Mount TBR #35

I read this book for the Mount TBR 2018 Reading Challenge.

This Mighty Scourge: Perspectives on the Civil War - James M. McPherson

This collects 16 essays, most of which were originally published as pieces for the New York Review of Books. The topics range from relatable such as the common soldier’s love of reading newspapers to huge topics such as the Confederate strategy of “the best defense is a good offense.” Along the way, he makes interesting points such as:

[L]ee’s counteroffensive in the Seven Days battles and other major victories during the next year ensured a prolongation of the war, opening the way to the emergence of Grant and Sherman to top Union commands, the abolition of slavery, the ‘directed severity’ of Union policy in 1864-65, and the Gotterdammerung of the Old South. Here was the irony of Robert E. Lee: His success produced the destruction of everything he fought for.

McPherson won the Pulitzer Prize for his history Battle Cry of Freedom so obviously he can write for both the expert and lay audience. But I think this book would mainly appeal to the non-expert, with historians hankering for a little more heft. I enjoyed it because I had not read about the conflict in a long time and it’s one of those topics, along with Eastasia and the history of popular entertainment, that holds endless fascination for me.

As Gertrude Stein wrote in her distinctive way, “So I was interested in being in Richmond and in Virginia and I was interested in hearing what they were all saying and I was interested, after all there never will be anything more interesting in America than the Civil War never.”

Mount TBR #6

I read this book for the Mount TBR 2018 Reading Challenge.

Patty/Tania – Jerry Belcher and Don West

On February 4, 1974, the United States experienced its first political kidnapping. The radical left group Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) kidnapped newspaper heiress Patricia Campbell Hearst from her apartment near the UC Berkeley campus.

In those far-off pre-information superhighway days, this fantastical crime garnered as much media attention as our society could muster: three major TV networks, local daily newspapers, and radio broadcasting. The hyper-competitive paperback book publishers churned out “instant books” – books written and published very quickly to exploit burning reader interest in topics of the day. Pyramid Books hustled this instant book into print in January 1975, while Bill and Emily Harris and Patty Hearst were still on the run.

Readers can easily imagine what half-baked junk many instant books were back then. However, Belcher and West give us a fast-moving narrative of the case. The outstanding point is that the two reporters provide wide-ranging background on the major players and their experiences. For example, they reproduce in full a pathetic autobiographical letter Donald DeFreeze, head of the SLA, wrote to a judge. Pathetic either way, that is, whether it is the pitiable truth or a cynical attempt to stir the sympathy of a judge.

Belcher and West give a wealth of interesting detail on the fringe characters to whom the media paid no attention. I had no idea that the prisons were such hotbeds of political activity and discussion in the late Sixties. Various programs had college students visit inmates for educational purposes and consciousness-raising rap sessions. But these meetings sometimes turned into political agitation and radicalization on both sides.

After the draft stopped vacuuming up college students, the anti-war movement lost a lot of steam and so did other far left activist groups. And by the early 1970s political activism on the left had curdled into angry, disappointed, desperate youth striking out in various ways. The authors discuss how the SLA recruited members from a defunct Maoist revolutionary group called the Venceremos ("We will win") who broke off from other radical groups because those groups were too restrained for them. The SLA claimed responsibility for the cold-blooded killing of Oakland School Board Director Marcus Foster, an African-American who was doing great work under trying circumstances. For this senseless stupid act, they were roundly condemned by other leftist groups.

As an added attraction, the appendix includes texts of the Symbionese Liberation Army tapes and communiques. Such primary documents -  with unreadable content, incoherent organization, harsh invective, and strutting tone - capture the utter poverty of imagination, education, or theory of the self-styled revolutionary militia.  

Both writers were veteran newspaper reporters so they were careful with facts and documentation. Their writing is brisk, readable, and not as flat and grey as much journalistic writing was back then. They had to be cautious about objectivity and not sensationalizing the case, because they worked for the San Francisco Examiner, edited by the victim’s father Randolph “Randy” Hearst. To Hearst’s credit, one gets the feeling that he did not interfere with coverage by his paper or investigations for this book project. But, as we would expect, Belcher and West don’t mention Hearst’s fondness for red wine nor do they discuss the strain the kidnapping  put on the Hearsts' marriage. 

Be aware that, as journalists usually do, Belcher and West break down when they try to take the bird’s eye view. For instance, the discussion of the influence on excessive TV watching on the anti-social behavior of the white, middle-class, baby boomers is singularly unpersuasive.

Our present-day image is that the Sixties were the time of turbulence, the Seventies of mellow. In fact, in only 18 months in 1971 and 1972 the United States saw in excess of 2,500 domestic bombings, according to FBI statistics. Besides the violence, the Seventies were a time when people retreated into bitter privacy and staying afloat. People felt nervous and disgusted over gas prices and blows to the auto industry, economic woes in what now is called the Rust Belt, fears about crime like serial killings and mass murders related with drugs, and the breaking of confidence and trust due to lies about the Vietnam war and the Watergate political crisis that forced Nixon’s resignation. Things hippie went mainstream in the Seventies – getting high, casual clothes, bright colors, crafts like macramé, just you and me simple and free, have you never been mellow – but the left politics of the hippies went into disrepute because of cults like the SLA and hundreds of mad bombings

Such is the oddity of life that we can be in the middle of commotion and upheaval but have little sense of the hurly-burliness of it all. In this book, Belcher and West didn’t seem to realize what crazy times the 1970s were, a cluelessness which appealed to me mightily. Because looking back I didn’t know the Seventies were that nutty either - in 1974 I was just a wiseass high school senior and naïve college freshman. I wanted only two things: not to flunk out of State and a girlfriend.

Mount TBR #5

I read this book for the Mount TBR 2018 Reading Challenge.

A History of Japan, 1615-1867 - Sir George Sansom

This is the final volume of the magisterial trilogy by the distinguished British historian. The first volume covered to 1334 (reviewed here) the second from 1334 to 1615 (reviewed here).

The book opens with an examination the creation of the Tokugawa regime under the three Shoguns after Tokugawa Ieyasu: Hidetada, Iemitsu, and Ietsuna. Sansom is sympathetic to the next one, Tsunayoshi, though he is notorious as the Dog Shogun who ordered everybody to address dogs politely as “O Inu Sama.”

In seven additional chapters, Sansom describes conditions in the second half of the seventeenth century in terms of political shifts, urban and rural conditions, economic expansion and the problems which it posed. He briefly – that is, tantalizingly - touches on how the philosophy of Neo-Confucian Wang Yang-ming influenced Japanese reformers running up the end of Tokugawa rule. The response to the Black Ships is handled cursorily.

I highly recommend this set to serious students of traditional Japan. These books focus mainly on topics in social science. For the humanities, see Sansom’s excellent Japan: A Short Cultural History.

Mount TBR #56

I read this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge hosted over at My Reader’s Block from January 1 – December 31, 2017. The challenge is to read books that you already own.

Dame in the Kimono: Hollywood, Censorship, and the Production Code – Leonard J. Leff and Jerold L. Simmons

Before the sound era ushered them out, silent movies became more daring in themes and risqué in content. A couple of Hollywood scandals and high-profile OD deaths fired up the bluenoses and government at the federal, state and municipal levels started making ominous growls about censorship. To police themselves, Hollywood moguls hired General Will Hays to enforce his Motion Picture Production Code, a set of guidelines as to what content was acceptable and unacceptable in movies. The Code ruled from 1930 to about 1968, when it was replaced by the ratings system we are familiar with today.

This book is a fairly readable account of the rise and fall of the Code, with a special emphasis on the Breen era. The authors are sympathetic to Joseph Breen. He was caught between the movie makers, who naturally wanted to push the boundaries of content and theme, and the censorship boards, who naturally wanted to protect citizens from salacious content and choke off material that might provoke independent thought and subsequent social change. I think Breen sympathy is appropriate and I came away from the book with a more tolerant view of the rough row Breen and his successors had to hoe. 

The prose is wordy in places, so much so that even a hard-core reader wonders if the point is coming any time soon. This is off-putting to the general reader and probably maddening to film / media studies students. With the student market in mind, what is probably more frustrating to youth is that the authors make the expert’s error because they seem to assume the reader knows more than she really does. Fatty who scandal?!.

Mount TBR #54

I read this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge hosted over at My Reader’s Block from January 1 – December 31, 2017. The challenge is to read books that you already own.

Silent Stars – Jeanine Basinger

Even people who consider themselves buffs of Hollywood from Edison to the death of the studio system – that would be readers like yours truly – carry around lots of conventional wisdom that they never question. Rudolf “The Sheik” Valentino – kind of dumb, exploiter of the fantasies of silly females. Mary Pickford and her sick-making Goody Twoshoes image. Marion Davies, the real-life model for bitter lush Susan Alexander in Citizen Kane. Lon Chaney as one trick pony with the monster makeup and all. Pola Negri as the Mad Hungarian, Clara Bow as the giddy party girl. Gloria Swanson the real life model for her own Norma Desmond in the immortal Sunset Boulevard. William S. Hart, the first in a line of tedious stone-faces a la Robert Stack. John Gilbert of the squeaky silly voice that sound movies made ridiculous.

Film scholar Jeanine Basinger explodes all these cliché misrepresentations. This is a highly readable book that blends biography, film criticism, and personal observations. She also provides deeply sympathetic portraits of Mabel Normand and the Keystone Kops; the archetypal he-man Douglas Fairbanks, and the unexpectedly interesting Rin-Tin-Tin (I had no idea that canine heroes were so popular in the silent era).

In about 500 pages, which never feel too long, Basinger provides plenty of non-academic-sounding arguments to support her basic arguments. She’s forthright about being unable to really comprehend how audience felt about such and such a star or movie because the past really is another country. Because this book is for the general reader, not her colleagues at other universities, it is written clearly, with humor and light-heartedness. I highly recommend this book to fans of classic Hollywood, the same readers who liked her other fine book A Woman's View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women 1930-1960.

Mount TBR #53

I read this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge hosted over at My Reader’s Block from January 1 – December 31, 2017. The challenge is to read books that you already own.

A Tree is a Tree: An Autobiography – King Vidor

To my regret, I’ve never seen this director’s most notable works: "Show People," "Hallelujah," and "The Big Parade," "The Champ," "Our Daily Bread," "The Citadel," "Duel in the Sun," ". I’ve never see his version of Ayn Rand’s "The Fountainhead," mainly because I can’t stand Gary Cooper. Nor I have seen Bette Davis say her immortal line “What a dump” in "Beyond the Forest."

However, when I lived in Saudi Arabia, a TV station used to play “Stella Dallas” over and over. I’ve seen the birthday party scene a half-dozen times. I remain impressed. And everybody has seen multiple times the Kansas scenes that open “the Wizard of Oz” in which Judy Garland sings her signature song. Vidor took over for Victor Fleming for “Oz" when Fleming was tapped to do "Gone With the Wind." "Every time I see 'Over the Rainbow,' I get a thrill,” said Vidor, “because I directed that.” Vidor, from Texas, had great feeling for the natural world.

Anyway, this 1952 autobiography is worth reading for fans of classic Hollywood. Vidor witnessed the very beginning of the silent era. A true artist, he was always looking for something new and original to do and say. An early adaptor, he always took up new technology and techniques before they were forced upon him. 

He’s a man of his generation and therefore reticent about the personal side. This does not mean that he doesn’t tell moving stories. The story about Mabel Normand’s funeral – where he saw the clowns of the silent era all beside themselves crying – is one of the saddest things I’ve ever read.

Mount TBR #51

I read this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge hosted over at My Reader’s Block from January 1 – December 31, 2017. The challenge is to read books that you already own.

The Assassins - Robert J. Donovan

This is a well-written study of the mainly delusional reasons behind the attacks on the lives of eight presidents.

Four were successful: John Wilkes Booth on Abraham Lincoln, Charles J. Guiteau on James A. Garfield, Leon Czolgosz on William McKinley, and Lee Harvey Oswald on John F. Kennedy.

Four were not successful: Richard Lawrence on Andrew Jackson, John Schrank on Theodore Roosevelt, Giuseppe Zangara on Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola on Harry S. Truman

Donovan researched materials on the 19^th century incidents and unearthed findings on psychology of the assassins, where available, on the more modern ones. His conclusion is one that we can take cold comfort from: the assassins were usually mentally unbalanced by delusions rather than political beliefs. Granted in the cases of Booth, LHO, and the Puerto Ricans, it’s hard to draw the line clearly between fanaticism and the insanity of narcissism and grandiosity. But the other assassins were plagued with cognitive and psychological problems that rendered them incapable of ordinary work and adult relationships.

Donovan observed that politics in our country has always been roiled by hysterical vitriol. Jackson, Lincoln, Garfield, FDR and Truman all had sustained inflammatory attacks directed their way. Donovan says given our sad history of assassination (not the mention the disgraceful response of the criminal justice system by putting insane people to death),”in an age apparently endless tensions” we should criticize with “a little more maturity, logic, and forbearance.”

Though the Depression stopped Donovan from going to college, he was a well-respected journalist covering the White House for the New York Herald Tribune. He had a reporter’s instinct for the telling detail and odd fact. He also includes curious artifacts such as the ballads that came out of the assassinations like Charles Guiteau.

His best-known book during this lifetime was the 1961 best seller PT-109, which recounted John F. Kennedy’s WWII Navy career. About half the content of this book was first published in the New Yorker in a series of articles in the early 1950s and collected in a book in 1955. The old paperback I read was apparently a version updated in 1964 after Oswald, an oddball loner misfit along the same lines as the killers in this book, murdered JFK.

Mount TBR #42

I read this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge hosted over at My Reader’s Block from January 1 – December 31, 2017. The challenge is to read books that you already own.

Personal note: When this book was published in 1985, the reviews made me want to read it, because I was interested in mass media's effects on culture. But I was wrapping up grad school and looking for work overseas, so I had no time. I finally got around to it after finding this anniversary edition at a used book sale. 

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business – Neil Postman

In early 2016, a TV character sang to his pregnant wife Paul Anka’s June 1974 hit “You’re Having My Baby.” 40 years ago – the wake of Roe v. Wade - the sexist undertone of “my baby” versus “our baby” was not, I recall vividly, unnoticed. The National Organization for Women gave Anka the "Keep Her in Her Place" award for that year. Nowadays this controversy is so forgotten, and 30-something TV writers and actors and producers so oblivious to the meanings and tones of words, it is as if the last 40 years haven't happened in terms of either mindless sexism or relish for the slushy sentiment of pop music.

Given how little things have changed, then, why the hell not read a complaint about television’s effect on culture written in the middle 1980s? Especially since digital communication is TV on steroids....

The thesis of this book is as relevant now as it was when it was first published in 1985. Postman’s thesis is that entertainment is the supra-ideology of all discourse on television. Babble drowns anything worth knowing in an information glut, as TV is not suited to thinking and talking, which is not a performing art. Good TV requires a performing art because people watch TV for dynamic images and strong emotions. The nature of American TV has developed along lines that accommodate the way human beings want to watch TV; that is, TV is not a medium for education or propaganda but for endless amusement, incessant distraction.

Visual- and entertainment-oriented TV has degraded public discourse in education, business, religion, and politics. Postman is not against junk on TV but argues that TV is at its worst when it is trying to be serious. He cites televised presidential debates as an example of the impossibility of discussing complex issues like peace in the Middle East in three minutes for Candidate A, while Candidate B has a minute to rebut. Postman is not claiming anybody systematically conspired to make TV technology a tool of suppression of literate or complex discourse in say, political campaigns and commercials. It just part and parcel of how we Americans use technology with humdrum inattention – like popping a smartphone in a toddler’s hand to make him shut up and then wondering why the little tyke seems unable to look anybody in the eye.

Indeed, things have change little in the last 40 years. We still live an age of information glut. We have flooded our culture with technologies that fill our lives with information, mainly about people, places, and events and situations that are out of our control. We are at the point where our dealing with too much information, so much it leads to a situation of meaninglessness. With poor skills at critical thinking and identifying illogical thinking, many people have no basis for judging what information is useful or useless. Media does not categorize itself as worthwhile or worthless so people get lost due to sheer noise. How to help people get meaning and truth has become an urgent problem. Ironically, near the end of this book Postman speculates computer technology may help people sort out the relevant from the irrelevant, but we all have seen how that has worked out.

The book is a well-written complaint, written in the hope that the vitality of America can contradict Aldous Huxley’s prophecy in Brave New World that our freedom is lost because of our immense propensity to be distracted. Readers looking for a book with intellectual heft and decorum won’t be disappointed by this slim book. 

Mount TBR #40

I read this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge hosted over at My Reader’s Block from January 1 – December 31, 2017. The challenge is to read books that you already own.

A History of Japan, Volume II: 1334-1615 - Sir George Sansom

The three centuries covered represent an era among the most troubled in Japanese history. In 1333 the Emperor Go-Daigo restored imperial power after knocking off the Kamakura Shogunate which was established in 1192 by Minamoto Yoritomo. But the Kenmu imperial restoration was short-lived. An irreconcilable conflict between the court aristocracy and the warrior class emerged with new struggles that ended with the Ashikaga, a branch of the Minamoto, who rebuilt the shogunal government establishing its headquarters in the Muromachi district of Kyoto.

But the new Ashikaga government failed to deal with the forces that made it the weakest of the three military governments of the times. The increased power of the great feudal lords, or daimyo, who established and maintained troops in their territories by employing warrior, or samurai, vassals, seriously jeopardized stability. On the one hand, the lords refrained from paying taxes to the shogunate and on the other, they gradually increased their territories at the expense of weaker neighbors. The same governmental officials who were responsible for controlling the provinces on behalf of the shogun became local military leaders and feudal lords.

The struggles that the feudatories took up in order to seize the most territory reduced the country to anarchy in a short time. As the daimyōs feuded among themselves in the pursuit of power in the decade-long and bloody Ōnin War, loyalty to the Ashikaga grew increasingly stressed, until it erupted into open warfare in the Sengoku (country at war) period. Reinstatement of order was the task of the three towering figures of Japanese history: Oda Nobunaga (1534 - 1582), Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536- 1598) and Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542 -1616). Sansom clearly and interestingly covers the military movements which ended on October 21, 1600 with the Battle of Sekigahara, the decisive clash that brought about the establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate.

Meanwhile, the Europeans had arrived in the Japanese archipelago. In 1543 some Portuguese merchants landed at Tanegashima. They introduced Japan's first firearms, which revolutionized the traditional techniques of war in Japan. Jesuit missionaries, led by Francesco Saverio, bravely undertook Christian preaching in the country. Nobunaga was impressed with Jesuit learning and manners and with his benign approval the Jesuits converted thousands of Japanese people in all walks of life. Hideyoshi did not impede Jesuit efforts until one evening in 1587 when he unaccountably banned Jesuit missionary work and placed restrictions on their movement and work.

In 1603 Tokugawa Ieyasu became Shogun and established the seat of government in Edo (today Tokyo). He imposed absolutism on the daimyo and oppressed the peasants unmercifully but assured the imperial court its honorary prerogatives at the same time.

Sansom was writing for both the specialist and the thinking lay reader. He organizes clearly and condenses essential events of politics, sociology, and economics. His interpretations are careful and rest on scholarship at a high level. Sansom’s critical insight combines a vast erudition and an extraordinary ability to write lucidly. I recommend this book to the reader seriously interested in the topic.

Mount TBR #34

I read this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge hosted over at My Reader’s Block from January 1 – December 31, 2017. The challenge is to read books that you already own.

The Forbidden Apple: A Century of Sex & Sin in New York City – Kat Long

This readable overview of risqué entertainment in the Big Apple describes how the enemies of vice sought to protect the public, only for the purveyors of vice to think up ingenious ways to deliver sex, liquor and male-oriented attractions to the ever-interested public.

For instance, Long describes the Raines law, an 1896 act that was designed to regulate alcohol consumption. One provision was to prohibit of the sale of alcoholic beverages on Sunday except in hotels. This was typical class-warfare stuff for elites to control the poor and working class. Since working men put in a six-day week, Sunday was the one chance for drinking at saloons. The law stipulated, though, that hotels could serve liquor on Sunday, to guests exclusively, only if it were served during a meal or in the hotel’s bedrooms. It stipulated that any business be considered a hotel if it had 10 rooms for lodging and served sandwiches with its liquor (if you lived in New York State, like I do, you’d know how typically convoluted these kinds of stips are). Saloons were quick to speed their carriages through this loophole by adding bedrooms and applying for hotel licenses. Scores of "Raines Law Hotels," strangely located directly above saloons, opened to great business. And side businesses...

Long is strongest when she is giving mini-biographies of figures we’ve all heard of but never really knew why they were important. Anthony Comstock's ideas of the labels "obscene, lewd, or lascivious" were so wide-ranging that as US postal inspector he lumped brochures about birth control with pornography. This put him on a collision course with Margaret Sanger, a real American hero. She opened the first birth control clinic in the US and established organizations that evolved into Planned Parenthood, which the "moral eunuchs" (Emma Goldman) of our own day are currently doing their best to destroy.

Another major topic in the book is 42nd Street, the theater and red-light district of Manhattan with its burlesque shows and Prohibition-era speakeasies. Peep shows also drew huge crowds; the lucky originator lugged to the bank in one day $15,000 in quarters (about $200K in our money). From the late 1950s until the late 1980s, cheap grindhouse movie theaters showed sleazy films. Long also covers spots where gay men would meet such as bath houses and the Y and the famous Stonewall incident, whose details I never knew before. Her overview of the AIDS crisis and activist Larry Kramer during the Reagan administration was news to me, since I was out of the country at the time.

Long tells the story of another champion of free speech, Ralph Ginzburg. In 1962, Ginzburg began publication of a magazine, Eros, a high-class quarterly featuring provocative articles and translation of erotica as well as photo-essays on love and sex. He published only four issues of Eros before he was indicted under federal obscenity laws for the fourth issue. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, incensed at anti-JFK material in the magazine, called for a fine of $280,000 and 280 years in a federal pen. Ginzburg was sentenced to five years in prison but was released after eight months, an experience that scarred him. He went on to publish Avant Garde, a slick I saw a time or two when I was in high school in the early Seventies. I seem to remember a naked picture of a heavily pregnant subject, but I can’t recall what I thought of it beyond feeling awe-struck. Reproduction - creation - is mysterious, stunning, impressive after all, and I was an impressionable youth.

The book illustrates the two classic orientations: authority opts for virtue and resistance chooses freedom. Authoritarians value obedience and submission to authorities such as religion and the state while rebels take keen pleasure in questioning authority in both word and deed. Or maybe it speaks to even deeper default settings. Alan Watts once spoke of materialists and abstractionists. Materialists are devoted to the physical and immediate present (and its attendant pleasures of lust, gluttony and good old sloth) while abstractionists are, in Watts words, “so preoccupied with saving time and making money that they have neither taste for life nor capacity for pleasure.” The abstractionists do their damnedest to make us scamps and slackers “fit” or “productive” or “compliant” or “regular” – “You’ve had your nose in that book all day; get outside and play” – and all we readers want is to be left alone….

“It is not when he is working in the office but when he is lying idly on the sand that his soul utters, ‘Life is beautiful.’” – Lin Yutang, The Importance of Living

"A good idea doesn’t come when you’re doing a million things. The good idea comes in the moment of rest. It comes in the shower. It comes when you’re doodling or playing trains with your son. It’s when your mind is on the other side of things.” Lin-Manuel Miranda, MacArthur genius and creator of the blockbuster musical Hamilton

Mount TBR #27

I read this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge hosted over at My Reader’s Block from January 1 – December 31, 2017. The challenge is to read books that you already own.

Khrushchev: The Years in Power - Roy and Zhores Medvedev

This short overview covers the period the subject was the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR. That is to say, he was a dictator of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964. The authors were writing for a general audience so they go into interesting details about why Soviet agriculture was such a mess.  Khrushchev realized this solving the problems that dogged every step from farm to fork was the key to economic development and maintaining his own power. In clear and serious prose, the authors make fascinating Khrushchev’s fight with Kaganovich over spring or autumn wheat in the Ukraine. Also well described is the surprising collaboration between the charlatan Lysenko and Khrushchev.

However, the authors also cover de-Stalinization and the economic, administrative, and political blunders of the subject. They also point out simple bad luck – in the guise of droughts and winds – undermined reforms in his agricultural endeavours. Indeed, later leaders such as Brezhnev and Andropov were not much more successful in reforming agriculture.

On the down side, in such a short book, there is little on the Sino-soviet split from 1960 nor is there anything about the U-2 incident. A curious thing they do relate is that Khrushchev preferred being read to than reading when it came to literature. His aides persuaded him to publish Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich after they choose evenings when he was in a good mood to read it to him. 

Mount TBR #26

I read this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge hosted over at My Reader’s Block from January 1 – December 31, 2017. The challenge is to read books that you already own.

Roman Warfare – Adrian Goldsworthy

This brief overview tells about the development of the army that created the Empire by conquering its near neighbors, defeating its rival Carthage and overwhelming Greek territories. As its republican institutions gave way to Imperial rule by Augustus and his heirs, politicians hungry for power and glory extended empire extended from the French Atlantic coast to Syria. Later conquests – gain because military success conferred glory on unmilitary figures (such as Claudius) - included Britain and much of modern Romania. It would be a good book for readers even just mildly interested in the topic.

Mount TBR #23

I read this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge hosted over at My Reader’s Block from January 1 – December 31, 2017. The challenge is to read books that you already own

The World of the Shining Prince: Court Life in Ancient Japan – Ivan Morris

The book describes Heian Japan's court life in cultural, political, socio-economic, and sexual terms. In the tradition of other brilliant explainers of Japan such as Sir George Sansom, Morris has read everything important concerning his topic to satisfy other scholars and writes in a graceful style to please us thinking lay readers.

This is a book for readers who want some background before they tackle Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji, the first psychological novel in world history. You should know, however, there are some spoilers but they don't, in my opinion, outweigh the benefits of background knowledge before reading. The risk to reading it without background knowledge is that feeling of being lost and disgruntled about 70 pages into it. And then quitting. This would be a shame.

Morris’ thesis is that the novel's hero, Prince Genji, behaves as the paragon of Heian cultural values. Genji has grace and charm, besides being a stylish dresser and expert scent and incense crafter. He has a refined sensibility and keen aesthetic understanding. He writes beautiful poems and draws and paints. No wonder he is such a hit with everybody that comes into contact with him. Members of patrician Heian culture in 10^th century Japan put social and aesthetic values over intellectual and psychological considerations. Morris points out the contradictions of the culture: steeped in Chinese learning but ridden with superstitions; a polygamous social scene but rife with jealousy, loneliness, and hurt; relishing with gusto the pleasures of the flesh but always feeling Buddhistic mujokan (無常観), the melancholy sense of the transience of life.

The Japanese and their culture have been blessed to be explained by sympathetic writers and scholars such as Morris, Sansom, Arthur Waley, and let's even include Lafcadio Hearn for sentimental reasons. In this book, Morris deftly blends fact and literary criticism to persuade us what a remarkable achievement The Tale of Genji truly represents.

Murasaki Shikibu had no models of what anybody would call “novels” to follow when she was writing this masterpiece. Yet, with keen psychological insight she developed a believable central character and a large cast of clearly delineated characters; a vibrant sequence of events happening over a period of four generations; and well-developed themes such as the costs of hierarchy and the pity of things. She also used digressions, parallel plots, stories within stories, foreshadowing and changes in point of view. It seems a miracle that the first instance of the psychological novel should be one of the high points of the genre.

Mount TBR #20

I read this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge hosted over at My Reader’s Block from January 1 – December 31, 2017. The challenge is to read books that you already own.

The Sawdust Trail: The Story of American Evangelism – Gordon Langley Hall

This pop history tells how evangelism started in the US with John Wesley and George Whitefield. In chronological order he examines Father Dyer, Dwight Moody, Rodney Smith, Billy Sunday, Evangeline Booth, Daddy Grace, Father Devine, Aimee Mcpherson, Reba Crawford, and Billy Graham. Hall researched newspapers and unearths some curious stories and facts. The writer was a journalist so the prose is readable and pleasant with nary a controversial word. Thus, readers looking for more substantial fare or critical takes on the origins of American evangelism or where Sinclair Lewis’ Elmer Gantry was coming from will have to go other books.

Mount TBR #11

I read this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge hosted over at My Reader’s Block from January 1 – December 31, 2017. The challenge is to read books that you already own.

The Ancient Explorers - M. Cary and E. H. Warmington

This 1929 book was republished by Penguin in 1963 in a pocket paperback for the interested thinking public and poor graduate students. It pulls together the observations and theories of ancient authorities and provides critical remarks on the views of both ancient and modern scholars, though not at great length. The main focus is on the actual adventures and routes followed by the ancient explorers.

Indeed, marvelous are the stories of Hanno the Carthaginian coasting down western Africa to Sierra Leone, Pytheas' voyage northward and his amazing tales, Diogenes and the Mountains of the Moon, Alexander's marches, and the agents of Maes Titianus journeying eastwards along the silk-routes.

Chapter 6 is an eye-opening look at the exploration of Europe by the Phoenicians and Greeks, as are the examinations of trips to Asia (chapter 7) and Africa (chapter 8.) Both authors taught at Oxford so it is definitely scholarly. The reader is presented with careful weighing of the historical grounds or evidence. I’m not a geographer or historian but I like to see a judicious, objective way of thinking of about what is possible versus what is probable. Perhaps I should note that there in nothing in this old book for folks that need more recent scholarly takes or Coast to Coast Insiders weighing the genetic proof that the pharaohs were hybrid aliens.

It’s a pleasure to read for the thinking lay audience that is interested in ancient exploration for commercial (for the luxuries of the orient), military and scientific purposes. Mercifully there is an index. The maps in this Penguin edition are very small and cramped, asking much of a brittle spine. Of a 50-year-old paperback a reader does not venture to demand of its spine what she would never require of her own middle-aged backbone.

Mount TBR #10

I read this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge hosted over at My Reader’s Block from January 1 – December 31, 2017. The challenge is to read books that you already own.

History of Japan to 1334 – George Sansom

This book covers lightly the Asuka period (538 to 710), a period marked by cultural and technological influence from Tang China. But the main topics are the Nara period (710 – 794), the Heian period (794 - 1192), and the Kamakura period (1192 - 1333). The Nara period saw the assimilation of Buddhism and things Chinese such as a writing system, Confucianism, Taoism, codification of laws and bureaucracy. The Heian period was an age of cultural flourishing, at least for a narrow group of people, with Tale of Genji being the monument to the era. The Kamakura period saw the warriors pushing aside civilian control to introduce feudalism.

Sansom fulfills his goal of providing an overview useful to both historians and the interested lay public. Born in 1883 and educated France and Germany, in 1903 he entered the British diplomatic service. He was sent to Japan where he learned the language to the point where by 1911 he was able to translate texts from the Kamakura era. Declared physically unfit for the trenches, he put in Great War service by acting as a spy in Russia, espionage being right up the alley of smart people with languages. In the Twenties, he returned to Japan, following a long tradition of diplomats who were also top-flight scholars. In 1928, he published An Historical Grammar of Japanese. In 1931, he released the masterpiece Japan: A Short Cultural History, called “the finest work in Western languages on Japanese civilization” in The Journal of Asian Studies in Sir George’s 1965 obituary

The ambitious purpose of this book is to provide an examination of social, political, and cultural changes. He uses primary and secondary sources expertly, providing illuminating quotations. The quotations make important points and are not without humor. From the Admonitions of Fujiwara no Morosuke (909 – 960), this shows how deeply the Japanese were influenced by the Chinese conception of auspicious days to do everything: “Comb your hair once every three days, not every day. Cut your fingernails on a day of the Ox, your toenails on a day of the Tiger. If the day is auspicious, now bathe, but only once every fifth day.”

Sansom wrote terse, lucid and beautiful prose. Note what Somerset Maugham called concision in the observation on Murasaki Shikibu’s world "The prevalent mood . . . was one of sentimentality, or at best of sensibility, and not of anxious speculation about good and evil and the nature of being." I was intellectually relieved that he kept at a minimum material on conspiracy and intrigue and machinations among rival clans. I get lost in the thickets of who is allied with whom, though I know some readers of history revel in such information.

I read this book in preparation for tackling Tale of Genji later this year. I feel while it is imperative to approach a masterwork on my knees, having background knowledge is essential for me to be able to look Murasaki Shikibu in the eye as another human being, though far away in time and space, dealing with the desires, aversions, pains, and pleasures entailed in dealing with other people.

Mount TBR #58

I read this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge hosted over at My Reader’s Block from January 1 – December 31, 2016. The challenge is to read books that you already own.

A Woman's View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women 1930-1960 - Jeanine Basinger

In mid-November Turner Classic Movies showed the woman’s movie Invitation (1953), giving us veteran movie buffs a chance to run down the melodrama checklist.

·         Deception, check: For the very best of reasons, a father and fiancé tell terrible lies to a wistful vulnerable woman. 

·         Setting, check: Upper middle class or lower upper class family, unspecified Northeastern town.

·         Check and double-check: No mother, but a doting father.

·         Love & marriage as central issue, check: Reconciled to being a spinster, Plain Jane blonde – indeed, we should all be as homely as Dorothy McGuire.

·         The bad brunette rival, check: Ruth Roman, of course.

·         Point of rivalry, the genial though fickle male, check: boyish Van Johnson, of course.

·         Lots of flashbacks, check:  to the point of maddening and pointless, in fact.

Anyway, poor Dorothy McGuire learns the secret why her husband married her. And selflessly accepts the reality of the situation. Melodramatic, but convincing. Our hard-pressed heroine comes to an admirable stoic conclusion, “It is not enough just to survive – at the end of our lives we have to be able to say that we lived.” She echoes Seneca in On the Shortness of Life: ‘Show me that the good in life does not depend upon life’s length, but upon the use we make of it; also, that it is possible, or rather usual, for a man who has lived long to have lived too little’.

Not Stella Dallas or Imitation of Life or Now, Voyager, but a worthwhile movie, I don’t demand the 90 minutes back again.

All in all, a worthy example of the “woman’s film,” a movie that was made to appeal to a female audience. Film historian Basinger argues it became a critically disrespected genre because many of the early 1930s movies for women really were trash. She also argues that modern film historians don’t like the genre because they think Hollywood movies supported anti-progressive views about women’s place at home, at work, in the world. Basinger makes the convincing argument that Hollywood made movies to make money so it tried to appeal to everybody and offend nobody. But, in fact, Hollywood writers and directors did manage to convey messages that all was not right with courting, marriage, the world of work, and motherhood.

In about 550 pages, Basinger provides plenty of plot explications to support her basic arguments. Because this book is for the general reader, not students at universities, it is written clearly, with humor and light-heartedness. I highly recommend this book to fans of classic Hollywood and others who tear up when, in Dark Victory, Bette Davis looks up at the bright noontime sky and says, “Ann, there's a storm coming...It's getting darker by the minute.”

Mount TBR #57

Happy Veteran’s Day

I read this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge hosted over at My Reader’s Block from January 1 – December 31, 2016. The challenge is to read books that you already own.

A Volunteer's Adventures: A Union Captain's Record of the Civil War - John William De Forest

John William De Forest earned fame as a novelist after the civil war and nowadays he is considered the first American realist. I have not read his most famous work Miss Ravenel's Conversion, but may because this memoir of his war experience was quite interesting and smoothly written. It consists of letters to his wife and magazine articles that we wrote both during and after the war.

Clearly De Forest was a highly educated man. He even knew French so he was able to communicate with Cajuns while he was posted to dangerous campaigning and tedious garrison duty in Louisiana. The siege of Port Hudson, for instance, is narrated very clearly.

After that, he fought under Sheridan in the valleys of Virginia and all his experience was grist to his literary mill. Some of the chapters are letters, some magazine pieces, and others recasts of official corps history that he was ordered to write as is federal plundering for food. I was surprised that between paychecks, union officers often nearly starved on meagre rations.

The editor provided instructive introductions to the chapters. I would recommend this account to serious students of the civil war.

Mount TBR #54

I read this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge hosted over at My Reader’s Block from January 1 – December 31, 2016. The challenge is to read books that you already own.

Raised on Radio – Gerald Nachman

Radio as popular medium in the US enjoyed its classic days from about the mid-Twenties to the end of World War II. This overview for the general reader is breezily written and enjoyable. It covers all genres, from soap operas to comedy to variety shows to cop and robbers. 

For readers seeking to improve their pop cultural knowledge, he gives the reasons why these figures were popular: Jack Benny, Fred Allen, Walter Winchell, and Jack Webb. His treatments of Amos n Andy, Bob n Ray, Burns n Allen, and Vic n Sade were very informative to me. His discussions of Fibber McGee n Molly and The Great Gildersleeve (“Leee-roooooy” “Ah, unc, for corn’s sake!”) are informed not only by his own warm memories of these shows but also by his understanding that we post-moderns may not grok these shows. 

Any reader into the history of popular entertainment or old time radio will get a great deal out of this book.

Mount TBR #52

I read this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge hosted over at My Reader’s Block from January 1 – December 31, 2016. The challenge is to read books that you already own.

The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1944-1945 - Ian Kershaw

This history explains the reasons why Nazi Germany continued to fight even when it was clear to the government and military that the war was lost. The book also tells grim stories about the consequences of Hitler’s decision never to capitulate. Thousands died. Concentration camp inmates died in thousands on death marches from camp to camp. German civilians died in their thousands under Allied bombing and rampaging Red Army soldiers. Three million German soldiers in the east went into captivity in the USSR and million did not return to Germany. What’s really grim about the whole story is the lack of moral courage on just about everybody’s part, military, civilian, bureaucrat, or thug. The take-away lessons do not say much for people in hard situations, in uniform or not, though the one-third that do step up are to be admired and, heaven willing, emulated.