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.
GoodReads metadata is 435 pages, rated 3.74 by 8858 litizens.
Genre: period krimi.
Verdict: Trying too hard.
Ex-communicate Giordano Bruno of Nola (1548 – 1600) became a peripatetic scholar, staying a few steps ahead of the Inquisition through Italy, Rhineland, Burgundy, Belgium, Nederlands, France, and then England. His travels took him to Oxford in 1583 where he found Lincoln College to be a mares nest of intrigue and backstabbing. So little has changed I shouldn’t wonder. As an enemy of the Pope, he was a welcome visitor to Anglican England, however as a born Catholic he was suspect at the same time.
In seeking refuge in England in these pages, Bruno accepts a commission to work for, that is, spy for Sir Francis Walsingham to ferret out enemies of the realm – Queen Elizabeth I. There are plenty of likely candidates in Oxford. If Bruno will merely keep his eyes open he may discern intelligence of value to Sir Francis. The arrangement suits Bruno for it secures his patronage in England and puts coins in his purse, and all he has to do is observe. Well, he is a scientist at heart, and observing is what he does. All the better to be paid to do so.
That commitment is the thin end of the wedge, and soon enough he is mired in detailed descriptions of gory murder(s) and bloody sacrilege. He is driven by his Holmesian curiosity and lust for the Lincoln dean’s daughter to dig ever deeper into comings and goings. He thwarted every step of the way by one-dimensional characters who are conjured on the page only to harass him and he stumbles under the weight of pages and pages of descriptions of woodwork, chandeliers, stone walls, floor boards, and guttering candles – all to evoke the time and place, and to bore this reader to mechanical pages thumbing on the Kindle.
B
Bruno did not want the life of a visiting professor, but his efforts to secure a tenured appointment failed each place he went. He was, perhaps, just too controversial to make a fixture. Allowing him to lecture for a few months, while he used the local library, could be branded as a sign of open-mindedness and even toleration, but to sign him up was going too far beyond the pale of conventionality. For he said in his tactless way what he believed: that the Earth orbited the Sun, that the universe was boundless, that Deism did not require an established Church, that…. Well, that is enough to kindle the fires.
A practical skill that made Bruno welcome in some princely courts was memory. He developed mnemonics to stimulate and structure memory, and devised a set of shorthand symbols to teach them. But to Republicans of the day these very symbols conjured the devil, like Arabic numbers today, and made him a devil. Idiocracy is nothing new.
Before MI5 and MI6 began their turf war, there was Walsingham (1532-1590). Wikipedia has a surprisingly informative and dispassionate entry on him right now. Read it before it gets edited again to satisfy a troll’s ego.
S J Parris
This is the first title in a series featuring Bruno. Having started it ages ago, this time I finished it but only thanks to perseverance not pleasure. After compiling a massive amount of research on the time and place, the author crams every last iota of it on the page at the expense of pace, momentum, interest, movement, character, balance, or plot. To liven the dead pages up that result, there are punctuations of fights and flights likewise described in numbing detail which I find even more boring. The result is indigestion as in a fifty-course degustation menu.
Despite the overheated tripe on the Amazon web page I downloaded and read this title out of morbid interest in the setting at Oxford University during the religious war(s) in 1585. Because Bruno was such a fascinating character I might try the second volume in the hope that the writer has gained confidence and no longer needs to force-feed the reader pointless descriptions. But not just yet.
Lee (1935 and 1958) by Douglas S. Freeman and Richard Harwell.
GoodReads meta-data is 648 pages, rated 4.27 by 1644 litizens.
Genre: biography, hagiography.
Verdict: Ineffable.
Robert Edward Lee (1807-1870) is a storied figure in American history and the definitive biography is a massive four-volume work by Freeman which I read in its entirety years ago. Freeman took twenty years to complete the biography and a Pulitzer Prize crowned the result. Yet at the time I first read it I felt I knew nothing more about Lee the man after I finished the two thousand pages than I did before I started on page one. To double check on that recollection I recently skimmed through the one-volume abridgement cited above. My earlier conclusion stands: Lee eluded the biographer. There is a blizzard of detail but in the ensuing white-out no overall picture of the man is to be seen.
In the abridgement the focus is nearly exclusively on a day-by-day account of Lee’s war after a few short chapters on his early and late life.
The treatment of Lee after the end of the Civil War is itself an historical study, I am told. While he was revered throughout the South and respected throughout the North, at the end of the war he sought seclusion free from the terrible times he had endured and became a very private citizen.
Then the survivors began re-writing history with a fury. Many of his subordinates found ways in their autobiographical works, and there were many such works, to blame their shortcomings and failures on Lee. Each book was peppered with unerring hindsight. I read a couple: one by James Longstreet and another by Jubal Early. Both took full credit for their successes, some fictional, and sheeted home full responsibility for failures to Lee. It was a litany repeated ad nauseam in the Reconstruction period as Confederate memoirs gushed out from every officer desperate to earn a living by the pen in those hard times. Lee himself, by the way, did not publish a word about the war, turning down considerable interest from publishers willing to pay him a fortune. He had no wish to profit from the blood of followers to paraphrase something Dwight Eisenhower once said. That reticence remained firm, while others had verbal diarrhoea.
Yet this flood of self-righteous libel between covers mattered not one whit to the public as statues of Lee proliferated, like that in New Orleans, where he never set foot during the War, with an inscription bearing historical errors. Nonetheless up it went up along with a forest of others. He became a demigod to the wider public even as he was a whipping boy for those colleagues disconsolate and desperate in defeat. That none of this mud ever stuck to him and the proliferation of statues led one biographer, Thomas Connelly, to refer to him as The Marble Man (1978).
Regrettably these statues have recently been caught up in the political tornados, but I rest content in recalling Robert Penn Warren’s observation (discussed elsewhere on this blog) that Lee would have spurned the strutting, fulminating segregationists of the 1960s as he had the firebrands of the 1860s. By the way, before the war began he personally freed the slaves he had inherited from his wife’s family, herself a distaff relative of George Washington.
The abridgement, like the original work, is a hostage to its sources. There are so many extant letters, reports, telegrams, diaries, logs, inquiries that a mountain of primary material exists, and it overwhelms any insight, meaning, or lesson in the biography. More yields less in this case.
Douglas Southall Freeman
Lee was an intensely private man all of his life and the pressures of command exacerbated that centripetal force. His most outstanding social characteristic was silence. He had iron self-control and even in the face of disaster brought about by an inept subordinate, he would strive to rectify the situation as best as possible with a nary a word of rebuke. He left it to subordinates in respite, if they lived that long, to see the errors of their ways. As the war went on he also realised that he had to make do with the officers available, whatever their limitations, because so many of their predecessors had been killed.
At war’s end surviving subordinates would list this forbearance as a fault, though they benefited from it. Likewise, his famous reluctance to give a direct tactical order to a subordinate became in hindsight a fault. Lee’s approach was that once a strategy had been set, he would not interfere in it, leaving it to the officers on the spot execution as the circumstances dictated.
His campaigns in Maryland and Pennsylvania have long attracted the most fire from armchair generals, yet each has a perfectly obvious albeit mundane explanation. The Army of Northern Virginia was a gigantic locust swarm that stripped the land of food, forage, provender, shoe leather, horses, grease, lead, firewood to say nothing of the impact on hygiene. Not even the bountiful Shenandoah Valley could sustain it indefinitely and also supply the civilian population. To stay in Virginia meant ever more stripping down to the roots, whereas to move north his army could live off lands as yet untouched by the needs of 80,000 mouths, 40,000 equines, and other camp followers. These incursions suited the Confederate government, too, which dreamed that these offensives would threaten Washington D.C., throwing the North on the defensive and weaken the will to fight, and might also win European support. Pipe dreams to be sure, but we have all been misled by dreams.
I used the word hagiography above because the treatment is almost reverential. The modest Lee would have blushed to see how his every move is parsed, exalted, and praised. Though I hasten to add that the author(s) does acknowledge that Lee made mistakes, but insists that he always learned from them and never repeated them. Ergo, the treatment is not completely blind but close to it.
There are two minor incidents that struck this reader. The first is Judah Benjamin’s noble lie. For those who missed Plato’s Republic — shame on you! — a noble lie is a one told in order to secure a greater good for the community. When after the crushing Confederate victory at the battle of Second Manassas, the Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia did not pursue the defeated Unionists an outcry went up in the Southern newspapers, whose writers saw in this victory a great opportunity to crush the North. What could explain the treasonous failure to capitalise on it?
Indeed, what could?
The simple facts were that the Confederacy had not one ounce of reserves left to chase down its enemy. There were no more horses, nor horse shoes, nor forage for the horses. No rations for the men. There was no ammunition for the muskets. No shot or shell for the artillery. Nor wagons to carry the ammunition. No leather for marching shoes. Everything had been expended at Manassas; nothing was left in the locker. But to admit that fact of complete martial impoverishment at this stage would be to encourage the North and depress the South, and cause European powers to withdraw interest in the Confederacy.
So instead the Confederate Secretary of War, Judah Benjamin (a biography of whom is treated elsewhere on this blog) proposed to take publicly the blame. Though he was surely the most competent, persistent, industrious, creative, and conscientious member of the the Confederate cabinet he was never popular with elite or mass for the simple reason that he was a born Jew. So the word was leaked to the Confederate free press and they hastily and happily hung Benjamin in effigy in their pages. Once a scapegoat was to hand, no further inquiries were made by the investigative journalists of the day because if the media sharks have blood, they are sated. Rien ne change jamais.
In this case the Confederacy did not have to admit how ill-equipped it was for war. Just blame the Jew. Thus the near fatal weakness of the Confederacy was concealed from the North, from the Confederacy itself, and the European powers.
I also noted that in 1869 when Lee, then president of Washington College in Lexington Virginia, was soliciting funding for the college at a reception, a youth of thirteen wormed his way through the crowd to see and meet the demigod. This spout was Woodrow Wilson. This incident by the way is not mentioned in the biography of Wilson discussed elsewhere on this blog. In that strange way that history connects the living and the dead, nearly a century later Wilson’s aged widow attended Jack’s inauguration which I watched on television in the auditorium of junior high school, and so the shadow of Lee fell even there, though I did not know it.
Lee did some post-war travelling and attended events to honour the fallen and veterans as well to promote the college and wherever he appeared a crowd gathered to catch a glimpse of him, and usually did so in church-silence. He might then, at the urging of his host, step onto the porch to bow in acknowledgement and then retreat. At most he might say, ‘Thank you.’ He, unlike his biographers, was a man of few words.
Finally, a minor incident recorded in these pages says it all. In 1870 Lee, while walking in Richmond, encountered John Mosby, a one-time colonel in the CSA Army, and they stopped, shook hands, and then, observed by another who reported this occasion, stood in silence. After some minutes Lee said, ‘The War.’ Mosby nodded and walked on. Nothing more can or need be said. This Colonel commanded Mosby’s Rangers of legend.
GoodReads meta-data is 273 pages, rated 4.19 by 901 litizens.
Genre: nonfiction, popular science
Verdict: Hive mind.
In this beguiling, informative, and elegant study, the author tells us much about the bees and a little about himself and other bee-ologists.
All that buzzing, flitting, and waggling that bees do is purposive behaviour and the more closely it is studied the more the purpose(s) are revealed. While hearing someone speak Cantonese sounds like gibberish to the uninitiated when one learns to hear, speak, and write it, the meanings encoded within it gradually appear. So it is with language of bees in their activities.
While the main focus of the book is on site selection for a new nest when a hive swarms (i.e., divides), there is much about how the hive comes to that juncture. An important part of that story is the division of labour among bees. Among the 10,000 bees in a typical hive in upstate New York where most of the research underlying this study was done, a certain percentage are foragers who leave the hive’s nest each morning with the first light on dry days to harvest from sources of food to carry back to the nest.
At certain times some of the emeritus foragers become scouts for a new nesting site. The number is not a great. maybe 50-100 in a hive of 10,000. This is highly specialised role and only a few undertake it. When each single bee finds a potential spot she examines it and then reports back to the hive, which absorbs the input from all of the several scouts. One spot may be scouted by many bees, but another will be scouted only by a few. Yet the ultimate selection may be that latter which only a few scouts initially reported. But as it gains favour, more scouts will visit it and report back.
The bees’ decision is not clouded by history, ego, institutions, or ideology. Site selection shows no preference for doing what they did last time or the time before. Swarms do not try to return to areas used previously. History is not a determinate. Nor does ego enter into it. Even scouts who continually brought back data about a reasonable site, go along with the swarm when it opts for an alternative. Nor are there institutional constraints like a fixed calendar or an electoral college. Still less is there an ideology (or religion) that takes precedence.
It is all so unlike human decision-making where history is always a factor: we keep repeating what we already did (even when it no longer works). Ego which is all for many of us: my way or the highway (for you or me). The fixed calendar prevails in the timing of elections. And ideology: god told me this is THE tree. Compared to much human decision-making, the bees are rational.
There are rare occasions when a hive mind cannot decide. In such instance the hives may (1) stay where it is too long and suffer the fatal consequences or (2) the swarm leaving the hive may itself divide, dawdle, and dither and likewise suffer the consequences delivered by the changing seasons. In these two cases all members of the swarm perish.
To explain the bees’ hive mind the author makes analogies to human decision-making, particularly the fabled New England town meetings, but I fear he has seen few of those or he would have seen history, ego, and ideology driving out assessment, fact, and science. Perhaps he was influenced at a remove by Robert Dahl’s Who Governs? (1961), which rather idealised these meetings. (Dahl changed his mind later in How Democratic is the American Constitution? [2001].)
The methods this author uses to study bee decision-making are ingenious, labor intensive, amusing, and fruitful, yielding a plethora of data as well as stings! The location of a new nest is a life-or-death decision for the members of a swarm and it may take several days for it to be determined. And sometimes the site is not adequate and the swarm dies. This failure is not due to mistaken decision-making so much as the intensity of the elements. The swarm may have chosen the best available site, but not even that site could not withstand the depth of that particular winter. Sad to say, a surprising high percentage of swarms dividing off from a hive, die as hostages to climate and weather. Perhaps a third of them meet this fate. The mortality rate among bees is surprisingly high to this neophyte.
I did find much of the exposition too technical for this layman.
N.B. Many bees were killed in the course of this study. Many.
All these buzzing bees remind me of Dutchman Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees (1705 [1714]). In it Mandeville implies that private vices lead to social benefits, and that conversely private virtues may lead to social collapse. That is, society is an aggregation of self-interested individuals bound by convention and regulated by law who are more interested in themselves than anyone else. Social cohesion results, paradoxically, from competition and conflict. All benefit from a rules-of-the-game cooperation which constrains the competition and conflict. Hobbes’s war of all against all is brought constrained by baselines with a rulebook and some referees.
If, however, competition and conflict are replaced by a rule of singular virtue, the result will be ruin. The effort to regulate every aspect of life according to (someone’s idea of) virtue will strangle productivity, cooperation, and more. Think of a society ordered by Pat Robertson! Or Rush Cancer. Thomas More. George Pell. Fred Nile. Alan Jones. Bernie Sanders. A monocular society weakens itself.
While the metaphor of the bees may bring to mind Adam Smith’s invisible hand, that is more focused on economic production and distribution, while Mandeville’s remit is more social than economic.
Inspired by this book I read a sample of José Luis de Juan’s Napoleon’s Beekeeper (2019) but found it so convoluted and cryptic it made no sense to me, probably destined for a Booker Prize. However, at the time it rated a respectable 3.25 from 8 litizens on GoodReads.
I have been reading my way through a krimi series by Michael Pearce. The touch is light, the locale exotic, and the treatment respectful and affectionate, as the Head of the Khedive’s Secret Police strives to keep order in an essentially disordered Cairo (and beyond) in the 1900s. This fearsome Head is the Mamur Zapt to give the job its Arabic name. He is one Gareth Owen, a Welsh captain in the British Army that occupied Egypt to secure repayment of loans, as the French once tried to do in Mexico and the Germans in Venezuela.
The legal fiction at the time was that Egypt was a semi-autonomous province of the Ottoman Empire at the indulgence of the Sultan in distant Constantinople who appointed the local governor, the Khedive. This arrangement came about in the aftermath of the construction of the Suez Canal which had led to vast investments and speculation in Egypt with attendant boom, corruption, and bust, occasioning ever greater tax increases to repay loans. The Khedive liked the high life and had soon sold all the Suez Canal shares assigned to Egypt to pay for his pleasure. French and British financial interests in Egypt reduced the Ottoman Empire’s sway over the region and that suited the Khedive to get away from the Sultan’s taxing reach.
The high life was very expensive because it included hundreds of pashas and their extended families who also got on the gravy train; in 1882 the party ended. A British Army intervened and the Khedive agreed to an arrangement that made Egypt a protectorate of Great Britain but still nominally associated with the Ottoman Empire so it was not coloured British pink on maps. None of this was easy. There was at least one pitched battle in 1882 before the Khedive went to the table, where he and the pashas were guaranteed British support in return for inviting the British to stay and stay and stay over the protests from the Sultan. That the Ottoman Empire could not resist this arrangement was one sign of its own decline.
Pearce was born in Sudan, educated in Cairo, and obviously knows the lands and peoples well, and holds them in high esteem. Most of the violence occurs off stage and in some titles there is no violence at all, but a mystery of a theft or — in one — a strange reappearance. Some of the events occur in what was then called Egyptian Sudan, a vast area, larger than India and nearly as diverse though not densely populated.
In these pages Cairo is a living museum of humanity with its myriad of races, ethnicities, nationalities, hundreds of religions, thousands of sects, alongside remnants of ancient histories (Pharaonic, Greek, Roman), and the endless variety among the Arabs themselves. All are dominated and much is determined by the relentless Sun and the life-giving Nile. Then there are the interlopers — Russian, Italian, Armenian, Syrian, Mingrelian, French, American, English, Montenegrin — who come to steal ancient artefacts or to build casinos or railroads for maximum profit and generally exploit the region.
The author is in no hurry to crowd in his encyclopaedic knowledge of Egypt but includes some title by title. Nor he is in any rush to give Owen a long and tiresome back story. We learn more about Owen as each title unfolds as the sequence continues.
Michael Pearce. Chapeaux!
One of the nationalities that is growing in awareness among Cairenes is Egyptian Nationalism: Egypt for Egyptians, and all that, but as many characters note, it is no easy matter to say who is and who is not an Egyptian. The Greek Christian Copts entered Egypt long before the Muslim Arabs and have a claim to historical priority. The Sudanese in the south were native to the region since before time. Religious conflicts among Jews, Copts, and Muslims are common as are conflicts among sects within each of these religions. Ottoman intrigues to undermine the Brits are daily. And in some of the later titles, the women of the burka become restive. Tourists are also a factor for good when the spend money, and bad when they overstep the mark or are victims of crimes.
In this swirl Owen goes about his business, censoring the local press every night and frequenting coffee houses to keep in touch with the vast network of informants he inherited when appointed. The Khedive liked a Brit in the job so that he could distance himself from any acts of the Secret Police, while being sure the acts occurred to keep his regime stable. In same spirit of McKinsey management, the Brits can also disown the Mamur Zapt, if need be, as an agent of Khedive. Thus Owen could be stabbed in the back twice. However, sometimes two masters can be played off against each other.
Owen takes a softly, softly approach that at times irritates the offstage Khedive, but he is usually more interested in the harem than anything else. Most of the Brits accept softly softy but there is an Army in occupation and sometimes it takes all of Owen’s growing skill to keep the soldiers in the barracks and out of trouble. His job is to prevent problems more than solve them and once the soldiers appear to keep order, inevitably disorder follows. There is an iron law in that.
Owen has a shambling multi-lingual Greek as his number one legman, who has the uncanny ability to get people talking to him from market porters, to hotel maids, to slumming tourists. The office is run with Prussian efficiency by Nikos, a Copt, who worships the files and who is always there with the files. Owen has speculated that he sleeps in an empty drawer with the name Nikos on it, but since Nikos keeps everything, including his door, locked Owen has never been able to confirm this suspicion. Selim provides the muscle when that is needed.
Then there is Paul, the aide-de-camp of the Consul-General, who is in fact the military governor of the protectorate. Paul is a master of never saying ‘no’ when insuring that things do not happen and likewise of never saying ‘yes’ but insuring the right things do happen. He is the consummate master of committee meetings who agrees with everyone, never commits himself, and yet the outcome is always what he wants.
Owen also has a good friend in the Egyptian judiciary with whom he works ever more closely on cases. Mahmoud el Zaki, an Egyptian nationalist, who aspires to see a modern Egypt make its own way in the world free of British suzerainty, but who himself remains wedded to many of the old ways where women are concerned.
Owen has a mistress, an Egyptian named Zeinab, who is a force of nature in her own right. No burka and veil for her. She can be counted on the stimulate Owen in many ways. She has even bamboozled that master of spin Paul more than once.
Other characters include the operational commander of the uniformed police, a tall, pudgy, pink Scots named McPhee who was a school headmaster back in the Highlands, but who wanted a job in Egypt because he loves the cultural mélange in Cairo. If ever Owen needs to trace a fragment of a tile, McPhee may be able to tell him where it was made. Though to tell him, McPhee may first try to explain the place of tiles in Egyptian culture at great length. And don’t get him started on mosques about which he knows everything and more: Sheiks have been known to consult McPhee on such matters. Windbag though he is, McPhee is an excellent organiser, having learned from unruly Scots schoolboys, and he can be relied upon in the crunch to turn out the uniforms when necessary.
No one is a cartoon in these stories. Even some pretty unlikely and unlikeable characters finish as rounded individuals like the dissolute riding’, huntin’, and shootin’ Egyptian prince who at the eleventh hour saves Owen’s life. In an earlier title Owen was rescued from an assassination attempt by some smugglers thanks to a village watchman, who was in fact a twelve-year old girl.
A word of warning for those who start at the beginning. Each of the novels, no doubt at the insistence of the publisher, is stand-alone. The result is that basic information about the Egyptian legal system, Owen’s place in Egypt and his personal life, and the basics of the context are repeated in each novel. It is like those cooking shows where in each episode the chef says heat the wok first or boil the water first. Got it. By volume fifteen below readers are jaded by this repetition and I expect it dissuades some from continuing.
1.The Mamur Zapt and the Return of the Carpet. Collins Crime. 1988.
2.The Mamur Zapt and the Night of the Dog. Collins Crime. 1989.
3.The Mamur Zapt and the Donkey-Vous. Collins. 1990.
4.The Mamur Zapt and the Men Behind. Harper Fontana. 1991.
5.The Mamur Zapt and the Girl in the Nile. Collins. 1992.
6.The Mamur Zapt and the Spoils of Egypt. Collins Crime. 1992.
7.The Mamur Zapt and the Camel of Destruction. Collins Crime. 1993.
