A Nation of Counterfeiters
Author: Stephen Mihm 2007 374 pp
My rating: 2.5*
Started February 25 2008, Finished February 28 2008
This rather academic history of the development of a standard US currency seemed to me much longer than it should have been – perhaps an expansive magazine article would have been a better format – and consequently didn’t really hold my interest. Prior to the Civil War the US had no standard currency with money almost entirely printed by private banks many of which were of dubious solvency and permanence, a situation which created a ripe environment for counterfeiting and created much friction in commerce of all sorts. However as specie, gold and silver, was in short supply and some form of currency was needed to conduct day to day business, counterfeiters were considered by many to be performing a necessary public service, “increasing the amount of money in circulation in a part of the world where demand invariably outstripped supply.” An interesting offshoot of this situation is that people tended to prefer a good counterfeit of notes from a reliable bank to an authentic bill from an unknown bank. Also of note to me: the first great American counterfeiter, Stephen Burroughs, attended Dartmouth in that college’s early years and might have been the foremost criminal produced by that school until Michael Corleone ruled the (fictional) American mafia almost 200 years later.
Friday, February 29, 2008
Monday, February 25, 2008
War Trash
War Trash
Author: Ha Jin 2004 350pp
My rating: 3.5*
Started February 19 2008, Finished February 24 2008
A novel in the form of a memoir, almost entirely drawn from actual historical accounts, this account of a Communist Chinese soldier’s incarceration in US POW camps during the Korean War feels strangely secondhand and while it is often fascinating history, it consistently failed to engage me emotionally. The book completely succeeds as an indictment of Maoist Communist totalitarianism which sent hundreds of thousands of unequipped and underfed troops into hopeless battle against foes of overwhelming materiel superiority, considered their capture, even if while wounded or unconscious an act of unforgivable betrayal, encourageed those soldiers once in captivity to stage inevitably suicidal symbolic protests e.g. a raising and refusing to lower the Communist Chinese flag resulting in dozens of fatalities among the flag raisers and then once the war was over, treated the returning POWs as traitors, stripped them of all privileges and rights and cast them to the lowest rung of society. As an indictment of the communist system that destroys its own and “always treats [its] enemies more leniently than [its] own people”, War Trash reminded me of Darkness At Noon, though lacking that earlier masterwork’s psychological acuity. Jin seems to realize the shortcomings of his method – forging a fictional memoir from actual ones – when toward the end he quotes a Korean War reporter: “Who can bear the weight of a war? To witness it is to make the truth known, but we must remember that most victims have no voice of their own, and that in bearing witness to their stories, we must not appropriate them.”
Author: Ha Jin 2004 350pp
My rating: 3.5*
Started February 19 2008, Finished February 24 2008
A novel in the form of a memoir, almost entirely drawn from actual historical accounts, this account of a Communist Chinese soldier’s incarceration in US POW camps during the Korean War feels strangely secondhand and while it is often fascinating history, it consistently failed to engage me emotionally. The book completely succeeds as an indictment of Maoist Communist totalitarianism which sent hundreds of thousands of unequipped and underfed troops into hopeless battle against foes of overwhelming materiel superiority, considered their capture, even if while wounded or unconscious an act of unforgivable betrayal, encourageed those soldiers once in captivity to stage inevitably suicidal symbolic protests e.g. a raising and refusing to lower the Communist Chinese flag resulting in dozens of fatalities among the flag raisers and then once the war was over, treated the returning POWs as traitors, stripped them of all privileges and rights and cast them to the lowest rung of society. As an indictment of the communist system that destroys its own and “always treats [its] enemies more leniently than [its] own people”, War Trash reminded me of Darkness At Noon, though lacking that earlier masterwork’s psychological acuity. Jin seems to realize the shortcomings of his method – forging a fictional memoir from actual ones – when toward the end he quotes a Korean War reporter: “Who can bear the weight of a war? To witness it is to make the truth known, but we must remember that most victims have no voice of their own, and that in bearing witness to their stories, we must not appropriate them.”
Monday, February 18, 2008
Far From The Maddening Crowd
Far From The Maddening Crowd
Author: Thomas Hardy 1874 470pp
My rating: 4*
Started February 8 2008, Finished February 15 2008
Reviewing the this novel upon its publication, the apparently post-modern Henry James in an opinion which dissented from what was otherwise a consensus, wrote “that the only thing we believe in are the sheep and the dogs.” While I more or less agree with James’ point, for this modern reader, the charming milieu, particularly the plethora of what are now long bygone agrarian procedures, and other period details that transport the reader to another age more than compensated for two-dimensional characters and a preposterous plot. Further warning: much of the prose requires a lot of unraveling, being convoluted, often even obfuscated, rife with anachronistic and/or obscure diction (gawkhammer?) and sometimes just downright incomprehensible; then again, unraveling such sentences came to be part of the book’s appeal. Another centrally winsome aspect of this work is its depiction of the western world shortly before the pace of change accelerated to the point where today, the trappings of each generation are nearly unrecognizably different than those of the preceding. After describing a communal sheep shearing in a centuries old barn, Hardy writes:
This picture of to-day in its frame of four hundred years ago did not produce that marked contrast between ancient and modern which is implied by the contrast of date. In comparison with cities, Weatherbury was immutable. The citizen's Then is the rustic's Now. In London, twenty or thirty years ago are old times; in Paris ten years, or five; in Weatherbury three or four score years were included in the mere present, and nothing less than a century set a mark on its face or tone. Five decades hardly modified the cut of a gaiter, the embroidery of a smock-frock, by the breadth of a hair. Ten generations failed to alter the turn of a single phrase. In these Wessex nooks the busy outsider's ancient times are only old; his old times are still new; his present is futurity
Author: Thomas Hardy 1874 470pp
My rating: 4*
Started February 8 2008, Finished February 15 2008
Reviewing the this novel upon its publication, the apparently post-modern Henry James in an opinion which dissented from what was otherwise a consensus, wrote “that the only thing we believe in are the sheep and the dogs.” While I more or less agree with James’ point, for this modern reader, the charming milieu, particularly the plethora of what are now long bygone agrarian procedures, and other period details that transport the reader to another age more than compensated for two-dimensional characters and a preposterous plot. Further warning: much of the prose requires a lot of unraveling, being convoluted, often even obfuscated, rife with anachronistic and/or obscure diction (gawkhammer?) and sometimes just downright incomprehensible; then again, unraveling such sentences came to be part of the book’s appeal. Another centrally winsome aspect of this work is its depiction of the western world shortly before the pace of change accelerated to the point where today, the trappings of each generation are nearly unrecognizably different than those of the preceding. After describing a communal sheep shearing in a centuries old barn, Hardy writes:
This picture of to-day in its frame of four hundred years ago did not produce that marked contrast between ancient and modern which is implied by the contrast of date. In comparison with cities, Weatherbury was immutable. The citizen's Then is the rustic's Now. In London, twenty or thirty years ago are old times; in Paris ten years, or five; in Weatherbury three or four score years were included in the mere present, and nothing less than a century set a mark on its face or tone. Five decades hardly modified the cut of a gaiter, the embroidery of a smock-frock, by the breadth of a hair. Ten generations failed to alter the turn of a single phrase. In these Wessex nooks the busy outsider's ancient times are only old; his old times are still new; his present is futurity
Sunday, February 17, 2008
The Long Road Home
The Long Road Home
Author: Martha Raddatz 2007 310pp
My rating: 4*
Started February 16 2008, Finished February 16 2008
A Black Hawk Down for Iraq. In April 2004, while assuming responsibility for “peacekeeping” duties in Sadr City, a Shiite enclave in Baghdad, just off the boat patrolling members of the First Cavalry division of the US Army are caught by complete surprise in a paralyzing crossfire – essentially ground zero for the entire Iraqi insurgency -- in what had been up to that moment of the occupation, a trouble free zone. Most of the book provides a minute-by-minute account of the pinned down platoon’s ordeal and the efforts by the rest of the division to rescue them. The rest of the book deals with how the news of the battle and its casualties affect the families back home.
While the book is a consistently riveting and harrowing depiction of the modern day fog of war where communications are still broken, confusion reigns and the pace of battle leads nearly insane decisions, such as sending rescue parties into zones of intense fire in vehicles which are totally open and unarmored, I thought it would have benefited from a little more authorial distance, both emotionally from her subjects whom she seems too love to well and temporally to provide a broader view perspective on the fallout from the battle. Raddatz depicts virtually every named character as blameless and heroic, though from the limited number of medals awarded for this battle indicate that the Army did not find this to be entirely the case; of particular curiosity for me was why the officer in command of the trapped platoon, whose conduct comes off as exemplary, was not personally cited for heroism when one of his sergeants was. Perhaps a future edition postscript would be in order, detailing the longer term consequences for the soldiers and their families – where the current version leaves off, everyone seems to be coping well, even the severely injured survivors and the widows with young children; much as we’d like to believe this outcome, it seems too good to be true.
A couple of nits that should have been corrected in the editing process:
When the rear three of four vehicles driving down a road first come under heavy insurgent fire, the unit commander in the first vehicle “is unaware of what was happening behind him until several minutes had passed … when he looked in the rearview mirror, he saw that the three trail vehicles had lagged and were some twenty yards behind him …” The twenty yard figure has to be wrong: normal vehicle spacing was probably close to twenty yards and a difference in speed of even one mile an hour over several minutes would have opened up a gap many times that. (p47-48)
A while later, when the patrol has abandoned some of their vehicles and made a stand inside of a house, the author describes the enemy concentrating on a nearby street, “where the noise of artillery and grenades was growing louder and louder”, a description which made me wonder “what artillery?” since the insurgents are not described as having any weapons of a caliber bigger than small arms and never used any against any of the US forces described and “what were they shooting at?” since the stranded patrol was the only US force in the area at that time. (p76)
Author: Martha Raddatz 2007 310pp
My rating: 4*
Started February 16 2008, Finished February 16 2008
A Black Hawk Down for Iraq. In April 2004, while assuming responsibility for “peacekeeping” duties in Sadr City, a Shiite enclave in Baghdad, just off the boat patrolling members of the First Cavalry division of the US Army are caught by complete surprise in a paralyzing crossfire – essentially ground zero for the entire Iraqi insurgency -- in what had been up to that moment of the occupation, a trouble free zone. Most of the book provides a minute-by-minute account of the pinned down platoon’s ordeal and the efforts by the rest of the division to rescue them. The rest of the book deals with how the news of the battle and its casualties affect the families back home.
While the book is a consistently riveting and harrowing depiction of the modern day fog of war where communications are still broken, confusion reigns and the pace of battle leads nearly insane decisions, such as sending rescue parties into zones of intense fire in vehicles which are totally open and unarmored, I thought it would have benefited from a little more authorial distance, both emotionally from her subjects whom she seems too love to well and temporally to provide a broader view perspective on the fallout from the battle. Raddatz depicts virtually every named character as blameless and heroic, though from the limited number of medals awarded for this battle indicate that the Army did not find this to be entirely the case; of particular curiosity for me was why the officer in command of the trapped platoon, whose conduct comes off as exemplary, was not personally cited for heroism when one of his sergeants was. Perhaps a future edition postscript would be in order, detailing the longer term consequences for the soldiers and their families – where the current version leaves off, everyone seems to be coping well, even the severely injured survivors and the widows with young children; much as we’d like to believe this outcome, it seems too good to be true.
A couple of nits that should have been corrected in the editing process:
When the rear three of four vehicles driving down a road first come under heavy insurgent fire, the unit commander in the first vehicle “is unaware of what was happening behind him until several minutes had passed … when he looked in the rearview mirror, he saw that the three trail vehicles had lagged and were some twenty yards behind him …” The twenty yard figure has to be wrong: normal vehicle spacing was probably close to twenty yards and a difference in speed of even one mile an hour over several minutes would have opened up a gap many times that. (p47-48)
A while later, when the patrol has abandoned some of their vehicles and made a stand inside of a house, the author describes the enemy concentrating on a nearby street, “where the noise of artillery and grenades was growing louder and louder”, a description which made me wonder “what artillery?” since the insurgents are not described as having any weapons of a caliber bigger than small arms and never used any against any of the US forces described and “what were they shooting at?” since the stranded patrol was the only US force in the area at that time. (p76)
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