Month: February 2021

The Library at Night (2006) by Alberto Mangual

GoodReads meta-data is 373 pages rated 3.99 by 3,333 litizens.

Genre: Bibliomania.

Verdict: Ruminative.

While converting a French barn into his private library Mangual thinks about libraries, books, and readers.  Alberto Mangual, Argentine born, is a cosmopolitan writer, editor, translator, and — most of all — reader.  How will he house his 35,000 books?  What kind of shelving is best?  Should the shelves be enclosed against dust and light?  If so, can he afford that?  Where will the readers go for e-books? How will the books be arrayed on the shelf?  Each of these and many other practical questions sent him to the books for answers reaching back beyond the fabled library at Alexandria and forward past the internet.  

By the way, Alberto, I recommend Henry Petroski, The Book on the Bookshelf (2010), mainly about bookshelves and shelving.  

The chapter titles all have the same stem:  The Library as ….

• Myth
• Order
• Space
• Power
• Shadow
• Chance
• Workshop
• Mind 
• Island
• Survival, and finally 
• Home

The insights are many and the prose is textured but supple.  Savour a few passages with me.

1. ‘The Alexandria Library that wanted to be the storehouse for the memory of the world was not able to secure the memory of itself.’ Now we know very little about it.  
2. A satire from the third century BC refers to the in habitants of that library at Alexandria in this way: ‘A horde of well-fed scribblers constantly squabbling among themselves in the cage.’  Universities it seems have a long history.
3. ‘The ancient dead who rise from books to speak to us.’
4. A book on papyrus has lasted longer than any book on a digital media.  Indeed CDs decay after little more than a decade, despite the claims of manufacturers, even if one still has the device to play them.  
5. The universal library is the world itself.
6. In the Koran we read that ‘one scholar is more powerful against the Devil than a thousand worshippers.’
7. Every person’s library is autobiographical.
8. In my mental library many books are reduced to a few remembered lines. By the way, his mental library also includes all the library books he has borrowed to read.  
9. We can imagine the books we’d like to read though they have not (yet) been written.
10. Reading was once considered useful and important, then become at times dangerous and subversive, and now is condescendingly accepted as a pastime for others [by those who do not have time to read]. (Corollary: No one has the time to do something they regard as unimportant, and everyone has the time to do the things they think are important.)  
11. He might have added this thought from me:  there is no book so dreadful that some idiot on GoodReads scores it a 4+ and praises it.  

It is all trip and no arrival, though there is a subsequent, similar book by Mangual called Packing My Library (2018) when it came time to move that carefully wrought Barn Library.  It is much shorter and perhaps I will continue with it. 

He does say something about organising the books by language which is overridden by content in some cases, e.g., all the krimis are together.  But he does not discuss the systems libraries use from Dewey on, nor does he mention the software now available for private libraries such as I use – Book Collector.  Zip on cataloguing or shelving, yet these are the gears of most libraries.  

Sherlock Holmes and the Red Demon (2001) by Larry Millet 

GoodReads meta-data is 404 pages rated 4.04 by 1552 litizens.  

Genre: Sherlockiana

Verdict:  Elemental.  

In the dry summer pine forests of deepest Minnesota fire is an ever present danger compounded by the sparks flying from railroad trains owned by Robber Baron J. J. Hill.  Meanwhile, Eugene Debs has been organising railway men into unions hostile to Hill.  Trouble is brewing.  

A new ingredient comes to this combustible mix when Hill begins to receive threatening letters signed by the Red Demon which promise ruin to the businessman.  While having the character of blackmail threats, strangely the letters do not demand money. This is a new one for Hill.  

When pursuing these letters his own trusted investigator disappears, Hill goes to the top of the tree by sending an agent to recruit Mr Sherlock Holmes of 221B Baker Street, London SW.  Hill offers a princely sum for Holmes’s services who he is more intrigued by the the situation than attracted by the dosh.  He and Watson set sail for the new world and then take the train to the NorthWest frontier of St Paul. 

There follows a lengthy game of cat-and-mouse in the later 19th Century woods of Minnesota with much detail about railroads, engines, tracks, switches, flying sparks and embers, trestles, telegraphs keys and posts, along with the axe men who live among the pines.  Holmes and Watson pose as London Times journalists doing research for a feature piece on rough-hewn ways of life in the north woods.  As if.  

They discover a cast of characters among the rustics, which includes a retarded sheriff, a clever brothel madame, a prissy woodsman, a flannel-shirted thug, a skeptical newspaper editor, while Holmes and Watson consume vast American servings of food.  It comes to a head when the summer drought makes a perfect fire storm.  

The text has footnotes relating to the Holmes cannon, and the historic events upon which the story is based. The telling is all rather theatrical as though the book aspired to being a screen play and much of Holmes’s work seemed pointless to this reader.  Still it is diverting.  

This is the first of a series.  

The Burgas Affair (2017) by Ellis Shuman  

GoodReads meta-data is 327 pages rated 4.0 by 48 litizens.  

Genre: krimi.

Verdict: [Grrrr.]

A bus loaded with Israeli tourists in Bulgaria is bombed on the way to a Black Sea coastal resort.  A joint Israeli-Bulgarian investigation follows.  Sort of…

A Bulgarian detective who is a man’s man, constantly smoking, drinking, and cursing, and having a pissing contest with every other man he meets, is half of one team; the other is a Mossad data analyst who has never been in the field before, but her father came from Bulgaria and she has a smattering of the language. The set-up is promising, combining spreadsheets with head banging.  

What follows is a disjointed series of backstories, punctuated by Man’s Man clumsy efforts to rape/seduce the Israeli who proves resistant to his crude efforts.  None of it is played for laughs, and we all know that in time she will relent because he is, after all, a man’s man.  The clichés abound without any substance.  Blind Freddy spotted the mole about two hundred pages before Man’s-Man did.  

Nor is the Israeli any better.  After riding for several hours in a car just as bored as the reader is, she is asked to drive for a while, and after taking the driver’s seat goes ballistic to find the car has a stick shift and not an automatic transmission.  Was she asleep for the preceding four hours when they drove down the road that she didn’t notice the gear changes up and down the hills of eastern Bulgaria with her single companion driving. And she is an intelligence analyst. Doh! (Don’t blame her, she is written that way.)

Much is made of identifying the bomber in the first half of the book and then this theme disappears.  Evidently it did not really matter that much. It seems there was little reason to follow the trail.  

There is some to’ing and fro’ing in Bulgaria and I preferred that travelogue to listening to that man’s man feel sorry for himself.  What a snowflake! Nor is the Israeli any more interesting.  A five-second scan of the reviews on GoodReads reminded me why I never bother to do that.  

The mechanical Turk alerted me to this title after I read a concise history of Bulgaria.  I tried the sample and found it not to my taste but assuming there were not many Bulgarian krimis in English and this might be the only one to hand, even the best one, I persisted.  Grrr, as above. 

l Came as a Shadow (2020) by John Thompson

GoodReads meta-data is 352 pages, rated 4.78 by 27 litizens.   

Genre: Autobiography.

Coach Thompson is a legend and it is easy to see why.  This man is a straight-shooter with a fast draw.  He transformed the Georgetown Hoyas from also rans to leaders with dozens of titles and trophies and what is more important, and singular, 97% of his players graduated.  Coach was an educator on and off the court.  

It is a long gruelling story of racism as Coach learned the games behind the game, and he learned them well.  Among his teachers were Red Auerbach who saw this gangly youth in a pick-up game on a playground one summer and encouraged him to stay in the game.  Coach later played two season with the Celts as back-up to Bill Russell, giving Coach plenty of time to study the game, front and back.  (Bill never sat down.) 

But most of all there were his parents whom he wanted to make proud of himself, and so he worked at it. Did he ever! The towel on his shoulder became a signature.  It reminded him that his parents spent their lives working 60 or more hours a week cleaning up behind white people so he could better himself, and when he said that in an interview a storm of angry protest broke with the Pox News haters who regarded it as a provocative remark. In another of his trademarks, he shrugged and repeated it, because after all it was true.  But as we know truth has no value to Pox News.  

In one telling passage he takes a list of examples of things coaches do, like arguing with officials, defending players before the media vultures, benching players, and shows how such actions are reported when a white coach does them, and when a black coach does them.  When he argues a ref’s call a white coach is feisty, when a black coach argues he is intimidating; when a white coach defends a player he is fair and a black coach who does that is stubborn; in benching a player a white coach is disciplined and a black coach is angry; and so on. Some of the examples can be found in 2020, by the way.

When he started recruiting for the Hoyas at Georgetown he often went after unschooled athletes that were regarded as high risk by other colleges, including at least two with prison records to whom he gave a second chance. As long as they kept their grades up to graduate, he guaranteed their scholarships even if they did not make the team. This arrangement so impressed parents that they drove their boys to take it and to make the team to pay off the implicit debt. Rival coaches were not sure if this was madness or underhanded, and made a fuss about it both ways. One of those second-chances was AI. The cognoscenti will get The Answer. The fine upstanding white young men who played against AI taunted him as a jailbird. Yep.  [Swish.]  AI always had the last laugh.  

Hard though it is for this cynic to believe, the University administration stood behind Coach even when his teams lost, and he was burned in effigy, labeled ‘nigger,’ on campus.  On other occasions his university office was ransacked with a message for this African boy to go home!  Need I say it, Georgetown University is Catholic school and a bastion of the liberal elite, and yet scratch the surface and there it is.  

He himself had been cut from the Olympic team because of the unspoken quota on black players, and he knew it.  This is one of the reasons why he was never grateful for his accomplishments.  He had earned them, and he knew others had also done so but were denied them by unseen, unspoken, unbreakable racial quotas.  

One observer (Michael Jordan) called him the Aristotle of basketball for his training of kings of the court. Coach thought of himself as a teacher who used a basketball to instruct in the use of one’s talents, in teamwork, in courtesy, in civility, in responsibility, in the value of education…..in the Georgetown way, never back down and always applaud an opponent’s well-earned victory.        

I have always liked Patrick Ewing, and now I know why.  Surely the best NBA center never to make it to a final. This is the coach that channeled the Van Gogh of basketball, Allen Iverson, into a productive career without parallel.  

Coach has some choice words for that old chestnut that blacks have biological superiority as athletes, too, seeing in it yet another way to belittle the accomplishments of blacks. He attributes the success of black athletes to intelligence and a drive to succeed, and the ability to succeed where there are fewer racial barriers, sports being one of the domains where the barriers are lowest these days.          

The janitors, laundrymen, ballboys, porters, ushers, maids, attendants, security officers, and doormen at hotels and arenas all welcomed his teams because the players said ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and never left a mess for someone else’s mom and dad to clean up.  A player who violated such norms of courtesy and civility would find himself with his 21-point scoring average on the bench until he learned that 70% of Hoya basketball was off the court.  

John Thompson was the first Division I coach to hire an academic advisor for the team, a woman.  He then hired a trainer, a woman, whom he promoted to assistant coach so that she could sit on the bench in games (and also get on a higher pay grade), readily available for injuries.  Both appointments threw the NCAA into a frenzy trying to find rules to block such changes since both were white women it also set off a media feeding frenzy.  Use your imaginations just a like a Pox journalist. Both these women worked for Coach for many years.  

Hoya scheduling had been historic. Every year was the same as last year.  No more when Coach came on the scene. He wanted to play arch rivals at home, or not at all.  (And if these rivals refused to schedule at Georgetown, he leaked it to the press to embarrass the rivals.) He wanted to play and beat teams that dominated post season tournaments in early season games. He also wanted a better gymnasium for his team(s) and fill it with shouting fans.  To further these ends he engaged in an infinity of negotiations in the games behind the game. He seldom compromised, and that got him the reputation as a trouble-maker, but he noticed white coaches were seldom asked to compromise and he stuck to his guns.   

Then there is the deflated basketball he kept on his desk about the other 70%, but, well, read the book. The title is explained on the last page, but I didn’t get it.  

Coach admits his many mistakes, civil, social, and tactical, and hands out praise to many who worked with the Hoya teams.  The telling is episodic marked by basketball seasons.  In that respect it is not easy to read though the ghostwriter’s prose is smooth.  

Recent news from GT suggests things have gotten worse in subsequent days. Autobiography is never a completely reliable source, to be sure.