The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
I was going to leave this book starless, because if there is any truth in me I can't say I enjoyed it, but it is a very well written. A painfully realistic grunt's eye view of the war in Vietnam, I'm still cleaning the shit out of my ears.
The title comes from what each soldier carried on patrol into the jungle.
The things they carried were largely determined by necessity...Henry Dobbins, who was a big man, carried extra rations...Dave Jensen, who practiced field hygiene, carried a toothbrush, dental floss, and several hotel-sized bars of soap he'd stolen on R&R in Sydney...Ted Lavender carried 6 or 7 ounces of premium dope, which for him was a necessity. Mitchell Sanders, the RTO, carried condoms. Norman Bowker carried a diary. Rat Kiley carried comic books. Kiowa, a devout Baptist, carried an illustrated New Testament...As a hedge against bad times, however, Kiowa also carried his grandmother's distrust of the white man, his grandfather's old hunting hatchet...Because the nights were cold, and because the monsoons were wet, each carried a green plastic poncho that could be used as a raincoat or groundsheet or makeshift tent. With its quilted liner, the poncho weighed almost 2 pounds, but it was worth every ounce. In April, for instance, when Ted Lavender was shot, they used his poncho to wrap him up, then to carry him across the paddy, then to lift him into the chopper that took him away.
The narrative goes back and forth in time, before, during and after the war, and although the author refers to himself by name, he cautions the reader repeatedly not to believe everything he says, and that the truth isn't really the point anyway.
I'm skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is as Tim trying to save Timmy's life with a story.
The creepiest story is "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong," when a soldier manages to bring his stateside girlfriend to the war, and she takes to it a lot better than anyone could have imagined. But the story that sticks to me most is "On the Rainy River," when Tim gets his draft notice and takes off for six days. He thinks he's going to Canada, but
I survived, but it's not a happy ending. I was a coward. I went to the war.
Not an easy read, but worth it.
# Permanent link to I’m still cleaning the shit out of my ears.
Pitch Perfect: The Quest for Collegiate A Cappella Glory by Mickey Rapkin
Go ahead, make all the fun of me you want, I love a cappella. It's probably my mom's fault, she loved Broadway musicals and I grew up knowing all the lyrics to My Fair Lady and Oklahoma and, yes, The Music Man, where Professor Harold Hill keeps seducing the town council away from their duty into four-part harmony. I loved the Spike Lee documentary about a cappella, too. So it follows that I loved Pitch Perfect, that great little 2012 film about two collegiate a cappella teams, one all-boy, one all-girl, competing for some prize or other (Who cares? The music was what mattered.). When the credits rolled and I saw that the film had been based on an actual book, of course I had to read it.
While there are virtually no similarities between book and film, nevertheless this is one of those books specializing in a single subject that is fun and informative and left me googling the dates for the next A Cappella Festivella at UAA. Rapkin writes
That a cappella began with Gregorian chant in the church shouldn't come as a surprise--what's closer to God than the unadorned voice? The music then traveled. In time, the Puritans would embrace shape-note singing and a book of vocal spirituals called The Sacred Harp. Call-and-response singing from Africa, meanwhile, would mingle with these vocal traditions to become American gospel. Somewhere along the way, what began as a service to a higher power went secular. Then it went pop. This is how...
Rapkin takes us from the Mills Brothers in 1931 to Pete Seeger and the Weavers' 1950s cover of Solomon Linda's 1939 song "Mbube," better known to us all (and especially my mother, who was also a huge folk music fan) as "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" or "Wimoweh." We get quickly to collegiate a cappella, which to my great surprise is no longer represented only by the Whiffenpoofs (and it is a miracle to me that they have survived this long with that name). Turns out Pitch Perfect wasn't that far off, that today practically every college worthy of the name fields one and often more than one a cappella group, although
...a cappella is the vestige of college life that dare not speak its name. There is no shame, no real social stigma, in admitting you were a Sigma Chi. You might discuss it on a first date. You might even put it on a resume. A cappella, however, is topic non grata.
Whatever, and Rapkin also writes
On campus--though it's crass to say--a cappella will get you laid.
Rapkin writes about three groups, the tradition-ridden Beelzebubs of Tufts, the bad boy UV Hullabahoos, and the UO Divisi, who, everyone agrees, even the group that won, were robbed at the International Championship of Collegiate A Cappella in 2005 because one of the judges didn't like them singing Usher's "Yeah!" instead of something like, well, maybe "Wimoweh." The book is about the Divisi coming back from that, or not, and the Bubs and the B'hoos trying to figure out what they are.
The Bubs aren't professional musicians. They're students. They've been using the word profession as a noun, when they should have been thinking of it as an adjective...
The thing about college a cappella is that it exists in this incredible space: college...The problem arises when you take a cappella out of the context of college--then what is it, really? A cover band. With no instruments.
Pro or am, some of the groups, especially the Bubs, get a hell of a ride out of a cappella, including right into the White House, onto the David Letterman Show and all the way to the Philippines. A lot of them find it hard to give it up when they leave college, and remain very active in their alumni associations, which makes colleges love a cappella groups all the more. An active alumnus is an alumnus who writes checks.
A whole 'nother subculture of which I knew nothing, until now. Worth reading.
One note: There will be significant time spent on YouTube during and following the reading of this book. You have been warned.
# Permanent link to A cappella will get you laid.
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[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3F7yUo1fKw&w=640&h=360]
Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World's Greatest Scientist by Thomas Levenson
This is one of those books that only underscores how little I know. I knew about Newton, sure, I'd even heard that great line of Pope's ('God said Let Newton be! and there was light.') but I certainly didn't know that after thirty years at Cambridge Newton got a patronage job at the Royal Mint and pretty much personally hauled the British nation back from the brink of bankruptcy, and further, acted in the capacity of criminal investigator (squee!) in chasing down counterfeiters.
Reading this book is like eating a really long, really good dinner sitting next to a really good raconteur who knows all the fun facts about Newton and his time. Herein, you discover that the story about the apple was not, in fact, apocryphal, and that
In 1943, at a dinner party at the Royal Society Club, a member pulled from his pocket two large apples of a variety called Flower of Kent, a cooking apple popular in the 1600s. These were, the owner explained, the fruit of one of the grafts of the original at Woolsthorpe. Newton's apple itself is no fairy tale, it budded, it ripened; almost three centuries later it could still be tasted in all the knowledge that flowed from its rumored fall.
Eating of the fruit of the the tree of knowledge. Really, I just have to give another [squee!].
They were crowd sourcing back then. Yes, they were:
...how glorious it would be if gentlemen of England rose from their beds and made similar observations all over the country, building a picture not just of local conditions but of the varieties of climate throughout the realm...Hooke published his meteorological call to arms in the journal of the Royal Society...
You'll find out why coins are ridged around the edge instead of smooth, that counterfeiting flourished in spite of a freely applied death penalty (always supposing you didn't have L6,000 to buy a pardon), that Newton spent twenty years trying to turn lead into gold, which had everything to do with his determination to prove the existence of God, and then refused to take communion from the Church of England before he died.
Newton and indeed all science, or natural philosophy as it was called then benefited by the explosion of print media at that time. Anyone with an axe to grind and a few schillings could print a broadside and see it circulated, including William Chaloner, a coyner (counterfeiter) who wrote a broadside attacking bad practices inside the Mint and actually succeeded in getting the ear of the Parliamentary committee that oversaw it. He came way too close to getting a job inside the Mint itself and proved to be Newton's biggest foe. Chaloner, who got his start with sex toys, faked coins of every denomination, the first Bank of England notes, lottery tickets, you name it, if it served as legal tender, Chaloner made a copy and sold it.
He was very careful about never distributing any of the fakes personally, farming that out to friends and associates, and therein his downfall, because
Like any street cop in history--and unlike any other fellow of the Royal Society or Cambridge don--[Newton] would have to wade hip-deep into London's underworld.
And wade he does. He even has himself appointed a justice of the peace so as to solve problems of jurisdiction over London's seven counties, and then, like any good natural philosopher, he starts gathering data.
Most of London's coiners did not grasp the danger this strange new Warden posed. The documents Newton didn't burn [and the story behind that involves torture, extralegal, shades of extreme interrogation], all written between 1698 and 1700, reveal the almost unfair contest between the Warden and those who tried to trade in bad money.
You get the feeling that Levenson feels a little sorry for those hapless counterfeiters, because Newton?
Always gets his man.
Highly recommended, and a quick read, too.
# Permanent link to God said, Let Newton be! and there was light.
Mousetronaut: Based on a (Partially) True Story by Mark Kelly
The sweetest little picture book, about Meteor the Mouse, one of a rodent team of, uh, mission specialists on board a space shuttle mission who saves the day. At the end Kelly includes an afterword with a brief history of NASA and lots of fun details about travel in space.
During my first flight in 2001, there were eighteen mice on board. All of them, with one exception, clung to inside of the mesh during the entire mission. One mouse, smaller than the rest, seemed to enjoy the experience and effortlessly floated around the cage. The story of Mousetronaut is inspired by that mission. We all watched him as he enjoyed the feeling of being weighless. I started to think about that mouse and what it would be like to have him as part of our crew.
The illustrations are just marvelous (lovelovelove the one of Meteor squeezing in between the control panels to get the key, and the one of him in his space suit), and you know the details are right. Any kid of any age will enjoy this book, and more importantly, no adult will be bored with having to read it 9 times in a row to his kid.
# Permanent link to One mouse, smaller than the rest…
[from the stabenow.com vaults, July 5, 2010]
So I'm sitting here bawling because John Adams just died. It doesn't seem to matter that it happened 182 years ago.
The best biographers understand that a biography is not only a history of the title subject but a time machine to the time in which he or she lived. Having read David McCullough's John Adams, I now feel like I was in the room when John (look at that, we're on a first-name basis) rose in Congress to speak in support of the Declaration of Independence, like I was sitting at Abigail's elbow when she wrote to him wherever he was, Philadelphia, Paris, Amsterdam, London. There are so many great word pictures, like the one of John helping to repel boarders when his ship came under attack crossing the Atlantic, told this time in the words of the ship's captain.
And Abigail. Has there ever been such a woman? Has there ever been such a partnership? It's almost enough to make me believe in marriage.
Of course it helps that John and Abigail both were such indefatigable correspondents (they weren't happy that they were so many times separated but we sure lucked out) and such amazingly good writers. The quality of their writing, as well as that of their multitude of other correspondents is certain to leave you wondering where the hell that ability went.
McCullough's organizational skills in plucking just the right phrase from just the right letter are astonishing, and his own prose doesn't suffer by comparison, either. A glorious, you-are-there book.
# Permanent link to John Adams just died, dammit.
I first read this book back in my teens, and I was in Hawaii recently and decided it was time to reread it. It has held up really well in the interim. Okay, Michener not the greatest master of the craft of writing, agreed, but he knows how to tell a story.
Here he tells a history of Hawaii through the eyes of the different races who lived it, beginning with the Polynesians who emigrated in open canoes across five thousand miles of open ocean 600 years before Prince Henry the Navigator sponsored his first voyage, navigating only by the stars and a few scraps of oral history. Then come the Calvinist missionaries from New England who wrought such unthinking, well-meaning havoc on the native Hawaiian population, with help from the whalers and traders, who were all then followed by the Chinese and the Japanese imported by the missionary descendants for labor in the sugar cane and pineapple fields, although they sure didn't stay there.
This epic narrative, 1,036 pages in length, is ambitious and all-encompassing. (He probably thought (or his publisher did) that if he included the story of the Filipinos the book would be too long to sell.) The story of the four Sakagawa brothers and their poor sister (I will never forgive Michener for what he did to Reiko), and the story of the 442nd Battalion in World War II is sobering and instructive, and I'm pretty sure Shig's story is the fictionalized version of Senator Daniel Inouye's life.
The story I found most compelling was that of Char Nyuk Tsin, also known as Wu Chow's Auntie, also known as Pake Kokua. This peasant woman is kidnapped from her village in rural China, rescued from a career as a prostitute by an inveterate gambler and immigrates to Hawaii with him. He contracts leprosy and is banished to the leper colony on Molokai, also known as hell on earth. Nyuk Tsin accompanies him there voluntarily and nurses him till he dies, after which she takes on all the other lepers as patients, which earns her the title of Pake Kokua (Hawaiian for, roughly, Chinese Helper, which really ought to read Saint).
She scratched his grave into the sandy soil, choosing the side of a hill as she had promised, and where winds did not blow and where, if there was no tree, there was at least a ledge of rock upon which his spirit could rest on its journeys from and to the grave.
Finally the authorities in Honolulu, who have been supremely indifferent to the terrible state of the leper colony thus far, allow her to return home. There, she and her four sons, Africa, America, Australia, and Asia (really, and the whole Chinese name thing is fascinating, and dizzying), get their hui working to found a financial dynasty that would eventually buy the land out from under the descendants of the missionaries. This book is worth reading for Nyuk Tsin's story alone. I defy you not to tear up when she returns to Molokai to sit next to her husband's grave and report to him on the state of their family.
There is an hilarious scene where one of the missionary descendents writes a marvelous expose entitled
Sex Aboard the Brigantine
or
They Couldn't Have been Seasick All the Time
or
There was Friggin' in the Riggin'which is about exactly what you think it is about. I only wish Michener had let us read the whole thing, and I would love to have seen the original source material he got that from. I am also intensely curious as to what the Islanders themselves think of Michener's book, and how close it is to the truth. I have googled madly and found very little criticism of it, or comment of any kind for that matter. Be interesting to know.
Well worth reading.
# Permanent link to There was Friggin’ in the Riggin’
[from the stabenow.com vaults, 8/23/2010]
Patrick at Mysterious Galaxy in San Diego is my connection for good fantasy and good science fiction. (He posts reviews here.) This year he got me hooked on military sf, space operas, the kind of novels that span light years as well as decades, where fates of galactic empires hang in the balance and it all comes down to the decisions of one man or woman in the captain's chair of a space carrier facing impossible odds. The battles rage up and down solar systems and in and out of hyperspace and even if you're a card-carrying pacifiist you can't help but thrill to the might and majesty of it all.
In Jack Campbell's
Lost Fleet series beginning with Dauntless, a war has been raging between the Syndic and the Alliance for more than a century, and in a perfidious bit of treachery the Syndic has killed the Alliance fleet's combat officers. Ah, but then the Alliance rescues Captain Black Jack Geary from the cryopod he's been adrift in ever since the last battle he fought a hundred years before. Since, after they wake him up, he's the most senior officer in the fleet, he takes command, and over six novels leads the lost Alliance fleet home.
John Scalzi's Old Man's War is the direct descendant of Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers and Joe Haldeman's The Forever War. At age 75 John Perry leaves earth to join the Colonial Defense Force. In return for a new young body, one specially upgraded for battle, John and his peers will fight the alien races who are in competition with the CDF for new planets to colonize. John's got a smart mouth and a grunt's-eye view and he is very good company through a plot that just keeps throwing new stuff at you, and then throws some more. A must read.
Right now I'm tearing through David Weber's Honor Harrington series like a dreadnought through n-space. Think Horatio Hornblower with Pip for a pet. In On Basilisk Station, the first of this now 12-novel series, Captain Honor Harrington, Royal Manticore Navy, and her ship Fearless are assigned to picket the galactic transfer port Basilisk. Smart, principled, courageous, the aptly-named Honor cleans up the mess left behind by the last captain, including but not limited to a planetary insurrection and an enemy invasion. The characters are great, the plots brobdingnagian, but the detail of the setting is these novels' greatest strength. You feel like you're one of Honor's crew and you will both cheer and cower during the battle scenes.
Addendum on June 24, 2013:
And THEN I discovered Tanya Huff's Valor series all by myself. Confederation Space Marine Master Sergeant Torin Kerr battles her way across the galaxy, in spite of a novel-to-novel realization that the war the Confederation is fighting is not anything like it seems. I won't spoil it, but these books, five so far and I hope there will be more, are funny, smart, and real enough to smell the powder. You get the feeling that real marines talk and act and fight just like this (okay, absent the aliens), and the books might just give you the warm fuzzies that people like Torin stand between us and threat every day.
# Permanent link to Military SF
[from the stabenow.com vaults, 2/1/2010]
Today some recommendations for great reads in Alaska history--
Did you know the last shot fired in the Civil War was fired in the Aleutians? You would if you’d read Confederate Raider by Murray Morgan, a book about the Confederate raiding ship Shenandoah, built and commissioned to disrupt if not destroy the Union’s whaling industry in the North Pacific. Built in England, armed in the Madeira Islands, the Shenandoah travels around the Cape of Good Hope and starts sinking Yankee whaling ships from the south Atlantic on. But unbeknownst to them, the war ended in the middle of their search and destroy cruise. When they discover this they are afraid to surrender to a Union ship for fear they will be sunk out of hand, so succesful has been their mission, so in an extraordinary feat of seamanship they sail south, dodging irritated Union vessels all the way, round Cape Horn and surrender to the British back in the UK, without suffering a scratch. One of the great sea stories.
If you’re interested in the Gold Rush there is no better book on the topic than Pierre Berton's The Klondike Fever, but I also love Good-time Girls by Lael Morgan. This history of the women who came north with the stampeders to mine the minors in saloons, dancehalls and hookshops from Dawson to Nome to Cordova is filled with anecdotes of those days when an attractive woman was literally worth her weight in gold. French Marie, the Oregon Mare, Black Mary, Klondike Kate and more, Lael’s affection and respect for these women, whom she regards as pioneers, rises up from every page of this book. And wait till you find out who the Sterling Highway was named for.
The Thousand-Mile War by Brian Garfield is a page-turner set in the Aleutians during World War II. Six months after Pearl Harbor the Japanese took the islands of Attu and Kiska, catching the United States by surprise for the second time in six months and putting Alaska and the west coast seriously at risk from invasion. America scrambled to respond, and for fifteen months the two nations slugged it out in ice and snow and fog. In the end, the Aleutian Campaign tied up a sixth of the Imperial Japanese Air Force and 41,000 ground troops, forces which McArthur and Halsey did not have to fight further south. Complete with maps, illustrations and notes.
# Permanent link to Great Reads in Alaska History
Many Battles by Ernest Gruening is a personal narrative written by one of Alaska’s territorial governors and later a US Senator, one of two to vote against the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. A practicing politician, Gruening still has less of a personal ax to grind than most, and he’s a good writer. His eyewitness account of Elizabeth Peratrovich’s speech before the territorial legislature in 1948 on the subject of Native suffrage will give you goose bumps.
[from the stabenow.com vaults, 3/15/2010]
Friends in Ireland introduced me to the adventures of Asterix and Obelix, who, thanks to the magic potion of the resident druid, Getafix and with the help of canine companion, Dogmatix (and in spite of resident bard Cacofonix) triumphantly defend the borders of their village against Caesar’s legions, to the legions’ great dismay (“I hate those Gauls.”).
My personal favorite is Asterix and Cleopatra where they travel to Egypt to help Getafix’s buddy Edifis win an architectural contest between Ceasar and Cleopatra. There are of course pirates on the voyage, and when they get to Alexandria the Egyptians speak in hieroglyphics, but no worries, there are subtitles.
Oh, and the Sphinx’s nose? Obelix did that.
Second favorite? Maybe Asterix in Spain, where Asterix and Obelix rescue the urchin Pepe, son and heir of Chief Huevos y Bacon of Hispania from those dread Romans Raucus Hallelujachorus and Spurious Brontosaurus. Asterix is thrown to the aurochs but is saved by an opportunely-dropped red cloak belonging to the half-sister of Julius Caesar's cousin by marriage, and there is of course a pleasant voyage (except for that little problem with the pirates) and the traditional homecoming feast.
This graphic novel series has everything, great storytelling, superb drawing, awful puns, and wonderful sound effects. Yes, really. My personal favorite is "PAF!" whenever Asterix clobbers somebody into orbit. I also love the "TANTANTARA!" every time Cleopatra arrives on her gigantic, solid gold, uh, vehicle.
And sneakily? Insidiously? While you’re laughing, you’re learning.
# Permanent link to Oh, and the Sphinx’s nose? Obelix did that.
[from the stabenow.com vaults, 3/29/2010]
I went to Philadelphia a few years ago and saw Independence Hall, the Liberty Bell, and City Tavern where Paul Revere came galloping up with news of the British blockade of Boston. When I got home again, the first book I reached for was James Thomas Flexner’s Washington: The Indispensable Man.
Any good biography is not only a portrait of the subject, it is a doorway that opens into a place and a time, and Flexner’s book is rich with this kind of detail.
“The “Wild West” was then on the Atlantic seacoast,” he writes of Virginia in 1675, the year the first Washington came to America.
There, that gives you a little perspective on the time.How about this: “In 1768, Washington went to church on fifteen days, mostly when away from home, and hunted foxes on forty-nine…He attended three balls, two plays, and one horse race…He visited a lioness and a tiger, and gave nine shillings to a showman who brought up an elk up the long driveway to Mount Vernon.” I feel like I know the father of our country a little better now, don’t you?
Flexner has an able pen, and at times an enjoyably acid one, too, as in this portrait of General Charles Lee: “He was tall and emaciated, dirty of clothes and body, voluble, foulmouthed, seemingly brilliant, best characterized by his Indian name, “Boiling Water.” He felt that he was making perhaps too great a sacrifice in agreeing to be commanded by the amateur Washington.”
“As always,” Flexner writes, after Yorktown, “when the British were in trouble, patriots came flocking [to Washington’s army]…”
Of French Minister Edmond Charles Genet, he writes “Jefferson now tried to tone the Frenchman down, but it was like arguing with a tornado.”
Jefferson, Munro, Adams, Franklin, all the usual suspects are of course present in this narrative. But it is Flexner’s contention that only Washington could have led the Continental Army to victory, and only Washington who could have led the nation during those first shaky years of the first government ever of laws and not of men. He’ll make a believer out of you.
# Permanent link to “Jefferson now tried to tone the Frenchman down, but it was like arguing with a tornado.”