rocketjk's 2021 Off the Shelf adventures

Here's me again! Last year, given my second full year of retirement and first year of Covid, I hit an amazing 82 books read, 31 of which I counted as "Off the shelf." Don't know if this will be as fertile a reading year as last, so I'll just go with 30 as a goal. Cheers, all!

Book 1: The Conversion of Chaplain Cohen by Herbert Tarr
Book 2: The Rover by Joseph Conrad
Book 3: Western Adventures Magazine - October, 1943
Book 4: Ways of Escape by Graham Greene
Book 5: The Union Reader edited by Richard B. Harwell
Book 6: Pennant Race by Jim Brosnan
Book 7: The Zelmenyaners: A Family Saga by Moyshe Kulbak
Book 8: Harper's Magazine - June 1959 edited by John Fisher
Book 9: Sgt. Mickey and General Ike by Michael McKeogh and John Lockridge
Book 10: Up from Slavery by Booker T. Washington
Book 11: The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe
Book 12: We Band of Brothers: A Memoir of Robert Kennedy by Edwin Guthman.
Book 13: Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
Book 14: The Book of Kells: Art -- Origins -- History by Iain Zaczek
Book 15: Scoundrel Time by Lillian Hellman
Book 16: Adventures of Captain David Grief by Jack London
Book 17: Death Blew Out the Match by Kathleen Moore Knight
Book 18: Shiloh by Shelby Foote
Book 19: The Human Stain by Philip Roth
Book 20: Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust
Book 21: Youth by Joseph Conrad
Book 22: Now We Are Enemies: The Story of Bunker Hill by Thomas J. Fleming

Book 1: The Conversion of Chaplain Cohen by Herbert Tarr

I wouldn't call this humorous novel, first published in 1963, a "deep" book, but it is a very thoughtful one. David Cohen is a newly ordained rabbi who is told by the head of his rabbinical seminary that unless he spends two years in the military as a chaplain first, he'll never get a congregation of his own. Duly coerced, Cohen finally succumbs and tries to enlist as an Army chaplain. But our hero is an early 60s anti-hero, and so a smartass, and manages to irritate someone at his physical exam to the extent that he is blacklisted. Sighing deeply, Cohen's superior pulls strings and gets Cohen into the Air Force. Once he begins his Air Force Chaplaincy training, he is plunged into several strange new worlds at once.

His parents having been killed in a car crash when he was very young, Cohen has been raised by his loving, aunt and uncle, immigrants both, in a very Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn. Although comfortable in the diverse cultures and classes of New York City, Cohen's sudden status as one of only two Jews in a 50-chaplain training course, though expected, still comes as a shock, especially as many of his classmates have never met a Jew before. His roommate, with whom he becomes good friends, has been under the misconception, for example, that rabbis, like Catholic priests, are celibate.

And so, in many ways, this is a novel about alienation and loneliness, and the ways in which we can make our peace with those conditions, or not. Cohen is a Jew in a Gentile world and very much a civilian dropped suddenly into military life. Soon he is a northern liberal in the segregated south. Also a city dweller dealing with the cultural isolation of life on an Air Force base. And he is an Air Force chaplain with a fear of flying! Tarr handles these themes well. They are implicit rather than explicit; we are not hit over the head with them (except maybe the fear of flying part). Surprisingly effective are Cohen's conversations (not debates, thank goodness) about religion and philosophy with his roommate, a Lutheran minister.

The novel is mostly episodic, as Cohen settles into his two-year chaplain stint and begins to figure out his role, and deal with his own loneliness, his outspokenness occasionally getting him into trouble. Some of these episodes work better than others, but overall I found this novel quietly effective. As a Jew myself, I found the portrayal of Judaism and Jewish philosophy to be well done and rarely heavy handed. The book is a timepiece, certainly, as the patriotic descriptions of the crucial nature of the Strategic Air Command as a temporary bulwark of world peace (until the politicians can get their acts together) make clear. I found that that added to the interest for me. It reflected, for example, the sort of thinking my own father would have been doing.

Hi Jerry, welcome back. Let's hope 2021 will be much better than 2020.

>3 connie53: Thanks, Connie. And to you, as well.

Welcome back and have a great reading year!

Welcome back!

Happy reading in 2021!

Welcome back from me too - have a good year!

Book 2: The Rover by Joseph Conrad

For over a decade, I have had a personal tradition of beginning each calendar year with the reading (or, in most cases, rereading) of a Joseph Conrad novel, and in this way reading through all of the Conrad novels in the chronological order of their publishing. The Rover is the last of the novels published by Conrad while he was alive, and so, perhaps,* concludes this tradition.

The novel takes place in France during the Napoleonic Era. Jean Peyrol is a French seaman, old though still hearty, who has spent his life roving the seas, often as a privateer, sometimes as a gunner in the French Navy. He has had more than his share of violence, blood and adventure. Being so far from home, the French Revolution had left him essentially untouched, other than having formed a contempt for the revolutionary extremists who have crossed his path. Finally ready to retire, Peyrol returns to the place of his birth, a remote farming area close on to Toulon, a maritime city on the Mediterranean coast of France. He has brought with him a huge secret stash of old coins, a windfall discovery on a English merchant ship he has captured for France, enough to maintain him quiet comfort for life. Peyrol brings the ship in to Toulon, duly turns it over to the French authorities, and then, once he's sure all is in order, slips out of town for his remote destination. On the farm he picks out as a lodging locale, Peyrol finds three survivors of the Terror. Scevola has been a viscious perpetrator of horrific violence, the beautiful young Arlette has seen her parents murdered, and her taciturn aunt, Catherine, who has devoted her life to caring for her emotionally crippled niece. Peyrol wants only rest, but the war with England is still in progress, the English fleet is lying off the coast in blockade, and a young French navel officer, Real, soon turns up "on assignment." He, too, has been traumatized by the Revolution.

This novel delves less deeply into the mysteries of human psychology than Conrad's earlier novels. Peyrol is a more traditional protagonist than earlier Conrad figures like Marlow, Lord Jim or Verlock, and this is a more straightforward story, though still adorned with the Conrad observations about human nature that I so enjoy.

Book 3: Western Adventures Magazine - October, 1943

This was a fun collection of western stories, ranging all the way in length from "novels" (really novellas), longish short stories and a couple of very short tales. Of the authors represented, I'd heard of only two of them from my used bookstore-owning days (I had a pretty large Westerns section): Norman A. Fox and Eli Colter. Most of the stories were engaging enough. There is a distinct pattern to them. Someone, usually a stranger in these here parts, has been wrongly accused of a crime and has to figure out a way to clear himself. Often in doing so, our hero gets the girl into the bargain. One of the most entertaining of the entries, the "novel" by Norman A. Fox called "Land Beyond the Law," is described thusly in its teaser on the table of contents: "Matt Larkey discovered too late that his bargain with the law had sent him into Hell's Vest Pocket with his gun fangs pulled."

Book 4: Ways of Escape by Graham Greene

This book is listed as an autobiography, but I really consider it more a memoir, as Greene here provides us memories and insights into his writing career and his fascinating travel experiences, but leaves out pretty much everything about his personal life. We don't really, then, get a full picture of Greene's life. But that's OK, because what is here is extremely interesting and--not surprising considering the author--sharply written. Greene picks his story up here at about age 27, having already chronicled his earlier life in his book, A Sort of Life. This is perfect for me, as I generally find the early, childhood, part of memoirs/autobiographies tedious to a great or lesser degree.

Greene walks us through the writing of his novels, telling us how much he still liked them (or disliked them) as he was writing this memoir at age 75. More usefully, he tells us about the inspirations and real life events/memories that went into each, which characters are based on real life figures, and how he felt about the critical reception to the works. Greene converted from Protestantism to Catholicism in early adulthood and took his faith seriously. But he was bemused and somewhat dismayed to find that, after he wrote a pair of novels in which Catholicism (The Power and the Glory is the one that comes to mind for me right this second.) and issues of the Church featured prominently, critics began to refer to him as a "Catholic writer," as if that were the key theme of his work or his motivation. His account of the writing of the screenplay for "The Third Man" is almost worth the price of admission in and of itself.

The details about the various novels will be of real interest to fans of Greene's books. I've only read a few, and those quite some time ago, but now I'm thinking I need to read a few more. The book sings when Greene is discussing the creative process, and also when he is reminiscing about some of the fascinating places he took himself to, basically in an effort to get away from himself, usually after arranging a writing assignment. He tells of being in Dien Bien Phu shortly before the battle that drove the French out of Vietnam for good, with descriptions of how incompetently placed the French forces were, and how inevitable their destruction. He was in Havana during the final months of the Batista regime and in Haiti during the darkest days of Duvalier.
The title of this book comes from Greene's notion that the artistic process is often employed by the artist as means of escaping the dark or drab elements of life. Greene speaks of his writing and of his traveling as concurrent means to this end. He speaks of his novel writing as an escape from his own self, and his short story writing as an escape from having to live continually for with the characters of his novels as he was writing them. Very late in the book, Greene wonders how people who do not have some artistic creative process to turn to manage to get themselves through life.

There are certainly unattractive aspects to Greene's character that he makes no effort to hide here, whether from honesty or from a take-it-or-leave-it attitude, it's hard to tell. Either way, he's very matter of fact about them. He speaks often of visiting brothels, mentions (without naming) various mistresses, and describes his foray into opium use in Malaya. His politics were liberal. For instance, after having taken the measure of Batista in Cuba, he gets in trouble with the dictator of Paraguay while on a visit there for speaking highly of Cuba's new revolutionary lead, Fidel Castro.

All in all I found this book a very interesting and valuable reading experience.

>11 rocketjk: Thanks for the detailed review, this sounds like a very interesting book!

Book 6: Pennant Race by Jim Brosnan

In 1961, Jim Brosnan was a relief pitcher for the Cincinnati Reds, who surprised the baseball world by winning the National League pennant. This book is his diary of that season. In fact, this was Brosnan's second book. His first, The Long Season, was first person account of the 1959 season, during which Brosnan was traded mid-year from the Cardinals to the Reds. That book was considered ground breaking, in that it was the first candid (sort of) look at life on a major league team. Oddly, I haven't read The Long Season, yet.

Anyway, Pennant Race is entertaining fare for baseball fans. This book was published several years before Jim Bouton's Ball Four, about the 1969 season, which was really the first baseball memoir to reveal baseball life warts and all. In Pennant Race, Brosnan depicts life in the bullpen, and on the team in general, as a series of wise cracks under which lie the players' real desire to win and to perform well, along with their not always successful attempts to shrug off their day to day failures. Racial issues are dealt with, but not too deeply or often. Personal animosities among teammates seem non-existent. Again, Brosnan's books were a step forward in terms of real life portrayals of the baseball life, but he doesn't bring us all the way there. The descriptions of some players' personalities are perfunctory. For others, even some relatively famous ones, those portrayals are non-existent. We get almost nothing, for example, about Frank Robinson, then a young star (now in the Hall of Fame). Still there is a feel for what the life was like. Brosnan was a good writer with a breezy, self-deprecating style. It helps that the 1961 season was one of Brosnan's best as a professional ballplayer.

For baseball fans interested in the game's history (or for those with long memories), this book is fun and worth reading, as long as you don't expect too much of it.

Book 7: The Zelmenyaners: a Family Saga by Moyshe Kulbak

The Zelmenyaners is considered a classic of Yiddish literature. The novel is a comedy spanning several generations of an extended Jewish family in Minsk, the capitol city of Byelorussia (now Belarus), but centering on the period from 1926 through 1933 or so. The family all lives together, in a single courtyard on the outskirts of town originally built by the family's patriarch, one Reb Zelmen, who came to the city from somewhere in "deep Russia" in the 1870s. By the time the action of the novel begins in the late 1920s Reb Zelmen has died, though his widow lives on, and the family is led by Zelmen's four sons, whose own children and sons and daughters-in-law and their children populate the courtyard's many old buildings. (One building is even made of brick!)

The tale centers around the older generation's desires to retain their old ways, including the vestiges of their Jewish beliefs and practices, in the face of the growing incursions of Soviet society and economic collectivisation. As the younger generation grows to maturity, they less interested in the old ways and more interested in being good Bolsheviks. Even the older Zelmenyaners are pushed to end their independent lives as tradesmen (tailors, tanners, carpenters) and go to work in the factories, like good Soviet workers.

The story is in fable-like, farcical narrative. Rumor, scandal and gossip, feud and loyalty, busybodies and misanthropes swarm and swirl about the courtyard. Knowledge of the outside world is minimal, sometimes comically so, for most of the Zelmenyaners. Our affection for this crowd is cemented early on, and though the story is played for comedy, the pathos is evident throughout as the family fights a losing battle to retain their way of life, their heritage and their family identity in the face of societal forces from without and betrayal from within.

Adding poignancy to the reading was this note on the book's back cover:

Moyshe Kulbak (1896-1937) was a leading Yiddish modernist poet, novelist and dramatist. He was arrested in 1937, during the wave of Stalinist repression that hit the Minsk Yiddish writers and cultural activists with particular vehemence. After a perfunctory show trial, Kulbak was shot at the age of forty-one."

Just popping in to wish you and yours a Happy Easter, Jerry.

Keep up the Reading and ROOTing.

>15 connie53: Thanks! Happy Easter to you, too. We're actually hitting the road today for a week's car camping near Sequoia National Park. My wife and I each have both shots, and we can eat and sleep in the van we've rented.

That sounds great, Jerry. Here it will be a month or so before we get our first dose. The Netherlands is behind with vaccinating. And now AZ vaccination are stopped because of deaths after the first shot. I've no idea which one I will get or my husband.

Have a very nice holiday in the camper.

>17 connie53: We're just back from our vacation, which was a fun getaway. Our German shepherd, Rosie, was a bit perplexed by the new vehicle and the new locales (we rented a sleep-in van and stayed at RV parks of different sorts), but certainly enjoyed all the hiking, as did we!

I hope you and your husband both get your shots soon. I'm sorry to say that I've only spent one quick layover evening in Amsterdam as my only visit to the Netherlands. It was winter, there was a light snowfall, and every place we walked was beautiful. I hope I get to return for a long visit to your country someday in the not too distant future. Be well!

Hi Jerry. Good to hear you have had a enjoyable vacation including Rosie!

Yesterday Peet made an appointment for Pfizer in May and June. I will have to wait a bit longer but not to much I hope.

If ever you visit the Netherlands I hope you like it as much as that one night in Amsterdam.

Book 8: Harper's Magazine - June 1959 edited by John Fisher

This is another from the stack of old magazines sitting in my office closet that I've been gradually reading through. I find these old periodicals to be fascinating time pieces, looks at the society and its concerns that would be otherwise hard to find so many years later. The June 1959 Harper's begins with an hilarious take down of the novel, The Ugly American.

The edition also includes one of Leo Rosten's fun and funny H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N stories (The title character was an adult European Jewish emigre to the U.S. and the setting was always the night time English/citizenship adult school class that Kaplan shared with other recent immigrants from all over the world. These stories were quite famous in their day. My parents loved them. Rosten was, perhaps, best known for his book The Joys of Yiddish.)

There is a somewhat horrifying piece called "Germs and Gas: The Weapons Nobody Dares Talk About," by Brigadier General J. H. Rothschild, in which the good general makes the case for biological and chemical weaponry and criticizes the U.S. government for going along with the international ban on them.

"Reading, Writing, and Television" by David C. Stewart is not, as one would first imagine, another complaint about the ways that television is dumbing down the country, but instead an enlightening early look at the ways that public television was being used creatively to help fight illiteracy.

The two most interesting pieces, for me at least, are by George Steiner and Nat Hentoff. Steiner's piece, "Notes from Eastern Europe," really is a fascinating picture of a moment in time. Although of course the Russians were sitting everywhere in the region, one of the major concerns of the people in countries like Czechoslovakia was to wonder what American and Western European leaders thought they were playing at by rearming Germany. Hadn't we learned anything? Reading Steiner's piece is a useful reminder to the typical ignorant modern reader (i.e., me) that these were individual countries and not simply a bunch of chunks frozen together into a single "Eastern Bloc." For example:

"Czechoslovakia and Poland are more cut off from each other than from the West. The Czechs are simply afraid of letting Poles across the frontier. They have achieved an extraordinary material prosperity at the price of total political subjection. Poland, on the contrary, is desperately poor; but the winds of freedom blow there in wild gusts. For the lone rail traveler (the fleas and I were the only passenegers in the car that night) the contrast is startling. The Czech frontier guards roused me from my bench in some black and frozen corner of nowhere at four in the morning to ask acrimoniously why I had not flown. I was so much quicker and more comfortable. It must be that I wanted to see something. I pointed to the grime-laden windows and the blackness beyond. But they did not seem convinced. A few minutes later, the Poles entered . . . The Poles were cheery and corrupt, in a fine liberal style. Was I an academic? What did I teach? Had I any dollars to sell? Hints that I liked to sleep at four in the morning struck them as absurd. In Prague one could sleep. There was nothing else to do. But surely not in Poland. There was so much to talk about. Soon dawn was coming up over mud-soaked, gray southern Poland."

Steiner's description of Warsaw, still devastated by the war and in ruins, is vivid and sobering. Interestingly the book review section of the magazine includes a review of Steiner's book, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in the Old Criticism, which the reviewer calls "a book to read and learn from many times over."

The Hentoff essay is called "Race Prejudice in Jazz: It Works Both Ways." I approached this piece with some trepidation, I must admit, although I have certainly come to admire Hentoff's insights into the music and also to trust his political and cultural leanings. At any rate, I needn't have worried. While the piece does begin by pointing out the examples of black musicians' sometimes only grudging acceptance of white jazz musicians, Hentoff spends much, much more time explaining the hardships of being a black musician in America and the reasons why the might feel that way. It made me wonder whether the title was Hentoff's own creation or whether some editor had come up with it to make the piece seem "balanced." Alternatively, I wondered whether the title had indeed by created by Hentoff as sort of a enticement to lure the less savvy readers into his descriptions of racial conditions that such readers might not otherwise voluntarily enter into.

Those are the highlights. My next such periodical will be the January 1959 edition of The Atlantic.

Book 9: Sgt. Mickey and General Ike by Michael J. McKeogh and Richard Lockridge

This is a short memoir by Michael McKeogh about his time spent as General Dwight Eisenhower's enlisted aide, orderly and driver before and during World War 2. Originally published in 1946, the book is essentially a hagiography. McKeogh quickly begins referring to Eishenhower as "the Boss," and essentially, other than an occasional bought of temper, the Boss can do no wrong throughout McKeogh's narrative. Well, maybe it is McKeogh's narrative. Harry C. Butcher, who was Eisenhower's Naval Aide during the war, says in his 2-page introduction, "Former Naval Lieutenant Richard Lockridge* has caught the spirit of Mickey's story with uncanny perception. When I read some of the manuscript I could hear Mickey talking." So I assume this is an "as told to" situation, and I'd further guess that Lockridge was tasked not just with putting McKeogh's story into clean prose, but also with smoothing out any rough (or interesting) edges portrayed in Eisenhower's character.

So while this memoir provides a mildly interesting picture of the duties of an aide to a commanding general during wartime there are otherwise few particularly interesting historical notes on offer. Don't get me wrong, it certainly looks like McKeogh had a hard job (although mostly a physically safe one, as he freely admits). Mostly the issues were logistical. McKeogh was responsible for, among other things, ensuring that Eisenhower didn't have to worry about day-to-day issues like laundry, lodging or sustenance. That makes sense, as the general would have had plenty of more important items to concentrate on 20 hours a day. But they kept moving command posts, of course, and McKeogh tells about each new search for lodging as they moved. (Item: The more spacious and luxurious the lodging, the less "The Boss" liked it.) There were some interesting aspects of Eisenhower's command style portrayed, mostly to do with his attitudes about the GIs under his command. For example, he refused to use any supplies that he felt had been taken from his soldiers, and he made frequent inspections of the kitchens serving enlisted men and would be critical of any officers who weren't feeding the soldiers adequately. Well, that's assuming these things were true and this isn't more a case of legend building.

But as to the war itself, McKeogh (or Lockridge) reports very little. Toward the end there are some general descriptions of the death and destruction that the members of the command post saw as they moved forward, but by design a command post is in the rear of the action. Also, McKeogh (or Lockridge) tells us that he made a point never to eavesdrop on Eisenhower's conversations with other officers about the progress, plans or execution of the war, thinking that what he didn't know, he couldn't inadvertently let drop in the mess hall. That makes sense, though it doesn't make for particularly interesting reading. And who knows if that is McKeogh talking or Lockridge's explanation for why he's taken most of the intriguing conversations out of the book?

Book 10: Up from Slavery by Booker T. Washington

Up from Slavery is Booker T. Washington's memoir. On the national stage, Washington was one of the most famous African Americans of his time. As the title tells us, he was born enslaved on a Virginia plantation in 1858 or 1859 (he wasn't sure of the exact date or even year). Through force of will and an impressive work ethic, Washington earned his way into the Hammond Institute, a progressive school of both basic and higher learning for freedmen and their descendants. At age 25, he was recommended for and accepted the post of leader/principal of Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute (later Tuskegee Institute, now Tuskegee University). When he got to Alabama to take over the school, it turned out there was no school and he had to build it from scratch. The story of this process constituted, for me, the most compelling section of the narrative. Afterwards, Washington's success building the Tuskegee Institute, and his impressive abilities as an orator, brought him an ever growing fame, both nationally and, eventually, internationally. I'm afraid Up from Slavery bogged down for me toward the end, as Washington begins relating the places he went to, the audiences he spoke to and the accolades he received. I can understand why these would have been important to him to include, perhaps to exemplify the ways in which it was possible for a Black man to attain such status and success, but it all became repetitive and impersonal for me. Nevertheless, this is an important book to read for anyone wishing to gain an overall understanding of Black history in America, although his ideas about race relations are somewhat controversial now. (He believed that Blacks as a group needed to gain practical skills and other individual success before working toward social equality, despite, and seemingly ignoring, the fact that White society as a whole was expressly intent upon violently surpressing any such advances) Overall, Washington is a person to admire.

Book 11: The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe

This, of course, is Wolfe's famous and very detailed history of the Mercury Space Program and, especially, the astronauts who went up in those little space capsules. I found it extremely engaging. I'm not quite sure how/why I'd never read this before. Maybe it was my life-long aversion to reading best sellers, and this book was huge when it was first published in 1980. At any rate, I'm very glad I finally got to it.

You're reading some fine books and I especially like your vintage-magazine reading. Did I miss how you acquired the issues? I love everything mid-(20th)-century and have been fascinated by 1950s-60s issues of women's magazines at the library. Now I have a stack of early 2020 issues that I had no appetite for a year ago; I'm looking forward to seeing how different they feel from in the "before times."

>24 detailmuse: Hi MJ, I just got back from vacation and saw your post. Mostly I got those magazines during thriftstore visits and even in an old used bookstore I used to frequent in San Francisco. The stack was really piling up and I was never getting to them until I made the decision to begin reading them one article at a time between my book reading.

Reading old magazines really helps one to gain perspective into what the concerns and issues were when the magazines were published, and also provides some important background into current issues.

Cheers!

Hi Jerry, I hope you had a nice vacation and read some good books.

Book 12: We Band of Brothers: A Memoir of Robert Kennedy by Edwin Guthman.

In the late 1950s, Guthman was a Seattle journalist who had already won a Pulitzer Prize. When Robert Kennedy came to town as a federal prosecutor to investigate corrupt labor leaders, Guthman, who had been writing about those same issues, decided to cooperate with the investigation, knowing that Kennedy would have subpoena power that would enable him to get at financial records that a journalist could never uncover. The friendship that grew between the two men led to Kennedy, upon becoming Attorney General, inviting Guthman to Washington as special assistant for public information in the Department of Justice. Essentially, he was RFK's chief press representative, as well as a trusted advisor, and as such was present for many important deliberations during Kennedy's time as AG. This book is Guthman's fascinating memoir of those times.

Guthman takes us through those initial investigations and his growing admiration for RFK's intelligence, tenacity and integrity, and then through the JFK presidency, including the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the Cuban Missile Crisis and, most compellingly, the Justice Department's involvement, such as it was, in the Civil Rights movement during the JFK years. Most harrowing is Guthman's description of the hour-by-hour negotiations and decisions during James Meredith's attempts to enroll as the first black student at the University of Mississippi.

Guthman also provides a brief but moving picture of Robert Kennedy's intense grief over his brother's death, and goes into some detail about his clashes and eventual enmity with Lyndon Johnson. Guthman stayed on Kennedy's staff through his successful Senatorial campaign in New York, and gives an interesting description of those days, but then went back to his journalism career, and so offers only a few insights into Kennedy's time as a senator. He leaves the details of RFK's death to others to describe.

This is not a "warts and all" biography. Guthman was an unabashed RFK admirer. Given that this admiration comes from a hard-nosed journalist after years of close contact, we might give it some strong credence. But Guthman does not claim to be offering a comprehensive study of Kennedy, and I would guess that he had knowledge of skeletons in RFK's closet that he chose not to reveal.

Book 13: Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

I'm sorry it took me so long to finally read this beautiful, sad, poetic novel. Janie Crawford is a young Black woman coming of age in Jim Crow Florida. As the novel progresses, Janie gains assuredness, learning about herself and the world and about love. Throughout the story, Hurston weaves the poetry of dialect and mythology, and the power of the natural world: a power of beauty and inspiration as well as the power for disruption and death. Also, in this novel, Hurston epitomizes the writer's rule for "showing" rather than "telling." We mostly see Hurston's Black characters living in essentially all-Black communities. Whites are mostly an unseen menace, appearing only occasionally to assert dominance. Also, only a few times in the novel does Hurston use the word "poverty." But the conditions the characters are living in are shown in the paper-thin walls of their homes and the circumscribed limits of their aspirations. A good day picking beans is a great day of work, with no loftier goals seemingly to be imagined. The one character who does evince such drive raises himself only within his own community, and in succeeding creates for himself mostly a fresh corner of loneliness. This is, for me, an inspirational story of a woman who retains her faith in herself and grows into her own power despite disappointment and hardship. One might see Janie, perhaps, as also representing the power and soul of the Black community that has fostered her in the face of poverty and repression.

Book 14: The Book of Kells: Art -- Origins -- History by Iain Zaczek

This is a lovely and interesting small coffee table book about the amazing late 9th Century illustrated Book of Gospels believed to created in an Irish monastery, most likely on the Island of Iona. The brief text tells of the conjectured history of the book and its supposed purpose (probably for display in a monastery and rather than for study or proselytizing), describes with much use of detail and example the artistic styles to be found and what their antecedents were likely to have been, and finally describes the materials probable methodology employed.

Below is one very poorly reproduced (just used my cel phone) page that will at least give you an idea of the sort of art on display, here.



I bought this book at Trinity College in Dublin, where the Book of Kells has been on display for many years, back in the late 1990s. They turn one page of the book every day, and what you get to see is just whatever page the book happens to be open to on the day you're there, but only for a few seconds, maybe half a minute at the most, as on most days there is a long viewing line that is understandably kept moving. It's still worth the visit.

This book is fun and interesting, though there are some funny misplacements in the layout: half sentences repeated and sometimes parts of sentences left out. The funniest one is found on page 26, which ends thusly:

"The curious articulation of the creature's hip joing has strong affinities with the beasts that are found on Pictish stone-carvings. This has fuelled the theories of"

The next page begins a new chapter, so we never get to learn about those theories! Oh, well, a minor snafu in the grand scheme of things. I assume they got these issues ironed out in later editions. While the text in this book is relatively brief, there's more than enough info, and the full color reproductions are very enjoyable.

Book 15: Scoundrel Time by Lillian Hellman

Scoundrel Time is Lillian Hellman's memoir of her dealings with the Red-baiting McCarthy Era version of the House Un-American Activities Committee. In the late 1940s through the 50s, cynical, opportunistic politicians like Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon went mining for headlines and power by tormenting anyone who was suspected of having attended such a meeting, or knowing anybody who had, or committing such horrible sins as expressing support for the Loyalist side of the Spanish Civil War (whence came the mind-blowing phrase, "Premature Anti-Facist"). Lives were ruined and friendships dissolved, as people had to decide between being a "friendly witness" (naming the names of others one had seen at such a meeting, say) or refusing to cooperate and risking jail time.

When Hellman was called, in 1952, she did refuse, essentially, to cooperate. She offered, in a letter to the committee, to answer all questions about herself fully but said she would not answer questions about anyone else. This offer was refused, and so Hellman was forced to take the Fifth. But the committee made the mistake of making this letter public, and the immediate support for her position in the press basically shielded her from further prosecution, meaning no jail time. But she knew her living as an author of plays and screenplays was over, and that her income would be drying up immediately. She instantly put the farm she'd lived on most of her life in Westchester, NY, up for sale. Her life was changed irrevocably, just by the fact of having been called and refusing to throw anybody else under the bus.

At any rate, Hellman was a wonderful writer, and this short memoir (around 115 pages all told), provides an extremely vivid account of the tension, sadness, anger and frustration of those times for her. She waited until 1975 to finally publish an account of the episode, saying early in the book that she'd tried twice before to write about it all but hadn't liked what she came up with. The fear of being called, the dread when the subpoena finally came, the tense weeks when she tried to figure out what to do about it, the fury Hammett expressed* at the strategy she came up with, at the encouragement of her lawyers, the actual experience of testifying and the impact of it all on her subsequent life are all vividly rendered, including not a small amount of dry humor in the telling.

Book 16: Adventures of Captain David Grief by Jack London

Read as a "between book" (see first post). Captain David Grief is a South Seas adventurer, a self-made millionaire, tycoon merchant during the days of the sailing ships, with engines just beginning to come on the scene. I kept thinking of Grief as sort of a South Seas Bruce Wayne. At any rate, London, of course, was a great writer of adventure stories. In these seven tales, Grief is always the hero, almost always the smartest one on the ship or in the village. There's not much going on below the surface in these stories. Sometimes the villains and/or fools are other Europeans, sometimes they're the island inhabitants. This collection was originally published in 1911 under the title "A Son of the Sun." The assumptions about European cultural superiority one would expect from fiction of that time are here, but, are less overt than I was fearing they would be when I took this slim volume down off my pulp paperback shelves. I did have fun reading these.

Book note: My copy is a beautiful second printing Paperback Library edition from 1957.

Book 17: Death Blew Out the Match by Kathleen Moore Knight

Death Blew Out the Match is a "Golden Age" mystery, first published in 1935 and the first entry in Knight's "Elisha Macomber" series, set on Martha's Vineyard. When copywriter Anne Waldron loses her job (it's the Depression, after all), she falls back to her cabin in the island town of Penberthy Village. Her friend, Hazel Kershaw (Kerch), a nurse also newly jobless, joins her there. In a nearby cabin, a famous playwright, Marya Van Wyck, is suddenly murdered. Anne and Kerch find the body . . . and off we go! There are lots of plot twists and strange goings on, here, that make the reading fun. The writing is crisp and there is a pleasing amount of sly humor, self-deprecating often, as Anne, our first person narrator, has plenty of opportunity to doubt her own credentials as a sleuth. So this was a good time.

>32 rocketjk: Hi Jerry, that sounds lovely. I love a fun murder mystery.

>30 rocketjk: Great review, onto the wishlist.

>33 connie53: "fun murder mystery" is exactly right. I'd love to know how you like that one if and when you do get to it.

>34 detailmuse: Thanks! By the way, that's a shortened version of the full-length review I included in my Club Read and 50-Book Challenge threads. The asterisk next to Hammett refers to the fact that Hellman lived with author Dashiell Hammett for years. Hammett thought that the strategy Hellman and her lawyers had settled on (she would agree to talk about herself in full, but would not talk about anyone else) was bound to land her in jail, which he didn't think she was cut out for, to put it mildly. He'd already served a jail sentence for his refusal to talk to the committee. Hence his anger at her decision.

>35 rocketjk: That won't be any time soon, not translated and I don't see it on my digital shelves. So I have asked my brother to find it.

Book 18: Shiloh by Shelby Foote

This is a short, well written novel about the Battle of Shiloh (also known as the Battle of Pittsburgh Landing), fought in southwestern Tennessee in 1862. Some historical perspective, as per the website of American Battlefield Trust: https://www.battlefields.org/learn/civil-war/battles/shiloh

"The Battle of Shiloh, also known as the Battle of Pittsburg Landing, allowed Union troops to penetrate the Confederate interior. The carnage was unprecedented, with the human toll being the greatest of any war on the American continent up to that date. The South’s defeat at Shiloh ended the Confederacy’s hopes of blocking the Union advance into Mississippi and doomed the Confederate military initiative in the West. With the loss of their commander, Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston, in battle, Confederate morale plummeted."

Foote is a well known Civil War historian, author of several detailed histories and a major contributor to Ken Burns' Civil War documentary series. The novel is a short one, only 142 pages in old fashioned pocket paperback format. (I selected it for reading more or less at random from my pulp paperback shelves.) Over the course of the book, Foote tells the story of the battle from lead up to finish, through the eyes of a variety of fictional participants, both Southern and Northern, some officers, others enlisted men. In this way, Foote is able to take us into the minds of the men who are planning and leading the battle, and into those who are only reacting to those plans and doing the actual fighting. The narrative is crisp, and the voices of the narrators believable. The book stays for the most part with the day-to-day and moment-to-moment aspects of the battle, touching only occasionally and briefly (though effectively) on the greater issues at stake in the war itself and the soldiers' motivations for fighting. (This was sometimes seen as a flaw in Foote's approach, as noted in Foote's NY Times obituary: "Some {critics} said that Mr. Foote may have played down slavery so that Southern soldiers would seem worthy heroes in the epic battles he so stirringly chronicled." Foote died in 2005 at the age of 88.

At any rate, I would say this is a very good novel about men at war and about the conditions that Civil War soldiers fought under, with the foregoing reservations.

Book 19: The Human Stain by Philip Roth

This was a reread, chosen by me for my monthly book group. Roth is one of my very favorite authors, and I have some direct connections to him, as I lived my first 11 years in the exact same neighborhood in Newark, NJ, that Roth wrote about so extensively. We went to the same grammar school. My father went to the same high school Roth graduated from. So when Roth was still alive and still writing novels, I read everything he published as soon as it was available. Meaning I first read The Human Stain in 2000.

This book is, for me and for many others, a thrilling novelistic journey of exploration of human identity and destiny, character by character in multidimensional illumination. Silk's family history, and the lives of many others that Silk has been or becomes intimate with, are examined. Each has struggled to overcome the tyranny of family and/or circumstance to create his or her own destiny and identity. I've always been drawn by Roth's use of language and his ability to penetrate the mysteries of human emotion and intent. As Roth says during the narrative:

"There is truth and then again there is truth. For all that the world is full of people who go around believing they've got you or your neighbor figured out, there really is no bottom to what is not known. The truth about us is endless. As are the lies."

And yet, via the paradox inherent in the passages above, Roth, through Zuckerman, sets out to do just that impossible thing: to know, to allow us to see as much as can be determined about both Silk and all the characters who come into and affect, for good or ill, his life. Roth moves the camera around relentlessly, showing us the motivations and histories off all these people, the factors that have formed them and, significantly, their struggles against those factors and the ways in which they have coalesced to form what we often understand to be our individual fates. War, abuse, ethnicity, family expectations, societal rules and the boundaries eradicably erected by mortality ("The stupendous decimation that is death sweeping us all away. Orchestra, audience, conductor, technicians, swallows, wrens . . The ceaseless perishing. What an idea! What maniac conceived it? And yet what a lovely day it is today, a gift of a day . . . "), all are examined here. Just when you think that a character has been left behind, dimensions and motivations unestablished, Roth returns to breathe life into that character's struggles, dreams, fears and successes.

I had been wondering whether I would find The Human Stain as rewarding a reading experience now, 20 years on, when I am myself in my mid-60s, pretty much the same age as Zuckerman is in this book, as I did upon it's original appearance. I'm happy to say that I did.

Just a follow-up note that my wife and I are embarking on a road trip and visit. We're driving from our northern California home across country, spending a month in the NYC area, and then driving back. So all told we'll be gone around 6 weeks. And while I'll be bringing a book or two along, mostly I'll be reading books I buy while on the east coast. Hence, with 11 off-the-shelf books to go before I reach my goal, it's not looking as if I'll be anything like hitting that goal this year. C'est la vie!

>39 rocketjk: Oh, but that sounds like such an amazing trip! Hope you have a safe journey, and make tons of memories!

>40 Jackie_K: Thanks! What could be more exciting than 30 days in Jersey City? (Second prize, 60 days . . . ) :)

Seriously, though, we're both Jersey natives, so this will be a "what would it be like to live there again" exploratory venture. Jersey City is right across the Hudson from Manhattan, plus the neighborhood we'll be in has a couple of great looking pizza joints and a park with a dog run (we're bringing our German shepherd). So it'll be family, old friends, the excitement of Manhattan, the "wow, this is familiar" fun of Jersey, and the adventure of the road trip. We even took the big step of trading in our gas guzzling SUV for an all-electric SUV so we can make the cross-country drive guilt free!

>39 rocketjk: That does sound like an amazing trip! Enjoy the drive, the friends, the pizza, the dog park, and the book-buying!

>41 rocketjk: Have a safe trip and enjoy the ride!

>39 rocketjk: Hope you're having a fabulous trip!

Book 20: Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust

At this late date, nobody needs a lengthy review of Proust by the likes of me. Finally, at the age of 66, I decided to take on "In Search of Lost Time" (a.k.a. "Remembrance of Things Past"). It's really not a bad time in life to read these works, I guess, as they deal with the elusiveness of one's memories, and the joys, frustrations and sorrows that come from trying to recreate one's past lives via those memories. That's, obviously, a clumsy way to express the themes of this famed set of works, themes that have been described much better and in much greater depth elsewhere.

At any rate, I found the early sections of the book, in which our narrator describes deep and lasting memories of childhood, to be quite lovely and affecting. The long section about the title character's years-long love affair with a woman who's affections for him recede slowly but surely and about whom he must continually delude himself if he is to continue caring for her, as he wishes to, I found much harder to plow through, due to its repetitious nature and the "Alright, already!" reaction it elicited in me. I would be interested to read a feminist take on this section. Then, when we return to the narrator's coming of age and first love of his own, I again found the story more compelling.

Just a note that it is by now clear that I am definitely going to fall short of my 30-book off-the-shelf goal for this year. I’ve been away from home since late October on a fun trip with my wife and won’t be back home until around Dec 8. Other than Swann’s Way, just finished, I did not bring any other books from my shelves along with me. I won’t be reading 10 books from those shelves during the final three weeks of the calendar year. C’est la vie! Maybe next year!

A lovely trip is a very good reason for not reading as much as planned!

I hope the trip is just as beautiful as you hoped and you, your wife and the dog are enjoying it lots.

Never mind the ROOTing goal!

> Thanks, Connie! We are in fact packing up right now to begin the long drive back from New Jersey to California. We have had a wonderful month exploring the neighborhoods of Jersey City and Hoboken and getting reacquainted with Manhattan. We also saw lots of my wife's family and also some old high school-era friends of mine. All in all a huge success.

>49 rocketjk: That sounds fabulous!

>49 rocketjk: Oh, that sounds like you really had a marvellous time.

Hi Jerry, Good to hear you had a wonderful time in New Jersey and a safe trip home.

Book 21: Youth by Joseph Conrad

This wonderful work is a novella, only about 40 pages long. Conrad's frequently returning narrator/hero, Marlow, sits around with a group of friends with an ever-present bottle being passed around as he recounts a sea voyage of his youth, a passage on a coal ship bound for Bangkok, his first voyage to the East and his first as second mate. The journey is one delay causing--often life threatening--disaster after another, but the young Marlow sees it as nothing but adventure. Or at least that's how the old Marlow remembers it in the telling, full of beautiful, stirring description that puts you right onto this ill-starred old vessel.

I read this all in a single gulp, as it demands to be read. I first read it 35 years ago, still in my 30s. Now that I'm 66, it certainly resonates all the more.

"By all that's wonderful it is the sea, I believe, the sea itself--or is it youth alone? Who can tell? But you here--you all had something out of life: money, love--whatever one gets on shore--and, tell me, wasn't that the best time, that time when we were young at sea, young and had nothing, on the sea that gives nothing except hard knocks--and sometimes a chance to feel your strength--that only--what you all regret?"

I might get one more off-the-shelf book in, but I'm certainly not going to hit 30, mainly for the reasons stated above.

Oh, and thanks to all for the recent comments and greetings!

Book 22: Now We Are Enemies: The Story of Bunker Hill by Thomas J. Fleming

First published in 1960, this history of the Battle of Bunker Hill, the first major battle of the American Revolution, was evidently hailed as a major success at the time, and I can see why. Fleming did a great job of laying out the contributing factors to the growing points of contention between England and the American colonies, both political and economic, as well as giving thumbnail sketches of the major players on both the English and American sides. The conditions the combatants fought under, the weapons they carried and their motivations for fighting are all clearly described as well, as are the tactics of the officers and the ways in which those tactics either worked or didn't.

The battle itself is described in detail, with a flowing narrative style that puts the reader directly into the horrific, bloody action. At times Fleming took some liberties, creating conversations between the participants that are, he explains in his afterward, recreations from the many diaries and journals he consulted. On the American side, most of the soldiers who actually took part fought bravely indeed, but many of those assembled, intimidated by the British artillery, actually stayed well away from the battle. Fleming gives a lot of credit, also, to the courage of the British soldiers, who three times charged the American emplacements in the face of point-blank musket fire. The British after that third charge, managed to get the Colonials out of their emplacements and off the hill (actually Breed's Hill, not Bunker Hill itself, as Fleming explains), but at a cost so high that they the British generals had to abandon their plans to try to break the American siege of Boston, the reason they attacked the stronghold in the first place. The British lost half their army, killed or wounded, on that day, and the question of whether American volunteer soldiers would stand and fight against the British regulars, an army considered at that time the best in the world, was settled emphatically.

I highly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in the history of the American Revolution or of military history in general.

And that's probably a wrap for me for this year. I have one more book I think I'm going to get read during calendar year 2021, but it won't be an off-the-shelfer. So I'll be falling short of my 30-book goal. Such is life! I'll be back next year, though. Since I got to 22 this year, I'll try for 23 in 2022. Cheers, all!

Happy new year when it comes! :)