Stephen L. Carter. The
Emperor of Ocean Park. When I read Carter’s Palace Council, I thought it was too long and was impatient to
finish. When I finished Disk 10 of The Emperor of Ocean Park, I wondered
how Carter could spin out the plot to fill Disks 11 to 20. This time I didn’t get impatient. There are wheels inside of wheels inside of
wheels. Talcott Garland’s father, Oliver
Garland, had been a judge on the US Court of Appeals. During the hearings for his nomination to the
Supreme Court, information came out that he had had an ongoing relationship
with Jack Zeigler, a notorious underworld figure, who also happened to have
been his college roommate. Needless to say,
he didn’t get the appointment and had to resign in disgrace from the Court of
Appeals. The Garlands are an elite black
family that lives on the “Gold Coast” in Washington, DC, and summers on Martha’s
Vineyard. Talcott is the only African
American law professor at a prestigious Ivy League university in Connecticut
which may or may not sound a lot like Yale.
When the book opens, Oliver has just died under somewhat mysterious
circumstances, and at the funeral Zeigler approaches Talcott to say that as
soon as he figures out his father’s “arrangements,” Talcott is to tell Zeigler
and no one else. This is the beginning
of the mystery or mysteries. What was it
that Oliver did after his younger daughter, Abby, had been killed by a hit and
run driver? Did he hire a private
detective to try to find out what the police could not. Why was there no record of payment to the detective and, if
there was no payment, what was the quid pro quo? Who is following Talcott and why? Is there more than one group having him
followed? Will this all effect his wife’s
nomination to be a federal judge. What
are the “arrangements?” Is the key to
the solution in a chess problem called “double excelsior,” which involves a
white pawn and a black pawn? Yes, Carter
is a little wordy and he makes Talcott too much of a goody-two-shoes, but this
was a great read. A bonus is Carter’s
description of life among our African American elite, including the disquietude
of members of “the paler nation” when they discover that these black people are
as smart as they are and can accomplish real and important things.
George V. Higgins. The
Friends of Eddie Coyle. I
started and quit. It was a discussion of
the ins and outs of how criminals operate.
Boring. January 2013
Langston Hughes. Tambourines
to Glory. The end notes say that
this was first written as a play which ran on Broadway for 25 days in 1963 Many prominent blacks criticized the play,
because it seemed to mock the African American churches. I don’t know how it would be to read this off
the page, but the recorded version is a joy – we get to hear Hughes’s gospel
songs which are the heart of the story.
Essie and Laura are each living on welfare in one room apartments in
Harlem in a building known locally as “the rabbit warren.” Laura is casting about for a way to earn some
money and spice up their lives. When she
discovers that Essie has an amazing singing voice, she persuades Essie that
they should start a church. Laura learned the lingo of a preacher growing
up with her grandfather, and she can sing too.
The first time out they set up on a corner on Lenox Avenue, and after
they pass the tambourine, they find they have raked in $11.59. By the time summer is over and it’s too cold
to hold services outside, they have saved enough money to rent the ground floor
of a brownstone. This is so successful
that they move on to an abandoned theater.
Essie finds religion, but Laura finds financial success and treats
herself to a Cadillac and a mink coat.
She also acquires a boyfriend named Buddy, who can fix things with
landlords and building inspectors and who has all sorts of ideas about how to
make money from the church. First
there’s water from the Jordan at $1 a bottle and then a rumor that the three
number designations of Laura’s readings from the Bible are likely winners in
the weekly numbers lottery. Laura
eventually kills Buddy from jealousy, after he puts moves of Essie’s daughter
and others, but Essie soldiers on with plans for a day care center and more,
which for me negates the criticism mentioned above. The services described are all about joy, and
maybe that’s what religion should be about.
Read and sung beautifully by Myra Lucretia Taylor.
Joseph Kanon. Istanbul
Passage. Leon, who represents
Reynolds Tobacco, was moved from Germany to Istanbul when WW II broke out. During the war he did some odd jobs for US
intelligence and still has that connection after the war, even though most of
the spies have gone home to be demobilized.
During the war his wife Anna, a German Jew, worked with groups trying to
save Jews from the holocaust. After
witnessing some terrible disasters including the drowning of many children when
a leaky refugee boat sank, she fell into a depression so deep that she might as
well be in a coma. Bauer is asked to
pick up a Romanian coming in on a fishing boat and hide him. On the pier he’s fired on and fires back,
killing his attacker, who turns out to be Tommy, the Consular Officer who asked
him to make the pickup. What follows is
a cat and mouse game with Emniyet -- the Turkish secret service, the Istanbul
police, Russian intelligence, and the Consulate, the last because there’s no
way of knowing who was working with Tommy.
It’s a great read, although I was put off by a long and explicit sex
scene which added nothing to the narrative.
Salmon Rushdie. Luka
and the Fire of Life. .It’s a
long and involved fairy tale or a rewrite of
1001 Nights or something else. It
seems that all the gods and all the mythical creatures that no one believes in
any more have been sort of pensioned off in a magical world. The thing about this particular magical world
is that it was created by Luka’s father, the story teller. When Luka’s father falls into a coma and
looks like he may soon die, Luka sets off with his pets, Dog the Bear and Bear
the Dog, to enter the magical kingdom and steal the fire of life which will
save the father. He gets some help along
the way, especially from Soraya, who moves about on King Solomon’s flying
carpet and leads the OAF (Otter Airforce), also on flying carpets. Soraya is not an otter. She’s a redhead and looks about 17, even
though she’s probably 1000s of years old.
Soraya and Luka’s other new friends – a pair of memory birds, a coyote,
four dragons, a squirrel-interpreter and a titan -- are able to help him
through the trials involved in stealing the fire, but for some trials it’s up to him. It is his knowledge of his father’s stories
plus being left handed that enables him to reach the temple with the fire and
to persuade the gods to let him leave with a small pot of the fire. As in his other work, Rushdie packs in a mass
of details. The only slip I noticed is
that he has someone refer to the coyote as a “prairie dog.” January 2013
Simon Winchester. Krakatoa. We all
know that Krakatoa in the Sunda Straits between Java and Sumatra erupted on
August 26-27, l883 a little after 10: 00 AM and that its effects on the upper atmosphere
were seen around the world and even noted in the sky of Edvard Munch’s The Scream. I had no idea of the breadth and depth of
Krakatoa’s implications for scientific discovery. Winchester starts with some history of
Portuguese and then Dutch colonization and then goes back to refer to
historical documents written on palm leaves as early as the 4th C
CE. Much of the exploration of the
historical record is to document earlier eruptions and their effects on the
surrounding islands. By 1883, there were
scientific instruments in place around the world and the Royal Society in
London collected every reading possible to prepare a report on the effects of
the eruption. The shock waves in the
atmosphere were measured by noting a pattern of sudden drops in atmospheric
pressure, and it was discovered that the waves circled the earth seven times
before dissipating. There were able to
find records of even such minor phenomena as a two inch tidal surge in the
Thames. Out of this study came an
important step toward understanding tectonic plates, significant advances in
biology and botany, and the development of the science of meteorology. To this day there is a worldwide effort in five
universities to study the causes and effects of the Krakatoa eruption.
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