A Fiery Peace In A Cold War

 A Fiery Peace In A Cold War
Author: Neil Sheehan 2009 480 pp
My rating: 4*
Started October 4 2009, Finished October 20 2009.

The story of the development of the US ICBM fleet, framed by the career of the air force officer who lead the program in its first decade, Bernard Schriever. While this book would be of particular interest to military hardware geeks, I strongly recommend it for those also interested in post-war politics and the back room workings of our government.

I felt the book’s strongest section was the one in which Sheehan describes the onset of the Cold War, depicting that standoff which was the dominant factor in world relations for 40 years, not as an inevitability, but as a result of constant misperception and miscalculation on both sides, resulting from Stalin’s paranoia on the one side and the intellectual arrogance of US leader’s and opinion shapers on the other. The book’s surprising dramatic highlight describes the months of bureaucratic maneuvering required to place a briefing about the nascent ICBM program on President Eisenhower’s schedule; the resulting presentation to the president and consequent fast track granted the program was likely the zenith of Schriever’s career if not his life.

One of the book's strengths is its character sketches of important players in the saga, particularly those of Air Force general Curtis LeMay and Presdient Eisenhower.  LeMay went  from been an open-ears innovator in World War II to a power corrupted nutjob as leader of SAC in the '50s, so over the top in his god-like delusions that was the model for the General Jack Ripper character in Dr Strangelove.  Eisenhower comes across both as tough, reasonable, open-minded and fiscally conservative; the author depicts him as a remarkably effective president by recent standards.

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For every American lost in the Second World War, approximately twenty-seven Soviet servicemen and women died: 11.285 million including the 2.7 million who died in German captivity. (77)

[Re Cold War leaders’ understanding of Soviet motives] The men of power were not interested in what the men of knowledge had to say. (106)

Their overall budget for each fiscal year also had be approved by, in turn, the budget committees of the ARDC and the Air Materiel Command, and then by the Air Staff, the Air Force Budget Advisory Committee, the Air Force Council, the secretary of the Air Force, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the Bureau of the Budget. (269)

… Bernard Schriever was without a doubt the handomest general in the United States Air Force.(295)

The Silver Swan

The Silver Swan
Author: Benjamin Black 2008 290 pp
My rating: 3*
Started September 22 2009, Finished September 24 2009.

Benjamin Black is an alias for John Banville, a Booker Prize winning Irish novelist, who has taken to slumming or at least paying the bills by writing detective novels under the name of Black. As one might expect, The Silver Swan consequently has considerable literary merit. Alas, it does not rise above the pack as a compelling who-done-it, failing to generate much suspense or interest in its central mystery. At the very end, however, it does find itself in a memorably indefinite and bleak place.

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Strange, she thought again, this business of people dying. It happened all the time, of course, it was as commonplace as birth. To not be here and then to be here was one thing, but to have been here, and made a life in all its variousness and complexity and then suddenly to be gone, that was what was truly uncanny. (72)

Everything rushes back, everything replaces itself. … When she turned back to the hall the emptiness of the house rushed at her, as if she were a vacuum into which everything was pouring, unstoppably. (272)

Service Included

Service Included
Author: Phoebe Damrosch 228 pp
My rating: 3*
Started September 20 2009, Finished September 22 2009.

This book, subtitled “Four-Star secrets of an Eavesdropping Waiter” is touted as the story of the author’s experiences working at Per Se, one of New York’s most highly regarded fine dining establishments, during its first two years of operation. I found the parts of the book in which Damrosch recounts the insider’s view of such a palace of privilege -- the culinary imagination, attention to detail and vast amount of effort required to be the best -- to be quite revealing; without having eaten there, I have a pretty good idea what a meal at Per Se would be like. However, despite the successfully execution of its stated objective, the book was much less than it could have been since so much of it was devoted to the ostensible filler of the author’s life outside of the restaurant . It feels as though the author and her editor realized they did not have a book length of primary material available so rather than do more research they decided to pad the work by letting us get to know the author; the sections in which the author pointlessly describes a café where she spends many of her off hours seem intended solely to build page count while the various chic-litty sections detailing the author’s love live are intrusive enough to be annoying but not probing enough to be interesting -- I started and finished this book much more interested in the restaurant than the author.
  The shame of it is that Damrosch is fairly engaging writer from whom this reader at least would have been happy to learn much more about the restaurant itself e.g. I would have been quite interested in more detailed descriptions of the many other jobs performed at Per Se and the inside perspective of those who perform them. As one who routinely bemoans the indifferent food preparation and service of the eating establishments I tend to patronize, I was fascinated by the near fanatical preparation (including weeks of training for the entire staff before the opening), solicitousness and attention to detail of the Per Staff. A fair amount of get-a-life entertainment was provided by the entire organization’s preoccupation with identifying the New York Times’ undercover restaurant reviewer and ensuring that his experiences at Per Se (he visited six times while forming his four star review which by itself seemed to ensure Per Se’s success) were even more perfect than those of all other patrons. Ultimately the book left me quite impressed by the level of professionalism and pride demonstrated by the Per Se staff ; I was encouraged to learn that Americans still excel at something.

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“She’s fabulous,” she would tell her guests with a grand gesture toward me, as if recommending a house specialty. The guests looked at me skeptically, waiting for me to be fabulous. (181)

Not liking to discuss my writing with strangers, I had been privately auditioning possible conversation stoppers … “Actually, I’m writing a biography … About a man in Alaska who makes foie gras from penguins.” (207)

Methland

Methland
Author: Nick Redding 246 pp
My rating: 3.5*
Started August 18 2009, Finished August 26 2009.

This examination of how illegal methamphetamine drug affects small town society succeeds most when in explores the nuts and bolts of meth usage, addiction, manufacturing and distribution. I found the first section quite compelling, the second, in which the author tries to draw far reaching connections between the rise of big pharma and agribusiness, the spread of meth and the collapse of small town America to be stretching-it-to-book-length filler and the third, where Redding follows up on people introduced in part one and provides an up to date assessment of the effectiveness of anti-meth legislation, well worth reading. The book clearly depicts the devastating addictiveness of this drug and the cataclysmic consequences for those addicted to it, their families and their communities. The book also makes a compelling case that big pharma has contributed mightily to the meth crisis by lobbying strenuously against measures that would have greatly reduced the availability of precursor drugs used to manufacture meth because such restrictions would have modestly inconvenienced the makers of over the counter cold medicines. When more effective legislation is put in place, albeit still watered down as a result of concessions to the drug lobby, and seems to be effective, anti-drug authorities quickly proclaim that the battle against meth has been won and the media declares the crisis over and possibly overblown in the first place; as the mucky-mucks rest on their laurels, the drug cartels figure out how to exploit the loopholes in the law to restore their supply of precursor drugs. As the author writes his final chapter, arrest statistic indicates that whatever progress had been had been lost and that meth is more prevalent than ever.

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… high on crank … Jarvis could easily go for sixteen hours without having to eat, drink, use the bathroom or sleep … he could have sex with his girlfriend for hours on end, drink without getting drunk and be awake for work the next day without ever having slept. (49-50)

Twelve hours is roughly the length of meth’s half-life, and a measure of how long it takes one’s body to completely metabolize the drug, as well as an indicator of how powerful the drug is. (The half-life of crack is only twenty minutes …) (51)

… the reasons to do crank are in fact quite often -- initially, at least -- more numerous and compelling than the reasons not to do it. … the ability to make something in your basement that promised work, success, wealth, thinness and happiness was not necessarily too good to be true. (54)

The lengthy description of the décor in the Mexican restaurant on page 170 was completely irrelevant and struck me as pure filler.

Whether meth changed our perception of the American small town or simply brought to light the fact that things in small-town America are much changed is in some ways irrelevant. In my telling, meth has always been less an agent of change and more a symptom of it. (183)

He was working hard -- at staying clean, at raising Buck, at making money. But without meth, Major found it impossible to feel, as he put it, “happy.” … Even when Major did the right thing, he couldn’t quite believe in its rightness, for that thing didn’t satisfy him -- meth did. (230-231)

Meth seizures that year went down, along with purity, signaling the first major DEA triumph over the drug’s spred. Of course, the victory was pyrrhic, once traffickers switched to the pill-form pseudo that drug lobbyists demanded remain unmonitored. (238)

The Things They Carried

The Things They Carried
Author: Tim O’Brien 270 pp
My rating: 4*
Started July 19 2009, Finished July 22 2009.

In these finely wrought stories exploring his Vietnam experience, O’Brien mixes memoir and fiction, distilling potent material that whether imagined or remembered, feels very true, describing a world of stoned and terrified infantry grunts whose patrols lack senior officers, tangible enemies and any purpose whatsoever but are all the more deadly for these reasons. The intent is to capture the feel of the experience rather than exactly document it, so little explanation is given as to the wherefore and whys, an approach that worked well for me, except when a character engages in ambush by hand grenade (145), a weapon choice which seemed motivated by dramatic effect rather than combat plausibility.

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You’d be sitting at the top of a high hill, the flat paddies stretching out below, and the day would be calm and hot and utterly vacant, and you’d feel the boredom dripping inside you like a leaky faucet, except it wasn’t water, it was a sort of acid, and with each little droplet you’d feel the stuff eating away at important organs. (37)

Forty-three years old, and the war occurred half a lifetime ago, and yet the remembering makes it now. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That’s what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. (41)

… it seemed to me that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause. You can’t fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can’t make them undead. (44)

Like a killer forest fire, like cancer under a microscope, any battle or bombing raid or artillery barrage has the aesthetic purity of absolute moral indifference -- a powerful, implacable beauty -- and a true war story will tell the truth about this, though the truth is ugly. (89)

Call It Sleep

Call It Sleep
Author: Henry Roth 441 pp
My rating: 5*
Started July 12 2009, Finished July 19 2009.


  This depiction of an early 20th century, underclass, ethnic childhood rivals Angela’s Ashes, particularly in its fly-in-the-head conveyance of a child’s view of the world, thought process and inner voice. Though Sleep is fiction, it was largely based on Roth’s childhood which while materially far better off than Frank McCourt’s -- the protagonist, David Schearl, does not want for food -- was characterized by psychic trauma that makes McCourt’s harrowing upbringing seem a model of well being. Though unlike McCourt’s father, David’s is a steady breadwinner, his constant simmering rage makes him the focal point of David’s chronic state of fear. David’s mother is the counterpoint to his father and the only dependable positive and island of security in David’s life. In the dog eat dog milieu of the Brownsville and lower east side neighborhoods of New York city, most of David’s interactions with other children, whether his fellow Jews or goyim, increase his wariness as there is very little sense of the protected childhood that we have come to expect for children in America: other boys are often feral predators indifferent to exposing each other to physical hazard and even ten year old girls can be precociously sexual, experimenting with David in ways he finds repulsive and terrifying.
  The book’s two salient stylistic characteristics (and triumphs) are its child’s eye point of view and its phonetically rendered English speech. The narrative point of view is David’s and the author succeeds completely in rendering David’s impressions and thought process -- his continual attempts to make sense of the world he inhabits where everything except his mother’s company represents peril. Virtually all the characters in the book are recent immigrants whose spoken English is often unrecognizably accented, making most such speech seem that of simpletons. Roth conveys that this impression of ostensible stupidity is highly misleading by transcribing the Yiddish that the Jews speak among themselves in a formal English which projects learning and rationality.
  I found the book’s ending a bit of a letdown. David’s terror and his father’s anger both seem headed toward catastrophic crescendos which somehow don’t come to pass; the mechanism for the dispelling of the father’s murderous rage is not even shown or described so that particular plot twist -- at the moment of greatest provocation, he somehow gains control of himself, something that he had never previously shown any capacity for, struck me as a highly implausible conclusion unbefitting a great work of literature. Nonetheless, I found the book’s strengths so compelling and engrossing that despite this lapse, I still give Call It Sleep my highest rating.

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David really didn’t care what she thought of him just as long as she sat there. Besides, he did have something to ask her, only he couldn’t make up his mind to venture it. It might be too unpleasant. Still no matter what her answer would be, no matter what he found out, he was always safe near her. (65)

“You were good enough, the gentlest of us all. But you weren’t truly Jewish. You were strange. You didn’t have a Jew’s nature.”
“And what kind of a nature is that?”
“Ach!” Aunt Bertha said impatiently. “You see? You smile! You’re too calm, too generous.” (165)

“Leo, Did he say he wuz Leo?”
“Leo, yea; futt flaw, sebm futty fi.’ He’s a goy.” (317) [Fourth floor, seven forty five]

Mrs. Dalloway
Author: Virginia Woolf  199 pp
My rating: 3*
Started June 21 2009, Finished July 8 2009.

This is a boulder problem of a novel, a technical challenge that goes nowhere. An exercise in stream of conscious writing, the book follows the titular character and some whose paths she crosses through her day of party planning, reminiscing and social encounters. Though short, it is nonetheless demanding, requiring close reading and careful attention on the part of the reader, particularly as transitions from one character’s thoughts to another tend to occur in mid paragraph and even mid sentence. The books modernism and ambition to reinvent the form bring to mind Eliot’s contemporaneous The Waste Land, as do various moments and for that matter, its setting in London, the “unreal city”. Of all the characters, Mrs. Dalloway herself came across as the least clearly depicted.

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“In love!” she said. That he at his age should be sucked under in his little-bow-tie by that monster! (45)

The word “time” split its husk; poured its riches over him; and from his lips fell like shells, like shavings from a plane, without making them, hard, white imperishable words, and flew to attach themselves to their places in an ode to Time; (69)

Later she wasn’t so positive perhaps; she thought there were no Gods; no one was to blame; and so she evolved this atheist’s religion of doing good for the sake of goodness. (78)

The compensation of growing old, Peter Walsh thought, coming out of Regent’s Park, and holding his hat in hand, was simply this; that the passions remain as strong as ever, but one has gained -- at last! -- the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it round slowly, in the light.  
  A terrible confession it was … but now, at the age of fifty-three one scarcely needed people any more. Life itself, every moment of it, every drop of it, here, this instant, now, int the sun, in Regent‘s Park, was enough. (79)