The Ladies From St. Petersburg

The Ladies From St. Petersburg - Nina Berberova

The first two novellas are about the trials of genteel women in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. Life has become shabby for them, living in grimy rooming houses, with vindictive members of The Folk for whom semi-poverty, a monotonous diet, puzzled incomprehension, and hateful curiosity have become the default despite Communist assurances that every day, in every way, life will get better and better.

The last story, The Big City, is a surreal look at The Big Apple by a Russian immigrant – anybody who has had to develop new eyes in a foreign city like Copenhagen or Naha or Riga or Osaka will connect with this story.

 

The Professor and the Madman

The Professor and the Madman - Simon Winchester

This is short readable book tells the story of how two scholars worked to make the Oxford English Dictionary the towering monument to our native language that it is. 

The achievement of the OED is that it includes all word definitions and provides example quotations that would show how the word has changed through time. The work involved reading hundreds of old tomes to locate suitable quotations. 

James Murray was the chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. William Chester Minor contributed thousands of word quotations despite the fact that he was an inmate in an asylum for the criminally insane. 

A story of greatness and sadness, of adversity and triumph, a must for people who like words and reading.

The Reason Why

The Reason Why - Cecil Woodham-Smith

This is a popular (i.e., footnotes-free) account of the famous military disaster The Charge of the Light Brigade near the start of the Crimean War.  The short biographies of Lords Lucan and Cardigan and the social history of the early Victorian era are excellently done. So is the section on the causes and effects the famine in Ireland (Lord Lucan was a landlord there).

The book describes how aristocrats were able to buy high positions in the army, thus going over the heads of more experienced but less connected officers. It was a system that made it too easy for deeply flawed characters such as Lords Lucan and Cardigan to contribute to military disasters.

Readers who liked Leon Wolff’s In Flanders Fields: The 1917 Campaign will like this one too. Beautifully written in a lucid style, it made me want to read W-S’s other books about  the famine in Ireland and even Florence Nightingale. I saw her biography of Queen Victoria at the AAUW UBS* in the days when such events were safe but didn't buy it (for a buck) because the spine was loose. I could kick myself.

*Young 'uns ain't the only ones that can use cryptic abbreviations. Nyah.

The Ides of Perry Mason 18

The 15th of every month until I don't know when I will post a review of a Perry Mason mystery. For the hell of it.

The Case of the Lonely Heiress - Erle Stanley Gardner

This is the 31^st Perry Mason mystery, first published in February of 1948.  Perry is approached by a prospective client, Robert Caddo, a sleazy publisher of Lonely Hearts Are Calling, a magazine for the lonely looking for their soulmates. 

The cops, however, don't take the romantic view of this. Suspecting some kind of fraud, the cops are hassling Caddo, alleging Marilyn Marlow is just a cutout to juice circulation figures. Caddo wants to prove the genuine existence of Marilyn Marlow, who describes herself as a lonely heiress. Reasonably taking the view of the cops, Perry observes the ad is a fake, saying , “No intelligent heiress would even read your magazine. And no good-looking heiress of twenty-three would advertise to meet a man. ”

But Perry finds out that the mother of Marilyn was a nurse who had been hired to care for the rich crank George Endicott. Marilyn’s mother, then, stands to inherit George’s fortune, which she would fork over to Marilyn thus raising the girl’s expectations. George’s family understandably objects to the nurse-mom getting George’s dough and chattels. The nurse-mom ends up being killed and Marilyn is best suspect, given the bloody murder weapon was found in her car.

It’s not a surprise that fans regard Mason a hero, unlike the lawyers that they must deal with in real life. We believe Perry when he says lines like this: “[I always] Stick my neck out for my clients. I should have taken the case just the way any other lawyer would have; taken the facts as they were and let the chips fall wherever they might. But no, I’m not built that way. I’m always a pushover for a client who is having the breaks go against her.”

Parody of Dark PI Novel

Peeper – Loren D. Estleman

In this 1989 parody of the late Eighties hard-boiled detective novel, main character Ralph Poteet is a drunken, thieving, conniving sleaze of a PI. He’s not a sociopath like the protagonist in a Jim Thompson novel but he can’t help but make the wrong choices that only make the situation worse for himself and others. Through a combination of bad luck and sheer stupidity, he finds himself suspected of murder and arson.

The language is often pretty foul. The jokes are guy-oriented, which means the reader might feel coarse and crass in still finding them funny in our more enlightened era of 2020. If readers take the goings-on too seriously, they might find kind of sad, especially if they remember Detroit bleeding population and businesses at the time.

But readers of a certain age will enjoy the references to Eighties pop culture such as Brooke Shields, Popeil’s Veg-O-Matic, and an album called “Slim Whitman Yodels Songs of Faith.” Readers like me who know SE Michigan and, despite that, feel a sentimental feeling anyway will like the nod to the Uniroyal tire on eastbound 94 in Allen Park (no giant Presto Whip cans in Dearborn on Telegraph because they were removed in 1983 – a sad day indeed).

I’ve been reading Estleman for about 30 years and enjoyed the PI Amos Walker books in the 1990s. This book is a successful attempt to parody his own character. But he still manages to develop an original character and surprising twists and turns of plot. Unlike most comic mysteries, it does not feel too long by the end. Its incidents are darkly humorous but overall the hard-boiled genre is mocked for its pretentions and cynicism, especially in terms of its portraying the world as more unfair, uncaring, and corrupt than it really is.

The Infidel and the Professor

The Infidel and the Professor: David Hume, Adam Smith, and the Friendship That Shaped Modern Thought - Dennis C. Rasmussen

This title of this readable intellectual history is a bit off the mark, as it implies both giants of Enlightenment thought are treated equally. In fact, we get a better feeling for David Hume as a thinker and friend than Adam Smith. Smith’s side of the friendship is obscure because of the loss of his letters to Hume.

But Smith, after Hume died, proved himself to be a stand-up friend by writing praise of the skeptic Hume which roused religious people to anger, frustration, indignation, and sarcasm. Samuel Johnson attacked Smith as well. Smith asserted the truth of his statement that Hume died cheerfully. Johnson said, “You lied” to which Smith called Johnson “a son of a bitch.” In 1780, Smith said in an interview of Johnson:

‘I have seen that creature,’ said he, ‘bolt up in the midst of a mixed company; and, without any previous notice, fall upon his knees behind a chair, repeat the Lord’s Prayer, and then resume his seat at table. — He has played this freak over and over, perhaps five or six times in the course of an evening. It is not hypocrisy, but madness.’

Besides providing curious gossip, Rasmussen judiciously and concisely explains the influence that Hume had on Smith, especially in terms of ideas on the benefits of commerce and free trade, both of which were viewed with doubt and anxiety in Europe up to the 19^th century. One scholar points out that it is a wonder than Hume is not the poster boy for unfettered capitalism that Smith became since Hume was much more sanguine than Smith about income inequality, merchant chicanery, and the downsides to personal happiness and social virtue due to the relentless pursuit of wealth and fame.

There are some cameo appearances of Rousseau, Burke, Gibbon, Franklin and that dynamic duo Boswell and Johnson, who were both shocked at Hume’s views on religion. The epilogue, which includes Smith's letter to Mr. Strathan, is supremely touching and revealing in terms of what the genial and cheerful Hume meant to Smith and to all who knew him.

This book contributed to my knowledge about both thinkers without being excessively academic.

Wrap-up Post for Back to the Classics Challenge 2020

I read these books for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2020. Click on the title to go to the review

Category	Round 1
Classic by a POC Author	Behind the Scenes - Elizabeth Keckly (1868)
Abandoned Classic	Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War - Edmund Wilson (1962)
19th Century Classic	The Book of Snobs - William Makepeace Thackeray (1848)
Classic in Translation	Across the Street -  Georges Simenon (1945)
Classic by a Woman	Black Lamb and Grey Falcon - Rebecca West (1941
Classic about a Family	Dondidieu's Will - Georges Simenon (1937)
Classic with a Name in the Title	Phineas Finn - Anthony Trollope (1868)
Adapted Classic	Can You Forgive Her? - Anthony Trollope (1865)
20th Century Classic	The Girl with a Squint - Georges Simenon (1951
Classic with a Place in the Title	The Little Man from Archangel - Georges Simenon (1956)
Genre Classic	Maigret Enjoys Himself - Georges Simenon (1957)
Classic with Nature in the Title	Those Barren Leaves - Aldous Huxley (1925)

 

Category	Round 2
Classic by a POC Author	The Heroic Slave - Frederick Douglass (1852)
Abandoned Classic	The Expedition of Humphry Clinker - Tobias Smollett (1771)
19th Century Classic	The Prime Minister - Anthony Trollope (1876)
Classic in Translation	Big Bob - Georges Simenon (1954)
Classic by a Woman	Persuasion – Jane Austen (1818)
Classic about a Family	The Duke’s Children - Anthony Trollope (1879)
Classic with a Name in the Title	Phineas Redux - Anthony Trollope (1874)
Adapted Classic	The Truth About Bebe Donge – George Simenon (1942)
20th Century Classic	Sunday - Georges Simenon (1959)
Classic with a Place in the Title	The House on Quai Notre Dame - Georges Simenon (1962)
Genre Classic	Maigret and the Wine Merchant - Georges Simenon (1970)
Classic with Nature in the Title	The Eustace Diamonds - Anthony Trollope (1873)