Books read February through December 2023
| Author | Brooks, Geraldine |
|---|---|
| Publication | Viking / Penguin / Random House, 2022 |
| Copyright Date | 2022 |
| Number of Pages | 417 |
| Extras | Afterword |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| When Read | February 2023 |
In the 1850's, at a time when horse racing was a major interest of the members of the American upper classes, a horse with an outstanding pedigree and an extraordinary ability to race was born on the horse farm of Dr. Elisha Warfield in Kentucky. It was raised and trained by Warfield's slaves Harry and Harry's son Jarret. The horse, originally named "Darley" was renamed "Lexington" under which name it became the most successful race horse in the country, and when its racing days were over it was used to "cover" a large number of mares, from which its "get", the product of the breeding, produced an extraordinary number of great race horses in the next generation.
Brooks' novel weaves together the known facts about Lexington together with more speculative stories about the people who worked with Lexington when he was alive (the slave boy Jarret, the painter Thomas J. Scott, and various others), and after he was dead - the people involved in reconstructing Lexington's history, physiology, and the paintings of him (Jess, Theo, Martha Jackson). Jess is an Australian woman (as was Brooks) now working in 2019 for one of the Smithsonian Museum's research departments, and her lover Theo, a mixed British and African PhD assisting in researching Lexington's story. Theo is shot and killed by a Washington DC cop who imagines that Theo, standing over a seriously injured woman, has hurt her and has a gun in his hand. The presumed gun is just a cell phone with which Theo had called for help. It is a story that Brooks felt impelled to write.
The story goes back and forth in time. It begins in the recent past of Jess at the Smithsonian Museum. Then it alternates back and forth between the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, progressing in each time period as the story develops. There is also some part of the story in the 1950s when a painting of Lexington was discovered and identified.
Brooks is a good writer with a very deep sympathy for both horses and people. The photo of her on her website (https://geraldinebroks.com) shows her with a good looking horse. She produces convincing descriptions of what she takes to be the personality of each horse in the story. I enjoyed reading about Lexington and being exposed to a world parallel to that of us humans. If that world is not as complex as ours, it's still one that we can appreciate and sympathize with. Lexington has a quite attractive personality.
There is a horse at the center of the story but there is plenty about humans too. Jared is presented as a boy, and then as a man, as a person who understands far more about Lexington than the owners and more even than the jockeys or any of the other people around him. Both the initial and the second owner of Lexington understand that Jared is more competent than anyone else involved with him, and they're not unsympathetic to Jared, but he is in no wise their equal. They consult with Jared on some (pardon me) horsical matters but not on all key decisions concerning his training and, none about what the horse will be required to do. Slavery, even when the slave masters are reasonably sympathetic to their slaves, is definitely not an attractive way of life. Its repercussions are still with us as we see in the death of Theo.
I read the book for an NCI book group meeting. The book was well liked by the members. Others also liked it. It had over 50,000 "ratings" on Amazon.
| Author | Penny, Louise |
|---|---|
| Publication | Minotaur Books |
| Copyright Date | 2006 |
| Number of Pages | 314 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | February 2023 |
When an elderly lady named Jane Neal is found dead from an arrow wound in a small town south of Montreal, Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his team are called in from the city to investigate. In the first half or more of the novel, Gamache determines that Jane was murdered on purpose and not killed in a hunting accident, and that the crime had to have been done by one of the local people. The rest of the story fills in the details as he investigates each of the locals, eventually learning the identity of the killer.
I came across this novel the way I come across so many of them, seeing reviews, often on the websites of Amazon. Penny followed this book with a series of Inspector Gamache mysteries. Were they good? This example wasn't badly written and was certainly intelligent though it lacked the intensity and power of, say, Michael Connelly's works.
As I read the book I thought about another writer who also wrote in "village cozy" style. I searched my notes for the word "cozy" and found the book. To my surprise it was another Gamache novel by the same Louise Penny. I had entirely forgotten her name. My memory isn't so good any more but my reactions to books can be surprisingly consistent.
I'm not against Penny. She has an established place in the cozy village mystery market. However I think I'll need to read a lot of other books before I read another of these.
| Author | Connelly, Michael |
|---|---|
| Publication | Audible / Hachette |
| Copyright Date | 2002 |
| Number of Pages | 448 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | February 2023 |
A dog returns to his master with a bone in his mouth. The master, a retired doctor, recognizes the bone as that of a human child. He calls the police. Harry Bosch and a rookie cop named Julia Brasher are assigned to the case. Working with Bosch's regular partner Jerry Edgar, they eventually identify the child as a 12 year old boy, full of terrible scars of old injuries, and finally killed by a beating and buried hurriedly in a park in an LA neighborhood.
Their first suspect is a man who lived in the neighborhood who was arrested for molesting a child 25 years earlier. The news reporters find out and broadcast his history far and wide. He kills himself and the police department wants to close the case but Bosch won't allow it. He doesn't believe this guy was guilty. Next they talk to the boy's older sister. She offers no help. They find the down and out father and he confesses everything, but Bosch doesn't believe him either. He's convinced that the father is confessing in order to protect his daughter, the dead boy's sister. Again the LAPD want to close the case but again, Bosch doesn't believe the suspect is guilty and won't stop pursuing the truth. Eventually he tracks down the real killer, the cop Brasher, herself killed along the way in the investigation.
Having his own history as a troubled child, Bosch has a special interest in child abuse and abuse in general. He goes after his quarries with a personal commitment to avenge the crimes that they committed and to take them off the street. There are aspects of Bosch's behavior in all of his books (though less so in this abridged version) that I find interesting and compelling. They make up for a lot of his prickly habits, such as his tendency to keep all of his thoughts to himself, offending his partners as well as making little or no use of them. This trait always irritates me. In my work as a computer programmer I learned that people who work together accomplish more both collectively and individually than they accomplish alone, but Bosch just wasn't the kind of guy that works with others.
I suspected early on that this book was abridged. I should have tried harder to find out. It was still an interesting story but there were some bare bones that must have had a lot more meat on them in the full novel.
Ah well, I've done this more than once. I'm sorry I didn't have the unabridged audiobook but even the abridged version wouldn't have been too bad if I were able to ignore the fact that a great writer had half of his achievement cut out and thrown away.
| Author | Diaz, Hernan |
|---|---|
| Publication | Riverhead Books, 2022 |
| Copyright Date | 2022 |
| Number of Pages | 416 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | March 2023 |
This extraordinarily deep and complex book is divided into four sections, each written as if by a different author at a different time. All four of the sections deal with the development of the American stock market and/or of one fantastically rich fictional couple who are at or near the top of the pyramid of stock market investors. Section One is about the development of the stock market in the United States, centering around the story of Benjamin Rask as related by Harold Vanner. In Section Two we learn from one Andrew Bevel that "Rask" is Vanner's pseudonym for the real (i.e. real only in the novel) Andrew Bevel himself, a billionaire stock market investor. Bevel offers his view of the situation. In Section 3 Bevel's secretary writes about what happened decades before in the story that Bevel was attempting to write in the previous section. And in Section 4, Bevel's wife offers a short description of the marriage and the stock investing as she saw it - a much more accurate account than the one Bevel himself created. It turns out in Section 4 that, contrary to Bevel's account of the brilliant investing he claims to have done, it was actually his wife that made all the investing decisions and made them unimaginably rich.
This was a very unconventional book. It's shift of perspective between the four sections is not unknown in literature, there are more jarring ones in some of Mario Vargas-Llossa's books, but this one was unique in its way, as Vargas Llosa's was in his way. I'm not sure that I had much sympathy for any character other than the secretary and author of section Three. Bevel was not a likable man. His determination to be the world's richest man was unanalyzed and meaningless. His attitude toward his wife was condescending in his own account (section 2) and somewhat despicable in the eyes of his wife.
It was one of those books that I greatly admired but only a little liked.
Read for the NCI Book Group.
| Author | Christie, Agatha |
|---|---|
| Publication | Harper Audio |
| Copyright Date | 1940 |
| Number of Pages | 240 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | March 2023 |
In an English village Mrs. Laura Welman, a very wealthy woman dies intestate. The law requires when there is no will that the wealth of the deceased transfer to the closest relative, in this case it is her niece, Elinor Carlisle. Just before her death, Laura Welman asks Elinor to give something to Mary Gerrard which Elinor does, but then Mary is murdered with an overdose of morphine. After much investigation the police arrest Elinor Carlisle. Only then, halfway into the novel, is Hercule Poirot brought into the case by Peter Lord, an admirer of Elinor. In Christie's inimitable way, Poirot uncovers more suspects, reinterprets misinterpreted clues, and works out the logic of the murder.
I don't recall reading or watching another Poirot mystery in which the great detective arrives into the novel at such a late stage. However everything is, as usual, both surprising and very logical. The mystery works.
| Author | Cumming, Charles |
|---|---|
| Publication | St. Martin's Press |
| Copyright Date | 2006 |
| Number of Pages | 352 |
| Genres | Fiction; Spy |
| When Read | March 2023 |
Alec Milius, formerly working for the British secret services, has left them and spent the last six years in Spain. He now speaks fluent Spanish and is working for Endiom Bank, a British bank with an office in Madrid run by Julian Church, a decent man who much appreciates Alec's good work, but doesn't know that Alec is having an affair with Julian's wife, Sophia.
Alec is sent by Julian to the Basque country to see what the prospects are there for Endiom to invest in this rebellious province. While there he meets Mikel Arenaza, a man who was once associated with "Herri Batasuna", the political wing of the ETA, a far left, violent, Basque separatist group. They spend an evening together at a restaurant and bar and become friends. A few days later, Mikel disappears and is eventually found to have been murdered. It appears to Alec that what is happening is a third occurrence of a "dirty war" between the ETA and the GAL, the "Grupos Antiterroristas de Liberación" a secret agency run by right wing officials in the Spanish government. Alec investigates what happened to Mikel and, getting involved like that, he is grabbed by terrorists of one side or the other and badly beaten up and held and tortured for several days to try to get info from him. Eventually, beaten and bruised, they let him go.
Alec hates what happened to him but is excited by his involvement. He is deeply attracted to the spy game. He meets Richard Kitson who makes himself known as a British agent to Alec and Alec, a man who has built multiple identities for himself and constructed tissues of lies supporting each one, attempts to help, ingratiate himself to, and impress Kitson with his knowledge and his honest service. Kitson is impressed and promises that the British secret service will re-hire Alec.
In the end, a woman whom Alec attempted to deceive and learn more from, and a man working with her, attempt to capture and torture him but Alec, in a burst of anger, smashes the knife wielding man with a wine bottle, punches the woman hard, and leaves them beaten, bleeding, and only semi-conscious. He goes to Kitson and tells all but soon is told that Kitson and his crew are actually CIA agents working in Spain for the USA, not Britain. Alec's hopes and dreams are defeated.
This is a sophisticated novel. The characters are complex. The writing is interesting. Here are some examples:
___The voice is just as I remembered it - flat, smug, entitled - and acts as an immediate irritant.
___Then I leave the apartment, slamming the door with my own brand of adolescent petulance, and hurry down the stairs to the metro.
___What an idiot I have been. What an amateur. The first thing you should know about people is that you don’t know the first thing about them.
I never felt that Alec was a hero. I can't say that I ever identified with him. I found his behavior to be disturbing. Nevertheless, I thought he was an interesting person. He engaged my attention. I was absorbed by the novel and, in spite of all my misgivings about his behavior, I was drawn to his story.
As sometimes happens to me, I read this book only to learn later that it is a follow-on to an earlier book A Spy By Nature. Had I known I would probably have read the first book first. I don't know how much time I have left or how many books I can read or even if I'll retain the mental capacity to read and understand them, but I don't rule out more Charles Cumming books.
| Author | Deutermann, P.T. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: St. Martin's Press, 2013 |
| Copyright Date | 2013 |
| Number of Pages | 352 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | March 2023 |
The story opens somewhere in the Pacific Ocean in late 1944 during World War II. Commander Gar Hammond of the U.S. Navy submarine Dragonfish is patrolling in Japanese waters and has encountered a small convoy of what appears to be two destroyers and three tankers. He attacks with great boldness and much quick thinking and sinks the entire convoy. Then he returns to Pearl Harbor.
Back at Pearl, Hammond is given a new assignment. He is to take his ship into the shallow waters of Bungo Suido, a narrow strait through part of the Japanese home islands. There he is to first, drop off a pro-American Japanese fisherman on a secret mission near Hiroshima, and then to find, attack, and attempt to destroy a giant Japanese aircraft carrier under construction in Japan.
The mission is partly successful. The Dragonfish makes it through the anti-submarine minefields, the fisherman makes it ashore with his secret box of equipment, and the Americans attack the dry dock area where the carrier is, successfully sinking two nearby destroyers and blowing up a pair of barges loaded with munitions. The Dragonfish then attempts to wend its way back through Bungo Suido but is caught and sunk by the Japanese. Commander Hammond was on the bridge above the sub when it was attacked and he ordered the second in command to leave him and escape. Hammond turned out to be the only survivor. He is taken aboard the Shinano, the huge carrier that has left dry dock and is heading for safer waters. But the Shinano is torpedoed and sunk by another American sub and Hammond, back in the ocean, is picked up again, now recognized for what he is - the captain of an American submarine. He is interrogated and instead of sticking to name, rank, and serial number, he tells the Japanese that all of their propaganda is false, the Americans are getting closer and closer to Japan, and they will win with overwhelming numbers and technology. His goal is to convince them that the war is lost for Japan and fighting on can't change that. Hammond winds up working in horrible conditions as a POW in a Japanese coal mine where he is eventually liberated by the Japanese surrender.
The war story is over but there is one more part of the novel. Another prisoner of war knew about Hammond's telling the Japanese so much and he accused Hammond of selling out to the Japanese. There is a court of inquiry and Hammond is acquitted of all charges with the help of a female Navy lawyer whom he met earlier in Pearl and who, at the end of the war, went off with him to his home in Pennsylvania.
This was the second novel in a series of ten written by the former naval officer and son of a WWII destroyer commander. The story of a Japanese fisherman placing a radio beam device in Hiroshima and the story of a 73,000 ton Japanese aircraft carrier struck me as most unlikely. However I checked it out on the Internet and, to my great surprise, Deutermann's fictional account was based on facts. There was a huge aircraft carrier built in secret but then sunk by an American submarine in the manner that D described. The story of the submarine "Dragonfish" may have been based on an actual sub named "Archerfish" that was sunk in Bungo Suido with all survivors taken to shore and ordered to keep their mouths shut about the loss of the ship. The story of Hammond's mistreatment by the Japanese military after his capture was also in accord with accounts I have read by real survivors.
My interest in WWII is partly motivated by many factors including a deep interest in human history in general, the horror and heroism of the war, and the high importance of the war in the lives of my parents and the people of their generation.
P.T. Deutermann is not a great writer in the literary sense but he is a man with a deep interest and a high competence in his subject. There are greater writers who have taken on similar subjects but I find PTD to be worth reading.
| Author | Deaver, Jeffrey |
|---|---|
| Publication | Penguin Audio, 2019 |
| Copyright Date | 2019 |
| Number of Pages | 544 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | April 2023 |
The hero of the novel, Colter Shaw, is a lone man, highly experienced in finding missing people. He grew up in an isolated rural home with a father who allowed no television and insisted on his children learning survivalist skills, including tracking and finding people. Now an adult, he has made a career out of finding missing persons and accepting rewards for his actions. The story opens with Colter (calling him "Shaw" just doesn't have the same oomph) answering an ad by a desperate father whose daughter has disappeared and is offering $10,000 to anyone who can find and retrieve her. Colter does the job. The girl had been kidnapped but a combination of her effort and Colter's understanding of the clues saves her though her boyfriend, who also attempts to help her, is killed by the miscreant.
Some of the characters in the story are deeply interested in video games and the killer turns out to be an obsessive player of a particular type of video game in which a player is put in a complex and desperate position which he can only survive by overcoming a terrible threat to is his life. The killer is playing that game for real. He traps his victim in a dangerous situation and kills him or her if the victim cannot escape. Colter Shaw discovers the killer, survives the killer's attempt to murder him, and works with the police to end the threat.
This is the fourth Jeffrey Deaver novel I've read. It is the first of a new series of Colter Shaw novels.
Deaver is a prolific writer of popular, often best selling, mystery stories. He appears to have produced an average of about one new book per year. It seems to me that some of his productions are a combination of hit and miss. This one strikes me as having a few more misses than hits though both he and his fans must have liked it enough that he based a whole series on it.
Some writers seem to me to be just naturally inspired. Each scene in their novels leads naturally to the next one and all of the writing is built around a common theme - explored in greater and greater depth as the story proceeds. Others work via a choppy process in which some very good material is written down in different parts of the story but the writer is unable to sustain his inspiration. Perhaps he writes himself into a corner. Based on the small number of his books that I've read, I'd put Deaver in that category, but then that may be where the great majority of fairly good writers reside.
| Author | Banks, Iain M. |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Orbit / Hachette Book Group, 2008 |
| Copyright Date | 2008 |
| Number of Pages | 620 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | May 2023 |
King Hausk, head of the Sarl Kingdom on Level 8 of the shellworld of Sursamen had four children, Elime (oldest son, killed in a war), Ferbin (second son, dissolute but decent), Oramen (third son, not yet fully adult), and Djan Seriy (aka Anaplian, mature daughter and SC (Special Circumstances) agent of the Culture). Hausk is a beloved king of the Sarl and leader in the war against the Deldeyn, inhabitants of the Ninth Level. Hausk is murdered by Mertis tyl Loesp, Hausk's personal equerry who has pretended to be a dutiful and loving servant of his king for 20 years - starting a process in which tyl Loesp will take over the kingdom and attempt to kill off the remaining children of the king. Ferbin has witnessed the murder of his father from a hidden spot in the building where the murder took place and it is he who attempts to find, alert, and save his younger brother and older sister to save the family and the kingdom. In the end, an intelligent machine from a billion years before is discovered and brought back to life. It searches for all the information it once had and determines that it must destroy the shellworld and all the living beings in it. Djan Seriy is still sort of alive but only her head remains. It is not totally clear whether she will die or not but everyone else appears to be gone and we might assume that Sursamen is about to be destroyed with an uncertain future for the whole galaxy.
At the end of the novel there is an appendix with brief explanations of the many names in the text followed by an Epilogue in which Choubris Holse, servant to Ferbin, goes home to his poor family in Pourl, capital of the Sarl kingdom. That Holse is still alive and that Pourl still exists indicates that the horrible machine that came to life did not succeed in destroying the lives and places of the human (or is it just humanoid) species of the Sursamen shellworld. Did the publisher warn the author that many of his readers would be warned not to read the book by other readers if all of the good guys died?
The story is a wild collection of imaginative creations of alien worlds, creatures, weapons, places, and scenes. Just reading my description above might lead someone to think - I don't want to read this. However there is more to the story than its wild characters and plot.
To begin with, the writing is, in my opinion, extraordinarily good. Here are a few excerpts:
___Vollird was a tall, thin, darkly intense fellow with a look that could, as now, verge on insolent. He usually regarded the world with his head tipped downwards, eyes peering out from beneath his brow. It was by no means a shy or modest aspect; rather it seemed a little wary and distrusting, certainly, but mostly mocking, sly and calculating, and as though those eyes were keeping carefully under the cover of that sheltering brow, quietly evaluating weaknesses, vulnerabilities, and the best time to strike.
. . .
___“No, more than that, sir,” Neguste told him. “These are facts.”
___“I think I might dispute that,” Droffo said.
___“All the same, sir, facts is facts. That itself’s a fact.”
. . .
___In a sense, knowing this before she’d left would have been fairly meaningless; a so-what? fact.
Banks doesn't just write exciting adventures. His writing is rich with nuance and a sparkling vocabulary. The language can be quite humorous and this reader felt like the author was enjoying himself and engaging in some whimsy along with his galactic visions.
I've read seven of the nine Culture series novels. I think they continued to grow and cover new ground as Banks became more sure of his vision, his purpose, and his style. This one was long and sometimes digressive. It was not a tightly written story but it was still one that I much enjoyed.
| Author | Balzac, Honore de |
|---|---|
| Original Language | French |
| Translators | Unnamed |
| Publication | Gutenberg, 1874 |
| Copyright Date | 1832 |
| Number of Pages | 90 |
| Genres | Fiction; Short stories; Comedy |
| When Read | June 2023 |
See 2004-11.05 for notes on my first reading of this first volume of Balzac's three volume collection. In those days I was still limiting my book notes to what I could fit on a 3-1/2 x 5 inch filing card, or else adding notes in my diary. Since I have more room here I'll add some brief notes on some of the stories.
I've read six of Balzac's books over the years. For most writers that might be a significant fraction of the author's output, but not for Balzac. I found one listing of his output and counted 93 books. There may have been more. Droll Stories was the only comedy I read. The others were all serious books about realistically described people with complex personalities though they weren't all in a 20th century realist style.
Balzac said that he wrote every night from 1-8 am. He is said to have been able to write 30 words per minute with his quill pen, that he sometimes wrote 15 hours straight and that he once wrote continuously for 48 hours with only 3 hours of rest. He apparently worked on multiple books in parallel. His lifelong writing effort was extraordinary but he also attempted many different business schemes as a publisher, an entrepreneur of various types - all of which failed. His personal life was surprising too. He married for the first time in 1850, six months before his death. There is some evidence that he was gay but I am not aware of his coming out - something that apparently was kept private and secret, but was not as severely persecuted in France as in England or the U.S.
In English literature the great writers of the early 19th century, I'm thinking of people like Jane Austen, William Makepeace Thackeray, Charles Dickens, and the Bronte sisters, were deeply into the English language. From a combination of natural linguistic talent and great fascination with the problem of how to explain things fully and precisely, they produced great art. Does Balzac have a similar fascination with language? I don't know. There are passages that seem to me to be brilliant - laying out a whole scene in a sentence. There are others that I see as strange and awkward but maybe they're that way because Balzac was using a medieval dialect that sounds strange to our ears - especially problematic because of its two translations, Medieval French to 19th century French. 19th century French to (later) 19th century English, now read by 21st century Americans.
If I understand him, Balzac wrote about Medieval France in the 13th through 15th centuries but he setup that period not only for the purpose of making fun of it but also, I think, for the purpose of making fun of the institutions of the France of the 1830's, the period of the writing of these stories. B wrote much about sex, parodying both men's and women's sexual activities and mocking the nobility, the government, and the church. He portrays the medieval society as being run by men who had no scruples, and suffered few or no consequences, for torturing and murdering lesser folk in their domains. He writes about these events as if he were observing natural situations and actions. I can't always tell whether he is giving us something like a true description or a comic exaggeration. I'm sure it's both. Is he trying to horrify us?
Here are some notes on the stories themselves:
The Fair Imperia
A very nice and quite innocent young priest is attached to the retinue of the Archbishop of Bordeaux and taken to the Council at Constance where he is flabbergasted by the sight of a top courtesan visited by Bishops, Counts, Cardinals, and all types of rich and powerful men. He is instantly in love with her and will do anything to spend a single night with her. She, being used to men who are rich and powerful but much older and much less truly in love, is entranced by the young priest.
___"Ah, ah! Come my gentle cavalier, my dear boy, my little charm, my paradise of delectation, let me drink thine eyes, eat thee, kill thee with my love. Oh! my ever-flourishing, ever-green, sempiternal [i.e., everlasting - AHM] god; from a little monk I would make a king, emperor, pope, and happier than either." ... 'he gazed at her in silence, with his eye so lustrous with love, that she said to him, trembling with joy 'Ah! be quiet, little one. Let us have supper.'___
The Venial Sin
Messire Bruyn, from being a boistrous, frivolous and even barbarous young man grows old with money, power, and people at his command, but with his ability to make love now gone. Then a pretty, innocent, 17 year old Moorish girl, an acrobat named Blanche, is arrested in the town and condemned to be burnt to death. Bruyn falls hopelessly in love. He uses his power and influence to save her and gets her to marry him.
Blanche knows nothing about the love life of men and women but yearns for a child, a baby she can love. Bruyn, unable to manage this, finds one excuse after another to put her off but, following her intuitions, she eventually pretends to be asleep in front of a handsome young page of the household who is entranced by her. The deed is done. The page runs off to the crusades to escape Bruyn's vengeance. Bruyn remains her protector, pretending to be the father of her child. Then he dies and leaves everything to Blanche. Blanche hears that the page has returned from the Holy Land and, sitting in the same chair where the page knew her [can I say that?] she dies.
The King's Sweetheart
A rich but miserly goldsmith with a beautiful and much sought after daughter sells the girl to an ugly old man.
___He bargained away his daughter, without taking into consideration the fact that her patched-up old suitor had the features of an ape and had scarcely a tooth in his jaws. The smell which emanated from his mouth did not however disturb his own nostrils, although he was filthy and high flavoured, as are all those who pass their lives amid the smoke of chimneys, yellow parchment, and other black proceedings. Immediately this sweet girl saw him she exclaimed, "Great Heaven! I would rather not have him."
___"That concerns me not," said the father,
Her only possible savior was none other than the king. Although she married the ugly advocate, she became the paramour of the king and then a harlot to the rich who, when accused by the king of leaving her for 10,000 crowns she denied it, saying she never took less than 30,000.
Finally, she works with her maid to fool her husband into believing that he will sleep with her in the black night for 12,000 crowns when, in fact, it is her maid that does the deed and keeps the money.
The Devil's Heir, The Merrie Jests of King Louis XI
The High Constable's Wife
The high constable of Armagnac is married to the Countess Bonne, a woman whom he chose because of her wealth and beauty. She was already in love with "little Savoisy", a young nephew of the king, but her new husband didn't know that. He did however deduce that she had another lover and went crazy with jealosy, killing his wife's ladies' maid when the girl refused to tell him anything.
The constable sets up a trap for the unknown lover to catch and kill him when he comes to the house (mansion? palace? castle?) but Bonne winks and smiles at a different young man who then comes to the house. He is caught and killed - which doesn't seem to bother him a bit. Bonne thinks she has won but the constable catches and kills Savoisy too and then threatens to kill Bonne - who says she doesn't care. The constable leaves her alone.
The moral of the story is:
___As this book should, according to the maxims of great ancient authors, join certain useful things to the good laughs which you will find therein and contain precepts of high taste, I beg to inform you that the quintessence of the story is this: That women need never lose their heads in serious cases, because the God of Love never abandons them, especially when they are beautiful, young, and of good family; and that gallants when going to keep an amorous assignation should never go there like giddy young men, but carefully, and keep a sharp look-out near the burrow, to avoid falling into certain traps and to preserve themselves; for after a good woman the most precious thing is, certes, a pretty gentleman.
The Maid of Thilouse
The aging 60 year old lord of Vallenne, married to a disagreable wife who wants nothing to do with him, is always on the lookout for young maids. He pursues the 16 year old virgin Marie Fouquet who is guarded by her poverty stricken vociferous mother. The mother extracts much from the lord before allowing the girl to go to work as maid to the lord's wife. But Marie still holds the lord at bay until he has her married to a fat 70 year old but nice, pleasant, and undemanding husband, giving her rights in the 70 year old's nice house.
Balzac concludes:
___"... Now if you asked me in what consists, or where comes in, the moral of this tale? I am at liberty to reply to the ladies; that the Cent Contes Drolatiques are made more to teach the moral of pleasure than to procure the pleasure of pointing a moral. But if it were a used up old rascal who asked me, I should say to him with all the respect due to his yellow or grey locks; that God wishes to punish the lord of Valennes, for trying to purchase a jewel made to be given.
The Brothers in Arms
Two young knights become brothers in arms - men who will defend each other to the death in any and every circumstance. The Cadet of Maille, the ugly but strong one of the brothers, must go on a trip. Fearing that his young and lovely wife will be pursued by handsome knights, he asks his brother in arms, the Sieur de Lavalliere, to move in to defend Maille's marriage against interlopers.
The wife is attracted to Lavalliere and becomes more and more so as she sees what an upright man he is, totally loyal to his pledge to Maille. Unable to hold her at bay and fearing his own emotions, Lavalliere tells the girl that he has a terrible venereal disease that might kill them both.
___The lady burst into tears, admiring this great loyalty, the sublime resignation to his oath, and the extreme sufferings of this internal passion. But as she still kept her love in the recesses of her heart, she died when Lavalliere fell before Metz, as has been elsewhere related by Messire Bourdeilles de Brantome in his tittle-tattle.___
The Vicar of Azay-le-Reideau
The story of a fine, decent, vicar, much admired and loved by the common people of his parish as well as the nobility. Was he a little too interested in the pretty women of the area? Well, perhaps, but there no one criticized such a fine, handsome, generous man. When he died he was mourned by all.
The Reproach
The hunchback Carandas, a manufacturer of textile machines, is madly in love with the wife of his friend, a dyer. The wife encourages him but she is only playing with him, getting him to come to the house only to be doused with cold water on a freezing night, or made to hide all night in a bedroom chest, unable to make a sound for fear of waking the dyer whom Carandas had been told would not come home that night. Carandas is furious and conceives a fiery hatred for the wife. He follows her and learns that she is having a weekly night with a handsome priest, He tells the dyer what is happening and goes with him to the place of the tryst with a poison dipped sword, intending for the dyer to kill the two lovers with it, but the wife throws herself at the feet of her husband and begs him not to kill the priest, who is the real father of their two children. The dyer, in a fit of emotion, drops the sword but it lands on the foot of the hunchback, killing him with the poison.
___This teaches us not to be spiteful.___
. . .
I recommended this book to our National Cancer Institute (NCI) book group. When I got around to re-reading it I saw it from what I think would be the point of view of the other members in the group and feared that it would not be liked by the other members. Of the ten or so book group members, besides me only three showed up for the meeting. Nobody said they didn't come because they thought the stories were horrible but (sigh) I couldn't help thinking that was the case.
I wrote all of these copious notes as part of my preparation for leading the discussion of the stories.
| Author | Fox, Jason |
|---|---|
| Publication | Audible |
| Copyright Date | 2018 |
| Number of Pages | 320 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Autobiography |
| Keywords | War |
| When Read | June 2023 |
Jason Fox joined the British Royal Navy after graduating high school and from there he graduated to more and more difficult and dangerous roles eventually landing in the special forces. He sought the combination of adventure and service to his country that young people seek. As it turned out, he was good at his job. He worked hard. He trained his body for three hours each day. He learned many military skills. He fought in numerous raids on enemy camps in the middle east. He doesn't say whether he fought in Iraq or Afghanistan or somewhere else but, wherever it was, he was in dangerous fights against both foolish and untrained men and against experienced and very dangerous men. He saw close friends in his "brotherhood" die or, maybe worse, be crippled, paralyzed, blinded, castrated, and/or mentally damaged for life.
Foxy (as his friends called him) became more and more fearful and disturbed in the many battles he fought. When a man next to him was killed or injured Foxy was acutely conscious of how his moving a few feet or even inches, or his enemy moved his rifle just a millimeter, might have resulted in Foxy being killed or mutilated for the rest of his life. He was frightened at his work and upset and angry during the few months of the year he might spend at home. His marriage went south and his wife and two children left him, pending a divorce. He had relationships with other women but couldn't really get along with anyone except his soldier comrades. He feared more fighting and was bored when they weren't fighting. He hated the idea of leaving his comrades and despaired of having any meaningful and acceptable life apart from them. He finally talked to someone in the armed forces and was sent for psychological counseling. He was diagnosed as suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The treatment he received didn't help but, on the urging of a civilian who worked hard to help returning soldiers, he found another counselor who did help and set him on a path of recovery.
Over time Foxy overcame his psychological problems. He joined four other men in a plan to row a boat across the Atlantic Ocean, landing in Venezuela after 50 days of hard rowing. He worked in a film for TV on Colombian drug cartels. He became a person of some kind on a regular TV show (I learned this mainly from looking at reviews of this book by others.) He wrote this best seller memoir (or whatever we call it) and then wrote another book. He seems to have completely overcome his problems.
I liked this book. I liked its open honesty. I liked its willingness to speak frankly. I liked the unabashed working language he used to read it aloud. It's a popular book, rightly appreciated by many readers.
| Author | Appelfeld, Aharaon |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Hebrew |
| Translators | Green, Jeffrey M. |
| Publication | New York: Harper and Row, 1989 |
| Copyright Date | 1988 |
| Number of Pages | 138 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Holocaust |
| When Read | June 2023 |
Bartfuss is a Holocaust survivor living in Israel with a wife whom he met and married in Italy after the war. He works a few minutes a day, buying and selling unnamed things, perhaps illegal things, from which he secures enough income to support himself and (with some reluctance) his estranged family and even piles up some reserves. He imagines himself, or maybe it's the people who know him imagine him, to be immortal because he has survived so much during the Holocaust that it seems like nothing can kill him. His oldest daughter is married while his wife and his somewhat retarded younger daughter live in an apartment in Jaffa, the two women in one bedroom and Bartfuss in the other. He gets up early and leaves the house before his wife and daughter get up and comes back late after they have gone to bed. He spends a few minutes a day in his undercover business and spends most of the rest in coffee shops and restaurants, mostly sitting at tables by himself. Occasionally he sits at tables with other Holocaust survivors but they never reminisce and often barely speak to each other.
Bartfuss (beard foot?) is a man who has been psychologically injured by his experience in the death camps and the war. He is unable to relate to anyone. He and the other survivors are also estranged from each other and, in some interior way, from themselves. Bartfuss is not happy with the way things are but it's not clear that he can see any path to a better life for himself or his family. It's not clear that he even has any vision of what a better life might be. While he lives it seems that he will continue to live the same, limited, life.
This is one of those books that only sophisticated readers on Amazon reviewed. Some praised the book as one of the best books of the twentieth century. Another ("Marysia"), recognized and admired its unusual qualities but regarded it as "self pity at its most absolute, un-abating and ultimately self destructive." She gave it just three stars out of five. I can't disagree with her assessment.
Marcia and I watch movies while eating dinner. I often propose movies that are highly regarded by experienced and sophisticated critics, but not as much liked by audiences - even though the audiences are composed of people like me, people who are impressed by sophisticated writers and think that we all ought to like them.
My personal solution to the problem is to give the writer, or screenwriter, or whatever he or she is, credit for being intelligent and perceptive and for giving me something to learn from. But, while I do that, I am not sorry when Marcia tells me she wants to change the channel (or whatever you call it in this day and age of streaming video.) I offer Appelfeld his due. He is a sophisticated writer, knowledgeable about many kinds of people. I lean towards giving five stars. But I also understand that it's not wrong to leave the book in the bookcase and change the channel.
| Author | Shaw, Ian |
|---|---|
| Publication | Oxford University Press |
| Copyright Date | 2004 |
| Number of Pages | xiv + 192 |
| Extras | References, Further reading, Useful websites, Glossary, Timeline, Index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Egypt; Ancient Egypt |
| When Read | June 2023 |
Shaw is an Egyptologist and professor at the University of Liverpool in the UK. He has published a number of books about Egypt both as author and as editor. This particular book however struck me as having a great deal to say about Egyptology and ancient Egypt in 19th and 20th century research and popular culture, but very little to say about ancient Egypt itself. I'd call it "A Very Short History of the History of Ancient Egypt. Topics include a short review of the ancient sources of our knowledge - reading discovered texts and hieroglyphs, examining archaeological finds, examining found materials in objects and in the ground, and so on; considering issues of kingship, ethnicity, race, gender, funerary practices, religious texts and symbols, etc. Much time is devoted to the impact of Egyptology on the popular culture in books and especially in movies.
I have the feeling that the book is written for Egyptologists rather than ordinary folk interested in learning about ancient Egypt. There is nothing about the economy or economic development; nothing about the class division of society; nothing about politics or the evolution of pharaonic rule; very little about contacts between Egypt and the surrounding areas; nothing about what life was like for the majority of Egyptians. Maybe these deficits were simply due to lack of knowledge. A pyramid may say a lot about a pharaoh and his immediate environment but not much about the likely thousands of people who participated in building it. Or maybe the pyramid says more about those people than I imagine.
One thing I learned was that my thinking that ancient Egypt goes back only to 2000 or so BC is inadequate. The pharaonic/dynastic period actually goes back to 3000 BC, the period in which specifically Egyptian cultures are now known to exist goes from 4000 to 3000 BC, and the evidence of prehistoric human presence in Egypt may date from around 700,000 BC. Many of the cultures of the early, prehistoric peoples may have been more sophisticated than we imagine for very early human communities.
As I read the book I got over my disappointment with Shaw's lack of historicity in his account and the mismatch of his work with what I take to be the concept of the "Very Short Introduction" series. He is a good writer. He does know a lot about ancient Egypt. His observations about the directions taken by modern Egyptologists and film directors (there is even a photo of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in a scene from Antony and Cleopatra, a blockbuster Hollywood epic of my youth), and his account was pretty short.
There is a very new edition of this work but, at the moment, I'll skip it.
| Author | Szabo, Magda |
|---|---|
| Original Language | Hungarian |
| Translators | Rix, Len |
| Publication | New York: NYRB Classics, 2015 |
| Copyright Date | 1987 |
| Number of Pages | 288 |
| Extras | Introduction by Ali Smith |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Hungary |
| When Read | June 2023 |
The first person narrator, Magda, known sometimes as "the Lady Writer" or "the Writer Lady) lives with her husband in an apartment in Pest (the "pest" in "Budapest".) The date is not specified. A search of the novel's text for "195", "196", "197", and "198" produced only a single hit and it referenced a date that occurred before the start of the story proper, however a quite impressive movie version of the book announces that it starts in the 1960s.
Magda needs help taking care of her household. She is advised to hire Emerence, an old woman who seems to work all the time - brushing snow off the neighborhood sidewalks, cooking food for sick people, and of course cleaning houses. But Emerence has her own opinions about how to live and how to take care of a home. An employer must accept Emerence's methods, charges, and decisions, or do without Emerence's help. Everyone would allow Emerence into their houses but Emerence allows no one into her apartment. The windows are always shaded. The door is never opened for any purpose except to allow Emerence and her cats to slip in or out.
Magda and Emerence are poles apart intellectually. Magda goes to church every week. Emerence scoffs at the idea. When the two women rescue a dog named "Viola" by Emerence, Magda fails in her attempts to control him while Emerence, who beats the dog when it disobeys her, wins absolute obedience from Viola and Viola becomes the only creature allowed into the house except for nine cats that Emerence feeds. The relationship between the two women is complex and difficult but, despite enormous differences they become fast friends.
Emerence is old. When she becomes extremely ill, she stops working and still will not allow anyone into the house. Unable to get her to see a doctor, Magda finally follows the doctor's advice and tricks Emerence into opening the door. The doctor and others then break through the door, seize Emerence, and bring her to the hospital by force where her life is saved for at least a short period. Emerence will never forgive Magda for lying to her and helping the doctor kidnap her into the hospital. She dies shortly after she learns the truth, that her home was penetrated by outsiders, her cats were gone, her old furniture, photos, and mementos were all burned because they were smelly and possibly infected, and that the various lies that Magda told her to try to protect her were just lies.
Magda is left with her work, her husband, her now depressed and lonely dog, and with a guilty and inescapable conscience that she can never get rid of.
One of the benefits of belonging to a book club is that I am pushed to read interesting books that I would never have known about, much less read, if I were choosing books completely on my own.
It turned out that there were many interesting things in this book - most having to do with the characters and the story, but some having to do with the time and place, post-war Hungary, where working as a novelist involved political issues and pressures that we don't worry about in the United States or other democratic countries.
Magda Szabo would have been about 70 years old when this book was first published. She had been effectively censored from the end of the 1940's to the aftermath of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. When she was finally able to publish her poetry and fiction, she must have done what all writers in communist countries did at that time, avoid obvious criticism of the regime and the state that it created, and confine themselves to apolitical topics. It's not always easy to do that. It's even harder to do that and produce very good writing and very good stories at the same time. I thought Szabo was a success.
Bob Kline and Elaine Mills, members of the book club and old friends, told us about the movie version of the book. Marcia and I watched it, streaming it on Freevee. I was truly impressed by the cinematic effort. The actors were good, the adherence to the written story, in spite of the movie being made after Szabo's death, was extremely good, and even Viola the dog produced a marvelous likeness of the dog in the book. High marks for both the author and the people who produced the film.
| Author | Herodotus |
|---|---|
| Original Language | grc |
| Translators | Macaulay, George Campbell |
| Publication | Munich, Germany: BookRix, 2014 |
| Copyright Date | c. 430 BC |
| Number of Pages | 143 |
| Extras | Preface (by an unidentified modern writer) |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History; Society |
| Keywords | Ancient Egypt |
| When Read | July 2023 |
Herodotus was born around 484 BC in the Greek city of Hallicarnasus, now Bodrum on the southwest coast of modern Turkey. He also lived in the Greek colony of Thurii in modern day Calabria in the "boot" of Italy. He visited many of the cities and civilizations around the Mediterranean and wrote about what he found in each place in a series of 12 (as one source divided them) histories of which An Account of Egypt is the most popular. The series is said by some experts to be the first set of texts that have anything close to the goals, the structure, and the the point of view of what, today, we know as "History".
I thought this was a fascinating book. The earliest productions of human civilization have struck me as formulaic. King So And So had defeated these people and those, the God X has done this and that, and a tablet contains icons of gods and men in which hawks and herons, or lions and elephants, in carvings, paintings and statues, are acknowledging the greatness of whoever.
This book is different. Herodotus describes what and who he has seen in Egypt. He talks to priests who tell him stories of the gods that they worship and histories of the temples that they serve. He talks to Greek merchants, sailors, and soldiers who are living in Egypt. He writes down what he is told but he doesn't just accept it. He thinks about it and considers whether it makes sense and whether it conflicts with established facts that he has learned. In some cases he may actually measure the number of cubits in a stone block and the number of blocks in one face of a pyramid or a temple to see if the constructions are as big as he is told they are. He never takes the remarks of others as gospel. He examines the buildings, the rivers, and the mountains in front of him. He dips buckets on ropes while still a day off shore of the Nile delta - confirming that the geological structure of the area north of Egypt is constructed of mud from the Nile - showing that the towns of the delta are necessarily recent constructions.
Herodotus is a critical thinker. Early in his book he writes:
___the nature of the land of Egypt is as follows: - First when you are still approaching it in a ship and are distant a day's run from the land, if you let down a sounding-line you will bring up mud and you will find yourself in eleven fathoms. This then so far shows that there is a silting forward of the land.___
He confirms stories that he has been told with his own independent observations:
___The pillars which Sesostris king of Egypt set up in the various countries are for the most part no longer to be seen extant; but in Syria Palestine I myself saw them existing with the inscription upon them which I have mentioned and the emblem. Moreover in Ionia there are two figures of this man carved upon rocks, one on the road by which one goes from the land of Ephesos to Phocaia, and the other on the road from Sardis to Smyrna. In each place there is a figure of a man cut in the rock, of four cubits and a span in height, holding in his right hand a spear and in his left a bow and arrows, and the other equipment which he has is similar to this, for it is both Egyptian and Ethiopian: and from the one shoulder to the other across the breast runs an inscription carved in sacred Egyptian characters, saying thus, "This land with my shoulders I won for myself."___
Herodotus tells us to understand that not everything he is told is true, but it is worth reporting:
___This priest, they say, with his eyes bound up is led by two wolves to the temple of Demeter, which is distant from the city twenty furlongs, and then afterwards the wolves lead him back again from the temple to the same spot. Now as to the tales told by the Egyptians, any man may accept them to whom such things appear credible; as for me, it is to be understood throughout the whole of the history that I write by hearsay that which is reported by the people in each place.___
Are humans immortal? Do they reincarnate on earth three thousand years after their death as some priests have told him?
___This doctrine certain Hellenes adopted, some earlier and some later, as if it were of their own invention, and of these men I know the names but I abstain from recording them.___
Herodotus didn't have the libraries that our contemporaries have, or even the libraries that just a few generations later were developing in Greek, Persian, and then Roman civilizations. He had hardly any of the continually developing science that we now rely on, And yet he showed himself to be an intellectual with an open and logical mind. He was a man who examined questions and, more than most others of his time, found interesting and sometimes convincing answers.
Compared to Ian Shaw'sAncient Egypt: A Very Short Introduction, which I read just a few weeks before this one, Herodotus produced a book very much about ancient Egypt, not just a book about the "Egyptologists" of his day.
This was a great book. It brought to light the same high intelligence and curiosity that we see in modern day scientists and historians. I loved it.
| Author | Asimov, Isaac |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Doubleday and Co. |
| Copyright Date | 1942 - 1951 |
| Number of Pages | 225 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | July 2023 |
The Foundation stories began in 1942 with a short story in Astounding Science Fiction, followed by three more separately published stories which were then combined into this novel, and soon followed with more novels that either continued or preceded the story first published when Asimov was 22 years old.
The story proceeds in several sections. In the first one, Hari Seldon, a "psychohistorian", has calculated that the Galactic Empire that rules the entire Milky Way system from the planet Trantor is in the process of collapsing. Seldon's predictions are that barbarism will become the norm throughout the galaxy and it will take 30,000 years to recreate a galactic civilization based on science, a second empire. However, Seldon has calculated that a relatively small number of carefully studied actions can change the future and reduce the barbarian period from 30,000 to 1,000 years. To implement the plan he succeeds in establishing a foundation on the planet Terminus near the edge of the galaxy. Its mission is to create a Galactic Encyclopedia that will preserve the scientific knowledge of the empire.
The next section, I presume it was a separate story in Astounding, occurs 50 years later when the first "Seldon crisis" arrives, an inflection point where the leaders of the Foundation watch a video made by Hari Seldon to describe what is happening and what must be done to push the galaxy towards Seldon's desired end. That is followed by a second Seldon crisis 30 years after that, and then two more sections where important changes will occur. As the parts of the story unfold, old characters grow old and new characters are introduced.
The encyclopedia has some value but it turns out not to be the heart of the novel. There is nothing in it about psychohistory. There is no new research in it, only documentation of existing science. Many of the efforts of the characters are devoted to keeping Terminus from being attacked and overwhelmed by the much more populous and resource rich planets in other solar systems. The steps taken mostly involve spreading an apparently magical religion that uses the Foundation's scientific sophistication, especially in "nucleics", to make the ignorant masses of the surrounding cultures believe that the Foundation is able to perform magical deeds in which an omnipotent God is known to exist and all must obey him.
There are hints of the far future in this book, for example the mention of another Terminus like planet at the opposite edge of the galaxy. I suspect that they were little bits of material back ported from the succeeding novels in the Foundation series, first published as a stream of three novels and later, after Asimov's death in 1992 in a total of seven novels.
My book notes show that I read this book in April of 1993 and in those notes I wrote that I first read the book "at age 19 or so", which would have been around 1965. If my dim recollections are accurate, I read my first SF novel at age eleven while in elementary school. I soon read all of the SF novels in my elementary school library and went on later to my junior high and high school libraries and the Enoch Pratt public libraries including Branch 21, then Branch 14, and Branch 16 - the furthest one I tried to reach by walking or riding my bike. I believe that my acquaintance with Asimov began in this period.
Science fiction began at least as early as Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and other 19th century writers, but the notion of a science fiction genre, a realm of fiction that became important in its own right, started later in the 1920s and 1930s. Asimov (a capable scientist and a prodigious rapid reader who could read multiple books in a day and write a book every month for 10 years!) would have grown up with this early SF and he became one of its most popular and prolific writers.
I looked at his vision of a galaxy wide empire of humans and thought - What? How could he imagine so many trillions and quadrillions and more of human beings spread over an entire galaxy and with no aliens or AIs and robots? But Asimov was a sophisticated intellectual, story teller, and writer. He knew what he was doing when he restricted his story to humans only. As I worked on this comment on his book, I found an excerpt from an interview he gave to Terry Gross of NPR's Fresh Air (1987-09-25):
". . .The kinetic theory assumes that gases are made up of nothing but molecules, and psychohistory will only work if the hosts of intelligence are made up of nothing but human beings. In other words, the presence of aliens with non-human intelligence might well bollix the works. . . ." So Asimov made choices. Use this unlikely idea or that one? His base idea, he said, the one that drove the entire sequence of stories, was the notion of psychohistory. Asimov was the kind of guy who could take an idea and run with it.
This is one of Isaac Asimov's earliest works. It established his career as a popular and professional writer. He got better over time and I enjoyed his later works a lot.
| Author | Clancy, Tom |
|---|---|
| Publication | Random House Audio, 2010 |
| Copyright Date | 1986 |
| Number of Pages | 725 |
| Genres | Fiction; Thriller |
| Keywords | World War III |
| When Read | July 2023 |
Sometime in the future near to the time of Clancy's writing, a projected time based on what existed in the cold war between NATO and the USSR, a catastrophe constructed by Islamic terrorists severely damages the Soviet oil industry and leaves the country in a very precarious situation. The Russians decide that they can only correct the situation by invading some middle eastern countries and seizing their oil fields. And they can only do that if they defeat the NATO alliance in a blitzkrieg attack. They prepare themselves over a four month period, moving men and materials to the western borders of their East Bloc territory and intensively plan and train for the war. Then they launch their invasions. The main one is a multipronged invasion of West Germany. Another is an air and sea based invasion of Iceland to convert it to an airbase for interrupting assistance from the United States. There is also fighting in northern Norway and in some other NATO countries.
The Russians pour everything into the conflict but the Germans fight fiercely and withdraw slowly. In the air and under the sea, American and western European air forces and submarines put up more effective resistance than the Russians expected. In the end, the last Russian offensive fails and a group of military officers attack the Kremlin, capture all of the members of the Politburo and offer a truce and retreat of Communist forces to prewar borders. The Allies accept. The war is over. A new and more democratic future is possible in the Soviet Union.
The novel is about the mechanics of the war. Clancy builds a high level but still quite detailed story of what he believes it would be like for soldiers, sailors, and airmen with vehicles, ships, aircraft, and submarines built with 1986 technology to engage in war. The main characters of the story are from American and Russian forces with some additions from British, German, and a few other armies and navies.
I was surprised at how much Clancy either knew, or convincingly invented, the technology of 1980s weaponry and the tactics of how the weapons would be used. He was knowledgeable about Eastern as well as Western armaments and tactics. He did a, surprisingly to me, good job of distributing courage and intelligence among characters on both sides of the conflict. I found myself hoping that Russian officers and soldiers would also survive the war.
For the most part, Clancy stayed within the limits of his interest in military affairs. There was some Soviet politics needed to account for the start and end of the war, and to describe how he believed that the political leaders in the USSR might be expected to damage their military efforts by constantly demanding too much of the military while blaming all failures on them when in fact it was the politicians who failed. Given what I know about Stalin's failures in WWII and the awful impositions and punishments meted out to innocent Russian officers and soldiers in that earlier war, Clancy stayed within realistic limits. The Putin government is doing something similar in their current Ukraine "special military operation".
Human relations were handled relatively simply. There was a love affair between a beautiful young Icelandic woman whose parents were killed and herself raped by a few out of control Russian soldiers until a shy young American officer leading a small group of Marines arrived. They killed the Russians and rescued the girl. In general, most of the soldiers, sailors, and airmen of the story were portrayed sympathetically. In general, the Americans and Russians, together with a few Brits and Germans, did what we would expect of them.
This was the kind of book that we might read for what it has to say about modern warfare. The reason for the war was unconvincing to me, but I don't think Clancy cared about that. He wasn't writing a novel intended to alert people to the politics or the dangers that might lead to war. But if we set aside politics and history it does have a lot to tell us about what war might be like at the 1980s technological level.
| Author | Cather, Willa |
|---|---|
| Publication | Gutenberg, 2004 |
| Copyright Date | 1922 |
| Number of Pages | 284 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | August 2023 |
See the abstract I wrote exactly sixteen years ago in 2007 after my first reading of this novel (2007-08.01).
The novel won the Pulitzer Prize exactly 100 years ago in 1923.
I read this book, as I read most books these days, in digital form. As I read I often highlight passages that strike me as particularly thoughtful and beautifully written. With this book there were a great many such passages and I had to force myself to stop marking passage after passage.
Cather understands her characters and sympathizes with them. She can see that young Claude, the main character in the book, is deeply depressed. He sees life passing him by. His couple of years at the religious college he attended were not just a waste of his time but were actually a barrier to his receiving a real education at the university. His marriage to the pretty girl he had played with as a child was a total failure. The woman thought only of her fundamentalist religion and her campaign against alcohol. Sex was of no interest to her and she could not bring herself to engage in it. Soon she leaves Claude to spend all of her time with her evangelist sister in China. Other characters, Claude's parents and two brothers, the old housemaid Mahailey, the men he meets in the army and the Europeans he meets in France are interestingly done. The ones from Nebraska being especially well understood and described by the author.
I have just looked at my bookmarks to try to pick out something to illustrate Cather's writing. It's hard to do justice to her by quoting passages but here's one that I found interesting. It's describing Claude's mother, peering into her psyche to reveal the relationship that mother had to son.
___"Rest, rest, perturbed spirit," she sometimes whispered to him in her mind, when she wakened thus and thought of him. There was a singular light in his eyes when he smiled at her on one of his good days, as if to tell her that all was well in his inner kingdom. She had seen that same look again and again, and she could always remember it in the dark,--a quick blue flash, tender and a little wild, as if he had seen a vision or glimpsed bright uncertainties.___
I read the book for the NCI Book Club. It was much appreciated by most of the people in the club.
| Author | Vidal, Gore |
|---|---|
| Publication | Little Brown, Reprint edition |
| Copyright Date | 1968 |
| Number of Pages | 264 |
| Extras | For Christopher Isherwood |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Sex and gender |
| When Read | August 2023 |
27 year old Myra Breckinridge, presenting herself as the widow of one Myron Breckinridge, appears at the Academy for Aspiring Young Actors and Actresses. Her husband Myron was the nephew of Buck Loner, the CEO of the Academy and Myra, as heir to Myron's assets (that originate with assets from a relative of both Myron and Buck), demands ownership of half of the Academy from Loner. She also becomes the teacher of classes in Empathy and Posture and is much admired by the students.
Myra seems to have seen virtually every Hollywood movie of the 1930's and 40's. She considers these films to be classics, the very best work of Hollywood before it would be overwhelmed and reduced by the competition from television. She knows the names, film histories, biographies, and talents of hundreds of actors and actresses from that period. She is very good at teaching the students - all clueless young people who will never get any real acting jobs. Then she meets two students who have a possible chance at acting careers. Rusty Godowsky, the handsomest young man in the school has seduced Mary Ann Pringle, the prettiest girl and best singer. Myra is driven to overwhelm and conquer each of them. She succeeds. She learns that Rusty is on probation for crossing the Mexico/U.S. border. She uses her authority as a teacher, her threats of reporting Rusty to the police, and her naturally powerful effect on others to tie him up and rape him anally with a big dildo and then soon after she convinces Mary Ann that Rusty has left her and is seeing one woman after another. Innocent Mary Ann comes to love her caring teacher and even allows Myra to hug her and play with her body and breasts - though not with her vagina.
It is only in the last part of the novel that we learn that Myra and Myron are one and the same person. Myron never died, he just underwent a set of sex change treatments that turned him into a woman. However, after a hit and run driver (Buck Loner?) hit Myra as she crossed the street, she was almost killed. Unconscious for ten days in a hospital, the doctor removed her silicon breasts for fear of the silicon blocking Myra's arteries and, of course, no hormone treatment was maintained to keep her from growing facial hair. She was caught in a gender contradiction.
The story ends as she works out what has happened, who she is, and who and what she wants to become.
I had not read a Vidal novel in a while and, when I saw this one I thought I'd get back into his historical fiction. Every one of the six books by Vidal that I had read in the past was a historical novel. So without reading a single summary or review of the book, I started right in.
The novel was a surprise to me. This book was not historical at all unless the many references that Myra makes to Hollywood actors of two decades before can be called "historical". It was a novel about sex - not the kind of sex that appears in romance novels, or even the kind of explicit sex now found in books and movies of the 21st century. It's about what is now known as "LGBTQ+" sex, plus some outrageous sex between Myra and Rusty and others. I'm no expert on any of this so I did a bit of research in the Wikipedia and learned that (see article on "Gender-affirming surgery (male-to-female)") Johns Hopkins University opened the first "sex reassignment surgery clinic in America", just two years (or less) before Vidal's novel was published. This may well be the first novel to include sex reassignment surgery. Vidal gives us no scientific information about it. He's not interested in the science. My sense is that he was not interested in, or at least not deterred by, what society may think about it. What he's interested in is the outrageous but intriguing activity of Myra/Myron Breckinridge. Jean-Luke Swanepoel, an author in his own right as well as a reviewer on goodreads.com writes: "and Myra--well...I adore her--despise her--admire her--detest her. It is a book full of -isms, having been published in 1968, and can still spark both a riot and a conversation across the ideological spectrum."
I think that Jean-Luke nailed it. After reading for a while I would begin to admire Myra and then, BAM!, Vidal would give us page after page after page of her evil, merciless, rape of Rusty, or her lies to, and manipulations of, Mary Ann.
I doubt if I would have read the book if I knew more about it before I started, but I can't deny that it was a remarkable piece of work - a noticeable expansion of my experience with literature.
| Author | Kilmeade, Brian |
|---|---|
| Publication | Penguin Audio, 2021 |
| Copyright Date | 2021 |
| Number of Pages | 304 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History; Biography |
| Keywords | Abraham Lincoln; Frederick Douglass; American Civil War; Race and slavery |
| When Read | August 2023 |
Kilmeade switches back and forth between biographies of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass before concentrating on the problems, positions, and interactions of the two men in the struggle against slavery in the critical period of the American Civil War. As is fully agreed upon by historians today (I think), Lincoln was not an uncompromising opponent of slavery at the beginning of his administration, when a number of states had already seceded from the union with more on the way. He opposed slavery but his main concern was the survival of the union of all of the United States. If it were necessary to retain slavery to re-unite the union, he would probably have worked hard to limit slavery, but he would have allowed it to continue if that was the price of preserving the union. Douglass, the most well known of all of the runaway slaves in the U.S., had other views. He opposed slavery in the past, the present, and the future, in all jurisdictions and conditions. He saw freedom for all human beings as part of the bedrock of what was required for any country to call itself a free and democratic state.
Kilmeade was clearly sympathetic to Douglass' view of the moral issues but he also understood that getting the necessary votes in Congress and the voter support for them was going to require flexible and skillful negotiation and compromise. Lincoln may have achieved the most that could be achieved in a country like the U.S. where racism was rampant in the North as well as the South.
Kilmeade gives us a lot of information about the personal relations between Lincoln and Douglass. Douglass was invited to meetings with Lincoln and, to the great surprise of many white men, Lincoln singled him out as a person especially close to the president, apparently closer than the great majority of whites. This was not acceptable in most of white society and Lincoln was criticized for it but he persisted in treating Douglass as an equal and important man. Douglass was not prepared to give up all criticism of Lincoln. He continued to see unequal and unethical (from Douglass' and my points of view) treatment of black people in Lincoln's policies and administration, but he came to understand that race was a difficult issue that required compromise if any progress was to be made.
I have read two books by Douglass, at least another six about Lincoln, and a bunch more about race and slavery in the United States. This book by Kilmeade was not the best book I've read about any of these subjects, but it had its strong points. In particular, I thought it was accessible to people without much previous knowledge of race and slavery in the Civil War era, or the actions of these two important people in ending slavery in the US. I think it was a strongly anti-racist book that made the moral issues that still bedevil American politics clear. Within the limits of a single moderate sized book that tries to cover quite a lot of subjects related to race and slavery as well as to the lives and roles of two important people, I think it did a good job.
It was only after I finished the book that I looked up Brian Kilmeade and found out that he is a Fox News TV and radio broadcaster. I understand that many users of Fox News are not racist and I hope that those who are will have a chance to hear Kilmeade's viw on the subject of race.
I read this book for the NCI Book Group.
| Author | Peters, Ellis |
|---|---|
| Publication | Durkin Hayes Audio, 2005 |
| Copyright Date | 1988 |
| Number of Pages | 130 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction; Mystery |
| Keywords | Cadfael |
| When Read | August 2023 |
Three novellas were published separately in 1979, 1981, and 1985 and were published together in one volume in 1988. The titles were A Light on the Road to Woodstock, The Price of Light, and Eye Witness. In the first of these Cadfael had come over to England in the long journey from the the Holy Land to Normandy and then England where he finishes his service to one of King Henry's knights. He is present at a meeting with people from the Abbey of Shrewsbury where Cadfael finds his new calling.
The next two stories are mysteries from later in Cadfael's career as herbalist and doctor at the abbey.
Peters did a good a job in writing these stories as she did in her novels, but I preferred the novels. There is room for a richness in a novel length book that Peters used to fill out the characters, the settings, and the mystery that is at the heart of each novel. Still, the Cadfael novels occupy a place in my reading that is reserved for books that I came to accept and enjoy earlier. Books of this sort form series for me and other readers like me. Rex Stout, Dick Francis, and 20 or 30 or 40 more authors are in this class. The Peters Cadfael stories occupy a special position in the group.
| Author | Deighton, Len |
|---|---|
| Publication | London, New York: Harper Collins |
| Copyright Date | 1970 |
| Number of Pages | 496 |
| Extras | Introduction by Len Deighton, 2009 |
| Extras | Acknowledgments by Len Deighton |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | World War II |
| When Read | September 2023 |
Deighton, himself a Royal Air Force airman from 1947-9, produced this remarkable novel about a fictional 24 hours (in fictional June 31, 1943) of a fictional RAF Lancaster bomber squadron in an attack that accidentally bombed the fictional town of Altgarten instead of the intended Krefeld, a real city about four kilometers west of the Rhine River and some miles from Altgarten.
The story begins in the morning at the fictional RAF base at Warley Fen in Kent. The squadron's sixteen bombers are prepared for the air raid planned for the coming night. They will be part a massive raid by 750 aircraft. At the same time, the Luftwaffe and Wehrmacht are preparing their defense. They don't know exactly where the bombers will be but their radio interception, air reconnaissance, long range radar, and other techniques tell them that a big raid will soon begin. Night fighters, anti-aircraft batteries, search lights, radars, and anti-aircraft gunboats are brought into play while measures for protecting civilians are implemented all over the Ruhr.
The number of characters in the story is much larger than we find in most novels and the number of Germans and the time devoted to showing what happened to them seems as high as, or even higher than, that of the English.
The descriptions are both highly technical - explaining how and why certain things happen in the flying and fighting, and humane - describing the horrific things that are happening both to the fliers shot up in the air and the people on the ground inundated with explosive and incendiary bombs.
The technical descriptions are very clear and convincing. Deighton goes into detail about why the long distance radars can find aircraft twice as far away as the near distance ones, but they produce less information about aircraft types, numbers of planes, altitudes, etc. The aircraft can absorb some damage and continue flying but all the damaged parts may now be less capable, more fragile, and more likely to fail as the flying proceeds. Damage and crashes are explained in detail, as are injuries and deaths among the airmen. A gunner has his bottom half smashed into a pulpy mess that kills him within minutes of the injuries. His blood and his mangled body parts are plastered onto the fuselage walls where the sights and smells sicken the other airmen until they become either overwhelmed or inured. Among the Germans, civilians in Altgarten are blown to pieces by explosive bombs. Others are struck by bits of burning phosphorus from incendiaries that cannot be put out by water. Firemen and rescue workers are killed or severely injured by falling debris in buildings where people have been dazed and trapped by the debris. Others are killed by explosions that have been deliberately delayed.
In the end, the fate of each of the major characters is made clear. Men, women, and children live partly by skill and competence and partly by pure luck. Others, including many capable and decent people on both sides, are severely injured or killed. Terrible outcomes afflict thousands of people in a single day of the war, and day after day after day lay ahead.
I was surprised by many things in this book. To begin with, the author's knowledge of the details, even quite small details, of flying and fighting are extraordinary. I've known a number of pilots in my life and Deighton is right up there among the better and more technical ones. That by itself is impressive, but his knowledge of the war, from both the British and German sides, is also impressive. I believe his claim that he read 200 books on the subject to prepare for writing this novel.
Most of the books I've read about wars, especially books of fiction, and especially books written by British and Americans about World War II, have clear identification of who is good and who is bad. British and Americans are good guys. Germans and Japanese are bad guys. Russians and Italians hover between the good and the bad. Yet here is Len Deighton treating both Germans and British as ordinary human beings - people who have personal lives that are important to them and not always very different from those of the other side. Some of them are Nazis, but even the Nazis seem mostly ordinary people who identify with their country.
I, personally, have a strong point of view about the war. The British and Americans were the good guys. The Germans and Japanese were bad. Russians and Italians were in the middle. Not every soldier was good or bad as I have defined them and not every person was a soldier, but When I read the book I was rooting for the British. I hoped that the better and more decent Germans would survive, but maybe with experiences that would teach them to despise Nazism, or if necessary, injuries that would at least take them out of the war.
. . .
As so often happens in my reading life, I only discovered after I finished the book and written most of my book notes that I had read it before, in this case 38 years before in 1985. I even discovered the notes again in 2016 when, semi-crippled in a reclining chair, I was converting hand written index cards to digital format.
I liked the book before and liked it again. See my early notes for 1985-12-04.
| Author | Overy, Richard |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York, London: W.W. Norton and Co. |
| Copyright Date | 2018 |
| Number of Pages | 150 |
| Extras | Illustrations/photos, citation notes, map, commentary on photos, index |
| Genres | Non-fiction; History |
| Keywords | Britain; World War I; Aviation |
| When Read | October 2023 |
On April 1, 1918, the British government and military officially created the Royal Air Force (RAF). This was the first independent air force ever created by any country in the world. It was not part of the army or part of the navy, it was a separate organization with its own command structure that was not directly accountable to army generals or navy admirals.
This was surprising. The greatest part of the work by British aircraft was in supporting soldiers on the ground. Planes were used to scout behind enemy lines, to direct artillery fire, to bomb enemy rail lines and depots, and to strafe enemy soldiers on the field, mostly ordered by army generals. In a very few cases they attempted to defend Britain against air attack and, not very successfully, to make independent bombing attacks on German airfields and factories. Planes used by the navy scouted for enemy ships and submarines. A very small number of bomb or torpedo attacks against German ships were attempted and some reconnaissance.
This book is about the organizational and bureaucratic events that various government, military, and naval institutions battled out with each other in their ponderous efforts to each protect their turfs or to create this new one.
Shortly after finishing Len Deighton's Bomber I came across this book in the library and, since I had read and liked a previous book by Overy (Why the Allies Won), and since this one is quite short, I decided to read it.
RAF is not a book about the war, or about flying, or about flying in the war. It is a book about people meeting in committees where they argue out their interests and their points of view about who should have control over what. I myself was not persuaded that either point of view (flying airplanes is or is not something that merits an independent organization) was clearly the right one. It seemed to me that Overy didn't take sides either. He had come across what he thought was an important 20th century historical event and, successfully in my view, preserved its history.
| Author | Banks, Iain M. |
|---|---|
| Publication | Hachette Digital |
| Copyright Date | 2010 |
| Number of Pages | 656 |
| Genres | Fiction; Science fiction |
| When Read | October 2023 |
The story opens with a young woman named Lededje Y'breq running from someone named Veppers. She is caught. Rape is attempted. She bites off the end of the man's nose and he immediately kills her. Unknown either to Lededje or Veppers, the Culture had made a backup of her consciousness and memory. It was used to "revent" Lededje into a new body not unlike her old one. From then on the story ranges over many characters and many events of increasingly wide scope but eventually returns to Lededje's determination for revenge.
Veppers is the most powerful person on his planet and on the region of space around it. He collaborates with others, both human like and alien, in the production of multiple simulations of Hell. Beings who have committed errors in their lives (it is not clear what errors but it does seem that Veppers is not in danger of condemnation) may be brought to a simulation of life and condemned to some period, perhaps everlasting, as victims in Hell. They are tortured, starved, and harmed in every possible way, but they are not able to die and their condemnation is never ending. This is thought by the promoters of Hells to be the only way that good behavior can be imposed on people who live "in the real", i.e., who are not simulated. The political and social units of this part of the galaxy have divided between those who support the creation of Hells and those who oppose them. The two factions are at a sort of simulated and sublimated war but over the course of the novel the war has spread to the "real" and the Hell supporters are gradually winning - until the Culture gets involved and its advanced warships quickly turn the tide, returning the galaxy to the steady advance of science and civilization.
As always Iain Banks has an extraordinarily rich imagination. In my own mind, I imagine him to be the kind of writer who produced text, as it were, on impulse. The powerful rapist chases down the hapless woman and grabs her. She can't escape. No options are available to save herself. What does she do? Why ... she bites off his nose. It is not written as the beginning of a new novel but it is full of surprise and emotion. It becomes the beginning.
Is that how he does it? Banks is no longer alive. I can't write to him and ask.
This is the next to last novel of the Culture series. I found it to be rather scattered and overburdened with characters and subplots that involved multiple threads of stories. But the imagination is amazing. The artificial worlds in space, the planet with concentric layers of land and air with expanding civilizations at each higher layer, the notion of hellish punishment of artificial minds. It's not always sensible but it is always imaginative and, in a unique way, interesting. This volume in the series is not the best and I'm inclined to say that most of the volumes have serious faults, but the books always attracted my attention.
| Author | Le Carre, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | London: Chivers Audio Books |
| Copyright Date | 2015 |
| Number of Pages | 567 |
| Genres | Fiction; Spy |
| When Read | October 2023 |
The story opens in 1991 in Zurich, Switzerland at a very high class and exclusive hotel. Jonathan Pine, a former soldier in a crack section of the British army fighting in the Middle East, is the night manager of the hotel. A snowstorm has prevented people from flying in to Zurich and staying at the hotel, but a private plane makes it in anyway, bringing Richard Roper, a fabulously wealthy man who is eventually revealed as an arms merchant, a man who sells weapons to shady organizations around the world, some of which may actually be secretly funded by a British spy agencies, or perhaps by the American CIA.
Pine leaves his job in Munich and goes to work in the Caribbean. He makes less money but he manages to do a huge favor for Roper, apparently saving the life of Roper's young son in a kidnapping at the hotel where Pine is working and Roper is staying. Roper feels deeply indebted to Pine and brings him into the organization.
The situation becomes more and more complicated. We learn that Pine hated Roper because Roper had caused the death of a woman that Pine admired. That becomes even more complicated as Pine is attracted to another woman who is Roper's current inamorata, a woman who does not take much care to protect herself or Pine in front of Roper. Finally, we encounter members of the British spy agency who do not approve of using Pine and perhaps not of taking the side of Pine over that of Roper. In short, it's the kind of book that Le Carre, and perhaps only Le Carre, can write.
I found this book to be subtle and difficult to follow. That may be partly due to my age and partly to the complexity of the plot and characters. I would have done better to read the text rather than listen to an audiobook version where it is difficult to rewind and reread passages and easy to be distracted by other things. I might also have done well to read some of the enlightening reviews on the Internet before I read the book rather than after. Nevertheless, I still got a lot from it. Le Carre was a brilliant writer.
I've read 22 of the 25 novels that Le Carre wrote (according to ChatGPT), one of them twice (The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. I might just take on the remaining three sometime.
| Author | Garmus, Bonnie |
|---|---|
| Publication | Doubleday Canada |
| Copyright Date | 2022 |
| Number of Pages | 394 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| When Read | October 2023 |
In the early 1960's Elizabeth Zott is a highly intelligent but almost single minded chemist. She made an impression on an equally highly intelligent and rather single minded young man, Calvin Evans, who was the best known chemist at his university. Elizabeth stole beakers from Calvin's lab to use in her own experiments but, in spite of her self-centered action the two of them came together. Calvin found a place in his own lab for her and was able to use his high reputation to overcome the misogyny and anti-feminism of the university and its chemistry department and get Zott accepted. Calvin wants to marry Zott but she refuses because she wants her research papers to be published under the name of Dr. Zott, not Dr. Evans because the social conventions of the early 60's required that a new wife take the last name of the new husband.
Zott does valuable research but, when her boyfriend and protector dies in a freak accident, the dean at the university succeeds in plagiarizing her work and, when she fights hard against his thefts, booting her out of the chemistry department and the university. She fights back but is thwarted by the dean and not taken seriously by male chemists who don't believe that any woman can become a real scientist.
Zott works in jobs beneath her own level of expertise and quits the university when she discovers the full extent to which the dean is publishing her work under his own name. Zott's break comes when a decent but lonely, alienated and single parent television producer named Walter Pine becomes interested in this good looking female chemist with a daughter of the same age as is own daughter. Pine opens a door for Zott to become a TV personality on what started out as a cooking show. Then Zott transformed it to a show about cooking based on an understanding of the chemistry of food. It turned into a surprising success.
Eventually it all comes out right.
The book was a serious exposure of the subjugation of women in science, done in a comic style. Elizabeth Zott, her lovers, her child, and even her dog are comical characters. I sometimes became irritated by them but mostly accepted that the points they make are well taken. It was a very popular book, one chosen by our NCI book group.
| Author | Connelly, Michael |
|---|---|
| Publication | Hachette Audio |
| Copyright Date | 2017 |
| Number of Pages | 448 |
| Genres | Fiction; Mystery |
| When Read | November 2023 |
"He knew there were two kinds of truth in this world. The truth that was the unalterable bedrock of one’s life and mission. And the other, malleable truth of politicians, charlatans, corrupt lawyers, and their clients, bent and molded to serve whatever purpose was at hand."
Bosch is now retired from the LAPD but still working as a volunteer on cold cases for the small San Fernando Police Department. Early in the novel he focuses on a pharmacy where the two pharmacists, a father and a son, have been murdered. He and the rest of the police determine that the father was selling opioid drugs to old addicts controlled by gangsters. The son discovered what his father was doing and attempted to stop it. The gangsters retaliated by shooting both of them.
Bosch is the oldest of the available cops and he volunteers to pretend to be a drug addict. Wearing dirty, stinky clothes and limping as he walks, he gets pushed by a gang dominated pharmacy into a group of a dozen or so addicts who fly from town to town where they show up at crooked pharmacies with prescriptions from gang controlled doctors to buy up as much as hundreds of pills a day with street values up to 80 times their cost to the criminals. Bosch is ultimately discovered and sent off in the plane with two Russian gangsters who plan to push him out the door and kill him. But they underestimate him. He kills one gangster with a knife, takes the dead man's gun, and goes after the other - a man who jumps out the door himself over a lake, but who does not survive. Bosch is able to make contact with the police and drug enforcement people.
He learns from LAPD people he knew that one of his old cases has been re-opened. Bosch had been instrumental in putting Preston Borders in prison for three rapes and murders 30 years before, but now he has been told that a drop of another killer's blood/DNA, has been found on one of the victim's clothing. Lawyers representing Borders are claiming that some of the victims were not killed by Borders at all but by another, now dead, rapist and killer. Furthermore, they claim, that the key evidence discovered by Bosch in the earlier conviction was actually planted in Borders' home by Bosch. If they can prove this, and they have reason to believe that they can, not only will Borders go free, but the city will be sued for tens of millions of dollars and Bosch's reputation will be ruined. He'll be sued, probably tried, kicked out of his current occupation, and despised by everyone he knew or worked with.
Bosch knows that he never planted evidence in any arrest and is infuriated by what has happened. He goes to work to discover how the DNA got planted in the 30 year old evidence collection for the case, who planted it, and how it was done. He brings his half brother Mickey Haller in as his lawyer and Haller's own highly competent investigator, Dennis “Cisco” Wojciechowski. Together, they solve the case, figuring out who actually planted the evidence. Haller takes some risks, pretending to have more knowledge than he has, and getting confirmation from the real criminals whom Haller has second guessed. Bosch is angry. It's not Harry's way of winning but Haller's risk taking pays off and the real crimes and criminals are uncovered.
As one expects in a Connelly novel, and maybe in real life too, the higher up bureaucrats have their say in what the consequences will be. The lying lawyers and the corrupt evidence clerk are discovered but not entirely exposed. Justice is done at least to the extent that Harry Bosch is fully exonerated. The lawyers will suffer and may be disbarred, but won't go to jail. The lowly clerk who actually planted the old blood sample will possibly pay the full price.
Connelly is my current favorite mystery/crime writer. When I searched Google for top crime writers, the first site I found listed Connelly as number seven among all crime writers and number one among those still alive and working. His characters are based on what he saw working as a journalist among real police detectives in Los Angeles - a job he undertook for the specific purpose of enabling him to write realistic novels about crime and police detective work. C's depiction of both the strengths and faults of these characters are convincing to me and apparently to millions of other readers.
I sympathize with Harry Bosch. At the same time, I'm irritated by his shutting other cops out of his thinking and perhaps also by his willingness to do things that the police departments would not just disapprove of but absolutely forbid. But I, and no doubt millions of other readers, admire Bosch's police work, which is to say Connelly's great ability to see into the situations that Bosch confronts and to have him make realistic, intelligent and courageous decisions about what he should do. Bosch's decision to pretend to be an elderly (no pretense required there) drug addict raised the danger level extraordinarily high as he'd be out of touch with the rest of the police force and in the hands of a gang of killers. The other story in the novel, the one about the attempt to throw Bosch under the bus and make millions in a lawsuit against his alleged planting of false evidence, doesn't threaten death for Bosch but it does threaten to make him the despised enemy of the police and the public.
This is the twentieth Michael Connelly book that I've read. I hope to live long enough to read a lot more. As of this writing, Connelly is noted by the Wikipedia as having published 38 novels. At age 67, ten years younger than me, he may well have a bunch more in his brain. I hope to live long enough to read a lot of them.
| Author | Pausch, Randy |
|---|---|
| Author | Zaslow, Jeffrey |
| Publication | Harperion Audio |
| Copyright Date | 2008 |
| Number of Pages | 217 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Autobiography |
| When Read | November 2023 |
Randolph Frederick Pausch, known to everyone except his mother as "Randy", was a Professor of Computer Science, first at the University of Virginia, then at Carnegie Mellon University. He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2006 and underwent a hard chemotherapy, surgery, and radiation treatment in hopes of living long enough to bring up his three children but it was not to be. He died on July 25, 2008, at the age of 47 with children aged 6, 4, and 2.
The Last Lecture was about Pausch's attitude towards life and his coming death. It followed and expanded upon an actual last lecture that he gave at Carnegie Mellon in what appears to be an effort to preserve something of his personality and his values for his children, his students, and whatever readers might be interested. It was largely done for the benefit of his viewers and readers but also for his own benefit - to realize as much positive value that he still had in him to help make his life good and meaningful in the unexpectedly short time that was still left to him.
He struck me as a great optimist. From his young childhood he always had great aspirations, from playing football in the NFL to flying into space. As a professor, he worked on learning and advancing one of the most interesting and practical sciences then and now. He learned about the "Imagineering" in progress at Walt Disney's works and decided that he wanted in on the project. He spent 80 hours studying the work of the head scientist/engineer in the Imagineering project, then asked if he could meet the fellow just for a brief talk about computer work. Then, at the meeting that resulted, he overwhelmed the imagineer with the great studying that he had done in virtual reality and other topics of vital interest to the movie business. They offered him a job. He didn't want to leave the university but he did negotiate a six months long sabbatical and continued to work on projects for Disney for years to come.
Jeffrey Zaslow, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, assisted Pausch with the book. Although Pausch had written previous books and articles, they were all about computer science. I expect that Zaslow was a real help but I also believe that we were reading the thoughts of Pausch throughout the book.
I could not but admire this man and wish that I had been more like him. Was he a little childish? I don't think so. I would rather say that he was more open about his life than most of us are.
I really liked the book and found myself tearing up as I read it. If I get a chance, I'll watch the video of his actual last lecture and add some notes on it.
| Author | Zauner, Michelle |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2021 |
| Copyright Date | 2021 |
| Number of Pages | 256 |
| Genres | Non-fiction; Memoir |
| When Read | December 2023 |
Zauner's book is a memoir, published when she was 32 years old. Her father, Joel Zauner is a Jewish American born and raised in the U.S. while her mother was Chong Mi Zauner, born and raised in South Korea. Michelle spent early childhood in Korea and then visited Korea for a couple of weeks with Chong Mi every other year. She became a great lover of Korean food and a good friend of her Korean family but, other than that, she struck me as very American.
Michelle had many conflicts with her parents. She wanted to be a band leader developing and playing her particular brand of "indie-pop" music. Although the family lived in Oregon, they sent Michelle to Bryn Mawr, where she graduated at age 22 in 2011. There is almost nothing in her memoir about her college experience. Her main interests seemed to be cooking and eathing Korean food and struggling with her mother, who had very strong opinions about what was right for Michelle, many of them in opposition to Michelle's own very strong opinions.
Chong Mi developed pancreatic cancer and died of it at the age of 56. It resulted in a crisis for Michelle. The young woman had fought with her mother but knew that her mother loved her deeply. She wasn't at all sure how she would continue without her. The story is a recounting of that phase of her life.
I read this book because it was chosen by the NCI book club - most of whom, but not all, thought highly of the memoir. My personal reaction, and I think some of the women in the club agreed, was that we were reading the thoughts of a grown up but still childish and immature girl, one who longed for her mom but also longed for independence from her mom. But at the same time, Michelle Zauner was a highly intelligent and highly articulate woman. Her perception of herself seemed to me to be quite deep and very well described. The publication of her book, her very first book, was extremely well received, and not unjustifiably so. If her thoughts about herself and her mother were immature, they were still very perceptive and well expressed. The author had a lot to say.
One point I'll add is that her relations with her father, the Jewish American who apparently worked hard to send Michelle and Chong Mi to Korea every other year and presumabley support their Korean family in the off years. He was the man who worked hard to send her from Oregon on the west coast all the way to Bryn Mawr on the east coast. After Chong Mi's funeral Michelle convinced (demanded?) her father to invite all of the family members to the most expensive restaurant in town and then (as a rebuke to her father?) ordered the very most expensive meal on the menu. I commend her for her openness and honesty in telling us about that episode in the story. I'm turned off by her seemingly (to me) childish and uncaring attitude.
| Author | Runcie, James |
|---|---|
| Publication | New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019 |
| Copyright Date | 2019 |
| Number of Pages | 336 |
| Genres | Fiction |
| Keywords | Religion; Christianity; World War II |
| When Read | December 2023 |
Runcie wrote a series of six books with stories about a vicar named Sidney Chambers who had survived the terrible battles in Italy during World War II and became an Anglican priest in a fictional town named Grantchester, a suburb of Cambridge England, where he worked with detective inspector Geordie Keating to solve murder mysteries. This prequel, that Runcie called number 0.5 in the series, was published in 2019, after the last of the six main works.
The first third of the story takes place in Italy where Robert Kendall, Sidney's best friend from before the war and the brother of Amanda Kendall, Sidney's early love interest, is killed in battle. Later we learn that Sidney himself might just possibly have killed Robert by accident while attempting to spray the German positions with machine gun fire. At the end of the war Sidney is mentally and emotionally scarred by his experience and is drawn towards a life in the church. He goes through training in a monastery. He begins to work with working class people, helping them through hard times and offering comfort and companionship to those who need it. His relationship with Amanda slowly melts away and eventually he confesses to her that he might possibly have killed her brother. It is the end of the possibility of the life that Sidney may have been moving towards before he was damaged by the war.
Marcia and I have watched the Public Broadcasting System streaming of the multi-year BBC series of all of the Grantchester productions. We liked them. I wanted to read some of Runcie's writing and I decided to start with this book - written last but setting up the background for the story of Sidney Chambers.
One thing that always interests me in books like this is the presentation of religion. I believe that religion can indeed offer comfort and companionship to people, but I also believe that there is no God and that the stories of the Bible, the Koran, and the other early religious works are based on the imaginations of pre-scientific people who believed things that we now understand at a much deeper level than they did. I want to know if there is a way to present and spread the humane and positive aspects of religion while discarding the false, primitive beliefs. Impressed by Runcie's sophisticated writing and his capable characterization of the people in his work, I wanted to see if he was able to present the positive parts of religion while setting aside the primitive beliefs.
In my opinion, Runcie did not achieve that. I don't know whether he wanted to. He created religious skeptics among his characters. They struck me as agnostics rather than atheists (a distinction that is too complicated I think to dig into here.) When Sidney reads passages from the Bible to his parishioners he presents the story of Jesus and similar writings as literally true. When we die we may go to heaven. When bad things happen beyond our control, God has not punished us, rather he is doing something that is beyond our understanding but must still be accepted. We must not reject God and not stop praying to him.
What is going on here? Is Runcie a sure as hell believer, or is he presenting Sidney as such a believer while he, Runcie, is himself an agnostic. I don't think he could be a sure as hell atheist, as I still am.
In the final analysis, I consider Runcie to be a very good writer who offers us interesting stories to read. The religious views of Sidney Chambers aren't mine, but I like the character and think that, whatever I believe about religion, I am still happy to read things from his point of view.
| Author | Creasey, John |
|---|---|
| Publication | Honor of Stratus, Inc. |
| Copyright Date | 1972 |
| Number of Pages | 507 |
| Genres | Fiction; Historical fiction |
| Keywords | Crime |
| When Read | December 2023 |
As eighteenth century England grew in population, wealth, and poverty, the crime rate grew. The number of valuable things to steal kept increasing as did the number of people whose best hope for a decent life or even for survival involved stealing those things. There was hardly any government run police force to protect people from crime or to pursue and arrest criminals. Protection against crime was a private affair. Rich people hired guards for themselves, their families, and their property. Private security companies and individuals suppressed crime, arrested criminals, and recovered stolen goods in return for reward from the wealthy victims. Some of the apprehenders of criminals were themselves criminals or partners of criminals. Given stolen goods by the thieves that stole them, they all shared the profits, the original owners got their possessions back and the criminals took a reduction in the value of their goods but were not threatened with punishment for their crimes. Some of those who claimed to be arresting criminals didn't even bother with real criminals. They found poor people who could be arrested for crimes they didn't commit, but were punished, often with hanging, to enable the men who "caught" them to win a reward.
In the early eighteenth century efforts began to build a police force that would protect everyone, without payment by the victims. The king and parliament of England were not interested and private efforts to organize something and pay the men who operated it made only a small impression on the government. One of the first attempts to make progress was the "Bow Street Runners" organized by Henry Fielding (the famous author) with great financial assistance from the wealthy Furnival family. Over the years, the organization became larger, more experienced, and more accepted by the British government.
Creasy's book is historical fiction that loosely follows historical fact.
I thought the book was interesting for what it said about the early history of crime and the establishment of law enforcement in modern England. It was not the kind of crime writing that became what I consider to be the rule in the late 19th - early 20th century with Sherlock Holmes and which still dominates English and American mystery writing.
What we are accustomed to today is novels featuring an individual detective who is the hero of a story with a complicated plot. This person, either a policeman of some type or a private detective, must find an individual criminal, usually someone who commits a murder. The hero may have a helper (e.g., Dr. Watson) and the criminal may have a gang, but Creasey's book is more about teaching us the history of crime fighting than it is about the thrills and adventures of modern mystery novels.
Creasey is said by Wikipedia contributors to have published over 600 books in the 64 years of his life. None of them that I looked at on Amazon had large numbers of reader/reviewers. Taking 600 as the number of his books and 43 as the number of years of writing, that's 14 books per year - a little better than one per month. Regardless of success or failure or something in between, Creasey appears to be one of those writers like Isaac Asimov, Agatha Christie, or Honore de Balzac, who can't keep themselves from writing and writing and writing.
More power to all of them.