Goodreads meta-data is 329 pages rated 3.7 by 323 litizens.
Genre: krimi
Verdict: Many trees, little forest.
Welcome to the back office of a very large and expensive hotel far away from the glitz and glamour of the lobby and the guest rooms. In back the floors are concrete, the paint is peeling, and the staff are treated like slaves. No it is not quite that bad, but the contrast between the front of the house and back is nonetheless stark. The laundry, the stains, the effort to please those paying a thousand dollars a night, the demands of the head of an association who brings its annual conference with hundreds of expense-account guests each year, the thefts, the health inspections, the demarcation disputes among the staff, the ego war in the kitchens, the indifference of the McKinsey-schooled managers to anything that does ring the cash register, they are all in a day and night at the Hotel California, which I identified with that rambling structure the Hotel del Coronado with its paper thin walls in San Diego where I once had a conference.
Our hapless protagonist has been passed over for promotion to manager more than once. Is that the cause or the effect of his increasingly cynicism? The incumbent manager, ever faithful to the book of McKinsey of delegating responsibility downward to maintain deniability, seems to take delight in heaping ever more duties on him, perhaps to drive him out. Well our hero is made of stronger stuff and will not buckle…yet.
With housing for nearly a thousand guests across several buildings and an endless stream of comings and goings it is a small town, and lots of shenanigans from mischief to murder, with a suicide in-between not to mention the nocturnal tepee creeping. (The description reminded me of the Hilton Village in Waikiki.) The police have learned to use the deliveries entrance. None of these events are good for business and the sooner swept under the carpet the better. Woe betide the housekeeping staff who lift that carpet.
There is slow build after an initial explosion of violence in a guest room, and much exposition of hotel mechanics along with a survey of the staff. That may sound laboured, however, it is well integrated into the unfolding of the narrative. Note, it is merciful shorn of IKEA descriptions of furnishings or Elle clothing fashions. Indeed I have no idea what the protagonist looks like.
However, yes there is a ‘but’ coming. The exposition does become forced when every room, every employee, every incident has a nickname or code name in hotelese which is explained. The tide of information is relentless. Time after time, page after page. It gets to be mechanical, Robbie. It became like following a jaded tour guide reciting facts and figures to no end. None of that exposition fed into the plot.
There are clever set-ups like the Bob Johnsons Convention which was a completely new idea to me, and it made a screwball comedy sort of Kurt Vonnegut sense. The solution wrapped-up just about everything, but not everything. Bob ‘Bull’ Johnson must still be roaming the hallways.
Alan Russell
Oversold re laugh out loud but dryly amusing page-by-page. But perfect for bedside table reading matter.
Goodreads meta-data is 208 pages, rated 3.56 by 258 litizens.
Genre: krimi.
Verdict: Meh.
I have read at least a dozen of these Charles Paris krimis and enjoyed the plotting and the theatrical ambience which is so lovingly detailed. This book is the sixteenth in the sequence. Surprising then, I could not finish this one but stopped at 48% on the Kindle meter. It seemed to be going nowhere. Instead there were endless discussions about the nature and meaning of the play to be performed – Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night – that went on and on in every chapter.
The only crimes were artistic, punctuated with Charles’s usual alcoholism and colossal blunders in relating to his Penelope, who has wisely divorced him but still – for reasons of the plot – puts up with him, and diamond hard cynicism. Not a stiff in sight.
I signed out in favour of another title by another author. Have I become an impatient reader? Guess so. Because of my affection for the other titles by this writer and appreciating how hard it must be to sustain such a series, I hesitated for some time about posting this remark, but well, the truth will out. I don’t suppose my comments will damage the sales of this title or any other.
GoodReads meta-data is 161 pages, rated 3.59 by 593 litizens.
Genre: krimi
Verdict: Offbeat, very.
No, not this one.
Morbidly obese, incompetent accountant Eugene daydreams about escaping the rut of an hour-long commute on the crowded, dirty, smelly, and unreliable Tube where people sneeze on him to work, a cold sandwich downed at his hot desk in an open-plan zoo between associates struggling not to bump into his ungainly bulk. That bulk may well be the only reason he hasn’t been fired, the firm fearing some kind of law suit for discrimination against the fat.
Eugene lives with his grandmother to save money, so poorly paid is he. His co-workers shun him, and it is easy to see why. He is painfully inept, tongue-tied, sloppy, and, well, not very bright. The tomato sauce stains on his shirt are ever present. ‘I’m a Loser’ is his theme song.
Into this downward spiralling life comes a wind, well, a breeze, of change. After work one day, during a cloud burst he ducks into a bookstore where he comes across a krimi he read years ago when he was a student, and thumbs through it, recalling something of the story and savouring the recollection of his youth when he read it. The rain stops, and as he heads toward the dreaded Tube, and because he went into the bookstore he walks along a street he usually does not, passing an Op Shop which has a men’s trench coat in a window display. More rain is in the offing and he is surprised to find that the coat encompasses his XXXXL+ girth. ‘Sold!’ and as he walks along he feels a surge of energy – a new experience for him.
Strange. Remember Jackie Chan’s The Tuxedo [2002]? Not quite as powerful as all that but a surge nonetheless.
Moping in his room, as he does every night, stuffing his face with greasy food and slurping gigantic sugar-laced sodas, trawling the web, when nearly unconsciously he types an advert onto an internet market place as a PI.
Imagine his surprise when a few nights later, surrounded by pizza boxes and double whopper colas, he gets an imperious response to this notice, instructing him to arrive at an address at 11 a.m. tomorrow morning…alone. Taking time off work, sure that no one will miss him, he meets Melissa who sets him to find her missing husband, a highly paid and successful surgeon, who has been gone for weeks. Did I mention that Eugene is also a virgin and naive to boot. He will do anything she says if he can fathom it.
Trouble is that Eugene has no idea what to do, desperately trying to remember the detective books and films he has read and seen for inspiration. He is not very good at that either: Mumbling, stumbling, scratching. It does eventually occur to him to ask around among husband’s colleagues. However, his near total lack of personality means most ignore him even though with his size he is hard to miss.
He is altogether a loser, but somehow…. Yes, he has the luck of the stupid, and by chaotic shambling he uncovers the plot, and it is resolved with very little help from him. There is an adage in sports that a better opponent brings out one’s own best game. One plays up, or tries to do so, to the competition. Eugene does something like that.
Christian Hayes
It is unusual and unexpected and diverting. It includes a novel within the novel, namely that 1940’s noir he found in the bookstore in a tour de force. I did read it all and that in itself is a recommendation from this impatient reader. There is a sequel but I have not bit yet. Perhaps I will.
[A week later.] I did, very similar to the above but with unexpected touches like the cab stand at Russell Square, at which I remember once waiting far too long before dawn on a wet day for a ride to Heathrow.
IMDb meta-data is runtime of 17 minutes, rated 8.2 by 6 cinematizens.
Genre: Sy Fy
Verdict: Charming.
Somewhere in a Latvian potato field Aldis talks to the plants, commending them on their endurance, praising their versatility, luxuriating in their foliage, and cheering them on. This potato field is his canvas, his work, his mission, his wife, his dog, his life. Then one night he sleeps through the crash of an alien spaceship into his field of dreams! Well, farm work is tiring, making him a heavy sleeper and he missed the impact only to awaken to a loud knock at the door.
Next thing he knows the long arm of Riga has reached out and evacuated him from his property while the downed spacecraft, which he is told is a weather satellite, is secured. The government offical who moves him is Arn from Prince Valiant working a second job. Aldis plots with two friends, a married couple, that he stays with while his farm is fenced off for study, to get back among those tubers, because they cannot do without him, nor he without them. The trio try several ruses in good fun to get in, from movie making to a tourist walk through the potato field but the guards will not open the gate to either the costumed film crew or the ersatz tourist.
Desperate, Aldis goes in via a wormhole burrowing under the fence, and finds a great silver potato (looked like that bean in Chicago to me, but not that big, things in Chicago have to be too big). He politely knocks on the door and it opens wherein he finds an injured alien from Area 51. They communicate, sort of, a mutual goodwill. All Aldis has is a bag potatoes he just picked and he offers one to the alien. Offer accepted, and the alien bites in, and starts to feel better immediately. Aldis is surprised but he know his potatoes are good.
Aldis goes back to his potatoes and the alien takes off, disappointing Official Arn before he can use the alien technology to make Latvia great (again). After haranguing Aldis and his two co-conspirators…he asks for some potatoes to take home!
The slow smile from Aldis is charming, as is the whole deal.
P.S. We are left to infer that none of the officials bothered to knock.
GoodReads meta-data is 201 pages, rated 3.75 by 16 litizens.
Genre: krimi.
Verdict: By the numbers.
It is 1990 in the People’s Republic of China following the Tiananmen Square massacre. Inspector Bao goes to see an opera. On his police officer’s salary his ticket puts him in the cheapest of cheap seats. As the luck of crime writing would have it, another patron nearby is murdered in his seat, and, well, a fictional dick has got to do what a fictional dick has got to do and he investigates.
Of course, he is warned off by overlings and that threat causes him to redouble his efforts, and so on. It is an atmosphere of distrust and suspicion and that is among the coppers.
There is much locale and atmosphere of contemporary China and that kept me flipping Kindle pages as the genre clichés piled up.
Two straw horses dominate Bao’s tedious efforts at social criticism: first, is the corruption of the Communist Party which has become even more strident and hypocritical post-Tiananmen and, second, evil capitalism (which is simply equated to money) corrupting the comrades. It is a world of blacks and whites. Reminded me of that Danish kiminiologist who equates anyone with a few Euros to Hitler – Jussi Adler-Olsen.
Mostly Bao, like so many other fictional detectives, is more interested in his own introspection and self-absorption than anything else. ‘I am so fascinating’ would a truthful subtitle for many krimi heroes.
Chris West
There is much of China, as indicated above, the division between city slickers who breathe smog and country bumpkins who breathe methane, dutiful northerners and slack southerners, real Chinese versus Hong Kongers, and the spectral shadow of Mao and the Cultural Revolution hang over all like a miasma. (Aside, it seemed to this cynical observer that the Trump era bore many similarities to the Cultural Revolution with its celebration of ignorance.)
Some time ago I came across an explanation for the two names Beijing used to bear when transliterated to English: Peping and Peking. One means northern city and other northern capital but I forgot which way around they go.
Goodreads metadata is 172 pages, rated 4.27 by 227 litizens.
Verdict: What a trip!
An incredible story that has not (yet) been bastardised and exploited by Hollywood. (I searched IMDb.) Dibs on that.
On 4 December 1941 Pan American flight 606 took off from Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay for Auckland in far New Zealand (and return therefrom) with stops along the way, starting with Honolulu. It had a crew of ten men and fifty passengers. All the members of the crew were experienced long-haul flyers, well versed in Pan Am’s exacting safety protocols.
This was an enormous flying boat – a Boeing 314 – equipped with all the latest mod cons and hi tech of the day. The hull was marked with company logos and a US flag on roof and both side of the nose cone, as well as the civilian registration number NC-18609.
By this time it was Standard Operating Procedure for the pilot commanding to be handed an envelope as he entered the aircraft to prepare for takeoff with the forbidding label: To Be Opened Only in an Emergency. Captain’s eyes only. Captain Robert Ford was required to carry it in the internal right hand breast pocket of his uniform coat at all times per company rules. He had carried such an unopened envelope on many previous flights: Situation normal.
The flight duly arrived in Honolulu and laid over for fuelling, passenger changes, and some relaxation for the crew, staying at the Moana Hotel where we had a reception once. It took off the next day, 6 December and wound its way southwest making stops for fuel, food, relaxation, and water at Canton Island, Suva, and Noumea. So far so normal.
Everyone was aware of the tensions in the Pacific and at each stop there is talk about it in the abstract. Then…. about an hour from Auckland the onboard radio operator began trying to establish radio contact with Auckland and came across a Kiwi radio news bulletin that proclaimed unconfirmed reports of an attack at Pearl Harbor …. Oops! Consternation prevailed as the crew members recalled the Pearl Harbor they had left less than a day ago. They continued in silence for a few minutes while the radio operator sought confirmation, then they received a message from the Pan Am ground station in Noumea: Pearl Harbor Attacked. Implement Plan A. Good luck.
The Captain opened the envelope to read PLAN A (PLAN B was for Pan Am flights in the Atlantic Ocean, mostly to South America, but also one to Africa). Plan A was very detailed. It started with a decision tree. That is, it was divided into parts based on where the aircraft was when the envelope was opened. This close to Auckland and with no apparent trouble there, the obvious thing to do was to get to Auckland by taking anticipatory evasive action and changing their flight path and going to radio silence (both sending and receiving can be traced).
Leaving aside the details, Plan A said to continue West to New York City, like Magellan or Columbus, not to return over the Pacific. How to do this was left to the discretion of the captain. This was an enormous challenge to both man and machine. They had no maps, charts, weather reports or history, radio locator guides, tidal records, descriptions of anchorages for such an aircraft, spare parts, and they would need fuel, food, and mechanical supplies along the way. Nor had any of them ever before been in those parts of the world. West from Auckland the nearest Pan Am base was…[wait for it] at Léopoldville in the Belgian Congo. (Why Pan Am established a base station there remains a mystery.)
Dinner time.
During a week in New Zealand the crewmen laid in supplies from the Pan Am base in Auckland, all the few remaining passengers having disembarked there, using the cash on hand in the local office and pocketing the rest for later. An array of spare parts and two whole engine assemblies were packed into the passenger accommodation. Meanwhile, the navigators went to the public library to look at geography textbooks, maps, and atlases with tracing paper to make copies and the radio operators went to radio stations to seek out information about which radio bands were used in those parts of the world. The library mission was fruitful, the radio investigation was not. From Auckland to New York City on the western route was 20,869 miles at least.
The areas to traverse were vast and may be war zones by then. One possibility was to overfly Australia to Perth and from there to South Africa, however, flying over the Australian continent with no landing gear was daunting. In any case, that last leg from Perth over the southern India Ocean to Durban was beyond the range of the aircraft. Instead they decided to go to Darwin and from there to Ceylon via the Dutch East Indies…. To infer from these pages, most of the decisions were collective after discussion, which was after research.
What’s so hard about this anyway? Just draw a straight one place to another and fly that. Simple. Hmm. How does one allow for the drift of crosswinds, the false readings of the magnetic North Pole, the inconvenient location of mountain peaks, the long stretches where there will be neither fuel nor food nor any place to land the beast. How do you know you are flying a straight line? Indeed.
The subsequent adventures were many. The Boeing was buzzed by fighter aircraft, just missed Japanese bombing in Darwin, shot at by a Japanese warship, had to repair the engines several times (once in flight), borrow money from strangers, fly by dead reckoning, guess at the location of mountain ranges, hit unexpected storm fronts, land in unfamiliar waters (including some that were mined) risking accidents, guesstimate the wind drift, allow for the magnetic North Pole, stay aloft when one engine, pushed beyond the redline – exploded while in mid-air, all the while looking out for Zeroes. In some takeoffs the plane was more than a ton over the prescribed weight, because they stocked up on avgas whenever they could get it. One engine blew doing that.
From Ceylon to Karachi, Bahrain, Khartoum (landing on the Nile River), Léopoldville (on the Congo River), and Natal in Brazil. The distance from Léopoldville to Natal was 3480 miles. The maximum range of the Boeing was 3600 miles. Not much leeway if a storm threw the ship off course, if headwinds slowed the plane, if they mistook landmarks, if the next waterway was clogged, if the navigators miscalculate, if the effect of magnetic North Pole confuses things…. They had by now violated all manner of safety rules to adapt the aircraft to the circumstances, changing the fuel mix, rerouting hydraulic lines to reuse oil, and punching holes here and there so that they could pour fuel into the tanks in flight from jerry cans in the cabin. Needless to say, no one smoked.
Captain Robert Ford
That flight from Léopoldville to Natal took 23 hours and 35 minutes. Due to the recurrent overheating of engines because of substandard fuel, the cowlings on two of them had blown off, increasing the risk of fire. The plane trailed smoke for most of this leg of the journey. The plane was fully serviced and repaired at Natal before takeoff. (In a sad and annoying coda, while in Natal thieves got on board and stole the crew members’ personal affects [watches, rings, extra shoes] and much else from the plane, like a gyroscope.)
The long way.
Early in the morning of 6 January 1942 Pan Am flight 602 radioed La Guardia Tower for permission to land. The call was acknowledged and a stunned silence followed. After that it is anti-climatic.
Over five weeks the total flight time was 209 hours in the air, covering 50,694 kilometres or 31,500 miles. Most of the flight was incognito because the aircraft was regarded as technological prize of value to an enemy, i.e., it had advanced navigation and communication systems which were only being used for the first time on this flight. Those assets together with the engines made it a valuable commodity. Moreover, the ground stations they visited did not report the passage for the same reason, and in any event such civilian news would not have had priority for wartime communication. Ergo the families and friends of the crew had not word of them since leaving Noumea five weeks before.
The Wikipedia entry is slim pickings. It does not even include the flight number or offer a map of the route. This anodyne account is the only book I could find. Yet the documentary material seems plentiful, as all the crewmen kept logs, and Pan Am had plenty of photographs.
‘Anodyne’ I said above. Never once does a member of the crew lose his temper, despair, grow despondent, blame another, slack off, be late for departure, go into hysterics, become so hungover as to be unfit for duty, but each and every one is the very model of modern Pan Am employee stepping out of the advertising poster. What a cheerful, polite bunch – insufferable. Disney’s seven dwarfs were more creditable than these (paper) thin men.
The fifty passengers are invisible in these pages. Only one has a name, a Fiji resident who asked to visit the cockpit when approaching Fiji so that he might see his home from the air. Even later when the plane was detained in Bahrain to take on a passenger for Léopoldville, she is never identified or mentioned thereafter, though there was much grousing about being delayed for her convenience. The implication is that being a woman, she cannot have been worth the bother to these men. For all we know, she might have been carrying an enigma machine or Tojo’s P.I.N. to the Allies.
Despite the enveloping context of the war, the book is also silent on the politics of some of the locales where the plane stopped. New Caledonia (Noumea) was a French colony. Was the colonial government Vichy or Free French in late 1941? Did that distinction effect the reception of the plane on either of its two landings? Unknown. Likewise at Léopoldville, at the time the Congo was a Belgian colony, and Belgium had been occupied by the Germans since in 1940 and by the time the Pan Am plane got there Germany had declared war on the USA. What was the nature and attitude of the Belgian colonial authorities to this aircraft and crew? We’ll never know from these pages.
New Zealand was an ally of Great Britain in the European war, but when the Japanese attacked Malaya that bought the war closer. Did that happen while the Pan Am crew was in Auckland? Did it make things easier or harder for them? This context is absent.
All of which is to say there is a lot more to the story for someone else to dig up and put into words.
Amuse yourself by imagining how Hollywood would mangle this ‘based on a true story.’ Captain Ford would be played by that midget, whatshisname, and he would flap his arms to power the aircraft, which would be attacked by giant condors. There would be much yelling and histrionics and CGI galore of irrelevant crocodiles and such. A Nazty femme fatale would figure in the plot. The passengers would include the director’s current squeeze. Christopher Nolan would add his own touches with a gratuitous big-named star taking his hat off and putting it back on repeatedly. (An old theatrical trick to upstage the action.)
Pan Am seems to have been a world of its own, and I am wondering about reading a history of the company to find out more. Recommendations are welcome.
GoodReads meta-data is 328 pages, rated 3.74 by 98 litizens.
Genre: Krimi.
Verdict: More!
The ten nations bordering the Baltic Sea come together to enhance shipping along its waters and create an international organisation – Baltic Area Development Agency (BADA) – to superintend those efforts by dredging harbours, widening channels, improving port machinery, enhancing computer technology, buying time on satellites. For these purposes BADA busies itself with fund raising. Enter the Sloan Guarantee Trust of New York in the person of the redoubtable and imperturbable John Putnam Thatcher in his twenty-fourth outing; the first was in 1961. Age has not wearied him.
As with all of the previous titles there is much office politics and BADA is a mare’s nest held together only by the iron will and rapier flexibility of its Swedish Director Annemarie Nordstrom and the technical wizardry of her number two, Stefan Zabriski of Poland. She has larger political ambitions and he loves the boy toys that BADA offers him. The Kiel Canal comes into the spotlight when on a windswept night of ice fog a collision involving several ships occurs and creates a Baltic traffic jam and crisis with a tailback from Kiel to Tallinn, while Thatcher just happened to be on hand in discussions of an infrastructure loan with his irascible off-sider Everett Gabler whose lust for spreadsheets is obscene.
Just when the traffic jam seems to be under control, a storm in a BADA tea cup spills over, and Zabriski is corpse number jeden. Who dun it? The Dane, the Swede, the Estonian, the Lithuanian, the Latvian, the Russian, the German, the Finn, the Norwegian, or …. all of the above? Then there are all the lobbyists and hangers-on that gather around BADA. And why? Had the deceased discovered something among his computer datasets? Did he himself do wrong?
Much atmosphere around Kiel and the BADA HQ in Gdansk are retailed. Many shenanigans in high finance occur. Zabriski (was that point named for him?) is by far the most interesting character. Too bad he left the scene so early. Also well drawn is his surviving (but not for long) assistant who knows more than she realises. The plot thickens, rather like my waist line.
There is much to’ing and fro’ing from a horse auction to a state funeral and rather little character development or unravelling of the plot. Lots of light and sound, but not much upon which to chew, but still fun. Gabler’s puritanical nature is put to the test when he sees how Poles do business. Much as he treasures the paper trail he also likes to see things for himself!
I thought I had read all of the John Thatcher mysteries and then I discovered I had not. Whoopee! I have sung the praises of the Lathen partnership in earlier posts and will not repeat that tune here. Click the link below for enlightenment.
Each of these Kindle reissues is accompanied by a long, self-indulgent, and tedious ego trip by Deaver Brown for reasons known only to him. It adds nothing and consumes about half the sample, serving as an example of how not to market a book. It is repeated in every one of the preceding re-printed twenty-four Lanthen titles.
GoodReads meta-data is 629 pages, rated 3.80 by 164 litizens.
Genre: Biography.
Verdict: Wonder Woman!
Every scrap of paper she ever wrote remains, or so it seems, and it overwhelms a biographer. Her dates were 1820 – 1910.
No lamp and not a nurse. Got it! What she was was a public administrator. Not a fashionable title these days but that it what she was.
The woman in the girl is plainly visible with her systematic approach to everything, her appetite for work, her linguistic ability, her packrat saving of any and everything, her mulish determination to see things through, her industrial strength letter writing, and so on and on. How different she was from her sister though both had a virtually identical upbringing. This difference is something the two sisters discussed themselves more than once, when her sister could be bothered to be serious for a moment.
To illustrate both the differences in the girls and Florence’s nature, consider this. The girls would attend an opera, and while there Sister would flirt with men, strike poses, and laugh to attract attention to herself. Meanwhile, young Florence would be writing notes about the music, costumes, and singing because she was keeping a spreadsheet (avant le mot) of her taste in music, trying to work out what she liked and why she liked it. Ever the analyst she was always on duty. Even at this age she felt she had some sort of calling. She does much talking to god through the pages (and pages).
In the Victorian era her choices were limited. Stay at home…forever with her parents. Or, marry a house, well, a husband, but then work the house. To illustrate one suitor with whom she well matched intellectually and morally she rejected because she feared the closeted life marriage would entail. He married another, and in the first month this new wife hosted more than twenty dinner parties, three receptions, and five open house breakfasts. He was wealthy and had political ambitions, networking constantly. A new wife gave him an excuse to entertain non-stop, and no doubt the pace slackened later, but it indicates what the matrimonial deal was. This man would have accepted Nightingale’s other activities as long as they took second place to management of the house, the servants, the suppliers, the guest lists, the seating charts, the budget, the soirees, the children,….and so on.
Her search for a vocation that would be pleasing to her, and to god, and acceptable to her parents went on for years, and years, and years. There were several false starts toward nursing. That answered to her feeling of service and philanthropy, but nursing at the time was little more than a sickroom maid. There was no training, no qualification, and if anything the social status was lower than a lady’s maid. Use your imagination and figure that out. She was intrigued by the Kaiserwerth Institution in Germany, but her efforts to find out more took several years, but she went there for three months and it inspired her. Nurses were trained there in hygiene, sanitation, basic medical procedures like taking pulse, testing reflexes, and measuring blood pressure, and applying external salves, cleaning wounds, bandaging, and so on. They wore uniforms and there was an authority structure by seniority. A premium was on order, system, and cleanliness. Exact records were kept. This all appealed to her and she set about importing it to England. Another uphill struggle. Her campaign then, as later, was mostly by letter writing.
She got a chance, at last, to practice what she preached when hired to run a genteel ladies hospital. Genteel meant middle class, usually retired and impoverished governesses, and Protestant (not Catholic, not Jewish…). She only took the job on condition she could broaden the intake, and run it the way she wanted as long as it stayed within budget. One of his first acts was to save money by dismissing the resident protestant clergyman who had been treating the patients as a captive audience for his proselytising. Every step she took was contested but she was made of stern stuff and felt the divine hand was now on her shoulder. She introduced those new fangled Teutonic ideas and that was also resisted root-and-branch.
She learned to manipulate the management committee and that experience stood her in good stead later. She no longer went at things headfirst, but planted seeds with this member or that, and let them think it was their own idea, and voilà.
The Crimean War was the first major conflict since Napoleon in 1815 and the British Army was woefully unprepared in every way. But needs must. Stiff upper lip, and so on. Situation normal, all fouled up. But then that journalist William Russell sent in his reports, and the appalling condition of the army, including the sick, wounded, and dying was there in black-and-white. Needless to say the first reaction from Whitehall was to blacken his name, after all he was Irish, and so by definition an unreliable troublemaker. Denial, first. Then discredit. Next dissimulate. All of this was and is normal damage control.
However to its credit the Times of London which employed him and printed his dispatches stood by him, as did the photographs he got. Then they played musical chairs in Whitehall and a new minister did many things, but most of all he recognised Nightingale. That was to save many lives in the immediate future and set in train a great many changes.
William H. Russell
Coincidentally, Nightingale had written a petition in response to Russell’s report, volunteering to go to Turkey at her own expense and superintend one of the hospitals. That letter crossed one from the new minister offering her an official role so within five days she was on a ship for the Bosporus. Whirlwind indeed. What she found was even worse than Russell reported, since he was restrained in the interest of not putting off readers.
Comes the hour, comes the man, is an Italian adage I once heard, and it applies here. She was the person for the job and this was her hour. In the mayhem and chaos she cut through incompetence, carelessness, corruption, resignation, dishonesty, confusion, miasma, and worse to achieve order, system, and regularity. She soon made the minister who commissioned her sorry he had by her barrage of requests and demands, all couched ever so politely and all implicitly backed up the threat of publicity from Russell if the response was unsatisfactory. She worked twenty-hours a day for the first few weeks, dismissing incompetents, paying herself for some necessary equipment like mops to clean up the blood, instructing those willing to learn in the basics, writing her letters to London, and on and on. She threw herself into as her life’s work all at once.
She herself did very little nursing and never carried that famous lamp. That was a hagiographic embellishment for public relations. She did do rounds, sometimes at night, to double check on things. While the army lurched from one disaster to another, her’s become the only good news from the campaign and so got pride of place, and that gave her ever more leverage, and she used it.
It should be noted by the way that the hospitals she managed were all devoted to the rank and file and not to the officers. These grunts were the brutes and ruffians commanded by the toffs in the language of the day. The social distance between officers and men was measured in light years. That she solicited the welfare of working class dregs who ended up in the army was often part of the prejudice against her by the toffs and their kind, while making her very popular with that majority.
The conflicts within the medical service were many as were those between the medical service and rest of the army and with Treasury back in London. Nightingale had an unending struggle with just about everyone and their cousins. To give a reader some idea of what it was like. The society ladies and wives of officers who volunteered thought they should have separate and better quarters and food. Among others there were conflicts over authority, social status, and religion that only she could resolve, and each time she did the loser fired off an angry letter to The Times and to the Treasury.
Or another example about the Treasury which oversaw the expenses she claimed. Treasury refused to pay for new shirts for those wounded and sick soldiers admitted to the hospital because it is a soldier’s responsibility to look after his kit. Men who arrived in bloodied and torn shirts after being hit by cannon fired shrapnel were denied a change of clothing; she lost this war of words and paid for the shirts herself.
The Protestant nurses suspected the Catholic nurses of soliciting deathbed conversions to Catholicism and vice versa. Meanwhile, Nightingale would not have a clergyman of any kind in the wards to proselytise and that offended them both. And so on and on. Every pinhead was fought over by the pinheads.
She got a lot of hagiography, true, but the only spurred the trolls on to ever more venom. Her public image was two parts angel and one part devil. Her parents who had disapproved of her mission and her annoying and egotistical sister took up the cudgels on her behalf, as did many cousins, aunts, nephews, and nieces from the extended clan. Even Queen Victoria weighed in with a medal.
Her fame attracted many volunteer nurses who wanted a share of the limelight, an oriental adventure, a change of scene, a spot of husband hunting among the officers, and she was lumbered with a great many such dilettantes and it was impolitic to send them all packing. These volunteers arrived unannounced but all with letters from someone important. Some of the society ladies who arrived would not enter a ward when they discovered it stank, was full of working class men, had vermin, and was noisey. Carrying a bedpan was out! Mopping a floor, no way! One such volunteer came with her own maids to do all the heavy lifting, while she graced the proceedings, she thought. That lasted just over a day.
Is it any wonder that Nightingale lost weight, lost appetite, developed anaemia, and caught every disease floating around so that she became a semi-invalid. That added to her angelic halo for some and trolls supposed she was faking. Think of Pucker-Up on Pox News. Some things never change. The years she spend in the Crimean War must have seemed like centuries. The author is very good at laying out and explaining the debilitating illness that Nightingale developed after leaving the Crimea. He is also excellent on her efforts to influence (without seeming to do so) a postwar royal commission into army reform with her revolutionary ideas, mopping the floor, not building a barracks over cesspits, changing bandaging, and so on. These were shocking and revolutionary ideas to the Army Medical Service. Needless to say the army resisted all such recommendations. Needless to say she persisted and overcame with enormous effort.
In her steady efforts to reform the British Army she also pursued other reforms in her spare time! When conflict with the USA loomed and the government wanted to increase its army strength in Canada, she was consulted and threw herself into the project for a month or so, poring over maps, interviewing by letter travellers returned from Upper Canada, reading weather reports from army posts, assessing the thermal properties of wool blankets versus buffalo robes, estimating the effects of exposure to the weather on marching troops, calculating the food needed to sustain a regiment in a winter, and so on. Like a barrister on a large and complex legal case, she assembled, mastered, and ordered a mass of material for a report, but the storm passed and it was not needed.
Later when in a massive change the East India Company Army in India was integrated into the British Army she was called upon again, and applied the same vigour and methods to determining the needs of this newly organised force for sanitation, diet, exercise, and this report was completed, accepted, and implemented without her name attached to it per her preference.
By the way, her inquires about India brought her into contact with Indian nationalists, and she became, albeit, in a low key and advocate of home rule for India. More letters!
She burned the candle at both ends, despite the bacterial infection that persisted in the absence of antibiotics and made her bedridden for much of her life thereafter the pain from which changed her personality. She became ever more imperious, short-tempered, impatient, and uncompromising. She herself suffered, at times her weight would balloon up and at other times she would waste away. In hindsight that fluctuation came from the disease’s ravages on her system, but at the time it was incomprehensible, and all the more frightening for it. Despite her own aliments, or perhaps because of them, she worked at least two of her acolytes to death quite literally. Least a reader think this is an exaggeration, she wrote to one who was on his deathbed to say she was disappointed he had not done more! No lady with the lamp there.
The irony is that it took a long, long time for her to accept that germs led to contagion, sticking to the miasmatic theory for decades, despite the mounting evidence from her own statistical research, though she finally did accept it.
The book proceeds in detail which I can no longer summarise. Suffice it to say she was one of a kind, and we are the poorer for that, by which I mean we could benefit from more of her kind. We need more public administrators who try to get things right, and leave the headlines to those who cannot do anything else.
By the way she was born in Florence Italy when her parents were on a grand tour, hence the name.
Mark Bostridge
The stimulus to read a biography of Florence Nightingale was a BBC Radio4 episode of ‘Great Lives’ (highly recommended to eggheads) about her, featuring this biographer. It included the only remaining voice recording of the woman herself. I was surprised and enlightened by that brief, albeit superficial, discussion and went looking for the book. Glad I did.
We visited the small nursing museum at the old Sydney Hospital a few years ago and it featured a display on Nightingale Nurses, and that stuck in mind, too. On a visit to Istanbul in 2015 we saw the site of Scutari from a ferry, but had not time to visit it.
Goodreads meta-data is 227 pages, rated 3.81 by 26 members of the extended family.
Genre is krimi.
Verdict is not for me.
While I found the context and circumstances intriguing with a sub rosa secret service and the research into the period details is noteworthy that was all that kept me flicking the Kindle pages.
The protagonist is so inept it is hard to believe he made it that far alive, given what an imbecile he is. He takes as many pratfalls as a slapstick performer in a burlesque without the timing. Nor are any of the supporting players better delineated. The obnoxious superior officer is cardboard, as is the seductive (hardly) empress, while Hero’s notional superior is almost as inept as he is. No wonder the Empire fell if likes of these two were charged to hold it up. Hmm, may be I should have read it as a satire.
None of that is eased by the laboured prose and typos that keep the reader guessing. There are several volumes in this series. Decide for yourself.
Inspired by listening to a BBC Radio 4 episode of ‘Great Lives’ on Hadrian I thought to read Marguerite Yourcenar’s biographical novel on the Roman Emperor, Memoirs of Hadrian (1951). (By the way her full name is Marguerite Antoinette Jeanne Marie Ghislaine Cleenewerck de Crayencour. She shortened that to Marguerite Yourcenar.) I read her novel Coup de Grâce (1939) about star-crossed lovers in Latvia long ago. Sorry to say Memoirs of Hadrian is not available for the Kindle, and so I eschewed it. I did click the button to request it become available on Kindle, a new feature to me.
In the course of consulting Amazon about it, several other titles concerning Hadrian were proffered and I took this one, proving my humanity because I erred.
IMDb meta-data is 8 episodes of 50 minutes rated 6.2 by 927 cinematizens.
Genre: Thriller.
Verdict: Exotic, preachy, and clichéd.
I gave it a look as my lunch time viewing because of the Greenland setting, and that is superbly realised with a drone and more. But I gave up when the cop-show clichés just kept coming, piled high. I gave up after 2 1/2 episodes.
Here are a few: Jurisdiction is more important than solution. The victims may be Swedes but it is Danish territory. Cooperation, no way. Yet a US helicopter is among the first to respond and no comments are made on that?
Head office pushes the locals out of the way, doing without local knowledge, and proves to be more interested in punishing subordinates than doing the job. Sure I know that is McKinsey Management 101, but it so tired that it creaks.
An officer has a personal connection for motivation and confusion. Back stories intrude, as if the front story isn’t enough.
Swedish Foreign Minister says it is time to overthrow governments because they are incapable to reaching agreements in a striking remark that, nonetheless, rings hollow. Meanwhile, we see the incompetence in the jurisdictional disputes that are more important than the crime, by the hierarchy that excludes anyone with local knowledge, the omission of any indigenous peoples from the Arctic Council but then which indigenous people? Or are all such people uniform across Canada, Russia, Alaska, Finland…?
The acting is superb but not enough to hold the interest of this jaded viewer.
I also did much tooth-grinding with the inane, repetitive TV commercials. Yes, I am fast with the mute, but not as fast as I would like to be. No FF for broadcast, more is the pity.
![The Long Way Home (2d ed) (2010 [1998]) by Ed Dover](https://theory-practice.sydney.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/9780615214726.jpg)
