Books read January through December 2019
| Author | Adam, Paul |
|---|---|
| Publication | Thomas Dunne Books |
| Copyright Date | 2005 |
| Number of Pages | 320 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| Keywords | Music; Violin |
| When Read | January 2019 |
63 year old Giovanni Battista Castiglione, "Gianni" to his friends, is a luthier living in the country outside of Cremona, Italy. Once a month he gets together with three friends, luthier Thomaso Rainaldi, Father Arrighi, and detective Antonio Guastafeste of the local police, to play string quartets. After the session Rainaldi and Arrighi have left for the evening when Gianni gets a phone call from Mrs. Rainaldi asking for her husband. Gianni and Antonio eventually find him, murdered, in his workshop. They begin an investigation, Antonio leading the local police inquiry and Gianni tagging along as a violin expert explaining the work that Rainaldi did and the business he was engaged in concerning his possible discovery of the whereabouts of a famous, and priceless, Stradivari violin known as "The Messiah's Sister".
Much of the novel is not really about the murder but about violins, luthiers, dealers, violinists, and violin collectors.
In the end, the killer is found. It's the nasty English violin dealer we suspected all along, however the death of the strange old millionaire collector in Venice and theft of one of his violins is due to someone else - the wife of a good violinist but worthless man who is the lecherous teacher of Rainaldi's gifted granddaughter.
I really enjoyed this book - not for the murder mystery, which seemed almost incidental to the real core of the story concerning violins and the milieu in which they are made, played, bought, sold, and collected. The character of Gianni is very attractive and his love of violins and music is convincing and endearing.
| Author | Diaz, Hernan |
|---|---|
| Publication | Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2017 |
| Copyright Date | 2017 |
| Number of Pages | 256 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | American frontier |
| When Read | January 2019 |
In the 19th century, teenage Håkan Söderström (or Hakan Soderstrom for ease of searching) leaves remote Sweden with his brother to emigrate to New York. They make it to England but there they are accidentally separated and Håkan, speaking no English, winds up on a ship headed for Argentina rather than New York. From there he goes to San Francisco during the gold rush. With no money, no knowledge of geography or of the world, and only a hazy command of the language, he winds up working for an obsessed gold prospector, and then for a gangster woman who keeps him as a sex slave, probably because of his huge size. He escapes from her into the desert where he is discovered by a naturalist with a crackpot theory of evolution (not Darwin's version) and who, together with an Indian medicine man teaches him a lot about anatomy, surgery, and treating the sick. They part ways and Håkan continues through the desert and the empty plains, generally heading east. However he is picked up by a wagon train heading west and works for them for a bit when they are attacked by a party of religious fanatics pretending to be Indians. Presumably this is a reference to the Mormon militia's Mountain Meadows Massacre in 1857, or it's a fictional story modeled on that event. Håkan, a peaceful man, is incensed when he sees innocent men, women and children being killed and he uses a six shot pistol he was given by the wagon train leader, plus his own great strength, to kill perhaps ten of the killers. Disgusted and demoralized, he mounts a horse and leaves the camp, heading east again.
Håkan wanders the plains but is arrested and beaten by a corrupt sheriff aiming to get a reward for subduing and capturing the famous "Hawk", killer of women and children in the wagon train - presumably a story spread by the Mormons (never so named in the novel) to cover up their own crimes. He is freed by another man who understands that the sheriff is the criminal and Håkan is a decent man. From then on they live in the wild.
Years pass. Håkan's friend is killed. Håkan escapes various traps and pursuits but he can never live among people again. His great height and blond hair make him easily recognizable and the false stories of his crimes have only been exaggerated over time. In California he saves a lost child and brings her to her family. The child's wealthy father, also a Swede, sends Hakan to Alaska where he begins a trek to cross the ice of the Bering Sea and walk through Siberia, heading for Sweden. That's the end of the story.
This is another peculiar book, like Lincoln in the Bardo that garnered very high praise. It was one of two finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in 2018 that was won by Andrew Sean Greer for Less.
Diaz' book was deep and well written. It didn't appeal to me because it was not about any of the things that I am interested in reading about. The characters were mostly quite good or very, very bad. The hero of the story was a kind of anti-hero, a man of no intellectual aspirations and hardly any understanding of the world. His main efforts were, first, to get to New York, although he had no ability to understand how to do that and, understandably, to just keep away from everyone and stay alive. He developed interests in medicine and in skinning animals, but not deep interests, and he wandered from place to place without thinking about any future or any destination.
His loneliness, nihilism, and despair were palpable and discouraging. However they were not incomprehensible. Diaz created a character who was stunted, outcast, depressed, and uncomprehending but who was nevertheless rather convincing. It took some work to convince me but, in the end, Diaz succeeded in doing that. I believed in the character.
I read the book for the NCI Book Group and will be interested, as I always am, to hear the upcoming discussion.
Most of the Book Group members liked the book, some liked it a lot. They felt great sympathy for the character as a person of deep humanity and good will towards others. Thinking about that I can see their point. Diaz developed that side of Håkan's character very convincingly and gave us a man who had great limitations but also this very admirable quality.
| Author | Banks, Iain M. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Time Warner Books, 2005 |
| Copyright Date | 2004 |
| Number of Pages | 544 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | January 2019 |
In the year 4034 "Slow Seer" Fassin Taak, a human living in the Ulubis star system, plans to spend his life delving into the "Dweller" civilization that occupies planetary gas giants like Jupiter all around the Milky Way. But a quiet life studying in Dweller libraries isn't in the cards for him. A space war is brewing.
The story is complicated and difficult to abstract in a few paragraphs. The galaxy contains a large number of different intelligent species, mostly united in an organization called the Mercatoria. That organization has many sub-organizations but there are also species, like the Dwellers, and outsiders like the Beyonders and the E-5 Discon (Epiphany Five Disconnect), that stand outside the authority of the Mercatoria and make war upon it. We never learn much about the social or political organizations of either group. The E-5 is run by a sadistic egomaniac torturer, and the Mercatoria seems to be run by hereditary families. If there is anything approximating a democracy the Dwellers come closest to it, or maybe they're better described as an anarchy. The long lived Dwellers, millions of years for each individual and billions for the civilization, are the most scientifically advanced but they seem to be uninterested in anything like power politics, conquest, or other pursuits outside their own gas giant realms. Even their military capabilities appear to be antique, anarchic and opaque, but nevertheless sufficient to vaporize anyone who attacks them.
The story follows Taak, who travels through the galaxy attempting to learn the secret of the "Dweller List", purportedly a list of wormholes connecting all of the Dweller worlds via faster than light travel. He hopes to find the secret that would enable a Mercatorian space fleet to arrive through the wormholes in time to stop the evil Archimandrite Luseferous, tyrant of the Starveling Cult of E-5 Discon, from attacking the Ulubis system and conquering it.
In the end Luseferous makes the mistake of threatening and then actually attacking the Dwellers, who snuff out him and a part of his fleet forthwith. Taak figures out the secret of the list (the wormhole entrances are at the center of each of the Dweller gas giant worlds), and discovers that there are still AIs living amongst the Dwellers in spite of all efforts by the Mercatoria to wipe them out.
This was pure space opera, replete with all manner of strange creatures, evil monsters, exotic locales, ancient secrets, and heroes and villains. It was a wild ride. Perhaps I should have disdained it but, well, I actually enjoyed it. Before I was halfway through I was hooked, wanting to see if Taak would find the secret, if the evil Luseferous would be stopped, if the selfish capitalist Saluus would be punished for his misdeeds, if the amiable Dweller Y'sul would survive his injuries inflicted by the nasty Voehn, and if the Dwellers would take a break from their pastimes to save the humans of the Ulubis system.
It all came out right in the end, in fine and traditional style.
Apparently Banks thought about making a series of books out of this but never got around to it. He died of gall bladder cancer at age 59.
| Author | Garcia Marquez, Gabriel |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Spanish |
| Translators | Grossman, Edith |
| Publication | Penguin Books, 2014 |
| Copyright Date | 1996 |
| Number of Pages | 304 |
| Genres | Non-fiction |
| Keywords | Colombia |
| When Read | January 2019 |
Over a period of months In 1990 ten Colombian journalists were kidnapped on the orders of Pablo Escobar, the boss of the Medellin drug cartel. The book opens with the kidnapping of Maruja Pachón de Villamizar and her assistant and sister-in-law Beatriz Villamizar de Guerrero, respectively the wife and sister of Alberto Villamizar, a prominent anti-drug politician. Villamizar had survived two assassination attempts and now Escobar was trying to get at him and others in the government by kidnapping prominent family members and holding them prisoner. His goal was to force the government to ban the extradition of drug traffickers to the United States where they could expect to be imprisoned for life. Escobar and other drug kingpins called themselves "the Extraditables".
GGM interviewed the surviving prisoners after their release and read the diary entries they created while in captivity. He writes about their travails under 24 hour guard by young men, mostly teenagers, in rented houses in residential neighborhoods, where they are hidden from sight. Although they were not beaten, their living conditions were unpleasant and they lived in fear of rape and execution.
Meanwhile the police were attacking the drug gangs with great violence and were randomly arresting and/or killing young men who lived in the neighborhoods dominated by the gangs. Men like Escobar had to take extreme measures to hide.
Villamizar was appointed by President César Gaviria to try to contact the Extraditables. Much of the book is about his efforts to persuade Escobar that, if he released the hostages and surrendered, he would be incarcerated in a special prison for fourteen years where he would be protected from his enemies and not be extradited. Eventually, Escobar agreed, released the remaining hostages, and surrendered to Villamizar. He was taken to the special prison built for him. Any number of family members and friends were admitted to see him. He had all sorts of amenities brought to him by his family and associates and lived in some luxury. But it wasn't enough for him. Possibly convinced that his enemies would break in and kill him, he escaped. Pursued by the police, he was cornered and either killed or committed suicide.
In his acknowledgments, GGM says that Maruja Pachón and Alberto Villamizar suggested that he write a book about their experience but, six months into the first draft, they all realized that they needed to write about the larger events of all ten kidnappings and the full resolution of the story. His projected one year project turned into almost three.
I picked up this book not realizing that it was non-fiction. The opening paragraph that described the kidnapping of Maruja and Beatriz, and the murder of their driver, was as compelling as any fiction I have read. But as I read further I kept seeing names of real people and looked up the book, learning that it was non-fiction.
The picture of Colombia that I constructed from this book is more complex than it had been before my reading. There was criminality, violence, and corruption, and not just among the drug lords. The police and the politicians were also more criminal, violent, and corrupt than I like to believe that we are here in the United States. But there were also people of high integrity and honor who worked hard for the good of all Colombians.
Living here as a white, well off, educated person in the U.S. I have had little to do with poverty, crime, corruption, police brutality, revolutionary violence, and social chaos. Colombian society seems dangerous, unpredictable and unsettling to me. I thought that, if I lived there, I would want to escape to North America or Europe. I felt discomfited by the whole milieu and disoriented by the acceptance of that milieu by the people who lived in it. Writing as an insider, from the interior of Colombia's intellectual and professional class, GGM was obviously more at home and gave me some feeling for what it was like for at least some Colombians.
I found the view of Colombian society, from the President down to the kids who worked for the drug gangs and were massacred by police, to be very interesting. I think I already had a reasonably (I hope) informed view of life in Latin America, not least from writers like Garcia Marquez and Vargas Llosa as well as from non-fiction histories. News of a Kidnapping enriched it.
| Author | Clancy, Tom |
|---|---|
| Publication | Random House |
| Copyright Date | 1991 |
| Number of Pages | 1216 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| When Read | January 2019 |
The stage is set for the novel when an Israeli Air Force plane carrying an atomic bomb is shot down over the Golan Heights during the Syrian invasion in 1973. 17 or so years later it is discovered by Palestinian terrorists who pull it out of the ground and assemble a team led by a former nuclear war expert scientist from East Germany to resurrect the bomb and get it back into operating condition. Their story continues in parallel with the story of an American nuclear "boomer" (missile carrying) submarine, the story of several terrorists, the story of a new Middle East Peace Plan advanced by the U.S. government that has real hope of success, and the story of Jack Ryan, now Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (DDCI) working for President Bob Fowler and in conflict with Fowler's lover, Liz Elliot, the nasty, ambitious, and scheming Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs.
The terrorists succeed in making the bomb functional, getting it to Denver and placing it in a van in a parking lot at the Super Bowl game where the Secretaries of State and Defense were in the audience and the President and Ms. Elliot were expected but couldn't go due to a snowstorm in Washington. The bomb explodes. Liz Elliot thinks the Russians did it and that it had something to do with a military coup that she believed must be underway in Moscow. Ryan does his best to calm everyone down and get the facts before reacting but Fowler and Elliot become increasing unhinged by the crisis. Fowler orders Ryan to resign and becomes less and less interested in any opposing points of view. The CIA, FBI, police, scientific labs, and others gradually work out what happened and who did it and even manage to arrest the two head terrorists as they land in Mexico City, torturing them to get the full story, believing that they needed the information on how and why 100,000 Americans were killed. Ryan tells the President that it was a terrorist attack, funded by a radical mullah in Qum in Iran. Fowler orders a nuclear attack on Qum but Ryan manages to stop it, determined that the U.S. will not kill 100,000 innocent people in retaliation against one evil man. Cooler heads prevail and, in a denouement, Fowler resigns his presidency, Elliot is under sedation, and the U.S. and USSR pull back from the brink of war.
There are many subplots to the story, most of which do not show themselves to be part of the main story until after the explosion when the tension is building to its maximum.
This book must be one of the defining works of the genre of techno-thriller. The buildup to what could become a general nuclear war justifies the title of sum of all fears.
I didn't know if I'd like this book. I've had mixed feelings about Clancy's work. I wondered if it would be politically right wing, create super-hero characters, and depend on implausible and theatrical effects. However it did none of those things. The politics were fairly neutral. The characters were fallible and very human. The development of the story, while a little wild at times, was essentially restrained and frighteningly plausible. The technical aspects of the story - bomb physics, submarines, aircraft, cryptography, tank warfare, and other aspects were all convincing, at least to this non-knowledgeable reader. Many Amazon reviewers hated all the space Clancy gave to technical details but I thought they added a lot to the story and made it more plausible. I was grabbed by the suspense. It was hard to put down.
Clancy declined some opportunities for melodrama that would have heightened the tension, choosing to manage things more maturely instead. I expected Ryan's wife to drive him away after Elliot planted a story in the press that Ryan was unfaithful to her. I expected Elliot to be humiliated in a big scene at the end. I expected a bigger confrontation with the terrorists. However Clancy chose not to engage in obvious histrionics. It was a high drama story, but not as manipulatively so as it could have been. Clancy restrained himself, opting for reader education over cheap tricks.
Clancy was not a literary author but he knew his business and I was impressed.
| Author | Grann, David |
|---|---|
| Publication | Doubleday |
| Copyright Date | 2017 |
| Number of Pages | 352 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | United States; American Indians |
| When Read | January 2019 |
The Osage Indian tribe was pushed from place to place by the United States government in the 19th century, winding up in the hill country of Oklahoma, an unpromising and unproductive territory of no special interest to white settlers. Then, in the early 20th century, oil was discovered on the Osage reservation lands. "Head rights" to the underground riches were granted to Osage families that were worth millions of dollars. Large numbers of immoral and opportunistic white men attempted all kinds of strategies to rob the Indians of their oil wealth. The techniques employed ranged from seizing guardianship of Indians who were claimed to be too unsophisticated to manage their own money, to marrying them, and incredibly often, to outright murder. This book is about the murders that took place in the period from 1921 to 1927, and the efforts of the FBI to stop the crimes and bring the criminals to justice.
J. Edgar Hoover, brand new to his job and eager to burnish the image of his new agency and of himself, assigned former Texas Ranger Tom White to lead a group of agents in attempting to find the guilty parties and bring them to justice.
It turned out that leading members of white society, including Bill Hale, a local landowner, and the Shoun brothers, a pair of medical doctors, were involved in shootings, poisonings, blowing up a house, and other crimes leading to the deaths of dozens of Indians. Despite corruption and malfeasance by the authorities, intimidation or murder of witnesses, destruction of evidence, jury tampering, and every imaginable trick to obstruct justice, Tom White and his team managed to accumulate enough evidence to put a number of the murderers in prison.
Grann describes the crimes, the tracking down of evidence and testimony, the corruption, the position of Hoover - who seemed as much concerned with reputation as justice, and the aftereffects of the investigation. Despite Hoover's representations, only a fraction of the criminals were ever brought to justice. A number of other prominent white citizens were involved in murders and theft. Grann worked not only with the existing documented evidence but also with the still living children and grandchildren of the victims to piece together parts of the story that eluded the FBI.
I read this book for the NCI book group. My initial thoughts were that this would be a story of limited interest to me, but the limits kept expanding as I read further in the book. It documented a sorry part of American history and gave me a greater understanding of the tragic effects of European expansion into America on the native peoples. I learned something, not just about the facts of the history, but also about the human dimension of the tragedy.
| Author | Stout, Rex |
|---|---|
| Publication | Bantam Books |
| Copyright Date | 1944 |
| Number of Pages | 209 |
| Extras | Introduction by John Lutz, bibliography of Nero Wolfe novels |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| Keywords | Nero Wolfe |
| When Read | January 2019 |
There are two novellas in this book written and published during World War II. In Not Quite Dead Enough Archie Goodwin attempts to convince Wolfe that there is no value for him in training to become an ordinary foot soldier but much value to the country if he puts his mind to work to solve espionage cases for the government. He convinces Wolfe to solve the case of the murder of a young woman. In Booby Trap Wolfe discovers that a well known civilian supplier to the U.S. military is also selling secrets to the Germans and has murdered an American colonel who helped him to prevent the colonel from confessing. Wolfe gathers enough evidence to charge the man but convinces him to commit suicide instead - saving his reputation and also avoiding embarrassment to the government.
This is the 20th Rex Stout book I've read, the last before this being in 2014. They are quick reads, always spiced with humor and cleverness. These short novellas weren't his best but were still fun to read. Maybe some readers who were depressed by the war got a few hours of respite by going back into the brownstone house on West 35th Street, the one with the greenhouse and orchids on the roof, chef Fritz Brenner working in the kitchen, Nero Wolfe with his eyes closed and his brain churning, and the irrepressible Archie Goodwin coming down the steps from his room on the third floor.
| Author | Anderson, Kevin J. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Brilliance Audio |
| Copyright Date | 2014 |
| Number of Pages | 353 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| Keywords | Comedy |
| When Read | February 2019 |
The trio of zombie private investigator Dan ("Shamble") Chambeaux, human lawyer Robin Deyer, and ghost office manager and Dan's girlfriend Cheyenne, work on three cases. An operatic baritone ogre named Stentor has lost his voice. It turns out to have been stolen by a large lawn gnome. He uses it to command his gang of smaller lawn gnomes who rob shops and shoot people with their little "timmy guns". Finding the gnomes turns into a case of its own. A second case is helping Thunder Dick, a weather wizard running for election as chief weathermancer against Alistair Cumulus III, to discover who is sabotaging his campaign. The third case is that of a 12 year old wannabe evil genius and supervillain Jody Caligari. He has been evicted from his experimental lab in the sewers by the evil Ah'Chulhu, a tentacle faced demon who also took all of Jody's scientific equipment and is holding it while he demands back rent. It's part of his plot to take over all the sewers in the unnatural quarter and dominate the city.
All of the cases are eventually solved by a combination of skill and luck. Stentor gets his voice back and resumes his singing career. The lawn gnome is busted. Dick and Alistair each get one vote and the campaign interference turned out to be by TV weather reporters. Jody gets his lab equipment and patents his discoveries. Ah'Chulhu is grabbed by his other dimensional godparents. The unnatural quarter is at peace again.
The stories are getting a bit stale, but not so much that one read every year or two is too much. Anderson is a master of throwaway comedy - turning events and words on their heads, converting sentences into jokes on all of the unnatural subjects.
It's light fare, not intended to be anything else. It works.
| Author | Brinkley, Joel |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Public Affairs |
| Copyright Date | 2011 |
| Number of Pages | 416 |
| Extras | map, photos, notes, bibliography, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Cambodia |
| When Read | February 2019 |
Starting with a brief introduction to Cambodian history, Brinkley soon concentrates on the governments mostly led by Hun Sen, the former Khmer Rouges officer who defected to the Vietnamese and was installed as Prime Minister after the 1979 Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia.
The substance of the book is a thorough, sector by sector, exposé of corruption and kleptocracy in each sector of the Cambodian government, economy, and society. At the top of the Cambodian pyramid, the Prime Minister and his closest associates appoint the leaders of the various government agencies in return for large bribes. They in turn demand bribes from their subordinates, who are paid by their subordinates, all the way down to six year old school children who must pay their teachers every day when they come to school so that the teachers can pay off the principals who pay off the local administrators, who pay off the regional administrators, who pay off the central administrators, who pay off the Minister of Education, who pays off the Prime Minister. The same system reigns in health care, police, judicial agencies, food distribution, land management, forestry, mining, public works, and every other aspect of life. If you are sick and go to a hospital, you either pay cash to the doctor and staff, or you can expect to lie on a bed of straw and, if you are lucky, be given a few drugs that are past their expiration date. At mealtimes a cart will be wheeled down the hallway with rice and beans and, if you want any, you must either get up and get it or have a relative with you to get it. To pass a high school or college exam, you pay off the teacher. To get a judicial judgment in your favor, you pay the judge. To prevent a negative story about you from appearing in the newspaper, you pay the reporter who threatens to write it. To get the land farmed by poor folk, you pay the government to title it to you. To steal the trees in a national forest, you pay. To steal the minerals under the land, you pay. It goes on and on, in chapter after chapter. The professional people in the country are mostly the products of the local schools. The doctors know little about medicine, the judges little about law or justice, the police little about investigation, and on and on. And if a person becomes a political leader or a newspaper reporter, or a union official, or anyone else who poses a danger to the status quo, he can expect threats and a beating at best, or a drive-by shooting at worst, to remove him from the scene.
The United Nations and its many wealthy members have donated billions of dollars to Cambodia to try to improve things. Some of the money is used for direct distribution of food, education, and health care to poor people. But most of it must go through government agencies where much, or even all in some programs, is skimmed off by the grafters. And yet, surprisingly or not, the donors keep donating year after year, often increasing the donations. 500 million dollars seems to have been a common amount of annual aid and it has been as much as double that, for a country with 13.4 million people in 2008 where money incomes can be very close to zero for the 80% of people living in the countryside.
Based on surveys, it appears that most Cambodians are satisfied with their current government. They expect nothing and want only to be left alone. They see the government as the force that rescued them from the insanity, brutality, overwork and starvation of the Khmer Rouge. They have lived their entire lives in a culture of corruption that extends long before modern times. They know nothing else and expect nothing else. According to Brinkley, most Cambodians see their lives as better today than before - though much of that has to do with the foreign aid they receive. The people are largely illiterate. Significant percentages of them are stunted by malnutrition. As many as half are thought to be suffering from PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) from the years of American bombing, of Khmer Rouge brutality and, for younger Cambodians, from the violence and brutality of their fathers and husbands - a legacy of a brutal "save face" culture and of pervasive PTSD.
Brinkley is a professor of journalism at Stanford, prominent New York Times reporter, editor, and foreign correspondent, the author of five books, and a Pulitzer Prize winner for his coverage of the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime in 1979. I'm not able to verify his claims about the Cambodian government, but he certainly has earned a credible reputation. I believe him.
Marcia and I visited Cambodia for four days starting on December 31, 2017. Phnomh Penh seemed beautiful. People on the street looked decently fed and healthy. Our hotel was delightful (see the photos in our 2018 collection for "Indochina/02PhnomPenh".) We visited Prison 21 where the KR tortured and killed Cambodians they didn't like, and we talked to our Cambodian guide a man with a terrible past. See my diary entry for January 3, 2018 for more about our trip. What we saw was the tourist version of the city and the historical sites. Clearly, it wasn't the Cambodian reality.
| Author | Kasparov, Garry |
|---|---|
| Author | Greengard, Mig |
| Publication | New York: Public Affairs, 2017 |
| Copyright Date | 2017 |
| Number of Pages | 287 |
| Extras | notes, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction |
| Keywords | Chess; Artificial intelligence |
| When Read | February 2019 |
Kasparov has written an extended essay on chess and computers. It covers his introduction to computer chess when he was already a world class player, his appreciation of the growing capability of computerized chess, his famous matches against "Deep Blue", the IBM parallel processing chess machine, and his thoughts about how computers have influenced chess, training as well as play, and what impact they will have for the future.
The book did not have what I thought I wanted - information about artificial intelligence. It didn't have any details of how chess programs worked except at a conceptual level. It didn't have any records of chess games, though Kasparov's matches with Deep Blue and other opponents are available on the Internet. However it did have K's thoughts on the games and they were very interesting. There are only a few players who have attained K's level, and few of them have written about the psychology of chess, the lack of psychology of the machines, and the impact of the cold calculation of the machines on human players.
One thing I learned is that computers have had a major influence on human training and human play. At first human players learned to play specifically anti-computer strategies. The most common such strategy was to create a closed position, blocking offense by either side. The human would then maneuver behind his wall of pawns to prepare a grand attack while the computer milled about, unable to calculate any move that produced a high evaluation. The human built up his position and then pounced. K tried that against Deep Blue but DB built up its position and attacked first. The early ideas about how to defeat the machines were falling to a combination of continuously improving brute force calculation, and continuously improving programming.
It was an interesting read.
If I remember correctly, Kasparov stated that, by the time he was writing this book, chess programs running on ordinary desktop computers had progressed to the point that they were better than Deep Blue. Presumably they were also better than him. One factor, of course, was that the desktop computers of 2016 were a lot more powerful than the desktop computers of 1997. However a major factor was that the programming had improved. IBM was relying heavily on massively parallel computing to calculate the consequences of each possible move. Now, the algorithms for pruning unproductive branches of the decision tree have improved so that less computation is required to delve deeper than Deep Blue could go in a reasonable time. Perhaps one day pure machine vs. machine matches will be as interesting to chess aficionados as the human matches are today.
| Author | Connelly, Michael |
|---|---|
| Publication | Hachette Audio |
| Copyright Date | 2011 |
| Number of Pages | 496 |
| Extras | Recorded interview with the author |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | February 2019 |
Mickey Haller has built a practice defending homeowners against mortgage foreclosures during the big recession. One of his clients, Lisa Trammel, a single mother elementary school teacher, has been arrested for murdering an official of the Westland Bank in charge of foreclosures. He defends her, building a case that the murder might have been ordered by Louis Opparizio, a mob connected man who headed the company that processed Westland's and other banks' foreclosures. Trammel insists violently and volubly that she is innocent.
There is a trial. Haller faces a smart and determined prosecutor, a friend of Haller's still loved ex-wife. Connelly takes us through the complex trial with a deep understanding of all of the ins and outs of the judicial process. In the end, he convinces the jury that there is reasonable doubt that Trammel is guilty of the crime. She is acquitted. It is only afterward that Haller realizes that, in fact, she is guilty. He works out that she must also have killed her disappeared husband. When the police show up at Trammel's house and begin digging in the garden to find her dead husband, she pleads with Haller to defend her, but he walks away. He has had enough of being the Lincoln lawyer. He has decided to run for district attorney. He will stop defending criminals and be on the side of the law that will win over his ex-wife and his teenage daughter to respect him again.
Connelly is a master of this kind of novel. There are other great writers of crime novels but I can't think of any that I think are any better.
One of the subtle and surprising features of the character of Mickey Haller is his vulnerability. He presents himself as something of a tough bastard, going for a win against his opponents no matter where justice lies. He yells at his staff even when they didn't do anything wrong. He attempts to trick the prosecutor and maybe even the judge, as long as what he is doing is not explicitly illegal. If it's just a touch shady and he thinks he can get away with it, he'll try. And yet for all that he's unable to fire his driver after learning that the man betrayed him for $400. He pines for his ex-wife. He is mortified if his ex-wife or their daughter berate him for his behavior.
Connelly gives us what appears to me at least to be a deeply informed and authentic view of the operation of the criminal justice system. Cops and prosecutors are the adversaries of the defense attorneys, but they're not stupid. Their investigations are thorough and their tactics intelligently designed to ferret out criminals and defeat defense stratagems. We learn a lot about the whole process, both the good and the bad, the smart and the stupid, from reading his books.
In an interview at the end of the book Connelly says that he tries to grow his characters and his stories. He felt that Haller has completed his story and it's time for him to grow and change, hence the decision to have Haller announce his intention to run for district attorney. I don't know if that book has been written yet, but I would like to read it some day.
| Author | Furst, Alan |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 2004 |
| Copyright Date | 1995 |
| Number of Pages | 325 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | February 2019 |
Captain Alexander de Milja, cartographer and staff officer in the Polish Army, survives the German invasion in 1939 and continues to fight in the Resistance. He works for a while in Poland, then is sent to England, and then to France, where he works with resistance people of various nationalities during the period of the Battle of Britain. His main tasks are to try get information and to participate in partisan actions, to damage the German plans for bombing and invading England. He assists in arranging parachute drops of men and arms, in gathering information about locations of German units, ships, barges and fuel supplies, and in planning an attack on a busload of German pilots who fly the "Knickebein" radio beam pathfinder flights. That mission fails because the bombing of England stops in the run up to the invasion of the USSR and the bus they have carefully planned to ambush is no longer running.
De Milja does his best but his commanders in England are unimpressed by his performance and replace him, sending him back to Poland instead. There he participates in more partisan operations until most of his partisan group are wiped out. Fearing the Russian backed communist partisans almost as much as the Germans, he must work hard to stay alive and continue the struggle. At the end of the novel he is still in Poland, heading for Warsaw with a Jewish woman, trying to figure out how he will hide her and what he will do, understanding that his odds of surviving the war are limited at best.
The plot of this book is more diffuse than in most of the others in the series. There isn't a main focus, a main task that de Milja must accomplish in his struggle against the Germans. Sometimes he is an organizer of others, sometimes a spy, sometimes a saboteur, and sometimes a partisan fighting with a gun or grenade in his hand. Unlike many of the other books, there is no escape to safety at the end. I thought he might wind up in England but instead he is in occupied Poland, apparently an even more dangerous place than occupied France.
Furst's characters are never natural soldiers and don't like fighting but they do it because they believe they must. They are afraid but they won't run away. They love life and love women, but they are resigned to dying if that is what must happen. They are intellectuals, friends, lovers, men of conscience, men of principle, believers - not in a particular ideology like socialism, or maybe not even so much in democracy, but in a sense of right and wrong and with a conviction that Nazism and Stalinism too are both wrong and must be resisted.
Furst is, of course, a professional novelist, a writer of spy thrillers, a man who has found a niche and an audience that allow him to survive and, I presume, prosper while doing something he cares about. I think he is also a believer, not in God, probably not in the Judaism of his ancestors, but in the dignity and worth of humanity. I think he writes his books, not only to pay his rent and earn his living, but as a way of paying tribute to the people of conscience who risked their lives to fight the greatest evil of our times. I like his books. I share some of his obsession. I think maybe I understand him. This is the tenth of his books that I have read. I expect I'll read the rest before he and I are done.
| Author | Banks, Iain M. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Orbit, Hachette Book Group, 2009 |
| Copyright Date | 1987 |
| Number of Pages | 545 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | February 2019 |
In some indeterminate future, the Milky Way Galaxy is populated by numerous organic species, including multiple versions of human beings, and also by some artificial intelligences. Two civilizations are at war with each other. One comprises the Idirans, large (compared to humans), fierce, warlike, and deeply religious, and The Culture, a civilization comprised largely of various kinds of humans together with AIs, including some super intelligent "Minds", and more human scale individuals such as various kinds of robots. The warlike Idirans, deeply offended by the existence of non-living (i.e., AI) beings have resolved to wipe them out. The Culture, with no special ambitions to do anything with or too the Idirans, no interest in conquering anybody, no special warlike qualities, and no desire to do much except enjoy existence, must nevertheless defend themselves. After many years on the defensive, gradually giving up territory to the Idiran expansion, they have used their advanced AI to perfect advanced weapons and technology that will enable them to turn the tide. They have no interest in conquering the Idirans, only in stopping their aggression and pushing them away a bit.
The story opens with "Bora Horza Gobuchul", known as "Horza", a "changer" (a humanoid who can, with time and effort, significantly change his appearance to impersonate someone else) is rescued by the Idirans for whom he is working. His mission is to go to Schar's World, "one of the Dra'Azon Planets of the Dead", where a Culture Mind is known to have taken refuge after the destruction of the space ship it occupied. The Idirans want to capture the Mind and learn as much as possible about the Culture's technology.
Horza survives a battle in space, joins a company of mercenaries, raids a couple of sites for them, kills the mercenary leader and changes to take his place, makes it to Schar's World, fights a couple of Idirans who don't believe he is on their side, and is ultimately killed by the last one of them. The female human Culture agent, Perostek Balveda, who has opposed him throughout the novel, survives, kills the Idiran, and brings the Mind back to the Culture.
The title of the novel is taken from the fourth section of T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land". Phlebas the Phoenician sailor is dead. Banks quotes Eliot:
Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.
The story is pure space opera of the extravagant type. Banks writes:
"The Querl Xoralundra, spy-father and warrior priest of the Four Souls tributory sect of Farn-Idir, clasped two hands on the surface of the table. It looked to Horza rather like a pair of continental plates colliding."
“So, Bora Horza,” boomed the old Idiran, “you are recovered.”
“Just about,” nodded Horza, rubbing his wrists. He sat in Xoralundra’s cabin in The Hand of God 137, clothed in a bulky but comfortable spacesuit apparently brought along just for him."
Horza's adventures, at least the initial ones, struck me as aimed at adolescents. Horza fights alongside the mercenaries in two raids intended to steal money or valuables. He kills innocent defenders without any apparent qualms. The action is non-stop as Horza skips from one frying pan to the next, escaping each by the skin of his teeth only to land in even hotter circumstances requiring a still more desperate escape. The reader risks whiplash as the author bounces his character from one scenario to the next, each apparently created for its opportunities for adolescent adventure writing rather than because there is some meaningful connection to an advancing plot. It was not long before I was wondering why I was continuing to read this book.
However there were reasons. First of all, I read The Algebraist, liked it, and found the kind of sophisticated scientific imagination that I like. I was hoping for more and better. Secondly, the Culture series is Banks' best known effort. It comprises 10 books. I thought if I wanted more Banks, I ought to read this series and start with the first one. Thirdly, there was a promise of writing about AI, a subject of particular interest to me in reading science fiction.
To my surprise, the story got more sophisticated as it went on. The AI was, as is often the case, rather peripheral and not deeply imagined as in Egan's Diaspora, but it was not badly done. In particular, there was an intelligent flying drone with a nicely conceived personality that made the reader want to know more about it (I started to write "him".)
Banks published three novels, none science fiction, before he got this one published. It was his first published SF novel and it was what he really wanted to write. I might read more of them. If I do, I might read book 2 of the series, or I might read reviews and find the best reviewed book and read that. I'll see what else is on my reading list and where my moods take me.
| Author | Battles, Matthew |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: W.W. Norton and Co. |
| Copyright Date | 2015 |
| Number of Pages | 253 |
| Extras | illustrations, notes on sources, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Libraries |
| When Read | February 2019 |
Battles, currently an Associate Director of the "metaLAB" at Harvard University, offers his take on the history of libraries from ancient Alexandria to the modern Widener Library at Harvard, where he was working when he wrote the first version of this book in 2003. He gives some information about ancient libraries, the loss of libraries in Christian Europe in the Middle Ages, though they did continue in the Islamic world, and the European revival that grew through the 18th century but only took off in the 19th.
There is a lot of discussion of the changes in book collections based on the politics and religion of the times. Until long past the Renaissance (if I have understood Battles correctly), libraries continued to be repositories of religious classics. In one important 700 volume library, 98 of the volumes were copies of the works of Augustine. In the post Renaissance scientific revolution, books on science, history, and other secular topics competed for space in the libraries of the time but were strongly resisted by many in authority, assisted by the librarians themselves. Later, in the nineteenth century, religion had lost the battle for control of collections, but librarians still saw themselves as keepers of the flame of civilization (my words, not B's), aiming to bring enlightenment through educational books to the masses. Fiction in general and popular fiction in particular were seen as low brow distractions.
If religion ceased to be the dominating force in libraries, politics did not. B devotes considerable space to the Nazi book burnings and argues that most librarians assisted the Nazis in their destruction, though whether that was done in support of Nazism or in fear of oppression was not entirely clear to me. The Stalinist communist movement was also guilty of suppression of the free expression of ideas.
There was some discussion of technical issues, the continual corruption of texts in the process of hand copying of them before printing was invented, the creation of catalogs, the transition from codex to card form catalogs, the classification system of Melville Dewey and, very importantly, the influence of the computer age on books, reading, and libraries. However the book was primarily a social history, not a technical one.
I had not heard of this book or this author. I just happened upon it on a library shelf, read a few pages, and decided to borrow and read it. I was expecting something more technical, perhaps more about the development of cataloging, the organization of books on shelves, the differences between Dewey Decimal and Library of Congress cataloging, and much more about the influence of computers. However I think Battles took a lot of that for granted and instead wrote mainly about social changes in libraries. In addition to more general ideas about the evolution of the library missions, he wrote about the tiny libraries that Jews assembled in their concentration and death camps and about how survivors saw them. He wrote a lot about the German destruction of libraries throughout Europe, including the shelling of the library at the University of Louvain in WWI, its subsequent resurrection with money from America, and its following destruction in WWII by Germans who destroyed it just for spite, as if to say, "You think you escaped from us with money from America, well you didn't!" Large quantities of irreplaceable historical manuscripts were destroyed at Louvain and many other places. The same thing happened in the Yugoslav civil war in 1992 when the Serb nationalists purposely destroyed the Bosnian National and University Library and a number of other libraries in an attempt to extinguish Bosnian history and culture from the earth. It's the kind of thing that has happened throughout history but one that, we hope, is more easily thwarted in the age of digitization.
He is a sophisticated reader and writer. He likes terms like "biblioclasm" (the burning of a library) and "gnomic biblio-cosmogony (p.224. I haven't even tried to figure that one out.) He says a lot about Jonathan Swift. He talks about "universal libraries". Reading him, I felt that I was in the presence of a deep and well educated thinker. I think he might be quite interested in what Jonathan Israel has to say about publishers and libraries in his Radical Enlightenment, which tells us something about the impact of church and state in censorship during the Enlightenment period of 1650-1750, and the dark age that preceded it.
In my brief years as a reference librarian at the "main branch", i.e. the Central Library of Enoch Pratt Free Library, I too imagined myself to be spreading culture. I don't think I saw it as my main mission, but I did try to suggest more sophisticated books to sophisticated readers and more truthful materials to those who came to find books on astrology, scientology, and other absurdities - though I tried to do what all reference librarians try to do, which is to answer readers questions and find the books or subjects for which they ask.
I still have some calling as a librarian, or at least as a book collector and curator as well as a reader. I have a fantasy that I occasionally use to amuse myself of escaping death in a space capsule with my large collection of accumulated ebooks and my computer and other electronic devices for reading them and writing about them. But of course I also need my lovely wife to accompany me and I'm not sure that she would find my escape very fulfilling.
| Author | Ko, Lisa |
|---|---|
| Publication | Algonquin Books |
| Copyright Date | 2017 |
| Number of Pages | 368 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | March 2019 |
Unmarried and pregnant 19 year old Peilan Guo leaves Fuzhuo province in China for New York, smuggled in by a professional smuggling agency for $3000 down and $47,000 in debt. Her child, Deming Guo, is born in New York and is thus a U.S. citizen. Unable to both care for the child and work to live and pay down her debt, she sends the baby back to her fisherman father in the town of Minjian in Fuzhou. Deming grows up to age five or six before his Yi Gong (grandpa) dies and he is taken by an uncle to New York to live with his Yi Ma (mama). There he attends school, learns English, and the two of them eventually move in with two other illegal Chinese, Leon, who becomes Deming's Yi Ba (dad) and Leon's sister Vivian and her son Michael, just a year younger than Deming. Peilan, now called Polly, is working as a manicurist in the Hello Gorgeous nail salon. She tells everyone she wants to go to Florida where a friend of hers can get her a job as a waitress making more money than at the salon. Then she disappears. No one knows what happened to her, whether she went to Florida, or somewhere else. If they have ideas, they don't tell them to Deming.
After some months Vivian, who cannot care for both children, turns Deming over to the state as an abandoned child. He is placed as a foster child, then adoptee, in upstate New York in the home of Peter and Kay Wilkinson, two college professors. They rename the child Daniel Wilkinson and give him all the support and material things he lacked in the care of Polly and Leon. They try to raise him to become a college student and professional like themselves, but Daniel/Deming resists. He doesn't like school. He loves rock music. He learns the guitar and wants to play in a band. He also becomes a compulsive gambler and loses $10,000 he borrowed from a childhood friend which he cannot pay back. He feels betrayed by his real mother and doesn't know how to react to his new identity and new parents.
Most of the novel concentrates on the story of Deming/Daniel, but gradually, more and more appears in first person from the point of view of Peilan/Polly, as if she is writing to Deming - though she is not actually sending him anything. Eventually, Leon finds Peilan in China and through a chain of communications, Deming is given her phone number. He contacts her and later flies to China to see her again. He learns the full story of what happened to her. ICE raided the nail salon and arrested Peilan and everyone else. She lost her phone and had no phone numbers to contact anyone and was only allowed one attempt to make a call. She had no lawyer. She was sent to Ardsleyville prison (a fictional name based on the real privately run tent prison in Texas named the Willacy County Correctional Center.) It was a horrible place with horrible treatment and no useful ability to contact anyone she knew. She spent 14 months there, was brought before an immigration judge with no lawyer, was asked three questions she didn't fully understand, said hardly anything, and was deported to China where she was taken off the plane in prison clothes, given 20 yuan, and left alone. There she made a life for herself, married, and was financially successful. And there she met and reconciled with Deming.
At the end of the story Deming has returned to New York. He has stopped gambling, tried a summer semester at college but still didn't like it, got a low paying job, played guitar in clubs in the City - working on his own songs, and slowly paid off his $10,000 debt. He is living with his old friend Michael, now a grad student.
I both liked and admired this book. It was difficult to read about Deming's self-defeating behavior, his rejection of school, his gambling, his childish attitudes towards the adults in his life, his running away from problems, and his impulsive behavior. But difficult or not, it was presented in a way that seemed very real and very perceptive to me. The same was true of other central characters such as Peilan and Kay and Peter Wilkinson. It was a book that set out to teach the reader something and it succeeded with this reader.
Ko made a real and successful effort to tell the truth about these people and their situation. I didn't see her as either glossing over problems or exaggerating them. It was easy to imagine all of these people and all of these events. That's not easy to achieve but I think she did it.
Read for the NCI Book Group (and to be discussed tomorrow.)
| Author | Kahneman, Daniel |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Copyright Date | 2011 |
| Number of Pages | 499 |
| Extras | diagrams, bibliography, notes, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Cognitive science; Economics |
| When Read | March 2019 |
Experimental psychologist and Nobel Prize winner in Economics Kahneman begins with what he describes as two "systems" for thinking. The fast system, or System 1, uses associative memory, pattern recognition, innate thinking behavior, and learned responses to answer questions and solve problems quickly, with high speed and low effort. It can serve us well when we have many problems to solve or we need answers very quickly. It uses a principle that Kahneman calls "What You See Is All There Is" ("WYSIATI"). In other words, jump to conclusions quickly based on the immediately available evidence without waiting to find out what other evidence should be sought, and substitutes pattern recognition ("this is like that") rather than logic and computation to evaluate the WYSIATI evidence. Unfortunately, and for reasons that are obvious in the above description, it gets a lot wrong - in which cases it often serves us very poorly.
The slow system, or System 2, uses logic and computation together with a deeper search for evidence and more probing of memory to work things out. System 1 enables us to multiply 3 x 6 to get a very quick answer. It comes from our memorized and heavily used multiplication table, not from adding up three sixes or six threes. Most of us cannot do the same for 328 * 794. For that (assuming no access to calculators) we need to go through the multiplication procedures we learned in elementary school of multiplying one digit by one digit, carrying over the tens column digit, shifting one position to the left for the next multiplier digit, and adding the three lines of results to get the right answer. Intelligent people make heavier, sometimes much heavier, use of System 2. Dumb people rely more heavily on System 1. They may never have properly trained their System 2 faculties, or they may be intellectually lazy (a problem that almost all of us are subject to, especially when we are tired, bored, distracted), or all of the above. Kahneman is very concerned to make all of us aware of this problem and to get us to work harder and thereby become smarter.
There is no claim here about physical partitioning of the brain into separate systems. K is talking about intellectual behavior, not brain physiology - about which not enough is known to relate this type of behavior to it.
K gives examples of common ways in which we rely on System 1 but are betrayed by it. System 1 never employs statistics. It looks at remembered experience and applies it to immediate problems without concern for changes of context, base values, or factors that are not presented to us but affect outcomes. It is the system we rely upon for most of our conclusions and it has the advantage of enabling us to think fast and draw many conclusions in a short time, but of course it is a terrible system for making decisions about politics, economic choices, and all other complex questions.
The last half or so of the book is devoted to economics and to statistical type decisions. K was given the Nobel Prize for his experimental proofs that most people are not the rational actors that economic theory assumes. We hate losses much more than we value gains. Framing a decision in terms of its chances of loss will turn people against it much more than is warranted by the objective statistics of the choice. If you have a 75% chance of winning $1,000 and a 25% chance of losing the same amount in an investment, the great majority of people will not invest. Professional investors will grab at the chance.
K ends every chapter with a set of statements of a kind that people should make. They are examples of using System 2 in cases where we are automatically inclined to make incorrect System 1 type judgments.
It seemed to me that the same point was hammered home with example after example. K showed that we make the same mistakes in many different fields. Surprisingly, although some kinds of professionals were immunized against System 1 type errors, other kinds were not. For example, public health officials are much more likely to approve a drug described as extending life for 90% of patients than the same drug when described as causing 10% to die early. Present a drug one way and they'll approve it. Present the same drug the other way and they'll reject it. Professors of statistics, including Kahneman himself, routinely perform statistical studies without doing the calculations that would establish the minimum sample size needed for the degree of certainty that they hoped to prove. K was appalled when he went back over his own published experimental reports to see how sloppy he had been and how often his sample sizes were too small.
Either I did better than the average bear, or I was on the alert for System 1 type errors by virtue of reading the book. I got many questions right that the majority of subjects in the studies he reports got wrong. However I was dismayed to see that the great majority of my financial decisions had been textbook cases of System 1 thinking. I have invested in very low performance investments like certificates of deposit out of fear of losing. If, instead, I protected myself with adequate diversification and invested for the long haul, I could have significantly more money today than I actually have. Of course it doesn't really disturb me too much because, in spite of what I learned from K, I still favor low performing but maximally safe investments because it still hurts me much more to see a small loss than to forego a large gain. My System 1 won't let my System 2 make the most logical moves in investing. I also don't care too much because we have more money than we need and, if we had double or triple what we have we almost certainly wouldn't live differently from the way we do now. There just isn't anything either of us wants to buy that we can't easily afford.
The book was valuable. Its main lessons are not very different from those taught by Arthur Whimbey in Intelligence Can Be Taught, however K has examined the principles much more deeply to explain exactly what specific things that our System 2, our higher intelligence, can do, that our System 1 cannot. They are the things that require effort, thought, deep searches of memory, appreciation of context, and so on. It is much more thorough than Whimbey's book and has a broader application - though Whimbey did a great job of explaining just how to get an 11 year old to think harder.
| Author | Butler, Samuel |
|---|---|
| Publication | Gutenburg, 2005 |
| Copyright Date | 1903 |
| Number of Pages | 448 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Family; Religion; Literature |
| When Read | March 2019 |
This is the story of Ernest Pontifex along with four generations of his ancestors and one of his descendants. Ernest's great-grandfather was a fine, generous man. His grandfather, not so fine and generous. His father, Theobald Pontifex, downright nasty. Theobald was a curate of the Anglican Church in the town of Battersby. He raised Ernest, the eldest of his three children, to be a perfect little church child. Ernest must master Latin and Greek, be pious and obedient, do everything he is told to do, and confess everything he may have thought or done that he was not supposed to do. Should he fail in any of these tasks he was whipped until, crying, he promised never to do again what he had just done and could not help doing again.
Ernest is unhappy at home but when he is sent to a church boarding school in Roughborough at age 12 he hates that too, but does meet his maiden aunt Alethea Pontifex, who moves to Roughborough from London specifically to spend time with Ernest. She sees great promise in the boy and hopes to rescue him from his father and mother, but must be very careful in how she does it, knowing that her brother Theobald will become angry and vengeful if he thinks she is helping Ernest to break free of his parents. With no children of her own and no desire to leave money to her unattractive brothers, whom she doesn't like and who don't need her money, she writes a will that gives 5,000 pounds to Ernest on his 21st birthday and all the remaining 15,000 pounds of her money to her friend Overton, the narrator of the story, with secret instructions to invest the money and wait until Ernest reaches the age of 28 and then give him his full inheritance. She wants Ernest to be old enough to be past the foolishness of youth that might cause him to throw away the money. Then she dies.
Ernest goes to Cambridge and actually does well, but he is indeed foolish. He attends a meeting run by an evangelical preacher named Hawke who convinces him to dedicate his life to Jesus. Raised to believe in Christianity, Ernest has never thought deeply about it in spite of his father's profession but Hawke transforms him into a true believer with one single sermon. Ernest falls in with a rigid young believer named Pryer who convinces Ernest to give him what is left of his 5,000 pounds to invest and grow to be enough to found a religious institution. When Ernest comes more to his senses Overton attempts to rescue Ernest and retrieve the money, but Pryer and the money are gone forever. Ernest gives up belief in the supernatural and the rigidities of the church which had not changed a single one of its opinions in 300 years.
Jumping from the frying pan of Pryer and religion, he goes straight into the fire. He makes an unwanted approach to a young woman in the building where he has a room. The girl panics and runs to the police. Ernest is arrested by a bully cop, convicted by a bully judge, and sent to prison for six months. While there he learns the tailoring trade but, when he gets out, no tailor shop will hire him. Then he runs into beautiful young Ellen who once worked for Theobald and was fired for a pregnancy that Ernest never knew anything about. He had always liked her and she him, and he had been beaten by his father for giving his watch and all his little money to Ellen when she was sent away - and then lying about it. In a short time, against the advice of Overton, Ernest marries Ellen and they setup a second hand shop where they sell second hand clothing that Ernest has bought and repaired and also second hand books. Overton leases the house where they live and conduct the business. But if Ernest was in the fire before, it only gets hotter. Ellen was a fine helpmate until she fell off the wagon and gave in to drunkenness, stealing from Ernest to buy liquor, pretending to be sick because of her pregnancy, running down the shop, and getting pregnant again. Only by good luck does Ernest learn that Ellen was already married and so Ernest and Ellen's marriage was void. Ellen leaves England for America with another man and Ernest is left with two children, whom he places in a good working class home with a pound a week from him, financed by an easy job working for Overton.
I'll conclude all of this with just the final position. Ernest has cut all ties to his mother and father. He attempts to become a writer and eventually succeeds, but by writing philosophical and political books which are not popular and do not earn much money. Then he reaches age 28, gets his inheritance, sees his family of origin again and is cordial to them but very uninvolved. His fortune has grown in the stock market to 70,000 pounds and his income from it is way more than he needs, but he has no ambition or interest to join society. He prefers to work on his writing and his music - which he is doing at the end of the story, still in the small apartment that Overton had found for him.
Butler wrote this mostly in the 1870's but it was not published until after his death in 1902. I presume that Butler decided that his criticism of religion, and perhaps of rigid parenthood, would have caused him more social condemnation than he wanted to face.
I read this book after seeing a comment on it somewhere that said it was the first true 20th century novel. I don't know about that. If I compare the work to books published in the first decade of the 20th century by Jack London, Maxim Gorky, Upton Sinclair, Andre Gide, H.G. Wells, Butler doesn't seem very 20th century to me - though there are other books from that period that don't seem as modern as the first authors I mentioned. Is the work more "modern" that the works by Emile Zola? But this is really besides the point. Butler wrote about religion in ways that would probably not have been acceptable at all in the 1850's. He explicitly referenced Charles Darwin's Origin of Species and tacitly accepted Darwin's implication that man is not created in the image of God, or created at all. He rejects supernaturalism and rejects a lot of the pomp, presumption, and rigidity of the Anglican Church. He attacks Theobald and Christina's approach to child rearing and criticizes the attitude of both church and school to children. Ernest's tolerance of Ellen's sexual freedom, his rejection of the high class society to which his riches entitled him, and his acceptance of working class life, would all have been disquieting to 19th century English readers and therefore considered "modern". He was perhaps more realist than Dickens, though not perhaps as much so as Zola, Baudelaire, or the other French social realists.
The novel was well written. Here are a few passages that I liked:
"Mrs Cowey had been so accustomed to scheming on her own account that she would scheme for anyone rather than not scheme at all."
"I may say in passing that Dr Skinner had dabbled in a great many other things as well as chemistry. He was a man of many small knowledges, and each of them dangerous. I remember Alethea Pontifex once said in her wicked way to me, that Dr Skinner put her in mind of the Bourbon princes on their return from exile after the battle of Waterloo, only that he was their exact converse; for whereas they had learned nothing and forgotten nothing, Dr Skinner had learned everything and forgotten everything."
Butler was a good writer with that 19th century command of English that was later replaced with plainer language. He addressed serious issues and didn't shy away from unpopular stands. His characters, sometimes awkwardly portrayed, were nevertheless complex and realistic.
I was impressed by the book and consider it to have been an important work, even if it did only reach the public 25 or so years after it was written.
| Author | Mo Yan |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Chinese |
| Translators | Goldblatt, Howard |
| Publication | Penguin Audio, 2015 |
| Copyright Date | 2009 |
| Number of Pages | 400 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | China |
| When Read | March 2019 |
In the Northeast Township of Gaomi County in Shandong province, starving children eat coal in the hard times before the Cultural Revolution. Wan Zu (also known as Xiaopao and Tadpole) grows up with all of the other members of the village. His aunt Gugu (or Wan Xin) is the local midwife and obstetrician. She assists in pregnancies and deliveries but is also responsible for enforcing the Communist Party's "one child" policy by inserting IUDs or performing vasectomies, tubal ligations, or abortions. Sometimes the local people resist, especially if they already have one child but she is a girl. A second try may be allowed but, if that also produces a girl, then that's the end of it. Gugu will chase the women down with police, pull them out of their hiding holes, follow them down the rivers, impose fines, and even knock down the houses of their neighbors to force the pregnant women and their husbands and fathers to give up rather than be responsible (as Gugu insists they will be) for destroying their neighbors lives.
Tadpole, the narrator of the story, tells of these different cases, including his own, in letters to Sugitani Akihito, a former Japanese soldier in China and something of a mentor to Tadpole. Tadpole's wife has gotten pregnant against his wishes by secretly having a local man pull out her IUD. He wants her to get an abortion but she refuses, hides, is tracked down by Gugu, submits to abortion against her will, and dies during the procedure. Tadpole and Gugu are both devastated but are both good communists and continue to support the policy. The rest of the novel is about the effects of the policy on others and the anger, guilt, and hardship in the life of the village from the period of the Cultural Revolution right up to the new, largely capitalist Chinese society of 2009.
The story involves many characters from multiple generations. Frogs show up at various times and places in the story and there is a bullfrog breeding farm that serves as a cover for a place where men may mate with or provide sperm to surrogate mothers in order to have more children. Tadpole and his second wife Little Lion, she is now past childbearing age, avail themselves of this service.
The story ends with a long nine act play, written by Tadpole, that tells the story of the village and the battle between Little Lion, the would be mother, and Chen Mei, the surrogate mother, for the possession of the baby that they each claim.
The story described above could be anything between terrible and brilliant. In my opinion, it was brilliant. Mo's characters were magnificently drawn - simple and complex at the same time - outrageously annoying but completely human. No matter whether they were beggars, idiots, mystic doll makers, ruthless communist ideologues, selfish millionaires, nasty children, suffering cripples, grieving mothers, outraged grandfathers, air force pilots, corrupt officials, or dedicated public servants, they were always in character and yet always capable of surprising Tadpole and/or the reader. I have read a bit of Lu Xun and a few of the other Chinese writers to come out of the revolutionary period and the times after 1949, but this was nothing like them. It was a wonderfully sophisticated achievement - deep, philosophical, literary, historical, and humorous, but never pretentious. Its author deserved the Nobel Prize for Literature that he won. I believe that the book was the equal of the greatest works coming out of the West. I loved it.
I looked at the Amazon reviews. There were only 25 of them and many were harshly negative. Some readers thought the book was tedious. One (whom I responded to in a comment) thought it was a defense of the Communist Party policy on abortion, though I thought it was clearly the opposite of a defense.
| Author | Kalb, Marvin |
|---|---|
| Publication | Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2018 |
| Copyright Date | 2018 |
| Number of Pages | xxiv + 174 |
| Extras | notes, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Politics |
| Keywords | Democracy; Trump |
| When Read | March 2019 |
At age 88, veteran journalist Marvin Kalb has produced a book about Trump's attacks on the American news media and its dangers for American democracy.
K argues, in the spirit of Edmund Burke and Thomas Carlyle, that there are three institutions that can stand up to authoritarian leaders and block their attempts at establishing a tyranny. They are the Congress, the courts, and the free press. The Congress, or at least the Republican portion of it that dominated both houses when K was preparing his book, has run away from the problem. "... the Republican Party has truly lost its way, abandoning principle to gushing obsequiousness before Trump ... " (p.154) The courts are under attack by Trump, and the press is accused by Trump of being "fake news" and "the enemy of the people."
Kalb doesn't go into the history of Trump's attacks except to say that he tried out various ways to turn people away from his detractors in the press and found that "fake news" and "enemy of the people" worked best and so were emphasized. Trump appears to have no clue as to the role of these kinds of attacks in the rise of other totalitarian regimes, and probably couldn't care less.
A major part of the book is about Senator Joe McCarthy's impact on the country and the press in the late 1940s and early 50s. McCarthy had approval numbers similar to and a bit higher than Trump's today. He told bald lies without any apparent concern for consistency or evidence, making up stories and statistics as he went along and as he felt like doing at the moment. This is very like Trump. The majority of Republicans, and many Democrats too, supported him out of fear, just as Republicans today dare not criticize Trump out of fear of losing their jobs in the next election. Newspapers and radio and TV news shows dared not attack McCarthy for fear of McCarthy supporters chasing away the sponsors that paid for the production of the news. Then finally, after much delay, much waiting for the right moment, much laying of ground work, Edward R. Murrow, the most respected American journalist, launched a devastating attack on McCarthy on nationwide TV. It was the beginning of McCarthy's end. Within a few weeks his approval ratings dropped from 46% to 32%. Timid players in American politics began to gather a little more courage. The Army-McCarthy hearings broadcast not long after Murrow's attack knocked McCarthy further down and finally 3/4ths of the Senate voted to censure him and the curse of McCarthyism began to fade, not of course before thousands of people had lost their jobs due to McCarthy's and his supporters vicious attacks on them.
Walter Cronkite played a smaller but still pivotal role in 1968 in convincing both Americans in general and Lyndon Johnson in particular that there was no victory on the horizon in Vietnam. Woodward and Bernstein played a pivotal role in exposing Richard Nixon's crimes and, ultimately, bringing about his impeachment.
Kalb argues that it is much harder today for the press to do much harm to Trump. The insularization of the news, the power of Fox News over Trump's "base", and the lack of journalists with the kind of nationwide reputations that Murrow and Cronkite had (not because there aren't equally good journalists now but because the positions that Murrow and Cronkite held don't exist any more) might all prevent any decisive exposé of Donald Trump.
K is not entirely pessimistic about the future. The press is still strong, still free, and still able to say what it wants to say, but we are at risk.
Millions of people in the U.S., Marvin Kalb and myself among them, are deeply distressed by the Trump presidency. Many of those are doing what they can to change things but what they can do is limited. K knows things about the nature of American journalism that most of us don't know, he has a good reputation, and he is able to get his views published. So at a time when most people are quietly retired he has spent time and effort to try to counteract the Trump threat to American democracy. His impact will necessarily be small. The people who most need to hear his views will be the ones least likely to read them. But his impact won't be zero. Even though I am already in the choir that he is preaching to, I have learned some things from his book and maybe I can apply them in the few future cases when I might be able to influence someone.
Here are some of the things that I took away from his book. First, there is his emphasis on the interdependence of democracy and a free press. Each requires the other in order to survive. I knew this before but a little reminding of the centrality of this principle doesn't hurt. Democracy need only fail once to destroy the free press and itself for decades or longer. Hitler was (sort of) elected in a free election. No more free elections were held while he was alive and none would have happened after he died if his regime had not been crushed at gigantic cost from outside. It helps to keep this very much in mind. Secondly, I learned from his description of the McCarthy phenomenon. That too is something I already knew about, from William Shirer's books among others, but K added some information that I didn't know. I didn't know that Murrow's broadcast had such a dramatic effect, lowering McCarthy's approval ratings almost one-third. I understand from K's explanation that conditions no longer obtain for a leading journalist to make such an inroad into Trump's "base", however the idea that such a turnaround is possible among the kind of people that support Trump is encouraging.
I think Trump is in a good position to dominate the news and the political views of the "conservatives" (whatever they are these days), the evangelicals, the ignorant, the forgotten, the people who feel left out and condescended to. I wish I knew how to reach them.
| Author | Cather, Willa |
|---|---|
| Publication | Gutenburg Australia |
| Copyright Date | 1927 |
| Number of Pages | 299 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Religion; Christianity |
| When Read | March 2019 |
See the abstract, comment, and notes in the entry dated 1977-04.03, my first reading of this novel. I still agree with everything I wrote there.
See 1977-04.03
When the NCI Book Group asked for reading suggestions from its members, this was on my list. I picked it because I thought it was a great book and it seemed to me that we had focused too much on reading current publishing and not enough on the great classics. There are fine pieces of music being composed today, but we should never stop listening to Mozart and Beethoven. I think the same is true of great literature.
To prepare to lead the discussion at the meeting I read a number of reviews, one of which, in _The Catholic World Report_, was entitled _The Protestant who wrote the greatest book about American Catholicism_. For me, the book was indeed one of the great and most successful attempts to make sense of Catholicism.
| Author | Clarke, Arthur C. |
|---|---|
| Publication | UK: National Library Service, 1984 |
| Copyright Date | 1982 |
| Number of Pages | 291 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | March 2019 |
This is a continuation of Clarke's 1968 2001: a Space Odyssey. A small number of Americans and a larger group of Russians leave earth on a mission to find out what happened to the original expedition and to the unaccounted for Dave Bowman. They arrive in the vicinity of Jupiter (following the movie version rather than Saturn in the book version of 2001) to find that a Chinese spacecraft has preceded them, burning all of its hydrogen fuel and landing on a moon of Jupiter to get more - but all dying there.
The ship reaches the original Discovery One vessel. An Indian American (not an American Indian) AI expert reboots the HAL 9000, the computerized intelligence that killed four of the five crew of the original mission and HAL works with the crew to locate the monolith and attempt, unsuccessfully, to learn more about it. Dave Bowman appears and warns the people to get away fast, which they do in time. Jupiter is radically transformed with much release of energy that would have destroyed them. They make it back to earth. Dave Bowman also arrives at earth and performs a number of reconnaissance tasks under compulsion from the aliens who sent him there.
I don't currently recall any of the 18 previous books by Arthur C. Clarke that I read that I didn't find worth reading. The story was acceptable. The characters worked. The theme of the series is successfully continued. And most of all, Clarke's brilliant ability to explain his deep knowledge of science to the reader is fully intact. Clarke had also obviously thought hard about what a superior alien civilization might be like and what it might seem like to an inferior humanity - a subject that he had pursued at least since Childhood's End in 1953.
There are no answers here, only a believable concept of a species and civilization that has little respect for, but not necessarily any ill will, towards humans. The main subject of the book is the humans, not the aliens, but the alien mystery remains an unavoidable background theme of the story.
| Author | Seymour, Gerald |
|---|---|
| Publication | Clipper Audio, 2006 |
| Copyright Date | 2005 |
| Number of Pages | 448 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| When Read | April 2019 |
Down and out Malachy Kitchen is living as a beggar and a bum after having been expelled as a coward from the British Army in Iraq when he disappeared from his unit during a battle and was found walking around in a daze without his weapon or his gear. A big Jamaican social worker, Ivanhoe Manners, finds him and installs him in a small apartment in the Amersham estate, a building in a London slum and apparently sets him up with a dole sufficient to buy food. He is the main character and connecting person in a story that weaves drug gangs and an Al Qaeda "coordinator" who is attempting to reach England in order to activate young "sleeper" terrorists.
Malachy reaches the bottom when the Mrs. Johnson living next door to him, a woman who invites him in for tea twice a month is beaten and seriously injured by drug addicts aiming to steal her purse. Malachy had missed his appointment to walk her to and from her bingo game.
Mrs. Johnson's son, a cop who knows who the drug pushers are but has no evidence for a conviction, meets with Malachy and offers him information about the dealers, encouraging him to do something to redeem himself. He does. With a plastic toy gun, he picks up three street pushers, ties and gags them, and hangs them upside down off the roof of the building. They are rescued the next morning but, terrified, they leave the area. Then he hangs their supplier upside down from a lamppost. Then he burns down the house of the supplier's supplier. The cop tells him he's done enough but Malachy doesn't feel that way, he goes after Ricky Capel, the importer who supplies everyone. Capel and his cousin, both real sociopaths, beat Malachy and kick him in the head.
In a parallel story, Polly "Wilco" Wilkins, directed by Frederick Gaunt in England, has tracked the Al Qaeda coordinator through Czechoslovakia, where his fanatical bodyguard sacrifices his own life to save the coordinator from the Czech police, and arrives in Hamburg at the same time as Capel arrives, with Malachy secretly on his trail. Albanian gangster Timo Rahman has been contracted to deliver the coordinator to England and has called in his man Capel to organize the transfer.
In the end, Malachy kills Capel. Timo Rahman is arrested for seriously hurting his wife, the coordinator is blocked from getting to England though we don't know if he died or not, and the true story of Malachy's supposed cowardice is revealed to the reader, though not to Malachy or anyone else. He had been hit in the neck by a brick thrown from a rooftop and was knocked unconscious. His gun was taken from him then. He had not been a coward. Gaunt and the real hero Wilkins are punished for their failure to stop Malachy from interfering in the pursuit of the coordinator. Malachy winds up as a social worker organizing basketball teams for the neighborhood kids.
The story was loaded with Seymour's usual cynicism about, and criticism of, self-serving security services - especially the British ones. Also, as is often the case in his books, the hero is a man who is rejected by society, depressed, and self-loathing. It's a formula that works once, twice, but maybe not so much thereafter. It begins to feel artificial and manipulative. The intertwining of the different stories is another specialty of Seymour's, but one that is especially stressed in this book and also feels forced and manipulative. Some of the actions are unconvincing, like Malachy's hanging drug dealers over the side of the building, or the discovery by Malachy's old commander that his army action was not cowardly but the knowledge is suppressed to avoid having to change the already accepted view of Malachy's past. It's a book with significant problems.
On the other hand Seymour is good at writing suspenseful scenes. At least at times, the book is a compelling read. If we are disappointed in Gaunt and disturbed by the treatment of Polly Wilkins, we are at least satisfied by the death of the nasty Ricky Capel and the disrespecting and arrest of the kingpin Timo Rahman. I've read eight of Seymour's books now and may yet read more of them.
| Author | Fast, Howard |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Open Road Integrated Media, 2013 |
| Copyright Date | 1969 |
| Number of Pages | 138 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories |
| When Read | April 2019 |
This is a collection of nine short stories, all apparently written in the late 1960's, by the very prolific Howard Fast. The place and time of the stories was contemporary with the time of writing but, as in most SF, things happen in the stories that don't or can't happen in real life.
In the title story an American Army general in Vietnam loves to fly over the countryside in his helicopter, shooting at Viet Cong, or whoever, on the ground. After one such mission the Marines at a base he flew over radioed to say that he had "zapped" an angel - and so he had. It was a 20 foot tall snow-white man with big wings. The general takes the apparently dead angel back to the air base for examination by army chaplains but the angel wakes up, gives the general a deep and meaningful stare, and then walks over to the runway and takes off into the sky.
Other stories are similarly fantastic. In "The Mouse", tiny aliens capture a mouse, turn him into an intelligent creature who works as their scout to report on what he sees. The mouse commits suicide by walking into a mousetrap when he learns that he cannot go to the aliens home and must live as a rodent. "The Vision of Milty Boil" is about a short man who convinces humanity to evolve to shorter heights. "The Mohawk" is about an Indian who sits in front of a Catholic cathedral hoping for a vision and leaves after he has one. In "The Wound" an oil company places an atom bomb deep in the earth to bring up shale oil but what emerges is the blood of mother earth. In "Tomorrow's Wall Street Journal" the devil trades a copy of tomorrow's Journal for a man's soul. The man and his wife desperately try to borrow millions of dollars to buy stock in AT&T that will split the next day but of course no one will lend it to them and the wife berates her husband for stupidity. The devil convinces the man to throw his wife out the eighth floor window and live as the devil's man. "The Interval" has a playwright retreating to a theater club that stays alive when almost all of the rest of reality is rolled up and taken down as scenery for a play that has finished its run. In "The Movie House" people live in a sealed building watching movies played by the very old projectionist. A young man discovers a door to the outer world and makes a key but is condemned for his irrational beliefs and moved into the sub-cellar. Finally, in "The Insects", a super hive mind representing all of the insects on earth demands that humans stop killing them. When they don't, people start being stung or bitten to death or have their crops destroyed.
This is the tenth book I've read by Howard Fast. I was a big fan of his left-wing historical fictions on the Roman slave revolt, the post-civil war suppression of freed slaves, the progressive governor Altgeld of Illinois, Tom Paine, and so on. However this is the first of his books that I've read since 2004.
I liked it. I liked his social consciousness. I liked his interesting perceptions of his contemporary society - the society that I lived in when I was coming of age. I liked his characters from the arrogant, murderous general to the timid mouse. I liked the vivid imagination that he allowed to run free - not something he could do in his historical fiction.
| Author | Yu Hua |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Chinese |
| Translators | Barr, Allan H. |
| Publication | New York: Pantheon Books, 2018 |
| Copyright Date | 1987 |
| Number of Pages | viii + 211 |
| Extras | Translator's note |
| Genres | Fiction; Short stories |
| Keywords | China |
| When Read | April 2019 |
This collection comprises seven stories, originally published in China between 1987 and 1991. Titles were "As the North Wind Howled", The April 3rd Incident", "Death Chronicle", "In Memory of Miss Willow Yang", "Love Story", "A History of Two People", and "Summer Typhoon".
The stories are all centered around a main character, different (I think) in each case. They are modern China stories as opposed to Communist China stories. There is no interest in the class struggle, no Party members, no work or social point of view. There is a personal frame of reference that would, I think, have been considered bourgeois and reactionary during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.
The title story reminded me of Alain Robbe-Grillet's _The Voyeur_, and also the existentialist novels of Sartre and Camus. The translator also pointed out the similarity to Robbe-Grillet in his introductory note, though I didn't remember (or did not consciously remember) that when I came to this story and noticed it myself. The 18 year old central character, although described in 3rd person narrative, is the center of all consciousness in the story. He is convinced that everyone is conspiring against him. Other characters exist only as he perceives them. As with Robbe-Grillet's character, there is a hint of murder, related as some sort of delusion, hallucination, dream, or perhaps a kind of waking dream. It is relentless in its walled in consciousness and paranoia. The other stories also had that view of the world not as an objective place so much as a idealistic or even solipsistic vision of a person whose testimony about it was reliable, at best, as testimony about that person's state of mind. Who knows what the objective reality around the character really was.
I was a student during the years of the Cultural Revolution and was much attracted to Mao and Chinese communism. Even then, in my anti-Vietnam War, anti-imperialist state, the Chinese magazine articles and books I was reading seemed immature and stilted. I wanted to see a flowering of literature that, I was hoping, would have both the proletarian point of view and the intellectual expression that was present in the great literature of the west and even, to a significant extent, in the literature of Soviet Russia. But that kind of literature was forbidden. It was only in the 1980s, '90s, and more and more in the 2000s, that the intellectual imagination of human beings everywhere could also be expressed in China. Yu Hua must have been quite early in that wave.
| Author | Westover, Tara |
|---|---|
| Publication | Random House |
| Copyright Date | 2018 |
| Number of Pages | 352 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Autobiography |
| When Read | April 2019 |
Born into a family of extreme fundamentalist Mormons in Idaho, Tara Westover grew up without ever having been in school. She was taught to read by an older brother but her main occupation in life was, first, assisting her father in his "scrapping" (tearing apart scrap materials for recycling) and building businesses, and second, helping her mother who worked as a midwife and herbalist healer. She handled heavy machinery, carried material on barn roof tops, and suffered serious injuries due to unsafe working conditions for which real medical treatment by qualified doctors was never permitted by her father.
Her father believed that the government was evil, doctors were evil, vaccinations and antibiotics were intended to take over people's minds, and all sorts of other crazy ideas. Of the seven children of the family, only the first few got any schooling at all. Tara, the youngest, and the other young ones never went to school, were born at home without the benefit of doctors, had no birth certificates, and received, at best, a 3rd or 4th grade home education. Decimals and fractions were problematic for Tara. She knew virtually nothing about world or American history, and had read no books other than the Bible and various Mormon tracts. She had two older brothers, Tyler and Richard, who were highly intelligent. They educated themselves, and made their own way into college, grad schools, and PhDs. Under Tyler's influence and with his help, she passed the ACT exams with a high enough score on her second try to enroll in Brigham Young University. She had her first exposure to the wider world. It was a real shock and it took many years for her to move her thinking from the closed, parochial, ignorance of her former life into the light of day.
One of Tara's brothers, Shawn (a pseudonym in his case), was a highly dangerous, compulsive bully. He was the kind of guy who studied martial arts and went into bars with the intention of picking fights. He married a girl who completely abased herself before him and accepted his physical and psychological brutality. Perhaps he loved his family in some demented way, but once she reached her middle teen years, Tara's life was endangered by him. Tara's parents simply refused to believe Tara's accounts of what happened and demanded that she, and her sister Audrey who had also been brutalized, confess to having made up the stories if they wanted to stay in the family. Her father demanded that reality accord with his view of it, evidence be damned. Her mother submitted to her husband, intentionally blinding herself to the facts. Both girls accepted the demands under duress but Tara eventually, after years of guilt and inner conflict, finally broke with her parents over the issue.
Eventually, Tara spent a year at Harvard and wound up with a PhD in intellectual history from Cambridge University, admired and supported by professors of very high standing. She seems to have rejected the views of her parents while still offering them her love.
This book was a moving story and a compelling read. The child, Tara, apparently a very well behaved and loving child, experienced major trauma at the hands of her father and her older brother Shawn. Both abusers seemed mentally ill. Her father, whom Tara later diagnosed as bipolar, had no intent to harm her but his neurotic, or perhaps one should say psychotic, religious beliefs made him insensitive to the terrible harm to which he exposed his children. God would not allow anything bad to happen and, if it did, the Godly healing powers of her mother would solve any problem. I don't know what the proper characterization of Shawn's problem would be. Tara didn't help us there. But it's clear that he suffered from an inner rage that could never be appeased no matter how his victim sought to submit to his will. The accounts of his physically hurting his sister in public, while she laughed in order to pretend to onlookers that it was all a game and so protect him from their interference, was painful even to read.
At many points in the book I wanted to scream my advice to Tara. Don't put up with this! Get out! Don't come back! Join the larger world! But I didn't appreciate the extent of the damage to her own psyche, damage that made it too painful and difficult to rebel. Even in her early 20's it took a huge effort for her to overcome the severe guilt, self-hatred, ignorance, superstition, and sense of isolation and otherness that had been instilled in her. Having renowned professors tell her that she was a brilliant student and clearing paths for her education wasn't enough. She thought that if they told her that she was an ignorant idiot she could accept that judgment and make it her own, but when they praised her they only threw her into confusion and even despair.
I read some portions of the story to Marcia. She was not surprised at all. Her experience in counseling adult victims of severe child abuse enabled her to recognize all of the symptoms of the harm done to children like Tara, and to understand that years of effort and help are required, even for the highly intelligent ones, to overcome the damage. Tara Westover's book made some of this clear to me.
I am mightily impressed with this woman who came from such a deprived and, in a sense, demented family background. To get a college degree was an incredible achievement for her. To get a master's degree, and then a PhD, from one of the most prestigious institutions in the world, was almost unthinkable. To get that degree in historiography and intellectual history is nothing short of astounding. Her father, an ignorant and mentally disturbed man, did at least instill a deep work ethic in his daughter and in his two sons (Tyler and Richard) who also got PhDs.
I read this book for the NCI Book Group and am grateful to them for finding and choosing it.
| Author | Baldwin, Alec |
|---|---|
| Author | Andersen, Kurt |
| Publication | New York: Penguin Press, 2017 |
| Copyright Date | 2017 |
| Number of Pages | 246 |
| Extras | photographs by Mark Seliger |
| Genres | Fiction; Politics; Satire |
| When Read | May 2019 |
"The really tremendous inside story of my fantastic first year as President Donald J. Trump" ... "A so-called parody by Alec Baldwin and Kurt Andersen."
Written in first person, the parody narrator Donald J. Trump writes about his very, very, very fantastic first year as President of the United States. In 42 chapters, each ranging in size from a single page to seven or eight pages, Trump brags of his own accomplishments, insults and disparages his enemies, and displays his profound ignorance of everything from science, to history, geography, politics and world affairs. This, the book proclaims, is his real, uncensored self, written without supervision by Jared or Ivanka, or any of the Congressional or Executive office leaders who normally try to temper or throttle his more outspoken pronouncements.
There are also photos of Alec Baldwin in Trump costume doing all sorts of things from playing golf to eating chocolate cake in bed while watching Sean Hannity on Fox News.
The book is a riot. I laughed at every photo and many of the jokes. The appeal of them was that, outrageous as they were, they were infused with a convincing Trump spirit that, for all its extremity, really sounded like Trump.
I had heard of this book before I picked it up off a library shelf and was won over by the photos. I thought I might just leaf through it but the humor was so compelling that I read it cover to cover.
| Author | Hitchens, Peter |
|---|---|
| Publication | Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan |
| Copyright Date | 2010 |
| Number of Pages | 224 |
| Extras | Epilogue on the debate between Peter and Christopher Hitchens, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Religion |
| Keywords | Atheism |
| When Read | May 2019 |
Hitchens, brother of the well known Christopher Hitchens, writes about the atheism of his early life and his conversion to Christian religious belief in adulthood. The book is an argument for religion and against atheism and what he calls "anti-theism", which I take to be a view that is not only atheist but is actively opposed to all belief in God.
PH's early atheism seems largely to have been a political and cultural rather than a philosophical stance. He identified with the educated leftist intellectuals who looked down upon religion as a type of ignorance. His conversion to Christianity was largely for moral, social, and historical reasons. He spent several years as a journalist in Moscow at the tail end of the Soviet era and was repelled by what he saw. Corruption, theft, and general ill-treatment were rampant. The police would stop cars, especially those driven by foreigners, accuse the drivers of traffic violations that didn't occur, and demand money from them. In one case he ignored the cops and drove on but, contrary to his expectation, they followed and stopped him at the entrance to his apartment building. It was a building where high officials lived. When the cops realized that he lived there too, they picked up PH's papers that they had thrown into the mud, apologized, and slinked off. A large part of the book was devoted to criticisms of communism and socialism, their horrible effect on morals as well as everything else, and their terrible brainwashing of children.
PH did make one philosophical argument for religion that I recall. He believed that morals must be absolute. They cannot be made up by people because, if they were, people could justify anything they want, "... to be effectively absolute, a moral code needs to be beyond human power to alter" (see my comments below.) This absolute moral standard seems to be at the heart of PH's beliefs.
PH is clearly a Christian and, I think, a protestant, Church of England Christian. However he did not strike me as hostile to Catholicism, Judaism, or Islam. He did devote some time to arguing that the wars of religion in the past were not evidence of a problem in religion but rather a problem in men (though I'm having trouble finding the passages at the moment.)
PH says that he and his brother Christopher (the famous author of God Is Not Great) argued all the time and didn't get along. However his epilogue on their debate at Grand Rapids, Michigan in April, 2008 was preceded by a kind of rapprochement between the brothers. It was a rather touching chapter.
I can think of a number of arguments against PH's view that the need of an absolute morality should lead us to believe in God.
First of all, even if the argument is true (which I'll discuss in a moment), it says nothing whatever about whether God exists. Our needs have no relationship to what exists. I may have a desperate need of something. I may die without it. But whether it, whatever it is, exists, is entirely independent of my need. Maybe the world would be a better place if God existed, but that doesn't mean that God exists. Secondly, it isn't clear that God's pronouncements confer any absoluteness on moral judgment. If, as Socrates said, God wills the right because it is right, then it's right independently of God. But if what is right is right because God's wills it, then he could will anything and even change his mind. He wills what he wills. Where is the absoluteness of that. And thirdly, and most practically, and therefore particularly relevant to PH's point of view, our notions of right and wrong change over the years. In the years of the Bible, slavery was permitted, homosexuals were to be killed, women (but not men) who had sex out of wedlock were to be killed, and men (but not women) could have multiple wives. Kings ruled by divine right. Over the years many additional things became right that we consider wrong today. Heretics were burned. Wars of religion were fought. Different points of view on fundamental issues separated Catholicism, Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Anglicanism. If there is an absolute right and wrong, religion certainly hasn't nailed it down. And finally, even if we gloss over all of those problems, what does any of it have to do with the nuts and bolts of Christianity or any other religion? If God exists and defines the right, and if we somehow know what that right is, how do we know that Jesus is the son of God and rose from the dead, that we have immortal souls, that heaven and hell exist and that there is a final judgment, that the Bible is the word of God - in spite of all of its internal inconsistencies and contradictions? I think I could go on for quite a while on just this one theme.
I have no doubt that Christopher Hitchens made all of these arguments to his brother and probably stated them more logically, eloquently, and forcefully than I have. I can't presume to say why his arguments were rejected, but I will go so far as to say that Peter's real reason for belief was personal rather than what I think of as philosophical. Religion gave him a ground to stand on. It anchored his experience of the world in something that he saw as permanent, valuable, and larger than himself. I think that religion filled a need that atheism left unfilled, and I suspect that his religious stance is one that many religious believers would accept.
PH is intelligent, articulate, eloquent, well-read, and well-traveled. I found his views on communism, politics, and society to be very interesting, even if I cannot accept his religion.
As I write this, I happen to be in the middle of Steven Pinker's Enlightment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. I'd love to hear Pinker talk to PH about religion.
| Author | Banks, Iain M. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Hachette Book Group, 2009 |
| Copyright Date | 1988 |
| Number of Pages | 309 |
| Extras | Excerpt from Matter by the same author |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | May 2019 |
The second volume of the series occurs in the same universe as the first but has none of the same characters and the Idiran War, the backdrop of the first volume, has ended some 70 years before. Chiark-Gevantsa Jernau Morat Gurgeh dam Hassease, known mainly as "Gurgeh" or Jernau Gurgeh" is a professional player of games. He attends tournaments and publishes articles and books. He is one of the top players of strategy games in the entire "Culture" civilization.
Gurgeh is approached by a "drone" (an AI that floats in the air using force field technology) to ask him to work for the "Contact" organization within the Culture. He turns them down and soon begins a match against a brilliant young player. He is almost beaten by her but manages to turn the tables and develop a winning position when he is approached by Mawhrin-Skel, another drone, who offers to give him information about all of the other player's hidden pieces, possibly enabling him to win a "Full Web", a clean sweep of the playing board. Gurgeh resists but is finally persuaded to cheat. He wins the game but brilliant play by the other player prevents the Full Web. He is then approached again by Mawhrin-Skel and blackmailed. He will either use his influence to get Contact to re-hire Mawhrin-Skel, or the drone will expose Gurgeh as a cheater. Ashamed and desiring to escape, he calls the Contact, makes the request for Mawhrin-Skel, and asks to be given the mission they had originally offered him, which turns out to involve visiting the lesser (Magellenic?) Cloud galaxy and play the tremendously complicated game of "Azad" as a representative from the Culture to the Azadians.
Gurgeh studies the game intensively during his two year journey to Azad, accompanied by the drone Trebel Flere-Imsaho Ep-handra Lorgin Estra, known as "Flere-Imshaho". The two land on Azad and begin a series of games that will eventually lead up to the selection of the next Azadian Emperor - the best player in the Empire. Learning more and more as he goes, Gurgeh wins match after match, even when nine players in a ten player game gang up against him and even when horrifying bets (castration of the loser) are at stake. His will to win is fortified when Flere-Imsaho takes him on a tour of the Azadian capital city, showing him what a horrible place it is and how the Azadians oppress and enslave all of the other civilizations in their galaxy. When he gets close to the final match against the Emperor he survives an attempted murder. Pressure on the Emperor mounts and, seeing his own doom at hand, the Emperor attempts a bloody coup of sorts that leaves the empire in disarray.
Gurgeh is protected by Flere-Imsaho and the two are rescued by their spaceship called the "Limiting Factor" - an apparently (but later we learn not really) disarmed old warship controlled by a "Mind", one of the AIs that are the most intelligent entities in the Culture civilizations. Gurgeh returns home.
We learn at the end, many years later, after Gurgeh is dead, that Flere-Imsaho is the narrator of the story and is also, in fact, Mawhrin-Skel. Under the direction of Contact and through the agency of Flere-Imsaho and through him, Gurgeh, the Culture has undermined the Azadian Empire and caused its collapse.
I thought this book fulfilled the promise of the flawed Consider Phlebas. The civilization of the Culture was presented in an appealing conception of a scientifically advanced society in which both humans and AIs achieved an amicable coexistence and each pursued personal goals under conditions of a very high level of freedom. The humans were more advanced than those of today with bioengineering that enabled them to live longer, think better, be healthier, re-grow damaged organs, and even grow into the other sex and then back again if so desired. The AIs had superhuman intellectual and physical powers, but the humans were neither powerless nor stupid. It was a society in which being a player of games was a respected and satisfying social role.
The AIs worked out a way to overcome an evil empire without war and with minimal losses to all concerned. It was a bold and risky strategy. To succeed they had to manipulate Jernau Gergeh, telling him some lies, but only the minimal ones needed to get him to do what needed to be done, and protecting him successfully against the dangers to which they exposed him. They put him at risk and he never knew the full extent of their manipulation but, given that the alternative was to leave the people of the Azadian Empire in oppressive slavery and to risk intergalactic war, the decision seemed justified.
I want to know more. I want to know Banks' ideas about the great "Minds" that exist in the gigantic space ships that had replaced planets as centers of civilization. I want to see his ideas about how this Culture arose and where it is heading. Of course what I really want to know is more about the future of humanity and the future of rationality. Nobody can provide that but some of the great science fiction writers have produced plausible, or at least intriguing, ideas about the answers to those questions. Banks is looking like one of those writers.
| Author | Pinker, Steven |
|---|---|
| Publication | Penguin Audio, 2018 |
| Copyright Date | 2018 |
| Number of Pages | 576 |
| Extras | Bonus material (graphics) on PDF |
| Extras | Extensive notes (in the text version only) |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Philosophy; History; Society |
| When Read | May 2019 |
In 23 chapters, the first three setting a stage, the next 17 each devoted to a different subject like life, health, sustenance, wealth, peace, safety, happiness, etc., and three final chapters on "reason, science and humanism", Pinker explains why he believes that the world has been getting better and better. By most objective measures, such as lifespan, calories eaten, levels of education, health and healthcare, and various indications of political and social justice, the people of the whole world, and of the great majority of individual countries, are doing much better than they have in the past. The improvements have been pretty steady. The world is healthier, more peaceful, and better educated than ever before and the trend is for this improvement to continue. Even some areas in which it may seem that we are doing worse, for example in the existence of terrorism, the exhaustion of natural resources, and the damage to the environment, we are doing much better than people realize. Terrorism has only the tiniest impact on societies outside the Muslim world. Resources are plenteous and those that are exhausted will be replaced by bountiful or renewable substitutes. Even global warming, which is getting worse and worse, is increasingly understood to be real and threatening and will ultimately be addressed.
All of these improvements are due to the values of the enlightenment. Steady progress in science, education, and democratic norms of government have produced a steady increase in health and wealth, a steady decline in superstition, and a spread of the enlightenment values around the world.
Pinker is not a Pollyanna. He recognizes the dangers of economic inequality though he argues that it hasn't prevented the rising up of the lowest classes. He is disturbed by what he calls "authoritarian populism" (as opposed to "left-wing populism") in the U.S. (via Trump) and in Europe. However he considers that these are temporary backward steps in a historical tide of increasing liberalism and humanism. The motivating forces behind this tide in the U.S. include the increasing diversification of the population, the growth of cities, the steady growth of women's rights, and the growth of higher education - which exposes young people to greater diversity and more complicated ideas.
P ends with paean to reason, science and humanism, which he believes are gradually conquering primitivism, nativism and religious superstition. The world is becoming a better place and will continue to progress.
Pinker has certainly challenged my own views. From my narrow personal perspective, the world seems a lot more dangerous and difficult than it does to P. However I can't argue with most of the facts that he asserts. By every measure, both the relative and absolute number of people in the world who are starving, illiterate, unable to access health care, etc., is going down. It follows, according to Pinker, and he backs it up with citations to empirical studies, that the number of happy people is expanding and doing so pretty rapidly. The increases in crime, terrorism, and health crises are largely an illusion created by a sensationalist press that sells much more with pessimistic reports than optimistic ones. The growth of economic inequality is rising, but "all boats" are nevertheless rising in the rising economic tide
I don't think he's 100% right. His discussion of economic inequality mentions but does not stress the danger that it imposes on democracy. He seems to me to be too complacent in the face of the threats posed by authoritarian populism. Yes, I agree that there is more education, more diversity, more cosmopolitan intermixing of people and I can understand why those are forces opposing Trump's advance. However, 40 years passed before the dictatorship of Franco was overcome in Spain and a terrible world war was required to overthrow the ruling authoritarians in Germany, Italy, and Japan. Stalin fell and Khrushchev and then Gorbachev looked better, but now Russia seems to be regressing again under Putin. I don't think we know what will be required in Russia, Turkey, Hungary, Poland, or Austria, or how big the threat is in Germany, France, Italy, or the Baltic states. It's not going to be easy to turn back the bigotry and national chauvinist fires fanned by the populist demagogues, especially in the face of immigration from Central America in the U.S. and Africa and the Middle East in Europe. I'm also concerned about the spread of Islamic extremism. It's not a threat to the U.S., but when large minorities or even majorities of Muslims in some countries have come to believe that it is the duty of Muslims to kill apostates, that is surely a big and dangerous step backward - unless it's always been that way, in which case it's still dangerous.
I imagine trading the last year of my life for a split existence, waking up for one day in each of the next 365 years and learning what has happened. I feel like the character in Dylan's song, "You're very well-read, it's well-known/ But something is happening here and you don't know what it is/ Do you, Mr. Jones?"
| Author | Carr, Edward Hallett |
|---|---|
| Editor | Davies, R.W. |
| Publication | Penguin, 1990 |
| Copyright Date | 1984 |
| Number of Pages | 188 |
| Extras | Introductory Note |
| Extras | Preface to the Second Edition by E.H. Carr |
| Extras | From E.H. Carr's Files: Notes towards a Second Edition of What is History by R.W. Davies |
| Extras | citation notes, index |
| Extras | citation notes on Davies' Notes |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Historiography |
| When Read | May 2019 |
This is a collection of six lectures given as "The George Macaulay lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge January-March 1961." The lectures are titled:
The Historian and His Facts
Society and the Individual
History, Science and Morality
Causation in History
History as Progress
The Widening Horizon
My interpretation of what I read is that there are objective facts and objective causes of history, but the selection and interpretation of those facts and causes is a very complex process involving not only the facts and the historians, but the social contexts of the facts, causes, and historians. In one example of fact selection, millions of people have crossed the Rubicon over the years but there was one specific crossing by one man, Julius Caesar, that carries historical significance. That it does has to do with the laws of the Roman Republic and the antecedents and consequences of Caesar's act. It is the context of the fact that makes it historically important. If a man is killed by a car turning around a blind curve when he is crossing the street to buy cigarettes, the cause may be the condition of the car or of the driver, or a poor design of the road, but it isn't the fact that the dead man was a smoker. When we look for causes of events we are looking for general and repeatable causes that are significant for multiple cars, drivers, and roads. Smoking is not, at least in this instance, a general cause of being hit by cars.
Historians don't stand outside of history. We may look at Abraham Lincoln or Thomas Jefferson from a 21st century standpoint and criticize their understanding of race in America and the depth of their sympathy for black slaves and freemen (this is my example, not Carr's.) But for their times they were squarely on the progressive side of the racial issues. Christianity may be seen as regressive and ignorant when it rejected the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions and when it, even today, condemns homosexuality and even birth control (again my example.) However the spread of Christianity across northern Europe and Scandinavia surely had a humanistic effect on the Iron Age societies that ruled those regions before their conversions. If we cannot see the spread of Christianity in the context of its times, we cannot understand it and the history we write will certainly be wrong.
Understanding the wider contexts of the past is one part of the historian's task, but he also has a responsibility to understand, or at least try to understand, the future. What the historian writes today will become part of the historical context of the future. If the historian hopes that his work will be meaningful in the future as well as the present, he must do his best to understand the present that he lives in and that influences him, as it might be viewed in the future. He must strive to recognize the social and intellectual forces that operate on and in him and not imagine himself to be fully objective and outside of history. He can't completely succeed at this task. No one, or maybe I should say hardly anyone, living in the 17th or maybe even the 18th century was likely to imagine the nature or effects of the coming Industrial Revolution. However some historians are better than others at recognizing the socially and historically dependent influences on their work and thereby achieving a more objective viewpoint than some of their peers.
Carr died before he could publish a second edition and all we have are his notes for it. Davies, a historian and close colleague of Carr, studied Carr's notes and produced his own interpretation, including many quotations from Carr's notes and additional material that Carr was considering for a new edition.
I have wanted to read this book ever since reading Willie Thompson's What is History and John Tosh's In Pursuit of History. Both authors referred to Carr with deep respect, and I can see why.
I have long seen myself as living in a historical and moving present and I have long tried hard to somehow stand outside of time and see my life and the life of the human race as an ongoing project with a dim past that needs to be recorded, explored and understood, and a dim future that needs to be projected as best we can. This is part of what motivates me to keep a diary and to make book notes, which I have done since 1971 and 1974 respectively. I imagine that I can remember who I was 48 and 45 years ago, but it's the written material that I made in those times that tells the most about who I was and it is the projections I made for the future in the past that tells the most about my ability to understand myself in both past and future terms. I believe, or at least hope, that these things enable me to improve my understanding of myself and my times and the past and future of us all.
I'm impressed with Carr's work. He has helped me to better understand the enterprise of History. He has helped me to better see the right way to understand my own place in history.
I have written more about all of this in five different diary entries, each averaging something around one page of notes on Carr's book.
| Author | Mosley, Walter |
|---|---|
| Publication | Books On Tape, 2014 |
| Copyright Date | 2014 |
| Number of Pages | 274 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | May 2019 |
31 year old Debbie Dare, nee Sandra Peel, works as a pornographic movie star. After a tough day at the studio where she has had her first orgasm in years she returns home to find a house full of cops and her husband, Theon Pinkney, dead in the bathtub with a 16 year old girl, also dead, both of them electrocuted when the video camera Theon had setup to record the sex fell into the water. Shorly afterward she discovers that her husband was in hock to everyone, all the money she made is gone, and it's only a matter of time before she loses her fancy house, her Jaguar car, and whatever else she has of value.
Debbie's first decision is to get out of the porn business. She cuts her hair and dyes it back to its natural color, discards her blue contact lenses, has the white circle removed from her face, and stops shaving her pussy. Concomitantly she works with a funeral home director to arrange for Theon's burial. The director knew Theon well and solicits contributions from his many friends. He gets $65,000 and plans a big ceremony at the graveside. Then Debbie, now Sandra again, attempts to get control of her life, figure out what she wants to do, and become the real mother of her five year old son Edison who is cared for by another woman named Delilah, and become the person that she believes she ought to be.
The path is far from straightforward. Richard "Dick" Ness claimed that Theon owed him $72,000. He tries to force her back into the porn business to pay him back. When he fails, he sells the loan to Coco Manetti, a tougher gangster who beats Sandra and tries the same plan. However it turns out that Theon's best friend, the mild mannered and gay Jude Lyon, is actually also a killer who is well known in the underworld. Jude faces him down and Coco backs away. Dick tries again and threatens Sandra with a gun. She isn't scared. She tells him to go ahead and shoot but Jude will kill him if he does, and if he just robs the house she'll call the police. The man slinks off.
In the end the severely injured Sandra is on the verge of committing suicide but she totters the other way, is given some money by Jude and another man who owed money to Theon, rents a small apartment, gets a job as a waitress, and goes to live with her son and the boy's "Momma Delilah".
I've liked almost every book I've read by Mosley and I liked this one too. It's different from the others. Debbie/Sandra is tough in a different way from Easy Rawlins, Fearless Jones, Leonid McGill, or Socrates Fortlow. She has a gun but doesn't have it in her hand when Coco Manetti beats her up, or when a crazed woman almost kills her with a knife. But she can take a beating in stride. She refuses to give in to fear, does whatever needs to be done, is willing to cope with whatever happens, but still retains her sympathy for others and her love for her dead husband, her son, her angry mother-in-law, and others. She, and the remarkable Mosley, see the world with realistic and still humane eyes, and the world they see is one that most of Mosley's readers will never see except through his writing.
| Author | Harris, Robert |
|---|---|
| Publication | Random House |
| Copyright Date | 1992 |
| Number of Pages | 338 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Alternate history; Nazism |
| When Read | May 2019 |
In 1964, homicide investigator Sturmbannführer Xavier "Zavi" March of the Kriminalpolizei investigates the drowning of a very wealthy man in Berlin in this alternate history in which Germany won World War II and now totally dominates Europe. The U.S. and Germany are in a cold war but, because both have nuclear weapons, neither dares to attack the other, though the U.S. is still supporting Soviet forces east of the Urals who are continuing a low level war. March is soon told that the Gestapo will take over the case and he is to bow out. But (this is a detective thriller so) he can't help himself. He furtively continues his investigation. With the help of young American journalist Charlotte Maguire, March learns that this death was part of a series of 14 deaths of men who had been present at the secret Wannsee Conference of January 20 1942, where the decision was taken to implement the "final solution to the Jewish question." Germany has denied the existence of a Holocaust and the rest of the world never saw the evidence of the liberated camps and their survivors. Now Zavi and Charlotte have documentary evidence and must somehow smuggle it out of the country.
Charlotte dyes her hair and is given a false passport that enables her to cross the border with Switzerland on Hitler's 75th birthday, a holiday on which all police efforts are in Berlin and border guards are not as rigorous about opening the "wedding present" box that holds the stolen documents. March will attempt to cross the next day. The two are known to the Gestapo who are looking for them everywhere and she has a better chance of crossing without him. He makes the mistake of going to see his estranged 10 year old son where he is caught by Obergruppenführer Globocnik ("Globus"), a vicious Gestapo general who works directly for Reichsführer Reinhard Heydrich (he survived his assassination in this alternate history.) Globus destroys March's hand with a baseball bat, smashes his face and body, and allows him to be rescued by one of his friends. March is too smart to believe this is a real rescue. He knows that he is being followed by a huge force of Gestapo agents and police, hoping that he will lead them to Charlotte. Instead he leads them to the east through Poland, drawing their attention away from the Swiss border where Charlotte is just then crossing. In the end he has made it as far as Auschwitz, where he awaits his doom with a pistol stolen from his "friend". Charlotte boards a plane bound for New York.
Alternate histories are complicated and difficult. Authors may be tempted to write rollicking adventures rather than plausible extrapolations of a few key historical events. Harris didn't do that. This was not a story about American heroes. The U.S. president elected in 1960 was not John F. Kennedy, but his antisemitic, crypto-fascist father, Joseph P. Kennedy. Charlotte is not an American agent but a real (if implausibly young and pretty) journalist who plans to turn over her material not to the U.S. government, but to the New York Times. She hopes to kill Kennedy's re-election campaign while spreading the truth about Nazi Germany and the Jews.
Another author of whom I think highly in the anti-Nazi genre is Alan Furst. His books are loaded with the menace of Nazism but he stays away from the bloody tortures, the attacks on innocents, and Jews dying of thirst in cattle cars or being gassed in the camps. Harris doesn't do that. He shields neither his characters nor his readers. He gives them the stinking, repugnant truth. The truth is published, but there is no final rescue and no happy meeting of lovers at the end.
I have been impressed by almost all of the ten books by Harris that I have read. As with the others, there is much for the reader to learn and much to be moved by, even when there isn't much to enjoy.
| Author | St. John Mandel, Emily |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014 |
| Copyright Date | 2014 |
| Number of Pages | 352 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | May 2019 |
Fifty-one year old actor Arthur Leandro has a heart attack and dies on the stage of a theater in Toronto where he is playing King Lear. A paramedic in training tries to save him. The next day the "Georgian Flu" begins spreading world wide and, within a few weeks, has killed almost all of the people on earth.
The story goes back and forth in time. Much of the story takes place 20 years after the apocalypse among a group of 30 musicians and actors who travel the areas of Ontario and Michigan giving classical music concerts and performing Shakespearean plays. They call themselves the "Traveling Symphony". The biggest population they visit is at the airport at the fictional Severn City in Michigan where about 300 people live in the buildings or the empty planes by farming and hunting and a small "Museum of Civilization" contains examples of now useless computers, phones, and other technology. They also find themselves exposed to a dangerous band of cult followers led by "the Prophet". A 12 year old girl has stowed away in one of the Symphony vehicles (an old truck pulled by horses) to escape a forced marriage to the Prophet.
Other parts of the story are flashbacks to Arthur's life, his three marriages, his child who grows up to become the Prophet, and his first wife who has self-published a comic book series called "Station Eleven", about a space station that has escaped an alien invasion of earth and is led by Dr. Eleven, who worries about renegade members of the station population.
In the end, the Prophet is killed along with some of his followers. Most of the members of the Traveling Symphony survive, and a view through binoculars at the airport control tower shows electric street lights in a far away town.
I read this for the NCI Book Group. The writing wasn't bad. Some group members thought it was very good. However the story left me, and a number of other readers, unsatisfied. It seemed to me to be a pastiche of characters, times, and stories, thrown together with little central plan to hold them together. Characters are introduced and then abandoned or treated randomly and perfunctorily. The title of the book comes from the comic book series but we never learn much about the comic books, about why they are so important to their author (Arthur's first wife Miranda), or how they influenced the Prophet, who was given a set by Arthur, his father. The Prophet is a horrible, disturbing character with roots in the early part of the story, but we never see him close up, never learn why or how he acquired his mania or his band, and he is disposed of with a quick bullet in the brain and never discussed again. The story just didn't come together for me.
I also had trouble with the post-apocalyptic theme. The technical issues are never addressed. How did people survive the flu? Why didn't more of them survive? How and why did it cease to be a problem after the initial apocalypse? What was happening outside the Traveling Symphony and the Severn City airport? How and why did the lights go on in the town? In 20 years of life, why wasn't anyone working on re-building more of the needed technology - maybe a windmill or watermill driving a car alternator to generate electricity? Maybe distilling alcohol for fuel? There is a lot that people could do in 20 years. The author wasn't interested in any of that in the way that, for example, many science fiction authors would be. There were parts of the story that were told with some real authorial interest but, to me, it felt like something cobbled together to make a publishable book with a sensationalist theme combining movie stars (Arthur), world-wide apocalypse, cult crazies, and decent people. Maybe that's an unfair characterization. The author tried to make this work. She tried to garner inspiration. However I don't think she was fully successful.
The book was a best seller with glowing comments by Ann Patchett, George R.R. Martin, and many others. There are currently 4,050 Amazon customer reviews.
One Amazon review by an anonymous writer summed it up this way:
"This book makes you feel like you'll eventually get to somewhere important. But you never do. The story, like so many well-reviewed books these days, has no point. There's no heart or moral. It drifts, as though the author ... lost interest while writing it. You wait and wait to find out why the various characters' lives are connected. You wait for that point in stories like these where the individual stories merge into a satisfying ah-ha moment where you finally put the pieces together and understand where the story had been taking you. You never reach that point here. This is a very unsatisfying story."
My sentiments exactly.
| Author | Peters, Ellis |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books |
| Copyright Date | 1980 |
| Number of Pages | 224 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | June 2019 |
In 1138, Gervase Bonel, the holder of a manor in nearby Wales, has offered his land and manor to the monastery in exchange for living in a nice house owned by the monastery in Shrewsbury. Gervase is murdered by poisoning with Monk's-Hood, an herb supplied by Cadfael in an oil for use in rubbing sore muscles. Young Edwin, aged 14 and the son of the Mistress Bonel, an old girlfriend of Cadfael from before he went on crusade, is accused of the crime because he had a spat with Gervase and ran from the house just before the poisoning. Gervase had promised to leave his manor to Edwin and could still do it, but he dislikes Edwin's independent manner and demands that the boy beg forgiveness on bended knee - something that the boy will not do.
There is the usual back and forth of a gentle mystery story. Edwin runs. He threw something away in the river that was assumed to be the vial of poison. Cadfael believes in his innocence and hides him. The boy is discovered in a stable and is almost caught but escapes on a fast horse belonging to Gervase that is housed there. Various things happen and, in the end, we learn that Meurig, an older boy who is a bastard son of Gervase but is treated as a servant, was the poisoner, hoping to become the inheritor of the manor. Meurig too escapes. Cadfael finds him and, in his wise and gentle way, determines that this boy is not evil and that he repents his action. Cadfael urges him to leave the area and do penance by making a confession to a priest, sending a written confession to Sheriff Hugh Beringar, and devoting his life to good works.
From the Wikipedia entry on Edith Pargeter: "In 1980, the British Crime Writers Association awarded her the Silver Dagger for Monk's Hood."
Peters had certainly found her voice by the time she wrote this book. Cadfael's gentle wisdom, his devotion to God and man, his penetrating intelligence, are all apparent and wonderfully manifest. As a work of religious faith, it lacks the realism of Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop but it has much of the same gentle spirit of a man trying to do right in a less than ideal world. One feels great sympathy for, and confidence in, Brother Cadfael.
Peters (Edith Pargeter) also has a wonderful mastery of the English language. I don't know what era, if any, the language is drawn from. Obviously it's not the old English of pre-Chaucerian times, but I can't properly characterize it. All I can say is that it works very, very well.
| Author | Clarke, Arthur C. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Random House Audio, 1988 |
| Copyright Date | 1987 |
| Number of Pages | 271 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | June 2019 |
60 years after 2001, 51 after 2010, Dr. Heywood Floyd of the two earlier books in the series is still alive at age 103 due to having gone through some hibernation after an accident in 2015. His physical age is no more than 70 (Clarke's age at the time of publication.) He's on the spaceship Universe on a mission to Haley's Comet when the crew learns that the ship Galaxy has been forced to land on Europa, the satellite of Jupiter from which Dave Bowman had warned all humans away. The Galaxy had been forced down by a woman in the navigation module with a gun pointed at the officer at the navigation console. The woman shot herself without explanation, but Galaxy could not return to space because there was not enough fuel on board to make it off the Jovian moon. The Universe was the only ship capable of rescuing the Galaxy crew and so headed off to Europa to do it.
Only near the end of the story do we begin to learn what was on Europa and why the aliens who controlled Bowman had warned humans away. It appears that there was intelligent life on Europa and the galactic aliens wanted Europans, and presumably humans too, to each have the chance to develop without interference.
The crew is rescued and we're ready for the last volume of the series.
The plot of the novel is fairly simple. What makes the book interesting is Clarke's truly fascinating scientific observations and constructions, and his marvelous ability to explain things. His characters are straight up and not too complicated, but they are as intelligent as we could hope for them to be and their behaviors are always pretty convincing. They observe the solar system for us and we learn a lot from them. Clarke shares a grand vision of the exploration of space with all of us earthbound readers.
I liked the book and plan to read the last one, probably some time this year.
| Editor | Fritz, Sandy and Editors of Scientific American |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Warner Books (Time Warner) |
| Copyright Date | 2002 |
| Number of Pages | 150 |
| Extras | index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Computer science |
| Keywords | Artificial intelligence |
| When Read | June 2019 |
This is a collection of 11 articles on artificial intelligence by different authors, all originally published in Scientific American between 1992 and 2001. I'm not familiar with all of the authors but it's obvious that they were leaders in the field. They include: Kenneth M. Ford and Patrick Jay Hayes, Gary Stix, Douglas B. Lenat, Bart Kosko, Geoffrey E Hinton, Mark A. Reed and James M. Tour, Craig A. Rogers, Ray Kurzweil, Hans Moravec, Marvin Minsky, and John Horgan.
Some of the articles aim to explain the technology including "Programming Artificial Intelligence" by Lenat, "Fuzzy Logic" by Kosko, "Computing with Molecules" by Reed and Tour, and "Intelligent Materials" by Rogers. Moravec's "Rise of the Robots" is a projection into the future. Kurzweil's "The Coming Merging of Mind and Machine", and Minsky's "Will Robots Inherit the Earth", might be called futurology.
I won't go into the content of the articles, I'll just say that they were written with the typical Scientific American mix of advanced scientific information and very clear and popular explanation. I learned some things from the book.
All of these articles are fascinating to a person like me who majored in epistemology in grad school. I consider the brain to be a material object that obeys all the known laws of physics and chemistry and that nevertheless gives rise to intelligence and consciousness. Creating analogous phenomena using future computer technology will be very difficult, but would certainly seem to be possible and, given the accelerating pace of scientific research, inevitable.
Some of the writers seem to me (and not just me) to be seriously overoptimistic about how long this will take. I think it will take 50, 100, 200, or many more years to do what Kurzweil and Moravec think is just around the corner in a decade or two. But even a thousand years is truly a blink of an eye in evolutionary time. It's just forty or so generations. I think that general machine intelligence, i.e. the ability to solve all kinds of problems not just play chess or predict stock prices, and even machine consciousness, is coming. The implications for the future of humanity are enormous and, as yet, hardly foreseeable.
| Author | Hume, David |
|---|---|
| Publication | Gutenberg |
| Copyright Date | 1766 |
| Number of Pages | 517 |
| Extras | The Life of David Hume, Esq. Written by Himself |
| Extras | Letter from Adam Smith, LL.D. to William Strahan Esq. |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | England |
| When Read | June 2019 |
This volume covers the period from Julius Caesar to the death of Henry III in 1272.
Hume covers the Roman period very quickly, then goes through the litany of Saxon kings, briefly describing the more important of the almost constant internecine battles between Saxons and Saxons, Saxons and Welsh, Saxons and Scots, and Saxons and Vikings. However the main emphasis of the book is on the period leading up to, and then after, the Norman conquest of England in 1066. If I understood him correctly, it is in this period that the historical records become much richer, that England completes its transition from the Germanic tribal culture of Saxon England to European feudalism, and that England participates much more fully in European culture, religion, economy, and of course, war.
The book is organized around the successive kings. Saxon kings are grouped together in just three chapters. Important Norman era kings (William, Henry I and II, John and others) have their own chapters. He writes about these people with attention both to their failures and their successes. He includes their interactions with Church and Pope, their escapades in France, their participation in the Crusades, and of course their constant efforts to get more money and power for themselves in constant struggle with their vassals, with the Church, and (I wasn't aware of the extent of this) by oppression of Jews - who were actually prevented by law from converting to Christianity because, in Hume's view, it would have made it harder to use them to amass money by usury, and harder to extort that money from them by simple violence outside of any consideration of law.
In addition to all of the chapters on kings there are two very important appendices. The first is on "The Anglo-Saxon Government and Manners", and the second on "The Feudal and Anglo-Norman Government and Manners." It is in these appendices that Hume offers his analysis of the society of England as a whole - how and why it transitioned from Saxon to feudal social organization, how that changed the character of society, and what limitations these social organizations imposed on the achievements of the government and the economy.
Everything is documented with extensive footnotes. Hume often brings in multiple sources for some historical information and offers his analysis of which ones are more reliable and why. The footnotes are obviously intended for the use of scholars, for example "Diod. Sic. lib." or "W. Malm. p. 124. H. Hunt. p. 378. M. Paris, p. 36. Ypod. Neust p. 442." It is simply assumed, a justified assumption at the time of publication I presume, that the reader will understand these references. There are also marginal notes - a style of printing that is out of fashion today.
I rate this book as a very fine history, one that stands up even today as the work of a scholar and a deep thinker about both history and society. E.H. Carr, writing in 1961, tells us that a historian must not only be able to see events from a present day standpoint, but also from the standpoint of the time about which the historian is writing. To condemn Jefferson and Lincoln as racists (my examples, not Carr's) because they did and said things that are unacceptable today, is to fail to achieve a historical understanding and to write things that are, themselves, likely to be condemned in the future. Hume didn't just study what happened in the past, he was able to put himself and his readers in a historical context. He called attention to the faults and mistakes of Henry II and Thomas Becket but he also saw them as complex and strong characters locked in a historical context that, when we understand it, gives us an insight into the pressures on them, the worldview that they each had, and the limitations of their options. He unequivocally condemns some characters such as King John, a vile man who seems to have cared for nothing but his own person but, surprisingly when we read it, he treats Simon de Montfort Earl of Leicester as a man of some character. Simon was a man of unbounded ambition, a man who made commitments and swore oaths that he never intended to keep, a man who unleashed pogroms against Jews, a man responsible for a great deal of violence throughout the kingdom. But he was also a man of courage and even vision who might, according to Hume, have done fine things under an abler king than Henry III. Hume castigates the Catholic Church and its popes as rapacious, dishonest, and a spreader of superstition, but he understands the distinctions between various people in the Church, and between the religious and temporal powers.
I found Hume's treatment of religion interesting. While attacking the Catholic Church and decrying the role of superstition in society, he never says a word about Christianity per se. Is it because he's a believing Christian? That's hard for me to believe after reading An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. I presume that he saw no value in entering into a debate about Christianity in this book. Besides, he had said that he thought that religion was a good thing for most people, helping them to live moral lives.
My interpretation of Hume is that England, and western Europe generally, saw three major types of society in the period of this book: tribal, one might say barbarian tribal; the Roman Empire; and feudal. The Saxons and the Vikings were more advanced than the original Celts of France and Britain, but were still essentially tribal, warrior led societies. The Roman Empire was, of course, far more advanced organizationally, intellectually, and economically. When the Angles and Saxons overran the Empire's territory in Britain they mostly killed or drove out the existing population and recreated their Germanic culture in Britain. They were influenced by Roman society and by Christianity, but not as much as on the continent. In Roman Gaul however the warrior tribes abandoned their pursuit of rape and pillage as the primary aim of the tribe. It was obvious that local populations, already Germanic, could produce far more for the warrior chiefs by a settled life of agriculture than they could if they were ruined by invaders. The warrior chiefs turned into settled feudal lords. The culture was dramatically changed. Although this volume ends in high feudal society, it seems clear to me that Hume is indicating that the limitations of feudal society had been reached. Agriculture was possible. Significant trade and manufacturing were not. In the absence of national law and national enforcement of laws, both absent in feudal times, protecting commerce was impossible. A ship could not put in to a port or a caravan move through a town with any assurance that they would not be plundered by the local feudal boss. A renaissance would be required. I may read more volumes though, at my age, time is growing short.
I wrote several pages about this book in my diary.
| Author | Ghosh, Amitav |
|---|---|
| Publication | Brilliance Audio, 2016 |
| Copyright Date | 2015 |
| Number of Pages | 624 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Opium War; India; China |
| When Read | June 2019 |
In book 3, the characters introduced in earlier volumes, plus a number of new ones, face the crisis of the Opium War. Each character has his or her own personal problems. They intersect in the struggle of the British merchants with their lackeys and allies to force the opium trade on the Chinese. Some solve their problems. Some don't.
Havildar (Sergeant) Kesri Singh works his way through the ranks of the sepoy Bengal Native Infantry 25th Regiment, gets in trouble with his own top NCO, and volunteers for overseas (in this case China) duty to serve with his long time commander, Captain Neville Mee. Kesri is a dedicated soldier who supports his men and does whatever is expected of him. In the end, he loses a leg in battle in China, is given a lot of money by Mee, and uses some of it to rescue some other characters.
Zachary Reed is a 21 year old Baltimore born ship's officer from the Ibis. He is implicated in the escape of accused murderers from the last book and goes through hoops to clear his name. Ordered to pay off the costs of his imprisonment and trial, he goes to work for the Burnhams. In a torturous group of scenes, Mrs. Cathy Burnham attempts to save him from the supposed horrors of onanism, "the Heinous Sin of self-Pollution." Eventually, and unsurprisingly, we learn that "Mrs. Burnham" is infatuated with "Mr. Reed" and they have a secret affair. Reed is recruited by unsuspecting Mr. Burnham into becoming an agent for him in the opium trade. He does it by working with the Chinese gangster Lenny Chan, by attempting to suborn Captain Mee - which he does by threatening to expose Mrs. Burnham's love affair with Mee many years before when she was not yet married, and by attempting to force Mrs. Burnham to go to bed with him again - leading to her suicide, and by betraying Freddy Lee to Chan. In the end Reed becomes the partner of Mr. Burnham and Lenny Chan. He has become an opium kingpin.
One more important character is Shireen Modi. She is the widow of Seth Bahram, the wealthy Indian merchant who risked and lost all in an attempt to bring a shipload of opium into China and then died in mysterious circumstances. She defies the conventions of Indian society by going to China to visit the grave of her husband, to recover his wealth when the Chinese are forced to pay for the opium shipments they destroyed, and to meet Freddie Lee, now an opium addict and mystic, the son of Seth Bahram by a Chinese washerwoman out of wedlock. One of the few characters who ends well, Shireen marries Mr. Karabedian, a friend of her late husband, and establishes a new household in Hong Kong. Freddie is killed by thugs paid by Chan.
In addition to Shireen and Karabedian, the young boy Raju comes out whole from the events of the story. With help from Karabedian, Kesri Singh, and others he is reunited with his father Neel who is living in China. They escape the Holocaust that is the British/Indian/Chinese conflict and get away.
The abstract of the story given above tells what happened, but it is how it happened, and how the story is told, that makes this a magnificent novel. It is filled with decency and deceit, horror and humor, courage and cowardice. The characters are deep and convincing. They invoke the understanding and, where merited, the sympathy of the reader. The language is an evocative mix of English and Indian languages (mainly Bengali?) with small admixtures of Chinese, all combining to produce a wonderful and often humorous atmosphere evoking the time and place.
To this American reader, Ghosh's work presents an inner view of the civilizations and cultures of a foreign time and place. It is both enlightening and entrancing. I think that Ghosh should be considered for the Nobel Prize in Literature. I'm sure that the scholars and critics who award that prize are fully aware of his literary power.
Raj Ghatak, the narrator, or perhaps I should say the performer, of the audiobook, did a fine job.
| Author | Kerr, Philip |
|---|---|
| Publication | Penguin Books, 1994 |
| Copyright Date | 1990 |
| Number of Pages | 288 |
| Extras | Omnibus edition including March Violets and A German Requiem. |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction; Mystery |
| Keywords | Germany; Nazism |
| When Read | June 2019 |
It's 1938 on the eve of the Munich Peace Pact and Krystalnacht in Nazi Germany. Former criminal police investigator and now private detective Bernhard "Bernie" Gunther is pulled in by SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich to take charge of an investigation of the rapes and murders of pretty, blond, blue eyed, teenage girls of the League of German Maidens ("BdM"). Unable to find the killers themselves, the police hierarchy would rather intimidate Gunther into leading an investigation than, themselves, admit that the crimes are occurring and they are powerless to stop them.
Gunther follows various leads and eventually finds that the killers are a cocaine addicted SS general and fake spirit medium who has ensnared Heinrich Himmler with his act, one of his own lower SS officers who does a lot of the dirty work, and a criminal psychotherapist who provides the cocaine and helps to manipulate others. They are planning to convince Himmler to publicly reveal the murders, accuse "the Jews" of the killings, stimulate a pogrom, and in the process turn Himmler against Heydrich in a bid to advance their own careers. Gunther shoots the psychotherapist himself to obtain justice against a very smart and capable man who might well weasel out of official condemnation. Then he exposes the two SS officers in front of Heydrich and Himmler, protecting Himmler by not exposing the fact that he was taken in by them (while getting kicked in the shins by HH as a reward for his help), and effectively overturns the plot to start a pogrom.
Just after he does this, a German diplomat is assassinated in Paris by a young Jew and that served as the pretext for Krystalnacht. So the pogrom occurred anyway. Chamberlain and Daladier had already caved in to Hitler on the Sudetenland at the Munich Peace Conference and both the war and the Holocaust were another step closer to beginning.
I can't say anything against Philip Kerr. He was a full bore opponent of the Nazis. He may have helped to introduce some readers to the evils of Nazism and to the darkness of Nazi Germany. He wrote in a popular mystery fiction style, but not without obvious intelligence and sophistication. Nevertheless, I did have some problems with the book, basically the same problems that I had with March Violets (q.v.), his first book in the Bernie Gunther series.
As with the earlier book, this one is written in the American hard boiled detective style. There are one-liners like:
"Pipe-smokers are the grandmasters of fiddling and fidgeting, and as great a blight on our world as a missionary landing on Tahiti with a boxful of brassieres."
"In Becker's everyday conversation there was more blasphemy against the divine beauty of life than you would have found among a pack of starving hyenas."
"You know, Arthur, I thought I knew every bad smell there was in this city. But that's last month's shit fried with last year's eggs."
"He was as cool as the piss of a frozen eskimo."
I know that a lot of readers will like this approach and I have to forgive Kerr for using it but, to me, these zingers stand out as artifacts imported into the story from a book of one liner jokes. Not possessing such a book, and not having Kerr's talent for making them up, I won't try to find an appropriate one-liner to describe what those artifacts are like.
Also, as with March Violets, Kerr's depiction of Nazi Germany captures a lot of historical fact and paints what I take to be an accurate picture of Nazi evil, but misses important parts of the nightmarish quality of life. Characters speak freely to each other and sometimes even to people that they don't know, about the stupidity and evilness of high Nazi officials, and about Nazi secrets. Arthur Nebe, a leader of the Kriminal Polizei just below Heydrich, tells Bernie that the army has prepared a coup against Hitler which will be launched as soon as Britain declares war over the German invasion of Czechoslovakia. This is indeed a historical fact that I had learned from another book, though whether the coup attempt would have succeeded will be forever unknown since Britain did not declare war when the Wehrmacht Chief of Staff expected them to. But what's wrong here is that nobody would have dared to tell such a story, especially not a chief of police, and especially not to someone who had no need to know. Nothing good could possibly come of it and both men would almost certainly have been tortured and killed if the content of their conversation was reported.
In another scene, a waiter in a restaurant occupied by Bernie and a local detective at one table and Julius Streicher and two whores at another, bad mouths Streicher to these two perfect strangers. Probably by 1934, and certainly by 1938, I don't believe that anyone would have been stupid enough to make off-hand anti-Nazi remarks to perfect strangers. The two instances I've given of this are only examples of similar incidents. Perhaps they are attempts to reinforce the reader's understanding of the ugliness of the regime, and maybe too to make it crystal clear that Bernie Gunther is not a Nazi. I applaud Kerr for trying to do that, but I think the method he used is too artificial and introduces a false idea of what daily life was like.
Finally, I'll note that there is a certain amount of fortuitous good luck favoring the protagonist. In particular, I thought the fact that Bernie saves Heydrich's bacon in an attempt to thwart an antisemitic pogrom is at least a little too fortuitous. Heydrich was an extremely dangerous and evil man - see for example HHhH. Kerr knows that and that knowledge of Heydrich's character was a key part of March Violets as well as this novel. It was very convenient for Bernie to have done an important favor for Heydrich, and convenient for Kerr to have him do it in the process of attempting to avert a larger evil - as opposed to doing it to save himself.
In my opinion, problems like this don't ruin the book. The faults, if such they be, are common in popular fiction. But they are jarring. There are some other jarring issues as well, including his murder of the psychotherapist, an off-hand uncomplimentary remark of Bernie's about Jews in an otherwise anti-antisemitic story (I can't recall it now and it may indeed have been an authentic comment for even a progressive man in Germany.) And perhaps too a partially hidden reference to a woman that Bernie cared about (Inge Lorenz from the earlier book) which might have, kind have, sort of, been an effort to absolve Bernie of his failure to work hard to trace her after she disappeared in March Violets.
Kerr wrote a third volume in the series and then waited sixteen years before adding eleven more. I am curious to know whether the later Kerr dealt with these issues and solved the problems more effectively.
I read this book for the NCI book group. I may say something about the opinions of other readers after our meeting tomorrow.
Most of the book club members liked the book though there were reservations about the character of Bernie Gunther. They liked the hard boiled detective aspect and some enjoyed the one-liners that I thought were over the top.
Charles Dickison, the fellow who recommended this book, did an excellent job of explaining the many things he liked about it.
The plot to overthrow Hitler if and when he invaded Czechoslovakia is the subject of the later historical novel Munich by Robert Harris (see 2019-12.03).
| Author | Schimmel, Robert |
|---|---|
| Author | Eisenstock, Alan |
| Publication | Philadelphia: Da Capo Press |
| Copyright Date | 2008 |
| Number of Pages | 223 |
| Genres | Non-fiction |
| Keywords | Cancer; Autobiography |
| When Read | June 2019 |
At age 50, on the threshold of starting a TV career with a weekly show on Fox TV, and about to marry a new young wife named Melissa, Schimmel gets sick and is diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma. He is told that he has a 50/50 chance of surviving if he immediately starts a course of eight sessions of chemotherapy. With no explanation to Melissa (and no explanation to the reader for why he gives no explanation to Melissa), he calls off the coming marriage and moves in with his ex-wife Vicki and their children after she offers to take care of him.
Schimmel is a comedian of the raw, extroverted sort. His response to calamity is humor. He exercises it everywhere, even in the chemotherapy room, lifting the spirits of those around him.
Although only given a 50/50 chance of survival, Schimmel wins the lottery here and his life is saved and he gets together with Melissa again.
I found Schimmel's battle for life to be impressive. Some patients wouldn't be able to deal with him, but some might do very well by learning from him. It was an interesting book that gave me some new insights into human behavior.
I found his unexplained lies to others difficult to take.
I looked him up on the Internet. He survived his cancer and lived for some years after, only to be killed in an auto accident.
| Author | Connelly, Michael |
|---|---|
| Publication | Brilliance Audio, 2008 |
| Copyright Date | 1997 |
| Number of Pages | 544 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | July 2019 |
When low budget film director Tony Aliso is found shot dead in the trunk of his Rolls Royce, Harry Bosch is assigned the case. Acting on his own and not explaining things to his partners, in the standard Harry Bosch way, Harry slowly puts the pieces together. No money was taken and It looks like a mob hit. Investigating in Las Vegas, Harry discovers that Aliso was laundering money for the mob and may have been killed for skimming, but in the end it turns out that the most obvious motive was the one that actually operated. Aliso was murdered by a corrupt cop, pushed to it by Aliso's wife, who was jealous of her husband's girlfriend and pissed off by his general behavior.
I can't think of another crime writer who has a better grasp of the details of a police procedural. The characters, the language, the actions, the bureaucracy, the details, and the departmental self-dealing - are all remarkably convincing. I come away from Connelly's books with the feeling that, if reality isn't like this, it ought to be.
"... if reality isn't like this, it ought to be". By "ought" I mean that Connelly's description of reality matches what our perceptions and our logic tell us reality is like, not that there is some moral reason for it to be that way.
| Author | Ward-Perkins, Bryan |
|---|---|
| Publication | Oxford University Press |
| Copyright Date | 2005 |
| Number of Pages | 239 |
| Extras | maps, illustrations, notes, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Roman Empire |
| When Read | July 2019 |
This fairly short book argues against the recent view that the transition from Roman to Germanic rule in the territory of the western Roman Empire was mostly peaceful and comfortable for both peoples. Some historians, especially in the United States and northern Europe have espoused a theory of "Late Antiquity" - that we should not see the events of the fifth century as a disastrous "fall" of Rome and decline of civilization, but as a progressive transition from one type of successful society to another.
W-P adduces considerable evidence, especially from archeaology but also from written records, that the comfortable transition view is false. The evidence shows that factory production of goods virtually disappeared from most areas. The record found in potsherds is clear. The amount, quality, and geographic distribution of pottery severely declined. Where typical farmers and townspeople had good quality expertly manufactured pottery in the Roman era, they had nothing but poorly made local items after the Germanic invasions. Pottery lasts for centuries. Even broken potsherds last. It's almost impossible to dig a hole in many areas of Roman occupation and not come across potsherds. But the ones from the Dark Ages (if we allow that term) are much fewer and poorer. This, W-P argues, must be true for textiles, tools, and other goods that do not last as well.
Other evidence includes - clear evidence of a great decline in literacy, archaeological evidence of a reduction in size of cattle, and evidence of a population decline that looks like 50% and may be as much as 75% in some areas. Furthermore, there is linguistic evidence that the German and Latin populations did not mix well and, even 100 years after the invasions, both languages were in use and the German conquerors had control of all of the upper reaches of society.
Ward-Perkins' view accords with what I read in Hume's The History of England. Hume saw the Saxon invaders of England as coming from a society not greatly different from that of the Vikings. They didn't come to England to live among the Britons, but to forcefully take everything the Britons had and kill or expel them. The Vikings raided all of the coasts of England, Ireland, and both the Atlantic and Mediterranean costs of Europe. They often landed and drove inland for considerable distances. A major determiner of where they went was where they had been. If they had already been somewhere there was no point going back because all of the wealth was already stolen, all of the people useful for rape or slavery had been taken, and much of the property had been destroyed. W-P doesn't specifically describe the Germans in this way and does say that some of the German invaders came to stay and exploit the land and people, not destroy them. But I think the modern meaning of the term "vandal" may have a lot to do with the behavior of the Vandals, and when we see how the Vandals and various Goths moved from place to place to place, it's easy to imagine that they moved because they kept looking for virgin territory to exploit.
The maps, photos, and illustrations in this book are fascinating and enlightening. Looking into the eyes of a young couple in Pompeii I felt mesmerized by their stares. The diagram of a kiln showed the sophistication of the pottery industry.
I think this may be the first history book that I've read that was written by a genuinely qualified archaeologist as well as a historian. W-P is able to bring facts and perspective to the book that would not be available to a historian who relies solely on documents. He was born and raised in Rome in a British family. He studied archaeology and appears to speak all of the requisite languages. I am impressed.
On our recent trip to Europe we saw Roman remains on the ground and in museums in Switzerland and Germany. Some were beautiful sculptures or pottery pieces. One was a restored amphitheater that accommodated 10-12,000 people. One was a magnificent mosaic floor that graced a room in the house of a well-to-do Roman citizen. Some were remains of public or private baths. One house had a pair of side by side toilets. A workshop contained sophisticated tools. It is clear that the level of civilization in the Empire was very high, much higher than that of the "dark ages" that succeeded it.
There is no doubt that the tyrannical and irrational governments, the existence of slavery and the dominance of the slave-holding class, the civil wars fought for personal advancement or even plunder, and many other things, separate the society of Rome from that of the present day. But I can't help wondering how much we have really advanced.
| Author | Clarke, Arthur C. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Random House Audio |
| Copyright Date | 1997 |
| Number of Pages | 288 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | July 2019 |
A thousand years after the original story a space ship encounters the deep frozen, space suited body of Frank Poole, the crew member from the original spaceship Discovery whom the AI HAL9000 had tricked into going out of the ship and then pushed him away into space. Poole is revived and brought back into the space program where he does various things, culminating in the first successful visit to Europa in almost a thousand years. He is allowed in by Dave Bowman and HAL, who are now living as simulations in the great alien monolith on Europa.
The earth people discover that the aliens controlling the monoliths inhabit a star system over 450 light years from earth. The monoliths themselves are autonomous but fully programmed machines. Now that enough time has elapsed so that information about 20th century humanity has made it to the alien star system and new instructions have come back, the humans fear that those instructions will be to harm the humans. "Halman" - the HAL and Bowman simulations, line up with humanity and help to implant computer viruses into the monoliths to destroy them. Consequences to Halman, who are simulations within the monoliths, are not developed in the book.
Humanity would appear to be secure for another 900+ years, but the long term future is unknown.
As with the other sequels to 2001, and indeed in all of Clarke's books, he produces a steady stream of science education. These include ideas about space travel, genetics, evolution, physics, planetology, and other things. His characters are straightforward men (and a few women) who think logically and speak honestly and clearly. I am always comfortable with these characters.
Important threads of the story are unresolved at the end, and even exposed as more complicated and precarious than we thought. Halman tells Poole that, on a couple of occasions, he observed some intelligent life forms that seemed to be above and beyond the beings that created and controlled the monoliths. Also, we still haven't learned the real purpose of the monoliths, the full set of reasons for the protection of Europa from Earth, or the true character of the aliens behind the monoliths, or of their intentions towards humanity. What more incentives could we need to write a 4001 sequel? Perhaps Clarke was considering writing it.
More books from Clarke would always have been welcome but this turned out to be his last one. He would have been 79 when it was published. He lived another 11 years but produced no more book length output.
| Author | Boyle, T. Coraghessan |
|---|---|
| Publication | Penguin Books, 1996 |
| Copyright Date | 1995 |
| Number of Pages | 355 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Immigration |
| When Read | August 2019 |
The story opens with an automobile accident. "Liberal humanist" Delaney Mossbacher is driving along a road when Cándido, an illegal Mexican immigrant, wanders into the path of the car and is knocked senseless. Delaney searches the bushes and finds him, severely injured, but totally unwillling to be taken to a hospital where he will likely be turned over to La Migra. He asks Delaney for money and Delaney gives him $20.
The story alternates its point of view from Delaney, to his wife Kyra, a real estate agent who earns good money for the family while Delaney cooks the dinners, cares for Kyra's six year child by her first marriage, walks in the forest, and writes his monthly "Wide Open Spaces" column - and Cándido and his common law wife, the pregnant, seventeen year old América. The Mossbachers live in nice house in upscale Arroyo Blanco in the Topanga Canyon. Cándido and América live in a lean-to in the woods, where he recovers from his injuries in the accident.
Each family is put under more and more stress. Kyra is threatened by a couple of Mexican hooligans. The same hooligans rape América and leave her injured, perhaps more seriously than she knows. Delaney sees his housing development closed in by a wall. The family dogs are killed by a coyote. The Mossbachers become more and more frightened, and more and more scared. Delaney buys a gun. The Mexicans become more and more desperate, the money they earn is stolen and Cándido is injured again by the thieves. Then in a small bit of luck, Cándido is given a free turkey but he accidentally sets fire to the forest while trying to cook it. Everyone seems cursed. Everyone is in trouble.
In the final scene, the forest fire is followed by a rainstorm which, in the burned out land causes a landslide. Delaney and the two Mexicans are washed down the mountain. Delaney drops his gun in the flood. In the very last words of the book Candido is in trouble and Delaney is in even worse trouble. Candido: "The dark water was all around him, water as far as he could see, and he wondered if he would ever get warm again. He was beyond cursing, beyond grieving, numbed right through to the core of him. All that, yes. But when he saw the white face surge up out of the black swirl of the current and the white hand grasping at the tiles, he reached down and took hold of it."
I read this for the NCI book group. It was selected by Jim Matthews, a man who writes fiction himself and thinks very analytically about it. He argued that the text was extremely well written and, although I thought it was good, his arguments convinced me that it was better than good. But I think that he, like I, and some others, was somewhat put off by the relentless beatings that Boyle administered to his characters. It seemed like they couldn't do anything right. No matter how hard they tried, they either screwed things up, or fate intervened and screwed things up for them.
Although written in 1995, the problems raised in this book are still unresolved and have been exacerbated by the Republican efforts, especially exploited by President Trump but originating before him, to turn white Americans against Central American immigrants - stirring up nativism and racism.
I found it a depressing book, only partially redeemed by the hand of help at the end.
| Author | Banks, Iain M. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Orbit, 2008 |
| Copyright Date | 1990 |
| Number of Pages | 512 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | August 2019 |
Cheradenine Zakalwe is a military expert employed by the Culture in various undercover ways to stop, start, win, or lose wars, under the direction of the woman Diziet Sma and, perhaps, the drone Skaffen-Amtiskaw. The "story" does not appear to be a coherent whole but a collection of individual episodes that are mostly related to each other and go back and forth in time, apparently alternating episodes that move forward in time with those that move backward until, at the end, we arrive back at the opening scene.
In many of the episodes, Zakalwe is commanding an army on behalf of one or another comparatively primitive and strange government, in a war with some other primitive and strange government. Something is at stake in this or that war but we never know exactly what. Higher powers, in the form of more advanced civilizations on the same or a different planet from that of the warriors, are interfering. The Culture is also interfering. Sometimes Zakalwe wins but he often loses and sometimes he is ordered to lose. Like other Banks characters, Zakalwe is uncommunicative, irascible, and self-willed, sometimes following orders and sometimes violating them. He disrespects and insults the drone - who, like the drones in the two earlier Culture novels, absorbs this treatment without doing anything about it - although we know it could if it wanted to.
Z's behavior often results in terrible injury to himself, even to the extent of having his head cut off, but he is always rescued by the Culture that comes in in the very nick of time, saving him just seconds away from permanent death and reconstructing a new body for him, as needed.
There was a lot not to like about this book. As a sympathetic character Zakalwe got old pretty quickly. Why was he important to the Culture? What were they actually using him for? Was there something that tied all of the episodes together that was bigger than Zakalwe, Sma, and Amtiskaw? What was achieved by Z's actions? I wasn't able to see why Z was the solution to any problem, why the "use of weapons" was in anyone's interest, or what Z or his human and AI handlers were trying to achieve.
I was unimpressed by the plot and the theme of the book. It too much resembled Consider Phlebas. It was a realization of an adolescent daydream of fighting and winning, always protected against real harm, while being both in the service of a higher power and independent and contemptuous of any adult control.
It was a disappointment. I liked the sophistication of The Player of Games and the purpose that propelled that story. I liked the Culture universe. I am interested in the conceptions of AI that Banks created. However I didn't find any of those things in this next novel.
The book was a difficult read. Okay, I am willing to read difficult books. But why was it put together in this difficult way? What was gained?
| Author | Reich, Robert B. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Vintage, 2016 |
| Copyright Date | 2015 |
| Number of Pages | 304 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Economics; Politics |
| When Read | August 2019 |
Reich shows how the current path of American capitalism is leading toward ever growing concentration of economic wealth in fewer and fewer hands, and its inevitable concomitant, ever growing concentration of political power the same hands.
At least since the Presidency of Ronald Reagan, the Republican Party has described the central choice in American politics as between the "free market" and "government". "Government can't solve the problem", said Reagan, "Government IS the problem". People have been indoctrinated to believe that giving more freedom of action to capitalists will result in more wealth for the country, and that wealth will trickle down to all Americans. Not only is that view false, according to Reich, it falsely asserts that the "free market" is truly "free". In fact, says R, there are "five building blocks of capitalism", and these determine much of what is possible in the capitalist economy and how economic actions will work out in practice.
The building blocks are: Property: what can be owned; Monopoly: what degree of market power is permissible; Contract: what can be bought and sold and on what terms; Bankruptcy: what happens when purchasers can't pay up; and Enforcement: how to make sure no one cheats on any of these rules.
These building blocks are nowhere near as simple and obvious as the Republican theorists make them out to be. Can DNA sequences be owned? What about oil created by natural forces 300 million years ago long before humans existed? How and why does someone get to own such things? What can be bought and sold? Slaves? Sex? Copyrights? Ideas? How about unsafe foods or drugs? Should Comcast, Google, Microsoft, and all the other tech companies be able to write contracts any way they like, with any provisions they like, that allow them to do anything they like and you, the consumer have the simple choice of signing or giving up access to computers or the Internet? No negotiation is possible between such massively unequal entities. What about bankruptcy rules? Should it be perfectly legal to require bankrupt companies to share out their assets to investors and creditors while giving nothing at all to pensioners and employees? Should a billionaire be able to create a shell corporation to buy casinos, then go bankrupt but pay nothing from his other wealth, while students are denied the protection of bankruptcy for their student loans? [I am, of course, referring to billionaire Donald Trump. This is my example, not R's.] And should it be okay to remove all of the people and organizations that enforce the laws against certain powerful companies, and set penalties so low that no one ever goes to prison and the fines are a paltry expense - so that, essentially, the laws may just as well not exist? At the same time a young man caught with marijuana might go to prison.
Reich delves deeply into all of these issues and goes on to explain other myths of modern capitalism and other tendencies such as the growing power of managers over wealth, the stagnation of the middle class, and the impoverishment of workers, the loss of unions, and on and on. He argues that "countervailing power" must be established in the hands of working people and the middle class so that they can change the rules of capitalism - not to redistribute the wealth, but to insure that fair distribution happens at the outset. If these things are not done capitalism will exhaust itself. It will take the incomes of the very people who provide the market for capitalist industry, causing a decline of that industry. It will initially be good for the capitalists and bad for everyone else, but will eventually be bad for everyone. He gives us his ideas of the kinds of changes that we need to convince everyone to make.
The book taught me a lot. I didn't understand the Five Building Blocks ideas before reading it and didn't realize that the whole concept of a "free market" is not at all "free". It's a construct that could have been constructed in many other ways but has been carefully constructed by powerful people to serve their interests and increase their wealth and power.
While I learned a lot about what's happening, I am not optimistic that we can create a countervailing power to change things. We have to try. It may be possible. But it won't be easy and the continuing decline of unions, biasing of the courts, injecting big and dark money into politics, increasing the cost of education, and the use of religion, racism, gun ownership, and on and on, only makes the task more difficult as time goes by. I think Reich understands the problems very well but, like me, he sees no straightforward path to a solution.
| Author | Furst, Alan |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books |
| Copyright Date | 2000 |
| Number of Pages | 288 |
| Extras | The author talks: Alan Furst in conversation with George Guidall |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| When Read | August 2019 |
In 1938-9 Nicholas Morath, the nephew of Count Janos Polanyi, a diplomat in the Hungarian embassy in Paris, works as part owner of an advertising agency and performs clandestine work for his uncle. Morath is a decent man living an otherwise private life with a young Argentinian woman named Cara Dionello, but he is offended by what is happening in Nazi Germany and its effect on Hungary and the other countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Fascism is on the rise everywhere. Horthy's government in Hungary attempted a careful balance between placating and resisting Hitler's demands. Polanyi and Morath assisted in the small ways that were open to them.
Cara's father appears and orders Cara back with him to Argentina. She does not resist. His beautiful lover is gone but life goes on. He takes up with Mary Day, a French/Irish woman from his office who is much closer to his own age and has a more interesting mind. She is a copy editor at the agency and writes risque romance novels under a pen name.
The story weaves back and forth between Morath's personal life and the things he does for his uncle. Many of the things he has to do are opaque to him. He trusts that they are for the greater good but doesn't know the names, purposes, or plans of the people he works with. He can only trust that it is for the greater good of his country and of Europe. At one point he is arrested, actually more like kidnapped, and taken into Romania from where it appears he may never be seen again but his uncle, pulling who knows what strings and begging who knows what favors which he will be required to return, manages to get him out and back to Paris.
Behind the characters of the story, the world is advancing to war. Hitler takes Austria. Chamberlain sells out Czechoslovakia at Munich. Hitler breaks his promises and, with all of the Czech fortifications in the Sudetenland now in his hands, he rolls on to Prague unopposed. There are rumors that the Russians have given up trying to ally with Britain and France and are now in discussions with Germany. A bad end is in sight. Morath is at least back in the arms of Mary Day.
There was much in this book that was like Furst's others. It is set on the eve of war. A good and decent man who wished for a happy personal life is dragged into the battle against Hitler and his monsters. Perhaps more than in the other novels, the man didn't ask for any of this and knew less about what he was doing and for whom. Like most of the men and women who fought Nazism, he never wanted to fight anyone. He only wanted to live a decent life, but no good and decent man could stand aside in the face of this evil and he knew he had to do what was asked of him. In the last line of the book Mary Day speaks to him:
“You are really very good, Nicholas,” she said. “Really, you are.”
The conversation between narrator George Guidall and author Alan Furst is very interesting and reveals much about each of them that I didn't know. Guidall is far more than a narrator. He is a fan of Furst and a serious student of his work. Furst is, not surprisingly, a complex man who reads all sorts of things, including many unknown works from the period he writes obsessively about.
Furst is one of the few authors for whom I have read ten or more books. I would need to write a program to count them, but there may be somewhere under 20. Most are science fiction, mystery, or other types of popular writers, though I don't know if Furst qualifies as popular and Mann, Dostoevsky and Cather (some other authors of books that I've read in quantity) surely don't.
I did write a program to to count books by each author. As of this date, there 25 authors for whom I've read 10 or more books.
| Author | Faulkner, Neil |
|---|---|
| Publication | Routledge |
| Copyright Date | 2009 |
| Number of Pages | 378 |
| Extras | maps, timeline, bibliographic notes, index, glossary, plates |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Rome; Roman Empire |
| When Read | August 2019 |
This is a history of the rise and fall of the Roman civilization in the west, starting with the myths of Aeneas and Romulus and Remus and extending to the fall of the last Roman Emperor in Italy in 476 and the complete end of the empire. Faulkner offers his Marxist interpretation of the history, with much analysis of socio-economic changes that underlay key political changes - from kingdom to patrician oligarchy, oligarchy to republic, republic to empire, and the final dissolution of the empire into separate barbarian kingdoms.
F describes the changes in form of government as generally following changes in the military power of the different classes. The Roman and Etruscan kings of the early monarchy were overthrown by the patricians in 509 who were in turn forced to cede some power to the equestrians and plebeians who provided the manpower of the army. The family members, clients, and hangers on of the patrician class could not resist the power of the peasant soldiers either to fight against, or to refuse to fight for, the patrician class, and were forced, in a series of changes, to provide protections against the spreading land grabs and debt slavery emanating from the patricians, and from laws that only benefited the patrician class. Starting in 451 BC, the first decemvirate of ten elected plebeian tribunes shared power with the Roman Senate.
Rome fed on expansion. With each new conquest, more taxable territory, more slaves, and more money fed the expansion and growing wealth. However this could only continue as long as the land to be conquered contained productive "plow agriculture". Expansion into western Europe was possible. Expansion into the tribal lands of Scotland, Germany, and north of the Danube was not. Forests, mountains, and nomadic tribes had little to offer to Rome that would justify the cost of conquering them, and conquest was pointless in lands where a Roman hilltop fort overlooked no important agricultural land or large population.
In F's view, the society was never stable for long. It was continually expanding, either in defense against the expansion of the other Latin, Italian, and Celtic tribes, or in offense designed to capture land, wealth, and slaves. This process made Rome more and more powerful on the Italian peninsula but it disrupted the socio-economic system that created the Republic. As wealth and slaves poured into the city the patrician class continued its land grabs and preferred to use slave labor rather than freemen. The slaves were not only cheap and easily dominated but also could not be drafted into military service. Meanwhile, as campaigns took the armies further and further from the heartland of Rome, the free citizen soldiers were kept away from their farms for longer and longer periods in further places in Sicily, Spain, Africa, Southern Gaul, and Illyria. From being farmers who were part-time soldiers, they were transformed into soldiers who were part-time farmers, and finally, certainly by the era of Julius Caesar, full-time professional soldiers. If they became farmers at all it was only at the end of their service and they were settled in colonies in conquered territory rather than back in Italy. The power base of the plebeians was gone and the Republic was unstable.
The changes in military manpower also occurred in military leadership. The patrician officer class was gradually replaced by professional officers, many from lower classes and from the enlisted ranks. Not too many years into the Empire, all military power, which is to say, all power, was in the hands of professional soldiers, most of them not from the city of Rome. Ambitious generals furthered their careers by purchasing the allegiance of their soldiers and using them as private armies, more and more often in civil wars. Fighting off the barbarians became less important than forming alliances with them against other Roman generals. The army consumed more and more of the resources of the Empire, taking them from the wealthy who in turn took what they could from the middle classes and the poor. The barbarians took more and more land. The process was unsustainable but unstoppable. By the time the barbarian King Oadacer deposed Romulus Augustus, the last emperor, the event merely formalized a change that had been occurring for hundreds of years and had already crossed the threshold.
The eastern Byzantine Empire continued, according to Faulkner, because it had far more resources to support its army, and because the pressures from the tribes of the North and empires of the East were less than the pressures coming from Germany.
Bryan Ward-Perkins argued in The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization that Rome could have hung on in the west for many centuries. He thought that with better leadership and some luck, the Empire didn't have to fall. Faulkner however makes the case that Rome's lease on life ran out well before the final collapse. Individual emperors could and did stem the tide and even make small improvements, but they couldn't reverse the trend. Monumental building stopped long before the collapse. Cities and towns were shriveling and shrinking. Population declined. Taxes increased as the tax base shrank. Civilized conditions continued in the East, in North Africa, and in places in the West but Gaul, Brittania, Illyria, and other areas were gradually turning into feudal lands.
Who is right? I'm not qualified to say. I don't know if Faulkner's arguments are fully supported by the Roman remains. However his case is pretty convincing to me. It makes sense to me that, when a process is continuing for many centuries, it's not an accidental process and not the effect of poor leadership and bad luck (I may be trivializing Ward-Perkins argument here without real justification.) It's an outcome produced by fundamental forces.
I liked this book. I think I learned a lot from it.
| Author | Bloom, Amy |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Random House |
| Copyright Date | 2018 |
| Number of Pages | 240 |
| Genres | Fiction; Biographical fiction |
| When Read | September 2019 |
In this first person novel, Lorena "Hick" Hickock, a leading journalist and biographer, tells the story of her youth as an impoverished and abused child, and of her lesbian love affair with Eleanor Roosevelt. The story goes back and forth in time from 1910 when 13 year old Hick left home after her mother's death, to get away from a sexually, physically, and emotionally abusive father, through to Lorena's own death in 1968, six years after the death of Eleanor.
The relationship between Hick and Eleanor is presented as passionate and sexual only for a limited time, about four years starting at the beginning of FDR's presidency. Hick needed Eleanor longer than that but Eleanor had broader horizons. She was political. She was socially involved. She was famous and popular. She had responsibilities to all of the people of the United States and the world. According to Bloom, Eleanor felt affection and responsibility for Hick, but she tired of passionate love. Hick was one element in a large life with many other elements in it. Hick on the other hand, although she took other lovers, deeply missed the intimate relationship she once had with this great lady.
The Roosevelts apparently had an open marriage. FDR had relationships with his secretary, Missy LeHand, and with various other women, but they were not deep relationships. Hick sees FDR as smart, friendly, socially sophisticated, a master politician, but essentially cold. He is a great president. He is needed to save the country from the depression, the war, and the Republicans, but he can never be counted on to really care about or keep any promise to any individual. Eleanor moves apart from Hick even in the 1930's, but has almost no time for Hick later on or after FDR's death when she continues as a leading person in the Democratic Party.
I read the book for the NCI book club. I didn't expect to like it. Lesbian love stories, or really any love stories, aren't among my major reading interests. I am very interested in Franklin Roosevelt but my interest runs towards the history books written by Arthur Schlesinger on the politics and society of that era, not on the personal feelings of the Roosevelt family. However, I was drawn in by the high intelligence and the striking prose. There were passages of great power, especially in Hick's soliloquies on her life, on her relationship with Eleanor, and on FDR. I consider this a very good book and am very impressed by the author.
| Author | Rovelli, Carlo |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Italian |
| Translators | Carnell, Simon; Segre, Erica |
| Publication | New York: Riverhead Books, 2017 |
| Copyright Date | 2014 |
| Number of Pages | 280 |
| Extras | notes, annotated bibliography, index, photos, diagrams |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Science; Physics; Quantum mechanics |
| When Read | September 2019 |
One of the pioneers of "loop quantum gravity", Rovelli attempts to explain relativity and quantum mechanics in terms that non-scientific readers can understand, and then uses his explanations to expound his theory of quantum gravity. Most of the equations in the book are relegated to footnotes in what I presume is an attempt to make the explanations as conceptually intuitive as possible while still placing enough math in the record, as it were, that mathematically sophisticated readers can see that there is logic behind these theories. They aren't, as we used to say, airy fairy.
Some key problems of quantum gravity have to do with an apparent contradiction between relativity and quantum mechanics. What could it mean to say that space and time are limited to certain sizes and above? Are we saying that an object can be in a certain spot, and in a spot next to that, but not in between those two spots? Why? Where are the spots? How does an object, say a photon or an electron, or even a neutrino, get from one spot to the next? What does it mean to say that time does not exist, there is only motion?
To answer these questions, my impression is that Rovelli holds that quanta of matter and energy, or we can just say matter or just say energy because they are the same, only have properties and positions in relation to other quanta. We can think, for example, of an electron as a cloud of negative charge occupying all of the space in its orbital around a nucleus. It solidifies into an object when, and only when, it comes into relation with another quantum object, for example another electron or a photon. It is (I won't say if I understand it correctly, only if I understand it minimally) a field that becomes a particle in relation to other particles and a field in relation to its non-relative-to-a-particle existence.
That was hard for me to handle, but it was easy compared to the theory of quantized space and "spinfoam".
Rovelli traces the key ideas of physics back to the ancient Greeks and the Renaissance Italians. He argues that, although hardly anything survives of the writings of Democritus, the man propounded a sophisticated and comprehensive theory of matter, only snatches of which are described in the writings of Lucretius. Maybe so. Maybe not. Rovelli is in a better position than I am to judge these matters but one can't help wonder if he is a bit carried away.
I didn't get a lot out of this, not because Rovelli's explanations were poor, and not (I think) because I'm stupid, but because the concepts are so completely counter intuitive for us ordinary non-scientists who are used to apples, pebbles, houses, and all the other middle sized, middle distance, middle velocity, easily perceptible objects in our ordinary lives. Some of the things we see like the sun, the moon, and the stars, or the blue sky, or magnets, or light beams in a room full of dusty air, are a step beyond apples and houses, but quantum gravity is a whole lot of steps beyond that.
There are many questions I would have liked to ask. Does a quantum of space have any mass or energy? Does it exist when it is not in a particular relation to something that occupies space? If it's finite, as Rovelli implies, what is happening when we see, as astronomers tell us, that the galaxies are moving away from us and may be exceeding the speed of light, not because they are moving faster than light, but because space is expanding between the galaxies?
I don't know if Rovelli or anyone else can answer these questions or, if they can, if they can do so in a conceptual way or if they can only do so by writing an equation that predicts the behavior of the galaxies and "explains" what is happening in a purely mathematical way.
I have made great progress in my study of molecular biology and decent progress in general chemistry and biochemistry. I am probably at an undergraduate level in molecular biology and have at least gone beyond a typical high school level of general chemistry. I'd love to get that far in physics and mathematics but, at my age, the best I think I can do may be to take occasional runs at it with the "popular" books like Rovelli's. I don't have too many years ahead of me before I die, or worse, become demented. I am tempted to pull in my horizons in order to continue doing well in some areas by forgoing others. But then I'm also sometimes tempted to cast a wide net. I'm sure the contradiction between these two approaches to reading and learning will continue right up to the end.
| Author | Drabkin, Artem |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Russian |
| Translators | Irincheev, Bair; Summerville, Christopher |
| Publication | Pen and Sword |
| Copyright Date | 2007 |
| Number of Pages | 142 |
| Extras | photos, featured aircraft, glossary, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Aviation; Soviet Union; World War II |
| When Read | September 2019 |
This is a collection of six recollections of service in the Red Air Force during World War II, as recounted to Artem Drabkin or another interviewer shortly before the publication date. Five of the six were fighter pilots, one was a maintenance technician. They were Vitaly I. Klimenko, Alexander E. Shvarev, Vitaly V. Rybalko, Viktor M. Sinaisky (the technician and the only one identified as a Jew), Alexander F. Khaila, and Ivan D. Gaidaenko. All were in their 80s at the time of the interviews.
If I remember correctly, all of these men joined the Air Force in the late 1930's and joined operational units before the war, in a couple of cases, just days before the Barbarossa invasion on June 22, 1941. They all survived the crushing early defeats, seeing most of their aircraft destroyed on the ground and fighting rear guard actions in inferior planes against better trained, more experienced, and better coordinated pilots. However, by early 1942, conditions were more stabilized. Aircraft factories were in full production in spite of having been moved east, shipments of additional planes were arriving from the West including Hurricanes from England (not well thought of by the pilots), and P-39 Airacobras (highly appreciated) and P-40 Warhawks (accepted as okay) from the U.S.
All of the pilots had successful combat records, shooting down Germans in Bf-109s and FW-190s, and some German bombers as well. Most of them were themselves shotdown, some multiple times, some with serious wounds, but always returning to combat after recovering.
Initially, they had many hard lessons to learn but by mid-1942 they were already reaching an equal footing with the Germans. The number of experienced pilots was increasing. The planes were better and better equipped with radios, armor, and most bugs and problems resolved. They believed that many of their planes were equal to or better than the German ones. By 1943 they outnumbered the Germans and their pilots were about equal to them. Meanwhile, the British and Americans were hammering the Germans in the air and two-thirds of the Luftwaffe was fighting in the west, enabling the Russians to gain mastery of the skies in the east.
The men recounted their experiences - what combat was like, how they were treated by officers, commissars, and fellow airmen, what their living conditions were like, and so on. By 1943 they had become confident and aggressive. A number of the pilots said that, after the Russians gained equality or superiority in numbers and experience, the Germans would not fight unless all of the odds were in their favor.
The stories were not unlike those of the American, British and German pilots that I've read (the Japanese were different.) Young men, in the prime of their youth, eager to win honors, thrilled with the experience of flying through the air, and not immune to the charms of the young women who were attracted to brave and handsome young pilots, joined their air forces and went into combat. As with American, British and German accounts, the pilots who wrote their memoirs were the successful ones. The ones that were shot down and left the war and the ones that flew away from the enemy leaving their comrades in danger, did not write memoirs of the war.
It was surprising to me that the Russians not only thought highly of the American planes that were rejected by the U.S. air forces, but also thought that those planes, especially the Airacobra, were better than the German planes. One pilot said they were aware of the British and American respect for the FW-190, but thought that the German plane only did well because the battle conditions were different. In the west, the Germans were flying with radar and ground control that was not available to the Luftwaffe in the east. The FW-190s were directed to their targets and enabled to gain altitude and speed before they reached the battle zone. In the lower altitude, more fluid conditions in the east, the Russians said the Airacobra was a superior plane. I would like to have seen what they could have done with Mustangs and Spitfires.
I'm always interested in stories of life in the USSR. To me, the Soviet Union was a deeply compromised but still grand experiment in social, economic, and political revolution. I like to read the success stories, even though I fully understand the terrible and bloody failures. I greatly admired Lenin and Trotsky but, for many years now, I might have been more likely to vote for Kerensky.
The photos were all of the low resolution Russian publication type, all of young men, often wearing heavy winter flying gear and standing in snow covered steppe near their fighters. There were no photos of the men in their 80s. I would like to have seen them.
| Author | Kaminsky, Stuart M. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Mysterious Press.com, 2011 |
| Copyright Date | 1977 |
| Number of Pages | 188 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | September 2019 |
Toby Peters, nee Tobias Pevsner, works as a private investigator in Los Angeles. He had been a security man at Warner Brothers movie studios but had been fired for breaking the arm of an actor who assaulted him. Four years later, in 1940, he is eking out a bare living doing any kind of work from bodyguard to finding missing persons, opposing blackmailers, collecting bills for the dentist whose office he shares, or whatever. He is contracted by Sid Adelman, a manager at the studio, to pay $5,000 to a blackmailer with a photo apparently showing their new star, Errol Flynn, having sex with a 14 year old girl. He goes to the assigned rendezvous spot and meets the blackmailer when he is hit from behind and knocked out, the blackmailer is shot and killed, and Toby's gun, the $5,000, and the photo and negative of Errol Flynn scene are all gone.
There are a series of misadventures. Toby's brother, an LAPD detective, wants the truth about what happened but Toby won't tell him the full story and makes up lies. Toby closes in on one possible killer/blackmailer after another but is assaulted, shot, or sees the man killed in front of him until he finally finds and accuses the last man, a security guard at Warners who turns out to be the grandfather of the 14 year old who didn't realize that the photo was a fake and the girl had never been with Flynn. Already in bad shape after the last time he was shot, he would be killed this time but for the appearance of Errol Flynn who swings down from above on a rope and knocks down the killer.
Toby forgives everyone, including the grandfather and the girl's mother who shot him in the back and almost killed him. On the last page, he receives a call from Judy Garland at MGM who is in trouble and needs help.
Some of the perceptive reviewers gave this book a poor rating on Amazon. Their criticisms are justified. The plot was hectic, the action implausible, the characters stereotypical. Movie star glamour was used to keep up interest. The book fell well short of K's later Russian detective novels. It was an imitation of the successful mystery novels of the 30's and 40's, attempting to cash in on their success. Yet I have to say, or perhaps I should say confess, that I enjoyed reading it. It had flaws and exaggerations but the writing was not at all dumb. The author seemed fully conscious of the difficulties in the story and didn't take himself too seriously. It was possible to laugh along while reading it.
This was Kaminsky's first novel, published when he would have been 43 years old. I read it because I liked the Inspector Rostnikov series that Kaminsky wrote later and thought I would try another of his series. He went on to write a total of 24 Toby Peters, 16 Rostnikov, 6 Lew Fonseca, and 10 Abe Lieberman mysteries by Wikipedia count and numbers of other books besides. Although he didn't come to this career until age 43, he certainly seems to have been suited to it.
Going back over my notes I see that I read another Toby Peters novel in 2003, Never Cross a Vampire. These kinds of discoveries are one of the reasons that I keep these book notes. My reaction to that novel then was much the same as it is to this novel now. I didn't take it seriously. I enjoyed it. I saw it as an amusing release for the author as well as for the reader.
| Author | Bayley, Barrington J. |
|---|---|
| Publication | London: Gollancz, 2011 |
| Copyright Date | 1982 |
| Number of Pages | 173 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | September 2019 |
See 1984-08.05.
I've done it again. I read this book again after reading it once before in 1984. I'll forgive myself for forgetting it 35 years after reading it. I remembered The Garments of Caen but not this one. Being so delighted at seeing a Barrington Bayley book I didn't check my notes to see if I had already read it. I just assumed that I hadn't.
Bayley was interesting to me in part for his scientific imagination. That's a characteristic of SF authors that I particularly value, along with skill and imagination in the writing itself. However, in addition to both of those, Bayley had a philosophical bent. He liked to think about the nature of truth, freedom of the will, and other questions that don't interest the authors of books aimed at adolescents.
I wrote in 1984 that, with the Internet, more books were available again. I think that what I must have been referring to in those days were not downloadable ebooks, but books available from book stores all over the country, instead of just from the few local book shops. Now there are ebook versions that are sometimes fairly cheap, instantly available, never dogeared or broken spined, and with previews and reviews that help the reader decide whether he wants to read the book before he acquires it.
| Author | Roberts, Andrew |
|---|---|
| Publication | Penguin Audio |
| Copyright Date | 2013 |
| Number of Pages | xli + 926 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History; Biography |
| Keywords | Napoleon Bonaparte; Napoleonic Wars |
| When Read | September 2019 |
One Internet source claims that 300,000 books have been written about Napoleon, more than about any other person, including Jesus. I'm not convinced of either the number or the comparison, but there certainly are a lot and this recent one of (xli + 926) = 967 pages is not even the largest.
This account concentrates on two main subjects, biographical details of Napoleon's life, and descriptions of all of his major battles. His achievements off the battlefield, including the creation of the Napoleonic code, the promulgation of equality before the law, the support of the arts and sciences, the promotion of commerce, the development of roads and the optical telegraph system, etc., are also discussed and admired.
Napoleon the man is presented in a reasonably complex light. Roberts sees him as an egotist, a nepotist (if I may coin such a word), and an autocrat, but not so much as a tyrant. He was no Hitler. He was a racist in the way that the great majority of white Europeans and Americans were at that time (and for well over a century after) but not a man consumed by racial hatred, or any hatred. He was able to listen to opinions that were contrary to his own and to discuss both political and military affairs with considerable objectivity. He strove to subjugate other lands. At various times and to various degrees he did so in Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Spain, Portugal, Holland, Belgium, Poland, and other places but, unlike Hitler, his goal was never to enslave the people of those lands. He was not a democrat. He was an elitist. He thought the best men should rule, and they should be ruled by the best of the best, namely himself. However he did imagine himself to be offering liberation and enlightenment to all people. To a significant extent, he was doing that.
I learned a lot from this book but not as much as I hoped to learn. There was no serious discussion of the causes of the French Revolution or of its overthrow by Napoleon. The general staged his coup on the 18th Brumaire (November 9, 1799.) Roberts tell us that the ruling Directory and Chamber of Deputies had done very little for the people and were perceived as ineffective rulers who argued with each other but achieved very little - much perhaps as more and more Americans perceive our Congress. No demonstrations occurred when Napoleon overthrew them. Napoleon was seen as a great man who could save the Revolution and the country and was widely accepted.
Okay, that's good, but it doesn't seem to me to be enough. What were the conditions in Paris and in France that brought Napoleon to power? Who were his supporters and why did they support him? Who were his enemies and why did they oppose him? What was going on in the other European countries - Austria, Prussia, Russia, Britain, and whatever other countries formed the six coalitions against him? What caused the defeat of each coalition to be followed shortly thereafter by another, and then another, and another? What led the Bavarians, the Saxons, the Hanoverians, and other Germans to support him? What was the nature of that support? Were they just mercenary troops? Opportunists? Were they conscripts from places that had been subjected and had no choice but to do as Napoleon demanded? And if so, why did they fight so well and so hard?
In short, I was hoping for more social, economic, and political history than Roberts gave us. By comparison, I'm reading Catastrophe: Europe Goes to War 1914 by Max Hastings. His work is full of information about the society and the times in the different countries that went to war in 1914. Hastings does not provide an in depth history of the development of Europe up to that year. He can't do it all, but he does more than Roberts does.
None of that should be seen as taking away from Roberts' achievement. He did produce a fascinating book.
Unfortunately, because I read this as an audiobook, I didn't have the maps that would probably have made the many descriptions of Napoleon's battles more enlightening.
I didn't write anything above about Napoleon's military prowess in the above comments but should have. Roberts is a military historian and much of this biography is about Napoleon's military achievements.
My impression is, first of all, that Napoleon did not prevail because of the weakness of his opponents. Roberts considers that all of the main adversaries, Austrians, Prussians, Russians, and English, and some of the lesser ones, Swiss, Italians, Spaniards, other Germans, were capable of formidable efforts. They weren't men who ran away from the battlefield and, at least sometimes, they had large numbers of men, quantities of horses, artillery, and munitions, and capable commanders.
It seemed to me that Napoleon won 53 of his 60 battles (if I remember the numbers correctly) for a number of reasons. One very important one was that he built an army that was more capable than those of the other states. He inspired his soldiers to fight hard and with great confidence. He (mostly) promoted men based on their competence rather than their noble status or their social connections. He encouraged a spirit of camaraderie and pride. Some of the other armies were not deficient in these things but my impression is that none, not even the Prussians, were better than the French. There were key points in quite a number of battles where the victory could have gone to either side but the French army pushed a little harder and a little longer and won the day.
Then, of course, there was Napoleon's keen grasp of both the tactical and strategic situations. He was quick to see opportunities and quick to take advantage of them. He moved troops, sighted guns, and pressed home attacks on weak points before his adversaries had fully comprehended what was happening. He somehow managed to fight on the very edge of his capabilities. Far from France, inadequately supplied, with few or no reserves, facing an army larger than his own and fighting on its own ground and with nearby resources, Napoleon might suddenly attack and roll over his opponents. In situations where lesser commanders would husband their resources and retreat, he might do that too, but if an opportunity arose he just might seize it and win the day. It's not surprising that military men studied his battles for many years after he was gone and probably still study them today.
| Author | Vonnegut, Kurt |
|---|---|
| Publication | Books on Tape, 1978 |
| Copyright Date | 1963 |
| Number of Pages | 304 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | September 2019 |
John, aka Jonah, is writing a book about what Americans were doing the day the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. He is led to interview Angela, Frank, and Newton Hoenikker, children of the late Felix Hoenikker, a key (fictional) scientist/developer of the bomb. He learns that Felix created a substance he called "ice-nine", an unusual crystal structure of water that functions as a seed crystal, self-catalyzing the conversion of any liquid water it contacts into also crystallizing as ice-nine. It is a dangerous substance. If let loose into the world it could crystalize all of the world's water, destroying almost all life. It turns out that Felix bequeathed a bit of ice-nine to each of his three children, which they still have in thermos bottles.
Everyone next moves to San Lorenzo, a desperately poor, fictional island in the Caribbean. There John learns about the illegal religion of "Bokononism" which turns out to be the actual religion of every person on the island, including the dictator of San Lorenzo who executes someone every couple of years for being a Bokononist.
In the end, of course, ice nine is released into the world. John and a few others hide with the beautiful Mona in a bunker and he later lives for a time in a cave with the two Hoenikker men and a couple of Americans. They meet Bokonon himself, the founder of the religion, who is deciding what to put as the last aphorism in his religious book, a book about human stupidity.
The story sounds strange and a little ridiculous. The characters are off the wall. The language includes a host of made up words like "karass" and "granfalloon". Whatever it is that John/Jonah is attempting to achieve, ultimately fails. And yet, I couldn't help liking the story. I liked the way John/Jonah/Vonnegut approaches each character with acceptance and even respect, no matter how ridiculous the character is. I liked the pervasive humor. I even liked the exotic character of the novel. It was something that no one but Vonnegut would ever have written.
| Author | Mosley, Walter |
|---|---|
| Publication | Random House Audio |
| Copyright Date | 2014 |
| Number of Pages | 308 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | September 2019 |
Easy Rawlins is hired by the police to find Rosemary Goldsmith, the estranged daughter of a wealthy arms merchant who has apparently been kidnapped by a radical left group. He has been hired because of his contacts and capabilities in the black community and given a $6,000 down payment for his services, presumably furnished by the girl's father. Rose herself has been involved in radical politics and Easy does not know whether she was really kidnapped or is pretending to be kidnapped in collusion with the radicals.
In a parallel story, Easy searches for and finds Battling Bob Mantle, a former welterweight fighter who has information relevant to the case but who is, himself, wanted for murdering three policemen and who has been ordered to be shot on sight by the police leadership. It turns out that Bob is not guilty of murder and Easy has proof of it, but is still worried that Bob will be murdered by the police to cover their own misdeeds.
The story is resolved in classic Mosley style. Easy Rawlins walks a fine line between courage and foolhardiness, controlling his temper and backing down when he knows he can't win but standing up in some borderline risky cases when he feels compelled to do right, or just refuses to give in and be bullied. It's not that he's unafraid (like Fearless Jones, another Walter Mosley character), it's that his self-respect sometimes means more to him than his safety, and perhaps his impulse control is less than perfect. Bob Mantle is cleared from the police shoot-on-sight order. Rose Gold is found and returned to her mother (not her father), and Easy and the friends that helped him are generously rewarded by the Goldsmith family.
This story may be a bit more complicated and scattered about than some of the other Easy Rawlins mysteries. There's a lot to keep track of. Nevertheless, all of the essentials are there. Easy is the same character as before. The social commentary is just as biting and just as cogent. The handling of racial issues is illuminating for white readers like me. The historicity seems convincing.
I like Mosley's books. This is the 19th one I've read - there are currently only four authors of whom I have read more (see what I can do with machine readable book notes?) I hope to continue reading as long as he is able to write them and I'm able to read them.
| Author | Egan, Timothy |
|---|---|
| Publication | Tantor Audio, 2006 |
| Copyright Date | 2005 |
| Number of Pages | 362 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | United States |
| When Read | October 2019 |
Near the beginning of the 20th century people began moving into the midwest and southwest of the U.S. to get cheap or even free homesteading land for farming. The land was covered with many varieties of tough grasses that could survive the hot and cold and very dry weather. The topsoil was deep. Vast numbers of bison roamed these prairies but white hunters with guns wiped them out, killing them for meat or hides or just for fun in expeditions organized for Eastern or foreign dandies. Indians were driven off. Cattle ranchers were driven out of business. Unscrupulous land speculators made fortunes. Roads and railroads were built. More people came and came.
The new farmers put up fences and plowed wheat into the land. In the period of World War I, wheat prices skyrocketed from 80 cents to two dollars a bushel and more and more land was plowed. Plentiful rain continued in the 1920's. Gasoline powered tractors arrived and could plow land vastly faster than horse drawn plows. Wheat prices dropped and farmers plowed and planted even more land, using the only method available to them to try to earn the money they needed to live and to pay their debts. By the end of the decade the stock market crashed, wheat prices tanked, over farming reached the maximum possible, and then farmers began to go bankrupt. Top soil was blowing away. There was no more money for seed or mortgage payments and no way to plant more wheat. The soil that was held down first by grass, then less effectively but still to some degree by wheat, was now free to blow about. Large, then huge, then gigantic dust storms blew much of the land into and through houses, into the lungs and stomachs of people and animals, into the Gulf of Mexico, and even, in a few monster storms, onto the East Coast, landing in cities from Boston to Washington DC, and on into the Atlantic Ocean. It was a man made environmental disaster on a scale not seen before in the Americas, and perhaps not in the world. President Hoover did nothing. Roosevelt tried and introduced a number of conservation programs, but the problem was too big. As of the writing of the book, progress has been made but the land has still not fully recovered.
Egan follows the lives and fortunes of a number of people, mostly in Texas and Oklahoma but also in Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado and New Mexico. Many of them fought desperately to keep their homes and farms, knowing that they were worth almost nothing to sell, and that if they abandoned them in the then current depression, they had almost no hope of jobs, income, and maybe not even housing anywhere else. They watched their animals die. They sold off whatever household goods they had from furniture to pianos. They sold off the least important of their farm implements and machines, and then more and more important ones. They spent hours sealing cracks, windows, doors, and roofs to keep out dust, and hours more sweeping and wiping in futile attempts to remove the dust that came in anyway and was quickly replaced when it was removed. Then they watched their babies and parents, and they themselves get dust tuberculosis and die young.
This was a difficult book to read. Egan portrayed the people very sympathetically and the reader feels for them, or at least I did. Reading this in the age of Trump, when environmental regulations are being disbanded as fast as he and his swamp creatures can disband them, it seems very possible for it all to happen again. Egan said that he thought it could happen again even before he knew about Trump. It's happening again now in Brazil as Jair Bolsonaro, the current right wing authoritarian president, condones the rapid burning of the Amazon rainforest to make way for farming and ranching - with no understanding of how quickly the land will be destroyed, how long the devastation will last, and how severe the impact will be on the entire world. But, like Trump, he is too ignorant and narcissistic to believe that he could be wrong, and too corrupt to give a damn what happens to the world, or even to Brazil, as long as his cronies get rich.
Whatever ideas I had about the dust bowl came from Steinbeck, mainly The Grapes of Wrath. That novel taught me about the terrible things that happened to the people of the dustbowl who gave up and left the land. This history taught me about what happened to the ones who stayed.
I used to think that we are tremendously advanced over the people in our history, but I haven't thought that for quite a while now. We are tremendously advanced in our science and technology but the advances are slow in spreading to our culture, our politics, and our society.
| Author | Fleming, Ian |
|---|---|
| Publication | Chivers Audio Books, 1986 |
| Copyright Date | 1955 |
| Number of Pages | 257 |
| Genres | Fiction; Spy |
| When Read | October 2019 |
James Bond, "double oh seven", is in his office in London between assignments, bored and wanting some action, when M asks if he's willing to help a friend of M's who thinks a member of an exclusive gambling club is cheating at bridge. Can Bond prove it and stop the cheat? He thinks he can. He gets a couple of packs of cards, goes to the club, observes Sir Hugo Drax for a while, and figures out that the man put his shiny lighter on the table and, when he deals cards, is able to see the face of each card reflected in the lighter as it is dealt. Bond eventually gets into the game and plays the part of a drunken fool who is convinced he's smarter than he actually is and gets deeper and deeper into debt to Drax. Then at the end, with stakes up and up he deals from one of his pre-arranged decks, giving a great hand to Drax but arranging it so that the great hand loses. He opens with a bid of seven clubs, doubled and redoubled, and wins 15,000 pounds. Drax is furious but promises to pay.
I write all of the above because much of the first third of the book is taken up with this. I don't recall a game of bridge being so detailed in any other novel, much less a spy thriller, that I've read.
It turns out that Drax is a German Nazi posing as an Englishman. He and fifty other Nazis from Germany recruited from the German wartime scientists have built a rocket known as Moonraker that can carry an atom bomb up to 4,000 miles. They plan an experimental test to send the rocket to an area in the North Sea, but it's a trick. The beautiful Gala Brand, secretary to Drax, but actually a secret detective for the police, has discovered that the Moonraker will not carry an instrument payload but rather a Russian atom bomb, and it will not land in the North Sea but in London. James and Gala try to stop it, are caught by Drax, badly hurt, and tied up in a room expected to be destroyed by the blast of the rocket taking off.
In a manner that became a repeating theme in Fleming's books, Bond engineers an escape and Gala reprograms the instruments controlling the flight path to put the Moonraker down in the original North Sea target zone. The destruction of London is avoided. A million lives are saved. Drax and his fifty Nazis have escaped in a Russian submarine but they zoom through the North Sea and are killed by the Moonraker.
In the end, Bond is ordered to leave the country for a month to avoid being discovered by the press. He plans a trip with Gala. But in an ending not sanctioned by Hollywood, Gala tells him that she is getting married to another man.
In my first year of college I took the required English 101 course, with weekly lectures to a thousand students by some professor and twice weekly real classes with a grad student teaching assistant whom I remember as Mr. Shapiro. Shapiro assigned an Ian Fleming James Bond book. It might have been On His Majesty's Secret Service, I don't remember for sure. After we read it and came back to class, all of us having loved the book, Mr. Shapiro proceeded to pick apart the characters, the story, and the writing to teach us more about what really makes a good book. I don't remember his criticisms of Fleming though I do remember that, at the time, I was impressed with them and had to agree with his analysis. I don't think I read any other Ian Fleming / James Bond books until Casino Royale in 2007, and now this one in 2019.
To my surprise, I really enjoyed reading the book. I can imagine the criticisms that Mr. Shapiro would raise against it and I can't disagree with them. Nevertheless, I thought it was a fine little adventure thriller that did just what it set out to do - to titillate the reader with high suspense, with fast action, with admiration and envy of Bond, with anger at Drax and his henchmen, and with prurient interest in the beautiful Miss Brand. He did all that expertly, and I have to say, commendably well.
It was a fun read.
| Author | Hastings, Max |
|---|---|
| Publication | William Collins, 2013 |
| Copyright Date | 2013 |
| Number of Pages | xxxvii + 628 |
| Extras | maps, photos, notes |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War I |
| When Read | October 2019 |
With a very brief introduction to the political and cultural milieu of the ruling classes in the major European powers in the period preceding the war, Hastings proceeds to tell us about the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife. He considers the decisions made by the Austrians and the Germans in response to the murders to be the proximate causes of the war. In his view, the powerful leaders of the armies of the Central Powers wanted war. The incompetent but arrogant Austrian generals wanted to punish Serbia once and for all and end the threat of a South Slav confederation (Yugoslavia), regardless of whatever the Russians thought and whatever they might do. The German army generals wanted to crush France and establish a long lasting dominance of Western Europe. They wanted to do it as soon as possible since the economic and military power of the Entente, and especially of Russia, was growing faster than that of Germany and the chances of winning were declining over time. He considers that the generals and the rest of the German ruling class also wanted an expansive, "patriotic", policy in order to overpower the growing popularity of the Social Democrats and the workers and labor unions behind them.
Hastings provides fascinating detail about the process of stirring up passions, winning popular support, making decisions, and mobilizing armies in each of the major powers. It's only the last three quarters of the book that deal with the war itself. He covers the period from the movement of the first troops against Serbia and France, to Christmas, 1914, with battered men of all armies wishing that this hell was over.
There may be a bit more about Britain than other countries, but Hastings gives considerable coverage to France, Germany, and Austria, and also a fair amount to Russia. As in his other books, he quotes generously from the diaries and letters of ordinary soldiers and people at home, as well as from the writings of political leaders, generals, officers, and journalists.
When 15 million men are sent into battle over multiple countries and thousands of miles of territory, only a limited picture of such a huge event can be drawn, even in a 628 page book. However Hastings does a pretty good job of writing history at multiple levels, from decisions made by governments at the top to reports by ordinary soldiers and civilians at the bottom. It's history well written.
Most of us who read history wonder about whether it could have been different if different decisions had been made. Some historians speculate on questions of that type. Others don't. Hastings is one of the speculators, though on the big questions his answer seems to be No, different decisions might have changed short term events on the ground but the ultimate outcomes would be the same. Better German generalship in the invasion of France would have enabled them to get further and lose fewer men, but France would not have fallen. A better replacement for the completely incompetent Austrian commander would have helped Austria conquer Serbia and resist Russian advances, but the Austro-Hungarian Empire would not have survived. Whatever happened that might foreseeably happen, Germany would not have won the war. Sometimes H plays armchair general and castigates particular generals for cowardice, incompetence, stupidity, and/or callous disregard for the lives of their men. I've learned over the years of reading military history that this can be an easy game to play for the historian but not so easy for the general on the ground in the fog of war. Still, while it's hard to know if Hastings himself would have been a great leader on the ground, his judgments on others are not unconvincing. I have no doubt that the levels of cowardice , incompetence, stupidity and callousness at the top were very high in World War I. Sir John French, the first commander of the British Expeditionary Force, and General Conrad von Hötzendorf, chief of staff of the Austrian army, were particularly egregious examples.
| Author | Lampedusa, Giuseppe di |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Italian |
| Translators | Colquhoun, Archibald; Waldman, Guido |
| Publication | New York: Pantheon Books, 2007 |
| Copyright Date | 1960 |
| Number of Pages | 336 |
| Extras | Forward by Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Sicily; Risorgimento |
| When Read | October 2019 |
Don Fabrizio Corbèra, Prince of Salina, head of the family of Lampedusa, lives in his palaces in Palermo and Donnafugata in Sicily in 1860 with his wife Maria Stella and a number of children and relatives, chief among them being his nephew Tancredi and his daughter Concetta. His greatest pleasures are astronomy and mathematics and his occasional visits to his mistress in town.
Italy was in the throes of the Risorgimento at that time. Don Fabrizio was a representative of the old nobility but his nephew Tancredi supported the rebels and fought with Garibaldi in the only significant battle in Sicily. Treated as a hero, Tancredi's stance covered for Fabrizio's and brought him successfully into the new order. Tancredi also abandoned his interest in Concetta, taking up with the rich and beautiful Angelica, daughter of Don Calogero Sedàra, the richest bourgeois in Sicily. They married, uniting the two families - the most important of the bourgeois and the most important of the old nobility. Don Fabrizio's place in society had slipped a bit in the new socio-political order, but not far. He was still an important and respected man. Angelica's father had correspondingly increased. He was now not only very rich and important, but more respected as well. Concetta is unable to win Tancredi back from the charms of Angelica. She never marries.
Fabrizio is not truly happy with what has happened. Lampedusa writes:
"Quite suddenly Don Fabrizio felt a loathing for him; it was to the rise of this man and a hundred others like him, to their obscure intrigues and their tenacious greed and avarice, that was due the sense of death which was now, obviously, hanging darkly over these palaces; it was because of him and his colleagues, their rancor and sense of inferiority, that the black clothes of the men dancing reminded Don Fabrizio of crows veering to and fro above lost valleys in search of putrid prey. He felt like giving a sharp reply and telling him to get out of his way. But he couldn’t: the man was a guest; he was the father of that dear girl Angelica; and maybe, too, he was as unhappy as others."
The story is taken up years later in the old age and death of Don Fabrizio. Later still, in 1943, the Don's palace at Donnafugata is destroyed by "a bomb manufactured in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania". The paintings on the walls and ceilings, the seemingly immortal images of the old society, were destroyed. The last remnants of the old life and the old culture were gone.
From the Wikipedia: "Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (Italian pronunciation: [dʒuˈzɛppe toˈmaːzi di lampeˈduːza]; December 23, 1896 – July 26, 1957) was an Italian writer and the last Prince of Lampedusa. He is most famous for his only novel, Il Gattopardo (first published posthumously in 1958), which is set in his native Sicily during the Risorgimento. A taciturn and solitary man, he spent a great deal of his time reading and meditating, and used to say of himself, 'I was a boy who liked solitude, who preferred the company of things to that of people.'"
This first time author, a man who largely kept to himself, reading books and thinking about them, a man with a heritage that must have preoccupied him, a heritage whose last physical remains were blown away in a war when he was 46 years old, this man chose to write a novel, perhaps as a summation, not of his life, but of the life of an ancestor whom he never knew but of whom he thought deeply about.
It was a great book. I loved the characters. I loved the sympathy that the author felt for them and the way he captured their subtle feelings. I loved the elegant language. I loved the author's appreciation for this past person and past culture - an appreciation that was fully cognizant of that person's and that culture's limitations and flaws. I loved his ability to see this past so clearly and describe it so adroitly. I'm sorry that he only gave us this one book but I'm grateful that it was as good as it was. I consider that, if we are called upon to justify our lives by our actions on behalf of others, Giuseppe di Lampedusa has passed muster.
I don't remember when I first heard about this book. It was probably when I was in my 20's, working downtown at the Pratt Library. I was intrigued when I read that Lampedusa never wrote any other books, just this one, but it was a great work, only published the year after he died. I believe I had borrowed it from the libraries more than once but I always borrowed ten books to read two and never got around to reading it. Then I saw the movie with Burt Lancaster playing Fabrizio. It was wonderfully well done and, when I saw the book again, I read it. Of course it was longer and richer than a movie could possibly be but I have to say I enjoyed both the book and the movie.
The book went through several editions, Lampedusa's adopted son wanted the book to be the best expression of his father's work. It was not always clear what parts of the draft text were definitive and matched the final intentions of their author. There were hard decisions to be made. The Forward to the book discusses these problems.
| Author | Wambaugh, Joseph |
|---|---|
| Publication | Delta, 2007 |
| Copyright Date | 1973 |
| Number of Pages | 512 |
| Extras | Introduction by James Ellroy |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Legal; Mystery |
| When Read | October 2019 |
This is the true story of the murder of a Los Angelos police officer by a criminal who was stopped by two cops after committing a robbery.
The story begins with novelistic style introductions to the two cops, Ian Campbell and Karl Hettinger, and the two criminals, Greg Powell and Jimmy Smith. The cops become good friends. The criminals have a more complex relationship in which white and somewhat crazy Greg Powell attempts to dominate darker skinned Jimmy Smith. Powell and Smith make their living holding up liquor stores, jewelry stores, any place that Powell happens to see as they drive around. Jimmy drives the car and Greg goes in with a gun to get the cash.
One night the cops pull over the car with Greg and Jimmy in it and gradually realize that they've got criminals on their hands. Greg realizes that the cops are wising up and he pulls his gun, takes the guns from the cops, and puts them in his car to drive to a remote place. Gregg tells Jimmy they're going to drop them off in a wilderness place where it will take them hours to get to a phone. They drive out of town to an onion field where Gregg, whether by premeditation or by impulse, shoots Ian in the face and then finishes him with four more shots to the chest. Karl Hettinger, terrified, runs for his life, weaving back and forth in the dark, scooting off into the field, with Greg in pursuit. Jimmy follows Greg's orders for a while then decides he's had enough. He takes the car and attempts to escape. Karl makes it to a farm house and calls the cops and Greg and Jimmy are both caught the same night.
All of that is complete before we are halfway through the book. The rest is dedicated to a series of trials that follow that last for years and years of appeals, retrials, sentencing hearings and re-hearings, changes of lawyers, and on and on producing 45,000 pages of transcripts - the most for any trial in American history. This all appears to be due to a combination of changes in courtroom procedures made to protect the rights of the accused, together with the machinations of a series of defense lawyers who object to absolutely everything and a series of judges who fear the intervention of higher courts and therefore choose not to discipline the attorneys.
In the end, both of the accused were convicted of the crimes. Both were sentenced to death (although Wambaugh's description of the crimes indicates that Jimmy Smith did not fire any of the bullets even though Greg Powell said he did.) However after many years of litigation both men's sentences were commuted to life in prison.
Is Wambaugh's presentation accurate? I'm unable to say for sure. I would have said that the behavior of both the lawyers and the judges were not convincing. Who would do what they did in a courtroom? Why did the lawyers spend years producing such huge quantities of obvious obfuscation and misdirection? Why did the judges fear to stop it? I don't know, but I do know that much of the material in the second half of the book consists of direct quotations from the records. Crazy as it was, it appears to have been an accurate presentation of what actually happened.
Wambaugh is a former Los Angeles cop who became a highly admired mystery writer. This was his first non-fiction work. I thought the first part was quite fascinating in his convincing construction of both the two cops and the two criminals. The second part also contained very convincing portrayals, especially of the psychological deterioration of Karl Hettinger under the impact of survivor's guilt combined with an absurd police department analysis of the situation that concluded that cops should never surrender their weapons because cops will die if they surrender their guns but won't if they don't. There is always something that can be done to resist. It was a policy that their own records conclusively showed to be false.
The book was overwhelming in its repetition of courtroom silliness, but Wambaugh probably made the right choice in presenting this as it was instead of in a further condensed form that failed to convey how silly it actually was.
| Author | Greene, Graham |
|---|---|
| Publication | London: CSA Word Classics |
| Copyright Date | 1958 |
| Number of Pages | 256 |
| Genres | Fiction; Spy; Comedy |
| Keywords | Cuba |
| When Read | October 2019 |
Forty-five year old James Wormold, abandoned by his wife some years before, lives with his 17 year old daughter Milly and ekes out a living selling vacuum cleaners from a little shop in Havana, Cuba. His only real friend is Dr. Hasselbacher, a very decent old German with some sort of past who drinks with his friend Mr. Wormold (never "Jim" or even "James") at the Wonder Bar. It is 1958 and Cuba is plagued with police, rebels, and spies.
Milly is sweet, beautiful, and charming. Disdaining religion himself, Wormold promised her mother that he would raise Milly as a Catholic, and she attends the local Catholic school. Wormold adores her, but she is totally impractical and returns home one day after spending more money than she has or he can afford on a saddle and riding outfit and tells her father that he must now buy her a horse, and then that they must join a country club where she can ride. Milly has attracted the attention of Captain Segura, the head of a police department that specializes in torturing suspects that belong to the "torturable class" (foreign citizens and people of stature are not among them) to get information about rebels and criminals. Wormold is dismayed by Milly's extravagance and alarmed by Segura's interest in her but he is unwilling to thwart her desires. To meet them, he takes up an offer from one Hawthorne, also known as "59200 stroke 0" to become agent "59200 stroke 5" in some spy agency in England. He is paid a significant salary and is given extra money to pay for the salaries and expenses of the four or five sub-agents that he has invented and pretended to hire to assist in his spying.
Everything works out well for a while. Wormold gets enough money to support Milly's whims. The agency is impressed by the phony reports he sends them including drawings of an installation of some sort in a remote part of Cuba that happens to look surprisingly like the parts of a vacuum cleaner. But they want more and, worse, they send him young Beatrice to act as his secretary and assistant and a young man who will act as radio operator and code clerk. Now Wormold must lie to them as well as to Hawthorne in order to keep all of the balls he's juggling in the air.
The pressure builds and builds. A man with a name that happened to match that of a fictitious agent that Wormold created, dies in a suspicious auto accident. A real man whom Wormold did not recruit but told his bosses that he did is shot at and almost killed. His friend Hasselbacher warns Wormold that he is in danger and then he, Hasselbacher, is killed. An attempt is made to poison Wormold but, because he had been warned by Hasselbacher, he manages to evade the threat and the would be assassin dies instead. Finally, Segura pressures Wormold to give him Milly's hand in marriage. Torturer and fiend he is, but Segura is old fashioned in matters of marriage and requires her father's permission before marrying her. Wormold holds him off by challenging the expert checkers player Segura to a game with little bottles of scotch on one side and bourbon on the other, with a player required to drink any bottle he captures.
In the end Wormold escapes back to England with Milly and Beatrice where, instead of being tried for treason as he expects, he is given a sinecure by Hawthorne's even more incompetent boss. He is able to marry Beatrice and send Milly to the school he had planned for her in Switzerland.
Treading a fine line between tragedy and farce, we tip one way and then the other, becoming more and more alarmed even as we appreciate the humor in the writing.
Greene manages to turn a lot of common ideas upside down. The western democracies are different from the Cuban Batista regime, but not nearly as better as they imagine themselves to be. The torturing police captain Segura has surprising sides to him. The seemingly harmless charade that Wormold perpetrates on his spy agency bosses turns out to be harmful to people who had no real part in it but were identified as Wormold's spies. The quiet life of whiskey and friendship that Wormold shared with Hasselbacher is destroyed.
We are never certain whether we are about to observe a tragedy or a farce, whether to worry or to laugh, whether to take a character seriously or to think of him or her as a caricature. This applies to Wormold himself as well as all of the subsidiary characters.
The plot, the atmosphere, the characters, the writing - are all very good. A worthy novel. I read it for the NCI book group. Everyone liked it.
| Author | Deutermann, P.T. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: St. Martin's Press |
| Copyright Date | 2011 |
| Number of Pages | 400 |
| Extras | Author's notes |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | World War II; Naval |
| When Read | November 2019 |
The story follows four characters, US Navy pilot Mick "Beast" McCarty, surface ship officer Marshall "Beauty" Vincent, and nurse roommates Glory Hawthorne and Sally Adkins, from the battle of Midway, through Guadalcanal, to the aftermath of the battle of Samar, also known as Leyte Gulf. Mick and Marshall had been friends at the Naval Academy where Mick earned his nickname "Beast" for his football heroics. Marshall earned his as a joke on his homeliness. Glory Hawthorne, a gorgeous woman that they and everyone else loved and/or lusted after, married a third Annapolis cadet named Tommy Lewis, a handsome, well liked, decent man who was killed at Pearl Harbor, trapped in the capsized battleship Arizona and never recovered.
Mick and Marshall are opposites. Mick is undisciplined. A fine pilot who plants a bomb on a Japanese carrier at Midway, and achieves many other victories, but always pisses off his commanders and is punished for it. Marshall is an upright, self-effacing heroic officer who follows orders responsibly, puts his life on the line, and yet imagines himself to be an incompetent coward. The two men both pursue Glory and she gives in to Mick, and gets knocked up by him. Sally meets Marshall and falls in love with him. By the end, Glory has delivered her baby at a Catholic hospital and given him up for adoption. Then she commits suicide by diving into the Arizona's hull and drowning, determined to be reunited with her beloved Tommy Lewis. Mick is killed at Samar. His plane damaged, himself mortally wounded, he dives his plane into a Japanese ship. Marshall takes his destroyer into a suicidal attack on the Japanese battleship Yamato. He survives but with the loss of one hand and one leg which are replaced by prostheses. Sally marries him anyway and they go to live in California. Later, he is awarded a Congressional Medal of Honor for his courage and his sacrifice.
The story is wrapped in a prologue and an afterward in which a middle aged man tells the story to a young man of the young man's real parents. The young man is Mick and Glory's child, adopted by Marshall and Sally, and grown up as their son.
This abstract of the novel makes it sound sentimental, which it is, and superficial, which it is not. It is actually a deeply informed story of the Pacific war. Deutermann's father was a destroyer captain in the war and D himself graduated at Annapolis in 1963. He too became a destroyer captain and eventually a squadron commander. Speaking of the events in Leyte Gulf, Deutermann says "I wrote this book because I've always wondered what it would have been like to do what they did that day. ... I've often wondered what I would have seen, heard, and, most importantly, done when the orders came to go drive off those approaching Japanese battleships, and eighteen-inch shells began to fall around my ship."
I know enough about the Pacific war, the technology, and the U.S. Navy to know that everything D said about the battles and the war that I knew about was true. I therefore considered all of the things I didn't know, and there was a huge amount, to also be true. This was a book that I believe really captured the reality of the war in a way that went beyond what most other post-war writers were able to do.
I have been interested in the Pacific war, and all of World War II, since I was a child. My father was a Marine in that war, though he didn't do any actual fighting (at least not against the Japanese) and the two of us always stayed up to watch the Late Show when a WWII war movie was on TV. I was very moved by the book and very appreciative of the men and women upon whom the story was based.
| Author | Pratchett, Terry |
|---|---|
| Publication | Harper Audio, 2012 |
| Copyright Date | 2012 |
| Number of Pages | 368 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | England |
| When Read | November 2019 |
"Dodger" is the name given to an agile young man who grew up in an orphanage in Victorian London and makes his living as a "tosher", a fellow who combs through the sewers of London for anything of value from coins to bits and pieces of whatever is there. At the opening of the story he emerges on a rainy night from a sewer and sees a young woman escaping from a carriage and being attacked and beaten by two men who were dragging her back into the carriage. Leaping to her defense, he wields his feet and his brass knuckle equipped fists to drive off the men and save the girl. Just then, two men are happening by. One is Charlie Dickens (yes that Charles Dickens) and the other is Henry Mayhew (also an important, if no longer well known man.) They take the girl to Mayhew's house, where she is dubbed "Simplicity" by Mrs. Mayhew, and put her to bed.
Dodger is enchanted by the girl. She is 17 years old, very pretty, and quite smart, though she hides that attribute from everyone except Dodger, to whom she also takes a shine. Dodger hears her story of being a lower class girl married to a rich German nobleman who, under pressure from his family, has renounced her. The family has murdered the pastor and the witnesses who married them and is now determined to murder Simplicity in order to tie up loose ends and eliminate all possible record of the marriage. But Dodger stands in their way and is determined to prevent that from happening.
Dodger lives with an older man, a Jew named Solomon, who lives as a small time trader but has a varied past in Europe that includes an education and an understanding of the world that few denizens of Dodger's and Solomon's low class neighborhood possess. Solomon is able to give him much useful advice and even taught him to write his name and read a bit.
The story proceeds at length as Dodger and his helpers and minders, Solomon and Charlie, not to mention Solomon's dog Onan, learn more about the story. Then Dodger goes to a barber who turns out to be the infamous Sweeney Todd. Todd is about to shave Dodger when Dodger stops him and grabs the razor just as the "Peelers" are closing in to arrest him. Dodger becomes a folk hero and is invited into society, even to an interview with Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Eventually he works up a complicated plan to stage the death of Simplicity, thus convincing the unnamed German nobles to consider that she is no longer a threat, and he marries her under her new name "Serendipity". Dodger has money from a raid he made on the consulate of the German state where the miscreants were, and he is provided with a new job by the government working on a redesign of the sewer system.
I have read two of Pratchett's "Discworld" series on the recommendation of my son-in-law Jim. They were fantasy novels, a genre that is normally not my cup of tea. However the stories were inventive, the magic all in good fun, and the writing rather spectacular in a special Terry Pratchett way. So when I came across this audiobook and saw that it was by Pratchett but wasn't a fantasy, I decided to try it.
Although he was already battling a rare form of early Alzheimer's Disease, you'd never know it from this book. The language was delightfully rich and nicely imitated the style and vocabulary of Dickens himself although, as with others of Pratchett's books, it was extravagant and over the top. I can only take so much before I need a more serious and less extravagant form of writing, but for the duration of the book, it was acceptable and even delightful. I often laughed out loud while listening to it.
| Author | Strugatsky, Arkady and Boris |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Russian |
| Translators | Bouis, Antonina W. |
| Publication | Melville House Publishing, 2013 |
| Copyright Date | 1977 |
| Number of Pages | 162 |
| Extras | Afterword by Boris Strugatsky |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | November 2019 |
Dmitri Malianov, a mathematician living in his Leningrad apartment with his cat Kaliam and his temporarily absent wife Irina, is working on his new theory of "M cavities" with implications for interstellar physics. A delivery man appears at the door with a box of expensive caviar, brandy and other goodies and leaves them. A beautiful young woman appears and says shes an old friend of Irina, who told her that she could come to the apartment and stay the night. A next door neighbor arrives and tells Malianov that he'll be going away for a while and he wants Malianov to hold his key. Then later, a detective arrives, tells Malianov that the neighbor is dead from a bullet in the head and Malianov is the suspected killer. The detective searches the apartment but only Malianov and the cat are there. The girl has somehow slipped away overnight without M knowing about it - though she leaves a bra which is discovered by Irina when she returns. It's all a mess.
Several of Malianov's friends, also university scientists, come to the apartment, eat the caviar, drink the liquor, listen to M's story, and tell him about what has happened to them. They have also experienced strange events, even including a visit from an extraterrestrial creature who vanished by jumping out of a high apartment window. They have been warned to abandon their current research projects. Val Weingarten's theory is that each of the men has done some research that is unacceptable to some extraterrestrial civilization, or maybe just to the universe itself. Some principle of homeostasis may be at work in which the universe itself is automatically and unconsciously destroying or deflecting theories that would change it.
Is all of this happening? Is it extraterrestrials? Is it homeostasis? Is it a made up story by Weingarten? Is it all coincidental occurrences? Should they abandon their research? No one knows the answers. Maybe they should. It is definite that maybe they should. But maybe they shouldn't. All of the scientists except for one man give up their research and, surprisingly perhaps, or perhaps not, they get good jobs or projects. There is no resolution to the story.
This is certainly an unusual story, one with no real plot and no definitive ending. It is full of loose ends. Was the man who came to M's apartment really a detective? Did he really think that M shot his next door neighbor? Why did the young woman appear, and why did she leave quietly, without saying anything to M? We don't know.
The story is told in a dramatic style. The narrator says little about the meaning of the events. There is only the plain presentation of what happened, and the words that each of the characters say to each other. In that sense, it is a simply told story, but it's not simple. Its meaning is far from clear - at least to me.
The authors have buried a lot of sophisticated things in the novel - unexpected things that other authors might have omitted. For example, the "M cavities" ("Malianov cavities?") project contains hints of pretty sophisticated mathematics. That is true for the projects of the other scientists as well. There are also unexplained and unremarked literary references and allusions, for example: 'I remembered Glukhov’s warning about going there now. "Don’t go there, Warmold. They want to poison you." What was that from? Something terribly familiar. The hell with it. I had nowhere else to go.' If I hadn't read Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana just a few weeks before this book, I wouldn't have understood this allusion. How much else is there in the book that I definitely, not maybe, missed?
Intellectuals in the USSR were always circumscribed and treated with suspicion by the Communist Party functionaries. The Strugatskys with their knowledge of science, their familiarity with English and with foreign literature, and most especially with their growing and alarming popularity in the west as well as at home, must have been near the bullseye of the censors' target. They succeeded in their writing because, in addition to being great writers, they successfully stayed on the narrow line between resistance and sycophancy - quietly flirting with the former while capably avoiding the latter. They learned to obscure their messages and yet still say things of relevance and interest.
This is the ninth book that I have read by the Strugatsky brothers, seven of them between 1977 and 1988. I had the good fortune to be a librarian at Pratt Central Library during part of that period where unusual books like these were to be found - though it was not long before they began to show up at the smaller, branch public libraries. I remember the fascinating title of this book from that period and I believe that I must have checked it out at least once but, since it's not in my book notes and I don't remember the story, I assume it was among the great many books I check out but don't have time to read before they must be returned. I read another Strugatsky in 2011 and now this one in 2019. It's interesting to go back like this to read authors from my (relative) youth. All in all, my tastes have remained fairly consistent.
| Author | Francis, Dick |
|---|---|
| Publication | AudioGo/Chivers, 2011 |
| Copyright Date | 1971 |
| Number of Pages | 187 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | November 2019 |
Neil Griffon is minding Rowley Lodge stables while his father recovers in hospital from a severe car crash when he is kidnapped by a rough gangster who will let the stable survive and Neil live only if he agrees to a condition. The condition is that the gangster's son, Alessandro Rivera, must ride as jockey on the best horse in the stable in the biggest race of the season. It is an impossible request in many ways, not least that the owner of the horse would never agree to an apprentice jockey on his greatest horse, and the racing authorities would not permit an apprentice either. But to enforce his will, the father, Enso Rivera, has his thug cripple a horse, then another one, then almost a third before he is caught and beaten by Neil.
It turns out that Enso is gradually going out of his mind as a result of syphilis contracted shortly after Alessandro's birth. He is determined to both totally control his 18 year old son and, at the same time, fulfill the boy's ardent wish to ride the great horse Archangel in the great race, the Derby.
Alessandro loves, respects, and also fears his father. Neil, on the other hand, has no love for his own cold and critical father who gave him no love when he was a child and none now as an adult. Each one of the two sons comes to respect and even admire the other. Alessandro turns out to be an excellent jockey with a deep love of the horses and the sport and Neil turns out to be an excellent manager of the stables who, over the course of the novel, earns the respect of the staff and the horse owners.
In the end, Enso orders his thugs to kill Tommy Hoylake, the top jockey assigned to ride Archangel in the Derby. Hoylake will be shot while training with a different horse, Lucky Lindsay. However instead of the original plan, it turns out that Alessandro is training with Lucky Lindsay. Enso finds out and tries to stop the murder, shooting the two thugs, one of whom has already killed the horse Alessandro was riding and is aiming at Alessandro. That thug kills Enso and then dies, so the criminals are all cleaned up and Alessandro is freed. Then the elder Griffon also dies, leaving Neil free to own and run the stable. Neil has turned Alessandro into more of a man and the two will get along.
At first I was irritated by the usual Dick Francis issues in this book. Neil does not confide in the police or in anyone except his London girlfriend about the threat from the gangster. Even after the first and then the second horse are crippled and consequently "put down", he tells no one - not the police, not his father, not the head stable hand Etty, not Tommy Hoylake. The reader wants to say, "Dammit Neil, get help!" But Neil goes blithely on. Not only does he not get help, he lies to everyone about who Alessandro is and what's going on at the stables. It reminded me a bit of Tara Westover's (see Education: A Memoir) covering up all of the terrible things happening in her family. Neil is hardly on top of the situation but he acts as if he can keep everything under control.
As the story went on however Francis' profound knowledge of the horse racing world and his steady ginning up of the tension worked their usual spell on this reader. Two instances of Deus ex machina were invoked at the end to get rid of the thugs and the two irritating parents. I would have liked something more realistic or less happily ever after, but I got what I expected from Bonecrack and was satisfied with reading it.
| Author | Saslow, Eli |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Doubleday |
| Copyright Date | 2018 |
| Number of Pages | 304 |
| Extras | Author's Note |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Society; Politics; Biography |
| Keywords | Racism; Antisemitism |
| When Read | November 2019 |
Derek Roland Black, now renamed Roland Derek Black, is the son of Don Black, former Grand Wizard of the Klu Klux Klan and later founder and still current webmaster of the Stormfront website. Derek is the godson of David Duke, a prominent neo-Nazi, white supremacist, and one-time Republican candidate for governor in Louisiana. His mother Chloe was the wife of Duke before they split up and she married Don Black. Derek grew up in the white supremacist community, accepted all of its premises, and as early as age ten played a significant role in promoting "white nationalism" with a special children's web page on Stormfront. He appears to have been instrumental in converting the movement from its overtly racist, white supremacist, antisemitic past to the same movement but with a more sophisticated face promoting "white nationalism", anti-immigration, fear of "white genocide", and so on. The new terminology attempted to make the white supremacist philosophy more politically palatable as a positive promotion of white people rather than a negative rejection of blacks, Jews, Chinese, and others. Derek is highly intelligent, a fine student, and an attractive young man, but one who believed all of this trash.
At age 21 Derek enrolled in the New College of Florida, "listed in college guides as the most liberal school in Florida". It was the beginning of a change in Derek's life. He was exposed for the first time to liberal, anti-racist students and teachers. An outgoing and intelligent person himself, he soon made friends with, among others, a Jew and a Peruvian immigrant. He didn't reveal his views about Jews or immigrants but just interacted with them as another student. However, by the end of a year, someone discovered him to be the host, with his father, of a white nationalist radio show, and a major contributor to Stormfront.
The student body split over what to do about Derek. Some wanted to ostracize him. Some wanted to publicly ridicule and shame him. Some wanted to convert him to a more liberal humanist outlook on life. The latter group included the only orthodox Jew on campus, the Peruvian immigrant and, eventually, his future girlfriend Allison Gornik. They were careful with him. The Jew invited him to shabbat dinner every Friday night and stayed away from discussions of race (of course being a Jew was considered a matter of race, not religion, in the white nationalist movement.) Their strategy was to first get Derek to understand that people of different "races" were all human, and often interestingly and attractively human, beings.
A history student, Derek was also exposed to a more informed and sophisticated view of history than he had known before college. The white supremacists imagined the middle ages as the great period of the white race, when European whites first began the development that would take over the world. Derek's studies at New College and in Europe (he learned German, French, Latin, and Arabic) brought him a much more sophisticated understanding of the Middle ages. Gradually, his entire world view became far more encompassing and sophisticated. The combination of fine friends, excellent education, and his own powerful intellect rescued him from his roots.
His first plan was to change his name and flee from white nationalism. He would get a PhD in history and become an academic. But ultimately that wasn't enough. He had to at least try to right the wrongs that he had committed, even though he had good intentions when he committed them. Articles in the Washington Post, New York Times, and the SPLC publications were written, and he worked with Eli Saslow to produce this book.
I have great sympathy for Derek. He did wrong, but he did it out of sincere belief and following arguments that appeared to be logical within the white supremacist world that he grew up in. When he was exposed to the realities of human diversity, the realities of history, and the people that he had always been taught to condemn, he changed his views and became a new person.
From my own experience as a philosophy teacher in the early 1970's, I learned to especially respect people who did not easily change their centrally held beliefs. As W.V.O. Quine put it, our belief system is an "interanimating network" of propositions in which our most central beliefs inform each other and all of our peripheral beliefs. If you tug on one of the central propositions you're tugging on the whole network and it's impossible, at least for a logical person, to replace one central belief without calling many others into question. All the evidence for each one of the propositions thus bears on all of them.
So it was with Derek Black. The long time it took him to turn his ideas around was not due to his being a stubborn racist, but to his being an intelligent man who had built up a complex network of beliefs that had to be broken down in many, many areas and rebuilt from the ground up. That's not something that can or should be done in a short time.
The end of the book had much to say about the growth of white nationalism in the era of Donald Trump. It started before Trump and was evident in the 2012 Republican primaries when all of the candidates took strong anti-immigrant stands. The Party had abandoned the non-white voters and concentrated solely on whites. It was a major factor in Trump's success. I hope that Americans will rebound from this philosophy and become supporters of American diversity again. I will work towards that goal.
| Author | Mitter, Rana |
|---|---|
| Publication | Blackstone Audio, 2013 |
| Copyright Date | 2013 |
| Number of Pages | 480 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II; China |
| When Read | December 2019 |
Cambridge historian Mitter, a specialist in Republican China, gives a small amount of background to the 20th century movements in China, then describes the leadup to the war between China and Japan. The "Manchurian Incident" provoked by local Japanese troops in northeast China in 1931 was followed by a series of incidents in which Japanese provocations were presented to the world and the Japanese people as caused by the Chinese. They were followed by a major incident in 1937 that started the full scale war. M holds that the Japanese had no special plan, didn't expect an all out war, and were shocked by the ferocity of the unexpected Chinese response to Japanese aggression. They thought that they could just bite off some more and hadn't planned to attempt a full scale conquest, at least not at that time. But Chiang Kai-shek realized that if he didn't fight while China was still mostly intact, he'd have little chance in a fight in which much of China had already fallen to piecemeal Japanese aggression. He therefore ordered both defense of the eastern cities including Beijing and Shanghai and many others, and counterattacks against Japanese field armies. The results were mostly, but not entirely, one-sided. Chinese soldiers with little training, inadequate weapons, hardly any air force, no navy, insufficient food and ammunition, and frequently led by corrupt and venal officers, suffered huge casualties - far worse than those of the Japanese. Chinese civilians were mercilessly bombed, murdered, starved, robbed, raped, and exploited by the Japanese. The results must have been very close to the horrors of the Nazi invasions of Poland and the USSR.
Piece by piece, the Japanese took important cities, railroads, and productive farm land. Many middle and upper class Chinese with the means to do so fled before them. Poor peasants could only expect to starve to death if they left their land and most did not go, though they were often drafted into the Nationalist army or drafted to work for the Japanese.
M divides the Chinese into three parties. The Nationalists and their regional warlord allies fought large scale conventional battles with the Japanese, however the government ministers and army officers were mostly corrupt and incompetent. There were cases of great heroism by Chinese officers and men, but also many others of gross incompetence, dereliction of duty, and officers fleeing and leaving their men behind to die.
A second party was the Chinese Communists. Arriving in Yenan at the end of the storied Long March, Mao Zedong won the leadership of the party and built up both the military and economic forces, relying heavily on the peasants rather than the upper and middle classes. The Eighth Army and Fourth Route Armies grew steadily during the war from only 30,000 men at the beginning to 600,000 by 1945. Although still much smaller and less well equipped than the Nationalist army, it was disciplined, well led, and generally supported by the peasants. The communists avoided conventional battles with the Japanese and relied on guerrilla tactics instead. They organized society, suppressed the wealthy (and many not so wealthy) people and promoted land reform. They evolved over the period from an intellectual and somewhat pluralistic party at the beginning into a disciplined, authoritarian party at the end.
A third party, led by Wang Jingwei, accepted collaboration with the Japanese and established a puppet government at Nanjing. Wang had been a close associate of Sun Yat-sen, then a partner with Chiang Kai-shek, moving to the left towards the communists and then to the right towards the Japanese. The story of his hesitant escape from the Nationalist government was explained in some depth.
The war in central China wore down the Nationalist side until, in 1944, the Japanese launched their desperate Ichigo offensive that almost finished it off. It didn't help, according to M, that the American general and Chief of Staff of the Nationalist army, "Vinegar Joe" Stillwell, imposed upon Chiang by Roosevelt as a condition for military aid, despised Chiang, disobeyed his orders and removed the best Chinese troops to fight in Burma, leaving central China to fend for itself with lesser forces against powerful Japanese armies.
M describes a number of interesting aspects of the period and the war. All three Chinese parties relied on secret police suppression of their enemies, and none of them were very careful about distinguishing who was truly an enemy and who was actually a friend. Dai Li and Kang Sheng were, respectively, the security chiefs of the Guomindang and the CCP. It's not clear that either of them was any better than Lavrentiy Beria in Stalin's Russia.
The end of the war brought what M considers to have been a largely inevitable communist victory. No Americans "lost" China to the communists, though Stillwell didn't help and American antagonism to the communists may have reduced the opportunities for collaboration. It's doubtful to me that any collaboration between the U.S. and either the Nationalist or Communist parties would have significantly altered the course of events after the war.
M gives more credit to all three sides and all three leaders than is customary in books I've read about China. He sees Chiang's wife and family to be totally corrupt and sees Chiang himself as allowing corruption, but considers him to have been a well meaning and sincere believer in Chinese nationalism and the quest for a modern Chinese state. If I read him correctly, M thought that that might possibly have happened if the Japanese had not invaded China.
Mitter, himself of Indian origin, is sensitive to the imperialism, racism, and condescension of Britain, America, and the USSR towards China. He considers that China's huge sacrifices amounting to perhaps 20 million people in the war, and huge destruction of cities, land, and infrastructure, were important in the war against Japan. I'm not as sure of that. The Soviet defeat of Japan in the Nomonhan "incident" scared off the Imperial Japanese Army warmongers (see Nomonhan, 1939: The Red Army's Victory That Shaped World War II) and Hitler's lack of interest in Japanese help didn't encourage them (M says that the German government tried to persuade Japan to fight the USSR. Was that later in the war when Hitler finally realized he had bitten off more than he could chew?) Perhaps the half million Japanese soldiers in China could have made a difference in the Pacific war, but perhaps not. The Imperial Navy and the air forces would still have been ground to powder (Churchill's phrase) by the Americans no matter how many extra Japanese troops made it to the Pacific islands. The U.S. air force would still have devastated Japan. The naval blockade would still have eliminated the import of food and materials. The atom bombs would still have ended the war if the other destruction was insufficient.
This was the most comprehensive as well as balanced account I've read of the Chinese role in World War II. It was written almost entirely from a high level. It didn't go into the experience of ordinary Chinese either in the armies or the civilian population - offering only high level descriptions and statistics of the horrors. However what it did, I thought it did well.
| Author | Obama, Michelle |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Crown |
| Copyright Date | 2018 |
| Number of Pages | 448 |
| Extras | photos |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Autobiography |
| Keywords | Politics |
| When Read | December 2019 |
Michelle Obama, nee Robinson, grew up in the southside of Chicago in a small house occupied by her grandmother and grandfather on the first floor and her parents, older brother, and herself on the second. She was raised by her family, and by her own driving need to succeed, to study very hard. Doing very well at a public high school that would be called a "gifted and talented" program in Baltimore, she got top grades, did well on exams (though she doesn't tell us her SAT scores) and was admitted to Princeton and then Harvard Law School. Still working very hard she joined Sidley and Austin, a big corporate law firm in Chicago. At 25, she worked on the 47th floor, had an assistant, wore an Armani suit, drove a Saab, and subscribed to a wine service. She thought she had gotten with the program and was heading for the top of the world. Then Barack Obama, who had just finished his first year at Harvard Law, was brought on as an intern at Sidley and Michelle was assigned as his mentor. Although himself a rising star who had made a brilliant impression both at Harvard and at Sidley, he was different from other interns. As she became more involved with him she began to question her own career goals. Did she want to be a corporate lawyer? Barack didn't. He wanted to help people. He graduated from Columbia and then became a community organizer in Chicago for some years before going to Harvard Law. Michelle started to look around and got a kind of organizer job of her own at way less money than she was making in corporate law. She had other boyfriends before, but Barack was the one who moved her. They married.
Michelle didn't like it when Barack ran for Congress (and lost to Bobby Rush.) She didn't really like it when he ran for State Senate and won. She didn't like that he was away at Springfield from Monday to Thursday and she was at home with her two little children and her full-time job. She was family and community oriented. She got a good job at the University of Chicago doing neighborhood outreach and was busy all the time directing a staff that grew to 22 people. She didn't like it when Barack ran for the Senate in 2006 and lived largely in Washington while she stayed at her job in Chicago. And she didn't like it at all when he ran for President in 2008. She was shocked when he won the nomination and then the general election. Her life was drastically changed but she recognized that Barack was an exceptional person with exceptional things to offer to the people of the U.S. and the world and she decided to change her life work to be the way he needed her to be, and to use her own position as First Lady to do things for people on a scale that she couldn't have achieved in Chicago.
M describes life in the White House. It's not like life in Chicago. Servants, cooks, security men, maintenance men, and more surround them. The White House has six floors, 130 rooms, 35 bathrooms, a bowling alley and a swimming pool (I assume some of the six floors are underground.) The windows are made of bulletproof glass. If the family wants to go outside, screens are erected to shield them from view. If they want to go somewhere else, a motorcade and motorcycle cops are set up, traffic is cleared from the streets, snipers are positioned on rooftops, and the Obamas travel in a seven ton armored car disguised to look like an ordinary limousine.
M describes Barack's work. He eats dinner with the family and they take occasional vacations but, for the most part, he worked and worked and worked. M worked at her own projects to reduce obesity, get more education for young women, and other non-partisan, non-political things.
She has very positive things to say about Hillary Clinton and very negative things to say about Donald Trump.
I was trying out a public library service that offered downloadable ebooks on loan. A page of recommendations came up on my phone screen, including this book on the first page. I picked it, not to read the book, but just to see whether I liked the reader software. However, after just a few pages I was hooked. I didn't expect to be particularly interested in the life of a First Lady, but I quickly became absorbed in her story and the story of her family and of the personal side of the presidency.
The details of life in the White House were surprising. M had a wardrobe manager, hair dresser, and makeup artist on her staff. That was in addition to a staff of secretaries and assistants who handled communications, travel, social protocols, and helped with the programs that M laid out. Security agents took her kids to school and to play dates, sometimes with Michelle or her mother present (which entailed extra staff), trying hard not to freak everyone out. All the family meals were prepared by expert chefs but the family had to pay for the food. That surprised them (and me.) If Barack made a comment about how he liked some exotic imported fruit it would appear at his breakfast and the bill for it would appear on their expense account, so they had to be careful about what they asked for. Her account of a date night at a New York Broadway play was incredible. It was not repeated.
I finished the book with a great deal of respect for both Barack and Michelle Obama. They are both exceptionally smart, exceptionally capable, exceptionally hard working, and exceptionally dedicated to doing the right thing for the country, for their own family, and for all families everywhere. Looking at Barack from outside, I had thought he was a pretty good president, but I also thought he was naive about the nature of the Republican Party and not as capable of getting things done as I would have liked. That was from the outside. Reading this interior view by Michelle I got a much better appreciation of the difficulties he faced and the Herculean efforts he made to get as much done as he did.
I should mention that this book was first brought to my attention by Elaine Mills. She had recommended that the NCI Book Club read it. I had forgotten about that when I saw the book on the "OverDrive" library book list, but I now agree with her that it was very much worth reading. Marcia is in the middle of reading it now.
| Author | Harris, Robert |
|---|---|
| Publication | Random House Audio, 2017 |
| Copyright Date | 2017 |
| Number of Pages | 320 |
| Extras | Afterword |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | December 2019 |
Two one-time friends, one British and one German, attend the Munich Peace Conference organized by Neville Chamberlain in 1938. Hugh Legat is a private secretary and language translator for Chamberlain. Paul Hartmann is a translator for the German Foreign Office. Hartmann is part of a conspiracy led by ex-Chief of the General Staff, Ludwig Beck. They believe that if Hitler goes to war against Czechoslovakia, the British and French will go to war against Germany, threatening to crush it with overwhelming force. At that point the conspirators will arrest or, if necessary, shoot Hitler and end the Nazi dictatorship. Hartmann gets a letter to Legat to convince him of that and to enlist Legat in an effort to persuade Chamberlain to stand up to Hitler.
The plot, as we know, never gets off the ground. Chamberlain will do anything to prevent war, including throw part of Czechoslovakia under the Nazi bus. Nobody can change Chamberlain's mind. Legat returns to England with the British delegation where he plans to leave his faithless wife and join the RAF for what he knows will be the coming war. At one point near the end of the story, Hartmann finds himself alone in a room with Adolf Hitler, and with a gun in his pocket. However he is unable to shoot. It is against his nature to kill someone and, in addition, he can never be sure of what would happen if he did. He is suspected by the Gestapo, but never found out. He survives until the July 20, 1944 attempt to assassinate Hitler, after which he is executed on a meat hook with all of the other conspirators.
The surprise to me about this book was how convincing I found Chamberlain's arguments to be. Official estimates (in the Wikipedia) put UK casualties in World War I as at least 744,000 dead or missing and 1,675,000 wounded. Chamberlain believed that another world war, this time with aircraft dropping bombs and poison gas on civilian populations, would be even more deadly. Almost any compromise seemed justified in avoiding that. As for protecting the Sudetenland, C saw no possibility of doing it. Whether Britain went to war or not, the Sudetenland was doomed and, besides that, Hitler claimed with at least some justification, that the population of the area was largely German. So what C did was attempt to hem Hitler in with one commitment after another that no further damage would be done to Czechoslovakia, that there were no other territorial demands anywhere, that Czechs would be given ten days to leave their homes and would be allowed to take their possessions, that plebiscites would be held in different areas of the Sudetenland and those areas would only go to Germany if the people voted to do it, that Britain and Germany would hereafter always hold discussions on issues before taking unilateral actions, and so on. Listening to it, C's effort seemed to be justified and the alternative of war seemed to be worse than anything else that could happen.
So it seemed to Chamberlain and so it seemed to the British, French, American (insofar as they cared at all) and other peoples. It was only the Czechs that were outraged, and why should millions die to defend them, especially if the damage to them is limited by agreements signed by Hitler?
The big flaw in the argument was that Hitler was determined to go to war. Agreements meant nothing to him. Peace meant nothing to him. The desires of the German people meant nothing to him. War was inevitable, and if it could be started before Germany got still larger and still stronger, and with more enemies like the Czechs out of the way the better chance there was for victory over Germany.
Chamberlain couldn't believe that any sane man would want a war, and even if he did, there's no doubt that the people of Britain and France would condemn him for going to war against Germany for the sake of Sudeten Czechs. How could he lead a democracy to a war that no one wanted? They wouldn't back him.
Beck, Hartmann (a fictional character partly based on a real one) and the other members of the conspiracy hoped to convince Chamberlain that they could overthrow Hitler if, and only if, he mobilized the army to invade Czechoslovakia. I have read elsewhere that such a plot did actually exist and communications were actually sent to Chamberlain. But what were the chances of success? They seem pretty small to me and they apparently did to Chamberlain too.
I have always condemned Chamberlain. Like most people who learned about Munich after the war, and as shown in many of my previous book notes, I have always thought of Chamberlain and his government as the great appeasers who made it harder to win the war when it inevitably came. From some abstract point of view that argument is right but in reality, it may be that no other course was possible. All we need do is look at Roosevelt to see how hard it was to bring democracy to total war. We don't know if or when the U.S. would have gone to war if it were not for Pearl Harbor and the subsequent German declaration. It's not clear to me that, if Churchill were Prime Minister in 1938, he could have led the British people to war. Maybe it was only the clear agreements that Chamberlain made with Hitler, and Hitler's unquestionable violations of all of those agreements, that made it possible to go to war in September 1939 upon the invasion of Poland.
One of the things I always tell myself when reading history is that hindsight and foresight are not the same. It's easy to condemn decisions that failed and that ignored truths that we deem to have been obvious beforehand - in this case that Hitler was a madman who hated everyone, wanted war, and could not be controlled by the German people. But at the time the decisions were taken, alternatives weren't always as attractive, or even as possible, as they appear in hindsight to have been.
I've liked almost all of the ten previous books I've read by Harris, and I liked this one too. It wasn't a great work of literature but it did make what I consider to have been an honest re-examination of a topic that we all long ago made up our minds about. I wouldn't call it a pro-Chamberlain book. Harris made it pretty clear that C's understanding of Hitler and the Nazi regime was deficient. He should have known better - as Churchill already did before 1938 and as perhaps Roosevelt and Daladier did too, at least to a degree higher than Chamberlain. But Chamberlain was in a bind and he made an honest attempt to do the right thing and to save millions of lives.
Once again I see that the more history I read, even in fictional form like this, the more complicated my views must become. It was an interesting and enlightening book.
| Author | Gordon, Charlotte |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Random House |
| Copyright Date | 2015 |
| Number of Pages | 672 |
| Extras | images, notes, bibliography |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Biography |
| Keywords | Women; Women's rights |
| When Read | December 2019 |
Mary Wollstonecraft (MW) grew up in a family with an abusive father and an abused mother. Largely self-educated, she became a teacher, then a governess, but was eventually able to eke out a living as a writer, writing about politics, travel, society, and what we now call feminism and women's rights. She had a rich older brother who inherited money but she herself barely managed while also helping her two younger sisters who made frequent claims upon her. She moved to Paris during the Revolution there and became better known. Alone for most of her life men began to become interested in her and she in them in her thirties. She pursued writer Henry Fuselli until HF's wife drove her away. Then she met American businessman Gilbert Imlay and had a child (Fanny) by him but he was put off by her desire for a settled family life and would not settle down with her - though he did help support the child. Then she conceived a child with William Godwin and, in spite of their both expounding belief in free love, they married. Godwin was a rather stiff man and a virgin until he met MW but had very progressive views (including atheism and women's rights). He, like MW, eked out a bare middle class living writing books on politics and philosophy, and writing fiction. MW died ten days after giving birth to Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, later Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (MWS).
MWS also had a difficult childhood. Although she loved her elder half-sister Fanny and her father Wm. Godwin, she didn't get along with her father's second wife Mary-Jane, who brought two more children into the family. At age 16 she ran off with the 21 year old poet Percy Bysshe Shelley - a sometime disciple of her father. Shelley was already married and had a child but he no longer felt anything for his wife, who had nothing of MWS's love of ideas, poetry, or the arts. She lived with Shelley until his death by drowning at age 30, conceiving four children, the first three of whom died by or before the age of three. Her relationship with the poet was often strained as she went into depressions after the deaths of the children and rejected her husband - who had affairs with other women, whether because of Mary's coldness and rejection, or because of attractions isn't entirely clear.
The dual biography alternates chapters between MW and MWS, following each until their deaths at age 38 and 51 respectively. Each of their important works is described and discussed - though not in any detail, this was a personal biography, not a literary one. Extensive notes and bibliographies appear at the end.
I think this was a thoughtful and well executed biography though it was rather depressing to read. Both of the women lived emotionally difficult lives with strained relationships with parents and family and often facing financial hardship. Each was supported by a man at one time or another (Imlay for MW, Shelley for MWS) who had access to lots of money, but they were never secure. Percy Shelley was completely irresponsible when it came to money. His wealthy father was angry about Shelley running away from his wife (who committed suicide) and child. He consented to give his son a thousand pounds a year (by comparison MW lived on 40 pounds a year as a governess and gave significant parts of that to her father and sisters) but the son squandered it on high living and on giving away money to people who hung onto him. He was constantly borrowing money and running away from his creditors. Money that he and MWS made from their writing went into the hole. It was hard for a congenitally frugal person like me to read.
In addition to Shelley's irresponsibility, all of the people had what we now call "issues". MW would make shrill and seemingly inappropriate demands on her male friends. Imlay would respond with lies. MW's sisters would make demands on MW, treating her as if she were responsible for their welfare and never offering anything in return, even though they were fully grown. MWS lost herself in the pain of the loss of her children, showing no sympathy for Shelley who felt the same loss and tried to comfort her. Peripheral characters, Henry Fuseli, Edward Trelawny, Jane Williams attacked the women behind their backs while acting as if they were friends. In some ways most damaging of all, MWS's sister Claire was constantly taking umbrage at MWS although she herself was at least as difficult and problematic as her sister. It was tiresome to read. I wanted to tell all of these people to grow up and treat each other with more sympathy and regard.
Be that as it may, this was still a very well done pair of biographies, well researched and documented as well as well understood and explicated. As for any deficiencies in the characters of the subjects, they shouldn't count for much against the brilliance of their artistic achievements and the courage of their criticisms of the ugly social and economic realities of their day.
I'm glad that Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley have this very well researched and written account of their lives.
| Author | O'Brian, Patrick |
|---|---|
| Publication | Brilliance Audio |
| Copyright Date | 1977 |
| Number of Pages | 348 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Naval; Napoleonic Wars |
| When Read | December 2019 |
Stephen asks: "Do you know the Boadicea?" And Jack replies: "Boadicea, thirty-eight? Yes, of course. A weatherly ship, though slow: fitting foreign for the Leeward Islands station. Charles Loveless has her."
Jack is assigned to take the Boadicea and several other ships to the Indian Ocean to take on four French frigates that have been raiding British commerce there. It is his first command as commodore of a squadron of ships. With Stephen aboard as ship's doctor and with some of the men from his previous commands, he arrives in the Indian Ocean. After a number of battles, some won by the British, some by the French, and all with ships being captured and changing hands, Jack's group takes the French island of La Reunion and is in position to also take the more important island of Mauritius where the remaining French frigates are being serviced and repaired.
Then two pieces of news arrive at the same time. Jack's wife has given birth to a boy, and a large British fleet has arrived. Its admiral takes over Jack's squadron and assimilates it into the fleet. Jack ceases to be a commodore and is now just a ship's captain again. The admiral and his fleet arrive at Mauritius, receive the surrender of the French, and take the lion's share of the credit and the prize money. The admiral is ready for resistance from Jack but Jack doesn't resist. He is a happy man. In gratitude, the admiral sends him home to bear the message of victory to England, and to see his wife and children.
I don't think anyone I have read has yet overtaken C.S. Forester and his Hornblower series. Forester's feel for the sea, his depth of characterization, and the drama of his stories, are still the gold standard. But O'Brian has an impressive charm of his own.
For this volume at least, and for this reader, O'Brian's ordinary scenes of Jack and Stephen at sea, his remarkable mastery of the language of the time and the detail of the sailing ships at sea, are the real attractions. Jack is always optimizing his ship. Is she too far down by the head? Does she carry too much weight aloft? Is the rake of the foremast optimal? Is she in need of careening? Is it time to take in the stunsls and royals? Can he sail another half point to windward? I don't know enough about sailing to say for sure whether O'Brian knows what he's talking about or not, but he sure is convincing. He paints a vivid picture of the Royal Navy and its professional seaman. The separate English languages of officers and crew are remarkable as well as the common language they use for working the ship. It's a delight to read and a particular delight when read by Patrick Tull, who does a marvelous job of sounding it out.
I like the old style sea stories and don't think I'm finished with O'Brian just yet.