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0743431707
| 9780743431705
| 0743431707
| 3.74
| 17,864
| 1965
| Feb 26, 2002
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it was amazing
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THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Cur THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Currently in the challenge: Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Christopher Buckley | Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | Lee Child's Jack Reacher | Philip K Dick | Ian Fleming | CS Forester's Horatio Hornblower | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | Shirley Jackson | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | Cormac McCarthy | China Mieville | Toni Morrison | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Terry Pratchett's Discworld | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | Jeanette Winterson | PG Wodehouse Finished: Isaac Asimov's "Future History" (Robot/Empire/Foundation) 2024 reads, #56. I got behind on my “beach and airport” summer reads this year, because of volunteering to be a judge in a bunch of romance literary contests (which counts as marketing work for my freelance career as a book editor precisely of romance novels and other genres, which is why I’m always glad to do it); so I’m squeezing in a few more here in the waning days of September before moving on to the denser (both intellectually and in page count) books of each autumn, winter and early spring. As long-time friends know, I’m doing duel completist reads these days of both Ian Fleming and John Le Carre as part of each year’s summer reading (earlier this summer, for example, I did what I think is a rather nice write-up of the 1956 James Bond novel Diamonds Are Forever), because they’re such two natural opposite sides of a coin when it comes to metaphorically important genre literature in the Mid-Century Modernist years; both were writing at roughly the same time (although Fleming died long before Le Carre did), both were writing stories about the special branches of Britain’s Military Intelligence department (specifically MI-6, although given fictional names in the various books), and both were former members of special branches themselves during World War Two, which is where the impetus for writing about the subject came from for both. But Fleming wrote rah-rah stories about the derring-do of the unstoppable British forces even in a post-Empire, “Little England” UK, using the always suave yet deadly Bond to serve as the smartest person in the room in a new “jet age” of international treachery and Soviet menace; while Le Carre was interested in the exact opposite, examining the perpetually bumbling British government of the post-war years to paint a damning portrait of a nation in decline, everything made worse by the Fleming-type rah-rahers who used the increasingly aging events of World War Two to try to artificially prop up the old “stiff upper lip” of an empire (oops, I mean Commonwealth) on which the sun never sets. After a couple of warm-ups to start his career, written when young and not yet a full-time author, Le Carre really hit his doom-and-gloom stride with the novel right before today’s, 1963’s The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (my review), where he thought that he had adequately made the point that a post-war British intelligence complex really didn’t know what it was doing anymore, relying on less resources in a more complex world to solve mysteries over the heads of these aging pipe-smoking eggheads, who were increasingly having to rely on first-hand intel from their big rich beefy cousins over in America’s CIA. So Le Carre was aggravated and disappointed, then, to see a strong part of the British public interpret Cold as exactly the kind of Bond-like rah-rah propaganda for a forever ascendent British as Fleming’s books were; and he decided at that point to write a next novel that not a single person would ever be able to incorrectly interpret again. That led to today’s book, 1965 The Looking Glass War, and he’s not kidding around; virtually every single character in this book is some kind of moral coward or conniving sociopath or doddering pensioner, ironically making the world a much worser place while they think they’re making it better, using endless nostalgia for the war to sink into a worse and worse bureaucracy that results in more and more screwups for the entire British intelligence community. And in this, Le Carre picked a surprising yet excellent (nay, almost perfect) setting for such an unmistakably pessimistic story, which is another one of these Military Intelligence units similar to MI-6 but that is about to finally get shut down for good twenty years after the end of the war, which is when the department was created in the first place. This is something I got interested in several years ago, when first starting the Bond books, why there’s a modern MI-5 and MI-6 that everyone knows about (roughly congruent with the US’s FBI and CIA), but seemingly no other numbers; and it’s because all those Military Intelligence units were started during the two world wars, most of them with these really hyperspecific duties (MI-9, for example, did nothing but debrief escaped prisoners of war), which saw them rapidly get closed in the decade after the war ended, until all that was left was department 5, now handling all domestic threats to Britain, and department 6, now handling all foreign threats. (And in fact, neither department officially calls themselves MI-5 or -6 anymore, but simply acknowledges that a large portion of the public still do, precisely because of things like the Bond novels and subsequent movies.) Le Carre never mentions which MI number the one at the heart of our book is, but it’s quite obviously one of the ones way down on the importance ladder; here in 1965, twenty years after the war, they’re down to a handful of employees in a single decrepit building that everyone has forgotten about, full of aging intellectuals who think the way they did it against the Nazis is still the way to do it now, where the British government clearly thinks it’s best to just let these old fogies retire in a few years without a fuss and then quietly close down the department for good. So when some blurry dark photos come in one day from a forgotten old war resource supposedly showing a warehouse of Russian missiles accidentally spotted in East Germany, the desperate employees of MI-22 or whatever number they are decide to take this as seriously as possible as quickly as possible, despite the numerous red flags that come up over whether any of this information is true or can be trusted. That leads to an ever-cascading series of disasters, each worse than the last, including sending a career desk jockey out into the field for the very first time with no training, partnering him with an aging Polish defector they haven’t worked with since the war, and insisting on using the bulky and finicky suitcase-sized wireless transmitters all these aging administrators had become experts at during the 1940s, too old now to understand the latest generation of better, smaller, more reliable tech, and their department not important enough anymore to be able to successfully requisition it anyway. Le Carre, true to his word, makes his point so obvious here that there’s absolutely no way to misinterpret it; every person we see in this book, from the first page to the last, is incompetent or corrupt or a combination of the two, which brilliantly adds up one small fuck-up at a time in a snowball effect until suddenly they have an international incident on their hands by the book’s climax. This is officially called one of the “George Smiley” novels, named for Le Carre’s most enduring character, one of these aging war-veteran eggheads who’s described in the books as a squat little balding fat man with coke-bottle glasses and a wife who openly cheats on him. But as fans of these books know, some of the nine “Smiley novels” feature little more than a cameo from him, like is the case with this one, where he shows up for only two scenes out of the entire book. Still, though, it’s legitimate to call them Smiley novels, because those two scenes are really key ones for the book’s overall plot, in that Smiley actually works for the main MI-6 (which Le Carre fictionalizes in these books as “the Circus,” named because their headquarters is located in the Cambridge Circus neighborhood of London). When word gets out that this almost shuttered MI-22 or whatever is suddenly requesting cars, weapons, twenty-year-old wireless transmitters, safe houses and plane tickets, it’s Smiley’s job to figure out what’s going on; and when he realizes what a fuck-up this MI-22 is going to make of the entire thing, it’s Smiley’s job to figure out what MI-6 should do about it. That’s what really ties together all of these Cold War Le Carre novels; Smiley may understand that the system is crumbling around him, resigned to just put up with it for the few years he has left until retiring, dying or both, but he’s still ultimately good at what he does, which gives these books their clever a-ha moments that make them more entertaining than their otherwise relentlessly bleak tones would. That would reach its apex about a decade later, with the novel that’s looking more and more likely will be the one out of all of them that people will remember about Le Carre, 1974’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy; but before that, we have 1968’s A Small Town in Germany, a thriller about the rise of neo-Nazis in West Germany’s new capital, Bonn (and the first book of Le Carre’s career to not feature Smiley at all). See you next summer for that one! John Le Carre books being reviewed for this series: Call for the Dead (1961) | The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (1963) | The Looking Glass War (1965) | A Small Town in Germany (1968) | The Naive and Sentimental Lover (1971) | Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974) | The Honourable Schoolboy (1977) | Smiley’s People (1979) | The Little Drummer Girl (1983) | A Perfect Spy (1986) | The Russia House (1989) | The Secret Pilgrim (1990) | The Night Manager (1993) | Our Game (1995) | The Tailor of Panama (1996) | Single & Single (1999) | The Constant Gardener (2001) | Absolute Friends (2003) | The Mission Song (2006) | A Most Wanted Man (2008) | Our Kind of Traitor (2010) | A Delicate Truth (2013) | A Legacy of Spies (2017) | Agent Running in the Field (2019) | Silverview (2021) ...more |
Notes are private!
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2
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Sep 28, 2024
not set
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Sep 28, 2024
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Paperback
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0316289361
| 9780316289368
| 0316289361
| 4.32
| 8,586
| 1938
| 1999
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it was amazing
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THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Cur THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Currently in the challenge: Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Christopher Buckley | Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | Lee Child's Jack Reacher | Philip K Dick | Ian Fleming | CS Forester's Horatio Hornblower | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | Shirley Jackson | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | Cormac McCarthy | China Mieville | Toni Morrison | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Terry Pratchett's Discworld | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | Jeanette Winterson | PG Wodehouse Finished: Isaac Asimov's "Future History" (Robot/Empire/Foundation) 2024 reads, #34. It’s summer, which means I’m back to my usual summer reads, a series of easy-to-digest genre novels (also sometimes known as “airport and beach reads”) being done to honor 10-year-old Jason, who used to read the kid’s version of these each year for his public library’s summer reading program. CS Forester’s “Horatio Hornblower” books are a recent addition to my summer completist list, and fall under a category that I call “Grandpa Lit,” which I just recently aged into myself (I’m 55 this year), called this mostly because the books in this category are ones I remember my own grandfathers reading back in the 1970s when I was a kid, and seem like the kinds of books that only grandpas can fully get into (including not only these but old-style Westerns by people like Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour, military technothrillers along the lines of Tom Clancy, and more). Like with the first one I read last summer, 1937’s Beat to Quarters (my review), I’m tempted to say that you actually need to know a lot less in advance about the intricacies of tall sail ships to enjoy these than you might expect at first (for those who don’t know, these all take place within the British Navy of the late 1700s and early 1800s, as they fight France in the romantically historic Napoleonic Wars); but upon reflection, perhaps it’s more that here in late middle age, I’ve finally picked up enough general information about sailing here and there over the years and decades to be able to follow along with these books in a way a younger person can’t, thus helping to explain even more why these might only appeal to grandfathers and others who have lived long enough a life to actually be able to figure out what’s going on here in these jargon-filled books full of references to “quarterdecks” and “tops’ls” and the like. And for sure, another reason grandpas gravitate towards these kinds of books is that they’re unabashedly and unapologetically old-fashioned in their morals and culture, which is something important for younger people to understand before picking one up; in the world of the Hornblower novels, men are men, women are mostly pregnant and silent, God has chosen the rich to be the natural masters over the poor (and He has given them happy permission to beat the poor with knotted ropes anytime they put up a fuss about it), and people of color largely just don’t exist at all, with most of the storylines so far revolving one way or another around the idea of the people of southern Europe, in countries like Spain and Italy, being shiftless, lazy ne’er-do-wells, constantly causing trouble for the “True Gentlemen” of northern Europe who are always having to come down with their big impressive warboats and save their incompetent asses yet again. That said, if you can embrace a milieu such as this, the Hornblower books are undeniably thrilling adventures, giving us a sweeping look at a planet quickly being corralled and mapped by the newest generation of these tech-forward, highly proficient tall ships, a world in which navies are all-powerful because water is the one and only way humans have in these years to move large amounts of goods quickly, meaning that even the largest army in the world is quickly in trouble if their navy can’t get food and ammunition to them regularly. Forester very deliberately packs in just about everything that could possibly happen to one of these naval ships into each one of these books, deliberately to crank up the drama and stakes to a ridiculously high level, where it’s a matter of life or death pretty much every week of their sometimes year-long voyages; in the first book this all happened over on the west coast of Central America, as Hornblower and company help a Nicaraguan general who has declared his independence against invading French forces, while this second book is set in the much more expected area of France’s southern coast and Spain’s eastern coast, with his ship being just one of half a dozen traveling together (the “line” of the book’s title), and whose mission is this time the much more general “try to screw things up for France in as many ways as you possibly can.” This leads us to all kinds of adventures, including lots of daring raids on occupied Spanish forts in the middle of the night (not to mention a little retconned contemporary social commentary from Forester, writing this in the late 1930s, and having Hornblower think about how the Spanish are fated to have a country-destroying civil war in the future if they don’t get their act together), all while he takes an equal amount of time to simply describe what daily life was like on these ships, a harsh martial life where it’s just taken for granted that some humans are naturally the masters over others simply because God made it that way, and where the tiniest infractions can often lead to public beatings while the offender’s crewmates are forced to stand silently and watch. That’s the main reason to read these, because they describe in exacting detail a world that not only doesn’t exist anymore but that never really existed in the first place, taking the events that might happen to half a dozen ships over their course of their entire lives back then and squeezing them all into just one ship over the course of a single year here, then making everything work out great for the British people in charge of things just from their natural can-do spirit and God-given smarts above the rest of those other, lesser European states that surround them. (Not for nothing were these novels written while in the middle of England being bombed back into the Stone Age by an all-powerful Germany at the beginning of World War Two, an attempt by Forester to nostalgically remember the “good ol’ days” when the sun never set on an unstoppable British Empire.) They should be read with this mindset; but brother, if you do, you’ll get a thrilling experience unlike any other in modern literature, and they come recommended in this highly specific, highly grandpa-friendly spirit. CS Forester "Horatio Hornblower" books being reviewed in this series: Beat to Quarters (1937) | Ship of the Line (1938) | Flying Colours (1939) | Commodore Hornblower (1945) | Lord Hornblower (1946) | Mr. Midshipman Hornblower (1950) | Lieutenant Hornblower (1952) | Hornblower and the Atropos (1953) | Admiral Hornblower in the West Indies (1958) | Hornblower and the Hotspur (1962) | Hornblower During the Crisis (1967) ...more |
Notes are private!
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2
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not set
not set
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Jun 13, 2024
not set
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Jun 13, 2024
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Paperback
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0316289329
| 9780316289320
| 0316289329
| 4.29
| 12,061
| Feb 04, 1937
| Sep 30, 1985
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it was amazing
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2022 reads, #47. THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they
2022 reads, #47. THE GREAT COMPLETIST CHALLENGE: In which I revisit older authors and attempt to read every book they ever wrote Currently in the challenge: Margaret Atwood | JG Ballard | Clive Barker | Christopher Buckley | Jim Butcher's Dresden Files | Lee Child's Jack Reacher | Philip K Dick | Ian Fleming | CS Forester's Horatio Hornblower | William Gibson | Michel Houellebecq | John Irving | Kazuo Ishiguro | Shirley Jackson | John Le Carre | Bernard Malamud | Cormac McCarthy | China Mieville | Toni Morrison | VS Naipaul | Chuck Palahniuk | Tim Powers | Terry Pratchett's Discworld | Philip Roth | Neal Stephenson | Jim Thompson | John Updike | Kurt Vonnegut | Jeanette Winterson | PG Wodehouse Finished: Isaac Asimov's Robot/Empire/Foundation I recently had a chance to watch again all eight of the "Horatio Hornblower" television movies produced by the British ITV in the late 1990s and early '00s, regarding the derring-do adventures of an officer in the British Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars; and my big enjoyment of them all over again finally convinced me to try reading at least one of the original books by CS Forester these are based on, first published in the 1930s through '60s. I've put it off until now, frankly, because it feels like a real grandpa move to me; and that's primarily because when I was a kid in the '70s, these were exactly the kinds of books my actual grandfathers and all the grandfather-types around me used to read, along with unending amounts of Louis L'Amour, Zane Grey, James A. Michener and other such "manly men" genre thrillers about cowboys and conquistadors and square-jawed sailing ship captains, screaming "FIRE!!!" to their dutiful crew shooting a 50-pound cannon out a hole in the side of their wooden ship at those damned dirty Frenchies. On the other hand, however, I am trying to get in more easy-reading genre thrillers in my life these days, or at least during the summer, to nostalgically honor my pleasant memories of being in my public library's childhood Summer Reading Camp each year; and it's not like I had to sign on for the entire eleven-book series just to check out one of them, and not like I even had to finish the first book if I wasn't jibing with it, given that I just got it from the Chicago Public Library for free anyway. And so I tried it, and I suddenly discovered why grandpas the world over have been falling in love with these books for the last 80 years and still counting, because this turned out to be a lot easier for a non-sailing enthusiast like me to read and understand than I had been expecting, a real corker of a swashbuckler that not only delivers action-movie thrills but also gives you a lot to philosophically think about when it comes to human nature, why we admire the people we do, and the age-old question of whether the severe stoicism of military life erodes our fundamental humanity or not. Here in the first book of the series, originally published in 1937 during the interregnum of the World War (which, as sci-fi author Ada Palmer has inspired me to do, I now treat as just one big war that lasted from 1914 to 1945, not a War 1 and War 2), we are introduced to our series hero already as a middle-aged captain of a major naval ship in the year 1808, in the middle of the war years when the people of Spain and its Central American colonies rose up against French occupation, declared independence and suddenly became the allies of Great Britain. That's what takes Hornblower and the HMS Lydia not just to Central America but to the western, Pacific side of Central America, where British ships almost never went (this is long before the Panama Canal, mind you, when the only way over there from Europe was to sail all the way around the southern tip of South America), to help out a former member of the Nicaraguan nobility who has decided to enact a military coup of the occupying French forces. This nicely also helped Forester solve the challenge he faced each time with every new book, which is that he didn't want to have to deal with the Mid-Century Modernist equivalent of snotty Comic Book Guy leaving rants at Amazon about how he got tiny details of actual Napoleonic battles wrong, so he instead set each Hornblower book far away from any of the actual battles that were taking place in the real world at that time. In the 1808 of this book, these were mostly back in Spain and Portugal, so Forester instead places Hornblower literally thousands of miles away, which allows him to be both geographically accurate in the book but also take a lot of liberties when it comes to what actually happens. That's what lets him stuff this first one to overflowing with fascinating developments that, while fanciful, did actually happen occasionally in these years; the Central American noble he's sent to help turns out to be a dictatorial psychopath who literally crucifies his enemies, while Hornblower's ship ends up in a rare turn of events picking up a woman for part of its trip, an important noble back in Britain who's also unusually forward and independent, and unusually has training in treating the sick and injured (and so helps out after a major battle in which half the ship is injured or killed, gaining her a lot of admiration among the all-male crew). And that's not even counting the chasing of a fabled ship filled with Spanish gold; the idyllic pause at a sandy South Pacific island while they tip the entire ship sideways, repair the hole-filled bottom, and create a brand-new 125-foot-tall main mast; and the bragging contest on board over which sailor ate the most amount of rats during a period at sea when they ran out of food. Yeah, Forester's packing in every detail he can get away with in a tale about the Napoleonic British Navy, including introductory lessons on sailing terms and how ships navigated in the 1700s using only a sextant and the night sky. That's what makes this so memorable, because it's everything and the kitchen sink, not just exciting but thought-provoking and instructive, and so scratches that very specific older male itch that modern authors like Tom Clancy and Michael Crichton do in our own times. That makes it all the more the surprise that it's so relatable and easy to follow as well, and that Forester really squeezes as much as he can out of this milieu by making Hornblower an unusual character on top of everything else, unusually caring and sensitive but who overcompensates by always maintaining a stony arms-length demeanor with his men, ironically celebrated by them for this as an exemplary example of the True British Man. That's beating in the heart of any grandpa nerd who still tears through a book every couple of days like they did when younger, but whose tastes have simply gravitated towards the more traditional, more historical and more conservative as they've gotten older; underneath the fascination with guns and vehicles and other inventions is the heart of a romantic, and this Hornblower novel lets this tech-obsessed military-friendly male reader vicariously see himself in our admirably tender captain, who feels much more deeply for his men than the infamously insular discipline of a naval ship would ever allow him to display publicly. Forester actually wrote five novels in a row depicting Hornblower at the height of his powers, a dashing and wise Jean-Luc Picard type who is never less than brave, honest, even-tempered, and most often the smartest one in the room, which got us in his fictional timeline to July 1815 and Napoleon's final defeat at Waterloo; but public demand for more stories was so vociferous, Forester then turned to Hornblower's early years in the Navy as a bumbling teenager who was constantly making mistakes but still acting with guts and bravery, set way back in the 1790s when Napoleon was still just a military commander and not yet emperor. Those turned out to be equally as popular, so much so that some people now read them in the chronological order of the character, not the order Forester originally wrote them. (Certainly this is what the ITV movie series did, following an adventurous Hornblower in his teens and twenties as he rises from a lowly midshipman [basically a cadet] to eventually the captain of his own warship; star Ioan Gruffudd, who moved to Hollywood at the end of the series to star in the ill-fated "Fantastic Four" movies, has publicly stated in many interviews since that he'd be very enthusiastic about doing a contemporary big-budget adaptation of this first Hornblower adventure now, in that he's currently middle-aged himself and thus naturally ready to take on the part.) Whatever the case, with there being only eleven books in the whole series, I think for sure that I'll be tackling at least one more of them, and I imagine unless they suddenly go horrible that I'll probably be incorporating the rest into my summer reading challenges over the next decade, when I tackle such other summer-friendly beach and airport authors as Lee Child, Jim Butcher, Elin Hilderbrand, Terry Pratchett and more. For now, I very enthusiastically recommend this first book of the series, at least for those of you who also have at least a theoretical interest in Clancy, Crichton, Michener, Grey, L'Amour and others. I'm 53 this year, so I'm just officially old enough now to start unironically embracing the "grandpa-lit" category out there (eat your heart out, chick-lit); and this first Hornblower novel is a super-solid entry in this category, exactly the gift for the silver-haired technothriller fan in your own life. CS Forester "Horatio Hornblower" books being reviewed in this series: Beat to Quarters (1937) | Ship of the Line (1938) | Flying Colours (1939) | Commodore Hornblower (1945) | Lord Hornblower (1946) | Mr. Midshipman Hornblower (1950) | Lieutenant Hornblower (1952) | Hornblower and the Atropos (1953) | Admiral Hornblower in the West Indies (1958) | Hornblower and the Hotspur (1962) | Hornblower During the Crisis (1967) ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Sep 16, 2022
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Sep 16, 2022
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Paperback
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1984881256
| 9781984881250
| 1984881256
| 3.80
| 16,619
| Mar 09, 2021
| Mar 09, 2021
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2021 reads, #8. DID NOT FINISH. Mediocre race-baiting technothriller nonsense. Not so much a "disturbingly plausible" and "chillingly authentic geopol
2021 reads, #8. DID NOT FINISH. Mediocre race-baiting technothriller nonsense. Not so much a "disturbingly plausible" and "chillingly authentic geopolitical thriller" like the dust jacket declares, but more a cartoonishly unrealistic and childishly written war-hawk wet dream, in which an all-ascendent Chinese military ten years from now deliberately triggers a world war by deploying technology so advanced it might as well be magic spells by Hogwarts students. How do you know the Asians are the baddies? Why, their military leader menacingly eats M&Ms on the front porch of the White House right at the 10 percent mark! Ouch, stop hitting me directly on the nose so hard, Ackerman and Stavridis! If you listen closely, you can hear Tom Clancy spinning in his grave, which is perhaps this book's greatest crime, far beyond its attempt to justify its ugly racism -- of insulting the very audience it's supposed to be geared towards. As more informed reviewers at Goodreads have pointed out, this book doesn't get even the first thing right about China's military structure or cultural norms, which is the most obvious sign of the authors' contempt for their readers; say what you will about Clancy, but he at least respected the Soviets enough to make them the kind of smart and rational villain that can truly drive political thrillers like these. Ackerman and Stavridis have no such respect for their own villains, making this book a disappointment to all but the most hardcore Tr*mp-loving, gun-toting xenophobes, just itching for an excuse to shoot up some Asian-Americans and destined to use this plodding, nonsensical novel as their excuse for doing so. ("Dem chin-chins were gonna blow up all our cellphones with their magic lasers, and dem libtards were gonna let 'em! U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!") Avoid at all costs; or better yet, boycott your local bookstore for even carrying it, as well as the now fully fallen and currently morally bankrupt Wired magazine for giving the book all its original hype. Fuck you, Penguin Press; do better than this.
...more
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Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Mar 24, 2021
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Mar 24, 2021
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Hardcover
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0449206521
| 9780449206522
| 0449206521
| 4.04
| 16,458
| 1947
| Sep 12, 1984
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really liked it
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The Jason Pettus 2020 Autumn Reading Challenge (join us!) #4: A Pulitzer Prize winner When I was growing up in the 1970s, seemingly every adult I knew h The Jason Pettus 2020 Autumn Reading Challenge (join us!) #4: A Pulitzer Prize winner When I was growing up in the 1970s, seemingly every adult I knew had at least a couple of James A. Michener's humongous historical-fiction tomes in their bookshelves, and it always made me curious to take some of them on once I got old enough and became a good enough reader to do so; but now that I have gotten old enough, Michener has profoundly fallen out of favor, and in the 2020s I doubt you'll find even one young person out of ten who has even heard of him. That's a shame, I discovered after finally reading my very first book of his, which happens to be the very first book he wrote, 1947's Tales of the South Pacific; because despite the daunting reputation of his books' page counts, this turned out to be one of the more pleasantly readable books I've taken on in the last year, a much more poetic and emotionally moving manuscript than I was expecting from Michener's reputation as "King of the Overlong Exposition." Michener's one and only Pulitzer win of the over 50 books he published, and the source material for the Broadway musical of the same name, this is even more surprising when you realize that he was a simple high-school teacher with no publishing credits in the years leading up to World War Two, and that he only wrote this book in a personal attempt to capture all the crazy stories he witnessed as a Navy journalist during the war (a position he volunteered for because of otherwise being a pacifist Quaker, and a position only given to him because his commanding officers mistakenly thought he was the son of Admiral Marc Mitscher, and therefore needed to be handled with kid gloves). But once you read it, you immediately understand why the wartime Pulitzer committee would consider this irresistible catnip; because much like John Hersey's fellow Pulitzer-winning A Bell for Adano two years previously, Michener's main point here is to show how the benefits of a capitalist democracy like the US provided the exact entrepreneurial skills and "can-do attitude" that allowed the US to be the decisive factor in the Allies winning the war in the first place, a sort of paean to the kinds of quick thinking, solutions on the fly, and dogged persistence that allowed the American military to finally overcome a vastly superior Japanese force, one that already knew the tiny hidden islands of the Pacific Ocean with a kind of intimacy and mastery that the US still hasn't acquired even 80 years later. But what sets this apart from previous wartime books -- and what truly made it so beloved when it first came out -- is that Michener digs down to find the beating heartbeat of humanity that lurks within these stories of battleship maneuvers and bombing raids, excelling at showing just how much downtime there is between battles in war, and the various good, bad, serious and silly ways the soldiers involved deal with these anxious downtimes. And in this, Michener is surprisingly critical of the very soldiers he means to champion, not shying away at all from the acknowledgement that alcoholism was rampant among the US military during the war, that there were many soldiers who used fascism as a convenient excuse to line their own pockets, and that American nurses had to be stationed literally on islands by themselves with no male soldiers in sight, for fear of otherwise being the perpetual victims of sexual assault the entire time they were there. It's the back-and-forth between this idealistic heroism and the sometimes ugly realities of human nature that provides the frisson that makes this book so readable, and it pretty much draws a line in the sand that demarks the way that all military stories were told before it, and the way all such stories were permanently changed after it. Nonetheless, I'm giving it 4 stars instead of 5, mostly as a way of acknowledging that younger readers and especially readers of color will find every single problematic element that's almost always found in books this old; for despite Michener's relatively progressive stance here that "rape is bad," he still loads this manuscript up with so many awkward cultural statements about race and gender as to give heart palpitations to any good Woke. I personally wasn't that particularly bothered by it; but with every passing year, I feel more and more compelled to follow up such statements with an acknowledgement that I'm a 51-year-old straight white male, so of course I wasn't that particularly bothered by it, but that others with different backgrounds than mine will find this a much more troubling book than I did. (And of course, the less said about the musical adaptation's "There's Nothin' Like a Dame," in which Rodgers and Hammerstein make a lighthearted joke about these soldiers' predelection for serially raping any woman who comes within grabbing distance of them [actual lyrics: "We feel as hungry as the wolf felt when he met Red Riding Hood"], the better.) So all in all, like most books of this type, caution and an open mind is required when approaching Tales of the South Pacific here 74 years after its initial publication; but if you're able to do so, you'll find a surprisingly enjoyable, surprisingly sophisticated record of both the highs and lows of the so-called "Greatest Generation," and I have to admit that this did nothing but even further solidify my interest in reading yet more by Michener. (For those who don't know, by the '70s Michener had become much more famous for outputting enormous 1,500-page novels every few years about such specific subjects as the history of Poland, the founding of Judaism, and the establishment of America's space program, gaining accolades worldwide for his meticulous research and even-handed overviews; so there's a big part of me that feels like I haven't "truly experienced" Michener until I take on at least one of these.) That probably won't be coming until another year from now, though, so I hope you'll join me again in late autumn 2021 for that! ...more |
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0300190379
| 9780300190373
| B071PBGSS5
| 3.73
| 595
| Jun 2017
| Aug 11, 2020
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really liked it
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I have to admit that I didn't actually finish this book, even though I enjoyed the parts I read; and that's because, even though the book deals with t
I have to admit that I didn't actually finish this book, even though I enjoyed the parts I read; and that's because, even though the book deals with the ultra-fascinating subject of the Nazi Party and their obsession with the occult, looking not just at the war years but at everything in the entire German culture from the Victorian Age until the '30s that led to this kind of obsession, the book itself is actually written in the dry, reference-filled style of an academic dissertation, and I could only take about a hundred pages of that before the tedium finally got the best of me. Worth picking up just for the look at the events that led to the rise of the Nazis in the first place, but you'll need a bigger tolerance for academic writing than me if you expect to get all the way through it.
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0306823810
| 9780306823817
| 0306823810
| 4.20
| 106
| Oct 13, 2015
| Oct 13, 2015
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it was amazing
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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) Most of us know Winston Churchill as the rotund, elderly leader of Great Britain during the tumultuous years of World War Two; but this remarkable man had a long and varied career before that, including being a war correspondent at the end of the Victorian Age who reported from such far-flung battlefields as Cuba, India, Egypt, Afghanistan and South Africa. As historian Simon Read points out in his new book Winston Churchill Reporting, there's never been a full-length book this entire time that's been devoted just to this part of Churchill's life alone; and that's too bad, because as Read's lively, action-packed account shows, the twenty-something Churchill led a life in the late 1800s worthy of an Indiana Jones adventure, getting into the kinds of scrapes and charging through the middle of the kinds of massive battles that would be scarcely believable if it all wasn't so heavily documented by multiple sources. The son of an aristocrat, the young Churchill was actually in the British army himself in those years, although assigned to one of those largely ceremonial divisions like so many other members of the aristocracy were back then (his regiment was mostly only known for being international polo champions); but seeking fame, glory and adventure, he essentially (with the aid of his blue-blood mother) begged anyone who would listen to send him out where the actual action was, eventually realizing that he could put his writing skills from school to good use and become a free-floating war correspondent, able to be assigned willy-nilly to whatever British Empire hotspots happened to be seeing the most fighting on any given year, and happily joining in the fighting while there himself. This led Churchill through a whole series of adventures, not least of which was getting captured as a prisoner during the Second Boer War in South Africa, then actually escaping his POW camp by trekking across enemy territory for three days and eventually hiding in a mine, and somehow managing to telegraph updates on his own escape to the British newspapers in real time through the help of British sympathizers (a fact that blew me away when reading about it here), turning him instantly into a national celebrity back home and providing the kick that let him finally win his first election to public office, an event that he built and built upon until eventually becoming Prime Minister forty years later. Read conveys it all through the unusual style of an action novel instead of the usual academic history book, a gutsy move that could've badly backfired on him; but in this case it works perfectly, in that there is just such an overwhelming amount of recorded evidence still around about Churchill's very personal thoughts and opinions about this period of his life, allowing Read to portray him like a swashbuckling hero with conflicted inner thoughts about warfare precisely because Churchill actually was a swashbuckling hero with conflicted inner thoughts about warfare. A lively and incredibly fast-paced book, this will be a revelation to people like me who only knew Churchill as the balding, stogie-chewing curmudgeon of 1940s fame, and it comes strongly recommended to the general public. Out of 10: 9.5 ...more |
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1939987245
| 9781939987242
| 1939987245
| 3.33
| 6
| Oct 27, 2014
| Oct 27, 2014
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it was amazing
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[DISCLOSURE: I am the owner of the publishing company that published this book.] This is the latest by my publishing company, a deep character study ab [DISCLOSURE: I am the owner of the publishing company that published this book.] This is the latest by my publishing company, a deep character study about a British blue-collar slacker and the terrible messes he gets himself into while visiting Afghanistan in the middle of the "War on Terror." Dark and dense, like a Graham Greene novel, and I hope you'll have a chance to check it out at [cclapcenter.com/thewoundingtime], especially given that the ebook version is completely free if you choose. Would love to see your comments about it here at Goodreads! ...more |
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Oct 17, 2014
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B0DWTVNDZ9
| 3.68
| 41
| May 01, 2013
| Oct 2013
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liked it
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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) The unique and intriguing premise of Paul J. Bartusiak's new novel -- that the US military decides for the first time in its history to design a vehicle through open "crowdsourced" input from the general public -- ensures that this book is at least a little better than the typical Tom-Clancy-ripoff technothriller; but make no mistake, this is still a Tom-Clancy-ripoff technothriller, even down to the central event propelling its plot being almost exactly the same as The Hunt for Red October. (In a nutshell, a Russian uses the contest in an attempt to pass along military secrets while defecting, but passes along the secrets in a sly way that most of the Americans don't catch onto, except for one brilliant analyst withering away at a desk job within the defense department.) Featuring nearly every cliché ever even invented in the military technothriller genre -- from the world-weary top brass to the sexy but tough-as-nails female scientist, the crude and jokey junior agents and a lot more -- this will try the patience of most general audience members, although I suspect that this will go down just fine with hardcore technothriller fans who burn through a novel like this every week. It comes with a limited recommendation today, only to such fans. Out of 10: 7.1 ...more |
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ebook
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0140449337
| 9780140449334
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| 4.28
| 322,997
| 180
| Apr 27, 2006
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liked it
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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) The CCLaP 100: In which I read for the first time a hundred so-called literary "classics," then write reports on whether or not they deserve the label Essay #67: Meditations (160-180 AD), by Marcus Aurelius The story in a nutshell: Written essentially as a private journal from around 160 to 180 AD, by one of the better leaders in the history of the Roman Empire, Marcus Aurelius' Meditations (a title given to this manuscript almost randomly, in that Marcus never meant for it to be published) can be thought of along the lines of any great military strategist's memoirs, a combination of practical information, an explanation of their larger philosophy about life (Stoicism in Marcus' case), and official acknowledgement of all the mentors of their youth they owe their success to. A working soldier-emperor who was handpicked by the previous Caesar when he was just a child, the upper-class Marcus was subsequently put through the finest education that was humanly possible on the planet at that time, which is what makes his otherwise workaday journal so historically important; for by studying under the finest minds of his age, his surviving notes give us a rare look at what it was like to be a student of these masters, and what kinds of practical knowledge was actually being culled by these students when it came time for them to start their day jobs. Not really "literature" per se, nor even in any kind of coherent order, this should be read much more like one of those punchy advice books from famous corporate CEOs, full of bullet-point Twitter-like messages that can be quickly scanned and absorbed. The argument for it being a classic: As with most books this old, the main argument for this being a classic is its massive historical importance, a hugely informing snapshot of its times that is even more valuable for being private and therefore more candid. Plus, historians generally agree that this is perhaps the third or fourth most important book about Stoicism to survive those years; certainly not groundbreaking in its own right, but definitely an easy-to-follow primer on the subject (think "The Ancient Roman Idiot's Guide To…"), a philosophy which for those who don't know advocates a type of "living as one with nature" that is translated here as meaning a clean and minimalist lifestyle, one that largely avoids empty pleasures for the crippling vices they are. (After all, as Marcus reminds us, the only way your enemies can hurt you is by you yourself deliberately cultivating a weakness they can exploit; if you instead lead a virtuous life devoid of physical addictions and moral compromises, there's no way for these people to attack you for being weak or hypocritical.) And so by doing so, Marcus almost accidentally established a long and proud tradition of Stoicism among the military, the third main argument for why this is a classic, a "body is a temple" mindset that is still the main guiding force behind even such 21st-century military commanders as David Petraeus. The argument against: There seems to be two main arguments for why this should not be considered a classic, starting with the most obvious; that much like many of the books from this period being reviewed for this essay series, its age and outdated writing style simply makes it an awkward choice for everyday reading by a general audience, certainly historically important but with information that can now be found in modern books in a much more nuanced and contemporary way. And then there's the people who are simply in disagreement with the fundamentals of Stoicism itself, a sort of "philosophy for Republicans" that encourages a simplistic, joyless, black-and-white interpretation of the world, and which while not necessarily harsh unto itself is absolutely practiced in a harsh way by its most famous and vocal fans; for example, famed modern moral relativist Bertrand Russell thought that Stoicism was a big pile of hogwash, a "sour grapes" view of the world that argues that none of us will ever be happy, so we should pretend instead that "acting good" is just as important. My verdict: So setting aside the argument that a book should automatically be disqualified from being a classic simply because one doesn't personally agree with its philosophy (an argument I find inherently invalid no matter what the situation), otherwise I have to admit that I mostly side with Marcus' critics today; for while I found it interesting to flip through this light tome, or at least as interesting as one of those aforementioned bullet-point advice books from famous corporate executives, I also got tired of this manuscript rather quickly, and didn't really get much out of reading the original text that I didn't already get merely from its Wikipedia entry. (And also, I have to agree with several of the angry sentiments I found at Goodreads while researching this essay; that even though there are over 200 meditations here, it seems that Marcus really had no more than a dozen or so original thoughts, the rest of these text blasts essentially repeats of the same information over and over again.) In fact, now that I have recently reached the two-thirds point of finally being done with this CCLaP 100 series (four and a half years down! only two years to go!), I find myself once again reflecting on what the biggest surprises have been since starting these essays back in 2008; and certainly one of the most unexpected surprises of all is just how thoroughly and cleanly the entire idea of "literature" (and by this I mean "storytelling via book-length written tale") was single-handedly invented during the rise of Romanticism in the late 1700s, and how before this moment there were largely no book-length written stories at all (with a few exceptions, of course), most storytelling instead taking place via plays and formal poetry. I've always known that when these pre-1700s citizens wanted to "sit down with a good book," it was generally nonfiction they were picking up; but it wasn't until I started reading a fair sampling of this pre-1700s "literature" that I started profoundly realizing how little this work conforms to the modern definition of the word, and that the very concept never even existed until well after the Renaissance. Although it's been a valuable learning experience, it can be safely said that when it eventually comes time in another few years to compile the reading list for the "CCLaP 200," I will most likely be starting with 1719's Robinson Crusoe and exclusively making my way forward in time from there. Is it a classic? No (And don't forget that the first 33 essays in this series are now available in book form!) ...more |
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Jul 18, 2012
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0394756959
| 9780394756950
| 0394756959
| 3.98
| 8,841
| Jun 27, 1944
| Mar 12, 1988
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it was amazing
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(As of July 2012, I am selling a first-edition copy of this book through the rare-book service at my arts organization, the Chicago Center for Literat
(As of July 2012, I am selling a first-edition copy of this book through the rare-book service at my arts organization, the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com/rarebooks]. Here below is the description I wrote for its listing.) Written in the middle of World War Two and the winner of the 1945 Pulitzer Prize, this was just one of the many high points of the fascinating John Hersey's life, over the course of a long and eventful career. A missionary brat who learned to speak Chinese before he could speak English, he was eventually a Yale football star and once a private secretary to Sinclair Lewis, experiences which made him almost perfect to be a TIME magazine correspondent in Asia as well as Europe during the war, where among other heroics he survived four plane crashes and was commended by the Navy for evacuating freaking soldiers in Guadalcanal. He was most known in his own lifetime for the groundbreaking, hauntingly poetic reporting he did from the aftermath of Hiroshima, eventually assembled into an entire standalone issue of The New Yorker that officially kicked off both the term and era of "New Journalism," a public sensation (once read out loud by ABC Radio over two hours because the printers literally couldn't keep up with demand) that led directly to the first successes of other storytelling journalists like Truman Capote, Norman Mailer and Hunter S. Thompson a decade later. (Interestingly, New Yorker founder Harold Ross once called the publication of the Hiroshima issue the happiest moment of his professional life, while the event ruined Hersey's relationship with TIME co-founder Henry Luce, who felt that he should've offered it to sister publication Life magazine first*.) But before all that, though, was his first novel, 1944's A Bell for Adano, a thin fictionalization of an actual situation he stumbled across as a war correspondent during America's liberation of Italy. Set in one of the tiny Medieval fishing villages that dot the southern Italian coast, crucial as launching and resupply posts for the inward-bound Americans during the invasion, the book largely follows the fate of one Major Victor Joppolo, back home an Italian-American sanitation-department clerk in the Bronx but here the "temporary mayor" of Adano, essentially the mid-level officer in charge of such medium-term goals as rounding up all the remaining fugitive Fascists, replacing draconian local officials, getting the local judges and police working again, re-establishing infrastructure, food distribution, open commerce, etc. And that's essentially what the story is -- a charmingly slow-paced look at Joppolo's work in this chick-lit-worthy, impossibly magical little Mediterranean town, Hersey's point being to show people back home how the natural "get 'er done" resourcefulness of the average American, combined with the democratic freedoms that so many of us were dying for at that point in the war, repeated over and over in thousands of little situations like this one, was the key to the slow turn in tide that was happening in the war right around this time period. Although certainly "rah-rah U-S-A" in tone throughout, the obvious explanation for its Pulitzer win a year later, popular Broadway adaptation a year after that, and popular Hollywood movie a year after that, the book definitely has its fair share of darkness as well, moral ambiguity over how the town should even start approaching the job of punishing next-door-neighbors for being on the losing side of the war, and plenty of self-critical comments about the lousiness of some Americans over there; see for example the blustery "General Marvin," plainly modeled after real war hero General Patton but here presented as the story's main villain. An amazing start to an amazing career, and a war novel admired by both troops and citizens of the time, its low price here makes it a perfect acquisition for Hersey fans, WW2 buffs, and those compiling a collection of Pulitzer-winning first editions. *Oh, and yet more fascinating trivia about Hersey, a man who's been sadly forgotten by the culture at large and deserves to be re-discovered: he once won the National Jewish Book Award despite not being Jewish; a critical essay on the dullness of grammar school literary samplers directly inspired Dr. Seuss to write The Cat in the Hat; and in the late '60s Hersey became a passionate champion of anti-war protestors, the Black Panthers and other countercultural movements, all while serving as a Yale dean, owner of the school's bulldog mascot, and overseer of the campus's antique letterpress program. Wow! ...more |
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Jul 05, 2012
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1609768442
| 9781609768447
| B00439GK80
| 4.06
| 31
| May 13, 2010
| unknown
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it was ok
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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of C
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) I spent a long time contemplating what to say about Mike Saxton's literary debut, 7 Scorpions: Rebellion, volume one of a coming science-fiction action-thriller trilogy; because while it's obvious that Saxton has put in quite a lot of time and effort with this title, and probably quite a financial commitment too, it's hard to say anything else about it besides that it's pretty terrible, less a finished genre novel for adults and more a profoundly hackneyed collection of violent apocalyptic-lit cliches designed for the "juggalo" end of the teenage-boy spectrum. (I mean, what can you say about a book that sees right on page one the meteoric rise of an unstoppable laser-wielding supervillain, dressed in spike-covered armor and named after a '70s serial killer? That's page freaking one, people.) But then, this may be the saving grace of such a book too -- because I'm sincere when I say that it will legitimately appeal to videogame-playing 14-year-olds, and there are far worse things in the world than to write a story that appeals to such a group, especially given that I used to be a violent little videogame-playing teenage boy myself. It would certainly be possible to print up, say, 500 copies of such a title, market it wisely, do a lot of live events tied into sci-fi and gaming conventions, and be able to make a tidy little profit by the end, all while getting the book into the hands of people who will legitimately love it; and while I can't in good conscience recommend this novel to intelligent grown-ups, I also wouldn't want to stand in the way of Saxton doing something exactly like what I just described, a plan that won't get anyone rich but that would certainly justify the book's existence, in the face of those who are undoubtedly tempted to make vicious fun of it. It's in that spirit that I recommend this today to the "Grand Theft Auto" playing teenage boy in your own life. Out of 10: 5.9, or 7.4 for violent teenage boys ...more |
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Dec 13, 2010
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Dec 13, 2010
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Kindle Edition
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0449213943
| 9780449213940
| B00EJ3APSG
| 4.10
| 506,452
| 1928
| Jan 01, 1987
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it was amazing
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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.) The CCLaP 100: In which I read for the first time a hundred so-called "classics," then write reports on whether or not they deserve the label Essay #47: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), by Erich Maria Remarque The story in a nutshell: Originally published serially the year before, Erich Maria Remarque's 1929 All Quiet on the Western Front concerns the events of World War One a decade previous, and in particular the insanely long battlefront running almost the entire length of western Europe that the war became most known for, in which both sides lined up millions of soldiers along an unmoving border that stretched literally from The argument for it being a classic: Well, as mentioned, according to its fans, there's a pretty simple argument for why this book should be considered a classic; it's demonstrably the very first novel to establish so many of the tropes now found in almost all modern creative projects concerning war, including not only the examples already mentioned but also the older rah-rah schoolmaster who gets all the boys whipped up for combat in the first place, and the concept of a returning soldier finding it almost impossible to reconnect with his old life once getting home from active duty. Plus the book has a strong connection to both Hollywood's past and future, with the 1930 adaptation being the very first non-musical "talkie" to ever win the Best Picture Oscar, and with a brand-new big-budget adaptation in the works as we speak, starring Daniel "Harry Potter" Ratcliffe; plus it's an important landmark of the Early Modernist arts as well, say its fans, the book that inspired the term "Lost Generation" through Baumer's remarkable monologue about halfway through, on how he and all his school buddies left for the war as naive children who thought they understood the way the world worked, but were returning as scarred adults who have lost the ability to understand how polite society even works, shades of the Tropic of Cancer "Jazz Age" times just around the corner. And then there's the fact that the Nazis were so threatened by this book, it was one of the first they banned after gaining power in the 1930s, even going so far as to cut off Remarque's sister's head in retribution for Remarque himself successfully escaping to America; and if the Nazis hated it this much, there's gotta be something to it almost by default, right? The argument against: Not much, to tell you the truth; although like most books that are considered classics, you find a fair share of people online complaining about being forced to read this in high school under unpleasant circumstances, which pretty much ruined whatever chance they had to enjoy it. But that's not really a complaint about the book so much as it is about their old high-school lit teacher, so am not sure how appropriate it really is. My verdict: As regular readers know, after three years we're finally approaching the halfway point of the CCLaP 100, at which point I plan on writing a long essay about everything I've now learned from the process, including a series of lists such as the titles I've been most enjoyably surprised by; and All Quiet on the Western Front definitely earns a spot on such a list, a shockingly powerful book to this day which is not exactly the anti-war screed its fans claim it is, but rather becomes one by default for so unflinchingly detailing the random, utterly unglamorous brutality that comes with war. And indeed, this was one of the many surprises I had with this novel, was learning just how many military veterans love it themselves, precisely for being one of the most realistic depictions of life along an actual battlefront ever written, which when combined with its poetic Modernist elements makes it still such an affecting winner, even 81 years after its original publication. (And for an excellent example of the "poetic Modernist elements" I'm talking about, see the whole section near the end where Baumer gets caught in an enemy foxhole during an artillery attack, is forced to kill a French soldier at close range, then is stuck with the corpse in the hole for four straight days without food, which drives him so insane that he starts holding conversations with the dead man and promising to deliver his personal effects to his widow after the war is over, a temporary insanity that he quickly comes out of again once being reunited with his buddies. If that isn't one of the most effectively bizarre war anecdotes ever written, I don't know what is.) Although not exactly a textbook example of Early Modernism when it comes to style, and in fact displaying at points more of an affinity for the now-hated Genteel literature of the same period ("Ah! Mother, Mother! How can it be that I must part from you? Here I sit and there you are lying"...sheesh), this is very much a touchstone of Modernism in terms of expanding the scope of what was allowed to be discussed in "polite company," and it's hard to imagine how we would even have such modern classics as Saving Private Ryan and the like without this trailblazer paving the way. It's not only an undeniable classic, but will probably end up as one of my ten personal favorites of the entire series once it's all over, and it comes strongly recommended today for just about everyone out there. Is it a classic? Yes (And don't forget that the first 33 essays in this series are now available in book form!) ...more |
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Aug 26, 2010
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Aug 11, 2010
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Mass Market Paperback
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B004TVXZ3K
| 3.95
| 552,420
| -500
| Jan 01, 2005
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really liked it
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(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally here.) The CCLaP 100: In which I read for the first time a hundred so-called "classics," then write essays on whether or not they deserve the label. The Art of War is essay #27 of this series. The story in a nutshell: More of a technical manual than a piece of general literature, The Art of War is a field guide of sorts by famed Chinese military leader Sun Tzu, written it's believed sometime in the 6th century BC (during the period when China was coming together as a unified empire for the first time in history), as a way of instructing other commanders how to have as much success on the battlefield as he had had. (And please know that there's a debate among scholars as well regarding whether Sun Tzu even wrote this book by himself, or if like many other classics from antiquity this isn't in fact a sly compilation, gathering up the best thoughts back then from amongst a whole group of military strategists.) Now of course let's not forget that Sun Tzu was a Taoist as well, so of course his particular advice is going to be Taoist in nature, a very important thing to understand in order to really "get" this book; he sees the best war, for example, as the one that's never actually fought, because you've already dismantled the enemy's forces through sabotage and cunning to the point where they can't put up a resistance in the first place. And so it is throughout this extremely slim book (which in fact is more like a long magazine article) -- chapter after chapter of surprisingly spiritual text concerning the fine art of getting what you want, even when other people are actively trying to stop you from doing so. The argument for it being a classic: It's a 2,500-year-old book still being read and studied on a daily basis, argue its fans; what more do you want? And in the meanwhile, it's influenced nearly every Western military leader since first being translated into a Romantic language (French) in 1782, racking up a whole list of self-declared admirers from Napoleon to Norman Schwarzkopf. And if this weren't enough, starting in the 1980s it also gained a whole new life as a surprisingly apt if not Machiavellian guide to the corporate business world, best typified by symbol-of-yuppie-greed Gordon Gekko from Oliver Stone's fantastic movie Wall Street, who is constantly walking around quoting from it as a way to justify his monstrous, inhuman actions. If all of this isn't enough to safely consider a book a classic, ask its fans, what is? The argument against: The case against this being a classic seems to be one used a lot with books over a thousand years old; that even if that book turns out to be historically important (and it usually does), it might be better at this point to actually study the book and how it affected society, not read the book itself for pleasure anymore. Always remember, that's part of how I'm defining "classic" here in this CCLaP 100 series, is not just how important that title has been to human history, but also whether it's worth literally sitting down and reading it page-for-page yourself, no matter if you have any specific interest in that book's subject or not. If it's yes on the former but no on the latter, as critics of this book claim, then by my definition it's not a classic, but rather simply a historically important book that should be studied by the general public but not necessarily read. My verdict: So let me start by admitting how surprisingly readable this is for being 2,500 years old, and that it really does translate metaphorically to the business world surprisingly elegantly; after all, since it's a guide to war written by a Taoist, it's more of a symbolic examination of how to get out of life what you want the most, even in the face of tough opposition, with advice that is surprisingly relevant to the modern world even when he's talking about the mechanics of medieval Asian warfare. (Just for one example, near the beginning he talks in one paragraph about how a successful commander will literally steal the food of their enemy, both to sap the enemy's strength and to avoid the burden of having to carry all that food to battle themselves; this may not seem to have much relevance to the modern business world at first, until you stop and think about it in terms of stealing talent from your competitors, literally the intellectual "food" nourishing their "army" of goods and services competing against your own.) That said, though, I think ultimately I'm going to have to side with the critics this time; that unless you're a military commander or corporate raider yourself, most people's eyes are going to quickly gloss over while trying to read this book, merely after the first few pages. Now, don't get me wrong, I definitely think this should be a primer for people who are getting into the profession themselves; this should for sure be a must-read not only for soldiers, for example, but also the politicians in charge of those soldiers' budgets. But this is a perfect example of the surprisingly complicated process of determining whether a book is a classic or not, the entire reason I started this essay series in the first place; because unless competitive strategy actually is your business, most people will find it more rewarding to spend their time reading up on how this book has affected history, and of the circumstances in ancient China that led to it getting written in the first place. There's really only one major lesson in The Art of War for a non-military general audience to get -- that most battles are won based on how well one can surprise the enemy, usually by deceiving them using their own weaknesses (to act incompetent when the enemy is haughty, for example, threatening when they're meek, picking them off at the edges when they outnumber you, destroying their supply lines when they're far from home); for those not interested in the nitty-gritty of how to actually accomplish such things, though, there's actually a lot more to be learned by studying how such a thing has been attempted over the centuries, making the book certainly important but not necessarily a classic. Is it a classic? No ...more |
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1569714029
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| Dec 28, 1999
| Dec 28, 1999
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