Category: Book Review

GoodReads meta-data is 253 pages, rated 3.66 by 93 litizens.  

Genre: History.

Verdict: Whitewash.

The book presents the recollections of scores of survivors of the war in an oral history interspersed with contemporary newspaper accounts, and German Abwehr and diplomatic reports.  The Swiss speak of Switzerland as a Will-State, that is, it is willed to exist.  This they did 1939-1945 as never before or since.

The oral history speakers are school teachers, insurance agents, doormen, clerks, road workers, journalists, train conductors, shop keepers, factory workers, hausfraus, children, and so on.  There are no decision-makers and very little from the political perspective, though the army figures prominently.  

According to this account the Swiss made all the efforts within their grasp to will Switzerland to survive by turning the country into an armed camp.  Inspired by Finland’s resistance to the Soviet Union and chastened by the collapse of Norway, Netherlands, and the others, the Swiss spared no effort.  

However much the Swiss did, there is no doubt that the reason it survived was the German quagmire on the Eastern Front. The gigantic scale of the Nazi war in Russia consumed all the mental energy and war material available first in preparation and then in execution. After the defeat of France in June 1940 and when by late September 1940 it was apparent that the Luftwaffe would not establish the aerial dominance needed for a seaborne invasion of England, Hitler turned his attention Eastward, and there it stayed. Because of that preoccupation Switzerland survived, as did Sweden.  

That is hindsight, of course, no one knew that at the time, and especially not from September 1939 to June 1940 when the Swiss made considerable efforts to defend the country.  Unlike the flatlands of Poland, Netherlands, Denmark, northern France, the Swiss had a major ally in its topography. All those steep mountains with their few narrow passes on the eastern side nearest Germany and its vassal Austria were readily fortified, ergo the initial strategy was frontier defence.

That strategy had to change when the fall of France opened up the possibility of an invasion from the West. At one time Hitler dangled the possibility before Vichy prime minister, Jean Darlan, that France occupy the Geneva region of Switzerland provided it did so with its own arms, not requiring German assistance. How serious this possibility was remains unknown to this correspondent. Nonetheless the threat remained that Germany itself might invade from its bases in France, a threat that flared up in November 1942 when Germany occupied Vichy France after the Allied landings in North Africa.  

Be that as it may, the Swiss had to prepare for the worst, and in so doing changed the grand strategy from border defence in the East to a Réduit national in the fastness of the Alps.  The Swiss army would withdraw to an area in the mountains where it built more than 2000 fortifications, mined all the passes, roads, and bridges, and could put a maximum of 850,000 men under arms in concrete bunkers cut into mountains, that number represented about a fifth of the population. Food was stockpiled, rations were cut, ammunition was stored in vast cave arsenals, and so on. Munitions factories and hospitals were moved into caverns. Supplies might last a year if husbanded carefully. The prospect of a costly stalemate for a six months or longer would discourage the Germans from trying, was the reasoning.   

Much is made of the Swiss tradition of universal male military service which allowed it to mobilise more soldiers faster than any other European state. I saw some of this myself in Zurich once long ago. Nothing is said of the implication of such a Redoubt, namely that most of the country would be yielded to the invader without a fight. Odd that. 

After emphasising the fear of and hostility to the Nazis throughout the nation, how would most of its citizens feel about being left to fend for themselves passes in silence.  Made me think of tiresome politicking over the so-called Brisbane Line in Australia, which by the way was mostly the figment of the post-war political imagination, but has found its way into history books by repetition. 

The oral histories of this book are repetitive and seldom enlightening.  One is reminded of that sociologist Harry Lime’s observation in June 1945 there was not a Nazi in Germany, and by October 1945 there never had been any at all.    

The author emphasises the German Army (Abwehr) intelligence reports which found that the Swiss would fight and fight well.  Yes, this archival material is interesting, but it is at least as interesting for what it tells us about the Abwehr as about Switzerland.  Abwehr was always gloomy and always exaggerated the strength of opponents. Its reports on France implied that German would lose a war there. Hitler routinely discounted these Cassandra songs. see Ernest May, Strange Victory (2000), discussed elsewhere on this blog. 

We now know that the head of the Abwehr, Wilhem Canaris used these reports to temper German aggression for reasons of his own. A biography of this enigmatic man is discussed elsewhere on this blog for clickers.  

The author explicitly sets aside the matter of banking.  Likewise but implicitly he ignores the possibility that a letter-neural Switzerland might have suited Germany as did Sweden and Turkey. They became windows on the world and were used for that. The book touches on this in a chapter on espionage, but there was also currency trading, import and export, medicines, precision tools, precious metals, and more that passed through these countries, including many people going both ways.  There was a tenuous air service from Zurich to Lisbon, and a ground link to Genoa for sea cargo existed.  

In some sort of agreement, which the author does not mention, the Germans controlled several Swiss border train stations like that at  Basel. I had hoped to learn more about this, having passed through that station myself, and knowing it was a barrier to German refugees who tried to get into Switzerland like the novelist Thomas Mann.  

There is virtually nothing about the indigenous Nazi movement, though there was one.  Moreover, these sympathisers and German agents harassed and in some cases kidnapped or murdered German citizens who had fled to Switzerland like Eric Remarque.  Not a word on that subject is to be found in these pages.  

Because the book is arranged chronologically there is much repetition, say when the author parades German diplomatic reports that complain of Swiss hostility to Nazism.  The author takes these reports at face value, but it was routine for German diplomats to make such complaints in case they were later needed to mask some atrocity. Austria was characterised in the same way before the Anschluss; yet on the day it was received with tumultuous rapture.    

My point is not a demand for moral purity, but a request for an explicit discussion of the compromises that had to be made with the devil. 

There are a lot of typos, many the failure to capitalise the first letter in words, especially ‘polish’ (for the people, not the shine) but also many others like ‘maginot.’ 

GoodReads meta-data is 384 pages, rated 3.91 by 5604 baseball fans. 

Genre: Baseball.

Verdict: Sobering, entertaining, insightful. 

Will sets out to demystify major league baseball by revealing its inner WORKings.  Mission accomplished.   

Where the uninitiated sees luck, talent, and inspiration, Will finds calculation, attitude, and preparation. Some of the latter is physical, to be sure, but much of it is mental.  It is all W O R K.  

Will selected four individuals as case studies, a manager, a pitcher, a batter, and an infielder.  Along the way he salts the mine with anecdotes from other times, places, and players, making a rich dish.  

Manager Tony La Russa’s abiding aim in the 1980s to advance the runner seems curiously old fashioned read in 2021 when that simple ambition seems from a lost world. Drag bunts, fielder’s choice grounders behind the runner, run and hit, switch hitting, delayed double steals, disguised cut-off throws, using the infield fly rule, all these now belong in a museum as millionaire hitters below the Mendoza Line swing from the heels as if an opposite field single is beneath the dignity of their signing bonus. There speaks the curmudgeon who will be heard from again below.   

At times it seemed to this reader that there is a paralysing overkill in the analysis of the work; examine in minute detail any instance and it becomes unique. Whose on first? Free will or determinism?  

Listen to the advice of that general manager, Francesco Giucciardini (1483-1540), who wrote that ‘it is fallacious to judge by example, because unless these be in all respects parallel they are of no use, the least divergence in the circumstances giving rise to the widest divergence in the angle of conclusion,’ History of Italy, p. 110.  Just before dismissing Frank Gee as a pen pusher remember he commanded combat armies in the field long before the Dead Ball Era.   

Spurious correlations abound: ceteris paribus, this batter swings at a slider outside on Tuesdays, but not Thursdays.  Well that is what the data shows.  Today is Tuesday, here comes a slider.  Like life, baseball comes from a partly written script. There is determinism entwined with free will as vine to fence.  That fact seems obvious to everyone but a sociology PhD.  

I half expected it to be in the stars, though astrology has not yet been tapped by the baseballmetricians (aka sabermetricians).  It will be one day.  

The endless war of batters against pitchers is the heart of the book. Each tries to unsettle the other, using a very great deal of intelligence coupled with honed abilities. Who will blink first? To a batter the opposing pitching staff is a creature with ten arms coming him. The more so in the age of pitcher surfing when they come and go five, six, seven times in a game, if not an inning. 

Who knew? John Sain (of Spahn and rain fame) bridged history, throwing the last major league pitch to George ‘Babe’ Ruth and the first to Jack Robinson, two of the immortals.  

By the way, the eternal pitchers’ manual is the Book of Job: man is born to troubles.  Nowhere is that more true than 60 feet and 6 inches from the plate on a ten-inch high mound. Lamentations for the passing of the fifteen-inch mound in the annus horribilis of 1969.  

Speaking of wars of words, I enjoyed being reminded of Steve Carlton’s silent trances before going to the mound to show the world how to throw a slider, and his continued silence afterward.  In a twenty plus year career he spoke exactly once at a post game press conference. As a result he became a favourite whipping boy of the ladies and gentlemen of the media for failing to give them copy. (Yes, I know SC went off the deep end.)

To the pitcher the batters are many and varied, and just keep coming, left and right-handed, short and tall, inside hitters and reachers in their infinite variety.  Not even the strike zone is a constant (though I relish the always-on-top image of the strike zone now part of television broadcasts which may have brought some visibility and stability to this illusive Bermuda rectangle). 

Here is a complaint. Buckle up! The chapters on hitting and pitching are very repetitive, right down to the anecdotes.  I started to wonder if it had been proof read or if I was dreaming.  Neither is a good sign. 

Will comprehensively debunks the natural athlete assertion for the disguised racism it is.  To take one example, Willie Mays was a close observer of pitchers who never forgot a move, and with experience got so he could anticipate moves both at bat and on base. As a fielder he was likewise a Cartesian who broke down the outfield into its smallest parts and mastered each of them by turns. He made it all look easy because he worked so hard at it.  In the same way it was always said that magician with the bat Tony Gwynn was a natural.  Really? Then why did he take five-hours of batting practice on playing days?  Ten hours on off-days.  By these unnatural practices he became a natural.  

Here is a test for the baseball fan that will be inscrutable to the benighted.  What these numbers represent?  (Note the publication date of the book.)

511

.406

56

60

61

1.12

1,406

(I knew them all but the last, sorry Ricky.) No spoiler, figure them out or go home.  

In baseball as in life numerical reduction has grown stronger. Like economic rationalism, McKinsey management, and Pokemon, reduction is a fad and will fade after doing a lot of damage in the hands of those who do not understand it, but cargo-cult it.  Originally these were good ideas, but they have been destroyed by acolytes who did not know when to quit. Think of customer feedback. Good idea. Current practice has the effect of destroying it. NO! I do not want to give feedback on the experience of purchasing a bag of kitty litter!  Communicating with customers is a good idea, but a dozen emails and text messages from Australia Post about a routine delivery is overkill!  

Statistics start as tools and soon become masters.  Although the pedant must say that baseball has many numbers and few statistics, but most people, including Friend George, call numbers statistics just to confuse the children.  A number is, well, just a number, say 6.  A statistic is number subjected to some arithmetic manipulation, divided, multiplied, kissed on both cheeks, or something, like the ERA.  That is the Earned Run Average, not the Equal Rights Amendment, Mortimer. (Yes, he’s back.) In the list above there were two statistics while the rest were numbers. I could go on about this but won’t in the interest of world peace.   

Yet there still remains the fundamental prejudice for the long ball over winning games. The case in point that Will selects is Nebraska’s own Richie Ashburn whose achievements by any metric were remarkable without hitting home runs.  In one of his best seasons he hit but one while dominating most games in which he played with fielding, throwing, running, and batting singles. And yet he is unheard of apart from diehard fans like moi.  Then there is Bill Mazeroski who played second like no one before or since (even leaving aside 13 October 1960, a fine birthday-eve present for me).  ‘Bill who?’ pretty well sums it up.  These two were the perfect Tony La Russa players who played for the team and disappeared from memory down the dugout tunnel.  

Loved that old chestnut, how do you pitch to a Henry Aaron?  Set up your best pitch, throw it, and then run to back-up third. Found touching the encomium to ABG (if you don’t know who ABG was, hang up your spikes).  

I return to my curmudgeon complaint above to note that Will agrees that basic baseball skills are sadly lacking in MLB and offers an explanation. Each year’s new crop of players mostly come from college programs. To get a return on the money paid to these recruits the drafting teams force-feed them into the Big Show. No matter how good the college coaching has been over four years with maybe 150 total games, it is paltry in comparison to four years in the minor leagues playing up to 150 games each year, thus 600 in all. Moreover, the college players are only part-time athletes for those years and full-time students (well, that is the legal fiction), whereas the minor leaguers are full-time athletes and so work at baseball three or four times more each week than a college player.  Added to that, a multi-millionaire MLB newcomer is reluctant to practice Little League fundamentals, like bunting, throwing to a cut-off, the first base stretch, choking up on the bat, moving on the rubber, and so on. Likewise the management that gave these newcomers millions is reluctant to display their elementary deficiencies in training before the vultures of the media.  

One of Will’s cherished pet peeves is the fashions in baseball stadiums, which even the 1980s were becoming entertainment centres and not cathedrals of the 108-stitch orb. That trend, and many others he reviles, has multiplied since the publication of the book. In these stadia the game on the field is one of many distractions competing for the patrons’ attention with restaurants, bars, music, museums, fish tanks, mascots (shudder!), clowns, more music, stand-up comedians in lounges, giant TV screens showing other games or even – gasp! – other sports and so and on. There are even padded chairs enclosed by glass! (Good grief!) Baseball is best appreciated on a hard seat exposed to the elements is the gospel according to Will.  The dual use stadia of the 1980s he cannot abide, suited for neither baseball nor football, and used for both, and rock concerts!   

Concern with public health and sanitation means I can no longer watch MLB games with their exquisite camera work of players spitting.  While Will notes in one clanger of a scene this disgusting habit he does not make a sufficiently BIG DEAL of it, so I will.  Yes, the constant spitting is tiresome, unnecessary, and, well, talk about cargo-culting.  Is there data to show that spitting improves performance, George?  

While less repulsive, but equally idiotic, is the war paint players apply to their faces.  It is a fetish with no basis in fact but there are those stick-on dark lines under the eyes.  Really, how stupid can you be.  ‘I lost the ball in the glare from the lights on the dark skin off my high cheekbones, Coach, honest! This in a night game.’    

I had hoped that Will might explain why we insist on calling these men at work boyish names, Johnny, Ricky, and so on.  What’s wrong with calling a John a John?  And by the way, George why is that Babe Didrikson was the last woman to hit a major league fastball? 

Until 2016 George Will patiently explained the merits of the Republican Party to the uninitiated, but he gave up that Sisyphean task as impossible by that year, and said so in a loud voice. 

P.S. Inspired by this reading I watched a few game highlights on You Tube. Superb camera work to be sure, and some snappy curveballs and some very nice plays, until …with his team behind by one run late in the game, a .215 hitter swung and missed at a third strike as the catcher dropped the ball. The batter turned slowly to the dugout walked away as the catcher retrieved the ball and lunged to tag him, and in so doing dropped it again. No matter the batter kept walking and the umpire then called him out as off the base path, I suppose. From the other world, I can hear Coach Kramer screaming his lungs out! Run!

P.P. S. That led me to the blooper videos where there are rich pickings from this young season alone, including outfielders who do not know how many outs there are, pitchers who do not cover home after a wild pitch (as two runs score), a third baseman with no idea where third base is, cut-off men who do not go out for the throw, but stand their ground waiting for it to come to them, a relief pitcher who threw a wild pitch on an intentional walk. I have to lie down just thinking about those.  

GoodReads meta-data is 107 pages, rated 4.33 by three litizens.  

Genre: History.

Verdict: Brisk and informative. 

Tibet is a geographical expression of a vast area bounded by mountains, deserts, and rivers. It was never quite consolidated into political boundaries by its god-kings over the millennia.  Absent countervailing pressures at the time, five hundreds years ago – give or take a few decades – the Buddhist tenet of reincarnation became a socio-political institution in the person of Dalai Lama, literally the big master, in a theocracy. Think of Iran today, or Vatican City. 

A born ruler removes politics from the equation, as in hereditary monarchies. (Sure.) That desire to rise above locality, personality, and regional conflicts partly underlies the institution.  Each incumbent Lama identifies, or hints at his successor.  Yes, so far, no Madame D Lama.  

Curiously, there is often a gap between the death of DL and the location, identification, and confirmation of his successor, and then the successor’s growth to manhood.  In one instance it took years to find the successor who was at discovery and confirmation a boy of five or six.  He was then whisked away to Lhasa and surrounded by a court of regents.  One imagines that regents enjoyed regenting.  The selectee is young enough to be moulded by such regents, thus assuring their pensions. The opportunities for goal displacement in this method are many.   

Confirmation involves eight criteria and the scouts who locate the successor have to be satisfied that the candidate meets enough of the criteria to be THE ONE.  Yeah, right.  Enough.  This is starting to sound like Thomas Hobbes’s analysis of political power: arbitrary.  

The criteria themselves have elasticity. Location is one. When the incumbent Lama said his own last rites, did the weather vanes on the building point South?  If so then the successor will be from the South, or found in the South, or maybe not. The other criteria are likewise vague, opaque, and readily challenged to a recount.  Indeed there have been conflicting claims, resulting in a Double Dalai Lamas. Then there are the doctrinal conflicts among the Buddhists, which are many. It all starts to sound like Reformation Europe with its religious wars.   

Though Tibet is a crossroads, there has never been a high volume of traffic on it, but Kazacks and other Muslims from the west encountered there Mongols from the North and Hans (Chinese, not Germans) from the East, and Indians from the mountainous south. In the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries when European powers competed for empire they began to intrude into this region. Defeated by the Japanese in 1905, the Russians turned this direction for softer targets. (When a serving officer in the Russian Tsar’s army, Gustav Mannerheim, later of Finland, went on an exploratory mission to these lands.  He missed Shangri-La.) This move alarmed the British in India. Meanwhile, in a dying spasm the Chinese empire reached for Tibet about the same time. 

Among Tibetans the major conflict has been between the candidates of the Red Hat monasteries and the Yellow Hat monasteries.  In effect, this was a doctrinal religious conflict like the period of Two Popes in Europe.  It involved the usual shenanigans, war, intrigue, lies, foreign alliances, theft, murder, imposters, forgery, and betrayal. A typical day in Canberra. The Yellow Hats won and the current, aged incumbent is one of their number. The Chinese propped up a Red Hat rival. It seemed a natural for the Red Chinese. 

Divided among themselves, Tibetans have often been easy pickings for outsiders, though there is little in Tibet to pick. Rather the object has often been to make it a buffer between rivals, like Russia in the north and Britain (in India) in the south, the Han Chinese in the East and the Muslims in the West, and so on in the kaleidoscope of changing political alliances. Note, India and China have had numerous armed conflicts along their Himalayan border in 1962, 1967, and as recently as 2020. 

Only in 1950, hot on the heels of the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949 with all those soldiers and guns still mobilised the Beijing government reached to the far west to insure that neither the British nor the Soviets oozed into those wide open spaces. The Soviets were allies but not friends.  

Chinese conquest was bad for Tibetans, especially for Buddhist. Then it got even worse with the Cultural Revolution and the Red Guards who went to Tibet to destroy. (One wonders where these geriatric Red Guards are now, and what they think of their deeds in retrospect.  Pride probably. The assigned reading is Hegel on the French Revolution.)  Monasteries, temples, nuns, priests, lamas, elders, books, scrolls, tapestries, prayer flags, statues, and images, everything old (defined as Tibetan) was destroyed.  Savonarola came to mind with his bonfires.  

Following the Great Helmsman’s demise there was a brief relaxation of the death grip of Beijing but it soon re-clenched its fists. With the subtlety of a tyrant the Chinese regime decided to out-populate Tibetans in Tibet by building roads and railroads and giving incentives to Han Chinese to go West, settle, and populate, displacing the natives. Sound familiar?  Ask Crazy Horse.  

There is a major irony in the efforts of the People’s Republic of China’s efforts to eradicate Buddhism in Tibet, least it infect China itself with this opiate.  Chinese efforts at suppression and oppression drove Tibet Buddhism onto the world stage, and from thence it spread around the world more effectively than would have been the case if the Chinese had simply left it alone in Tibet and played a long game for generational change. Now there are Buddhist here, there, and everywhere.  For years there was a large rooming-house redolent of incense and murmuring of oms full of them near us. And these external Buddhists, many of them westerners, sustain and support the Tibetan Buddhists. 

In 1950 no one had ever heard of Lhamo Dhondup, that is, the Dalai Lama (14th), and now he is world figure, known everywhere and anywhere. ‘Instead of being wiped out by China, Tibetan Buddhism had spread around the world.’ thanks mainly the Chinese repression, says the author. We all obey the law of unintended consequences.    

Moreover, continued Chinese repression has inspired and stimulated expatriate Tibetans to unite, and there is now a global Tibetan community with a parliament-in-exile and an elected prime minister (shown above).  Check out the Facebook page for further enlightenment. The incumbent Dalai Lama renounced his secular authority in 2014, declaring that a theocracy was not the way of the future. No doubt this move was partly to head off a Chinese effort to control and manipulate the reincarnation of his successor. That has been tried before. 

The Chinese, by the way, have also made it illegal to reincarnate without permission. Remember that! 

The author acknowledges the propensity of Tibetans, just like so many others, to murder each other in the name of god. Buddhism is not all chanting ‘oms.’  Indeed this writer is much even-handed than the fiction writer of Water Touching Stone, discussed in an earlier post. I wanted some background while reading that novel and from a few alternatives, selected this short, easy to read book. It is volume seven (7) in a series of such brief histories.  On Amazon Kindle it is credited with 107 pages, but on GoodReads is shrank to 91 pages. What’s in a number? 

Make Russia Great Again (2020) by Christopher Buckley

GoodReads meta-data is pages rated 3.72 by 1,372 litizens.  

Genre: Satire.

Verdict:  Mission impossible to parody reality.

A satire that parodies the Other Guy mercilessly and yet isn’t funny because it is too much like reality. How many different ways can i-m-b-e-c-i-l-e be spelled. Not many.  

It is couched as a prison therapy project for The Other Guy’s seventh Chief of Staff, who writes a memoir of his turbulent, if short, career in the White House. Herb Nutterman had been happy as a catering manager, until he got the offer he couldn’t refuse. 

Many names have been changed to protect the guilty.  Though on GoodReads I see those who feel their pouts deserve a wider readership don’t get it. It is Dickensian. Get it?  (No, well, look it up.)

Buckley’s imagination is unequal to the task of thinking of some grotesque stupidity, indecency, or crime The Other Guy did not commit. Buckley sets out to exaggerate and ends up with understatement.  

I chose it because the author is a prince of the capital ‘C’ Conservative priesthood, scion of the singular William Buckley, who along with other keepers of that flame like George Will and Gary Wills have remained human and humane in the tsunami of offal that continues.   

Sweden, the Swastika and Stalin: The Swedish Experience in the Second World War (2011) by John Gilmour.

GoodReads meta-data is 336 pages rated 3.67 by six litizens.  

Genre: History.

Verdict:  A good book about a grim subject. 

Sweden spent the years 1939 – 1945 between a rock (Nazi Germany) and hard place (Soviet Russia).  By dint of careful diplomacy, a determination to temporise, and a good dose of secrecy it managed to stay out of the war, despite threats, pressures, sanctions, and counter pressures from Great Britain which made difficult things worse. The incumbent Social Democratic (SD) government won a wartime election in 1942 and continued to do nothing and that was indeed hard going.  The election produced a SD majority but the incumbent PM chose to retain a coalition to express national unity (and share the responsibility).  

August 1939: Was the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact a harbinger of the unity of totalitarians to make war on western democracies? This possibility threw Swedish thinking into a spin that only got worse when the war started in September 1939 with Poland followed by the Finnish Winter War in November 1939. It seemed both totalitarians were concentrating on the Baltic, a conclusion confirmed when the Soviet Union occupied Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in short order.  

Finland had been part of Sweden until the Congress of Vienna in 1815 when after the defeat of Napoleon it became a spoil of war for Russia.  Because of its long integration into Sweden there were many ethnic Swedes in Finland caught up in the Winter War, and popular pressure was great in Sweden to do something to help them. There was also a strategic elements, too, because Finland’s Åland Islands had an almost exclusively Swedish population of 10,000. These islands block entry into the Gulf of Bothnia from the Baltic Sea and were bound to be a Soviet target to deny sea access to Finnish ports on the the west coast. That would also strangle eastern Swedish ports on the Gulf.   

During the Russian Civil War the Bolsheviks had lost Finland; did the Red Tsar want to reclaim Finland as a Soviet Socialist Republic? That would put the Red Bear on Sweden’s doorstep. There was no good news in any of this. It got worse.  

Then came the German invasion of Norway in April 1940, which had also been part of Sweden until 1905 in the living memory of a good part of both populations. These next door neighbours spoke a similar language, followed the same habits, had similar democratic governments, and worshipped the same gods.  Ditto Denmark with an even smaller population and with even less of an industrial base and a smaller army.  After being offered the chance to join the Aryan side, the Norwegians chose to fight and fight they did. The Swedish government stood back as its neighbour and blood relative went down.  That passivity convinced democratic Finland it could not count on anything from democratic Sweden and it began to ally itself more closely with Germany against the next Soviet attack which was only a matter of time.

The Swedish government quickly realised it could not withstand a German attack, and tried very hard to negotiate a modus vivendi with Germany, Soviet Union, and Great Britain. The diplomatic activity was Herculean.  

The result was a negotiated neutrality that yielded to the inevitable and remained flexible rather than an absolute neutrality that brooked no exceptions and broke when tested.  Some may see hypocrisy in this approach but its purpose was to spare Sweden those privations inflicted upon warring and occupied nations, and was that not the main responsibility of the government, to shield its people as best it could? There can be little doubt that before say February 1941 any resistance to German demands would have led to an invasion and occupation. It would have been a form of national suicide to defy the Germans before the tide turned at Stalingrad in 1943.  Had Sweden done so there would have been a brief battle with many encouraging words from Great Britain, followed by defeat, and occupation. The privations inflicted by such an occupation would have been far greater than those suffered in its neutral isolation.  

One product of the negotiations was a triangular trade whereby the Germans allowed four merchant ships to enter Göteborg Harbour each month with food and fuel from England.  The merchant ships were British or Swedish. In return the British accepted Swedish exports of iron ore to Germany. Great Britain also imported Swedish ball bearings by air freight. Yes, these flights were sometimes attacked by the Luftwaffe.   

It is also true that Swedish commercial interests prospered during the war supplying Germany with iron ore and ball bearings in return for food stolen from Poland and Ukraine and paid for by gold stolen from Jews and others, e.g., melted down teeth extracted from murdered corpses.  

Had Germany not become completely fixed on preparing for war with the Soviet Union an invasion and occupation of Sweden might well have happened no matter how craven the Swedish government became.  But the demands of the Russian invasion absorbed all the mental and material resources of Germany and made dickering with Sweden a minor nuisance.  

Thereafter, as the balance of the war turned against Germany, Sweden dared to act more independently in a series of small tests concerning interned Norwegians ships, military training, use of railroads, and the like. Likewise after the United States entered the war, the Allied diplomacy became much more aggressive in its demands on Sweden, technicalities and legal fictions the British had (pretended) to take seriously were brushed aside by American representatives.  Our author regards this as bad manners.  

Perhaps it should be noted that Germany wanted to use Swedish railways extensively to supply its occupation of Norway to avoid coastal shipping in North Sea exposed to British air and sea attacks.  Goods and men could go by ship from Germany through the Gulf of Bothnia to Sweden and then by train through Sweden to Norway or Finland putting them, all pretty much beyond British reach at the time. One element which the author omits is that shipping men and goods by train through Sweden would have used Swedish neutrality to discourage aerial attacks on the trains by either the British or the Soviets, surely that was part of German thinking that the author passes in silence.   

I found nothing about the many American bomber pilots who flew to Sweden and were interned.  There were a lot, I believe, and many did it to avoid Catch-22. SEE  https://wikivisually.com/wiki/Sweden_during_World_War_II

Life was hard in wartime Sweden without a doubt, yet nothing like that endured in Norway during the occupation or in England during the Blitz nights or V-rocket days. The Swedish government managed to protect its population from forced labour in Germany, genocide, Allied bombing, starvation, and the like as inflicted on Norway where the the cold shoulder of Sweden is still well remembered.

When in Stockholm years ago a Swede proudly told me that a princess of the Swedish royal family, living in an apartment that looked onto the German embassy, had drawn a curtain in 1940 so as not to look at the Germans. Take that you Nasties!    

I wondered about Waffen SS recruitment from Sweden when other sources say there were 15,000 from Norway, and 5,000 from Denmark, who went to the Russian front.  The author is  largely silent on popular support for Germany though surely there was some, especially once it went to war with the Bolsheviks.    

An excellent last chapter sums up and concludes the foregoing discussion.  I wish more books had that and did it as well. Throughout the book there are a lot of typos which may have come from the OCR conversion to a digital copy.    

Double Star (1956) by Robert Heinlein

GoodReads meta-data is 243 pages, rated 3.90 by 20,380 litizens.

Genre: Sy Fy

Verdict: Zippy. 

An actor is hired as a stand-in for an incapacitated politician who just has to make a public appearance.  Actor is reluctant to get tangled up with this exercise but the money is good and the thespian challenge is irresistible, and then there is the woman.  These are the typical ingredients for a Heinlein novel with some Sy Fy window dressing which is seldom integral to either plot or character.  Nonetheless it is a diverting ride to be sure.  

Once in-role our hero finds he cannot leave it. The principal he is doubling combines being hors de combat with so many admirable qualities that Actor stays in part.  The end.  

While Martians figure in the early going, they more or less disappear and with them much of the Sy Fy element about other lifeforms.  Though there are some good scenes, as when Actor discovers that not everyone is fooled by his flawless impersonation.  That was nicely judged.  

There are also some fumbles.  Much is made of dropping a candidate from a cabinet nomination and then that line disappears. Surely such a victim of trade-offs would have had to be compensated.  There are a few other glitches like this, but overall I was pleasantly surprised at the presentation of the political process.  Subtlety is not something I associated with Heinlein’s fiction, but it is manifest here, especially in the realisation that a political campaign can do some good and for it to do that a team effort is best.  

Dotted throughout are alternative history tidbits that add spice to the narrative.  

In my prejudice these day I usually associated Heinlein with Ayn Rand bellowing about rugged individualism while enjoying the benefits of a well-ordered community made possible by everyone else.  What I expected to find was there, albeit in a minor register: namely, many blokes furiously engaged in displays of manhood, aka, pissing contests that fascinate so many chaps.  However they neither dominated proceedings nor put me off the story line this time.  

I was reminded of this title (which I had read when a high school boy) after I posted a review of Il general della Rovere, a film with Vittorio de Sica, where a lowlife impersonates a hero and comes to live up to that heroic standard. There are parallels in that summary but the telling by de Sica is compelling and I cannot say the same about Heinlein, but I did read it to the end, and that is not something I do not automatically any more.   

The Library at Night (2006) by Alberto Mangual

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

Genre: Bibliomania.

Verdict: Ruminative.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Genre: Sherlockiana

Verdict:  Elemental.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is the first of a series.