Books read January through December 2021
| Author | Hawking, Stephen |
|---|---|
| Author | Mlodinow, Leonard |
| Publication | Random House, 2010 |
| Copyright Date | 2010 |
| Number of Pages | 208 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Popular science; Physics |
| When Read | January 2021 |
Hawking and Mlodinow attempt to present the deeply counter-intuitive theories of the "multiverse" in ways that us ordinary humans can at least partially understand. There are discussions of the possibility of an infinite number of alternate universes, each differing from our own, starting out in very small ways. There were also discussions of string theory and its derivative "M-theory", a formulation of string theory that unifies it and is discussed in other books and videos I've read or seen by Brian Greene.
The authors appeared to be arguing that there is not and cannot be a wholly objective description of the universe that is independent of the concepts and theoretical models that we humans or other intelligent organisms elsewhere or in the future have constructed or will construct. We can construct models that may have increasing value in predicting observable events, but they are still models that do not give us access to an underlying reality.
I think that the notion of a "model dependent" theory of physical reality is very close to Immanuel Kant's notion of the distinction between things "in themselves" ("an sich"), and things "for me" ("für mich") that I read about in Critique of Pure Reason in my schooling in philosophy. Kant argued that we can never know the nature of reality completely independent of our own perceptions and theoretical constructions of it. All we can know is how things appear to us - either to our sense perception or to the conceptual and theoretical notions that we construct to help us understand our experience.
I never resolved my own thinking about Kant's theory. If we have a model that enables us to predict everything that can happen, then is it still "just" a model? What would or could be left out of that model's description of reality? Kant and Hawking/Mlodinow might say that we don't know what's left out but we can never know that there can't be anything left out because, after all, what we have is only a model, not a 100% objective view of the real universe. There's a part of me that wants to say that K, H, and M are right. Our mathematical physics can make good predictions, though they are sometimes purely statistical, but we can't know whether there are or aren't any aspects of reality that stand outside our models. We can never know if our models are complete. But on the other side there's another side of me that wants to say with the "pragmatist" or "instrumentalist" philosophers, and the many physicists who consider epistemology to be a pointless endeavor with nothing to add to our knowledge, that if the physics works, then it's real, and that's that. Attempting to resolve the conflict between these two points of view is interesting and appears to be giving us the widest possible vision of the nature of knowledge. But maybe it's all hot air and the distinction between "model" and "reality" is of no consequence. Whichever view we adopt, it's still the case that real knowledge comes from the equations of physics and chemistry that our greatest minds struggled so hard to discover.
Leaving all of that aside, there's also the big question of the "multiverse". Can the universe be infinite? Maybe. If it's not then can there be an infinity of universes? Maybe. Can all of those universes be interrelated in such a way that there is another person just like me and another set of persons just like each of the people I know, etc., etc., each such universe varying in some small way from the one I live in? I'm thinking that the answer to that is "Maybe not." I may be too anchored in the "middle sized, middle distance" (see W.V.O. Quine) nature of my own human perceptions, unable to wrap my mind around infinities of infinities. I can't deny that possibility. But I still have trouble with the theory that, in an infinity of infinities, every possible construction must exist. Somebody once denied the theory that an infinite number of monkeys on an infinite number of typewriters must type out the complete works of Shakespeare by arguing that all of the monkeys at all of the typewriters might all just type the same letter 'a' an infinite number of times. The probability of that may be vanishingly small but then how big is the probability of typing out all of Shakespeare?
If I had access to a physicist believer in the theory that all of the subtle variations of our reality also exist, I'd ask him about it. I'd want him or her not just to assert this and say that that's what "infinity" means, but to explain it and answer the counter arguments. So far, I haven't heard the questions posed to the experts. I'd love to hear what they say.
A theory of an infinity of infinities presenting us with universes filled with people just like us, differing perhaps only in microscopic ways, seems to me to be making a logical error. Aquinas argued that God must exist because he is the greatest imaginable thing and, surely, "existence" is greater than "non-existence". So the greatest imaginable thing must exist. But surely, even if an existent God is greater than a non-existent God, that doesn't mean that there is an existent God. If God is the only final authority for our existence, as my rabbi once told me, that doesn't mean that there is a final authority for our existence. And so it seems to me that even if an infinity of infinities could accommodate any specific state, that doesn't mean that any specific state exists in that set of infinite states. The monkeys could all be typing 'a', or at least typing every letter except 'h', leaving Hamlet out of the outcome.
Theory is great. I'm all for it. But I want to see some empirical evidence for the existence of the multiverse. Was it in Hawking's book? Did I miss it?
| Author | Dick, Philip K. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Random House Audio, 2006 |
| Copyright Date | 1977 |
| Number of Pages | 304 |
| Extras | Author's note |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| Keywords | Narcotics |
| When Read | January 2021 |
Bob Arctor lives in a house in the Los Angeles area with two friends, Jim Barris and Ernie Luckman. Arctor is actually a secret undercover narcotics agent attempting to find out if Barris is a drug dealer, and who his sources are for drugs. But there's a problem with Arctor's position. In order to get into the clique of the drug dealers he had to, himself, take the drugs, including the dangerous "Substance D", popularly known as "Slow Death". An effect of the drug on Arctor is that his two personas, the addict and dealer "Bob Arctor" and the narcotics agent using the pseudonym "Fred", split from each other. Fred doesn't realize he's Arctor and Arctor doesn't even know about Fred. Even some of the drug enforcement agents don't realize the true situation. The result is a continually increasing explosion of confusion and exotic behavior.
It transpires that the principal drug enforcement agents, including a young woman whom Arctor is in love with, understand the situation quite well. When they have gotten the information they need about Barris they send Fred/Bob to a drug rehabilitation institute where he is further involved in undercover work to root out drug development at the institute. Arctor has become a hollow shell of his former self.
This novel has the hallmarks of Philip K. Dick all over it. I don't know any other science fiction writer, and perhaps not any general fiction writer, who could create such extraordinary concepts as a man split into two and working against himself and make everything work as well, I should say as brilliantly, as Dick did. The crisis of Bob Arctor may be the central achievement of the author but it is hardly the only one. The character and behavior of Barris walks a fine line between normality, criminality, and madness that kept this reader unable to come to any conclusions about him. The girl agent Donna may be a true friend of Arctor or not. She may be a drug dealer or a ruthless narcotics agent. Like Barris and Arctor himself, she is complicated and not easy to place in one pigeon hole.
Reading Dick is not like reading other authors. He has a kind of creative weirdness that is recognizable in most of his books. I have the feeling that, if I, Dick, and ten other people all walked through the same area and then wrote about it, ten of us might possibly produce similar descriptions but Dick's would be all his own. He'd see things that we didn't see and draw conclusions that surprise the rest of us.
A Scanner Darkly won awards, sold well, and was one of his most popular books.
"... who could create such extraordinary concepts as a man split into two and working against himself and make everything work as well, I should say as brilliantly, as Dick did."
Re-reading that sentence today a bell rang in my mind and I remembered who could do it as well, and I may even say as brilliantly, as Dick did. It was Robert Sheckley in his Crompton Divided. Crompton was divided into three parts, one more than Bob Arctor, and the story was brilliant.
| Author | Patchett, Ann |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Harper Collins |
| Copyright Date | 2019 |
| Number of Pages | 352 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | January 2021 |
Young Danny Conroy with his father Cyril, mother Elna, and older sister Maeve, move into a mansion style house on VanHoebeek Street (properly pronounced Van Who-bake) in the Philadelphia suburb of Elkins Park. Cyril, newly rich from canny real estate investment, bought the house as a surprise for Elna, but the surprise backfired. Elna, committed to helping poor and needy people, ran away and disappeared for years, leaving her two children motherless and her husband with no wife.
The boy grew up in the care of his sister and of the nanny and housekeepers hired by Cyril. Things moved along acceptably well until Cyril became involved with and finally married a younger woman named Andrea who turned the household upside down. She brought her own two children to live in the house, which was okay, but she began pushing Maeve and Danny out. When Cyril died unexpectedly of a heart attack Maeve, who had been working in the business and elsewhere and understood it well, proposed to immediately take it over and keep it moving. However it transpired that Andrea had gotten the house and business placed in joint ownership with Cyril so that whe was now sole owner of both house and business. She promptly sold the business and took all of the cash, kicked Maeve out of the house, and pushed Danny, still in high school, out to live in Maeve's small apartment. The only thing left to Maeve and Danny was a trust fund for Danny's education. Andrea tried to take that too, but Maeve's lawyer stopped her and Maeve sent Danny to an expensive Ivy League University and then even more expensive Columbia Medical school in New York. Danny get the M.D. degree but discovered that he really didn't like medicine. What he wanted to do was what his father did - buy, fix up, and sell houses. He went into business and was successful.
In the balance of the novel, Danny, Maeve and the former nanny and housekeepers all help each other and build new lives, but always do so in the shadow of the Dutch house. Danny marries and is later divorced. Maeve never marries. As they move into middle age Maeve developes diabetes and, like her father, suffers from heart disease.
Much changes in the last quarter of the book. Andrea is living alone in the Dutch house, growing older and suffering from increasing dementia. The long disappeared Elna returns. She had gone to India but had returned and had been living in the U.S. for many years without contacting her children. The housekeepers found her and brought her back where she was attracted to Andrea's unfortunate condition and stayed in the house to help her at her end. Maeve dies. Danny is alone. He has finally overcome his obsession with the Dutch House.
The Dutch House was chosen by our NCI book group and liked by some of the readers, not as much by others. I had read Patchett's Bel Canto and liked it but my feelings about this one were ambivalent. As I expected, the quality of the writing was high. Patchett understands her characters and handles complex emotions well. However it seemed to me that the book was based on tense opposition between the readers feeling anger and resentment against Andrea and Elna, and maybe towards Cyril too, and being pushed by the author into understanding and toleration of these characters. Andrea was selfish and cruel, but perceived later as sick, helpless, and defenseless. Elna was completely oblivious to the emotional damage she did to her own children but was full of sympathy for poor people and even for Andrea.
Okay. I can understand that. I can agree to refrain from wishing harm to Andrea and Elna. I can agree that they are human beings too and are entitled to at least a modicum of sympathy and, in Elna's case, acknowledgment of her self-sacrifice for others, even if not for those to whom she owes what most of us consider a primary obligation. Or maybe sympathy is too much. Maybe all they are entitled to is freedom from a revenge that would do harm to them but do no good to anyone and might perhaps corrode the hearts of Danny and Maeve if they indulged in it. Life is complicated. Justice is elusive and difficult to pin down. We must be content with lives and actions that conform approximately well to our ideals and desires. We must concede that our own actions are imperfect and resolve to err on the side of sympathy and of doing no harm.
Again, Okay.
Patchett has made her point. I acknowledge it. I might even agree that it has done me some good, giving me a perspective I didn't have before, or had, but didn't have so vividly in mind.
Now I'll go read other books that I enjoy more.
| Author | McMurtry, Larry |
|---|---|
| Publication | Simon and Schuster, 2010 |
| Copyright Date | 1985 |
| Number of Pages | 864 |
| Genres | Fiction; Western |
| When Read | February 2021 |
Former Texas Rangers Captain Woodrow Call and Captain Augustus "Gus" McCrae are partners in the Hat Creek Cattle Company where they employ their old colleagues - Pea Eye, a solemn, simple, but reliable workman and Deets, a black man who is an outstanding scout. Located in the small, dusty town of Lonesome Dove, just north of the Rio Grande, they are in the business of selling cattle and horses that are largely rustled from Mexicans, who themselves are in the business of rustling cattle from the norte americanos - no one thinking it is a real crime on either side to steal the goods of the thieves, and others too, on the other side of the river.
Call and Gus are very tough men, experienced in fighting whites, Mexicans, and Indians and hanging men they considered obviously guilty without the distraction of judges and juries. They are deeply respected by everyone around them and feared by their enemies. Then Jake Spoon, an old member of their Ranger company, shows up. He is a gambler and a ladies man and is on the run from a sheriff in Arkansas after accidentally killing a dentist who happened to be the sheriff's brother-in-law. Jake fascinates and charms the lovely prostitute Lorena and also fascinates Call by telling him of a wonderful, uninhabited place, ideal for cattle raising, north of the Missouri River in the still unsettled territory of Montana. Gus isn't interested but Call, restless and unsatisfied with his life, is. When Call announces that he is going and will round up a herd to go with them, they all agree to go - Gus, Jake, Lorena, Newt, Pea Eye, and others easily recruited from the area. They go for different reasons. Jake plans to escape the sheriff then abandon the cattle drive and Lorena. Gus hopes to meet and perhaps marry his old love Clara Allen. Newt hopes to win the respect of Call and Gus and take his place as an adult. 22 year old Dish Boggett aims to prove himself a "top hand" as a cowboy. Pea Eye aims simply to continue his life of hard work and service to Call and Gus.
The story proceeds over the preparation for and execution of the cattle drive to Montana. Multiple events, including some real horrors, occur over the slow amble of cattle, horses, and men over a perhaps 2,000 mile trek. The Arkansas sheriff chasing Jake, July Johnson, learns that his wife has taken off from home, leaving this upright and committed husband to find a useless gambler (not Jake) who toyed with her in the past but whom she fantasizes can be made to love her. Lorena, abandoned by Jake, is captured and abducted by the criminal "Blue Duck" and sold to a mix of Indian and white criminals who repeatedly beat and rape her. Gus goes after her with July. Gus kills all the criminals except Blue Duck, who escapes and murders July's clueless deputy sheriff and two children that are accompanying him. Jake unintentionally falls in with a group of murdering outlaws and all of them, including Jake, are hung by Call and his men. There are rain storms and dust storms and losses along the way - the capable and intelligent Deets and then Gus, a man embedded at the center of the novel, are killed.
At the end of the novel, Call, more adrift than ever, fulfills his promise to Gus to take his body back to Texas.
The story may sound like an adolescent wild west adventure novel, but it's not. I found it to be a truly great work, full of deeply engaging characters, stories and themes, and well worthy of the 1986 Pulitzer Prize that it earned. Each character had a unique personality, well developed and convincingly presented effectively in his or her own words and actions, and in the author's narrative description. The individual stories of love and sex are achingly human, whether they are of lost love, of interactions with prostitutes, or of foolish desires that will never be fulfilled. The stories of the cattle herd, whether of rustling cattle in Mexico and taking them over the Rio Grande, or of herding them through rain or dust storms or across rivers, with cowboys falling asleep in the saddle, are vivid. The stories of horrid violence and rough justice are riveting.
Was it all authentic? I can't say for sure that it was, but I can't say that it wasn't either. The people and events of the novel were far enough beyond my own experience that I just don't know whether or not they were true depictions of the old west. All I can say is that I found them real enough to be moving.
I have read three other McMurtry books, most recently and most importantly, The Last Picture Show in 2015. That too was a fine book.
| Author | Irving, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | Random House, 1998 |
| Copyright Date | 1978 |
| Number of Pages | 624 |
| Extras | Afterword by John Irving |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | February 2021 |
In 1942 Technical Sergeant (TS) Garp, a ball turret gunner in a B-17, was severely wounded while flying over occupied Europe. Upon landing he was found to have lost control of most of his mind and body. He could say the word "Garp" and he could masturbate, but that was the limit of his capacity. In the hospital he was cared for by nurse Jenny Fields who tried hard to help him but he got worse and worse. Before he died she straddled him in order to get pregnant without having to marry someone or deal with an unwanted man in her life. She named their offspring T.S. Garp.
T.S. Garp grew up with his mother, now a school nurse at the private Steering School in New England. He had part of his ear bitten off by a dog, he became an accomplished wrestling champion, and he determined to become a writer of fiction. The rest of the novel is partly made up of Garp's personal story, marriage, extra-marital affairs, travel to Vienna, Austria, and involvement with his mother's feminist activities and friends; and partly made up of stories that Garp wrote, especially The Pension Grillparzer and The World According to Bensenhaver.
The stories both of and by Garp are often violent and grotesque. In the "real" portion of the novel, eleven year old Ellen James is raped by a man who cuts her tongue out to keep her from speaking about it - though she can still identify him by writing. A coterie of deranged women, believing that as dedicated feminists they must cut out their own tongues in sympathy, call themselves (in writing) "Ellen Jamesians". His mother Jenny is shot dead by a deranged man who blames her and her feminist activity for his abused wife turning against him. Garp and his wife Helen are both seriously injured in an incredible sort of auto accident in which she is in one car attempting to fellate her grad student lover Michael Milton in order to get him to go away while Garp, driving another car with their two children, five year old Walt and eleven year old Duncan, entirely accidentally due to bad weather and ice over the windshield, rams into her parked car in their driveway. Helen and Garp sustain severe mouth injuries. Duncan loses one eye. Walt is killed. The lover has his penis sheared off. Those are all stories written directly by Irving as himself. Not by Irving as Garp.
The stories written by Irving as Garp include the tormenting of a bear working as a unicyclist for a declining circus family of which one member can only walk on his hands; and a gruesome rape of a nice young woman by a real yahoo whom she manages to kill by pulling a knife from his discarded pants and repeatedly stabbing him until he dies.
Finally (for Garp but not for the book) Garp himself is shot to death at age 33 by a deranged Ellen Jamesian while he is coaching wrestlers at the Steering School. The book continues with another CD's worth of stories about the rest of the lives of Helen, Duncan, a former Philadelphia Eagles tight end who has become transgender named Roberta (née Robert) Muldoon. The most gruesome story in this chapter is probably the one that involves one-eyed Duncan's horrible motorcycle accident that breaks most of the bones in his body and requires the amputation of one arm. In the end, many years after Garp's death, everyone else is dead too. The novel ends only when the last living character, Garp's daughter Jenny, born shortly before his own death, finally dies of cancer. The last sentence is "... in the world according to Garp, we are all terminal cases."
The Afterword by John Irving talks about what he thought when his own 12 year old son Brendan asked to read the book. Irving worried about what the effect on Brendan would be but he did give him the book and was proud and relieved to see that Brendan handled it very maturely. Irving also noted that he got many letters from people attempting to comfort him for the harm that came to his children, but in fact, he said, his children never experienced any terrible injuries or death.
Long experience has taught me to be tolerant of others, to try to appreciate their skills, and to attempt to see things from their point of view. And so I am tolerant of Irving, will concede that he is a very accomplished writer, and have attempted, though without a lot of success, to see things from his point of view. Reading reviews from others who praise him (one even saying that Garp was the best book he ever read) and seeing that he won a National Book Award and was short listed for a Pulitzer Prize for this novel, makes clear to me that many people with critical skills equal to or better than mine thought Irving wrote a great book.
One thing many reviewers praised was his sense of humor, but it didn't work for me. Rape, murder, and severe physical injuries just don't make me laugh. Were the culprits ridiculous? Yes they were. But that didn't make their actions funny. The rapist murderer in the Bensenhaver story is killed by his intended victim, in part because of his own stupidity. His behavior before and during the rape is bizarre. But does that make his actions funny? He deserved what he got, but does that somehow counter balance the obscenity of his actions? Michael Milton behaved like an ass but is it really funny that his penis was chomped off? The death of Walt, the skewering of Duncan's eye and later loss of his arm, the shootings of Jenny and Garp, all felt, not like interesting turns of plot, but like nasty impositions of the author upon his characters and ultimately upon the reader. Many of the events aren't even acceptably plausible. Garp is presented as a man who is way over protective of children, yet he puts them in his car and drives with a fully obscured windshield, then accelerates to get up his uphill driveway, smashing into Milton's car. It isn't consistent with what Irving tells us about Garp, let alone being interesting or curious, much less amusing.
I didn't like the book. I felt offended by the unjustified attacks on the most innocent of the characters. I had to force myself to read through the descriptions of those acts. At the end of each one I thought that the book might level off, but it didn't. The mayhem continued. I read to the end because I almost always read to the end. I want to give an author a full hearing. In the case of a famous book and author, like this one, I wanted to see what it is that so many other readers praise. But I never saw it. There was good writing. It was clear and understandable. The characters were often quite interesting. The author showed insight into their thoughts, motivations and actions. Irving has a capable mind but, from my possibly too intolerant point of view, it seemed to me that that his writing was cruel and very difficult to digest.
"S. Cooley" wrote the following review on Amazon under the title "I HATE this book...and I never hate books." (Reviewed in the United States on June 28, 2009)
"I HATED this book. I wanted to scrub my mind after reading it. ... Irving was not satisfied with following around the title character for his entire life from birth to death; he also stalked the character's children and reported on their odd and early demise to make sure that every person in the story you had ever known was in their graves by the end. ... Why would I want to subject myself to a depressing fictitious depiction of this? Ugh!"
| Author | Stout, Rex |
|---|---|
| Publication | Random House Audio, 2000 |
| Copyright Date | 1975 |
| Number of Pages | 188 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | February 2021 |
Late one night Nero Wolfe's favorite waiter from his favorite restaurant shows up at the door of the brownstone house and asks Archie to bring him to Wolfe. He says that someone wants to kill him but he can only talk to Wolfe about it. Not wanting to wake Wolfe but not wanting to turn the man away with a possible killer after him, Archie puts him up in a spare bedroom in the house, locks the door, and heads back to his own bedroom to resume his sleep. Then there is a rumble and crash. Archie runs to the bedroom and finds the waiter dead on the floor, his face blown off by a bomb that must have been in an aluminum cigar tube that had been planted in the man's pocket. Wolfe, with no client to pay him, decides to spend his own money to find the killer, without help from the police, to get even with whoever had the audacity to murder a man, a man he liked no less, in Wolfe's own house. Wolfe calls in his three contract agents, Saul Panzer, Fred Durkin, and Orrie Cather, and with Archie Goodwin they all go to work.
In the end, Wolfe first, and Archie, Saul, and Fred later, figure out that their own Orrie Cather is the killer, and the murderer of two others.
This was Stout's last Nero Wolfe novel. He was 88 years old in the year of its publication.
I have no recollection of any earlier reading of this story and no record of it in my book notes. Yet I was sure that I knew that in one of the very late Nero Wolfe novels Orrie Cather was discovered to be a killer. Perhaps I read a summary of this book. Or perhaps I read it but forgot to write it up in my notes. Whatever the case, the story was reasonably well done. I didn't think it was Stout's best or near his best but it was damned good for an 88 year old man. The character and acute intelligence of Wolfe and Goodwin are as well honed and convincingly presented as in all of the others.
The last two books in the series that I have read are the very first book, Fer de Lance, and this one, the very last book. I don't plan to read every book in the series but I might read more of them and now, in any case, I have visited the book ends.
| Author | Lodge, David |
|---|---|
| Publication | London: Harvill Secker / Random House |
| Copyright Date | 2011 |
| Number of Pages | 449 |
| Genres | Fiction; Biography |
| When Read | February 2021 |
In this fictional biography of the English writer H.G. Wells, Lodge tells us the story of Wells' life, gives us excerpts of Wells' actual writings and correspondence, presents imagined but credible conversations between Wells and the people he knew, and offers us a kind of internal conversation between Wells and an alter ego. After the first appearance of one side of this conversation Lodge writes:
"He has heard this voice frequently of late, but when he looks round there is nobody else in the room, so it must be in his head. Sometimes the voice is friendly, sometimes challenging, sometimes neutrally enquiring. It articulates things he had forgotten or suppressed, things he is glad to remember and things he would rather not be reminded of, things he knows others say about him behind his back, and things people will probably say about him in the future after he is dead, in biographies and memoirs and perhaps even novels."
This is, of course, an accurate prediction (or is it a postdiction?) of Lodge's biographical novel. The conversations or, perhaps more accurately, interrogations of himself by himself, appear periodically over the course of the novel. The bolded font (in my ebook reader) voice makes statements about him and asks questions. The answering voice generally defends himself against the accusations openly or obliquely expressed in the questions. However the defense is never composed of unreasonable rationalization. Wells is a complex man. He is an ethical man. If his actions are not entirely justifiable, neither are they entirely unjustifiable. His point of view is always worthy of consideration.
I would say that the main topics of the book are: the events of HG's life; the nature of some of the many books (more than a hundred) and many articles he has written over the course of his almost 80 years; his efforts to influence the world for peace, equality of the sexes, social and economic equality, and the advancement of science and technology; and his unconventional marriages and multiple love affairs.
Lodge gradually builds up his story of a very complicated man. The book opens in 1944 just two years before his death. He is in decline and is reflecting upon his life. The story then restarts in his childhood and brings the reader from his birth in 1866 to parents who worked in the servant class, through his education and self education, his remarkable success as a writer and a lover, up to where we were at the beginning of the novel and his death in 1946 just before his 80th birthday.
I liked this book very much. I had read a number of Wells' books in my youth but they were the ones that we call "science fiction" today. They had the sensational qualities that appeal to adolescents. Later, in 1986, I read Tono Bungay, an excellent novel that showed the deeper complexity and more sophisticated social inquiries that went beyond what he had put into his SF work.
Lodge presents Wells as a deeply intelligent man. Largely self-educated and still retaining some working class idioms in his speech, he nevertheless was the intellectual equal in both output and sophistication, of the other leading writers in England and elsewhere. His interests were not unlike my own. He cared about the state of society. He supported women's suffrage. He believed in socialism. He tried to influence British government policy. He used his skills as a writer in the interest of others as well as himself.
Like many others (Winston Churchill comes immediately to mind after reading Sonia Purnell's Clementine), Wells was not very responsible in his handling of money. Confident of his ability to make more when he needed it, he spent liberally and saved less than he should have. His love life was unusual. He fell in love with his first wife but only after their marriage discovered her indifference to many of his interests and her total disinterest and even resistance to sex. They separated after only a few years and he married again, this time to a young woman who was deeply interested in Wells' intellectual life and was genuinely in love with him but, to his surprise and dismay, was also uninterested in sex. It was after realizing that, with the consent of his wife, he began his many extramarital affairs. It would have been easy for Lodge to have made this highly unconventional aspect of his personal life the dominating theme of the book or, on the other side, to ignore or downplay it and concentrate on his political and/or literary efforts. I think Lodge struck a good balance. Perhaps Wells would have approved.
I plan to read more Wells in the future with a new interest in the author.
| Author | McBride, James |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Riverhead Books / Penguin, 2006 |
| Copyright Date | 1996 |
| Number of Pages | 295 |
| Extras | Afterword to the 10th Anniversary Edition. Sept. 2005 |
| Extras | Acknowledgements |
| Extras | James McBride (bio) |
| Extras | Ruth McBride Jordan (bio) |
| Extras | Readers Guide |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Biography |
| Keywords | Racism; Antisemitism |
| When Read | February 2021 |
James McBride is the seventh of twelve children born to the white woman Ruth McBride Jordan and her first husband Rev. Andrew D. McBride, or her second husband Hunter Jordan. Ruth was born as Ruchel Zylska in Poland, renamed Rachel Shilsky as a child in the U.S., adopted the name Ruth in an effort to reduce her visibility as a Jew in 1930's Virginia, and then took the names Ruth McBride after marrying the black Christian Rev. Andrew McBride in New York City, and then Ruth McBride Jordan after the death of her first husband and her remarriage to Hunter Jordan, also a black man in New York. The Color of Water is James' biography of his mother, including many lengthy passages that are presumably spoken to James by Ruth talking about herself.
Ruth's Polish Jewish parents were poor for many years until, eventually, her father, Rabbi Fishel Shilsky, opened a store in a black neighborhood in Suffolk Virginia where he gradually became wealthy by exploiting the people of the neighborhood, as well as also exploiting his partly crippled wife and his three children. Shilsky also sexually abused Rachel/Ruth. Ruth ran away from the family in Virginia and lived with her grandmother in New York until she met and married Rev. McBride. She became an ardent Christian and assisted McBride in founding a small church in Brooklyn. Virtually all of Ruth's neighbors, friends, and friendly relatives were black people, and all of her twelve children self-identified as black.
All twelve of the children went to college, many of them becoming doctors, professors, business executives, or other professional people. Their mother forced them into predominately Jewish schools in other parts of the city where educational standards were much higher than in the poor black area where they lived. Ruth managed to do this in spite of Her complete disorganization, poverty, and neurosis.
James McBride, the author, describes the family's strengths in the midst of its weaknesses and tells the story of his own problems with drugs, alcohol, petty crime, and truancy, all of which he overcame to become a successful writer and jazz musician.
The story is pretty amazing. Nothing in my own experience would prepare me for a life like that of the Shilskys, McBrides, or Jordans. The main characters are so different from me that I have trouble placing myself in their shoes. James, Ruth, and almost all of the others are either very strong religious believers or are at least perceived that way by the author. He thinks that it is only because God has guided him that he has come through all this. Ruth would drive me crazy with her neuroses. Rabbi Shilsky might have driven me to seek revenge against him. (Or maybe not, I don't know if I'm the kind of person who would resist effectively. As I child I was pushed around by an older and stronger relative whom I never figured out how to successfully oppose.)
For me, I think this story was a slice of a life that was beyond my experience and which I never would have imagined or understood without the assistance of a book like this.
As usual, the "Reader's Guide" at the end, presumably intended for book clubs and high school classes, left me scratching my head. Did the author of the guide (unnamed) read the same book as I did? Why was he or she asking such besides the point questions?
Read for the NCI book group.
| Author | Hitchens, Christopher |
|---|---|
| Publication | Hachette Book Group |
| Copyright Date | 2007 |
| Number of Pages | 307 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Society |
| Keywords | Religion |
| When Read | March 2021 |
"Hitch", as he was known, wrote and narrated this book about how the theories of all religions are just false. God, miracles, heaven and hell, are myths. In addition, in spite of claims to the contrary, Hitch argues that religion does not justify or explain morality. Worse, it often promotes what most people would agree today are immoral practices such as oppression of women and children and men too in some cases, physical disfigurement such as in circumcision, conning people into donating money to religious organizations and their representatives, and spreading clear falsehoods such as the promotion of the theory of creationism and the denigration of theory of evolution. He goes into detail with example after example of how a large percentage of religious groups prey on ignorant people, and how the much smaller percentage of more sophisticated groups are still unable to avoid misleading their adherents.
I periodically loosen my opposition to religion on the grounds that there are millions of very decent, very moral, and very intelligent people who subscribe to religion. I'm thinking of some of my friends or, among the more publicly visible people, ones like Jimmy Carter, Joe Biden, Francis Collins, or David Brookes. They are people who have done a lot more for others than I have and who have demonstrated considerable intelligence and intellectual sophistication. It is important to keep up my respect for these people. But on the other hand books like this one by Hitchens, and writings by many other extremely impressive intellectuals make it clear to me that reason is on the side of atheism, not theism. Listening to Hitch's dissection of the pro-religion views makes it very clear that religion is not in accord with what we now know about the universe or about human society.
Hitchens' book does not strike me as absent all error. There were things he said, I can't remember them now and didn't take notes as I exercised or washed dishes while listening to the audiobook, that I thought might well not be true. Mostly they were criticisms of religious leaders who may not have meant what Hitchens took them to mean. But that doesn't alter the overall strength of his arguments.
There is no evidence for the existence of God and some important evidence against it - such as that spirit changing the world would seem to violate the law of conservation of energy, a physical law that in the hundreds of years that we have known it, has never, to my knowledge, been known to have been violated.
There is no evidence of actual "revelation", as opposed to the speeches of human beings who may or may not have been named Jesus, Mathew, Peter John, Eliezer, Ezekial, Isaiah, Joshua, or Mohammed. It seems clear that, as our moral views evolve, for example in the treatment of people of other genders, sexual orientations, races, ethnicities, nationalities, or social classes, come from ordinary people and run counter both to the "revelations" of the "holy" books and to the pronouncements of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim leaders.
We need people like Hitchens.
As a side note, I liked hearing his voice as narrator but there were passages where he did not sound as easy to understand as a professional narrator would have sounded.
I have actually read a fair number of books and articles about religion, starting in my late teens. I taught Philosophy 101 as a graduate assistant at the University of Illinois in the early 1970's and read a lot for the six week or so segment in which I asked my classes to learn the arguments and evidence for and against the existence of God. At age 16 I came to the conclusion that God didn't exist, but I like to at least think that I continued reading arguments on the other side with an open, or at least non-antagonistic, mind. I have continued to occasionally read arguments on both side on into my old age.
| Author | Robinson, Ian |
|---|---|
| Author | Webber, Jim |
| Author | Eifrem, Emil |
| Publication | O'Reilly Media |
| Copyright Date | 2015 |
| Number of Pages | 238 |
| Extras | index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Computer science |
| Keywords | Databases |
| When Read | March 2021 |
"Graph database" refers to a logical, and often physical, database structure in which the objects modeled are "nodes" and "relationships" linking pairs of nodes. "Neo4j" is the name of a company (I think) and of one of the prominent database management systems that is designed from the ground up to support graph databases. The authors are, or were at the date of publication, authors of Neo4j as well as this book that explains the concepts of graph databases in general and, to some extent, of Neo4j in particular.
The authors contrast Neo4j with relational database management systems (RDBMS), "document management" systems, "key value" systems, and "column" systems. Of these alternatives, RDBMS is the one in most common use and is most discussed by the authors.
After explaining the concepts of a node->relationship->node database structure, the authors illustrate its operation in three domains, social networks like Facebook or LinkedIn, recommendation systems for finding product reviews, and geographic systems such as Fedex might use to route package deliveries for delivery trucks. The examples are anonymized. We cannot conclude solely from the book that LinkedIn or Fedex actually use a graph DBMS in general or Neo4j in particular.
There is some enlightening discussion of how Neo4j can gain speed over relational systems by foregoing indexes to use hard links instead. A pair of nodes and a relationship between them can each be represented as a disk record address offset number rather than a name that can only be found in storage by an index lookup. Some discussion of "join pain" aims to show how direct links between nodes can overcome the need to perform relational database joins, often multiple joins, between rows in RDBMS systems that are not in the same tables and may only be linked either by going through additional tables on disk that have soft (non-physical) links to two objective tables, or by denormalizations that speed processing at the cost of significant update and delete complexity.
Two ways of programming Neo4j are described. A declarative language named "Cypher" can be used at a relatively high level, perhaps a similar level to SQL, though quite different from SQL. A lower level Java API is available for direct programming of create, read, update, and delete ("CRUD") operations. Neo4j is, itself, written in Java.
I read this book at the recommendation of Steve Carton after I volunteered to help with his open source machine learning project. Steve is very, very far ahead of me in understanding machine learning, which he has worked on for years, but I hope to catch up enough to be useful, at least on specific tasks in the project.
Although published by O'Reilly, a PDF of the book, and of some other books and articles, is available for free at Neo4j.com.
Looking up "graph database" on Google I was surprised to learn that, at this time, there are 45 known graph database management systems including 10 open source systems. Neo4j is open source and may be used for free in producing any open source software. If it is used in a commercial system then a commercial license must be procured.
| Author | Pelecanos, George |
|---|---|
| Publication | Audible |
| Copyright Date | 1998 |
| Number of Pages | 304 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | March 2021 |
Eddie Golden, a young dishwasher installer, had just dropped off his hoped-to-be girlfriend Donna Morgan at a DC record store when a fast car speeding down a city street flew out of the control of its young, possibly high, driver and rammed into a utility truck. The driver of the car was decapitated and the car caught fire. Eddie jumped out of his car to try to save the driver, saw that the young man was way past saving, but also saw a pillow case in the back seat apparently stuffed with money. He reached into the back, grabbed the sack, and headed out. He'd explain his behavior to Donna later, after he got away with what turned out to be $25,000. Only an eleven year old kid on the corner actually saw him take the sack. So begins a story of drug gangsters, record shop managers, corrupt beat cops, a 14 year old girl in love with a handsome and conflicted young drug gangster, the eleven year old boy, and a neighborhood in decline.
One of the corrupt cops, Richard "King" Tutt, is white, not very smart, but macho tough and infused with self-confidence. He says openly racist things but still likes his black partner because, well, cops have partners that stick up for each other and Tutt is a cop. The other cop, Kevin Murphy, is black, also corrupt, but ashamed of it and becoming increasingly ready to turn against the drug dealers who pay him four thousand a month for police protection. Kevin yearns to be a good cop and be friends with Marcus Clay the owner, of four record shops, and Dimitri Karras, his main assistant manager.
Tensions between all these men build as the dealers beat on the kids and find out that Eddie Golden was the man who made off with their money. They decide to take down Marcus and Dimitri, protectors of the kids and, they think, hiders of the money. It all ends up in a gunfight between Tutt and Murphy on one side, the dealers on the other, Tutt killed, Murphy severely injured, and the dealers wiped out. Eddie, himself severely injured by torture administered to him by the dealers, survives and makes it to Florida with Donna, who has learned to appreciate how much he loves her.
Pelecanos is a master of the life of the streets in Washington DC. A white man himself, he is neverthess able to portray the black culture and police culture as well as the Greek immigrant culture of his own roots. His books are violent and disturbing but he builds complex and imperfect characters like Marcus, Dimitry, Kevin, Donna, and Eddie who strive to overcome their failures and limitations and, in the end and, each in his own way, succeed.
Each of P's books has taught me things about about life in the cities of the United States that takes place not very far from where I live, isolated and (I at least imagine) safe from its dangers.
| Author | Greene, Graham |
|---|---|
| Publication | Audible, 2014 |
| Copyright Date | 1948 |
| Number of Pages | 288 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | April 2021 |
Major Henry Scobie is a police commander in an unnamed British West African colony (later confirmed by Greene to be based on his experience in Sierra Leone) during World War II. Scobie is happy and at home in his house and his job but not in his marriage. Louise Scobie has no social life and no great interest in her husband. She is pursued by Edward Wilson who is interested in her intellect, but she has no real interest in him. She hopes to escape to South Africa where she has, or thinks she has, some friends and can have a social life, but Scobie has no money to send her there. He manages to borrow the money from a crooked Syrian merchant named Yusef and, in Louise's absence, has a tepid and rather uninteresting love affair with Helen Rolt, a survivor from a ship torpedoed on its way to England and brought to shore in West Africa in a lifeboat. Scobie is subsequently blackmailed by Yusef and finds himself in a psychological bind. He has cheated on his wife - who may not care. He has done nothing much for Helen. He has lied for Yusef. He has been spied upon and accused of various sins to his superior by Wilson. As a good Catholic, he believes he has sinned against God. And now he will resolve it all by sinning further. In a visit to a doctor he fakes the symptoms of heart disease, gets sleeping pills, saves all the pills up for one night, takes them all at once, and departs the scene.
Scobie struck me as a man who could be upright and tough in his professional life, but was at sea in his personal life. He always professed his love to Louise and to Helen and lied to them to try to keep them happy, but he knew that his lies would not survive examination. He didn't seem to understand that he didn't really mean very much to either woman and was not hurting them with his infidelity. When he gave in to Yusef's request of him and to his blackmail, he felt himself to have destroyed the only real foundation of his integrity. He could no longer value himself. He wanted to get out of life, and do it in a way that looked like a natural death and not a cowardly suicide.
The Heart of the Matter is a pessimistic, discouraging book. I couldn't "enjoy" it, but I nevertheless found it a compelling read. It is certainly not a book for every reader (are there any of those?) However it took me into a world in which some suppressed and not well understood aspects of my own personality were brought out and realized in a painful but convincing way. Scobie, a man who had settled into a way of life that allowed him to live, work, and respect himself, had run onto the rocks and run out of options. He could not continue his old life and could not accept his new one. Instead of straightening things out, dealing with his difficulties, and making the best of things, he dug himself deeper and deeper into his hole. It's the kind of thing that I think I and many other people could do, and that I struggle against. My difficulties would not be the same as his and I have never allowed myself to get in trouble as deeply as he has, but I think I understand and sympathize with him.
It was interesting to read Greene's portrayal of colonial Africa from the perspective of the 1940's, before the powerful independence movements arose. I expect his view of the African people was progressive for his time, though not so much from ours.
I said above that I could do the kind of thing that Scobie did. That needs emendation. I don't know if it's really possible for me to lie or to cheat on my wife. I can dig myself into a hole alright and I can become depressed over it and even contemplate suicide. However there are things Scobie did that I just would not do. Now at age 75, on the down and closing side of life and with options narrowing, I think I can reasonably assert that I have succeeded in maintaining the resolutions that have been most important to me.
| Author | Kingsolver, |
|---|---|
| Publication | Harper Collins |
| Copyright Date | 2018 |
| Number of Pages | 496 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | April 2021 |
This is a story of two different families living at two different times in the same battered house in Vineland New Jersey. One family, introduced in the 21st century, consists of Willa Knox, a struggling writer of magazine articles, her English teacher husband Iano whose college had closed leaving him to take a temporary high school job, their grown daughter Tig, and grown son Zeke. Zeke has fathered a child by a woman who then committed suicide, leaving the baby with him. He took it to Willa and abandoned it with her while he went off to his budding investment business in Boston. Tig, Willa's unconventional, Spanish speaking, pro-Cuban daughter shared the work of raising the baby. They lived with Nick, Iano's sick, hard right wing, dying Greek father in a decomposing inherited house that they could not afford to repair but also not afford to leave.
The other family was that of Thatcher Greenwood and his wife Rose along with Rose's mother and twelve year old sister Polly, all moving in to the house in the 1870's. Thatcher, a high school science teacher, attempted to teach Darwinian evolution in a community dominated by a millionaire religious nut (a real person named Captain Charles Landis) who tried either to get Thatcher to give up his ungodly ideas, or else to get him fired from his job. Thatcher's next door neighbor, Mary Treat, another real person, is an expert botanist and entomologist who supports Thatcher in his effort to bring science and logic to his students.
There is no full resolution to all of the characters' problems but they do come manage to develop their strengths and survive.
Kingsolver is a popular and very well respected author of fiction who lives up to her high reputation in this novel. K manages complex personalities and situations but always remains sympathetic to each of the characters. In Willa's family this includes Nick with his ignorant and anti-social attitudes, Zeke with his oblivious selfishness, and Tig with her strong, independent opinions. I would come to the brink of condemning some character that Willa described as offensive, but then she'd pull me back by exposing that character's humanity, deserving of at least some sympathy and respect.
I'm not sure what to make of rolling the two stories and time periods into one book. The Thatcher Greenwood story involved the same house, and Willa Knox did try to use that and its association with Mary Treat to appeal for funds from a historical society, but the connection was weak. I expected K to produce more points of contact between the times and people than she did. All I can say about it is that the Greenwood story was interesting in its own right. It made me think of my assignment at Pratt Library in 1974 to look through the old 19th century philosophy books in the basement and weed out those that were not worth the cost of re-cataloging. Evolution, and the resistance to it in American religious and philosophical circles, turned out to be a major subject of the period from 1859 to after 1870. Thatcher Greenwood would have been one of those people holding the despised view that, only over a period of years, became respectable.
This book was chosen by our NCI book club. It was not a book that I would likely have chosen to read by myself. I consider it a benefit of being in a book club of intelligent readers that they expose me to good books that I would never have chosen alone.
| Author | Wells, H.G. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Gutenberg |
| Copyright Date | 1905 |
| Number of Pages | 392 |
| Extras | Advertisements for other Wells' books in the original publication |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | April 2021 |
Arthur Kipps is raised by an aunt and uncle with virtually no knowledge of his parents. The substitute parents are servant class people who have worked hard and managed to become owners of a small shop. They give Kipps the best education they can afford. It's the cheapest private (in the American sense) school they can find, but perhaps a bit better than the government run options. As a teenager he befriends a boy from the shop next door and then falls in love with Ann, the boy's sister. However he is sent by his aunt and uncle to become an apprentice in a large draper's shop where years go buy and he loses all contact with Ann.
Then an extraordinary thing happens. A grandfather that Kipps never actually knew dies and leaves the young man a pile of money producing an income of 1,200 pounds a year. He is rich with way more money than anyone he knows, or probably all of them put together. His life is dramatically changed. He leaves his paltry job, moves into a fine house left him by his grandfather, makes new friends - though it's hard to say which of them are true friends and which are just after his money and, at the urging of all of them, attempts to become a gentleman. It's not a straight path and not one he is equipped to follow. He pays court to the only educated young woman he knows and she resolves to help him, introducing him to her brother, a money manager and, we think, hoping herself to become a wealthy woman by marrying him.
It looks like everything is headed in the direction of pushing him into this new life and new identity when, to his surprise, he runs into Ann, his old flame, a girl now working as a servant in the house of one of the upper class people he now moves among. Out of honor, fear of his new life, and not yet extinguished feelings, he marries Ann instead of the educated girl.
The rest of the story is a whirlwind of events. Kipps is talked into building a huge, 11 bedroom house - much against Ann's wishes. He rides in one of the new fangled automobiles. Then his former fiancee's brother disappears with all of Kipps' money and he is poor again. It enables him to stop the house building project and come to grips with life. But then, to everyone's surprise, an alcoholic playwright who imposed on Kipps to fund his new play has a huge hit and Kipps is rich again - now as a new and wiser man.
I read this book because of the role it played in David Lodges' A Man of Parts. Lodge saw it as an important work, stretching Wells' abilities and his impact in the world of literature. Lodge considered it to be a comedy, though I personally had trouble laughing at Kipps' predicaments. I felt sorry for him and was constantly thinking, "No Kipps, don't do that!" However, some of the things I wanted him not to do, like quit his job before he had absolutely confirmed that the legacy was real, or investing in the alcoholic's play, worked out well for him.
As I learned from Lodge's book, Wells was an important observer of British society. This book was one of the fruits of his labors in that area. For me, it was uncomfortable to read but it had plenty to teach me about a society not exactly like the one I live in today, but one that had a hand in forming our history.
| Author | Owens, Delia |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons |
| Copyright Date | 2018 |
| Number of Pages | 400 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | April 2021 |
Owens, a PhD wildlife scientist and author of three books on her life in Africa plus many articles about the natural world, published this first novel in 2018, when she would have been 69 years old. It was a wild runaway best seller which, at the time of this writing, had garnered 129,871 Amazon ratings with an average rating of 4.8 out of five stars.
Catherine Danielle Clark, known as "Kya", is the youngest child in a very poor family of seven living in the marshland of eastern North Carolina. Her father is an abusive alcoholic who beats her mother and her siblings. By the age of six, the mother and all of the siblings have left the family leaving only Kya and her Pa. For a while, Pa settles down and treats Kya well, but soon he is drinking again, acts abusively, and finally disappears for good from Kya and from the novel. Kya is pursued by a truancy officer hoping to get her into school and under adult care. The lady persuades Kya to come to school but, after one day of being ridiculed and isolated, she refuses to go back. Numerous efforts are made to find her but one thing Kya has learned above all else is how to disappear into the wilds near her cabin. She mostly raises herself, bringing mussels that she catches to the fishing pier of the elderly black couple, Jumpin' and Mabel, and selling them for just enough basic food and small change that, with the aid of fish and other food she can catch or scrounge, she is able to stay alive.
Kya grows up and, as a young teen, falls in love with Tate Walker, an older boy, son of a local commercial fisherman who lives nearby. Tate is sensitive to her shyness and fear and she comes to trust him. When he goes off to college he promises to come back for her but he doesn't. Kya then takes up with the local Don Juan and star athlete Chase Andrews who pursues her relentlessly and, eventually, gets her into bed with him using promises of marriage, household, and a normal life. But he is a liar and betrayer and marries another girl from his own class. When he shows up again, demanding the same relationship they had before his marriage, she refuses. He attempts to rape her and punches her hard in the face. She kicks him in the balls and the kidney and escapes. She sees him many days later, cruising the swamp in his boat and searching for her at and around her cabin while she hides in the swamps. Kya knows enough from her experience with her father that Chase is the kind of man who will never accept her escape and humiliation of him but will pursue her forever to have his revenge.
The story shifts back and forth between two time periods. The first one extends from 1954, slowly advancing to 1970. It is the story of Kya's life. The alternating period begins in 1969 with the discovery of Chase Andrews' body in the swamp. Gradually, the sheriff garners more and more information and finally arrests Kya for murder. An excellent public defender takes on her case and is able to win a not guilty verdict. She goes home and the novel proceeds in a single advancing time frame.
Kya has been educated by Tate. She can not only read and write, but she devours the science books that Tate brings her. She collects shells and feathers. She writes up what she is learning about nature. She paints beautiful pictures of swamp life. Eventually, with Tate's urging and assistance, she publishes books that achieve acceptance from naturalists and nature lovers. She settles down with Tate and lives with him until the age of 64, when Tate discovers her lying dead in her boat. Only then, after the end of her life, does he fully search the cabin and find evidence that the sheriff missed that confirms that she was indeed the murderer of Chase Andrews.
The novel is very well written. Owens is obviously very knowledgeable about the biology of the swamp and about science in general. That would be expected from a long-time professional scientist. What I might not have expected from a 69 year old author who had never published any fiction before was convincing and naturalistic characters, only one of whom, Tate Walker, was a scientist like her. However I thought that she did a pretty good job of that. Her understanding of brutal men, one an alcoholic and the other a patient and charming liar, seemed very authentic. It made me wonder about her own experience.
In the critical Amazon reviews the readers attacked Kya as a totally artificial and unbelievable character. "Eliza" from the U.K. writes "We are asked to believe that this beautiful (natch), sensitive, artistic blah blah little girl raises herself from barefoot illiteracy to womanhood and published fame as a naturalist, with three self-illustrated books on marshland flora and fauna."
I certainly agree that Kya's achievements would be very unusual, but I don't agree that they are obviously impossible. I think I'd say only that the author chose an exceptional child to be her main character. It was the exceptionality of that child that motivated the story.
The book was chosen by Bob Kline for our NCI book club. One of our NCI readers was very disappointed in the book for the same reasons that others have disliked it. She too thought that the story was unrealistic and perhaps a little manipulative of the reader. I agree with both points, but considered that the strengths of the novel overcame those weaknesses.
| Author | Morin, J.S. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Nashua, NH: Magical Scrivener Press |
| Copyright Date | 2017 |
| Number of Pages | 343 |
| Extras | Author's Note |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| Keywords | Artificial intelligence; Robots |
| When Read | May 2021 |
At some unspecified time, perhaps in the latter part of the 21st century, Earth is attacked by unknown aliens who, for unexplained reasons, destroy life on earth. 27 scientists, just before their deaths, manage to upload their memories into robots. A thousand years later, a few of the surviving robots, working with many more they have built since, are working on restoring and repopulating the earth, mainly using DNA that has been resurrected or reconstructed. They have been very successful with plants and lower animals and are now working to reconstruct humans. They are reversing the extinction visited upon Earth by the aliens.
The various robot committees have created many rules to govern human development but at least one robot, Evelyn38, later found to actually be a reconstruction of Evelyn11, has developed Eve14, a now 16 year old girl of extraordinary intelligence, physical ability, and beauty and is experimenting with her in the laboratory. However, Eve14 escapes Evelyn's grasp with the help of Toby22, Charlie7, and a very large, very smart, but not yet very mature human male named Plato. We don't know why Evelyn11/38 is doing all this, but Charlie7 is quite sure that it's not for Eve14's interest and he and Plato work more or less together to try to hide Eve. When Eve14 is recaptured by Evelyn we learn that Evelyn's plan is to wipe the mind of Eve14 into nothingness and then download her own mind into Eve's body. Evelyn will murder Eve's mind in order to take over her body. She wants to restore to herself the human feelings and pleasures that she remembers and fantasizes about from when she and other humans inhabited the Earth.
In a nerve wracking ending, Charlie7 and Plato manage to save Eve14 and kill Evelyn11/38, but Charlie is also killed in the effort. The reader feels great relief until the very last passage in the book in which a backup copy of Evelyn's mind is uploaded into a new robot body and we see that the pursuit of Eve14 will continue.
I am attracted to science fiction. The adventure, excitement, and often wild imagination are interesting, but they're not the main reasons why I read it. I don't, for example, care for "fantasy" fiction, which also prides itself on adventure, excitement, and wild imagination. I require plausibility in fiction that aims at anything other than humor or satire. What I really want is plausible and intelligent ideas about the future.
I have come to believe that the future of intelligent life on earth involves artificial intelligence. All the AI experts who exuberantly proclaimed that we're on the cusp of AI were wrong in their timing but not, I think, in their prediction that AI will happen. If not in the next 100 years, then in the next thousand or whenever. Unless humans are wiped out before then, I think there will be intelligent machines. There may also be more intelligent and otherwise improved humans (we certainly need them!) engineered with improved DNA.
I had never heard of J.S. Morin before I found this book but it was part of a series in which robots were prominently featured. After reading a few pages it seemed to me that the author had thought seriously about what it might be like to be a machine and had some interesting ideas about it. For example:
“What?” Paul208 asked. His optical sensors darkened from amber to a menacing crimson. “You think just because I keep busy I wouldn’t want to go back? Charlie, I remember what a cheeseburger tastes like. I remember the smell of the ocean. Just because I’m only eighty-three doesn’t mean I haven’t gotten sick to death of drifting along in sensory purgatory.”
Morin tried to imagine what it would be like to be a robot. Unlike, say, Greg Egan, he imagined robots who were interested in feelings and old movies that humans made. Some actually didn't care for mathematics and, although they could perform any math using their internal computers, they didn't necessarily deeply understand or care for what they were doing. They were patterned on people who had feelings and they wanted to experience these feelings too. It's an intriguing vision worked out with some interesting detail.
I may read more.
Today is my 75th birthday. I am aware of how short my remaining time is likely to be and that awareness has informed my writing about books. When I started keeping book notes at age 27 in January of 1974, I was thinking of using them to assist library patrons in finding interesting books. Within a few months I was writing for myself, not for the patrons. I wanted to remember what I had read and what I thought about it. Now however I am conscious of the fact that, if these notes survive me at all, they are more likely to be read by others than by me. I am gradually writing more for other readers and less for myself. Or maybe I should say that I, myself, am now more interested in what others might think of what I think about the books I read.
It's a gradual process, not an abrupt one. I still read my book notes and still benefit from reading them. I still want to recall to mind what I read and what I thought about each book. I hope to do that right up to the end of life. The reading for me is a very important part of who I am and how I think of the world. The book notes have evolved into a companion to my diary. They are, more and more, another type of diary of my life.
| Author | Scahill, Jeremy |
|---|---|
| Publication | Bold Type Books |
| Copyright Date | 2013 |
| Number of Pages | 680 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Terrorism |
| When Read | May 2021 |
Shortly after the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center in New York, President George W. Bush, with bipartisan support in the Congress, announced a war on terror. Initially centered on Al Qaeda in Afghanistan it steadily spread to Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, and other places in the Middle East influenced by Al Qaeda or by Islamic extremism. Largely directed by Bush's Vice-President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, the war was pursued partly through the U.S. military and the CIA, and also by the less well known "JSOC", the Joint Special Operations Command, a collection of elite military units from various American military forces that was not subject to the Congressional oversight that had been established for CIA operations. Barak Obama continued much of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld policy and developed and extended it. Extra judicial killings of people in foreign countries, with only limited oversight and limited efforts to avoid collateral damage, and no or coerced support from local governments, actually accelerated under Obama, a man who opposed Bush's war on Iraq.
Different organizations developed different conceptions of how to fight the war on terror. To a significant extent, the U.S. Army and the CIA attempted what we in the Vietnam era called a "hearts and minds" strategy. They aimed to win the support of local peoples by helping and protecting them. JSOC however pursued an attrition strategy. Rumsfeld is quoted as saying (not an exact quote here) that they would regard their practice as successful when they killed more Al Qaeda terrorists than Al Qaeda could recruit to replace them.
According to Scahill JSOC was under strong pressure to kill terrorists. As a result, in Afghanistan at least, there were multiple missions almost every single night in which American special forces invaded Afghan villages, targeting particular houses, killing people inside them, and leaving them devastated. It seemed to me not unlike the Vietnam body count phenomenon in which officers were under pressure to kill as many Viet Cong and North Vietnamese as possible in order to make the war intolerable for the Communists and force them to give up and surrender. Ultimately, according to S, blanket authority was given to local commanders to determine targets by themselves, without having to consult either higher commanders or the liason officers of local Army and CIA. They were defeating the "hearts and minds" efforts of their American comrades without even trying to find out what those efforts might be.
In other countries, other techniques came to the fore. In Yemen, there were frequent drone strikes and occasional fighter-bomber attacks, the most prominent of which targeted the Muslim cleric and American citizen Anwar Awlaki. In Somalia, the main technique was the financing and suborning of the forces of other countries who were induced to send troops into Somalia.
Scahill discussed a number of operations, most of them the best documented examples drawn from a pool of similar operations where innocent civilians were kidnapped, tortured, or killed, enraging not only them but their extended families, friends, and neighbors. Scahill argues that these operations fueled bitterness against the United States and pushed more recruits into the Al Qaeda camp than the U.S. could kill, even when the kill rates were dramatically raised. S describes the operations, quoting multiple eyewitness accounts from ordinary civilians and from reputable (S believes) journalists and both local and American witnesses or investigators.
The operations were not all conducted by Americans. The U.S. was, according to Scahill, a major force influencing the Ethiopian invasion of northern Somalia, the "AMISOM" (African Union Mission in Somalia) forces in Somalia, and the actions of anti-extremist forces in the Somalian, Afghan, Pakistani, and Yemeni governments that took a terrible toll on local peoples, including many who had nothing to do with Al Qaeda, al Shabab, or other anti-American extremist organizations before these events, but did come to associate with them afterwards.
Very little of Scahill's reporting is in the form of personal opinion. Most of it is documented by quotations from named American, local, or European officials, soldiers, or journalists.
It seemed to me that there were a number of important questions to be considered in these "Dirty Wars" as Scahill called them. First, is the question of whether JSOC, in its enthusiasm for killing the enemy, did huge harm to the American cause? It seems to me that Scahill established that it did. Secondly, did the killing of terrorists and their supporters produce overbalancing good? S thinks the answer is No. I don't know whether he's right or wrong. I believe that the terrorists truly are criminals, whether they think, or just pretend, that they are following the commandments of an all merciful god. Some of the things S says appear to argue that, in most of the countries, the extremist Islam that suppressed women's rights, music, alcohol, the ability of a person to decide for himself how he would read, think, speak, dress, eat, cut his hair, and live, were not popular - to some extent even among old, superstitious, and uneducated people, and certainly among the young and even partially educated. However, many who would have been attracted to American ideals of democracy and human rights were angered by the high handed American killings of innocents. It seems to me that assaults on ordinary people by Americans had the same effect on Middle Eastern peoples that the German bombing of Britain, or the British and American bombing of Germany had. The planners were fully committed to belief in their self-aggrandizing plans and couldn't see how much harm they were doing to their own cause.
I learned a great deal from Scahill's book. I believe that his criticisms of the one dimensional Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Obama strategy are justified, but I wish he had given us more analysis of what a better strategy would have been.
If I were President I might continue to support the extra judicial killing of terrorists who are outside the reach of American law. However I would only do so as part of a multi-dimensional policy that promoted notions of freedom and democracy and protected the lives of innocents.
| Author | Peters, Ellis |
|---|---|
| Publication | Chivers Audio Books, 2000 |
| Copyright Date | 1992 |
| Number of Pages | 288 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction; Mystery |
| Keywords | Cadfael |
| When Read | May 2021 |
In this late Brother Cadfael book, published in the year that Peters turned 79, a handsome young troubadour and novice monk named Tutilo sustains a mutual attraction with the beautiful young Daalny, a singer enslaved to Remy, a traveling minstrel who bought Daalny as a slave in order to profit from her fine, pure voice.
Early in the story, a long period of rain floods the abbey and other areas of Shrewsbury. The brothers of the abbey move all of the valuables to high ground or upper stories of buildings, including the remains of Saint Winifred. In the process however, the saint's remains are stolen and then further removed when a band of ex-soldier highwaymen capture the cart conveying the treasures, make off with the horses and some of the treasures, and leave Winifred's casket in the forest. Tutilo turns out to be involved in the removal of the saint and he is arrested when it is discovered that a witness to the crime who could have identified the culprit has been murdered.
In the end, of course, the nice young man is proven to be innocent by Daalny and by Brother Cadfael. Tutilo and Daalny make their way towards Wales. The slave owner Remy chooses to pursue work at the castle of Robert Beaumont, Earl of Leicester, rather than to pursue his runaway slave.
There were a couple of things in this story that struck me as at least a bit different from the previous books. One was that Cadfael seems more open about what I would think of as religious superstitions than I recall him in previous work. Another was that the civil war between King Stephen and Empress Matilda (aka Maud) was drawing to a close - with a bit more influence on the story than was commonly found in the other novels.
Whatever is the case with those matters, the novel has all of the hallmarks of Ellis Peters'/Edith Pargeter's wonderful writing. The subtlety of feelings, the beauty of the language, the fine feelings of Cadfael, the Abbot, the dying lady who wants to hear Tutilo's music as she dies, even the marvelous narration of Stephen Thorne, all combine to make this just as good a novel as all of the others.
I like Ellis Peters' work. She brings forth sympathy and humanity in her readers.
| Author | Austen, Jane |
|---|---|
| Publication | Penguin Audio |
| Copyright Date | 1871 |
| Number of Pages | 103 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | May 2021 |
In Austen's very early epistolary novel, the recently widowed, beautiful, highly skilled, and intelligent Lady Susan Vernon plots to deceive and conquer a well meaning and vulnerable man who just happens to have lots of money. To do so she attempts to push her own shy but pretty and intelligent 16 year old daughter into marriage with a rich fool, and to take advantage of family and friends to advance her schemes. Susan is thwarted by the actions of her sister-in-law and mother-in-law, honest and capable women who can see what Susan is doing and who resolve to prevent the forced marriage of the girl and to bring her to their homes to live - something that Susan resents but accepts as a convenient way to get rid of the girl. At the end, Susan is left angry and vengeful against her daughter and her relations. Her one apparent friend, i.e., a person to whom she writes more freely of her hopes and plans, is of no help to her. The "friend" is herself, like Susan, a selfish and untrustworthy woman.
Published in 1871, long after Austen's death in 1817, Lady Susan is thought by some, according to the Wikipedia, to have been written in 1794, when Austen would have been 18 years old.
Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters by William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arther Austen-Leigh (great nephews of the author?), published in 1913 and available on the Gutenberg website, has these interesting comments on why Lady Susan was not published during the author's lifetime:
"As a stage in the development of the author it has great interest. Strictly speaking, it is not a story but a study. There is hardly any attempt at a plot, or at the grouping of various characters; such as exist are kept in the background, and serve chiefly to bring into bolder relief the one full-length, highly finished, wholly sinister figure which occupies the canvas, but which seems, with the completion of the study, to have disappeared entirely from the mind of its creator. It is equally remarkable that an inexperienced girl should have had independence and boldness enough to draw at full length a woman of the type of Lady Susan, and that, after she had done so, the purity of her imagination and the delicacy of her taste should have prevented her from ever repeating the experiment."
And later, discussing why Lady Susan was not included by Austen in a later collection of her work:
"... Lady Susan is generally looked upon as an early and immature production; and Jane's judgment should have been too good to allow her to desire the publication of an inferior work at a time when she had already completed, in one form or another, three such novels as Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Northanger Abbey."
I accept these analyses of the novel. It is not as polished or as publishable as her later work. Austen's decision not to publish it in her lifetime is understandable. Now however we know what a great writer she was and I think we can set aside specific criticisms and just appreciate what this 18 year old child produced. The language is magnificent. It is marvellously precise and articulate. When Lady Susan or any of the other characters make a point, they do so with extraordinary eloquence and precision.
This story is not a big seller today and I presume it would not have been so when it was written. Perhaps Austen recognized that, or perhaps she took it to publishers who told her they were uninterested. Be that as it may, I am glad the work was preserved and is now available. It shows us a lot about Austen's depth of talent and about some great attributes of early 19th century literature, or maybe we should say late 18th century literature, that are not commonly seen today.
| Author | Singer, Isaac Bashevis |
|---|---|
| Translators | Singer, Joseph; Gottlieb, Elaine |
| Publication | New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Copyright Date | 1967 |
| Number of Pages | 442 |
| Extras | Author's Note |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | May 2021 |
Written in Yiddish between 1953 and 1955, The Manor opens after the end of the Polish insurrection against Tsarist Russia in 1863 and continues to near the end of the 19th century. Count Wladislaw Jampolski, proprietor of the Manor at the town of Jampol, had been arrested and sent to Siberia. His son, one of the insurrectionists, left the country and went into hiding. The Manor that he owned was taken by a Russian aristocrat. The deeply religious but hard working Jewish businessman, Calman Jacoby, won the contract from the Russian to run the Manor and the farms, forests, and other resources that it entailed. Jacoby allowed Jampolski's family to continue to live in the Manor while he worked and worked and worked with Poles and Jews to keep everything productive and turn a profit.
The story isn't just about these characters, it's about the Jewish society in Poland at that time. Calman's four daughters meet and marry very different men - from the pious son of a famous Hassidic rabbi to a young man with doubts about religion and an interest in science, to the deranged and dangerous son of Jampolski. Calman himself is lonelier than he expected to be when his old, ignorant, superstitious, Jewish wife dies. He falls for the wrong woman, one who is attractive and lively but who mainly uses him to get his money and abases herself for a charming young Pole who is to her what she is to Calman.
All of the characters develop. We see more than one side of each of them. All wrestle with ideas, emotions, and corresponding conundrums that they have no good way to resolve.
There is no particular end to the story. Poland is moving into the capitalist and industrial age. The Jews, perhaps the most backward segment of the population, are also moving into the modern age. Some welcome it. Quite a few do not. Holding on to their yarmulkas, their ancient Hebrew traditions, their artifacts, books, and commentaries, they look around at the changing world with fear and depression. They cast their eyes to heaven and pray for redemption. Presumably their stories continue in the second book of Singer's series, The Estate.
Isaac Bashevis Singer and his older brother, Israel Joshua Singer, have been important writers for me. They described and, in a literary way analyzed, the culture of my own and Marcia's ancestors. Through the Singers I have a greater understanding of my mother's mother and father and her uncles and aunts, some of whom were still alive during my childhood and others of whom I have only memories of stories. The culture they came from and their experience in Poland, Lithuania, Galicia, Russia and the rest of Eastern Europe were influential in my upbringing. If it weren't for the Singers, I'm not sure how much of that culture, especially its Hassidic and traditional components, would still be accessible to any of us today.
Singer understood the people he lived with. I think he wrote about them, as it were, from the inside. They are conflicted. They have been brought up with fabulous beliefs that are out of sync with the reality of the modernizing world in which they live. Singer himself seems to me both to recognize the ridiculousness and absurdity of the Hassidic Jewish worldview and yet still be bound by it. He knows it's crazy but it is the culture of his childhood and young adulthood. His experience and his native talent combine to present it to us in a way that I think only a skeptical but fully indoctrinated insider could do. I don't know if any non-Jewish or western Jewish writer could have done the same.
Of all of the characters, the one with whom I could most identify was Ezriel. Son of a rabbi and raised to become a rabbi himself, he married Calman's sexy daughter Shaindel. He thought he might be able to play the role for which he had been brought up but he could not overcome his doubts. He aspired to more. The science of the enlightened world appealed to him. The theory of evolution could not be just ignored and swept away. Life was not just like what the rabbis described, and maybe it wasn't like it at all. Like Ezriel, Singer too had his doubts and was forced to make unwanted decisions. He was affected by the conflict between science and religion.
Of course for me, the conflict was long ago resolved. 59 years ago, at the age of 16, I resolved the conflict by rejecting religion. Philosophically, I have never looked back. But for the purposes of literature, history, and the understanding of my own culture, Isaac Bashevis Singer has much to say to me.
| Author | Ford, Richard |
|---|---|
| Publication | Audible, 2020 |
| Copyright Date | 2020 |
| Number of Pages | 270 |
| Genres | Fiction; Short stories |
| When Read | May 2021 |
This is a collection of nine stories. I didn't see any publication dates and don't know whether they were written near the same time or for the same original publication. Here are summaries of six of them.
"Nothing to Declare": A middle aged lawyer attending a meeting at a hotel in his home city of New Orleans happens to meet a middle aged woman that he has seen before. They realize that they had gone to Iceland together at age 20, 25 years before, and been lovers for ten days. Both are married but they toy with the idea of a love affair, she more than he, and then separate, probably never to see each other again.
"Happy": Bobbi "Happy" Kamper, aged around 59, goes to the home of people she knows in Maine on the occasion of the death of Mick Riordan, aged 73, her live apart lover of many years duration. All of the peoople are writers or editors. "Happy", brings her big obstreperous dogs that no one likes having, and tells the others what shits she thinks they all are. The others behave politely. They don't much care that Happy thinks ill of them. Happy drives off with Mick's ashes.
"Displaced": A sixteen year old boy is left with his mother in Mississippi when his father unexpectedly dies. They live in what was once an old respectable neighborhood of single family houses that are now often divided into apartments for poorer, less socially desirable people. Across the street, a handsome young Irishman, Niall MacDermott, lives with his father, mother, and sister and largely supports them by driving his father's cab. Niall takes an interest in the boy that proves to be a sexual interest, but the boy has no interest in that. Still, he is lonely when Niall leaves town.
"The Run of Yourself": Two years after his wife's death, middle aged Peter Boyce is alone in a rented cottage on the coast of Maine. He experiences some hostility from the locals but attemts to ignore it. He meets a 24 year old woman who is in financial and other trouble and he offers her help, asking nothing in return.
"Jimmy Green - 1992": Fifty year old lawyer Jimmy Green is in Paris during the 1992 elections in the U.S. He meets a French woman and is attracted to her. They go to the American Bar which is occupied entirely by American Republicans, all hostile to his open affiliation with the Democratic Party. Their leader threatens him and when he leaves the bar with the woman a man follows him and beats him down. The woman assists him to her apartment, but is turned off, perhaps by his failure to fight back.
"Second Language": Charlotte Porter, a beautiful 44 year old realtor was abandoned by her Irish husband who went back to Ireland and took their two sons with him. Two years later she meets and marries 55 year old Jonathan Bell, a wealthy widower whose wife of twenty some years had died suddenly of a rare cancer. The new second marriage of each of the characters seems to be close and loving but, suddenly, with no long period of reflection and no discussion, Charlotte decides to end the marriage. Johnny has no option but to accede to her decision. They separate, Charlotte seemingly perfectly happy with her decision to become an unattached woman, Johnny more confused but accepting of the situation.
All of the stories are peopled by middle class professionals - mainly lawyers, realtors, and writers. They are worldly, well heeled, well traveled, intellectual people all of whom seem to have ambivalent attitudes and seem to experience a quiet alienation from life. Ford places these people in their surroundings without seeming to me to push them towards any goals, any judgments, or any commitments. They don't seem to be going anywhere.
The language and the writing are very good. Ford is able to capture subtle feelings and state them in a way that gives the reader insight into his characters, mostly by writing about what they think rather than why they think it. He leaves it to the reader to make any judgments and draw any conclusions.
The stories didn't appeal to me. I wanted to see some commitment towards lovers and families. I wanted to see more ideas. It wasn't my kind of writing. However I did admire the author's ability and intelligence.
Read for the NCI Book Club.
| Author | Seymour, Gerald |
|---|---|
| Publication | Harper Collins Audiobooks |
| Copyright Date | 1979 |
| Number of Pages | 414 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| When Read | June 2021 |
Leaving his wife in their apartment in Rome, Geoffrey Harrison, a British business representative, heads off to work but is stopped and kidnapped by three men who immediately tie him up, put a bag over his head, and drive him away for many hours. He winds up, bound and gagged, in a remote barn in Calabria. Shortly thereafter a call demanding two million dollars in ransom is sent to the police, who forward it to the business in England.
In the meantime, in a small apartment in Rome, the beautiful, communist (or maybe "anarchist", Seymour doesn't nail down explicit politics) terrorist (this was during the period of the "red brigades") Franca Tantardina gets out of bed with the 19 year old Giancarlo Battestini, a foolish but not stupid boy who has come to believe in the politics and to worship Franca. They are suddenly attacked by an anti-terrorist squad of the national police. One gang member fires a gun and is killed by the police. Franca is captured. Giancarlo is unseen and escapes. From then on, he dedicates his life to saving Franca and escaping with her to another country. He reads about the kidnapping of Harrison in the newspapers, figures out that a particular person must have been involved, finds that man, aims a gun at him, gets Harrison's location in Calabria, and then kills the gangster. He goes to Calabria, hunts down the kidnappers, kills two more, and makes off with Harrison in a stolen car. Then he presents his demand to the police. He gives the police 24 hours to release Franca to another country, or else Harrison will be killed.
Not having any real alternative, the police agree to Giancarlo's demand to put Franca on the phone the next time he calls.
The rest of the novel is a cliff hanger of a story as the police close in on Giancarlo. A little boy who saw him tries to tell his mama but she won't listen. He tries to tell his papa but mama won't allow him to wake his father. Only when the father wakens does he hear the boy's story, understand what the boy saw, and call the police. At the very end, a police official with a rifle shoots Giancarlo in the head and saves Harrison - who must then be told that his wife has died in an auto accident. Unknown to anyone else, the wife had been raped by boys that she was trying to seduce and she drove home at way too high a speed.
My abstract leaves out the various police officers, British consular officials, and a security officer from the company Harrison worked for. They occupied a significant and interesting part of the story consisting of the responses by police, government, and employer to the kidnappings.
In one way it was a good ending. The innocent man was saved. The criminals were stopped and many killed - three of them by Giancarlo. But it was also a sour ending. It convincingly described and explained the difficult choices forced upon everyone involved, however no one came out better than he or she was at the beginning of the story. All the survivors could do was rest and then move on.
This was Seymour's fourth book and the ninth of his novels that I've read. I can't say that I "liked" what happened in any of them if by "liked" we mean "derived pleasure from". However all of them captured and held my attention. As far as I know, 42 year after the publication of this book and 46 years after the publication of his first book, Harry's Game, Seymour is still writing. I expect I'll read more of his work before he and I are done.
| Author | Liu Cixin |
|---|---|
| Original Language | cn |
| Translators | Hanlon, Elizabeth |
| Publication | Whole Story Audiobooks |
| Copyright Date | 2020 |
| Number of Pages | 256 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | June 2021 |
Sixty-five million years ago, at the end of the Cretaceous period, two genera of animals had evolved intelligence - the dinosaurs and the ants. Initially they fought each other. Dinosaurs stomped and smashed the ants and destroyed their nests and cities. Ants crawled up the dinosaurs noses and attacked their brains and circulatory and respiratory systems, and also set fires to their buildings. However the war benefited no one and they eventually learned how to communicate and live together. The dinosaurs performed major tasks while the ants performed tiny tasks from medical assistance to electronic construction and repair that all required fine manipulation of tiny biological and mechanical structures.
All seemed well but the dinosaurs divided into two nationalities, the Gondwana Empire of tyrannosauruses and the Laurasian Republic of tarbosauruses. They engaged in periodic warfare and eventually developed nuclear weapons. That was bad enough but the ants determined that the dinosaurs were destroying the earth by extracting so many resources that there was no hope of avoiding severe destruction of the environment with hardship for everyone. The ants protested to the dinosaurs and demanded a change in ways of living but the emperor and the president of the two nationalities treated their protests with contempt. Finally, the ants launched a surprise attack on the dinosaurs, killing all of their top leaders and burning their cities with millions of tiny time bombs all set to go off in dinosaur bodies and buildings at the same instant. It seemed like the only way for the ants to proceed, but it resulted in disaster. Unbeknownst to the ants, the two dinosaur nations had setup doomsday apparatuses that were set to explode monstrous anti-matter bombs that would destroy life on earth if the bomb containers failed to receive coded postponement messages on schedule. If one nation launched a nuclear attack and wiped out the other, the coded messages would not be sent and the initiator of the war would be wiped out along with the victim. Now, the ants had killed the dinosaurs who sent the signal and damaged the transmission system. On schedule, the anti-matter bombs exploded. The dinosaurs and most other life forms died. Only a tiny remnant of the ants remained and they were reduced to a state of nature from before their developed society. The earth only slowly recovered.
Of course the biological basis of the novel is outrageous. Of course the dinosaurs and the ants could not have done what they did in this novel. But that wasn't the point and it wasn't a problem for this reader. It was a satire and, in my opinion, a very successful one. My acquaintance with science fiction is very limited in comparison with some consumers of the medium but I can say that, for me, it was a fine book.
Liu Cixin (pronounced by the narrator as Leeoo Suh-sheen) has become one of my favorite SciFi authors. His knowledge of science is very impressive. His imagination, both scientific and otherwise, is brilliant. His ability to put together an interesting story is on a par with other great authors, and his willingness to write dark and pessimistic stories without fear of rejection by readers and publishers, and without sugar coating his ideas, establishes him as a brave and independent minded writer. This is the fourth book by him that I've read.
| Author | Larson, Erik |
|---|---|
| Publication | Crown |
| Copyright Date | 2020 |
| Number of Pages | 608 |
| Extras | Notes, bibliography, Reader's Guide |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History; Biography |
| Keywords | World War II; Winston Churchill |
| When Read | June 2021 |
This is a biography of Winston Churchill and his family from Churchill's ascendance as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom during the fall of France to the period immediately following the entry of the United States into the war. There are many details of his interaction with important British and American leaders, and of his determined and impressive leadership of the fight against Hitler and Nazism.
The story was very personal. We see WC climbing to the roof of 10 Downing Street during air raids, scaring the hell out of his staff in his eagerness to see the action. We see him walking the burning streets of London and other cities seeing the damage with his own eyes and speaking directly to the suffering citizens. We see him meeting with staff and officials while sitting in his bed or his bathtub or walking around in pajamas or a robe, and sometimes wearing nothing at all, with a drink in one hand and a cigar in the other. He is living the great adventure of his life.
There is a fair amount of material about Churchill's family. We learn details of WC's daughter Mary's attendance at the debutantes' ball and her and her friends' eagerness to meet and dance with RAF fighter pilots. We learn more about Pamela Digby Churchill, the abused and neglected 20 year old wife of WC's son Randolph and her affairs with Averell Harriman, Edward R. Murrow, and other wealthy and influential older American men. In their own ways, the young Churchill women are also living out the adventures of their lives. Larson includes some of the material covered in Sonia Purnell's Clementine and adds to it, though his perspective is centered on WC, not WC's wife Clementine.
Periodically, the author changes perspective and writes about the actions and points of view of Hitler, Goebbels, Hess, and Goering. There are also passages concerning some of WC's interactions with President Franklin Roosevelt and the French Prime Minister, Paul Reynaud.
Larson says very little about the actual details of the wider war. Most of his discussion is about the Luftwaffe's assault, first on the Royal Air Force, then on the war economy, and then, inevitably, on the civilian population of Britain. Even there, nothing is said about the controversy between Hugh Dowding and Keith Park on one side, and Leigh-Mallory and Douglas Bader on the other over how the air war should be fought and whether priority should be given to defending the cities or defending the air force itself. The controversies over Churchill's judgment on war strategies were not addressed. The fall of Singapore was related in a single sentence, and nothing was said about the Japanese destruction of British armies, colonies, air forces, and warships in the far east. Most surprising to me was that the mention of Russia was very slight even though many modern historians consider that it was the Soviet Union, more than the United States, that saved Britain from Hitler's attacks.
As a work of history, It seemed to me that Larson's book was accurate and extensively documented, but strictly limited in its scope. I thought it gave a useful, if very limited, account of the Battle of Britain. It taught me more about the effects of German bombing on the people of Britain, and some things about aircraft production, that I hadn't learned from other accounts of the battle. Though even there, there was nothing at all about the grave shortage of pilots, or about the internal argument about protecting the cities vs. protecting the RAF. I don't recall L mentioning the efforts to bomb German airfields or to sink the barges accumulating across the Channel for the "Sea Lion" invasion of Britain. There was almost nothing on the "Battle of the Atlantic" and very little about the war in the Mediterranean and its effect on Churchill and on morale at home.
All of that sounds negative but, in fact, I enjoyed the book and learned from it. Larson gave us a convincing description of Churchill's life and the lives of other people in his class during this period. His short interjections of information about Hitler, Goebbels, and other Nazi leaders made very clear the differences were between a fascist dictatorship and a democratic republic - even one under the pressure of war. Of course I already knew about these differences, but I still found L's description of them fascinating and enlightening. I liked the book.
I read this for the NCI Book Club. I may add some notes after we meet about it next week.
The Book Club members were divided in the same way that I was in my own thinking about the book. Some thought the treatment of Churchill and his family was informative and very well written - which I think it was. Some thought that the treatment of the war was very inadequate and, as a result, we learned much less about this phase of the history of Churchill and the war than we might and should have - with which I also agree. Several of us brought up Larson's focus on 18 year old Mary Churchill and her pursuit of parties and dances with RAF pilots. My understanding of the pilots is that they were under tremendous strain, facing life and death actions day after day, watching friends be horribly maimed or killed and battling overwhelming responsibility, fear, exhaustion, and depression that I expect might have interfered with the pleasure of dancing with well to do teenagers.
The Washington Post review of the book by Gerard DeGroot made these points and a number of others that were critical of Larson's book.
| Author | Connelly, Michael |
|---|---|
| Publication | Hachette Audio |
| Copyright Date | 2017 |
| Number of Pages | 439 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | June 2021 |
Connelly introduces a new hero, hard charging 30 something Renee Ballard. Four years before the start of the novel Ballard lodged a sexual harrassment case against her superior officer, Lt. Robert Olivas, but the police department ruled against her and Olivas got her assigned to the night shift, the "Late Show", where she worked at night and handed cases over to the regular shift in the morning, after which she was officially no longer "on the case". She has a partner, John Jenkins, but like Harry Bosch, she tells him little and works as a loner.
The novel revolves around two cases. One is the rape and attempted murder of a transgender prostitute who survives the murder attempt. The murderer in that case attempts to rape and murder Ballard as well and comes very close to succeeding before she manages to kill the man and escape. The other, is a case run by Olivas concerning the murder of five people at a fancy restaurant. Ballard is shut out of the case by Olivas but she works it anyway, hiding what she is doing but accumulating evidence that the murderer must have been a cop.
It's hard for readers not to imagine that Olivas himself is the cop who killed the people at the restaurant. He is so determined to shut Ballard out of the case that we have to wonder whether there is more to his animosity than just anger at her rejection of his sexual advances and her accusations in the department. However, the ending absolves Olivas of the murders. Ballard's extraordinary police work in solving the case leads Olivas to invite her back into the murder investigation unit. She refuses unless he publicly apologizes for his misdeeds - something he will not do. At the end she returns to the Late Show, still something of a mistrusted outsider on the police force.
I imagine that Connelly decided to create Ballard partly as a replacement for the aging Harry Bosch, and partly out of a desire to see things from another point of view in which gender, at least as much as age, was a big factor.
With some caveats, I thought the novel was a success. Connelly's recreation of Harry Bosch as a 30 something female detective seemed a bit much. She appeared to me to have every one of Harry's faults. She never trusted her police partners with information that she figured out. She pushed hard on cases that were not hers, keeping her efforts secret. She violated orders when she thought that was justified. She pursued her suspects with single minded efforts to the point of exhaustion. Maybe "faults" is the wrong word for describing Bosch's and Ballard's obsessive behaviors. Certainly the two detectives solve crimes that would have not been solved by other cops. I presume that's what makes them worthwhile main characters in C's writing, and what makes them so interesting to read.
Connelly has recreated Bosch. I say, "so what?" He's still one of the very best writers of police procedural crime novels. His writing is compelling and hard to put down. To me, and obviously to many other readers, his stories offer a deep dive into the nature of police, their work and their culture.
| Author | Wolfe, Tom |
|---|---|
| Publication | Hachette Audio, 2012 |
| Copyright Date | 2012 |
| Number of Pages | x + 704 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | July 2021 |
Nestor Comacho is a young police officer working in the Miami Police Department Marine Patrol. His patrol boat encounters a big sailing yacht full of irresponsible young people and with a dirty, skinny, scruffy, older man holding on 70 feet up the mast. Nestor, a very strong young man, is sent up the mast to bring him down. He does so in a dangerous and heroic effort, against the scruffy man's will, within view of a large crowd on a nearby bridge. Believing himself to be a hero and described as such by young Miami Herald reporter John Smith, he finds that, in fact, the entire Cuban American community, including Nestor's own parents, neighbors, and friends, consider him to have participated in the arrest and deportation of a new Cuban refugee. So begins Nestor's odyssey through what is for him a surreal world of politics, bureaucracy, sensationalist news, fraud, sex, drugs, and high and low society.
Another important character, Nestor's strikingly beautiful girlfriend Magdalena, abandons Nestor, first for her employer, Doctor Norman Lewis, a psychiatrist specializing in treating addiction to pornography, and later for Sergei Korolyov, a Russian millionaire oligarch and art collector who donated 70 million dollars worth of Russian paintings to a Miami art museum that changed it's name to incorporate "Korolyov" into it. When John Smith finds evidence that the paintings donated to the museum are fakes the action shifts from high to higher gear.
Although he has many strikes against him, Nestor survives the storm and remains an active and now more experienced police officer. He connects with a new girlfriend and hopes for a good life. Along the way, we readers are introduced to the Miami social scene with its powerful Cuban American community, less powerful Black community, expatriate Russians under the domination of Korolyov, and rich and ultra-rich white Americans pursuing sex and social superiority.
Some Amazon reviewers panned this book. It is quite long for a novel. It digresses from the main story line to bring us displays of exotic behavior that we might never have imagined without Wolfe to imagine them for us. Its characters are extreme. The writing repeats unusual, over the top constructions in which words and sounds are repeated again and again and again until a reader (and especially an audiobook listener) gets tired of them and wants to brush them away. It takes a long time before it even begins the main plot about Koroloyov, his fraudulent donations, and his motivation for them - viz. selling additional Russian art fakes on the American art market for millions of dollars.
Yes, Wolfe does all of that. It annoyed me while I was listening to the book, but ultimately, I accepted Wolfe's idiosyncrasies. As he has done in all of his other books that I read, he has produced a veritable feast of social observations that are unmatched by any other writers that I can think of as I write this. Who else could write about a billionaire porn addict and a psychiatrist who successfully exploits him? Who else could invent a Russian oligarch, con man, and ferocious sexual predator like Korolyov? Who could create the beautiful, intelligent, but naive Magdalena who is taken in by such men?
Are Wolfe's creations real? Do events like these happen? Well, maybe not. Or maybe they are real and I'm just too far removed from them to imagine them. I need Wolfe to bring them to life for me. Real or not, Wolfe's creations are amusing as hell and they expand the readers' notions of what life in America can be like.
According to the Wikipedia, the book, Wolfe's last novel before he died in 2018, produced very mixed reviews and was a big financial failure. The publisher, Little Brown, did not recover the seven million dollar advance it paid to the author.
| Author | Chandler, Raymond |
|---|---|
| Publication | Vintage |
| Copyright Date | 1943 |
| Number of Pages | 216 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | July 2021 |
Private investigator Philip Marlowe is hired by wealthy Degrace Kingsley to find his missing wife Crystal and to protect her from arrest by the police. A complex plot follows in which Crystal and Mildred Haviland, another woman who looks like Crystal, each wind up dead with Marlowe being the man who figures out who killed each one, the killer being himself killed in the end.
I didn't care all that much for the story but this was the first Raymond Chandler novel I've read since October 1983, almost 38 years ago. It brought back to me the culture and the style of American detective fiction in the 1930's and 40's. It was like revisiting an old, familiar place. I appreciated Chandler's vision and writing style. I liked the book.
| Author | Brown, Jeremy |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Touchstone / Simon and Schuster |
| Copyright Date | 2018 |
| Number of Pages | ix + 258 |
| Extras | illustrations, notes, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Medicine; History; Popular science |
| When Read | July 2021 |
Brown, an English doctor who completed his medical education in the U.S., worked here as an emergency room doctor for many years and is currently an employee of the National Institutes of Health. He writes about the history of our knowledge of influenza, the big "Spanish flu" pandemic of 1918, and what we have seen and learned since then. There was some discussion of the science, some of the battle against the disease, and some of the social and economic causes and implications of influenza along with its health consequences. Brown describes the history of our battle with influenza in the hundred years since the Spanish flu pandemic (which is now reasonably well known not to have originated in Spain), including the discovery of viruses, the search (mostly still unsuccessful) for anti-viral drugs, the difficulties with predicting what strains of flu will predominate during the flu season, the research to uncover the reason why flu is active in the fall and winter but not the summer, the research on mechanisms of transmission, and more. Flu is much more prevalent among the urban poor than among others. It appears to be partly caused by the fact that poor people live, on average, in more crowded accommodations. Poorer people in the United States also have less access to medical care and worse care when they do get access, less ability to take time off work, less sanitary living and working conditions, and lower rates of vaccination. Although he stays clear of politics, it is clear from Brown's book that he thinks medical care is both cheaper and more effective in the UK than in the US.
I thought this was well considered effort. Obviously intended for the general public, it left out the hard cell biology but also mostly avoided the anthropomorphic tricks (like "clever virus" which appears only once, and that in a footnote) and misleading oversimplifications that some writers use.
This was an NCI Book Club selection. Many of the group participants have experience working with sick people and I thought they offered interesting discussion at a level that might have been above what other book groups that I have participated in would have done.
| Author | Macintyre, Ben |
|---|---|
| Publication | Random House Audio, 2010 |
| Copyright Date | 2010 |
| Number of Pages | 432 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | August 2021 |
In 1943, as the Western Allies were closing in on the German and Italian armies in North Africa, they began planning for an invasion of Sicily as a next step. To assist in that end, a section of the British Secret Service developed a deception plan intended to make the Germans believe that the next Allied offensive would be in Greece in the Eastern Med, or Sardinia in the Western, or both. Another part of this fictitious plan was to launch a fake attack in Sicily intended to draw German reinforcements to the wrong place and prevent them from reinforcing Greece or Sardinia. Fake radio and air traffic and fake preparations were made in Libya and Egypt but the heart of the deception was Operation Mincemeat, the planting of a dead body with top secret documents that would wash up on the coast of Spain with faked documents on his person and in his briefcase.
The story is complicated. There were British, Spanish, Germans, and Italians involved, and not only those who occupied positions in the direct line of military planning and intelligence. It was expected that fascist Spanish officials would do a cursory autopsy and pass copies, together with copies of the dead man's papers, to Germany. However a very competent autopsy was performed that might have raised doubts in the Germans about whether the man actually died in a plane crash. Then the reports and documents went into the hands of the Spanish Navy, a generally pro-British group who proposed to return everything to Britain without letting the Germans see it. Fortunately however, when the papers did finally pass through the custody of an Abwehr agent he was too thrilled with his intelligence coup to raise questions about its accuracy. Instead, he actually suppressed a few questionable observations.
There were also problems in Britain. To make the story of a dead officer convincing, the British had to create a life for him in England, replete with a biography, a family, a fiancée, a specific station in the Navy, a death notice, and other things that would be noticed by British officers as well as possible German spies. The British officers who made inquiries to find out who this dead man was who was in their unit but unknown to them had to be put off the trail, sometimes just by being ordered to shut up, but they could not be told why. On the German side there were significant political considerations that worked to benefit the British. Once Hitler expressed an interest in this case and thought that the invasion in Greece might be real, his sycophants and their sycophants fell all over themselves in expressing their support for their Leader's thinking. They dug up or re-interpreted evidence to be sure that it showed just what the Fuehrer thought it showed. One or two courageous men expressed their doubts but they were overwhelmed by would be believers in the deception.
It was a long book with a surprising quantity of detail.
The length and detail of the story were more than I expected but gave me a better appreciation of the operation and of the complex nature of this type of warfare. Of course we don't know what would have happened if the operation had not been performed, or worse, performed but failed in such a way that the Germans understood that the Allies were really aiming to attack in Sicily. It is possible that another one, two, or even more German divisions might have been sent to Sicily. The estimated total of almost 23,000 British and American soldiers killed, wounded, or missing might have been substantially higher. Considering all that, I am convinced of the value of the operation.
Macintyre has written numerous books of this kind, one of which Agent Zigzag, I previously read.
| Author | Wood, Gordon S. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Oxford University Press, 2009 |
| Copyright Date | 2009 |
| Number of Pages | xix + 778 |
| Extras | Maps, Editor's Introduction, Bibliographic Essay, Index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | United States |
| When Read | August 2021 |
Wood describes the state of the union over the period from George Washington's first term as President through to the end of the War of 1812. The narrative concerns the nature of the society, culture, economy, education, religion and other aspects of the new republic, its political division into a "Republican" or "Democratic Republican" faction that emphasized democracy and the equality of (white) men, and a "Federalist" faction that wanted the government to be led by the best men, educated, refined, wealthy - at least to the point of not having to depend upon government salaries or corruption for their livings. The Federalists initially took charge of the government. Washington is considered more a Federalist than a Republican, but he opposed all factionalism. Then, in the election of 1800, it was the "Republicans" led by Thomas Jefferson, that won over the majority of American voters and pushed for a new type of democracy with a greater commitment to equality than any European society had developed. Jefferson was deeply committed to the words he wrote for the Declaration of Independence, that "all men are created equal".
The struggle to define the nature and future of the country was carried out in a land, a society, and we might even say in a world, in which the concepts of democracy were yet to be worked out. Notions that we take for granted, for example of the independence of the courts, the relationship between federal and state governments, the roles of army, navy, and militia, the roles of parties and factions, the nature of social classes, and so on, were not the subjects of consensus. Our forebears didn't really even agree on what the issues were. It was all new.
America was not like England. There was no hereditary aristocracy and the people who longed for one were in a smaller and smaller minority. Everywhere, but especially in the North and West, people came to see themselves as the equals of anyone. In the North, more and more people went into "business". Businesses were not yet composed of huge factories with thousands of workers. Much of it was composed of individuals, at home or on farms, producing products for sale to others. In some communities virtually everyone, even if they were farmers, also had some sideline or other.
Wood was very aware of the lack of liberty and democracy for black people. Many of the revolutionaries from Virginia were also aware [this is my comment here based on Noble Cunningham's biography of Jefferson In Pursuit of Reason] but were forced to choose between a career in politics, influencing American policy, and exclusion from politics and from any influence in American policy. Most believed that slavery would die out of its own accord and the country need not be torn apart by it. That, however, was not what happened. The growing role of cotton in the southern economy made slavery more and more important. The social and political relations of upper and lower class whites vis a vis each other and blacks reinforced notions of racism. Finally, the westward expansion of the country and the battle over slavery in the new territories exacerbated the conflict and brought about fighting and the Missouri Compromise of 1820 that opened the eyes of the anti-slavery Americans to the difficulties of eliminating slavery in the U.S. We were launched on a path that led directly to secession and civil war.
I read histories from my current perspective. I try to free myself from too much current perspective, as E.H. Carr, or for that matter David Hume, would recommend but of course, like all of us, I can only partially succeed. Reading history is an exercise both in attempting to apply a broad perspective to the new specifics one is reading, and also attempting to expand one's perspective and make it broader still.
I was born and raised in the United States. I imagine myself to be knowledgeable about American history and culture. I imagine myself to understand the notions of party, equal rights, democracy, and other foundations of our society. However it's always a partial understanding, one that always needs expansion and re-analysis.
Wood's book argued that American democracy was not something that is fully understood by reading the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Our democracy grew out of antecedents that might have led in different directions but, in the give and take of a growing economy and culture, created the kind of imperfect democracy that led to the one that we have now. Some of the operative factors included resistance to aristocracy, the entrenchment of capitalism, relative freedom from the oppression of European states - even including the great power of England, continuous and largely unrestrained geographical expansion that encouraged men to believe in themselves and their ability to do as they pleased - and racial conflict between whites on one side and blacks and native Americans on the other.
By 1815, the end of the period covered by this book, the United States was an expanding power with valuable agricultural assets, a very large and growing world wide shipping industry, an expanding capitalism, and internal seeds of self-destruction that were only resolved, or I should really say placed on the path of resolution, by the Civil War.
There are about eight pages of notes on Empire of Liberty in my diary entry for August 18, 2021 (20210817). I've discussed the book much more extensively there.
| Author | Marcus Aurelius Antoninus |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Greek |
| Translators | Long, George |
| Publication | ?, 180 |
| Number of Pages | 122 |
| Genres | Philosophy |
| When Read | August 2021 |
Considered to be the last of the "five good emperors" of Rome, Marcus is thought to have written this collection of philosophical essays for himself. It was not published in his lifetime. The essays are divided into 12 books (or chapters in our current publishing style.) They are filled with analyses, mainly of ethical issues and addressed to "you". Assuming the essays were intended only for himself, then "you" would have referred to himself, writing to himself. He advocates rationality, fairmindedness, pursuit of knowledge rather than riches, acceptance of reality, and objectivity. He cites the work of other philosophers before him and is clearly well read in both Greek and Latin sources. He is one of the important philosophers in the school known as Stoicism.
Audiobooks are not the right way to learn philosophy, science, or many other fields in which the learner must stop, think, re-read, backup, and re-think in order to learn the subject. However I didn't want to commit a large block of time to understanding Stoic philosophy or Marcus Aurelius but did want to at least expose myself to it, so listening to the narration was a kind of compromise I have often made.
I'll just record a few reactions here. The first has to do with MA's treatment of past, present, and future. He writes:
"10. Throwing away then all things, hold to these only which are few; and besides, bear in mind that every man lives only this present time, which is an indivisible point, and that all the rest of his life is either past or it is uncertain. Short then is the time which every man lives, and small the nook of the earth where he lives; and short too the longest posthumous fame, and even this only continued by a succession of poor human beings, who will very soon die, and who know not even themselves, much less him who died long ago." (Book III - from the Gutenberg's The Thoughts of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus)
I get some impression from this and similar passages that MA not only thinks that life is short relative to the infinity of time, but also that we live in a reality that is a moving present from which the past is a fading, disappearing reality and the future is a yet unformed one. In some respects this reminds me of philosophical "idealism", the philosophy whose most radical exponent was Bishop Berkeley. It is a view that sees life and the world from the point of view of an observer. But it is also a view that acknowledges the objective reality of the world around us.
Nowadays, the most advanced thinkers who write books of philosophy live in an academic environment and write for an academic community. Their work is technical, sophisticated, and generally exhibits great skill at splitting hairs. It is not the kind of work that an emperor of the largest empire in the known world is likely to produce. I think that reading the work of any people from previous times and cultures requires an understanding of those times and cultures. To read Marcus Aurelius today, a writer who was very remote from our time and culture, is probably best done by specialists - though Marcus does not seem to me to have been aiming at specialists, much less academic hair splitters of two millennia in the future.
| Author | Banks, Iaian M. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Hachette Digital, 2008 |
| Copyright Date | 1998 |
| Number of Pages | 393 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | August 2021 |
In some world other than Earth, there is what may be described as a late medieval culture in which a number of kings live in uneasy relationships with each other, occasionally going to war for land and power. One of the two main characters in this world on the novel is "the Doctor" a woman from a far northern part of the planet working as a doctor to King Quience in the land of Haspidus. Her story is related in first person by Oelph, an assistant who cares very much for her but is also a spy for some unidentified master. The other main character is Dewar, known as "the Bodyguard", who works as bodyguard to General UrLeyn, Prime Protector of the Tassasen Protectorate for the years 1218 to 1221
The world of the novel is fraught with intrigue. Some of the nobles of Haspidus secretly vie for power with each other and with the king. The doctor stays out of the politics and just cares for the king's physical health, but she sets an example of the kind of honesty, service, and competence that the king admires. The bodyguard also avoids politics. His only concern is to block assassinations, something he does with extraordinary efficiency. Nevertheless, where intrigue is the rule in political life, even the most honest and dedicated people cannot save the world from it. At the end of the story, the Doctor boards a galleon and leaves the city, Oelph heart broken at her loss. UrLeyn has lost his war and Dewar could not save him from eventual assassination, or even save himself. The world continues on its way, still medieval, still disorganized, still ruled by men out mainly for their own good, but perhaps stumbling towards a higher civilization.
I read this book because it is sold as book six in "the Culture" series, a series that, so far, for me, was best represented by number two, The Player of Games. I was much taken by Banks' vision of a future in which both humans and intelligent machines have evolved to a higher level of intelligence and a more sophisticated civilization - or at least more sophisticated in some important ways. But this book only had hints of the existence of the Culture. Those who have read earlier books might detect that the Doctor, and possibly even the Bodyguard (or possibly not) had come from a more advanced and civilized world to try to guide this backward medieval world into a higher level of civilization - but without using any of the force or advanced technology that the Culture has it its disposal. I expect that readers who have not read the other Culture series books would be totally ignorant of Banks' premise that there is a galactic civilization, dominated by AIs, standing behind the story in this novel. The novel didn't give me what I was expecting and I missed that. Banks has only written so many books and I'm disappointed that they're not all about a fascinatingly imagined future instead of, like this one, a re-imagined past.
Having said that, I'll still concede that Banks is a very good writer who can create both attractive and repulsive characters that we like to read about. He can produce adventure stories that contain all of the things that popular fiction requires.
| Author | Noah, Trevor |
|---|---|
| Publication | Audible.com |
| Copyright Date | 2016 |
| Number of Pages | 304 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Autobiography |
| Keywords | South Africa |
| When Read | August 2021 |
When Trevor Noah was born, Apartheid was still the law and it was illegal for men and women of different races as defined by Apartheid law (white, black, colored, Indian) to have sex with each other. With a white father from Switzerland and a black mother from South Africa, Noah's very conception was a crime.
He came from a very unusual household. His father and mother could not be seen together and lived mostly apart. His mother, Patricia Noah, was an ambitious, very hard working person who made a career for herself as a secretary in an office of a European company in a society where local companies only hired white women for office work. She was (and is) also a deeply committed Christian, a member of "Team Jesus", who dragged her little Trevor to three different churches every Sunday, one in the morning, one in the afternoon, and one in the evening. She prayed passionately and insisted that Trevor do the same. She also pushed him to think and read and study and was always finding books for him.
Trevor describes his experience growing up. Strictly speaking he was not a "colored" person (mixed white and black) because they were all descendants of people who mixed racially before Apartheid began. Under Apartheid, these people could only marry each other and only live in colored neighborhoods. But Trevor didn't live in one of those neighborhoods. His mother's extended family were all black. His cousins and friends were black. He identified as black. Under the influence of his mother and white father, He learned excellent English and it was his first language, but he also learned to speak all of the major native languages fluently. That gave him distinct advantages and helped him in his rapid development as an adolescent and an adult. One of the major life lessons of his young adulthood came when he was put in prison for auto theft when he borrowed (without asking) one of his stepfather's junk cars and was arrested with no driver's license and no vehicle registration. Thrown in jail to await trial, he met a huge, gigantic man whom everyone feared. The man was interrogated by a guard but only Noah was able to understand both the language of the guard and the language of the giant. He interpreted for them, earning the thanks and appreciation of all.
Noah lived a remarkable life. He shoplifted. He earned a living by making and selling pirated music CDs. He became a member of a local group that ran what are called "block parties" in the United States. Noah was the disk jockey who played the music, introduced the group's street dancers, and made and sold CDs to the audience. As something of an outsider in all of the circles he traveled in, he never had a girlfriend or even a date with a girl until he was (IIRC) almost 20 years old. But he was very smart, excellently self-educated, and became successful as a comedian and entertainer, traveling around Africa and then in Europe.
There was some tragedy in Noah's life. The worst began when his mother took up with "Abel", a highly competent auto mechanic and a man revered by neighbors as a good man but who also became more and more alcoholic and violent. He ran his own auto repair shop, but was a terrible businessman who, some time after he married Patricia, got drunk more and more often, drank up all of his income, and became violent towards Patricia and others who criticized his behavior. He was repentant after the first beating he administered to Patricia but, eventually, it happened again and then again and again. Patricia reported him to the police each time but he was never charged. Police considered that men had the right to beat their wives and that domestic disputes were not serious and were best handled by family members, not police. Finally, one night, he shot her. Trying to shoot her in the head he succeeded as she attepted to drive away. She survived with what her doctor declared was a miraculous path of the bullet in through the back of her head and out through a nostril without destroying any critical parts inside. Astoundingly to me, although Abel was charged with attempted murder, he got off with nothing more than 90 days probation.
The story ends there. There is nothing about Noah's remarkable career in England and the United States culminating, so far, with his appointment to succeed Jon Stewart as host of The Daily Show.
I think Trevor Noah's story was different from any American autobiography that I have read though, on the other hand, each person's life, and hence each autobiography, has some different, if not truly unique, aspects. Certainly South Africa was different from the United States though I think it can be said that the racial prejudice that had become so deeply ingrained in South Africa and had such a negative effect on Noah was at least as severe at times and places in the U.S. Perhaps the most similar biography I've read was The Color of Water by JamesMcBride - also a book about a boy growing up in straitened conditions, with mixed race parents, and a mother (white in this case) who pushed her son and all of her children into education and achievements far beyond what anyone would have imagined would be possible for them.
Some of the things Noah did as a boy were nothing to be proud of but Noah did not seem to shy away from describing them. He engaged in some shoplifting with one or more of his friends. He pirated music and sold it on the street. He lied freely to family, friends, and authorities to protect himself. Noah's view of this is that these were the things that boys did to survive on the street in a poor society where jobs were very hard to get and paid very little. They were nothing out of the ordinary and nothing to agonize about. I certainly can't condemn him for them or even think the worse of him for his behavior. In his stealing, lying, and conning of people, I didn't see anything that harmed anyone except, perhaps, the owners of stores and copyrights - people who were not of his race or class and who were not visibly harmed by his petty theft.
I read this book for the NCI book group. I was planning to read a written copy of this book until Elaine Mills of our group told me I really needed to hear Noah's narration. I found it in the local library and listened. It was an impressive narration that brought extra life to the story.
I may have notes to add after our discussion next week.
It seemed like everyone in the book group liked the book. Many expressed interest in the views of South Africa and Apartheid that Noah presented.
| Author | Graves, Robert |
|---|---|
| Publication | Rosetta Books, 2014 |
| Copyright Date | 1949 |
| Number of Pages | 341 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| When Read | September 2021 |
In a novel based on a real historical event, in 1595 a meagerly outfitted fleet of four ships sailed from Peru under the command of General Don Alvaro de Mendaña de Neira to find, colonize, Christianize, and appropriate the wealth of the Solomon Islands, which had been discovered by Mendaña in a previous voyage in 1567. Don Alvaro is portrayed as a weak commander, bullied by his wife Doña Ysabel Barreto, and her brothers. Ysabel is a dangerous, lying, scheming, selfish, but very beautiful younger woman who regards the other people on the voyage as expendable nobodies who must do her will without question and without regard for their own possessions, lives, and safety. The others aboard include several priests, soldiers commanded by the dangerous Colonel Pedro Merino, sailors increasingly directed by the Chief Pilot Pedro Fernández de Quirós as the sailing officers died off, and various merchants, farmers, craftsmen and others hoping to settle and make the fortunes in what had been portrayed to them as primitive but fabulously wealthy islands. The story is told by Don Andrés Serrano, an assistant to the General's secretary, then secretary when the original secretary dies, then secretary to Doña Ysabel when the General dies.
After months of sailing, the ships arrive at the Marquesas islands, then later at the previously unknown island they named Santa Cruz. In Graves' recounting, the expedition is riddled by stupid, selfish, violent, and racist behaviors. Soldiers, following the lead of Colonel Merino, killed Marquesas islanders and seized or destroyed their property just because they felt like it. There were no consequences for those actions and when the ships arrived at Santa Cruz, already almost out of food, water, and naval stores, similar behavior occurred. Between the continuing deterioration of their ships, sails, and supplies, and their continuing antagonism of the local peoples, they determined that they must abandon the church and housing they had been building and leave the island. Before they left, General Mendaña and the Barretos arranged for the murder of Colonel Merino and his supporters, then Mendaña died, and they were off. The remainder of the story centered on the Chief Pilot, who worked tirelessly to take the fleet to the nearest Spanish settlement in Manilla, and Doña Ysabel and her brothers, who treated the Pilot and everyone else with contempt, eating and drinking and even washing clothes using their large private stores of food, wine and fresh water, demanding dangerous and even impossible actions from the Pilot, while all the time the shrinking population of crew, soldiers, and passengers were dying of starvation and thirst.
They made it to Manilla, perhaps 90 people still alive of the 350 or so who started out.
Graves' beliefs about the horrors of human society and the ultimate defeat and martyrdom of decent and well meaning men seem to me to be the same in The Islands of Unwisdom as they were in I, Claudius, Claudius the God, and Count Belisarius. Instead of a Roman Emperor or a Byzantine general, we have a humble sailor, the Chief Pilot, a man who understands the positions of the sun and the stars in the sky, and the rocks, currents, and winds in and over the oceans, but not the people who contend to use and abuse him him to advance their personal interests. They are a mystery to him. He wants to be a good man. He wants to be loyal to his religion, his masters, his fellow travelers, and his wife and child. He is willing to sacrifice himself to fulfill his duties. But his burden is severe. There is, at best, only a deeply compromised final victory over evil.
As with Graves' other books, his characters are complex and richly conceived. The language he uses to describe them is magnificent. Here are a few passages:
"'Your Excellency,' I answered, 'I see patience as a virtue compounded of faith, hope and resilience. Its emblem is cork, which when struck a heavy blow springs back undented into shape, though all but flattened, and is light enough to buoy up the heavy heart struggling in dark waters of despair.'"
...
"Therefore, my sons, flee from the deadly sin of fornication, and from the still deadlier sin of adultery! If your flesh be proud, abase it by abstinence; be sparing with meat and wine; for the Seven Vices dance in a ring together and Lechery holds her sweetheart Gluttony by the right hand."
...
"The Devil showed great subtlety indeed when he tempted our Mother Eve first, and in the disguise of a talking snake. It is a common frailty of women to be deceived by novelties; but it is my belief that, had he gone to Adam instead, and persuaded him (with equal ease) to eat of the apple, Eve would have refused to share it. 'Drop that forbidden fruit at once, husband,' she would have cried, 'and run to make your peace with the Lord God, if you ever wish to lie with me again!'"
As with his other novels, The Islands of Unwisdom is not an optimistic story. It's hard to read about the casual butchering of islanders even when the islanders themselves are not free of sin. It's hard to watch as the aristocrats torture, starve, or kill the people in their charge for no better reasons than selfish aggrandizement and sickening vanity. But the depth of the author's understanding of his people and his story, and the richness of his language, repay the effort. A perhaps minor but not unimpressive aspect of his language was his rich vocabulary. I frequently had to look up words like "objurgations", "leal", "cumberers", "bepiss", "sooterkins", "talbot", and "tucket" - all but one of which is not in the spelling dictionary of the Emacs editor I'm using to type these notes, but when I do find them in other dictionaries they often hark back to the English spoken in the sixteenth century - the period of the story.
I looked up reviews of this book and found some, but I had to wonder if some of their authors, including the one from Kirkus Reviews, had really read the book or only skimmed it.
| Author | Hunter, Stephen |
|---|---|
| Publication | Brilliance Audio |
| Copyright Date | 2019 |
| Number of Pages | 400 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| When Read | September 2021 |
Now aged 72 going on 73, the same age as the author when he wrote the book, Swagger is approached by the elderly Mrs. McDowell from Baltimore who wants Swagger's advice and help in finding and nailing the sniper who killer her son, a U.S. Marine in Baghdad. Swagger attempts to discourage her but fails and is won over by her courage, her dedication to justice and family, her intense suffering for her cause, and the deep understanding of her quarry that she has achieved. He accepts her mission and and the two of them, plus an Israeli intelligence officer with whom Swagger had a connection, work on the case.
Juba the Sniper is very much in the sights of Israeli intelligence. Gershon Gold of the Mossad happens to already be working on Juba. He recruits Swagger to help explain what top ranked snipers need to carry out their missions. Swagger outlines the rifles, the ammunition, the practice long distance firing ranges located on land and in weather that mimic the intended target, etc., and helps the Mossad pinpointing Juba's location from among the likely sites in southern Syria. He goes in with the Israeli commandos in a helicopter raid, almost getting killed in the process. They fail to catch Juba but they learn more about him, ultimately learning that he has gone to the U.S. for a terror mission.
Juba's handlers have put him in the charge of a Mexican cartel overlord who provide all of his wants in exchange for millions of dollars. The FBI, assisted by Gold, Swagger, and McDowell, are now on the case. After many failed attempts to catch him they eventually track him to a site where "Mogul" (a very thinly described pseudonym for Donald Trump) will be giving a speech and set up to stop the assassination and catch the sniper. Swagger argues for bringing in Mrs. McDowell again and she convinces the FBI team that Juba is too smart to fall into their trap. The targeting of Mogul sounds like a trick to her. They all figure out that the actual target is "Renegade", (a thinly disguised name for Obama), who will be on a nearby golf course at the same time as Mogul/Trump's speech. With only minutes to change things around Swagger takes off in a helicopter that makes it just in time into the line of fire between Juba and Renegade, and Juba and Swagger each fire one shot. Both are hit. Swagger, badly injured, survives.
Game of Snipers has everything that we desire and expect in Hunter's thrillers. The technical accuracy and detail are exceptional. The plot moves at a perfect speed. The characters, if not always entirely convincing, are very diverse and always fascinating. Some are larger than life, I'm thinking especially of La Culebra, the psychopathic killer who guards the drug cartel master and thinks that he himself, Culebra, is really a snake, but that's okay. In a book like this we're looking for exotica and are delighted when we find it.
This is the tenth of Stephen Hunter's books that I've read, and the fifth of his Bob Lee Swagger series. I met him once in a taxi ride that I think I described elsewhere in my writings, and have admired his writing from the time he was a movie reviewer for the Baltimore Sun through to this latest book.
| Author | Ishiguro, Kazuo |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2021 |
| Copyright Date | 2021 |
| Number of Pages | 320 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| Keywords | Artificial intelligence; Robots |
| When Read | September 2021 |
Klara is a girl "AF", which we eventually learn is an "Artificial Friend". She's a robot made in the shape of a teenage girl to be sold to customers looking for a part friend and part caretaker for their teenage children. The story opens in a store where Klara and another girl AF are on display together, sometimes in the front window of the store and sometimes on a shelf further back. Klara and her companion are hoping to be sold and Klara is much attracted to a teenaged girl who sees her in the window and wants very much for her mother to buy Klara. There is a delay and Klara goes against [the] Manager's policy by being cool towards another girl that comes in, but Manager forgives her and eventually, the original girl, Josie, comes back with her mother and they purchase her.
The family situation turns out to be complex and Josie turns out to be seriously ill and in danger of dying. Klara is frantic to save Josie and concocts a plan. Klara herself is a solar powered machine. She will win the help of [the] Sun, whom she believes retires each night not far west of the house. She has seen the Beggarman and his dog apparently die across the street from the AF store and then be revived by light from Sun. She promises Sun that she will sabotage the "Cootings" machine that puts out severe pollution in its work in demolishing buildings. With the help of Josie's engineer father, whom Klara refuses to tell her complete plan to but insists that she can save Josie's life if he helps her, sacrifices half of a liquid in her head that the father understands will damage key parts inside the machine. The machine is indeed severely damaged and, as the story develops, we readers are surprised to learn that the plan works. On a beautiful day, Klara opens the curtains in Josie's room and, in the sunlight, Josie begins to recover.
There are a number of complexities in the story. The mother and father are separated and have different ideas about how to help Josie. The mother has allowed herself to be persuaded into supporting a plan to convert Klara into a replacement for Josie if and when Josie dies - though she instinctively understands that Klara is not Josie and cannot be made into a substitute Josie. Josie has a long lasting relationship with Rick, a nearby neighbor of the same age. Klara hopes to assist Josie and Rick to marry and live together but, as they reach adulthood, they go their separate ways. Klara herself (itself?) is part of a "B2" generation that is being superseded by a new set of "B3" AFs.
In the end, the humans have continued their lives and Klara is existing in a kind of junkyard. She is visited there once or twice by some of the humans who knew her and they offer to move her to another section of the yard where some other AFs have been situated. She declines the offers. She spends her time standing in her spot, thinking about the humans that she knew and her time spent with them.
I was talking to Bob Kline and Elaine Mills recently and mentioned that I was especially interested in "hard science" science fiction that was about artificial intelligence. They told me about this book which was about AI and was written by a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. How could I not read it? I had some relatively minor quibbles with the story but did, overall, think well of it.
First, the quibbles.
Some objects in the story are introduced and used, but not explained until halfway through or even later. Everyone has an "oblong" which, much later, turns out to be a cell phone. Most young people, but not Rick, have been "lifted", which means genetically engineered for high intelligence (before birth? Later? Ishiguro doesn't say.) I don't mind the oblongs and the uplifts, what I quibble with is keeping readers in the dark about these things, creating a diversionary mystery where none is required in the plot. Maybe a more perceptive reader than me would have figured out these little mysteries before I did.
Another quibble, or maybe a little more than a quibble, is Klara's lack of knowledge of the nature of the sun. Okay. Maybe it's the case that someday we will be able to construct an AI with a sophisticated understanding of the English language and the needs and emotions of human beings, but one who has never been exposed to an elementary school science book or the Wikipedia and has never discussed the nature of the sun with her manager or the people or bots that place her in the sun for battery charging. It's a bit of a stretch, but I'll buy it. However I have trouble with Klara's enormous misconception turning out to be just what she claimed it was. She opens the curtains, allows the light to fall on Josie, and by a miracle, and after a long downhill slide towards death, Josie begins to recover and becomes a healthy young woman. The whole plot seems to turn on the vindication of Klara's wild act based on total misunderstanding.
On the positive side, Ishiguro did produce an interesting character in Klara and surrounded her with sympathetic human beings. We are interested in Klara's thoughts and her reactions to the thoughts and actions of the humans. We are interested in the attitudes of the humans to Klara and other AIs. We feel sorrow when we see her abandoned in what is essentially a junkyard. She might have been handed over to another family with another child in need of the comfort of an artificial friend, but I'll avoid quibbling over that. The author had what I take to be sufficient reason for presenting her fate as he did, and for giving us a credible view of what she thought of it.
| Author | Adiga, Aravind |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Scribner, Simon & Schuster |
| Copyright Date | 2020 |
| Number of Pages | 272 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Australia |
| When Read | September 2021 |
Danny the cleaner is living in a room above a store in Sydney Australia. A Tamil, he arrived from his home in Sri Lanka on an educational visa but, considering the education to be a profit making scam, he dropped out of school and found he could get work at $60 for one of his high intensity cleaning jobs. The store owner shafted him with high rents, but Danny was very good at what he did, was well liked by his clients, and was getting along okay. His biggest problem had to do with his expired visa. He was an "illegal" and if he were caught he would be expelled from the country, back to Sri Lanka.
A personable fellow, Danny becomes friends with. and is trusted by, his clients. In particular, he becomes friendly with Rahda Thomas and her friend Dr. Prakash. She is cheating on her husband with Prakash, and he is not a really doctor but is only called one by Rahda. One day when Danny is cleaning an apartment police run into the building. He is afraid they are there to arrest him for being an illegal alien, but in fact they are looking for someone who murdered a woman living in a building across the street.. The murdered person turns out to be Rahda. The police have no clues as to who might have done it but Danny, reading the news and learning where the murder occurred and how it was carried out, soon comes to the conclusion that Prakash killed her.
He starts getting texts and phone calls, lots of them, from Prakash. Prakash tells Danny that he is leaving on a plane for South Africa at 6:30 pm but he badly needs Danny to clean his apartment, one loaned him by Rahda, before he leaves the country. Danny is more and more suspicious. Fearing that Prakash killed Rahda and will kill him, Danny, too, he runs away to different places in the city. He runs into Prakash at one point. Prakash is now denying that he killed anyone but needs assurance that Danny won't "dob" him to the police. Danny assures Prakash and tells him that he knows that if he dobs Prakash, Prakash will dob him as an illegal.
The day becomes more and more frantic. New sections of text now often begin with a boldface time like, 2:46 p.m., 2:52 p.m., etc. The times are closer together. When Prakash confronts Danny, Danny has a little cactus plant he had bought for a girlfriend and nurse named Sonja. He jams the the cactus into Prakash's face and runs - fast, a long way, making random turns so that if Prakash tries to catch him, Danny will quickly be out of sight. Then Danny calls the airport to find out the time of the next flight to South Africa. There is no flight until the next day. Danny is now sure that Prakash is the killer. What should he do. He doesn't want to be deported, but he wants to be Honest Danny, Good Danny, Danny who will be appreciated by the police and given citizenship for his good citizen behavior.
The local news reports the next day that the murderer was caught. He is thought to have been planning the murder of Rahda's husband. "... the person who tipped police off on the hotline confessed during questioning to being illegally present in Australia and is now being processed for deportation to his home country."
End of story.
I thought that the story was interesting but I was especially impressed by the character of Danny. He was a very intelligent fellow. He had been in multiple countries and spoke multiple languages, including excellent English - impressive for an uneducated man. It is tempting to dismiss Danny's intellectual sophistication as something that the author wanted his character to have, but could not convince us that he does have. However, Adiga presents it very convincingly. You don't have to be well educated or well to do to be intelligent. In Danny's case, this intelligence has nothing to do with understanding physics or reading classic literature. Like Adiga's other heroes, Danny is intuitive. He can tell himself a lie and can say it out loud, but he can't make himself believe it. As the evidence comes in, as he hears more and more claims of innocence from Prakash, he becomes more and more convinced that Prakash is guilty, and more and more confirmed in his determination to keep out of reach of Prakash.
So what should Danny do? He can't decide. He can accept Prakash's commitments and lies but he can't make himself believe in them. He can try to run, but he can't make himself believe that he will be secure. He can hope that if he doesn't turn in Prakash, Prakash will be caught anyway but won't betray Danny, but Danny can't make himself believe that Prakash won't turn him in, or that Prakash will be caught if Danny doesn't turn him in. And whatever he decides to do, he can't dismiss the nagging feeling that it is his responsibility to Rahda, to any future victims of Prakash, and to himself, to be an honest man.
As usual, Adiga offers unvarnished views of the society that powerless people and outcasts face every day. However in this case, the country and society on display is Australia, not India. It's absolutely a better place, a wonderland for a lowly housecleaner compared to the society of the drivers and servants in The White Tiger or the living hell of Between the Assassinations. Adiga is a complicated man and he is sensitive to the complexities of our complicated world.
As always, or at least as always in the books I have read so far, Adiga shows himself to be a great writer.
| Author | Bahari, Maziar |
|---|---|
| Author | Molloy, Aimee |
| Publication | Tantor Audio, 2011 |
| Copyright Date | 2010 |
| Number of Pages | xxiv + 356 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Politics |
| Keywords | Iran |
| When Read | September 2021 |
Bahari was a journalist and film maker with both Iranian and Canadian citizenship living in London with Paola, his pregnant English-Italian fiancée. In June of 2009 he traveled to Iran on behalf of the American magazine Newsweek to cover the presidential election. The leading candidates (not counting the many candidates that were disqualified in advance by the unelected Guardian Council and its Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei) were the incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinajad and the moderate reformer cleric Mir-Hossein Mousavi. Mousavi won the pre-election poll by a landslide but lost the election by a landslide leading Mousavi supporters to cry foul. Bahari clearly had a low opinion of Ahmadinajad even before the election but, and I find his claim to this convincing, he worked hard to be objective, to report the opinions of people he interviewed rather than his own opinions, and to present both sides in his articles.
Bahari risked his safety and security to cover the protests. He went into the midst of high risk demonstrations and had to run when the Basij (a Revolutionary Guard Corps volunteer militia) attacked with clubs and electric shock weapons. His fiancée in London and his friends and family (his mother and brother-in-law were all that were left after the inroads of both the Shah's and the Islamic Republic's political police) warned him about getting out but, as a committed journalist, he kept on hoping for one more interview, one more photograph or video, one more important fact. He waited too long. He was arrested at his mother's house and taken, blindfolded, to Evin Prison, a notorious place with many political prisoners.
At Evin, Bahari became the property of a "specialist" investigator. The man never told Bahari his name. In his mind, B just called him "Rosewater" because the man smelled as if he had annointed himself with rosewater scent. Rosewater never allowed B to see his face. He mostly stood behind B. He generally blindfolded him. He always ordered B to look down and away. Then he leveled accusations, demanded confessions, and administered beatings - slapping, punching, and sometimes whipping him.
Rosewater demanded two things. He wanted Bahari to confess that he was working for Western intelligence agencies and was under their control, and that he knew many similar Western agents currently living and working in Iran. As day after day passed with beating after beating, Bahari finally broke down and "confessed" that he was working for Western intelligence and that Newsweek was one of their agencies. But he would go no further than that. He would not name people working against the regime. When asked about specific individuals that Rosewater and his masters were pursuing, B always insisted that he knew nothing whatever about any subversive acts by anybody, neither the people that he knew nor those that he didn't. He was always polite to Rosewater and spoke to him as if he believed Rosewater's promises of freedom if he named names, he would not cross the red line of sending others to prison. B's father, a communist revolutionary in the time of the Shah, had always insisted that it's okay to say any lie if need be to survive but it is never okay to incriminate someone else.
Paola, Newsweek, and other friends of Bahari worked tirelessly to free him. They enlisted the support of the Canadian government and of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Eventually, the Iranian government must have decided that the political cost of keeping Bahari imprisoned was greater than the cost of letting him go. Rosewater demanded that B become an agent of the Iranian government. He would become a spy for the Iranian government, reporting on the activities of Iran's enemies. He told B that Iran had agents all over the world. When B went back to London, or to anyplace else, Iranian agents would be watching him and would give him orders. If he didn't follow those orders he would be punished and eventually killed. Bahari pretended to believe him and to be afraid. He promised to be a good spy and to follow orders. 118 days after his arrest, he was released and flew back to London shortly afterward. He received his first communication from Rosewater sometime after arriving. I don't remember the words he used, but the sense of them was that Rosewater could go to hell.
Immediately after arriving in London, he married Paola, they had their first child, and Maziar Bahari went to work writing this book.
The impression I got from this book is that the Islamic Republic is worse than I thought. The Guardian Council and the Revolutionary Guard Corps are thoroughly corrupt. The Supreme Leader, the leading cleric in the land, knowingly condones and supports the corruption. While Bahari was in Tehran, one of the twelve Guardian Council members, a man who was presented as a stern cleric, was in an auto accident and a young prostitute was found with him in his car. Many people witnessed the scene. The government told various lies to protect him but finally gave it up and had him make some lying statement and then resign. Top leaders lived in mansions and traveled in chauffeur driven limousines. The Revolutionary Guard Corps keeps taking a larger and larger part of the economy. Men who acted as if they were righteous representatives of divine religion were anything but that. The "Basij" were little better than Nazi SA units, including many young men who may or may not have understood Islam, but loved to harass and beat both men and women. Elections were rigged - both by limiting the candidates to those who were very close to the regime, by bribing rural and working class voters, and by stuffing the ballot boxes. I don't think the behavior of the government was as bad as that of ISIS, the Taliban, or Nazi Germany, but it was still pretty bad.
Bahari put himself on the line at a time when, perhaps, he underestimated the threat from the government. He understood that opponents of the government were being arrested, imprisoned, and mistreated but he didn't believe that he qualified as an opponent of the government. After all, he tried to be objective. He interviewed people on both sides of the election and on all other issues that he covered. He tried to present both sides in his reporting. However, that wasn't enough. As an objective observer he was understood by the government to be an opponent. They only recognized two categories of people, those who supported the government and those who opposed it. If you weren't a supporter then you were, in the government's eyes, an opponent of the Islamic Republic and worthy of punishment. Bahari was too prominent and too active to be allowed to get away with his neutral objectivity.
I respect B's attempts at objectivity. It's easy to take sides and not listen to your opponents and hard to force yourself to listen to both sides. B knew that Ahmadinajad and the government were in the wrong but he offered them every chance to present their opinions. But even more than that, I respect his courage in taking risks to expose the truth before his arrest, and in holding to a principled plan in the face of foul torments after.
There were 31 reviews on Amazon, almost all of them highly favorable. I'm sorry that it didn't attract more readers and reviewers.
Shortly after reading this I happened upon the SciFi novel Zendegi (a word that Google translates from Persian as "Life") by Greg Egan. I think he's a terrific writer and I've liked all of his books so I began to read it. I'm near the end as I write this. To my surprise, it's another book that takes place in Iran. The first part of the book takes place in 2012 (one year after Bahari's book) and features a peaceful revolution against the repressive Islamic state.
Would that it had happened.
Then They Came For Me is now for sale under the new title Rosewater. I don't know if is was revised or just re-titled.
| Author | Alam, Rumaan |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Ecco, Rough Trade Publishing |
| Copyright Date | 2020 |
| Number of Pages | 253 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | September 2021 |
Clay and Amanda and their two chidren, 15 year old Archie and 13 year old Rose, have left their apartment in New York to vacation in a rental house on Long Island. The house is owned by G.H. (George) and Ruth Washington, an older black couple. Clay is a university professor of literature, Amanda is an executive in a financial firm, George is a partner, owner, or something of the sort in a boutique financial firm, and Ruth is a housewife. Some strange events occur and G.H. and Ruth appear at the door and want to come in. Amanda appears to be afraid of them, perhaps because they're black, and G.H. uses his best and most ingratiating voice to calm her down, offering a thousand dollars to the couple to allow G.H. and Ruth to come back and live temporarily in their own house.
What are the strange things that happen? TV and radio are off the air. There is no Internet. All phones are out, both a landline in the house and all cell service. Electricity still works, but odd things are happening in the environment. Deer show up in huge numbers - Alam has Rose say there are a hundred, no a thousand. Flamingos land in the swimming pool. Terrible ear-splitting noises occur a total of four times - first portrayed perhaps as nuclear explosions, then perhaps as the sonic booms of warplanes breaking the sound barrier. Amanda demands that the family go home. Then Archie gets sick. He throws up and has a fever. They put him to bed. The next day he wakes up with loose teeth, five of which come out. Clay and G.H. determine to take Archie to a hospital. Amanda still demands to go home. Ruth demands that G.H. stay with her and not leave the house. She is afraid he might not make it back. Then they realize that Rose is nowhere to be found.
At the end of the story we learn that some sort of nuclear weapons have been launched against the United States from some unnamed country or terrorist group that doesn't like us. Rose has left the house and gone to another house not far away. She rings the bell and, when no one answers, break down the glass door (is there no substantial door behind it?) and invades the house, where she steals a bunch of meaningless things. The author implies that only Rose has understood what to do.
I had problems with many aspects of this novel, beginning with the plot. Something has gone wrong with the world the characters live in. Almost all communications are cut. Electricity is working at the house, but television, radio, and Internet are all out. The only means of communication left is to go out on foot or by car to find out from others what they know about the outages and, later, about the loud booms that have occurred. Yet the characters make only the most feeble attempts to do that and are easily stymied and run back to the house. Is this because the characters, in spite of their high educations and positions in the world, are actually idiots or is it because the author is manipulating the readers to sustain the suspense?
Unexplained events occur. The characters have no clue as to the cause of the loud booms, the presence of the deer and flamingos, the failure of the communications, the non-failure of the electricity, or the terrible illness of Archie. The author gives hints to the readers, as for example when he tells us that Archie's symptoms are going to appear in G.H.'s handyman Danny's wife - "Danny didn’t know that the teeth in Karen’s mouth were themselves loose, would soon fall out." It seems that Alam can't decide how much to reveal through the action of the characters of the story and how much to reveal by going behind the characters' backs and telling the readers or giving them hints that his characters are unable to figure out.
This brings us to the characters. Why do people with high levels of education and highly responsible jobs behave so cluelessly? Amanda wants to get in the car and drive home to their apartment in Brooklyn. There is some question about whether a nuclear bomb has been dropped on New York, but she doesn't ask whether Brooklyn has been devastated, whether there is electricity in their building, whether the windows are intact, whether food is available, whether driving in the city is practical, whether gas stations are open, whether they have enough gas to get to Brooklyn or enough to get back to G.H. and Ruth's house if they can't make it. Okay. We'll accept that Amanda is panicked, hysterical and unreasonable, but why doesn't her husband, her partly grown children, or her new friends raise these questions to her? And what about Clay? Why has he made no serious plan for how to carry out his mission to drive to town to find out what's going on? Why is he focused on his embarrassment at getting lost instead of his failure to find out anything?
For a highly rated best seller with positive reviews published by NPR, the Washington Post, the L.A. Times and others, all cited by Amazon, this seems like a pretty ridiculous book. Ordinary Amazon reviewers are closer to my views. 42% gave it three stars or less with the average of the total 10,943 ratings (as of 2021-09-29) at 3.6 stars.
The author picks and chooses which character does what or has what done to him, not because it makes sense in the story but because it aims at a particular effect on the reader. Alam wants to cut off his characters from information. He tells us they knew nothing of the world shaking events happening around them. They can't find out by calling anyone because both cell and land line services are out - not just a few of them, but every one of them. Ditto for Internet. But the author wants his people to have a normal house to live in, so he turns on the electricity. It's apparently not on at the phone exchanges or at the radio broadcasters or at the Internet servers, but it's on at their house. He wants to threaten the characters with nuclear radiation but only a few of them so that the others can be mystified by the symptoms. So he gives radiation sickness to the boy but not the girl, even though she was with him the whole time, and definitely not to anyone else. He isn't sure that he's made it clear to readers that the boy has radiation sickness and that it's caused by a bomb blast, but he doesn't want to go back and put the information into an earlier part of the story - that would be taking away the surprise ending - so he creates a character (Danny's wife Karen) with no role in the story except that the author can say that she's going to get sick and lose her teeth the next day, though nobody knows it yet.
I don't understand what Alam had in mind here. The story seems very poorly thought out and all of the writing is about the unimportant personal things the people do - as if this is the way that upper middle class intellectuals would somehow be expected to behave, and how middle class readers would be expected to enjoy learning about, in the midst of an existential crisis.
I say, fooey.
I read this for the NCI Book Club. We'll meet in a week to talk about it.
The book group was about evenly divided of nine members who met to discuss it, I counted five who disliked it and four who liked it.
| Author | Beevor, Antony |
|---|---|
| Publication | Penguin Audio, 1999 |
| Copyright Date | 1998 |
| Number of Pages | 560 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | World War II; Eastern front |
| When Read | September 2021 |
Beevor begins his history on the day of the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of Russia. He covers Stalin's initial failure to cope with reality, ordering his army commanders to hold on where they were, thereby making it easier for German forces to surround and capture them, sometimes hundreds of thousands of men in one "kessel" or cauldron until they pushed on to Moscow, arriving during a winter for which the Germans were completely unprepared - in clothing, food, weapons, or tank and truck operation. The Red Army counter attacked successfully but Stalin failed again, pushing his armies to continue their attacks beyond hope of success. Then in the spring of 1942 the Germans resumed their offensive, this time concentrating in the south with one army headed for Stalingrad and another attempting to reach the oil fields in the Caucasus.
Beevor covers the battle for Stalingrad in considerable detail, from both sides, and from the viewpoints of the highest commanderss down to the lowest infantry grunts. He seems to have read at least something of everything, including memoirs of top Wehrmacht and Red Army generals and letters home from infantry officers and soldiers, giving a good sense of the thoughts of many participants. His descriptions appear to me to be factual and his conclusions convincing.
This is at least the fifth book I've read dedicated to the history of the battle of Stalingrad. All of them attracted my interest and held my attention (why else would I read five of them.) This one may be the most complete and balanced of the five volumes. It's complete in the sense that it covers participants from Stalin, Hitler, Zhukov, and Paulus, down to German, Russian, Romanian, and Italian soldiers who starved and froze in the trenches and the prisoner of war camps.
Beevor's views confirm the ones that I already held. The German catastrophe at Stalingrad was due in smaller part to mistakes made by German army commanders, but in much larger part to errors made by Hitler, errors that go beyond the meaning of "mistakes", and rise to the level of "mania". Hitler was unable to believe, or even to hear, any information that contradicted, or even cast doubt, upon his own views. In Hitler's mind, Stalingrad was the key battle of the war. If only he could take the city, the war would be won. Holding the line of the Volga River would cut Russia off from its oil production in the Caucasus. It would force the Russians to throw in the dregs of their reserves, finishing off the last elements of the Red Army. It would add the vast resources of European Russia, including the Ukraine and Belarus to Germany's strength and correspondingly reduce the USSR to living on the dregs of its holdings in central Asia and Siberia. It would prove to the world that Hitler and the German people were smarter, more capable, braver, more powerful, and intellectually superior to Stalin and his subhuman Slavs, Orientals, and Jews. It was a fantasy. Any general who denied that this had already been achieved, who thought that the Russians had not already been defeated, who saw the Russian counter-offensive as a real threat, and worst of all who believed that Paulus' Sixth Army must be withdrawn from Stalingrad or else it would be lost, risked dismissal from his command or worse.
I've written elsewhere that I believe that the war in the East was a contest to see who could make the most mistakes, Hitler or Stalin. Stalin made many egregious mistakes, including many that stemmed from his egocentric belief that he knew more than his generals. but Hitler was worse. He began his war against the Soviet Union with his demented racist beliefs that Germans were supermen while Russians, Jews, and others were subhumans, fit only to serve as slaves to German masters. Many citizens of the USSR hated Stalin and opposed communism. They embraced the invading Germans as liberators and not a few volunteered for service with the Germans, not all of them doing so at gunpoint. However, as bad as Stalin was, most of the people of the USSR grew to hate the Germans as the inhuman beasts that Hitler and the Nazis strove to make them. Led by officers and commissars who cared very little for the lives of their men, surprising numbers of those men came to hate Germans worse than their own leaders. They fought with great courage and determination but then, surprisingly to me, so did the Germans.
I grew up in the shadow of World War II. My Dad served in the Marine Corps. My uncle Gordon parachuted into Normandy the night before the landings. I watched all of the war movies of the 1950s with them. I heard or read the Holocaust stories that were integral parts of the Jewish culture and community of my youth. Of all of the wars that have been fought in human history, it seemed to me that World War II was the most righteous and the most critical for our civilization. The British and American soldiers and leaders were my heroes, and they still are.
During my middle 20s I became a Marxist. My interest in Marxism was initiated by my opposition to the Vietnam War but was also based on my reading of Marxist books, my attraction to the "materialist" theories of history, and my readings in political and labor history. Independently of that I also came to believe that the Soviet Union was the main force in beating Germany in World War II. The U.S. and U.K. made huge contributions, but it was the Soviets that accounted for three quarters of all German casualties and had themselves suffered ten times the casualties of the U.S. and U.K combined, even including the Western allies casualties in the war against Japan, but not including the incomparably greater civilian casualties suffered by the Soviets.
Naturally, I think, there are a lot of emotions surrounding these facts. I want to believe that the Soviets were heroes too. I want to find in my reading about the war in the East, that a grand army dedicated to freedom and equality, even if not democracy, fought to save us all from Nazism. But of course reality is never so simple. Josef Stalin was no kind of hero. After executing most of the best Red Army commanders in his 1937 purges, he treated the remaining ones badly and encouraged them to win in ways that would enhance his own power and prestige at the expense of the Soviet soldiers and civilians. While the U.S. executed exactly one American soldier during the war, the Russians executed (if I remember correctly) over 13,000 Russian soldiers at Stalingrad alone, not a few of whom had no trial and not a few of whom were probably not guilty of any crime or dereliction of duty. So were the Russians heroic? I think yes, they were. I also think that many German soldiers were heroic, fighting under horrifying conditions and giving their blood and their lives for their comrades and for what they considered to be ideals at the time. The best I can say is that the heroism and sacrifices of the Soviet soldiers were made for what truly were, by our best 20th and now 21st century values, enlightened reasons. The German heroism and sacrifices were in the service of what truly were debased and disgusting values.
The battle of Stalingrad was one of the great events of World War II. There are other battles that may be thought of as turning points in the war (Moscow and Kursk) but, to my thinking, Stalingrad was the key one.
| Author | Egan, Greg |
|---|---|
| Publication | Night Shade |
| Copyright Date | 2011 |
| Number of Pages | 300 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| Keywords | Artificial intelligence; Politics; Iran |
| When Read | October 2021 |
The novel is in two parts. Part One takes place in Tehran in 2012, a year after the book was published. Large numbers of Iranians are protesting the rigging of the recent elections, the corruption of the mullahs who control the state, and the oppression of people trying to free the country. Martin Seymour, an Australian living in Tehran, participates in the protests that bring down the government. Part Two takes place fifteen years later. Martin has married Mahnoosh, one of the young anti-government activists and the two have a five year old son, Javeed. They own a bookstore in downtown Tehran.
The second most important character after Martin is Nasim, an Iranian woman living in the United States and working on artificial intelligence research. Excited by the new Iranian revolution and wanting to help build a new society in her native land, she has returned to Tehran where she has become a middle manager leading the research team at Zendegi (the Persian word for "life" according to Google Translate.) Zendegi is developing and selling an AI framework for game designers that creates the most advanced virtual reality environment available. Martin has become friends with Nasim and she periodically allows him and Javeed to play in the Zendegi demonstration system, an activity that Javeed is tremendously enthusiastic about.
Then personal tragedy strikes Martin's family. An accidental collision of Manoosh's car with a truck kills her and injures Martin. In the course of his treatment the doctors discover that he has metastatic liver cancer. They operate to remove the main metastasis in his back and begin to cultivate a new liver for him but, even with the best medical treatment they can give him, they give Martin only a 30% chance of surviving another five years.
Martin is devastated, not because he fears dying, but because he fears that Javeed, who has just lost his beloved mother, will now lose his father too. In hopes of continuing to protect his child after his death he approaches Nasim with a request for her to build an AI Zendegi "proxy" who will represent Martin to his son in the VR environment, giving as much love and support as possible. Martin spends time, eventually hours, every day in the Zendegi MRI machine, having continuous brain scans with a myriad of relevant types of stimulation to build the most complete pseudo Martin that is possible with the existing technology. This occurs in the context of new hacker attacks on the company by organizations with great fears about AI.
Egan is quite realistic about what is possible here. Unlike some of his other books, no complete, fully conscious, large memory, general artificial intelligence is created. The best that can be achieved is a very, very sophisticated gaming system. At the end, after Martin's death, Javeed is living with the family friends Omar and Rana, Javeed's godparents. We don't learn what effects the artificial father has on Javeed.
This book was in some ways less ambitious than some of Egan's more famous novels. It took place in a nearer future with a less advanced technology. Many Amazon reviewers who were great fans of Diaspora, Permutation City, Axiomatic, and others of Egan's highly ambitious AI and future physics projections, were disappointed with this book. I am not one of them. I thought the story presented very sophisticated AI conceptions that challenged my ability to understand them and that always had enough plausibility to make me take them seriously. As one Amazon reviewer said, the hard to produce and highly limited human proxy creations were more foreseeable and more plausible than the quick scan and transfer of complete memory and consciousness from humans to AIs postulated in some of the other books. However, apart from the SciFi predictions Zendegi was also an engaging human story. Martin was a man who loved his wife and son and his family story and the tragic end to Martin's life gave me a sense of real humanity in Egan's writing.
I have tried to write some things myself. Reading this novel shows me how far short I have come as compared to Egan. Here is a passage that demonstrates Egan's typically marvelous scientific imagination:
...
"Nasim fitted the skullcap that would be used to take EEG recordings simultaneously with the multi-mode MRI; Martin sat beneath a UV light and watched in a mirror as the semi-permanent tattoos they’d given him revealed themselves with green fluorescence, to aid in the alignment of the cap. In order to limit interactions with the MRI’s magnetic field and radio pulses, the skullcap’s ‘circuitry’ was purely optical, reading the electric field leaking out of his brain by observing its effect on tiny capsules of electrolytes incorporated into the tattoos."
| Author | Yu Hua |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Chinese |
| Translators | Berry, Michael |
| Publication | New York: Anchor Books / Random House, 2003 |
| Copyright Date | 1993 |
| Number of Pages | 256 |
| Extras | Translator's Afterword |
| Extras | Author's Postscript |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | China |
| When Read | October 2021 |
The story is opened by an unnamed narrator who loves to wander about the countryside and talk to people. One day he meets an old melon farmer named Xu Fugui who works his small tract of land with an old ox whom he has also named Fugui. Fugui, the man not the ox, loves to talk. He tells the narrator all about his life, which the narrator relates in Fugui's own words, only stepping in himself for a few pages in between each of Fugui's long narration sessions.
Fugui was born, presumably in the 1910s or 1920s, into a successful family (by early 20th century peasant standards) with 200 mu of land. The patriarch of the family, Fugui's father, spent his youth in profligacy and lost half of the family inheritance in whoring and gambling before he repented and settled down, but then Fugui, his son, also went into whoring and gambling. He had a prostitute whom he paid to carry him around on her back as he took drunken tours of the town. He gambled with professional cardsharps who cheated him. Over time, he lost all of the family savings and was then confronted with various documents he had signed, or appeared to have signed, which gave the family house, the land, the animals, the tools, and the money to Long Er, a genial but devious cardsharp. Fugui, a man who often beat his loving wife for no good reason, who beat his children when they angered him, who drove his parents - the source of all his income, to destitution, became a poor peasant in a shack on five mu of land left to him by the good graces of Long Er. It is there they will all live including Fugui's wife Jiazhen, his deaf and mute daughter Fengxia, and his little son Youqing
In the late forties, after the end of the war with Japan and in the midst of the civil war between Nationalists and Communists, Fugui, now with two children at home, has walked to the town to get something when a Nationalist army artillery unit comes into the town and drafts him and about 20 other men at gunpoint to haul their artillery pieces. He has no way even to send a message to his home explaining what happened to him. For two years he is incommunicado until the unit is finally overwhelmed and he is released and sent home by the Communists.
Everything changes after the revolution. Land reform gives the land, first to the peasants with Fugui getting his five mu, and then to the local collective with everyone sharing land, animals, tools, income, and food. Long Er and other exploiters of the people are shot. We see some of the complexities of the revolution. A community kitchen reduces the work of cooking and cleaning for the majority of people and the food quantities improve. It's only later that everyone understands that cooking rice and vegetables and killing pigs and lambs only works when you have carefully measured the amount of food reserves and understood the difficulties of predicting weather and production correctly. After the time of plenty, the time of starvation sets in. Similar problems occur in "the Great Leap Forward", when pots and pans are broken up and melted, or attempted to be melted, to meet national requirements for iron and other metals. Most of what's produced is useless crap created by destroying good and useful pots and pans and burning up precious fuel. Then comes the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution with its teenagers running wild and beating up the village leaders.
In the end, old Fugui has outlived all of his family. His mother and father died of old age. His wife and two children have died tragically, his son when an overzealous health care worker extracted all of the boy's blood in a transfusion aimed at helping a local political leader's wife, his daughter during childbirth of his grandson. Even Fugui's son-in-law, killed in a workplace accident, and his grandson, who choked on a bowl of beans, have died. Fugui works his land all day and helps out his neighbors when he can. To everyone's surprise, his old ox is still alive to work with him and man and beast keep each other company.
I thought this was a wonderful book, comic and tragic, critical but sympathetic, political and historical but not rigid or ideological, written with a palpable sensitivity for all of the people and even the animals in the story. In his afterword, the translator cites a sentence from another work where Yu Hua writes "I understand now better than ever why I write - all of my effort is directed at getting as close as possible to reality."
Readers familiar with 20th century Chinese history will understand more and get more from reading this book. A basic understanding of the events of the civil war, land reform, "The Great Leap Forward", "The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" and its aftermath, and are assumed by the author and are essential for understanding the story.
I've recommended this for next year's NCI book club reading.
I have to say that the book was not a success in the book club. A number of club members didn't finish it. They and others too were turned off by the depressing aspects of the story - Fugui's relatives all suffering and dying, quite gratuitously it would seem. The political and historical aspects of the story were important to me, a person who is, and has been for many decades, very interested in China's history and politics. That was not the case for the other group members.
I watched a Chinese movie based on Yu Hua's novel. Although it was initially banned in China it was released in Canada and the U.S. in 1994 and "... To Live brought home the Grand Prix, Prize of the Ecumenical Jury, and Best Actor Award (Ge You) [7] from the 1994 Cannes Film Festival ..." (Wikipedia). The movie version corrected (if I may use that term) the depressing aspects of the novel, left a number of family members alive, and closed on a positive note.
| Author | Stout, Rex |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Bantam Books |
| Copyright Date | 1936 |
| Number of Pages | 208 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | October 2021 |
A young woman, Clara Fox, seeks Wolfe's help in defending herself against a charge of theft from an associate of her employer, and in pushing a wealthy Englishman to carry out his promise of enriching former associates or their heirs (the young woman in this case) in return for their saving him from lynching in a wild West gang case 40 years before. Along the way Wolfe also hides her from the police.
Several of the characters are murdered before Wolfe, with assistance from Archie, Saul Panzer, and Fred Durkin, discovers the murderer and works out an acceptable agreement with the Englishman.
Number 3 of 47 in the series, it impressed me as remarkably consistent with all of his others - something that always strikes me as remarkable although one reviewer on Amazon was struck the opposite way. Reading this right after reading one of the late Wolfe novels, he was struck by Stout's development of the course of his career.
I read more Amazon reviews than usual for this novel and I was struck by the sophistication of the reviewers. Stout attracted intelligent readers. I'm proud to be one of them.
| Author | Du Bois, W.E.B. (William Edward Burghardt) |
|---|---|
| Publication | Penguin Books, 1996 |
| Copyright Date | 1903 |
| Number of Pages | xxxviii + 247 |
| Extras | Introduction by Donald P. Gibson |
| Extras | Notes by Monica M. Elbert |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | United States; Race and slavery |
| When Read | November 2021 |
"Work, culture, liberty, - all these we need, not singly but together, not successively but together, each growing and aiding each, and all striving toward that vaster ideal that swims before the Negro people, the ideal of human brotherhood, gained through the unifying ideal of Race; the ideal of fostering and developing the traits and talents of the Negro, not in opposition to or contempt for other races, but rather in large conformity to the greater ideals of the American Republic, in order that some day, on American soil, two world races may give each to each those characteristics that both so sadly lack."
Du Bois (pronounced like "du boys", not "du bwah") was a deeply educated intellectual, steeped in both European and white American cultures, and in the many cultures of the freed slaves in the United States, often very primitive and purposely driven down and suppressed by the slave owners and the exploiters of the freedmen. He describes in clear and remarkably objective language the situation among black people living in the South after the end of the Civil War. What happened to them? What are their needs? What level of culture have they attained? What are the fine and decent traits of their cultures that benefit them and benefit white Americans? What are the failures and degenerations of their cultures that hamper them and hold them down? Du Bois faces all of these question with deep, personal knowledge of the people he is writing about.
Early on in the book du Bois discusses Booker T. Washington, an important black educator established in Tuskegee Alabama. Washington believed that blacks should give up political rights and civil rights and devote themselves to education to make themselves more useful and valuable in American society. He won the admiration of Southern whites who were happy to live with blacks who stayed in their "place" and the animosity of blacks and whites who believed in the rights of the black community. My reading of Du Bois is that he was a clear supporter of black political and civil rights, but was also understanding of the benefits that Washington was attemptimg to bring to the black community. He was an idealist who wanted people to have what they were entitled to. He was an intellectual who attempted to ascertain the truth in every situation. He was a member of what was then known as the Negro race and had great sympathy for black people. But as a practical matter, he was also willing to consider giving up what cannot be achieved in order to get what can be.
Du Bois had what seemed to me to be a deeply humanistic and optimistic view of American society, both white and black. He had no illusions. He described sectors and layers of black society that were so badly oppressed, and so unable to combat the oppression, that their futures were almost hopeless. These were not thin layers either. It was the layers of blacks with hopeful futures that were thin. Often the only hope that blacks had was to escape the rural South, either to Southern towns and cities, or better, to Northern cities.
Many of the passages offered a truly humane vision of both blacks and whites in America. Du Bois could describe a doomed teenager, a girl with no hope and no future, but still he could see her as a human being worthy of his and our sympathy. He could also describe a white man who extracts every penny's worth of value from a doomed black share cropper, using every conceivable honest and dishonest tool to do it but he, Du Bois, can see what's happening as a social phenomenon as much as an act of robbery. It was something that had to be battled on a national scale.
I don't remember when I first heard of this book. It was surely at least 50 years ago and maybe 60. I knew it was an important work and I always thought I should read it. I'm glad that I finally got to do that.
| Author | Christie, Agatha |
|---|---|
| Publication | Harper |
| Copyright Date | 1936 |
| Number of Pages | 250 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | November 2021 |
Captain Hastings returns to England on business from his home in South America and visits his old friend Hercule Poirot when one day Poirot receives a letter purportedly from a murderer who plans to murder a person whose name starts with the letter 'A' in a town whose name starts with the letter 'A'. It's the beginning of a story of a murderer, apparently a maniac, planning to murder multiple random victims in towns with railroad stations where the town names are based on letters of the alphabet. The first murder occurs with the killing of elderly Mrs. Ascher in the town of Andover.
The murders continue. The newspapers are printing multiple stories, citizens are panicking, police are alerted around the country as more letters arrive at Poirot's apartment, more people are killed, and more bits of evidence are discovered by Poirot or by the police until, finally a fourth person is murdered in the town of Doncaster and the obvious suspect, one Alexander Bonaparte Cust is arrested for the crimes. Everyone is sure that the maniac has been found and the danger is over - everyone except Hercule Poirot.
Poirot continues his investigation and eventually determines that the crimes were not random. The killer was a man with a reason for killing his brother, an obvious reason, that could only be disguised by making the murder out to be a random killing by a maniac.
I chose to read this book after seeing two episodes of an Amazon Prime dramatization of the story in which Poirot was played by John Malkovich. The portrayal of all of the characters and the dark, one might say frightening, tone of the story was totally different from the tone of the BBC dramatizations with David Suchet, which I have really enjoyed.
I thought the Prime video version was very interesting but the BBC's portrayal of Poirot is the one that matches Agatha Christie's. If I get a chance to see the remainder of the Prime version, I'll watch it, but it's Agatha Christie, like Rex Stout, who gives me the light weight but wonderfully intelligent series mysteries that are so nice to be able to turn to.
| Author | Whitehead, Colson |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Doubleday |
| Copyright Date | 2021 |
| Number of Pages | 336 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Racism |
| When Read | December 2021 |
The story begins in 1959 and continues on to the Harlem riots in 1964. Ray Carney, a decent family man, owns a furniture store on 125th Street in Harlem. He sells both new and used furniture, including good quality pieces, but he also makes money disposing of stolen jewelry brought to him by his cousin Freddie or by other people he knows. He does that in part because he also has to pay money in weekly envelopes to both the local cops and the local gangs in the neighborhood of his store. Some dishonesty, kept at the level of moving small quantities of goods of which he has and wants no knowledge of their provenance, adds just enough to his income to keep his family in their increasingly middle class life - still aspiring to move out from their low budget apartment near an elevated train to a higher class apartment in a nice neighborhood.
But Carney's Harlem milieu isn't stable. Cousin Freddie offers Ray up to a criminal gang as a fence who can help dispose of the jewelry they are about to steal from a high class (for Harlem) hotel. Carney is upset about it but sees no way to escape. The consequences are frightening. One of the gang members, "Miami Joe", starts killing the others in order to get all the goods for himself until Joe is in turn killed by "Pepper", a World War II vet, former friend of Ray's late father, and man much able to take care of himself. But Miami Joe isn't the only danger facing Ray and Freddie. A very wealthy white family was victimized not only by the theft, but also by the behavior of their own drug addicted son who is friendly with Freddie and whom the family considers to have been a victim of Freddie's manipulation.
It's a very complex story that ends with Ray Carney surviving and continuing to sell furniture and protect his family.
I thought the quality of the writing was exceptionally good. It has an expressive liveliness, a continually switching combination of story narration, description of the inner feelings of the characters, and dialog - all built with a very convincing appreciation of the culture prevailing in Harlem during the period of the novel. Some writers don't have the ability needed to depict an intellectually complex characters and some writers can't depict people from the streets. However, I think Whitehead does both well. He can manage many kinds of characters, often with considerable panache. In one scene, after Carney secretly exposes the bad behavior of a wealthy leader in the black business community who had harmed him, he feels bad about what he had done. Should we hurt people just out of revenge? Then Whitehead writes in the person of Carney: "But this - this felt like revenge. Sustaining, without flaw. It was the sun on your face on a Saturday afternoon, it was the world smiling briefly upon you."
The plot was difficult for a sheltered, middle class fellow like me to read. Carney was moving down a path that felt like it could only lead to disaster. Books like that cause me to think, No, no, don't do that. You're going to get caught. You're going to hurt people. You're going to hurt yourself and your family. You're going to put yourself in a place where you don't want to be but can't get out of. The story becomes grim and is not headed into a place where a reader like me wants to go. Some readers have no problem at all with this. After, all, it's just a book. It's not real life. We can laugh at the foolish things people do. I can do that too when what I'm reading is a satire or a comedy, not intended to be taken seriously. For me however it can be disturbing to follow a serious character as he goes through one mistake after another. I know it's a weakness, but, well, it's me.
I read this for the NCI Book Group. Almost everyone either liked the book or at least thought it was very well written.
| Author | Andrić, Evo |
|---|---|
| Original Language | sh |
| Translators | Hitrec, Joseph |
| Publication | Arcade Publishing, 2015 |
| Copyright Date | 1945 |
| Number of Pages | 444 |
| Extras | Translator's note |
| Extras | A note about the author |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Napoleonic era |
| When Read | December 2021 |
By the year 1807, the Napoleonic Empire was expanding its interests all over Europe, including in the Balkans where French and allied troops had moved from Italy to the east bank of the Adriatic Sea. Accordingly, the Empire sent an envoy to the town of Travnik, northwest of Sarajevo in Bosnia, about 75 miles inland from the Adriatic. Jean Daville arrived from Paris with his wife and children to assume the newly established duties of French Consul in this area, still at that time a province of the Ottoman Empire. Daville was followed shortly after by the arrival of Colonel Herr Joseph von Mitterer in Travnik as the Imperial and Royal Consul General of the Austrian Empire. The two consulates occupied former villas within sight of each other, one on each side of the Lashva River.
For the next seven years Daville faithfully represented the interests of the French Empire, cultivating leaders of the four religious communities - Muslim, Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and even the small, isolated and despised Jewish community. Behaving honorably and with compassion, he does his best to show respect and compassion to everyone. He becomes a friend of whichever Turkish vizier has been sent to rule the town, even including the last one he meets, a vicious killer who arrives with 1,200 Albanian mercenaries and terrorizes everyone in the town, executing, or we should really say murdering, a number of them. Daville and his family centered wife are respectful to all and are in turn respected by all.
Although Daville receives the most attention, many other characters are treated individually, including the Austrian Consul and his wife, von Paulich - a very different successor to Mitterer, Desfosses - a fearless and intelligent young assistant to Daville, D'Avenat - a physician, translator, and another fearless agent for the French, Cologna - a courageous, independent minded and multilingual old doctor of uncertain nationality who, nominally, works for the Austrians. The local population receives less attention from Andrić but he does give a sense of how ordinary working people live and their very, very low intellectual sophistication and knowledge of the world.
The story ends in 1814 with the disastrous defeat of Napoleon in Russia followed by the invasion of France by a coalition of European empires, the overthrow of Napoleon's government, and the restoration of the old order of Bourbon autocracy in the person of Louis XVIII. Daville's position has become extraneous. He is not financially supported by the new/old French government. He must return to Paris and attempt to find a way to support himself and his family. Even getting to Paris might have been impossible for him but for the aid of an old Bosnian Jew who appreciates that Daville has treated him and the entire Jewish community with compassion and respect that are regularly denied them by the Muslim and Christian communities and officials at Travnik.
It seems to me that Andrić was trying to recreate and preserve a period, a people, a culture, and a way of life, that was gone by the time of his writing and in danger of being lost to history, but which nevertheless was a precursor and parent of the Bosnia that existed in Andrić's time. We might say today that it contained a phase of the ongoing cultural DNA that brought forth the later Bosnia. And if Andrić did not find a way to preserve it, who would? Who else would delve into the history as he did? Who else would have the knowledge and skills to do it? Who else could bring it to life? How much would be lost forever? Who else would care?
Many years ago I read The Bridge on the Drina, the first book in this trilogy and the one that was particularly instrumental in winning a Nobel Prize for Andrić. I remember it as a great book and that memory inspired me to read this Bosnian Chronicle. I believe that this too is a great book written in the same spirit.
I shall say that if I have understood Andrić, and if I have understood myself as a diarist and a writer of book notes, I think that I share with him a desire to preserve the ordinary life of ordinary human beings. In my case, the substance, the boundaries, and the historical significance of the subjects of my writing are far simpler, far more limited in their aspirations, and far less competently understood and pursued, but I like to think that what I do helps me to understand what Andrić did, and that Andrić would be pleased that he has influenced one more reader, younger than him and living into an era that he could not live to see, perhaps one among many who will continue long after I also have gone and on into a distant future. I believe that it would please him to know that, and it pleases me to know it too.
It's been many decades since I read The Bridge on the Drina, but I believe that this book has the same quality as that earlier one did.
Before ending this comment I will remark on Andrić's insertion of a Jewish merchant into the end of the story as a savior of Daville and his family. The author, himself a diplomat and former Yugoslav ambassador to Nazi Germany until the Nazi invasion of Yugoslavia, would have started this book during World War II. He lived under virtual house arrest in a friend's apartment in Belgrade. He was a humanist who understood the situation of the people of Europe under Nazi oppression, including the situation of the despised Jews. Clearly, he sympathized with them and, in this book and perhaps in other venues, spoke up for them. I appreciate his action and his compassion too.
| Author | Connelly, Michael |
|---|---|
| Publication | Little Brown and Co., Hachette Audio |
| Copyright Date | 2018 |
| Number of Pages | 448 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | December 2021 |
Nine years before the time of the novel, 15 year old Daisy Clayton had been raped and murdered. Renée Ballard, coming in to the LAPD office from her night time effort in "the late show" (see the Rene Ballard series Book 1, The Late Show), discovered a man she didn't know going through department files in the otherwise empty office. It turned out to be Harry Bosch, now officially retired but still pursuing cases under the cover of his status as a department volunteer. Bosch was searching for info on Daisy. Daisy's mother, the drug addicted Elizabeth Clayton, was living at Bosch's house, still depressed and even suicidal over the loss of her daughter. Ballard soon becomes absorbed by the case and, despite their mutual prickliness, she and Ballard team up to spend their spare time searching for the killer. Eventually, partly because of Bosch's unconventional and borderline illegal actions, they each independently converge on the killer, a man in a home repair business who uses a van to carry tools and materials to job sites, and occasionally to places where he targets young girls.
Each of the two detectives is smart, capable, unconventional, and brave, and each has a tendency to go it alone. Their partnership is complicated by the separate tendencies of each to act without fully informing their new "partner" about their plans. However, each of them winds up at some point in a deadly trap and each is saved by the competent action of the other.
By the end of the book, Ballard and Bosch have forged a friendship and respect that will lead to more books featuring the Ballard and Bosch duo from Connelly.
By this second novel in the Renée Ballard series and 21st in the Bosch series, Connelly has already fully established his characters and even with Ballard does not have to write much to teach the reader who these characters are. Connelly has millions of fans who have already read millions of copies of his books. And because C has been writing these stories since 1992 and they have also been produced as videos, he knows that what his readership knows and what they expect from him. He delivers it.
I am generally a bit annoyed by Bosch's and now Ballard's tendencies to keep secrets from the people they work with, but I accept this behavior as probably authentic among some kinds of detectives. I also accept that there is some not inconsiderable portion of police detectives who are obsessed with fighting crime and, like Bosch and Ballard and some others in Connelly's books, are 100% committed to their profession. They're not really working for the money. They're motivated by a powerful desire to get the killers and rapists off the street and into prison.
As of this writing, according to the Wikipedia, Connelly has published 36 novels. To my knowledge, all of them are crime novels. This is the sixteenth one I've read and, so far, none of them have disappointed me.
| Author | Restrepo, Laura |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Spanish |
| Translators | Lytle, Stephen A. |
| Publication | New York: Ecco / Harper Collins, 2013 |
| Copyright Date | 1999 |
| Number of Pages | 380 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Latin America |
| When Read | December 2021 |
An obviously impoverished and undernourished young teenager shows up at the barrio of La Catunga in the city of Tora in Columbia. This is the barrio of las mujeres (the women), where they work as prostitutas or putas for short. The young girl who offers no name has come for the express purpose of becoming a puta.
The girl is unofficially adopted by Todos los Santos, a middle aged former puta, who takes care of her, sees to her education, and prepares her for her new vocation. The girl who, due to her partly Indian heritage, has a vaguely Asiatic appearance, is given the name "Sayonara". Something of an exotic beauty, Sayonara becomes the darling of the "petroleros", the men who work in the nearby American owned oil fields. She is particularly pursued by two friends, Sacramento and Payanés. Sayonara falls in love in different ways with both of them but learns that, although each is in love with her in their separate ways, the love that each offers is problematic. She marries Sacramento but, although she commits to him completely and abandons her life as a whore, she can never overcome his obsessive jealousy. She returns to La Catunga and pursues Payanés but finds him to be unable to fulfill his commitments. Sayonara, the most popular of the prostitutas, the girl pursued by most of the men and envied by many of the women, is a lovelorn girl, unable to find a place and a value for her life. She leaves La Catunga with or without someone who may or may not be Payanés while her friends in the community look on from a distance, uncertain about what will become of Sayonara.
There are other parts of the story that have to do with other characters, and with the North American owned Tropical Oil Company, a company that exploits its workers, feeds them terrible food, and suppresses the labor strike that wells up from below. Restrepo has a background in journalism and in social protest. She is sensitive to the condition and the needs of the mass of people at the bottom of the social pyramid in Columbia and clearly considers that story to be important for her audience to read. The unnamed narrator of the story, perhaps Restrepo would be a name that Restrepo herself would accept for the literary context of the story, plays an important role. She never meets Sayonara in person but does interact with Todos los Santos, Sacramento, a sympathetic American engineer from the oil fields, and other characters. In that role she is able to give us additional information to help the story along.
In both of her roles as a participant in the story and as the author of the novel, or so I believe, Restrepo writes:
"Writing this story has turned into an already lost race against time and faulty memory, twin brothers with long fingers that touch everything. Each day they appear and momentarily stir up before my eyes glimpses and reflections of situations, of moments, of words spoken or unspoken, of faces that I recognize as invaluable, loose pieces of the great puzzle of La Catunga, which overwhelm me with their little voices shouting for me to pay attention to them and ordering me to document them in writing or else they will be swept away by a broom and become lost among the debris. I cannot keep up with this attempt to imprison a world that goes by in flashes like a dream remembered upon waking, elusive in its vagueness and hallucinatory in its intensity."
The above extract captures how I feel about the things that I see and the ideas that swim, only to quickly sink in my own brain, ideas that seem important when I think them but which somehow disappear before I sit to write them down, never mind that if I did manage to write them I could never express them as elegantly as Restrepo does in her writing.
The book is astonishing. As I write this, I can't think of any novel I've read that has the same extraordinarily interesting and sophisticated ideas mixed with such wonderful expression. I'm sure there are others. I suspect that I've read some of them. But in my mind Restrepo's story telling is above the level of the great majority of even very successful and well regarded writers. There are many passages that demonstrate the wide ranging sweep of her ideas and the elegance of her expression of them. Here are just an arbitrarily selected few:
"Todos los Santos, Sacramento, Olguita, Machuca, and Fideo were extraordinary narrators, gifted with an astonishing ability to tell their tragedies without pathos and to speak of themselves without vanity, imprinting on the facts the intensity of those who are willing, for motives I still do not understand, to confess to a stranger for the sole reason that she writes, or because she’s precisely that, a stranger, or maybe because of the simple fact that she listens. As if the act itself of telling their own story to a third party would stamp it with a purpose, would make it somehow lasting, would clarify its meaning."
. . .
"She gathered up her confidence, folded it over twice with great tenderness as if it were a fine linen handkerchief, carefully put it away hidden against her heart, clinging to it to stay alive during those times of transit through the lands of nothingness."
. . .
"Todos los Santos, taciturn and withdrawn, has begun every now and then to break the long silences that overwhelm our conversations with an explosive cascade of words which are sometimes scolding, sometimes advice or warning, but are most often simply nostalgic digression. The content varies, but the form, always torrential, alerts us, because her urinary incontinence, by some curious anatomical symbiosis, is usually preceded by verbal incontinence. In these circumstances she mentioned for the first time the episode that she refers to as the elephant. When the thing with the elephant happened . . . and she’s off and running."
These passages were arbitrarily selected from among a great many pages that are just as rich and just as surprising. It was a wonderful book, one which one wants to read slowly and with frequent re-reading of paragraphs.
The book was recommended to me by Susan Bassein, who read it in the original Spanish. I did not try to obtain a Spanish language edition and compare it to the English translation but the English was very sophisticated and was peppered with Spanish words, many or most of which I couldn't find via Google Translate. Susan is a very bright and well educated woman.
| Author | Jeter, K.W. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Angry Robot / Brilliance Audio, 2011 |
| Copyright Date | 1987 |
| Number of Pages | 384 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| Keywords | Steampunk |
| When Read | December 2021 |
George Dower, owner of a clockwork shop established in London by his late father, a genius at building unheard of clockwork mechanisms for everything from playing the violin to flying, has no idea how his father's inventions work and limits himself to simple sales of clocks and watches with the assistance of Cref, his factotum/assistant who worked for the Senior Dower but who, like the Junior Dower, still has only limited knowledge.
Then one day people start showing up in the shop, "the Brown Leather Man" who appears to be wearing a brown leather skin and turns out to be the last survivor of a race of people whose natural home is the sea, and two people who speak in late twentieth century American accents, Graeme Scape and Jane McThane. It turns out that the Americans, or maybe they're English people who saw so much future information from one of Dower Senior's extraordinary machines that they adopted accents of the future. For different reasons, these three are desperate to get certain devices made by Dower Senior that they think may be stored somewhere in the Dower shop.
George Dower goes through one cliff edge experience after another as he is manipulated by the three people, and by other people who compose "the Godly Army" and other organizations masquerading as decent and moral but actually corrupt. Dower escapes one predicament after another by the skin of his teeth and/or with help arriving in the very nick of time from the Brown Leather Man, Scape and Jane, the devoted dog Abel, or just dumb luck. In the end he meets a clockwork Paganini who easily passes as a man, and he saves the earth from destruction by another of his father's machines capable of inducing pressure waves in the earth which build up in synchronous amplification to become devastatingly destructive.
He returns to his shop in London.
The book was a kind of adventure, Sci Fi, and linguistic comedy but, ridiculous as the story was as a serious novel, I thought it succeeded in being funny. One unusual feature, emphasized in the narration in the audiobook, was the combination of 19th century highly sophisticated, articulate and polite English spoken by an educated Englishman - Dower, low class English spoken by Cref and others, and low class 20th century American English spoken by Scape and Jane. The author is American but his portrayal of the UK English speakers seemed pitch perfect to me. All of the language accents were over the top, intentionally so I think, but they were convincing and delightful to hear.
The only hints given about the time period of the novel that I could detect would seem to place it in the early 19th century. Was Paganini still alive? I don't think that The text ever said he was, but there were women who were mad to meet him. He died in 1840 at age 57. I don't recall any reference to railroads, steamships, or other steam powered devices, so early 19th century would seem to be indicated. The book would therefore seem to be situated sometime while Paganini was active, after his reaching popularity, just at the end of the Napoleonic era, but probably before the steam era that began to sweep Britain in the 1830s.
I chose to read this in part because of positive reviews, and in part because Jeter was the inventor of the word "Steampunk". In fact the book seems to pre-date most steampunk environments in that there is clockwork, but no steam. Still, it was interesting to see one of the progenitors of the steampunk style.
| Author | Napolitano, Ann |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Dial Press |
| Copyright Date | 2020 |
| Number of Pages | 384 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | December 2021 |
12 year old Edward "Eddie" Adler boards a plane in New York with his mathematician father Bruce, his writer mother Jane, and his 15 year old brother Jordan, for a flight to Los Angeles. The family is moving to enable Jane to take up a new job. They meet, or at least observe, a number of other characters with limited roles in the novel - a black Army sergeant severely wounded in the Middle East, a cocaine addicted stock broker, an unmarried but pregnant young woman who hopes to marry a scientific man in California that she met online, a big black woman named Florida who imagines that she remembers dozens of previous lives from which she has been serially reincarnated, and a super sexy flight attendant who invites the stock broker for a quickie in the bathroom. All but one of these people are killed in a crash in Colorado caused by an instrument failure that is accompanied by poor judgment and panic on the part of the copilot and pilot. The one person who survives is Edward, who was thrown out of the plane by the crash and, although seriously injured, was not crushed or burned as all of the rest of the people were.
Eddie is found by a paramedic, hospitalized, treated, and eventually released to his aunt and uncle, Lacy and John Curtis, sister and brother-in-law of Jane Adler. They take Eddie into their care for family and humanitarian reasons and also because they have been unable to have children of their own.
The heart of the novel is about Eddie's growing up between ages 12 and 18, concentrating on his dealing with and overcoming the post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that deeply affects his life after the crash. He does it with the support of the new key people in his life - John and Lacey, his school principal, his new next door neighbors Besa and especially her daughter Shay who is Eddie's age and becomes his girlfriend.
The plot structure of the novel is unusual. We learn of the crash early in the novel but after we already know about that Napolitano continues to include scenes of other characters on the plane, moving back and forth between the few hours in the air and the six years of Eddie's growth and development after the crash.
I had mixed feelings about the book. When Florida, the woman who believes that she is a reincarnation, is introduced, I wondered if some sort of magical silliness was going to be part of the book. It wasn't, but the author didn't quash the idea, merely presented it and then ignored it. A scene with Eddie and a fortune teller in New York made me wonder about it again. Was some supernatural theme going to be developed? It wasn't and upon reflection I came to the conclusion that the author never intended for readers to take such ideas seriously, but she didn't take any explicit stand on them.
More importantly, I had some questions about Eddie and his new family. For all six years of the novel, Eddie seemed to have no friends at all except Shay. Why not? I understand that he suffered from PTSD, but why didn't the author put in some scenes that clarified Eddie's relationship to the other kids at school? If the PTSD precluded friendships, wouldn't it help for the author to show us why such natural ties failed to form or broke apart? Similarly, the treatment of the family dynamics of John, Lacey and Eddie were sparsely explained. Most of all, it seemed to me that the peculiar relationship between Eddie and Shay in which they slept for some period in the same bedroom but never touched each other and never appeared to think or speak of love, yet suddenly declare their love at the end of the novel - begged for an explanation that was never made. My memory of teenage life was nothing like that. There were other questionable aspects of the novel as well such as the thousands of letters from relatives of survivors of the crash, the settlement of seven million dollars on Eddie by the brother of the stockbroker from the plane and the cavalier discussion of it by Eddie, John and Shay, the odd behaviors of some of the people on the airplane, and so on.
On the other hand, it was refreshing to read a story that had no bad people in it. I expected John and Lacey to distance themselves from this nephew of theirs whom they never asked to take care of, but they turned out to be good substitute parents. The pregnant girl, the wounded soldier, and even the stock broker and sexy stewardess seemed like decent people.
On the whole, the NCI Book Club members liked the book - more than I did I think.