Titus Andronicus (William Shakespeare, between 1588 and 1593)

[read in October 2013, summary to come]
[didn't much like this]

King Richard III (William Shakespeare, 1592)

[finished in August 2013, description to come]

“Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.”

Julius Caesar (William Shakespeare, 1599)

[read in April 2013, summary to come]

[quite wonderful; astonishing number of quotations in constant use (per list below)] [which is one of several reasons reading Shakespeare is basic for reading so much else of Western literature][and succeeding at Jeopardy]
____________________________

The live-long day. (1.1.42)

Beware the ides of March. (1.2.13)

Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a Colossus . . .

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings. (1.2.135)

Yond' Cassius has a lean and hungry look;
He thinks too much: such men are dangerous. (1.2.192)

But, for my own part, it was Greek to me. (1.2.283)

Let's carve him as a dish fit for the gods,

Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.

But I am constant as the northern star,

Et tu, Brute? Then fall, Caesar! (3.1.77)

Cry, 'Havoc!' and let slip the dogs of war. (3.1.268)

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Cæsar, not to praise him.

There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries. (4.3.218)

This was the most unkindest cut of all;

The Great Influenza - The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History (John M. Barry, 2004)

The editor could (and should) have done a bit of chopping here and there (starting with the title:  does he really need "great," "epic," and "deadliest"?), but overall this is very much worth reading.  The author focuses on the intersection of two story lines:  (1) the bringing of "modern" (or "German," if you will) medicine to the U.S. in the decades leading up to WWI; and (2) the incredible influenza outbreak in the dying days of WWI, along with related efforts to fight it.

I wish I had read Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith just after this book (rather than just before).  Lewis's novel would have had a lot more meaning.  This author explains how Lewis built the novel around contemporary events, including a cigarette relating to researcher Paul Lewis.  Amazing overlaps.  Including issues like anxious-to-publish institute leadership in conflict with go-slow, meticulous researchers.

Some thoughts about story line one:

1.  U.S. med schools were in the dark ages well into second half of 19th century (and, in many cases, early 20th century).  John Hopkins University as an unlikely pioneering institution in Baltimore.  Rockefeller Institute in NYC develops.  And others.

2.  Prior to the new standards - med school professors earn fees by tuition - which means pandering to (rather than challenging) students.  No or few autopsies.  No research or labs in almost all cases.  Generally no requirement for an undergraduate degree as a condition of admission.  Graduates often saw their first patients after graduation.  1910 Flexnor Report is catalyst for change.

3.  Author devotes a lot of time to mini-biographies of key players.  Not entirely sure why - no one came up with a "cure" for this influenza, it just had to play itself out - ongoing mutations regress virulence to the mean, or something.

As to the flu itself:

1.  Appeared to commence in at army setting in Kansas.  Overcrowded barracks and constant transfers enabled the spread in a way that wouldn't have happened in peacetime.

2.  Astonishing worldwide spread - especially with the far more virulent phase 2.  20 million deaths in India alone?

3.  Interesting discussions of the way these diseases mutate and flow within and among different population centers - quite reminiscent of this book.  Isolated populations get wrecked - limited antibody development.

4.  Killed young, healthy folks (flu normally attacks the young and old) - antibody system went into overdrive.

5.  Staggering death tolls, staggering effect on cities.  Oxygen deprivation created a deep blueness in corpses that caused folks to call this a recurrence of the black death.  And there were horse-drawn carts in US cities with calls to "bring out your dead" - amazing in 20th century.

6.  Disaster in Philadelphia.

7.  176 of 300 "Eskimos" dead in Nome when a relief ship arrived.  85%+ death tolls in surrounding villages.  Grisly scenes where half-wild dogs devoured corpses when the few surviving natives were too weak to fight them off.  (As I understand it, this had nothing to do with the 1925 Balto serum run - that involved a later diphtheria outbreak.)

8.  The amazing-ness of flu and why outbreaks will continue.  How it doesn't need continuous access to a large human population - can nestle in bird or pig or whatever populations and then jump to humans in new forms.

Another thing:  this story brought home the pervasiveness of the repressive environment during WWI - Wilson wanted, and got, a total war environment.  Sedition Act - amazing.  Buy war bonds - or else.  Shut up - or else.  The frightening know-it-all-ness of Wilson and the Progressive movement - hooray for experts and top-down control! (Unfortunately, that part doesn't seem to change much.)

The flu became known as the "Spanish Flu" because Spanish newspapers - printed in a neutral country - actually reported on the disease.  It had been rampant elsewhere for a long time, but censors in combatant countries suppressed the news.

Author thinks Wilson was affected by this flu during critical portions of Versailles negotiations during which Wilson seemed to fold on long-held principles;others have attributed to Wilson's weakening to some other disease.  In any event he never was very healthy thereafter.  (#1 adviser Colonel House already was out of commission prior to Versailles via the flu.)

A Season in Hell - My 130 Days in the Sahara with Al Qaeda (Robert Fowler, 2011)

K picked this as selection #2 for the little book club that we (mostly NOC as driver) are initiating.  Will update this post with a few thoughts sometime after the big BC session.

The Guns at Last Light (Rick Atkinson, 2013)

Atkinson has a real gift for taking an overwhelming mass of facts - many of them already well-known to any reader who would bother to pick up a book like this - and turning them into a surprisingly fresh, coherent story line complete with compelling characters.  This is the third of his WWII trilogy.  I had confidence I'd like it based on how much I enjoyed book #2 (discussed here) - though I was a bit, and entirely unnecessarily as it turned out, concerned that my mildly greater familiarity with the Normandy-VE Day material covered in this third book might make this one less interesting.

Not so (and it turns out I wasn't familiar with much of anything anyway).

Now I need to go back and read the first volume of the trilogy.

Stuff I found interesting:

1.  Does a good job of making the reader feel like you know something about the key political leaders and the top military guys.  Without losing sight of the lower officer ranks and the regular soldiers - plenty of personal stories about them as well.  The biographical elements are useful.

2.  Eisenhower's quote about Montgomery seems spot on:  "a good man to serve under, a difficult man to serve with, and an impossible man to serve over."

3.  Never knew anything about Yalta other than a vague sense of the agreements reached, FDR looked awful, and the conference was held somewhere in the Crimea.  So the descriptions were interesting (including czarist origins of the meeting place, logistical difficulties, etc.).

4.  I didn't know much about the Western Front beyond D-Day, Market Garden, Battle of the Bulge, race through Germany.  Sure it was no eastern front in terms of carnage and scale of battle - but it seems the Germans fought much harder and longer in the west than I realized.  Lots of nasty battles.

5.  I had this vision of the U.S. as an inexhaustible well of manpower - but not so.  At least in terms of shortages of men for some of the key fighting positions.  Interesting discussion of the loosening of physical (and psychological) standards as manpower needs accelerated.

6.  The book gives a glimpse of the incredible overload that so many GIs must have experienced - no doubt worse for those who served longest, but bad for all.  I lose sight that for some of the GIs, things started in Africa, slogged through Italy, then onto Normandy and into Germany - a parade of "normal" war awfulness, made worse by atrocities against soldiers, wrecked towns, wrecked civilians (often reduced to un-civil behavior), fatigue, awful weather, food problems, etc.  Then as they move into Germany and the end nears - the unhappy reality of the swarms of DPs relentlessly on the move, often hopeless.  When it's hard to imagine what else they might run into - now they start to encounter the concentration camps - worst of the worst.  Just amazing.  How did so many of these guys come back and thrive?

7.  Related - the book hints at a sense of the apprehension - in the background but so-real - relating to the Pacific War.  For anyone that survived the list in the previous paragraph - a very real possibility of success in Europe being followed immediately by a quick trip to hell in the Pacific.  No respite in sight.  Not discussed in this book, but I'm thinking that this factor is another piece of the puzzle in understanding why the A-bomb was dropped on Japanese cities.  Could anyone really ask America-writ-large, after all this, to take massive GI casualties in a conventional invasion?

8.  Military logistics are unfathomable to me in general, and the European invasion must have been the most unfathomable of all.  It took a while to take control of Antwerp - with it, provisioning was next to impossible.  Without it - the invasion could hardly have succeeded at scale.  Nazis were great wreckers of sites they scuttled, but failed to wreck Antwerp (though it became a V-2 target).

9.  I don't think I ever had read a word about the landing at Marseilles and the push up from the south of France.  Interesting story throughout.

Gift from PJr and Nedda, quite delightful.

Arrowsmith (Sinclair Lewis, 1925)

I don't think I much care for this kind of work.  It was a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1925.  The dust jacket lauds Sinclair Lewis "at the peak of his powers as satirist and social chronicler, vigorously unmasking the pretenses and hypocrisies of American middle-class life."

But why is this such a great thing to do?  The fact that we humans are laden with absurdities can hardly be news to anyone.  The novelists I prefer do plenty of "unmasking" - but with gentleness and humor, and with a recognition that typically there is lots of good enmeshed with the absurd (examples, in my opinion = Proust, Dostoevsky).

This work reminded me of this famous, much-lauded work by Sherwood Anderson - which I also didn't much care for.

In this one, Arrowsmith is a Midwesterner who ends up in med school.  Lengthy passages about his days in school - his frat, the classes, the climbers, Dr. Gottlieb (his hero), his girlfriend (who he throws over to marry Leora).  Lengthy passages about his initial medical practice - in small-town North Dakota.  Next he works as a public health official in an Iowa town - lab work being his preferred work.  Next he works for a year in a clinic in Chicago with one of his med school compadres.  Next gets invited to work with Dr. Gottlieb in a research institute in New York City.

There is a plague in the Caribbean; his research comes into play.  Lots of angst about research and medicine as commerce.  The descriptions from each of his work settings were interesting - various aspects of medicine in early 20th-century - supposedly Lewis worked very closely with a doctor or doctors to make this reasonably realistic.

Easy reading, not sure it was worth 470 pages.  This Library of America edition also includes Elmer Gantry and Dodsworth, each of which I shall skip.