GoodReads meta-data is 374 pages, rated 3.92 by 2710 litizens.
Genre: krimi.
Verdict: Whoosh!
It had to happen! McKinsey management has made it to the afterlife, and there, after a 360-degree review accompanied by all the mod clichés of corporate-speak, Satan’s performance has been found unsatisfactory. St Peter has mined the data on his computer tablet and there is no denying the optics of the spreadsheets: things in Hell are bad, but no thanks to Satan. Well, things are so bad many condemned souls cannot even get into Hell so long are the poorly managed entrance lines, but must abandon even that hope. Yet that is one of Satan’s core competencies.
His KPIs are no longer scalable, indeed, they are no longer visible. No amount of thinking outside the box, colouring outside the lines, corporate values, empowerment, leverage, over the wall(ness), bench-marking, peeling the onion, breaking down the silos, pushing the envelope, increasing the bandwidth, paradigm shifting, data-driving, closing the loop, low-hanging fruit, return on investment, SWOTing, or reaching out can take Hell down to the next level. When asked if his management of Hell represents best practice, well, what is Satan to say? Who’s is better?
After the usual collegial backbiting, some of it literal, Satan appeals this decision because St Peter is sending too many souls to Hell for parking in disabled zones, DVD copying, nose picking, unreturned library books, and the like. But the review committee to hear his appeal, packed with angels unlikely to be sympathetic with the Lord of Darkness, is implacable: Satan is being out-placed. G-o-n-e.
He is condemned to live on earth as an earthling! This is, indeed, for him a fate worse than death. Hell is certainly other people, vide Jean-Paul Sartre’s Huis Clos.
And where is he sent as an alternative to Hell? Birmingham England that is where. A place, it seems, where there is no respect for evil incarnate, and it is forever cold and wet.
There he adjusts slowly to the new circumstances, and seeks out Satanists to worship himself, but finds them useless poseurs who have never pitch-forked writhing souls into the Lake of Eternal Fire. He’s got nothing to learn from them. Then by chance he finds his métier in Heavy Metal music and for a time is a sin-sation. But even that grows boring: shouting damnation at dunderheads who pay for the privilege is fun and profitable but the amusement wanes. That low boredom threshold may have been his problem in managing Hell.
In an effort to fit in with his new neighbours Satan prepares a dinner party, like nothing anyone has ever had before. (Did I mention that he had a part-time job – more of a hobby to remind him of the old days – at a mortuary?) Then there was the flamethrower, he does like fire, for the crème brulée. It did not end well.
In time he discovers his dismissal was rigged in a management coup and finds unlikely allies (including Jeanne d’Arc) to put things back to rights, er, well, wrongs.
It is a cackle and since there is a murder (followed by a resurrection) it is classified as a krimi above. Well, two of each to be technical.
Heide Goody and Iain Grant.
When we were planning a trip to Birmingham I found a few novels set in Britain’s second largest city, this among them. Though that trip was cancelled, by then I had the book sample on the Kindle and when I started reading it, there was no stopping. It is the first title in a series and I have already finished the second which has more twists and turns than a dean at a budget meeting and started the third in which eternally young and bored Jeanne goes on an away mission. In the fourth, yes I have read that one, too, we learn where work-weary demons go for a quiet life. And I am now up to volume seven, ah hmm, eight.
GoodReads meta-data is 235 pages, rated 3.70 by 57 litizens.
Verdict: [Blank]
Charles XII in a Stockholm park
Charles XII of Sweden figured in the biography of Peter the Great I read before we travelled to Russia in 2016. That was the first time I had heard of him, but he seemed to be a snow and ice version of Alexander the Great. From that hostile, secondhand view, as Peter’s nemesis, aside from Charles’s warrior prowess, what was remarkable was that Sweden remained stable while Charles constantly campaigned. That stimulated me to find a biography. I tried samples of The History of Charles XII, King of Sweden (1731) by Voltarie; Charles XII, King of Sweden (2012) by Carl G. Klingspor, and A Warrior Dynasty: The Rise and Decline of Sweden as a Military Superpower (2014) by Henrik Lunde. The scholarly one by Lunde has so much indigestible front matter about sources, acknowledgements, definitions, summaries that the sample ends just as the text begins. Voltaire’s pamphlet is a vehicle to excoriate the barbarian Peter the Great. Klingspor is hagiography. That left Bain.
Charles XII (1682-1718) was king of Sweden from age fifteen and made endless war with Danes, Germans (the Hanseatic League, Saxony, Prussia, Hannover), Poles, Danes, and Russians singly or in alliances. For the Hansa Stockholm was a backwater that had no business in Baltic commerce (timber, amber, felts and furs). For the Poles, and Poland was a power in this day, Sweden was the protector of hated Protestants and it was, accordingly, god’s work to destroy Swedes. For the Danes, Sweden had once been a colony in all but name and should stay that. For Russia Sweden blocked access to the Baltic.
Then there were the outsiders, Catholic France wanted to undermine Protestant Netherlands by weakening its Swedish protector, and Protestant England that wanted to undermine Catholic France by encouraging continental Protestants.
Got it so far?
Two generations earlier Sweden had intervened in continental religious wars and earned the title of Protector of Protestants. Sweden then was little more than a geographic expression, however, Swedes, though few in number, proved to be organised, thorough, and committed and so had military success. The artillery helped. Swedish armies were among the first and most proficient at combined arms operations where cavalry, artillery, and infantry co-operated and co-ordinated in attack or defence. By the time Charles took the field this was old news.
Once enmeshed in the geo-politics of the region, Sweden could not extricate itself and instead waded in deeper and deeper. By age fifteen Charles conceived of a Swedish Empire that enveloped the Baltic and drove the hated Danes onto the peninsula shorn of a navy. Sword in hand he set out to make it so – this became the Great Northern War (1700-1721) that in time drew in the Ukraine, Ottomans, Bulgars, Tatars, Hannover, Prussia, Danes, Saxony, Poland, Cossacks, Tatars, and more.
When Charles took the throne the Swedish Empire was at its peak, encompassing all modern Sweden, a good chunk of the middle of Norway, all of Finland, the Karelia peninsula some of which is now in Russia, the Baltic islands, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and some of the Polish Baltic coast. There were also two overseas colonies in Delaware in America and in Benin in Africa. It was a power of its day to rival the Netherlands and England, though not golden Spain nor vast France. That is, it was a middle power.
What followed in the reign of Charles XII was continuous war that led to defeat and by 1721 Sweden had shrunk to the borders it now has. He left Sweden spent, depleted, exhausted, and impoverished by his appetite for war with the hordes of Russia, the masses of Poland, the might of the Germans and Prussians, and he never seemed to know when to quit. When adversaries offered favourable peace terms, he spurned them. The comparison to Alexander the Great makes itself.
Greater Sweden
One historian estimates that one fourth of all men between 20 and 40 years old during his tenure died in war. Nearly every man served in the army at one time, stripping the land of labor in the fields, orchards, ports, markets, tanneries, smiths, and so on. By his death vast stretches of contemporary Sweden were ghost towns. If young(er) men are away at war for twenty years there are fewer young children.
King Charles departed Stockholm in 1700 and never returned to that capital. He spent the remaining twenty-one years of his life mainly with the army on campaign. Yet with his absence for more than two decades back home Sweden remained stable and willing, if not always able, to supply his financial and human requirements for the army. Despite his long, and costly absence from Stockholm, there was no usurper, no rebellion by the nobles at the war taxes, no deterioration in the civil administration for lack of funds, no palace coup, no secret deals with the Russians, Poles, or Germans to end the war. Or so it seems. That is what I found fascinating when I read about Charles in the biography of Peter the Great. Regrettably Bain offers no explanation for this remarkable stability in the permanent crisis.
If Peter the Great had spent twenty-one years away from Moscow there would have been a palace coup and/or an uprising by the nobles in the first six months. French kings seldom travelled further than Versailles, fearing that when absent the nobility would plot even more than it did when the king was present. Elizabeth in England had a secret service actively blocking internal threats to her seat. Alexander had secured his home base with a trusted emeritus general and a small but dedicated palace guard in Macedonia, but nothing like any of that seems to have been the case, or to have been necessary, in Stockholm.
While he was away, he was, in fact, not always with the army. Here is a quirk of history. After defeat at what proved to be the last major battle of the Northern War in central Russia, Charles found it impossible geographically to return to Sweden and so he went south on the reasoning that my enemy’s enemy is my friend. He found his way to the Ottoman Empire which sheltered him from the Russians for many years, while he always plotted a return to the battlefield and always urged the Ottomans to strike at Russia. He was there for years, and wore out his welcome.
When he finally returned north he continued to make war on all comers, and whenever the Senate or Chancellor in Stockholm cried for peace, he sent a stern letter reminding them who was king, and they then dutifully complied to his latest demand for yet more money and yet more men.
While he was polite in person he had a stubborn streak that had no bounds. With no political sense he went at everything straight ahead. Likewise his military tactics consisted of frontal assaults. There was no Napoleonic manoeuvring or artillery preparation. He usually plunged ahead so rapidly that artillery could not keep pace and in some campaigns he dispensed with it altogether. His wars were as destructive as Napoleon’s it is true but there is nothing constructive in his reign as there was in Napoleon’s: schools, laws, reforms, science, bridges, roads, weights and measures, tolerance….
Charles was nearly as ascetic as any stylite, wearing one uniform until it was bloody rag and then changing to a new one, eating the soldier’s gruel, sleeping on the ground in a Russian winter, and so on. He was usually at the front in combat and that is where he was killed in a meaningless skirmish with Danes. In these ways he led by example. But he had none of Napoleon’s charm in dealing with the rank and file. He remembered no names, handed out no medals, did not promote individuals for special contributions, offered no pensions, seldom even acknowledged the men as more than tin soldiers.
In sum, it remains a mystery to me why Swedes put up with this self-destructive man who was willing to take the whole Swedish people with him to the grave.
GoodReads meta-data is 110 pages, rated 3.96 by 324 litizens.
Genre: Biography (sort of).
Verdict: Wash your hands and fasten your seatbelts.
Ignaz Semmelweis
Hands up if you know Semmelweis (1818–1865)! He is the man who explained why we should wash our hands. His assiduous research into morbidly rates in maternity hospitals in Vienna led him to the conclusion that infections were transmitted by the hands of the doctors from one patient to another. From that finding he advocated hand washing and more hand washing. On that subject more in a minute, but first a few words about the book.
The Life and Works of Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis was an eighty-page thesis submitted to meet the requirements of the medical degree Céline earned. But there is nothing thesis-like about it. An indication of its tone and style hits the reader in the first lines: ‘Mirabeau howled so loudly that Versailles was frightened. Not since the Fall of the Roman Empire had such a tempest come crashing down upon men…. ‘ This opening passage goes on the characterise the French Revolution as a carnival of blood. Only three chapters later does Semmelweis appear, well, first his mother appears.
To return to the story, for that hand-washing advocacy Semmelweis was shunned, ridiculed, demoted, demonised, exiled, and finally driven mad; in the latter state he took his own life by the very infection he had identified.
Members of the obstetrics profession had long been resigned to high mortality in pregnant women, and accepted it. According to this upstart Semmelweis, doctors themselves caused these deaths! Ridiculous! Moreover, hand washing was undignified! Hmmph!
The fact that women who gave birth at home, or even on the street, had lower death rates than those who gave birth in all modern-conveniences maternity hospitals was written off as false news.
John Stuart Mill once opined that if the laws of geometry annoyed Republicans they would immediately declare them false. (He may not have mentioned Republicans but I got the hint.) Semmelweis’s intrusion upset a very elaborate and complacent medical establishment and the reaction was to shoot, stab, garrotte, strangle, quarter, and bludgeon the messenger.
In Paris, Prague, Berlin, and London as well as Vienna the medical profession united against this tiresome interloper and his pages and pages of data. In truth he was an easy man to reject, being rude and crude; he was quite unwilling to proceed by half-measures. It was all or nothing for him with the result that it was nothing. On more that one occasion he barged in the office of a hospital director and berated him about hand washing. Likewise he burst into wards when doctors were doing the rounds and berated them in front of patients and students. The Austrian emperor at one point exiled him because of these disruptive antics.
N.B. Semmelweis worked from aggregate data and there is nary a mention of a microscope observing little critters. That came later. What he had was a mass of data that showed a correlation between no hand washing and death. Reason and evidence are feeble assailants of the fortress of conventional wisdom and it took forty years for Semmelweis to be vindicated, and countless thousands of maternal deaths that soap and water would have prevented.
All of the above can be gleaned from the Wikipedia entry. And it bears little resemblance to the book at hand by one of the most remarkable figures in French literature: Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches (1894-1961) who used the nom de plume Céline. He was invalided out of the Army in 1915 with a wound at Ypres. Later he took a job with the League of Nations in Francophone Africa where he travelled extensively. Upon returning to France he trained as medical doctor and laboured in the working class districts of Paris where he was seldom paid. At the time he was a rabid communist only later to because an equally rabid fascist (and energetic anti-Semite) during the war years. He could be as rude and crude as Semmelweis.
Dr Destouches
His most famous novel was Journey to the End of Night (1932) about his observations in Africa, followed by Death on Credit (1936) about working class life and death in the slums of Paris. He wrote in the argot of the people he chronicled and not the stylised prose of the Academy and was thus reviled by the literary establishment for generations. These establishment gatekeepers are now gone and forgotten, while Céline is still in print.
Declaration of interest: One of the first reading assignments I had in graduate school concerned Semmelweis and his empirical data. That is all I can remember but the name stuck because of the association with hand washing.
GoodReads meta-data is 336 pages, rated 2.73 by 11 litizens.
Genre: Biography.
Verdict: Not found.
Declaration: I read only the Kindle sample.
We have been to Doris Duke’s (1912–1993) home — Shangri-la — three times, and found it interesting, impressive, intriguing, innovative, and more. The accounts of the guides and the handouts tell visitors a little about the reclusive DD, but not very much.
When I went looking for more information after our last visit I came across a reference to this forthcoming title, so I signed on for the Kindle sample when it was published. In due course it popped up on the screen.
Well, the sample includes the first two chapters which I read to the end. I am none the wiser about DD. The chapters I read have neither rhyme nor reason but dart back and forth with the breathlessness of a confused thriller writer. There is no orderly or organised examination of her origins, nature, nurture, growth, and….
Even that soft touch, GoodReads, has some stingers about the ‘shambles’ the book is and the endless ‘fluff’ and ‘distractions’ that pad it out. Two chapters was more than enough for me to press Delete.
This title was published by a very major New York City publisher from which fact draw your own conclusions, Reader. Bingham has published many short stories and other fiction.
Here’s what I already knew: Mr Duke make money from cigarettes, so much that he founded the eponymous university, Doris was the only child and a fabulously rich heiress who built on Oahu a spectacular all-modern-conveniences house, which has an Arabic water garden and pavilion. She filled the house with with Islamic decorative art. During its construction in the 1930s the film Lost Horizons (based on James Hilton’s novel) was current and the builders nicknamed the building Shangri-la; she liked that. Tall, elegant, and rich, this is one of the places where she went for solitude, hiding from the predators.
In addition to the buildings and the art work, there are also videos of its construction and some of her activities there. She was a very serious collector and the property also houses an archive documenting and authenticating the collection. She willed it all to the state of Hawaii to preserve and make public with an endowment of one billion dollars.
There are entries on Wikipedia that offer a more general account of the Dukes.
GoodReads meta-data is 364 pages, rated 4.19 by 17465 litizens.
Genre: Chick Lit.
Verdict: Flip, flip go the pages.
The narrative arch is a mystery that keeps interest for a while, but the litany of drunks, hangovers, casual sex, and more of the aforementioned soon wore thin. Knit one, purl one, repeat. Fascinating. Not.
The locale offered some interest but on the page it always took second place to the drink and sex.
Our heroine is given a shop in picturesque Cockleberry by an anonymous benefactor. That is the overarching mystery. Who is the giver and why? The shop has been derelict five years (and that gap is never explained within my attention span). What will our hapless heroine make of it? (Since we know it is the first of a series, success of some kind is guaranteed.)
Without a shred of self-discipline, numeracy, or much else Heroine makes the shop a success and discovers some true(r) love. She also discovers who her benefactor is. My discovery was why some chick lit is not for me.
Nicola May
It is the first (and for me last) in a series set in picturesque Devon. The author published this first volume herself and has since made quite a success of the series. So be it.
I seem to recall I went down that way once by train to a PSA conference in Exeter in 1980. The Veil of Ignorance is drawn over any details.
GoodReads meta-data is 208 pages (it seemed like a lot more), rated 3.96 by 120 relatives of the publisher.
Genre: krimi.
Verdict: slow and steady and slow.
Romanian public intellectual journalist muses on life, and death when late one afternoon with a colossal hangover he finds a dead body has disordered the books in his study – the library of the title. He vaguely recognised the victim as a passing acquaintance. What to do?
In his befuddled state he concludes that hiding the body in the cellar of the apartment building makes more sense than calling the militia (police). Sure he is a 98-pound weakling intellectual, lugging around a deadman in the dark of night is the safer option in a ruthless totalitarian state governed by a demon in a necktie.
Does it have to be said? None of that goes well.
He sets out then to resolve the mystery to make sure he is innocent, because all that pálinka the night before has undermined his confidence. The fraternity brothers have ordered a case of the stuff to see if it beats Romulean blue ale.
He romances a duchess who lives in a deuce palace with her father who disapproves of this slovenly journalist. She and he have enough misunderstandings to quality the title as Chick Lit.
After a while this hack realises someone is systematically plotting to bring him to ruin. He consults the list of people who hate him compiled in the telephone book, and settles on a likely prospect, a chicken farmer whom the journalist tried in the court of pubic opinion some years ago.
He gathers the principals in a room, and…..
Nit picking note: the dead man was not killed in the library, ergo there was no attack in the library. And as noted above a study with bookshelves does not a library make. A library has to have librarians, as well as books.
While it is set in Red Bucharest it is largely bleached of references either to communism or the regime. How such an all enveloping miasma can be filtered out is itself a wonder. After all, it was published in Romania by a regime that left nothing to chance. By the way, the femme fatale is not in fact a duchess but she lives like one and that is why he calls her that. Indeed how did anyone live like that in Romania in 1983?
George Arion with pipe.
This is the first in a series involving our hero, one Mladin, Andrei. In 2018 Arion was still publishing a book a year. Strength to his arm, but no more for me.
GoodReads meta-data is 320 pages, rated 4.00 by 37,381 litizens.
Genre: Chick Lit.
Verdict: Ignite!
Introverted, harassed, unloved, acned, beset teenage girl dreams of the stars while her wicked stepmother and cruel step sisters torment her in a tag team. If and when she finally snaps they will get the inheritance from the deceased father and be rid of her once and for all to live unhappily ever after. (It’s pretty clear these people do not have the happiness gene.)
The evil step mother is certainly decanal material. No argument, no loyalty, no evidence, no reason, no services rendered, no compassion sways her from the KPI of seeing off Introv. That way lies promotion. Sending Introv up on the roof in a thunderstorm to fix a leak is all in a day’s meanness for her. Nothing special. Overdrawn just a tad, one might say. On the other hand, speaking of deans….[some stories are not fit to print].
Introv works in a food truck with Stud Girl, a reference to the many piercings the latter sports. They communicate in grunts. Don’t underestimate this Newtown wannabe.
Long ago and far away Introv had parents who loved her and took her (metaphorically) to the stars, as founding fans of StarField, a brief television series that subsequently won a following in syndication.The odes to the dead parents and the stars are humbling, moving, and spectacular to read. If this is Chick Lit, let there be more of it.
Meanwhile, in another world the StarField franchise is getting a re-boot these years later with a teenage Jason Bieber in the lead.* Yuck! Nothing could be more wrong which Introv boldly declares on her blog which gets taken up far and wide simply because by some quirk of time zones she was the first to voice this opinion.
We learn that despite appearances and expectations, this teen idol has a soul, one that yearns to be free of being Jason Bieber 24/7. The iron cage of celebrity is very nicely realised in these pages. Though again perhaps a tiny bit overdrawn just for fun. Still I liked the ever distracted manager and monosyllabic bodyguard. Likewise the co-star who tells the boy wonder that if he doesn’t stand up for himself now, he never will.
He wants out so bad he calls an old number he found for help to wiggle out of a commitment without a confrontation, which old number once belonged to Introv’s deceased dad, and so he makes unintended contact with her. Through this mischance they communicate, and find that they can communicate more, and more easily with texts to a stranger than with anyone around them. He is surrounded by cannibalistic fans and hangers-on; she by the equally ravenous evil step family.
We just know that somehow these two worlds are going to meet, perhaps with a jolt, and that only these two can save each other.
Along the way they learn (as do some others) that they are not alone. Introv also learns that she does have friends and does not have to push the rock up the hill everyday alone. Bieber learns to act like the hero he plays in film, just a little bit, and discovers he likes it and it works.
Did I mention the food truck that specialised in pumpkin fries with a giant pumpkin painted on the side. Did I mention that? Shoulda. Did I mention Stud Girl’s cry at the gate: ‘Today we fight!’ Shoulda.
Loved it.
First is a series of Geek Girl books.
*No it is not really Justin Bieber but I wanted name from the popular culture and so little do I know that I took this one to represent the ephemera, vacuity, and fatuousness thereof. While I am sure many others fill that bill, Jason is a good fit.
GoodReads meta-data is 256 pages, rated 3.58 by 201 litizens.
Verdict: more.
In rural north east Ohio among a largely Amish farming community, one teenage Amish girl is found shot to death. Bad. It was no NRA-inspired school shooting. The bullet comes a serious organised crime handgun sanctioned by the NRA for every trigger finger. Worse. Crime scene tests find traces of cocaine. Worst. How could a sheltered Amish teenager get involved with a drug crime?
What follows is a police procedural with emphasis on questioning those who knew her again and again and piecing together an inferential picture of what might have happened. This is done against the background of the shock and grief of her family and friends at this ugly intrusion into their largely cocooned life.
The trail extends to Sarasota in Florida where many Amish go to winter in the off season of Ohio farming. There is quite a bit of back and forth between Ohio and Florida.
The manners and mores of the Amish are treated with respect, as are their interactions with the sheriff who investigates and who seems to have a bottomless budget as he goes all out. No McKinsey manager is in sight telling the sheriff to go back to writing parking fines where there is revenue flow.
There is a side bar about an EPA investigation that allows the author through the sheriff to tweak the nose of Federal authority, but which adds nothing to the main line, though I, too enjoyed seeing the bumptious cardboard stereotype come undone.
One the things I learned about Amish practice in this book is the daadihaus. The dictionary defines it as a Pennsylvania Dutch (Amish) term for a granny flat near or attached to the extended family home, with the difference that is grandpa. In practice, in this book it seemed to be a man cave where the elder male of the clan may retire in privacy to do things that might not be 100% Amish in the eyes of the local Bishop. Though the story is tragic, it does not have a morally satisfying end, but I guess that is lifelike.
P L Gaus
Eighth in a long running series but the first I have read. I have already acquired another for future reference.
GoodReads Meta-data is 336 pages, rated 3.65 by 519 litizens.
Genre: Popular Philosophy (as is Popular Science).
Verdict: More!
Classical historian Edith Hall delves into the mind and works of the one and only Aristotle her BFF. He is the leader of the pack as far she is concerned and there is no one else. The enthusiasm for the subject with the light touch, simple prose, punctuated with real life examples and references to the popular culture are delight. Though I doubt it got her tenure or promotion. On that more below.
At the outset she briskly dispatches two of the rotten tomatoes thrown at Aristotle. His remark that women lack deliberative capacity has empowered generations of the virtuous to hurl rotten fruit at him. Yet in the Politics there is a more fine-grained remark that women have deliberative capacity but it is not authoritative; if an interpreter were less interested in scoring retrospective points, this remark could be taken as a sociological fact of the time and place. In subsequent passages he goes to refer to wives running (ruling) the households of slaves, servants, extended family, provenders, tradesmen, and the like. This oikos is the economy which has become the god all worship now. Though, of course, he concedes less to woman than Plato does twice over.
The most common trope used to justify ignoring Aristotle is this remark:
‘Males have more teeth than females in the case of men, sheep, goats, and swine; in the case of other animals observations have not yet been made’ (Animalia 3). This obscure passage and paraphrases of it abound among those who specialise in cheap shots. Yes, Aristotle was wrong, but he was wrong because he was misinformed about observations, not because he did not value observations, though that it the drum most often thumped when this passage is cited. Let’s take that drumbeat seriously for a minute.
Though this statement is joyfully repeated on thousands of web sites, none of these bloggers themselves settle the empirical question empirically. No writer who has belaboured Aristotle with this remark has ever then said, and I counted (to be strictly parallel) my wife’s teeth and we have the same number. Think about that.
As any dentist will say, counting teeth is easier said than done. It is not just a matter of saying Aaah. Any ten people people on Oxford Street today may well not have the same number of teeth. Ditto dead bodies for the ghoulish. There are congenital omissions (I never had two adult molars), damage in childhood, and in Ari’s world most adult simply lost a lot of rotten teeth which accounts partly for all the soft food: olives, cheese, figs. But her main defence of him on this point is simply that it was a passing, incidental point in his biological studies which he cited from other sources as a fact. He neither proclaimed it himself, not declared it a priori. In the passage where it is cited, he draws no grand conclusion about the inferiority of women as thus proven by teeth. At most it proves difference.
The female of 1940s popular culture in film and fiction was flighty, easily frightened, weak, lacking concentration, physically inept stereotype. It continued into 1950s television where its steady diet went some way to make real the fiction it portrayed, repeatedly showing it so did make it so. It took a great effort — intellectual as well as social — to see through those shadows on the cave wall, single them out, test, and reject them, and for that All Hail.
The book is thematic starting the governing narrative of happiness, which is not an ephemeral feeling but a contentment and calm perhaps like zen, but she does not go that far. When I look at the gang leaders on television news these days… oh, did I say ‘gang leaders,’ I meant world leaders, none of them look contented and calm. They look driven, angry, confused even, bitter, overwhelmed, determined, purposeful in some cases. There are far too many angry old men who have never had anything to be angry about and aren’t going to take it any longer!
She does not mention Jean Vanier, Happiness – Aristotle for a New Century (2002). But it is a companion piece, though it lacks the depth of the volume at hand.
She goes on to treat such topics as Family, Friendship, and Mortality. There is also a discussion of discretion that made me uncomfortable. In my years as Associate Dean, Institute Director, Head of Department I made it a point not to exercise discretion. My rule was: what cannot be done for all that cannot be done for one. Believe me there were a great many instances of special pleading, mostly by staff, but some by students. But I knew that to concede one would set off an avalanche of more pleaders. To say yes, would be to open the flood gates.
Confession: I did make one exception. As Associate Dean there was always tsunami of special pleading about admission. Students whose track record made it abundantly clear they could not do the work of the course, wanted to pay the tuition. I aways rejected them on the ground that no one should be admitted to fail. Even so on one occasion a letter of appeal got through the buffers from one Veronica. She had done the HSC fifteen years before and hashed it. Since then she had done all manner of things including very successful study on TAFE, and she wanted to go to University to do things not available at TAFE. If she had applied on the basis of the TAFE results, she would have been admitted. However, in NSW one never escapes the HSC score and hers was so lousy that it pulled down the TAFE results. That ghostly and ghoulish HSC result was always going to be there. I admitted her. (Though I never made her acquaintance I noted that she graduated in minimum time with a credit average.)
Back to Aristotle and our author, who went to and spent time everywhere Aristotle did, walking where he walked. Who paid for that junket? Well whoever did spent the money did well. That tactile immersion adds depth to the page.
It is a book by an Aristotelian scholar but not one that is not written for Aristotelian scholars, and therein lies the reference to tenure above. Nor is it a textbook which a promotions committee might grudgingly acknowledge at a heavy discount.
Edth Hall who has many more titles for me to read.
When I gathered the meta-data from GoodReads my eye fell on a few of the niggardly comments, reminding me why I don’t read them. So pompous, so self-centred, so much like a department meeting.
Peersonal note. When we traversed the Anatolian plateau in 2015 one of our stops was Assos on the Aegan Coast. I was keen on this when I saw it in the program because Aristotle lived there for a time and married a woman from there. The tour guide assured me that in 2009 a statue of Ari had been erected to affirm the connection.
Our stay at Assos was rainy and the roads were clogged with desperate Syrian refugees who could see the European Union a few miles away across the water in the Greek island of Lesbos. The plinth for the statue of Aristotle was there but not the likeness. It had been vandalised and dismounted for repairs. I have since learned it was replaced in 2017.
I stood in front of the plinth for some snaps now lost in the labyrinth of computer bits and bytes. It was rainy and because I wanted the snap we missed the bus and had to walk back in the rain, getting soaked and never quite drying out for the rested of the trip.
GoodReads meta-data is 428 pages, rated as 4.26 by 1301 litizens.
Genre: Biography.
Verdict: Unique.
Crazy Horse (1840-1877) was born an odd man out in the Sandhill country of Nebraska. He was of fair hair and fair skin relative to his people. There is no reason to suppose any European connection in his gene pool, just an aberration like Peter the Great’s height. When he was teenager a European described him as an albino with red eyes. Set apart from birth by appearance he became moody teenage loner, often preferring his own company to that of his peers. Aloof, he played little role in the tribe, though his father and brothers were leaders.
There had long been a trickle of European immigrants travelling west on the Holy Trail in the Platte River Valley, but the trickle changed after 1865 in two ways: first, Europeans established ever more permanent settlements along the way. They were coming to stay. Second, after the end of Civil War the trickle became a flood. These changes coincided with Crazy Horse’s manhood.
There were many conflicts, first, with the traditional enemies the Crow, Pawnee, and Utes for hunting grounds and winter quarters; there were few with the immigrants who passed though but when the army began to build forts the conflicts with the immigrants and army increased. The linguistic and cultural barriers provided much room for misunderstanding and conflict, as did the sense of superiority held both by the Sioux and the Europeans. Each thought the other primitive.
Even in Crazy Horse’s youth the demographics were clear. There were many more white men than red men at any one place. But it is also true that the many Indians had no history of cooperation, and for a long time many of them still perceived other Indians as the real enemy, which was reinforced by cultural norms that praised horse theft, ambush of traditional rivals, and the like. There were no cultural values for dealing with the white man and his guns and cannons. In addition, the usual Indian methods of warfare emphasised the individual warrior and not teamwork, coordination, or planning. Ergo even within one tribe like the Ogalala Sioux there was neither experience nor cultural reward for teamwork, coordination, or planning. The impetuous hothead who struck out on his own was the ideal.
Add to that the temptation of demon whiskey and some tribesmen sold out others to get the burning cup.
But the capstone was gold in Black Hills. Once it was found the whites did not pass through or stay in the forts, but penetrated the hinterland and spread out to find and to mine gold, and the army followed to protect them. This exploration led, inevitably, to many conflicts and escalating violence. Once the Civil War ended many in the eastern and southern United States looked to the West for a new life, to forget the past and gold was magnet for them and those who would live off them selling coffee, shovels, and the like. The demand for protection from Indians increased exponentially as the white population increased.
Crazy Horse proved to be skilful warrior and had many successes. He was thus anointed as a shirt-wearer, or leading warrior, who embodied the tribe. Later he lost this honour in a quarrel over a woman. Sioux leaders were supposed to be above such personal concerns, think Philosopher Kings, and he lost the title, though he remained the best warrior.
There were peace-makers and peace-keepers, straight arrows, and negotiators among both the Red and White, but there were also self-serving scoundrels, liars, hotheads, and the greedy on both sides. The Indian social unit was a clan and any joint action with other Indians was difficult after years or rivalry, hostility, and worse. It is also true that in the army were many officers who had learned that the gun solved all problems. They applied the Appomattox solution of overwhelming force to the Indians. The irony is that many of the US troopers in the Indians Wars were veterans of the Confederate army who had nothing and no one to go home to and no other means of livelihood but soldiering. They were determined to be on the winning side this time.
The white buffalo was a rarity and when one appeared it was taken by the Sioux to be sign from the gods. That Crazy Horse was so pale associated him in the minds of many of the tribesmen with this holy sign. Moreover, he himself came to find several of the white buffalo which was remarkable. The white buffalo is not a sacred cow, but rather is killed and returned to the earth as an offering to the gods. It was rare for a warrior to kill one white buffalo when Crazy Horse had killed two. In this way he was further set apart from his fellows.
There were also other signs of charisma. He survived being shot in the face by a jealous rival when all thought he would die. He was indeed marked out. His successes attracted envy and the envious started rumours to blacken his name, but his persistent modesty and serenity were proof against these innuendoes.
The sad story ends when Crazy Horse surrendered to live on a reservation, but was killed. How and why he was murdered is unclear, but murdered he was at a fort while under the protection of the United States Army. No inquiry was held and no one held responsible. Sounds like something that could happen today.
This book is written from the Sioux point of view, using the idioms and references of the Lakota. One might almost might call it a fictional autobiography. At the end is long list of the individuals whom she interviewed, and the archives consulted. Sandoz grew up in the Sandhills among the Sioux and they were a lifetime preoccupation for her.
Mari Sandoz
Following Charles van Doren’s advice from long ago, I usually skip the front matter of a book to read the book and make up my own mind, but for some reason I started to read introduction by the reprint series editor and found is self-deprecating, honest, devoid of clichés, self-promotion, and corporate-speak, and penetrating. I read it to the end, a rarity that.
A decade ago or so we went to Mount Rushmore and saw the site of the Crazy Horse memorial. The mental note I made then to find out more about this legendary figure was redeemed with reading this book.
Crazy Horse echoes: An Excelsior class starship bears his name in StarTrek: The Next Generation.
Like an NBA shooting guard, a writer needs a short memory to forget the mistakes, errors, misses, and rejections. Sandoz once said she had had more than 7000 rejections for her short stories, novels, essays, and non-fiction. She was so depressed by word ‘No’ at one time that she burned a bathtub full of manuscripts. In the early years she made a living as a school teacher by day.
Sandoz’s first book was rejected by fourteen major publishers before it won a prize sponsored by a magazine for a new writer’s first book. That was Old Jules (1935), followed by many others including Cheyenne Autumn (1953) and These were the Sioux (1961). The more she published about the treatment of Sioux the more persona non grata she became in Nebraska and she finally relocated to the East Coast to be near the publishers. Though now her likeness graces the state capital building in a hall of notables.
Alan Wilkinson’s Red House on the Niobrara (2012) is a tribute to Sandoz. It is discussed elsewhere on this blog.
