tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6933760054360070122024-03-18T10:49:27.237-05:00Old Books by Dead GuysSpoiler-free reviews of classic literature (and whatever else I happen to be reading)Karl Janssenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16133816726897297775noreply@blogger.comBlogger1423125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-693376005436007012.post-87394961111307260092024-03-18T05:30:00.006-05:002024-03-18T09:38:13.700-05:00Star Trek Memories by William Shatner with Chris Kreski<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-iGEbUYe9MCA/TcRrfQ0Kz_I/AAAAAAAABf0/3aqwoTPnzmMy8t72-TDPgdVlFebPY-vngCPcBGAYYCw/s1600/4stars.gif" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-right: 0px;"><img border="0" data-original-height="17" data-original-width="106" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-iGEbUYe9MCA/TcRrfQ0Kz_I/AAAAAAAABf0/3aqwoTPnzmMy8t72-TDPgdVlFebPY-vngCPcBGAYYCw/s1600/4stars.gif" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>More of a TV production history than a personal memoir</b></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span><i><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoGPjLqLTKZx445eFxR6hN773dfXCDPtjz2UlMd5HDbXTtbFYvd5IgYEYnROujGmtXSXmurr3EfIgXwpYdMBfCByIqfuxNh2SlpGwubdV3YEJ2hurvMiCL5jKTOIPrHuALv1zQTOEH9lyK8VCEdXvqvopnGH8kx2k2LuRxjPCLKjC_E8X850jvHNUsBiAf/s220/shatnerstartrekmemories2.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="220" data-original-width="144" height="220" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoGPjLqLTKZx445eFxR6hN773dfXCDPtjz2UlMd5HDbXTtbFYvd5IgYEYnROujGmtXSXmurr3EfIgXwpYdMBfCByIqfuxNh2SlpGwubdV3YEJ2hurvMiCL5jKTOIPrHuALv1zQTOEH9lyK8VCEdXvqvopnGH8kx2k2LuRxjPCLKjC_E8X850jvHNUsBiAf/s1600/shatnerstartrekmemories2.jpg" width="144" /></a></div>Star Trek Memories</i> was published in 1993, after the completion of the sixth <i>Star Trek</i> motion picture, the last to focus exclusively on the original <i>Star Trek</i> cast. Seeing his career as Captain Kirk coming to an end, Shatner felt inclined to wax nostalgic by publishing his recollections of the making of the original <i>Star Trek</i> television series. A sequel published the following year, <i>Star Trek Movie Memories</i>, covers the making of the film franchise. I’m not a Trekkie who obsesses over all the trivia on each episode, but I do enjoy the show, and I like Shatner.
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</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span><span><span><span><br /></span><span><i>Star Trek Memories</i> is packaged like a Shatner memoir, but that’s not really what it is. This is a behind-the-scenes history of the production of the first <i>Star Trek</i> television series. It begins with Gene Roddenberry’s childhood, and ends in 1968 with <i>Star Trek</i>’s cancellation after three seasons. Shatner doesn’t even get involved with the series until a quarter of the way through the book. Although there are plenty of first-person interjections, this doesn’t really read like it was written in Shatner’s voice. One suspects coauthor Chris Kreski had a heavy hand in this. If you are expecting a lot of secrets and gossip about the cast of the show, you’re not going to find much here. The crew actually gets more coverage than the cast. You learn more about the set decorator and the script editor than you do about any of the actors, with the exception of Leonard Nimoy. He gets a fair amount of ink, even more than Shatner himself. The rest of the cast members pretty much get one good anecdote each. There are several tales of practical jokes among the cast and crew that strike the reader as being surprisingly unfunny, and in some cases just mean.
</span></span></span></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span>The refreshing thing about this TV memoir is that it’s not just a relentlessly positive lovefest for the show or a pat-on-the-back “look what we accomplished” story. There is a surprising amount of negative criticism of the show and the people involved with it, including some directed towards Shatner himself. It is forthrightly acknowledged that while some of the <i>Star Trek</i> episodes are masterpieces, quite a few are terrible schlock. The book recounts the constant struggles between the <i>Star Trek</i> production team and its parent studio, who demanded that this ambitious science fiction program be made under a paltry budget. The network also often interfered in the creative direction of the show by censoring stories, pushing for dumbed-down content, and trying to shape the characters to their liking. At the beginning of the book, Gene Roddenberry is portrayed as a veritable saint, but by the end of the narrative he has morphed into a sort of villain. His widow was still alive when the book was published, however, so one gets the idea that Shatner and Kreski had to hold back on any unflattering revelations of the <i>Star Trek</i> creator. </span></span></div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span><span><br /></span>
<span>This book is kind of like reading a rock and roll autobiography where the star doesn’t talk much about his famous bandmates but instead says more about his manager, publicist, lawyer, and accountant (I’m looking at you, <a href="https://obdg.blogspot.com/2014/08/who-i-am-memoir-by-pete-townshend.html">Pete Townshend</a>). This book wasn’t quite what I expected, but I found it all very interesting nonetheless. <i>Star Trek</i> was first broadcast shortly before I was born, but I did grow up on old-school television, back when there were only three networks. This book gave me a good idea of how shows were made in those days, for better or for worse.
</span></span></span><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span><span><span><span style="font-size: x-small;">If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.</span></span></span></span></span></div><div><br /></div>Karl Janssenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16133816726897297775noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-693376005436007012.post-17792843545650458382024-03-15T05:30:00.005-05:002024-03-15T05:30:00.132-05:00Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatán by John Lloyd Stephens<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>Dueling presidents and Mayan ruins</b></span><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgeUnyn4DfnyrIIumfjjXMfqRws09_BiwWkOVh_8aZLDgMXqsMJFfCEwWUSYqpNnvSC7EDCPbCSto_NaihYuS-zILn813V4xJcmmKcwC2y8yJkfjd5V0YYe-xmTnLqeCCxAcNnRNnzERIAZQ2cKhT5gTwylLCQXZ9TF_E2GPddx0pHpkD7Wv81bOlliCRP4/s226/stephensincidentsca2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="226" data-original-width="144" height="226" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgeUnyn4DfnyrIIumfjjXMfqRws09_BiwWkOVh_8aZLDgMXqsMJFfCEwWUSYqpNnvSC7EDCPbCSto_NaihYuS-zILn813V4xJcmmKcwC2y8yJkfjd5V0YYe-xmTnLqeCCxAcNnRNnzERIAZQ2cKhT5gTwylLCQXZ9TF_E2GPddx0pHpkD7Wv81bOlliCRP4/s1600/stephensincidentsca2.jpg" width="144" /></a></div>John Lloyd Stephens (1805-1852) was an American diplomat and travel writer. In 1839, President Martin Van Buren appointed him Ambassador to Central America. Soon after, he traveled to Central America to assume his new post. It’s unclear what exactly his mission was, however, since Stephens just seems to travel around doing whatever he wants. Stephens’s journey lasted several months, during which time he also ventured into Mexico. His account of his expedition, <i>Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatán</i> was published in two volumes in 1841. This book should not be confused with his 1843 publication <i>Incidents of Travel in Yucatán</i>, which covers a second trip Stephens made to Mexico.</span><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">
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<span>In 1839, the several nations of Central America were united under one government, the Federal Republic of Central America. When Stephens arrived in Central America, however, the presidency of that government was in dispute between two warring generals, Rafael Carrera and José Francisco Morazán. Stephens doesn’t seem to favor either would-be presidente but rather curries the favor of whichever he happens to be facing at the time. Stephens spends much of the book chronicling the political and military conflict between these two figures. He met with both generals and witnessed some battles fought and atrocities committed by both parties. Although borders may have been different back then, I believe Stephens’s travels took him through every country in Central America except maybe Panama. He doesn’t venture into Mexico until halfway through Volume 2.</span></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span><span><span><span><br /></span><span>Stephens also explored the ruins of several Mayan cities, three of which are discussed at some length: Copán in Guatemala, Palenque in Chiapas, and Uxmal in the Yucatán. Accompanying him on these explorations was the artist Frederick Catherwood, who documented the sites in drawings and paintings. Stephens had no archaeological training, so his discussions of the Maya don’t really hold up to today’s standards. Catherwood, on the other hand, is the real deal. His illustrations of Mayan ruins are quite remarkable in their attention to detail, particularly when you consider he had almost no precedent to build upon. This book contains dozens of engravings of Catherwood’s drawings, but he also published his own book <i>Views of Ancient Monuments in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan</i> with color lithographs. I don’t want to overemphasize the archaeological content of the book, however, because it’s really only a small portion of the text. The bulk of the two volumes deals with the politics and military matters of Central America, which will likely be of interest mostly to historians of Latin America.
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<span>There’s also quite a bit of complaining about unsavory accommodations, incessant mosquitos, and unsatisfactory hired hands. Stephens is more interested in getting to know wealthy Spaniards than the poor Indigenous population, because the former can offer him better lodgings and dinners than the latter. As an explorer and travel writer, Stephens is no Alexander von Humboldt. You’re not going to get a really liberal and enlightened account of Latin American culture and politics, but Stephens is at least a conscientious observer and chronicler of what he sees.</span></span></span></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span><span><span><br /></span></span></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span><span><span>This book is valuable as an outsider’s historical account of what Central America, Chiapas, and the Yucatán were like during this time period. Much of the information imparted, however, won’t hold much interest for today’s reader. Before reading this book, one really needs to consider if it will be worth roughly 24 hours of your reading time. For those only interested in the archaeological sites, just read the illustrated chapters on the Mayan cities.
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span><span>If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.<br /></span></span></span></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span><span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/review/R21C7NO6LCQJQC/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm">https://www.amazon.com/review/R21C7NO6LCQJQC/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm</a></span></span></span></span></span></div><div><br /></div></div>Karl Janssenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16133816726897297775noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-693376005436007012.post-62194570845641001382024-03-13T10:15:00.003-05:002024-03-13T10:16:19.807-05:00The Experimenters: Chance and Design at Black Mountain College by Eva Díaz<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-cQQAI9jrR9E/TfDR-pEtECI/AAAAAAAABfo/F3Msr5bKBdkVycYqNcO2qYu1e66ui0_ugCPcBGAYYCw/s1600/2halfstars.gif" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-right: 0px;"><img border="0" data-original-height="17" data-original-width="106" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-cQQAI9jrR9E/TfDR-pEtECI/AAAAAAAABfo/F3Msr5bKBdkVycYqNcO2qYu1e66ui0_ugCPcBGAYYCw/s1600/2halfstars.gif" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>A very academic study of three Black Mountain faculty</b></span><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjI5MVmyW25IVpQvOnsOF4Dao7qKofRsZGCiahzEGJXPrK6MSk4H7ZBlobZtMcxNk4AhMa32AS28GuSbcJT2kEVL4gCSPHTz977SZfZXoz6-Tq8-DK-RelHW-hBIdezgk6lXZr6E1tx_2e91TXQqedRtUoqGAEWpHH57zZ0k9CR0IatP2AXJ_0iVOgh9wJ_/s207/diazexperimenters2.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="207" data-original-width="144" height="207" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjI5MVmyW25IVpQvOnsOF4Dao7qKofRsZGCiahzEGJXPrK6MSk4H7ZBlobZtMcxNk4AhMa32AS28GuSbcJT2kEVL4gCSPHTz977SZfZXoz6-Tq8-DK-RelHW-hBIdezgk6lXZr6E1tx_2e91TXQqedRtUoqGAEWpHH57zZ0k9CR0IatP2AXJ_0iVOgh9wJ_/s1600/diazexperimenters2.jpg" width="144" /></a></div>Robert Rauschenberg is one of my favorite American artists, and I’ve done much reading on his life and artistic career. By association, I’ve also learned a fair amount about his colleagues John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Buckminster Fuller. At one point circa 1950, they all converged at a mysterious institution in North Carolina called Black Mountain College. Though a small school in an obscure location, Black Mountain had a profound influence on American art. What the Bauhaus was to modern European art, Black Mountain could be thought of as the equivalent force in late-twentieth-century American art. I have always been rather fascinated by this nexus of creativity, but accounts I’ve read of the school have been rather vague and sketchy. I was happy, therefore, to stumble upon Eva Díaz’s 2015 book <i>The Experimenters</i>, hoping it would shed some insightful light on the goings-on at Black Mountain.</span><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">
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<span><i>The Experimenters</i> is not a comprehensive history of Black Mountain College. From what I gather from this book’s notes, that story may have already been written and published. This, rather, is a narrower monograph focusing on the ideas and careers of three members of Black Mountain’s faculty: Joseph Albers, John Cage, and Buckminster Fuller. While their time at Black Mountain is emphasized, this study looks at their entire careers, including the time before and after their semesters at the North Carolina college. In this book, one doesn’t learn much about the students who studied under these teachers. Black Mountain alumni like Rauschenberg, Willem de Kooning, and Cy Twombly are mentioned briefly but not much delved into, save for a few quotes about their time at the school. One learns more about the influences of the three central figures of the book—Erik Satie as a precursor of Cage, for example, or Laszlo Moholy-Nagy as a colleague of Albers’s at the Bauhaus. Only on rare occasions does the reader really get an idea of what it would have been like to be a student at Black Mountain, attending one of Cage’s theatre productions, for instance, or assisting Fuller with the erection of one of his geodesic domes. Instead, the text focuses more on the intellectual development, artistic philosophies, and pedagogical techniques of the three protagonists, drawn largely from their own published writings and statements from prior interviews.
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<span>The writing of this book is very academic. That doesn’t mean you need a PhD to understand it, but you may need a PhD to enjoy it. It is written as if the intended audience were a dissertation committee or a tenure board, not a general reading audience. Díaz’s introduction is very jargon-heavy, to the point where you may find yourself wondering if you really want to go through with the rest of the book. She spends much time contemplating the meaning of the word “experiment.” The average art lover, however, probably couldn’t care less and just wants to know what went on at Black Mountain. Thankfully, the chapters that follow are less esoteric and more engaging as one learns about the work of these three featured artists. Still, the thesis is reiterated constantly throughout the book, and the same points are repeated again and again to support that thesis. One wonders how much more information could have been delivered without so much tedious repetition of the same conclusions.</span></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span><span><span><br /></span></span></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span><span><span>An art historian might very well find this to be a five-star read. I certainly have no problems with Díaz’s scholarship, and I am not qualified to argue with her if I did. I merely offer the perspective of the general reader who’s interested in the history of American art, as I’m sure many of the people who read this review may, like myself, fall into that category.
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span><span>If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.<br /></span></span></span></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span><span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/review/R6X8Q9WJK2AU/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm">https://www.amazon.com/review/R6X8Q9WJK2AU/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm</a></span></span></span></span></span></div><div><br /></div></div>Karl Janssenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16133816726897297775noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-693376005436007012.post-2561230772957572532024-03-12T12:59:00.000-05:002024-03-12T12:59:53.019-05:00The One-Act Plays of Eugene O’Neill<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-xMpCofstnVg/TcRrk_t4kuI/AAAAAAAABfI/rxsCmX-il6QkjoI4pklWi7JuY2G1IBKmACPcB/s1600/3stars.gif" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-right: 0px;"><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-xMpCofstnVg/TcRrk_t4kuI/AAAAAAAABfI/rxsCmX-il6QkjoI4pklWi7JuY2G1IBKmACPcB/s1600/3stars.gif" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: verdana;"><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><b>Short sketches from a master playwright</b></span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-fho_6njEoH4/V-UwbsjYpUI/AAAAAAAADAA/X6FojrLFXTMB0_Ra-8EcD81KVJpKmGoiwCPcB/s1600/ONeill-Eugene-LOC2.jpg" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-fho_6njEoH4/V-UwbsjYpUI/AAAAAAAADAA/X6FojrLFXTMB0_Ra-8EcD81KVJpKmGoiwCPcB/s1600/ONeill-Eugene-LOC2.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Eugene O’Neill</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table><div><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">One-act plays are the short stories of drama. These are brief stage plays lasting perhaps 15 to 30 minutes. American playwright Eugene O’Neill, winner of the 1936 Nobel Prize in Literature, is best-known for his full-length plays like <i><a href="https://obdg.blogspot.com/2014/12/the-hairy-ape-by-eugene-oneill.html">The Hairy Ape</a></i>, <a href="https://obdg.blogspot.com/2019/04/desire-under-elms-by-eugene-oneill.html"><i>Desire Under the Elms</i></a>, and <i>The Iceman Cometh</i>, but he also wrote 21 one-act plays. I don’t know if any book has ever been devoted exclusively to these short plays, but they can be found in complete-works collections of O’Neill’s writings, or in the three volumes on O’Neill published by the Library of America. In O’Neill’s day, one-act plays would have been staged for theatre festivals and variety nights, which served as opportunities for up-and-coming playwrights to establish a reputation and perhaps win some awards. Nowadays, one-act plays seem relegated to high school and college students performing them in theatrical competitions. </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">While you are unlikely to ever see most of these short plays performed on an actual stage, they are worth a read. </span><span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">O’Neill is one playwright whose works come across well on the printed page. His well-crafted dialogue and detailed and descriptive stage directions often read like prose fiction, calling to mind the works of novelist contemporaries like John Steinbeck or William Faulkner. </span></div><div><br /></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">With the exception of the final play on this list, <i>Hughie</i>, all of these works were written early in O’Neill’s career, before he achieved fame and critical acclaim with plays like <i><a href="https://obdg.blogspot.com/2017/10/beyond-horizon-by-eugene-oneill.html">Beyond the Horizon</a></i> (a Pulitzer Prize winner) and <i>The Emperor Jones</i>. The first four plays listed below comprise a series with recurring characters, the crew of the ship <i>Glencairn</i>. Many of O’Neill’s early plays deal with nautical travel or the lives of sailors, either at sea or on shore. Seafaring tales were more popular in the early twentieth century than they are today, and the genre allowed O’Neill to deliver popular dramas to the audience while honing his craft towards more mature sailor plays like <i><a href="https://obdg.blogspot.com/2017/04/anna-christie-by-eugene-oneill.html">Anna Christie</a></i>. In the later plays on this list, one can see the development of O’Neill’s interest in dysfunctional families and their psychological problems, which would lead to later, greater plays like <i>Mourning Becomes Electra</i> and <i>Long Day’s Journey into Night</i>. Through no fault of O’Neill’s, many of his one-act plays present scenes that will seem very familiar from films of the last hundred years, so familiar that they often come across as predictable and clichéd now. It’s hard to tell, however, how they would have been received by theatre audiences a century ago.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /><b>Bound East for Cardiff </b>(1914) - 3.5 stars<br />The first of a series of four one-act plays set on the ship <i>Glencairn</i>. This one presents a death scene in the ship’s forecastle. One crewman lies dying, injured from a fall, while his shipmates converse around him.</span><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>In the Zone</b> (1917) - 3 stars<br />Set during World War I, the ship <i>Glencairn</i> is carrying munitions and has entered “the war zone.” The crewmen are suspicious that one of their own, Smitty, may be a German spy. Not badly written, but utterly predictable to anyone who’s seen enough old war films.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>The Long Voyage Home</b> (1918) - 4 stars<br />Men from the <i>Glencairn</i> stop in a waterfront tavern in London, where the barkeep and his friends hope to shanghai an unsuspecting drunk into servitude on another vessel. This is a familiar scene from literature and film—such as the nautical writings of Jack London or Robert Louis Stevenson, for example—but well done here.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>Moon of the Caribbees</b> (1918) - 2 stars<br />The <i>Glencairn</i> is docked in the West Indies. The crewmen wait for some Black women to show up bringing liquor and sex. Drinking and dancing ensues. The women represent the exotic temptations of the nautical life and wanderlust amid the tropics, but the depiction is racist and the plot is pointless for the most part.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>A Wife for a Life</b> (1913) - 2 stars<br />Two partners work a gold mine in Arizona. The younger of the two gets a telegram from an old sweetheart summoning him home. This leads to a conclusion that is not at all surprising. The dialogue is bogged down with a lot of clumsy explanation.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>The Web</b> (1913) - 3 stars<br />A New York prostitute with a child lives at the mercy of her abusive boyfriend/pimp. At first this reads almost like a piece of muckraking realism, but it gets very heavy-handedly melodramatic towards the end. Again, this is like a scene you’ve seen in countless movies.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>Thirst</b> (1913) - 3.5 stars<br />Three survivors on a life raft are dying of hunger and thirst and fighting off insanity. There’s some racism here, not uncommon for the era, but it is a decently written melodrama. This reads as if it were written for film because the set directions seem as if they would be impossible to execute on a stage.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>Recklessness</b> (1913) - 2 stars<br />An ugly marriage scene, perhaps foreshadowing O’Neill’s later dysfunctional family dramas but not very successfully. A rich older man with a lovely young wife finds out she is cheating on him with their chauffeur. The depiction of the woman is deliberately cruel, indicative of a woman-is-the-root-of-all-evil mindset that plagues some of O’Neill’s other plays.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>Warnings</b> (1913) - 3 stars<br />A telegraph operator for a steamship discovers that he is losing his hearing. He decides to sail on one last voyage, even though he knows his deafness might endanger the ship and its crew. This features a good family scene up front, worthy of O’Neill’s better efforts, but a pretty straightforward, expected ending.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>Fog </b>(1914) - 2.5 stars<br />Another lifeboat drama. Two men talk while a poor woman hugs her dead child. One of the men is a businessman and one a poet, and they carry with them all of the clichés that go along with those professions. This play is ambitious for its supernatural ending.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>Abortion</b> (1914) - 4.5 stars<br />A college baseball star cheats on his fiancée and gets another girl pregnant. His father helps him pay for an abortion. When the girl dies, her brother comes looking for revenge. Surprisingly dark and risqué subject matter for the time. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>The Movie Man</b> (1914) - 2 stars<br />A comedy set in the Mexican Revolution. A movie director has a contract with a rebel general to film all of his battles. The general is a thinly veiled parody of Pancho Villa. The humor isn’t very funny, and the depiction of the Mexicans is a bit racist.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>The Sniper</b> (1915) - 4.5 stars<br />Set in Belgium during World War I, in a cottage destroyed by shells. A peasant mourns over his dead son, a soldier killed by the Prussians. The peasant vows vengeance against the Germans, but a priest tries to dissuade him from rash violence. Brief but powerful.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>Before Breakfast</b> (1916) - 2 stars<br />A trashy alcoholic shrew of a woman bitches at her husband, a poet (who is offstage, never seen). Reading as if it were written to punish some ex-girlfriend, this is another woman-as-the-root-of-all-evil story, yet it still might be provide a meaty monologue for some character actress.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>Ile</b> (1917) - 3.5 stars<br />In the arctic, a whaling boat is blocked by ice. The captain refuses to turn back until his ship is filled with whale oil (“the ile”). The crew, starving and overworked, threaten mutiny. The captain’s wife, also along for the ride, pleads with her husband to turn the ship back towards home as the voyage weighs on her sanity.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>The Rope</b> (1918) - 4 stars<br />A dysfunctional family drama, heavy on the white trash. A bitter old man is losing his sanity. He keeps a noose hung in his barn so that his estranged son can someday return and hang himself with it. Meanwhile, his daughter and her husband scheme to get the old man’s farm and money. A good surprise ending.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>Shell Shock</b> (1918) - 2.5 stars<br />A World War I hero suffers from PTSD after some horrific trench warfare, as evidenced by his compulsive obsession for hoarding cigarettes. This feels a bit like an after-school special with a rather simplistic take on its issue. It hints at a bleak and cynical ending that would have risen it above the mediocre but ultimately backs out in favor of a crowd-pleasing expression of patriotism.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>The Dreamy Kid</b> (1918) - 3 stars<br />A blaxploitation film in one-act play form. An elderly Black woman lies ill on her death bed. She waits for her grandson Dreamy to show up before she succumbs to death. Dreamy, however, is a hoodlum on the run from the law. The dialogue is penned in heavy Black accents, but otherwise this isn’t noticeably racist.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>Where the Cross is Made </b>(1918) - 3.5 stars<br />A former sea captain, obsessed with a buried treasure, is losing his sanity. He has built a replica of a ship’s cabin on the roof of his house and confined himself to it. His son wants to get him committed to a mental institution. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>Exorcism</b> (1919) - 2 stars<br />Two roommates live a drunken existence in a squalid New York apartment. One is depressed over his impending divorce and considers suicide. It’s hard to see the point in this one.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: georgia;"><b>Hughie</b> (written in 1941, first performed in 1959) - 3 stars<br />A boisterous professional gambler lives in a run-down hotel in New York. In the wee hours of the morning, he accosts the new night clerk on duty and bombards him with conversation. Mostly, he regales the new kid with tales of his night clerk predecessor, the recently deceased Hughie. Written later in O’Neill’s career, this is a fine character study, but rather devoid of plot.</span></p></div>Karl Janssenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16133816726897297775noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-693376005436007012.post-23604131881425812832024-03-04T14:52:00.001-06:002024-03-04T14:52:33.432-06:00Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-S-uZ6aHfgmk/TfDSE6KsfZI/AAAAAAAABjQ/WONLY4BFfpoVSSXHoUXBPtCkg0wC_lx8ACPcBGAYYCw/s1600/3halfstars.gif" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-right: 0px;"><img border="0" data-original-height="17" data-original-width="106" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-S-uZ6aHfgmk/TfDSE6KsfZI/AAAAAAAABjQ/WONLY4BFfpoVSSXHoUXBPtCkg0wC_lx8ACPcBGAYYCw/s1600/3halfstars.gif" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>Everything you’d want to know about living in a cylinder</b></span><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEik_JDFEhbdq3H_GsoaSfJZrq0-j5ET6R35vZ0Adrh5ATu9eBl1VJN-beiy2FJ_5MNnKqaElZyTzGuwB1V5PhLlQAnW38i6pp38bu9iB_jTiXjkFs3D8AsabK_TmTUXsx64CyvuHakGbVpY78a3x5FfMrCMhCpCDFbBYesD2DsjpbzGebkV0yl6PMfkGdCj/s212/clarkerendezvous2.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="212" data-original-width="144" height="212" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEik_JDFEhbdq3H_GsoaSfJZrq0-j5ET6R35vZ0Adrh5ATu9eBl1VJN-beiy2FJ_5MNnKqaElZyTzGuwB1V5PhLlQAnW38i6pp38bu9iB_jTiXjkFs3D8AsabK_TmTUXsx64CyvuHakGbVpY78a3x5FfMrCMhCpCDFbBYesD2DsjpbzGebkV0yl6PMfkGdCj/s1600/clarkerendezvous2.jpg" width="144" /></a></div>Arthur C. Clarke’s novel <i>Rendezvous with Rama </i>was first published in 1973, and it won just about every major science fiction award for that year. It was Clarke’s first published novel after the book and film combo of <i>2001: A Space Odyssey</i>. <i>Rendezvous with Rama</i> is unrelated to the 2001 series, but it likewise tells a story of mankind’s first encounter with an alien intelligence.</span><br />
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<span>The novel begins in the year 2131. By that time, mankind has established colonies on several planets and moons in the solar system. The government of Earth has also developed a system to track the trajectories of asteroids that may potentially impact with Earth or its colonies. (We now have the beginnings of such a warning system, but none existed when Clarke wrote the book in the ‘70s.) The Spaceguard system detects an unusual object heading toward the inner solar system. This celestial body is named Rama, after a Hindu deity. A calculation of Rama’s trajectory indicates that it has come from outside our solar system—a true interstellar visitor. Scientists deem Rama worthy of investigation and divert an existing unmanned space probe to perform a flyby. The first photos taken by the probe reveal that Rama is more than just an unusual asteroid. It is a rotating cylinder, fifty kilometers long and twenty kilometers in diameter, so geometrically perfect it could only have been created by an advanced intelligent civilization.</span><br />
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<span>The nearest manned spacecraft, the <i>Endeavour</i>, is sent to investigate. The crew only has a short period of time to examine Rama before its course takes it out of our solar system. Landing on one of the flat ends of the cylinder, the crew finds an entrance to the spacecraft and proceeds to explore its interior. Though technologically advanced, Rama appears to be uninhabited, but the expedition nevertheless searches for archaeological evidence of the spacecraft’s creators.
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<span>The problem with <i>Rendezvous with Rama</i> is that it never really lives up to its philosophical potential. This isn’t really so much a novel about what it would be like to find evidence of an intelligent alien civilization. The bulk of the book is just Clarke describing what it would be like to live inside a giant rotating cylinder—the gravity, the climate, the atmosphere, the logistics of getting around, and so on. For example, there are three or four chapters devoted entirely to descriptions of staircases and the astronauts’ challenges in traversing them. Is that really necessary? And is that really what anyone is hoping for when they pick up a book like this? Clarke is so obsessed with the physics of this cylindrical spaceship that the idea of alien intelligence or extraterrestrial archaeology doesn’t seem to hold much interest for him.
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<span>Mankind underwent a <i>Rendezvous with Rama</i> moment in 2017, when an interstellar object with unusual characteristics, dubbed ‘Oumuamua, was discovered in our solar system. Rather than a cylinder, it was shaped more like a pancake. This is not the year 2131, however, and we don’t have a surplus of spacecraft out studying the solar system, so we’ll never know for sure if ‘Oumuamua could have been our Rama. The opening chapters of <i>Rendezvous with Rama</i> provide a commendably realistic look at how the process of investigating an interstellar craft might actually proceed. As the novel goes on, however, it starts to dilute its realism by accumulating sci-fi novel cliches, like the captain’s space romance with a buxom female scientist and an act of war between feuding planets. Such tropes prevent the novel from being entirely satisfying, but there is still enough interesting, serious science in <i>Rendezvous with Rama</i> to make it well worth reading.
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span>If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.</span></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: x-small;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/review/R68D2VDA1SGFG/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm">https://www.amazon.com/review/R68D2VDA1SGFG/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm<br /></a></span><div><div><br /></div></div></div>Karl Janssenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16133816726897297775noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-693376005436007012.post-19023920256542497892024-03-01T15:25:00.006-06:002024-03-04T08:35:01.035-06:00United Nations: A History by Stanley Meisler<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>Engaging, balanced overview of the UN’s successes and failures</b></span></span><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span><span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHDRs8UVtCxr0lbHpSLEiB9T27VBG__z4sk4Tdw2XOqbEUGG4iz-eB3Mxi-KXik63vYD4spivXI_u6o3aSyf_Uwi1eny0n-fka3_-3oAzIYZ4ScGOVNJ584hRgYqUL0tGHeXNotbgY36crJnpj4UpkuU742qoXMdAUhjtj8Bj6esG4tLVG1NZ7l1YC3y7O/s218/meislerun2.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="218" data-original-width="144" height="218" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHDRs8UVtCxr0lbHpSLEiB9T27VBG__z4sk4Tdw2XOqbEUGG4iz-eB3Mxi-KXik63vYD4spivXI_u6o3aSyf_Uwi1eny0n-fka3_-3oAzIYZ4ScGOVNJ584hRgYqUL0tGHeXNotbgY36crJnpj4UpkuU742qoXMdAUhjtj8Bj6esG4tLVG1NZ7l1YC3y7O/s1600/meislerun2.jpg" width="144" /></a></div>Stanley Meisler’s book <i>United Nations: A History</i> was first published in 1995. A revised edition was published in 2011 with additional material that continues the history of the UN through the first decade of the 21st century. Meisler was a foreign and diplomatic correspondent for the Los Angeles Times for thirty years, and he published a biography of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in 2007. Meisler’s historical narrative of the United Nations begins with the initial conception of the organization at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference of 1944. From there, Meisler chronicles all the major diplomatic crises and peacekeeping missions in which the UN became embroiled, including Israel, Korea, the Congo, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Somalia, the Gulf War, Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, and more. In addition, Meisler’s institutional history reveals the interior power struggles and personality conflicts behind every secretary-general election, many policy debates, and the occasional accusation of corruption.</span></span><span><span><br />
<span><br /></span><span>From his preface to the book, you can tell that Meisler believes in the mission of the United Nations. He is not a conservative or isolationist naysayer. Even so, his hopes for the organization don’t prevent him from providing a balanced assessment of the UN’s accomplishments and failures. In fact, the way Meisler tells the story, it would seem that the failures outnumber the successes. As Meisler puts it, in summation, “Throughout its history, the United Nations has never fulfilled the hopes of its founders, but it accomplished a good deal nevertheless.” Meisler’s telling of the UN story is heavy on the American perspective, both because he is an American journalist and also because the United States has played such a large role in the UN. Since so much of the UN’s work is carried out in what used to be called “the third world,” however, the coverage extends far beyond New York and Washington. One ends up getting more recent history on developing nations than you are likely to find in many world history textbooks.
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<span>Because of its often bureaucratic subject matter, Meisler’s book isn’t always exciting, but it delivers everything I expected and more. At least half of the events covered in this book took place before my adult memory, and Meisler provided me with a thorough education filled with interesting details. As for the more recent events, I was due for a refresher course, and this book gave me one. In the United States, UN happenings often get page-three treatment behind the doings of our president and Congress. In this book, crucial moments of world politics, policy, and diplomacy are placed front and center to give the reader a broader perspective and understanding of what was happening throughout the rest of the world.
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<span>I enjoyed reading Meisler’s mini-biographies of the UN secretary-generals and other major players in the organization—figures like Dag Hammerskjöld, Ralph Bunche, and Kofi Annan. Also, through Meisner’s behind-the-scenes insights into the workings of the UN, I gained a better understanding of what it is that diplomats actually do. Out of necessity, Meisler had to heavily condense a great deal of history to fit the UN story into one volume. The entire Vietnam War, for example, is dispatched in about half a chapter. Nevertheless, I feel like I got a comprehensive, engaging, and well-written history of the first 65 years of the UN.
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.</span></span></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: x-small;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/review/R2WTNFBYBG848I/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm">https://www.amazon.com/review/R2WTNFBYBG848I/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm<br /></a></span><div><br /></div></div>Karl Janssenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16133816726897297775noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-693376005436007012.post-61820688410256144942024-02-28T09:21:00.002-06:002024-02-29T09:13:47.297-06:00The Woodcarver and Death by Hagar Olsson<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>Melancholy and the infinite sadness</b></span><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhr0ULSziccRYcn8Hwc4lPUcfh_A10xb4cX8tq0FqQvJo9YiDxMyfGoyB6acSvwDdoxKZungEM7_MHiW_hKt7INKzfWmC-iCTx4pP9dEGlDw49IEpkrf9KveM9euNkzmwsXPa4ZpkmFybZt9hqVGunuXeOCLXsTqOTGougJxXYWAdcvp0SNw4hBHPtEhhLr/s224/olssonwoodcarver2.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="224" data-original-width="144" height="224" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhr0ULSziccRYcn8Hwc4lPUcfh_A10xb4cX8tq0FqQvJo9YiDxMyfGoyB6acSvwDdoxKZungEM7_MHiW_hKt7INKzfWmC-iCTx4pP9dEGlDw49IEpkrf9KveM9euNkzmwsXPa4ZpkmFybZt9hqVGunuXeOCLXsTqOTGougJxXYWAdcvp0SNw4hBHPtEhhLr/s1600/olssonwoodcarver2.jpg" width="144" /></a></div>From reading the introduction to this book, I learned that the nation of Finland has a minority Swedish population that has produced a considerable body of literature in the Swedish language. Author Hagar Olsson was born into this Finland-Swede community and became one of its prominent modernist writers. Her novel <i>The Woodcarver and Death</i> was published in 1940. It was translated into English by George C. Schoolfield and published in 1965 as a volume in the University of Wisconsin Press’s Nordic Translation Series. The UW Press has since released the books in this series as open access publications, <a href="https://search.library.wisc.edu/digital/ANordicTrans#:~:text=The%20Nordic%20Translation%20Series%20was,%2D%20and%20twentieth%2Dcentury%20authors.">available for free download from the website of the UW Libraries</a>. This provides an opportunity to freely sample some works by modern Scandinavian authors who aren’t very familiar to English-language readers.</span><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">
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<span>In <i>The Woodcarver and Death</i>, there isn’t much woodcarving going on, but there sure is much contemplation of our ultimate demise. The story opens in the home of a young woodcarver named Myyriäinen who lives with his mother. She works in a factory, and he carves little wooden figures that he sells. The father/husband of the family is deceased. The mother worries about her son because he doesn’t seem to have any friends, doesn’t talk much, and doesn’t do much other than carve wood. He appears depressed, and she worries that he may be suicidal, though her concerns remain unsaid. One day the boy decides to leave home and embark on a pilgrimage to his birthplace in another region of Finland, hoping that he might discover some meaning to life. He is undergoing an existential crisis and obsessed with thoughts of death, the pointlessness of life, and the futility of religion. The book calls to mind some of the soul-searching wanderer novels of German-Swiss author Hermann Hesse, such as <i><a href="https://obdg.blogspot.com/2012/02/siddhartha-by-hermann-hesse_29.html">Siddhartha</a></i> or <i><a href="https://obdg.blogspot.com/2017/09/narcissus-and-goldmund-by-hermann-hesse.html">Narcissus and Goldmund</a></i>, but drearier and less interesting. Myyriäinen meets up with a group of pilgrims heading to a holy site to cure their illnesses. Among the crowd he befriends a father and his dying daughter. Although Myyriäinen doesn’t believe in religious miracles, he is touched by the faith of these pilgrims and decides to accompany them on their journey.
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<span>From reading Schoolfield’s introduction, one gets the idea that you need a doctorate in Finland-Swedish studies to understand what’s going on in this novel. Most of the story takes place in Carelia, or Karelia, a region on the border of Finland and Russia. Not long before Olsson published <i>The Woodcarver and Death</i>, Carelia was taken by the Russians in the Finnish Winter War of 1939 to 1940. Schoolfield informs the reader that Carelia is a region much romanticized by the Finns, and Olsson, as “the holy place of Finnish culture.” In this novel, Carelia serves as a bastion of the Eastern Orthodox faith. The essential purpose of the novel (as Schoolfield tells me) is for Olsson to champion the Eastern Orthodox faith as a superior alternative to Catholicism. Rather than focusing on the suffering of Christ, the Orthodox faith has a healthier attitude toward death (in Olsson’s opinion) as a natural part of the cycle of life.</span></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span><span><span><br /></span></span></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span><span><span>Of course, I wouldn’t have gotten all of that if Schoolfield hadn’t spelled it out for me. For the typical English-language reader, this is basically a coming-of-age novel about a young man looking for the meaning of life. This young man just happens to be more morbid than most. Olsson demonstrates literary skill in her drawing of characters and in crafting the emotions and conflicts stirring inside Myyriäinen’s mind. For my taste’s, however this novel was a bit too contemplative, to the point of navel-gazing. This is not one of the better works in the Nordic Translation Series. It may be very meaningful to a Finnish or Swedish audience, but much is lost on the foreign reader.
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span><span>If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.<br /></span></span></span></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: x-small;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/review/R54WDL1IX9BH8/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm">https://www.amazon.com/review/R54WDL1IX9BH8/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm</a></span></div></div>Karl Janssenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16133816726897297775noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-693376005436007012.post-46263804483608250232024-02-23T05:30:00.003-06:002024-02-23T05:30:00.139-06:00True Grit by Charles Portis<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-mz3lDirD_PY/TcRrW8orz-I/AAAAAAAABgA/atGsooMTmz8VFtN_S6b9JlYaDVQ9cx_6QCPcBGAYYCw/s1600/5stars.gif" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-right: 0px;"><img border="0" data-original-height="17" data-original-width="106" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-mz3lDirD_PY/TcRrW8orz-I/AAAAAAAABgA/atGsooMTmz8VFtN_S6b9JlYaDVQ9cx_6QCPcBGAYYCw/s1600/5stars.gif" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>A Western masterpiece, even for those who don’t like Westerns</b></span><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyMQcs1KWQMCZ0aBri6HNWMLdzMp5YL3YHc4GVpXJAmsQxGGXuECNxQmIW0ePNFNJlV4Lk10rsv_HFkNh125Cs8T23WWseV9fm8bBuNIlNWiPkNGQuQ1X1UGA0i6mQ4Nqa_D2Ge1JeV-OWo9mOrLVbhNE8PtwkJGq47JjBlLwDjGgJUOpaK_Txv7eLnU7T/s216/portistruegrit2.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="216" data-original-width="144" height="216" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyMQcs1KWQMCZ0aBri6HNWMLdzMp5YL3YHc4GVpXJAmsQxGGXuECNxQmIW0ePNFNJlV4Lk10rsv_HFkNh125Cs8T23WWseV9fm8bBuNIlNWiPkNGQuQ1X1UGA0i6mQ4Nqa_D2Ge1JeV-OWo9mOrLVbhNE8PtwkJGq47JjBlLwDjGgJUOpaK_Txv7eLnU7T/s1600/portistruegrit2.jpg" width="144" /></a></div>Charles Portis’s novel <i>True Grit</i> was first published in 1968. The famous film adaptation starring John Wayne was released the following year. While the film may have made Portis’s novel a household name, it may also have discouraged potential readers who might think of the book as merely “that John Wayne movie.” In fact, the <i>True Grit</i> novel has less in common with the John Wayne film than it does with the Coen Brothers’ adaptation of 2010. That later film really captures some of Portis’s delightful sense of humor, which permeates this entire novel. <i>True Grit</i> may be a Western, but one doesn’t have to be a habitual reader of the Western genre to enjoy it. If there is one Western novel that transcends the genre to appeal to a wider literary audience, it’s this one.</span><br />
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<span><i>True Grit</i> is narrated by Mattie Ross, an elderly woman looking back on an adventure from her youth. At the age of 14, Mattie’s father is murdered by a no-good drunk named Tom Chaney. From her Arkansas farm she ventures to the city of Fort Smith to claim her father’s body. While there, she decides to engage a marshal to help her track down Chaney and bring him to justice. She deliberately chooses the marshal with a reputation for violence and “grit”: Rooster Cogburn, an overweight, aged, one-eyed gunslinger. Meanwhile, another lawman named LaBoeuf also shows up in Fort Smith, likewise chasing Chaney on another charge. Hearing that Chaney has fallen in with the outlaw gang of Lucky Ned Pepper, Cogburn and LaBoeuf decide to team up and hunt Chaney together. What they didn’t bargain for, however, is that Mattie Ross insists on coming along on their manhunt, and won’t take no for an answer.
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<span>The strength of this novel rests on Mattie Ross’s voice, which Portis renders exquisitely. The narration reads as if it were penned in the 1870s but imbued with an underlying humor that’s still funny today. Through Mattie’s speech, Portis manages the impressive feat of capturing both the spunky teenage girl and the proud elderly spinster. The other characters in the book, from the major players of Cogburn, LaBoeuf, and Pepper, on down to the briefest bit parts, are portrayed equally well, with idiosyncratic quirks and subtle nuances of personality that give multiple dimensions to each role. The novel is probably about 90 percent dialogue, so the story unfolds through the conversations of these characters in their unique voices that combine period realism with contemporary savvy. The characters aren’t always intelligent, in fact many of them are not, but Portis’s writing always is. The dialogue is so natural, smoothly flowing, and downright interesting that once you get into it, you just don’t want to put the book down.
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<span><i>True Grit</i> is more than just a great Western. It is a great work of American literature that deserves to be more widely read. It definitely does not deserve to be confined to a genre-ghetto of mass-market Western paperbacks. Given its portrayal of a strong and intelligent teenage girl, this book should be assigned reading in American high school English courses. <i>True Grit</i> not only provides a good role model for young readers, but it is an intelligent, adult narrative that, unlike many books in the English-class canon, students would actually enjoy reading. And even if you normally don’t like Westerns, so will you.
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span>If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.</span></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: x-small;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/review/R1R59YDB92LK0J/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm">https://www.amazon.com/review/R1R59YDB92LK0J/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm<br /></a></span><div><div><div><br /></div></div></div></div>Karl Janssenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16133816726897297775noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-693376005436007012.post-38192685681740760472024-02-21T05:30:00.058-06:002024-02-21T08:19:38.520-06:00Juan Gris by Juan Antonio Gaya Nuño<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Qj23U7ycNRw/TfDR3pZ-mVI/AAAAAAAABfQ/yQ7Iv4UuIXcuayrbmAmI34wOhQETfLv0gCPcBGAYYCw/s1600/4halfstars.gif" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-right: 0px;"><img border="0" data-original-height="17" data-original-width="106" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Qj23U7ycNRw/TfDR3pZ-mVI/AAAAAAAABfQ/yQ7Iv4UuIXcuayrbmAmI34wOhQETfLv0gCPcBGAYYCw/s1600/4halfstars.gif" /></a></div>
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<span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>A lovely showcase of the cubist master’s work</b></span></span><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span><span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIBDXTyfYnMaXmp4PMC4k7M3IUleZWCWC_eWZ3MSyPOKO5L7PaC0TcSDvTvVtvu2230jc7okPXIk5Xwl0rzpNtVthH1aVlo8djYqxKl3k4kzputnErHRE02TdnoZG95XBQu2QCMINZhipIfb4ylpbOg6RYmIInM2gDn0UY9x_yAsXf-Ww10XQLL5o8mi7Y/s199/gayanunogris2.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="199" data-original-width="144" height="199" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIBDXTyfYnMaXmp4PMC4k7M3IUleZWCWC_eWZ3MSyPOKO5L7PaC0TcSDvTvVtvu2230jc7okPXIk5Xwl0rzpNtVthH1aVlo8djYqxKl3k4kzputnErHRE02TdnoZG95XBQu2QCMINZhipIfb4ylpbOg6RYmIInM2gDn0UY9x_yAsXf-Ww10XQLL5o8mi7Y/s1600/gayanunogris2.jpg" width="144" /></a></div>The Spanish painter Juan Gris did not invent the pictorial style of cubism, but he perfected it to its zenith. While Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque moved on to other modes of expression, Gris devoted his whole career to the visual language of cubism, creating some of the most ingenious, intricate, and aesthetically stimulating works in the cubist idiom. </span></span><span><span><br />
<span><br /></span><span>The book simply entitled <i>Juan Gris</i> by Spanish art historian Juan Antonio Gaya Nuño was published in 1986 by a Spanish publisher, Ediciones Polígrafa, but they also published an English-language edition. The book opens with 25 pages of nothing but text, set so densely that it is painful to the eyes. Beyond that, however, the remaining hundred pages are filled with reproductions of Gris’s work. The text by Gaya Nuño presents an informative biography of the artist. It is unlikely that Gaya Nuño ever met Gris, who died young, but the historian did interview some of the artist’s contemporaries and friends in his research for this essay. Written from a Spanish perspective, the text contemplates and emphasizes Gris’s Spanishness and to what extent he expressed the national spirit of his homeland in his works. Gaya Nuño’s assessment of Gris’s relationship to Picasso is somewhat surprising. According to this account, Gris looked up to Picasso as a mentor and idol, but Picasso looked down on Gris and resented any critical acclaim the younger artist received.
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<span>While the text is educational, the main attraction here is the images. The book reproduces 166 of Gris’s artworks. About three-quarters of them are printed in color, and many occupy a full page. The photographs of the artworks would have been supplied by the individual museums that held them, so the quality of the photographs varies in terms of lighting and clarity of focus, but on the whole the images are reproduced beautifully. They are presented in chronological order, even starting with several examples of Gris’s day-job work as a graphic artist and illustrator. Some of his theatrical designs for stage sets and costumes appear towards the end of the book. Over the course of this retrospective, one can see Gris’s style develop from an analytical cubism based on the ideas of Picasso and Braque to a more idiosyncratic synthetic cubism later in his career. From the very beginning, however, Gris’s work exhibits a lyricism, experimentation, and playfulness that distinguishes him from his cubist contemporaries.
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<span>I know of two other fine illustrated books that have been published on Gris. <a href="https://obdg.blogspot.com/2018/04/juan-gris-by-christopher-green.html">Christopher Green’s book entitled </a><i><a href="https://obdg.blogspot.com/2018/04/juan-gris-by-christopher-green.html">Juan Gris</a> </i>was published in 1992 by Yale University Press. James Thrall Soby’s 1958 book, also entitled <i>Juan Gris</i>, was published by the Museum of Modern Art. <a href="https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_1887_300062180.pdf">You can find a digitized version of the latter book on the MOMA website</a>. The Green book is much stronger on text, with lots of biographical content and analysis and criticism of Gris’s work. If you want a thorough scholarly overview of Gris’s career, Green’s is probably your book. Soby’s book is similar in size and number of photographs to Gaya Nuño’s, but, being printed in 1958, more of the pictures are in black and white. If you’re a fan of Gris’s work, you really can’t go wrong with any one of these three. Gaya Nuño’s book, however, may be the best illustrated of the three.</span><br />
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<i>Violin and Guitar,</i> 1913, oil on canvas, 100 x 65.5 cm<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0UHgnwwfs9NxCu-LS9Xu9wfjqPqYL011UBi6u6CtcNNTKE1mS6fePFMsbcPDakihBwqvFtKerXT-LfCaF9utiCvYiFSeumRWk4GEjnzwD3eS_D1sux-uvf04k1hWgshbrmyoqRz8pwyXtXTa3s2QQHcxXUmBV4oOUxNcK5E9OnxGQ2Tlu8Nbc4oOPgfCl/s659/grischeckerboard525.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-right: 0px;"><img border="0" data-original-height="659" data-original-width="525" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0UHgnwwfs9NxCu-LS9Xu9wfjqPqYL011UBi6u6CtcNNTKE1mS6fePFMsbcPDakihBwqvFtKerXT-LfCaF9utiCvYiFSeumRWk4GEjnzwD3eS_D1sux-uvf04k1hWgshbrmyoqRz8pwyXtXTa3s2QQHcxXUmBV4oOUxNcK5E9OnxGQ2Tlu8Nbc4oOPgfCl/s16000/grischeckerboard525.jpg" /></a></div><br /></div><span style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-right: 0px; text-align: left;"><i>The Checkerboard,</i> 1915, oil on canvas, 92 x 73 cm</span><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggA8I2P9RgSwLsH5Vtbh8NdBg6jLoBe8v8TMrRXscmHZAdvCawFgGflyYR1qAUJ5n7ElfZVhfQFPX_fd11P9JV0bgFMQihqrDonvitifN78j3cyDpftvAXzlyc3iwvneL5lKU0qMDhZ6johZl316I3ai0VUlYGDeouUsawzyYooBJDjSL0iCqPjBR_w83K/s851/gristheviolin525.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-right: 0px;"><img border="0" data-original-height="851" data-original-width="525" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggA8I2P9RgSwLsH5Vtbh8NdBg6jLoBe8v8TMrRXscmHZAdvCawFgGflyYR1qAUJ5n7ElfZVhfQFPX_fd11P9JV0bgFMQihqrDonvitifN78j3cyDpftvAXzlyc3iwvneL5lKU0qMDhZ6johZl316I3ai0VUlYGDeouUsawzyYooBJDjSL0iCqPjBR_w83K/s16000/gristheviolin525.jpg" /></a></div><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjcc-y7DWEz681KGYnp3Wm5ofZyhdl28tA_h6ba9_MvtE2vH3gMECKBHs6y4dsF0dzaPdDMkEJ10WKjpu2pmQAFhjbnqaoEe2u0odmgeySXE41ECPgU_nId-IEzsCiBlIcL26pZX-MoKMb0a6zYdoeo-8RkNQ8RxS1u4UzX7h2qdpRobikpqx1I-TePB7qq/s812/grisviolinandguitar525.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-right: 0px;"><br /></a></div><br /><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-2Tg3cQGB1oE/WrViZIye0JI/AAAAAAAADpQ/kTt-rUrw5pQYgaXNsMqOzRa1Y6fwLSprwCLcBGAs/s1600/grisfruitdishcarafe496.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-right: 0px;"><br /></a></div>
<i>The Violin,</i> 1916, oil on wood, 116.5 x 73 cm<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhY0fjmShlO9XjTVEqhfoo2gyCZIwZtBGornM2jpdU8xpzpA9Hbc_1ke2IqoH6PCQSvMQYGr6IWYLs1juuYk_vYWiDriIEWcN72P5fzmiCMnGMSH6TN_KVwKtdACtPTw1BLQcg1abYEbGcNlhV6ryyvGwVEHpH209KsuK8qORtuOKmyJxgieC8r1s6LP0wN/s525/grisguitarbottleandglass525.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-right: 0px;"><img border="0" data-original-height="407" data-original-width="525" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhY0fjmShlO9XjTVEqhfoo2gyCZIwZtBGornM2jpdU8xpzpA9Hbc_1ke2IqoH6PCQSvMQYGr6IWYLs1juuYk_vYWiDriIEWcN72P5fzmiCMnGMSH6TN_KVwKtdACtPTw1BLQcg1abYEbGcNlhV6ryyvGwVEHpH209KsuK8qORtuOKmyJxgieC8r1s6LP0wN/s16000/grisguitarbottleandglass525.jpg" /></a></div><br /><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-ihqxoyp95Gw/WrViniqYBtI/AAAAAAAADpY/7hUkYdo1yH8cj4xD148gompYQMQyMTfSQCLcBGAs/s1600/grisguitarandfruitbowl525.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-right: 0px;"><br /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i>Guitar, Bottle, and Glass,</i> 1917, oil on canvas, 73 x 92 cm</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.</span></span></span></span></span></div><div><span><span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/review/R39WW965E5DVCA/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm">https://www.amazon.com/review/R39WW965E5DVCA/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm</a></span></span></span></span></span></div>Karl Janssenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16133816726897297775noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-693376005436007012.post-89529811111930123082024-02-19T08:27:00.003-06:002024-02-19T08:27:32.963-06:00The Absolute at Large by Karel Capek<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-cQQAI9jrR9E/TfDR-pEtECI/AAAAAAAABfo/F3Msr5bKBdkVycYqNcO2qYu1e66ui0_ugCPcBGAYYCw/s1600/2halfstars.gif" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-right: 0px;"><img border="0" data-original-height="17" data-original-width="106" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-cQQAI9jrR9E/TfDR-pEtECI/AAAAAAAABfo/F3Msr5bKBdkVycYqNcO2qYu1e66ui0_ugCPcBGAYYCw/s1600/2halfstars.gif" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>One-joke satire of religious fanaticism</b></span><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJK9v6-nj4ePttsbbJ3nFZ_YmK3fDjpqLoIANUkxQjjrI7J5a6OEQfcYAEqnAWlc0XtBUBNVyo1sTNQAemQpCRhBSE41k9mkMvyMey8L77g6-8d2AOKWMMk5fBUWj716H3OO47nhs89WVJKJQqibP9MguvTeZR3a_q2f2UYujGN3PxIMgLZ_3Y-DBHa9jH/s220/capekabsolute2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="220" data-original-width="144" height="220" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJK9v6-nj4ePttsbbJ3nFZ_YmK3fDjpqLoIANUkxQjjrI7J5a6OEQfcYAEqnAWlc0XtBUBNVyo1sTNQAemQpCRhBSE41k9mkMvyMey8L77g6-8d2AOKWMMk5fBUWj716H3OO47nhs89WVJKJQqibP9MguvTeZR3a_q2f2UYujGN3PxIMgLZ_3Y-DBHa9jH/s1600/capekabsolute2.jpg" width="144" /></a></div>By the time Czech author Karel Capek published his first novel, <i>The Absolute at Large</i>, he had already established himself as a playwright. His most famous work nowadays, the science fiction drama <i><a href="https://obdg.blogspot.com/2016/02/rur-rossums-universal-robots-by-karel.html">R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots)</a></i>, was first staged in 1920. Like that play, <i>The Absolute at Large</i>, published in 1922, is also a work of science fiction that takes place in the future. Capek is an exceptional writer who deserves to be better-known among English-language readers. His writing bears some resemblance to that of his countryman <a href="https://obdg.blogspot.com/2018/12/the-metamorphosis-by-franz-kafka.html">Franz Kafka</a> in its dystopian visions, pessimistic tone, and deadpan sense of humor. <i>The Absolute at Large</i>, unfortunately, is not one of Capek’s better novels.</span><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">
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<span>The story begins in 1943. G. H. Bondy is an industrialist who owns a factory in Prague. While perusing the newspaper, he comes across an ad placed by an inventor wishing to sell his latest invention. Bondy recognizes the name of the inventor as a former classmate of his and decides to call upon his old friend. The inventor, R. Marek, shows Bondy a dynamo he has created that runs on atomic power. He calls the device the Karburator. Unlike the inefficient burning of coal or wood, the Karburator can utilize the full atomic energy of its fuel, completely obliterating the raw material for a far more efficient and clean energy production. With such a wonderful and potentially lucrative invention, Bondy wonders why Marek is so eager to sell his creation.
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<span>It turns out that the Karburator produces an unusual side effect: an overwhelming feeling of religious fervor. According to philosopher <a href="https://obdg.blogspot.com/2017/09/ethics-by-baruch-spinoza.html">Baruch Spinoza’s pantheistic doctrine of monism</a>, God is inherently present in all matter, thus permeating the entire universe. When Marek’s Karburator annihilates matter, the portion of God, or the Absolute, contained in that matter is then released, affecting the minds and souls of those in proximity to the machine. While Marek finds this side effect troubling, Bondy has no such scruples. He purchases the Karburator and begins mass production. Soon the world is run by these atomic power plants, and outbreaks of piety and zealotry become more frequent. Various cults arise, and members of established religious denominations become increasingly fanatical, leading to killings and war. In addition, the Absolute not only affects human minds but also acts on its own behalf. By applying its creative powers to manufacturing, it destabilizes economies by glutting the market with overproduced goods.
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<span>The premise of <i>The Absolute at Large</i> is commendably ingenious. What follows, however, becomes tedious. Capek presents scene after scene of religious fanaticism, which to the reader is like hearing the same joke over and over again. I don’t have a problem with Capek’s religious irreverence, as we seem to share the same freethought views. He is not satirizing Spinoza so much but rather making a mockery of organized religion and each believers’ sense of denominational superiority. The conflicts between sects escalate into a dystopian, apocalyptic future, but one told with satirical silliness. Capek keeps introducing new characters every couple chapters, thus making it hard to become emotionally invested in any protagonist. Towards the end of the novel, Capek makes some valid points about religious tolerance, but by that time I was rather bored. </span></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span><span><span><br /></span></span></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span><span><span>For his time period, Capek was a unique voice in science fiction, and his works are still surprisingly thought-provoking and impressively innovative a century later. In general, however, I think I prefer his more serious works (not all of them sci-fi), like his “<a href="https://obdg.blogspot.com/2022/04/three-novels-hordubal-meteor-ordinary.html">Noetic Trilogy</a>” comprised of the novels <i><a href="https://obdg.blogspot.com/2021/12/hordubal-by-karel-capek.html">Hordubal</a></i>, <i><a href="https://obdg.blogspot.com/2022/02/meteor-by-karel-capek.html">Meteor</a></i>, and <i><a href="https://obdg.blogspot.com/2022/03/an-ordinary-life-by-karel-capek.html">An Ordinary Life</a></i>.
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span><span>If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.<br /></span></span></span></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span><span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/review/R2QDAMHBGKJKUG/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm">https://www.amazon.com/review/R2QDAMHBGKJKUG/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm</a></span></span></span></span></span></div><div><br /></div></div>Karl Janssenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16133816726897297775noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-693376005436007012.post-1469694961446526602024-02-16T05:30:00.008-06:002024-02-16T05:30:00.143-06:00The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century by Peter Watson<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>An invigorating whirlwind tour through the arts, science, and humanities</b></span><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhI7DnO2u7pd5ah6wdpiOG8aXNuSx483js1JO7M7AIwvpG277bLjl2o-4iofHnnJOajvrAgDEQdLwVjno_EOWqpkfqtVlxmndHdRvpp1vYGI1Nd-C9uzhrrN9bVZIjJePJe8z8_ZJFE531ko7bNyrWoNa88QIBgwRBgkSsOW_4sy3PrENVFrvCuSCEiZt85/s217/watsonmodernmind2.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="217" data-original-width="144" height="217" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhI7DnO2u7pd5ah6wdpiOG8aXNuSx483js1JO7M7AIwvpG277bLjl2o-4iofHnnJOajvrAgDEQdLwVjno_EOWqpkfqtVlxmndHdRvpp1vYGI1Nd-C9uzhrrN9bVZIjJePJe8z8_ZJFE531ko7bNyrWoNa88QIBgwRBgkSsOW_4sy3PrENVFrvCuSCEiZt85/s1600/watsonmodernmind2.jpg" width="144" /></a></div>Peter Watson’s 2000 book <i>The Modern Mind</i> is essentially a history textbook, but instead of focusing on political events, wars, or world leaders, Watson concentrates instead on developments in the arts, sciences, and humanities. The result is a very ambitious, panoramically erudite, and thoroughly engaging intellectual history of the twentieth century. Watson is a Brit, as evident from some of his spellings and turns of phrase. This is not merely a history of English-language culture, however. Watson has written a true world history, although by his own admission much of that history takes place in Europe and America. Watson follows the epicenter of ideas as it changes throughout the century, from Vienna to Berlin, Paris to London, then on to New York and the universities of the United States.</span><br />
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<span>Not all of the intellectual movements Watson discusses are positive, progressive, or even morally acceptable. Social Darwinism, racism, anti-Semitism, Nazism, fascism, and Stalinism are discussed, not because they were good or intelligent, but because they happened, and they affected human lives. Over the course of the hundred years covered here, the modern mind was often mistaken, sometimes horribly so. Watson’s flowing narrative shows how ideas sprout from, counteract, and refute previous ideas as ideological movements come and go. For example, Watson acknowledges Sigmund Freud as one of the most influential minds of the twentieth century—an inspiration to many artistic movements, scientific theories, and the entire field of psychology—but he also points out that by the end of that century most of what Freud had to say was generally considered wrong.
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<span>Watson does a superb job of explaining some of the most complicated scientific and philosophical concepts in a manner accessible to any reasonably educated reader, without dumbing down the content. He summarizes countless published books by the greatest thinkers of the century and compares and contrasts them articulately. In terms of disciplines, Watson leaves no stone unturned. No matter how well-read you think you are, Watson covers a diverse enough array of fields of knowledge that you’re bound to learn something outside your comfort zone, and his writing is interesting enough to make you care about topics that didn’t interest you before. You never know where his encyclopedic mind will lead you next, and it is a pleasure to follow his lead through philosophy, physics, mathematics, psychology, economics, archaeology, art, music, literature, and many more areas of interest. I’m sure some could quibble about what’s included or what’s left out, or Watson’s particular take on some thinkers, but overall this is really an impressive work of staggering scope. If nothing else, I came away from <i>The Modern Mind</i> with a reading list of at least a hundred books for further consideration, in all fields of study.
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<span>While Watson’s text deserves praise, the publishers of this book (the Kindle edition, to be specific) should be ashamed of themselves. In 15 years of reading ebooks, I’ve never seen a worse collection of typographical errors. There are multiple problems with letter substitutions. In particular, double l’s came out as d’s and vice versa, so objects “cast a shallow,” “all” becomes “ad,” scientists don’t work at “Bell Labs” but at “Bed Labs,” not just in one instance but constantly throughout the text. The word “titles” always shows up as “tides.” Prehistoric man used “dint tools “ instead of flint. I work in book publishing, and I don’t even understand how such a screw-up is technologically possible. The bigger question is, how did HarperCollins release this ebook to the public without even noticing this pervasive problem? Maybe by the time you read this review they will have corrected the errors and uploaded a new file.
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span>If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.</span></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: x-small;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/review/RDEIA9VAEMZY8/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm">https://www.amazon.com/review/RDEIA9VAEMZY8/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm<br /></a></span><div><div><br /></div></div></div>Karl Janssenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16133816726897297775noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-693376005436007012.post-81372900171541670172024-02-14T05:30:00.002-06:002024-02-16T08:20:02.925-06:00Whipping Star by Frank Herbert<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-UjVeyfQLE9Y/TcRrtEJ45qI/AAAAAAAABjY/LRKuQaB76_YFcszm9Ba-CTnykqApGaVeACPcBGAYYCw/s1600/2stars.gif" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-right: 0px;"><img border="0" data-original-height="17" data-original-width="106" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-UjVeyfQLE9Y/TcRrtEJ45qI/AAAAAAAABjY/LRKuQaB76_YFcszm9Ba-CTnykqApGaVeACPcBGAYYCw/s1600/2stars.gif" /></a></div>
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<span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>Weird-for-weird’s-sake space cop adventure</b></span></span><div><span><span style="font-family: georgia;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpFROcd_Wy0dXh6_lQ-DCBj9XZOtOrQlOVKJPQE0SEpMf_mRbN_LHb3G18GQ7oQ22UweRPBUtHusI_IhjwVaFd7L_PERDtc-pPWnDDMRjAM6LoJJYwdwnJluODyGoBoWMe86VogRa8KpHGOvENxl1AViq0C1b9bQaq_aCmuvhJRJpQnCGROQDCWXKNlV1s/s241/herbertwhippingstar2.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="241" data-original-width="144" height="241" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgpFROcd_Wy0dXh6_lQ-DCBj9XZOtOrQlOVKJPQE0SEpMf_mRbN_LHb3G18GQ7oQ22UweRPBUtHusI_IhjwVaFd7L_PERDtc-pPWnDDMRjAM6LoJJYwdwnJluODyGoBoWMe86VogRa8KpHGOvENxl1AViq0C1b9bQaq_aCmuvhJRJpQnCGROQDCWXKNlV1s/s1600/herbertwhippingstar2.jpg" width="144" /></a></div>American science fiction author Frank Herbert is famous for his <a href="https://obdg.blogspot.com/2017/07/dune-by-frank-herbert.html">Dune</a> series of novels, and some may be familiar with his trilogy <a href="https://obdg.blogspot.com/2022/10/the-jesus-incident-by-frank-herbert-and.html">The Pandora Sequence</a>. His 1970 novel <i>Whipping Star</i>, however, is part of Herbert’s lesser-known ConSentiency series. This series takes place in a future where mankind has not only colonized other planets in the galaxy, but has also, unlike <i>Dune</i>, made contact with several sentient alien species. Somewhat like Star Trek, an interspecies government has been established to govern the galactic community. The ConSentiency series began with two short stories that are included in Herbert’s collection entitled <i><a href="https://obdg.blogspot.com/2020/04/eye-by-frank-herbert.html">Eye</a></i>. <i>Whipping Star</i> is the first novel in this series. It is followed by 1977’s <i>The Dosadi Experiment</i>. These four works in the series were all previously published in science fiction magazines before appearing in book form.</span></span><div><span><span style="font-family: georgia;">
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<span>What ties the ConSentiency series together is the character of Jorj X. McKie, agent of the Bureau of Sabotage (or BuSab for short). BuSab is a government agency created by the interplanetary government to sabotage the government itself and impede its own progress as a form of bureaucratic self-regulation. I found the idea of BuSab pretty ridiculous when I read the short stories in <i>Eye</i>; it is even more so here. <i>Whipping Star</i> comes across as so weird-for-weird’s-sake that you’re never quite sure when Herbert is trying to be silly.
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<span>A species called the Calebans have aided mankind through their gift of jumpdoors, teleportation portals between worlds. When a Caleban beachball (their form of spacecraft/dwelling) lands on the planet of Cordiality, McKie is sent to investigate. He finds that this particular Caleban is being literally and periodically whipped by an evil woman with an S&M fetish. (One can imagine Herbert delighting in his own naughtiness as he worked in that plot device.) This is more than just a consensual good time, however. This Caleban, in fact, is being slowly flogged to death. Even more shocking, McKie discovers that when this Caleban dies, almost all sentient life in the galaxy dies with her (why is too complicated to explain here). McKie must put a stop to the flagellations in order to save intelligent life as we know it. What makes his task difficult, however, is that these are long-distance floggings, employing jumpdoors (portal opens, arm swings whip, portal closes), so McKie has no idea where the dominatrix resides. He must track her down and stop her, or the end of humanity (and several other intelligent species) is imminent.
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<span>The most interesting aspect of this novel is McKie’s conversations with the Caleban, in which Herbert explores the language barrier between two species. Both parties speak the same language, but their syntax and vocabulary are different enough to impede understanding, which makes a critical situation even more difficult to overcome. These linguistic exercises seem to be the reason Herbert wrote the story, because beyond that, <i>Whipping Star </i>is just a jumble of goofy anything-goes space gibberish that is so divorced from any recognizable logic that it’s hard for the reader to care about any of it.
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</span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span>If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon and leave me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.<br /><a href="https://www.amazon.com/review/R15QQUELZJUR0H/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm">https://www.amazon.com/review/R15QQUELZJUR0H/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm</a></span></span></span></span></div><div><br /></div></div>Karl Janssenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16133816726897297775noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-693376005436007012.post-53702056140625304802024-02-12T08:17:00.002-06:002024-02-12T08:34:00.648-06:00Clouds of Witness by Dorothy L. Sayers<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-UjVeyfQLE9Y/TcRrtEJ45qI/AAAAAAAABjY/LRKuQaB76_YFcszm9Ba-CTnykqApGaVeACPcBGAYYCw/s1600/2stars.gif" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-right: 0px;"><img border="0" data-original-height="17" data-original-width="106" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-UjVeyfQLE9Y/TcRrtEJ45qI/AAAAAAAABjY/LRKuQaB76_YFcszm9Ba-CTnykqApGaVeACPcBGAYYCw/s1600/2stars.gif" /></a></div>
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<span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>Too much whimsy in Wimsey’s second outing</b></span></span><div><span><span style="font-family: georgia;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNBU14ms2MCuYdB_-EcVIXaFGtoFET4L3DC_9xvpkMotonyURWav0nzfGUpZG1pNJKZEdk0b91vt5-mDhvmG_dWO1FTwnmMnluIvpH1NIrPvLKXu0Ciu4SV2xKtpO2_ACjCXNPzlqawP-YFP6gmdmO3RbF6oBu5wSZtDOhEqW3g7W5UPEDSq4jWudioPQU/s219/sayersclouds2.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="219" data-original-width="144" height="219" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNBU14ms2MCuYdB_-EcVIXaFGtoFET4L3DC_9xvpkMotonyURWav0nzfGUpZG1pNJKZEdk0b91vt5-mDhvmG_dWO1FTwnmMnluIvpH1NIrPvLKXu0Ciu4SV2xKtpO2_ACjCXNPzlqawP-YFP6gmdmO3RbF6oBu5wSZtDOhEqW3g7W5UPEDSq4jWudioPQU/s1600/sayersclouds2.jpg" width="144" /></a></div>Lord Peter Wimsey may not be as famous as Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot, but as far as classic sleuths of British detective fiction go, Wimsey’s certainly in the top ten. The creation of author Dorothy L. Sayers, Wimsey is a British nobleman who solves crimes as a hobby. <i>Clouds of Witness</i>, published in 1926, is Sayers’s second Lord Peter Wimsey novel. I enjoyed Wimsey’s debut novel, <i><a href="https://obdg.blogspot.com/2015/12/whose-body-by-dorothy-l-sayers.html">Whose Body?</a></i>, but found this second outing less than satisfying.</span></span><div><span><span style="font-family: georgia;">
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<span>A man has been shot and killed at Riddlesdale, a country estate of the Wimsey family. Lord Peter was not present at the time, but his elder brother Gerald, the Duke of Denver, and his sister, Lady Mary Wimsey, were hosting a group of friends for a week of hunting. The victim is Denis Cathcart, Lady Mary’s fiancé. All evidence points to Gerald, who is arrested. Because the accused is a peer of the realm, the legal proceedings become a media event. Lord Peter, having already established a reputation for solving mysteries, comes to solve the case and exonerate his brother. Peter’s secretive siblings make his task more difficult, however, by concealing information, thereby increasing suspicions of their guilt.
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<span>Once Lord Peter arrives on the case, he takes the testimony of all the parties present at the Riddlesdale chateau. Among the various perspectives, there is much disagreement as to the timetable of events, which Lord Peter must set straight. He also conducts a thorough examination of footprints on the grounds, the description of which is quite confusing for the reader, who doesn’t have the benefit of eyes on the scene. One must understand every detail perfectly, because this is one of those mysteries where if you blink, you’ll miss a critical clue. Lord Peter is aided in his investigations by his valet Bunter and a police detective named Parker. Neither really rises to the level of a Doctor Watson sidekick, but Parker proves a more active contributor to Wimsey’s investigations than Inspector Lestrade in Holmes’s cases.
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<span>There is a good mystery story here, but it is unfortunately bogged down in way too many distractions. The story feels drawn out and padded to fit the page count of a novel. Sayers employs quite a bit of humor in her storytelling, but it’s the kind of humor you’d really have to be a Briton of the 1920s to appreciate. Wimsey and friends speak with many expressions of outdated slang, and Sayers gives the servant class heavy accents that are barely decipherable. This mystery novel really could have used less humor and more suspense. It’s as if Sayers, relying on laughs, neglects to include any thrills. After the morass of minute details the reader is forced to digest, when all is said and done, the ending feels too easy. With all the assistance given by Bunter, Parker, and other policemen and lawyers, it doesn’t even appear that Lord Peter has done the lion’s share of the detective work.
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<span>I’m sure Lord Peter Wimsey has some exciting and perplexing mysteries somewhere amongst his case files, but <i>Clouds of Witness</i> isn’t one of them. There’s not enough pure detection here, as Sayers gets sidetracked in social satire and the Wimsey family dynamic. Before Sayers introduced us to Lord Peter’s family, she should have really focused more on impressing us with his detective work.
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</span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span>If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon and leave me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.</span></span></span></span></div><div><span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/review/R2RIJDI6ZAWIN3/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm">https://www.amazon.com/review/R2RIJDI6ZAWIN3/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm</a></span></span></span></span></div><div><br /></div></div>Karl Janssenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16133816726897297775noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-693376005436007012.post-21803068063219179132024-02-05T15:45:00.003-06:002024-02-12T08:59:27.943-06:00Early Stories by Mikhail Sholokhov<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-iGEbUYe9MCA/TcRrfQ0Kz_I/AAAAAAAABf0/3aqwoTPnzmMy8t72-TDPgdVlFebPY-vngCPcBGAYYCw/s1600/4stars.gif" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-right: 0px;"><img border="0" data-original-height="17" data-original-width="106" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-iGEbUYe9MCA/TcRrfQ0Kz_I/AAAAAAAABf0/3aqwoTPnzmMy8t72-TDPgdVlFebPY-vngCPcBGAYYCw/s1600/4stars.gif" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>Realist vignettes of Cossack life</b></span><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyAyiZAlWCWoU4dZ4Ehlyh_EY-dxowg0uHteOVqyEN0tw-Eku9In_HCSY51pjzvZfxMyIVPruDaofXX4NNQjBPjh2lOpHkh9lp_nN_ZcpJy4riZvi_kaGHZESTGnsVxRHjLZIO7QjpF16zgyWlktZ4jUvRgaOTFXKv0GUvjg9lH7k9plL3XkLHo0dExpEr/s230/sholokhovearlystories2.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="230" data-original-width="144" height="230" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyAyiZAlWCWoU4dZ4Ehlyh_EY-dxowg0uHteOVqyEN0tw-Eku9In_HCSY51pjzvZfxMyIVPruDaofXX4NNQjBPjh2lOpHkh9lp_nN_ZcpJy4riZvi_kaGHZESTGnsVxRHjLZIO7QjpF16zgyWlktZ4jUvRgaOTFXKv0GUvjg9lH7k9plL3XkLHo0dExpEr/s1600/sholokhovearlystories2.jpg" width="144" /></a></div>Russian author Mikhail Sholokhov, winner of the 1965 Nobel Prize in Literature, is known for his epic novels, most notably the monumental <i><a href="https://obdg.blogspot.com/2019/01/and-quiet-flows-don-by-mikhail-sholokhov.html">And Quiet Flows the Don</a></i> and its sequel <i><a href="https://obdg.blogspot.com/2021/04/the-don-flows-home-to-sea-by-mikhail.html">The Don Flows Home to the Sea</a></i>. Not all of Sholokhov’s fiction comes in big packages, however, as evidenced by the half dozen works of short fiction in <i>Early Stories</i>. This collection was published in English translation in 1966. The book has no introduction or bibliographic information, so there’s no telling when exactly these early stories were first published.</span><br />
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<span>Much like <i>And Quiet Flows the Don</i>, the stories collected here demonstrate Sholokhov to be a master of realism. More specifically, Sholokhov is a socialist realist who achieved great acclaim and won numerous awards in the Soviet Union. Sholokhov’s literature toes the party line, so to speak, and he enjoyed the approval of Joseph Stalin. Even so, his writing is not mere Soviet propaganda but truly insightful and powerful literature of the human condition that just happens to be set amid Soviet society and ideology.</span></span><br />
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<span>Sholokhov was born in the territory of the Don Cossacks (near the Don River), and much of his literature is concerned with Cossack life. Most of the entries in <i>Early Stories</i> take place around the 1920s, when the majority of Cossacks were hostile toward communism. Sholokhov’s depiction of this time and place reveals the contrasts between the traditional pastoral Cossack lifestyle and the encroaching modern communist regime. As Sholokhov depicts it, the armed conflict between these two forces is played out in the bleak and dusty environment of the steppes, where life is hard to begin with even without the added horrors of warfare. Sholokhov’s writing here reminds me of the stories of Mexican author Juan Rulfo in his book <i><a href="https://obdg.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-burning-plain-by-juan-rulfo.html">The Burning Plain</a></i>, which take place during the Mexican Revolution. Both authors vividly recreate the experiences of their homelands in stark and unsparing tones and illustrate the riveting drama of unsung human lives amid brutality, poverty, and oppression. Each relates such dark themes, however, not without touches of beauty, humor, and a mystical surrealism. Their works transcend location and ideology to elucidate universal truths of the human experience.
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<span>In “The Bastard,” an 8-year-old boy is reunited with his father, who has been gone for years fighting in the communist army. Their neighbors in their Cossack village, however, are not favorably disposed towards the Reds. In “The Azure Steppe,” an old serf tells his grandson stories of life before the Revolution, detailing the violent treatment of peasants by the landlord, and how some of those peasants fought back. In “The Herdsman,” a young man with communist leanings dreams of an urban education, but he’s stuck in his backwards Cossack village. “The Birth Mark” depicts the lawlessness and banditry rampant during wartime. “Alien Blood” is a poignant tale of a Cossack couple who lose their son to war, while “The Foal” relates the life of a horse unlucky enough to be born to an army unit during a military campaign.
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<span>Despite his Nobel Prize, I imagine Sholokhov’s association with Stalin hasn’t done his long-term literary reputation any favors. Nevertheless, communist or not, Soviet or not, Sholokhov is a terrific author of powerful and fascinating fiction. And Quiet Flows the Don is a masterpiece. By comparison, these short stories are more like the sketches of a master painter. They aren’t as impressive as the artist’s masterworks, but they display the same prodigious talent. Anything by Sholokhov is worth reading; unfortunately, there isn’t a whole lot available in English. If you come across a copy of the now out-of-print <i>Early Stories</i> in a used book store, snatch it up.
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<span class="Apple-style-span"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span"><b>Stories in this collection</b></span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span">The Birth-Mark</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: georgia;"><span>The Herdsman</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: georgia;"><span>The Bastard</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: georgia;"><span>The Azure Steppe</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span">The Foal</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="Apple-style-span">Alien Blood</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.</span></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: x-small;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/review/RZXAOHW4JTBKP/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm">https://www.amazon.com/review/RZXAOHW4JTBKP/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm<br /></a></span><div><div><br /></div></div></div>Karl Janssenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16133816726897297775noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-693376005436007012.post-23175000171700834902024-02-02T05:30:00.008-06:002024-02-05T08:31:05.492-06:00Northwest Coast Indian Art: An Analysis of Form by Bill Holm<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-iGEbUYe9MCA/TcRrfQ0Kz_I/AAAAAAAABf0/3aqwoTPnzmMy8t72-TDPgdVlFebPY-vngCPcBGAYYCw/s1600/4stars.gif" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-right: 0px;"><img border="0" data-original-height="17" data-original-width="106" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-iGEbUYe9MCA/TcRrfQ0Kz_I/AAAAAAAABf0/3aqwoTPnzmMy8t72-TDPgdVlFebPY-vngCPcBGAYYCw/s1600/4stars.gif" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>An informative style guide to a sophisticated Indigenous art form</b></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6wfznPy2T8H96LY9oTkHu7f9qCD6dVk0i3h1C7M82VolkBxo3OTpg90Ed190S9uVScyRYBFke4hkhUw3k85vRlFzt4Rfh4SjN1p_OwiyWB1aHhxlbusJEilC4XAmOgzD_5eElN_XxVDm5Szu5joVLwudDQG80EAkJfqw9YWJW6CCsI6qVrKfnJXTCHeEE/s205/holmnorthwest2.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="205" data-original-width="162" height="205" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6wfznPy2T8H96LY9oTkHu7f9qCD6dVk0i3h1C7M82VolkBxo3OTpg90Ed190S9uVScyRYBFke4hkhUw3k85vRlFzt4Rfh4SjN1p_OwiyWB1aHhxlbusJEilC4XAmOgzD_5eElN_XxVDm5Szu5joVLwudDQG80EAkJfqw9YWJW6CCsI6qVrKfnJXTCHeEE/s1600/holmnorthwest2.jpg" width="162" /></a></div>The Native Americans (or First Nations, as Canadians would say) of the Northwest Pacific Coast of North America developed a beautiful artistic style that is still actively practiced by artists of the region, as evidenced in everything from totem poles to jewelry to modern lithographic prints. What makes this art so attractive and intriguing is the unique formal language of sinuous, undulating lines, and the composite, interconnected imagery of animal and human forms that’s instantly recognizable as common to this particular region. University of Washington art historian Bill Holm set out to establish a code of formal guidelines endemic to the Indigenous art of the Northwest Coast. He accomplished this by analyzing roughly 400 works in different media and quantitatively calculating statistics of form, color, and design to draw conclusions about the universal characteristics of this aesthetic language. Holm clarifies that he is specifically examining the art of five nations that he considers produce the purest examples of this art form: the Haida, Tlingit, Tsimshian, Bella Bella, and Bella Coola peoples. Holm’s book <i>Northwest Coast Indian Art: An Analysis of Form</i> was first published in 1965 by the University of Washington Press.
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</span><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span><span><span><span><br /></span><span>I read their 50th Anniversary Edition, published in 2015. This is really a beautiful book. Even though it’s just a slim paperback, it has the luscious quality of a coffee-table art tome. Graphic designer Thomas Eykemans deserves commendation for his composition and layout of this book. (I also design books for a university press, and this book makes me envious.) The photographs are all high quality, the illustrations are very well executed, and the book is beautifully printed.
</span></span></span></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span>The text by Holm, on the other hand, isn’t quite as pleasurable. His writing often reads with the dryness and abstrusity of a geometry textbook but without the mathematical precision. Holm may have been the first to write down the aesthetic rules for this art form, but I’m not sure how useful the guidelines he’s established will really be for artists attempting to learn this visual language. A lot of Holm’s statements are just obvious generalities that anyone could make by observing several pieces of Northwest Coast Indian art—the curvilinear forms and the use of ovoids, for example. Holm also phrases a lot of his aesthetic assessments in the form of “Some artists do this; some artists do that,” which doesn’t really provide any useful definitiveness either. Holm’s greatest contribution is his revelation that two-dimensional Northwest Coast art is made up of a primary formline, secondary forms, and tertiary forms, all of which must be balanced in their own right before working together as a cohesive whole. These levels of form also correspond to the three main colors employed: black, red, and blue-green. The book includes some very good diagrams that illustrate this concept well. Holm never discusses the meaning of the imagery in these artworks, such as the animal or human forms depicted. For artists looking to practice or learn from this art form, I think a better instructional manual would be Hilary Stewart’s <i><a href="https://obdg.blogspot.com/2013/10/looking-at-indian-art-of-northwest.html">Looking at Northwest Coast Indian Art</a></i>. </span></span></div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span><span><br /></span>
<span>The strength of Holm’s book is its instructive illustrations and diagrams. The design and full-color printing also make it a more visually attractive volume than Stewart’s book. Though I’ve expressed reservations about Holm’s writing, if you’re really interested in Northwest Coast Indian art, this is a book you should own. It’s not a huge coffee table book, so it’s not going to set you back a lot of money, and with the paperback price you’re certainly getting your money’s worth.
</span></span></span><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span><span><span><span style="font-size: x-small;">If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.</span></span></span></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span><span><span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/review/R2V2JGKH6IVS5K/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm">https://www.amazon.com/review/R2V2JGKH6IVS5K/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm</a></span></span></span></span></span></div><div><br /></div></div>Karl Janssenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16133816726897297775noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-693376005436007012.post-85949888714984021312024-01-31T05:30:00.007-06:002024-01-31T05:30:00.137-06:00What Shall We Do? by Leo Tolstoy<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-cQQAI9jrR9E/TfDR-pEtECI/AAAAAAAABfo/F3Msr5bKBdkVycYqNcO2qYu1e66ui0_ugCPcBGAYYCw/s1600/2halfstars.gif" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-right: 0px;"><img border="0" data-original-height="17" data-original-width="106" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-cQQAI9jrR9E/TfDR-pEtECI/AAAAAAAABfo/F3Msr5bKBdkVycYqNcO2qYu1e66ui0_ugCPcBGAYYCw/s1600/2halfstars.gif" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>Thought-provoking utopianism mixed with drunk-uncle curmudgeonliness</b></span><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTimw5xcRRRz3rqRSQouYUP_4q2DBsowKshgKQEsH0WvTAQPT4IaLp5mrMOUQ7JRa1qvaAIRP4LiE4RyzbDMtAdCOzmEuk-pC_7lBhOjZdDAxn9QruDkoajVnZHkU0fEPjT3bDkjUwFFlKvoaFLASzxRfKVbycAPalKft0WqxK1p-vga-pjhkugdvYp48_/s209/tolstoywhatshall2.jpeg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="209" data-original-width="144" height="209" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTimw5xcRRRz3rqRSQouYUP_4q2DBsowKshgKQEsH0WvTAQPT4IaLp5mrMOUQ7JRa1qvaAIRP4LiE4RyzbDMtAdCOzmEuk-pC_7lBhOjZdDAxn9QruDkoajVnZHkU0fEPjT3bDkjUwFFlKvoaFLASzxRfKVbycAPalKft0WqxK1p-vga-pjhkugdvYp48_/s1600/tolstoywhatshall2.jpeg" width="144" /></a></div>Leo Tolstoy is renowned as one of the world’s greatest novelists, but he also wrote short stories, plays, and nonfiction works. In the latter category, Tolstoy was quite prolific as an essayist and philosopher. His book <i>What Shall We Do?</i> was first published in 1886. In this nonfiction work, Tolstoy addresses the topic of poverty and the inequality of the class system. <i>What Shall We Do?</i> has also been published in English as <i>What Must Be Done?</i>, <i>What Then Must We Do?</i>, or <i>What is to Be Done?</i></span><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">
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<span>Tolstoy was born to a wealthy aristocratic family. He owned a few thousand acres of land worked by over 300 serfs. Around 1870, Tolstoy had a “born-again” experience. Although not a proponent of organized religion, he developed a philosophical conviction that one should live one’s life in accordance with the moral and ethical teachings of Jesus Christ. From <i>What Shall We Do?</i>, the specifics of Tolstoy’s theological beliefs are not entirely clear (I believe he covers that ground more thoroughly in his 1884 book <i>What I Believe</i>), but he definitely advocates the emulation of Christ’s life by giving up one’s riches for the benefit of others. His ethical views bring to mind those of the Christian socialists or Christian anarchists.
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<span>The first dozen chapters or so of <i>What Shall We Do?</i> feel like a waste of time, quite frankly. Tolstoy relates how he discovered poverty while residing in Moscow. He visits the housing projects of the poor and converses with beggars on the street. He tries to come up with charitable endeavors to alleviate the sufferings of the urban poor, but none of his attempts are satisfyingly successful. He asks his rich friends to donate money to the cause, and they all agree to do so, but then never deliver the funds they pledged. There is an annoying disingenuous to the way that Tolstoy discusses poverty in these chapters, acting as if he were a naive country boy who never realized that rich people or poor people existed before he hit the age of 50.
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<span>After this lackluster intro, however, Tolstoy starts to get into the nuts and bolts of his views on political economy. He discusses at great length the “division of labor,” which he sees as an excuse for the wealthy and privileged to avoid doing their share of the work in society. Whenever it is pointed out that some people labor like mules while others perform no labor at all, the reason given for this inequality is always “the division of labor.” Tolstoy sees no valid reason why the wealthy, the clergy, scientists and artists should be excused from manual labor, or why they are financially rewarded for doing so. In Tolstoy’s view, everyone should grow their own food, for starters, and contribute a fair share of manual labor required to legitimately justify their existence. Science and art are things should be done in one’s spare time and should not be funded by tax dollars. Tolstoy argues with an old-fashioned curmudgeonliness. In <i>What Shall We Do?</i>, he comes across as anti-government, anti-religion, anti-science, anti-art, and anti-birth control, among many other antis. He calls to mind American thinker <a href="https://obdg.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-art-of-commonplace-agrarian-essays.html">Wendell Berry</a> in that they both seem to think we would all be better off if we reverted to some quasi-Amish lifestyle. </span></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span><span><span><br /></span></span></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span><span><span>Nevertheless, Tolstoy has some very interesting things to say about money, the exploitation of labor, and income inequality. One of his more interesting ideas is that everyone should spend a few hours of each day performing manual labor, intellectual labor, and artisan handicraft labor. That may be an unrealistically utopian idea for today’s world, but it’s a utopia I might enjoy living in. Overall, I found <i>What Shall We Do?</i> to be a confusing mash-up of liberal and conservative ideas, but not without glimpses of enlightening wisdom. You’re bound to find something to agree with here, but it’s unlikely you’ll agree with all of it.
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span><span>If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.<br /></span></span></span></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span><span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/review/R3PZVJY0RTN09N/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm">https://www.amazon.com/review/R3PZVJY0RTN09N/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm</a></span></span></span></span></span></div><div><br /></div></div>Karl Janssenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16133816726897297775noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-693376005436007012.post-24815933865158398382024-01-29T05:30:00.006-06:002024-01-29T05:30:00.167-06:00Sly and the Family Stone: An Oral History by Joel Selvin<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>From genius to nightmare in a few albums</b></span><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTVZLtJgjgO7RfQGcWPOrK9kCksT2axLJNddiycaouJnRHu41uHkxBP23upfcnDGYMadVroi9P4FlKLTijawzKUiq57x-cQBa8fRPPJXEHWWhgASolO5KgKGJfKlmSJtfCGyY5iAr67nGExpVCGvQl-b86TLxx30AnW-_UWSvXjrZYKCqUTIwt6s_iQGet/s213/selvinsly2.jpeg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="213" data-original-width="144" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTVZLtJgjgO7RfQGcWPOrK9kCksT2axLJNddiycaouJnRHu41uHkxBP23upfcnDGYMadVroi9P4FlKLTijawzKUiq57x-cQBa8fRPPJXEHWWhgASolO5KgKGJfKlmSJtfCGyY5iAr67nGExpVCGvQl-b86TLxx30AnW-_UWSvXjrZYKCqUTIwt6s_iQGet/s1600/selvinsly2.jpeg" width="144" /></a></div>Sly and the Family Stone still get some radio airplay on classic rock stations, but most people under the age of 60 are unlikely to remember or comprehend the level of fame and critical acclaim this band achieved in their heyday. Formed and led by the incomparable musician and songwriter Sly Stone (born Sylvester Stewart), the Family Stone was one of the first prominent bands to feature black and white artists, and men and women, making rock and roll music together. And no one was a token member. While the band was in its prime, Sly made sure everyone got their juicy riffs and solos. When people my age praise what a musical genius Prince was, I can’t help thinking Prince learned 90% of what he knew from Sly and the Family Stone.</span><br />
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<span>First published in 1998, <i>Sly and the Family Stone: An Oral History</i>, is a biography of the band compiled by rock journalist Joel Selvin. The text of this oral history is assembled from interviews with about forty different persons who lived and/or worked with Sly and the band. Notably absent from the interviewees is Sly himself. It would have been nice if he were present here to defend himself, but given that he’s been a recluse since the 1980s, that would be an unrealistic expectation. All of the other members of the Family Stone participated in Selvin’s project, with the exception of “Little Sister” Rose Stone. KC and Alpha Stewart, parents to Sly, Freddie, Rose, and Vaetta Stewart/Stone, tell their side of the story, as does Sly’s ex-wife. Most of the other participants are managers, bodyguards, record company execs, and other members of the entourage. There aren’t many big-name stars among the speakers, but Bobby Womack, Grace Slick, and the Grateful Dead’s Mickey Hart are among the few notable rock and rollers who testify.</span><br />
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<span>I’ve always found oral history to be an excellent format for rock and roll biography, especially when the artist in question has lived a scary and terrible life (see many episodes of VH1’s <i>Behind the Music</i>). A prime example would be the formidable <i><a href="https://obdg.blogspot.com/2013/09/ill-sleep-when-im-dead-dirty-life-and.html">I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead: The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon</a></i>, but in terms of self-destruction, paranoia, and violent behavior, Sly may have Warren beat. The story the participants tell here is really a shocking and tragic tale.
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<span>Sly was a musical genius who wrote songs and produced records even as a teenager. He was a successful radio DJ in San Francisco before he decided to form his own band. Sly and the Family Stone blew the crowd away at Woodstock and put out classic albums like <i>Stand!</i> and <i>There’s a Riot Goin’ On.</i> Sly’s songs told of a better way of life in which love and brotherhood triumphed over oppression and hate.
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<span>The story behind the scenes, however, was much darker. Sly turned into a control freak, not just in the studio but outside as well. With escalating fame came escalating drug use, including a proclivity for PCP. Members of the band often lived together in Sly’s homes amidst his large collections of guns and dogs. (There is a dog story in this book that is one of the most incredibly harrowing scenes I’ve ever read.) Sly’s bodyguards behaved like mob goons, allegedly beating up band members. Sly’s derangement got to the point where he considered showing up for concerts to be optional. Over time he isolated himself more and more, until the Family Stone became a one-man band. This book is more than just a hatchet session by the people interviewed. Despite the broken hearts, physical injuries, and shattered careers, one can sense that they truly cared about Sly. His decline was a tremendous squandering of artistic potential. This oral history is definitely not a feel-good story, but it does make for a riveting and eye-opening read.
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span>If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.</span></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: x-small;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/review/R1SLII7TVTLY2J/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm">https://www.amazon.com/review/R1SLII7TVTLY2J/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm<br /></a></span><div><br /></div></div>Karl Janssenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16133816726897297775noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-693376005436007012.post-77025814679259616912024-01-26T05:30:00.014-06:002024-01-26T13:48:28.688-06:00Werner Drewes: Sixty-Five Years of Printmaking by Martina Roudabush Norelli<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-S-uZ6aHfgmk/TfDSE6KsfZI/AAAAAAAABjQ/WONLY4BFfpoVSSXHoUXBPtCkg0wC_lx8ACPcBGAYYCw/s1600/3halfstars.gif" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-right: 0px;"><img border="0" data-original-height="17" data-original-width="106" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-S-uZ6aHfgmk/TfDSE6KsfZI/AAAAAAAABjQ/WONLY4BFfpoVSSXHoUXBPtCkg0wC_lx8ACPcBGAYYCw/s1600/3halfstars.gif" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>Biographical interview with a pioneering abstractionist</b></span><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfSn4ps7AfKwG42JTPRkGOjTrlaaK9VN-XfrUHZilSk5P0uDRPpNhGCxLKvYCO8lHbvLYqiLimMRHKPz7doD7cbCqxaE6Y22Lsaa988yabFrdhj5UKCwDBxjmdocwkH_czMyJjfh7gSfJdtry7WIZMgtM2zCJslF9GbDd4d0ZhepL1FOKMP6Orc1i0-8q3/s188/drewes652.jpeg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="188" data-original-width="144" height="188" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfSn4ps7AfKwG42JTPRkGOjTrlaaK9VN-XfrUHZilSk5P0uDRPpNhGCxLKvYCO8lHbvLYqiLimMRHKPz7doD7cbCqxaE6Y22Lsaa988yabFrdhj5UKCwDBxjmdocwkH_czMyJjfh7gSfJdtry7WIZMgtM2zCJslF9GbDd4d0ZhepL1FOKMP6Orc1i0-8q3/s1600/drewes652.jpeg" width="144" /></a></div>I dabble a bit in printmaking—linocuts and woodcuts—so I always keep an eye open for good books on the subject, and “new” (to me) artists to discover. I recently became aware of Werner Drewes (1899-1985), a prolific German-American artist who produced several hundred prints, most of them etchings and woodcuts (as well as over a thousand paintings). After stumbling upon a collection of Drewes’s work online, I was really blown away by his range of styles and subject matter, his skillfully aggressive style of carving, and his bold yet sensitive taste in color and design. Drewes studied at the Bauhaus in Germany before emigrating to America in 1930. His work ranges in style from German expressionism to abstract expressionism, with occasional touches of cubism and surrealism.</span><div>
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<span>As far as I know, only a few books have ever been published about Drewes, and all of them are out of print. The best of these books is the massive tome <i>Werner Drewes: A Catalogue Raisonné of His Prints</i>, compiled by Ingrid Rose. Like most catalogue raisonnés, however, a used copy will set you back at least 80 bucks. The runner-up, and a distant second in terms of size and coverage (only 56 pages), is <i>Werner Drewes: Sixty-Five Years of Printmaking</i>, an exhibition catalog published by the Smithsonian National Museum of American Art in 1984.</span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span><span><br /></span><span>If you are looking for a beautiful portfolio of Drewes’s art, this book isn’t it. <i>Sixty-Five Years of Printmaking</i> contains only three color plates, 26 black and white images of Drewes’s prints, and a few photos of the artist at different stages in his life. The exhibition for which this catalog was published was about evenly split between etchings and woodcuts, so the illustrations in the book are about evenly split as well. Fortunately, if you want to look at Drewes’s art, you can view hundreds of his works in full color online, either at <a href="http://drewesfineart.com">drewesfineart.com</a> or at the website of the <a href="https://americanart.si.edu/artist/werner-drewes-1344">Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM)</a>.
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<span>The main attraction of this book is the text. Drewes was still alive when this exhibition was held, and the bulk of the catalog is devoted to an interview with the artist. In this interview, Drewes discusses his childhood, his artistic education, his world travels, and his career as an artist and teacher. This first-hand account by Drewes is likely the most authoritative source on his life and the influences behind his art. In the Bauhaus, Drewes studied with Johannes Itten, Walter Gropius, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and László Moholy-Nagy. Decades before abstract expressionism became big, Drewes was part of a small group of American artists who pioneered purely abstract art. Though he never became a household name like some of his Bauhaus contemporaries, Drewes nevertheless built a solid career as an artist and educator. He led a very adventurous and inspiring life.</span><br />
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<span>Interviewer Martina Roudabush Norelli doesn’t ask all of the questions I would have asked. Sometimes the interview reads more like a curriculum vitae than a discussion of an artist’s methods and philosophy. Nevertheless, there’s a lot of interesting content to this conversation that makes this a worthwhile read for any fan of Drewes’s prints. This may not be the visual feast that this talented and innovative artist deserves, but considering the scarcity of information on Drewes, this book at least serves up a satisfying snack.
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</span><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: x-small;"><span>If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.</span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: x-small;"><span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/review/R3LK3AZEAL1SB3/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm">https://www.amazon.com/review/R3LK3AZEAL1SB3/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm</a></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">Visit the website drewesfineart.com to see several hundred images of Werner Drewes’s prints:</span></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://www.drewesfineart.com/" style="margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px;"><img border="0" data-original-height="369" data-original-width="525" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaqBY7nF0MR9uxuXamifCU6y8H0JmC7YgQ70h2DZpGTGz4_QoS3WB8SU8Xe7ilCV5lswMjFCZDdIm1MMtickxKl_9PI1pQQwIWbdndoAMKWUeOcQNOxckNxBs7IDYQfL1zV4qdKxqD6ART_f9tFrCretRR8WaAk7NFYDzfQU8epOAESRICzT_B4ZyV72Xj/s16000/drewesfineart525.jpeg" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></div><div><br /></div></span></span></div></div>Karl Janssenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16133816726897297775noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-693376005436007012.post-63667995656008322022024-01-24T05:30:00.036-06:002024-01-24T05:30:00.129-06:00They Walked Like Men by Clifford D. Simak<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-xMpCofstnVg/TcRrk_t4kuI/AAAAAAAABfI/rxsCmX-il6QrB-PcRlpoT79Id8uXmiFuACPcBGAYYCw/s1600/3stars.gif" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-right: 0px;"><img border="0" data-original-height="17" data-original-width="106" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-xMpCofstnVg/TcRrk_t4kuI/AAAAAAAABfI/rxsCmX-il6QrB-PcRlpoT79Id8uXmiFuACPcBGAYYCw/s1600/3stars.gif" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span><span><b style="font-family: verdana;">Newspaperman uncovers far-fetched invasion plot</b></span><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgXE7AYKWlL5W1HO8dlAUgpz24CMPklkayvdNaiUNV-izbyeMk42Cud5vdYNaUDnR0jh5NszPwXRYMWj_ibR8hZSgeKdTvlx2O6_0pxWuaInrMPu8fP55JvHCcsPZl-6ZPAGoTp6PqO_4sgBmLGYy_lKM9Ft_jGvH65vj5Y6qwnkPvgMZjDnvORPSaTLYI/s216/simaktheywalked2.jpeg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="216" data-original-width="144" height="216" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgXE7AYKWlL5W1HO8dlAUgpz24CMPklkayvdNaiUNV-izbyeMk42Cud5vdYNaUDnR0jh5NszPwXRYMWj_ibR8hZSgeKdTvlx2O6_0pxWuaInrMPu8fP55JvHCcsPZl-6ZPAGoTp6PqO_4sgBmLGYy_lKM9Ft_jGvH65vj5Y6qwnkPvgMZjDnvORPSaTLYI/s1600/simaktheywalked2.jpeg" width="144" /></a></div>When I was younger, I read a couple of short stories by Clifford D. Simak, but he didn’t really register on my radar until Open Road Media started re-releasing his works in ebook format in 2015. Since then, having really enjoyed Open Road’s series <i>The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak</i>, I decided to read and review Simak’s complete works. I was forced to hunt down some obscure paperbacks, but Open Road has finally caught up with me and published just about all of Simak’s work in ebook format. Their most recent release is his 1962 novel <i>They Walked Like Men</i>, which also happens to be my final read in Simak’s extensive catalog of fiction. I probably could’ve ended on a better book, as this is not one of his best novels, but Simak’s science fiction is at the very least considerably above average, and <i>They Walked Like Men</i> is worth the time spent for Simak fans.</span><div><span><span><span style="font-family: georgia;"><br /></span></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span><span>While his career as a science fiction author lasted more than half a century, Simak also had a day job as a journalist and editor for the Minneapolis Star and Tribune. His stories often take place in the Midwest, and newspapermen frequently figure as protagonists. In this case, the city is unnamed, but it might very well be modeled after Minneapolis. Parker Graves is a reporter for the city’s daily newspaper. Graves and his fellow journalists cover issues of local importance, such as the closing of the hometown department store or the scarcity of available residential real estate in the metro area. Graves’s girlfriend Joy, also a reporter, gets stuck with more mundane fare like a man who breeds tame skunks for pets. Little did anyone suspect that all these various threads would be tangled in a sinister plot that threatens not only the city but the entire world.
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<span>In the novel’s first chapter, Graves has an encounter with an alien creature. In my opinion, Simak jumped the gun a little too early with such a startling reveal, but the title of the novel kind of gives away the general gist of the story anyway. This is a mystery/thriller in which the villains are nonhuman invaders. <i>They Walked Like Men</i> is a very entertaining and engaging novel while you’re reading it, but it’s one of those books that when you get to the end you think to yourself, there were some aspects of that story that were rather dumb. This is not a comedy, though it does have some comedic moments. In fact, this is perhaps one of Simak’s more deadly serious novels. Even though this is science fiction, however, some degree of logical believability is reasonably expected, and this story definitely lacks in the credibility department. The physical aspect of the creatures is conceived and handled very well and leads to some thrilling and suspenseful scenes. Their grand strategy for taking over the world, however, defies logic, not only the logic of our real world but even the rules that the aliens have established for themselves. The plot brings up some thought-provoking issues of economics and politics, but the ideas feel a bit half-baked, as if Simak didn’t thoroughly think them through.
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<span>enjoyable read than probably 90 percent of the sci-fi authors out there. Every Simak book is worth reading, though some more than others. If <i>They Walked Like Men</i> comes up as a Kindle Daily Deal, by all means buy it, but make sure you also read some of his better novels like <i><a href="https://obdg.blogspot.com/2017/09/city-by-clifford-d-simak.html">City</a></i>, <i><a href="https://obdg.blogspot.com/2016/12/way-station-by-clifford-d-simak.html">Way Station</a></i>, <i><a href="https://obdg.blogspot.com/2017/04/mastodonia-by-clifford-d-simak.html">Mastodonia</a></i>, <i><a href="https://obdg.blogspot.com/2023/08/the-werewolf-principle-by-clifford-d.html">The Werewolf Principle</a></i>, and <i><a href="https://obdg.blogspot.com/2022/08/the-visitors-by-clifford-d-simak.html">The Visitors</a></i>.
</span></span></span><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span><span></span></span>If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.</span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/review/R24FR5HGBSKCHB/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm">https://www.amazon.com/review/R24FR5HGBSKCHB/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm</a></span></span></div><div><br /></div></div></div>Karl Janssenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16133816726897297775noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-693376005436007012.post-56220925893713331132024-01-22T05:30:00.008-06:002024-01-22T05:30:00.134-06:00Owls of the Eastern Ice: A Quest to Find and Save the World’s Largest Owl by Jonathan C. Slaght<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>Moderately interesting field-work memoir</b></span><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhk51895syF8KIoRuT5xRvhDjkGNV67gtJEHWTqmfvAP42NIDTzc6-2JPK_6vSzK46uxOXTd5CddDnq2OoUa5otKFWnJW9KcaWem702T5eX_1Kzl4cPuZp9TdTL_Tl4kj2xL_tHwDxMkUpgQFshYGY1XS7mmitrRHZv0dSWB6jmp1QpCvEi0quQqUQgwM4F/s224/slaghtowls2.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="224" data-original-width="144" height="224" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhk51895syF8KIoRuT5xRvhDjkGNV67gtJEHWTqmfvAP42NIDTzc6-2JPK_6vSzK46uxOXTd5CddDnq2OoUa5otKFWnJW9KcaWem702T5eX_1Kzl4cPuZp9TdTL_Tl4kj2xL_tHwDxMkUpgQFshYGY1XS7mmitrRHZv0dSWB6jmp1QpCvEi0quQqUQgwM4F/s1600/slaghtowls2.jpg" width="144" /></a></div>In 2005, Jonathan Slaght was working on a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota. To achieve his degree, he formulated a research project to study the Blakiston’s fish owl. This majestic bird, the largest owl species in the world, lives in the forests of Eastern Asia. Slaght decided to conduct his research in the Russian province of Primorye, along the Pacific coast northeast of Vladivostok. Though an American by birth, through his father’s occupation and some time in the Peace Corps Slaght had previously lived in Primorye, spoke the language, and was familiar with the region’s customs. Over the course of the next few years, Slaght made repeated trips to Primorye to find Blakiston’s fish owls, capture them, and fit them with radio telemetry devices to track their movements, with the end goal of crafting a conservation plan for the fish owl and completing his dissertation. Slaght’s 2020 book <i>Owls of the Eastern Ice </i>is a memoir of his time spent in Primorye conducting this research project. </span><div><span style="font-family: georgia;">
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<span><i>Owls of the Eastern Ice </i>is basically a 24-page <i>National Geographic </i>article that has been drawn out into a 300-page book. There isn’t enough of interest here to merit such a lengthy treatment. At least half of the book consists of Slaght and his team looking for owls and not finding any. The reader gleans a little bit of a feel for what life is like in this remote portion of Russia, but Slaght doesn’t delve much deeper into the culture than many episodes of drinking in hunting cabins. The most memorable passages of the book involve Slaght and his Russian colleagues escaping some natural threat or obstacle, such as a flood or blizzard.
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<span>Other than the fish owls that Slaght is searching for, he doesn’t offer much discussion of the rest of the ecosystem beyond a few mentions of other species spotted here and there. The reader never really gets the feeling of what it’s like to be among these forests. Although this is a book about nature, it’s not really nature writing. A naturalist like Bernd Heinrich might combine concrete bird science with broader Thoreau-like musings, but Slaght’s book is strictly focused on his research. For other zoologists engaged in projects involving the tagging and radio-tracking of animals, this might be a helpful case study in methods and techniques. As an average bird-lover, however, I was disappointed to find that I learned more about capturing fish owls than I did about the birds themselves. This is a perfectly sound volume on an ornithological research project, but I’m not sure why the publisher decided to give this book the full-on trade book treatment and market it to general readers.
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<span>I envy Slaght’s adventures: exploring remote wilderness in a foreign land, observing beautiful birds, uncovering previously unknown facts about them, and working to conserve wildlife. His writing, however, while exhibiting the perfectly competent and articulate voice of a scientist, didn’t really generate much excitement in the relating of his travels. This memoir isn’t colorful enough to succeed as a travelogue. The audience most likely to enjoy this book are Slaght’s fellow ornithologists, not for its scientific findings—which would be presented in his dissertation or other academic publication—but for its relatable anecdotes of field work.
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span><span>If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.<br /></span></span></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span><span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/review/RV6C06BICQJP3/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm">https://www.amazon.com/review/RV6C06BICQJP3/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm</a></span></span></span></span></div><div><br /></div></div>Karl Janssenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16133816726897297775noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-693376005436007012.post-70213974485946096322024-01-19T05:30:00.002-06:002024-01-19T13:08:27.488-06:00We Murderers: A Play in Three Acts by Guðmundur Kamban<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: verdana;"><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><b>Scandinavian drama of an American marriage</b></span></span><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIlxpq0At4sY0MYYKw_o8zi4X7r85Pc4_RLDf19wtr8h6FSBZjmiht4JhxcTJzkZin7OfMVPY756UDgRqAa2bzEB5szNunXY6bzhKvK_KsnWdvWgD5ypvohScxM82uHH5H3_hbEyc2FF8dSScYnO2ZXWLH-JecxmKazroDGtSx_g2RezeaqkcKdquOj8WZ/s224/kalmanwemurderers2.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="224" data-original-width="144" height="224" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIlxpq0At4sY0MYYKw_o8zi4X7r85Pc4_RLDf19wtr8h6FSBZjmiht4JhxcTJzkZin7OfMVPY756UDgRqAa2bzEB5szNunXY6bzhKvK_KsnWdvWgD5ypvohScxM82uHH5H3_hbEyc2FF8dSScYnO2ZXWLH-JecxmKazroDGtSx_g2RezeaqkcKdquOj8WZ/s1600/kalmanwemurderers2.jpg" width="144" /></a></div>Playwright Guðmundur Kamban was born in Iceland. He moved to Denmark for college and remained in Copenhagen for most of his life, although he lived briefly in New York, London, and Berlin. His play <i>We Murderers</i> was first staged in Denmark in 1920. The play is set in New York, where Kamban and his wife had recently lived for a year or two. In 1970, <i>We Murderers</i> was published in English as one of about a dozen books in the Nordic Translation Series from the University of Wisconsin Press. One notable thing about this series is that the University of Wisconsin has made these translations freely available to the public. <a href="https://search.library.wisc.edu/digital/ANordicTrans">The books can be downloaded from the UW Libraries website</a>, allowing curious readers to sample the works of 20th-century Scandinavian writers, many of whom are revered in their home countries but little known in America.</span><br />
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<span><i>We Murderers</i> presents the tumultuous marriage of Ernest and Norma Macintyre. They had previously enjoyed a happy and stable marriage, but since Norma took a solo vacation to Florida, their relationship has not been the same. Norma has recently taken up flying lessons with an instructor named Mr. Rattigan, whom she met in Florida. She swears that there is nothing romantic happening between them, but Ernest is a very jealous husband who resents the amount of time his wife is spending with another man. Norma thus feels she has to lie to Ernest when she spends time with Rattigan, and her mother and sister aid her in her deceptions. Ernest has had enough and demands a divorce. Norma refuses to agree to a divorce, and swears that she will change her behavior to please her husband. For Ernest, however, their love has been tainted by dishonesty, and he will not settle for anything less than true love and complete devotion.</span><br />
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<span>There is a touch of Eugene O’Neill in this, but it would be early-career O’Neill, as seen in such forgettable plays as <i><a href="https://obdg.blogspot.com/2018/04/welded-by-eugene-oneill.html">Welded</a></i>, <i><a href="https://obdg.blogspot.com/2017/06/diffrent-by-eugene-oneill.html">Diff’rent</a></i>, and <i><a href="https://obdg.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-first-man-by-eugene-oneill.html">The First Man</a></i>. This ain’t no <i>Long Days Journey Into Night</i>. Kamban clearly sympathizes with Ernest in this conflict, but to readers a century later the husband’s stance seems like unreasonable overreacting. Kamban’s views of love, as voiced by Ernest, seem pretty high-falutin a century later. Even the title, <i>We Murderers</i>, is rather pretentious for what today feels like a rather pedestrian marital drama.</span><br />
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<span>Why would a Scandinavian playwright set his play in New York? Perhaps the Danish audience would have liked that. The bigger question is, why would anyone translate it for this series? If you’re doing a series on Nordic literature, why not translate books that give some insight into Scandinavian life? For the American reader, this little play about a New York marriage is not very special. The introduction by D. E. Askey informs us that Kamban was satirizing American society but if so, this isn’t a very biting satire.</span><br />
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<span>The story of Kamban’s death is one of the saddest that I’ve ever heard. On the day that World War II ended in Denmark, Kamban was wrongly suspected of being a Nazi collaborator and was shot in the head in front of his family. During his life, Kamban was also reputed to have psychic abilities. He sounds like an interesting man, but this play unfortunately is not very interesting. Of the several volumes I’ve read in the Nordic Translations Series, this is the weakest entry. Thankfully, it might also be the shortest book in the series, so it doesn’t require a major investment in reading time.</span><span class="Apple-style-span"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.</span></span><div><span><div><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/review/REWLFFFWI3VG9/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm">https://www.amazon.com/review/REWLFFFWI3VG9/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm</a></span></div></span></div></div>Karl Janssenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16133816726897297775noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-693376005436007012.post-70871856134770046772024-01-17T05:30:00.004-06:002024-01-17T05:30:00.129-06:00Interstellar: The Search for Extraterrestrial Life and Our Future in the Stars by Avi Loeb<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>We can’t get to know alien visitors if we’re not looking for them</b></span><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRYxzMxBIrb-jdIj3z4WtOUFkQwbJ50dPS8UW9DVFCHJwVFdXWiNinnkdG9QPFjUx0Np5GXH411sLUHheDOPgyqM7cGN7suBkHr2t5Uzd_4rk2jYLoBTXDgpw17Ht583mvMXlpa1f-jbPMNYJyOKRgiGmCpJrzwJFIwaPNn6X0b0aQ2mwS07_w76Ke-6wI/s217/loebinterstellar2.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="217" data-original-width="144" height="217" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRYxzMxBIrb-jdIj3z4WtOUFkQwbJ50dPS8UW9DVFCHJwVFdXWiNinnkdG9QPFjUx0Np5GXH411sLUHheDOPgyqM7cGN7suBkHr2t5Uzd_4rk2jYLoBTXDgpw17Ht583mvMXlpa1f-jbPMNYJyOKRgiGmCpJrzwJFIwaPNn6X0b0aQ2mwS07_w76Ke-6wI/s1600/loebinterstellar2.jpg" width="144" /></a></div>Israeli-American astrophysicist Avi Loeb is a professor at Harvard University. In addition to his academic publications, Loeb has published two science books for the general public. The first was <i>Extraterrestrial</i>, published in 2021; the second is <i>Interstellar</i>, published in 2023. In these books, Loeb advocates that we employ more active measures in searching for evidence of alien life. In <i>Interstellar</i>, he also expresses hopes that connecting with an extraterrestrial intelligence will aid humanity in colonizing other worlds.</span><div>
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<span>Thus far, mankind has sent five objects out of our solar system. Millions of years from now, one of those objects may drift into another star system, informing an exoplanet’s inhabitants of our existence. If the roles were reversed, however, and some interstellar civilization’s space junk drifted into our solar system, would we even notice it? Loeb’s argument is not if we don’t try. For this reason, Loeb has established the Galileo Project to actively search for interstellar visitors. He has designed a small observatory to monitor the skies with instruments and AI designed to filter out natural phenomena and alert us of UAPs (what used to be called UFOs). Loeb wants to place these observatories in multiple locations around the globe. There have been four confirmed objects from outside our solar system that have entered our neighborhood. Three were meteors that landed on Earth. Loeb’s team is working to recover and analyze fragments of those meteorites. The fourth was ‘Oumuamua, a mysterious object that passed within 33 million km of Earth. It’s not examined in detail here because Loeb discussed it in his previous book <i>Extraterrestrial</i>. Could ‘Oumuamua have been an alien probe? We’ll never know, because we didn’t get a good look at it. Loeb argues that we should be better prepared for the next interstellar object that comes our way.</span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span><span><br /></span><span>I really like most of what Loeb has to say in this book, but I didn’t always like the way he says it. The text is accessible to general readers with a reasonable level of science education. There are a few instances where Loeb’s explanations of theoretical physics were over my head, but I got the general gist. On the other hand, Loeb must think his audience is dense, judging by how he continually hammers the same points home over and over again. His writing is sooooo repetitive. The whole second half of the book consists of multiple reiterations of the same points made in Part I, just restated in a more philosophical tone with different metaphors.
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<span>As to “Our Future in the Stars,” I agree with Loeb that ultimately mankind will have to migrate to other star systems or face extinction here on earth. If we don’t destroy ourselves sooner, the Sun will eventually die. His vision of our extrasolar exodus, however, isn’t entirely appealing. Loeb proposes sending thousands of small craft with 3D printers that can molecularly constitute human DNA to seed alien worlds. That’s not exactly what I had in mind when envisioning my descendants colonizing other planets. Loeb himself admits that such a plan “may promise human civilization endures but not as anything recognizably human.” Loeb is also very excited about a recent article in which some researchers assert it is possible to create a “pocket universe” in a laboratory. Why is this even a goal?</span><br />
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<span>I admire Loeb for daring to think about the big picture of mankind’s future and the rational way he has gone about working through these issues. Though I’m not wholeheartedly sold on everything he says, I’m glad someone is doing this work, and I look forward to hearing more about his findings.</span><br />
</span><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: x-small;"><span>If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.</span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: x-small;"><span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/review/R25RHXN8FA8UO5/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm">https://www.amazon.com/review/R25RHXN8FA8UO5/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm</a></span></span></div><div><br /></div></span></span></div></div>Karl Janssenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16133816726897297775noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-693376005436007012.post-5429837434610013532024-01-15T05:30:00.009-06:002024-01-15T05:30:00.138-06:00The Cotton-Pickers by B. Traven<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>An American drifter in post-Revolutionary Mexico</b></span><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEic1Q7fxSnDPI1xClPYxw7NWSQqGZQS2efSGOOaV8PQ01sPGIADp5iSp0jXA8GAupyyGsqeAQ-WUt27ZeS7jrZsljkys4lkN1be6_JrCMnAdS9wjQskyxNihGX4633a56bN5KBfQh-drrJmC5jrIKGIgYI-8sb4riU7ynBo5vYdp2y50Fg8qtaLflfTZM9f/s219/travencottonpickers2.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="219" data-original-width="144" height="219" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEic1Q7fxSnDPI1xClPYxw7NWSQqGZQS2efSGOOaV8PQ01sPGIADp5iSp0jXA8GAupyyGsqeAQ-WUt27ZeS7jrZsljkys4lkN1be6_JrCMnAdS9wjQskyxNihGX4633a56bN5KBfQh-drrJmC5jrIKGIgYI-8sb4riU7ynBo5vYdp2y50Fg8qtaLflfTZM9f/s1600/travencottonpickers2.jpg" width="144" /></a></div>B. Traven was a German writer who lived for years in Mexico, where most of his fiction is set. The name is a pseudonym. The exact identity of the writer has never been verified, but there are a few educated guesses. Traven’s debut novel, <i>The Cotton-Pickers</i>, was originally published in 1925 in the newspaper of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. It first appeared in book form the following year under the title of <i>The Wobbly</i>, but subsequent editions have used the original title of <i>The Cotton-Pickers</i>.</span><br />
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<span>Gerald Gales is an American drifter wandering through Mexico. He gets a tip that a farmer named Mr. Shine is looking for cotton pickers. Seeking work, Gales sets out to find the farm in the vicinity of an obscure place called Ixtlixochicuauhtepec. At a train station, he meets up with five other drifters looking for the same Mr. Shine. The six wandering laborers decide to team up and travel together to find Shine’s farm, where they then sign on to pick his cotton.</span><br />
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<span>The novel takes place shortly following the Mexican Revolution and the overthrow of the dictator Porfirio Díaz. Since that momentous regime change, the Mexican workers supposedly have more rights, but the employers still exploit them and treat them very much like peons. Here, all the employers seem to be White Europeans or Americans, while the laborers are mostly people of color: Latinos, Indigenous Mexicans, Blacks, Asians (though Gales is White). <i>The Cotton-Pickers</i> is first and foremost a novel about labor. Traven depicts the squalid conditions under which the cotton pickers live and work. Mr. Shine tries to pay them as little as possible, but the workers find ways of fighting for their rights and attaining small victories. This story, however, is not told in the depressing style of a muckraking exposé. Rather, it’s more of a comedy infused with a persistent gallows humor. The cotton pickers work like mules, but they also have fun and enjoy their lives as vagabonds. Traven doesn’t really push any socialist agenda, but he does point out the absurdities and abuses of capitalism and colonialism. Beyond Shine’s farm, the narrative also follows Gales as he moves on to other jobs, sometimes accompanied by a cotton-picking friend or two.
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<span>I had heard the name B. Traven before, but this is my first time reading his work. He is best known as the author of <i>The Treasure of the Sierra Madre</i>, the basis for the John Huston/Humphrey Bogart film. I really enjoyed this book. Rarely does it occur that I “discover” an author and immediately think I want to read everything this person wrote, but such is the case with Traven. (I also love Mexico, so that probably has something to do with it.) Traven’s closest equivalent might be John Steinbeck, as seen in labor novels like <i><a href="https://obdg.blogspot.com/2022/03/the-grapes-of-wrath-by-john-steinbeck.html">The Grapes of Wrath</a></i> and <i><a href="https://obdg.blogspot.com/2020/05/in-dubious-battle-by-john-steinbeck.html">In Dubious Battle</a>.</i> Traven, however, comes across with fewer pretensions of literary dignity and more of a down-to-earth matter-of-fact bluntness. His prose often has the feel of pulp fiction, with occasional touches of Ernest Hemingway or Jack London. For a book from the 1920s, <i>The Cotton-Pickers </i>is remarkably forthright and uninhibited. In one memorable passage, Traven describes a whorehouse in Tampico and captures its raunchy reality without ever saying anything obscene.
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<span>The term “Wobbly” was a nickname for a member of the Industrial Workers of the World labor union. Neither Gales nor anyone else in the book is a member of the IWW, but Gale reminds someone of a Wobbly in that wherever he goes, labor trouble follows. That’s not explained until the final page of the book. <i>The Cotton-Pickers</i> is a much better title. Gales is a recurring character in several of Traven’s books. I look forward to following his Mexican wanderings in subsequent novels.
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"><span>If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.</span></span></span><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: x-small;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/review/R199W9PEDL9V5E/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm">https://www.amazon.com/review/R199W9PEDL9V5E/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm</a></span></div></div>Karl Janssenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16133816726897297775noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-693376005436007012.post-79026940644224758852024-01-12T05:30:00.001-06:002024-01-16T10:04:53.649-06:00Victoria by Knut Hamsun<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: verdana;"><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><b>Love stinks in semi-feudal Norway</b></span></span><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span face=""verdana" , sans-serif"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRvPQiqQIdllPa9GRnwgmmV4usnPh32mQgykAN0VFgwpGocOUcA6-MAbFc8WjiK27FxgyWZbxHxXpSKcdQ2M_y7SD2BYaLVdO7yTcAP7MrokVTonVlfAASEFleGC1zHat0jr4w4jtPRMmFpXrvxBA1OXgLNWUnm9juzHT2GQasyN-1sEuRHybEaBfoVFyC/s220/hamsunvictoria2.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="220" data-original-width="144" height="220" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRvPQiqQIdllPa9GRnwgmmV4usnPh32mQgykAN0VFgwpGocOUcA6-MAbFc8WjiK27FxgyWZbxHxXpSKcdQ2M_y7SD2BYaLVdO7yTcAP7MrokVTonVlfAASEFleGC1zHat0jr4w4jtPRMmFpXrvxBA1OXgLNWUnm9juzHT2GQasyN-1sEuRHybEaBfoVFyC/s1600/hamsunvictoria2.jpg" width="144" /></a></div>Norwegian author Knut Hamsun (1859-1952) won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1920. He was a pioneering modernist whose style has been extremely influential in world literature. Norway basically disowned him when he became a Nazi sympathizer during World War II, but after a few decades it again became acceptable to appreciate his work. Hamsun’s novel <i>Victoria</i> was published in 1898. Though not one of his better-known works, <i>Victoria</i> has been adapted into film a half dozen times, more than any other of his novels.
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</span><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span><span><span><span><br /></span><span>Johannes is the son of a miller in a rural town on the coast of Norway. Nearby stands the Castle, where dwell the Master and his family. The Miller and his family are essentially servants to the Master. They not only mill the grain produced on the Master’s lands but also perform odd jobs when asked, such as rowing boating parties on an afternoon outing. As a youth, Johannes becomes playmates with the Master’s daughter Victoria, who is a few years his junior. Playing outdoors amid the idyllic landscape, Johannes and Victoria develop an innocent love for one another. When they grow into young adulthood, the two admit their love for one another. Victoria makes it clear, however, that she and Johannes are not of the same social class, and her father would never approve of a union between them.</span></span></span></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span>As the years go by, the two go on with their lives while their love steadfastly simmers below the surface. This is not, however, simply a melodramatic tale of two saintly lovers pining away for one another. Victoria entertains other suitors and encourages Johannes to woo another woman. The unsatisfied longing between the two sometimes poisons their interactions, resulting in outbursts of resentment and hurtful exchanges. Victoria repeatedly makes it clear to Johannes that he is beneath her station, yet she unfairly resists letting him go completely and sometimes plays a cruel coquette. Though the novel begins as a very idyllic romance, it soon turns into an unconventional love story with a rather pessimistic view of love and fate.
</span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span>Hamsun was a neo-Romanticist who rebelled against the trends of realism and naturalism that prevailed in world literature in the late-nineteenth century. He felt that modernism should aspire to more than just the relation of reality. Literature should delve into the psyche and soul as Romanticists had done before, but through the lens of modern philosophy and psychology. Here Hamsun accomplishes that through the use of stream of consciousness and interior monologue, literary techniques of which he was one of the world’s pioneers.</span></span></div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span><span><br /></span>
<span>With its Castle and the Miller and so on, this novel has a very fairy-tale atmosphere to it, but I suspect it depicts the reality of Norway at a time when some vestiges of feudalism still existed in land ownership and social strata, particularly in rural areas. The psychological drama between the characters is anything but a fairy tale. Their behavior bears the authenticity of real relationships, which is what makes this story timelessly compelling more than a century later. Hamsun may have shunned realism, but I think there is still a naturalistic aspect to this novel in the way that the characters are shaped and restricted by their social environment and the class system of their time. All lit-crit terminology aside, I liked Hamsun’s delicate balance between romance and realism here, and more importantly he made me truly care about these characters and feel what they felt.
</span></span></span><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span><span><span><span style="font-size: x-small;">If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.</span></span></span></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><span><span><span><span style="font-size: x-small;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/review/R3JN9UE7UY4L0R/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm">https://www.amazon.com/review/R3JN9UE7UY4L0R/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm</a></span></span></span></span></span></div><div><br /></div></div>Karl Janssenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16133816726897297775noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-693376005436007012.post-22415329163627581152024-01-10T05:30:00.002-06:002024-01-10T08:20:37.740-06:00Maigret in Holland by Georges Simenon<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-S-uZ6aHfgmk/TfDSE6KsfZI/AAAAAAAABjQ/WONLY4BFfpoVSSXHoUXBPtCkg0wC_lx8ACPcBGAYYCw/s1600/3halfstars.gif" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-right: 0px;"><img border="0" data-original-height="17" data-original-width="106" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-S-uZ6aHfgmk/TfDSE6KsfZI/AAAAAAAABjQ/WONLY4BFfpoVSSXHoUXBPtCkg0wC_lx8ACPcBGAYYCw/s1600/3halfstars.gif" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>A bit formulaic by Maigret standards</b></span><div><span style="font-family: georgia;"><i><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHWIDK8ABo8-KLdbvFNfHyrUvhCUyhV1Uh9DUw0zpH6JYhRTsjFijKR8Vw-Q2a5oawivcMEdKrgvEDF2iwPioWf68WlUHZDTNWpQrhV0NLUMU-sPeQtRJHOZr1qhUXQ3HSMlb-l7u5Xj2s-H9GrAY4XMJKUyEj3i1c0hGAeqG3s_buzHDqdJz0JVNMHAR_/s241/simenonmaigretholland2.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="241" data-original-width="144" height="241" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHWIDK8ABo8-KLdbvFNfHyrUvhCUyhV1Uh9DUw0zpH6JYhRTsjFijKR8Vw-Q2a5oawivcMEdKrgvEDF2iwPioWf68WlUHZDTNWpQrhV0NLUMU-sPeQtRJHOZr1qhUXQ3HSMlb-l7u5Xj2s-H9GrAY4XMJKUyEj3i1c0hGAeqG3s_buzHDqdJz0JVNMHAR_/s1600/simenonmaigretholland2.jpg" width="144" /></a></div>Maigret in Holland</i>, also known as <i>A Crime in Holland</i>, is the 8th novel in Georges Simenon’s series of mysteries starring Parisian police inspector Jules Maigret, a series that would eventually grow to 75 novels and 28 short stories. Simenon, one of the most prolific authors of the twentieth century, could really crank out novels at a startlingly rapid pace. The first ten Maigret novels, including this one, were all published in 1931.</span><div>
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<span>As the title indicates, Maigret ventures to the Netherlands for this case. A French professor on a lecture tour is detained in Holland as a murder suspect. The professor’s university contacts Maigret to request his assistance in investigating the crime, in hopes of exonerating their faculty member. Maigret travels to Delfzijl, a small coastal town in the far northeast of the Netherlands (a real town near Groningen). Following his lecture, the professor attended a party at a private home in Delfzijl, along with nine or ten other people, servants included. That night the host was shot and killed, and the professor was found with the gun in his hand. Though Maigret has no jurisdiction in the Netherlands, the small-town cops of Delfzijl allow Maigret some leeway to investigate, given his reputation and experience. Maigret interviews the party attendees and uncovers a web of secrets, animosities, and infidelities.
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<span>I’ve read about twenty of these Maigret novels and know I can count on them for a good read. Some of the books in the series are excellent, and they’re all consistently at least pretty good. This is one of the pretty-good ones. What sets the Maigret novels apart from most detective fiction is that Simenon usually delivers an unconventional mystery that has more to do with Freudian psychology and existential philosophy than with clue-and-deduction puzzles. Compared to most Maigret mysteries, <i>Maigret in Holland</i> is pretty formulaic. Within the first two pages, the crime has been committed, Maigret is on the case, and he has a list of suspects in hand (literally a list, written on a piece of paper). It ends with a re-enactment of the crime that feels more like it belongs in a Hercule Poirot novel instead of one of Maigret’s. Throughout the novel, there are really only two, maybe three people who would have been in the right place at the right time to commit the crime, so it’s not much of a surprise when the killer is revealed.</span><br />
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<span>It seems almost as if in these early novels Simenon were still trying to figure out the direction he wanted to take this character. In the previous novel, <i><a href="https://obdg.blogspot.com/2016/01/night-at-crossroads-by-georges-simenon.html">The Night at the Crossroads</a></i> (#7), Maigret is such a macho tough guy he’s almost an action hero. In <i>Maigret in Holland</i>, he’s more of a stereotypical sleuth looking for that one Encyclopedia Brown red herring that will convict the murderer. I don’t believe Maigret’s wife is even mentioned in this novel, which is quite unusual. The reader learns very little about his personal life in this book. I also felt like <i>Maigret in Holland</i> was too similar to other troubled-marriage murder mysteries in Maigret’s oeuvre (<i><a href="https://obdg.blogspot.com/2023/12/maigret-has-scruples-by-georges-simenon.html">Maigret Has Scruples</a></i> in particular). I’m not reading these books in order, however, so rather than this book repeating familiar plot elements, it’s the later novels that are derivative of this one. Like all Maigret books, this is a quick and entertaining read, but it’s not one of the French detective’s most compelling cases.</span><br />
</span><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: x-small;"><span>If you liked this review, please follow the link below to Amazon.com and give me a “helpful” vote. Thank you.</span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: georgia; font-size: x-small;"><span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/review/R3NKEFO9M02I41/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm">https://www.amazon.com/review/R3NKEFO9M02I41/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_rdp_perm</a></span></span></div><div><br /></div></span></div></div>Karl Janssenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16133816726897297775noreply@blogger.com0