rocketjk and the 2021 magical reading lamp

Last year (2020) I read a crazy 82 books in my second full year of retirement and first year of Covid, breaking the 50-mark for the fourth straight year. 20219 found me reading 63 books. My previous five totals, when I still owned my used bookstore, had been 41, 41, 46, 44, 46 and, in the first year of the store, only 40. I doubt I'll ever hit 82 again, but it will be a while before I get that vaccine, so who knows?

In case you're interested:
2020 50-Book Challenge thread
2019 50-Book Challenge thread
2018 50-Book Challenge thread
2017 50-Book Challenge thread
2016 50-Book Challenge thread
2015 50-Book Challenge thread
2014 50-Book Challenge thread
2013 50-Book Challenge thread
2012 50-Book Challenge thread
2011 50-Book Challenge thread
2010 50-Book Challenge thread
2009 50-Book Challenge thread
2008 50-Book Challenge thread

In addition to the books I read straight through, I like to read anthologies, collections and other books of short entries one story/chapter at a time instead of plowing through them all at once. I have a couple of stacks of such books from which I read in this manner between the books I read from cover to cover (novels and histories, mostly). So I call these my "between books." When I finish a "between book," I add it to my yearly list.

Master List (Touchstones included with individual listings below):
1: The Conversion of Chaplain Cohen by Herbert Tarr
2: The Rover by Joseph Conrad
3: Western Adventures Magazine - October, 1943
4: Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar
5: Black Power: The Politics of Liberation by Kwame Ture (formerly known as Stokely Carmichael) and Charles V. Hamilton
6: Look Down on Her Dying by Don Tracy
7: Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell
8: Ways of Escape by Graham Greene
9: The Union Reader edited by Richard B. Harwell
10: The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World - and Globalization Began by Valerie Hansen
11: Lucia in London by E.F. Benson
12: Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism by Patricia Hill Colliins
13: Pennant Race by Jim Brosnan
14: American Heroines: The Spirited Women Who Shaped Our Country by Kay Bailey Hutchison
15: A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin
16: Bright Orange for the Shroud by John D. MacDonald
17: They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers
18: The Zelmenyaners: a Family Saga by Moyshe Kulbak
19: Voice of the Whirlwind by Walter Jon Williams
20: The Comedians by Graham Greene
21: Harper's Magazine - June 1959 edited by John Fischer
22: In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s by Clayborne Carson
23: The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race by Walter Isaacson
24: Sgt. Mickey and General Ike by Michael J. McKeogh and Richard Lockridge
25: Rashomon Gate by I.J. Parker
26: The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together by Heather McGhee
27: Pot of Trouble by Don Tracy
28: A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende
29: Harvard Has a Homicide by Timothy Fuller
30: Up from Slavery by Booker T. Washington
31: The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe
32: The Seventh by Richard Stark
33: The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois
34: The Best of It: New and Selected Poems by Kay Ryan
35: We Band of Brothers: A Memoir of Robert Kennedy by Edwin Guthman
36: Glimpses by Lewis Shiner
37: A Promised Land by Barack Obama
38: Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
39: The Book of Kells: Art -- Origins -- History by Iain Zaczek
40: Scoundrel Time by Lillian Hellman
41: Sorry for Your Trouble by Richard Ford
42: Adventures of Captain David Grief by Jack London
43: The Corporal Was a Pitcher: The Courage of Lou Brissie by Ira Berkow
44: Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer
45: The Slave Ship: A Human History by Marcus Rediker
46: Death Blew Out the Match by Kathleen Moore Knight
47: The Atlantic Monthly - January 1959, Volume 203, Number 1
48: The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt
49: The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson
50: The Giants and Their City: Major League Baseball in San Francisco, 1976-1992 by Lincoln Abraham Mitchell
51: San Francisco Life Magazine - Volume VI, No. 5 - April, 1938 edited by E. I. Campbell
52: Sigh for a Strange Land by Monica Stirling
53: Death of a King: The Real Story of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Final Year by Tavis Smiley
54: Shiloh by Shelby Foote
55: Picnic Grounds: A Novel in Fragments by Oz Shelach
56: Indian Summer by Effie McAbee Hulbert
57: The Human Stain by Philip Roth
58: Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision by Barbara Ransby
59: Swann's Way by Marcel Proust
60: The House of Ashes by Stuart Neville
61: The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree by Shokoofeh Azar
62: Reunion with Murder by Timothy Fuller
63: In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History by Mitch Landrieu
64: The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles
65: Youth by Joseph Conrad
66: Now We Are Enemies: The Story of Bunker Hill by Thomas J. Fleming
67: Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

Is it my turn...?

I've dropped a star here Jerry. Although last year I became hopelessly behind in the threads, I'll try to keep watch. I do between books with anthologies as well, but usually only 1 or 2 at a time.

Good luck with your reading. We may surprise ourselves with how much we read this year since I think we have many months to go being shutdown.

Glad to have found your new thread, Jerry.

EIGHTY-TWO!!

You go with that pace! Better in '21, too!

Congratulations and Happy New Year!

Thanks to everyone for the New Year's greetings, and right back atcha. I'll be checking in on everybody's thread (those I haven't visited already) soon!

Book 1: The Conversion of Chaplain Cohen by Herbert Tarr



Here's my first completed book of 2021 (I began this book during the afternoon of the last day of 2020!). I wouldn't call this humorous novel, first published in 1963, a "deep" book, but it is a very thoughtful one. David Cohen is a newly ordained rabbi who is told by the head of his rabbinical seminary that unless he spends two years in the military as a chaplain first, he'll never get a congregation of his own. (Again, this is 1963, during the days of the Cold War. I'm sure such things do not go on today.) Duly coerced, Cohen finally succumbs and tries to enlist as an Army chaplain. But our hero is an early 60s anti-hero, and so a smartass, and manages to irritate someone at his physical exam to the extent that he is blacklisted. Sighing deeply, Cohen's superior pulls strings and gets Cohen into the Air Force. Once he begins his Air Force Chaplaincy training, he is plunged into several strange new worlds at once.

His parents having been killed in a car crash when he was very young, Cohen has been raised by his loving, aunt and uncle, immigrants both, in a very Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn. Although comfortable in the diverse cultures and classes of New York City, Cohen's sudden status as one of only two Jews in a 50-chaplain training course, though expected, still comes as a shock, especially as many of his classmates have never met a Jew before. His roommate, with whom he becomes good friends, has been under the misconception, for example, that rabbis, like Catholic priests, are celibate.

And so, in many ways, this is a novel about alienation and loneliness, and the ways in which we can make our peace with those conditions, or not. Cohen is a Jew in a Gentile world and very much a civilian dropped suddenly into military life. Soon he is a northern liberal in the segregated south. Also a city dweller dealing with the cultural isolation of life on an Air Force base. And he is an Air Force chaplain with a fear of flying! Tarr handles these themes well. They are implicit rather than explicit; we are not hit over the head with them (except maybe the fear of flying part). Surprisingly effective are Cohen's conversations (not debates, thank goodness) about religion and philosophy with his roommate, a Lutheran minister.

The novel is mostly episodic, as Cohen settles into his two-year chaplain stint and begins to figure out his role, and deal with his own loneliness, his outspokenness occasionally getting him into trouble. Some of these episodes work better than others, but overall I found this novel quietly effective. As a Jew myself, I found the portrayal of Judaism and Jewish philosophy to be well done and rarely heavy handed. The book is a timepiece, certainly, as the patriotic descriptions of the crucial nature of the Strategic Air Command as a temporary bulwark of world peace (until the politicians can get their acts together) make clear. I found that that added to the interest for me. It reflected, for example, the sort of thinking my own father would have been doing.

Book note--stamped on the title page I found this:

Library
Congregation Beth El
222 Irvington Ave.
South Orange, New Jersey

That's the synagogue my parents became members of after my sister and I left home for college, as it was closer to their house than the congregation we'd been members of during our childhoods. The inside back cover shows glue marks, a sign that the pocket for the library stamp card had been removed. All this tells me that one of my parents had purchased this book as a discard from the synagogue library. The entry date into my LT collection is 2008, so the first wave of my LT library entries. So this book came from my parents' bookshelves somewhere along the line and had been sitting on my own shelves for decades.

Sounds like an interesting read!

>8 rocketjk: I call that a legacy.

Book 2: The Rover by Joseph Conrad



For over a decade, I have had a personal tradition of beginning each calendar year with the reading (or, in most cases, rereading) of a Joseph Conrad novel, and in this way reading through all of the Conrad novels in the chronological order of their publishing. The Rover is the last of the novels published by Conrad while he was alive, and so, perhaps,* concludes this tradition.

The novel takes place in France during the Napoleonic Era. Jean Peyrol is a French seaman, old though still hearty, who has spent his life roving the seas, often as a privateer, sometimes as a gunner in the French Navy. He has had more than his share of violence, blood and adventure. Being so far from home, the French Revolution had left him essentially untouched, other than having formed a contempt for the revolutionary extremists who have crossed his path. Finally ready to retire, Peyrol returns to the place of his birth, a remote farming area close on to Toulon, a maritime city on the Mediterranean coast of France. He has brought with him a huge secret stash of old coins, a windfall discovery on a English merchant ship he has captured for France, enough to maintain him quiet comfort for life. Peyrol brings the ship in to Toulon, duly turns it over to the French authorities, and then, once he's sure all is in order, slips out of town for his remote destination. On the farm he picks out as a lodging locale, Peyrol finds three survivors of the Terror. Scevola has been a viscious perpetrator of horrific violence, the beautiful young Arlette has seen her parents murdered, and her tacitern aunt, Catherine, who has devoted her life to caring for her emotionally crippled niece. Peyrol wants only rest, but the war with England is still in progress, the English fleet is lying off the coast in blockade, and a young French navel officer, Real, soon turns up "on assignment." He, too, has been traumatized by the Revolution.

This novel delves less deeply into the mysteries of human psychology than Conrad's earlier novels. Peyrol is a more traditional protagonist than earlier Conrad figures like Marlow, Lord Jim or Verlock, and this is a more straightforward story, though still adorned with the Conrad observations about human nature that I so enjoy. For example, Peyrol stands out from most of the men around him by the fact that he is clean shaven. This is explained by his possession of a fine set of English razor blades that he enjoys using. Toward the end of the novel, Peyrol's use of these blades brings about this reverie:

"Cleaning the razor-blade (one of a set of twelve in a case) he had a vision of a brilliantly hazy ocean and an English Indiaman with her yards braced all ways, her canvas blowing loose above her bloodstained decks overrun by a lot of privateersmen and with the island of Ceylon swelling like a thin blue cloud on the far horizon. He had always wished to own a set of English blades and there he had got it, fell over it as it were, lying on the floor of a cabin which had been already ransacked. 'For good steel--it was good steel.' he thought looking at the blade fixedly. And there it was, nearly worn out.The others too. That steel! And here he was holding the case in his hand as though he had just picked it up from the floor. Same case. Same man. and the steel worn out.

He shut the case brusquely, flung it into his sea-chest which was standing open, and slammed the lid down. The feeling which was in his breast and had been known to more articulate men than himself, was that life was a dream less substantial than the vision of Ceylon lying like a cloud on the sea. Dream left astern. Dream straight ahead. This disenchanted philosophy took the shape of fierce swearing. 'Sacre nom de nom de nom . . . Tonnerre do bon Dieu!'

While tying his neckcloth he handled it with fury as though he meant to strangle himself with it."

All in all, a gripping novel, more straightforward than what we're used to with Conrad, but with a wistful quality, as the author, perhaps, was contemplating his own mortality as well.

* When I began this tradition I left out the first two novels, Almeyer's Folly and An Outcast of the Islands, because I remembered enjoying them less than I did the later books. Perhaps I'll go back and read those two (likely), or perhaps next year I'll read Suspense: A Napoleonic Novel, which was unfinished when Conrad died and was published posthumously (not too likely), or maybe I'll read the three novels wrote together with Ford Maddox Ford, which I've never heard anyone else speak of reading (a might-could, or maybe just one of the three, just for curiosity's sake), or simply start over with The Narcissus (a relatively high probability), or pick a new author (Philip Roth is the most likely, or maybe Isaac Singer).

Happy reading 2021. I dropped a star.

Book 3: Western Adventures Magazine - October, 1943



Read as a "between book" (see first post). This was a fun collection of western stories, ranging all the way in length from "novels" (really novellas), longish short stories and a couple of very short tales. Of the authors represented, I'd heard of only two of them from my used bookstore-owning days (I had a pretty large Westerns section): Norman A. Fox and Eli Colter. Most of the stories were engaging enough. There is a distinct pattern to them. Someone, usually a stranger in these here parts, has been wrongly accused of a crime and has to figure out a way to clear himself. Often in doing so, our hero gets the girl into the bargain. One of the most entertaining of the entries, the "novel" by Norman A. Fox called "Land Beyond the Law," is described thusly in its teaser on the table of contents: "Matt Larkey discovered too late that his bargain with the law had sent him into Hell's Vest Pocket with his gun fangs pulled."

The magazine was published by Street & Smith Publications. When I first started my reading here, I did a little fishing online and found a pulp crime and westerns blog that described Western Adventures as Street & Smith's third-string periodical. That may explain the relative sameness to the stories. Regardless, as I mentioned, these stories were entertaining if loved just for themselves, and if one likes their lead flying and their bad guys tumbling grimly to their just desserts.

As always with old magazines, the advertisements provide plenty of interest, too. For example, we learn "How a Free Lesson started Bill on the way to a Good Radio Job." Also, you may be amused to learn, we have a full-page ad selling Listerine as a dandruff treatment. Frequent reference to the war is made in these ads. Another full-page spot for International Correspondence Schools features a pen & ink drawing of a GI with rifle pointed as we are advised to "Increase Your 'Fire Power' on the Production Front and increase your chances for prosperity in tomorrow's victory world by enrolling in a low-cost, short-term War Course." The half-page ad for Gillette Razor Blades toward the back of the publication makes a promise that I don't believe it could keep, to put it mildly.

Book 4: Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar



Well, at age 65 I have finally taken the plunge and joined a book club. The book club reading was Homeland Elegies, and I want to get this posted before this afternoon's zoom meeting to discuss the book.

Our protagonist in Akhtar's narrative is a fictional version of himself (of how much fidelity I don't know) right down to the Pulitzer Prize for play writing. The narrator is an American-born Muslim, whose parents emmigrated to the U.S. from Pakistan. His father is a leading cardiologist with a high-visibility specialty. His mother is forceful and loving, but her longing for Pakistan seems to drop a veil around her emotions. The narrator (I'll just call him Ayad for our purposes) has gained the sort of status that gains him access, sometimes, to the rich and powerful and affords him a perspective on modern American society: politics, economics and cultural aspects, as well. So this novel is a tour through those elements and through Ayad's family life. Also, we get a very revealing and effective look at what it's like to be born Muslim in the U.S., particularly in the post-911 world. (There is, in fact, a harrowing depiction of what it was like to be recognized by strangers as Muslim on the streets of Manhattan on the day of the attack.) So the novel is a tapestry, more or less, of all these factors. We move fluidly back and forth from the personal to the societal, as the narrator tells us about the former and tries to make sense of the latter. Most forcefully, the narrator describes for us the depressing and encompassing effects of globalization (though I don't recall him ever using the word), and of the changes in the corporate structure that have resulted in the devolution of the average American from customer to commodity.

If this all seems somewhat fractious and confusing, it isn't, as we are in the hands of a very, very good novelist. It's the great strength of the book that these disparate elements seem as a whole. The people, especially the narrator's parents, seem alive. Issues of cultural and national identity in America, both of immigrants and the children of recent immigrants, are deftly handled.

The book does suffer somewhat for me from what I call famous-itis. I generally prefer books about the struggles and insights of more . . . well, I'm not sure what word to use . . . mainstream(?) characters than about those whose fame and/or wealth have given them a relatively unusual access to the events/issues being described. Obviously, the narrator worked and struggled before becoming famous (this process is described, as is his arduous writing schedule), but the perspective at the time of the narrative is still one of unusual access. At any rate, I offer this observation as a personal aside only. It's not a flaw in the novel, but instead a quirk of my own.

Anyway, this novel has been highly praised, and it's praise I agree with.

Book 5: Black Power: The Politics of Liberation by Kwame Ture (formerly known as Stokely Carmichael) and Charles V. Hamilton



This concise and well-written book was first published in 1967 as the Black Power movement and many other historical waves in world and U.S. history were coalescing. I do remember those days, although as young observer, as I turned 12 during the summer of 1967. "Black Power" was a term that made white conservatives angry and white liberals, and some Blacks, nervous. It seemed to speak of separatism, anger and violence. But as Ture and Hamilton described the philosophy, at least from this far historical remove, it seems more common sense than anything else, especially if one allows some--to me--clear fact of the pervasiveness in America of systemic racism, a term the authors here were using in 1967. (I don't know when that term was coined. Maybe it was new then, or maybe it was centuries old. Certainly the condition was centuries old.)

The authors here specifically reject separatism. They are basically calling for African Americans to coalesce into a group that can exercise civic and political power for their own self-interest. They point out that every other ethnic and national group in America had to do, and did do, just that before gaining justice for themselves and traction in the overall body politic.

History had clearly showed the authors that Blacks could not count on whites of supposed good will to help in substantive ways in the grand scheme of things, because the white middle class was more or less designed to be exclusive, and even people who wanted to help would fall away when they felt their own privilege or status being challenged. Basically, the idea being put forward is that whites will really help Blacks only when Blacks as a community or group have gathered enough power, could give or withhold enough things that white power brokers wanted, that whites would find it within their own self-interest to begin to move the dial in substantive ways. But the writers were explicit that alliances with whites who wanted to help were both possible and would ultimately most likely be necessary. But, they imply, allies have to be selected carefully.

Ture and Hamilton also provide several concrete examples of the national Democratic Party turning its back on its promises to help African Americans gain justice and political participation. Voting, said the authors, wouldn't be enough, as white liberal politicians would never follow through on promises in substantive ways, and a smattering of Black office holders wouldn't suffice, either, if they were not people who were willing to speak up for their people rather than "going along" with the system on behalf of gradual changes in the face of glaring problems of poverty, poor education, injustice and more.

In my Vintage edition, published in 1992, both authors included "contemporary" afterwords. Hamilton, in his, points out that it had turned out that African Americans had for the most part retained their desire to take part in liberal Democratic Party politics, and had made moderately more strides thereby than they'd expected was possible in 1967.

But there was nothing "radical" about the positions articulated here, nothing that should have been threatening to any but racists determined to continue to exclude Blacks from power and prosperity. Of course, there were a lot of such people, and the term "Black Power," I guess, was easily distorted and used as a cudgel against its originators (as is being done now to those who are call for "defunding the police").

I found this book to be greatly instructive, even these many years later, as a concise primer on what was meant by "Black Power." This was another of the books from the list my friend Kim Nalley, a wonderful jazz/blues singer and an American History PhD candidate at Cal-Berkeley sent around last year. Other books from that list that I read last year were:

Capitalism & Slavery by Eric Williams
Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery by Leon Litwack
Trouble in Mind: Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow by Leon Litwack *
The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man by James Weldon Johnson
Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party by Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin
Women, Race & Class by Angela Y. Davis

* Not on Kim's list, but a crucial follow-up, I thought, to the first Litwack book.

Book 6: Look Down on Her Dying by Don Tracy



From the "They Can't All Be Classics" Department. This is the 4th book in Don Tracy's Giff Speer series, an obscure pulp series from the 1960s featuring, obviously, Giff Speer, a member of a secret crime solving unit inside the U.S. Army that handles the jobs the CIA or FBI won't or can't. As usual (an unfortunate characteristic that has now become apparent to me), the book starts with the murder of a young woman, in this case near a Louisiana university with an ROTC component as a prominent feature. Around the same time, for cases of hand grenades go missing from the ROTC. The first undercover investigator sent in by Speer's boss is then murdered, as well (all this on the first 3 or 4 pages). Next in is our man, Giff.

The book was published in 1968. Speer has to cull through the ROTC brass, the campus hippies who are vociferous in their demands to get the ROTC off campus, and the reactionary elements in the Southwestern Louisiana town who would like to deal personally with the hippies.

As usual, Tracy has a clear style and a good, flowing eye for plot development and detail and for the planting of clues for the observant reader to pick up on. Not a classic series of the genre, by any means. The trap door is the misogyny, as per the times for this sort of writing. My plan is to gradually read through this series, but if the next book continues this trend, I'll have to bail. Otherwise, these books are lots of fun, but I'm hoping that "otherwise" won't be carried forward.

Book 7: Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell



A couple of years back, my wife and I instituted a new routine whereby at the beginning of each calendar year, we each give the other our favorite book from the previous year to read (taking into account in our selections, what we know of the other's reading preferences, of course). This year, my wife handed over Hamnet for me to read a big best seller from 2020, of course, and one which, based on all the reviews I'd seen here on LT, I was happy to dive into.

The book is admirably written, with a stunning sense of time and place (Stratford, England, during Shakespeare's time) and a wonderfully effective sense of invention (Shakespeare's family life, essentially, through the two perspectives of Shakespeare himself and, more emphatically, his wife, Agnes). All of this orbits around the pull of the short life of their son, Hamnet.

For all the writing skill and acute observation, however, I have to admit that I frequently became impatient during the book's first half. The characters and situations struck me too often as too familiar set pieces, and more than once I thought to myself, "Can we move along?"

The second half of the book, however, I found very effective, indeed, as the characters came much alive to me as individuals, and their situations, experiences, relationships and emotions moved for me from the general to the unique. By the end (which I found terrific), I was wholly invested. So, yes, all in all, I found Hamnet to be a very, very good book.

Book 8: Ways of Escape by Graham Greene



This book is listed as an autobiography, but I really consider it more a memoir, as Greene here provides us memories and insights into his writing career and his fascinating travel experiences, but leaves out pretty much everything about his personal life. We don't really, then, get a full picture of Greene's life. But that's OK, because what is here is extremely interesting and--not surprising considering the author--sharply written. Greene picks his story up here at about age 27, having already chronicled his earlier life in his book, A Sort of Life. This is perfect for me, as I generally find the early, childhood, part of memoirs/autobiographies tedious to a great or lesser degree.

But, for example, after some early references to his wife and two children (he writes gratefully of his wife's "courage and patience" when Greene's early writing career flounders, bringing along the monetary troubles one would expect), his mention of the breakup of this marriage takes up only one parenthetical remark, in which he blames some short-term but intensive Benzedrine use that made him querulous, his depression and his infidelities for the marriage's demise. In addition, he alludes to his manic-depressive condition, and the swings that either helped or hindered the writing of specific books, as one would mention the irritations occasioned by, say, an inefficient travel agent, but with only infrequent references to the real pain brought on by the condition.

Greene walks us through the writing of his novels, telling us how much he still liked them (or disliked them) as he was writing this memoir at age 75. More usefully, he tells us about the inspirations and real life events/memories that went into each, which characters are based on real life figures, and how he felt about the critical reception to the works. Greene converted from Protestantism to Catholicism in early adulthood and took his faith seriously. But he was bemused and somewhat dismayed to find that, after he wrote a pair of novels in which Catholicism (The Power and the Glory is the one that comes to mind for me right this second.) and issues of the Church featured prominently, critics began to refer to him as a "Catholic writer," as if that were the key theme of his work or his motivation. His account of the writing of the screenplay for "The Third Man" is almost worth the price of admission in and of itself.

The details about the various novels will be of real interest to fans of Greene's books. I've only read a few, and those quite some time ago, but now I'm thinking I need to read a few more. The book sings when Greene is discussing the creative process, and also when he is reminiscing about some of the fascinating places he took himself to, basically in an effort to get away from himself, usually after arranging a writing assignment. He tells of being in Dien Bien Phu shortly before the battle that drove the French out of Vietnam for good, with descriptions of how incompetently placed the French forces were, and how inevitable their destruction. He was in Havana during the final months of the Batista regime and in Haiti during the darkest days of Duvalier.

He provides short sketches of friends and acquaintances (his longtime friend Evelyn Waugh gets a particularly loving treatment), as well as some enjoyable chance encounters with memorable (for all sorts of reasons) characters. For example, after discussing the fact that the character Davis, the arms dealer in This Gun for Hire was entirely made up, Greene continues thusly (sorry for the long quote, but it definitely gives a taste of the book's character):

" . . . after the book was written I did, for the only time in my life, encounter a former traveler in armaments. No one could have been less like Mr. Davis.

I was one of two passengers on a small plane flying from Riga to Tallinn. . . . (I was there for no reason except to escape to somewhere new.) I happened to be reading a novel of Henry James and when I glanced at my fellow passenger I saw that he too was absorbing James in the same small Macmillan edition. In the thirties it was more rare than it is today to find a fellow devotee of James. Our eyes went to each other's books and we immediately struck up an acquaintance.

He was a man considerably older than myself and he was serving as British Consul at Tallinn. Since he was not very busy and a bachelor, . . . we spent a good deal of time together {while Greene was in Tallinn}. . . .

My new friend had traveled in armaments . . . after the First World War. He was surely unique among armaments salesmen, for I doubt if any of his colleagues could have claimed to be a former Anglican clergyman. When the Great War started he became an army chaplain. Before it ended he was converted to Catholicism and was about to be received into the Roman Church by the archbishop of Zagreb when an Austrian air raid interrupted things and the Archbishop fled to the cellar. When the war was over his conversion was consummated, and he was left without a job. For want of anything better he became an armaments salesman. He was a very gentle, very solitary man, in whom James might well have discovered a character, in spite of his bizarre past (James would have wrapped it in folds of ambiguity)--someone a little like Ralph Touchett in The Portrait of a Lady, the novel I was reading in the plane from Riga.. . . For a fortnight, thanks to Henry James, we were close friends. Afterwards? I never knew what happened. He must have lost his home when the Russians moved in. It seemed hardly a danger in those days--our eyes were on Germany."

The title of this book comes from Greene's notion that the artistic process is often employed by the artist as means of escaping the dark or drab elements of life. Greene speaks of his writing and of his traveling as concurrent means to this end. He speaks of his novel writing as an escape from his own self, and his short story writing as an escape from having to live continually for with the characters of his novels as he was writing them. Very late in the book, Greene wonders how people who do not have some artistic creative process to turn to manage to get themselves through life.

There are certainly unattractive aspects to Greene's character that he makes no effort to hide here, whether from honesty or from a take-it-or-leave-it attitude, it's hard to tell. Either way, he's very matter of fact about them. He speaks often of visiting brothels, mentions (without naming) various mistresses, and describes his foray into opium use in Malaya. His politics were liberal. For instance, after having taken the measure of Batista in Cuba, he gets in trouble with the dictator of Paraguay while on a visit there for speaking highly of Cuba's new revolutionary leader, Fidel Castro.

All in all I found this book a very interesting and valuable reading experience.

Book 9: The Union Reader edited by Richard B. Harwell



Read as a “between book” (see first post). This is a very interesting anthology for those who care about American Civil War history. It’s a collection of letters, newspaper columns and journal entries from people of all sorts who took part in the war or witnessed it the war from the Union side. (Harwell also published a companion collection, The Confederate Reader.)

We get journal entries from Union soldiers in far flung theaters of war like New Mexico, but we are also taken inside Fort Sumter at the very beginning of the war, a diary entry of a woman watching the soldiers of both sides rush back and forth through the streets of her hometown, Gettysburg, first-hand accounts of major engagements like the Battle of Shiloh, letters and telegrams back and forth from an increasingly exasperated Lincoln to his generals during the early years of the conflict. There are accounts of life inside prisoner of war camps and a description of life in New Orleans during the Federal occupation.

Editor Richard B. Harwell (1915-1988) was a prominent enough Civil War historian (especially regarding the Confederacy) that the Atlanta Civil War Round Table now confers the Harwell Book Award for the best book on a Civil War subject published in the preceding year: http://www.civilwarroundtableofatlanta.org/Harwell-Bio.htm

The Union Reader was published in 1958. My copy is a first edition hardback.

Book 10: The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World - and Globalization Began by Valerie Hansen



A couple of things to know about the title of this book, and how the title relates to historian Valerie Hansen's actual premise and execution here. First, and most importantly, when Hansen says "Globilization," she's not talking about the concept that we think of today, that of, for example, a company setting up organizational shop in one country but building factories in another to take advantage of lower wages. She is really talking about a growing interconnectedness between ever wider areas of the world for the purposes of trade, yes, but also the sharing of ideas and innovations. Second, the year 1000 is really used as a sort of central point in time, one that Hansen frequently circles back to, but not one that she slavishly adheres to. She talks, really, about developments over a range of times within a 2- or 3-century time period, from around 900 to around 1200. Finally, the use of the word "explorers" is misleading, because, at least for a Western reader, it puts to mind people in ships or on expeditions intentionally setting out to explore places they'd never been before to see what they could find out. Only a few of the major players in this narrative fit that mold. More often, Hansen is talking about conquerors, merchants and even historians. So all this makes me wonder whether the book title was Hansen's own idea fully or one that her publisher came up with. Well, at any rate, I say all that not by way of a criticism of the book, but more as a way of aligning the expectations any prospective readers.

Basically, what Hansen does in this book is give us a tour around the world, circa 1000, to describe what an observant traveler then might have found, and both going back in time to illuminate how things got that way and then moving forward. What she wants to emphasize is that the world then was much more interconnected, that trade routes, for example, were much more far flung and markets more sophisticated, than we might imagine via a Western view through which we think of parts of the world as being "discovered" in the 15th and 16th centuries. (To Hansen's credit, in my view, she spends very little time making this last point, choosing instead to concentrate on her topic and let the reader come to his or her own conclusions on that score. It is only at the very end of the book that Hansen mentions the European explorers at all.)

Unfortunately, at least for my own experience here, Hansen begins with, perhaps, the least convincing chapter of her "globalization" thesis, that of the Vikings' travels to North America. It's not that there's anything to be doubted about the idea of the Vikings having been there. (I have actually been to the excavated remains of their settlement at the very northern tip of Newfoundland! It's very cool, and they even have a nearby recreation of the small buildings with folks showing how the forge would have worked, etc.) It's more the fact that the Vikings didn't stay very long, and didn't have much successful interaction with the indigenous inhabitants. So, OK, the Vikings figured out how to get to North America, but they weren't adaptable enough, never, for example figuring out how to catch seals and other marine life through the ice, as the locals could. Also, evidence shows that they returned from time to time to harvest lumber. But still, how is a brief, non-lasting, interaction really evidence of globalization?

Things get more convincing, however, when Hansen begins discussing the Mayans' far reaching trade routes from their Yucatan Peninsula base north as far as Arizona and south into South America. The Vikings also come back into the picture when Hansen describes the forays of Scandinavian bands into northeastern Europe. They came to trade with the inhabitants, but because they were fiercer and had better weapons, they were soon forcing tribute from the people they interacted with, essentially demanding protection money. The people were known as the Rus, "a word derived from the Finnish name for Sweden, which means 'to row' or 'the men who row.'"

As Hansen explains it, one of the most important elements of the globalization she writes of is the consolidation of much of Eurasia from fragmented localized religions into large blocks of people (or at least rulers and upper class) into the four major religions, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism. Hansen says that this occurred not because the missionaries of those religions were so persuasive, but more for political and economic reasons. Alliances and even trade agreements were more easily made between coreligionists, and internal power could be consolidated more effectively as well if religion was eliminated as an excuse for the questioning of legitimacy and authority.

Well, I've already gone on for too long here. I'll just add that Hansen does a good job of illuminating her overall thesis, showing how trade was common and markets widespread, particularly between China, Southeast Asia, Africa (The chapter on the wide ranging trade throughout the continent and then outward is short but quite interesting.), the Middle East and India. She describes quite a few technical innovations, such as improvements in shipbuilding, around 1000 that enhanced these factors. (A trading journey known to have been made by Chinese sailors all the way to Madagascar was twice as long in miles as Columbus' first trip.) Sadly, we see that the international slave trade was a major driver of many of these developments. There are times when Hansen seems to be trying too hard to jam events into her globalization premise, saying that things happened "because of Globalization" that might more convincingly be described as signsof globalization. And some of the individual chapters I found more interesting than others. All in all, though, I'm glad that my reading group chose this book for this month. While I would imagine that among historians there is room for debate about some of Hansen's conclusions, I feel that I certainly learned enough and was engaged enough for most of the time, to find this a valuable reading experience.

Book 11: Lucia in London by E.F. Benson



This is the third book in E.F. Benson's humorous Mapp and Lucia series. Miss Mapp and Emmeline Lucas (a.k.a. Lucia) are two strong-willed, busybody women living parallel lives in England between the World Wars. (There are six books in the series all told, published from 1927 through 1939, and the two characters don't meet up until the series' fourth book, Mapp and Lucia). Both are members of the upper-middle class, live in small towns, and are mostly preoccupied with getting their friends to do their bidding and acknowledge their own preeminence within their social settings.

In Lucia in London, dear Lucia's husband, Philip (a.k.a. Pepino), has inherited a house in London from his aunt. Will the couple stay loyal to their own Riselholme or will they decamp to the more glamorous world of the capitol? The answer becomes clear early on, as off to London they go. Lucia soon begins trying to push her way up the social ladder. At first, the London society members Lucia encounters are put off by her, but soon many of them become amused and delighted by the clumsy transparency of her ambition, and start encouraging her just to see what she will do next. In the meantime, the friends left at home have issues of their own. It's a gentle comedy, all played for laughs, and Lucia is never allowed to become a villain.

There are times when the goings-on in this novel become repetitive, but overall this was for me enjoyable light reading. You have to have a tolerance for reading about the idle well-off, but Benson is making gentle fun of them, and we're not meant to take their problems, or even their existence, too seriously.

These books were evidently quite the thing among the literati of their day. People like Gertrude Stein and Noel Coward sang their praises, and when they went out of print they were considered quite a prize to find "in the wild.". They now have been back in print for quite some time. In many iterations, Lucia in London is considered the second book in the series rather than the third, but I've been reading them in the order presented here on LT. (Just a note that the image above is of the cover of the Omnibus edition of all the novels that I read this from.)

Book 12: Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism by Patricia Hill Colliins



Here is my next reading from my friend Kim's list of recommended books about African American history and racism in America. Collins outlines her views here on the development of gender roles and identification within the Black community in America. In particular, she focuses on the ways in which these roles have been shaped, one might say warped as well, by the histories of slavery and subsequent oppression, and how they have evolved through the lens of popular culture, movies and television in particular. Published in 2004, the book is somewhat dated in that social media is barely mentioned and that constructive Black representation, it seems to me, has improved in our culture over the intervening years. That's not to say that this isn't still an extremely valuable book. I certainly learned a lot about how post-Civil Rights Movement racism (referred to by Collins as "color-blind racism") has continued to affect millions of Americans. This is racism that, for many White Americans, has been hiding in plain sight. Believing that the Voting Rights Act and other 1960s Civil Rights legislation had set the country on the correct path, and that now it was just a case of waiting, watching and occasionally pushing for things to gradually get to where we wanted them, the ways in which, in particular, economic opportunities for minorities were in fact shrinking rather than expanding went right by the majority of White Americans. This is, I think, another area in which the book's age shows somewhat. Not that this condition has ended, or even changed appreciably, but I think that recent public conversations about these issues have brought them into better clarity for a lot of White Americans. We'll see how well that all translates into better results, of course.

At any rate, as Collins explains things, the ways in which these factors unfolded also affected the ways in which Black men and women, both heterosexual and LGBT, interacted with each other. Those gender interactions, particularly in regards to the LGBT community, seem to me to have progressed in positive ways (I'm not saying "solved," but "progressed") since this book was published, but I am a straight White guy living in a rural community with a very small Black population (albeit with about a 50-50 apportionment between Anglo and Latinx folks) so I am very much open to correction about that.

The book is not always an easy read, as Collins is an academic and her writing style reflects that. My eyes and brain occasionally bounced off individual sentences and paragraphs several times before I could finally apply myself to unfolding the jargon Collins was using. Nevertheless, her explication of stereotyped gender roles, both as seen from without and within the Black community, are cogent overall. While not all of the information was new to me, having a well constructed and explained overall look at these phenomena was extremely valuable for me. My friend Kim, the provider of the list I'm working from, and who is a History PhD candidate at Cal-Berkeley as well as a great blues/jazz singer, says, "I cannot say how important this book is."

Book 13: Pennant Race by Jim Brosnan



In 1961, Jim Brosnan was a relief pitcher for the Cincinnati Reds, who surprised the baseball world by winning the National League pennant. This book is his diary of that season. In fact, this was Brosnan's second book. His first, The Long Season, was first person account of the 1959 season, during which Brosnan was traded mid-year from the Cardinals to the Reds. That book was considered ground breaking, in that it was the first candid (sort of) look at life on a major league team. Oddly, I haven't read The Long Season, yet.

Anyway, Pennant Race is entertaining fare for baseball fans. This book was published several years before Jim Bouton's Ball Four, about the 1969 season, which was really the first baseball memoir to reveal baseball life warts and all. In Pennant Race, Brosnan depicts life in the bullpen, and on the team in general, as a series of wise cracks under which lie the players' real desire to win and to perform well, along with their not always successful attempts to shrug off their day to day failures. Racial issues are dealt with, but not too deeply or often. Personal animosities among teammates seem non-existent. Again, Brosnan's books were a step forward in terms of real life portrayals of the baseball life, but he doesn't bring us all the way there. The descriptions of some players' personalities are perfunctory. For others, even some relatively famous ones, those portrayals are non-existent. We get almost nothing, for example, about Frank Robinson, then a young star (now in the Hall of Fame). Still there is a feel for what the life was like. Brosnan was a good writer with a breezy, self-deprecating style. It helps that the 1961 season was one of Brosnan's best as a professional ballplayer.

For baseball fans interested in the game's history (or for those with long memories), this book is fun and worth reading, as long as you don't expect too much of it.

Book 14: American Heroines: The Spirited Women Who Shaped Our Country by Kay Bailey Hutchison



Read as a "between book" (see first post). Kay Bailey Hutchison was a sitting U.S. Senator from Texas and the Vice Chairman of the Senate Republican Conference when this book was published in 2004. The book is a collection of short biographies (from around 8 to 20 pages in length) of influential women in many different fields and many different time periods throughout American history. The bios are presented by category, with one or two of the bios per section followed by one or two short Q&A conversations with category-appropriate contemporary (as per 2004) women.

All in all, the biographies are well written and interesting. There are a decent number of African American, Latina and Native American women represented, as well. Some of the biographies served as good refresher courses for me, but quite a few were women whose stories and accomplishments were entirely new to me. In the acknowledgements, Howard Cohn is acknowledged as researcher and draft writer. I don't know how much of the actual writing is his and how much is hers. I say that not because I doubt Hutchison's abilities as a writer--why should I?--but only because she was a sitting senator at the time, so I'm wondering where she would have found the time. At any rate, as I said, the book is clearly and informatively written.

So I think this is in fact a valuable and interesting volume. I could see it used in a high school or even a college syllabus.

Book note: I purchased this book at the Goodwill Store in Willitts, CA, in Mendocino County, where I live. It must have been originally bought at a book signing, as it is signed by Hutchinson under the inscription, "To Margie, A great Republican!"

Book 15: A Manuel for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin



Read as a "between book" (see first post). This is a wonderful collection of short stories, full of writing that manages to be heartbreaking and life affirming at the same time. The tales are loosely interconnected and reflective of Berlin's own life. Teaching, single parenthood, childhood time spent in South America, dealing with the grim lifestyle of the alcoholic and the relative peace of recovery, odd jobs, teaching, lovers and marriages, loneliness, spending time in Mexico City with her sister who is dying of cancer . . . the stories in this collection circle back around to these themes, inspecting them from a variety of perspectives. The observations are acute and Berlin's sentence-and paragraph-level writing often made me stop and reread. The title story is a tour de force, the building of a life on the page, minute detail by detail.

From the next to last story in the collection, "Wait a Minute"

Time stops when someone dies. Of course it stops for them, maybe, but for the mourners time runs amok. Death comes too soon. It forgets the tides, the days growing longer and shorter, the moon. It rips up the calendar. You aren't at your desk or on the subway or fixing dinner for the children. You're reading People in a surgery waiting room, or shivering outside on a balcony smoking all night long. You stare into space, sitting in your childhood bedroom with the globe on the desk. Persia, the Belgian Congo. The bad part is that when you return to your ordinary life all the routines, the marks of the day, seem like senseless lies. All is suspect, a trick to lull us, rock us back into the placid relentlessness of time.

When someone has a terminal disease, the soothing churn of time is shattered. Too fast, no time, I love you, have to finish this, tell him that. Wait a minute! I want to explain. Where is Toby, anyway? Or time turns sadistically slow. Death just hangs around while you wait for it to be night and then wait for it to be morning. Every day you've said good-bye a little. . . . The camote man whistles in the street below and then you help your sister into the sala to watch Mexico City news and then U.S. news with Peter Jennings. Her cats sit on her lap. She has oxygen but still their fur makes it hard to breathe. "No! Don't take them away. Wait a minute."

Book 16: Bright Orange for the Shroud by John D. MacDonald



This is the 6th book in MacDonald's classic Travis McGee series. Once again, McGee is a Paladin, off to right wrongs amid the squalor of the those willing and anxious to prey on the unwitting and vulnerable. When a friend is defrauded of close to a half million dollars by a consortium of clever and brutal ne'er-do-wells, McGee is pried off of his Florida houseboat and into the fray. This entry seemed a bit darker to me than any of the previous five, especially toward the end. MacDonald was a very good writer, and his descriptions of the nature of the Everglades and his observations of American consumer culture, circa 1965 when the book was originally published are all very good.

Book 17: They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers



This interesting and extremely valuable history, recently published, explores the role of women in the slave system and economy of the southern U.S. during the centuries before the Civil War. Jones-Rogers uses extensive research in contemporary newspaper accounts, WPA History Project testimony of formerly enslaved people and court records as well to show that many women in the South owned slaves of their own and were simply subservient to their husbands when it came to slave owning and economic considerations of all sorts. Women were often "left" slaves in their parents' wills and were also given slaves as "gifts" by their parents when they married. Furthermore, many couples signed what we'd now called pre-nuptual agreements stipulating that wives would retain complete control of their own slaves and all other financial interests. Jones-Rogers tours the multi-faceted world of slave owning and shows that women were often mens' equals when it came to wheeling and dealing for profit, and also for savagery in their treatment of their enslaved workers. The work is important particularly, I think, in that it is an extensive treatment the pervasiveness of the slave system in the American south: all whites took part, not just men.

I found it interesting and enlightening that Jones-Rogers refers most often to "enslaved persons" rather than to "slaves." I've never seen this before, but I found it an effective way of making an important point. "Enslaved person" clearly expresses the point that we are referring to people who have been enslaved by someone else. There is action, violent, horrible action, involved. Perhaps this locution is more widespread than I realize, but it seems like it's the first time I've come across it.

There are times in the book where the examples Jones-Rogers uses become more than a little repetitive to read. It's not something I would fault her for at all. It crucial that she establish that the research behind her thesis is extensive, to ensure that we are convinced. So there were times when I was ready for the narrative to move along, but I understood the reasons for the structure Jones-Rogers employed. I think this history all in all is a crucial building block for a serious modern-day understanding of American slavery.

Book 18: The Zelmenyaners: a Family Saga by Moyshe Kulbak



The Zelmenyaners is considered a classic of Yiddish literature. The novel is a comedy spanning several generations of an extended Jewish family in Minsk, the capitol city of Byelorussia (now Belarus), but centering on the period from 1926 through 1933 or so. The family all lives together, in a single courtyard on the outskirts of town originally built by the family's patriarch, one Reb Zelmen, who came to the city from somewhere in "deep Russia" in the 1870s. By the time the action of the novel begins in the late 1920s Reb Zelmen has died, though his widow lives on, and the family is led by Zelmen's four sons, whose own children and sons and daughters-in-law and their children populate the courtyard's many old buildings. (One building is even made of brick!)

The tale centers around the older generation's desires to retain their old ways, including the vestiges of their Jewish beliefs and practices, in the face of the growing incursions of Soviet society and economic collectivisation. As the younger generation grows to maturity, they less interested in the old ways and more interested in being good Bolsheviks. Even the older Zelmenyaners are pushed to end their independent lives as tradesmen (tailors, tanners, carpenters) and go to work in the factories, like good Soviet workers.

The story is in fable-like, farcical narrative. Rumor, scandal and gossip, feud and loyalty, busybodies and misanthropes swarm and swirl about the courtyard. Knowledge of the outside world is minimal, sometimes comically so, for most of the Zelmenyaners, although the outside world has been though town within recent memory, in the form of the German Army, who stormed through during World War One. One of the brothers, in fact, has been made a widower during an artillery barrage. Two of the men, one from each adult generation fought in the Russian Army during that war, with the younger going on to fight with the Reds in the Russian Revolution.

Our affection for this crowd is cemented early on, and though the story is played for comedy, the pathos is evident throughout as the family fights a losing battle to retain their way of life, their heritage and their family identity in the face of societal forces from without and betrayal from within.

I found this book moving for many reasons. For one thing, it describes the place my grandparents came from, the place where they would have lived, and most likely would have died within a decade of the action of this novel, had they not left for America in the early 20th century. Furthermore, Kulbak was also a poet, and his descriptions, especially his uses of natural settings to set mood, are often wonderful. The winter snow and freezing cold becomes almost a character, a member of the family. But here is a description of the end of one summer:

"The first thin, slanting autumn rains began to fall. Beneath them the silent summer, its myriad colors squelched and soiled, was snuffed out in the gardens. Disconsolate beet leaves with hard, purplish veins lay cast between the vegetable beds. Dirty yellows, oranges, and browns were trodden silently underfoot. On days like that you didn't need an antenna to hear distant cries."

Oh, to be able to read this in the original Yiddish. Adding poignancy to the reading was this note on the book's back cover:

Moyshe Kulbak (1896-1937) was a leading Yiddish modernist poet, novelist and dramatist. He was arrested in 1937, during the wave of Stalinist repression that hit the Minsk Yiddish writers and cultural activists with particular vehemence. After a perfunctory show trial, Kulbak was shot at the age of forty-one."

>28 rocketjk: ouch, got me with this one...

>28 rocketjk: Yup....shot through the heart by that BB. I had not heard of it, or of Kulbak. Off I go in search of this classic.

>29 fuzzi: & >30 laytonwoman3rd: Glad you folks were intrigued. I will be very interested in your responses. As to "in search of," it shouldn't be hard to find. The book was published by Yale Press relatively recently. I bought my copy in 2019, though I don't remember where.

>31 rocketjk: Yup...easy. Amazon has both the translation and the original Yiddish version (much cheaper in Yiddish!) I navigated from there directly to the Yale University Press website, and found the entire New Yiddish Library series which is apparently an ongoing project. So....

>31 rocketjk: I'm not intrigued by the cost of the book, will wait until I see something a little cheaper.

>33 fuzzi: Yes, I know what you mean. Now that I think of it, my copy was used or on a remainder pile, as inside the front cover is written $32.00 in pencil, but with that crossed out and $8.00 written in underneath it. I remember looking at that last week and thinking, "Wow. That's a lot!" Lucky find for me, then!

Book 19: Voice of the Whirlwind by Walter Jon Williams



This is the second novel (there was also a novella slid in between Books 1 and 2) in Williams' fun Hardwired science fiction/cyberpunk series. We're 100 years on from the action of the opening novel. Humans are spread out around the solar system and beyond, though now in the company of an alien race known as the Power. Corporations have nation-state status and private armies that they use to wage war on each other. People with money can buy "life insurance" that enables them to be cloned, complete with consciousness and memory, in new bodies when they die. Our hero, a mercenary soldier named Steward, is such, known as a Beta. The hitch is that his Alpha neglected to "update" his memories into the data base for the 15-year period before his death, leaving Steward now with a memory gap for those years.

The book is basically a political thriller, as Steward goes in search of those memories and also plots revenge against a series of evildoers. However, added on to that is some very good writing and clever science fiction world building. So this is not very deep reading, but it is fun if this sort of thing is your cup of tea.

Interestingly, at least to me, the series was originally published quite some time ago. This book first came out in 1987. Given that so much of the world here is based on computer technology, it is fun to see what Williams imaged correctly, or close to correctly, and what he missed. There is a lot of sophisticated technology described, all sorts of interfaces between the computer and the human mind, and all kinds of gene manipulation. And yet, although it's not specified, I got the feeling that, when it comes to the computer systems, Williams' imagination never really got him past DOS. Well, that's not meant as a criticism. Just an observation. I'd say Voice of the Whirlwind was not as good as its predecessor, Hardwired, but it is still good reading. There's one more book to go in the series, which I'll be getting to probably sooner rather than later.

>35 rocketjk: ouch.

Book 20: The Comedians by Graham Greene



This was a reread, picked, by me, for my monthly book group. Our club's rule is that you have to pick, when it's your turn, a book that you've already read and therefore know to be good. This was perfect for me, in that I originally read this so long ago that I hardly remembered any of the plot, but clearly remembered enjoying it thoroughly.

At any rate, The Comedians is Greene's novel of Haiti during the dark days of the Papa Doc regime. Brown has been a rolling stone over the course of his lifetime, British by culture but born in Monte Carlo to father, to Brown, unknown and a mother who soon leaves him in a Catholic boarding school. But Brown's mother eventually summons him to Port Au Prince, where she owns a hotel, to announce that the hotel will be left to him in her will. Brown soon must decide whether to take possession, and his decision to do so brings him into immediate contact with the troubles--and dangers--of the country and the Haitians he soon befriends.

Greene's storytelling here is superb, and there are intertwining themes of the value of loyalty and compassion, bravery and absurdity, and the quicksand of despair that self-loathing, jealousy and mistrust may throw in one's path. The plot moves quickly and the characters are, mostly, believable. The constant sense of horror and dread help the reader understand what life in that time and place was about. Greene actually did spend time in Haiti during this era in its history. Naturally, there is a difference between reading an account, fictional or otherwise of these times written by a Haitian and reading one written by an Englishman, by definition here an outsider. Within those limitations, I felt that Greene did an admirable job, here.

I recently read Greene's memoir, Ways of Escape, and it seemed that this was one of the novels Greene was proudest of.

Book 21: Harper's Magazine - June 1959 edited by John Fischer



Read as a "between book" (see first post). This is another from the stack of old magazines sitting in my office closet that I've been gradually reading through. I find these old periodicals to be fascinating time pieces, looks at the society and its concerns that would be otherwise hard to find so many years later. The June 1959 Harper's begins with an hilarious take down of the novel, The Ugly American.

The edition also includes one of Leo Rosten's fun and funny H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N stories (The title character was an adult European Jewish emigre to the U.S. and the setting was always the night time English/citizenship adult school class that Kaplan shared with other recent immigrants from all over the world. These stories were quite famous in their day. My parents loved them. Rosten was, perhaps, best known for his book The Joys of Yiddish.)

There is a somewhat horrifying piece called "Germs and Gas: The Weapons Nobody Dares Talk About," by Brigadier General J. H. Rothschild, in which the good general makes the case for biological and chemical weaponry and criticizes the U.S. government for going along with the international ban on them.

"Reading, Writing, and Television" by David C. Stewart is not, as one would first imagine, another complaint about the ways that television is dumbing down the country, but instead an enlightening early look at the ways that public television was being used creatively to help fight illiteracy.

The two most interesting pieces, for me at least, are by George Steiner and Nat Hentoff. Steiner's piece, "Notes from Eastern Europe," really is a fascinating picture of a moment in time. Although of course the Russians were sitting everywhere in the region, one of the major concerns of the people in countries like Czechoslovakia was to wonder what American and Western European leaders thought they were playing at by rearming Germany. Hadn't we learned anything? Reading Steiner's piece is a useful reminder to the typical ignorant modern reader (i.e., me) that these were individual countries and not simply a bunch of chunks frozen together into a single "Eastern Bloc." For example:

"Czechoslovakia and Poland are more cut off from each other than from the West. The Czechs are simply afraid of letting Poles across the frontier. They have achieved an extraordinary material prosperity at the price of total political subjection. Poland, on the contrary, is desperately poor; but the winds of freedom blow there in wild gusts. For the lone rail traveler (the fleas and I were the only passenegers in the car that night) the contrast is startling. The Czech frontier guards roused me from my bench in some black and frozen corner of nowhere at four in the morning to ask acrimoniously why I had not flown. I was so much quicker and more comfortable. It must be that I wanted to see something. I pointed to the grime-laden windows and the blackness beyond. But they did not seem convinced. A few minutes later, the Poles entered . . . The Poles were cheery and corrupt, in a fine liberal style. Was I an academic? What did I teach? Had I any dollars to sell? Hints that I liked to sleep at four in the morning struck them as absurd. In Prague one could sleep. There was nothing else to do. But surely not in Poland. There was so much to talk about. Soon dawn was coming up over mud-soaked, gray southern Poland."

Steiner's description of Warsaw, still devastated by the war and in ruins, is vivid and sobering. Interestingly the book review section of the magazine includes a review of Steiner's book, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in the Old Criticism, which the reviewer calls "a book to read and learn from many times over."

The Hentoff essay is called "Race Prejudice in Jazz: It Works Both Ways." I approached this piece with some trepidation, I must admit, although I have certainly come to admire Hentoff's insights into the music and also to trust his political and cultural leanings. At any rate, I needn't have worried. While the piece does begin by pointing out the examples of black musicians' sometimes only grudging acceptance of white jazz musicians, Hentoff spends much, much more time explaining the hardships of being a black musician in America and the reasons why the might feel that way. It made me wonder whether the title was Hentoff's own creation or whether some editor had come up with it to make the piece seem "balanced." Alternatively, I wondered whether the title had indeed by created by Hentoff as sort of a enticement to lure the less savvy readers into his descriptions of racial conditions that such readers might not otherwise voluntarily enter into.

Those are the highlights. My next such periodical will be the January 1959 edition of The Atlantic.

Book 22: In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s by Clayborne Carson



Here's another work from the list of books on African American history and racism in America I've been reading. This extremely interesting volume traces the development, achievements and ultimate demise of the Southern Nonviolent Coordinating Committee one of the eminent organizations in the Civil Rights movement in the Deep South in the early- to mid-1960s. By the late 60s, the group had evolved to enter the forefront of the Black Nationalist movement.

SNCC was developed as a group working to encourage the original anti-segregation protests in the south. As Carson describes the organization, they were unique in that they eschewed top-down organization as much as they could. Although they had a Central Committee, project leaders were mostly encouraged to run their projects as they saw fit. Also, rather than coming into a community and attempting to lead protest programs. Instead, they would encourage and support local leaders, feeling that that would lead to more long-lasting progress. Eventually, a schism developed within SNCC between those who wanted to continue the anti-segregation work and those who thought more political activity, particularly voter registration work, was more valuable. Either way, they were working in the face of still-virulent and often violent Jim Crow opposition. The group decided there was room for both. For several years, SNCC workers waiting for the JFK and then LBJ administrations to back up their pro-Civil Rights rhetoric with actual federal protection from local and state oppression. That wait was long, frustrating and, in some cases, ultimately demoralizing. In addition, the advantages and disadvantages of working with white volunteers became a point of increasingly sharp debate.

Eventually, SNCC took their battles north into urban Black areas. As they did, they became more a source of political ideas and less an important source of local programs. The organization evolved from the non-violent, religion based philosophy of people like John Lewis to the more controversial figures like Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown. SNCC was among the first groups to adopt the rallying cry "Black Power." Carson does a good job of describing the personal and philosophical internal friction that became debilitating to the organization's effectiveness, as well as the damaging harassment campaign by the FBI that went a long way toward crippling the group, as well as SNCC's often problematic relationship with Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference on the one hand, and the Black Panthers on the other.

In Struggle is written in a clear, straight-forward style that avoids that sort of academic prose I sometimes have trouble plowing through. The book was originally published in 1981, which puts it relatively close to the action, time-wise. For example, Carson was able to attend a 1979 reunion of SNCC activists and volunteers and conduct several interviews there. I don't know whether a more recent study would present additional or substantionally different information, but I certainly feel that this is an exceptionally valuable history of the time and of these crucial events. I was 13 in 1968 and I certainly remember many of the important names. I think that, together, this book and Black Against Empire, the terrific history of the Black Panthers that I read last year, go a long way toward providing a good picture of the events of those days, whether one is old enough to remember any of it or not.

Book 23: The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race by Walter Isaacson



Isaacson's latest biography is a long an fascinating account of the development of the science of gene editing, as filtered through the life, experience and accomplishments of Jennifer Doudna, co-winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020. Isaacson, a clear and straightforward writer, does an excellent job of weaving his narrative between Doudna's life story, the concepts of genetics, the progress of the science as discoveries are made, the many scientists that mentored Doudna and with whom she has collaborated and/or competed.

The story of how, over a period of several decades, Doudna and her colleagues discovered the features of DNA and, especially, RNA that allowed them to understand how these enzymes work, and especially the way that RNA is effective in actually cutting to pieces the DNA of invaders like viruses, is fascinating indeed, and Isaacson tells the story very well. He's adept at providing just enough of the technical description of the processes involved to give a lay reader enough of a general idea of what's going on without getting bogged down in too much detail. I actually experienced an element of "willing suspension of disbelief" during the proceedings that I found wholly appropriate. It was fascinating for me to learn, for example, that the genetic techniques being studied and applied by humans now are essentially the same ones that bacteria have been using to fight off viruses for billions of years.

Isaacson stops about 65% of the way through the book to provide an overview of the ethical questions being wrestled with by the scientific world over the issues that our increasingly effective ability to edit our genetic makeup has brought forward. Do we want "designer humans?" What might the unintended consequences be of altering our genetic makeup? How drastically will the ability to genetically enhance or protect our children exacerbate financial and class inequality, as parents with money begin accessing techniques that poorer parents cannot? On the other hand, shall we stop short of curing genetic diseases such as sickle cell anemia, or protecting our children from AIDS by altering their DNA? The line in the sand, if you will, is between the ability to provide genetic treatments to individuals to treat or cure genetic conditions from which they're suffering, versus editing a person's overall genetic makeup in a way that will be passed down to their offspring, and thereby affect the species as a whole.

Isaacson describes the question thusly:

"The primary concern is germline editing, those changes that are done in the DNA of human eggs or sperm or early-stage embryos so that every cell in the resulting children--and also of their descendants--will carry the edited trait. There has already been, and rightly so, general acceptance of what is known as somatic editing, the changes that are made in targeted cells of a living patient and do not affect reproductiive cells. If something goes wrong in one of these therapies, it can be disastrous for the patient but not for the species."

And then, as Isaacson was doing his obviously years-long research for this biography, the Covid pandemic hit. The final section of the book describes the ways in which the academic scientific community quickly swung into action, cooperating in areas that would have been sources of competition previously, to create the new sort of vaccines--utilizing RNA manipulation for the first time in vaccine technology--that we are now using to combat Covid.

Isaacson does not skip over the fact that, when Doudna was a young woman deciding upon a career, the idea that "women can be scientists" was one that met stiff resistance within the world of science and in the culture in general. Her role as a pioneer, not among the very first women scientists, of course, but in the vanguard of the generation that battered down many (certainly not all) of the roadblocks taken for granted by previous generations, is stressed, as is her role as a mentor.

There is a lot more in this rich and fertile book, which is at once a biography of a fascinating woman, a primer for how science and private industry inter-relate in our society, a history of the science of genetics, a look inside the war against Covid, and an outline of the ethical/philosophical questions that we are going to be grappling with over these new capabilities.

Book 24: Sgt. Mickey and General Ike by Michael J. McKeogh and Richard Lockridge



This is a short memoir by Michael McKeogh about his time spent as General Dwight Eisenhower's enlisted aide, orderly and driver before and during World War 2. Originally published in 1946, the book is essentially a hagiography. McKeogh quickly begins referring to Eishenhower as "the Boss," and essentially, other than an occasional bought of temper, the Boss can do no wrong throughout McKeogh's narrative. Well, maybe it is McKeogh's narrative. Harry C. Butcher, who was Eisenhower's Naval Aide during the war, says in his 2-page introduction, "Former Naval Lieutenant Richard Lockridge* has caught the spirit of Mickey's story with uncanny perception. When I read some of the manuscript I could hear Mickey talking." So I assume this is an "as told to" situation, and I'd further guess that Lockridge was tasked not just with putting McKeogh's story into clean prose, but also with smoothing out any rough (or interesting) edges portrayed in Eisenhower's character.

So while this memoir provides a mildly interesting picture of the duties of an aide to a commanding general during wartime there are otherwise few particularly interesting historical notes on offer. Don't get me wrong, it certainly looks like McKeogh had a hard job (although mostly a physically safe one, as he freely admits). Mostly the issues were logistical. McKeogh was responsible for, among other things, ensuring that Eisenhower didn't have to worry about day-to-day issues like laundry, lodging or sustenance. That makes sense, as the general would have had plenty of more important items to concentrate on 20 hours a day. But they kept moving command posts, of course, and McKeogh tells about each new search for lodging as they moved. (Item: The more spacious and luxurious the lodging, the less "The Boss" liked it.) There were some interesting aspects of Eisenhower's command style portrayed, mostly to do with his attitudes about the GIs under his command. For example, he refused to use any supplies that he felt had been taken from his soldiers, and he made frequent inspections of the kitchens serving enlisted men and would be critical of any officers who weren't feeding the soldiers adequately. Well, that's assuming these things were true and this isn't more a case of legend building.

But as to the war itself, McKeogh (or Lockridge) reports very little. Toward the end there are some general descriptions of the death and destruction that the members of the command post saw as they moved forward, but by design a command post is in the rear of the action. Also, McKeogh (or Lockridge) tells us that he made a point never to eavesdrop on Eisenhower's conversations with other officers about the progress, plans or execution of the war, thinking that what he didn't know, he couldn't inadvertently let drop in the mess hall. That makes sense, though it doesn't make for particularly interesting reading. And who knows if that is McKeogh talking or Lockridge's explanation for why he's taken most of the intriguing conversations out of the book?

All in all, I'd say this book is mostly interesting as an historical artifact about the public's appetite for narratives about World War 2 and its heroes in the months and years immediately after the conflict. Books of this sort continued coming out into the mid-60s, I think. Perhaps Americans, alarmed by the dropping of the atomic bomb and by the growing threat of Stalinist Russia, were already looking back with nostalgia to a more understandable time and therefore embracing the mythology quickly coalescing around WW2 and those who fought it. Or maybe that's overthinking things.

* It is unclear to me whether this is the same Richard Lockridge who went on to co-write a slew of popular detective novels with his wife, Francis Lockridge. The LT touchstone takes us to that page, but I couldn't find anything about how that Richard Lockridge spent the war years. I suppose it's likely enough that this is the same fellow.

Book Note: My copy is a first edition hardcover. On the inside I find an Ex-Libris sticker with the name May Galway written below in ink. And at the top I find May Galway's name inked in again under the date (presumably of purchase) May 29, 1946.

Book 25: Rashomon Gate by I.J. Parker



Rashomon Gate is the second novel in Parker's Sugawara Akitada Mysteries series, set in 11th Century Japan. Our man Akitada is a relatively low-level nobleman who holds down a boring government administrative job but who in the series' first book acquired a reputation for being able to solve mysteries. So these are mysteries of the "talented amateur is smarter than the police" variety. In this novel, Akitada has been asked by his former mentor to return to the royal university to help unravel a blackmailing scheme. Also, there as been a disappearance of a high-ranking nobleman from within a Buddhist shrine which is being put down by everyone from the emperor on down as a miracle: the nobleman has achieved Nirvana and been taken in by the gods. Murders ensue and complications arise, as we knew they would.

These books are fun. The plotting is good and the historical information, assuming it's anywhere near accurate, is interesting. The writing itself, on a sentence level, I give a B or B-. People to often "preen" and "mince" and "comment drily." But this sort of thing does not turn up in the writing often enough to ruin the entertainment value of the story for me. I have the first four books of this 18-book series on hand. I'll probably read books 3 & 4 over the next little while, though I doubt I'll go much further.

>41 rocketjk: It is indeed the same Richard Lockridge, Jerry. I have what I believe to be a complete set of his work, both with Frances and individually. I started reading the mysteries when I was in high school, and started collecting them with fervor in the 1970s. He served in the Navy Public Relations Office during WWII. I haven't read Sgt. Mickey and General Ike; I suspected it might turn out as you have characterized it. Richard's second wife, Hildegarde Dolson was also an author. His book, One Lady, Two Cats, is a delightful memoir of the difficulty of introducing her -- not a cat lover -- into his household.

Here's a site that has as much information on the Lockridges as I've ever found anywhere. (Another lifelong aficionado maintains it.)

>43 laytonwoman3rd: Thanks for all that, Linda. I'll check out that website, too. Cheers!

Book 26: The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together by Heather McGhee



I took a slight diversion from my friend Kim's reading list about African American history and the history of racism in America to read the recently published The Sum of Us after my wife and I saw McGhee interviewed about the book by Trevor Noah. My wife put the book on order from the library and I ordered it on Biblio without telling each other! At any rate, this is an excellent and thought-provoking book. It is often depressing, as you would expect, although McGhee also presents reasons for hope.

McGhee runs down the racist, anti-Black roots of many of the major societal problems in America today, examining at the same time the ways in which these policies have also greatly harmed whites along the way. Her thesis, as per the title, is that working and middle class whites have been sold a "Zero Sum" philosophy: if Blacks "win," whites, by definition, "lose." So, for one easy example, welfare programs that would help many more whites than Blacks must be bad nevertheless, because Blacks are "takers" who don't deserve taxpayer help. Never mind the number of poor whites who would be lifted as well.

McGhee uses as her operating metaphor (as per the book's cover art) the history of public swimming pools. During the middle part of the 20th century, communities across the country, including across the South, had built public swimming pools. They were symbols in many cases of civic pride, gathering places for often thousands of people. However, when the law mandated that these pools be integrated, community after community closed the facilities, often filling the pools in and covering them over, rather than comply with that new law. So not only were Blacks kept out, but tens of thousands of white people lost their public swimming pools as well.

The book examines the housing/mortgage crisis, environmental racism, redlining, voting rights, disengenuous "color blindness" and several more issues, which all come under McGhee's microscope to convincing effect. There is also a chapter on the psychic toll that racism takes on whites called "The Hidden Wound," the title taken from Wendell Berry's 1968 book of the same name.

The book's final chapter, though, is titled "The Solidarity Dividend," and outlines several successful effective, cross-ethnic efforts currently underway at the grass roots level both in individual communities and across the country. McGhee spent a lot of time crossing the country and investigating her thesis and she has a career's worth of experience in policy advocating and organizing to draw on, as well.

Finally, the book is clearly and engagingly written, and does not come across as a polemic. McGhee seems to me to be writing out of sorrow and, often, frustration, but also out of love and hope for the future. She lays out the problems and conditions of our times exceedingly well, and suggests what could be a doable roadmap for the future.

>45 rocketjk:
Thanks for this review. I had been wondering about this book and trying to figure out what exactly it was about. You clarified and it resulted in a book bullet.

>46 benitastrnad: Thanks for your kind words. The Sum of Us is absolutely worth reading, in my opinion.

Book 27: Pot of Trouble by Don Tracy



Back to Don Tracy's Giff Speer mystery series from the late 60s/early 70s. This 5th entry finds our pal Giff having been booted from the super secret Army outfit he'd been solving crimes for because he'd cut some corners to keep a friend of his, a general who'd been a patsy for some counterfeiters in Saigon out of trouble when he'd busted the bad guys. Now this same friend, Lew Lokey, is in a bunch of trouble on his super glitzy spread in the Arizona desert and calls on Giff to come help him again, strictly as a private citizen now. Well, as will happen, crime and mayhem ensure. There is a super rare dug up artifact being contested and somebody is shooting out Lew's windows. Is it the hippies in the hills? The Native Americans from their nearby reservation? The mafia? Or someone closer to home? Did Lokey's first wife really die in a car accident, or was she murdered?

This is, unfortunately, the least satisfying novel of the series so far. To much is static in the storytelling, and I never really cared much about anybody or their problems. Well, there are four more books in the series and I guess I'll read them all sooner or later. They're all only around 180 pages of old fashion pulp pocketbook size, and they're kind of fun intermissions. Here's hoping old Giff bounces back in the last four books!

Book 28: A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende



This, Isabel Allende's most recent novel, was a selection by a member of my reading group. I expected to like it better than I did, alas. It is the story of two families, and in particular one member of each (one man and one woman who end up together; no shock, there), living through the Spanish Civil War. The protagonists end up in Chile (again not a spoiler, as the book's title refers to that country). The story takes the two through their entire lives.

The storyline, the times described and the characters are certainly interesting, so why was the book ultimately unsatisfying to me? One element was the flat nature of the narrative. We are in third person omniscient. And while we often touch down inside the mind of one or another character, particularly our two main players, I felt that too much of the book was spent in above-the-fray exposition and explanation, and way too much time in historical overview mode. Everything from the history of the Spanish Civil War through the Chilean coup that brought Pinochet to power, with long lessons on Chilean history in between, are doled out paragraphs, sometimes pages, at a time before we finally get back to our characters and their stories.

Also, the book suffers (in my view) from what I call "exceptional-itits." That is, both protagonists are exceptional enough in their fields as to open doors for them and create the kind of freedom and in some cases safety that a more "common" individual wouldn't experience. So our man, Victor, has learned medicine and surgery on the Spanish Civil War battlefields and is exceptionally good at it, as well as being exceptionally dedicated and selfless and hence beloved and respected by one and all. Roser is an exceptionally level-headed and practical woman who is also a self-taught but of course wonderful pianist who is eventually able to create a career that allows her to travel South America. Of course, famous pianists have their professional struggles and frustrations, but Roser's are never made evident.

Finally the books suffers from a casual sprinkling of cliches and even grammatical errors that made me wonder about the attention paid by the translators (two are listed). Certainly the English language editors were asleep at the switch. On the grammar side, from time to time we get sentences like this one:

"They traveled to Scotland, where Isidro had secured a deal for his Patagonian wool, and to Wales, where he was hoping to do the same, but which fell through."

On the cliche side, here's one example:

"Aitor's visit left Victor speechless for several days."

It's all too bad, because there is so much here that could have been great. In particular, the descriptions, toward the beginning, of life on the losing side of the Spanish Civil War and of the final retreat/mass exodus/mad deadly dash to the French border away from Franco's murderous forces are very well done and harrowing. And I was certainly interested in the story of the Spanish refugees who managed to set up new lives in Chile. But it goes by too fast, and, for me, from a perspective too far removed from the characters. Overall, I felt that the attempted scope in time was too ambitious. I rarely ask for books to be longer than they are, but for 60 years of tumultuous history and multiple character storylines, I think we needed more than this novel's 314 pages. Better still in my view would have been a sharper focus on maybe two or three particular points in time. Look at me, telling Isabel Allende how to write a novel, right? But anyway, that's how I experienced this one.

>49 rocketjk: A very good review...for some reason I've never been able to warm up to Allende. I wanted to love her Zorro, but I had some of the same issues you point out with that one...flat characterization, and too much telling.

>49 rocketjk: >50 laytonwoman3rd: agree agree. But this review makes the book sound oddly compelling because having read Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls at the beginning of the year I have been itching to re-read it already and I also want to learn more. So the idea of info dumps of history mixed into a story is exactly what I want! Unfortunately it sounds like it just wasn't done well. Sigh. I may give this a try someday, especially since our libraries are reopening next week. It sounds short enough that it might be worth a gamble for me. Thanks for the full review Jerry. Very much appreciated.

>50 laytonwoman3rd: I've read comments similar to yours about Allende's novels, especially the later ones, here on LT, so I would most likely have given this book a miss if it hadn't been a reading group selection. Oh, well. I enjoyed parts of it and didn't hate any of it, though I was happy when I was done and could move on.

>51 RBeffa: The Spanish Civil War section of this novel is over after about 100 pages, so it's maybe worth a trip to the library rather than the bookstore if that's your interest. I will say that those descriptions are the best in the book. But if you really want an info dump about the Spanish Civil War, I highly recommend Antony Beevor's fascinating (though very detailed) history, The Battle for Spain.

>53 rocketjk: i've had Beevor's book on a list I keep in my wallet of books to look for. It has been there for several years and I have not run across a copy yet locally. (Libraries don't have them here but I should probably ask about an ILL loan someday.) I've nibbled on some of Beevor's books before and they are very info dense, too much so for me frankly. But he writes rather definitive works. As a prelude to WWII, tho, I feel like I should know more about the Spanish civil war. Our library catalog shows multiple copies of the Allende book however.

>54 RBeffa: The two most interesting books I've read on the topic, not counting Beevor's history, I guess, might also be hard to find. One is called Another Hill. It is a novel by Milton Wolff, who was the last commander of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. I can't recall how/where I stumbled upon it, but I know that online copies are quite pricey. Another is a memoir, War is Beautiful: An American Ambulance Driver in the Spanish Civil War by James Neugass. I bought this book new at City Lights Books in San Francisco's North Beach (this is the store started by Laurence Ferlinghetti and owned by him until his recent death). I don't think it got any traction and I would be surprised to find that it's still in print, but it might be available online fairly cheaply and it is absolutely fascinating.

There is a dormant Spanish Civil War LT Group where you might find some other suggestions, if in fact you're looking for such, here: https://www.librarything.com/ngroups/792/Spanish-Civil-War

>38 rocketjk: H*Y*M*A*N*K*A*P*L*A*N*! I did so love those stories. "Feh? For the class?!"

Hilarious if there were Yiddish speakers in your world.

>56 richardderus: Hey Richard! Thanks for stopping in to say hello. Hope you're doing OK these days.

Yep, those H*Y*M*A*N*K*A*P*L*A*N stories were hilarious, at least, as you say, if you knew from Yiddish-speaking immigrants and their kids. My parents loved them.

>55 rocketjk: Thanks Jerry

Book 29: Harvard Has a Homicide by Timothy Fuller



Well, the last thing I needed was another mystery series to be in the middle of, but, alas, when I went to my fiction shelves and decided to pull down an old mystery hardcover, This is Murder, Mr. Jones, I found that it was the fourth book in a series, and, well, off to the Biblio website I went.

So, here we are at the beginning of Fuller's Jupiter Jones series, this first entry published in 1936. Our man Edmund "Jupiter" Jones is a smart-aleck Harvard grad student, with, evidently, plenty of money and, you'll not be surprised to learn, generally the smartest person in the room. Or so he thinks. At any rate, when Jones is the first to discover the corpse of the recently stabbed to death Professor Singer, he can't resist butting in and "helping" the Cambridge police department's Inspector Rankin solve the case. Or, as Jones' girlfriend comments drily to another character, "He thinks he's the Thin Man." Fuller plays this situation nicely for laughs. When Jones early on steps over the line in his comments to Rankin and gets slapped down, we are told that Jones thinks to himself, "The situation was now perfect. The policeman was irritated at the amateur sleuth." Happily, Fuller plays this against type somewhat, as the policeman is portrayed at very good at his job, rather than the genial bumbler we've come to expect in these situations.

Anyway, as you'll have noticed by now, I found this mystery to be rather fun, although Jones does get a bit tiresome in his smugness, especially towards the end. But the plotting and the mystery itself are pretty good, so I am, in fact, going to read on in the series, which is five books long, all told. Unfortunately, there is some of the racism we'd expect of this time and place, as Jones' Black servant Sylvester is portrayed cringingly condescendingly, although he is at times smart as anyone else in the room, and is clearly a better craps player than most. However, there are two minor characters whose obviously Jewish names are presented as simply normal rather than as occasion for antisemetic commentary, not something we'd take for granted at Harvard circa 1936, so at least there's that.

Book notes:
Fuller was, in fact, just 23 years old and a recent Harvard graduate when this first book was published in 1936. Here is a fun reproduction of a Harvard Crimson article about Fuller published the next year:
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1937/3/23/timothy-fuller-author-of-recent-har...

My copy of the book, as you can see by the image here, is an Armed Services Edition copy. There were books that were selected by the Council on Books in Wartime, a government sponsored group of writings and editors, for republishing and free dispersal to American soldiers fighting overseas in World War 2. I found the story of these books interesting in and of itself. Here's the wikipedia page explaining the project:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armed_Services_Editions

Book 30: Up from Slavery by Booker T. Washington



Back to my friend Kim's list of books about African American history and the history of racism in America for this classic that I should have read long ago. Oh, well. Good to get another "reading gap" filled in. Up from Slavery is Booker T. Washington's memoir.

On the national stage, Washington was one of the most famous African Americans of his time. As the title tells us, he was born enslaved on a Virginia plantation in 1858 or 1859 (he wasn't sure of the exact date or even year). Through force of will and an impressive work ethic, Washington earned his way into the Hammond Institute, a progressive school of both basic and higher learning for freedmen and their descendants. At age 25, he was recommended for and accepted the post of leader/principal of Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute (later Tuskegee Institute, now Tuskegee University). When he got to Alabama to take over the school, it turned out there was no school and he had to build it from scratch. The story of this process constituted, for me, the most compelling section of the narrative. Afterwards, Washington's success building the Tuskegee Institute, and his impressive abilities as an orator, brought him an ever growing fame, both nationally and, eventually, internationally.

Washington's opinions about race relations are somewhat controversial now, as per the more modern histories that I've read on the topic of the Civil Rights Movement and, particularly, the Jim Crow era that Washington was working in attest. Appearing as the principle speaker at the opening of an Agricultural Exposition in Atlanta in 1895 (a remarkable feat for a Black man at the time in and of itself), Washington made a hit with the mixed-race audience when he stated "In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress." His ideas were that the Black race (I use the word "race" here because Washington used it.) needed to build itself up economically and educationally before worrying about things like integration and even voting rights (not to mention political power),* and he saw in schools like the Tuskegee Institute, which emphasized the benefits of physical labor and the learning of essential trades like brick making along with academic learning, an important means to this end. What he seemed to be ignoring, at least when looked at from a later perspective, was the ferocity and pervasiveness of Jim Crow/White supremist actions to prevent the average Southern Black from advancing in this manner. According to the excellent history Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow, any sort of learning or financial success (a successful crop or even a few dollars in the bank) could be enough to get a Black person lynched.

It's for me hard to imagine that Washington could have been so isolated by his own success as to not know this. I wonder whether he felt that presenting a more hopeful, even if less than realistic, message would help whites accept his school's success (which had always depending for funding to a significant degree from donations by sympathetic whites) and allow for more institutions of the same kind and further advances. Or maybe he didn't realize the ways in which the exceptional nature of his own success could be used by racists as a shield for their own attitudes, as in, "Well look how we applaud Booker T. Washington when he speaks, and how we give him money for his school. Obviously we're not racist." Again, it's hard for me to imagine him really being blind to this, but I would need to read a biography of Washington to have an idea of what the answer to these questions might be.

In the reading, I'm afraid Up from Slavery bogged down for me toward the end, as Washington begins relating the places he went to, the audiences he spoke to and the accolades he received. I can understand why these would have been important to him to include, perhaps to exemplify the ways in which it was possible for a Black man to attain such status and success, but it all became repetitive and impersonal for me. Nevertheless, this is an important book to read for anyone wishing to gain an overall understanding of Black history in America. Certainly, Washington is a person to admire.

* It occurred to me that this attitude found a strange mirroring in the ideas of the Black Panthers, whose platform including the belief that Blacks in America needed to unite before they could make real progress in America, because they needed to present to the American political and social establishment a single, powerful negotiating block. (See: Black Against Empire: the History and Politics of the Black Panther Party) The positions are obviously far from identical, but both contained the concept of, "We need to get ourselves together first, and create a position of strength, before we can hope to deal successfully with White America. (There may well be obvious holes to poke in this comparison that I'm missing. That would be far from a first.)

Book 31: The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe



Goodness knows how long ago I bought this paperback copy of The Right Stuff, probably at a thrift store or maybe a garage sale, thinking, "Well, I really ought to read this one of these days." My copy's LT entry date is in 2008, which means it was already on my shelf when I first began entering my library on this site. It's the sort of, "I'll get to it someday" book that is easy to pass over until that mythical "someday" or more whimsical "maybe next time." This time, when I came upon it while perusing my shelves, I found I had crossed into "Oh, what the heck," territory. Every once in a while it's fun to cross a book off the "Have I really not read that yet?" list.

And, holy cats, I enjoyed the stuffing out of The Right Stuff! As most here probably already know, this is Tom Wolfe's account of the Mercury Space Program, the initial series of one-man flights that led eventually to the Apollo moon-landing flights. Wolfe gets very in-depth about the ethos of the original seven astronauts and how that grew out of the tough "Right Stuff" derring do, laugh at danger attitudes of the early fighter jet test pilots. Wolfe describes the politics of the program, the personalities of those test pilots and, of course, of the astronauts. He delves into the situations their wives found themselves in, as well. Finally, he takes us on a minute-by-minute trip within the Mercury capsules of several of those now legendary flights.

Wolfe describes compellingly the ways in which the sudden rush to get a man into space came as a reaction to the Russian launch of Sputnik, the first successful orbital satellite, and the panic that set off in the press, in the public and, correspondingly, in Congress. Then, the Russians sent Yuri Gagarin in orbit around the earth several times, and the panic was on good and proper. Could America let the Commies rule space?

All that much I already knew, but something I found fascinating and that I'd never known was that when John Glenn was assigned to be only the third American into space, he deemed that a failure. The first two flights, made by Alan Shepherd and Gus Grissom, were sub-orbital flights. Basically, they went up and came down in a parabola like a mortar shell, launched by smaller rockets than would be needed for earth orbit. Glenn's flight was supposed to be the third such flight, as that larger rocket, the Atlas, was not ready yet for prime time. But when the Russians sent another cosmonaut into space, this time to orbit the earth seven times, it was determined that the time for fooling around with sub-orbital flights was over. The Atlas rocket was rushed to completion and John Glenn, slated to be "merely" the third man to go up and come down, was suddenly rescheduled to be the first American to orbit the earth! Thus, it was the Russian space program that handed Glenn his ticket to everlasting fame.

As to how many of Wolfe's details and descriptions are accurate, well, one does not really know. I don't ever recall any serious push-back against the book when it was at its highest fame (which was considerable) or when the movie version came out, but I would not have been seriously tracking that in 1980, when the book came out and I was 25 and had more immediate "concerns." The end of my copy features about a page and a half of testimonials to the book's accuracy and "got it right" qualities by folks in a position to know, including a couple of astronauts. But the publishers would not have included blurbs by folks who read the book in horror or fury, so I take a lot of the details here with a certain grain of salt.

Nevertheless, despite my final caveat that the book is overwritten in places (well, this is the writer who would go on to author Bonfire of the Vanities, after all), I found The Right Stuff to be, overall, very well written, quite compelling, and a book that has also aged quite well.

>61 rocketjk: I loved that book. Glad you enjoyed it as well.

Book 32: The Seventh by Richard Stark



This is, in fact, the seventh book in Richard Stark's (a.k.a. Donald Westlake) guiltily entertaining "Parker" series. Parker is a psychopathic thief and all-round criminal who doesn't have any particular desire to kill you but will without compunction if you represent the slightest bit of trouble for him, the job he's in the midst of, or the security of his alias. In this short novel, Parker, as part of a 7-man team, has just pulled off a beautiful, profitable heist. The team holes up in separate locations to wait for the heat to die down, with Parker holding on to the loot. He goes out for 10 minutes to pick up some cigarettes and beer, which turns out to be quite enough time for extremely deadly bedlam to kick in (not a spoiler: this occurs on page 1). As I said above, these books are definitely guilty pleasures. The writing is very sharp and the plotting swift and enjoyable, but the protagonist puts the "ugh" in anti-hero and books include the standard misogyny of the era. (This book was originally published in 1966.) Looking back, I see that it had been two years since I last visited Parker world. I can't guarantee I'll wait that long to read the next book.

Book 33: The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois



"One ever feels his twoness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder."

This classic set of essays, first published in 1903 during the full savagery of Jim Crow America, is W.E.B Du Bois' heartfelt and detailed description of race relations, particularly in the South, and the plight of African Americans trying to attain some level of dignity and prosperity in the face harsh and determined resistance from white America. Du Bois refers to racism as the Veil behind which African Americans must live, a veil which serves to hide the true nature of Black culture and aspirations from the racist white America. The essays cover history and cultural, relgious and economic conditions and the nature source of racism itself. Du Bois also provides two essays that sketch the lives of individuals whose talents and potential are crushed under the weight of mindless Jim Crow hatred. Du Bois was a wonderful writer, and although my previous reading had already revealed to me most of the conditions and history he describes, reading Du Bois' heartfelt explanations and accounts, written from the heart from the midst of those particular dark days (which is not to say that the dark days have relented even today) was a moving experience for me.

Professor Donald B. Gibson, in his introduction to my Penguin Classics edition of the book, says that these essays were Du Bois attempt to reach white America through logic and emotion, to lay out the case that Blacks were individuals in the same way whites were, people with souls, with longings and emotions, capable of nobility and degradation and everything in between, in the same way that whites were. If only the Veil could come down, how much better for everyone. Says Gibson at the conclusion of his introduction:

"Du Bois believes that black and white may may interact in a humane way if whites recognize that blacks have souls (which probably means, at base, human feeling) just as they do. The Souls of Black Folk is an apoeal for that recognition, an appeal that, if we may judge from Du Bois' subsequent approach to racial issues, fell on deaf ears. Du Bois never abandoned reason, but after this book he never felt again that the matter was an issue for understanding and goodwill alone. . . ."

I will admit that I was brought up a bit short by the antisemitism Du Bois displays in a couple of the essays. At any rate, I recommend this book very, very strongly, indeed to (at the very least) all Americans. It is crucial reading, I think.

Book 34: The Best of It: New and Selected Poems by Kay Ryan



Kay Ryan, who was the U.S. Poet Laureate from 2008 through 2010, published this collection of "greatest hits" along with a section of new poems in 2010. It on the members of my reading group selected it for last month's group read. Mostly the poems here are bite sized or at least relatively short. I started out enjoying them very much, but my interest began to wane somewhat as I went along. First of all, here's a poem I like a lot:

The Edges of Time

It is at the edges
that time thins.
Time which had been dense and viscous
as amber suspending
intentions like bees
unseizes them. A
humming begins,
Apparently coming
from stacks of
put-off things or
just in back. A
racket of claims now,
as time flattens. A
glittering fan of things
competing to happen,
brilliant and urgenst
as fish when seas
retreat.

Too many of the poems, though, concluded with what seemed to be to be heavy-handed pay-offs: the moral of the story. These are poems I thought would be much better without their final lines. Here's a short example of what I mean:

Reverse Drama

Lightning, but not bright.
Thunder, but not loud.
Sometimes something
in the sky connects
to something int he ground
in ways we don't expect
and more or less miss except
through reverse drama:
things were heightened
and now they're calmer.

How much better that poem would be (for me) if it ended at "through reverse drama." There were too many that left me with that impression. Obviously, Ryan has been at this a long time, is much admired and knows exactly what she's trying to accomplished, so mine is of course a minority opinion. I was certainly the only member of my reading group who had this reaction. Anyway, I'll leave you with another poem I greatly enjoyed:

Felix Crow

Crow school
is basic and
short as a rule--
just the rudiments
of quid pro crow
for most students.
Then each lives out his unenlightened
span, adding his
bit of blight
to the collected
history of pushing out
the sweeter species;
briefly swaggering the
swagger of his
aggravating ancestors
down my street.
and every time
I like him
when we meet.

Book 35: We Band of Brothers: A Memoir of Robert Kennedy by Edwin Guthman



In the late 1950s, Edwin Guthman was a Seattle journalist who had already won a Pulitzer Prize. When Robert Kennedy came to town as a federal prosecutor to investigate corrupt labor leaders, Guthman, who had been writing about those same issues, decided to cooperate with the investigation, knowing that Kennedy would have subpoena power that would enable him to get at financial records that a journalist could never uncover. The friendship that grew between the two men led to Kennedy, upon becoming Attorney General, inviting Guthman to Washington as special assistant for public information in the Department of Justice. Essentially, he was RFK's chief press representative, as well as a trusted advisor, and as such was present for many important deliberations during Kennedy's time as AG. This book is Guthman's fascinating memoir of those times.

Guthman takes us through those initial investigations and his growing admiration for RFK's intelligence, tenacity and integrity, and then through the JFK presidency, including the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the Cuban Missile Crisis and, most compellingly, the Justice Department's involvement, such as it was, in the Civil Rights movement during the JFK years. Most harrowing is Guthman's description of the hour-by-hour negotiations and decisions during James Meredith's attempts to enroll as the first black student at the University of Mississippi. This revealing paragraph from the beginning of this section, written in 1971, when this book was published, is worth reproducing, I think:

"{RFK's} views at the time: that strong positive leadership by the President, persistent federal action to protect federally guaranteed rights, and continuing dialogue with Southern officials and civil rights leaders would isolate violence and gradually but steadily lift the burden of discrimination from the backs of Negroes with civility and justice. The men around Bob shared this view, although {Burke} Marshall {head of the Civil Rights Division of the US Department of Justice}, perhaps, saw the inflexibility of white supremacy in its true perspective sooner than the rest.

The trouble, as the passage of a few years would show, was that temporary solutions and the heady atmosphere of the new Frontier obscured our view of the depth of the problem. Despite the enlightened Southerners among us, we lacked a sense of Southern history. Particularly lacking, I can see now, was full understanding of the destructive effect of the federal government's long record after Reconstruction of vacillation and finally abandonment of the Negro to the wiles of white supremacy. There, we did not recon fully with the ingrained stubbornness of Southern leaders and their adeptness at forestalling federal action to help Negroes.Nor did we fully confront what all must have known instinctively; that the beliefs, fears and customs of discrimination were embedded nto the nation's mind and soul much more deeply against Negroes that against any other minority."

Again, this book was published in 1971. Later in the book Guthman offers this assessment of RFK's original naivete on this subject, and the gradual evolution of his views:

"The difference between his rather hard-nosed replies to Dr. King in 1961 and his sensitive remarks in Fort Wayne in 1968 accurately measures how greatly his attitude toward the black struggle for equal rights changed in seven years.

In 1961 he recognized that the country had been too slow and too intractable in redressing the Negroes' historic grievances, and he had acted within the government to accelerate the pace. But, like most whites in the North and West, he thought in the cliches of the times. He did not then regard the incipient black rebellion as the gravest threat to American society. There still seemed to be time for steady, rational progress that would satisfy the Negroes' demands and peacefully accommodate with the democratic process their hardening insistence on freedom "now." Bob was confident that resolute leadership by the federal government and the good sense of the American people would overcome the centuries of prejudice and white insensitivity to the human aspirations of those who were not white. He thought about the problem then in terms of leadership, tactics and the law. He urged Dr. King and other Negro leaders to concentrate on registering black voters instead of demonstrating. The surest way to improve conditions in the South was to get the vote and exercise it, he thought in 1961 . . .

His road to full recognition of what was behind the black rebellion and its crucial implications for the future of the nation, however, lay not only in discharging his official duties but in frequent walks through ghetto neighborhoods, in many visits to ghetto schools, particularly in Washington, and in countless conversations--some of them acrimonious confrontations--with black leaders."

Guthman also provides a brief but moving picture of Robert Kennedy's intense grief over his brother's death, and goes into some detail about his clashes and eventual enmity with Lyndon Johnson. Guthman stayed on Kennedy's staff through his successful Senatorial campaign in New York, and gives an interesting description of those days, but then went back to his journalism career, and so offers only a few insights into Kennedy's time as a senator. He leaves the details of RFK's death to others to describe.

This is not a "warts and all" biography. Guthman was an unabashed RFK admirer. Given that this admiration comes from a hard-nosed journalist after years of close contact, we might give it some strong credence. But Guthman does not claim to be offering a comprehensive study of Kennedy, and I'm sure Guthman had knowledge of one or two skeletons in RFK's closet that he chose not to reveal.

I grabbed this from the 60s section of my U.S. History shelf in my own collection more or less at random. I have no idea when I bought it, but I'm very glad I ended up reading it. I was 13 when RFK was shot and remember the event, and the times, clearly, though obviously through the prism of youth.

Book 36: Glimpses by Lewis Shiner



The spine of my copy of Glimpses tells us that this novel is science fiction, but it isn't. The blurb at the top of the front cover tells us that the novel was "Winner of the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel!" but the book isn't really a fantasy novel, either. What this is is a very good adult "coming of age" novel (the protagonist is pushing 40) with strong currents of magical realism.

Genre quibbles aside, I enjoyed this novel quite a lot. Ray Shackleford is, as mentioned, in his late 30s, and the story is set in the late 1980s. (It was first published in 1993.) Shackleford, who works for himself fixing stereo equipment for a living, is in a decaying marriage. His emotionally abusive father has just died in a diving accident that might or might not have been suicide, a fact that doesn't diminish Ray's fury at the man one bit. His mother is emotionally frozen. One day, he sits alone in his study thinking about the Beatles. He meditates on the song, "The Long and Winding Road," which was recorded by Paul McCartney alone at the piano and released later on the Let It Be album with kitschy string arrangements added by famed producer Phil Spector, arrangements that McCartney has always strongly disliked. Ray begins dreaming of another version of the song, one without the strings, but with all the Beatles taking part instead. To his shock, Ray realizes that his imagined version is coming out of his speakers. Still disbelieving, he goes back to the beginning and does it again, this time hitting the record button on his cassette player. Sure enough, he gets the version on tape.

This is the jumping off point for a strong novel about self-discovery, disappointment and redemption. The fragile, illusory nature of the promise of the counter culture 60s, the inevitable implosion of that promise and the sense of mourning felt afterwards by those who lived their youths during those years are strong themes, here, deftly woven through the protagonist's own coming to grips with those feelings and with his own life changes. The magical realism episodes deal essentially with things that didn't happen, potential subsumed by tragedy or strife. There are times when Shiner lays Ray's issues on a little thick, but mostly I found this a surprisingly effective and thought-provoking novel. The details built into the magical realism trips back to the late 60s are impressive and capture the era extremely well, the lows as well as the highs.

I turned 13 in 1968, and had a 13-year-old's naivete about it all. I couldn't wait to get to college and dive in, but by the time that happened, it was 1973, and the retreat was in full force. Some of us fought a rearguard action, but in our hearts we knew we were too late. My disappointment was profound, though I've unapologetically retained some of the spirit of those times in my heart through the years. So that's one reason I found this novel's themes particularly affecting, I suppose.

Book note: So how did I come to read this extremely obscure novel? When I owned my used bookstore, this book was on the shelves in the Science Fiction section, because of the label on its spine. One day, somebody bought it. As is true for most used bookstores, I generally gave store credit for books people brought me, and my rule was that I would always take back for credit books that had been purchased in the store (regardless of whether I really needed another copy of the book or not), assuming the book had been kept in sellable condition. One day, the fellow who had purchased the book brought it back to the store. I didn't really know this person, he wasn't that regular a customer, but he knew that I had a weekly radio show on the local public station. He said, "I'm bringing this book back, but not for store credit. I'm giving it to you personally as a gift, because you're a music lover and I think you'd really like it." So I thanked him and duly brought it home and put it on my "short" TBR list, which somehow turned into a 7-year wait, but now I've finally read it and enjoyed it. So I offer sincere thanks to that thoughtful fellow, from a distance in time that fits well into the theme of the book.

Book 37: A Promised Land by Barack Obama



I found Barack Obama's memoir of his early political career and, especially, the first term of his presidency to be interesting indeed, and quite well written. In particular, I found the memoir to be a useful trip back through the events and issues of those years (2009-2013). The details of the financial crisis and the TARP program Obama's administration came up with to deal with that situation were enlightening in particular, for me. Throughout the book's 700 pages, we get the background stories on the issues that Obama took on (both those on his planned agenda, like healthcare, and those that got thrown at him, like the Deepwater disaster in the Gulf of Mexico), including all the planning, research, discussion and agonizing over what should be done and what could be done politically. Obama often offers, as well, the perspectives of the people who thought he was acting in error, such as those who thought the TARP bank bailouts were mistakes. Understandably, I think, he gives his own reasons for the actions he did take much more emphasis. If there were times when Obama's explanations seemed not quite convincing in hindsight, I was willing to give him a bit of latitude in terms of the memoir itself. This was meant as Obama's memoir, after all, and not a comprehensive history of the era. His attitude seemed to be, "Here's what I did and here's why I did it. History will have to work out how right or wrong I was." All in all that seems a fair perspective to me.

Obama came across to me as very clear-eyed about the systemic faults (and racism) in U.S. culture and system of government. He writes often, and with great frustration, about the obstructionist policies of the Republican Party, and especially Republican leadership, during his tenure. But he still retains his optimism, at least in public/print, about the promises that America and America's founding mythology represent (hence, the memoir's title). One's overall respect (or lack thereof) for Obama's worldview might depend to a significant extent upon whether one shares any part of, or is instead cynical about, that optimism.

Book 38: Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston



I'm sorry it took me so long to finally read this beautiful, sad, poetic novel. Janie Crawford is a young Black woman coming of age in Jim Crow Florida. As the novel progresses, Janie gains assuredness, learning about herself and the world and about love. Throughout the story, Hurston weaves the poetry of dialect and mythology, and the power of the natural world: a power of beauty and inspiration as well as the power for disruption and death. Also, in this novel, Hurston epitomizes the writer's rule for "showing" rather than "telling." We mostly see Hurston's Black characters living in essentially all-Black communities. Whites are mostly an unseen menace, appearing only occasionally to assert dominance. Also, only a few times in the novel does Hurston use the word "poverty." But the conditions the characters are living in are shown in the paper-thin walls of their homes and the circumscribed limits of their aspirations. A good day picking beans is a great day of work, with no loftier goals seemingly to be imagined. The one character who does evince such drive raises himself only within his own community, and in succeeding creates for himself mostly a fresh corner of loneliness. This is, for me, an inspirational story of a woman who retains her faith in herself and grows into her own power despite disappointment and hardship. One might see Janie, perhaps, as also representing the power and soul of the Black community that has fostered her in the face of poverty and repression.

Book 39: The Book of Kells: Art -- Origins -- History by Iain Zaczek



This is a lovely and interesting small coffee table book about the amazing late 9th Century illustrated Book of Gospels believed to created in an Irish monastery, possibly on the Island of Iona. The brief text tells of the conjectured history of the book and its supposed purpose (probably for display in a monastery and rather than for study or proselytizing), describes with much use of detail and example the artistic styles to be found and what their antecedents were likely to have been, and finally describes the materials probable methodology employed.

Below is one very poorly reproduced (just used my cel phone) page that will at least give you an idea of the sort of art on display, here.



I bought this book at Trinity College in Dublin, where the Book of Kells has been on display for many years, back in the late 1990s. They turn one page of the book every day, and what you get to see is just whatever page the book happens to be open to on the day you're there, but only for a few seconds, maybe half a minute at the most, as on most days there is a long viewing line that is understandably kept moving. It's still worth the visit.

This book is fun and interesting, though there are some funny misplacements in the layout: half sentences repeated and sometimes parts of sentences left out. The funniest one is found on page 26, which ends thusly:

"The curious articulation of the creature's hip joing has strong affinities with the beasts that are found on Pictish stone-carvings. This has fuelled the theories of" The next page begins a new chapter, so we never get to learn about those theories! Oh, well, a minor snafu in the grand scheme of things. I assume they got this issues ironed out in later editions. While the text in this book is relatively brief, there's more than enough info, and the full color reproductions are very enjoyable.

Book 40: Scoundrel Time by Lillian Hellman



Scoundrel Time is Lillian Hellman's memoir of her dealings with the Red-baiting McCarthy Era version of the House Un-American Activities Committee. As many (or most) folks here will know, McCarthy and his cronies (including, prominently, a young Richard Nixon), particularly went after writers and movie-makers during the Red Scare of the late 1940s and into the 1950s. Lots of intellectuals had attended Communist Party meetings, usually small groups that met in somebody's house, during the 20s and 30s, but virtually none of these meetings resulted in anything even vaguely akin to revolutionary activity.

By the 50s, cynical, opportunistic politicians like McCarthy and Nixon went mining for headlines and power by tormenting anyone who was suspected of having attended such a meeting, or knowing anybody who had, or committing such horrible sins as expressing support for the Loyalist side of the Spanish Civil War (whence came the mind-blowing phrase, "Premature Anti-Facist"). Lives were ruined and friendships dissolved, as people had to decide between being a "friendly witness" (naming the names of others one had seen at such a meeting, say) or refusing to cooperate and risking jail time. But even the taint of having been called and having invoking the Fifth Amendment was enough to get people blacklisted or bring the IRS down on them. By the time Hellman was called to testify, her longtime lover, Dashiell Hammett, had already been in and out of jail, blacklisted, and attacked by the IRS with the result that any further income he might accrue in his lifetime would be going directly to them. When Hellman was called, in 1952, she refused, essentially, to cooperate. She offered, in a letter to the committee, to answer all questions about herself fully but said she would not answer questions about anyone else. This offer was refused, and so Hellman was forced to take the Fifth. But the committee made the mistake of making this letter public, and the immediate support for her position in the press basically shielded her from further prosecution, meaning no jail time. But she knew her living as an author of plays and screenplays was over, and that her income would be drying up immediately. She instantly put the farm she'd lived on most of her life in Westchester, NY, up for sale. Her life was changed irrevocably, just by the fact of having been called and refusing to throw anybody else under the bus.

At any rate, Hellman was a wonderful writer, and this short memoir (around 115 pages all told), provides an extremely vivid account of the tension, sadness, anger and frustration of those times for her. She waited until 1975 to finally publish an account of the episode, saying early in the book that she'd tried twice before to write about it all but hadn't liked what she came up with. The fear of being called, the dread when the subpoena finally came, the tense weeks when she tried to figure out what to do about it, the fury Hammett expressed* at the strategy she came up with, at the encouragement of her lawyers, the actual experience of testifying and the impact of it all on her subsequent life are all vividly rendered, including not a small amount of dry humor in the telling.

* Hammett thought Hellman's strategy (the offer to testify about herself but no others) was mad and sure to land her in jail, which he didn't think she was cut out for.

Here is a relevant early quote, in which Hellman talks about the origins and nature of McCarthyism. She marks the real start with the Marxist Revolution in China:

"The fear of Communism did not begin that year, but the new China, allied in those days with Russia, had a more substantial base and there were many host men and women who were, understandably, frightened that their pleasant way of life could end in a day.

It was not the first time in history that the confusions of honest people were picked up in space by cheap baddies who, hearing a few bars of popular notes, made them into an opera of public disorder, staged and sung, as much of the congressional testimony shows, in the wards of an insane asylum

A theme is always necessary, a plain, simple unadorned theme to confuse the ignorant. The anti-Red theme was easily chosen from the grab bag, not alone because we were frightened of socialism, but chiefly, I think, to destroy the remains of Rooosevelt and his sometimes advanced work. . . . It is impossible to remember the drunken face of McCarthy, merry often with a kind of worldly malice, as if he were mocking those who took him seriously, and believe that he himself could take seriously anything but his boozed-up nightmares."

I highly recommend this short, vivid memoir, written by an exceptional writer, that provides an incisive look at the folly of those days and the personal price paid by the people that came under the glare of these cynical, incompetent, opportunistic politicians and the great public, including the press for the most part, who acquiesced for so long.

Book 41: Sorry for Your Trouble by Richard Ford



The is a recent (2020) collection of longish short stories by Ford, best known, perhaps, as the author of The Sportswriter (and three other novels about that book's protagonist, Frank Bascombe). These stories are mostly about relatively successful people who are at or post middle age. In one way or another, the characters here are all navigating the dimming of expectations that that time of life can engender. Marriages are either over or have become everyday and humdrum. Ford, as I think is usual for him, spends a lot of time describing his characters' histories and states of mind. This might all sound tedious, and in some of the stories (the book's final tale, "Second Language," in particular) it is. But in the book's better entries, Ford still displays an ability to put his characters into relatable situations, and give them enough self-awareness of their own foibles to create sympathy in the reader. He also generally avoids marching the storylines to predictable endings. I guess Ford's writing style is not necessarily for everyone. I found most of these tales enjoyable and gave the whole schmear 3 1/2 stars.

Book 42: Adventures of Captain David Grief by Jack London



Read as a "between book" (see first post). Captain David Grief is a South Seas adventurer, a self-made millionaire, tycoon merchant during the days of the sailing ships, with engines just beginning to come on the scene. I kept thinking of Grief as sort of a South Seas Bruce Wayne. At any rate, London, of course, was a great writer of adventure stories. In these seven tales, Grief is always the hero, almost always the smartest one on the ship or in the village. There's not much going on below the surface in these stories. Sometimes the villains and/or fools are other Europeans, sometimes they're the island inhabitants. This collection was originally published in 1911 under the title "A Son of the Sun." The assumptions about European cultural superiority one would expect from fiction of that time are here, but, are less overt than I was fearing they would be when I took this slim volume down off my pulp paperback shelves. I did have fun reading these.

Book note: My copy is a beautiful second printing Paperback Library edition from 1957.

Book 43: The Corporal Was a Pitcher: The Courage of Lou Brissie by Ira Berkow



This is a fascinating, well-written biography. Lou Brissie's story is quite something. A teenage pitching phenom in his native South Carolina in the late 1930s, Brissie interrupted his promising baseball career to enlist in the Army after Pearl Harbor. When he went off to war, he already had a commitment from Connie Mack, the longtime owner/manager of the Philadelphia A's. Mack was going to sign Brissie and then pay for him to go to college for three years, an arrangement that provides an idea of how much potential Brissie was seen to have.

But Brissie's leg was shattered during an artillery attack in Italy in 1944 and he had to beg the doctors not to amputate. Luckily for Brissie, he found one Army doctor willing to try to save the leg. Brissie went through multiple operations--his leg bone was essentially fused together from the fragments the exploding artillery shell had left behind--and he had to wear a cumbersome brace to walk, let along pitch in the major leagues. And yet pitch in the major leagues, he did, and quite effectively, despite that leg brace and the essentially constant pain he endured. In fact, Brissie was extremely well known during the post-war years as an inspiration for wounded veterans and kids with handicaps. It's surprising and more than a bit sad that his story has been largely forgotten.

Brissie was comfortable around blacks and happy to be teammates with black ballplayers, not something to be taken for granted in those early days of the integration of Major League Baseball, especially given Brissie's Southern upbringing. During the Depression, Brissie's father, a former daredevil motorcycle rider, had had a cycle repair shop in their small South Carolina town and had a black friend as a full business partner. For this sin, one night the Klan pulled Brissie's father out of their home and beat him severely in their front yard in front of the family, breaking two ribs, then lit a cross ablaze in front of the house. The lessons Brissie took from this was admiration for his father's courage and a hatred of racism.

Brissie was still alive when Berkow was working on the book (the book was published in 2009 and Brissie died in 2013) and sat for extensive interviewing. He comes across as an extremely thoughtful fellow. Berkow, a Pulitzer Prize winning jouralist, is a fine writer who clearly had a strong connection to his subject for this biography. I highly recommend this book for readers with an interest in American history and with even a passing interest in baseball.

Book 44: Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer



This is an intriguing and memorable book that effectively melds memoir, Native American history and philosophy, ecology and plant science, with a reverie about nature and a sad, frustrated, pained warning about the destructive nature of Western civilization's highly commodified* nature. Kimmerer is herself a Native American who has melded her people's ancient philosophies of human's integral role and caretaker's responsibilities with Nature to the scientific establishment's perspective as scientist as observer rather than participant via her own academic studies as a botanist and ecologist. Kimmerer takes us through several personal memories, such as making maple syrup with her two daughters from the trees that stand on their own property, and shares a lot of fascinating information about the ways that diverse species of plants and animals cooperate in nature to the benefit of all. Her book is in many ways a plea that humans return to a role of participation in that cooperation rather and discard industrial society's determination to obstruct and destroy these cycles in the service of profit and material comfort for those with the wherewithal to buy it.

Kimmerer is a very good writer, an element that is particularly crucial to an ambitious endeavor like this one. I would think the book would be extremely thought provoking to anyone already inclined to read it. Our own lifestyle choices and even our daily decisions have meaning and consequence, and this book is a very good reminder of those truths. Some of Kimmerer's examples of the destructive nature of industrialized society's policies are heartbreaking, and it's not hard to feel chagrin (to put it mildly) at the degree to which it is all too easy to turn a blind eye to things that are in plain sight before us.

There are numerous examples of all of these factors, the good and the bad and the wondrous, provided here. It was entirely understandable to me why Kimmerer felt it necessary to provide so many. Each is a little different, of course, and together they form a stronger whole than any would provide on it's own. And yet, at a certain point in the reading, things did bog down somewhat for me. Even though, as I mentioned, I understood the need for length, I did feel at some point that I'd gotten the point, particularly when it came to Kimmerer's presentation of Native American mythology, practice and philosophy. (It's not like the book's a doorstop. My paperback edition comes in at 384 pages.) Well, anyway, that's just me. All in all, this is a beautiful if often heartbreaking book, an invaluable eye-opener and reminder, entirely and emphatically (for me, anyway) worth reading.

* What is meant by "commodified" is, for example, the idea of a forest as some company's property to be exploited for profit rather than employed mindfully and, mostly, protected for the benefit of all. And by "all," Kimmerer means all beings, not just humans.

>75 rocketjk: I'm looking forward to reading this one.

>76 laytonwoman3rd: And I'll look forward to reading how you like it.

I've been reading a lot of Native American fiction and non-fiction in the last month or so, for the American Authors Challenge. I have a hold on this one at the library, and I just checked on it---I'm next in line!

>78 laytonwoman3rd: I hope you like it. I'll be interested in reading your reaction.

Book 45: The Slave Ship: A Human History by Marcus Rediker



This is one of the most disturbing, depressing books I've read in a long time, which is going a ways since I've been gradually reading through my friend Kim's list of important books about African American history and, especially, racism in America. This book is exactly what the title suggests, a history of the process of bringing slaves to the Americas from Africa. Rediker has created a comprehensive and very well written narrative. He tells of the cultures and kingdoms of Western Africa who took part in kidnapping members of other groups, marching them sometimes hundreds of miles to the coast and selling them to European slave traders. He uses first person accounts to describe what it was like to be one of those captured in that way. He finishes up by talking about the abolitionist movement and how the practice was finally brought to an end. But mostly Rediker describes the horror and despair the kidnapped experienced aboard the slave ships themselves. And, in addition, the violence, cruelty and high mortality rates experienced not just by the enslaved, but by crew members as well. For common sailors had an aversion to the trade and the danger, and most often had to be coerced in one way or another to man the slave ships. The power of the captains of the slave trade was absolute, and their cruelty, often wanton, toward both crew and "cargo" was notorious. Rediker also makes clear that the enslaved resisted however they could, through uprisings when possible, refusing to eat and often committing suicide when the chance presented itself. And, of course, the people making the real money were sitting in offices in America and England. The book, very well written, as I said above, is a detailed horror show from beginning to end. If you can put yourself through it, though, it is important reading, a crucial, fundamental part of the American and European story.

Book 46: Death Blew Out the Match by Kathleen Moore Knight



Time for something fun! Death Blew Out the Match is a "Golden Age" mystery, first published in 1935 and the first entry in Knight's "Elisha Macomber" series, set on Martha's Vineyard. When copywriter Anne Waldron loses her job (it's the Depression, after all), she falls back to her cabin in the island town of Penberthy Village. Her friend, Hazel Kershaw (Kerch), a nurse also newly jobless, joins her there. In a nearby cabin, a famous playwright, Marya Van Wyck, is suddenly murdered. Anne and Kerch find the body . . . and off we go! There are lots of plot twists and strange goings on, here, that make the reading fun. The writing is crisp and there is a pleasing amount of sly humor, self-deprecating often, as Anne, our first person narrator, has plenty of opportunity to doubt her own credentials as a sleuth. So this was a good time.

As noted above, this is the first book in a series that has 16 entries! Elisha Macomber is the town's only policeman, with a down-to-earth sense of humor of his own and plenty of smarts, as well. I wonder whether Anne continues to narrate the series, or whether Knight provided different perspectives in the rest of the novels. I might someday read further in the set, but I'm in the midst of so many series already at the moment that I'm not planning on forging ahead here right away.

I looked up Knight just to see what I could find out about her. It turns out that she published upwards of 40 mysteries, all published by Doubleday Doran's "Crime Club" imprint. I found one fun interview with her, originally published in the Boston Daily Globe in 1946 with the headline, "Kathleen Moore Knight Pictured Corpses All Over Martha’s Vineyard - Then Wrote." And does that remind us of anything? Here's a quote:

“One day I happened to be looking out of the window and wondering what it would be like if the island homes around me housed murderers; in my own imagination I scattered the landscape with corpses and before I knew it, a detective story was born,” Miss Knight recalled.

Full interview here: https://readinggoldenagemysteries.blogspot.com/2021/02/kathleen-moore-knight-194...

Book note: My copy is a first edition hardback, sans jacket, that I found at some used bookstore or thrift store or other somewhere along the line. I chose it more or less at random off my shelves because, as I said, I was looking for something light. On the inside front cover of my copy I find the ex libris sticker, "From the Library of Vesta Harvey" It looks like this as a library book, also, as there are a series of handwritten dates, with the earliest being April 1973 and the latest August 1997.

Book 47: The Atlantic Monthly - January 1959, Volume 203, Number 1



Read as a "between book" (see first post). This was another off the stack of old magazines sitting at the bottom of my home office closet that I'm gradually reading through. This issue wasn't as consistently interesting as some of the others I've read recently, though there were some noteworthy entries. The cover article, "Admiral Rickover's Gamble: the Landlocked Submarine" by Commander E.E. Kintner, describes Rickover's campaign to sell the idea of an atomic submarine to the U.S. government and joint chiefs, and his insistence that a full scale prototype be built and tested on dry land before anything got put in the water. The details of this process, including the various tests and the unknowns successfully overcome, made very interesting reading, whatever one's thoughts atomic power, and atomic submarines in particular, might be.

George Kennan's essay about the American military expeditions in Russia immediately after World War I provides an excellent overview of that now mostly forgotten chapter.

Ralph Samuelson's short story, "A Beautiful Game," about racism in the country club tennis world, was well written and engaging.

The issue also included the final installment of the Atlantic serialization of a novel called "Sigh for a Strange Land" by Monica Stirling. Well, I was not about to read the final section of a novel, not having read the first parts, was I? So I went online and ordered the full novel. It looks very good, and Stirling's story is interesting, as well. I am going to be reading that book soon, so details will have to wait until then!

Those are the highlights.

Book 48: The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt



The Righteous Mind is psychologist/ethicist Jonathan Haidt's attempt to understand and explain why humans can come to see things so differently from each other and, most importantly, to become so set in our ways that we see people who disagree with us on important matters as enemies and/or fools.

The book, for me, works best in its first half, as Haidt lays out his research and his theories about human perceptions, how we form opinions, and what drives our responses. Essentially, his theory, based on his research, comes down to his belief that our subconscious really provides the bulk of our opinions, which are generally pre-conceived rather than based on new information, and that our conscious mind is mostly responsible for coming up with rationalizations to fit those preconceptions. If you have ever read an essay or article by someone with an opinion that's the opposite of yours, for example, and found yourself actively looking for the faults in the logic rather than trying to learn from the author's experience or perceptions, you'll understand Heidt's basic idea. He calls the subconscious the "elephant," because it's so big and powerful, and the conscious mind the "rider," because it is only nominally able to steer the beast. All this makes for interesting, and somewhat convincing, information, although Haidt's habit of turning the narrative into a semi-memoir by relating his own progression through various theories ("First I thought this, and then I saw different research, so then I thought that.") was distracting to me.

As Haidt describes it (and again, he also details his research), most humans' perceptions of the world are based on five factors, what he calls "foundational concepts," but in different proportions for different people. He identifies these as "Care/Harm," "Fairness/Cheating," "Loyalty/Betrayal," "Authority/Subversion," "Sanctity/Degradation." He says that a major difference between how liberals and conservatives view the world is that Conservatives react strongly to all five of these foundations, but that liberals are driven chiefly by only two: Care/Harm and Fairness/Cheating.

All that's all fine, and there are other interesting points made, as well, especially Haidt's description of the idea that group/societal evolution has gone hand in hand with individual human evolution. His ideas about the benefits of religion seem much more forced, however. And in the book's second half, he seems more to be trying to force all of the foregoing information over his own ideas of politics and culture. He begins doing things like describing another researcher's theory and then proceeding to further conclusions based on that theory as if we had reason to accept the theory as fact. Towards the end, I must admit, I began skimming. So I give the first half of this book 3.5 stars, and the second half 2 stars. I do give Haidt credit for clear writing, relatively free of doze-inducing scientific jargon.

I generally don't read these sorts of books, but a group of my friends organized a group read and periodic discussion group, which my wife and I decided to join. Unfortunately, my need to finish Barak Obama's 900-page memoir on schedule for my regular monthly reading group pushed me behind in my reading of Righteous Mind, so I had to drop out of the discussion. Being already around 2/3 of the way through, though, I decided to push through and finish Haidt's book nevertheless.

Book 49: The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson



The subtitle for Larson's latest is "A Saga of Churchill, Family and Defiance During the Blitz," which is a pretty good description. This is a history of the first year of Churchill's time as Britain's wartime Prime Minister. I was mostly already familiar with the circumstances of the Battle of Britain, but Larson, in focusing in on this one year and in the Churchill family's experience of the event, adds a lot of detail that was new, and interesting, to me. The details about Churchill's key advisors, what they accomplished and how they supported Churchill, for example, worked very well for me, as did the descriptions of Churchill's desperate attempts to encourage Roosevelt to do as much as he could, in the face of very stubborn American politics and isolationism, to support England's war effort. The horrifying narratives about individual nights or the Blitz, where the bombs fell on particular nights, what damage was done during each raid, and how diarists described the events, helped to transform the Blitz for me from a general impression of calamity, fear and death to a succession of individual desperately fearful events. In other words, I had come to think of "the Blitz" as an event rather than a years-long series of individual nights of terror. Another strength of the book is its depiction of Churchill as an individual during these times, as seen through the eyes of the people who worked with and for him, and also the depictions of the ways in which the English people rallied around him.

The parts that didn't work quite as well for me were the sections describing the lives and experiences of Churchill's family, in particular his daughters and his son. They were essentially grown during the period being written about, and Churchill was by necessity--due to his crushing workload--largely cut off from their daily lives, though he saw his daughters (in particular) frequently. The book doesn't provide a real sense that their experiences were intruding into his own daily tasks and troubles (although his son was a horrid piece of work in particular). I understand Larson's impulse to include the children's romantic travails and experiences of the war. A person running a country in wartime is also a person with a family, and the descriptions were well done, but somehow there didn't seem to me to be a strong organic connection between the family segments and the wartime leadership chapters, the latter making up the bulk, and the central theme, of the endeavor.

Also, I didn't feel that there was enough explanation for the Blitz's end. Suddenly, it seemed to just stop without any clear reasoning from Larson, other than the fact that Hitler had launched his invasion of Russia and meant to get back to finish off England once the Russians had been dealt with. We know how that all worked out, but still I felt something missing there at the end.

All in all, though, these are a relatively minor quibbles. I highly recommend the book to anyone with an interest in World War Two history in general, and the Battle of Britain and Churchill in particular. I read this for my monthly book group. Strangely, given how highly Larson's previous books have been regarded, this is the first of his I've read. I'm likely to circle back and read a few of his others some time.

Book 50: The Giants and Their City: Major League Baseball in San Francisco, 1976-1992 by Lincoln Abraham Mitchell



This is a mostly fun book that traces the history of the San Francisco Giants, and the history of the city itself, during the era when the team was owned by real estate tycoon Bob Lurie. Mitchell's account is book-ended nicely, as it begins in 1976 with Lurie stepping in the buy the Giants in a last-minute act that kept the team from purchased by folks in Toronto who were going to move the team there, and ends in 1992 with Lurie's almost consummated sale of the team to moneyed interests in Tampa, before grocery store magnate Peter Magowan stepped forward at, once again basically at the last second, to save the team once again for San Francisco.

In addition to the team's ups and (all too frequently) downs on the playing field from season to season, Mitchell does a good job weaving the team's fortunes around events in the city, while also describing Lurie's frustrated attempts to get a new stadium built to replace the remote and extremely uncomfortable Candlestick Park. It was the newly elected progressive mayor, George Moscone, who was to a great extent responsible for finding Lurie and bringing him into the Giants picture. Not long after Lurie's purchase of the team, however, Moscone was assassinated, along with SF City Counsel member and famed LGBT activist Harvey Milk, by disgruntled former counselman Dan White. These events, the AIDS epidemic that affected San Francisco so dramatically, the city and country's economic difficulties and San Francisco's mostly progressive political climate all created an environment in which voters were understandably skeptical of the idea of voting municipal dollars to allow millionaires to build sports facilities. Four voter referendums for creating new stadiums failed: two in San Francisco, one in Santa Clara, and one in San Jose.

At the same time, Mitchell aptly describes the team management's mostly fumbling attempts to improve the team on the field during Lurie's early tenure. Only, according to Mitchell, with the hiring of Al Rosen as general manager, and Rosen's subsequent hiring of Roger Craig as field manager, did the team's roster and play begin to improve. Mitchell takes us through those horrid seasons of the late 70s, the slight rise and quick fall of the early 80s, and then the comparative glory years when a young Will Clark led a team resurgence that brought a short but memorable glory period that was sadly short-circuited by the 1989 earthquake that hit the Bay Area just as Game 3 of the World Series between the Giants and the A's was about to be played at Candlestick.

There are times when Mitchell's writing seems a bit less than fully professional. Events are sometimes described twice more or less in the same passage. There are occasional grammatical errors and typos, too, that seem to speak to a lack of proper editing. And Mitchell seems to not have fully decided whether he's writing for a baseball-knowledgeable audience or for an audience that is less sophisticated in that manner. So, for example, individual statistics, like OPS+, are often used without explanation to help define players' seasons, but other, more basic baseball ideas are explained in full. But while these sorts of quibbles did detract from the reading experience, overall I think Mitchell did a fine job with his history.

On a personal note, I moved to San Francisco in 1986, so a little short of halfway through the period the book covers. I enjoyed reliving some of my own experiences following the team and attending games at the basically horrid (certainly horrid for night games) Candlestick Park. One thing that Mitchell does get right, I think, is the complicated relationship between the team and the city's citizens, and the ways in which team management recognized the particular aspects of the San Francisco mindset and used that understanding to create whimsical marketing campaigns that, even in the team's most dismal periods, kept them in the city's imagination and affection.

For baseball fans only, no doubt. This book was a birthday present from my darling wife.

Book 51: San Francisco Life Magazine - Volume VI, No. 5 - April, 1938 edited by E. I. Campbell



Read as a "between book" (see first post). This is another of the stack of old magazines sitting at the bottom of my office closet that I've been gradually reading through. This one is so slight that I would have skipped listing it here were it not for a couple of items that caught my attention, one historical and one personal.

The publication was clearly one meant specifically for members of San Francisco high society, or for those with an interest in following their exploits. There are two or three "Who's Been Seen Where?"-type columns, with all of the names and events of the upper crust variety. I scanned through these, wondering, as I lived in San Francisco for 22 years, beginning, however, 48 years after the publication of this magazine, whether I'd recognize any of the names, or at least the family names. I was surprised that I did not, but maybe I shouldn't have been.

The one particularly interesting column was a lament about the tearing down of the Columbia (nee Orpheum) Theater, opened in 1887, destroyed in the fire following the earthquake of 1906, and then rebuilt, and about to be finally taken down in 1938. The unnamed writer chronicles the theater's highlights, including dramatic and comedic plays and the venue's long run as a vaudeville house.

The ads are fun, of course. If I still lived in San Francisco it might be a fun project to go around to all the addresses of the businesses advertised here, taking pictures of what exists at those locations, now. My guess is that I wouldn't find a single of those businesses still operating. Could be a cool blog, though.

One advertisement really caught my attention, however, and this is the "historic" item mentioned above. The entire back cover of the magazine is taken up by an advertisement for a newspaper called The San Francisco News. More specifically, the advertisers are letting us know about an upcoming series ("An Article a Day -- for 30 Days!") called "Roosevelt's Own Story." "An entirely new, dramatic account of the New Deal--by the man who made it!" First, I was sort of surprised that the paper would think it useful to advertise a series about the creation of the New Deal on the back cover of this clearly upper class, and thereby presumably Republican, magazine. But what really grabbed my attention was the newspaper's slogan: "San Francisco's complete, white, Home Newspaper." Wait . . . white? Don't worry: I'm well aware that there is, was, and has always been racism of all sorts in San Francisco, as everywhere in the U.S. But that seemed pretty blatant to me. I wondered whether the term meant what I thought it meant, or whether maybe they were differentiating themselves from the "yellow journalism" of the Hearst newspapers.

I did my best to run an online search and came up with a brief wikipedia entry that says, in part, "The Daily News, later titled The San Francisco News, was a newspaper published in San Francisco, California. It was founded in 1903 by E. W. Scripps as a four-page penny paper. In its early years, it was the smallest of the several newspapers in San Francisco. It advertised itself as the "friend of the working man." It was distributed only in working class districts: Mission District, Skid Row, South of the Slot. It specialized in short, easy-to-read stories one to two paragraphs long. After the 1906 earthquake, it operated out of a former 720 sq ft 'relief house.' It changed its name to The San Francisco News in 1927, and in August 1959 merged with Hearst's The Call Bulletin to form the San Francisco News-Call Bulletin."

Well, I have learned in quite a bit of reading about San Francisco history that all the way up to World War 2 (when China became our allies in the war), "friend of the working man" in San Francisco usually meant something along the lines of "friend of the white working man" to the exclusion, specifically and often emphatically, of Asian immigrant workers. But, wow, again, pretty blatant! According to that wikipedia entry, copies and clippings of the newspaper are on file for public view in San Francisco, so, again, if I still lived in town . . .

I was also somewhat pleasantly surprised, given the general hum of antisemitism that ran through American upper classes in those days, the following letter (excerpted) to the editor in the front of the magazine from the president of the San Francisco Jewish Community Center:

"Please accept our sincere thanks for your splendid cooperation in according space to the Jewish Community Center in the columns of your paper. We feel that this valuable publicity has helped in bringing to the attention of the public the recreational-educational program offered by the center."

In the April 1938 edition of San Francisco Life, that "cooperation" consisted basically of listing the center's events in the listings of Arts and Lecture events at the back of the magazine. In any event, I scanned the lectures column interested mainly in seeing if I'd recognize any names. I recognized one: "Dr. Joachim Prinz, Jewish Center, Topic: The Future of World Jewry." The reason this jumped to my attention was that almost exactly 30 years after this magazine was published, June 22, 1968, to be exact, Dr. Prinz, as rabbi of Temple B'Nai Abraham in Newark, NJ, stood beside me at the front of that temple as I was bar mitzvahed! So that's the personal note I mentioned above. I wasn't that surprised to see Rabbi Prinz's name as a speaker. I remember Rabbi Prinz as a very kind man who sometimes came to our Hebrew School classes (although there was a younger associate rabbi who mostly handled this job.) He had been a figure of the American Jewish Community since fleeing Nazism (he'd been a rabbi in Berlin) in 1937. He also became prominent in the American Civil Rights movement and spoke at the 1963 March on Washington rally shortly before Dr. King delivered his famous "I Have a Dream" speech. A quick online search will yield several photos of Prinz with Dr. King and other Civil Rights leaders, including meetings at the White House with JFK. (Looks like there is a children's book coming out in November about them! -- https://www.amazon.com/Rabbi-Reverend-Joachim-against-Silence/dp/1541589769)

Well, gee, that's a pretty long essay for a 46-page magazine!

Book 52: Sigh for a Strange Land by Monica Stirling



Monica Stirling was a correspondent in Europe for the Atlantic Monthly Press both during World War 2 and afterwards. According to the short bio of her on the dusk jacket of this novel, "Monica Stirling belongs to a theater family. Her father, the late Edward Stirling, founded the English Theater in Paris and took his company all over Europe, the Middle East, and South America. Her mother, Margaret Vaughan, is an actress, and her sister, Pamela, who trained in Louis Jouvet's class at the Paris Conservatoire, was the first English actress to be admitted into the Comédie-Française company. Miss Stirling started writing during the war and was encouraged by Edward Weeks, of the Atlantic Monthly, who bought her first stories. In I944 the Atlantic sent her home to France as their war correspondent."

Sigh for a Strange Land is a short novel about displacement and alienation, but also about love. Our protagonist is Resi, a teenage girl being brought up by her Aunt Natasha. As the novel opens, is on the way to fetch her aunt out of the hospital, where she is, essentially, suffering nothing more serious than the consequences of an all-night bender. (The novel's opening line is, "On the day the revolution started my Aunt Natasha was drunk.") But the streets are mostly empty, save for a few people seemingly scurrying to shelter. And as the two head home together, tanks have arrived, shelling has begun, dead bodies start to cover the streets and buildings are afire. They find Natasha's lifelong friend, Boris, and soon the trio are packed into a bus on its way to the frontier, where they suddenly transformed into refugees. Now what?

Stirling's writing here is hallucinatory and somewhat fable-like, adding to the sense of confusion and alienation. We're never told what country and what revolution we're in, or what country is over that frontier. But given the book's 1958 publishing date, the tanks and the confusion, the implication is clear that Resi, Natasha and Boris have escaped the Hungarian uprising and landed in Austia. The books themes about dislocation are clear. Resi's parents are dead but between her parents and her grandparents, she has the blood of four nations in her. Natasha and Boris have bounced around Europe, sometimes apart, sometimes together, since, as members of the Russian upper classes, they were run out of their homes by the Russian Revolution. All of this is very effective and compelling during the book's first half to two thirds, but by the final section, for me at least, the storyline flattens, as the sense of doom and horror fade.

Still, this is a very interesting and often powerful novel, also of note for its spot in history and its author's interesting story, as well. The only photograph of Stirling I could find online is one of her in olive drab sitting in an American jeep with the famed correspondent Lee Miller in Paris in 1945. I discovered this novel only because in an old copy of Atlantic Magazine I was reading (see Post 82, above) appeared the final installment of the book's serialization in that magazine. Reading the final section of the book would never do, but, curious, I immediately order it online. I do recommend Sigh for a Strange Land. Even the sections that were quite as good as other were still fine, all in all.

Book 53: Death of a King: The Real Story of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Final Year by Tavis Smiley



I remember when this book was originally published in 2014, hearing Smiley interviewed about it on, I believe, the NPR show Fresh Air, and thinking, "That sounds interesting." A few months back I found the book on our local library sale table and scooped it up. And, in fact, Smiley's book about MLK is interesting, indeed.

It is also a sad book. That final year of King's life almost exactly encompasses the speech in which he strongly and unequivocally condemned the Vietnam War and the Johnson administration's execution of that war. King was strongly condemned both within and without of the Civil Rights movement for this action. He was told by whites, conservatives and liberals alike, that he should stick to civil rights and leave politics and the war in particular to the people who knew what they were talking about. From within the movement, many of his closest advisors felt strongly that King was basically taking his eye off the ball and, worse, risking alienating the liberal whites who had been the movements allies up until then. The FBI stepped up their campaign of hounding King and executing their disinformation campaign against him. And at the same time, more radical Blacks in the Panthers and SNCC criticized King from the left, accusing him and his insistence on non-violence of becoming increasingly irrelevant. King came up with the idea of a Poor Person's March on Washington, as he began identifying a 3-pronged system of oppression in America: racism, poverty and militarism. Even within his own Southern Christian Leadership Conference, King faced growing discontent with this idea. One of the most bitter blows to King was longtime friend and ally Bayard Rustin's spurning of the Poor Person's March idea. Rustin thought this was a waste of time and money. He thought the time for mass demonstrations of this sort had passed, and wanted to focus on getting more legislators elected who would help them pursue their policy goals in Congress. In all, Smiley portrays King's final year as harrowing and disheartening. King began to muse ever more frequently on his own death, which he assumed was coming soon. And yet King never did fully lose heart, according to Smiley. He continued pushing for his March plan, and insisted on going to Memphis to help out with the long and bitter strike being waged by the garbage men's union there.

There were a couple of small irritations with the book for me. Smiley insisted on continually referring to MLK as "Doc," which was his nickname among his friends and advisors. I didn't feel that was necessarily appropriate here and it irked me from time to time, though not seriously. Also, Smiley relatively frequently writes as if he knows King's thoughts. He explains this in his introduction, saying he only does this when his interviews with King's close advisors reveal what these people felt sure King was thinking, or sometimes what he said to them. I was willing to give Smiley the benefit of the doubt on this effect, basically trusting that he had the ideas and emotions correct. Somebody who knew King might have a different idea.

All in all, I thought this book was very much worth reading, though frequently depressing. I had tended to think of King's live as mostly single-toned, if that makes sense. King was just King, the great man who sometimes had his missteps but was consistent in the long run. Understanding the that the enormous pressures of the times--the discord, hatred and doubt--had on King during his last year only adds to my esteem for his life and what he was able to accomplish.

Book 54: Shiloh by Shelby Foote



This is a short, well written novel about the Battle of Shiloh (also known as the Battle of Pittsburgh Landing), fought in southwestern Tennessee in 1862. Some historical perspective, as per the website of American Battlefield Trust: https://www.battlefields.org/learn/civil-war/battles/shiloh

"The Battle of Shiloh, also known as the Battle of Pittsburg Landing, allowed Union troops to penetrate the Confederate interior. The carnage was unprecedented, with the human toll being the greatest of any war on the American continent up to that date. The South’s defeat at Shiloh ended the Confederacy’s hopes of blocking the Union advance into Mississippi and doomed the Confederate military initiative in the West. With the loss of their commander, Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston, in battle, Confederate morale plummeted."

Foote is a well known Civil War historian, author of several detailed histories and a major contributor to Ken Burns' Civil War documentary series. The novel is a short one, only 142 pages in old fashioned pocket paperback format. (I selected it for reading more or less at random from my pulp paperback shelves.) Over the course of the book, Foote tells the story of the battle from lead up to finish, through the eyes of a variety of fictional participants, both Southern and Northern, some officers, others enlisted men. In this way, Foote is able to take us into the minds of the men who are planning and leading the battle, and into those who are only reacting to those plans and doing the actual fighting. The narrative is crisp, and the voices of the narrators believable. The book stays for the most part with the day-to-day and moment-to-moment aspects of the battle, touching only occasionally and briefly (though effectively) on the greater issues at stake in the war itself and the soldiers' motivations for fighting. (This was sometimes seen as a flaw in Foote's approach, as noted in Foote's NY Times obituary: "Some {critics} said that Mr. Foote may have played down slavery so that Southern soldiers would seem worthy heroes in the epic battles he so stirringly chronicled." Foote died in 2005 at the age of 88.

At any rate, I would say this is a very good novel about men at war and about the conditions that Civil War soldiers fought under, with the foregoing reservations.

>89 rocketjk: ouch. Got me with that one.

Book 55: Picnic Grounds: A Novel in Fragments by Oz Shelach



Picnic Grounds is an understated but very powerful collection of short vignettes (the fragments of the title), anywhere from a half page to a page and a half long, about life in Israel, mostly in and around Jerusalem. More specifically, they are about denial and absurdity. The "absurdity" aspect could mostly be about government deception and double-talk anywhere. But the "denial" dimension, much more prevalent overall, are about a very specific Israeli phenomenon, the historic denial of the destruction of Palestinian villages and the uprooting and banishment, sometimes the murder, of their inhabitants around the time of the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.

Here is the book's opening fragment, from which it takes its title:

A professor of History from Bayit Va-Gan took his family for a picnic in a quiet pinewood near Giv'at Shaul, formerly known as Deir Yassin. It was not too cold to be in the shade and not too warm to build a fire, so the professor passed on to his son camping skills he had acquired in the army. They arranged three square stones in a U, to block the wind, leaving access on the fourth side. They stacked broken branches on top of twigs on top of dry pine needles. He let his son put a match to it. Listening carefully, they heard a faint low hum from the curves of the winding highway, hidden from view by the trees. They professor did not talk of the village, origin of the stones. He did not talk of the village school, now a psychiatric hospital, on the other side of the hill. He imagined that he and his family were having a picnic, unrelated to the village, enjoying its grounds outside history.

This short "fragment" becomes even more powerful if a reader recognizes Deir Yassin as the scene of an infamous massacre of Palestinian villagers by members of the far right terrorist paramilitary groups, Irgun and Lehi, in 1948. Not many of the fragments refer to specific incidents, but more to general historical patterns. A common theme, for example, is the wholesale planting of pine forests, non-indigenous trees that did harm to local ecosystems, to cover over the traces of the villages and farms that Palestinians had been evicted from. The psychic cost to individual Israelis, especially army veterans, is also alluded to.

Shelach was born in West Jerusalem in 1968. He was in the army when the first Intifada broke out. Entirely disillusioned, he left Israel for New York City at the age of thirty. This book was published five years later, in 2003. He became an activist for Palestinian rights and Israeli protest. Or was. I could find no reference to him online any more recent than the interviews he gave in support of this book and the reviews of it. The blog he had set up seems to be inactive.

Here is a very revealing interview Shelach gave in 2003:
https://www.worldpress.org/1012.cfm

But not entirely revealing, for we have to read this approving review:

https://www.haaretz.com/1.5369983

from the Israeli publication, Haaretz, to learn this:

"We live in a small country. If we know who Oz Shelach is, a shiver goes down our spine, because it is difficult to forget what this young storyteller's connection is to Sinai {In October 1985, his entire family was killed in a terrorist attack in Ras Burqa}. But if we do not yet know who Oz Shelach is, let us be patient. No, he will not say a word about Ras Burqa, perhaps because that story has had so many interpretations that he hates, and he is telling the same story, over and over again, about our desire to escape from this country that has no history, and the return to its history, which is not our history. Again and again, nature is subverted; this is 'our' nature."

My wife picked up this slim book the last time we were at City Lights Books in San Francisco, one of my favorite spots on the planet. City Lights is also the book's publisher.

>90 fuzzi: No worries. Shiloh is nice and short!

>92 rocketjk: ...but...my shelves!!!!!

Book 56: Indian Summer by Effie McAbee Hulbert



This memoir, written as a fictional narrative, describes the author's girlhood growing up during the late 19th century and into the early 20th century in the Yorkville and Anderson Valley region of Mendocino County, California, and about her constant, loving interactions with the native tribes of the area. My wife and I have lived in this same locale since 2008, and I have been undertaking a gradual project of reading as much as I can about local history of this singular spot on the planet.

The book begins with a brief history of the local native tribe and an imagining of their experience of the first coming of Europeans to the valley. The valley is surrounded by what were then relatively inaccessible mountains and is located generally in a remote part of northern California, so white settlers were relatively late arriving and few in number. That didn't last long, however. At any rate, Hulbert grew up in a prominent early land-owning family in the region, raised by her parents and grandparents. Her grandfather, particularly, had a strong empathy for and friendships with their Indian neighbors. Hulbert herself was back and forth constantly between the family ranch and the Indian villages and made life-long friendships there.

The book is full of descriptions of her interactions and relationships with the Indians, and descriptions, as well of events and individuals in the tribe during those years. There are many very well written details, also, of native way of lifestyle, crafts, religious practices and philosophy. But as more white ranchers come into the Valley, the Indians are squeezed more and more. Soon, just about all the land around is "owned" by whites. Whether or not the Indians can remain on land they've lived on for centuries come down to the attitudes of individual ranchers. Or, sometimes, the children who inherit land when a parent dies. The ranchers' livestock eats or tramples much of the native plant life that the Indians have long relied upon for food and medicine. Game they've relied upon for hunting becomes scarce. Tuberculosis (the "white man's disease") take a giant and ever larger toll. Infant and child mortality increases. In Hulbert's lifetime, the Indian culture in the valley essentially withers away.

So in the end it's a melancholy story, told in hindsight. And yet so many of the incidents that Hulbert relates from her childhood memories are filled with love and wisdom. Humor as well. In a way, Hulbert's attitude is a mixed bag. Obviously, her esteem for the indigenous people she has grown up among is sincere and the dominating aspect of her narrative. And yet, there is a clear paternalistic strain, as well. Indians are described at various times as "childlike" and "loyal" (as if Indians being loyal to the white settlers who were crushing their culture somehow made sense). Even her grandfather at one point tells an Indian leader who is concerned that the tribe may be forced to move to one of the reservations being set up for native tribes nearby that "if the government says the tribe has to move to a reservation, you will have to go." On the other hand, after saying this, he deeds a large part of his ranch officially over to what's left of the tribe. Since they now officially--as per the white man's law--own this tract of land, they cannot be forced to move off of it. So he means well by them and acts accordingly. But the injustice of their having to rely on his largess for their survival is only very lightly implied in Hulbert's telling.

Hulbert was a good, descriptive, writer. This book, published in plastic ring binding locally in 1988, is a very valuable source of information about the Native Americans of this specific time and place. It was, in fact, published by the Anderson Valley Historical Society, an organization of which I'm now on the Board of Directors. The Hulbert Ranch was still in evidence when my wife and I moved here, but on the land now stands a vineyard and winery.

Book 57: The Human Stain by Philip Roth



This was a reread, chosen by me for my monthly book group. Roth is one of my very favorite authors, and I have some direct connections to him, as I lived my first 11 years in the exact same neighborhood in Newark, NJ, that Roth wrote about so extensively. We went to the same grammar school. My father went to the same high school Roth graduated from. So when Roth was still alive and still writing novels, I read everything he published as soon as it was available. Meaning I first read The Human Stain in 2000.

The novel is narrated by Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's frequently appearing protagonist, like Roth a novelist from Newark. But in the The Human Stain, Zuckerman is mostly telling us the stories of others as they unfold, and as he either discovers or invents them, in a small Western Massachusetts town, the home of the similarly small, but also prestigious, Athena College. Zuckerman has retreated to this place to try to spend the end of his writing life isolated from his fame as a writer and from his tumultuous life. There he meets Coleman Silk. Silk had long been the dean of the college, responsible for dragging the institution into the modern age, hiring younger and relatively diverse instructors and administrators and gaining enemies as he rode roughshod over older sensibilities. Recently returned to the classroom, Silk is teaching a seminar at which two students on his class roster never appear. After several weeks of their absence, he asks the other students, "Do they exist or are they spooks?" Alas for Silk, the two students are black, and the furnace of outrage, along with the animus of those he has offended during his tenure as dean, swings open. This is the age of the Bill Clinton impeachment proceedings. Things devolve for Silk. His wife dies of a stroke brought on, Silk is sure, by the hounding. Instead of hoping for things to blow over on campus, Silk resigns in fury, and in that same fury, one day seeks out Zuckerman, the novelist living nearby whom he has never met, pounding on Zuckerman's door one night to be let in, to demand that Zuckerman write his story. And so begins a friendship. All of this is described over the book's first few pages.

What follows is, for me, a thrilling novelistic journey of exploration of human identity and destiny, character by character in multidimensional illumination. Silk's family history, and the lives of many others that Silk has been or becomes intimate with, are examined. Each has struggled to overcome the tyranny of family and/or circumstance to create his or her own destiny and identity. I've always been drawn by Roth's use of language and his ability to penetrate the mysteries of human emotion and intent. Here is an example. Silk, who is 71 and is by now is in a relationship with a much younger woman, has received an anonymous letter (though he's sure he knows the letter writer) that begins with the words, "Everyone knows . . . . " Zuckerman, attending a rehearsal orchestral concert at Tanglewood, see Silk with his lover, Faunia, in the audience:

"Three rows down from me, Coleman, his head tipped slightly toward hers, was talking to Faunia quietly, seriously, but about what, of course, I did not know.

Because we don't know, do we? Everyone knows . . . How what happens the way it does? What underlies the anarchy of the train of events, the uncertainties, the mishaps, the disunity, the shocking irregularities that define human affairs? Nobody knows, Professor Roux. "Everyone knows" is the invocation of the cliché and the beginning of the banalization of experience, and it's the solemnity and the sense of authority that people have in coining the cliché that's so insufferable. What we know is that, in an unclichéd way, nobody knows anything. You can't know anything. The things you know you don't know. Intention? Motive? Consequence? Meaning? All that we don't know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing.

And then as well . . .

"There is truth and then again there is truth. For all that the world is full of people who go around believing they've got you or your neighbor figured out, there really is no bottom to what is not known. The truth about us is endless. As are the lies."

And yet, via the paradox inherent in the passages above, Roth, through Zuckerman, sets out to do just that impossible thing: to know, to allow us to see as much as can be determined about both Silk and all the characters who come into and affect, for good or ill, his life. Roth moves the camera around relentlessly, showing us the motivations and histories off all these people, the factors that have formed them and, significantly, their struggles against those factors and the ways in which they have coalesced to form what we often understand to be our individual fates. War, abuse, ethnicity, family expectations, societal rules and the boundaries eradicably erected by mortality ("The stupendous decimation that is death sweeping us all away. Orchestra, audience, conductor, technicians, swallows, wrens . . The ceaseless perishing. What an idea! What maniac conceived it? And yet what a lovely day it is today, a gift of a day . . . "), all are examined here. Just when you think that a character has been left behind, dimensions and motivations unestablished, Roth returns to breathe life into that character's struggles, dreams, fears and successes. Just when we think "Zuckerman couldn't possibly have known that," Roth returns to provide us with source of Zuckerman's knowledge. Though of course we also know that some unknowable but presumably large portion of the narrative is solely Zuckerman's conjecture, and, of course, all of it is Roth's invention.

There is some metafiction, here, as Zuckerman refers to the book he is writing, which is the book we are reading. In the book's final scene, a character says to Zuckerman, "Aren't you the author?" And Zuckerman replies, "That I am."

I had been wondering whether I would find The Human Stain as rewarding a reading experience now, 20 years on, when I am myself in my mid-60s, pretty much the same age as Zuckerman is in this book, as I did upon it's original appearance. I'm happy to say that I did.

Book 58: Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision by Barbara Ransby



This is an excellent biography of a fascinating woman, Ella Baker, an essential and vastly underappreciated figure of the American Civil Rights Movement. (That is, "underappreciated" to Americans in general, not to scholars of the movement or to folks knowledgeable about African American history.) Baker was brought up in a middle class Black family in the South in the 1920s. Her mother insisted that Baker be well educated and, as would turn out to be crucial to her life's work, well spoken. Baker began her work fighting for the equal rights for all in the Harlem of the 1930s. Over the next four decades, Baker worked both within the NAACP and in Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Baker was a moving force in the creation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) despite the fact that she was considerably older than the organization's other founders.

Throughout her decades of work, Baker's operating principle was a faith in the people she wanted to help, in their ability to set their own goals, make their own decisions, to know what strategies were right or wrong for themselves. The idea was to come into a community, find the local leaders who could lead efforts to gain voting rights and/or integration (as two examples), provide guidance and, when necessary, manpower, and then get out of their way and let them go to work. This was the operating philosophy of SNCC in its first years. This provided Baker with some significant dissatisfaction with Martin Luther King during her days at SCLC, where she was never given her full due or the responsibilities that her experience and talents should have allowed. The King/SCLC model was to provide strong leadership role models (always men, although a huge portion of the grassroots work was accomplished by women) and top-down leadership and closely controlled and coordinated programs and events. Also, Baker supported the idea of nonviolence, but only as a tactic to be used when appropriate, one strategy in an arsenal of strategies, rather than as a over-arching dominant paradigm.

Well, I see I've given more of a summary of Baker's life, as told by Ransby, than a review of the book. So . . . Ransby's account of Baker's life is detailed and, mostly, readable. There are times when I felt the accounts bogged down some, but that was only because necessary background information is not always scintillating reading. Baker didn't write much, and although she gave many speeches over her life, the texts of these talks were rarely set down. As a result, we don't get much in Baker's own voice. And, unfortunately, Baker suffered from dementia late in life. But Ransby did do all the interviewing of Baker's contemporaries that she could. My sister-in-law, who for years was a college lecturer on the Civil Rights and other popular movements, tells me that this book is considered the authoritative Baker biography. So, while this is not always free and easy reading, all in all it is a compelling study of a very important woman in American history.

Book 59: Swann's Way by Marcel Proust



At this late date, nobody needs a lengthy review of Proust by the likes of me. Finally, at the age of 66, I decided to take on "In Search of Lost Time" (a.k.a. "Remembrance of Things Past"). It's really not a bad time in life to read these works, I guess, as they deal with the elusiveness one's past, and the joys, frustrations and sorrows that come from trying to recreate one's past lives via one's memories. That's, obviously, a clumsy way to express the themes of this famed set of works, themes that have been described much better and in much greater depth elsewhere.

At any rate, I found the early sections of the book, in which our narrator describes deep and lasting memories of childhood, to be quite lovely and affecting. The long section about the title character's years-long love affair with a woman whose affections for him recede slowly but surely and about whom he must continually delude himself if he is to continue caring for her, as he wishes to, I found much harder to plow through, due to its repetitious nature and the "Alright, already!" reaction it elicited in me. I would be interested to read a feminist take on this section. Then, when we return to the narrator's coming of age and first love of his own, I again found the story more compelling. Here is a quote toward the end that I like quite a lot:

When a belief vanishes, there survives it—more and more ardently, so as to cloak the absence of the power, now lost to us, of imparting reality to new phenomena—an idolatrous attachment to the old things which our belief in them did once animate, as if it was in that belief and not in ourselves that the divine spark resided, and as if our present incredulity had a contingent cause—the death of the gods.

I should note that I came to this book blind, as it were, having read no writings about these famous books beforehand and having decided to pass on reading the Introduction by Lewis Galantiere. I'm sure some pre-reading of this sort would have opened my awareness of additional themes and cultural contexts that might have added to my understanding overall. As it is, I found this to be a mixed reading experience. It took me the better part of a month to read this book. I should add, though, that my reading pace was affected by the fact that my wife and I completed a cross-country drive and have been enjoying a month-long visit on the East Coast (U.S.) that has cut into my reading time quite a bit. I do plan on continuing on with the next book in the set, Within a Budding Grove, sooner rather than later.

Book note #1: The copy I read of Swann's Way was a beautiful old Modern Library edition, circa 1948. Therefore, I was reading the original English translation by C.K. Scott Moncrieff. I've read that Moncrieff was known for taking some liberties with Proust's French in literal terms, in some cases to the annoyance of Proust, even when it came to this first book's title, but that he's thought to have had a good touch when it came to getting across idiomatic meanings. I also have books 2 and 4 in the series at home in old Modern Library editions, also, obviously, in the Moncrieff translations, so I will read those. But for any other volumes I read, which I'll have to order specifically, I will look for a more modern translation, just for comparison's sake.

Book note #2: On the blank page facing the title page, I find inscribed, with a fountain pen, in my copy of Swann's Way, "Raymond Kilduff Nov 6, 1950." There are quite a few Raymond Kilduffs listed on google, so I'm not prepared to take a guess, but whoever he was, he bought the book I own just a touch past 71 years ago.

Book 60: The House of Ashes by Stuart Neville



This is a novel of two storylines:

Sara, a young, educated woman, is married to Damien, her ever-increasingly controlling and emotionally abusive husband. They have moved to a house in a relatively remote area of Northern Ireland where it soon becomes clear that Damien's father is a powerful and violent man with a dark past.

60 years previously, a man and his two grown sons lure women to their farm, throw them down into the basement and keep them captive, letting them out of the basement only when it's time to do housework and have forced sex (not graphically depicted). Violence is common and the threat of violence is unrelenting. As the story begins, two of these young women and the daughter of one of them, a little girl named Mary, still survive.

The connecting thread between the two stories is that they are taking place in the same house. Soon we learn that Mary has survived into old age and is living in an assisted living home very close by.

Neville is a very good writer, and these dual and soon interlocking stories are told extremely well. My wife and I each read through this novel in two or three days. The theme of men's cruelty to and abuse of women through physical violence and emotional manipulation are explored extremely effectively. The question is whether or not a reader wants to inhabit these worlds enough at any given time to delve into the book.

Neville is known as a crime writer, a writer of Northern Ireland noir. This book is a departure for him. Certainly, horrific crimes are being committed, but not of the sort that come to mind when the term "crime fiction" is used. So it's important to understand what one is going to be in for with the reading of this novel. I bought and read this book basically sight unseen because I am such a fan of Neville's first novel, The Ghosts of Belfast (published in Europe as The Twelve). Neville has published quite a few books in the interim, which I've been meaning to get to, but when I happened to notice that he had a new one out, I just went ahead and ordered it from my local independent bookstore. I'm not sure I would have done that if I'd realized the subject matter, but having done so, I can say I am glad to have read the book.

>97 rocketjk: I love finding inscriptions in the books I acquire. In the last year or so I was able to contact someone by the name in the front of the book, and got a response!

>99 fuzzi: Wow, that's cool! More generally, yes, that's one of the reasons I love to buy used books, and also one of the charms of physical books vs. digital. That's not a knock on digital formats, though. To each his/her/their own!

Good reading here I see.

>97 rocketjk: Everyone seems to be reading Proust this year. I picked up a copy of the 4th book (also a Modern Library edition) last year. It seems a good time of life to tackle him. As for Raymond Kilduff, I love these mysteries. Considering where you are and assuming you picked that book up locally I nominate this Dr: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/77091420/raymond-kilduff Or I won't rule out another Dr Raymond Kilduff who I assume may be his son living down here in San Mateo county. Both alive in 1950. https://www.newspapers.com/clip/71114114/the-york-dispatch/

>98 rocketjk: A friend handed me a copy of Neville's Ghosts of Belfast last month. I have it on the TBR shelf. I've avoided him in the past because I was afraid it would be too gritty but he was recommended and I will give him a try.

>101 RBeffa: Hi, Ron. Sorry, I've been away from my own threads for a bit. Today is "catch up" day. As to the Kilduffs, I had, indeed, seen those two online listings. My vote is for the elder Raymond Kilduff. The elder would have been, perhaps, recently retired, presumably with more time for the sort of time commitment that Swann's Way represents, and quite possibly more likely to have written his name with a fountain pen. That's my guess, anyway.

Definitely give Ghosts of Belfast a try. It is gritty, but also very good. Quite an ingenious premise, at any rate. Hope things are good down your way. We just got back to Mendocino from our 6 weeks away a few days ago. We got in just in time to miss driving in the current rains. Cheers!

Book 61: The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree by Shokoofeh Azar



This is a fascinating novel about life in Iran just after overthrow of the Shah and the onset of the Islamic Revolution, and over the following decade. The story is narrated by 13-year old Bahar. We learn in the book's second sentence that her brother, Sohrab, has recently been hung without trial by the new regime for political "crimes" that are trifling at best. Bahar's parents, and particularly her father, are lovers of art, history and literature, both modern and ancient, and deeply versed in age old Iranian mythology. In other words, they are targets in the new order. Soon, Bahar's parents have moved the family to a remote village in hopes of evading the wrath of the revolutionaries. As the novel progresses, we watch Bahar's family attempt to make their way through the crucible of anti-intellectualism, institutionalized violence and cruelty.

This fable-like allegorical tale of the violent unraveling of Iranian society during this era is told in fluid, poetic language (and, oh, to be able to read this book in the original Persian). The story is full of magical realism, as both ghosts and the jinns and demons of Iranian mythology abound. There is a real human touch shining through, here, and yet the current of anger courses through the telling of the story, especially in the book's first half, as a counterweight. In the second half, the fantasy element spins out in ways that I didn't always feel were entirely effective. I have a guess, though, that if I were more knowledgeable about Iranian legends and mythology, that section might have resonated with me a bit more. At any rate, by the book's end I was fully on board again.

For all its violence and sorrow, this a thought-provoking and, at least for me, ultimately life-affirming novel. It's worth noting that Azar is an Iranian political refugee, now living in Australia.

Book 62: Reunion with Murder by Timothy Fuller



This is the second entry in Fuller's Jupiter Jones mystery series. I read the first book in the series, Harvard Has a Homicide, back in August of this year. Like the first novel, Reunion with Murder is a mostly breezy mystery of the Thin Man variety featuring our irreverent hero and amateur sleuth, Jupiter Jones. The first book was published in 1936 and found Jones as a Harvard grad student. Reunion was both published and set in the year 1941. Jones is still at Harvard, now as a lecturer in the classics. He is about to be married but gets a call from his best man, Edward Rice, who is at his 10th Harvard reunion at a remote Massachusetts resort. We are not surprised to learn that a murder has been committed there, and Rice is a suspect. Can Jones hurry up to the site and help him out of the jam? Well, of course he can, tomorrow's wedding day notwithstanding, his long-suffering fiance, Betty, coming along for the fun.

The story is fast-paced and suspects, of course, abound. The police and district attorney are on the case, but naturally Jupiter is always a jump or two head of them. This is all lots of fun, although, again, the year is 1941. Jokes about Lend Lease among the reunion goers are common, and a serious undercurrent of concern about the war that most are sure they'll soon be swept up in runs throughout, as well, just enough to keep this book's feet on the ground, as it were. At one point, Jones is talking about the horrors and futility of war, for any purpose, when Betty says to him, "What are you going to do when they tap you on the shoulder and say, 'Here's your uniform?'" Jones' answer is realistically noncommittal. How does he know what he's going to do? But we're somehow aware that he knows full well he's going to put on the uniform. Again the book was written, and is taking place, with the war in Europe blazing but Pearl Harbor still in the future.

Well, I don't want to give anyone the idea that this mystery is any weightier than it is. This is a fun, comic mystery romp for the most part. Here's a fun quote from the very beginning of the book about the nature of reunions in general:

"The Reunion as a social function must have originated in the minds of a small group of men who wanted to recapture the spirit of some bygone, happy time. Probably some Stone Age massacre had gone off rather well and the participants vowed to meet again in a year to talk things over. It would have been interesting to have witnessed the varying degrees of disappointment each one registered as he realized there was going to be damn little recapturing of the old spirit. The party undoubtedly broke up on a false note of hilarity with promises to meet again next year and with every man telling himself he'd take pains to skip it. That the Reunion as a social function ever got beyond this stage is merely another monument to man's unfailing optimism and ability to forget his wounds."

There are five books in this series, and I'll probably read them all sooner or later. Anyone interested in my review of the first book in the series can find it here: >59 rocketjk:.

>112 fuzzi: I think I'll tackle The Ghosts of Belfast soon.

I am glad we got some more rain. Very much needed. My backyard gauge shows 3.2 inches for this current storm. I'm glad I didn't have to drive in it.

Book 63: In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History by Mitch Landrieu



This book does not quite deliver what it promises, but it is still well worth reading. Mitch Landrieu was finishing up his second term as Mayor of New Orleans when he published this memoir in 2018. Landrieu was the mayor who made the very fraught decision to remove four Jim Crow Era statues from public spaces in the city, an obelisk called the Liberty Place Monument commemorating an 1874 riot by White supremacists against the city government, and statues of Confederate figures Jefferson Davis, P.T. Beauregard and, most famously, Robert E. Lee. What I thought I was going to get was an in-depth look at the vociferous, increasingly nasty and sometimes violent fights around the decision, and Landrieu's reasons for taking the political risk to make that call. And the book does begin (relatively briefly) and end (in more depth in the book's final chapter) with that information. What we get in the interim is a political and family memoir by Landrieu, and an account of his terms in the Louisiana legislature, as lieutenant governor of the state, and as mayor for two terms.

But, as I say, this is all still worth reading. Landrieu recounts, among other things, the horrifying events that took place during the flooding of the city in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, making the connection, not in great depth, but more subtly, regarding how African American neighborhoods suffered more devastating and long lasting after effects. Landrieu also recounts the infuriating rise of Nazi and KKK member of David Duke in Louisiana politics, drawing a direct line between Duke's popularity and Donald Trump's eventual electoral success.

Landrieu's father, Moon Landrieu, was New Orleans' mayor before Mitch. Moon Landrieu, who later served in Jimmy Carter's cabinet, was a pro-integration mayor during the 1970s, at a time when Jim Crow was dying very hard in the South. Moon, recounts his son, was responsible for integrating positions in city government, for example. And the son recalls the threatening phone calls that they family would receive at home, and the people calling out to him, while on his way to in junior high school, that his father was "ruining the city." Those phone calls would return when Mitch Landrieu made his decision about those statues, during the year and a half that the many court challenges to the decision ground slowly through the courts. Landrieu begins the book by relating how, with post-Katrina construction projects abounding around New Orleans, nobody would lease the city a crane to remove the Lee statue from atop its high column. When one construction company finally agrees, the owner of the company has his car fire bombed in his driveway, and the bid is rescinded.

Landrieu discusses the processes he went through as he evolved from a well-meaning but in too many ways not fully aware liberal to a person much more cognicent of the power and debilitating effects of systemic racism. He talks about the decades during which he passed by those statues, just taking them for granted, without even thinking to wonder how his African American neighbors (and constituents) regarded them. Having lived in New Orleans myself for much of my 20s and into my 30s, I can sadly say that I saw myself, with regret, in that description as well. It was just New Orleans, you know? Or so I thought then. I had come to fuller understanding of it all before reading this book, but still I was affected by that part of this reading.

Landrieu is a clear, effective writer, so the narrative is smooth, the accounts of events are vivid and the messages easily understood. There are times, especially in his accounts of his own post-Katrina accomplishments as mayor, including the rebuilding of the city and the improvements in the public school system, that Landrieu comes off as too good to be true, and possibly a bit self-congratulatory. I'm sure there are others who could provide a more critical assessment of Landrieu's mayoralty.

I should say, though, that Landrieu's history of those Confederate statues, of the timing and reasons for their construction, and of the white supremacist roots of the Cult of the Lost Cause, through which so many white Southerners came to (and still) view Civil War history, is quite good. It's certainly an effective primer on the subject for anyone who has not considered the question and is looking for an education on the subject.

Book 64: The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles



This bloated novel just didn't work for me. It is a fable-like tale with a glaring plot hole* near the beginning, a group of characters who all speak in essentially the same voice, sentences full of empty phrases and cliched expressions ("mind you," "as far as the eye can see," "boggled the mind," etc.), a black man from Jim Crow era rural Tennessee who speaks as if he grew up in New York, an 18-year old boy who essentially acts like an 8-year old for no discernible reason and an 8-year old who, when it suits the plot, reasons like a 20-year old. There are some good passages, and Towles certainly has some good ideas. And the second half is marginally better than the first half. But this verges way too far into Tom Robbins territory for me. If this hadn't been a reading group selection by a friend of mine, I would have concluded my efforts somewhere around page 100, but as it was, I did a forced march through all 567 pages of this self-indulgent porridge of a book.

I know lots of people have liked Towles' previous novels, A Gentleman of Moscow in particular. The friend who selected this book for our group described it as a "fun read." I suppose I might have had fun with the plot if I hadn't found the language so exasperating. So, depending on one's tolerance for the sorts of things I've been complaining about, your mileage may vary with this book.

* And here I'm talking about something that just doesn't make sense even given the willing suspension of disbelief that the narrative calls for.

Book 65: Youth by Joseph Conrad



This wonderful work is a novella, only about 40 pages long. Conrad's frequently returning narrator/hero, Marlow, sits around with a group of friends with an ever-present bottle being passed around as he recounts a sea voyage of his youth, a passage on a coal ship bound for Bangkok, his first voyage to the East and his first as second mate. The journey is one delay causing--often life threatening--disaster after another, but the young Marlow sees it as nothing but adventure. Or at least that's how the old Marlow remembers it in the telling, full of beautiful, stirring description that puts you right onto this ill-starred old vessel.

I read this all in a single gulp, as it demands to be read. I first read it 35 years ago, still in my 30s. Now that I'm 66, it certainly resonates all the more.

"By all that's wonderful it is the sea, I believe, the sea itself--or is it youth alone? Who can tell? But you here--you all had something out of life: money, love--whatever one gets on shore--and, tell me, wasn't that the best time, that time when we were young at sea, young and had nothing, on the sea that gives nothing except hard knocks--and sometimes a chance to feel your strength--that only--what you all regret?"

Book 66: Now We Are Enemies: The Story of Bunker Hill by Thomas J. Fleming



First published in 1960, this history of the Battle of Bunker Hill, the first major battle of the American Revolution, was evidently hailed as a major success at the time, and I can see why. Fleming did a great job of laying out the contributing factors to the growing points of contention between England and the American colonies, both political and economic, as well as giving thumbnail sketches of the major players on both the English and American sides. The conditions the combatants fought under, the weapons they carried and their motivations for fighting are all clearly described as well, as are the tactics of the officers and the ways in which those tactics either worked or didn't. The battle itself is described in detail, with a flowing narrative style that puts the reader directly into the horrific, bloody action. At times Fleming took some liberties, creating conversations between the participants that are, he explains in his afterward, recreations from the many diaries and journals he consulted. On the American side, most of the soldiers who actually took part fought bravely indeed, but many of those assembled, intimidated by the British artillery, actually stayed well away from the battle. Fleming gives a lot of credit, also, to the courage of the British soldiers, who three times charged the American emplacements in the face of point-blank musket fire. The British after that third charge, managed to get the Colonials out of their emplacements and off the hill (actually Breed's Hill, not Bunker Hill itself, as Fleming explains), but at a cost so high that they the British generals had to abandon their plans to try to break the American siege of Boston, the reason they attacked the stronghold in the first place. The British lost half their army, killed or wounded, on that day, and the question of whether American volunteer soldiers would stand and fight against the British regulars, an army considered at that time the best in the world, was settled emphatically.

I highly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in the history of the American Revolution or of military history in general. I don't know how much additional scholarship on the battle has taken place in the intervening 60 years since Now We Are Enemies was published. I know, for example, that Nathaniel Philbrick has written a history: Bunker Hill: a City, a Siege, a Revolution. I don't know how much new material was included in that book. It is in my LT library but is not on my shelf. I vaguely remember loaning it to someone, but can't remember who. It will come back eventually, I guess!

Book note: My copy of the book seems to be a first edition. At least, there's no mention of any edition other than the 1960 publishing date with the book's publishing info. The LT entry date for this book is in 2008, the year I first posted my library here, so there's no telling how long it's been on my shelf awaiting my attention. I do know that my copy at one time resided in the sailors' library aboard the USS General William Mitchell (AP-114), as per the stamp on the book's rear inside cover. There is also a pocket at the back in which the book's withdrawal card resides, though it is blank. Either nobody ever took this book out, or one or more previous cards had been filled up.

Book 67: Gilead by Marilynne Robinson



I thoroughly enjoyed this beautiful novel for its compassion, insights and wonderful language. John Ames, an aging and ailing Congregationalist minister in a small Iowa town where he's lived all his life, knows that his time is short, due to his bad heart. He has married late in life and has a very young son. Ames is not afraid of death, but grieves that his son will grow up without him, and so sits down to write him a long journal, composed over many weeks, explaining his faith, his philosophy, his past, including the lives of his own father and grandfather (both ministers themselves), and events going on around the family as Ames writes that the son is too young to be aware of but that he might want to understand better as he gets older. Whew! That was a long sentence. I found this book wholly absorbing, though I understand some readers find it slow and I've noted one or two comments lately of folks here on LT who've said the didn't finish it. C'est la vie! Possibly I enjoyed this novel so much because it served as an antidote for what I found to be the insufferably sloppy storytelling and prose of The Lincoln Highway. Anyway, here are a few examples of passages I particularly enjoyed:

This first one I found by opening my book at random just now:

"I believe that the old man {Ames' grandfather} did indeed have far too narrow an idea of what a vision might be. He may, so to speak, have been too dazzled by the great light of his experience to realize that an impressive sun shines on us all. Perhaps that is the one thing I wish to tell you. Sometimes the visionary aspect of any particular day comes to you in the memory of it, or it opens to you over time. For example, whenever I take a child into my arms to be baptized, I am, so to speak, comprehended in the experience more fully, having seen more of life, knowing better what it means to affirm the sacredness of the human creature. I believe there are visions that come to us only in memory, in retrospect. That's the pulpit speaking, but it's telling the truth."

This one I made note of when I read it:

"I remember once my father and my grandfather were sitting on the porch together cracking and shelling black walnuts. They loved each other's company when they weren't at each other's throats, which meant when they were silent, as they were that day.

My grandfather said, 'The summer is ended and still we are not saved'

My father said, 'That is the Lord's truth.'

Then silence again. They never looked up from their work. It was the drought they were speaking of, which had already set on and which would go on for years, a true calamity. I remember a sweet, soft wind like there is today. There is no work more tedious than shelling black walnuts, and the two of them did it every autumn of the world. My mother said they tasted like furniture, and I'm not sure anyone disagreed But she always had them, so she used them."

Also:
"It is worth living long enough to outlast whatever sense of grievance you may acquire."

And finally:
"There are a thousand thousand reasons to live this life, every one of them sufficient."

And that's a wrap for me for 2021. My 67 books this year were substantially fewer than last year's 82, but I'm quite happy with my reading. I think I tackled more longer books, for one thing. I'll have a 2022 list up soon Cheers!

>111 rocketjk: I'll be watching for it.

>111 rocketjk: Please give us a link when you get that new thread up!

>112 fuzzi: & >113 laytonwoman3rd: Thanks for your interest! I'll be looking forward to following along with your threads, as well. Here you go:
https://www.librarything.com/topic/338366