Category: Book Review

GoodReads meta-data is 285 pages rated 3.85 by 310 litizens. 

Genre:  Mythology. 

Verdict:  The beginning and the end.

Life is a battle and life is a journey, it is often said. If so, then Homer covered it all.  Ten years of battle followed by ten years of journey.   

Manguel passes lightly over the caltrops that plague classrooms, was there anyone called Homer, did he live at the right time, were the texts written, could he have witnessed anything, was there a Troy,…? (We visited the site of Troy in 2015.)  These obstacles often obstruct college readers.  Well, I know they impeded my first readings, but Homer rises above the pygmies and prevails.  While those controversies come and go with the tide of tenured controversialists, Homer endures.

The book charts the passage of the two books through European culture with the sure hand that Manguel always displays, and with some of the most compelling insights this reader has ever encountered in a lifetime of reading (about) these texts. The obvious comparison is the essayist Umberto Eco, who has become a showman, all form and no substance; in contrast, Manguel has both form and substance to spare.  

For example, he lays bare the love stories within the Iliad, missed by those who see only a war story, that is, Achilles for slave girl Briseis, Patroclus for comrade in arms Achilles, Hector for wife Andromache and she for him, Priam for son Hector, and Paris for ineffable Helen.  All of these are blotted out by the dark fate that brings them into collision. Love does not conquer all but is omnipresent.  By the way, the only survivor in the foregoing list of lovers is Briseis.    

When Hector and Andromache, he holding their young son, Astyanax, embrace Homer closes this scene of familial love by saying ‘the bright helmet lay at his feet.’  The fate it betokens is inescapable.  

Yes, it is war, and there is killing, but as Manguel notes Homer describes the deaths of warriors individually and no two of them are the same.  He gives to each of the fallen a name and a distinctive turn of phrase, more than sixty of them. There are no unknown soldiers here in mass graves. Each of them is a tragedy in which a noble spirit becomes a thing dragged in the dust. If it is a war story it is also the first anti-war story in its merciless detail. 

Both Achilles and Odysseus tried to dodge the draft.  Achilles hid among women while Odysseus feigned madness by plowing sand.  But neither could escape fate. In the afterlife Achilles laments the fate that befell him, though he partly chose it, making it all the more bitter.  

In his decade-long return Odysseus remained staunch to Penelope, giving way only to goddesses where he had no choice.  The one mortal woman who came to him, he politely declined. Circe and Calypso he could not decline.  (Try that one sometime with Mrs and see what happens.)  

I liked the story of Alexander Pope’s rendering of the Iliad. Pope knew no Greek (and only some autodidact Latin) and thus did not work from a Greek text or an early Latin version, but rather compiled the existing English translations and synthesised them into a single text, and then edited it to get the right effects. While the result is thus not a translation from the Greek text, the emotional resonance is perfect.  

While Manguel covers much he could not mention Madeline Miller’s beautiful novel Circe (2018) and I wish he could have done so.  Perhaps in a second edition.  What would he make of this splendid novel?  Nor does he mention the drum-beat cadence of Christoper Logue’s War Music (2003), a translation of parts of the Iliad. Nor does he mention any of the audible versions now available, though he does note some of the public recitations that have become a fashion. I was tempted by one in Sydney last year until I realised that it was standing room only.  That is, to say the audience was to stand for three three-hour sessions over three nights.  Include me out.  

Nor does he mention Homer’s contention that heroes need poets more than vice versa for without poets to tell the story and make it memorable no one would know what heroes have done. Poets can versify other things, if there are no heroes, but for heroes without poets there is only oblivion.  I looked for the passage just now but could not find it readily.  Perhaps a reader can lay eyes on it.

There is no discussion of the philology of the foundation text of either poem.  Indeed, is there a foundation text somewhere in the world?  I assume the Homeric texts came to Europe through Spain via Arabic translations, but have no confirmation for that assumption from these pages.  Hold on, Wikipedia has it that the oldest complete, authentic text was middle Greek from the Tenth Century AD in Byzantium. It was the basis for Latin translations at the time, but has since itself been lost, either to a private collector, or – more likely – to destruction. A Latin translation might have been taken to Florence when the Medici’s offered a bounty for such treasures.    

A title in a series concerning books that changed the world, I have read at least two others in this series.  One was adequate and the other not, but this one rises well above the series as a stand alone title.   

GoodReads meta-data is 309 pages, rated 3.66 by 2195 litizens.

Genre: Novel.

Verdict: Amen, Sister!  Tell it!  

In which are chronicled the further adventures of Professor Jason Fitger who has become chair of the fractious Department of English at Payne State University after the longterm incumbent decamped over the summer. Fitger is immediately deluged with a backlog of administrative paperwork, including a Vision Statement. To be budgeted each department must submit such a statement that meets the approval of the Provost.  

The University President’s main task is constantly lobbying the state legislature to slow the continued, inexorable erosion of Payne’s appropriation. In her absence the University is run by the above mentioned Provost who is seldom seen, and any effort to secure an appointment fails.  Indeed some long-serving deans have never seen this shadowy provost.  

In the age of McKinsey management, Payne University is dedicated to cutting deadwood, increasing quality, and turning anything and everything to a profit. The Business School has become a Forbidden City unto itself selling degrees.  The sciences have been tailored into applied research and development laboratories for the industries owned by Payne donors. Drug and medical insurance companies fund and own the life sciences. Those sciences that could not secure private funding have disappeared, e.g., astronomy, with the planetarium now used for storage. The University president dreams of a future where there will be a Division of Numbers and a Division of Words, and she will then have only two direct reports to delegate to the Provost.  

All the while, the administration has grown from one building to three while the student population has increased and the faculty members decreased. (Once remodelled the planetarium will be the fourth admin building.) Faculty members are constantly summoned to training sessions to keep abreast of Payne’s many, conflicting priorities. Indeed, one member of the English department has been dispatched to sensitivity training for twelve consecutive weeks. There are rumours that the consultant who runs the sensitive training is from North Korea.     

A nefarious plan is afoot to eradicate all humanities departments at Payne State University. How could that be done?  Not so hard when one thinks about it. Get this! That Vision Statement must be endorsed unanimously by all members of the Department with signatures!  That is the killer. There was, there is, there never will be anything that all members of the English Department will agree on!  Nothing.   

The first line of defence is to dispute the composition of the Department.  Do all the adjuncts, associates, emerita, or honoraries count? Do the drudges who do all the work count? The part-timers, the temporaries, the underpaid grad students, and the unpaid interns: Do these transitory peons four-to-a-room in the dank and dark basement count?  Does anyone even know their names?  Fitger’s forays into the cellar do not go well. 

When the academic year begins the English Department has no Vision Statement and hence no budget, but it has more students than any other department on campus, students whose expectations have been inflated by the endless trumpeting of all those administrators recruiting students (= cash flow). It falls to Fitger to cajole, coax, bribe, coerce, or blackmail members of the English Department one-by-one to endorse a statement while dealing with the flood of students.  Oh, if it were only that easy. Then there is a really big Kapow!

The catalyst for the explosion is the Shakespeare requirement. All majors in English have had to do a one semester course on the Bard since time out of mind, taught by the most senior member of the Department who is long past retirement age but whose pension was looted by corporate shenanigans facilitated by McKinsey management. His whole being is embodied in this course. He is also the only member of the faculty with a record of publications making him untouchable. But the Vision Statement has opened the whole question of the curriculum, and from the can wriggle the worms of post-modernism in its many forms. The Bard may only survive because the Po-Moeans cannot agree what should replace him.        

Ah, life without a budget means, among other things, that meetings cannot be held because meeting rooms are rented to departments.  In the same McKinsey spirit only the student toilets and hallways are cleaned.  To have offices and faculty toilets cleaned, Departments have to pay for it from the budget. No budget, no meetings and no cleaning. Still less can Fitger’s desk-top computer be repaired, nor the broken window replaced in the Department secretary’s office. Though as long as the window is in disrepair the contents of the office are not insured, as he is repeatedly reminded by the Safety Officer whose job is to harass him, not to repair the window.   

Lest a reader think this rent-seeking is fantasy, when a director of a unit I was enjoined to prepare a budget that included renting the teaching rooms we used. Nothing came of it at the time but it was a trial run.   

Venality, back stabbing, undermining, intransigence, solipsism, this book has it all. Innocent readers might think it is exaggerated.

Rather than agree and survive, members of the English department would rather disagree and perish. This revealed preference partly arises from a failure of imagination. Tenured members of the Department cannot imagine their own demise. Never fear, that unseen Provost can imagine it. In short, tenure means that a professor is entitled to a specific job, but if that job itself is eliminated, there is nothing to which that professor is tenured. If I am a tenured professor of Albanian political theory, when the position of professor of Albanian political theory is eliminated then so am I.  

In the end Fitger proves what everyone thought.  He is much too inept (nice) to be a head of department, and that is what saves him, and the Department.  The last service done by the Shakespeare teacher is something to ponder.  

I waited for more than year for this title to become available on Kindle but it didn’t so I got it in hardback, because I could wait no longer to read of Fitger’s latest escapades.  

With the great personal restraint I have long cultivated, I have not told a story about the conversation I once had when acting dean with the head of a department about accommodating curriculum changes in which he happily agreed that (1) he and his department would not cooperate and (2) as an inevitable result there would be fewer of them. So be it! Compromise was not an option. Sssh. The cognoscenti will know which department that was.   

GoodReads meta-data is 336 pages rated 4.60 by measly 5 litizens.

Genre: History. 

Verdict:  More Circle than Schlick.

The book is a history of the Vienna Circle from its inception in 1907 to its  development, evolution, and activities to its end in 1936. It began with Philip Frank, Hans Hahn, Otto Neurath, Kurt Reidemeister, and Moritz Schlick with others attending ad hoc skull sessions. Their discussions at first were in Viennese coffee houses, but as the agenda got more systematic and others joined, they began to use a classroom after hours.  Their discussions concerned the relationship of science to philosophy and vice verse. How does science know the world as distinct from philosophy? These philosophers set out to answer that question. 

In time they found a prophet in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s gnomic jottings. The more unintelligible Wittgenstein’s aphorisms, the more they were dissected in the search for meaning.  One acolyte made pilgrimages to Wittgenstein’s mountain retreat and recorded the master’s oracular remarks.  When Wittgenstein did a volte-face, the Circle members did likewise.      

Schlick became the de facto manager of the Circle as others participated, like Rudolph Carnap, Herbert Feigl, and Kurt Gödel with visitors like Bertrand Russell and Karl Popper.  Rose Rand and Olga Hahn both attended its meetings and published.  Neurath was the public face of the Circle and published a manifesto in 1929 announcing the birth of logical-empiricism. (By the way the picture language that guides travellers to rest rooms in train stations originated with Neurath, see his International Picture Language [1936].)  Only statements that can be verified by observation (it is raining) or are logically coherent (a bachelor is an unmarried man) are permitted.  For all else: silence. This was a conclusion they just could not stop talking about. 

The Circle seeded analytic philosophy in the English-speaking world which started with a clean slate, ignoring with contempt the two thousand years of thinking that went before it. Plato, Kant, Hegel, and others were all thrown into the dustbin of history.  A. J. Ayer was the English apostle who carried the reliquary to Great Britain for veneration.  

These thinkers pondered: 

• What sentences can be deduced from S?
• Under what conditions is S supposed to be true, and under what conditions false?
• How is S verified?
• What is the meaning of S?

While they were preoccupied with such matters, Nazism arose in Germania and Vienna became a battleground.  In 1936 Schlick was shot dead on the steps going to a morning class in the mistaken belief he was Jewish by an aggrieved student who was then exonerated by the judicial system.  Needless to say, the McKinsey managers at the University of Vienna welcomed the student back and expunged Schlick’s name from its records. Since the court had found Schlick somehow responsible for his own murder, his widow was denied his pension.  And some might have thought the reference to McKinsey management was gratuitous.  

It gets worse.

In the 1970s an Austrian newspaper published an historical account of this murder, and the perpetrator who had survived sued the newspaper for libel, and …. won.  The Brown Years have been buried deep.  Only in Austria!  See my review of a history of Austria elsewhere on this blog.

There are some entertaining descriptions of Karl Popper’s thuggish behaviour that fits his texts.  

I was motivated for graduate school by the taste of Plato in my undergraduate thesis.  Yet when I arrived at grad school there was nothing but acidic analytic philosophy which ingested political theory and dissolved most of it. The readings were often derived from the Vienna Circle or its acolytes like Ayer, or the egregious Popper. Analytic philosophy is rigorous and that is good training, and it was the fashion of time, but it is also empty and sterile.  Not something to say in a seminar paper.  Salvation came in the form of teaching the history of political theory to undergraduates, noting the irony that these texts were not included in graduate program.   

I commented on Exact Thinking in Demented Times (2017) a time ago.  

‘Exact Thinking in Demented Times: The Vienna Circle and the Epic Quest for the Foundations of Science’ (2017) by Karl Sigmund.

GoodReads meta-data is 502 pages, rated 3.70 by 140 litizens. 

Genre: history.

Verdict: Alstublieft! 

‘God made the world; we made the Netherlands,’ say the Dutch, referring to the 60% of the Netherlands’ current landmass which has been reclaimed from the North Sea via land fill, drainage, polders, dikes, levees, canals, sluices, weirs, damns, culverts, and windmills.  All the mud, water, mire, swamp, morass, bog, and more, combined with the lack natural resources, meant that the Netherlands was largely left alone by the larger nation states surrounding it (France, Germany, and England), though it offered a soggy passage among them.  

At one time the Austrian Netherlands (Belgium, Brabant, Dunkirk, Flanders, the Netherlands, Limburg, and Luxembourg) loomed large, but the Hapsburgs had other more pressing problems, as their gene pool swung from Austria to Spain.  When they withdrew the Low Lands were left to their own devices as a buffer between the greater powers.  It is a complicated story.  For a time the Netherlands included Belgium, but the latter broke away in an argument about taxation between Antwerp and Amsterdam. The provinces of the Netherlands squabbled among themselves about taxation, even when William  III of Orange was King of England.  He gets short shrift in these pages.  

By the way, Holland is one of the nine provinces, and to refer to the whole country as Holland is like calling Australia by the name of one of the states, e.g., Victoria.  

Rotterdam and Amsterdam used the experience of the Hanseatic League to go into global trade, and the Dutch Golden Age was born.  Literally golden because of the lucrative profits made shipping goods for others far and wide.  As commercial ventures this trade was unarmed, and the Dutch specialised in building ships with vast storage and no room for weapons, unlike the East Indiamen ships used by the British East India Company (BEIC).  To convert the Dutch trading ships to warships, they had to be rebuilt and no one would pay for that.  Ergo once the BEIC challenged by gun Dutch traders, they lost. But for a while the Netherlands had a global reach from Taiwan, to Korea, to Macau, Ceylon, Indonesia, South Africa, Suriname, Brazil, Aruba, St Maartens, and more.  

When the Golden Age flourished so did Dutch art and that became an established part of the culture that remains today in all those galleries and art students.    

When Arthur Wellesley (Wellington) broke the French attacks at Waterloo a quarter of the troops in the thin red line were Netherlanders in orange who are largely omitted by English history. 

At the Congress of Vienna ending the Napoleonic Wars a republican, greater Netherlands was regarded as too unstable and too unwieldy to survive. Instead it was divided into two, creating the Kingdom of Belgium and the Kingdom of Netherlands.  The House of Orange had dominated several of the nine Dutch provinces, after generations of asserting its primacy more generally, and it became the royal choice. The House of Orange was resisted by the burgers of Amsterdam because of its engrained animosity to Catholics and propensity to tax, both being bad for business. But their attitude was not decisive. 

Is this orange a connection to Northern Ireland protestants?  Yes,  it traces back to the William of William and Mary.    

That town hall in Amsterdam on the Dam had been built as a republican town hall, but during the Napoleonic ascendancy it was converted to a royal palace for Napoleon’s brother, Louis, who became King of the Netherlands.  By the way, Napoleon installed him to extract taxes, but once in place, this brother sided with the Dutch, and Napoleon then removed him after but four years. This was the first instance of a Dutch king. Après la guerre the town hall became the royal palace of the House of Orange, but because of the long hostility of Amsterdammers to the House of Orange, the monarch took up residence in Den Haag as neutral ground, making it the seat of government, though Amsterdam is still referred to as the capital. Confusing, no? Confusing, yes!   

Declaration of interest.  I spent a semester at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies years ago, and have returned to the country many times since. 

This book does not even mention, still less resolve, one of the mysteries of the Netherlands I encountered.  Walking from the Institute to my apartment in the evening, I went along quiet, darkened residential streets, where, invariably, in each house I passed the front curtains were open at all hours of the day and night.  Indeed it seemed the curtains were never drawn, and I saw many a Dutch family in the front room watching television or eating dinner as I went by.  Whence came this practice of public display of private life?   

Another enduring memory of the Netherlands came from the lunches in the common room, where the Dutch invariably ate sandwiches with a knife-and-fork. Yep.  Even a ham and cheese was cut and sliced.   

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

Genre: History.

Verdict: Grüezi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Genre: Thriller.

Verdict: Good.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Genre: Bibliomania.

Verdict: Crackerjack.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Libraries are the home of our oldest friends.”

The last word is this: 

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

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

GoodReads meta-data is 380 pages, rated 3.80 by 254 litizens. 

Genre: History.

Verdict:  A comprehensible narrative.  Aaaah. 

The first and hardest thing for me to grasp is just how long the Portuguese and Spanish have been in the Americas.  Sailors in the employ of the Portuguese monarchy landed in what is now Brazil in April 1500. They began building permanent settlements in 1532 and remained thereafter.  To avoid conflict among Christian nations with the threat of the Ottomans in the East, the Pope brokered a treaty dividing the new world(s) between Spain and Portugal, recognising that the Portuguese were already in Brazil to stay.  That solved one problem and created another since neither catholic France nor protestant England or the Netherlands recognised that division. 

Brazil began to pay for itself with the sugarcane, the price of which skyrocketed when the Haitian rebellion against the French all but eliminated it as a source of the commodity.  This lucrative trade attracted the Dutch, first to trade in it and later to grow it in Suriname, as it is now called, and likewise the French.  Conflicts followed.  

But the most unusual conflict, however, was among the Portuguese. Three hundred years after first contact, Napoleonic France invaded Iberia. In the ensuing Peninsula War, the French continued into Portugal, which had long been associated with England as a counterbalance to Spain.  The French pursued the British into Portugal and in 1808 the Portuguese royal court went into exile wholes bolus, setting sail for Brazil, numbering as many as 12,000 courtiers, soldiers, merchants, officials, priests, and others.  The English cooperated for a mix of reasons, some political and some commercial.  Banks in London lent money to the exiles to set up in Brazil where the King John VI declared the United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil, and the Algarves (a province of Portugal itself like Holland in the Netherlands).  There were also unrealised ambitions to extend this realm to the Portuguese African colonies of the time.   

With the extinction of the Napoleonic threat by 1815 there were those who wanted to move the king and court back to Lisbon and return Brazil to the status of a colony ruled from there.  Others wanted the court to remain, including the king for a time.  Meanwhile, back in Lisbon a council governed with close English oversight in the royal absence, but in 1820 King John returned to quell the restive. (He was urged to return by the English who found the close oversight expensive and unproductive.) Now here is where the wrinkle sets it.

The king did not reduce Brazil to a colony, rather to placate local interests he left behind his son Pedro as Regent.  Inevitably conflicts occurred between those who supported the Regent and those favoured autonomy or even independence, inspired by the distant example of the United States and fired by rebellions against Spain in its American colonies. Much manoeuvring followed.  

The upshot was that in 1822 Pedro declared Brazil independent, even while in Lisbon lawyers were splitting hairs about the reversion of Brazil to one colony among many. A civil war of sorts ensued in Brazil between the Portuguese loyal to Lisbon and the locals. The French and Dutch stoked these fires to confuse the English, who were not quite sure whom to back, having sizeable commercial interest in both Brazil and Portugal.  To distinguish him from his father the king of Portugal, Pedro became the emperor of the empire of Brazil.  Compared to the long-lasting and bloody wars for independence in Spanish America’s colonies this transition was short.  King John soon accepted this independence, partly in order to maintain commercial relations, lest the French intervene. At times Brazil invoked the Monroe Doctrine to ward off European interest in picking off part of its vast and underpopulated territory.  

But wait, there is more!  When King John died his presumptive heir was Pedro in Rio de Janeiro.  The crowns were one, again, but not the nations.  See? (No, neither do I.)  Pedro soon abdicated the Portuguese throne in favour of one of his daughters who went to Lisbon to be queen.  

While the author does not consider the general context, to this reader Brazilian independence in this way distinguished it from its other Latin American cousins.  (1) The army was not the crucible that created the nation which it was in Argentina, Venezuela, or Colombia. Indeed the army was Portuguese and much of it left with the king. In its place were local militias which later morphed into a national army.  But the Brazilian army did not create Brazil in contrast, say, to the Argentine army which created Argentina.  

(2) When Simon Bolivar recruited armies to rebel against the Spanish he declared anyone who joined the fight was a free man be he white, black, or red and any shade between.  While the liberation rhetoric of the King James Protestant Bible was absent, the message was indisputable, and at times Bolivar’s army was more dark than light, more Black and Red than White. In Brazil without this martial deliverance, race remained a fixed social identity and barrier, and all the more so because of the vast slave – mostly black but some red – population for the labour-intensive products: sugar cane, coffee, cotton, and rubber.  Only external pressure and the vagaries of the markets for these commodities gradually led to emancipation.  All of that made it a late entrant in attracting European migrants as a cheap source of labour to replace slavery.  

GoodReads meta-data is 780 pages, rated 4.36 by 484 litizens.  

Genre: History (not biography).

Verdict: Parochial. 

Declaration: I only read the lengthy sample, and decided not to proceed.

The sample was long on pointless erudition and short on facts.  It seemed to presuppose the reader was familiar with the major elements of the history of the region, the arrival of Europeans, and the individuals and families that founded Brazil. And then sets about to debunk them without ever quite explaining or contextualising them.    

I did learn this. Portuguese sailors in the East Indies found a tree with red bark and red sap which was used to make a red dye.  Then when the Portuguese in their constant competition with the Spanish went West, they found a red tree with red sap that could be used as a dye and they called the area Brasil after the name of tree in the east Indies.  It is from the Latin for embers as a colour.  

While the authors expatiate at length on the terrible consequences of the European invasion for natives, they are mainly portrayed as hapless and helpless victims even as the more detailed discussions show that some native tribes cooperated with the Europeans to defeat their traditional enemies.  

After first debunking myths about cannibalism in the region, the authors then devote much space to it.  

Yes, I know only a small mind would be bothered by these inconsistencies and so I stand convicted.  

The book does not offer the short history of this vast and varied land that I sought.  Rather it declares its purpose to be to debunking the myths Brasilians tell themselves about their history and country. Since this reader does not know these myths, there is no traction.  It lacks the conventional road signs to guide readers and it lurches back-and-forth. There are no transitions, no indications of time, no summaries and much musing which is not amusing. There is a whiff of the post-modern.  Always deadly.

The city of Brasilia registered on my imagination when I was an adolescent and since then I have come across a few references to it.  The striking architecture is the main thing, though James Scott’s Seeing Like a State (1998) has some diamond insights into the resulting city. John Brunner’s sy fy novel The Squares of the City (1966) was another take on it. I also sought out and read a couple of novels set there, but they made no use of the reality or fantasy of Brasilia. Some of this itch was stimulated anew by our visit to mother Portugal a couple of years ago where there was no sign of Brazil or any of its other one-time colonies.  Not even any statues that I saw.   

The post hoc criticisms of Brasilia are legion.  I tried reading David Epstein’s  Brasília: Plan and Reality (1977) but found it largely impenetrable.  It is a discussion mostly of what other researchers have said, and so guarded and encoded in academicese that it does not communicate to a general reader – moi.  It reminded me a little of the story of a Danish bus shelter without the insights or humour in Bent Flyvbjerg, Rationality and Power: Democracy in Practice (1998). 

This activity about Brasilia on Amazon awakened the mechanical Turk who presented me with this title.  I clicked for a sample, and read it.  In this case it is a substantial sample of many pages (though on the Kindle I cannot be exact about the number), whereas many Kindle samples of Non-Fiction are so consumed by superfluous front matter there are few pages of substance.  Not so in this case.  There is plenty to judge by.