William Boyd. Waiting
for Sunrise. © 2012 The book opens in Vienna just before WW I
with Lysander Rieff, a British actor, seeing a Freudian psychiatrist in hope of
a cure for a sexual dysfunction. He
meets Hetty, a patient of the same shrink, and they have some very satisfactory
sex. He’s cured. Lysander writes his fiancée back in London
and breaks off their engagement.
Unfortunately Hetty lives with a very unpleasant and very influential Austrian
lover. When Hetty turns up pregnant, the
lover insists she charge Lysander with rape.
He ends up in the slammer. The British
secret service bails him out and helps him skip. He ends up owing them 10 thousand pounds for
the bail plus expenses. After war breaks
out, the service comes to collect, that is to forgive the debt if he will do a little
job for them in Switzerland. He turns
out to be a pretty clever spy. This was
one of those novels where the plot is pretty interesting, but somehow it’s hard
to relate to the main character.
November 2014
.
Vincent Cannato. American
Passage: The History of Ellis Island.
© 2011 I wasn’t
sure I wanted to read this. I’m glad I
did. The issues haven’t changed much in
125 years, and we are still fighting the same policy battles we fought 125 years
ago. From 1855 to 1890, Castle Garden on
the Battery at the tip of Manhattan was the official processing center for immigrants
arriving in New York. Unfortunately the
immigrants processed there were at the mercy of runners, who grabbed their bags
and led them to overpriced boarding houses, where they could be fleeced of
whatever they had left after paying their passage and their entry fee. It was closed down in 1890, and Ellis Island
was opened in 1892. For the interim,
immigrants were processed at the Barge Office on the Battery. Ellis Island was closed down as an
immigration center in 1954 and had a rather checkered history after that until
it finally became a national park. The
narrative follows the careers of the several directors and the stories of some
of the immigrants. Most interesting to
me were the attitudes of the politicians in Washington and the immigration
officials on the island. Some were very
liberal and others sounded like Fox News.
Sanitary conditions weren’t very good at Ellis, including during the
rather cruel medical exams, the eye exams in particular. Inevitably every imaginable theory about the superiority
of some races over others was expressed and sometimes acted upon. The word “moron” was coined on the
island. Twelve million
immigrants passed through the halls of Ellis Island from 1892 to 1954. There
were several other entry points for immigrants, but Ellis Island seems to be a
symbol for them all. I was
interested learn that Fiorello LaGuardia was an inspector there for three years
while he went to law school at night. He
was trilingual in English, Italian and Croatian. November 2014
.
Haruki Murakami. Colorless
Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. © 2014
After reading Murakami’s 1Q84,
I didn’t know what to expect when I started this. This time there was only one moon and one
world. A Japanese engineer, age 36, has
recovered physically but not psychologically from the sudden and total
rejection of the peer group with whom he had been best friends all through high
school. He’s called colorless, because
he was the only one in this group of five who didn’t have a name that meant a
color. The others were two boys named
Aoi and Aka, red and blue, and two
girls, Kuro and Shiro, black and white.
Tsukuru’s name means maker. They
grew up in Nagoya and Tsukuru was the only one who went away to college. He studied engineering in Tokyo and lived in
a condo provided by his well to do father.
When he went home for a visit in his sophomore year, he could not get in
touch with any of the four. Finally he
was able to talk to one of the boys, who told him never to call any of them
again. When he asked why, the boy said:
“You know why,” and hung up. He was so
devastated at the loss of his friends, his only friends, that he almost
died. After five months of grieving, he
started to recover his health and get on with his life, but, with one
exception, he was never able to develop new friendships, and the one friendship
lasted only 8 months. Finally Tsukuru
meets a woman who interests him. She
recognizes that he has a problem that he must solve before he gets on with his
life and his relationship with her. She
insists that he talk to his former friends in Nagoya and try to find out what
actually happened. He does, and that’s
what the novel is about. Murakami drills
deep into the psyches of his characters, and
as we learn about their inner lives we learn a lot about what makes
Japanese different from us and also how much we share with them in our inner
selves. Murakami often digresses to
examine some arcane subject like the history of people with six fingers or the
ins and outs of the construction of railroad stations, and he never fails to
tie these into the main line of his narrative to heighten our understanding of
where he is taking us. I’m not sure
reading this was a pleasure, but it was certainly fascinating, and I’m glad I read
it. November 2014
.
Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy. The Men Who Lost America, British
Leadership, the American Revolution and the Fate of the Empire.
© 2013 Ten biographic sketches of
British leaders tell the story of the American Revolution as seen from
London. The reader goes back and forth
in time as the author moves ahead from one sketch to another. Instead of confusing things, it seems to
bring greater clarity to the narrative – sort of like listening to Bolero.
The subjects of the sketches are:
George III –“the driving force behind the war;” Prime Minister Lord
North; General Sir William Howe; his brother, Admiral Lord Richard Howe;
General John Burgoyne; Lord George Germain, First Viscount Sackville and
Secretary of State for America; Sir Henry Clinton; Lord Cornwallis; Admiral Sir
George Rodney; and John Montague, Earl of Sandwich and First Lord of the
Admiralty. I knew nothing of Lord North
and his story turned out to be the most interesting, particularly his
interaction with George III. The king
was all in for winning the war outright and threatened to abdicate after
Yorktown rather than accept defeat. North
recognized early on that the war was unwinnable and repeatedly tried to
resign. The king would not allow
it. From Lord North’s sketch I learned
something I didn’t know about the tea tax.
It was accompanied by the withdrawal of an export tax and would have
made tea cheaper in the colonies. Its
purpose was to establish the Crowns’ right to tax the colonies. Americans’ rejection of the tea tax led to the
coercive acts (Intolerable Acts) of 1774.
The Americans blamed North and were not open to his efforts in 1775 to abolish
the taxes, if the American would agree to tax themselves and make some
contribution to the cost of administering the colonies. The
last two bios were also of particular interest, because they cover the naval
war in the Caribbean and the manning and supply problems the navy experienced
during the war. I wish Robert McNamara
had been able to read this book before he committed us to all out war in
Vietnam. I was amazed at how similar the
situation was, a war unwinnable by a great power engaged by an ill-equipped but
determined indigenous population. Now
I’m wondering if we aren’t facing the same situation in Syria and
Afghanistan. November 2014
.
Simon Winchester. Fracture
Zone: A Return to the Balkans. ©
1999 This seems to be part travelogue and part
reporting on the horrors of the breakup of Yugoslavia. Winchester first visited the Balkans in the
early 70s. He was driving his aging
Volvo from London to India for an assignment there. He recalls stopping for lunch in a beautiful
meadow. When he returned in 1999, he
found that the meadow had been the site of a massacre of thousands. He started his 1999 venture into the Balkans
in Vienna, where he got special permission to see the head of the Grand Vizier,
whom the Sultan had had strangled after he led Ottoman forces to defeat by Jan
Sobieski and others before the walls of Vienna in 1689. As he moves on by train he wonders if the
broken topography was a factor in the separateness and strife that
characterizes the Balkans. They’re all
Slavs, but some are Muslims, some are Orthodox Catholics and some are Roman
Catholics. They can live together in
peace for years and then suddenly they all hate each other. One of the flash points was the Krajina, a
crescent shaped territory in Croatia. In
the 17th C it was mostly unoccupied, and the Hapsburgs moved about
30,000 Serbs into the area as a barrier against the Turks. In 1995
the Croats systematically massacred the Serbs there and forced as many as
100,000 to flee. Winchester visited
Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina. It was besieged by the Army of Republika Srpska from 5 April 1992
to 29 February 1996, the longest siege of a capital city in the history of
modern warfare. He entered Kosovo with
British KFOR forces in 1999. The Serbs
did not leave willingly. Virtually all of the houses in Muslim areas were
destroyed and the abandoned Serb houses were untouched. It was a case of ethnic hatred and economic
envy. The rich Muslims were attacked
first, then everyone else. From Kosovo
he drove on to Sophia. He makes it sound
like a nice place – maybe he was relieved after experiencing the horrors of the
former Yugoslavia -- and follows with a brief sketch on the Bulgarians. Their three products are roses of attar,
horse radish and yogurt, which they invented.
He didn’t mention their long wine list until he described a dinner he
had there. They are the origin of the
word “bugger,” from the name of an 11th C sect known for infamous
practices. At one time Bulgarians were known as the nicest people in Europe, but
that reputation was somewhat sullied by Bulgaria’s notorious secret service,
which sent a Turk to try to kill John Paul II and another assassin to poison a
BBC employee by jabbing his leg with an umbrella tipped with ricin. Winchester went on to Istanbul, where an
engineer friend let him walk across the Bosphorus on a cable strung as a start
on a new bridge. He claims to be the
first person to walk across. That may be
so on that particular bridge but Darius had a pontoon bridge built sometime
before 485 BCE and then there’s the modern suspension bridge dedicated in 1973.
November 2014
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