The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914 by Barbara W. Tuchman
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I recall thinking Guns of August was a great book when I read it decades ago though. The golden years before WW1 were an incredibly interesting time. So when I found this one on a free shelf I grabbed it. What a disappointment. This book is basically Barbara Tuchman vomiting her research notes into a book. Enormous numbers of facts, figures, characters and events from the time period, but nothing to engage the reader whatsoever. If you insist on reading it, I would select certain chapters that may be of interest to you. IF you are into music, the chapter on Strauss and the arts scene at the time might engage. If you are into revolution, the chapter on socialists and anarchists will be of interest. As a whole though, the book fails to draw any of the chapters together in any way whatsoever, and is simply long and boring if read cover to cover.

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On the Road North of Boston: New Hampshire Taverns and Turnpikes, 1700-1900 by Donna-Belle Garvin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read a version of this book with two authors (Donna and James Garvin) and a different cover design. This is a very thorough and we'll illustrated account of New Hampshire roads taverns and travelers, though more of a reference book than a page turner. A few interesting characters appear such as the thief and womanizer Henry Tufts who published an autobiography of his nefarious exploits in 1807. The book contains lots of rich local detail on the early roads of NH, which is what I was specifically researching. Conclusion: The development of River Road in Lyme, where I live, was funded by a decision of the public legislature of the colony in 1752 as part of a larger project connecting Fort number 4 (south of Claremont) and the rich farmland of Coos county. I find it interesting that Boston Mass, not Portsmouth NH, has for centuries been the major port and mercantile city for NH commerce, because it has been more easily accessible than NH's coast for centuries, by river, then road, then railroad, then interstate highway because the local geography simply makes east west travel more onerous than north south.

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Deacon King Kong by James McBride
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I suppose I must be pretty late to the party having just discovered James McBride, since there is a long list of his previous heralded novels on the first page. I read this book because it was number 2 on the NY Times 'best books of 2020' list. Number one, which I read first, was quite a disappointment (see my last review), but I'm glad i persevered! This book is wonderfully written and a real pleasure to read. I finished it in a couple days. The prose is a bit like the old potboiler dick tracy gumshoe writing style, and the story is packed with wonderfully rich characters. It is a bit of over the top with the racialization - all the characters are initially and primarily characterized as being 'irish' or 'brown' (including southerners) or 'eye-talian', followed with some pretty trite prejudicial sounding description of this characterization. I guess this was pretty standard though, in the 1960's, in NY, when the story takes place.

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A Children's Bible by Lydia Millet
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I read this book based on the intriguing sounding review it received in the number one slot on the NY Times list of the 'best books' of 2020. Fake News NY Times! If you want to read about a apocalyptic dystopia try 'The Road' by Cormac McCarthy. If you want to read about children living amongst themselves without adults try 'The Lord of the Flies' by William Golding. And finally, for literary biblical allusions, I'd suggest 'East of Eden' by John Steinbeck. This book tried all three. It's main saving grace is that it is quite short, so I was able to finish it in a few hours. Had it been longer, I would have had to score this one a 'did not finish'.

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The Splendid and the Vile

The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz by Erik Larson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I read this book on my cell phone in Japan using an interlibrary loan in my home state of New Hampshire, in the US. Interestingly, the book's main resolving chord was the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, which lead a tit for tat set of war declarations culminating in Roosevelt declaring war on Germany. This was the act which Churchill had been muttering about, making impassioned speeches for, and lobbying various American visitors dining at his country houses for, for the bulk of the book. I originally thought 'Splendid and Vile' would mean that we would read about Churchill at his best and worst in the book, but this was not the case. THere is nothing vile to see in anything about Churchill, only splendiferousness. The reference is to a journal entry where another character looks out on gleaming airplanes in the beautiful moonlit night lit below by bombs and fires and declares the scene to be splendidly beautiful, and yet at the same time evidence of the degree of vileness to which humans can fall. I was reminded a bit of the contrast between the beautiful and artistic rendition of evil flying war machines in Studio Gibli movies. The book draws mostly on journals and portrays the real life vicissitudes of the characters that wrote them, during one of the most splendid, and indeed vile, moments in human history, during the blitzkrieg from 1939-41 in London.



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The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I saw the movie on an airplane. At the time, I had no idea it was a book - just thought the title looked interesting so I watched it. Of course, watching a Hollywood rendition in advance of reading a book is always a mistake. In this case, for example, I knew the eventual happy hollywood ending right from the get go. I don't think I've ever read a fully epistolary novel before (eg. I have not yet read Les Liaisons Dangereuses). Some of these letters were absurdly short (eg a single sentence, or even a single word), which made them seem like they might be telegrams. But later in the book some telegrams did appear and were indicated by 'stop' where periods go, so maybe not? To bring about the hollywood ending the author did switch to someone's journal rather than letters, just at the very end. Mechanics aside, the setting was very interesting (Guernsey) and the characters were nicely developed. A nicely constructed and appealing window into small town dynamics rent asunder by wartime atrocities.



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One Piece

One Piece, Volume 1: Romance Dawn by Eiichiro Oda

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


We have volumes 1-3 sitting in the house from when our kids were younger. I picked up volume 1, and found it fairly good, especially as our version is in French. It is interesting how difficult it is to say 'punch' in French (donner un coup de poing). Since this word comes up fairly frequently, it must have meant they needed to shrink the font size considerably to fit the text in the bubbles. The art is confusing at times, with strange perspectives that you could not get with a camera and usually don't see. I guess that is part of the appeal of anime.



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Peter the Great

Peter the Great: His Life and World by Robert K. Massie
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This was quite a thick biography about someone I was totally ignorant of (other than his famous name), so I started in on it with both low expectations and quite some trepidation. It was Great. Like Peter. It read like an adventure novel - quests, foreign wars, defense of the motherland, parties and royal intrigues. Peter opened Russia to European technology and culture much the same way that the Meiji Restoration (明治維新) opened Japan. He established Saint Petersburg as his capital, building it from nothing in the Neva Delta swamp, and brought Russia into the Maritime age with a new, mostly ice free port on the Baltic. Just as Japan managed a few centuries later, Russia learned quickly once Peter forced it to open up and adopt Western ways, and rapidly exerted itself as a military power.


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United Nations Resolve

This week I was wished Happy UN Day by many colleagues. Some navel gazing about the day follows.

The United Nations officially came into existence on 24 October 1945.

In 1948, the General Assembly declared 24 October to be "devoted to making known to the people of the world the aims and achievements of the United Nations and to gaining their support for" its work. In 1971, the same body adopted Resolution 2782 declaring that United Nations Day shall be an international observance or international holiday and recommended that it should be observed as a public holiday by United Nations member states.

It may seem a bit introspective and self serving for an institution to go about declaring its own day (twice). Of course it was not the UN secretariat that took these decisions. It was the Member States. This begs the question, given Member States took this 1971 resolution with the above recommendation, how many countries have followed up their own resolved recommendation and actually observe it as a public holiday? I am tempted to guess the answer is zero. The UN Secretariat does not even include UN day in our list of 10 annual holidays (so we also ignore the recommendation it seems). If someone knows of a country that celebrates UN Day as a public holiday please post it in a comment on this blog. Of course setting holidays is hardly a world altering issue. It doesn't really matter if countries celebrate this day or not. But why resolve this if it doesn't really matter or if you have no intention of following through with your own recommendation, or both?

This underscores a real difficulty with recommendations in UN resolutions in general. Member states declare their mutual resolve in various venues, including the General Assembly, but the resolve too often ends in the UN chamber, and fails to result in sufficient action on the ground. How to improve the efficacy? Fewer resolution creating bodies and fewer resolutions in each of them would perhaps be a good start. Perhaps consider eschewing recommendation paragraphs altogether, and restrict the operative text of resolutions to statements of agreed mutual action. Some other document called a "Recommendation' could be adopted rather than 'resolution' for those.  Maybe pass a resolution to take fewer, more meaningful resolutions? LOL.

Happy UN Day everyone.

The China Lover by Ian Buruma
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The wonderful thing about this book is the intricate and erudite knowledge of the period. The knowledge and opinion of the author comes out strongly in each of the three protagonists. Indeed, because of this, they all sound the same in the end. The fact that they are all interested in frequent meaningless sex and not romantic relationships is another common feature. The author's commentary on Japanese society and recent history spoken through these three characters is interesting and illuminating. This said, as either a fictionalized quasi-biography of Yamaguchi, or a novel, both of which it the book seems to wish to be, it does not really work. I gained little insight into Yamaguchi, other than some trivial things like where she was located and what she was employed doing at various phases in her life, and that the author feels she was a bit vapid, but attractive, ambitious and lucky. Calling this a novel is the real problem. The three segments don't fit together at all. There are some tantalizing possible connecting threads but they fizzle out in strange ways (sato san, the 'I' from part one reappearing in part 2 only to be eaten by a dog immediately, Vandoever the 'I' from part two reappearing in part three, only to be strangely nonexistent in Yamaguchi's memory). Towards the end it gets quite tedious to read, as by then you are aware that it is not a novel. That the stories and insights, do not link together, and just sort of peter out rather than ending in a way to leave the reader with any kind of overall insight or question.


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