Category: Book Review

Pereira Maintains (1994) by Antonio Tabucchi

Good Reads meta-data is 196 pages, rated 4.18 by 27,893 litizens.

Genre: Fiction.

DNA: Portugal.

Verdict: Pereira maintains.  

Tagline: What did Pereira do?  What will Pereira do?

It is the high summer in the Lisbon of 1938 Dr Pereira, editor of a minor literary page on a minor weekly newspaper, plods though life, obese, a widower, inward-looking, and slowly repeating each day the day before when by accident he comes across two young idealists out to save the world. 

Surprising himself, Pereira helps them with some small change, and then a few escudos, then a few more, and then shelters one of them, well two, because, from the shadows, a third emerges. Little by little he does more and more for them. 

It is neither a good time nor a good place to take even little chances.  Salazar’s regime is determined not to offend the great powers, starting with neighbour frenemy Spain then tearing itself apart in a savage civil war, nor the distant giant Germany still less Portugal’s historic ally Great Britain. To walk a fine line among these traps, the regime has given free rein to the Polícia Internacional e de Defies do Estado (PIDE), which encourages denunciations of anyone and everyone, and sure enough and soon enough Pereira is reported by a concierge who found his last Christmas tip inadequate, perhaps, thinking a new tenant would tip more.  Those young people hiding in his flat are exposed.   

The situation goes from bad to worse, but unlike most others, Pereira has a life boat. His night job has been translating French literature into Portuguese and this means he speaks French and has connections in France, so he packs a bag and scoots. Yes, we know this haven will not long be safe, but it is enough at the time.

Pereira’s lonely and morbid day-to-day life in the scorching heat of day and the suffocating heat of night is well portrayed in short chapters with limpid prose. It brings to life something of the Lisbon we visited a few years ago.  

It is written almost as the confession of a crime: Intriguing, kind of a reverse krimi, as Pereira confesses how he came gradually to commit the crimes he did against the regime without ever quite intending to do so.    

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Roberto Calasso, The Art of the Publisher (2015).

GoodReads meta-data is 148 pages rated 3.78 by 608 litizens.

Genre: Memoir.

DNA:  Bibliomania.

Verdict: Engaging.

Tagline: Indophile.  

Roberto Calasso is himself a story teller with many books to his credit, however he is also a publisher of books by others. Between these covers he has collected essays reflecting on his long career as a publisher, a vocation that combines a circus ringmaster with a bazaar stall holder on his telling. After an apprenticeship in other publishing houses, in the 1960s he started Adelphi to bring to Italy high quality works the big publishers, for reasons of their own, were not translating or publishing, e.g., George Simenon’s novels, apart from the Maigret titles.  

To establish Adelphi press, Calasso strove to make an Adelphi book whole, by that he means making every aspect of each book from the cover, to the blurb, to the advertising, the front and back flaps, the paper on which it was printed, the font, the spine to be all of a piece with the words of the book itself.  

He also broke with a long tradition in Italian publishing, he says, of treating readers as children. Before Adelphi, foreign books in translation for Italian readers always had a forward explaining the book to readers.  Adelphi omitted such condescending expositions.  Indeed, in one case when translators admitted they could not render a certain German writer into serviceable Italian, he published the book in its original German in the Adelphi collection for the Italian market. Was that the incomprehensible Heidegger? 

Few readers like me spare a thought to publishers, but perhaps we should especially in this age of transition from analogue on paper to digital in pixels.  He dissects one passionate defence of digital books in a series of brilliant strokes. The expositor went on and on about how digital books mean we read together as a community because we can know who else is reading this book, how far they have gotten, and the very passages which they have underlined and the annotations they have entered. This approach undermines the very essence of reading, per Calasso, namely a silent and solitary communion between author and reader, not among readers, not with crowd noise, alone and yet in company. Amen, Brother Roberto. Willa Cather said the meaning of a book is a chemical suspension in the air between reader and page. John Williams in Stoner (2006) has a moving passage on this communion at the end of this neglected masterpiece.  

Digression warning: Speaking of underlining or highlighting texts, as a student I bought used textbooks. The crush and confusion of the beginning of semester in the bookstore taught me how to select quickly from the used copies. One that had many passages underlined in the first chapter or two, was a prospect.  The more underlining in those chapters the better, because it meant the underliner had no idea what was important, using a net when a line was needed.  Invariably in later chapters there was no underlining because the over-underliner (I couldn’t resist that) had dropped the course and sold back the book.  Every time I applied this algorithm, it worked: a heavily marked up first chapter meant clean pages to come. Detour is complete.

Does a reader of William Faulkner’s Sound and Fury really want to see what everyone else, or even a selection of them, have underlined while reading this demanding but memorable story? Does it add anything to our relationship to the bewildered Benjy? 

Moreover, I harbour the suspicion that in the whole world every line of every book has been underlined by someone, and so…. Yes, what is the point? Good question, Mortimer.  

In Calasso’s essays there is much insider talk of Italian authors, editors, publishers, translators that would mean more to someone versed in Italian Twentieth Century literature than it does to me.  But Calasso has some perfect turns of the phrase to hold even my jaded attention.  

The tagline ‘Indophile’ above comes from his repeated references to Indian mystics, the Hindu vedas, which did not make much headway for me.  It comes across as faint echo of tie-dying, dope smoking, incense burning Westerners who went to India to find the perfect curry.  

The Stainless Steel Rat (1957 as a short story and 1962 fleshed out as a novel) by Harry Harrison.

Good Reads meta-data is 208 pages each rated 3.93 by 15,404 litizens. There are twelve titles in the sequence.

Genre: SyFy.

DNA: USA.

Verdict: Bring on the maze. This rat will beat it.  

Tagline: Where there’s money, there’s the Stainless Steel Rat

Meet James Bolivar di Griz who goes by so many names he has lost track, but those who know him prefer Slippery Jim, those who don’t, call him Rat.  He is occasionally charming and always a rouge, even on his wedding day. He is a fast-talking code hero who steals from rich, again and again. ‘Code hero?’  Look it up, Mortimer. 

He is a rat because he gets into and out of places up to no good, and stainless steel because his world is made of steel and glass, not wood or cement with cracks and crevasses, but even so he finds interstices in the steel and glass at the joins. The rat is something of a thinker when he has a few minutes off from being an action man.

His ambition has long been to be the biggest criminal of them all and he is well on his way to that achievement when in the course of a one-man heist he cleverly takes refuge in an empty office, only to find the head of the ultra-secret Special Corps sitting there waiting with a complete file on him and a phalanx of heavily armed guards. Gulp!  Until that moment the Rat had not really believed that the Corps existed and he had certainly not believed anyone could outmanoeuvre him. Those two truths were hard to swallow but swallow he must.

In the subsequent negotiations, the Rat is licensed to continue his larceny but only as directed by the Corps. It turns out there are many targets the Corps would like brought low and the Rat is the man to do it.  Doing the Corps’ bidding, he travels through time and space to steal to his heart’s content, while compiling data for blackmail, destroying forged bonds, freeing hostages, sabotaging weapons, all in day’s work. A victim of the Everest Syndrome, he steals because it is there to be stolen. (Pretty much how I deal with eating chocolate.)  While doing so he falls in love, marries, sires children and continues with his galactic crime spree through twelve novels in all. The stories are set in the far future, so far that the origins of humanity on Earth are unknown to humankind who are spread far and wide in the galaxy. One blogger nerd estimates the Rat was born of woman, if he was, in the 346th Century.   

His first assignment with the Special Corps is, single-handedly, to overthrow a militarily aggressive world that is conquering its neighbours.  Such long range invasions had long been impossible due to time and distance and their combined impact on logistics.  No D-Days in the 346th Century, not until now!  His mission is to find out how they do it and then scuttle it.  

He finds that the Aggressors play a long game, and undermine the worlds to conquer by financial support for dissidents within. Sound familiar? It is Putin’s Moscow game plan, with agents of influence like Murdoch and The Other Guy (whose name never passes my lips or  keyword). When the dissidents rise up, then the Aggressors move in as though aiding them, and then wallop everyone and takeover.  See, I said he was a thinker.  

He foils them by….means fantastic.

This rat is not the Chinese democracy campaigner, Liu Di, who used ‘The Stainless Steel Rat’ as a nom de guerre. She has been in the slammer since 2002 for her troubles. If only Slippery Jim could get her out with a little time travel.  

I read a few of these in a teenage science fiction phase and stumbled across one the other night trawling for Kindle reading, and once I started, well, I kept going.  But one is enough.

Blurb Your Enthusiasm (2022) by Louise Wilder

Good Reads meta-data is 352 pages rated 4.16 by 185 litizens. 

Genre: Non-fiction (though some of the stories belie that).

DNA: Bibliomania.

Verdict: Snappy!

Tagline: Occam did it. 

The world beyond wherein are produced those tantalising paragraphs on the back of books, those lures cast on book-selling web sites, the too-good-to-be-true hooks in advertisements. These are the blurbs. Who hasn’t bit on one of those baits…and read to regret it?  

They run to a hundred words plus or minus, one.  The discipline is strict and stern in this sweatshop. T. S. Eliot’s day job was to do just that, write blurbs for Faber and Faber.  No wonder he went cryptic with his poetry at end of a day. He wrote 5000 published blurbs, and countless drafts (some of which were probably better than the copy used, but excellence does not always prevail).  

Within those one hundred words a copywriter summarises the book honestly but in such a way as to market it to a buyer. It’s like introducing someone at a party, emphasis on the positive, on the common ground, on the best side…. No comment on the negatives. Don’t mention the short-temper, the habitual tardiness, the slovenly home, the relentless egotism, the jail time, the snobbery, the cheating at cards, the nose picking, the carelessness in driving a car….  

It is best if the blurb reflects the nature and manner of the text within the book.  No high fluting terminology for a down and dirty book, nor vice versa.  Last, but not least, the blurb must satisfy its first reader, the author, or failing that, the even higher authority of the publishing editor.  Few authors insist on writing their own blurbs and still fewer publishers let them, because the marketing department knows best. 

Here’s a bet.  Next time you are fondling a new book, read the blurb and see if you can tell who wrote it, the author or a hack copywriter?  Those by authors use – shutter – adjectives, while hacks stick to the facts of the text.  (Pssst, authors have even been known to use, ahem, adverbs.) If the story is set in Berlin, a hack will say ‘Berlin,’ while an author will embellish that as ‘wintry Berlin.’  See the difference. Authors seldom resist backstories, hacks have taken the oath to do so.  The hack writes ‘Berlin. Joe had to…’  The author wants more, so ‘Tall and elegant Joe found himself in very wintry Berlin to…’  The one hundred word guillotine falls on the author’s blurb before it gets to a punchline.  A hack is tempted to put the punchline first to get attention and then backfill.  

Authors are prone to describing the book, in superlatives: ‘outstanding,’ ‘incredible,’ ‘brilliant,’ ‘amazing.’ These terms are used for everything these days and so have been emptied of significance, but they persist like semantic ghosts to offer a substitute for meaning. Indeed some book-covers are so crowded with such empty calories of praise that there is no room for a few words for what the book is about. By Gresham’s Law, cheap words drive out valuable ones.  

The hack blurb writer sometimes has to start with a draft blurb from the author, and applies Occam’s razor. Slash!  

Blurbs have always been with us but they have changed over time.  Once they were more like tables of contents, then for a while they were displaced by quotations from other writers and critics praising the book with adjectives and adverbs as above! These Masonic salutations tended to zero credibility and now appear, if at all, as supplements.  

However, it is a baleful truth that publishers have lately began to mimic the promotional pitches for movies, with such meaningless remarks as ‘in the tradition of [last year’s box office success],’ which means derivative, ‘based on a true story,’ which means it isn’t, and ‘if you liked [ … ],  you will like this.’ I may have liked one but find that to be quite enough, no more thanks.  (Buy a toilet seat from Amazon, and you’ll see. Thereafter you will be followed to your grave by Amazon’s suggestions of other toilet seats you might like!) Commercial algorithms assume consumers are single-track obsessives. 

The prose is spritely, the insights sharp, the chapters short.  What’s not to like.  

Aside on discipline. I recently had to write a synopsis of a book in 300 characters, and a space counted as a character.  It took me two weeks of editing to get something adequate.  

War Women (2021) by Martin Limón 

Good Reads meta-data is 214 pages, rated 3.18 by 96 litizens.

Genre: krimi.

DNA: South Korea.

Tagline: Women with guns!  

Verdict: The dynamic duo return. 

Having recently enjoyed a South Korean movie, I remembered this title was in the Kindle reading bank so I turned to it to continue my mental travels in Korea.

Sergeants George Sueño and Ernie Bascom are at it again. Ernie is tall and looks very aryan, while George is even taller and looks very hispanic dark.  They often play on this contrast as bad cop Ernie and worse cop George.  Since they have served in this fictional South Korea well beyond the decade of the 1980s, George has had time to learn a lot of Korean, and treats the natives with consideration and respect.  Ernie accepts his leadership on this front…when he is  sober. Since they are cops, GIs shun them, leaving them to spend most of their time off- and as well on-duty together.  

In this outing one of their prime snitches has gone missing, a Sergeant First Class aiming at the twenty-year pension who manages the classified files, filing system, and archives — the last man to go AWOL. In the past he has passed over useful intel to them for a price. Ergo his absence is more than just an official problem, it jeopardises their own capacity to stay on the good side of the Head Shed wherein sit the brass (sometimes on tacks).  

The plot concerns the rape of women by American soldiers and is even more unpleasant to read in the book than in this line.  Ah, most readers probably supposed the women in the previous sentence to be Korean. Not so, The victims are members of 877th Field Transportation Company, drivers and loaders who cart around boy toys.  Yes, these are women, because the volunteer Army has to take whom it can get, and that riles pea-brains high and low, including brass in that Head Shed in Seoul whose widely repeated off the record remarks about what women are good for have been interpreted by a few sergeants on field manoeuvres as the license to rape.  Everyone knows that in the Eighth Army to lodge a complaint about being raped, or anything else, is more likely to lead to punishment for the reporter than the perpetrator, as in most corporations. After all, there was no problem until the report created it.

Instead the women have turned vigilante on the same assumption, that for the C.O. to report their mutiny would be a stain on his record, one big enough to lose his pension.  Having no North Koreans to shoot at, the Americans, men and women, trade gunfire.  It may sound far fetched but the writer make it credible, nearly.

All of this is aided and abetted by that recurring intrepid journalist, Katie Bird, who puts plenty of cats among the Army pigeons.  She is always a welcome addition to any party with a razor wit and never take no for an answer attitude. She is always two or three steps ahead of Bascom and Sueno and stays there as they follow in her wake.

The to-ing and fro-ing in Seoul is detailed, and in this instance there seems to this reader to be too much of that to disguise the rickety, if distasteful, plot. North Koreans are in the formula as usual.

The series started in 1992 with Jade Lady Burning and this is #17 recounting law enforcement (sort of) in the Eighth Army during its occupation of South Korea in the 1980s. At the time South Korea was a military dictatorship of an unpleasant type, and still impoverished with the constant threat from the north.

Olivier Zunz, The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville (2022). 

GoodReads meta-data is 472 pages, rated 4.08 by 37 litizens.  

Count Tocqueville’s life’s work was the reconciliation of liberty with equality.  It began when he was twenty-five and went on to the end.  Liberty can only exist if it is self-limiting. Democracy with its countervailing institutions might offer a means to that end. This is a counter-intuitive conclusion because for most people liberty means license, that is, no limits, meaning anything goes. Of course, if anything goes, liberty will soon destroy itself, e.g., shouting fire in a darkened theatre.

This self-destructive tension pervades and explains everything he did and wrote.   

John Stuart Mill put it this way: the maximum liberty consistent with a like liberty for all.  We can only be as free as everyone else, and vice versa.  By the way, he and Mill were correspondents, and Karl Marx may well have been in the British Library on the days Tocqueville visited with Mill.  

It all began when as a bored lawyer with little to do, Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) and his friend Gustav de Beaumont (1802-1866) went to the New World in 1831 for nine months, which to them was less a geographic than a political expression. The New World they wanted to see (and to report back to France upon) was Democracy which happened to be located in North America. Making use of their aristocratic connections during the reign of King Louis-Philipe, they got themselves commissioned to study prisons. This writ related to a movement to reform French prisons to rehabilitate inmates rather than only to confine or to punish them.  The commission gave them letters of introduction and entrées to French counsellors but no financial support. The trip was funded by their families. 

They did visit many prisons like Sing-Sing and they did write a report (1833) which few either read or cite. More importantly, Tocqueville wrote the magisterial Democracy in America, and Beaumont wrote novel called Marie (1835) (about the evils of slavery and racism which he had seen).  

The trip itself is worth reading about: they went by ship, steam boat, canoe, barge, horseback, foot, raft, dog sled, mule, and stagecoach from New York City, Boston, Montreal, Quebec, Detroit, Sault St Marie, Green Bay, Pittsburg, Cincinnati, Louisville, Nashville, Memphis, New Orleans, Mobile, Columbia (SC), Fayetteville (NC), Norfolk (VA), Baltimore, Washington (DC), Philadelphia, and many points between from May to March of the next year through swarms of mosquitos, boiling heat, enervating humidity, hail, driving rain, sleet, snow, over black ice, and repeat. See Anne Bentzel, Travelling Tocqueville’s America (1998).  

They met all manner of people from President Andrew Jackson, former president John Quincy Adams, Davy Crockett, Sam Houston, to rising magnates, and French-speaking native Amerindians around the Great Lakes, German immigrants who spoke no English, and more. This trip and these experiences were the formative years of his life and later as he wrote the two volumes, the experience made him the man he became. The book was his teacher as he ordered, culled, refined, discarded, reinterpreted, digested what he had seen, heard, and learned, and it changed his mind about many things. To be sure, the man certainly made the book, but the book also made the man.  

Having seen France go through one cataclysmic disaster after another, each of its own making, Tocqueville hoped to find a new way to live in Democracy and to communicate it to his fellow citizens. This ambition was no abstract exercise for him.  His parents, just married, had been arrested and sentenced for the crime of birth to the guillotine during Robespierre’s Terror. They endured 10-months or so on death-row waiting for their turn at the blade, such was volume of prisoners, as all of his wife’s family from her aged great grandfather to her teenage nieces, nephews, and cousins were beheaded one after another to the audible cheers of the crowd. They were spared, and later Tocqueville was born, only when Robespierre was ousted and there followed a brief respite in the blood-letting. 

The author avoids the pious homilies that others shower on Tocqueville when he points out more than once the obvious that he missed, like the suppression of his Catholic brethren in New York City and Boston, like the emerging political machines in those cities, like the continued theft from Amerindians, like the oppression of French in Canada and the Irish in the States, the early gestation of the abolitionist movement in Boston, and so on.  Nor did he have much of an eye for the wonders of nature. There was so much to take in and almost all of it was new to this ingenue, so that he did not perceive it all. 

What he did have was a thirst for knowledge, and he filled one notebook after another with observations of towns, crossroads, inns, street scenes, hotels, and endless interviews with all and anyone would talk to him.  He spoke a fractured English swotted up during the sea voyage to New York. In addition to the high and mighty he met, he also talked to wagoneers, hunters, inn keepers, travelling salesmen, farm wives where they bunked en route, gamblers, deck hands on river boats, a day labourer at a harbour, and a slave or two.  When they took ship to return to France he had three large steamer trunks filled with the notes and artefacts he had collected from government reports to a bow and arrow and a buffalo rug.  

As he travelled through North America he hatched the idea of a book on democracy, but upon return he and Beaumont decided they had to write the prison report immediately to complete that obligation. They did so post haste: On the Penitentiary System in the United States and Its Application to France, which runs to 300+ pages, nearly half of which being appendices of notes and documents. What they found was no system at all but variations between and within states. A great deal of hindsight has been applied to this report by scholars in search of a topic.   

Tocqueville is so judicious, careful, and hesitant in Democracy in America that he gives lengthy accounts of opposing points of view, subsequently providing ammunition for others to quote for and against every proposition he considers. He can be quoted for and against democracy itself, since he recognised and catalogued its flaws and failings.  Moreover, he did not suppose the American example could be transplanted to France, so he did not recommend that, but rather sought, and continued to seek, the underlying mechanisms that could be developed in France.  Hence, his later research into the origins of the French Revolution, where he elaborated what a hundred and fifty years later would be called the J-curve explanation of revolution. (Look it up, Mortimer.)         

Every US President, except for the illiterate one, has had occasion to quote, cite, or refer to Tocqueville, yet one suspects that they have seldom turned a page of Democracy in America (1835 and 1840), making it a classic that fits Mark Twain’s definition perfectly.  It is widely cited and equally unread.  I have to plead guilty to that charge.  I bought the abridged student edition of the two voluminous volumes when I was an undergraduate and read whatever was assigned at the time and no more.  Since then I have picked over other sections when investigating this topic or that.  I tried and failed to read the long chapter ‘The Three Races.’  It is a safe bet that few, very few, of those who quote from Democracy in America have read even as much as that, and sure thing to bet that they have not read more.  

By the way, while topics like the tyranny of the majority command many citations, one of the best parts of the book concerns the development of public opinion in the spiral of silence.  

See also, as reviewed elsewhere on this blog, Leopold Damrosch, Tocqueville’s Discovery of America (2010).  

By the there is a phd to be had in a comparative study of theorists in parliament, Tocqueville, Mill, and Max Weber had a term in office.  Who else?  

We Scholars: Changing the Culture of the University (1995) by David Damrosch

GoodReads meta-data is 242 pages rated 3.83 by 6 litizens.

The central line of argument in this monograph is the long term deleterious effects of specialisation which combines with a central tendency of colleges and universities to converge on a single model, as seen in Australia where within a decade colleges of advanced education and institutes of technology assumed the name and morēs of universities, abandoning their own distinctive histories and achievements near instantly. In my small world I had an experience similar to one the author describes.  Writing a letter of assessment for a candidate for promotion in one of those re-named institutions, I meant to praise and support the individual.  In it I emphasised the clever means by which she had integrated current research into undergraduate courses and presented it in ways that would arrest the attention of young students, adding that I had seen her classroom interaction with students and admired it. I also said that chapters of her dissertation could be published in the fullness of time for their groundbreaking insights.  Pushing back from the keyboard, I thought that this testimonial would help. Not so. In fact, quite the reverse.  

I had tried to calculate the letter to match the circumstances of what was in all but name a teaching-only institution and so stressed teaching and put that comment on publication as a ‘might be.’  Both tactics were mistakes. My assessment had been sought, said an icy reply from the dean at that institution, because I was a leader in the field (no one else before or since has ever crowned me thus, so I savoured that) at the leading research University (our marketing department always said that but this was the first and only time someone outside feigned to take it seriously) in the country so that I would measure the candidate against the standard that prevailed in my milieu.  Oh.  By concentrating on teaching I had condemned the applicant.

While he mourns the loss of some of the fruits of a core curriculum in a common reference point, in shared experience, and in the intrinsic value of much of it (like William Shakespeare or Emily Dickinson) as compared to watching a comic book-based film, he makes a hash of the defences of the core by the likes of Allan Bloom by showing just how selective that core always was, namely that despite the loud and persistent howls of its defenders it never did include anything of the stories from the Bible, yet what could be more core to the Western tradition than that.  He also shows just how narrow the focus is of one the most widely used undergraduate literary anthologies (which I had myself in those salad days), the Norton Anthology of World Literature. His aim is not to amend the core with the Bible, but to demonstrate how tenuous the justifications for the core have been.  

In my years I heard the ‘curriculum’ discussed repeatedly, even annually, but in none of those discussions did I ever hear anyone talk about what a students needed to learn and how they would learn it by graduation. The discussion was always about boxes of content that might allow us to teach our research to undergraduates.  In other words, the interests served were those of the teachers not the students.  This order of priorities was announced early in my experience by one colleague thus: ‘It matters not what the subject is, as long as it is offered with enthusiasm.’  I put it somewhat more delicately than he did, but clearly it was all about being the centre of attention and having a captive audience to do what he liked to do.  Yet these discussions of curriculum could be teleological, reasoning backward from the knowledge and experience a citizen might benefit from in later life, a civil servant, a lawyer, a social worker, a journalist, a parent, a researcher, a data analyst, a trade unionist, a community organiser, and a graduate student. Once three or four of these generic types were identified the content and the experiences were put under them, or not.  By experience I mean, essay-writing, small group seminars, group work, community research by interview, statistical literacy, front of the room presentations, analysis of data, comparative assessments, revisions, seminars and other kinds of discussions, long or short essays, and so on.  This approach never worked.

He also indicts the nationalism of departments to which I plead guilty, nor do I like the changes he has outlined. Dissolving departments in financial acid, which is certainly happening, will create a mass society in which individuals relate singularly and poorly to the whole. That way lies hegemony coupled with anomie and alienation, requiring a new book to address that situation with another title drawn from Nietzsche. 

He is dead right about the hypocritical individualism of the humanities and social science professoriate.  On the keyboard we pound out clarion calls for community engagement, civil society harmony, fraternity, and camaraderie, but themselves refuse to go to committee meetings, or worse, once there, feigning duress, fail to take the proceeding seriously during and afterwards, or concentrate on their grievances (that start with parking). Of course many committee meetings become idle talking shops but that is because of the participants, not intrinsic to such associations. 

I savoured his description of academic conferences as the opportunity for delegates to patronise inferiors, pander to superiors, and sample the local cuisine.  His explication of the mechanics of conferences that lead to those ends is interesting and it is juxtaposed to a residential, invited seminar of dozen specialist which was productive.  Hmm, I took part in a couple of such gatherings that included Olympian professors, ambassadors, senior civil servants, and an international celebrity and found them useless.  Everyone talked when it was their turn, but it was never anyone’s turn to listen, it seemed.  People talked past each other in seriatim though everyone was effusive at the end about how wonderful it was. They liked the local wines, sights, and cuisines.    

Though Damrosch deplores the denigration of undergraduate teaching in favour of graduate supervision, he does the same himself in that the longest chapter of the book, with one of the most developed alternatives, concerning graduate education.  While its importance is undeniable, say I as one of the its products, it is not the heart of higher education for it touches so few. Of courses, there are the indirect and long term effects but they are even harder to estimate.

It is an insightful, well written, and fully researched book.  Yet since its publication in 1995 the major changes in higher education have not been such as he commended, but rather, changing attitudes of students to inflate grades, and in Australia the availability of material first through the cheaper air cargo of print books and now digital technology, and ever more resources like Wikipedia or ChatGPT. 

Echoland (2013) by Joe Joyce

GoodReads meta-data is 352 pages, rated 3.72 by 458 litizens.

Genre: Krimi

DNA: Ireland.

Verdict: More, please.

Tagline: High heels on cobble stones?

A krimi set it in Dublin during May and June 1940, sprinkled with Gaelic and the manners and morēs of rural Erin.  A desperate Britain might be driven to occupy the Free State to preempt a German advance.  That would start with seizing the western ports and airfields as enclaves for the Battle of the Atlantic, and once ensconced, expansion to the hinterlands would follow all the way to Dublin. Or the Germans, already using Ireland as a base for spies, might target the western ports for its U-Boats.  That seems dangerous enough but there is also the irreconcilable IRA within looking for German allies to unite the island on the principle that my enemy’s enemy is my friend.  Meanwhile, the parliamentary government with a thin majority and thinner legitimacy sticks to neutrality in word and deed, while preparing for both eventualities.

Into this minefield steps a junior army officer who reads some German and because of that is transferred to Army intelligence and set to work spying on the spies both German and British and later American.  There are some nice twists and turns and the characters are several and varied.  There is much of the time and place, the bicycle as transportation, the ubiquitous cigarettes, the invisible hand of Catholicism in hospitals and schools, the furnishings and dress, the smells and sounds of the city, but the descriptions of these backdrops are spare and do not deflect or delay the narrative.  By and large the author’s touch is light but firm and clear.  

The officer is a country boy new to the ways of the big city, and stumbles around.  But he is good at finding threads in the files of reports, and questions the obvious that others have looked through. Moreover, his knowledge of German is better than that of many others in the office, and they turn to him for help in translation, which enlightens him further about the bigger picture.  

There is no explanation of the title that I noticed, and note well that the title used by three or four other authors.  Nor is there an explanation of why and how he learned German.  

I liked it enough to go onto the second in the series, and the third.  

Above, I said that the characters are varied, and when I started another similar book, I was reminded of the importance of that variation.  In this other, unnamed book, every character in the Kindle sample uses the same words, idioms, and register, like one of those plays where one actor does all the parts, changing costume but nothing else.