David Baldacci. King and Maxwell. © 2013
The two P.I.s, Sean King and Michelle Maxwell, were drummed out of the
Secret Service in some earlier book. In
this one they are about to take off on vacation when they see a teenager
running down a dark road in the rain with a pistol in his hand. They run him down, learn that he’s upset
because the army has just told him and his stepmother that his father has been
killed in Afghanistan. There's something
wrong here, the kid, Tyler Wingo, knows it, and the P.I.s decide to help him
sort it out. The next day Tyler gets an
email from his dad, and he’s sure it’s for real because it has a subtext in a
code only he and his dad know. Tyler’s
dad was on a secret mission to deliver a billion Euros to some Iranian
dissidents. Wingo’s truck was hijacked,
and he went into hiding until he could find out who did it, so that he could
clear his name. It’s up to the P.I.s to
unravel an amazing plot to use the Euros to finance the assassination of the
president using the computer codes that control the functions of his limo, AKA
“The Beast.” The plot was ingenious but
something about this book bothered me.
Maybe the two P.I. s are just too perfect. August 2014
.
Margalit Fox. The
Riddle of the Labyrinth. © 2013 In 1900 while digging
in Crete, Arthur Evans unearthed some clay tablets written in an unknown
language with unknown symbols. When
neither the language nor the writing system is known, decipherment is close to
impossible unless one can find the same text written in a known language, as
happened with the Rosetta Stone. The
newly discovered tablets were clearly not in the same language as that of the
even older Cretan script designated Linear A, but it used many of the same
symbols and was dubbed Linear B
Archeologists and linguists worked on this for years, but it was Alice
Kober, a professor at Brooklyn College, who did what amounts to cryptanalysis
to lay the groundwork for its eventual deciphering by Michael Ventris. She determined it was a syllabary and
identified the signs that showed it was inflected. Toward the end of her research she became ill
and died before she could complete the deciphering, but she left such good
records that Michael Ventris was able to complete her work within a year. The ancient language of Cyprus, which was
written in Linear A, remains unknown.
What Ventris discovered was that those earlier symbols had been adapted
to write an Archaic form of Greek, which had been named Linear B. With this discovery in hand archeologists were
able to compile the early history of Cretan civilization that we know today and
to link it to Mycenae and other ancient Greek sites. July 2014
.
Three
by Alan Furst: I was reading Storm Front by John Sandford when the
prinicipal character, Virgil Flowers, took time out to read Furst’s Red Gold, the sequel to The World at Night, see below. This was a nice tribute from one great mystery
writer to another.
.
Alan Furst. Dark
Star. © 1991 Andre Szara is a foreign correspondent for Pravda, who is occasionally or maybe too
often asked to do little jobs for the Soviet security services. He’s a Polish Jew with Russian citizenship
who has survived Polish pogroms and Russian civil wars. Eventually he is co-opted by the NKVD in 1937
and becomes a full time spy master in Paris.
The more I read of Alan Furst, the more I am convinced that his goal is
to document what went on behind the scenes and will never appear in standard
works of history. He is documenting the
terror and banality of clandestine intelligence operations and, in some of
these novels, the heroic efforts made to save as many Jews as possible. This novel in one in a series of 11 called The Night Soldiers. July 2014
.
Alan Furst. Spies
of Warsaw. © 2008 In 1937 in Warsaw the French military attaché,
Colonel Mercier, runs an operation that penetrates the war plans bureaucracy in
Berlin and obtains German war plans to bypass the Maginot line and invade
France through Belgium. Petain refuses
to believe it. As always with Furst,
individual characters and the subplots are at least as interesting as the
principal narrative. July 2014
.
Alan Furst. The
World at Night. © 1996 This is the predecessor to Red Gold, in which film producer Jean Casson, is coopted by the
French police to join the Resistance. In
this one, he sort of drifts into an active role and spoils a Germans plans for an
operation. More interesting, perhaps,
are his efforts to maintain his relationship with his lover, an actress who has
moved to Vichy. July 2014
.
Christopher Hibbert. Agincourt. ©
1964 This is the story of Henry V's invasion of France in 1415 and his
victory near the castle of Agincourt over a heavily armed French force that
outnumbered his by at least 4 to 1.
Hibbert documents the elaborate preparations that were needed to finance,
recruit and equip and transport an army of about 7000 plus their horses and
gear across the channel to Honfleur.
After taking that city, they planned to march to Calais with about 5,000
men. Near Agincourt Henry's army met the French. The English victory seems to have been the
result of field position and the effectiveness of the longbow. The field was muddy which made movement
difficult for the heavily armored French and it gradually narrowed between
groves of trees on each side which forced the French together ever more closely
as they advanced, even to the point where some of them could not get enough
room to use their weapons. Meanwhile the
tree line on each side provided positions for the English archers, who launched
their arrows with devastating effect. Some
of the French men at arms fell and could not get up and eventually either smothered
or were killed by the archers who dropped their bows and picked up the weapons
dropped by the French. It was a great
English victory but had little positive effect on Henry's territorial claims. There is much debate about what kind of
leader Henry was, and that is not settled in this book. He certainly was decisive and cold
blooded. After the first two French
lines had been overwhelmed and many prisoners taken for ransom, it looked like
the third line might launch an attack.
Henry did not have enough people to guard the prisoners and repulse the
attack so he had the prisoners killed.
Such was life during the Hundred Years War. August 2014
.
John Sandford. Storm
Front. © 2013 After 24 Lucas Davenport novels, let's hope Sanford
will concentrate on Virgil Flowers, who is a lot more fun. This crazy plot starts off with Elijah Jones,
an American professor and clergyman, who is dying of cancer, stealing a stele
from a dig in Israel and smuggling it back to the US to sell to the highest
bidder. He wants the money to support his
wife, who is in a home for Alzheimer patients.
There’s a lot of interest because the text on one side in hieroglyphics tells
of the glory of an Egyptian pharaoh and the text on the other side in ancient
Hebrew script tells the same story, but the king is named Solomon. If it’s genuine, it could cause a lot of
reinterpretation of the Bible and cast doubt on the legitimacy of Israel. All sorts of people come out of the woodwork:
two very dangerous Turks who are buyers for someone in Istanbul, representatives
of Hezbollah, two women representing Israel, one of whom is legit, and two
antiquities adventurers, one a TV personality and the other a Texan working for
a couple of oilmen. Flowers has to keep
track of all of them while he tries to find Jones and the stone. The whole thing is just non-stop surprise and
the writing never fails to please.
Sample: When the stones were
fitted together, an ant couldn’t have crawled through the crack on his hands
and knees. And even the paleologist Virgil
meets in Israel knows that he's called “that fucking Flowers.” August 2014
.
Russell Shorto. Amsterdam. ©
2013 The subtitle is “A
History of the World’s Most Liberal City.”In effect this history of Amsterdam could
be considered a history of liberalism itself.
The book starts with Shorto interviewing an 86 year old Auschwitz
survivor who new Anne Frank when they were young girls. She says that Anne was quite a free
spirit. Then there is a quick shift to the
nature of the city. Perhaps it started
with water. To reclaim land, people had
to work together to build dikes, canals and windmills and when the land was
cleared it was theirs, not the property of some aristocrat. In the 1500s they invented the stock market,
pretty much the basis of a free society.
The cooperation on water seems to have carried over into the herring
trade and many Dutchmen got very rich from fishing and trading. With the Reformation, secular authority
replaced the church, which in turn opened the way to scientific research. Add to this the early adoption of printing
and you have the major elements of modern, liberal society. He notes that the VOC, the Dutch East India
Company, was the first multi-national corporation. Eventually the Dutch were able to eject their
Spanish overlords and continue their liberal traditions right down to today. July 2014
.
Stendahl. The
Red and the Black. I do know why I didn’t read this 60 years
ago. It’s critical of the Catholic
Church and my Jesuit mentors wanted to protect me from error. Sheesh.
Apparently Julien Sorel is
considered one of the three great characters of 19th C ficton. (I wonder who the other two are). As I read this thing I could see how it had
been mined by those who came after it, but I really didn’t care for it. It’s a social critique of society under the
Bourbon Restoration (1815-1830), but I had a hard time distinguishing this set
of rich, self-centered people from similar sets in other periods. Maybe it was better in French. Both of the love affairs are ridiculous as
was Julien’s attempt at murder, and his decision not to appeal his conviction. So now I’ve read it and read some commentary,
and I wonder why I stayed with it to the end. August 2014
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