Author: Michael W Jackson

GoodReads meta-data is 339 page rated 3.61 by 103 litizens. 

Genre: History.

Verdict: Grüezi

Switzerland became a state with central government only in 1848, but it has never been a nation-state. The largest nation is German but there is also France, Italy, and Romansh in those mountains.  By the way, the Alps, unlike most other mountains, yield no metal. That is important because it meant no great power ever had an incentive to conquer them for gold, silver, iron, or anything else.  

In the early Fifteenth Century isolated alpine communities made defensive alliances against maundering intruders, like Magyars, Avon ladies, and Huns.  Schwyz was one of the first communities to do so.  This alliance expanded when larger threats loomed from France in the west and the Germany (Holy Roman Empire) in the east.  In time the alpine alliances added trade, and with trade came some standardisation, e.g., weights and measures, and some law to resolve disputes.  Neither language nor religion inhibited these practical agreements. Or so it seems.  

The Hapsburg dynasty started in Switzerland but moved east to richer pickings, and when the lords were gone, the vassals started to acted autonomously.  While Swiss mythology turns around William Tell and stout resistance to tyrants, the author suggests a more gradual change occurred largely due to the indifference of the Hapsburgs and the internal preoccupations among the French. Italians were so disorganised that they never posed a threat.    

Those who resided in what is now Switzerland were as riven by religious strife as elsewhere in Europe. Catholics enjoyed murdering Protestants, and when the Catholics were unavailable Protestants happily murdered each other over split infinitives.  All of this was justified by minute interpretations of disputed Biblical grammar. There was the Thirty Years War, the Hundred Years War, the unnamed war, and more.  

As long as these larger European conflicts raged, Swiss moderated their own internal disputes, and surprisingly did not try to draw in larger forces. Only when the pan European conflicts subsided did internal conflicts become more intense, proving they were quite capable of cultural suicide if given half a chance. 

By 2010 Switzerland remained insular but no longer isolated from broader currents in Europe and the world from AIDS to the GFC.  The world had come to Switzerland, leaving it little choice but to integrate itself more with the world in trade, finance, migration, defence, health, and more.  Watches are not enough, though the introduction of the Swatch was controversial in Switzerland for pandering to the market. Banking secrecy inhibits trade. The population is declining. The once sacred army is eating the budget to no discernible purpose. Swissair subsidies were bottomless. All of these have had to change.  

Swiss isolation was useful to the major European powers, making it a source of agricultural produce, mercenaries, leather goods, and so on.  Note that neutrality was a novel concept when it came later, and Switzerland more less invented it, and to affirm it worked hard at mediating conflicts among others and hosting organisations like the Red Cross, and later UN agencies and non-government humanitarian agencies.  

How Switzerland stuck together remains a mystery to me, when other polyglot countries like Belgium, Canada, and Czechoslovakia have had so much conflict along language lines. The Swiss say their country is Willed. Does that mean that the television talk shows hum with ponderous opinions on ‘What it means to be Swiss?’ the way they do with ‘What it means to be Canadian on the CBC?’  Willed, often OK, but surely not always, and not ever to a same degree among the dominant Germans and minority French and Italians.  The manifest expression of that Will are the numerous ‘votations’ (a term I had never come across before) in direct democracy and the concurrent majorities in the cantons, which they author does not spell out. The discrepancies in these votes show just how divided the country is just beneath the surface, but the author does not scratch this surface.    

There is an interesting sidebar here.  The Swiss became a state without ever having had a royal ruler.  One result of that absence was that the Swiss never had a queen, never had a queen who acted in public, never had a queen who mothered a king, never had a queen who acted as regent for a successor, never had a queen who succeeded a king even briefly, and so was one the few European countries in the Twentieth Century with no experience whatever of women near to or in a public and powerful position. That lacuna cast a long shadow over succeeding generations of women in Switzerland.  Even when in 1979 women got the vote in Swiss national elections, they were still denied it in the local elections of many cantons. When the first woman took a seat on the Federal Council (cabinet) some other members quit rather than serve with her, and she was subject to a very blatant and hostile media campaign for abandoning her family….  Think Pox News and you have it.  No blow is too low.  No lie is too old.  No distortion too fantastic.  

Personal disclosure.  I spent a fortnight in Switzerland a long time ago (1983) and found the smug complacence palpable.  

GoodReads meta-data is 320 pages, rated 4.16 by 153 litizens.

Genre: Thriller.

Verdict: Good.  

In late 1944 the Allied armies in Northern Europe reeled from the German offensive in the Battle of the Bulge. Though much of Belgium had been cleared of Nazis, the Germans remained nearby.  

In particular Peenemunde was seventy miles from British lines in Belgium.  Hitler had latched onto the rocket program as a wonder weapon that would yet win the war and poured resources into it, despite the doubts of the scientists and the objections of hard-pressed generals.  Fictional Willi Graf is one such scientist, second only to Wernher von Braun (1912-1977) in the rocket team.  

The V1 (doodle bug) had been superseded by the Vergentungswaffe 2, that is Vengeance Weapon 2.  We learn some of the complications of operating, building, conceiving of such a rocket, and the humanity of those who worked on it, all through Graf’s eyes.  None of the scientists and engineers are good Nazis but they are committed to the rocket as end in itself. Von Braun had joined the SS and made good use of that in this story to protect his team.  

In parallel there is British Aircraftwoman Kay who studies aerial reconnaissance photographs in a London bunker as the RAF tries to find the launch site(s) so as to bomb them. Meanwhile, the Germans have learned to use mobile launchers to escape detection, and to launch mostly under cloud cover. 

Kay survives not one but two V2 explosions in London and begins to take it personally.  Meanwhile, Willi’s wife is killed in an RAF bombing raid that hits everything but the V2s.  

Though the V2s are pinpricks in the bigger picture of 1944, they are dreadful and so a dedicated effort is assembled to target and destroy them.  Kay and her slide rule are recruited to a team of RAF Aircraftwomen to go to Belgium and calculate the point of origin of the missiles by using radar signals of the launches correlated with impact locations in England.  For this calculation to guide bombers to the target it has to be done in six minutes, which allows time for the RAF to strike before the Germans have dismounted the launch equipment and hidden everything in the forest. 

We get more of Willi’s backstory than Kay’s, principally his long comradeship with von Braun and their mutual enthusiasm for space flight with rockets, spiced with some technical details.  There is, what seemed to this reader, a pointless sidebar with a local prostitute, too.  

Thanks to some (rather unbelievable) loose lips, the Nazis learn of the calculators in Belgium and target one V2 to hit them.  It is Kay’s third brush with V2 death.  

Unknown to each other, Kay computes angles to find Willi and company for the bombers, and Willi devises more ingenious ways to disguise the launch sites and shorten the dismounting time, while targeting one rocket to hit Kay and her squad of pencil pushers.  They each have some near misses.  

In the summer of 1945 they meet at a debriefing, and realise that they had been – in their own ways – trying to kill each other.  The end.

About 3000 V2s were launched, half at London and half at Antwerp (the major seaport through which Allied armies were supplied).  In London they killed about 3000 civilians, and injured far more.  The destruction of the V1 and V2 explosions was the prime cause of homelessness in London after the war, effecting as many as 80,000 people.  No doubt something similar in Antwerp was true.  In producing the rockets between 12,000 – 20,000 slave labours died, either being worked to death, murdered, or hit in RAF raids on the production plants.  

After the war both German generals and Allied analysts concluded the vast materiel and labour that went into the rockets detracted from the German war effort to no strategic or tactical gain.  While Harris does not speculate, it is possible that Hitler’s desperate demand for wonder weapons and the resources devoted to them might have distorted German arms enough to shorten the war to some extent. 

Most of the action takes place in the woodlands near Den Haag where I spent a semester in 1983.  Indeed the nearest village is Wassenaar which was exactly where I was at the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Studies. I walked through some of those woods near the seaside.  

The moon is mentioned a couple of times as the goal of the rocketeers, but I thought their goal always was Mars with the Moon as an interim step, not a final goal. That is not hinted at in these pages.

In an afterword Harris says the text was written during the 2020 pandemic lockdown over some weeks.  It was released on 17 September and I got it on that day via a Kindle order.  Now that is a technology von Braun did not anticipate.  He did however live to see a man on the moon.

The book raises the question of the morality of the rocket men, and also of the race to acquire them.  In these pages they are technocrats like those that built the atomic bombs or tank chassis.  Though in this case they also aimed and fired the weapons. Are they war criminals?  Should they have been punished?  In any event thanks to the wily von Braun, who, though he is seldom on the page, dominates the story, planned ahead and traded their technical knowledge for salvation so that more than hundred of his team were transplanted to the USA with no penalty.  

And if they were war criminals for targeting civilians, then so was most of those who served Bomber Command which started the so-called City Busting bombing campaign in 1942 and continued it long past any justification, including Dresden, except vengeance.  The implicit indictment of Bomber Command in Freeman Dyson’s essay ‘The Children’s Crusade’ comes to mind.  

I enjoyed this book a lot and read it in two nights, the more so for the resonance of the location with my own experience, but I did find it a little thinner than some of Harris’s other historical novels.  It relied more on the technical details than the emotional lives of the characters.  Willi’s ambiguity comes too easily and the loss of his wife does not quite seem real.  Von Braun dominates the events but remains a cipher.  

The SS officer sent to raise morale is emphasised and then lost in the story.  When he appears the reader takes him for pivotal figure and invests in him, only to find him both cardboard and inconsequential.  

GoodReads meta-data is 317 pages rated 3.91 by 78,875 litizens.

Genre: Bibliomania.

Verdict: Crackerjack.

In the morning 29 April 1986 smoke issued from air vents in the Central Library of the Los Angeles Library system. There soon followed a conflagration that required half of the City’s fire department to contain.  The fire and subsequent water damage destroyed 600,000 books and damaged a like number, some of them rare, a few unique, but all representing the work, thoughts, and hopes of the individuals who wrote them and of those who read them.  

The Library Book chronicles the origin and development of the Los Angeles central library with something of its branch libraries throughout the SoCal sprawl.  There is a colourful cast of characters among the librarians from would-be writers, showmen, and suffragettes.  This backstory is interspersed with an account of the fire and the recovery, as well as the investigation into the cause of the fire.  

The fire began in one of the four closed stack silos and reached 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit, melting the steel shelves, injuring more than thirty firefighters, and cracking three-foot thick walls.  More than ten percent of the drinking water of the greater Los Angeles areas was pumped onto it, least it leap to other buildings.  While books do not burn easily, they do burn at 451 F-degrees as all science fiction readers know.  There is an amusing description of the author burning a book to see what it is like.  Which book?  Well it had to be that one written in this very building by Ray Bradbury. (If you don’t know that book, tant pis).

The building by the way was designed by the same architect who had earlier done the Nebraska state capitol building with its edifying accoutrements.  

The response of the library community was remarkable.  When the Fire Marshall declared the site safe, volunteers (some 5000 in number) went to work pulling books out of the debris.  In her words: 

“They formed a human chain, passing the books hand over hand from one person to the next, through the smoky building and out the door. It was as if, in this urgent moment, the people of Los Angeles formed a living library. They created, for that short time, a system to protect and pass along shared knowledge, to save what we know for each other, which is what libraries do every day.”

Overnight local businesses found 15,000 cardboard boxes, and fish processing plants combined to free an enormous freezer warehouse to hold the damaged books until they could be assessed and restored. (Mould is a book killer when exposed to water, and freezing prevents mould.) The success rate on restoration of damaged books is low, around ten percent.  For maps and art work there was no chance whatever. Plates on glossy paper and magazines have no hope.  

The fire investigators concluded it was arson and pursued leads and suspects for years with no result.  Despite the reassuring world of detective fiction, in fact, arson is hard to detect, harder to prove to a legal standard, and almost impossible to prosecute with a clearance rate, according to insurers, of about 1%.  Caught in these investigations was one hapless Harry Peak whose strange manner of existence is, per Orlean, most likely to be found in LA where make-believe is even more common than reality.  Insurance investigators were not so sure about arson, and gave up the chase. The building was fifty plus years old and full of old and new wiring for electricity, telephones, and computers, most of it installed after it was completed.  Then there are all those electrical appliances from coffee machines, sewing machines for binding repair, and more. 

Loved her descriptions of Los Angeles: “The sidewalks in Hollywood sagged under the weight of all the handsome young men who flocked there, luminous with possibility.”  

[Hope and ambition] “are  in the chemical makeup of Los Angeles; possibility was an element, like oxygen.”

For the young who come to find fame and fortune “moments were fortune cookies ready to be cracked open.”  They are “lifted by the continuous supply of hope and sun.”  

Everywhere you look there are “over-groomed busboys…and gym-trim extras.”

There are also many love songs to books and libraries embedded with the pages as she traces the history of the library and librarians up to the fire and then the recovery.  Savour a few:

“a library is an intricate machine, a contraption of whirring gears.”

“the whole orchestral range of book-related noises—the snap of covers clapping shut; the breathy whisk of pages fanning open; the distinctive thunk of one book being stacked on another; the grumble of book carts in the corridors.”

“the city has a bloodstream flowing through it, oxygenated by books.”

“The publicness of the public library is an increasingly rare commodity. It becomes harder all the time to think of places that welcome everyone and don’t charge any money for that warm embrace.”

“Destroying a culture’s books is sentencing it to something worse than death: It is sentencing it to seem as if it never lived.”

‘There is a human mind behind every book waiting to meet the reader.”

“Libraries are the home of our oldest friends.”

The last word is this: 

Heinrich Heine’s warning: “There where one burns books, one in the end burns men.”

The book is so well written I am tempted to read other of hers just to revel in the exact prose and the positive attitude that propels it.  Chapeaux!