Goodreads meta-data is 64 pages, rated 4.50 by four members of the family.
Genre: History.
Verdict: Once over lightly.
I remain in the market for a corporate history of Pan Am. This essay has whet my appetite and enlightened me on some points, but, well, there must be a lot more to the story.
This is my first first Google Book book and that meant I had to read it the screen, not on the Kindle. Fortunately, at 64 pages that could be done. Moreover, I found skimming it was best. It has the typos I associate with books from CreateSpace, and offered the laborious prose of a trained engineer.
Goodreads metadata is 172 pages, rated 4.27 by 227 litizens.
Verdict: What a trip!
An incredible story that has not (yet) been bastardised and exploited by Hollywood. (I searched IMDb.) Dibs on that.
On 4 December 1941 Pan American flight 606 took off from Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay for Auckland in far New Zealand (and return therefrom) with stops along the way, starting with Honolulu. It had a crew of ten men and fifty passengers. All the members of the crew were experienced long-haul flyers, well versed in Pan Am’s exacting safety protocols.
This was an enormous flying boat – a Boeing 314 – equipped with all the latest mod cons and hi tech of the day. The hull was marked with company logos and a US flag on roof and both side of the nose cone, as well as the civilian registration number NC-18609.
By this time it was Standard Operating Procedure for the pilot commanding to be handed an envelope as he entered the aircraft to prepare for takeoff with the forbidding label: To Be Opened Only in an Emergency. Captain’s eyes only. Captain Robert Ford was required to carry it in the internal right hand breast pocket of his uniform coat at all times per company rules. He had carried such an unopened envelope on many previous flights: Situation normal.
The flight duly arrived in Honolulu and laid over for fuelling, passenger changes, and some relaxation for the crew, staying at the Moana Hotel where we had a reception once. It took off the next day, 6 December and wound its way southwest making stops for fuel, food, relaxation, and water at Canton Island, Suva, and Noumea. So far so normal.
Everyone was aware of the tensions in the Pacific and at each stop there is talk about it in the abstract. Then…. about an hour from Auckland the onboard radio operator began trying to establish radio contact with Auckland and came across a Kiwi radio news bulletin that proclaimed unconfirmed reports of an attack at Pearl Harbor …. Oops! Consternation prevailed as the crew members recalled the Pearl Harbor they had left less than a day ago. They continued in silence for a few minutes while the radio operator sought confirmation, then they received a message from the Pan Am ground station in Noumea: Pearl Harbor Attacked. Implement Plan A. Good luck.
The Captain opened the envelope to read PLAN A (PLAN B was for Pan Am flights in the Atlantic Ocean, mostly to South America, but also one to Africa). Plan A was very detailed. It started with a decision tree. That is, it was divided into parts based on where the aircraft was when the envelope was opened. This close to Auckland and with no apparent trouble there, the obvious thing to do was to get to Auckland by taking anticipatory evasive action and changing their flight path and going to radio silence (both sending and receiving can be traced).
Leaving aside the details, Plan A said to continue West to New York City, like Magellan or Columbus, not to return over the Pacific. How to do this was left to the discretion of the captain. This was an enormous challenge to both man and machine. They had no maps, charts, weather reports or history, radio locator guides, tidal records, descriptions of anchorages for such an aircraft, spare parts, and they would need fuel, food, and mechanical supplies along the way. Nor had any of them ever before been in those parts of the world. West from Auckland the nearest Pan Am base was…[wait for it] at Léopoldville in the Belgian Congo. (Why Pan Am established a base station there remains a mystery.)
Dinner time.
During a week in New Zealand the crewmen laid in supplies from the Pan Am base in Auckland, all the few remaining passengers having disembarked there, using the cash on hand in the local office and pocketing the rest for later. An array of spare parts and two whole engine assemblies were packed into the passenger accommodation. Meanwhile, the navigators went to the public library to look at geography textbooks, maps, and atlases with tracing paper to make copies and the radio operators went to radio stations to seek out information about which radio bands were used in those parts of the world. The library mission was fruitful, the radio investigation was not. From Auckland to New York City on the western route was 20,869 miles at least.
The areas to traverse were vast and may be war zones by then. One possibility was to overfly Australia to Perth and from there to South Africa, however, flying over the Australian continent with no landing gear was daunting. In any case, that last leg from Perth over the southern India Ocean to Durban was beyond the range of the aircraft. Instead they decided to go to Darwin and from there to Ceylon via the Dutch East Indies…. To infer from these pages, most of the decisions were collective after discussion, which was after research.
What’s so hard about this anyway? Just draw a straight one place to another and fly that. Simple. Hmm. How does one allow for the drift of crosswinds, the false readings of the magnetic North Pole, the inconvenient location of mountain peaks, the long stretches where there will be neither fuel nor food nor any place to land the beast. How do you know you are flying a straight line? Indeed.
The subsequent adventures were many. The Boeing was buzzed by fighter aircraft, just missed Japanese bombing in Darwin, shot at by a Japanese warship, had to repair the engines several times (once in flight), borrow money from strangers, fly by dead reckoning, guess at the location of mountain ranges, hit unexpected storm fronts, land in unfamiliar waters (including some that were mined) risking accidents, guesstimate the wind drift, allow for the magnetic North Pole, stay aloft when one engine, pushed beyond the redline – exploded while in mid-air, all the while looking out for Zeroes. In some takeoffs the plane was more than a ton over the prescribed weight, because they stocked up on avgas whenever they could get it. One engine blew doing that.
From Ceylon to Karachi, Bahrain, Khartoum (landing on the Nile River), Léopoldville (on the Congo River), and Natal in Brazil. The distance from Léopoldville to Natal was 3480 miles. The maximum range of the Boeing was 3600 miles. Not much leeway if a storm threw the ship off course, if headwinds slowed the plane, if they mistook landmarks, if the next waterway was clogged, if the navigators miscalculate, if the effect of magnetic North Pole confuses things…. They had by now violated all manner of safety rules to adapt the aircraft to the circumstances, changing the fuel mix, rerouting hydraulic lines to reuse oil, and punching holes here and there so that they could pour fuel into the tanks in flight from jerry cans in the cabin. Needless to say, no one smoked.
Captain Robert Ford
That flight from Léopoldville to Natal took 23 hours and 35 minutes. Due to the recurrent overheating of engines because of substandard fuel, the cowlings on two of them had blown off, increasing the risk of fire. The plane trailed smoke for most of this leg of the journey. The plane was fully serviced and repaired at Natal before takeoff. (In a sad and annoying coda, while in Natal thieves got on board and stole the crew members’ personal affects [watches, rings, extra shoes] and much else from the plane, like a gyroscope.)
The long way.
Early in the morning of 6 January 1942 Pan Am flight 602 radioed La Guardia Tower for permission to land. The call was acknowledged and a stunned silence followed. After that it is anti-climatic.
Over five weeks the total flight time was 209 hours in the air, covering 50,694 kilometres or 31,500 miles. Most of the flight was incognito because the aircraft was regarded as technological prize of value to an enemy, i.e., it had advanced navigation and communication systems which were only being used for the first time on this flight. Those assets together with the engines made it a valuable commodity. Moreover, the ground stations they visited did not report the passage for the same reason, and in any event such civilian news would not have had priority for wartime communication. Ergo the families and friends of the crew had not word of them since leaving Noumea five weeks before.
The Wikipedia entry is slim pickings. It does not even include the flight number or offer a map of the route. This anodyne account is the only book I could find. Yet the documentary material seems plentiful, as all the crewmen kept logs, and Pan Am had plenty of photographs.
‘Anodyne’ I said above. Never once does a member of the crew lose his temper, despair, grow despondent, blame another, slack off, be late for departure, go into hysterics, become so hungover as to be unfit for duty, but each and every one is the very model of modern Pan Am employee stepping out of the advertising poster. What a cheerful, polite bunch – insufferable. Disney’s seven dwarfs were more creditable than these (paper) thin men.
The fifty passengers are invisible in these pages. Only one has a name, a Fiji resident who asked to visit the cockpit when approaching Fiji so that he might see his home from the air. Even later when the plane was detained in Bahrain to take on a passenger for Léopoldville, she is never identified or mentioned thereafter, though there was much grousing about being delayed for her convenience. The implication is that being a woman, she cannot have been worth the bother to these men. For all we know, she might have been carrying an enigma machine or Tojo’s P.I.N. to the Allies.
Despite the enveloping context of the war, the book is also silent on the politics of some of the locales where the plane stopped. New Caledonia (Noumea) was a French colony. Was the colonial government Vichy or Free French in late 1941? Did that distinction effect the reception of the plane on either of its two landings? Unknown. Likewise at Léopoldville, at the time the Congo was a Belgian colony, and Belgium had been occupied by the Germans since in 1940 and by the time the Pan Am plane got there Germany had declared war on the USA. What was the nature and attitude of the Belgian colonial authorities to this aircraft and crew? We’ll never know from these pages.
New Zealand was an ally of Great Britain in the European war, but when the Japanese attacked Malaya that bought the war closer. Did that happen while the Pan Am crew was in Auckland? Did it make things easier or harder for them? This context is absent.
All of which is to say there is a lot more to the story for someone else to dig up and put into words.
Amuse yourself by imagining how Hollywood would mangle this ‘based on a true story.’ Captain Ford would be played by that midget, whatshisname, and he would flap his arms to power the aircraft, which would be attacked by giant condors. There would be much yelling and histrionics and CGI galore of irrelevant crocodiles and such. A Nazty femme fatale would figure in the plot. The passengers would include the director’s current squeeze. Christopher Nolan would add his own touches with a gratuitous big-named star taking his hat off and putting it back on repeatedly. (An old theatrical trick to upstage the action.)
Pan Am seems to have been a world of its own, and I am wondering about reading a history of the company to find out more. Recommendations are welcome.
GoodReads meta-data is 256 pages, rated 3.91 by 2213 litizens.
Genre: Journalism.
Verdict: Bring on the Nobel Prize.
Steinbeck was the subject of a BBC Radio 4 Great Life program in which were made references to this collection, so I acquired it. Compelling, compassionate, generous, critical, angry, confused, proud, moving, irritating, insightful, clinical, banal, and more, the dispatches appeared in New York Herald Tribune when it was the best newspaper in Gotham. I suggest a reader save the front matter for last, including Steinbeck’s own forward, and just savour his sharp insights and prose scalpel as he carves to the bone. He delivered copy daily to a deadline and some of the pieces show that necessity, but others are clearly more deeply etched and more deeply felt.
The subjects are fear, loss, loneliness, pain, humour, endurance, incompetence, and more, including death and crippling injuries. Few punches are pulled save to comply with Army censorship of the time. There is also an arresting and wonderful chapter on Bob Hope entertaining troops. For me that was the high point of the book. I kept thinking George and Lenny might be in one of those hospitals. (You either get the reference or you don’t, Mortimer.)
Hint
The tension in Steinbeck’s report on a British minesweeper patrol nearly cracked the Kindle screen. See for yourself. There are items from England, Algeria, Sicily, Salerno, and more.
Steinbeck was forty-one at the time, trundling around the countryside, clabbering down cargo nets on and off ships, taking cover from strafing attacks, cowering in trenches when the bombs fell, glad for and yet repelled by the rations on the line, wearing the same clothes for weeks at a time, forgetting what hot water felt like…. It may seem strange in this age of Ego over All, sanctified by the media school term Subjective Journalism, but he says nothing about his own experiences in these dispatches. This information comes from subsequent biographers.
I have neither forgotten nor forgiven the disparaging piece in the New York Times the day after Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1962. This is the same organ that on a like occasion in 1950 dismissed William Faulkner as a regional writer. Believe it or not, Ripley. The New York Times opinionators who passed those judgements have long since been come to dust.
By the way, there is that expression ‘Give ‘em the whole nine yards,’ and I now know its origin. It has nothing to do with sports. The nine yards was the length of an ammunition belt for the wing guns of US fighter aircraft, and to expend the whole length of the belt is to ‘give ‘em the whole nine years.’ Pub trivia ready!
GoodReads meta-data is 888 pages rated by 4.38 by 143 litizens
Genre: Biography.
Sample only. No traction for this reader.
My reading did not complete the Kindle sample. I could not get started for some reason. Maybe it was because the Irish names in Gaelic were impenetrable, each with a variant spelling. More importantly, the author drew straight lines from some incident in Ford’s youth to a scene in one of his movies, as if there were no intervening mediations, or anyone else involved. I could never quite grasp the organising principle of the account. A BBC Radio 4 Great Lives episode on Ford was intriguing for suggesting some hidden depths in the man, but they remain hidden from me.
I have stood on John Ford Point, been in Gould’s Trading Post, skirted the west mitten, and so on, and consider ‘The Searchers’ THE greatest western. My credentials are in order.
GoodReads meta-data is 253 pages, rated 3.66 by 93 litizens.
Genre: History.
Verdict: Whitewash.
The book presents the recollections of scores of survivors of the war in an oral history interspersed with contemporary newspaper accounts, and German Abwehr and diplomatic reports. The Swiss speak of Switzerland as a Will-State, that is, it is willed to exist. This they did 1939-1945 as never before or since.
The oral history speakers are school teachers, insurance agents, doormen, clerks, road workers, journalists, train conductors, shop keepers, factory workers, hausfraus, children, and so on. There are no decision-makers and very little from the political perspective, though the army figures prominently.
According to this account the Swiss made all the efforts within their grasp to will Switzerland to survive by turning the country into an armed camp. Inspired by Finland’s resistance to the Soviet Union and chastened by the collapse of Norway, Netherlands, and the others, the Swiss spared no effort.
However much the Swiss did, there is no doubt that the reason it survived was the German quagmire on the Eastern Front. The gigantic scale of the Nazi war in Russia consumed all the mental energy and war material available first in preparation and then in execution. After the defeat of France in June 1940 and when by late September 1940 it was apparent that the Luftwaffe would not establish the aerial dominance needed for a seaborne invasion of England, Hitler turned his attention Eastward, and there it stayed. Because of that preoccupation Switzerland survived, as did Sweden.
That is hindsight, of course, no one knew that at the time, and especially not from September 1939 to June 1940 when the Swiss made considerable efforts to defend the country. Unlike the flatlands of Poland, Netherlands, Denmark, northern France, the Swiss had a major ally in its topography. All those steep mountains with their few narrow passes on the eastern side nearest Germany and its vassal Austria were readily fortified, ergo the initial strategy was frontier defence.
That strategy had to change when the fall of France opened up the possibility of an invasion from the West. At one time Hitler dangled the possibility before Vichy prime minister, Jean Darlan, that France occupy the Geneva region of Switzerland provided it did so with its own arms, not requiring German assistance. How serious this possibility was remains unknown to this correspondent. Nonetheless the threat remained that Germany itself might invade from its bases in France, a threat that flared up in November 1942 when Germany occupied Vichy France after the Allied landings in North Africa.
Be that as it may, the Swiss had to prepare for the worst, and in so doing changed the grand strategy from border defence in the East to a Réduit national in the fastness of the Alps. The Swiss army would withdraw to an area in the mountains where it built more than 2000 fortifications, mined all the passes, roads, and bridges, and could put a maximum of 850,000 men under arms in concrete bunkers cut into mountains, that number represented about a fifth of the population. Food was stockpiled, rations were cut, ammunition was stored in vast cave arsenals, and so on. Munitions factories and hospitals were moved into caverns. Supplies might last a year if husbanded carefully. The prospect of a costly stalemate for a six months or longer would discourage the Germans from trying, was the reasoning.
Much is made of the Swiss tradition of universal male military service which allowed it to mobilise more soldiers faster than any other European state. I saw some of this myself in Zurich once long ago. Nothing is said of the implication of such a Redoubt, namely that most of the country would be yielded to the invader without a fight. Odd that.
After emphasising the fear of and hostility to the Nazis throughout the nation, how would most of its citizens feel about being left to fend for themselves passes in silence. Made me think of tiresome politicking over the so-called Brisbane Line in Australia, which by the way was mostly the figment of the post-war political imagination, but has found its way into history books by repetition.
The oral histories of this book are repetitive and seldom enlightening. One is reminded of that sociologist Harry Lime’s observation in June 1945 there was not a Nazi in Germany, and by October 1945 there never had been any at all.
The author emphasises the German Army (Abwehr) intelligence reports which found that the Swiss would fight and fight well. Yes, this archival material is interesting, but it is at least as interesting for what it tells us about the Abwehr as about Switzerland. Abwehr was always gloomy and always exaggerated the strength of opponents. Its reports on France implied that German would lose a war there. Hitler routinely discounted these Cassandra songs. see Ernest May, Strange Victory (2000), discussed elsewhere on this blog.
We now know that the head of the Abwehr, Wilhem Canaris used these reports to temper German aggression for reasons of his own. A biography of this enigmatic man is discussed elsewhere on this blog for clickers.
The author explicitly sets aside the matter of banking. Likewise but implicitly he ignores the possibility that a letter-neural Switzerland might have suited Germany as did Sweden and Turkey. They became windows on the world and were used for that. The book touches on this in a chapter on espionage, but there was also currency trading, import and export, medicines, precision tools, precious metals, and more that passed through these countries, including many people going both ways. There was a tenuous air service from Zurich to Lisbon, and a ground link to Genoa for sea cargo existed.
In some sort of agreement, which the author does not mention, the Germans controlled several Swiss border train stations like that at Basel. I had hoped to learn more about this, having passed through that station myself, and knowing it was a barrier to German refugees who tried to get into Switzerland like the novelist Thomas Mann.
There is virtually nothing about the indigenous Nazi movement, though there was one. Moreover, these sympathisers and German agents harassed and in some cases kidnapped or murdered German citizens who had fled to Switzerland like Eric Remarque. Not a word on that subject is to be found in these pages.
Because the book is arranged chronologically there is much repetition, say when the author parades German diplomatic reports that complain of Swiss hostility to Nazism. The author takes these reports at face value, but it was routine for German diplomats to make such complaints in case they were later needed to mask some atrocity. Austria was characterised in the same way before the Anschluss; yet on the day it was received with tumultuous rapture.
My point is not a demand for moral purity, but a request for an explicit discussion of the compromises that had to be made with the devil.
There are a lot of typos, many the failure to capitalise the first letter in words, especially ‘polish’ (for the people, not the shine) but also many others like ‘maginot.’
GoodReads meta-data is 384 pages, rated 3.91 by 5604 baseball fans.
Genre: Baseball.
Verdict: Sobering, entertaining, insightful.
Will sets out to demystify major league baseball by revealing its inner WORKings. Mission accomplished.
Where the uninitiated sees luck, talent, and inspiration, Will finds calculation, attitude, and preparation. Some of the latter is physical, to be sure, but much of it is mental. It is all W O R K.
Will selected four individuals as case studies, a manager, a pitcher, a batter, and an infielder. Along the way he salts the mine with anecdotes from other times, places, and players, making a rich dish.
Manager Tony La Russa’s abiding aim in the 1980s to advance the runner seems curiously old fashioned read in 2021 when that simple ambition seems from a lost world. Drag bunts, fielder’s choice grounders behind the runner, run and hit, switch hitting, delayed double steals, disguised cut-off throws, using the infield fly rule, all these now belong in a museum as millionaire hitters below the Mendoza Line swing from the heels as if an opposite field single is beneath the dignity of their signing bonus. There speaks the curmudgeon who will be heard from again below.
At times it seemed to this reader that there is a paralysing overkill in the analysis of the work; examine in minute detail any instance and it becomes unique. Whose on first? Free will or determinism?
Listen to the advice of that general manager, Francesco Giucciardini (1483-1540), who wrote that ‘it is fallacious to judge by example, because unless these be in all respects parallel they are of no use, the least divergence in the circumstances giving rise to the widest divergence in the angle of conclusion,’ History of Italy, p. 110. Just before dismissing Frank Gee as a pen pusher remember he commanded combat armies in the field long before the Dead Ball Era.
Spurious correlations abound: ceteris paribus, this batter swings at a slider outside on Tuesdays, but not Thursdays. Well that is what the data shows. Today is Tuesday, here comes a slider. Like life, baseball comes from a partly written script. There is determinism entwined with free will as vine to fence. That fact seems obvious to everyone but a sociology PhD.
I half expected it to be in the stars, though astrology has not yet been tapped by the baseballmetricians (aka sabermetricians). It will be one day.
The endless war of batters against pitchers is the heart of the book. Each tries to unsettle the other, using a very great deal of intelligence coupled with honed abilities. Who will blink first? To a batter the opposing pitching staff is a creature with ten arms coming him. The more so in the age of pitcher surfing when they come and go five, six, seven times in a game, if not an inning.
Who knew? John Sain (of Spahn and rain fame) bridged history, throwing the last major league pitch to George ‘Babe’ Ruth and the first to Jack Robinson, two of the immortals.
By the way, the eternal pitchers’ manual is the Book of Job: man is born to troubles. Nowhere is that more true than 60 feet and 6 inches from the plate on a ten-inch high mound. Lamentations for the passing of the fifteen-inch mound in the annus horribilis of 1969.
Speaking of wars of words, I enjoyed being reminded of Steve Carlton’s silent trances before going to the mound to show the world how to throw a slider, and his continued silence afterward. In a twenty plus year career he spoke exactly once at a post game press conference. As a result he became a favourite whipping boy of the ladies and gentlemen of the media for failing to give them copy. (Yes, I know SC went off the deep end.)
To the pitcher the batters are many and varied, and just keep coming, left and right-handed, short and tall, inside hitters and reachers in their infinite variety. Not even the strike zone is a constant (though I relish the always-on-top image of the strike zone now part of television broadcasts which may have brought some visibility and stability to this illusive Bermuda rectangle).
Here is a complaint. Buckle up! The chapters on hitting and pitching are very repetitive, right down to the anecdotes. I started to wonder if it had been proof read or if I was dreaming. Neither is a good sign.
Will comprehensively debunks the natural athlete assertion for the disguised racism it is. To take one example, Willie Mays was a close observer of pitchers who never forgot a move, and with experience got so he could anticipate moves both at bat and on base. As a fielder he was likewise a Cartesian who broke down the outfield into its smallest parts and mastered each of them by turns. He made it all look easy because he worked so hard at it. In the same way it was always said that magician with the bat Tony Gwynn was a natural. Really? Then why did he take five-hours of batting practice on playing days? Ten hours on off-days. By these unnatural practices he became a natural.
Here is a test for the baseball fan that will be inscrutable to the benighted. What these numbers represent? (Note the publication date of the book.)
511
.406
56
60
61
1.12
1,406
(I knew them all but the last, sorry Ricky.) No spoiler, figure them out or go home.
In baseball as in life numerical reduction has grown stronger. Like economic rationalism, McKinsey management, and Pokemon, reduction is a fad and will fade after doing a lot of damage in the hands of those who do not understand it, but cargo-cult it. Originally these were good ideas, but they have been destroyed by acolytes who did not know when to quit. Think of customer feedback. Good idea. Current practice has the effect of destroying it. NO! I do not want to give feedback on the experience of purchasing a bag of kitty litter! Communicating with customers is a good idea, but a dozen emails and text messages from Australia Post about a routine delivery is overkill!
Statistics start as tools and soon become masters. Although the pedant must say that baseball has many numbers and few statistics, but most people, including Friend George, call numbers statistics just to confuse the children. A number is, well, just a number, say 6. A statistic is number subjected to some arithmetic manipulation, divided, multiplied, kissed on both cheeks, or something, like the ERA. That is the Earned Run Average, not the Equal Rights Amendment, Mortimer. (Yes, he’s back.) In the list above there were two statistics while the rest were numbers. I could go on about this but won’t in the interest of world peace.
Yet there still remains the fundamental prejudice for the long ball over winning games. The case in point that Will selects is Nebraska’s own Richie Ashburn whose achievements by any metric were remarkable without hitting home runs. In one of his best seasons he hit but one while dominating most games in which he played with fielding, throwing, running, and batting singles. And yet he is unheard of apart from diehard fans like moi. Then there is Bill Mazeroski who played second like no one before or since (even leaving aside 13 October 1960, a fine birthday-eve present for me). ‘Bill who?’ pretty well sums it up. These two were the perfect Tony La Russa players who played for the team and disappeared from memory down the dugout tunnel.
Loved that old chestnut, how do you pitch to a Henry Aaron? Set up your best pitch, throw it, and then run to back-up third. Found touching the encomium to ABG (if you don’t know who ABG was, hang up your spikes).
I return to my curmudgeon complaint above to note that Will agrees that basic baseball skills are sadly lacking in MLB and offers an explanation. Each year’s new crop of players mostly come from college programs. To get a return on the money paid to these recruits the drafting teams force-feed them into the Big Show. No matter how good the college coaching has been over four years with maybe 150 total games, it is paltry in comparison to four years in the minor leagues playing up to 150 games each year, thus 600 in all. Moreover, the college players are only part-time athletes for those years and full-time students (well, that is the legal fiction), whereas the minor leaguers are full-time athletes and so work at baseball three or four times more each week than a college player. Added to that, a multi-millionaire MLB newcomer is reluctant to practice Little League fundamentals, like bunting, throwing to a cut-off, the first base stretch, choking up on the bat, moving on the rubber, and so on. Likewise the management that gave these newcomers millions is reluctant to display their elementary deficiencies in training before the vultures of the media.
The Green Monster, long may it survive.
One of Will’s cherished pet peeves is the fashions in baseball stadiums, which even the 1980s were becoming entertainment centres and not cathedrals of the 108-stitch orb. That trend, and many others he reviles, has multiplied since the publication of the book. In these stadia the game on the field is one of many distractions competing for the patrons’ attention with restaurants, bars, music, museums, fish tanks, mascots (shudder!), clowns, more music, stand-up comedians in lounges, giant TV screens showing other games or even – gasp! – other sports and so and on. There are even padded chairs enclosed by glass! (Good grief!) Baseball is best appreciated on a hard seat exposed to the elements is the gospel according to Will. The dual use stadia of the 1980s he cannot abide, suited for neither baseball nor football, and used for both, and rock concerts!
Concern with public health and sanitation means I can no longer watch MLB games with their exquisite camera work of players spitting. While Will notes in one clanger of a scene this disgusting habit he does not make a sufficiently BIG DEAL of it, so I will. Yes, the constant spitting is tiresome, unnecessary, and, well, talk about cargo-culting. Is there data to show that spitting improves performance, George?
While less repulsive, but equally idiotic, is the war paint players apply to their faces. It is a fetish with no basis in fact but there are those stick-on dark lines under the eyes. Really, how stupid can you be. ‘I lost the ball in the glare from the lights on the dark skin off my high cheekbones, Coach, honest! This in a night game.’
I had hoped that Will might explain why we insist on calling these men at work boyish names, Johnny, Ricky, and so on. What’s wrong with calling a John a John? And by the way, George why is that Babe Didrikson was the last woman to hit a major league fastball?
Until 2016 George Will patiently explained the merits of the Republican Party to the uninitiated, but he gave up that Sisyphean task as impossible by that year, and said so in a loud voice.
P.S. Inspired by this reading I watched a few game highlights on You Tube. Superb camera work to be sure, and some snappy curveballs and some very nice plays, until …with his team behind by one run late in the game, a .215 hitter swung and missed at a third strike as the catcher dropped the ball. The batter turned slowly to the dugout walked away as the catcher retrieved the ball and lunged to tag him, and in so doing dropped it again. No matter the batter kept walking and the umpire then called him out as off the base path, I suppose. From the other world, I can hear Coach Kramer screaming his lungs out! Run!
P.P. S. That led me to the blooper videos where there are rich pickings from this young season alone, including outfielders who do not know how many outs there are, pitchers who do not cover home after a wild pitch (as two runs score), a third baseman with no idea where third base is, cut-off men who do not go out for the throw, but stand their ground waiting for it to come to them, a relief pitcher who threw a wild pitch on an intentional walk. I have to lie down just thinking about those.
GoodReads meta-data is 107 pages, rated 4.33 by three litizens.
Genre: History.
Verdict: Brisk and informative.
Tibet is a geographical expression of a vast area bounded by mountains, deserts, and rivers. It was never quite consolidated into political boundaries by its god-kings over the millennia. Absent countervailing pressures at the time, five hundreds years ago – give or take a few decades – the Buddhist tenet of reincarnation became a socio-political institution in the person of Dalai Lama, literally the big master, in a theocracy. Think of Iran today, or Vatican City.
A born ruler removes politics from the equation, as in hereditary monarchies. (Sure.) That desire to rise above locality, personality, and regional conflicts partly underlies the institution. Each incumbent Lama identifies, or hints at his successor. Yes, so far, no Madame D Lama.
Curiously, there is often a gap between the death of DL and the location, identification, and confirmation of his successor, and then the successor’s growth to manhood. In one instance it took years to find the successor who was at discovery and confirmation a boy of five or six. He was then whisked away to Lhasa and surrounded by a court of regents. One imagines that regents enjoyed regenting. The selectee is young enough to be moulded by such regents, thus assuring their pensions. The opportunities for goal displacement in this method are many.
Confirmation involves eight criteria and the scouts who locate the successor have to be satisfied that the candidate meets enough of the criteria to be THE ONE. Yeah, right. Enough. This is starting to sound like Thomas Hobbes’s analysis of political power: arbitrary.
The criteria themselves have elasticity. Location is one. When the incumbent Lama said his own last rites, did the weather vanes on the building point South? If so then the successor will be from the South, or found in the South, or maybe not. The other criteria are likewise vague, opaque, and readily challenged to a recount. Indeed there have been conflicting claims, resulting in a Double Dalai Lamas. Then there are the doctrinal conflicts among the Buddhists, which are many. It all starts to sound like Reformation Europe with its religious wars.
Though Tibet is a crossroads, there has never been a high volume of traffic on it, but Kazacks and other Muslims from the west encountered there Mongols from the North and Hans (Chinese, not Germans) from the East, and Indians from the mountainous south. In the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries when European powers competed for empire they began to intrude into this region. Defeated by the Japanese in 1905, the Russians turned this direction for softer targets. (When a serving officer in the Russian Tsar’s army, Gustav Mannerheim, later of Finland, went on an exploratory mission to these lands. He missed Shangri-La.) This move alarmed the British in India. Meanwhile, in a dying spasm the Chinese empire reached for Tibet about the same time.
Among Tibetans the major conflict has been between the candidates of the Red Hat monasteries and the Yellow Hat monasteries. In effect, this was a doctrinal religious conflict like the period of Two Popes in Europe. It involved the usual shenanigans, war, intrigue, lies, foreign alliances, theft, murder, imposters, forgery, and betrayal. A typical day in Canberra. The Yellow Hats won and the current, aged incumbent is one of their number. The Chinese propped up a Red Hat rival. It seemed a natural for the Red Chinese.
Divided among themselves, Tibetans have often been easy pickings for outsiders, though there is little in Tibet to pick. Rather the object has often been to make it a buffer between rivals, like Russia in the north and Britain (in India) in the south, the Han Chinese in the East and the Muslims in the West, and so on in the kaleidoscope of changing political alliances. Note, India and China have had numerous armed conflicts along their Himalayan border in 1962, 1967, and as recently as 2020.
Only in 1950, hot on the heels of the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949 with all those soldiers and guns still mobilised the Beijing government reached to the far west to insure that neither the British nor the Soviets oozed into those wide open spaces. The Soviets were allies but not friends.
Chinese conquest was bad for Tibetans, especially for Buddhist. Then it got even worse with the Cultural Revolution and the Red Guards who went to Tibet to destroy. (One wonders where these geriatric Red Guards are now, and what they think of their deeds in retrospect. Pride probably. The assigned reading is Hegel on the French Revolution.) Monasteries, temples, nuns, priests, lamas, elders, books, scrolls, tapestries, prayer flags, statues, and images, everything old (defined as Tibetan) was destroyed. Savonarola came to mind with his bonfires.
Following the Great Helmsman’s demise there was a brief relaxation of the death grip of Beijing but it soon re-clenched its fists. With the subtlety of a tyrant the Chinese regime decided to out-populate Tibetans in Tibet by building roads and railroads and giving incentives to Han Chinese to go West, settle, and populate, displacing the natives. Sound familiar? Ask Crazy Horse.
There is a major irony in the efforts of the People’s Republic of China’s efforts to eradicate Buddhism in Tibet, least it infect China itself with this opiate. Chinese efforts at suppression and oppression drove Tibet Buddhism onto the world stage, and from thence it spread around the world more effectively than would have been the case if the Chinese had simply left it alone in Tibet and played a long game for generational change. Now there are Buddhist here, there, and everywhere. For years there was a large rooming-house redolent of incense and murmuring of oms full of them near us. And these external Buddhists, many of them westerners, sustain and support the Tibetan Buddhists.
In 1950 no one had ever heard of Lhamo Dhondup, that is, the Dalai Lama (14th), and now he is world figure, known everywhere and anywhere. ‘Instead of being wiped out by China, Tibetan Buddhism had spread around the world.’ thanks mainly the Chinese repression, says the author. We all obey the law of unintended consequences.
Transition from theocracy to democracy of a sort.
Moreover, continued Chinese repression has inspired and stimulated expatriate Tibetans to unite, and there is now a global Tibetan community with a parliament-in-exile and an elected prime minister (shown above). Check out the Facebook page for further enlightenment. The incumbent Dalai Lama renounced his secular authority in 2014, declaring that a theocracy was not the way of the future. No doubt this move was partly to head off a Chinese effort to control and manipulate the reincarnation of his successor. That has been tried before.
The Chinese, by the way, have also made it illegal to reincarnate without permission. Remember that!
Helena Drysdale
The author acknowledges the propensity of Tibetans, just like so many others, to murder each other in the name of god. Buddhism is not all chanting ‘oms.’ Indeed this writer is much even-handed than the fiction writer of Water Touching Stone, discussed in an earlier post. I wanted some background while reading that novel and from a few alternatives, selected this short, easy to read book. It is volume seven (7) in a series of such brief histories. On Amazon Kindle it is credited with 107 pages, but on GoodReads is shrank to 91 pages. What’s in a number?
Make Russia Great Again (2020) by Christopher Buckley
GoodReads meta-data is pages rated 3.72 by 1,372 litizens.
Genre: Satire.
Verdict: Mission impossible to parody reality.
A satire that parodies the Other Guy mercilessly and yet isn’t funny because it is too much like reality. How many different ways can i-m-b-e-c-i-l-e be spelled. Not many.
It is couched as a prison therapy project for The Other Guy’s seventh Chief of Staff, who writes a memoir of his turbulent, if short, career in the White House. Herb Nutterman had been happy as a catering manager, until he got the offer he couldn’t refuse.
Many names have been changed to protect the guilty. Though on GoodReads I see those who feel their pouts deserve a wider readership don’t get it. It is Dickensian. Get it? (No, well, look it up.)
Buckley’s imagination is unequal to the task of thinking of some grotesque stupidity, indecency, or crime The Other Guy did not commit. Buckley sets out to exaggerate and ends up with understatement.
I chose it because the author is a prince of the capital ‘C’ Conservative priesthood, scion of the singular William Buckley, who along with other keepers of that flame like George Will and Gary Wills have remained human and humane in the tsunami of offal that continues.
The Life and Death of Olof Palme: A Biography (2015) by Pelle Neroth.
GoodReads meta-data is 181 pages (it seemed like a lot more), rated 3.30 by ten litizens.
Genre: Biography (ostensibly).
Verdict: Bah!
Olof Palme (1927-1986) was bigger than life, or so it seemed at times. He was here; he was there; he was everywhere promoting this cause and that. It seemed to me that his talkfests were in fact productive in the long run, and that is why I wanted to read about him. What motivated him to start the marathons and what kept him running? I am still wondering after reading this, the second book I have been through about him.
While there is some information about Palme’s background as a child of privilege, as an army officer, as a Labor party apparatchik, as a minister, and prime minister, there is very little about the man inside. If there are letters he wrote to friends, personal acquaintances who knew him, insightful associates, they are absent from these pages which increasingly became a chronicle of his public life taken from his official calendar, punctuated by rambling asides about the Cold War, environmentalism, Swedish class structure, or sonar technology as the context, and then – inevitably – the assassination where the Bermuda Triangle of speculations continue unencumbered with either rhyme or reason in a cocktail of stupidity, credulity, and worse. Idiocy is not confined to MAGAites.
Some obvious points are elided. Swedish prosperity from 1945 was founded on neutrality in World War II which meant it did not have to rebuild after the war, unlike most of the rest of Europe, and also its role in administering the millions of the Marshall Plan. This prosperity paid for much that followed until the rest of the Europe caught up. By the way, Count Bernadotte whom Napoleon put on the Swedish throne established Swedish neutrality in the early 19th Century. Until then Sweden had long been a major aggressor in northern Europe.
The claim is made in this book that Sweden began to lag in science and technology because Palme governments had other priorities. The evidence for this slide is the decrease in the number of Nobel Prizes going to Swedes. ‘Oh dear, is there not an obvious explanation?’ The process of Nobel Prize selection has become less parochial and more systematic, international, and transparent and that led to a wider distribution of prizes than Swedes awarding Swedes. See Burton Feldman, The Nobel Prize (2001), discussed elsewhere on this blog. To wit, there was a time when I had the word ‘Dean’ in my title, when I got a letter from Stockholm every year inviting me to nominate someone for the Nobel Prize in Economics. The net was cast very widely.
On the subject of Nobel Prizes my question is why Palme did not get a Peace Prize for endless good works in the Middle East and Africa? When I think of some Peace Prize winners, well, not naming any names, ahem, but Palme was far more significant than some named Al or that one-term senator from Illinois.
What with all the rather confused asides I never had a feeling for whom his constituents were, or even how many elections and votes the Social Democratic party won with him leading it. Nor is there any effort to show him on the campaign trail. Did he meet-and-greet? Remember names? Did his speeches register with auditors? Was his electoral appeal generational? Gendered? Could he laugh at himself?
I did learn a few things. The Sweden Palme was born into was a conservative, religious, rigid society with sharp class distinctions underscored by the use of language in ways unfathomable to me. Think of the sclerotic Ingmar Bergman movies of the 1950s. Palme was born to the haute mercantile class and related to other members of the second-tier elite, like Max von Sydow and Raul Wallenberg. His paternal grandmother was a Baroness who spoke German. The first tier, by the way, were those with inherited wealth from the residual aristocracy. There were many more tiers in a finely calibrated social structure that had the rigidity of an Indian caste system.
He grew up in a multi-lingual environment, and spoke freely in German, Swedish, and English. But he was often cryptic, perhaps impatient, and that led to many misunderstandings. An example is his often quoted remark that his experiences in the United States as an exchange student for one year at Kenyon College in Ohio made him into a socialist. Most of the references to this remark have it that he was repelled by the poverty and racism he saw (and he was) on his many Greyhound bus travels before and after school, but in fact he meant that he was inspired by the can-do attitude he found into thinking great things could be accomplished by energy and perseverance in a rich society.
When his father died young, Olof had been sent to a boarding school (like Eton), where as a sickly weakling he was bullied but found the schoolwork easy. It is also said he failed to wash himself and continued that habit for years. My inference is that this ninety-pound weakling avoided the communal showers where he would have been tormented, but the author draws no such conclusion. The author peers down the psychology lens and supposes that much of Palme’s later reforming zeal was payback to the elite for these experiences, reducing the political to the personal. That elite would have included most of his friends and family.
He had a budding career as an army officer where he proved adept at intelligence work and kept a cool head under pressure. While still a reserve officer in the army he was the president of the Swedish National Union of (university) Students, an unpaid position, where he proved to be an adept organiser and motivating force. He concentrated on international cooperation especially with the emerging nations of the post-colonial world. How he could afford to work full time for nothing is not explained.
He came to the notice of the incumbent Social Democrat prime minister, Tage Erlander, who in 1953 hired him as an executive assistant, because his party needed a broader international outlook in the post-war world and more engagement with youth. This selection of an outsider irked many entrenched interests with the SD tent.
Erlander became a father figure for Palme who was his number one protégé. The Social Democratic party at the time was dominated by trade unionists and their aspiration was a comfortable living for their members in the existing social order. These were sewer socialists with no program of social change such as Palme later envisioned.
Palme resigned from the army and very much against the wishes of his family went into politics, winning election to parliament in 1957. His first major assignment in politics was to mastermind the switch from left-hand to right-hand driving in Sweden to align it with Norway, Finland, and Denmark with which it had land borders. That must have been an enormous challenge, but it is barely mentioned in these pages. Yet it would have brought him into contact with a broad cross section of the society, and given him a network for the future.
He married Lisbet from a similar social background who influenced him greatly with her work in child psychology, first as minister of education and then minister of communication, under her influence, he made children a priority. Opponents saw this as indoctrinating youth. Take that Sesame Street! (She was omitted from the Palme biography on Wikipedia when I looked. Figure that out.)
In the 18th Century warrior King Charles XII had made church attendance compulsory and put pastors on the government payroll, making them agents of the state. They visited homes twice a year for inspections, reporting findings up the line. The pastors were to make sure everything was done the right way at home. this intrusion became a state function in the 1930s with home visits by officials. (This Swedish practice is parodied in Kitchen Stories [2003], a Norwegian film.) The pressure for conformity backed by the fear of damnation explains much of the oppressive weight in Bergman films.
(Charles wanted healthy boys, and lots of them, for the endless wars he waged in Poland, Denmark, Russia, Ukraine, Moravia, Saxony, Lithuania, Crimea, and more. In the end he depopulated Sweden of men, that story is mentioned in my review of a biography of this dynamic but destructive king elsewhere on the blog.)
This preoccupation with national health and fitness followed the science in the late 1920s down the path of eugenics and then euthanasia, which continued far too long. Yes, the sanctified Social Democratic government of Sweden practiced forced sterilisation for generations. And dare it be said, murder of the unfit. It was Prime Minister Palme who put a stop to such practices. See New Mankind (2007), a Finnish movie about these activities in Sweden. It seems Sweden’s closest neighbours are least blinded by its halo, and its most severe critics.
‘Sanctified,’ I wrote above. The Anglo-American hagiography of Sweden was founded by Marquis Childs, a significant journalist of his time, with three books that set the mould for much of the perception of Sweden for the next several generations: Sweden: Where Capitalism is Controlled (1934), Sweden: The Middle Way (1936), and This is Democracy (1938). These texts became the old testament gospel of Sweden which has continued to this day. Reformer, idealists, dreamers, many of them thought Sweden was the pot of utopian gold at the end of rainbow. Pilgrimages to Stockholm to see this land of dreams has remained a coming of age ritual for many English-speaking intellectuals. Even in Australia of the 1980s this cult of Sweden was strong with Laurie Carmichael’s government sponsored report Australia Reconstructed (1987) based on the mirage of Sweden. Dig up a copy for amusing reading today. Hint the State Library lists in the online catalogue but the University of Sydney Library does not, despite the pontifications about it by members of that university.
Australia was not the only place where this sanctification occurred. Stateside, I once gave a conference paper on the superficial stupidity of worshipping the Swedish model as utopia, pulling my punches as usual, to a glacial reception of PhDs who visibly cringed at hearing criticisms of Swetopia. (Just coined that term – Swetopia.) It was a struggle to get that paper published, though persistence finally paid off, but I also remember well some of the inane comments of anonymous referees defending Swetopia, but I failed to keep the copies when I vacated my office in 2010.Tant pis!
Andrew Brown’s Fishing in Utopia (2007) remains the best book I have read on Sweden because it is about his life day by day. Its most memorable take-away is that Swedes work hard and do so because no one owes them a living either as individuals or as a country. I was tempted to add a layer of Protestant Ethic to his explanation. He contrasted that to the England he had left, where work was to be avoided at all costs. This simple but fundamental insight is not to be found in the Swetopia hagiography like Australia Reconstructed (1987).
Count Bernadotte whom Napoleon put on the Swedish throne to get him out of the way, founded the Swedish foreign policy of neutrality as the best way to survive great politics and war.
Went I first visited Stockholm I made a pilgrimage to the site of Palme’s murder. (Saw a man urinating on the street mid-morning on the way, something I never saw in Italy.) On SBS a few years ago I saw a Swedish four-part series on the investigation into the Palme murder which I thought then was excellent: The Death of a Pilgrim (2013). Must have another look now that I know more of the time and place.
I had hoped to learn something of Palme’s biography from reading the book about his murder, but not so. Ergo I went back to this title, though I found the sample tabloid, but it is all there is. Fears confirmed.
Blood on the Snow: The Killing of Olof Palme (2005) by Jan Bondeson.
GoodReads meta-data is 233 pages, rated 3.60 by 62 litizens.
Genre: Non-Fiction
Verdict: [Not what I was looking for and not much else.]
On 28 February 1986 Olof Palme (1927-1986), long-serving Prime Minister of Sweden was shot dead on the street in Stockholm at about 11:20 pm when he was walking home from a movie. Who dun it remains a mystery and with that why it was done. Into these voids much speculation has flowed.
Hedge: this is my only source though I did cast an eye over the entry for Palme on Wikipedia in the original search for a biography as explained below. Of course I remember him from the times as a lightening rod for many good causes and some not so good.
The author describes early police reaction as Keystone Kops: the panic line (+ 000, or 911) went unanswered, and the first person to call in the incident hung up before it was answered. When another caller got an answer, the officer taking call did not believe anyone would be shot on the street and regarded the call as a hoax. Only when two officers in a patrol car passing-by saw a small crowd gathering and stopped did police action, of a sort, start. Again their first reaction was that it was joke of some kind, nor did they recognise the fallen Prime Minister or his accompanying wife who, covered in his blood, stood stunned. These two hapless traffic cops seem to have had no training in management either crowds or crime scenes, and it got more chaotic as more officers and medics arrived.
The author describes all this in pitiless detail and more of the like was to follow, as no one seemed to have been in or taken charge of the investigation. Even when the realisation dawned that it was a shooting murder and then that the victim was the incumbent Prime Minister, the major crime or murder squads with their experienced detectives, forensic specialists, and equipment were not mobilised. Instead there was a stampede by senior police administrators for the glory of the case before world media, and the grandstanding started the very next day. Yes, there were press conferences, but no there was no management of the investigation. Indeed, in general one of the major faults the author finds is that the investigation was handled by administrators who themselves had no police experience.
The mass of witness statements collected, eventually, were contradictory and confused as any experienced officer (or reader of krimis) would expect, and the author narrates these on end, but never puts them in any discernible explanatory or analytical framework that I could fathom. The result is a confusing mass of detail with no contours which perhaps mimics the police approach.
The initial response of the grandstanders was to round up the usual suspects (druggies, pushers, violent criminals) and fit one of them to some of the eye witness descriptions (take your pick) of those around the time and place. When that failed the first grandstanders were pushed aside by the another lot who next went for foreigners (immigrants, refugees, or spies [Russian, American, South African, Iranian, Iraqi, Swedish, or in combination]). There followed a conspiracy theory focussed on a Bofors contract with India, implicating Indians, and a host of international arms traders. Then the police officers themselves became suspects as a way to explain the incompetence. There being no end to stupidity as we have seen in D.C., another school of thought was that his own immediate family murdered him, i.e., his wife and his son(s) either collectively or individually. Finally, well probably not ‘finally,’ there is also the belief that he arranged his own death as either suicide, or by cleverly swapping someone else so he could take off to a life of ease in one of the sunny but poor African countries he was always banging on about.
No doubt somewhere both Hillary Clinton and aliens have also been blamed. Check Pox News.
In each case vast time and money with attendant media irresponsibility went into the exercise to come up with nothing and the decades dragged by.
Because of the glory to be had in the case, the first officials to direct the investigation were managers who per the McKinsey testament had themselves no policing experience to influence, i.e., taint, their management activities. It is an article of faith in the Church of McKinsey, supported by faith alone and no evidence, that managers should not be contaminated with experience of what they manage. While that seems normal these days, and explains much incompetence, they must not have watched any krimis on TV either because they omitted the most basic procedures, like securing the crime scene, avoiding witness contamination, systematic finger printing, cross-referencing files, identikit pictures, and so on. (All these things were eventually done piecemeal after the fact.) These omissions were compounded by the desire to manage the investigation without assigning experienced homicide detectives in preference to officers personally dependent on and so loyal to the managers, including officers seconded from regional offices unfamiliar with Stockholm who were free of local prejudices, yes, but also unaware of the most basic geography of the city. The litany of blunders is Trump-like.
When the investigation proved intractable and the quotient of glory available evaporated these managers abandoned the project leaving no one in charge. Anyone who has worked in a large organisation has seen some or all of these behaviours by the McKinsey bots in our midst: The rush for CV glory; when things go wrong the flashing blame bat that strikes subordinates, the hasty departure before the trumpeted change fails, and so on. ‘Fail and Move up’ is surely a chapter title in the McKinsey manual.
If all one knows of Sweden is what we read in these pages, the real question is how such an unpopular, reviled, and despised man ever got to be PM. There are long roll calls of vitriol about Palme. It remains that the party he led won election after election, and when it lost it was by a hair. That electoral popularity might explain why he was feared by some, but this angle is not explored in these pages.
In these pages following the great tradition of blaming the victim much responsibility for everything is implicitly applied to Lisbet Palme, his wife, who was walking with him at the time of the murder. She went into hysteria and shock – who would not – but this obvious fact seemed to have escaped the notice of the on-site police officers (when they arrived) who said she was inconsistent and uncooperative. And in this case and all others that followed, cheque-book journalism ensured everything said under the veil of secrecy was broadcast within twenty-four hours.
After getting off on that note, she thereafter was reticent with the police – again who would not. Because the investigation was disorganised with even junior officers competing for glory, she was questioned repeatedly by different officers. In one notable instance four different sets of officers tried to interview her on the same day. And no they did not share their findings with each other, and in some cases no notes were taken in the name of secrecy, opening the door to wild speculation. It might be that she soon concluded the police were using her as a dupe – who would not – and she became ever less cooperative.
It is also pretty clear that some members of the Pox media did not want a resolution, but a continued melodrama with which to castigate authority. This is another angle omitted in this text. Rather like the 1970s murder of Australian journalists in East Timor which is periodically revived to boast circulation and hits, not to resolve the incident.
I wonder if any police investigation subjected to the same intense and enduring examination would prove to be similar? Mistakes are made, and concealed. Short cuts are taken and hidden. Officers are unfamiliar with or contemptuous of protocols. Equipment does not work. Analyst cannot use the expensive systems they have. And so on. I wondered that at the time of Chamberlain Trial(s). I did ask a judge of my acquaintance about this but he fobbed me off.
I also wondered what all those Swedes were doing on the sidewalks at near midnight in Stockholm on a cold winter night. There seemed to be many people dawdling about. Is that typical in sub-zero weather? Are those Nordics that tough?
Jan Bondeson
For film buffs try Death of Pilgrim (2013), a four-part series, for a gripping account of one of the (many) subsequent investigations into the original investigations.
While mentally in the Nordic world I went looking for a biography of Palme but after reading the Kindle sample of the only one on that source I decided against it – breathless, sensation-seeking, and superficial journalism it seemed to me – and opted for the above title, though I did not like its sample any better – it read like a failed thriller script – but it came from Cornell University Press and that bespoke quality, a rigorous editorial process that would prize order, facts, dispassion, and analysis. And the blurb on the Amazon Kindle entry said this book would lay to rest the innumerable conspiracy theories. That seemed promising. So I had hoped when I pressed on. As if!
![The Long Way Home (2d ed) (2010 [1998]) by Ed Dover](https://theory-practice.sydney.edu.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/9780615214726.jpg)
