even as women would have behaved in the USSR in the 1930's and 40's.
I thought the writing was quite good. I thought the exposure of the criminal nature of Nazi culture was quite good. I thought her depiction of the nobility and heroism of the Poles was romanticized, but she could be forgiven for that. MacInnes too was a kind of a warrior in this terrible war for the future of so many countries.
"While still we live" is from the opening words of the Song of the Polish Legion, first sung in 1797, after the division of Poland by Prussia, Russia, and Austria.
| Author | Barnes, Julian |
|---|---|
| Publication | Naxos AudioBooks, 2007 |
| Copyright Date | 1989 |
| Number of Pages | 320 |
| Genres | Fiction; Comedy; Satire |
| When Read | December 2016 |
Barnes gives us 11 thematically interconnected short stories. The first is about Noah's Ark, which was actually a small fleet of ships in B's accounting. The story is narrated by a woodworm, a species that had not been invited onto the Ark but which nevertheless succeeded in worming its way aboard. The story of Noah is referred to in various ways in the subsequent stories, as is that of the wood worm.
Another story is about a lecturer on a cruise ship hijacked by terrorists. The third is an eclesiastical trial of woodworms in the middle ages. They are accused of eating through the legs of the bishop's chair, causing him to fall and become brain damaged. The prosecutor argues for their excommunication. Chapter 5 is the wreck of the Medusa, the sailing ship off the coast of Africa in which the passengers were abandoned by the officers and crew. Chapter 6 is about a nineteenth century woman who is obsessed with the story of Noah's Ark and who goes off to find it. Chapter 7 has three short stories, one each concerning the Titanic, Jonah and the Whale, and the "Ship of Fools" of Jews escaping from Germany. Chapter 8 is a sequence of letters from a British movie actor working in a jungle in South America to his onetime girlfriend back in England. It eventually emerges that he has betrayed her and now she wants nothing to do with him in spite of his increasing desperation. Chapter 10 is a return to Noah's Ark, this time in a search by a half crazed American astronaut. The final chapter has a dead man waking up in a kind of heaven in which all of his dreams are fulfilled. At the end, bored, he must decide whether to go on with this life after death or give it up and end it.
I know I left out a couple of stories that I don't remember at this time.
I don't know any way to report the plot of these stories that would do justice to the brilliance of their ideas and of the writing. Some of them struck me as over done, particularly the first story of Noah's ark. But others blew me away. Listening to the arguments of the two medieval lawyers prosecuting and defending the woodworms was a remarkable experience. After each speech I thought, yes, that nails it. Then the other would refute the last arguments and present a new set of his own. The whole idea of putting woodworms on trial is perfectly and obviously ridiculous, and yet Barnes makes it all fascinating. On the other side, his account of the Medusa was dire and troubling, yet Barnes wrote it just as (or almost as) effectively.
Barnes' history of the world is a history of human foible, of blundering on, consciously aware of futility but facing a reality in which futility is built-in to life.
I liked the book very much.