Category Archives: Books

Time for A Time for Gifts

Posted on by

Bitter cold today, and it’s only going to get bitterer. Maybe minus 15 F. by Wednesday, after another round of snow. At times like that, icy little puffs push through the cracks in your house to remind you that the chilly world is indifferent to your fate, you who came from subtropical climes but were headstrong about migrating toward the pole.

My reading material at the turn of the year is A Time for Gifts (1977), in which Patrick Leigh Fermor, who died in 2011 at 96, recounts part of his walk as a very young man from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople in the winter of 1933-34. A remarkable story, well told, and reminds just about everyone else (such as me) that their travels are pallid indeed compared with his.

It features a lot of interesting detail: “I pestered Fritz Spengel, the son of my hosts, with questions about student life: songs, drinking ritual, and above all, duelling, which wasn’t duelling at all of course, but ritual scarification. Those dashing scars were school ties that could never be taken off, the emblem and seal of a ten-years’ cult of the humanities. With a sabre from the wall, Fritz demonstrated the stance and the grip and described how the participants were gauntleted, gorgeted and goggled until every exposed vein and artery, and every inch of irreplaceable tissue, were upholstered from harm… and the blades clashed by numbers until the razor-sharp tips sliced gashes deep enough, tended with rubbed-in salt, to last a lifetime.”

And musings: “The Thirty Years War, the worst of them all, was becoming an obsession with me: a lurid, ruinous, doomed conflict of briefs and dynasties, helpless and hopeless, with principals shifting the whole time, and a constant shuffle and re-deal of the main actors. For, apart from the events – the defenestrations and pitched battles and historic sieges, the slaughter and famine and plague – astrological portents and the rumour of cannibalism and witchcraft flitted about in the shadows. The polyglot captains of the ruffian multi-lingual hosts hold our gaze willy-nilly with their grave eyes and their Velasquez moustaches and populate half the picture galleries in Europe…”

Custer Shorn

Posted on by

Historical tidbit for the day, from The Last Stand by Nathaniel Philbrick, subtitled “Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of Little Bighorn” (2010), p. 38.

“Custer was known for his long hair, but in 1876 he, like many men approaching forty, was beginning to go bald. Before leaving Fort Lincoln, he and another officer with thinning hair, Lieutenant Charles Varnum, ‘had the clippers run over their heads.’ This meant that the former ‘boy general’ with the famously flowing locks now looked decidedly middle-aged.”

Nice detail. All the depictions I’ve ever seen of Custer just before he met his fate feature the distinctive locks. It’s a good book so far, as all of the other Philbrick books I’ve read – Sea of Glory, Mayflower, and In the Heart of the Sea – though this one isn’t about the sea. Unless you consider the Great Plains as a vast kind of ocean.

As the subtitle says, the book isn’t just about Custer. Sitting Bull gets equal billing as the winning commander.

Also interesting to note: Going west that spring, Custer, publicity hound that he was, hoped that a battle with the Indians would win him a large measure of fame back east in time for the Centennial. Sure enough, it did. But maybe not quite in the way he planned.

I don’t think I’ve read this much about Custer since before we went to Little Bighorn in 2005.

Last Stand Hill, 2005The stone with the black backdrop is Custer’s, but unlike the other men, his body was reburied elsewhere, at West Point in fact.

Early Winter Sky

Posted on by

After a brief not-cold spell on Saturday and Sunday – I can’t call it warm, but still not bad – it’s winter cold again. Diligent neighbors used the interlude to sting lights on their houses or finishing removing leaves from their lawns. I did no such things.

The sunset on Saturday was shot with pink and gold.

Northern Illinois, Nov 29, 2014

I did manage to read Fahrenheit 451 over the long weekend. Or rather re-read, because I read it when – 40 years ago? Does that even count as re-reading? I picked it up because Lilly read it for school not long ago, and asked me about the story sometimes, but I had to confess to remembering very little about it, besides colorful scenes of book burning and the idea of becoming a living book.

I understand that it’s an important work. But I’m not particularly taken with Bradbury’s writing style. Not sure what it is. Also, Bradbury was clearly afraid of the pernicious effects of dumbing down society, especially as expedited by television, and I’m not entirely persuaded. Maybe the level of stupidity is always about constant, just manifesting itself in different ways across the decades.

TR & Saint-Gaudens

Posted on by

Remarkable summer-like weekend just passed, but unlike the previous weekends, we didn’t go anywhere. Spent a fair amount of time on the deck reading. Seemingly overnight, some neighborhood trees have turned yellow.

The other day I picked up Striking Change: The Great Artistic Collaboration of Theodore Roosevelt and Augustus Saint-Gaudens by Michael F. Moran (2007) at Half-Priced Books. Looks good. Presidential history and numismatics: a winning combo for sure. I hope to get around to it soon, but then again I have Illegal Tender: Gold, Greed, and the Mystery of the Lost 1933 Double Eagle, by David Tripp, and I haven’t gotten around to reading it yet.

Anyway, TR thought US coinage of the time was uninspired at best, particularly the gold coins, and set about to change them. A lesser-known effort than busting trusts or digging the Panama Canal, but one certainly worthy of TR’s attention. So was born the well-admired Augustus Saint-Gaudens coins.

But there seems to be more to the book than that story. Q. David Bowers writes in Coinbooks.com: “The text is particularly valuable in showcasing the sculptor’s activities with important numismatic projects beyond the famous 1907 coinage. While the story of the coins has been told in depth in several places, including in Renaissance of American Coinage 1906–1908 (Burdette, 2007) and United States Gold Coins: An Illustrated History (Bowers,1982), treatment of the important medals has ranged from scarcely anything to light sketches. Striking Change ends that.

“Further, the author gives a comprehensive look at the design competition for new United States coins in 1891. This involved quite a bit of effort at the time, but ultimately ended as a non-event, as outside artists consulted in the competition did not seem to have created motifs that anyone liked—and Chief Engraver Charles E. Barber of the United States Mint ended up creating new motifs for the dime, quarter, and half dollar.”

Team of Rivals

Posted on by

Rain early in the morning, again in the afternoon, and more promised for Friday morning. You could call it a rainy spell. Just when the grass and other flora were looking a little thirsty from the intermittent August heat.

The other day I picked up Team of Rivals at a resale shop. Hardcover version, in decent condition. Cost: $1.75 plus tax. Considering my known interest in presidential history, it’s about time I got around to reading some Doris Kearns Goodwin. I haven’t gotten far yet, but so far so good. I’m looking forward to a detailed account of the Republican Convention of 1860. Remarkable how history turns on such seemingly small events.

And I’m going to wonder, where did I see Goodwin speak? I know I did, at some real estate convention or other in the early or mid-2000s, back when I used to go to such things more regularly. Can’t remember exactly when or where, though. Speakers I saw at one time or other included her, but also the elder George Bush (post-presidency), James Cavill, Newt Gingrich, James Lovell, and Colin Powell.

Summer Interlude

Posted on by

Summertime and the living is — not so different from the rest of the year, considering that we have climate control in the house, have to meet the same deadlines as the rest of the year, and so on.

Time for summer break anyway. Back to posting around July 27. Till then, a handful of summer tunes. Been fond of “Summer Wind,” sung by Sinatra, only since the late ’80s, when I acquired a tape of Strangers in the Night. Music by Heinz Meier and lyrics by Johnny Mercer.

I’ve known “Summer Breeze,” by Seals & Crofts, probably since it was released, or at least fairly new. It evokes a moment in summer, in particular a summer evening, without mentioning beaches or puppy love or such.

Not quite sure what’s going on in “Suddenly Last Summer,” by the Motels, but it’s to do with a particular summer. Some summers, after all, are more memorable than others, especially when you’re young.

Also, some recommended reading. I just started Arabian Sands by Wilfred Thesiger. I’m already hooked, and I haven’t even gotten to his crossings of the Empty Quarter. He’s only been dead about 10 years. The Telegraph’s obit is here, and the Guardian’s is here.

A Passing Coconut Boat

Posted on by

I’m done with Orwell for now, though I need to find more of his essays and other writings and dip into them. So I’m taking up some of the travel books I have around the house but haven’t gotten around to. Such as The Great Railway Bazaar by Paul Theroux (1975), which I’m reading now. Somehow or other I’d never read it, though I’ve had a copy for a long time.

Other unread titles I have around the house include Journey to Portugal (Jose Saramango), three books by Evelyn Waugh (Remote People, Ninety-Two Days, and Labels), and The Happy Isles of Oceania (also Theroux). Or the subject at hand might be Far Away, rather than travel, since some of the books are about spending extended periods in far away places, such as Under the Mountain Wall: A Chronicle of Two Seasons in Stone Age New Guinea, Seven Years in Tibet, and Out of Africa.

The Great Railway Bazaar is justly famous as a tale of months of rail travel in Asia in the early ’70s. Lately I’ve finished the chapters about traveling through Sri Lanka, and was struck by how impoverished the country was 40 years ago. In some sense I must have known that, but mostly I’ve been used to reading or hearing about the decades-long civil war there, and then its more recent economic growth. Time flies, places change.

Which brings me to this picture. Vietboat 1994In June 1994, we were traveling down the Mekong in Vietnam, and we came very near to this coconut boat, and I happened to be ready to take a picture. Vietnam is and was a major producer of coconuts – 1.25 million metric tons in 2013, compared with 1.07 million metric tons in 1994 (a handy Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations interactive web site tells me this).

But never mind the production numbers. What became of the people in the boat? Are the parents still running a coconut boat, or did they ever really specialize in that? The child would be an adult now, assuming he survived the perils of third-world childhood, and very likely he did. What’s he up to? Or was it a girl? Just another set of minor unknowables here in the hyperconnected Information Age.

Thursday Debris

Posted on by

It’s been a brilliant run of late spring, early summer days here. Rain, but not too much. Heat, but not too much. A few mosquitoes, but not many. Last week at the Klehm we did run into some large clouds of gnats, however, especially on the narrow trails.

Klehm Arbortetum May 2014

See the gnats? Maybe not. The camera’s not that good. But they’re there.

I just finished reading Neither Here Nor There, an entertaining Bill Bryson book. Mostly he dispenses with background detail about the places he visits, and focuses on his own experiences in getting from A to B and seeing what he sees in A and B. Even better, his enthusiasm for going out to see things shines through. Not many writers can pull that off without being a bore, but he does. A small example, describing Rome:

“You turn any street corner in Rome and it looks as if you’ve just missed a parking competition for blind people. Cars are pointed in every direction, half on the pavements and half off, facing in, facing sideways, blocking garages and side streets and phone boxes, fitted into spaces so tight that the only possible way out would be through the sun roof. Romans park their cars the way I would park if I had just spilled a beaker of hydrochloric acid on my lap.”

Since the travels he describes were in Europe in 1990, as well as flashbacks to the 1970s, he’s also detailing an increasingly obsolete style of travel, but one that I well remember myself, at least that of the last two decades of the 20th century. That is, pre-Internet, pre-smartphone, pre-debit card, pre-Ryanair travels. It won’t be long before — if it hasn’t already happened — smartphones or glasses tell tourists absolutely everything about getting to and being at a place. That’ll drain the life right out of the experience.

I wondered today whether the half-season finale Mad Men, broadcast Sunday, used all the lyrics of “The Best Things in Life Are Free.” I wasn’t very familiar with the earliest recorded version, so I looked it up.

As many songs were in the 1920s, much of it is instrumental. So yes indeed, the show used all of the lyrics. The 2010s recalling the 1960s recalling the 1920s. A remarkable scene.

Storm of the Century

Posted on by

I found Burmese Days at a bookstore not long ago. Once I finish rereading Homage to Catalona, which I’m close to doing, I’ll read that for the first time. It’s a wonder that George Orwell escaped Spain with his life in 1937. How close the world came to never having Nineteen Eighty-Four, Animal Farm and the rest.

What have we missed because antibiotics weren’t quite good enough yet to save Orwell in 1950? The man might have written for another 30 or more years. To modify a line of Tom Lehrer’s, it’s a sobering thought to realize that when Orwell was my age, he’d been dead six years.

Actually, I’m taking a detour from Orwell to read a book I chanced on at the library the other day and couldn’t resist, Storm of the Century: The Labor Day Hurricane of 1935, by Willie Drye (2002). I’m pretty sure I first heard about that storm watching Key Largo. Lionel Barrymore’s character mentioned it, at a time when the hurricane would have been still fairly fresh in memory, as Katrina is for us.

“On Labor Day in 1935, a hurricane that produced the record low barometric pressure reading of 26.35 inches hit Florida’s upper Keys, destroying virtually everything in its path,” the Publishers Weekly blurb cited by Amazon says. “In his meticulously researched work, Drye gives a vivid, detailed account of the storm’s approach and impact when it made landfall. Drye was drawn to the story of the unnamed hurricane not only because of its intensity, but also because it killed nearly 260 World War I veterans who were building a highway as part of a federal construction program.”

So far it’s pretty good. The book even has occasional funny asides, something you wouldn’t expect. For instance, Key West as a modern tourist destination was largely invented during the 1930s, to help it recover from the Depression but also the contraction of the area’s ship salvaging and natural sponge businesses earlier in the century. The Florida Emergency Relief Administration led the effort to clean up the town and its attractions, hiring a PR man named E.M. Gilfond to handle publicity.

“Gilford and his staff, which included talented graphic artists, launched a nationwide advertising campaign to lure tourists to Key West,” writes Drye. “When the visitors arrived they were given a booklet published by the Florida ERA that included a map of the city’s attractions.

“The effort was a rousing success. About 40,000 tourists visited Key West during the 1934-35 season, and the city’s income from tourism increased by about 43 percent…

“No one had bothered to confer with Ernest Hemingway before putting his house on the maps handed out to visitors. The author’s home was listed as attraction number 18, and a fair number of those 40,000 tourists tramped onto his property and peered into the windows of his home or gawked at him from the sidewalk as he tried to relax on his porch with a drink and a cigar. One especially bold visitor opened the front door of Hemingway’s home and marched into his living room as though he were walking into a museum.”

Party Like It’s 1984

Posted on by

Been a while – can’t remember how long – since I was on a good literary bender, so I decided recently that Orwell would be just the thing. I was inspired by George Orwell: A Life in Pictures, which is superb firm. It isn’t a documentary in the purist form – and “docudrama” doesn’t really fit either – but it’s well worth the trouble of watching all the parts as they’ve been posted on YouTube, starting with this one. (No embedding, or I’d do that.)

George Orwell: A Life in Pictures, a BBC production, originally aired more than 10 years ago. Which goes to show how easy it is to miss things. As the film points out, no moving pictures of Orwell himself are known to exist, so an actor stands in for Orwell, looking like him, and saying things Orwell wrote (e.g., “all writers are vain, selfish, and lazy.” Hear, hear.) The actor, Chris Langham, nailed the part. I wasn’t familiar with him; apparently not too long after playing George Orwell, he completely disgraced himself.

I took a look the other day, and among Orwell’s fiction the Schaumburg Township Library only has Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm. That’s an awful lapse for such a good library. I was looking for the two novels I haven’t read, Burmese Days and A Clergyman’s Daughter. Later, I checked the shelves at B&N, and found all of his non-essay collection works except those two. Of course they’re available on Amazon, but that’s a last resort.

Right now I’m most of the way through Down and Out in Paris and London, a copy of which I own, and which I’ve read at least twice, but not in good many years. Later, I’ll re-read some or all of the others that I have, also unread for years: Coming Up for Air, Homage to Catalonia, The Road to Wigan Pier, Keep the Aspidistra Flying. Strangely enough, I bought my copy Keep the Aspidistra Flying at the Aspidistra Bookshop on Clark St. in Chicago about 25 years ago (a fine store, closed since the late ’90s).