Saturday Review of Books: January 14, 2012

Jan13

â€œThe Egyptians often, in death, had their favorite cats embalmed, to cozen their feet. If things go well, my special pets will pace me into eternity, Shakespeare as pillow, Pope at one elbow, Yeats at the other, and Shaw to warm my toes. Good company for far traveling.â€ ~Ray Bradbury

Welcome to the Saturday Review of Books at Semicolon. Hereâ€™s how it usually works. Find a book review on your blog posted sometime during the previous week. The review doesnâ€™t have to be a formal sort of thing. You can link to your thoughts on a particular book, a few ideas inspired by reading the book, your evaluation, quotations, whatever.

Then on Friday night/Saturday, you post a link here at Semicolon in Mr. Linky to the specific post where youâ€™ve written your book review. Donâ€™t link to your main blog page because this kind of link makes it hard to find the book review, especially when people drop in later after youâ€™ve added new content to your blog. In parentheses after your name, add the title of the book youâ€™re reviewing. This addition will help people to find the reviews theyâ€™re most interested in reading.

After linking to your own reviews, you can spend as long as you want reading the reviews of other bloggers for the week and adding to your wishlist of books to read. That’s how my own TBR list has become completely unmanageable and the reason I can’t join any reading challenges. I have my own personal challenge that never ends.

One Amazing Thing by Chitra Divakaruni

Jan13

In addition to The Canterbury Tales (which appears in my novel) and Wuthering Heights, I was drawing on works such as The Decameron, The Arabian Nights, and the Indian Wise-Animal tales, The Panchatantra. Just before beginning my book, I reread Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto because I really liked the feel of that novel. ~Chitra Divakaruni

A group of diverse people are trapped by an earthquake inside a visa office, and to survive emotionally they begin, one by one, to tell their stories.

“Unless we’re careful, things will get a lot worse. We can take out our stress on one another–like what happened–and maybe get buried alive. Or we can focus our minds on something compelling— . . . We can each tell an important story from our lives. . . Everyone has a story,” said Uma, relieved that one of them was considering the idea. “I don’t believe anyone can go through life without encountering at least one amazing thing.”

So each of the nine people trapped in the unstable building tells his or her story. I thought the premise was genius, and the execution was good, too. I don’t care much for short stories, but these were knit together by the over-arching plot of nine people imprisoned in an office with possible death staring them in the face. The themes of the characters’ stories were inter-woven, too. The stories were all about thwarted desires and about what happens when we get what we think we want, but not what we really need or want.

What story would you tell if you were to tell about One Amazing Thing that had happened in your life?

I’m thinking about using this book in a high school World Literature class that I’m planning for next year. If you’ve read it, what do you think? Could high schoolers relate to the characters in the book? Wouldn’t it be a good introduction or exposure to colliding cultures and grace under pressure?

Do you have other reading suggestions for an 11-12th grade World Literature class?

1948: Events and Inventions

Jan11

January 30, 1948. Mahatma Mohandas Gandhi is assassinated by a fanatical Hindu man while Gandhi is a prayer meeting in New Delhi. All India mourns.

February 25, 1948. Communists seize power in Czechoslovakia.

May 14, 1948. Jewish leaders Chaim Weitzmann and David Ben-Gurion declare the independence of the new Jewish state of Israel.

June 23, 1948. The Soviet Union blockades road and rail links to the city of Berlin located inside the Soviet zone of Germany. On June 30, U.S. planes, carrying supplies for besieged Berlin, land in the city delivering 2500 tons of much-needed food.

June, 1948. Columbia Records introduces the first long-playing commercial vinyl records.

July 1, 1948. Yugoslav Communist Marshal Tito provokes the Soviet Union into expelling Yugoslavia from the Cominform (the international organization of communist parties) in Tito’s determination to remain independent from Soviet control.

August, 1948. The Republic of South Korea is proclaimed in Seoul with Syngham Rhee as president.

September, 1948. Communist leader Kim Il Sung proclaims the People’s Republic of North Korea in Pyongyang.

October 22, 1948. Chester Carlson and Haloid Corporation announce the invention of “xerography”, electrophotography. Haloid Corp. will change its name later to Xerox Corp., and it will be 1960 before the first commercial automatic copier is released by Xerox.

December, 1948. In Switzerland, Georges de Mestral invents Velcro, a new clothes fastener.

The Bone House by Stephen Lawhead

Jan10

I read The Skin Map, the first book in Stephen Lawhead’s Bright Empires series, in 2010 when it first came out because Mr. Lawhead is one of my favorite authors. I found it confusing and somewhat unsatisfying because it’s one of those “first of a series” books that doesn’t stand alone and ends in an abrupt cliffhanger way.

Still, I was interested enough to request a review copy of the second book in the series, The Bone House. I found it confusing and somewhat unsatisfying because it’s one of those “second of a series” books that doesn’t stand alone and ends in an abrupt cliffhanger way.

THe books remind me of Connie Willis’s Blackout and All Clear, my favorite two-volume book from last year. However, I kept the time travel and the multiple story lines straight (mostly) in the Willis books, and I couldn’t remember who was whom in these books. Nor could I remember what happened to one character in the last chapter about him when his story was separated by several chapters about other characters in other times and places. Yeah, confusing. It didn’t help that I read The Bone House on my Kindle. There are many things I like about my Kindle, but being able to go back and remind myself of something that happened in the earlier part of the book isn’t easy or intuitive for me on the Kindle. In fact, I can’t do it.

So, I think I should read confusing books with multiple stories that change times and places and characters from one chapter to the next . . . in print. And I think I should wait to read series books until the entire series has been published. Of course, that means that I will be the last one to read some really good series of books. But at least I’ll enjoy them. And I can always go back and read classics and all of the book I missed in past years and all of the books on my TBR list while I’m waiting for those series to be completed.

So, maybe I’ll re-read Stephen Lawhead’s Bright Empires series, in print editions if those are still around by then, in a few years when all of the books in the series are available. And if you enjoy and recommend them now, just don’t tell me.

There’s nothing quite like a Real Book:

Twelve+ Recommended Books for the North Africa Challenge

Jan9

I’m not saying these are the best books to read for the North Africa Challenge. I may read several this year that are even better than these. However, I can recommend these because I’ve already read them and enjoyed them.

Picture Books:
The Sabbath Lion: A Jewish Folktale from Algeria retold by Howard Schwartz and Barbara Rush. I thought this story of a young Jewish boy, Yosef, who honors the Sabbath day even at the risk of his life had a great lesson and plot. The prose in this retelling is adequate, but nothing special. A little flowery language to go along with the deeply spiritual tale would have been welcome. And I had a bit of a problem with the “Sabbath Queen” who supposedly rescues Yosef from the jaws of death. However, the story reminded me of Aslan and of the fourth commandment and of the mercy and faithfulness of God. So, not a bad little book. (I’d change “Queen of the Sabbath” to “God Almighty” if I read the story out loud because I can do stuff like that when I’m reading out loud if I want to.)

The Day of Ahmed’s Secret by Florence Heide Parry. (Egypt) Ahmed lives in busy, bustling Cairo, and he has a secret. As he delivers cooking fuel to his customers, he anticipates sharing his secret with his family. Published in 1995, the book doesn’t seem outdated to me, but then again I’ve never been to Cairo.

The Egyptian Cinderella by Shirley Climo and Ruth Heller. Rhodopis is a slave girl from Greece whose only possession is a pair of of rosy-gold slippers. When a bird/god steals one of her slippers, she is heart-broken, but soon her stolen slipper will lead to fame and good fortune for Rhodopis. The writing in this Cinderella variation is quite good, and the illustrations are colorful and Egyptian-style.

Bill and Pete Go Down the Nile by Tomie de Paola. “It’s a new school year, and Bill and Pete are back in a new adventure. Their teacher, Ms. Ibis, is taking all the little crocodiles (and their toothbrushes) on a class trip to the Royal Museum. But who’s that trying to steal the Sacred Eye of Isis? Can it be the Bad Guy? Can Bill and Pete save the day once more?”

I have quite a few more picture books set in Northern Africa that I will be reading and reviewing in the coming year, but those four are the only ones I’ve already sampled.

Children’s Fiction:
Star of Light by Patricia St. John. Ms. St. John was a missionary nurse in Morocco for 27 years, and her novel about Hamid and his blind little sister Kinza reflects her knowledge of North African culture and peoples. This story is good for read aloud time.

A Long Walk to Water by Linda Sue Park. (Sudan) Semicolon review here.

Home of the Brave by Katherine Applegate. (Sudan) Semicolon review here.

There are also a lot of children’s books set in ancient Egypt, not quite what I’m looking for in this reading challenge, but you may want to pick one of these: A Place in the Sun by Jill Rubalcaba, Shadow Hawk by Andre Norton, The Golden Goblet by Eloise McGraw, Mara, Daughter of the Nile by Eloise McGraw,

Adult Fiction:
Acts of Faith by Philip Caputo. (Sudan) Semicolon review here and here.

Nonfiction:
Wind, Sand, and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. Semicolon review here.

The Bible or the Axe by William O. Levi. (South Sudan) “Subtitled ‘one manâ€™s escape from persecution in the Sudan’, this autobiography reads like a novel.” Semicolon review here.

Men of Salt: Crossing the Sahara on the Caravan of White Gold by Michael Benanav. Semicolon review here.

Stolen Lives: Twenty Years in a Desert Jail by Malika Oufkir and Michele Fitoussi. (Morocco) Semicolon review here.

The Spy Wore Silk by Aline, Countess of Romanones.(Morocco) “An undercover agent tells how she followed future CIA chief William Casey through the back streets of Marrakech to the palaces of Casablanca on a mission to prevent the assassination of Morocco’s king.” I read this book a long time ago, and I remember it as a good read. But I can’t tell you much more than the blurb does.

1947: Events and inventions

Jan9

Starting in early 1947: A collection of 972 texts from the Hebrew Bible and extra-biblical documents are found between 1947 and 1956 on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea at Khirbet Qumran in the British Mandate for Palestine. These Scripture fragments are collectively called the Dead Sea Scrolls.

'Detail From A Dead Sea Scroll' photo (c) 2010, Ken and Nyetta - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

January 15, 1947. Communists take power in Poland with the support of the Soviet Union.

February 21, 1947. In New York City, Edwin Land demonstrates the first “instant camera”, his Polaroid Land Camera, to a meeting of the Optical Society of America.

March 12, 1947. The Truman Doctrine, a policy set forth by U.S. President Harry S Truman in a speech on this date, states that the U.S. will support Greece and Turkey with economic and military aid to prevent their falling into the Soviet (communist) sphere. Historians often consider Truman’s speech to be the start of the Cold War.

June 5, 1947. U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall reveals his plan for the reconstruction of war-torn Europe. Called the Marshall Plan, the goal was to make Europe prosperous again through monetary aid to European economies. Over the next four years, the U.S. will give $13 billion to the countries of Western and Central Europe, including Germany. More aid goes to France and to The United Kingdom than to any other nations.

August 7, 1947. Thor Heyerdahl’s balsa wood raft, the Kon-Tiki, smashes into the reef at Raroia in the Tuamotu Islands after a 101 day, 4,300 mile, voyage across the Eastern Pacific Ocean, proving that pre-historic peoples could hypothetically have traveled to the Central Pacific islands from South America.

August 15, 1947. The British Raj in India is replaced with the independent countries of India and East and West Pakistan. East Pakistan later (1971) becomes the independent nation of Bangladesh. In September in the newly partitioned states, violence between Hindus and Muslims kills thousands.

August 31, 1947. The communists seize power in Hungary, with the military support of the Soviet Union.

October 14, 1947. American pilot Chuck Yeager becomes the first person to fly faster than the speed of sound.

November, 1947. The United Nations votes in favor of the partition of Palestine and the creation of a new Jewish state, Israel.

December, 1947. The first transistor is patented by American physicist William Shockley.

1946: Events and Inventions

Jan8

January 19, 1946. The United Nations holds its first general assembly session in London. British Prime Minister Clement Attlee: “Our aim is the creation of justice and security.”

February, 1946. IBM introduces a new electronic calculator using vacuum tubes.

February 24, 1945. Juan Peron is elected president of Argentina for a six year term, in spite of opposition from the United States.

March 5, 1946. In a lecture tour of the United States, Sir Winston Churchill warns that “an Iron Curtain has descended across Europe.” He urges an alliance between the United States and Great Britain to counter Soviet aggression, especially in the recently liberated (and re-enslaved) Communist countries of Eastern Europe.

March 2-4, 1946. Ho Chi Minh is elected President of North Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh signs an agreement with France which recognizes Vietnam as an independent state.

March 22, 1946. The United Kingdom grants Transjordan, as it is then known, its independence; 3 years later the country changes its name to Jordan.

May 1, 1946. A new plan proposed by Britain and the United States attempts to divide the ancient country of Palestine into separate Arab and Jewish states. Jewish survivors of the Holocaust and Jews from other parts of the world have been traveling to settle in Palestine, but the Arab population there is hostile to Jewish immigration into Palestine and to Zionist claims that Palestine is their hereditary homeland.

June 2, 1946. In a referendum, Italians decide to turn Italy from a monarchy into a republic. Women vote for the first time.

July 22, 1946. King David Hotel bombing: The Irgun, a Jewish Zionist terrorist group, bombs the King David Hotel (headquarters of the British civil and military administration) in Jerusalem, killing 90 people.

August-September, 1946. As the British move toward independence for India, violence between Muslims and Hindus in Calcutta leaves 3,000 dead. The interim government of India takes charge with Jawaharlal Nehru as Vice President. Street violence between Muslims and Hindus erupts in Bombay. The new British plan is to divide India into two countries, a Hindu-majority India and a Muslim-majority India that would later be renamed Pakistan.

October 16, 1946. The Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals end with 11 Nazi leaders condemned to death. Herman Goering commits suicide by swallowing cyanide hours before his scheduled execution.

November, 1946. The National Health Service (NHS) is created in Britain by the Labor government.

Suggested reading: Exodus by Leon Uris, Justice at Nuremberg by Robert Canot, Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges, Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie.

Winston’s War: Churchill, 1940-1945 by Max Hastings

Jan8

Winston Churchill was an amazing man, full of contradictions, as larger-than-life heroes usually are. He was a Tory (Conservtive Party), and yet he campaigned for and won huge changes in the way war was waged. He lauded freedom and democracy as the highest goals of mankind, and he governed as a one-man show, a near dictator during the years of World War II. He was Britain’s beloved and greatest war leader of the twentieth century, and yet as soon as the war was won, the British people threw him out of office.

Mr. Hastings, a British journalist and author, shows Churchill with all his warts and also with all the endearing and audacious qualities that make him a fascination to historians and readers and students of World War II. I can’t rewrite the book here, so I’ll just give you a few sample quotations from the book:

“His supreme achievement in 1940 was to mobilise Britain’s warriors, to shame into silence its doubters, and to stir the passions of the nation, so that for a season the British people faced the world united and exalted. The ‘Dunkirk spirit’ was not spontaneous. It was created by the rhetoric and bearing of one man, displaying powers that will define political leadership for the rest of time. Under a different prime minister, the British people in their shock and bewilderment could as readily have been led in another direction.”

Churchill on Pearl Harbor and the entrance of the United States into the war:

“it was a blessing . . . Greater good fortune has never happened to the British Empire. . . . Saturated and satiated with emotion and sensation, I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful. One hopes that eternal sleep will be like that.”

Churchill on the Russians:

“Experience has taught me that it is not worthwhile arguing with the Soviet people. One simply has to confront them with the new facts and await their reactions.”

(I have learned this same fact recently about a certain teenage family member. Arguing is a waste of time and breath.)

Alan Brooke, senior commander in the British Army describing a scene in Churchill’s bedroom (of which there were apparently many):

“The red and gold dressing gown in itself was worth going miles to see, and only Winston could have thought of wearing it! He looked rather like some Chinese mandarin! The few hairs were usually ruffled on his bald head. A large cigar stuck sideways out of his face. The bed was littered with papers and dispatches. Sometimes the tray with his finished breakfast was still on the bed table. The bell was continually being rung for secretaries, typists, stenographer, or his faithful valet Sawyers.”

Marian Holmes, one of Churchill’s private secretaries:

“In all his moods—totally absorbed in the serious matter of the moment, agonized over some piece of wartime bad news, suffused with compassion, sentimental and in tears, truculent, bitingly sarcastic, mischievous or hilariously funny—he was splendidly entertaining, humane and lovable.”

The author’s summation:

“Churchill had wielded more power than any other British prime minister had known, or would know again. . . Himself believing Britain great, for one last brief season he was able to make her so. To an extraordinary degree, what he did between 1940 and 1945 defines the nation’s self-image even into the twenty-first century.
His achievement was to exercise the privileges of a dictator without casting off the mantle of a democrat. Ismay once found him bemoaning the bother of preparing a speech for the House of Commons, and obviously apprehensive about its reception. The soldier said emolliently: ‘Why don’t you tell them to go to h—?” Churchill turned in a flash: ‘You should not say those things: I am the servant of the House.'”

Hastings catalogues all of Churchill’s mistakes and disasters, and there were many throughout the war. But the author’s admiration and appreciation for Winston Churchill’s leadership during World War II shines through. Churchill comes across in this slice of his biography as The Indispensable Man without whom Hitler and his Nazis could not have been defeated. I’m sure a counter-argument could be mounted, but Churchill himself would have brushed all argument aside, a demagogue in the most admirable and heroic sense of the word.

Saturday Review of Books: January 7, 2012

Jan6

â€œMay your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful, and don’t forget to make some art — write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.â€ ~Neil Gaiman

1945: Events and Inventions

Jan6

February 15, 1945. Over 1000 British and American bombers flatten the city of Dresden, Germany in a single night of carpet bombing. The death toll, mostly civilians, is thought to be as high as 100,000.

February 23, 1945. U.S. troops capture the tiny Pacific island of Iwo Jima and raise the flag on Mt. Surabachi.

February, 1945. Winston Churchill, Josef Stalin and FDR meet in Yalta to decide how to end the war and what to do about the “liberated” countries of Europe in the aftermath of World War II.

March, 1945. Japanese schools and universities are shut down, and everyone over the age of six is ordered to help in the war effort.

April 12, 1945. Franklin D. Roosevelt, president of the United States in his fourth term, dies of a brain hemorrhage. Vice-President Harry S. Truman becomes president.

April 28, 1945. Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci are executed by Italian communist partisans.

April 30, 1945. Adolf Hitler commits suicide in his bunker beneath the Reich Chancellory garden in Berlin. On the 29th, he married Eva Braun, the woman who has been his mistress since 1932, and she joined him on the 30th in a double suicide.

April-May, 1945. Allied troops enter and liberate Nazi camps including Belsen, Treblinka, and Auschwitz. Despite efforts to save the remaining prisoners, hundreds die after liberation from disease and the lingering effects of starvation and torture.

May 8, 1945. V-E Day. The Germans surrenders unconditionally to the Allies on May 7th, and on the 8th Europe and the United States celebrate Victory in Europe Day with fireworks, parades, bonfires, and parties.

May, 1945. Werner von Braun and other German rocket scientists, who were responsible for the German V-2 rockets used to attack Britain, surrender to the U.S. Seventh Army. Von Braun says to the press:

“We knew that we had created a new means of warfare, and the question as to what nation, to what victorious nation we were willing to entrust this brainchild of ours was a moral decision more than anything else. We wanted to see the world spared another conflict such as Germany had just been through, and we felt that only by surrendering such a weapon to people who are guided by the Bible could such an assurance to the world be best secured.â€

In June von Braun and his fellow scientists are brought to the U.S. to work for the U.S. rocket development program.

July, 1945. The first atomic explosion, a test of the new U.S. weapon the atomic bomb, takes place in Alamogordo, New Mexico.

August 6, 1945. The Americans bomb Hiroshima, Japan, killing an estimated 80,000 people. Three days later on AUgust 9, Nagasaki, Japan is also bombed with the new atomic weapon that was developed in a top secret program in the U.S. called THe Manhattan Project.

September 2, 1945. Japan surrenders to U.S. and ALlied troops on the deck of the U.S. battleship Missouri.