War Buff Alert

WWII buffs, and sea warfare buffs take note as you don’t want to miss this one.  Stephen Budiansky has masterfully brought together Patrick Blackett the man and the wartime scientist in Blackett’s War: The Men Who Defeated The Nazi U-Boats And Brought Science To The Art Of Warfare.  Any one of Blackett’s individual contributions to the war effort would merit a book; but this man made so many that he created the new field of operational research.  Blackett would win the Nobel Prize in physics after the war in 1949 for work I shall not attempt to explain; however, the author does.

Now, what Blackett and his fellow scientists called operational research is standard fare for our military and naval officers with their masters and PhDs; but this may belie the myth of modern warfare.  Can there ever be a “smart war?”  Well trained, experienced, educated, honorable men can and will make stupid decisions that destroy others’ lives and leave them to continue their professional careers.

In telling Blackett’s story, the author also reveals much about the war dances of Winston Churchill and Karl Domitz, opposite encampments and different roles, and equally fascinating.  The star of the book, however, remains Brackett.  Charles Marlin

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Saenz and Munro Cruise The Mississippi

So I am sitting in this graceless bar in St. Louis and fall into conversation with two disgruntled, recently fired hospitality workers from a casino that cruises the Mississippi; however, since then I have learned there are no casino boats on the Mississippi that go out more than two hours.  It could be my conversationalists were over stressed by the demands of their jobs, or they were stoned the entire time they were employed.  I don’t think it matters as their tale is a good one.

After Alice Munro published Dear Life, the Canadian government reached an agreement with her; they would give her a travel fellowship anywhere in or outside of Canada, if they were no longer under any obligation to give her another award or banquet.  She was miffed, but took it.  She then emailed her Facebook friend Benjamin Alire Saenz who had just seen Everything Begins & Ends At The Kentucky Club published, and offered to take him along for free.  He agreed; and then she discovered the Mississippi cruise was more expensive than she could have imagined, especially since she wanted to keep some money set aside for gambling.  They decided to bunk together to save money.

They boarded in St. Louis, bound for New Orleans, and were immediately bummed out: no gambling or night club atmosphere, only eating, napping, and elder chatter.  By noon of the first day they were not even to Cape Girardeau before they were exhausted from trying to one-up each other in literary name dropping, and retreated to drinking Bloody Marys.  By four in the afternoon they reached an understanding; Alice would only talk about Alice, and Benjamin would only talk about Ben.  From that point on, my hospitality friends say they learned a great deal.

The characters in Alice’s short stories are particled of the same stuff as is the landscape and weather.  No matter if they live in country isolation or urban anonymity they are natives of her Lake Huron.  In some way each story deals with departure and finality, isolation and insufficient affection, the pallor of love.  There is not a lot of sunshine in these stories, nor do they seem to be about life today.  The reader’s experience is rather like buying a forgotten title in a yard sale and reading it straight through while it retains its abandoned odor.

The characters in Ben’s short stories are urban and cross cultural in their anger, depression, and desperate search for identity and love.  Wherever the Mexican and American cultures and flesh meet in full contact, there is the border between El Paso and Juarez, the home turf for his stories.  The contemporary devils of drugs, homophobia, street violence, and shattered families make the stories dark and brooding in an in your face style.

The mystique of the Kentucky Club, like the magnetic pull of the Canadian vista, belong more to the authors than to the Canadians and border residences or people who by chance pass through.  They are literary dots on the map of life.  Unless the reader goes there with the authors, he will never find them.

The Mississippi cruise ended for them, not in New Orleans, but in Memphis.  Alice and Ben debarked to see Graceland and never returned.  They eventually called the cruise line and paid to have the autographed copies of their most recent book shipped home, and told the cruise line to give their clothes and toiletries to whomever would take them.

A friend, who knows either author better than I, may take issue with some details; but I am not uneasy in writing I believe every word of the story as I recall it.  Read both books and you may very well be of the same opinion.  Charles Marlin

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What Else Do You Want?

In What Else Do You Want?, author J. V. Miller offers a beautifully written, deeply felt, loving portrait of the lives of an immigrant Ruthenian (you have the internet, look it up!) family in America.  They are working-class, living in a small mill town on New York’s south-central border.  The book begins in the early 1960s with Joe and Ann and their three pre-teen sons living in a small apartment in the house owned by Ann’s parents, who live in the basement.  Yellowed linoleum and threadbare upholstery suggest the decor.

The sons were born two years apart.  Joey is the oldest and suffers a learning disability which marks him forever as being “different.”  Johnny is the middle son and, I should point out, the principal narrator of the book.  Michael is the youngest.  Their mother depressingly shuffles around the house in fuzzy pink bunny slippers, struggling to endure the numbing, unending demands of daily housework.

In the book’s opening two chapters, the young boys submit to the family’s rituals, routinely prodded, corrected, and scolded by their elders.  They find relief in verbally jabbing one another, (though Joey, impaired, less so) generating rude noises and offering an occasional shot to the ribs.  An incredibly funny scene in this chapter has the boys washing the family’s car, a Chevy Biscayne, under the strict supervision of their father, while the boys’ grandfather looks on as an added layer of criticism.  Out of nowhere, success in turning on and off a lawn spigot becomes a defining testy and, for the reader, stuff of comedy.

The book’s third chapter takes place a decade or so later.  By this time John is a college student and has been offered a plane ticket to visit his mother’s brothers George and John in California.  It is a college break at the school John has been attending in upstate New York.  To John, seeing Los Angeles and visiting these uncles seems a better deal than hanging out at a deserted campus or returning home for an awkward visit with his insular parents.  In no way could John anticipate the oddity of all that follows on this trip, the kind of stuff that happens but grows more remarkable on reflection with the passage of time.

The book’s fourth chapter takes place the following year when George is seriously ill and John’s grandmother flies to California to visit him in the hospital.  There are a few funny moments in this chapter but the deeper content is the mother/grandmother dreamily pondering the passage of time, reliving briefly sweet memories of her late husband and, ultimately, weighing whether coming to America had ended up a cruel joke, a colossal mistake.

The final two chapters of What Else Do You Want? include a chapter in which John, now in his mid-40s, joins his brother Joe and two of Joe’s “special” friends to attend a minor league hockey game, (Joe states “We’re playing the Utica Devils Nick, and you know them Devils can be pretty devilish Nick.”) and a chapter in verse form where John and his wife call John’s father, now 80, to announce a visit coming three weeks hence.  The father immediately focuses on the details of the breakfast buffet he plans to take them to: “I’ve got a coupon good till the twenty-sixth; a dollar off on each breakfast.”  Many of you who have dealt with elderly relatives will be able to relate.

In the end, I am pleased to say I enjoyed reading this book.  I liked the structure of  doling out its few stories like selected pages from a family photo album.  Finally, while I enjoyed the humorous scenes and characters, what I valued more was how each of the individuals were treasured fo who they were, loved and valued as part of the fabric of family, at times childishly amusing in their own way, but ultimately treated with great tenderness and respect.  Seeing a family with such appreciation is a special gift.  Greg Ramsey

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Associate Justice Sotomayor

 

I am convinced from reading My Beloved World that Sonia Sotomayor is so right for the Supreme Court I wonder why the Republican Senators did not fall on their swords when they let her appointment be confirmed.  True, the autobiography gives you more personal information than you are accustomed to learning about a justice on the high court; but, that may be your residual sexism at work.

Her life is a wonderful American story, and a delight to read.  Even if she projects backward more maturity and insight than was there originally, it is good to know what she values in growing up and in making a career against heavy odds.

Make no mistake, this is not your usual auto-fluff written for easy profit and idle minds.  She is demonstrating why it is good to be proud, ambitious, and young in America.  Her story and her appointment are a return to quality for an institution sadly in need of redemption.  Read and take hope.  Charles Marlin

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The Gifted Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power, by Jon Meacham, is a masterful biography because it lets the great man speak for himself.  Themes are followed from his beginning to his death so there is no single shot history here.  The later day critics who must nurture their contemporary biases will not like the book.  They will not want to acknowledge the whole of Jefferson.  Although their biases make for shrill voices, such do not carry far when confronted with scholarship of this quality.

If you enjoy Founding Fathers scholarship, and feel yourself better informed than most readers, don’t despair.  You will appreciate the insights and clarity of Meacham, and emerge better informed.  He writes with no revisionist’s ambitions or restorationist’s glory; he tells the story; the reader will make of it what he will.  Charles Marlin

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Uncommon Grit and Grace

Her story is inspirational; she was a woman who through hard work, diligence, an unlimited appetite for information, and a modest talent made herself a voice heard round the world.  On a Farther Shore: The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson, by William Souder, describes a life always in a struggle against something, either early childhood poverty, limited employment opportunities for women, modest pay for women, a dependent family, or finally failing health.  She met it all with an uncommon grit and grace.

Her story is cautionary.  The same governmental bureaucracy that impeded her work, and abetted the chemical catastrophe she exposed in Silent Spring is still protecting its own bare ass instead of caring about the public good.  The same business interests are at work purchasing influence and dictating public policy that encouraged unlimited nuclear testing and insecticide poisoning of our environment during her life.  We have the same buffoons elected to represent us now as then.  Support for education and research is unimportant to them as it does not contribute to their reelection coffers.  Super PACs are now our masters.

Souder gives us a real person.  In reading the biography, it is easy to imagine you know her and understand her decisions.  You experience the constraints she overcomes, and appreciate her approach to work which would have been maddening if you were her work partner.  Though her loneliness is painful, it is hard to imagine her working in tandem with another.  Her late in life encounter with Dorothy Freeman is a fully earned reward.

For grit and grace, you cannot go wrong admiring Rachel Carson.  Charles Marlin

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Quiet Enlightenment For America

Talk radio, poisonous emails, and Fox News are pesticides killing our understanding of what it means to believe in the American way of government.  To rid ourselves of these destructive chemicals we must educate ourselves in our history and culture.  While they make noise, we should reserve judgement until we are well grounded.  A superb starting point is Akhil Reed Amar, America’s Unwritten Constitution: The Precedents and Principles We Live By.

The premise of the book is clear, “America’s unwritten Constitution encompasses not only rules specifying the substantive content of the nation’s supreme law but also rules clarifying the methods for determining the meaning of this supreme law.  Since the written Constitution does not come with a complete set of instructions about how it should be construed, we must go beyond the text to make sense of the text.”

The men most influential in molding the unwritten Constitution were William Blackstone, George Washington, John Marshall, and Earl Warren, each unique and fortuitous in time and role.  The birthing of the written Constitution sheds light on the fundamental principles of our government more so than any time since its ratification.  A quiet return to the study of our history will bring rich rewards in understanding past and present leaders, events, successes, failures, and public responses.

“Precisely,” writes the author in his Afterword, “because America’s unwritten Constitution and America’s written Constitution fit together to form a single system, no proper account of the former should ever lose sight of the latter: The terse text is inextricably intertwined with the implicit principles, the ordaining deeds, the lived customs, the landmark cases, the unifying symbols, the legitimating democratic theories, the institutional settlements, the framework statutes, the two-party ground rules, the appeals to conscience, the state-constitutional counterparts, and the unfinished agenda items that form much of American’s unwritten Constitution.”  Charles Marlin

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If Children Were Legos

There is enough rock and debris in what my teachers didn’t know and in what I didn’t know as a teacher to completely hide Pennsylvania.  Although what we should have known is now readily available, the lowering of the mountain is not up to individuals.  Systemic reform of our schools and parenting is needed.  For a book that can make a difference, try Paul Tough, How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character.

Tough’s thesis is that cognitive skills are important, but do not ensure success in education or life.  Obsessive concentration on one or two narrow areas of talent may produce exceptional achievers, but again will not ensure success or happiness in education or life.  The key to success in all pursuits is noncognitive skills that make up character.  Yes, character.  From the research and the trial and error of experimental school programs, the important list of components can be shortened to grit, self-control, zest, social intelligence, gratitude, optimism, and curiosity.  Parents and educators need to understand how to create routine experiences that develop these qualities for small children.

We know it takes no talent or brains to be biological parents.  The same is true of being state politicians and school board members, all of which is a shame.  Who will lead us to a more enlightened life?  You know the answer; no one is going to.  Despite the need for systemic reform, if the light is to shine, it must shine one parent, one teacher, one school administrator at a time.  Tough’s book may be the match that ignites your light.  Charles Marlin

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A Book To Remember

Over the winter holidays I read books like a black bear eats berries, storing up ideas and experiences, or in the case of the black bear, fat cells to sleep on until spring.  All the books can be outstanding, as they were this season, but only one levitates to the top.

From the holidays, two great idea books that would appeal to  readers already interested in the topics, so take your cue from the titles of Dan Pallotta, Charity Case: How The Nonprofit Community Can Stand Up For Itself And Really Change The World, and Andrew Zolli and Ann Marie Healy, Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back.

Salman Rushdie has written an autobiography of his years under the fatwa of Ayatollah Khomeini, using his cover name for the period, Joseph Anton: A Memoir.  It is a door stopper at 636 pages, painfully honest and gossipy at the same time.  Some of the details may bore you but not the intensity and anguish portrayed.  If you have enjoyed him in the past, you will again with this book.

The last two books are by mature, American naturalists, writing for the general public; however, neither are dumbed down.  This is not pop science, but well researched and elegantly woven together to read like a novel.  Life Everlasting: The Animal Way Of Death, by Bernd Heinrich, draws on his long career as researcher, teacher, and writer to give insight and meaning to all forms of death and reentry in nature.  Mankind and his footprint on nature is also given close scrutiny.  The author is a powerhouse and very popular; a reader cannot go wrong picking any or all of the titles he lists in the front.  With Heinrich, it is a silly game to say you like one title over another.  None are to be missed.

The book that became my holiday lodestar seems an unlikely candidate so you may have missed it.  If so, stop, and start your winter reading again with David George Haskell, The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature, in your hand.  I began reading one evening and finished it by the next.  A biologist at the University of the South, well-known for his innovative and inspiring teaching, Haskell based his book on a year’s close observation of a meter of old-growth forest in the Cumberland Plateau.  Can any reader imagine the response to a doctorial candidate if he advocated such an idea as his dissertation topic?  Not even Haskell would have approved.

We are lucky Haskell is his own obsessive boss for he has much to offer, new ideas, old ideas in new attire, and a refreshing optimism in his little book.  I would vote to award a Ph.D. for it.  How many naturalists write of the expectation that a mutant bacteria may, at the moment you are reading this sentence, be at work eating its first golf ball, given to nature by a charitable golfer?

The image is from Fineture.com.  Charles Marlin

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The Gaping Gulf Wars

Three young Americans serve honorably in Al Tafar, Iraq, in an unholy war that either destroys or breaks their will to live.  Though you fully understand this is a novel, you will feel as you read that parts and the whole of each of them has lived in many men who have served in the Gulf Wars.  The Yellow Birds, by Kevin Powers, is best read privately for you will shed tears for these men.  Short, the book is an intense experience.

The author gives no smug comfort to the reader, no patriotic catch phrases to make us proud of our country.  The reader is left to answer the questions of why and at what cost do we enter war.  The author leaves no room for flag waving, and yet every word is deeply American.

The Blue Ridge Mountains image honors the one still moment in the book; even so you know at that moment, the weather is ever-changing.

Salute the truth, known and hidden.  Charles Marlin

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