Category: Book Review

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.  

The Burgas Affair (2017) by Ellis Shuman  

GoodReads meta-data is 327 pages rated 4.0 by 48 litizens.  

Genre: krimi.

Verdict: [Grrrr.]

A bus loaded with Israeli tourists in Bulgaria is bombed on the way to a Black Sea coastal resort.  A joint Israeli-Bulgarian investigation follows.  Sort of…

A Bulgarian detective who is a man’s man, constantly smoking, drinking, and cursing, and having a pissing contest with every other man he meets, is half of one team; the other is a Mossad data analyst who has never been in the field before, but her father came from Bulgaria and she has a smattering of the language. The set-up is promising, combining spreadsheets with head banging.  

What follows is a disjointed series of backstories, punctuated by Man’s Man clumsy efforts to rape/seduce the Israeli who proves resistant to his crude efforts.  None of it is played for laughs, and we all know that in time she will relent because he is, after all, a man’s man.  The clichés abound without any substance.  Blind Freddy spotted the mole about two hundred pages before Man’s-Man did.  

Nor is the Israeli any better.  After riding for several hours in a car just as bored as the reader is, she is asked to drive for a while, and after taking the driver’s seat goes ballistic to find the car has a stick shift and not an automatic transmission.  Was she asleep for the preceding four hours when they drove down the road that she didn’t notice the gear changes up and down the hills of eastern Bulgaria with her single companion driving. And she is an intelligence analyst. Doh! (Don’t blame her, she is written that way.)

Much is made of identifying the bomber in the first half of the book and then this theme disappears.  Evidently it did not really matter that much. It seems there was little reason to follow the trail.  

There is some to’ing and fro’ing in Bulgaria and I preferred that travelogue to listening to that man’s man feel sorry for himself.  What a snowflake! Nor is the Israeli any more interesting.  A five-second scan of the reviews on GoodReads reminded me why I never bother to do that.  

The mechanical Turk alerted me to this title after I read a concise history of Bulgaria.  I tried the sample and found it not to my taste but assuming there were not many Bulgarian krimis in English and this might be the only one to hand, even the best one, I persisted.  Grrr, as above. 

l Came as a Shadow (2020) by John Thompson

GoodReads meta-data is 352 pages, rated 4.78 by 27 litizens.   

Genre: Autobiography.

Coach Thompson is a legend and it is easy to see why.  This man is a straight-shooter with a fast draw.  He transformed the Georgetown Hoyas from also rans to leaders with dozens of titles and trophies and what is more important, and singular, 97% of his players graduated.  Coach was an educator on and off the court.  

It is a long gruelling story of racism as Coach learned the games behind the game, and he learned them well.  Among his teachers were Red Auerbach who saw this gangly youth in a pick-up game on a playground one summer and encouraged him to stay in the game.  Coach later played two season with the Celts as back-up to Bill Russell, giving Coach plenty of time to study the game, front and back.  (Bill never sat down.) 

But most of all there were his parents whom he wanted to make proud of himself, and so he worked at it. Did he ever! The towel on his shoulder became a signature.  It reminded him that his parents spent their lives working 60 or more hours a week cleaning up behind white people so he could better himself, and when he said that in an interview a storm of angry protest broke with the Pox News haters who regarded it as a provocative remark. In another of his trademarks, he shrugged and repeated it, because after all it was true.  But as we know truth has no value to Pox News.  

In one telling passage he takes a list of examples of things coaches do, like arguing with officials, defending players before the media vultures, benching players, and shows how such actions are reported when a white coach does them, and when a black coach does them.  When he argues a ref’s call a white coach is feisty, when a black coach argues he is intimidating; when a white coach defends a player he is fair and a black coach who does that is stubborn; in benching a player a white coach is disciplined and a black coach is angry; and so on. Some of the examples can be found in 2020, by the way.

When he started recruiting for the Hoyas at Georgetown he often went after unschooled athletes that were regarded as high risk by other colleges, including at least two with prison records to whom he gave a second chance. As long as they kept their grades up to graduate, he guaranteed their scholarships even if they did not make the team. This arrangement so impressed parents that they drove their boys to take it and to make the team to pay off the implicit debt. Rival coaches were not sure if this was madness or underhanded, and made a fuss about it both ways. One of those second-chances was AI. The cognoscenti will get The Answer. The fine upstanding white young men who played against AI taunted him as a jailbird. Yep.  [Swish.]  AI always had the last laugh.  

Hard though it is for this cynic to believe, the University administration stood behind Coach even when his teams lost, and he was burned in effigy, labeled ‘nigger,’ on campus.  On other occasions his university office was ransacked with a message for this African boy to go home!  Need I say it, Georgetown University is Catholic school and a bastion of the liberal elite, and yet scratch the surface and there it is.  

He himself had been cut from the Olympic team because of the unspoken quota on black players, and he knew it.  This is one of the reasons why he was never grateful for his accomplishments.  He had earned them, and he knew others had also done so but were denied them by unseen, unspoken, unbreakable racial quotas.  

One observer (Michael Jordan) called him the Aristotle of basketball for his training of kings of the court. Coach thought of himself as a teacher who used a basketball to instruct in the use of one’s talents, in teamwork, in courtesy, in civility, in responsibility, in the value of education…..in the Georgetown way, never back down and always applaud an opponent’s well-earned victory.        

I have always liked Patrick Ewing, and now I know why.  Surely the best NBA center never to make it to a final. This is the coach that channeled the Van Gogh of basketball, Allen Iverson, into a productive career without parallel.  

Coach has some choice words for that old chestnut that blacks have biological superiority as athletes, too, seeing in it yet another way to belittle the accomplishments of blacks. He attributes the success of black athletes to intelligence and a drive to succeed, and the ability to succeed where there are fewer racial barriers, sports being one of the domains where the barriers are lowest these days.          

The janitors, laundrymen, ballboys, porters, ushers, maids, attendants, security officers, and doormen at hotels and arenas all welcomed his teams because the players said ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and never left a mess for someone else’s mom and dad to clean up.  A player who violated such norms of courtesy and civility would find himself with his 21-point scoring average on the bench until he learned that 70% of Hoya basketball was off the court.  

John Thompson was the first Division I coach to hire an academic advisor for the team, a woman.  He then hired a trainer, a woman, whom he promoted to assistant coach so that she could sit on the bench in games (and also get on a higher pay grade), readily available for injuries.  Both appointments threw the NCAA into a frenzy trying to find rules to block such changes since both were white women it also set off a media feeding frenzy.  Use your imaginations just a like a Pox journalist. Both these women worked for Coach for many years.  

Hoya scheduling had been historic. Every year was the same as last year.  No more when Coach came on the scene. He wanted to play arch rivals at home, or not at all.  (And if these rivals refused to schedule at Georgetown, he leaked it to the press to embarrass the rivals.) He wanted to play and beat teams that dominated post season tournaments in early season games. He also wanted a better gymnasium for his team(s) and fill it with shouting fans.  To further these ends he engaged in an infinity of negotiations in the games behind the game. He seldom compromised, and that got him the reputation as a trouble-maker, but he noticed white coaches were seldom asked to compromise and he stuck to his guns.   

Then there is the deflated basketball he kept on his desk about the other 70%, but, well, read the book. The title is explained on the last page, but I didn’t get it.  

Coach admits his many mistakes, civil, social, and tactical, and hands out praise to many who worked with the Hoya teams.  The telling is episodic marked by basketball seasons.  In that respect it is not easy to read though the ghostwriter’s prose is smooth.  

Recent news from GT suggests things have gotten worse in subsequent days. Autobiography is never a completely reliable source, to be sure.

Secrets of the Seven Smallest States of Europe (2004) by Thomas Eccardt

GoodReads meta-data is 348   pages rated 3.78 by 65 litizens.  

Genre: History

Verdict:  The Micro Seven! 

Go ahead list them!  

Ordered by population.  

	Population	Area in km2	Per capita GDP US$
Vatican City	825	0.49	–
San Marino	34,232	61.2	60,551
Monaco	38,300	2.1	115,700
Liechtenstein	38,784	160	98,432
Andorra	77,543	467	42,035
Malta	514,564	316	48,246
Luxembourg	626,108	2,586	112,045

Source: Wikipedia

These entities have most of the features of a state, though the most dubious inclusion is Vatican City. While each is unique, in general they have survived largely as a convenience to their larger neighbours, usually because they had nothing those neighbours wanted. Their existence was written into treaties at one time or another.  Luxembourg was a buffer between France and Germany.  Monaco made many compromises with France to retain such sovereignty as it has. Only Malta and founding member Luxembourg are in the EU, but most accept the Euro.    

The only one with significant natural resources is Luxembourg which has long produced high quality steel.  None is self-sufficient in food. They have all issued post stamps for revenue.  Andorra made itself into tax-free shopping mall. Monaco has that casino. Liechtenstein has Swiss banking secrecy even if the Swiss no longer do.  San Marino has a nonpareil stone cutting and stone working craft. Malta has Maltesers. The other major asset Malta has, along some of the other micros, is an expatriate community that supports it.  

The micros represent collectively and individually a residue of European history.  The Knights of Hospitaller played a major role in making Malta European when Charles V of Spain gave the island to the Knights (in return for a first round draft pick [checking to see who is paying attention]). Then there are the 13th Century Grimaldis in Monaco who passed from pirates to princes, the come-lately Grand Duke of Luxembourg, and the co-princes of Andorra, and the fiefdom that is/was Liechtenstein, a country named after a family.  Only San Marino stands apart with its 13th Century origins as a republic (and by the way being a republic does not make it democratic, see a political science 101 textbook for the distinction). Of the Vatican, well it is a medieval monastery writ global.   

During the Spanish Civil War, to avoid that conflict Andorra pretended to be French, and then to avoid World War II to avoid that conflict it switched to pretend to be neutral Spain. Dual nationality can be handy. San Marino supported fascist Italy but did not declare war on anyone while the Italians lost their black shirts at the casino in Monaco. During the war many (of the few) Liechtensteineans (take that spell checker!) embraced Austrian Nazism, but after the war they dusted off neutral Swiss cow bells. During World War II the German dismembered Luxembourg and its steel went into tanks, while Malta was bombed to ruination.  

Luxembourg has laboured to integrate itself into Europe and the UN, and Malta has trod the path of de-colonisation along with many other African and Asian states though it seldom associated itself with them.  

I am ready for Eggheads! I can distinguish Monaco from Monte Carlo, and I know how the Grimaldis got the title prince, and I am telling all!  First, Mount Charles in Italian is Monte Carlo, and it is a rocky rise named for an earlier Grimaldi, and the area now is where the Croesus clan lives, as in ‘as rich as Croesus.’  Monaco City is where the casino and historic belle époque buildings are to be found. 

The first Grimaldis who seized the area and ruled by the sword were nautical pirates who tired of salt water.  One of them, trying to establish the legitimacy of his rule, wrote letters sent by couriers to all manner of dukes, kings, princes, popes, and signed himself as Prince of Monaco.  After doing this for years and getting little response, because it was convenient in a geopolitical struggle a king of Spain wrote back and addressed him as prince to secure access for shipping to and from Naples.

Well, thereafter this Grimaldi make sure anyone and everyone knew that the King of Spain said he was a prince, and that made it so!   Does that still work?  

Liechtenstein is the only country in the world named after a family.  Roy Licthenstein is no relation. or maybe he is and just cannot spell.    

It is alleged that San Marino hosted about 100,000 refugees from World War II, about ten times the resident population. Many were Jews escaping from the German killing machine in 1943. I did find that number hard to credit.     

The mechanical Turk consulted the algorithms and the stars and recommended this title after I had read concise histories of several European countries.  I bit out of (idle) curiosity.  

Death in Eden (2014) by Paul Heald.

GoodReads meta-data is 344 pages, rated 3.91 by 66 litizens.  

Genre: Hybrid – academic krimi.  

Verdict:  Different.  

In which the untenured professor of industrial sociology Stanley interviews female workers about job satisfaction and is almost murdered, almost loses his wife, and does not get tenure.  But learns a lot about the specialised porn film industry in Los Angeles, far away from home in small-town, down-state Illinois.  

When the opportunity arises to go to LA and interview a cohort of workers the  hapless professor is quickly in way over his head, but perseveres.  After all he knows how to interview people, so he starts interviewing people and when one of them is murdered he keeps on interviewing, and adding things up.  

The investigating police officer starts out as a stereotype but there is more to him than meets the cliché, and that is nicely done. The character are differentiated, and the setting is, well, distinctive. Likewise his wife proves more than a match for the odd circumstances. These good qualities are diluted by a denouement that is too much deus ex machina for this reader. 

The author has many other titles. 

The Immortal Dracula (2020) by Robin Bailes. 

GoodReads meta-data is 305 pages, 4.67 by a paltry three litizens. Read faster you lot! 

Genre: Pastiche.

Verdict: Razor tongue strikes again. 

The redoubtable Maggie has been burrowing away in Romania when….  This is the fourth title in Bailes’s series of tributes to the Universal Horror films.  In her archeological pursuits Maggie usually works with Amy.  Confronted with a problem on a dig, they had a division of labor; Amy retires to the library to research it, while Maggie hits it with a spade to see what happens.  

The title gives away quite a bit, but Maggie didn’t read it and when trudging through the snow during a winter storm in the Carpathian Mountains she is glad of a welcome and a warm fire in the Gothic castle on the hilltop; she shows no surprise to meet the Lord….Dracula.  He’s kindly old gent, bit pale, but it is deep in a long winter, and he keeps telling her to unwrap the scarf from her neck…  Keep the spade handy, Maggie! Readers want you on deck for later titles in this series. 

The time line is fractured but immortals like Dracula don’t wear watches and the cast of characters got lost on me.  I did think too much was made of the English village doctor in the first third of the book and then he more or less disappears.  But in general Bailes ties up all the loose ends by the last page!  Can one say of the Count: The End?    

Bailes hosts a zinger You Tube channel called My Dark Corner of this Sick World on which he savages bad movies once a week, and more.  Highly recommended for the brilliant editing and razor sharp commentary in 5 – 7 minutes.  Plus you can chart his ever changing hair styles and speculate on the reasons why at no extra charge.   

A Concise History of Bulgaria (2d ed) (2005) by Richard Crampton.

Goodreads meta-data is 287 pages, rate 3.71 by 114 litizens.  

Genre: History

Verdict: Be glad, be very glad….  

Bulgars are not Slavs and they were not always all Christians either.  One early Bulgar ruler negotiated with the Roman Pontiff and the Byzantine Prelate for the best terms to convert the kingdom to Christianity.  This episode seems to prefigure much of the following history for the Bulgars, dealing with internal divisions between Bulgars and Slavs, while holding off two powerful neighbours. By the way he got the best deal from Constantinople though later it was reneged. That, too, recurred: Deal followed by no deal.  

When the Bulgarian Empire waxed it needed a common language for cadastral lists, i.e., tax collection by another name. Cyrillic script was developed within its borders for that purpose.  At times the Bulgarian lands reached from the Black Sea to the Adriatic Sea. 

The bigger it got, the bigger target it became for Magyars, Serbs, Russians, Greeks (inevitably Byzantine tax collectors), and finally the Ottomans who were less inclined to negotiate than the Byzantines had been. Later enemies of the Ottomans saw in the Bulgars an ally. 

Bulgaria and Bulgarians inevitably were sucked into the recurrent wars between Russia and Turkey, each side quick to take revenge on the smaller, third party. Bulgarians long saw Russians, because of Christianity, as saviours. In 1878 Russians and Ottomans agreed to permit a Bulgarian state, but later the same year the Treaty of Berlin pared down its territory to weaken it. The result was to dispossess many ethnic Bulgarians whose cause became the main foreign policy target for successive Bulgarian regimes, justifying the Serbian war (1908), the First Balkan War (1912), and the Second Balkan War (1913), and World War I allied with Germany and with the ancient enemy, the Ottomans in return from promises of new borders that would encompass all Bulgarians (and some others besides). 

An Ottoman army officer in the First Balkan War, Kemal Ataturk, envied Bulgarians their unity, nationalism, and language.  While the Ottoman Empire was gigantic in comparison, it was also disorganised, dispirited, and disunited. There was nearly nothing in common to rally the troops. Later when he became the philosopher-king of Turkey, he created a Turkish language and a panoply of national symbols to match those he had seen among Bulgars.  

In the Great War Bulgarian troops held off an Allied Expeditionary Force operating from Greece for years, despite being outnumbered and outgunned at times.  But the human and material cost was considerable with dead, wounded, and displaced refugees.  In the Treaty of Versailles it lost considerable ground and several hundred thousand ethnic Bulgars migrated into its new, reduced borders, causing many dislocations. Tsar Boris III initiated a long period of authoritarian rule in 1918.    

With the intrusion of German hegemony in the Balkans, Boris III entered into a passive alliance with the Nazi regime.  In return for this association Bulgaria was to occupy Macedonia, lately part of Yugoslavia, and Thrace, taken from Greece, and there was a complicated arrangement with Rumania, too.  True many residents of these territories were ethnic Bulgars, but not all. These early gains were popular until resistance in them occurred and casualty lists arrived.  Boris insisted that the Bulgarian army, undertrained and ill equiped with few capable officers, was totally committed in these territories, and had to remain as a buffer and deterrent to any attack from Greece or Turkey.  Ergo Bulgaria did not take part in the war on the Soviet Union, though German troops and supplies for the East passed through its lands. Pressure from the Germans led to anti-Jewish measures but Bulgaria made little effort to enforce them.  Also to placate Hitler it did declare war on England and the USA, a symbolic gesture that led the Allies to seize Bulgarian assets, few as they were, and to bomb Sofia and elsewhere. It never did declare war on the Soviet Union despite increasing German pressure.   

In the 1930s there had been parliamentary elections in Bulgaria in which voting was compulsory for men and optional for married women.  These affairs were carefully managed, administered, and manipulated to get the result Boris desired (as in Florida and Texas), but nonetheless they occurred and sometimes threw up surprises. Remember it was not until 1979 that woman got the vote in enlightened, Western, and democratic Switzerland.  

In August 1943 upon returning from a meeting with Hitler, who raged at him about deporting Jews more than fighting the Soviets, at age 49 Boris died. Rumours of poison soon circulated. He was succeeded by his six year old son and a coup d’état followed. Thence came a succession of governments, some self-appointed, and efforts to steer between the Soviets and Nazis, pleasing neither. Bulgarian Jews who were Bulgarian citizens in Bulgaria had the best chances of survival, but not the Bulgarian Jews who were not Bulgarian citizens even if in Bulgaria, still less those from areas outside the map lines of Bulgaria at the time. It is no doubt a more complicated and messy story.  In latter 1944 the Bulgarian government dominated by communists changed sides and declared war on Germany in a desperate effort to assuage the all-conquering Soviets. Italy’s 1943 switch saved it from much Allied retribution but the Bulgarians had no such luck with the Soviets who used the Bulgarian Army in the remainder of the war as cannon fodder and then in the subsequent peace punished Bulgaria as a defeated enemy.   

While there were plenty of home-grown anti-semites, Germanophiles, and fascists in Bulgaria in these pages they never seemed to have much influence on the government or army.  Don’t know quite why even after reading this book, when such types were so influential in other places. 

The Western allies left Eastern Europe to the Soviets and by 1947 Bulgarian was a one-party state with a monotone press.  The repression that followed was, well, repressive, violent, erratic, relentless….  Bulgaria became more Red than Moscow most of the time.  When regime change came to Moscow, Bulgaria’s north star was gone.  The incredulous response of Bulgarian communists to the indifference of Gorbachev’s Russia would be amusing were it not so destructive. As long as Bulgaria was Red, Moscow had subsidised it, but with Gorbachev the subsidies stopped…abruptly.  The result was a disaster that got worse over the following years of the New World Disorder. 

With Russia indifferent, the only choice was the West, i.e., the EU and NATO, and Bulgaria has tried to fit into both, but, well, the rule of law is one problem it has in common with Romania (and now Washington DC).   

The book ends with a nice reflection on the vexed history of this crossroads, that inevitably is at the margins of either East or West.    

It seems to have been my week in the Balkans. On the night table is Robin Bailes’s The Immortal Dracula (2020) set in contemporary Transylvania and on the day table is this title.  

Bulgaria has tried to manage two large, aggressive neighbours in Germany and the Russia.  When I read about Finland’s efforts during World War II to work with but not join the Nazi Axis powers, there were a few allusions to Bulgaria’s efforts to ally with Nazi Germany on its own terms.  How did that work? Time to find out. See above.