My First Real Book

I'm not sure but I think I was 10 or  11 when I picked up a copy of the autobiography of Louis Armstrong, Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans.

It covers his childhood, his stay in a home for JD's where he learned to play trumpet, and then up to the time he was hired by Joe Oliver to play in a band in Chicago.

I think what drew me in was that it was about a kid about my age, growing up in different circumstances than me but surrounded by lots of vivid personalities as I was too.

Armstrong wrote it himself and it was subjected to only a little prissy editing so it has an extraordinary integrity about it, you really heard his voice, his zest for life. I'd read it again.

Mount TBR #8

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.

Hedy Lamarr: The Most Beautiful Woman in Film – Ruth Barton

Ruth Barton recounts the life, inventions, passions, and troubles of Hedy Lamarr. Barton is a lecturer in film studies at Trinity College in Dublin and has already published several books on cinema history. But here she focuses on Lamarr, considered by many fans and critics alike the most beautiful woman in classic Hollywood.

In our age of social media snark, I was thankful that Barton brings to this project insight and patience towards her subject. Lamarr was a contradictory and distressed person. She wondered if people were drawn by her looks or her self. This insecurity made her act in contradictory, difficult, and strange ways. What can we make of stories like this?

A few years later, when Zsa Zsa Gabor and George Sanders were married, Hedy called on them. Their daughter Francesca, who was three, was on her way to bed. Hedy volunteered to say good-night to her, since it was the nanny’s night off. Then as an afterthought, she asked, “Does Francesca know the facts of life yet?” Perturbed, Gabor shook her head. “The next morning Francesca came downstairs with a balloon stuck inside the front of her dress and informed me that she was pregnant. Hedy Lamarr had told my three-year-old daughter the facts of life. I was livid.”

Who wouldn’t be irate? But we feel a bewildered compassion too – what kind of broken person would think it appropriate treat a child and anger parents in such a way?

Hedy’s personal life was an ongoing turmoil.  She married six times and had children and failed to have a satisfactory relationship with any of them. She and her adopted son were estranged when Hedy, in a fit of displeasure, just broke off relations.  Near the end of her life, Hedy was a shoplifter, notorious in department stores but Barton doesn’t ask any shrinks as to the origins of this behavior.

So, with such a hard to subject to like, the story that Barton tells is not a simple "star bio" because Hedy was not an actress though she may have become a fine comedienne if Hollywood, notorious waster of talent, had been smarter in judging what she could do persuasively. Because she sure couldn’t act, never was able to overcome a wooden, remote, icy quality that was more overpowering than likable. Unfortunately, her first appearance in film created preconceptions. Hedy stripped naked on camera for the very first time in the history of mainstream film (a European – of course – movie called Ecstasy in 1933). Like Paris Hilton found out after the sex tape, success came with both benefits and hazards.

Barton did not interview any art critics to give us readers a sense of how skillful an abstract painter Hedy was. Barton does describe a little bit of Hedy’s technological achievements. With composer George Antheil she patented an innovative modulation system for encoding information to be transmitted on radio frequencies. Its discovery had repercussions in technology, such as with the encryption systems used for mobile phones. Another upside is that Barton provides the insight that Hedy was an émigré – she had to leave Austria because of her Jewish background (which she never talked about). Forced out of her native country, Hedy never felt as if she were home in California, New York City, or Florida. It must be a grim feeling to never feel at home.

Barton's book persuades us that Lamarr's life  was a tangle of unique adventures, appetites, escapes and episodes more or less bleak. On the other hand, it is the same old story, told yet again, of a person who can’t tolerate great gifts. Like, the Donald was born to wealth and power; he couldn’t tolerate so much money, authority, and fame so he turned into an ogre. Hedy was born beautiful beyond belief, gifted with intelligence. And she acted like a person, mercifully rare, who feels most alive when fussin' and fightin', embroiled in constant arguments, suits, and feuds.

Mount TBR #7

Silent Thunder – Loren D. Estleman

This is the ninth mystery to star the series hero Amos Walker. In the hard-boiled manner of Raymond Chandler’s Phil Marlowe, Walker drinks like a fish, smokes like a chimney, shoots straight as an arrow, and cracks as wise as … an owl?

Walker is hired as a freelancer by a large security firm. The behemoth assigns him to investigate Doyle Thayer Junior. His widow Constance has admitted to killing Junior but claims his history of abusing her drove her to plug him fatally in self-defense. Building an argument for self-defense, her lawyer wants Walker to dig up dirt on the dead husband so that the jury will be grateful to the widow for removing such a menace to society. Inarguably, Thayer Junior was a threat to himself and others because he collected enough weapons to stock an arsenal and he partied like it was 1989. Alcohol, clubbing, testosterone, and negligent firearms safety practices were as volatile a mix then as it is nowadays.

Walker’s investigation takes him to the market in illegal guns. His nearly paid-for Chevy is raked by M-16 fire by a hooded quartet. After getting bonked on the head by a knuckle-walker, Walker is comforted by the widow. Not just with iodine.

The language is rough, various scenes feature gun violence. The grim attitudes reflect the noir fallacy that the world is more dangerous than it really is. The reveal centers around a villain whose plot is as grandiose as any Bond-movie megalomaniac.

But Estleman's hard-boiled mystery never fails to entertain. Walker, like Lew Archer, has soul and quick wit, though realistic and tough. The references to SE Michigan and uses of local lingo such as “up north” will appeal to Downriver born and bred readers like me.

Mount TBR #6

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.

From the Sahara to Samarkand: Selected Travel Writings of Rosita Forbes 1919-1937

Between the wars was the golden age of travel writing. Freya Stark, English travel writer, and Ella Maillart, Swiss journalist, are the two women best-remembered nowadays for their narratives of journeys in the Middle East and Central Asia. Forgotten, however, is Rosita Forbes, but this collection of her best pieces will remedy that.

Forbes wrote for magazines so in plain language she gets across the thrill of accomplishing of difficult feats such as finding the way where roads don’t exist and local guides aren’t used to be 20 miles away from their native village. In the typical English way, she gets through travel ordeals with humor. However, without bragging, she also conveys that overcoming harrowing experiences takes bravery, intelligence, and the stoic’s ability to keep a cool head when faced with situations in the desert that are utterly out of one’s control. The feeling the reader gets from her tales is that she never hesitated even when safety and caution might have been bywords.

Also like other travel writers like Peter Fleming, she carries her knowledge of  geography and history  lightly. She deftly weaves expositions about the local cultures and current events with stories of travel. She has sincere pro-imperialist views and she doesn’t kid herself about objective about, say, the British in Iraq. In fact, she admired anybody that thought and felt independently.

Strongly recommended.

Mount TBR #5

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.

Johnny Underground – Patricia Moyes

The British mystery writer Patricia Moyes created Detective Chief Superintendent Henry Tibbet and his Emmy. Her 19 mysteries appeared between 1959 and 1993.

Johnny Underground is based on Moyes’ WWII Royal Air Force experience where she served as a radar operator and flight officer.  Set in 1966, the opening takes Emmy to a reunion of officers served at an airbase in England during the war. Scandal around the sudden demise of a long-dead colleague re-surfaces. When one of the reunited officers ends up murdered, Emmy becomes a prime suspect. All the old comrades in arms, who may or may not have something sinister to hide, turn on Emmy to protect themselves. One thing about these old-timey English mystery writers – they sometimes had a stoical view of the roads to hell people take with their eyes wide open. Kind of grim, but kind of real.

In fact, though, the appeal of Moyes’ Henry and Emmy series offers various attractions. For one, the characters are very English. As an example of the deep English respect for privacy, Emmy realizes that she didn’t even know the name of the boy she loved because everybody during the war used nicknames or last names. For another, their marriage represents a stability in personal relationships that readers like to see. Of course, Henry’s job reassures us that most murders won’t going running around doing in folks like us.

Finally, this mystery lays down smart clues to follow for readers that like puzzles but also turns out as novel of manners with a genuine literary sensibility a la the work of Margery Allingham.

Top 5 Must-read Nonfiction

1. Ethics, Aesthetics: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert Pirsig

2. War: With the Old Breed at Peliliu and Okinawa - Eugene Sledge. Best WW2 memoir ever

3. Laughter: My Life and Hard Times - James Thurber

4. Scholarship, Love of Family, Friends, and Colleagues: Caught in the Web of Words: James Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary - K.M. Elizabeth Murray

5. Travel, History: Black Lamb and Grey Falcon - Rebecca West

Classic #5

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2016.

Life and Times of Frederick Douglass

Born a slave, Frederick Douglass (1818 - 1895) escaped in 1838 and became a key figure in the Abolitionist movement. This book was his third memoir, written in 1881 and revised in 1892. I have no reservation recommending this book to readers with an interest in antebellum America, race-based chattel slavery, the Abolitionist movement, post- Civil War reform in the US, or memoirs of great Americans.

In the first third of the book, Douglass paints a picture of the absence of law, of civil society, in slave states: “That plantation is a little nation of its own, having its own language, its own rules, regulations and customs. The laws and institutions of the state, apparently touched it nowhere.” Slavery also had a bad effect on slave owners and their families:

The poor slave, on his hard pine plank, scantily covered with his thin blanket, slept more soundly than the feverish voluptuary who reclined upon his downy pillow. Food to the indolent is poison, not sustenance. Lurking beneath the rich and tempting viands were invisible spirits of evil, which filled the self-deluded gormandizer with aches and pains, passions uncontrollable, fierce tempers, dyspepsia, rheumatism, lumbago, and gout, and of these the Lloyds had a full share.

Douglass takes jabs at the work ethic that was undermined by slavery. Farms are shabby, workmanship shoddy. For all the talk of refinement and genteel manners, slave-holders and the hired help are careless, stupid, ill-informed, angry, short-tempered, lacking in foresight, paranoid, and never seeing anybody outside a narrow world of uncouth stressed relatives and impatient vulgar cronies. Not to mention the whole system has to be propped up with an army of thugs such as overseers and hired kidnappers. Ashley Wilkes - my red Indian ass.

The great thing about Douglass is that he names names. The book is filled with telling anecdotes like this one:

No stronger contrast between two men could well be presented than the one exhibited on this day between President Lincoln and Vice-President Johnson. Mr. Lincoln was like one who was treading the hard and thorny path of duty and self-denial; Mr. Johnson was like one just from a drunken debauch. The face of the one was full of manly humility, although at the topmost height of power and pride; that of the other was full of pomp and swaggering vanity. The fact was, though it was yet early in the day, Mr. Johnson was drunk.

After the Civil War, the Republican party turned its back on ideals and black people and became the party of money that it is in our present day. The Republicans' walking away from Reconstruction and leaving blacks defenseless against the former slave-owning, slave-beating, slave-driving, slave-catching class filled Douglass with sadness:

Clinging in hope to the Republican party, thinking it would cease its backsliding and resume its old character as the party of progress, justice and freedom, I regretted its defeat and shared in some measure the painful apprehension and distress felt by my people at the South from the return to power of the old Democratic and slavery party. To many of them it seemed that they were left naked to their enemies; in fact, lost; that Mr. Cleveland's election meant the revival of the slave power, and that they would now be again reduced to slavery and the lash. The misery brought to the South by this widespread alarm can hardly be described or measured. The wail of despair from the late bondsmen was for a time deep, bitter and heartrending. Illiterate and unable to learn to read or to learn of any limit to the power of the party now in the ascendant, their fears were unmitigated and intolerable, and their outcry of alarm was like the cry of dismay uttered by an army when its champion has fallen and no one appears to take his place. It was well for the poor people in this condition that Mr. Cleveland himself kindly sent word South to allay their fears and to remove their agony. In this trepidation of the unlettered negro something is apparent aside from his ignorance. If he knew nothing of letters, he knew something of events and of the history of parties to them. He knew that the Republican party was the party hated by the old master class, and that the Democratic party was the party beloved of the old master class.

Anyway, this review grows too long. In his day, Douglass critics argued if he was a better orator or a better writer. This book shows his powerful writing style. I hope these long quotations give a sense of that.

PS: I moderate comments to this blog. If I get any  trash, nonsense, or bilge I will, without remorse, trash them. 

I promise.