My Take: I found “Band of Brothers” to be a deeply frustrating book to read. On the one hand, the story of Easy Company is more than compelling. The company featured prominently in D-Day, Operation Market Garden, The Battle of the Bulge and the famous siege at Bastogne, the liberation of Nazi Concentration Camps and the occupation of Goering’s Palace and Hitler’s Eagles Nest. Further, the fact that the Company was a volunteer unit formed before the war offered “Band of Brothers” a group of characters that readers could get to know and follow throughout Easy Company’s experiences.

However, these strengths are more than off-set by two major, and in my mind related, weaknesses in this book.

First, Ambrose completely over-eggs the dramatic story telling aspect of the book. I’m certainly not against using a dramatic narrative to improve the accessibility of history, in fact there’s clearly a lot of value in this, but at times “Band of Brothers” read like a teenage boy’s G.I. Joe Fan Fiction. I wish I was exaggerating in this regard, but take for example the following, not atypical paragraph:

“Get ‘em?” Winters yelled. Lorraine hit one with his tommy-gun, Winters aimed his M-1, squeezed and shot his man through the back of his head. Guarnere missed the third Jerry, but Winters put a bullet in his back. Guarnere followed that up by pumping the wounded man full of lead from his tommy-gun. The German kept yelling, “Help! Help!” Winters told Malarkey to put one through his head.”

I’m sure I’m not the only non-American who was grimacing while reading the passages like this. What made this even more frustrating was that the substance of Easy Company’s war experiences were more than dramatic enough without the jingoistic, melodramatic flourishes. The “Fan Boy” dramatic passages of the book were both embarrassing and unnecessary.

The second glaring weakness of “Band of Brothers” was the complete lack of perspective and objectivity that Ambrose shows throughout the book. Ambrose doesn’t just describe Easy Company’s exploits with added schlock, he views them through rose coloured glasses tinted with the Stars and Stripes. As described in Band of Brothers, Easy Company were the All-American, pure of heart, defenders of democracy and the Free World. He’s so close to his subject that he is completely unable to position the Company’s actions within any kind of broader context or offer any meaningful insight into the experience of war.

It is clear from even a superficial reading that “Band of Brothers” is heavily dependent on the accounts of members of Easy Company. Even more disturbingly, Ambrose offers little or no critical perspective on these accounts. Jarringly, at one point, after quoting extensively from a Staff Sergeant’s account of a heroic battle field experience, Ambrose goes so far as to add the following post script:

“If that sounds idealised, it can’t be helped; that is the way Lipton and many others in Easy, and many others in the Airborne and through the American Army – and come to that, in the German and Red Armies too – fought the war.”

Forgive me if I become sceptical when historians are defending ‘idealised’ accounts of the experience of war. Ambrose genuinely sounds more like a cheer-leader than a historian at times in this book.

Even worse, Ambrose has been caught out a number of times copying extracts from veteran’s accounts almost verbatim. As Patricia Nelson Limerick, a professor of history at the University of Colorado has observed:

“You can’t get a more striking example of lack of critical distance from your sources than simply typing it into your own word processing program,” said

After reading philosophically substantial war historians like Antony Beevor and Vassily Grossman, “Band of Brothers” feels more akin to reading a comic book account of war – a one-dimensional, triumphalist sketch of something far more complex and nuanced.  I suppose “Band of Brothers” works as a piece of pop non-fiction written for an American audience – it certainly sold enough copies. But for those wanting a bit more substance and perspective and a bit less myth-making and self congratulation, there are far better options.

Highlight:

“Webster (a Harvard English literature graduate and member of Easy Company) went back to the road to get in on the shooting. A German turned to fire back. “What felt like a baseball bat slugged my right leg,” Webster recalled, “spun me around, and knocked me down.” All he could think to say was, “They got me!” which even then seemed to him “an inadequate and unimaginative cliché.”

Synopsis:

My Take: While I’m not much of a science fiction fan (relative to its real adherents), as a general principle I do try to give the seminal authors of all genres the benefit of the doubt. Most of the time, if you’re the best of breed in one genre, you probably have something to offer people outside of your niche. As a result, H. P. Lovecraft has always been on my list of authors to give a try.

His work, most of which was released in the mid-1920s has been deeply influential both within the Sci-Fi community (frequent references to his work on Boing Boing is a testament to this) and a broader fraternity of artists who take a darker perspective on the progress of human civilisation (including Stephen King, Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Guillermo Del Toro, and Jorge Luis Borges). Writing before the Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror genres were even recognised (they were collectively referred to as simply weird fiction at the start of the 20^th Century) Lovecraft has subsequently become a canonical writer in all three.

So with this in mind, thanks to my trusty Kindle, copyright expiry and Project Gutenberg, I recently sat down with Lovecraft’s most famous work “The Call of the Cthulhu”.  TCOTC tells the story of a young man who stumbles across a pre-historic blood cult that worships extra-terrestrial beings who look like a cross between a squid, a dragon and a man and inhabited the earth before mankind. In the abstract, it all sounds more than a little absurd, but Lovecraft is a dab hand at the art of story-telling and “The Call of the Cthulhu” unfolds with impressive suspense through three independent, documentary style narratives. While each narrative largely stands alone, as each develops, the narrator reveals a bigger, horrifying picture to the reader.

Lovecraft’s admiration of Edgar Allan Poe and the influence that the great author had on his work is obvious in TCOTC. Despite its globe-wide setting, the book’s first person retrospective format gives the story a dark and claustrophobic feel. Overall, it’s first class horror. Amusingly enough, despite its fame and cultural influence Lovecraft himself was not particularly enamoured with TCOTC describing it as:

“rather middling—not as bad as the worst, but full of cheap and cumbrous touches.”

I think Lovecraft is being a bit hard on himself here. Yes, it’s a bit absurd – but it’s well told and atmospheric – more than enough for a good ‘weird fiction’ tale.

Highlight:

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.” Lovecraft’s protagonists are nevertheless driven to this “piecing together,” which becomes a primary plot device in many of his works.

My Take: You know you’ve written a story that has really had an impact on popular culture when it forms the basis of not one, but two episodes of The Simpsons. Throw in an Academy Award winning movie adaptation, a Hugo Award for Best Short Story and a Nebula Award for Best Novel and you’ve got a real cultural icon.

“Flowers for Algernon” (first published as a short story in 1959 and as a novelisation in 1966) tells the story of Charlie Gordon, a middle aged intellectually disabled man, and Algernon, a laboratory mouse, who both undergo experimental surgery to triple their IQ.  Told in the first person via contemporaneous entries in Charlie’s personal journal (an ‘epistolary novel’ for the pedants), Keyes’ story explores a number of complex moral and philosophical questions through his protagonist’s intellectual awakening. Given that “Flowers for Algernon” tackles subjects as significant as the meaning of happiness, the relationship between the intellectual and the emotional and the proper role of science in an engaging and accessible way, it’s easy to see why it has had such an impact.

The central dramatic engine of “Flowers for Algernon” is provided by Charlie’s growing understanding of the world around him. This knowledge opens up new worlds and opportunities for Charlie – both intellectual and emotional, but it also destroys many of his simpler pleasures as well as the naïve illusions that have protected him from hurt in the past. Most challengingly, his ever increasing IQ allows Charlie to understand both what has been done to him in the past – by family, friends and his doctors – as well as what lies in his future. In light of Charlie’s tormented sentience, the reader is left to ask whether he would have been better off remaining in blissful ignorance. Thought-provoking and engaging reading.

Highlight:

“Now I understand that one of the important reasons for going to college and getting an education is to learn that the things you’ve believed in all your life aren’t true, and that nothing is what it appears to be.”

Synopsis:

My Take: Strangely enough for a recent Pulitzer Prize winner, I only heard about Junot Diaz’s “The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” whilst perusing a few ‘Best books of the Noughties’ lists earlier this year. I’m not sure how I missed it when it was released in 2007 because it’s just the kind of thing that I’m naturally drawn to – a quirky, cross-cultural narrative with a prose that fizzes and pops with life. Better late than never though I guess, because “The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” is one of the best books I’ve read in recent times.

TBWLOW is a difficult book to categorise. It somehow manages to combine elements of an urban modernist tale, a multi-generational family epic, a cultural history of the Dominican Republic and a magical realist fable into a genuinely unique literary form. Similarly, it’s not often you read prose that combines Hispanic street slang, obscure science fiction references, high literary allusions and magic realist metaphors in a single novel. It’s bizarre – but it works.

These disparate literary forms are bound together by the eponymous Oscar de Leon (mockingly known as “Oscar Wao” in reference to the Spanish pronunciation of Oscar Wilde, whom Oscar’s peers disparagingly claimed he resembled when in costume as Dr Who). Oscar is a strange and sad protagonist. Growing up as a poor Hispanic immigrant in Patterson, New Jersey, Oscar is saddled with the dual burdens of a morbidly obese frame and a personality shaped by his devotion to Science Fiction/Fantasy (or as Oscar describes the “the more speculative genres”).

As Yunior, the third-person narrator of Oscar’s story sums it up “Our hero was not one of those Dominican cats everybody’s always going on about – he wasn’t no home-run hitter or a fly bachatero, not a playboy with a million hots on his jock”. These afflictions are particularly tragic because beneath his overweight and nerdy exterior beats the heart of a hopeless romantic. Oscar is no wall flower – against all odds he continues to put himself out there in pursuit of his frequent crushes however his appearance and his “Dune” allegories, “The Matrix” quotes and “Lord of the Rings” references are unable to win him even a single kiss (strangely enough proclaiming that a girl is “orchidaceous” is not a winning strategy). Even worse, Oscar knows he needs to lose the weight, as well as the comic books and role-playing games if he is going to get the girl, but for some reason is powerless to become the master of his own destiny.

This is where TBWLOW takes a very strange turn. Through the eyes of Oscar’s mother, Beli, and his sister, Lola, TBWLOW takes on an epic aspect and Diaz portrays the sweep of Dominican history and the story of the D.R.’s U.S. Diaspora on a grand scale. We learn that a run in with the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic two generations ago has left Oscar’s family as the victim of a ‘Fuku’, a curse that pervades all aspects of the family’s life.  As this new aspect of the story unfolds, a strong magic realist thread emerges opening up a completely unexpected dimension to the novel.

It’s all very strange, but somehow it works perfectly. The novel never seems to jar despite the jumble of literary methods it employs and the core narrative of the story feels like it is unfolding completely naturally. It’s only when you look back on the story and think “how did I get here?” that you realise the strange mix of approaches that are brewing in this novel.

I can’t recommend the Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao enough.

Highlight:

Sophomore year Oscar’s weight stabilized at about two-ten (two-twenty when he was depressed, which was often), and it had become clear to everybody, especially his family, that he’d become the neighborhood pariguayo. He wore his semikink hair in a Puerto Rican Afro, had enormous Section-8 glasses (his anti-pussy devices, his boys Al and Miggs called them), sported an unappealing trace of mustache, and possessed a pair of close-set eyes that made him look somewhat retarded. The Eyes of Mingus (a comparison he made himself one day, going through his mother’s record collection; she was the only old-school Dominicana he knew who loved jazz; she’d arrived in the States in the early sixties and shacked up with morenos for years until she met Oscar’s father, who put an end to that particular chapter of the All-African World Party). Throughout high school he did the usual ghettonerd things: he collected comic books, he played role-playing games, he worked at a hardware store to save money for an outdated Apple IIe. He was an introvert who trembled with fear every time gym class rolled around. He watched nerd shows like “Doctor Who” and “Blake’s 7,” could tell you the difference between a Veritech fighter and a Zentraedi battle pod, and he used a lot of huge-sounding nerd words like “indefatigable” and “ubiquitous” when talking to niggers who would barely graduate from high school.

He read Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman novels (his favorite character was, of course, Raistlin) and became an early devotee of the End of the World. He devoured every book he could find that dealt with the End Times, from John Christopher’s “Empty World” to Hal Lindsey’s “The Late Great Planet Earth.” He didn’t date no one. Didn’t even come close. Inside, he was a passionate person who fell in love easily and deeply. His affection—that gravitational mass of love, fear, longing, desire, and lust that he directed at any and every girl in the vicinity—roamed across all Paterson, affixed itself everywhere without regard to looks, age, or availability. Despite the fact that he considered his affection this tremendous, sputtering force, it was actually more like a ghost because no girl ever seemed to notice it.

Anywhere else, his triple-zero batting average with the girls might have passed unremarked, but this is a Dominican kid, in a Dominican family. Everybody noticed his lack of game and everybody offered him advice. His tío Rodolfo (only recently released from Rahway State) was especially generous in his tutelage. We wouldn’t want you to turn into one of those Greenwich Village maricones, Tío Rodolfo muttered ominously. You have to grab a muchacha, broder, y méteselo. That will take care of everything. Start with a fea. Coge that fea y méteselo! Rodolfo had four kids with three different women, so the nigger was without doubt the family’s resident metiéndolo expert.

Oscar’s sister Lola (who I’d start dating in college) was a lot more practical. She was one of those tough Jersey Latinas, a girl soccer star who drove her own car, had her own checkbook, called men bitches, and would eat a fat cat in front of you without a speck of vergüenza. When she was in sixth grade, she was raped by an older acquaintance, and surviving that urikán of pain, judgment, and bochinche had stripped her of cowardice. She’d say anything to anybody and she cut her hair short (anathema to late-eighties Jersey Dominicans) partially, I think, because when she’d been little her family had let it grow down past her ass—a source of pride, something I’m sure her rapist noticed and admired.

Oscar, Lola warned repeatedly, you’re going to die a virgin.

Don’t you think I know that? Another five years of this and I’ll bet you somebody tries to name a church after me.

Cut the hair, lose the glasses, exercise. And get rid of those porn magazines. They’re disgusting, they bother Mami, and they’ll never get you a date.

Sound counsel, which he did not adopt. He was one of those niggers who didn’t have any kind of hope. It wouldn’t have been half bad if Paterson and its surrounding precincts had been, like Don Bosco, all male. Paterson, however, was girls the way N.Y.C. was girls. And if that wasn’t guapas enough for you, well, then, head south, and there’d be Newark, Elizabeth, Jersey City, the Oranges, Union City, West New York, Weehawken—an urban swath known to niggers everywhere as Negrapolis One. He wasn’t even safe in his own house; his sister’s girlfriends were always hanging out, and when they were around he didn’t need no Penthouses. Her girls were the sort of hot-as-balls Latinas who dated only weight-lifting morenos or Latino cats with guns in their cribs. (His sister was the anomaly—she dated the same dude all four years of high school, a failed Golden Gloves welterweight who was excruciatingly courteous and fucked her like he was playing connect the dots, a pretty boy she’d eventually dump after he dirty-dicked her with some Pompton Lakes Irish bitch.) His sister’s friends were the Bergen County All-Stars, New Jersey’s very own Ciguapas: primera was Gladys, who complained constantly about her chest being too big; Marisol, who’d end up in M.I.T. and could out-salsa even the Goya dancers; Leticia, just off the boat, half Haitian, half Dominican, that special blend the Dominican government swears no existe, who spoke with the deepest accent, a girl so good she refused to sleep with three consecutive boyfriends! It wouldn’t have been so bad if these girls hadn’t treated Oscar like some deaf-mute harem guard; they blithely went on about the particulars of their sex lives while he sat in the kitchen clutching the latest issue of Dragon. Hey, he would yell, in case you’re wondering, there’s a male unit in here. Where? Marisol would say blandly. I don’t see one.

Synopsis: Bored New York psychiatrist begins living his life according to the roll of a dice in order to escape the constraints of his personality.  Unpredictable, but ultimately boring.

My Take: There’s promise in the premise of this book. I first heard of “The Dice Man” gimmick via the highly entertaining Discovery Channel travel series of the same name. The concept of someone making decisions according to the roll of a dice certainly adds a healthy dose of conflict and unpredictability to a narrative.  Similarly, a mechanism that allows an individual to explore one’s ‘minority self’, the ‘parts’ of you that might want to do something unusual that are ordinarily repressed by your dominant personality, is also intriguing.

However, I just couldn’t get onto this novel’s wavelength. After finishing it, I couldn’t quite work out whether it was satire (and if so, what the main target was – 70s psychiatry? Society in general?), whether it was intended to be subversive or whether it was simply a comic farce. Of course, it shouldn’t matter what the book’s purpose/genre is so long as it’s engaging, but while it is amusing in parts, the novel’s plot aimlessly meanders for so long that by the end, the appeal of the gimmick is thoroughly exhausted.

And so as I was reading “The Dice Man” I was left wondering “What is the point?”. On the one hand the novel is clearly scathingly and amusingly satirical about 70s psychiatry. However, one the other at times the book seems to come perilously close to genuine advocacy of “dice life” as a response to the repressive absurdities of modern society.  If you think that this is a naïve reading of an intentionally satirical text, consider that the author claims to have actively used ‘dicing’ himself for a decade before writing “The Dice Man” after musing on the nature of freedom while teaching Nietzsche and Sartre as a psychology lecturer.  I may be wrong, but there were plenty of moments while reading “The Dice Man” that my mindset shifted from ‘This is amusing’ to ‘This is absurd’.

While it’s not without redeeming characteristics, unfortunately, I can’t recommend “The Dice Man” to others.

Highlights:

“I shared my office on 57th Street with Dr Jacob Ecstein, young (thirty-three), dynamic (two books published), intelligent (he and I usually agreed), personable (everyone liked him), unattractive (no one loved him), anal (he plays the stock market compulsively), oral (he smokes heavily), non-genital (doesn’t seem to notice women), and Jewish (he knows two Yiddish slang words). Our mutual secretary was a Miss Reingold. Mary Jane Reingold, old (thirty-six), undynamic (she worked for us), unintelligent (she prefers Ecstein to me), personable (everyone felt sorry for her), unattractive (tall, skinny, glasses, no one loved her), anal (obsessively neat), oral (always eating), genital (trying hard), and non-Jewish (finds use of two Yiddish slang words very intellectual). Miss Reingold greeted me efficiently.”

…

“If that dice has a ‘one’ face up, I thought, I’m going downstairs to rape Arlene. ‘If it’s a one, I’ll rape Arlene’ kept blinking on and off in my mind like a huge neon light and my terror increased. But when I thought if it’s not a one I’ll go to bed, the terror evaporated and excitement swept over me: a one means rape, the other numbers mean bed, the die is cast. Who am I to question the dice?’

…

Now the curious reader will want to know what kind of an analyst I was. It so happens that I practiced non-directive therapy. For those not familiar with it, the analyst is passive, compassionate, non-interpretive, non-directing. More precisely, he resembles a redundant moron. For example, a session with a patient like Jenkins might go like this:

JENKINS: ‘I feel that no matter how hard I try I’m always going to fail; that some kind of internal mechanism always acts to screw up what I’m trying to do.’

[Pause]

ANALYST: ‘You feel that some part of you always forces you to fail.’

JENKINS: ‘Yes. For example, that time when I had that date with that nice woman, really attractive – the librarian, you remember – and all I talked about at dinner and all evening was the New York Jets and what a great defensive secondary they have. I knew I should be talking books or asking her questions but I couldn’t stop myself.’

ANALYST: ‘You feel that some part of you consciously ruined the potential relationship with that girl.’

JENKINS: ‘And that job with Wessen, Wessen and Woof. I could have had it. But I took a monthly vacation in Jamaica when I knew they’d be wanting an interview.’

‘I see.’

‘What do you make of it all, Doctor? I suppose it’s masochistic.’

‘You think it might be masochistic.’

‘I don’t know. What do you think?’

‘You aren’t certain if it’s masochistic but you do know that you often do things which are self-destructive.’…

The intelligent reader gets the picture. The effect of non-directive therapy is to encourage the patient to speak more and more frankly, to gain total confidence in the non-threatening, totally accepting clod who’s curing him, and eventually to diagnose and resolve his own conflicts, with old thirty-five-dollars-an-hour echoing away through it all behind the couch.

And it works. It works precisely as well as every other tested form of psychotherapy. It works sometimes and fails at others, and its success and failures are identical with other analysts’ successes and failures.

My Take: Hendrik Hertzberg is like an over-sized red-velvet armchair in the corner of The New Yorker’s metaphorical living room. A relic of a past era now slightly out of fashion, but a comfortable favourite for those who’ve grown up with him.

I enjoy Hertzberg because while he is an unreconstructed 60s lefty (and a Jimmy Carter speechwriter at that!) he treats politics seriously without being self-righteous. He’s a rare breed – a long term left-wing commentator that hasn’t turned bitter and contemptuous as the world has changed around him. As a result, Hertzberg can be wry without being sarcastic and can be critical without being shrill. Equally rarely, he’s a political writer who isn’t so arrogant as to assume that he is always in right and that everyone else is motivated by stupidity or ill will. Combine this with the fact that he’s an extremely talented writer and Hertzberg is one of the most reliably enjoyable political columnists in America.

“Politics” is a collection of the best of Hertzberg’s political writing over the past forty years. It’s worth reading just to luxuriate in an extended dose of Hetrzberg’s writing, but the best part of this book are the tit-bits of trivia and minutia political life from eras past. For instance, it pains my soul that I wasn’t able to experience the unintentional comedy of the Dan Quayle era of US Politcs. While the 1988 Vice-Presidential Debate is infamous for Lloyd Bentson’s vicious take down of Quayle, the real highlight of the debate as recounted by Hertzberg was the eventual Vice-President’s total disconnection from reality:

“Tom Brokaw sadistically asked (Quayle) to describe the last time he had visited a poor family and to tell how he had explained to that family his votes against the school breakfast program, the school lunch program and the expansion of the child immunization program. In a quavering voice Quayle said he had too met with ‘those people’ and that ‘they didn’t ask me those questions on those votes, because they were glad that I took time out of my schedule to go down and talk about how we’re going to get a food bank going..”

….

“Asked to name a ‘work of literature or art’ that had impressed him lately, Quayle cited a book… by Richard Nixon…. One CBS guest commentator said that this answer ‘came across as non-prepared’.”

Also amusing was the coverage of the Gary Hart saga capped by this surreal exchange on Newshour highlighted by Hertzberg:

Lehrer: You don’t think it speaks to the question of judgement as to what a person would do as a candidate for president of the United States?

Hart: Jim, if I may call you Jim, let’s reverse the logic. Does it suggest that because Ronald Reagan used poor judgement on Irangate that therefore he’s unfaithful to his wife?

Lehrer: I don’t understand what you mean.

Reading contemporaneously written accounts of past political eras also offers provides the added amusement of allowing judge historical predictions against reality. Given his generally humble approach, Hertzberg comes out of this pretty well, but there are a few clangers. One example that springs readily to mind is an amusingly misguided article pimping Michael Dukakis’s Presidential prospects titled ‘The Tortoise’ and positing that Dukakis’s positive campaigning (“Good jobs at Good wages”) had George Bush on the defensive. The opinion of British journo quoted in the same article summing up Dukakis as ‘a hopeless wanker’ has held up rather better with time.

My Take: The things we do for those we love. When my future wife told me that “Gone With The Wind” was her favourite book, I thought the only appropriate thing to do was to head out and grab a copy as quickly as possible for my own consumption. Usually epics, especially those featuring ‘strong’ heroines, aren’t my style and as a result, I hadn’t even seen the iconic movie before being guided to the book by love. But “Gone With The Wind” did win the Pulitzer Prize in 1937 and has managed to sell more than 30 million copies to date, so I figured it must have something going for it.

And it does. To an extent. I’m glad to have invested the time to read GWTW and not just for reasons of domestic harmony. Margaret Mead has crafted an extraordinarily meticulous portrait of late 19^th Century life in the US South in GWTW based largely on the first hand accounts she heard from relatives as a child. To the extent that you can ever trust accounts like this, I learnt a lot from the sheer volume of detail that Mead packs into GWTW. So I felt like I got something out of the book there.

That being said, you don’t read GWTW for a history lesson. Most readers who are drawn to this book pick it for the grand sweep of its narrative and its iconic characters. It’s here that I part from the consensus (and the views of my better half). Margaret Mead has described the main theme of the book as ‘survival’:

“…what makes some people able to come through catastrophes and others, apparently just as able, strong and brave, go under? It happens in every upheaval. Some people survive; others don’t. What qualities are in those who fight their way through triumphantly that are lacking in those who go under…? I only know that the survivors used to call that quality ‘gumption.’ So I wrote about the people who had gumption and the people who didn’t.”

Ok. I can see this. Scarlett is able to survive the societal cataclysm brought on by the war through her determination and stubbornness and Rhett is able to survive through his cunning and pragmatism.

The problem is that I didn’t much like Scarlet O’Hara despite her admirable perseverance and fortitude. While she had spunk, she was also self-centred and ruthless. While her independence and spunk are undoubtedly good examples for young girls, especially in the less enlightened times in which this book was published, frankly Scarlett consistently treated those who cared for her (particularly Melanie and Rhett) appallingly. There’s no truer line in the book that Rhett’s frustrated explanation for why he could never show his love for her:

“You’re so brutal to those who love you, Scarlett. You take their love and hold it over their heads like a whip.”

For a book this long, you’re going to struggle to keep me interested if I don’t particularly like the protagonist. This was partially offset by the strength of Rhett Butler’s character (a rake, a speculator, a blockade-runner and a social pariah – but a romantic at heart) but not enough to save the book to my mind.

I’ll finish by noting that what GWTW needed more than anything else was an editor. There was simply no real reason for this book to be the giant that it was. It would have been a much better read if it was half the length.

Highlight:

Rhett Butler on the imminent war:

“‘All wars are sacred,’ he said. ‘To those who have to fight them. If the people who started wars didn’t make them sacred, who would be foolish enough to fight? But, no matter what rallying cries the orators give to the idiots who fight, no matter what noble purposes they assign to wars, there is never but one reason for a war. And that is money. All wars are in reality money squabbles. But so few people ever realize it. Their ears are too full of bugles and drums and fine words from stay-at-home orators. Sometimes the rallying cry is ‘Save the Tomb of Christ from the Heathen!’ Sometimes it’s ‘Down with Popery!’ and sometimes ‘Liberty!’ and sometimes ‘Cotton, Slavery and States’ Rights!’”

…

“There’s just as much money to be made in the wreck of a civilization as in the upbuilding of one.”

Scarlett O’Hara in the ruins of Twelve Oaks:

“Hunger gnawed at her empty stomach again and she said aloud: ‘As God is my witness, and God is my witness, the Yankees aren’t going to lick me. I’m going to live through this, and when it’s over, I’m never going to be hungry again. No, nor any of my folks. If I have to steal or kill – as God is my witness, I’m never going to be hungry again.’”

Favourite GWTW factoid found while looking for background to this post:

(Margaret Mead) originally called the heroine “Pansy O’Hara”, and Tara was “Fontenoy Hall”. She also considered naming the novel Tote The Weary Load or Tomorrow Is Another Day

My Take: I am a bit of a sucker for condensed knowledge. It’s a deeply shallow (if that’s possible) way of learning, but I love adding to my stocks of knowledge by digesting pre-masticated titbits of trivia. So when I came across “The Know It All” (first Chapter available online here) in my favourite second-hand store I had high hopes. Surely a condensed and accessible Encyclopaedia Britannica would be both an interesting and rewarding read?

Unfortunately, I was sadly mistaken. These kinds of eclectic narratives depend heavily on the judgement and personality of the curator and I just didn’t warm to “The Know It All’s” author, AJ Jacobs. Partly this was because I thought he came across as a bit of a wanker, but mostly what rubbed me up the wrong way was his approach to reading and learning more broadly.

Jacobs’ body of work gives you a bit of a flavour for his approach; in addition to his Britannica reading stunt, he has also penned books on the experience of spending a year following every single rule in the Bible (“The Year of Living Biblically”) and on turning his life into a series of human experiments (“The Guinea Pig Diaries”). In short, he has become quite the exponent of the literary gimmick in recent times. You get the feeling reading “The Know It All” that despite the affectations, it’s all just a bit of a stunt for a book deal and he doesn’t have any real passion for his cause.

Yes, there are plenty of interesting facts, but Jacob’s self-reflection is facile and the bolt on memoir about his family is just dull (not all families are interesting enough to be memorialised sad to say). There are redeeming sections, but on the whole the book is formulaic and pitched at the audience of Entertainment Weekly.

One issue in particular that would have been worth some consideration, but seemed to be completely overlooked was whether Encyclopaedias have any role whatsoever in today’s society. In the times of Google, Wikipedia and the internet, is there any point in a generalist collection of introductory information on subjects chosen and edited by a chosen few? Jacobs claims that:

“The Britannica is still the gold standard, the Tiffany’s of encyclopedias. Founded in 1768, it’s the longest continually published reference book in history. Over the years, the Britannica’s contributors have included Einstein, Freud and Harry Houdini. Its current roster includes dozens of academics with Nobels, Pulitzers and other types of awards with ceremonies that don’t feature commentary from Melissa Rivers. The Britannica passed through some tough times during the dot-com craze, and it long ago phased out the door-to-door salesman, but it keeps chugging along. The legendary Eleventh edition from 1911 is thought by many to be the best-it’s inspired a fervid if mild-mannered cult –but the current editions are still the greatest single source of knowledge.”

Really? The ‘Greatest single source of knowledge?’ Come on. This is the gimmick wagging the book – a justification rather than an examination of the medium.

Jacobs almost stumbles an interesting insight into the changing role of the medium when he cites Hans Koning’s explanation for why the 11^th Edition of the EB, released in 1911 is considered by aficionados to be the greatest of all Encyclopaedias:

“The eleventh was the culmination of the Enlightenment, the last great work of the Age of Reason, the final instance when all human knowledge could be presented with a single point of view. Four years late, the confidence and optimism that had produced the eleventh would be, as Konig puts it, “a casualty in the slaughter at Ypres and Argonne.”

Now here’s a topic for some critical reflection – the changing role of the EB in a world in which there is no longer a single fount of knowledge and the internet is changing the way that we seek, find and use information. Unfortunately, Jacobs isn’t interested:

“Yes, there’s the Internet. I could try to read Google from A to Z. But the Internet’s about as reliable as publications sold next to Trident and Duracell at the supermarket checkout line. Want a quick check on the trustworthiness of the Internet? Do a search on the words ‘perffectionist’ and ‘perfestionist.’ No, I prefer my old-school books. There’s something appealingly stable about the Britannica. I don’t even want that new-fangled CD-ROM for $49 or the monthly Britannica online service. I’ll take the leatherette volumes for $1400–which is not cheap, but it’s certainly less expensive than grad school. And anyway, at the end of this, maybe I can go on Jeopardy! and win enough to buy a dozen sets.”

Sigh. All he’s interested in is his gimmick and as a result the level of analysis you get from him rarely rises above that that you’d get from a reality television show. In summary, an interesting concept poorly executed.
(Random) Highlights:

From the original 1768 edition of the Britannica on Cats:

“Of all domestic animals, the character of the cat is the most equivocal and suspicious. He is kept, not for any amiable qualities, but purely with a view to banish rats, mice and other noxious animals from our houses… constantly bent on theft and rapine, they are full of cunning and dissimulation; they conceal their designs; seize every opportunity of doing mischief, and then fly from punishment… In a word, the cat is totally destitute of friendship.”

On Nathaniel Hawthorne (of The Scarlet Letter fame):

Towards the end of his life Nathaniel Hawthorne “Took to writing the figure ‘64’ compulsively on scraps of paper’.

On Montaigne and the writing process:

Montaigne “coined the term ‘essay,’ which translates to ‘attempt,’ or a little ‘project of trials and error’.

On the quirks of fate:

“On the dropping of Fat Man on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945: “The B-29 spent 10 minutes over Kokura without sighting its aim point; it then proceeded to the secondary target of Nagasaki, where at 11:02am local time, the weapon was air-burt at 1650 feet with a force of 21 Kilotons.”

Jacobs’ final insight from 44 million words:

“We have made our lives better. A thousand times better. Never again will I mythologize the past as some sort of golden age. Remember: in the 19^th Century, the mortality rate was 75 percent fro a caesarean section… the workday was fourteen hours.. the life expectancy in ancient Rome was twenty nine years. Widows had to marry their late husband’s brother. Originally forks only had one tine, and umbrellas were available only in black, and you ate four-day old fetid meat for dinner.”

(I don’t disagree with this BTW).

My Take: It took me a while to give Gore Vidal a try. As regular readers know, I have a bit of hero worship thing going on with Robert Kennedy. And while Vidal was the step-brother by marriage of Jacqueline Kennedy and therefore technically Bobby’s step-brother-in-law-by-marriage-one-removed, the pair famously did not get along.

As a result, my early exposure to Vidal came consisted entirely of a series of highly unflattering accounts in various Kennedy biographies. As Arthur Schlesinger Jr, court historian to the Kennedys writes in his magisterial “Robert Kennedy and his Times” (extracted from Google Books), their relationship was strained from the start:

Bobby hated Vidal’s pretension (and let’s be frank, his homosexuality) and Vidal hated Bobby’s ruthlessness and impertinence and frequently spoke out against RFK whilst on the campaign trail.

This natural bias against Vidal was further entrenched by the fact that Vidal was similarly estranged from another of my literary favourites, Norman Mailer. Amusingly enough, the feud between this pair of US literary giants culminated in Mailer:

Head-butting him in the green room of The Dick Cavett Show in 1971, then telling him, on-air, that he ruined Kerouac by sleeping with him. Six years later, he threw a drink at Vidal—and punched him—at a Lally Weymouth soirée.

All of which I was very familiar with before having read a single word of Vidal’s writing. So you’ll forgive me if I thought Vidal’s critical bite was bigger than his literary bark.

That was however, before I read “Lincoln”. Put simply, it’s a tour de force. Historical fiction is an extremely difficult medium to do well. How do you go about credibly writing dialogue for a figure that has been canonised to the extent of Lincoln? If you want to see how badly it can go wrong, go no further than the television mini-series adaptation of “Lincoln” staring Mary Tyler Moore. Fast forward past the credits until you get to the stilted dialogue and overacting and get ready to cringe – it takes a talented writer indeed to avoid coming across as hackneyed or clichéd with subject matter like this.

In “Lincoln”, Vidal pulls off this difficult task with aplomb. Telling his story from multiple perspectives (the primary narrator being Lincoln’s presidential secretary, and later Secretary of State, John Hay),Vidal vividly recreates the world of Civil War era Washington and the massive figures that inhabited it. Luckily, there’s plenty of action in the period for Vidal to draw on to keep his plot moving forward too. Putting to one side the obvious drama of the Civil War, the constant political machinations of Lincoln’s “Team of Rivals”, principally his Secretary of State William H. Seward and Secretary of the Treasury Salmon Chase, is enough to drive the narrative of a political thriller in its own right.

Highlight: Not from the book itself, but from Vidal’s public response to a critical review of “Lincoln” in The New York Times by a historian unhappy with the historical accuracy of the book. Vidal describes his reviewer as “the author of the captions to several picture books on the Civil War era” and “pleasantly scatterbrained” then goes on to state:

Professor Richard N. Current fusses, not irrelevantly, about the propriety of fictionalizing actual political figures. I also fuss about this. But he has fallen prey to the scholar-squirrels’ delusion that there is a final Truth revealed only to the tenured few in their footnote maze; in this he is simply naive. All we have is a mass of more or less agreed-upon facts about the illustrious dead and each generation tends to rearrange those facts according to what the times require. Current’s text seethes with resentment and I can see why. “Indeed, [Vidal] claims to be a better historian than any of the academic writers on Lincoln (’hagiographers,’ he calls them).” Current’s source for my unseemly boasting is, God help us, the Larry King radio show, which lasts several hours from midnight on, and no one is under oath for what he says during—in my case—two hours. On the other hand, Larry King, as a source, is about as primary as you can get.

Now it is true as I said on the King show that I have been amazed that there has never been a first-rate biography of Lincoln, as opposed to many very good and—yes, scholarly—studies of various aspects of his career. I think one reason for this lack is that too often the bureaucrats of Academe have taken over the writing of history and most of them neither write well nor, worse, understand the nature of the men they are required to make saints of. In the past, history was the province of literary masters—of Gibbon, Macaulay, Burke, Locke, Carlyle, and, in our time and nation, Academe’s bête noire, Edmund Wilson.

Quite!

My Take: So I’ve got a bit of a thing about macho writers – the Hemingways, the Mailers, the Updikes and the Roth’s of the literary world. There’s something in me that enjoys seeing their antiquated and uncomplicated visions of masculinity put down on paper. It’s not because I think it’s a realistic view, but more because it makes for some great fiction as conflict inevitably manifests itself between their ideals of manhood and reality.

“The Sun Also Rises”, one of Hemingway’s best books is a great example of this tension. The protagonist of the story, American war veteran Jake Barnes, is a none-to-subtle exploration of what it means to be a man. Barnes physically lost his manhood in a plane crash in WW1, but did not lose his manly desires.  In Hemmingway’s world, this inability to act on the most fundamental aspect of manhood meant that Barnes could never be happy.

It is the basic act of consummation that matters beyond all else. Any other form of non-physical fulfilment never crosses Hemmingway’s mind. Throughout the book, Barnes attempts to salve his wounded manhood through physical labour, heavy drinking, hunting, fishing, bull fighting, through a whole series of actions, but can never bring himself to seek emotional satisfaction.

What I find most interesting about “The Sun Also Rises”, was that Hemingway chose this conflict not to critique this over-emphasis on the physicality of masculinity, but to emphasise it. Hemingway has obviously thought deeply about the subject. As Gary Dexter writes at the excellent ‘How Books Got Their Titles’ blog:

On July 8, 1918, while serving as an ambulance driver on the Italian Front at the end of the First World War, Hemingway was seriously injured by a trench mortar, receiving over 200 separate shrapnel wounds to his lower body. His scrotum was pierced twice, and had to be laid on a special pillow while it recovered. His testicles were undamaged and his penis intact. He had not lost his penis. But he knew a man who had:

Because of this I got to know other kids who had genito urinary wounds and I wondered what a man’s life would have been like after that if his penis had been lost and his testicles and spermatic cord remained intact. . . . [So I] tried to find out what his problems would be when he was in love with someone who was in love with him and there was nothing that they could do about it.

So Hemingway had considered the central conflict of this book in some depth and the conclusion he reached was that without sex, ‘there was nothing they could do about (their love)’. Seriously, you can’t help but be amused at self-parody as good as this.

“The Sun Also Rises” is a Hemingway at his best. Succinct and direct writing, great dialogue and a pervasive overlay of out of control machismo. Great stuff.

Highlight:

“This was Brett that I had felt like crying about. Then I thought of her walking up the street and stepping into the car, as I had last seen her, and of course in a little while I felt like hell again. It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night is another thing.”