Portrait of a Lady (Henry James, 1881)

This is considered one of James' best novels. A young American lady (Isabel Archer) is brought to England after her parents die; she meets various upper crust types and receives a large inheritance from her uncle (at the request of her cousin, who was in love with her and thought the money would make her independent). She turns down marriage proposals from an American businessman and an English lord - supposedly wants to be free, explore Europe and beyond, etc. Ends up heavily influenced by an American expatriate (Madame Merle) that she meets in England, and marries another American expatriate (Gilbert Osmond) mostly through Merle's influence. She was used, in large part for the money that was supposed to help her remain free.

The book was pretty long, but very little action - lots of conversation, the heroine thinks about things etc. Lots of James' usual portrayals comparing and contrasting American and European ways (he lived on both sides of the Atlantic). In the end, I'm not a huge fan of his.

But this book was quite good. They made it into a movie in 1996, but it was criticized as too "talky." Small wonder, it's hard to see how this would transfer well to the screen.

After the Victorians (A.N. Wilson, 2005)

Third book by Wilson within the last year or so, and I have really enjoyed each. This one starts around the time of Queen Victoria's death (1901) and traces U.K. history into the 1950s. I really can't tell the strategy for this book. Wilson seems to know quite a bit about almost everything, and throws it all in. So there are portions that lose me - discussions of plays, architecture, design, science - but in the end it all works just fine as far as I'm concerned.

I like the guy's writing because he endlessly puts opinions out there - whether or not you agree, it's interesting and makes you think. It was fairly long, 500 pages, and good material for reading at the gym.

The story goes through World War I; celebrations of empire at a time when its demise was pretty much inevitable; disturbances in Ireland; World War II; lots about Churchill (who is more amazing every time you read about him); loss of empire (India in particular); etc. He walks through the thesis that England quite possibly could have made peace with Hitler after the fall of France; Hitler did seem to have a reluctance to attack England and an affinity for things English; it was believed he may have been content to dominate Europe/Western Asia and let England continue to run its empire at the margins. That quite probably is fantasy, but what is true is that England watched itself become irrelevant while behaving quite heroically throughout WWII.

It's interesting to hear him discuss the English schools and the administrative class that rose to prominence in the latter days of the Empire. I'm reading a book by Graham Greene right now, he's described as coming from that world.

Wilson's bio of Tolstoy is summed here.

Stalingrad (Antony Beever, 1998)

So much has been published about Stalingrad, but I certainly never get tired of it. This author supposedly had access to previously-unavailable archives in both Russia and Germany. Beever goes into quite a bit of battle detail, but focuses more on the “way it felt” for attackers, defenders, civilians. Many quotations from letters and diaries. Some of the letters were from German soldiers and were in Russian archives after the Russian victory; the Nazi censors wouldn’t have allowed them to reach Germany.

The story is pretty familiar. Nazis sweep across southern Russia, but too late to polish off Stalingrad in 1941. Luftwaffe levels the city, unintentionally making a great defensive zone for the Russians. Russians make a stand in Stalingrad. Often the defenders’ morale was bolstered by commissars standing behind them with pistols, shooting anyone who flinched. Building-by-building, floor-by-floor fighting. Snipers. Civilians (including children) surviving in the rubble, with techniques like crawling out at night to take the “bread bag” off dead Russian soldiers. Horrific winter weather. Cruelty to prisoners – but what to do when fighting men lacked shelter and food? Lice. No fuel on the steppes. Minimal care for numerous wounded.

He describes how the Russians encircle the Germans – who flipped from being on the verge of winning to starved and frozen encirclement in the Kessel. The ineffectual air bridge bringing in hopelessly inadequate supplies. Russians fighting in German uniform (probably with more motivation than even the Germans, as the Russians closed in). Hitler’s interference in military matters. Propagandists on both sides. Christmas in the Kessel, as starving soldiers saved bits of bread to give as gifts to celebrate Christmas “in the German way.” A German artist drawing the “Fortress Madonna” for Christmas on the back of a captured Russian map (there being no other paper).

The book wears you down. Just unbelievable what happened here.

More info on the battle can be found here.

Cradle & Crucible: History and Faith in the Middle East (2002)

I signed out this book because David Fromkin was listed as an author, and I have enjoyed reading other stuff of his. Then it turned out that this was a National Geographic compilation consisting of short pieces by numerous authors, so I thought the book would be pretty much a waste of time. Turns out that it is actually a very useful overview of what we call the Middle East, tracing from earliest days, Greeks, Romans, Byzantium, rise of Islam, Ottomans, through WWI carve-up (Fromkin’s piece), founding of Israel, etc. Maps are helpful.

It is remarkable that the religious fervor of three major religions, along with associated mayhem through the ages, came from this one area. The back of the book includes a chapter on each of the religions.

Short, readable, useful.

We Shared the Peeled Orange ((letters from) Louis E. Braile, M.D.)

I was pretty much out of books and not able to get to the library, so went searching the shelves here in the house. And I found this book, which I didn’t even remember that we owned; it was a gift from my sister, Therese.

Dr. Braile, aka Papa, was a doctor from Minneapolis who did a volunteer tour on the Thailand-Cambodia border following the Pol Pot days. Many Cambodians (or Khmers) were fleeing Pol Pot or a subsequent Vietnamese invasion and trying to get into Thailand; many ended up in camps on the border hoping to secure permanent homes pretty much anywhere other than Cambodia. The camps were open for years, and conditions weren’t great.

Braile’s first tour was in 1981 when he was in 60s, and he kept going back (usually to the same border area); about a dozen times in total through 1996. Somewhere along the line he retired from his Minneapolis practice but kept returning to Southeast Asia. Obviously this must have been pretty challenging for his spouse etc.; one way they dealt with the separations was to write lots of letters.

Braile was traveling mostly under the auspices of an organization named the American Refugee Committee. I know just a bit about this organization, as Therese has worked there for a few years. Somebody at ARC or somewhere had the bright idea to compile all the letters into book form – and it works well. (Though they could have edited it down quite a bit and still gotten across the story.)

Anyway, the book comes across as an unusually effective way to get some sense of the day-to-day lives of folks that undertake these tasks. Braile talks about getting used to living in the Thailand-Cambodia border area: tracking down food (lots of pineapple and chicken-on-a-stick); dealing with snakes and insects; basic transportation via bicycle or crowded buses; heat and humidity; local restaurants (ice cream at Kim Kim’s); and on and on. Also day-to-day adventures in medicine: limited technology and resources; efforts to train Khmer medics; evacuation rules for leaving camp if Situation 2 or higher (shells landing in camp); rides in a hot, cramped ambulance where the Khmer passengers always seemed to be getting sick; the faith of the locals in IVs; etc.

I liked that the guy had a very positive way of describing the many, many challenges and difficulties he encountered in living situation and medical service. Also that he seemed very respectful of the local ways and didn’t automatically try to impose Western approaches, and genuinely took this as a learning opportunity for which he was grateful.

Well worth reading. And, TMG is acknowledged at page 326. ARC info is here.

A Room With A View (E.M. Forster, 1908)

Not very good, but fortunately pretty short. I liked A Passage To India, maybe because I almost always like stories premised on different cultures coming into contact. I listened to Where Angels Fear to Tread on cassette, thought the reader did a nice job and enjoyed the story. So I was looking forward to another Forster book. Unfortunately, this one had cartoonish characters and just wasn’t very interesting. The timing is interesting – in 1908 I think big chunks of upper class or aspiring-to-upper class England still lived like it was Victorian times, though changes must have been well underway (with the remnants blown away in World War I).

Forster apparently was quite impressed with Italy; this book overlapped with some of the Italy material in Where Angels Fear to Tread.

I’m done reading Forster’s stuff.

In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made (Norman F. Cantor, 2001)

The topic is certainly fascinating, but I didn’t like this book all that much. Cantor goes through the history of the plague, focusing on England (which has the most extensive written record). First (and deadliest) wave of plague peaked around 1350. Sounds like the plague occurred after a period of warmer weather and population growth that had resulted in placing more marginal ground under cultivation; this was reduced for literally centuries.

The plague occurred during the course of the 100 years war, making recruitment more difficult. Labor was short, peasants made some gains economically, and some even moved up socially to yeoman status.

This author thinks it was anthrax combined with bubonic plague. There was a bunch of discussion about rats spreading the disease.

The author's bio is here.

He thinks the plague contributed to the development of modern real property law – the landed gentry suffered huge losses (sometimes resulting in several dowagers taking a portion of the income). So they needed lawyers to sort things out. Author says you could thaw out a 14th century real property lawyer, give him (it would have been a him, after all) a six-month refresher course, and put him to work today. Maybe it’s true, I don’t practice in this area. My law school course on this topic was pretty archaic.

Then the author goes off on some tangents about disease. Says bubonic plague – which did hit portions of the Roman empire in the fifth century – was largely responsible for the fall of the empire. Funny, the fella writing the book mentioned immediately below must not have been aware.

This is my second book by this author (“Inventing the Middle Ages,” discussed here) and he’s dropping down the priority list. In this one, it felt like he was forcing a cause-and-effect between the plague and all sorts of things. But then again, who knows.

The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (Bryan Ward-Parkins, 2005)

This guy was writing in response to a controversy I didn’t know existed. Apparently there are various scholars taking the position that Rome didn’t really "fall" due to "barbarian attacks." These folks wouldn’t claim that the process was entirely peaceful, but they assert that the Roman world gradually reached accommodations with Germanic folks (please don’t call them barbarians or put down their culture as compared to Rome’s) and transitioned into a different, less centralized but equally satisfactory lifestyle.

And here I had envisioned these wild Gothic types looting and pillaging and whatever (just like the cover artwork on the book), I didn’t even know an alternate view was out there.

Anyway, this author disagrees with this school of thought. He feels that the process was violent, not consensual, and ended up with a huge degradation of civilization, if more pronounced in some areas than others. All this is quite interesting, and I find his position compelling. The guy has studied lots of potsherds over the years, studied the use of tile roofs and coins, and evidence (such as it is) of the spread of writing. All this gives a pretty good picture of the extent to which some version of prosperity spread far beyond upper crust Roman society and down to the average citizen. Trade clearly was taking place all over the Roman world. After the barbarians took over, this type of evidence suggests rapid, swift disintegration (especially in the western parts of the empire).

The part about Britain was particularly interesting – because Britain was on the very edge of Roman civilization. Apparently this makes it easier to identify the influence of Roman civilization, and in turn the post-barbarian drop-off is incredibly pronounced. The author describes it as going back to the Iron Age, with a recovery period mentioned in centuries.

Something else interesting (at least to me) is that I have had some of these dates mixed up in my head. I tend to think of Rome as falling shortly after the time of Christ, when the traditional measuring date for the fall is the taking of Rome by Odoacer in 476. Roman ways no doubt survived long after that. When you think of Clovis in 511, the rapid progress of Islam via battle in the vacuum during this time, Battle of Tours in 732, Charlemagne in 800 – it really was a short leap in time between some of these developments, rather than century after century of “dark ages.”

Short, well-written, worth reading.

True at First Light (Ernest Hemingway, 1999 (posthumous))

Starting back in August 2005, I've gotten through For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms. And I was ready for a break from Hemingway, but this book looked to be something different.

And it was. His son (Patrick) actually edited this for publication 35 years after Hemingway's death. It is based on experiences on safari near Nairobi in 1953. I think the manuscripts (which were extricated along with other unpublished stuff from Cuba in exchange for Hemingway's real estate) needed a lot of work, and the book is uneven. But I ended up really liking it. The book is pretty much autobiographical, though fictional. It being 1953, the old-style safari and colonial days are done for. The protagonist oscillates between his American and European mores and the African lifestyle that he seems to really enjoy. His wife kills a huge lion, using her mediocre hunting skills. He likes a native girl. They hunt and drink and talk and fly in airplanes. It's good.

Hemingway had quite the interesting life, summarized here. Injured while driving an ambulance in Italy during WW I (A Farewell to Arms gets into this). Hung out in Paris in some expatriate group after the war (The Sun Also Rises gets into this). Spent time in Spain around the time of the Civil War (For Whom the Bell Tolls gets into this). And all sorts of other things before shooting himself in the head. Of those three novels, I thought For Whom the Bell Tolls was definitely the best.

Also read this at the gym. (It's amazing how many pages you can cover during 30 minutes every other day on a stairmaster.)

Little Miss Sunshine (September 9, 2006)

Patricia and I went to this movie at Camelview back on September 9. We hadn't thought the trailer looked like much, but all three of our sons had given it the major thumbs up. So we gave it a try. And I'm glad we did. Six central characters in the extended family. I thought they all did a great job, and all the parts fit together. Greg Kinnear probably had the largest role - his character was trying to launch a lecture tour with associated books and CDs for a nine-step program on how to be a "winner." The movie opens with him doing the program with an overhead projector. Which pretty much spoke to his prospects.

His brother in law was the second best Proust scholar but let's say was working through some issues. His son had gotten into Nietzsche, and had concluded that he couldn't talk - so he communicated via handwritten notes, which was a neat device. The kid actor was effective and not annoying, which is pretty rare. Etc. My favorite scene was the dinner scene at the beginning of the movie when the characters were more or less being introduced. But there were many good moments.

Tolstoy (A.N. Wilson, 1988)

Read this lengthy biography at the gym. I took a break from reading this biography a couple monthgs ago when I unwittingly learned from it how Anna Karenina ended. I guess the biographer assumed familiarity with Tolstoy’s main works. So I went back and read Anna Karenina (discussed here) before any more of the plot was spoiled, then finished this biography.

This definitely was one of my favorite books of the year. Much more than a biography. I’ve read a ton of Tolstoy’s stuff over the years and always like it. Wilson provided all sorts of biographical information, but also much history (focused on 19th century Russia) and plenty of opinions on all sorts of topics. I like his writing a bunch. (Also read “The Victorians” last year and have “After the Victorians – The Decline of Britain in the World” signed out of the library (this could be an interesting follow-on to the 1759 book in the post immediately below.)

Some things I wanted to remember:

--Tolstoy’s long life – he was writing at Sebastopol during the Crimean War in 1854, and finally died in 1910 just a few years before Revolution in 1917. Went through the liberation of the serfs in 1861 and all the late 19th-century Tsarist repression etc.

-- Aristocratic blood, so he had access to top levels of society all the way up to the Tsarist household. Yet ran his mouth (or wrote pieces) against Orthodox Church, government methods, private property, war; and in favor of rights of serfs, etc. – things that would have sent anyone less famous or less connected straight to a labor camp in Siberia.

-- Inconsistencies all over the place. Aristocrat but tried to identify with the serfs. Denounced private property yet lived well and satisfied his scruples by licensing property to his wife. Made his own shoes, espoused simple food, etc.

-- Eventually excommunicated by Orthodox church; his followers ("Tolstoyans") made his views almost into a religion (and something he probably would have had trouble recognizing).

-- Interacted with many, many leading figures. Gandhi picked up ideas re nonviolence. Chekhov and Gorky stayed with him in his last years. Loved reading Dickens. Competitive with Dostoyevsky. On and on.

-- Communists probably could have used many of his ideas and his persona for PR, but couldn’t figure him out. He was against private property but didn’t like what they were doing either. Lenin was in the same town as Tolstoy when Tolstoy was doing some wonderful famine relief work in 1891; Lenin was one of the few that refused to assist (in the belief that the more deaths and suffering, the faster the revolution could come).

-- This guy named Chertkov who competed with Tolstoy’s wife for access and publishing rights, etc. Strange.

-- Wife put up with his idiosyncrasies (though I guess she had her own) and was key to getting the works done, published, organized.

--His incredible fame and stature in and out of Russia. His novels that make him famous today were 50 years old by the time he died, and everyone knew him but not for those books.

Wikipedia bio is here.

1759 - The Year Britain Became Master of the World (Frank McLynn, 2004)

I didn’t like this as much as many other items I’ve read. The author picked 1759 as the pivotal year. The book was quite interesting and McLynn clearly knows a lot, but the premise felt forced. He drew some “conclusion” that if 1759 hadn’t turned out the way it did, the colonies may not have made their break in 1776 with who knows what consequences. That is not a very interesting premise. You always can always tweak some historical episode and speculate what might have been. (I always think of Homer and the toaster.)

The guy generates numerous books, many on related topics, and probably recycled some of his material into this one.

It was quite useful seeing the pieces fit together with a single-year focus: North America, West Indies, Europe, India. I’ve never read much about North America in that time period. He described the slaughter following the French/Indian victory at Fort William Henry; James Fenimore Cooper placed the main characters into this scene as part of The Last of the Mohicans.

Probably the most interesting discussion regarded the interactions between Europeans and American Indians – their practices, comparisons to pretty brutal tactics of whites, etc. Also good discussion about the causes for England's successes and corresponding French reverses. It truly was a world war going on.

And I liked the lead-in to each chapter, which discussed what was going in the literary and artistic world. The best feature of the book was that it integrated a bunch of topics that normally are presented separately.

The House of Mirth (Edith Wharton, 1905)

A few months ago I had read a collection of Edith Wharton’s short stories and novellas between 1911 and 1937 (here’s a link to that book). I didn’t know a thing about Edith Wharton (photo to left) and liked the short stories quite a bit. She was a society person that lived in wealth on both sides of the Atlantic; somewhat like Hemingway, she worked an ambulance during WW I. I liked the stories; many dealt with the foibles in the “high society” in which she lived; a few had WW I themes; a few were very imaginative (for example, one was about a castle where murdered dogs came back to take down their oppressor).

So I decided to try a full-length novel, The House of Mirth. I listened to this in the car (10 cassettes, 13.5 hours). Started slowly, but was worth finishing. The heroine, let’s say, is a beautiful but relatively poor woman named Lily Bart; she was orphaned in her teens and lives with her aunt. She has a great touch for hanging out with wealthy society types but blows it when it comes to landing a wealthy husband, gets disinherited, blows it again with the love of her life (a comfortable-but-not-wealthy lawyer), gets ostracized by her erstwhile society buddies, and things go downhill from there. Notwithstanding, I liked it. Amazon posts customer reviews here; a biography on Edith Wharton is here.

I hadn’t realized that a movie was made out of this book in 2000 with some fairly well-known folks. Gillian Anderson of X-Files fame (middle photo) played Ms. Bart; Dan Ackroyd played the slimy Gus Trenner. Having read the book, I’d be interested in seeing the movie. It’s reviewed here.

Anna Karenina -- Leo Tolstoy

I read this novel at the gym in 30-minute sessions on the Stairmaster. So it took a little over two months. And well worth it. In addition to being a fantastic author, Tolstoy is a larger-than-life character in his own right.

I’m not sure how to compare, but many folks seem to think Anna Karenina is Tolstoy’s greatest novel. (It was published between 1875 and 1877, after War and Peace and before he started getting preachy.) He takes 900+ pages going over seven main characters (Anna Karenina and Aleksey Karenin, Dolly and Stiva Oblansky, Konstantin Levin + Kitty, Vronsky) and, through them, revealing so many dimensions of married love, family life, the consequences of infidelity, and much more.

The most interesting character is probably Konstantin Levin (perhaps portrayed sympathetically because the character is so obviously based on Tolstoy himself, as this biography by A.N. Wilson explains). Supposedly Tolstoy actually wrote expressions of love with chalk on a tablecloth to his wife-to-be (just as Levin does with Kitty Shcherbatskaya). Like Levin, Tolstoy gave his diaries to his wife right after the wedding (though Tolstoy’s diaries caused much more disruption than the diaries in Anna Karenina). Like Tolstoy, Levin is an aristocrat who enjoys working on his estate in the country rather than hanging around in Petersburg (or even Moscow) society. The deathbed scene involving Levin’s brother mirrors Tolstoy’s own brother’s death. Levin, like Tolstoy, tried to run schools for the peasants on his estate. Etc.

I understand that Levin didn’t even appear in the first draft of the story, which focused on the title character. The book was published in installments in a Russian magazine, and the story ran off in different directions over the course of several years. But the parts work.

Tolstoy has a way of making his characters ridiculously realistic. When reading his things, I constantly have the reaction “yes, that’s how people, including me, really think or feel about things.” His description of going to meet Kitty Shcherbatskaya at the skating rink when he was in love with her but completely uncertain whether he “had a chance” is dead on. His descriptions of mowing hay with the peasants, the interactions with Kitty, the politicking among the Russian gentry, etc. are thoroughly enjoyable.

The novel has been filmed many times, typically with big-name leads. Details about the book are here.

By the way, the novel begins with one of its most quoted lines, "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." A Tale of Two Cities, described below, also had a pretty famous opening line ("It was the best of times, it was the worst of times").

A Tale of Two Cities Charles Dickens)

Somehow I had missed reading this book all these years, and finally finished it on Wednesday. I can understand why the story has had such staying power – memorable characters set against the French revolution. The plot lines involve all sorts of links and coincidences among a group of folks, and sometimes this felt a bit forced. I think the story would have worked fine without all the links; for example, Madame DeFarge with her knitting would have been a great character without the link that is revealed in the last part of the book. The Sydney Carton stuff at the end is quite nicely done. It’s all nice, though more melodramatic than would be acceptable today.

Dickens does a great job communicating the atmosphere in France in the days of the Terror (at least as someone who wasn’t there writing for readers who weren’t there either). He describes some of the perks enjoyed by the nobility over the years at the expense of the peasantry in a way that explains some of the ensuing butchery on a more visceral level. Details about the story are here.

I didn’t really appreciate how popular Dickens was, and is. Read this for more.

Dead Souls - Nikolai Gogol

Gogol was writing just a bit before the likes of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. I don't know enough about Russian literature to know where he fits in. But I liked "Dead Souls" a lot. The lead character - Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov - is a hoot. The guy traverses the provinces of Russia trying to buy up dead "souls" - meaning serfs that had died but whose death was not yet recorded on the tax records. Owners of these souls would benefit by not having to pay taxes on them; Chichikov planned to borrow against the souls before the lender figured out that they no longer existed.

Gogol shows Chichikov's interactions with provincial landholders and local government officials - all quirky folks; he was interested in showing bureaucratic bungling and corruption, local vanities, etc. Chichikov is funny - he keeps professing his desire to be honest and have a family, but keeps backsliding into one scheme after the other. He has but two live serfs - his drunken coachman, and his flunky with the bad odor.

Gogol planned additional parts to the story. The second part isn't finished. He fell in with some religious fanatic and burned the near-final manuscript. The second part has been reconstructed in part from earlier drafts.

Here's an article about Gogol, and a separate article focused on "Dead Souls."

What I'm Doing Here

I like movies, concerts, books, etc. As noted in the header above, I'm tired of seeing, hearing or reading something and very quickly losing track of it. A few years ago I started keeping some notes on books and movies. After working the GalesAz blog for awhile, I recognize that this is an easier place to store this kind of information.

If I can figure out an easy way to import the earlier information, I will do so. In the meantime, here is a movie and book note from GalesAz. Future review-type items will appear here. We have fallen out of the habit of going to movies but perhaps this will pick up as my movie-buddy is now through with school and getting through her job orientation phase. I do read steadily, mostly when working out on the stair machine or by listening to books-on-tape when driving around, plus bits and pieces of reading at the house or when traveling.

Anyway, this blog is designed for me to have quick reference to things I want to keep track of. Not likely to be of much interest to others.

My Hitch in Hell: The Bataan Death March (Lester Tenney, 2000)

Enlisted man from Chicago is part of surrender in the Philippines. Bataan Death March, prison camps in the Philippines and Japan.

Quick read, interesting. The author - later a professor at ASU - was quite the operator - ran entertainment, gambling, prison black market, etc.

But the focus is on the awful conditions in which these POWs tried to function. The book is very good at describing this.

The Stranger and the Statesman (Nina Burleigh, 2004)

Gift from my five children purchased during the trip by four of them to visit KHG in DC.

Biographical information on James Smithson - illegitimate son of English nobility - who left his estate to the U.S. Ex-president John Quincy Adams played the lead role in seeing that the estate (bags of gold) was used to build what became the Smithsonian.

Not many specifics available on Smithson himself (mostly due to an untimely fire), but the book does an interesting job of portraying early 19th century America and contrasting it to Europe.

Nobody seems to know why he gave the money to the U.S. Apparently he didn't have any heirs to cut out.

Joseph Smith - The Making of a Prophet (Dan Vogel, 2004)

Lots of detail about Smith’s early life in New York, treasure seeking, “finding” the plates, “translating” the plates, etc. Apparently treasure-seeking was not all that uncommon in early 19-century NE; when the treasure wasn’t found, it was blamed on spirits guarding it or other miscues that caused the treasure to slide away through the earth. Translation ended up being done through the seer stone (in a hat) so that it wasn’t necessary to keep the plates around the house (visitors threatened to burst in and confirm its existence, or not). No one saw the plates except with spiritual eyes. Many revelations and visits from angels and others. Book ends as they relocate to Ohio.

Last Citadel: A Novel of the Battle of Kursk (David L. Robbins,

I like Robbins' World War II novels (such as The War of the Rats and The End of War). This one is set in the battle of Kursk, which is described as history's largest tank battle. Hitler was trying to retake initiative after the failure in Stalingrad - effectively his last gasp on the eastern front. Relying heavily on the huge, powerful, but long-delayed Tiger tank; outdone by Soviet T-34s.

Berko family - Cossack father with Communist son man a tank while daughter is a Night Witch. Spanish SS officer comes from Spanish Civil War and fights for Nazis. Breit is working to overthrow Hitler. Partisan fighting.

The Tiger tank stories are interesting - awesome weapon but overdone to the point of impractical.

Complete Stories 1874-1884 (Henry James)

Gave up after 600 of 800 pages. The stories were very similar after awhile, mostly about high society folks moving between America (i.e. NY, Boston and environs), Paris, London; pointing out differences, foibles.

I've since read a bunch more about James (and his brother William) so should go back to these.

The Seamstress (Sara Tuvel Bernstein, published posthumously in 1997)

Holocaust memoir.

Unusual – this was a Romanian Jewish woman who lived through shortages and mistreatment in her home village and in Bucharest and Budapest (where she in fact worked as a seamstress) before being sent to labor camps and concentration camps and barely surviving.

The writing style is odd – structured as exact narratives and events over the years. The book probably was published only because Edgar Bronfman became interested. But in the end the style and the sincerity are the book’s strengths and it’s well worth reading. The Holocaust stories are just beyond belief.

A Farewell to Arms (Ernest Hemingway, 1929)

This tells the story of an American serving as an ambulance driver on the Italian front in WW I. He falls in love with an English nurse; she attends him following an injury and they fall in love.

He returns to the front, but the Germans overwhelm the Italians and the protagonist eventually deserts as he figures out that scapegoats are being sought. Finds the nurse, and they cross the border into Switzerland.

I liked it, but not nearly as much as For Whom The Bell Tolls.

The First Circle (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, released 1968)

Excellent - one of my favorite books. Solzhenitsyn is simply wonderful.

A bit hard to follow with so many characters, but it’s well worth the effort.

Perspective of prisoners without hope. Even though special prison for the technically skilled.

Many powerful scenes but I think the best was when Nerzhin’s wife visits him – the effect on her, and him.

Camaraderie, tensions among the sharaskas. Their endless discussions, filled with literary/learned references. Zek life. References to WWII. Stalin and the other officials – their own terrors. Working on the encoder (Rubin).

Gulliver's Travels (Jonathan Swift, 1726)

Finally caught up with this classic. The objects of the author's satires can be guessed at somewhat but it would be helpful to have footnotes or some other form of readers' guide to assist.

Lilliput; Brobdingnag; the floating government; the marvelous Houyhnhnms; the repulsive Yahoos; etc.

Didn't do much for me.

The Making of Revolutionary Paris (David Garrioch, 2002)

Daily life details from 18^th century Paris – influence of Enlightenment, Jansenism, shifts from corporate bodies to individual rights; opening boulevards and public spaces to permit air to circulate; adding house numbers; centralized authority; etc. Interesting and worth reading.

The Austrians: A Thousand-Year Odyssey (Gordon Brook-Shepard, 2002)

This was very interesting; I had never read much about Austria. Presented as a buffer zone to the east (ost reich) of the French/German kingdoms of the middle ages; evolved through Hapsburg days; lack of national identity as this developed elsewhere. Many desired to link with Germany; quite a bit of support for the Anschluss (notwithstanding Sound of Music patriotism story). Only seven million people after being cut down to size after WW I. Neutrality adopted as a way to get the Soviets to leave. Then joined EU, started to deal with Nazi cooperation etc.