Good Reads meta-data is 255 pages, rated 4.28 by 2,867 litizens.
Genre: Non-fiction; Species: Condescension.
DNA: [Jaded.]
Verdict: Clichéd.
Tagline: Meh.
A small rural high school baseball team in Illinois succeeded. This is so astonishing that Author investigates. In 1971 this was a team that could sometimes field only nine players, with a coach who knew nothing about coaching, from a school with an enrolment of 250, and yet it defeated teams with professional coaches from schools enrolling 9000. Out of 370 high school teams in the state this one emerged. What was the secret sauce to their success?
What follows is an account of two high school baseball seasons. It seemed to be written as an aspirant film script with villains, and climaxes. Even so the odour of disdain arises from page one, and lingers. The characters are too often painted as black or white to create tension. The descriptions of the games are perfunctory as though watching animals in a zoo across a moat, through a steel fence, or behind unbreakable glass.
Chris Ballard
Yes, it is true that I did not warm to the book. While the story is great, the telling does not match that.
In addition to the undertone of snobbery from the big city boy author about small town life, it ignores much of the full story. Most, if not all, of these boys played American Legion baseball in the summer after the high school season ended, where they had much more practice and coaching, and this is mentioned, well, I can only remember one time but let’s say twice. Would this experience have not affected their skills and attitudes? One way or another, the answer is yes.
While the context of the Vietnam War is underlined how it applied to these boys on graduation is omitted.
It is no surprise that it gets a higher Good Reads score than a far better book, i.e., Bottom of the 33rd. That fact simply confirms my prejudice about those who contribute to that source.
To judge from the blurb, the book had noble ambitions but… [See above.] These include the impact of high school sports on the players and on their families and communities. The roles of teachers as catalysts to stimulate the formative years. The glue of teamwork. That the purpose of the strong is not to bully the weak but to help them, making both of them stronger. It is a good list but it does not grow from the text.
Good Reads meta-data is 238 pages, rated 4.26 by 127 litizens.
Genre: Fiction; Species; Krimi.
DNA: De Bronx.
Verdict: Safe!
Tagline: A drag bunt!
A year that has lived in infamy: 1920, when the Boston Red Sox committed original sin, selling George Herman Ruth’s baseball contract to the New York Yankees. Ruth’s sportsmanship and showmanship gave the Yanks three years of untold prosperity. Bankrolled by Ruth’s draw of fans to games and long desirous of their own turf the Yankees built Yankee Stadium in two years. (That is less time than it takes to get a pot hole filled in a local street in most places.)
At the dawn of 1923 the NYYs were bound for another pennant and now had THE stadium. It was not a ‘field’ (Ebbets), ‘grounds’ (Polo), ‘park’ (Shibe), ‘bowl’ (Baker), no it was a ‘stadium’ of Roman grandeur. (Though built to last its final at bat was in 2008.
Into this shiny new temple of baseball stepped a Yankee team based on THE BABE, who lives up to expectations on the field and down to them off the field. Somewhere along the dugout bench is Utility infielder whose curiosity is surpassed only by his carnal love for baseball. Well, he probably sleeps with his bat and glove ready to get in at midnight.
The fun begins when workmen putting finishing touches on The House find a corpse stuck into the wall behind a concession stand on opening day. Mum’s the word! With President Harding in the stands no one wants to spoil the party with this sordid detail, moreover, the owner does not want the brand new stadium cursed with this cadaver, so he asks/directs Utility Man (whose few baseball duties give him plenty of time off) to find out what happened on the QT. Why him? Because the victim was a onetime teammate on his journey through the majors. This is New York City 1923 and the police couldn’t care less if there is no cut for them.
What follows is a lot of baseball, though none of it bears on the krimi plot, and some digging by Utility Man to backtrack the victim. In addition to the baseball asides, there is a diversion into the film world of D. W. Griffith that tails away into nothing. Likewise, the rookie Utility befriended in the early pages disappears. Despite assurances that he would be rewarded for his efforts, there is no justice and after Utility Man figures it all out, he is cut to make way for a strapping rookie name of Gehrig.
Tony Soos
On the brighter side, the baseball is palpable, the characters are clearly distinguished, the human side of Circus Ruth is revealed, and the plot, albeit only a third of the book, makes sense. The mix and match of historical and fictional characters is seamless. It is the seventh in a series that has many more titles. I read one years ago set in Wrigleyville (figure it out or go home), and liked it. Still earlier I started one set in Green Monster Nation (ditto) but failed at a flood of clichés in chapter two. Still two for three is some average!
Ruth in the early stages of his celebrity is well done. He is already being eaten by expectations both on and off the diamond. He knows it but is powerless to resist the siren call.
Good Reads meta-data is 182 pages, rated 3.73 by 15 litizens.
Genre: Krimi; Species: Sherlock.
DNA: Brit.
Verdict: Elementary.
Tagline: The stuff that nightmares are made of.
The Woman reappears, having twice outwitted the incomparable Sherlock Holmes, she turns to him for help in an hour of need: the one, the only Irene Adler.
It seems an overweight, gregarious, duplicitous, and garrulous Man thinks she has what is his – dat boird – only she doesn’t. It beggars belief but Irene is engaged to a young wastrel who schemed to get that bird, make a fortune, and whisk her away to parts known. But both wastrel and bird have taken flight.
Enter Holmes.
J R Trtek
There is a coda that traces the characters in this tale, including Sam Spade, to 1940. That alone is worth the price of admission.
But it lacks that early line in The Maltese Falcon that said it all: ‘We didn’t believe you; we believed your $50.’
Good Reads meta-data is 464 pages rated 4.21 by 1107 litizens.
Genre: Historical fiction.
DNA: Edwardian England.
Verdict: Not for me.
Tagline: …. (Meh.)
The book is very well written, well researched in keeping with Harris’s other historical fictions, but…. Yes, there is a ‘but’ because, well, the story is depressing and boring. British Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith (1852-1928) went sleepwalking into the Great War, daydreaming about his mistress in cabinet meetings, only occasionally noticing what went on, and even more remarkable, throwing secret state papers into the street for the German sympathisers and agents who followed him around to collect, so preoccupied was he with his lady love; this sixty year old man in a teenage hormone haze barely knew what he was doing. When confronted with this fact of the state papers, first he denied it, then, then excused it, and then…continued it.
PM Asquith
All in all, he must be a candidate for the Donald Trump Prize for the most vacuous head of government. Yet he was PM for nearly a decade and Liberal Party leader longer. Asquith’s entitlement mentality and monumental incompetence is so tedious that I started flicking pages, and pages.
The woman was far more responsible than he was on this telling. She secreted his nine letters a day, tried to stop his littering with state papers, and finally broke with him to go to France to drive an ambulance. His reaction to the latter was to feel sorry for himself rather than snap out of his stupor.
Bring on Lloyd George!
Grey (sometimes ‘Gray’ in the Kindle text), Kitchener, and Churchill were the only ones in these pages who realised from the off that there would be a long and terrible war. Grey tried to prevent it, while Churchill savoured the thought but was realistic about what had to be done, and Kitchener feared it. None of them got any help from Asquith who drifted.
By the way, Harris claims both in a forward and an afterward that all of this is true. I believe him.
IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1h and 54m, rated 7.9 by 23,001 cinematizens.
Genre: Parody.
DNA: Japan.
Verdict: More!
Tagline: A Noodle Eastern.
A square-jawed stranger rides into town and when he enters the saloon the crowd of idlers goes quiet. So opens the Spaghetti Western.
Well, sorta. The stranger is driving a tanker truck, and the saloon is a ramen bar on the outskirts of Tokyo. In what follows are fist fights, espionage, Rocky training, and more as the stranger searches for the perfect ramen through an encyclopaedia of oater movie tropes. A team is assembled and the quest proceeds.
***
The momentum is hampered by interludes about love and food, some of which are odd and others incomprehensible, including a very tedious start. None add to the main theme. Cutting them would reduce the film by 30+ minutes. But the red line (as they used to say in Moscow) is clear and it rattles along.
I saw this long ago at Sydney Film Festival on its first release.
IMDb meta-data is runtime 2 hours and 39 minutes, rated 7.8 by 20,000 human comedians.
Genre: BioPic.
Verdict: Indigestion.
The spectacles just kept on coming without rhyme or reason until this viewer lost interest, about an hour before it ended. Since no Hollywood movie can be made without Tom Hanks, he is there under a ton of make-up, attenuating everything well beyond the breaking point.
When Elvis sings, that is the best part, but even that wore thin by repetition. While the black roots of his music are emphasised it is external not internal. It goes from the outside in, and does not emerge from the inside out with the gospel songs. There exist live recordings of Elvis singing in black churches before an audience that are spectacular for the energy and emotion that are discharged. There is no need for kaleidoscopic camera spins and other confusions. Despite the no-expense spared staging in this film that electricity fizzles.
These church recordings are, well, unrestrained and exultant quite unlike the studio versions of the same songs. They have an immediacy and intensity that is palpable.
When I visited Graceland, the overwhelming impression I had was the ever presence of music in every room, in every nook and cranny there were record players, instruments, sheet music, 45s, radios set to music stations. The music was oxygen for The King, and he had to have it, had to make it, to live. The house communicates that need far better than does this film.
Moreover, the movie missed the obvious fact that celebrity killed Elvis as he was consumed by his fans. Eaten alive in the constant demand for performances and in turn he became addicted to the audiences. Colonel Tom was a catalyst not a cause.
At times the film seems to use Elvis as a prism to observe US society, and that loses its biographical focus.
Are we there yet? Where are we going? And why? Alain Resnais once said if a story cannot be told in 90 minutes, it is not (yet) a story. Put differently, if you know what you want to communicate it can be done in 90 minutes, if you don’t know then it takes 2 hours and 39 minutes or more.
Those who want something of Elvis the man might try (1) Bubba Ho-Tep (2002) for a cackle and half, or (2) one of Daniel Klein’s krimis in which Elvis investigates, e.g., Blue Suede Clues (2002).
GoodReads metadata is pages 288 rated 4.23 by 48 litizens.
Genre: Krimi.
Verdict: Deft.
A very disagreeable housekeeper trips over a whiskey bottle and dies. Good riddance and all that. The tabloid press goes even more bonkers than usual. In distant Sydney the sanctimonious tones of the ABC are sounded since this housekeeper once talked to a Strine. It’s world news because the house the victim kept was Buckingham Palace and her employer is one Mrs Elizabeth Mountbatten née Windsor, Queen of all the Englands, and more.
All those Buck House officials lift the carpet to sweep the housekeeper (deceased) under it on the way to their knighthoods. Trouble is someone is standing on the carpet. Indeed, it is Her Self the Majesty who would like to know just how one trips over a whiskey bottle in a place where one has no business and one is not a drinker of spirits, and one is roundly disliked by so many. What really did happen? Of course, this one cannot be so direct. Circumspection is thy name, Queenie.
And while she is about it, HM would also like to know how a painting given to her personally many years ago by an obscure Tasmania artist went from her bedroom wall to a Royal Navy wardroom. Drinking tea there after cutting yet another ribbon (must 50 this year already!) when she noticed it. Too polite too inquire then and there, she went back home to check. Sure enough, not where it used to be. So hard to keep track of one’s 7,000+ paintings.
Do these two mysteries intertwine, the errant painting and the corpsed keeper? All those prim and proper (blinkered) officials in Buck House will never notice. Still something is not quite right about either the wandering painting or terminated housekeeper. No, this is a job for someone who cannot say ‘no,’ the junior Assistant Private Secretary (APS), late of the Royal Horse Artillery, gets the assignment. The instruction are ‘Find the route that painting took from the royal bedroom to the naval wardroom, and find out who put the whiskey bottle there to fall over (if that is what happened). And do so with such deft discretion that no one knows you have done it. Should keep you busy a day on two on top of all your other duties.’
QEII cannot do anything herself since she is scheduled twenty-four hours a day and under scrutiny from staff every one of those hours. Any deviation would be an earthquake. The portrayals of royal life are many and fascinating in these pages. The gravities on Her Britannic Majesty exceed those borne by most astronauts. The pecking order among the Buckingham Palace staff is positively Byzantine with invisible lines of demarcation guarded day-and-night by fanatics. The buck-passing and blame-shifting are constant. Is this is the incubus of McKinsey management.
The Palace officials (all stiff upper-lipped chaps) seem relieved that the obnoxious housekeeper is no more, and are happy to move on with no further unpleasantness. That is in the great tradition of McKinsey Management, blame the victim. Absent fuel, the tabloids find something else to lie about. Check Pox News or the Moloch Press for the latest in fiction. The chaps have even less interest in an odd painting of no market value that does not belong to the nation but to Elizabeth Mountbatten. No, to achieve satisfaction, HM will have to see to it herself, but – of course – she cannot be seen to be seeing to it. Good thing she has had years of practice of not being seen to be seeing to things, and getting them done. They call it reigning rather than ruling.
That there seems to be a systematic and extensive campaign of stalking and harassing women employed in Buck House soon becomes apparent to everyone except those stiff-lipped chaps who run the place. Even the none-too-perceptive police officer who had a look at the house keeper’s cadaver grasps that and says so, but the chaps don’t hear what they do not want to know. What happens under the carpet, stays under the carpet, that seems to be their mantra. Once under the carpet, everything is under control.
S J Bennett
This is the second in this series I have read and lapped up. Though I admit there is far too much padding with descriptions of clothes, furnishings, and food. When that description is in Buck House it is part of the atmosphere but it carries on as the APS goes out and about and it does go on. And on. Every where she goes, we get the full-IKEA, full-Elle, and full-Gourmet accounts. Treacle.
While whingeing I add that I found the plot tangled beyond my comprehension. Still I enjoyed the ride and the insight into the life of Buckingham Palace. HM’s affection for the valueless painting is explained in a charming aside. The title, by the way, refers to the appropriate number of dogs to take on a walk if one wants to think through a problem. Fewer than three and they expect to be entertained by ball throwing; more than three and one spends the whole time minding them. Three is just right: Enough to entertain themselves but not so many as to distract one from cogitation. This is just one of the many charming nostrums to be found in the book.
Have we reached the Durkheim Line? Once crossed is it possible to go back? (Over and back is a penalty, remember?)
‘Categories such as time, space, cause, and number represent the most fundamental relationships which exist among things…. If we did not have the same conception of time, space, cause, and number, all contact between our minds would be impossible,’ wrote Émile Durkheim in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), pp. 22-23. To emphasise their currency he called them Social Facts.
This line is what I think of when I hear the latest nonsense spouted in D.C. by the GOP, which by the way, now stands for Group of Pygmies and the mindless robots on Pox News. (Apologies for the insult to pygmies.) Then there are the antipodean echoes of that nonsense. Did he anticipate Queensland’s war on daylight savings time? Did he advocate faded curtains?
Book Collector has paid for itself many times over by preventing the purchase of multiple copies of the same book. An appealing book or one I thought I should read and so have on the shelf to encourage me to read it was purchased and stacked away for future reading or reference and… a few years later the same book comes to hand and I have the same thought and buy another copy, and then later another. Nothing but that memory lapse could explain why I had three copies of something like Antonio Gramsci’s unreadable The Modern Prince. (Yes, I know, ‘Why have one copy at all?’ No answer to that.)
I became painfully aware of these multiple copies when upon retirement I was preparing to move my professional library of about 5000 titles. As I was thinning the collection, shredding textbooks and other items I saw of no further use, I told Trevor Cook about this labour and he told me about Book Collector.
Wow! I did not know such applications existed and made it a mission to find out more. That was about ten years ago. The timing was opportune as I was moving and re-shelving and so each book had to be handled a couple of times. Hence I acquired the app and got to work.
I found my first use easy and simple. Of course, I had a long backlog amounting to about 2500 titles after I finished shredding books. I purchased a scanner and used that to ease the burden, and it worked fine on books with a bar code. Recommended.
However, my collection dates back to graduate school in the 1960s and many of the books that I retained had neither as ISBN nor a bar code, while others had an ISBN on the obverse of the title page but no bar code and so had to be keyed in. I paced this work to about 50-60 a day (about 400 a week) so that I could do other things and not go crazy and make too many mistakes. In a month most of the work was done, and I am very pleased.
Cataloguing identified what I had and synchronizing the catalogue to my cell phone has saved me several duplicate purchases very quickly, and more since. Three or four such saves more than paid for the software, the scanner, and the time and trouble to learn its use.
Now there is a hitch here. When I brag to visitors that I have catalogued all the books in my library they assume that means a given order on the shelves, and it does not. I have grouped the books by subject matter but not anchored any of them to a sequence, shelf mark, or locale. Maybe I should have but I did not and now it seems a task beyond my needs, abilities, and interests. The books on a subject like ‘Utopia’ occupy a bay with the tallest on the bottom shelf. All the reference books are in another bay. The titles on the history of political thought occupy the top shelves in the bookcases I face from my desk as my favourites. While there is room in the template to enter such shelving information, it has to be done manually and I have not done that.
Adding books by title and author or ISBN works pretty well but it is not perfect. I find books published in Australia are less likely to be retrieved, and recently issued books with ISBNs still sometimes prove illusive, so there is still more manual entry than I would like.
When I am doing this manual entry at times the application has asked me to enter the data a second time on the master data base (the core) in the Cloud and I found that an annoyance. Since I have already entered the data on my system, could it not be uploaded from there rather than keyed in again? But that practice seems now to have stopped.
When I capture a book by the automated search I find sometimes that the author’s first and last names get transposed and have to keep an eye on that. This becomes even more pesky with several authors. Then there is the need to distinguish translators and editors from authors, say of an edition of Plato’s Republic of which I have six or eight. For scholars these distinctions are crucial.
The templates have pages and boxes for everything imaginable and some things unimaginable to me, but in my case most are empty. Those that come with drop down lists are easy to complete, and I have done that, creating a few categories of my own.
In the last five years I have become converted to digital reading on a Kindle for the convenience, accessibility, text searching, and more. Not having a copy of the book to put in the pending tray on my desk means that sometimes I forget to enter them in the catalogue, and I have not yet developed a method to overcome such slips of memory.
I have been confused a few times when changing to a new computer about the catalogue files and I am sure I lost data at least once. The files names and locations are a mystery to me.
Like everyone else I wish, sometimes, that applications were integrated. I use EndNote a lot (and it is a beast and have never been invited to give feedback on it) and means I key in duplicate information on Book Collector and EndNote quite often. That is no doubt good for the soul but it is tedious.
While listing nits, I should say I also find it impossible to distinguish among the many products associated with Book Collector. CLZ Barry left me blank. Such proliferation I suppose meets some need, but not mine.
Having BC has meant I catalogued my library, something I would not have done without it, and that has been invaluable. I have heard fellow book worms say they know where every one of their 5000 books is shelved without the need for such a computer crutch but I don’t believe them.
Good Reads meta-data is 510 pages rated 4.28 by 247 litizens
Genre: Biography
Verdict: An éminence grise without the robes.
‘Harry Who?’ asked the fraternity brothers, ever perplexed by reading, since they get along just fine without it. Harry Hopkins (1890-1946) was a shopkeeper’s son from Iowa who by dint of his mother’s determination and grit got a college education, along with his sisters, at Grinnell College in Iowa. Lucky them. Prior to that the Hopkins family had lived briefly in Kearny and Hastings Nebraska (though I remember nothing about him from Hastings but I do remember the WPA works at Heartwell Park. See below for relevance.)
After graduating from college he followed in his older sister’s footsteps and became a social worker, and Jacob Riis in New York City was hiring, so this Iowa hick (q.v. Bill Bryson) took the train east to work in a settlement house. His experiences in the immigrant slums of New York City during the Great Depression made him a champion of government intervention, regulation, and assistance. It also proved him to be an efficient and effective organiser of people, material, and money. His work impressed the philanthropic owner of Macy’s department store who later recommended him to New York state governor FDR.
Per Wikipedia his claim to fame is that he was US Secretary of Commerce for a little less than two years, 1938-1940. In that capacity he was an architect of the Works Progress Administration whose labours can still be seen far and wide, e.g., Heartwell Park, and later the organiser behind the Lend-Lease program. Those, Class, were some of his lesser accomplishments!
Later in Washington Hopkins was a whirlwind, working all the hours of the clock at the expense of his first marriage, and set land speed records in distributing funds to put the unemployed to work. Within a fortnight of his first appointment he had put 88,000 unemployed men with families to work through state governments building bridges, tarring roads, landscaping parks, reinforcing railway embankments, digging drainage ditches, repairing the roofs of libraries and town halls, shoring up damns, stringing telephone wires, planting trees, cutting fire trails in forests, and so on and on. He did this working from a broom closet in a ramshackle building off the beaten track in D.C.
In these works he was an ambitious empire builder who irritated some and made enemies of others, particularly Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes. Hopkins made mistakes but he always pressed on.
His most significant accomplishments were not, however, in these domestic matters but later in foreign policy where many, including such diverse figures as Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin regarded him as the glue that held together the Anglo-Soviet Alliance against the odds. About which more later.
Hopkins back left.
Harry was a sickly child, boy, and adolescent but youth fuelled him, as it does, though the maladies remained and came to the fore with maturity, compounded by a life of cigarette smoking and whisky drinking. He can be seen in many photographs as a spectral figure on the periphery with FDR. He was so constant that some referred to him as the shadow.
When people met him for the first time, there were many remarks on his pale complexion, bony face and figure, pallor, pasty face, clammy perspiration, sunken eyes, ….. But they also noted that when the spoke of his purposes, the embers came to life and the fire within was apparent to even the most imperceptive observer. Those purposes kept him alive against the odds.
On the first of his many visits to wartime England in the middle of 1941 Hopkins was allowed to see and go when and where he wanted. By then FDR had no confidence in the reports and assessments of the US ambassador to England, and wanted an unbiased account from someone he trusted. The mission fell to Hopkins, who by the way was paid no salary, though his travel expenses were covered. For FDR’s personal friend and representative the British rolled out a red carpet. Hopkins was inquisitive and demanding; he was also impressed. More than once in the company of Winston Churchill inspecting bomb damaged docks in Bristol, military hospitals overflowing with wounded, rubble strewn streets in London, those Britons present stopped their weary labours to cheer the Prime Minister who walked among them. In a most secret cable Hopkins told FDR that Churchill’s rhetoric, while elevated and melodramatic, nonetheless represented popular opinion. (The cable was carried by hand to an American warship in port, and transmitted from here in the navy’s darkest code.)
During this visit, Hopkins also managed something few others ever did, upstaging Churchill. At a dinner of forty Churchill gave an orotund speech of welcome. Hopkins had selected the guest list to include those he wanted to meet, trade union heads, businessmen, press owners, munition plant managers, bankers, hospital directors, Red Cross workers, shipping experts, accountants, aviation engineers, and social workers. After the meal it was Hopkins’s turn to thank his host. He did so by quoting the Book of Ruth, bringing tears to Churchill’s eyes and silencing the room… ‘even to the end.’ (Look it up.)
Pilloried after his death by headline hunting red baiters of the Republican Party as a Soviet agent because he advocated material support to sustain the Soviet front. If it needs to be said, Russian archives give that allegation the lie. Churchill and Hopkins and others wanted to keep Russia from signing a separate peace with Germany, and that meant keeping Russia in the war. With that priority Churchill himself sometimes deferred British needs for American material to satisfy Russian hunger for supplies which held down 140 German divisions on the Eastern Front. With perfect hindsight we now assume that Hitler was so driven by hate, as weaklings are, that no peace with Russia was possible. Ahem, everyone had thought that before the 1939 non-aggression pact, too, and were surprised at his and Stalin’s flexibility. Better not to risk another surprise. The more so when it was realised that Soviet and German diplomats met regularly in Stockholm even as the war raged.
For much of later 1943 to early 1945 Hopkins was the de facto Secretary of State, as the incumbent Cordell Hull, a decade on the job, had become ill and was replaced by a cypher. Hopkins committed himself completely to holding together this unlikely and unholy alliance against the common enemies of Germany and Japan. He traveled the world in difficult circumstances to listen patiently to the complaints of each party about the other(s), and slowly found the common ground firm enough for the next step. Churchill complained to him about FDR who complained to him about Stalin who complained to him about both of them, and so on. A glutton for punishment Hopkins also tried to draw Charles de Gaulle into the party by fair means and foul. Since he turned on the tap of Lend-Lease I suppose Churchill, Stalin, and de Gaulle were aware that he might turn it off, too.
The book is particularly good on the international conferences. The prose brings to life the preparations and activities, but it is especially good at demonstrating what was at stake in the meetings from Newfoundland to Yalta. The conclusions about Yalta are insightful. In short, Roll concludes that the fate of Eastern Europe was sealed long before Yalta in 1945. When the decision was made to invade North Africa in 1942, rather than to wait until 1943 and then attack northern France, the deed was done.
Without a second front in 1942 or 1943, the Soviets went all out and by the time the second front came in mid-1944 the momentum of Soviet advances into Eastern Europe could not be rolled back short of another war. The 1942 decision to land in Africa was prompted largely by Churchill’s morbid fear of a repeat of the charnel house of World War I in northern France, but in hindsight it made military sense to test the US Armed Forces on a small scale before the Big One. Indeed the pitiful performance of much of American arms in North Africa was a stimulant for major changes from the equipment of rifle companies, tank armour, operational command, signals, co-ordination of arms, and more.
Let it be noted that Hopkins’s son Steven was a marine, killed on the Kwajalein Atoll in 1944. Another son Robert was hold up in Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge.
Hopkins was the man behind Lend Lease for several years. He made it work for Great Britain and then extended it to the Soviet Union. He also suggested war crimes trials and got agreement for that. He was early advocate of a United Nations and staked out many of the arrangements the came into being. FDR said it was Hopkins’s good-natured persistence that provoked Stalin into a grudging commitment to join the war against Japan which at the time had the highest priority on the assumption that neither Britain and the Empire, the Netherlands, or France would offer much.
His health was never good and there were periodic hospitalisations for blood transfusions and vitamin injections. There was also abdominal surgery over the years. When FDR died, Hopkins’s hold on life slipped, too.
The early, brief description of Hopkins’s students days at Grinnell reminded me of my own years in a similar institution of do-gooders who did good by me and many others.
For some time I had in my mind and in my Amazon shopping cart Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Robert Sherwood’s biography of Hopkins, but, well, it is out of print and not always available, and, worse, it is not in a Kindle edition, so it languished in both places. Then the mechanical Turk’s algorithms suggested this title and I bit.
