Political theory and practice

GoodReads meta-data is 320 pages, rated 4.16 by 153 litizens.

Genre: Thriller.

Verdict: Good.  

In late 1944 the Allied armies in Northern Europe reeled from the German offensive in the Battle of the Bulge. Though much of Belgium had been cleared of Nazis, the Germans remained nearby.  

In particular Peenemunde was seventy miles from British lines in Belgium.  Hitler had latched onto the rocket program as a wonder weapon that would yet win the war and poured resources into it, despite the doubts of the scientists and the objections of hard-pressed generals.  Fictional Willi Graf is one such scientist, second only to Wernher von Braun (1912-1977) in the rocket team.  

The V1 (doodle bug) had been superseded by the Vergentungswaffe 2, that is Vengeance Weapon 2.  We learn some of the complications of operating, building, conceiving of such a rocket, and the humanity of those who worked on it, all through Graf’s eyes.  None of the scientists and engineers are good Nazis but they are committed to the rocket as end in itself. Von Braun had joined the SS and made good use of that in this story to protect his team.  

In parallel there is British Aircraftwoman Kay who studies aerial reconnaissance photographs in a London bunker as the RAF tries to find the launch site(s) so as to bomb them. Meanwhile, the Germans have learned to use mobile launchers to escape detection, and to launch mostly under cloud cover. 

Kay survives not one but two V2 explosions in London and begins to take it personally.  Meanwhile, Willi’s wife is killed in an RAF bombing raid that hits everything but the V2s.  

Though the V2s are pinpricks in the bigger picture of 1944, they are dreadful and so a dedicated effort is assembled to target and destroy them.  Kay and her slide rule are recruited to a team of RAF Aircraftwomen to go to Belgium and calculate the point of origin of the missiles by using radar signals of the launches correlated with impact locations in England.  For this calculation to guide bombers to the target it has to be done in six minutes, which allows time for the RAF to strike before the Germans have dismounted the launch equipment and hidden everything in the forest. 

We get more of Willi’s backstory than Kay’s, principally his long comradeship with von Braun and their mutual enthusiasm for space flight with rockets, spiced with some technical details.  There is, what seemed to this reader, a pointless sidebar with a local prostitute, too.  

Thanks to some (rather unbelievable) loose lips, the Nazis learn of the calculators in Belgium and target one V2 to hit them.  It is Kay’s third brush with V2 death.  

Unknown to each other, Kay computes angles to find Willi and company for the bombers, and Willi devises more ingenious ways to disguise the launch sites and shorten the dismounting time, while targeting one rocket to hit Kay and her squad of pencil pushers.  They each have some near misses.  

In the summer of 1945 they meet at a debriefing, and realise that they had been – in their own ways – trying to kill each other.  The end.

About 3000 V2s were launched, half at London and half at Antwerp (the major seaport through which Allied armies were supplied).  In London they killed about 3000 civilians, and injured far more.  The destruction of the V1 and V2 explosions was the prime cause of homelessness in London after the war, effecting as many as 80,000 people.  No doubt something similar in Antwerp was true.  In producing the rockets between 12,000 – 20,000 slave labours died, either being worked to death, murdered, or hit in RAF raids on the production plants.  

After the war both German generals and Allied analysts concluded the vast materiel and labour that went into the rockets detracted from the German war effort to no strategic or tactical gain.  While Harris does not speculate, it is possible that Hitler’s desperate demand for wonder weapons and the resources devoted to them might have distorted German arms enough to shorten the war to some extent. 

Most of the action takes place in the woodlands near Den Haag where I spent a semester in 1983.  Indeed the nearest village is Wassenaar which was exactly where I was at the Netherlands Institute of Advanced Studies. I walked through some of those woods near the seaside.  

The moon is mentioned a couple of times as the goal of the rocketeers, but I thought their goal always was Mars with the Moon as an interim step, not a final goal. That is not hinted at in these pages.

In an afterword Harris says the text was written during the 2020 pandemic lockdown over some weeks.  It was released on 17 September and I got it on that day via a Kindle order.  Now that is a technology von Braun did not anticipate.  He did however live to see a man on the moon.

The book raises the question of the morality of the rocket men, and also of the race to acquire them.  In these pages they are technocrats like those that built the atomic bombs or tank chassis.  Though in this case they also aimed and fired the weapons. Are they war criminals?  Should they have been punished?  In any event thanks to the wily von Braun, who, though he is seldom on the page, dominates the story, planned ahead and traded their technical knowledge for salvation so that more than hundred of his team were transplanted to the USA with no penalty.  

And if they were war criminals for targeting civilians, then so was most of those who served Bomber Command which started the so-called City Busting bombing campaign in 1942 and continued it long past any justification, including Dresden, except vengeance.  The implicit indictment of Bomber Command in Freeman Dyson’s essay ‘The Children’s Crusade’ comes to mind.  

I enjoyed this book a lot and read it in two nights, the more so for the resonance of the location with my own experience, but I did find it a little thinner than some of Harris’s other historical novels.  It relied more on the technical details than the emotional lives of the characters.  Willi’s ambiguity comes too easily and the loss of his wife does not quite seem real.  Von Braun dominates the events but remains a cipher.  

The SS officer sent to raise morale is emphasised and then lost in the story.  When he appears the reader takes him for pivotal figure and invests in him, only to find him both cardboard and inconsequential.  

GoodReads meta-data is 317 pages rated 3.91 by 78,875 litizens.

Genre: Bibliomania.

Verdict: Crackerjack.

In the morning 29 April 1986 smoke issued from air vents in the Central Library of the Los Angeles Library system. There soon followed a conflagration that required half of the City’s fire department to contain.  The fire and subsequent water damage destroyed 600,000 books and damaged a like number, some of them rare, a few unique, but all representing the work, thoughts, and hopes of the individuals who wrote them and of those who read them.  

The Library Book chronicles the origin and development of the Los Angeles central library with something of its branch libraries throughout the SoCal sprawl.  There is a colourful cast of characters among the librarians from would-be writers, showmen, and suffragettes.  This backstory is interspersed with an account of the fire and the recovery, as well as the investigation into the cause of the fire.  

The fire began in one of the four closed stack silos and reached 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit, melting the steel shelves, injuring more than thirty firefighters, and cracking three-foot thick walls.  More than ten percent of the drinking water of the greater Los Angeles areas was pumped onto it, least it leap to other buildings.  While books do not burn easily, they do burn at 451 F-degrees as all science fiction readers know.  There is an amusing description of the author burning a book to see what it is like.  Which book?  Well it had to be that one written in this very building by Ray Bradbury. (If you don’t know that book, tant pis).

The building by the way was designed by the same architect who had earlier done the Nebraska state capitol building with its edifying accoutrements.  

The response of the library community was remarkable.  When the Fire Marshall declared the site safe, volunteers (some 5000 in number) went to work pulling books out of the debris.  In her words: 

“They formed a human chain, passing the books hand over hand from one person to the next, through the smoky building and out the door. It was as if, in this urgent moment, the people of Los Angeles formed a living library. They created, for that short time, a system to protect and pass along shared knowledge, to save what we know for each other, which is what libraries do every day.”

Overnight local businesses found 15,000 cardboard boxes, and fish processing plants combined to free an enormous freezer warehouse to hold the damaged books until they could be assessed and restored. (Mould is a book killer when exposed to water, and freezing prevents mould.) The success rate on restoration of damaged books is low, around ten percent.  For maps and art work there was no chance whatever. Plates on glossy paper and magazines have no hope.  

The fire investigators concluded it was arson and pursued leads and suspects for years with no result.  Despite the reassuring world of detective fiction, in fact, arson is hard to detect, harder to prove to a legal standard, and almost impossible to prosecute with a clearance rate, according to insurers, of about 1%.  Caught in these investigations was one hapless Harry Peak whose strange manner of existence is, per Orlean, most likely to be found in LA where make-believe is even more common than reality.  Insurance investigators were not so sure about arson, and gave up the chase. The building was fifty plus years old and full of old and new wiring for electricity, telephones, and computers, most of it installed after it was completed.  Then there are all those electrical appliances from coffee machines, sewing machines for binding repair, and more. 

Loved her descriptions of Los Angeles: “The sidewalks in Hollywood sagged under the weight of all the handsome young men who flocked there, luminous with possibility.”  

[Hope and ambition] “are  in the chemical makeup of Los Angeles; possibility was an element, like oxygen.”

For the young who come to find fame and fortune “moments were fortune cookies ready to be cracked open.”  They are “lifted by the continuous supply of hope and sun.”  

Everywhere you look there are “over-groomed busboys…and gym-trim extras.”

There are also many love songs to books and libraries embedded with the pages as she traces the history of the library and librarians up to the fire and then the recovery.  Savour a few:

“a library is an intricate machine, a contraption of whirring gears.”

“the whole orchestral range of book-related noises—the snap of covers clapping shut; the breathy whisk of pages fanning open; the distinctive thunk of one book being stacked on another; the grumble of book carts in the corridors.”

“the city has a bloodstream flowing through it, oxygenated by books.”

“The publicness of the public library is an increasingly rare commodity. It becomes harder all the time to think of places that welcome everyone and don’t charge any money for that warm embrace.”

“Destroying a culture’s books is sentencing it to something worse than death: It is sentencing it to seem as if it never lived.”

‘There is a human mind behind every book waiting to meet the reader.”

“Libraries are the home of our oldest friends.”

The last word is this: 

Heinrich Heine’s warning: “There where one burns books, one in the end burns men.”

The book is so well written I am tempted to read other of hers just to revel in the exact prose and the positive attitude that propels it.  Chapeaux!

GoodReads meta-data is 380 pages, rated 3.80 by 254 litizens. 

Genre: History.

Verdict:  A comprehensible narrative.  Aaaah. 

The first and hardest thing for me to grasp is just how long the Portuguese and Spanish have been in the Americas.  Sailors in the employ of the Portuguese monarchy landed in what is now Brazil in April 1500. They began building permanent settlements in 1532 and remained thereafter.  To avoid conflict among Christian nations with the threat of the Ottomans in the East, the Pope brokered a treaty dividing the new world(s) between Spain and Portugal, recognising that the Portuguese were already in Brazil to stay.  That solved one problem and created another since neither catholic France nor protestant England or the Netherlands recognised that division. 

Brazil began to pay for itself with the sugarcane, the price of which skyrocketed when the Haitian rebellion against the French all but eliminated it as a source of the commodity.  This lucrative trade attracted the Dutch, first to trade in it and later to grow it in Suriname, as it is now called, and likewise the French.  Conflicts followed.  

But the most unusual conflict, however, was among the Portuguese. Three hundred years after first contact, Napoleonic France invaded Iberia. In the ensuing Peninsula War, the French continued into Portugal, which had long been associated with England as a counterbalance to Spain.  The French pursued the British into Portugal and in 1808 the Portuguese royal court went into exile wholes bolus, setting sail for Brazil, numbering as many as 12,000 courtiers, soldiers, merchants, officials, priests, and others.  The English cooperated for a mix of reasons, some political and some commercial.  Banks in London lent money to the exiles to set up in Brazil where the King John VI declared the United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil, and the Algarves (a province of Portugal itself like Holland in the Netherlands).  There were also unrealised ambitions to extend this realm to the Portuguese African colonies of the time.   

With the extinction of the Napoleonic threat by 1815 there were those who wanted to move the king and court back to Lisbon and return Brazil to the status of a colony ruled from there.  Others wanted the court to remain, including the king for a time.  Meanwhile, back in Lisbon a council governed with close English oversight in the royal absence, but in 1820 King John returned to quell the restive. (He was urged to return by the English who found the close oversight expensive and unproductive.) Now here is where the wrinkle sets it.

The king did not reduce Brazil to a colony, rather to placate local interests he left behind his son Pedro as Regent.  Inevitably conflicts occurred between those who supported the Regent and those favoured autonomy or even independence, inspired by the distant example of the United States and fired by rebellions against Spain in its American colonies. Much manoeuvring followed.  

The upshot was that in 1822 Pedro declared Brazil independent, even while in Lisbon lawyers were splitting hairs about the reversion of Brazil to one colony among many. A civil war of sorts ensued in Brazil between the Portuguese loyal to Lisbon and the locals. The French and Dutch stoked these fires to confuse the English, who were not quite sure whom to back, having sizeable commercial interest in both Brazil and Portugal.  To distinguish him from his father the king of Portugal, Pedro became the emperor of the empire of Brazil.  Compared to the long-lasting and bloody wars for independence in Spanish America’s colonies this transition was short.  King John soon accepted this independence, partly in order to maintain commercial relations, lest the French intervene. At times Brazil invoked the Monroe Doctrine to ward off European interest in picking off part of its vast and underpopulated territory.  

But wait, there is more!  When King John died his presumptive heir was Pedro in Rio de Janeiro.  The crowns were one, again, but not the nations.  See? (No, neither do I.)  Pedro soon abdicated the Portuguese throne in favour of one of his daughters who went to Lisbon to be queen.  

While the author does not consider the general context, to this reader Brazilian independence in this way distinguished it from its other Latin American cousins.  (1) The army was not the crucible that created the nation which it was in Argentina, Venezuela, or Colombia. Indeed the army was Portuguese and much of it left with the king. In its place were local militias which later morphed into a national army.  But the Brazilian army did not create Brazil in contrast, say, to the Argentine army which created Argentina.  

(2) When Simon Bolivar recruited armies to rebel against the Spanish he declared anyone who joined the fight was a free man be he white, black, or red and any shade between.  While the liberation rhetoric of the King James Protestant Bible was absent, the message was indisputable, and at times Bolivar’s army was more dark than light, more Black and Red than White. In Brazil without this martial deliverance, race remained a fixed social identity and barrier, and all the more so because of the vast slave – mostly black but some red – population for the labour-intensive products: sugar cane, coffee, cotton, and rubber.  Only external pressure and the vagaries of the markets for these commodities gradually led to emancipation.  All of that made it a late entrant in attracting European migrants as a cheap source of labour to replace slavery.  

GoodReads meta-data is 780 pages, rated 4.36 by 484 litizens.  

Genre: History (not biography).

Verdict: Parochial. 

Declaration: I only read the lengthy sample, and decided not to proceed.

The sample was long on pointless erudition and short on facts.  It seemed to presuppose the reader was familiar with the major elements of the history of the region, the arrival of Europeans, and the individuals and families that founded Brazil. And then sets about to debunk them without ever quite explaining or contextualising them.    

I did learn this. Portuguese sailors in the East Indies found a tree with red bark and red sap which was used to make a red dye.  Then when the Portuguese in their constant competition with the Spanish went West, they found a red tree with red sap that could be used as a dye and they called the area Brasil after the name of tree in the east Indies.  It is from the Latin for embers as a colour.  

While the authors expatiate at length on the terrible consequences of the European invasion for natives, they are mainly portrayed as hapless and helpless victims even as the more detailed discussions show that some native tribes cooperated with the Europeans to defeat their traditional enemies.  

After first debunking myths about cannibalism in the region, the authors then devote much space to it.  

Yes, I know only a small mind would be bothered by these inconsistencies and so I stand convicted.  

The book does not offer the short history of this vast and varied land that I sought.  Rather it declares its purpose to be to debunking the myths Brasilians tell themselves about their history and country. Since this reader does not know these myths, there is no traction.  It lacks the conventional road signs to guide readers and it lurches back-and-forth. There are no transitions, no indications of time, no summaries and much musing which is not amusing. There is a whiff of the post-modern.  Always deadly.

The city of Brasilia registered on my imagination when I was an adolescent and since then I have come across a few references to it.  The striking architecture is the main thing, though James Scott’s Seeing Like a State (1998) has some diamond insights into the resulting city. John Brunner’s sy fy novel The Squares of the City (1966) was another take on it. I also sought out and read a couple of novels set there, but they made no use of the reality or fantasy of Brasilia. Some of this itch was stimulated anew by our visit to mother Portugal a couple of years ago where there was no sign of Brazil or any of its other one-time colonies.  Not even any statues that I saw.   

The post hoc criticisms of Brasilia are legion.  I tried reading David Epstein’s  Brasília: Plan and Reality (1977) but found it largely impenetrable.  It is a discussion mostly of what other researchers have said, and so guarded and encoded in academicese that it does not communicate to a general reader – moi.  It reminded me a little of the story of a Danish bus shelter without the insights or humour in Bent Flyvbjerg, Rationality and Power: Democracy in Practice (1998). 

This activity about Brasilia on Amazon awakened the mechanical Turk who presented me with this title.  I clicked for a sample, and read it.  In this case it is a substantial sample of many pages (though on the Kindle I cannot be exact about the number), whereas many Kindle samples of Non-Fiction are so consumed by superfluous front matter there are few pages of substance.  Not so in this case.  There is plenty to judge by.