FIRST PERSON SINGULAR

 On 4/2/2012 I wrote a review of Haruki Murakami’s bestseller, 1Q84, and stated that this Japanese author writes in a semi-abstract way aimed at the artsy crowd and that he may be starting his own genre. Well, that might still be the case, but not with this novel of eight short stories. Like Seinfeld’s show about nothing, this novel also seems to be about nothing. Most of his stories in this work are very pedestrian...un-Japanese for the most part. You can change the names of the cities he uses in his book to American cities without changing the theme or flavor of the story. Two of his stories were somewhat entertaining and displayed a smidgen of Japanese writing. The other six could have been aped by any American or English author of note. There are two things that I observed to be typical Murakami. The first one is the overall feeling of loneliness in his eight stories. Secondly, I noticed the familiar suicide motif lurking in the background. Japanese writers have committed suicide fifty-four times since 1900 (I’m not saying Haruki is suicidal). The attitude in Japan is still muddled with the past actions of the Samurai Warriors and Kamikaze pilots. If you think you have failed in life there is always hara-kiri (seppuku) to perform to better yourself in your next life. That kind of feeling is lurking in the backdrop in most of his stories. All narrators (In the first person singular novel) displayed despondency and estrangement. I think this writing style is the direct result of losing WWII (especially how it ended), for most Japanese authors, who write with a “Woe, is me” slant (consciously or unconsciously). 

In the middle of the With the Beatles short story, Haruki writes, “...That was how I ended up that Sunday reading part of Akutagawa’s Spinning Gears to my girlfriend Sayoko’s eccentric older brother. I was a bit reluctant at first, but I warmed to the job. The supplementary reader had the two final sections of the story Red Lights and Airplane--but I just read Airplane. It was about eight pages long, and it ended with the line, ‘Won’t someone be good enough to strangle me as I sleep?’ Akutagawa killed himself right after writing this line.” Later on in the story, Haruki runs into the brother again, “Sayoko passed away,” he said quietly. We were in a nearby coffee shop, seated across a plastic table from each other. “Passed away?” The brother responds with, “She died three years ago.” “I was speechless. I felt as if my tongue were swelling up inside my mouth. I tried to swallow the saliva that had built up, but couldn’t”

In the short story, Confessions of a Shinagawa Monkey we finally come to a somewhat amusing story. Haruki finds himself in a town too late to go home. All the inns are full except a shabby one at the end of town. He checks in and finds that he is the only guest (In each story loneliness crops up). “I was soaking in the bath for the third time when the monkey slid open the door with a clatter and came inside.” “Excuse me,” he said in a low voice. It took me a while to realize that this was a monkey. All the thick, hot water had made me a little dazed, and I’d never expected to hear a monkey speak, so I couldn’t quickly make the connection between what I was seeing and the fact that this was an actual monkey.” “How is the bath?” the monkey asked me. “...hold on a second. What was a monkey doing here? And why was he speaking in a human language?” Haha, you will have to read the story yourself to find out what happens next. I think that I’m used to Stephen King-type short stories or collections of novellas like Four Past Midnight (1990) that spawned the scary movie, The Langoliers. There just wasn’t any guts to Haruki’s novel.

RATING: 3 out of 5 stars

Comment: Japan is not alone with authors that wrote depressing short stories and committed suicide. The USA’s main offender would be Ernest Hemingway, who shot himself with his shotgun in Idaho after years of being treated for depression. 

His short story The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1936) is filled with death, isolation, and estrangement. Nothing to cheer about here.

His Hills Like White Elephants (1927) is another depressing story about a man and a woman in Spain discussing an operation believed to be...abortion.

And there is nothing happy about the slaughter of bulls (bullfighting) he wrote about in Spain during the 1950s for Life magazine.

As he was dying, he reportedly said to his wife Mary, “Goodnight my kitten.” 

the EFFORT

 It’s not just another story about a comet hitting earth...well it is in a way, but for all intents and purposes, it’s about how the hoi polloi would react when it gets the news (fake news or true) of an impending collision? It doesn’t matter if the news is inaccurate or true. Once the cat is out of the bag...the poop hits the fan. Will China and Russia pull in their horns and not help until they find out where the comet will hit. Would they be less cooperative if they think the comet will hit the USA? How long before the looting starts and grocery shelves become empty? Is it every man for themselves? This story attempts to answer those questions. Claire Holroyde’s novel is a good one with some minor flaws. The prose is solid and mistake-free. The amount of research she put in is questionable, although I personally like the lack of confusing scientific facts. Just give me the story! She escapes my theory of three to five maximum main characters by spotlighting the remainder in separate chapters. And she gets away with having different champions at the story’s end than the protagonists that I thought were the main heroes in the beginning chapters. What I mean by that is the author had Ben, Amy, Love, Jack, and Maya (no surnames needed) dominate the first part of the novel, then they almost disappeared and Gustavo, Zhen, Dewei, Ned, and Captain Weber became the main characters in the waning chapters. How did she do that? Good writing? Am I the only reviewer that noticed the writer's theatrics? 

In chapter one, Dr. Ben Scwartz gets an urgent phone call in the middle of the night. It’s from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It’s the famous astrophysicist, Dr. Tobias Ochsenfeld. He says, “Now, Ben, you need to get to the airport in Los Angeles. Immediately. “Why?” “Because the UN is arranging your flight to French Guiana.” (The author never explains why French Guiana). “I’m not going anywhere until I know what this is about.” “A dark comet was discovered yesterday,” the Professor said. “It just rounded the sun on an eccentric orbit...the comet has no name, only its label, UD3. No one at Spacewatch wanted to put their mark on it.” “I suppose extinction is...inconceivable,” The Professor added. “Extinction? How big is the comet?” The Professor said, “Eight kilometers.” There was silence on the line. Ben could hear his own panting. I’m wondering if a comet of about eight kilometers would make it through our atmosphere since it’s mostly ice? A meteoroid would certainly get partially through. Like I previously said, I’m not interested in the scientific side anyway. Haha. Stop wondering! So how are they going to stop the comet? Once in the French Guiana Spaceport, Ben surmises, “Nuclear weapons weren’t built to vaporize a comet or asteroid flying through space at tens of thousands of miles per hour, they were built to hit static, terrestrial targets.”

In analyzing Claire’s book further, I found two other items to chew on. Why was chapter 24 so hostile compared to the other 35 chapters and so long? Did little Dr. Zhen Liu change into a tiger that fast? And in chapter 31, what did Enrico of Mexico have to do with the story? He came out of left field for no reason. So as usual I found flaws, but as a whole, it was a good yeoman’s effort for her first novel. I know, I know, it’s tough writing a novel. But when you compare the authors I have reviewed over the last eleven years, they pale when I compare them to my two writing pedagogues, Mark Twain and Cormac McCarthy (He of zero quotation marks and very few characters).

RATING: 4 out of 5 stars

Comment: I don’t have a favorite comet crashing into earth movie or book, but I do have five disaster movies that I’ve enjoyed over the years:

1. The Poseidon Adventure (1976) - Great action with Ernest Borgnine leading the way! Score: Tsunami 1, Luxury liner 0. 

2. Titanic (1997) - The Disaster love story for the ages!

3. The Perfect Storm (2000) - Oh my God...that last horrible wave!

4. The Day After Tomorrow (2004) - The big chill...Dennis Quaid looks for his son!

5. Jurassic Park (1993) - The first one. The tension after the power failure was awesome! 

THE BELL JAR

This stellar novel by Sylvia Plath spawned me to think about how delicate the human brain is. Sylvia connects suicide with a bell jar. I thought about that...what is a bell jar? If you are trapped under a bell jar, you are doomed...there is no way out unless someone (a psychiatrist or a counselor) relieves the pressure and lifts the patient’s doubt, dejection, and lack of self-confidence out of the jar. Our protagonist in Sylvia’s novel, Esther Greenwood, slowly gets depressed over things that would normally not affect one’s attitude. This novel made me ponder depression more than any other recent novel. Just as Holden Caulfield in J.D. Salinger’s novel, The Catcher in the Rye (see my review of 11/23/2012) made me imagine...so did Esther Greenwood. Wow, good ole brain exercise! Think back, how many books have you read when days after finishing, you were still mulling it over. Not many. Maybe Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (see my review of 12/9/2012) hit a nerve. It also occurred to me that maybe some people are predetermined to have mental problems. In this novel, nothing that happened to Esther Greenwood should have been powerful enough to shake her confidence as it did. Are these the same morale problems that our author, Sylvia Plath had? The pundits say yes. It seems that as self-doubt and ego dissipate, suicide seeps into the mind and locks the bell jar down forever. No way out. Asylums seldom cure... only lock up. And yes, as you will find in this novel, electric shock treatments to the brain don’t help. BTW, this author has a way with words that would make any literature teacher applaud. 

“It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York. I’m stupid about executions. The idea of being electrocuted makes me sick, and that’s all there was to read in the papers-goggle-eyed headlines staring up at me on every street corner and at the fusty, peanut-smelling mouth of every subway. It had nothing to do with me, but I couldn’t help wondering what it would be like, being burned alive all along your nerves. I thought it must be the worst thing in the world.” So that’s the first paragraph of the novel. Bingo! Right away I knew the direction of the story and I had a taste of the writer’s prose. Esther Greenwood was a junior in college (somewhere in Massachusetts, never disclosed) on a summer work program at Ladies Day magazine in NYC. She was a straight-A student who didn’t have confidence in herself. She constantly questions her ability to write even though she won a grant to be where she was...she is always debriefing her sexual desires...should I stay a virgin or not. “I would catch sight of some flawless man off in the distance, but as soon as he moved closer I immediately saw he wouldn’t do at all.” Long-term relations with anyone are a no-no. She prefers to see everyone as a hypocrite. When her summer job is over and she goes home, she is blindsided by her mother, “I think I should tell you right away, you didn’t make that writing course.” The air punched out of my stomach. “All through June, the writing course had stretched before me like a bright, safe bridge over the dull gulf of the summer. Now I saw it totter and dissolve…”

If you want to find out what happens next, you will have to buy your own copy. My lips are sealed. Oh, I also forgot to mention the wonderful side characters, such as Doreen, Jay Cee, Betsey, Buddy, and Joan. It reads like One Flew over the Cuckoo’s nest, but out of the asylum. The following is the last taste of Sylvia’s prose, only because I can remember my first run down a ski slope (1976) without useful lessons: “The interior voice nagging me not to be a fool-to save my skin and take off my skis and walk down...fled like a disconsolate mosquito. The thought that I might kill myself formed in my mind coolly as a tree or a flower. I measured the distance to Buddy (who was waiting at the bottom for her) with my eye. I aimed straight down. I plummeted down past the zigzaggers, the students, the experts…” After she crashed at the bottom, she bravely told Buddy, “I’m going to do it again.” Buddy said, “No, you’re not, your leg’s broken in two places.” HaHa.

RATING: 5 out of 5 stars

Comment: In London on 2/11/1963, Sylvia Plath blocked the bottoms of all the doors in her kitchen with tape, towels, and cloths, stuck her head in the oven, and turned on the gas. She was only 30 years old. 

She didn’t live to be famous. She died one month after The Bell Jar was published in the United Kingdom. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize posthumously in 1982 for The Collected Poems.

A famous quote from Sylvia is: “What is my life for and what am I going to do with it? I don’t know and I’m afraid.”

‘Nuff said.

 

TO SLEEP IN A SEA OF STARS

 This special signed edition available through B&N was supposed to be YA king Christopher Paolini’s first adult novel. It read like a normal 12-18-year-old YA novel to me. I felt hemmed in once I started to read this 878-page tome and I hate to stop reading once I start a novel. While the novel does have mostly adult characters, there are almost no sexual innuendos. It reads like a cross between Star Wars and Guardians of the Galaxy...a little too silly for my taste. In a sci/fi novel, I prefer the antagonist be as close to a single entity as possible, such as in the Alien series or in The Day The Earth Stood Still. I don’t need to read a book with a variety of foolish characters in impossible situations; such as the movie Abbott & Costello go to Mars (1953) or Spider-man or Batman novels. Now after that somewhat rant you must think that I hated this novel...not so book lover! I hate being deceived. When I read the teaser inside of the dust jacket, and it says, “Kira Navarez dreamed of life on new worlds...now she’s awakened a nightmare.” That’s false advertising...believe me, it was not that dramatic. Was it well written? Yes. Was it as teased? No. 

Kira Navarez and the company she works for were finishing up its survey of Adrasteia, an earth-size moon, light-years away from earth. On the last night of their mission, they celebrated their departure in the mess hall. While Kira and her fiance, Alan, were at the punch bowl, the expedition boss cleared a path to her. He said, “We have a problem: one of the drones down south went dead.” Kira said, “So? Send another one.” Her boss replied, “They’re too far away, and we don’t have time to print a replacement. Last thing the drone detected was some organic material along the coastline. Needs to be checked before we leave.” The moon they were on had to be cleared before the expected colonist could arrive. Kira would have to shuttle down in the morning and check it out. Kira and Alan spent the night together before Kira’s mission in the morning. That night, Alan asked Kira if she would be his wife. She said, “Yes. Thousand times yes.”

The organic material in question was on the top of a hill a few hundred meters to the south of her shuttle. “At the top of the hill, she found a flat spread of rock scored with deep grooves from the last planetary glaciation...biologically, there wasn’t much interest on Adrasteia...still, the absence of more developed forms of life was a plus when it came to terraforming: it left the moon a lump of raw clay, suitable for remolding however the company, and the settlers, saw fit.”

She found a rock formation that looked like the result of a meteor strike or a volcanic eruption. She then fell into the hole. “Kira lay where she was, stunned. In front of her, all she saw was rock and shadow.” She was lying on a pile of stone rubble, covered in dust. When her head cleared, she realized that she fell into a room. It had to be made by intelligent aliens. The dust started to cover her body like a series of tight, ever-shifting bands. “Outside the suit, the dust flowed over her visor, plunging her into darkness, Inside the suit, the tendrils wormed their way over her shoulder and across her neck and chest...she opened her mouth to scream as the torrent of dust rushed inside of her. And all went blank.”

The tight suit of tendrils and dust is the focus of the novel (that could have been finished in 350 pages). What is it? Is the suit good or bad? It is capable of defending her in any attack, but possessing it causes ungodly damage to many planets and aliens. Why does all of the universe seem to want the suit? Good luck finding that out...I was on page 646 and still didn’t know. The author has to learn how to leak out a little information in order to keep the reader interested...but alas, he didn't.

RATING: 3 out of 5 stars

Comment: I’m not into exotic-looking aliens like you would see in a Star Wars movie. That’s how I visualized the different types of aliens in Paolini’s space opera. Give me a good ole Robot like Robby or Gork anytime before an Ewok, Chewbacca or God forbid...a Jar Jar Binks! 

In Larry Niven’s classic 1985 novel, Footfall, the antagonists threatening Earth are the Fithps, baby elephant-looking creatures with multiple trunks. Why is this monster okay? Because it’s a single entity. No other creature appears in the novel. See my review of this wonderful story on 3/30/2011.

the SPLENDID and the VILE

My favorite non-fiction writer who writes like a fiction writer, Erik Larson, has finally disappointed me. His latest novel is nothing more than a chess game in the skies between Winston Churchill and Adolph Hitler. A game of who could bomb one another better. If you want to know what was in Churchill’s head while trying to get FDR and America into the war...you will like this book. If you want to know what was in Hitler’s head while delaying the blitzing of England...you will like this book. If you want to know what went on at Churchill's country home in Chequers...you will like this book. With the countries only 485 miles away from each other and Hitler involved in many other conflicts at the same time, you would think England with their famed RAF would be the favorite against the Luftwaffe, but they were not (the Luftwaffe was too massive). Why Hitler took so long to bomb London is still a mystery to me. So basically this novel takes us through many bombing raids between these countries and almost nothing else (I am exaggerating). Okay, you do meet all the other characters Hitler had working for him and Churchill’s many Lords, generals, and advisors. And who has the better bombers and who has the better fighter aircraft? Are the German Messerschmitts better than the RAF’s Spitfires and Hurricanes? All these facts with no sidebar or secondary story (which is Larson’s strength in storytelling) were putting me to sleep most nights. If you want to read the author that I know and love, read Larson’s The Devil in the White City (see my review of 1/26/2012). 

“America loomed large in Churchill’s thinking about the war and its ultimate outcome. Hitler seemed poised to overwhelm Europe. Germany’s air force, the Luftwaffe, was believed to be far larger and more powerful than Britain’s Royal Air Force, the RAF, and its submarines and surface raiders were now severely impeding the flow of food, arms, and raw materials that so vital to the island nation.” For Churchill to win the chess game depended on one thing as far as he was concerned. “I shall drag the United States in.” Not that Churchill wasted much time waiting for FDR’s decision: “Within two days of his (Churchill) taking office, 37 RAF bombers attacked the German city of Munchen-Gladbach, in Germany’s heavily industrialized Ruhr district.” On and on this book struggled till it came to the conclusion that the hoi polloi of the world already knew how it (WWII) would end. I thought there would have been a good chance of a quality secondary story...but nooooo! (John Belushi). Just more facts that have been dissected more than the proverbial frog. If it wasn’t for Erik Larson’s great writing skills, I would give this rigorously historical book a lower rating.

RATING: 3 out of 5 stars

Comment: On 6/18/1940 at 3:49 pm, Churchill stood before the House of Commons to address the French debacle (France surrendering). This speech would go down as one of the great moments in oratory, at least as he delivered it in the House of Commons. He issued an appeal to the greater spirit of Britons everywhere…"Let us, therefore, brace ourselves to our duty and so bear ourselves that if the British Commonwealth and Empire last for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour.’ "

Churchill agreed to broadcast his speech made earlier in the day to the British public that night. It didn’t go well. He was accused of being drunk, sick, or fatigued. What happened? “As it happened, the problem was largely mechanical. Churchill had insisted on reading the speech with a cigar clenched in his mouth.” Haha.

Also of note, There was a young American journalist and war correspondent in England at the time that would write a 1,300-page epic, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. His name was William L. Shirer.  

 

the HANDMAID'S TALE

If you are a chauvinist pig, you will love this 1985 novel by Margaret Atwood. While there are no creatures such as the crakers in Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (see my review of 3/12/2015), it is still one spooky dystopian story. Our story is way into the future where the USA is now Gilead, except for Hawaii and Alaska. Somehow congress and the senate were wiped out (murdered?) by some group (never identified in the novel) and the constitution was replaced by The Book of Genesis with the new leader’s interpretation. What were they reading? Except for some barren wives married to commanders, all women had no power or rights. There were some women assigned to cook and maintain a commander’s house (the Marthas and the econowives), but the majority were handmaidens. What are handmaidens?  They are women all dressed the same: long red dress like a moo-moo and a large white bonnet with blinkers (so they couldn’t see right or left). They do small chores (in pairs) like walking to a meat market named All Flesh to pick up tonights meat for their assigned commander’s house. Their main responsibility is to have sexual intercourse with their commander while the wife (usually barren) holds the handmaiden down. How else is this regime going to populate the New USA? Yes, I remember the 1950s…”keep them barefoot and pregnant”. Remember? Haha. The ladies are constantly watched by Angels, Guardians, or a big black truck with a large eye painted on it. Any protesters are gunned down by the new army. 

I could go on and on about the depressing lives women now endured, but I just wanted to give you a taste of what this story was all about. Where are the husbands of the handmaidens? You are briefly told that there is rebel fighting somewhere. Our narrator for this tale is Offred. Real names are forbidden for women except for the wives of a commander. We never find out what Offred’s real name is. All names now start with “Of”, so the narrator’s name means: Of Fred. What happened to her real husband Luke? I think the main criticism I have for Atwood’s writing is that she is too secretive. Stop leaving me out to hang and dry! Don’t let me squeeze the pages like a lemon for a drop of information. I know she finally wrote the sequel to this story in 2019 (The Testaments), but come on...that’s 35 years ago! You are an old woman now! Haha. Does she finally divulge what the hell’s going on? Don’t get me wrong...I loved the story. But the 93 authors that follow my reviews know I always find something wrong. My last beef is that if you are going to use Cormac McCarthy’s style of writing (no quotation marks)...stick with it. I believe the first page that you used with quotation marks was page183. Every time I read a dystopian novel, I say I’m not going to read another...they are too depressing… then I read another one. Now if you want to criticize me, I know, I know, I know that I love my ellipsis and parentheses, but that’s my style of writing. Oh okay, also writing paragraphs that are too long.

RATING: 5 out of 5 stars

Comment:

I’m not surprised that Atwood finally wrote a second book, because late in this book, Offred says, “I’m sorry there is so much pain in this story. I’m sorry it’s in fragments, like a body caught in crossfire or pulled apart by force. But there is nothing I can do to change it.”

“I’ve tried to put some of the good things in as well. Flowers, for instance, because where would we be without them?”

“Nevertheless it hurts me to tell it over, over again. Once was enough: wasn’t once enough for me at the time? But I keep on going with this sad and hungry and sordid, this limping and mutilated story…”

At the novel’s end, there is a historical notes section that is a very interesting addition to this novel. It’s the year 2195. Professors are having a symposium about a tale (this story) they found in an old storage trunk along with other memorabilia of the time. Professor Pieixoto starts the proceedings with, “...I wish, as the title of my little chat implies, to consider some of the problems associated with the soi-disant manuscript which is well known to all of you by now, and which goes by the title of The Handmaid’s Tale.”  

Well done Margaret Atwood!

The Last Day

It was a good novel, but not as good as I thought it would be. The premise got my sci-fi mind drooling. Just think of it...the rotation of the earth slows then finally stops. I’m asking myself, “What happened and how can it be fixed? What countries are now permanently in the dark and cold? Which ones are now permanently sunny and hot? Are there some countries that will straddle the line and have great weather? If so, will they try to rule the world?” So you can see how tasty this novel could be. Andrew Hunter Murray wrote a good story, just not as strong as it could have been. He is somewhat talented in the descriptive end, but a little shallow in keeping the reader excited. I also had the feeling that he was trying to write at the same pace Dan Brown writes novels. Murray’s main character, Dr. Ellen Hopper (an ocean scientist studying currents) is trying to solve her mystery at the same breakneck speed Dan Brown’s, Professor Robert Langdon (see my review of Origin on 10/24/2017), a religion symbologist, does. The only thing similar is they both have unusual occupations. So here’s a little taste of the novel. 

Early on (page 38 of 407 pages), the reader finds out how earth’s problems started: “Eventually, the cause was discovered. A white dwarf star, a rare celestial creature the size of earth but two hundred thousand times as dense, loosed from its own star system by a supernova explosion, now free to barrel through space disrupting everything in its path. It was traveling at two thousand kilometers a second through this part of the Milky Way, its trajectory and enormous gravity dragging the earth slowly backward, its path as perfect as if it had been designed by some malign heavenly committee. It was already millions of kilometers away by the time it was spotted, speeding from the wreckage, its damage done.” So you see, it doesn’t seem like anything could have been done to avoid the inevitable...maybe if we could have gotten Indiana Jones involved. Haha, just kidding.

The novel starts in the year 2059, thirty years after the slowing earth finally stopped. We meet our heroine, Dr. Ellen Hopper, out on a rig in the North Atlantic charting the new currents and whale patterns. Whoopi! (sorry). Anyway, two mysterious people from Britain helicopter onto the rig to bring her back to London. It seems a famous Oxford professor Edward Thorne (on his death bed) has something he only wants to tell his ex-student, Ellen Hopper. What’s so secretive that he will only speak to her...not even to the prime minister. This reminded me of how Dan Brown’s hero, Robert Langdon was whisked off to the Vatican City in Angels & Demons. This is where the story takes off and where I’m going to leave you to agree or disagree with my review… after you read it. 
 
RATING: 4 out of 5 stars

Comment: There is a novel that I read and reviewed on 3/28/2013 that dealt with the earth’s slowing rotation... The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker. Walker’s novel dealt with the slowing rotation viewed through the eyes of an adolescent girl in California. It was more about how gravity sickness affected a town in California. Gravity sickness was never mentioned in Murray’s novel. Neither novel reached apocalyptic proportions, which was refreshing.

The first work of apocalyptic fiction goes to Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville, who wrote Le Dernier Homme in 1805. Wow, that was a mouthful! It translates to The Last Man. Lord Byron’s 1816 poem Darkness deals with the sun’s extinction. And Frank Lillie Pollock has a second sun incinerate earth in his 1906 poem, Finis. Popular H.G. Wells wrote The Time Machine in 1895 and has his time traveler witness the sun’s expansion, wiping out the earth’s population. 

COUNTDOWN 1945

Move over Erik Larson, there’s a new sheriff in town and his name is Chris Wallace (just kidding). Well, Wallace’s book is certainly on par with the writer of Dead Wake, Erik Larson, the king of non-fiction books that read like fiction. Wallace’s chapters were countdown days to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan during WWII. For instance, the first chapter was countdown: 116 days, and the last two chapters were countdowns: 43 seconds and Firestorm. Each chapter ending with a cliffhanger to the next. I also liked the short chapters, long ones put me to sleep for whatever reason. The book was co-written by Mitch Weiss, winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting and bestselling author of the Heart of Hell...so I’m going to assume he had a lot to do with Countdown 1945.

Countdown 1945 goes over in detail the last 116 days of The Manhattan Project, the death of FDR, the emergence of Harry S. Truman, the last weeks of the famous Potsdam Conference (Stalin, Churchill, & now Truman replacing FDR), the genius of J. Robert Oppenheimer and his team and of course, Col. Paul Tibbets, Jr, and his crew that flew the B29 Superfortress (Enola Gay) that dropped Little Boy (atomic bomb) on Hiroshima on 8/6/1945. Was that a long fused sentence, or what? 

Oppenheimer headed the team at Los Alamos, New Mexico where they finished the development of the atomic bomb. He was the son of a German immigrant, six feet tall, 135 pounds with an “appetite for rare steaks, stiff martinis, spicy foods, and cigarettes.” And did I forget to mention “a genius of theoretical physics?” Students at Berkeley and California Institute of Technology loved him! “But Oppenheimer had a dark side, too...he didn’t tolerate small talk...dismissive to the point of rudeness and his brilliance could be clouded by melancholy and peevishness.”

“FDR thought very little of Truman, keeping him out of the war effort during Truman’s short stay at VP...he made no particular impression on me.” That’s why Truman didn’t know anything about the Manhattan Project. Truman was president for 13 days before the Secretary of War, Henry L. Stimson, walked into the oval office. “He handed the president a short, typewritten memorandum and waited while Truman read it. The first sentence was a battering ram...within four months we shall in all probability have completed the most terrible weapon ever known in human history, one bomb of which could destroy a whole city.” It will be (down the line) Truman’s call whether to drop the bomb or not.

 “Creating an atomic bomb was a devilishly complex process. First, the country had to produce radioactive fuel. Then it had to figure out how to safely detonate the fission process-setting off an atomic chain reaction-at the right moment and in the right place. And it had to pull all of this in complete secrecy.” There you go, you got a 43-page taste of what this book is all about. Did I like it? No. I loved it!

RATING: 5 stars out of 5

Comment: “The closer the U.S. got to the Japanese homeland, the more fiercely the enemy fought. Not a single Japanese unit surrendered. And the enemy homeland was mobilizing for an invasion and the bloodiest battle of all. Japan had more than two million troops stationed there. And every civilian had been armed and trained to fight.” 

After the successful testing of the atomic bomb in the desert of New Mexico on 7/16/1945, the Los Alamos workers partied in the streets. Hooray, hooray.

Then the euphoria died down.

When Oppenheimer imagined what it would be like to be under the explosion in Hiroshima, he mumbled to himself…”Those poor little people. Those poor little people.” President Truman wrote in his diary, “We have discovered the most terrible bomb in the history of the world.” General Eisenhower was against the dropping of the bomb, he wanted to overrun Japan. Truman wondered if he should warn Hiroshima, would they still surrender? If he did invade the main islands, the price could be millions of dead and wounded Americans besides the Japanese dead and wounded.

the BIG FELLA

Jane Leavy, author of The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle (see my first review of 11/15/2010) writes an enjoyable tale of Babe Ruth’s historical barnstorming tour of 1927 with Lou Gehrig. Ruth had just finished the 1927 season with a record of 60 home runs. The hard-nose Commissioner of major league baseball, who was hired by baseball because of the 1919 Black Sox scandal, had a rule that the winner of the World Series couldn’t barnstorm that year. What?? Babe didn’t care about rules or fines. He made more money than God (just a phrase, but almost true) with his countless endorsements, vaudeville acts and silent movie appearances. The Babe had a sports agent! Yes, Christy Walsh is the sport’s world’s first full-time agent...and his only client was the Babe (who needs anybody else). The Babe’s team was called “Bustin Babes” and Lou’s team was “Larrupin’ Lou’s. They toured many cities from the east coast to the west coast, playing local all-stars sprinkled in with some major leaguers. They attended and missed many town breakfasts, luncheons, and evening banquets and local award ceremonials they were invited to. It’s been said that they signed 5,000 baseballs during the tour! Every town in America wanted it.

I wasn’t aware of how badly the Babe was harassed and catcalled his during his career. His ethnicity was constantly questioned because of his big lips. People like Ty Cobb (a known racist) yelled the N-word at Babe from his dugout whenever the Yankees played Detroit. Babe is best described by Brother Gilbert from St. Mary’s in Baltimore (Babe’s childhood home), “If you ever wanted to see a bone out of joint or one of nature’s misfits, you should have seen him.” A sportswriter said, “His ears stuck out. Like handles on a loving cup. His hair stuck up. His nostrils spread wide. His lips were full as the rest of him would become. He was dark complected, having inherited his olive skin from his mother’s side of the family. In the rough tongue of the playground, he quickly acquired a nickname: Nigger Lips, or Nig, for short.” Wow, yet he succeeded big time. “George Ruth never shared his first impressions of St. Mary’s with his family. He never spoke about what it was like to go from being one of two surviving children in a family defined by a loss to be one of the many, what it was to go to bed that night wondering when or if he’d see that family again. He never said what it was like to sleep in ordered rows and dress in matching clothes, to share sinks and stalls in a communal washroom, to surrender to a system predicated on uniformity and routine.” Doesn’t it make sense that as the Babe got older, he became a nonconformist and a champion for orphaned boys?

In the late 1940s, as Babe was dying, the author spelled out the many opinions of various doctors. Even during his dying days, everybody wanted a piece of him. John Rattray, a Maryland chiropractor, thought the operation to stop his headaches was unnecessary. “Rattray was convinced he could have restored the Babe to full health and that he died not of cancer but as a result of nerves severed during surgery.” Bernarr MacFadden, a physical culture doctor (what!), had Ruth’s picture on the cover of his magazine three months after his death. He said, “If he would have put Babe on an exclusive grape diet he might have returned to the baseball field for many years of active service, notwithstanding his age.” Haha. “Ruth chose another course. He consented to an experimental form of chemotherapy and radiation then being tested on mice at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital, where doctors reported that tumors treated with the drug melted away.” As Mel Allen, the great NY Yankee announcer would say, “how about that!”

Jane Leavy’s style of writing is soothing but also a little annoying. You will be going along with something interesting and realize that she is suddenly talking about something in the past right in between the current stuff she was just talking about. It’s done almost unobserved. Does that make any sense? Her books do seem to be highly certified though. In this book, she has 104 pages of author’s notes and sources to back up her claims. Overall, I enjoyed this book mostly because of the subject matter...Babe Ruth.

Rating: 4 stars out of 5

Comment: From Jane’s Epilogue:

On August 12th,1948, the hospital announced his condition was critical. Two days later, doctors began issuing hourly bulletins. On the 15th, Paul Carey reached Julia at the nearby hotel where she was staying with Claire, “I think you’d better get over here.”

On Sunday, August 16th,1948, he managed to get out of bed and sit in a chair for twenty minutes, but his breathing was labored. His temperature continued to rise. He told Claire, “Don’t come back tomorrow, I won’t be here.”

Slugger rallies, pulmonary complications. Family at the bedside. Slugger sinking rapidly. Slugger failing.

“The slugger had never failed at anything and he certainly wasn’t going to fail at this. At 6:45 p.m., May Breen DeRose read him a telegram. As she got ready to leave, he lurched out of bed and started across the room. “Where are you going, Babe?” the doctor asked.”
“I’m going over the valley.”

“At 7:30 p.m., he received a final blessing (8/16/1948). Minutes later he fell into a deep coma. He was pronounced dead at 8:01 p.m.”

The autopsy showed that he didn’t die of cancer of the larynx. He died from a very rare and aggressive form of nasopharyngeal cancer that had spread to his neck, his lungs, and his liver.
His granddaughter Linda offered a different opinion. “I think baseball killed him; not cancer. He had no more worth in his head.”

Babe Ruth died at age 53, his clean-up hitter, Lou Gehrig at 37.

SAM HOUSTON & the ALAMO AVENGERS

I’m always a little leary of historical fiction novels written by Fox News Network celebrities. Most of them are published in an uncannily fast time, such as novels written by Bill O’Reilly (ex?), usually co-written with Martin Dugard, published at least once a year. He is what I call a commercial writer. How much research can be done at that pace? But, lo and behold, Brian Kilmeade, Fox News Network TV star (Fox and Friends) and radio star (The Brian Kilmeade Show) seems to have written a book all by his lonesome. So you can imagine that I was apprehensive reading another Fox Network star. Guess what? Although not a fact-filled almanac, I was pleasantly surprised at the author’s historical accuracy. This is not my first rodeo reading about the Alamo and its afterlife. It was a smooth and seemingly factual rendition of one of America’s favorite stories. One thing though...I thought the author spent too much time on The Alamo and too little time on the Avenger part.  

The birth of Texas was started by Stephen F. Austin’s father in 1821. “The fifty-nine-year-old Moses Austin obtained permission from the Mexican governor of Texas, who was eager to populate the sparsely occupied state, for three hundred American settlers to establish a colony there. Just weeks after settling the deal, he died of pneumonia.” On his deathbed, he pleaded for his son, Stephen, to take up his cause. He came. As the years went by, Austin went to see President /General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna about making Texas a separate state. Santa Anna would have nothing to do with that and had him arrested. “He felt lucky when, in late July 1835, he was finally permitted to head home to Texas. After his many months in Mexico City, he fully grasped the size of the enemy; he and his thirty thousand Texian (spelling at the time) settlers faced a fight with a nation of some eight million.”

The fight to take Texas from Mexico (go west, young man's first step? haha) would be a mammoth struggle, to say the least. And Santa Anna was a Napoleon look-alike to the nth degree. Here is a man who ordered one of his own Mexican states (Zacatecas) to give up their weapons and when they refused to give them up...he destroyed them. “The president permitted his soldiers to run wild, setting fires and pillaging. In fact, more than two thousand civilians in the town had been slaughtered, among them hundreds of women and children. Santa Anna’s message was clear: He would be merciless in putting down any who opposed him.” This is the man the brave Texians would have to wrest Texas from. Read the rest of this historical novel to find out how they did it! In it, you will meet President Andrew Jackson, Sam Houston, Jim Bowie and Davy Crockett (see my review of (7/18/2013).

RATING: 5 out of 5 stars

Comment: Winning the war:

“Sam Houston, through some mix of luck, instinct, fortuitous timing, and good counsel-and bravery-of men around him, did something remarkable. He and his army of farmers and shopkeepers, men distracted by the plight of their families and friends, who had become homeless wanderers fleeing for their lives, faced off with a large professional army, one amply supplied with guns, artillery, and munitions. And won a stunning, one-sided victory.”