GoodReads meta-date is 276 pages, rated 3.93 by 193 litizens.
Genre: krimi.
Verdict: Po-Mo
I chose it for the Hamburg setting. We had been planning to spend a few days there in September 2020.
Reading some of Goodreads reviews, I was impressed that so many who commented were able to summarise the book. I couldn’t. I could not figure out who our hero was, what her work was, or why I should care, or much else. Still less could I fathom why I should be interested in any of it. Instead I waded through repeated laborious descriptions of hangovers, bitterness, and ponderous witticisms. To the deus ex machina finish.
I found it to be cryptic, convoluted, and disjointed, eschewing a linear narrative. It leaves the effort of integrating the parts into a whole to the reader. This reader declined the task.
Po(st)-Mo(dern) is it then. Whenever I see that phrase Po-Mo I always fear the worst, and so far Po-Mo has never let me down.
GoodReads meta-data is 256 pages, rated 3.71 by 190 litizens.
Genre: krimi.
Verdict: deliberate but obscure.
When an unidentified, crippled homeless man is shot dead in what looks like a professional murder, putting Inspector Espinosa back on the mean streets of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) in the rain. Why would anyone go to the bother of killing with such efficiency a helpless and hopeless man? Why did the victim hobble up the steep cobblestoned hill in a thunderstorm to the place of his death?
Then there are the guests at a nearby dinner party who parked cars on the street where the murder occurred. Did the dinners see or hear anything in the deluge? No, but one of them seems evasive, or is he just vague? Espinosa has many questions and sets about getting answers.
A police procedural follows. There is much back-and-forth in Ipanema and Copacabana as Espinosa and his team question, trace, and question again. And that part I liked as they pieced together the puzzle.
But the momentum is interrupted by unnecessary backstories of nearly everyone and anyone along the way. Nor did I like the denouement which seemed to me to undermine most of what went before. I had the same reactions to the two earlier titles in this series: the locale is fine, and Espinosa plods away but the plot is – well, really it is not a plot at all. There is no way a reader can follow it.
Alfredo Garcia-Roza
Spoilers alert, take warning!
The efficient killing was not efficient.
Nearly all the testimony so painstakingly pieced together is irrelevant.
The narrator is untrustworthy.
Did the wife know about the gun or not? Sometimes yes, and sometimes no.
The last character introduced is the one. (A rule violation of the procedural.)
The catalyst was a psycho like a storm and not integral.
GoodReads meta-data is 240 pages, rated 4.17 by 247 litizens.
Genre: krimi.
Verdict: tasty.
Vish Puri, chief of Most Private Investigations, is fully occupied with a money laundering problem when his mother brings him a new client.
The money that needs laundering is his own, stuffed in bags under the bed off the tax radar. However, in its wisdom the Government has abruptly decided to phase our high denomination currency in its losing war against corruption, and everyone, Puri included, has only a few days to redeem such notes, and in so doing invite the attention of the aforementioned tax authorities. Son of an upright police officer, Puri will not break the law, but a little bending is in order, and he shifts and sways to find a way, which brings him into contact with some types he would have preferred to avoid.
While he is bobbing and weaving, his mother, whose repeated interference in his investigations makes him appreciate his stay-at-home and mind-her-own-business wife all the more, brings in a new client, who of course cannot pay. What’s more she claims to be the reincarnation of a dead murder victim. Ah ha! Here is line Puri can draw. No dead clients.
That is, until he realised that the ostensible victim’s death was one his deceased father investigated to no avail because it was caught up in the terrible 1984 Sikh riots following the murder of Indira Gandhi. His father was sure the victim was murdered and not yet another victim of the riots, but in the chaos of the time he could turn up no evidence. Reluctantly then, Puri opens a file to honour his revered father and placate his mother who seldom takes no for an answer.
Meanwhile, an unhappy former client wants him to cure his new son-in-law’s snoring or give back the handsome fee Puri was paid to assess the young man as a suitable husband for this client’s daughter. Whew! Clients do ask for a lot for their money. Puri offers a refund but that is refused with a threat of bad publicity or even court action. With no choice he adds snoring to his list of tasks.
To deal with the trifecta Puri mobilises his operatives: Hand Brake, Facecream, Tubelight, Flush, and Ms Elizabeth Rami who is the office manager, and no one dares to take liberties with her name. Then there is the spy gecko, a drone of sorts. Much of the telling is light-hearted, and Puri offers again a guide to Indian cuisine as he munches his way around Delhi trying to find ways to deal with the money, the murder, and the snorer. In the course of so doing, his Hindustan Ambassador automobile is wrecked, and his operatives torture a hitman with a cat, and his youngest daughter wants to get married with or without his permission! Meanwhile, a tax man cometh.
This is the fifth in the series, and as always recent Indian history provides the backdrop, in this case the riots that saw countless Sikhs murdered for being Sikhs following the killing of Prime Minister Gandhi (by the Sikh bodyguards). Madness and badness are not confined to the USA.
Tarquin Hall
I tried the web site on Safari, Firefox, and Chrome without success, and then quit while I was behind. Try if you must: http://www.vishpuri.com/#http://
The change of currency reminded me of the phasing out of the 500 Euro note. It was done to make black market transaction in the drug business more difficult, because the €500 was the favourite of drug cartels. Evidence? Well, one news account said that at one large European bank 5000 of the €500 notes were tested and all of them but four (4) tested positive for traces of cocaine! I found that pretty convincing, leaving aside the larger question of whether drug use should be illegal. Regrettably, I did not bookmark that article for the reader’s reference.
GoodReads meta-data is 380 pages, rated 3.80 by 254 litizens.
Genre: History.
Verdict: A comprehensible narrative. Aaaah.
The first and hardest thing for me to grasp is just how long the Portuguese and Spanish have been in the Americas. Sailors in the employ of the Portuguese monarchy landed in what is now Brazil in April 1500. They began building permanent settlements in 1532 and remained thereafter. To avoid conflict among Christian nations with the threat of the Ottomans in the East, the Pope brokered a treaty dividing the new world(s) between Spain and Portugal, recognising that the Portuguese were already in Brazil to stay. That solved one problem and created another since neither catholic France nor protestant England or the Netherlands recognised that division.
Brazil began to pay for itself with the sugarcane, the price of which skyrocketed when the Haitian rebellion against the French all but eliminated it as a source of the commodity. This lucrative trade attracted the Dutch, first to trade in it and later to grow it in Suriname, as it is now called, and likewise the French. Conflicts followed.
But the most unusual conflict, however, was among the Portuguese. Three hundred years after first contact, Napoleonic France invaded Iberia. In the ensuing Peninsula War, the French continued into Portugal, which had long been associated with England as a counterbalance to Spain. The French pursued the British into Portugal and in 1808 the Portuguese royal court went into exile wholes bolus, setting sail for Brazil, numbering as many as 12,000 courtiers, soldiers, merchants, officials, priests, and others. The English cooperated for a mix of reasons, some political and some commercial. Banks in London lent money to the exiles to set up in Brazil where the King John VI declared the United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil, and the Algarves (a province of Portugal itself like Holland in the Netherlands). There were also unrealised ambitions to extend this realm to the Portuguese African colonies of the time.
With the extinction of the Napoleonic threat by 1815 there were those who wanted to move the king and court back to Lisbon and return Brazil to the status of a colony ruled from there. Others wanted the court to remain, including the king for a time. Meanwhile, back in Lisbon a council governed with close English oversight in the royal absence, but in 1820 King John returned to quell the restive. (He was urged to return by the English who found the close oversight expensive and unproductive.) Now here is where the wrinkle sets it.
The king did not reduce Brazil to a colony, rather to placate local interests he left behind his son Pedro as Regent. Inevitably conflicts occurred between those who supported the Regent and those favoured autonomy or even independence, inspired by the distant example of the United States and fired by rebellions against Spain in its American colonies. Much manoeuvring followed.
The upshot was that in 1822 Pedro declared Brazil independent, even while in Lisbon lawyers were splitting hairs about the reversion of Brazil to one colony among many. A civil war of sorts ensued in Brazil between the Portuguese loyal to Lisbon and the locals. The French and Dutch stoked these fires to confuse the English, who were not quite sure whom to back, having sizeable commercial interest in both Brazil and Portugal. To distinguish him from his father the king of Portugal, Pedro became the emperor of the empire of Brazil. Compared to the long-lasting and bloody wars for independence in Spanish America’s colonies this transition was short. King John soon accepted this independence, partly in order to maintain commercial relations, lest the French intervene. At times Brazil invoked the Monroe Doctrine to ward off European interest in picking off part of its vast and underpopulated territory.
But wait, there is more! When King John died his presumptive heir was Pedro in Rio de Janeiro. The crowns were one, again, but not the nations. See? (No, neither do I.) Pedro soon abdicated the Portuguese throne in favour of one of his daughters who went to Lisbon to be queen.
While the author does not consider the general context, to this reader Brazilian independence in this way distinguished it from its other Latin American cousins. (1) The army was not the crucible that created the nation which it was in Argentina, Venezuela, or Colombia. Indeed the army was Portuguese and much of it left with the king. In its place were local militias which later morphed into a national army. But the Brazilian army did not create Brazil in contrast, say, to the Argentine army which created Argentina.
Boris Fausto
(2) When Simon Bolivar recruited armies to rebel against the Spanish he declared anyone who joined the fight was a free man be he white, black, or red and any shade between. While the liberation rhetoric of the King James Protestant Bible was absent, the message was indisputable, and at times Bolivar’s army was more dark than light, more Black and Red than White. In Brazil without this martial deliverance, race remained a fixed social identity and barrier, and all the more so because of the vast slave – mostly black but some red – population for the labour-intensive products: sugar cane, coffee, cotton, and rubber. Only external pressure and the vagaries of the markets for these commodities gradually led to emancipation. All of that made it a late entrant in attracting European migrants as a cheap source of labour to replace slavery.
GoodReads meta-data is 780 pages, rated 4.36 by 484 litizens.
Genre: History (not biography).
Verdict: Parochial.
Declaration: I only read the lengthy sample, and decided not to proceed.
The sample was long on pointless erudition and short on facts. It seemed to presuppose the reader was familiar with the major elements of the history of the region, the arrival of Europeans, and the individuals and families that founded Brazil. And then sets about to debunk them without ever quite explaining or contextualising them.
I did learn this. Portuguese sailors in the East Indies found a tree with red bark and red sap which was used to make a red dye. Then when the Portuguese in their constant competition with the Spanish went West, they found a red tree with red sap that could be used as a dye and they called the area Brasil after the name of tree in the east Indies. It is from the Latin for embers as a colour.
While the authors expatiate at length on the terrible consequences of the European invasion for natives, they are mainly portrayed as hapless and helpless victims even as the more detailed discussions show that some native tribes cooperated with the Europeans to defeat their traditional enemies.
After first debunking myths about cannibalism in the region, the authors then devote much space to it.
Yes, I know only a small mind would be bothered by these inconsistencies and so I stand convicted.
The book does not offer the short history of this vast and varied land that I sought. Rather it declares its purpose to be to debunking the myths Brasilians tell themselves about their history and country. Since this reader does not know these myths, there is no traction. It lacks the conventional road signs to guide readers and it lurches back-and-forth. There are no transitions, no indications of time, no summaries and much musing which is not amusing. There is a whiff of the post-modern. Always deadly.
The city of Brasilia registered on my imagination when I was an adolescent and since then I have come across a few references to it. The striking architecture is the main thing, though James Scott’s Seeing Like a State (1998) has some diamond insights into the resulting city. John Brunner’s sy fy novel The Squares of the City (1966) was another take on it. I also sought out and read a couple of novels set there, but they made no use of the reality or fantasy of Brasilia. Some of this itch was stimulated anew by our visit to mother Portugal a couple of years ago where there was no sign of Brazil or any of its other one-time colonies. Not even any statues that I saw.
The post hoc criticisms of Brasilia are legion. I tried reading David Epstein’s Brasília: Plan and Reality (1977) but found it largely impenetrable. It is a discussion mostly of what other researchers have said, and so guarded and encoded in academicese that it does not communicate to a general reader – moi. It reminded me a little of the story of a Danish bus shelter without the insights or humour in Bent Flyvbjerg, Rationality and Power: Democracy in Practice (1998).
This activity about Brasilia on Amazon awakened the mechanical Turk who presented me with this title. I clicked for a sample, and read it. In this case it is a substantial sample of many pages (though on the Kindle I cannot be exact about the number), whereas many Kindle samples of Non-Fiction are so consumed by superfluous front matter there are few pages of substance. Not so in this case. There is plenty to judge by.
Good Reads meta-data is 510 pages rated 4.28 by 247 litizens
Genre: Biography
Verdict: An éminence grise without the robes.
‘Harry Who?’ asked the fraternity brothers, ever perplexed by reading, since they get along just fine without it. Harry Hopkins (1890-1946) was a shopkeeper’s son from Iowa who by dint of his mother’s determination and grit got a college education, along with his sisters, at Grinnell College in Iowa. Lucky them. Prior to that the Hopkins family had lived briefly in Kearny and Hastings Nebraska (though I remember nothing about him from Hastings but I do remember the WPA works at Heartwell Park. See below for relevance.)
After graduating from college he followed in his older sister’s footsteps and became a social worker, and Jacob Riis in New York City was hiring, so this Iowa hick (q.v. Bill Bryson) took the train east to work in a settlement house. His experiences in the immigrant slums of New York City during the Great Depression made him a champion of government intervention, regulation, and assistance. It also proved him to be an efficient and effective organiser of people, material, and money. His work impressed the philanthropic owner of Macy’s department store who later recommended him to New York state governor FDR.
Per Wikipedia his claim to fame is that he was US Secretary of Commerce for a little less than two years, 1938-1940. In that capacity he was an architect of the Works Progress Administration whose labours can still be seen far and wide, e.g., Heartwell Park, and later the organiser behind the Lend-Lease program. Those, Class, were some of his lesser accomplishments!
Later in Washington Hopkins was a whirlwind, working all the hours of the clock at the expense of his first marriage, and set land speed records in distributing funds to put the unemployed to work. Within a fortnight of his first appointment he had put 88,000 unemployed men with families to work through state governments building bridges, tarring roads, landscaping parks, reinforcing railway embankments, digging drainage ditches, repairing the roofs of libraries and town halls, shoring up damns, stringing telephone wires, planting trees, cutting fire trails in forests, and so on and on. He did this working from a broom closet in a ramshackle building off the beaten track in D.C.
In these works he was an ambitious empire builder who irritated some and made enemies of others, particularly Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes. Hopkins made mistakes but he always pressed on.
His most significant accomplishments were not, however, in these domestic matters but later in foreign policy where many, including such diverse figures as Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin regarded him as the glue that held together the Anglo-Soviet Alliance against the odds. About which more later.
Hopkins back left.
Harry was a sickly child, boy, and adolescent but youth fuelled him, as it does, though the maladies remained and came to the fore with maturity, compounded by a life of cigarette smoking and whisky drinking. He can be seen in many photographs as a spectral figure on the periphery with FDR. He was so constant that some referred to him as the shadow.
When people met him for the first time, there were many remarks on his pale complexion, bony face and figure, pallor, pasty face, clammy perspiration, sunken eyes, ….. But they also noted that when the spoke of his purposes, the embers came to life and the fire within was apparent to even the most imperceptive observer. Those purposes kept him alive against the odds.
On the first of his many visits to wartime England in the middle of 1941 Hopkins was allowed to see and go when and where he wanted. By then FDR had no confidence in the reports and assessments of the US ambassador to England, and wanted an unbiased account from someone he trusted. The mission fell to Hopkins, who by the way was paid no salary, though his travel expenses were covered. For FDR’s personal friend and representative the British rolled out a red carpet. Hopkins was inquisitive and demanding; he was also impressed. More than once in the company of Winston Churchill inspecting bomb damaged docks in Bristol, military hospitals overflowing with wounded, rubble strewn streets in London, those Britons present stopped their weary labours to cheer the Prime Minister who walked among them. In a most secret cable Hopkins told FDR that Churchill’s rhetoric, while elevated and melodramatic, nonetheless represented popular opinion. (The cable was carried by hand to an American warship in port, and transmitted from here in the navy’s darkest code.)
During this visit, Hopkins also managed something few others ever did, upstaging Churchill. At a dinner of forty Churchill gave an orotund speech of welcome. Hopkins had selected the guest list to include those he wanted to meet, trade union heads, businessmen, press owners, munition plant managers, bankers, hospital directors, Red Cross workers, shipping experts, accountants, aviation engineers, and social workers. After the meal it was Hopkins’s turn to thank his host. He did so by quoting the Book of Ruth, bringing tears to Churchill’s eyes and silencing the room… ‘even to the end.’ (Look it up.)
Pilloried after his death by headline hunting red baiters of the Republican Party as a Soviet agent because he advocated material support to sustain the Soviet front. If it needs to be said, Russian archives give that allegation the lie. Churchill and Hopkins and others wanted to keep Russia from signing a separate peace with Germany, and that meant keeping Russia in the war. With that priority Churchill himself sometimes deferred British needs for American material to satisfy Russian hunger for supplies which held down 140 German divisions on the Eastern Front. With perfect hindsight we now assume that Hitler was so driven by hate, as weaklings are, that no peace with Russia was possible. Ahem, everyone had thought that before the 1939 non-aggression pact, too, and were surprised at his and Stalin’s flexibility. Better not to risk another surprise. The more so when it was realised that Soviet and German diplomats met regularly in Stockholm even as the war raged.
For much of later 1943 to early 1945 Hopkins was the de facto Secretary of State, as the incumbent Cordell Hull, a decade on the job, had become ill and was replaced by a cypher. Hopkins committed himself completely to holding together this unlikely and unholy alliance against the common enemies of Germany and Japan. He traveled the world in difficult circumstances to listen patiently to the complaints of each party about the other(s), and slowly found the common ground firm enough for the next step. Churchill complained to him about FDR who complained to him about Stalin who complained to him about both of them, and so on. A glutton for punishment Hopkins also tried to draw Charles de Gaulle into the party by fair means and foul. Since he turned on the tap of Lend-Lease I suppose Churchill, Stalin, and de Gaulle were aware that he might turn it off, too.
The book is particularly good on the international conferences. The prose brings to life the preparations and activities, but it is especially good at demonstrating what was at stake in the meetings from Newfoundland to Yalta. The conclusions about Yalta are insightful. In short, Roll concludes that the fate of Eastern Europe was sealed long before Yalta in 1945. When the decision was made to invade North Africa in 1942, rather than to wait until 1943 and then attack northern France, the deed was done.
Without a second front in 1942 or 1943, the Soviets went all out and by the time the second front came in mid-1944 the momentum of Soviet advances into Eastern Europe could not be rolled back short of another war. The 1942 decision to land in Africa was prompted largely by Churchill’s morbid fear of a repeat of the charnel house of World War I in northern France, but in hindsight it made military sense to test the US Armed Forces on a small scale before the Big One. Indeed the pitiful performance of much of American arms in North Africa was a stimulant for major changes from the equipment of rifle companies, tank armour, operational command, signals, co-ordination of arms, and more.
Let it be noted that Hopkins’s son Steven was a marine, killed on the Kwajalein Atoll in 1944. Another son Robert was hold up in Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge.
Hopkins was the man behind Lend Lease for several years. He made it work for Great Britain and then extended it to the Soviet Union. He also suggested war crimes trials and got agreement for that. He was early advocate of a United Nations and staked out many of the arrangements the came into being. FDR said it was Hopkins’s good-natured persistence that provoked Stalin into a grudging commitment to join the war against Japan which at the time had the highest priority on the assumption that neither Britain and the Empire, the Netherlands, or France would offer much.
His health was never good and there were periodic hospitalisations for blood transfusions and vitamin injections. There was also abdominal surgery over the years. When FDR died, Hopkins’s hold on life slipped, too.
The early, brief description of Hopkins’s students days at Grinnell reminded me of my own years in a similar institution of do-gooders who did good by me and many others.
For some time I had in my mind and in my Amazon shopping cart Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Robert Sherwood’s biography of Hopkins, but, well, it is out of print and not always available, and, worse, it is not in a Kindle edition, so it languished in both places. Then the mechanical Turk’s algorithms suggested this title and I bit.
Goodreads meta-data is 351 pages, rated 3.84 by 45992 litizens.
Genre: Chick Lit
Verdict: Go girl!
Our titular heroine (an updated Elizabeth Bennett) is late-twenties, educated, smart, loner, who works in an indie bookstore, reads, bests all comers in trivia contests, plans each day on paper, talks to her cat, is nearly anti-social. She runs three bookclubs at the store, one for first readers 5-8 years old, readers around 10, and seniors. Then twice a week with a team whose members have learned not to intrude on her privacy, she dons a Kevin Ashmore super hero Quizzling non-descript costume on a trivia team destined to be champions of East Los Angeles.
All that is fine, until one day an unusual customer walks into the neighbourhood bookstore seeks her out. He wears a ten thousand dollar three-piece suit with a thousand dollar haircut. Yes, he is a lawyer come to tell Nina that her long lost and forgotten biological father has named her in his will.
That she had a father was news to her. Wait, that is, the biological fact of siring was not new to her because she had read about it (just kidding), but that there was a distinct individual who knew her name and was her father, so named on her birth certificate, that was (unwelcome) news to her, intruding on her carefully circumscribed world. Remember this is a person who makes a written plan for everyday and never deviates from it.
It is all a matter of indifference to her roaming, rambling, and — as usual — absent mother who liked men so much she could never marry just one.
Over the decades that father had three wives, and there are children from each as well as Nina, the resulting clan is large and spans generations. On Monday morning there was just Nina and the cat in her life, and on Monday afternoon came along half-a-dozen siblings, grand parents, more aunts, and a slew of nieces and nephews by blood and law. Whew! What’s more they are riven by carefully nurtured grievances against each other. There is enough malice to go around and around to incorporate Nina whose G&Ts disappeared apace that night, while Phil, the cat, watched in brooding and silent disapproval.
I liked the set-up in the bookstore with its crew, and the quiz league, but they receded quickly into the background. Though Nina spends all her time reading we never quite know what she is reading with such intensity or what she gets out of it.
Following the Chick Lit convention there are about a hundred pages of misunderstandings between boy-girl which is resolved in a flash in the last few pages. Predictable, and also forced. And most of that miscommunication is played out in dialogue that goes on and on, and on. It looks like a wannabe film script.
Really?
Really.
Really!
(See what I mean?)
Abbi Waxman, who has other titles.
Moreover, the wedding on picnic blankets complete with a supernumerary camel followed by a food fight at the bookstore are just too much. The deceased father is partly redeemed, but not the ever-absent mother. I did like the motor mechanic’s patient effort to teach Nina to drive a stick-shift.
Goodreads metadata is 273 pages, rated 3.73 by 453 citizens.
Genre: Cold War espionage fiction.
In 1949 West Germany entered its first post-war democratic election with an unspoken bipartisan agreement not to mention the only issue that mattered: reunification. Incumbent chancellor by appointment Konrad Adenauer, der Alte, was expected to win easily. Into this milieu Blackford Oakes (aka the alter ego of William Buckley, Jr.) is dropped.
Start with that name: Blackford Oakes, a New England wanna be aristocrat who is suave, so resourceful that he makes MacGyver look like a boy scout, a lady killer in every way, and never, ever at a loss. (See his Wikipedia entry for more hyperbole.) He is tall, lanky, handsome, multi-lingual, and just about perfect for a CIA agent. James Bond is an uncouth oaf in comparison. Oh, and Blackford is humourless, unlike Mr. Bond.
The neatly arranged German apple cart is threatened by Prussian Count Axel Wintergrin who has formed a reunification movement and could well best Der Alte at the polls. Such an outcome might prompt the Soviets to intercede. As always, Washington decides to interfere. The D.C. intercession has three parts: (1) diplomatic as the USA tries to convince the USSR to accept the situation, (2) while itself working feverishly to discredit Wintergrin with all kinds of Pox News from this spotless past (he sat out the war in far north Norway), and (3) by inserting the polymath BO into his entourage as an engineer employed through a Marshall Plan grant to restore the Wintergrins’ private chapel. BO is the backstop if all else fails. See that coming…?
The reader realises far sooner than the smug and self-confident BO that the final phase of the Washington plan will be to murder Wintergrin to keep the Soviets from invading. BO finally does figure this out and there are pages and pages of his crisis of conscience. He likes, he respects, he has a man-crush on Wintergrin and the prospect of pulling the trigger on him gives him sleepless nights. Let us pause here and reflect.
Wintergrin is a mirror for BO: two peas in two pods. Both devastatingly attractive, omni-competent, far-seeing, in short, god-like. If Wintergrin had been a working class stiff, say like the real German opponent of Der Alte, Kurt Schumacher, it seems doubtful to this reader that BO would have thought twice about murdering him for the greater good. By the way Adenauer is named in the novel, but the Socialist Party leader is made fictional, and not named as Schumacher. Go figure. I read a biography of Schumacher so long ago I have forgotten whatever I learned from it.
Spoiler. In the end all of BO’s posturing is pointless since his superiors, after having wasted much time and effort in priming him, arranged another end for Wintergrin, whose omniscience extended to his own Christ-like death.
Loose ends are many: the resident KGB agent is left in place, the nuclear weapon Wintergrin had purloined are not retrieved, the election outcome is not mentioned (Der Alte won by a whisker), and Wintergrin was wrong about his own death. Yet the closing is reverential. This is the second in a series of ten of these potboilers. Not sure I can brook another bout of BO’s smug complacence. Far better on a similar theme is A Small Town in Germany (1968) by John le Carré.
William Buckley, Jr.
In fact, I read this one eons ago and forgot it, until I read Buckley’s Unmaking of a Mayor. That prompted me to try again with the same reaction: what a tiresome prat is BO.
The Idealist: Wendell Wilkie’s Wartime Quest to Build One World (2020) by Samuel Zipp
GoodReads meta-data is 416 pages rated 4.0 by two litizens.
and
The Improbable Wendell Wilkie (2018) by David Lewis
GoodReads meta-data is 400 pages, rated 3.73 by 86 litizens.
Genre: Biography.
Verdict: Meh. Meh.
I am in the market for a biography of Wendell Wilkie but neither of these two samples captured my attention. The Zipp sample is quite long but the book is not a biography and otherwise not compelling. The Lewis sample is chapter one only and it did not suffice to lure me in for the whole works. In neither case is my judgement a reflection on the subject who remains of interest.
Lewis Wendell Wilkie was born in Indiana and proud of it. He never held a public office and ran for an elected office only once – the President as the Republican Party nominee in 1940, against the twice incumbent FDR.
He went by the name Wendell because when he joined the Army in 1917 a clerk mistakenly transposed his first names, and by the time Wilkie realised this had happened it was in all of the army records, so he decided to accept it. On the point of names it is a curiosity to note that he married Edith Wilk.
Wilkie grew up in a small town that experienced the ups and downs of the business cycle. That experience of boom and bust made him accept, if not advocate, government regulation. Elwood, Indiana prospered with electricity and in time he became a business man investing in and selling electricity in the area. At the time, as with the railroads, there were many competing electricity providers with different standards and little capital for investment in research and development or improvement of service. He began buying these up in a holding company that at one time was one the largest businesses in the land. He re-located to New York CIty.
His parents instilled in him a respect for and appreciation of art and literature and he waxed in New York City with its libraries and galleries. He became a patron of the arts, but he never did quite fit in. He seldom wore the de rigour tuxedo on glittering occasions; he introduced himself to drivers, waiters, and other workers. He did not regard the Roosevelt administration as socialist as did so many eastern industrialists. He encouraged the development of trade unions in his electricity empire and worked with them to improve safety. From New York City his outlook broadened to international affairs. In short, he became a Ripon Republican true to the original purposes of the GOP.
He differed strongly with FDR about the Tennessee Valley Authority and became a national figure as a result. He led the business and industry opposition to this vast project, testifying before Congress, on a speaking tour, lining up lobbyists, overseeing the advertising campaign, and in so doing discovered that he liked the limelight, that he liked meeting people, that he liked travelling (and seeing the country), that he had the stamina and wit to do it.
Robert Taft and Thomas Dewey were silently locked in a death struggle for the 1940 Republican nomination when Wilkie took it by storm. He did not participate in the few primary election there were, nor did he court the GOP establishment in state committees. He did it by an energetic public campaign of speaking, meeting, listening, debating, and being here, there, and everywhere. He got the nomination on the fifth ballot when it was clear that neither Taft nor Dewey would ever get a majority so much did they and their supporters detest each other. It all seemed spontaneous and neither of these samples say anything about the organisation that made it happen, but surely there was one.
While he polled better than the 1936 Republican candidate (Alf Landon) he lost. He alienated much of the Republican base during the campaign with his explicit support of trade unions, international relations, civil rights, and more. A journalist today looking for a cheap shot (when do they not?) would say he was FDR-lite, His differences with Roosevelt were matters of degree, not of kind.
He had been a registered Democrat and said in many interviews that Woodrow Wilson was right about the League of Nations. That conviction meant the Republican Senate which had blocked adhesion to the League was wrong, and that riled the hard core of the GOP. Some of those very same Republican Senators were still in the Senate. He changed his registration to Republican six weeks before the nominating convention but he never changed his mind about Wilson.
In January 1941 after the election, President Roosevelt asked him to go on a good will tour around the world, bearing personal messages from FDR to Churchill, Stalin, and Chang-Kai Shek in a display of national unity. Wilkie took the assignment and set out on a remarkable voyage that made him even more of the internationalist than before. Neither of these samples gets to this trip.
The relationship between Democrat Roosevelt and Republican Wilkie seems to parallel that of Democrat Wilson and Republican Hoover. Respectful and civil with a fundamental unity of purpose for the common good which proved more important than momentary partisan advantage.
