This book caused a sensation as it came out of nowhere to dominate all the best seller lists for months. That does not typically mean I rush off to read it, but in this case recommendations from those whose sentiments I value, were so consistently laudatory that we read it for our reading group. What an extraordinary book!
McCourt recently retired from teaching writing in a New York City high school. I have heard him read from his work, and judging from his way of reading and responding to his audience I suspect he was a wildly popular and effective teacher. This book represents the story of growing up in Limerick just before and during World War Two.
He was born in New York City, but his father was an unrepentant alcoholic who managed to lose every job he got by drinking up his wages on payday. The children grew up in extraordinary poverty. Angela, his mother, lost several children to disease inflicted by the squalor she was forced to inhabit. Her mother sent them fares to return to Ireland -- it's a wonder that wasn't imbibed also -- but refused to put up the McCourts claiming to have no room. They managed to find lodging in the Limerick slums. Downstairs was referred to as Ireland and it regularly flooded during the rainy season; upstairs was Italy. It was so cold and they had not money so they were forced to dismantle the wooden walls to burn in order to heat the water for the imperative tea. Frank's father finally sought work in the booming English industry which had geared up to produce war materiel. He didn't help; he remained shiftless and reduced his substantial earnings to liquid form.
What's extraordinary is the level of superstition that existed in Ireland -- at least what we see of it -- as late as the 1940's. When Frank is extremely ill and leaking blood from virtually every orifice, his grandmother insists it's just part of growing up and recommends all sorts of bizarre home remedies. His hospitalization lasts for several months to cure the consumption. Frank was to have numerous health problems -- no wonder given the living conditions, rats, lice, and fleas were common -- and he almost lost his sight to conjunctivitis. In order to bring in a couple of shillings for his mother he helped a friend, whose legs were giving out after years of labor, deliver huge sacks of coal. This left him covered with coal dust that filled his eyes making them even worse.
The memoirs have hundreds of poignant episodes. Throughout everything one sense that Frank never lost his sense of humor and many of the stories bring a quick chuckle even while experiencing an unremitting sense of horror at the extreme poverty.I think my favorite anecdote involved the library. When Frank was about thirteen, they were evicted from their hovel for nonpayment of rent. They move in with a distant relative, a slothy, alcoholic, ex-Royal Navy officer, who lies around and reads all the time. He sends Frank to get books for him, and one rainy day the librarian suggests he stay and read in the library rather than walk back (some two miles) in the rain and risk ruining the books. She gives him Butler's Lives of the Saints to read assuming it cannot help but edify. Frank is soon hooked and wishing it would never cease raining. These saint stories are different from the ones he hears about in church or from Uncle Pa Keating. "There are stories about virgins, martyrs, virgin martyrs and they're worse than any horror film at the Lyric Cinema. I have to look in the dictionary to find out what a virgin is. I know the Mother of God is the Virgin Mary and they call her that because she didn't have a proper husband, only poor old St. Joseph. In the Lives of the Saints the virgins are always getting into trouble and I don't know why. The dictionary says, Virgin, woman (usually a young woman) who is and remains in a state of inviolate chastity. Now I have to look up inviolate and chastity and all I can find here is that inviolate means not violated and chastity means chaste and that means pure from unlawful sexual intercourse. Now I have to look up intercourse and that leads to intromission, which leads to intromittent, the copulatory organ of any male animal. Copulatory leads to copulation, the union of the sexes in the art of generation and I don't know what that means and I'm too weary going from one word to another in this heavy dictionary which leads me on a wild goose chase from this word to that word and all because the people who wrote the dictionary don't want the likes of me to know anything. All I want to know is where I came from but if you ask anyone they tell you to ask someone else or send you from word to word."
After a while it eventually stops raining and our lovely librarian is so impressed by Frank's attentiveness to the Lives of the Saints that she sends a note home to his mother suggesting that she may have a future priest on her hands he was so intent in the saints' lives. Little does she know.
This book is a gem.
This book is the sixth of the Hornblower saga. He is now in command of the Sutherland that has been ordered to assist in the Mediterranean in the hope of harassing Bonaparte's souther shores.
Many of the Hornblower exploits, as outlandish as they often seem, are actually based on the true accomplishments of Lord Cochrane whose biography I reviewed several years ago. Sometime the adventures take an amusing turn.
The captain and a group of volunteers take the captain's barge ashore after spying a French coastal vessel slowly making its way along a seemingly impregnable inland waterway. They successfully surprise the small ships' crew by swimming naked, armed only with cutlasses strapped around their waists, out to the ship in the middle of the canal. They banish the crew to the ship's dinghy and set the ship afire. They discover upon swimming back to the shore that the enemy have destroyed their clothes so they are forced to march through some fields and across the beach in a rather uncomfortable state. The image created of nine swarthy seamen being piped back aboard the Sutherland is just too preposterous to be a complete fiction. I suspect this tale is based on one of Cochrane's real feats.
In 1912 Clarence Darrow was indicted for bribery as a result of a sensational trial of John McNamara. Darrow was a mass of contradictions. He worked for companies as a lawyer, defending them against the working man, charging huge fees so he could take cases he truly believed in defending the working man against corporate power. He could be ruthless and often unethical, doing anything he believed necessary to win.
Darrow's childhood was devoid of love and affection as he remembered it. His agnostic and freethinking parents insisted their children attend church - his father had been to seminary - but rarely were the children praised, hugged or kissed, just a lot of puritanical rules. Whether because of this or not, Darrow grew up feeling enormous empathy for the less fortunate. "My sympathies always went out to the weak, the suffering and the poor. Not only could I put myself in the other person's place but I could not avoid doing so." This attitude surely lay behind his decision to take the McNamara case.
The defendant had been hired by union organizers in Los Angeles to place bombs at various sites in their fight to overcome a rigidly antiunion city. The publisher of the Los Angeles Times had spent a small fortune organizing the business leaders and they effectively controlled the labor market. McNamara was an expert, but he made several mistakes. He placed the bomb in an alley that was used to store barrels of highly inflammable ink. The resulting conflagration killed twenty people. He was distraught, as he had intended to cause only physical damage. He immediately went into hiding, but the Burns Detective Agency tracked him down.
Darrow did not want to take the case. He was getting tired, was looking forward to retirement, and he believed that McNamara was guilty. Samuel Gompers, head of the AFL, had to pull out all the stops by agreeing to a huge fee. He also threatened Darrow with the knowledge that if he did not take the case, Darrow would appear to be a traitor to the labor movement.
With Darrow's approval, the AFL began a public relations campaign trumpeting the innocence of McNamara and accusing Burns of manufacturing evidence. By doing so he put the credibility of the labor movement on trial with the defendants.
Darrow's old friend Erskine Wood did not approve of the tactics Darrow adopted. Wood believed truth was inseparable from the cause: acquittal achieved corruptly would send the message that violence works. Darrow, conversely, believed that educating the public was a primary goal of the trial, that the McNamaras were mere pawns in the struggle between capital and labor and since the prosecution had resorted to kidnaping, cajoling and coercion of witnesses, that the defense was obligated to adopt an equally aggressive posture.
The evidence against the McNamara's was overwhelming and Darrow knew it. So did Lincoln Steffans who helped negotiate a guilty plea that would spare the lives of the two. It is difficult to overestimate the impact the guilty plea had on the labor movement that was thrown into turmoil. It changed to course of an election in Los Angeles resulting in the election of an administration unfavorable to labor and by the "time the smoke cleared, the events in Los Angeles had helped make the [labor movement] a more conservative and mainstream organization."
Darrow, in the meantime, was in a precarious position as the evidence of his complicity in the subordination of jurors accumulated. He hired Earl Rogers, an extraordinary character, to defend him. Rogers was a spectacularly successful defense lawyer who would use any number of theatrical and devious devices to win the case. One of his favorites was to use a lorgnette as a prop to distract the jury. He would peer intently at a hostile witness through the glasses, then spin them around at the end of a long ribbon finally flying them neatly into a breast pocket. He never missed. He specialized in defending people he knew were guilty. As Darrow was famous for his bending the rules in defense of ideals, so was Rogers notorious for his zeal in defense of the less savory.
The irony is that Rogers did not win the case; it was Darrow who, in the most stirring oration of his career, that convinced the jury to find him innocent.
The author, a life long Democrat and liberal, examines the tendency and historical evidence for the extreme left to be as illiberal (defined as intolerant, bigoted, and narrow-minded) as the extreme right.
In current debate there exists little agreement (and perhaps there should not be) over what constitutes "progressive" and "reactionary." Vigorous criticism always toughens a position and suppressing or ignoring inconvenient facts strengthens no political dogma. "Protected from criticism, any argument becomes lazy and prone to excess." Ellis' goal is to "toughen the liberal reform tradition not to discredit or reject it."
It is inconceivable to think of liberalism without attendant belief in equality. Explicit in the Declaration of Independence, equality stems from seventeenth century liberalism that meant recognizing the equal worth of people's qualities and preferences.
"One of the great virtues of the modern liberal welfare state is that it does not pretend to have discovered the ultimate solution that will dissolve all contradictions; rather the welfare state explicitly 'muddles through,' institutionalizing the understanding that no single value, not equality, not liberty, not individualism, not community, not order, can be the polestar of public policy. The liberal welfare state recognizes that all institutional structures and arrangements, capitalist markets as well as governmental control, have weaknesses that must be compensated for if we are to achieve a decent and humane society."
Ellis goes further than Hofstadter's Age of Reform in that Ellis seeks to define the trend to illiberalism from a cultural perspective not just a psychological one. The actions of individuals derive from more than a desire to exorcize personal demons. Quite different personalities have adopted similar patterns of behavior and belief, and conversely similar personalities have opted for opposite poles of expression. Ellis traces radical egalitarianism episodically from the radical abolitionist movement to radical environmentalism. He has identified the "recurrent organizational and ideological dilemmas that have periodically thrown radical egalitarian political thinkers and movements down illiberal tracks. The desire to reform often results in an embracement of intolerance and violence, often welcoming authoritarianism.
In the case of the Students for a Democratic Society, one of Ellis' case studies, the normal democratic structures were perceived to be inegalitarian and were replaced by consensus voting. This effectively stripped the conventions of any decision-making ability so power shifted to the permanent national office. This office was staffed on an annual rotation basis and the offices of president and vice-president were abolished. Thus democratic reforms that were intended to make the organization more egalitarian had precisely the opposite effect. In an effort to become less elite, they became more patrician.
Of course, often the proletarian stance of many organizations is pure posturing. "Characteristic of both radical feminism and radical environmentalism is the tendency to dismiss the choices people make as a product of false consciousness. . . . Society implants the acquisitive impulse in us," they say, hence we cannot make the proper choices. The radicals pervert the liberal emphasis on privacy because it "impedes efforts to transform the way people think." Jesus recognized this and spoke of ripping the family apart. (cite) clearly, there is a political side to the distinction between what is public and private. "But to concede that the personal has political elements is one thing; to insist that the personal is equivalent to the political is to open the way to the politicization of private life."
The radical environmental movement has obscured this distinction. Its leaders have basic contempt for the way the everyday lives of people. In order to pave the way for greater intrusion into private decision-making, the radical environmental movement formulates all questions in terms of apocalyptic outcomes. "If the dangers to the human race are imminent and cataclysmic, then unprecedented restrictions on individual behavior are not just acceptable but mandatory. If no mistakes can be tolerated, then an individualistic trial-and-error process is out of the question. In an effort to remain "pure," these groups become less and less willing to work with established organizations. Outside groups are perceived to be unchangeable and violent confrontation becomes inevitable as the only solution to achieve change.
Another inherent flaw of the radical egalitarian movements is their unstated disdain for the underclass they purport to represent. Efforts to organize oppressed groups by intellectuals consistently fails because these groups are "more passive, distrustful, and diverse than the radicals romanticized view of the oppressed had led them to expect." The romanticization of the oppressed then created the necessity of explaining away the flaws of the persecuted."
One of the examples, among many, that Ellis cites is that of John Brown and his varying degrees of support from pre Civil War egalitarian abolitionists who rejected pacifism and came to support the war. William Lloyd Garrison, for example, had been such a committee devotee of nonviolence that even when attacked by a mob he refused to defend himself with the use of weapons. Ellis suggest that a gradual shift in the nature of egalitarians' view of slavery provided the basis for the change in viewpoint. The struggle against slavery became Manichean in nature; a classic contest between good and evil that justified any means to eliminate the evil that was slavery. Moral suasion could work only if the other side were viewed as redeemable.
Henry Wright provides another example of one who made an abrupt switch from devoted pacifism to support for violence against slaveholders. They were nothing more than subhuman animals in his eyes. This Christ's admonition to turn the other cheek did not apply. Violence in support of God's interest was validated. "In the end, radical abolitionist's utopian zeal outstripped its liberalism. . . . Opposed to institutionalized authority of virtually any kind, radical abolitionists often found themselves drawn toward arbitrary or charismatic leaders who disregarded legal or institutional restraints, restraints that are essential; to ensure the sort of limited and predictable government that is the foundation stone of liberal democracy."
Egalitarians are not unique in their desire for utopias that create a "unity that dissolves jarring conflict. Both the right and left have historically sought to transform questions of values, where disagreement is unavoidable, into questions of fact, where correct answers can be found." Egalitarians are uniquely vulnerable to the hope that perfect unity is possible since they distrust conflict and competition.
Ellis portrays these basic themes as being inherent flaws of egalitarian movements since the nineteenth century including as his final example, the anti-war movement of the sixties.
A man walks into a bar, talks to several of the people there, walks over to a man sitting eating oysters and plunges a spike repeatedly into his skull. That's the beginning of this very well written story. It's hard to decide what genre the novel belongs to; it's part mystery, part thriller, part philosophical examination of who and what we are. The narrator, Paul Wedekind, who anglicizes his name to Paul Watkins, we learn through an assortment of flashbacks, is a Soviet spy, forced into the business by the Stazi. He was a soldier in Afghanistan who was captured by the Mujahadin. He watches two friends being tortured and is exchanged at the last minute before his own execution.
Because he has been listed as a fatal battlefield casualty, the Russian secret service force him to enlist as a spy. He is sent to Newport Beach to help Suleika, another spy, whose husband had died. Suleika's cover was running a fishing boat. Her mission was to ferry couriers from Russian submarines to shore and back again. Paul's life seems settled until the Berlin Wall crumbles, a sub fails to show up during a near hurricane and the courier carrying hundreds of thousands of dollars tries to abandon them as their boat is sinking.
Suleika realizes that Paul has recognized the killer in the bar, a man from out of the deep past, someone he thought was dead, and a friend he knows will intertwine him into systematic revenge he would rather forget.
The worst civil engineering disaster
of the twentieth century occurred on March 12, 1928 when the St.
Francis Dam collapsed sending a wall of water 110 feet high down
a canyon to the sea. Five hundred people were killed and bodies
were found washed up on San Diego beaches 150 miles away.
The dam was the keystone of the water project that essentially created Los Angeles. William Mulholland, chief architect of the entire water system, had designed it. His career collapsed along with the dam. For years the cause of the catastrophe was discussed and investigated. The definitive explanation is reported in this fascinating article.
Mulholland was the archetypal practical engineer who rarely read of new reports and data and who was always in the field at the site. He had proposed and built the largest aqueduct in the world. It stretched more than 230 miles bringing water from the Sierras to the San Fernando Valley in 1913. It wasn't enough as the population exploded. Now they had water. (Cadillac Desert - book and video series provides an excellent history of the influence of water on development of the west). The new dam across the San Francisquito Canyon was to store a one-year supply of water in case of the frequent droughts. It was originally designed to be 175 feet high holding back 30,000 care feet of water. It was a curved gravity dam that would combine the best features of gravity dams that hold back the water by sheer dead weight and arch dams that transfer the load onto the abutments. The drawback was that masonry dams require a solid, hard and stable rock foundation.
Because of Mulholland's reputation little outside oversight was required. His judgment was unassailable and unquestioned. The original dam design he raised by twenty feet as drought increased the prospective demand for water. Evidence suggests that the dam's base was not strengthened to handle the additional pressure of some 8,000 acre feet of water. Leaks appeared in the dam almost from the start. All dams leak to some extent and Mulholland insisted these were normal manifestations. On the day of the disaster the water stood three inches from the top of the dam and wind was blowing waves over the top. A report of muddy water leaks (potentially bad news because it might indicate foundation weakness) brought Mulholland to the dam for an inspection the day before the collapse. He and other engineers reported no danger. The next day everything was gone.
Several investigat6ions produced contradictory evidence as to the cause. Mulholland shouldered the complete blame and retired as the city paid out substantial claims with little fuss. Soon the great Boulder and Grand Coulee dams overshadowed the short memories of the outside world.
Recently, J David Rogers, owner of a consulting firm that specializes in investigations of engineering failures who combines the knowledge of the geologist and the tenacity of the historian has examined all the records and reports of the survivors in addition to examining the site. He read the definitive history of the collapse by Charles Outland (Man-Made Disaster) and was intrigued. His analysis revealed six major flaws any one of which could have caused the dam's collapse: the cast abutment rested on the site of an ancient landslide that was then lubricated by water leaking through and around the dam; the dam had not been allowed to cure properly leaving cracks; the abutments had no drainage pipes which caused an actual buoying up of the structure reducing its deadweight and effectiveness; the arch loads were insufficient to withstand the additional pressure of water on the top of the dam; and the dam was not designed properly to handle the additional feet of water at the top.
Finally, Mulholland's autocratic nature and independent work were primarily responsible. No one engineer should ever bear so much design responsibility. The dam was never rebuilt. Today there is a small creek that meanders around the remaining huge broken blocks of concrete and personal effects left from the tragedy still periodically wash up around where the town had stood before being swept away.
This novel is set during the cataclysmic transformation that accompanied the death of the Roman Empire at the beginning of the middle ages when the Christian Church stamped out the vestiges of Roam cultural and religious heritage.It was Theodosius in the late 4th century that mandated trinitarianism and struck down all pagan forms of worship. He hastened the fall of Rome by splitting the empire into two sections, leaving his inheritance to two sons, both incompetent: Honorius ruled in the West; Arcadius in Constantinople. The hostility between the two malcontents forms the backdrop for the novel which begins and ends in the year 414 A.D. although flashbacks take it back further.
Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, is a prominent character. By thwarting Theodosius's demands for restitution to Jews for their destroyed property -- Theodosius protected Jews -- Ambrose began the struggle between the state and religious authority for supreme power. Ambrose and Hadrian, an ex-Roman civil administrator both view the world through restricted vision which was to become the predominant view for many centuries thereafter. These views are reflected by the drama surrounding a Roman who is arrested for ostensibly conducting archaic and illegal religious celebrations.
In 1951 when Catcher in the Rye was published Holden Caulfield was sixteen. That would make him sixty-three. He probably getting ready to retire from his job as a stock-broker with a huge pension; or, perhaps he got a golden parachute several years ago when his firm downsized. He still resides in Levittown and probably should replace the plastic on the living room furniture. Depressing.
This marvelous historical mystery takes place during a pilgrimage to the Shrine of St. James in Spain during the months of March through July of 1142. Catherine (an ex-nun who had studied under both Heloise and Abelard) and her husband Edgar are taking the pilgrimage in hopes that paying homage to St. James will make Catherine fertile and bring her a child after several miscarriages.
They embark on the journey accompanied by her father, her husband, an uncle, and a cousin. Her family is unusual in that her uncle and cousin are Jewish, a situation that creates a not inconsiderable amount of tension between them and the monks who travel with them. Four knights are traveling along as guards for a group of monks who are traveling with the Abbott of Cluny.
In the twelfth century travel was difficult and dangerous. It was important to voyage in large groups as protection from marauding bands of thieves and predators.
The knights are being killed one-by-one as the journey progresses and suspicion soon is attached to various members of the party as past secrets are revealed. Catherine begins to seek some answers to the riddles posed by the killings as suspicion is transferred to her relatives because of their religion. Finally only one knight remains and the hidden motives of the four guards become apparent.
McCrone begins with two assumptions: that "self-consciousness must have a biological basis" and that the mind evolved.
Language is one of the defining human characteristics; indeed it is language that has permitted our species to learn how to control the environment around us rather than being forced to adapt to it. Language permitted self-awareness and self-consciousness.
Being intelligent is hard work. The brain uses about one fifth of the oxygen intake even though it's only about one fiftieth of the bodys weight. During the climatic changes of the Miocene era some 10 million years ago, the apes which had flourished in the rich forest environment were forced to adopt a land-gait and leave the trees. Most of the ape lines became extinct, a process almost completed today; they had reached an evolutionary dead-end. Only the human line of apes survived. Because two-legged movement is not as efficient, nor as fast as four-legged, these strange upright ancestors of ours developed social organizations for the common defense (also a characteristic of the few remaining apes like baboons and chimps.) Still, this alone was not enough for several early hominid lines became extinct, unsuccessful experiments of God.
The Australopithecines, with strong jaw for chewing up the tough roots and plants of its diet disappeared with the advent of the colder ice age. Our direct ancestors, with smaller jaw, a more varied diet, and the ability to cook, were better suited to adapt to the change in environment. The last 3,000,000 years have been dominated by the ice-age with only brief 10,000 - 20,000-year long interruptions of more temperate climates (we near the end of the most recent one now.) These periods placed terrible stress on the animals that had developed warm coats and had adapted to colder climates. Many species died out. The lightweight homo line with his intelligence and flexible diet was again successful. Another advantage was food-sharing -- almost unique to humans -- and pair bonding. But language, appearing it is thought with home sapiens, was to make a crucial difference. "Language paved the way for all the special abilities that we so value abilities such as self-awareness, higher emotion and personal memories."
McCrone examines how various basic mental abilities work such as thought, memory and learning, in order to appreciate the structures that language expanded.
The years between 1960 and President Kennedy's death were fraught with danger. At no time in the world's history, perhaps, have we come closer to self-annihilation. It was one crisis after another ending with the Berlin standoff and Cuban Missile Crisis.
Kennedy's first test was the Bay of Pigs. He learned many hard lesson: The CIA could not be relied on; The F.B.I. under Hoover had dirt on Kennedy the director would unhesitatingly use to remain in power; and the military brass often failed to substantiate their judgments with accurate information. It was a time of bully-boy politics. The United States made several attempts on Castros life (interestingly, Castro had never used the applied the word "Socialist" to his country until after the Bay of Pigs fiasco). During this short period the war in Laos and Vietnam had their beginnings, the Berlin wall was created, and atmospheric nuclear bomb testing was conducted by both countries.
The fate of the world was controlled by a millionaire's son and a former metal-worker. Beschloss focuses on these two personalities using many recently released documents. One engaged in reckless extramarital affairs, the other audacious international adventures. The flashpoints were so numerous as to be virtually unbelievable. Simple events like escorting United States officials into Berlin by U.S. army personnel against the wishes of the Soviets and the boarding of Soviet-bloc vessels engaged in international trade with Cuba, spy flights over the Soviet Union, any of these events could have been used as an excuse for war.
To make things worse, there was no system of instant communications such as exists now. Critical messages were relayed by Western Union bicycle messengers. One important message from Kruschev to Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis required eight hours to be translated and transmitted to Washington. That message contained information that Kruschev intended to remove the missiles from Cuba. American air strikes that surely would have begun WW III were planned for the following day. A further delay in the delivery of the message would have resulted in apocalypse.
Some of the detail is simply stunning. For example, following Kennedy's decision not to bomb Cuba after Kruschev's withdrawal of the missiles, Curtis LeMay and George Anderson, two of the Joint Chiefs loudly took the President to task for not starting the war. Perhaps a stronger President would have fired them on the spot. We also learn how many of the President's private licentious liaisons had the potential to compromise his public duties. (One of the pieces of dirt that Hoover held over Kennedy's head was his knowledge that Kennedy was known to have been sleeping with a Nazi spy during WW II. That revelation would have harmed Kennedy immeasurably.
Still, Kennedy's skill at crisis management as well as Kruschev's unwillingness to (not to mention his knowledge of the vast superiority of the United States missile resources) to fight a nuclear war, plus a whole lot of luck left the world intact.
There were so many new documents and especially Soviet politicians still alive who are now willing to be interviewed about that era, that it took Beschloss six years to write about a two-and-a-half-year period.