Samuel Clemens. Autobiography
of Mark Twain , Vol. 1.
©2001 Mark Twain had his own
ideas about what an autobiography should be.
First of all it shouldn’t be published for at least 100 years so that
the author can be honest about himself and avoid injuring others. It shouldn’t proceed in any particular order,
but instead should reflect what the author is thinking at any given time. It should be a portrait gallery of his
contemporaries. He takes his own advice,
and it is a delight to follow him as he rambles down the corridors of his own
life. He knew everyone and went
everywhere. The person who comes out best
in all this is Ulysses S. Grant, whom he knew well and helped financially by
publishing his memoirs. He also has
admiring words for Henry Rogers of Standard Oil, who was his close friend in
later life. After Clemens met and was
profoundly impressed by Helen Keller, he recommended her to Rogers who paid for
her education at Radcliffe. Teddy Roosevelt
doesn’t fare so well. A woman named
Morris came to the White House uninvited, and Roosevelt’s secretary had her
thrown out, bodily, and then the police manhandled her. It became known in the press as “the Morris
incident” and Clemens comes back to it at least twice. I made notes of a few things that especially
interested me. An actress named Brown (I
missed the first name) seems to have been a 19th C version of Kim
Kardasian, famous for being famous. The
family doctor in Florida, Missouri where he started life was paid by the
year. About slavery he said he preferred
a world where a mother could own her own child.
In Hartford he was ostracized for voting for Cleveland. It seems like most of the funny things that
have ever been said were said first by Mark Twain, but Clemens was more than a
humorist. He was a modern man with
modern ideas. He was always rational,
and perhaps it is that rationality that was the secret of his humor. The autobiography is a mishmash, just as he
intended, and Grover Gardner’s reading makes you feel like Twain is right there
with you. I just learned that Vol. II
has been published. I can hardly
wait. October 2013
.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
Faust. ©2011 This is a four disk dramatization of the
play. It didn’t work for me, and I quit
after the first disk. October 2013
.
David P. Goldman. How
Civilizations Die (And Why Islam Is Dying Too). ©2011 Goldman’s main thesis is that as secularism
replaces religion, fertility declines. When
women become literate, fertility declines.
Soon there are too many old people and not enough young people. Eventually civilizations collapse. He has spent a lot of time with population
figures and predicts doom for many civilizations. In less than a century there will be no Poles
or Iranians. The US will be fine because
we have lots of evangelicals and Catholics and fertility will not drop below the
replacement rate. In a few decades, the
Israelis, who are also rather fecund, will be able to field a larger army than the Germans
and soon after that the Germans will die out. So will the Russians and the
Turks and the Japanese. The whole Muslim
world will soon collapse because of the drastic rates of fertility decline, but
they will be dangerous as they lash out in their death throes. Goldman dashes back and forth through history
to try to support his generalizations and along the way mentions just about every
historical figure I’ve ever heard of (and none that I haven’t). Towards the end he tries to make the case
that the US should never negotiate and should use its power to get what it
wants. It all started with the Cuban missile
crisis when we gave away too much. He really dislikes Muslims and gives plenty of
good reasons why he does, but he doesn’t seem to have thought of trying to get
along with them. Goldman seems unaware
of the mountains of studies that worry about over population outstripping the
earth’s resources. It’s true that Japan
is struggling with the problem of an aging population and many other developed countries
will be too in the near future, but it seems naive to think that human
societies can’t work through this problem.
I think I’m close to the right figures if I say that in the US in the
early 19th C, 90% of the
population was engaged in agriculture and today it’s less than 3% Changes in productivity in many non
agricultural sectors have experienced similar gains. Since we can’t plan on a new green revolution
every decade, maybe it would be a good thing if the earth had a few less
people. You can skip this book. October 2013
.
Tony Hillerman. The
First Eagle. ©1998 Someday I’ll have to try to figure the
chronology of the Hillerman novels. In
this one Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn end up working together again, but Leaphorn
has been retired for a while and Chee is only beginning his relationship with
Bernice. That doesn’t add up. In any event, Leaphorn is hired by a wealthy
widow to find her daughter, a scientist who has been working on hantavirus and bubonic
plague, both of which are endemic in parts of Arizona. Meanwhile Chee has arrested a young Hopi for the
murder of a colleague in the Navaho tribal Police. The two cases come together, the daughter is
found, and so is the real killer. October
2013
.
Ian McEwan. Sweet
Tooth. ©2012 From page one you know you are in the hands
of a great writer. The book is about a
young woman recently graduated from Cambridge named Serena Frome. She is hired by MI5 and tasked with “running”
one of the writers in operation Sweet Tooth, a project to give financial
support clandestinely to young writers whose views coincide with those of the
British government. Serena’s target is
Tom Haley, who has published some short stories and some learned articles which
drew on academic work he had done in international affairs and plans to write a
novel. Serena recruits Tom and then
sleeps with him and they fall in love.
There’s no counter espionage in this one; there’s only the question of
whether Serena should disobey her instructions and tell Tom where she worked
and what would happen if she did or didn’t.
It’s a love story, or maybe two love stories, and a story about
writing. McEwan summarizes three of the
stories written by Haley. I was left
wondering if the stories were something McEwan had in a drawer and never got
around to finishing. October 2013
No comments:
Post a Comment