Category: Book Review

Harry Martinson, Aniara (1956).

Genre: Sy Fy: Species: Epic poem; subspecies: Blank verse. 

Good Reads meta-data is 157 pages, rated 3.85 by 3001 citizen’s.  

DNA: Sweden.

Verdict: 47.  

Tagline: Helvetet är andra människor.  (Hell is other people.)

The basis for an opera, and four films. Whew!  Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1974 for being the second most important book published in Swedish. Double whew! The only Nobel Prize for SyFy, apart from those in economics.

What’s the story then?

Aniara, a routine shuttle carrying 8,000 people, lifts off for Mars from a despoiled Earth.  (‘I told you so,’ said Greta, again.) It is a three-week flight aboard this Volvo ferry with its casino, IKEA shopping mall, theatres, and such mod cons with 2000 rooms each with an en suite bathroom(?).  Millions have taken this ride before.  But hardly has this one left Earth orbit for the jaunt when the unimaginative writer’s friend, a meteor shower, strikes.  The contractor who built Aniara did not anticipate such an occurrence and the ship is damaged. Like the mighty Bismarck, the Aniara’s rudder is mangled and the craft cannot be steered.  Instead it is thrown well off course toward the light-centuries distant Lyra constellation.

Pippi Longstocking, Max von Sydow’s knight, Inspector Beck and other Swedish stereotypes are on board. The crew attempts repairs to no avail, and there is no emergency road service from Volvo for Aniara.  These 8000 are condemned to live out their lives, as are their descendants, within this metallic shell on the way to Lyra where they will never arrive (because the ship itself will wither en route into a Marie Celeste hulk).  What meaning is there in this existential crisis?  See above.

(Was this the basis for StarLost in 1973.  Hope not. But it is a trope in a lot of SyFy before and after 1956.)

In addition to all the other short term diversions the ferry has Mima with its minder.  What is Mima?  Mima is an AI as conceived in 1956. It is referred to in the same casual I might refer to my iMac, and so I can only guess what it is.  Mima is there to inform, entertain, educate, and pacify passengers during the short trip to Mars. It has a repository of tapes, both video and audio, but it also receives and intercepts transmissions from the ether, including from Earth. Intended to function mostly as a diversion for three weeks at a time, when left on continuously for the years of this journey it becomes increasingly self-conscious, and it is aware of the situation. It is sentient enough to realise the hopeless situation even as it itself wears out, those flash drives and circuit boards don’t last forever, and sentient enough to feel dread of the darkness to come.  The minder became the central character in the two film versions I have seen.  

So for the first few months or even years Mima keeps up a happy face, but like Grock the clown it grows melancholy as it ages and becomes decrepit.  The CDs wear out from repeated spins.  It receives incomprehensible transmissions, perhaps from alien beings.  It loses contact with dying Earth long before all that.  

(Note to self: turn off iMac before it becomes sentient.)

Mima mirrors the hopes of the passengers and as this robot loses hope, so do they, or vice versa.  On board the population re-enacts much of the stupidity of life on Earth. There is wasteful use of resources that are not infinite on Aniara.  Salvation cults come and go. Orange demigods strut and fret. First there is unlimited orgy followed by celibacy. Human sacrifice was a short-lived fad. (Get it?) Through it all Aniara drifts on.  

While we learn much of Mima’s moods, the passengers keep eating and drinking.  Those supplies seem infinite for this three week crossing which has stretched to more than twenty years within a few pages.  

It is partly a take on a common Cold War setting of mixed group of survivors of a nuclear war, having to deal with each other. e.g., Five (1951), Day the World Ended (1955), On the Beach (1959), This is not a Test (1962), The Earth Dies Screaming (1964) and many more.  This trope has since been done to death and well past that in the Post-Apocalyptic genre that has exploded in recent times.  But in this case none of the passengers are distinctive personalities. 

C. L. Moore, ‘No Woman Born’ (1944).

Good Reads meta-data is 40 pages, rated 3.87 by 101 litizens.

Genre: Sy Fy.

DNA: USA.

Verdict: Thoughtful.

Tagline: Abandon clichés all who read here.  

A diva who was horribly disfigured and mutilated in a theatre fire, slowly is recovered, that is, remade into…?  That is the question.  On the one hand her brain has been placed in an artificial body, say like MurderBot as discussed elsewhere on this blog.

In that way her life was saved by the heroic efforts of a team of doctors and technicians, but now, how shall she/it live? That is another question.  

A take on the mind/body problem, as well as personal identify and autonomy, especially for a woman.  Some of the Good Reads reviewers, as usual, entirely miss the point.  

A compelling if protracted story with an ending, happy or otherwise.  I heard it commended by Gary Wolfe in a Wondrium lecture and sought it out.  It took some seeking but I found it in a collection selling for $500 on Amazon and $5 on Abe Books.

Inspired by this reading I got another one of hers.  To dodge the sexism of the age, she often wrote under the pseudonym Lewis Padgett or Lawrence O’Donnell.    

A Short History of Fiji (1984) by Deryck Scarr.

GoodReads meta-data is 202 pages, rated 3.60 by 5 litizens.  

Genre: Non-fiction; Species: History.

DNA:  ANU.

Verdict:  Read that.

Tagline: Feudalism remains. 

The archipelago that comprises Fiji is a thousand nautical miles long with two hundred islands, some twenty of which are inhabited with a total population today of just under one million in Melanesia, as distinct from Polynesia (further east) and Micronesia (further north). Within these groups of ‘nesias’ (islands) there are cultural and racial similarities.  Melanesians are more likely to have darker skins.  ‘Poly-nesia’ means a lot of islands, while ‘Micro-nesia’ refers to small islands.  Rather mixed lines of demarcation: pigment, area, and number. (‘Indonesia’ means ‘Indian islands.’) 

These Pacific islanders are reputed to be descendants of daredevils who went rafting from Taiwan millennia ago.   

Prior to the British arrival, Fijians divided into clans or tribes with chiefs and that has remained the primary level of social organisation. These tribes had conflicts among themselves, and occasionally pirated around nearby islands like Tonga, Noumea, Samoa, or Cook, which broadened the gene pool.  Then Europeans arrived to trade first in copra (dried coconut) which releases oil if pressed.  It was a fad as a luxury good in Europe.  

Then came sugar cane to rival the West Indies, where blight threatened supply.  That had two consequences.  First, commercial interest grew, led by the CSR from Sydney, later including investor Frank Packer.  Second, there came in train a demand for much cheap labour in the cane fields.  This latter demand arose at a time of dislocation on the Indian subcontinent, where there was large scale internal migration to escape drought.  

The result was an indentured servitude program recruiting Indians (men and women) to work in Fiji at a pittance (which was far more than they would have had in India).  Estimates suggest as many as 30,000 in short order, and more later.  Subsequently, the Fiji population at times has been about 50:50 between island Fijians and Indians with a smattering of others (Chinese, Kiwi, Māori, Strine, Tongan, Samoan, Brit).  Per Wikipedia today the ratio is closer to 60:40.  

During this colonial period, the British tried to devolve responsibility by negotiating with the Fijian chiefs about land and government.  Hmm, but there were conflicts among the chiefs that hampered that.  The chiefs preferred to deal with the Brits whom they regarded as equals, rather than the Indians whom they regarded as slaves in all but name.  (I am going beyond the author in some of this interpretation.)  

Here is what is interesting.  When the Brits began withdrawing, they wanted to hand over to an elected government. The more recent example of this approach is Hong Kong. The Indians (though there were religious and caste differences among them, these were rinsed out by the Fijian waters) were keen on elections.  Not the Fijians, who insisted that the chiefs nominate each other for seats in government. This mixed arrangement of half elected and half appointed was not going work very well but it lasted.  

The Indians were very well organised (inspired by Gandhi) and got themselves elected with a mandate, whereas the chiefs’ purpose seemed to this cynic to be to hold onto their feudal entitlements.  The differences and tensions between the two communities are deep seated.  

With the proliferation of beet sugar, island cane sugar lost value, and tourism began to develop in the 1970s.  Hence, our trip. We are the number one business for Fiji.  

The author’s circumspection and concentration on description did put me in mind of ANU — privileged and complacent.  It also made me conclude he was keeping the door open for a return visit to Fiji by not calling things as he saw them.  Tricky doing that.

Good Reads meta-data is 512 pages, rated 3.80 by 10 litizens.  

Genre: Biography; Species: Hagiography.

DNA: Strine.

Verdict: Time conquers all, Bob. 

Tagline: A philosopher-king without a throne. 

Bartholomew (Bob) Santamaria (1915-1998) was a major figure in Australian public life for two generations, yet he never held a public office, though many of those who did so looked to him for guidance, including a recent Prime Minister (who liked to pick fights with people who never heard of him, that being so much easier than governing for all the people).  

Much is made of Santamaria’s service in World War II. It is resolved by Santamaria’s own testimony.  Be that as it may, I wondered why there were no archival records that applied to this question of fact.  But on this point, and many others in the book, saying it was so makes it so.  

Santamaria had a weekly column in the Australian newspaper from 1976 and a 7-minute Sunday television program called Point of View sponsored by the National Civic Council which ran from 1963-1991. There are episodes on You Tube. (His column and television comments were in English. I mention this because comparable Catholic television in Quebec of the early 1970s was in Church Latin, if you can believe it.  Believe it, because it is true.)  

Earlier he had founded and run The Catholic Worker to counter the Communist Daily Worker.  In its pages he found a red under many a bed. Soon he was a force in Catholic Action in Australia (see Tom Truman, Catholic Action [1960]), a Catholic soldier marching and marching his whole life, continuing to do so long after that war was over.

His most famous role was in ‘The Split’ that divided the Australian Labor Party and condemned it to the electoral wilderness for a long generation. This is a complicated story but the kernel is the influence of communists in trade unions which in turn influenced the Labor Party. The omens were there for those with eyes to see:  A loud and proud Labor minister in previous governments revelled in the nickname Red Eddie.  A noted Canberra historian of the time was awarded an Order of Lenin. It was a time of mass immigration from both post war Europe and Asia, and many, like Santamaria, supposed communist sympathisers and infiltrators were among them. Then came the Petrov Affair to confirm the menace.  

Unlike many rabid anti-Communists of the 1950s, Santamaria was calm, measured, insightful, and stuck to facts most of the time. That gave him creditability beyond the hard core. The result was the Democratic Labor Party which supported the Liberal Party by siphoning votes from the Labor Party. See, I said, complicated.  (For those that don’t know it, The Liberal Party has never been liberal.) In all these ways and means he had more influence than most knights of Rome.  

He continued to fight this fight long after it was lost and that combined with his adherence to a medieval version of Catholicism meant that the march of time left him behind by the 1960s. One can only speculate on his reaction to the Beatles tour of Australia, including Melbourne, in 1964 (because it is not mentioned in this text), but it’s fun to do so. Labor Party leaders began to use his intransigence to illustrate the dead hand of the past. Dogmatic as he was, he maintained good personal relations with many whom he opposed in the Labor Party. There was never then nor now any reason to doubt his sincerity, unlike the many opportunists who rode the anti-communism bus to fame and fortune.

His final rearguard battles were against snail’s-pace changes in the Catholic Church itself, especially regarding contraception.  He was, as the saying goes, more Catholic than the Pope. He also wanted to turn the clock back on professional sports, homosexuality, the ABC, and much else, stopping the march of time around 1936. 

I said ‘hagiography’ above but it is true that Henderson notes Santamaria’s blind spots, inconsistencies, ego, and the like, but still the tone is reverential. Henderson is less sparing with rival acolytes like Robert Mann, and that was very enjoyable. 

The book offers a wealth of detail, names, dates, meetings, reports, speeches, piled into a ziggurat, but the altitude yields no insight, and after my reading I did not feel I knew Santamaria any better than when I started. The man himself is obscured, not revealed, by the blizzard of details that comprise the book. 

What I can say is that Santamaria was parochial Melbourne through and through, with little reference to the wider world beyond the Yarra River. He seldom traveled and when he did, well, he went to teach not to learn; to give his wisdom not receive any; and to tell not to see or listen.  

Nor is there any evidence in these pages that he mixed with the racial, cultural, social, generational, aspirational, diversity that Melbourne was becoming in the 1960s and after. His reaction to the Labor election in 1972 was fatalistic.  How could people be so wrong?  Back to bully pulpit he went with renewed energy.  

Upon reflection, the details are so many that it almost seems the author himself is trying himself to find the man in the jigsaw puzzle pieces of the information he has amassed.  By the way this is Henderson’s second book on Santamaria.  

Questions remain for me.  Why did he (and his parents) prefer ‘Bob’ to ‘Bart’?  Was he tempted by the priesthood because that was certainly his calling?  Henderson touches on these points, but that is all it is, a touch: Enough to underline the question not enough to shed light.

*** 

By the way, I borrowed an electronic copy from the library and read it on the Kindle as a PDF.    

Good Reads meta-data is 380 pages, rated 4.16 by 6029 cinematizens.  

Genre: SciFi; Species: Hard.  

DNA: NASA.

Verdict: SETI, indeed. 

Tagline:  Less can be more.  

Dr Bored missed a place among the astronauts and now monitors satellite data from distant and demoted Pluto, when….   Something happens that makes no sense. The titular object appears and does not behave according to the laws of physics legislated by the Solar System.  Are the Plutocrats up to something? Someone is going to have pull it over and give it a traffic citation.  Who better than the first to see it.  

That narrative is interrupted, deflected, and slowed by backstories, sidestories, understories, and overstories, which all too often crowd out the front story.  On the plus side, there are no cardboard villains gumming up the works as plot devices.  Those who are unenthusiastic about Dr Bored’s mission have reasons which are fully explored. 

There is a lot of trip and then the Arrival. Remember Encounter at Farpoint? 

P.S. ‘Hard’ means lots of STEM-speak. Lots.  None of it contributes to plot or character and all of it was lost on me.  One has been warned.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (1886).

Good Reads meta-data is 240 pages rated 4.03 by 3930 litizens.

Genre: Non-Fiction. Species: musings.

DNA: Teutonic.

Verdict: Mad, bad, and brilliant.  

Tagline: ‘Nietzsche will teach’ya.’ 

Nietzsche (1844-1900) has two reputations: First, as a harbinger of Naziism with his Übermensch, and this book folds into that.  It is sometime erroneously supposed that he meant by the title that the Übermensch need not be bound by any morality.  As is often the case with popular interpretations, he means the opposite.  That the ordinary moralism of churchmen, editorialist, school teachers who label things ‘good’ and ‘evil’ is superficial, failing to plumb the depth and complexity of the lifeworld.  In reality evil can come from good and good from evil, rather than being opposites these two intersect, interact, and sometimes one nurtures the other: yin and yang.  If we accept and stop with the simple labels of these everyday moralists without question, we will never understand the deeper and disturbing reality.

His second reputation is as an obscurantist.  It is certainly true that he makes demands on readers.  Mainly because he so categorically rejects conventional wisdom, but also because he is not a systematic thinker (like Kant, Hegel, or Marx). He rejects and reviles such an approach. He contradicts himself, is inconsistent, and is incomplete and admits it, because life is like that. 

But, if a reader relaxes and lets him flow there are rewards to be had without subscribing to his weltanschauung. 

Part of his message is that a lived morality must be self-consciously chosen by the individual, akin to the message in the book of Matthew of the New Testament:  Don’t do things because Christ tells you to do so, do them because they are right.  It is a message as old as Aristotle: do the right thing, in the right way, for the right reason (because it is right).  Nietzsche thought only a few people could accept this responsibility and do it.  They who can do so should be, in fact, are the leaders of society.  This kind of selection is only possible in authoritarian, aristocratic societies, so like Tocqueville, he preferred that social structure, in contrast to Matthew who thought everyone could and should do this or Tocqueville who did not assert his preference onto others. Nietzsche has no such restraints.   

(By the by, this same message can be found in Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative, but Nietzsche reviled Kant so much he would not admit it.  Nietzsche often refers to the Chinaman, and that is his racist contempt for the man from Königsberg. That is, Kant was so determined to maintain the consistency of his elaborate system that it became detached from reality, like the European stereotype of a Chinese emperor.)

There is no doubt that Nietzsche was not a man of our time and the pygmies have made careers out of proving that obvious fact.  For him race, class, gender all had decisive meaning. He justified slavery. Smelled the herd in democracy or socialism. He regarded women as barely human.  He drank deeply of Richard Wagner’s music, imbibing a heady Teutonic mysticism, which he denied while wallowing in it.  Some of this is shaded by contemporary translators who elide, soften, gloss, mute these declamations.  

All that said, still his prose burns bright.  Here are a few illustrative passages with my comments beneath, after the dash. 

Preface. ’all great things have first to wander about the earth as enormous and awe-inspiring caricatures.’

– it takes time for new ideas to be accepted, but once they are accepted, they wander further all around the world. 

’22. Let me be pardoned, as an old philologist who cannot desist  from the mischief of putting his finger on bad modes of interpretation, but ‘Nature’s conformity to law’…exists only owing to your interpretation…. Scientific findings are not matter merely matters of fact, but a human interpretation and invention.

– truth consists of concepts not naturally occurring facts, e.g., an average, the atom, gravity, ….all are concepts.

28. ‘But how could the German language, even in the prose of Lessing imitate the tempo of Machiavelli, who in his ‘ll Principe’ makes us breathe the dry, fine air of Florence, and cannot help presenting the most serious events in a boisterous allegrissimo,  perhaps not without a malicious artistic sense of contrast he ventures to present – long, heavy, difficult, dangerous thoughts and a tempo of the gallop, and of the best, most wanton humour.’ 

– Machiavelli’s prose has a cadence, true, but the air of Florence was seldom fine along the sewer the Arno often was. 

42. ‘as far they allow themselves to be understood – for it is their nature to wish to remain something of a puzzle – these philosophers of the future’

– did he anticipate the wizard Martin Heidegger who do not want to be understood because that would reveal that there is nothing behind the curtain to reveal. 

44. ‘Need I say expressly after all this that they will be free, very free spirits, these philosophers of the future – as certainly also they will not be merely free spirits, but something more, higher, greater and fundamentally different, which does not wish to be misunderstood and mistaken?’  

– ditto above.

46.  religion represents a suicide of reason 

– compare to H. L. Mencken on the body count of religions. 

’63. He who is a thorough teacher takes things seriously and even himself – only in relation to his pupils.’ 

– few meet this requirement.  

144. ‘When a woman has scholarly inclinations there is generally something wrong with her sexual nature. Barrenness itself conduces to a certain virility of taste; man, indeed, if I may say so, is “the barren animal”.’

– sounds like a contemporary US Republican which party will soon ban women from higher education. 

146. ‘He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.’

– you become what preoccupies you. 

169. ‘To talk much about oneself may also be a means of concealing oneself.’

– talk can be a way of not communicating. 

206. ‘The worst and most dangerous thing of which a scholar is capable results from the instinct of mediocrity of his type, from the Jesuitism of mediocrity, which labours instinctively for the destruction of the exceptional man….’   

– ever more about ever less.

‘the objective man’

‘the lulling poppy of scepticism’

 ‘the conceited ape’

‘a kind of safety police’

214. ‘we firstlings of the twentieth century’

‘good conscience is the respectable pigtail of an idea.

– loved all the above bons mots.

219.  ‘The practice of judging and condemning morally is the favourite revenge of the intellectually shallow and it is an opportunity for disguised malice.’ 

– the mediocre scholar delights in deprecating great achievers. 

228. virtue has been more injured by the tediousness of its advocates than anything else.

– ditto 

English happiness [utilitarians]

footsteps to self-knowledge

239. unlearns to fear

– this one reminds me of a passage in Machiavelli.  

252 ‘They are not a philosophical race – the English: Bacon represents an attack on the philosophical spirit generally, Hobbes, Hume and Locke, an abasement, and a depreciation of the idea of a “philosopher” for more than a century. It was against Hume that Kant uprose and raised himself; it was Locke of whom Schelling rightly said, “Je méprise [I despise] Locke”; in the struggle against the English mechanical stultification of the world…’ 

253.  ‘There are truths – which are best recognised by mediocre minds because they are best adapted for them, there are truths which only possess charms and seductive power for mediocre spirits.’

– intellectuals can’t see the obvious. Instead all too often offer elaborate explanations of the dead obvious. 

260. master-morality; slave-morality

‘According to slave-morality, therefore, the “evil” man arouses fear, according, to master-morality, it is precisely the ‘good’ man who arouses fear and seeks to arouse it, while the bad man is regarded as the despicable being.’

• what rouses the mediocre scholar is not an evil man but a good one, whose example is an embarrassment to his small mind, so he endeavours to bring the great low.  

273. ‘A man who strives after great things, looks upon everyone whom he encounters on his way either as a means of advance, or a delay and hindrance – or as a temporary resting-place.’

• users all.

274. ‘He who does not wish to see the height of a man, looks all the more sharply at what is low in him, and in the foreground – and thereby betrays himself.’ 

– the valets of the world, pace Hegel. The 3rd reader! 

***

While browsing in the Argyle Emporium in Goulburn I came across this cantankerous old frenemy.  Idly, I picked it up and flipped a few pages and started to read, and kept reading, so I decided to buy.  I once had a copy of it in a collection of his works that I shed when I downsized from the university office, thinking I would not get back to it.  

P.S. Nietzsche did warn us in the Genealogy of Morals about the blond beast of prey that pounces on a population with terrible claws driven by insatiable egoism.  If any of that sounds familiar go the head of the class.  

P.S. The opening quotation is from Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life (1983), Bruce’s song.  

Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait (2008) by K. A. Bedford.

Good Reads meta-data is 390 pages, rated 3.58 by 531 litizens. 

Genre: krimi.

DNA: WA aka Sandgroper.  

Verdict: I couldn’t resist the title.

Tagline: ‘Are we there yet?’

‘It’s a job,’ says the technician who needs both the money and the distraction that work brings.  The machines themselves are simple but the regulations from the Department of Time and Space are not.  Then there are the punters who can be unbelievably stupid. Just as they drive cars like the fools they are, so, too, they drive the time machines!  

Quick primer on Time Machines for those who skipped that class in Future History.  They travel in Time, that is why they are called time machines. Doh!  They do not travel in space.  If your time machine is parked next to the car in your garage in Perth, that is where it stays.  You can set it for 1660 or 1912, yes, but when it arrives at that time, it is still at that very same spot. Most time travel is backward (1) where people go back to change things for better (and always fail: Kismet) and (2) tourism to witness events.  There is little forward time travel since there is no tourist draw, and most do not want to find out about themselves in the future.  Yet there are exceptions. 

Technician is having a bad day: Very. His McKinsey manager is tsk tsking about his Key Performance Indicators. His estranged wife wants more money.  The new apprentice is even more hopeless than the last one.  No matter how expensive the beans, the workshop coffee machine produces brown dishwater. Just when he thinks things can’t get worse, they do. His latest repair job is….  Well, his latest repair job revealed a corpse in the time machine. Ah, that would explain why it didn’t work. Usually a corpse in a time machine is a bird, rat, or a cat. Not this time. Bad, very. 

Worse, the corpse and machine seems to have come – sit down – from the future.

***

Technician is weighted down with the mandatory tiresome backstory. 

Isaac Asimov’s End of Eternity came to mind.

Gave up in confusion, needed a flowchart, run-sheet, and a scorecard. About halfway my confusion became terminal.

John Rossi, The 1964 Phillies: The Story of Baseball’s Most Memorable Collapse (2005). Rev. ed. (2024).

Good Reads meta-data is 192 pages, rated 3.0 by 1 litizen. 

Genre: History: Species: Baseball.    

DNA: Philly.

Verdict: [Here I go again.]

Tagline: They were all out!  

In 1964 an unprepossessing Philadelphia Phillies baseball team led the National League for 74 consecutive days in the home stretch, World Series tickets were printed, and…the Cinderella Cardinals from St Louis won it all.  Huh?  That result set two records.  For the Phillies: it was longest lead that late in the season to dissipate, and for the Cardinals: the largest deficit overcome in the shortest time.  

The Phillies lost ten straight games in the last fortnight of the season and sank from view. It all started with Chico Ruiz, who stole home, when he shouldn’t have. Tsk, tsk, tsk.  (I have decried this event in other posts and will not add further salt to that old wound.)

Much ‘If only’ second guessing, inevitably, fills the pages about rosters, pitch calls by the catcher, pinch hitters, pitching rotation, use of the windup rather than the stretch, line up cards, batting order, even leads from first base, each and all in an effort to solve the mystery of the debacle. 

But, at the end, as the author admits, there was no mystery.  Or rather the mystery is how an average team like the Phillies, played well enough to lead the balanced Dodgers, the big bats of the Giants, and the laser pitchers of St Louis for so long.

In 1964 only two Phillies made the National League All Star team for the only time in their careers.  The one Hall of Fame player on the roster, pitcher Jim Bunning, had started slowly, and was not an All Star that year, but later he carried the team much of the way. (Stock broker by winter, in the season Bunning always wanted the ball. Two days between starts was fine with him.) Further evidence for the mediocrity of the team is that in the following years it sank still further and still faster, as did most of the members of the 1964 roster who disappeared from view.  

The success in 1964 was a compound of good luck, good management, and some grit.  Though of course in unfailing hindsight the manager — Gene Mauch — was blamed for the defeat, rather than congratulated for the successes of his tactics of ‘little ball.’

‘Little ball?’ asked the fraternity brothers, who have forgotten everything and learned nothing. It means advancing the runner and playing for one run at a time, and relying on defence and pitching to keep the game close. Ergo it involves hit-and-run, hitting behind the runner, bunting for hits, squeeze bunts, tag ups for sacrifice flies, advancing on fielder’s choices, double steals, going deep into pitch counts, and delayed double steals, playing the infield in, pitch outs, double cutoffs, and so on. It also places a premium on defence in the middle of the diamond with a sound double-play combination, a strong-armed centre fielder, and a smart catcher who can block the plate. The final piece of the puzzle is a bullpen of strike-throwing relief pitchers.  

Manager Mauch also played ‘money ball’ avant le mot by  platooning in several positions, notably left field and first base, to give hitters an advantage.  

As the day-by-day, game-by-game report in this book shows the Phillies ran out starting pitchers in August.  Instead of five, as the coach’s manual says, they had two.  The others had one problem or another. Things were so desperate that the starting pitcher in one crucial game during the slide was an 18-year old called from the minors getting in his first major league game.  A promising left-hander had a shoulder injury in June that made every pitch painful. The two other right-handers in the pre-season planning each became unreliable. One had lost confidence in himself (later compounded by the Ruiz incident): he overthought everything and simply did not want the ball in baseball speak. The other, much less experienced pitcher, seemed resigned to losses before he threw the first pitch and the manager lost confidence in him. 

While Rossi refers to the crowds attending games, and quotes often from the press, there is little about the social impact more generally on the city. It was a year of turbulence and, I have seen it asserted elsewhere, that the Phillies’ successes had a positive influence on the communities of the city by giving disconnected people something in common that transcended their own grievances and adversities.  

Christopher Buckley, Little Green Men (1999).

Good Reads meta-data is 317 pages rated 3.66 by 3,658 litizens.

Genre: Satire.

DNA: D.C.

Verdict: Reality.  

Tagline: They beamed him up, but not for long.

TV Host is the Prince of D.C., then….  His smug ever so polite attack journalism irritates a minion in an deep state agency so secret it may not exist.  In a fit of pique Minion hits the keyboard and things are never the same for Host again, nor for Minion. Host’s wealth, his status, his influence, his marriage, his friends, his sponsors, his home, all are soon lost.  But like Phoenix he rises to become leader of the Abductees Alliance. Yes, you read that right. The little Green Men got him and he is going to make them pay.

Meanwhile, rejected by the deep state for his ill discipline, Minion joins forces with Host to reveal….  But wait, it is not that simple….   

It is a satire on the D.C. establishment, but how can one parody what is already absurd. Buckley tries very hard to do so and does succeed in landing some stingers, but by and large, read today, it seems understated.  

Oh, and when it is finally resolved the plot holes are big enough to accommodate the starship Enterprise.  

Yes, of that Buckley, born with a silver keyboard in hand.