What Are You Reading

[Fading Fast]

The Vagrants by Yiyun Li, a chronicle of moral complexity surrounding Chinese dissidents during Tiananman Square,
dovetailing present day Hong Kong. A gift from my friend Ruth, after her gals-only Hyde Park reading coven
voraciously devoured said then picked the bones clean, before tossing it over to me at lunch recently, when I promised
to read it and reciprocate a literary gift. Ruth is a Sabra, a native born Israeli and former physicist who later
studied medicine at the University of Illinois-Chicago. Fascinating lady, and someone who thinks things through;
but at lunch she confessed that she intuitively believed the accusation against Justice Kavanaugh during his
Senate confirmation hearing. This somewhat surprised me as the accuser was uncertain as to the facts pertaining
to an alleged assault but Ruth held firm. I came across a book review of Millie Hemingway's Justice on Trial;
The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Supreme Court and decided to pass it on to Ruth for her
studied analysis. I confess my motive was to prove my point concerning the facts of the case-stubborn cuss
that I am. But in the same batch of culled internet stuff from The New Criterion archives, I zeroxed an essay
that explored the intellect and its limits on comprehending the mysteries of life and by extension the heart's
intuitive capacity to absorb abstract truth often hid within concrete objectivity. This certainly does not obviate
factual legal analysis but seemingly adds a measure to same. But I am a Scrooge for the what's what of a case.
I eagerly anticipate Ruth's opinion of Hemingway's study and her further voice to her intuition.

I look forward to an update when Ruth gets back to you.

 

[bluesmandan]

Just finished a biography of George Whitefield. His voice was so loud he could be heard by 30,000 people with no amplification at all. Amazing.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[Fading Fast]

The Unlikely Spy by Daniel Silva published in 1996

Historical spy thrillers need to deliver an intricate espionage plot incorporating geopolitical events personalized by spies, spy masters and "average" people caught up in the game of intrigue.

Silva delivers all that in The Unlikely Spy by taking WWII's Normandy invasion as his geopolitical event, allowing him to weave in Nazi internecine intrigue, British and American coordination and tension, Winston Churchill (no WWII story would be complete without his outsized presence) and the preparation of the largest invasion force the world has ever seen.

It's amazing that the Nazis accomplished as much conquering as they did for a time as their hatred for other groups seems equal to their hatred for each other. Silva shows us one German spy agency trying to subvert another as Hitler played his usual game of pitting his senior officers against each other (the internal fighting between German spy agencies is historically accurate).

Despite that, in Silva's world, Germany tucked a small band of elite sleeper spies into England in the late '30s that are only first activated in '44, months before the Normandy invasion, in order to discover the invasion's plans and location.

Trying to thwart that effort is a modest history professor, Alfred Vicary, who was recruited early in the war by his friend Winston Churchill to identify and turn as many German spies as possible. Vicary is no James Bond -- a receding hairline, a professor's rumpledness and being a victim of both unrequited love and paralyzing seasickness forces this spymaster to use his outsized, subtle brain to succeed at a game where you never see the full picture, never have all the facts and where everyone is trying to deceive.

Having turned what MI5 believed to be all of the German spies in England at the start of the war - and running a "Double Cross" network where false information is fed back to those spies' handlers in German - Vicary is shaken out of his comfortable success when the sleeper spies' efforts to steal the Normandy invasion plans are revealed by indirect evidence. Vicary and his team are forced into a race against time to discover and stop the spy network from delivering the invasion site to Germany.

And Vicary has some worthwhile adversaries in the sleeper cell. First, is the ruthlessly cold, stunningly beautiful and searingly smart German, Catherine Blake, who uses her gun, wits and body with equally ferocious precision to steal classified Normandy documents from a senior Allied officer with whom she's sleeping. And second, there's Horst Neumann, a quiet and modest-in-stature German agent who is Caroline's contact for passing information to Germany and, ultimately, the one who leads her (and his) harrowing escape effort once they are discovered.

There are other characters - like Vicary's of-questionable-integrity-and-loyalty MI5 boss - and additional plot twists (how many times can the same spy be turned? ) - that amp up the action and drama. Also, there's plenty of sex - Ms. Blake is, basically, a bisexual Mata Hari. There's plenty of violence - the bodies start to pile up toward the end. Finally, there's a darn fine climax that has you wanting to skip ahead to see how it is resolved, but also held in the grip of its twists and turns.

More would give too much away of this fine effort. Does it rise to my personal gold standard of spy novels - Tom Clancy's Cold War classics like Red Storm Risingand the Cardinal of the Kremlin - no, but it also isn't as unnecessarily convoluted as the John le Carré ones with which I, at least with my small brain, am never really certain of what happened, even when it's all over.

I found my way to this one from a recommendation by FL member and author Mellisa Amities. Her excellent review is here: https://bestofww2.blogspot.com/search?q=an+unlikely+spy

 

[Harp]

I look forward to an update when Ruth gets back to you.

Ruth adamantly remains her stubborn self. Spoke with her briefly today and I think I should have tendered
a dinner invitation this evening as she seemed to steer the conversation in that direction, but for some work
in the bag I would have bit. Hemingway's study and further argument await a more convenient time.

 

[LizzieMaine]

"City of Dreams: Dodger Stadium and the Birth of Modern Los Angeles," by Jerald Podair.

There are few sports topics that have been hashed and rehashed more in print than the relocation of the Dodgers, but nearly every book and article that's come out over the last half-century has focused on the New York side of the equation. Comparatively little of substance has treated the West Coast part of the picture, so I was looking forward to this book to fill in some of the gaps in my own knowledge of the story.

First off, this is not a "baseball book." It's more a study in the very peculiar sort of urban politics that characterized 1950s Los Angeles, and the individuals who controlled both public action and public opinion. And it's also a study of how a city, laboring under the burden of a whopping inferiority complex, tried to turn itself into a "world class" city and damn the consequences. Podair's essential thesis is that the arrival of Walter F. O'Malley and his ball club in 1958, and the construction of Dodger Stadium, were the catalysts that created the modern city -- thanks to an interlocking web of public and personal agendas that converged on the main goal of turning LA from a sprawling hodgepodge of neighborhoods to an Eastern-style metropolis built around a central Downtown hub. With that being the focus, the ball club itself is really little more than an instrument for the accomplishment of a larger purpose -- one which Walter F. O'Malley himself managed to swing to his own personal advantage.

This book is sanctioned by the O'Malley family, and portrays The Big Oom according to the family line -- a man more wronged than wronging -- so there's a tremendous amount of soft-pedaling going on here when it comes to many of the unsavory details of the Chavez Ravine Land Giveaway that led to a city referendum and a wrenching court case before the way was cleared for ballpark construction to begin. But there are still some fascinating facts here -- especially when dealing with the odd political coalitions which stood on both sides of the issue, with both opponents and supporters of the deal combining both left and right-wing voices. There were so many different agendas at play that you can't predict who is going to take what position. As an exercise in mid-century urban gamesmanship, it's fascinating.

Nevertheless, there are some interesting little sidelights that come out over the course of the story. There have often been allegations that O'Malley left Brooklyn due to his discomfort with the shifting racial demographics of the borough -- but it's flat-out stated here that a major factor in the move was that O'Malley was disturbed by the working-class alignment of the Dodger fanbase, and the consequent working-class image of the team -- something he could easily escape in a cosmopolitan city like LA. Evidence is also offered concering O'Malley's fixation on Disneyland as the ideal example of what seeing a ballgame ought to be like -- a sanitized, packaged, uniform and utterly controlled product for a nice middle-class clientele. He couldn't very well build "Dodgerland" in Flatbush, with a fanbase made up of the Frankie Germanos and Hilda Chesters of the world, but Los Angeles, again, offered the perfect environment for such a Disneyfied approach -- an approach which today has come to dominate the sport. And yet, it's also documented that even as late as 1959, W. F. O. was suggesting he might go back to Brooklyn if he didn't get what he wanted out of the city. Oh really? No, O'Malley.

Again, this is not a baseball book. You won't find colorful stories about Duke Snider wrecking his shoulder trying to throw a ball out of the L A Coliseum on a dare, but you will learn just how convoluted the law can be when it's being bent and wrangled and extruded and manipulated and thrown down into the dirt and stepped on in the name of money, prestige, and "Progress." In that sense, even with caveats about its point of view, it's fascinating reading.

 

[Fading Fast]

The Guest Book by Sarah Blake, published in 2019

If you've ever wondered what a summer read mashed up with a modern political screed would be like, here it is.

The Guest Book's summer read part is solid - in the 1930s, a WASP family purchases an island with a large house off the coast of Maine and, as with many a good page turner, the purchase is cloaked in a possible original sin tainting and cursing the generations that follow.

The book's political screed takes a modern view of both race and WWII and, with other than a nod here and there to the complexity of the issues in their day, weaves in a narrative that loudly and smugly passes muster with today's accepted political pieties.

How did Ogden Milton (not since Clark Kent has a name left no doubt of its American "tis of thee" roots), senior partner at the fictional investment banking firm of Milton Higginson, raise the money to buy an island in the middle of the Depression? Was he one of those horrible Wall Street capitalists who financed Nazi Germany when there was money to be made or had he simply invested based on a friendship dating back to well before the Nazi takeover of Germany?

Did his wife, Kitty, selfishly leave a window open in the Sutton Place apartment (almost every WASP redoubt gets a shout out eventually) for her infant son to find or was a good mother left forever wounded by a sad accident.

And if those two events were't enough, in a coincidence only a novelist on a political mission could love, the Miltons, really Kitty, has an opportunity to save a Jewish boy, incredibly, offered to her care the first day she visits the Island in 1936. Her refusal, perfectly aligned to a modern view of why she would, haunts her the rest of her life.

With those secrets tucked away until they aren't, Ogden and Kitty raise their family - a family that refuses to quietly and seamlessly play its part in the great American WASP dream.

First, an heir apparent son is more interested in playing music than investment banking while also showing a sensitivity to race and religious issues all but perfectly aligned to how a self-satisfied modern mind would fantasize it would have envisioned race and religious issues if transported back to the mid century. Also buffering the senior Miltons is a daughter with epilepsy who falls in love with, hold your breath, a young Jewish man who, unrelatedly (coincidences come fast and furious) becomes her father's favorite young star at Milton Higginson.

All of this drama will play out, in yet another incredible coincidence, during one concussing weekend at the Milton's island - loudly proclaimed as a perfect world by the Miltons and a ring-the-bell metaphor for the author denouncing a WASP-dominated mid-century America.

As a summer read, it's fun - sand, sunsets, tides, sailing, damp houses, affairs, secrets, lies, cocktails and big money push each page and generation of Miltons forward - a perfect companion to your own cocktail under a beach umbrella. But The Guest Book ruins itself because it aspires to be more in our modern age in which everything is political - especially everything "intellectual". The result is a too obvious and preachy virtue-signaling of modern race and religious views.

Just when you're settling into a good soap opera moment, you're pulled out of the forbidden sex, dirty business deal or withering WASP look to be told how wrong every view on race and religion was then and, by proxy, how right certain forward-thinkers are today.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Of course, we did, in fact, have such a family who controlled an island off the Coast of Maine during the Era -- the Morrow clan, and their son-in-law Herr von Lindbergh. Not particularly nice people -- Papa Dwight was a minion of J. P. Morgan, a shadowy figure who pulled imperialistic strings behind the scenes while acting as Ambassador to Mexico, and a genteel anti-Semite in the manner of early 20th Century WASP America. Nothing too overt, of course, no black shirts or anything like that, you understand, it just isn't done. "A few of the better kind of Those People, perhaps, they're very smart you know, but we can't let them take over."

Although Anne Morrow did raise some eyebrows when she married a celebrity aviator with a vulgar populist father, it all cooled down when it became apparent that young Charles was a "right-thinking sort of fellow."

 

[Fading Fast]

Of course, we did, in fact, have such a family who controlled an island off the Coast of Maine during the Era -- the Morrow clan, and their son-in-law Herr von Lindbergh. Not particularly nice people -- Papa Dwight was a minion of J. P. Morgan, a shadowy figure who pulled imperialistic strings behind the scenes while acting as Ambassador to Mexico, and a genteel anti-Semite in the manner of early 20th Century WASP America. Nothing too overt, of course, no black shirts or anything like that, you understand, it just isn't done. "A few of the better kind of Those People, perhaps, they're very smart you know, but we can't let them take over."

Although Anne Morrow did raise some eyebrows when she married a celebrity aviator with a vulgar populist father, it all cooled down when it became apparent that young Charles was a "right-thinking sort of fellow."

All fiction comes from real life.

Have you read "The Guest Book?"

 

[LizzieMaine]

I haven't, but from your description it sure sounds like a roman a clef on the Morrows. Baby "falling out a window" = Lindbergh Kidnapping Case?

The big difference, of course, is that the real Morrows would never have allowed any crusading YCL types on the island, let alone to marry into the family.

 

[Fading Fast]

I haven't, but from your description it sure sounds like a roman a clef on the Morrows. Baby "falling out a window" = Lindbergh Kidnapping Case?

The big difference, of course, is that the real Morrows would never have allowed any crusading YCL types on the island, let alone to marry into the family.

I know very little about the Morrows, but while there's an echo, the "Miltons" appear more open minded, which seemed to me was used by the author to say "stuff it" to their open-mindedness as it wasn't good enough so it was bad / evil.

Blake did a good job showing the contradictions and limitations of an "open-minded" family of that type, in that day.

 

[Harp]

Bryan Magee's classic The Philosophy of Schopenhauer. Considered the definitive take, a long overdue look
at S; though I doubt any book can be considered either definitive or the last word on this man.
His clarity and historical post Napoleon vantage on European society afford a rare glimpse inside a reflective soul.

 

[Fading Fast]

Padlocked by Rex Beach, published in 1926


Beach was a popular novelist in his day (roughly most of the first half of the 20th century) who wrote smart page turners - not "literature -" that, today, give us a contemporaneous window into his time period.

Two things come clear from every Beach novel (I've read four or five by now) - the past was not as black and white as we sometimes like to think and what liberals and conservatives passionately believed has changed a lot over the years - sometimes flipped completely.

A wealthy, hard-core social "reformer -" on the "correct" side of every moral issue (he views prohibition as the reform movement's crowning achievement) , "charitable" in that "I'll lift you up way -" cannot accept the moral "failings" of his wife and teenage daughter. Though tame "failings", even by the standards of that day, they lead to the daughter all but running away from home upon the death of her mother.

Alone in New York City - with no money, family or friends - the daughter, Eddie, survives by singing in a cabaret (to the horror of her father), while trying to find the funds and a path to leverage her one special asset, her voice, into a respectable singing career.

A wealthy benefactor, a society kinda-sorta boyfriend, a from-the-streets-of-Brooklyn girlfriend and a decent booking agent - combined with some unwanted involvement from her fire-and-brimstone father - push and pull her every which way, leading to a calamitous misunderstanding landing genuinely decent girl Eddie in dire straits with the law on, of all things, a mistaken morals charge.

Today, our culture screams at us that there are no differences between the sexes resulting in many TV shows and movies having women enthusiastically initiating random and all but, anonymous sex; but in the '20s, women wanting/initiating/trading in sex, especially young women, out of wedlock, were considered wanton. Decent men were expected to protect women from predatory men. This was simply part of the public view of morality at the time (what really happened is what always happens - people had sex and then covered-up, as best they could, whatever society required them to cover-up).

Eddie's long sentence in a women's reform prison provides the book's climax. Failing physically and mentally in prison, and desperately in need of rescue, almost none of Edith's friends and family behave as expected. Some prove to be surprisingly faithful while her father, manipulated by another reformer and romantic interest with her own nasty agenda, all but destroys his daughter. (Public service announcement: always beware of the do-gooders passionately telling others how to live their lives because they, the reformers, claim to have those others' best interest at heart.)

Beach is a first-rate story teller who keeps the pages turning, which can be enough, but he also weaves social and philosophical views and opinions into the story making it more than just a plot-driven affair; it's a view into some of the prevailing bents of the day.

Effectively, for us, it's time travel to the 1920s - a '20s that can feel quite modern. To wit, note this comment from a young woman arguing with a young man that she can handle moonshine as well as he, "How Old-fashion you are!...remember, there's no longer a weaker sex. Independence has dawned for us girls."

Of course, that doesn't "prove" anything other than that few things were as black and white back then as they are often portrayed today. And "new" ideas tend to look less new when seen in the true sweep of history. And while all that is interesting and engaging, Beach's best skill is one that has had value all throughout history - he tells a good story.


N.B., For those interesting in reading his or her first Beach novel, I would recommend:

Son of the Gods #7878

or Mad Money #7897

 

[Harp]

The procedural fracas surrounding impeachment found on some low-hanging fruit culled off the internet:
Must the House Vote to Authorize an Impeachment Inquiry?; Keith E Whittington, Lawfare Wed. 10/09

Gladstone opined that the American Constitution was the most splendid document ever struck by the mind of men;
into which said paper finds itself caught in a maelstrom of confusion and philosophic contradiction.
Stirring the pot further, Whittington seemingly ignores Hamilton's Federalist Papers#5 commentary that any
such process constitutes a national public inquiry; presumably requisite would be a floor vote by the entire House
speaking as a singular deliberative chamber, followed by applicable rules regulating its set investigative process
which would include all enrolled members serving under the Speaker of the House's gavel.
The Senate serves as a bulwark against proletariat vindictiveness and Artice 1 requires a 2/3rd majority to convict,
substantive cause assumed. Whittington skates around this issue of substance and does little other than
focus on partisan ridiculousness, casting his veneer of somber reflection at the circus.

 

[LizzieMaine]

"Home Of The Braves: The Battle for Baseball in Milwaukee," by Patrick Steele.

The modern era of franchise shifts in major league baseball began in March of 1953, when owner Louis Perini moved his Boston Braves to Milwaukee, a move which led to attendance records, two pennants, and a World Championship over the next five years. Six years after that world championship,with attendance shrinking and the franchise struggling, word leaked out that new owners were planning to shift the Braves to Atlanta. After a bitter, wrenching court battle between the team and Milwaukee County, the Braves went South in 1966.

What really happened? Steele, who writes from the position of a Braves fan who never got over the shock of the move from Milwaukee, uncovers some interesting texture in telling the story -- blaming several factors, all of which combine to reveal that the Braves, in spite of their on-field success, were a very poorly-run operation thruout their tenure in Wisconsin. The problems started with Perini, who never left Boston himself, running the team on an absentee basis, and continued with Milwaukee County, which engaged in a long and bitter battle with the team over its lease on County Stadium: having given away a bargain contract to lure the team west, officials soon realized they'd been had. The team and county would bicker thruout the franchise's tenure in Milwaukee over stadium rent, over parking and concession profits, over operation costs for non-baseball activities at the stadium, and over petty personality issues that often devolved into cheap name-calling. And amidst all this, the team itself did no planning for the future -- during its entire tenure in Milwaukee only four star-quality players emerged from the Braves farm system: Henry Aaron (who was already under contract before the shift from Boston), Joe Torre, Rico Carty, and Phil Niekro. Because of this, as the young, powerful team that came west aged out in the early 1960s, the quality of the on-field product rapidly devolved into mediocre indifference. And Braves fans, spoiled by early success, simply lost interest in a second-rate club. By the time Perini sold out to a Chicago-based syndicate in 1963, it was a foregone conclusion that the "Milwaukee Miracle" was over, and that the Braves were leaving. It was just a question of when.

Steele is clearly bitter about what happened, but he doesn't take the easy way out of blaming "the carpetbaggers" who bought the team from Perini. There is more than enough blame to go around for everyone here, and it's fascinating look at what the notion of a ball club as an enterprise designed to operate strictly for short-term profits did to the Game. Boston sportswriter Harold Kaese was right in 1953 in his eulogy for the Boston Braves, when he warned Milwaukee fans that their time would come.

 

[Harp]

"Home Of The Braves: The Battle for Baseball in Milwaukee," by Patrick Steele.

After the Series, and baseball withdrawl sets in, Steele will be a welcome read.
The Cubs are on the cusp now, and Theo just might sign Joe G as team manager/barracks topkick; trade one of the
four core elements to beef up the offense and/or keep Castellanos; and hammer the rotation and bullpen closed.
Another Ace is needed and a mercurial batting line that ranks last in contact needs fixing. Chicago's proverbial
four-year World Series window will require $$$$$ to prop but the purse strings may have severed this past season.

 

[Fading Fast]

"Home Of The Braves: The Battle for Baseball in Milwaukee," by Patrick Steele.

The modern era of franchise shifts in major league baseball began in March of 1953, when owner Louis Perini moved his Boston Braves to Milwaukee, a move which led to attendance records, two pennants, and a World Championship over the next five years. Six years after that world championship,with attendance shrinking and the franchise struggling, word leaked out that new owners were planning to shift the Braves to Atlanta. After a bitter, wrenching court battle between the team and Milwaukee County, the Braves went South in 1966.

What really happened? Steele, who writes from the position of a Braves fan who never got over the shock of the move from Milwaukee, uncovers some interesting texture in telling the story -- blaming several factors, all of which combine to reveal that the Braves, in spite of their on-field success, were a very poorly-run operation thruout their tenure in Wisconsin. The problems started with Perini, who never left Boston himself, running the team on an absentee basis, and continued with Milwaukee County, which engaged in a long and bitter battle with the team over its lease on County Stadium: having given away a bargain contract to lure the team west, officials soon realized they'd been had. The team and county would bicker thruout the franchise's tenure in Milwaukee over stadium rent, over parking and concession profits, over operation costs for non-baseball activities at the stadium, and over petty personality issues that often devolved into cheap name-calling. And amidst all this, the team itself did no planning for the future -- during its entire tenure in Milwaukee only four star-quality players emerged from the Braves farm system: Henry Aaron (who was already under contract before the shift from Boston), Joe Torre, Rico Carty, and Phil Niekro. Because of this, as the young, powerful team that came west aged out in the early 1960s, the quality of the on-field product rapidly devolved into mediocre indifference. And Braves fans, spoiled by early success, simply lost interest in a second-rate club. By the time Perini sold out to a Chicago-based syndicate in 1963, it was a foregone conclusion that the "Milwaukee Miracle" was over, and that the Braves were leaving. It was just a question of when.

Steele is clearly bitter about what happened, but he doesn't take the easy way out of blaming "the carpetbaggers" who bought the team from Perini. There is more than enough blame to go around for everyone here, and it's fascinating look at what the notion of a ball club as an enterprise designed to operate strictly for short-term profits did to the Game. Boston sportswriter Harold Kaese was right in 1953 in his eulogy for the Boston Braves, when he warned Milwaukee fans that their time would come.

Rarely isn't the answer they are all villains with the only difference being to what degree. The teams, the towns, the major personalities - public and private - almost always (there are exceptions) come off terrible in these recounting. Sometimes there's a hero in team management or the city trying to do the right thing - but he or she usually gets steamrolled.

It's part of why my "loyalty" to teams is very weak. I'm a Yankee's "fan," but if they lose, so be it. I just don't care that much anymore. It's also made me a fair-weather fan - if the team stinks, I'll move on 'till it gets better. It isn't loyal to me, so why should I be to it? I get it - it's a business with the players, owners, mangers, local politicians all just pursuing what's in their best interest.

Here's an honest contradiction - I support free agency, but also realize it greatly diminished my enjoyment of sports as teams felt more like long-term commitments when the same players were there for years and you felt like they were "your guys." But the players deserve to be able to sell their talents in something like a free market, or a less-controlled one anyway.

Quoting the famous Fitzgerald closing line from "The Great Gatsby:"

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."

I go on, but with mild enthusiasm as my past feelings and enjoyment for the game are a big part of why I go on at all.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The guy who comes off worst in the whole business is Lou Perini -- who pulls the team out of Boston two weeks before the regular season opens just to keep Bill Veeck from moving the Browns into Milwaukee, and then wallows in the adoration of Wisconsonians like a conquering hero. And yet he never maintains anything more than a token presence in the city himself and sells out to the Chicago interests as soon as the going gets rough. He keeps 10 percent of the club after selling, votes along with the majority in favor of moving to Atlanta, and then sheds big fat crocodile tears in the press about how much he hopes Milwaukee can get an expansion club. No wonder Walter F. O'Malley called him a pal.

The whole thing plays out like a divorcing couple where they both hate each other but one wants to leave and the other one wants them to stay just out of spite. There were so many court orders and conflicting rulings going back and forth during the winter and spring of 1965-66 that there was actually a chance the team would be ordered back to Milwaukee after opening in Atlanta. County Stadium was kept in a full state of preparation -- down to team listings being in place on the scoreboard -- for games that would never happen there. No wonder Bud Selig was so messed up.

 

[Harp]

An Argument Open to All; Reading The Federalist Papers in the 21st Century; Sanford Levinson

The definitive source to the United States Constitution and its triumvirate nom de plume, Publius
remains a contested purchase in this tract, found for a dollar and cold Chicago winter eves.

 

[Fading Fast]

The Secrets We Kept by Lara Prescott

Lara Prescott weaves three narratives into this historical novel telling the story of several US spy agencies' efforts, in the late '50s, to surreptitiously acquire, publish and, ultimately, distribute in the USSR, Russian author Boris Pasternak's unflattering-to-the-USSR novel Dr. Zhivago. At the same time, the USSR was trying to keep the book unpublished (a kinda pre-book banning).

The first narrative covers the above-outlined plot which starts with the FBI's and CIA's belief that ideas - spread in the Soviet Union through books, amongst other ways - could contribute to its anti-Soviet efforts. The Soviet Union was so passionate to prevent Zhivago's publication that it sent Pasternak's lover (Pasternak was also married) to the Gulag for three years because they believed she helped smuggle his manuscript out to the West. The threat of the Gulag was hung over Pasternak and his family, but his fame and popularity in Russia engendered some constraint on the dictatorship.

The book has its strongest moments revealing the authoritarian abuses of the Soviet secret police: the fear the average Russian lived with and the horror of being arrested, interrogated, tortured and sent to a labor camp for years - for activities such as helping to get a book published - with no legal representation, no trial, no appeal, no human rights, just a train ride from hell to the hell of a very bleak work-camp imprisonment.

The book, told from the perspective of the all-female typing pool at the CIA that handled the "subversion through ideas" effort, describes the story of how Zhivago's manuscript, via Western spy craft, was smuggled out and published, first in Italy and then other Western countries, before being smuggled back into the USSR.

This segues to the author's second narrative - the desire to yell at the 1950s for not giving women equal rights. Instead of representing the women rights' initiatives and views of the time - which were developing if only modestly successfully, but which would have been historically accurate - the author, as is the bane of so many modern writers, opts instead to have characters - some of the women in the typing pool - speak and think as if they had time-traveled back from an elite educational institution in 2019 to live and advocate for women's rights in the '50s.

Perhaps this is cathartic and ego-boosting for the author but it cheats historical accuracy and diminishes its impact. It becomes just another voice advocating a modern political view as opposed to a historically accurate portrayal of the aborning feminist views of the '50s. A review of books and other records from that era would show that there was a passionate effort by many women and men to advance women's rights, but it had a '50s viewpoint - and style and language and construct - that is not represented here.

Prescott's third agenda is to show the challenges a lesbian couple - two of the typing pool secretaries-turned-spies fall in love - faced in the '50s. Here she does a better job of limning a '50s outlook by reflecting that most people never even thought about lesbianism, but if they did, viewed it as an abashing perversion. While not badly handled, it added little to the broader narrative of the Zhivago story.

I have no idea of the historical accuracy of most of the book as it isn't footnoted (the book does have a list of citations), but the author, noting fictional elements, writes a story implying that most of the successful spy efforts and ideas that obtained and published Dr. Zhivago were the results of the work of female spies recruited right out of the typing pool.

Pick one story and tell it well would have been good editorial advice. The publication of the eventual Pulitzer Prize-wining Dr. Zhivago is blocked by the author's government because that government allows for no criticism. The book is, however, ultimately published internationally through the clandestine efforts of the West and, then, smuggled into the USSR as part of a plan to subvert the Soviet Union. That's a darn good story but it gets lost sometimes amidst the book's other politically-driven and non-core efforts.

Last point, the writing technique of using "we" to represented a group view - as was done here for the typing pool, for example, "we worked hard," "we were all good friends," "we never questioned our bosses -" is grating and demeaning as it argue some group-think collective accurately reflects the myriad of individuals and experiences of the typing pool's staff. Having suffered through an entire book constructed this way - The Wives of Los Alamos by Tarashea Nesbit - I swore to never subject myself to it again; fortunately, The Secrets We Kept only dips into this nails-on-a-chalkboard tick for a few short chapters.

 

[Tiki Tom]

Just read “Dubrovnik: A History” by Robin Harris. I would not recommend it because it reads like, well, a history book. On the other hand, I had no idea that the city had such an amazing history. In short, when a nearby Roman town was sacked by the barbarians, the survivors fled to a defensible piece of rock surrounded by cliffs. This was where they built what was then called the Republic of Ragusa. The little republic spoke Latin right up to the 1400s and then a dialect of Dalmatian, which I gather was a watered down Romance language. Anyway, the Republic of Ragusa survived for 1,000 years (except for a 100 year break when Venice conquered them) by playing off their powerful neighbors against one another through ever shifting loyalties, bribes, flattery, diplomacy, and trade deals. At its height in the 15 And 16 hundreds, Ragusa had a merchant fleet of 300 vessels and rivaled Venice. The story is that tiny Ragusa was one of the first countries to recognize the independence of the USA. It’s ships sailed under a white flag with the word “Libertas” on it. Poor Ragusa finally fell to Napoleon and then became part of the Habsburg Empire. Fascinating stuff. Too bad James Michener is no longer around to give us a fictionalization of the colorful history of the Republic of Ragusa.