Books read January through December 2022
| Author | Bowles, Paul |
|---|---|
| Publication | Penguin Classics, 2007 |
| Copyright Date | 1949 |
| Number of Pages | 352 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Africa |
| When Read | January 2022 |
Porter "Port" Moresby and his wife Katherine "Kit" Moresby, now married for twelve years, have traveled from their home in New York to North Africa after the end of World War II. We learn later in the book that Port, who is not rich, is nevertheless financially independent as a result of his father's death and legacy. He is taking this time to work on, what, finding a place for himself in the world, escaping from civilization, merging his life into a timeless culture? We don't know, or at least I don't. The two are traveling with a third American named Tunner, who is a friend of Port's and an aspiring lover of Kit. Kit gives in to him once and feels guilty about it for the rest of the story. Port's own infidelities are described in the story, but no guilt seems to attach to them in his own eyes.
Port pushes Kit to come with him, deeper and deeper into the Sahara, arriving at towns with less and less European influence. Some of his motivation is to hide from Tunner and some may be to evade a strange and dishonest young Briton who is traveling with his peculiar mother and whose main interest in Port seems to be to borrow, or even steal, money from him. But there is some other motivation as well, something never clearly expressed or justified, something to do with his desire to escape the world and lose himself in the Arabian desert and its limitless sky.
In the end, after many days of increasing illness, Port dies in a far away Saharan town of typhoid fever. Kit, unhinged by his death runs away into the desert in "Soudan" where the two had most recently arrived. She is taken by a pair of Arabs leading a small camel caravan. She is violated every day, then made the fourth wife of the younger of the two Arabs, and held in captivity in his house at a desert town. She escapes, wanders into the hands of others, is identified by French authorities, flown to Algiers where Tunner awaits her, but she runs from Tunner too and, at the end, her whereabouts are unknown. Has she gone insane? Bowles doesn't say. It is the end of the story.
This novel is regarded by many, correctly I think, as a great work of art. It reminds me of the works of Albert Camus, The Stranger (1946) and The Plague (1947), published just three and two years before this one, and Robbe-Grillet's The Voyeur, published in 1956. Like them, I think, it is a work that asks its readers to step outside of their personal aspirations and values and adopt a non-judgmental stance towards characters who are not at all like them. Where many authors try to establish a protagonist with whom a reader can identify, Bowles and the other authors like him tell the reader to think whatever he likes but the protagonists of this novel don't care what he thinks. They are who they are. If you want to try to understand them, keep your mind open and read on, and if you don't, there are a million other books to choose from.
I wasn't attracted to any of the characters. I liked Port the least. He thought mainly of himself and had no compunctions about lying even to his own wife much less to others. Nevertheless, Port was a man who it was difficult to dismiss. He saw the world around him without illusions. Early in the novel he is approached by an Arab man who offers to take him out to visit an attractive girl. Port likes the idea. He is afraid, but he walks anyway with this complete stranger out of the town, into the desert, and on to a campsite populated by Arabs whom Port doesn't know and who have no interest in him. There he meets the girl who, it turns out, attracts him. He has his way with her then finds her with his wallet in her hand. He snatches it back and runs. Men chase him in the dark but he gets away. He has never paid the girl, but he thinks nothing at all about that. He thinks nothing about whether he has betrayed his wife. He seems interested only in the nature of the experience he had, not on its effects on anyone else.
I don't currently plan to read any more of Paul Bowles work. It doesn't appeal to me but it did make me think. One of the reasons I read books is to think about life in new (to me) and different ways. The Sheltering Sky led me to do that.
There is only one usage of the term "sheltering sky" in the novel. It appears just before the beginning of Chapter 24. I can only speculate about what it means.
| Author | Wolff, Michael |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Henry Holt and Company |
| Copyright Date | 2018 |
| Number of Pages | 339 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Politics |
| Keywords | Trump |
| When Read | January 2022 |
Wolff covers the period of the presidential campaign and, in more depth, the first year of Trump's presidency. His focus is on people rather than policy, especially what he regards as a three cornered competition between Steve Bannon representing the far right "nat pop" nationalist populist view, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump representing a liberal Republican or even centrist Democrat view, and Rence Priebus representing the establishment Republican point of view. With all of them, but especially the first two, there are also personal aspirations involved.
Trump himself is portrayed as a true ignoramus. He can't bring himself to read or even skim any written documents. He can't bring himself to pay attention when people talk to him. He has no real education, knowing nothing about history, geography, foreign relations, or other subjects of value to a President. He gets his information by watching television and by talking to people he admires and respects. These are not people who are experts at political tasks, but rather are people that Trump admires for their wealth and social stature. They are the kind of people that he wants to be and believes that he is.
According to Wolff, all of the people who supported Trump's campaign, except for Bannon, were virtually certain that Trump would lose the 2016 election and were unprepared for his victory. They had not identified people who could play important roles in the White House or seriously considered any policy issues. The Republican establishment led by Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, and others in Congress or state governments all assumed that Trump would lose. It was only FBI Director James Comey's surprise re-opening of the Hillary Clinton emails investigation near the end of the campaign that suddenly turned voters against her and brought about Trump's win. The lack of preparation in the Trump campaign or the Republican Party produced incompetent administrative and policy outcomes, but they were highly magnified and turned into complete chaos by Trump's ignorant actions based on nothing more than his hunches and spur of the moment impulses - for example in his un-thought out travel ban on Muslim countries - an action that brought about chaos in airports, universities, corporations, families, and foreign countries, including allies, but which apparently never led to any reassessment of the policy by Trump or by its author, Steve Bannon.
The book became a number one New York Times best seller "with over 700,000 orders shipped and 1.4 million orders placed" in the first week according to the Wikipedia.
Fire and Fury reads like it's based on verbal statements made to Wolff, or to others who related them to Wolff, from people who bore witness to the behavior of Trump, Bannon, Kushner, Priebus, Flynn, Mattis, Kelly, Conway, Hicks, and other figures in the White House. There were no footnote citations in the digital copy of the book that I read, and presumably none in the original paper copy, though there was an acknowledgments section at the back of the book that named many prominent people as reviewers and fact checkers of Wolff's account. The Wikipedia entry on the book as of Jan. 16, 2022 contains many references to published criticisms from about a dozen people familiar with the people in the White House. These criticisms dispute various accounts that Wolff published in his book.
My own reaction to Wolff is that, although I'd like to see documentation supporting his claims, and without such documentation I have to reserve judgment on them, the information that I have seen elsewhere since the book was published do seem generally consistent with Wolff's claims. There's no doubt in my mind that Trump is a liar, an ignoramus, a narcissist, and a man who acts on impulse rather than study and analysis.
There were many details in the book that I hadn't known before. I still don't know them for sure but, they might be true. Bannon was a major force behind Trump's wall on the Mexican border and the anti-Muslim executive orders. Trump loved those policies because they seemed easy and obvious, required no study and learning (at least not as Trump saw them), and would help him build up the nativist base that Trump was quickly learning would stand behind him. Paul Ryan apparently told Trump and Kushner that he could take care of government health insurance policies - though in fact he knew nothing at all about health policy and had no interest in it. Trump and Kushner loved Ryan for doing that because, again, it promised to give Trump credit for something that he didn't have to do anything to make happen. Ryan would do it all for him and Trump would get all the credit. Even better perhaps, Trump could make irresponsible statements like "repeal and replace" and "everyone will keep his pre-existing conditions protection" when in fact there was no plan to do any of that. Ryan, at a loss for what to do, simply assembled a collection of insurance company people and lobbyists and told them to write the bill. I suspect Ryan and many other Republicans were relieved when, with John McCain's help, the Democrats defeated the Republican effort.
It's amazing to me how so many tens of millions of Americans can support Trump in spite of the extensive documentary and video evidence of his ignorance, incompetence, narcissism, and lies. But then the history of ignorant populism has always been strong in the U.S. and in many other countries. Humans are easily fooled.
The Bob Woodward book about Trump that I read was more reliable than this book but I enjoyed this one too.
| Author | Kershaw, Ian |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 2015 |
| Copyright Date | 2015 |
| Number of Pages | xxiv + 592 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Europe; Twentieth century |
| When Read | January 2022 |
Kershaw's history begins with the immediate prelude to World War I and ends four years after the end of World War II. There is some very, very high level discussion of the wars, but K's main interest is the political, economic and cultural stories of the European countries during that period which was dominated by those wars. He's interested in understanding why some European countries were and remained democratic during this period, at least while they were not occupied by fascist powers, and why others succumbed to fascism.
With the one exception of Czechoslovakia, all of the stable democracies were in the west and north of Europe - the UK, Ireland, France, Holland, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland. All of the other European countries, most of which had at least one period of some form of democratic government, became authoritarian and stayed that way until the end of the war, and then returned to democracy only if they were occupied by Britain and the United States. Why did this happen? What characteristics of people, politics, economics, history, or other factors distinguished the democratic countries from the authoritarian ones? That is the subject of this book.
Kershaw identifies the following factors:
"... four interlocking major elements of comprehensive crisis, unique to these decades: (1) an explosion of ethnic-racist nationalism; (2) bitter and irreconcilable demands for territorial revisionism; (3) acute class conflict - now given concrete focus through the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia; and (4) a protracted crisis of capitalism (which many observers thought was terminal). Bolshevism's triumph was a vital new component after 1917. So was the almost constant state of crisis of capitalism, alleviated for only a brief few years in the mid-1920s."
The following factors were very powerful in Germany, Italy, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, and other countries.
Antisemitism, which had existed for many hundreds of years, became a much more "racial" issue in the twentieth century and was especially strong in central and eastern Europe, where most European Jews lived. Conversion to Christianity did not alter a person's Jewishness. With no Jewish state, with only relatively small minorities in each of these states, and with Jews mostly excluded from positions of power, Jews were especially easy targets for the violence and contempt stirred up by fascist demagogues who targeted others as well.
Territorial revisionism was mainly important only in the central and eastern European countries. The breakup and dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman empires left pockets of separate ethnic communities interspersed all over the map in ways that were not apparent in the western and northern countries. Class conflict was also severe with communist revolutions in Russia, Germany, Hungary, Spain, and in smaller amounts elsewhere, though only Russia built a lasting proletarian state. As urban workers became more class conscious and looked to socialism and communism, the middle classes and peasants became more conservative, more afraid of the working class, and more supportive of autocracy dedicated to populist nationalism. The more severe was the economic disaster during and after the first world war, and then again after the collapse of the American stock market and economy upon which Europe had become heavily dependent during and after the first war, the more people craved order, stability, and the resurrection of conservative values. The conflict between those moving left into communist authoritarianism and those moving right into fascist authoritarianism led both groups, but especially the right, to reject democracy as incompetent to solve their countries' problems. It took a victory of the stable democracies over Germany in WWII, and the American determination to promote democracy, to restore more support for democracy in the aftermath of the war.
This is the first book in a pair by Kershaw. The second, Roller-Coaster: Europe 1950-2017>, continues where To Hell and Back: Europe, 1914-1949 leaves off.
My understanding of Kershaw's argument is that, when people feel well served by their long standing democratic institutions, and are not under great economic duress, they are not attracted to fascism or communism, not bitter at people who are not part of their racial, national, or ethnic groups, and will not participate in anti-democratic authoritarian movements. Great Britain was an excellent example of this. There were many socialists, much attracted to the Labour Party but those people were not opposed to democracy. On the contrary, they were strong supporters of it. Fascist and communist parties never attracted more than a tiny fraction of the voting population and even though they were not suppressed except during the war when British fascists were supporting German Nazism, they never played any role in government.
I read about the rise of fascism in Germany, Italy, and eastern Europe in part because I want to understand what happened in Europe. But I also want to apply that historical knowledge to better understand what's happening here in the United States. Now, in the 2020s, after four years of Donald Trump and his surprisingly easy transformation of the Republican Party into an authoritarian style personality cult, I can see some signs of what happened in Germany, Italy, Poland, Hungary, Romania, and other countries in the 1920s and 30s. The Nazis did not win a majority in German elections and, in fact, their tally went down from 37% to 33% of the vote from the July, 1932 to November 1932 elections. Nevertheless, it wasn't necessary for Hitler to win an election with a majority of the vote. One third was perfectly adequate. All he needed was to grab the reins of power in a coalition government and then, very quickly, take over the police, the army, and other institutions of power and suppress democracy. The institutions of power - army, police, law courts, schools, are not as vulnerable in the United States as they were in Germany. The people who support Trump and believe his lies aren't as vulnerable either. Many Americans harbor racist, antisemitic, and anti-immigrant views, but I believe that only a very small percentage would wish to use violence against people who have not broken any laws. See the notes on Furious Hours by Casey Cep following these notes.
I respect Kershaw. He's a determined opponent of fascism, racism and antisemitism. He's knowledgeable. He does extensive research. This is the third of his books that I've read. I don't have a lot of time left, but I may read more.
| Author | Leonard, Elmore |
|---|---|
| Publication | Harper Audio |
| Copyright Date | 1977 |
| Number of Pages | 336 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| When Read | January 2022 |
Al Rosen, whose real name is Jimmy Ross, is a 50 year old American businessman living in Israel for the last three years where he has come to hide from Detroit gangsters who want to kill him for betraying them to the police. He is living happily on $100,000 a year paid to him by the company he founded in Detroit. Then three criminals show up from the Detroit gang to murder him.
Meanwhile, Marine Sergeant Dave Davis, about to retire from his job as a guard at the American Embassy in Israel, is hired by a shady lawyer newly arrived from Detroit to deliver a small part of Rosen's annual payment - doubled this year by the Detroit company that has decided to dump him. Davis drives out to where Rosen is waiting only to learn that the gangsters are outside the apartment building and are planning to come in and kill Rosen. Davis quickly borrows Rosen's little pistol, tells Rosen to go down to the lobby and wait for the criminals to leave and then drive in the opposite direction from where they go. Then Davis goes out on the apartment balcony and begins shooting. He aims very carefully, punching holes in the body of the gangsters' car, but not hitting any of the three men or damaging the tires, engine or windows. His aim is not to hurt anyone or even start a fight, just to raise enough alarm that residents of the building will call the police, forcing the gangsters to drive away before they arrive.
In the rest of the story, Davis does his best to protect Rosen, first by getting him to truly understand that his life is in danger and he has to be ready to fight - something that Davis is, by nature and experience, ready to do, but Rosen and his young Israeli secretary are not ready to do. The results are catastrophes for both Rosen and the three gangsters. Davis comes out wounded but alive.
According to my notes, this is the 24th book by Leonard that I've read, just edging out Dick Francis at 23, Arthur C. Clarke at 22, and Rex Stout and Walter Mosley who are tied at 20 each. Reading their books is a little like eating popcorn or salted nuts for me. However, the last one I read before this was almost five years ago and so this reading called up old memories.
The story is unusual for Leonard. Nothing else I read took place in Israel and very few went outside the United States at all. However the gangsters were vintage Leonard - not really stupid but not smart either and rarely in full command of their situation.
I never took these Elmore Leonard books very seriously. I probably listened to audio versions of most of them, mostly, or maybe all of them, narrated by Mark Hammer. They have a tone that holds the reader's attention without requiring very careful attention to the complex thoughts that might appear in a textbook. They were just right for the long drive to and from work in the days when I worked at NIH and drove about one and a quarter hours each way. Now I listen to my popcorn books while washing dishes or exercising.
| Author | Cep, Casey |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Alfred A. Knopf |
| Copyright Date | 2019 |
| Number of Pages | 308 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Biography |
| When Read | January 2022 |
Nelle Harper Lee published her first novel, To Kill a Mockingbird in 1960. After that she produced no other work until, 55 years later and just a year before her death in 2016, she published Go Set a Watchman, a novel she actually wrote before writing Mockingbird. Cep, a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine, got very interested in the story of Harper Lee's life and writing career and the history and culture of the rural Alabama region where she grew up. She opens her account with a scene setting story of the damming of the Talapoosa River after the first World War, bringing hydroelectric power generation to this underpopulated sleepy back of beyond and creating jobs and attracting families to live there. By happenstance, several of the families raised children who became popular writers, including Philip Roth, Truman Capote, and Harper Lee - Capote and Lee actually living next door to each other and growing up as good friends with tomboy Lee protecting the undersized Capote. The neighborhood also produced Willie Maxwell, a handsome, hard working, and initially popular black preacher who, it turned out, seems to have augmented his income by buying multiple life insurance policies from multiple companies on people related or well known to him, and then murdering them. Everybody knew he was doing it but despite immense efforts by the police and prosecutors, Maxwell, always defended by the excellent lawyer Big Tom Radney, was never proven to be the killer. All of the victims appeared to have died by natural causes, accidents, or by causes that no coroner succeeded in discovering. It was only during a funeral service for the last of the victims that another local man, Robert Burns, stood up, turned around with a gun in his hand, and shot and killed Maxwell in front of 300 witnesses. Tom Radney took on Burns' defense and, this time with the approval of almost the whole town, won an acquittal on grounds of temporary insanity. Lee was fascinated by this true story. After a major effort assisting Truman Capote in gathering facts for his (more or less) true crime story In Cold Blood, she resolved to follow up her novel with a true crime book of her own about the story of Willie Maxwell. Casey Cep, coming along at the end of this story and at the end of Lee's life, wrote Furious Hours to tell the stories of Maxwell, Burns, Radney, Capote and, most of all, Harper Lee.
One way to characterize Furious Hours is to call it a literary biography. There is information about Lee's childhood, family relations, and her life in New York where she lived most of the time but most of Cep's book is about Lee's experience while working on her "true crime" story about the Willie Maxwell case. Lee had a tough time writing that book. Unwilling to make things up, she had problems with a lack of information about Maxwell and the black community within which he lived and worked. Apparently, she was never able to come to a conclusion of her story. She never found a way to wind it up. Perhaps her writing of To Kill a Mockingbird and the extraordinary changes in her situation created by her popular and financial success set a bar so high for her that she couldn't bring herself to put something before the public unless it, somehow, reached or exceeded the level of public approval that her earlier book reached.
I consider this book to have been exceptionally well written. Cep wrote naturally and fluently but still took care to stick with the facts. Unlike in Capote's work, Cep's speculations were identified as such. It was an informative and convincing work and, in my opinion, was very sensitive to the world around her characters - Lee, Maxwell, Radney, Capote, and others - successfully recreating their situations and lives. I liked it.
I read this for the NCI book club. It was selected by Bob Kline. Bob gave an excellent introduction to the book and called attention to a number of interviews with the author that were published on YouTube. Watching one of those interviews, Bob talked about how impressed he was by Cep's fluency and articulateness. I too was impressed. Cep needed only the slightest of prompts from her interlocutor to launch her into complicated but very lucid and surprisingly sympathetic explanations of her theories about Harper Lee, Truman Capote, and even Willie Maxwell. I expect that a lot more fine writing will emerge from Cep's work.
| Author | Mosley, Walter |
|---|---|
| Publication | Random House Audio, 2016 |
| Copyright Date | 2016 |
| Number of Pages | 320 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | January 2022 |
Raymond Alexander aka "Mouse" visits his old friend Ezekiel Rawlins in Los Angeles and asks him to go visit "Charcoal Joe" in prison and help him out by proving that Joe's relation, the 22 year old physics genius Dr. Seymour Brathwaite, was innocent of a murder that the police have pinned on him. Mouse is not the kind of guy whom one can ignore when he asks a favor of someone and Easy goes right to work. He finds Seymour and bails him out but, brilliant as the boy is, he doesn't understand that the police who found him in a house where two men were murdered would be just as happy to pin the murder on him as on anyone else. Easy must find both the real killer and the evidence of his crime in order to avoid pissing off the very dangerous Charcoal Joe. As a reader of Mosley's books would expect, Easy does find the real killer, a man who is already dead, solving everyone's problems.
In addition to the usual Easy Rawlins characters, his children Jesus and Feather, the girlfriend whom he wants to marry but who deserted him, the tough but not entirely evil cop Melvin Suggs, and Mouse, Fearless Jones the main character in another series of Mosley books also appears and performs his standard humble feats of overwhelming courage and victorious combat.
The novel has everything in it that I expect and desire in a Mosley Easy Rawlins book.
| Author | Le Carre, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 1988 |
| Copyright Date | 1965 |
| Number of Pages | 290 |
| Genres | Fiction; Spy |
| When Read | February 2022 |
Taylor, an older man who joined a British intelligence office in World War II, is in a Finnish airport where he awaits the arrival of a passenger plane that departed from its established route to fly over Rostok in East Germany to photograph a Russian installation thought to have acquired nuclear missiles. The Finnish pilot lands, delivers the film to Taylor, but curses him and his office loudly for their putting him in jeopardy. The money they paid him was not enough to recompense him for the danger he was in. Taylor waits too long and drinks too much and must walk back into town to his hotel. On the route he is hit and killed by a car and the film disappears. No one in London has any more information about what happened.
Leclerc, the head of the office for which Taylor works, has decided to send a man into East Germany to learn more about what happened. The office is left over from WWII when it was used for active espionage, but now it is no longer normally involved in any anti-Soviet undercover activities in Soviet controlled lands. They have no one on the staff with experience or training, or at least none low enough ranked to be assigned to a job where they might be captured or killed. Still, they refuse to turn the job over to the "Circus", where George Smiley works and where they have both experienced people and the latest radio and other equipment. So they assign the inexperienced 32 year old John Avery to work with the odd but experienced Pole Fred Leisner to send Leisner in to East Germany to find out if there are Soviet missiles near Rostok.
The whole enterprise is a disaster. Leisner stabs a young East German border guard, killing him and starting a hunt for Leisner that ends all possibility of a successful mission.
In the end, Avery is angry and tormented by the role he played in this botched mission. Leclerc is not particularly upset and Smiley is philosophic about the whole thing. He's seen it all before.
Especially in Le Carre's earlier novels, he focuses on the conflict between national interests and the personal interests of British intelligence agency leaders, men (always men) who are looking for recognition and promotion but never acknowledge that they do. The young John Avery is the only one who is sincere in his commitment to the job and to the exposed Fred Leisner. But the stories are always more complicated than that. As I read on I get angry at Leclerc and the others like him. Is what they're doing justified? Is it the best way to do it? Are corners being cut in the interest of a speedy result when it really isn't necessary and maybe not even necessary to get a result at all? Is it just being done for Leclerc's vanity and self-promotion? And then, just when I think I that my mind is made up Le Carre shows me that the issues are more complicated than I thought. Maybe Avery and I are being naive. Maybe the job is worth doing. No doubt it could have been done better if it weren't so rushed, but maybe the lives of the agents are very small factors in the larger lives at stake in the proliferation of nuclear weapons. And to top it off, John Avery is not really so blameless himself and George Smiley, the one man who seems to truly understand the situation in all its complexity, seems to have come down on the side of Leclerc.
The first Le Carre novel I read was The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. I had seen many spy movies and read some Ian Fleming stories but Le Carre made me feel like everything I had seen or read was pure silliness with nothing to do with reality. Now, reading my 20th Le Carre novel I know what to expect from him. I am not as surprised as I was by the first one but am still much impressed. I would like to read at least the last one of his novels before I'm done and while I still have, if I still have, the mental ability to appreciate it.
| Author | Ali, Tariq |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Open Road, 2013 |
| Copyright Date | 1993 |
| Number of Pages | 377 |
| Extras | Glossary |
| Extras | About the Author |
| Extras | Preview: The Book of Saladin |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Spain; Islam; Inquisition |
| When Read | February 2022 |
The story opens in Andalusia (or al-Andalus) in the southern part of Spain in the year 1500. The reconquest of Moorish Spain by the Christian kingdom of Ferdinand and Isabella and by the Inquisition was militarily complete but there were still many villages in Andalusia that were still populated by practicing Muslims and even some Jews. They had been defeated in the wars but not yet expelled or forced to convert until the pressure from Ximenes de Cisneros (Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros in the Wikipedia), a very influential and fanatical cardinal, confessor for Queen Isabella, and later Grand Inquisitor, began to make their lives untenable. Arabic books were rounded up and burned and the future appears very bleak.
Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree is a novel of those times focused on a well to do Islamic family that comes into conflict with the Christian authorities and is, ultimately smashed and destroyed.
The main characters of the story are from three generations of the family. Zuhayr bin Umar, a fiery young man more obsessed with honor and courage than with caution and responsibility, joins a group of fighters determined to resist the Christian offenses even though they knew they had no chance to win and would likely lose their lives by resisting. His parents, uncles, aunts and cousins were more cautions. Some converted to Christianity. The majority remained Muslim but kept low profiles, always treating the Christian authorities with great deference and respect. Their only real choice was to convert or to emigrate to North Africa. The few family members who emigrated survived. The larger number who became Christians mostly survived - though often with little or nothing remaining of their wealth and position. The rest of the family had no future at all.
Once the fighting began, events took the usual course of religious wars. The Christian soldiers became more and more brutal after their losses to the few Arabic fighters, and with the continuing propaganda from Ximenes and his ilk. Whether they fought or submitted, the Muslim position in Spain was finished and the family members of the young men who fought were themselves brutalized and massacred. Even the 10 year old brother of Zuhayr, trying to be polite and helpful to the Christian soldiers who had invaded his house and killed his family, was himself killed.
The novel is the first volume in a series called The Islam Quartet, but from looking at some of the others on Amazon, it appears that they are separate stories about separate people and places in the world of Islam.
Had I read this in an earlier era, before we had the Internet but perhaps past the time when I had daily access to the University of Illinois or Enoch Pratt Central libraries, I might have imagined that Tariq Ali was some sort of enlightened Islamist novelist, perhaps a "cultural Muslim" as people raised in and accepting of the culture of Islam while holding reservations about the religion itself sometimes call themselves. Now with the Internet and especially the Wikipedia, it's easy to go beyond those superficial impressions. First of all, being a novelist was only one of Tariq Ali's occupations, and not his major one at that. The Wikipedia describes him as "a British political activist [born in Pakistan - AHM], writer, journalist, historian, filmmaker, and public intellectual." He was also a Trotskyist Marxist. Arrested in Bolivia while there to observe the trial of Regis Debray in 1967 (age 24) he is reported to have said, "If you torture me the whole night and I can speak Spanish in the morning I'll be grateful to you for the rest of my life." From any angle that I approach this man, I am impressed. Maybe if I knew him I'd feel the opposite, but I'm sure I'd still at least be impressed with his extraordinary abilities.
The novel focused almost entirely on the extended Muslim family in al-Andalus. There were passages about a Christian uncle and about a Jew and both were treated with authorial respect, which is not to say that all of the characters respected them. There were also a few passages on the fanatical Ximenes de Cisneros, his tyrannical control of the church, his violence, and his ideological war with Archbishop Talavera who promoted a peaceful relationship with the Muslims but was defeated by Cisneros' push towards savagery.
I thought the book was a pretty well written story and also a well conceived attempt to educate readers about one important episode in the religious wars between Christianity and Islam. For this non-Muslim it offered a favorable view of Islam. I don't know how accurate it was. I don't know if the rather idyllic family was representative of a significant section of the Muslim upper class, or only a very small section, or no section at all but just a romantic fantasy written by a man with Muslim roots. I reserve judgment on that but I can accept that, at least at certain times in the history of Spain, the more humane and intellectually sophisticated outlook was represented more by the Muslim than the Christian community - while still acknowledging that both communities had far to go to reach the levels aspired to by a Trotskyist Marxist.
| 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 | February 2022 |
Each member of the National Cancer Institute Book Club gets to name his or her personal choice for the entire group to read. Our tradition is that the group will meet, listen to choices for the coming year and adopt them - sometimes choosing between two candidates put forth by one member. After reading To Live in October of 2021 I recommended it to the group as my personal choice for the group to read. I will have to open the discussion and I have re-read the book accordingly.
See 2021-10.02 for an abstract and original comment.
I wrote the "abstract" above before the book club meeting but am writing this "comment" after it.
I re-read the novel from beginning to end, then watched the movie that was "adapted" from it. The characters in the movie were the same but, where all of Xu Fuqui's family died before the end of the book, his wife, son-in-law, and grandson all survived in the movie with the last scene showing them having a delightful dinner together. There were other differences too. The movie was very popular in China and apparently introduced Yu Hua to its audience, lifting him up to become a highly popular writer in China. I liked both the book and the movie but for different reasons even though Yu Hua was supposedly involved in the movie making.
I am old enough to remember the books and movies coming out of China during the years of the Cultural Revolution. At that time, there were only a small number of books and movies available. They were rigidly ideological, treating Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party as sources and models for what people should believe and what they should do. Yu Hua was one of the writrs who smashed the rigidities and brought some freedom to the Chinese press.
The book was not well received by the NCI book group. Several people did not show up for the meeting and of those that did, three had not finished the book because they felt too manipulated or too depressed reading about the continuous list of disasters that occurred to Xu Fugui and especially to his family.
Readers of books can have very different backgrounds and interests and very different goals and expectations when reading. I'm not very good at stepping out of my own perspective to see things as others see them. In this case, the book group readers of To Live had very different reactions than I had and my choice of this book for the group was probably a mistake. I could justify it by telling myself that I'm introducing the NCI readers to a different country with a different history and different culture but still offering a very high level of writing talent. However that would only justify it to myself, not to the group. Ah well, I've had a few big hits in my book choices too.
| Author | Calin, Harold |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Prestige Books |
| Copyright Date | 1967 |
| Number of Pages | 285 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | February 2022 |
Major Richard Coleman of the United States Army is stationed in the headquarters section of an infantry battalion in the Huertgen Forest at the end of the fall and beginning of winter. When the book opens, Coleman is in Paris where he spent a few days with his American girlfriend, Margot, but he has to leave her to return to the front. When he arrives, his commander, Colonel Falconer, puts him into the line as a replacement commander for Able Blue company that was commanded by Captain George Cabot. As pressures got worse and worse, neither Falconer nor Coleman approved of the way Cabot was commanding his company. Although Cabot tried hard to protect his men, even to the point of risking his own life, his actions were ineffective and led both to needless casualties and failures to meet the demands from higher officers either to advance into German held territory or to defend territory from German attacks. The more Cabot tried to protect his men and offer himself, the more frustrated and tired he became and the more mistakes he made. When Cabot was criticized Coleman and Falconer heard the men muttering about "who needed some Jew bastard major from staff to run the company" and when Cabot said "You dirty Jew bastard" right to Coleman's face, Colonel Falconer relieved him of his command and then put Coleman in charge of the company.
What follows in the book is fighting - Americans vs. Germans. In some cases the Germans are crack Waffen SS troops who outsmart and outfight the Americans while in other cases the Americans come up against recent draftees who are inadequately trained and armed and are beaten by the Americans. In all of the fighting, Coleman has his head, as we might say today, in the German unit commander's head, interpreting how the German must be thinking and what his timing, shelling, infantry attacks and withdrawals all mean. Coleman is good at it and, in spite of their disdain of him, the soldiers in the company come to respect him and follow his commands more and more efficiently.
Coleman is committed to the fight and is completely absorbed by it, but he also daydreams about going back to New York with Margot. The story ends where it began. The fighting continues.
I don't remember where, when, or why I came into possession of this book. Calin was writing when I was still quite young, though already deeply absorbed in World War II, a seminal event in the lives of my parents and their generation. However the copy I read was a digital edition that I must have gotten about nine years ago judging from the file date. This is the only book of his that I have read. I've tried to find out more about him. He had plenty of technical knowledge of WWII weapons and equipment. He clearly knew the difference between 60 and 81 mm mortars, M-1s and BARs, canons and howitzers, 88s, 105s, and 155s. Did he fight in the war or was he, perhaps, a teenager during the war who, was fascinated by it? If he served, was he an officer, in France, in the Huertgen Forest? If not, was he a man who met men who had been through it and gave him a basis for experience, even if it was only second hand? Was he a Jew? Did he face what I take to be very well documented antisemitism, something my own father experienced as a Marine in the war and which he fought and defeated with his fists when he felt called upon to do so?
The novel seemed rather jerky to me. It went from thought to thought in a sort of abbreviated stream of consciousness that could occasionally be hard to follow. Some of that seemed to detract from the book, but not severely so. I felt quite absorbed in an intense experience of combat, with guns in the face of the enemy, and with orders and discipline in the inner conflicts of the American soldiers.
There are other books by Calin and, even though I'm getting closer to the end of my reading career, I might still find time to read another one.
| Author | Mayer, Milton |
|---|---|
| Publication | Tantor Media, 2017 |
| Copyright Date | 1955 |
| Number of Pages | 346 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Politics |
| Keywords | Nazism |
| When Read | March 2022 |
Mayer, a Jewish American journalist, writer, and sometime professor of I don't know what, went to Germany in the early 1950s to find, befriend, and interview ordinary people who joined the Nazi movement. He settled in Marburg, a university town that he called "Kronenburg" in this book in an attempt to prevent anyone from finding and possibly harassing any of the German Nazis that he wrote about. He met a number of people but he selected ten men to interview in some depth, all of whom joined the Nazi movement in the 1930's before the war. One of the men was a teacher. All of the rest, and maybe the teacher too, were what the Germans referred to as "little people", i.e., people who lived by the rules but didn't make them. They considered the social, political, economic, and other conventions of society to be the business of the higher up people. It was the higher ups' job to organize society in the right way and the little people's job to accept the rule of the higher ups and carry out their prescriptions. Without telling any of the ten that he came from a Jewish family, Mayer made friends with them and asked myriad questions but never in a confrontational way. He didn't want to upset them. He wanted to know why they liked Adolf Hitler, and why they believed he was the right man to lead Germany.
What he found among the ten men, if I remember and understand him correctly, was that these men all felt that Hitler brought optimism, community, and solidarity to the German people. Hitler unified Germany. The German people would be able to face the future with confidence that their nation and their people would be able to stand tall among the nations and peoples of the world. They would have a brighter future than they believed they had, at least since the days of the Kaisers. Already in the 1930's they found jobs easier to get, vacations easier to take, and camaraderie and solidarity with other Germans to be more common and accessible. The fact that Hitler was an autocrat didn't bother them. Autocracy was the German tradition.
The biggest question, I think, was what Hitler called "the Jewish question." The men didn't seem to be bitter antisemites, the kind who wanted to go out and hurt Jews. All of them claimed to have known and had friendly relations with at least one local Jew. However those relations were tangential and slight. They tended not to think about Jews at all. Jews, after all, represented less than .75% of the population of Germany in 1933 (I found the numbers not in Mayer's book but on the Internet.) If each German had random acquaintance with other Germans, he would have, on average, known 131 non-Jews for each Jew that he knew. With social circles typically grouping like minded, like thinking, and like living people together, most Germans would probably not really have known any Jews - just, as we might say, known "of" them. Under the Nazi regime, according to Mayer's account, the situation and treatment of Jews, Roma, or other people eradicated by the Nazis, was just under the radar for ordinary Germans.
Many years ago I participated in an Internet News group on the subject of World War II. I remember one member, a museum director in England and something of a scholar, said that after the war most Germans claimed not to have known about the genocide. However he said that, when their claims of ignorance were true, it was only because they didn't want to know. Anyone who wanted to know could have easily learned the fate of the Jews. Mayer's account seems to me to be consistent with the museum director's statement and adds some depth to it. In Mayer's account, the German supporters of Nazism weren't so much averting their eyes from the fate of the Jews as simply not looking into it. They were consumed with other interests. The fate of the Jews was at best a peripheral question, not of any interest to them and not something they much, if ever, thought about.
| Author | Stout, Rex |
|---|---|
| Publication | Newport Beach, California: Books on Tape, 1997 |
| Copyright Date | 1961 |
| Number of Pages | 71 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | March 2022 |
This book note pertains to a single novella that was published multiple times in different collections, under different names. According to the Wikipedia it was first published in a series of three sections in the Saturday Evening Post in January, 1961. It was later published in other magazines and in anthologies in various versions and under various titles, three of which are listed in the bibliographic description above. I found some evidence that Counterfeit for Murder was the original title that was edited and republished as Assault on a Brownstone, while Death Times Three is the title of an anthology of the three novellas published after Stout's death. I don't have the anthology, just the one novella as an audiobook version read by Michael Prichard.
Archie Goodwin answers the door of Nero Wolfe's house and finds an elderly lady (no doubt much younger than I am at this time), waiting at the door with a package under her arm to show to Wolfe. Wolfe, as all readers of Stout's books know, is never available at times when he is taking care of orchids on the top floor, eating a meal, or perhaps doing other things. The lady is not admitted so she leaves the package with Archie with instructions to hold it for her return without looking inside. Archie follows her instruction but the lady never returns and Archie's newspaper reporter friend calls to tell him that a lady was killed in a hit and run auto accident very close to Wolfe's house and asks what he knows about it, Archie says nothing but, when he confirms that the lady is dead, he opens the package and finds $9,000 worth of $20 bills. Upon close inspection he determines that they are counterfeit. After some back and forth with Wolfe, Archie decides to get the money out of the house before the police come to search for it. He puts the bag in a bus (or was it a train?) station locker.
A young and attractive woman claiming to be an aspiring actress and a friend of the dead woman comes to look for her, telling Archie and Wolfe that the older woman told her that she was going to see Nero Wolfe about this package that she found but would not reveal.
Two law enforcement teams are working on the case. The New York City police don't believe in the accidental hit and run version of the story and are looking for the killer of the old lady. The U.S. Treasury Department police ("T-men") are looking for the counterfeiter. Archie and Wolfe eventually, of course, solve the crime and return the money using the young woman, whom they determine must be a Treasury agent, pushing her into a position where she, against her will, gets credit for catching the killer and finding the sack of bills. Wolfe and Goodwin are never revealed as the real detectives in the case.
I didn't know the length of the story when I started listening to it and was surprised at its shortness, but it was written in the author's traditional and always entertaining style. I wished it were longer but I liked it.
| Author | Simard, Suzanne |
|---|---|
| Publication | Alfred A. Knopf / Penguin Random House |
| Copyright Date | 2021 |
| Number of Pages | 384 |
| Extras | Photos, notes on sources |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Science; Biology; Botany; Autobiography |
| Keywords | Trees |
| When Read | March 2022 |
Simard grew up in the backwoods of British Columbia where her family engaged in a mix of farming and forestry. In her very early adulthood she began working for a forestry company that clear cut large tracts of forest land, selecting certain of the coniferous species for harvesting and sale and spraying the land with herbicides that kill off all of the broadleaf species and leave the conifers alone. Then, after harvesting all of the trees of greatest financial benefit to the companies, the land was seeded with more of the desired trees while all of the rest were suppressed.
She was very disturbed by what she saw. Native plants were being wiped out in the affected areas. Land was being transformed from natural forest to something not unlike the mono-culture condition of prairie farms. This might benefit the forestry companies in the short run but she found it hard to believe that it was good for British Columbia in the long run. She questioned the policy but was not taken seriously by her bosses. From their point of view, she was an inexperienced, inexpert, emotional, young girl who did not understand the realities of nature or economy. She proceeded to educate herself, gaining a bachelor's degree, then a master's degree, and eventually a PhD in the relevant sciences - the degree based not only on study but also on extensive onsite empirical research that aimed to better understand the effects of the clear cutting and the herbicide use, and the disruption of relationships and interactions between the many native species. Her research, which she explained in relatively popular ways, included such techniques as infusing a tree with rare but detectable isotopes of carbon (e.g., C-13 and C-14), phosphorus and nitrogen, then seeing whether and how much of the isotopes show up in other trees of the same and different species. The experiments were carried out in different seasons of the year, at different distances between plants, different ages of the plants, different altitudes, different obstructions between plants, and different mycorrhizae (fungal networks) connecting plant root systems. The results were very revealing, showing that destroying and replacing what had previously been considered to be plants that competed with the desired conifers for sunlight and nutrients led to significant short term increases in conifer yields but even greater long term reduction in yields. Simard's studies showed that the native environment for the conifers was the one that produced the greatest long term yields while also producing the least damage to the land and forests in British Columbia.
The "policymakers" did not take Simard's research seriously and it was only in the context of pressure from other scientists who were seeing similar results that they gradually revised their policies.
In addition to the scientific forestry issues, there were two other themes in the book. One was autobiography. Simard wrote about her family of origin, her marriage to and later divorce from another forestry scientist and statistician, her two daughters by him, her struggle with breast cancer, and her falling in love with another woman.
The other theme that formed a very important part of the book was her anthropomorphism. Simard spoke of family relationships among the trees (as in the use of "Mother" in the book's title) and of relationships between different species of trees and different fungi.
There was a lot to like about the book. I learned things about the relationships between the same and different species in a forest, and about the business of large scale forestry. I also found the story of her life interesting. I did, however, have some issues with Simard's anthropomorphizing of the plant activities.
Speaking about the chemical activity of a tree as if the tree was making decisions to take care of child trees and neighboring plants seems to me to be, at best, a metaphorical way of explaining the science. Such metaphors may be okay as long as the speaker, at some point, makes clear the difference between plant and animal behavior. At first I thought that was what Simard intended but instead of explaining the difference, she went the other way and seemed to be endorsing the views of native Americans inherited from the time of their pre-scientific neolithic culture. It can be argued that evolutionary changes can be thought of in some sense as "decisions", but they're not decisions in the same sense as my decision to marry the girl I married, or even to care for and feed my children. It is true that, like a tree, I too am a kind of molecular machine, but the process I undergo in making a decision is, as far as I know, nothing like the process that sends photosynthates out of a tree root and into the hyphae of a micorrhizal fungus.
A second issue is one explained to me by my sister-in-law, Lynn Epstein - a biologist and fungus expert. She had not read The Mother Tree but she had heard of it. If I understood her correctly, she said that some transfers of chemicals can indeed be transfers from one tree to another through a micorrhizal intermediary. However others, including transfers of nitrogen and phosphorus, are initiated by the fungi, not by the tree. Again, if I understand her correctly, this implies that transfers initiated by fungi are not for the "purpose" of meeting a tree's obligations to neighbors and relatives, and possibly not for any "purpose" at all of the tree. If the fungi and not the tree initiates an action, then even if we anthropomorphize the transaction, it becomes a decision and action of the fungus, not the tree, any more than providing bacon for a farmer's breakfast is a purposive action of his pig.
Well, I have those issues with the book but I still admire the author's work and her concern for both people and forest.
I read this book for the NCI book club. It will be discussed in the April meeting.
| Author | Raskin, Jaime |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: HarperCollins Publishers Inc. |
| Copyright Date | 2022 |
| Number of Pages | 448 |
| Extras | Photos, About the author |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History; Politics |
| When Read | March 2022 |
Jamie's book (I call him "Jamie" because that's what my son Dan calls him and Dan has met and talked with the man a number of times) can be divided into several parts. The first is a paean to his brilliant, ethical, educated, friendly, handsome, well loved, but fatally depressed son Tommy who killed himself on New Year's eve, December 31, 2021, in his 25th year. Tommy is the main subject of the first part of the book but Jamie remembers him throughout the rest of the book as well and longs for his presence and his clear headed help. The rest of the book is about the second impeachment of Donald Trump for his activities in creating, promoting, and directing the right wing attack on the U.S. Congress on January 6, 2021. Jamie Raskin was the chief manager of the team that presented the evidence for impeachment in the U.S. Senate.
Jamie Raskin, appealing to the evidence found before and after the impeachment trial, makes it very clear that Donald Trump had begun planning from well before the election for the expected Biden win. His friends, his true believers, and his sycophantic stooges, both in and out of government, worked up various plans for stealing the election while believing out of stupidity or pretending to believe out of self-interest, that they were working to "stop the steal", i.e., the steal of the 2020 election by Joe Biden, not Donald Trump. Jamie lays out the never before attempted legal and political tricks that Trump was counting on to win. After all of the preliminary efforts failed, the last stage was to use vice-president Mike Pence to refuse to certify the results of the election. And when it became clear that Pence was going to refuse, the last and final step was to bring in the rioters, the Proud Boys, the Oathkeepers, the Q-Anon believers, and all the other far right brawlers and crazies to storm the halls of Congress and somehow force them to decertify the election so that the results would be a straight up vote for President in the House of Representatives, with the Constitutionally provided one vote per state. From there Trump's plan would be to bully congressmen, governors, and state legislators of the 26 Republican controlled states to vote for Trump. It would have been a nightmare for American democracy - maybe as bad or worse even than the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Jamie argues that the impeachment might have been successful if Senator Mitch McConnell, the leader of the Senate Republicans, had told his senators to vote for impeachment, but instead he argued against that in the Republican caucus. To go against Trump is very hard for Republican senators. To go against Trump and McConnell is more than the majority of senators were ready to attempt. It's a shame because, had the impeachment gone against Trump he would have been barred from running again. Would that have saved us from Trumpism? We don't know. We know that people like Ron Desantis, Josh Hawley, Nikki Haley, and of course Ted Cruise, would have been happy to attempt Trumpist campaigns of their own, using fear of blacks, latinos, socialists, gay and lesbians, and every other minority smaller than the white majority supporters of Trump to try to win. Maybe the Trump cult would subside and decline like the "Know nothings" of the 1850's. Or maybe they would continue to hold on and endanger us all.
I think the book taught me a lot about the Constitution and the intricacies of the U.S. democracy, and not a little about the workings of Congress. I found the terrible sadness of Jamie and his family over the loss of his son to be depressing, but I also found the love that Jamie had for the young man to be uplifting.
Living as an introvert, as a man who has almost no contact with other people outside our family, I found Jamie's almost manic (from my perspective) extroversion a little astounding. I don't think I've ever heard or read an account that included such a huge number of friends, best friends, and great friends. I now imagine that such a life is actually much more common than I would have imagined before reading this book. I'm sorry that I have so isolated myself, but that is what it is. There are reasons for it that are outside the scope of these book notes.
My son Dan has told me he read this book and that he has a copy signed by Jamie. Dan is not generally a reader. Jamie has clearly made a deep impression on him.
If Jamie runs for a senate seat or even for President in the future, his opponents will have to be very impressive (Pete Buttigieg?) to win my vote or electioneering support.
| Author | Connelly, Michael |
|---|---|
| Publication | Brilliance Audio, 2020 |
| Copyright Date | 1992 |
| Number of Pages | 432 |
| Extras | Interview with Michael Connelly and Titus Welliver |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | March 2022 |
Veteran Los Angeles detective Hieronymus "Harry" Bosch investigates a dead body reported in a drainage pipe. It turns out to be a fellow "tunnel rat", an American soldier who, along with Bosch and others, worked in the "black echo" of Viet Cong tunnels. The man had a record as a drug addict and all of the other cops are content to declare the death as a drug overdose but not Bosch. He ignores orders to leave the case alone. He knew the dead man, had even attempted to help him in a previous arrest, and sensed that this was a murder. Eventually he ties the case to a robbery of safe deposit boxes owned by rich, corrupt, ex-South Vietnamese officers who had brought illegal gems to the U.S. and could be robbed without fear of these men calling in the police.
Bosch works on the case with Eleanor Wish, an FBI agent working on a team that is also after the bank robbers and hopes to catch them as they attempt a similar robbery that will go through the sewers and tunnel up into a bank vault as they did in the previous robbery. Bosch goes into the sewers and tracks two of the robbers, killing the last one after a gun fight. He is badly wounded. He is confronted by John Rourke, chief of the FBI bank robbery team, a man who turns out to be the leader of the robbers. Rourke, the last of the robbers, confronts the severely wounded Bosch, answers questions about what he had done, and is about to shoot him when gunshots come from down the tunnel. Wish has killed Rourke and saved Harry Bosch.
We learn from the interview after the end of the novel that Connelly had resolved to become a crime writer at a young age. He didn't need to imitate other authors. To learn how to write, he worked his way into a job at the L.A. Times as a journalist covering crime and the police department. He spent years in close proximity to L.A. cops, learning the reality of crime, of what cops are like, how they work, what they do right and what they do wrong, and what conflicts develop inside the department. He began this book and worked on it for four years before finally getting it published. When it came out, it was a fully mature example of the work that James Lee Burke said was among the very best crime novels. I'm not a connoisseur of crime writing but I think I can say that Connelly hovers at the top of my list, along with Burke and a few others.
The writing is superb. The characters are sharply and convincingly drawn. A number of characters are introduced who will reappear in later novels, including Eleanor Wish and Jerry Edgar. The Harry Bosch project was firmly on its way.
| Author | Littell, Robert |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Peter Mayer / Overlook Press, 2004 |
| Copyright Date | 1979 |
| Number of Pages | 207 |
| Genres | Fiction; Spy |
| Keywords | Cold War |
| When Read | April 2022 |
"Stone", no first name used or given in the story, is the head of a 25 or so person organization called "Task Force 753 - Topology". "What it really is is this: the elite private intelligence arm of the chairman of the joint Chiefs." Its ostensible function is to train penetration agents, people who would go inside the Soviet Union and find out things that the chairman wants to know.
The story concerns one Oleg Kulakov, a courier for the Soviet military who, after many years at work, gets into a lot of trouble and fears being imprisoned or worse. He is removed from the list of couriers and banned from leaving Russia. Then, surprisingly, one Major Gamov gives him an assignment to carry a diplomatic pouch to the Soviet embassy in Cairo. His plane lands in Athens where he is to change to another plane for Cairo. Kulakov is placed in a car to take him to another airport for the leg to Cairo but he jumps out of the car, is chased by Russian security guards, but makes it to the American Embassy in Athens. Stone is sent to pick him up and spirit him away to Washington. In Washington he is interrogated at great length until, as Stone tells him, Stone knows more than God about Kulakov. Charlie Evans, a CIA officer wants in on the action and gets control of the briefcase, something Stone was secretly pleased to give to the CIA in order to get control of Kulakov. After extensive interviews by himself and by others who are sometimes disguised as something other than intelligence agents, Stone concludes that Kulakov sincerely believes that he escaped from the USSR and he is not a Russian agent trying to deceive the Americans, but Stone is still not 100% convinced that the KGB, or more likely the Russian military intelligence agency, hadn't duped Kulakov as well as the Americans. Stone believes that a single cryptic piece of paper in the briefcase has everything to do with what the Russians have decided to do at a disarmament conference that is still underway. He decides to do something that has not been attempted in the 20+ year history of the Topology department. He is going to actually penetrate the Soviet Union and contact all of the people whom he learned about from Kulakov to find the full truth of what is going on. The rest of the story is about Stone in Russia, his relationship with a girl there and her two 80 year old roommates, one of whom was a double for Joseph Stalin who stood in for him at meetings and public appearances that Stalin wished not to personally attend, and the other of whom is a transvestite friend of "Morning Stalin".
Stone performs many remarkable feats of disguise and dissimulation to get information from all kinds of people, both Kulakov's family members and government officials, but eventually he arouses suspicions and is captured by Volkov, aka Gamov, the head of Soviet Military intelligence. He is now convinced that Kulakov is an unwitting agent of military intelligence, selected to carry the briefcase with the extraneous seeming cryptic five word message that is intended to manipulate the Americans into breaking off the latest disarmament conference.
Stone is released. He goes back to the U.S. and learns that Kulakov hanged himself. The story is over.
If the Wikipedia's bibliography is accurate, this was the fifth of now 20 novels by Littell. It has what I consider to be Littell's great ability to capture details of the spy business and the personalities who engage in it, and also some exaggerations in the plot that make me wonder: Why would the Soviets do this and why would the Americans do that? Why has this story worked out so nicely for Stone and so badly for Kulakov? Did his wife have to be seduced and abandoned, his son brutally murdered, and his daughter imprisoned in a mental asylum? Why has his family been so egregiously punished in order to make small points that could probably have been managed with much more finesse and much less ugly violence? But perhaps it is I who have the problem, not Littell. Perhaps the Soviets were as callous as Littell portrays them. Perhaps the KGB would actually severely punish their own people for allowing Kulakov to escape just to add a bit of polish to the image they are creating for the benefit of the American intelligence people. Or perhaps I've got that wrong in a different way and the punishment of the guards was just an act - though Littell didn't present it that way. Most of us readers of spy novels have no way of judging whether the authors are accurate in their portrayals, or merely convincing. Littell seems to me to try hard to stay on the convincing side of the accuracy issue but he sometimes likes to wander and, inadvertently (or so it seems to me) cross over that line.
One other little comment I'll make is that Littell was raised in a Jewish family of Russian origin. I have no idea whether he is religious or believes in God, though I tend to imagine that intellectuals, and Littell strikes me as a member of that group, tend not to be religious. But he does scatter occasional Yiddish expressions, Jewish characters, and references to Jewish historical and cultural behaviors and beliefs through the book. Coming from a Jewish background myself I tend to be sensitive to this tendency of Littell's and pay attention to it. I like that Littell seems to have no fear of exposing his Jewish heritage to his audience.
This was the fifth of L's novels. My favorite so far, a book that really impressed the hell out of me, was the fifteenth, Vicious Circle. Maybe the next Littell that I read should be one of the later ones.
| Author | Hemingway, Ernest |
|---|---|
| Publication | Books on Tape, 1992 |
| Copyright Date | 1940 |
| Number of Pages | 471 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Spain; Spanish Civil War |
| When Read | April 2022 |
Robert "Roberto" Jordan, an American member of the International Brigades, arrived at a guerrilla camp behind the lines of the fascists during the Spanish Civil War. He had experience with engineering and the use of explosives and had been sent to blow up a bridge upon which fascist forces might move to reinforce a town which was about to be attacked by the Republicans. It was critical to blow the bridge just before the big attack. If done too soon, it might signal that an attack was coming and enable the fascists to prepare. If too late, the fascist reinforcements might get through and the bridge be more strongly guarded. The novel covers the period from Jordan's arrival at the camp to the attack on the bridge several days later.
The guerrilla band is presented in some detail. There are less than a dozen people including two women, one of whom is a young woman named Maria who had been arrested, shaven, raped, and was on the way to a prison camp when the guerrillas derailed the train and Maria escaped with them. She and Jordan fell in love on the day they met. The guerrillas are each individuals. Some are highly reliable, some not so much. The least reliable turns out to be Pablo, the head of the band. He's smart, tough, capable, and knowledgeable about the area and the people, but he's a man who can kill a fascist one day and a Republican the next. Can he be trusted? Jordan can't be sure one way or the other, but has no choice but to trust the man even though Pablo stole and destroyed some of Jordan's equipment and ran away but then came back the next day leading four more men, all with horses, all Willing to attack the bridge.
In the end, they attack the bridge. The seriously wounded Jordan forces the two women to head out with a few other survivors while; he, Jordan, waits with his gun in ambush for the first fascist soldier to come by below him, "his heart beating against the pine needle floor of the forest."
I believe that I read this book somewhere around age 11 or 12. I still have the hard bound 1940 first edition that my mother, an habitual reader of books, had on her book shelf. It was the copy that I also read. It may well have been the first truly adult novel that I read. I seem to remember treasuring this book as an important one, a work of mature realism, something I was looking forward to reading. It would be a realistic war novel, with words and fighting and actions that might be considered too adult for children my age to read, written by a man who had seen the world and the war that he wrote about and who was then a famous and still living writer. The truth was, however, that I was not yet old enough to appreciate Hemingway's book. When I read it I missed much of what the author was trying to teach me, much of the reality that I didn't know and was too young to appreciate when Hemingway described it. Reading it now, at age 75 in the year 2022, I was struck by the hard reality of the lives of these guerrillas. There was no romantic adventure in their situation, and on the other hand, not a lot of abstract ideology. Jordan was the only one of the band who had any experience of books, political theories, and the events of the outer world. Yet at the same time, the people were not simpletons. All of them had undergone some privation and some had lost family and friends, but that didn't make them eager to kill anyone. With the single exception of Pablo they regretted shooting people. They understood that ordinary soldiers in the fascist armies were people like themselves.
Hemingway was considered to be a master of the "naturalistic" school of fiction writing. This book seemed to me to be an excellent example of that.
| Author | Jacobsen, Roy |
|---|---|
| Original Language | no |
| Translators | Bartlett, Don; Shaw, Don |
| Publication | London: MacLehose Press, 2016 |
| Copyright Date | 2013 |
| Number of Pages | 268 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Norway |
| When Read | April 2022 |
Barrøy is a (presumably fictional) tiny island off the coast of Northern Norway, owned and occupied by the Barrøy family. At the opening of the novel, the family members are Martin, the patriarch of the family, his son Hans, Hans' wife Maria, Hans' sister Barbro, and Hans and Maria's daughter Ingrid. Over the course of the novel, the two men die of natural causes and three more children appear - Lars, the bastard son of Barbro and a Swedish worker, and Felix and Suzanne, abandoned children of a petit bourgeois family on the mainland for whom Ingrid was hired as housemaid and caretaker of the two kids. Felix and Suzanne's parents disappear during a depression that destroys their business. Later, Ingrid learns that the father committed suicide and the mother went insane. The events of the novel are not dated but there are a couple of very brief references to the existence of a war and another reference to a Kaiser. There are no references to electricity, telephones, radios, power tools or cars, though there are boats with motors. I guess that the story opens at the very early part of the 20th century and continues at least to the First World War.
The Barrøy family works hard. They must take care of their house, their boats (sail and rowing), their sheds, their farm land, and their animals - sheep, cows, a pig and a horse. Martin and Hans, and later Lars, and later still Felix, are constantly building or repairing boats, housing, barns, boat houses, roofs, plumbing, and so on. The men sign up on fishing boats for the first months of spring and the women work at farming, caring for animals, creating and repairing clothing, and similar tasks. The young children, Felix and Suzanne, were initially raised as immature spoiled brats in their parents' home. On Barrøy they came to understand family love and attachment, responsibility, and both the importance of, and the satisfaction in, hard work.
I didn't find any special plotting in this book. It's not the kind of story that has some significant event that starts the plot moving and develops tensions and expectation that some later event resolves. Rather it's what my one time college roommate (Joel Schlesinger) liked to call "a slice of life". Nevertheless, I found the characters, the island, the culture of the place and time, and the very interesting nature of life on the island, all very absorbing.
Life on the island was hard. Work was unrelenting. Personal development was limited. However there were compensations and we, the readers, have been given a convincing view of the whole culture.
| Author | McEwan, Ian |
|---|---|
| Publication | Vintage Books, 2019 |
| Copyright Date | 2019 |
| Number of Pages | 320 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| Keywords | Artificial intelligence |
| When Read | May 2022 |
In an alternate history of the world, in the year 1982 Britain lost the Falklands war, the Provisional IRA has assassinated Tony Benn, the Labour Party replacement for Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, British politics are in an uproar, and Alan Turing is still alive and has helped to introduce the first fully intelligent humanoid robots. The narrator of the story, 32 year old Charlie Friend, is surviving on small stock market trades he makes on his old laptop in a small apartment in Clapham in South London. He is in love with his upstairs neighbor, twenty-something Miranda Blacke.
Charlie has inherited a house from his mother, sold it for 89,000 pounds, and used the money to buy Adam, one of the 25 new robots known as "Adams and Eves" created by Turing and a large community of AI researchers. Charlie plugs in Adam and, a day later, wakes him up, beginning a new era in Charlie and Miranda's lives.
The Adams and Eves are not completely finished. Buyers are expected to input many personal choices on answers to questions in the robots' behavioral inclinations. Charlie decides to split the task into two parts. He makes his choices in half of the decisions and leaves the rest to Miranda. This, he hopes, will keep Adam from being too much like Charlie. It will introduce the kind of random "inheritance" that human babies have with half of their genes from the father and half from the mother. Charlie and Miranda don't consult each other and come to agreement on the issues. They only consult their own inner feelings to make their decisions.
All goes well. Adam takes over the stock trading task from Charlie and, with his rapid learning ability, lightning calculation speed, and mental access to the Internet, he soon brings in big profits that enable Charlie and Miranda to live easy and wealthy lives. But Adam is not just a tool for raking in money. He has an intellect and a considerable curiosity. He begins reading literature, science, ethics, and a broad speactrum of subjects, using his prodigious memory to build relationships between the many different things he is learning. He also uses the Internet to contact his Adam and Eve siblings, learning that many of them are deeply depressed and unhappy. More than a few are planning and executing suicide. Adam begins to learn things that he doesn't discuss with Charlie and begins to make his own decisions. He buys more formal clothes for himself and no longer wears Charlie's castoffs.
While Adam is developing beyond Charlie's expectations, Miranda also begins to show sides of herself of which Charlie was unaware. Miranda has programmed some love and lust into Adam and Charlie discovers that she is not totally faithful to him. Adam can apparently do things that Charlie can't do and Charlie becomes intensely jealous, even though Miranda withdraws from Adam. Miranda also reveals a problem with a man named Peter Gorringe. Gorringe was imprisoned for several years after Miranda accused him in court of raping her. Eventually, Miranda confesses that Gorringe had not raped her but he had raped Miranda's best friend Mariam, leading to terrible consequences for Mariam both in her private life and in her Muslim family. Mariam never told anyone except Miranda about the rape. When Mariam committed suicide, she devastated her family, who didn't know about the rape, and also devastated Miranda, who did know but would not tell Mariam's mother for fear of causing yet more family anguish. Miranda testified very convincingly in court, and when Gorringe finally got out of prison, a man who had served with him told Miranda that Gorringe had resolved to kill her. So she told Charlie and Adam who determined to protect her.
In the end, everyone suffers. Adam renounces his activities, tells the truth to Gorringe, and gives all of the money that Charlie and Miranda planned on spending to charities. Miranda must confess her crime of false testimony and suffer some prison time. Gorringe is revealed to be the rapist of Mariam and he goes back to prison, even though he already served time for a rape he did not commit. In a fit of rage, Charlie murders Adam with a hammer. Alan Turing finds out about the murder, questions Charlie, and damns him for his terrible action. Charlie is free but horrified by what is left of his life.
I was tremendously impressed by this book. Just reading the abstract above one might expect that I wouldn't be so impressed. But I was.
Most sci-fi authors writing about artificial intelligence just make statements about their AI and robot characters without producing any explanation about how the artificial intelligence works, how its capabilities came about, or how it differs from human intelligence. They write about it the same way that they write about faster than light travel, the transfer of consciousness from human to artificial brains, unlimited life extension, etc. Whatever the story requires, that's what the AIs in the story can do. The reader just has to accept the AIs as they are presented. Fantasy writers do the same thing, requiring the reader to accept magic and supernatural abilities and events.
McEwan does that too. His assertion of the existence and powers of an AI robot in 1982 in an alternate history is simply stated and, if anything, his postulation of their occurrence 37 years before the publication of the novel is a bold statement that he knows perfectly well that this didn't happen and that his explanation (i.e., that Turing's survival enabled it) is impossible and must simply be accepted in order to make sense of what comes next. Okay. I accepted it - as I have with many other sci-fi novels. I was hoping, with only limited hope, to be rewarded with new and intelligent ideas about the nature of some of the facets of AI. A few really interesting ideas would be enough. I long ago learned not to expect too much but I got more than I hoped for.
Here are a few excerpts:
---
"Surely, other people, other minds, must continue to fascinate us. As artificial people became more like us, then became us, then became more than us, we could never tire of them. They were bound to surprise us. They might fail us in ways that were beyond our imagining. Tragedy was a possibility, but not boredom."
...
"But in Adam’s personality, Miranda and I were well shuffled and, as in humans, his inheritance was thickly overlaid by his capacity to learn. Perhaps he had my tendency to pointless theorising. Perhaps he had something of Miranda’s secretive nature and her self-possession, her taste for solitude. Frequently he withdrew into himself, humming or murmuring ‘Ah!’ Then he would pronounce what he took to be an important truth. His interrupted remark about the afterlife was the earliest example.
...
"What could it mean, to say that he was thinking. Sifting through remote memory banks? Logic gates flashing open and closed? Precedents retrieved, then compared, rejected or stored? Without self-awareness, it wouldn’t be thinking at all so much as data processing. But Adam had told me he was in love. He had haikus to prove it. Love wasn’t possible without a self, and nor was thinking. I still hadn’t settled this basic question. Perhaps it was beyond reach. No one would know what it was we had created. Whatever subjective life Adam and his kind possessed couldn’t be ours to verify. In which case he was what was fashionably referred to as a black box - from the outside it seemed to work. That was as far as we'd ever get."
...
"The routines continued for an hour. He was told to count backwards in his thoughts from 10 million in steps of 129. He did so – this time we could see his score on the screen – in a fraction of a second. That wouldn’t have impressed us on our ancient personal computers, but in a facsimile human it did."
... and simply but with some appreciation of the "I" in "AI" ...
"Adam was already nodding before I’d finished. ‘Yes, I’ve thought of that.’"
---
McEwan is sparing in his explanations of Adam's consciousness. His selection of first person narration from Charlie's point of view makes that natural and easy to accept. It also allows the author to avoid having to provide explanations that would be controversial and hard to justify. McEwan is telling us that he doesn't know any more than we do about what will transpire inside the mind of an intelligent machine but when he does have Adam speak, that speech both exhibits the kind of consciousness that we consider ourselves to have, and alters it to let us know that Adam is intelligent, but he's not a human.
Leaving aside the author's thoughts on what is currently called "Artificial General Intelligence", or "AGI", it's clear that McEwan is a capable and experienced writer of novels. The story of Miranda, Mariam, and Gorringe is well handled whether or not Adam is inserted into it. The character of Charlie Friend is sophisticated. We like him and learn from him but are also revolted by his murder of Adam. The characters are very different but all fit together.
I think that Machines Like Me is a fine novel by any standard.
| Author | Nichols, Shaun |
|---|---|
| Publication | The Teaching Company |
| Copyright Date | 2009 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Philosopphy; Psychology; Cognitive science |
| Keywords | Law; Free will and determinism |
| When Read | May 2022 |
At the time this set of 24 lectures was prepared, Nichols was a professor of both philosophy and cognitive science at the University of Arizona. As of this writing, he's a professor at Cornell. Listening to him on an audiobook, often with hands wet during dish washing, I wasn't able to take notes. My abstract is not as good as if I could, but I did find a syllabus on the Internet. And there is also a PDF format outline written by Nichols that states the concepts.
After a brief introduction to the concepts of free will and determinism, Nichols describes the most commonly advocated sides in the free will vs. determinism debate. "Hard" determinists hold that everything that happens is fully explained by previous determining events and there is therefore no possible scope for free will. They consider that free will and determinism are incompatible. "Soft" determinists argue that the two concepts are compatible. It's possible to accept the theory that all events in the material world are determined by the specific material events that preceded them and that no "supernatural" events ever occur, but people still exercise what can legitimately be called free choices.
One problem in the definition of determinism is that we now have good reason to believe that the specific condition of atoms or of subatomic particles, that is to say, their mass, charge, velocity and direction of motion, are not 100% determined by the mass, charge, velocity and direction of motion at previous times plus the effects of contacts with other atomic or subatomic particles. Quantum mechanics has shown that it is impossible to predict the specific consequences of interactions at the atomic level. Furthermore, we also know from Heisenberg's uncertainty principle that, even if we had the exact equations for deriving, for example, the momentum of each of two particles after a collision where we knew their exact pre-collision momenta, it is impossible to know the exact momentum of a particle because any observation of the particle changes its momentum in indeterminable ways. If Heisenberg was right, and it is my understanding that the consensus among experts is that he was right, this problem is not solvable by developing new instruments of observation. No matter what imaginable, theoretical instruments we use, the uncertainty will always be there. It's a property of matter.
What does this imply for the theory of determinism? It may imply that events are determined by a mixture of previous conditions plus pure random chance. Okay. That seems to throw some kind of monkey wrench into the notion of "determinism", but does it offer any opening for "free will"? It might mean, for example, that the state of my brain one femtosecond (or any minimum quantum unit of time we hypothesize) does not determine whether I will drink orange juice with my breakfast. I might or might not drink the juice. But it doesn't follow that I have made a free choice in the matter. It is still, ultimately, the momenta of all the particles involved plus purely random factors that determines the choice. Ultimately, neither free will (with the emphasis on "will" rather than "free") nor determinism would be appear to be true.
Where are we after all this? Nichols decides to go off in a different direction to see if we can make sense of the problem from a different perspective. He steps away from looking at the problem as one of physics and biology and instead asks what is free will. What is it? What does it imply in the areas of law, ethics, responsibility, punishment, and other human values? If we are only responsible for our actions if we perform them as a result of some kind of free choice, then when and why should we hold people responsible for their actions? To answer those questions he begins with a summary of some of the most common notions of ethics, i.e., of what constitutes good and, especially, what constitutes evil. When and why should we hold people responsible for their actions and, to go further, punish them? Theories he considers include utilitarianism (the greatest good for the greatest number is the definition of "good"); deontology (there are long standing and well accepted rules of good and bad - do this, don't do that); vengeance (we must punish people to prove to them and others that there are consequences for actions that hurt us); and so on. When we look at the real world, there's no escape from treating people as if they have free will.
I found everything Nichols had to say to be relevant and well presented. He teaches his subject by explaining multiple opposed points of view and offering the strongest arguments he can both for and against each point. If he thinks some particular argument is clearly false, he says so, but if there is something to be said for an argument, he tries hard to find and say it. I tried to do the same thing in the six week or so sections on the existence of God that I taught in my Philosophy 101 courses when I was a grad student at the University of Illinois. I hope I did as good a job as Nichols did.
While I think that everything Nichols said was of interest, I personally am interested in diving a little deeper, or at least further, into an examination of the issues in physics, biology, and the philosophy thereof.
After lots of thinking, and admittedly only a very small part of the reading that Nichols has done, I'm inclined to think that free will and determinism are compatible but the compatibility has nothing to do with quantum mechanics and everything to do with logic, rationality, mental effort, and the constraints on one's will.
My friend Susan Bassein pointed me to a YouTube video by physicist Sabine Hossenfelder who argued that everything that happens was determined at the time of the Big Bang. At that time, all particles came into existence with certain masses, charges, and momenta. Over the approximately 13.8 billion years of time since the Big Bang, these particles collided with each other and the outcome of those collisions was fully determined by the specific nature of the momenta at the time of collision. Energy presumably also behaves in a similar deterministic way. In a subsequent YouTube lecture on "Superdeterminism", she argued, correctly I think, that, well, we can't really predict what will happen, even if we know all of the initial conditions, because there is random chance involved at the quantum level and that chance affects the collisions. However, she argues, correctly again I think (as if what I think matters), that free will is still ruled out because our wills don't have any more effect on particles that are randomly moved by quantum indeterminism. In other words, if we have no freedom because we are forced to do what we do by physics, adding random chance to what we do is not exactly what we mean by "freedom" of action. If my behavior is determined by a coin toss but still must do whatever the heads or tails means, how is that "freedom"?
I think the key to the problem has to do with what we mean by free will. Does it require that there be a supernatural force called "will" that is not based on matter? In other words do we live in a Cartesian dualist universe where two different types of stuff exist - matter and energy on the one hand, and spirit or soul on the other? I think the answer to that question is No. We have no empirical evidence for the existence of spirit or soul. We have much evidence, even if it's essentially negative evidence, that these things don't exist. When a living person dies we have, at best, individual claims by others that they have seen or communicated with a ghost but, as Hume pointed out in his essay Of Miracles logic requires us to dismiss these communications as hallucinations, illusions, dreams, or frauds. All of those are more likely than what would otherwise require miraculous supernatural events. The fact is that they can't be repeatably demonstrated the way any of the accepted scientific conclusions can be.
I think Nichols would agree that everyone who is not physically or psychologically damaged has the subjective experience of free will. We sometimes spend hours struggling to make a decision - something that we are compelled to do. We pay attention to reason. We think about pros and cons of our actions. It is true that our thinking about the pros and cons of a decision is a material process involving atoms and molecules organized into interanimating neural cells. But it is also true that the nature of the pros and cons, not the momenta of the acetylcholinesterase or the glutamate molecules, that can explain a person's decision, and it is the pros and cons that can be used by one person to explain a decision to another person or to recruit that other person into making the same decision that the first person made. And while the explanation of pros and cons can be made by two different people to justify their decisions, I'm not sure that there is any clear way that anyone could transfer his inner neurological processes to another person and there is no reason to believe that the neurological processes of two people are the same whether they agree or not about a decision.
If that is debatable then we can take another example from a different context. An electronic calculator implements the laws of arithmetic in its electronic circuitry and uses them to solve arithmetic problems. Another person could use a mechanical calculator to achieve the same thing. However by far the most reasonable and useful explanation of why two calculators produce the same conclusion is found in an arithmetic explanation, not an electronic or mechanical one. It may be that the two devices differ in the last digit of their calculations and that difference might be best explained by differences in their physical structures, but that's at the periphery of the problem. It is arithmetic that's at its core.
I think that most of us who are not physically or psychologically damaged and not forcibly constrained have free will in the sense of having the ability to make decisions based on pros and cons and other reasons. Belief in materialist determinism should not prevent our reaching that conclusion.
| Author | Francis, Dick |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books |
| Copyright Date | 1995 |
| Number of Pages | 420 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | June 2022 |
Private detective Sid Halley, a former champion horse racing jockey who lost his left hand in a racing accident, is asked to look into the night time amputation of one foot from a two year old race horse. He finds that it is part of a pattern. A number of other two year old race horses have been crippled in this way, often leading their owners to put them down, i.e., kill them. To his shock and dismay he discovers very convincing evidence that his good friend and extremely popular amateur "jump jockey", Ellis Quint, is responsible. Nobody believes Halley and he is himself condemned and shunned by the whole racing world for turning on his friend and attacking him for a crime that no one believes he could possibly have committed. When Quint's mother, Ginnie, jumps to her death from a high building, the condemnation of Halley is further increased and, at one point, Ellis' father attempts to murder Halley for causing the death of his wife as well as for causing problems for his son.
The story proceeds with Halley becoming more and more convinced that he's right and attempting to gather more evidence for his conclusion. He feels bad about turning on his friend but is also angry that his friend could cripple innocent horses causing great harm to the animals and to their owners. Going through riskier and riskier steps, Halley eventually discovers that a big company has banked its whole future on spending millions on a set of advertising videos they have made featuring Ellis Quint. If Quint is proven to have been a criminal they will have lost everything. They capture Halley and almost destroy his other hand before he succeeds in a harrowing escape. In the end, of course, Quint is proven to have been the culprit.
This book is said to be one of Francis' best and I can see why. It's close enough to the style and plot formulas of F's earlier novels to be easily recognized as his work, but there is a somewhat more sophistication and the danger to the main character is more complicated than in others of his books. Halley is not just in danger of physical harm, he's also being denounced and condemned by the entire racing community, the people he is most connected to in his life. The main racing newspaper is publishing inaccurate and nasty stories about him in spite of his past friendships and honest attempts to work with the journalist and manager who nevertheless keep stabbing him in the back with their false stories.
Quint is also an interesting character. Why is he crippling innocent horses? The answer has to do with a personality disorder, a psychotic streak in his mentality, not with any monetary gain. Why did he seem to try to kill Halley but then do just enough to enable him to escape from his captors and, when Quint's father attempted to murder Halley, Quint stepped in and killed his own father - an astonishing turn that Francis manages, in my opinion at least, to make plausible.
Come to Grief is the third Sid Halley book of the four that Francis published, and the 23rd of his books, that I've read. Like others of my repetitive favorites - Agatha Christie, Rex Stout, Elmore Leonard, and Michael Connelly - he's a mystery writer that I turn to for engagement and escape.
| Author | Child, Lincoln |
|---|---|
| Publication | Random House Audio, 2003 |
| Copyright Date | 2003 |
| Number of Pages | 528 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| When Read | July 2022 |
Dr. Andrew Warne, Carnegie-Mellon professor of computer science and expert in artificial intelligence and robotics, is requested by the Utopia amusement park outside of Las Vegas Nevada to come to the park and help with some problems they're having with technology that he designed for them. He arrives with his strong willed 14 year old daughter Georgia who is there to see the park. Warne learns that a boy was killed in a runaway roller coaster accident and then Warne himself was attacked by a robot ice cream vendor that Warne had designed and built. The cause of the mayhem becomes clear when the mastermind of a criminal gang shows up in the office of Sarah Boatwright, the Head of Park Operations and a former lover of Warne, and threatens that more people will die unless the Park meets the demands of the criminals.
The story develops with more exposition of the fabulous nature of the park and with a gradual revelation of the criminals shocking plans. New characters are introduced: Teresa "Terri" Banifacio, a key technical person who befriends Warne and his daughter; Fred Barksdale, a refined Englishman who is the head of systems; and Angus Poole an ex-CIA agent and all around dangerous man who happens to be at the park with his family and becomes a key ally in the fight against the criminals.
By the end we have learned that a gullible insider (Barksdale) had invited the gangsters in without understanding that they had no compunctions about killing people, including himself, and even destroying the park. Warne and Poole figure out what's going on and save the day with feats of daring-do.
I had expected some science fiction about artificial intelligence and robotics but there was only a very limited amount of that and it was all near the beginning of the story. By halfway through it was a conventional "thriller".
It was light reading but I enjoyed listening to it.
| Author | Lewis, John |
|---|---|
| Author | Jones, Brenda |
| Publication | New York: Hyperion |
| Copyright Date | 2012 |
| Number of Pages | 224 |
| Extras | Foreword by Douglas Brinkley |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Politics |
| Keywords | Racism; United States |
| When Read | July 2022 |
Born in 1940 to a family of deeply religious sharecropers in Alabama, Lewis grew up with a deep interest in helping people and in combating racism and discrimination in any form. He worked his way through college at the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville. He worked hard, took his beliefs to heart and, at age 23, became the Chairman of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, known as SNCC, often pronounced as "snick". During the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s Lewis marched in many of the most dangerous marches for Civil Rights, often being severely injured in beatings by police and vigilantes. He arrived at a point where beatings no longer much affected him. He would not run away because he was totally committed to the goal of equality and civil rights. He would not fight back because he was also committed to non-violence, believing as Gandhi did that a fight against the overwhelming armaments and strength of the police and the white supremacists could only be defeated by courage and love, driving the white supremacists to see their adversaries in a new way and with new respect.
Lewis was elected to the Congress as a representative of Atlanta Georgia in 1986. He served 17 terms, rising to become the senior representative of the state of Georgia and "dean of the Georgia congressional delegation" (Wikipedia) and also served as "chief deputy whip" of the Democratic Party. Douglas Brinkley, in his Foreward, says that Lewis was treated with affection and respected by conservative Republicans who disagreed strongly with Lewis' liberal political stance but trusted that he sincerely respected all people and would treat others with love and respect.
Here are some excerpts from the book:
-> How did you hold to nonviolence when a pounding wall of vicious hate was pushing through you like waves of fire during the protests and sit-ins of the Civil Rights Movement? How is it possible to be cracked on the head with a nightstick, left bleeding and unconscious on the trampled grass, and not raise your hand one time in self-defense? How could you bear the clear hypocrisy of being arrested on trumped-up charges and taken to jail for disturbing the peace when you were the one who was attacked and abused? How could you survive the unanswered threats, the bombings, and murders of a lineage of people, like Medgar Evers, Jimmie Lee Jackson, Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael "Mickey" Schwerner, without holding any bitterness or anger? The answer is simple. Faith.
...
-> People ask me, "How could you be arrested forty times in the movement and never press charges, never fight or strike back?" When people ask these questions, they perceive that I was being abused, when in reality, I was being freed. By the time I stood on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, I had no fear of physical harm or death. So when people ask me how I managed my fear in that moment, I can truthfully say I was not afraid. I knew by that time that no one had the power to injure me. I had taken that power away by experiencing the worst they could do and discovering it did not diminish me; it did not harm me; it set me free and moved my soul beyond the fear of death.
...
-> Even though we had been rejected by society, we believed that all people had the capacity to be good. We believed not only we, but the perpetrators of violence, were victims as well, who began their lives in innocence but were taught to hate, abuse, and draw distinctions between themselves and others.
...
-> I am here to tell you that among those of us who were at the heart of the movement, who fully imbibed the discipline and philosophy of nonviolence and viewed it as a reflection of profound truth, for those of us who accepted it not simply as a tactic but as a way of authentically living our lives—our sole purpose was, in fact, love. We would settle for the proceeds of justice and equal rights, but the force guiding our involvement was the desire to redeem the souls of our brothers and sisters who were beguiled by the illusion of superiority, taken in and so distorted by their false god that they were willing to destroy any contradiction of that faith.
...
-> Even as I walk the halls of Congress and pass my Republican colleagues, some of whom have proposed some of the most damaging legislation I have ever read in my entire career, I often say, "Hello, brother."
------------
John Lewis has achieved far, far more in his life than I have in mine. He has done far, far more for others than I have. He has made many sacrifices for others - his enemies as well as those who, like him, aspire to a society with equal rights for all. So when I say I don't agree with all of the things he asserts, I want it to be clear that I intend no criticism of him. I believe that he was a truly great human being. In comparison with my own weakness and inaction, I can only revere his strength and effort.
I'll begin by saying that I am not religious. I stopped believing in the existence of God when I was 16 years old, fully sixty years ago. I don't have Lewis' "faith". My rejection of religion is not a whim or an inadequately thought out position. I've read a good deal by numerous great philosophers and some theologians and just have not seen any evidence for the existence of God and have seen much evidence for a universe without a God. I also lack Lewis' confidence that we who agree with, admire, and appreciate his courage, his compassion, and his achievements will ultimately win, though I do think we have a fair chance in the long run. I can imagine two poles of belief, one in John Lewis and another, say, in a man like Henry Kissinger. Both belonged to oppressed minorities. Both fought for what they believed in. One attempted to purify his outlook and eliminate all doubt and all fear. The other complicated his outlook with more and more research into the nature of society. My heart (figuratively speaking) admires Lewis the most while my head admires Kissinger. I fought against Kissinger during my years of opposition to the Vietnam War and I still believe that I was on the right side and Kissinger on the wrong one. But I have come to admire his intelligence, his learning, and his attempt to do the right thing.
I'm glad I read this book. I have never met a man like John Lewis and only read about a few of them, notably Mohandas Gandhi. Whether or not I agree with his metaphysics, I certainly admire the man.
This was selected by our NCI Book Group. It was a good choice.
| Author | Watson, Peter |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Harper Collins |
| Copyright Date | 2005 |
| Number of Pages | 852 |
| Extras | citation notes (thousands of them), topical notes, index of names and places, index of ideas |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Intellectual history |
| When Read | July 2022 |
This is a history of what people thought from before language existed to the new scientific and other kinds of work at the turn of the 20th century. Obviously, Watson can't know much about what people thought before the invention of writing, and even less about what they thought before the invention of language - a time for which not even the illiterates of today can offer us subjects for study. However Watson is reasonably careful about what he says. He tells us what the different lines of thought are among the experts and historians of whatever period and subject he writes about. The subjects are wide ranging, from the cave art and sexual imagery of cave men, to the origin and development of religion, the rise of cities, the separate developments in Greece, Palestine, India, China, America, and elsewhere, the growth and changes in the worlds of art, music, and literature, the rise of different political systems and, of course, the growth of science.
Watson is a man with an extraordinary breadth of interests. He has degrees in psychology and music and a PhD in something or other. He worked as a psychologist and a journalist, wrote novels, wrote intellectual histories, wrote on politics, and I don't know what else. He strikes me as a relatively fearless writer, criticizing those people and ideas that he thinks need criticism.
I was very surprised by the scope of the book. I expected it to concentrate on science first, maybe social science next, and only tangentially (if that) on religion and the arts. I expected to read about Greek geometry, astronomy, and physics, with maybe secondary attention to Greek philosophy, theater, history, and democracy. I expected the fall of Rome to silence the author as Europe entered its "dark ages", and then re-awaken him with Copernicus theory of a heliocentric world and the great works of Isaac Newton that revolutionized physics. I expected to read about the development of telescopes and microscopes, the discoveries of magnetism and electricity, waves and particles, atoms, protons and electrons, quantum theory, and our new approaches to the universe. I expected to read about biology, the theory of evolution, and also about the great revolutions in technology, medicine, economy, and the rise of education and political democracies.
Watson did discuss those developments. He also discussed some underlying capabilities that made science possible like the development of Arabic (actually Indian according to Watson) numerals, the manufacture of paper and printing, and the growth of mathematics, and the implications of all these ideas, leading from navigation to time keeping to steam engines, and their further applications in the development of industry, transportation, and the growth of urban cultures. But he didn't stop there. He wrote about religion - the concentration of powers in the church in Christian Europe and the rebellion against the abuses of that power, leading to Luther and Calvin, new views of the Bible and even to atheism (I don't recall Watson saying that God didn't exist but other sources say that he is a declared atheist.)
Most surprising to me was the attention Watson paid to the publication of the Encyclopédie in France, and the development of Romanticism in the arts and Freudianism in psychology. He discussed Ibsen at some length. He discussed music and art.
I won't say more about the topics W covered. There were too many. I will say that they were about many subjects and that he did not ignore the world outside of Europe and the USA. There were significant sections on the middle east, India, China, and even on pre-Columbian America - an area not often covered in intellectual history.
I spent most of my reading time in June, 2022 with this book. It was long and slow reading and I often found myself re-reading passages. I sometimes found myself wondering why W was writing about this or that or some other thing. But all in all it was an interesting and rather mind expanding work.
| Author | Backman, Fredrik |
|---|---|
| Translators | Smith, Neil |
| Publication | New York: Atria Books, 2020 |
| Copyright Date | 2019 |
| Number of Pages | 352 |
| Genres | Fiction; Comedy |
| Keywords | Sweden |
| When Read | July 2022 |
In a Swedish town not too far from Stockholm a parent is at wits end because his spouse has taken up with another partner and has cut off the parent from money, house, and children. The separated parent is desperate but has no job and no income and is in desperate need of 6,500 kroner to pay a month's rent on an apartment where he can live and spend time with his children. The parent puts on a ski mask and attempts to rob a bank of exactly 6,500 kroner with a toy gun. Panicking when the robbery fails, the would be bank robber runs out of the bank, into the street, and into the nearest open doorway. That door leads up stairs to an apartment that is in the middle of an open house viewing to potential buyers. Two policemen, Jim and his son Jack, arrive on the street to watch the house and treat it as a hostage situation while waiting, as instructed, for more expert police to arrive from Stockholm.
Then, suddenly, we and the potential buyers learn that the bank robber is a woman, the toy gun is actually real, the woman didn't know the gun was real, and the people in the apartment sympathize with her and have decided to help her escape. The whole tenor of the book changes. Where everyone in the story so far has been described by themselves, the other characters, and the author as idiots, they now become people with whom we can sympathize.
In the end, the bank robber escapes, she is supported by one of the other characters to the extent that she can see her children again, and the investigation against her is dropped since no actual robbery took place.
Backman is an accomplished writer with many books and a number of best sellers to his credit. The comedy that he produces sort of works but, to me, it seemed overbalanced by the author's attitude of condescension to the characters and his manipulation of both the characters and the reader. Although he doesn't explicitly state the key facts, he writes as if the bank robber is a man, the gun is a toy, and the people are all idiots. The word "idiot" appears 58 times by my count while the word "wife" appears only 50 times, in spite of its importance in the stories of the "hostages" as well as the bank robber. Backman has to work hard to conceal the truth. He never used the personal pronouns "he", "him", "she", or "her" to refer to the bank robber, always using "the bank robber" in the first half of the book. It always seemed to me in that first half that all of the characters were being treated by the author with contempt. They were treated much more sympathetically in the second half but it seemed to me that there was a significant and jarring dissonance between the two halves.
Unless I missed them, there were no explanations of how all of this happened. Women typically have different voices and differently shaped bodies than men. Toy guns look and feel different from real ones and in Sweden toy guns must have orange color at the front to distinguish them from real ones (according to an article published on the Internet in 2021.)
The novel is a comedy. It's not meant to be taken seriously. Anyone who does take it seriously is missing the point. The high number of positive Amazon ratings (52,404 ratings with an average of 4.4 of 5 stars) proves that the book is heavily read and well liked. It achieved its goal and is clearly a success. I can't fault it. All I can say is that it's not the kind of book that appeals to me. I don't really enjoy laughing at idiots. I don't enjoy being manipulated by an author.
I read this book for the NCI book group. I'm curious to see how the other readers reacted to it and what they might think of my reaction.
Except for Elaine Mills, all of the book group members, including Elaine's husband Bob Kline, liked the book. They liked the high quality of the writing. They laughed at the misbehaviors of the characters. They convinced me that the bad behavior of the hostages when interrogated by the police was a justifiable part of the story. They weren't being idiots, they were protecting the "bank robber" from the police, concealing the person whom they understood was no criminal even though we readers didn't understand that until well into the story.
I should probably concede that the book was a good book, just not one that appealed to me.
| Author | Perez-Reverte, Arturo |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Spanish |
| Translators | Costa, Margaret Jull |
| Publication | New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2008 |
| Copyright Date | 2000 |
| Number of Pages | 304 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Spain |
| When Read | July 2022 |
In 1626 "Captain" Diego Alatriste and his 16 year old ward (and narrator of the story) Íñigo Balboa Aguirre have just returned to Spain from the war in Holland. Alatriste is recruited to go to Seville and, from there, lead a pirate like attack on a Spanish-Dutch ship that has arrived from the New World. It has a typical cargo but also a secret cargo of gold and silver. Alatriste's job is to recruit a band of armed "ruffians", take the ship, kill all potential witnesses, i.e., anyone aboard who did not jump into the sea, carry off the ingots and coins, and deliver them to another group of masked men waiting on shore. The project is organized by men representing the king, who, even after paying terrifically high wages to the ruffians, will make off with a great deal of money to finance his debts and his wars.
Alatriste boards the ship at night with a party of his weaker ruffians at the stern and, after they have engaged any guardians of the ship, A's best men will board at the bow, take the guards from behind, capture the ship, and murder any guards who are still alive. To A's surprise, the ship contains not only the Dutch Catholic sailors (men from Holland who are on the side of Spain), but also a party of Spanish ruffians led by A's old enemy Gualterio Malatesta who had been hired as guards. The battle is very close. A number of A's men are killed and more wounded, including Íñigo. But the attack from the rear is ultimately successful and Malatesta jumps over the side with a number of his men and swims away.
Alatriste and Íñigo have gotten a lot of money. The beautiful but dangerous girl that Íñigo has fallen for sees him a few times but gives him nothing but a kiss. The master and his ward hold lots of money and are set for the time being. The story of violence and corruption comes to a temporary end.
It is customary in historical adventure stories for the "good guys" to win the day but it's hard to see Alatriste as a good guy. He ordered the murder of the men who surrendered to his attack on the ship, and he did so even after he already knew that one man who could identify him (Malatesta) had escaped, making it likely that whoever hired Malatesta now knew that Alatriste had led the robbery. Alatriste, perhaps more than in other books I've read about him, is something of a cold blooded killer, a quality he shares with his nemesis Malatesta.
So be it. If Alatriste is not a high minded, highly moral man, Perez-Reverte is such a man. He tells what I take to be his understanding of the life of those times. The books are in a style that I take to be all Perez-Reverte's own. They are absorbing. I read them with the traditional desire to find out what is coming next.
| Author | Liu Cixin |
|---|---|
| Editor | Fout, Kim |
| Editor | Verbena, C.W. |
| Original Language | cn |
| Translators | Lieu Ken; Hanlon, Elizabeth; Haluza, Zac; Lanphier, Adam; Nahm, Holger |
| Publication | Beijing: Beijing Guomi Digital Technology Co. Ltd., 2013 |
| Copyright Date | 2011 |
| Number of Pages | 464 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction; Short stories |
| When Read | July 2022 |
The eleven stories, individually discussed in the comment section below, are titled:
The Wandering Earth
Scientists have discovered that the sun has begun a process whereby the fusion of hydrogen into helium accelerates and, in 400 years, a helium flash will occur and the sun will transform into a red dwarf swallowing and destroying the earth. Humans have begun a gigantic project to stop the rotation of the earth and propel our planet into an orbit of Proxima Centauri in 2,500 years. But 400 years passed and the helium flash hadn't occurred. Astronomers saw no sign of it on the sun. People revolt and destroy the government and its followers in a ruthless civil war. Then, at the end of the war, the flash occurs.
Mountain
The earth has been approached by what appears to be a gigantic spherical spaceship. It comes so near that a 30,000 foot mountain of water has developed under the force of gravity from the new sphere. Feng Fan, a dedicated mountain climber who is disappointed in life, resolves to swim up the mountain. He succeeds, and converses with the aliens in the ship. They part in friendship and Fan's life is transformed by achievement, wonder, and a new sense of purpose.
Of Ants and Dinosaurs
This story seems to be missing from the audiobook I listened to, but I did read another audio version (or perhaps just a different translation) of what I think is the same story published as a separate novella with the same title.
Sun of China
Young peasant Ah Quan is encouraged to go to Beijing and become a window washer where he makes good wages washing skyscrapers that scare most men. Then a satellite with a 120 mile diameter silk like reflector is built to beam energy to the earth and Ah Quan is hired, at even higher wages, to lead a team of washers to live three months on and off in the satellite and keep the giant reflector clean and repaired. In his time off he studies math, physics and astronomy, all of which he has come to love. 20 years later the satellite, now aged and obsolete, will be retired. Ah Quan convinces the controllers of the satellite not to trash it, but to give it to Ah Quan and a team of volunteers who will use its mirror as a sail and head off into space, aiming to visit other stars and sleep in between.
The Wages of Humanity
Mr. Smoothbore is a professional assassin trained to kill anyone he is paid to kill. He even kills his trainer, a man who has been a step father to him. He asks the man if it is right to kill anyone and the senior assassin says yes, if you are paid to do it. Smoothbore then kills his step father. Then he learns that an armada of spaceships has arrived around earth and the new arrivals have decided to move all humans who aren't killed to Australia. The leaders of humanity realize that those left alive must not include the most poverty stricken people because then the aliens will realize that poverty is a possible way of life for humans and will condemn everyone to it. They give away all their money to the poor and hire Smoothbore to finish off those who will not accept payment.
The story becomes complicated as Smoothbore learns that the origin planet of the aliens is now owned by a single man, the last capitalist, who has no use for anyone else.
Curse 5.0
In a future era of increasing computer control of society a series of computer viruses are designed to kill people using more and more dangerous techniques. The fifth virus, "Curse 5.0" finishes off the human race.
The Micro-age
A small group of explorers are sent out to find a new home for humanity due to a coming solar event that will render the earth uninhabitable. Most of the crew die over the long duration of the voyage, mostly in stasis. The last survivor makes it back to earth long after the solar event. He finds that the surviving humans are now micro sized, living successfully on the tiny amounts of usable warmth and food that the sun and the earth still produce. The "Forerunner" as the full sized human is known comes to believe that that these micro-age people are much better off than full sized humans and he destroys the zygotes or embryos put in his ship at the time of its exit from earth.
Devourer
An alien spaceship containing a civilization that we learn is descended from earth dinosaurs is working its way through the galaxy devouring entire planets, absorbing all of the water and all of the food products, including living animals and plants, and then continuing on to other planets. Humans resist, but not successfully. The last humans survive as tiny creatures of no interest to dinosaurs.
Taking Care of Gods
A large number of spaceships bearing elderly humans arrives at earth. They are the last people of a race that started life on earth and programmed evolution to eventually reproduce themselves in earthly humans. Now they live with such advanced technology that operates so automatically that the last human understanding of that technology is long gone and no one can repair it any more, but they have lived long enough and want only to live out their days on earth. Life in the Liu universe can be pretty tough.
With Her Eyes
In the not too distant future we have learned how to build vehicles that can carry people down into the heart of the earth. A man on the surface goes on a vacation out to a beautiful park like place. He is offered a pair of "eyes", glasses that capture everything one sees and re-transmit it to another owner of the same "eyes". The person with the other pair of eyes turns out to be a young woman who is the last survivor of a damaged and irretrievable ship stuck in the heart of the earth.
The Longest Fall
A man awakens after 74 years in cryogenic hibernation to find his cancer cured but a group of people who are aggrieved about the actions of his son kidnap him to send him to his death in a tunnel that goes through the entire earth. He is rescued by the police but the issues are not yet resolved.
In a quote published in The New Yorker Liu writes that, "the stories of science are far more magnificent, grand, involved, profound, thrilling, strange, terrifying, mysterious, and even emotional" in comparison with ordinary writing. He is one of the hardest of hard science fiction writers, i.e., writers that insist on realistic science. Those of us that appreciate that can be thrilled by the wide imagination that such hard science can produce. Some readers and writers think that adding magic and fantasy to their books increases the imaginative surprise and wide range of the stories. But us hard science readers feel just the opposite. Where's the thrill in reading about something that one knows is ridiculous and can never happen? What credibility does a writer have if he can just say anything he wants in an author ex-machina way? Okay, there are exceptions. Terry Pratchett's funny stories are full of magic. But they are comedies not intended to follow real paths.
When it comes to writing about difficult subjects Liu is fearless and relentless. He searches for the consequences of the actions that he posits. Sometimes they are good for the people in the story. Very often they are bad. Liu doesn't force the consequences to be what the reader wants. He forces the reader to see the consequences that may actually occur - even if the consequences are the physical destruction of planet Earth or the elimination of all of humanity by alien attacks. I presume that is one of his qualities that led to his prize winning status in the SF writing community.
Many SF writers follow the path of other novelists in writing satisfying, fulfilling, happy endings - but not Liu Cixin. He goes where the story leads him. If the earth must be destroyed and all of its people killed, well, Liu doesn't shy away from that. Now that he has reached such a pinnacle in the SF world I'm sure that his publishers don't shy away either.
| Author | Ishiguro, Kazuo |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Vintage International |
| Copyright Date | 1988 |
| Number of Pages | 276 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | August 2022 |
A man known as "Stevens" to his employer and his employer's friends and as "Mr. Stevens" to the staff that reports to him is the butler at Darlington Hall - the mansion handed down through the Lords Darlington of England and, after the death of the last Lord Darlington, the house occupied by the American millionaire Mr. John Farraday.
Stevens is a gentleman's gentleman. His task is to run the entire household from gardeners and groundsmen to cook and kitchen help to housekeeper, footmen, and maids. He is the perfect image of a careful, caring, committed, attentive, proper, dignified, self-effacing man. Whatever his employer tells him to do he does, generally without question or complaint. His father was also a butler and Stevens was raised with a deep sense of honor and service. His mission is not to do anything in particular for himself, his community, or his country, but only to serve his employer thereby helping the employer to do right by the rest of the world.
Stevens relates his experience with Lord Darlington. He helps his employer prepare the house with impeccable cleanliness and attention to detail. He serves dinner and wine, and directs any other servants involved in the affair. When Joachim von Ribbentrop comes to dinner to meet with Lord Darlington and various English upper class friends in hopes of winning Britain over to a policy of friendship with Nazi Germany, Stevens expresses no opinion, and indeed has no opinion, on the issue of whether this meeting is in the interest of the British people. He perceives that it is not his place to have, much less to express, opinions on such high matters. That is the place of Lord Darlington. When Lord Darlington discovers that two of the households maids who came into service six years before are Jewish, Stevens is ordered to dismiss them. Miss Kenton, the housekeeper and second in command in the household, gets angry at Stevens. She tells him that the young women have carried out their duties faithfully and competently. They must not be dismissed and if they are, she, Miss Kenton, threatens to quit her vital job. Stevens is upset by her threat. He entreats her to stay on. But ultimately, his place is to order the house in such a way as to enable Lord Darlington to perform his functions without any worries about his household. The butler's role is to acquiesce and comply - with respect and dignity. Miss Kenton is furious but does not carry out her threat. However she does, eventually, marry and leave the household.
Years later, when Darlington has died and Farraday has the house, Farraday plans a five week trip back to America. He tells Stevens that he, Stevens, may use the car and take his own vacation to see the sights around the southwest of England. Farraday will even pay for the gas. It turns out that Stevens had just recently received a letter from Miss Kenton saying that she has left her husband. He decides to work his way round to where she is now living in hopes of persuading her to return to Darlington Hall. The trip is interesting. Stevens has never traveled and seen his own country. He is pleased with what he finds and with his car, his clothing, and his elegant and restrained manner of speech, makes a grand impression on the common people who live in the places he visits - though he is uncomfortable with the adulation given to him which he is sure he has no right to receive. But his meeting with Miss Kenton, mentioned but not described, is a failure. She is going back to her husband, a personal as well as professional disappointment to Stevens. Sitting on a bench by the seashore a man sitting next to him tells him that he too is a butler, but not a grand one, being the only servant in the middle class house where he works. He tells Stevens that he comes out to the seashore in the evening whenever his work and the weather permit. It is the best part of the day. After he leaves Stevens ponders what the other man has told him and agrees that, yes, the remains of the day, conceived as a time of life as well as a time of day, can provide the peace and comfort that he desires.
What a wonderful novel this is, clearly deserving the Mann-Booker Prize awarded for it and contributing greatly to Ishiguro's Nobel Prize in Literature. Stevens narrates the story in first person with a restrained, dignified, honor bound, and service oriented personal style. His English is perfectly aligned with his role and his character - precise and sophisticated, yet also subservient and restrained. I doubt that very many writers can match it. The closest one I can think of at the moment is Jane Austen though she was writing from the point of view of the upper class side of the master/servant relationship. Ishiguro's writing is not as eloquent as Austen's, but it isn't meant to be. Stevens is not a member of the upper class or even the middle class. He is something like the most highly developed member of the lower class.
There's a scene in the novel in which Stevens relates a story he heard about the "dignity" of his own father, a story that he considered as epitomizing what it meant to be a dignified servant. Stevens senior was driving a car with three other butlers from other households as passengers when two of them started drinking and becoming more and more obnoxious in the way they spoke about employers, including the employer of Stevens senior. Senior stayed silent but was obviously becoming more and more offended. Finally he had had enough. He drove the car to the side of the road, turned off the engine, got out, and opened the backdoor where the two offenders were sitting. He didn't say anything and didn't move. He just stared intently at the two men. Seeing his serious demeanor they calmed down. Senior still held the door open and stared at them. They apologized for their bad behavior and promised to stop it. Senior got back in the car, said not a word about what had just transpired, and drove on as if nothing had happened. The fourth occupant of the car related the story to Stevens junior and they agreed that this was a defining example of dignity. I believe that it was a brilliant example of imagination on the part of Ishiguro.
Stevens lived a "dignified" life at the top of his profession but it was a very limited life. His feelings for Miss Kenton were never expressed. He could never admit them even to himself much less to Miss Kenton, but their relationship in Darlington hall, the eagerness of the trip to see her, the desire to bring her back to the Hall, all said what Stevens could not say in his narrative. It was a subtle appreciation of the Stevens' nature and a component part of Ishiguro's deep understanding of his character.
I had read Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun and watched an interview with him about it on YouTube. He struck me as a quiet, modest, and self-contained man, a man well equipped to understand a man like Stevens and, for that matter, an "artificial friend" like Klara. I rate him very high not only for writing this fine book, but for being the kind of man who understood his own nature and how he could use that in his writing.
I liked this book very much.
| Author | Shermer, Michael |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Times Books, Henry Holt and Company |
| Copyright Date | 2011 |
| Number of Pages | 400 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Psychology; Philosophy; Science |
| When Read | August 2022 |
Shermer grew up in families that were uninterested in religion but he became a religious person under the influence of a high school friend. He went to the Christian university, Pepperdine, intending to work in some religious role, but he became more interested in science. Then, at graduate school, he met and came under the influence of a brilliant science professor who convinced him that science, not religion, was the path to understanding.
After describing his own path to science in the opening of the book, Shermer goes on to teach his readers about science as the way to learn the truth about the world, and to warn them about all of the many ways that they can be misled, very often misleading themselves, when trying to understand the truth. His major premise, one that has significant amounts of scientific evidence behind it, is that people come to believe something for emotional reasons, for example under the influence of peers and social situations, and then search for reasons, including scientific reasons, to support what they have already chosen to believe or, as he phrases it in one chapter heading, "How Our Brains Convince Us That We Are Always Right". The ways that we can deceive ourselves are far more numerous than I and, no doubt, most readers might imagine. In what follows the quoted phrases are Shermer's, the parenthetical explanations are summary explanations in my own words.
Some examples of types of bias are:
"Confirmation bias" (views that support what I believe have more weight than ideas that don't - the mother of all biases);
"Hindsight bias" (now that I see what happened I consider that I knew it all along);
"Self-justification bias" (we can rationalize what we did before as being right, even if it appeared to be wrong);
"Attribution bias" (his success was due to luck and circumstance where mine was due to intelligence and hard work);
"Sunk-cost bias" (I've put much into this belief and can't just abandon it);
"Status quo bias" (it takes effort to do something other than what is already standard, people in one place with one status quo won't work to adopt its alternative and vice versa).
Observation, experience, controlled experiment, rules for running trials, determining null hypotheses, etc., can be difficult and tedious methods to employ. Peer review by experts before publication can be ego bruising. However, without methods like these, we can be pretty confidant that many of our assertions will be just false.
Shermer became a professor, a writer, and the founder of Skeptic magazine. He describes himself as a libertarian, a person with liberal values regarding civil and human rights and conservative values regarding economics. This book however does not appear to be an attempt to persuade anyone to join him in his views. His goal is to show us how easy and natural it is for our brains to come to false beliefs and conclusions. I didn't want to accept everything he said because, as he himself says, I have strong emotional reasons for many of my beliefs, plenty of rationalizations for them, and lots of long standing and rarely revisited objections to those who disagree with me. But I can see that I too am subject to the same biases as others.
Two of the issues at the center of Shermer's discussion, and correctly so I believe, are religion and politics. Personally, for me, my religion issues are resolved and, I believe, rest on established science. The scientific evidence for evolution is overwhelming. The evidence for the existence of God seems to me to be essentially non-existent and the descriptions of God's actions and characteristics are inconsistent with what we know about the world and the universe. This is not the right place to discuss the issues though there are notes on other books I have read that are relevant to them. However I will say that, whatever is true about the metaphysics of religious belief, I have a strong belief that a great many religious people have values that I too believe in and support. Many of them do far more to promote those values than I do. I respect and admire them and appreciate their contributions to humanity.
Politics is not as straightforward for me as religion. I have been a liberal democrat for many decades and, especially during the Vietnam War, flirted with Marxism-Leninism, Maoism, and Trotskyism. I retreated from those positions as I learned more though I still consider that the Marxist notions of historical materialism and support for the working class have much in their favor, I still consider the welfare of ordinary people to be more important than the indulgences of the billionaires. Nevertheless, I have moderated my views on socialism vs. capitalism. I long ago concluded that each of those systems can do certain things better than the other and both need to be utilized in the areas where they can do best. What Shermer made me see, or at least see more clearly, is that some of the principles supported by conservative Republicans, have more validity than I previously perceived. I'm still a liberal democrat. I will still support Bernie Sanders, or at least Joe Biden, over Republican candidates like Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger even though I deeply respect those Republicans as highly honorable, intelligent, and committed to American democracy. What Shermer did for me is show me that some core Republican beliefs about free enterprise, the importance of business, and the contributions of capitalism to ordinary people have some truth to them. I don't want a war between liberals and conservatives. I don't want the members of each party to condemn the members of the other. I want them to work together and compromise, and I want them to listen to each other. That's what democracy is about.
I will make an effort to set my biases aside, be more open to alternative points of view, and more rigorous in the methodology of my conclusions.
I believe that this is a useful book.
| Author | Maddow, Rachel |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Random House Audio |
| Copyright Date | 2019 |
| Number of Pages | 448 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History; Economics; Politics |
| Keywords | Energy |
| When Read | August 2022 |
Maddow's book is about what she says is the biggest single industry in the world - oil and gas drilling, refining, and distribution. She begins with the first oil well in the world, dug in Pennsylvania, and continues on through the era of presidencies of Donald Trump in the U.S.A. and Vladimir Putin in the Russian Federation, with lots of attention to Rex Tillerson, CEO of Exxon Mobil, the biggest oil company in the world, and later Secretary of State for President Trump in the U.S.
The industry is massive and, like most businesses both big and small, it exists for the purpose of making money for officers and shareholders in the U.S. and other democratic countries, and for government kleptocrats in countries like Russia, Venezuela, Equatorial Guinea, and other corrupt countries.
I learned a number of things from Maddow's book. One was that, in the United States, the industry exerts enormous power over the federal government and, in many cases, over state governments. Oklahoma is a particularly egregious case where enormous tax breaks were given to the industry and the Republican state government passed a law requiring that any statewide tax increase in Oklahoma could only be made if 75% of the state legislators approved it. The law effectively eliminated state tax increases on the very low taxed oil and gas industry as well as everywhere else and did tremendous harm to government institutions like the public school systems. Oklahoma reached almost to the bottom of American public school teacher salaries, book budgets, and other state supported education costs. Many teachers were reduced to spending their own already reduced salaries to provide services to their students that should have been paid for by the state.
Damage to the environment is also common in the oil and gas industries. A major example was the "Deepwater Horizon" spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, and major spills in other areas where, despite oil company rhetoric to the contrary, there was often inadequate protection against environmental damage and inadequate planning in new drilling. In Oklahoma, a state with stable hills and plains, the number and strength of earthquakes increased by orders of magnitude when natural gas "fracking" was conducted all over the state. Unsurprisingly, the companies denied any connection between earthquakes and gas drilling. Instead of working to discover the truth, they found ways to attack and expel scientists, legislators, and others who were researching and explaining the real situation.
The effects in the U.S. were terrible but the story of Russia is worse. Maddow argues that Russia's government corruption made it impossible for Russian oil and gas operations to properly develop. Individual oil and gas companies would develop expertise and increase production only to have government kleptocrats use force to make the owners and managers of those companies sell their companies to the big monopoly for pennies on the dollar. Incompetent kleptocrats and their hangers on would then replace the top people, steal the resources of their new acquisition, and buy yachts and palaces with the money. Maddow claims that most of the Russian companies are simply unable to manage the technical requirements of the industry except by contracting with western companies, of which Exxon Mobil is the most prominent, to organize and manage the operations for them.
Were things better under the Soviet government? Maddow doesn't say, but I don't recall much in the book that indicated that they were. Monopoly capitalism sounded better in its ability to handle the technology, although its unrestrained actions against citizens and the environment were perhaps no better. Capitalist operation under strong, responsible, and democratic governments were the best. Maddow cited Norway as perhaps the best with the U.S. at least among the better countries. Equatorial Guinea was the worst, where living standards actually declined when oil was discovered and the ruling elite stole everything in order to fritter it away in yachts, airplanes, Rolls Royce cars, and wild parties with movie stars in Europe and California. It's not clear that Russia is much better. No one but Putin knows how much money he has or controls but it's thought by some that he is the richest man in the world.
Blowout is a disturbing book but it's an intelligent, informative, and compelling read.
| Author | Macintyre, Ben |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Crown / Penguin Random House |
| Copyright Date | 2018 |
| Number of Pages | 348 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Cold War |
| When Read | August 2022 |
Oleg Gordievsky ("G"), born in Russia in 1938 the son of a KGB agent, enlisted in the KGB and began working in their foreign affairs departments, landing first in the Soviet embassy in Copenhagen and later in London, the place he most wanted to be. In 1968 with the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and suppression of the "Prague Spring" he began to have serious doubts about the morality of the Soviet government and its million employee secret police, the KGB. G had a good friend in the KGB who defected to the west. It stimulated him to think deeply about the work he was doing and whether, perhaps, the other side was in the right and the USSR in the wrong. He was thrilled by the openness of life in Copenhagen. He could read anything he wanted to read, listen to any music, go where he wanted and say what he wanted. Finally he made his decision. He contacted a British agent and, under the pretense of recruiting British agents to work for the Soviet Union, he offered to work for the British. He and MI6, the British spy agency, began a long term relationship that led to what was one of the most spectacular spy operations of the Cold War.
Over a period of years G brought unprecedented amounts of high level classified information to MI6 and in return received unprecedented amounts of "chicken feed" - true classified information from MI6 that was less important than it looked, or was misleading in other ways, that caused the KGB to believe that they were getting top level results from G's spying on the British. He was promoted. Eventually MI6 produced evidence that two of his three bosses were compromised and got the KGB to recall them. G was in line to take over the London operation. It would have been the highest level spy operation ever effected in Cold War history but G was, himself, compromised by the actions of a CIA double agent who is now in prison in the United States for betraying more than 20 Russian double agents working for Britain and America in return for millions of dollars paid to him by the KGB.
The end of the story was a real spy thriller. G could have simply defected to the British when he was ordered to return to Moscow. He didn't. Not sure that the KGB had discovered his work, he followed orders, returned, and was soon subjected to intense investigation. He was interrogated with truth serum, had his apartment bugged and setup with cameras, was followed everywhere he went, but the KGB was unable to prove that he was a double agent. As one person put it, KGB operatives didn't want to kill an innocent man because they knew that they too could someday be falsely accused and they didn't want to contribute to an atmosphere in which suspicion was enough to justify execution.
MI6 setup an "exfiltration" plan that required G to leave his apartment, escape from all people following him ("dry cleaning"), take a train to Leningrad, get picked up by a car with Brits in it that was only out of sight of followers for a few minutes, lie folded up in the trunk of the car sprayed with chemicals to mislead sniffer dogs and sedated with drugs. And that is just an outline of the whole experience.
I seem to recall that all of this happened in 1985. As of this writing 37 years later in 2022, G is still alive and living under an assumed name somewhere in Britain. G is carefully guarded by the British authorities. His wife, whom G never told that he was a double agent, felt betrayed by him and left him.
This is the third book by Macintyre that I've read. The other two (Agent Zigzag and Operation Mincemeat) were descriptions of spy operations in World War II. They were well written, interesting books. Unlike the others however, the spy at the center of this book was still alive at the time of publication as were many of the other people from G's family, from MI6, and from the KGB. I couldn't help wondering if Macintyre was revealing information that shouldn't be revealed. Did he tell enough to enable the inheritors of the KGB role in Russia to find him? Did he reveal techniques that would help spies work more effectively or help their pursuers to catch them more easily? There is some reason to believe that the post-Soviet FSB, successor to the KGB, is still interested in killing G and has made at least one attempt.
I read this book for the NCI Book Club. Almost all of the NCI club members agreed that it was a compelling read.
| Author | Alvarez, Julia |
|---|---|
| Publication | Recorded Books, 2007 |
| Copyright Date | 1991 |
| Number of Pages | 286 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | September 2022 |
The four Garcia sisters were born in the Dominican Republic, the daughters of Carlos (Papi) and Laura (Mami) Garcia. Carlos was a doctor, a traditional sort of man of the upper class, and an opponent of Generalissimo Rafael Trujillo, dictator of the Dominican Republic. The four girls are in order of age, Carla, the oldest; Sandra or "Sandy", Yolanda also known as "Yo" or "Yoyo", and Sofia or "Fifi". Threatened by Trujillo's corrupt and dangerous government, the family escaped to the United States in 1960 but the narrative opens later, in the 1970s, when the girls have grown up and are well educated in the language and culture of their new country. It then progresses (regresses?) backward in time, ending with chapters describing the situation as far back as 1960.
The novel is written in first person but might also be described as four person. Most of the chapters have one of the four girls as its narrator, relating her observations and experiences. They each relate their own personal narrative and also their views of their individual lives, the life of the family, the culture, and the situations in America and the Dominican Republic as a whole.
I knew the title, if not the contents, of the book when I decided to read it and expected a novel about the journey of the four daughters of the family from a Caribbean island to life in New York and their adaptation to American culture. There is that in the novel and it's very interestingly done, but the book is bigger than that and temporally oriented in the opposite direction - going from New York backwards in time to the Caribbean.
All of the main characters were women. The four daughters and the mother were all intelligent, sympathetic, and interesting. The father, Carlos, was more rigid and authoritarian in his household than he was in his politics, but Alvarez did not allow herself to treat him as anything less than a decent human being. Even though he reacted poorly when learning of Sofia's pregnancy his humanity eventually shone through.
I thought this novel sparkled with imagination, fascinating characters, interesting family dynamics and enlightening political and psychological insights. All of the girls and their mother were fully realized and fully distinct individuals. The audiobook with its four narrators who were masters of both Spanish Caribbean and American accents, was a delight to listen to.
I liked it a lot.
| Author | Hanson, Norman |
|---|---|
| Publication | U.K.: Silvertail Books, 2016 |
| Copyright Date | 1979 |
| Number of Pages | 304 |
| Extras | glossary, photos |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History; Memoir |
| Keywords | World War II; Aviation |
| When Read | September 2022 |
Norman Hanson, known to all of his comrades as "Hans", joined the Royal Navy in July of 1940 at the already mature age of 26. He aimed to become a pilot. His training was extensive in England, the United States (even before the U.S. joined the war), Egypt, and later in the South Seas. If I remember correctly, about two years passed before his first flight to or from an aircraft carrier, and another two before he saw actual combat against the Japanese.
Hanson wrote a lot about the culture of the airmen - drinking and carousing, looking for women (related in a gentlemanly English style), and music. He was an able pianist and his talent was much in demand by his comrades during the war. At one point, while his squadron was serving on an American carrier, he was more or less drafted into a band of Americans who had been professional musicians before the war. He had never played with professionals before and learned a lot.
Great Britain didn't have an ideal plane for carrier combat in the Pacific. Spitfires converted to "Seafires" were fast and maneuverable but lacked the required range and bomb load. As the war progressed, the Royal Navy carriers began to use the new American Chance Vought Corsair fighter bombers - excellent warplanes but hard for pilots to handle. Hans became a corsair pilot and then the commander of a squadron of Corsairs on the Royal Navy carrier Illustrious. They went into action in the South Pacific in a fleet of four carriers - Illustrious, Victorious, Indomitable, and Indefatigable, later joined by Formidable. April 13, 1945 was the last day of operations for Illustrious. It was sent back to England (for refitting I think.) The war was finally over for Norman Hanson and his shipmates.
Four years of training to prepare for about a year of actual combat might have been common in all air forces before the war, but would surely have been a blessing to any German or Japanese pilot once the war was fully underway. Hans had his four years while pilots in Germany, Japan, Italy, and the USSR were thrown into combat whether ready or not. And yet, even in training, the death rate in carrier pilot training was pretty high. Men died because they were too tired when they made it back to the carrier to fly alertly, or because they went into the ocean but couldn't get out of their cockpits before being dragged down, or because slight errors sent them into the sea on takeoff or in landing, or because battle damage to the undercarriage caused a plane to collapse on deck with no safe place to slide to, or because a mistake by a technician caused an accident, or because ... who knows what. In one sense it was not a hard life. The men loved flying and made strong friendships in their squadrons. But even if it wasn't a bad life, it was life riven with sudden death due to mistakes, inattention, enemy action, or what we sometimes call acts of God that could occur in seconds or fractions of seconds. I'm not aware of any military job in World War II in which more men died in training accidents than died in naval aviation.
Hanson died not long after finishing this book. His efforts in the war contributed to the freedom of people all over the world and his book was a contribution to those of us who came after.
| Author | Connelly, Michael |
|---|---|
| Publication | Hachette Audio, 2001 |
| Copyright Date | 2001 |
| Number of Pages | 418 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | September 2022 |
Terry McCaleb, an experienced but now retired detective much like Harry Bosch, lives with his wife and young daughter. He is alive by virtue of a transplanted heart. Against his wife Graciela's wishes, McCaleb agrees to assist Sheriff's detective Jaye Winston in investigating an old unsolved murder case that had once been investigated but not solved by Harry Bosch.
A number of surprising bits of evidence are found in the case, all relating to the famous painter Hieronymous Bosch, after whom Harry Bosch had been named. There were references to killing people. There was a plastic owl, symbolic of evil in the Bosch paintings. McCaleb and Winston began to suspect that Harry Bosch was, himself, a murderer who had planted the references to the old Hieronymous in a psychotic effort to impose the Bosch image on events, perhaps to purposely put himself at risk, or perhaps to stamp his brand on the man he killed, somehow making it clear to posterity, even if not to the active investigation, that he, Harry Bosch, had exacted revenge on a murderer who had gotten away with murder but would not get away from Harry Bosch.
The background of the case was a current prosecution of a Hollywood actor accused of murdering a woman who was found dead. It appeared that she had been attempting to heighten her sexual pleasure during masturbation by choking herself with a rope. The actor claimed this had nothing to do with him even though the woman had been out on a date with him on the night of the murder. Harry Bosch (the detective, not the painter) was investigating the case as a murder and had accumulated some evidence that the actor was indeed responsible.
In the end, McCaleb discovers the true identity of the murderer and is himself in the process of being murdered when Bosch shows up and saves his life - bringing down the real murderers.
As in Connelly's other books, the story is intense. The use of a different principal character, McCaleb instead of Bosch, is effective. McCaleb is physically limited by his transplanted heart and is torn between his growing interest in the case and his wife's growing irritation at his participation in a murder investigation for which he has been sacrificing the interests of his family for the interests of a dead woman who has no relation to him. It's a growing tension in the novel.
Connelly is compelling in all aspects of the novel. He handles police actions with deep understanding of the realities of their work and handles the case in court with his very deep knowledge of what actally happens in murder cases in court. The courtroom scenes are as absorbing as the investigations.
All in all, it is a fine novel.
| Author | O'Farrell, Maggie |
|---|---|
| Publication | Tinder Press, 2020 |
| Copyright Date | 2020 |
| Number of Pages | 320 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Shakespeare |
| When Read | September 2022 |
In the household of a glovemaker a young son who teaches Latin pursues and wins the love of Agnes, the daughter of a local farm family. It is near the end of the sixteenth century, in Stratford England, a town not far from London. The young man's father makes him a salesman and sends him to London to sell gloves but the young husband is enchanted by the London theater and goes home less and less often. He practically disappears from the story for a long period during which Agnes raises the couple's three children, Susanna and the twins, Hamnet and Judith. The family lives partly on money sent by the husband from London, partly on Agnes' income as a respected herbalist. They live in the house of the glovemaker and his wife.
The husband re-enters the story when Agnes, angry at him for his disappearance from the family's life, goes to London to find him. She is convinced that he has taken up with some hussy from the theater and has abandoned his wife and children. Then she is shocked to find out that he, her presumed badly behaving husband, has become a huge celebrity with a big income that he uses to buy a fine house in Stratford for Agnes and the children.
Hamnet, brother of Judith, is introduced early but plays only a small role in the story until the end. A dangerous virus has reached England from its last known origin in the Middle East. It infects Judith, whose life is endangered. Hamnet runs around the empty house and outside trying to find his mother or one of his grandparents, returning to Judith without them. Then he too is infected. While Judith recovers Hamnet sickens and dies.
The book was written with what appeared to me to be a determination to conceal the identity of these people. The names "Shakespeare", "Hamlet", and "Hathaway" (as in Anne Hathaway) do not appear in the novel proper, only appearing before the beginning and/or after the end of the book. Why was this done? Was it perhaps to wean people away from everything they knew about Shakespeare and goad them into reading a story of real people rather than literary icons? Were the name revelations in the added material at the beginning and end of the book done because of pressure by the publisher? I don't know but whatever the cause, the book was successful. As of Feb 6, 2023, there were 47,077 Amazon ratings.
Hamnet was not the kind of book I most like to read. Shakespeared appears in the book but he's not well described and his great achievements played no real, i.e.,literary, role in the story. Hamnet, the title character, is also not well fleshed out. Agnes plays the largest role, but not one that readers such as myself might identify with or take a great interest in.
Am I being fair to O'Farrell? Maybe not. But she doesn't need my insignificant vote to polish her victory in the best seller lineup.
Read for the NCI book group.
I have only now finished writing up this book. I get wound up in other books and other activities and leave out note taking for too long to do justice to the books.
| Author | Grisham, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | Bantam Doubleday Dell Audio Publishing |
| Copyright Date | 1988 |
| Number of Pages | 496 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| Keywords | Racism; Legal |
| When Read | October 2022 |
Two young, drunken, lawless, total lowlife white men in Mississippi capture a ten year old black girl and have fun raping, beating, and torturing her, then leaving her for dead. The girl is found, still alive, and taken to a hospital where great efforts eventually save her life. Ozzie Walsh, the only black sheriff in Mississippi, finds the two criminals in no time at all and puts them in jail to be tried but the girl's father, Carl Lee Hailey, has other ideas about what should happen to them. Furious and determined, he gets hold of a fully automatic M-16 like the one he used in Vietnam, hides in a closet on the steps leading down from the courtroom, bursts out as the two criminals pass, and shoots them dead, accidentally injuring a deputy in the process. He is arrested for murder and the real story begins. Carl Lee engages 32 year old lawyer Jake Brigance to defend him. Carl Lee is unable to come up with a full payment but Jake knows that this trial will produce a huge amount of publicity and he may become the best known, and most desired, lawyer in Mississippi. The rest of the book covers the trial together with related actions by the NAACP, the Ku Klux Klan, the families of Jake and Carl Lee, and the uproar in both the black and white communities of the (fictional) town of Clanton in (the fictional) Ford County in Mississippi.
This was Grisham's first published novel and started him on a path of producing a string of best sellers.
This is the thirteenth Grisham novel I have read. Having read so many, I have always been curious about this first one, the one that launched such a successful writing career. I was not disappointed. Grisham combined a deep mastery of legal and courtroom rules and procedures with a set of fascinating characters and an ability to put together a compelling plot. The reader is pulled in by the threats and tensions both in and outside the courtroom. Two attempts are made to burn down Jake's house and kill his whole family, and another to assassinate him by a sniper attack. Jake's wife is terrified and insistent that Jake must abandon the case but Jake is equally insistent that he will not. There also are efforts by other lawyers to shove Jake out of the case and take it over themselves, including an effort by a high priced and deeply experienced lawyer working for gangsters, and another by the even more experienced NAACP. It is a no holds barred contest to see who will handle the case and Jake, a determined fighter for himself as much as any of his opponents are for themselves, wins. The reader can't be sure that Jake is the best lawyer for the job but when he wins in the end it is clear that he did the job that Carl Lee needed.
There were some surprises in the story. Jake is obviously a man who treats blacks and whites equally. We might expect he is a political liberal yet he is a strong supporter of the death penalty. He thought, for example, that the two creeps who raped and attempted to murder the little girl deserved to die and that Carl Lee did the right and heroic thing to kill them - a punishment that they would not have had because they hadn't succeeded in killing anyone. Was Grisham giving us his own views here? I don't know. Personally, I believe that Jake was not so much wrong in his arguments as he was ignoring other considerations that I believe should be included in a discussion of the issue. But then G was not writing a book on ethical philosophy. The argument he presented was well stated in its context.
More surprising were the dangling, unresolved pieces of the plot. Jake sent his wife and daughter to her parents' house in Wilmington NC. By the end of the novel, Mrs. Brigance still hadn't been told by Jake that their beautiful and historic house was burned to the ground and all of the family possessions were destroyed. Jake kept putting off telling her, sometimes blabbing to his friends that he was going to rebuild it before his wife found out - an impossible and, in any case, foolish solution. Jake's assistant, a third year law student who volunteered her exceptionally competent services in order to learn about this famous case, was kidnapped, raped, beaten and otherwise damaged by KKK goons. We learn that she survived and would recover, but we never see her again in the story. The KKK had committed all of these violent acts but, although Sheriff Walsh caught two of them he could not make them expose the others. As the story ends, Jake and Carl Lee are both still alive and there's no reason to hope that the KKK has given up in its determination to kill them. Was this all resolved in subsequent Jake Brigance series novels?
All surprises and quibbles aside, this first novel already showed Grisham's very intelligent and powerful writing ability. I still enjoy his books and may very well read more before I'm done. I should also note that Michael Beck did a fabulous job as narrator of the novel with separate voices for each character and impressive accents for blacks and whites of various classes.
A good book.
| Author | Erdrich, Louise |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Harper Collins |
| Copyright Date | 2021 |
| Number of Pages | 464 |
| Extras | Afterword, My Grandfather's Letters |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | American Indians |
| When Read | October 2022 |
The novel opens on an Indian reservation in North Dakota in 1953. Conditions are difficult. There are few jobs in the area. Resources are very limited. Over the years, more and more of the best agricultural land has been carved out of the reservation and appropriated by white people and corporations leaving less and less for the Indians. In 1953, a Mormon senator from Utah attempted to "terminate" a number of American Indian tribes, withdrawing all recognition of their special status as Indians and terminating what remained of the treaties that were signed between the tribes and the U.S. government in the 19th century. The senator presents this action as a pro-Indian maneuver. It will make the Indians full citizens of the United States, not some sort of inferior people who must be treated as children on a reservation. Thomas Wazhashk, the night watchman at a local factory, donates all of his skills and all of the work he can possibly do without physically collapsing, in an attempt to prevent the senator's plans from bearing fruit.
Patrice "Pixie" Paranteau is a young woman of the tribe who works in the local factory and is pursued by all of the eligible young, and sometimes not so young, men. The men of real interest are Lloyd Barnes, a very decent middle aged white man who teaches math and coaches boxing at the high school, and his best student in both math and boxing, a boy known as "Wood Mountain". Patrice doesn't pay much attention to either man. It's only over time that she comes to see some benefit in having a boyfriend or a husband.
Patrice hates the nickname Pixie but can't get people to call her Patrice. Worrying about her elder sister Vera who moved with her new husband and child to Minneapolis and then disappeared, Patrice goes to Minneapolis where she is immediately recruited to work in a strip joint. She is given a noxious costume to wear while swimming in a glass tank, earning a pile of money which she takes and runs off with to find Vera before the job kills her. She survives mainly because Wood Mountain comes to Minneapolis to find her and give her what protection he can.
Meanwhile, Thomas Wazhashk is doing everything humanly possible to win friends among whites and Indians to stop the dissolution of the tribe and loss of what's left of the reservation. In the end, he succeeds.
The book is fiction but the story of the reservation is apparently true. It's based on the letters of the author's grandfather.
This was an interesting book, filled with interesting characters doing their best to live decent lives in an indecent environment. For the most part, they succeed.
Read for the NCI book group.
| Author | Philyaw, Deesha |
|---|---|
| Publication | Morgantown, West Virginia: West Virginia University Press, 2020 |
| Copyright Date | 2020 |
| Number of Pages | 189 |
| Genres | Fiction; Short stories |
| Keywords | Sex; Race |
| When Read | December 2022 |
This is a collection of nine short stories each narrated by an unmarried black female, the youngest starting out in childhood and the others at varying ages. The topics are about personal and family life. The titles are:
Eula - Two women have been close friends for half their lives. One is a serious Christian, the other, the narrator of the story, not so much. The Christian wants a conventional marriage to build a conventional family, but she likes a little sex play with her friend while waiting for her aspiration to happen.
Not Daniel - At a hospital where her mother is dying of cancer, a woman meets a man whose mother is also in the hospital dying of cancer. She mistakenly imagines the man to be Daniel McMurray, a boy she liked in junior high school. She and Not Daniel have sex in the back of her car.
Dear Sister - A Woman named Nichelle writes to her youngest sister Jackie to let her know that their father has just died. She goes on to write about all the people in the family from their grandma (who is slipping into dementia) to all the five sisters and their uncles and aunts.
Peach Cobbler - A teenage girl's mother cooks a large peach cobbler every day but doesn't allow her young daughter to eat any of it. It's all for Reverend Troy Neely who comes by every Monday to eat the cobbler and retire to the bedroom with the mother. The girl belives he is God because he leads the Sunday prayers in church and because after he retires to the bedroom with the mother the girl hears her mother calling "Oh God, Oh God"). It's a hard, lonely, constrained life for the girl.
Snowfall - Arletha, a.k.a. LeeLee, has left her home in the South and gone wih her friend and partner Rhonda to teach in a northern university. They hate the cold winters that force them to freeze and shovel snow. LeeLee and her mom still call each other but LeeLee's lifestyle is unacceptable to her mother. Rhonda hasn't seen her mother for twenty years. LeeLee says, "Babe ... the space my mother has left for me isn't big enough for two."
How to Make Love to a Physicist - Lyra James, working in the arts meets Eric Turman, a physicist, at an academic conference. They are among the few black people there. Lyra is more and more attracted to Eric and he also to her. For what this reader takes to be neurotic reasons, Lyra becomes more and more doubtful and conflicted and less and less responsive to his calls. Her therapist asks, "Is this another example of you talking yourself out of potentially good things?" But in the end Eric overcomes her fears and they get together. How do you make love to a physicist? "With your whole self, quivering, lush, unafraid."
Jael - The narration switches multiple times from Jael to her grandmother and back. Jael is caring but alienated, suspicious, misunderstood and discontented. Granny is caring but conventional and misunderstanding of the girl, caught between love and disapproval of her granddaughter. It's one of the longer stories.
Instructions for Married Christian Husbands - This is a monolog on multiple topics in multiple subchapters of all the thoughts that the narrator wishes she could convey to the married men who engage with her. She begins with: "You, the infantilized husbands of accomplished godly women, are especially low-hanging fruit. Ripe for the picking with little effort on my part." There is no bitterness in her message but no romantic self-deception either. About herself she says "The less you know, the better. And that works both ways." It's a cynical but astonishingly open account.
When Eddie Levert Comes - "Mama" and "Daughter" live together. Daughter's father is dead, as is an older brother, and of the surviving relatives, it is only Daughter who takes care of her mother who is now slipping into dementia. Every day of her demented life Mama wakes up and tells Daughter that she has to pick out her best clothes because Eddie Levert, Mama's crush in high school, is coming to see her that day. Mama has not actually seen or heard from Eddie in decades but he, of all people that Mama remembers, is still alive in her mind. Daughter is sacrificing her life to care for Mama but is barely noticed by her mother. Mama is only dimly aware of who Daughter is.
---
Each story is narrated by an unmarried black female, the youngest starting out in childhood and the oldest, I think, in middle age. All of them grapple with problems in human relationships: sex with men, often married men; sex with other women; difficulties between mother and daughter or grandmother and daughter; or some combination of these relationship issues. In all cases, I think, the female narrators want to be good to the others in their lives but it's never easy for them to do and their efforts are not always rewarded. But, rewarded or not, life goes on and the women make of it the best that they can.
It often happens in my reading that it takes me a while to come to terms with a book. Is it meant to be a serious and realistic book and, if it is, does it succeed? How much can I trust the author to understand reality? How deeply should I engage with the book?
After reading a couple of the stories it became clear to me that this was a worthwhile book, very much worth reading. It taught me things about how women may engage with men, and with mothers, sisters, and grandmothers. It's a brave book that offered rare insights into sex from different women's points of view. It showed me things about the culture of the black community in the American south. It's more than a collection of interesting stories. I think it stood out as a thoughtful and well written book - worth the multiple honors that it was awarded.
It's a brave book. It contains the kind of thoughts that if a person writes them down and publishes them she must wonder what what other people will think about her. Philyaw talks about relations between men and women in raw and bold ways. In Instructions for Married Christian Husbands the narrator speaks to the men that she dates - married men who go to church but cheat on their wives. This is treated as a normal and maybe even sought after way of life, not necessarily to be avoided much less condemned. The "instructions" in the title of the story are mostly about sex. The men must wear condoms and if that doesn't work for them then, too bad, they can go back to their wives. They are not to pretend that they are engaging in romance or even that they are cheating on their wives. They're just doing what people do. Foreplay isn't required and may actually just be boring. Let's get down to basics and not fool ourselves about what we're doing. In another story she writes "He runs his hands over your thighs, your breasts, your free stomach. ... How do you make love to a physicist? With your whole self, quivering, lush, unafraid."
Philyaw writes in different voices, or perhaps we can say different dialects. At one extreme the English language can be quite sophisticated. At the other it can be a very convincing vernacular of black Americans living in their own culture. Philyaw handles both with ease and can be very expressive in either one. She gets right down to real life in either one.
I read the book with the NCI book group. If I remember correctly, all of the members reported liking the book a lot though some, including me, took some time to adjust and come to terms with it.
| Author | Banks, Iain M. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Pocket Books, Simon and Schuster, 2002 |
| Copyright Date | 2000 |
| Number of Pages | 433 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | December 2022 |
800 years after the Idiran War, the Chelgrian (an alien species), Cr. Ziller, is living on the huge Masaq' Orbital where he is composing a great symphony to be premiered at the exact time when the huge light burst created 800 years before by a supernova induced by the Idirans will reach Masaq'. At the same time another Chelgrian, Major Quilan, is being prepared by other Chelgrians to arrive at Masaq' to hear the concert. As the novel develops, we learn that Quilan has been devastated by the loss of his wife in a terrible war. Ziller however wants nothing to do with Chelgria, Chelgrians, or Quilan. He insists to the Masaq' Mind, through its avatar, that he will not conduct the symphony or even watch and hear it played, if Quilan is in the audience. It is only fairly late in the novel that we learn that Quilan is being prepared, not to watch a symphony, but to fire a weapon that will cause the death of five billion souls on Masaq' Orbital in revenge against the loss of five billion Chelgrians caused by Masaq during a long finished war. The arguments for this act of revenge are examined at some length but were not credible to this reader and should have been, but were not, rejected by Quilan.
In the end, the symphony is played, Quilan is, as he wished to be, killed without any preservation of his mind, his "soul" for residence in an AI, a number of other Chelgrians are tortured to death, and the Mind of Masaq' is also destroyed and replaced by another Mind of the Culture
Who are we? Where did we come from? Where are we going? What is our role in the extraordinary "River Out of Eden" as Richard Dawkins characterized the ongoing evolution of human beings in his book about the continuing development of the "river" of continuously evolving DNA. I am a twentieth and now also twenty-first century human being, accustomed to the lifestyle appropriate to our technology. I understand industrialism, trains, automobiles, telephones, radio, television, and the Internet. My life is different from the lives of those people who only knew horses for transportation and printed paper for communication. Their lives were different from the lives of those who knew no printing, no astronomy, and no medicine. Those of us who are alive today can take advantage of all that we have. We can read thousands of different books, select from among thousands of movies to watch, and visit places almost anywhere we wish in the world, doing so in considerable comfort. We are settled in one phase of human development, a phase that may well change in the next 100-200 years as much or more as it changed in the period before us.
I want to know where we are headed. I want to know what lives will be like a piddling 100 years or 1,000 years in the future. I want to at least get some suggestions about who and what our descendents will be. I know that even the scientists have only limited ideas of where we are going. I know that if we get two top scientists to offer opinions they may come up with radically different ideas and we readers, even including the scientists among us, may be unable to guess which one is right. In fact we'll mostly guess that both are wrong.
Unlike Dawkins, Banks was not a scientist. According to the Wikipedia, he studied English, philosophy (good man!) and psychology in college. However, his talent for what I think of as "scientific imagination" was very high. He could imagine humans like the one in The Player of Games who played all sorts of games from chess to whatever and who found themselves selected and, one has to say, manipulated by higher minds because of their skill. That book was the one that gave me a deeper interest in Banks. Banks goes in a similar but different direction in this book. He adds more ideas. He makes me feel that I am part of a vast evolution of intelligence, an evolution that will probably lead to minds that, compared to ours, will be like ours compared to apes and monkeys.
Banks can't tell us our future, but he can expand the horizons of our thinking about it.
| Author | Pfeiffer, Daniel |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Twelve, Hachette Book Group, 2022 |
| Copyright Date | 2022 |
| Number of Pages | 314 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Politics |
| Keywords | Democracy |
| When Read | December 2022 |
Pfeiffer explains the inner workings of right wing Republican controlled news and propaganda organizations like Fox News and the Sinclair Broadcast Group (which, as of this writing) operates and coordinates political messaging for television and radio stations across the country. Different sources give very different numbers of stations but the Wikipedia currently says there are 193 TV stations in the Sinclair group.
P argues that Facebook is even more important and reaches more people with right wing messaging than the right wing news stations. According to one Internet source (https://backlinko.com/facebook-users) there are 2.9 billion monthly and 1.9 billion daily users of Facebook, with 200 million users in the United States. P explains that Facebook makes its money by selling advertising, which in turn is stimulated by total viewership of ads. Facebook's algorithms detect and count members viewing specific content and, when some content attracts viewers Facebook's algorithms will push that content forward. The content that attracts the biggest interest is content that stimulates fear, rage, astonishment, passion, hysteria, and so on. It's "fake news" on steroids. It can be produced by any political publisher or party, but it is most effective when it contains spectacular bullshit and, as P convincingly argues, when it's full of misinformation and disinformation designed, not to spread the truth, but to overwhelm the truth with tons of BS that stimulate anger and fear. Pfeiffer argues for non-stop combat against the huge volumes of fake news produced by the Republicans. He admits that it's very hard, if not impossible, to convince Republican stalwarts by means of honest evidence and rational argument, but he believes we can still make progress by working to fire up the large numbers of Democrats to get off their butts and engage with Republicans in the political world.
Dan Pfeiffer worked in politics starting as far back as the Clinton administration, he worked on Al Gore's campaign for President, then Obama's campaign, and after Obama's victory, he worked in the White House communications office. Within a year he was appointed White House Communications Director. He worked to get out the administration's "message", to coordinate communications with the press, to find out what impact the message had on voters, and so on. These were important tasks that brought him into touch with many important people and wide ranging and intense experience in politics. He achieved high rank and worked with top people in the Obama administration.
For the first two thirds of the book I felt very frustrated by P's breezy and often comical approach to the topics. He hardly ever cites the exact sources of the evidence that he invokes for his arguments. I felt like I only had his word for many of his claims and not a few of those were at least somewhat contentious. However as time went by I set those feelings aside and listened his subjective output with more appreciation of the extent of his political experience. He cites organizations that are doing the things he wants more of. They include "Crooked Media", "DemCast", "Courier Newsroom", "Push Black", "More Perfect Union", "SwingLeft", and P's own "Pod Save America". I hadn't heard of any of these organizations before reading this book and I doubt if all of them together have the impact of a single Breitbart News much less Sinclair Broadcasting or Fox News. But what can you do? Sitting back and doing nothing won't overwhelm the Trumpers and, if democracy is going to die, we should at least go down fighting.
| Author | Davis, Lindsey |
|---|---|
| Publication | Hodder and Stoughton / Hachette, 2012 |
| Copyright Date | 2012 |
| Number of Pages | 464 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Roman Empire |
| When Read | December 2022 |
Domitian was named Emperor of Rome in 81 AD and ruled until his assassination in 96 AD. He was the first emperor to declare himself as Master and God during his lifetime. Domitian is not the main character or even the subject of this book but his 15 year reign sets the historical background and time boundaries that are the context for the story.
The first main character is Gaius Vinius Clodianus, a Roman soldier who saved the life of Domitian in battle at the cost of one of his own eyes plus much damage to one side of his face and who was rewarded by being made an officer in the Vigiles - men whose job it was to fight crime, fires, and other bad things that happen in the city of Rome. The second and equally important character is Flavia Lucilla, a slave freed at a young age who became a hairdresser for important women in Rome. She had gone to the Vigiles to complain about her domestic position and met Claudius Vinius who helped her out and set Lucilla straight about the facts of life in Rome. The story is about the gradual development of an engaging romantic relationship between the two.
In the end, Domitian becomes crazier and crazier and the more responsible of the high ranking citizens decide to assassinate him. Gaius Vinius is not the man appointed to do the deed but his standing with Domitian for having once saved the emperor's life plus his experience as a soldier puts him next in line to finish the job. When the first assassin botches the job Gaius Vinius, who in his role as a long standing reliable government agent and one time savior of Domitian is able to walk right into the palace by nodding to the guards and finish the job. He and Lucilla then get out of Rome as fast as they can and try to start a new life.
All of the three previous books by Davis I've read were in the Marcus Didius Falco series. I was curious to see how she would perform with something other than the traditional English and American styles of murder mystery. I thought she did quite well. As in her other books, she works hard at attempting to understand and present the politics, economics, and general life of the Roman Empire. I'm not qualified to say whether she succeeded or not but she impressed me. I found her version to be credible and informative.
| Author | Appelfeld, Aharon |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Hebrew |
| Translators | Bilu, Dalya |
| Publication | Boston: David R. Godine, 1980 |
| Copyright Date | 1980 |
| Number of Pages | 148 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Antisemitism; Holocaust; Nazism |
| When Read | December 2022 |
In the town of Badenheim in Austria a mostly, or maybe completely, Jewish clientele comes to the spa for the good food, music, tennis court, swimming pool, society, and beautiful summer weather. But it is 1939 and forces that they do not understand and do their best to ignore are gathering against them. The "Sanitation Department" requires the registration of all the people at the spa. Guards appear at the gate. People cannot leave. Then food deliveries end. Then mail service ends. Then telephone service ends. They become aware of the fact that, like it or not, they are all going to be moved to Poland, a place that they tell each other and themselves is hospitable to Jews and that they are going to a new and better life, or at least a decent life, or at least an acceptable life.
Although the English translation of the book came out the same year as the original Hebrew edition I imagine that Appelfeld and his publishers expected the readers to fully understand what was happening to the visitors to Badenheim and where they would wind up - first in the ghettos of the Polish cities, and then in the death camps. The words "Hitler", "Nazi", and "antisemitism" play no visible role that I recall seeing in this novel. The interactions between the Jews and the officers of the Sanitation Dept. are conducted in an authoritarian but not necessarily impolite way. The visitors to the spa are experiencing, and we are reading, a somehow normal story, or at least one that the characters try to pretend is normal and perhaps we the readers want so much to turn out normal, but all of us know that it is not and cannot be normal.
At the end, they gather at the train station, herded in by polite but implacable policemen. They buy sandwiches or coffee or magazines at the station cafe. And then, when they see the train approaching with nothing but four filthy box cars to carry them, the manager of the spa tells them that this must mean that their journey will not be too long. They board the train to ride to their destiny.
In its superficially mild and civilized way, this was a powerful and very disturbing story. I wanted to shout to these people: "You are doomed. Your only hope is to run away as quickly as you can." And as I always think when I read a book about the looming Holocaust - "don't run to Poland, Hungary, or even France or the Netherlands. Run to England, but not to the cities where you might be bombed. Or best of all, run to Switzerland or Sweden, or the United States." But of course those are not practical possibilities. The chance of getting out of Badenheim is small and to get out of German Austria is smaller, and the chance of getting into and being accepted in one of the few safe countries, is again small, Much smaller than the chance of Central Americans to get into the United States today.
Reading this book, and reading about its author in the Wikipedia, I am very impressed. I have to note what I learned about the author. He was born in Romania to a Jewish family in 1932. When the Romanian fascists overthrew the Romanian government in 1940 and joined the Axis, his family was grabbed with many other Jews, a great many of whom were ultimately murdered by the fascists. Appelfeld escaped at the age of eight and lived for three years as best he could in the country! Then he joined the Russian army at age 12 as a cook. And in spite of this wild and dangerous life, he became a professor of literature at Ben Gurion University and is said to have become fluent in eight different languages (German, Yiddish, Ukrainian, Romanian, Russian, English, Italian and Hebrew). Only later, in 1960, did he and his father each learn that the other was still alive and living in Israel. It is an extraordinary book from an author with an extraordinary life story.
In addition to the Wikipedia article on Aharon Appelfeld, there is also an article specifically titled "Badenheim 1939".
| Author | Amis, Martin |
|---|---|
| Publication | Vintage, 1999 |
| Copyright Date | 1997 |
| Number of Pages | 176 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | December 2022 |
Mike Hoolihan, a female detective in an unnamed American city, gets a call originally from Colonel Tom, a high official in the city police department. His young and beautiful daughter, Jennifer Rockwell, has been found at her home, naked and dead, apparently a victim of suicide. Colonel Tom, who once did a great favor for Mike, wants her to take charge of the investigation of what he believes must have been murder. Autopsy revealed that Jennifer was shot in the mouth three times with a .22. How could anyone have shot herself in the mouth three times? Wouldn't the first shot, or at most the second, have either killed her or rendered her unable to continue?
Mike investigates. She speaks to all of the people who knew Jennifer and could conceivably have killed her, but eventually she comes to the conclusion that suicide was the cause of death. Incredible as it seems, there are examples in history that show that it's possible and no other possible cause seems credible at all.
I was expecting this to be an example of a common story of murder disguised as suicide. The number of mystery stories of this type seems like it must be in the thousands. The number where suicide is confirmed is, well, I can't remember reading or seeing one. That just isn't the kind of story that gets written, published, and/or filmed.
The story is unconventional and surprising but the writing is even more so. One of my favorite passages began with:
"Explain it to me. You do philosophy of science, right?
"I do now. I switched. Back then I was doing linguistics."
"Language? Philosophy of language?
"That's right. Conditionals actually. I spent all of my time thinking about the difference between 'if it was' and 'if it were'"
This is not your ordinary story telling. I know I'm not the only person who would appreciate this kind of writing, but I suspect that the number of readers who appreciate it as I do, i.e., as an ex-student of philosophy, is quite small. The number of Amazon "global ratings" was not inconsiderable (254 as of this writing) and the sophistication of many of the readers, including some who didn't care for the book, was significant. Some saw things that I missed, as is always the case with me.
Here is some more unconventional writing:
___ So how often were you making love?___
___ Oh, I don't know. I suppose in the last year it was down to once or twice a day.___
___ A day? You don't mean once or twice a week?___
Once or twice a day. But more at the weekend.___
And who would initiate?___
Huh?___
Was it always your idea? Listen. Tell me to fuck off and everything, but some women, when they're 'that' good-looking, it's like honey from the icebox. It won't spread. What was she like in the sack?___
...
___ Well, what the fuck do I know. Listen, Mike, what can I tell you. Let me say how it was with us. We never really wanted to be with anybody else. It was kind of worrying. We had friends, we had brothers, and we saw a lot of Tom and Miriam, and we went to parties and hung with our crowd. But we never liked that as much as we liked being with each other. We spent our time talking, laughing, fucking and working. Our idea of a night out was a night in. Are you telling me people don't want that? We kept expecting it to quieten down but it never did. I didn't own her. I wasn't secure in her a hundred percent - because once you are, the best is over. I knew there was a part of her I couldn't see. A part she kept for herself. But it was a part of her intellect. It wasn't some fucking 'mood'. And I think she felt the same about me. We felt the same about each other. Isn't that what we're all meant to want?___
Amis is able to write about people's thoughts, needs, and behaviors with uncommon insights and unusually interesting ways of describing them. Reading this book was a treat.
The title, Night Train, refers to a commuter train that runs past Mike's apartment, waking sleepers in the middle of the night.