Bookends

The Beatles: The Biography by Bob Spitz

The dust cover of this extensive history of The Beatles (from childhood to partnership breakup) is a photo of a gigantic head with four faces; one brain with four aspects. The Beatles became an entity, a being, a life form of its own separate from the individuals—John, Paul, George and Ringo. Many, many Beatles fans know too much about The Beatles. There are 155 reader reviews of this book on Amazon and a number of complaints about inaccuracies. I haven’t read anything about the lads before now so Spitz’s book was an eye-opener and, essentially, all news to me. For example, Ringo always seemed like a dufus to me but he turns out to be the most well-adjusted member of the group. He was a genuinely nice person. George had known John and Paul since he was fourteen years old and they were seventeen. Those three dog years held til near the end when on the Abbey Road album he earned his bones writing and soloing on Here Comes the Sun and Something. With these two songs he finally won John and Paul’s respect as a song writer (he was always the best guitar player). John was an anarchist and a drug-sodden lunatic. Paul was a narcissist and control freak with a spectacularly winning personality. George was a thoughtful, introspective fellow and a great guitarist. Ringo was Ringo. Pete Best, once a Beatle was handsome and popular but a lousy drummer. And, Stuart Sutcliffe, the sixth Beatle really couldn’t play at all.  What’s most interesting about The Beatles and what can’t be explained is their musical genius. Spitz provides the provenance of many compositions but, of course, there is no explanation. There never is for genius. John and Paul could whip our songs almost on demand—great songs. Songs that are being heard by a third generation of fans. When Beatlemania made it impossible for them to perform in public, they went into the studio and made even greater music, albums that revolutionized the music industry. They made the first music videos years before MTV and were the first to publish lyrics on the album covers. Even the covers were artistic and memorable. They were unbelievably popular and successful. Beatlemania was a word coined to describe the insane excitement that followed them as they traveled. Their experience in the Philippines is so weird it’s worth the price of the book.
Ironically, they were inept, even buffoonish as businessmen. They didn’t pay attention. Although their doomed manager Brian Epstein did great things for them, he fumbled the ball on many big deals. Financially, all the Beatles should have been billionaires. They had to settle for millions. Not surprisingly it was money and power that broke them up. Ego raised it’s ugly head, fueled by drugs and poor advisors and the Rasputin-like presence of Yoko Ono who was like gasoline poured on a fire that had already started to burn. Amazingly, they produced Abbey Road, a really great album, while they were at each other’s throats and as Yoko looked on—from a hospital bed. In one of the most amusing and telling anecdotes in the book we see Yoko, pregnant and fresh from a car wreck with John, ordered by docs to stay in bed. She has a hospital bed delivered to the studio, has the engineers rig a mike above her bed so she can offer her constant and unwanted (by Paul, George and Ringo) comments on the production.
The book is meticulous in its detail about the boys’ early lives (and has equally interesting backgrounders on Yoko, Brian, Pete, Linda Eastman (McCartney), Cynthia Lennon, Stuart Sutcliffe and others).
Partnerships seems to go through four phases. The first is the formative stage where the participants get together. The second is the euphoric stage where they begin to believe anything is possible. The third stage is the success phase when the partners begin to achieve their goals. And, the final stage, the dissolution brought about the success—disagreements about money and control. Partnerships are difficult and fascinating. The Beatles partnership was layered. We had the John and Paul brotherhood. George was a tag-along younger brother. One of the original band members, Stu Sutcliffe, self-eliminated and Ringo was recruited at a later date to replace the inadequate Pete Best. Ringo remained pretty much an outsider in the inner circle. The John/Paul dynamic is the most interesting part of the story with their synergistic relationship producing spectacular results. They fed off each other and enhanced each other’s work
I don’t suppose anyone should be surprised at the amount of drug use involved in The Beatles story. John was the worst; at the end of the partnership a heroin addict. Drugs probably helped some of the music along but still doesn’t provide an explanation for the fantastic output of music.
Author Spitz is frank about sex and the promiscuous times the very heterosexual Beatles enjoyed. Occasionally, he names names.
It is a tumultuous, rollicking story with many complex, neurotic characters. If you happened to miss the sixties as I did, it’s a way to vicariously catch up.
There’s no doubt that The Beatles: The Biography is a story of sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll.
(Kept my iPod handy and listened to the songs as they unfolded in the book. Very enjoyable.)

Summer by Edith Wharton

Life in tiny villages, common a century and more ago, is uncommon, almost unknown today. In Summer we find our heroine, Charity Royall, living in a village, North Dormer, with a mere handful of houses, a church which is open every other Sunday and a library which Charity tends some afternoons. The library, endowed in the name of one of the village ancestors, is full of dusty, unread, twenty-year-old books. Yet, North Dormer  is a genteel community with it’s agreed standards of deportment. It is not even a town, really (there are no businesses) but it is led by Charity’s guardian, Mr. Royall, an unambitious attorney who many years back returned to North Dormer from a larger city and who only occasionally practices law. It was he who retrieved Charity from the backward mountain people and raised her as his own, Mrs. Royall having died a few years after Charity arrived. Lawyer Royall has never taken the legal step of adopting Charity and they have a relationship that is full of tension. Charity is bored and unhappy. “How I hate everything,” she proclaims as she heads up the street to open the library. She is aware of her shortcomings and lack of sophistication when she compares herself to the stylish Annabel Balch who often visits Miss Hatchard, patron of the library and aunt to Lucius Harney, a young architect who shows up one day to survey old houses in the neighborhood. Charity attaches herself to Lucius and drives him around the neighborhood in lawyer Royall’s buggy so he can draw and measure the old places. Included in these stops is a visit to a family from the mountain people where Charity and Lucius take refuge in a storm. Charity is disturbed by her low-life kin and worries that Lucius, who knows the story of her birth, will be put off. But he isn’t. As summer warms, so does their relationship. Complicating the summer is the fact that lawyer Royall proposes twice to his ward. Charity is shocked and offended but doesn’t leave his home feeling, that she has a power over lawyer Royall that keeps her safe. Charity is seen coming away from Lucius’s quarters late at night and creates a scandal, even though she is innocent of any real offense. Lucius leaves then sends a message that he wants to see her. Soon, they are literally shacked up, meeting regularly in an abandoned cabin furnished roughly and featuring a mattress covered with a Mexican blanket. She learns she is pregnant then has this epiphany: “She had given him all she had—but what was it compared to the other gifts life held for him? She understood now the case of girls like herself to whom this kind of thing happened. They gave all they had, but their all was not enough: it could not buy more than a few moments...” Lucius after all is from New York, member of a men’s club. He speaks French and has traveled abroad. He has to leave, he tells her, for some months. Lucius, she then learns, is engaged to Annabel Balch. Has been engaged the entire time. He writes letters pledging that he will come back. Charity releases him from his pledge and flees to the mountain in a desperate move to escape to her roots. Coincidentally she arrives at the collection of mountain hovels in time for the funeral of her emaciated mother who has just died. One night on the mountain is enough and  Charity begins the long walk back to North Dormer, meeting lawyer Royall along the way. Once again, he has driven to the mountain to rescue her. For the third time he proposes that they marry and before she can think it through completely they take the train to a neighboring city where there is a brief wedding and a chaste overnight stay in a fine hotel. In the morning they return to North Dormer as Mr. and Mrs. Royall. “Their eyes met, and something rose in his that she had never seen there: a look that made her feel ashamed and yet secure.”  But summer has ended and she prepares to settle in with lawyer Royall, her former and present guardian. Charity has had her summer. Short and bittersweet.

The Rise of Silas Lapham by William Dean Howells

This is one of those books like that other Silas (Marner) that in high school will make one drop off to sleep. Long out of high school, I found it engaging on several levels. First, it’s an interesting case study in business and business ethics. Second, it’s an examination of snobbery in nineteenth century Boston. Finally, and most curious, all the main characters are likable. Circumstance is the villain. In today’s terms we’d view it as a study in karma—how the decisions of nouveau riche Silas Lapham affected his family, the old line Boston Coreys, Silas’s ex partner, the widow and daughter of the man who saved Colonel Lapham’s life in the Civil War, and even his upstart competitors.
Silas Lapham makes a fortune in mineral paint and resolves to elevate the status of his family by building a mansion on Beacon Hill, Boston’s posh neighborhood. His wife and two interesting daughters could care less. They seem content. They are practical. During a summer retreat they meet the Coreys, an established Boston family and the younger Lapham sister, Irene, who is quite beautiful falls for Tom Corey, a serious and practical young man. The older sister, Penelope, who is clever but not so beautiful, falls for Tom as well. Penelope can’t see, nor can Irene, that Tom is smitten with Penelope. Silas and his wife Persis can’t see it either assuming that Tom would be interested in their more beautiful offspring.
The Coreys also assume that Irene is the object of Tom’s affections but are most disturbed that he is courting someone out of their class. But they are dignified and supportive and invite the Laphams to a dinner party. This is the height of Silas’s career and though his wife and daughters have no interest in moving up the social chain he feels it is his due. Under the stress of unaccustomed drink Silas lets loose his hubris and embarrasses himself by bragging about his paint and his business and even young Tom Corey who has come to work for him. Tom, unlike his effete father, wants to do something and has an idea to open the Mexican and South American markets to mineral paint. Irene considers the dinner a great triumph and is positive Tom has an interest in her. Penelope, on the other hand, had refused to go. At the dinner one of the discussion topics in a popular novel titled, Tears, Idle Tears. In this book one heroine gives up the love of her life for her friend because the friend had cared for the man first. Later in a discussion with Tom, Penelope declares that the girls actions were wicked. But when Tom states his love and intention for her and not for Irene, Penelope reacts like the wicked girl in Tears, Idle Tears and sends Tom away.
Coincidentally with Tom’s declaration, Silas discovers that he is in serious financial difficulties. He has bought on margin and lost. He has sent good money after bad in a financial investment with his old partner, an investment condoned by Persis who thought Silas had been unfair to the old partner when they parted ways years before. And, Silas discovers he has a competitor who makes paint just a good and more cheaply. While he is trying to pull all this together his new house, still under construction, burns to the ground with no insurance. Silas is broke and his only way out is through a dishonest sale of assets he obtained from the ex-partner as security to his loan. He refuses to compromise his ethics which would have saved him from bankruptcy and is forced to sell out of Boston to clear his debts. The family returns to their homestead in Vermont where Silas starts over. His rise appeared to be a business one but in the end was a rise of moral virtue and the subjugation of the hubris that caused his downfall. His wife and daughters are no less happy than they had been in Boston and persistent Tom wins Penelope in the end and, in a way, saves the business as well.

The Inner Circle by T. C. Boyle

T. C. Boyle writes social historical fiction often focusing on a charismatic type person (Dr. Kellogg in the Road to Wellville and Dr. Kinsey in The Inner Circle). Boyle also likes to detail the collision of lifestyles (California hippies trying to survive an Alaska winter in Drop City or a yuppie couple and an illegal immigrant couple living wildly different lives in the same neighborhood, The Tortilla Curtain). In The Inner Circle Boyle imagines the collision of Kinsey’s sexual scientism with the very human and unquantifiable emotions of love and jealousy. The novel is about the arc of the marriage of John Milk, Kinsey’s first employee (fictional) and MIlk’s wife Iris. Milk is a milquetoast, totally dominated by and half in love, like the fatherless man he is, with Kinsey. Iris is an independent thinker with real character, the hero of the novel and never buys into Kinsey’s pansexual approach. She is resentful of the  work, the extensive travel and the sharing required. Though, when she learns of Milk’s history with both Kinseys she engages, with Kinsey’s blessing, another member of the staff. This episode of cheating creates a conflict for Milk that he finds impossible to resolve. Milk can’t reconcile his feeling for Iris with Kinsey’s requirement that sex be seen as mechanical. Kinsey will have none of Milk’s sex shyness and he keeps the pressure on ultimately requiring his staff to perform on film in front of the entire group. Iris balks and Milk finds his spine but nearly loses Iris even as he makes a stand against the great Kinsey. It’s a simple plot but ingeniously played out against the pageant of Kinsey’s research and oppressive management style. As with all T.C. Boyle novels he educates while he entertains. Titillating as well as heartbreaking, Boyle demonstrates the dangers of listening to someone who tells us that our basest instincts are normal and acceptable. Because human biology follows the law of physics which tells us that every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

Gnomes by Wil Huygen

Wil Huygen reports on his interviews and observations of gnomes over a period of twenty years. Widely distributed in Europe, particularly Scandinavia and the British Isles, gnomes are found in a few localities in the United States including, I am pleased to report, North Puget sound’s coastal areas. I expect they are found on islands as well because the gnome has learned to use the otter to cross streams and other bodies of water. Gnomes are tiny creatures who wear pointy hats and live for hundreds of years in underground dwellings assisted by moles in the digging of sanitary chambers and wells. Gnomes are vegetarians, ovo-vegetarians to be specific as they enjoy the occasional egg of a songbird. Gnomes are expert herbalists, practice natural medicine with occasional emergency surgery. Mr. Huygen very modestly points out and Rien Poortvliet vividly illustrates the fact that female gnomes have large breasts. Interestingly, because of their short stature decreased gravity precludes the necessity of a brassiere even at very advanced ages, say 350 years. Never having seen a real gnome, readers will perhaps be acquainted with the “garden gnome” statues and aware that gnomes only appear wearing a tall, pointed, felt hat. It is said that a gnome would rather appear without his pants than without his hat. The hat is the essence of gnomishness. Gnomes are nocturnal, can run at high speed and are, relatively speaking, seven times stronger than man. They are very clever and can do glassblowing, metal working, pottery, and milling using machines powered by wind; that is, powered by wind as the proximate cause. Long lines are attached to trees and as the trees sway in the wind the energy is transmitted through the lines to various, ingenious machines. Gnomes have extrasensory perception and are wonderful dowsers. If you could hook up with one you would have no trouble finding a well. Little is known of the sex life of gnomes. Curiously, the female ovulates only once in her long lifetime whilst the male remains potent until about 350 years of age, after marrying at age 100. The gnome gets along with all wild creatures save the polecat and the domestic cat. Consequently, the entrance to each gnome dwelling is constructed with a polecat trap.
I only touch the high points of this most interesting monograph and am not eloquent enough to do justice to the illustrations. There’s much more to learn about gnomes who set a very nice lifestyle example for the rest of us. However, even if they emerge as a force in the world I fear the pointy hat will never catch on.

My Detachment by Tracy Kidder

It’s been a few years since I’ve read anything about Vietnam. But a new memoir by Pulitzer Prize Winner Tracy Kidder caught my eye. Kidder was in the army, an intelligence officer. He spent a year in Vietnam supervising a small communications detachment somewhere in the Central Highlands. It was a safe posting, in the war zone but away from the action. Most of us who served in Vietnam were in less danger than we had been in the states, although by the time that Kidder was serving the war was becoming unpopular and being fragged by your own troops was a real possibility. Kidder tells his story in a self-deprecating and totally honest fashion. He captures the angst of youth and inexperience, the real melancholy of his failing romance with his childhood sweetheart, his discomfort with the war and the lifers who ran it, his desire to be liked and appreciated by his men and his ambivalence over hating the war yet wanting to be affected by it in some heroic way. On his return to the states he wrote a really horrible novel based oh so loosely on his experience. After many rejections he destroyed the manuscript. Years later a friend he had sent it to returned this lone copy. He uses selections of the novel to illustrate how he tried to make his mostly boring tour of duty into more than it was, the novel’s protagonist being his fictional alter ego. Kidder is frank in exposing lies he told while in-country to impress or manipulate his friends and family, insinuations that he had killed and done horrible things, when the most horrible things he did were losing a piece of classified information and, later in his tour, a metal roof. Using that old novel and letters he wrote Kidder recreates the self-absorption of the twenty-three year old who has no experience leading or managing. His worst moment comes when he has a breakdown after his hooches are inspected by a stiff-necked major and he worries, is certain, in fact, that his men have heard him sobbing in his cot. He is very good at recreating the tension between officer and EM and the difficulty of maintaining control which in My Detachment required begging, whining, cajoling, bullying and manipulation on his part. A kid named Pancho represents the EM in the book and always gets the best of Lieutenant Kidder. Years later, Pancho, now an ex-CIA operative, shows up and they reminisce. Pancho, the streetwise Hispanic gets the best of Harvard grad Kidder one more time. This is a short but complex, engrossing and very readable story that captures the real flavor of a Vietnam soldier’s year.

My Life So Far by Jane Fonda

The biggest surprise of Jane Fonda’s autobiography (well, there’s two: she wrote it herself and wrote it quite well) is that Jane is not the most interesting character in the book. That honor goes to Ted Turner. Hers is actually a very interesting bio which moves at a rapid though detailed  chronological pace through Fonda’s life. But it really gathers speed when Turner appears. He’s a male hurricane, powered by billions, a human bowling ball who turns fifty-one year old Jane upside down on their second date, easily making her a bedpost notch while having to pee every ten minutes (nerves, he says; swollen prostate methinks) and saying everything that comes into his head like some kind of crazed poster boy for Tourette’s. He’s a money-fueled charmer, a narcissist so disordered that he sucks La Fonda up like an Oreck, taking her from ranch to ranch, plantation to plantation and high rise to high rise often telling her that he needs a “fonda-ling.” (Could a mere mortal have won a two time Oscar winner with such a crudity?) Turner is the classic narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) whose charisma obscures the fact that his people are his possessions, extensions of himself; there to serve his whims. During the Turner period, Fonda disappears into his corporate, self-pleasuring web becoming completely subservient to his needs as she had been to her first two spouses, the French film director, Roger Vadim, and the very homely professional antiwar activist, Tom Hayden. Vadim and Hayden no doubt suffered from the curse of the narcissist as well since neither valued Fonda as an individual. She, however, a pleaser to the end is generous to a fault with each of her exs, offsetting criticisms with lavish praise. Jane Fonda has led an interesting and varied life and thus has a good story to tell. There are interesting vinnettes—a nude swim with Greta Garbo. Confessions—threesomes with Vadim. Revelations—she’s now a Christian, and enough dirt to keep you turning pages. (Friends report that the audio version read by Ms Fonda is very good as well). She spends many pages on her antiwar activities which made her anathema to those on the right, abhorrent to them even today as she made her recent reappearance into show business and more public activism. Some old Vietnam vets still grouse about Fonda but, let’s face it, she was right. And, as an old Vietnam vet, I will accept her explanation for sitting laughing on a North Vietnamese antiaircraft gun. (The most upset I ever got with Jane was when she married Tom. Even though she explains it, it’s still hard to understand. Hayden always seemed like a phony to me and Fonda makes him look like one while pointing out that he’s a good father. Oh, by the way, he’s a drunk and a philanderer. As mentioned, she trashes her exs and in the same breath builds them up again presumably to not upset the kids.  Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden. It still makes no sense to me. You have to read it to believe it). She gives us a brief on most of her forty-nine films (my favorites were Tall Story and Cat Ballou) some gush on her show biz favorites like Dolly Parton and Bonnie Rait and details the case study of her phenomenal workout videos. While we hear about the husbands, a varied crew of lovers, some named but mostly not, we follow the personal growth of Fonda as a developing human being recovering from her insecure childhood as daughter of a cold but famous actor and a depressed and, unfortunately, suicidal mother. Clearly, in her late sixties, Fonda is obsesses with finding her self. By her own testimony she has made amazing progress these last few years, the years just before and since her divorce from the amazing Ted Turner. Always a Fonda fan I can’t help but be cynical about the timing of her self-actualization. Just in time it seems to relaunch a career in show biz. In one very poignant chapter Fonda details the making of On Golden Pond which won her dad an Oscar and gave them a final chance to connect as daughter and father, though they had to do it while filming a scene. She tells of the difficulties created by the elderly hubris of Katherine Hepburn and the competitive nature of that old woman. Hepburn is gone now. The part is open. Fonda may be ready to step in.

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

I have a copy of The Grapes of Wrath on my bookshelf that must be left over from college. If I read it then, it made no impression on me and if I’ve seen the film, only the nursing of the starving man at the conclusion made any impression. But reading The Grapes of Wrath during the buildup  and aftermath of Hurricane Katrina the book made a tremendous impression on me. A devastating natural event exacerbated by man’s impact on the environment takes place. The result is that hundreds of thousands are ruined and dispersed into the greater population. Katrina will create migrants. In many cases, migrants that nobody wants to see. They will not be welcomed, especially the poor, uneducated, black ones. The wrath that they feel will be countered by the indignation of those who are pledged to defend private property. They will be characterized as “looters” as the “Okies” were criminalized and forced to leave Oklahoma often pushed off their land by other Oklahomans, former tenants like themselves, who opted to take jobs running equipment for the bank. This was the scene that faced Tom Joad, paroled from prison after a four year term for manslaughter. He got in a fight, was stabbed and brained his opponent with a shovel. He meets up with his old preacher on the road and they return together to the Joad homestead to find it empty; wrecked. An old friend named Muley appears, now living like a ghost in the fields and woods, living on  trapped rabbits, and tells the story of what happens and where the Joad family is living. Rejoining the extended family Tom decides to go with them on their quest to California even though it means violating parole. Steinbeck writes this story in a very naturalistic style linking the people to the earth and the environment and alternating the Joad saga with chapters that read like prose poems: the process of buying a car, the selling of possessions, forlorn abandoned houses and barns, the roadside cafes, California agriculture, exploitation of labor, migrant entertainment, the wasting of crops, cotton picking, and bad weather. The Grapes of Wrath is a road story like no other. The characters are carved into the pages, tough as barbed wire, frustrated, humiliated, angry but ready to work. They are like the tortoise featured in the early pages of the novel who symbolizes their closeness to the ground, their hard shell and their confusion at getting tipped over. But like the tortoise, the Joad family presses on, taking tiny steps, keeping an eye on the future. Even with their optimism and resilience, it’s the saddest story you’ll ever read.

Bleeding Blue and Gray: Civil War Surgery and the Evolution of American Medicine by Ira M. Rutkow

Civil War medicine was pretty much a disaster for the hundreds of thousands of casualties. Medical training and skills were primitive. There was no standardization of practice or protocol and there was a huge battle taking place between the homeopaths and the allopaths. (This struggle is detailed in the classic medical history Divided Legacy: The Conflict Between Homeopathy and the American Medical Association by Harris L. Coulter). Bleeding Blue and Gray is a bit difficult to praise. But it does have its moments. I will rarely plod through a book I feel is poorly organized. This one is a mess. Couldn’t follow the outline. But there is lots of interesting material about the treatment of wounded in the Civil War that I haven’t seen anywhere else. It may be for Civil War buffs only.
If I were to subtitle a book “Civil War Surgery” I would plan to have lots of information about surgery. Lots and lots of case studies and perhaps even a surgical event from start to finish. And if I were to imply that the book would tell the story of the “Evolution of American Medicine” I would feel obligated to show how it had evolved. There are a few case studies rather inadequately written. There are no comprehensive details on surgical practice. There is no descripton of the evolution of American medicine. Near the end of the book Dr. Rutkow writes:
    “There were no astounding breakthroughs during the Civil War. Communicable diseases ran rampant. Wound infections spread unchecked. Surgery, despite the performance of tens of thousands of operations, remained as barbaric and crude in 1865 as it was in 1861.”
No evolution here. But he also writes:
    “Civil War medicine may be best remembered for its effective organization and administration of health care.”
    The gist of this summary is that before the Civil War there were no hospitals to speak of. People didn’t want to go to the ones that did exist. They wished, quite reasonably, to be treated at home. Allopathic doctors knew nothing about sanitation, did not know what caused disease and had few medicines with which to treat. They used the heroic treatment of colomel (mercurous chloride) and tartar emetic (antimony and potasium) which both caused extreme salivation, “explosive diarrhea, and volcanic vomiting.” The colomel could actually eat away at the bones and tissues of the face. When the modern day equivalent of the Surgeon General outlawed these two medicines he was court-martialed and cashiered due to the objections of doctors who had no other tricks in their kit save for those two medicines.
As far as organization and administration was concerned most of these developments were lobbied for by a civilian group, The Sanitary Commission, whose leader was Frederick Law Olmstead of Central Park fame. The Sanitary Commission campaigned hard for sanitation in the camps and raised huge amounts of money in order to provide necessities to the wounded, filling the enormous gap left by the government.
Civil War historians are caught up in the sequence of battles and Dr. Rutkow spends way too much time detailing military maneuvers more than adequately described in dozens of other histories.
His book is really a history of medical politics during this horrible era. Giant egos, stupidity and bureaucracy played out on a tapestry of blood, guts and broken bones. Not a pretty picture. But a fascinating story that could have been told (and titled) better. (For a detailed case study of a Civil War injury I recommend Fallen Soldier: Memoir of a Civil War Casualty edited by William Miller. A Union soldier is shot in the groin in 1862 and suffered with his wound until his death in 1914. His memoir, editor's observations and a modern doctor's analysis of the wound and treatment. Most interesting and informative).

Honor Killing by David E. Stannard

Page turners are most often fiction. It is pure happiness to find a 400+ page work of history than you can’t bear to put down. I whipped through Honor Killing in less than two days. Of course, it takes place in Hawaii, a great setting for any story and involves rape, murder, hypocrisy, racism,  crooked cops, vigilantes, corrupted press, dramatic trials and, finally, a sense of fair play opposing raw power. With Honolulu as a backdrop, Honor Killing is a great read, ripe as a mango, tasty as papaya, filling as a young coconut.
Five young mixed blood Hawaiian men are arrested for the rape of a wife of a naval officer. The rape never occurred. The white oligarchy calls for blood. The honor of white womanhood must be protected or the navy will prevent the fleet from stopping at Honolulu during maneuvers thus costing business men millions. This is the Massie Affair which was the trial of the century before O.J. and gained for Hawaii publicity that, for a time, crushed the embryonic tourist trade. Professor Stannard, who teaches American Studies at UH puts the Massie Affair into a broad historical and sociological context and argues that this event, more than any other, broke the power of the military/business complex that ruled Hawaii from the time of the illegal overthrow of Hawaii’s king and led to a multi-racially managed society which, more or less, exists today.
In the old plantation economy control was maintain by separating the races, Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, Hawaiian by playing one group against the other and fostering racial division. After the Massie Affair these groups came together in a new political coalition and exerted their strength at the ballot box and union hall. But before all that happened drama after drama unfolded in the courtroom, on the Pali in Manoa, and on the road to Blowhole.
Thalia Massie, the “victim” was a spoiled rich girl with an obnoxious personality who was in the habit of sleeping around with naval officers not her husband. She was related on her mother’s side to Alexander Graham Bell; on her father’s to Teddy Roosevelt. Her parents, however, were mostly destitute and lived off the good nature and hospitality of wealthier relatives. But they enjoyed narcissistic delusions of grandeur. When Thalia cried “rape” her mother Grace Fortesque arrived on the scene and took the affair to a new level. The five Hawaiian men accused of rape were blessed with an excellent attorney who destroyed the prosecutor's weak charges. The jury, under much pressure, cannot decide and the men are released. The white community and military are outraged and step up their disinformation campaign begun during the trial. Hawaii, they claim, is unsafe for woman. Rapists are rampaging. This claim made in face of the fact that rape was the rarest of crimes in laid back Hawaii. The Southern lynch mob mentality prevails. One of the accused is kidnapped by a large group of sailors and taken up to the Pali where he is beaten nearly to death. Then Grace decides to take matters into her own hands and force a confession to close the deal. She recruits her son-in-law, Lieutenant Massie, and two enlisted sailors to help her kidnap Joe Kahahawai. They take him to her rented home in Manoa where one of them shoots Joe with a single pistol shot. They drag him into a bathroom and let him bleed out, then toss him into a car with the idea of losing his body in the ocean. Since they were seen abducting Kahahawai the police spot the car out near Koko Head and chase it down, find the body and arrest the perpetrators who are unremorseful. The Navy admiral in charge spirits Grace and her gang out of jail and takes them to VIP housing at Pearl Harbor to await trial. Grace calls on rich relatives and friends to donate money for her defense. She basks in the applause of her actions, the honor killing, applause that is widespread. The great Clarence Darrow, in his last hurrah, is enlisted to defend the perps and this trial gets more publicity than the rape trial with reporters from all the major news outlets arriving by ship to cover it. Under sea cables have recently allowed radio and Darrow’s summation is broadcast live. Darrow uses an insanity defense for Lieutenant Massie who he infers fired the shot. The jury, made up of middle class males, some of mixed race and all employed by establishment businesses, is under tremendous pressure to acquit. But after painful deliberation they find the defendants guilty of manslaughter with a recommendation for leniency. The governor under extreme pressure from even the White House immediately commutes their sentences and the Navy rushes Grace, Thalia her husband and the two sailors off the island to much mainland acclaim. Honor Killing is an exciting, interesting book to read and a reminder of the racism that underlay our thoughts and attitudes not that long ago. Professor Stannard benefits from long suppressed information (such as an investigation by the Pinkerton Agency) to shed light into the shadows of this human tragedy. Highest recommendation.

Bribery, Corruption Also, by H.R.F. Keating

Inspector Ghote is the most endearing detective in the genre because the only talent he possesses is persistency. He is no super hero. In fact, in Bribery, Corruption Also the villains get the best of him. He is cornered and cheated and there is nothing he can do about it except gain satisfaction that he solved the mystery. Ghote is a Bombay man married to a Bengali from Calcutta he met in college. His wife, Protima, has unexpectedly inherited from an uncle a mansion in Calcutta which she recalls nostalgically from her childhood. Immediately she wants Ghote to pull up stakes and move from his beloved Bombay across the country to the land of the proud, talkative Bengalis. I know nothing of these regional differences but expect it might be something like a New Englander considering a move to the South. The Bombay way is direct. The Bengali circuitous, with lots of parenthetical thoughts. Ghote is happy for Protima’s good fortune but dreads being pulled out of his job to be pushed into the Bengali culture where he will be a fish out of water. The Bengalis are great eaters of fish and there are eutrophic lakes ringing the city where fish are raised. These nutrient rich wetlands are prized and normally protected. But there is bribery, corruption also. Protima’s house, they discover, is run down and occupied by squatters and Ghote quickly discerns that the shyster attorney handling the estate wants her to sell. The lawyer emphasizes the decaying condition of the house and the mess the immigrants have made. Protima, however, is resolved to get her money and rehabilitate her Bengali memories. Ghote reads a piece of paper on the attorney’s desk that refers to an “eventual assignee” and this leads him on a quest to find out what is behind the machinations of the attorney. He learns that a powerful man wants to develop the wetlands and Protima’s house stands in the way of the necessary access road. Ghote resorts to bribery himself to obtain the legal file, goes to a supposed colleague on the police force to offer evidence of possible corruption and finds himself mugged for the papers under a banyan tree, the mugging obviously ordered by the police official with whom he has confided. Ghote is fed up with Calcutta, its Botanical Gardens, marble palaces, the poet/hero Rabindranath Tagore and, most of all, with fish. But Inspector Ghote persists in his quest, motivated to assist his wife while all the time wishing she could just sell and return their family to Bombay. He takes his evidence of corruption to a reporter of a crusading newspaper but the story is spiked. Ghote threatens the editor, who bears a striking resemblance to Calcutta’s great hero Nataji Subhas Bose, with exposure to a competing paper unless the editor, who sits proudly in front of a bust of the great Bose, will reveal the name of the man who gave the order. The name he is given is the most powerful, the richest man in Bengal, Mr. M. F. Tuntuwala who, when confronted by Ghote is unrepentant and unimpressed with our detective’s persistence. Tuntunwala lectures Ghote on the ways of the real world, explaining that corruption is just another word for business. Ghote is beaten. There is nothing he can do about corruption or bribery in Calcutta. They must sell the house and, now, the price has gone down. The police official shows up to threaten Protima with arrest for bribery. In order to be allowed to return to Bombay they must leave a briefcase full of cash, the entire proceeds of the sale of the house, at the Kali Temple for the police officer to pick up. They are under surveillance, try hard to lose the tail, but fail. They leave the money and return safely to Bombay. Even Protima is relieved to go home realizing that she is no longer at home in Calcutta because of bribery, corruption also.

The Singing Life of Birds by Donald Kroodsma

How would one go about learning how birds sing?

Perhaps you'd start out with a Ph’d in biology/ornithology based on studying bird song. Then get a job at a prominent research university that has good field programs and encourages research. Acquiring listening skills is good preparation. Learn Morse Code as a kid to develop that ear. Buy some or all of the following equipment: a shotgun microphone and another microphone that works with a parabolic reflector, some good headphones and an HiMD recorder. You’ll need a laptop and some software that creates sonograms from birdsong. A camp chair is good. Lots of warm clothes, flashlights, extra batteries and some rain gear. Obtain some grants. Travel all over tarnation getting up before dawn to set up your equipment and record hours and hours of birdsong making notes all the while based on your keen listening ability and increasing expertise. Go back to the office and print literally miles of sonograms and analyze them to determine the number of songs the bird can sing. Go back to the field. Record multiple birds in the same vicinity and try and figure out whether or not they know their songs innately, learn them from their parents, learn them from the neighbors, imitate other birds or improvise. As you conduct these studies you’ll learn to identify hundreds of bird songs from memory and perhaps even prove that one species is actually two based on the differences in their song. For this you will become renown among other scientists and lovers of birds and will attract graduate students who will do the laborious effort of comparing thousands and thousands of sonograms to determine song frequency. You  might even get an entry in the Guinness Book of Records for discovering that one bird sings more than 2000 different songs. You won’t be rich but you’ll be sort of famous in the tight little world of ornithologist and will be able to call for help when you need it. During your field work you’ll net thousands of birds and band them so you know which little birdie is singing to you. You’ll steal eggs and fledglings from their nests, fly them cross country in your carry on luggage and raise them in your basement feeding them, with the help of an indulgent spouse, a mixture of steak and eggs and other ground up stuff. You’ll play recordings to these birds and see what they learn; or don’t. Every once in awhile you’ll go to Central or South America and study birds like the three wattled bell bird and learn to your delight that they sing dialects like many other birds and that their songs are evolving year by year dropping in frequency. You’ll study the birds that live in your own neighborhood and even climb up on your steeply pitched roof to make recordings in the dark. You will keep detailed field notes and develop a writing style that is somewhat comprehensive to layman; a style that is often lyrical. You will wax (waxwing?) poetic about your life as a field researcher. You will practice the scientific method developing a hypothethis and trying to work it out, often developing more new questions than you answer. l Your enthusiasm for the study will never waiver. You will find all of this great fun, decide to write a book to tell what you’ve learned and even try and convince your readers that they ought to buy a tape recorder and a parabolic mike and get out there and record some local song and download a free program available for Mac or PC and learn to “see” the songs with their distinctive visual patterns. You will, of course, think every little detail of your field work is fascinating and write it down, probably arguing with your editors attempts to cut some of it. You’ll put a CD with an hour or more worth of bird songs in the book so the reader can listen to what you did. Sonograms too. Soon the reader will start to hear the neighborhood birds, be able to separate them one from another, recognizing the amazing variety and versatility of the songbird, begin to appreciate the diverse sounds that these feathered creatures emit from their two voice boxes. The book will sell well. Royalties will roll in. Equipment will upgraded. Trips will be planned. More questions will be answered; even more asked. The birds will continue to sing.

Locked in the Cabinet by Robert Reich

Here’s a tough assignment: write and interesting a funny book about being Secretary of Labor. I think most people would take a pass on that one. Not Robert Reich. He was Bill Clinton’s (referred to as “B” in the book) Secretary of Labor from 1992 to 1996 and who would have remained so for the next term if not for his family’s strong desire to have him home. It’s unfortunately for readers that he didn’t continue in his post because his insights into the second term would have been most valuable.
Robert Reich first met Bill Clinton on the ship that was taking their group of Rhodes Scholars to England. So he is a certified FOB  (Friend of Bill) with access to the President and, more important—Hillary, that other cabinet members might not have enjoyed. He was also the most progressively liberal member, along with Hillary, of the Clinton team. Through a series of well-composed vignettes in the form of a journal we get a sense of how, in Reich’s opinion, the first term succeeded and failed.
If you have any impression of Robert Reich at all it is probably that he is a tiny man. Physically tiny. He is 4’10” tall. Hardly enough meat for a sandwich. For many men, smallness is an issue. But 4’10” can be viewed as a physical handicap for a man. Yet Reich, with his seven foot brain has come to terms with his height and uses it to advantage. He has a genuinely wonderful self-deprecating style and is not adverse to portraying himself as the fool. This results in laugh-out-loud humor that keeps one turning pages rapidly. In one scene, feeling the need to escape his handlers he sets out to explore the huge Department of Labor offices and gets lost in his own building, finally rescued and led back to his suite by a security guard. He describes the huge chairs of the White House Cabinet Room and points out that if sat all the way back in them his legs stuck straight out like a small child’s. He relishes the way his competent top staff members managed and schooled him in the mysterious ways of Washington; how young George Stephanopholus dressed him down for a mistake.
Reich is also honest in his impressions and in reports on the players makes no apologies for his disdain for such characters as Dick Morris, a dark eminence, who got control of part of Clinton’s brain until a sex scandal took Morris out of the picture. He has fun characterizing Chairman Greenspan, Newt Gingrich, Lloyd Benson, Lane Kirkland (AF of L, CIO) and other prominent politicos. Reich created his own backdoor bypass route to the President for his ideas, submitting his memos on plain paper to Hillary who presented them to B. And, in the end, he reveals his belief that the failures of the first term resulted in Bill Clinton acting too much like a Republican, catering to the interests of big business.
A surprisingly interesting, funny and insightful book about an insider’s Washington experience. I was shocked that I enjoyed it so much.

From Here to Eternity by James Jones

There’s a lot to like about From Here to Eternity. I liked the main female charater’s riff on hysterectomies, something one might not be expecting in a novel about soldiers. Her monologue was a foretelling of a half century of mostly unnecessary  surgery from the perspective 1951, the year From Here to Eternity was published. I liked the idea that the obscure French guitarman Django Rheinhardt was the inspiration for the musical theme of the book—The Re-enlistment Blues. I liked the setting of the story. Hawaii in the months leading up to Pearl Harbor provides tension. The reader knows what’s coming. Schofield Barracks, one of the handsomest posts in the army, adds ambiance. Hotel Street with its bars and whorehouses and Waikiki are like stage sets for a series of taut scenes.
I liked the characters. Robert E. Lee Prewitt is a thirty year man, committed to the army where he’s found a home after a lousy childhood and a life on the bum. He’s a great bugler and good boxer but decides, stubbornly, not to do either and his decision brings him a transfer to ‘G’ Company, a jock outfit where the company commander is determined to win the regimental boxing championship. When Prewitt won’t box, he gets the “treatment” from his fellows to force him to toe the line, tacitly approved of by Captain Holmes. Prewitt wants to prove he can take everything dished out to him and does. First Sergeant Milt Warden (played expertly by Burt Lancaster in the film) is the perfect soldier and ruthlessly efficient non-com. He admires Prewitt but can’t overtly show it. He hates Captain Holmes and seduces his captain’s wife to exact revenge. Karen Holmes turns out to be a handful. She’s had a previous affair with Maylon Stark, the Mess Sergeant, back at Fort Bliss, and Maylon tries to warn Milt off. But Milt Warden doggedly pursues romance with Karen and is soon hopelessly in love with her, risking his rank and career to spend afternoons together at Waikiki. In the meantime, Prewitt forms a close friendship with Angelo Maggio, a tough little Italian from Brooklyn. Prewitt also liasons with a prostitute named Lorene at Mrs. Kipfer’s Hotel New Congress and is soon shacked up with her. Lorene, nee Alma, intends to save her money, return to her small town in Oregon, marry a banker, join the country club and become respectible. Angelo gets tossed into the brutal Scholfield Stockade, the first jail to host John Dillinger. Then Prewitt slugs a non-com and is also sentenced to the stockade. The stockade is the most interesting section of the book and most difficult to read. The guards are brutal, dedicated to breaking the prisoners and making them into obedient soldiers. The toughest, most recalcitrant prisoners are placed in Barracks Number 2 where they are led by a hard timer named Jack Malloy, an almost mystical, Christlike figure who attempts to instruct the men in the methods of passive resistance and mind control. Jack tells them how to survive solitary confinement, “The Black Hole” by using a form of meditation that he learned “reading yogi books.”
“You concentrate on a black spot inside your head in front of your eyes and whenever a thought starts to come in your mind, you kind of push it away from you, sort of, and don’t think it. After a while, you do it long enough, they stop coming and all you see is just light...”
Prewitt is actually able to follow the instructions and has an out of body experience while in solitary.
Maggio fakes madness and is given a Section 8 (mental discharge) after terrible beatings at the hands of Fatso Judson the sadistic lead guard of the Stockade. Jack Malloy escapes and adds to his legend. Fatso beats another prisoner to death and Prewitt vows to kill him in retribution. Nine days after his release Prewitt stalks Judson in an alley behind a bar and they fight with knives. Fatso dies and Prewitt is seriously injured. He makes his way to Lorene’s home and becomes, effectively, a deserter and after December 7, 1941, goes on a long, drunken, binge. Finally, when he learns the prisoners have been released to their units he tries to rejoin ‘G’ Company. And, just like in the movie, he is shot and killed trying to cross the Waialae Golf Course (where they play the Hawaiian Open every January). The women are being evacuated and Warden is able to rendezvous one last time with Karen where they chastely pledge their love recognizing they don’t really love each other and that they will never meet again. Karen had browbeaten Sgt. Warden into applying to become an officer so they could marry. But, too much the enlisted man, he has already turned down the commission after learning what she described as a brief event with Maylon Stark had, in fact, been a serious six month relationship.
In the final scene Karen and Lorene find themselves next to each other on an ocean liner leaving Honolulu, passing all the familiar landmarks of Waikiki and Diamond Head and Hanauma Bay. Lorene tells an illusionary tale of her bomber pilot fiancee named Robert E. Lee Prewitt, and Karen, who knows all the intimate details of ‘G’ Company laughs (to herself) at human folly while, at the same time in pursuit of her own folly, invites the shipboard advances of a young, handsome, Air Corps Lt/Colonel.
There’s a lot to like in From Here to Eternity. I liked it when James Jones made a pun on the title of his own very serious book (From Hair to Maternity). I liked the karmic aspect of the story which arcs fatalistically to inevitable conclusions based on a series of connected decisions. Prewitt decides not to play bugle. Decides not to box. Decides he’s in love with Lorene. Decides to slug the old sergeant. Decides to join Maggio and Malloy in Barracks Number 2. Decides to kill Fatso. Decides to rejoin the company over Lorene’s objection because he’s “a soldier.”
I liked the authenticity of the dialogue. I liked the author’s ability to describe how a group of men can form a family and become quite emotional about their shared experience. I liked the way Jones shows how we all create little universes within universes which become so important and all consuming. I even liked the unexpected suicide scene which was brilliantly written. I liked the political incorrectness of the book which is often shocking in its discussion of homosexuality, masterbation, sex, marriage, race, love, religion and brutality. It must have sizzled in 1951 when it won the National Book Award.
Most of all I liked the fact that the book is 850 pages long. When they’re really good, you want them to keep on going.

My Life in Orange: Growing Up With the Guru by Tim Guest

Little Timmy’s mom joined a cult and he got dragged along and had a very unhappy childhood. When Tim got older and became a writer he decided his years as a child of the Rajneeshees would make an interesting memoir. He was mostly wrong. What this little kid did when he was lonely is not particularly fascinating and Tim’s activities, his comings and goings, his visitations with his father in California, his transitory friendships encourage a rapid turning of the pages looking for the “good parts.” In My Life in Orange the good parts are any dish on the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh or his followers and the malefactors who took over the cult and turned the State of Oregon upside down in the early 80’s. (There is some dish, but not enough to justify the $14 cover price).
The story of the Bhagwan, his chief lieutenant Ma Sheela, Rajneesh City (aka Antelope) and Rajneeshpurnam (The Ranch) is one of the most bizarre and fascinating tales of the late twentieth century. It’s really too bad that Tim Guest wasn’t older during his Rajneeshee childhood. For ten years, starting at age six, his mother dragged him from one location to another—England, India, Oregon, Germany and England again, where she was, in turn, a high ranking disciple, an out of favor dishwasher/waitress, and then promoted once more. So Tim saw it all, including the Bhagwan, and had he been older might been more interested in the social dynamic, the politics, the organization and intrigue, instead of his lego toys, his stuffed animals and his mother’s benign neglect. Still, as a journalist, with access to many former sanyasins he had a chance to put together an interesting account by interviewing his mother and her former colleagues. The childhood narrative is broken up with history of the movement, particularly the evildoings at The Ranch    in the last harrowing days of Bhagwan’s glory in America. These are interesting but seem to be drawn mostly from other memoirs and newspaper reports rather than from first hand accounts.
Expectation often colors one’s opinion. I had hoped that My Life in Orange would offer some real insights into the Rajneesh experience, particularly at Rajneeshpurnam.
In the summer of 1985, a short time before the bliss hit the fan at The Ranch, our little family, on our way from Yakima to Ashland made a side trip to Rajneeshpurnam. My brother Bart was with us and he had a couple of friends living at The Ranch he wanted to see. We took an exit off Highway 97 and drove down a winding grade into a picturesque western valley into what had been the town of Antelope. We thought we were there, but learned while having vegetarian lunch at the local Rajneesh owned cafe, that The Ranch was still a good distance off. Bart got on a pay phone and called his friend Scott who happened to be on duty at The Ranch’s Visitor’s Center and he told us to come along. It was a long way from Antelope to The Ranch—perhaps twenty miles of dusty dirt road. The route was marked by guard shacks and armed guards, though no one stopped us. It was eery driving through the Eastern Oregon dessert and seeing these armed checkpoints. It was as if we were approaching SMERSH headquarters or the secret entrance to a bandits’ lair. Finally, we came to the Visitor’s Center and Bart ran in to confer with Scott. He couldn’t get off work but was able to contact the other friend, Sunny, who was to meet us and give us a tour.
Just beyond the Visitor’s Center was a gap in a ridge and as we passed through we entered a different world, a world unexpected in the dry wasteland of this part of the state. There was a lake with an earthen dam. The dam was landscaped with flowers. We began to see orange and maroon clothed people walking along the road or waiting for busses. There was an airfield with several aircraft on the runway and, ahead, a boomtown of nondescript buildings. Tent-like structures lined the hillsides. There were lots of people all in their colorful costumes wearing the necklace that symbolized their discipleship and devotion to the Bhagwan. There was a sort of a business district like a strip mall with a large bookstore as an anchor and we parked while waiting our rendezvous with Sunny who breezed in on a cloud of maroon looking like a Playmate gone cultish. Sunny gave an overview of The Ranch as we ate ice cream cones from the ice cream parlor. Couples wandered the street holding hands, licking their cones. Always couples. The atmosphere was sexually charged. Sunny was telling us that the Bhagwan had started to come to the night club every night and was dancing with them. There was a hotel we could stay at. We should stay, she told us. We could dance with the Bhagwan.
Our family has some experience with gurus. And, based on this experience the idea of a dancing Bhagwan was humorous, even ludicrous. Bart and I had a yen to stay the night and view the dancing. But Linda and Noble found this idea abhorrent. They didn’t like The Ranch. Didn’t like the atmosphere. They sensed that something was horribly wrong and wanted to leave immediately. They felt there was evil lurking there. Bart and I argued a bit. But we had a weak case. We didn’t feel the evil but had to admit there was something a bit goofy about a huge bookstore, for example, where every single book was by one author, the prolific Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. We lost the argument and our chance to witness the Dance of the Bhagwan, said our goodbyes to Sunny and hit the road.
Of course, the dancing of the Bhagwan ended soon after, with the poor old guru trying to flee the county in a private jet, with a bag full of diamond watches. He plea bargained his way out of the US, left Ma Sheela to take the fall, such as it was, and finally made his way back to India where he died a few years later.
Tim Guest and his mother ended their life in orange and worked out their issues. Tim wrote a book about it. But, not the one I was hoping to read.

An Unsuitable Job for a Woman by P. D. James

Continuing my survey of crime fiction, I arrive late at the bookshelf of P. D. James who, now close to eighty years old, has just published her most recent entry into the series involving a police commander cum poet named Adam Dalgliesh. In addition to the series involving Dalgliesh, Ms. James wrote two books with a young female private detective named Cordelia Gray as heroine. In An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, the first of the two, Cordelia has just inherited the Pryde Detective Agency from her mentor, a cancer-wracked suicide who once worked for, was sacked by, but who worships his old boss Adam Dalgliesh. Cordelia’s training was peppered with Dalgliesh aphorisms which prove most helpful when she is interrogated by this famous officer at the end of the book. Using her intelligence and cleverness and survivor skills, Cordelia is able to outlast her mentor’s mentor and avoid arrest and prosecution as an accessory to murder.

Is Cordelia guilty? Yes she is. And, her moral ambivalence, her ability to make a quick judgment in favor of a premeditated murderer, is just one of the things that makes her a fascinating heroine. As a sometime writer of fiction it is interesting to try to analyze how a master of the genre builds a character who’s thoughts, observations and activity will keep us turning pages. Cordelia’s second and last adventure, The Skull Beneath the Skin, was publish ten years after An Unsuitable Job for a Woman. I haven’t read it though I will because Cordelia is an engaging character.

So, what has P. D. James told us about Cordelia in this first book? Her mother died in the first hour of her birth. She was separated from or abandoned by her father and, as a result, spent her early years in a succession of foster homes where all her foster parents demanded that she be happy. From this unreasonable expect ion the little girl developed a stoical nature and the ability to hide her emotions when necessary. Living a childhood of emotional deprivation, Cordelia devised a mythical mother who in that last hour of life loved her daughter intensely, enough love for a lifetime, and whom Cordelia consults for advice and counsel.

At age ten, through a confusion of identities on an exam, she is entered into a Roman Catholic school, and though an incorrigible Protestant, is well-educated by dedicated nuns at the Convent of the Immaculate Conception. No longer needing to hide her intelligence and cleverness, she flourishes and aspires to a scholarship to Cambridge. But at age sixteen, for reasons not explained, her father, an itinerant Marxist poet and amateur revolutionary, calls on her to join him in Europe and she goes. For five years, they travel about as she acts as cook, nurse, companion and hanger on, spending hours in art galleries which the revolutionaries liked to use as rendezvous points for their nefarious activities.

When she is twenty-one, her father dies in Rome and Cordelia returns to London where she takes a job at a secretarial agency. She is assigned to Pryde’s Detective Agency (“we take pride in our work”) and is soon working cases with the pathetic but lovable Bernie Pryde who teaches her the rudiments of the detective business and loads her up with wisdom from Adam Dalgliesh. He also teachers her how to shoot a pistol (she becomes by her own admission a credible shot) and rents her a bedroom in his rented house. His motives seem pure and fatherly. There is no hint of impropriety, though it is clear that Cordelia is attractive.

We learn that she has had two lovers. One she saw a a mercy case and the other she might have loved but was glad to see leave her life. Cordelia has an independent nature.

Physically, she is small, a “slip of a girl” with a tough body and the face of a cat. She has light brown hair, large hazel eyes, wide cheekbones and a gentle childish mouth. We know that she can sew for she makes a suede drawstring bag for Bernie’s handgun. She is a coffee drinker, enjoys a shandy (a cold pint of lager graced with a lemonade top) and a Scotch egg (a hard-boiled egg stuffed into mashed potato and deep fried) and has a hearty appetite for a small woman.

She is a reader, always carries a paperback in her bag, often her favorite Jane Austin (but during the course of this book—Hardy’s Trumpet Major. Obviously well read, she recognizes a passage from William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell an also an obscure Shakespearian allusion. During a short shopping trip in Cambridge, the setting for this novel, she buys a small volume of Keats. Cordelia has strong views on architecture and decorating, and is knowledgeable about art. She can drive a stick shift, loves clothes, especially her favorite Jaeger suit, but is determined to get her entire wardrobe in one suitcase, an fixation no doubt resulting from her life of moving and wandering. Curiously, for someone not grounded with a sense of home or place, she is obsessed with order and punctuality, perhaps as the result of six settled years in the convent school.

Detective work may in fact be an unsuitable job for a woman. But Cordelia Gray proves most adept at the work using her survivor skills, intelligence and tenaciousness to solve the crime. Her decision, then, to aid the murderer of the villain of the book catches the reader by surprise. Putting herself at great personal risk for a person she doesn’t even like, as the result of a snap emotional judgment on the righteousness of the killing, seems somewhat out of character and perhaps is only a device of the author. P. D. James clearly wants to put Cordelia in the hands of Adam Dalgliesh who interrogates her but doesn’t succeed in breaking her. Cordelia and Dalgliesh go head to head. Cordelia wins and earns his grudging respect though he knows, circumstantially, that she is guilty as an accessory to murder. But in the end, he deems her suitable.

Dark Star Safari by Paul Theroux

Africa is just huge. It’s at least four times the land mass of the United States. One small country, Mozambique, is twice as big as California. Africa is also pretty much screwed. Civil wars, megalomaniacal leaders, corrupt government, outflow of talent, lack of infrastructure, AIDS and other disease are ubiqitous. Africa is a dangerous place. Has been and will be.  I’d like to see it yet I don’t want to go there. But I am curious. What shall I do? I will send my travel doppelganger. He’s about the same age I am. Okay...he’s a year older. He lives in Pupukea Heights on Oahu part of the year. So do I. He’s a writer. I wrote something once. He wears glasses. Me too. He’s known for being endearingly irascible and wittily observant. I’ve been known to be a pain in the ass who can occasionally make people laugh. It will almost be the same as going myself except I won’t get sick, won’t have to eat disgusting food, drink bad water, get shot at, devoured by mosquitoes or robbed. I won’t have to sleep in dank, dirty hotels or ride in armed cattle truck convoys, decrepit ferries, rusty trains, cranky buses, obsolete boats or native dugouts. Here’s what I will do. I’ll get Paul Theroux to take the trip. That  guy will do anything to come up with material for a book. He’ll walk around England The Kingdom by the Sea, ride lots of trains
Riding the Iron Rooster through China and  through the Americas on The Old Patagonia Express,  and even paddles some through the Pacific in The Happy Isles of Oceana.  When he’s not traveling, essaying or assembling compendiums of his various works into other titles to bulk up his list, he writes entertaining novels of questionable value. I like his travel books better and enjoyed Dark Star Safari very much.
I’m going to guess Mr. Theroux was just about sixty when he set out from Cairo to make his way to Capetown some 4566 miles. Since he didn’t travel in a straight line as he made his way through East Africa, he must have logged way more miles than that. It is a bold sixty year old who sets out on such a comfortless trip as the author undertook. Most of us, in our sixties, are creatures of routine and habit, requiring hot water, rich, easily accessible foods, plus clean and copious amounts of toilet paper to make it through the day. Theroux is an old Africa hand having served there in the Peace Corps. Peace Corps people, in my experience, are pretty knarly, disdainful of luxury travel, obsessed with broken down buses and other arcane methods of transport. After the Peace Corps Theroux stayed on as a teacher, an experience fictionalized in My Secret History wherein the main character sleeps with many African and other girls in the era before HIV. Theroux is a kind of writing machine who turns every experience into a book. His tone is generally crabby. He finds humor in the unusual. He is adventurous, curious, courageous, even foolhardy. And, he feels bad about what has happened to Africa in the years since he left. Things are worse. His old friends are often in high government positions and just as often are corrupt or on their way. Many old acquaintances have served time in prison as political prisoners. Others are hopeful about the future of Africa but anxious to send their children abroad for education. And, those kids want to stay in Europe or America. One of the industries which comes under Theroux’s withering commentary are the do-gooders, the professional aid organizations who accomplish nothing while driving around Africa in new Range Rovers, a form of transport abhorrent to Peace Corps vet Theroux. He visits his old college which is disintegrating and is saddened. He meets white farmers in Zimbabwe who have been driven from their farms.
In a postscript to the paperback edition, Theroux returns to Malawi, Zimbabwe and and Zambia to see how things are coming along. They’re worse. After taking the Dark Star Safari it’s difficult to be optimistic about the Dark Continent. But, you’ll know way more than you did before you started. And, you’ll be glad it was Theroux with his boots on the ground and not you.
Hey Paul! Where are we going next?

Castles of Steel By Robert K. Massie

They say the only difference between men and boys is the size of their toys. Very true of war where the boys get to play deadly games. In the nearly forgotten World War, W.W.I, the biggest toys were the dreadnoughts, the battleships which carried guns that could fire a projectile weighing nearly a ton for several miles. They fired from a rolling platform with accuracy that could find a distant ship, hit it, blow it apart and sink it. In a great naval battle a huge ship and a thousand or more men could disappear in seconds.
Robert K. Massie, a Pulitzer Prize winner brings us Castles of Steel: Britain, Germany, and the Winning of the Great War at Sea. Massie provides nearly 800 pages of detail on the development of the British and German navies, the characters who led them, the geography and weather, technology and intelligence that determined the outcome of the famous battles they fought. Some of these battles still echo faintly today like the Dardanelles and the Battle of Jutland, one of the largest fleet battles in history involving 250 warships. Familiar also is the Battle of the Falklands though this one of W.W.I vintage and not of Ms Thatcher’s design. In addition to a naval battle fought on the Atlantic side of South America, another notable engagement, the Battle of Coronel was waged on the west side of that continent.
The characters were larger than life: young Winston Churchill served as First Lord of the Admiralty before he was sacked and joined the army in France. Churchill had brought Admiral Jackie Fisher out of retirement to be First Sea Lord. Fisher was legendary as the father of the modern British navy. In charge of the Grand Fleet was the widely admired Admiral John Jellico who moved the fleet to Scapa Flow, a huge bay surrounded and protected by the Orkney Islands to the north of Scotland. Admiral David Beatty commanded the Battle Cruisers and was touted as England’s next Nelson for his aggressiveness in battle. On the German side were Admirals Tirpitz, Scheer and Hipper and Kaiser William who was so proud of his navy that he didn’t want to risk it. As a result the German High Seas Fleet stayed bottled up in port most of the war emerging only on a few occasions. And because British intelligence had cracked the German code as they were to do in W.W.II, the British were always waiting for the German fleet, first at The Battle of Dogger Banks, then at Jutland. Even with this intelligence, the German navy got the best of the British in both these battles though the High Seas Fleet was sent scurrying back to the safety of their base at Wilhelmshaven.
Author Massie describes the many mistakes made on both sides in each of the major campaigns and the always surprising amount of egotism that drives “great” men to defend their actions and undermine their rivals. Not only that, but the wives and mistresses get into the act as well.
W.W.I at sea was represented by the devastating blockade of Germany by the Allies and the submarine war finally launched against American and neutral shipping by the Germans. The United States was forced into the war and the additional manpower tipped the balance. The German fleet was interned at Scapa Flow where their admiral ordered his men to scuttle the fleet to the surprise of the British and consternation of the French. Many of the hulks have been salvaged but enough wrecks remain to make Scapa Flow a very popular scuba diving destination. http://www.scapa-flow.co.uk/
Castles of Steel is a long book but easy and exciting to read with many poignant personal stories woven into the narrative. In The Battle of Jutland the 587’ long battleship Invincible was hit and broke in half and sunk in 180’ of water. Each half of the went vertically to the bottom and stuck there with 100’ of the bow and 100’ of the stern sticking perpendicularly out of the water with their few survivors cheering the other ships of their squadron as they raced by in pursuit of the Germans.
In another incident a British ship damaged a German submarine with a depth charge (invented near the end of the war). A device for listening under water had just been put into service and the British crew could hear the turning of propellers and the scraping of the submarine hull on the bottom. The noises stopped. Then, a pistol shot. Then twenty-four more pistol shots. Then silence.
The aircraft carrier ended the age of the dreadnoughts. The battleship on which so much treasure had been spent, on which reputations had been made and on which strategy had been based were now old toys. Obsolete. Mothballed.  The Great War was their time in history and their story is told well by Robert Massie.

The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell

Americans don’t have the same investment in W.W. I as the Brits do. They lost a million men and were in the trenches four years. We Yanks lost 48,000 (less than Vietnam) and were in combat six months. As a result, W. W. I is prominent in British memory; less so in ours. For us W. W. I is overshadowed by subsequent wars. We spend little time with it though a close examination shows that we are impacted by it today especially with our language. “Over the top,” “lousy,” and “crummy,” are words and phrases that evolved from the Great War. And, the form letter made its first appearance as well as a post card for the troops to use to write home. They could scratch out phrases that did not apply. (I have been admitted to the hospital and am sick/wounded and am going on well/hope to be discharged soon.) Paul Fussell wrote this book in 1975 and it has been named one the 100 best works of nonfiction of the twentieth century and was a winner of the National Book Award. This isn’t a history per se. It is a series of essays in which Fussell, a W.W.II wounded infantry lieutenant wished to explore three questions: 1) “What did the war feel like to those whose world was the trenches.” 2) “How did they get through this bizarre experience?” 3) “And, finally, how did they transform their feelings into language and literary form?”
W. W. I transformed the landscape of France with a trench system that stretched 400 miles from Belgium to Switzerland. Each side’s system of trenches consisted of multiple parallel ditches so that between the Allies and the Germans there were 25,000 miles of trench. In these muddy, death-filled gullies, men lived for four long years. They slept, ate, and died. Many of them wrote and the author spent an entire summer at the British War Museum reading their letters, dispatches, diaries and notebooks. Curiously, several of the most famous men from WWI are poets and writers. They were excellent officers and performed heroically. Wilfred Owen, a young poet who was killed. Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and Edmund Blunden all survived wounds and shell shock to publish widely read memoirs and poetry. They would serve time in the trenches, be wounded, sent home to England and return.  England was very close. You could have breakfast in the trenches and dinner at your club. Sassoon, Graves and Blunden all suffered from shell shock (what we now call post traumatic stress syndrome). Sassoon was hospitalized after writing a manifesto against the war. He was treated by a Dr. Rivers and their encounter has been immortalized Regeneration, the first in a trilogy of WWI novels by Pat Barker which captures the feel and sensibility of those damaged by life in the trenches. Great Britain was very much about class in 1914 and the officer corps was filled with the cream of society. There was a rush to enlist and these highly educated Brits, endoctrinated with a national literature in which the “enemy” was the “foe,” where a “soldier” was a “warrior,” and “where one’s death” is one’s “fate,” took their euphemisms to the battlefield expecting to “assail,” and “vanquish,” to be “keen” and “plucky,” to display their “gallantry” in a “manly” way after responding to the “summons” and “joining the colors” and, if need be, to “perish” in the attempt to “conquer.” Professor Fussell shows us how language and literature, theater and myth affected the thought process of those caught up in trench warfare. WWI was the stupidest of wars. The eminent war historian John Keegan has written, “The First World War is a mystery. It’s origins are a mystery. So is its course.” In face of the irony of the situation (stalemate in the trenches) and stupidity of the its leaders (sacrificial attacks against heavy firepower), the question remains, how did these young men sustain themselves for these long, nasty years? Paul Fussell makes his best effort to answer this question. This is a first class piece of writing and scholarship.

Inspectors Frost and Ghote

  A few years back an Englishman named John Williams who loved American detective fiction traveled to the US to seek out and interview his favorite American detective fiction authors. He toured the country and met and talked with James Lee Burke, Tony Hillerman, James Elroy, Andrew Vachss, James Crumley, Sara Paretsky, Joe Gores, Gar Anthony Harwood, Carl Hiasson, Elmore Leonard, George V. Higgins and the late Eugene Izzi. If you’ve never read a detective novel, this is a pretty good track to run on. (Though Williams tastes run to what might be described as “hard-boiled”). His trip was memorialized in a worthwhile, but now out of print, memoir titled Into the Badlands.

    There are so many detective novels out there that a reader needs the kind of help that Into the Badlands provides. Mystery Guide.com http://www.mysteryguide.com/index.html is a great on-line source for information on the grand category of “mystery” and breaks it down into seventeen different genres! These include “private eye,” “hard-boiled,” and “history,” to name just three. Yes, a history genre. That is correct. There are shelves full of mysteries set in medieval times, for example, where nuns, or monks or retired soldiers solve murders in an historical milieu. I don’t prefer them, myself, but a couple I’ve read are very engaging and skillfully done. What I look for in a detective novel is a sense of place and a well-defined main character. On the Williams list James Lee Burke and Tony Hillerman do the best job of satisfying my need.

    But back to Mr. Williams—I’m not sure that he needed to leave England to find two of the best mystery writers—R.D. Wingfield and H.R.F. Keating. Perhaps R. D. Wingfield wasn’t published yet when John Williams began his quest. Perhaps neither Wingfield or Keating is hard-boiled enough for his taste.

    Wingfield is responsible for the Inspector Jack Frost series (A Touch of Frost, Night Frost, Winter Frost, and Hard Frost). Jack Frost is a rumpled, politically incorrect, anti-establishment character whose only purpose is to bumble through a case until he solves it. He is not motivated by acclaim or hope of promotion. He seems motivated only by motive. I suppose that, technically, the Frost books are “procedurals”. But they are procedurals not in the sense of how-the-cop-solves-the-crime but in their evocation of how organizations really work. In most murder mysteries you begin with a dead body and the detective starts talking to people. One clue leads to another until the crime is solved. With Wingfield’s books you get a clearer picture of what the life of a homicide inspector might be like with multiple cases which may or may not link together to deal with simultaneously. In addition, the interaction of the the folks in the office affect the pursuit of justice, or injustice. And, he shows how the self-serving antics of Frost’s boss, an incompetent bureaucratic numbers cruncher gets in the way of the pursuit of criminals. Frost is untidy, his life is untidy and his job is untidy. Everything in his world is a great big mess and he is relieved when he finally clears a case. Even then, there is no sense of finality. We know that Jack Frost has more to do. Wingfield’s books race at a high rate of speed, usually for about four hundred pages which is long for a detective novel, with short stops for Frost to wipe the ashes off his shirt and try to recover from insulting someone. These books are highly recommended. They are never contrived—a common problem with detective novels.

    But my favorite of all the detectives is Inspector Ghote, the creation of H. R. F. Keating. Inspector Ghote lives not in LA or New York, Chicago, New Orleans or London. Ghote lives and works in Bombay, India. In contrast to the detectives who people most other novels, inspector Ghote is rather soft-boiled; curried even. There are about a dozen books in this series. Each is one to look forward to.
    Inspector Ghote seems mostly unknown in the United States. If you check Amazon.com you will see that there are virtually no reader reviews. But Keating is a proflific writer with perhaps twenty books on his resume. Without knowing his body of work I have the highest respect for his skill based on reading The Sheriff of Bombay and Dead on Time (since writing this a ways back I’ve read several more of this series; all good). Both are short, two hundred pages or so and quick reads. Quick but very satisfying. Anyone who has ever tried writing anything will appreciate the craftsmanship you’ll find in these books. In addition, Keating has a wonderful sense of place and if one has an affinity for or interest in India, it’s delightful to spend time with Ghote.

    Inspector Ghote seems overmatched by his cases, his superiors, his suspects and witnesses. But he has extreme confidence in himself and pushes tenaciously for a conclusion to his assigned crimes. And, while we follow his progress Keating gives us some education about India, parts of India that most Westerners will never know. The Sheriff of Bombay is set in the red-light district of Bombay and we meet prostitutes of every class and caste as Ghote pursues the killer of one of the “ladies.” Yet Ghote’s trip through Bombay’s brothels doesn’t feel seedy, nasty or sinfull. It seems instead to be karmic, reflecting the Hindu belief that past lives determine the present one. Karma dictates that we are each actors playing our parts. The women are treated with great sympathy and even the suspects are treated with dignity. Ghote occasionally uses a heavy hand but it is mostly through raising his voice and browbeating rather than roughing someone up.

    In Dead on Time Ghote travels to a rural village where he recalls his own village boyhood and relives the vision and smells of the “hour of cow dust” when the cattle return from the fields at dusk. And in Dead on Time Keating has fun with his title theme contrasting city time with village time and making constant, clever word plays on time. There are persistent references to clocks and wrist watches and scenes that take place in watch towers. The murder occurs in a clock shop with a clock salesman as victim and one of the chief suspects is a watch salesman. Ghote is put on a severe time deadline by his superior who owns a beautiful new wristwatch while Ghote’s timepiece goes on the blink. Ghote is chastised by his wife for not spending enough time with his son. In the end he is “dead on time” for his deadline (as in “dead on target.”)

    It’s hard to say what genre Mysteryguide.com would place Ghote in for, shockingly, Keating doesn’t appear on the website at all. From our provincial point of view we can place him in the genre of Foreign Detective. H.R.F. Keating is the author of Crime & Mystery : The 100 Best Books. Presumably he knows where he belongs.