Tag Archives: book review

DATING

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I’m in a writing group where I got the prompt: Write about two characters who like each other but don’t get a happily ever after.

Dating came to mind, and within a week The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times published articles on the hopelessness of dating scenes. The Journal highlighted the use of rejection notes after the first date. The Times went though the particulars of dates and what creeped the women about one table-mate.

The approach to dating and romance is off, unlike Shakespeare’s day when love was fixed. Today it is fluid and adjusting because information is always available instantly. Friendship, not acquaintance, is  a good start, but dating between generations is suspect. In the movie, Network, William Holden admits to an uncontrollable infatuation with Faye Dunaway, a woman a generation younger. The wife screams, “Does she love you?” Holden answers, “I don’t know. She grew up watching Bugs Bunny.”

Americans have become a visual people. Let’s see what you look like on the Internet before my heart throbs. Use a checklist: Morning lark/night owl; Sports/no sports; Reader/no books in sight; Homebody/wanderer; Drugs/no drugs; Talker/thinker; No rhyme to poetry/weaving gold; This is a problem/how to help; Separate bed(room)/sheet music; Irritable/easy going; Adamant/sense of the ridiculous; Appearance/dignity & integrity; Dressed to attend upcoming Kennedy Center Awards/slob.

I’m no good at any of this. In Call of the Dead John LeCarre described George Smiley at his work: “It provided him with what he…loved best in life; academic excursions into the mysteries of human behavior; disciplined by the practical application of his own deductions.” (Chapter One) Of course from those pages George Smiley was Alex Guinness who had the great fortune to play opposite Grace Kelly during her last movie. I can think of no better launchpad than that, carrying out the mantle of George into the future.

That’s where I’m at, in getting to-know-you. But a question from Socrates arises and must be addressed: “An unexamined life is not worth living.” Avoid the old, poisoned Greek teacher and be forlorn forever. Remember no examination should be private. Your chosen mate is supposed to help.

WE ARE LINCOLN MEN

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David Herbert Donald

Every man who was a friend or had exposure to Abraham Lincoln wanted history to know that each of them was Lincoln’s best friend. They were all wrong. WE ARE LINCOLN MEN tells why.

This book is about friendship among human beings. It uses Abraham Lincoln as the person everyone wanted friendship with, not always during his lifetime. Over those fifty-six years, in society and work, Lincoln was a pleasant, resourceful fellow to have around with an inexhaustible supply of stories and antedotes, and hiding his imagination and intelligence. Lincoln liked persons like himself: Story tellers and persons who were fountains of tales – clean, dirty and engaging.

But what is friendship? The book does not answer the question directly. Communication is key, and talking is the primary means to convey what one person or another is thinking, is doing, might do, and how reactions come out; discretion of friends is necessary. Some stuff might never be repeated, and some might be repeated only long after the telling. And acceptance and going forward is always a goal – life goes on in the company of friends.

Each of these elements is present in WE ARE LINCOLN MEN, but none of Lincoln’s friendships had a chance to come to fruition: Interrupted by time and travel – Illinois, Washington; position – country lawyer, President; issues and thinking differently about the Constitution and solutions, concerns about slaves, the union and state’s rights.

Of course, Lincoln was a master of politics and law but handled as best he could issues before him, until his assassination. There is a tendency to make Lincoln prescient, a master and in control. No, he sometimes was making it up as he came to him – using his intelligence, collecting all information and opinions and ingenuity to make the best decisions. David Herbert Donald wrote an excellent biography of Abraham Lincoln and next, this book. Many of those decisions are in these books.

If there is a shortcoming in either book was defining Lincoln’s imagination and originality. In many ways he thought originally, and how that manifested itself to the American public was in speeches and amongst men, with humor, and sometimes gallows humor. This part of the story is difficult to tell because the assassination cut short Lincoln’s life at War’s end.

Humor – what delighted Lincoln, what amused him, what intrigued him – tells much about the man. There are collections of stories and antedotes but no systematic analyses connected to the President’s life and actions. Many human beings finding entertainment in the mind – concepts, organizing ideas and facts, storing it in the memory and using it when appropriate – is exercising the imagination. This process makes human beings different from all other animals. Getting

within a brain and learning how a biographical subject works, thinks, responds – sometimes on impulse, greatly aids the work of the writer. Whether a subject can recall something from memory quickly (being bright) or it rolls in after a few hours, makes the subject likable, engaging and social.

One trait coming from Lincoln is explaining his thinking to others. He told stories, and they were sometimes metaphors. Metaphors are not always understood, e.g. the British ambassador, but using that means to communicate suggests that Lincoln sought the polite way to urge persons to do what he wanted: Metaphors are by nature indirect.

On the friendship premise alone, I recommend We Are Lincoln Men.

L.A. NOIR

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John Buntin

Written in a journalistic style, this history supports the notion of Los Angeles becoming a city by accident. Primarily, there was no law enforcement. Crime rates were high. For a long time Los Angeles Police were paid off by various sorts of law breakers: Gamblers, smugglers, white slavers; and white collar criminals – rule breakers, favor-for-favor enthusiasts, and rich or influential persons taking advantage. Los Angeles seemed a city (and county) which was unmanageable and unpoliced. Counting the population growth was a feat, let alone policing with an undermanned police department.

Robert Parker became a Los Angeles policeman in the 1920s. He was thoroughly incorruptible. His primary focus was overcoming organized crime coming from eastern cities: Mickey Cohen. Cohen was elusive and laws were not enforced, like paying taxes to the IRS. Cohen died owning the federal government more than $500,000, yet he was in and out of prison (mostly out), living the high life (people gave him gifts). His attributable income for a year exceeded the amount of taxes he ever paid in taxes for a decade. He never ratted. He was smilingly approachable to the press but vague with answers to committees and to courts. During a Congressional hearing Cohen was accused of threatening a man “to put his lights out.” Cohen’s response: “Look it, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m not an electrician.”

Parker like many crusaders was blind to the changing population and to social forces. 1950s Los Angeles was not white as it was during the 1920s when Parker joined the force. World War Two brought in hundreds of thousands of African-Americans; the Mexican-American population grew as rapidly. Parker did not change his views of either minority and their criminal ways. NOTE the book only mentions organizational shifts in the Police Department from 1930 to 1970. So Parker’s management abilities are difficult to evaluate.

From 1910 to 1960 the book gives enough detail to tell the foregoing story (pages 1 – 300). But three events – Watts Riots 1965 – Kennedy Assassination 1968 and Rodney King and those riots (1991) are presented in 46 pages. The point the author tries to make is Parker’s ordinances and regulations isolating the Police Chief from the whims of the Los Angeles City Council were changed in 1992. Thereafter, Daryl Gates (presented as incompetent but scored well on texts) was removed.

NO HISTORY

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The American Civil War in Missouri, 1864-1865, did not end in 1865. Violence spread across the center of the country and west, and ended later. Most of the behaviors held by Americans in 1865, resulted in quick resorts to violence, arising from unsettled conditions.

An explanation of why this occurred is told in The Collapse of Price’s Raid, Mark Lause. Along with a prequel, that book tells of battles in Missouri during the Civil War. Every word is as accurate as can be stated. The biggest drawbacks are (1) the numbers of players – who led these men in each skirmish or raid, (2) what they were thinking or what they believed, and (3) where each encounter happened and (4) the sense of the battle. Specifically, there are no maps and no diagrams indicating where attackers and defenders were. From the words of the book alone, the Confederate forces were wastefully expended; captured Union fighters might be executed. Of course, the Union prevailed.

The most telling statement about Missouri of those years and afterward was in the last paragraph of the book:

…the peace that settled over the western border also required peace among the Confederates and peace among the Unionists as well. And that mandated was, for most whites, a blessed forgetfulness about the real issues and experiences of the Civil War. (emphasis supplied, p.194)

There was NO HISTORY. If men who did the fighting kept everything untold for 40 or 50 years and died with those experiences, without challenging, discussing and coming to some sense of what actually happened, little was learned and nothing was gained from the Civil War. What passed to succeeding generations were made up stories and fantasies about feats, deeds, glorious times and burdensome oppressions and phantoms that the fighting men generated and reenforced years after the fighting, and told to succeeding generations. The Collapse of Price’s Raid is a book which explains why the Confederacy did not succeed. Divisions among Confederate soldiers and raiders were as deep and rank, as those with the enemy, or between the rich and poor today.

Today, on the Left in America made up facts and stuff from LBJ’s Great Society plus the Vietnam War (largely forgotten) form the basis for what proponents envisioned that America should be today. These people are satisfied with benign neglect. Anyone proposing change like Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton are villains. (Clinton less so.) Their moves to get people away from comfort zones, and country going forward were significant during the 1980s and 1990s.

On the Right appears a more ludicrous set of facts and thoughts. Some of the proposals want to take America back one hundred years, to the years of jazz, partner dancing and snappy band music and movies, but no pensions and no social programs. Those years left Americans distrustful and suspicious of their neighbors. Americans were identified by the country where

their parents or grandparents came from, e.g. Irish, Italian, Swedish, German, Greek, Pole. Minorities were a smaller part of the population and marginalized. Today minority populations, put all together, constitute a sizable minority.

Who wants to wonder today about a person’s country of origin, if living here and being productive is the outcome? Returning to the thinking of the 1920s ain’t going to help America go forward.

For the United States having its population thinking diverse things about supposedly accepted facts and incidences makes governing more difficult. Americans seem to chose the course of the Missouri soldiers after the Civil War – not at peace with one another and forgetful of the facts in the past, and facts going forward. It is the role of politicians to rectify and smooth differences about facts, not trumpet and promote every erroneous interpretation of facts or documents. Wrong facts are not so cherished when they become principle and can never be changed – and ideas can never be changed? – and nothing can ever be changed?

The value of books like The Collapse of Price’s Raid is to set out facts, so everything can be changed and considered. Learning and collection of facts present circumstances, plus time alone forces thoughts and attitudes of human beings to change.

H.L. Mencken

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MY LIFE AS AUTHOR AND EDITOR

Salient in the life of this journalist with a name is asking what type of American he was. Mencken came from Germany and during World War One and World War Two he was pro- German and pro-Hitler. He lost his newspaper job with the Baltimore papers in 1941. Apparent German actions again other peoples were dismissed because they were not Germans. Carrying on with that antiquated thinking (feudalism or before) into the Twentienth Century makes Mencken an unexplained throwback, and given the quality of writing in the book, a throw away.

The book presents an autobiography of part of Mencken’s life. I have no idea how much he drank, womanized, or contributed to established art and literary politics. The book describes some of this editorial activities, but does not set human beings in business except to say this happened that happened and the reasons for any disagreements – the other person was Jewish, or was a woman, or would not do what Mencken advised. Mencken dismissed film and California completely without realizing it dramatized American short stories many times better than the writer could put it on a page.

The book was Mencken’s final writing effort with time qualities reflected in the writing. It tells its story sloppily, if at all. It appears Mencken chained himself to a typewriter and merrily typed. There is no sense a wordsmith was at work, edited or believed the manuscript needed further work. The book’s editor, Jonathan Yardley did his best, but elementary flaws flow throughout the writing.

A few observations early in the book should be noted:

“…I am convinced that writing verse is the best of all preparations for writing prose.
I makes the neophyte look sharply to his words, and improves the sense of rhythm and tone-color – in brief, that she of music which is at the bottom of all sound prose…” Page 5-6)

“Under the influence of my father…I emerged into sentience with an almost instinctive distrust of all schemes of revolution and reform. They were…only signs and symptoms of a fundamental hallucinations…the hallucination that human nature could be changed by passing statutes, and preaching gospels – that natural law could be repealed by taking thought.” (page 34)

“…my interest in Roosevelt 1 was always born of delight in the mountebank, not of belief in the prophet.” (page 34)

Work at home: “We … wondered why none of our colleagues had hit on the device of staying way for their offices…we escaped the burden of listening to countless visitors who infest such places – mainly authors trying to sell their manuscripts, not on the merits

thereof but by selling talk. Virtually all our business was done by mail, and it was thus possible for us to do it at our own convenience, and with expedition. On my trips to and from New York I read more manuscripts than the average editor could get through in ten times the time in his office. It was not until long afterward that I discovered that a number of English magazine editors had practiced keeping clear of their offices before we thought of it.”(Page 50)

Paying writers: The Saturday Evening Post’s “…editor…not only paid much higher prices for manuscripts…but he also paid off once a week. As a result [he] got first whack at virtually all the better fiction of the time…” (page 51)

Personal responsibility/memory: “After [Zoe Atkin’s] removal to New York, she let it be known that [Reedy] had not only discovered her but also seduced her, and in the course of time she pushed back this catastrophe back in time until in the end he was depicted as her undoing when she was but sixteen years old. This, if true, put it in 1902, when Reedy himself was forty.”(Page 68)

1920’s Greenwich Village: “…the Village, like the Paris Left Bank, was much less literary artistic than sexual, and most of its male denizens lived on women. The typical menage consisted of a widow or spinster from some small-town in the Middle West, come east to spend her dead husband’s or father’s money and see life, and a bogus painter or pulp- magazine fictioneer who let her feed, clothe and love him.”(page 95)

Any sort of writer putting together an autobiography would have given thought to organization. Little does Mencken’s story at the typewriter evince such expansive thinking – just put together antedotes loosely. What lacks is the potential for an authoritative description of the literary artistic scene on the East Coast i.e. the market Mencken was involved with. Mencken should have stepped back to write the Big Picture. But he could not escape his profession, journalism and its need to advance facts (and Mencken’s opinions) in detail without describing the setting, or telling any reasons. Influences (other than getting drunk), the environment (Mencken did not believe important) and competition (society) – did not writers know one another? As an editor did he not know writers talked and exchanged ideas, concepts and reactions?

So this book falls short in its organization and in its writing.

BEGAT

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DAVID CRYSTAL – RECOMMENDED

This book attempts to tell how various editions of the Bible influenced the evolution of English. It is incomplete; the text could be longer, much longer.

The text introduces the reader to the subject, succinctly refreshing readers/writers to the subject matter and its sensitizes writers to the contents. The book is organized by idioms, phrases and verses, like it is a guide explaining business or management practices. [Robert Townsend, Up the Organization was one of the first types of this book.] Hence Begat becomes a valuable quick resource for references to Biblical idioms, phrases and verses, sometimes from the original usage to the present.

There are omissions. Before 1559 the English Bible was in prose and paragraphs. Thereafter, the Bible was in verse. Its style was greatly influenced by poetry and the playwrights of Elizabethan England. Prose and poetry obviously differ. Modern prose stresses the verb; poetry has always been about using and associating nouns and sometimes using specific forms and linguistic devices. Prose seems much more accepting to change of grammar, use of words, shifting words and odd word order.

The original language of the Volgate Bible, in the fourth century from the Greek, was Latin, with its five declensions. Modern day English has three declensions – subjective, possessive and objective. Most modern English speakers nail the subjective declension but botch or ignore the other two. Miss declensions in Latin, German, Russian or languages stressing nouns and get the word order wrong, and the student fails!

In Begat there is nothing about the prose/poetry shifts in English, when the Bible was being translated and through time to today.

THE YEARS AT OCCIDENTAL COLLEGE IN THE LATE SIXTIES CHARLES E. ROUSE

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Events in this book are about the author. The college setting is an accidental backdrop.

The book does not tell about the effect of significant, outside events on the Occidental College campus or among the students: Were there anti-War protests, demonstrations and writings on campus by teachers or students? What were the effects of rioting elsewhere? The author did not see Martin Luther King speak at Occidental College in 1967, but in less than a year Doctor King had been assassinated. Where there reactions about assassinations at Occidental? What did the administration do?

An odd fact out: I doubt if the yippies organized the 1967 Pentagon demonstration, as the author reports. This demonstration was inserted like other significant events: Tet, student riots, student politics campus to campus. Merely mentioning events does not tell what happened to anyone or to anything at Occidental College.

The author is loyal and devoted to Occidental. He identifies every class he had and every professor. But little is told about the teaching, the learning or the students action and growth of the author, or of other students. Everyone at Occidental was smart. They liked to drop names and supply authorities, venturing into German philosophy or onto someone’s newly discovered poem. The author’s favorite authorities were Thomas Wolfe – Electric Kool Air, etc – and Ayn Rand.

The author was awkward around girls, but the psychological diagnosis is incomplete. The reader does not learn if the trouble with women is the root cause of psychological disabilities, or merely one manifestation of other problems. Lots of pages are given to girlfriends (ambiguous suggestions of sex: Everyone was chaste at Occidental?), to mental issues, to eastern religions and to meaningless comments from persons or others in quotes.

For IRONY, try. On the back cover squirb, the author mentions that Barack Obama spent two years at Occidental College during the 1980s. Not mentioned is a state legislator, decades later always trying to please Obama, had a stretch of the 134 Freeway named after Obama. Those four miles, east of the 2-Freeway to Figueroa Avenue, is the route to the Scholl’s Canyon Dump.

Avoid this book.

WARLORD

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Carlo D’Este

This excellent history/biography uses Winston Churchill as a model to show British ways of war, the British mindset during war and British systems of making war. This biography is enlightening yet unsympathetic to Churchill and British diverting methods as World War II dragged on. The book overall tells the World War II perspective of the British.

For a long time before D-Day Churchill was against any landings in Northern Europe. He proposed and applauded Anzio in Italy which was greatly pared down (five divisions to one and reduced logistics and supply). {Politicians have long been deceived by U.S. Grant’s amphibious landing south of Vicksburg in May 1863 and eventually surrounding and obtaining the surrounding of that river town.] Churchill devised and held to the idea that taking over Greek islands in 1944 in the Aegean Sea was the masterstroke that would end the War in Europe. He insisted Rome be taken in June 1944 rather than attack and weaken the German army. Churchill opposed the American invasion of Marseilles in August 1944, opening a second supply route for American armies: Forty (40) percent of the supplies for those armies came through Marseilles.

Meanwhile, the British used Montgomery (seemingly the best general the British could produce). Churchill did not like other generals and summarily dismissed them. Between August 1944 and November 1944, Montgomery lengthened the war by losing opportunities to destroy German armies at Falaise Gap in Normandy; he did a risky, men-wasting incursion of Belgium and Holland called Market Garden – supplies had to go up one long road; he failed to open the Scheldt Estuary, depriving the allies of using the port of Antwerp for three months.

So the British fought World War II using men expensively, and Winston Churchill was a Warlord, not a cabinet position of the British government, but akin to Warlords of yore commanding armies, promoting strategies, wanting to join the fight, always in political control, urging actions leading to non-profitable military measures, sanctioning incompetence from military underlines, and craving compliance from the British people and every person in government for each of his decisions.

THE INVENTION OF MURDER

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BY BOOKJudith Flanders

The story of murder in the Nineteenth Century promises more than this book gives. In Nineteenth Century England an active swirl surrounds death, accusation, murder, trial and execution. According to the book not many murders happened, but enough gained public attention. Some stories survived decades; one Seventeenth century death was picked up during the Nineteenth century and used. The Invention seems to tell this story. It does in the first 110 pages when I stopped reading repeat actions and stories of death, accusation, etc… Victorian England had to be a dull place for the masses and the middling peoples to be enthralled by this sort of deviancy.

What could interest me in this book’s subject was developing detection of crimes and causes into evidence presented in court. This is no indication that this knowledge or ways were of interest, but the same trip, all well-put down. However, this book is neither a cultural anthropology nor a sociology. It is one telling of death, one after another, as though the public insisted upon new deaths to become sensational to engage them. One prays for the public’s interest to be distracted – like professional sports, largely a Twentieth Century invention coming from America.

How to judge this for The Invention? From a case that lasted decades, any reader and watcher of bit plays, would expect the basic facts of death, accusations, etc to be used as procedures and processes of detection became sophisticated; those ways and means would be written into the story as the time from the events distanced. Note the criminal is not the protagonist; nor is the victim. But investigators become prominent and their methods interesting. MORALE: the bad people are caught and punished.

In the one telling of a 1840’s murder, the story, according to the book, had to be close to the real facts for a long time. What Victorians seemed to like was thoroughly retro and religious: Repetition of accepted facts and outcomes as though to reassert the foundations of the purity, the justice and righteousness of their society. No one has to read 480 pages of that. However, writers might be expected to mention and use changing methods of detection. Those writers did not exist.

By 1894 Conan Doyle changed crime and detective stories, and decades of more nonsense followed. Raymond Chandler’s writing analyzes some of that, chopping up popular, misleading detective stories for readers to observe the nonsense. Chandler used current methods changing criminal investigations and writing. And what of detective stories today, and of the last 25 years? Can anyone spell DNA?

A FISTFUL OF SHELLS

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Toby Green

The author says this is the first history telling of West African circumstances from 1300 to 1750. That is true. No other history attempts to put together communities, countries and activities along the 1200 miles of coast from Sierra Leone to Nigeria, and tell of the slave trade. No one has a complete picture of West Africa for those centuries. Documents are scattered everywhere; letters and diaries are in more diverse places. Within West Africa it seems oral traditions of conveying history can be reliable – stories and incidences passed down from generation to generation.

And readers of A Fistful of Shells still have no idea what was going on during those centuries along that coast.

  1. Maps of West Africa should be specific as to time and to each place mentioned in the text. The book and its maps are not helpful because the names of locations changed in those four hundred years. And remember, tell of one place at a time because it is 1200 miles of coast, plus villages, communities, and towns inland. I suspect communications along that coast were irregular.
  2. Next write the history chronologically, as to one place and then the next. The reader goes wary: Good stopping pages were 48 and 49: Fifteenth Century – seven lines later Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries – carried over to page 49 the year 1200 – next paragraphs 2015 London Lecture; 2017 Lecture.

This history should be reorganized to convey all the events of that coast. Or take an area and write a history of it over those 400 years. Or, have some other organization which readers, completely unfamiliar with the subject matter, can follow.