Hedrick Smith. Who Stole the American Dream?

Hedrick Smith.  Who Stole the American Dream?  ©2012  For the last several years I have been addicted to national and business news.  As a result I found almost nothing new in this book.  Instead I found the most comprehensive and well thought out statement of how shifts in the attitudes of corporate leadership beginning in the early 1970s did just what the title of the book suggests.  Corporate America, aided and abetted by Congress stole the American dream and handed it over to the top 1%, who now account for 23% of all income in the US.  We went from a society with a strong manufacturing sector that provided jobs, decent incomes and pensions for its workers to a society that provides none of that.  In the virtuous circle that prevailed from the end of WW II through the 1960s, workers were well paid and felt their futures were secure.  As a result their spending provided the demand that allowed the economy to continue to grow.  Corporate decisions beginning in the 1970s and perhaps a thousand fold increase in lobbying expenditures resulted in legislation that ended the virtuous circle and benefitted only the very wealthy, the so called “1%.”  This gift to the rich was provided by a Congress that now spends its time raising campaign money instead of looking after the people’s business.  About 50% of baby boomers can look forward to living in poverty until the end of their lives.  Read this book or if you can’t take it all in, read the appendix, which is a chronology of how our economy became so warped that we have an extreme maldistribution of income and millions of formerly so called middle class people living in poverty with little or no hope of ever attaining financial security.  So what do we do about it?  Smith’s answer is political activism.  He lays out a series of recommendations that would basically take us back to the successful traditions of the past where administrations from George Washington through maybe Bill Clinton took leadership to develop infrastructure and promote technological development.   When government performs its leadership role, everyone benefits, both business and the people at large.

Slumberland, Three Day Road, Hold Tight, Atomic Lobster, Suffer the Little Children, The Moonshine War, The White Nile, That Old Cape Magic, Fooled by Randomness, Richard Wright, Black Boy

Paul Beatty.  Slumberland.  Funny, clever, irreverent, scatological.  If you can’t deal with toe jam, stop now.  A young black guy from LA who calls himself DJ Darkie is an accomplished DJ besides having an IQ  that varies between 89 and 174.  Although he had a perfect score of 800 on the SAT’s, counselors didn’t bother to direct him toward math and science in college, and he settled for an associate’s degree in library science and is making his living spinning.  When he puts together a “beat” that is nearly perfect, his friends tell him he can only perfect it if he gets the approval of Schwa or Charles Stone, a legendary jazz musician who hasn’t been seen in years.  In the mail he gets a pornographic video tape with a music track that was definitely laid done by Schwa.  The return address is a bar in Berlin, so he calls there and gets a job as a jukebox sommelier, and begins his search for Charles Stone.  He finds him just after the wall comes down and helps Stone rebuild the wall with music.  None of this makes any sense.  I had no idea what the author was talking about in long passages about music, but who cares.  What a fun ride!  June 2012

Joseph Boyden.  Three Day Road.  June 2012  The three day road is the journey a man takes after death on his way to join the Great Spirit.  Two Cree hunters, Xavier and Elijah, volunteer for service in the Canadian army in WW I.  Xavier and his aunt Niska, the woman who raised him and taught him the old ways, narrate the story.  Both young men are excellent marksmen and are used as scouts and snipers, often operating in no man’s land between the opposing trenches.  Elijah learned his skills from Xavier, but his English is much better and his nature is flamboyant so he becomes the leader of their small team.  He also becomes a morphine addict and adopts a totally amoral and self-promoting attitude.  With Xavier’s help he builds an amazing kill record.  Just days before the end of the war, Elijah is killed.  As Xavier puts Elijah’s documents in his own pockets and prepares to carry his body back to their lines, he is hit by a bursting shell and almost mortally wounded.  He wakes up weeks later in a hospital, where they assume he is the hero sniper Elijah.  Minus a leg, addicted to morphine and close to death, he is handed over to Niska, who takes him away in her canoe and tries to cure him by telling him stories of the old ways.  The story was inspired by a real life Canadian hero, Francis Pegahmagabow, an Ojibway who had 378 kills, received his medals and then was treated very badly by the Department of Indian Affairs.  The theme of disrespect for and discrimination against Indians runs throughout the novel.

Harlan Coben.  Hold Tight.  Coben keeps so many balls in the air that it doesn’t seem possible that he can bring all together at the end in a unified but multifaceted mystery story.  It’s suburban middle class New Jersey.  There are a couple of murders, a teen suicide, some good kids gone temporarily astray, strains between parents and teens, and a homicidal maniac unwittingly unleashed by a teacher in trouble for humiliating one of his students.  The most likeable character is the lady police detective who unravels most of the mystery.   June 2012

Tim Dorsey.  Atomic Lobster.   Serge is an insane criminal genius.  His constant companion is a clueless drugged out alcoholic named Coleman.   Serge is constantly engaged in nutty research projects, which inevitably clash in some way with some criminal enterprise.  His way out is to murder whatever criminal has gotten in his way and some that he just observes in passing like the purse snatcher, whom he knocks out with a crowbar he holds out the window as he drives by him.  That night he ties him to a chair in front of a baseball pitching machine and leaves him there with the machine on and well stocked with balls.  The thief is just a bloody lump by morning.  This was one of at least five murders, he arranged himself, as well as accidentally burning down two houses and setting a couple of gangs up to start killing each other and breaking up a ring that was smuggling Mayan antiquities and cocaine into Florida.  June 2012

Donna Leon.  Suffer the Little Children.  The recorded version of this book is a delightful performance.  We accompany Commissario Guido Brunetti of the Venice police force, who lives a beautiful life, despite having to deal with a daily diet of crime.  We start with an investigation a brutal assault against a local pediatrician by the Carabinieri, who entered the doctor’s flat in the middle of the night to take away the 18 month old boy he was accused of buying from an immigrant Albanian mother.  There are no murders in this story, but the investigation eventually leads Brunetti and his team to identify a self-righteous pharmacist, who uses the information he gleans from patients’ records to punish them for their sins.  It would be a better world if all policemen were like Brunetti and his team.  June 2012

Elmore Leonard.  The Moonshine War.   This one wasn’t very good.  A revenuer tries to horn in on the 150 barrels of bourbon his wartime buddy has hidden somewhere on his farm.  Some really nasty bootleggers also come after the whiskey and eventually the revenuer and his buddy team up and blow up the whiskey and the bootleggers.  I’m not shy about summarizing the plot because it’s all clear from about page 2.  June 2012

Alan Moorehead.  The White Nile.  This history of the exploration of the White Nile was published in 1960 and recounts the exploration of the river in the second half of the 19^th C.  The story of exploration, the search for the source and the attempts by the British and the Egyptian government to hold the areas along the White Nile is told through the experiences of the principal explorers: Burton and Speke, Baker, Grant, Stanley, and Livingston and officials such as Emin and General Gordon.  The explorers did succeed in laying out the course of the river as it flowed through several lakes and an almost impassable swamp, but ironically, according to Wikipedia, no one is yet sure of the exact sourced of the White Nile.  July 2012 

Richard Russo.  That Old Cape Magic.   This is a novel about two marriages, the narrator Jack Griffin and that of his parents.   Jack’s parents were both university professors in Indiana, who regretted through their whole lives that they had not been able to get positions at a prestigious eastern university.  They were mean spirited, unpleasant and rather uninterested in their son.  Jack is 60 when the book opens and he tells his story in flashbacks.  He did hack work as a screen writer after he got his degrees and later moved east to a good school to a tenured position teaching screen writing.  His wife Joy comes from a very normal middle brow family.  They have a good marriage and a wonderful daughter, Laura.  Jack has always shielded Joy and Laura from his parents but he can’t shield himself.  It almost costs him his marriage until he makes one last effort to escape from the imprint his parents seem to have left on him.  Perhaps all of us sometimes feel that when we are acting badly, we are acting out some trait we noticed in one of our parents.  June 2012

Nassim Nicolas Taleb.  Fooled by Randomness.   Taleb gives endless examples of how people make decisions on the basis of faulty information.  He mentions his ideas about black swans, of course, but goes on to describe one trader after another crashing because he or she put too much faith in compilations of data that contained strong elements of unrecognized randomness.  By the time he’s finished, it’s hard to have confidence in anyone, and markets appear to be no more predictable than crap games.   June 2012

Richard Wright.  Black Boy.   This is Wright’s autobiography from his days growing up in Jackson Mississippi through his early adult years in Chicago in the 1930s.  One theme that runs through almost the whole book is hunger and the constant effort to find jobs to stave it off; another is the abominable treatment of blacks in Mississippi and later in Memphis before he moved to Chicago.  He only finished grammar school, but he educated himself by reading and writing and once he had done that he could tell us about the inability of blacks like himself to even imagine a better life for themselves.  In Chicago he joined the Communist Party, having found for the first time an organization that respected blacks and treated them equally.  After several years of trying to play a role in the party, he had to leave because they would not let him think for himself.  I wish I had read this book 50 years ago.  June 2012

The Air We Breathe; Red Gold; The Longest Winter; and The Gambler Butler’s Wager

Andrea Barrett.  The Air We Breathe.   I was in a hurry and thought I was picking up a book about the environment.  Instead I got a wonderful story set in a tuberculosis sanitarium for the indigent In Tamarack Lake, NY starting just before the US enters WW I.  There’s a love story involving a Russian immigrant patient and a nurse’s aide and a tale of unrequited love between a cement factory owner in Tamarack Lake for the cure and a young maid who works at the rest house where he is staying.  For me the real interest was in the description of how tubercular patients were treated at that time, the state of X-ray technology, the labor unrest and desperate poverty among immigrants in the cities and the anti-German and anti-immigrant hysteria that broke out when we entered the war.  May 2012

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Alan Furst.  Red Gold.  Red gold means the money smuggled from Moscow to the Communist Party in France.   Jean Casson is an apolitical French film producer on the skids because of the outbreak of WW II.  When he gets arrested in a roundup of street people, a police inspector gives him the choice of working for the Resistance or going to jail and perhaps falling into the hands of the Gestapo.  He is asked to make contact with the Communist Party’s resistance network.  He helps arrange a transfer to the CP of 600 automatic weapons.  When he loses his Vichy contact, he manages through his wealthy ex-wife to connect with Gaullist forces in London and becomes the liaison between them and the CP.  It’s a good story, particularly the smuggling of the guns from Lebanon to Vichy to Paris.  What’s even more interesting is Furst’s account of daily efforts to survive in wartime Paris and the cynical interplay among bitter political rivals to defeat the common enemy, Hitler’s Germany.  May 2012

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Alex Kershaw.  The Longest Winter.   This is an account of the heroic action of an IR unit of the 99^th Division in the Battle of the Bulge and afterwards when the survivors were POW's.  Eighteen men, whose usual function was reconnaissance patrols, were ordered to dig in and hold their positions against the van of the German advance.  They delayed the German timetable by at least a half a day, which turned out to be critical to the organization of resistance to and counter attack against this totally unexpected German advance into the Ardennes.  Their contribution was not recognized until the 1970s because of a cover up of Gen. Patton’s botched effort to liberate his son-in-law from the POW camp where the 99^th’s IR unit survivors were also interned.  This is not an account of the whole Battle of the Bulge, but instead an in depth and personal record of one small unit’s experiences from induction into the army to long overdue recognition of their bravery and suffering decades later. June 2012 

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James Patterson and Maxine Paetro.  The 9^th Judgment.   What was I thinking!  Patterson has written some pretty good mysteries like the Alex Cross novels, but when he gets together with Paetro, what starts out with a couple of  interesting crimes devolves into a vehicle for explicit sex which contributes nothing but titillation.  I had forgotten that I had tried one of these before and had concluded my note on it with the words “stay away.”  This time I only made it halfway through the second disk  I’ll never know the fate of the lady cat burglar junior high teacher or of the psychopath who shoots a year old baby point blank after killing his mother and plans to murder his own wife and their two children.  Usually when I give up on something, I just cross it off my list and move on, but I have to say again: Stay Away.  May 2012

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Robert J. Randisi.  The Gambler Butler’s Wager.   Ty Butler fled Philadelphia after his father and the rest of his family were murdered.  His father’s lawyer told him that he didn’t know who was responsible for the killings but that Ty was likely to be next.  He headed west, and by the time he gets to Dodge City in 1881 he has killed at least ten men who have attempted to kill him.  He’s become a professional poker player and master of the quick draw.  His first day in Dodge he saves ex-marshal Jim Masterson from being shot in the back in the saloon, where Masterson is half owner.  Soon others come who would eliminate both Butler and Masterson.  The best parts of this are the card by card descriptions of Butler’s poker games.  This looks like the beginning of a series.  June 2012

Recorded Books: Guns, Germs and Steel; Bright-sided; Team of Rivals; The Price of Civilization; The Great Upheaval

Jared Diamond.  Guns, Germs and Steel.   I had meant to read this book when it came out in 1997.  Was there ever a better title?  From the time of the civil rights movement or perhaps earlier I have thought that primitive peoples don’t know less than Harvard Business School graduates, they just know different things.  Diamond suggests that they may be smarter.  In a place like Papua New Guinea before it was “discovered” by Europeans, there was no organized society larger than the band, which consisted of a few interrelated extended families.  The primary cause of death was murder by persons from other bands.  Life was short, but very likely it was the cleverest Papuans who lived long enough to reproduce.  In more complex societies people enjoyed some greater level of protection and therefore the less intelligent members of that society had a greater chance of reproducing.  It seems obvious that over a period of 10,000 years, the average intelligence level among Papuans would rise in comparison to intelligence levels in less selective societies.  Diamond’s years of field work living among Papuans convinced him that the conclusion is valid.  He found that Papuans have an amazing knowledge of every element of the environment in which they live, that they make good decision and they are amazingly curious when they run across something new, for example noticing and investigating everything that was unfamiliar when he took them along to assist him outside their own territories.  Whether he is right or not, this made a great introduction to his thesis that environmental differences determined levels of development throughout the world.  In Papua, the general term for the tangible products of western civilization is “cargo.”  In 1972 Diamond was walking on the beach with a Papuan politician named Yali, when Yali asked him this question:  Why do western countries have so much cargo?  This book is Diamond’s attempt to answer that question.  He identifies four factors that account for differences in levels of development throughout the world before the age of discovery began in the 15^th C CE.

1.  The presence of plant and animal species suitable for the agricultural development necessary to increase food production and support larger and more complex societies.

2.  The ease of diffusion of farming and technology.  East west diffusion in areas with a horizontal axis like the Fertile Crescent is easier because weather conditions are similar throughout whereas a north south axis can be a barrier to diffusion.

3. The ease of intercontinental diffusion.  Advances moved more easily from Eurasia to Africa than to Australia or the Americas.

4.  Within a continental area, development of farming enables larger populations, and these larger groups displace smaller, less technologically advanced groups.  In these larger groups, there are more inventors and innovators and they have much more to work with.

The “guns” and “steel” of the title obviously represent the technological developments that enabled advanced societies to colonize more primitive areas.  The question of “germs” is less obvious and perhaps more interesting.  People living with domestic animals received from them diseases such as small pox and measles and over time developed some immunity to them.  When peoples who had developed without exposure to domesticated animals were exposed to these diseases, 90% or more died.  It is estimated that when the first explorers visited North America, the native population was about 20 million.  By the time settlers arrived, this population may have numbered no more than a million.  Whole societies like the Mississippi culture were wiped out by the spread of disease without ever being exposed directly to a European.  Diamond makes his case well.  His basic tools are archeology and linguistic analysis.  May 2012

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Barbara Ehrenreich,  Bright-sided, How Positive Thinking is Undermining America.   How the pop psych business people must hate this woman!  She starts off with the breast cancer gurus who would tell a woman that she should look at her illness as an opportunity to turn her life around and goes on from there to take on the team builders, motivational speakers, life coaches, mega-church preachers and a host of other hucksters who prey on the public by bringing them feel good messages that will make them healthy, happy and rich.  For the origins of this pseudo psychology she goes back to the 19^th C when Mary Baker Eddy was promoting self cures and proceeds on to Dale Carnegie’s How to Win friends and Influence People in 1936, Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking in 1952 and a host of others since then.  Here are a couple of lines I swiped from a review in the Washington Post: “Crafted as a correction to Calvinism's soul-crushing pessimism, positive thinking, in Ehrenreich's view, has become a kind of national religion, an abettor to capitalism's crueler realities and an overcorrection every bit as anxiety-producing as the Puritans' Calvinism ever was.”   It’s easy to cope with her message about the people marketing hopefulness as some kind of physical science based on quantum physics, but not so easy to sort things out when she takes on Martin Seligman and “positive psychology” and happiness research.  Is “positive psychology” a legitimate branch or subset of psychology or something different?  Her research is thorough but secondary.  She hasn’t “read the literature,” but what she has to say seems worthy of consideration by those who have.  Among the many reviews I read was one by a college professor who offers a course in positive psychology, and he opined that the book was a useful commentary on his discipline.  May 2012

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Doris Kearns Goodwin.  Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln.  I have read many books on Lincoln and the Civil War and this may be the best.  Early in my reading I made a note of an incident that impressed me.  In the 1830s Henry Seward and his wife Frances started off on what was to be a three month tour through the south.  They got as far as Virginia and turned back after seeing the poverty that accompanied slavery and its cruelty, including the sight of a dozen African American boys age 6 to 12 tied together on their way to auction in Richmond.  The main theme of the book is how Lincoln swept his rivals for the presidential nomination in 1860 into his cabinet, thereby unifying the Republican party by including representatives all of its divergent views within his administration.  There are extensive profiles of each of the cabinet members, all of whom started out scorning Lincoln as a dumb country lawyer and all of whom ended up as devoted friends and admirers, except Salmon P, Chase at Treasury who never forgave Lincoln for winning the nomination.  Along the way we learn that Lincoln was a consummate politician and capable of leadership at the highest levels and under the most difficult conditions.  With little military experience, he taught himself to be an effective commander in chief.  I came away admiring not only Lincoln but also Seward and Stanton, both of whom sacrificed much and made important contributions to the success of Lincoln’s presidency.  One thing that struck me was the passions about personal relationships expressed in the letters quoted by Goodwin.  Another was the thought that in this day of email and texting, it may be harder for future historians to reconstruct our time than it was for Goodwin to write about the Lincoln era.  Those people wrote long letters and they kept the ones they received, treasure troves for researchers.  May 2012

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Anne Perry.  Treason at Lisson Grove.   There’s a traitor in the British Special Branch and there are anarchists lurking everywhere.   I started to summarize the plot and that didn’t work, so I’ll just say that this is a pleasant period piece with lots of intrigue and a stay at home spouse who is just as good a detective as her husband.   March 2012

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Jeffrey D. Sachs.  The Price of Civilization, Rewakening American Virtue and Prosperity.   Read this book.  Get everyone you know to read this book.  Dr. Sachs succinctly summarizes everything I have learned in nearly 78 years about politics, economics and sociology.  I can’t say his analysis of what’s wrong with the way we are governing our country and of what we should be doing is brilliant, because it should be totally obvious to any thinking and informed adult who has any concept of social responsibility.  Sachs believes that we need more government, not less, because the market, useful as it is for producing the goods we need or think we need, does not and cannot deliver the public goods and services essential for our society.  Priority areas are education, infrastructure, the environment and science and technology.  He even invokes Hayek and Friedman to help make his case.  America is falling behind other developed countries in most of the areas that really count, principally, education and health.  If we don’t change our ways, we will only fall farther behind.  He demonstrates that we can afford to move forward, if only we can agree to do it.  He gives about equal time to criticizing our two political parties, the Republicans for a totally unrealistic approach to the economy and the Democrats for following the Republicans.  In effect we have two center right parties, who cater to special interests and wealth, with occasional lip service from Democrats about taking on our real problems and investing in our future.   May 2012

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Jay Winik.  The Great Upheaval.  April 2012   I really enjoyed this book but after reading the New York Times Review, I suspect it was a lot better by ear than it would have been on its many, many pages.  http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/15/books/15gord.html   Winik takes us through the last two decades of the 18^th C in Russia, France and North America.  His thesis is that it was in this period that the ideas of Locke, Montesquieu, Voltaire and Rousseau came to fruition and enabled society to make the transition to the modern world.  The acceptance of the Enlightenment was successful in the United States, messy and delayed but eventually successful in France and possible in Russia but then fended off and delayed for 100 years when Catherine the Great changed her mind about adopting liberalism.  I particularly appreciated Winik’s detailed commentary on the events of the French Revolution and also on events in Russia, about which I was relatively ignorant, perhaps because other authors I’ve read did not value the influence of Russia on western events as much as Winik does.

Recorded Books: Palace Council;The Coldest Winter; Jack Kennedy, Elusive Hero; That Old Ace in the Hole; and Naked Lunch

William S. B Burroughs.  Naked Lunch.  March 2012   I picked this off the library shelf because the title was vaguely familiar.  I started and was turned off.  I simply didn’t want to hear it.  A review in the NYRB of  a memoire by the late Richard Seaver, a longtime editor of Grove Press, put the problem into words for.  Naked Lunch is a surrealistic account of the life of a heroin dealer and user.  I have better things to do with my time and so I laid it aside.
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Stephen L. Carter.  Palace Council.  March 2012     The Palace Council is a group of 20 rich and powerful men, many of them the elite of 1950s Harlem, who met on Martha’s Vineyard in 1952 to launch a conspiracy to “shake the throne.”  Those words are from Paradise Lost and the group uses much of the language of the poem as a sort of code for its operations.  The intentions were idealistic, including promoting racial equality, but the methods of some individuals on the Council were self-interested and criminal.  Eddie Wesley is a young black writer from Boston who comes to Harlem in the 1950s seeking a writing career. He becomes a successful novelist and essayist and a confidante of Presidents Kennedy and Nixon as we follow his career from the 1950s through the Nixon years.  Early on his sister, June, disappears immediately after graduating from Harvard Law School and reemerges as the elusive leader of a violent civil rights organization.  Through the whole novel Eddie is trying to find here and, as he searches, he gradually becomes aware of the Council and her connection with it.   This was an enjoyable read but instead of hoping it would never end, I felt just the opposite.  It would have benefited from some serious cutting.
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David Halberstam.  The Coldest Winter.  Halberstam doesn’t need any compliments from me, but I still have to say this is a masterpiece.  The Coldest Winter is his 20^th and last book.  Just a few days after he finished, he was killed in an automobile accident on his way to an interview with Y.A. Tittle to start a new book on football.  Halberstam used hundreds of interviews as material to recreate the war in Korea, from the arrogance of MacArthur and Almond, MacArthur’s  personal pick for command in the field, to the heroism and military skills of subordinate commanders who were put in impossible positions by those two generals, and all of this in the context of miscalculations by Mao, Kim, Stalin and the American leadership in Washington.  I came away with a better understanding of the strategies and tactics in this forgotten war and, I hope, an on-the-ground understanding of what Americans soldiers went through as they fought against the overwhelming numerical superiority of the Chinese forces.  April 2012
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Chris Matthews.  Jack Kennedy, Elusive Hero.  March 2012    Matthews reads the introduction himself and sums up in one sentence why he has done something extraordinary with this book:  To understand who Jack Kennedy was, you have to look behind the glamour.”  (The quote is approximate because I got it, of course, by ear).  The things that struck me were JFK’s constant ill health and pain, the mastery he gradually attained over the political process that enabled him to defeat Lodge for the Senate and then Nixon for the Presidency, and his pretty much single handed resolution of the Cuban missile crisis over the objections of his hawkish generals and cabinet members.
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Annie Proulx.  That Old Ace in the Hole.  After community college and a few odd jobs in Denver, Bob Dollar is hired for his first real job.  He is to be a site scout for a hog production company headquartered in Tokyo, and his assigned territory is the Texas panhandle.  Bob’s supervisor advises him to develop a cover story so that as he goes around trying to find out who might want to sell his farm or ranch, he won’t have to tell the prospective sellers that the property will be used for modern hog production, i.e., operations known for inhumane treatment of animals and a stink that will travel to the next county.   For most of the book Bob’s story seems like a vehicle for telling the stories of panhandle characters, but when Proulx wraps it up in the end Bob lands on his feet as the manager of a program financed by a rich rancher to restore a huge swath of the panhandle to its original state as grazing land for buffalo.  And the stories of the ranchers and farmers, some of whom became oilmen, are funny and fascinating. March 2012

Recorded Books: Tuesdays with Morrie, The Hours, The Sign of the Book, Escape from the Deep and others

Peter Abrahams.  Delusion.  This one is a little different in that the central character is the wife of a police officer.  She met him during the investigation of the murder of her boyfriend and father of her unborn child.  Her eyewitness testimony was conclusive in the conviction of“Pirate” Dupree, a local thug who got life in prison without possibility of parole. Twenty years later after a hurricane remarkably similar to Katrina, FEMA finds a security tape which exonerates Pirate in a locker in the ruined police station.  He is set free and comes back to town.  This unleashes all the ugliness that had been covered up by his conviction.  You will figure out most of it before you get to the finale.  March 2012

 Peter Abrahams.  Behind the Curtain.  I checked this out because I had just read Delusion.  This one is a mystery told from the perspective of a 13 year old girl and is thus classified as “a children’s book.”  It is pretty easy to figure out the mystery, but it was a pleasant enough diversion while vacuuming and like that.  March 2012

Mitch Albom.  Tuesdays with Morrie.   I guess everyone should read this book.  Morrie Schwartz, a sociology professor at Brandeis, was in the early stages of ALS when Mitch Albom, a former student of his, saw an article on him in a Detroit newspaper.  Albom got back in touch with Morrie for the first time since he had graduated 17 years earlier.  Then every Tuesday for 13 weeks he flew the 700 miles from Detroit to visit Morrie and record their conversations.  This was Morrie’s last class; he died on the Saturday after their 13^th session.  What he was teaching was how to live and how to die, and he tasked Albom with writing this story.  Albom wasn’t the only one following Morrie.  Ted Koppel interviewed him three times for nightline and many others came to see him or wrote to him seeking his advice. March 2012  

Michael Cunningham.  The Hours.  I read this a few months ago and couldn’t figure out what to say about it.  I watched the movie for a second time and still couldn’t figure it out.  I checked out Mrs. Dalloway and have been trying to read that but there are too many distractions. I also watched the film, “Mrs. Dalloway,” with Vanessa Redgrave.  From this film plus my limited understanding of The Hours,  I guess I can say that the subject is the choices we make about whom we love and how comfortable we are with our choices.  November 2011  

John Dunning.  The Sign of the Book.  Cliff Janeway, a former police detective and currently the owner of a rare used book store in Denver, agrees to take on an investigation for the defense for a murder in remote Paradise, Colorado.  A woman calls the sheriff’s office and says she has shot and killed her husband.  The sheriff’s deputy who answers the call finds her by the body and her three children in a bedroom.  It seems clear to the defense team that it was her 11 year old autistic son who actually killed the husband and she is trying to protect him.  The house contains 100s or perhaps 1000s of seemingly valuable  autographed books.  The defense strategy is that an unknown person killed the husband and that the mother confession is not valid.  There are wheels within wheels here, a team of crooked book dealers, doubts about the authenticity of the signatures, a sheriff’s deputy who is a loose cannon.  It’s a fun read.  March 2012  

Alex Kershaw.  Escape from the Deep.  This is the story of the US Tang, the WW II submarine which was finally sunk by one of its own torpedoes in the Formosa Straits after the most successful service of any US submarine in WW II.  Its captain and 8 crew members survived the sinking and a brutal captivity by the Japanese.  There have been a number of books about WW II submarines and this is one of the good ones.  The author brings to life a lot of the technical detail of submarine operations and makes it exciting reading.  March 2012

Frances Titchener.  A History of Rome.  This is a recorded course of 14 lectures read by Dr. Titchener.  She has all kinds of academic credits and has received her share of honors and she knows her subject.  I picked up several ideas about Rome and why it fell.  Her view that Christianity replaced the Roman dedication to the state and thus eroded citizens’ faith in and commitment to their government was of particular interest.  The problem is that she talks down to her listeners as if they were college students who were unprepared for college and needed remedial work before they could handle a course that required a little critical thinking.  March 2012