Rick Atkinson. An
Army at Dawn, the War in North Africa (1942-1943). I’m not sure this was worth 26.5 hours, but
I did learn a lot about Operation Torch; the battle for Tunis which concluded
the North African campaign; the difficulties of logistics, communications and battlefield
coordination; the inexperience of US troops and either the inexperience or
incompetence of the American generals; the unproductive rivalries between the
Americans and the Brits, especially the generals; and the superiority of the
German fighting forces until they were overwhelmed by allied numbers and materiel.
The book is a very detailed record of
Allied operations and could not have included Montgomery’s campaign against
Rommel nor very much about the thinking on the German side as the Americans
pushed from the West without going into multi-volumes, but I would probably
have been happier with less detail and broader coverage. Perhaps the most interesting two themes were
everyday life among the enlisted men and the metamorphosis of Eisenhower from
staff officer to Allied commander. If
you are considering a career in tank warfare, read this book. The Quartermaster Corps will look better and
better as you get towards the end. Nov.
2012
.
Benjamin Black. Vengeance. Two
Irish families have shared ownership of a business through two generations and
a third has reached adulthood and eventually will take over from the second
which currently heads the firm. The head
of the family that has always dominated commits suicide and the head of the
other is murdered a week later.
Everything proceeds almost casually and eventually the hospital
pathologist and the chief of detectives figure out who the murderers are. None of it is very surprising except for the
amorality of everyone involved. People
hop in an out of bed with each other, smoke a lot and drink even more. Perhaps it’s meant to portray a style of life
in Ireland. I doubt that it’s like
that. November 2012
.
David Mitchell. The
Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet. This was a delightful read despite one subplot
line which was somewhere between ridiculous and unbelievable. Jacob DeZoet is a young Dutch clerk seeking
his fortune with the Dutch East India Company, when he is assigned to Dejima in
Nagasaki, Japan in 1799. Mitchell has obviously
done a lot of research, because he tells the story so well of Japanese
xenophobia and the isolation of the Dutch at this “factory” or trading station,
which was Japan’s only window on the outside world, and also of the
machinations of the Dutch traders who all hoped to return home rich and the
Japanese interpreters who interacted with them.
Mitchell fictionalizes a real incident when HMS Phaeton entered Nagasaki
harbor in 1808 hoping to resupply and better yet to take a couple of Dutch
merchantmen as prizes. In this novel the
Phaeton comes in 1800 and it is young Jacob who schemes with the Japanese to
force the British to leave. The subplot
involves a young midwife, Aibagawa, who studies with the Dejima station
doctor. Naturally Jacob falls in love
with her, but she is from a samurai family and totally unattainable. In the
part I disliked, a powerful Japanese priest had set up a sort of baby factory
at a shrine in the hills of his fief. The women were all disfigured or deformed so
their families were happy to see them become “nuns.” They were serviced by the priests and the
offspring were immediately taken from their mothers and destroyed in an insane
ritual that was supposed to prolong the lives of the monks. Aibagawa is forced into the monastery. An interpreter, Ogawa, is in love with her
and sets out to rescue her. He doesn’t succeed,
but Jacob is able to bring down the monk as part of his machinations against
the British. Aibagawa is saved, but
Jacob sees her only once more. It is
many years later just before he leaves for Holland, a rich man, who will marry,
succeed in business and receive civic honors.
Mitchell does a great job of
using his story to describe Japanese and Dutch customs at the time. Nov. 2012
.
Haruki Murakami. 1Q84. This novel is long; it comes in three books
on 38 CDs and also has three disks for transferring the text to an MP3 player. At
first there are two different stories which alternate but eventually, of
course, they merge. Tengo Kawana is a
young writer who supports himself teaching in a math cram school. His editor asks him to rewrite a manuscript from
a 17 year old girl, who calls herself Fukaeri (Eriko Fukada). Meanwhile our heroine, Miss Aomame, is on
her way to assassinate a vicious wife beater.
When her cab gets stuck in a traffic jam on the overhead highway, the
driver tells her how she can escape down a ladder from an emergency turnout. She does and finds herself in a slightly
different world, where the most obvious difference is that there are two moons
in the sky. There is a connection
between Tengo and Aomame, even though they haven’t seen each other since they
were ten years old and now they are thirty.
The book by Fukaeri becomes a bestseller. It is a fantasy involving “little people” who
have special powers and a secretive cult that has a compound in the mountains. The little people use the leader of the cult
as their channel for access to our world.
In the world into which Aomame has stumbled, the book is not fiction and
the little people are angry that it has been published. Without going further, let me just say that
this is a dark fantasy with lots of explicit sex, an incredibly complicated
plot, and a nice love story than finally brings Tengo and Aomame together. October 2012
.
Lawrence Shames. Sunburn. While visiting his son in Key West, a Mafia
godfather decides to write his memoirs and hires a journalist friend of his son
to be the ghost writer. He informs his
Florida son and also his son Gino, who is visiting from New York, where he
takes care of family “business” when his father is away. On his own initiative and against his
father’s orders, Gino tries to move in on another family’s business in
Miami. When Gino finds himself in a
small boat in the Gulf Stream with an anchor chained to his neck, he trades the
info about his father’s book for his life.
Then he persuades the other family that it would be bad for business if
they killed the godfather, but they could send him a message by breaking his
pencil, i.e., killing the journalist.
Read it and find out what happened.
October 2012
.
Javier
Sierra. The Secret Supper. This
isn’t as exciting as the DaVinci Code,
but it’s a lot better story. The action takes
place in 1497 while Leonardo Da Vinci was finishing The Last Supper in Milan. It’s
a wild tale that suggests that the Cathars belonged to the cult of Mary
Magdalen and Leonardo was trying to promote their cause by encoding their basic
truths in the painting. The story is
narrated by Father Agostino, a Dominican inquisitor from the Holy Office in
Rome. When Agostino is captured and
detained by the Cathars, he learns their ways and decides to stay with
them. As sort of a specialist in Italian
Renaissance art, I particularly enjoyed this novel because of the subtle ways
in which Sierra introduced references to both painters and scholars and their
works. October 2012
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