Unbroken

Unbroken

Author: Laura Hillenbrand 2010 406pp

My rating 3.5*

Started December 8 2010, Finished December 12

This story of Louie Zamperini, a world class distance runner who became an Army Air Force officer at the beginning of WWII, was shot down in the middle of the Pacific, floated for months on a raft with no provisions or shelter and then spent years being hideously abused in Japanese POW camps is a testament to human psychological and physical resilience. Hillenbrand does an excellent job of researching this story, bringing to light facts even Zamperini was not aware of, but to me the book, perhaps because of the memory blurring effects of the decades between the events and Hillenbrand's research, did not provide enough insight into the mechanisms Zamperini used to endure his sufferings. Unbroken is a great story, but lacked psychological depth.

At five he started smoking (5)

… Pete was the only kid in Torrance who could get away with such a remark (14. How was this assertion fact checked?)

Japan galloped all over the globe. (52 More sloppy writing/editing. It would be more accurate to write “Pacific” instead of “globe”.

… between 1943 and 1945, four hundred AAF crews were lost en route to their theatres. (79)

In 1943 in the Pacific Ocean Areas Theater … for every plane lost in combat, six were lost in accidents (80 I suspect “lost” is too strong a word and that damaged would be more accurate.)

PP 173-4 Gorging after weeks of starvation without extreme stomach pain and associated illness?

The Japanese sealed their camps from outside information and went to some lengths to convince their captives of Allied annihilation … by inventing stories of Allied losses and ridiculously implausible Japanese feats. Once, they announced that their military had shot Abraham Lincoln and torpedoed Washington D.C. (205)

The Reader

The Reader

Author: Bernhard Schlink 1995 218 pp

My rating 3.5*

Started January 9 2011, Finished January 10

For such a minor work, One Day has become somewhat central to my current from of reference for appreciating other books. One Day comes to mind when assessing The Reader as they both concisely yet movingly convey the emotional arc of an entire life. This novel(ette), the movie version of which won Kate Winslet an Oscar, is set in Germany and narrated by its protagonist, Michael Berg. In the unremarkable first half of the book, set in the late 1950s, Michael is a teenager who has a consuming affair with a woman, Hannah, in her mid thirties who one day without notice disappears from Micheal’s town and life. In the far more provocative second half of the book, Micheal chances upon a trial for war crimes committed as part of the Holocaust in which Hannah is the central defendant. This section is something of an exploration of the motives of “Hitler's willing executioners” and raises the surprisingly hard to answer question “what would you have done?” had you been a German citizen of age during WWII. The book also raises the interesting idea that our small personal shames can become so consuming that maintaining their secrecy can become more important than self preservation.

She was struggling, as she always had struggled, not to show what she could do but to hide what she couldn't do. A life made up of advances that were actually frantic retreats and victories that were concealed defeats. (134)

There is no need to talk, because the truth of what one says lies in what one does. (174)

Colonel Roosevelt

Colonel Roosevelt

Author: Edmund Morris 2010 570 pp

My rating 4*

Started December 15 2010, Finished Jan 4 2011

This worthy conclusion to Moriss's highly-recommended life of Roosevelt trilogy gets a slightly lower rating from me that its predecessors not due to any shortcoming on the author's part, but because I found the period of TR's life after he left the presidency to be less interesting than that covered in Morris's first two volumes. Roosevelt was a man of action par excellence and I found him less compelling as a spectator in the stands rather than as the key player in the center of the action; in fact in the section near the end of the book about World War I, the actions and words of a sickly TR observing from afar are much less interesting than those of his children who are in Europe actively involved in the carnage – up to that point in his story, TR always commanded the spotlight by force of personality, intellect and action. While it is sad to read of Roosevelt's physical decline from unstoppable dynamo to his early death as a broken down wreck – the rough use he had continually put himself through seemed to have caught up with him – one still comes away from the book and the series as a whole for an overwhelming respect for this man who has to be considered a short list candidate as the most capable and accomplished American in history.

A tip of the hat also to the author for the thoroughness of his research, the sprightliness of his prose and the even handed appraisal he provides of his subject despite his obvious great admiration for him.

“Villa,” Roosevelt said, “is a murderer and a rapist.”

[John] Reed tried to provoke him. “What's wrong with that? I believe in rape.”

But Roosevelt only grinned. “I'm glad to find a young man who believes in something.” (427)

Ted [Roosevelt Jr] noted with approval that more than half of his 1,400 fellow [army] trainees were Harvard graduates. “I suppose some Yale men would fight if there was a war, but it is more clear than ever that Yale is the great middle class college, wand the middle classes are not naturally gallant.” (433)

Freedom

Freedom
Author: Jonathan Franzen 562 pp 2010
My rating: 4*
Started November 21 2010, Finished November 26 2010

I don’t feel quite right giving this novel a mere half star more than the far less worthy One Day. But while Freedom is vastly better written, far more ambitious and much funnier, it lacked the emotional wallop of One Day, in fact the characters really did not engage me much, and is diminished but what strikes me as snobbishness. 
On the positive side, the word that comes to mind when assessing Freedom is Updikeian. Page after page of Freedom contains prose worthy of that master with insights akin to those found in the Rabbit quartet: one character's page long diatribe about all the irritations posed by contending with other drivers reminded me of one of my strongest Rabbit memories when in Rabbit At Rest, the aged Rabbit reflects that when he was younger the roads were filled with slowpokes, while now that he is a more patient, if not timid, driver, everyone else seems to be a speed maniac. Freedom also brings to mind the Rabbit books in its attempt to dissect the inner workings of modern American life and its overemphasis on sex as the driving activity of that existence.
Freedom also earns points for readability -- it’s nearly a page turner -- and at least for me, its polemical but not excessively didactic or heavy handed theme of how the American lifestyle is extremely rough on our environment.
Freedom’s primary weakness for me is that all its main characters come from a very thin slice of American society, the white, liberal lower-upper-middle-class. (Note: all the main characters of Franzen’s previous novel, The Corrections, were of the same ilk.) Characters from better off classes are viewed as self-entitled depredators while those from below it are viewed as feral cretins. While in all fairness, I do not necessarily disagree with those stereotypes, it seems an author's duty is to try and provide a “warts and all” portrait, not just a “warts only” one, to rise above his and his reader's prejudices and show all sides of the story.

Matterhorn

Matterhorn
Author: Karl Marlantes 566 pp 2010
My rating: 5*
Started November 8 2010, Finished November 12 2010

A very powerful, pro-soldier, anti-war statement.

Marlantes' novel, presumably based on his time as a Marine Corps officer in Vietnam all those years ago, provided me with what was possibly my most intense reading experience ever. This unrelenting, stripped down -- Hemingwayesque? -- depiction of war puts the reader in the characters skins better than anything else I can remember, allowing him to feel a soldier’s boredom, terror and most of all, physical misery. In the world of Matterhorn, the putative enemy -- Vietcong troops -- are just another hostile force of nature along with weather, vegetation, tigers, malaria bearing mosquitoes, and leaches while the real foci of the soldiers’ animus are the commanding officers who needlessly send men to die simply to further their own careers. Anther major theme is the racial tension afflicting the Corps which almost magically evaporates during combat when the marines’ only hopes of survival are effective action as a unit.  Matterhorn evokes other all time great war novels including Catch-22 (stripped of irony) in its depiction of a world where the main impetus of commanders is furthering their own career and The Naked and The Dead whose climactic mountain assault is reprised here.

“There it is.”

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… what really mattered in combat was what people were like when they were exhausted. (11)

He was trying to remember what he’d been told to do, back at Quantico. His mind seemed empty. … All alone. All alone, and maybe about to die. (83)

It was all absurd, without reason or meaning. People who didn't even know each other were going to kill each other over a hill none of them cared about. The wind picked up slightly, bring the smell of the jungle with it. Mellas shivered. He couldn't figure out why the didn’t just quit. Yet they wouldn't.

Mellas was transported outside himself, beyond himself. It was as if his mind watched everything coolly while his body raced wildly with passion and fear. He was frightened beyond any fear he had ever known. But this brilliant and intense fear, this terrible here and now, combined with the crucial significance of every movement of his body, pushed him over a barrier whose existence he had not known about until this moment. He gave himself over completely to the god of war within him. (351)

The Disappearing Spoon

The Disappearing Spoon
Author: Sam Kean 2010 375 pp
My rating: 3*
Started October 18 2010, Finished October 29 2010

The subtitle of this book, “And other true tales of madness, love, and the history of the world from the periodic table of the elements” pretty much says it all. There is no overarching theme, just a series of interesting stories from the world of elemental chemistry. While I found it interesting and enjoyable, its disjointed nature left me without much of an impression. In two weeks, I probably won’t remember much of “The Disappearing Spoon” at all.


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Unlike modern pills, these hard antimony pills didn’t dissolve in the intestines, and the pills were considered so valuable that people rooted through fecal matter to retrieve and reuse them. Some lucky families even passed down laxatives from father to son. (22)

“But since this Japanese Vulcan died with his secret, it was lost for five hundred years -- proof that superior technology does not always spread and often goes extinct” (89)
This is faulty logic, something happening “once” is not “proof” that it “often” happens.

… scientists might soon be able to build “matter lasers” that shoot out ultra-focused beams of atoms thousands of times more powerful than light lasers, or construct “super solid” ice cubes that can flow each other without losing their solidity. (293-4)

Theodore Rex

Theodore Rex
Author: Edmund Morris 2001 555 pp
My rating: 4*
Started September 14 2010, Finished October 2 2010

The second volume of Morris’ life of Theodore Roosevelt while highly enjoyable and informative did not impress me as much as the first. This book covers Roosevelt’s time as President and lacks the expansive feel of the first book which though it covers a much greater time span and contains about the same number of pages, felt more detailed. Theodore Rex does not quite give the reader the feeling that every noteworthy event of Roosevelt’s personal and professional life during the period covered was thoroughly explored. In particular this book seemed to stint on the personal life; I would have liked to know more about his family, in particular his daughter Alice. Nonetheless, Roosevelt still comes across as a sui generis physical and intellectual dynamo, making more recent presidents seem under-powered and ineffectual.

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After TR had Booker T Washington to dinner at the White House: “ … South Carolina Senator Benjamin J Tillman endorsed remedial genocide: ‘The action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that nigger will necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South before they will learn their place again.’” (55)

What held them together was their collective dedication to politics as a profession. Conscience, not corruption, kept the average senator in office. He worked seven days a week, assisted by one secretary and one typist, for five thousand dollars a year … (75)

After more blacks were greeted at the White House: “James K. Vardaman, running for Governor of Mississippi, went to the limits of public invective. Theodore Roosevelt was nothing but a “little, mean coon-flavored miscegenation’s”, while the White House had become “so saturated with odor of the nigger that the rats have taken refuge in the stable.” (203)

Henry Adams description of a White House dinner were TR, at the height of his powers, held forth: “We were straws in Niagara. Never have I had an hour of worse social malaise. We were overwhelmed in a torrent of oratory, and at last I heard only the repetition of I-I-I -- attached to indiscretions greater than one another … it is mortifying beyond even drunkenness.” (307)