The Merchant of Venice (William Shakespeare, between 1596 and 1598)

Continuing to work my way through Shakespeare's plays.

I read this in short chunks over the course of a few months, so perhaps lost the flow.  But I didn't like this as much as Julius Caesar or Richard III, when I thought I remembered liking it quite a bit.

Shylock - the avaricious Jew - yet given perhaps the best speech in the entire play ("Hath not a Jew eyes?").  Fuel for anti-Semitism; but it seems to me that Shakespeare had a more nuanced view.  (I do like the use of this speech in Ernst Lubitsch's movie "To Be or Not to Be").

Always interesting, but mostly saddening:  the incredible continuing definition of the Jew as the "other", or the "outsider".  And not just in Christian Europe - I suppose one could carry this story back to the book of Exodus, to the Babylonian Captivity, to any long list of occurrences.  Not clear how much this particular viewpoint is shaped by the formation of the State of Israel in 1948 - seems like "not much."  Amazing, frustrating, how little things change.  What's up with this?

Usury as a flash point in those days.

Portia with her famous - and really, quite lovely - speech about mercy.  "The quality of mercy is not strained:  It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven Upon the place beneath.  It is twice blest:  It blesseth him that gives and him that takes."  [etc.]

Then, in disguise, she switches to some fancy legalese.

Shakespeare = so worth reading.

The Monuments Men - Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves, and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History (Robert M. Edsel, 2009)

Book club selection (via POC).

Author recounts the story of folks - generally taken from the art world - who were attached to various army units, mostly starting around D-Day, and charged with helping the army minimize unnecessary destruction of historically significant objects.  And to help track down art objects looted by the Nazis.

It really is quite a story, and an excellent companion piece to this narrative of the war in the west.  Also fits with this really great story on this topic, based on Gustav Klimt's most famous work, in Vienna.

Hitler as the failed artist - but with an eye on building a collection for the ages.  Goering also a collector, but moreso based on greed.  The Nazis were incredibly systematic looters.  Some materials hidden in mines.  Quite a bit of focus on famous works such the Bruges Madonna and the Ghent Altarpiece, among others.

The "book club" folks - per POC's fine arranging - also attended the movie on its opening weekend.  Let's say George Clooney took some massive liberties with the story line in the book, or maybe I just didn't read it carefully enough.  In a story that would have been plenty compelling without being converted into a buddy movie, or whatever Clooney was trying to do here.

"The Rape of Europa" started it all with this author, and remains the most compelling work we've seen in this genre.

I Kiss Your Hands Many Times - Hearts, Souls and Wars in Hungary (Marianne Szegedy-Maszak, 2013)

Author's parents and grandparents came through difficult times in WWII Hungary.  Author, growing up with extended family in NY, had limited understanding of family background until she arranges translation of stacks of letters after her parents died.

I've read lots of WWII stuff - but the story that she frames is one of the most interesting and unique of all.  Partly because it is centered in Hungary - relatively safely away from the fighting until the last year of the war (which I had never thought about).  And Hitler had enough other things keeping him busy such that he didn't put the hammer down on this semi-reliable ally until late in the game.

"I kiss your hands" - a traditional Hungarian departure gesture, also used in the closing of letters.  Aladar - typically guarded in his communications - expressed a bit stronger feelings toward Hanna by adding "many times" in closing letters to her.  Nice.

A few of the threads running through this:

1.  Author's father - Aladar - rising political star in Hungary, from a Christian family.  Encounters Hitler in a couple settings while on government business.  Pretty outspoken against Nazis - which naturally enough didn't help him at certain points in the story.

2.  Author's mother - Hanna - belongs to a Jewish family - incredibly successful business operators, supposedly their operations constituted about 10% of Hungary's GDP (hard to believe).  Wealthy, aristocratic, assimilated, some converted to Christianity - but still, Jews.

3.  As Aladar and Hanna fall in love, anti-Semitic legislation makes the match nigh-impossible.  Hungarian government goes slow on attacking Jews; Nazis finally force the process in 1943 or 1944; too many Hungarians were way too glad to assist.  The Nazi Jew-killing machine was in top condition at this point, and - with plenty of local assistance - murders of Jews in Hungary were accomplished with incredible efficiency.

4.  As the Nazis advance and then, in short order, the Russians start to attack - Aladar ends up in Dachau.  A political prisoner of the Nazis.  Awful experience; he's there when the U.S. army arrives.  Budapest itself badly wrecked, including blowing up beautiful-historic Danube bridges.  The war finally hit home in Hungary with full force.

5.  Prior to Aladar being taken away:  Hanna's family is bargaining with a Nazi - in a deal that was approved by Himmler himself - family members already in camps are released and with most of the rest are allowed to emigrate to Portugal.  In exchange for most of their assets.  Though with a few hostages left behind to make sure the rest behave once outside Hungary.  Aladar not aware of how this is turning out.  (Author explains why Nazis didn't just steal the assets, something to the effect that they were still putting up a show of limited interference with their allies.)

6.  Very touching story in the immediate postwar era - Aladar and Hanna reconnect.  Married in the wreckage of Budapest.

7.  Pretty much immediately after the war, Aladar (still highly thought of) is appointed by the new government to be ambassador to the U.S. - so he and Hanna move to DC.  Hopes for democracy.  Hopes for U.S. intervention.  But the Communists take over Hungarian government in their typical 1940s-thug-style as applied throughout Eastern Europe.  And the U.S. had other priorities - Hungary pretty clearly a lost cause in terms of Soviet domination.  So Aladar is out of a job.  And returning to Hungary is not possible.  But his in-laws start showing up, and they still had both money, and business smarts.  So no danger of missing meals.

8.  Aladar - something of a nervous personality - didn't thrive in the wake of all this.  Not surprisingly.  Did work for Radio Free Europe and Voice of America in relation to Hungary.  It was effective that the author didn't sugarcoat his problems.

9.  The quoted correspondence is pretty amazing throughout.  Hard to imagine educated, articulate folks writing to each other in these circumstances.  Quite wonderful to read.

Author didn't realize until it was too late:  but her parents had quite a love story under truly extraordinary circumstances.

The above doesn't do justice to the book.  I dog-eared dozens and dozens of pages - lots of ideas about history, and just plain nice moments, that I want to keep track of.

Robert Schumann - The Life and Work of a Romantic Composer (Martin Geck, 2010)

As with this book by the same author, I'm trying to read stuff that might give me some kind of window into how composers work.  It's not really working (though the books are enjoyable enough in their own right).

A few Schumann thoughts:

1.  His efforts (successful) to marry Clara Weick are pretty well-known.  Hard to say that Clara's piano-teacher father was wrong to be a bit wary of young Schumann - who seems at least in his early days to have had a Werther-type Romantic personality.  Which seems to have gotten worse over time.

2.  Schumann was a very successful and creative writer in addition to his composing efforts.  Didn't have any idea he was doing so much musical criticism.

3.  I do find quite interesting the lives of these young folks in Germany in the post-Napoleonic years, the run-up to the 1848 disturbances, etc.  Schumann definitely caught up in this.

4.  The struggles of German composers to live up to, or move beyond, Beethoven.  Haven't appreciated how high his stature was - seemed to make it very difficult or impossible for others to even attempt symphonies.

5.  Interesting stories of his efforts to romance Clara - using pseudonyms etc. to work around the recalcitrant father.  Clara as quite an impressive figure - virtuoso pianist, incredibly supportive wife willing to subordinate her career.  They had a large family.

6.  I've found Thomas Mann's discussions of music very interesting (especially in his take on Faustus); this author refers to Mann's capacity to do this well, and uses an illustration from Buddenbrooks.

7.  How much these folks loved Bach (whose work was rediscovered, if that's the right term, by Schumann's contemporary, Mendelssohn)!  Schumann wrote out The Art of Fugue as a way to try to understand it.  Devoted to  The Well-Tempered Clavier and The Musical Offering as well.

8.  Friendly with Mendelssohn and Liszt.

9.  Became very close to Johannes Brahms - maybe 15 years Schumann's junior.  And who ended up very much in love with Clara, it seems.  This author wasn't pushing to develop a scandal-theme (and who knows if there was much of anything to support it anyway).   Certainly was a helpful support as Schumann deteriorated.

10.  Anxious, nervous personality - ended up in asylum, and died there in 1856 (age 46).  Clara lived another 40 years.

Still don't know much about how he went about doing his work.  Oh well.

The Fall of the House of Dixie (Bruce Levine, 2013)

I seldom pick Civil War-era books, in part because I think I already picked up a fair amount of information about the topic.  Incorrectly.  Levine pulls together all sorts of primary source material to create a highly interesting discussion of what was going on in the South - social and political stuff, not so much from the oft-reported battlefields. I liked it a great deal.

And it wasn't just another consciousness-raising exercise about the awfulness of slavery (not to downplay its awfulness, but that topic has been done quite a few times).  The author gives lots of context around the various social classes in the South, their sometimes-overlapping and sometimes-diverging outlooks, etc.  Very helpful.

Philosophical underpinnings of slavery - how blacks were better off enslaved - did anyone really believe this (or just profess it for convenience sake)?

The power of the Southern states from Revolutionary War era on through the run-up to the Civil War - strong representation in all branches of government.

Complex politics of the Republican Party - the belief that slavery would die a natural death if prevented from spreading to new territories (thus Lincoln's aversion to outright prohibition in existing states).  Southerners believed this as well, leading to border wars and fights over opening up new states and territories to slavery.

Didn't realize that both sides desperately needed the manpower represented by blacks.  Confederacy refused to use them (other than the most menial of labor-support tasks) for pretty obvious reasons:  can you trust armed slaves?; how can you make them a soldier if you believe they are dimwitted, docile and incapable of independent action?; implicit equality with white fellow soldiers is a big problem in this belief system; etc.  North record not the greatest, but some blacks were given the opportunity to fight and took full advantage of it.

The very different uses of (and attitudes toward) slavery within the South.  Plantation society in just a few areas.  Lots of upland whites with no real investment in slavery - their enthusiasm for the war dimmed much more quickly.

Slave owners willingly sending their own sons to war, but refusing to release slaves for support activities.

How Northern attitudes (including Lincoln's) changed over the years - to unabashedly pushing for abolition.  Realized the middle ground didn't exist.

Democrats undermining Republican efforts.  On-the-ground challenges in the South - how to ensure that the war wasn't lost after the South surrendered?  This didn't work out so well (not the topic of this book, though there is another new book out on the topic of Reconstruction).

Touching stories of blacks being freed; families reunited after separation via slave sales; etc.

The South - burdened with, but dependent upon, an indefensible institution - with no choice but to defend it.

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.

The Honorary Consul (Graham Greene, 1973)

I like Greene's books, and will continue to work through them.

Protagonist is a doctor (Plarr) who moved south from Paraguay with his mother when a child - leaving behind his politically dubious father (in a country where that always seems to be a big problem).  Now he lives in a small town near the Paraguayan border.  Half-English and half Paraguayan; identifies with the local English community (consisting of three members, including him).  The Honorary Consul (English) is an aging mediocrity with a new, young wife who Plarr finds interesting, let's say.

The Honorary Consul is mistakenly kidnapped and held for ransom with some desperate amateurs who were going after the U.S. ambassador.  The kidnappers are Paraguayans with information about Plarr's father; Plarr is mixed up in their activities.  Head of the kidnapper group is a former priest, which gives Greene some room to work in his Catholic themes.

Good, I liked it.

The Small House at Allington (Anthony Trollope, 1864)

I've been wanting to read Trollope, not quite sure why it's taken so long to pick up one of his books.

This was entertaining, but I won't prioritize reading more of his stuff.  Good, but didn't grab.  Easy reading.

The protagonist - Lily Dale - is supposed to be one of his best female characters - but I found her behavior after being jilted (pretty outrageously, by the "swell" Mr. Crosbie) to show somebody "in denial" and just plain naive - didn't strike me as "noble" at all.

Trollope can sketch characters and scenes extremely adeptly - this is enjoyable.  Though I don't think it required 650 pages to tell this particular story.

Johnny Eames grows up, with an assist via the earl and the bull.  Sub-plot involves him at the boarding house with Amelia Roper, the Lupex couple, "Cradell," etc.

De Courcy family - this was a very effective discussion of what life must have been like for nobility in decline; it was increasingly acceptable for these types to marry the right type of commoners, though not so wise if the commoner doesn't bring money into the marriage (as Crosbie didn't).

Lily's sister (Bell) and her mother; Dr. Crofts.

The squire - his nephew (Bernard).  The squire belatedly builds relationships with the Dales.

A Canticle for Leibowitz (Walter M. Miller, Jr., 1960) (take 3)

Book club selection (via PJr).

Re-read for "book club".  I like it better each time.

Earlier (and very brief) discussion can be found here.

Some related thoughts (from 1976) can be found here.