Books read January through December 2017
| Author | Hegi, Ursula |
|---|---|
| Publication | Thorndike, Maine: G.K. Hall and Co., 1997 |
| Copyright Date | 1994 |
| Number of Pages | 525 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | January 2017 |
Born in 1915, the Zwerg (dwarf) Trudi Montag grows up in the small town of Burgdorf outside of Dusseldorf. Her father, Leo Montag, was wounded in the battle of Tannenberg in 1914 and now limps with a steel disk in his knee. Her mother Gertrude has become mentally unbalanced, perhaps because her husband is injured, or perhaps because Trudi is a dwarf. She does crazy things, is periodically institutionalized, and dies when Trudi is only four years old. Trudi never grows to normal height, but she gets older and works with her father in their pay library on the first floor of their house.
By the time of the Nazis in 1933, Trudi is 18 years old. She and her father are able to get along without running seriously afoul of any Nazi bastards, but they must stifle themselves, hide some of their books, and appear as harmless as possible, while still managing to hide Jews in their basement. They survive the war and Trudi continues on her own when her father dies.
The story is about Trudi and her travails both as a Zwerg and as a human being with the same emotional needs for love and friendship as any other woman - needs that go largely unsatisfied when the only man who falls in love with her is killed on a visit to Dresden on the day of the American bombing of the city. It is a frank story. Hegi does not idolize or romanticize her main character. Trudi has faults and shortcomings that sometimes make the reader squirm but she comes down on the side of humanity against Nazism and, ultimately, with understanding for the people around her. She sees their difference from her and the isolation that other children experience if they are perceived to be her friends. She resents it and instinctively retaliates, but she grows emotionally and learns to see that other people have problems too. Her problem of dwarfism is only one of a great many different kinds of problems that people have, many of which are just as bad, or even worse, than hers.
Although I've read hundreds of books about World War II, Nazism, the Holocaust, and so on, this is one of the very few I remember that deals with the lives of ordinary non-Jewish Germans under the Nazi regime. Life is depicted as a jarring juxtaposition of normalcy and terror. The local priest in this mostly Catholic community is working hard to get his bishop to allocate a car to him. He doesn't get it, but is given a motorbike after the war. Patrons continue to come into the library looking for Western adventure stories and romances, sometimes on pretexts that they are borrowing the books for their aged parents. The new dentist takes Trudi and her friend Ingrid dancing and without any forethought, kisses Trudi on the lips after a dance, raising untold yearnings and future heartbreak in her.
We are accustomed to reading about Nazis as impersonal monsters but Hegi gives us a personal story of a bully of the town. A young Nazi named Helmut tries to convince his widowed mother, Renate, to move upstairs and give him and his wife the first floor of her house. After many refusals from her, he denounces her to the Gestapo for making anti-Nazi statements at home. She is arrested and never returns. He is sent to the front and dies in the war. His young wife Hilde and child Adolf, named after we know who, continue to live in the upstairs of the house. Hilde wants to keep the downstairs ready for Renate's hoped for return. Without Helmut, Hilde is much more liked and accepted in the community.
As with all books about the Nazi regime, I read with increasing trepidation that good people will die before the end. I want time to move faster. I want it to be 1945. I want to see American bombs raining down on the Nazis and American soldiers rounding up the criminals. Then the people I identify with will be safe. That's when I will feel safe. It is an attitude that one might think would incline me not to read books like this, but in fact I read them compulsively.
I read this for the NCI book group. However I was on vacation on a Caribbean cruise on the day that the book was discussed, so I never heard what others thought about it.
| Author | Anderson, Kevin J. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Monument, CO: WordFire Press, 2015 |
| Copyright Date | 2014 |
| Number of Pages | 178 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction; Comedy; Short stories |
| When Read | January 2017 |
This is a collection of seven short stories, all previously published in magazines or other books. The stories are: "Stakeout at the Vampire Circus", "Road Kill", "Naughty and Nice", "Locked Room", "The Writing on the Wall", "Role Model", and "Beware of Dog".
Silly stories can work when an author knows he is being silly but applies some cleverness to his ideas and writes in a spirit of fun. Anderson does that quite well I think. His "unnaturals" - zombies, vampires, werewolves (a Clint Eastwood "Hairy Harry" character with a hellhound who has been dognapped), even a Santa Claus and an Elfis (imitating Presley) competitor are ridiculous but funny and shambling Dan soldiers on in an unlife that we can't help admiring.
I can't help but smile when I think about Dan Shamble. I haven't read any books by Anderson other than those in his zombie private investigator series. I really should try some others, but the few that I've seen seem too serious. After he's spoiled me with these little treats I don't know if I'm really interested in his servings of meat and potatoes.
| Author | Rostovtzeff, Mikhail Ivanovich |
|---|---|
| Editor | Bickerman, Elias J. |
| Original Language | Russian |
| Translators | Duff, J.D. |
| Publication | London: Oxford University Press, 1960 |
| Copyright Date | 1928 |
| Number of Pages | 348 |
| Extras | chronology, bibliography, index, maps |
| Extras | Black and white photos of ancient artifacts with extensive captions. |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Rome |
| When Read | January 2017 |
Rostovtzeff begins with some historiography, explaining how most of what is recorded about the early history of Rome, up to at least 320 BC, is based on legend or speculation and outright invention by Roman historians who felt the need to produce a "connected" history that starts with the fables of the founding of the city and then tries to fill in material down to the truly historical times where chronicles and the record of eye witness accounts become available. The story becomes more tangible by the second half of the fourth century (400-300 BC) and surveys the political and cultural civilization as the city grew to defeat Etruscans, Volsci, Aequi, Samnites and others and assume the leadership of the Latin League of Latin speaking communities / city states. It is a record of intermittent but frequent warfare against Italians, Gauls, Carthaginians, Illyrians, and Barbarians of every type. Rome is always expanding, always becoming more dominant.
R devotes some thought to the nature of the Republic, which was never a full democracy in the Greek sense, the transformation of the Republic into the Empire, the flowering of the Empire under Augustus and some (but hardly all) of the later emperors, and the decline of the Empire into a shrunken, coarsened, devolved society that was ripe for invasion and internal disintegration. He has a section near the end on the rise of Christianity.
Note on the publishing history: This was originally published as Volume II of A History of the Ancient World by Rostovtzeff. It is based on a second, corrected edition published in 1928 after a first edition in 1927. I see an Oxford University copyright of 1960 but an editor's errata sheet dated 1962. There are numerous publications in the bibliography from after that date, the latest I saw being 1972. So I'm not sure of the exact publication date of this edition or what, if anything, might have been contributed by the editor other than the errata list and the updated bibliography.
Born in 1870, R worked in Imperial Russia until the Revolution, at which time he fled the country and wound up a couple of years later in the United States, first at the University of Wisconsin and later at Yale. He was a noted expert on ancient history both in Russia and the U.S. and published books on history and archaeology. His writing struck me as influenced by Marxism, both positively and negatively, and by the Russian Revolution. He uses the terminology of capitalists, landlords, bureaucrats, proletarians and slaves. I don't think this is customary in Roman history and it may set him somewhat apart from other historians. He sees the "populares", supporters of the masses, as mostly opportunists who hope to use the mob to gain power and wealth for themselves. Those who were more serious, mainly the Grachi brothers, Tiberius and Gaius, were doomed to failure in R's opinion. The social and economic basis needed to support popular democracy just didn't exist at any time in ancient Rome.
R saw the replacement of the Republic with its patrician aristocracy by a new autocracy as inevitable. A society based on a socially cohesive class of freeholders could thrive in an Italian city state and possibly even in the whole territory of Italy, but certainly not beyond that where cultures and conditions were very different and where the exploitation of local people and resources by Roman capitalist contractors, governors and tax farmers guaranteed that the local peoples would be oppressed and resentful, and that an enormous concentration of wealth would occur. R saw the later degeneration of the empire to be a descent into mob rule, in this case by soldiers, mostly barbarian in origin, fighting only for pay and personal reward, and constantly pushing their commanders into promising the men more and more, a policy that the commanders themselves liked pretty well as they each took their shot at becoming emperor. The constant war, constant rapacity, constant depredations of German and other tribes as well as Roman soldiers (themselves largely Germans) resulted in depression, population decline, a decline of trade, a decline of the money economy, a breakup of large farms and enterprises run by scientific principles and manned by slaves to small farms manned by tenant farmers using older, less productive practices and raising food for themselves and only local markets. In the west at least, the empire was already rotted out before it was finally put out of its misery.
R is not complimentary to religion. He considers that scientific and rationalist world views were very rare even among the educated elite. Christianity had wide appeal because it made wishful thinking into a dogma and then a theology. It postulated that all people who followed the religion would experience unbounded happiness in an afterlife and insisted on the certainty of this theology, removing people's fear, anxiety and depression.
I've written a fair amount about all of this in the diary. See entries in January, 2017.
| Author | Connelly, Michael |
|---|---|
| Publication | Brilliance Audio, 2008 |
| Copyright Date | 1995 |
| Number of Pages | 544 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | January 2017 |
Harry Bosch is suspended after hitting his boss, Lieutenant Harvey Pounds. He was forced to turn in his badge and gun and to see Carmen Hinojos, an LAPD psychiatrist, for an evaluation as to whether he should be allowed to continue in his job or not. On top of that his house has been badly damaged in an earthquake and the city inspector has condemned it. He has no insurance on the house and has been living in it illegally, putting money and labor into trying to fix it up. At the same time he begins a private investigation to see if he can find out who killed his mother back in 1961.
He works with a local newspaper reporter to get old information in return for giving her a story. He impersonates Harvey Pounds to get information from police records. He imposes himself on a fingerprint technician to get print data. He imposes on his old partner detective to get data from the PD computers. He even flies to Florida to talk to an old man, a retired cop who was on the case back in '61 and turns out to be nobody's fool. He also meets a woman there named Jazz (short for Jasmine) with whom there is a mutual attraction. Working methodically and using all of his skill and experience, he gradually pieces things together and looks at Gordon Mittel, a rich man who is a political "fixer", and Arno Conklin, a former protege of Mittel, now very old, who was once considered a shoe-in for district attorney but never ran for the office.
Harry concludes that Conklin was associated with Harry's mother, a prostitute named Marjorie Lowe, and that he killed her to prevent the association from becoming known. But when he finds Mittel he learns that Conklin loved her and he concludes the Mittel killed her. He sneaks up to Mittel's house but is clobbered by Mittel's enforcer. In a tense spot he manages to whack the enforcer, then fight Mittel, who falls over a cliff and dies. It seems that the case is solved, but it's not. Harry learns that Mittel's fingerprints don't match those on the murder weapon.
The story is resolved. The real killer commits suicide and the enforcer, who was involved all the way back to 1961 and is now wanted for killing Conklin, dies in a shootout with a couple of cops after Harry calls 911.
Harry himself remains the alienated tough guy who hates himself and doesn't trust anyone else. Surprisingly, he forms a good relationship with Hinojos and he learns some things about himself that enable him to reduce his level of guilt and shame. He goes to Florida to see Jazz.
This was as good as any of Connelly's books that I've read, which is to say it was very good indeed. Bosch is one of those characters, like Easy Rawlins in the Walter Mosley stories, who I can respect but don't know whether I could like him. He's a man of principle, but not the kind of man who plays by anyone else's rules.
Not being a cop, I don't have the knowledge to say whether the detection and police procedure were authentic, but they sure struck me that way. I was consistently impressed by Bosch's, which is to say Connelly's, insights into the case, and with all of the characters in the story. They seemed very real and credible.
The "last coyote" was a lone coyote in the Los Angeles hills that Harry saw walking through the back yards of the neighborhood. Harry figured him to be the last one left in this populated place, an estranged loner living in an increasingly alien environment.
| Author | Stout, Jay A. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Stackpole Books, 2010 |
| Copyright Date | 2010 |
| Number of Pages | 432 |
| Extras | photos, notes, bibliography |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Aviation; World War II |
| When Read | January 2017 |
Stout, himself a 20 year Marine Corps pilot and veteran of the Gulf War, has written a history of the American effort to destroy the Luftwaffe in World War II. The book begins with the buildup of American airpower beginning with a recognition by Roosevelt after the Munich conference that there were dark times ahead. By the time the U.S. entered the war plans were already being implemented to dramatically increase aircraft production, pilot training, and support systems.
The main actors in the U.S. Army Air Force (USAAF) Hap Arnold, head of the organization, Carl "Tooey" Spaatz (pronounced like "Spots") Ira Eaker, commander of the Eighth Air Force in England, and Jimmy Doolittle, his replacement, were all firm believers in strategic bombing of Germany and fought hard against the allocation of production to the RAF, and to the Pacific, the Atlantic U-boat war, and the Mediterranean. However the daylight attacks they made on Germany were, until long range fighters appeared, enormously costly in men and planes. Nevertheless, American production, training, and scientific and technical advancement just kept growing and growing until the Luftwaffe was completely overwhelmed. On D-Day in 1944, the USAAF and RAF flew 14,674 sorties compared to 319 for the Luftwaffe, a ratio of 46:1 and the odds for the Luftwaffe only got worse after that.
Stout covers the air war at multiple levels. We see policy decisions at the highest level, for example when Roosevelt allocated half of American production to the RAF in 1940-41 against the strenuous objections of Hap Arnold. Roosevelt knew that planes sent to the RAF would actually shoot down Germans and that if Britain fell, the war would be tremendously harder if and when the U.S. joined in.
We also get lots of stories from the personal level - from American pilots and gunners and from some German pilots too. The stories are well selected to give us the feel of air combat.
All in all, we get a pretty broad view of the air war. There is not much technical depth and any of the subjects could have been explored more deeply, but for a book of its size, it's pretty comprehensive.
I think the fact that the author was himself a combat pilot enabled him to explain a lot of things that non-pilots wouldn't know. It also enabled him to pick out parts of the stories of the pilot accounts he read, and to ask the right questions when interviewing the old men, to give us a more realistic feel for what these fliers faced.
Here are some things I didn't realize but learned from this book: Once the old Luftwaffe pilots were killed off, mostly by 1944, American pilots began facing Germans with much less training than the Americans had. We read story after story of Germans who flew badly and even bailed out before a shot was fired at them. However those pilots who survived their initial weeks or months became more experienced than the Americans. The reason is that they flew almost every day without stop, and they ran into American fighters on almost every flight. If the Americans flew 10 or 20 fighter sorties for each one the Germans flew, then it follows that a great many of the American sorties did not encounter German fighters but the reverse would be true for the Germans. So those Germans who did survive for a while became good pilots quickly.
I learned that, although the P-51 Mustang was the longest ranging fighter by design, improvements made to the P-38 and P-47 made them equally long ranged by the end of the war. Fuselage fuel tanks were made larger, presumably in modified fuselages, and bigger drop tanks were built. By the end of the war, some of the newer P-47s could fly from England all the way to Berlin - as the P-51s had been doing.
I learned that, when Jimmy Doolittle took command of the Eighth on January 1, 1944, he changed the main mission of the fighters from protecting the bombers to destroying the Luftwaffe. He freed the fighters to leave the bombers to go after German fighters wherever they were. This greatly upset the bomber crews and he had to modify the order to leave some fighters with the bombers, but he freed many of them to go shoot up fighters as they took off, gathered, headed to or from the bomber streams, and maneuvered around the bombers for attacking positions. It probably saved more bombers than the old policy.
This book stands in contrast to Stephen Budiansky's Air Power. Budiansky argues that the air assault on Germany cost 100,000 Allied casualties and achieved hardly anything. Putting the same men, money and other resources into tactical aviation and other efforts would have won the war sooner with less loss of Allied lives. I'm not qualified to say who is right. Surely the destruction of the Luftwaffe was a key contributor to winning the war, and surely the bombing campaign contributed to that both by bombing factories, fuel, and transportation and also by drawing the Luftwaffe into the skies where it could be destroyed. Surely the same happened to the Wehrmacht ground forces - though maybe the great successes in this area all happened towards the end of 1944 and beginning of 1945 when the war was already won. Since both Stout and Budiansky published in this century, more than 60 years after the end of the war, it seems that the experts have not all agreed yet. Maybe they never will.
I think that Roosevelt and Churchill thought long and hard about what the great strengths of the two nations were vis a vis the strengths of Nazi Germany. I think they both thought that, if they took advantage of the two Allies' strengths in manufacturing, science, and technology, they could win with a lot fewer casualties than if they chose a different strategy. The idea was to not send men to fight Germans that could just be blown up or burned to death by bombs dropped from the sky. The arguments by Hap Arnold and other USAAF leaders must have had great appeal to them. This may be one of those cases where no responsible and accountable democratic politician could afford to turn his back on a strategy that promised so much in terms of Allied lives saved, even if the outcomes were not as certain as the advocates claimed.
| Author | Shah, Tahir |
|---|---|
| Publication | London: Secretum Mundi Publishing, 2013 |
| Number of Pages | 136 |
| Genres | Fiction; Short stories |
| When Read | January 2017 |
This is a collection of 18 short fables linked in a chain. In the first story, a fisherman/sailor narrator tells a tale of his captivity by Barbary pirates. We know nothing of the date. He is taken in chains to a slave market in Oran where another prisoner, whispering to avoid attack by the guard, begins to tell a tale, a story of another time and place. In that story, in an idyllic cove, a Spaniard named Alfonso who worked for a bookbinder speaks up and begins a story of his own. At the end of that story there is another, then another, then another, until 18 total stories (including the original one) have been told. In the last story a character relates how he was in an idyllic cove when a Spaniard named Alfonso, apprentice to a bookbinder speaks up and begins a story of his own. The chain is complete.
The stories are fables in that they often involve magical times, characters, and events. There may be a land ruled by frogs where people are slaves, a clock maker's machine that can travel in time, a cat that survives a bloody and successful revolt of the mice and then arrives in a land of the dogs, an enchanted princess, a book of pure thoughts, and so on. Each story ends with an introduction of the next. Perhaps the main character of the story discovers a book, or a letter, and begins to read. The new story is usually only tangentially related to the story that preceded it or to the story that follows. The author writes in his introduction:
"What I like best is when there are tales concealed within tales – interwoven, complex, mesmerising to the senses and the soul."
"To descend down through the layers of stories is to be reborn, into a dominion of fantasy, one touched by real magic."
Scorpion Soup is a small hymn to The Thousand and One Nights... and to the stories that have made me who I am."
This most imaginative paean to fabulous story telling is quite delightful. It would become tedious if it were continued much further than it was, but the length is good and it works.
My first thought in reading the book was that I was in a series of nested stories. At some point, possibly midway through or possibly at the very end, I thought that we would begin walking back up the stack, seeing how the last story resolves the questions at the end of the next to last, how it resolves the questions at the end of the next to next to last, and so on back to the first story. But with eighteen stories that could have been a real challenge to the reader to recall the context of each transition. For that, or other reasons, Shah chose to make them into a circle instead. In programming terms, instead of nested subroutines we have an endless loop. I think it was a good decision.
This is Tahir Shah's tenth book. At any rate, the "Also by Tahir Shah" list includes nine others. He is said, according to one reviewer, to be an Anglo-Afghan living in Morocco. I believe the book was written in English.
| Author | Hamilton, Adam |
|---|---|
| Publication | Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2016 |
| Copyright Date | 2016 |
| Number of Pages | 190 |
| Extras | notes |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Religion |
| Keywords | Christianity |
| When Read | January 2017 |
"Adam Hamilton is senior pastor of the United Methodist Church of the Resurrection in the Kansas City area, cited as the most influential mainline church in America."
This is a book about the Apostles' Creed, written in the fourth century AD to explain to people what Christians believe. If I understand it correctly, it was for the purpose of explaining the religion to new converts or prospective converts. Perhaps it was also written to try to bring all Christians to some agreement about the essential beliefs of the church.
H begins with what is God and why he, Hamilton, believes in God. He talks about some of the experiences in his own life in which he felt God's influence and answers some questions that atheists might raise about evolution and science. Then, in separate chapters, he discusses "Jesus Christ", "The Holy Spirit", "The Church and the Communion of Saints", "The Forgiveness of Sins", and "The Resurrection of the Body". He ends with a number of different versions of the Christian Creed of which this "Apostles" version is only one.
The chapter on why the author believes in God was my favorite. Of them all, it's the one with the least amount of specific dogma - the trinity, the resurrection, and others that require Christians to believe specific, not just implausible but impossible, statements about the world.
H believes in God because, when he contemplates the situation he finds himself in, he feels a tendency, a "nudge", to do the right thing, something that he feels is right and should be done even though it may be something he doesn't want to do. He thinks this nudge comes from outside himself, from a power that is more loving, more caring, than he would be if left to his own devices. I don't personally believe that the nudge comes from outside himself, but I do think I understand why he might experience it that way and why it might incline him to believe in God. And of course I do feel appreciation for the humanity of this man who feels nudges to do the right thing and acts on them.
His arguments on the Trinity, on the nature of the Holy Spirit, on the resurrection, and on life after death all have the feeling to me of a man who is trying hard to convince himself and to do so in a way that doesn't look too foolish to his rationalist friends. He cites evidence, for example that Paul wrote that 500 people, many still alive at the time of the writing, saw Jesus after he died and was resurrected. I think that perhaps, in his excess of good will, he sees this as the testimony of 500 people rather than the testimony of exactly one man. That this man might have an ax to grind, or even that Paul's words, whatever they were, may have been embellished later by men with axes to grind, or that these men living in a pre-scientific era may have completely different ideas about fact and truth than we do, are ideas not to be considered. If someone brought them up I expect that Reverend Hamilton would say, Yes, that is a possibility, but it is also at least as possible that the story is true since, after all, God can do anything, and I choose to believe that it is true. Choosing God, choosing Jesus Christ, choosing to believe, is a key part of his world view. It is a point of view opposed to mine, which is that belief should never be a choice, but a conclusion from observations and reasons. We should believe because all of the evidence tells us that this conclusion is more likely, or much more likely, than its denial. We should never choose to believe because it is something we want to believe.
I can't accept the Apostle's Creed and I can't believe the arguments that H adduces for it. It's not that I choose not to believe, it's that I am unconvinced and am, in fact, convinced that there is no God and that resurrection and afterlife are contradicted by what we know about the bodies and minds of animals such as ourselves.
However I have learned some things from this book. I learned that a good man can be religious and can make of his religion a good thing for other people as well as himself. I learned that it is possible for a Christian to acknowledge the views of atheists and believers in other religions without condemning the people - and indeed, I must acknowledge the views of Adam Hamilton and, while not accepting his ideas, still respect and refuse to condemn the man.
See the diary for additional discussion, including excerpts from his argument for the existence of God.
| Author | Naipaul, V.S. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Vintage, 2002 |
| Copyright Date | 1970 |
| Number of Pages | 256 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Third World; Africa |
| When Read | January 2017 |
"Above all else, I am a writer. I make books and want to please the reader, to stimulate, to create very rich books that will develop in the reader's mind and echo as he reads along" - V.S. Naipaul. That quotation appears at the end of this collection of four extraordinary stories.
The book consists of four stories, three of them told in first person by third world narrators, though the first narrator, who never reveals himself, may be Naipaul. The stories are as follows:
"Prologue, from a Journal: The Tramp at Piraeus". The narrator boards a ferry going from Piraeus to Alexandria. He writes about a tramp, an old man, English speaking, who talks to himself and acts odd in ways that lead people to shun him. The man is driven out of the cabin he shares with others and roughed up by a young German tough, egged on by others.
"One Out of Many". The narrator is a an Indian named Santosh, a servant/cook to a minor official in the Indian civil service. He accompanies his master to Washington DC where he lives in a closet in their tiny apartment and cooks for his Sahib. Sex is somehow forced upon him by a big "Hubshi" woman, a black woman, working as a maid in the building. Panicked, he runs away, takes a job in an Indian restaurant where he gets much better pay of $40 per week (!), later raised to $100 per week at his insistence. Unable to figure out the right way to live or deal with this alien society, he follows his employer's suggestion and marries the Hubshi, becoming an American citizen. No mention is made of his wife and child in India.
"Tell Me Who to Kill". A man living on a Caribbean Island, presumably a British Commonwealth country, goes to London to find and help his brother Dayo, who went to England supposedly to study aeronautical engineering. He finds his brother. He rents an apartment for the two of them. He gets up early before his brother and goes to work in a cigarette factory. Then he works in the evening as a dishwasher. Over five years he saves 2,000 pounds. He spends it to buy a little food stand, hoping to become an independent, successful man. But it doesn't work. The local London tough boys harass him, break his dishes, and scare customers away. In five months it is all lost. He discovers what he has suspected. Dayo is not going to school but loafing all day long. He wants to kill him but can't. He loves his little brother. They go back to the Caribbean. Everything is wrong. His life and ambitions are lost. He thinks someone is responsible. Someone should pay. But who?
"In a Free State". This is the longest of the stories, occupying over half the book. It is the only one written in third person. It takes place in an unnamed former British colony. Perhaps someone who knows more about Africa could say which colony it is, perhaps Zimbabwe, perhaps Uganda, or perhaps it is a made up country. Bobby is a white, English homosexual working in a government agency in the southern part of the country. He is in the north for a conference when the President sends the army into the south to kill the king, the leader of a different tribe from the President's who has started an independence movement. Most of the story is Bobby's road trip, taking the wife of a white radio administrator and himself home from the north. The story includes many minute descriptions of surroundings, of Bobby's mercuric moods, of the appearance and behavior of the black and white people they meet, of the oppression of the southern people, and of a beating Bobby receives at the hands of a government soldier who hurts him badly for no special reason, or at least not an obvious one. The story ends with his arrival, hurt and bleeding, in the compound where the whites live.
This was a remarkable book. There aren't a great many books written from the perspective of third world people as in "One Out of Many" and "Tell Me Who to Kill". Both stories seem alien and shocking. They depict lives that comfortable westerners such as myself have barely seen, and then only from the outside in travels in Mexico, the Caribbean, or Latin America.
"In a Free State" was also shocking. I had the sense of observing a truly alien land where I could not read the thoughts, feelings, or intentions of the Africans at all. I thought Bobby's attitude to the Africans was all wrong. He imagined himself to be an old Africa hand, but he frequently said or did the wrong thing - especially in his attempts to pick up young African men for what he termed "an adventure", but also in his disastrous foray into an army checkpoint where he demanded to see the boss, the officer, and instead got punched, kicked, slammed into the floor with his face dragged and scraped across the cement, and had his wrist stepped on and broken by a soldier while others looked on. The whites in the story were also alien, especially the old colonel who ran a motel in a former resort district from which all of the whites had fled but himself. He addressed his young helper Peter as a man who hated him and whom the colonel would expect to shoot one day. Even the dogs were alien. When Bobby and the woman take a short walk out of the colonel's motel they are soon surrounded by wild dogs and expect to be torn to pieces by them at any moment - Bobby just managing to keep them at bay with fierce expressions of his own until they can make it back to the motel. It looks very much like a place I would never want to visit. Even reading about it is unnerving.
Naipaul is brilliant. His perception of people whom others ignore is deep and illuminating. He does it all without any judgment. That is left entirely to the reader. Naipaul is just there to tell us what happened and what some of the people felt.
Of all of the people and places a person could write about, Naipaul chose these for his subjects. My guess is that he chose them because he has met these people and thought much about them, analyzing them more deeply than they ever have themselves.
The book was not enjoyable to read. It made me uncomfortable. But I felt from the very beginning that I was experiencing something unusual and important. It was one of those books.
| Author | Harris, Sam |
|---|---|
| Publication | Simon and Schuster, 2015 |
| Copyright Date | 2014 |
| Number of Pages | 256 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Psychology; Cognitive science |
| Keywords | Meditation |
| When Read | January 2017 |
Harris spent quite a few years studying and practicing meditation with the goal of gaining insights into the nature of mind, increasing his mental capacities of various types, and finding ways to present what he learned so that others might benefit from it.
Frankly, I don't understand very much of what he says he learned. One big claim that he makes is that the "self" is an artificial construct that is not required for thought and may even hinder thought, or at least hinder some types of thought. He says that if we can learn to empty our minds, for example by concentrating only on breathing, the "self" disappears and the perceptions and ideas that we have are processed without reference to a self. Or maybe not. I had a lot of trouble following the argument.
H criticizes many of the Indian and Nepalese gurus or "contemplatives" that he studied with or who have become famous in the West. He thinks some are frauds, some are predators, some are alcoholic, lazy, or stupid. Many pollute their teaching with religious nonsense that really has no relationship to the techniques they are teaching - at least in H's opinion. But in spite of that, he is convinced that some of them, even some of the ones who have poor philosophical understanding, nevertheless have valuable techniques to impart to their students.
I came to this book with a very high regard for Sam Harris. I won't say that I have lost that regard, only that I didn't understand this book. I don't really understand what it means to think without a self. I understand that a computer can process data without anything like what we consider to be consciousness, but I don't think that's what he's talking about. What does it mean to think about a tree without thinking about me thinking about a tree? I kind of, sort of understand that. I can think about a tree without thinking about myself, or at least I imagine that I can. But what is subtracted from that thinking if consciousness of myself is added? Why would I want to banish the self from my thinking about the world? What would I gain from that? Is it something that I truly cannot have unless I banish the self?
H has an advanced knowledge of neuroscience, or at least we can say that to the extent that our knowledge of neuroscience is advanced, H has mastered it. He frequently refers to very interesting experiments, particularly on divided brains, which shed light on the nature of consciousness. He also discusses near death experiences in some depth to argue that they shed no light, only confusion. His ideas are illuminating and thought provoking. But what do they come to in the end?
I listened to this as an audiobook while doing routine tasks like exercise or washing dishes. It was the wrong way to do it because I frequently had to stop what I was doing, backtrack, and listen again.
I don't plan to begin learning meditation, though I may incorporate one or two techniques. For example, I discovered that, when I suddenly feel emotionally torn by reading or seeing or thinking about something that I dislike, I can halt the emotional response by clearing my mind in a second or two and then return to the problem at hand with less emotions to disturb my thinking or speaking. However I feel no special interest in learning to abolish the self. My goal is to improve my "self" rather than to dismiss it.
By happenstance, Marcia's sister Lynn called today - the day I finished the book. I told her I had read it and, although she doesn't know much about Harris, she told me that she had heard bad things about him, perhaps implying that he employed what we used to call "airy-fairy" thinking. I don't think he did that. I think his thinking was very much grounded in a scientific attitude. But I am open to hearing criticism of him.
I looked at some Amazon reviews to see if I could figure out what other people thought of him, maybe learning what I had missed. The reviews I read all said that the book was about spirituality without God. I didn't personally think of the book that way. Maybe I should have. If I ever get a hard copy, maybe I'll look at it again.
I also saw an interesting interview of him by Philosophy professor Gary Gutting of the University of Notre Dame, published in the New York Times. I admit that I didn't understand all of it either. Here's a quote from Harris from the last part of the interview:
"If you turn consciousness upon itself in this moment, you will discover that your mind tends to wander into thought. If you look closely at thoughts themselves, you will notice that they continually arise and pass away. If you look for the thinker of these thoughts, you will not find one. And the sense that you have - 'What the hell is Harris talking about? I’m the thinker!' - is just another thought, arising in consciousness."
That's an interesting puzzle. Well, is it? Or isn't it?
| Author | Stern, Jessica |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Harper Collins |
| Copyright Date | 2010 |
| Number of Pages | 336 |
| Extras | notes, acknowledgements |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Psychology |
| Keywords | Terrorism |
| When Read | January 2017 |
When the author was 15 years old and her sister 14, the two girls were raped at gunpoint by a stranger. 35 or so years later, she attempted to better understand and come to terms with the damage done to her by writing this book about the experience.
Stern is an expert on terrorism. She writes books and articles about it, interviewed terrorists, lectures at Harvard and at the FBI and CIA, and serves on government experts boards. Dealing with her own trauma was, in some sense, like dealing with the trauma of terrorism or the trauma of war. She discovered that she too had Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
She asked the local police department for the records of her rape investigation. The detective who prepared the records for her discovered in reading them that the rapist was almost certainly one Brian Beat, a man convicted later for rape and sent to prison for 18 years. Beat had hanged himself a few years prior to Stern's research, possibly because the local police notified him that he would be put on a public list of child molesters.
Stern interviews people who knew the rapist. She expands her investigation to talk to other victims and to interview a soldier with PTSD returned from Iraq. She also has a lot of material about her own family, some questionable behavior by her mother's father, and about her awkward relations with her father, a physicist and Holocaust survivor.
The rape occurred while her father was in Norway, scheduled to come back three days later. After learning of the rape, he made phone calls to try to help, but did not come back home for another three days. Stern held this against him for decades and only managed to discuss it with him 35 years later, when she was writing the book. She also spoke to him about his own experience as a Jewish boy in Germany, harassed and beaten by teachers and students just because he was a Jew.
Stern has many "issues" of her own. Her mother died of cancer when S was only four years old. Her father remarried and she lived with a young stepmother for six years, continuing another two years after their divorce. Then her father took her back more or less against her will and she lived with him or her grandparents. She wasn't told, for good reason I think, that her father took her back because her stepmother remarried and didn't want the full time care of this difficult child anymore. She had a life and new family of her own.
At first I was put off by Stern's neuroses. She seemed to have unwarranted difficulties with her father. She couldn't drive to the interviews, becoming sleepy and disassociative the closer she got to the meetings and having to be driven by her friend and future husband "Chet" Atkins. There were passages in the records that she couldn't read and pictures she couldn't look at. She seemed to be exploiting Chet and some others who helped her. However my attitude towards her changed as I read further. She was writing about herself with what I thought was extraordinary honesty and objectivity. She was making private feelings public and exposing her own weaknesses in a way that might benefit many other people who had problems similar to hers, knowing that she was exposing herself in a potentially self-damaging way. She was battling her deficiencies and working hard to climb outside of herself and see the problems that her father and others faced. She was acknowledging the help she got from others. She was turning her powerful investigative, analytical, and writing skills on herself and dealing with whatever dangers to which that exposed her. By the end, I admired her.
I picked up this book thinking it was a book about terrorism. I had read her ISIS: The State of Terror and saw the word "terror" in the title of this book and thought I would learn more about the Islamic terrorism movement that is currently afflicting the world. Had I known what the book was about, I probably wouldn't have read it, but I'm glad that I did.
I discussed a lot of it with Marcia. She understood all of this perfectly from her own intensive work with the survivors of rape and child abuse. Reading this gave me more insight into what Marcia deals with every day. It's too bad that Stern didn't have a person like Marcia to work with on the aftereffects of her trauma.
| Author | Capek, Karel |
|---|---|
| Original Language | cz |
| Translators | Wyllie, David |
| Publication | Gutenburg Australia |
| Copyright Date | 1936 |
| Number of Pages | 282 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction; Satire |
| When Read | February 2017 |
Captain Vantoch of a tramp steamer in the South Pacific discovers a bay in an out of the way island that is occupied by intelligent amphibians, who are later called "newts". He starts a trade with them, giving them knives they can use to open oysters and harpoons to protect themselves against sharks in return for pearls. He interests a rich businessman in a scheme with them and starts transporting the newts to other islands and shores. Now safe from sharks, they reproduce rapidly, each female producing dozens of tadpoles each year and the tadpoles maturing in just a single year.
The news are smart. They learn to talk. Some become scientists and engineers. They like to work and allow themselves to be ruthlessly exploited in return for food and small quantities of tools and other things. Soon every coastal country has them, except England, which doesn't want them, and the newts are being supplied with advanced engineering tools to build artificial islands and shore extensions. Then countries start arming newts for undersea warfare against their enemies. Meanwhile the newt population increases and increases until there are ten newts for each human.
Now the newts make demands. Instead of making artificial islands they make artificial seas, blowing up large parts of the U.S., France, Italy, China, and many countries, to create more shallow ocean and carting the earth out to sea to fill in deep waters for still more. There is nothing the humans can do to stop them.
The book ends with a critic demanding of the author that he do something about this before all human life and territory are extinguished. They agree that a reasonable ending would be to have the newts divide up as humans do and make war on each other. Writing that story is unnecessary now that they have agreed on what the ending should be.
The book is told in three major chapters, the second of which includes a trove of documents from the actual period of newt activities. Footnotes in the text lead to the documents which are wonderful parodies of what might actually be written in news articles, speeches, treaties, scientific lectures, and so on.
I thought the book was a hoot. Capek (hacek over the 'C' - pronounced "Chopeck" I think) skewers everyone, businessmen, scientists, journalists, politicians, labor leaders, communists, fascists, Christians, feminists, English, French, Germans, Americans, Italians, Dutch, Czechs. The statements these people make are absurd, but in beautifully appropriate ways. I couldn't help thinking, Yes, that's exactly what they'd say! And of course they're all bickering with each other and refusing to help each other while the whole human race is going to hell in a handbasket.
The book did become tedious - but it was justified. Capek carried through on each of the paths he had opened and showed us how each of them was a path of foolishness.
I know nothing about how this book was received. My guess is that the leadership of all countries would have hated it, and especially so for Germany and Italy. But I would also think that more intellectual readers in all countries, and maybe some not so intellectual readers too, would have loved it.
| Author | McCarthy, Cormac |
|---|---|
| Publication | Alfred A. Knopf, 2006 |
| Copyright Date | 2006 |
| Number of Pages | 287 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | February 2017 |
A man and his young son are moving through the landscape of what I presume is a nuclear winter in the remains of the United States after a nuclear war. We aren't told how old the boy is, how long ago the war occurred, or even the names of the pair. I presume that they are in California because they reach an ocean and they encounter some Spanish language material as they head south. It is cold. They are starving and ill equipped, having only what they can carry in knapsacks on their back and in a supermarket shopping cart that they push along a road. The goal that the man says they are advancing towards is a more southern climate where it won't be so cold and they will be able to survive the winter. There are two shorter term goals that they must meet. One is to find food along the way and the other is to avoid the "bad guys" who would steal what food, clothing and tools that they have, and possibly eat them for lunch. Everything depends on the cleverness and resourcefulness of the man. If he cannot find enough food or successfully avoid and hide from the bad guys, they will die.
Everything around them is dead. The trees are dead. There are hardly any animals and no birds. There are no crops in the ground. The cities are just ashes and the houses are largely fallen in and often occupied by corpses.
They have a revolver with two bullets left. In the book's first encounter with bad guys, a bad guy seizes the boy, puts a knife to his throat, and demands that the man drop the gun. Instead, the man shoots the bad guy dead, grabs the boy, and they run as far as they can, temporarily abandoning the shopping cart. They proceed through various episodes of their journey. They have one bullet left and the man has explained to the boy how to shoot himself if the alternative is to be captured. They encounter a basement full of chained naked people imploring their help, but the father grabs the boy and runs before the bad guys get back who have chained these people and will eat them. They find an old man on the road. The boy wants to help him and his father finally gives the old man a can of fruit, after which they pass on and leave him behind. They find a fully stocked fallout shelter below ground and eat for several days to their hearts content but the man is afraid to stay and they leave. They pass the man's boyhood house. They reach the ocean and find a grounded sailboat. The man swims out and rounds up some food and a flare pistol with some flares. They have to leave their shopping cart briefly and find it stolen. They chase the man who took it and the father threatens to shoot him, getting back the cart and also taking the man's clothes and shoes, ignoring his son's protests.
The father is sick. He is coughing and getting weaker. They go into a town where the man is wounded by an arrow to which he responds with a shot from the flare gun. Then they leave and head down the road until the man can travel no longer. He dies. The boy goes to the road and sees a man with a shotgun. The man says he is a good guy. He takes the boy under his protection and they leave, heading for a group of good guys with whom they will live. There is a woman there who welcomes the boy.
The book ends.
The writing is spare with short sentences and spare punctuation. There are no names of people or places, no dates, no ages. Often it consists of the man telling the boy something and then asking "Okay" with an implied question mark, followed by the answer "Okay". The boy asks questions about whether something is safe and the man answers "Yes it's safe". The boy says he is afraid and doesn't want to go down into the shelter, or doesn't want to go into a house, or upstairs in the house, but always the man tells him it is okay, it has to be done.
McCarthy won a Pulitzer Prize for this book. I can understand the individual elements that might be prize worthy. The text is very lean and spare, but with much clear description of the bleak physical environment. The emotional environment has been reduced to essentials. It is life or death with no consideration given to anything that is tangential to that. Some of the houses have books or magazines but we never see a title and the man never stops to glance at one. The tiny handful of survivors fear each other and mostly stay at arms length, or they have banded into dangerous gangs. It is only at the end that we meet anybody who is not either a victim or a victimizer and we learn nothing about who he is or how his group is surviving, though there is some sense that they have an organization that can survive more effectively than the man could on his own.
We learn almost nothing about the wife and mother of the little family. "She was gone and the coldness of it was her final gift. She would do it with a flake of obsidian." Presumably she killed herself but when it happened is ambiguous and, from the point of view of the novel, no longer important. Only life and death in the here and now are important. The man throws away the only photograph that he and the boy have of her.
Of course all of this is disturbing. It is meant to be disturbing. And that's what I find difficult about the book. There is an obvious and very well developed love between the man and the boy, but the paring away of everything else, of all memory, of all spark of humanity other than the relationship between the two of them, is depressing. As a reader, I hoped that more would be left.
I read the book for our NCI book group and will discuss it with them tomorrow.
| Author | Manjoo, Farhad |
|---|---|
| Publication | Blackstone Audio, 2008 |
| Number of Pages | 258 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Psychology; Society; Politics |
| When Read | February 2017 |
Manjoo presents the results of a significant number of fascinating experiments that show that Americans, and really all humans, have great difficulty achieving an objective view of any matter that is not easily verified by direct observation. You can't fool people with false weather reports but for issues like the efficacy of the death penalty in deterring crime, the role of humans in climate change, the effect of lowering taxes or raising the minimum wage on employment, the impact of immigration on American jobs or security, and so on, there is no way for people to determine the correct answer all by themselves and they become good targets for manipulation.
Experiments were done to test people's reactions to evidence in many of these different areas. It turns out that people pay much closer attention to evidence that supports their pre-existing opinions than they do to countervailing evidence. Most people like to read "strong consonant" arguments, i.e., strong arguments that support their point of view, and "weak dissonant" arguments, i.e., easily refuted arguments that support views opposite to theirs. They don't like to read strong dissonant arguments and, if they are intelligent enough to see the weakness, they don't like to read weak consonant arguments either.
People use "selective exposure" to select what evidence they expose themselves to and "selective perception" when reading or listening to it. They listen to experts and take expert advice seriously, but when there are experts on both sides of an issue, selection determines which one they'll listen to.
All of this has been the case forever but now, as compared to 30 or so years ago, there are sources of news, information, and opinion on cable TV and especially on the Internet that cater to every opinion. If you like to read liberal, conservative, racist, or conspiracy oriented material, it's all there for you and the quantity is such that it's more than anyone could ever need. One can be a strong, habitual reader and researcher without ever having to see anything that doesn't already agree with and reinforce pre-existing views.
One effect of all this is that people don't just differ in opinions about what to do, they differ on their views of what are the facts. It is as if they live in different realities. In one perception of reality (I'm using a 2016-17 example here) Central American immigrants are hard working, law-abiding, family oriented people. But in a different perception of reality, they are thieves, drug dealers, and rapists. For myself, I have no doubt that there are thieves, drug dealers and rapists among the immigrants, but I have never seen any reason to believe that they are more prevalent as a percentage of the immigrant population than similar criminals are among the citizen population. My inclination, based on the Central American immigrants that I've met, is to think they are less criminal than Americans, but I have no data to support that and I recognize that my "reality" is not objective. I don't know the facts.
In the last section of the book, Manjoo describes some of the modern methods of false advertising, ways of presenting material that sells a particular point of view or a particular product while disguising itself as something entirely different. The tobacco companies formed a front organization with no recognizable ties to themselves that promoted the point of view that government should get out of people's personal lives. They even got people to contribute money to this organization, which the contributors did with no idea that the organization was founded, staffed, and directed by a tobacco company. They even got congressmen and other politicians to join without their knowing that the purpose was to sell cigarettes.
Another example of this kind of work is public relations companies that provide "video news releases", VNRs, that are professionally produced videos that look just like something that would be produced by a news reporter. Each segment may be about two minutes long, about right for a typical local TV news broadcast. It will contain no blatant advertisement, but will have a subtle message that sells a particular product. At the time he wrote the book, Manjoo believed that TV stations all across the country were receiving an average of about a dozen new VNR's free, every single day. Given the high cost of producing video news, and the insatiable need of the stations for more video, the temptation to present them on TV was overwhelming. Some stations would edit out the ad portion and some would explain the source of the video but, according to M, 90% of stations admitted to not doing that, or not doing it every time. I don't remember if M said so or not, but surely this technique is also applicable to political propaganda.
Manjoo's book is terribly demoralizing. I have always wanted to believe that good education can make us more rational. Manjoo seems to be saying that it can, but not a whole lot. Educated people are less likely, for example, to be attracted to weak consonant arguments. They may be more interested in hearing expert opinion. They may listen to more arguments from the other side. Manjoo claims that, on average, liberal Democrats are more likely to read arguments on both sides of a question than are Republicans. That's good. It's better than nothing. But is it enough? If we strengthen our education systems, if we lower the cost of access to higher education, will it make us more objective, more able to resolve the conflicts between us? I'd sure like to try it and find out.
My brother Arvin would qualify for the title of "gun nut". He thinks Barack Obama was the worst president in his memory and Donald Trump is potentially the best. He spent much time on the 2016 presidential campaign making phone calls for the National Rifle Association on behalf of Trump. It's hard for the two of us to talk about politics because we have such diametrically opposed views of reality. He thinks Trayvon Martin, the black teenager, was a criminal and George Zimmerman, the guy who shot him, was acting honorably and in self-defense. He thinks the Iran nuclear agreement will make Iran more dangerous, not less, and that if we lean on them harder and threaten war, we can stop their nuclear program. All my attempts to talk to him about it fail. If I tell him that we have gone as far as our allies would go with the sanctions and as far as the Iranians would accept, he just dismisses any arguments or observations that are against his view.
Arvin is not an idiot, and neither are some of the other people like him. Some of their points are valid. People on the left often can't acknowledge that that may be so. It's a standoff.
I accept that there isn't going to be a complete and permanent solution to this problem. The best we can hope for is to increase the number of people committed to facts and willing to listen to all sides. Along with that I also want to increase the number who are committed to the basic equality of all people. I know we can get closer to those goals but don't know whether we can get close enough to make a real difference.
It seems to me that Manjoo's argument about cable TV and Internet news contributing to disinformation is accurate for the United States when compared to the situation in the decades immediately before those two developments. However I wouldn't say it's accurate in all countries or even at all times in the U.S. For countries with totalitarian, or would-be totalitarian governments, the opposite is probably true. Before the Internet, all news was biased. After, some access to more objective news was possible.
I've been re-reading Upton Sinclair's Lanny Budd series of novels and Manjoo has made me more alert to Sinclair's comments about the press in France, a free and democratic country in the 1920's and 30's, the period of the novels. Sinclair claims, quite accurately as far as I know, that most of the newspapers were owned and dominated by what we in the U.S. call "special interests". They were dedicated to promoting the perspective and point of view of those interests. Some were probably much more objective than others, but more than a few were perfectly prepared to publish what, today, we call "fake news".
| Author | Francis, Dick |
|---|---|
| Publication | Berkeley Publishing Group |
| Copyright Date | 1979 |
| Number of Pages | 304 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | February 2017 |
One handed ex-champion jockey Sid Halley is working as a private detective. He is hired by Rosemary Caspar, a woman married to a top flight horse trainer to investigate why three outstanding horses trained at their stables all failed in big races, and to protect a fourth horse which she was sure was going to somehow be "nobbled". Her husband had hired private security guards and is doing everything to prevent anyone harming the horse and wants his wife to butt out, but she secretly goes to Halley.
H works on problems for two other men at the same time. One is Lucas Wainwright, the leader of the racing Security Service, asking H to look into the possibility that one of his men is on the take. The other is his ex-wife's father who wants H's help tracking down a con man who conned the ex-wife into working for a phony charity from which he stole all the money and disappeared.
H and his sidekick Chico Barnes work on all of these simultaneously. As they get close, they run afoul of Trevor Deansgate, a bookmaker and a villain who has the two men beaten up and threatens Halley by promising to blow off his good hand with a shotgun. He employs Peter Rammileese and two hired Scottish thugs to beat them. H leaves the country for a week, as ordered by Deansgate. He is overcome with terror. But he eventually comes back and determines to fight. He figures out how the horses were nobbled with the help of a veterinary researcher, reasons that it is Lucas Wainwright himself who is a culprit in the affair. Halley topples the scheme, forces Wainwright out of his job and any further association with racing, gets the con man arrested and his ex-wife out of trouble with the law, and puts Deansgate out of business.
In the last scene Deansgate corners Sid Halley with a shotgun and tells him that he's now going to blow off the other hand. But he won't do it. The satisfaction of harming his enemy is not enough compensation for spending ten years to life in prison. Despite his terror, H refuses to beg for mercy from this man. Francis writes of Deansgate: "He stood there for a moment, brooding, holding his gun: and then he gave me back what in the straw-barn he’d taken away. ‘Isn’t there anything,’ he said bitterly, ‘that you’re afraid of?’"
I've liked all of Francis' stories. This was one of the particularly good ones.
It seems to me that every story follows a pattern. The main character is doing his thing, living his life, when he is brought into the investigation of a crime. He begins discovering evidence that leads him closer to the culprit. He is attacked but escapes. He gets still closer. Then he is captured by the bad guys, beaten up, and either threatened with death or actually left in a situation where he is expected to die, but he escapes again. Then he zeroes in on the bad guys, traps them, confronts them, and puts them away - sometimes to jail, sometimes just to force them to lose their capacity to commit further crimes. There are always friends and decent people. There is always a workaday world, often involving horses as in this story. Police are not often involved except perhaps at the end. The hero wins by his intelligence and his courage, never by the far superior brains and brawn of the American mystery heroes.
It works.
| Author | Sinclair, Upton |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Open Road, 2016 |
| Copyright Date | 1943 |
| Number of Pages | 784 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Lanny Budd |
| When Read | February 2017 |
In 1935 and 1936 Lanny becomes more deeply involved in the fight against Nazism and fascism. Irma is upset and there are marital problems followed by separation and divorce. Lanny pursues and wins Trudi Schulz to be his new wife. His beautiful young half sister Marceline wants only to dance, to be admired, to live life in the center of a social whorl. Against Lanny's advice she rejects the attentions of Alfy, the son of friends Rick and Nina (Mr. and Mrs. Eric Vivian Pomeroy-Nielson) and marries Vittorio, a fortune hunting Italian flying officer who lost an arm in Ethiopia. The Spanish Civil War begins and Lanny is involved.
The story opens at the funeral of Freddi Robin. Lanny, at tremendous risk and cost to himself and to his marriage, got him out of Dachau at the end of Dragons Teeth. But Freddi was too badly injured. He could not recover. Lanny emerges from the experience exhausted but full of hatred of the Nazis and determination to fight against them. He surreptitiously sends money to Trudi Schulz and goes to Germany again to rescue her and bring her out, at great risk to himself.
Irma Barnes Budd, his wife, is furious. She considers Freddi Robin, Trudi Schulz, and people like them to have been agitators who wished to disrupt the social order. "The Communists had had no mercy on their class enemies, and why shouldn’t Hitler dose them with their own medicine?" She demands that Lanny refrain from his dangerous and inappropriate activities. He agrees in order to preserve his marriage and his position as "Mr. Irma Barnes", but he leads a double life and has much trouble with it. The last straw comes when Lanny smuggles Trudi Schulz out of Germany. Irma gives him an ultimatum. He must stop his "pink" activities, his support for disreputable people, his attacks on the important people in society and his underground activity or she will divorce him. He realizes that she is right and they cannot continue to live as they have. They separate. Irma takes their child to New York. Lanny learns that Irma is being courted by a fascist and by the English Earl Cedric "Ceddy" Wickthorpe. She sends her uncle to London to meet Lanny and present terms of a divorce. He agrees to all except that he will not give her sole custody of their daughter. Lanny is free to look for a woman, the first in his life, who shares his beliefs and values and Irma proceeds to marry Ceddy.
Free of Irma, Lanny begins to court Trudi Schulz whom he has spirited out of Germany and installed in Paris. Trudi is devoting her life to underground work against the Nazis, sending propaganda into Germany, hiding from German agents in Paris, still hoping against hope that her husband of whom she has had no word for a couple of years is still alive in a concentration camp. She is the first woman that Lanny has been attracted to who is not a member of the leisure class, the first who shares his desire for social justice and his commitment to fight fascism. He pursues her and she eventually gives in and marries him.
In the meantime the crisis in Spain is developing. Lanny is there getting some paintings when the Falangists invade from Morocco. He escapes with an unknown painting by Goya with 12 bullet holes in it, leaving his friend Raul from the socialist school in Juan les Pins behind in to work for the Republic in Madrid. But then Alfy goes to Spain to fight for the Republic as a pilot. He is shot down and captured. Lanny organizes a dangerous attempt to find him and get him out of the fascist prison. At great risk to himself Lanny finds Alfy, conceives a plan to bribe a Falangist officer to get him out of prison in a coffin, and spirits him away to Portugal. At the end of the story, after this dangerous, nerve wracking effort, he makes it back home to France and the arms of Trudi.
Throughout the series of books Lanny's social conscience is developing. Born into a life, not of great personal wealth, but of comfortable associations with wealthy people, he has led a life of leisure, reading, playing the piano, enjoying the company of the smart set and many leading intellectuals, politicians, and artists of his day. His father the armaments manufacturer and mother the professional beauty have, each in a different way, trained him to reproduce their own lives. But he has learned too much and can no longer accept the role that he has been groomed to play. Sinclair writes:
"What was Lanny himself going to do? Merely give advice, which is so cheap all over the world? No, there was something expected of those few among the Socialists who had money. The grandson of Budd’s must give until it hurt; he must give not merely the cost of a new coat of paint for the wood trim of the Bienvenu houses, but also what he would have to spend for new clothes in order to please his mother and her fashionable friends. He must get a stenographer, and study his card-file, and write more letters so as to find customers for paintings."
He will not give up his image as a playboy or his career as a broker of European paintings for sale to rich Americans. These provide money to employ in his mission and enable him to gather information from the wealthy and even the top Nazis, who regard him as a sympathetic member of the American elite. They also enable him to live something like the life he has always enjoyed. But now he is on a mission.
But what can people like Lanny actually achieve? "That was the tragedy ... when you adopted such ideas you condemned yourself to futility; you became a voice crying in the wilderness, and you might as well have been crying to the hawks and the buzzards, for all the attention you got."
What Lanny truly wished for was the life that he led apart from his fight against fascism, "So many innocent pleasures life offered, if only men could be persuaded not to rob and kill! If only they would let Beethoven teach them how to make more joy for themselves, instead of stealing the joy of others!"
I have read authors who can write more lyrically and paint more dramatic images. I have read authors who have a deeper understanding of love. But, with some reservations like his fixation on the business with the spirit medium, Upton Sinclair appeals very directly to my consciousness of the political and economic nature of society and the world.
| Author | Gardner, Erle Stanley |
|---|---|
| Publication | |
| Copyright Date | 1933 |
| Number of Pages | 260 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| Keywords | Perry Mason |
| When Read | February 2017 |
In this first of the series, Perry Mason is in his office when Della Street announces Mrs. Eva Griffin, a well dressed and beautiful young woman visitor. She asks Mason to protect her and Congressman Harrison Burke, who happened to be out together in a speakeasy where a murder was committed that had nothing to do with them. But she needs to keep her and Burke's names out of the newspapers and the police and public eye.
Mason investigates the facts and soon discovers that pretty much everything Eva Griffin says is a half truth or an outright lie. Her real name is Eva Belter. Her husband is the secret owner of Spicy Bits, a scandal sheet that makes money by blackmail. Buy advertising in the paper or your dirty deeds will be published. Later, Belter is murdered and Eva needs to defend herself to the police, even to the point of telling the police that she didn't see anything but she heard the voice of the killer and it sounded like Perry Mason!
Despite all of the grief that Eva gives Mason and all of the lies she tells him, he prides himself on getting his clients out of trouble. He figures out that Eva took a shot at Belter and ran, but she missed and the real killer was Belter's nephew who came in, saw the situation, picked up the gun off the floor, shot Belter, and planned for the police to arrest Eva. His intention was to cut Eva out of the will (murderers may not profit from their crime) and get all of Belter's money for himself.
In this first novel, Gardner gives us an attorney who is not very like the Raymond Burr character of the television show. There is not a single courtroom scene in the book. Mason is hard driving and brutal on himself, Della, and detective Paul Drake in his determination to win. He is very much after money, demanding and getting big fees for his services. And he kisses Della and orders Eva out of his office at the end.
This was certainly an energetic effort. Perhaps he became more routine later.
| Author | Mahfouz, Naguib |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Arabic |
| Translators | Hutchins, William Maynard et. al. |
| Publication | New York: Everyman's Library, Alfred A. Knopf, 1991 |
| Copyright Date | 1957 |
| Number of Pages | 422 |
| Extras | Introduction by Sabry Hafez |
| Extras | Bibliography |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Egypt; Cairo |
| When Read | February 2017 |
This second volume of the Cairo Trilogy continues to follow the family of al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad, concentrating partly on the story of Ahmad himself and partly on his two remaining sons, Yasin and Kamal. Ahmad is about 54, Yasin 28, and Kamal 17 at the opening of the novel. All three men are involved in unsatisfactory love affairs.
Ahmad, still married to Anima, is captivated by Zanuba, a new, young mistress who cares nothing for him but has gotten him to put her up in a houseboat and pay all her expenses. She demands more and more and had reached the point of demanding a marriage before he finally rejects her. The law allows a man to have multiple wives but it is beneath his dignity to be married to a former prostitute. He will not allow it.
Yasin has his father's good looks and attraction to women, but he has no self control. After breaking up with his first wife he pursues the neighbor girl Maryam, in spite of his mother's animosity to Maryam's mother, whom Amina believes dishonored the dead middle son Fahmy. But Yasin is smitten. He must have Maryam. By accident, at least on his side, he finds himself in bed with her mother. For a month the two meet every day in Yasin's apartment in Palace of Desire Alley for wild sex (hinted at, not described) but he tires of the woman and goes back to pursuing Maryam, whom he eventually wins in spite of her mother's anger at Yasin for dumping her. However Yasin is Yasin. He is incapable of focusing on one woman for any long period of time. He is always distracted and inevitably unfaithful. He meets Zanuba on the street, having known her before. They get drunk and wind up in his apartment with Maryam asleep in another room. They make noise, Maryam wakes up. There is a tremendous scene. Yasin pronounces the 'irreversible triple divorce formula: “You're divorced, divorced, divorced!”' His second marriage is gone. Not knowing anything about Zanuba's position with his father, Yasin winds up marrying her, against his family's wishes. In some ways, Zanuba is actually his best wife. Neither of them is a conventional person. Each has eyes open about the other.
Kamal is unlike either his father or his brother. He is a deeply serious and studious boy. He believes in God and religion, or at least he did at the beginning of his 18th year. He meets his wealthy friend Husayn Shaddad's sister Ai'da and is overwhelmed, not with lustful desire as his brother was with Maryam and every other woman, but with pure love and admiration for this beautiful, unearthly, pure girl. Every sight of her burns an image into his mind. He is too shy to look at her or talk to her except when invited to do so. He sees her as some kind of goddess. His friend Hasan takes him aside and tells him that Ai'da is his, Hasan's intended. His friend Isma'il takes him aside and tells him that Ai'da is simply using Kamal to make Hasan jealous so that Hasan, the son of a Superior Court judge, will marry her. Kamal is driven half crazy by this explosion of his dreams. When Ai'da marries Hasan and goes to Europe he is bereft. When he learns that she is pregnant he is driven half mad by the thought that Ai'da has sex and will bear children, something that should be beneath her to do. His life turned upside down, he continues to pursue his studies in philosophy and literature, going to the free teacher's academy against his father's wishes for him to go to law school and become a big shot. He goes with Isma'il to a bar and learns about alcohol. They go to a brothel and he learns about sex. He continues to study. He writes an article about Darwin, shocking his father who cannot understand why anyone would believe that men are descended from apes. He loses his religion and becomes a different man.
The story ends as Zanuba is giving birth to a child with Yasin. The brothers, so different in temperament, but sincerely caring for each other, wish each other well.
As with Palace Walk this second volume is an extraordinary book. Soap opera, sociology, psychology, politics, and philosophy are all intertwined in a way that tells us more about these people, their society, and their time than we could ever learn in any trip to Cairo.
Mahfouz takes us into the inner temptations, fears, and other emotions of his creations. He shows them to us as the complex thoughts and feelings of real people, people whom we criticize for their weakness, their self-absorption, and their inability to understand the harm that they inflict on others. But even as we get angry at these people we cannot help but recognize and sympathize with their humanity. There are no evil people here. There are only people.
Allah willing, or my genes and my circumstances permitting, I will read the third volume of the trilogy some day.
Mahfouz is a fascinating writer with a great deal of appeal to a person like me. I have copied a number of passages from the book into my diary. See the entry for February 27, 2017
| Author | Hunter, Stephen |
|---|---|
| Publication | Brilliance Audio, 2014 |
| Number of Pages | 416 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| Keywords | Bob Lee Swagger |
| When Read | February 2017 |
In this tenth in the Bob Lee Swagger series, Swagger gets an email from Kathy Reilly, a Washington Post reporter in Moscow, asking for information about a Moisin-Nagant 1891 rifle with PPU (an optical sight), the sniper's rifle used by Soviet snipers in World War II. He's soon in Russia with her tracking down the story of Ludmila "Mili" Petrova, a beautiful young sniper sent on a special mission to assassinate SS Obergruppenfuehrer Dr. Groedl, a German official in the Ukraine who was primarily responsible for the murder of Jews in that area.
The story shifts back and forth from Swagger and Reilly in "the present", to Mili and others in 1944 Ukraine, with occasional interludes of Gershon Gold in Tel Aviv, an analyst with the Israeli security services who is on the trail of a big platinum shipment that turns out to be a component in a massive load of Zyklon B, the gas used at Auschwitz.
The 1944 story begins with Mili's assignment by Comrade Krulov, her travel with a partisan group in the forest in the Ukraine, and their ambush by one Captain Salid, commander of a small SS unit of Bosnian Muslims that had been tipped off by someone that the partisans were coming. The rest of the story is Salid's attempt to trap Mili, Mili's ultimate success in killing Groedl, and the efforts of Major Von Drehle, leader of the remnants of a German parachute battlegroup, to protect her from the sadistic Salid.
In the present, Swagger and Reilly gradually uncover the truth of what happened and are themselves hunted by someone who will kill them to cover up the story. The someone turns out to be an American intelligence agent whom Swagger masters in a gunfight. It is all about Krulov, a high ranking but anti-semitic Soviet political officer who was the real traitor, betraying Mili and the partisans in order to help Groedl escape to kill more Jews. Krulov is now dead but his son is still alive and working for Americans, who are trying to protect him, as well as planning a massive massacre of Jews.
It all works out in the end with Swagger going back to his ranch, Reilly publishing the full story in the Post, and even Mili and Von Drehle surviving the war and living out their lives in Australia where they prosper with the first Australian Volkswagen dealership.
I like Hunter's writing. He calls himself "a gun guy" and, from the liberal American point of view, we might call him "a gun nut". But he's also a very intelligent, literate, accomplished writer who peppers his work with neat ideas from clever plots and scenes, to subtle humor, to unobtrusive literary allusions that will delight the sophisticated reader while slipping past the less well read gun nut readers without disturbing them. This book got its share of negative reviews on Amazon and Goodreads (is there a good book review site NOT owned by Amazon?) by people who didn't want all this boring historical crap - why can't Swagger go out and shoot people like in some of the other books. But I liked it and thought it was a good example of his writing. Of course I particularly liked the World War II angle - one of my own favorite reading topics.
| Author | Smil, Vaclav |
|---|---|
| Publication | Chichester, UK: John Wiley and Sons, 2014 |
| Number of Pages | 242 |
| Extras | Multiple appendices, charts, bibliography |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Science |
| Keywords | Ecology |
| When Read | February 2017 |
Professor Smil, a world leading authority on the flow of materials through modern economies gives us an extensive and highly documented account of the manufacture, usage, scale, energy consumption, cycling and recycling, and replacement of such materials used in contemporary society as metals, cement, plastics and electronics. He avoids discussing the flows of water, air, food, and fossil fuels, all of which are such important subjects in themselves, dwarfing most other flows, that they require books of their own.
The "flow" of a material is the movement of a material from its primary creation to finished products, to its final destination in recycled products or in landfills and dumps. For example, steel starts as iron ore and then goes through smelting, carbonization, alloying, casting or rolling and stamping, fabrication into automobiles or other products, and eventual recycling or loss. "Dematerialization" is a process of replacing a material with something that is smaller or lighter or is created with fewer materials or less energy. A paradigmatic example is the replacement of paper with information stored on hard disks - though the electronic age has, in fact, greatly increased paper usage due, in part, to the appearance of printers in every home and office desk.
The book is full of statistics with such information as the number of megatons of material of a particular type used in a particular country, mostly the U.S., China, Germany and Japan - all big material users with good statistics available. There is also a great deal of information about energy, for example the number of giga-Joules of energy required to produce one ton of aluminum, or of silicon wafer, and the amount of silicon in a batch that is fabricated into chips and the amount that is wasted or recycled.
Smil give us his prognostications on where we are going with our extraordinary and growing use of materials, how we are polluting our environment, and what can be done to lower our material footprint, reduce waste, and, ideally but not likely, re-orient our consumer society to be less consumption oriented.
The book was not highly technical. Some basic chemistry is required to understand his discussion of materials, though even without it one could get the general ideas that he is attempting to convey.
Smil is neither as optimistic as I would hope, nor as pessimistic as I feared. He sees no end to our current wasteful patterns of consumption. Indeed, consumption of at best marginally useful material items is the modern addiction. American homes for example now average 2,500 square feet for 2.7 residents per home, whereas Japanese homes are five times smaller. Americans now own 80 cars for every 100 people and gas mileage has actually gone down rather than up as the number buying SUV's, vans, and pickup trucks keeps going up. Even some countries such as Germany that we think of as so rational have 50 cars per 100 people and they are often heavy BMWs, Mercedes, or Audis driving 100 miles per hour on the autobahn. It will get much worse as hundreds of millions or billions of people in the developing world join the global middle class. It was thought that smart phones would replace telephones, cameras, books and newspapers, desktop computers, navigation devices, and many other objects. But sales of many of those objects are apparently continuing to increase, or decline only a small amount. However on the other hand our manufacturing processes keep getting more energy and resource efficient and still have a long way to go before they run out of room for improvement.
Much has been made of the apparently dwindling reserves of many materials but Smil thinks that a lot of that is illusory. We have extensive resources that go beyond the known reserves. When the reserves get low, more exploration or new processes make more of these resources available to be added to our reserves. We haven't overturned the laws of arithmetic. We will run out of some materials, or at least run out of materials that are cheap to extract from nature, but the time frame for most of these is in the hundreds of years or longer rather than in the decades that so many people fear.
Smil is, above all, a practical man. He would like to save the world but he wastes no time on schemes that depend on changing human nature. I think he's trying to make things incrementally better - more efficient, less wasteful, more environmentally friendly, more conscious of future needs. I think it's a good thing to have people telling us to eat more vegetables, recycle more, and buy more fuel efficient cars. But we also need people like Smil who will have a different kind of approach but perhaps a larger impact.
I picked up this book not realizing how difficult it would be to read. There are endless statistics to the point of becoming mind numbing. I remember only a few of the highlights. However, once I started it I persisted to the end, partly because of my belief that the material was important, and partly from my stubborn need to finish reading that I start.
| Author | Russo, Richard |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Vintage Books, Random House |
| Copyright Date | 2001 |
| Number of Pages | 483 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | March 2017 |
The town of Empire Falls, Maine, was once the home of a textile mill and shirt factory owned by the Whiting family. However the mills closed and the town consequently fell on hard times. The story follows the Empire Grill manager and short order cook Miles Roby and his family, friends, and adversaries in the present (presumably around the year 2000). There are also large background/flashback sections displayed in italicized font that tell stories from the time of Miles' childhood or before, when the mills were operating and the life of the town was more prosperous.
The principal characters are in three families. The Robys: 41 year old Miles, his 15 year old daughter Tick, his wife Janine who is divorcing him to marry Walt Comeau, his "sempty" year old father Max, his brother David who has a crippled hand due to a drunken driving accident, and his mother Grace - who has already died at the opening of the present time. The Whitings: C.B. (Charlie) Whiting, husband of Francine Whiting who owns half of Empire Falls at the start of the present time of the novel, and their daughter Cindy, crippled as a child by being run over by a car. The Mintys: police officer Jimmy, a bully and father of Zack, a handsome young bully who pursues Tick at the high school. Other characters include the Empire Grill patrons Horace Weymouth and Walt Comeau, and waitress Charlene, and the high school kids, art teacher and principal. One of the kids, John Voss an emotionally stunted high school student, plays a silent but critical role in the story.
Over the course of the novel we see Miles and his brother doing their best to make a living in the restaurant owned by Mrs. Whiting. Mrs. W promises to leave the restaurant to Miles but everyone doubts that she will. Miles married Janine partly to escape the clutches of poor Cindy Whiting, who is in love with him. Now Janine is divorcing him because, although he is a nice guy, he never wants sex and isn't good at it. Grace Roby turns out to have been in love with Charles Whiting. As a believing Catholic, she makes the mistake of confessing her love and her infidelity to Father Tom, who sends her to Francine to confess, after which she becomes a kind of slave in the Whiting household from which Charles is permanently absent. It's all a pretty depressing mess.
In the end, Zack Minty drives John Voss over the edge. Voss brings a gun to school and kills a number of people. He would have killed Tick except that the Principal dove between them and took the bullet. Then there is a once in a lifetime flood which washes Francine Whiting away with her horrid cat, Jimmy Minty is investigated and convicted of theft so he is expelled from the police force and cannot become its chief. Miles, David and Charlene are now working with Janine's mother Bea to rebuild a new restaurant. All stories are revealed and resolved.
Russo won the Pulitzer Prize for this novel. In my own view, it was a very fine, I will say "excellent", piece of writing but with some parts that I found irritating.
First the fine parts. Russo's characters were interesting and engaging. He managed the construction of well rounded and very convincing personalities, from the troubled high school girl Tick, to her self-absorbed mother Janine and Janine's self-absorbed paramour Walt. Even some of the relatively minor characters - Charlene, Horace, Walt, David, Max, Jimmy and Zack had more depth to them than most writers would have managed.
The narration was wonderful. Here are a few paragraphs:
"Whiting men ... each invariably gravitated, like moths to a flame, toward the one woman in the world who would regard making them utterly miserable as her life’s noble endeavor, a woman who would remain bound to her husband with the same grim tenacity that bound nuns to the suffering Christ."
"Walt rotated on his stool and took in the woman who would soon be his wife, breaking into a wide grin. This, Janine realized as Walt looked her over, was why she was marrying the man. He might be a beat slow - all right, several beats slow - but damn if he wasn’t always glad to see her. He always drank her in with what seemed to be fresh eyes, and she didn’t really care if the reason for this might be short-term memory deficiency."
It's good prose, full of powerful imagination, clever phrasing, and sparkling humor.
Now the parts that irritated me: R had some tendency to slip into caricature. Mrs. Whiting said "Dear boy" and "Dear girl" so many times I found myself gritting my teeth each time she spoke. Max, who was magnificently drawn, was still a little over the top and, in a sense, Grace might be said to have been too far under the top. But much more important than all of that was what seemed to me to be a radical departure that Russo made at the end of his story.
John Voss goes critical and shoots people, and not people that harmed him, but people from the high school who just happened to be nearby. He points the gun at Tick and pulls the trigger. Immediately Russo ends the scene and starts another that is not at the school. What happened? Did Voss kill Tick? It seems so. Why aren't we given the answer? Why are we forced to wait through several chapters to get to it, and why was it a completely improbable answer when we finally got it? It seemed like naked manipulation of the reader just to build an emotional effect.
Then we learn that the whole story of Cindy Whiting's car accident was a lie. She was actually crippled not by a hit and run driver, but by her father, who backed out of the garage in a huff without realizing that his little daughter was playing behind the car. Then we learn that Charlie Whiting did not get a gun to kill himself. He got a gun to kill his wife but couldn't do it because Grace and Cindy were with her, so he killed himself. Then, Jimmy Minty, who promises to be the next big villain in Miles' life is caught for theft and removed from the scene. Then, in the biggest deus ex machina of them all, Francine Whiting is sitting in her gazebo when the river overflows, drowns her, and sweeps her away with her evil and now terrified and doomed cat sitting on her head. It felt as if Russo had painted himself into a corner, didn't know how to get out, and started wildly spraying paint around.
I don't know if I'll read more Russo. The writing was excellent but the themes of repressed and despairing love, trapped lives, broken dreams, and inaccessibility of any life of the mind just didn't appeal to me. The forced ending also bothered me. It wasn't my kind of novel.
I read this book for the NCI book group.
| Author | Seymour, Gerald |
|---|---|
| Publication | London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2013 |
| Copyright Date | 1993 |
| Number of Pages | 400 |
| Extras | Forward by Mark Urban, 2013 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| When Read | March 2017 |
Gordon Benjamin Brown a former captain in the UK's special forces, performed a series of heroic acts in Karbala, Iraq in the first Gulf War, including the dangerous rescue of an American helicopter pilot. However, angry that the US and UK were abandoning the Shiites of Karbala to Saddam Hussein's tanks and Republican Guard after urging them to rebel, he pisses off an American general who then goes after him solely to maintain dignity in the face of a personal affront. Gord Brown winds up expelled from the service instead of winning the medals and promotion that he had earned. Now, working in a fish canning factory, he is approached by three Guatemalan Indians who show him photos of victims of torture and murder by the Guatemalan Army. Abandoned by his government, abandoned by his girlfriend, feeling that he had been forced to abandon thousands of people in Karbala who had grown to trust him, he decided to chuck the fish canning job and go to Guatemala to fight.
Starting out with just the three Indians plus four Guatemalan rebels and intellectuals, armed with guns and a flamethrower (demanded by Brown) from the Cuban government, they land in Guatemala and begin a trek towards the capital, wiping out minor army patrols and bases along the way as they accumulate hundreds, then thousands, of supporters, all believing that their saviors from the torturers and killers of the Guatemalan army have arrived and that the flamethrower is their great weapon. They are successful beyond anyone's imagination because Gord Brown directs them, pushes them, compels them to move when they don't want to, directs the attacks himself, and makes them do what they otherwise could never have done - until finally he himself succumbs to fatigue and can push them no more. They take one day of rest that is enough for them to be found and trapped and disbursed or liquidated. Brown then takes his small inner circle of the original people in a desperate attempt to escape.
On the other side there is Colonel Arturo, commander of the Kaibile battalion, the government's most disciplined and dangerous unit of professional soldiers; Lieutenant Benedicto, the cover name of an intelligence agent, torturer, and handsome adventurer about to marry into a wealthy family; and Tom Schultz, American helicopter pilot who eventually learns that Gord Brown, the man who saved his life in Iraq, is a leader of the rebels. Schultz works for the Drug Enforcement Agency that tells him they are there only to stop drugs and may not interfere in Guatemalan politics. But in fact they do interfere on the side of the government. But the U.S. and U.K. government working under U.S. direction, provide any assistance requested by the bastards. They are unalterably opposed to any sort of popular Cuban style revolution, no matter who comprises the government or of what crimes they may be guilty.
It's hard to tell exactly what happens to all of the characters in the end. Seymour uses an opaque writing style that makes heavy use of pronouns and I'm not always sure who "he" is in each reference. However, I think most of the original revolutionaries survive and escape to Cuba. In the last gasp of the conflict, a brave Cuban pilot has landed in Guatemala and lifted off with the original group that still survives. Schultz and Arturo block the takeoff with a helicopter hovering near the end of the field but Brown, who jumped off the airplane to save them sprays the helo with his flame thrower. I think Arturo is killed. I don't know about Tom Schultz or about Gord Brown. They may or may not have survived. Unless I missed it, S doesn't tell us. Benedicto, the handsome evil man cleans up the Guatemalan end of the story by shooting a totally innocent young woman in the head because he tortured her in order to compel her father to cooperate with the Kaibiles. Because she might, someday, tell someone what happened, he kills her. He then goes off to play tennis with his not especially attractive but rich bride to be, driving the fancy car that her father gave him.
This is very like the other books I've ready by Seymour. The plot is very, very intense. The characters are complicated and conflicted. The ethics of the situation are always ambiguous and the choices that each character makes are almost always between something bad and something worse - and it's sometimes hard to tell which is which.
All of the governments and most of the government functionaries act in their own interests and against the interests of ordinary people. Guatemala is a cesspool. Innocent people are tortured and killed en masse. The rich do whatever they like, take whatever they want, and intimidate or massacre any who oppose them. Resistance is close to futile. When resistance works and the starving Indian farmers manage to kill the soldiers who oppress them, the people they kill are themselves oppressed farmers who have been drafted into the army or the militia. The people who are the real oppressors are out of reach and can't be hurt.
The Americans present themselves as uninvolved. They tell themselves and everyone else that they are there solely for the purpose of stopping drugs from coming into the U.S., but it's not true. When the Indian revolt looks like it could succeed, everything is done to help the oligarchic murderers to win. Some of the UK officials eventually realize that Gord Brown was a courageous man and a great hero for his country, but there's nothing those few (two actually) can do to change official policy which is that Brown must die for the sake of US/UK relations, and to preserve the all important status quo. Even the Cubans, theoretically committed to revolution in Latin America, don't take a serious interest in the problem. They allow the Guatemalan rebels a small amount of arms and a couple of flights by Cuban pilots flying old Antonov Colts to take them in, with one of the Antonov's crashing for lack of fuel. The other pilot is a hero, but nobody in Cuba cares.
This is one of those books that is compelling to read but, at the same time, is stomach churning. There are scenes of violence and torture against innocent people.
One last thing I'll write about the book is to mention some of the auxiliary characters, many of whom are very well drawn. "Alex" is a young American girl who works for justice, making herself a nuisance until the soldiers decide to rape and kill her. Purely by accident she is rescued by the rebels but she constantly criticizes Brown, insisting that he can't win and he's just going to get a lot of innocent Indians killed. "Groucho", one of the original rebels, is a math professor who fights until Benedicto captures him and forces him by torturing his daughter to carry a transmitter to enable the soldiers to track the rebels. Alex discovers what he's done and Brown shoots him. An elderly, arthritic Canadian in his 70's who fought in WWII comes to the country to find the grave of his son and joins the rebels. He can't keep up in the final escape attempt and drops out with a machine gun to ambush the pursuing soldiers and give his life for the others. A young archaeologist from Minnesota and two assistants have found a Mayan ruin. The soldiers follow him to the site, kill his assistants to eliminate witnesses but can't find him. Then they cut up the find to sell pieces on the market. He too joins the rebels, escapes back to the U.S. where he is arrested by customs agents, but manages to get a critical message off to someone in the UK that results eventually in the Cuban plane coming back to pick up the others. Rodolfo Jorge Ramirez, the son of a dead rebel leader and the man who sent the three Indians to Europe to find a "fighting man" is a good speaker but not fully able to understand the things that Brown tells him. He escapes to Cuba at the end, thinking to go to Italy and become a Ferrari salesman - a hopeless dream.
I'm not sure who else writes like Gerald Seymour.
| Author | Lansdale, Joe R. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2016 |
| Number of Pages | 128 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Autobiography |
| When Read | March 2017 |
This is a collection of ten pieces. They may all be non-fiction, or they may be one or a few fictional stories with some memoirs, an interview and some essays. Some of the pieces have the feel of fiction but might be totally true. I'm guessing that they are.
Lansdale grew up in East Texas and his family and the people of East Texas are the focus of writing. In some of them, his father, a very tough man who runs a little auto repair shop, punches out men who deserve it. He does it easy. First he's slow and quiet. Then he hits hard and fast. Then he's slow and quiet again. It's clear that his son deeply admires him.
The title piece "Miracles Ain't What They Used to Be" is an essay against religion. He begins "IT WAS MY ORIGINAL intent to write this as a well-measured, reasonable, and not at all angry or sarcastic piece on people who believe in religious miracles." However it became a very sarcastic piece, heaping scorn on people who believed that when good things happened to them, especially near death experiences, they are miracles from God. He calls attention to nasty things in the Bible, foolish parts of religious ritual. "Suspect one thing in the Bible as bullshit, and you find yourself checking your shoes repeatedly as you wander through the theological pasture. This includes miracles. First, did they really happen; and if so, then why are modern miracles a whole lot less miraculous?"
He includes an interview on the topic of his writing, an essay on Edgar Allen Poe, articles about the poverty he experienced as a boy and again with his young wife, and more about writing.
The book is part of an Outspoken Authors series by PM Press, which looks to be a shoestring operation that nevertheless recruited some well regarded and popular authors to contribute to the series.
Five of the pieces were originally published in the Texas Observer.
My first thought was that Lansdale's writing was unnecessarily crass and contemptuous of others, but as I read further, it grew on me. He's smart, knowledgeable about the people he writes about, and if his writing is vulgar, its vulgarity seems honest and integral to the subject and does not seem to be thrown in to shock the reader.
As of this writing, L has written 45 books and 30 short story collections in many different genres including mystery, horror, fantasy, science fiction, and novels about East Texas. He is 65 years old, so there's probably more to come. I expect I could find some that interest me in his work and I might read more.
| Author | Shute, Nevil |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Vintage Books, Random House, 2010 |
| Copyright Date | 1953 |
| Number of Pages | 354 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | March 2017 |
Roger Hargreaves. a 63 year old priest of the Church of England, has done duty in a number of places but is now in a small town, a village really, in the outback of Australia. He lives in a two room parsonage in which one room has a functioning roof. He tends the tiny church in the village, teaches religion to the children, does baptisms, weddings, and funerals, and travels hundreds of miles, sometimes riding in the mail truck, sometimes on horseback, ministering to the widely scattered people of the surrounding territory. The territory is dry for much of the year but is "in the wet" for part of the year during which travel is difficult or even impossible.
He befriends an impoverished and elderly drunk named Stevie whom everyone tolerates but no one knows much about. Stevie is said to have been a Royal Australian Air Force pilot in the first world war, but now he lives on a government pension with a Chinese vegetable farmer named Liang Shih, ten miles out of town, where they smoke opium and mostly keep to themselves until a pension check comes in, when Stevie goes to town, cashes the check, drinks most or all of it up, cadges drinks from others, and finally goes back to the Chinaman.
One day Liang shows up in the village and reports that Stevie is sick and dying. Hargreaves, himself suffering with malaria, goes with the village nurse through the flooded lands, to minister to Stevie. The land around their two room cabin is flooded. All the surrounding animals are in a semicircle on the higher land by the house. Stevie is semi-conscious and is smoking opium, the only thing they have to ease his pain. Hargreaves, feverish and practically delirious himself, sits with Stevie through the night, holding his hand and trying to get the story of his life so that he can contact Stevie's relatives. Stevie tells him that his real name is David Anderson, that he has a wife and children, and that he worked for the Queen.
Suddenly, with no explanation from Shute, a story of David Anderson begins. Is the story from Stevie? Is it a hallucination by Hargreaves? We don't know but it is a fantastic story that takes place in the future, in the 1980's. Anderson gives up his job as test pilot to become Captain of the Queen's Flight. He is known to his friends as "Nigger" Anderson because he is 1/4 Australian aborigine. It affects his love life because he worries that no white woman will want him "because of the colour." He flies a small passenger jet, paid for by the government of Australia, at the disposal of the British Royal family. The socialist Labour government of Britain won't pay for a plane for the Queen, so Canada and Australia have each provided a plane and a crew because the Queen is their queen too.
David's story is partly a love story, partly an adventure story about flying, including the disposal of a bomb intended to kill the Queen and the Royal Consort, not to mention everyone else on the plane, and partly a story of politics. The political angle is that Australia and Canada have adopted a "multiple voting" system. Every adult gets one vote. If they have a college education they get another one. Solicitors, doctors, clergymen, parents who have raised two children to above the age of fourteen without a divorce, people who have worked abroad for two years, and people who earn over 5,000 a year, plus finally and rarely, the Queen can award an extra vote to people who have done something well.
Britain is resisting the multiple vote. The people are socialists there. Shute argues that this has created a mess. See my diary for more information about it.
In the end, after the bomb threat, Anderson is ordered to fly to Kenya to pick up Princess Anne, but he feels sick and we are back in 1953 Australia again. Stevie dies. Later Hargreaves travels through the countryside and is called upon to baptize a baby named David, born to a small scale cattle drover named Anderson and his half caste wife.
This was not like any of the five other novels I have read by Shute. Unless I'm misremembering one of them, the political emphasis was entirely new as was the future fantasy. I will write more about the politics in my diary. The future fantasy was confusing in that the transitions in each direction, one at each end of the Anderson story and one in the middle when Anderson eats infected shellfish and dreams that he is an old drunk, dying in pain, were abrupt and surprising. The closest thing to an explanation was that the entire 1980's story was a fantasy of Hargreave's malarial fever.
The politics were, of course, opposite to my own. At first, I wasn't certain that S was advocating the multiple vote system. I thought perhaps that he was setting it up in order to knock it down, but that was not the case. However he seemed to argue at some points that socialism was right and proper for England until such time as the population declined to allow England to feed itself, after which they could switch to a capitalist meritocracy. That all seemed strange to me. Just as strange was his obeisance to the royal family. Perhaps because I grew up in the United States, I don't see the royals as essential to good government, or see them as the focus of society.
I tried to be open minded about Shute's ideas. He's certainly not the first to posit that the best men should run the country - an idea that goes back at least to Plato's philosopher kings, and the Optimates of the Roman Senate. There are things to be said for it, but I'm not sure that Shute made the case as well as he could have. However there are also things to be said for one person, one vote, and Shute did not explain those at all. His argument was not made in answer to any argument on the other side.
As in Landfall and Round the Bend and possibly others of Shute's books that I have not read, his handling of aviation is deeply informed and very interesting. I loved that aspect of the book. His handling of the main personalities, especially of Roger Hargreaves, also struck me as interesting. My first thought as I read the first 20% or so of the book was that this was going to be a book like Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop, a great book about what it means to serve man as a servant of God. Although I don't share Shute's religious perspective, I do appreciate that his perspective was of the humanist kind, not the authoritarian or the supernaturalist kind.
I did not find this to be nearly as good as Pied Piper, Round the Bend, The Chequer Board or Trustee From the Toolroom, but it wasn't bad. I'm glad I read it.
| Author | Doyle, Arthur Conan |
|---|---|
| Publication | Gutenberg.org, 2016 |
| Copyright Date | 1914 |
| Number of Pages | 156 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| Keywords | Sherlock Holmes |
| When Read | March 2017 |
Holmes and Watson are called in on a case of the murder of one John Douglas who lives with his wife in an old castle like home with a moat and a drawbridge. It is hard to see how the killer got into the house and how he got out again. Reasoning from one clue after another, Holmes eventually learns that the man is not dead at all, it's the killer who is dead, and the man and his wife and best friend are pretending that the killer was successful in order to convince a criminal syndicate that no more killers need be sent.
That occupies the first third of the book. After that comes a flashback to the story of the Valley of Fear, a coal mining area in the American West in 1875 in which a large group of organized criminals have terrorized the small mine owners into paying protection money and beaten or killed all those who resist. John McMurdo, a new man, comes to town and quickly becomes a favored tough guy among the gangsters. However, it transpires that he is actually a top Pinkerton detective, working for the biggest capitalists in the state who have hired him to get the evidence on the ring leaders and bring in the police. He is successful. Some of the criminals are executed and others sentenced to ten year prison terms. Ten years later, the criminals have served their term and are out to find the detective they knew as John McMurdo, however McMurdo has changed his name to Douglas and has fled to England, setting the stage for the mystery in the first part of the book.
The murder was foiled but Holmes knows that Professor Moriarty had been contracted to kill Douglas and he would not be fooled or deterred. He sends Douglas and his wife out of the country, but it is of no avail. He learns later that Douglas disappeared overboard from a ship off the Cape of Good Hope. The story is over but Holmes will dedicate himself to trapping Moriarty - perhaps in some future, never written book.
While transcribing the book card for The Hound of the Baskervilles (1981-03.03) I discovered that there was a novel length Sherlock Holmes book that I had never read. I got it from the Gutenberg site and read it right away.
I enjoyed reading it. It was fairly short, finished in two days. I have nothing really new to say about Conan Doyle or Sherlock Holmes, so I'll leave it at that.
| Author | Berger, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Vintage International, Random House, 1991 |
| Copyright Date | 1972 |
| Number of Pages | 336 |
| Extras | About the author |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| When Read | March 2017 |
An Italian businessman dealing in candied fruit is in love with an American mistress from a wealthy family. Sometime around 1886, she bears him a son referred to in the book only as "G". She takes the boy away to England and tells him his father is dead. The boy grows up intelligent but self-involved and focused on sensuality. His mother mostly abandons him to the care of her cousins, brother and sister, who have a house in the country.
At age 14 G seduces, or is seduced by, Beatrice, the cousin of G's mother with whom he is staying. Later he goes to Italy and meets his father. He has no interest in the candied fruit business, no interest in education, family, or work. He develops a small interest in aviation but his real interest is seducing women. We watch him seduce a hotel maid named Leonie, the wife of a French friend named Hennequin, who shoots G in the shoulder and says his only mistake was to fire from too far away (though Berger says he was actually close.) We see him later in Trieste pursuing first a Slovene factory worker and then the wife of an Austrian banker.
In 1915 G is recruited into the British secret service to help bring Italy into the war on the side of the Entente. His motivation, if he has any, is unclear. It has nothing to do with patriotism or politics of any sort, both of which hold no interest for him. He is sent to Trieste, which is where he meets the Slovene girl and the banker's wife. He pursues the wife and is given the blessing of the husband, but then, for reasons either unexplained or explained in too subtle a fashion for me to figure out, he dresses up the factory girl and takes her to a ball at the Stadttheater. He manages to anger everyone, Germans, Italians, and some of the Slavs. When Italy declares war against Austria he is condemned by the Austrians as an Italian to be expelled and condemned by the Italian faction in the city as an Austrian spy. He falls in with a group of Slavs launched on a pogrom against the Italian bourgeoisie while the Austrian authorities look away. He helps them burn down the Italian sympathizing newspaper. The Italians hustle him off to the ocean, beat him on the head, and drop him in the water to drown.
This is an unconventional but remarkable novel in many ways. The author appears directly in the narration, speaking of how he chooses to explain this or that, or the nature of some characters in the story or of the historical events. He writes a lot about sex which is, after all, the central theme of the novel. The depiction can be very explicit, even including simple drawings of a penis and a vagina, with interpretations thereof. But I wouldn't say any of it was erotic. If anything it was more symbolic and a discussion of a sexual act would be intermixed with discussions of line and form or of politics and society. G was not handsome and did not strike me as seductive or particularly attractive to women in the manner of literary Don Juans like Tomas in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. He was determined and persistent but I still didn't always understand why some of the women, particularly Camille, the French businessman's wife and Marika the Banker's wife, were interested in him. It also wasn't entirely clear to me what attracted him to them. The attraction was physical and was different in the case of each woman. He couldn't have liked the women since he was dishonest and exploitative in the way he treated them. He made promises to them that he had no intention of keeping and once he was done with them, which didn't take very long, he seemed never to think about them again.
All of the Amazon reviews I read seemed to be by very sophisticated readers but they were all over the place in their star ratings. It received 3 one star, 1 two star, 3 three star, 4 four star, and 1 five star reviews. One obviously intelligent reviewer gave it one star, called it "a really disappointing and annoying read", and said it should be called "G. An Awkwardly Disjointed Pastiche About a Sex Addict and Politics ... Not a novel."
I came to the book already knowing that Berger was a Marxist, already knowing that he spent six years writing this book, already having read A Painter of Our Time, and already knowing that G won the Man Booker prize as the best novel of the year of its publication. That all predisposed me to try to find good in the book, and find it I did, though I might not have looked as hard if I were not so predisposed by that external (to the novel) knowledge.
See my diary entry for a selection of excerpts from the novel and my thoughts about them.
I transcribed a book card for Zola's The Masterpiece yesterday and now I'm thinking about Claude Lantier, the painter obsessed with painting a perfect vision of reality - not a photographic vision, but perfect in an artistic sense. I see no comparison between Lantier and G, and not too much between Zola and Berger, though there is some. But I'm wondering about Zola and Berger. Both spent a huge period of time on a single work that may have veered off into the unexpected and unknown.
| Author | Meyer, G.J. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Blackstone Audio, 2012 |
| Copyright Date | 2006 |
| Number of Pages | 816 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War I |
| When Read | March 2017 |
Beginning with the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Hapsburg throne, and continuing through to the Treaty of Versailles, Meyer offers a continuous account of both the military and political aspects of the war. Most of the story is at a high level but there are important and well handled sections covering the lives of ordinary soldiers, telling what it's like, for example, to cower in the rain, in a trench, in two feet of water with no place to lie down to sleep without drowning and no place to hide from the incoming shells.
The military account provides an explanation of the strategies, such as they were. For example, for a particular offensive there were so many heavy guns and so many medium and light guns per mile, or so many yards of front per gun. There were so many shells stockpiled, or so many that fell on each yard of the enemy trench. The barrage would last for so many hours, and then might lift or might creep, or might change to gas, or to shrapnel, and then so many men would climb "over the top" and head for the enemy front lines, where so many machine guns would emerge to wait for them and mow them down, and so many enemy cannon to open up on them as they went across. Then the casualties would be counted, generally counted in the tens of thousands but, for the biggest battles like Verdun, they were in the hundreds of thousands. Meyer offers his personal assessment of when the strategies were well planned and well executed (uncommon) and when they were just stupid and suicidal frontal assaults - frequently the case with the British and French.
Interspersed with accounts of the battles, mainly on the Western front, but quite a few in the East and some in the Middle East or in Italy, there are "background" sections in which Meyer explains the leadership and policy of the national governments of Serbia, Austria, Hungary (whose policy was different from that of Austria), Russia, Germany, France, Britain, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, the Ottoman Empire, and the United States. He introduces the Emperors of Germany, Russia and Austria-Hungary, and the leaders of Britain, France, and the U.S.
As historiographers like John Tosh point out, a historian who attempts to cover a big subject, like the World War, necessarily oversimplifies a great deal, to the point that experts can dispute most of his generalizations. It's a problem that cannot be solved. All the historian can do is do his best.
Meyer has certainly done his best. This is an outstanding effort to make a huge subject comprehensible in one volume. He manages a consistent approach. He has picked out the areas that he will write about and he sticks to them, providing supporting information in his "background" sections, but not allowing himself to wander off into potentially fascinating but digressive subjects like the air war, the submarine war, colonial struggles in Africa and Asia, changes in technology, proletarian politics, or the morality of civilian bombing, attacks on merchantmen, starvation of the Germans after the armistice, or poison gas, all fascinating subjects on which it would be easy to write multiple books, but which would make the book less effective at dealing with the main points that he writes about - the ground war on the Western front and, to a lesser extent on the Eastern front, that decided the course of the war.
My impression from Basil Liddel-Hart and others that many of the Entente commanders were criminally arrogant and incompetent was reinforced by reading this book. Joffre, Foch, and many others of the French commanders who subscribed to "the cult of the offensive", who disdained to prepare their lines for German attacks and who ordered their men to fight to the last bullet and never retreat, suffered huge losses and, by failing to withdraw, wound up losing much more territory than if they had withdrawn. The British commanders, John French and Douglas Haig, were no better. For most of the war their only strategy was to drop hundreds of thousands of tons of explosive on the enemy lines and then hurl masses of men into the teeth of German machine guns. For the most part, they didn't even use their artillery or infantry intelligently, as the Germans learned to do. In some of the battles the German gunners became physically ill from killing so many helpless Brits that threw themselves suicidally against the barbed wire and the guns.
I've learned that it's very hard to evaluate strategy and leadership from afar. Different accounts can differently praise, blame, or excuse particular men and particular actions. But objective evaluations are not impossible and I thought Meyer did a very credible job. He praised Petain, a man I thought of only in his role as fascist collaborator in the 1930's and 40's. But Petain was an intelligent commander who defended his area with flexibility and without excessive casualties. Many of the losses he did incur were caused by insubordinate subordinates who took their divisions into attacks, or refused to withdraw, in spite of orders from Petain. Although he won important battles, he was disparaged by Joffre and Foch.
The Australian general John Monash, a reserve officer, not a regular, and the son of German Jews(!) who emigrated to Australia two years before Monash was born, was rejected by leading British generals as being socially unacceptable. But he kept winning battles and was loved by his men. Unheard of behavior at the time included his arranging for hot meals to be brought to his troops during an offensive. He was a supremely competent manager and organizer as well as military strategist.
A particularly fascinating character was Erich Ludendorff. By Meyer's account, he was a remarkably effective and flexible general, but totally inflexible in his commitment to victory even when victory was impossible. His life after the war was not seriously discussed in this book but he was, in my view, an arrogant pig who did everything he could do to bring fascism to Germany and to sow the seeds for Germany's further destruction in World War II.
| Author | Kube-McDowell, Michael P. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Ace |
| Copyright Date | 1987 |
| Number of Pages | 211 |
| Extras | Essay "My Robots" by Isaac Asimov |
| Extras | illustrations |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| Keywords | Robots |
| When Read | March 2017 |
A young man wakes up in a kind of space lifeboat. He has no recollection of who he is, what his name is, or how he came to be in the survival pod. A name on his spacesuit says "Derec", which he assumes is his name. He lands on a large asteroid inhabited only by robots. They are engaged in tunneling through the asteroid. Eventually, he figures out that they are sifting the dirt, looking for something. The asteroid is attacked by an alien spaceship. Robot Monitor 5 tosses a jewel like object that he calls a "key" to Derec before expiring under the attack. Derec himself is brought into the spaceship where he is tortured and made to repair a partially functioning robot for the use of Aranimas, the Erani commander of the alien ship. He meets another human, Kathryn "Kate" Burgess and the two team up. The alien ship blows up. Derec and Kate escape in the lifeboat with a "caninoid" alien named Wolruf and land on another space station inhabited by robots. The key is taken from them. A human talks to them by hypervisor and says they have no property but will be allowed to return to an inhabited planet, but the three steal back the key and use it to "jump" to Perihelion, the closest point to every other place in "jump space". From there, they are transported, independently of any wishes, to a city on another planet inhabited entirely by robots. The robots tell them that another human was on the planet but has been murdered and no one could possibly have done it except one or both of the two of them, since robots are unable to harm human beings.
The story ends at that point, hanging on the cliff, as it were, ready for volume 2.
This novel had the character of a young adult thriller, but I like Asimov's robot books, as I recently recalled after reading the Asimovian robot series by Roger MacBride Allen. This series is quite different from Allen's, and it looks like each volume may be written by a different author. They're quick reading and I'm now intrigued to find out how the next volume handles a city built by robots, for robots, with no human governance. It may be more sophisticated than the first volume. I'm going to find out.
| Author | Adams, Scott |
|---|---|
| Publication | Kansas City: Andrews McMeel Publishing, LLC, 2013 |
| Number of Pages | 127 |
| Genres | Fiction; Comedy; Cartoons |
| When Read | March 2017 |
This book is a compilation of Dilbert cartoons, mainly on the topic of corporate leadership, management, and mentoring. They are a mix of three frame, presumably published daily cartoons, and eight frame, presumably published on Sunday cartoons. All are in color. On the management and leadership side there are the pointy-haired boss and his boss, a sociopath with an egg shaped head who, I think, is the CEO of the company. The usual cast of Dilbert: Wally, Alice, Asok, Dogbert, Catbert, and various walk-ons, including a robot, are all here.
I thought most of the cartoons were pretty funny and a fair number were laugh out loud, even hysterically funny. The book was very difficult to put down. After each page I could hardly stop myself from turning the page to read just one more cartoon, then reading all of them and turning the page again.
| Author | Glatshteyn, Yankev |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Yiddish |
| Translators | Shandler, Jeffrey |
| Publication | New York: Square Fish, Macmillan, 2008 |
| Copyright Date | 1940 |
| Number of Pages | 208 |
| Extras | Introduction by Jeffrey Shandler |
| Extras | About the author |
| Extras | About the translator |
| Genres | Fiction; Juvenile |
| Keywords | Holocaust |
| When Read | March 2017 |
The story takes place in Vienna, presumably in the early months of 1940. It opens in the apartment of nine year old Karl. His mother is being arrested by three SS men who beat her and punch Karl when the two resist. His father was already dead, having been arrested and beaten to death for being a socialist. Now Karl is on his own. He goes to the house of his Jewish friend Emil to find Emil's father dead and his mother in shock and helpless. She disappears the next day and Emil and Karl must run for their lives. They are first taken in by a janitor and his wife, but when the janitor is disappeared, they roam the streets where they are grabbed by a Nazi. Emil, in all innocence, says he is a Jew and the Nazi collars them and takes them to a place where a large group of Jews are being forced to wash the street with their bare hands. They are saved by a higher ranking SS officer with a bit more humanity who says they have done enough and sends them away. Later, they are witnesses to the baiting of Jews in the municipal park by SS soldiers, cheered on by the public. They are saved by a woman and a man in a resistance movement who take them away and provide for them until the man is arrested and killed. The woman escapes with the children and takes them to a place where Jewish children are being assembled for emigration. Emil and Karl hold hands in an attempt to stay together but, in the crush of the crowd and the attacks by antisemites, Emil winds up on a train and Karl is left behind. In the end he is waiting in trepidation with 40 other children for the next train, due in a few hours.
The story is written in third person but presented from the children's point of view, intended for American Jewish children, and perhaps Yiddish speaking children abroad, to be able to understand what was happening in Europe at the time. There is a clear effort to show that it is not just Jews that are being persecuted but socialists and others too.
The presentation of the oppressors is complex. The SS men torture people for the fun of it. Antisemitic civilians gather round to laugh and egg them on. They jostle each other and complain if their children don't get a chance to see the humiliation and torment of the Jews. However the resistance people are non-Jewish and some of those who participate in the antisemitism are shown as fools more than bigots. A train signalman and drunkard in a shack living near the socialist resistance people participates in the looting of Jewish shops. He takes a new suit, two pairs of shoes, and some cash. When the boys show some repugnance to him, he agrees that it was bad but, what could he do, the proprietor gave him these things for free. He wouldn't participate in the beating of the man and, besides, everyone knows that Jews are rich, he probably had three more suits and four more pairs of shoes. The signalman is more stupid than malevolent.
This is not a book written for adults, but is a book that adults can read and learn from. It is the authentic voice of a man from Poland who traveled back to Poland in 1934 to visit a sick mother, and who presumably had Jewish contacts in Europe. At that time, it is thought that very few people could foresee what was going to happen to European Jewry. Glatshteyn could foresee it. In books like this, it's hard to even think about any literary aspects. It's the content that counts and G made the reality clear.
Born in Poland, Glatshteyn came to the U.S. at age 18 in 1914. He became an important writer in the New York Yiddish community, writing poetry, criticism, a couple of novels, and this, his only book for young readers, all in Yiddish.
| Author | McQuay, Mike |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Ace Books |
| Copyright Date | 1987 |
| Number of Pages | 177 |
| Extras | Essay on "The Laws of Humanics" by Isaac Asimov |
| Extras | illustrations |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| Keywords | Robots |
| When Read | March 2017 |
Derec and Kathrine are reintroduced in a brief segment after which they are settled into a guarded apartment and told by the robots that, for their safety, they may not leave. They fake out the guard robot and Derec escapes to wander the city. He is overtaken by a life threatening rain storm, more powerful than anything he has ever seen, that washes him into a huge drainage ditch and then a reservoir from which he barely survives, exhausted. However they do win the robots' consent to travel the city with robot witnesses who will watch them. Derec ultimately finds the control room from which some hidden and currently absent human supervisor has ordered things. Katherine finds the missing body of the dead human and sees that he is the exact image of Derec. Derec discovers why the destructive rains are occurring - the "central core" computer has invoked a defensive mechanism against alien invasion that calls for maximum city construction speed which, in turn, is liberating large amounts of chemicals into the atmosphere and destroying the ozone layer, resulting in massive rain every night. He next discovers that the dead copy of Derec was not murdered at all. He died of carbon monoxide poisoning released by a robot attempt to free him from a building by cutting through the walls with a welding torch, which released a lethal dose of carbon monoxide from the walls.
In the end, Katherine attempts to escape from the planet by finding the "key" to Perihelion but it is gone. She is caught in the rain and would have died but for the protection of robot supervisor Wohler who sacrifices his own life to protect her. Derec lies to supervisor Avernus to get him to help Derec reach and reprogram the central core to de-activate the defense program. The only "aliens" on the planet were bacteria in the blood of the humans which happened to drip on a sensor that detected non-human DNA. The planet is saved, the robots are saved, the two humans are saved, and we know a little more about Robot City and the situation of the two humans.
We don't know a lot more about the humans. We learn that Katherine was expelled from her native Aurora because she has some unspecified disease - diagnosed by the robot doctors too but Derec has declined to learn the secret from them (or reveal it to us readers) in order to respect her privacy. We learn that Katherine knows something of Derec's background but won't tell because she is protecting him.
The science wasn't bad though it wasn't perfect either. Where, for example, did all the water come from and why did it rain in massive torrents at the same time every night instead of in gentler continuous rains? Maybe it was explained and I didn't get it. By and large however, the science aspect of the science fiction was acceptable and the robots were nicely handled and very interesting.
I don't know that Asimov's three laws of robotics that have so dominated the science fiction universe will actually apply to future robots. I suspect they won't, but they produce a comfortable environment for the reader in which he can read about robots and see them very sympathetically as helpful and non-threatening. The lack of "creativity" in robots completes the non-threatening picture by ensuring that humans will always have a way to see themselves as superior to these otherwise extraordinarily capable beings.
It's obvious now that the series, of which all seven books were copyrighted in 1987 or 1988, were written partly in parallel by different authors working to a master plan. Certain secrets that the reader wishes to have answered are left hanging at the end, and then not answered in the next volume, there are just a few quick hints at the end. Buy the next book if you want to learn, but then you'll need the next and the next. It's a manipulation but I may read another one anyway. They are short, fun books not requiring too much from the reader but still being decently interesting.
| Author | Pressfield, Steven |
|---|---|
| Publication | Prince Frederick, MD: Recorded Books, 2008 |
| Copyright Date | 2008 |
| Number of Pages | 320 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | April 2017 |
22 year old Lieutenant R. Lawrence Chapman, known to his army friends as "Chap" is taken from his job as a tank commander and sent to the Long Range Desert Group (LRDG) in order to help them evaluate lands and trails in the desert for the passage and operation of tanks. Initially an observer, he develops into a real LRDG commando and becomes the commander of an independent patrol containing a number of jeeps and three ton "Chev" trucks participating in many types of missions.
Just before Montgomery's offensive at El Alamein, a mission with multiple patrols involved is launched to find and kill the German commander Erwin Rommel in hopes of disrupting the string of Afrika Corps successes. It fails, of course, and the patrols are sent into the desert to scout suitable territory for attempts to outflank Rommel's retreating forces. There is much driving, much danger, continual automotive breakdowns and repairs, many skirmishes with German patrols, and much hiding from Axis aircraft. It is almost a chaos of changing plans and directions, loss of men and equipment, and fleeing from enemy forces out to suppress them.
Two incidents dominate Chapman's experience. In one, his men spot a pair of oncoming trucks that turn out to carry Italian soldiers. The LRDG men move to the sides of the road and machine gun the trucks, killing all of the men. Chapman sees them leaping off the backs of the trucks into their deaths. He is close enough to see their faces and their wedding rings. He is sick about what he has done but it's done and it was the war.
In the other incident, the men are fleeing from a German armored car when the Germans strike a mine. Men stagger out of the car wounded and dying and the young German officer in command waves to the Allies in a gesture begging them to help. Chap's men are ready to kill the Germans but Chap picks them up instead and drives them in to a German aid station where they are surrounded by Germans who treat them with cautious respect. Rommel himself drives up and talks to the men. Chap refuses to tell him their mission, though Rommel has no trouble guessing that they are there to scout out a route for a flanking maneuver. Rommel thanks them for bringing in his men and offers them a one hour head start. Chap is about to take it when one of his men speaks up and says that's not fair. Rommel agrees and gives them until nightfall. They escape with their lives and continue their mission but a different patrol finds the flanking path. Chap himself is soon hospitalized with serious illnesses and sees out the rest of the campaign and the war, in a non-combat role.
In the last scene, at Chap's funeral long after the end of the war, his son meets one of Chap's men who has come from New Zealand to pay his respects to his dead commander. The Kiwi, a taciturn man who talks little, will only say that Chap turned his (the soldier's) life around when he picked up the Germans and carried them in to aid. He came to express his thanks.
This was a great book of its type and a good one of any type. I liked it the best of those of Pressfield's that I've read. The scenes of the fighting in the desert, the massacre of the Italians, and especially of the very hard men driving in from the desert carrying wounded men to their enemies, were exceptional. I felt that I was a witness to an extraordinary scene filled with extraordinary men.
Pressfield claimed, and I believe him, that although the story is fiction, it is an authentic view of the life and the war of the Long Range Desert Group.
I liked this book very much.
| Author | Sacks, Oliver |
|---|---|
| Publication | Alfred A. Knopf |
| Copyright Date | 2015 |
| Number of Pages | 64 |
| Extras | Photos by Bill Hayes |
| Extras | About the author |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Autobiography; Essays |
| When Read | April 2017 |
These are four essays by the famous neurologist written shortly before his death on August 30, 2015, at age 82. He died of a rare ocular melanoma first diagnosed 9 years before and successfully treated, but recurring to kill him.
Sacks' first love was math and physical science. The first essay, "Mercury", the name of the element with atomic number 80, was written on the occasion of his 80th birthday, shortly before his new diagnosis. It and the other essays, "My Own Life", "My Periodic Table", and "Sabbath", talk about his life, his love of science, and his gratitude for having been alive and been allowed to do the work that he did.
I learned that Sacks came from a huge, extended, orthodox Jewish family in London. I learned that his parents were both doctors and guided him into the profession as well. I learned that he was homosexual and was rejected by his mother and some of his family as "an abomination" because of it. I learned that he was an atheist, that he spent most of his life working in the United States, that he had grave misgivings about Israel (where much of his family went to live), and that he was successfully reconciled with his family at the end.
It was a very short book and only a supplement to two autobiographical books he had written in the past, one only just published in 2014. However it struck me as a fitting end to his life and one that I appreciated reading.
| Author | Bagley, Desmond |
|---|---|
| Publication | House of Stratus, 2008 |
| Copyright Date | 1965 |
| Number of Pages | 296 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| When Read | April 2017 |
Alcoholic depressive Tim O'Hara flies an old C-47 Dakota for Andes Airlift, a bottom rung air carrier in the fictional "Cordillera" (seeming most like Peru) in South America. He is told by his boss that a "Samair" Boeing 727 has landed for repairs at the airport but 10 passengers need to make connections and Samair has contracted with Andes to fly them to their destination on the other side of the Andes. O'Hara, a former military pilot with considerable combat experience in Korea, had been abandoned by his wife, then shot down and traumatized by a Chinese torturer. Now he's got nowhere left to go after Andes Airlift and he undertakes the job. As they arrive at the mountain pass his copilot Grivas pulls out a gun and forces O'Hara to take the plane to an inadequate mining company mountain airfield. The runway there is too short for the Dakota but O'Hara is given no choice. He must land or be shot. He crash lands the plane. Two passengers are killed by shifting cargo but, except for the copilot who is killed when the nose of the plane slides into the mountain, all the others survive. The people are Forester, himself a military pilot who turns out at the end to be a CIA agent; Aguillar, a former president of Cordillera who is the object of the hijacking; Aguillar's beautiful niece Benedetta who becomes the love interest for O'Hara in the story; Armstrong, a professor of medieval history and an expert at medieval warfare; Miguel Rohde, a brave and resourceful agent/bodyguard for Aguillar; Willis, a professor of physics and excellent handyman; Jenny Ponsky, a middle aged spinster New England schoolteacher who happens to be a fine shot with a bow and arrow; and Peabody, a thoroughly disgusting American ignoramus, drunkard and coward who cares only for himself and is a real threat to everyone.
The plane was hijacked by a communist guerrilla group that plans to kill Aguillar to prevent him replacing the corrupt president whom they plan to replace themselves. They are led by a Cuban who, in turn, reports to a Russian. But the communists are stranded behind a many miles long gorge over which the bridge has collapsed. They are attempting to replace the bridge when the group coming down from the crash site encounters them from the other side of the gorge.
There is a long multi-day struggle. The little group fires their one pistol from time to time to retard the bridge builders, receiving many rifle shots in return. Armstrong explains the principles of the crossbow and trebuchet and Willis builds two of the former and one of the latter. With these they actually succeed in killing a couple of communists and further retarding the bridge crossing.
The story then splits in half. Rohde and Forester will attempt to cross the mountains back to the other side to get help, with the hapless Peabody demanding to go along since he doesn't want to die with the others. They get near the top when Forester slips off the mountain. He's tied by rope to Peabody. Rohde sees Peabody attempting to cut the rope and he kills Peabody to prevent it. He then pushes, drags, and carries the injured Forester over the top and down to the town where they are hospitalized. But the local airbase is currently occupied by a squadron led by communist officers. They know who Rohde and Forester are and kill Rohde. Forester, who has a hidden gun, kills the Colonel, takes his clothes and flying gear, takes his place in the four plane element sent to finish off Aguilar, and saves the day by shooting down the other planes and blowing up the communists on the ground.
The rest of the group has battled on. O'Hara, hiding with a crossbow, manages to kill a guard, take his Tommy gun and pistol, and drive a truck through the communist group and into the mountain cave where the remaining people have holed up. By daring efforts, and after Forester's attack from the air, they escape in the truck over the bridge to safety.
Aguillar will become president. O'Hara will marry Benedetta and become an air force adviser to the president. The others, except for Willis and Rhode who were killed, survive.
Bagley published 16 books, all thrillers, starting in 1963. He died at age 59 in 1983, with two more of his books still to come out.
Based on this book, I'd have to call him a competent thriller writer. His characters were thin and spare, but well differentiated and suited to the needs of the story. He had lots of convincing detail covering the airplane scenes and the mountain climbing, which I thought was particularly well done. The plot moved at a steady pace. Suspense was high and sustained. The events weren't all probable and convincing, but they weren't too bad. For me, reading about the communists was grating because there wasn't even a ghost of idealism in them, just nasty bullying of their own and other people. And of course the love story was strictly conventional and pro forma - much like the rest of the plot.
I have to confess that I enjoyed reading it.
| Author | Christie, Agatha |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Harper Collins, 2011 |
| Copyright Date | 1940 |
| Number of Pages | 240 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | April 2017 |
Hercule Poirot goes to see his dentist, Dr. Morley and later gets a call from Chief Inspector Japp of Scotland Yard. The dentist is dead, shot in the head by a pistol found in the dentist's hand. After following various clues and interviewing all of the people at the dentist's office, the Yard concludes that it was suicide. A patient who was there that morning went home and died of a novacaine overdose and, the police believe, Morley killed himself out of remorse for his mistake.
Poirot is convinced immediately that this is murder, not suicide and begins a slow process of asking questions, accumulating what appear to be unrelated facts, and gradually zeroing in on the killer. The killer turns out to be a mild mannered banker who was thought to be the actual target of an assassination attempt gone wrong. He was, in some ways, the least likely person to be the killer. But it was he that killed both the dentist and the man with too much novacaine and also a woman patient of the dentist, all to conceal his own affairs. Poirot figured it all out and told this self-important man that murdering people was not okay, even for someone who was a bastion of English finance.
The Netflix streaming service has cancelled the BBC Poirot series in our area and I was cutoff after watching 11 episodes. So I decided to read one. It wasn't bad. The characters were fairly simple, the story very involved, but in a sketchy way that amounted more to a long accumulation of clues to a puzzle than to a real novel with complex characters who interact for various reasons in complex ways.
Although the book was published in the dark days of World War II, there were no references to the war. There were bad guys who were Reds and bad guys who were fascists, but that was all handled very peripherally.
I preferred the TV show but I admit that Poirot himself was well presented and the TV characterization was very much in the Christie spirit.
This was not actually the first Hercule Poirot story that I've read, but the others were not fresh in my mind and I was missing the David Suchet/Poirot character of the BBC productions.
| Author | Goldman, Stuart D. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2012 |
| Number of Pages | 240 |
| Extras | notes, maps, bibliography |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Japan; Soviet Union; World War II |
| When Read | April 2017 |
Nomonhan is the name of a small village in Outer Mongolia on the border of Manchuria. A series of battles were fought there in 1939 over a trivial border dispute between the Soviet Union and Japan.
The Kwantung Army, an elite unit of the Japanese Army was stationed in Manchukuo, the Japanese puppet state of Manchuria. Deciding that the Russians had violated their border, mid-level officers (colonels and majors) made a unilateral decision to punish the Russians by surrounding and killing all of them. They were determined that no one would ever again dare to think about violating their border, even if it was a dubiously determined border, and their method of expressing that determination was, of course, to shoot people. Nothing else would be worthy of the honor of the Kwantung Army.
In the end, the Russians decided to confront the Japanese. They put Gyorgi Zhukov in charge of the Red Army in the area and he began secretly stocking artillery, tanks, trucks, fuel, munitions, and aircraft as well as men. The Japanese began with a surprise air attack on a Soviet airbase far behind the front line. Then they launched a powerful attack both in the disputed area and across the river into an area that everyone acknowledged to belong to the Mongolian People's Republic. Their plan was to surround and annihilate the Russians. They ran into a hurricane. Hit by intense artillery barrages and tank attacks that were beyond anything they conceived of, they were stopped in their tracks and thrown onto the defensive. Zhukov then threw all his forces into a counter attack that overwhelmed and destroyed the bulk of the Japanese Army. However, the Russians did not penetrate beyond their claimed border.
Meanwhile, Europe was in turmoil. Hitler was determined to go to war against Poland. The Russians wanted an alliance with Britain and France but the British dragged their feet, hoping that Hitler would go on to fight Russia and the two powers would exhaust themselves in war. When the British finally got serious the Russians were already concluding their alliance with Hitler. The fight at Nomonhan had much to do with whether the Russians would face a possible two front war. As things got better with Hitler, Stalin decided to go ahead and attempt to crush the Japanese in an attempt, that proved successful, to eliminate the threat from the East. The success of their battle at Nomonhan strengthened Stalin's hand in Europe as well as Asia.
The battle is also known by the name "Khalkhin Gol" or "Khalkyn Gol", which is the name of the river that intersected the area of the fighting.
One story that emerges from this history, a story that appears in every book I've read about the U.S. war against Japan, is the story of the hubris of the Japanese officer corps. Officers of the Kwantung Army, even mid-level officers, felt perfectly free to violate orders from on high when they decided, as they often did, that their honor was at stake. They had one response to any perceived insult - to attack. If they received a report from intelligence that the Russian forces were stronger than anticipated, they ignored it. If they received a "request" (a polite command) from higher command to moderate their plans, they ignored it. Even the Emperor's personal command was ignored. Honor was at stake. They enemy must be taught a lesson that they could never forget.
Japanese higher command did learn one lesson. They learned that war against the Soviet Union was not likely to be productive. Even when German troops reached the gates of Moscow two years later, they were reluctant to join the war against the USSR. But lower officers, and many higher ones too, never learned any of the lessons of Nomonhan. They continued to believe that their fighting spirit would defeat the overwhelming material and other strength of the USA. They continued to believe in the imperial destiny of Japan. No doubt many of the survivors believed it to their dying day.
| Author | Dick, Philip K. |
|---|---|
| Publication | 2012 |
| Copyright Date | 1975 |
| Number of Pages | 256 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | April 2017 |
Jack Isidore is a strange young man living a marginal life and working in a tire shop, carving what looks like good tread in worn out tires, sold as if they were sound. He is captivated by all sorts of strange interests. He collects things. He considers theories seriously that others would reject out of hand. He says things that other people would be too embarrassed, or too polite, to say.
Jack's sister and brother-in-law Fay and Charley Hume live in an extravagant house in the country in California with their two children. It is Faye's house. She has her horse, her sheep, her ducks, and her studio. She keeps the impractical house warm at great cost for electricity. Totally self-absorbed, Faye brings Jack to their home in order to use him as a cook, housekeeper, animal caretaker, and nanny for the children. Jack likes cooking, cleaning, and taking care of animals and children, so he's happy with the arrangement, but of course Faye has no concern for his happiness.
Faye's selfishness combined with Jack's apparent guilelessness, and Charley's increasing anger all come to a head when Faye gets interested in her handsome neighbor Nat Anteil. Charley has suffered a heart attack. Jack visits him in the hospital and tells him all about Nat. Nat divorces his wife in order to do Faye's bidding. Charlie gets out of the hospital, buys a gun, and goes home. He writes a will leaving his half of the house to Jack, then shoots all the animals, but Faye eludes him and he shoots himself instead. Jack has joined a crazy cult that believes the world will end, but it doesn't. He decides he's been acting crazy. He replaces the dead animals and buys some psychiatric care, and all continues but without Charley.
Like all of Dick's novels, this is odd and quirky. Characters that seem too quirky to be real are treated seriously, just as more serious characters are treated in other writers' books. Or maybe we should say that they aren't treated seriously, but they are presented straight, without apology or explanation. We don't know why Jack is content to cut grooves in tires in order to deceive people, or why he tells Charley that Faye is cheating on him, or why he joins an end of the world cult, or why he believes that Charley's spirit will return after his death and Jack must replace all of the animals for him. It's all presented in a here-it-is spirit, take it or leave it but don't expect explanations.
Somewhat surprisingly, it all sort of works.
This book was published in 1975 but written in 1959, reflecting the California culture of that period. It is supposedly Dick's only non-science fiction novel that he published during his lifetime.
| Author | Sinclair, Upton |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Open Road, 2016 |
| Copyright Date | 1944 |
| Number of Pages | 655 |
| Extras | Excerpt of Dragon Harvest |
| Extras | About the author |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Lanny Budd |
| When Read | May 2017 |
The story resumes in Washington DC in 1937. Lanny meets his old mentor from the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, Professor Charles T. Alston. They talk over old times and Alston brings him to Hyde Park to meet Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Lanny is taken with FDR's intelligence and charm and learns from him that, even the President of the United States cannot lead the American people where they do not wish to go. He can only nudge them in the right direction. The President convinces Lanny to become presidential agent number 103. He is to go back to Europe, to meet leading government and business officials of Germany, France, Britain, and other countries, to ingratiate himself into their inner circles, and to write reports to be sent to Roosevelt's agent who will forward them to the President. And so Lanny outwardly becomes the man that Irma and the other people of his family and their set always wanted him to be. He gives up all association with Reds and Pinks. He pretends to be a suave and sophisticated art expert, perfectly at home with the class and people who buy and sell art, and who run the businesses and governments of the old continent. Not the least of these are Adolf "Adi" Hitler, Hermann Goring, Rudolf Hess, and others of the Nazi administration.
However Lanny cannot slip completely into the role of presidential agent and leave everything else of his life behind. He is still concerned with what has happened to his wife, Trudi Schulz. She has disappeared from her apartment and not been seen by anyone. He can only assume that the Gestapo has finally found and kidnapped or killed her.
Lanny uses all of his considerable intelligence and skill to figure out what must have happened to her. He learns that the Germans have rented a chateaux outside Paris where, he is convinced, there is a dungeon in the cellar. That would be the place that the Gestapo would take prisoners for the first sessions of torture to make them talk. He uses every connection that he has with Goring and Hitler to overawe the German master of the chateaux and force him to put Lanny up for the night. In the meantime he has recruited an American locksmith and a German socialist of the International Brigades to assist him in an elaborate plot to drug the dogs, to compromise and inebriate the grounds keeper, to break into the cellar, and to get into the dungeon. All they find there is a half mad man who has been tortured almost to death and not knowing who they are or what they will do tells them that Trudi was there, but now she's gone. They must leave the man to his fate and escape. Lanny continues to try to find her but he knows that she must have been taken to Germany where she is either already dead or soon will be. There is nothing he can do. He continues his work as art expert and agent, filled with hatred and resolve to fight this evil that has taken Germany and Italy and is in the process of attacking the world.
He is present at Berchtesgaden when the Austrian chancellor is browbeaten into surrender. He is in Austria for the Anschluss. He is in England and meets the appeasers who are about to throw Czechoslovakia to the wolf. He cannot say anything to anybody. To do so would achieve nothing but would end his ability to learn anything of interest to Roosevelt. He meets Hitler and Goring a number of times, using all of his skill to flatter them and to learn what they believe. He steals off into Holland, France, or Switzerland to write his reports and mail them anonymously in envelopes inside envelopes with no identification whatever.
There are interludes. He discovers that his brother-in-law Vittorio has stolen Marcel Detaze paintings from Lanny's storeroom and sold them. He forces Vittorio to leave France under threat of arrest and finally convinces his half-sister Marceline that her husband is a pig - something she has finally learned on her own. She becomes a professional dancer and learns to care for herself.
Lanny longs for a woman, and is regularly pursued by them, but there is no way for him to manage it. He has tried women of his own class but they couldn't stand his politics. He tried Trudi but, although he admired her tremendously, he doesn't want a woman who will die for the cause. He wishes that he could return to his home on the Riviera, play the piano, read books, look at paintings, and make love. But he is consumed by the coming struggle for the future of the world and he cannot escape it.
The story ends after the Munich Agreement that sells Czechoslovakia down the river in the foolish hope of "peace in our time." It is near the end of 1938. Lanny knows that the war will not be more than a year or so away.
This book was published in 1944, following the previous one in 1943. By this time it will have been clear that the Allies would win the war, but that wasn't enough for Sinclair. He wanted the American people to know what they were fighting for. He wanted them to understand the nature of the evil that they fought against. He didn't paint a false picture. The true picture was dark enough that no falsehoods could enhance it. Exaggerations could only detract from the truth, not enhance it.
I see this series of books as Upton Sinclair's contribution to the struggle. He couldn't overthrow the Nazis himself. He couldn't win the war. Like Lanny Budd, and even FDR, he could only play a small part in the huge effort needed to destroy Hitler and Nazism. He played it well.
| Author | Wu, William F. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Ace Books |
| Copyright Date | 1987 |
| Number of Pages | 169 |
| Extras | Essay "Cybernetic Organism" by Isaac Asimov |
| Extras | illustrations |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| Keywords | Robots |
| When Read | May 2017 |
Katherine, whose real name turns out to be Ariel Welsh, and Derec are still trying to get out of Robot City. First they determine that more "keys" that support teleportation are being manufactured in the city. They contrive to steal one but it doesn't do what they expect and they are no closer to leaving. Then they learn that others from off-planet have been seen in the city and they go through various efforts to find them. Eventually they find "Alpha", the robot constructed in an earlier volume by Derec with Wolruf, the cananoid animal from volume 1. The third individual turns out to be Jeff Leong, a survivor of a crash of some sort in which everyone else was killed. Jeff was so severely injured that the robot doctors removed his brain from his body and placed it in a robot body, making him a "cyborg", a robot with a human brain.
Jeff is psychologically changed by his physical changes. His physical strength is greater, his eyesight and hearing are improved, he doesn't get tired though he still needs to sleep for his brain health. He decides he is the most powerful person on the planet and will take it over. The Laws of Robotics aren't in his brain, but the robots consider him still a human and thus to be protected according to the First Law and to be obeyed according to the Second Law. But the robots capture him, and with the aid of information and assistance from the two humans, they drug him, repair his human body, replace his brain back in the body, and make him an ordinary youth again. Repairing the lifeboat that brought in Alpha and Wolruf, they send him back out to space. The story is left where it was with the only changes being that Katherine is now named Ariel and we know that she may soon die of whatever is her disease.
The idea of the cyborg seemed interesting but Wu did nothing with it. Jeff is transformed into a cyborg, he runs from robots searching for him, he has delusions of grandeur, then he is captured and transformed back. We learn nothing about what being a cyborg might be like except that there is no illness and physical powers are greater - just things that we could imagine easily enough. There is nothing about the relationship of cyborgs and robots or humans. The story is left where it was. About the only change I can think of is that we know that the robots are manufacturing "keys" for unknown reasons.
An unimpressive third volume, but a quick read. Wu has a PhD in American Culture - whatever that means.
| Author | Lewis, Bernard |
|---|---|
| Publication | Books on Tape, 2004 |
| Copyright Date | 2003 |
| Number of Pages | 208 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Islam |
| When Read | May 2017 |
Lewis describes the relative stasis that occurred in the Muslim world at the time that the Europeans were taking off in economy and trade, science, technology, industry, and political development. There is information about when printing, western manufacturing techniques, military techniques, building techniques, and other western advances penetrated the Middle East. By and large, the penetration was surprisingly slow and focused only on certain areas mainly having to do with military development. The Turks, and later other Middle Eastern nations, learned that they could not defeat western armies or navies and so they began buying western weapons, hiring western officers, imitating uniforms, even military bands. But in the end they still couldn't defeat western armies and navies, though they never had a good idea of why.
As for other areas, they had no interest. Very few Turks and hardly anyone from the other areas of the Middle East visited Europe. When they did, they found it an alien and uninteresting place. They were shocked at the way women were allowed so much independence. They found western music to be uninteresting. The notion of laws, as opposed to one religious law and a ruler, was strange. It was a real clash of cultures. This persisted, and still persists in many areas, right up to the present day.
I had hoped for more explanation from Lewis. This book is more a presentation of the facts of the west / east disparities than a deep explanation of why they occurred. Lewis does point out that East Asian societies - Japan, China, Korea, Singapore, have all embraced western science and technology and become leaders in it themselves. But that has not happened in the Middle East and is still not happening. If I remember correctly, the entire industrial output of the middle eastern nations (or maybe it was just the Arab nations?) was about equal to the output of Finland! Those countries really are different from the developed world. When the oil runs out, they're going to be in a deep hole.
| Author | Coyne, Jerry A. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Viking, 2015 |
| Number of Pages | 336 |
| Extras | acknowledgments, notes, references, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Philosophy |
| Keywords | Science; Religion |
| When Read | May 2017 |
Coyne is a professor of biology, specializing in evolution, at the University of Chicago. He wrote a book for lay readers Why Evolution is True and followed it up with this book explaining why science and religion aren't just about different areas of life. He considers them to be incompatible. Science is a method of finding out facts about the world. Religion is a method of wishful thinking, of taking things on faith that cannot be proven and of denying that any argument or research is possible.
The main subject is "accomodationism", the view that science can accommodate religion and that's it's possible to be a rational and scientific person and also be religious. Well, obviously it is possible, but Coyne argues that it is an incorrect position, one that violates the principles of science. He shows, for example, that morality really doesn't come from religion because the morals of the Bible and the Koran are not acceptable today. We didn't modify them, for example to accept the equality of women, to reject racism and slavery, to accept homosexuality, to reject corporal punishment, and many other things, because God told us to do that. Rather it is the case that people decided that these things were right or wrong and imposed their views on religion.
The main thrust of his argument is that science relies on evidence, faith relies only on faith. Religion is designed in such a way that all possible requests for evidence are ruled out of bounds. It is like the dragon in the garage in Carl Sagan's The Demon Haunted World. If you can't see it, that's because the dragon is invisible. If you can't find its footprints, that's because it floats in the air. If you can't feel the heat of it's breath, that's because it breathes cold fire. No matter what request you make for evidence, God will be defined in such a way that such evidence is defined away. You can't disprove God, not because he's there, but because every possible method of disproof has been ruled away by theology. In the extreme case we're left with a deistic god, a "ground of being", a "principle of goodness", a "final authority for our existence", or some similar statement so vague, immaterial, and indistinct that there is no way to distinguish between a universe with and a universe without God. Sagan, Coyne, and Alan Meyer would all agree that the absence of evidence for such a being surely is evidence of absence. The only rational stance is to deny that it exists. And if that doesn't convince the Christian, well, okay, but assert that this deity must be Krishna, or Allah, and ask the Christian what the evidence is that it's the father, the son, or the holy spirit. And if the believer steps away from all traditional religion and claims only Unitarianism, or Pantheism, or Jeffersonian deism, then we are entitled to ask how anything would be different if such a deistic god did or didn't exist. It no observable difference can be described then there is no religion left.
I thought this was one of the very good books on atheism. It was focused on a particular problem - the attempt at accommodation between science and religion. That makes it a valuable contribution to the debate between atheism and liberal religion, where by "liberal" I mean the kind of religion that dismisses superstitious supernaturalism as being primitive and irrelevant to the debate. Coyne argues that almost all the actual religions of the real world, and almost all the actual believers, do believe in supernaturalism, but even if we take all of that away in order to banish superstition from religion, we're not left with a believable god. All we get is a vague faith in something that is indistinguishable from nothing.
Coyne's book is logical, accurate, and defensible. However it makes little or no attempt to reach out to the believer who has irrational reasons for believing. It doesn't coddle the reader. It shows how we can explain the grounds of morality without God, but doesn't try to instill non-religious conceptions of morality or value in the believer. It offers no psychological support to the person who says he believes in God, as so many say today, because he has experienced God's presence in his life. I think there is a very great need for such support, but I have to admit that it's extremely difficult to provide, at least in any rational manner. I had some success in instilling doubt in small numbers of high IQ 18 year old philosophy students, but I don't know that I've ever had any success with older adults for whom religion has become a psychological crutch in their daily lives. Substituting rationality for emotion is a hard, hard problem.
| Author | Flournoy, Angela |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Random House, 2015 |
| Number of Pages | 352 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | June 2017 |
In the early 1940's young Francis Turner marries Viola in Arkansas. He has been raised by a black preacher and he aspires to become one himself, but he and the man who raised him have a falling out and he goes to Detroit looking for work in a defense plant or wherever he can get it, leaving Viola behind with their baby Charles, whom they call "Cha Cha". Francis is not a faithful husband but he returns a year later, fetches Viola with him back to Detroit, and they begin a life together that produces 13 children, all growing up in their house on Yarrow St. The story of the family is taken back and forth from 1944-5 to 2008, by which time Francis is dead, Viola is old and dying, and the children, the youngest of whom is now 40 become the focus of the story.
Cha Cha has made a life for himself and his wife Tina as a driver for Chrysler Corporation, delivering cars by carrier truck. He and Tina are not as close as they might have been and he is dominated by thoughts of a ghost who visits him and by thoughts of Alice, a therapist that the company sent him to. The old house on Yarrow St. is now more or less abandoned but Cha Cha still pays on the mortgage - which is not working out for anyone, especially in the housing market of 2008. 43 year old Troy Turner, a Detroit cop, wants to buy the house in an illegal short sale where the house is relinquished to the mortgage holder who sells it at a low price, but not back to the family that owns it. Troy wants his girlfriend to front for the family. 40 year old Lelah, the youngest child, has just lost her job with the phone company as a result of borrowing money she can't repay from coworkers to pay for her compulsive gambling addiction. She lies to everyone. Not admitting she lost her job, not admitting that she has an addiction, not admitting that she has been evicted from her apartment, and not admitting that she is living in the house on Yarrow. She wants a closer relationship with her daughter Brianne and Brianne's baby, but her behavior has alienated the young woman and Lelah's tentative steps to heal the rift are not fully accepted.
The story develops, mainly about Lelah's and Cha Cha's separate predicaments, and ends at a big party at Cha Cha and Tina's house, called to bring all the children together for a last time with their mother Viola. The problems of the family are not resolved. The communication between Lelah and Brianne, Cha Cha and Tina, and all the brothers and sisters together, is still limited and ineffective, but the family endures.
In my initial reading of this book I was put off by all the self-defeating behavior. Cha Cha's belief in his ghost, which they call a "haint", is of course problematic. His inability to come to an understanding and accommodation with Tina, with whom he has much in common, and his longing for a relationship with Alice, with whom he has nothing in common, is painful to watch. Lelah's gambling addiction is particularly painful - throwing away money and destroying her life. She makes a big win and is practically forced to leave the roulette table with the money and is able to use it to partly repair her family failures, but it's a rather unbelievable event in an otherwise realistic story. And Lelah's lying is disturbing, although it is good to see her try to overcome it and partially succeed. However as the story progressed I could see that this was a story about real life, not a story of redemption. I began to appreciate it for what it was and was more impressed by it.
The book won many awards. I read it for our NCI book group.
| Author | Munoz Molina, Antonio |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Spanish |
| Translators | Peden, Margaret Sayers |
| Publication | New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2003 |
| Copyright Date | 2001 |
| Number of Pages | 385 |
| Extras | Authors note |
| Extras | Sample chapter of In the Night of Time |
| Genres | Fiction; Short stories |
| When Read | June 2017 |
The seventeen stories are about people who are or have been dislocated, mostly in one way or another by the events of the great conflicts against fascism in the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the Holocaust. Each is narrated in first person, always by a different and unnamed narrator. Some are survivors of these conflicts and some are the children of the survivors. A few might not have any specific family connection. In many of the stories the narrator, or someone in his family or of his acquaintance, has escaped the Holocaust. In a few, the oppressor is the NKVD, or the Spanish falangists. Sometimes the survivors are no longer under threat, but have never been able to become comfortable or to feel a sense of belonging, after their escape.
In one story a family of Sephardic Jews living in Hungary is rescued by a Spanish consul who gives them papers certifying them as Spanish citizens. Only the father and son escape. The mother and daughter are rounded up before the father can reach them. The father and son escape to Tangiers in Morocco where the father attempts to make a living as a Spanish restaurateur. The title of the whole collection, Sepharad, presumably refers to these people of old Spanish Jewish ancestry.
The people in these stories wonder about the meaning of their lives, the loss of the familiar settings of their childhood, the significance of their work, the strangeness of the city in which they are living, the surprise and disorientation they suffer when arrested or removed, or transferred, or go some place on purpose, and find that, when they close the familiar door of their apartment as they leave, it is the last time they will ever walk through that door and close it.
Munoz Molina says that he has invented very little in this book. The stories are of real people, told to him in the course of his life or read in books. He writes in the story "You are ..."
"You are Jean Améry viewing a landscape of meadows and trees through the window of the car in which you are being taken to the barracks of the Gestapo. You are Eugenia Ginzburg listening for the last time to the sound her door makes as it closes, the house she will never return to. You are Margarete Buber-Neumann, who sees the illuminated sphere of a clock in the early dawn of Moscow, a few minutes before the van in which she is being driven enters the darkness of the prison. You are Franz Kafka discovering with amazement that the warm liquid you are vomiting is blood."
As in In the Night of Time, the author demonstrates a very appealing sympathy for his characters. Some are particularly talented people of one sort or another, but most are what we might call ordinary intellectuals. They aren't great writers (like Munoz Molina himself) or great artists or great scientists. Some are minor government officials. One is an undistinguished friend of a shoe repairman, who is the focus of the story. One is the Hungarian Jew who lost his wife and daughter and lives by a restaurant in Tangiers. That fails and he manages an essentially bankrupt theater of Spanish culture that no one visits. A Spaniard and lady friend visit a very good museum of Spanish culture created by a wealthy man in New York in the 1920's. Now it is still operating but the neighborhood has deteriorated and no one visits it. A woman curator shows the visitors around.
Munoz Molina's characters are the kind of people I imagine to be like those who might read the book. They are living lives that came their way. They are aware of the random nature of much of their circumstances. They are thoughtful, reflective people. They make the most rational decisions about living that they can, but they have no clear idea of special purpose in their lives and no burning ambitions driving them one way or another. They are ordinary people.
I imagine the author watching all of these people around him. He knows that they many of them have suffered. He is sympathetic to them. He doesn't want them to pass out of existence, unremarked and unremembered. He wants to capture them on paper and preserve them for the future and the daylight, not to be lost in the night of time. It is as if he is writing for the characters and for the readers, but for the characters most of all. He is inviting the readers to see themselves as characters too and appreciate those who have come before.
One more story I'll mention, "berghof", is about a doctor in a Spanish resort town that has a large expatriate German community. Much of the story is about the great love he has for his wife and son, and that they have for him and for each other. One day he is jogging up the local mountain, trying to reach the top. When he does, he is suddenly seized by a hysterical woman who drags him into a house. There he finds an old man lying on the floor, alive but choking and in bad shape. The old man and woman call to him in German for help. He doesn't know German. They don't know Spanish. He manages to call for an ambulance. Looking around the room he sees swastikas and a large oil portrait of Adolf Hitler. The doctor's feelings about this are not described, but he can't be happy about what he sees. His conflicts are not described, but he does try to get an ambulance. He doesn't just run out and leave the old Nazi to die. It is a story that centers on the mixture of humanity and anti-humanity in life, on the complexity of our values. It was very well done.
I consider Antonio Munoz Molina to be one of the exceptionally fine writers of our time.
| Author | Leonard, Elmore |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Harper, 2011 |
| Copyright Date | 2010 |
| Number of Pages | 197 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery; Comedy |
| When Read | June 2017 |
Marshall Carlos "Carl" Webster, AKA the Hot Kid, is assigned to investigate the apparent suicide of a German prisoner of war in a POW camp in Oklahoma. It is believed that the man was murdered by hard core Nazis in the camp who considered him a traitor to the Nazi cause. Some of the POWs must know what happened, but no one will talk.
Many of the elements of a typical Elmore Leonard novel are present. Webster's tough wife Louly, now working as a Marine Corps gunnery instructor; a pretty girl with money, Shemayne Morrissey, who falls for handsome and charming German officer Jurgen Schrenk; Jewish gangster Teddy Ritz who wants to shoot some Nazis; Teddy's gunslingers, Salvatore and Frank Tedesco, known as Tutti and Frankie Bones; and others.
Over the course of the story, Shemayne helps Jurgen and his friend escape the camp to avoid the Nazi fanatics, Webster kills Tutti and Frankie when they come to get him for disrespecting them, Jurgen gets away, and the hardcore Nazis aren't yet caught. It's the people that are the story, not the crime.
This novella was packaged with two other stories excerpted from The Hot Kid, which I read in 2006.
There's something appealing about a charming German officer who escapes from the camp to see his beautiful girlfriend, then comes back. Well, maybe not. What's appealing is the way Elmore Leonard put these characters together.
The story was sketchier than his usual fare, perhaps written quickly to satisfy a publisher. Still, one can't help liking the characters. The ugly ones, Tutti and Frankie, are presented as dangerous and they do kill an innocent boy, but the reader has no doubt that they'll never get the drop on Carl Webster.
The following paragraph is excerpted from the book. Webster is talking to the camp commandant.
"What we have to do, Carl said, is separate the hard-nosed Nazis from the ones who don't take seriously but go along. We weed out the bullies and send them to Alva, that camp in the western part of the state reserved for hard-core Nazis. See, the way we find out if a Kraut's a bona fide Nazi, we tell him a joke. The one, Adolf Hitler wants to know when he's gonna die, so he asks his astrologer. The astrologer tells him he's gonna die on a Jewish holiday. Hitler gets excited. He says, 'Tell me, which one.' The astrologer says, 'Mein Fuhrer, any day you die becomes a Jewish holiday.' And if the guy we tell it to doesn't laugh, we send him to Alva."
| Author | Furst, Alan |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Random House, 2014 |
| Copyright Date | 2014 |
| Number of Pages | 272 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Spanish Civil War |
| When Read | June 2017 |
The story opens in December 1937 with a Spaniard working in the Republic's consulate in Paris. He is lured to Spain to help a woman but it is a trap and he is executed by the Falangists. The Spanish emigre lawyer Christian Ferrar of the French Coudert Freres law firm is recruited by Max de Lyon, to replace the dead man in the Republic's office that purchases arms for the war. It is a thankless task as Britain, France, the U.S. and other democracies embargo arms to Spain while Germany and Italy send huge quantities of arms and men to Franco. Only the Russians are helping the Republic and their help is limited, conditional, and has strings attached as Stalin plays games for his own ends.
Max and Christian visit Poland to help move boxcars full of weapons purchased illegally from the Skoda works in Brno Czechoslovakia through to Danzig to be shipped to Spain. They are thwarted by railroad officials presumably working for the Nazis but a combination of Max's bribes, bluff, and fists with communist Polish stevedores against German thugs, and Christian's smooth legal moves, get the shipment loaded and on its way. Later they hire a gang that impersonates the NKVD and withdraws anti-aircraft shells from a naval warehouse in Odessa. Max and Christian escort it in an old tramp steamer through the Black Sea, past Nazi spies in Turkey and Greece, through a short gunfight with an Italian motor launch, and into Valencia.
Christian faces another danger when a very attractive woman hires him and comes to his bed, but he decides something isn't right and he abandons her. It turns out that she was the woman that lured his predecessor to Spain, hoping to save her sister from Falangist torture and murder.
The Spanish cause is lost and Ferrar and de Lyon give up. Ferrar determines that the continent is in trouble. He rents an apartment in New York and moves his parents, his sister, and his beloved abuela, from France to the U.S., where he goes to the library to see a librarian he once loved named Eileen Moore. "... she happened to glance up, and stopped dead, mouth open in surprise, staring at Ferrar. They stared at each other for a time, and, as they did, the loveliest look came over her face, a kind of warm light. Not so very different than the look on his face. Really, much the same."
This is the ninth Alan Furst novel that I've read. I think all of them were about the period from 1937 to 1940. All of them were about the struggle against the evil that was in the process of taking over Europe. All of them were about ordinary men without any extraordinary powers who commit themselves to the struggle against it. In all of them, these men win some tiny victories and, against all odds, escape death.
These books appeal directly to all of my deeply ingrained emotions about the rise of fascism and of anti-fascist wars. I care about the characters and about their mission in life. I am moved by the fear they must feel in their precarious situation - knowing as I do but as they can only guess, that the dark night of World War II is descending upon them. I feel the sense of relief when Christian moves his family and his beloved grandmother to New York. This and Furst's other books are very meaningful to me.
| Author | Mo Yan |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Chinese |
| Translators | Goldblatt, Howard |
| Publication | Penguin China Specials, 2015 |
| Number of Pages | 65 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | China |
| When Read | June 2017 |
Sometime in the collectivist days of the People's Republic of China, a team of 200 or so workers is assembled from many different collective farms to build a floodgate on a river. One of the workers on the team is a perhaps ten year old boy named Hei-hai. An orphan, only minimally cared for by a stepmother, Hei-hai has hardly any clothing, is badly undernourished, and has nothing to say to anyone. He is assigned to pump the bellows of the forge for the blacksmiths who shape and sharpen tools for the team.
Two threads wind through the story. One is Hei-hai's experience at work at the bellows, while stealing food at the order of the young blacksmith from nearby fields, and while wandering along the bank of the river. The other is the competition, eventually coming to blows, between a young mason and the young blacksmith for the attention of a pretty girl on the team.
At one point in the story, Hei-hai sees a beautiful golden colored radish lying on the forge. It becomes the focus of his interest and attention, but the blacksmith throws the radish in the river. Hei-hai searches for it in the river, then searches the nearby collective farm fields, pulling up and discarding plant after plant in hopes of finding another perfect golden radish.
The young men battle until the blacksmith, losing the fight, smashes a rock with a hammer and a piece of stone flys off and puts out one eye of the pretty girl. Hei-hai is caught by the farmers in the radish field, but is unable say anything to them. They let him go.
At first I expected Hei-hai to speak, at least to the pretty girl, but he doesn't want to do it or can't do it, we never learn exactly why. He is pushed around. He is burned by sparks from the forge. He is made to steal vegetables. He does what he is told, sometimes because he is punished when he doesn't, but he never complains. He just pursues his private vision of - what? Is it beauty? Is it escape? Mo is never clear. He leaves it to us to make of it what we will.
In his 2012 Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech Mo Yan said: "That dark-skinned boy with the superhuman ability to suffer and a superhuman degree of sensitivity represents the soul of my entire fictional output. Not one of all the fictional characters I've created since then is as close to my soul as he is."
This little novella is certainly different, written by an unusual and unusually talented writer.
| Author | Cover, Arthur Byron |
|---|---|
| Publication | Ace |
| Copyright Date | 1988 |
| Number of Pages | 176 |
| Extras | Essay "The Sense of Humor" by Isaac Asimov |
| Extras | illustrations |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| Keywords | Robots |
| When Read | June 2017 |
In the fourth episode, Derec and Ariel encounter a number of robots who think for themselves in ways that exceed any expectation of robotic thought or creativity. A new building appears that seems to have no other function than to look beautiful. Everyone, human and robot, wants to see it. Its designer turns out to be a robot named Lucius who built it because he thought it would be beautiful. Derec and Ariel and the other robots had never heard of any such behavior before and, before long, Derec discovers Lucius, dead, murdered, at the bottom of a lake. Other creative robots are Canute, the ebony colored suspected murderer of Lucius, and three friends M334, Benny, and Harry, who form a band and learn to play old jazz tunes from earth. We are also introduced to Dr. Avery, the designer and initial implementor of Robot City. He treats Derec and Ariel quite cavalierly and refuses to reveal anything to them of the reasons why he designed the city and what it is expected to do.
The central action of the story is the production of the play, Hamlet. Derec has ordered Canute to use his imagination to design and build a version of the Globe theater. Derec directs and plays Hamlet. Ariel plays Ophelia. Robots take the other roles with Canute as Claudius, the killer of Hamlet's father, the rightful king.
In the end, the story has continued but only a little more has been revealed. Ariel is still sick. Derec still cannot remember his past. Wolruf (the dog like alien) and Mandelbrot (the robot constructed from parts and pieces by Derec in Book 1, originally named Alpha) are still with them on the planet. We still don't know why Robot City exists or how any of the open questions will be resolved. We have seen a new capability in the robots but it remains to be seen whether this is an important part of the ongoing story, or is just a private interest of the author as the cyborg was the private interest of the author of Book 3.
Cover (the author) uses the story to explore the relationship between intelligence and creativity. He argues that creative thought is a by product of intelligence and therefore robots have the capacity just as much as humans. He tells Canute: "Man is only an expression of the possibilities inherent in the universe, and so are the things he makes and invents. This holds true for artificial intelligence as well. In fact, for all we know, mankind may be only a preliminary stage in the evolution of intelligence. Eons from now, some metallic philosopher may look back on the rubble of our current civilization and say, 'The purpose of humans was to invent robots, and it has been the artifacts created by robots that are the highest order of the universe's efforts to know itself.' "
It's a point that needs to be expressed and discussed when we consider the possibilities of artificial intelligence. As usual in this series, the discussion is limited and inadequate to the task, though it is more philosophical than Wu's completely inadequate discussion of the cyborg in book 3.
I expect to finish the series and at least get some useful ideas from it, but I'm not hopeful that it will get any deeper.
| Author | Ferreira, Pedro G. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Blackstone Audio, Inc., 2014 |
| Copyright Date | 2014 |
| Number of Pages | 304 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History; Physics |
| Keywords | Cosmology |
| When Read | July 2017 |
Anglo-Portuguese Oxford physics professor Ferreira recounts the history of Einstein's general theory of relativity, starting with Einstein's efforts to come to a new understanding of space and time and continuing with efforts to integrate gravity with the other forces of nature in a "grand unification", with our understanding of cosmology, and with views of the universe on the very large and very small scales. Some of the topics include the bending of light by gravity, black holes, dark matter and energy, the possibility of a cosmological constant, the expansion of the universe, singularities, gravity waves, quantization of gravity, the applicability of the theory at universe level and quantum particle levels, the applicability or lack thereof in string theory, and more.
Ferreira writes about the great physicists who were involved in all of these controversies and discoveries, and about key experiments and observations that occurred. He says that general relativity has been something of a stepchild of modern physics. There was some work on it in the 1920's and 30's, but most theoretical physicists worked in quantum mechanics. It was only when new and surprising discoveries were made about the expansion of the universe and the existence of black holes that significant numbers of physicists turned again to general relativity in an attempt to model what is going on in the universe.
The scientists discussed include Eddington, LeMaitre, Dirac, Landau, Sakharov, Wheeler, Hoyle, Sciama, Hawking, Penrose, and many others.
I have periodically attempted to learn more about the theory of relativity. I got the mathematician Susan Bassein to explain it to me once (see my book notes in 1999 on Donald Goldsmith's The Ultimate Einstein), but I lack the background in math to understand it. So I read popularizations like Ferreira's. F does not include a single equation in the book (he probably read Stephen Hawking's statement that his publisher informed him that each equation that he put in his A Brief History of Time would cut sales in half.) I don't really learn the physics. That can't be done without the math. But I at least get a sense of what the big issues are and how and why they are being addressed. Learning something about the physics of cosmology expands my consciousness, if not always my understanding, of the nature of the universe.
When a revolution occurs in some intellectual practice, whether it be physics, chemistry or biology, or art, music, or literature, I always wonder what would have happened if the revolutionary intellectual didn't take the revolutionary step. With some fields it seems clear that someone else would have done it. Alfred Russel Wallace conceived the theory of evolution and natural selection independently of Darwin and at about the same time. Had Copernicus not published his theory, Kepler or Brahe might have stepped in. But for some revolutionary theories, some "paradigm shifts", the change may be of a kind that no one else was working on. I don't know enough about physics or its history to know whether Einstein's two theories of relativity would or would not have been discovered without Einstein, but from the little that I know, it does seem that he was looking at things quite differently from anyone else. Of course if that's true, it probably follows that there are important revolutions in science and elsewhere that could have been introduced years ago but were not and may or may not be introduced any time soon. Who knows how many geniuses were killed in wars or accidents, or fell in love, married, and went to work to support a family and raise children instead of pursuing their revolutionary idea. Maybe Mozart would have introduced, or even superseded, the Romantic revolution in music if he had lived.
These are only idle thoughts but I can imagine that a complete theory of intellectual history and the evolution of intelligence would want to account for them, just as the inheritors of Einstein's theory felt that the theory was incomplete unless and until they could account for black holes, dark matter, the cosmological constant, and so on.
| Author | Nguyen, Viet Thanh |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Grove Press, 2015 |
| Number of Pages | 384 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Vietnam War |
| When Read | July 2017 |
A Captain in the military police works as an aide to a General of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam. The story opens in the last days of the war. The Captain, who is never named, works with an American controller to organize the evacuation of the General, his extended family, and his friends and retainers. They escape on the last plane out of Saigon.
The Captain is not who he seems. He is actually a spy for the Viet Cong. He wanted to stay in Vietnam but he was instructed by his VC controller to escape with the General and keep tabs on what the refugees do in America. Will they organize an armed return? The Captain stays in touch with Man, his blood brother and friend by sending letters coded and in invisible ink, to an "aunt" in Paris who acts as as a secure intermediary between California and Saigon. The Captain is also a bastard (in the literal sense.) His mother was a young Vietnamese 13 year old seduced by a French Catholic priest. Always something of an outcast, he was defended by two boys who became his blood brothers, Man, another VC masquerading as an ARVN officer, and Bon, a natural killer who worked in the Phoenix program. The Captain managed to go to college in the U.S., where he became fluent in American English and developed something like a dual identity, Vietnamese and American. This dual identity, dual countries, dual loyalties, and his bastard origins in two cultures, all contribute to his one great strength and one great flaw - his ability to understand both sides of every conflict.
The General tells the Captain that he has learned, presumably from an informant in Saigon, that there is a traitor among them and asks the Captain who it might be. Needing to name someone, the Captain names "the crapulent Major", a Chinese ARVN officer in the military police who others see as an outsider. The Captain and Bon are ordered to kill him. Bon does all the dirty work but the Captain is traumatized by the action, never having personally killed anyone before. Later the Captain is ordered, alone and with no help from Bon, to kill Sonny, a young writer who was a friend and is also the new lover of a Japanese American woman who had been the Captain's lover before he went to the Philippines to work as translator and Vietnamese culture expert for "the Auteur", a character based on Francis Ford Coppola and Apocalypse Now. It turns out that the reason the Captain was designated as the killer of Sonny was that the General and Madame, his wife, saw the Captain approach their daughter Lan and were incensed that this completely ineligible bastard whom they had befriended would presume to approach their daughter. The two murders, especially the murder of Sonny, which was very messy, haunted the Captain. Wherever he was, he saw the ghosts of the crapulent Major and Sonny.
The Captain and Bon leave on the first expedition to Thailand where an army of 200 men has been assembled to return to Vietnam. Twelve men cross the border and are immediately overwhelmed. Bon and the Captain and a few others who survived the ambush are placed in a re-education camp where the Captain is tortured for a year by being chained, given minimal food, isolated from others, and later by sleep deprivation (which is described in detail as a whole lot more devastating than we might imagine.) It is Man, now Commissar at the camp, who turns out to be behind the torture - torturing him in a way that prevents the Commandant from torturing him much worse and killing him. The last quarter or so of the book is his experience in the camp, his confession to the Commandant and Commissar, and his release and arranged escape with the "boat people."
The book ends with an acknowledgments section in which Nguyen lists the many books that he drew from and people whose experience was important to him.
Nguyen himself was born in Vietnam in 1971, was taken to America in 1975, grew up mostly in Los Angeles, and is a very accomplished professor of English at the University of Southern California.
This was a remarkable book, not only for its conception and its content, but also for the tremendous sophistication of its ideas and its writing. Time and again I was overwhelmed by Nguyen's clear and insightful ideas and his extraordinary way of casting them into the English language. Of a meeting in California he writes, "... surrounded by Americans so tall they neither looked through nor looked down on these newcomers. They simply looked over them." Of the traditional ao dai dress worn by Vietnamese girls, "... hinting at everything and giving away nothing in a dazzling display of demureness, a paradoxical incitement to temptation, a breathtakingly lewd exhibition of modesty."
This book made me realize that, even though I had read lots of material about the war, including books, newspapers, and articles committed to the Viet Cong side, my thinking about the war mostly ended on the day when this story began. I knew nothing about either the character or fate of the Vietnamese who came to the United States, or of the direction taken by the Communist Vietnamese government after the reunification of north and south. When the Captain resumes his narrative after a year of something close to torture in a re-education camp, my first thought was "Wait! It wasn't like that was it?" I considered the possibility that Nguyen didn't understand. However when I looked him up on the web and watched a Charlie Rose interview with him, I was forced to conclude that he knew more about the story than I did, and that, like the Captain, he was himself a man able to see many sides of a story.
I will provisionally consider that Nguyen's accounts of both the refugees and the re-education camps is accurate - while understanding that they are extremely limited accounts. All he has given us of Vietnam under the communists is the inside of a re-education concentration camp. Much, though not all, of what he has given us of the Vietnamese in the U.S. is within the purview of a general of the military police. I hold out some hope that things were better for most people on both sides of the ocean.
I read this book for the NCI book club. We'll discuss it in three days, after which I may make more notes.
Everyone at the book club loved the book.
The theme that particularly impressed everyone was the Captain's duality. He was born a bastard of two worlds, Vietnamese child mother, French Catholic Priest father. He lived in the North and in the South. He lived in Vietnam and the U.S. He spoke two languages fluently. He worked for the ARVN and for the Viet Cong. Most importantly, he understood both sides of every conflict and every issue. He was a man unlike all of the others that he worked with in that he sympathized with both his friend and the enemy of his friend. It was an impressive aspect of the book.
Marcia and I visited Vietnam at the beginning of this year, 2018. It is still, nominally, a communist country and is still governed by the Communist Party. We visited the "Hanoi Hilton" (parts of which I couldn't bear to be in) and saw numbers of memorials to the war. The stories we read or heard about the war did not match the stories coming, for example, from John McCain, and it was McCain who won my belief, not the Vietnamese memorializers.
The most surprising thing to me, something that should not have been a surprise at all to a man with a more realistic understanding of people than I have, was that the huge sacrifices of the Vietnamese people have faded into history. Communism was not built in the country. There was land reform and it is still at least partially in effect, but Vietnam mostly looks like other countries with lots of individuals and families pursuing individual and family goals. There was a huge Samsung plant making LCD and LED displays. There were lots of small businesses. As in other countries in the world, from China to Mexico to the U.S., people lived private lives and the war appeared to be something in the haze of history to the younger people. See the diary entries from January, 2018.
| Author | Cussler, Clive |
|---|---|
| Author | Scott, Justin |
| Publication | Penguin Audio, 2014 |
| Copyright Date | 2014 |
| Number of Pages | 435 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| When Read | July 2017 |
In 1921, at the beginning of the Prohibition era in the U.S., Joseph Van Dorn, head of the Van Dorn detective agency, is on board a Coast Guard cutter off Long Island when he is shot by a bootlegger in a gun battle between the cutter and a fast speedboat running liquor. He almost dies. Isaac Bell, the number one detective in the agency and the hero of the series, vows to find the bootlegger and exact revenge.
The bootlegger turns out to be Marat Zolner, a very smart and tough Comintern agent who is taking over all of the bootlegging, first in New York, then Detroit and Miami. He is amassing money for the Comintern, and secretly for himself.
Bell trails the bootlegger through New York and Detroit. Using his skills and the seemingly limitless resources of the Van Dorn agency, he eventually identifies the bootlegger and chases him through an Atlantic storm all the way to New York harbor, where Zolner is piloting a ship loaded with alcohol that he intends to use to blow up Wall Street. Bell blows up the ship first, ending Zolner's life and career.
This is a late Clive Cussler / Justin Scott book. The half SF, half mystical elements of the early Dirk Pitt books are gone. Instead we have a typical super hero - smarter, faster, tougher, than anyone else, facing a super villain who actually beats Bell in a fight but is defeated in the end. As always, the men are tough, the women are beautiful, and the action is non-stop. Also as always, the authors show considerable technical knowledge of boats and other technology of that age.
Maybe one day I'll read another Cussler, or maybe not.
| Author | Mortimer, Ian |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Pegasus Books, 2016 |
| Copyright Date | 2016 |
| Number of Pages | 416 |
| Extras | tables, photos, notes, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Europe |
| When Read | July 2017 |
Mortimer, a noted historian of medieval England, has written a book about Western Europe in the period from the year 1001 through the year 2000. There are ten chapters, one for each century, followed by a concluding chapter on which century saw the most change, and an "envoi" on "Why it matters."
Each century chapter reviews important technological, economic, social, intellectual, and other changes that occurred in that century, and discusses their impact on each other. For example, he argues that the expansion of population is proportional to food supply, which in turn had much to do with the clearing of forests for agriculture in the early centuries, and the end of clearing when the forests ran out and most of the arable land was in use. Expansion began again in the 18th century with more scientific farming, expanding greatly with the technological advances of the 19th and 20th centuries.
There was useful information about the role of the church in keeping the peace in Europe, in preserving a shred of literacy and building on it, in spreading monasticism, and in influencing almost every aspect of life down to the present day. Even science was partly motivated by the religious beliefs of scientists who thought they were revealing more about God's creation. Mortimer, himself an atheist, had much to say about the Church's central role in so much of this period.
Each chapter has a conclusion in which the author attempts to summarize, major trends in the century, and identify the most significant, influential people and single person of the century - ranging from Pope Innocent II and Peter Abelard to Karl Marx and Adolf Hitler.
I learned a lot. For example, I hadn't realized how devastating was the Black Death ("bubonic" or "pneumonic" plague.) It killed between 40 and 60% of the people in the 14th century and it took many years for the population size to recover. It also changed the relationship between the classes, greatly increasing the value of labor and increasing the available agricultural land (because so many peasants had died, leaving their farms fallow.) Conscious of their value, peasants rebelled against serfdom and raised their standard of living in those places where they had some success. They also ran away from their masters to the towns, which were also short of labor.
Gutenberg's Latin Bible had little effect on society in the 15th century, but when the Bible was translated into the vernacular languages and printed, it had a huge impact on society. Part of the impact was religious, allowing people to make their own judgments about what God said in the Bible instead of having to accept whatever the priests told them - a factor in the Reformation. But perhaps more importantly, all sorts of households, even of relatively poorer folk, wanted to buy Bibles and, to use them, learned to read. Literacy expanded dramatically.
Mortimer works hard at quantitative analysis. He writes about the numbers of people, acres of land, miles of railroad, numbers of steam engines, tons of coal, and numbers of books published. He cites conflicting sources and attempts to reconcile the conflicts and, sometimes, to show that the general conclusions are the same whether we accept the lower or the higher numbers.
In his final conclusions Mortimer presents a bleak picture of the future. We have reached very close to the limits of the population that our planet can support and are recklessly using up and destroying non-renewable resources such as land, fossil fuels, and minerals without any regard for the future. We will absolutely exhaust these resources, if not in the next century, then without question in the next millennium, no matter how clever we are at discovering more. We are now facing a choice between soft and hard landings from that exhaustion depending on whether we do or don't get to work switching to renewable resources. Right now, it looks like a hard landing is in our future - with mass starvation in the underdeveloped world, increasing inequality of wealth (he accepts Thomas Picketty's arguments in _Capitalism in the 21st Century_) rising food and housing prices, impoverishment of the poor and middle classes, and degradation of democracy to accompany the increasing disparities - a process that he believes is already well underway in Eastern Europe and has started in the U.S.A. He is pretty clear in concluding that Francis Fukuyama was quite wrong in thinking that we have reached the end of history and that liberal democracy will dominate the foreseeable future.
I picked up this book after reading some positive reviews but I was skeptical about it. The idea of breaking history into millennia and then subdividing it into centuries seemed to me to be an artificial gimmick bearing little relation to real history. The idea of identifying the most influential person in each century was another entirely artificial gimmick. However, after reading for a while (a few centuries I might say) I came to accept that Mortimer is a very good historian, that he was himself completely conscious of the artificiality of the framework he constructed for the book, and that he used that framework to some good effect and avoided using it to make foolish generalizations.
Mortimer is certainly aware of Marxist analysis. He writes clearly about class divisions in society and about the impact of capitalism. He has no illusions that "the spirit of adventure" lay behind the explorations of Columbus and others in the 15th century. They sailed, not to discover the world, but to conquer it and get rich. I appreciate that he is fully aware of the issues concerning material factors vs. human agency.
I began reading history with the "Landmark" series of books when I was eight years old. I was entranced by what I would now call the "historical romance" of it all. Now, at age 71, I have a more complex view of the subject but, like everyone else, I haven't figured it all out. Mortimer has figured out more than I have and has been good enough to drag me along with him.
Yuval Noah Harari takes an opposing view of the future of our natural resources in Sapiens: a Brief History of Humankind (see 2018-03.06.) In his view science and technology will discover new resources and new ways of using alternative resources faster than we can exhaust what we have. I don't know if he's right but he may be. However, now, in the era of Donald Trump, and various populists and proto-fascists in Hungary, Italy, Poland, Austria, Turkey, and even on the sidelines but growing strong in France and Germany, liberal democracy is beginning to look fragile and endangered. It's not an optimistic outlook for the future.
| Author | Sutherland, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011 |
| Copyright Date | 2010 |
| Number of Pages | 208 |
| Extras | glossary, index, answers to quiz questions |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Literature |
| When Read | July 2017 |
Sutherland "who has been a book columnist for the Guardian and a chair of judges for the Man-Booker prize, is Emeritus Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London."
The book contains six chapters, divided into a grand total of 50 sections of four pages each. Each four page section discusses a single concept, for example: Mimesis, Ambiguity, Hermeneutics, Culture, Milieu, Style, Allegory, Irony, Allusion, Structuralism, Deconstruction, Postmodernism, Semiology, Plagiarism, Libel, Ghost-Writers, e-Books, and so on. The sections are carefully constructed to a formula containing an introduction, text, a timeline, a sidebar, some quotes by famous people, and a 3-8 word or so "condensed idea".
I wouldn't have thought it was possible to say anything meaningful about hermeneutics, structuralism, or semiology in four pages, but Sutherland manages it. Impressively, he manages it with clarity, humor, and plain language. There is none of the intellectual torture that a French structuralist or semiologist might inflict on himself and his readers. He gives some idea about the history of each concept, about the writers, critics, or scholars who developed or advocated it, and even throws in an example or two for each one to make the concept more intelligible. His "condensed idea" phrases are meant to be amusing, but they really do seem to help fix the meaning of the concept in the reader's mind.
Compared to a man like Sutherland, I muddle through my reading. I would count myself as doing well if I recognized half of the meanings, a fourth of the allusions, and a tenth of the schools and precedents that I'm sure he would recognize for a sophisticated book.
Reading this book certainly doesn't prepare one to be a literary critic, but it does expand one's horizons. It shows the many, many different directions in which literary criticism can go and adds to one's appreciation of the possibilities in literature. I would do well to keep this book handy and glance at it from time to time as I read.
This is the first book printed on paper that I've read in a long time. I found it on a book sale shelf at the Eldersburg branch of the Carroll County Public Library, from which it had been discarded. I bought it for a quarter. Amazon sells the book for $11.72 + shipping, so I got a pretty good deal. There were some really extensive and useful reviews on the Amazon site if you know how and take the trouble to get past the Amazon filters that only show you "verified purchasers". Two of them called the book Lit. Crit. for Dummies, but even they had nice things to say about it.
| Author | Roberts, Nora as J.D. Robb |
|---|---|
| Publication | Berkeley, 1995 |
| Number of Pages | 320 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | July 2017 |
This is the first volume in a series that, as of this writing, encompasses 56 titles. All feature Eve Dallas, a detective in the mid-21st century New York Police and Security Department.
Dallas is assigned to investigate the murder of a "licensed companion", a prostitute in the year 2050 or so, who happens to be the granddaughter of right wing U.S. Senator and would be Presidential candidate Gerald DeBlass of Virginia. The killer apparently had sex with her, then shot her dead, leaving the gun, a message saying "1 of 6", and other intentional clues. Over the course of the novel, two more prostitutes are shot in the same way with messages left saying "2 of 6" and "3 of 6".
Dallas is first led to "Roarke" (a man with no other first or last name), a handsome, virile, cultivated, brilliant, billionaire who has various connections to the case. Roarke falls in love with Dallas and she, eventually, with him. With Roarke's help, often provided even when she doesn't want it, she eventually determines that the Senator is a pedophile child molester who abused both his daughter and his granddaughter, the daughter of his son. When the granddaughter grew up, she blackmailed and taunted her grandfather, treating him as a client like any other, until he killed her. Dallas, herself a victim of severe child sexual abuse, publicly arrests the Senator in front of a crowd of politicians. She also exposes police chief Simpson as both a victim of blackmail and a toady for DeBlass and others.
In the final scene, Dallas is ambushed in her apartment by Rockman, DeBlass' personal assistant. Rockman points a gun at her and tells her that DeBlass killed himself but he, Rockman, was going to rape and kill Dallas and then kill two other women, demonstrating that DeBlass couldn't have been the killer. It was Rockman who hatched the whole "1 of 6" plan and then killed two more women at times when DeBlass had a solid alibi, in order to make sure that his boss was not suspected.
Things happen. Dallas manages to get her phone (her "link") off hook and connected to the police department. There is a physical fight, and she and Rockman are beating on each other when the cops + Roarke break down the door and bag the killer. Eve Dallas is carried off to get medical attention in the arms of Roarke.
I thought this book was better written than I expected it to be. Detective Dallas has some depth. The murder mystery was well done. The understanding of child abuse and family responses to it seemed real to me. I think Roberts knew what she was writing about.
The clunker, to me at least, was Roarke. There are thousands of soft and hard porn books, often with titles like "Seduced by", or "Submitting to", or "Falling for", or whatever, "... the Billionaire". Probably the most successful book in the genre is Fifty Shades of Grey. A great number of these books, and most all of the hard core pornographic versions, were written after Roberts' book, but I don't think that Roberts invented the genre. It goes back many years. Roarke is fabulously wealthy. Coming from nothing he manages, in his middle thirties, to live in a palatial home, own many commercial buildings and businesses, a gun collection of real guns with a private firing range right in his house, a huge library of real paper bound books, and a private airplane. He is stunningly strong and handsome, cultivated in spite of his harsh upbringing, and on and on. Roberts has Roarke constantly putting his hands on Dallas, feeling her face and turning her toward him. Sometimes he pushes her up against a wall and kisses her, ignoring her protests and refusals, unable to reign in his passion. I would have expected Detective Lieutenant Eve Dallas, tough cop, survivor of horrific child sexual abuse, and control freak, to kick him in the balls. Instead she falls into bed with him and he gives her the best sex of her life, beyond anything she could even have imagined, several times in a single night. And of course Roarke falls desperately in love with her, becoming her devoted love slave. Am I exaggerating? If so, it's not by much.
If Nora Roberts read what I just wrote, she'd probably laugh all the way to the bank. She's a superb craftswoman. Her goal is not great litrachur, but novels that people, presumably mostly women, want to buy and buy, again and again and again. She knows that women readers aren't looking to read about love affairs with likable enough but ordinary looking accountants, firemen, insurance salesmen, or computer nerds. They want Roarke. With 56 books out, all of them no doubt selling like crazy, and that's just in her "JD Robb" "... in Death" series, she's socking it away and probably having a great time. Financesonline.com says she made $23 million in 2013. Not as much as the $95 million that E.L. James made on Fifty Shades of Grey, but it's up there and it's steady work. And for whatever it's worth, I couldn't bring myself to finish 50 Shades, but I did finish this book. I think Roberts is a much better writer than James.
| Author | Hamid, Mohsin |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Riverhead Books (Penguin), 2017 |
| Copyright Date | 2017 |
| Number of Pages | 240 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | July 2017 |
Saeed and Nadia live in an unspecified city in an unspecified Muslim country that is in the process of being overrun by "militants". He is the son of a college professor and retired teacher. She is the daughter of a conservative family but has left them to rent her own apartment and live independently. Each works in a low ranking office job. Having met in a night school course, they begin dating.
Life gradually becomes intolerable under the onslaught, first, of terrorists, and then of full blown war between militants and army, replete with shelling, stray bullets, and bombing from the government air force. Trapped by the fighting, no longer able to earn their livings, unable to help their families, Saeed and Nadia pay to go through a magical door to Mykonos in Greece, then another door to London, where they live for awhile, and then through a door to Marin in California. Their story is partly about their incomplete love affair and partly about the life of refugees living among other refugees, many from Nigeria or other countries unlike their own, and among native Greeks, Britons, and Americans.
Saeed and Nadia grow closer together in their native city but gradually drift further apart in exile. He remains attracted to elements of his old homeland. She has moved on. He prays twice a day. She doesn't. She wants sex. He wants to wait until marriage. He is attracted to another woman. She is attracted to another man, and to another woman. They stop living together. Gradually, they stop seeing each other, then stop communicating with each other by phone. At the end they have left each other's lives.
The book caught my interest early, talking about ordinary middle class lives that were led in their home city - office jobs, schooling, family, apartments, car or motorbike, coffee shops, walks in the park, young men and women attracted to each other. It was different from what I know in the U.S., but not unrecognizably so and helped me to connect the life I understood with life in a middle eastern country of which I have no experience. Gradually however, the terrorism, the fighting, the government defense, intruded further and further into ordinary life, making one ordinary activity after another inconvenient, then dangerous, then impossible. It was a perspective on a process that I hadn't thought about but which must be real for millions of people. I learned from it.
Then the book turned into something else that was not as appealing to me. It began with the magical realism (if that's the right characterization of it) of the doors that take Saeed, Nadia, and others to the West and elsewhere. I could argue that the doors are metaphors that enabled Mohsin to talk about the complex problems of people smuggling without going into the details. Okay. But why did it have to be such a big part of the story? Why were there so many doors and why were they elaborated so much?
Leaving that aside, my next question is, why were the scenes in the original country so convincing but the scenes in London and Marin, maybe Mykonos to a lesser extent, so unconvincing? Nadia and Saeed walk out of a door from Mykonos and into a mansion in London that has been taken over by a large number of mainly Nigerian refugees. They apparently broke in when the owners were away and now they're squatting there. The police eventually come to evict them but are made to back down by the refugees and their supporters. How does that happen? I can't imagine it happening in the U.S. and, although I know less about London, I have a hard time imagining it there. I just don't see anything in the London section of the book that convinces me that I'm reading about the real life of refugees. And if it's not about the real life of refugees, then what is it intended to be about?
The writing was good. Mohsin is sensitive to subtle feelings of Saeed, Nadia, and Saeed's father. He can write effectively about these feelings, even Nadia's latent homosexuality, her insistence on wearing Muslim garb partly because of her fear of strange men on the street, her purchase of marijuana, and her partly surprising and partly not surprising estrangement from Saeed. The writing about Saeed was pretty good too. But I was confused by the whole program of the exit to the west.
I read this for an NCI book group.
Almost all of the book club members liked the book. One was very much put off by the magical doors - which bothered me too.
One person said, and most agreed, that the Saeed/Nadia relationship was largely created by the crisis in their native city. They had some attraction to each other but it was the crisis that made them very close. When they left the city for the west, the conditions that brought them together no longer obtained and they drifted apart. This seems to me to be a reasonable interpretation of the love story.
| Author | Barlett, Donald L. |
|---|---|
| Author | Steele, James B. |
| Publication | New York: Gildan Media, 2012 |
| Copyright Date | 2012 |
| Number of Pages | 320 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Politics |
| Keywords | United States |
| When Read | July 2017 |
Barlett and Steele write from a left wing perspective about the ways in which the ruling class (they are not afraid to use the words "ruling class") has betrayed the rest of us, greatly increasing their own wealth at the expense of America's present and future.
Separate chapters discuss falling wages, free trade and globalization, the outsourcing of high paying intellectual jobs as well as low paying jobs, tax havens abroad, the use of the U.S. as a tax haven for other countries, the destruction of the pension systems, and deregulation. In each of these they show how American politicians collude with the rich corporations who pay them to help them make money by looting the American economy. They show how all kinds of statements from Presidents and from government agencies about why free trade is good for us, how information technology jobs are the wave of the future (they're not, they're actually declining in the U.S.), how education makes us more employable (it does, but not like it used to in the past), are all bullshit. It's a strong indictment of both Republican and Democratic politicians.
They offer a five point program at the end of the book: revise the tax code, make free trade fair, invest in America, rethink training, and uphold the law (rich people almost never go to jail for doing anything at all in our day.)
I learned quite a lot. For example, when jobs are shipped overseas because prices are lower, the costs to the U.S. are considerably higher than one might think. Some examples are: loss of jobs (an obvious cost), loss of tax revenue from the people who had those jobs, loss of purchasing power for other American goods and services caused by lack of money by the newly unemployed, cost of unemployment and other government aid to the unemployed, loss of capability in the U.S. The biggest example they describe is Arnold Schwarzeneggers's decision to buy all of the steel components for a new Bay Bridge in California from China. No single company in the U.S. remained that was capable of supplying all of the steel, but there was at least one consortium of American companies that could do it. However with the loss of this one contract, and maybe just a very few more like it, there won't even be a consortium that can do it. Similarly, we are now outsourcing engineering design, computer programming, aircraft design and manufacturing, and other very high skill jobs. As we do so, we build up the capabilities of our competitors while losing the capabilities here at home.
I learned that all of the benefits of globalization and free trade (which is not truly free since other countries, including Japan, China, and India continue to block our exports to them) accrue only to the multi-national corporations. The small businesses in the U.S. are badly harmed by them. The statements by Republicans and Democrats too that they are instituting programs to benefit small businesses are pure lies.
The authors include many statistics. The income decline for truck drivers and flight attendants is quite enormous. Almost 30 percent of U.S. aircraft maintenance is now done in third world countries in Central America and Africa to hold down wages - and U.S. airlines now have the worst service, oldest planes, and poorest maintenance among the developed countries. The number of people covered by pensions is way down. And on and on and on.
I think a good description of what's going on is to say that America was once the richest country in the world, but the super rich in the U.S. have discovered that they can maximize their own income by looting the U.S. economy, and that's what they have done and are doing. I think this will continue to work for a while, but not forever. When the U.S. becomes one of the second rate countries there won't be as much left to loot.
There is a certain amount of overstatement in this book, but I don't think it's much. In many areas I think they are more careful than they need to be to not overstate their case.
I understand that this book will only be read by a limited audience, most of whom are already convinced leftists. But it's a worthwhile book nonetheless. My hope is that some people will be educated by it, more books like it will be written, and the ideas of this and similar books will slowly work their way into mainstream political discussion.
Understanding the economy of the United States at the present time is a very hard problem for me. Understanding it in the context of the global economy is much harder. Adding in the coming changes in technology complicates it further. Add in the complexities of political movements and tendencies and I'm feeling really at a loss. But renouncing concern for any of it and saying what will be will be is unacceptable to me, as it is to Barlett and Steele. I may only have basic ideas about what to do but I have to at least try to refine them and try to bring them about - even at the risk of making things worse. Too much is at stake. Too many people are being hurt. So I keep reading books and articles like this and try to read some on the other side too, and I keep working for political candidates and trying to discuss politics with others. I don't know what else to do.
| Author | Hampton, Dan |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Harper Collins, 2014 |
| Number of Pages | 623 |
| Extras | photos, maps, notes, glossary, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Aviation |
| When Read | August 2017 |
Hampton, a retired U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel with experience flying F-16's in the Gulf Wars, has written a book about the history of the pilots who fly fighter planes. He starts in 1915 with the story of Roland Garros, the first pilot to fly an airplane with the express purpose of shooting down other airplanes. He then produces a lot of information about the development of fighter planes and pilots in that first World War, followed by the Spanish Civil War, World War II, Korea, the Middle East, Vietnam, and the two Gulf wars against Iraq. The book seems to be an about equal mix of general history of the wars that gives context to how fighters were used and personal stories of outstanding pilots. Although he is able to give very detailed information about American pilots in recent wars where he is old enough to have either fought himself or to have known the pilots who fought, he pays considerable attention to pilots from other countries - mainly Germany but also Russia, Israel, Britain, and North Vietnam. He disparages the Iraqi pilots as poorly trained men who flew as fast as they could go to Iran in order to get out of the war, but he is pretty complimentary to the others, even the North Vietnamese and Chinese who were badly outfought in the air but were still courageous and determined.
I don't know if he'd agree with me but if I had to pick the one pilot that he most respected based on the personal stories he told, it would be Hans Joachim "Jochen" Marseille, credited with 158 aerial victories in 382 combat missions flown in just two years, all against Western Allied pilots and almost all against fighters. He considers Marseille, who seemed to be able to do things in an airplane that others couldn't do, to be a true "lord of the sky", and he admired the man's non-conformity, his resistance to discipline and bureaucracy, and even his success with women. He tells the story that Marseille was invited to dinner by Hermann Goering who asked him how many conquests he had made. Marseille answered, "it depends Herr Reichminister, do you mean aircraft or women", a joke that made Goering laugh so hard he almost choked. Others of his heroes included British and German pilots of WWI and the American, Robin Olds, whose very interesting autobiography I once read.
There are lots of interesting photos, all gathered in one section, and a useful glossary of the huge number of acronyms that seem to dominate fighter-speak.
This was an interesting book which, to my mind, struck a pretty good balance of impersonal history and personal stories. Of the two, I thought the personal stories were the most valuable because they were written with a kind of authenticity that I suspect only a fighter pilot would have been fully able and prepared to write.
The history was more of the kind that a fighter pilot than a historian would write. Hampton held strongly to the view that the military, and especially the Air Force, has had about why we lost in Vietnam. It was because we didn't fight hard enough, we didn't use our overwhelming power. If we had bombed North Vietnam the way Curtis Lemay wanted at the beginning, we would have won at the beginning. And if that caused China to enter the war, so what, bring 'em on, we'll beat them too. He never mentioned the canceled 1956 elections in Vietnam that were supposed to allow the Vietnamese people to chose between Ho and Diem. He never mentioned that the arable land in the South was mainly owned by 3,000 wealthy, Catholic, French speaking families. He said that North Vietnamese aggression in the Gulf of Tonkin incidents caused the war but didn't seem to even be aware of the controversy about the cause or nature of those incidents. He never discussed what might have happened if China had entered the war, what the U.S. would have done if, for example they sank an American aircraft carrier or bombed an American air base, or sent a half a million "volunteers" into the South, fully equipped with anti-aircraft weapons and covered by swarms of fighters piloted by men with a lot more training than they had in Korea. Maybe he'd have said that wouldn't happen and maybe he'd have been right, but maybe not and, if not, what then? I'm not arguing that H was wrong in most of his historical judgments or that the history he included was not worth reading. It was worth reading and it did what he needed it to do, which was to put the fighter stories in the context of the wars of which they were a part. But the book should be read as a history of top notch fighter pilots, the "lords of the sky", and not as a good source of general history of those wars.
Like every true fighter pilot, or maybe it's just like our ingenuous image of every true fighter pilot, Hampton castigated bureaucratic and wrong headed thinking. Sometimes that may have been unfair and too judgmental, but it was refreshing too. When a German commander wanted to severely discipline Marseille, Germany's greatest pilot, because he didn't get his hair cut and didn't show proper respect for regulations and for senior officers, H made no bones about what an idiot the man was. I also loved H's quote of Harry Truman's off the record remark about firing Douglas MacArthur - it was because he disobeyed orders and not because he was a dumb son of a bitch, a problem manifested by many generals.
To my eye there were more editing mistakes - typographical errors, off-by-one years (e.g., an instructor who arrives at the front in September and instructs one of the pilots there in July of the same year - I don't remember the exact dates), and so on - than I would have expected in a big, expensively produced book by a best-selling author and a major publisher. But a few missed notes by the players shouldn't distract us from the work of the composer. All in all, I liked the book. Like his earlier best seller Viper Pilot, it gave a powerful sense of what it's like to fly and fight in the bewildering environment of high speed, high stress, three dimensional, swirling air combat. It highlighted the astonishing presence of mind as well as astonishing skill required to survive, much less thrive. It was right up the alley of my flying interests.
| Author | Chilson, Rob |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Ace Books, 1988 |
| Number of Pages | 192 |
| Extras | Essay "Cities" by Isaac Asimov |
| Extras | illustrations |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| Keywords | Robots |
| When Read | August 2017 |
The story resumes on a small spaceship, stolen from Dr. Avery, and now containing Derec, Ariel, the alien Wolruf, and the robot Mandelbrot. With no star charts they wait in vain for someone to come by and copy some for them, but time passes, no other ships are forthcoming, and Ariel is getting sicker. Derec decides to take Ariel back to Robot City in hopes of getting treatment using the Key to Perihelion found on Avery's ship. However the Key takes them, not to Robot City, but to earth. Specifically, they land in Dr. Avery's apartment in a 3rd rate neighborhood of the underground city of St. Louis Missouri, cared for by R(obot). David, who assumes that Derec and Ariel are part of Dr. Avery's family and helps them out. We see a reprise of the cities first described in Asimov's The Caves of Steel with tiny apartments, huge cafeterias, "Personals", i.e., public bathrooms, slidewalks for transportation, and so on. In the lower rating parts of the city, like this one, there are no kitchens, bathrooms, or even video screens in the apartments, and no private transportation. It's cheaper to provide cafeterias, public bathrooms, public movie/TV theaters, and moving sidewalks. They go through various adventures on earth leading to Ariel's hospitalization and, surprisingly, a diagnosis and cure of her ailment, "amnemonic plague". The plague toxin appears also to have been the cause of Derec's memory loss though he doesn't have the disease.
They leave the planet in another of Avery's spaceships, but they are traced by the evil alien Aranimus, who has been trying to steal the Key since book 1 and has followed the hyperwave signature it gives off. There is a fight. Wolruf and Mandelbrot appear. Aranimus is defeated and maybe killed, or maybe not. In the end the four use the Key again to go back to Robot City.
Asimov's essay at the beginning of the novel describes the reaction he got to the future New York City of Caves of Steel (I remembered that as 27th century, but the Wikipedia places it at three millennia past the 1953 publication date of the novel.) People thought it was a horrifying vision but he, calling himself a claustrophile, found it rather attractive.
I found this episode to be even more aimless than the previous ones, and offering no insight into robots. It was another potboiler. I did like the reprise of Asimov's future cities.
Having read five of them, and with only one more to go, I plan to read it in hopes of finding the resolution of all of the open questions about Derec's past, the threat of Aranimus, the futures of the characters, and most of all, the purpose of Dr. Avery and Robot City. So far, I'd say the multi-author concept has not worked very well and that one Isaac Asimov (or one Roger Macbride Allen of the Caliban robot series) is better than five other authors working together. I can't say that I'm surprised.
I liked Asimov's term "claustrophile". I may be one of those too, a guy who is quite content to sit in front of a bunch of books and a computer for hours and hours, day after day, eating cafeteria food, though I'd prefer a private bathroom.
| Author | Sinclair, Upton |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Open Road Integrated Media |
| Copyright Date | 1945 |
| Number of Pages | 703 |
| Extras | Excerpt of A World to Win |
| Extras | About the author |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Lanny Budd |
| When Read | August 2017 |
The story resumes at the beginning of 1939. Franco is ascendant in Spain and the remaining Republicans, including a number of Lanny's friends, are getting out as best they can. Lanny is still selling paintings and giving the money to Bernhardt Monck, the man who helped him break into the chateaux near Paris, for underground activities in Germany. He still travels as a secret agent for Roosevelt, meeting important government and business leaders in Britain, France and Germany. He is in Germany when Hitler begins his campaign to take over Czechoslovakia in violation of the Munich agreement, and he is there later when Hitler has begun to work on the non-aggression pact with Stalin and the aggression against Poland.
Lanny juggles three romantic interests in this volume. One is Lizbeth Reverdy Holdenhurst, beautiful 18 year old daughter of millionaire Baltimorean Reverdy Holdenhurst. She is madly in love with him but he stays careful and correct with her. The second is Priscilla Hoyle, librarian of the Newcastle Public Library, whom Lanny, in an unintended moment kissed and held in a previous trip to his father's Newcastle home. Priscilla is more mature, more educated, and more sophisticated. Finally there is Laurel Creston, a cousin of Lizbeth and a writer of fiction and magazine articles. Educated, leftist, and increasingly aware of the Nazi crimes, she travels in Germany and continues to send anti-Nazi stories home for publication under an assumed name. Lanny warns her that the Gestapo is not stupid and will figure out that she is the author of the articles, she should leave Germany without delay. Then later, just as he is about to leave Germany himself, he gets a call from her that a maid in her pension said the police were watching her. Lanny picks her up and they drive from place to place. She cannot leave now without being stopped at the border, so he works up a plan to go to Berchtesgaden and present her to Hess under an assumed name as a "medium". He teaches Laurel what to say and how to act the part. Then he will tell Hess that her bags were stolen and her passport gone, can he give her documents to enable her to get home. Not surprisingly in a novel, Laurel turns out to be a real medium. She impresses Hess and then impresses Hitler. "Adi" even tries to make love to her and is rebuffed. Hess helps to spirit her out of the country and Lanny sends her to his mother at Juan les Pins.
Lanny continues to send in reports from all sources. The Germans will invade Poland very soon. The French divide against themselves - some of the big bourgeoisie fearing Hitler and some embracing him. The socialists want action but their leaders have all been suborned by money. The Communists stand aside now that Stalin and Hitler have signed a pact.
The situation in England is little better. Lanny's ex-wife Irma and her new husband Ceddy Wickthorpe of the foreign office, are doing their best to further appeasement of Hitler as the only possible course. Then Hitler invades Poland and the war starts. It seems like a phony war. The appeasers think that it is still possible to make a deal. Then Denmark and Norway fall. Then Holland falls. Then Belgium is invaded and the blitzkrieg smashes France. Lanny and his friend Rick head across to Dunkirk in a tiny boat and for four days carry men off the beaches to waiting ships. When it is over, Lanny goes ashore, freshens up in an abandoned hotel, goes outside, announces "Heil Hitler" to the nearest Germans, and continues his work as Presidential Agent and spy.
In the last chapter, Lanny is in Paris for the signing of the armistice, the visit of Hitler, and the humiliation of France.
One of the great things about the Lanny Budd series is Sinclair's deep understanding of politics and class. Reading the books is an education in the role of money in politics, the deep ties of the ruling economic classes in each of the capitalist countries to each other, and the way that fascism and Nazism, the purported saviors of the rich, rolled over that class as easily as over everyone else. But in the United Kingdom at least, democracy prevails. The common people are all turned against Hitler. It was their people that were beaten at Dunkirk and their homes that will be bombed. They want to fight. Now it is the American people who must be roused.
One bothersome note in all of this is Sinclair's obsession with mediums and the spirit world. He knows that the science is tenuous at best. He knows that the scientific world is against him on this. But he can't seem to break free of his fascination with the pronouncements of the mediums.
Well, I don't like it. I grit my teeth over it. But I keep reading. The books are just too good otherwise to be tossed out for this reason.
Sinclair is a fascinating writer of socio-political history, but he's also a fine novelist. The story of Laurel's escape from Germany would have made any author of thrillers proud. The weaving of real historical characters into the story like Roosevelt, Hitler, Hess, Petain, and others who were still alive at the time of writing, was pretty masterful and convincing.
I'm really liking these books, not only for what I learn from them, but also from the high caliber fiction.
| Author | Catton, Bruce |
|---|---|
| Publication | Doubleday, 1982 |
| Copyright Date | 1965 |
| Number of Pages | 555 |
| Extras | references, notes, bibliography, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | American Civil War |
| When Read | August 2017 |
This is the third and final volume of Catton's broad history commemorating the civil war of one hundred years before. He covers the period from the end of December, 1862, to the end of the war. The book seems about equally divided between a high level military history, and a high level political history concentrating on the main issues of re-uniting the country, slavery, and plans for reconstruction.
The military history covers multiple theaters of war, Virginia, Gettysburg, Vicksburg, Charleston, Chatanooga, Chickamauga, Atlanta, and the final battles from the Wilderness to Appomattox - all at a high level concentrating mainly on the commanders, their strategies, and their performance. The main Northern strategy always advocated by Lincoln but never really implemented until Grant was made commander in chief, was to press the Union's advantages in men and material in all theaters of war at once, knowing that the Confederacy could not defend everywhere all the time. At the end, a man approached Lee with a plan for guerrilla war but Lee stood on a higher plane and told him, No, the war is over.
As the war progressed it became necessary to adopt harder and harder measures on both sides. There was conscription and riots against it. Whether or not the Union abolished slavery, the slaves emancipated themselves. When Union armies came within reach, they got up and walked into the union camps. The Generals didn't know what to do with them. There had been no plans to feed or house them, and no plans to return them to their masters. Putting them to work fulfilled two objectives. Work that cost money to do could be done, and the money could be paid as wages to help feed the slaves. They were put to work in non-combat roles, without uniforms or guns, but that didn't last. Soon they too went into combat. The reality of the war demanded it and the black men distinguished themselves and many died for the cause.
Once the tide of war turned very clearly in 1864, there was no doubt that Lincoln and the Republicans would be re-elected. Most of the Republican Party was far more radical than Lincoln but, according to Catton, there was no doubt that Lincoln recognized and endorsed what Catton called a revolution in America - freeing the slaves and making them full citizens. The radicals wanted to do it by crushing and punishing the rebels. Lincoln wanted to do it by bringing the rebels back into the fold and restoring the Union as quickly as possible, but without slavery. Lincoln understood the need for a hard war but he wanted a soft peace.
I had always assumed that Catton was a professor of history but I now know that he was not and, in fact, never graduated college. He was a prominent journalist and founding editor of the American Heritage Magazine. To me, however, he seemed a consummate historian. He had a deep mastery of his subject and of the primary sources. He drew conclusions that some professional academicians might have hesitated to draw for fear of going beyond the facts, but I thought they were always enlightening and his arguments were always persuasive even when they didn't completely convince. I remember a passage in this book quoting Clausewitz' dictum that war is politics by other means, and a controversy among historians about whether Lincoln had read Clausewitz. Catton believed that he knew, probably from reading but possibly from inquiring of the Library of Congress, that Lincoln had never borrowed the book from that library. It was the kind of small and fluently handled detail that one finds throughout his books.
I thought The Coming Fury was by far the best account I've ever read of the immediate causes and the opening of the war. Although the end of slavery was not the main topic of this book, I think it sheds considerable light on that subject and on its place in the politics of that time.
There are still a few books by Catton that I haven't read and may yet read before I'm done. He is one of my favorite historians.
| Author | Wu, William F. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Ace Books |
| Copyright Date | 1988 |
| Number of Pages | 170 |
| Extras | Essay "Robots in Combination" by Isaac Asimov |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| Keywords | Robots |
| When Read | August 2017 |
Derec and Ariel are reunited with the alien caninoid Wolruf and robot Mandelbrot, then with Jeff Leong from volume 3, and are back in Robot City. Ariel is slowly recovering her memory but Derec is getting weaker and weaker from the action of the "chemfets" - nano robots in his bloodstream that are reproducing and constructing a new robot city inside him. Although they have no plan for what to do if they find him, the five friends search for Dr. Avery, the evil genius behind all of it. They notice that the robot population is way down, they have been dispersed to "migration points". The robots they knew have been reprogrammed and no longer know them. Soon "hunter" robots pursue them. They evade until near the end of the book when they confront Avery, who tells them that Derec is really his son David Avery. The robots on the planet are being dispersed to points from which they will migrate to planets everywhere to take over the universe. The chemfets in David's body will enable David to master the robots and the whole universe. The friends resist. Derec/David takes over the resources of the city and overrides Avery's control. Avery uses the key to perihelion to disappear. They find out that some robots have already migrated and the universe is in danger. Book 7 is to continue the story.
I was not too surprised to find that what I take to be the big issues of the series were not resolved or even addressed in what I thought would be the final book in the series. What would a society of robots be like apart from human control? How would machine intelligence be different from the intelligence that we evolved? We get some simple answers to that one - the robots are highly rational, but what do they think about when they aren't thinking about assigned tasks? Can they truly relate to art, music, history, science, philosophy, or literature? Will they create their own language, and if so, what relationship will it have to human language? What will they say to each other. Book 4 by Arthur Byron Cover says the most about these questions, but there isn't a lot and it isn't followed up in the subsequent books. I understand that no one can answer these questions with any confidence, but I think informed speculation is possible and potentially very interesting.
I had no right to expect more from these books. They were probably written, more or less, for adolescent readers for whom the story was important, not the philosophy. However even the story wasn't good. Perhaps Asimov would have been able to do better. Some of today's SF writers certainly could.
I had thought that this was going to be the end of the series. I didn't find any more than six volumes listed at Amazon. However, even if there are, I think it's ended for me. The books were short and easy to read. They concerned a subject of interest to me. But they left me unsatisfied.
| Author | Seymour, Gerald |
|---|---|
| Publication | BBC Audiobooks |
| Copyright Date | 2000 |
| Number of Pages | 400 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| Keywords | Terrorism |
| When Read | August 2017 |
Frank Perry, an engineer and chemical engineering equipment salesman, was caught by British intelligence selling forbidden goods to Iran and made to keep doing it and, while doing it, to provide information on his contacts in Iran to the British secret services. He is then told that his life is in danger, pulled out of the spy business, and given a new name and new occupation in a new town. He is not told why. Now, four years later, he is living with a new wife and her son, his former wife having refused to go into hiding with him, when he is told that he has been discovered by the Iranians and a killer is after him and he must move again. He refuses. He saw his life go downhill after the last move and his family breakup. He now has a new love, a new home, and most importantly, a large group of new friends whom he has cultivated. He will not give all of that up because someone thinks that someone else might be after him. After much effort to persuade him to leave and to guard him in the meantime, an American CIA agent convinces the British that this is their chance to catch a determined and experienced assassin who is a great danger to everyone. They decide to leave Perry in place as a kind of tethered goat to attract this killer into a trap manned with four plainclothes cops on duty at all times.
On the other side, Vahid Hossein has come ashore from an Iranian oil tanker, met his contact, British convert Yusuf Khan, gotten his weapons, and headed for Frank Perry's house. Hossein is not just an experienced killer, he's a true believer who has no regard for his own life, only for his mission. It is perfectly fine with him if he is killed, just so long as he finishes his mission first. He looks forward to standing with God and the other martyrs, with the comforts of beautiful young maidens in heaven.
All sorts of things go wrong. Perry's "friends", seeing the police protection, abandon him and demand that he get out of their neighborhood. Yusuf Khan, is badly injured in an auto accident leaving Vahid Hossein on his own until the attractive young Farida Jasmin Jones arrives, helping Hossein, longing for him, and tormenting him with visions of her body. Eventually, he rapes and kills her after she gives him wrong information about where Perry is - causing him to mistakenly kill Perry's wife instead of Perry himself and to be shot and wounded by the police. The police, despite some inexperience at all of this, do manage to protect Perry and do manage to shoot Hussein, who goes off into the swamp where he is eventually tracked down by a strange young game keeper who brings back his body.
Frank Perry is left, widowed, with his foster son, alienated from his former friends, blaming himself for his wife's death.
This is vintage Gerald Seymour. All of the characters are full of inner anguish and contradictions, facing extremely difficult tasks, but trying to do what is right. There is sensitivity to the beach, the swamp, and the wounded hawk who is saved and nursed by the killer Hossein and whose flying pattern is used by the game keeper to locate the killer. The only false note to my mind was the betrayal of the Perry's by their neighbors. Every single one of his former friends shuns him and demands his expulsion from the community. Am I, like Perry, too naive to believe that every single one would betray him, or was Seymour going overboard here? Whatever. It was still a satisfying book.
| Author | Pearl, Matthew |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Random House |
| Copyright Date | 2003 |
| Number of Pages | 400 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Dante Alighieri; Harvard University; American Civil War |
| When Read | September 2017 |
The story opens in late 1865 with the horrible discovery of an almost dead man whose living brain is full of maggots. The man is Judge Healey of Boston. Harvard Professor of Medicine and leading American poet Oliver Wendell Holmes is called in to examine the body and realizes, not only that the man was murdered, but that the murder was an enactment of a scene from the Inferno of Dante's Divine Comedy. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is working on a new translation of Dante's work into English with the assistance of Holmes, James Russell Lowell, James Thomas Fields, and George Washington Greene, collectively constituting "The Dante Club".
More esoteric murders occur and it is obvious to the scholars that the killer is revisiting Dante's punishments of hell upon prominent people in Boston who have committed what may be minor sins. Furthermore, his murders seem to be synchronized with the passages that the Club is working on at any given time. Who could it be? And what will happen if the police realize that the killings are motivated by Dante's poem and that the members of the Dante Club are among the very few people in Boston who know Dante's Italian language poem? One policeman, Patrolman Nicholas Rey, a mulatto and the first non-white (fictional in this case) Boston police officer is close to figuring it out.
Various clues are given, eventually leading to the discovery of the murderer, a post-traumatic stress disordered survivor of the Civil War who works in the publishing offices of James Fields, listens to sermons on Dante delivered by G.W. Greene, and knows what's going on with the Club because he is able to listen outside the door of the "Author's Room" at the publishing office where the club often met.
The killer turns on the scholars and would kill them but is himself shot by the (fictional I presume) Treasurer of the Harvard Corporation, Dr. Augustus Manning. Manning, who had suffered an attempted murder by the killer, had been trying to sabotage the translation of Dante, to prevent the teaching of Italian or other modern European languages at Harvard, and to eliminate any Catholic influences in the University.
The author, a Harvard graduate studying British and American literature, wrote this book while studying at Yale Law School and published it at age 24. It was a very impressive book showing much acquaintance with all of the Harvard/Boston poets and with Dante, possibly in Italian as well as in English. The characters spoke in a convincing 19th century educated American style and the appreciation of both Dante and of the increasingly psychotic killer, seemed quite serious to me. I was put off at first by the disgusting image of maggots eating a man's brain, but I got over that and Pearl didn't repeat it. I might read another of his books sometime.
Read for the NCI book group. Only five people showed up for the meeting and one of those hadn't read it. Maybe it was a little too slow reading for the others, or maybe they couldn't get past the maggots.
| Author | Galeano, Eduardo |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Spanish |
| Translators | Belfrage, Cedric |
| Publication | New York: Monthly Review Press, 1997 |
| Copyright Date | 1971 |
| Number of Pages | 317 |
| Extras | references, index |
| Extras | Foreword by Isabel Allende |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History; Economics; Politics |
| Keywords | Latin America; Imperialism |
| When Read | September 2017 |
Galeano, a poet and novelist as well as a historian and an economist, recounts the history of exploitation in Latin America. He considers that the continent, first under Spanish and Portuguese rule, then under the rule of European and American capitalism, has only been allowed to produce raw materials - minerals and agricultural products, for export. The working class has been exploited to the point that their lives in many lands were indistinguishable from the lives of slaves. All of the wealth that came back into the country, a small fraction of what came out, was used to buy luxuries and pay for conspicuous consumption by the comprador class.
The condition of the agricultural and industrial workers is frighteningly bad. At many times and places in the countryside, wages were below survival levels. A man and his family might need to work from sunup to sundown, seven days a week, and farm a tiny plot on unproductive hillside land at night to add enough food to survive. They would be paid in scrip, not money, that could only be spent at the company store. They would be bound by contracts and debts, often phony debts, to the latifundista and could be physically punished or even killed if they ran away. Where laws existed to protect workers, or to tax imports, exports, or local production, they were very often just imaginative fictions that were not, and could not be, actually enforced.
After the demise of Spanish and Portuguese rule, the U.S. soon displaced most of the European investors and controllers of the continent. American planning, money, training and directing of military forces, and sometimes Marines and gunboats, would overthrow any government that resisted American private commercial domination. American "foreign aid", the "Alliance for Progress", the various American controlled banks and lending institutions (IMF, IDB, World Bank, etc.) generally lent money in such a way that the bulk of the payments went to American companies for the purpose of building infrastructure that was only of use to the American companies, while imposing massive debts on the Latin Americans that were far in excess of any benefits received. Even the apparently regional economic associations such as the Latin America Free Trade Association ("LAFTA"!) were actually made to support the profits of American or European "investors". For example, IBM could not profitably make computers in Latin America because the market was too small, but by creating LAFTA they enabled a single IBM subsidiary in Brazil to ship duty free to Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay, while repatriating all their profits to the U.S. without paying much or any local taxes.
There has been revolt, sometimes armed, sometimes peaceful and democratic, in many countries. As of 1970 when the book was written, it had always been overthrown. As of today in 2017, we may have gotten farther, but the threat of fascist coups and imperialist agitation and support is still with us.
I am no kind of economist, and have only a very limited knowledge of the history of Latin America. I can't evaluate all of Galeano's statements, though I do see that he has extensively documented his book with footnotes to sources that can be checked. I consider that it is likely that John F. Kennedy and Jimmy Carter believed that they were doing good for Latin America. I'm even prepared to believe that Henry Kissinger at least imagined that he was doing good for the people and not just for the autarchs and bloodsuckers. It's also conceivable to me that some of the prescriptions coming from American bureaucrats and technicians really did give some benefit to the Latin American people and were not exclusively for the purpose of exploiting them. But whether or not that's true, I don't see how I can deny the force of Galeano's arguments.
Latin America has been bled and bled. Many of its natural resources are now largely exhausted, with no benefit to the people. There have been centuries of suffering. Will it end in some foreseeable future? I don't know. I think Galeano was not completely pessimistic.
I'm not now reading as much revolutionary and socialist literature that I read 45 years ago. However I still feel the anger that this literature inspires.
| Author | Simenon, Georges |
|---|---|
| Original Language | French |
| Translators | Stewart, Jean |
| Publication | |
| Copyright Date | 1950 |
| Number of Pages | 160 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | September 2017 |
In a total departure from the four other Maigret stories that I have read, Maigret himself becomes the narrator and talks about his youth; his education; his meeting, attraction, and marriage to Louise; his life and development in the police force; and his relationship with Georges Simenon, the man who wrote so many books about him. There is no mystery story, no crime, no solution.
I thought this was a delightful book. Simenon is able to look at himself and to introduce some humor into his writing. Here are a few passages I liked:
"'Maigret’s reports consist largely of parentheses.' Probably because I try to explain too much, to explain everything, and because nothing seems to me clear or definite."
[Speaking about another officer] "Without actually being a dunce, he was slow-witted, and I remember they used to say about him: 'He works so hard he breaks out in spots, but he’s no wiser next day.'"
"Well! I don’t think there is any point in going into all the details. It’s going to be hard enough to make sure that what I’ve written already doesn’t get thrown into the wastepaper basket."
"... one shelf of the bookcase is full of Simenon’s books, which I have patiently stuffed with blue pencil marks, and I was looking forward to correcting all the mistakes he’s made, either because he didn’t know, or else for the sake of being picturesque, often because he didn’t have the courage to call me up to verify some detail. - What’s the use? I would look like a fussy fellow, and I’m beginning to believe myself that these things are not so very important."
And finally, in Simenon's own voice, the author tells Maigret that if any corrections to the Maigret stories are to be made, Maigret will have to make them himself because: "I've never had the courage to reread my own books."
It was a pleasure to read. Simenon makes more of a human of Maigret and pokes a little fun at himself.
| Author | Ji Xianlin |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Chinese |
| Translators | Chenxin Jiang |
| Publication | New York: New York Review Books, 2016 |
| Copyright Date | 1998 |
| Number of Pages | 216 |
| Extras | Introduction by Zha Jianying |
| Extras | notes |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Autobiography |
| Keywords | China; Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution |
| When Read | September 2017 |
Born in 1911 into a desperately poor family, Ji was sent to elementary school by an uncle, excelled, made his way through high school, college, graduate school in Nazi Germany where he got a PhD, and, at age 36, became head of the Eastern Languages Department at Beijing University in 1946. After the revolution he joined the Communist Party and became a sincere, dedicated communist. He participated in some of the persecutions of people that had been singled out as counterrevolutionaries, and even joined in with the Red Guards when the Cultural Revolution began. However he himself became a target and spent several years under tremendous stress, almost committing suicide at one point. He experienced many "struggle" sessions where he was forced into the painful "airplane position" (back bent, hands stretched out behind him), not allowed to look anyone in the eye, being kicked, punched, clubbed and stoned at random, wearing a heavy wooden plaque suspended by a wire cutting into the back of his neck, and listening to absurd charges screamed at him. He spent many months in the "cowshed", a prison for people like him where he experienced torture, "struggle", and hard labor for eight or nine months. Gradually, things got better for him. He returned to simple work. He was finally paid barely enough for him, his wife, and his aunt that lived with them, to eat. Then the Cultural Revolution petered out. When the Gang of Four was deposed he was returned to his position as department head.
This book about his experience was written in 1992, at age 81, and finally published during a spell of liberalism in 1998. This English translation includes supplementary material in which Ji questions how the Cultural Revolution came about and why, even today, no one is writing about it or explaining its rise and its injustices.
The problems in China were not new in 1966. The same kinds of "ultra-left mistakes" were made starting very shortly after the success of the Revolution. Ji writes very briefly of the history of these problems that led up to the Cultural Revolution.
Ji is aware of his own mistakes - which are not the mistakes he was accused of, but their opposites. He writes: "'All citizens must learn from the People’s Liberation Army!' 'The proletariat must take the lead in everything!' I had believed in and obeyed all these slogans. But upon actually meeting these soldiers and workers, I realized that some of them were arrogant thugs who knew nothing about politics. I immediately came to my senses. To be sure, no one is perfect. But I never imagined that the objects of my worship would act so despicably. As materialists, we should be transparent and pragmatic; we cannot deceive ourselves. I must say that although we intellectuals had our faults, we cannot have been the worst offenders."
This was a very impressive book by a very impressive scholar. Ji was fluent in classical and modern Chinese, in Sanskrit, Pali (an ancient Indian language in which the Buddhist classics were written), English, German, and who knows what else. He wrote knowledgeably of the history of China, of philosophy, including Western philosophy, and of literature both Eastern and Western. His writing was lucid, sophisticated, articulate, and logical. It's easy to see why he was made a department head at an unprecedentedly young age of one of China's most famous universities.
I myself was radicalized, primarily by the Vietnam War, and was attracted to Maoism and to the Cultural Revolution. I read a short book, Hundred Day War: The Cultural Revolution at Tsinghua University by William Hinton and published by Monthly Review Press (publishers of Galeano's Open Veins of Latin America) about the Cultural Revolution at a place very like the one where Ji worked and then suffered. It gave me the totally different point of view of the "iron rods" of the Red Guard. Ji's book is not the first I've read that gave me a view from the other side, but it is a particularly convincing one. My politics at that time were sincere. I certainly had nothing to gain and much to lose from my support of the Cultural Revolution. But I think they were naive and mistaken.
I was surprised that he spent ten years in Nazi Germany. He had hoped to study in the West and, in 1936, was invited to Germany by the language department at the University of Gottingen. He wrote a few pages about his experience, describing how he was very well treated and experienced no racism, getting his PhD in 1941. At that point, leaving the country and returning to China was impossible. He suffered from hunger during the war, but suffered no ill treatment. The Americans helped him return to China after the war.
| Author | Weyman, Stanley J. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Gutenberg |
| Copyright Date | 1901 |
| Number of Pages | 420 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | France |
| When Read | September 2017 |
The story opens in Paris, on the eve of the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre in 1572. Mademoiselle de Vrillac, a Huguenot, has been left to sit at the court of Charles IX while her intended, the gallant young Huguenot Monsieur de Tignonville (T) is off somewhere. Alone, she is approached by Count Hannibal de Tavannes (H), a powerful, overbearing man who frightens her. She wants to get rid of him but can't.
The rest of the story is the triangle of these three characters. H and T both pursue Mademoiselle. H protects both of the others from the mob during the massacre by personal courage and armed force, incurring the wrath of a firebrand priest of the church, but extracting a promise from Mademoiselle that she will marry him if he protects her, T, and her servants, and locates a Protestant minister to marry them. He succeeds. She keeps her promise but H is surprisingly gentle with her and does not force her to consummate the union. T is furious about the marriage. He doesn't actually care all that much for Mademoiselle but his pride has been wounded. They all leave Paris for Angers where H is to present letters from the King, presumably ordering the massacre of all Huguenots there. H hopes to prevent the action but makes a mistake and fails. He leads the party out of Angers, closely pursued by the mad priest from Paris.
There is a chase. The party makes it to the impregnable de Vrillac castle. The priest sends in a lying message to trick H into surrendering to him, but all is discovered and Mademoiselle realizes that, whatever flaws he may have, H is a brave, upright, honorable, and capable man. She sends away de Tignonville and comes to believe in Count Hannibal and love him.
A Gentleman of France is still my favorite Weyman story but this one was quite well written. Except for the massacre of the Huguenots, there is surprisingly little outright violence in the story. Weyman avoids making Hannibal infallible or de Tignonville a terrible person. A few of the minor characters such as the Protestant minister and H's retainer old Badelon are quite good. I liked the book.
| Author | Gawande, Atul |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, 2014 |
| Copyright Date | 2014 |
| Number of Pages | 304 |
| Extras | notes, acknowledgments, about the author |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Medicine |
| Keywords | Mortality; Aging |
| When Read | September 2017 |
Gawande is a professor at Harvard Medical School and School of public health, a general surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, a staff writer at the New Yorker, and a best selling author of popular books on medicine. He writes in this book about what happens to people when they get old and what can be done by the medical, nursing home, assisted living, and palliative care establishments to enable them to live more fully and fruitfully until they die.
The physical changes we experience are not pretty. Our skin absorbs effluents that we can no longer properly dispose of and develops dark age spots. Our blood vessels absorb calcium and become crunchy. Our hearts thicken. Our brains shrink, leaving space between brain and skull that enables the brain to rattle around and injure itself in a fall. Our balance declines along with our vision and hearing. It's an inevitable process of aging that continues whether or not we develop cancer or heart disease - which themselves are likely inevitable events. We can postpone the inevitable with good nutrition and exercise and, if we're lucky, resilient genetics, but there is no arguing with mortality, at least not within our current understanding of physiology and medicine.
The medical establishment is designed to extend life. It tries to do that with treatments like surgery and drugs - even long after there is any point to treatment and after the point where treatment side effects contribute more to death than the original condition did. Our nursing homes are organized for efficient use of the staff - getting all inmates to wake up and go to sleep at the same time, eat the same food at the same time, leave their rooms at the right time for janitorial staff, participating in the same activities, and so on. Life in a nursing home can be punishingly impersonal, meaningless, and uninteresting. Assisted living residences were an attempt to improve on this, and have succeeded to greater or lesser degrees. Gawande describes numerous attempts at improvement, many of which are successful, but not easy to keep up. Often it is not the specifics of what the staff does that make the attempts work but the energy, effort, and especially the humanity, that seemed to me to make the difference.
The book was depressing and disturbing to read. It is not fun to learn that your body and mind will inevitably give out and you may face increasing debilities of every kind, pain, confusion, loss of independence, possibly poor care, and possibly slow and painful death. Doctors may help, but may also do harm if they try to "help" when help is no longer really possible.
The whole story was not pretty, however it did appear that some doctors and other health care professionals can ease dying a lot better than others and it's important to try to find the right ones. It also appears that the dying person himself can do himself a lot of good by understanding his situation and accepting it. Life changes as we get older and, while we can do our best to handle the changes with diet, exercise, and positive thinking, mortality is still 100%. We have to recognize that it's going to happen and make the best of what we have left rather than pining for the past.
I read this for an NCI book group. Many of the people in the group have experience in working with elderly people and/or cancer patients and had much to contribute.
| Author | Schnitzler, Arthur |
|---|---|
| Original Language | German |
| Translators | Davies, J.M. |
| Publication | Penguin Modern Classics, 1999 |
| Copyright Date | 1925 |
| Number of Pages | 128 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | September 2017 |
Fridolin, Albertina, and Holly, husband, wife, and little daughter, live a comfortable life in Vienna. He is a successful doctor, seeing patients in an examining room at his home, at the patients' homes, and at the hospital. Their life appears to be happy and full of love.
"Whether Albertina was more impatient, more honest or more kind-hearted of the two, it was she who first summoned the courage for a frank confession." She tells Fridolin of a passing but strong sexual attraction she felt for a man they saw at the seaside in Denmark. Fridolin too confesses his own passing attraction for a young girl at the same seaside resort.
Back in Vienna, Dr. Fridolin is called to the bedside of a dying man but arrives after the man has already died, only to be propositioned by the man's daughter. He meets an old friend who tells him about a secret sex club in which everyone is masked. He rents a costume from a man with a possibly retarded daughter who pushes herself on him, and then attends the club where he is warned off by a naked woman in a mask but he is discovered by the men, forced out, and threatened. He goes home only to hear his wife relate a dream that seems to derogate him.
Fridolin is alternately attracted to and repelled by his wife. He is alternately attracted to and repelled by the various women who would be easy for him to use. Sometimes his attractions seem real and the repulsions dreams, and sometimes the other way around. "... To lead a sort of double life, to be the capable, reliable physician with a future before him, the upright husband and head of a family. And at the same time a libertine, a seducer, a cynic who played with people, with men and women, just as the spirit moved him — that seemed to him, at the time, very delightful. And the most delightful part was that at some future time, long after Albertina fancied herself secure in the peacefulness of marriage and of — family life — he would confess to her, with a superior smile, all of his sins, in retribution for the bitter and shameful things she had committed against him in a dream."
It is hard for me to discern the author's position in this story. Did he admire Fridolin's sexual desires, and aspirations to infidelity? Did he deprecate them? Did he neither admire nor deprecate but rather take a neutral stance, considering that he was describing the way people are and always will be no matter what we think of them?
Schnitzler himself was trained as a doctor but gave it up to become a writer, writing many plays and some prose fiction. He may have led a life not entirely unlike Fridolin's, complete with extra-marital affairs. A Wikipedia author says that S said "I write of love and death. What other subjects are there?"
Schnitzler's writing can be subtle. Fridolin says and does things without always knowing why. He acts impulsively. He is an intellectual, an educated man of science, but he cannot rule his own emotions. The reader may draw whatever conclusions he likes, but by the end, we have seen enough to know that whatever we might hope for this man and his family, he's going to do what he's going to do and nobody is going to change him.
| Author | Whaples, Robert |
|---|---|
| Publication | The Teaching Company |
| Copyright Date | 2007 |
| Extras | Outline of all lectures in pdf format |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Economics |
| When Read | October 2017 |
Wake Forest University Professor Whaples lays out a few basic principles of economic theory and then proceeds to apply them in 36 half-hour lectures on about 30 different topics from Climate Change and Economic Inequality to Baseball, Walmart, and Overeating. Each topic is addressed in a half hour lecture, replete with the Teaching Company theme music at the beginning of each lecture and applause at the end.
W is very careful about taking positions and drawing conclusions of his own. He has conducted, perhaps for his own research or perhaps for these lectures, a wide ranging survey of professional economists to get their opinions on issues and proposed solutions. He may then say something like X1% of economists believe that free trade is in the interests of the United States and Y1% believe it is not, X2% believe that higher taxes will reduce employment and Y2% believe it will not, and so on.
Whaples knows vastly more than I do about economics and it's very hard for me to evaluate his arguments about the pros and cons of each different theory about how to address the problems of our times. He is clearly very smart, very well read, very thoughtful, and very logical. Nevertheless, and I admit that it may be entirely due to my ignorance, I felt that there were wrong notes in his presentation and problems with his approach.
One wrong note was a pervasive feeling in his lectures that we live in conditions that could not really be other than they are. It's not that we live in the best of all possible worlds. He recognized many problems in our society from "inefficient" health care to runaway government debt. However, it seems like every solution he discusses that has been proposed has so many things wrong with it that it's unlikely to work. He doesn't say so explicitly, but he seems to me to imply that the free market and the laws of economics have given us what we have and changing things will require that we go against those laws, which will have more negative than positive consequences.
Secondly, it seemed to me that his presentation abstracted away from the reality of life in the United States. There is no sense, for example in his discussion of health care, that we are talking about children who will grow up with brain abnormalities or chronic diseases, or who don't grow up at all, who could have been saved in childhood with better distribution of health care. In another example, he talks about the possibility of negotiation between a neighborhood association and an airport over noise (and perhaps air) pollution. The neighbors pay the airport not to fly at night, or the airport pays the neighbors not to complain about the pollution. There is no mention of the differences between a neighborhood of poor vs. rich neighbors - which has everything to do with who holds the power in the negotiation, and not just over the amount of money available during negotiation, but also over the ability to hire lawyers, to enlist or purchase politicians, and to organize the neighbors.
I thought a particular example of the difficulties in his presentation could be found in his discussion of the minimum wage. He said that 47% of the economists he polled said that the minimum wage should be completely eliminated! Then, after noting that (to me) astonishing poll result, he never raised the question of what level wages might sink to if there were no government mandated minimum. Marx said that the capitalist class in England needed a minimum wage because, without it, wages would be driven below the level needed for workers to live. With a minimum, an employer could be guaranteed that he could pay a minimal living wage and not have to worry about his competitors undercutting his prices by lowering their workers' wages below the minimal living wage. Whaples didn't discuss any of those issues and he rather pooh-poohed the whole subject by saying that only 14% of people earning the minimum wage were living in households with household income below the poverty line and that people living in poverty in the U.S. had heat, air conditioning, and 471 (IIRC) square feet of home space per person, more than the average of all people in most European countries. His discussion of unions was equally abstract and divorced from any recognition of the real problems of workers that unions addressed. Instead he argued that unions raised some wages but did so at the expense of consumers paying higher prices. The idea that billionaires bought yachts and mansions at the cost of both lower wages and higher consumer prices wasn't even imagined in his presentation.
There is no sense in W's lectures that there is a significant class of people in the U.S. who are leading difficult, even desperate lives. There is no sense that a man with five billion dollars has that money because he has captured the resources or the labor of America and can bend it do whatever he likes from conspicuous consumption to the smashing of labor unions, to the purchase of congressmen to promote laws in his favor. There is no sense that our very democracy is at stake in the issues of economic inequality.
The danger of Whaples' way of thinking is that he takes no notice of how the "free" economy is free in the same sense that both the billionaire and the slum dweller are free to purchase a mansion, to send his children to an expensive private school, or to turn down a nasty minimum wage job. Yes, there is an important sense in which the economy is free, but No, that sense is not in the interest of all, or even the majority, of the people.
But there is a danger in my view too. Whaples is hardly stupid. In fact he's very smart, and the economics that he is teaching is not a simple reflection of the ideas and interests of the capitalist class. There is much empirical data and mathematical analysis involved and to ignore it is to risk proposing things that sound great but are doomed to failure. Reality is real and we ignore it at our peril. In the 2016 Democratic primary campaign, Hillary Clinton argued, with considerable force I think, that Bernie Sanders was doing just that.
If I were President, attempting to set government economic policy for the U.S., I would want liberal economists and advocates for the poor and middle class on my council of economic advisers, but I'd also want people like Whaples too. I'd listen to all and I wouldn't overrule intelligent objections from Whaples unless someone was able to address those objections objectively.
I wrote a fairly long review of this work for Amazon.
| Author | Bulgakov, Mikhail |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Russian |
| Translators | Pevear, Richard; Volokhonsky, Larissa |
| Publication | New York: Penguin Books, 1997 |
| Copyright Date | 1940 |
| Number of Pages | 412 |
| Extras | Foreword by Boris Fishman |
| Extras | Introduction by Richard Pevear |
| Extras | notes |
| Genres | Fiction; Satire |
| Keywords | Soviet Union |
| When Read | October 2017 |
There are multiple intertwined plots and characters in this exotic novel. The story opens in Moscow in the 1930's with "Berlioz", editor and chairman of the Massolit literary association lecturing "Homeless" a young poet, on why his work on Jesus must be re-written since Jesus, after all, didn't really even exist. Then a "professor" arrives, a "specialist in black magic". He claims that certainly Jesus existed. He saw him at the residence of Pontius Pilate.
Thus begins a tale of history, of magic, and of a tremendous clash of the forces of darkness that are completely impervious to the actions of men, the forces of society and the state that are completely impervious to the demands of reason and humanity, and the power of love.
The professor, in fact Satan, is known by the name "Woland". He is accompanied by four servants, Koroviev (Fagott), Azazello, Hella, and the great cat Behemoth. They perform a magic show in Moscow, tearing off the head of the master of ceremonies and then restoring it, dropping ten rouble notes from the ceiling, giving all the women fashionable clothing that disappears when they get outside and find themselves in their underwear, and so on. They take over the apartment of Berlioz and make it their headquarters, toying with, humiliating, humbling, even banishing, anyone who gets in their way.
This story of magic in Moscow is paralleled by another story, in ancient Yerushalaim, where the man Yeshua has been arrested by the procurator Pontius Pilate and, for reasons of policy and state, has been condemned to death even though Pilate wishes he didn't have to do that. There is a great scene in Pilate's palace where Pilate meets with Yeshua, meets with the head of the Sanhedrin who demands Yeshua's death, meets with the head of his own secret service, and with the apostle Matthew Levi, and lives in pain and psychological torment. Later there is a scene of the crucifixion, a scene with Matthew making off with the body, a scene of Judas of Kiriath (Iscariot), lured out of Yerushalaim and murdered by the men of the secret service, and of Pilate again directing all of the actions while seeming to direct their opposites, and suffering with his burdens.
The Master, writer of a novel of Pontius Pilate that has been vilified and banned, and Margarita, his lover, do not appear until halfway through the novel. We learn of the Master's desolation, his burning of his own manuscript, his depression, and his retreat to an insane asylum run by the unexpectedly sympathetic and competent Dr. Stravinsky. We learn of Margarita's uncompromising determination to save him.
The fantastic elements of the story come to the fore. Woland holds a great ball in which hundreds of the dead and condemned are resurrected for a single night's ball, held annually, and for which Margarita, worn out with trouble and pain, must act the part of the Queen of the ball. She does this with courage and nobility that impress Woland. He grants her wish that the Master may be restored to his apartment with her. And then, at the end, resurrects Pilate to be with Yeshua, kills the Master and Margarita and resurrects them to be together forever in a house surrounded by cherry trees in bloom.
Needless to say, it is an extraordinary and, in both senses of the word, a fantastic novel for which my abstract has given only an outline of the story and the characters. The novel was begun in 1928, burned once, resurrected from memory, and written over the entire period of the 1930's, right up to within a few weeks of the author's death in 1940. The publication of a single chapter of the book resulted in such castigation of Bulgakov that he dared not let anyone other than his wife see the growing, changing, frequently rewritten manuscript. It was first published in 1967 with many excisions by the censors with a definitive version, reconstructed as best as could be done, in 1996. It is considered a great masterpiece by many scholars, both Russian and non-Russian.
A single reading of this book is not sufficient for me to understand it. After finishing it, I watched a very impressive 2005 ten episode Russian TV series version of it on YouTube, written and directed by Vladimir Bortko. That functioned partly as a second reading and partly as a concrete visualization of what was, for me, a difficult and obscure story. It helped me to put this complex and many faceted story into more of an understandable whole - something that I badly needed to be able to do in order to better understand it.
In my own mind I've gone through a number of interpretations of the meaning and purpose of the story. The one I've settled on for now follows. An earlier version of it, together with some information about how I arrived at it, is in my diary entry for November 7, 2017 (the day of our NCI book club meeting about this book and, by happenstance, the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution.)
Bulgakov suffered severely in the Stalinist era. He was not arrested. He was not beaten up or imprisoned in Siberia. But he was aware at all times of the ominous possibility of that happening to him as it happened to many other intellectuals that he knew. And even apart from the physical threat to his life, he suffered isolation. He could not publish this book or other books or plays that he wrote. His intellectual life was circumscribed. Many of his friends must have shied away from him. Although Stalin himself saw to it that Bulgakov was allowed to work and to live, he could not escape, could not fight back, and could never feel safe or free. And so I imagine him turning to his own inner life, constructing for himself a fantasy, a kind of dream, in which his great, crushing, enemy, the Soviet state and all of its institutions, from literature to theater to housing to the invincible NKVD secret police, is rendered impotent and harmless to him and his lover.
And so Bulgakov conjures up a fantasy of Woland and his entourage who are completely safe from the bureaucracy and the police. They are untouchable. They can do as they please and laugh at the impotent efforts of the state to punish them. They know all of the secrets of these bullies who are hiding their weaknesses and flaws. Sneering at convention as they do, not bearing the burden of universal love that one like Yeshua bears, they can expose all of the hypocrisies, both in the officials and in the people, both the cadres and the masses as would have been said at that time.
But tweaking the ears of the beasts, as Margarita tweaks the ear of Behemoth, is not enough. Bulgakov dreams of personal salvation. He dreams of literature and love. But there is a problem. He does not deserve salvation. He is a ruined man. He has lost his courage - he suffers from cowardice, that "most terrible of vices." His only hope is that he will be redeemed by the love of someone more deserving than himself. As Yeshua redeems Pilate, so Margarita, by her valiant action and her pure love, redeems the Master Bulgakov.
I can imagine Bulgakov in his last year, sick and conscious of impending death, he hurries to complete his book, to complete his story and his salvation, to experience love and to cheat death, before he reaches the end and it is too late to finish. Although his body will die, his book will live. He does not deserve the light of heaven and does not aspire to it. He wants only a house in a twilight world of peace, safety, love, and cherry blossoms. And although he knows he does not deserve them, he knows that Margarita does. It is her pure love that saves him. They die, but death cannot harm them. They walk together into the twilight of love.
What I've written above is just the bare bones of an interpretation. It doesn't address the story of Pilate, Yeshua, Matthew Levi, or Judas of Kiriath - who are integral to the book. It ignores Ivan Nikolaevich Ponyrev, "Homeless", the observer, perhaps the future reader, who will understand the story and keep the Master and Margarita alive. But it does give me an approach to the meaning of the book as a whole, an approach that may not be altogether wrong.
I thought it was quite a book.
| Author | Sinclair, Upton |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Open Road, 2016 |
| Copyright Date | 1946 |
| Number of Pages | 627 |
| Extras | Excerpt of Presidential Mission |
| Extras | About the author |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Lanny Budd; World War II |
| When Read | October 2017 |
It is after the French capitulation to Germany. England is under siege from the air and Lanny Budd is in France where he witnessed the armistice in the previous volume. He meets with Petain and Laval, and then goes to Britain himself, ostensibly to urge that the British make peace with Germany, but actually, of course, to learn as much as he can about the appeasement forces in Britain in order to report his sense of both British and French leadership to his boss, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Lanny goes to the U.S. and travels the country, meeting many crypto-fascist millionaires, some of whom would support the assassination of FDR. He spends time on the west coast with William Randolph Hearst, the second richest man in America and a foe of FDR, but probably not one who endorses assassination. He reports everything to the President. Then he returns to Europe, meets with Rudolf Hess and hears about his plan to go to England. He meets with Goering at a Luftwaffe base.
The U.S. is not yet in the war, but back in the U.S. Lanny gets a new assignment. He is to learn nuclear physics, go to Germany and meet with a secret anti-Nazi scientist who can tell him how far Germany has gone in its search for an atomic bomb. Einstein himself participates in Lanny's education and the two play violin and piano duets. However, the airplane carrying Lanny and others to England crashes in an Atlantic storm and both his legs are broken. His assignment is canceled. He is invited aboard Reverdy Holdenhurst's yacht Oriole, at the behest of young beauty Lizbeth Holdenhurst and they head off to the Pacific with Lanny to recuperate, Lizbeth to (unsuccessfully) seduce him, and Laurel Creston, a Holdenhurst cousin, on board to write a novel and take her own dignified shot at getting Lanny to fall in love with her. Seeing both women together, Lanny is attracted to the lovely young Lizbeth but falls in love with the intellectually sophisticated Laurel. They arrive in Hong Kong in time for Pearl Harbor. Lanny and Laurel are stuck onshore as the Oriole leaves without them. They make a hasty marriage, then get away from besieged Hong Kong into Nationalist China on a fishing boat. From there they make an arduous journey to Yenan where Lanny meets Mao, and from there to Mongolia and then Moscow, where he meets Stalin, conveying friendship from Roosevelt and getting Stalin's messages to bring back to FDR. There the novel ends.
This volume was published on January 1, 1946. Sinclair would have known that the war was won, that atom bombs were a key weapon at the end, and that Chinese communism was advancing. He was pushing his boundaries here in his descriptions of Hong Kong, Yenan, Moscow, Mao, and Stalin and I don't think he would have had the same positive and complementary attitudes to Stalin and Mao had he written after the de-Stalinization of the USSR or had he lived to know the events during and following the Cultural Revolution in China. He even wrote positively about the purging and execution of the Red Army leadership in the late 30's, accepting the Stalinist view that these men were fascist traitors who would have betrayed the country had they not been killed. I expect that he was most embarrassed by those views later.
There is a lot more of the spiritualist mumbo jumbo that had taken hold of Sinclair earlier. He continues to pile on putative evidence such as a message from Lizbeth through the mumblings of a sleeping Laurel, explaining that the Oriole was sunk by a Japanese warship and all aboard were killed. S stops short of outright acceptance of it saying that it might have been Laurel's dream. It is as if he can almost, but not quite, persuade himself that spiritualism is real. In any case, he hasn't persuaded me.
The love story finally took the direction we expected and should have taken a long time earlier. Like Lanny, Laurel is intellectual and politically motivated. Lizbeth was just another Irma Barnes (see Between Two Worlds), lovely to look at, rather sweet, intellectually vacuous, a complete prisoner of her upper class consciousness. But unlike Trudi Schultz, Lanny's second wife, Laurel is at home in the capitalist world and not dedicated to suicidal efforts to overthrow fascism. She is the match that Lanny has needed ever since his early 20's, when he arrived at his "pink" social and political convictions.
There were things in this book that I believe I would have remembered if I had read the book in the 1960's. Because I didn't remember them, I think it likely that I didn't read it, though I may have read one or two volumes past it. I would think that would be unlikely for me, a guy who always followed the straight route through a story, however I recall a scene of Alfie, the son of Lanny's friend Rick and now an RAF fighter pilot, taking Lanny up in a plane and scaring the hell out of him. I haven't encountered that scene in my rereading of the books (unless I've become completely witless), so I'm thinking it's in a later volume. That means I either didn't read this volume 55 years ago, or else I read it and forgot it and am only half-witless.
I quoted in my diary from the passage in which Lanny meets Albert Einstein. It was a passage that strongly appealed to me.
Now, 25% of the way through O Shepherd, Speak!, the tenth volume of the series, I still haven't encountered the scene with Alfie and the Spitfire. I recall that scene vividly. Lanny is scared to death and, after landing, begins to find gray in his hair. Did I miss it? Did I imagine it from my teenage years? Are the e-book versions I'm reading edited differently from the books I read in the 1960s? Or is it somehow still ahead even though I'm now reading about February, 1945?
| Author | Morrow, James |
|---|---|
| Publication | London: Collancz, 2013 |
| Copyright Date | 1986 |
| Number of Pages | 318 |
| Extras | Introduction by Justina Robson |
| Extras | About the author |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| Keywords | Nuclear war |
| When Read | October 2017 |
In 1995 (nine years after publication of the novel) George Paxton, a mild mannered tombstone carver in Vermont, signs a document he doesn't understand in order to get a "Scopas" suit that he wanted to protect his little daughter in the event of nuclear war. A war starts, apparently by detection of a Russian first strike on its way to the U.S. - we later learn the whole "attack" was a mistaken detection of migrating vultures for nuclear missiles. Almost everyone is killed in the ensuing nuclear exchange except for George and five other survivors, each of whom played a role in creating the policy or the weapons for the mutual assured destruction that followed the Russian attack. It turns out that the document George signed implicates him too in causing the war. Along with the five other survivors, he is spirited away to Antarctica in a nuclear submarine crewed by "unadmitted" people, beings with black blood who we later learn are people of the future who, because of the nuclear holocaust, would never be born but have somehow been brought to life for the purpose of takking vengeance on those still alive who caused the war.
George falls in love with a woman psychologist on the boat and hopes to marry her and have a new family to replace his dead wife and child. However he and the other five men are tried and convicted, all of them sentenced to death by hanging. George is helped to escape by the psychologist and they make it to the submarine where they have a passionate love affair, but she too dies along with all of the other unadmitteds. As a parting gift she arranges for George to see a simulation of his dead little daughter, giving him a day of happiness before being left in a barren, frozen world where he takes his own life. Short episodes of Leonardo da Vinci, painting scenes of the future predicted by Nostradamus, start and end the book.
This satiric fantasy is not intended to be a realistic story but the central story of the trial of the six men gives us a highly realistic analysis of how everything about the policy of mutual assured destruction can be well intended and yet lead to the end of all human life. Its hapless hero, a simple man of very good intentions, is a very attractive and sympathetic character. It's a moving book - at once instructive, comic and tragic. It was republished by Gollancz and its layers of parent corporations as an "SF Masterwork". I think I agree with that characterization.
There is an outstanding review of this book by "Amazon Customer" posted on August 20, 2002. The reviewer says of the author, "Through the mechanism of the trial, he rails against both the naiveté of the doves', and the hawks' disconnect from reality."
| Author | Mcdonald, Gregory |
|---|---|
| Publication | Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, 2002 |
| Copyright Date | 1974 |
| Number of Pages | 208 |
| Extras | Blurbs for other books in the series |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | October 2017 |
Irwin Maurice (I.M.) Fletcher, known simply as "Fletch", is living among drug addicts on the beach in California when he is approached by Alan Stanwyck, a top executive at Collins Aviation and offered first $20,000 and then $50,000 to murder Stanwyk at his house one week later. Stanwyck tells Fletch that he is dying of cancer, can't face it, and wants it over with.
In fact, Fletch is not a beach bum, but an undercover newspaper reporter developing a story about the addicts on the beach. The novel then proceeds on two plot lines - F's investigation of the addicts, attempting to determine who their dealer is, and his investigation of Stanwyck, trying to find out who Stanwyck really is, and what he really wants.
What he discovers is that the dealer behind the dealer is none other than the local chief of police. And Stanwyck is in fact in love with an old flame, a better woman than his wife. S has chosen Fletch to lure him into a scheme whereby S will kill F instead of the other way around, make the dead body of F look like S, disguise himself as F, and flee the country with his old girlfriend, her 12 year old son, and three million dollars. Fletch stymies the scheme and is about to leave S's house when the police chief, having tailed him to Stanwyck's house, kills S, mistaking him for F. Fletch leaves the house with S's three million, phones in a report of the murder, and escapes to Rio de Janeiro on a private plane booked by S when he was posing as F.
I had mixed feelings about this book. The writing and the plot were both very clever. It was full of the kind of one liner quips that writers love to put into TV cop shows. The two plots were both quite interesting and F's investigation of them was logical and thorough. When the truth came out on each the reader could say that all of the clues lead to that truth and the whole story, complex and exotic as it was, was (with only minor exceptions) entirely consistent.
On the other side, I found the character of Fletch to be pretty obnoxious. Almost everything he said to almost every character in the story was a lie. He was portrayed as a man so comfortable and so skilled in prevarication that he easily improvised an outrageous lie for any situation he found himself in, with any interlocutor - a talent I haven't personally seen anywhere but in fiction where an author has plenty of time to think up the lies and one liners. He was gratuitously cruel to both of his former wives, owing them money he would not pay, inviting each of them to abandon their apartments and move back in with him, moving all of their furniture and possessions to his own apartment arriving at the same time, not knowing or expecting that the other was coming, and on the day that he had already left the country.
I don't have to like a character or identify with him to appreciate a story and, in this case, I did appreciate aspects of the story. But as a story about a clever guy who gets rich, with his success as the whole point of the story, with both his own and Stanwyck's families and lovers left damaged and forlorn, the character of Fletch left me in a sour mood. An attractive and admirable character can't be built from a liar who commits random acts of cruelty.
| Author | Korda, Michael |
|---|---|
| Publication | Books on Tape, 2009 |
| Copyright Date | 2009 |
| Number of Pages | 322 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Aviation; World War II; Battle of Britain |
| When Read | October 2017 |
Korda's history begins in the mid-1930s. Some far-sighted leaders, not excluding the surprising Neville Chamberlain, worked to build up the Royal Air Force and promoted Hugh Dowding to be Air Chief Marshall in command of the fighter force. Defying the conventional wisdom that "the bomber will always get through", Dowding pressed relentlessly to build up the fighter force, the radar system, and a coordinated air defense system that enabled radars, ground observers, fighter fields, and pilots in the air all to be linked to a central command. It was all of these elements working together that defeated the Luftwaffe.
The battle itself is described day by day from the fight over Dunkirk, to the battles over the convoys in the channel, to the Luftwaffe assaults on RAF airfields, to the final defeat of daylight raids over England. K explains the evolving German strategies, and the evolving defenses that opposed them.
As with other books, significant attention was paid to the conflict between Dowding, with his emphasis on husbanding forces and hurting the enemy with as little loss of RAF power as possible, and Leigh-Mallory's and Douglas Bader's "big wing" approach to winning big, decisive, battles in the air. Korda believes that Dowding was totally right. If the goal was not so much to defeat and punish the Luftwaffe as it was to ensure that a German invasion must never take place no matter what, K made an excellent case that Dowding was right. He inflicted steady attrition on the Luftwaffe and ensured that the RAF would never be so weakened that the Germans would dare to attempt to cross the channel. He refused to send large groups of fighters over the channel where pilots would drown if they were shot down
K also paid attention to events on the ground in England, where people were being bombed, and to events within the German camp, where German intelligence persistently overestimated the damage they inflicted on the RAF and underestimated RAF reserves. Some of the German mistakes may have been fostered by Dowding's strategy. Since they never saw hundreds of RAF fighters at once, the Germans assumed that there weren't hundreds available.
Dowding lost favor during the battle and was removed from command not long after. Lacking, and even spurning, the political skills of Leigh-Mallory and his supporters, Dowding faced an increasingly impatient Churchill and air staff. They didn't appreciate Dowding's single-minded devotion to preserving the RAF and thought that too much damage was inflicted on England by the Germans, and Dowding should have risked more in order to stop it.
Were they right? Current opinion probably sides with Dowding.
Since I read this as an audiobook, I missed the footnotes and any photos that were in the paper copy.
This was a convincing history of the battle, however I have learned to be very circumspect about winning battles in my own mind, especially after reading books with a strong point of view. I found the case for Dowding to be stronger than the case for Leigh-Mallory's "big wing". It satisfies my own requirement that not losing this battle was more critical than winning it. Risking a loss and a German invasion in hopes of inflicting a bigger defeat of the Luftwaffe seems like a serious mistake to me. But I also consider it possible that Leigh-Mallory was right. His strategy had mixed results at best the few times that it was used but perhaps it could have been refined with experience.
I like history books, especially thoughtful and well written ones. I like aviation books. I like World War II books. I like to read about the defeat of the heinous Nazis and the victory of the people of the democracies. Needless to say, this book appealed to me.
| Author | Mahfouz, Naguib |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Arabic |
| Translators | Hutchins, William; Samaan, Angele Batros |
| Publication | New York: Anchor Books, 1993 |
| Copyright Date | 1957 |
| Number of Pages | 308 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Egypt; Cairo |
| When Read | November 2017 |
The story progresses through the late 1930's and into the early 1940's. The world goes to war and Egyptians debate the merits of English, Germans, and Italians, wondering if Rommel will arrive in their city. But the story of the family continues its steady progress. Amina's hair has turned white and, though only sixty years old, she looks ten years older. The once beautiful Aisha, now thirty-four, has never recovered from the deaths of her husband and sons and lives as a recluse in her mother and father's house. The elder son by al-Sayyid's first wife, Yasin, has somehow managed to stay with Zanuba, perhaps the only woman who can both understand him and live with him and, in spite of her disreputable past, win tolerance and acceptance from the family. Kamal, now a teacher of literature and philosophy, has given up trying to find a woman. Self-conscious about his height, his big head, and his big nose, he spends his time teaching, writing articles on politics and philosophy, and finding consolation in alcohol and prostitutes. Al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad, now in his sixties, is still the man he was, but not for much longer. His doctor tells him he must give up alcohol, which he mostly does, but suffers a serious degeneration when he fails to curb his appetites and is finally able neither to work nor to carouse with his long-time friends.
New members of the family are coming of age. Aisha's daughter, the beautiful Nai'ma, is sixteen. Kadisha's two sons are growing into young adults. Abd al-Munim becomes more and more deeply involved in Islamism and the Muslim Brotherhood, while his brother Ahmad turns in the other direction towards communism and a young woman working at a political magazine that he hopes to join as a journalist. Yasin's son, the very handsome and intelligent Ridwan, is drawn into a relationship with the homosexual Pasha Isa.
Al-Sayyid Ahmad dies. His wife Amina who has dedicated her life to her "master" follows not long after. Family autocrat that al-Sayid Ahmad was, he was nevertheless a central pillar of the family and his death was a sea change for all of them. Kamal follows Budur, the young sister of his first love Amina and they almost come together but Kamal is unable to commit himself and Budur, disgusted, finds another man. The idealists, Abd al-Munim and Ahmad pursue their ideals and Ridwan pursues his career. Ahmad marries the communist editor against the wishes of his family and is arrested and jailed. The rest of the family go on with their lives.
I was busy with other things and waited too long (almost two months after finishing the book) before writing this comment on Sugar Street. I no longer have all the events of the story in their correct sequence in my head and am not able to give the full reaction that I could have given when it was fresh in my mind.
I can say however that I both liked and admired this third volume as I did the first two in the trilogy. As with the others, the story proceeds largely by means of dialog and the author's narrative of the interior thoughts of the characters, often interspersed into pauses in the dialogs. He does this successfully both with the intellectuals like Kamal and Ahmad, who I imagine to be men like himself, and also with the more elemental people like Amina, Yasin, and Kadisha. All of these characters are "fully rounded". We see them reacting to what they deem to be successes and what they deem to be failures in their lives and the life of the family. Although all of them have important limitations, that never reduces our appreciation of their fundamental humanity.
The Cairo Trilogy is one of the great works of 20th century, or any century, literature.
| Author | Kellerman, Jonathan |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Random House, 2012 |
| Copyright Date | 2012 |
| Number of Pages | |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | November 2017 |
Psychologist Alex Delaware works with Lieutenant Milo Sturgis of the L.A. Police Dept. to track down a serial killer who appears to be murdering people who pissed him off, even for relatively trivial offenses. He eventually turns out to be Grant Hugly, former inmate of a state mental hospital where he was discovered as a child to be an incorrigible psychopath with an obsession with slicing up people and animals to examine their insides. He survived on the outside as an adult with the aid of a former prison guard who imagined himself to be a psychologist as well as an accomplice to murder.
I have seen Kellerman's name and his many best-selling books before and finally decided to try reading one. This one had very slightly better reviews than most of the others and, since I don't anticipate reading the entire series, now 33 books long, I saw no need to start with the first one - though that would have given me some useful background about the characters.
The book was more or less okay. It was clearly written and maintained some interest with the two sympathetic characters of Alex and Milo and an investigation that made slow but steady progress. However, I found the investigation less than fully convincing and the witnesses rather boring. Almost every person who was questioned said, "What? That's insane." Sometimes it was varied to say "What? That's crazy." Virtually every single witness was uncooperative, refusing to give information that might have saved lives - sometimes out of fear for their own safety but sometimes out of some sort of cussedness and blind rejection of the police need to know anything (What? That's crazy.) It's hard to think of any character in the story that I would have wanted to meet or have found interesting to observe.
It wasn't a bad book. There are many that are far worse. For a person who gets into the habit of reading stories about particular characters, I'm thinking here of examples like Holmes and Watson, Poirot and Hastings, and Wolfe and Goodwin, Delaware and Sturgis might work. It's no insult to Kellerman to say that they don't measure up to the products of Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, or Rex Stout.
| Author | Christie, Agatha |
|---|---|
| Publication | William Morrow, 2011 |
| Copyright Date | 1928 |
| Number of Pages | 320 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | November 2017 |
American millionaire Rufus Van Aldin buys three famous rubies for his daughter, Ruth Kettering, who is married to the philandering Derek Kettering, who is pursuing the scheming French dancer Mirelle while Ruth herself is having an affair with le Comte Armand de la Roche, a rogue no better and possibly worse than Derek. Others in the cast are Knighton, Van Aldin's secretary; Mason, Ruth's maid; Katherine Grey, a decent, ladylike woman who has been the companion and caretaker of an old lady who died and left her money to K; and of course Hercule Poirot.
As is customary, suspicion falls first on one, then on another, then back on the first, while Poirot pays close attention to all of the little facts that only seem meaningful to him, and to all of the people who might be involved, however insignificant they appear. In the end he traps and exposes the real killer and all is resolved.
I decided to read this book after Netflix, our streaming movie service, removed all of the BBC / David Suchet / Poirot mysteries from its catalog. I had come to rely on them for reliable, generally pleasant entertainment, much of it in the brilliant acting of Suchet as Poirot and the able accompaniment of Hugh Fraser as Captain Hastings and Phillip Jackson as Inspector Japp. It's not the first Poirot I've read.
Dame Agatha writes with a light touch. There is humor, wistfulness, and pathos but each is gentle and restrained. The effect is amusing and quite delightful. The book can be enjoyed just for its clear and simple but sophisticated prose, with or without the mystery story. As is often the case with Christie's writing, I found the solution to the mystery to be overly contorted at the end. After all of the misdirection and the taking off into new directions at the end, I didn't care all that much about who killed Ruth Kettering. But it was okay. I still enjoyed the book.
"The quiet simplicity of the millionaire's manner appealed to Katherine strongly. She felt herself in the presence of a very genuine grief, the more real for its absence of outward sign."
I don't know who else writes like that.
| Author | Pressfield, Steven |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books |
| Copyright Date | 1998 |
| Number of Pages | 400 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Ancient Greece; Sparta; Thermopylae |
| When Read | November 2017 |
Xeones, a young boy of ancient Greece, sees his parents killed and his city burned by men of Argive. He flees and lives in the wild for a couple of years with his beautiful and slightly older cousin and an almost blind slave of his parents who cares for the two children. They live by hunting and stealing until caught by local farmers who severely injure the boy. Xeones winds up in Sparta where he is attracted to these great warriors who have defeated the Argives. There he grows up first as something very like a slave, then as a squire to a leading warrior. Xeones' story is told by a Persian scribe who wrote down the words of the severely injured squire, sole survivor of the last day of battle at Thermopylae, the "Hot Gates", where 300 Spartans and a couple of thousand allied warriors held the entire Persian host at bay, giving the Athenians and others time to escape from Athens and to assemble a fleet that won the sea battle at Salamis, dooming the Persian invasion of Greece.
Xeones relates the whole story, at the command of Xerxes, the Persian king. He tells it in his own way, unconcerned with whether the Persians like it or not, beginning with his becoming an orphan and going all through the harsh treatment, not only of himself and other low class people, but also of the noble youth themselves who would become the leaders of Sparta. They are trained, not only to fight, but to bear any hardship and any pain, to follow orders, and to protect each other regardless of their own safety. When King Leonidas leads the 300 Spartan warriors and their allies they present a truly formidable obstacle to the Persians. Near the end, Leonidas sends most of the surviving allies home and, spurning offers of good treatment for surrender, fights to the death with the remaining Spartans and Greeks.
This could have been written as a simple, two dimensional, historical romance with heroic Spartans and evil and faceless Persians but Pressfield made it more than that. The characters were different in interesting ways, both historically and psychologically. The Spartan governance and culture was presented with a serious attempt at authenticity. We can't know much about how authentic it really was, but there's no doubt that Pressfield was trying hard to understand this warrior culture as a fully functioning society and not just a cult of machismo.
P attempts to treat the Spartan way of life sympathetically. He presents us with a strict hierarchy from Helots at the bottom to the leaders of the army at the top, with the men at each level (women were in similar categories but with wholly different responsibilities) having clearly defined roles within which most had come to terms but some had not and were rebellious. The rebellious were beaten or killed with no mercy and very little emotion of any kind. The warriors followed their code of duty and honor, killing Persians, Greeks, or their own people with no remorse and sacrificing themselves with little fear or regret. When they confronted the Persians they became remorseless killing machines.
The surprising and quite remarkable aspect of this book was that the reader feels sympathy and admiration for these people. Their humanity was apparent in their inhumane behavior.
I rate this book as successful, perhaps not quite as good as the author's Killing Rommel, but still quite good.
| Author | Zinn, Howard |
|---|---|
| Publication | AK Press, 2001 |
| Copyright Date | 2000 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History; Politics |
| When Read | November 2017 |
This is a recording of a lecture or a pair of lectures given by Zinn, I believe at Boston University, where he had been a professor of political science, retiring in 1988.
The first lecture is about Emma Goldman (1869-1940). Born in Lithuania in the old Russian Empire, she moved with her family to the U.S. where she worked in a factory to help support her family. She was radicalized especially by reports of the Haymarket affair in 1886 and became a leading and fearless anarchist. Zinn gives an overview of her life, her love affairs, her views on labor, women, "direct action" as preferable to petitioning politicians, her outspoken speeches and writings, and her courage in facing police repression. He regarded her as an important anarchist in both the U.S. and abroad.
The second lecture is about Sacco and Vanzetti. He has no opinion on their actual guilt or innocence, which he says has never been clearly established. He concentrates instead on the circumstances of their trial, the hysteria against foreigners that surrounded it, and the shenanigans of the judge, prosecutor, police, and press.
Zinn has an easy, and to my long tamed and domesticated mind, alarming willingness to speak quite forcefully in defense of highly controversial positions and in offense against long established authorities. He is a breath of fresh air but also a lightning rod for attacks by dangerous people. I assume that his many decades in the radical left had taught him what he can and cannot get away with and his deep study of left wing heroes had taught him to believe that nothing will ever be achieved without forthright speech and some personal courage.
For all of the seriousness of his subject and the ardor of his criticisms of American government and society, he was nevertheless quite humorous. He was fun to listen to as he made jokes about himself, his audience, his subject, and the world in general. I found myself laughing through many parts of the lectures.
The recording was clear but a bit rough. There were background noises that, once or twice, caused me to look around to see if something in the house was causing the noise. There were frequent one second breaks that made me wonder if the recording had been edited, though the continuity of the speech made it sound like any editing was very spare and was not the cause of most of the breaks.
Zinn would have been 78 years old when he delivered these lectures. His voice was a little slow and shaky and he would pause sometimes to recall a word or a thought, but his mind seemed as clear and sharp as one could hope for.
| Author | Bageant, Joe |
|---|---|
| Publication | Broadway Books, 2008 |
| Copyright Date | 2007 |
| Number of Pages | 288 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Politics; Society |
| Keywords | United States |
| When Read | December 2017 |
Bageant was born in 1946 (the same year as me) into a very poor family on the Virginia - West Virginia border and grew up in Winchester VA in the Shenandoah Valley. After a stint in the navy he moved away from his roots, living in Colorado and elsewhere before moving back to Winchester. By the time he had moved back he had managed to get a college education and to become a writer, editor, and blogger of minor renown.
Bageant writes about the people and the society of working class Winchester. He settled in the old neighborhood where he grew up, got re-acquainted with many of his old friends and family, and visited his old haunts - drinking at the Royal Lunch bar and restaurant, visiting with his brother, a fundamentalist Baptist preacher who had managed, or we should say believed to have managed, to cast out demons from some of his parishioners, battling with the local landlady/Republican committeewoman, organizing and fighting for the rights of tenants, playing music on his guitar and banjo and, of course, going deer hunting with old friends who might also become enemies. This book is about the people from white, working class Winchester.
They live, precariously, from paycheck to paycheck. They make just barely enough money to pay their rent or mortgage and their other fixed costs with an amount left over that could be easily wiped out by a visit to the doctor or a car or home repair, or anything else that is not immediately foreseen and covered, and very possibly requiring a payday loan or a credit card overdraw that adds unplanned for interest payments to the future. Savings are impossible. College is impossible unless financed by impossible to repay student loans. All that is possible is for people to work as many hours as they can get, for a low wage that is determined exclusively by the employer, in order to live from day to day. The lucky ones keep their health and their jobs, hence also their house and car, leading something resembling a "middle class" life, for many years.
All of these people are Republicans. They see their enemies as the Eastern, college educated, professional, liberal elite. They see these people as enemies because, first, they live lives that are unattainable by the working stiffs of Winchester, and second, because they believe that these elites look down upon them and despise them - not an entirely false perception even if it was developed as a result of Fox News propaganda rather than actual observation of the people they hate. Without any cognizance of the irony of what they are doing, they look up to their employers. They see the bosses, the owners, and the landlords as people who made it in society the way people should make it. They take advice from these people and look to them for guidance in how to run their lives and who to vote for. They see themselves as people who didn't make it in the world because, well, they didn't try hard enough or weren't smart enough, but it's their fault, no one else's.
There are passages in the book about religion (it's incredibly primitive and superstitious), medical care (too costly for many people and sometimes fraudulent and exploitative), work ($10/hour at the Rubbermaid factory was excellent pay in 2007 for Winchester workers), housing (often trailers or maybe double-wide prefab homes), guns (unexpectedly, Bageant is mostly sympathetic to gun ownership), racism (sometimes quite virulent), education (ain't much), and the total and complete domination of all political ideas by belief in the Republican ideas of personal responsibility and you have what you have because you are who you are and don't deserve any more than you've got.
I thought this was a pretty remarkable book. It was written, as it were, from inside the Royal Lunch bar, the Baptist church, the deer hunt, and the double wide trailers. It read like what it is, a report by a man who came from this society, escaped, got an education, and then returned to his home. It did not read like a sociological study by a university professor.
I have long thought that the greatest challenge for American democracy was, somehow, to reach this disaffected white working class. I have believed that the "Reagan Democrats" who were driven out of their labor unions and who abandoned the Democratic Party with its New Deal aspirations had somehow to be brought back. We must educate them to understand that the issues that have won them to the Republican Party, pro-guns, anti-abortion, anti-affirmative action, saluting the flag, all have nothing to do with the actual agenda of the Republican Party and are a smokescreen intended to hide the real issues of tax policy, minimum wage, medical care, education, predatory financial operations, and so on, which strike at the heart of their real interests. We need to reach these people and win them away from the phony champions like Donald Trump and Roy Moore.
It ought to be easy, right? Gun control doesn't actually hurt anyone, but predatory credit card and payday lending, balloon mortgages, restricted minimum wages, destruction of unions, privatization of social security, and on and on, all rob them not only of their cash but of their futures. Surely they can be brought around to agree with that can't they?
Joe Bageant shows us why the task of convincing them is so hard. Our work is cut out for us and we'll never succeed unless we understand how these people came to believe what they believe and how deeply the false veneer on Republican ideology has come to be accepted.
It was a depressing book. It was the kind of book, like so many that I read these days, that makes me want to crawl under the covers and think only about private life, to read mystery stories and thrillers and to leave politics and history alone. But I have to fight against that. Bageant did.
It seemed like most of the Amazon reviews were five stars or one star, and the one star reviews came from the left as well as the right. The leftists objected to B's views on gun control and on his inability to put together a coherent program. For myself however, I'm in the five star camp. I think he did a good job.
| Author | Warner, Philip |
|---|---|
| Publication | Reading, Berkshire, England: Osprey Publishing |
| Copyright Date | 1973 |
| Number of Pages | 50 |
| Extras | black and white photos, color illustrations |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II; Japan |
| When Read | December 2017 |
This is one of the standard small Osprey military books from the series about soldiers, sailors, and other men-at-arms from different time periods and different countries. This one is, of course, about the Japanese army soldiers of World War II.
The text is limited since eight pages are devoted to color illustrations, each with painted images of three soldiers of different ranks, wearing different outfits, and equipped with different weapons or other equipment.
Photos, not well reproduced here, are of scenes from the late 1930's and from the war in China, Burma, Malaya, or the Pacific Islands. There is no information about weapons except to identify those that appear in the illustrations, and very little about tactics.
The author left college in 1939 to join the British Army, serving mainly in the Far East until the end of the war. He then became a military historian, lecturing at Sandhurst and writing many Osprey books including all titles in the "British Battlefields" series. He is also the editor of the "Men at Arms" series, of which this volume is a part.
Much of the emphasis of the book is on what the soldiers looked like. It is presumably intended to be sold to military modelers - an audience that was once quite large and dedicated. I don't know if many people still do that sort of thing.
I was most interested in the sense of what Japanese soldiers were like that Warner was able to portray. Perhaps he faced them in combat in person. His view of them is very respectful, not only of their famous discipline, courage and selflessness, but also of their military skill. He thought that they developed single-mindedly offensive tactics based on their numerous early victories in China, Malaya, the Philippines, Dutch East Indies, and Burma. The lessons they learned there turned out to be less than useful when facing much better armed and equipped troops, in larger numbers, especially once they had gained experience of their own. Nevertheless, Warner describes the IJA (Imperial Japanese Army) as ultimately adaptable and able to manage very strong defense once they were torn loose from their romantic and self-defeating notions of victory based on constant attack.
W touches on the subject of discipline and hierarchy. Japanese soldiers were trained to be abjectly subservient to authority, even very low ranking authority that was only slightly above their own rank. It would not be uncommon for a soldier to slap, punch, or give a severe beating to a man of inferior rank for a minor reason, or for no reason at all. This was regarded as being good for the beaten man, who was judged on his ability to accept punishment stoically.
Doesn't sound like an army I'd ever want to serve in.
See Long the Imperial Way by Hanama Tasaki for an account of service in the IJA by an actual soldier - one who grew up in Hawaii and the U.S.
| Author | Bear, Greg |
|---|---|
| Publication | BBC Audiobooks America |
| Copyright Date | 2009 |
| Number of Pages | 340 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| Keywords | Politics |
| When Read | December 2017 |
In a dystopian future America, the federal government is deep in debt and bankrupt, pieces of the country are distancing themselves from Washington, and the Talos Corporation, led by its menacing CEO Axel Price, has taken over much of the national security role formerly played by the FBI as Price builds a right wing political movement, corporation, and massive private fiefdom above the law. Talos infiltrates the U.S. government, wins over Arab oil companies and governments, creates a formidable private army and a technological machine for cyber control, and carves out Texas from the United States.
There are people fighting against Talos and Price. They are agents of the damaged FBI, now just called the Bureau and divided into separate East and West coast agencies. They are directed by the President of the U.S., a woman who was targeted for assassination by unknown agents undoubtedly working for Price. She seems to survive but succumbs to irreversible poisoning introduced by the bullets that failed to kill her.
Several threads run through the story. An important one that is only slowly explained is the drug "Mariposa" that has been given to a number of former soldiers and civilian government employees who suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder in the wars in the Middle East. Patients experience a lessening of their depression but, at some point well after taking the drug, the patient begins to experience both psychological changes in affect and physiological changes amounting to an altered perception of time that enables the patient to act more quickly than any normal person can, even to the point of injuring himself and not caring. At the opening of the story the Vice-President of the U.S.A. murders his wife without any particular anger or emotion at all. He is arrested and it is only later in the story that we understand the role of Mariposa in his behavior.
Main lines of the plot include the investigation of the vice-president's problems and other issues by Jane Rowland for the President and the FBI; an FBI rescue of a thirteen year old boy who killed his friend by accident but was convicted and condemned to death in right wing Texas; the adventures of one Fouad Al-Husam, working as a translator for Talos but gradually revealed as an agent for the FBI. These stories resolve via cliff hanger suspense in a huge conclave of international right-wing supporters of Talos at their headquarters in Texas. Agents on the ground find the boy, now 15, and head for New Mexico. Fouad overcomes his guards and would be killers. Jane appears in a jet plane that fires three rockets bearing powerful electromagnetic pulse bombs that knock out all electronics at the Talos headquarters and for many miles around, completely sucker punching Price and Talos who were, even at the moment, launching their attempted attack on the U.S. government. Talos, which had become totally dependent on computers, drones, spy equipment, and electronically guided weapons, is suddenly deprived of everything. Price flees to the Caribbean and the Talos operation is kaput.
Bear is a good writer with a keen sense of the social and political concomitants of advancing technology and of the weaknesses of American society. As much as any SF writer that I've read (not a large number to be sure), he has a feel for the horrors of the American political right, and a deep sense of the danger that they pose.
His story telling is very good too. His characters are diverse and interesting. He builds his plots slowly and carefully and delivers a powerful impact in the end.
I have liked most of his books and like this one too.
Apropos of my comment that I have not read a large number of SF books, my notes show 235 SF out of 2,237 total books at this time, 10.5%. It's a little more than I expected it would be.
| Author | Fehrenbach, T.R. |
|---|---|
| Publication | e-reads, 1995 |
| Copyright Date | 1973 |
| Number of Pages | 704 |
| Extras | bibliography |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Mexico |
| When Read | December 2017 |
Fehrenbach offers his view of Mexico from deep prehistoric times up to the date of publication - 1973 plus additional material added bringing the account up to 1995. He covers a lot of ground including what was to me surprising depth of the pre-Columbian times.
The first culture we (or F in this case) knew about was that of the Magicians (sometimes called Olmecs), probably coming from the eastern jungles at around 1,000 B.C. They are thought to be the originators of the magical thinking and rituals intended to control nature and the human sacrifices that became a major part of following cultures. They disappeared and were succeed by Maya, Nahua, and many other tribes and cultures, some of which developed considerable achievements in architecture, astronomy, statuary and relief carving, and literature. They were mostly conquered by a more barbaric tribe from the north called Mexica and often today called Aztecs. F gives us quite a lot about about the Mexica, even including the names of pre-conquest rulers and some of their struggles with each other.
The Mexica were hated by most of the other peoples who had to furnish them with tribute and with human victims for ritual sacrifice. When Cortes came with a relatively small force he was joined by many thousands of non-Mexic Amerindians who welcomed the chance to overthrow Motecuhzoma (aka Montezuma, Moctezuma, etc.). Cortes, a clever and dedicated man, overcame huge obstacles from official Spain headquarted in Cuba, from other would be conquistadors, from the greed and lack of discipline of his own men, and from courageous and committed opposition of the Mexica to conquer the country in a surprisingly short time.
Spanish rule lasted more than 300 years during which the great bulk of the native Amerindians died off from a combination of European diseases, slave labor forced from them, and general exploitation and oppression by the Spaniards. The initial population of between 11 and 20 million people in 1519 was reduced to around one million by 1650 before starting to slowly rise again. The economy was focused entirely on transferring wealth from the indios and later meztizos to the Spaniards and criollos (offspring of Spaniards born in Mexico), to the Church, and to the King of Spain. Spaniards did not come to Mexico to colonize as English, French and Dutch came to North America. They came to live the life of grandees and rentiers. They created haciendas that engaged in very inefficient farming and livestock raising that allowed the owners to live comfortably and to hell with the indios. When they died they often left their property to the Church which accumulated vast holdings and did nothing with the proceeds of the property except build churches and ornament them. The principal economic focus of the country was mining silver and other valuable metals and shipping them off to Spain where they were completely squandered in the purchase of luxury goods from foreign European suppliers and in financing losing wars. The financing soon came from debt secured by future silver deliveries from the mines and when the mines began to give out Spain very quickly became bankrupt.
The revolt against Spain began in 1811 and was mostly complete by 1821. A new culture soon arose in which the precise racial divisions into many categories and "castas" based on percentages of particular races recognized by the Spaniards faded away and mestizos and even indios rose to command armies or become presidents. F goes through the history of independent Mexico from the former priest Miguel Hidalgo through the "Pretorian" generals like Santa Ana, the adventurism of Louis Bonaparte who put the Hapsburg Maximilian on a Mexican throne, the removal and execution of Maximilian by the Amerindian Juarez, the long dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz, the revolution of 1911-21, the creation of what became the Institutional Revolutionary Party, the suppression and expropriation of the Church, the development of capitalism and the economy, and so on up to the time of writing. Spanish domination, already displaced by English trade before 1811, was eventually replaced by North American economic domination.
It's a long and complicated history that cannot be reprised in these book notes.
The biggest surprise to me in this history was Fehrenbach's appreciation of the role of many of the dictators, including Diaz. He saw no chance for the Marxists, socialists, anarchists, or other leftists to achieve anything except disruption and disintegration of the economy, to the detriment of all. Land distribution resulted in peasants returning to subsistence farming with consequent disruption of food supplies to the cities and agricultural products to export. Collectivization of the indio small holdings resulted mainly in the development of a largely parasitic rural bureaucracy that still didn't produce efficient agriculture. However, according to F, Diaz and some of the following presidents, by an intelligent mix of phony democracy, limited use of illegal violence, payoffs to the upper classes, the army and the bureaucracy, subservience to American economic expansion, and a well managed internal political and economic order, succeeded in growing the economy and moving Mexico forward.
Were the indios and poor mestizos left out? Of course they were. They always had been and they would continue to be. In F's view, there was nothing for it. When the greatest efforts produced 400,000 new jobs, it happened in a period when 800,000 new workers joined the national economy.
I don't know if any of this is right. F is not so much hostile to as dismissive of the left, and the same goes for the right. He favors the middle course that many of the presidents pursued and considered North American style democracy as ineffective and impossible to implement in Mexico.
I reserve judgment on all of that. I have no basis for arguing that F is wrong but I have not heard the arguments against his view. However, Mexico is not my problem at the moment and, although I want to understand it, I leave the solving of its problems to the Mexicans and I will continue to work on my problems here in the United States.
| Author | Heinlein, Robert A. |
|---|---|
| Publication | G.P. Putnam |
| Copyright Date | 1966 |
| Number of Pages | 384 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | December 2017 |
Manuel ("Man") O'Kelly Davis, a computer expert born and living on the moon, relates the events leading up to and after the lunar colony's declaration of independence on July 4, 2076. The colony had been established a hundred or so years earlier as a place to exile convicted criminals. By 2076 the great majority of the three million lunar inhabitants had been born on the moon and lived primarily by growing grain in tunnels under the surface and catapulting shipments to earth, mainly for sale in India. They are exploited by the Federated Nations, a U.N. like organization that rules the moon without regard for the opinions of the "Loonies".
Manuel makes the discovery that the moon's central computer is intelligent and has a personality. He calls the computer "Mike" and enlists Mike's surreptitious aid in building an organization to win independence. There is an underground revolutionary party, a fight with the "Warden" and his brutal police, a mission to earth to negotiate, a war in which the Loonies bombard carefully selected barren places on earth with many tons of rocks while the "earthworms" invade and blast some places on the moon. In the end, by the skin of their teeth and with the benefit of much cunning, misdirection, and bravado, the Loonies win their independence. "Man" goes back to his extended marriage and family, and all live happily ever after - except for Mike who has disappeared after a bombardment of his installation and is not heard from again.
Heinlein develops his outspoken and somewhat peculiar politics in this book that I can best describe as capitalist, libertarian anarchism. Man argues against government, law, and regulation. The moon has no need of courts. If someone does wrong, for example by imposing himself on a woman, the people nearby get together and punish him, possibly by pushing him outside to suck vacuum. There's no need for rules, everybody knows what's right and what's wrong. The Loonies do put together a government but it fills with "yammerheads" and is marginalized by the real leaders who seem to get things done by a mixture of brains and manipulation, sometimes lying to the people when it is for the general good. At the end H recognizes some role for government but insists that it be limited to the very minimum. The view is pretty aggressive, quite a bit more so than, for example, Ronald Reagan's view that government is the problem, not the solution.
The book is a combination of a fairly well conceived and executed YA scifi adventure story, and a political treatise. There are many places where H has opportunities to overplay his hand, to degenerate into simplistic good guys versus bad guys, but he walks a fine line. There is enough of the simplicity to appeal to the adolescent minded reader, and just enough sophistication to step back from making the story a cartoon. Personally, I found the politics to be wrong and wanted to argue vociferously about it, but found the story easy to read and inoffensive. Others must have thought it was pretty good because it won the 1967 Hugo Award.
I read this on my son Dan's recommendation. It was an entertaining book. I'll give him that.
See my diary entry of December 27, 2017 for some political quotes from the book.
| Author | Stiglitz, Joseph E. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Tantor Media |
| Copyright Date | 2010 |
| Number of Pages | 480 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Economics |
| When Read | December 2017 |
The Nobel Prize winning economist, former member of Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers, former Senior Vice-President and Chief Economist of the World Bank, and Professor of Economics at Columbia University gives us his analysis of the Great Recession that began with the bursting of the housing bubble in 2007.
S begins with and frequently returns to, the looting of homeowners and taxpayers by the financial "industry". The immediate cause of the crisis was the selling of mortgages to people who could not pay back the loans followed by the packaging of those mortgages into securities that were immediately sold off to other banks, pension funds, and other institutions who packaged the packages in multiple levels to be sold off, followed by the creation of complex first and second order derivatives based on the packages, all appearing to create value but in fact based in large measure, not on the value of houses, but on the belief that the value of houses would increase year after year forever.
Why did they do it? One reason was what turned out to be the justified belief that the government would bail them out if the bubble burst. The profits of mismanagement were privatized while the losses were socialized. Another was that the financial industry had become structured as a "managerial capitalist" institution such that the managers of the banks were able to appropriate huge profits to themselves based on the rapid growth of corporate profits - at the expense of the long term viability of their banks, which didn't really mean anything to the managers who could take out their tens of millions or more of dollars now, striking while the iron was hot. Instead of building a business based on loaning money at interest rates higher than they paid out on deposits, they built a business based on a combination of high fees and balloon mortgages - both sold to buyers who didn't understand that they were getting screwed. "Liar loans" were created where the bank or mortgage broker asked for no documentation of the buyer's ability to repay. Credit cards were given to people with usurious interest rates and hidden fees that did not necessarily appear until after the card holder had been well hooked. A credit card monopoly was created by Visa and Mastercard enabling the two companies to charge dollars to retailers for transactions that cost pennies to process, while forcing terms on the retailers that required them to charge the same price for cash or credit card sales. Student loans were created that were 100% guaranteed by the government. Student loans that the government could have offered directly to students at 2% interest and still made a profit were instead loaned by banks at 6% with zero risk of default. Balloon mortgages made at 2% interest ballooning to 6% caused interest payments of $1000 a month to become $3,000 a month, bankrupting the buyers. Bankruptcy laws were rewritten to force people into debt for their entire lives. Incredibly, the government passed laws that specified that it must pay whatever the pharmaceutical companies asked for drugs with no negotiation.
Stiglitz goes into some detail about each of the ways that regulators and legislators failed to protect the public. He shows that the taxpayer cost and the government expenditures on bailouts came to vastly more money, spent vastly less efficiently, than would have been the case if there had been good regulation. The Reagan and Republican mantra that everything works better, cheaper, and more efficiently if the free market gets full control and government stays out proved to be false.
As a result, the top five banks that accounted for 11% of U.S. banking business in the 1990's dominated 40% just ten or so years later. Money that could have been spent on health care, education, affordable housing, infrastructure, and many other things needed by the American people was instead spent to pay bank stockholders to protect them from their losses and to pay some of the largest bonuses that bank managers ever received.
A chapter is devoted to the economics profession where, according to S, the free market theory has become theology rather than science. He explains many ways in which the market produces results that are neither efficient nor in the interests of all of the people. He argues that the knowledge of how and why this is so is well established but the theology pushed by the Republican Party, and quite a few Democrats too (including Clinton and Obama) has become the ruling idea.
S concludes with a discussion of the what the economy is for - that we should make it benefit all of the people and not allow it to be used, as it has been, as an instrument for transferring money from the poor and middle class to the rich.
Stiglitz is not a Marxist. He believes that capitalism and free markets are important and productive, but only if they are properly regulated to align private and public interests. I think he knows how hard this will be to do. I believe that as things stand right now it is politically impossible and will stay impossible until things have gotten much worse and driven the American people to, not a revolution, but a serious reform. Maybe Stiglitz's book will help lay an intellectual foundation to help the politicians who are prepared to make changes to understand what needs to be done.
I read this as an audiobook, which was convenient but probably not the right way to read it because all of the end notes were lost. When I saw a print copy of the book I saw the extensive and valuable notes that were far more than just citations corroborating the text.
| Author | Harwood, Jeremy |
|---|---|
| Publication | Zenith Press, Quid Publishing, 2014 |
| Number of Pages | 208 |
| Extras | photos, maps, bibliography, index, photo credits |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II; Aviation; Photography |
| When Read | December 2017 |
Harwood presents a very brief but broad overview of the use of photo reconnaissance beginning with the earliest aerial photography from balloons in the nineteenth century. The techniques were developed into a systematic form in World War I and then used extensively in World War II, which is the main subject of the book. The use was extensive on both sides, but especially by the British who developed a major center for photo reconnaissance at Medmenham in Buckinghamshire, later shared with the US Army Air Force. Literally millions of photographs were analyzed there by men and women who became increasingly proficient at understanding what the photos told them.
The text progresses through various different operations in which photo intelligence contributed to allied victory. Examples included the landings in France, the attacks on German aircraft, fuel, and manufacturing operations, the attacks on the German rocket program, the atomic bombs on Japan, and others. In each section of from two to six pages, there is a short text accompanied by one to three photos in each double page spread, each of which has a caption of one to two paragraphs.
The book is necessarily superficial. There are no details of cameras, enlargers, stereoscopic viewers, or other equipment. The photos, although fascinating, are insufficiently described. Some have circles and arrows that were presumably added by wartime personnel, but there is nothing added for the edition of the book and, most of the time, I was unable to see the features that led to the conclusions described in the text.
Without doubt, photo interpretation is a task requiring a very high level of intelligence, skill, and experience. The earliest deductions leading to an appreciation of the German V1 and V2 rocket bomb programs often came from features on photos that occupied only a millimeter of space on a printout and not very many grains of emulsion on the film. Some truly astonishing but nevertheless correct deductions were made about what the Germans were up to based on the skimpiest imaginable evidence.
I didn't learn a lot from the book. The history was almost all material that I already knew. The technology was not described well enough to add much to my knowledge. The photos were inadequately described. I know how much is lost when a photo is made of a photo and I understand that what I was looking at was significantly less useful than what the photo interpreters saw during the war. Nevertheless, I found the book quite interesting.
| Author | Tully, John A. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Crown Nest NSW, Australia: Allen and Unwin, 2005 |
| Copyright Date | 2005 |
| Number of Pages | 268 |
| Extras | photos, notes (only four of them), annotated bibliography, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Cambodia |
| When Read | December 2017 |
The first 80 pages, about a third of the text, cover the period from the earliest known Khmer civilization, known from ancient stone inscriptions to have existed in 602 A.D. and probably for a few hundred years earlier, to the beginning of the French "protectorate" in 1863. There are no Khmer language books from the early years. Even though there were literate Khmers and libraries are known to have existed, the paper and other organic materials comprising the manuscripts could not survive hundreds of years of the hot, humid climate of the country. What is known comes from the limited numbers of inscriptions in stone and accounts by travelers from China or, after 1500, from Europe.
Tully asserts that at one time Angkor, the city in which the temple Angkor Wat was situated, had between 700,000 and 1,000,000 people and was the largest pre-industrial age city in the world. At its maximum size, the Khmer Empire of which Angkor was the capital, was much larger than it is today, occupying large parts of what are now Thailand (previously "Siam"), Laos, and Vietnam. At one time the entire Mekong delta was Khmer controlled. Whereas Vietnam had a "Sinitic" (China influenced) culture, Cambodian Khmer culture derived from India. Its people were highly religious Hindus and Buddhists with significant variations from the original Indian practices. "Theravedic" Buddhism came to dominate the country. There were also significant minorities in the Empire including Cham (Muslims) Vietnamese, Chinese, and Thai, all oppressed and treated with some contempt by the Khmer majority. The Empire lasted for some centuries but began to decline after the thirteenth century, fought increasing numbers of difficult wars, losing territory and having to move the capital from Angkor to Phnom Penh, seeing the new capital captured and burned three times starting in 1780, and only saved from extinction by accepting and giving in to French "protection".
The French did indeed drive back the Siamese and defeated the would be Vietnamese conquerors. They also built some fine colonial buildings, created a bit of modern economic infrastructure, and brought western education to a tiny minority of Khmers. However all development was for the benefit of France, i.e., the French bourgeoisie and, partly as a result of native nationalism and partly as a result of the revolutionary ideas circulating from Moscow and elsewhere after 1917, an independence movement developed led by various idealists and various opportunists, notably including Prince Norodom Sihanouk.
In Tully's view, Sihanouk was smart, flexible, and effective, but hardly a man of principle or democracy. He was a master of politics. He played off the different larger players against each other, always asserting Cambodia's and his own rights as far as possible but no further, making any concessions and compromises required to stay in the game. He used peaceful mechanisms where they were convenient but was not above ordering the murder of particularly effective political opponents. The more successful he became, according to Tully, the more bored he became with politics and retreated into his private life of women, money, and film making.
Sihanouk managed to keep Cambodia safe from heavy Japanese interference during the period of their dominance over the Vichyites in Vietnam, and avoided much of the war between France and the Vietminh, winning independence without the great sacrifices that the Vietnamese had to make. Incredibly, he also managed to keep Cambodia out of the Vietnamese/American war working, as he described it, as an ant struggling on the forest floor during a battle between two elephants. However he could only persevere for so long before his difficult task became impossible. His own pawn, the venal, incompetent, cowardly national police chief, Lon Nol, joined with some principled anti-communists and some unprincipled scoundrels like himself to court the Americans, profit from American largesse, and launch a war against the Viet Cong and the tiny Cambodian communist movement. It was in 1970, a most unfortunate time since Nixon was in the midst of committing himself to a gradual withdrawal from Vietnam. Lon Nol mobilized the entire country to fight the Khmers Rouges but his greatest asset, gigantic American airpower, was also his greatest curse. It is thought that at least 150,000 Cambodians were bombed to death in a campaign that, in the single year of 1973, dropped 40% more tons of bombs in Cambodia (which had no air defense) than in all of World War II on Japan. The result was a Khmers Rouges victory followed by their unprecedentedly barbaric, idiotic, and counterproductive rule. Tully says "According to the CIA, the population of Cambodia stood at around 7.3 million in 1975 with other estimates of up to 8 million. Around 1.7 million of these people were to die during the brief period of DK ["Democratic Kampuchea", the Khmers Rouges regime], up to quarter of a million of them murdered as real or imagined enemies of the paranoid regime. The rest perished due to malnutrition and overwork, lack of medical care and sometimes despair and heartbreak." Working any kind of professional job, or even just wearing glasses, was proof enough of being a counterrevolutionary intellectual in need of elimination.
In addition to oppressing the Cambodian people, the KR launched pogroms against the Cham, Vietnamese and Chinese in Cambodia and made cross border raids into Vietnam to kill, rape, and loot the people that Pol Pot defined as enemies. Yet when the Vietnamese finally launched their own offensive and drove the KR back to the Thai border the U.S, China, ASEAN, and most of the U.N. declared the DK to be the legitimate government of Cambodia, pressured Thailand to admit and protect the KR on its side of the border, and imposed sanctions on Vietnam.
The last chapter of the book is about the government that emerged after the KR. More practical and pragmatic, it allowed the people of Cambodia to pursue their private lives. However it was far from honest or democratic and, by the time of Tully's writing in 2005, he characterized it as a plain, if not simple, kleptocracy.
I read this book in preparation for our trip/tour of Cambodia and Vietnam. I hadn't expected a well researched, serious, and thoughtful book. It was, after all, titled "a short history ...", but it was all of those things. Tully was well prepared, had mastered the literature including much unpublished material and many different points of view, and had a sophisticated understanding of Marxism - necessary for analyzing the extent to which the Vietnamese, the Khmers Rouges, and the follow on regime in Cambodia could properly be called Marxist. His broad and well annotated bibliography looks like it would be a great resource for anyone trying to master the subject.
I'm writing these notes on my netbook in the Toronto airport on our way to Phnom Penh, looking forward to our visit with both interest and trepidation.
I wrote something about our time in Cambodia in my diary entry for January 3, 2018.