GoodReads meta-data is 336 pages and rated 3.97 by 6972 litizens.
Genre: krimi.
Verdict: Gripping.
In 1956 two airliners in the wild blue yonder ran into each other over the Colorado River and bodies, luggage, and debris rained down into the Grand Canyon. A hundred seventy passengers on the two flights were killed along with the planes’ crews. It took weeks to recover the body (parts) and the larger pieces debris. But not everything was found. This did indeed happen as per the link below.
Thirty years later and a legal dispute about inheritance from one of those killed is reaching a Jarndyce and Jarndyce conclusion. Not only was this man carrying an attaché case full of diamonds to New York City, he was also the last scion of a wealthy father, the kind of family that owns cases full of diamonds. A shady lawyer has been exploiting the inheritance while the judicial wheels ground but there is a claimant who hopes to use DNA to prove her assertion by finding the body of her putative father, the courier with the diamonds, who was also the heir to a fortune since directed to the foundation the lawyer controls to his own satisfaction. This lawyer hires an unscrupulous investigator to go the Grand Canyon country and head off the claimant’s efforts by any means.
None of that is very interesting. What is interesting the geomorphology of the Grand Canyon which becomes a moving force in this story, along with the Hopi Indians who live along the banks of the Little Colorado River at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. One of the Hopis is the Skeleton Man (or so I thought).
The plot has more convolutions than I needed and the backstories to thirty years before were confusing to this casual reader at bedtime, but Jim Chee and Bernie Manuelito carry the story when Jim’s friend and law enforcement colleague Cowboy Dashee asks for his help in tracking down an errant relative. It is all done with such delicacy. Dashee does not ask Jim for help but explains what he is going (to have to do) to find this cousin of his who has done something stupid. It is dangerous and not really a search one man alone can effect, but… well, he has to try. Jim realises this explanation is an appeal for help, though the task will be arduous and there is some danger (less if the two work together), Dashee has done him many good turns in the past, so he volunteers, and, of course, where he goes Bernie has to follow, wanted or not.
So the three of them descend into the Grand Canyon’s where they meet its inhabitants and also some interlopers after both the diamonds and the DNA specimen represented by the bones they may find. They have some clues that have recently come to light that lead them to a location…. In the end despite the bad will and guns of the villains, the Grand Canyon prevails and washes away the human stain.
I grew unsure about who the titular Skeleton Man was at the end. There are three possibilities: the elderly Hopi shaman, the courier whose ulna remains, or the male villain. Reader let me know what you conclude.
Tony Hillerman
This is the 17th title in the series, believe it or not, and it glows with Hillerman’s skill in place, character, and plot. It all done to Indian-time, no one is in a hurry but it all gets done.
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.
IMDb meta-data is 6 minutes, rated 6.2 by 60 cinematizens.
Genre: SciFi
Verdict: Coker.
Another winner from DUST.
A ‘Crop and Hop Circle Tour’ mini-bus with a half-dozen UFO enthusiasts on board roams the cornfields of southern England, while the cynical tour guide mouths the nonsense script about aliens with much eye-rolling and snide asides, but it is what the punters paid for. Then the vehicle breaks down as darkness falls, the real fun begins. Is this Jurassic Park? Are there agricultural Banksys? Will the tinfoil hat do any good? These and other questions emerge quick smart. Check it out on You Tube.
GoodReads metadata is 1120 pages, rated 4.11 by 81,479 litizens.
Genre: Biography.
Verdict: Chapeaux!
At thirty-three, single, and out of work, when the U.S. entered the Great War Harry S. Truman joined the Army. His life changed thereafter. He became the Decider-in-Chief.
The efforts outgoing Democratic President Truman made in 1952 to smooth the transition to the incoming Republican President Dwight Eisenhower make poignant reading after January 2021. Truman spared nothing to put Ike into the office within hours of the election result, being motivated both by the national interest that transcended and dwarfed his own feelings, and his abiding respect both for the electorate and the office as well as his personal admiration for Ike. Read on.
That ’S’ was put on his birth certificate because his parents could not decide which grandfather’s name to put there, both beginning with ’S.’ And they never got around to changing it. Thus neither felt slighted, I guess. Such indecision would not have suited Truman in his prime, when getting things done meant deciding right here, right now.
Born to modest circumstances, he started wearing glasses and being bullied for it at an early age. He took to music and his parents made sacrifices so that he could have piano lessons and later as a high school student he worked several part-time jobs to pay for his own lessons. He saw some great classical performers in Kansas City (which contrary to the belief of the other guy was and is in Missouri). While in France during World War I he discovered opera and spent his money on that. He was bullied for this girlish interest in music, too but it remained with him all of his days.
Somehow he always remained cheerful, energetic, and ready to work.
He had two months of intense combat during the Argonnne offensive, including direct fire. (The redlegs out there will know what that means and it is not good.) Truman had been over age and blind in one eye when he enlisted but lied about his age and memorised the eye chart. In this as in much else when he decided, he finished what he started.
As a farmer and a store clerk by experience he was well suited to the 1917 army. Farming meant he was accustomed to supervising the work of a dozen or more seasonal hired hands, using horses, digging trenches and dikes, keeping machinery and tools in good repair, and monitoring the weather. His clerking meant he could read the artillery tables, keep an inventory, and insist on order the routine. He commanded a battery of four guns with about 200 men, most of whom returned to Missouri and soon became his first constituents and lifelong supporters. Some were still marching with him in 1952.
The first constituents of the 129th Field Artillery Battery D.
In the army he became friendly with a scion of the Pendergast family and in time that mob recruited him to run for political office. It was a case of opposites attracting and while the relationship was not always smooth it amused the Pendergasts to have an honest man in their ranks. His organisation, attention to detail, energy, and determination made him a productive county and later state supervisor who got roads, hospitals, schools, and bridges built and repaired while saving money. He did much of this work on site meeting people, not ensconced in an office in KC and soon gained more responsibility.
Truman liked making things happen, liked being out and about meeting people who would use the bridges and schools, and soon aspired to ever higher offices at the State level or even Congress in distant Washington. He was an enthusiastic Franklin Roosevelt supporter as early as 1924 and voted him at the nominating convention in 1930 and never strayed from that path, though Senator Truman did vote against the Supreme Court packing, and opposed FDR’s third term, facts recorded in the White House.
Quite how Truman avoided the Pendergast enterprises of prostitution, boot legging, tax evasion, profiteering, influence peddling, illegal gambling, tax evasion, and more is not specified. The Pendergasts focus on Missouri meant it was easiest to send their tame honest man to the Senate where he would not interfere with their profits and so he went to Washington where he kept his mouth shut and his head down for a time. He sat near another notable Senator, Huey Long of Louisiana whom he detested.
His first term was unremarkable, but when re-election loomed the Pendergasts support shifted to another candidate (for the same reason, to get him out of Missouri), and in the ensuing three-way race the pundits of the St Louis and Kansas City Press placed Truman third.
This was an all of nothing race for him. He was fifty and broke. The farm had long since been sold by his sister. He campaigned in a car and criss-crossed the state. He was not a good platform speaker but he was sincere and he worked the crowds before and after the speeches until everyone went home. That is, he never quit. During the thousands of miles he racked up, he often slept in the car since he had no money for hotel rooms. He never gave up! He never surrendered! By Grabthar’s hammer he won! In a way that victory foreshadowed 1948, as the cognoscenti know.
He returned to the Senate in 1941 now clearly his own man, while in Missouri the Pendergast gang was being dismembered by Federal tax evasion prosecutions, which also dragged down both of his opponents in the Senate re-election campaign. In all these investigations which went on for years, no link was ever found that led to Truman though the investigators looked hard for it (after his above mentioned opposition to FDR’s third term).
He became chairman of a special Senate Select committee on war procurement and that made his name. He had seen waste and profiteering in war contracts in Missouri on a grand scale, and supposed it was a general malaise. When he proposed an inquiry there was much opposition in the name of the emergency, and FDR had no interest in riling contractors who would be major donors to future campaigns. One man stepped forward in support, and that is all it took. That was George Marshall. He volunteered to testify and appeared as the first witness. That set the tone for all that followed and began their lifelong bromance. Years later Marshall estimated that the Truman Committee, as it came to be called, cut costs by 25% and raised quality by a like amount in war industries. Its revelations were breathtaking in the audacity of the crimes revealed, far beyond anything Boss Pendergast would have dared. Reading the excepts from the testimony is, well, depressing. See Arthur Miller, All My Sons (1946) for another perspective on this sad chapter.
The Truman Committee made Harry a national figure. Hearings and investigation were held here, there, and everywhere, and Harry was ever-present. As chair he was unfailingly polite and considerate and seldom spoke in public sessions beyond the need to order the agenda. The Committee was bipartisan and it focused on facts. (Remember those?) Over the years it issued twenty-five reports and made four hundred recommendations. Each report was unanimous and so was each recommendation. That was the first and last time such a bipartisan ad hoc committee had such unanimity. Put that down to Truman’s endless smoothing of the members and his absolute insistence on facts, and nothing but in their private deliberations.
Then came the big ticket. FDR changed Vice-Presidents like his shirts. While incumbent Vice-President Henry Wallace wanted to hang on, in 1944 he was perceived to be past his use by date. The ultra-liberal Wallace, a civil rights advocate, and one who flirted with Communists was deemed a liability in both north and south this time. (In 1940 with his recent exemplary record as Secretary of Agriculture to compensate, he had been an asset in the South and West.) The obvious choice was Senator Jim Brynes who knew the presidency better than anyone bar FDR himself, but he was a southern Roman Catholic who was a racist. He would be a liability in the North and West and not an asset in the South because of the Catholicism. Many others were considered and still others put themselves forward. As was often the case, FDR was inscrutable.
Moreover, and this was news to me, nearly everyone in the inner circles (there were several inner circles) realised FDR might not live out the next term. In choosing this Vice-Presidential candidate they were nominating a president to be, or as one wag put it, in this convention two presidents would be nominated. There were even those who feared that FDR would die before the election and that would make Henry Wallace president, so palpable was the worry.
Truman got the nod for these reasons: No one was against him. He was acceptable to organised labour; he would not antagonise the black vote in the north nor alienate the white vote in the south; he had impeccable New Deal credentials; he was staunch on equality before the law; and though only four years junior to FDR he appeared youthful and energetic in comparison. That latter was an asset when he proved to be a vigorous and likeable campaigner, though he was never an accomplished speaker in a way that became an asset for it made him seem ordinary, ‘one of us,’ as many auditors told journalists. The 1944 Democratic ticket was also aided by the ineptitude of the Republican campaign of Thomas Dewey as below.
Their only meeting in 1944.
For his part Truman realised that in taking the nomination he was likely to become president. Indeed he was among the shortest serving Vice-Presidents, holding the office for eighty-two days.* Yet as the biographer shows he made no effort from the nomination in July 1944 to prepare himself for the higher office. Quite how he might have done that without seeming presumptuous is anyone’s guess.
Then came the message one day while he was presiding over the Senate. A handwritten note scrawled by FDR’s appointments secretary and delivered by a sweating messenger to him in the well of the Senate asked him to come to the White House right now! He ran most of the way as if he knew what the news was. The whirlwind followed.
After years of FDR’s prestidigitation, oracular vagaries, rhetorical heights, sly manipulations, sleights of the tongue, temporising, increasing lethargic mien, Harry S Truman was a cyclone in small and large ways. Where FDR with his ten-pounds of steel braces was ponderous, Harry was a jack rabbit and the Secret Service men soon discovered they could not keep up with him. Items that had languished on FDR’s cluttered desk for months or more because with his declining energy were briskly dispatched. The office staff accustomed to FDR’s deliberate pace were unprepared for this barrage of decisions.
The biggest ticket in all this is Special Project S-1. Truman knew nothing about the Bomb until the twelfth day of his presidency when the Secretary of War, the redouble Henry Stimson, asked for an interview and brought in a two-page summary, along with General Lester Grove to elaborate. So secret was the project that this two-page paper had been typed by Groves himself and it was not sent ahead in the usual way but carried by hand. There followed the most momentous event of Truman’s presidency. The hindsighters have made careers out of being holier than thou about this, but to read the process in context it all makes sense. There are many threads in this tapestry but one that new to me were the intercepted Tokyo cables to the Japanese ambassador in the then neutral Soviet Union in April 1945 declaiming there would be absolutely no surrender on any terms. At best the Soviet Union might broker a truce, nothing more. (For those dozing in history class, the US had cracked the Japanese naval and diplomatic codes in 1941, but not the army one.) Everyone in Washington, but few members of the Hindsight League, recalled the Japanese continued negotiations in December 1941 even as the attack fleet turned into the wind to launch the first wave of aircraft. (I also learned why fire bombing in massed raids occurred in Japan and not Germany and that, too, had a logic to it.)
To that date in April 1945 no unit of the Japanese army or navy had surrendered at any time. That left the million-man home army and its civilian auxiliaries (women trained to stab with cutlery and children to strap on explosives), another million soldiers in China, and a third million in South East Asia to subdue. Would each one of them fight to the death? That seemed a possibility. Pentagon planners estimated one million US casualties to overcome these forces, assuming that they fought as tenaciously as had those in Okinawa and Iwo Jima. Thirty divisions of the US Army in Europe were being re-fitted for the Pacific, and in the Pacific rear echelon troops like MPs (including my dad) were being trained in assault firing. Little was expected from the depleted Allies, Great Britain and the Soviet Union, beyond a symbolic participation.
Trinity.
One of Truman’s early acts was to appoint a new Secretary of State. Why had he bothered to take the time to this in the urgency of the circumstances? Because according to the Constitution of the time, the Secretary of State was now next in line for presidential succession and he wanted to ensure it was someone who could govern if fate took that turn. That is presence of mind.
There is a detailed discussion of the Potsdam Conference where the primary American objective was obtained, a Soviet commitment to enter the war against Japan no later than 15 August 1945. Everything else was at an impasse and there remained.
As soon as the war ended, domestic politics descended into chaos with labor strikes large and small, price manipulations by big business, corporate shenanigans on Wall Street, back-biting in Congress – in short, business as usual. Truman had hoped the unity of purpose during the war would continue in the face of the incipient Cold War. Not so, and he floundered for some time, but finally arrived at the conclusion that he had to act, and did, winning no friends but bringing some order to affairs. He was likewise distrustful of the Soviet apologists in his own ranks, like Henry Wallace but felt unable to act against them without creating more instability. The incompetence and corruption in the IRS shook his faith in government, but he bit that bullet, too.
But all of this was only just the beginning when came the Berlin Blockade, the Marshall Plan (which he got through a Republican Congress), the Greek Civil War (initiating the Truman Doctrine), Soviet delay in withdrawing from Iran, and one crisis after another end-on-end. As it was his strength so it was his weakness that he did not want to discuss problems but to resolve them and resolution was by a presidential decision, and damned the torpedoes, he made them. When he made mistakes, and he did, he just as quickly corrected them, but it was always full steam ahead for this land lubber.
Not all the crises were international. The House Un-American Activities Committee undermined by hyperbole, innuendo, and lies most government institutions. In this context Truman appointed David Lilienthal (of the Tennessee Valley Authority [TVA]) to head the newly created Atomic Energy Commission and that set off a long-running fire storm. The Army opposed civilian control of nuclear energy, and ergo any appointment. Senate Republicans saw in Lilienthal an easy target and went after him with little or no scruple. The fact that at the TVA he had done more concrete good for more people than all of the cannibals combined only proved to them that he was a pinko, if not worse. (On the TVA see ‘Wild River’ [1960] for enlightenment. Roger Ebert said it was Elia Kazan’s love letter to the New Deal.)
When Truman offered Lilienthal the job, Lilienthal had predicted a difficult confirmation, and Truman said he knew that and would see it through come what may, and he did.
The 1948 campaign had many unusual and remarkable features. Too many to enumerate here, but election junkies will find it worth reading those chapters. I will limit the keyboard to two of them. The polling showed Truman behind 3 to 1. In 1946 the Republicans had already secured comfortable majorities in both houses of Congress. Yet Truman never doubted he could win and infused his entourage with energy, if not belief.
Truman’s masterstroke was this. The Republican nominating convention produced a platform for the election of proposed legislation, which was largely modelled on the current situation. Their claim was that they could do it better, not that it was much different from Truman who was an accidental president, a common man in over his head, and an incompetent (and by innuendo, corrupt).
Leaving aside that insulting rhetoric, Truman found little to dislike in the Republican platform, but he doubted that it represented the reality of a Republican administration. To test that proposition he did the following.
He called Congress back into special session during the campaign and dared the Republican majorities to pass the legislation proposed in the campaign platform into law: unemployment insurance, low cost housing, immigration extensions, farm price support, and so on, and on. If they pass it, I’ll sign he said. If that is what Republicans want, they can have it now.
Congress duly assembled in the sauna that Washington is (at a time when air conditioning was scarce) and…. Well, all that platform was publicity and did not represent the intent of the GOP, and instead of passing bills, they spent the two weeks of his session denouncing Truman for making them return to Washington. Did he ever get mileage out of that. This was the do-nothing Republican Congress. Any momentum the GOP had from its 1946 Congressional majorities was stopped then and there.
His opponent was Thomas Dewey, governor of New York State, who had run against FDR in 1944. In that campaign Dewey had gone for blood, demonising Roosevelt, slandering Eleanor, deriding each of the Roosevelt children by name, and even deprecating the pet dog, Fala. As one wit put it, the only thing that stopped him from stooping lower in vilifying every Roosevelt was the floor. Dewey lost, and decided to go at 1948 in a different way.
He ran as though he had already been already elected. He ignored the platform mentioned above, and spoke only in platitudes and generalities. His failure to emphasise the Republican platform gave Truman ammunition. The vagaries of Dewey’s speeches were such that the Truman campaign published collected excerpts from them to show that he had nothing to offer.
Dewey’s aim was to present himself as above partisan politics, while not making campaign promises that would later tie his hands. He was being presidential, he thought, acting as if he had already won, after all that is what the polls kept saying. He presented the smallest target ever. And he never once asked audiences to vote him, as beneath presidential dignity. While he, too, travelled by train he did not stop at every crossroad and give a talk, but moved from city to city to speak in hotels and auditoria. After he spoke, he did not descend from the podium to shake hands, but rather left by a back door. Even on the platform he exuded an icy aloofness that journalists reported.
In contrast, Truman explicitly asked for members of the audience to vote for him. In so doing, he sometimes directed this request to Republicans in the audience who had come to see if he was the fool being portrayed. He was always careful to distinguish Republican voters, who were ordinary folks, from Potomac Republicans in Washington D.C. The voters were just trying to get along and mistakenly thought sending Republicans to D.C. would help them do that. But how could it, he would ask, look at that do-nothing congress that had ample opportunity to enact its own measures for the benefit of the common man, but did not do so, because that was not really the goal. The goal was to win office, and then favour the vested interests of Wall Street, industrialists, and their kind. He hammered away at this theme, leading to that famous headline.
Restored to office, things went from bad to worse for Truman. The Berlin Crisis remained. There was an assassination attempt. China went Red. The Senate went witch-hunting. North Korea went south. George Marshall quit due to ill health. Never a dull moment. At this point I think I will give up summarising his presidency except to say it was action-packed. Just remember there is the Korean War, the showdown with General Douglas McArthur over civilian control, the vandalism of that Kremlin asset Joe McCarthy, and more.
Perhaps one point has to be made. Truman was adamant that the atomic bomb would not be used in the Korean War. Though there was much pressure to do so from the public, the army, the press, and the Congress, he steadfastly refused even to consider it. He, like any sensible person – always a minority in a crisis, was terrified of this weapon and kept it off the agenda. He could say honestly it had never been discussed as an option. Not even in the darkest hours when the Busan perimeter buckled. Though he made many decisions to act, this was perhaps his most important decision and it was not to act and he made it repeatedly.
He had made up his mind in 1950 just before the Korean Conflict started that he would not seek another term in the 1952 election, because by then he would have served just 82 days short of two full terms. That was enough for anyone, he concluded, and wrote in longhand a letter he kept in his drawer to be produced in the middle of 1951 in which he declared he was stepping down.
There are long chapters on the 1952 election with the reluctant candidate, Adlai Stevenson succeeding Truman as head of the Democratic ticket. Stevenson had the soul of a poet, not a politician, but in any event no one was going to best Dwight Eisenhower. Ditto 1956 when no one else wanted the nomination and Stevenson backed into it again.
In retirement the still sprightly, Truman moved back to Independence to the family home and devoted himself to memoirs, which are largely lists of meetings offering no insight into either events or people. He also turned his formidable energies to his presidential library. Though there is much discussion of the detail, this book does not give Truman nearly enough credit for establishing the concept of the presidential library. He had seen the way souvenir takers had carted off just about anything mobile from the White House when FDR died, from furniture to filing cabinets of papers. Truman had encouraged Eleanor to take whatever she wanted, and it turned out she wanted a lot because it had been her family home for more than a decade and she had proprietorial feelings. This observation was the seed that later came to fruition.
He lived thereafter on his army pension, as there was no presidential pension, and later a publisher’s advance for memoirs.
I have been to the Truman Presidential Library in Independence and a visit is highly recommended for president buffs. It certainly reflects the man, fearless, direct, and simple. While it was being built he pitched in more than once himself to the work (no doubt as relief from this memoirs), and insisted on some of the displays, like the piles angry and damning letters he got from parents of GIs serving, missing, wounded, or killed in Korea. Those families paid the price for his decision(s) and he thought they should have their say. He would take the heat.
Of all the things he said and all the things said about him, the one that I like best is his remark in this paraphrase: There are million people who are more qualified than I am to be president, but it has fallen to me and I will give it everything I have got.
The book reads like a novel, a thriller even, in its invocation of people, places, and events. I found myself on more than one night sitting up past my usual bedtime reading on and on, finding it hard to stop mid-chapter, and so not stopping. My practice is usually to switch off such serious reading in the evening and read a few pages of a krimi as bedtime and sleep beckon, but some books are hard to put down and this is one of them. It is easy to see why the Pulitzer Committee gave it an award. I have been through one other of his biographies, that of John Adams quite a time ago, with no particular memory of it, but that was the audible version while I was driving around historic utopian communities in the midlands, midwest, and upper south in days gone by.
* Who was the shortest serving Vice-President, you ask? Take notes for the next round of pub trivia. John Tyler had 31 days from taking the oath of office to when President William Harrison, just elected, died. Andrew Johnson who succeeded Abraham Lincoln had 42 days. William King who never set foot in Washington D.C. as VP died 45 days after taking the oath of office in Cuba. Then comes Truman.
Good Reads meta-data is rated 3.69 by 158 litizens.
Genre: Krimi
Verdict: A Start
Deep in the bush of Kenya our heroine leads a group of snappers among the game, big and little. She spends a lot of time feeling sorry for herself, i.e., backstory. The compensation for that dreary indulgence is the setting which is very well realised: the heat, humidity, smells, noise of birds, insects, grunts of lions, and so on, though sometimes it seems forced into the story, contributing neither to character, plot, or ambience.
It is a small group of eight Safarians (plus attendants) and as the guests start dying, the plot thickens, following the rulebook: the obnoxious boor dies (because no one could stand him for many more pages) and it seems a heart attack triggered by his constant bad temper combined with a surprise tumble. No one seems to care or miss him, though he dominated the first chapters, least of all his wife. When a second member is speared in her sleep, not even the rulebook deniers can deny it is foul play. Well it turns out later they can deny the reality.
For as convention has it, one member of the party is a Republican and denies reality vigorously while loudly proclaiming his law and order credentials and obstructing the police investigation in every way possible and some impossible for no other reason than to inject some tension into the story. Quite how anyone could think not investigating two murders made sense is never explained but that’s fiction.
The Kenyan detective who descends on the camp is a marvellous character as is his taciturn sergeant. Their approach to investigation is not from the manual of krimi conventions, and very refreshing for that. Among the noteworthy scenes is a visit to a Masai village which I found intriguing and informative.
There is also some self-deprecating humour. When asked how she suspected the least likely person to be the murderer, our heroine said, ‘When she pulled a gun and threatened to kill me, then I knew.’ Not before. Nice.
Yes, much of the book is David Attenborough about the plants, the animals, and the peoples of Kenya but I found that tolerable. What I found less tolerable was the Elle fashion commentary of everyone’s clothes in each scene. Still less the Gourmet Traveller menus for each meal. None of the clothing or food contributed to the plot but taken as a whole it went on for pages. Likewise I found some of the dialogue attenuated to spin out the length. Grumble, grumble, grumble.
Karin McQuillan
First in a series and perhaps in later titles the author relaxes a little and lets the time and place carry the reader along without the fashion shows or gourmet meals. Maybe our heroine will spend less time thinking about herself in later titles. Or perhaps the success of this one has encouraged the writer to pad the next title even more with irrelevant details and victimology.
The title reminded me of a restaurant by that name – The Safari – on King Street at the corner of Queen Street that opened early at 5 pm and so I had meals there often before evening classes in the middle of the 1970s. Despite the name and the mosquito netting suspended from the ceiling, it was a continental menu leaning to Italian (pasta and scaloppine) but it was run by a couple from Germany. Since I was early, alone, and regular I got to know them. I did once ask about the name and all I can remember now (nearly fifty years later) is that the business had that name when they took over. Perhaps there was more to it but that is now lost to time.
On one occasion I was in a hurry and to accommodate my need for speed Heinz (though I do not remember his name) put the water for the spaghetti through the espresso machine to get it to boiling temperature in no time at all. That was my most memorable meal, I ordered as I walked in and by the time I sat down and drew out the papers to review before class, the plate arrived!
When the German couple left about 1980 the new proprietors changed the cuisine to Indonesian but retained the name. In the next decade organised labour put that incarnation out of business, protecting workers rights so well that none them any longer had a job, and since then it has been a vegetarian butcher (you read that right) per the signs in the window, a tattoo parlour, and it is currently….? I haven’t been that way in a while and don’t know.
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.’
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?
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.
Live theatre at the Riverside Theatre in Parramatta (May 2021) with Jane Phegan, 55 minutes with no break.
Described as a verbal essay by a woman whose lifelong dream was to see the Amazon River (page 132 on her schoolgirl atlas) and voyage along the great river, as if into the unknown. That dream come true segues into a metaphor for her father’s parallel voyage into the unknown lands of dementia. Sounds grim perhaps but it is punctuated with wit and insights that relieve the doom and gloom of the inevitable.
There is even a reference to Fordlandia and Henry Ford, and one does not hear that everyday, and Fitzcarraldo (1982), Hank and Fitz were not alone in their failed attempts to conquer the Amazon, but there is no reference to the other Amazon that is a contemporary fact of life, and seems alike impervious to time and tide. I have read about Fordlandia and commented on the books linked below for those who must know.
Something caught my eye and interest when I read about this one-woman play, maybe it was a reference to Fordlandia, and after due diligence I got tickets on-line for a Saturday matinee and on the appointed day off we went by Metro train via Strathfield. We have been largely bunkered and hunkered down for more than a year like everyone else and it was a treat venturing to distant Parramatta, strolling the streets for a light lunch, dining, and crossing the river to the theatre, and then returning home in the fading sunlight. Though rain was in the forecast it missed us.
Noëlle Janczewsk
The stroll was more like dodging around a construction site as the Parramatta tram line works seems to have totally taken over Church Street.
While that production has come and gone, it may be revived again. Take note. The writer’s website is linked below.
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?
