Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Hearts of Darkness

Hearts of Darkness
Author: Frank McLynn 1992 359 pp
My rating: 3*
Started November 31 2008, Finished December 3 2008.

“To face hostile tribesmen, to witness the horrors of the slave trade, and to endure Africa’s diseases would have pushed to the limit the mettle of the bravest adventurer alive. When we add to this the ordeal by wild animals faced by the white pioneers in Africa, it is hard not to conclude that in their insouciant disdain for danger, the explorers were either a genuine breed of supermen or perhaps clinically insane.” (300)

This study of the history of African exploration is organized as and reads like an academic monograph which is a shame as this approach results in details of the explorations themselves receiving short shrift. The first section of the book covers each of the significant explorations in a prosaic fashion (“explorer X went from A to C via B”) omitting most of the details of the attendant adventures which are what make such accounts compelling; the maps that accompany this section leave much to be desired, lacking captions, dates and track arrows. The in-depth examination of the difficulties encountered by Stanley in his three year long crossing of the continent, the subject of the chapter entitled “An Object Lesson in Obstacles” provided the level of detail and human drama that I desired and was for me the highlight of the book. The chapter on “Explorers and Imperialism” seemed particularly muddled.

In spite of these major shortcomings, I give this book an overall positive grade because it still manages to convey a sense of the continuous hardship experienced on virtually every expedition and instill a strong sense of disbelief in the reader that anyone who survived such an ordeal would be willing to have any more to do with the continent, let alone return for ever more ambitious explorations, as nearly every explorer did.



Galton’s Art of Travel, published in 1855 “advised mountaineers to carry a cat with them as a barometric gauge, since felines were alleged to go into convulsions at precisely 13,000 feet about sea level”. (56)

Livingston’s last journey in 1873: “The crossing of the Chambezi brought torments from mosquitoes, poisonous spiders and ants to compound the pain from dysentery and haemorrhoids.”

Stanley’s 1874 expedition “ … saw a veritable roll-call of African diseases: dysentery, bronchitis, pneumonia, ophthalmia, rheumatism, sciatica, asthma, dropsy, emphysema, erysipelas, elephantiasis.” (99)

The first coast to coast crossing of Africa, completed by Stanley in 1877 took 999 days. (101)

Cloth, beads and wire were the staples of African commerce … (138)

For Africans labour’s role was primarily social: that of strengthening a kinship group by shared experiences or consolidating a hierarchy for reasons of social system. (155)

Stanley would not even allow his porters to stagger away into the jungle to die of smallpox; he insisted that they carried their loads until they dropped dead. (155)

In the eighteenth century it was estimated that between 24 and 75 per cent of the military died in their first year on the Guinea coast. (228)

Thursday, December 4, 2008

Great Bridge

Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge
Author: David McCullough 19722 562 pp
My rating: 4*
Started November 5 2008, Finished November 20 2008.

“In another time and in what would seem another world, on a day when two young men were walking on the moon, a very old woman on Long Island would tell reporters that the public excitement over the feat was not so much compared to what she had seen “on the day they opened the Brooklyn Bridge.” (542)

This book of is a piece with McCullough’s history of the construction of the Panama Canal, The Path Between the Seas; readers who enjoyed either book are likely to enjoy the other. Of historians I’ve read, McCullough does as good a job as anyone of both poring through the archives and identifying the compelling storylines in order to make history both authoritative and readable. This book which details the building of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1870s and 80s has two major components: the technical details of building the bridge -- one of the great engineering challenges of its time -- and the personnel and personal elements behind it, particularly the struggles of the eccentric genius, John Roebling who conceived and designed the bridge but died (of lockjaw!) before construction began, and his son, Washington, who possessed a remarkably different and complementary set of gifts than his father and who, as “chief engineer”, oversaw virtually every detail of construction during the 14 years required, even though he was a housebound invalid for almost all of that time.

A particular highlight for me was Chapter Nine’s recounting of existence in the pressurized caissons wherein the bridge’s foundations were laid despite the ravaging effects of “caisson disease” (the bends) which were previously unknown to mankind.

A couple of minor complaints:
The book could have used more technical illustrations to depict construction techniques that the author made great attempts to describe in words; this is a case where a one of the former would have been worth a lot of the later.
A three sentence footnote on P390 briefly mentions that “about one out of every four [bridges] build” in during the period when the Brooklyn Bridge was under construction “failed.” Given that this is a book about building by far the most ambitious bridge ever constructed at that point, the issue of contemporary bridge failures deserves more than a brief footnote.




[Roebling Sr.] drank vile concoctions of raw egg, charcoal, warm water, and turpentine (39-40)

Hegel on America: “It is a land of hope for all who are wearied of the historic armory of old Europe.” (42)

By the time it would be finished, in 1871, Tweed’s courthouse would cost more than thirteen million dollars, or nearly twice the price paid for Alaska. (133)

Horatio Allen “who had never built a suspension bridge [and] who knew little about the subject” was a high-paid “consultant” on the bridge (147)

Roebling Jr.: History, teaches us that no man can be great unless a certain amount of vanity enters into his composition … For a man to be important it is also necessary to have a good opinion of one’s self, even if for no other purpose than to impress others.” (149)

The day before elections the Executive Committee would grant to each of the families of the deceased payments of $250, or a little better than three month’s wages. (260)

Roebling Jr.: “not once in all fourteen years [of construction] did he ever set foot on the bridge.” (515)

Monday, December 1, 2008

The Devil Wears Prada
Author: Lauren Weisberger 2003 360 pp
My rating: 2*
Started November 19 2008, Finished November 23 2008.

“… incredibly unfunny, uninteresting, wholly uninspired …” (310)

This may be the first book I’ve ever read which can be classified as pure chic lit and now there is another genre I will avoid. From the standpoint of general literary worth, specifically quality of prose and development of believable, three dimensional characters, this roman a clef is easily the worst fiction I’ve blogged so far. However, it is saved from a really savage rating by it’s overall readability -- it generates just enough interest to keep the pages turning -- and by its one interesting character, the loathsome Miranda Priestly, the narrator’s boss, editor of a big deal fashion magazine who is apparently closely modeled on Anna Wintour of Vogue where the author once interned. This book would probably appeal to fashionistas -- the Sex in the City crowd -- but not to literistas, which is somewhat ironic since the narrator/protagonist, Andrea, repeatedly claims she is not of the fashion world while expressing a devotion to and desire to work for The New Yorker. It seems unlikely that Devil’s prose which consistently reads like a cross between email and journal entries would qualify her for a writing job at that magazine with its state-of-the-art writers. Some samples of Prada’s uninspired and hackneyed prose:

“Lily’s New Year’s party was good and low key.” (96) If she’d tried, Weisberger would have been hard pressed to find a less descriptive adjective than good.
“The boy genius who’d first been published at the ripe old age of twenty.” (118) An Ivy League English major ought to have sense enough to avoid a bled-white phrase like “ripe old age.”

Further complaints are that the protagonist’s supporting cast, her boy friend and best friend, and her relationships with them are unconvincingly depicted and subject to the whims of plot convenience. The book’s climax when Miranda suddenly appreciates Andrea’s devoted slavery to her every whim and offers to help her obtain a position at The New York occurs at the same time as Andrea’s friend is hospitalized after a drunken car wreck is purely contrived melodrama. The ensuing fully predictable happy endings are Hollywood pat.




Like everything else at Elias-Clark designed to make employee’s lieves better, it just stressed me out. (129)

Miranda … had deliberately created a persona so offensive on every level that she literally scared people skinny. (217)


Saturday, November 29, 2008

Middlesex

Middlesex
Author: Jeffrey Eugenides 2002 529 pp
My rating: 3*
Started October 27 2008, Finished November 4 2008.

This book could have been a lot better if it had had more rigorous editing. Problem areas include both plot and style. Eugenides often digresses from his story, the hermaphrodite narrator’s, Callie, coming to terms with his/her gender, to provide a poorly integrated history of the city of Detroit through much of the 20th century. Equally bothersome is the frequently joking tone he uses which clashes with Callie’s often poignant identity struggles. The attempt to mix comedy and tragedy is unsuccessfully Garp-like, while the attempt to weave an urban history into the story seems a clumsy attempt to emulate what Roth did so well in American Pastoral. Another big problem is the gap in Callie’s story: the book consists primarily of a detailed first hand account of the Callie’s first 16 years interleaved with observations from the middle aged, gender-determined Callie. While the youthful Callie is a believable, often compelling creation, the middle age Callie is rarely either and, worse, not a fully plausible grown up Callie.




Chapter One is simultaneously jokey and portentous, an uncomfortable and discordant combination.

Book seems overstuffed and extroverted

Too digressive: The depression chapter has asides about the development of photography, smut of the era and Fard Muhamad, the founder of the Nation of Islam, turns out to be Jimmy Kizma, Callie’s grandfather, thought to have died in a bootlegging, a revelation which is utterly preposterous and irrelevant to the plot.

On P 169 the Willow Run automobile plant is said to have produced “B-52s” during WWII. The B-52 was not developed until after the Korean War.

Middlesex is in part of eulogy for the Detroit of the middle of the 20th Century, in the same way that American Pastoral is for the Newark of the same era; this element of the book seems forced and awkward, unlike in Roth’s book where it seamlessly seems part of the narrator’s consciousness. The plot is often contrived in order to reveal some detail of Detroit’s history e.g. the riots and the house in Grosse Point.

The scene of seven year old Callie following tanks on her bike across town into intense gunfire during the riots is beyond preposterous.

Chapter Eleven’s return from college is stock, clichéd 70’s era rebellion.

The death of one of Callie’s schoolmates during a school play is a pointless bit of melodrama.

The later third of the book, which concentrates on Callie’s teenage years and the discovery of her hermaphroditism, improves considerably. The in the cabin in the chapter “Flesh and Blood” is very effective.

P442 - More lack of editorial thoroughness: watching a football game on TV ona Wednesday AM.

Omniscient first-person narrator doesn't really work -- knows too much about what others are thinking

Too much of a gulf between the Callie we last seen at age 15 and the adult telling the story at age 40 -- what happened in between. In fact the entire adult thread is halfhearted and unconvincing.




Mother’s bras are “fire retardant” (6)

“The only way we know it’s true is that we both dreamed it. That’s what reality is. It’s a dream everyone has together.” (343)

German wasn’t good for conversations because you had to wait to the end of the sentence for the verb, and so couldn’t interrupt. (7)

Friday, October 31, 2008

A House For Mr. Biswas

A House For Mr. Biswas
Author: V.S. Naipaul 1961 531 pp
My rating: 5*
Started October 18 2008, Finished October 26 2008.

Delights on almost every page. Of all the books I’ve read since I started blogging, this was the first one that I felt a tinge a sadness upon finishing -- I wanted more of Mehun Biswas and his family. A fair comparison to this book is the complete Rabbit quartet, as both works completely realize their protagonists, though Biswas achieves similar impact much more economically and Naipaul reveals his characters more from exterior traits and interactions than Updike does. The plot, the bulk of which runs from about the mid 1920s to the mid 1950s, takes Biswas, a Trinidadian Hindu of Indian extraction all the way from his inauspicious birth to his premature death at 46, thoroughly chronicling his lifelong struggle to assert himself as a unique and noteworthy individual, a quest symbolized by his attempts to acquire a livable house from himself, his wife and his children. Biswas undertakes many careers ranging from sign painter for which he has a natural aptitude, to shop-keeper for which he has little, to plantation-manager for which he has none before he finally finds his calling as a sensationalistic journalist. While Biswas’ life has at least as many valleys as peaks, the prevailing tone is comedic, though Naipaul’s skill in depicting the full range of emotions Biswas experiences can occasionally whipsaw the reader, as during the vertigo inducing change of tone from the desperation of Biswas’ nervous breakdown at the end of his time as the plantation overseer which is immediately followed the comedy of his days as a an intern reporter, endlessly recycling phrases from the old newspapers that had constituted the wall paper in his plantation hut. I also tip my hat to Naipaul for rendering a character as frequently unsympathetic as Biswas -- he his not above hitting his wife and his feelings for his children rarely extend beyond how their actions reflect upon him -- so completely and fairly that we come to understand and forgive his shortcomings and, in the end, have a fair amount of affection for him.




… as a journalist he found himself among people with money and sometimes with graces; with them his manner was unforcedly easy and he could summon up luxurious instincts; but always, at the end, he returned to his crowded, shabby room. (45)

Living in a wife-beating society, he couldn’t understand why women were even allowed to nag or how nagging could have any effect … [Susila] talked with pride of the beatings she had received from her short-lived husband. She regarded them as a necessary part of her training and often attributed the decay of Hindu society in Trinidad to the rise of the timorous, weak, non-beating class of husband. (133)

Biswas, the novice reporter described by interviewee as an ‘incompetent, aggrieved and fanatical young report who distastefully noted my guarded replies a laborious longhand.” (295)

[Exam day] Altogether it was a dreadful day, a day of reckoning, with Daddies exposed to scrutiny on every side, and the examination to follow. (425)

So later, and very slowly, in securer times of different stresses, when the memories had lost the power to hurt, with pain or joy, they would fall into place and give back the past. (524)

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Indignation

Indignation
Author: Phillip Roth 2008 231 pp
My rating: 4*
Started October 15 2008, Finished October 16 2008.

Seductively readable, this novella length work crosses the somewhat hopeful early Roth of the “Goodbye Columbus” era with the later fatalist of American Pastoral and The Plot Against America. Indignation begins as a Jewish family drama with local college commuter Marcus Messner’s attempts to get out from under the thumb of his overbearingly protective father in Newark, NJ then turns into a fish out of water tale as Marcus transfers to an insular, WASP school in Winesburg Ohio. The book’s tone seems comedic but gradually turns to darkness. The Roth protagonists of 30 and 40 years ago, about the same age as Marcus, were primarily concerned with having sex while Marchus is primarily concerned with maintaining a high enough GPA to avoid being drafted and having to fight in the Korean War. If this were a full novel length, it might get five stars. As it is it has a couple of weaknesses: characters tend to speak in perfectly formed paragraph or longer speeches and the Sonny Cottler character does not make much sense except as a plot mechanism.




What girl found a bay “desirable” at Winesburg College? I for one had never heard of such feelings existing among the girls of Winesburg or Newark or anywhere else. (58)

I couldn’t even get my first blowjob without wondering while I was getting it what had gone wrong to allow me to get it. Why wasn’t that good enough for everybody? (91)

Work -- certain people yearn for work, any work, harsh or unsavory as it may be, to drain the harshness from their lives and drive from their minds the killing thoughts. (165)

… the incomprehensible way one’s most banal, incidental, even comical choices achieve the most disproportionate result. (231)

Thursday, October 16, 2008

Midnight’s Children
Author: Salman Rushdie 1980 533 pp
My rating: 4*
Started September 30 2008, Finished October 12 2008.

Serious, rich and challenging literature of the highest of aspirations, which a reader can enjoy without fully comprehending though a study guide and/or multiple readings would undoubtedly deepen ones enjoyment, understanding and satisfaction. Midnight’s Children scores top marks for authorial vision, ambition and sense of mission. So why don’t I give it five stars? In short readability -- most importantly, the plot does not generate a lot of momentum, a shortcoming that is not helped by the profusion of Indian, Hindu and Muslim names (Wikipedia lists 41 major characters) and terms which, however necessary to the tale being told, are completely unfamiliar to the western reader and thus tend to break reading concentration and flow on a regular basis; for example, while writing this, I randomly turned to page 151 and noted the following names, most of which are not present elsewhere in the book: Zohra, Narlikar, Warden Road, Mahalaxmi Temple, Willingdon Club, Vallabhbhai Patel Stadium, Bano Dev the Invincible Woman, Dara Singh, Haji Ali, Vellard, Worli, Mahim, Salsette, Maunga, Colaba and Mazagaon.

The novel, essentially the life story of its narrator, Saleem Sinai, is a parable of the partition birth of India and Pakistan and the subsequent first thirty years of those countries. Saleem was born exactly at midnight on 15 August 1947, making his own growth symbolic of India’s. He comes to discover that he and the other 1001 Indian children born during that hour each have a unique superhuman property and that the closer to midnight one was born, the more potent the power. Saleem’s power is telepathy, the ability to enter other people’s minds and know their thoughts and feelings. The other of the midnight children born at that first instant and thus possessing a comparable power is Saleem’s nemesis, the ominous Shiva whose power, as in Hindu myth, is destruction. Saleem’s family is Muslim, but chooses not relocate to Pakistan after the partition, although eventually circumstances force them to move there during Saleem’s teenage years. For Saleem, India past, present and future, is a country brimming with life and possibility while Pakistan is a still-born trouble spot dominated by a “we are the state” military, “ … a country where the truth is what it is instructed to be, reality quite literally ceases to exist, so that everything becomes possible except what we are told is the case; and maybe this was the difference between my Indian childhood and Pakistani adolescence -- that in the first I was beset by an infinity of alternative realities, while in the second I was adrift, disorientated, amid an equally infinite number of falsenesses, unrealities and lies.” (373)

The book is a pillar of the magic realism style, along with such postwar classics as 100 Years of Solitude and The Tin Drum. From what I’ve read of India, life there is fairly surreal in the first place, so a more realistic depiction may have served the author better, at least with the western reader, by grounding it to a more plausible reality. The lack of believable human continuity from one chapter to the next prevented me from becoming fully engrossed in the work -- since Saleem is much more a symbol than a an attempt to depict a relatable person, it is hard to really connect with him.

Near the end, the author provides a critique of his own work: “The process of revision should be constant and endless; don’t think I’m satisfied with what I’ve done.” (530) He then enumerates plot points, characters and scenes which do not sit quite right with him.

Saleem ends up as a pickler in a chutney factory, the preserving of scents and tastes as a metaphor for history. In fact, to Saleem, each chapter in the book represents a jar of pickles. And this reader was puzzled by the transcendently moving final two pages, are they Saleem’s post-mortem dream and an attempt to see the future?

What does Saleem’s cracking symbolize?




Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence. (14)

Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems -- but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible. (189)

Exit Music

Exit Music
Author: Ian Rankin 2007 421 pp
My rating: 2.5*
Started September 25 2008, Finished September 30 2008.

This novel, the last in a series of about 20 (none of the others of which I’ve read), features the police inspector John Rebus of Edinburgh ,struck me as a Scottish version of the Arkady Renko books and my ho-hum reaction to this book made me question my attachment to that other series.
This book featured, as does the Renko series, a world weary protagonist/anti-hero at odds with his bosses but with a preternatural aptitude for and visceral commitment to solving unusual murders. As with Renko books, this one spends some time detailing the political and economic backdrop of the place and time (Scotland in the mid 2000’s, a time of rising nationalist/separatist impulses). Perhaps as with the Renko books, much of the pleasure of new volume comes from allusions to those which preceded it and if so, I missed out starting on the final edition. That said, I didn’t find the central mysteries particularly compelling, the resolution of one being somewhat arbitrary and unengaging and the other quite obvious.



For a while now, he’d know the truth -- that it wasn’t so much the underworld you had to fear as the overworld. (208)

Monday, September 22, 2008

The Crying of Lot 49

The Crying of Lot 49
Author: Thomas Pynchon 1965 152 pp
My rating: 2.5*
Started September 19 2008, Finished September 22 2008.

Whoosh. That’s the sound of this book going over my head. This is supposed to be an archetypical (and relatively accessible, hmmm) example of post modern fiction; if so, I’ll stick to modern and earlier. Basically, the only thing I liked about the book were the few satirical elements which I actually understood: a defense company called Yoyodyne, a not that funny parody of British invasion era rock group and a send up golden era Hollywood movies in which a dog stands watch on a submarine, looking through a periscope and barking whenever it sees anything. What I didn’t like was the hard to follow, red herring plot involving Oedipa Maas’ attempt to unravel a possible conspiracy as part of her duties as executor of an ex-lover’s estate, the over the top names assigned to every character (Pierce Inverarity, Stanley Koteks, Mike Fallopian etc.) and the lack of recognizable human action, interaction or emotion.

I suspect that to really understand, appreciate and enjoy this book, one would have to put a lot more effort into it than I did, reading (and rereading) slowly and carefully and perhaps consulting a reader’s guide as one read along.




ACDC stands for Alameda County Death Cult. (99)

Friday, September 19, 2008

I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead

I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead
Author: Crystal Zevon 2007 452 pp
My rating: 3.5*
Started September 8 2008, Finished September 13 2008.

This biography of the darkly intellectual rocker Warren Zevon by his ex-wife, a pastiche of reminiscences by friends and associates, excerpts from his journal and observations by the author, struck me as unexpectedly worthwhile and compelling, though I suspect it would be much less so for the reader not familiar with Zevon’s music. Zevon died in his early fifties, a few months after being diagnosed with cancer. He used the time remaining to him after his diagnosis in a spurt of creativity, writing, producing a performing a final album (ironically, his most successful in decades) and accompanying making-of video. Obviously concerned with image management and keeping his name and career alive after his death (he said he didn’t want a funeral because he didn’t want to spend his last days “wondering whether [the Eagles’ Don] Henley would come”), he requested that Crystal write this book and make it, “a warts and all portrait”. Credit to Crystal for fully fulfilling this commission as she did an excellent job of interleaving quotes from nearly a hundred sources while maintaining a decent narrative flow and honoring, almost to a fault, Warren’s request to show his dark side. This longtime Zevon fan felt his admiration for Zevon, as a person if not an artist, substantially diminished by the tales of the blackout alcoholism and associated abuse of friends and, especially, spouse, his lifelong womanizing and his general primadonnaish self-indulgence -- he played the role of demanding rock star for decades after his star had waned. The interviews with friends often mention Zevon’s that humor and genius usually compensated for his dark side, but in this telling, the dark side predominates though some of the humor comes through in his journal entry, albeit along with his ego. Fans of the music should appreciate the insights into the composition of many of those great songs revealed in the journal and by collaborators. Also of note were the insightfulness and generousity of Jackson Browne's reminiscences.
As I write this, I’m listening to Zevon’s music and am once again struck by what a deep and rich body of work it is. If you’re already a fan, read this book. Otherwise, listen to the songs.




It’s rock and roll, we can rhyme ‘thanks’ with ‘mom’ (375)

[On rock star tantrums] You have to let them know you’re not going to take it. Listen, if you give in to them one time, just one time, you let them send you coach, and you’re going coach for the rest of your life. (384)

[Obsessive compulsive behavior] I would sometimes bring him upwards of ten Cokes before he found one that was good luck. He’d flip it open, and just by the sound, he could tell if it was good luck or not. (385)

I better go quick so they’ll give me a Grammy nomination. It’s a damned hard way to make a living, having to die to gem ‘em to know you’re alive. (429-30)

Monday, September 8, 2008

The Charterhouse of Parma

The Charterhouse of Parma
Author: Stendhal 1839 392 pp
My rating: 2.5*
Started August 23 2008, Finished September 7 2008.

“Criticism can find no fault with the greatest character, nor with the smallest”
From the introduction by Balzac (xiii)

I strongly disagree with Balzac on that one. This book, considered a major classic and an early milestone in the development of the novel, presented many problems for this modern reader, foremost among which is its central character, Fabrizio del Dongo, whose motivations I found inscrutable, whose hypnotic charm I found unbelievable and whose one-note moonstruck romantic pining I found tedious and excessive -- the second quarter of the book, concerned to a large extent with Fabrizio’s cursory romantic dalliances particularly dragged. Another big problem with the book, written in a speed-of-transcription 57 days, is that I often found it hard to follow; to some extent this was my problem as I was somewhat challenged keeping track of the Italian names and archaic titles and aliases but it was primarily due the abrupt transitions in scene and time continually employed by the author who would, for example, segue, without section break or transitional explanation, from a long conversation to a paragraph set at a different time, a different place and involving different characters. Parts of the book that did engage me included Fabrizio’s clueless wanderings at the Battle of Waterloo which powerfully depicted the fog of war and which, set early in the novel, gave me unrealistically high hopes for the book as a whole, almost anything having to do with the preternaturally perspicacious Count Mosca (a character apparently based on the Metternich, one of the great ministers in history) and, in general, Duchess of Sanseverina, a woman of superhuman beauty and charm who captivates virtually every male she encounters and who often reminded me of a happier Toni Buddenbrook.




The Duchess possessed two special characteristics. What she had desired once she desired always, and she never deliberated a second time concerning anything she had once decided. (288)

The Count, regarding punishing revolutionaries: “You must either hang ten thousand, or not a single one;” (335)

“The Princess, who had a strong dislike for energy, which always struck here as being vulgar …” (345)

“In the eyes of the true courtier, people who are not of noble birth have no existence at all.” (385)

Friday, August 29, 2008

1984
Author: George Orwell 1949 326 pp
My rating: 3*
Started August 15 2008, Finished August 22 2008.

“a complete and final elimination of Goldsteinism” (57)

I found 1984, as I had found A Tale of Two Cities, to be a big name book that does not hold its own as a novel. And while I read it before I started blogging and did not record my impressions while they were still fresh and detailed, the book 1984 seems most comparable to is Brave New World, a similar thought experiment depicting a dystopic future whose author was unable to enrich his ideas with a fully believable human context. After my recent reading of much of Orwell’s oeuvre, I believe that Orwell’s strengths as a writer stem from his courageous willingness to get his hands dirty by becoming a participant in his subject (cf Down and Out …, … Wigan Pier, and Homage …) and then simply report on what he has seen and experienced, but that his ability to invent three dimensional people and envision their inner lives -- the sine qua non of a novelist -- is at best limited. The totalitarian world that Orwell envisions in 1984, while its control structures and extreme regimentation are a not implausible extrapolation of the some of the most diabolical aspects of Nazi Germany and Stalinist USSR, overall struck as unbelievably lifeless and its inhabitants as not recognizably human-- the inner and outer party members may as well have been robots, while the distracted, downtrodden “proles” who were intended to much more resemble pre-Big Brother humans were indifferently rendered and come across as two (and even one) dimensional clichés. Plot details don’t ring true either: Julia’s infatuation with Smith seems weakly grounded and Smith and Julia’s arrest with the associated revelation that Charrington is part of the thought police struck me as absurdly melodramatic and allows even the very long arms of the Though Police’s law a bit too much reach.

If I were rating this book on its first two thirds, the section before Smith’s arrest, I might give it one or no stars. However, it is mostly salvaged by its cultural import -- perhaps more than anything else it has brought home to the free world the tone of existence in a totalitarian state -- and its last third in which it which it alternately abandons its novelistic affectations during the long excerpt from Goldstein’s manifesto on “The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivsim”, a cogent exegesis on the motivations and intellectual underpinnings of totalitarianism and then, during Smith’s torture/reeducation, narrows its focus so drastically -- to just the bound and blinded Smith and his reactions to Obrien’s tortures -- that Orwell’s inability to depict a believable world are no longer a factor. The interrogation/torture/reeducation section is the strongest in the book, and while it still didn’t fully connect with me as Orwell was unable to impart a visceral sense of what Smith was experiencing , it is nonetheless quite powerful, particularly in its depiction of a world completely beholden to an evil ideology -- Obrien’s utterances during these scenes evoked hazy memories of The Grand Inquisitor and Smith’s gradual capitulation, his renunciation of his essential self, brought to mind (the far subtler and more persuasive) Darkness at Noon.

Shortly after finishing 1984, I read a New Yorker article by George Packer on life in Burma under a military oligarchy whose determination to maintain a hold on power with no consideration for the well being of the people under its control brought to mind the Big Brother and Ingsoc of 1984 with the difference that Packer’s reporting rife with real life detail seemed vastly more convincing than Orwell’s imagined world.




Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously and accepting both of them (223)

All the confessions that are uttered here are true. We make them true. And above all we do not allow the dead to rise up against us. You must stop imagining that posterity will vindicate you, Winston. Posterity will never hear of you. You will be lifted clean out from the stream of history. We shall turn you into gas and pour you into the stratosphere. Nothing will remain of you, not a name in a register, not a memory in a living brain. You will be annihilated in the past as well as in the future. You will never have existed. (266)

We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. (276)

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- for ever. (280)

To die hating them, that was freedom. (294)

Monday, August 11, 2008

Shooting an Elephant

Shooting an Elephant
Author: George Orwell 1945-50 200 pp
My rating: 3*
Started August 8 2008, Finished August 11 2008.

This book of essays is for the aficionado. The essays cover a diverse range of topics, not all of which are remotely relevant to the modern reader: a couple of reminiscences from his Burmese days, including the essential Shooting an Elephant, a denunciation of Tolstoy’s denunciation of Shakespeare, thoughts about writing and reviewing, a critique of the writings of the otherwise lost to history James Burnham and some shorter pieces apparently written for a newspaper towards the end of his life, my favorite of which was a rare upbeat piece about the wonders of spring.
As ever, even when expressing another unsubstantiated, almost crackpot denunciation of capitalism, Orwell‘s prose commands the reader‘s attention: “… the civilization of nineteenth-century America was capitalist civilization at is bets. Soon after the Civil War the inevitable deterioration started.” (200) The book’s primary interest for me was the insight Orwell’s writing about writing provided into why I am finding him so compelling:

Dare to be a Daniel,
Dare to stand alone;
Dare to have a purpose firm,
Dare to make it known. (106 - from a “Revivalist hymn)

To write in plain, vigorous language, one has to think fearlessly (114)




With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, in Saecula Saeculorum, upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest’s guts. (4)

They had not shown much interest in the elephant when he was merely ravaging their homes, but it was different now that he was going to be shot. (6)

… suddenly I realized that I should have to shoot the [now calm and harmless] elephant after all. The people expected it of me and I had got to do it; I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly. (8)

… I think now, as I thought then, that it’s better to die violently and not too old. (25)


Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise. Ultimately it is the Christian attitude which is self-interested and hedonistic, since the aim is always to get away from the painful struggle of earthly life and find eternal peace in some kind of Heaven or Nirvana. (48)
“what is the relationship between agreement with a writer’s opinions, and enjoyment of his work?” (72)

The durability of Gulliver’s Travels goes to show that, if the force of belief is behind it, a world-view which only just passes the test of sanity is sufficient to produce a great work of art. (76)

“no modern writer of the kind I am discussing … would ever tabulate his thoughts in that precise and detailed way.” (84)

Rules for effective prose:
“(i) Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
(ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.
(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.
(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. (DG note: the quote above about the British Raj violates this rule.)
(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous. (91-2)

One may feel … a sort of aesthetic distaste for Gandhi … [or] feel that Gandhi’s basic aims were anti human and reactionary: but regarded simply as a politician and compared with the other leading political figures of our time, how clean a smell he has managed to leave behind! (103)

“Napoleon remarked once that if only a cannon ball had happened to hit him when he was riding into Moscow, he would have gone down to history as the greatest man who ever lived.” (132)

I am always amazed when I hear people saying that sport creates goodwill between the nations, and that if only the common peoples of the world could meet one another at football or cricket, they would have no inclination to meet on the battlefield. Even if one didn’t know from concrete examples … that international sporting contests lead to orgies of hatred, one could deduce it from general principles. (152)

All he knows, at least if he’s a male toad, is that he wants to get his arms round something, and if you offer him a stick or even your finger, w\he will cling to it with surprising strength and take a long time to discover that it is not a female toad. (162)

Echoes of patients etherized upon tables: “As for spring, not even the narrow and gloomy streets round the Bank of England are quite able to exclude it. It comes seeping in everywhere, like one of those new poison gases which pass through all filters.” (163)

The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, steeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it. (165)

Variations of the following sentiment from the essay “Confessions of a Book Reviewer” have occasionally crossed my mind during the book-a-week campaign:, “Until one has some kind of professional relationship with books one does not discover how bad the majority of them are.”(174)

Saturday, August 9, 2008

Bottlemania
Author: Elizabeth Royte 2008 229 pp
My rating: 2.5*
Started August 5 2008, Finished August 8 2008

“The outrageous success of bottled water, in a country where more than 89 percent of tap water meets or exceeds federal health and safety regulations, regularly wins in blind taste test against name-brand waters, and costs 240 to 10,,000 times less than bottled water, is an unparalleled social phenomenon, one of the greatest marketing coups of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.” (40-1)
“Bottled water does have its place – it’s useful in emergencies and essential for people whose health can’t tolerate even filtered water. But it’s often no better than tap water, its environmental and social price is high, and it lets our public guardians off the hook for protecting watersheds, stopping polluters, upgrading treatment and distribution infrastructure, and strengthening treatment standards.” (225)

Royte summarizes my interest in her subject, bottled water, in the above two passages. Nonetheless, the book failed to engage me. It felt both somewhat slight and fairly padded -- it would probably have been better as a magazine article and I did not come away from it feeling that my knowledge of the subject was greatly enhanced. Royte seems to feel that there is something inherently wrong forcing people to pay for as basic a commodity as water; my reaction is why not -- we pay for everything else. Too much of the book is devoted to an inconclusive history the water wars of Fryeburg Maine whence comes Poland Springs bottled water. Also, Royte and her editors lose credibility with the following statement that “In 2006, Nestlé’s 32 percent share of the US bottled-water market … brought profits of $7.46 billion” (86) which makes the elementary error of confusing sales with profits.




Over 700 domestic and 75 imported brands of bottled water are sold in the US (17)
“In 2006, Americans consumed an average of 686 single-serve beverages per person per year; in 2007 we collectively drank fifty billion single-serve bottles of water alone.” (42)
[In NYC] “During the Dutch period, freshwater was used for livestock and cooking; the preferred beverage was beer, which everyone, including children, drank warm.” (95)
“Federal law requires the EPA to prove that the cost of removing a contaminant doesn’t exceed its benefits (deaths averted, that is, with a human life valued at $6.1million). (106)
“In Fiji, as in Fryeburg, nothing’s simple.” (154)
“In Lagos, Nigeria, the poor pay four to ten times more for a liter of water than do people hooked up to water mains; in Lima, they pay seventeen times more; in Karachi, twenty-eight to eighty-three times more; in Jakarta, up to sixty times more; and in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, up to one hundred times more.” (206)
“… according to the EPA, letting a faucet run for five minutes consumes about as much energy as burning a sixty-watt incandescent lightbulb for fourteen hours.” (218)

Tuesday, August 5, 2008

Blood And Thunder

  • Blood and Thunder
    Author: Hampton Sides 2006 404 pp
    My rating: 3.5*
    Started July 17 2008, Finished Aug 5 2008

    This book is consistently engrossing and informative, but suffers slightly from lack of a clearly defined theme. It’s partly the story of the demise of the Navajo people, partly the story of the occupation and annexation of the New Mexico territory by the United States and partly a biography of Kit Carson, mountain man, pathfinder and tracker extraordinaire. The books strengths are substantiating the legend of Carson, a man born for his times, and elucidating the plight of the Navajo (a symbol for all the tribes wiped out by white man’s occupation of the continent) whose historical way of life and general view of the world was simply incompatible with that of the encroaching Anglos. Though neither the Navajo, nor any of the other southwest tribes detailed in the book, whose existences were to a considerable degree perpetuated by rustling and slave-raiding of nearby peoples, come off as completely admirable by today’s standards, the reader cannot help but feel for them, once they have seen their field and flocks destroyed and been starved into accepting confinement outside of their historical territory on an agricultural reservation where the water is bad, the crops would not take and the entire tribe of formerly proud people either dies of disease or sinks into a an engulfing trough of despond.

    Observations:
  • The book could have used more and more detailed maps.
  • Major (later Colonel) John Chivington , a Methodist preacher of Old Testament judgment, could well have been the inspiration for the character of The Judge in Blood Meridian a book whose vision of southwest US in the middle of the 19th century, a near apocalyptic world of non-stop violence, this history often mirrors.


    Carson’s second daughter died as a “toddler was scalded to death when she fell into a boiling vat of soap tallow.” (34)

    “What was paper? Most of the Navajos had never seen it, nor ink pens, nor written words. They had no concept of individual land ownership or constitutions or the rule of law or the delegation of political authority. Their traditions were so radically different that they had no idea what the Americans were really talking about.” (239)

    Of a Confederate troop marauding through New Mexico territory early in the Civil War: “Most of the Rebels were armed with little more than fowling pieces, squirrel guns, pistols, and other frontier weapons – one quixotic unit was composed entirely of lancers.” (278) The opposing Union units were commanded by US Army officers though the enlisted ranks were comprised primarily of untrained “New Mexican paisanos” who “spoke almost no English”.

    Iraq parallel in the Indian Wars: “Before Carleton’s arrival, the vocabulary of the the Navajo wars was centered almost entirely on the principle of punishment – punishment in a raw Old Testament sense. The army was there to “chastise” and “overawe” them, to make them “fell the power and the sting of the government.” But now a certain noblesse oblige had crept into the dialogue, a sense of white man’s burden.”

    “Carson believed that most of the Indian trouble in the West were caused, as he once flatly put it, ‘by aggression on the part of whites.’ Most of the raids, by Utes and other tribes, were visited upon the settlements only out of desperation – ‘committed,’ he argued, ‘from absolute necessity when in a starving condition … their game is becoming scarce, much of it having be3en killed by the settlers, and a great deal of it driven from the country …” (334)

    “ … the Navajos could not understand the Judeo-Christian universe – its male monotheism was forbidding to a tribe with so many female gods, its stories of a chosen people half a world away had no relevance, and rituals like communion and confession seemed beyond strange.” (368)

Saturday, July 26, 2008

McMafia

McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld
Author: Misha Glenny 2008 348 pp
My rating: 1.5*
Started July 17 2008, Finished July 24 2008

Aside from a sense that globalization has been a boon to large scale criminal operations, I did not get much out of this book which I found this book very annoying, a combination of overly ambitious, under researched and endlessly digressive wherein. The first section of the book dealt with the emergence crime networks in eastern Europe and was relatively focused and informed but marred by the chapters’ independence from the others and failure to build upon each other – they could have been randomly rearranged without much affecting how they read. The rest of the book is worse with some chapters having little to do criminal networks, instead being filler/digression concerned primarily with the author’s take on globalization.

The writing is generally characterized by TV docudrama-like suspenseful interruptions as if heading to commercial and sudden lapses into the most jarring slang.

For this book to be more successful, much more research would have been required which would have been an admittedly difficult task – showing how many of the world’s criminal networks operate and interact; such an expose seems beyond even the combined abilities of all the world’s law enforcement agencies. Glenny probably would have been better off focusing his efforts on Eastern Europe where he seems the most knowledgeable.


[During the Yugoslavian civil war] “ … “Bosnians, Croats, and Albanians [were] more than happy to sell oil to their Serbian enemies because of the extraordinary profits that a sanctions regime generates.” (29)

“Bulgaria’s main route to the rest of Europe was through Serbia. The UN Security Council had already told Sofia to kiss good-bye the $1 Billion it was owed by Saddam’s Iraq when it imposed sanctions on Baghdad. Now the UN was telling Bulgaria it could not send its trucks through Serbia. This was devastating, as the country’s most important exports to Western Europe were perishable. ‘Bulgaria had a GDP of $10 billion and on the fruit and vegetables alone they lost $1 billion of income annually, explained Bill Montgomery. ‘I proposes that we allow the Bulgarians to send a weekly convoy through Serbia [escorted by UN forces]. The UN signed off … the Europeans signed off …; but Leon Furth, advisor to … Al Gore … blocked it.’ [This provided a] boost to organized crime, which thrived on the economic distress such myopic policies promoted.” (31)

“Despite the murders and the shoot-outs, the Russian mob actually ensured a degree of stability during the economic transition [from Communism to Putinist stability] (61)

Tomas Machacek, head of the Czech anti-Russian organized crime unit “is a real life Arkady Renko … engaged in a quixotic struggle with much more powerful and darker forces.” (71)

Sloppy writing: “Gazprom .. [has] an annual turnover of just less than $30 billion” (78)

Pakistani ISI trains Indian Moslem criminals to plant explosives for a terrorist act in which hundreds die. (138-9)

Clinton administration had an anti money-laundering initiative which the Bush administration eliminated as being anti business. “After 9/11 no AML regime is too strong for the US. Any kind of concerns about secondary effects go out the window. … everybody has to have this regime, and the stronger, the more onerous, the better – no cost is too high.” (147-8)

“Gangsters from Mumbai to the Balkans began pouring money into Dubai’s property market in an effort to launder their money and, where possible, to launder their reputations as well.” (153)

The last 20 pages of Chapter Seven, ostensibly about the Mumbai underworld, is instead a long digression about globalization and Dubai containing digressions within digressions such as an account of the author’s summer job in Carbondale IL in the 1970s.

Page 167, in the midst of a wandering discussion of Nigerian 419 scammers, contains a nearly full page and absolutely irrelevant aside about a Macumba priestess.

Page 170 contains another annoying aside, one paragraph about McNamara and the World Bank.

Page 176 contains another big digression, this time about the history on international trade including the “mercantile period of the 16th to 18th century.”

(184) Of a South African drug courier imprisoned in a US minimum security federal prison where a guard manipulated her into having sex: “ … if she reported it, she said, he would have killed her.” Author presents this claim of ultimate retribution as if it were a likely consequence in a US minimum-security prison as if no one would have noticed or cared and the guard would have gotten away with it.

Page 206 the country China is spelled with a lower cased ‘c’.

Page 216. Account of marijuana growers in British Columbia running large artificial 24/7 indoor growing environments on electricity illegally tapped from grid. Doesn’t the BC power company notice the loss of such a large amount of power?

218 contains unsubstantiated generalizations about Canadian attitudes towards Americans that have nothing to do with the ongoing discussion of drug cultivation in the Pacific northwest.

Chapter ten is essentially a recitation of the failure of the War on Drugs and has very little to do with organized crime.

Logic attempting to indicate that growing coca plants is far more lucrative to the Columbian farmer than bananas would be: “a kilo of bananas during the 1990s would fetch $2 on average; a kilo of coca base … was worth between $750 and $1000.” (256) This is a meaningless comparison as it gives no idea of the amount of acreage or effort required to produce a kilo of each product – if, say, an acre could yield 1000 kilos of bananas or enough coca to produce a kilo of coca base, then bananas would be more profitable on a per acre basis.

Page 272 claims that each peripheral attached to a computer has its own IP address. This is not necessarily true.

301 paragraph long digression on how tattoos are created.

“… pachinko [in Japan] … has an annual turnover estimated at about $300 billion, twice the value of the entire Japanese automobile industry …” (308)

“Health concerns and legislation aimed at reducing smoking in the United States and Europe may have dented tobacco companies’ profits in the West, but in China and Asia, it’s party time!” (336)
“One man well known both to the ‘baccy mafia and the Chinese police was Tun Yan Yuk …” (337)

The last chapter, about China, again has very little to do with organized crime and is mainly a discussion of how Chinese manufacturing has prospered in the last 15 years.

Monday, July 14, 2008

The Road to Wigan Pier

  • The Road to Wigan Pier
    Author: George Orwell 1937 232 pp
    My rating: 3*
    Started July 8 2008, Finished July 11 2008

    Orwell’s examination of working class poverty in the coal mining towns of northern England during the depression has two parts: the first is a detailed description of what that poverty entails based on Orwell’s first hand experiences living among his subject families and the second is Orwell’s proposed remedy, in a word, Socialism. The first part was quite compelling, but felt a bit truncated; perhaps as with The Reluctant Communist, there is just not very much one can say about such drab, uneventful and purposeless lives. Also of note about this section, since the early sproutings of what would eventually become the British welfare state were extant at the time of Orwell’s research, his subject families received enough assistance from the government to avoid starvation (though their diets were quite limited and innutritious) or homelessness. Since these people weren’t faced with starvation as say, the characters in Down and Out in Paris and London were, the most destructive effect of poverty for the residents of Wigan Pier was the lack of self-worth resulting from lives without gainful employment or any hope thereof.
    The second part of the book is a testament to the power of Orwell’s writing – his take on the human condition places such a premium on honesty, particularly due to his constant questioning of his own prejudices and biases, that his prose can be far more readable than his logic and conclusions would justify on their own. In part two, Orwell addresses the issue of what can be done to rectify England’s social-economic structure that allows perhaps one third of its citizens to exist in dire poverty. The only answer Orwell sees is the adoption of Socialism. The alternatives are dismissed in passing: capitalism is self-destructive, dying (if not already dead) and essentially designed to benefit the few at the expense of the many; Communism is a perverted, dictatorial perversion of Socialism; Fascism, which was ascendant at the time Wigan Pier was written, is an abomination that Orwell was willing to put his life on the line to combat it years before the outbreak of WWII. Orwell wastes much time defending Socialism from its supporters who are stereotyped as head in the cloud proto-hippies or the subset of the affluent classes which espouses support for the working class while secretly detesting almost everything about the people who constitute it. The biggest problem in this section though is that as the book’s original publisher, Victor Gollancz, points out in the book’s forward, Orwell never defines what he means by Socialism; I read the forward after reading the rest of the book and this was a point that had bothered me for almost all of point two – I found this lacking severely undercut whatever points Orwell was trying to make.
    Also of note in part two are several instances where Orwell draws boneheaded conclusions or time has proved him utterly wrong:
  • “I have listened by the hour to their tirades against their own class, and yet never, not even once, have I met one who had picked up proletarian table-manners. Why should a man who thinks all virtue resides in the proletariat still take such pains to drink his soup silently? It can only be because in his heart he feels that proletarian manners are disgusting.” (Ch 8) This reader considers it possible that such silent soup sipping is the ingrained habit of a lifetime, requiring no thought or effort, not an overt statement of social revulsion.
  • “In order that one may enjoy primitive methods of travel, it is necessary that no other method should be available. No human being ever wants to do anything in a more cumbrous way than is necessary.” (Ch 12) This passage, part of a section where Orwell inveighs against the increasingly complete mechanization of society, completely fails to appreciate that people could come to enjoy activities such as biking, hiking and running for their own sake.
  • “… Socialism is the only real enemy that Fascism has to face. The capitalist- imperialist governments, even though they themselves are about to be plundered, will not fight with any conviction against Fascism as such.” (Ch 12) This quote is one of many throughout Orwell’s studies on poverty where he completely underestimates the health of capitalism; of course it was the “dying” capitalist and the corrupt communist countries that crushed capitalism, socialist countries playing no significant role whatsoever.




    ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    On the day when there was a full chamber-pot under the breakfast table I decided to leave. (Ch 1)

    This business of petty inconvenience and indignity, of being kept waiting about, of having to do everything at other people's convenience, is inherent in working-class life. (Ch 3)

    It is a great achievement to get slum-dwellers into decent houses, but it is unfortunate that, owing to the peculiar temper of our time, it is also considered necessary to rob them of the last vestiges of their liberty. (Ch 4)

    In a working-class home it is the man who is the master and not, as in a middle-class home, the woman or the baby. Practically never, for instance, in a working-class home, will you see the man doing a stroke of the housework. Unemployment has not changed this convention … (Ch 5)

    We may as well face the fact that several million men in England will--unless another war breaks out--never have a real job this side the grave. (Ch 5)

    Instead of raging against their destiny they have made things tolerable by lowering their standards. (Ch 5)

    I happened to be in Yorkshire when Hitler re-occupied the Rhineland. Hitler, Locarno, Fascism, and the threat of war aroused hardly a flicker of interest locally, but the decision of the Football Association to stop publishing their fixtures in advance (this was an attempt to quell the Football Pools) flung all Yorkshire into a storm of fury. (Ch 5)

    Twenty million people are underfed but literally everyone in England has access to a radio. What we have lost in food we have gained in electricity. Whole sections of the working class who have been plundered of all they really need are being compensated, in part, by cheap luxuries which mitigate the surface of life. (Ch 5)

    The most obvious sign of under-nourishment is the badness of everybody's teeth. (Ch 6)

    I should say that a manual worker, if he is in steady work and drawing good wages--an 'if which gets bigger and bigger--has a better chance of being happy than an 'educated' man. (Ch 7)

    In the kind of shabby-genteel family that I am talking about there is far more consciousness of poverty than in any working-class family above the level of the dole. Rent and clothes and school-bills are an unending nightmare, and every luxury, even a glass of beer, is an unwarrantable extravagance. Practically the whole family income goes in keeping up appearances. (Ch 8)

    Hence, at the age of seventeen or eighteen, I was both a snob and a revolutionary. I was against all authority. I had read and re-read the entire published works of Shaw, Wells, and Galsworthy (at that time still regarded as dangerously 'advanced' writers), and I loosely described myself as a Socialist. But I had not much grasp of what Socialism meant, and no notion that the working class were human beings. At a distance, and through the medium of books--Jack London's The People of the Abyss, for instance --I could agonize over their sufferings, but I still hated them and despised them when I came anywhere near them. I was still revolted by their accents and infuriated by their habitual rudeness. (Ch 9)

    And all the while everyone who uses his brain knows that Socialism, as a world-system and wholeheartedly applied, is a way out. (Ch 11)

    the swindle of “progress” (Ch 12)

    But at any rate we must drop that misleading habit of pretending that the only proletarians are manual labourers. It has got to be brought home to the clerk, the engineer, the commercial traveller, the middle-class man who has 'come down in the world', the village grocer, the lower-grade civil servant, and all other doubtful cases that they are the proletariat, and that Socialism means a fair deal for them as well as for the navvy and the factory-hand. They must not be allowed to think that the battle is between those who pronounce their aitches and those who don't; for if they think that, they will join in on the side of the aitches. (Ch 13)

    “so that it is still necessary, and will be necessary for a long time yet, to show that modern methods of production do work under Socialism and no longer work under capitalism. (xviii) From forward by Victor Gollancz.

    Mr. Orwell does not once define what he means by Socialism (xx)

Thursday, July 10, 2008

Netherland

Netherland
Author: Joseph O’Neill 2008 256 pp
My rating: 3.5*
Started July 2 2008, Finished July 4 2008


This book, belonging to that new genre, the post 9/11 NYC novel and subject of (too) much critical praise, often comparing it to Gatsby, has much to recommend it including state of the art prose that as with Updike and Roth, occasionally causes me to marvel “now that’s writing”, a couple of intriguing mysteries that keep one turning the pages, a refreshingly outer-boroughs centric point of view, a novel to the American reader central cricket-as-new-world-life-metaphor, an almost unequaled differentiation among voices – contrary to most novels, each character speaks in a unique and credible voice -- and a bravura stream of consciousness time changing in the narration of a long chapter near the end when the narrator’s thoughts range seamlessly across almost his entire life with each shift unapparent until well after it has occurred. However, Netherland falls short of greatness for me because the mysteries are not satisfactorily resolved and its central characters never really resonated. The novel hinges on the trans-Atlantic separation of the narrator, a successful early 30’s Dutch expatriate financial analyst, and his wife Rachel, an English lawyer who for nebulous reasons loses faith in Hans and their life in New York, prompting her return to her native country. The separation plunges Hans into isolation and despondency which ultimately lead to his immersion in the sub world of New York area cricket leagues comprised primarily of barely legal third world immigrants and through which he meets Chuck Ramskoonian, a Trinidadian expat, dreamer, schemer and bootstrapper who is the book’s Gatsby analogue. Chuck is an intriguing character, but not enough to build a book around. The nostalgic grounding Hans finds in cricket is more described than felt causes the book’s center to never fully cohere. However, the biggest problem for me was the inability of Hans and Rachel to communicate about their marriage. Hans clearly resents the separation and throughout the book longs for a resumption of the relationship, but is maddeningly passive, letting the barely communicative Rachel dictate their course. I find it very hard to believe that such a UMC couple would not have talked the issue to death or that at the least, Hans would have repeatedly demanded an explanation and a prognosis from the confused and tongue-tied Rachel; Hans’ simmering deferral to his wife, which extends over years, rendered him implausible to me; Rachel’s disinclination to explain her actions had a similar effect and my consequent lack of identification with and belief in the central characters significantly diminished the book for me.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“You know what my motto is?”
“I didn’t think people had mottoes anymore.” (80)

“Like an old door, every man past a certain age comes with historical warps and creaks of one kind or another, and a woman who wishes to put him to serious further use must expect to do a certain amount of sanding and planing.” (109)

[London] “… I’ve speculated, to the bizarrely premature crystallization of lives here, where men and women past the age of forty, in some cases even the age of thirty, may easily be regarded as over the hill and entitled to an essentially retrospective idea of themselves; whereas in New York selfhood’s hill always seemed to lie ahead and to promise a glimpse of further, higher peaks: that you might have no climbing boots to hand was beside the point.” (178-9)

… “ she reaches for my hand and squeezes it. Strange, how such a moment grows in value over a marriage’s course. We gratefully pocket each of them, these sidewalk pennies, and run with them to the bank as if creditors were banging on the door.” (183)

“As he stared up at millions of stars, he was filled with a dread he had never known before.
… I was just a boy on a boat in the universe.” (200)

“ … all people, Americans, whoever, are at their most civilized when they’re playing cricket.” (211)

Tuesday, July 8, 2008

Homage to Catalonia

Homage to Catalonia
Author: George Orwell 1938 232 pp
My rating: 3.5*
Started July 7 2008, Finished July 8 2008

Written immediately upon Orwell’s return from his stint as a volunteer with the “Government” (anti-fascist) in the Spanish Civil War -- service foreshortened by his being shot through the throat – this memoir cum political reportage is best when chronicling the life of a soldier at the front and least engaging during its overlong description and analysis of the internecine battling among Government forces (communists versus anarchists) while he was on leave in Barcelona. Upon finishing it, the reader cannot help but feel a strong admiration for Orwell’s clear sighted honesty and devotion to honest reporting, his willingness to sacrifice all for his beliefs and his ability to maintain an idealistic hope for a more just world in the face of corruption, waste and self-serving

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Human beings were trying to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine. (Ch 1)

We were near the front line now, near enough to smell the characteristic smell of war--in my experience a smell of excrement and decaying food. (Ch 2)

In trench warfare five things are important: firewood, food, tobacco, candles, and the enemy. In winter on the Zaragoza front they were important in that order, with the enemy a bad last. Except at night, when a surprise--attack was always conceivable, nobody bothered about the enemy. They were simply remote black insects whom one occasionally saw hopping to and fro. The real preoccupation of both armies was trying to keep warm. (Ch 3)

The centuria was an untrained mob composed mostly of boys in their teens. Here and there in the militia you came across children as young as eleven or twelve, usually refugees from Fascist territory who had been enlisted as militiamen as the easiest way of providing for them. As a rule they were employed on light work in the rear, but sometimes they managed to worm their way to the front line, where they were a public menace. I remember one little brute throwing a hand-grenade into the dug-out fire 'for a joke'. At Monte Pocero I do not think there was anyone younger than fifteen, but the average age must have been well under twenty. Boys of this age ought never to be used in the front line, because they cannot stand the lack of sleep which is inseparable from trench warfare. At the beginning it was almost impossible to keep our position properly guarded at night. The wretched children of my section could only be roused by dragging them out of their dug-outs feet foremost, and as soon as your back was turned they left their posts and slipped into shelter; or they would even, in spite of the frightful cold, lean up against the wall of the trench and fall fast asleep. Luckily the enemy were very unenterprising. There were nights when it seemed to me that our position could be stormed by twenty Boy Scouts armed with airguns, or twenty Girl Guides armed with battledores, for that matter. (Ch 3)

But in practice when the emergency came I seldom fired my rifle; I was too frightened of the beastly thing jamming and too anxious to reserve at any rate one round that would go off. (Ch 3)

Nothing will convince a Spaniard, at least a young Spaniard, that fire-arms are dangerous. Once, rather later than this, I was photographing some machine-gunners with their gun, which was pointed directly towards me. 'Don't fire,' I said half-jokingly as I focused the camera. 'Oh no, we won't fire.' The next moment there was a frightful roar and a stream of bullets tore past my face so close that my cheek was stung by grains of cordite. It was unintentional, but the machine-gunners considered it a great joke. Yet only a few days earlier they had seen a mule-driver accidentally shot by a political delegate who was playing the fool with an automatic pistol and had put five bullets in the mule-driver's lungs... (Ch 3)

And apart from the libels of the inter-party feud, all the usual war-stuff, the tub-thumping, the heroics, the vilification of the enemy--all these were done, as usual, by people who were not fighting and who in many cases would have run a hundred miles sooner than fight. One of the dreariest effects of this war has been to teach me that the Left-wing press is every bit as spurious and dishonest as that of the Right. (Ch 5)

It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda-tours. Sometimes it is a comfort to me to think that the aeroplane is altering the conditions of war. Perhaps when the next great war comes we may see that sight unprecedented in all history, a jingo with a bullet-hole in him. (Ch 5)

In stationary warfare there are three things that all soldiers long for: a battle, more cigarettes, and a week's leave. (Ch 6)

In that community where no one was on the make, where there was a shortage of everything but no privilege and no boot-licking, one got, perhaps, a crude forecast of what the opening stages of Socialism might be like. And, after all, instead of disillusioning me it deeply attracted me. (Ch 8)

'Hi! Don't you shoot at us!' 'What?' 'Don't you fire at us or we'll fire back!' 'No, no! I wasn't firing at you. Look--down there!' … 'I was firing at him. He fired first.' (I believe this was true.) 'We don't want to shoot you. We're only workers, the same as you are.' He made the anti-Fascist salute, which I returned. I shouted across: 'Have you got any more beer left?' 'No, it's all gone.' (Ch 10)

When you are taking part in events like these you are, I suppose, in a small way, making history, and you ought by rights to feel like a historical character. But you never do, because at such times the physical details always outweigh everything else. Throughout the fighting I never made the correct 'analysis' of the situation that was so glibly made by journalists hundreds of miles away. What I was chiefly thinking about was not the rights and wrongs of this miserable internecine scrap, but simply the discomfort and boredom of sitting day and night on that intolerable roof, and the hunger which was growing worse and worse … (Ch 10)

It may seem that I have discussed the accusations against the P.O.U.M. at greater length than was necessary. Compared with the huge miseries of a civil war, this kind of internecine squabble between parties, with its inevitable injustices and false accusations, may appear trivial. It is not really so. I believe that libels and press--campaigns of this kind, and the habits of mind they indicate, are capable of doing the most deadly damage to the anti-Fascist cause. (Ch 11)

One morning it was announced that the men in my ward were to be sent down to Barcelona today. I managed to send a wire to my wife, telling her that I was coming, and presently they packed us into buses and took us down to the station. It was only when the train was actually starting that the hospital orderly who traveled with us casually let fall that we were not going to Barcelona after all, but to Tarragona. I suppose the engine-driver had changed his mind. 'Just like Spain!' I thought. But it was very Spanish, too, that they agreed to hold up the train while I sent another wire, and more Spanish still that the wire never got there. (Ch 12)

I admit I was angry when I heard of Kopp's arrest. He was my personal friend, I had served under him for months, I had been under fire with him, and I knew his history. He was a man who had sacrificed everything--family, nationality, livelihood--simply to come to Spain and fight against Fascism. By leaving Belgium without permission and joining a foreign army while he was on the Belgian Army reserve, and, earlier, by helping to manufacture munitions illegally for the Spanish Government, he had piled up years of imprisonment for himself if he should ever return to his own country. He had been in the line since October 1936, had worked his way up from militiaman to major, had been in action I do not know how many times, and had been wounded once. During the May trouble, as I had seen for myself, he had prevented fighting locally and probably saved ten or twenty lives. And all they could do in return was to fling him into jail. It is waste of time to be angry, but the stupid malignity of this kind of thing does try one's patience. (Ch 13)

I did not make any of the correct political reflections. I never do when things are happening. It seems to be always the case when I get mixed up in war or politics --I am conscious of nothing save physical discomfort and a deep desire for this damned nonsense to be over. Afterwards I can see the significance of events, but while they are happening I merely want to be out of them … (Ch 13)

Smillie's death is not a thing I can easily forgive. Here was this brave and gifted boy, who had thrown up his career at Glasgow University in order to come and fight against Fascism, and who, as I saw for myself, had done his job at the front with faultless courage and willingness; and all they could find to do with him was to fling him into jail and let him die like a neglected animal. (Ch 14)

I have the most evil memories of Spain, but I have very few bad memories of Spaniards … They have, there is no doubt, a generosity, a species of nobility, that do not really belong to the twentieth century (Ch 14)

Curiously enough the whole experience has left me with not less but more belief in the decency of human beings. And I hope the account I have given is not too misleading. I believe that on such an issue as this no one is or can be completely truthful. It is difficult to be certain about anything except what you have seen with your own eyes, and consciously or unconsciously everyone writes as a partisan. In case I have not said this somewhere earlier in the book I will say it now: beware of my partisanship, my mistakes of fact, and the distortion inevitably caused by my having seen only one corner of events. (Ch 14)

Monday, July 7, 2008

Keep the Aspidistra Flying

Keep the Aspidistra Flying
Author: George Orwell 1936 248 pp
My rating: 3*
Started July 5 2008, Finished July 5 2008

This volume continues Orwell’s chronicle of poverty in English society, examining the lot of a member of the working poor. The protagonist, Gordon Comstock, attempts to as fully as possible, reject participation in the “money society”, forsaking a promising job as an advertising copy writer for a much lower paying, dead end one as the sales clerk at a used book store which, in theory, will pay him just enough to subsist while he focuses his energies on writing poetry. What happens though is that Gordon loses his muse, writes virtually nothing and become obsessed with his sense that money controls everything in society and that a person who lacks it is nothing, developing an Underground Man like hostility to the world around him and a paranoid sense that all the interactions in his life are determined by the contempt people have for him as a person without money.
The book had several flaws as a novel, primarily because most of its characters do not ring true as human beings. The book gets off to a bad start in this respect in chapter one’s description of a typical day in the bookstore where all the customers all caricatures in action, speech and book preference. Further, the adoration Gordon’s sweetheart, Rosemary, has for him is never really plausible given that we see him offer her little but rudeness and complaint. The support Gordon receives from Rosemary, his spinster sister and his friend/champion, the well-to-do Ravelston, stretch credibility in the face of Gordon’s endlessly self-defeating actions and self pity which make him a thoroughly unlikable anti-hero, whatever the reader feels about Gordon’s anti-capitalist principles.
The book’s centerpiece is memorably excruciating chapter in which Gordon manages to in the course of a few hours to convert an unexpected windfall into an appalling, completely abasing catastrophe after which he develops a Bartleby-like indifference to his own existence and appears headed straight for the gutter. Given Gordon’s negative trajectory in the rest of the book, its relatively happy, nearly Hollywoodesque ending jars a bit, though offering everyone, the reader included, substantial relief from the grinding spectacle of Gordon’s self destruction.
Eliot’s take on the modern world, one of the many things Gordon scoffs at, casts a shadow over this novel of “lonely clerks in shirt sleeves” who conduct degrading assignations with their equally unmoored female contemporaries. Also of note is the degree to which the materialism of the “dying capitalist society” portrayed in the book resembles that in our own; the copywriting for which Gordon has such unlimited contempt is for things which sound all too familiar to the reader seventy years after: “Whiterose Pills for Female Disorders, Your Horoscope Cast by Professor Raratongo, The Seven Secrets of Venus, New Hope for the Ruptured, Earn Five Pounds a Week in your Spare Time, and Cyprolax Hair Lotion Banishes all Unpleasant Intruders.” (51)
Another plus for me was the nasty comic relief provided by Mr Cheeseman, the owner of a for profit lending library where Gordon finds better-than-nothing employment after the windfall catastrophe, a feisty dwarf who “was not a bad person to work for, so long as you understood that if you worked till the Day of Judgement you would never get a rise of wages” and who despite owning a mini-empire of book stores “had never in his life read a book himself, nor could he conceive why anyone should want to do so.” (204-5)

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“It was the lack of money, simply the lack of money, that robbed him of the power to 'write'. He clung to that as to an article of faith. Money, money, all is money! Could you write even a penny novelette without money to put heart in you? Invention, energy, wit, style, charm--they've all got to be paid for in hard cash.” (9)

“Money is what God used to be. Good and evil have no meaning any longer except failure and success.” (43)

“The prospect of searching for another job bored him even more than the prospect of poverty. Besides, he would never find another job. There are no jobs to be had nowadays. He was going down, down into the sub-world of the unemployed--down, down into God knew what workhouse depths of dirt and hunger and futility. And chiefly he was anxious to get it over with as little fuss and effort as possible.” (189)

Tuesday, July 1, 2008

Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
Author: Tim Weiner 2007 514 pp
My rating: 4*
Started June 13 2008, Finished June 21 2008

This book’s discouraging chronicle of the CIA’s history documents a non-stop litany of Agency ineptitude, political kowtowing, lack of oversight and even malfeasance. The salient themes include:
The CIA’s failure to accurately fulfill its primary mission of intelligence gathering resulting in failure to predict many of the major events of the last sixty years including: the development of the A-Bomb by the USSR, the invasion of South Korea by the North Koreans and subsequent Chinese entry into the war, almost anything involving Vietnam, the fall of the Shah, the collapse of the Soviet Union and various terrorist strikes against the US.
Covert operations which, especially in the agency’s early years, drained resources and usually spectacularly failed to meet their objectives though when they did succeed it was towards a goal which at this historical remove usually seems strategically counterproductive and often morally reprehensible e.g. the overthrow of Mossadeq in Iran.
Presidents who ignored the agency unless it told them what they wanted to hear. The only presidents who come across as somewhat effective and concerned in their interactions with the agency are Eisenhower and Carter. Nixon and Clinton come off particularly unfavorably.
The tendency of the later agency directors to tailor reports – corrupt the intelligence – in order to curry favor with the current president, a trend which culminated most disastrously for the US in the intelligence concocted to justify the US invasion of Iraq.
Lack of institutional controls and processes resulting in mistakes being repeated across the tenures of multiple directors: to this day, the agency lacks sufficient linguists to translate essential intercepts from the most prominent threats, moles and double agents were never effectively dealt with and covert operation seem a series of criminally wasteful rogue actions from beginning to end.

This book is certainly worthwhile reading for the concerned citizen, but to my mind it had significant weaknesses. The author is a writer for the New York Times, not an historian which perhaps is why the book occasionally comes across as somewhat rushed and unbalanced and lacking in historical perspective. In particular, the agency’s few successes are generally not discussed as thoroughly as the far more numerous failures and events are sometimes dropped after the author has made his point, even though the reader would like to know more about how they played out – this is a book that would have justified at double the length. A strength and a weakness of the book is its reliance for sources upon interviews with and the memoirs of high ranking current and former personnel, particularly directors, and internal agency histories and documents. While these sources impart a great deal of credibility to Weiner’s arguments, they often come off, no matter how badly the reflect on the CIA, as self-serving; the book could have used more outside observations, perhaps from congressmen who dealt with the agency and historians. A definite though lesser strength of the book is its self-documenting: 153 pages of thoroughly detailed endnotes.


“All told, hundreds of the CIA’s foreign agents were sent to their deaths in Russia, Poland, Romania, Ukraine, and the Baltic States during the 1950s. Their fates were unrecorded; no accounts were kept and no penalty assessed for their failure.” (47)

[1950] “… the agency had misread every global crisis of the past year: the Soviet atom bomb, the Korean War, the Chinese invasion.” (52)

“… almost all the secret information the agency gathered during the [Korean] war had been manufactured by the North Korean and Chinese security services.” (57)

[During Korean War] “The ability to represent failure as success was becoming a CIA tradition. The agency’s unwillingness to learn from its mistakes became a permanent part of its culture. The CIA’s covert operators never wrote “lessons-learned” studies. Even today there are few if any rules or procedures for producing them.” (58)

[Overthrow of Mossadeq] By renting the allegiances of soldiers and street mobs, the CIA had created a degree of violence sufficient to stage a coup. Money changed hands and those hands changed a regime” (92)
This operation was considered a great success.

CIA history re 1953 Berlin tunnel electronic intercepts: “We were never successful in obtaining as many linguists as we needed.” (111)

“The CIA knew none of this. Dulles assured Eisenhower that reports of a joint Israeli-UK-French military plan were absurd. He refused to heed the CIA’s chief intelligence analyst and the American military attaché in Tel Aviv both convinced that Israel was about to go to war against Egypt …” (128)

Wisner in Hungary, during 1956 uprising: “He had told the White Hosue he would create a nationwide underground for political and paramilitary warfare … He had failed completely. The exiles he sent to cross the border from Austria were arrested. The he tried to recruit were liars and thieves. His efforts to create a clandestine reporting network inside Hungary collapsed. He had buried weapons all over Europe, but when the crisis came, no one could find them.” (129)

“Dulles told the president ‘Because of the power of public opinion, armed force could not be effectively used. Approximately 80 percent of the Hungarian army had defected to the rebels and provided the rebels with arms.
But Dulles was dead wrong. The rebels had no guns to speak of. The Hungarian army had not switched sides.” (131)

1958, CIA attempts to overthrow Indonesia’s Sukarno, heretofore believed to be anti-American and pro communism, collapsed when leading American operative is captured with all his identifying documentation after attempting to bomb Indonesian ships, causing US to stage an intelligence and policy reversal. “As quickly as possible, American foreign policy reversed course. The CIA’s reporting instantly reflected the changed. … For the rest of his days in power, Sukarno rarely failed to mention [the US’s attempt coup] He knew the CIA had tried to overthrow his government … The ultimate effect was to strengthen Indonesia’s communists …” (153)

One of the CIA’s “best analysts” in 1958: “we had constructed for ourselves a picture of the USSR, and whatever happened to be made to fit into that picture. Intelligence estimators can hardly commit a more abominable sin.” (154)

“In 1960, the agency .. projected … that the Soviets would have five hundred ICBMs ready to strike by 1961.” Moscow actually had four missiles pointed at the US. (158)

CIA puts Mobutu in power in Congo. (163)

“Long before Nixon created his “plumbers” unit of CIA veterans to stop news leaks, Kennedy used the agency to spy on Americans” (193)

Implies CIA dropped ball on Oswald: “In short, an angry defector who admired Castro, whom the CIA had reason to believe might be a recruited communist agent, who was urgently seeking to return to Moscow via Havana, was staking out the route of the president’s motorcade in Dallas.” (228)
DG: would the CIA have any reason to know the route of the presidential motorcade?

1964: Director McCone wants to get CIA “out of the cloak-and-dagger business” and concentrate on intelligence. “the clandestine service was consuming close to two-thirds of the agency’s budget and 90 percent of McCone’s time.” (239)

Tonkin Gulf: “Within an hour [onseen commander] reported: “ENTIRE ACTION LEAVES MANY DOUBTS.” Ninety minutes later, those doubts vanished in Washington. The NSA told the secretary of defense and the president … that it had intercepted a North Vietnamese naval communiqué reading: “SACRIFICED TWO SHIPS AND ALL THE REST ARE OKAY.”
… “Upon review, the message actually read: “WE SACRIFICED TWO COMRADES BUT ALL ARE BRAVE. … [After a couple of days, NSA reviewed the message and its time of transmission, retranslated it and determined the correct translation; it turned out not to be about the pivotal second clash when US ships were allegedly fired upon, but the first one, two nights earlier] … The NSA buried this salient fact.” (241-2)

“Within the Agency, our failure to penetrate the North Vietnamese government was the single most frustrating aspect of those years. We could not determine what was going on at the highest levels of Ho’s government, nor could we learn how policy was mad or who was making it. [At the root of this failure of intelligence was] our national ignorance of Vietnamese history, society, and language” (244)

After an early setback in Vietnam, the White House orders heavy bombing: “The White House sent an urgent message to Saigon seeking the CIA’s best estimate of the situation. George W. Allen, the most experienced Vietnamese intelligence analyst at the Saigon station, said the enemy would not be deterred by bombs. It was growing stronger. Its will was unbroken. But Ambassador Maxwell Taylor went over the report line by line, methodically deleting each pessimistic paragraph before sending it to the president.”
(247)

“Like almost all who followed him, LBJ liked the agency’s work only if it fit his thinking.” (248)

“Four times in 1965, the Americans destroyed innocent civilian targets in Laos, once bombing a friendly village that Ambassador Sullivan had blessed with a goodwill visit the day before. The bombing run had been called in by Bill Lair, who was trying to rescue a CIA pilot who had touched down in a hot landing zone and was captured by the Pathet Lao. The bombs fell twenty miles from the intended target; the pilot, Ernie Brace, spent eight years as a prisoner of war in the Hanoi Hilton.” (255)

“Yet the CIA’s best analysts had concluded in a book-length study, The Vietnamese Communists’ Will to Persist, sent to the president and perhaps a half dozen top aides, that nothing the United States was doing could defeat the enemy.” (266) But Helms, for no reason other than political pressure to support military’s more optimistic picture, later reduces agency’s estimates of Vietcong in South Vietnam by more than 25% (268)

Helm’s “greatest triumph as director of central intelligence: the CIA’s accurate call of the Six-Day War. (277) (From Israelis through Angelton.)

“Nixon was outraged when the agency argued that the Soviets had neither the intention nor the technology to launch a knockout nuclear first strike [which] flew in the face of Nixon’s plans to build an antiballistic missile system.” In the end, Helms fold to political pressure, “erasing a key passage of the CIA’s most important estimate on Soviet nuclear forces in 1969.” (296)

“Under President Nixon, secret government surveillance reached a peak in the spring of 1971. The CIA, the NSA and the FBI were spying on American citizens.” (318)

1980: “Intelligence analysis had become corrupted – another tool wielded for political advantage – and it would never recover its integrity. The CIA’s estimates had been blatantly politicized since 1969, when President Nixon forced the agency to change its views on the Soviets abilities to launch a first strike.” (352)

“The Soviets would be most reluctant to introduce large numbers of ground forces into Afghanistan,” the CIA’s National Intelligence Daily, its top secret report to the White, the Pentagon, and the State Department, confidently stated on March 23, 1979. That wee, thirty thousand Soviet combat troops began to deploy near the Afghan border in trucks, tanks, and armored personnel carriers.” (365-6)

Success: “ … in January 1980, the agency execute a classic espioage operation to extract six State Department employees who had managed to find refuge across town at the Canadian embassy.” (372)

“When Casey disagree with his analysts, as he often did, he rewrote their conclusions to reflect his views. When told the president, ‘This is what the CIA thinks,’ he meant, ‘This is what I think.’ He chased independent-minded. Let-the-chips-fall-where-they-may analysts out of the CIA.” (379)

Success, plot to sell faulty gas pipeline control software through Canadian shell company to Soviets was “a smashing success” (387)

Iran-Contra, Casey persuades Reagan to make a public statement saying the operation was intended “to foil the Soviets and the terrorists in Iran – not trading weapons for hostages … Once again, as in the U-2 shootdown, as at the Bay of Pigs, as in the war in Central America, the president lied to protect the covert operations of the CIA.” (408)

Successes: uncovers Taiwan ability to build nuclear weapons; destruction of the Abu Nidal terrorist organization, Afghanistan. (419)

After repeatedly saying Saddam was unlikely to invade Kuwait, CIA warned White House that invasion was imminent. “Bush did not believe his CIA.” Hours later, Iraq invaded. (426-7)

Ames: “his personnel records were a chronicle of drunkenness and ineptitude. He had failed upward for seventeen years. In 1985, he had reached a pinnacle: chief of counterintelligence for the Soviet Union and Easter Europe. He was known to be an alcoholic malcontent. Yet the agency gave him access to the files of nearly every important spy working for the United States behind the iron curtain.” (448) “ … he named every name he knew … The agency knew that something had destroyed its Soviet operation. But it took seven years to being to face the facts.” (449) “For eight years, from 1986 to 1994, the senior CIA officers responsible for these reports had known that some of their sources were controlled by Russian intelligence. The agency knowingly gave the White House information manipulated by Moscow – and deliberately concealed the fact.” (450)

1994: “ … a total of three people in the American intelligence community had the linguistic ability to understand excited Muslims talking to each other.” (453)

Guatemala, early 90s: CIA was supporting murderous right wing military dictatorship while unknowing American ambassadors were “preaching human rights and justice.” Guatemalan intelligence provided CIA with tapes of US ambassador engaged in pillow talk with her secretary, Carol Murphy, in the ambassador’s bedroom. CIA spread this report throughout Washington – the “ … CIA had defamed an ambassador by back channels.” Turned out the tapes were of the ambassador talking to her pet poodle.” (459-60)

Agency caught by surprise when India explodes a nuclear bomb. “ … a nuclear blast by the world’s largest democracy should not have come as a shock – but it did. The reporting from the CIA’s station in New Delhi was lazy. The analysis at headquarters was fuzzy. … The test revealed a failure of espionage, a failure to read photographs, a failure to see.” (468)

A few months prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Tenet told the Senate Intelligence committee “’Iraq provided al Qaeda with various kinds of training – combat, bomb-making, and [CBR] and nuclear.’ He based that statement on the confessions of a single source … a fringe player who had been beaten, stuffed in a two-foot-square box for seventeen hours, and threatened with prolonged torture. The prisoner had recanted after the threat of torture receded. Tenet did not correct the record.” (486)`

Powell addressing the UN on 5 Feb 03: “Every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we are giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.” (491) Powell asserted, based on CIA’s “best intelligence” that Saddam had biological weapons, mobile bio-weapons labs and massive stocks of chemical weaponry. (491)

Judge Silberman’s report on CIA’s prewar Iraq intelligence: “The president’s daily briefs … left an impression of many corroborating reports where in fact there were very few … the daily reports seemed to be ‘selling’ intelligence – in order to keep its customers, or at least the First Customer, interested.” (495)

“The clandestine service routinely ‘used different descriptions for the same source,’ so that readers of its reports believed they had three corroborating sources on information when they had one.” (496)

[Porter Goss, upon becoming director] “ … surrounded himself with a team of political hacks he had imported from Capitol Hill. They believed they were on a mission from the White House … to rid the CIA of left wind subversives. It was the perception at headquarters that Goss and his staff … prized loyalty to the president and his policies above all.” (503)