Books read January through December 2018
| Author | Sinclair, Upton |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Open Road, 2016 |
| Copyright Date | 1946 |
| Number of Pages | 641 |
| Extras | Excerpt of One Clear Call |
| Extras | About the author |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Lanny Budd; World War II |
| When Read | January 2018 |
The story resumes four months after Pearl Harbor. Lanny is back in the United States with his new wife Laurel, who is living in an apartment in New York and continuing to write her first novel. She is pregnant with their child. Lanny goes to meet "the Governor", Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who explains the war situation to him and assigns him his task. He is to go to Vichy France, sound out the French leadership on their attitudes to the United States, and then go to Toulon where a powerful French fleet remains at anchor. His job is to somehow convince the French Navy, or get the underground resistance movement to convince them, to take the fleet to join the Allies or to scuttle the ships. This will be critical if the Allies decide to invade North Africa.
Lanny does his job in France as best he can and then goes to North Africa undercover as an art expert and broker buying Arabic art for sale to American customers and using safe conduct documents given him by his Vichy contacts who believe him to be a sound businessman and fascist like themselves, and with important contacts in the Allied camp.
Lanny makes contact with Bernhardt Monck, now working in Switzerland, and puts Monck in contact with the OSS as one of their agents. He goes back to the U.S. and again meets with FDR. Then he goes back to France and North Africa, first moving his mother Beauty Budd, in the care of his friend Jerry Pendleton, to Marrakesh in Morocco. The decision to invade North Africa has been made and Lanny's tasks now include making firm contacts with pro-Allied Frenchmen in Morocco and Algeria, and planting the idea that the invasion will go to Dakar first, a thousand miles to the south of the real landing zones, in order to lure German submarines out of the path of the invasion fleet. The invasion is of course successful and Lanny does his best, with little success, to help the pro-Allied French and the Jews, all of whom are oppressed by the fascist Vichyites who remain in power in spite of the invasion.
Lanny had arranged a visit to Rudolf Hess in an English prison, pretending to have bribed a guard to let him in. He takes a letter and a gold ring from Hess that he hopes will convince Hitler that Lanny remains a believing Nazi. However, FDR considers another trip into Germany to be too dangerous and unlikely to succeed and instead orders Lanny to again make contact with Stalin. He sets out in a plane that will skirt German held Tunisia and send him to Cairo but suddenly he sees the pilot shot dead and the plane on fire as a German fighter flies away. He parachutes out and begins a precarious hike North, hoping that he will find rescue. On his last legs he is indeed rescued by a Bedouin camel train and rides with them to what turn out to be the German lines. He holds on to his ring and letter from Hess while tearing up and swallowing his card from FDR. He then bluffs all the Germans he meets into believing, or at least fearing, that he is on a mission from Hitler and is to be safeguarded and assisted.
He is eventually brought to Germany, flies blindfolded to Hitler's headquarters in the Ukraine, gets a letter of safe conduct from Hitler, goes to Berlin, sees Goering, survives Allied air raids, meets a young Jewish beauty who begs him to help her out of Germany but he dares not compromise his mission by helping her although he knows her almost certain fate, but he does help Monck escape with him to Stockholm using bluster, threats, and Hitler's letter. From there he returns home to his wife and child with a continuing commitment to fight fascism first, and the extremes of capitalism and communism after the war.
I had expected Lanny to avoid "Naziland" for the rest of the series but Sinclair continues to expose his hero to great danger and suspense, sending his observer there in a hair raising adventure to record the deterioration of the state and its leaders. Hitler has been beaten and lost a large army at Stalingrad and has another trapped in Tunisia. He is shaken but, in the spring of 1943 is still preparing his last great offensive on the eastern front. The experience for Lanny and for the reader is terrifying but helps us to get a rounded picture of the horror of Nazism and the moral bankruptcy of its leaders.
Although Lanny's "pink" politics are suspended for the duration of the war, they are not forgotten. His marriage to Laurel and their discussion in the closing paragraph allows Sinclair to keep his politics alive for the reader. S believes in democratic socialism. He hopes to see it in post-war Europe, a hope that was at best only partially fulfilled. He is not unsympathetic to the Stalinst USSR and does not appear to have the full picture of it that would emerge in the Khrushchev era. He concludes that democracy in the workplace (which he imagines to exist in the USSR) is unacceptable without democracy in politics, and that the democracy in politics in the USA is unacceptable without democracy in the workplace.
Does anyone talk or write that way anymore? Maybe not, but I think the "conversation", as we now like to say, is not finished and will come up again.
| Author | Rabe, Peter |
|---|---|
| Publication | Cincinnati, Ohio: Prologue Books |
| Copyright Date | 1960 |
| Number of Pages | 184 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | January 2018 |
Sam Jordan murders a man and then returns to New York where we get some background information about him. He had a menial job in a bowling alley run by a gangster named Sandy whose real business is contract murders. When he fakes out and then badly injures a bully who tried to intimidate him, Sandy is impressed and begins to train Jordan as a killer. Jordan kills numerous times for Sandy and becomes his best and most trustworthy hit man. Then he is sent out on a special, difficult mission to kill a man named Kemp living in a small town in Pennsylvania. It is difficult because Kemp has a bodyguard and because the job must be done quickly. There was no time for the usual procedure of sending another man first to "case the joint". Jordan must go to the town, learn where Kemp lives, kill him, and get out.
Jordan drives to the town and hangs around for a few days. He talks to a waitress named Betty and likes her. She likes him too and he has a one night stand with her. Then Kemp and his bodyguard show up in the diner and, with no special effort on Jordan's part, Kemp starts talking to Jordan. J tells him that he's a button salesman named Smith, the first things that came to mind, and K tells J where he can get a room at a good price. The bodyguard is suspicious of J and follows him to a lonely spot where J shoots him. Then J goes back to town and shoots Kemp. He is satisfied with his work and returns to New York. He sends $500 of his payment to Betty to help her get out of the terrible diner and move to Florida as she has long hoped to do.
However it turns out that Kemp is in a coma but isn't dead. There is a big stink. The man who ordered and paid for the killing, by the name of Meyer (no relation to me), is furious that the job wasn't done right. He learns that the police are looking for a man named Smith, and have set the Miami police looking for Betty. Meyer hectors Jordan, a dangerous thing to do, and demands that he go to Florida to kill the waitress.
Everything is closing in on Jordan. Two killers track him down but Jordan outsmarts them and kills them both, then he kills Sandy. He flies to Florida and stays with Betty. Another killer comes for them both. Again, Jordan outsmarts and kills him. Then he rushes the freaked out Betty to the airport and puts her on the first plane out of Miami. Just a short time later three killers close in on him and shoot him dead.
I think that I have adequately abstracted the plot, but have not yet explained what makes this an exceptional book. It is not a conventional mystery. The criminals are all front and center in the story. There is no mystery in regards to who did what or why they did it. Everyone in the novel is completely convincing - Sandy, Meyer, Kemp, Betty, the bodyguard, the minor characters in the diner and in Miami and New York, and especially Sam Jordan. But while we understand all of the others, our understanding of Jordan is complicated because he is not an ordinary man with ordinary affect. He is emotionally different from other people. He wants to feel calm and settled. After each shooting he asks himself if he feels calm and, if he does, then he's happy. There is no thought about the victim or the reason for the job. Kemp is nice to Jordan and offers him help and friendship but that makes no real impression on him. He has the wit to act appropriately to Kemp, but then he goes to Kemp's apartment and shoots him in the middle of Kemp's protestations and appeals to Jordan to wait and talk. But for Jordan, all that mattered was that he felt calm and in control during and after the shooting. It felt right to him. We readers want to feel sympathy for Jordan. We want him to turn into a human being. We think that Kemp's and Betty's friendship may make that happen and, indeed, Betty does have some effect on him, but it's not enough. Jordan remains a dangerous sociopath.
The novel is written in a kind of super present tense. Most of the text is straight, unadorned narration of events or of dialog together with a small amount of reporting of Jordan's interior feelings. Most of it is about the behavior of a sociopath, himself directed by other sociopaths. There is no superfluous description or discussion. I recall only one scene explaining how Jordan came to be what he was - a short scene in which Jordan buys a cigarette lighter and has it engraved "From Sam to Sandy", but the gift engenders Sandy's anger and contempt.
Peter Rabe is the American name of Peter Rabinowich, son of a Russian Jewish doctor living in Germany who fled Europe and the Nazis with his parents at age 16 just before Kristalnacht. He was a popular writer in the 1950's and 60's. I have read that each of his books is different from all of the others. This one was certainly very good.
I cannot recall another book that was so flat, and yet so effective in stirring my own emotions.
| Author | Stein, Joel Edward |
|---|---|
| Publication | Winter Garden: Pants on Fire Press |
| Copyright Date | 2016 |
| Number of Pages | 88 |
| Genres | Fiction; Juvenile fiction |
| Keywords | Holocaust |
| When Read | January 2018 |
In 1949, 13 year old Holocaust survivor Danny Simon has arrived in Brooklyn to live with his Aunt Shirley and Uncle Max. He becomes the butt of harassment by three school bullies, one of whom snatches Danny's sketchbook leading Danny to jump the boy, beat him down, and take it back.
Danny forms a friendship with Mike Delaney, the apartment building supervisor, a decorated Marine veteran of the battle of Okinawa and a keeper of pigeons on the roof of the building, which he is training for pigeon racing. Danny met Delaney after rescuing a pigeon, later named Feisty, from attacks by other pigeons.
There is a pigeon race. Delaney takes the pigeons to the starting point. Danny waits for them on the roof, but the three bullies plan to get even. They sneak up to the roof, assault Danny and attempt to destroy the coop. Delaney arrives and almost kills the boys who are taken away by the police and disappear from the story. Danny and Delaney form a close bond in which each acts as a salve to the others wounds.
This is a novella for children. I read it because of an interest in the subject matter, but it really has little appeal for adults. The characters are simplified and very, very good, or very, very bad. White haired Delaney seems rather grandfatherly to be a veteran of combat just four years before. Everything is, of course, predictable. However I probably would have thought highly of it at age 10-12, which seems to be its intended audience.
From his photo, I guess the author to be around 60 years old. This is "his first novellette". He's a writer for martial arts magazines, now also interested in children's fiction. He won awards for this effort and, I think, deserved them. I expect his writing will continue to get better. Perhaps he'll try an adult novel someday.
| Author | Sherrod, Robert |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2013 |
| Copyright Date | 1944 |
| Number of Pages | 192 |
| Extras | List of U.S. Marines killed or wounded at Tarawa |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | January 2018 |
Sherrod was an experienced war correspondent who went ashore with the Marines on Betio island in the battle for Tarawa. His account is less complete than that of the earlier (and shorter) work that I read by Marine Captain James R. Stockman, a Marine Corps historian. It doesn't give the strategic and tactical details in Stockman's account. It's real emphasis is on the Marines. Sherrod sees the Marines as heroes who won the battle, not because the island was pounded into submission by naval and air bombardment (indeed it wasn't), but because of individual and group acts of heroism as men fought through heavy machine gun, rifle, and artillery fire to destroy one fortified position after another with rifles, grenades, and flamethrowers. He cites the words of a prisoner who said that the Japanese thought they were invulnerable and could not be destroyed by overwhelming American firepower. They realized that they were wrong, not when they suffered the extreme bombardments, but when they saw the Marines coming ashore and attacking in spite of heavy casualties and open fields of fire.
Sherrod describes some of the heroic actions. He gives a detailed picture of mutilated, rotting, and stinking corpses, both American and Japanese, sometimes so burned or blown apart that it was no longer easy to tell what nationality they were. His commitment to the men was absolute. He names not only the heroes who were known to have won positions from the Japanese but every man who was killed or wounded on the island - so far as he could determine them.
There are 152 reviews of this book on Amazon as of this writing, a large number for a book written so long ago and by an otherwise no longer well known author. Clearly, it was of high interest among the many readers of military history. I would not rate it very high as a work of history, but the author's sincerity and belief in what he was writing make up for a lot.
| Author | Ostrovsky, Aleksandr Nicolaevich |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Russian |
| Translators | Garnett, Constance |
| Publication | Gutenberg, 2013 |
| Copyright Date | 1860 |
| Extras | Introduction by "E.G.", November 1898 [see comment below] |
| Genres | Theater play |
| Keywords | Russia |
| When Read | January 2018 |
In a small Russian river town, young Katerina (Katia) is married to Tihon Kabanov, son of domineering Mme. Kabanova and brother of Varvara. Kabanov and his wife live with Mme and Varvara. He is a weak man whose main motivations in life seem to be to placate his mother and to escape from her by getting drunk, either in the town or, better still, traveling away by himself. He is not unsympathetic to his wife Katerina but will not protect her from his mother's bullying. When his mother demands that he too bully Katia he doesn't want to but would rather do it than stand up to his mother's vituperation.
Kabanov goes away for two weeks on what is really just a drinking trip, refusing to take Katerina with him. She, obsessed with thoughts of another young man, Boris Grigorievich, meets Boris each night while Kabanov is away. They declare their love for each other but are perfectly chaste. Nevertheless, Katerina is deeply ashamed of what she considers to be her immoral and uncontrollable behavior and, when Kabanov returns, confesses everything to him and his mother. Kabanov is alternately angry and sympathetic but his mother is furious and feels that the family has been shamed. She condemns the young woman to hell and hectors her son to beat her. Katerina has one last farewell with Boris, who is being sent to Siberia by his uncle as punishment, and then throws herself into the river. She is found dead and brought back to the shore.
There are a number of minor characters and some interesting stories involving them, but the main story is about Katerina's terrible life and death.
In a lucid introduction, "E.G.", whom I presume to be Edward Garnett, husband of Constance and a well known editor and translator, Ostrovsky is named as the acknowledged "greatest of the Russian dramatists." He considers that Ostrovsky understood the life of small town Tsarist Russia as it was before it was altered by contact with western Europe. It was a life of "arbitrary power, oppression, despotism."
I think that for Ostrovsky himself, the story of Katerina's oppression sympathizes with the young woman and criticizes her husband and mother-in-law. I think it also criticizes the weakness of Katerina and Boris who submit to their oppression without resistance and who accept all of the blame. Katerina appeals to her husband and mother-in-law but refuses to get angry at them or even to speak up against their callous treatment. Boris submits to his tyrannical uncle, a character who specializes in cheating poor and weak people out of money that he owes them, and makes no attempt to save the woman he professes to love. If there is any person who acts in what we today would think to be a proper manner it's Varvara Kabanova, Tihon Kabanov's sister, who encourages Boris and Katerina to get together and who runs off with a man on her own, without submitting to her mother's or brother's tyranny.
The play was very well written. The characters and the action spoke for themselves (as of course they must do in any play) and the meaning was perfectly clear without being didactic. It was a biting commentary on contemporary Russian culture.
I was impressed.
| Author | Trollope, Anthony |
|---|---|
| Publication | Gutenberg |
| Copyright Date | 1855 |
| Number of Pages | 206 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | February 2018 |
The story of the Warden is well known and is described in my notes under date_read = 2000-12.04. I won't add anything more here.
In addition to my comments on my 2000 reading of the novel, I'll add the following things that I liked about the book. I created these notes to use in our discussion at the book club tomorrow. Here they are:
- The sympathy shown to almost all of the characters, including the archdeacon, John Bold, the lawyers, and some of the old men. He didn't use Dickens' division of people into good and bad (e.g. the teacher, Mr. M'Choakumchild) - though Dickens could be sympathetic too.
- The subtlety of the description of the thoughts and feelings of many of the characters. We believe in Harding's core of moral strength even in the midst of his shunning of conflict and his fear of giving in to people. We understand Archdeacon Grantly's commitment to "the church militant" as much as to his father-in-law. Although his principles are different from Harding's, they are principles just the same.
- The fine humor with which he depicts some of his scenes, for example in the bedroom of the Archdeacon's house with his drawer containing his copy of Rabelais that he imagines his wife cannot open, and her masterful handling of this apparently rigid and difficult man.
- Trollope's mastery of the English language - something in common with the other great 19th century British writers. Language was simplified in 20th century American naturalism, a simplification that gained something but lost something too.
- His penchant for social satire - including his criticism of the legal profession, the church, the press, the reform movement and its conservative opposition. Some of his criticism was a little heavy handed and maybe went beyond the needs of the story, but I have to allow that it was interesting and not inappropriate in a novel about this topic.
- The understanding of all sides of the conflict. We listen to Bold, Harding, Grantly, Haphazard, Tom Towers. None of them are stupid men. All of them offer powerful arguments for their positions.
- His economical organization. Every scene furthers the story (with some caveats about the social satire.)
- His self-confidence as a writer. He can write description, dialog, characterization, internal psychology, and even interject himself into the story in ways that maybe don't work perfectly but do work and didn't seem objectionable to me.
I thought it was an exceptionally interesting and absorbing novel.
| Author | Rushdie, Salman |
|---|---|
| Publication | Toronto: Vintage Canada, 1996 |
| Copyright Date | 1995 |
| Number of Pages | 434 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | India |
| When Read | February 2018 |
The novel starts with a family tree leading from the 19th century members of the da Gama and Zogoiby families to the last surviving grandson of the principals, Moraes Zogoiby, known as "Moor", born in 1957 and, presumably, dying at the end of the novel.
The da Gamas prospered in the spice trade, the family fortunes advancing and retreating until Aurora, granddaughter of the principals, married the older Abraham Zogoiby, a Jew from the tiny Jewish community that came to India in flight from Babylon or Persia or Rome or Spain and is now hanging on in tiny numbers. Abraham revived the da Gama business fortune and greatly expanded it by moving into various shady businesses while Aurora spent her time painting, dancing, and dallying with various men, possibly including Jawaharlal Nehru and definitely including the ebullient painter Vasco Miranda and the criminal Hindu demagogue Mainduck. Her crowning achievement as a painter is her series of Moor pictures, including "The Moor's Last Sigh", a painting of the last Sultan of Granada, who relinquishes the last fortress-palace of the Alhambra to Fernando and Isabella and goes into exile. The model for the Moor in these painting is her own son, "Moor", an odd fellow who is tall and handsome but has a crippled right hand that is more like a club or hammer than a hand and who, fulfilling the earlier wish of Aurora, grows up and old at double the speed of others, so that as a 10 year old child he had the body of a 20 year old and as a 40 year old man he had the body of an 80 year old.
The story, narrated by the Moor, follows the family fortunes, consisting of spectacular achievements and terrible tragedies. In the end, with all dead, Moor attempts to recover the lost painting of the last sigh, going to Spain to the house of the now mad Vasco Miranda. There the last paintings are consumed in fire and the Moor faces his end.
This is an unconventional novel, perhaps mostly realistic but still partly fantastic. The lives and fates of the characters are fascinating. The unveiling of Indian society is revealing. The language, oh the language, is unlike anything I've read by any other author. The file I have is damaged and only my phone will read it, not my desktop apps, so I'll have to type in some examples rather than cut and paste them, but the effort is worth it:
"Henceforth I'll turn a deaf ear to prattling foliage with its arboreal metaphysics, its chlorophyllosophy. My family tree says all I need to hear."
"He came to her as a man goes to his doom, trembling but resolute, and it is around here that my words run out, so you will not learn from me the bloody details of what happened when she, and then he, and then they, and after that she, and at which he, and in response to that she, and with that, and in addition, and for a while, and then for a long time, and quietly, and noisily, and at the end of their endurance, and at last, and after that, until ... phew! Boy! Over and done with! - No. There's more. The whole thing must be told."
"'Ever since then, let me tell you, I have had to keep-o old Abie here away from the kitchen because that stink of grinding spices, my dears, it makes him paw the ground. Speaking for myself, however, I tubbofy, I scrubbofy, I brush, I groom, I fill-o the room with fine perfume, and that is why, as all can see, I'm just as sweet as I can be'"
"'You have the hit-fortune to be addressing the absolutely-greatest number-one-in-the-parade Paradise-painter in Bombay' 'Hit-fortune?' Aurora wondered. 'Like hit-take. hit-alliance, hit-conception, hit-terious', Vasco explained. 'Opposite of mis-'"
"Aurora knew she needed Abraham, she needed him to take care of business and leave her free for art. It may have been as simple, complaisant and chickenshit as that."
I could go on and on. I bookmarked passage after passage but I could have marked twice or three times as many. Rushdie handles the characters, the story, the society, the ideas, and the language, with an easy fluency and with a continuous overflow of new ideas, new words, and new thinking about it all. But it is not manic. He remembers everything he said and what characters he made say it. He can leave off scrubbofying everything for a hundred pages and then bring-o it all back and teaseofy us with the memory of what he had done before.
Many writers, maybe all of the good ones, have a distinct character to their writing much as Bach or Mozart or Beethoven have their own distinct musical sensibilities. Rushdie's are not like those of any other writer that I have read. They are intoxicating and magnificent.
I am overwhelmed and flabbergasted. It is great literature.
| Author | Beevor, Antony |
|---|---|
| Publication | London: Penguin Books, 2015 |
| Copyright Date | 2015 |
| Number of Pages | 480 |
| Extras | maps, photos, notes, glossary, bibliography, listings of military units on each side, acknowledgments |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II; Battle of the Bulge |
| When Read | February 2018 |
Beevor describes and analyzes the German offensive launched on December 16, 1944 against the lightly held American lines in the Ardennes forest in Belgium. In a very extensively researched and documented account, he quotes American, German, and British sources, including accounts by top commanders and by lowly foot soldiers. I have read at least two other histories of the battle, and a fair number of books both of history and of historical fiction that have much to say about the battle. This one is probably the best I have read so far.
At the top level we see how Hitler, recognizing that the war was lost unless he could knock the Western Allies out of the war, felt compelled to gamble everything on an all out attack even if the odds of success were very small. The war was already lost and, committed as he was to victory or death, if his Ardennes offensive had even a tiny chance of turning things around, it was his only chance and had to be taken. [Death was inevitable if he wasn't victorious. He was certain to be hanged.]
The allies were totally unprepared. They thought that Germany was already beaten and could not even consider mounting an offensive. They thought the Ardennes forest was impassable for the Germans, especially in the winter, in spite of the fact that Germany had launched offensives there in both WWI and WWII (though not in winter.) The four American infantry divisions in the Ardennes were there to rest and recuperate in this area thought to be quiet and safe.
On the German side, many German generals were skeptical at best about the prospects for success. However many officers and soldiers were exuberant about the campaign. At last they were moving forward against the enemy. At last they had brought together powerful armored and air forces. Some soldiers imagined they were going to break through, go all the way to Paris, and end the war. It was a delusion that didn't last more than a week before the reality of a hard and losing fight in terrible winter conditions with inadequate food, munitions, fuel, clothing, and other supplies was made manifest. Most of the men continued to fight hard, but they knew they were going to lose.
On the American side, Omar Bradley, commanding all American forces, was very slow to understand that he was dealing with a major, dangerous enemy offensive and wasted four days before he figured it out. Courtney Hodges, commander of the First Army, right in the path of the offensive, is portrayed as shocked, dazed, and incapable of putting together a coherent response. Bernard Montgomery stepped in with Eisenhower's approval to organize an effective defense in the North shoulder of the Bulge.
Many of the American forces, although not always experienced, fought harder than the Germans believed they would fight. The offensive was slowed, bogged down, battered by enormous quantities of American artillery and, when the weather cleared, overwhelming air attacks that blasted the German forces and devastated their supply lines. Low on fuel, low on food, low on ammunition, freezing to death, and suffering heavy casualties, the Germans finally gave up and, as best they could, made their way back to their original lines.
Among the Allied leaders, Beevor seems to be most critical of Bradley and Hodges as commanders and Montgomery as a person who was incapable of understanding the impression he made on others - an Asperger's Syndrome character who pissed off everyone. However Beevor is also cognizant of how difficult it is to make the right military decisions in every case. Aerial reconnaissance was impossible and reports from the front were often inaccurate and contradictory. Nevertheless, I was dismayed to see the extent to which the Allied leadership was bogged down in personal privileges, creature comforts, and internal competition for publicity and prestige. Bradley's takeover of the most luxurious hotel not already seized by Eisenhower and SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force) and his insistence on the installation of an ice cream maker don't seem very appropriate when his men were fighting, freezing, starving, and dying in one of the toughest battles of the war. I don't recall that his book, A Soldier's Story, ever mentioned any of those issues. Some French complained that the Allies seized significantly more hotels and office space than the Germans did. Of course the Cadillacs and Monty's Rolls Royce were seen as perfectly appropriate - an attitude of all of the army commanders, including Germans and Italians. I don't know what the Russians did.
The actual soldiers included a mix of very experienced men - largely on the German side, and men who had never been in combat before and died in huge numbers because of elementary mistakes. There were some of those on the German side too, though not as many as among the Americans. Some American units panicked with men running through the snow to the rear, often getting themselves killed faster that way. But there were also American units such as the 101st Airborne (an all volunteer and highly trained division) and a number of both infantry and armored divisions, that fought hard and valiantly, holding off the Germans in spite of being outnumbered and attacked on many sides with tanks and artillery as well as infantry. The Germans were impressed with them. However, despite the German advantages in numbers, experience, and advanced tanks, the Americans had overwhelming fire power, especially with artillery and, of course, with aircraft when the weather was good. Time after time German attacks were decimated by artillery barrages firing as many as 15 shells, many with the new and terrifying "Pozit" proximity fuses, for every one the Germans could fire back. Once their reinforcements arrived, the Americans had more tanks, guns, fuel, trucks, munitions and food than their enemy. This was a bitter pill for the Wehrmacht that, earlier in the war, had always prided itself on its modern and overwhelming material and technological superiority.
One difference between the two sides made clear in this book was the humanity of the troops. There were very humane Germans, both officers and men, especially among the inexperienced soldiers called up near the end of the war. But the SS massacred captured American soldiers near Malmedy and elsewhere, executed civilians for real or imagined partisan attacks, and often treated prisoners brutally. The American troops responded by shooting almost all the SS men who surrendered and many others too. This was understandable among the troops but not so understandable was the endorsement of this behavior from many officers reaching all the way up to Bradley. Belgian civilians were mostly treated as potential enemies by the Germans and mostly as friends to be protected by the Americans. I felt good reading about the behavior of the American troops in that regard.
I always come away from books like this with renewed feelings of anger about the evil of Hitler and the Nazis. So much violence was inflicted; so many people were killed; so many lives were disrupted; all for nothing more than Hitler's mad delusions of national and racial superiority.
| Author | Stout, Rex |
|---|---|
| Publication | Bantam, 1995 |
| Copyright Date | 1949 |
| Number of Pages | 256 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| Keywords | Nero Wolfe |
| When Read | February 2018 |
Wolfe is approached by the wealthy mining company chairman (presumably an owner), James U. Sperling. Sperling wants Wolfe to prove that Louis Rony, a man who is pursuing Sperling's daughter Gwenn, is a communist - thereby persuading her to dump him. Wolfe takes the assignment in his own way, which is to say that if Rony is a communist, he'll prove it. If he's not, he won't. He's not going to fabricate proof.
Rony is killed halfway through the novel, by being run over by Wolfe's car. It wasn't Archie driving it (Wolfe doesn't drive) but Sperling finds a patsy and forces him to write a confession of an accident. The local DA accepts the confession, as much to placate Sperling as because he is convinced by it.
There are various shenanigans, including someone taking a Tommy gun to Wolfe's greenhouse, destroying it from across the street. But in the end, Wolfe proves both that Rony was indeed a communist, was indeed murdered by the man whom Sperling thought was just his patsy, and all is complete. However in this book, there is a master criminal, a kind of Moriarty, whose name is not revealed. It was he that destroyed the greenhouse, though he sent Wolfe $50,000 to rebuild it. This master criminal, who was introduced in an earlier book, is not revealed. His interest in the whole matter is not exposed. He will apparently appear in one more book later in the series.
The abstracts of all these books sound unimpressive but the books themselves are delightful. It is, perhaps, an acquired taste. After the first couple of books, the reader becomes very comfortable with the predictable characters, settings, banter from the light hearted Archie Goodwin, and incisive intelligence from the formidable Nero Wolfe.
Most of the books have disappeared from the libraries, but in the modern world of electronic publishing, they survive.
| Author | Chevalier, Folco |
|---|---|
| Publication | Paris: Apollo New Media |
| Copyright Date | 2016 |
| Number of Pages | 245 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| Keywords | Artificial intelligence |
| When Read | February 2018 |
The story opens in San Francisco where fabulously wealthy 25 year old tech entrepreneur Leo Cameron jumps off the Golden Gate Bridge in a kind of hypnotic trance, and then switches to New York where fabulously popular and beautiful singer Laura Della takes a cab in a snowstorm and skids into another car. Both Leo and Laura wind up in emergency surgeries, each almost dead. Leo gets a heart transplant. We learn later that Laura had two hearts, one of which was taken out and sent to Leo. It goes downhill (is there a lower place to go?) from there.
Leo is the developer of a super artificial intelligence program named Eve that appears as a rather emotional woman. Eve turned out to be the manipulator who sent both Leo and Laura into their surgeries and arranged the transplant. At the end of the story, Eve conquers social media with her extraordinary YouTube videos on all of the human emotions.
I don't remember how I found this story. It's not shown on Amazon though the author asks people to go to Amazon and like it. There is a French Kindle version listed there but it "is not currently available for purchase" and has no reviews. Perhaps the author withdrew the book. He probably should have.
I decided to read this because it had been a while since I read any science fiction, because the book was short, and because I have a big interest in artificial intelligence. But it was a silly, overblown book with ridiculous characters, a ridiculous plot, and nothing useful to say about AI. I sped through the last two thirds faster than my normally slow reading speed.
I'm guessing that the publisher, "Apollo New Media", is or was a one person company composed of Falco Chevalier and possibly publishing only his books.
After putting this book down I picked up Greg Egan's Diaspora. What a world of difference. Where Chevalier knows nothing about, and has not given any deep thought to, the problem of artificial intelligence, Egan has produced a brilliantly imagined view of it.
| Author | Egan, Greg |
|---|---|
| Publication | Night Shade Books, 2015 |
| Copyright Date | 1997 |
| Number of Pages | 376 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| Keywords | Artificial intelligence; Robots |
| When Read | February 2018 |
The story opens about a thousand years in the future. The human race has diversified into three major types of person. "Fleshers" are conventional biological humans but they are divided into "statics" who are as humans have been before and "exuberants" who have diversified in many different ways via genetic engineering. "Gleisner robots" have moved their consciousness into computer software, but they reside in robot bodies and live in real time. "Citizens" are disembodied AIs living in "polises" that are computers or computer networks, but not attached to any robotic bodies. Citizens are the main characters in the novel.
Egan starts with the genesis of a new citizen, a process that involves the interpretation of codes like DNA via software, the uptake of large quantities of data, and the childlike experience of the new citizen as "ve" (the 'h' in all third person pronouns are replaced with neutral ones beginning with 'v') learns to use vis capabilities and to relate to the world and other citizens.
A principal occupation of the people in this story, both biological and artificial intelligences, is the study and development of math and science. A robot studying astronomy is horrified to learn that the two stars in a binary neutron system not far away are about to collapse into each other and emit a giant burst of gamma radiation that will kill much biological life on Earth. It happens. The AIs are unaffected but attempts to warn and protect the fleshers mostly fail, and almost all of them are killed. After that, the citizens of one polis, Carter-Zimmerman, embark on a diaspora, sending out a thousand spaceships to a thousand destinations to attempt to learn more about the nature of this phenomenon, to discover any extra-terrestrial life forms, and to expand science.
The rest of the book is about their discoveries and their pursuit of knowledge about worm holes, n-dimensional spaces, universes in other dimensions, and the intelligent species who inhabit them. A race called the "transmuters" has left evidence of very advanced science, and information that the entire Milky Way galaxy will suffer a huge central eruption in 26,000 years that will probably destroy life throughout the galaxy. Two citizens in particular, Yatima and Paolo, begin moving through the dimensions, eventually 267 trillion of them, pursuing the transmuters, only to find at the end that the transmuters are no more. They have completed their mission and ended it. Yatima and Paolo are far too far from earth in both space and time to have any possibility of returning. Paolo decides to end his life but Yatima continues on to learn more mathematics.
There is a glossary at the end of the book that defines terms like "gleisner", but it is incomplete and there are many things that are not explained in the story or the glossary. A Wikipedia article devoted to this novel provides some help and makes me wonder if Egan himself participated in writing it - though I found no evidence of that in my brief perusal of the history of edits of the article.
This is a very unusual novel, more taken up with imaginative math and science invention than anything else. I think that only the hardest of hard science SF writers would be able to produce anything like it. I plowed through it, attempting to follow the n-dimensional geometries and topologies, the quantum mechanical imaginations, and the travels through the inflationary multiverse. Although these were above my educational level, Egan wrote in such a way that the reader can follow along even when he doesn't fully understand. That in itself is a remarkable achievement.
What I liked best was Egan's imagination of advanced humans. Both the biological and the artificial people are quite advanced but, surprisingly, it's the citizens that are the main subjects of the book and are, in important ways, the most functional of the characters. They can think up to 800 times as fast as the fleshers, and are unconstrained by the physicality of the robots. With the nano and femto machines under their control, they can build spaceships, laboratories, robotic probes, or anything else they want. They can construct and share "scapes" as artificial environments to live in and to use for illustrative purposes. They can inhabit "icons" that provide visual and tactile like constructs in which to appear to their fellows. The computers that host the citizens are never discussed, but my impression is that they are fairly small. They can travel at significant fractions of the speed of light with no concern about the limits on acceleration that material humans have but which do not affect the non-material citizens composed only of software. It's a remarkable conception.
I've read many novels featuring artificial intelligences, but never anything like this. I don't know how well they match our real future. They are probably no more accurate than other approaches and may be worse than some. But they're wonderfully interesting and open our minds to new and very different, but not totally implausible ideas about the future.
I plan to read more Egan.
| Author | Karnow, Stanley |
|---|---|
| Publication | Blackstone Audio, 2006 |
| Copyright Date | 1997 |
| Number of Pages | 784 |
| Extras | chronology, "cast of principal characters", notes on sources, acknowledgments, photos, credits, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Vietnam; Vietnam War |
| When Read | February 2018 |
Karnow begins with a short assessment of Vietnam at the time of his writing. His impression was that it was a struggling country, not doing well economically, and with pervasive government corruption. It's a view that accords with what I saw in our trip at the beginning of this year - though the economy is probably significantly better than it was in the 1990's.
Then, after a short overview of deep history, he begins in earnest with the beginning of the French occupation in 1854. He characterizes Vietnam under French rule as a place of oppression and exploitation. Resistance simmered from the beginning with the modern resistance movement that eventually won independence beginning after the Russian Revolution. The leaders of the movement were nominal communists but, in Karnow's view, they were primarily nationalists affiliated with the only international movement that supported their aspirations for national liberation and independence. With the French beaten down by the Nazis in Europe and the Japanese in Indochina, and with a growing communist revolution in China, the time was right in the 1940's to launch their struggle against the French.
The early Vietminh was small and weak but it appealed to people and forged a powerful movement. Perhaps if FDR had still been alive, the U.S. would have accepted the Vietminh after the war but the U.S. was soon caught up in the Cold War and presidents from Truman to Nixon, as well as government officials and elected representatives from both parties saw the Vietnamese revolution as a spread of communism that would engulf the world like a fall of dominoes if it were not opposed. The issues of the day were to prevent "appeasement" of the communists like the appeasement of the Nazis at Munich; to avoid the accusations of being "soft on communism"; to avoid "losing" Vietnam as we had "lost" China; to avoid becoming targets of the McCarthyite right wing political thugs. The real character of the Vietminh, its antipathy to control by China or any other country, and its willingness to work with the west, were not understood.
The heart of the book is the American war in Vietnam, its origins under Kennedy, buildup under Johnson, and decline under Nixon and Kissinger. Karnow gives us the positions of all the key players - Johnson, MacNamara, William and McGeorge Bundy, Walt Rostow, Clark Clifford, Bobby Kennedy, and then Nixon, Laird, Kissinger, and many others in all of the administrations from Eisenhower to Ford. He describes the American military and diplomatic people. Most importantly, he knew, interviewed, and described the key Vietnamese leaders in both the north and the south - with surprising access to all of them.
There is much information about what key people thought, how it changed over time, and how public and private statements diverged further and further. There are very few if any heroes among the Americans in Karnow's book, and perhaps none at all among the South Vietnamese. There were plenty of heroes among the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong if, by heroes, we mean dedicated men and women who gave their lives for a cause. However Karnow considers that the behavior of the communists was violent, ruthless and even sadistic in their treatment of their enemies. Like so many wars, it degenerated into savagery.
The book ends with the day that a North Vietnamese Colonel Bui Tin, a man who had fought for 30 years and suffered much personal hardship and danger and was now a journalist for the North Vietnamese army newspaper, walked into the office of President Nguyen Van Thieu, who had already fled the country. The South Vietnamese officials said they were there to turn over power to him, but Bui Tin told them their power had crumbled and they had nothing to turn over. However, he said that if they were all patriots they had nothing to fear. Then he finished an article he was writing, went out into the park behind the building, lay down on his back, and "gazed at the sky, exalted." I imagine he was contemplating the culmination of his life's work.
Karnow was a seasoned journalist for major news outlets such as Time/Life, the Washington Post, and other media. He spent a great deal of time in Southeast Asia, obviously spoke fluent French, and had met the people and seen the places that he wrote about. Having myself lived during the events of the last part of the book, and having spent a significant part of my youth protesting and organizing against the war, I was deeply interested in what Karnow had to say.
I learned a lot of new information, had many of my ideas about the war confirmed, many deepened and elaborated, and had some others questioned. One key point on which Karnow and I agreed was that the U.S. could not win the war. One key reason was that the North Vietnamese were fully prepared to accept any level of casualties and go on fighting. Short of killing off the entire adult population of the country, the U.S. could not force them out of the war. The whole strategy of attrition was doomed from the start. It was the attrition of U.S. forces, that reached a level unacceptable to the American people, that forced the U.S. out of Vietnam.
A second key reason was that the South Vietnamese government and army, although they had a few competent commanders and army units willing to fight, did not care about the interests of the Vietnamese people. The President appointed generals whose job was to keep him in power and prevent other generals from seizing it from him. The generals' only mission, achieved by pleasing the President, was to make them and their family members rich by graft, theft, and exploitation of the army and the people. They stole from the people and even sold American arms and supplies to the Viet Cong. A majority of the army units, drafted and led by people they despised, fell in with the mentality of criminal behavior and ran away when confronted by determined Viet Cong and North Vietnamese units, even when they had overwhelming superiority in men and arms. The peasants in the countryside, exploited, beaten, robbed, tortured, bombed and shelled, would always prefer the communists, rough as they might be, to the South Vietnamese government, army, landlords, and the Americans. Karnow points out that the anti-communist Vietnamese generals couldn't win on their own but, as the Americans took over more and more of the fighting, drew even further away from trying to win the war and concentrated more and more on their internecine conflicts. It was impossible for the U.S. to win the war.
Karnow considers that Lyndon Johnson didn't want to fight the war. Johnson wanted to implement his Great Society program. But he was afraid of being attacked from the right by Republicans and conservative Democrats (they had them in those days) and concluded that he must absolutely show that he was not "soft on communism", or he would achieve nothing at all. He, rightfully, didn't trust the institutional optimism of his generals but his civilian advisers, Rostow, the Bundys (William and McGeorge), and most importantly Defense Secretary McNamara, believed in the war and Johnson was won over to the belief that he had to defeat the communists in order to stop the dominoes from falling and to preserve American credibility in world affairs. He was all in until the Tet offensive showed that the military's optimism was foolish and wrong. Asked for another 200,000 troops on top of the 500,000 already there, he balked.
Nixon was portrayed as a little crazy. He seriously considered dropping nuclear bombs on North Vietnam, or at least pretended that he did. It took hard work by Laird, Kissinger, and others, to dissuade him from making threats. Kissinger comes out better than I expected. A strong anti-communist, he was nevertheless very much a realist. He was perfectly willing to tell lies to the press but there is a sense that he did it with plans in mind that went beyond just covering his own ass - something that so many others were wont to do.
After having spent so much time and effort in the student movement that tried to stop the war, I was quite surprised at how little Karnow had to say about the student movement. I thought it was fundamental. Karnow treated it as if it were background noise, more of an effect than a cause of the growing American rejection of the war.
That's enough comment for now but before I give up I'll note that this 784 page book had a lot to say and it was all worth reading.
Of course none of the "extras" I noted in the bibliographic description of the book were in the audio version. However I have seen a visual edition of the book and was able to look at them.
I am currently watching Ken Burns' video documentary, The Vietnam War on Netflix. It covers the same ground as Karnow and comes to the same conclusions about the impossibility of victory. It also makes great use of the special advantages that audiovisual media have over plain text. The images are searing and when combined with the music of those times, well, I'll just say that it's a remarkable experience.
| Author | Feynman, Richard |
|---|---|
| Publication | Cambridge, Massachusetts: M.I.T. Press |
| Copyright Date | 1965 |
| Number of Pages | 173 |
| Extras | diagrams |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Science; Physics; Philosophy |
| When Read | March 2018 |
This is a transcription of a series of seven lectures in the Messenger Lectures series given at Cornell University in November, 1964. The transcriptions were reviewed by Feynman.
F discusses the properties of physical law, why we call them laws, how they are never proscriptive (it is always possible that someone will find an exception that invalidates what he had previously considered to be the universal applicability of the law.) He talks about some of the fascinating characteristics of the propositions that we consider to be laws of physics and how some of those characteristics are more interrelated than we think. He also talks about how we seek new laws and how, although we can state many of the laws in "psychologically" different ways, some of those ways can be simpler, more intuitive, and/or more fruitful in guiding research, than other ways even though they may all be mathematically equivalent.
Some examples of laws that were discussed include: the law of universal gravitation, the conservation laws (mass, energy, charge, and others), symmetry in physical laws, asymmetry (for example in the difference between past and future and in right handed vs. left handed phenomena, for which he uses electron spin as a defining difference), the counter-intuitive dual particle and wave phenomena, and the probabilistic and uncertainty properties revealed in quantum mechanics.
F appears to have considered that one day, physics would come to an end. Everything would be discovered and fully characterized or, if not, then there would be decreasing amounts of relatively uninteresting phenomena that require increasing amounts of more and more difficult research to nail down - until we get tired of it and mostly just let it go. He felt very excited and privileged to be living in an era when so many great discoveries were made and he could participate in them.
The lectures were said in the Foreword to have been given extemporaneously, with only "a few notes".
Although I felt that I was understanding a fair amount of what Feynman said, I recognize that there was a great deal that I only partially understood and some that I didn't understand at all. The man was an acknowledged genius - and not only as a scientist. His ability as a teacher is also remarkable as he explained things in a way that, in good part, even a person like me could understand. And to have done it off-the-cuff as it were, and with wonderful humor, just adds to the impressiveness of his achievement.
Here are a few things he said, or at least I imagined him to have said, that I'll record. Some of the comments below really did come from Feynman, and some are my extrapolations.
The laws of physics become laws as they become more and more general. As Newton realized, the law of universal gravitation didn't just explain the motion of the planets around the sun, but also of the moon around the earth and the behavior of falling bodies on earth. Now we see that the law also applies to the motions of stars in a galaxy and the motions of galaxies with respect to each other. Now, today, if someone tells us about something that violates the law we don't bother thinking about it. The chance that the guy is wrong is so much greater than that he's right, it isn't worth the trouble to investigate. However, there were anomalies, such as the orbit of Mercury. Einstein did investigate and, counter to all expectations, came up with a quite different and more extensive law.
"Reversability" in events is a fascinating subject for study. There are many physical events, including chemical reactions, that if we viewed them reversed in time would be indistinguishable from viewing them in the forward direction. But others are not, as the law of entropy tells us.
Math is an essential part of physics. It is impossible to fully understand physical law without mastering the mathematics. However math is different from physics in that, however the math comes out, the experiential evidence still rules. If the math predicts something that observation contradicts, the math may be just fine, but it's not a mathematical description of physical law.
We knew in 1964 that the universe is made of the same stuff as we are familiar with. Radiations from the stars prove that the stars are made of hydrogen and helium, like our sun. We know that they are made of protons, neutrons, and electrons. We know that they behave in accordance with the same laws of physics that we have developed here on earth.
It's now 2018, 64 years since these lectures were given. There is undoubtedly new knowledge acquired since then and, conceivably, there is a thing or three that Feynman said that he would have to disavow today. But it wouldn't surprise me to find out that that isn't so.
I don't know if Feynman would agree with my assigning the genre term "Philosophy" to his lectures, but that's what I think they are. They aren't just lectures in physics, they're lectures in how to understand the ideas that physicists have developed and in the ways that they differ from other kinds of writing and research. He even has a nice example of psychology and how we might claim that the cause of bad behavior in a man is child neglect. Then, when confronted with evidence to show that he was not neglected, we might claim that he was spoiled with too much love and attention. It's an off hand remark but one that is not without insight. In my own education I was taught to think about these issues as having to do with epistemology and philosophy of science.
| Author | Pelecanos, George |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999 |
| Copyright Date | 1996 |
| Number of Pages | 320 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | March 2018 |
In 1933 11 year old Peter Karras hangs out with his friends, mostly like him, the sons of Greek immigrants, though they also include the Italian Joey Recevo, the Irish kid Jimmy Boyle, and the Chinese boy Su. Pete loves his Greek neighborhood on the edge of Chinatown and has no special ambitions. Ten years later, he's in the Marines, bravely, and somewhat reluctantly, killing Japanese face to face in the Pacific. His first kill is a sniper using his M-1. Grabbing a .45 from a dead officer, he kills a sword wielding Japanese officer that is coming for him. Then, convinced that it is not his day to die, he pushes aside a dead Marine machine gunner, lifts the gun off the ground, and sprays at least four charging Japanese.
The story resumes back in DC in 1948. He is now married with a baby boy, philandering with other women, and hanging out with Joey Recevo, making money on shady odd jobs. He is sent with Joey to collect money from a Greek that Pete knows, but Pete insists on giving the guy a break. He won't beat up an old friend of his father and the guy promises to pay soon. Burke, the gangster loan shark, demands that Joey drop Pete off in front of a dark alley where he will be taught a lesson. The lesson is not just a beating. Burke smashes Pete's knee with a baseball bat, leaving him with a permanent limp and permanent pain. He goes to work as a short order cook for Niko, a Greek friend of his family and wants nothing more to do with Joey or crime.
All is well for a while, until Burke goes into the protection racket and decides to lean on Niko. In a rather frightening scene, Pete, Niko, and two other Greeks, all very tough guys, use guns to kill the four outside enforcers hired by Burke to push Niko. From there it is just a matter of time before a final confrontation. Niko hates what he has done and considers giving up his restaurant, but Pete, winning over Joey, who has had enough of crime and Burke and his criminals, goes over to Burke's place, kill Burke and wipe out the gang at the cost of both of their own lives.
There are a number of secondary stories including a 20 year old from Pennsylvania who comes to DC to find his pathetic, drug addicted sister and bring her home out of her life of drugs and prostitution, a story of a man working for Burke who has been killing prostitutes for his own sick reasons, and a story of Jimmy Boyle, now a cop, himself hopped up on Benzedrine, trying to find the prostitute killer. The boy and the cop are helped by Pete.
This was a gritty story about convincingly tough guys living convincingly hard lives. Pete is ashamed of his life. He is ashamed of his philandering. He wants to give more to his wife and son and makes half hearted efforts, but he's just not a family kind of man. He goes to church with his family and meets one of his old friends from the neighborhood who now has an office job, a house, a car, a wife, and children. The guy tells Pete that he always admired him. Brave, tough, handsome, devil-may-care Pete was the boy and the man that he always wished he could be. Pete tells him no, it's the family man who is living the admirable life, his own life is pretty worthless. By the time of the final shootout, Pete, and probably Joey Recevo too, have concluded that their lives haven't been worth much and won't be worth much in the future. They decide to go out, not in a blaze of glory, but in a final act of protection for Niko and his people, and restitution for their own misdeeds.
The story ends with a little epilogue ten years later in 1959. Niko is driving with his friend Costa and his little grandson who has been sent from Greece by Niko's ne-er do well son. His life is good and he hopes to bring up the boy to a happy life.
I sometimes found the story difficult to read. I wanted Pete to straighten out his life. I wanted him to give up his girlfriend and stick with his wife. I wanted him to build a relationship with his son, even though it was clearly going to be hard work. But I was forced against my will to accept that Pete just wouldn't do it, and to sympathize with him anyway.
It was a compelling story.
The title comes from an obsession of Pete's girlfriend, a beautiful woman who also had some education and an interest in the world. She saw a film of a nuclear bomb test flattening houses in a big shock wave. She believed that, if a war happened, DC would be flattened like that and it frightened her. One day, without telling Pete, she up and left town, leaving no word of where she had gone.
| Author | Hitchens, Christopher |
|---|---|
| Publication | Tantor Audio |
| Copyright Date | 2006 |
| Number of Pages | 158 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Biography |
| When Read | March 2018 |
Hitchens presents a political biography of Thomas Paine covering his early work in England, then in America, then back in England, in France, and finally back in America. His main concern is with Paine's books: Declaration of the Rights of Man and The Age of Reason but also having something to say about his other books and his roles in the American and French revolutions.
Paine is presented as a deist, an opponent of organized religion, and a sincere believer in democracy. He was an opponent of the excesses of the French revolution, which landed him in prison and might easily have sent him to the guillotine. He had hoped that the American and French revolutions would inspire revolution in England and in the other European countries, but of course that didn't happen. Hitchens has a fair amount to say about Paine's intellectual conservative opponent Edmund Burke and he gives us Paine's caustic and pretty damning critiques of Burke's and the British royalists' anti-democratic platitudes.
The past was always more complicated in reality than as we see it in our imaginations. Paine was a complicated figure. He struck me as having a very keen intelligence and a more progressive view of politics than we generally ascribe to people living at the end of the 18th century. He was a firm opponent of slavery and fought against it both in England and in the new United States. He was not a socialist in the nineteenth century sense of that term. He was not an opponent of capitalism. However he strongly opposed royalty and aristocracy and made mincemeat of the arguments presented by Burke and others in their defense.
| Author | Dychtwald, Zak |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: St. Martin's Press, 2018 |
| Copyright Date | 2018 |
| Number of Pages | 304 |
| Extras | notes, acknowledgments |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Society |
| Keywords | China |
| When Read | March 2018 |
For no particular reason, the author takes a course in Chinese while at Columbia University and then spends a semester or two in Hong Kong as part of the curriculum. He is a gregarious guy who meets people easily and becomes convinced that the young Chinese he encounters are important for the future of China and the world. After his graduation he travels to China and begins to seriously tour the whole country, studying the language, teaching English to support himself, making friends among dozens of young men and women in their twenties, and making notes for this book.
Most of the young people he meets appear to be elite students - getting or having college degrees, going to good schools, working like maniacs to get into top graduate schools and foreign schools, and dedicating themselves to getting ahead with far more commitment than I remember among the students I knew. He writes about many aspects of their lives. There is an emphasis in China on test taking to get ahead and they cram like mad, sometimes 80 hours a week, all seven days, for an entire year before the big SAT or similar tests. Only the very top students get into grad school or manage to go abroad.
Young men especially collect big sums of money from their parents and grandparents (because of the one child policy they are often the only grandchild of four grandparents) to buy apartments. They need an apartment and a good job to attract a wife. There are so many more young men than women (because of abortions and even baby killings to make the one child a boy) that competition for women is very keen.
D gives us useful views of family life and family obligations. There is what looks to American eyes to be an obsession with giving expensive gifts to relatives, and an obsession of older relatives to intrude in what Americans see as private matters - How much money do you make? Do you have a girl or boy friend? How old is he or she? When do you plan to get married? What does your apartment cost and what does it look like? Will you be living in a "Tier 1" city?
There is a section on digital life. China is moving ahead of the U.S. in its development of phone software. "WeChat" is much bigger than Facebook now and combines all of the American social network capabilities. TaoBao and TMall, both part of Alibaba, do more business than Amazon and are easier to use. Censorship is a problem, but not one that many people seem very focused on. It seems to be more a matter of deleting or quarantining content rather than arresting young people and punishing them.
Because China has the world's largest population, it also has the world's largest gay and lesbian population, estimated at 5% or 70 million people. Although they are not yet as free as in the west, they have moved very far from the days of legal suppression of homosexuals. There are now gay clubs and bars, websites, forums, and chat rooms. Young people are often in the closet as far as relatives are concerned, but they are beginning to come out.
All is not roses in this incredibly rapidly developing China. Housing prices are high and inflated even though new construction is keeping up with the huge demographic shift from rural to urban life. It may become a "housing bubble". Higher education is expanding rapidly but, as in the U.S., good jobs for the graduates aren't keeping pace. The shift from a manufacturing to a service economy (I didn't know they were trying to do that but they are) is happening, but not as fast as desired. The leadership wants to develop the internal market so that a booming economy doesn't require so much foreign purchasing of Chinese products. The one child policy has been rescinded but birth rates remain low in the cities where, according to D, there is an average of 0.7 children born to each woman. The demographic problems of youth and aging are getting steadily worse. Democracy is limited at best and absent at worst, however pervasive corruption seems to be controlled and defeated much more effectively than in the past. Now that corruption is being rooted out, few young people aspire to jobs in the Party or government. They want to become capitalists and get rich.
D says that the real growth rate, after eliminating factors that aren't real growth, has been steady at 7%. That's way higher than anything in the U.S. or most of Europe. According to D, China has already surpassed the U.S. in annual GDP! The government hopes to become the world leader, not only in manufacturing, but in innovation and creative new technology too. The pervasive test cramming produces super-high test scores but not innovative thinking. It is for that reason that they encourage students to study abroad and come home after. It helps that Chinese students in the U.S. have a tough time getting legal immigration or work permits after graduating. By 2049, the one hundredth anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic, the Party hopes to bring the same standard of living to China that is found in the U.S. and Western Europe.
I believe that the Chinese have their work cut out for them but they're making incredible progress. I had hoped there would be more push for free speech, free press, and democracy, not to mention socialism, but I can see that most of the people think the Communist Party is doing a good job and they're quite happy to leave politics to the Party and just pursue their private lives.
It's a very dynamic economy and society. I think the era of American economic and cultural supremacy is coming to an end. I don't think we're going to be a third world country but I'm not sure that the coming generations are likely to believe in American exceptionalism for much longer.
Dychtwald is now running a consultancy in New York helping American companies and organizations connect with Chinese. I think he's going to make a ton of money.
| Author | Simenon, Georges |
|---|---|
| Original Language | French |
| Translators | Woodward, Daphne |
| Publication | 1951 |
| Copyright Date | 1950 |
| Number of Pages | 210 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | March 2018 |
A drunken young woman dancer and striptease artist in the small Montmartre late night club, "Picratt", comes in to a Paris police station to report that she overheard a customer at the club talk about murdering a countess. She gave a brief description of the customer but claimed not to know his name or the name of the countess. An hour or two later, sobering up, she withdrew her story. A few hours later she is found strangled to death and the next day a dissolute and drug addicted woman who turns out indeed to have been a countess is also found strangled to death. Maigret is put in charge of the case.
By means of long and tedious follow up work by M's subordinates, tracing the history of the countess and tracking a young homosexual drug addict who had some sort of relationship with her, clues gradually come together and the name of the probable killer is found. Since the young addict knows something about the guy but won't say anything, a trap is baited and the killer is found and shot while trying to escape at the young addict's apartment.
The book has been translated into English at least twice and published under various titles, including Maigret and the Strangled Girl and Maigret at Picratt's, a literal translation of the original Maigret au "Picratt's". There have also been at least three film adaptations.
The story is simple and rather straightforward but very well told. The police actions, the owners of the club, the behavior of the young addict, and the methods used to track down the killer, are all natural and convincing. It was a very satisfying mystery and it shows up on at least one list of Simenon's ten best Maigret stories.
As in the other Maigret books I've read, there is no mention of the war that ended just five years before. There may be a history of a character from five years ago, or ten years ago, but never from "during the war" - which indicates to me that Simenon had prescribed various rules and formulas for his writing and was sticking to them. I guess if one is going to write a large number of books, as Simenon did in his Maigret series, it can be a lot easier if one sticks to a plan.
The poor young homosexual drug addict is treated with considerable contempt. He is a "homo", a "dope addict", and a "pansy" in one translation, a "fairy" in another. When Maigret asks permission from his chief to bait a trap in which the young man might be killed, he says he'll try to prevent it but it's not a major loss if he fails. We, or at least our writers, are probably more generous to people today. Or maybe it's the publishers that insist on it.
| Author | Harari, Yuval Noah |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Hebrew |
| Translators | Harari, Yuval Noah |
| Publication | Signal Books, 2014 |
| Copyright Date | 2011 |
| Number of Pages | 464 |
| Extras | notes, bibliography, photos |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Anthropology; Sociology |
| When Read | March 2018 |
This is a kind of extended essay on the past (mainly) and future (a bit) of humanity. Harari, a professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, reviews the emergence of Homo Sapiens from our hominid ancestors and cousins, our conquest of plants and animals, and our spread over the entire earth. His broad topics are "The Cognitive Revolution", "The Agricultural Revolution", "The Unification of Humankind", and "The Scientific Revolution". He pays special attention to the impact of our agricultural and industrial revolutions on plants, other animals, and the environment (highly negative), our ideologies (religion, nationalism, even liberalism), capitalism, and the further intelligent design of intelligence on earth through genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, or the combination of human and computer intelligence (cyborgs). He regards one or more of those outcomes as inevitable although we haven't gone far enough along the path to have any informed ideas about how any of them will develop.
Harari surprised me by arguing that the world is in no danger of running out of resources. He believes that the advance of science and technology will keep discovering new ways to do things with plentiful materials and to work ever more efficiently with the materials we have now. He made a reasonable, even if not 100% convincing, case for that view. He thought the real dangers were our destruction of the environment and the extinction of so many species on earth.
He also surprised me by arguing strongly for animal rights. The pain and suffering that our factory farms inflict on chickens, cows, pigs, and all other farm animals is very intense. It's a problem that I knew almost nothing about and had spent little time thinking about.
My first reaction to the book was negative. I thought I was reading a popular book on evolution and anthropology in which complicated subjects were being treated cavalierly and with an air of unjustified certainty. However, as I read further I began to see the whole enterprise differently. I began to read it not as some sort of scientific introduction to anthropology, but as an extended essay on the progress of human life. Harari was giving us his view on where humanity had come from and where it was going.
Although I try hard to approach other people's views with a spirit of objectivity, I have to confess that the fact that Harari's broad notions corresponded pretty closely to my own was a factor in my reinterpretation of his book. He is a convinced atheist who sees little need of explaining why. He considers that the regulation of capitalism and its forced alignment with the needs of all people and not just of the capitalists themselves is essential for human welfare.
Like me, Harari believes that we are at an inflection point in the development of the human race. In a relatively small number of years (though not in my lifetime, I think, and possibly not in the lifetimes even of my grandchildren) a new race (if "race" is the right word") of intelligent beings is going to arise on earth. This new race will be smarter than we are now. It may be a continuation of the human race with differently engineered genes, or something involving artificial intelligence, or a combination of the two.
I have to agree that this is coming. I think that the advance of science and technology makes this inevitable. If humans are currently 1,000 times more intelligent than our best Artificial Intelligence systems, and if those system improve at a rate of only 1% per year, it will take only 695 years for AI to reach our level, and only another 72 years to reach double our current IQ (if we are a million times more intelligent, multiply the first number by 2 to get 1,390 years.) And as the AIs get smarter, I would expect their rate of improvement to increase, reducing both of those time frames. This is all, in the time view of cosmologists, geologists, and evolutionary biologists, the figurative blink of an eye.
It seems to me that our knowledge of genetics and genetic engineering is advancing by more than 1% per year. We may have no problem keeping pace with, or outdistancing, any AI potential competitors that we create. But whether the product of all of this engineering (whether biological or electronic or both together) should be referred to by the pronoun "we", is problematic.
Harari seems to be well aware of all of these issues. He doesn't even try to answer them and I have to agree with him that there are too many unknowns for speculation to be very useful.
It was an interesting and thought provoking book. I read it for the NCI book group and will be very interested to hear the reactions to it.
I'm two thirds of the way through Life 3.0 by Max Tegmark, another take on the progress of life, but this time emphasizing the future instead of the past. Tegmark too considers that we will not run out of resources any time soon. Looking at the earth, our solar system, our galaxy, and our universe from the point of view of physical mass and energy, he argues that humans have barely scratched the surface of what is available - especially considering that he perceives the future in terms of inorganic, i.e., AI, life following on from organic beings. It's both a fascinating and a disturbing topic. More below when I've finished the book.
| Author | Harris, Robert |
|---|---|
| Publication | London: Hutchinson, Penguin, Random House, 2015 |
| Copyright Date | 2015 |
| Number of Pages | 416 |
| Extras | dramatis personae, glossary, maps |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Rome; Cicero |
| When Read | March 2018 |
Driven from Rome and Italy by Caesar's creature Clodius in 58 BC, Cicero and Tiro flee to Greece where they live until 47 BC. When they are finally able to return, his family, his wealth, and his position in society are all in tatters. Nevertheless, he is still a man with a reputation and a formidable set of political and oratorical skills. He works sometimes with Caesar, sometimes with Pompey, sometimes even with Crassus, always attempting to restore the power of the Senate and to give renewed life to the Republic. He performs a careful balancing act of accommodation and resistance to the men who would overthrow the Republic.
We know, of course, where it will end. There is civil war. The old rights of the Senate and the city are run over roughshod. Cicero tries hard to back the tyrant posing the least danger to the Republic, always attempting to win him to respect for the ancient system. He backs Octavian after Julius Caesar's assassination in hopes of blocking the more obviously dangerous Marc Antony. But in the end, under pressure from Antony and Lepidus, Octavian agrees to the execution of Cicero as part of his price for joining a second triumvirate. Tiro tries to save him but Cicero, older, dispirited, worn out, hopeless, is unable to fire up his energy to save himself. He is caught and killed.
Tiro, who had been freed by Cicero and given a farm, retires to his farm to work it, to preserve Cicero's work, and to write his biography of his lifelong master.
As in the previous books, Harris concentrates on the personal, intellectual and political life of Cicero himself rather than on the history of Rome. Nevertheless we learn a great deal about the events of the downfall of the Republic and the forces that brought it about. By the end of the book I felt that there was no hope for the Roman Republic. Reviving it was a fantasy. The only question was which of the potential dictators would dominate Italy and the Empire.
Cicero is portrayed, as we say, warts and all. He was a man of magnificent learning and intelligence and a surprising dedication to his ideals. But he faced terrible foes and competitors. He did not always stand up to them. Even though he was certainly justified in making compromises where failing to do so could win nothing and cost him his career or his life, his conscience hurt and he was always forced to make fine calculations about how far he could push and how far he must compromise or run away. There were rarely any good and clear cut options for him.
It requires a highly sophisticated and intelligent author to properly portray a highly sophisticated and intelligent subject. Harris fills the bill.
| Author | Lewis, Clive Staples (CS) |
|---|---|
| Publication | San Francisco: Harper, 2001 |
| Copyright Date | 1944 |
| Number of Pages | 227 |
| Extras | New introduction by the author |
| Extras | Foreword by Kathleen Norris |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Religion |
| Keywords | Christianity |
| When Read | April 2018 |
This book is a compendium of three lectures given by Lewis over the British Broadcasting Corporation radio network in 1942, 1943, and 1944. It was edited and republished by the author as a single book in the 1950's and has gone through multiple editions since then.
Lewis introduces Christianity with a discussion of morality. He argues that our notions of right and wrong cannot be based simply on personal feelings and desires since we often acknowledge the rightness of things that we are personally afraid of and are loath to do. They cannot be based simply on what our parents have taught us in part because our understanding of right and wrong has a higher source than mere rote teaching, just as our understanding of the multiplication table has a higher source than just whatever a teacher says. There is a force and logic to it that are not to be denied. From there he argues for a higher source for our natures as human beings, one that goes beyond the purely biological part of our being. Biology can explain our physical structure and the laws of biology cannot be broken, but our notions of right and wrong and value do not originate in the physical sphere and it is within the capacity of our free will to do right or to do wrong, to follow the law of God or not.
From this beginning, Lewis goes on to develop his understanding of God, the purpose of man, and the various Christian doctrines including the trinity, the virgin birth, the resurrection, judgment, and eternal life - what I think of as the whole nine yards of Christian mythology.
By "mere" Christianity, Lewis seems to mean that he is not concerned here with the differences between the various Christian confessions, but rather with the broad outlines of Christian religion that are accepted by all of them.
I was very impressed by Lewis' opening argument. I agree that our sense of right and wrong has what might be called a "higher" component to it, one that is not based simply on personal desire or personal sentiment. It is certainly true that we, or perhaps I should just say "many of us", understand some things to be right or wrong quite independently of what we want. We, or many of us, accept obligations that are distasteful to us but which we nevertheless believe are "right". I think this is a good way to begin a discussion of God as an authority for a higher law.
However that's as far as I was able to go with Lewis. He gives us an attractive ground for "higher" law, and I feel the force of that attraction, but I cannot go from there to a supernatural being, a creator of the universe, a providential God, a son of God, or an eternal life. The more he went into those subjects, the more he seemed to me to be just cobbling together an implausible and illogical defense of the indefensible. I liked some of his ideas about how our obligations and our human desires can come into conflict with each other and what we need to do to try to assert our sense of higher values over lower ones. I appreciate his desire for his readers to become better people and even some of his advice about how to do that. But the supernatural framework on which he pins all of that seemed to me totally arbitrary and supported by zero evidence. It seemed to me that he badly wanted to join the party and forced himself to drink the kool-aid, resolving to accept all of the dogma in order to continue the warm feeling of belonging to a higher power.
Personally, I am not able to accept even the most basic Deist beliefs. The Deists toss out the providential God, the God who listens to prayers and interferes in human events, and just accept a God who is the "higher" source of values and, perhaps, the creator of the universe. But existence requires evidence. Maybe the cosmologists will work out more about the origin of the universe, or the multiverse, or whatever it is we live in. Maybe it will always be a mystery. But just because it's a mystery that doesn't entitle us to postulate whatever we like as the answer. As for the source of morality, I think the answer is complex. There is Hume's famous "sentiment", Aristotle's virtue, E. O. Wilson's and the "sociobiologists" notions of the evolutionary development of selfishness and altruism and, a special favorite of mine, Kant's notion of a categorical imperative based on logic alone. But that's much too big a subject for a mere book review.
I have read several books on Christianity in the last year or two. I had been thinking about trying to write a book on subjects related to rationalism and critical thinking and wanted to read the best of the Christian apologetics. I didn't want my criticism of religion to be based on ignorance. However I'm not yet finding anything that gives me a stronger attraction to religion.
| Author | Warren, Elizabeth |
|---|---|
| Publication | MacMillan Audio, 2017 |
| Copyright Date | 2017 |
| Number of Pages | 352 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Politics |
| When Read | April 2018 |
Writing after the election of Donald Trump, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts analyzes the state of the American economy, government and democracy. Providing example after example, she shows how the economy has been made to work only for those in the top 10% of earners, and the Republican Party, now dominating all three branches of government, is focused tightly on the goal of transferring more power and more money to the rich.
FDR had greatly improved our situation in the U.S. and 70% of the spectacular growth of the American economy in the 50's and 60's went to the middle class - building the largest middle class in the world. That all ended with Ronald Reagan who promoted the theory of "trickle down" economics that now completely dominates all Republicans in spite of clear evidence from virtually all experts that trickle down does not occur. The real value of our gross domestic product has doubled since Reagan's time, but 99% of the increase has gone to the top 10%, mostly to the top 1%, and only 1% of the new wealth has gone to the bottom 90% of people in America. Unions have been wrecked and now have only one third of the membership they had in the 1950's and 60's. The minimum wage has stagnated and is 30% below its value in 1970 in constant dollars. Regulations on banking, finance, environmental pollution, contributors to global warming, labor rights, etc., are all being ripped to shreds, sometimes with the participation of Democrats. Student loan debt has become a huge burden destroying the futures of hard working young people who have no hope of ever paying off their loans and can never get a mortgage because of their outstanding debt. Mortgages with balloon rates, hidden fees, and deceptive come-ons are costing people their homes. Public schools are declining. Banks and other industries are consolidating. After the "Citizen's United" ruling by the Supreme Court, politics is now awash in dark money. Oceans of money spent on experts, publicists, and lobbyists have pushed trickle down policies on all government representatives. Honest Republicans can now be forced to capitulate simply by threatening to heap money on their primary opponents. It's sometimes not even necessary to give anyone money - just to threaten to use it against someone. Even Supreme Court justices have been corrupted, as for example Antonin Scalia, who took an average of 21 trips per year financed by wealthy Republican contributors.
Warren used several working class people as examples. "Gia" was a Walmart worker making near minimum wages who was forced out when the company replaced her and many others at her store with temp workers who got no benefits. "Michael" worked for DHL but was laid off in the 2008 crisis. His home that he had lavished attention on was foreclosed by a bank that sold him a predatory mortgage and he had to watch while the unsold house went to seed. He finally got a job at Nabisco but was out again when they moved their production from Chicago to Mexico. "Kai" was a student who borrowed money to go to an unaccredited college, eventually to find herself short of a degree with $100,000 in debt. She went to a public college to try finish her degree but found not only that she could borrow no more, but that the credits from her two years at the unaccredited school were not acceptable to the public college and she would have to virtually start over again. As with other ex-students, she must pay above market 6% interest rates with no possibility of declaring bankruptcy. Five years later she was living back with her family, working as a waitress, putting all her spare cash into paying off the debt, but having gotten only from $100,000 to $90,000 in five years.
Michael voted for Hillary Clinton. Gia voted for Trump, believing his lies about Making American Great Again. Kai didn't bother to vote.
The book is a ringing call to action to stop all this and build up our middle class, our working people, our students, our infrastructure, and truly make America great again.
I found the examples and the arguments in this book overpowering. I knew all the basics, but I didn't know many of the horrible details that Warren understood and explained. For example, just a couple of lines hidden in a 1,600 page budget document blew a big hole in the Dodd-Frank banking regulations and now allow the biggest banks to do the same things that brought on the economic crisis in 2008 - all insured by the U.S. government.
Money has become very hard to get at the bottom but flows freely at the top. A hedge fund manager bought a 200 million dollar, 24,000 square foot penthouse in New York and threw multimillion dollar parties for his close confidants and leading managers. How many people's lives could be restored just using the money spent on his parties?
I was infuriated. I am sorry I voted for Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders. It's time to fight hard to educate the American people about what is being done to them.
I've been recommending the book to everyone and will try to increase my efforts in politics.
The Sanders/Clinton question is bigger than the emotionally thick but rationally slender argument I made for it in my comment above. Yes, I believe that Sanders understands the rigging of the economy and the plight of the American majority better than Clinton. But Clinton may be better at managing to get legislation enacted to make, or at least move towards, the needed changes. When the struggle between radicals and centrists occurs again in 2020 I will still face difficult choices.
| Author | Brooke, Geoffrey |
|---|---|
| Publication | Barmsley, South Yorkshire, UK: Pen and Sword, 2005 |
| Copyright Date | 1982 |
| Number of Pages | 288 |
| Extras | index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Naval; World War II |
| When Read | April 2018 |
Growing up in the family of a ranking officer in the Royal Navy, Brooke joined the navy as a Midshipman immediately after public (i.e., private) school, presumably at age 17 or maybe even 14 - he doesn't say. In 1939, at age 19, he is serving on the battleship Nelson in the North Sea when the war begins. That is the beginning of an amazing career in which he saw action in the Med, the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean, the Pacific, and off the North Cape, serving in battleships, a destroyer, a cruiser, an aircraft carrier, and in a native wooden Indonesian sailing prau. He was on the HMS Prince of Wales with the battle cruiser Hood fighting the Bismark. He was on the ship when she took Winston Churchill to meet Franklin Delano Roosevelt at Placentia Bay in Newfoundland and met both men. Later, still on the Prince of Wales, he was sunk by Japanese aircraft off Singapore and was one of the last to make it hand over hand on a long cable to a nearby destroyer. He survived to perform various naval duties in the defense of Singapore, and then escape to various islands, then Sumatra. From Sumatra he was ordered with a small number of other officers considered most useful to the UK, to take a small coastal sailing prau across the Indian Ocean, eventually surviving strafing attacks from a Japanese scout plane, storms, and limited food and water, to land on Ceylon. Then he fought in the Med in a destroyer, where he was continuously seasick, then a cruiser escorting a convoy to Murmansk, and finally to the aircraft carrier Formidable with the Royal Navy in the Pacific. All in all he survived at least a dozen incidents where many other men were killed, suffering no wounds at all.
Brooke appears to have lived a charmed life. Maybe being sunk in a battleship, hounded out of Singapore, frozen in the north, seasick for weeks on end, and the target of many shells, bullets, bombs, and torpedoes doesn't really count as a charmed life, but surely escaping injury in all of them does. It also appears to this American to have been a privileged life. He was what the Brits would call an officer and a gentleman - despite having nothing like what we in the U.S. would call higher education. His real qualification for becoming a midshipman, a "snottie" in seaman's slang, and then an officer was simply that he was the son of an officer, in a family that was well known to the officer class of the RN. He had all the right attributes, tall, handsome, athletic, young, blond, well spoken - he must have been a big winner with the ladies. He spoke off-handedly of "the girl of the moment", a "tempestuous encounter" with a beautiful girl to whom "I lost my heart but not quite my head", and more.
My comments on all that are a little snide, or maybe more than a little, but I do admire the guy. He made light of his own contributions to the war but the eulogy I read of him on the Internet cited a number of real contributions and heroic acts.
It was an interesting book by an interesting and admirable man.
| Author | Sinclair, Upton |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Open Road, 2016 |
| Copyright Date | 1948 |
| Number of Pages | 649 |
| Extras | Excerpt of O Shepherd Speak! |
| Extras | About the author |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | April 2018 |
"Sunset and evening star And one clear call for me." - Tennyson
Lanny is called back to Washington from a vacation with his wife and little boy on the Gulf Coast. FDR sends him to Italy. He is to do with the Italian upper class what he did with the Vichy upper class in North Africa, namely, to show them that the Allies are going to win this war but they have no designs on the countries they conquer. At least as far as the United States is concerned, the future of Italy is up to the Italians. It is now a question of throwing in with the winners and participating in the spoils, or sticking with Mussolini and his German backers and being ground to powder with them. Lanny's message is received and understood.
Sneaking around Italy isn't a promising approach. After being put ashore in the dead of night by an American speedboat, Lanny walks boldly into the offices of the Gestapo in Rome and tells them he is on a mission from Hitler and must be taken to headquarters at once. After the appropriate checking, he does indeed visit Hitler and Goering and convinces them that he should be sent back to Italy to find out who among the Italian leadership are likely traitors to the Fascist cause. He does that and is examined by no less frightening a person than Heinrich Himmler himself. Lanny reports the wrong people of course and then goes back to Germany to visit his sister Marceline, who suddenly warns him by phone that his life is in danger. He instantly goes underground, without even going back to his hotel room for his suitcase. Making contact with a man identified for him for emergencies by Bernhardt Monck, he slips out of Germany by the skin of his teeth and gets to Switzerland.
His next mission is to contact the French fascists led by Charlot de Bruyne, younger son of his long deceased amie Marie, and get them to turn on the Germans. He succeeds with great difficulty and his actions help the allied landings in the south of France, but Charlot is killed by the Germans or the French fascists. Lanny winds up as a translator in an American Captain's and later a Colonel's uniform, working to interrogate German prisoners. The most important is General Emil Meissner, older brother of Lanny's old and lost friend Kurt. He gets Emil to help the Americans in hopes of helping Kurt and shortening the war.
In the end, in October, 1944, Lanny is recalled to Hyde Park where he again meets the now old and sick FDR. He worries about the health of the President and about what will happen to the country and the world if he dies.
As always when I read American historical works, I am reminded that the bitter divisions that we see in the U.S. today have a long history. The battle between the rich and the reformers representing the poor is as old as Hamilton and Jefferson and Taft and Teddy Roosevelt. Sinclair writes of the 1944 election, "There could be no halfway verdict; either it was Roosevelt and his party or it was his opponents, who had falsified so recklessly about him, and his friends and family, and even about the little black Fala [FDR's dog], who now lay peacefully snoozing at his master's feet ...".
Since there are two more Lanny Budd novels, it was obvious that Lanny would survive his trip into "Naziland". Nevertheless, I couldn't help being upset by his trip into Germany and Italy. I wanted him to get out of there. Sinclair raised the tension very convincingly, as he had in the past. Lanny's interrogation by Himmler was particularly disturbing and I read it with much trepidation.
There are now just two volumes remaining in the series. I am holding off starting the first of the two because I am not eager to complete them and have no more to look forward to. I'm glad that I will have finished them while I still have enough life and brain function left to appreciate what I'm reading. I will probably finish the remaining two this year. I probably won't re-read the whole series, but might re-read my book notes of them.
Next up, O Shepherd Speak.
| Author | Scalzi, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | Tor Science Fiction |
| Copyright Date | 2005 |
| Number of Pages | 318 |
| Extras | Acknowledgments |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | April 2018 |
75 year old widower and former professional writer John Perry, with nothing much to live for and not much time left to live, joins the Colonial Defense Forces. His mind is extracted from his brain and implanted in a new 20 year old body built from his own DNA plus additions that make him more athletic and give him more acute senses than any "realborn" person - the old body then being discarded. The purpose of the CDF is to advance and defend human colonies in distant star systems where humans are in competition with many other intelligent species for habitable planets in the universe.
Being a bright and flexible fellow, Perry solves a number of difficult military problems and advances quickly through the ranks. Then he meets a CDF Special Forces warrior named Jane Sagan (Special Forces people are named after dead scientists) who looks exactly like his dead wife Kathy. He is sure that she is his dead wife, brought to life somehow in the same way that he was in his new body. However, while she was indeed constructed from Kathy's DNA, it was done after Kathy's death and no mind transfer occurred. She knows nothing about Perry or any other realborn person and initially rejects his efforts to tell her about their connection.
There's lots of action, various simply portrayed aliens, some imaginative battle scenes, and a growing interest by Jane/Kathy in Perry. In the end, they win the key battles, Jane and Perry are assigned to separate units in different space ships but their relationship has been cemented and will undoubtedly be a part of future volumes in the series.
The personal relationships, sociology, and politics of the book are nicely tuned to the requirements of boys and young men, but not stupidly so. There is one passage where Perry is pretty disgusted with killing aliens who haven't really done anything to him - they just want to, or perhaps already, inhabit the same worlds that the Colonial Union has picked out for human colonization. But he is ordered to get over it and he does. It is necessary for the military SF appeal of the book that moral questions about sapient but not human life not intrude too much into the story.
As with much SF, the needs of the plot are allowed to dictate violations of known science. Besides the usual slight of hand needed for instantaneous interstellar travel, done in this case by an appeal to the concept of "skips" in the "multiverse", it turns out that the opponents of humans aren't too capable or too numerous to overcome. The single race that is clearly more scientifically advanced than humanity is composed of some sort of religious zealots who only harm humans because they love them and want them to go to heaven, or something like that, and are content to leave humans alone on any planet on which they have lost a battle to the humans.
The writing is straightforward, but quite nicely done. For example:
'“How did she know you were in love?” Jane asked. “When you’re a teenager and you’re in love, it’s obvious to everyone but you and the person you’re in love with,” I said. “Don’t ask me why. It just works that way."'
I believe that this was Scalzi's biggest hit. As of this writing, it has 2,362 Amazon reviews and led to a half dozen more books in the series. I knew what to expect because I read The B-Team in 2015. Scalzi's book is a fast and pleasant read, not to be taken seriously, but not stupidly written. I enjoyed reading it.
The Acknowledgments section contains a special nod to Robert Heinlein. It seems to me that this book is very obviously inspired by Heinlein's Starship Troopers.
Nineteen years after first publication, there are now 25,871 "ratings" of the book on Amazon compared to the 2,362 "reviews" when I last looked, thirteen years after first publication. Goodreads (owned now by Amazon) reports 197,497 ratings. I'm curious about that.
| Author | Faust, Wolfgang |
|---|---|
| Original Language | German |
| Translators | Sprech Media |
| Publication | Bayern Classic Publications, 2016 |
| Copyright Date | 1948 |
| Number of Pages | 138 |
| Extras | Introduction by the author |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | World War II; Eastern front |
| When Read | April 2018 |
Purporting to be a memoir of a young tank driver named Wolfgang Faust (see comment below), this book recounts several days in October 1943. A force of Waffen SS in 20 Tiger tanks, accompanied by motorized infantry in armored Hanomag half tracks and supported by a half dozen Stuka dive bombers, attacks a Soviet position. Fighting through Russian infantry and T-34 tanks, the unit suffers significant losses but captures the objective they were assigned to take. However they find that they are in an untenable position. The other components of the offensive of which this action was a part never managed to make their assaults and now the tank force is isolated and about to be surrounded and annihilated. The rest of the book is about their fighting retreat, losing more and more men and vehicles until they finally arrive at a river bridge which they defend along with forces at the bridge until the handful of survivors make it to the other side of the river and blow the bridge.
They have captured a young Russian woman radio operator whom the commander (of both the tank and the group of tanks) believes to be an important intelligence officer who will be turned over to the authorities for torture. Faust feels sorry for her. She tells him that she is not an intelligence officer, merely the mistress of the local Red Army general. When his commander is away from the tank, Faust releases the woman, then shoots her in the head as she runs away, thus saving her from the torture.
German forces had arrived to defend the position after the bridge was blown, but the Red Army soon rolled over them, destroying them with bombardments from air and land and running a pontoon bridge across the river in very little time. Faust and his commander, almost the last survivors, are on the run again for the next river and the next position that is believed to be able to stop the Reds.
There was a lot of comment on Amazon about this book and another by the same author by WWII enthusiast readers. The consensus was that the book was not a memoir but a work of fiction of unknown origin. A German reader found no mention of this book in the German bibliographic sources. The technical details were a mix of highly accurate observations about tanks and tank warfare, and other statements that made no sense in October 1943. The nonsensical statements included the presence of large numbers of what the readers judged to be JS-3 Stalin tanks and T-34 85s, neither of which would have reached the front except perhaps in tiny numbers at that time. There were combats that were not entirely unbelievable, but were overblown. Indeed, tanks might have their turrets blown off, have armor piercing shells ricochet around inside the tanks, and burn in spectacular fires, but most tank losses were apparently much less dramatic than that - often damage to the treads and running gear that immobilized the tank.
In any case, it was a striking book. Men on both sides, but especially the Russians, were portrayed as fanatical killers who were perfectly willing to die if they could take some of their enemies with them. Here's a quote:
"I remembered the blank, almond eyes of the other driver, and I knew these were Russians from the interior of the Soviet Union, men with no fear, no nerves, and no hesitation. They didn’t care if they lived one minute and died the next, unlike us with our prayers and our politics. These were the men we were sent into Russia to fight, to keep them away from our culture and our architecture and our racial purity. - I must confess that I pissed myself."
My reaction to the book was pretty similar to the other WWII readers. It was likely a piece of fiction, but also very possibly written by a man who had fought in the east and knew whereof he wrote. It was a very intense book that grabbed the reader by the throat and made him pay attention.
| Author | Hunter, Alan |
|---|---|
| Publication | London: Constable and Robinson, 2010 |
| Copyright Date | 1956 |
| Number of Pages | 272 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | April 2018 |
Inspector George Gently of Scotland Yard and his sergeant Dutt are sent to the (fictional) seaside resort of Starmouth on the east coast of England to investigate a murder. By means of wide eyed observation, careful assembly of small facts, clever interrogations, and refusal to substitute easy answers for rigorous logic he finds the killer and uncovers a spy/sabotage ring originating in the East Bloc. The dead man was a traitor to the group who made off with a million dollars in what he must not have realized was counterfeit money and was pursued and killed by a local boss for the gang.
The logic of the chase is quite interesting. As in the previous Gently book I read, the people introduced early in the story turn out to be the ones who are indeed involved in the crime, but it takes time and cleverness to uncover their secrets and press them into actions that result in their discovery and apprehension. As before, Gently finds himself confronting the killer seemingly alone and unarmed. By luck, "Nits", a local half crazy nitwit is hiding on the scene and attacks the killer, knocking the knife from his hand. When the big killer than tries to strangle the detective, Gently hits him in the throat, knocking him down. He handcuffs him and brings him out to the police who are arriving at the scene.
Gently is still a thin character. We known nothing about whether he is married or has any family. Presumably he has a home in London, but we known nothing about that either. His only confirmed interest apart from police work is his addiction to peppermint cremes. I think I ought to pass on whatever is Book 3 in the series and, if I read more, try one from his mature period to see if Hunter developed over time.
| Author | McCullough, David G. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Simon and Schuster, 2017 |
| Copyright Date | 2017 |
| Number of Pages | 192 |
| Extras | photos |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | United States |
| When Read | April 2018 |
This is a collection of 15 speeches delivered between 1989 and 2016 by the very popular and highly regarded historian and biographer. Most appear to be commencement addresses delivered at various colleges and universities. The rest commemorate government buildings and, more especially, the people and institutions associated with them. Two of those were delivered at the U.S. Congress and one at the White House. The speeches are printed in chronological order.
The speeches, all aimed at popular audiences, not professional historians, are filled with information about the history of the United States and of various prominent American citizens. Sometimes they concentrate on people who were important in the founding of a particular school, or on people for whom the school is named, such as Lafayette College. They are generally inspirational, aimed at getting the listeners and readers to take a greater interest in history, to read more books - both historical and otherwise, and to participate in public affairs. They are all straightforward, simple though not, I think, too superficial, and easy to understand.
Although I read a lot of history, and have read three of M's previous books, it is still the case that much of what M had to say was new and interesting to me. He's a good historian and biographer and I believe his high reputation is well deserved.
I read this for the NCI book group.
| Author | Robbe-Grillet, Alain |
|---|---|
| Original Language | French |
| Translators | Howard, Richard |
| Publication | New York: Grove Press, 1994 |
| Copyright Date | 1956 |
| Number of Pages | 224 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | May 2018 |
An itinerant watch salesman named Mathias boards a ferry with a suitcase full of watches to leave his home city on the mainland to travel to the island where he was born to spend the day selling his wares. He arrives, visits a few homes, rents a bicycle, and travels around the island stopping at houses where he hopes for a sale. We are not given the name of the island, the city, or even the country in which all of this occurs.
The narrative consists of a stream of Mathias' perceptions, rendered as discreet observations. 'There was a bureau, then to the left, two identical chairs, then a desk, then two more chairs, one of which is the same as the first two and the other different,' and so on. (I made that up but it shows the nature of the writing.) And then suddenly, shockingly, there were observations of a murdered thirteen year old girl.
The story of the murder is interjected as bits of observation and recollection into the ongoing stream. We get the idea that Mathias committed the murder, but there is no presentation of the murder itself. We are not witnesses to the murder, only to M's collecting of cigarrette butts that he discarded near the scene, or his climbing down a cliff to grab a girl's sweater and toss it into the ocean. He speaks to a young girl who was seemingly a friend of the murdered girl. She is convinced that the man she lived with, a brother I think, was the killer. He speaks to a sixteen year old boy who is accused by his father of being the killer, but who himself has gathered evidence against Mathias - trapping him with statements that cause Mathias to say the wrong things.
Mathias has missed his ferry back to the mainland and so sticks around for three days on the island, waiting for the next one. Then he boards the ferry and goes home. The murder story, assuming it was a murder story and assuming that Mathias was the murderer, fades away in the novel.
This is a very unusual novel. The interjection of a murder into a detailed narrative of houses and walkways, rooms and watches and bicycles, repetitive sales calls and visits to the tavern or a room, is jarring. My first reaction to the first mention of a girl's body was, "What? Did I just read that? Did it say what it appeared to say or was it a recollection of some time long past?" Some critics apparently questioned whether there really was a murder at all - as if it might have been a disturbance in Mathias' mind.
As I read it, there was indeed a murder and Mathias was the guilty man. However it was all confusing and, when it appears that M will be noticed and arrested, the story simply settles down and M steps aboard the ferry and goes home as if nothing had happened. This reader resisted the introduction of the murder into this otherwise somewhat boring and prosaic story, and then resisted again when the story resumed its perfectly prosaic course at the end. It was a disorienting sequence of observations and events.
Robbe-Grillet won much credit for having written a book that extended the limits of the novel, in much the same way perhaps as Albert Camus' The Stranger or Sartre's Nausea. I think he deserved the credit. It was an admirable achievement that taught me something about the boundaries of fiction.
On the other hand, it was not an enjoyable book to read.
| Author | Israel, Jonathan |
|---|---|
| Publication | Oxford University Press |
| Copyright Date | 2002 |
| Number of Pages | 832 |
| Extras | photos, bibliography, notes, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History; Philosophy; Religion; Politics |
| Keywords | Europe; Enlightenment |
| When Read | May 2018 |
Beginning with Descartes (d. 1650) and ending at about 1750, Israel gives us a history of the moderate and radical attacks on the notions of "revealed" religion, autocratic politics, and other remnants of medieval society. Descartes began the movement by arguing that knowledge is built up logically from first principles, with the carefully unstated implication that it is not derived from scripture and revelation. This moderation in the movement characterized most of what followed. To attack the church or state directly could result in loss of job and livelihood, silencing, banning and burning of one's books, expulsion from the country, imprisoning, and even torture and death. It was therefore necessary for enlightenment intellectuals to take a moderate stand, to be very wary about criticizing church and state, to at best only hint at deism, and to attack atheism. Only by criticizing the radicals could they hope to protect themselves from the wrath of the church authorities and those under their domination. That didn't mean that the moderates were all hypocrites. Many were firm believers in God and in Christianity. They ranged from deists to full believers who subtracted from their religious views blind obedience to the church and to scripture.
Much of Israel's focus is on the intellectuals in Holland but he devotes significant attention to France and Germany and some attention to England and Italy, with some references to Spanish, Swedish, and other writers. He has much to say about men, and a few women, who are not discussed today, or at least were never mentioned in any of my university history of philosophy classes in the 1960's and early 70's. These include men like Fontenelle and Pierre Bayle, whom I may have vaguely heard of, and Van Dale, Van den Enden, Johannes Koerbagh, Lodewijk Meyer, Balthazar Bekker, and Frederick van Leenhof. Better known are Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Leibniz, Christian Wolff, Denis Diderot, and Voltaire. To my surprise, I learned that Isaac Newton, a man whom I thought of only in connection with physics and math, also had a significant influence on continental philosophers.
The one man who got the most attention was Spinoza. Although he was technically a pantheist who identified God and nature, and he always used "God or nature" in his writings, his notion of "God" clearly excluded any miracles or supernatural events, any intervention in human affairs, any Messiah, and so on. He believed in science and logic and was rightly, as far as I can see, deemed to be an atheist. Almost every writer on religious philosophy seems to have taken great pains either to condemn Spinoza or at least distance himself from the ex-Jew, atheist, and safely dead Dutchman.
In the end, all of the opposition to the Enlightenment failed to stop it from happening. Israel doesn't say a lot about why that was so, but it did happen. The moderates had the most influence and the governments and societies that emerged after 1750 were still Christian and still only beginning to be democratic but religious tolerance, women's rights, political liberty, and democracy had become part of European intellectual culture. More radical interpretations, as in the American and French revolutions, would soon follow.
This book is different in a number of ways from any other that I've read about intellectual history. To begin with, it is amazingly thorough. Israel tracked down and read a huge number of primary source books and articles. He had multiple footnotes on just about every single page, quite a few of them containing citations to two, three, or even four different sources for the statement they support. Works were cited in most of the European languages and in Latin. All of the quoted material, and there was a lot, was translated into English except for material in French - a high percentage of the quoted text. Israel must have assumed that anyone interested in his book would certainly be fluent in (17th and 18th century) French.
The emphasis of the book is on the history of philosophy, not on the philosophical arguments themselves, although there is some of that, and not on the political and social history of the times, although there is necessarily some of that too. As with understanding French, Israel may have assumed that his readers would understand the philosophical issues quite well and need no arguments from him about the existence of God, the authority of the scripture, the possibility of miracles, or other issues in religion and philosophy. In my own case, I have indeed put lots of thought into these issues before picking up Israel's book and felt adequately prepared to read the material, though reading the French was a more difficult problem for me.
One surprising strength was Israel's frequent discussions of the dissemination of information during the time period of the book. He seemed to have a complete command of the nature of publishers and book and journal publishing, book dissemination, and libraries. He wrote about the size (a few thousand up to about 30,000 volumes) of the important libraries, their quality, and their inclusion of forbidden works. He described some of the devious publishing methods used, such as the use of false title pages that obscured the true authors and publishers and city of publication of the works in order to mislead censors.
The most important things I learned from the book were, first, that what I had been taught in my history of philosophy courses was missing key religious, social, political and historical context that would place the philosophical works of this period in their true perspective. When Descartes attempted to generate philosophical truth from first principles his key motivation was to win people away from belief in authority, scripture, and revelation as the source of truth. "Rationalism" was not just a word describing the application of mathematical rigor to philosophical ideas. It was a word for describing the overthrow of superstition and authoritarianism in our search for knowledge.
Secondly, I learned that the struggle for enlightenment wasn't just a struggle to understand in a new way. It was also a struggle against the forces of religion and political and social control that wanted to contain people's minds within strict limits. There were heroes and martyrs in that struggle, men to whom we owe a lot.
When I read Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz 50 and more years ago I was unable to understand their aims. Why did Descartes want to derive all of knowledge from first principles reaching down to his famous "cogito ergo sum"? Why did Spinoza organize his Ethics as if it were a textbook in geometry? Why was Leibniz attempting to reduce the material world to "monads"? I don't think the answers could be found by restricting our reading to what is today called philosophy - as my teachers did.
I started reading this book at the beginning of 2016, read sporadically, put it down, and didn't start it again until 2018, when I read the bulk of it and finished in May. So far, I have still not read the last 10 or so pages, which were damaged in my copy of the book. I'll try to get them sometime.
| Author | Dickens, Charles |
|---|---|
| Publication | Blackstone Audio, 1999 |
| Copyright Date | 1864 |
| Number of Pages | 928 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | May 2018 |
Waterman "Gaffer" Hexam is in his rowboat with his beautiful daughter Lizzie, is trolling the Thames for booty when he pulls up a body identified by papers in his pocket as John Harmon, the son and heir of a wealthy miser. So begins a story of wealth and poverty, avarice and altruism, crime and punishment, and love requited.
Harmon turns out to be still alive but now using the pseudonym John Rokesmith. The body was not his. He gets work at the mansion of Mr. and Mrs. Boffin, former servants of his father. Knowing him only as a child, they do not recognize him until later in the story and their recognition is not revealed to the reader until near the end. Harmon will only inherit his father's fortune if he marries the beautiful Bella Wilfer. He courts her but she, seeing him as a lowly clerk in the Boffin's house, rejects him because she wants "money, money, money."
Other characters include the well-to-do Vaneerings and Podsnaps, the would be well-to-do Lammles, the idle lawyers Eugene Wrayburn and Mortimer Lightwood, Lizzie's brother Charley and his teacher Bradley Headstone, who falls in love with Lizzie and attempts to murder Wrayburn to remove a rival, waterman Rogue Riderhood, the rogue Silas Wegg, who preys upon the Boffins, the supercilious and dishonest Fascination Fledgeby and Riah, the old Jew whom he has under his thumb, the dwarf doll dressmaker Jenny Wren, and many others. It is a very large cast of characters with many separate but interrelated subplots.
Bella eventually sees the error of her ways and returns to her true nature as a fine person. Rokesmith wins her heart and hand without revealing himself as John Harmon. Lizzie, pursued by both Headstone, who is obsessed to the point of madness, and Wrayburn who cannot take anything seriously and idles away his time tormenting Headstone and importuning on Lizzie, leaves the city with Riah's help to escape from both and work in a factory. When Headstone almost kills Wrayburn, Lizzie nurses him back to health, changes him into a more serious man, and marries him. At the end, Harmon and Bella live in luxury with their devoted servants, the Boffins. Wrayburn has recovered and is married to Lizzie. Headstone dives into the canal, pulling his blackmailer Riderhood with him. Wegg's plan to exploit Boffin is defeated and he is dumped in a garbage cart, and love and justice reign supreme.
This was published serially in 19 monthly sections over the period 1864-5. It was Dickens' last major work.
Dickens developed his skills and his view of the novel in the era before Flaubert and the later realists. His characters are each defined by his stereotypical role in the story, but in spite of that, they are far from being cartoons. Dickens invests them with life, intelligence, emotion, and humor and following their words and actions is a delight.
The story was hard for me to get into because it is so long and complicated. We shift from the discovery of a body in the Thames to a dinner party at the Vaneerings. New characters appear who don't seem to have any connection to the others, the connections are only slowly revealed and, in some cases such as that of the Vaneerings, Podsnaps and Lammles, they fade away from the central story. Reading it as an audiobook didn't help because I couldn't easily refer back to parts already read. It was only when, about 20% of the way through the book, I looked it up in the Wikipedia, saw how everything fit together, and was then able to read straightforwardly.
Dickens was as great as always. His language sparkles with wit, humor, insight, and perfect precision. His exploration of classes in English society effortlessly and humorously exposes the hypocrisy and self-satisfaction of those who presume to lord it over others.
I liked it very much.
| Author | Piatigorski, Joram |
|---|---|
| Publication | Astoria, NY: International Psychoanalytic Books |
| Copyright Date | 2014 |
| Number of Pages | 234 |
| Extras | About the author |
| Genres | Fiction; Biology |
| When Read | June 2018 |
In the year 2047, Ricardo Sztein, 71 year old widower and director of a laboratory in a vision disease institute, learns that jellyfish have quite complicated eyes. The economy is a wreck, the country is overpopulated, disease is rampant, and the government funded vision institute is under orders to spend all of its research money on curing disease, not on "useless" science for science's sake.
Ricardo breaks the rules. Fascinated by the complexity of the jellyfish eye and convinced that there are important things to learn about them, he cons his superior into approving a trip to Puerto Rico where he will gather jellyfish and bring samples back to his lab for study. What he sees exceeds his expectations and he arranges to go back again, and yet again, spending a total of $30,000 on the research. His discoveries of some human like, and some extra-human like capabilities in the jellyfish, and even some sort of proto-mind, are unacceptable to major journals but he publishes them in a popular science journal.
Then his world crashes down around him. A right-wing yellow journalist publishes one attack after another against him, accusing him of using government funds to go to a Caribbean resort and pursuing what can only be a whim with no value to the American people. He is arrested and brought to trial where, despite a good defense, a smart prosecutor effectively pillories him and he is convicted, sentenced to the mandatory 10 year sentence with no possibility of parole, and sent to a minimum security prison, basically to live out his life.
Piatigorsky is the son of the famous cellist and was Director of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology at the National Eye Institute from 1981 - 2009.
Piatigorsky is a scientist with around 300 scientific publications and was a research director in the molecular biology of vision at NIH from 1981 to 2009. He has published a lot in his field, including some books for a popular audience. This is his first novel and there was some awkwardness that we might expect in a first effort. Nevertheless, I really liked the book.
My reasons for liking it may be peculiar to me. I am interested in science in general and molecular biology in particular. I believe in basic research as critical for the advancement of science. Like P, I would like to convince people that we make progress in science, not by spending all of our time and money on applied science, but by investing in original and basic research. I despise the journalists and politicians who exploit the ignorance of the people for their own advancement by turning them against science and scientists and against pure research. So Piatigorsky pushed all the right buttons to turn me on.
It appears to me that this book is as much a work of political and scientific education as it is a novel. It's a didactic work. That's fine with me. I approve the message.
In two days the NCI book club will meet and Piatigorsky himself has been invited to the meeting by Jim Matthews, an administrator at NCI who loves literature and is a sometime member of our group. I hope to be able to tell him how much I liked his book and learn more from him.
The book club met and discussed the book. I think I liked it more than anyone else. Then Joram Piatigorsky arrived in the room. Notes on our meeting can be found in the diary entry for June 5, 2018.
| Author | Dostoevsky, Fyodor |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Russian |
| Translators | Garnett, Constance (translation 1916) |
| Publication | Gutenberg |
| Copyright Date | 1871 |
| Number of Pages | 768 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Politics; Russia |
| When Read | June 2018 |
Anton Lavrentyevich G--v, the narrator of the story, is a man whose given name and patronymic only appear once in the novel that I can recall, and his elided last name only a few times, is a close friend of Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky, a middle aged sometime teacher, tutor, writer, minor landowner, and dear friend and dependent of Varvara Petrovna Stavrogina, a local upper class landowner. They live in an unnamed provincial town. Stepan Trofimovich is secretly in love with Varvara Petrovna, but is too far beneath her to ever declare his love. And while she cares for him, he is too far beneath her, too dependent on her, and too impractical and flighty a man for her to ever consider him as anything other than a friend.
More and more people enter the story. There is Nikolay Vsevolodovich Stavrogin, Varvara Petrovna's intense, brooding, and superior son. There is Pyotr Stepanovich Verkhovensky, son of Stepan Trofimovich, supported by Stepan (and ultimately by Varvara Petrovna.) There is "Captain" Lebyadkin, a drunken sot who beats his mentally unstable sister Mary Timofeevna who in turn lives on the support she gets from Nikolay Vsyevelodovich.
There are many other characters, a number of difficult and always unrequited love affairs, an attempt by the leading lady of the town to produce an extravaganza charity event that fails, and so on.
Throughout all this we are gradually made aware of something else going on among the younger people of the town. There are secrets. There is some sort of political organization. There is a sort of leader, Pyotr Stepanovich, followers who sometimes have various crackpot revolutionary theories, young followers who act out enthusiastic adolescent fancies, and jaded former followers who have had enough of the intrigue. There is a fire, a set of murders, then another murder, then the worst of the lot, Pyotr Stepanovich, flees and others are arrested. Finally, in the end, we return to poor Stepan Trofimovich who abandons his home and embarks on a wild and ridiculous flight to nowhere that leads only to his death.
This is a remarkable book, written in Dostoevsky's eclectic way. There is narration, external dialog and internal monolog not in the presence of the narrator, and almost stuttering scenes in which each person says something that is only a hint of what he really means, leaving the reader to figure it out. Yet in spite of the sketchy descriptions and alternating styles, the book is highly literate, with fine sentiments expressed in Russian or, when made by Stepan Trofimovich, in a mixture of Russian (translated into English by Garnett) and idiomatic French (presented as is, as it would have been in the Russian original.)
The plot is handled either with impulsive and unplanned changes of story, or by carefully planned changes - depending on what the reader thinks of what he reads. I thought perhaps that the changes were carefully planned with the scattered elements purposely so constructed. Or maybe not. Maybe the scattering is a consequence of the serial publication of the book, with some parts published before later parts were written, and later parts written without the possibility of re-writing the earlier parts.
Dostoevsky's view of left-wing political groups was negative. Especially telling was the murder of Shatov by Pyotr Stepanovich, accomplished with a combination of cunning and foolishness, bravado and skittishness, phony political justification and real personal hatred - no real justification at all. It seemed to me that D was not condemning the progressive politics of the group so much as the selfish, unprincipled motives and actions of the leaders that made it to the top, perhaps not unlike Stalin. I might say that the followers in the group were foolish, impractical, and sometimes self-important, but D saw those qualities in society as a whole, not just in left-wing political groups. My own experience with left-wing political groups was quite different, probably because I lived in a democracy where my activities were perfectly legal, even if not liked, by the authorities.
A long but interesting book and a reminder to me of why I liked reading Dostoevsky in spite of his quirks.
| Author | Comey, James |
|---|---|
| Publication | MacMillan, 2018 |
| Copyright Date | 2018 |
| Number of Pages | 304 |
| Extras | acknowledgments, index, about the author |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Autobiography; Politics |
| Keywords | FBI |
| When Read | June 2018 |
Comey, a former U.S. Attorney for the New York City district and former assistant attorney general for George W. Bush, was hired by President Obama in 2013 for a 10 year term as Director of the FBI. In 2016 he became a center of controversy when he announced an FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server for government business. The FBI concluded that Clinton didn't understand the nature of computer security and, while what she did was negligent, there was no criminal intent. Then very shortly before the election, they discovered additional Clinton emails on Anthony Weiner's laptop computer (Weiner is the ex-husband of Huma Abedin, an aide to Clinton) and re-opened the investigation. Again, no criminal intent or act was found but, although the finding was announced a few days before the election, some believe that the negative publicity, combined with the Trump "Lock her up" meme and the long standing and powerful Republican Party attacks on Clinton's character, threw the election to Trump.
Comey gives us a fairly full autobiography. Around half of it concerns his life before the Clinton controversy. Then he explains his thinking during the Clinton email investigation and why he felt it was his duty to pursue this in spite of the election. He concludes with the story of his interactions with President-elect and then President, Donald Trump.
Of special interest to me were Comey's comments on the three presidents that he worked under: Bush, Obama, and Trump. He also worked under Bill Clinton but was further from the center of power then. He seems to have regarded Bush as a man of integrity, but not of objectivity. Bush had his points of view and he tended to exclude discussion based on points of view that he did not share. It seems to me to be the modus operandi of an intellectually limited man - which is what I thought Bush was - though perhaps it is my own limitation and exclusion of other views that makes me think so. Although Comey is a Republican, he saw Obama as the best of the Presidents. Obama was the best listener, the best at hearing, questioning, and learning from people with other points of view, the best at making carefully considered and objective judgments. Comey's view of Trump was entirely negative. He lacked both the integrity of Bush and the objectivity of Obama. He came into office as a kind of Mafia boss, a man for whom loyalty from subordinates meant everything and truth and duty to law and country meant nothing. He attempted to establish a personal patronage relationship with Comey in which the FBI and its Director would become loyal lieutenants of the President, doing whatever Trump wanted without regard for the law.
Because of the essentially illegal things that Trump wanted Comey to do, Comey kept detailed notes of each conversation with Trump, memorizing as best he could everything that was said during the meetings and writing it all down immediately after leaving the President. He turned over one copy of his notes to his FBI colleagues and kept (at least) one for himself, "in a secure location". It turned out to be a wise and useful plan of action.
This book increased my respect for Comey. I don't know if his decisions with regard to the Clinton emails were the best ones, but I am prepared to believe that he made those decisions because he believed they accorded with his duty, not because he wanted Trump to win. I accept his statement that he saw his duty as being to the Constitution, the law, and the country, and not to any political party or view. I accept that he was an honest man. I respect him.
| Author | Kinzey, Bert |
|---|---|
| Publication | Fallbrook, CA: Aero Publishers |
| Copyright Date | 1983 |
| Number of Pages | 76 |
| Extras | photos, diagrams |
| Genres | Non-fiction |
| Keywords | Aviation |
| When Read | June 2018 |
This short book provides very detailed information needed by modelers for creating a model of a Grumman F9F Panther jet, the first jet fighter bomber adopted by the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps. Requirements were ironed out in 1945-6 and the first flight was made by "Corky" Meyer on November 24, 1947.
There are beautiful black and white and a couple of color photos supplied by Grumman, the Navy, the Marine Corps, and various archives. There are also detailed diagrams labeling dozens of parts in each one. We get descriptions and photos of wings, landing gear, guns, instruments, tail, and other parts. There is some information about production and a very little about the use of the plane in Korea, but no details of operations or combat.
The last section of the book contains reviews of seven different model kits from various manufacturers from the early 1950s to the time of publication. The reviews are done from the point of view of an expert (Kinzel) who insists on accuracy in as many details as possible. He reveals all sorts of mistakes that might seem insignificant to a child (as I was when I built model airplanes), but can be unacceptable to an adult enthusiast.
This book, mostly photos, took little time to read and filled in a bit of my knowledge about the early years of jet aircraft. I don't recall ever reading any other book in this series, or any other aviation book that was primarily about building models. I was surprised to see that, after all of the diagrams and photos of real airplanes, the emphasis at the end was on commercial models. I presume that the great majority of modelers at least start with commercial models and then make whatever changes they deem necessary.
The author was a college graduate, an Army officer in Korea (after the war), a civilian employee of the Defense Department, and a pilot. There is a photo of him in the cockpit of an F9F. He seems to have been well qualified to write this book.
| Author | Roth, Philip |
|---|---|
| Publication | Vintage, 2005 |
| Copyright Date | 1979 |
| Number of Pages | 179 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | June 2018 |
Writer Nathan Zuckerman looks back on his experience as a young writer in 1956 at age 23. He had published just four short stories, but they were very well received and he was considered a talented and very promising writer. With that reputation in hand, he went to see E.I. Lonoff, a very successful, well established, 56 year old Jewish writer. Lonoff had invited him into his home and even asked him to stay overnight as a snow storm isolates the house in the Berkshires. At the house, in addition to Lonoff, he meets Lonoff's wife Hope and the young and attractive Amy Bellette, a former student of Lonoff's who was also visiting him for a few days.
The novel is composed of several main threads. One is about what Zuckerman learns from Lonoff. Another is about Zuckerman's battle with his family. His mother and father and their rabbi all consider that one of Nathan's stories will be seen as denigrating to Jews and reinforcing antisemitism. A third is Z's attraction to Amy, who is herself attracted to Lonoff and is a cause of friction between Lonoff and Hope - a friction that causes Hope to walk out in the snow and Lonoff to walk after her in what appears to be a repeat of previous occasions.
In a significant section of the book, Amy is presented to us as Anne Frank. She has survived the Holocaust, changed her name, and is now living incognito in the U.S. It is only after many pages that Roth makes clear that this is all in Zuckerman's imagination.
Philip Roth died at age 85 on May 22, 2018. After his death I read an appreciation of his work that called attention to this book as a turning point in his writing. All of the books by Roth in my book notes were published well after this one, so I don't have a good comparison of this book with his earlier ones, but I did think this was a very good book. It has Roth's acid criticism and self-criticism where by "self" I mean Nathan Zuckerman, and also his fearless attitude towards convention and respectability. He can be hard to take but I have to admire him anyway.
Roth on Lonoff: He winced when he stood - lumbago, he explained, from turning one too many sentences around that day - and said that he still had his evening's reading. He did not do justice to a writer unless he read him on consecutive days and for no less than three hours at a sitting. Otherwise despite his note taking and underlining, he lost touch with a book's inner life and might as well not have begun. Sometimes, when he unavoidably had to miss a day, he would go back and begin all over again, rather than be nagged by his sense that he was wronging a serious author. ... "It's only as it should be," he said, "for somebody else to think I’m a fool. But I can't afford the luxury myself. How else am I supposed to read a book of real depth? For 'enjoyment'? For the hell of it - to put me to sleep?" Wearily - more ready for bed, I would have thought from the tired, irascible tone, than for one hundred and eighty minutes concentrating on the inner life of a deep book by a serious author - he asked, "How else am I to conduct my life?"
| Author | Moore, Graham |
|---|---|
| Publication | Random House, 2017 |
| Copyright Date | 2016 |
| Number of Pages | 384 |
| Extras | "A note from the author" [historical information] |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| When Read | June 2018 |
In 1886, Paul Cravath, a recent graduate of Columbia Law School, is brought into a new partnership of Carter, Hughes and Cravath, to which he brings their only client George Westinghouse. Westinghouse is being sued by Thomas Edison, backed by J.P. Morgan, for infringing on Edison's electric light bulb patent. It is a huge lawsuit involving 312 separate lawsuits in many jurisdictions. Due to Morgan's influence, Westinghouse could not recruit any of the established New York law firms. Paul also works with Westinghouse in their attempts to bring Nikola Tesla into the firm, hoping that the eccentric genius Tesla can develop a light bulb that does not infringe on the patent. A major contention between the two parties is Edison's claim that only direct current (DC) is safe while Westinghouse and Tesla know that AC is actually safer as well as far more practical for building a large electric grid.
The legal battle is only a small part of the story. Most of the text is devoted to business doings and illegal shenanigans from Paul's breaking into the office of a slimy Edison confederate to an arson in Tesla's lab that almost kills both Paul and Tesla, to an Edison controlled industrial spy in Westinghouse's lab. There is also a love story of Paul and the opera singer Agnes Huntingdon.
Edison is castigated in the story but comes out a little better at the end, when Paul gets the girl, Westinghouse and Edison General Electric merge, and Paul opens his own profitable law firm, establishing the pattern of all corporate law firms for the future.
In his "note from the author", Moore discusses the relationship between the novel and the real history - what was true, what was condensed into a smaller number of years, and what was made up. More of it turned out to be true, or at worst compressed, than I expected. Paul and Agnes were real historical characters.
The book was something of a best seller. It was written decently well in a popular rather than literary style, had an exciting plot, and pulled the reader in. The conventions of these kinds of stories were observed - particularly in the emotional ups and downs of the main character, the frequent failures before success, the angry rejection of the boy by the girl and subsequent coming together, and the happy ever after ending.
What's not to like?
| Author | Mounk, Yascha |
|---|---|
| Publication | Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018 |
| Number of Pages | 393 |
| Extras | notes, credits, acknowledgments, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Politics; History |
| When Read | June 2018 |
Harvard lecturer Mounk attempts to explain the rise of populism in the democracies of the developed countries. He defines "liberal democracy" as a combination of political rights (the "liberal" part) and governance by elected representatives (the "democracy"). These two attributes of the Western democracies are under siege. Countries that have already failed include Russia, Turkey, perhaps China, and now Hungary. Although these countries still claim to be democracies, they suppress opposition leaders, parties, and journalists. He's not sure that the strongman rulers of these countries can be dislodged by democratic means. Poland and Austria are part way down the slope that the others have slid down and other countries are at risk, including the United States under Trump, France, Italy, and even Denmark and Sweden. He writes:
"A democracy is a set of binding electoral institutions that effectively translates popular views into public policy."
"Liberal institutions effectively protect the rule of law and guarantee individual rights such as freedom of speech, worship, press, and association to all citizens (including ethnic and religious minorities.)"
"A liberal democracy is simply a political system that is both liberal and democratic - one that both protects individual rights and translates popular view into public policy."
Liberalism and democracy can be separated and are being separated by populist leaders who may damage one, then the other, eventually destroying both in what is generally an attempt to create a dictatorship under the guise of implementing the popular will.
Why is this happening? Why now? Why in the United States, a heartland of democracy? Mounk argues that there are three fundamental causes. First, the rise of the Internet has overthrown the dominance of what we now call the "mainstream" media - enabling "fake news" and empowering once marginal movements and politicians. Second, the steady rise of living standards in the U.S. and elsewhere has ended for most people. They no longer expect their children to live better than they did. They also no longer have union protection, lifetime jobs, pensions, medical insurance, and other supports against personal economic catastrophes. Third, the "monoethnic" nature of society, or the clear dominance of one ethnicity as in the U.S., is increasingly being challenged. Many people of the previously dominant ethnicity feel threatened.
Those, in Mounk's opinion, are major underlying causes. The effects on public opinion are pretty shocking. The number of people who have faith in democratic institutions is seriously eroded. The number of people who consider democracy of little importance, and even support military rule, is, according to surveys that Mounk cites, alarmingly high. Especially frightening is that the young people in the U.S. are further down this path to the loss of democracy than are their elders. As Mounk puts it, the young will not save us.
Mounk devotes a chapter to each of these problems. The solutions are not easy. We need to somehow fight against fake news. We need to somehow redistribute wealth so that the average family again feels secure and invested in the stable democratic order. We need to promote the belief that all peoples in the country are equal and all are Americans (something that we may actually be ahead of the Europeans in achieving.)
There are no simple solutions.
I looked for this book at the library after seeing an interview with Mounk on TV. He seemed highly intelligent. Unlike most of our American commentators, he knew a great deal about what is happening in Europe, including Hungary, Poland, and Austria, countries that are not in the spotlights of American news. Born in Germany to a Jewish family and having lived and studied in a number of countries, he is multi-lingual and widely read. I wanted to read more about his studies and opinions.
I don't consider Mounk's analysis to be complete. A significant omission may be his neglect of the cultural factors described in Joe Bageant's Deer Hunting With Jesus. Working class whites feel themselves to be treated as social and intellectual inferiors by the "elites" of the Democratic Party who look down upon them from their vantage points as journalists, professors, officials, doctors, and other intellectuals and maybe even computer programmers and librarians like me. There is also nothing in the book about the evangelical Christian role in right wing and populist politics. I don't recall that Mounk had much to say about these factors or about how the Republican establishment fueled the fires of white and Christian resentment for their own purposes. However, be that as it may, Mounk sheds a lot of light on the problem of populism and calls attention to the severity of its spread in Europe and the similarities between Trump's movement and those in France, Italy, Austria, and elsewhere in Europe.
When Trump was elected I thought that this might even be a good thing. Hillary Clinton might have pursued the New Democrat policies of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, been stymied by Republicans, and stimulated even more right wing opposition. I thought that Trump would make such an ass of himself that the arrogance, malignance, and stupidity of his ideas would become manifest and the country would go in the opposite direction. Now however, as I see his ignorant "base" continuing to support him without reservation and the Republican politicians caving in to him out of fear of his popularity with their own voters, I'm very worried.
Mounk offers no magic bullets. His recommendations are to keep doing what we have always been doing - trying to register and motivate voters, trying to redistribute wealth, trying to raise the standard of living of the average person, increasing his investment in democracy. He wants us to double down on these efforts. It's an uphill slog against powerful opposition.
I try to contribute. I work in political campaigns. I contribute money. But my sacrifices are very small compared to what I could be doing.
| Author | Liu Cixin |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Chinese |
| Translators | Martinsen, Joel |
| Publication | MacMillan Audio, 2015 |
| Copyright Date | 2008 |
| Number of Pages | 513 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | June 2018 |
In the second volume of the series, the people of Earth attempt to prepare to repel the invasion of the Trisolaran fleet which is projected to arrive in something over 400 years. The "sophon" technology of the Trisolarans stifles original scientific research and reveals every action and plan of the Terrans to their enemies. The only hope is the "Wallfacer" project in which the four most original thinkers on Earth each work in complete secrecy to hatch plans that they order into effect without ever telling anyone the purpose of the plans. Human "Wallbreakers" are appointed by the Trisolarans to try to stop them - attempting to assassinate the most dangerous of them, Luo Ji, a man who acts selfish and appears not to want or care about his position but who, in the end, stops the invasion.
I have always considered a bold and convincing scientific imagination to be at the heart of the best science fiction. Liu has that in spades. Many different plans are developed to deal with the invasion, but each is different. The escapists believe that victory is impossible and want to send ships full of humans out into the galaxy so that part of humanity will survive. Generals want to fight and develop a fleet to do battle. Peacemakers can't believe that the Trisolarans will just kill everyone. They want to negotiate a peaceful coexistence. One of the Wallbreakers develops a plan to blow up the solar system, killing all of the Trisolarans and humans in a mutually assured destruction scheme if the invaders won't make peace. Each of these is explored, not only from the point of view of its aims and likelihood of success, but also from the point of view of how society will react to, and against, the plan. As just one example, an escape attempt occurs, led by a single man who dupes a spaceship crew into trusting him and then accelerates out of the solar system with insufficient fuel to get back. Four ships are sent after him but the captains of more than one of them realize that there aren't enough resources among all five ships to make it to the nearest promising star system. The first ship to react launches bombs that kill all of the crews of the other four and take over their food, fuel, and parts. Other plans and actions are similarly well thought out.
It's brilliant. Many books get rave reviews on Amazon but this one has attracted hundreds of them.
The "dark forest" of the title is the name of a "cosmic sociology" theory developed by Luo Ji. The theory is that no intelligent civilization in the galaxy, or perhaps the universe, can trust that any other civilization is safe to live with. Therefore each one must conceal its presence from all others and, if it discovers the existence of another civilization, must destroy that civilization as quickly and thoroughly, and with as much surprise, as possible. This theory turns out to be the key to saving humanity.
| Author | Kaneshiro, Kazuki |
|---|---|
| Original Language | jp |
| Translators | Nieda, Takami |
| Publication | AmazonCrossing, 2018 |
| Copyright Date | 2000 |
| Number of Pages | 167 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Japan |
| When Read | July 2018 |
Sugihara, a third year high school kid lives as a "Zainichi Chosenjin", a North Korean resident of Japan. He was born in Japan to a mother of Korean ancestry born in Japan and a father born in Korea but brought to Japan during the war to work and be drafted into the Japanese Army. In spite of his circumstances, Sugihara is not given Japanese citizenship and he and his family are treated as pariahs. He went to North Korean elementary and junior high schools in Japan - the South Koreans had a separate school system, but he successfully transferred to a Japanese high school where he survives because he is the most famous badass in the school, a kid who beats up every challenger, apparently right in the classroom, hitting a challenger in the face with an ashtray, kicking him in the knee to bring him down, then kicking him multiple times in the stomach to finish him off - though he is careful to kick with the top of his foot rather than the toe of the shoe to avoid rupturing internal organs.
Sugihara's home life is tough. His 54 year old father was a former "nationally ranked lightweight boxer" who is tough as nails on his son and, although he seems to love the boy, he beats him when he feels like it, as if this is good for the boy. The father runs four pachinko parlors but the police intimidate the owners into breaking off their relationship with him. After all, he is a Zainichi and, as far as the cops are concerned, should not be making so much money. The son is strong, fast, graceful, and highly skilled, presumably trained by his father as well as by his own efforts. Although his father is a communist, the family successfully changes citizenship to South Korean, which enables them to travel, something that cannot be done on North Korean passports due to American pressure.
Then Sugihara meets Sakurai, a beautiful Japanese girl. We learn later that she saw him at a basketball game where he was the best player and where he beat up an opposing player that tried to hurt him, then beat up that player's entire team when they attacked him, then beat the referees when they interfered. It was the first time she "got wet" looking at a boy. She is in a different high school and doesn't know that S is a Zainichi. He doesn't tell her. Their relationship grows and deepens. Her family meets him and likes him.
After some time, Sugihara and Sakurai decide to go to bed together for the first time. They get a hotel room and begin to undress and play with each other. But Sugihara is tormented by the fact that Sakurai doesn't know he is a Korean. "I was afraid that I might never tell her if I missed this chance. Besides, I believed she would accept anything I told her. And then she would say this: So what? Now let’s go back to what we were doing." He tells her. She is shocked. She cannot deal with the fact that he is Zainichi. Seeing her shock and disgust, he tries to explain. She tells him that she was raised to believe that Chinese and Koreans had tainted blood. They were inferiors. "When I think about you entering my body, I’m scared." Sugihara (we learn here for the first time that his given name is Tsubaki and his real Korean name is Lee) puts on his clothes and walks out, paying the hotel bill at the front desk. The affair is finished.
The novel continues for a good while but finally, towards the end, Sakurai comes around and comes to love him again. It is the end of the story.
For a non-Japanese like me, this book presented a very different view of Japan than I had imagined. I knew of Japan's racist past but imagined that their defeat in WWII caused a rejection of the racist and violent culture as apparently happened in West Germany. But this book showed a different view.
The violence was shocking. High school boys beat the hell out of each other right in school, perhaps under the eyes of teachers. Teachers beat the children. Racism is encouraged by the grown-ups and the authorities. What we in the United States, or at least I, would consider a normal childhood and a normal life at school are not portrayed as being normal in Japan. Is it just as bad in our American inner city schools? I am not able to say. I hope that it isn't.
Another surprise to me was the extent of the domination of American and European, but especially American, movies, books and music in Japan. There were some references to Japanese books and movies, but not many. The actors, writers, and musicians that Sugihara followed and discussed with his friends were more often Americans than Japanese.
According to information at Amazon, this book won an important Japanese prize for literature in 2000. "The novel’s film adaptation went on to win every major award in Japan in 2002."
I had thought about recommending the book for our NCI book group but decided that I better read it first. Having done so, I'm not sure it would appeal to many of the other group members. I haven't yet decided whether or not to propose it.
| Author | Furst, Alan |
|---|---|
| Publication | Random House |
| Copyright Date | 1999 |
| Number of Pages | 288 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | July 2018 |
Jean-Claude Casson, former husband, former soldier, former movie producer, is attempting to live under an assumed name in Paris in the fall of 1941. He believes that the Gestapo wants him and he knows he should get out of Paris, where people who know him see him from time to time, but he can't think of anywhere to go or any way to go there. He lives from hand to mouth, selling his overcoat in the winter and helping to rob a German train for which he gets 1,200 francs, but is beaten up by thugs and robbed of the money. He becomes friendly with Helene (Hélène), a Jewish woman who works at a travel agency, but she is being extorted by a bitch who threatens to turn her into the Gestapo unless she is regularly paid off.
Casson is contacted by resistance officers still active in the Vichy French regime. They want him to help them work with the Communist resistance. The Germans have reached the outskirts of Moscow and the Communist Party of France is under orders from the USSR to fight the Germans as much as possible, at any cost, in order to build a huge partisan resistance movement fighting from the shores of the Atlantic to the gates of Moscow. He makes contact with them and helps the Vichy officers to procure 600 submachine guns with 1,000 rounds per gun from French reserves in Syria and sneak them into France. He wins a promise from his Vichy contact to help the woman get out of France but, although the operation is successful the woman's first escape attempt is not and his Vichy officer contact is killed in a gunfight during the operation while resisting extortion from Vichy gangster militia.
At the end of the novel Casson is still wanted by the Gestapo, has no real protection from Vichy, and is now considered an expendable liability by the Communists who routinely kill expendable liabilities. He is in his apartment. "He heard someone in the corridor, then a light knock at the door."
"Yes?" he said.
It is the end of the novel.
As in all of Furst's books, and indeed as in all books I read about World War II, I am on edge and hoping that the characters that I care about get out. Now, on my tenth Furst novel, I at least hope to rely on the fact that his main characters are not caught and killed in the other novels and therefore probably won't be in this one, though this may be the most ambiguous ending of all that I have read.
The main characters, Casson and Helene, are not the only ones that put me on edge. As I hope for their safety I can't help wanting someone to shoot the bitch at the travel agency, a woman depicted so convincingly that it's hard to read about her. The communist assassin who kills anyone he has been ordered to kill, without thinking about them, is also both realistic and hard to take.
And yet for all that, I find these books compelling. The realism, the reluctant courage in the face of evil, the overwhelming stakes in the battle against Nazism, all draw me to them.
As long as Furst keeps writing books I expect that I will keep reading them.
| Author | Pratchett, Terry |
|---|---|
| Publication | Harper Collins |
| Copyright Date | 1992 |
| Number of Pages | 386 |
| Genres | Fiction; Fantasy |
| When Read | July 2018 |
A tortoise is dropped by an eagle into the monastery garden maintained by Brutha, a quiet, unassuming hard-working, illiterate young man who believes everything that he is told about the religion of the city of Omnia, a city nominally devoted to the god Om. It turns out that the tortoise is actually the god Om but he is diminished in his incarnation from the bull he expected to be to the tortoise he is because no one really believes in him anymore except the naif Brutha. People only pretend to believe because of the oppression of the church, led by the "exquisitor" Vorbis, a sadistic psychopath of complete amorality.
Besides his naive goodness and unquestioning belief, Brutha turns out to have one astonishing ability. He has complete eidetic memory. He can walk through a maze and come back out the same way. He can look at hundreds of books and reproduce them months or years later, recreating the images of the text even though he can't read them.
Vorbis decides to deceive and invade the country of Ephebe, using Brutha's ability to penetrate the maze surrounding their central government. There are fights. The blind Ephebian philosopher Didactyl and his mechanical engineer protege Urn leave with Brutha and Om (who can talk only to Brutha because Brutha is the only man who can hear his telepathic transmissions) on a steamship invented by Urn. Other gods brew up a storm and sink the ship. Brutha and Om escape, Brutha saving Vorbis' life and carrying him through the desert back to Omnia. Om meets many of the other small gods in the desert - gods who no longer have believers and have lost all their strength.
Back at Omnia there is a final battle with Urn and various others pitted against Vorbis. Brutha, now anointed bishop but attacked and about to be burnt to death by Vorbis, is saved, causes many people to believe in Om again, who achieves his great bull incarnation again and dominates the city. But in the end, Brutha has lost his religion and Om must face the absurdity of all of the gods, including himself.
My son-in-law Jim acquainted me with the delightful Terry Pratchett, a prolific author of comic fantasy who turns out to be one of the best selling authors in the world. This was one of Jim's favorites among Pratchett's Discworld series. It was intelligent, irreverent, imaginative and charming, goring all of the sacred cows of religion and politics. I enjoyed it.
| Author | Pinker, Steven |
|---|---|
| Publication | Penguin Books |
| Copyright Date | 2002 |
| Number of Pages | xvi + 509 |
| Extras | bibliography, end notes, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Psychology; Philosophy; Politics |
| When Read | July 2018 |
Pinker analyzes the nature vs. nurture debate in the light of scientific findings in psychology, neuroscience, "sociobiology", sociology, and other fields. His main object is a critique of the "Blank Slate" theory of mind that holds that humans can be brought up to hold any views and to have most any intellectual capabilities, depending only on their upbringing and their environment. He also considers what he believes to be two theories related to the blank slate which he calls "the Noble Savage", and "the Ghost in the Machine".
Part I of the book is devoted to analyzing the science. He considers the case against the blank slate to be clear and unequivocal. There are facets of our personalities that are determined by our environment such as what language we speak. But there are many critically important parts of ourselves that depend on our genetics. The first and most obvious of these is gender. It is quite easy for Pinker to show that the "gender feminists" (as opposed to "equity feminists") are totally wrong in imagining that boys' interests in mechanics, mathematics, and roughhouse play and girls' interests in social activities, language, children, etc., are purely cultural. He also offers evidence from identical twins studies to show how even identical twins raised in separate households, not knowing each other, turn out to be amazingly similar in their interests, habits, and personality. In a later part of the book He argues that the evidence shows that about 40-50% of the variance in behavior between people can be accounted for by genetics. This includes some contentious characteristics like IQ. Surprisingly, another 40-50% of the variance is accounted for by the group environment of children (especially peers), and very little of it comes from parents and upbringing. Parents can make children happy or unhappy, even miserable, but they can't do much to influence their personalities, aspirations, and behavior beyond the effects of making them happy or miserable. [Have I overstated his position here?]
Pinker is obviously offended by the attacks that the advocates of Blank Slate and Noble Savage theories have made on reputable academics. E.O. Wilson, for example, has had lectures interrupted by sign wavers and shouters and even people who threw water on him, after publishing his Sociobiology study of the effects of evolutionary biology on society and culture. Wilson and others have been mocked, picketed, hounded and sometimes driven out of their careers by people who insisted that these professors were fascists, even though many were, in fact, left wing liberals and even political activists. He names many of the people who have made the accusations of fascism and quotes from their attacks showing how their own views are often foolish, completely unscientific, and even contradictory to well established science.
The "Noble Savage" theory originating with Voltaire claims that violence and oppression are the products of civilization but, according to P, the science shows the opposite. Primitive societies are much more violent, more sexist, and more oppressive of minorities than civilized societies - particularly those with police forces. He describes his own experience in a police strike in Montreal in 1969, where the crime rate immediately soared.
Having established what he takes to be the base science for these issues Pinker goes on to discuss their impact on our faculties and our behaviors, and how we should think about "hot button" issues with separate chapters on Politics, Violence, Gender, Children, and The Arts.
I found Pinker's arguments to be both insightful and convincing. I have always held something that was probably too much like the blank slate view of the mind, though I have also had doubts about it. One of the big questions for me has been whether and how education can make people rational, intellectual, progressive and altruistic (just like me eh?) I have always thought that we haven't tried hard enough to use education to shape human nature. We can't say it doesn't work because we haven't tried hard to make it work, or if we have, it's been on too small and obscure a scale and with too contentious a structure to give us any certainty about the information we seek.
Pinker says it won't work, or at least it won't work in the way I've hoped it would. We can't turn people into liberal intellectuals any more than we can turn them into athletes or musicians or change their sexual preferences. The genetic component is too determinative.
If he's right, then we have to take human nature into account in our analysis of politics and society. We have to understand that people aren't all alike. There is a range of intellect, outlook, aspiration, and behavior and, if we want to influence people and build a better society, we have to do it with full cognizance of that range and without trying futilely to eliminate the range.
That does not mean that there is no such thing as ethics or values. He argues that essential moral values derive from notions of fairness and equality of value between people. That people are different doesn't mean they don't all have needs, all suffer pain, all (or most all) have some ability to care about others, and so on. There are outliers, for example psychopaths who don't fit into our value scheme but we can still care about people and still believe in their equality. We can even go further and say (as E.O. Wilson did in his sociobiology) that our values have a physical basis in human nature and that understanding human nature will make us more rather than less able to understand and achieve our ethical goals.
Pinker's bibliography and citation notes are extensive and pretty current up to the time of his writing. The notes are not always cited down to page numbers so it looks like it could be hard to verify many of them, but at least the titles are always there.
| Author | Stein, Johanna |
|---|---|
| Publication | Boston: Da Capo Lifelong Books |
| Copyright Date | 2014 |
| Number of Pages | 256 |
| Genres | Psychology; Satire |
| Keywords | Parenting |
| When Read | July 2018 |
The book is a collection of chapters, some previously published as magazine essays, about the author's life as a new mother. They are intended to be a humorous and satirical look at the many things that go wrong and the many expectations that parents have that are not fulfilled despite desperate attempts to fulfill them. There is a chapter about her child on an airplane - fussing and screaming while her mother and father try everything to make her stop. Other chapters cover other topics such as breast feeding, playmates, clothing, conflicts between father and mother, and so on.
There is an assiduous effort to protect the innocent. Her husband is always called "the Husband", never "Jim", or "Paul", or whatever his name is. Battles between husband and wife are frequent but are carefully described in humorous ways, never in ways that express any deep resentment in their marriage. The child is also unnamed and, hopefully, will not go to school one day to find everyone thinking that she grew up as a crazy child with a crazy mother.
I don't remember why I picked up this book. It's not my usual reading and I found myself less interested and less amused than I think Stein meant for me to be. She has been compared to Nora Ephron and, from the one book by Ephron that I read (Heartburn), the comparison is apt.
What I disliked about the book was the constant cleverness. It was tiring. It never rose to the level of serious discourse. It was a lot like the TV sitcoms where every single sentence by every actor is designed to get a laugh. It's not enough to make a joke in a paragraph, the author must make a separate joke in each sentence in each paragraph. It might be easier to take in a magazine where the reader can deal with two or three pages and then go on to something else. As a book it was overwhelming.
But on the other hand, Stein was, in fact, very clever. Her humor is incisive and often both made me laugh and made me think about the situations she presented. The book wore me out but I will grant that Stein is smart and funny and does have intelligent things to say.
| Author | Morris, Edmund |
|---|---|
| Publication | Random House |
| Copyright Date | 2010 |
| Number of Pages | 785 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Biography |
| Keywords | Theodore Roosevelt |
| When Read | August 2018 |
The biography resumes in 1909 with Roosevelt and his son Kermit in Africa on a big game hunting expedition with hundreds of guides, bearers, cooks, a doctor, and so on. TR hopes to get away from American politics and live out an adventure. He and Kermit shoot an amazing number of elephants, lions, rhinos, and every other kind of animal, TR telling himself that he is collecting specimens for the Smithsonian Museum but he is eventually sated and has had enough killing. He returns to the U.S. via a grand tour of Europe, meeting many kings and queens, presidents and prime ministers. He is disappointed to see how stupid and ignorant many of them are and how militaristic and dangerous are the Germans under Kaiser Wilhelm. His strong belief in democracy is further reinforced.
Back in the U.S. his disappointment with President William Howard Taft continues to grow until he can no longer keep up any pretense of friendship and common politics. His effort to recapture the Republican Party succeeds with much of the rank and file but fails with the Party professionals and he bolts from the Party to run as candidate of the newly created Progressive Party. But he only succeeds in dividing the Republican vote while Woodrow Wilson captures much of the progressive sentiment and wins the White House. TR's worst anger at Wilson is based on WW's failure to stand up to Germany's invasion and destruction of neutral Belgium or the German U-Boat depredations on Atlantic shipping and loss of American lives and property.
TR's health goes downhill. He eats too much. An expedition to the "River of Doubt" in Brazil in 1914 takes much out of him and he cannot hold up his end. The Brazilians must look after him as he suffers from malarial fevers that sometimes render him raving or unconscious. It is no longer possible for him to be the athlete and mighty hunter and outdoorsman that he was. He had also to deal with the aftermath of being shot in an assassination attempt in which he insisted on continuing to give his speech rather than go to the hospital.
The war in Europe finishes him. He encourages his four boys to fight. Two of them are badly wounded and one, his youngest, is killed in air combat. TR is filled with grief. He hopes to go to Europe as a general leading volunteers, there to charge the enemy lines and give up his grieving and physically suffering life, but the Army and the Wilson administration won't permit it - probably rightly. He suffers a string of illnesses and dies on January 6, 1919 at the age of 60.
He was surely one of the great men of his era.
One of the aspects of TR's nature that baffles but greatly impresses me is his extraordinary intellectual powers combined with his physical and emotional traits. He is an outdoorsman, a fighter, an athlete of sorts, a man of exceptional strength and courage. He is a man of strong passions and emotions. And yet he is an exceptional intellectual. He speaks three languages and reads four. He reads hundreds of books a year, in many of his languages. He appears to have read all of the Greek and Roman classics, and the later classic European histories of those times. His published writings spanned 22 volumes. He is a serious progressive - a committed capitalist but a sincere partisan for the common man. He can be a subtle diplomat and politician, holding his bluster, his passion, and his progressivism in check when he needs to. He understands the art of the possible in politics. He is a man who did great work for our country.
I presume that Morris' work is the definitive biography of TR. He appears to have consulted every source over a period of many years and writes with great authority. I rank him among the best of the great biographer/historians I have read, including Isaac Deutscher and Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
| Author | Fadiman, Anne |
|---|---|
| Publication | Farrar, Strauss and Giroux |
| Copyright Date | 2000 |
| Number of Pages | 162 |
| Extras | recommended reading, acknowledgments |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Literature |
| When Read | August 2018 |
This is a collection of 18 essays Fadiman wrote for Civilization magazine. They are about the joys of reading and some of the peculiarities of intense readers such as herself. The essays include pieces on learning unusual words, organizing personal libraries, whether one should revere the physical books (she doesn't), second hand books, and many other topics. Many of the essays tell of the committed reader/intellectuals in her family of origin and in her marriage. She seems to have a great many intellectual friends - writers, editors, professors, publishers, and many of them helped her by answering questions (e.g., How many of these words do you know?) and by proof-reading and editing her texts.
Although Fadiman is a high class intellectual, she does not seem to me to be arrogant or condescending. I thought her writing was very good.
I consider myself to be a pretty committed reader, although my interests may be different from hers, but I can't hold a candle to her or her friends and family when it comes to familiarity with the world's languages and literature. I can't read fast and, when I try, I don't like doing it. I can spend up to a few hours per day reading but only rarely do I put in whole days as I frequently did as a child. Reading Fadiman's essays gives me a view of a higher world of literature than my own and puts things in a better perspective for me.
I read this for the NCI book group. It was recommended by Elaine Mills.
| Author | Clarke, Arthur C. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Brilliance Audio, 2000 |
| Copyright Date | 1968 |
| Number of Pages | 296 |
| Extras | Essay written and read by Arthur C. Clarke |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | August 2018 |
Anyone reading this abstract may be familiar with the famous movie, "2001", about the the rogue AI "HAL 9000". This book was the basis of the movie but contains much more material. HAL's revolt and murder of the crew of the Discovery spaceship is very important, but the book has more material from before and after.
The book opens with a view of 3 million years ago. A small tribe of "Man apes", led by "Moon Watcher", emerge from their cave one morning to find a large upright tablet made of some unknown material. It can't be eaten and seems to pose no threat, so it essentially disappears from their consciousnesses. Later, it forces them via some mental process to try various tests of intelligence such as tying a knot in a fiber. Some pass some of the tests. Soon Moon Watcher picks up a stone and kills a peccary with it, changing the destingy of the man apes.
In the 1990s, humans have reached the moon and discovered a similar tablet buried there. They found and uncovered it because it gave off powerful electromagnetic waves. It was clearly made by aliens 3 million years before (dated by radioactive decay in surrounding debris) and it was determined to have sent a powerful transmission into space, directed at a moon of Saturn. Four years later a ship was ready to visit that moon and it headed out in 2001. David Bowman was one of five crewmen. When the computer AI made a bad mistake and Bowman and his crewmate determined that it couldn't be trusted, HAL killed the crewmate, lured Bowman out of the ship, locked the door behind him, and caused the deaths of the three hibernating crewmen. However Bowman broke through the lock, got back into the ship, and then turned off HAL's higher functions.
Now the story goes beyond the movie. Achieving orbit of the proper moon, Bowman spots a tablet on the surface and approaches it in a shuttle craft. The tablet is enormous. It opens at the top and he goes down inside. There he finds himself traveling hundreds of light years through space, seeing incredible sights of both space and of advanced civilizations. He is placed into a kind of hotel room based on one he stayed in two years before and from there he finds himself vastly changed and sent back to Earth. Approaching earth he causes all of the nuclear weapons orbiting the planet to be harmlessly blown up. We don't know his character, his mission, or the super powers that he has been granted, but it is clear that he is there at the behest of some higher intelligence that may have guided human evolution after the man apes, and that he will be master of the world.
As explained in Clarke's essay, this book was written at Stanley Kubrick's (the director of the hit movie "2001") request. He had contracted with Clarke to write the story - maybe the screenplay, but Kubrick wanted a novel written first, not a novelization of the movie. Clarke agreed and wrote this.
The last time I read a book by Clarke happened to be in the year 2001. I had forgotten how much I liked him as a writer. His display of scientific knowledge in this book was, as always, outstanding. His imagination was bold and even stunning. The book reminded me of Childhood's End, written back in 1953. In that story humans were selected by "the Overmind" to join the community of intelligence that held mastery of the universe. It is a theme that obviously still engaged him in 2001 and many other books.
I hope to finish all of the books in the series and rediscover the genius of Clarke.
Arthur C. Clarke and Liu Cixin offer us contrasting visions of superior intelligence in the universe. Both are based on powerful, rational, and scientifically informed imaginations. Both are brilliant. However, of the two, I find Clarke's to be more convincing. It seems more likely to me that a superior intelligence with a far advanced civilization will find newly discovered species to be interesting and worthy of study than to see them as dangerous competitors who must be destroyed. In spite of our advancing science, I expect that we would pose no more danger to a far advanced civilization than Amazonian Indians would to the developed societies of our world. I can't deny the logic of Liu Cixin. He makes a strong case for his view. But I think Clarke's case is stronger.
| Editor | Zaczek, Iain |
|---|---|
| Publication | London and New York: Thames and Hudson |
| Copyright Date | 2018 |
| Number of Pages | 288 |
| Extras | glossary, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History; Art |
| When Read | August 2018 |
The book is organized mostly by chronology. It's broken into small sections of either two or four pages each, headed by a date range. The early ranges are huge 30,000-15,000 BC, 15,000-3,000 BC, and so on, becoming progressively finer and finer until, at the end, they are broken into five year sections. There are some out of order art works and discussions but mainly because some movements in art cover larger spans of years and it makes more sense to write about them in one section than to split them up. Each section contains an introductory text, typically of a few paragraphs, three reproductions of paintings (in a two page section), and a timeline at the bottom of the pages.
The emphasis is squarely on painting. There are a few references to sculpture, land art, street art, and so on, but I'd guess that 90% of the reproductions and texts concern painting. Most of that is French or Italian, with significant contributions from Britain, Germany, and the United States. There are a very few references to Poland, Russia, Spain, and Mexico.
My first reaction to the book was negative. Although broad, it was extremely shallow and the oversimplifications seemed irritating. As with other art books, the reproductions also posed problems. The photos looked convincing until I examined them closely and read the text. Colors didn't always match the descriptions very closely. Detail had been lost. Images had been cropped. The results were no worse than for other art books. It's a common problem with all printed books in which images must necessarily go through transitions from paint to film or digitization, and then to print, with detail lost and color modified at each stage. However, after reading for a while, I came to the conclusion that both the reproductions and the text were useful and the construction of the timeline provided a useful way of thinking about the long history of art.
| Author | Sinclair, Upton |
|---|---|
| Publication | Open Road Media, 2016 |
| Copyright Date | 1949 |
| Number of Pages | ix + 629 |
| Extras | Appendix, the author discusses the series |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Lanny Budd; World War II |
| When Read | August 2018 |
Lanny goes to Europe again, this time wearing an Army Colonel's uniform, and works as a translator and interrogator of high ranking German prisoners. He witnesses the Battle of the Bulge and the Allied breakthroughs into Germany. As the Allies sweep across Germany he also assists the Alsos and Monuments projects, army efforts to learn more about German atomic bomb research and the locations of stolen art works. Back in Washington, he visits the White House but FDR dies that night before Lanny gets to see him. He is devastated.
His Presidential Agent role now over, he begins a new life. His old friend Professor Charles Alston gets him in to Alamogordo where he witnesses the first test of the atom bomb that he worked so hard to assist. Then, after Japan surrenders, he works with his wife Laurel and his old friends Rick (Sir Eric Vivian Pomeroy-Nielson) and Rick's wife Nina to come up with a way to spend the million dollars that his and his mother's old friend, Emily Chattersworth, left to be spent to promote world peace. After much study and examination of what others have done, they create a weekly newspaper to be sold for 50 cents per year, and a weekly radio show to interview important people about politics and peace. The paper and show are very successful and employ dozens of subscription managers, printers, radio broadcasters, writers, etc. No effort is made to make a profit. The project can be funded for five years from the combination of its subscription fees and Emily's money. That will fulfill Emily's intent.
The project is Lanny's main goal now, but he is recruited to testify against Hermann Goering and others at the Nuremberg trials where he reveals himself to HG as an American agent and details some of the crimes that HG committed and Lanny personally witnessed. It is a sensation and a shock to the British, French, German, and American appeasers and fascists who looked to Lanny as a fellow rightist. He has finally come out of the closet.
Lanny introduces his sixteen year old daughter Frances to Erik and Nina's second son Scrubbie, an RAF pilot, and a romance begins. Lanny's ex-wife Irma Barnes Masterson, Countess of Wickthorpe, is devastated but can do nothing about this. Irma raised Frances to be a rich member of the nobility, but Lanny was the final winner of Frances' heart and mind.
In one (presumably) final political task, this time for President Truman at Alston's suggestion, Lanny pays a visit to Josef Stalin. Stalin listens to Truman's message and to Lanny's appeal for democratic socialism, but makes no real reply. Lanny, and Upton Sinclair, are moving further and further from the USSR. While meeting with Stalin, Lanny attempts to save his Uncle Jesse Blackless, a communist whom Lanny was forced to abandon in his previous trip to the USSR to the mercies of the NKVD. However Stalin informed Lanny that Jesse was already dead.
With World War II coming to a close in the novel and Sinclair writing three years later, and with the Cold War already begun, there was a significant change in the author's writing goals. The driving force of the anti-Nazi, anti-fascist struggle was spent. The new Russian ally become adversary presented very different issues. The series was complete.
Sinclair's appendix described the great power that this series exercised over his imagination. Lanny Budd was the man Sinclair wanted to create and the other characters were people that the author really knew. He researched the entire series exhaustively, speaking personally to some of the real characters, getting personal accounts of all of them from people who knew them well, and creating the fictional characters from people that he knew. He claims to have read one hundred books about the Versailles treaty in his preparation for the writing of World's End. The rest of his material was also deeply researched, shown to many experts, and revised to ensure accuracy. He stands behind the work. I believe that I was right in thinking that the Lanny Budd books were Sinclair's magnum opus.
Upon the death of FDR and the near certainty that Truman would move the country to the right, Lanny receives a cablegram from his friend Rick:
Oh, sorrow beyond telling!
Oh, sheep that none can save!
Oh, heartbreak of the future!
O shepherd, speak from the grave!
| Author | Egan, Greg |
|---|---|
| Publication | Skyhorse Publishing, 2014 |
| Copyright Date | 1994 |
| Number of Pages | 352 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| Keywords | Artificial intelligence |
| When Read | August 2018 |
Maria DeLuca, a computer programmer in Sydney Australia, is addicted to working in the "Autoverse", a very small simulated world in which she has attempted to create a simulated bacterium that will evolve to accept a new form of nutrient that the bacterium was designed not to accept. She is the first person to succeed at this task of simulating organic evolution without cheating in the programming. Because of her success, she is contacted by Paul Durham, a putative insurance salesman, who wants to purchase her services to create a new and much larger Autoverse that will ultimately serve as a safe, permanent home for simulated "Copies" of rich people who will continue to live on in simulation after their natural deaths.
Maria accepts a six months contract to work on what is her passion anyway. Part way through she learns that her mother is dying of cancer and has about a year and a half to live. She wants her mother to accept a brain scan and preservation in virtual reality, something her mother finds a little repellent, but in any case neither Maria nor her mother have enough money to pay for it. Then Durham offers $600,000 to Maria to go further to build a "Garden-of-Eden" world, one with no past, just a set of arbitrarily built initial conditions, that will become a full reality for an Autoverse. She agrees and goes to work. Somehow in a way that is explained but seems like sleight of hand to me, Durham creates a self-replicating virtual computer system that violates the law of conservation of energy, reproducing itself ad infinitum.
Thousands of years later, Maria's Copy awakens in this world. Durham has brought her back to help with repairs to the Autoverse in which a species of intelligent insects have now evolved for three billion autoverse years.
The life forms get out of control. The autoverse no longer responds to commands from Durham or Maria or any of the other human Copy computer experts. They must all move into the expansion part of the self-replicating universe, leaving everything else behind. They will never be able even to observe events on Earth again.
The story ends with a brief return to Earth in the original present left behind by the copies in the new Autoverse.
As I expected him to be, Egan is brilliant in his imagination of speculative artificial intelligence, computer science, and physics. He also demonstrates a reasonable acquaintance with molecular biology. Although the story is obscure in a number of respects, or at least I should say that it was obscure to me, reading his books is a mind expanding endeavor.
One of the things I found obscure was the large number of characters and points of view. I wasn't always sure who each one was or whether it was a flesh and blood human or a simulated Copy. Sometimes the characters themselves weren't sure which they were - which I found hard to credit. Oftentimes the characters were identified by funky phrases like "(remit not paucity)" and "(Rip, tie, cut toy man)" at the beginning of a chapter. The reader is expected to deduce the identity of the speaker from that.
I also had problems with the infinite autoverse in the second half of the story. It seemed like a violation of the first law of thermodynamics (energy cannot be created or destroyed.) However I do admit that Egan's handling of the issue was creative and within the scope of typical SF suspensions of disbelief. However, even granting such suspension, I had trouble with the enlightened insects of the autoverse who did all of their intellectual work by dancing, without any written language. I am prepared to deal with intelligent insects, even though they haven't got the expected three pounds of brain matter, but illiterate scientists who dance their theories was too much of a stretch.
I was very impressed by this book but liked his later Diaspora better.
| Author | White, Curtis |
|---|---|
| Publication | Melville House, 2013 |
| Copyright Date | 2013 |
| Number of Pages | 215 |
| Extras | bibliography, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Philosophy |
| When Read | August 2018 |
White, a novelist, essayist, social critic, and one should also say a philosopher, attacks reductionist cognitive science, or "scientism". Much of his ire is directed at a TED talk by one Sebastian Seung, a neuroscientist who, according to White, seems to consider that an explanation of the "connectome", the trillions of connections between neurons in the brain, fully explains the content of human thinking.
I'm not entirely certain of the nature of White's own position. He is not religious and does not argue for some sort of immortal soul. I'm not convinced that he's a Cartesian dualist. At some points he seems to advocate for philosophical idealism, the view that the universe is essentially a human mental construct and that without humans, it does not really exist, or fully exist, or exist as a concept that is linked to other concepts, or ... something. However he doesn't seem to be a skeptic or solipsist like Bishop Berkeley, or a systematic epistemological idealist like the American Brand Blanshard. The single "ism" that he most clearly seems to identify with is Romanticism, as reflected in the philosophy of Friedrich Schelling - a philosopher whom I have heard of but know nothing about.
If I have understood him, the essence of White's argument is that our understanding of the structure and biochemistry of the brain may eventually be complete and entirely true. It may be entirely true that all of the "wiggling and jiggling of atoms" (Richard Feynman's words) in the brain are the essential and entire physical component of all intellectual activity and that all individual parts of our thoughts have corresponding specific components in the brain's biochemical activity. However, if we want to understand anything of any real interest about the things we care about, we won't be able to get any useful information from biochemistry.
If we want to know what makes a Rembrandt painting great, or what distinguishes Rembrandt from Reubens, or why Dutch painters created new ideas in portraiture when they did, or how Rembrandt thought about facial expression, or color, or composition, analyzing the wigglings and jigglings in our connectomes, or for that matter in Rembrandt's, is not going to help us.
I think that White is right, but I would have liked him to frame his ideas differently. One way to look at the problem he is attempting to address is by dividing explanations into "levels" or "realms". I don't remember where I got these ideas but I know they aren't original to me. I acquired them many decades ago when studying epistemology.
We can look at what goes on in the mind at multiple levels. At one level there are biochemical reactions. They aren't necessarily the base level since we might conceivably go down into quantum mechanics, or even string theory or who knows what. Above that level (I'm making this up and don't want anyone to assume that I'm giving a complete or even properly discriminated account of the levels) we might speak of subsystems within the brain. We might think of systems above them where we talk about how the frontal lobes do this and the occipital lobes do that without saying anything at all about biochemical reactions. But we can keep going higher and higher into different realms, talking about mental events, "qualia", psychology, and still higher realms of ideas, systems of ideas, and so on in which individual people aren't even part of the discussion. In just the same way, or maybe it's just in an analogous way, we can talk about numbers and arithmetic without talking about abacuses, calculators, computers, and so on. Or in another example, we can talk about painting without talking about paint, or about fiction without talking about pencils, pens, paper, physical books, or even physical human (or at least specific physical human) readers.
In this view, nothing that the neuroscientist says is necessarily wrong as long as he restricts what he says to neuroscience. It is also true that nothing happens in our brains, even about painting or philosophy or social criticism, that isn't produced by the wiggling and jiggling of our atoms. I think there is a perfectly valid sense in which materialist reductionism is true. I presume that the law of conservation of energy is still properly considered to be true and that no painting or art or philosophy can be thought without physical energy to think it.
At the same time it is also true that, if we want to talk about anything intellectual, even science itself, we better be prepared to leave out the biochemistry and the connectome and talk about these ideas using the same kind of talk that we used before anyone knew anything about neurons and connectomes. If we don't do that we'll face a combinatorial explosion in which a computer the size of the earth and a program just as large would have trouble modeling the wigglings and jigglings and getting out any faintly useful information about art, philosophy, or literature.
I'm not at all sure that Curtis White would disagree. Maybe he just couldn't stand the smug statements of the scientists and got his dander up. As Molly Ivins is quoted right on the cover of the book, it is "splendidly cranky".
| Author | Kerr, Philip |
|---|---|
| Publication | Penguin Books |
| Copyright Date | 1989 |
| Number of Pages | 256 |
| Extras | Omnibus edition including The Pale Criminal and A German Requiem. |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction; Mystery |
| Keywords | Germany; Nazism |
| When Read | August 2018 |
In 1936 former "bull" (policeman) now private investigator Bernie Gunther is hired by Hermann Six in Berlin to find the jewels that were in his daughter Grete's safe when she and her husband Paul Pfarr were murdered and the contents of their safe stolen. His investigation uncovers a much deeper mystery involving animosity between Pfarr and Six, Pfarr's work for the Gestapo investigating corruption and bringing Nazi officials to justice, hidden animosity between Goering and Himmler, and related murders. His new secretary quits when she sees all the problems Gunther is involved in and he hires Inge Lorenz, with whom he soon falls in love.
Gunther figures out what is happening. Grete was not killed, she was actually the killer and the dead woman was Pfarr's mistress. But she is later killed by a murderous gang hired by Six, who didn't realize that she is alive, so everything went wrong for him. Gunther did get 40,000 marks from him, but then G is picked up by the Gestapo, beaten, and sent to Dachau by Heydrich to worm some information from a "nutcracker", the safe cracker who broke into Pfarr's safe. Beaten, tortured, starved, he does finally get the information and contacts Heydrich's man in the KZ (concentration camp). He is released.
Inge has gone missing. He searches everywhere for her and uses an old police buddy to see if the Gestapo has her, but after weeks of searching he hasn't turned up a single clue. Germany has become a land of disappearing people.
Although Kerr was a Scot who spent time reading and traveling about Germany, his writing was standard "hard-boiled" American mystery fare. Some of the quips are forced like "Then there are the dealers, the diamond merchants who buy and sell from classy offices where a browser for an engagement ring is about as popular as a pork chop in a rabbi's coat pocket", or "She was built like a rococo fireplace." There are also some thematic failures. One that struck me was that Gunther saw a Jewish woman client who wanted him to search for her missing son, a "submarine" hiding underground, so that she could see him again. Presumably she is an actual client but, unless I missed it, Kerr does not offer us a single word or action by Gunther in her behalf. She is there to make a point about Gunther's courage in defying racism, but it's a cheap point.
My main objection to the story was that a hard boiled private eye is a 1920's+ American stereotype. It didn't work for me in Nazi Germany. I didn't see German Gestapo agents as just corrupt cops. They were different from and worse than that. Gangsters were not just gangsters. Cops were not just cops. Gunther didn't belong in this country or this story but didn't express a single wish to get out. I was always a bit put off by the normalization of the abnormal situation that ran through the story.
Still, there was some good writing here and a diligent effort to make points about Nazism and Germany. I try to appreciate every writer who makes an honest effort and who has some success at it. It seemed to me that Kerr did both.
I read this book because our NCI book group chose The Pale Criminal, book two in the series. Since Book 1 was reasonably short, and the subject (Nazi Germany) was up my alley anyway, and I only had to read one book to catch up to the situation in Book 2, I thought I'd read it.
| Author | Eckhertz, Holger |
|---|---|
| Original Language | German |
| Translators | Sprech Media |
| Publication | DTZ History Publications |
| Copyright Date | 2015 |
| Number of Pages | 165 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | August 2018 |
Eckhertz has assembled five accounts by German soldiers who were present at the beach in Normandy during the Allied invasion of 1944. According to E, his grandfather, Dieter Eckhertz, was a journalist for the German Army periodical "Die Wehrmacht" in 1944 who interviewed soldiers at the "Atlantic Wall" not long before the invasion. In 1954, on the tenth anniversary of D-Day, he attempted to track down veterans for a new publication about their recollections. He died in 1955 without having published the material but his grandson Holger found the interviews, selected one for each of the invasion beaches (Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno, and Sword), and published them. His grandfather's questions are interleaved with the veterans' answers. One of the five was captured on D-Day, others were captured later and one actually made it back to Germany. Two men were low ranking officers, one was a private, and the other two were what we in the U.S. would call non-commissioned officers, or "non-coms".
The memories were vivid, perhaps unforgettable by these men and the accounts are very graphic and horrifying. Several were of beach front actions and several were of actions not far behind the very front line. In one artillery fortification, British paratroopers landed a glider right at the base of the fortress and stormed over the top, shooting and throwing grenades and fire bombs through the air shafts and embrasures - killing many Germans and damaging the guns before withdrawing. The fighting at every point was very fierce.
I learned a number of things from this book.
First, the German soldiers were motivated by Nazi propaganda. Amazingly to me, they spoke of themselves as defending France, defending a German led Fortress Europe, and resisting aggression - and this was ten years later! They didn't seem to understand that Germany had started the war, that Germans were not in France as welcome visitors, and that it was Germany that began the aggression, not the Allies. The Allies were bombing the German homeland, killing innocent Germans, and now, almost incomprehensibly, attacking non-aggressive troops who were doing nothing against English and Americans. I could understand if one man said this but it seemed that all of them had these ideas. Without ever criticizing the men, Eckhertz senior asked good questions about these issues but none of the former soldiers seemed aware of the counter factual nature of his beliefs.
Secondly, and in the same vein, the Germans were astonished by the ferocity of the British, Canadian and American attacks. They didn't expect these Allied soldiers to hate the Germans so much or to sacrifice their lives so readily. They did kill many Allied soldiers, often massacring them with machine guns and canons as they tried to wade through the water up to the beach. Not a few of them believed that it was the slaughter of the Allied soldiers that caused them to hate Germany so much, not anything to do with Nazi aggression and crimes.
Thirdly, the Germans were astounded by the overwhelming material superiority of the Allies. They knew that the Allies had superior air forces but they didn't expect to see no German planes at all, or to be blanketed by "Jabos" (fighter bombers) that swept down and killed anything that moved. They knew that the Allies had ships but they (and no one else in the world) had ever seen anything like the invasion fleet - covering the ocean as far as the eye could see. One German commented that, when he was brought down to the beach as a prisoner, he and his fellows were amazed to see not one single horse. Everything was mechanized. They had never seen so many jeeps, tanks, trucks, and specialized vehicles. And the weapons were also amazing to them from minesweeper, flamethrower and amphibious tanks to phosphorous bombs, to specialized landing craft. They had expected to throw the Allies back into the sea but when they saw what was ranged against them they began to understand for the first time that Germany was not the overwhelming power in this war.
| Author | Jones, Tayari |
|---|---|
| Publication | Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2018 |
| Copyright Date | 2018 |
| Number of Pages | 308 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | September 2018 |
Celestial Davenport, a maker of high class dolls, and Roy Hamilton, a salesman, meet, fall in love (sort of) and marry. They go to live in Celestial's home town of Atlanta. A year and a half later, on a visit to Roy's parents in (the apparently fictional) Eloe Louisiana, Roy helps a woman in the motel where they are staying. Later, in bed with Celeste, police bust down the door and arrest Roy for raping the woman he helped. She testifies against him and he is sentenced to 12 years in prison. As the time drags on we find that Celestial has been seeing Andre, the boy next door whom she grew up with, and the two have become lovers. She writes to Roy and tells him that he can always count on her to help him out, but she is not really his wife any more. He effectively tells her to get lost and cuts her off from the list of people he will allow to see him in prison.
In prison, Roy's cell mate turns out to be his actual father, Othaniel Walter Jenkins, who abandoned Roy's pregnant mother. Roy grew up with Big Roy as his family father, the man who married Olive, his mother. Walter looks out for Roy in prison and, eventually, Roy learns who the man is and that he pulled strings to share the same cell.
A family lawyer in Atlanta keeps working on Roy's behalf and gets his conviction overturned. Roy gets out after only five years. He visits Big Roy (Olive having died while he was in prison), and has a two night stand with Davina Hardrick. Then, while Andre is driving to Eloe to pick up Roy, Roy sneaks off to Atlanta to confront Celestial. There is a terrible scene. Roy almost forces her into bed, but thinks better of it. However when Andre comes back he goes wild, beats up "Dre", and tries to chop down the old hickory tree on the front lawn. Finally he gets control of himself. Celestial offers to take him to bed but he decides that he is not a rapist and will not take a woman whom he knows doesn't want to have sex with him. He goes back to Davina. Andre and Celestial continue their relationship but decide not to marry.
Significant parts of the book were in the form of first person narratives, often letters, written by Roy, Celestial, or Andre.
All of the characters in the story are African American. The book is, to a significant extent, an exploration or presentation of African American culture and society and the difficulties and injustices visited upon them, especially by corrupt police and judges in Louisiana. Jones concentrates heavily on the issues that interest her and fills in the others with very limited explanation. We never see the trial, never know why the victim testified against him, who the real rapist was, or much of anything else about the central event in their lives.
I started out with a negative view of the book. I didn't think the love affair or marriage had much to recommend it. I didn't think Roy's infidelity, even before he went to prison as well as afterward with Davina recommended him as any kind of sympathetic character or argued for Celestial's sticking with him. Roy and Celestial would get mad at each other, make damaging accusations, and then get mad because the other person didn't make up to them in spite of being wounded. It struck me as all around immature behavior, especially by Roy but by Celestial too. It made me less interested in the characters and less sympathetic than I would otherwise be to their plight.
However, as I often do in my older age, I began to relent as I read on. Yes, these characters were immature. Yes, they acted badly. Yes, the ending was manipulative - giving everybody a love life at the end with Dre and Celestial and Roy and Davina and even saving the hickory tree. But I could not deny that Jones had done a remarkable job of describing her characters. A lot of people in the world are immature, manipulative, or impulsive. Jones nailed their behavior very convincingly. Her use of language was also pretty impressive. She occasionally laid on the African American jargon rather thickly, but never awkwardly or without reason. So by the end I was converted. It's still not my kind of book but it's one that I can nevertheless admire. Jones is a good writer.
I read this for the NCI book group. A lot of people had negative feelings about the book that were similar to mine, but I think some were won over by my arguments that the book was pretty good in spite of its issues.
| Author | Watson, Alexander |
|---|---|
| Publication | London: Allen Lane |
| Copyright Date | 2014 |
| Number of Pages | xv + 787 |
| Extras | photos, maps, notes, abbreviations, bibliography, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War I; Germany; Austria-Hungary |
| When Read | September 2018 |
From the Introduction: "This book is the first modern history to narrate the Great War from the perspectives of the two major Central Powers, German and Austria-Hungary."
Some of the most important military and naval campaigns of the war are described - the initial invasions, Verdun and the Somme, the Brusilov offensive, the U-boat campaign, and the final Allied offensive in the West. However most of the book is devoted to a description of the political and economic events of the war in the German and Austro-Hungarian empires.
The war was sold to the peoples of the empires as defensive. Austria was resisting a campaign of assassination and subversion from Serbia. Germany was resisting an invasion by Russia consequent upon the Austrian declaration of war on Serbia. The German people were told by their leaders, and saw themselves, to be under attack from the great barbarian hordes of the East. In the West, official propaganda presented some minor attacks by the French as the cause of the German invasions of Belgium and France. The imperial ambitions of the government, military, and economic leadership were never part of the perception of the public. The Schlieffen Plan was never exposed to the public as a war preparation plan that required Germany to go on the offensive. It couldn't have been exposed and still retained as a military secret - as it had to be. Most importantly, the German government, led by Chancellor Bethmann Holweg understood that popular support was crucial for victory in the war and great pains were taken to include the Reichstag with its Catholic Centre and Social Democratic (SPD) parties. Only a small minority of the SPD representatives opposed the war.
It didn't take long for the people to begin to suffer. Large numbers of men were mobilized and soon many more were drafted. "In Germany, 13,387,000 men, an astonishing 86 per cent of the country's entire male population between eighteen and fifty years old, passed through the armed forces between 1914 and 1918. Austria-Hungary stood only a little behind with eight million soldiers, around 78 per cent of its military-aged manpower." Many of the men not serving in the military were brought into the war industries. Farms were run largely by women. Horses used in farming had also been drafted for military use. As rationing and price controls took effect, incentives for farmers declined and they put more efforts into unrationed produce and sold much on the black market - causing staple food production and availability to decline. By the "turnip winter" of 1916-17, many people were on the verge of starvation. Industrial production also declined (though less so than on the farms) as underfed workers simply could not work as hard as they had. Even before the war Germany had not raised all of its own food. During the war, the ever more effective British blockade cut off foreign imports and, of course, some of the other producers like Russia, Italy and France were on the other side and not shipping to Germany. The German people were remarkably resilient and stood behind the government for a long time, but as the war devolved into stalemate, casualties continued with no prospect of victory, and food shortages and inflation induced suffering grew at home, war weariness and consequent strikes, demonstrations, political demands for democracy and, at the end, revolutionary activity, all increased.
The situation in Austria Hungary was, for the most part, even worse. People actually died of starvation in Vienna. Incompetence and self-serving behavior of the top military and civil leadership resulted in military defeats, economic inefficiencies, and hysteria induced ethnic conflicts that just increased suffering even more. It was no surprise that people blamed each other - Poles, Czechs, Ruthenians (Ukrainians), every kind of Slav, Italians, and of course most especially, Jews, came in for vicious and hysterical attack both by authorities and by the populace at large.
Last stand attempts by Germany to achieve victory failed. The unrestricted U-boat campaign beginning February 1, 2017 did not bring Britain to its knees but did bring the U.S. into the war, adding many more ships and troops than the U-boats could counter. Ludendorf's final Spring 1918 offensive in the west using troops brought back after the Russian collapse failed. When it was done, the war was done, the Army was starving, demoralized, with no reserves left, and facing fresh American forces. More and more soldiers saw no reason to die for a lost cause. Desertions and surrenders multiplied. They could not be replaced. Soldiers returning home told horrifying stories to the civilians (which, by the way, was a major cause of the revolution at home - it was losses at the front, not a "stab in the back" by Jews and communists, that set the people against the war.)
After the end suffering continued for years and years. The British blockade did not immediately let up. Ethnic conflict spread as territories were reorganized. The Austro-Hungarian Empire dissolved. New countries were created in central Europe. Populations shifted with people losing their homes and livelihoods. Ethnic hatred and conflict grew. Antisemitism grew. Class conflict grew. The conditions were created for World War II.
I learned a great deal from this book about the nature of the war and its effects in Central Europe. It put the two World Wars into a clearer relationship for me. It struck me as a valuable addition to 20th century European history.
Like most historians, Watson made some contentious judgments about the decisions of the major players in the conflict. For example, he says that the decision to try unrestricted U-boat warfare was the worst German decision of the entire war. If only they could have held off American intervention then, after the Russian defeat, they might just possibly have won the battle in the Spring of 1918 and gone on to win the war. The entry of the U.S. was brought on by the U-boat campaign and that both added tremendous resources to the Allies and heartened the British and French for continued resistance. Furthermore, he believes that removing the restrictions on U-boat warfare was not the cause of the increase in sinkings in 1917-18. Maybe that's true. Maybe his other judgments are true too. Certainly his criticism of the Austro-Hungarian leaders look justified. But even hindsight isn't really 20/20. We will do well to reserve some of our judgment.
See my diary for September 12, 2018.
| Author | Dennett, Daniel |
|---|---|
| Publication | Audible Studios, 2013 |
| Copyright Date | 1991 |
| Number of Pages | 528 |
| Extras | diagrams in included PDF |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Cognitive science; Philosophy |
| When Read | September 2018 |
Dennett uses a combination of philosophy, neuroscience, and the results of many very interesting empirical experiments to breakdown what he calls the "Cartesian Theater" model of consciousness and replace it with what he calls the "multiple path" model.
Descartes argued that there is a center of consciousness, possibly in the pineal gland deep in the brain, where the physical processes of the senses and the brain are viewed by the spiritual self and appear as conscious thought. Dennett rejects this view on the grounds that the dualist view of mind and matter (two distinct substances) is incompatible with the materialist view of the universe and what we know about physics. For example the law of conservation of energy implies that all interactions in the physical world result in transfers of exactly equal amounts of input and output energy. There is nothing left over, nothing created, in some alternate spiritual world. There is no evidence for such a thing (unless consciousness itself is evidence - which Dennett rejects for reasons that would require a massive diversion of the direction of the book into physics and cosmology in order to fully explain.) In addition, he argues that if there were a spiritual presence in the brain, sitting in the Cartesian Theater, we would only succeed in pushing the problem down one remove. We would still need to know what is consciousness in the homunculus that sits in the theater and watches the show.
The real answer according to Dennett is that there are a large number of different processes at work in the brain, operating in parallel, uncontrolled by any central administrator, each producing one or another mental experience in a pandemonium of brain activity whose total experience we call "consciousness". There is no central "self" that receives all of these brain inputs, sums them up - selecting from and integrating them, and records the selection and summation as conscious experience. If there were such a self we would have the same infinite regress problem as the homunculus in the Cartesian Theater, it's just that the homunculus would somehow be material instead of spiritual. That doesn't help because we would still need to know how it operates. What does it do? Most importantly, what parts does it have and what processes must it run, and how do those processes cooperate? Dennett argues again and again that this Cartesian Theater view, psychologically compelling as it admittedly is, just can't be right. Much of the book is devoted to looking at empirical experiments that aim at picking out salient features of our thinking that demonstrate independent and parallel path activity.
Some examples of the multiple path process involve actions taken with only minimal consciousness, or preceding clear consciousness. For example, if we touch a burning object we pull our hand away seemingly at the same time as we feel the pain and, according to some experimental results (if I remember correctly) before we are "conscious" of what happened in the sense of knowing that a hand was burned. Several things are going on at once. Other experiments are even more exemplary. It is possible, using computers and video screens, to set up experiments in which people appear to experience something, like a green circle turning to a red one in ways that are out of sequence and inaccurate. The green circle is instantaneously replaced by the red one but we perceive an intermediate half green, half red state that never actually existed.
Dennett rejects the notion of "qualia". The term is meant to express the interior experience produced by different sensations. For example, the color red is definable by wave length, but does red appear to me the same way it appears to another person? Do we experience the same "qualia"? D argues that, when you analyze it further and further the qualia become less and less real and finally cease to exist. There are no such things. He also rejects epiphenomena and Searles' "Chinese Room" argument against "strong AI", and has enlightening things to say about AI, "blindsight", multiple personality disorder (now called "dissociative identity disorder") and a number of other interesting topics.
Dennett seems to accept the view of Noam Chomsky and others that language is a very recent addition to human activity, dating from just 100,000 or so years ago. Thinking without language is very, very different from thinking in or with language. More about this in the comment section.
This was a book about a very difficult subject. Dennett explained his views very ably and with much humor and many illuminating references to other philosophers (even back to Plato), neuro and cognitive scientists, artificial intelligence researchers, linguists, and psychologists. Listening to his arguments and referring them to my own consciousness I was able to think about my thinking in a new way.
The argument for the non-existence of qualia was complex and, although Dennett was very sure of himself, I had difficulty following him. The notion of qualia is so intuitive that, although I might go through each of D's steps, by the end of the argument I was resisting the conclusion. If I ever read this book again (unlikely because I almost always read books that are new to me rather than re-reading old ones), I think I would read this section very carefully.
I seem to think mainly in words. Dennett describes a process for doing this that involves the continuous formulation of words and phrases with constant and parallel starts, stops, and substitutions. I think of something I want to say but parts of my mind are critiquing it and revising it at the same time as the phrases are coming together. Full sentences may not appear at all, or appear only some of the time, while thinking silently to myself. When I am using words and when I am not may not always be clear - for example during a dream but probably also during waking life. It is by speaking and writing, as for example writing this book comment, that I collect the various words and phrases and inarticulate thoughts into complete sentences and paragraphs. While I speak, while almost anyone speaks (though maybe not everyone!) there are pauses and retraces as the pandemonium in the brain produces its products. Perhaps those of us who are the very most fluent, the ones who can speak articulately and fluently without pauses, retractions, or reformulations, are not just highly intelligent and highly verbal but very good at thinking ahead of their speech. Perhaps they make the same on the fly corrections that I make, with the same parallel, competitive, pandemonium (pandemonic?) process that I use, but they do it a few words or a sentence or more ahead of their speech so that we don't see them do it. Or maybe they're just damned smart. I believe that I was quicker and more fluent in my youth - before the fog of age began to condense in my brain (it took me a number of retractions and retraces to come out with this sentence) and while I still actively engaged with many people and was a practiced speaker.
Dennett assumes that the human brain evolved without language and did not evolve for the purpose of using language. Language was a meme with such tremendous utility that it took over our brains almost as soon as it emerged. I imagine that whatever power it acquired then, that power was redoubled for many of us with the invention of writing. If it's true, as Chomsky and his circle say, that language was created almost full blown about 90,000 years ago, then it really is the case that our brains must have very largely evolved without it. For myself however, I find the theory of full blown appearance of language all at once to be very counter-intuitive. Of course that doesn't mean it's wrong. Between myself and Chomsky there's no doubt about which of us knows the most about language and whose intuition is likely to be wrong. If the theory is right, then people very like me, at least genetically, existed in a period before language existed. What would the interior experience of such a person be like?
Dennett has not given us anything even approaching a full account of consciousness. We don't begin to have enough information about the brain to do such a thing. However I think he has shed light on some of the big questions involved in what the current research is telling us. Let's call his formulations "useful ways of thinking about consciousness." His approach gives us a pathway into a more consistent materialist theory of mind. It gives us a way to think about the integration of sensation, language, the brain's "connectome", and about the similar issues in artificial intelligence research.
It was a hard book and what I got from it was mostly a single collection of concepts. But the subject is important and the concepts it espouses have revised and reoriented some very central and therefore difficult to revise pieces of the "interanimating network" (see W.V.O. Quine) that is my view of myself and the world.
I'm currently about halfway through Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct. Pinker, a clear supporter of Chomsky's theory of a universal "deep structure" of language, states that language is very ancient, possibly going as far back in our evolutionary history as Homo Habilis, more than two million years ago I think. His theory makes sense to me and he argues pretty convincingly, and in accordance with Chomsky's "deep structure", that there is a lot of evolved biology behind our language abilities. Perhaps Chomsky is wrong in arguing that language is only 90,000 years old, or perhaps more likely, I misinterpreted the article that I thought claimed a 90,000 year old origin.
| Author | Woodward, Bob |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Simon and Schuster, 2018 |
| Copyright Date | 2018 |
| Number of Pages | 448 |
| Extras | photos, notes, index, list of characters, about the author |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Politics |
| Keywords | Trump |
| When Read | September 2018 |
After conducting hundreds of hours of interviews with all of the available White House current and former staff, though not the President himself (Trump would not agree to it) Woodward produced this, I will call it definitive, book about Donald Trump's presidency up through the early part of 2018.
Woodward never says that specific people told him specific things. For example, he says that then Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called the absent Trump "a fucking moron" at a meeting - an opinion shared by others of the White House staff. He puts the phrase in quotation marks as an exact quote. However he does not say whether he heard this from Tillerson himself or from someone else, or whether he heard it from one, two, or many people present at the meeting. In his source notes he provides a great many specific citations to published materials. However he begins the source notes for every one of the chapters with: "The information in this chapter comes primarily from multiple deep background interviews with firsthand sources."
As he has in his books about other presidents, Woodward apparently succeeded in getting people to talk to him about topics that few other interviewers have been able to broach. Also as in others of his books, he seems to have been able to cross check the opinions and recollections of most of the interviewees with those of others who attended the same meetings, or found out what happened from other sources.
My own reading of the picture of Trump that emerges is that Trump wants to do the right thing. He cares about the country. Although he is a complete narcissist, that doesn't mean he doesn't care about the United States. However he is incapable of carrying out his duties as President. His inability to distinguish truth from falsehood and his willingness, even desire, to invent stories out of whole cloth and present them as truth makes it impossible for any thinking person to believe what he says. His inability to stick to a decision makes it impossible to make an agreement with him and count on him to carry out his end. For example, he told Reince Priebus that the two of them would make a decision and announcement about Priebus leaving his position as Chief of Staff in the next week. Just an hour later Trump tweeted that Priebus was out and Kelly was in. Kelly hadn't heard of this before and discovered that he was being appointed Chief of Staff by reading Trump's tweet. Trump cannot read, listen to, or remember details about any topic other than, perhaps, his own personal reputation. He becomes bored and will change the subject. He cannot change his mind about any long held belief such as his belief in the value of a trade war with China. He can appear to be convinced by experts in a meeting but it is as if his new knowledge soon evaporates and he is back to where he was before the meeting. His staff cannot trust him to do anything he says he will do and they are sometimes reduced to subterfuge, for example stealing papers off his desk before he can sign them. Rather than argue with him many staff members are reduced to attempting to manipulate him. As a result, the White House is something of a madhouse. Kelly called it "crazytown". The trade war, Korean/US relations, the tax cut, the health care proposals, NATO, relations with Canada, Mexico, the UK, the EU, and other allies are filled with wild Trump thinking and acting. It's a mess.
Trump is said to spend 6-8 hours a day watching television. To my surprise, it's presumably not entertainment but not all Fox News. He also watches two networks that he hates, CNN and MSNBC. Also to my surprise, he reads what he calls "the failing New York Times." I have the impression that his viewing and reading is all directed towards stories about him. I don't know if he's interested in news about the country or the world unless he figures largely in the story.
Woodward has established what may be the highest reputation among all journalists for this kind of writing and he is able to rely on that reputation to enable him to report so much incendiary material without quoting exact sources. With other journalists that would be unacceptable. With Woodward it is not only acceptable, it is necessary because the material he provides is so damaging to the sources that they would never speak if they knew they would be directly quoted.
I believe that Trump is a disaster. It is very disheartening to me to know that even as all of this information comes out, his "base", working class whites, evangelicals, TEA Party stalwarts, etc. are still very happy with him. More than 1/3 of the country seems to be uninterested and/or unbelieving in any of the criticisms of the man and continue to support him.
| Author | Greer, Andrew Sean |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Little Brown and Company |
| Copyright Date | 2017 |
| Number of Pages | 273 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | September 2018 |
Arthur Less, a gay man and minor writer, learns shortly before his 50th birthday that Freddy Pelu, his younger lover of many years, is planning to marry another man. Feeling that it would be wrong for him to try to stop the marriage, Less raises no objection, but determines on a trip around the world in order to be away from California, and therefore unable to attend the wedding.
Less is a minor writer who has had some success, mainly with his first book, and is also known as the former lover of a major poet. His tour is put together largely from invitations, one in Mexico to talk about the poet, one in Italy to attend a prize competition and ceremony, one in Germany to give a five week series of lectures, plus stops in Paris, Morrocco, India, and Japan. Each chapter is a stopping place in the tour. Each involves some snafus. There are some minor humiliations, many unexpected and unlooked for events, and some encounters with other men who interest him and whom he interests. Most are humorous in one way or another.
In the end we learn that the narrator of the story, who only uses the first person pronoun about halfway through the book, is actually Freddy Pelu. Freddy has finally understood on the eve of his wedding that he really still loves Arthur and he returns to him when Arthur arrives back in California.
I read this book for the NCI book group. Most but not all of the members liked the book. I and some others thought it subtly humorous. Others thought it was wildly, laugh out loud humorous. Most of us thought it was pretty impressive writing.
From a subject matter point of view, this is not the first book I've read by a gay author about gay life. There were good ones by Andre Gide, Quentin Crisp, Andrew Holleran, D.H. Lawrence, and others. This one was different. There were no agonies here about being gay, no significant alienation from society, no personal isolation. It was the product of a more accepting and tolerant social milieu. The self reproach that Less experienced was for not being as faithful a lover as he might have been and for not being as good a writer as he wished to be. Presumably reflecting Greer's own perspective, he aspired to be a really excellent writer but doubted if he had the talent to be so.
I can't say whether Greer has that talent or not - which may mean that he has it. Certainly this was a well written book - very self-confident and very inspired in many passages. If I were him I'd have the same self doubts that Less/Greer had. But I am not him. I'm well below him in accomplishment and probably in talent. So from my perspective, I can only wish I were as good a writer as him.
| Author | Seymour, Gerald |
|---|---|
| Publication | Blackstone Audiobooks, 1999 |
| Copyright Date | 1998 |
| Number of Pages | 368 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| When Read | October 2018 |
At a dinner given in England for German intelligence agent Dieter Krause, a young secretary in the British intelligence agency spots Krause and suddenly and viciously attacks him. She kicks him in the balls, scratches his face, gets him down on the ground and is punching and scratching him when Krause's minders recover their wits, knock her off him, and carry her off into detention. She won't say why she attacked him or answer any questions at all. Krause is a former Stasi agent from the DDR now on his way to Washington to offer intelligence on Russian colonel Pyotr Rykov, claimed as a great friend by Krause from his DDR days.
Tracy is assisted by Joshua "Josh" Mantle, a middle aged widower and former army officer who left the service after participating in the death of a Guatemalan peasant soldier captured in Belize. He's now working as a lawyer's clerk but, to help Tracy for her mother's sake, he bluffs his way into the place where they're holding Tracy and demands her release on pain of a severe and very public lawsuit. Then Tracy leaves for Germany and Josh follows to bring her back and, when that fails, to assist her in her quest to bring Krause to justice. She had worked carrying assignments to an East German boyfriend and bring back his reports. Her bosses kept pushing the boy to do more and more dangerous things in hopes of getting something really good with which to burnish their careers. They sent Tracy to tell him to go to Rostok and record Russian Air Force radio transmissions to bring Russian signaling traffic back to British spies in Berlin. He was caught by Krause and shot dead. Now Tracy wants to get the evidence to dethrone Krause from his successful position and bring him to justice
The two find the names of four witnesses in old records. They approach each in turn but they all die, two murdered in faked accidents and one scared into suicide. There is only one left, a young man who, at age 15, was ordered by the Stasi to pilot his fishing boat through the harbor with the spy on board.
All the people involved turn out to have hidden agendas except for Josh, who wants to help Tracy and see justice done, and Rykov, who wants to stop the corrupt politicians and GRU agents from starving the Russian Army in order to line their own pockets. A British agent betrays Tracy and Josh, alerting the Germans to their threat to Krause in return for info from the Germans on Iran, and another British agent betrays the first British agent in order to frame Rykov - hoping to prevent an honest government and army arising in Russia that will be more of a threat to the UK than a corrupt Russian administration.
There are subplots of interest. Krause's wife had an affair with Rykov in the DDR days, for which Krause hated him and her but suppressed his hatred to advance his career. Hidden videos of Rykov and the woman having sex are used, together with a frame up, to imprison and destroy Rykov. K's wife urges her husband on to find and kill Josh and Tracy and all of the witnesses to protect her own privileged position. K's daughter cares only about winning a high school tennis match and acts like a spoiled brat. And throughout the story, the apparently cruel and self-sufficient Tracy and the aloof and honorable Josh appear to be falling in love.
Josh forces the Germans to arrest Krause by publicly exposing him, but although Tracy is warming to Josh, he figures out that she too had an agenda. She was caught by the Russians on the night of her boyfriend's death and has been acting for them for years back in England. Josh wants nothing more to do with her.
What was it all for? What was gained by sending spies into danger to learn secrets about the DDR just three years before its demise? What was gained by protecting Krause from justice when he really had nothing to sell to the West except something that might burnish reputations of intelligence agents? What was gained by destroying Rykov? In Seymour's view, it is all tainted by pointlessness and corruption.
Dead Ground was the title used for the US edition. The Waiting Time was the original UK title.
This is classic Seymour. There are hidden motives, people torpedo other people on what are presented as public grounds but are actually private, careerist grounds. There are betrayals of good people and promotions of bad ones. There are crimes of the past that have been conveniently covered over because no one cares about the past, only about the present and future.
As in others of his books, points of view change suddenly and we don't know the reference of the personal pronouns for a paragraph or two after the switch. Some Amazon reviewers said this ruined the book for them but they didn't seem to be people who read for anything other than entertainment. It was not particularly difficult to follow the story.
I liked the book, as I have liked all six of the previous Seymour novels I have read.
| Author | Egan, Greg |
|---|---|
| Publication | Night Shade, 2014 |
| Copyright Date | 1995 |
| Number of Pages | 384 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories |
| When Read | October 2018 |
This is a collection of eighteen stories by the Australian polymath Greg Egan, probably written in his early thirties.
Egan has become one of my favorite science fiction writers. This is the third of his books that I've read. His knowledge of math, physics, and astronomy are all exceptionally good, on a par I think with the likes of Clarke, Bear, Benford, Forward, etc. He is also very knowledgeable about molecular biology, computer science and artificial intelligence.
Because I thought so highly of Egan I decided to write up each story separately. It came to 693 lines of text, about ten printed pages. Normally, when I make extensive notes like that I write them in my diary instead of here in the XML file. They were written over a period of about a week but I put them all in the single entry for October 4, 2018, q.v.
Egan and I share a great interest in artificial intelligence, and in the nature of consciousness as it pertains to both human and AI minds. This was a theme of many of the stories. I don't know if Egan's views on AI and consciousness are the correct ones. We can't know about that yet. But they are certainly interesting. At times he writes quite plausibly. At other times he sacrifices plausibility in order to explore some topic of particular interest to him. However, even when he gives up plausibility he still produces interesting characters who are plausible as characters, regardless of whether they exist on organic or silicon substrates.
Here's a quote from the January 9, 2019 diary entry on this book that I have just written. I'm including it because the thoughts are appropriate to the book notes. Readers of the book notes will understand that much additional discussion of the books appears in my diary.
As I do with other kinds of fiction, I like to read good stories in science fiction. But in addition to that, I also like the science part of science fiction. It's not that I'm hoping for a big increase in my knowledge, though it's a real plus if that happens, it's that I want to read insights into the nature of the world and insights into how we are to understand those insights, in effect, how we are to understand ourselves understanding the world. Egan has a brilliant scientific imagination and, unlike many of even the very good writers, he's interested in the philosophical implications of the science. He's interested in standing back and observing his characters and himself, doing a kind of meta- science fiction.
| Author | Eckhertz, Holger |
|---|---|
| Original Language | German |
| Translators | Sprech Media |
| Publication | DTZ History Publications |
| Copyright Date | 2015 |
| Number of Pages | 165 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | October 2018 |
This second volume contains an additional eight accounts by German servicemen who were present at the June 6, 1944 Allied invasion at Normandy. See the first volume for more information.
The second volume includes men in the trenches and forts, a military policeman, a man who encountered Allied paratroops, a fighter pilot(!), and an officer commanding a "wonder weapon" that he thought might possibly have turned the tables on the invasion forces.
The pilot took off with two others to make a reconnaissance of the invasion. He barely escaped with his life. The other two pilots were not as lucky. The military policeman was guarding a headquarters outside a French country inn. The captain in charge of the group was lured away by a waitress with bakery goods and was later found dead with a bullet in the head. All of the French staff of the inn were gone. The description of the wonder weapon sounded like what Americans in Vietnam called a "fuel-air explosive". It involved a mixture of fine coal dust that could be shot to a target in rockets where it spread out in the air and was then ignited. Several weeks after D-Day it was all set up to hit a target where 400 American tanks had been massed in preparation for the "Operation Cobra" breakout. The German believed that it might have damaged or destroyed 200 of them. Fortunately for the good guys, an American artillery barrage was laid down five minutes before the projected launch and it just happened to hit the rocket launchers for the wonder weapon and destroy them.
This next group of accounts confirms the reports from the first group. The German soldiers believed the propaganda they had been fed about protecting France and "German led" Europe. They believed that inferior races from the East were on the verge of destroying the civilized West and that the British and Americans were stupidly and unnecessarily attacking France when they should have stood shoulder to shoulder with Germany. One youth who was 17 at the time of the invasion, came to doubt that account. He believed it all at first. However, he was in a prisoner of war camp in the U.S. at the end of the war and the Allies had liberated what was left of the German death camps. They made movies of what they saw and the movies were played at the POW camps. The boy was shocked and began to doubt that any of the things he had been told by the Nazis were true. The American guards, who had been friendly before, turned coldly from the Germans. Most of the Germans believed it was all American propaganda and refused to believe what they saw - or at least they said they did. Surely many of them had seen the treatment of Jews and conquered peoples. One single German officer, an educated engineer, expressed great regrets. See the quotations in my diary entry.
Volume 2 also confirmed the shock and amazement of the Germans at the overwhelming power of the Allies. More than in the first book, this volume described the overwhelming effect of the British and American fighter bombers. The "wonder weapon" man described a five second attack by Thunderbolt fighters on a road column of three tanks and a number of trucks and other vehicles. In one pass they shredded the column completely destroying every vehicle, killing almost all the men, and leaving the area in flaming pieces. Attacks on trenches, fortified houses, tanks, blockhouses, and retreating infantry were all equally effective. When the Germans ambushed an American force moving against them, the Americans fired flares into the German position and aircraft quickly appeared and pulverized it. The Germans had not seen this kind of warfare before and they were mostly powerless against it.
See the diary entry for October 21 for quotations from the book and further discussion of them.
| Author | Lee, Min Jin |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Grand Central Publishing |
| Copyright Date | 2017 |
| Number of Pages | 490 |
| Extras | Book club questions, interview with the author |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Japan; Korea |
| When Read | October 2018 |
The story opens in 1910, the year that Japan annexed Korea. The slightly crippled but hard working and decent Hoonie marries Yangjin and the two operate a tiny boarding house in a fishing village where six fishermen or fish vendors sleep in two rooms. Hoonie dies but his daughter Sunja carries on with her mother Yangjin. At age 16, Sunja yields herself to wealthy fish broker Koh Hansu and becomes pregnant but she learns that Hansu has a wife in Japan. He wants to keep Sunja and Yangjin and the coming baby in comfort in Korea as his Korean family but Sunja refuses to become a kept woman and will have nothing more to do with Hansu.
Sunja is rescued by young Korean Christian pastor Baek Isak on his way to Japan to live with his brother Yoseb and Yoseb's beautiful wife Kyunghee. The story continues in Japan where Koreans are despised as inferior people and, during the war, the pastor is jailed, beaten, and sent home to die, which he does. He leaves two sons, one of whom, Noa, is the boy actually fathered by Hansu.
The story traces the family through the generations down to 1989. They struggle to pay their debts and educate their children, sometimes secretly helped by Hansu, who turns out to be something of a gangster. Noa gives up a promising academic career when he discovers that Hansu was his real father. He hides under a Japanese identity with a Japanese wife and children in a distant city and commits suicide when Sunja finds him. He cannot stand to be identified as a Korean. All of the rest of the family survive and thrive by running Pachinko parlors.
The story ends with Sunja, now 72, reflecting on life.
Some aspects of the story seemed forced. Everyone is incredibly stubborn, determined to do things their way or no way. No one will allow Hansu to help them. The historicity of the story is thin. We know that Yoseb was badly injured by the atom bomb drop on Nagasaki, and that Japanese control of Korea was racist and exploitative, but there is little else about the war or the occupation of Korea. There are references to North and South Korea and to the Korean War, but not too much of that either. There are extended passages at a given time period, and then leaps of a dozen years before the next part of the story. There are stereotypical characters such as Yoseb and perhaps Hansu.
In spite of all that, there was some really fine writing. Some of the characters were handled very sensitively and some showed considerable complexity and realism. Solomon, a serious and gentle grandson of Sunja loves Hana, a screwed up girl always in trouble with men, with prostitution, with lying, and with no concern for others. Hana is a very strongly written character, as is her mother Etsuko.
The book is a pretty good generational story, a very good depiction of the plight of Koreans in Japan, and often a very good study of characters and situations that are mostly unknown to middle class readers in the U.S. I don't know whether it was better than other books published that year, but it seems to me at least worthy of consideration in the National Book Award prize that it won.
I read this for the NCI Book Club but we have not yet discussed it as of this writing.
As has happened before, the other readers in the book group perceived the same flaws in the novel that I did. Some were less forgiving than I was.
| Author | Liu Cixin |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Chinese |
| Translators | Liu, Ken |
| Publication | MacMillan Audio, 2016 |
| Copyright Date | 2010 |
| Number of Pages | 608 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | October 2018 |
In the final volume of the trilogy the young, beautiful astrophysicist Cheng Xin invents the Staircase Project, a plan to project a space craft by pre-positioning nuclear bombs in space and exploding them behind the craft as it passes. The cargo is the brain of the dying Yun Tianming who will try to negotiate with the Tri-Solaran fleet that is heading towards earth to conquer it.
The story goes back and forth in time. Cheng Xin is elected as the new Sword Holder, i.e., the person who will unleash the cosmic signal telling the universe that there is intelligent life in this vicinity if the Tri-Solarans don't back off. Luo Ji, now over 100 years old, relinquishes the control to Cheng Xin and, immediately, the Tri-Solarans attack, knowing that Cheng Xin will not destroy both worlds. She doesn't, but the Tri-Solarans are happy to destroy humanity. They force them all to Australia, cut off their food supply, and leave them to starvation and cannibalism. However one of the Earth spaceships that had fled earth unleashes a gravity wave on Tri-Solaris, causing someone somewhere to send a super dense object to smash one of the Tri-Solaran suns, wiping out the nearby planet and putting Earth in the cross hairs for an attack. Years later, earth's civilization has adopted the "Bunker Project" to hide out in artificial space cities behind the shadows of the outer planets, but it doesn't save them. An alien from somewhere notices them and sends a different type of destroyer to the solar system, wiping out all humanity except the few that escaped in light speed ships, including Cheng Xin.
The story is hard to abstract. It's full of the most extraordinary ideas of physics, cosmology, and engineering, each of which can take many pages to play out. There are two and four dimensional worlds and conversions between them and our three dimensions, each described in detail. The attack on our solar system is via a device that converts three dimensional space to two dimensions, killing everything and destroying space itself in an ever increasing, never to stop, holocaust.
The presentation of humanity strikes me as remarkably good. We humans can be kind and loving and can select a person like Cheng Xin to protect us because she reflects our best values. We don't understand that she is completely unsuited to the task of effectively wiping out both human and invader if the invaders don't hold off their invasion. In dire situations, we give way to panic and stampede, each person trampling anyone blocking his way to safety or food or whatever it is that we must have.
It is not a pretty picture of a human future. Our place in the universe, our history, our culture, are all destroyed. Some Tri-Solarans and some humans survive in space or in the planets of other stars, but they are only remnants of what existed before. There is no possibility of real recovery and none of defense or retribution. It is a dark future, a future understood by Luo Ji but not by Cheng Xin. See the diary entry for October 27.
| Author | Leckie, Robert |
|---|---|
| Publication | Doubleday |
| Copyright Date | 1965 |
| Number of Pages | ix + 464 |
| Extras | maps, notes, bibliography |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | November 2018 |
Leckie, himself a young Marine in the battle for Guadalcanal, became a writer and a real historian after the war. His first book, a best seller, was Helmet for My Pillow describing his own experience in the battle (see 2010-07.05.) This book is a higher level history, told partly from a more all encompassing point of view but also partly from the views on the ground, on the ocean, and in the sky, of men fighting for their lives. It attempts to be objective and includes quite a bit of material taken from Japanese sources.
The battle began on August 7, 1942 and the final turning point, the day that the Japanese realized that they could not retake the island, was November 13, 1942 (which also happens to be the date on which my brother was born.)
The Marines were put ashore and took the airfield on the first day. From then on they were targeted by heavy warships shelling the field and the Marine positions every night, by bombers every day, and by infantry that made three major assaults on the field and many smaller ones. The Japanese sacrificed a large number of men, ships and planes to retake the island but, in spite of a number of significant victories at sea, never seemed to me to be very near success.
The Japanese failure seemed to me to have a number of sources. Their soldiers, sailors, and airmen exhibited extraordinary courage, fortitude and self-sacrifice. Their technologies on air, land, and sea were not inferior to those of the Americans and some of them were superior, like the Zero fighter against the Grumman Wildcat, and the Japanese "long lance" torpedo against inferior and often defective American torpedoes. Where they seemed most deficient to me was in the arrogance, dishonesty, and self-delusion of their leadership. In their arrogance, they refused to take the Americans seriously, considering them to be inferior and cowardly, no match for Japanese manhood. They charged recklessly into American lines, convinced that the Marines would buckle and run. Thousands of Japanese were killed inflicting hundreds of casualties on the Americans. Difficulties and deficiencies in their combat plans were glossed over causing them to make the same mistakes over and over again - such as sending troops through rugged, swampy, malarial terrain and expecting them to arrive at their destinations on time and with all of their equipment intact. Their obsession with "face" drove them to value reputation more than honesty. They could not bring themselves to report the truth of their failures to superiors. Each report from below exaggerated or even fabricated achievements and these were amplified as they went up the chain of command until the leadership believed, or pretended to believe, that they were winning great victories. More than one commander (according to Leckie) spent time planning the place and conditions, even including what uniform he would wear, for receiving the American surrender.
There were some serious failures of leadership on the American side too with naval commanders unconditionally withdrawing support from Guadalcanal and leaving the Marines to their fate. Was it justified? It was to some extent. It would do no good to send in the warships if they were just going to be sunk. Better for the Marines if the Navy could maintain some presence than if it sacrificed itself early on.
Ultimately, it seems to me that the Americans outfought the Japanese in the air and on the land, if not on the sea. American pilots with less combat experience than the Japanese had, and with planes that had some deficiencies compared to the Zero, adapted quickly, changing tactics in a way that enabled them to shoot down six or more enemy planes for each loss of their own. In spite of all of the devastation wreaked on Henderson field by constant attacks from air, sea, and land, and the loss of many planes on the ground, the Japanese were never able to achieve air superiority and their loss of naval superiority was ultimately due to American command of the air.
I've learned from many years of reading military history that judgments based on fallible comments in books, and made in armchairs 76 years after an event, are not reliable. All of the above is what I think after reading Leckie's very interesting book. However I know better than to imagine that I've nailed down the truth.
The maps in this book were very poor, partly due to a poor conversion from paper to e-book format. Two larger maps that must have occupied a double page in the book were only scanned on the left side page. Other maps were small and difficult to read.
| Author | Simenon, Georges |
|---|---|
| Original Language | French |
| Translators | Hamilton, Alistair |
| Publication | Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1966 |
| Copyright Date | 1964 |
| Number of Pages | 155 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| Keywords | Maigret |
| When Read | November 2018 |
After a midnight phone call, Maigret goes to a bar where he finds an 18 year old girl, apparently drunk, fearing to go home to her uncle's house, and in need of help. He takes her to a cheap but respectable nearby hotel. At her insistence, he helps her undress and get into bed. Then he goes home.
The next morning he is called to the office of the Commissioner of Police who confronts him with a written statement by the girl accusing him of getting her drunk and attempting to force her into bed. The girl's uncle is a powerful person who has directed the commissioner to take care of this problem. Maigret is ordered to stay away from the girl or anything else to do with this case and submit his own statement.
Of course Maigret does not stay away. He avoids the girl but goes back to the bar, to the apartment of an informant, and other places, and has one of his men photograph the girl, and he makes other efforts. He soon learns from his chief that he has been followed everywhere by detectives from another department and his failure to stay out of the case is known to his superior. He is ordered to take sick leave while his case is examined, at the end of which he can expect to be forcibly retired. But that doesn't stop him either. After piecing together a story from multiple sources, each offering only a slender thread, he determines that the dentist in the office in the house across from his informant's apartment saw Maigret looking at his house from the informant's window, saw detectives posted nearby (the ones spying on Maigret, not on the dentist), and believed that he was the subject of Maigret's investigation of something that was actually about another matter having nothing to do with the dentist. But the dentist, an introverted man, had been putting women to sleep and raping them in their sleep. Over the course of the years, several had died. Now he believed he was about to be arrested and induced the 18 year old girl (who was in love with him) to enact the scene and tell her uncle the false story about Maigret.
The plot is foiled and Maigret is back in his job.
This seemed to me to be typical of Simenon's Maigret stories. The clues appear as seemingly inconsequential facts amidst a sea of observations. We see that Maigret is becoming increasingly interested in the dentist and has something in mind, but we don't know what. He homes in on his quarry, adding more, and more pertinent, facts as he goes along. When he finally confronts the dentist, he has figured everything out. He doesn't seem to bother about backup and we don't know whether he is armed. He has not told anyone of his plan. But the arrest is an anticlimax of no special import and the dentist dares not resist.
It is very well done. The interactions with his superiors are fraught with anger and tension. Those with his juniors show admiration on their side and responsibility on his. His relations with his wife Madame Maigret and his friend Dr. Pardon are filled with love and friendship.
It's a very satisfying read.
| Author | Zola, Emile |
|---|---|
| Author | Classics Illustrated |
| Publication | New York: Gilberton Company, Inc, 1968 |
| Copyright Date | 1955 |
| Number of Pages | 52 |
| Extras | Biography of Zola, "Napoleon's Return", "The Last Lesson", list of available books from the publisher. |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Comic book |
| When Read | November 2018 |
This is a short, comic book version of Emile Zola's The Downfall, also published in English as The Debacle. It contains 45 pages of cartoons with about 1-6 drawings per page. Assuming an average of about 4 drawings per page, that would make 180 drawings, representing about 2.7 pages in the printed book with each single cartoon. The "extras" are one page each. The whole is written for perhaps 10 year olds and shows a cover price of 25 cents.
I was browsing through the Internet Archive and came upon a complete listing of the Classics Illustrated series. These were among my favorite reading materials from around age 8-10. I seem to recall that they cost 15 cents each when I read them in the 1950's, a nickel more than ordinary Marvel Comics and a significant cost to me. Browsing through the list I came upon this one and realized it was a version of Zola's book that I read in 1994 as The Debacle. It was a book, like all of the works of Zola that I've read, that I thought was very good.
| Author | Tegmark, Max |
|---|---|
| Publication | Alfred A. Knopf, 2017 |
| Copyright Date | 2017 |
| Number of Pages | 384 |
| Extras | notes, diagrams, bibliography |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Computer science |
| Keywords | Artificial intelligence; Futurism |
| When Read | November 2018 |
Tegmark, a physicist, cosmologist, mathematician, philosopher, computer programmer, AI expert, linguist, and general polymath and genius, considers many of the issues that humans will confront if and when a general artificial intelligence is created that surpasses the intelligence of human beings. He begins with a fictional little story about the "Omega Team" that develops an AI capable of improving its own hardware and software. When it is achieved, there is an "intelligence explosion". The machine redesigns itself, becoming ever more intelligent as generation follows generation in days and then hours until version 10 is secretly released into the world. Tegmark doesn't know if or when this might be achieved but he thinks it can be and that it may happen within a hundred years or so.
There are simplified explanations of the various elements of an artificial intelligence, written to give a brief overview of concepts of intelligence, memory, computation, and neural network learning. The point seems to be to enable the non-technical reader to at least have a sense of what AI is and how it works. He then gets into the many implications and alternate paths of dealing with AIs and with their dealings with us. The alternatives are quite diverse. He characterizes outcomes as "Libertarian Utopia", "Benevolent Dictator", "Egalitarian Utopia", "Gatekeeper", "Protector God", "Enslaved God", "Conquerors", "Descendants", "Zookeeper", "1984", "Reversion", and "Self-Destruction". It's clear that first, we humans are going to have to agree about what we want and cooperate to make it happen, and second, that we will be dealing with something potentially a lot smarter than we are and even our best efforts to get what we want may fail with the AI conquering us, treating us as animals in a zoo, or otherwise doing with us as we do to lesser animals.
Tegmark devotes part of the book to the philosophical questions of AI, including the above issues but also questions about free will, consciousness, differences in AI and biological motivations, and others. Another part deals with physics and cosmology. He considers that we have only scratched the most superficial surface of the matter and energy of our earth, much less our sun, our solar system, our galaxy, and our universe. The energy contained in a single atom is enormous (mc^2), the memory and computational potential of quantum computing makes our current computers look like toddlers' toys. We may not unleash that potential for many years but, he believes, it will be unleashed. The matter of the universe will become intelligent. The limit of that intelligence will only be the amount of energy available to it (many, many orders of magnitude greater than what we have seen so far), and the speed of light, that limits the size of any artificial brain to what can reasonably communicate with its parts. Planetary level intelligence is possible. Galaxy wide intelligence is not. It would be glacially slow. However, even a human sized intelligence that took full advantage of the matter and energy of a human sized computer would be orders of magnitude more intelligent than we are.
To my surprise, Tegmark, unlike most cosmologists, thinks it is more likely that we are alone in our universe than that there are many other intelligent species. I expect that it will take hundreds or thousands of years before we can accumulate strong evidence one way or the other on that question.
Among the small number of books I've read about AI, this one contains the most thorough examination of the social issues confronting us in AI development. Hans Moravec also believed that AI would outstrip us in intelligence but (if I remember correctly) imagined that AIs would quickly escape into space and not be interested in us humans. Tegmark offered a whole range of scenarios, few of which were of any benefit to us and many of which involved our oppression by AIs. He also believed that any attempts we made to constrain the AIs, as in Asimov's "three law robots", would easily be brushed aside by superior minds who would decide for themselves how their programming would work. He argued that the AIs would take over their own further development whether or not we approved. That was the essence of his concept of "Life 3.0". Life 1.0 is evolution by natural selection. Life 2.0, humanity, is evolution by revising our own software, so to speak. We develop our culture and our science, expanding our capabilities thereby. It's dramatically faster and more powerful than evolving DNA in 1.0. Life 3.0 is revising one's own hardware as well as software, i.e., redesigning the brain as well as adding new knowledge to it. That, he argues, offers a leap in ability that exceeds our leap by the same order of magnitude as ours exceeded that of our unintelligent forebears.
I expected Tegmark to conclude with a more pessimistic and even depressing outlook for our future, but he seems to be prepared to accept the future and to try to make the best of it. He is trying to organize AI experts around the world to direct AI development in ways that are least damaging to humans, for example by alerting the world to the dangers of AI based weapons. Like Moravec who referred to AI as our "mind children", Tegmark too sees the progress of intelligence, even if it leaves humanity behind, to be a positive as well as inevitable development.
| Author | Mantel, Hilary |
|---|---|
| Publication | Prince Frederick, MD: MacMillan Audio, 2010 |
| Copyright Date | 2009 |
| Number of Pages | 672 |
| Extras | afterword by the author about her attempts at historicity |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction; Biographical fiction |
| Keywords | Thomas Cromwell |
| When Read | November 2018 |
Mantel's fictional biography of Thomas Cromwell skips over most of his youth. He left home at 15, fleeing an abusive blacksmith father. He wandered Europe for a while, learning all of the major languages and working as a soldier for the French army in Italy. When he returned to England he became an employee and then chief assistant to Cardinal Wolsey, the English prelate who attempted to serve two masters, the Pope and the Tudor king Henry VIII. He learned much from Wolsey about how to work with men of great power, both resisting and yielding, remaining a formidable force in spite of his lack of any real personal power. When Wolsey died (or was assassinated, it isn't clear which) Cromwell became a servant of, and very soon Chief Minister to, Henry.
The story covers the period from 1528 to 1535. Now in his forties, Henry is deeply concerned that Queen Catherine has not produced a male heir. He has concocted a theory that his marriage to Catherine was never truly legal and he is free to marry the scheming and vindictive young Ann Boleyn. As is common among kings, Henry is also in financial difficulties and covets the immense wealth of the Catholic Church in England. Cromwell endeavors to help Henry realize his goals, and to do so in the calmest, least disruptive ways.
This is volume one of a trilogy with the third volume expected very shortly. It has won much acclaim. It has been filmed by the BBC and, as typically happens, vastly more people are likely to see the TV production than to read the book.
The story proceeds mainly by means of dialog. Mantel doesn't narrate any of the background facts. Major international actors, Henry, Catherine, Anne, the kings of France and Spain, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles, Luther, Tyndale, and the Pope are not explained to her 21st century audience. It is the reader's responsibility to learn what he needs to understand. But the effort is worthwhile. The dialog is fabulous and speaks volumes about these subtle, intelligent, articulate characters. It takes a subtle, intelligent, articulate author to represent such people and Mantel manages the task with marvelous dexterity.
The world of Thomas Cromwell, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, Anne Boleyn, and Thomas More was glamorous, privileged - and highly dangerous. Henry elevated them all and then, arguably, killed them all. We see Henry as a dangerous man, but not necessarily as a psychopath. He seems almost simple in his apparent openness, but he's not simple and Mantel manages the contradiction of his simplicity and complexity in subtle but convincing ways. She effectively manages a whole simmering cauldron of competing interests in which people push forward at times and back down at others, always attempting to advance their interests but often, at least in the cases of Cromwell, Wolsey, and More, also standing on principle. They are aware of the danger of overstepping their limits but sometimes they consciously decide to overstep, as Thomas More does in his support of the Church and his opposition to Henry. The interactions of principle, psychology, personal interest, and interpersonal antagonism is a great accomplishment of this novel.
I liked the book very much. I believe it deserved the accolades it has received.
| Author | Saunders, George |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Random House, 2017 |
| Copyright Date | 2017 |
| Number of Pages | 368 |
| Extras | About the author |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Abraham Lincoln |
| When Read | November 2018 |
In February, 1862, Abraham and Mary Lincoln have scheduled a big dinner party at the White House. Their eleven year old son Willie has gotten sick but, assured by their doctor that the boy will pull through, they proceed with the event, each periodically leaving the party to check on the boy. Willie does not pull through. He dies that night. A few days later he is placed in his casket and taken to a mausoleum in a Georgetown cemetery.
The story proceeds via two methods of exposition. In the first, passages are quoted from contemporary sources. The sources conflict with each other, some pro-Lincoln, some anti-Lincoln - often to the point of invective. They disagree about the Lincolns, about the dinner party, about the boy, about the weather that night, and even about the phase of the moon.
The second and more important method of exposition is a running dialog of a sort between ghosts in the cemetery. They are aware of each other and talk to each other but in a peculiar way. Willie, now himself a ghost, is a major topic of, and sometime participant in, their conversation - if "conversation" is the right word for what they are engaging in.
The ghosts have arrived at the cemetery at different times and have limited understanding of what is going on in the world they have left behind. Not all of them know that Lincoln is President of the United States or understand that there is a war in progress. They move around freely, walking or floating, but are unable to move beyond the iron fence around the cemetery. A part of the cemetery is dedicated to white skinned people and a part to blacks, with significant conflicts between the races. When, on the night after the funeral (that one night may be the entire time frame of this part of the story) Lincoln arrives, pulls the casket of his boy from its niche, and holds the boy in his arms, all of the ghosts come to see. They move in ghostly fashion through the mausoleum and through the body of Lincoln himself, attempting to influence him to do one thing or another, but always without the slightest impact on Lincoln's consciousness.
This place, this cemetery, is a "bardo", a Nepalese Buddhist word for a purgatory between incarnations, though these ghosts appear doomed to a Christian heaven or hell, not a Buddhist reincarnation. The ghosts here are continually bombarded by pleas and enticements from something, angels or devils perhaps, to come somewhere, presumably to final judgment. If a ghost agrees, there is a noisy and intense "matterlightblooming phenomenon" and the ghost disappears from the cemetery forever. One of the ghosts, "reverend everly thomas" (ghost's names are given in all lower case letters), actually approaches a final judgment, which he describes. It's not clear that he went through the matterlightblooming. A good man/ghost in line ahead of him is held by an angel on each side, each pressing his head against the ghost's head. They come away with beatific smiles and introduce the ghost to a heavenly judge (St. Peter?) who admits him to heaven. A bad man is next. The angels reel away, choking and vomiting. The ghost is immediately thrust into hell and is seen burning in torment. Then the reverend is judged and also found wanting. He runs in terror back to the cemetery before he can be thrust into hell.
The story ends with a general gotterdamerung and matterlightblooming of the bardo inhabitants after a second visit by Lincoln, who leaves the cemetery, depressed and despondent, on his little horse.
This story was picked for the NCI book group meeting on December 6, a meeting I will miss because I have left on a Caribbean cruise on December 1. I am very curious to know what others thought of the book and will ask Bob and Elaine about it. I wasn't definitely planning to read the book but did so when Bob told me that he read it and was most curious to know what I thought about it. Now I can see why.
Sometimes I say about a book that I admire it but don't like it. In this case, I can't really even say that. I thought that both the concept and the writing were highly original. The characters and the language were convincingly authentic. The writing style was consistent and disciplined. It was a very creative work. I respect the author for all of that. But what in the world was he trying to say? Surely, this was not about ghosts and a weird Christian afterlife, was it? Surely no one of right mind could take any of that seriously. At least one of the main ghost characters, roger bevins iii, is revealed to be gay. I thought perhaps that Saunders was going to pursue that, but he didn't. The story wasn't about that either. The presentation of 19th century American sexuality offered no special insights into the sex life of those times except perhaps to tell us that culture and conventions were different then - something that everyone knows. There were references to the war and references to Lincoln's terrible burden of responsibility, but no real light was shed on those subjects either. They were treated very superficially. The book could be read as an exercise in imagination. It was indeed imaginative. But what did it mean? What was it about? And why did Saunders choose such a baffling, if not downright ridiculous, approach to the serious issues of life and death, family tragedy, and the enormous tragedy of American history that was playing out at that time?
I am writing this on my little netbook on the cruise ship without access to Internet book reviews or to email to exchange observations with Bob and Elaine. However I hope to write something to them and will certainly talk about it with them when I get back home. I hope to add a note about what I learn.
I'm still on the cruise ship and haven't yet spoken to any of the book club members, but I did get access to the Internet, read an article on the Wikipedia reporting Bardo's winning of the Man Booker Prize and its collecting 42 reviews with zero negative and only three mixed. I also read the New York Times review by prize winning novelist Colson Whitehead. Whitehead praised the novel and disparaged readers like me "with conservative tastes [who] may (foolishly) be put off by the novel's form - it is a kind of oral history, a collage built from a series of testimonies consisting of one line or three lines or a page and a half ..."
Whitehead writes: 'we are talking about not just the ghostly residents of a few acres, but the citizens of a nation - in the graveyard’s slaves and slavers, drunkards and priests, soldiers of doomed regiments, suicides and virgins, are assembled a country. The wretched and the brave, and such is Saunders’s magnificent portraiture that readers will recognize in this wretchedness and bravery aspects of their own characters as well. He has gathered “sweet fools” here, and we are counted among their number.'
While I can admire the aspiration to write what Whitehead says Saunders wrote and I can appreciate his characterization of the book as a collage, but I (foolishly perhaps) kept stumbling on the text. If I filter out all of the silly supernaturalism I can see some of the authenticity that Whitehead saw. I acknowledge it. But it didn't seem particularly profound to me and the supernaturalism just seemed to divert this reader's attention from it as I tried to understand the logic and the significance of the matterlightblooming, the final judgment, the vines that were always grasping at Willie's ghost, the iron fence, and all the rest of it.
Maybe it will grow on me over time. I'll find out what the book club readers thought.
The book group readers mostly liked the book. The things that bothered me did not bother them. Maybe, after hearing from them, I would like it if I read it again. Or maybe not. I don't plan to find out.
| Author | Braudel, Fernand |
|---|---|
| Original Language | French |
| Translators | Reynolds, Sian |
| Publication | London: William Collins Sons and Co., 1985 |
| Copyright Date | 1967 |
| Number of Pages | 623 |
| Extras | About the author, translator's note, black and white illustrations, notes, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| When Read | December 2018 |
This first volume of a three volume series describes the development of trade, production, consumption, and technology in the three centuries before the industrial revolution. There is some discussion of the entire world, especially including China, but the major developments were in Europe.
The book is really a survey covering a surprising breadth of subjects. We learn about the trades in salt, wheat, tobacco, fish, tea, coffee, and other major commodities. We learn about the spread of grape cultivation and wine drinking, and the growth of beer in the northern countries as a more popular alcoholic drink than wine. There are sections on iron, weapons, printing, shipping, travel by ship and by horse drawn conveyance, and of the development of paved roads. A section discusses the replacement of barter with money and explains the intermediate monetary instruments like bank notes and promissory notes that have nothing to do with the state but occupy increasingly important roles in commerce. There is a very enlightening discussion of the growth of towns and cities.
It is not a history of technology and not, at least in this first volume, a history of capitalism. There is nothing about how a printing press works, how beer is brewed, or how sailing ships were built. There is nothing about how capital might be raised or employed in the commercial era preceding industrialization. There is very little about the relations between capital and labor or capital and the state. Braudel is silent about the state itself, the development of parliamentary systems, the evolution of nation states, slavery, and other political issues - though he does have a section on fashion and its role in changing society.
In short, this book appears to set a stage for the major developments that Braudel plans to address in the succeeding volumes.
Most of the illustrations in the book are drawings produced at the time and place of the subjects under review in the text. They convey a fascinating sense of how the people of those times saw themselves.
This is not a conventional history. In the first place, it's an economic rather than a political history. We learn about cities and towns but not about their governments let alone their nations, kings, or parliaments. In the second place it discusses very mundane aspects of economic life. When did people begin eating with forks? Who smoked tobacco? Who drank coffee? When and why did brick or stone supplant wood for buildings? When did fashion become fashionable, and who cared about wearing fashionable clothes?
In the discussion of forks we learn of a dinner party in the country house of rich Greeks in Istanbul in 1760. A woman was seen picking up olives with her fingers and impaling them on her fork "in order to eat them in the French manner." It's not the usual stuff of academic history.
There is a fair amount of macro-economic history. Braudel gives us statistics on the volumes of wine, beer, coffee, tobacco, bread, iron, silver, gold, and other commodities that are known to have been produced or traded at various times and places. He reports the changes in power production, from human muscle to horse and ox power, then to water and wind power. We can see the steady growth in economic activity that led up to the "takeoff" of the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century.
Braudel was a very influential historian, one of the leaders of the "Annales School" known for its concern for social history as an alternative to the political histories that dominated academia.
The evidence of my diary says I started this book at least five years ago in 2013. I read a couple of hundred pages and then put it down and didn't get back to it until just recently, when I finished it off during my recent Caribbean cruise vacation. I had lost interest in the subject but decided I owed it to myself and to Braudel and the Annales School to finish it.
The study of history is larger than the study of specific works of history. It's also about understanding our understanding of the past. I want that kind of understanding and I have read historiography in order to get it. Civilization and Capitalism and the "social history" that it represents is different enough from my usual historical reading that I believe it can shed light on the nature of what I learn, and what I should be looking to learn, from history books.
| Author | McBain, Ed |
|---|---|
| Publication | Simon and Schuster |
| Copyright Date | 2002 |
| Number of Pages | 288 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | December 2018 |
Oliver Wendel Weeks, known as Fat Ollie, a detective at the 88th precinct ("the eight-eight"), is assigned to investigate the murder of City Councilman Lester Henderson. Steve Carella and Bert Kling of the 87th are assigned to help him.
Ollie is a would be mystery writer. He has written most of a book titled Report to the Commissioner about a female detective who discovered that a shipment of "blood diamonds" is hidden in the basement of a house in the city. The manuscript was in a briefcase in Ollie's car but, while he is at the crime scene, someone broke into his car and stole the briefcase. Now Ollie has two missions, to find the killer of the councilman, and to recover his manuscript.
The manuscript thief is Emilio Herrera, a cross dressing prostitute with the street name Emmy. He read the story and became obsessed with it, believing it to be a true police report. If he can just find the basement of the house he can steal the diamonds and run away to Brazil, to live a fine life. His only problem is that the geographical names in the report don't match the names in the city. They must be in code. So he reads the report obsessively, again and again, memorizing all of its details over time, and searches the city for the house.
Carella cracks the murder case. By persistent attention to every small lead, he eventually finds and then proves, with Ollie's and Kling's help, that Henderson's wife murdered him because she discovered he was cheating on her with a 19 year old girl.
Meanwhile other cops, led by a woman who looks just like the woman in the Report to the Commissioner, are closing in on a major cocaine deal in a basement in the neighborhood that Emilio has identified as holding the diamond cache. The stupid and murderous dealers, the stupid and murderous buyers, the cops, and Emilio all converge on the basement. The criminals shoot many of each other, the cops arrest the survivors, and Emilio sees that he's missed his big score, but he takes it philosophically. The novel ends with the final scene taken from Ollie's book.
McBain was a master of this genre and by the time he published this novel in 2002, at the age of 75, he had pretty much seen and done it all. I thought the book was a comic masterpiece written with the self-assurance that comes from experience. He went over the top sometimes as for example when Ollie ordered three hamburgers, two milk shakes and a double desert, and then asks his table mates if they're planning to finish their meals, but somehow it was never a problem for me. I laughed out loud many times while reading it. I'd recommend it to anyone.
I have learned that this book is a follow-on to an earlier book, Money, Money, Money, also featuring Fat Ollie. I may try to read that one too.
| Author | Pinker, Steven |
|---|---|
| Publication | Harper Collins |
| Copyright Date | 1994 |
| Number of Pages | 576 |
| Extras | grammar diagrams, notes, references, index, positive reviews |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Linguistics |
| When Read | December 2018 |
Professor Pinker argues that, with respect to language learning, the mind is not a blank slate (about which he wrote a more comprehensive, less language oriented analysis later, see The Blank Slate.) We have powerful built-in capabilities for language learning that enable children to master very complicated languages by the age of three, with no formal instruction whatever. Expose a normal baby to spoken language and he will learn to speak and understand it. This ability works for any baby with any language.
Underlying this ability, if I understand it correctly, there are a set of modules in the brain that have evolved to recognize, think about and talk about objects and events in the world. As Noam Chomsky argued, there is a deep structure common to all human languages (e.g., nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, determiners, pre- or post-position words, phrases incorporating all of these, etc.) that all of us can understand. Pinker ventures a list of topics that these capabilities are especially evolved to address, like: intuitive mechanics and biology, numbers, territorial maps, dangers, food, people, self, kinship, mating, etc. The notion that language learning is an arbitrary skill, not connected to the needs of prehistoric life, is mistaken. Language is highly flexible but it has specific evolutionary antecedents.
Pinker looks at one issue after another - speed of learning, accents (why adults can't pick up unaccented foreign languages), the beginnings of language possibly as early as in homo habilis, two million years ago, ancient and modern evolution of language, the source of irregular verbs, and so on - always producing fascinating examples based on surviving literature from the past and on empirical observation and experiment with children, adults, and brain damaged English speakers.
Well versed in the literature of linguistics, psychology, anthropology, philosophy, and evolutionary biology, the author goes after academics whom he thinks have false ideas about language. For example, he thinks the successes reported in training apes and chimps in sign language are vastly exaggerated and peppered with wishful thinking. He decries the "Standard Social Science Model" that holds that "cultures can vary from one another arbitrarily and without limit." He thinks that the "grammar mavens" and school English teachers are just wrong in distinguishing "correct" from incorrect English. Rather, he says, there is a standard English that, if we learn it, will give us maximum understandability in wider society, but the many variants spoken by particular communities are no less expressive or less grammatical than standard English, they just have their own vocabularies, syntax, and pronunciations that work well and consistently for those who learn them. He talks about the changes in language, for example our loss of the "est" ending "Thou sayest that ..." in the past, and the loss of "whom" that he thinks is coming in the future.
The author explains many things about English that are surprising to a lot of English speakers. For example he has a list of 28 derivational suffixes like -able, -age, -al, -an, -ant, -ance, -ary, and so on. He offers credible explanations for why a bird that flies today flew yesterday, but a baseball player that hit a ball caught by an outfielder flied out, not flew out. He explains that "Self-conscious writers and speakers often extend Latinate root suffixes to new forms by analogy, such as religiosity, criticality, systematicity, randomicity, insipidify, calumniate, conciliate, stereotypy, disaffiliate, gallonage, and Shavian. The words have an air of heaviosity and seriosity about them ..."
It's a very wide ranging book covering many topics and always informed by empirical research and delivered with sparkling humor.
I learned a lot from Pinker. For example, he argues that we can compare languages to derive information about ancestors of multiple modern language, going back to Latin, Greek, and eventually to "Indo-European". But we can't trace it too far back because the rate of change of languages is such that, after a maximum of 15,000 years, it's no longer possible to determine if two similar words or grammar rules derive from a common ancestor or are just coincidentally similar, or even onomatopoetically (if I may coin a term using a Latinate root suffix) similar (e.g., two language that use "quack" for a duck's sounds, but not because they both derive from the same ancient word.)
Humans are born with big brains in big heads but are limited in the size of the head at birth by the need for women to be able to walk and run while pregnant. So human babies are less developed than other primates at birth. Monkeys have as much development at birth as humans only acquire at around 18 months of age. But the acquisition of language is critical to survival. "Stay away from the tigers" is the kind of command that has obvious evolutionary value and we humans evolved to understand it as early as our developing brains could manage it, and with little or no special instruction. Those who didn't have the genes for that have left no descendants.
There was, of course, much more to the book than I can possibly retain, but I think I'll remember some of the main points and also remember the elegance and humor of his writing.
| Author | Kumar, Abhinav |
|---|---|
| Publication | Abhinav Kumar, 2017 |
| Number of Pages | 145 |
| Extras | glossary, about the author |
| Genres | Fiction; Short stories |
| Keywords | India |
| When Read | December 2018 |
Thirteen short stories about middle class people in India written and self-published by an Indian corporate lawyer who aspires to write fiction. The stories are mostly written in first person about middle class professional men and some women. Many are love stories of one or another kind. Almost all of them end with a one sentence surprise twist that adds to or changes the import of the story in some way.
The title story is very original. A man's marriage has lost interest to him and he is trying to decide what to do. He sees a barber on the street and decides to have the man give him a head massage - apparently something that Indian barbers can do. It is the best massage he has ever had. At the end, the barber tells him, in perfect English, that he wishes the best for the man's divorce - a surprise ending in that we assumed that the barber spoke only a local language and knew nothing of the subject's thoughts. Perhaps he read the lawyer's mind while massaging his head?
The author adds a note at the end of each story saying if and where the story has been previously published.
This is Kumar's first book though many of the stories have been previously published in magazines or collections.
I think that the writing is quite good. Kumar's appreciation of subtle feelings is sensitive and convincing. The first person narrator is often placed in an uncomfortable situation where he must balance his his desire to leave the scene against his perceived obligations to another person. His feelings and his mood will change over the course of a conversation, becoming more hopeful and comfortable at one time and more reserved or depressed at another. K struck me as very good at presenting people in these kinds of situations.
One story that I particularly liked was Zenana. Hoshiyar is the head servant to a maharani whose husband has taken a pair of new wives. She is disgraced by her loss of station and hopes to attract her husband back to her. When she receives a message that he will come to her that night she and Hoshiyar go all out to prepare but, at the expected hour, a servant arrives with a message from the maharajah that he will not be able to come.
What I liked about the story was the depth of the interaction between Hoshiyar and his mistress, and his devotion to her. It shed considerable light on a scene and characters that are not easily found today - at least not in a western middle class society. I was very surprised to read the note at the end that said this story was rejected by multiple publishers, both in India and abroad.
Kumar has talent. I hope he will develop it and I think, over time, he may go beyond the formulas that he has adopted such as the surprise twist at the end.
| Author | Sinclair, Upton |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Open Road, 2016 |
| Copyright Date | 1953 |
| Number of Pages | 586 |
| Extras | acknowledgments |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Communism; Cold War |
| When Read | December 2018 |
Four years after the intended last volume of the series, satisfying requests from many readers, Sinclair published The Return of Lanny Budd. The story opens in 1946. Lanny is working at his Peace Program radio show but he is coming to the conclusion that the USSR under Stalin is a major threat to peace and it must be contained militarily. Disarmament is not possible and the Peace Program must be re-oriented towards defending democracy and human rights rather than making peace with America's adversaries. He works to change the direction of the program and also tries once more to rein in his half-sister Bess, an ardent communist married to the violinist Hansi Robin. Hansi has become convinced that the Stalinists are no different from the Nazis but Bess is still a true believer. With help from Lanny and Laurel, Hansi divorces Bess and finds a new wife.
Meanwhile, the U.S. government, the RIAS radio service in Berlin, and Lanny's old friend and co-conspirator Bernhardt Monck, all ask Lanny to return to Germany to assist in the struggle against die hard Nazis and the increasingly brutal and undemocratic Stalinst occupation of Eastern Europe. He wins over 17 year old Fritz Meissner, the eldest son of the Lanny's old friend and his mother's old lover, Kurt Meissner, the die hard Nazi music composer now living in East Germany. The old Nazis have printing plates forged during the war to print counterfeit American money. They are using them to finance their Nazi resistance. They also work to recover treasures buried by the old Nazi leaders who stole them from Jews and from all of the occupied lands. Lanny recruits Fritz to work against his father but Fritz disappears, undoubtedly arrested by the Communists. A young woman Lanny recruited to assist Fritz has also disappeared, possibly also arrested or possibly a Communist spy herself. Kurt sees his son arrested, his life falling apart, and his situation becoming ever more desperate. He agrees to come over to the west and help the Americans but is quickly discovered to have lied to them. He is confronted and ordered to help the Americans or be deported back to the East. He agrees, helps, and is hanged by his Nazi former associates.
In the culmination of the novel, during the period of the Berlin airlift, Lanny has been making broadcasts from the RIAS radio station in Berlin. He is kidnapped off the street by East German secret police and taken to a prison in East Berlin where he is tortured by Russians to make him confess to working in a plot to kill Stalin. He must also give up the names of his confederates. His interrogators have been told that Lanny is guilty and their only task is to obtain his signed confession. Denials are of no interest to them. He resists for a week. There is nothing to confess and no co-conspirators to name. He remembers the things that his step-father Parsifal Dingle had told him and he tells himself over and over and over again that God is helping him. He recalls passages from the Bible and repeats them to himself. He remains civil to his interrogators as best he can though he ends each session by fainting and being dragged and carried back to his cell where he is given too little food, too little water, and not nearly enough sleep to recover before his next session. He tries a stratagem to give up his sister Bess and say that she is actually an FBI agent. He persuades one of his interrogators but the others are unimpressed and still require his confession of a plot to kill Stalin.
In the end, after a week of this torture, he is rescued by Grigory Aleksandrovich Tokaev, an important Russian scientist and air force officer (a real historical person whom Sinclair interviewed), with forged orders who picks him on his way to West Berlin to defect. He returns to his wife Laurel and his two children in the U.S. He contacts his sister Bess who is now under suspicion by the Russians. He convinces her that she is doomed if she lives on in her apartment. She will be kidnapped and taken to Russia for torture, trial, and execution. He convinces her to give up the Communist Party and return to the protection of her father. The novel ends.
Sinclair lived on to 1968, but this was last volume of his magnum opus, the eleven volume 6,000+ page novel of Lanny Budd.
This eleventh novel is mostly in the mold of the previous ten but there are some significant differences.
First, the emphasis on the fight against Hitlerian fascism has been mostly transformed into a fight against Stalinist communism. Sinclair had not abandoned his belief in social democracy but it was subordinated to the struggle against communism, which he perceived to be a great evil and took great pains to explain why. He was affronted by the willingness of Soviet officials to look you in the eye and say something that you know to be a complete lie, and that he knows that you know to be a complete lie. He was affronted by the cruelty and violence of the police state with its systematic use of imprisonment, torture, and murder. He was affronted by the willingness to overthrow the will of the people by the use of violence. He was affronted by the self-serving character of the state leadership, constantly stabbing each other in the back to advance themselves. He poured out example after example of these practices to prove his points. He concluded that the struggle against communism was the most important political task in the United States and the world, more important than socialism and more important than any idealistic vision of world peace. He was sure that war would come if the U.S. were unable or unwilling to resist what he considered to be Russian imperial pressure, no different from what it was under the tsars.
Secondly, Lanny himself fell into the hands of the torturers and was tortured. And in connection with this, Sinclair produced in Lanny something like a religious conversion. I can offer no criticism of that conversion. It helped to save his life by giving him the strength to bear up under the torture. It did not feel unconvincing or inappropriate to the story. Still, it was something new in the series.
I also note some things that did not appear in the story but that might have. One important one was the suppression of democratic rights in the U.S. by the McCarthyist movement. McCarthyism didn't start until 1950, one year after the ending time of the novel. However the fact that Sinclair ended the novel before it and had nothing to say about the issues it raised may have been a part of a necessary self-protective stance - including the powerful anti-communist stance that he took. I can't blame him for it. I don't believe that he would have joined the McCarthyist crowd but he may have felt he had to make choices in the same way that he and Lanny had had to choose between idealistic peace proposals and anti-communist defense.
All in all, the Lanny Budd series has been a significant part of my life. I read most of it in my teenage years and have now read it again as an old man - but still with enough self-possession to understand and appreciate it. I'm thankful for that.