Category: Book Review

Bottom of the 33rd (2011) by Dan Barry

Good Reads meta-data is 255 pages, rated 4.08 by 2,415 Scrooges.  

Genre: Nonfiction; Species: ‘Informed Imagination.’ 

DNA: Horsehide, Grass, and Ash.  

Verdict: Wonderful!

Tagline: Hope. Frustration. Redemption. Resignation. Life.

Things went wrong from the start.  In the dilapidated stadium, the lights would not go on for the 7:30 pm start time.  An ominous portent. When a technician summoned on that cold night of April 18, 1981, Saturday before Easter Sunday, found a way to turn them on, the payback was that they remained on … until 4 a.m the next day. The site of this marathon  was McCoy Stadium of P’tucket in the Ocean State of Rhode Island.  

Stop right there!  Any 108-stitch baseball fan knows that date and place.  If not, get thee to Cooperstown, right now! 

In this early season AAA International League game the Pawtucket Red Sox hosting the Rochester Red Wings (Orioles) entered the Twilight Zone with no way out.  Jean-Paul Sartre said, in Hui Clos, ‘Hell is other people’ (Amen!), in this case it was another inning.  And another. Thirty-three times, while each team waited for Godot to deliver the game winning hit and to set them free.  

‘Baseball is life and life is baseball’ sums up this story of the players, umpires, fans, families, passers-by, owners, managers caters, groundskeepers, who populated this bittersweet moment, ah, hours, and hours, as the temperature fell.  If life has meaning, debatable I know, then so does baseball, and, perhaps, vice-versa, if baseball has meaning, then so does life.  

What brought these people together in this performance of the theatre of the absurd? How did they react to this Sisyphean labour? Where did they go after this purgatory?  Did those endless innings scar them for life? Some answers to these questions are gleaned in micro-biographies on more than a dozen of them.

Taking this extraordinary game, the longest ever played in ‘organised baseball’ (i.e., the North American Major Leagues and their minor league affiliates), as a case study, the author dissects the allure of the diamond for players (who hope to rise to the top in MLB, or reluctantly realise that they are sinking not rising), spectators, families, batboys, teenage girls in the concession stands, and lonely old men who prefer to sit apart in the stands. 

The result is a tour de force.  

In the course of the game, it is clear that some players are destined for the Elysian fields of the Bigs, while others need a day job – soon. The hopes of the latter have grown old and brittle in an Odyssean  journey around the minor leagues; among them is an infielder for whom the Red Wings is the fourteenth team he has played for in just over a decade of wandering through the minor leagues, earning just enough…to need a working wife. At twenty-eight or even twenty-five, most of these men are baseball-old, in a game where youth is almost everything.  

At times it is the team manager’s job to tell one of them that this is it. He will never ascend. Yes, he can hit.  Yes, his glove is good.  All true here in AAA. But the rosters are full of just such athletes, and he does not stand out among them.  Enjoy the moment, because – look up – the curtin is falling ever faster with each birthday.   

Pedant’s Corner. It seems the curfew rule was accidentally omitted from the AAA Umpire’s Handbook that year, and so the umpires had no express authority to end the game.    

* * *

The author did impressive research with even more impressive empathy, developing biographies of dozens the participants it seemed, giving many of them their own voice from the inside out to reflect on baseball, that game, and their lives.  It is touching, amusing, and poignant all at once.  

Needless to say, but say it I will, the pygmies have reviewed it on Good Reads.  (Apologies to pygmies for the comparison. If someone can suggest another metaphor for the small-minded gnomes who just have to criticise for its own sake to feel, briefly, smart, please let me know below.) 

P.S. One golden summer while I was in college, I was the official scorer at Legion games for the local paper, and I read much of this story from the standpoint of that job. How in the world would a scorer fit at 33-inning game into a scorebook. The ones I used allowed 3 extra innings.  Moreover, how would a publishing deadline be met. Ah, yes, the author not only explains how this scorer dealt with these problems but shows us the result. Ingenious, if nearly inscrutable.  

The Revolt of Gunner Asch (1954) by Hans Helmut Kirst 

Good Reads meta-data is 240 pages, rated 3.90 by 330 litizens.

Genre: Fiction.

DNA: Deutsch; Species: Nazi.

Verdict: Meticulous and boring. 

Tagline: One man’s war against the Wehrmacht from within.  

In late 1938 or early 1939 in a small garrison town in northern Germany Herbert Asch is a reluctant draftee who observes the absurdity of military life.  In the main the insanity is common to all armies. Any veteran will recognise the characters and situations, though in this case there is the added frisson that we know which way the wind of history is blowing, but Asch does not.  

As is typical in all-male groups, efforts are made to identify and abuse the weakest link.  For simplicity sake, Kirst limits this behaviour to the NCOs, and they focus on a harmless and hapless conscript who is a friend of Asch.  Driven nearly to suicide by the relentless abuse, Asch saves this friend and declares his private and personal war on the Wehrmacht. 

His heavy artillery are the many convoluted, contradictory, and obscure rules and regulations that govern army life.  Think of Jim Kirk talking a computer to death and that is Asch’s approach. With a blizzard of references to regulations, sub-paragraphs, dictates, and more, he soon rattles the leader of the NCOs into a blunder.  

For armour Asch uses the general indifference of officers to events in the barracks, as long as it does not blot their own personal careers.  The best way to insure that does not happen is never to record irregular occurrences, like fights, like lost ammunition, AWOLs.  If these things happen, and they do, and if they are recorded, then it means the relevant officers have failed!  Although daily reports are written in indelible ink, where there is a will, there is a means…  If they happen and are not recorded, well promotion remains within sight. 

Asch’s infantry are the records he makes himself by observing the petty grifting, marital infidelity, and absences of the NCOs.  This black book of data settles much hash.  

The telling is precise, but, well, holds little interest to this reader.  Asch’s campaign is the subject of at least three over novels by Kirst, but I am not at the moment motivated to continue.  It bears a passing resemble to Catch-22 but it is neither as funny nor as poignant as that novel.  Moreover, the shadow of hindsight darkens it.  

The End of Baseball (2008) by Peter Schilling, Jr. 

Good Reads meta-data is 340 pages, rated 3.85 by 209 litizens.

Genre: Alt History.

DNA: Baseball.

Verdict: What a ride!

Tagline: If only.

In Hollywood where fiction is fact the publicity for this book would say ‘inspired by a true story,’ almost.  Bill Veeck, baseball fans need no explanation, lived and breathed baseball, and kept himself alive through 36 operations after losing a leg on Guadalcanal (1942) in the USMC dreaming of hit-and-run, sacrifice bunts, faked cut-offs, catcher pick-offs, and line-drive doubles.  An invalid, he returned to the States in 1944 to light up the world of baseball for the next forty years, wooden leg and all.

The premise of this novel is that Veeck acted on his oft stated ambition to break the colour bar in Major League Baseball, hatching a complicated plan to do so in a coup de theatre that would surprise and defeat the many opponents of this change.  The nub of the plan was that he, with his $500 payout from the Marines, would buy two baseball teams, one all-white and one all-black, and Hey Presto! Switch the one for the other on Opening Day!  Genius! So he thought, but well, what did the elder von Moltke say, no plan survives first contact with reality, and neither did this one.  

FYI the two teams were the catastrophically broke Philadelphia Athletics in the American League and the unloved Philadelphia Stars of the Negro League.  This latter team was hardly better off financially than the A’s, but had many talented athletes.  Veeck assembled investors who had profited from some of his legerdemain before the war to funds the deals without knowing his master plan, and off he goes in this roller coaster ride of one imaginary season.  

The cast of characters ranges from Satchel Paige (whose autograph I once had), Buck Leonard, Roy Campanella, J Edgar Hoover, Eleanor Roosevelt, Judge Landis, and a great many more. What a kaleidoscope of the times and places of 1944.  

Post Script. By the way Veeck did break the colour bar in the American League when he ran the Cleveland Indians by signing and playing Larry Dobey.

The Way of the Bear (2023) by Anne Hillerman 

Good Reads meta-data is 281 pages rated 4.17 by 634 litizens.

Genre: Krimi.

DNA: Navajo 

Verdict: Overcooked.

Tagline: The evil Barbies did it.

Mostly Bernie and her bottomless portfolio of worries – career, sister, mother, neighbours, weather, parking, etc. If it’s there she will worry about it.  

Over-plotted, too much exposition, too much ‘How I am feeling.’ 

The snow and quick changing weather certainly dominate as are the distances with attendant loss of cell phone coverage but all rather mechanically.

Leaphorn’s name is on the cover but has but a few lines on the telephone at the end of the book.  

The two villains were obvious from the get-go. Both quickly crossed the border of my suspension of disbelief.  Each seemed too incompetent to pull off anything.  

The Angel’s Game (2008) by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Genre: Magic Realism.

DNA: Spain, Catalan, Barcelona.

Verdict: Immersive.

Tagline: All trip.

The obsessed writer seems to be writing his own life, and rewriting it.  He is on a quest and the man he seeks is himself.  

From humble beginnings his prose takes him into journalism, and then penny dreadfuls, and then THE BOOK. His prose is courted by a mysterious French publisher who does not seem to exist and yet the money he pays is real enough.  

***

This is the second instalment in Ruiz’s slow-motion sequence The Cemetery of Forgotten Books. The prose is so thick and luscious it has to be read with a knife and fork. I loved the description of the writer pounding out his prose on an old Underwood typewriter.  But no, I don’t get the title either.

White Russians, Red Peril:  A Cold War History of Migration to Australia (2021) by Sheila Fitzpatrick.    

Good Reads meta-data is 584 pages, rated 3.76 by 17 litizens.  

Genre: History.

Verdict: Helluva story well told.

Tagline:  Count your lucky stars. 

Post War Europe was a mess. Millions of displaced persons (whose countries had disappeared or had been destroyed), millions of refuges who had fled westward ahead of the Soviet advance, millions of Prisoners of War freed, all these remained. Nor was this human disaster limited to Europe because many Russians had decamped to Manchuria, first in 1917, and then again in 1930s, and later.  When I hear the term ex-pat ‘White Russians’ I think of those Tsarists who went to Harbin.  

But the reality is so much more complicated than that, and the author sets it out with admirable clarity.  A Displaced Person (many freed from slave labour and death camps) had a certain status because they had nowhere to go. Could Ukrainians be stateless since there had not been a sovereign Ukraine? Was Jewish a nationality or a faith? 

A refuge who fled west had a homeland that was ready and willing to take them, but many, perhaps most, did not want to go back to Poland, Belorussian, Russia, Hungary, or Armenia.  Many of these people had been in the same slave labour or death camps.  Then there were the POWS on whom there will be a comment below. 

Then there are semantics. ‘Belorussian’ could be translated as ‘White Russian.’  But these white Russians had nothing in common with those in the Far East.  These eastern white Russians who had weathered Japanese occupation of Harbin (where most had congregated) with the advent of the Chinese Communist, who had agreed to repatriate them to the USSR, where their fate was certain.  

All of this definitional and semantic differentiation may seem trivial but at the time it had life-and-death consequences.  

Into this maelstrom of misery Australia, Canada, the USA, and to a lesser extent England, along with several Latin American countries and the future Israel offered respite.  The Australian Labor government had decided with the concurrence of the Opposition to recruit immigrants to increase the population against the vicissitudes of the future.  (One outcome of that immigration was the gigantic Snowy River Engineering Project.)    

Needless to say many of the displaced persons, refugees, and POWs tried to manipulate the process to their personal salvation and some officials had a blind eye, whereas others demanded cash or kind. Many Ukrainians claimed to be Polish, but Poles who did not want to return to Poland.  Many POWs claimed to be forced labours from Belorussia.  Among all these unfortunates there were a small number of both ardent Nazis trying to escape the consequences of their deeds, and Soviet agents charged mainly with ferreting out Soviet citizens for return (and retribution) and later with spying on the West.  

Altogether a devil’s brew, but as the Minister of Immigration at the time, Arthur Caldwell, recognised it was a unique opportunity to recruit citizens for Australia.  His subsequent infamy as the proponent of White Australia is tempered in this account.  

The original targets for antipodean recruitment were British, on the assumption that a sunny new life would be more appealing than the bomb damaged and crippled United Kingdom.  This proved to be a very small pool, and most who presented themselves were the lame, halt, and blind.  Most £10 Poms stayed home. 

Then the circle was enlarged to Northern European. Vague, yes, but it came down to appearance.  This pool was if anything even smaller since for a time Germans were excluded, though some claimed to be Dutch or Danish.  Though it did include Baltic peoples from Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, and even some Finnish POWs held by the Soviets who passed themselves off as Germans to get west and then transformed themselves into Estonians. Those Balts came back to haunt the Labor Party, but that is another story. 

The next expansion was European and now appearance became explicit.  If an applicant looked European, then that was it.  Of course, not all Europeans look ‘European,’ whatever that is in the eye of the beholder.  Interviewers were reluctant to admit to Australia anyone who would look different.  Such a person would be stared at on the street. Would probably be denied work and accommodation.  Rather than seeing immigration leading to social change, the aim to cement White Australia into place unchanged.

Even so Caldwell made an effort to recruit Jews, but the local opposition from the press and other political parties put paid to that effort.  He feared jeopardising the whole program if the immigration of Jews was explicit, so he scaled those efforts back.  A judgement call.  

For most of the immigrants Australia was not the first choice. But it was the choice available and needs must.

In sum, about 20,000 Russians made in to Australia, one way or another.    

As well done and comprehensive, as the book is the petulant sniping on Good Reads is enough to put me off dinner.  

***

The pygmy historical revisionists repeatedly castigate Winston Churchill for returning Russians who came into Allied hands at the surrender of Germany in May 1945.  There were several hundred thousand Russian POWs in this situation, many of whom did not wish to return to the motherland, and even more determined not to do so were nearly a hundred thousand others who had sided with the Germans to fight the Soviets (Ukrainians, Cossacks, Belorussians, Armenians) in German uniforms.  Those returned meant a grim fate. The lucky ones went to the Gulag and many others were simply murdered on the spot of their repatriation.  

Armchair historians with unerring hindsight rail against this return.

The backstory that they never bother to add to the equation goes like this.  It was agreed by the Allied powers that they would return each others’ citizens at the end of the hostilities.  Signing up to that was part of Stalin’s price to enter the war against Japan. (At the time, estimates were that there would be up to a million US casualties in invading the Japanese home islands with ten times that many Japanese. Bringing the Soviet Union into that war, so it was hoped, would reduce that number and might even convince the Japanese to give up. And at the time no one knew if the atomic bomb would work, i.e., explode, or suffice to compel surrender.)  

By May 1945 the Soviets held a great many Allied personnel, twenty thousand Americans and a like number of Brits among others, who had been imprisoned by the Germans in Czechoslovakia and Austria. To get them back, the Soviets citizens held by Western powers had to be surrendered.  

I just watched a You Tube video by a self-appointed historian on the return of the Cossacks where the story is slanted to condemn the British.  No reference to Japan, and only the vaguest reference to Allied prisoners, who certainly would not have been returned had the Cossacks not been repatriated, one way or another.  

Erich Brown, Murder by the Book (2013).

Good Reads meta-data is 224 pages rated 3.63 by 369 litizens.

Genre: Krimi; Sub-species: Period piece. 

DNA: Brit.

Verdict: More!

Tagline: That old trope again.

Hero writes murder mysteries in 1955 London.  A demobbed soldier he tried investigative work immediately after the war with an army buddy but soon found writing about crime was easier and paid better than dealing with it, or dealing with wayward husbands or wives. In fact he found that he was good at writing and enjoyed it.  Now forty years old and unattached (his wife was killed in the Blitz) he is as unsure with women as a pimply teen.  Hard to credit that but there it is.

Then his agent needs some investigative work and some muscle applied and Hero enlists himself and his contacts from his own days on the street. What seems to be blackmail at first turns out to be far worse when the bodies start falling, and the way they fall.  

The suicides, accidental deaths, and natural deaths of a series of British crime writers just like Hero prove to be murders.  Moreover, a closer examination of each case reveals them to be bizarre and contrived.  Then the murders become more explicit, and Hero realises there is something familiar about a couple of them.

Spoiler ahead! Read on only with your eyes closed.

Someone is murdering them in a manner described in their novels! 

***

The characterisations of the several authors is delightful, and varied from aristocratic hauteur to wealthy bon vivant to deadpan drone to Cockney bantam and several steps between.  

London 1955 is a faint background, but it is very credible, even if everyone drives a car and finds a parking place.

Warning though, I found the pace slow, very, but I kept going because it was so well done.  I also found Hero’s hesitation and confusion about Marie Dupré artificial and likewise her patience with him.  He had been married and survived combat. Surely he would have more salt, while she must have had many suitors. Still together they make a likeable duo. I will certainly read another in the series of nine. Later: Mission accomplished.  Read all nine.

Murder at the Chase, Murder at the Loch, Murder Takes Three, Murder Takes A Turn, Murder Served Cold. Murder by the Numbers, Murder at the Standing Stone, and Murder Most Vile.

The late Eric Brown was one of those one-man industries with a list of books so long I grew weary reading it. He published about sixty novels, 150 short stories, and another trove of chapters in anthologies.   

The Officer Factory (1960) by Hans Hellmut Kirst

Good Reads meta-data is 1000 (!) pages rated 4.29 by 412 raters litizens. 

DNA: Nazi Germany.

Genre: War.

Verdict: Glacial. 

Tagline: Ideology über alles.  

Somewhere in 1944 Thuringia* is an Wehrmacht officers’s school preparing a new crop for the Eastern Front. Supervising and training these candidates are veterans, most of whom seem to be intact in January of 1944. The instructors work under the baleful eye of the General who is commandant of the installation.  

The routine of this army base is upset by the death of one of the instructors, which is where the story begins.  The death is treated as an accident. In a mine-setting demonstration a defective fuse ignited and killed the officer. Ranks seem to have closed over that explanation.

But as with such an artificial environment there are wheels within wheels, personal and petty rivalries abound.  Beneath the ordered surface is a disordered reality.  

Spoiler.

But no, not everyone accepts that account. In part this satire is also a detective story. And an informal but sanctioned investigation follows. It opens a can of many worms, and the disciplined and ordered facade of the school is shattered to reveal the corruption within it.  

***

The opening scene at the funeral is superbly rendered, and the characterisation of the General then, and later is memorable.  He is an honest man in a dishonest world.  

However, I found it hard going.  The combination of painstaking detail and doomed irreverence of the central character and some others seemed out of place, unless it was intended to be gallows humour, and it left me confused. 

Moreover, the insertion of backstories of the many characters as CVs disrupts the momentum, and adds little. I read the first few CVs and found they added nothing to my appreciation of the characters or plot and flipped over the remainder.  No doubt my loss in there somewhere. 

Vice triumphs over virtue both during the war and after on this telling.  It is indeed negative.  

Finally, it was a torte too rich in that it is over-plotted: there is just so much going on that I lost the thread more than once.  Life, of course, is like that, but stories must abstract from that to allow concentration, and in this novel my concentration was fractured. It is as long as War and Peace but without the epic dimensions. 

Yet it remains that it is superbly written, rigorously developed, and compelling despite these qualifications. I am tempted to try one of the four novels in his Gunner Asch sequence.  

Hans Hellmut Kirst joined the Wehrmacht in 1933 and became a lieutenant and political commissar (Führungsoffizier) who soldiered in Poland and France. Only slowly did he realise that he ‘was in a club of murderers.’  He published forty-six books, most novels, and many of those about honest men trying to remain human in a sea of corrupt criminality.  None of them survive, just as the General and his agent do not in the book discussed above.  

The most famous of his books in The Night of the Generals.  After the war he was a persistent publicist for German war guilt, especially in Poland.  

Ben Pastor cited him as the inspiration for the Martin von Bora series.

*Thuringia has a claim to be being the birthplace of Nazism.  

The Martian Menace (The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes) (2020) by Eric Brown. 

GoodReads meta-data is 352 pages, rated 3.72 by 75 litizens. 

Genre: Holmes; Sub-species: SciFi.

DNA: Brit.

Tagline: They’re Back!

Verdict: Capital!  

The Martians — remember them? — are back: this time speaking softly.  After their failed invasion, a decade later the Martians have returned, this time ‘They came in peace.’  A small mission lands in England and offers cooperation.  Access to their advanced technology sweetens the rapprochement.  With this exercise of soft power the Martians soon have an hegemony which extends around the world.  All this seems too good to be true,…because it is.  

Even in the first days of the reconciliation, there were humans who opposed it, and in time there are intimations that they were right. A leader of this underground surreptitiously contacts Dr Watson as a conduit to Holmes. It seems the Martians are playing a long and deep game that will end in the conquest and destruction of humanity. Yikes! 

The underground has purloined intel from the Martian embassy and has enough evidence to convince Holmes to act and act he does.  

What follows is quite a ride, involving androids, interplanetary escapades, Martian treks, jail breaks, and – wait for it! – Professor Moriarty!  Holy neutrons!   

It is great fun to read. The more so for those who need a Holmes-fix.