Books read January through December 2020
| Author | Hastings, Max |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Random House, 2010 |
| Copyright Date | 2009 |
| Number of Pages | 576 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History; Biography |
| Keywords | Winston Churchill; World War II |
| When Read | January 2020 |
"History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days. - Winston Spencer Churchill, November 1940" - from the opening of Hastings' paean to Winston Churchill's life and leadership during his time as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, from the darkest trials of the fall of France in 1940 to the final conquest of Nazi Germany and the following confrontation with the Soviet Union. Hastings directs the pale gleams of his own flickering lamp upon the former days of his hero, just as Churchill himself did in his own histories - of the war, and of the English speaking peoples.
The Royal Navy and Air Force performed well in the war but the British Army was beaten time and again by the superior German Wehrmacht - in Belgium, France, Norway, Greece, Crete, Africa, even in the Aegean in 1943 and in significant battles in France and Holland in 1944 when it was clear that Germany had already lost the war. It was primarily the Russians and secondarily the Americans who won the war and dominated the ensuing peace. By the end, "the big three" was really reduced to just two. But in spite of all of the military failures, many of them, if not caused by, then at least promoted by Churchill, he was the man that kept Britain in the war, kept up the spirit of the British people, and made Britain shine to the world as a beacon of democratic and free resistance to the monstrosity of Nazism.
Hastings sees Churchill as a flawed military leader. His promotion of ideas like the re-landing of poorly trained and barely equipped men of the British Expeditionary Force in Brittany after Dunkirk and just before the fall of France would have been a disaster if his Chief of General Staff had not stood up to him and withdrawn the men. His beloved commando raids, like the one that created the disaster at Dieppe, probably contributed nothing useful to the war. His hopeless interventions in Norway in 1940 and Greece in 1941 lost many men and ships for no military gain. His failed intervention in the Aegean in 1943, disdained and ignored by the Americans, pursued a hopeless strategy of saving the Balkans from the Russians. His efforts to prevent what he believed would be a disaster in Normandy if attempted before 1945 or 1946 had finally to be rolled over by the Americans in 1944 who believed, rightly, that they could and would beat the Germans. But although his ideas were, in Hastings' view, wrong, they were motivated by a sincere desire to support the conquered nations of Europe and win the war.
Although Churchill assumed more power as both Prime Minister and Minister of Defense than any British leader before him, and although he pushed hard against his military advisers, he was never an autocrat like Hitler, Mussolini, or Stalin. He never surrounded himself with yes men. He argued against his generals but never silenced them and understood when they stood up forcefully that he must be in the wrong and so he gave in to their judgment.
The title for this book in Britain is Finest Years: Churchill as Warlord 1940-45.
I thought the little excerpt of Churchill on the flickering lamp stumbling along the trail of the past was a beautiful example of the man's brilliant mind, fabulous eloquence, and deep commitment to history. He was a great man and Hastings, for all of his criticisms, makes clear that he thinks very highly of Churchill.
I do too. I know that the man was an imperialist. I know that his treatment of non-white people in India, Burma, Africa, and elsewhere was acceptable only in an earlier era that didn't recognize the full rights of these people, an era already under fire in the early part of the 20th century. I understand that Nehru and Gandhi rather than Churchill provided our most developed moral leadership in his time, but I read all six of his volumes on the war and some of his other work too and he made his history come alive for me.
Hastings is also a great historian. There are many other books about Churchill. He is one of the most written about men in all history, one on whom a huge amount of light has been shed.
Well, I need to stop this business with historical lamps and metaphors and just say plainly that I liked this book and consider it a significant addition to the literature on Churchill and on the war. Churchill comes across as a man of very high intelligence, a man of deep honesty, a man of real character, a man of unmatched eloquence, a man who sees himself, his country, and the entire world in a rich historical context. He was aware of the huge importance of the war against Hitler. He was aware of his central position in the struggle and his huge responsibilities. He carried them out to the best of his abilities and, at the same time, lived a full and human life.
| Author | Saramago, Jose |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Portuguese |
| Translators | Jull Costa, Margaret |
| Publication | Mariner Books, 2001 |
| Copyright Date | 1999 |
| Number of Pages | 262 |
| Extras | Book club suggestions |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | January 2020 |
Fifty year old Senhor José, a twenty-five year, never promoted veteran clerk of the Central Registry of Births, Marriages, and Deaths in a large city, lives a secret life in a tiny house that is the last remaining one of a set of houses originally physically connected to the registry building. José, always referred to as "Senhor José", has no friends or family. He has spent his adult life locating index cards among miles of card drawers, inserting new ones, updating old ones by hand, and moving cards from the section of live people to the much larger section of dead people after the Registry learns that they have died. He does his job faithfully as all of the clerks do, hoping only that he will not have to climb a ladder to the top of a drawer stack, an action that causes him dizziness and risks his falling.
However, José also has a secret life, an obsession with tracking the cards and activities of celebrities. He keeps them hidden in his closet and goes over them each night. One night he finds a card stuck to the back of a card for one of his celebrities. It identifies the birth of a girl who would now be in her thirties. This card was not selected by him but imposed upon him by chance and fate. It is this card, a record of an otherwise unknown woman, that disturbs and consumes him, becoming his biggest obsession. He must learn more about her.
He begins to track her down, going to the place recorded for her birth, trying to find people who knew her there, pretending that he is on a mission from the Central Registry. Eventually he breaks into the school where she was educated, stealing the cards they had for her student years, sleeping overnight on the headmaster's couch, and eating some food from the school refrigerator. He gets a cold from walking in the rain. In the end, he discovers that she was married, she became a math teacher in the very school that she attended and José burglarized, and she committed suicide just a few days before José discovered this last news.
Throughout the story, José runs dangerously close to discovery by the Registrar. He has used Registry stationery, told numbers of people that he was on Registry business when he wasn't, missed work, and was on the verge of losing his lifelong job. At the end however, the Registrar, counter to all expectations, appears to forgive José his transgressions. Perhaps the Registrar too was bored and found himself in sympathy with Senhor José.
This was the kind of book that, if I read it quickly, could be quite tedious and even boring. Why should a reader care about a stunted clerk with a pointless obsession? But if I read slowly it could be fascinating. Saramago's language is rich and subtle and the thoughts he expresses when speaking of even ordinary things call to mind extraordinary ideas. He writes:
"For, and let us make this quite clear, the 'Senhor' is not worth quite what it might at first seem to promise, at least not here in the Central Registry, where the fact that everyone addresses everyone else in the same way, from the Registrar down to the most recently recruited clerk, does not necessarily have the same meaning when applied to the different relationships within the hierarchy, for, in the varying ways that this one short word is spoken, and according to rank or to the mood of the moment, one can observe a whole range of modulations: condescension, irritation, irony, disdain, humility, flattery, a clear demonstration of the extent of expressive potentiality of two brief vocal emissions which, at first glance, in that particular combination, appeared to be saying only one thing. More or less the same happens with the two syllables of José, plus the two syllables of Senhor, when these precede the name. When someone addresses the above-named person either inside the Central Registry or outside it, one will always be able to detect a tone of disdain, irony, irritation or condescension."
Reading Saramago clearly requires an investment, not only in time, but also in sensitivity. The reader must open him or herself to reflections upon the subtleties of language and feeling.
I was alternately bored and fascinated by reading the book, but when I was bored I could change that boredom to fascination by slowing down and thinking more. It was a book that worked well with my usual practice involving concurrent reading of multiple books.
I looked at the book club questions and suggestions but, as usual, I found them to be a distraction from, rather than an addition to, my own ideas about the book.
There is an extensive and very fine appreciation of the book by Chilton Foliat, reproduced on the Amazon web page for this title.
| Author | Updike, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | Brilliance Audio, 2009 |
| Copyright Date | 2009 |
| Number of Pages | 304 |
| Genres | Fiction; Short stories |
| Keywords | Old age |
| When Read | January 2020 |
The first story, Morocco, was written in the 1970's in Updike's middle age. The other seventeen all date from the 2000's when Updike was close to or in his 70's, musing on old age and death.
I can't say that I liked the stories. I felt depressed by the concentration on aging. It was as if a man's present, in his old age, was the summation and object of his life and all of his youth and middle age were not really very important except in that they brought him to this conclusion. The old men of the stories were not unintelligent or unperceptive. They were not lost or incompetent. But I had a feeling of them as cast up on a far shore of life, waiting for the waves to claim them, not having any goals left to them, not especially engaged with anyone around them. I accept that this is an accurate picture of the lives of many old men. I accept that I myself am not free of the same type of isolation experienced by these men. There is much in Updike's account that speaks directly to me, but I hope for better. Even though I can see much truth in the stories I believe in another truth that is just as real and is more meaningful.
I might have done better to read the stories myself rather than listen to Luke Daniels' reading of them. I felt that the tone was flat and that it didn't have the sense of age of the subjects. Perhaps it was the right tone for these stories but its contribution to the writing seemed to me to emphasize the aspects of it that I liked least.
| Author | Simon, Scott |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Flatiron Books |
| Copyright Date | 2015 |
| Number of Pages | 272 |
| Extras | About the author |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Biography; Memoir |
| Keywords | Dying |
| When Read | February 2020 |
Simon, a writer, broadcaster, and author of both fiction and non-fiction, grew up under the wing of his mother when his Jewish, alcoholic, comedian, father, left the family and later died. His Catholic mother Patricia (or Pat or Patti) married another Jew and, when he died, yet another. She was a beautiful, smart, gracious woman who attracted friends easily and had many of them, both men and women. Simon was her only living child.
When his mother was diagnosed with incurable cancer and was living her last days in a hospital intensive care unit (ICU), Simon moved in with her, sleeping on the floor next to her bed, holding her, wiping sweat from her brow and snot from the tubes in her nose, singing songs with and to her, reminiscing constantly about the people they both knew. He tweeted frequent messages about her condition and, after her death, decided to publish a book about her and his and her last days together.
My initial reaction to the book was negative. I was especially reacting against Scott Simon's childish behavior as a teenager, being rude, ungrateful, and persistently nasty to all of his mother's male friends. I thought of Marcel Proust's Swann's Way, a book I attempted to read more than once but could never get past the childish self-absorption of the first part of the story. But over time I came to appreciate Simon's honest description of himself and his sincere devotion to his mother. I came to appreciate the humanity that each exhibited.
The book was an NCI Book Club selection. I would never have read and probably never even have looked through it without the Club member, Anne Middleswarth, who introduced this as her suggested book for the meeting in February, 2020.
| Author | Ulfelder, Steve |
|---|---|
| Publication | Audible |
| Copyright Date | 2011 |
| Number of Pages | 292 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | February 2020 |
In his first novel, Ulfelder has created Conway Sax, an ex-alcholic, ex-con, tough guy with a middle class girlfriend. His lifelong passion is fixing and racing cars. When a character named Tander Phigg from his local Alcholics Anonymous chapter, known as the Barn Burners, gets in trouble with an auto mechanic, he calls on Conway for help. Conway argues with the mechanic but is hit from behind, knocked out, and soon after finds his friend hanging in his messed up house. The story involves drug dealers and car mechanics who smuggle dope for them and Conway's own alcoholic father Fred Sax who hates his son for not helping him and who winds up helping a man who is not just out to rob Conway, as Fred thought, but to kill him.
In the end, of course, the truth is revealed, the killer is killed by Conway in a fight. The world returns to its proper state. Conway finds Fred at Purgatory Chasm state park where Fred runs downhill in a repeat of a wild, frightening foot race that he had run against Conway when his son was 13 years old and Fred aimed to teach him that racing drivers had to go all out, risk everything, use any tactic, and hold nothing back. Fred loses his footing, flies in the air, and is killed in the fall. In a last scene he acknowledges, and maybe forgives, his son.
The story had the typical problems that books like this tend to have. One that always bothers me is that the hero of the story has to keep a lot of his thoughts to himself, never telling enough to the police that they might be able to take events out of the hero's hands and find the killer without him. But I guess that's a convention of first person mysteries that has to be accepted.
The writing was pretty good, as good as the established mystery writers. The writing about cars and racing was very good, adding interest to the story. There was no great literature here but the book was a quite good first try at a mystery novel. It has led to two sequels so far.
| Author | Krauss, Lawrence M. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Free Press (Simon and Schuster) |
| Copyright Date | 2012 |
| Number of Pages | 240 |
| Extras | Afterword by Richard Dawkins |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Physics |
| Keywords | Cosmology; Quantum mechanics |
| When Read | February 2020 |
Krauss offers popular (non-mathematical) speculative answers to the questions: Why is there something rather than nothing? and, What is the nature of "empty" space? Along the way he introduces readers to some of the major issues in contemporary physics: How large is the universe? Will it expand more rapidly as time goes by (an "open" universe), reverse the expansion and shrink down to a big crunch (a "closed" universe), or expand more and more slowly without ever reaching the point where it will shrink (a "flat" universe.) He thinks a flat universe is the most likely possibility.
I can't claim to have understood much of what Krauss wrote. He made a heroic effort to explain concepts that are entirely outside the realm of the middle sized, middle distance world that we interact with in our ordinary lives, but I don't know how much of his explanations settled in my brain. I'm sure I could do better if I re-read the book two or three times, but I'm not going to do that, at least not now.
If I understood him correctly, particle pairs (e.g., protons and anti-protons, electrons and positrons, and some other particle types) arise spontaneously out of "empty" space and then annihilate almost immediately afterward, turning back into empty space. There is presumably some sort of energy (a field?) that occupies and perhaps even defines the space, that provides the source of the energy for the particle formation. However in neutral conditions, the lifetime of the particles is measurable in such tiny fractions of a second that there are no practical, and perhaps no possible, instruments that could detect them. But in other conditions, in the presence of positive or negative energy (not zero energy or 100% balanced energy) the particles may separate and remain in existence. This could be the start of a "big bang".
Krauss cannot produce the mathematics to explain the big bang in a popular book but he does say that there is no real doubt that the big bang occurred. The mathematics that describe the amounts of hydrogen, helium, and lithium in the universe (observable by measuring discrepancies in light spectra due to absorption by those elements), and the speeds of recession of distant galaxies (measurable by testing light brightness from a type of supernova that always produces the same amount of light) agree with the mathematical predictions based on a big bang theory to 10 decimal places! Our observed universe is therefore known to have been created in a big bang 13.72 billion years ago!
I have to hand it to Krauss and his peers. They've found possible answers to questions that most of us can't even ask. Some of these answers are strongly supported by empirical evidence. Some are possibly supported. Some are purely speculative hypotheses for which mathematical equations can be made to work out.
When I read Molecular Biology of the Cell I felt like I was beginning to understand what we humans really are at a deeper level. The relationship of life, thought, and chemistry began to coalesce and make sense. I think the physicists are doing the same sort of work but the level of abstraction is higher and the world they are investigating even more exotic than the world of cell biology. I don't understand it as well as I understand chemistry and biology, but I wish I did and I will continue to make at least weak efforts to develop some understanding of the world that Einstein, Bohr, Lemaitre, Feynman, Krauss, and all the others are revealing to us.
| Author | Weir, Andy |
|---|---|
| Publication | Andy Weir |
| Copyright Date | 2011 |
| Number of Pages | 387 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction; Comedy |
| When Read | February 2020 |
Six astronauts on a mission to Mars are forced to abandon the planet after only six Martian days ("sols") when a severe wind and dust storm threatens to destroy their ascent vehicle and their small base. One of them, engineer and botanist Mark Watney, is apparently killed by a flying pole and blown away by the wind. With the ascent vehicle tottering dangerously, the other five must abandon the lost and apparently dead Watney and escape into orbit and then into a return journey to earth. But Watney is not dead. He survives his injury and the storm and makes it back to the "Hab" where he takes stock of his situation and begins planning for how to plant potatoes, synthesize water from hydrazine fuel and oxygen, establish contact with earth, and make his way to the landing place for the next Mars mission that will come in in over a year later.
Watney displays incredible knowledge, ingenuity, and skill, surviving and learning from his mistakes. He retrieves the old Pathfinder probe sent to Mars decades before, repairs it, and gets its radio working to talk to earth. He modifies the two "rover" vehicles left on the planet to serve his needs. He plants potatoes, harvests them, replants the seeds, waters them with reclaimed and synthesized water, and stores away a good crop before a mistake with his hydrazine operation blows the Hab life support and exposes the plants to near vacuum and deep sub-freezing temperatures. But he recovers from every failure and makes progress on his goal.
On Earth, and then in the spaceship carrying the other five astronauts home, every preparation is made to retrieve him. After the most harrowing adventures and high dramatic tension, he is saved and brought home.
If a computer programmer had told me that he was going to write a scifi novel in which every page is saturated with mechanical, electrical, and chemical engineering details I would have said, "That's great Andy, but how many people do you think would be interested enough to read it?"
It turns out that the answer is - millions - and counting. What started as a free read on his personal website eventually turned into a 99 cent Amazon download and is now an $8.99 Kindle book after becoming a runaway popular movie. As of today I see 37,630 reviews on Amazon, an astonishingly high number.
The book is a real gem. Part of the reason is that Weir has done an outstanding job of explaining thousands of large and small facts about space travel, Mars, and all sorts of imaginable but, for the vast majority of us readers, unimagined details about everything involved in Watney's ordeal. Part is the constantly alternating web of cliff edge drama, heroic action, human foibles, and truly delightful comedy that Weir weaves through his steady technical description. It really was the kind of book that's hard to put down. I loved it.
I have to thank my son-in-law Jim Herndon for turning me on to The Martian. He said it was a great book and he was right.
| Author | Stout, Rex |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Farrar and Rinehart |
| Copyright Date | 1934 |
| Number of Pages | 313 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | February 2020 |
A young woman approaches Nero and Archie asking for help concerning her missing brother, an Italian machinist named Maffei living in New York. Wolfe figures out that the man was murdered because he had constructed a lethal golf club which, when swung and contacting a ball, would shoot a needle out of the handle with deadly snake poison. The club killed a well known doctor but it turned out that it came from the bag of a friend of the doctor who was the real target of the attempt. Wolfe and Archie soon learn the identity of the killer and the rest of the book is about how they get the proof, which ultimately wins them $10,000 from a wealthy states attorney who hates them but whom they saved from making stupid and false claims that the killing was just a snake bite, and $50,000 from the family of the doctor.
This was the very first Nero Wolfe / Archie Goodwin novel. The bibliographic descriptions comes from the first edition.
I was truly surprised to read this first book of the series and discover that almost all of the features of the following books were already present in this one. Wolfe lived in a house on 35th St. in Manhattan. It had a front parlor, office, kitchen, and dining room on the first floor, bedrooms on the second and third floors, an orchid greenhouse on the roof, and an elevator to move Wolfe's massive bulk up and down the floors. Wolfe lived there with Archie, Fritz Brenner, the cook, and Horstmann, the plant caretaker. Wolfe drank gallons of beer (this seemed overdone in comparison with later volumes.) Saul Panzer, Fred Durkin, and Orrie Cather, Wolfe's occasionally hired detectives, were already here, even Purley Stebbins, the cop, had a cameo role.
I speculate that Stout had already begun to think in terms of a series of novels and had already created outlines of more to come. By the time he finished the first book, he knew what elements he wanted in the future and planted introductions here to be ready. Stout had certainly learned a lot since his very inadequate 1914 effort in Under the Andes of two decades before.
| Author | Le Carre, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | Chivers Audio |
| Copyright Date | 1979 |
| Number of Pages | 468 |
| Genres | Fiction; Spy |
| When Read | February 2020 |
In this third volume of the Karla Trilogy a middle aged Russian emigre woman living in Paris is approached by Soviet agents and later attacked in a failed assassination attempt. She communicates with "the General", a former Red Army general during WWII and an Estonian leader of an anti-communist emigre group living in London who had protected her in the past. However the General is soon murdered. The Circus calls George Smiley out of his retirement to investigate this killing of a man who had been his agent. There are efforts from higher up to just paper over the murder as a simple street crime but Smiley knows there's more to it than that. He travels to Paris, Hamburg, Switzerland, and Berlin, attempting to track down people who are being murdered before he can reach them. In the end, he comes to the conclusion that Karla, a chief spy of Moscow Centre, has a daughter in a mental hospital in Switzerland whom he is trying hard to protect. Smiley sends a message to Karla threatening to expose Karla's daughter and Karla's actions to protect her to Moscow Centre where, as a result, very bad things are likely to happen to the girl and to Karla himself. In the end, Karla defects to the west.
The narrative includes classic hallmarks of Le Carre novels. Smiley's interrogations go on and on and on as he teases out nuggets of information. His personal nature is to be polite but highly focused on getting the information he wants. He's constantly going over what he has been told in his mind, attempting to relate what he's hearing now to what he heard before. Le Carre never explains Smiley's thought process. The reader often has only slight hints about the meaning of all of the small facts that he is accumulating and must pay close attention if he is to understand what it all means in the end. Characters are suffering. Smiley isn't there to help them, he's there to investigate, discover the facts, and make things come out in such a way that his side is the winner. Or is that what he's really after? How much does he care about the people on his team? How much does he care about those who may be on the other side? It's all murky and hard to see.
We never learn what happens to Alexandra, Karla's daughter. Is she reunited with her putative mother, the woman in Paris at the beginning of the story? Is she taken back to the the USSR for incarceration in one of the destructive psychiatric hospitals where anti-soviet people are "treated"? Will Smiley save her? Will he even try? If he does, will she accept Karla or hate him, and can she recover her equilibrium? I have to presume that he will rescue her as part of the incentive that he's offering to Karla for his defection, but we are given no details.
Smiley deals with his own personal issues too. His wife Anna was seduced by Bill Haydon, a top British agent who is actually a Soviet mole, ordered by Karla to undermine Smiley by seducing his wife. He has grown old and isn't sure what he should be doing with the little that remains of his life. He watches some of his old associates slide downhill.
This is classic Le Carre from the master who turned out one after another after another.
| Author | Russo, Richard |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Alfred A. Knopf |
| Copyright Date | 2019 |
| Number of Pages | 320 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | February 2020 |
Three young fellows from middle class backgrounds - Lincoln, Teddy, and Mickey - meet and become student friends in an upper class college where they work as "hashers" cooking and serving food, and cleaning up afterwards in a fancy sorority. All three fall in love with Jacy, a beautiful, unconventional, sorority sister who treats the boys as friends. The boys and Jacy all go to a house in Martha's Vineyard owned by Lincoln's mother, but Jacy disappears. She was scheduled to marry a stuck up rich kid who really had nothing in common with her. It is assumed that she ran away but, when she never reappears, it is feared that she was murdered. 45 years later in 2016, the three men, now all 66 years old, meet again at the same house. Lincoln and Teddy try to unravel the mystery of what happened to Jacy but it is Mickey who knows the truth. Jacy ran away to Canada with Mickey. At first it was to assist him in escaping the draft. He felt an obligation to fight in Vietnam but was more in love with Jacy than with the promise to his father that he would go. Later it is learned that Jacy had an incurable disease of which she died in Canada.
Those are the bare bones of a complicated story in which each of the four main characters has problems of his or her own. Lincoln is the son of the fundamentalist Wolfgang Amadeus ("Dub Yay") Moser who always has to be right, and a formerly Catholic mother who always gives in to Dub Yay except that she will not sell the house she inherited on Martha's Vineyard, even when Dub Yay has run out of money. In the face of all of her husband's opposition, she sends her only child to the ritzy Eastern college. Teddy is the son of two Midwest high school English teachers who raise him decently but not with any love. He is single because of his impotence, caused by an injury from one of his teammates egged on by an abusive high school basketball coach. Mickey, a burly man who beats the hell out of two of Jacy's abusers, comes from a working class family. When his mother tells his father that Mickey aced his SAT exam, puzzled, his Dad turns to her and asks, Who was his real father? But the only really tragic background belonged to Jacy. As an older teenager she discovers that her rich, sexually abusive and secretly criminal father, is not her real father, who was a handsome immigrant bartender at the country club whom her mother adored but dared not marry and who died of a genetic disease that later claimed Jacy herself. Her hatred of her non-father and resentment of her secretive and non-protective mother drives her to become the wild and rebellious young woman that she became.
The author builds this book very patiently. He concentrates mostly on Lincoln and Teddy, giving alternating chapters to one and then the other. Only towards the end are Mickey's and Jacy's stories filled in. Russo is deeply sympathetic to all of them and we are brought to understand and sympathize with them too. They are all intelligent and decent people. All of them deal with financial problems. They are affected by the war in Vietnam and, decades later, by the candidacy of Donald Trump.
I had some feeling that the 66 year olds that Lincoln, Teddy, and Mickey had become were looking back on their lives and wondering whether they had lived as they should have. Lincoln had a successful business career, married a fine wife, and had six handsome and successful children. He still looked out for his 91 year old father, Dub Yay. Teddy had worked first as an adjunct professor of English, and then as the founder and editor of a very small publishing house. He wondered if he should have entered a monastery. As an older man, Mickey appeared to have lived exactly as he had as a teenager, playing guitar in rock bands for his whole life, though in fact he had grown up more than he let on. Richard Russo, himself 66 years old when the events in the book took place and 69 when it was published, seemed to me to be clearly reflecting on his own life and the times in which he lived.
At my own age, now 73, of course I too look back on life. Most of my time has already been lived and whatever I did and whomever I was is who I am now and will remain. I am satisfied with it. I could have done more and better but I also could have done less and worse. The reflection that Russo has produced and induced in his older readers has fit well into my own reflection and given me considerable pleasure in his book.
Read for the NCI book group meeting in March, 2020.
The members of the group had mixed feelings about this book. Most liked Empire Falls, another Russo novel that we read, better than Chances Are. If I could summarize and paraphrase some of the reactions I'd say that some felt rather manipulated by the author's hiding of the outcome of the Jacy disappearance part of the story, and some were not entirely convinced that the sexual abuse of Jacy and her reaction to it were authentic. I had to admit that these criticisms were valid though I said that I liked Russo's sympathy displayed towards all of the characters and the humanity with which he imbued the three men.
| Author | Furst, Alan |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Random House |
| Copyright Date | 2004 |
| Number of Pages | 466 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | February 2020 |
In May, 1941, the Dutch tramp steamer Noordendam, under the command of Captain Eric DeHaan, is in Tangier in Spanish Morocco. The British secret services recruit him to deliver a group of commandos to a spot on the German occupied North African coast where they will attempt to capture some secret electronic equipment and bring it back for examination. As its only protection, the ship is repainted and reflagged as a neutral Spanish ship which is known to be under repair in Mexico and will not show up in Mediterranean waters. The mission is not very successful. The commando commander and a number of his men are lost, the equipment captured has been damaged, but at least the Santa Rosa / Noordendam is still intact and makes it to Egypt.
The next mission is even more dangerous. The ship will carry electronic spy equipment (radio or radar, I'm not sure which) to a secret observation post on the coast of Sweden to watch German activity in the Baltic. The date is mid-June, 1941. Furst doesn't tell us but those of us in the know realize that the time is getting closer and closer to June 22, the date of the German invasion of the USSR. The Santa Rosa makes it into the Baltic, negotiates the minefields, and arrives at the barren Swedish coastline where it offloads its equipment. But the next day it is accosted and boarded by Germans in a small minesweeper. There is a hair raising, edge of the seat episode in which DeHaan and his crew manage to kill or capture the boarders and make their way away from the Germans in a cloud of black smoke. They join a Russian convoy heading east from the first port in Latvia. The convoy is destroyed but the Santa Rosa makes it to Finland where it is interned and DeHaan and the Russian journalist Maria Bromen can live safe from both Germans and Russians.
As in other Furst books, the plot is episodic and the violence is held to a minimum given the nature of the subject. As in others, I have great sympathy for and with the characters. They are people with very little political ideology but a lot of human decency. They cannot abide Nazism or, for that matter, Stalinist communism. What they want is peace and personal fulfillment.
This is the 13th of Furst's books that I've read. They are a staple of fiction for me and they work well as audiobooks, a medium where the choices are very limited.
| Author | Egan, Greg |
|---|---|
| Publication | Night Shade, 2014 |
| Copyright Date | 1992 |
| Number of Pages | 224 |
| Extras | "Appendix: Finding the Odds" |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| Keywords | Physics; Quantum mechanics |
| When Read | March 2020 |
In 2034 the solar system grows dark. A "bubble" that prevents light and perhaps other things from entering or leaving the solar system has formed around it. People can still see the sun, moon, and planets, but not the stars. No one knows how or why this was done. Religious fanatics have their opinions but one faction of scientific opinion comes to believe that it was done in order to prevent human observers from collapsing quantum uncertainties by observing the rest of the universe (recall "Schrodinger's Cat"), severely limiting the lives of beings who lived in a universe in which people and objects existed in gigantic multiplicity.
In 2067 Australian private detective Nick Stavrianos is hired by an unknown person or persons to find Laura Andrews, a severely brain damaged woman who has either escaped or been kidnapped from a high security mental hospital. Nick has multiple "mods" in his brain, artificial modifications of his brain patterns that he bought and that give him extra capabilities, like the ability to remain calm, the ability to ignore boredom, the ability to see, hear, and speak to an imaginary representation of his wife who died seven years before, and very importantly, a "loyalty" mod forced upon him by the "Ensemble", Laura's kidnappers, when they catch him breaking into their building and decide to keep him in their own employ rather than kill him, something they would otherwise have to do to keep him from revealing the ensemble to others.
From then on Nick works as a security guard in "the New Hong Kong Republic", protecting a woman from anyeone like the man he was before. That woman is working on a new technique for using quantum uncertainty to enable a person to select from among multiple (as in many orders of magnitude) "smeared" eigenstates, for example, one in which all the security guards happen to be looking away, all the cameras are offline, and all the door locks happen to be unlocked when you happen to walk past them.
What follows is quantum mechanical heaven or hell, Nick doesn't know which, in which he becomes a key operative in the process whereby the quantum universe is "collapsed", or not collapsed, and the futures of the earth, the solar system, all human beings, and perhaps the universe, are all at stake.
Here are a few paragraphs that convey something of the flavor of the book:
"Loyalty mods don't whisper propaganda in your skull. They don't bombard you with images of the object of devotion while stimulating the pleasure centers of your brain, or cripple you with pain and nausea if you stray from correct thought. They don't cloud your mind with blissful euphoria, or feverish zealotry; nor do they trick you into accepting some flawed but elegant piece of casuistry. No brainwashing, no conditioning, no persuasion. A loyalty mod isn't an agent of change; it's the end product, a fait accompli. Not a cause for belief, but belief itself, belief made flesh - or rather, flesh made into belief."
...
"When you and Po-kwai smear, you smear into every possible state that either of you could be in - however unlikely. There’s no reason why that shouldn't include states where you influence the use of the eigenstate mod."
"I can't seem to summon up the energy to argue against this preposterous assertion; common sense has been rendered indefensible, naive, irrelevant. I finally say, pleadingly, 'But I don't want any of the things that happen!'"
The appendix at the end of the book explains the mathematics of the calculations of probability of all the improbable things that can happen.
This book was an extraordinary combination of the most complicated hard science and the most exuberant extrapolation of that science into science fiction. It was a tour de force.
Do I believe any of it? Is it possible that objects on human scale, the "middle sized middle distance" objects like people and cats and coins and keys and chairs and tables can be subject to quantum indeterminacy? My own limited understanding of the subject, an understanding way far below that of Greg Egan, is that No, they can't. The laws of quantum mechanics only apply at quantum scale, not to people or houses or even eye movements, all many orders of magnitude in size above an electron. However I can't say for sure whether that is only "belief", and not "understanding", and I can't say whether that belief is based on real knowledge, limited to be sure, but still knowledge, or whether it's based on the dizziness that comes over me when I try to imagine millions, billions, trillions, or quadrillions, or even just tens or hundreds of eigenstates in which some part of me can participate in a matter of seconds and all but one of which wink out of existence when I or someone else observes me.
I will admit that at least some simple minded understanding of quantum mechanics, assuming a simple mind can understand anything of quantum mechanics, is needed in order to get anything out of this book. Egan explains the basics but I expect that unprepared readers will still be left uncomprehending. Nevertheless, I rate it as a truly excellent novel. It seemed to me that, at just about every point where I wanted to ask, "Hey, wait a minute, what about ...", Egan was ahead of me. One of his characters, usually Nick himself, would be asking the same thing only more intelligently than I did. And beyond that, Nick would be raising questions and doubts that I hadn't thought of until he raised them and then I would think, "Yeah, that's right, what about that?" Then one of Nick's smooth acquaintances would explain why "that" was not an issue - leaving both Nick and I shaking our heads, but not knowing what to say about it.
It was a brilliant book - hard on Nick and hard on the reader, but highly rewarding for all that.
| Author | Robbins, David |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 2000 |
| Copyright Date | 2000 |
| Number of Pages | x + 398 |
| Extras | Interview with the author |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | March 2020 |
In January, 1945, Hitler's offensive in the Ardennes, his last, futile, hopeless attempt to turn the tide of the war, had been defeated. British and Americans forces were poised to cross the Rhine. Their bombers ranged at will over Germany in massive numbers, destroying Berlin and many other cities. Russian forces were poised along the Vistula, waiting for the Germans to destroy the independence movement in Poland and building up their forces for an assault across Poland and into Germany. Armies on both fronts were aimed to capture Berlin, a city that was defended in the east by do or die fanatics but in the west by men who knew the war was over and, mostly, wished to surrender to the Americans, whose country had never been bombed or terrorized by Nazi armies and who might therefore be the gentlest of the possible captors.
Robbins sees all this from the point of view of the three main Allied leaders, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin, and from a small number of (fictional) people on the ground - Life Magazine photographer Charley Bandy, Red Army punishment battalion soldiers Ilya Shokin and Misha Bakov, and Berlin Philharmonic cellist Charlotta ("Lottie") and her "Mutti" Freya.
The leaders each pursue large war aims. Stalin hopes to win the war by conquering Berlin, turning all of the east European states and maybe some of the western or near western ones too into Russian communist satellites. Churchill hopes to create a new world after the war in which Britain's Empire survives and the countries of Eastern Europe emerge as fully independent. Roosevelt hopes to create a new world order, organized around the United Nations, in which the US and USSR retain their alliance. Of course only Stalin gets his wish.
Much of the story is devoted to the little people, the photographer, the cellist and her mother, and the two Russian soldiers. Bandy is obsessed with creating images of the war. Lottie hopes to escape the bombing, the fighting, and the looting and rapes that are expected if the Russians conquer the city. Her Mutti hopes to protect Lottie and also a Jew that she is hiding in the cellar. Ilya and Misha hope to win back the honor taken from them by their assignments to the punishment battalion, though both experience a hardening of their hearts and dogged acceptance of more and more brutal fighting. All of them learn much about themselves and about the war.
There are no Nazi protagonists in this book. The points of view of Hitler, the the SS, and the young boys and old men drafted into defending the city play are not represented.
I began the book with some skepticism. Writing a novel from the points of view of Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin is a tall order. Having read quite a few books by (mostly Churchill, but one or two by Stalin too) and about these famous men I was skeptical that Robbins would be able to pull it off. Over time however, perhaps grudgingly but nevertheless truly, I came to respect his effort. His accounts were informative and plausible, however he said nothing about what I thought was a major reason for the western allies failure to take Berlin, namely that, in the democracies, people had enough of war and would be angry at any politicians who sent British or American troops to die when Russians were willing to handle the problem. That was also a big reason for dropping the atom bomb on Japan rather than launching a costly invasion.
The stories of the little people were also informative, mostly plausible and always interesting.
If I didn't know better, I'd be a little dubious about some of the intense action experienced by Ilya and Misha, but I've read enough about the eastern front, from both German and Russian as well as western sources, to know that the fighting was very much like what Robbins describes.
Novels are difficult to write. Writing from the points of view of multiple characters is harder than sticking with one protagonist. If the characters are famous and their personalities and actions are extensively documented, as Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin are, then the author's options are highly circumscribed. If those characters are embedded in situations and facing experiences that the writer has never himself been in and faced, I expect that making it all work is a challenge for even a very experienced writer.
The interview with Robbins at the end was very interesting. I think he said that he read 86 books in his research for this one, 70 some cover to cover and the others just to look up particular facts. That's a lot of books.
I think I get more and more appreciative of what writers do.
| Author | Barnes, Julian |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Vintage International, 1990 |
| Copyright Date | 1984 |
| Number of Pages | 192 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | March 2020 |
Dr. Geoffrey Braithwaite, an aging English doctor and veteran of World War II comes to France 40 years after the war to determine which of two stuffed birds whose current owners claim once belonged to Gustave Flaubert is the actual item that the famous writer borrowed from the Rouen Museum's stuffed bird collection. That's the premise and the wrapper around a series of GB's investigations and ruminations on Flaubert's life and writing.
The book is classified by libraries as fiction. Clearly, Braithwaite is a fictional character, however only a reader with much more knowledge of Flaubert than I have could say which of the other characters and their writings that appear in the text are fictional and which are historical. Barnes' text is so persuasive to me that I'm prepared to believe that all of it is historical, but if that belief is mistaken, I'm fully prepared to accept the text as brilliant fiction. Either way, it's wonderful writing, the kind that makes me aware of possibilities in biography, in humor, in literary criticism, in perceptiveness, in mastery of language, in awareness of the possibilities in life and in writing. Here are some quotes from Braithwaite quoting Flaubert, presumably accurately, but see my preparation above.
"1846: I am only a literary lizard basking the day away beneath the great sun of Beauty. That's all."
"1857: Books aren't made in the way that babies are: they are made like pyramids. There's some long-pondered plan, and then great blocks of stone are placed one on top of the other, and it's back-breaking, sweaty, time-consuming work. And all to no purpose! It just stands like that in the desert! But it towers over it prodigiously. Jackals piss at the base of it, and bourgeois clamber to the top of it, etc. Continue this comparison."
Braithwaite after reading a professional critic of Flaubert writes:
"... is there a perfect reader somewhere, a total reader? Does Dr Starkie's reading of Madame Bovary contain all the responses which I have when I read the book, and then add a whole lot more, so that my reading is in a way pointless? Well, I hope not. My reading might be pointless in terms of the history of literary criticism; but it's not pointless in terms of pleasure. I can't prove that lay readers enjoy books more than professional critics; but I can tell you one advantage we have over them. We can forget. Dr Starkie and her kind are cursed with memory ..."
And some more about writing and writers:
"Look, writers aren't perfect, I want to cry, any more than husbands and wives are perfect. The only unfailing rule is, If they seem so, they can't be. I never thought my wife was perfect. I loved her, but I never deceived myself. I remember ... But I'll keep that for another time."
"I was reading Mauriac the other day: the Mémoires intérieurs, written at the very end of his life. It's the time when the final pellets of vanity accumulate into a cyst, when the self starts up its last pathetic murmur of 'Remember me, remember me ...'; it's the time when the autobiographies get written, the last boasts are made, and the memories which no one else's brain still holds are written down with a false idea of value."
Barnes is, of course, as perfectly fluent in French as he is in English, and that's very fluent indeed. I have liked all of Barnes' books that I have read but I think maybe this one most of all.
I have long held that it's impossible to pick the greatest book ever written because great books are often great in very different and incommensurable ways. Barnes is one of those great writers who has beaten his own path to greatness. It's a private and personal way, not like the universal greatness of Tolstoy or Melville. It's in a writerly way that is not, if I may say so, in the same great way as Flaubert. It has its own greatness. I loved reading it.
| Author | Box, C.J. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Brilliance Audio |
| Copyright Date | 2003 |
| Number of Pages | 384 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | March 2020 |
Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett is observing a herd of elk browsing in a field in December when a shot is fired and one of the elk falls. It is legal for a hunter to shoot an elk, but the single kill is immediately followed by shot after shot after shot and seven elk are down by the time Joe comes upon a crazed man sitting in the snow and loading cigarettes from his pocket into the magazine of his hunting rifle. It's Lamar Gardiner, district supervisor for the national forest - in the middle of a nervous breakdown. Joe arrests him and puts him in his pickup to take to town but, along the way, Gardiner slips a pair of Joe's handcuffs out of the glove compartment, cuffs Joe's hand to the wheel, and takes off in the snow. When Joe gets loose and tracks him down he finds the hapless Gardiner nailed to a tree by a couple of arrows but still barely alive. He carries the man on his back to his pickup and drives to town but Gardiner is dead by then. Thus begins a story about finding the killer, figuring out why the nervous breakdown and the murder occurred, and attempting to avert a planned attack by rogue Forest Service official Melinda Strickland and rogue FBI agent Dick Munker, both selfish and crazy, on the camp of a group of "Sovereigns" who rejected the government.
Complicating the story, Joe's foster daughter April, is kidnapped by her birth mother who has slept with a corrupt judge to get a court order and then taken the girl to the Sovereign camp. Joe is desperate to stop an armed attack on the camp. Also, one Nick Romanowski, a difficult and somewhat dangerous man arrested and seriously maltreated by the local sheriff and his dimwitted deputies becomes an ally of Joe.
In the end, Dick Munker has caused April's death, Romanowski leads Munker into a fatal snowmobile chase, and finally, off-camera as it were, Romanowski forces Strickland to sign a pair of statements written by Joe to give $25,000 to fund children in trouble, and to resign her job. Then he kills her with her own gun and makes it look like suicide. Joe and his wife Mary Beth each suspect the other of murdering Strickland and are greatly relieved when they each learn that the other has the same worry and didn't commit the crime.
Reading Joe Pickett novels gives me what is probably a healthy dose of Western American individualism and view of politics and life. The government people are very disturbing in this story. They include Lamar Gardiner, the crazy idiot; sheriff Bud Barnum, a rather nasty fellow, and his low-life deputy who likes to hurt people; FBI maniac Dick Munker; and totally self-involved and narcissistic Melinda Strickland. On the other side we have Nate Romanowski, an ex-commando of some sort who uses a snowmobile to lead Munker to his death and then later out and out murders Strickland; and the "Sovereigns" who camp illegally on government land but are portrayed as decent people.
Box doesn't explicitly attack the government as government. The out of line government agents aren't the only government people. After all, Joe Pickett himself is a government agent. The nasty Feds are not the only Feds in the story. They are people who are known by previous superiors to be dingbats but they have been shifted around to places where they'd be out of the hair of their previous superiors and, perhaps, be relatively harmless? It's not an evil process, just a short-sighted, cover your butt, ain't my problem process. Some of the other characters, specifically the two roofers who murdered Gardiner because he ordered some roofing work that the government never paid for, aren't exactly fine folks either.
My personal experience with government employees and contractors is mainly with librarians and cancer fighters. The great majority are fine, educated, intelligent, dedicated, hard working people. I loved working with them. However it's probably not a bad idea for me to be exposed to people whose experience and outlook differ from mine.
As for the story, it was well written and engaging. It gives us a believable and absorbing look at the great outdoors in Wyoming in winter. Box earns his keep.
| Author | Goulart, Ron |
|---|---|
| Publication | DAW |
| Copyright Date | 1981 |
| Number of Pages | 160 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction; Comedy |
| When Read | March 2020 |
Sara Tenbrook has engaged robot Roscoe/203/TA-Humaform Time Machine Model JSG 1343-X2 to take her and her boyfriend Tim Zackery back in time to San Francisco in 1906. Reluctantly, she reveals to Tim that her goal is to find millions of dollars worth of pirate loot that a 17th century Tenbrook ancestor accumulated and, she believes, a 1906 Tenbrook ancestor buried in San Francisco and then lost in the great earthquake that occurred two days after she plans to arrive. Her task is made harder by her uncle Oscar Tenbrook who hopes to get his hands on the treasure before she does, and who sends a bunch of miscreants to follow her in time and steal the money.
The story is, of course, an amusing farce in which Roscoe is constantly catering to Sara, insulting Tim, and alternating between saving the day and losing it.
Being very interested in AI and robots, I was intrigued by the title. However there was nothing serious about either AI or robotics in the story. It was pure farce. However it was a short book that I read pretty quickly and chuckled as I read it. So nothing was lost.
| Author | Hunter, Stephen |
|---|---|
| Publication | Brilliance Audio |
| Copyright Date | 2011 |
| Number of Pages | 368 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| When Read | March 2020 |
42 year old now retired ace Marine sniper Ray Cruz is in the giant Mall of America shopping mall near Minneapolis with his bride to be when 14 or so Somali gunmen enter the mall, kill Santa Claus, shoot a number of other random people, and hustle a thousand shoppers into the atrium at the center of the mall. Cruz is in a second floor shop. He herds the nearby shoppers into the recesses of the store and assists baby sitter Lavelva Oates in moving the kids in her charge to a safer space. Then, when a Somali assaults Lavelva, he comes up from behind, breaks the man's neck, and takes his rifle and pistol. The action has begun.
Outside the mall, Douglas Obobo, the commander of the state police, is setting up an operation that he believes will provide the minimum loss of life on either side. He is a master of expressing empathy and defusing conflict. He is also a master of self-promotion. His plan is to find out what the gunmen are after, give it to them if he can, and get the release of the hostages. It's not a bad plan but it turns out to have two fatal flaws. One is that he tries to impede and misdirect the SWAT hotheads (as he sees them) and prevent them from inadvertently or otherwise starting a firefight by keeping them far from the mall. The other is that he doesn't realize that the guerrilla commander is not a Somali Muslim extremist with an agenda that Obobo can work with, but a brilliant but insane 22 year old American who is constructing a real life first person shooter game in which he hopes to kill the maximum number of players. It doesn't matter to him if hundreds die or if he himself dies. In fact he hopes for both to occur - just so he can go out in a blaze of glory that amazes and inspires others like him.
Hunter puts all this together with his usual intelligence and competence. In the end, the SWAT leaders have gotten men in close positions for a fast entry in spite of Obobo's orders, and Cruz working on the inside has already killed four or more Somalis before the crazy kid realizes he's under attack and unleashes the general conflagration that, in turn, brings in all of the SWAT fighters. Most of the people are rescued. All of the terrorists are shot. Obobo and his adjutant find a way for him to get most of the credit and get himself appointed to head of the FBI. Cruz goes on his way as unsung hero.
Ray Cruz, introduced in the earlier novel Dead Zero, was the son of Bob Lee Swagger and a Vietnamese woman who later died in the Tet offensive but was raised by adoptive parents in the Philippines. Hunter apparently felt the need of a hero younger than Bob Lee, but with the same sniper heritage.
The Mall of America is real. There are many photos of it on the Internet. It's a real fantasy land.
Stephen Hunter is a remarkable writer - an intellectual, a high award winnning Baltimore Sun and Washington Post movie reviewer (I thought his Sun reviews were the best I had read), a man with strong ties to the high arts, and a full out action/thriller/"gun nut". Are there other people like that? He's something of a guilty pleasure to read. Who else can combine an authoritative explanation of the loading procedure for an AK74 ammunition magazine with very insightful constructions of crazy killers, clueless boys whom fate dragged into Islamic terrorism, and neatly disguised allusions to classic literature and art? I have enjoyed all of his books and, in spite of all of his appeal to people who may be very, very different from me, he appeals to me too.
| Author | Rachman, Tom |
|---|---|
| Publication | Dial Press |
| Copyright Date | 2010 |
| Number of Pages | 369 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | April 2020 |
In 1953, millionaire businessman Cyrus Ott goes to Rome to establish an English language newspaper to be sold around the world. He pours money into the enterprise and soon has a stable of reporters, editors, printshop operators and managers hard at work. We learn this about the origin of the paper only in the third chapter. The story opens in Chapter One in Paris with a 70 year old reporter trying desperately to sell a story to the Rome paper in order to pay his bills. He makes up the story and, when the sharp editor in Rome keeps finding holes in it, he makes up more and more lies but ultimately fails to get his story published.
Ten more chapters follow, each concentrating on a single person on the newspaper staff, or on an Ott family member (Cyrus dies in 1962) as we build a larger, richer, and more variegated view of the institution that lasts into the 21st century before the Otts finally pull the plug on this business that cannot succeed in an era of declining newspapers and rising Internet news. Each of the characters faces increasing pressure, each in his or her own personal hell, dealing with his or her own personal devils. One has run out of money and work. One is oppressed by an editor who tears down his work and upon whom he seeks revenge. One is a new young man attempting to work as a stringer in Cairo but is being exploited and ripped off by an experienced and unscrupulous reporter who steals his laptop as well as his stories and uncaringly destroys the young man's career. One is a business manager who fires a copy editor and faces a romance that is turned against her in revenge. It continues until the final end when a clueless Oliver Ott sent by the Ott family to supervise events in Rome hides from the paper and has his own life torn down.
The book is very well written. The individual stories are imaginative. The language and plot are clever. The description of the complexities of the news business is convincing. The author does a fine job of integrating over a dozen disparate characters, building a striking whole of multiple parts. It is an impressive work. The only problem for me is that, in spite of its humor, it is relentless in the way it tears down its characters with self-defeating and other defeating acts. They lie to each other. They vie with each other for the attention of their superiors. They undermine each other. Their love affairs turn into antagonism affairs.
Are all people like that? If not, then are all news organization people like that? Authors aren't required to reproduce all kinds of characters in their novels - only the characters that they need for their story. Still, I found it grating.
I read this for the NCI Book Club. Most of the other club members saw the same good points in the book that I did but I didn't hear others voicing my criticisms. There were more critics of my type in the Amazon reviews.
I expect that Rachman is aware of my concerns, from Amazon reviewers if not from professional critics. This was his first novel. He'll have a chance to think it all over before his next one - which I expect will be very good.
| Author | Hobsbawm, Eric J. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Vintage Books, Random House |
| Copyright Date | 1987 |
| Number of Pages | 405 |
| Extras | illustrations, tables, maps, notes, further reading, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| When Read | April 2020 |
Picking up after The Age of Capital: 1848-1875, Hobsbawm continues the history of the development of western politics, culture, and economics, concluding with an analysis of the causes of the first World War. The history only really covers the developments in Europe and, to a much lesser extent, the United States. It is the "age" that is examined, not the "empire". There is hardly anything about the actual conquest, subjugation, rule, and exploitation of the lands and peoples of Africa and Asia.
The changes that took place during this period had everything to do with developments in technologies that began much earlier in the nineteenth century but only spread to all of society during the last quarter of the nineteenth and first part of the twentieth centuries. Manufacturing came to dominate western European and North American economies. Millions of peasant farmers moved to large towns and cities to work in factories or in service jobs. Millions of women entered the workforce, largely in new kinds of jobs - public (in the American sense) school teachers, telephone operators, typists and other office staff, and more. Women's education, including previously male only university education, spread. Voting rights for women became important. Public education expanded. The "middle" classes expanded as the number of educated people earning above poverty wages expanded. Railroads, telephones, motor cars, (especially in the USA), home appliances, mass produced clothing, and many other innovations were used by larger and larger numbers of people.
A major change in political life, occasioned by the changes cited above, was an increasingly democratic political environment. Voting rights were expanded with property and gender requirements going down and the number of voters going up in the western and northern European countries. Social democratic and labor parties arose in the 1880s and gained more and more adherents. They pushed for and achieved parliamentary representation. Some ruling class governments responded with repression but more advanced countries, including Britain, France, Germany, and the Scandinavian countries learned to co-opt the working class movements by permitting reforms that many bourgeois hated and resented, but which did not truly threaten the established economic order.
If I understood Hobsbawm correctly, he argued that the increasing role of the working class in society increased resistance to the coming war in 1914 but at the same time increased the pressure from the nobility and military classes to go to war, partly because of the culture of those classes and partly because war would emphasize their leadership of society and rally the people behind them. The big bourgeoisie also saw opportunities for themselves in conquest. The working class did not want war. Most of the little people in society understood that war was not in their interest. To the extent that their participation in parliamentary democracy affected the process, they resisted the march to war. But at the same time the ruling classes, especially in Germany and Austria but to some extent elsewhere too (Russia, Turkey, Italy?), considered that their future depended on a warlike assertion of their supremacy. And so, while the society, economy, and culture of the belle epoque seemed to be in flower, Europe moved steadily down the road to the catastrophe of World War.
Hobsbawm writes a kind of history that particularly appeals to me. He's interested in the big picture. He includes small amounts of information about Lloyd George, Otto von Bismark, Teddy Roosevelt, and other leaders of the day, and also about leading writers and artists, but individuals aren't the focus of his history. The focus is on the changes in economics, technology, culture, politics, peoples' view of themselves and of their world. Reading his books one finds very fine examples of the "historical materialist" approach to history that Karl Marx advocated - an approach that has been wielded well and poorly by different historians. Hobsbawm wielded it well. His history mainly examines the "big picture". It's a view of what was happening in certain important centers of the world, Europe, North America, even a bit in Japan, China, and India. However it's not an undisciplined free association of the historian's thoughts and conclusions. It's grounded and documented in footnotes, citations, tables, statistics, and generally objective data. The "Tables" and "Further Reading" sections struck me as particularly interesting in documenting the statistics behind his conclusions, and the wide and interesting reading that he did in researching his work.
I'm glad I got to finish this third volume in a series that I started in 1995. There is another volume that I haven't found yet, The Age of Extremes: 1914-1991 I hope to find and read it some day.
| Author | Suetonius |
|---|---|
| Original Language | la |
| Translators | Graves, Robert |
| Publication | Audio Connoisseur |
| Copyright Date | 121 |
| Number of Pages | 384 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Biography; History |
| Keywords | Roman Empire |
| When Read | April 2020 |
Suetonius is believed to have lived at least from 69 - 122 AD. He is known (see Wikipedia) to have served Pliny the Younger and the emperors Trajan and Hadrian, for whom he was said to be "secretary of studies" for part of Trajan's reign. His book covers the lives of "Julius Caesar (the first few chapters are missing), Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero, Galba, Otho, Vitellius, Vespasian, Titus and Domitian". The book covers the early life of each of the emperors and then progresses through each man's life to his ascent to power, his initial life and policy as emperor, his evolution over the course of his rule, and his (often violent) death. There is more extensive treatment of the earlier emperors than of the later ones.
The copyright date I've included is, of course, the date when Suetonius is supposed to have published his book. I'm not aware of any copyright laws at that time. Graves' translation was copyright 1957. A later version of Graves' translation, revised by James B. Rives was published in 2007 but I don't know whether the one I listened to was the original or the revised translation. The audiobook was released in 2009.
There is an anecdotal, gossipy character to these biographies. They are replete with stories of down and dirty deeds by the emperors, incredible but not unbelievable accounts of narcissism, astonishing examples of devil may care selfishness, and sickening stories of cruelty and vindictiveness. I know that the Roman Republic was a far less than ideal democracy but the biographies in Suetonius' history are full of complete submersion of the public good to the private and disgusting whims of crazed emperors. Men who might have seemed noble and public spirited before they became emperors were soon corrupted by their complete freedom from any control or even criticism. Some, Julius, Augustus, maybe Claudius, maybe Titus, were better than others but they weren't great and, in the cases of Julius and Titus, didn't serve long enough to see what a long span of absolute power might have done to them.
Suetonius' writing, and Graves' translation of it, were magnificent. It wasn't like modern history. Although S mentioned his sources many times, there were no rigorously formatted citations of the kind that appeared in the age of the printing press and the world wide academic community and library systems.
I don't trust that all of the stories in the book are true. Suetonius relied on accounts by people who had their own axes to grind and, while S was fully aware of this, the archives and databases of the times (if we can call them that) gave him only limited information to use in verifying their accounts. However Suetonius was a sophisticated intellectual and a keen observer of upper class society. He frequently raised his own questions about the veracity of his sources but often chose to include possibly doubtful stories with caveats about them. Oftentimes the stories were too good for him to ignore.
It's easy for me to imagine that if Donald Trump were Emperor of the United States it wouldn't take long for him to become as frightening a monster as Nero or Caligula. The horrible thing about that thought is that we Americans elected him. The heartening thing about it is that we have the power to throw him out.
Reading this book is rewarding in part for the information it conveys, in part for its clear and elegant prose, and in part because it speaks in the actual voice of a man of the Roman Empire. Too much of the ancient Greek and Roman literature is lost. What we know of it is mostly brought to us by historians of just the last few centuries. Reading modern histories tells us more than Suetonius tells us but it's still valuable to hear the authentic voices of the Romans.
As of this writing, we have indeed thrown out Trump, but it was a near thing. I did not expect that, after Trump lost by more than seven million popular votes and by an electoral college win of the exact same magnitude as Trump's "landslide" (his words) victory in 2016, so many Americans still bought into his lies, his extraordinary efforts to overthrow the vote counts, and his total condemnation by every court that heard the unsubstantiated and often ridiculous arguments made in courts on his behalf. I shouldn't be writing about this here in my book notes (there's plenty in my diary), but thinking about The Twelve Caesars heightened my now ever present fears for the future of American democracy.
| Author | Gaiman, Neil |
|---|---|
| Publication | HarperAudio |
| Copyright Date | 2014 |
| Number of Pages | 336 |
| Genres | Fiction; Fantasy |
| When Read | April 2020 |
A seven year old boy in England accompanies his father to the end of the lane where their stolen car has been found, a mile from their house. The family's lodger is found dead inside. He committed suicide. To keep the child from seeing too much an offer from Lettie Hempstock, the girl who lives in the house at the end of the lane, to take the boy into the house, is accepted. So begins a fantasy of terror.
The boy's mother takes a job. With both parents away working, a very pretty housemaid/babysitter named Ursula Monkton has been engaged. Ursula Monkton (never just "Ursula") turns out to be a terrifying creature who has won the allegiance of the boy's little sister and the sexual attraction of the boy's father. She pretends to be nice to the boy but he can see immediately that she is evil and he wants nothing to do with her. He will not eat food that she prepares, will not follow her orders, and wants only to escape to the protective house of Lettie Hempstock (never just "Lettie").
Ursula Monkton turns out to be a "flea", a banished creature from some ancient dark past from which she has escaped, arriving in the village to create her own little world of subject humans. Lettie Hempstock, and her mother Ginnie and grandmother Gran (who remembers the Big Bang) are determined to defend the world in general, and the little boy in particular, from the dark forces. In the end their power wins out. Ursula Monkton is defeated and banished. The "hunger birds" that attacked Ursula Monkton and then later attacked the boy are also banished. Poor Lettie Hempstock has given up much to save the boy and is placed in the pond, also known to Lettie as a magical ocean, at the farm house, to be swept away for years in hopes of recovery.
The story is presented as a memory from the now grown up boy 40 years later who has returned to the scene for a family funeral.
I had heard that Gaiman was a highly regarded fantasy writer but, not being interested in fantasy (though I have read some Tolkien, Adams, and some other fantasists), I never read his books. I seem to recall that I started one once but quit very quickly. When I came across this audiobook version of one of his creations I thought that might be an easier way to deal with his writing and I decided to read it.
I have to acknowledge that, for readers who are attracted to this sort of thing, it struck me as a marvelous creation. All the helplessness and terror of a seven year old in the face of evil, and all the sisterly, motherly, and grandmotherly love and protection that a seven year old boy could hope for, were present. There was much subtlety and much imagination - from creatures made of flapping canvas to hunger birds who eat holes in earth and sky and worms that burrow into a little boy's foot and reside in his heart. Gaiman did a more than creditable job as narrator as well as author. I don't see how a professional actor could have done any better.
Be that as may be (a phrase that Gaiman produces as "as maybe"), I don't expect to ever read another of his books. My pedestrian mind doesn't move easily in a world that violates the laws of physics or clips pieces of time out of the world's history. It's not just that my credulity level is too low, or that my attraction to childhood is too limited, it's also that the world of fantasy seems so much less interesting than our real world, our real history, or the scientifically imaginable future world of "hard" science fiction. Gaiman seems to write serious fantasy, not humorous or allegorical. It's not my thing.
| Author | Robinson, Derek |
|---|---|
| Publication | Maclehose Press, 2011 |
| Copyright Date | 2009 |
| Number of Pages | 346 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Aviation; World War II |
| When Read | April 2020 |
Fictional RAF bomber squadron 409 is stationed in Lincolnshire near the east coast of England at the beginning of World War II. The RAF characters in the story are all officers - pilots or their commanders and support people. They fly twin engine Handley Page Hampdens on propaganda leaflet drops ("Nickels"), sea mine laying ("Gardening"), and actual bombing strikes against German land and sea targets. The squadron gains experience and switches from Hampdens to the better performing Wellingtons.
There seem to me to be two themes running through the novel. One is the story of the pilots and other personnel in or related to squadron 409. Men are dying, some from enemy action and some from every kind of cock-up and accident. In one case, a major character whom we have followed for many pages, is simply reported lost when his plane doesn't return. In another, a dedicated cinematographer steps through a shell hole in the bottom of his plane as it is landing and is smashed to death by impact with the ground and the tail wheel.
The other main theme is a growing question about whether the bombing campaign is actually doing any good. Almost all of the pilots report that they found and hit the target on each raid. Their commanders strongly encouraged such reporting and one of them said "Damned good show" after each report. It gradually emerges however that hardly any of the bombs dropped from over two miles up, in the dark of night, often with ground further obscured by cloud, fog, or smoke, after mostly dead reckoning navigation, come anywhere near the target. Even if, by a miracle, a bomb hit the exact aiming point, it would be unusual for a flight crew to be able to verify the hit. A study based on aerial photos made during and after raids estimated that only 20% of the bombs dropped on Germany landed within five miles of the aiming point, and that five mile radius covers an area of over 75 square miles. At huge expense in money, aircraft and the lives of aircrews, the bombing campaign had achieved nothing more than to fortify British civilian morale with false claims of victories.
As I understand it, Robinson's analysis is dead on. Later in the war the RAF switched to terror bombing of cities using better navigational techniques to get more bombs on targets that were large enough that they were much easier to hit. The U.S. Army Air Force, which concentrated on daylight bombing of targets with military value, probably contributed much more to the eventual victory, but did so at very high cost in American as well as German lives.
Derek Robinson, now in his late 80's, has retired from writing. He was a good writer with a deep understanding of the technologies, policies, and culture of the RAF during the war. I think he also showed deep understanding of the people involved in the war, and a deep sympathy for them. He not only painted pictures of the pilots and aircrews, but also produced a compelling vision of Rollo Blazer, the obsessive cameraman who was committed to capturing the truth of the Luftwaffe's Blitz and the RAF's night bombing campaign.
A very good book I think.
I corresponded with Derek Robinson a few times in 2017. He was very gracious to me. The correspondence is in my email archives.
| Author | Seymour, Gerald |
|---|---|
| Publication | Clipper Audiobooks, 2013 |
| Copyright Date | 1987 |
| Number of Pages | 371 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| Keywords | Palestine; Israel |
| When Read | April 2020 |
A young man named Holt (no one uses his first name), is engaged to marry a young woman named Jane Canning. Both work in the British foreign service and have been assigned to Moscow. They accompany the British ambassador to the USSR to the Crimea. As they are leaving their hotel, a man with a crow's foot scar on his face steps out and fires a burst from an AK automatic rifle, killing the ambassador and Jane. Holt sees the killer but can do nothing as the man runs away. It was Abu Hamid, a Palestinian gunman of the PFLP, directed by the Syrian security service through a PFLP intermediary to wreak vengeance on the ambassador for his public humiliation of a Syrian envoy a year before. Back in England the Prime Minister decides to approve a plan to assassinate the killer. Noah Crane, an expert Israeli sniper is engaged to lead Holt into the Beqa'a valley where the killer has been identified as the commander of a PFLP training camp. Holt will be brought along to identify Hamid and Crane will kill him with a single 1,000 yard shot. The team would be directed by Percy Martins - who turns out to be an incompetent, self-serving, career bureaucrat.
About half of the story is devoted to the preparation for the mission. Crane, although much older than the "youngster" as he calls Holt, is much more physically fit. He demands that Holt build his strength, endurance, and hiking, running, and sneaking skills, always telling Holt what to do but always refusing to explain why. Seymour also devotes significant space to Abu Hamid, a man without the education of Holt or the perfected skills of Crane. He faces the difficult challenges of dealing with his deep sense of oppression by Israel, his fear of combat in a suicide attack, his attraction to a beautiful woman whom he later learns was sent to him by the head of a Syrian security organization to compromise him, and his boredom and disgust with his life. No one is simple in this book.
In the end, Crane is captured and tortured but tells nothing, misleads his captors away from Holt, and even kills the Syrian security chief in a sudden attack before his torturers can shoot him down. Abu Hamid is shot by Holt. Holt makes it back to Israel. The Prime Minister is pleased as punch and promotes Martins, the weak, incompetent, dishonest man whose personal failures almost destroyed the mission, to be head of the Middle East Desk.
A typical end to a Gerald Seymour novel.
Although it was never explicitly stated, it became clear to me over the course of the novel that the plan to kill Abu Hamid was senseless. Hamid was a nobody. He meant almost nothing at all to the leaders of the PFLP and even less to the leaders of the Syrian security services and their political bosses. Hamid was just a pawn in the eyes of an organization that regularly trained and sacrificed people like him for suicidal attacks in which the "martyrs" death are as desirable for dominating the Arab peoples as are any victories over the Israelis.
Seymour's books are never enjoyable but they are exceptionally educational. He gives us a deep, masterful understanding of the people, the techniques and technologies, the politics, and the abiding flaws of security services and covert wars. There are heroes but they aren't the people in charge and, if they survive, they do so with deep and permanent scars. The beneficiaries of their heroism rarely deserve what they get.
| Author | Schama, Simon |
|---|---|
| Publication | London: The Bodley Head, 2009 |
| Copyright Date | 2000 |
| Number of Pages | 320 |
| Extras | illustrations, bibliography, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Britain |
| When Read | April 2020 |
This popular history appears to have been produced in coordination with the BBC. It covers the neolithic period starting at about the time of Stonehenge (though Stonehenge is not described in the book), through to the death of Queen Elizabeth I.
The book is intelligent, easy and enjoyable reading, nicely illustrated, and finely crafted for its non-specialist audience. However it is somewhat superficial as history. There are bibliographic notes but no citation notes, at least not in my Ebook edition. The emphasis is not entirely unlike that of Suetonius. It is almost gossipy and says relatively little about major social, cultural, political, economic and intellectual developments. It's not that discussion of these is entirely lacking, but it's not emphasized. What were the deep differences that David Hume discussed in his history that occurred in the transitions from Celtic to Roman to Anglo-Saxon, Viking, Norman, and to feudal society, and to the society that emerged from feudalism? I learned more about the personalities and foibles of Elizabeth, Mary Stuart, and various players in the political games of the time than I did about real social and historical meanings of the transition from Catholicism to Protestantism, the growth of navigation and world exploration, the enclosure of previously public lands, the struggles with France and Spain, or the development of parliamentary and democratic forces.
These complaints are not intended as derogation of Schama's book. He was writing for the audience that prefers this approach to the subject and would not likely be interested in the type of history that Hume or Hobsbawm wrote. He did a very good job of fulfilling his mission.
I searched the book for Hume's name and didn't find it. I assume that Professor Schama has read it. If I were ever to meet him I'd like to ask him what he thought of Hume's history and why he chose not to include any reference to it in his book.
| Author | Haldeman, Joe |
|---|---|
| Publication | Audible, 1995 |
| Copyright Date | 1984 |
| Number of Pages | 320 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Vietnam War |
| When Read | May 2020 |
19 year old John "Spider" Speidel left college after one year and was drafted into the army tp fight in Vietnam. His first assignment was as a clerk in graves registration, a nasty job that he left to join a combat unit. There he went on patrols into the jungle, seeing small amounts of action until, finally, his unit was ambushed and essentially wiped out. Spider, having only a defective rifle, was wounded, ran, and smacked into a tree, knocking himself out. When he awoke a Vietnamese was walking from American to American on the ground, shooting each once in the head to be sure he was dead. Spider couldn't go anywhere or do anything but, for reasons unknown, the Vietnamese left him alone and he lay on the ground for two more days, wounded and half out of his mind, before he was discovered and evacuated by American troops. He was treated, doped up, and sent to Walter Reed Hospital in Washington DC, not far from his family's home in Bethesda and his girlfriend Beverly who, unbeknownst to Spider, had taken up with an anti-war activist named Lee.
Spider had been visiting a Vietnamese prostitute named Lee who introduced him to wild sex. When he got to Walter Reed, still half out of his mind, suffering from PTSD, drugged all the time, he babbled about sex with Lee. His psychologist assumed that "Lee" referred to Beverly's boyfriend and that Spider was gay. Spider told the psych that he wasn't gay but too much of his memory had been wiped clean by the trauma, the drugs, and the treatments for him to remember who "Lee" was. What followed was a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia and homosexuality, electric shock, and a mix of caring but misguided treatments from which he finally emerged and attempted to return to a normal life. It was a rocky road. His homophobic and alcoholic father had condemned his son and left home. However, by the end, Spider was making progress.
Haldeman is known as a science fiction writer. I had read four of his SF books, the last one in 2001. Although I read four of them, some because they were SciFi award winners, none of them appealed too much to my particular SciFi interests. This one, not SF at all, did appeal, maybe because I thought so much about the war while it was going on and spent so much time in the anti-war movement and a fair amount of time with students who had returned from Vietnam.
One surprise was that Spider did not recover very quickly from his trauma and, in fact, suffered serious problems after he got home. Another was that his girlfriend left him. Another was that he was beaten and robbed by a muscular jerk and, even though he learned the identity of the man, he made no attempt to get justice, understanding that it would probably be futile. When others, particularly the psychologist at the VA, did as much harm as good, there was no reckoning for that either. There was no reckoning for any of the veterans and no Hollywood tough guy emergence in them either in Vietnam or at home. In short, this was a realistic story. It was not any kind of adolescent fantasy, as so much SF writing was in its early days and still is today. I came to the end of the novel with considerable sympathy for Spider and his comrades and no contempt for either the Americans or the Vietnamese.
| Author | Hurston, Zora Neale |
|---|---|
| Publication | Harper Collins |
| Copyright Date | 1937 |
| Number of Pages | xviii + 211 |
| Extras | Janie's Great Journey: A Reading Group Guide |
| Extras | Foreword by Edwidge Danticat |
| Extras | Foreword by Mary Helen Washington |
| Extras | Afterword by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. |
| Extras | About the Author |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | May 2020 |
See my first reading in 1995 (1995-10.01) for an abstract of the novel.
The following is modified from notes I made for presentation to the book group:
When it was time for all of us in the NCI book group to propose books to read I went back over my records to see if I could find a book that everyone would like and that I could be sure about because I had read it before. When I saw this one I was sure, and in fact everyone did love the book.
Hurston turns out to have been a controversial figure in the black community. She was criticized by Richard Wright and others on the left for taking a white society view of black people. The faults and flaws of her characters were on public display. The dialect they spoke could be seen as ignorant and uneducated. The white people sometimes seemed more sympathetic to black people's dilemmas than the blacks themselves - as in Janie's trial for murdering Tea Cake. And apparently, in fact, Hurston was politically conservative. She is said to have opposed Roosevelt's New Deal and the presidential run of Harry Truman. She thought that black people had to rescue themselves from ignorance and poverty and not expect the white folks or the government to do the rescuing for them.
That is as may be. I'm not qualified to judge her and not interested in judging. I'm much more interested in recalling the remarkable fictive dream (John Gardner's phrasing in The Art of Fiction) that Hurston created. Her characters were often outrageous, and yet were interesting, complex, and convincing. The language they spoke was far from correct English but, instead of being a degraded form of communication, was sophisticated in its own peculiar and wonderfully expressive way:
"Ah'm questinizing you."
"... sorter gives uh de protolapsis uh de cutinary linin."
"She ain't good for nothin' exceptin' tuh set up in uh corner by de kitchen stove and break wood over her head. You're something tuh make uh man forgit to git old and forgit tuh die."
Hurston uses standard English in the narrative portions of the text, but it's full of powerful metaphor and imagery, talking about things that other writers don't know how to say.
"She was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees, the gold of the sun and the panting breath of the breeze when the inaudible voice of it all came to her. She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight. So this was a marriage! She had been summoned to behold a revelation."
...
"Oh to be a pear tree - any tree in bloom! With kissing bees singing of the beginning of the world! She was sixteen. She had glossy leaves and bursting buds and she wanted to struggle with life but it seemed to elude her. Where were the singing bees for her?"
It was an unusual and beautiful book.
| Author | Wolffe, Richard |
|---|---|
| Publication | Random House Audio |
| Copyright Date | 2009 |
| Number of Pages | 368 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Politics |
| When Read | May 2020 |
"Based on exclusive interviews with Barack Obama."
Wolffe worked with Obama during the 2008 campaign and was able to interview him and important people on his campaign staff like David Axelrod, David Plouffe and fund raiser Penny Pritzker. Wolffe covered many of the big events of the campaign, including the controversy over Pastor Jeremiah Wright, the debates with Republican nominee John McCain, the choice of Joe Biden and what the Obama staff thought about McCain's choice of Sarah Palin, the decision to rely on private fund raising rather than public campaign funding, and other important issues.
After spending hundreds of hours watching and reading about George W. Bush before the Obama presidency and Donald John Trump after, listening to the words of Barack Obama is a tremendous relief. I never really thought that Bush was a bad man, he just didn't have what it took to understand the complex issues of managing the United States. Trump is much worse. He not only isn't competent, and I should say even less competent than Bush, he's also a bad man, a liar, a man who subordinates the interests of the American people and the people of the world to his private, selfish, narcissistic interests. Trump is a man who is perfectly happy to stir up racial and national animosities simply to win ignoramuses over to his side. He's frighteningly successful at it.
By contrast, Obama is intelligent, thoughtful, committed, caring, and it all comes through in this book. He was not a perfect president. Nobody is perfect. But he is a man that we can respect. Wolffe brings out those qualities in his portrait of the candidate.
Once again, I was tricked into listening to an abridged version of a book. I knew nothing about that until, at the very end of the reading, the author/narrator credits the guy who abridged the book. I hate when that happens.
| Author | Barraclough, Geoffrey |
|---|---|
| Publication | Pelican / Penguin Books |
| Copyright Date | 1964 |
| Number of Pages | 285 |
| Extras | index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| When Read | May 2020 |
Barraclough covers the period from around 1890 through the time of his writing in the early 1960's. It is a high level view of what happened in that period. Hardly anything is said about the two world wars, about the great depression, about the battles between countries and leaders or the decisions of those leaders. Instead it is about the changes in the economy, the technology, the politics, and the way of life of all of the world's people, in Africa, Asia, and Latin America as well as in Europe and the United States. The eight chapters are titled:
1. The Nature Of Contemporary History - Structural Change and Qualitative Difference.
2. The Impact of Technical and Scientific Advance - Industrialism and Imperialism as the Catalysts of a New World.
3. The Dwarfing of Europe - The Significance of the Demographic Factor.
4. From the European Balance of Power to the Age of World Politics - The Changing Environment of International Relations.
5. From Individualism to Mass Democracy - Political Organization in Technological Society.
6. The Revolt Against the West - The Reaction of Asia and Africa to European Hegemony.
7. The Ideological Challenge - The Impact of Communist Theory and Soviet Example.
8. Art and Literature in the Contemporary World - The Change in Human Attitudes.
I found this book in Eric Hobsbawm's list of recommended readings at the end of his The Age of Empire, which covered part of the same period. Hobsbawm was unusually complimentary about this book, which is what decided me to read it.
History can be written in many ways. Simon Schama's A History of Britain (q.v. in my notes) centers on the personality, motivations, and actions of kings and queens and their most important ministers. Barraclough has none of that. His book is about what happened in the nature of society itself. Like Hobsbawm, he struck me as subscribing to the materialist view of history. The primary motivations are not the decisions of, say, Otto von Bismark, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Stalin, Hitler, de Gaulle, or anyone else. He treats these men as something like the executors of policy fashioned by forces that operated underneath their personal decisions and which helped bring them to power and conditioned and drove their behavior. Is that a correct view of history? In my view, the personality centered approach to history (as in Schama's and many, many other histories) is not useless and not necessarily even inaccurate. And on the other hand, the high level view as practiced by Hobsbawm and Barraclough is not necessariy useful or accurate. A great deal depends on how well the historian understands his subject, how completely he has discovered and addressed the facts, and how good he is at drawing conclusions and explaining them to his readers. Both approaches can teach us a lot and can be complementary to each other. Nevertheless, it seems to me that, when both are done very well, it's the materialist approach that gives us the biggest picture, the deepest understanding, and the greatest ability to see the correlations between the many factors and many outcomes in historical events.
Every one of B's chapters had interesting things to say. His approach to the history of the "third world" and the USSR in his period informed many of the chapters. He wrote very informatively about how the technology, economics, and politics of the "first world" affected the "third world", and how the effects were not what people of the first world expected them to be. In China, India, and many countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the USSR offered a much more interesting and practical paradigm than the western democracies. Democracy was appealing to middle classes, but the third world countries needed a rapid development of education, agriculture, and industry. The Russians achieved all of that in far fewer years than it took the west, and from starting conditions that were closer to those of the third world than the western democracies' starting conditions. The lack of constitutional democracy, a free press, and other things that are so important to us, didn't matter as much to Mao Tsetung, Ho Chi Minh, Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, and other third world revolutionaries, as did the need to pull their people out of imperialist domination, tribal ignorance, terrible health, and abject poverty.
B's discussion of democracy in the west was also fascinating. He pointed out something that I was aware of but hadn't fully understood in all of the ways that B did. In the 19th century, starting earliest in the United States with the election of Andrew Jackson, suffrage began to significantly expand. In the U.S. it required a civil war and powerful women's and civil rights movements, but suffrage did expand and did so in parallel in Europe. This expansion of the voter base and its extension into the working class changed the nature of democracy. For one thing, the working class, much more in Europe than in the U.S., organized and brought intellectuals into its leadership. Instead of being isolated, leaderless, relatively ignorant individuals, they became members of working class parties - labor, social democrat, and even communist parties. And with the rise of left wing parties, right wing and bourgeois parties also rose. Increasingly, it was only through these mass parties that plans and ideas had any chance of becoming policy. Democracy ceased to be the meeting ground of individuals and became a contest of political parties. This happened in every western democracy. It has become less and less important to choose between the personalities running in an American election and more and more important to choose the candidate who belongs to the voter's political party. There is nothing about this in the United States constitution. Parties are not even envisioned there. A student in school could study American constitutional and legal history without learning much or anything about the role of political parties in democratic government. But parties are real and, at least for the foreseeable future, will dominate politics. The choice that people face now and in the future will not be a choice between party democracy and a democracy of independent, cooperating individuals, but a choice between parties, and a hugely important choice between multi-party democracy and single party dictatorship. Those are the choices that confronted Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and other countries that came to be dominated by single parties, whether right or left, in the interwar period, and they are the choices we all face today. Clearly, it is the multi-party style of government, even with its deficiencies, its paralysis, its culture wars, and its base corruption and compromises, that we in the west do, and should according to Barraclough, aspire to.
The one chapter I had the most difficulty with was the last one, on art and literature. I had trouble following his arguments and, although I am reasonably well read, accepting his conclusions. But leaving that aside, I found this to be a fascinating and informative history. Barraclough certainly expanded my understanding of contemporary history.
| Author | Bellow, Saul |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Viking Press |
| Copyright Date | 1973 |
| Number of Pages | 512 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | May 2020 |
Charles "Charlie" Citrine, double Pulitzer Prize winner, awarded the Legion of Honor by the French government, White House guest of Jack Kennedy, is now in his late 50's, soon to turn 60, and living in his home town of Chicago. His Princeton University friend, Von Humboldt Fleisher, was a successful and famous poet who assisted Charlie's entry into the world of successful literary work.
The book is complicated and works on multiple levels. Charlie's love life is a tangled mess with an ex-wife Denise (with two of his children), a dead lover Demmie, killed in a plane crash, a live and much younger lover Renata, who is pestering Charlie to marry her, and others from the past. It is never clear whether they want his love or his money, or to be more precise, it's clear that they want his money but unclear whether they love him. His financial life is a mess on other sides as well. He's made tons of money in book sales and for his play and its movie rights. He lives high and frivolously. However he has no interest in learning how to preserve his money and is an easy mark for every con man he meets. He persists in treating all of them as true friends, even when their shenanigans are exposed. He just bumbles along giving to all the "friends" who ask of him and hardly worrying about his future. His real interest is not in money but in philosophy and literature. He studies "anthroposophy" (see the Wikipedia entry.) He speculates on life after death. He analyzes the failings of American culture and civilization. He talks about these things to everyone who will listen, but not too many will.
The story of Humboldt's decline, and Charlie's after him, progresses inevitably. Denise has sued Charlie again and again, most of the money going to her and his lawyers. As Charlie's older brother says, "That crazy broad won’t be satisfied until she’s got your liver in her deepfreeze." Renata and her mother have taken all of Charlie's remaining money and blown it on silly frivolities. She, discovering that the money was gone, leaves her young son for Charlie to care for during her two month honeymoon and slips away to marry a rich Chicago undertaker, an event for which Charlie doesn't even have the sense to say "good riddance".
Humboldt's "gift" is a movie manuscript that the two had developed together while at Princeton and that Humboldt left for Charlie upon his death. H had saved the manuscript along with proof that the work was theirs. Charlie thought it was just another of H's delusions but, in fact, Hollywood had somehow gotten hold of the manuscript and produced a huge international hit from it which various leeches were trying to get Charlie to force payment from them. The story ends when Charlie has been paid $80,000 by the studio for his movie rights and Charlie just blows through the money - giving to one after another and spending a small fortune to dig up the graves of Humboldt and his mother and rebury them in high class coffins in a high class cemetery. It is typical of Charlie's behavior.
I sometimes categorize books as "admirable" but not "likable". This one was both admirable and likable, and also impressive, but very difficult for a man like me to bear. It was admirable in that the language, the ideas, the social insights, the characters, and the plot, were all terrific. Its characters were magnificent from Humboldt to Renata, to the intense wannabe mafioso Rinaldo Cantabile who beat up Charlie's Mercedes with a baseball bat to make him pay the debts for his losses in a card game where Cantabile had won by cheating. It was impressive and interesting in Charlie's speculations on culture, literature, and metaphysics. It was likable in that Charlie was a very likable guy and, time and again, he managed to almost convincingly paint his many oppressors as intelligent, decent, kindly people whose problems and troubles were proper objects of Charlie's largess. But Charlie's total inability, or perhaps just unwillingness, to defend himself was hard to bear. It's hard to watch a nice guy be repeatedly taken advantage of, and then to see another situation, and then another and another, in which you know that he's going to be cheated again and again and there's nothing that you, the reader, can do but let it all flow by.
The writing was rich with sophisticated vocabulary (I frequently checked my dictionary), sparkling dialog (nobody ever just responded to another's statement or question, they always came back with some agenda of their own), and what we might call a continuous rolling texture. Many good writers combine plain, competent narration with inspired moments of great dialog or description. Bellow's inspiration is continuous. It's on every page and in every character. When one character tells Charlie he's spending too much time on his abstract ideas, Charlie spews more of them out without stop and, even when I found them completely off the wall, I never found them uninteresting.
A very fine novel from one of our great writers.
| Author | Ridley, Matthew White |
|---|---|
| Publication | Harper Audio |
| Copyright Date | 1993 |
| Number of Pages | 405 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Science; Biology |
| Keywords | Sex |
| When Read | May 2020 |
For around the first half of the book, Ridley goes over the evolutionary factors that caused the great majority of both plant and animal species to develop two sexes. There is only limited scientific agreement on this issue and the existing research, as of 1993, was far from complete. Ridley considered that one very important factor was that the regular gene mixing produced by sex conferred significant resistance to parasites and diseases. In parthenogenic species, leaving aside random mutations, which have only a very slow effect on a species, offspring have the exact same genetic makeup as their single parent. Any parasite that develops a perfect attack on that creature might rapidly destroy the entire species. But with sex, every individual and every generation is somewhat different and it is much more likely that disease resistance will develop and spread quickly. The benefits outweigh the disadvantages of halving the reproductive rate (only females can bear offspring in sexual species) and other complications of sexuality.
The second half of the book is about human beings. Ridley strongly opposes the views he attributes to sociologists and anthropologists that behavioral differences between men and women are purely culturally determined rather than genetic - "nurture vs. nature". I have read his arguments in other books, see Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature published in 2002. Both Pinker and Ridley offer convincing evidence that genetic predisposition has a large role in the differences between men and women. Ridley addresses a large number of such differences.
I thought Ridley's arguments were mostly convincing, but he himself states in his epilogue that "Half the ideas in the book are probably wrong." and "I sometimes feel that we are fated never to understand ourselves because part of our nature is to turn every inquiry into an expression of our own nature: ambitious, illogical, manipulative, and religious." It's a healthy dose of self-skepticism.
There were problems reading this as an audiobook. As with all science books it is often the case that the reader has not understood an argument at its end and needs to go back and re-read. It's much harder to do with an audiobook, especially if I'm driving, exercising, or washing dishes while listening, which is the only time I use audiobooks. It's not easy to stop doing and counting pushups or riding a bike, or to rinse and dry my hands, or whatever I need to do to be able to stop and fiddle with the audio player. There's also the problem of footnotes. There are many in the printed version but none in the audio. Unfortunately the number of audio conversions is limited and access to them even more limited and we have to read what we can find.
I had first assumed that Ridley was a professional scientist, then that he was a journalist and popular science writer, and then I looked him up. It turns out that he has been, in fact, all of those things. However he is also Sir Matthew White Ridley, 9th Baronet; 5th Viscount Ridley, a libertarian conservative member of the House of Lords and advocate for Brexit. He was also a businessman and board chairman of Northern Rock Bank which, in 2007, became the first British bank since the great crisis of 1878 to experience a run on deposits, fail, and be nationalized by the government. He resigned his board membership. Once more I have had my nose rubbed in the fact that highly intelligent, highly educated people do NOT all agree about important issues, and most certainly do not all agree with me.
All in all, I found the book to be informative and useful.
| Author | Peters, Ellis |
|---|---|
| Publication | Blackstone Audio |
| Copyright Date | 1981 |
| Number of Pages | 316 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | June 2020 |
Every year on the thirtieth of July the Abbey of Saint Peter and Saint Paul hosts a fair in Shrewsbury. Merchants and craftsmen from far and wide come to exhibit and sell their wares. This year, 1139, a deputation of townsmen has come to ask the Abbot to share 10% of the tithes and fees he collects from the merchants to help the town repair the damage done by a recent siege conducted by King Stephen against the castle and town. The Abbot refuses and the scene is set for the mystery - the murder of a well-to-do merchant from Bristol, several related crimes, and eventually the kidnapping of the merchant's beautiful 18 year old niece who, it turns out, has what the killer was after. Cadfael figures out many of the clues but it's a young man of the town, a leader of a group of protesters regarding the tithes and fees, who springs into action and saves the intrepid young woman.
Another perfectly satisfying Cadfael mystery, replete with marvelous pseudo-twelfth century English and the soft spoken and humane brother of the church.
| Author | Banks, Iain M. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Spectra, 1998 |
| Copyright Date | 1996 |
| Number of Pages | 499 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| Keywords | Artificial intelligence |
| When Read | June 2020 |
One of the Culture's great spaceships / "Minds" has traveled to a remote place in the Galaxy and discovered a star that appears to be 50 times older than the big bang - something that should not be possible. More exploration followed and an "excession" was discovered nearby. It was a huge but dark and featureless entity of some sort that appeared to be directly and simultaneously linked to both "real" and "hyper" space (of two types no less). All attempts to communicate with the excession were ignored and a ship that attempted to penetrate it with energy and drones suddenly disappeared. It was not known whether the ship still existed and if so whether it was inside the excession, in the same galaxy, the same type of space, or even the same universe.
Many great ship Minds become involved in the problem of the excession. They have different ideas about what should be done with respect to it. Some that have approached the excession have found themselves instantaneously displaced 30 light years away, with no obvious damage or disability except that all attempts to head back to the excession fail. Humans have also been recruited by the Minds to participate in the work - though a reader has to pick up on early hints to see how or why their participation is of any use at all and, in the end, at least as far as I can tell, it is not of any use.
In the meantime, another self-aggrandizing civilization, "the Affront" has arisen and is planning an attack on the Culture. Their plan looks dangerous but is quickly defeated by two Culture ships.
In a final two page epilogue, the excession reports its summary of the experience to who or whatever beings it reports to. Its conclusions concerning the great Minds, or at least my interpretation of its conclusions, is that they aren't really very great.
The book is wild, disorganized, hard to follow, confusing, and yet occasionally brilliant for all that. This is the first in the series that concentrates on the artificially intelligent (a term that the Minds deprecate) Minds. Humans take up a significant portion of the novel, especially in the first half, but the Minds take up a lot and it is their thoughts, their communications with each other, and their actions, that are the determining factors in the plot.
The humans are hard to take seriously since most of their actions appear to be self-centered and childish. The main human story seems quite ridiculous to me - assuming I even understand it. Somehow, a recording or data dump of a human woman who was captain of the ship seized in the first appearance of the excession still exists. To interrogate it the Culture must mate a particular man (and no other) with a particular woman (also no other) who each have just the right genetics, have them produce a baby, and raise the baby as host of the preserved mind. The hangup is that the man was unfaithful to the woman who, in some sort of 40 year long emotional hissy fit, puts her developing fetus on hold so that the mother is pregnant for 40 years without either aborting or birthing the baby. The great Minds, rather than forcing the birth they need (explicitly stated by the author to be possible) and then leaving the woman to continue her life as she sees fit, play along with the woman, and the man too, treating them like royal babies. I don't recall that they even told the woman why they need her to give birth. It's really absurd. Great Minds should not be so silly.
I read books like this partly for the delights of the story. Observing the traditions of science fiction, Banks can write adolescent adventure and wild space opera as well as most of the popular authors. In the parts that aren't too over the top, he can be fun to read. However, unlike most Sci Fi writers, he has a real interest in speculating about the future of humanity and intelligence, both natural and artificial. Greg Egan is still the most impressive of the modern AI writers I've read, but Banks has outdone his previous efforts in making AI plausible, or at least not simpleminded. He has these Minds thinking seriously over periods of years, communicating with other Minds that don't agree with each other, and also taking action in seconds or fractions of seconds when needed. He doesn't delve deeply into the nitty gritty of AI, something that Egan is willing to do, but he does recognize some of the attributes that are likely involved. His ideas are interesting.
This was the fifth book in the series, but the fourth was a collection of short stories said to have been cobbled together after Banks' death. I haven't read that one and probably won't, at least for a while. I may, however, read the rest of the novels, continuing in the order in which they were written.
| Author | Garcia Marquez, Gabriel |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Spanish |
| Translators | Grossman, Edith |
| Publication | Penguin Books, 1988 |
| Copyright Date | 1985 |
| Number of Pages | 349 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Columbia |
| When Read | June 2020 |
The story opens with the elderly Dr. Juvenal Urbino called to the house of an old friend and chess opponent who had just committed suicide, taking his dog with him. Dr. Urbino is happily married to Fermina Daza. They live together in a fine house with a parrot and a view of the sea. Their lives are developed for many pages before the parrot escapes, the 81 year old Doctor Urbino climbs a ladder to fetch the bird from a tree, and he falls to his death. That is the introduction to a story that goes back in time to the youth of Fermina Daza, her dogged pursuit by Florentino Ariza, her pursuit and eventual capture by the more mature, wealthy, urbane, and also dogged Juvenal Urbino, and the development of these three characters, through the time of cholera epidemics, up to and beyond the death of Urbino.
Starting at the age of 14, the beautiful Fermina Daza is noticed by the 18 year old bastard (in the literal, not the figurative sense) Florentino Ariza. Florentino is totally obsessed. He plays the violin each night near her house. He sits in the park every morning to get a glimpse of her walking to school. He sends her notes that she never answers but that never deters him. He is heartbroken when she succumbs to the almost equally persistent, and far more sophisticated advances of Juvenal Urbino. From then on, Florentino begins a life of pursuing one woman after another on his way to the top of the river shipping company run by his father's family, but with perhaps the exception of the teenage goddaughter whom he seduces and who commits suicide when she discovers his love for Fermina Daza, he cannot love any of them and his obsession with his first love remains strong, emerging again when he learns of the death of Juvenal Urbino. In the end, he has coaxed Fermina Daza onto his company's best river boat. They steam upriver into a country devastated by thoughtless exploitation of natural resources, years of on and off civil war, and repeating cholera epidemics. It is a bleak place and a seemingly hopeless situation. But Fermina Daza finally sees that her resistance to love is pointless. She accepts Florentino Ariza and the two plan to cruise together, as Florentino puts it, forever.
Chronologically, the story extends more than 50 years from the waning years of the nineteenth century on up to perhaps the 1930's. It is a story of the life and society of the Caribbean coast of Columbia, or at least of one stratum of it.
I enjoyed this novel as much as any by García Márquez that I have read, and very possibly as much as any novel by any author I have read. Reduced to its bare essentials, a love story, albeit a different and unusual one, it's not something that would have attracted my attention. But this was a story by García Márquez. It wouldn't be an ordinary story.
The characters were not entirely rational. They were driven by stubborn obsessions. Were I in the same situation as any of them, I believe that I would have behaved differently. I could not identify with any of them, and yet I could and did sympathize with them. One reason for that is that, right or wrong, each character was wonderfully interesting. They were passionate. They lived their lives intensely. Difficult, stubborn, unrealistic, obsessed, they were all of those things and, for all that, maybe because of all that, they were damned interesting.
The author's ideas about what goes on in people's heads and what drives them are unlike those of any other writer that I know. Examples:
"Resentments stirred up other resentments, reopened old scars, turned them into fresh wounds, and both were dismayed at the desolating proof that in so many years of conjugal battling they had done little more than nurture their rancor. At last he proposed that they both submit to an open confession, with the Archbishop himself if necessary, so that God could decide once and for all whether or not there had been soap in the soap dish in the bathroom."
"His powers of concentration had decreased so much with the passing years that he had to write down each chess move in order to remember what he had planned. Yet he could still engage in serious conversation and follow a concert at the same time, although he never reached the masterful extremes of a German orchestra conductor, a great friend of his during his time in Austria, who read the score of Don Giovanni while listening to Tannhäuser."
"Then he stood up, with the fascinating sensation that he was inside a body that belonged not to him but to someone who was still in the chair where he had been sitting, and he had to make a great effort not to lose his mind."
Does any other author write this way? Does any other author describe characters with so much passion?
GGM's language is also remarkable. Consider:
" ... and without warning she was filled with the instantaneous panic of happiness."
"Fermina Daza was no longer the only child, both spoiled and tyrannized by her father, but the lady and mistress of an empire of dust and cobwebs that could be saved only by the strength of invincible love."
This kind of language permeates the book. I bookmarked dozens of passages in order to revisit them but could easily have noted dozens more. It is dazzling. Something truly unusual happened inside GGM's head. Maybe it was happening all the time when he looked out at the world or looked into his own self. Maybe it only happened when he wrote words down with his pencil or typewriter or whatever he used. Whatever it was, it was a rare and wonderful thing.
I read the book at this time because Diane Rehm of WAMU Radio created a book club and chose this book to discuss with the writers Ariel Dorfman and Louis Bayard, and the critic Marcela Valdez. Their comments were very perceptive. I especially liked Dorfman's - himself from Latin America and apparently a onetime friend, or perhaps just an acquaintance, of GGM. They talked mostly about the story, something that I said little about in these notes. A few of their comments are:
Dorfman: [GGM] didn't like the term "magical realism". He called it "marvelous reality".
Dorfman: The book is filled with the language of Cervantes.
Dorfman: The past is crushing these people down.
Bayard: Everything is here: love, race, commitment.
Valdez: The widows are the happiest women. They are free of servitude to the men.
Valdez: Fermina Daza had no real choice besides Florentino. Her daughter thought any love affair in an old widow would be immoral.
There was much more but I spent too much time listening and not enough writing things down.
I've also written about the book in my diary.
| Author | Twain, Mark |
|---|---|
| Publication | Librivox |
| Copyright Date | 1896 |
| Number of Pages | 452 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | France; Hundred Years War |
| When Read | June 2020 |
Twain constructed his novel as a memoir of Louis de Contes, a person orphaned in the war and raised by a priest. He was apparently an actual scribe of Joan, engaged because he is one of the only young people in the village who was literate. In Twain's recounting, Louis is a few years older than Joan, lives the same village of Domrémy, and writes in 1492 at age 82, 61 years after Joan's death in 1431. The story of Joan begins a year or so before her receiving of the commandment from God to save the Dauphin and make him King of France.
Joan is presented as simple but intelligent, virtuous, pure of heart and, after her revelation, dedicated to the cause given to her via her inner voices. She is already revered for her purity and goodness by the local boys who go with her to seek the Dauphin and recruit an army to raise the English siege of Orleans. Men, some of them trained soldiers, are attracted to her cause and join her along the way. Bands of English and Burgundian raiders in the countryside attempt to stop them but they are either eluded or defeated by Joan's force and, by the time they arrive at the court they have won a considerable reputation among the common folk. The Dauphin, weak in mind and character and surrounded by self-serving ministers who are as likely to assist the English as the Dauphin, dithers around, holding Joan back for weeks from relieving Orleans, but eventually her purity and simplicity defeats the ministers and she heads for Orleans, thousands flocking to her cause along the way.
Twain gives us an account of Joan's string of victories. Always harassed by the Dauphin's ministers and by his own weakness and possible idiocy, she overcomes all odds, defeating one force after another until she is finally captured, sold to the English, and taken to Paris to be tried by an ecclesiastical court gathered to determine whether she has been directed by God or by the Devil - or more precisely, gathered to prove that she is directed by the Devil.
Book III, the final third of the novel, is about the trial. de Contes has been taken on as one of the secretaries to record the events, the court not knowing that he was Joan's scribe. There is nothing he can do for her but record what actually happened and, many years later, publish it. Joan answers every question put to her truthfully, eluding trap after trap with simple but perceptive answers. However, as everyone knows, she was convicted anyway and executed by being burnt at the stake.
This novel was quite an achievement. Twain said that this was his favorite among all of the books he wrote. It presumably follows the known facts of Joan's life but with fictional embellishments of Twainian (if I may say that) origin and style. One of the nicest of these was "the Paladin", a very large but foolish man from Domrémy who loved to tell made up stories of his glorious exploits, each retold multiple times and growing in grandiosity with each telling. It's obvious that Twain is having a good time creating stories for the Paladin to tell. Joan sees some good in the Paladin and names him as her standard bearer, a job that fills him with so much self love and appreciation that he becomes an actual hero, dying at the end in a desperate attempt to save Joan from captivity.
The story of the trial is told in extensive detail. Day after day, Joan is interrogated. It seems that each time she convinces someone that she is really innocent of heresy, that person is removed from the process so that the jurors are increasingly hostile. Twain does not make Joan out to be impregnable to the assault against her. She grows more despondent. Her fear of being burned to death grows. She wants desperately to send a message to her parents but is not allowed to do so. Her food is of poor quality. Her guards harass her. The strain is apparent and the failure of the Dauphin, now King, to come to her rescue is a bitter blow to her and to de Contes.
The last book I read by Twain was Roughing It in 2015, and the last before that may have been 50 years before in 1965. He's a significant American author whom I have neglected.
| Author | Stegner, Wallace |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Modern Library / Random House, 2002 |
| Copyright Date | 1987 |
| Number of Pages | 335 |
| Extras | Introduction by Terry Tempest Williams |
| Extras | Afterword by T.H. Watkins |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | July 2020 |
In the midst of the Great Depression in 1937, recent PhD Larry Morgan, orphaned son of an auto repair shop owner, by pure good luck, has gotten a one year appointment as an instructor in the English Department at the University of Wisconsin in Madison at a time when academic jobs are hard to get. He and his wife Sally arrive at the campus, rent the only basement apartment they can afford on Larry's $2,000 per year salary, and settle in. Larry works like a demon, putting in 50 hours a week on his teaching and grading and dozens more writing stories, book reviews, and a novel, hoping to earn a bit more money and to earn a permanent place in the university faculty. He's very good at his job and is earning respect and friendship, though he fails to get a contract for another year and must leave.
Larry and Sally meet instructor Sid Lang and his wife Charity and become best friends. Sid is a friendly, handsome man who loves to write poetry and is independently wealthy. His beautiful wife Charity is a social whirlwind - decorating their house, organizing parties for the English Department, telling Sid and everyone else what to do in a commanding but unselfish way. The two couples hit it off. Their friendship survives their separation when the Morgans must move to the East Coast to get work. They are together on a camping trip when Sally gets sick and is permanently crippled by polio. They meet every summer at Charity's Vermont home. They travel to Europe together. And at the end of the novel, when Charity is dying of cancer, they arrive with their children and grandchildren for a last celebration of Charity's life, one which Charity has carefully orchestrated but personally avoids for she and her two closest female relatives plus Sally to slip away to the hospital for Charity to die while Sid and Larry lead the celebration. In a final scene, Sid is given full instructions by Charity even down to a list of five younger women from whom he should choose his next wife, but he is not to come to Charity's deathbed because it would be too much for him. Sid refuses the celebration picnic and wanders off while Larry searches for him to try to avoid some terrible outcome. However there is a peaceful end of the story.
This was a fine novel about serious people, real friendships, and full lives. The language is clear, sophisticated, and literate though it's not effulgent in the style of García Márquez' Love in the Time of Cholera that I finished just before starting this.
Sid and Charity's wealth and generosity were key elements in the story. All four of them would have had a much tougher time if they didn't have Sid's inherited money. The problem for Larry and Sally was not so much how to survive, but how to do so without leaning on Sid and Charity for support.
Although Sid and Charity were rich, they were interesting and committed people. Sid was eventually let go from Wisconsin and became very depressed. He thought his academic career was over but, at the end of the war, Larry, recognizing that colleges would be flooded with students after the war and professorships would be a seller's market, got him a job at Dartmouth.
The difficulties and stumbling blocks of the characters in the novel weren't emphasized as problems that had to be resolved. The two men had to work very hard to achieve their career goals, but they would have done it whether or not they achieved them. Both were overachievers. Larry put great efforts into whatever he could write that would sell but only within the limits of his real interests. Did he achieve greatness? Stegner doesn't say. Perhaps he identifies Larry with himself and refuses out of both principle and conviction to call himself great. Sally, obviously, faces the very difficult challenge of living with the loss of the use of her legs, but little is said about her struggle. Almost nothing is said about what Sid did after losing his job at Wisconsin. Stegner didn't pose a set of problems in order to solve them through his plot, he posed them as parts of life. This was not a drama with an opening and a concluding resolution. It was a story about what it means to be human, what it means to be intellectual, what it means to be married, what it means to face the facts of life.
| Author | Kershaw, Ian |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Penguin Press, 2011 |
| Copyright Date | 2011 |
| Number of Pages | xxvi + 564 |
| Extras | photos, bibliography, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Germany; World War II |
| When Read | July 2020 |
Kershaw begins his analysis of the final collapse of Nazi Germany at the time of the July 20, 1944 attempt by Claus von Stauffenberg and his co-conspirators to kill the Fuhrer. Just five days later Operation Cobra began the American breakout from the Normandy beachhead and Operation Bagration was already tearing apart the Wehrmacht in the East. Germany had lost the war. Some generals still held out hope for something short of the unconditional surrender demanded by the Allies, but everyone at the top understood that they were facing massively more powerful opponents in men, guns, tanks, planes, transport, and every other measure of strength. The last wild attempt to change things was launched in the Ardennes in December 1944 (Battle of the Bulge), but the generals understood that it was hopeless and, when it failed, no one, including Hitler, could propose any Plan B for how to end the war short of surrendering. So why did the fighting continue? Why did the Germans fight to the bitter end, sacrificing millions of soldiers and civilians, almost all of their cities, and much of their industrial plant and economic infrastructure? Nothing could be gained by these losses.
That decision to fight to the end is the subject of this book. Why did Hitler demand these pointless sacrifices? Why did the Nazi Party, the generals, the soldiers, the bureaucrats, and the ordinary civilians follow his orders? Why did over a million old men and young boys accept service in the Volksturm, facing trained young men with battle experience and superior weapons who easily wiped them out?
Kershaw examines the common argument offered by surviving German generals after the war - namely that when the Allies agreed in 1943 to continue the war until unconditional German surrender, they made it impossible for the Germans to stop fighting. If they did, all of their soldiers could be sent to prisoner of war camps. Millions of Germans would be shot on the spot or shipped east to die in slavery in Siberian concentration camps. Germany would be divided up and cease to exist.
That, Kershaw agrees, was a factor, but not the major one and maybe not even one of the major ones. The major factors had more to do with Hitler's unbreakable hold on every facet of military and civil power, Hitler's total lack of any personal future after the war, and the fact that many of the top people in the Wehrmacht, the NSDAP, and the entire Reich were in the same situation with him.
The Nazis had long ago burned all of their boats. Hitler, Góring, Goebbels, Bormann, and most of the top people in army, party, and government understood that they had committed unforgivable crimes. They believed that they could count on being tried and executed for what they had done. They themselves would certainly have executed any of their adversaries who had done anything like what the Germans had done. They had nothing to lose by postponing the end by a year, or even by a just few months. For most of them, the future of Germany and the German people was a matter of very little concern. What did they care if Germany survived without them? As far as Hitler was concerned, the German people had demonstrated their weakness and worthlessness by losing the war - and of course, like a certain modern American president, Hitler could not conceive of the initiation and loss of the war as being his fault. He wanted to die as an unconquerable hero, a historic figure who took all of Germany with him in a doomed but magnificent fight to the last man and the last bullet. He wanted to be remembered as the great leader who led what was once a great nation in its highest approach to superiority among nations.
After the July 20 plot Hitler tightened his hold on everything - army, Party, government, economy, law and justice (or lack thereof), and propaganda. Unquestioning loyalty to the Fuhrer became the number one criterion for holding any office. By March, 1945, soldiers who ran away, civilians who hung white flags from their windows, people who spoke against the war or the fuhrer, were summarily hung or shot. "Trials" lasted seconds and executions were immediate. Party officials, Gauleiter (provincial governors), and SS and Gestapo madmen would force the people under their control to fight to the end, and shoot everyone who defied them - just before slipping away to try to hide themselves. Scores were settled. Witnesses to official misdeeds, camp inmates, slave laborers, prisoners of war, were often killed to hide as best as could be hidden (which was not really at all) the crimes that had been committed against them. Others were killed to settle old scores, or just to inflict immediate and irreversible punishment on those who would otherwise have survived the war and, at least in the imagination of the killers, looked down upon and laughed at their former Nazi oppressors.
The greatest fear of all Germans was the retribution the Russians would exact from them for all of the crimes that the Germans had committed in Russia. Ordinary Germans were mostly (though not all of them) sick of the war, sick of being bombed, sick of dying at the front, and sick of having their children drafted and killed, but they continued fighting in the east to avoid or postpone the revenge of the "Asiatic hordes".
I didn't find any surprises in this book. The muddle headedness, selfishness, cowardice, and prevarication of the Nazi leadership is just what we would expect from the whole history of the NSDAP and is not different from what we might see in totalitarian dictatorships everywhere but, hopefully, only to a lesser extent in the real democracies. There were genuine true believers. To be leading Nazis they would have to have been greedy for power. The competition for power was intense and even true believers were at a disadvantage without driving ambition. But some of these people, like Hitler himself and his propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, appear to have been genuine true believers. They told their lies out of some twisted conviction that they were serving a higher leader and a higher truth.
Kershaw laid out examples and details. The devastation in the last year was worse than in all of World War I. The Wehrmacht alone was losing 350,000 men per month in this period - dead, wounded, missing, or captured. Add in the Allies casualties. Then add the killed or wounded in the bombed cities, the refugees trudging hundreds of miles, starving and freezing without food or shelter, the death marches of the camp inmates, the slaughter of foreign workers in Germany, the people killed when their towns were bombed and blasted because the soldiers inside would not surrender and neither Russian nor American nor British soldiers were going to give their lives to take towns that they could just blow off the map. Millions of people died and millions more lost everything they had. And it was all for no real reasons other than the narcissism of Hitler, its reflection in the minds of his supporters, and the degeneracy of the political leadership. What a waste!
I would like to conclude these notes by recommending that every neo-Nazi read this book, but I doubt if more than a few would understand it or its implications.
| Author | Stephenson, Neal |
|---|---|
| Publication | Audible |
| Copyright Date | 1995 |
| Number of Pages | 499 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| Keywords | Cyberpunk |
| When Read | July 2020 |
In a strange and more than just improbable dystopian future, various "phyles" or "tribes" exist in and around Shanghai, China, some as ethnic groups in various places around the world, some as religions like Parsis, Jews, or Mormons, some as politically dominant groups in different areas in China. A little four year old white girl named Nell lives with her big brother Harv, her mother, and her mother's various abusive men friends in this area. Harv, who looks out for Nell, has stolen a "mediatronic" book, a kind of "smart" book that changes its content to meet Nell's needs, always teaching her more and more. This book, the brainchild of an extraordinary engineer named John Hackworth, is the driving force of two parallel and intertwined stories - the story of Nell as a real human child who grows older and increasingly more capable and sophisticated, and the story of Princess Nell, the protagonist in the mediatronic story of kings and wizards, dinosaurs and ducks. The stories swirl around each other, all aiming at a final success of Nell as a person and as a liberator of people (and mice!)
The society is permeated by the products of mediatronics and matter compilers - machines perhaps describable as an advanced development of 3D printing - that are now used for producing everything from food to nanomachines that permeate people's bodies (often as unwanted infections) to large scale building materials and big machines. The matter compilers put objects together, atom by atom, chemical bond by chemical bond, to make anything one can desire, even diamonds.
Perhaps some readers are entranced by this book in the same way that some are entranced by Tolkien's Lord of the Rings (I know a man who read it 25 times), or by the Harry Potter series. Those readers will spot the subtle nuances of each character and event and see the inspired plan and incredible depth of the novel. I, however, am not one of those readers. I'm prepared to accept that my appreciation of the book is inadequate to its true worth. I'm sure that I missed a lot. But the whole thing was too fabulous for me. Fables just aren't my cup of tea.
I'm not sorry I read it. It exposed me to a style of writing that I know little about and broadened my appreciation of imaginative literature.
I'll leave it at that.
| Author | Paul Adam |
|---|---|
| Publication | Isis Publishing |
| Copyright Date | 2009 |
| Number of Pages | 320 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| Keywords | Music |
| When Read | July 2020 |
Gianni Castiglione the 65 year old luthier living in the countryside near Cremona is visited by the brilliant 23 year old violinist Yevgeny Ivanov and his domineering mother/manager Ludmilla Ivanova. Yevgeny is contracted for a concert playing il Cannone - the Cannon - a Guarneri "del Gesù" - the actual violin owned and played by Nicolò Paganini. The violin is subtly damaged and Yevgeny is hoping that Gianni can repair it in time for the concert, which he can and does. So begins a story of life, crime and, always, music.
A fine arts and antique dealer has been murdered and turns out to have a very valuable gold box in his possession. It eventually comes out that the box was once owned by Paganini himself. The police, led by Gianni's friend Guastafeste, ask for Gianni's help and, as in the earlier novel, Gianni discovers the keys to the mystery.
In the end, the culprits are caught, the story of the gold box and its contents are explained, and the young master violinist Yevgeny learns to assert himself and find love while his mother accepts that he is an adult.
As with the first book, this one is a true pleasure to read. Paul Adam is not only a lover of music, but a fine writer who can articulate that love and teach the reader, in at least a rudimentary fashion, to love music as he does. The main character, Gianni, is a deeply admirable man - not because he is a super sleuth or even a super musician, he is neither of those - but because he is a man who has learned much about life and music and, in his own quiet way, is living a humble but full and humane life.
I loved these books.
| Author | Stevenson, Bryan |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Spiegel and Grau |
| Copyright Date | 2014 |
| Number of Pages | 352 |
| Extras | Notes |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Society |
| Keywords | Law; Racism; Race and slavery |
| When Read | August 2020 |
In 1983 Bryan Stevenson graduated Harvard Law School and went to work at the Southern Prisoners Defense Committee in Atlanta Georgia. The Committee concentrated on defending prisoners sentenced to death, not a few of whom turned out to be poor, black, uneducated, and, in some cases, completely and absolutely innocent - convicted because they were poor and black; despised by the sheriffs, the prosecutors, and the judges; ignored by underpaid public defenders; and generally treated as human trash.
The main story concerns the case of Walter McMillian convicted of murder and sentenced to death by a corrupt sheriff's department, prosecutor, and judge. They fabricated evidence, forced two other prisoners to testify against him, and ignored or destroyed ironclad evidence of his innocence. Apparently their main motive was to divert public attention from their failure to find the real killer. Stevenson eventually got him released after going through numbers of appeals, and then only after the CBS 60 Minutes program profiled the case on national television.
Another appalling case was the conviction of Marsha Colbey, a poor white woman who buried her stillborn baby and was accused by a nosy and suspicious neighbor of having killed the child. A "doctor" who worked for the state government and was eventually revealed as an incompetent fraud was assigned to disinter the body and perform an autopsy. He testified that the child was murdered. Later a whole battery of respected and qualified doctors examined the evidence and determined that the child was born dead. Colbey was convicted and sentenced to life in prison without parole and only Stevenson's dogged intervention saved her.
Another case was a 13 year old boy who went with two older teens to rob a store. When the storekeeper was killed, the older boys said the 13 year old did it. He too was sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole or, as Stevenson describes these cases "death in prison". There were many other children in this condition, and a great many prisoners with severe mental or emotional problems who, often, were not so much dangerous as in need of treatment or care rather than oppressive punishment in prison.
Stevenson began working more and more in Alabama and sometimes also in Mississippi, and then Florida, California, and around the country. In 1989 he formed the Equal Justice Initiative which, by 2013, had a staff of 40 people and, as of today (2020-08-06) has photos of 76 staff members on its website. Stevenson and the EJI have defended hundreds of prisoners and filed numerous briefs in both state and federal courts. By the time of writing of the book, Stevenson himself had argued five cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and won relief, not just for his pro bono clients, but also for whole classes of prisoners.
This book taught me a lot about the failure of justice in our country. I had thought that the horrors of Jim Crow persecution of black people in the South were smashed by the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960's and its aftermath over the next decade or two. I had imagined that there were still individual cases of injustice but had not realized that sheriffs, state police, prosecutors, judges, local newspapers, and others in Alabama would all work together to convict and execute a demonstrably innocent man in some cases because they hoped to gain something from the action and in all cases because they were convinced that black people were worthless trash who, if they didn't commit this specific crime then committed other equally heinous crimes (such as having a white girlfriend) and who needed to be put in their places. It was racism taken to the point of criminality. And some of the cases Stevenson fought were not even in the South, but in northern or western states.
I am thankful that Bryan Stevenson and his co-workers exist and have dedicated themselves to justice. I am thankful on behalf of the victims that they have saved, and on my own behalf for the education that Stevenson has given to me.
I read this book for an NCI Book Group meeting. It was proposed by Elaine Mills, wife of my long time friend and co-worker, Bob Kline.
| Author | Beir, Robert |
|---|---|
| Author | Josepher, Brian |
| Publication | Audible.com |
| Copyright Date | 2006 |
| Number of Pages | xxxv + 324 |
| Extras | notes, bibliography, photos (all in print version only) |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Holocaust |
| When Read | August 2020 |
Born in 1918, Beir came of age in a Jewish family in New York in the 1930s. Although his family must have been financially successful and Beir was sent to a private high school, when others discovered that he was Jewish he was often shunned and sometimes even harassed. Following his father's lead, he became a big supporter of FDR. After Pearl Harbor, he joined the Navy. He volunteered for sea duty on a battleship but, to his relief, he was given an office job, eventually a very responsible one managing shipping and communications from offices in the UK. After the war he worked in his father's fabric business and then became a history teacher. He studied FDR in depth, learned much about the Holocaust and FDR's actions regarding it and, toward the end of his life, in his 80s, decided to write this book. Almost half the book is dedicated to Beir's own personal story - his reverence for FDR, his own encounters with antisemitism, and his (to me) interesting life.
Beir's account of the Holocaust and FDR includes an extended discussion of the voyage of the cruise ship St. Louis (subject of the Hollywood film "Ship of Fools") and continues on to the end of the war. He focuses on the things that could have been done - accepting European refugees into countries where they would be safe, helping Jews to escape, bribing Nazi officials to release Jews, attacking death camps and rail lines leading to them from the air, and threatening and if necessary carrying out terror attacks via bombing, possibly with poison gas, against Germany and other countries that were participating in the Holocaust.
Accepting refugees turned out to be politically impossible in almost all countries. Antisemitism was present almost everywhere and was strong in the U.S. FDR might well have antagonized many American antisemites and made his leadership more difficult by doing more to save the Jews. The State Department, managed on this issue by the dyed in the wool antisemite Breckinridge Long, was solidly against any and all immigration and helped keep the immigration of German and other European Jews well below the legal limits. The one effort that Roosevelt made, admitting under 1,000 Jews to a military camp in Oswego, New York, resulted in a strong local antisemitic backlash.
There were efforts by individual government employees, led by Varian Fry working in Vichy France and Gerhart Riegner in Switzerland, in secret and against the orders of their State Department employers, to help Jews escape from Europe. Fry saved the famous artist Marc Chagall and thousands of other Jews. He helped the great Swedish humanitarian Raul Wallenberg who saved many Jews before being arrested and done away with by the Soviets. Beir states that a reasonable estimate of the number of Jews saved by Wallenberg, Fry, and others was about a quarter of a million (which sounds high to me, but I have nothing else to go on but Beir's account.) There was also a threat made and carried out to bomb Budapest when the Hungarian government allowed the Jews to be sent to the death camps. It apparently worked because the deportations stopped after the bombing and an estimated 120,000 Hungarian Jews survived the war. This number may include both those saved by Wallenberg and those who were saved when the Hungarian fascist regime decided they didn't want their city bombed any more.
A principal argument made by Roosevelt and all of the U.S. military was that the best way to save the Jews was to defeat the Nazis. They argued that sending bombers to far away Auschwitz would cost American lives but do nothing for the Jews who would only be murdered by other means if the camp gas chambers were damaged. And we know that, in fact, about half of all Jews killed in the Holocaust were murdered by other means, probably mostly by shooting.
Beir wished that Roosevelt had done more to help the Jews but nevertheless remained a Roosevelt supporter to the end of his days. He, Beir that is, did not see a better alternative to FDR and did not see any other leader who could or would have done as much, either before or after Pearl Harbor brought the U.S. into the war.
I found Beir's personal story interesting, his history interesting, and his arguments about FDR convincing. One aspect of my political views has changed a lot since my youth. While remaining an idealist I have come to accept that democracies cannot be forced to accept strong idealistic positions, and that democracy is more valuable even than progress. FDR did much to support Britain in its struggle against Germany and China in its struggle against Japan, in the teeth of virulent isolationism in the United States. He saved millions of Americans from extreme poverty with his bank holidays and regulations, his Social Security, his priming of the economy, his support of labor unions and Fair Labor Standards, the minimum wage, and more. He pushed the United States in a far more progressive direction. At least some of what he achieved has survived to this day in spite of powerful attacks by Ronald Reagan and succeeding Republican administrations. Have the USSR or China done better? Maybe in some ways yes but in others no, and they needed violent revolutions and civil wars.
I'm sticking with the Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr view of Roosevelt. I think Beir's view accords with that.
| Author | Brett, Simon |
|---|---|
| Publication | Blackstone Audio |
| Copyright Date | 2000 |
| Number of Pages | 368 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | August 2020 |
Retiree Carole Seddon is living in the (fictional) seaside retirement community of Fethering on the south coast of England. On one of her morning walks along the beach with her dog Gulliver she sees a dead body. She goes home, washes Gulliver because he'll stink up the house if she doesn't, and then calls the police. A couple of hours later two police officers appear at her house to question her. They had been to the beach, found nothing, and came to find out if Carole was a hysteric or mentally unsound person who reported a fantasy.
A little later in the day Carole meets her new neighbor "Jude", no last name given, not to the reader, not to Carole, and not to any other inquisitive character in the book. Jude is a less conventional person than Carole. She invites Carole to the local pub, a place Carole had never gone to before, and convinces her that the two of them can investigate this apparent murder and figure out what happened even if the police don't take any interest. So they do.
Carole and Jude eventually find the body inside a sailboat owned by a local dentist who has also disappeared. In the end we learn what happened and who was the killer, and the story is resolved, ready for Carole and Jude to take on the next mystery in what has become a long series of 19 books to date.
I read three of Brett's mysteries in 1994-5. Two of them were in the "Charles Paris" series. I liked them. The last was in the "Mrs. Pargeter" series, which I didn't like at all. When I saw this Fethering audiobook I remembered the two that I liked, thought I might indulge myself with a pleasant mystery story that I could listen to while exercising and washing dishes, and started it. I was disappointed.
The writing was competent enough. Brett is a professional who had written some two dozen mystery stories before this one. He punched all of the expected buttons - a protagonist who stumbles on a dead body, the police are uninterested, she gets a partner (not a standard button but not unknown), she is prim and proper while her partner is a little risqué, there are a few oddball characters and even a friendly dog. But there was also a lot that didn't work for me.
To begin with, I found Carole and Jude to be too bereft of history. Carole worked in the Home Office but we aren't told what she did. She is a sensible person with a sensible haircut living in a sensible house with a sensible wardrobe and a sensible dog, living in a sensible retirement community on a Civil Service pension "at the generous end of adequate". Okay. It's not Charles Paris (the first Brett protagonist) but, although I'd like more, I'll buy it. "Jude" is harder to take. Brett will not allow her to reveal her residential, job, or family history, or even her last name. Why? I presume that he wanted a clean slate so that he could go anywhere with this. Since he was planning a series, perhaps he decided to leave all options open. The other characters were fairly thin but acceptable. The thinness of the two main characters seemed to me to be a flaw.
The story itself also had problems. The motivation of the killer was plausible but not interestingly so. The police took no part in the investigation. The bar waitress, Tanya, secret girlfriend of the killer, seems to have known about the murder and seemed prepared to help in the killing of Jude, but she disappears near the end of the story and we have no idea what happened to her or where she went. Her disappearance is mentioned but doesn't seem to be of much interest to Carole, Jude, or Simon Brett.
Ah well, if I get a hankering for another Brett book maybe I'll find and read one from the Charles Paris series.
| Author | Trump, Mary |
|---|---|
| Publication | Simon and Schuster |
| Copyright Date | 2020 |
| Number of Pages | 207 |
| Extras | index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Biography |
| Keywords | Trump |
| When Read | August 2020 |
Mary is Donald Trump's niece, the daughter of his older brother Freddy. She has a PhD in psychology and has worked as a psychologist, professor, and businesswoman.
The first half of the book is mainly biographical, discussing the members of the Trump family beginning with Fred and Mary MacLeod Trump, the father and mother of Maryanne, Freddy, Elizabeth, Donald, and Robert. There is much about her father Freddy, the oldest boy, and his inability to be the person that his father Fred wanted him to be - leading to Donald's stepping in to the role of elder son. Freddy loved flying and sailing and alcohol, which was his undoing, leading to his separation from his wife and children and his death at age 42.
Mary considers that Donald is an incompetent sociopath whose flamboyant business deals were almost all failures from which he was rescued either by his exceptionally wealthy father or by his many creditors who had been beguiled by his successful salesmanship and flamboyant image and then were forced to release his debts when he declared his numerous bankruptcies. Donald is, in Mary's professional opinion, incapable of focusing on or caring about anyone except himself. When Fred senior suffered from the slow deterioration of Alzheimer's Disease, Donald treated him with more and more contempt and attempted, unsuccessfully, to trick him into signing a new will that strongly favored Donald. He cannot study or learn. He cannot take responsibility for any failure, or share credit for any success. He cannot focus attention on any subject other than himself.
Mary's advice to her uncle is to resign his office but, of course, that will not happen.
All of the things that Mary says about Donald are pretty common knowledge these days but are reinforced by the facts that she is a professional psychologist and that her experience with Donald goes back to her youth in the 1970's and young adulthood in the 80's - she was born in 1965.
This is not a political book. It has no interviews with politicians or employees of the government or of Trump's White House. It does not discuss any of the issues or attempt to explain any of Trump's policies or political behaviors in terms of his personality. There are some damaging facts about Donald's behavior: his attempt to trick his father into signing a new will, his going to the movies upon hearing of his older brother's death, his paying others to write his student essays or take his exams, his coldness and unconcern for the fate of Mary and her immediate family, his essentially fraudulent business deals. However there is nothing about the kind of things that only Trump administration insiders are privy to.
It was an interesting book. Perhaps, if we're lucky, some Trump supporters will read it and decide not to vote for him in November.
| Author | Stendahl (pen name of Marie-Henri Beyle) |
|---|---|
| Original Language | French |
| Translators | Howard, Richard |
| Publication | New York: Modern Library, 2000 |
| Copyright Date | 1839 |
| Number of Pages | xiv + 532 |
| Extras | Notes, illustrations, map |
| Extras | Afterword by Richard Howard (translator) |
| Extras | Book review by Honoré de Balzac |
| Extras | Reply to Balzac by Stendhal |
| Extras | Book review by Daniel Mendelsohn, New York Times Book Review, August 29, 1999 |
| Extras | Reading Group Guide |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | August 2020 |
Handsome, romantic, impetuous, sixteen year old Fabrizio Valsero, Marchesino Del Dongo, second son of the Marchese and Marchesa del Dongo leaves his home in Italy in an attempt to join Napoleon, headed at that time to Waterloo. He might not really be the biological son of the Marchese but was perhaps fathered by Lieutenant Robert of Napoleon's army in Italy in 1799. Perhaps that has something to do with Fabrizio's ill treatment by his putative father and older brother. Now equipped with money supplied by his aunt, the young and beautiful widow, Countess of Pietranera, later Duchess of Sanseverina, as well as his mother the Marchesa del Dongo, he is off to participate in a glorious war. So begins a tragicomic romance of love and the precarious political and social conditions in Italy after the rise and fall of the French Revolution.
Full descriptions of the plot and characters are easily available elsewhere and will not be presented here. I'll just note that Fabrizio is passionately attracted to one beautiful young woman after another and they all fall madly in love with him. This could easily result in disaster for both of them but for the intervention of the Duchess and her own loyal lover Count Mosca, saving Fabrizio at each of a number of critical stages in his life. He learns nothing from his experience except that love is elusive and that, perhaps, he is simply incapable of true love. His life ends at the monastery "Charterhouse of Parma" where he has retired, still only in his twenties.
I first encountered this book sometime in the 1960s, probably during my years at college since I see an old receipt (a bookmark?) inserted at page 286 from what I think must have been the University of Pittsburgh bookstore. I had no idea what it was but guessed from some vague memory of the name Stendhal that it was a famous book and therefore one that I would like to read. I never finished it though I still have the 75 cent paperback translation by Lowell Bair that I obtained at that time and always hoped to come back to some day.
Now I am old enough, and have read enough history, to have a better sense of what the book is about. As a romantic adventure, I think it is more parody than romance. I think that what it is really about is the conflict between the "ancien regime" of the tiny minority born to wealth and power that still ruled in Italy and was attempting to hold on everywhere else in Europe against the rising power of the "liberal" movement of the French Revolution that aimed to replace arbitrary autocratic rule with the rule of law and bring the bourgeois and professional classes at least into social and political equality with the nobility.
Most of the nobles in the book are anything but noble. They are mean, selfish, spiteful, condescending to their inferiors and licking the boots of their superiors. Some pursue pleasure but most pursue nothing more than social superiority. The Prince of Parma thinks nothing of imprisoning or poisoning those whom he believes have insulted him, to say nothing of massacring common folk who have simply suffered the misfortune of having gotten in his way.
No lofty political platitudes are presented. Bourgeois characters hardly appear at all. Government, legislation, justice - these are just forms cloaking the ordinary selfish behavior of that portion of the nobility or its wannabe noble hangers on that happen to be in power. Perhaps I've been reading too much about the French Revolution but I see the novel as a satire on the aspirations of those elements of French society (Stendhal was, after all, French, not Italian), who long for the days of Louis XVI.
The ancillary material is quite interesting. The translator Richard Howard wrote about some of the issues faced by translators. Balzac wrote a contemporary review in 1840. He read the book three times and wrote a mix of praise and criticism. That he was engaged to write the review says much about the popularity of the book at the time of its publication. Stendhal's clever reply is complementary to Balzac but makes no real concessions to his criticism. Finally, Daniel Mendelsohn's essay, published in the pages of the New York Times Book Review, offers a very excellent review from the perspective of more recent times, 160 years after the original publication.
| Author | Fast, Howard |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Open Road Media |
| Copyright Date | 1966 |
| Number of Pages | 158 |
| Extras | Biography of Howard Fast with photos |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Spanish Inquisition |
| When Read | August 2020 |
Don Alvero de Rafel and Friar Thomas de Torquemada have been friends for decades. Thomas is the godfather of Alvero's 22 year old daughter Catherine. The two travel together with Juan Pomas, Catherine's fiancé, from Segovia to the court of Ferdinand and Isabella in Seville where Torquemada is appointed Chief Inquisitor, the head of the entire Spanish Inquisition. Alvero is there to render his merchant's opinion of Christopher Columbus proposal to mount a westward sailing trading expedition to the Indies. All is well until the trio returns to Segovia and see a trio of brutes attacking an older man on the road. Alvero attacks them immediately, hurting the men and driving them away. Only then does he learn that the man under attack was Rabbi Mendoza, spiritual leader of the Jewish community in Segovia. Torquemada is not pleased with Alvero's defense of the rabbi.
The story moves inevitably from there. Juan Pomas is pressured by Torquemada into confessing that Alvero wears a mezzuzah along with a cross on a chain around his neck. Alvero is summoned to the court of Torquemada. He is arrested. In response to questioning he tells the truth. The ampoule he wears around his neck came from his father, who got it from his father. It contains the Hebrew words: "And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and all thy soul and all thy might." It is known to the Inquisition as "The Jewish Curse". He is imprisoned and tortured. He is to be burned at the stake which as a great favor to him, will "purify" him by ridding him of his apostasy and admitting his soul into an immortal afterlife.
Alvero's wife Maria is furious with him for putting himself in the way of the Inquisition but his daughter is disturbed by what's happening. She leaves home, wanders the streets, enters the 2,000 year old synagogue, and is there during a service when the doors are locked from outside and the building set fire with everyone inside burned to death.
Torquemada frees the tortured and beaten Alvero and tells him to leave the country because in 24 hours he will be hunted down and burned. He leaves his wife and his faithful servant and rides away.
The book is very short but its impact, at least on me, was very great. Torquemada was portrayed as a man of iron discipline and iron will. The other inquisitors were weak and stupid by comparison. Torquemada was not like the others, a man who persecuted Jews, or more frequently, Christians who had some slightest connection to Jewry, in order to advance himself or to steal all their possessions for himself and the Church. He hated them as enemies of God. Even his long time friend Alvero came to be regarded as an enemy of God on the basis of no other evidence than that he wore a mezzuzah in memory of his father and grandfather.
Some critic (I don't remember who) wrote that this book was motivated by Fast's horror of Nazism and McCarthyism. I can see it, especially with Nazism. Hitler, Goebbels, and many others appear to have been true believing antisemites, not just bullies and thugs out to steal what they can get from helpless Jews, or opportunists like Joe McCarthy who only vaguely knew what a communist was and just wanted to make a political career at other peoples' expense.
Fast was a professional writer who made his living by writing books but many of those books, including this one, were didactic efforts aimed at educating his readers. Surely he was one of the leading writers, worldwide, in writing politically progressive fiction.
| Author | McEwan, Ian |
|---|---|
| Publication | Anchor |
| Copyright Date | 1999 |
| Number of Pages | 208 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | August 2020 |
Two old friends, composer Clive Linley and newspaper editor Vernon Halliday, meet at the funeral of Molly, a former lover of each of them. Molly was married to publisher George at the time of her death. George was a morose man who, over the course of the novel, quietly takes revenge against all of Molly's former lovers, including Clive, Vernon, and important rightist government minister Julian Garmony. All of the former lovers come to terrible ends. Garmony is exposed as a transvestite, destroying his political career. Vernon, the man who exposed him with photos supplied by George, loses his position as newspaper editor for political incorrectness. Clive, while trying to complete the most important musical work of his career at the Amsterdam Concertgebouw gets diverted, drinks too much, and fails to finish the symphony. In the end, Clive and Vernon have each effectively poisoned the other using unscrupulous Dutch medical people who sell "assisted suicides".
I read this with the NCI book group.
My first reaction to the story was that it was a very well written story but was highly manipulative. The ending played on the combination of sympathy and antagonism building up to a surprise ending, much worse than would be expected from such a story, though not entirely unexpected under McEwan's careful staging and direction. However after listening to the comments of the other NCI readers, I had to agree that the book was superbly constructed and the manipulation of the characters, effectively also manipulating the readers, was McEwan's forte. I had to admire it's effectiveness.
I don't know if I want to read any more McEwan. The revenge of the nasty George on men who deserved criticism, but not for the reasons that George was attacking them, was not my cup of tea. Others in the (virtual due to coronavirus) book group meeting said that other books they had read by McEwan had much the same tone.
| Author | Lefebvre, Georges |
|---|---|
| Original Language | French |
| Translators | Palmer, R.R. |
| Publication | New York: Vintage Books, 1947 |
| Copyright Date | 1939 |
| Number of Pages | xvi + 191 + x |
| Extras | Preface by R.R. Palmer |
| Extras | index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | French Revolution |
| When Read | September 2020 |
Lefebvre, the great 20th century historian of the French Revolution, describes both the conditions and the specific actions that led to the French Revolution up through the movement of the royal family from Versailles into the Tuilleries in Paris where they effectively became captives of the Paris commoners.
In Lefebvre's authoritative account, it was the First Estate, the nobility, supported by the noble members of the Second Estate, the Catholic Church, that began the actions against the bankrupt royal government of Louis XVI and his ministers who had been trying to extract more money from the nobility as well as the commoners of the Third Estate. The nobility took the Third Estate (commoners) for granted as insignificant, useful only for the money that could be extracted from them, but that changed when more and more people raised grievances and the peasantry stepped in with great grievances against the nobility. L documents a fascinating interplay of bread and butter issues that dominated all parties in the debate mixed with ideals stimulated by the philosophers of the French Enlightenment, British parliamentarianism, and the American Revolution.
My impression of this work is that Lefebvre was deeply familiar with all aspects and all actors involved in the Revolution. He writes authoritatively about all of them. Where no documentary evidence is available, for example when meetings were held but no minutes taken or preserved, L provides convincing reconstructions of what he thinks must have taken place, down to the level beyond which there is insufficient evidence to go.
L posits that the Revolution could have been stopped by a more tractable nobility, but too many of them were too imbued with belief in their natural superiority, rights, and privileges. Too many disdained and discounted the power of the peasants and town dwellers until they learned, too late, that what had worked for them for centuries, in 1789 worked no more. Large numbers of rural manor houses were burned down, first and foremost the rooms containing archives of the landlord's ownership of the peasant land and rights to rents and taxes. Walls and fences enclosing what had once been common pasture were torn down. Even where the manor houses were intact, many peasants simply stopped paying their rents or tithes on the current crops. Assemblies formed in cities and towns all over the country. The resolutions they passed differed to some degree but the general trend everywhere was to move beyond the privileged estates of the past.
L was considered to be a Marxist historian, at least by the authorities of his day. I don't know if he thought he was a Marxist historian or what being a Marxist historian meant to him. In my view, L certainly understood that social, economic, and political aspects of society are interrelated and much of his book is devoted to explaining how those interrelations operated and what effect they had on the course of the revolution. However he was not insensitive to the fact that humans have minds and that they use those minds sometimes wisely and sometimes not - sometimes entirely in their own selfish interest and sometimes altruistically for the benefit of their fellows. This book was published in 1939, just before the start of the Second World War. Just a year later, according to the Wikipedia, the Vichy government burned 8,000 copies of the book, presumably all that they found, accusing him of Marxism. Whether or not the accusation was true, the book burning could only have suited the interests of the haute bourgeoisie and their Nazi conquerers that ran the Vichy government.
I learned a lot from this book. I especially learned that the social and economic conditions for revolution had built to a high degree before any action was taken. I learned that the nobility saw the king as their oppressor, too late recognizing that they needed his protection against the common people. I learned that the bourgeoisie assumed that they were the natural leaders of the common people and what they really longed for was acceptance by and equality with the nobility. It was only gradually that some (most?) came to understand that it was only by a general declaration for the rights of man and making common cause among all commoners that they could achieve basic equality for themselves. The commoners of the towns and cities longed for lower prices on bread and a reduction of odious taxes. The peasants only wanted the freedom to till the land and reap their harvests without having so much of it stolen by the nobility. All of these people, the nobility, the bourgeoisie (which includes craftsmen and shopkeepers in L's use of the term), the town and city proletarians, and the peasantry, learned that they must re-order and expand their ideas in order to win their goals. For the nobility this led them to oppose the revolution and favor the king. For all of the rest it led them to the famous Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. At any rate, that's my interpretation of the history.
The Revolution did not occur in a vacuum. It was closely watched by multiple elements of society in Holland, Germany, and elsewhere. In Prussia, the high bourgeoisie and the nobility came together and produced a stable society in which they could occupy the commanding heights. In Holland, attempts at revolution were quashed by the invasion of the Prussian army. But France was more fortunate. The nobility were too selfish to take the compromising steps that could have saved them. The king was weak and isolated. The army and the various militias were themselves infected by revolutionary thinking. Conditions were ripe both for the overthrow of the ancien regime and for the defense of that overthrow against later Prussian and Austrian intervention.
The revolution produced only a very limited democracy, as did the events in England and the United States, but it was a foundation on which a much fuller democracy would eventually grow in spite of Napoleon, the Restoration, and other stumbling blocks.
| Author | Auster, Paul |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Penguin Books, 1990 |
| Copyright Date | 1981 |
| Number of Pages | 135 |
| Extras | Introduction by Luc Sante |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | September 2020 |
This was a most unusual story about a writer named Quinn who writes mystery novels under the pseudonym William Wilson. He receives a phone call one night from Virginia Stillman, a woman desperately searching for help from the detective Paul Auster. She is certain that Quinn is Auster, a man whom Quinn doesn't even know. Curious, he decides to become a detective and not just a writer of detective stories. He visits the woman, pretending his name is Paul Auster. There he learns that Virginia is married to Peter Stillman, a young man who grew up in a sealed dark room and who asserts that Peter Stillman is not his real name - the real name being one that he cannot remember. Later we learn that his father, also named Peter Stillman, believed that, if young Peter had no contact with other human beings he would use the natural language that is built-in to being human, and his father would get to learn what that is.
The father went to prison for mistreating the boy and now, with the boy still not fully recovered, he has served his sentence and is about to be released. Virginia wants Auster/Quinn to protect young Peter. Quinn decides to do it by meeting the train on which the father will arrive from prison, following the elderly man, and preventing him from getting to Peter. At first Quinn follows the man around and discovers information about the madness and method of the father. But then the father leaves his low rent hotel and Quinn loses him. He decides instead to stake out Virginia and Peter's apartment. For months he literally lives in the alley across from the apartment building, degenerating all the time. Finally he goes up to the apartment only to learn it must have been abandoned months before. A phone call to Auster is unhelpful. A return to his own apartment reveals a disaster. His landlord has sold all of Quinn's belongings and leased the apartment to a new tenant after Quinn disappeared and stopped paying rent. At the end the story's narrator, whoever that is, went with Auster to Virginia's apartment and found Quinn's notebook, but there was no other sign of Quinn himself and no resolution to any of the open questions.
I don't know if anyone has written a story like this one. The Paul Auster character of the novel is and is not the Paul Auster who wrote the novel. In the novel, he is married to "Siri", clearly Siri Hustvedt, the real author's real wife and herself an author (see The Blazing World.) There is also a narrator who is not the Paul Auster of the story but may or may not be the Paul Auster of the title page. The story is mainly told in simple third person but at the end the narrator steps into the story and continues in first person. Then there is the pseudonymous William Wilson, yet another author. It is as if the author is split into multiple personalities who each examine an aspect of the story and each personify an aspect of the author of the story. They do, or do not, it's impossible to tell, begin to come together, or perhaps further split apart at the end. In short, in addition to being a story with a plot and a theme, it's a deconstruction and reconstruction of the basic narrative notions of authorship and story.
The topic of the story, the abuse and derangement of the young Peter Stillman and his subsequent dysfunctionality, is bizarre. The response by Quinn is bizarre. The three Stillman characters - father, son, and wife - have their own personal identity issues and we are not offered any definitive information about who they really are or what they hope to accomplish.
This novel expanded my own notions of what a novel could be. I won't say that it took us to new heights of artistic writing - as is sometimes said of Flaubert, Tolstoy, Faulkner, and other famous authors - but it did open a door into new possibilities in creative writing. I was educated and impressed by it. Time and life permitting (I am neither a young nor a rapid reader), I hope to read the next volume of the trilogy and maybe the final volume too.
Luc Sante's introduction is as complex and innovative as Auster's novel. I can't say that I understood it when I read it before starting the novel. It was only after reading the novel that I could go back and see what Sante was talking about. He writes at the end:
"There have been, in two hundred years, a great many novels and stories set in New York City, but until Paul Auster’s trilogy no one had made a serious effort to demonstrate its extreme antiquity, its surface flimsiness compared to its massive subterranean depths, its claim on the origins of stories far older than written culture. But now we know, and that truth will inhere no matter how many times the city is reconfigured and how thoroughly living memory is banished from it. Auster, who owns the key, makes its use available to all readers."
Sante doesn't let the reader off easy.
| Author | Fukuyama, Francis |
|---|---|
| Publication | Audible |
| Copyright Date | 2011 |
| Number of Pages | 608 |
| Extras | Reference guide with maps and diagrams |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| When Read | September 2020 |
The author attempts to explain what causes states to arise from earlier forms of society, all the way back to the stone ages and before, and what makes them succeed or fail. The breadth of the analysis is very wide and, as FF himself acknowledges, it cannot help but be shallow and contain errors of history that specialists in the different countries that FF explores would be better at explicating specifics than he has been.
The author concentrates very heavily on three areas: the formation of states, the rule of law, and the development of accountable government.
According to FF, the first modern state, i.e., the first government that imposed a uniform political organization over a large area and population, was created in China before the Common Era (as we sometimes refer to BC.) However this government had no rule of law. The emperor did as he pleased, killing people at his own whim and imposing whatever orders he wished to impose. There was also no accountability to those below him. Accountability only flowed upward in ancient (and modern according to FF) China, with peasants accountable to their various types of masters all the way up to the emperor himself to whom everyone was accountable while he was accountable to no one.
The states that FF discusses are all over the world - China, India, and the Ottoman Empire are important ones, as are the states of early modern Europe. Others include the early Arab states at the time and somewhat after the time of Mohammed, the Mongol empire, Hungary, Russia and, collectively, the states of South America. Surprisingly perhaps, he has little to say about ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome - the states that are traditionally treated as early models of government by European and American historians. FF can discern no Marxian like universal order of development (tribal -> slave -> feudal -> capitalist -> socialist) that applies to all of them. He argues that conditions are different in different countries and while we can find many parallels and common influences of common conditions, there is no one path forward from tribalism to modern states, no one way to "get to Denmark", the country most admired in the world today for its high standard of living, honest government, and social welfare. Some of the states developed with aristocracy (a continuation of the "patrimonial" organization of most primitive clans) that sided with commoners against kings, others with kings and aristocracy joined against commoners (for example under the 17th and 18th century Tsars where Ivan Grozny and Peter the Great terrorized the aristocracy into complete submission.) The results of these and other variations with other states of the different classes brought about very different histories.
No one can criticize Fukuyama for adopting a too narrow approach to history. In describing the behavior of clan and tribe social organization he includes examples of chimpanzee behavior to show that states do not emerge from a presumed Hobbesian state of nature in which every man is against every other. He then plows through political development all the way up to the beginning of what we, today, take to be modern states. His analysis is nothing if not bold.
I'm not sure what to make of the book. I often felt that I didn't know enough of the history (and I read a fair amount of history) to judge FF's specific conclusions about social and political development. His major examples, China, India, the Ottoman Empire, the Magyar state in Hungary, etc., are not in the mainstream of my own historical education. All I'm prepared to say for sure is that I found his analysis to be very, very interesting. One of the things that attracted me and many others to Marxist historical materialism is its recognition of the role powerful economic and social forces play in the development of societies. Marx thought that the decisions of kings and presidents were more driven by economic and social forces than that economic and social developments were determined by the decisions of individual leaders. His "dialectical materialism", which I prefer to call "historical materialism", gave us a way to understand history as a comprehensible subject, something that could be studied at least somewhat scientifically, not just a sequence of whimsical decisions by individual leaders. For example, we can foresee the fall of the Roman Republic whether or not Julius Caesar appeared on the scene. That fall was made inevitable by the transformation of the army from a citizens army to a professional one, and that in turn was determined by the expansion of the empire outside Italy, the replacement of free farmers with slaves, the need for garrisons throughout the imperial territory, and so on. I'm not arguing here that this particular view of the fall of the Republic is as I say it is, only that it happened for reasons that were not dependent on the personalities of Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, Pompeii, or Octavian. Fukuyama is in the same tradition in his analysis. He may disagree with the specifics of Marx's analysis, but he agrees with the notion of understanding history in a conceptual and material way, not as a study of one historical figure after another. And he seems to me to be pretty good at it.
FF is famous for his "End of History" theory. He wrote a short essay on the topic in his younger days (age 37, 1989) and a longer book three years later. I'm pulled in a hundred directions in my reading and no longer make firm mental commitments to individual authors or books, but I may make time at least for that essay in the days to come.
| Author | Weyman, Stanley |
|---|---|
| Publication | Gutenberg |
| Copyright Date | 1922 |
| Number of Pages | 421 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Economics |
| When Read | September 2020 |
In 1825, stimulated by the opening of the South American market to English investment and the exciting new prospects of steam railways and ships, a huge stock market bubble emerged in England. Prices of stocks were bid up out of all proportion to the value of the companies. In the euphoria induced in both rich and middle income investors, stocks were purchased and, when their value increased, they were used as borrowing collateral for the purchase of more and more stocks - "on margin" as we say today. The novel begins at the height of the euphoria and ends in the depths of the subsequent crash. As in modern times, the crash ruined thousands of people and businesses directly, and their ruination ruined many thousands more who were creditors, employees, customers, or just ordinary folk who had put their own money into the now tottering banks.
The story takes place in the fictional town of Aldersbury where the able, intelligent, and well intentioned Mr. Ovington has worked for years to build up a new bank in the town and to start a new joint stock venture to build a railway to link Aldersbury with a rail connection proposed in a larger town 13 miles away. Young Arthur Bourdillon, a member of the local gentry and a highly intelligent, likable, and hard working fellow works at the bank and has been invited by Ovington to put in 5,000 pounds to become a partner in the railway company. Arthur wants to be a decent man but he wants more to become a rich player in the economy. With no experience of hard times he takes the boom at face value, pooh-poohing all fears about what was happening. He browbeats his widowed mother for months to finally convince her to lend him the 5,000 pounds - which is almost all the money she has.
Arthur is related to Mr. Griffin, the leading member of the local gentry, a scrupulously honest man who has worked hard all his life, redeemed his inherited lands from the poor judgments and mortgages of his ancestors, and considers himself and his class to be superior people. Arthur is angling for a high position at the bank and possible marriage to Ovington's daughter Betty or, as a backstop when the future looks dodgy, a possible marriage to Griffin's daughter Josina and an inheritance of old Griffin's house and lands. Certain of his handsome figure, his wit, and his charm, he sees these two options as easily obtained once he chooses which girl to take.
However there is another man in the picture. Ovington's son and Betty's brother, Clement Ovington. Clement hates his work at the bank. It bores and stifles him. What he really wants is to be outdoors all the time, working a farm, enjoying the weather, relating to the plants and animals. Josina is attracted to Clement even knowing that her father would condemn him as a common man and son of a banker - an evil profession.
The crash occurs, slowly but inevitably. There is a run on Ovington's Bank. Ovington does everything to pay his debts but is on the hairy edge of bankruptcy. He and Arthur separately approach Griffin to appeal to him to save the bank, believing that if they can borrow 10 or 12 thousand from him they can survive the run and repay him within a few months. Griffin, of course, refuses and demands his own 400+ pounds on deposit in gold. Ovington gives it to him.
On his way home, Griffin's evil coachman assaults and robs him on the road, at night, stealing the money, blinding Griffin, and attempting to kill him. Clement happens upon them and fights the man. By happenstance, Arthur also appears in the night and assists the badly injured Griffin. The criminal runs away with 400+ pounds of Griffin's money. When Clement comes back to the coach Arthur urges him to go after the driver, assuring him that he'll get Griffin home. Each man goes to his separate task. Griffin is misled into believing that Arthur saved him, found the miscreant, and recovered the money. Later, Arthur steals securities worth 12,000 pounds from Griffin's secret safe. Talking the blind Griffin into signing papers that will get Arthur the money, with which he plans to save the bank and get the money back to Griffin without G's ever knowing what happened.
As expected in Weyman's novels, everything comes right in the end. Both Betty and Justina turn down Arthur. Clement wins Justina. Griffin save's the bank. Life goes on.
This is the most modern of the six Weyman stories I've read so far. It has hardly any of the adventure and violence so common in the others but it comes very close to my favorite A Gentleman of France in constructing fine characters, a convincing representation of a past society, and an ingenious plot. All of the characters, including Griffin and even Arthur, are portrayed with some sensitivity, sympathy, and credibility. I didn't feel at the end that Weyman bent his characters to make them come out okay. He kept them in character and went deeper into them than one expects in a historical romance.
It was a pleasure to read. I liked it.
| Author | Nielsen, Jennifer A. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Scholastic Press |
| Copyright Date | 2015 |
| Number of Pages | 317 |
| Extras | photos, maps |
| Extras | About the author |
| Extras | Q&A with Jennifer Nielsen |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | East Germany; Young adult |
| When Read | September 2020 |
12 year old Gerta's father and one brother were in West Berlin in 1961, hoping to bring the rest of the family over from the east when, overnight, the first iteration of the Berlin Wall was constructed. Gerta, her mother, and her oldest brother Fritz were now unable to visit their father or the other boy. The father, dubbed a subversive by the Stasi, was forbidden to return and, of course, didn't want to anyway. As Gerta walked to school she could see her father and brother waving to her from a rooftop on the western side of the wall.
One day the father did a dance on the rooftop that included a pantomime of shoveling and he indicated an abandoned house right on the wall. After seeing this multiple times, Gerta decided her father wanted her to dig a tunnel from the indicated house. She sneaked into the house and spotted a bomb shelter in the basement, from which the tunnel could be dug. She got a shovel and began. 18 year old Fritz figured out what she was doing and joined her, the two working very hard, hiding what they were doing as best they could. After many sacrifices, extremely hard work, hiding from the Grenzlers (border guards), deceiving a local informer, and discovery by one obnoxious Stasi officer who threatened to shoot them but was bought off by a promise by Fritz to bring him and his family across too. When all seemed to be hopeless, they discovered the father and brother digging from the west not far off. In a cliff hanger at the end, the two tunnels are joined, the family gets through, the Stasi officer's family and the family of a friend of Gerta all get through. The questionable Stasi is killed in a shootout with other guards. The family is, at last, re-united and free.
Our 11 year old granddaughter Elaine was reading this book during a week long visit to our house. She said she thought it was very good. She left it at the house when going home so I decided to read it. I'm glad that I did.
The book had a limited perspective. There was nothing in it about the ideological conflict between east and west, no history, and very little about either state or society. However the depiction of the domination of life by secret political police (the "Stasi") and pervasive informers was portrayed with suffocating realism. It seemed like there were Stasi dossiers on virtually every person, even including children. Many books and records were proscribed. All discussion between people, even friends, had to take into account the possibility that someone in the discussion was an informer - often an unwilling one who was forced to choose between informing or being punished or imprisoned him or her self.
Neilsen did a pretty good job of making her points and doing so in a way that could be understood by both young and older readers.
| Author | Hartley, L.P. (Leslie Poles) |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: New York Review of Books |
| Copyright Date | 1953 |
| Number of Pages | 326 |
| Extras | Introduction by Colm Tóibin, 2002 |
| Extras | Introduction by the author, 1963 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | October 2020 |
In the year 1900, twelve year old, middle class, Leo Colston is invited by his public school (i.e., "private school" in American parlance) friend Marcus Maudsley to Brandham Hall, the manor house of the Viscount Hugh, ninth Lord Trimingham who has let his home to the wealthy Maudsley family. Marcus' mother Mrs. Maudsley has concentrated hard on willing her beautiful and intelligent daughter Marian to marry Hugh but Marian has secretly fallen in love with Ted Burgess, the hard working and very masculine farmer working one of the farms on the Trimingham estate. Marian and Ted turn Leo into their postman, carrying secret messages of assignations back and forth from the Hall to the farm.
Leo stays at the Hall for quite a while and and wins considerable favor for a brilliant catch at a cricket match between Hall and village, for a pair of beautifully sung songs at a social gathering, and for his friendship not only with Marcus, but with Marian and Hugh as well. When he eventually learns of the content of the messages he is passing, he becomes alarmed and even tries to break things up by telling Marian that Ted wants to meet her at 6:00 when, in fact, he said 6:30, and counting on Marian's complete impatience, but it doesn't work. With no help from Leo, Mrs. Maudley has figured things out and pulls Leo with her to a hidden spot where they find Ted and Marian going at it. Marian will marry Hugh, which she already knew she must do, and Ted commits suicide.
In an Epilogue in the 1950s, the now much older Leo returns to the village to try to discover the fates of the people he met in 1900. He found the memorial to the death in 1910 of the Ninth Lord Trimingham in the church. A tenth Trimingham died in 1944, in Normandy. The birth date of the tenth was only seven months after Leo's 13th birthday at the Hall, from which Leo deduced that the tenth was actually Ted's son, not Hugh's. On the street outside the church he accosts a young man on the street who turns out to be the eleventh. Leo learns from him that Marian is still alive, living in the house where her old nanny lived. He visits her, learns more, and is importuned by her to visit the eleventh again and fill him in on the whole story. The last sentence of the novel ends with "... wondering how I should say what I had come to say, when the south-west prospect of the Hall, long hidden from my memory, sprang into view."
As often happens to me when reading books about subjects out of the ordinary pattern of my reading experience, it took some extra time for me to recognize the real value of the work. In this case, the experience of a 12-13 year old in the house of English aristocracy in 1900 was indeed outside the ordinary pattern of my reading, but it didn't take long for me to begin to appreciate it. The writing was brilliant. I bookmarked many passages for their wonderful descriptions of Leo's internal states and the subtleties of demeanor and behavior of the main characters in the story. I hope to copy out and comment on some of these passages in my diary, but I'll just cite a couple of passages here.
Of Mrs. Maudley Hartley writes: "... her glance still had the special quality of not traveling but arriving." That thought made this reader pause. It slowed me down (not that I'm a fast reader - I'm not) and made me think about what that could mean. It engaged more of my own thinking. It pushed me to see Mrs. Maudley more deeply than as just a bossy matron. It gave her a sharper, more focused image, just as it give her a more penetrating glance. And here's another quote, an earlier passage on Mrs. Maudley and her relationship with her three children. This one also speaks of her perceptive glance and, at the end, brings us out of the Maudsleys into Leo's notions of love.
"... I shouldn't have dared to love her if she had been my mother. Marcus did, but perhaps she showed another side of herself to him. She brought out all the clumsiness in Denys; when he saw her eye on him he always looked as if he was going to drop something - or had dropped it. Yes, with Mrs. Maudsley away one breathed more freely. Did Marian love her? That I could not tell: I had seen them watching each other like two cats; and then, as cats do, turn away again, indifferently, as if whatever was at stake between them had somehow faded out. It wasn’t my idea of love; my idea of love was more demonstrative."
Colm Tóibin was the right man to introduce the novel. Himself an expert in subtle language and emotion, he understands both Hartley's personal biography, and the purpose and power of his novel.
Reading Hartley made me think more about writing. It made me want to convey more about the characters and events that I write about, to be more careful to really delve into the deeper aspects of my subjects rather than to just get the people and events out into the text and move on. It made me want to pay more attention to what other writers were doing and to appreciate them when they are able to think more deeply about something than I have.
| Author | Fall, Bernard B. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Tantor Audio |
| Copyright Date | 1966 |
| Number of Pages | 463 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History; War |
| Keywords | Vietnam War |
| When Read | October 2020 |
Fall, a Jewish refugee from the Nazi occupation of Austria, taken by his parents to France, fought as a teenager in the French Resistance after his parents were killed. After the war, he worked at the Nuremberg trials, attended college in Paris and Munich and then studied political science in the U.S. He was a deeply experienced, educated, and informed young man when he went to Vietnam in 1953 to study the first Vietnam War (1946-54) at first hand. At the end of that war he returned to the U.S. and earned a PhD, returning to Vietnam five times for more study of the country and its history. This book is Fall's deeply researched and highly detailed history of the Battle of Dien Bien Phu where the Viet-Minh, led by the historian and general Vo Nguyen Giap, defeated the French Army and, effectively, ended the hope of restoration of French colonial rule in Indochina.
The French hoped to distract, tie up, and wear down the communist Vietnamese forces in a distant mountain valley on the border with Laos, very far from their administration in Hanoi. They parachuted in in November 1953. An airfield was soon built and covered with steel plates to make it serviceable in rain and mud. More men and supplies were flown in. Dozens of artillery pieces were sited. Outposts were manned and fortified in the hills surrounding the valley in order to defend the perimeter. Ten light tanks were flown in in pieces and assembled at the field. Land based air support flew from the new airfield and from Hanoi and other French occupied areas while French aircraft carriers (one on loan from the U.S.) added more fighter bombers to the fight. All of the guns, planes, tanks, munitions, ships, and most every other type of material required were supplied by the United States. The men themselves however were all supplied by France from France itself, from the French foreign legion, from French North Africa (Morocco and Algiers), from Senegal or other French colonies in central Africa, and from local Vietnamese and mountain tribesmen.
It took months for the Viet-Minh to accumulate troops, equipment, and supplies in the area in order to attack the base, but when they did attack, they were much more effective than the French expected them to be. Many of the troops were local teenage conscripts armed with whatever weapons were available, but many others were well trained and experienced soldiers, now armed with sophisticated weapons such as 105 mm howitzers, 120 mm mortars, 75 mm recoilless cannon, submachine guns, hand grenades and, most importantly, increasing numbers of 37 mm anti-aircraft artillery pieces that posed a great threat to French supply aircraft and to the bombers and fighter bombers that supported the French in battle. About 800 Russian made trucks were available to carry supplies over a tenuous trail from the Peoples Republic of China, together with large numbers of bicycles loaded with supplies and steered by individual men and women over the hundreds of kilometers of trails.
On March 13, 1954 the Viet-Minh began attacking the perimeter outposts with increasingly powerful artillery and infantry forces. The French defended them all successfully for a time, launching counter attacks when needed to drive back or outflank Viet-Minh attackers. However, one by one, the outposts fell. Viet-Minh trenches were dug closer and closer to the main center of resistance. The airfield fell under more and more artillery fire until it became entirely unusable. Supplies and reinforcements could only reach the French by parachute and, as the defended area shrank and the anti-aircraft fire grew, the number of men and supplies falling into Viet-Minh controlled territory increased as did the number of planes damaged or shot down. By late April, with the battlefield area reduced and covered by monsoon rains, the only hope for the French was a powerful relief force plus massive air support supplied by the Americans. But the relief force was unable even to get close to the battle and the Americans did not step in to the fight.
It was over on May 7, 1954. Exhausted, almost out of ammunition and food, pounded by enemy artillery, sometimes even dying for lack of sleep, the remaining French surrendered.
The title of the book surely expressed what the battle was like for the men of both sides. 2,000 of the French and 8,000 of the Viet-Minh forces are thought to have died and many more were wounded and psychologically as well as physically scarred. Under the monsoon rains, collapsing trenches and tunnels were the only refuges for thousands of wounded and other men. The battle to keep these muddy, flooded places from crushing or drowning the men was almost as hellish as the battle against the Viet-Minh.
As in Street Without Joy: Indochina at War, 1946-54, Fall has nothing to say about the underlying politics of the war or the battle. He was not hostile to the Viet-Minh, at least to the extent that he recognized their bravery and commitment, and sympathized with their suffering. However, even though he writes about some of the politics of the war in Paris, Washington, London, and Geneva, there is nothing about the essence of the struggle. Why were the communists fighting for independence? Why were they communists? Why did the French try so hard to reestablish their colonial control of Indochina? Why did the U.S. support them? Why did Britain, another colonial power refuse to support them? These questions were outside the scope of the book.
While I was not surprised that Fall didn't address these political questions, knowing that he had been to Vietnam five times after the battle and that he had personally met with Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap, I was surprised at how little he reported about the Vietnamese experience of the battle. There was a small amount from each of the two Vietnamese sides, pro-communist and pro-French, but less than I would have expected.
I think that, to understand Fall's position, it's necessary to look at the situation as westerners viewed it in the aftermath of World War II and the Cold War. It appeared to Western consciousness at that time that the war in Vietnam was a struggle between communism and democracy - part of a world wide struggle occurring in Europe, Asia, Africa, and even Latin America. The non-communist governments that France established in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia after their failure to reestablish colonial control were, in the imagination of the American and significant sections of the French and British public, "democratic". In fact, they were no more so than the communist government in North Vietnam and, in many ways, were less so.
This is not a book that should be read in order to understand the regional and world politics of the first Vietnam war. However, as a military history, one that explains the battle from the points of view of both commanders and what we now call "boots on the ground", it's a remarkable achievement.
| Author | Egan, Greg |
|---|---|
| Publication | Night Shade / Skyhorse, 2013 |
| Copyright Date | 1995 |
| Number of Pages | 400 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| Keywords | Physics |
| When Read | October 2020 |
In a shocking opening of the book, video journalist Andrew Worth is present and recording with his implanted video system as a murdered man is brought back to life by drugs that stimulate his dead brain and other organs enough to wake him up to try to get answers to questions about his murder. The drugs produce terrible pain and damage him even more, making it impossible to keep him conscious for more than a few minutes before he is completely and irretrievably dead. Andrew is devastated by the experience. When he is then ordered to produce a story on a horrible new disease called "Distress", he gets out of it by managing to shove out and replace another journalist on the story of the Einstein Centenary Conference in the artificial island "Stateless", where physicists are presenting new ideas on a Theory of Everything, or TOE.
It ought to be a relaxing assignment in a tropical climate, but it's not. "Ignorance cults", as the scientifically sophisticated people call them, are battling against the science. The least recognized but worst threat comes from the AC, or Anthrocosmologists. These people believe that the character of the universe depends on consciousness, in similar fashion perhaps to the idea that a falling tree makes no sound unless someone is there to hear it. If the TOE isn't sophisticated enough, the expanding multiverse won't exist and only a limited number of galaxies will be available for human occupation - or something like that. The leading TOE theorist, Violet Mosala, must therefore be killed before she can nail down a theory that didn't meet the desires or requirements, or whatever they were, of the "moderate" faction of the AC.
Andrew is thrust into the center of this nightmare. He battles the AC, tries to save Mosala, propagates her theory to the rest of the world after her death, and saves the Theory of Everything. The Distress disease regresses (it was somehow tied to the AC theory.) Andrew lives another fifty years to appear at the next Einstein conference. The world settles back into normality.
As with all of Egan's books, this is an extraordinarily hard piece of "hard science fiction". It is "hard" in the sense of disdaining unscientific fantasy elements and also hard in the sense of difficult. I have read enough to at least recognize what he's referring to when he writes of ten dimensional quantum theory (Brian Greene: The Hidden Reality, Carlo Rovelli: Reality Is Not What It Seems) the expanding universe and, with more personal knowledge, of the molecular biology he describes (Alberts: Molecular Biology of the Cell and others). However I'm still not entirely certain about where Egan is elucidating current theories and where he is branching off into fiction.
The Anthrocosmology theory seems preposterous to me. The sound in the forest when a tree falls is the same whether someone hears it or not. The human (or bird, fox, ant, or whatever) sensation of sound may or may not be present, but the sound waves are certainly the same and they impact on the man and the ant the same regardless of the differences in the two sensations. Since humans are made of matter, I find it impossible to believe that matter cannot exist without humans. It is humans that cannot exist without matter, not vice versa. I can easily believe that intelligent non-human beings (whether artificially intelligent or extra-terrestrial) would emphasize different ideas in their physics, and use different mathematical conventions in their physics, but reality is still reality and, to the extent that we or they have the science right, we have it the same. F=ma and E=mc2 whatever sort of brain you have. Did Andrew Worth believe that? Sometimes it seemed that he did and other times I wasn't completely sure. I am fully conscious of the fact that Egan knows much more about this issue than I do but I'm not even a little bit convinced that subjective thought determines objective reality.
Whatever Worth's or Egan's scientific views, he really is an impressive writer. His characters are highly intelligent but clearly differentiated. Their emotions are powerful. His description of the people, the floating island, the horrors of the diseases and medicines, the personal conflicts, the social and political reality, are all deep and convincing.
This is the fifth book I've read by Egan and I hope to read more.
| Author | Connelly, Michael |
|---|---|
| Publication | Brilliance Audio |
| Copyright Date | 1999 |
| Number of Pages | 416 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | October 2020 |
Harry Bosch is put in charge of an investigation of the murder of Howard Elias, a highly effective black lawyer who specializes in suing cops who are believed to have hurt or killed innocent black people.
The case is a minefield. The African American public thinks that Elias was most likely killed by the police, who hated him for his castigation of police behavior. At the time of his murder, Elias was about to expose police malfeasance in the arrest and torture of a black man accused of molesting and murdering a 12 year old step daughter of the richest car dealer in Los Angeles. Harry is convinced that the two cases are related. He discovers strong evidence that the black man accused of the crime was not guilty - another problem for the police department, and that the real murderer was the girl's step father, a secret pedophile - a third problem because of the wealth and power of the family. The department hopes to counter all of this by finding a guilty cop to appease the public, by prominently displaying Bosch's team, himself plus two black cops Jerry Edgar and Kiz Ryder, and by bringing in cops from the internal affairs department, and by also bringing in the FBI. Widespread riots like those in Watts in 1992 don't occur, but a number of incidents of arson, looting, and violence do occur in spite of all public relations moves. The situation is very tense.
In the end Harry Bosch figures it all out. He learns the identity of the real killer of Elias and of the person who killed the child. All of the bad guys die, but the department publicly blames one of Bosch's old friends in the department who is said to have committed suicide when, in fact, Elias' killer did him in too.
Harry has a choice. He can expose all of the dirty details of the case, remove the curtain of blame on his old, now dead friend, and get fired from his job, or he can keep his mouth shut and be satisfied with the knowledge that the killers are now dead. He swallows his anger and keeps his job.
As I'm sure I've commented elsewhere, Connelly's Harry Bosch novels produce a deep and gritty feeling of authenticity. C knows a huge amount about police psychology, behavior, procedure, and politics. Good or bad, C's cops are not usually dumb but none of them are supermen either. They are experienced. They understand their colleagues, their superiors, their adversaries on the street, and the feelings of the general public. Some of them are weak and some very strong. Some are venal and/or corrupt. All are prone to mistakes and the mistakes they make as cops may have life and death consequences. All are human.
I thought that this was a good example of Connelly's writing.
| Author | Gamow, George |
|---|---|
| Publication | Mineola, NY: Dover, 1988 |
| Copyright Date | 1961 |
| Number of Pages | x + 338 |
| Extras | 128 figures, 8 halftone plates, index |
| Genres | Science; Physics; History |
| Keywords | Quantum mechanics; Cosmology |
| When Read | October 2020 |
Actually beginning with Pythagoras, Archimedes, and various other ancient scientists and mathematicians rather than Galileo, Gamow continues through many of the well known names, emphasizing the issues and achievements more than the men. Experienced as a popular science writer as well as a theoretical physicist, he attempts to explain things in a sophisticated and accurate manner but, hopefully, still understandable to intelligent readers. His chapters include "The Dawn of Physics", "The Dark Ages and the Renaissance", "God said, 'Let Newton Be'", "Heat as Energy", "The Age of Electricity", "Relativistic Revolution", "The Law of the Quantum", and "The Atomic Nucleus and Elementary Particles". There is also a small section at the end in which he discusses the inability of the physics of his time to discover the theoretical nature of any of the elementary particles they were discovering. Physicists have performed more and more sophisticated experiments, accumulated accurate observations, successfully worked out the mathematics that describe many of those observations in a formal manner, but still don't know what protons, electrons, neutrons, mesons, neutrinos, and other particles actually are.
I thought this was a superb book. The concepts of physics are very challenging but explained very well. Gamow does not shy away from mathematical equations. He takes it for granted that the reader can handle basic algebra and he expects him or her to remember the meaning of at least the most important equations when he describes more advanced discoveries that depend on them. Despite the implications of his title, he's not writing biography. He's writing science. Still, the biography is not completely absent. It's oversimplified and anecdotal but it's interesting nonetheless.
Gamow was born and educated in Russia and the Soviet Union becoming one of the youngest scientists admitted into the Soviet Academy of Sciences. He left/escaped with his wife in the early 1930's, living and working in Holland, England, and finally the United States. He was not a wannabe scientist who gave up on research and became a popular writer. As a physicist he was the real deal. He worked on a team led by Niels Bohr. He made a number of important discoveries of his own in theoretical physics. He knew Einstein and numerous others who created the modern revolution in the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics. He was a part of the the great developments in physics in the first half of the 20th century.
Although the emphasis is on science there are some delightful passages concerning individual scientists, starting with Archimedes. The best of the passages concerns Niels Bohr, who comes across as a peculiar but very endearing genius. Bohr was known, according to Gamow, as a man who would listen to a young physicist lecture on his new research, and then say that he didn't understand it. Everybody would chip in, trying to explain it to him. He would keep on expressing his lack of understanding until finally he would say, Ah, now I understand, and then go on to explain why the lecture was wrong and what the real right answer was.
For a scientific and historical work, this book was very engaging.
| Author | Furst, Alan |
|---|---|
| Publication | Simon and Schuster Audio |
| Copyright Date | 2016 |
| Number of Pages | 256 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | October 2020 |
In April of 1941, French resistance leader Mathieu is leading a team in efforts to bring downed English airmen into the Vichy area of France, from which they get to Spain and eventually back to England. Mathieu must rely on many other people and they must rely on him. Eventually, he is compromised by a gang of three teenage delinquents who are harrassing a tavern owner who works with Mathieu. They send an anonymous letter to the fascists saying that a resistance conspiracy is operating at the tavern. Mathieu finds out that the Germans know about him and he and all of his people must, themselves, escape.
The story is episodic. One episode concerns the escort of an airman on a train journey south. One concerns a failed attempt to have a man picked up by a British plane. One concerns an explosives expert and a radioman landed in France by submarine. There are appearances of a supercilious British spymaster and an intelligent German policeman. None of these stories are pursued very far.
In the end, as in almost all of Furst's books, the good guys escape. Mathieu and his lover make it to Britain and return to Paris, to the very same tavern still run by the same man, after the war.
I looked at some of the reviews on Amazon and found a number of sophisticated readers had criticized this book. One wrote: "There is something half-hearted about the book, as if it had been written by an author bored with his work and carrying on only to fulfill a contractual obligation." That reviewer titled his review: "Alan Furst is one of the best writers working today."
I'm not sure whether I'd categorize Furst as one of the best writers, but I agree that he is a very good writer, perhaps one of the best, in his chosen genre and particular style. I read him because he writes about decent, right thinking men and women who have been pushed by Nazis, sometimes also by Russian communists, into resistance against oppression. His books are about people I admire. As in his other books, the reader feels very apprehensive but, although there is some shooting and a couple of Germans are killed, the nightmare character of Nazi occupations are always kept in the background. We fear that the characters will be caught and tortured, but they are not and, though the tension is high, the violence is low.
I don't know how many stars I'd give this book in an Amazon review. I agree with the reviewer quoted above that it's not Furst's best book. It is episodic, though perhaps no more so than some of his others. I learned less from it, perhaps, than I have from others that tell us about life, politics, and war in the Balkans, Poland, Spain, and so on.
| Author | Vidal, Gore |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Ballantine Books, 1977 |
| Copyright Date | 1976 |
| Number of Pages | 384 |
| Extras | Afterword by the author |
| Extras | About the author |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | United States |
| When Read | November 2020 |
In 1875, after his wife died and then his daughter's Italian prince husband died, the (fictional) American diplomat, writer, and first person narrator of this book, Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler, arrives back in the United States after more than 35 years of living in France. His daughter Emma, the widowed Princess d'Agrigente, leaves her teenage boys in France with her money grasping mother-in-law and comes with her father for her first ever trip to the United States. The two, especially the beautiful and eligible princess, are instant celebrities.
Two threads weave their way through the novel. The main one is Charlie's work as a journalist for important New York newspapers and publishers. He attaches himself to Democratic Party New York governor Samuel Tilden's campaign for president in 1876 and his reporting on the election in general and Tilden's campaign in particular, which he is supporting, is his journalistic focus. A second and separate thread concerns his efforts to see his daughter safely married with a good husband and a wealthy family that can give her the standard of living she's always enjoyed.
Vidal's main interests appeared to be the corruption of democracy that he considered to be overwhelming in the United States government, and the high society and extraordinary plutocracy that was developing in the ruling class. Have we improved since then? In very important respects, we definitely have. One major advance was the extension of democracy to include women and blacks in the electorate - though it took many decades to achieve and still requires major efforts to defend. Economic corruption is still a serious problem and economic inequality seems as bad as ever. But at least we now have minimum wages, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other ameliorations of what would otherwise be third world like poverty in our country.
I wanted to get Vidal's impressions of U.S. Grant - a man whose generalship I greatly admire though I know much less about his time as President. Vidal was ambivalent in his judgment. Reading his criticism of Grant I was never sure whether I was reading the judgment of the author or only of his main character. I learned nothing of substance about the famous general.
Vidal was an important writer of historical fiction regarding the United States and I've now read six of his novels, including four about the U.S. The history is always interesting but V often seems as or more interested in historical gossip as in historical fact. That's okay. He was, after all, writing novels, not histories. He was pursuing his own particular interests and the interests of many of his readers. The gossip doesn't interest me as much as the history, but there is enough there, in both categories, to shed significant light on his subjects.
| Author | Christie, Agatha |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Harper |
| Copyright Date | 1923 |
| Number of Pages | 240 |
| Extras | List of Christie's books. About the author. |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | November 2020 |
Poirot receives a telegram from a wealthy Englishman living in France named P.T. Renauld, urgently requesting that he come to the man's villa in France. Poirot decides to go and take his friend Arthur Hastings (the narrator of the story) with him. However, when they arrive at the villa, they are too late. Renauld has been murdered. As requested by the local police, Poirot stays on to assist in the investigation. A famous, arrogant police detective named Giraud also arrives from Paris to assist. He and Poirot each think the other is something of a fool and treat each other rather discourteously.
The plot is complicated. There are beautiful girls involved who are pursuing, or appear to be pursuing, Renauld's son Jack, or in one case, one appears to be pursuing the hapless Hastings. Clues abound in the manner later to become famous as part of Agatha Christie's style. Poirot picks up on them while Giraud pooh poohs them. But we, the readers, or at least I, one reader, don't see what Poirot can be deducing from the clues until he later explains them. There is a race at the end to save the life of Renauld's wife and prevent the innocent Jack from being convicted. They make it in the nick of time.
This is the second Poirot story and third novel of any type from Christie.
As with all types of literature, mystery stories come in many depths and flavors and the writers have different concepts of their craft. I read (or watched on TV) Christie's Poirot stories in the same spirit as I read Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe or Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories. They have a cast of characters who can be relied upon to stay constant from story to story, and an approach to finding and solving mysteries that varies in order to produce the desirable surprises for the reader, but keeps the basic scenes and structures constant and intact. A steady diet of them would be unappealing but they hit the spot after a bout of serious reading.
| Author | Ramachandran, V.S. (Vilayanur Subramanian) |
|---|---|
| Publication | Audible.com, 2011 |
| Copyright Date | 2010 |
| Number of Pages | 384 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Science; Cognitive science; Medicine |
| When Read | November 2020 |
Neurologist and neuroscientist Ramachandran educates non-scientists in the nature and function of the brain. The book is divided into an introduction "No Mere Ape", followed by nine chapters:
1. "Phantom Limbs and Plastic Brains"
2. "Seeing and Knowing"
3. "Loud Colors and Hot Babes: Synesthesia"
4. "The Neurons that Shaped Civilization"
5. "Where is Steven? The Riddle of Autism"
6. "The Power of Babble: The Evolution of Language"
7. "Beauty and the Brain: The Emergence of Aesthetics"
8. "The Artful Brain: Universal Laws"
9. "An Ape with a Soul: How Introspection Evolved".
In each of these chapters, R offers a simplified description of the areas of the brain involved in the described activities, examples of actual patients with damage or genetic abnormalities in these areas with explanations of the bizarre effects and behaviors that result, and informed speculation about why these areas evolved and what advantages they provided to our ancestors and ourselves. In all cases, R is able to provide first hand observations of patients with the described problems together with first hand knowledge about possible treatments. In addition to his work as a physician, he is himself a leading scientist in brain research and a number of important facts about the brain and treatment of its disorders were discovered by him and his associates. He is certainly a leading authority on his topics.
I read this book in order to learn more about the nature of cognition. I wanted to know more about the nature of intelligence, thought, and consciousness, in addition to what Daniel Dennett hypothesized in his Consciousness Explained. I was particularly interested in learning things that would help me understand the possibilities for artificial intelligence. Unfortunately, that did not seem to be a focus of R's research interest, or at least it wasn't a focus that was covered in this book. I thought about stopping the book and choosing something else to read but, although I hadn't been especially interested in R's topics before reading, I got interested as I read and got more interested as I read more.
Part of what interested me was R's explanations of the various components of our neurological equipment - how they functioned and how the loss of function of any particular component had very specific and often very revelatory effects on how we think and act. I was also quite interested in the speculations on why the functions evolved and how they increased our ability to both cooperate and compete with other people, bringing about a very rapid evolution of our cognitive capability. Finally, I was interested in the scientific research methods that R employed in discovering more about the brain. His experiments were often surprisingly simple. He had access to and used very complex equipment such as electroencephalograms and magnetic resonance imaging of several types, but sometimes he made very important discoveries with nothing more complicated than a mirror. It was an impressive demonstration of a sophisticated scientific imagination.
| Author | Lethem, Jonathan |
|---|---|
| Publication | Doubleday, 2014 |
| Copyright Date | 1999 |
| Number of Pages | 352 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | November 2020 |
Lionel Essrog, a boy growing up in a Brooklyn orphanage, suffers from Turette's Syndrome. The other orphans regard him as a freak and treat him rather badly but he copes. People think he's stupid, but he's not. He spends most of his time in the orphanage library, reading everything available to him.
A dubious character named Frank Minna recruits Lionel and three other boys from the orphanage to move boxes for him - from buildings to trucks and from trucks to buildings. They never know what's in the boxes or who owns the trucks or the buildings. They just do a good job and keep their mouths shut. Eventually, Frank has a regular business. The four boys drop out of high school to work for him full time. In addition to Lionel they are Tony Vermonte, Gilbert Coney, and Danny Fantl. Tony is the oldest, two years older than Lionel and Gilbert and one year older than Danny. Tony is convinced, correctly, that Frank works for the Italian Mafia, and he aspires to do it too. Frank sets all of them up as L and L Car Service, driving people around, but their real work, or so he tells them, is as detectives.
The story opens years later with Lionel and Gilbert ordered to follow Frank in a separate car and to listen to what happens on his radio device when he goes into a particular building. Lionel and Gilbert do what they're told but they are unable to prevent Frank's murder. They take the dying Frank to a hospital but it's too late to save him. After that, the backstory of orphanage, school, and the creation of Frank's business is filled in. In the rest of the story, Lionel tries hard to find Frank's killer and, eventually, he succeeds.
Lethem is a master of literary imagination. I've never read any other novel featuring a character with Turette's, much less one in which the protagonist has the syndrome, much less one in which the protagonist narrates the story in first person. However, while Turette's is a thread weaving through all aspects of the novel, it's not really the main theme. In part, the novel is a mystery, in part a comedy, and in part, a major part I think, a story of a man searching for meaning, relationship, and identity in a life that can never be normal. Lionel will always be something of a freak in the eyes of others. He will never be more than just tolerated by them. He'll never find a woman to love him. He'll never have a close friend or any kind of relative. Frank Minna, the man closest to that description - though still not close, is dead. Lionel can never conquer and must therefore simply try to live with, his inner demon of Turette's. In the midst of a mystery and a comedy, I think it is this inner struggle that is the heart of Lethem's story.
Based on my readings of The Fortress of Solitude and Gun with Occasional Music I recommended this book to the NCI Book Club. I'm always a bit nervous about recommendations. In this case there was the double concern of first, that I hadn't read the book (true of most of my recommendations - I almost always prefer to read new books than books I've already read) and was afraid that it might turn out to be a bad book, and second that the other two Lethem novels I read were quite unconventional and might not appeal to most readers. This one might be like that too. But on the other side it had been positively reviewed by well known litterateurs and won a couple of significant awards.
I read four or five published reviews by professional readers and writers as well as the usual crowd of Amazon reviewers. They all helped me to see more deeply into the novel. I wound up liking it a lot. I also watched the movie of the same title that started out as a somewhat faithful translation of the book from print to screen and then wandered into an entirely different mystery story. However I thought the movie was very well done and I liked it as much as the book. It was faithful to the conception of the book even if it took the plot off in another, not uninteresting, direction.
| Author | Plato |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Greek |
| Translators | Griffith, Tom |
| Publication | Audible, 2000 |
| Copyright Date | c. 375 BC |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Philosophy |
| When Read | November 2020 |
Plato's Republic is thought to be the first book length statement of political philosophy in the world. Major topics include the nature of justice and virtue, classes of people in society, the roles of men and women, education, and the comparative nature and value of different forms of government. The work is presented in the form of a Socratic dialog between Socrates and various other influential (I presume) Athenians.
Plato's opinions are well stated and well defended against multiple objections posed by his interlocutors, or even by Socrates himself, heading off arguments that he does not ascribe to the specific people he is addressing. Those opinions are not in conformance with the opinions of 20th or early 21st century Americans. They come from a different time, place, and culture. Some of them were probably pretty radical even in ancient Athens, for example his proposal that women and children should be shared between men and that parents and children, at least in the classes of rulers and guardians, should not even (if I rightly understand Plato's position) know their ancestries. The working classes appear to have no role to play in Plato's notion of government other than that of working. He speaks with some respect of shoemakers and other working people but I have some sense that, for him, a shoemaker is probably the master of a small business with people beneath him rather than an individual working in a one person, one room shop, or worse, an employee or slave of a master shoemaker. Plato mentions slaves but with no interest in them as human beings. At one point he says that Greeks should not enslave other Greeks, only barbarians. Was that a progressive view in his time? I don't know.
A section of particular interest to me was Plato's description of five forms of state. The optimum state is ruled by "philosopher kings", men of mature years with strong rationality, high education, and a deep commitment to justice and virtue. They are supported by "guardians", a class of professional soldiers who, like the philosophers, are personally uninterested in wealth, power, or the exaltation of their families or progeny. In fact, they would have no families in the sense that ordinary citizens have them but would share them with other guardians. This ideal state might degenerate into a "timocracy", perhaps something like what we recognize as a military dictatorship. That in turn might degenerate into oligarchy in which the richest people from various classes assume power. Oligarchy can be replaced by democracy when the people revolt against rule by the rich. That in turn can degenerate into mob rule and tyranny, rule by a populist demagogue who disenfranchises everyone else and subjugates people and state to his own personal interests - the worst of all possible governments. Before the election and presidency of Donald Trump I would have thought that democracy provides the best defense against tyranny and that those democratic or partially democratic governments that degenerated into tyranny - Italy, Germany, Japan and others in the 20th century, Turkey, Hungary, the Philippines and others today, had only weak and short lived democratic governments that lacked the solid entrenchment of the strongest democracies such as the United States, United Kingom, France, and others today. Now I'm no longer sure. It's not that I think other forms of government may be more resistant to tyranny than democracy, rather it's that I'm no longer so sure that democracy is very resistant. See also Trumpocracy below, a book I have just now finished.
Are Plato's analyses of ethics and politics applicable today? Were they applicable in the fourth century BC? Or were they peculiar to Plato's extraordinary life and mind? I'm not prepared to offer any definitive answers to those questions. I am not as smart as Plato was and I know far less about his circumstances than he did - in spite of my access to more than two millennia of history subsequent to Plato's times. My inclination is to treat Plato's ideas not as viable political philosophies either for his time or for ours, but rather as windows into a great flowering of philosophical thought, one that formed an early foundation of human thinking about ourselves, and one that offers, if not solutions, then at least insights, into our political and social problems.
I found this audiobook and listened to it, only realizing that it was an abridgment after I reached the end. This must be the tenth time I've fallen into that hole. I went into my basement and found two different paperback editions of The Republic, one of which had yellow highlighting applied in every chapter. I first read the book in my undergraduate days but I felt an interest in re-reading it to refresh my thoughts of this seminal work. Perhaps between the new listening/reading and this write up, I'll retain more for my remaining years.
| Author | Sajer, Guy (pseudonym of Guy Mouminoux) |
|---|---|
| Original Language | French |
| Translators | Emmet, Lily |
| Publication | New York: Harper and Row, 1971 |
| Copyright Date | 1965 |
| Number of Pages | 614 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Autobiography |
| Keywords | World War II; Eastern front |
| When Read | November 2020 |
Sajer, whose real name is Guy Mouminoux, either enlisted or was drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1942, at the age of 16. He was brought up in France, mostly in Alsace as I understand it, by a French father and German mother. He said that when the Germans annexed Alsace in 1940 he fell under the jurisdiction of the draft, though he also admitted to being an adolescent who was attracted to the German soldiery he saw before going into service. He tried and failed to make it in the Luftwaffe and so was trained as a truck driver. He was in a truck convoy carrying supplies to Stalingrad, none of the Germans in the convoy knowing that the city was already surrounded. They were turned back before getting near it and were attacked both by aircraft and partisans as they retreated. At some point Sajer was isolated from his unit and volunteered for combat in the Grossdeutschland division where he fought for the rest of the war on the Eastern front until a final retreat into Denmark where he and his companions surrendered to the British. The British sent him to the French who ordered him to make up for what he had done in the Wehrmacht by joining the French army, which he did, serving for another ten months.
The book is a horrifying journey into ice and fire, among men who faced deep sub-zero winter nights, often in the open on the Russian steppes, in fluid battle lines in which an isolated unit couldn't always be totally sure whether the forces on any side of them, including the rear, were German or Russian. They faced death by starvation, freezing, and sleeplessness, and of course mostly by overwhelming violence. Their Russian adversaries, often, though not always, brave and determined, gradually grew in size, strength, equipment, and expertise until they had overwhelming power in the air and on the ground with great superiority in numbers of aircraft, tanks, guns, rockets, shells, bullets, trucks, and men.
There are many individual stories here of Sajer with his small group of comrades, often separated and, in some but not all cases, rejoined. When he finally returned to his family, he was a changed, deeply scarred man.
Sajer, who at the time of this writing may still be alive (he'd be 94 in 2020) paints a picture of horrifying realism. No one reading it would see much of the adolescent adventure that Sajer hoped for when he joined up in 1942.
Was it real? Was Sajer giving a fully accurate account of his experience? Was it mostly accurate? Was it a complete fabrication - a novel disguised as a memoir? There are opinions on both sides. Reading some sources on the Internet inclined me to believe that the account is credible - at least in regard to the feelings, the terror, the violence, the suffering, and the hard work that Sajer and his comrades experienced. Some attacks on its credibility based on things like inaccurate descriptions of shoulder patches or details of armaments can, I think, be accepted as common deficits of memory of lack of interest that people have in different types of details. Those who investigated this issue spoke to other soldiers from various armies after the war and found the same patterns of selective memory. Technical details were often not among the memories that were retained.
I searched the digital copy of the book for the syllable "jew" there was one "jewelry" and one "jewel". There were zero references to the Holocaust in the conquered territories. There were many references to partisans and a few, but not many, scenes of the destruction of Russian villages and of the execution of prisoners. On the other side, it seemed to me that there were many depictions of Ukrainian, Belorussian, and Polish people welcoming the German soldiery. This was not in 1941 but in 1942-45, by which time the history that I've read indicates that the Germans had severely antagonized almost everyone in the east. It is of course the case that when a German army unit comes into your village you will welcome them with open arms and give them something to eat. After all, they are heavily armed and have demonstrated ruthlessness. But it is also easy to imagine that a teenager who has deep love and respect for his comrades in arms might see this caviling to the conquerers as more genuine than it actually is. In reality, we know that Hitler gave orders to the army to treat the invasion as a race war, a war to destroy not just the Jewish Bolsheviks, as he imagined them to be, but to treat the people as slaves whose existence was going to be solely for the purpose of serving their new German masters. That propaganda had a major effect on German policy in the east. Sajer omits all of this.
Be that as it may, I don't think that invalidates Sager's account of the war from his point of view. It is natural for a person, especially a young person, to see his close friends, in this case close friends who have shared life and death experiences with him and who have saved each other's lives at the risk of their own, to emphasize that part of their experiences.
The book has sold millions of copies and been translated into many languages. When Sajer's real name was revealed, he was fired from his job as a well known cartoonist in France but the money he made from the book compensated for the loss.
I found the book very compelling.
| Author | Gaddis, John Lewis |
|---|---|
| Publication | Oxford: Oxford University Press |
| Copyright Date | 2002 |
| Number of Pages | 192 |
| Extras | Photos, illustrations, notes, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Historiography |
| When Read | November 2020 |
Yale professor Gaddis, an expert in the history of the U.S. / USSR cold war, addresses historiography, the nature of the writing of history.
As I understand him, Gaddis compares the study of history to the studies of natural sciences and social sciences. He seems to argue that history is closer to natural science than to social science. He seems to regard social sciences (presumably economics, political science, sociology, anthropology, and related disciplines) as somewhat off the rails as compared to both history and natural sciences. The social sciences have become preoccupied with separating independent from dependent variables but in fact, according to Gaddis, there are no independent variables in the study of society. All the variables depend on each other and changing any one causes others to change. Gaddis seems to think that history is much more like physical science than it is like social science. He goes even further and argues that physical science is becoming more like history. If I understand him correctly, he argues that the birth of quantum mechanics with its discovery of the uncertainty principle has removed mathematical certainty from physics and made it more like statistical notions in history.
Gaddis uses multiple types of abstraction to describe aspects of writing about history. He compares "particular generalization" to "general particularization" and returns again and again to these concepts.
I had to force myself to read this book. At first I was excited by his opening discussions of E.H. Carr and Marc Bloch, two historians and historiographers that I respect. I thought his ventures into abstraction would be brought home with concrete examples of the application of one abstraction over the other in concrete historical cases, or perhaps with concrete examples of how the use of one abstraction brought out historical information that was not brought out by the other. But as I read page after page he seemed to me to be wandering further and further from actual history into empty abstractions. Like many social scientists and philosophers, he seemed to want to associate himself and his profession with "hard" science while engaging in soft science - an enterprise that I endorse, but only within limits that Gaddis seemed to me to transgress. Since the book was short I gritted my teeth and read on to the end.
I don't know whether the problems I saw in the book were due to Gaddis or to me. If I read and re-read his words very carefully, they always made sense, but I still had trouble connecting them to actual historical writing. I wanted him to present an actual historical problem. It could be a huge one like the fall of the Roman Empire or a big one in his field like the end of the cold war. Or it could be a smaller one like the nomination of Abraham Lincoln or Ronald Reagan, or the establishment of Medicare. Maybe it could be a historical event treated in two very different ways by two different historians. I am agnostic about what the problem should be, but I wanted it to be concrete, something where facts like "In 1964, private health insurance was unaffordable for 80% of Americans facing the diseases of old age" would pertain to the issue. I wanted him to show me how such facts are established, how they affect political leaders and voters, and how historians might best explain the events.
Here's a quote about science that bothers me:
"Physicists have long regarded as universally applicable the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that everything in the universe tends toward entropy, or 'heat death'; but this principle seems hard to reconcile with the tendency of certain life forms, as they evolve, to become more complex. Social scientists, confronting apparently anarchic phenomena like markets or the international state system, have encountered similar difficulties in explaining how cooperation can evolve within such structures." (p. 84)
Is he questioning the Second Law? I would have liked him to explain that life forms extract energy from the difference between higher and lower energy places in the environment, leading to a concentration of energy in the life form but an overall diminution of energy differentials in the system - no contradiction at all of the Second Law. Maybe he just thought that was common knowledge and didn't need to be stated? As for mutations in a genome that are selected by evolution, I don't see where any doubt of the Second Law is involved.
"The connection Adams looked for between science and history now seems quite feasible, and in a way that does violence to the work of neither scientists nor historians. As in any complex adaptive system, both groups would benefit from the stimuli each could provide the other, not least because historians already know a lot about what the scientists are only now discovering to be one of the most sophisticated of all methods of inquiry: the narrative." (p.88-9)
Hmmmm. What does that mean and what would an example look like? I don't want to condescend to Gaddis from some arrogant position of scientific knowledge. I am not a scientist and my understanding of the philosophy of science is also limited. However Gaddis' observations on science at the very least require more elaboration and explanation than he has given them.
"If the idea of self-similarity across scale can sharpen our definitions of character, though, why shouldn't another concept from the new sciences - that of sensitive dependence on initial conditions - help us out with historical distinctiveness? I'd venture the hypothesis that in every instance in which historians have singled out one individual from masses of others, it's because there's been a moment of sensitivity: some point at which small shifts at the beginning of a process produced large consequences at the end of it."
If I read the above passage carefully, I can understand it and even think that it makes sense, but I still want to see examples of writing that conforms to Gaddis' abstraction and writing that fails to conform. What would we be looking for? Is it something that couldn't be described in some less abstract and more obvious way?
There are dozens of relatively obscure passages. I could quote more but it's enough and the problem might still be mine and not Gaddis'. The Amazon reviewers liked the book more than I did. Maybe I'm just too lazy to make the most of what Gaddis is telling me. Maybe if I read the text again, slowly, with repetition of the tricky abstractions, I'd come away with a deeply enhanced appreciation of how to understand history and how to evaluate historical writing. Or maybe I'd just analyze hundreds of sentences to find out that sometimes things are this way and sometimes that way. I don't know which is the case. However there are hundreds of thousands of books that are very fine and more congenial to me than this one, so I don't plan to the book again to find out more about Gaddis' theories.
| Author | Mosley, Walter |
|---|---|
| Publication | Audible, 2013 |
| Copyright Date | 2013 |
| Number of Pages | 304 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | November 2020 |
Easy wakes up from a two months long semi-coma after a terrible automobile crash / suicide attempt. Raymond Alexander / Mouse, a smaller man than Easy but a devoted friend, had found him and carried him up a mountainside, saving his life. In return, Mouse asks Easy to find Evander Noon, a 19 or 20 year old called "Little Green" by Mouse. Evander had gone missing with a girl for some days and his mother is frantic to locate him. Easy tracks him down via a number of hippies who saw him at different times. He finds him at a spot in the woods where he has been tied up and tortured by a group of white men who want to know what happened to their $200,000 in drug money. Easy creates a diversion, rescues Evander, puts him up in a temporarily unoccupied apartment and, without Raymond's help, deals with the bad guys. In the end, Easy is fully recovered from his car crash and re-established with his children, Jesus and Feather. We readers are ready for the next episode, Rose Gold, which I have already read.
As always, I very much liked the book, for all of the reasons I've written about in my notes on other Mosley and Easy Rawlins books. This one is the tenth Easy Rawlins and the twentieth Walter Mosley book that I've read. He is a prolific author and one of my favorites.
| Author | Frum, David |
|---|---|
| Publication | Harper Collins |
| Copyright Date | 2018 |
| Number of Pages | 216 |
| Extras | Notes |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Politics |
| Keywords | Trump |
| When Read | December 2020 |
In January of 2018, David Frum, the well known columnist and former speech writer for President George W. Bush, published a devastating critique of President Donald J. Trump. It's divided into twelve chapters detailing the areas in which Trump has demonstrated corrupt and anti-democratic practices, or areas in which people in the Republican Party have enabled, supported, appeased for fear of him, or used or bribed him for their own ends. The details are abundant and extensively documented, mostly with references to articles available on the Internet.
Topics include: Trump's ignorance, his disorganized management style, his bullying, his encouragement of violence against Democrats and others whom he believes have insulted him, his corruption (much deeper than I realized), his catastrophic pissing off of almost all American allies, and other aspects of his failed presidency. He also writes about the people he calls Trump's enablers, appeasers, and co-conspirators in corruption. At the end of the book he has useful things to say about why Trump's "base" supports him. See my diary entry for December 10, 2020 where I have elaborated ideas from Frum and others on this topic.
The final chapter, titled "Hope", is about things that might give us reason to believe that Trump's power is limited and resistance will grow. See more about this in the comment below.
I learned about Frum from a TV interview recorded in 2018 (I think) that was recently rebroadcast. Frum said he was giving away the book. Anyone could download it.
This is the fourth book I've read about Trump. The others were Fear: Trump in the White House by Bob Woodward, Enemy of the People by Marvin Kalb, and Too Much and Never Enough by Mary Trump. All were good but I thought this one may have been the most comprehensive of the four indictments of Trump. (Can anyone write a book about Trump that is not either an indictment or an encomium?) Where Bob Woodward restrained his account (IIRC) to attacking Trump but not his allies or his "base", Frum produced a more comprehensive account. I recall that Woodward was also a Republican, but I don't recall that he went after the Republican party with the intensity that Frum showed.
I'd love for every American to claim his free copy of Trumpocracy and read it but I doubt that very many Trump supporters, even those who read books, would be able to read past the first chapter or two. If I tried to read a book by Glenn Beck or Sean Hannity (the right wing pundits) I'd likely be so furious after the first twenty or so pages that I'd slam it down. We each have a great many interanimating beliefs that would be offended by an attack on any one of them much less on the whole kit and kaboodle.
Depending on what happens in the future I may take a look at Frum's other books. He strikes me as offering a rare combination of deep understanding, wide acquaintance with facts, and a brand of Republican Party politics that even I can respect.
I was very impressed by Trumpocracy and have sent free copies to a number of friends.
| Author | Frank, Pat |
|---|---|
| Publication | Audible, 2010 |
| Copyright Date | 1959 |
| Number of Pages | 352 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| Keywords | Nuclear war |
| When Read | December 2020 |
Randy Bragg lives in the small (fictional) Florida town of Fort Repose. He gets a message from his older brother Frank, an Air Force officer stationed at the Strategic Air Command at Omaha with the code words "Alas Babylon". It's a Biblical reference to an apocalyptic event and signifies that the country is facing the strong possibility of a nuclear war. Frank shows up the next day and leaves his wife and two children with Randy, hoping that this rural Florida town, far from any of the big cities or military bases, will be safe for them. Then he flies back to his duty at Omaha.
"The Day" happens. Miami, Orlando, and many other Florida cities are, like Washington DC, New York, and many other cities elsewhere in the U.S., obliterated. It doesn't take long for life in Fort Repose to become very precarious. Existing stocks of food, gasoline, medicines, batteries, and other essentials run out. Telephones no longer work. Electricity disappears when the power plants are destroyed in the distant cities where they reside. Even without destruction, they would have run out of fuel. Randy and his closest friends and neighbors, the local librarian, a retired admiral, a doctor, Randy's inamorata and her father, a nearby black family, Frank's wife and children, all face the new reality together. There are many serious privations but, over time, they learn how to find food, produce corn liquor (largely for bargaining with others), mine salt, and do many other things that they didn't know they could do. They also trap and kill four "highway men" who had beaten the doctor almost to death and murdered at least two other people, losing the most helpful of the black neighbors in the gunfight. Over time, after the diabetics and other locals who could not get medicine died, and others went through severe want, some of them dying, the rest of the community adapted and maintained a stable lifestyle.
At the end an Air Force plane, flew over them and later a helicopter landed. The whole country was in ruins. The Air Force officer in the helicopter thought it would take a thousand years to recover and the big cities would never come back. In the meantime, the United States would be a third world country. The survivors at Fort Repose would probably spend the rest of their lives in only very, very slowly improving conditions. At the very end of the novel, Randy asks the Air Force officer who won the war. He learns that the U.S. won.
The author did a pretty good job of developing the story. Both the war and its effects on the lives of the people were convincing. The book was a compelling work of fiction and it became a best seller in 1959. Maybe it helped give at least a little nudge to the peace movement of those days.
I found the book technically intriguing as well as interesting as a story. What else could the people have done? Would it have been possible to put together a sort of bicycle express to receive and transmit mail and information to and from nearby towns? Could they have created a central library, or at least a central catalog, to enable technical information and recreational books to be shared? Could they have used the still created to make corn liquor to produce alcohol fuel for some engines? How about using that to drive an alternator from one of the cars to charge up car batteries and use them for at least a few radios, maybe even a transmitter? Had I lived in Fort Repose I would have been interested in all those things.
I had my 13th birthday in 1959. It was a time when nuclear war loomed larger in the American consciousness than it does today. In the mid-50s we had "air raid" drills in school where we each hid under our desks and covered our faces with our arms. In some schools we went into the hall and sat on the floor with our backs against the wall. It provided protection against a blast that blew out the windows - though I don't recall our being told that. In any case, I remember 1959 and the environment of the novel is still realistic to me.
I liked it.
| Author | Purnell, Sonia |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Viking |
| Copyright Date | 2015 |
| Number of Pages | 436 |
| Extras | photos, portraits, notes, bibliography, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Biography |
| Keywords | Winston Churchill |
| When Read | December 2020 |
In 1908, 23 year old Clementine Hozier married 33 year old Winston Churchill. She had not attended college but she was beautiful, was fluent in French and German, and had the manners of a young woman of the upper class. This book is her biography, concentrating mainly on her but also offering much information about both the family life and the political life of Winston. Although Clementine was a suffragette and had well considered liberal political views that were to the left of Winston's, she had no experience in politics. Nevertheless she gradually built up her self-confidence to the extent of helping Winston in his political campaigns and striking out on her own to do what she could for the country - sometimes by arguing Winston into changing his views or at least his demeanor, and sometimes by engaging in work of her own, for example to assist in the war effort during the First World War.
The family life of the Churchill's was not like anything I could recognize and the private lives of the upper class from which they came were not at all in what I had imagined to be in the Victorian style. Both Clementine's mother, Blanche, and Churchill's mother, Jennifer, were notorious for their unrestrained extra-marital affairs. Except for the twins, it is not known for certain whether any of the Hozier children were fathered by Hozier himself, or even if they were all fathered by the same man. In Purnell's account, it seems likely that Clementine and Winston were faithful to each other, though each did have close friends of the opposite sex whom they visited by themselves for significant periods of time. Clearly, they cared very much for each other. Clearly, they made sacrifices for each other though C's sacrifices seemed to be more extensive than W's.
The couple had four surviving children plus one who died at age two of an illness that might have been treated if the parents had more presence in their children's lives, but both were away and had left their children in the care of "one short-term nanny after another", sometimes teenage girls hired for low wages in the neighborhood of their country home. The girl in charge wasn't so much negligent as inexperienced and slow to recognize that the child was not responding to the girl's attempt to care for her and needed a doctor right away. Only after this did the adults recognize that better child care was essential and an experienced and loving woman was engaged to take their youngest daughter Mary into her own home on the Churchill estate and give her the love and care she needed.
Before and after the war, when Clementine was depressed she would go on vacation, by herself or with a friend. She might be gone for weeks or months, possibly in Italy, or once on a cruise in the Caribbean and once in the South Pacific, in both cases on private yachts owned by rich men. Winston might head off to a friend's villa on the Riviera for a rest, to drink and schmooze with upper class friends.
Not surprisingly, all of the children except Mary had difficulties. The boy, Randolph, "a beautiful child with golden locks and flashes of charm, was a particular handful, once pushing a nursery maid into a full bath in her clothes." He also bullied the younger children. Diana and Sarah were also headstrong. There were seven marriages among the three young adults, and not a lot of success in marriages or love affairs. When Randolph decided to get married he proposed to nine young women "in the space of a fortnight", marrying the ninth, the beautiful nineteen year old Pamela Digby, an upper class girl who was dazzled by the prospect of marrying the son of the prime minister. He treated her badly and she left him, soon taking up with various wealthy and important American lovers such as ambassador Averell Harriman, journalist Edward R. Morrow, and an American Air Force general. She acted as a Churchillian courtesan spy as well as a lover, which both Winston and Clementine supported, remaining close to Pamela well after her separation and then divorce from Randolph.
The big issues of Churchill's work as a member of parliament, the two world wars, and as Prime Minister, are primarily covered in relation to his family life and especially his impact on Clementine. It is assumed that readers interested in the issues themselves will avail themselves of the many other sources of information about them.
Winston died at age 90 in 1965 and Clementine at age 92 in 1977.
I have read ten books by or about Winston Churchill, but knew nothing whatever about Clementine before reading this one. If asked, I don't think I would even have been able to recall her name. I also knew nothing about his children or his family life. I wouldn't normally have chosen to read a book about private family life or about the spouse of a famous man but this book was chosen by our NCI book club and I read it for (a still upcoming) club meeting. I'm glad that I did. The biography of Clementine was interesting in its own right, and much light was shed on sides of Winston that I never knew. Understanding his personal and family life, his carelessness with money, his combination of great love of, and great inattention to, his children, his need for the love of his wife, his identification with the English ruling class combined with his sympathy for the working class, his enormous capacity for work - all of these rounded out his character for me. I found it to be a compelling read.
| Author | Allende, Isabel |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Spanish |
| Translators | Peden, Margaret Sayers |
| Publication | Harper-Audio, 2006 |
| Copyright Date | 2005 |
| Number of Pages | 400 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| When Read | December 2020 |
Allende's version of the story of Zorro begins before his birth in Alta California, starting with his father Alejandro de la Vega, and his mother Toypurnia, half Indian and half Spaniard war chief of a local Indian tribe. Toypurnia, known as Chief Grey Wolf, leads an attack on the local Mission church of Padre Mendoza. She is struck down but survives and is cared for by Alejandro and the Padre, eventually taking the name Regina, marrying Alejandro and giving birth to Diego de la Vega, the future Zorro. Diego and his "milk brother" Bernardo, a full blooded Indian with some ancestry in common with Diego and suckled by the same wet nurse, grow up as inseparable companions, one as an aristocrat, the other as his nominal servant. Bernardo's mother is killed in a pirate raid but Diego just manages to save Regina by valiant efforts.
At age 15, the two boys are packed off to the home of Tomas de Romeu in Barcelona, Spain where Diego is to be educated and where he also attends "Maestro Manuel Escalante's Fencing Academy for the Instruction of Nobles and Caballeros". He falls in love with the beautiful teenager Juliana de Romeu but she sees him only as a kind of brother, not as a potential lover. She is pursued by the wealthy Rafael Moncada, a handsome but evil man who conspires to destroy Juliana's father while pretending to try to save him. Moncada and Diego become deadly enemies.
It is in Spain that Diego assumes the mask of Zorro, the fox. He rescues Juliana from Moncada and escapes with her, her sister Isabel, and their faithful chaperone Nuria to America. Their ship is taken by the pirate Jean Lafitte and the group is taken to New Orleans where Juliana, madly in love with Lafitte, marries him and leaves Diego, Isabel, and Nuria to continue on to California, where they arrive in 1815. What they find there is frightening. Due to the diversion to New Orleans, Moncada has preceded them to Alta California and used the power of his political connections to intimidate the local government. Diego's father Alejandro has been arrested and so maltreated that he is expected to die. Father Mendoza's land has been despoiled and the Indians he protected have been seized by Moncada's men to sell or use as slaves. Alejandro's and Diego's house is now held by Moncada. It is time for Zorro to re-emerge. Then, after the expected adventures, all is set right.
At the end we learn that the narrator of the story is Isabel de Romeu, from many years later. She has loved Zorro but "I always have kept a cool head in regard to him. I realized in time that our hero is capable of loving only women who do not love him back, and I decided to be one of them. He has tried to marry me every time he has lost one of his sweethearts or been made a widower that has happened twice and I have refused. Perhaps for that reason, he dreams of me after he eats a heavy meal." ... "I know that we will be together when he is an old man with feeble legs and a soft brain, when other, younger foxes have replaced him and, in the remote possibility that some lady opened her balcony to him, he would be unable to climb to it. Then I will avenge myself of the troubles Zorro has put me through!"
The quotation at the end of my abstract exemplifies the essential delight of this novel. It is a masterpiece of romantic comedy. I do not appear to have read any of Isabel Allende's books before this one. Maybe it's time to look for more.
| Author | Clostermann, Pierre |
|---|---|
| Publication | Silvertail Books, 2019 |
| Copyright Date | 1951 |
| Number of Pages | 256 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Memoir |
| Keywords | World War II; Aviation |
| When Read | December 2020 |
Clostermann was a Frenchman who (according to the Wikipedia) left France in 1939 after being turned down for the French air force. He went to the U.S. to learn to be a pilot, then to England where he was enrolled in a French fighter unit that was incorporated into the RAF. By 1943 his combat training was complete and he went into combat flying Spitfires. Posted to the famous airfield at Biggin Hill, he flew against German bombing and reconnaissance planes flying over England, and in fighter sweeps generally preceding or accompanying British or American bombers flying over France. After the Normandy invasion, he was based in France on new airstrips carved out in the strip of land in Normandy held by the allies. After a several month stint at headquarters recovering from severe stress, he returned to combat in December 1944 flying Typhoons for a short period, and then Tempests for the rest of the war. Again according to the Wikipedia, he shot down eleven German aircraft for sure, and probably another seven. "He also claimed 225 motor vehicles destroyed, 72 locomotives, five tanks, and two E-boats (fast torpedo boats)."
He fought almost up to the last day of the war, suffering significant damage to his aircraft and to himself, most of it from flak but also quite a bit from enemy fighters. He rose to the rank of Wing Commander in the RAF (equivalent to a U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel) with a chestful of medals and decorations, but was only given the rank of Lieutenant in the French forces at the end of the war.
As described in C's preface, the contents of his book are taken from three volumes of diary entries that he made during the war. I will note that one Amazon reviewer said that the Silvertail Books edition is abridged since he read an edition years ago that had significantly more material in it.
The memoir was pretty extraordinary. C's descriptions of his first ever flights in the Spitfire and the Tempest, together with his descriptions of aerial combat against German fighters and flak were edge of the seat reading experiences. The book was hard to put down.
I've read numerous memoirs by American fighter pilots of WWII, some from Germans, and at least one each from Japan and Russia. C's account is quite different from the American accounts. As expected, there were some irritations that each country's men held against their allies, but that was not problematic for me. More surprising to me was that C's account of the Luftwaffe was quite different from that of men like Clarence "Bud" Anderson, Robert Johnson, and some other American aces and historians of the air war. My recollection of the American accounts is that the Luftwaffe was defeated by the summer of 1944 and, certainly by 1945, had become "meat on the table" to the U.S. Army Air Force pilots. German fuel supplies were badly depleted, flak was still dangerous but was beginning to be diminished. Training of pilots had become almost impossible due to lack of fuel and Allied domination of the skies. Many German airfields were under almost continuous observation.
C described facing large formations of modern FW-190s and Me-109s plus significant numbers of Me-262 jets and other state of the art aircraft right up to the end of the war. There may be some confirmation from other sources. Chuck Yeager described a raid on Berlin in April, 1945 where American fighters flew at altitude in bomber formations, fooling the Germans into thinking that there were no fighters. Yeager said that 300 German fighters intercepted the formation, only to be massacred by the Americans. So it's not at all impossible that masses of German fighters were still taking off in the spring of '45.
Clostermann said that the German pilots were of two types, highly experienced men who were the best pilots fighting at that time, and inexperienced men who had insufficient training and were relatively easy to shoot down. He said that, when engaging German patrols, you never knew which kind of men you were facing until the shooting started. If it was the experienced men you faced, if you weren't killed, you'd be bathed in sweat and shaking by the time combat broke off. Also somewhat to my surprise, perhaps because the American pilots whose memoirs I read were heavily engaged in bomber escort and didn't often get close to the ground, C feared German anti-aircraft (flak) more than anything else. He thought it improved steadily over time and by the end of the war was fearsome. In one RAF raid on a German airfield, six of the eight British Tempests were shot down, with all six pilots killed. Only two German aircraft were definitely destroyed on the ground and no German pilots were hit.
All in all, Clostermann produced a highly descriptive and very convincing account of an experience that would make any (well most any) reader understand what air combat was like at that time and place, and why he should be glad he didn't experience it first hand.