What Are You Reading

[Tiki Tom]

Great review, FF. I note that The Wheel Spins was published two years after Murder on the Orient Express. I love the British mystery on a train sub-genre. It is a unique window into a world that has disappeared. Ah! Aristocrats traveling by train during the inter war period. You can’t get much more golden age than that! Thanks.

 

[Fading Fast]

Great review, FF. I note that The Wheel Spins was published two years after Murder on the Orient Express. I love the British mystery on a train sub-genre. It is a unique window into a world that has disappeared. Ah! Aristocrats traveling by train during the inter war period. You can’t get much more golden age than that! Thanks.

Thank you for the kind words. I'm a sucker for a good golden-era train book, too. I was really impressed with this one.

 

[Hurricane Jack]

Not golden-era or a soft bedtime read, but an important book nonetheless.

Published March 2024. I have the ebook, in hardback it’s 400 pages. Great detail.

Nuclear weapons were created in the twentieth century to save the world from evil & now in the twenty-first century they are about to destroy it. Jacobsen starts by explaining the buildup of nuclear weapons post-WWII & how it became overkill. Today there are nine countries with stockpiles of thermonuclear weapons in launch ready status that have more than 4000 times the explosive power of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

The nine countries & their number of launch ready nuclear missiles (not including stockpiles of nuclear warheads) as of 2024 are:

US — 1770
Russia - 1675
China - 500
United Kingdom
France
India - 165
Pakistan - 165
Israel
North Korea - 50

Jacobsen thoroughly describes so the reader understands exactly what happens during “a bolt out of the blue” as the US Nuclear Command & Control refers to a first strike scenario; the US Launch on Warning policy; that an ICBM with a 1-megaton nuclear warhead travels at Mach 5 & the President has only a 6 minute window to decide which weapons & how many to launch in return; that we are closer today to having a nuclear war even by accident, than at any time during the Cold War; that North Korea is the loose cannon (an ICBM launched from North Korea would take just 33 minutes to reach the eastern US); & no matter how nuclear war begins, it ends in Armageddon. A single nuclear weapon is a weapon of mass extinction. There is no such thing as a limited nuclear war.

I could go on. A compelling read.

 

[Monte]

Just picked up Frankenstein at a thrift spot. Excited to read it sometime soon. Fairly interesting author backstory and circumstances that lead up to penning.

 

[Tiki Tom]

Re: Nuclear War. You win! I thought I was capturing the crown for the summer’s most depressing reading, but I think you win. I just finished reading “The Devil’s Garden” by John R. Cencich. On the cover it says “A war crimes investigator’s story.” It is basically about the team of international cops (under U.N. auspices) who investigated the war crimes committed in the Former Yugoslavia during the Balkan wars of the 1990s. The author himself mainly focuses on Croatia, but an overview of Bosnia, etc, is also given. Very depressing, but a wealth of procedural and tradecraft information. Amazing the insane cruelty that humans can inflict on each other. If there is a bright side, it’s that Ratko Mladic is now safely behind bars.

Re: Frankenstein. Please write a review when you finish it. Frankenstein is on my list of classics that I need to get around to. I’ve made a dent in the list, but it’s endless. Anyway, at this point I’m mostly fascinated by Shelley’s link to the so called “romantics”.

Right now I am reading SPQR by Mary Beard. All roads lead to Rome!

 

[Trenchfriend]

Franz-Olivier Giesbert "A dictator for dessert" (2013 F, 2016 D)

 

[Hurricane Jack]

Very depressing, but a wealth of procedural and tradecraft information. Amazing the insane cruelty that humans can inflict on each other.

Among the world powers with nuclear weapons there is a gentleman’s agreement to never target a nuclear power plant. On the Pacific coast in CA sits the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant. If North Korea (a mad king with a nuclear weapon) were to strike that plant & the fuel rods overheat, the continental US & western Canada would become uninhabitable as far east as eastern Colorado.

If this mad king believes there can be such a thing as a limited nuclear war, & he wants to puff his chest out he has the ability to easily strike Hawaii, with the large US military presence there.

A very unstable individual.

 

[Fading Fast]

The Northeast Corridor: The Trains, the People, the History, the Region by David Alff, published in 2024


Despite its ambitious title, the book's length of only 225 pages (before footnotes) tells you this is not going to be a detailed history, but a breezy survey of the country's busiest rail corridor, whose roots stretch back to the country's original Indian footpaths.

That is also the modern corridor's handicap as it's not a single route planned for today's high-speed trains, but an amalgam of footpaths, canals, short train lines and engineering limitations spanning 400-plus years. It's impressive, but not what would best serve the country today.

Author Alff does a good job speeding the reader through the early years of Indian paths, settler expansions and canal building, which preceded the railroads. The unified railroad we know today started in the 1800s as several small lines trying to solve local transportation issues.

It wasn't until the end of the 1800s that a few of the larger railroads - the Pennsylvania and the New York Central - started to consolidate and build out much larger interstate systems. Still, the massive Hudson and East rivers surrounding New York City were formidable obstacles.

Another obstacle was the challenge of running steam engines through long tunnels, which was solved with electricity. Yet even to this day, amazingly, trains switch current from AC to DC at points along the Northeast Corridor because of legacy systems still in use.

The early 1900s is also when some of the huge and architecturally beautified Beaux-Arts and classical railroad stations and terminals started to be built. Later, Alff takes us through the painful series of decisions that led to the demolition of New York's impressive Penn Station.

The demolition of Penn Station was a late sign that the golden age of passenger railroad in America was ending. Economics, by the end of the 1960s, necessitated a government takeover to keep intercity rail service alive.

The birth of Amtrak - the government agency that took over all intercity passenger rail service in 1971 - isn't pretty, but despite regular funding battles, it still limps along today.

Alff devotes nearly a third of the book to the, now, fifty-plus-year travails of Amtrak, including the just-noted funding struggles, the demands of maintaining a far flung rail empire and, of course, never ending technological changes and challenges.

Starting with the discussion of the footpaths, but especially during the Amtrak years, Alff's textbook liberal political views are revealed, as debatable historical points are all seen through a prism that sneers at capitalism, but forgives government failures.

It's Alff's book, so he presents his interpretation of history. His view, though, is only one view, with many historical and present-day statements presented as facts that are not so. Hoover, for example, was hardly a laissez-faire president, as Alff states.

Toward the book's end, Alff drops any pretense of objectivity. He lets his inner liberal antipathy to Ronald Reagan and the second President Bush rip. Political defenders of money-losing trains are heroes; those who argue for budget restraint and cost-benefit analysis are villains.

A more surprising flaw, for a book about a train corridor covering a large part of the east coast, is that there is only one insufficient map located before the title page. Unless you know the region very well, you will be Googling frequently to get a visual of where things are happening.

The Northeast Corridor also suffers from a choppy narrative that never settles on using either a timeline structure or chapters based on themes, so the book can sometimes feel like a brain dump of facts and anecdotes versus a well-structured historical account.

For newbies to rail history, there are better starting points, but for someone basically familiar with the history of the Northeast Corridor who is looking for a refresher with several very good vignettes - and who can tolerate the political bias - The Northeast Corridor is a quick, easy read.

 

[Tiki Tom]

Just finished “SPQR, a history of Ancient Rome” by Mary Beard. 536 pages. It covers roughly the first thousand years of Roman history, until roughly the early 300s CE. The book is well written and easy to read, with plenty of interesting illustrations. On the other hand, it is a history book. Fair warning has been given.

In short, the story of Rome calmed me considerably as we enter our own summer of discontent.

For starters, Ms Beard tells how our own founding fathers studied the ancient Roman historian Polybius and learned how the Romans used checks and balances to foster something that resembled systemic stability. In the first 200 years CE, Rome only had 14 emperors. Some were bad, some were good. Beard says they might as well have been interchangeable. What was important was that they all followed the Augustan template of governance and Rome enjoyed its golden age.

Also, overall, ancient Rome lasted for 1,000 years. You can be sure that during those Centuries there was plenty of trouble and drama, violence and dirty tricks. But no matter who was in power, Johnus Q Publicus was mostly not affected. He muddled along, continuing to enjoy good roads and relative safety. It kinda puts the chaos that I’ve been observing for the last 50 years into context. As long as the overall system does not collapse, we will most likely muddle along fine.

I will keep SPQR on my bedside table for the next few months. There is something comforting about taking the long view of history. (Until, of course, another Dark Ages suddenly drops out of the sky. ) Overall, it was a pretty good book and offered some interesting factoids and fun bits of ancient gossip.

 

[Davidchee5]

On the third Lord of the rings, one of the most beautifully writing works I’ve ever read.

 

[Fading Fast]

The Pleasure of His Company by Bernard Glemser, originally published in 1961 and based on a play by Samuel A. Taylor and Cornelia Otis Skinner.


Some books are art, while others, maybe not rising to the level of art, offer deep insight into the human condition. Some, though, are just fun page-turners that create engaging characters, even if you know they are archetypes and not real people.

The Pleasure of His Company is entertaining in the same way that many modern TV shows are entertaining: the characters are intelligent, attractive and speak off the cuff with unrealistically perfect sharp barbs, witty observations and smart-sounding philosophical bromides.

No one in real life, perhaps other than Oscar Wilde or William Buckley, speaks like these characters. Still, it's entertaining to see a world where words and sentences are fired off like heat-seeking missiles, here, in service to a mild family feud.

First up is the incredibly named Biddeford Poole, nicknamed Pogo, who is that mid-twentieth century marvel: a man of independent means who travels the world living an exotic life that is captured on the society pages. He's rich, charming, cultured, handsome and social.

Today, he'd be on the board of a few charities – one with "green" bonafides would help – and he'd have to, occasionally, dress like a forklift operator to show his "common man" touch, but in his day, living a life of self-indulgent luxury with style was acceptable.

Two decades earlier, Poole was married to Kate, who is now a happily remarried San Francisco housewife. She and her kind and calm banker second husband, Jim, live in a large pretty house overlooking the San Francisco Bay.

Kate's life is charity lunches, shopping and cocktails. Her life is also seeing her beautiful nineteen-year-old daughter, Jessica, get married this upcoming weekend. Despite being Poole's daughter, Jim and Kate have raised Jessica together since Jessica was five.

That's the setup that sees Poole, who hasn't seen Kate or his daughter in fifteen years, show up unexpectedly - he was invited, but no one thought he'd come - the week before Jessica's wedding.

The rest of the story is Poole pushing Kate's buttons, buttons that he knows too well, while she does the same to his. Poole also forms a seemingly genuine bond with daughter Jessica who has hero-worshiped her society-page-famous dad from afar.

It's all Noel Coward drawing-room banter with an American edge. It's entertaining as heck if you're in the mood for sharp barbs, with no real purpose. It's smart people saying a lot of entertainingly snarky things.

There is a plot of sorts as Poole wants Jessica to ditch her 'boring' rancher fiancé to travel the world with him for a few years. He, of course, presents it as wanting to 'save' his daughter from a sheltered life of boredom.

Kate, of course, doesn't want her ex-husband to derail the pending nuptials, so they, mainly obliquely, fight it out by undermining each other. Poole plays on Kate's insecurity that maybe her life with Jim is boring versus her prior life with him.

Kate retorts that "Pogo," for all his outward nonchalance, needs a muse to hero-worship him or he becomes restless and morose. Her life might be boring, but his life is really a shallow one that is feeling even more shallow as he ages.

There are plenty of fun scenes and mid-century San Francisco atmosphere to make this short, smartly written, but ultimately fluffy book fly by. It's a book you read for a few days while you decide the next "real" book you're going to read.

The final part of the fun equation is that after you've read The Pleasure of His Company, you can check out the not quite as fun, but still good 1961 movie version of the story starring Fred Astaire, Debbie Reynolds and Lilli Palmer.

Comments on the movie here: #31,561