Alexis de Tocqueville. Democracy in America: Excerpts. Originally
published in 1835. A modern introduction
to de Tocqueville’s work summarizes
the struggle in post-Napoleonic France
between the aristocracy and democracy that wasn’t resolved until the Third
Republic and adds some perspective to de Tocqueville’s commentaries and reminds
us that he was an aristocrat writing from an aristocrat’s perspective. De Tocqueville begins by identifying five characteristics
of Americans and American society: (1) lack of distinction between the classes,
(2) the relative absence of military personnel and civil servants, (3) the
violence of the language of the press, (4) the importance of religion in
maintenance of morality, and (5) the excess love of profit to the neglect of
the fine arts. These are probably the
good old days that conservatives would like to bring back, although they would
probably like to keep enough of the military around to wage continuous war in
the Middle East and their politicians and their spokes people seem to have
taken over the violent language role from the press. De Tocqueville and his companion, Gustave de
Beaumont, started in New York and traveled widely to do their study of the
American penal system for the French government, which they published in 1833.
For me the most interesting part of de Tocqueville’s own work (Vol. I, 1835 and
Vol. 2, 1840) was his description of the wretched plight of the Indians in the
Mohawk Valley, former allies of France, who had been reduced to alcoholism and
begging. His main themes were our
Puritan beginning, the Federal Constitution and the status of women. John Stuart Mill praised the second volume,
which is considered the foundation of modern sociology. De Tocqueville’s direct heir was Max
Weber. June 2015
W.E.B. Griffin.
The Assassination Option.
© 2014 This is a thriller built
around the transition after WW II of the OSS into what eventually became the
CIA. A young second lieutenant is bumped
up to captain and made director of intelligence in Germany in an effort by the
White House to create an intelligence structure that would not be dominated by
the military. There’s lots of
bureaucratic infighting, but the only real action is a successful extraction
from Eastern Europe of the family of a KGB defector. It was o.k., but I won’t be going back for
more …. Unless I forget. That sometimes
happens. June 2015
Kristopher Jansma. The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards. © 2013
The unreliable narrator is an aspiring writer, who was raised in North
Carolina by his single mom, a flight attendant.
From early childhood his ambition is to write the Great American Novel. At a small college he rooms with another
aspiring writer, Julian McC ann, a rich kid who is more sophisticated and later
in the book more successful. (Julian has
three different names in the novel). The
two of them get most of the attention from the freshman writing professor as
they compete for success at school and eventual fame and fortune. What he professor tells them over and over is
“Tell all the truth but tell it slant,” a line
from a poem by Emily Dickinson . All the reviews say the narrator is
unnamed, but in the writing class the professor addresses them as Pinkerton and
McCann. Through Julian the narrator meets
Evelyn, an aspiring actress, and falls madly in love. They stay in love but later perhaps she
marries an Indian geologist or a Japanese royal or a Luxemburg prince. In the years after college the narrator gets
a few short pieces published but is never able to write that novel. He does produce an occasional manuscript but
always loses it, one of them down an ice hole in New England. Using a stolen identity he teaches a wildly
successful writing course at a New York university. Julian writes one incredibly successful
novel, an international bestseller, but is never able to repeat that initial
success and spends much of his life having nervous breakdowns. In the second half of the novel, the narrator
travels to exotic places, does some reporting and criticism and keeps working
on a novel. It never works out. I read several reviews. I was amazed at how many different
interpretations there were. I think this
means Jansma accomplished what he set out to do in this first novel. The best of the reviews with the least
annoying pop-ups were in The Village
Voice and Popmatters, a blog, I think.
June 2015
http://www.popmatters.com/review/170675-the-unchangeable-spots-of-leopards-by-kristopher-jansma/
Nigel Jones. Peace and War, Britain in 1914. © 2014 This turned out to be a great read. It’s like a trip through the daily papers in
London in 1914. I wish I had retained
more of what I read; I plan to go back and read this again, because there is so
much there both about everyday life in Britain that was so radically altered by
WW I and about the events that led up to the war. One of the things that struck me was a short
history of the women’s campaign for the fight to vote. The women were really serious and endured,
i.a., arrest and forced feeding to prevent hunger strikes. When forced feeding became politically risky,
the authorities adopted a new policy:
When women in prison lost too much weight, they were released for five
days and then put back in prison. Not
everyone survived the protests. Emily Wilding Davison (11 October 1872 – 8 June 1913) was a militant activist who
fought for women's suffrage in Britain. She was jailed on nine occasions and force-fed 49 times. She is best known for stepping in
front of King George V's horse Anmer at the Epsom Derby on 4 June 1913, She
died four days later from her injuries.
July 2015
Erik Larson. Thunderstruck. © 2006
Larson has carved out his own place as an author who turns real events
into thrillers. In this one he tells two
stories in parallel and then brings them together at the end. The
first is the struggle of Guglielmo Marconi to develop wireless
communication, prove its utility and then defend his interests against other
inventors, several of whom he used badly.
The other is about Hawley Harvey Crippen, a patent medicine man, who
murdered his overbearing wife, dismembered her body, burned or otherwise
disposed of her head, hands and feet and buried what was left under the floor
of his coal bin. When questions started
to be asked about her disappearance, he fled Britain with his young mistress
dressed as a boy and posing as his son.
Scotland Yard was hot on his heels. The murder was a sensation in Britain second
only to Jack the Ripper. In the
introduction the reader already learns that the captain of the ship on which
Crippen sailed for Quebec recognized the couple and reported this by wireless. Nevertheless all the way through I wondered
why Larson didn’t just tell Marconi’s story, which is fascinating all by
itself, but in the end it all becomes clear.
The apprehension of Crippen thanks to the availability of ship to shore
wireless communication was what finally proved to the public, to investors, and
to shipping lines the value of Marconi’s invention. July 2015
John Lescroart. Damage. © 2011
Ro Curtlee was convicted as a
serial rapist and murderer of at least one of his rape victims. His parents were the very rich and
influential publishers of one of San Francisco’s newspapers. As revenge for the conviction, they ruined
the careers of everyone on the prosecution side. Now,
ten years later, the Curtlee’s lawyers have succeeded in an appeal to have the
conviction thrown out on a technicality, and Ro is out until a new trial can be
convened. Within 24 hours after Ro’s
release, the key witness in the first trial is found dead and so badly burned
that there are doubts about whether she can be positively identified. Abe Glitsky, who had been the lead detective
for Ro’s first arrest and trial, has recovered from his reassignment to the
police payroll office and is now Chief of Homicide. When the wife of the jury foreman is found strangled
and immolated, Glitsky and Wes Farrell, the recently elected DA, are convinced
that Ro is out for revenge and some insurance against being convicted in the
retrial. Glitsky has no evidence, and he
and Farrell are constantly harassed by the Curtlees directly and in their
newspaper. Lescroart finds a way out for
Glitsky that is sort deus ex machina. It’s an ending, but….. June 2015
John Lescroart. The Ophelia Cut. © 2013
Brittany Mcquire is drugged and raped
by Rick Jessup, the chief of staff for a San Francisco City Councilman
who aspires to be mayor. 24 hours later
Jessup is found murdered. Everyone
assumes it was Brittany’s father, Moses
McGuire, who did it. His attorney brother-in-law,
Dismas Hardy, takes on his defense. There’s
another agenda here. Hardy and Detective
Abe Glitsky don’t want Moses in jail, because they are afraid he will talk
about something the three of them did ten years earlier. They took the law into their own hands to
waste a couple of truly bad guys. It
turns out the councilman and a Korean businessman who runs a string of massage
parlors have reasons for wanting Jessup dead.
There’s lots going on here and the best of the action is in the
courtroom. July 2015
David Liss. The
Day of Atonement. © 2014 Benjamin Weaver, an ex-boxer and a thief
catcher, takes in a
13-year-old Portuguese boy, Sebastião Raposa, who has been smuggled to London
from Lisbon, where the Portuguese Inquisition has imprisoned and killed his
parents.
The family is of Jewish heritage, but they have been “new Christians” for
several generations. This means nothing
to the Inquisition; the priests want their money. Weaver trains the boy in his craft, and the boy
changes his name to Sebastian Foxx. When
Foxx is old enough, he returns to Lisbon intending to rescue his childhood
sweetheart Gabriela and avenge his parent’s murder. Nothing is as it seems at first. Everyone has an agenda he doesn’t expect,
friends become enemies and enemies become friends. To
right a perceived wrong, he steals a hoard of gold bullion and during the Great
Lisbon Earthquake of November 1, 1755 he rescues Gabriela and her family from
the Inquisition’s prison and gets them and some others on a boat out of Lisbon
to safety. Until I read a review of this
book, I didn’t know that the Benjamin Weaver character has been the principal
character in earlier novels by David Liss.
I’ll be looking for them. July
2015
Matthew Quirk. The 500. © 2012
Mike Ford, a former juvenile delinquent and son of a con-man, finishes
Harvard Law and takes a job with the Davies group, a powerful Washington law
firm that specializes in lobbying. This
is somewhat like John Grisham’s The Firm,
but there are problems. Washington isn’t
run by 500 people, DC police detectives don’t investigate the Federal
Government and Washington law firms don’t keep hired killers on the
payroll. It seems the Davies Group wants
to control everything and is even up to murdering a Supreme Court Justice. As James Grady said in his review in June
2012 in the Washington Post: “In the end, what might have been the sleek story of a
conflicted hero battling for his skin and soul becomes an overburdened saga of
a superhero trying to save the world from a megalomaniac who seeks to dominate
it. Quirk is a proven journalist and a
fine writer with, presumably, other novels to come. But for his fiction debut,
one cliche he should have embraced is that sometimes less is more.” July 2015
John Sandford. Bad Blood. © 2010
I don’t know how it would be to read this book off the printed page, but
I have to say that the audio book as read by Eric Conger is an experience. My favorite flaky detective, Virgil F.
Flowers, simply comes alive. It all
starts when a young guy just out of high school and working at a grain
elevator, hits a farmer on the head with a baseball bat and then buries him
under the load of farmer soy beans he was delivering to the elevator. When he was sure the farmer was dead from
suffocation if the bat hadn’t killed him already, he called the police to
report the “accident.” The boy was
actually avenging some really nasty crimes by the farmer. As the story spins out, Flowers and the very
attractive sheriff uncover a perverse religion that the settlers brought over
from Germany generations ago. It
practices forced wife swapping, group sex, and sexual abuse of children
including incest. The group will do
anything to keep their secret including murder.
July 2015
Allison Weir. Lancaster and York: The War of the Roses. ©
1995 How does one keep track of all
those English kings and their horses and men?
The House of Lancaster started when Henry IV usurped the throne. He was followed by Henry V and then the
infant heir Henry VI. Henry VI was
anything but a dynamic leader, but his Queen, Margaret of Anjou more than made
up for his lack of initiative. This book
is mostly about the struggle between Edward IV of York and Henry VI and
Margaret. There were lots of other players
including especially the Earl of Warwick who was Edward’s mainstay and then turned
against him. It’s amazing how often the two sides fought
and how their fortunes waxed and waned.
It’s a great read, but there is almost too much information. It would be interesting to have a statistical
appendix. I’d like to know just how many
noble heads got cut off. Just so you’ll
know, the only problem at Henry VI’s coronation was head lice. There is a nice summary all the way from
Henry IV to Henry VII in Wikipedia. July
2015 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wars_of_the_Roses
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