Dues of Nature (Coolidge County Mysteries Book 2)

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He looked no further. There were no laudatory accounts on the pink pages of the 'Financial Times' nor in the Gothic script headlines of 'Der Spiegel. What have teachers said since Odysseus returned? Check the original to see if there really was a horse. Webb did not verify anything because he dearly loved the idea of doing a favour for major player in Russia, a favour that could be cashed later. Ergo, he saw what he wanted to see and nothing more. In his case a successful deal would lead to a promotion up the greasy org pole.

Once promoted he would move on away from any fallout anyway. That is the other lesson. Later when asked who set up the contact, Webb tried to make it sound like his initiative. When finally he later reluctantly admits that the Russian contacted him first, the tale takes on a different light. It seems it was Webb who was being reeled in and not the Russkie. The London sky line these days. Back to those nits, I found it hard to believe that Dickie would spot the hood quite that easily after all those years.

Equally hard to believe was that Dickie did not wonder why it was so easy. In that administration, verbal communication became the order of the day to avoid written records. Freedom of Information applies only to what is in writing, after all.

For what it is worth he won the popular vote in three elections. The plotters were at odds among themselves in every way but united in one. Over night school teachers were required to mark out their names in every scrap of instructional material. Republicans have been doing likewise regarding Obama. He had seen the thousands come to mourn her as she lay in state, and since there was demand he set about supplying it. Work had begun on that. There was also a nascent plan to produce wax replicas, least the body decay despite the preservation.

They came; she gave. Even the touch was enough. Some of this work of preservation had been done in secret and later amid the turmoil of the coup which was followed by an in-house palace revolution by another faction. Moreover some of those trusted with the cadaver tried to hide it from the usurpers.

When usurpers found it, they in their turn tried to hide it. In short, the body got lost for many months. When it was discovered the new regime was in a quandary about what to do with it. Unsure even if it was the real thing. To hide it indefinitely in a time of coup and counter-coup would not suffice. To summarise what cannot be summarised, thinking takes time and initially during the thinking time a squad and a colonel, low enough in rank that he could not reject the assignment, drive the cadaver in a coffin around in a truck from place to place, phoning in for more orders.

This becomes a truck of Otranto as the six men keep to themselves, park in deserted streets, eat army rations, skirt cemeteries, and begin to think Santa Eva is watching them from the coffin they transport, the coffin which they must not open, but which…. When the truck is parked overnight, and a careful watch is set, yet the next morning the truck is surrounded by flowers. Or when they turn into a blind alley far off the beaten track to park for the night, when they open the doors to get out they find the alley is now illuminated with candles.

Thereafter the colonel is obsessed by the body. Meanwhile, others took charge of her personal effects and papers and in pawing through them come into vicarious contact with the Argentines she touched. There is no doubt that she was a miraculous saint to millions, one who brought material succour and, more importantly, spiritual hope. It is all there in the letters she received from individuals and the letters she sent in reply. In death there are sightings of her in the valleys, pampas, deserts, villages, barrios, hills of Argentina.

Since there are no facts to contain the imagination, the rumours grew. If a sighting was reported in a village in the distant mountains, within a few hours a host of peasants was on the road making for that village. If a bundle of cash was bestowed anonymously on an orphanage the dead hand of Eva was credited. When the national soccer team scores a goal against the odds …..

Dead she was omnipresent and omnipotent. The replicas are as dangerous and priceless as the cadaver and in the hysteria, miasma, fear, exhaustion, and confusion of the time, those responsible for the replicas and the cadaver themsevles become uncertain about which is which. Much is fact, most is fiction. At time the author breaks the theatrical fourth wall and addresses the reader directly. Likewise he makes short shrift of Juan Luis Borges attempt to crucify Eva. The grip the woman had on the soul of Argentina and Argentines is the theme.

And that grip included both those who loved her in their millions and those who hated her in their millions. Both get plenty of space in these pages. Eva is much present in these two titles, but I wanted to read more. What she argued was that historically the army made Argentina and that despite its many later corruptions and failings it remained the only legitimate institution in the society. When I referred to a scorecard above the meaning is that it helps to know the players, some of whom I have learned of through the reading above. Every military coup in Argentina was justified on the ground that it would bring stability.

A coup was followed by a counter-coup in one case by a single day and in another by a month. No military government lasted as long as the term of an elected government. Civilian governments, said the army officers, were unstable. The duty of the army was to bring stability. This it did in an endless parade of coups and counter-coups, sometimes between the services, Navy, Air Force, and Army, and sometimes within the Army. They shot it out, bombed Buenos Aires, and fought it out again and again.

Stability is a hard thing to get out of a gun. He makes few friends and falls in lust. It is and when he is expelled, then he is drafted and dies in Korea. Our hero is Messner who dislikes other Jews he meets in Ohio, cannot get along with Gentiles who befriend him, and is attracted and repelled by the only co-ed who knows he exists. With the auto-didacticism of youth he spouts ill digested bon mots from Bertrand Russell. On the one hand he is typical of a nineteen-year old in all this and on the other he has not got the sense to stop.

His self-destructive streak has no rhyme or reason but the needs of the author to make him and vicariously himself the author into a victim. Young men are often as stupid as Messner but they grow up little-by-little but not so here in either case. HIs expulsion arises in this way. He hates attending Chapel, not on religious grounds, but because it is boring.

He hires a substitute to go in his place. This fact is revealed by one of the many people he antagonises and when confronted with the fact he is defiant. I attended Chapel in a similar fashion and found it often boring, but not always. It was sometimes an opportunity for rest, if not reflection. At other times I heard Basil Rathbone read Shakespeare, Robert Penn Warren recite poetry, Ernie Chambers call blacks to arms, Sarah Gardner make science wonderful, Alexander Kerensky mourn the missed opportunities of , Paul Tillich bring the New Testament to life, and a stage set designer whose name has been lost talk about how to stage Greek tragedy in a contemporary theatre, and more that I can no longer remember.

It is the usual from Philip Roth, to my mind ever an greying instance of arrested development. He is totally focused on his ….. He and Silvio Berlusconi are cut from the same cloth. Neither Messner, the paper protagonist, nor Roth, the writer, shows any interest in Olivia, the co-ed, except insofar as she relates to his first friend. The style is simple and that is a relief as the pages are free from the lengthy and pointless descriptions that encrust other of his novels which I have sampled. Ergo it is easy to read. The style, one supposes, is to match the voice of the man-boy Messner.

In that it succeeds. The title is ironic. In Korea at a map reference he is killed by Chinese, we must suppose. That all goes beyond heavy-handed to lead-handed. There is never any explanation of how and why Messner has latched onto this passage. Did I mention that Messner was dead all along. I did not much care. Not true, I did not care at all. Here is a comparison. Anderson's prose is supple and evocative.

The people come to life off the page. A reader feels the breeze from the river and hears the quiet sobs from behind closed windows with a minimum of words. The development of Atomic Bomb in twenty-seven months on a mesa in New Mexico is quite a story from theory to practice. The book offers a near day-by-day account mostly of the administrivia of Los Alamos.

Largely told through the subsequent recollections of the office manager of the project, located at East Palace Street in Santa Fe, Dorothy McKibben, who adored Oppenheimer. In silence the author credits Dorothy with a remarkable and flawless memory for conversations because she recalled them years later without the benefit of diary or any other written record from the time. Apart from listening to complaints about laundry and indulging the pranks of immature minds, Oppenheimer never comes into focus in these pages despite his image on the cover and his name in the title.

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These impressions are not helped by the slangy style of exposition and the credulity of the author who takes as fact whatever a favoured source said. This reader got no sense that any assertions were double checked. In addition, facts were scarce. I never did get an idea how big the operation was. Only more than half way through are some numbers mentioned, e. I said one-eyed because the author is always on the side of the scientists, say when they complained about secrecy and security and seems repeatedly to belittle both the GIs who built most of the set-up and the intelligence agents who censored the mail, kept strangers away, demanded to see passes, and so on.

The immaturity of many of the scientists involved is breath-taking, the more so later when some of the same individuals took it upon themselves later to pontificate about the use of the Bomb. Even the fraternity brothers paled at some of their antics. While some of these draft-exempt scientists were planning panty-raids, in the Pentagon was sending yellow telegrams a day to mothers and wives. Most of the Europeans on the project were more serious because Naziism was a reality to them, and not a newsreel.

Indeed so focused were they on Germany that when the war ended in Europe many wanted to quit the project. They had so quarrel with Japan since it had no bomb and no prospect of one. Their goal was to get to the Bomb before the Naziis did. At this point Oppenheimer was, it seems, crucial in motivating them to work ever harder, far from quitting. That he did this is, however, not explained by anything in his nature or character developed earlier in the book.

Yet it was certainly crucial and he was the one who did it. We did get earlier the grudging admission by one of his many critics that Oppenheimer, despite his dilettantish pre-war mien, had proven adept at getting all those egotistical scientists to talk to each other. No mean feat that. More exposition of how that was managed would be welcome. There are many assertions that Oppenheimer was attractive to women, that he had blue eyes, and a confident manner. There are many of these and none of them built the bomb. There had to be more than these superficial descriptions to explain his singular achievements as noted in the paragraph above.

Using the word 'charisma' is neither analysis nor explanation. Oppenheimer is the centre of the book, even if he is seldom on the page. His own disregard of security is numbing. Why did he do those things that later would look so damning? My own conclusion is hubris. In the first instance Oppenheimer was sure, because he was so much smarter than everyone else, he would never make a mistake and give anything away, no matter to whom he talked. Second, he was likewise sure he would always be able to talk his way out of suspicion.

Instead he simply called attention to himself again and again, and it stuck. And he created a pattern that was at best reckless and at worst sinister. That a skilled intelligence agent could learn much from what is not said, or from the lies told, these are tricks of the spy trade that Oppenheimer never considered, since his hubris meant he never thought anyone else could out think him.

His hubris had another strand. After the war, he could have gone back to Cal and time might have healed some of the wounds, but instead he haunted Washington, putting himself forward as Mr. Atom, advocating committees, and himself as a member. He was hard to miss. He had come to view himself as indispensable. Maybe he was, but the effect, given the two strands already mentioned, was to make himself into a target.

He seems always to think he was an invulnerable Achilles. While the author mocks the efforts of the security officers with the fact that they missed Klaus Fuchs, who was indeed passing information to Them, she seems to fail to see that the security officers were right. Fuchs, by the way, was not the only source of leaks but the most well placed. Nor does the author indicate any effort at ascertaining, say by visiting the National Archives, whether German agents were active in the matter.

Still less other Soviet agents who monitored Oppenheimer when he was away, as was often, from Los Alamos. The drama accelerates quickly in the middle of the book, and we read less about bickering, picnicking, and laundry, when it is time to test Trinity. The Trinity test at 10 seconds after detonation.

Yet she sits on the fence about the use of the bomb. She quotes estimates of causalities of the projected November invasion of Japan and then in a rare footnote says this figure might have been fabricated. That is quite an accusation to make in a throwaway footnote. It is a fact, by the way, that the Pentagon planners had begun preparations for , American casualties from an invasion of Japan. It had also contracted for 10, yellow telegrams a day.

Given the many uncertainties involved with the Bomb, the only way to go was to use it. What demonstration would convince the Japanese? Blow up an uninhabited island? Not likely to be convincing. They would suspect a trick. That the Bomb would even work was always in doubt. If it did not work on the island, then it would serve no purpose but waste the weapon and do so in a way that nothing could be learned from the failure.

And a failed demonstration would queer the pitch for another demonstration. Moreover, the weapons grade uranium was so scarce and hard to use that wasting a Bomb on an island might mean another one was not available for some time. Furthermore transporting the Bomb to the Pacific was hard. The cruiser USS Indianapolis that delivered the first Bomb was sunk by a Japanese submarine a few days after completing that mission. See 'Jaws' [] for confirmation. Would the next ship transporting a bomb be sunk with it on board?

The prospect of besieging Japan into surrender was considered and rejected on many grounds. The Soviet Union would nibble away at Japanese weaknesses, while leaving the hard work to the United States. Little material support would come from a depleted England. The Chinese would turn full-time to fighting among themselves.

During a prolonged siege the young, the women, and the civilians would suffer most as scarce resources would go to the defence forces. The result would be to cripple Japan for a generation or more without discrediting or displacing the war party. Douglas McArthur always preferred manoeuvre and surprise to direct attacks, but he saw no other way in The zealots in Japan were ready to fight on, and the example of Okinawa frightened everyone in the Pentagon.

They would fight to the death unless the Emperor ordered them not to do so. To get to that order, the zealots had to be completely undermined. Hence the first big bang. It was made all the more dramatic for being a single aircraft. Japanese air defence spotted it but did not respond to its approach, assuming it was photographic reconnaissance. In the two-day interval allowed for the Japanese to assess the destruction of Hiroshima, we now know what was unknown in D. The second bomb, by the way, was not targeted on Nagasaki but bad weather took it there.

Back to the book in hand, the author seems to relish name dropping, as if everyone associated with a notable university is somehow a superior person. I could only put this down to an ingrained snobbery. This attitude shows also in the way those who were not blessed with such illustrious associations are portrayed. General Lesley Groves is one example. He, more often than not, is portrayed just one step away from Groucho Marx. Yet he oversaw an unprecedented and wide-spread effort of which Los Alamos was only a part, but he gets barely any credit, until, perhaps at the urging of editor, some condescending good words are applied toward the end.

But overall the tone is, how could this nobody criticise these men from prestigious universities. Yet the text shows he was right about many things, like the irresponsibility of some of the scientists, about the need for secrecy, about the dubious nature of the undertaking, about the subsequent need to explain and justify everything done, and even the spies. More importantly, that he stuck by Oppenheimer as the right man for the job even though he did not like him.

Reading this book but confirms my cynicism about the world of New York City publishing. The Greek world is full of gods in a bewildering array of statuses, ranks, powers, egos, and so on. Zeus defeated the Titans and most were destroyed in the Divine War. Only the most essential, like Helios, survived. He is one of the most important remaining Titans but no Titan is important among the Olympians.

Over the eons he has sired many children. Every deity is important to mortals. Some are gods, some are demi-gods, some are titans, some are nymphs, some are mortals, some are half-animal, and so on and on. This is a family tree for the LDS to sort out. The book is a biography of one such child, Circe. She and Flavia, whose books are reviewed elsewhere on this blog, would make quite a pair. For this sin she was exiled to an island dot far away to pass eternity alone with pigs. Later clever Circe finds a way to blackmail Helios with her sin.

Over the centuries in this insular retreat she meets passers-by, and she learns of the mortal world from these experiences. For a time she is befriended by Hermes, though he does so only for his own amusement and when no longer amused he is no longer friend. None of the echelons of the immortals will have anything to do with this outcast, apart from Hermes who is partly spying on her for Helios, and so she takes an interest in the mortals who find the shore. She welcomes some, careful to keep her yellow eyes concealed for they declare the godhead, and regrets it.

One betrays her trust. Another rapes her before she can utter a spell, but she takes revenge by increasing the population of the sty. Thereafter, she is much more cautious. Then one day wily Odysseus comes and she finds she cannot, nor does she want to deceive this deceiver. What a fresh and vivid portrait of this marriage springs from the pages.

Yes, the story is well known but this is a telling Homer would envy. Finally he leaves, not knowing that she is bearing his child, a son. This is a circle that closes in the remainder of the book. With the great learning that underlies the book, the author explains much. One example will suffice. Why are the gods so capricious with mortals? If mortal life was easy, then mortals would have no reason to pray to the gods and make sacrifices.

While the gods do not need these prayers and sacrifices in any material way, together these offerings are how the divinities establish status along with their powers among themselves. They are counters in the social snobbery of the Olympians, nothing more.

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But since the gods have no other pastime but that snobbery, it is the only game in town. The worse the harvest, it follows there will be more the prayers and sacrifices. The more children and women who die in childbirth, the more the prayers and sacrifices. Of course, to keep the wheel spinning the gods must occasionally allow a good harvest, and for child and mother to survive birth. But only now and then when it pleases them. Sounds about how casinos work, come to think of it.

Odysseus did in time return to rocky Ithaca, but as with many a war veteran, the man who came back was not the one who went away. That change is the dynamic of the latter part of the book. He returns short-tempered, easily bored, lustful, violent, and voting Republican. Yet in some ways he is what he always was. This schizoid duality makes sense in these pages. Penelope plays her part, too. The author brings this world of the gods to life with razor sharp insights, exhilarating prose, penetrating details, and a profound compassion.



Yet no punches are pulled. The violence rips the page. The arrogance of the gods burns the eye of the reader. The duplicity of mortals in this world is bottomless. All this is true, yet Circe delights in spring flowers and warm sand underfoot. Telemachus is straight as an oak. Her earlier book 'The Song of Achilles' is reviewed elsewhere on this blog with the same acclaim.

While pulling these remarks together I noticed a number of deprecating reviews, many of them video, by mouth-breathers in Jim Rockford's phrase. It was amusing to watch a couple of these pygmies. A self-indulgent memoir of time spent in Barcelona by the man with shag carpet for a typewriter, the rich, soft, deep pile of his prose remains but in this instance it is largely devoid of substance.

Well, unless a reader must know where Hughes drank sangria in For that information, this is the book. Ostensibly a guide to the city, it a scrap book to selective memory mainly confined to his personal experiences. However, to his credit, and unlike some, he does note in passing the deep and murderous divisions among Spaniards. Their many failed attempts to find a modus vivendi and Hughes labours under no illusions about the future. But all in all, it is a very short and lazy book that seems to have been spoken into a recorder and then typed. I chose it prior to a trip to Spain and to Barcelona but found it offered little of interest.

The momentous five days are May 24 to May 28 when Winston Churchill became Prime Minister and overcame the resistance to his leadership within the War Cabinet and stiffened British resolve to resist Hitler and Naziism. In so doing Churchill felt the pulse of the British people far more accurately than his many opponents, most gathered behind him in the Conservative Party. British resistance at the time of Dunkirk prevented Hitler from winning the war so that later American gold and Soviet corpses would win it.

The story is without parallel. His energy and concentration alone are noteworthy. His hour had come and he lived up to it. He was certainly the Greatest Britain. First to the internal resistance. When Neville Chamberlain, over seventy himself stepped aside, after tumultuous scenes in parliament, he remained in the five-man War Cabinet, literally there was no one else at the starting line but Churchill. As PM he alone, it seemed, could restore order to Parliament which was elected in in far different circumstances.

And many in the Conservative Party thought it best to let him try …. That was Edward Halifax who had so many names and titles I gave up trying to keep track of them. An aristocrat to the core, Halifax could not push himself forward but would wait to be called.

He was, after all, a personal friend of the King, and a vastly experienced parliamentarian, diplomat, cosmopolitan, and more. On and on he went in the super secret discussions, which remained secret at the time. According to the author, efforts were made subsequently by weeding archives to bury the secrets.

Halifax minced words, explored semantics, twisted meanings to find a way to open a mediated dialogue with Nazi Germany, anything to avoid another blood bath like World War I. He talked repeatedly with the Italian ambassador until Italy invaded France. He sought out informal intermediaries. He lunched with the King.

While nothing concrete remains on paper such an arrangement would involve leaving Europe to Nazi domination. It might also involve emasculating Britain sufficiently so as not to pose a threat in the future to German domination of Europe by reducing the British fleet, by forcing it to withdraw from the Mediterranean and sacrifice Malta, Gibraltar, even Suez.

Further it might involve disarmament, as it did for Vichy France in a few weeks. Would it also involve compliance with Nazi racial policies Churchill took the view from the start, albeit muted, that there was no point in trying to negotiate with Hitler. Either Hitler would propose impossible demands, or, if not, he would not keep his word. In either case for it to be known that Britain had begged for a separate peace on such terms would destroy British morale on the domestic front and comprise British standing on the international front with the Dominions and the United States.

The author makes a tenuous distinction between public opinion and popular sentiment in the era. The former, public opinion, was formed by the intellectual classes in newspaper articles, letters to the editor, lectures, universities, BBC interviews, essays, and the like. As a consequence many in these ranks were Defeatist to one degree or another. Some were admirers of Hitler. Popular sentiment in contrast was the silent majority of the day, largely working class, generally uneducated and unaware of the wider world, although a great many had served in World War I and the author seems to forget that.

The author makes extensive use of reports from the Mass Observation Survey, begun in , as a window on to this stratum. These reports were qualitative surveys of doorstop interviews, pub conversations, overheard remarks on buses, talk in queues at the market, or discussions exiting cinemas.

Unsystematic to be sure, but rich in detail. Yes, that is true but it is also true they were a lot more like gossip than systematic observations in the specimens I have read. Popular sentiment was resolutely patriotic with none of the weakening cosmopolitanism of the intellectual classes. Germans were the Hun, not the progeny of Brahams, Beethoven, and Bach. It also had a rugged confidence in muddling through and took pride in that. They had once crossed the Siegfried Line and could do it again.

This was the heart beat that Churchill felt, because he shared it, and which he mobilised. He timed meetings of the cabinet of thirty where he had many supporters, War Cabinet where he had none, parliament, BBC speeches, and personal meetings to create support and momentum for his commitment to war, war, and more war, and so to undermine Halifax's position.

In part his publicity campaign was to show to the United States and the Dominions that Britain would prevail. While Dunkirk is mentioned, it is not the focus. In the foreground is the tactical conflict between Churchill and Halifax across the meeting table against the backdrop of the war. War Cabinet met two or three times a day. For Halifax what was a stake in the war was the future of Britain. For Churchill what was at stake was Western Civilisation.

Naziism was a ravening and devouring beast that could not be caged, tamed, constrained, or reduced by negotiation and treaties. To plead with this beast from a position of weakness was suicidal.

In a few weeks the French example would prove that point. It would show that Britain had done everything possible to avoid war. That almost makes sense, until considering the sacrifices that would have to be offered or made to a Nazi dominated Europe and Mediterranean. The willingness to bargain away the defeated countries some of which had formal alliances with Britain, many of whose fleeing citizens had taken refuge in England and those that might follow would never be forgotten nor forgiven.

He also differed from Halifax and his ilk in another way. He saw Naziism as the greatest evil and threat to Western Civilisation. Whereas Halifax and his kind feared Communism above all else, and many had earlier seen in Naziism a bulwark against the Red Tide, as earlier had many German nationalist, liberals, monarchists, bankers, musicians, and jurists who supported or tolerated Hitler at the outset. The comparison has to be France, where nothing was ever secret and where the disputes within cabinet were blood thirsty.

Every remark in cabinet was in the boulevard press within the hour. The conflicts between cabinet members were personal, religious, regional, and racial as well as ideological. Finally, the French generals gave up before the politicians. They were ready to surrender before Paul Reynaud, the last Prime Minister.

Indeed Reynaud resigned rather than surrender. John Lukacs has a long list of impressive publications. The book does not do the events justice. It treats Dunkirk and the decision-making about that as an annoyance to the cabinet machinations rather than central to it. It is replete with asides and ruminations that lead no where. Much of it is parsed in the negative, e. A manuscript like this submitted blind to a publisher today would be unlikely to be produced. I read it years ago and did not find it satisfactory but recent stimulation about Dunkirk brought it back to mind and I tried it again with the same result.

The Desert Fox is a hundred miles away or less. No one is sure. Of that everyone is sure. Egypt is a sovereign state with its own army, but it is neutral in this struggle. Well, that is diplomatic fiction. Nationalists in Egypt are ready to welcome a Rommel victory as the means to end British domination and the corrupt local elite that thrives on that domination.

Members of the Egyptian Army plot to that end, though there are many divisions among them. British soldier Jim Ross arrives in Cairo in the custody of an MP who dies of food poisoning unexpectedly and quickly, and Ross switches places with the dead officer as a means of escape. But once in Cairo he is mistaken for that officer and soon finds himself growing into the role. That is a nice twist, and it is well realised. Ross discovers he has a penchant for reading files and making inferences. Into the mix come many others. Throughout is the rogue Wallingford, a man of infinite charm, bottomless self-confidence, utter audacity, and who is amorally unscrupulous enough to go into politics.

Even with a gun to his head, he continues to bargain. Each character has a personality, but the sharpest is certainly Sergeant-Major Ponsonby who runs the office, and much else. In a complicated set of circumstance Ponsonby is forced to comply with the request of the arrogant women, the wife of a high ranking officer. Meekly he does so. At every stage it is misplaced, misfiled, mis-stamped, mis-signed, or mislaid.

In the end Ponsonby is proved right, what she wanted was a bad mistake, and he explains the delays in action to Ross by saying 'the SMs stick together. There are also vivid portraits of Egyptians caught between the worlds of the past, the present, and the future. Though the reaction of one Egyptian seems mistaken to this reader.

His enemy was the king not the nationalists, but plots must have their devices. Though the plot device creaked here in the person of Percy, the ersatz South African. For those that must have it, there is also one skirmish as the Germans advance, and Ross is in the wrong place at the wrong time. Len Deighton ———— After false starts with some krimis I wanted something to read that I could and would read, so I turned to an old reliable. While sure I had read this before, I remembered nothing of it, not even as I read it.

In any case it lived up to my hopes, it was engaging, informative, amusing, and enlightening with a story, a plot, characters, and such that the krimis that I had aborted did not have. Moustaches, butter chicken, cricket, Pakistan, history, international intrigue, terrorism, samosas, this caper has it all! Vish Puri by name, he lives in Delhi but in this outing his travels include Mumbai and…. While at a banquet after an Indian Super League cricket match in which his nephew played, Vish is there when a visiting Pakistani falls dead, face down in a dish of butter chicken.

Vish had earlier espied this Paki skulking about in the garden, though he did admit that all Pakistanis skulk as far as he is concerned. This dramatic death throws Vish off the current case of the moustache-napper. There are contenders for the title of the longest moustache in India and they are being shaved in their sleep! The mo disappears and a clean lip remains. Nothing is sacred in secular India! His team consists of Tubelight, Handbreak, Facecream, and assorted others contracted in when needed.

Back in the office Madame coordinates. It is a smooth operation, usually, mostly, sometimes. No tricks are missed. Along the way, much Indian cuisine is consumed, and why not. He has stuck a dowel in the bathroom scales so his weight remains constant when Madame checks him, which is all too frequently. The plot thickens with international gamblers, Scotland Yard detectives, a digital gecko, and more. It become necessary for Vish to travel to Pakistan! He spends some time trying to avoid it, but in the end, applies for a visa, and after more delay crosses the border, where he expects to be murdered immediately.

He is astonished to find he is treated civilly and respectfully. In the end what drove him to go was not the case but the chance at tasting a delicacy in Lahore. This is not the cesspit of violence and corruption he had expected. There is much about the terrible days of the Partition, enough to put anyone off religion as Muslims hacked up Hindis who happily reciprocated. An unknown story to me.

In fact the murder was part of the long fall-out of those dark days. Much to his surprise Vish finds several Pakistanis who are stalwart and amiable, and they share information. But he also discovers that his Mummy, who has long had a penchant for interfering in his investigations, much to his annoyance, has a deep and dark past. In fact, she was a secret agent for the Indian Rescue and Recovery Commission during Partition and went on many dangerous missions, as one of his new Pakistani associates tells him with admiration.

Not a word has she ever spoken of those days. Together they crack the case of the murder and also the international gambling, while the team finds the mo-napper. Much of the subject is serious, but the touch is light, and while the history is detailed, it is crucial to the plot and focussed, as well as informative. India may have corruption and incompetence galore but it has never resorted to the rule of the gun. Another a good show. There have been so many successors that they have nearly obscured the fount.

The original, by the by, is moody, understated, and terse, whereas most of the spawn are bland, bloated, and blurred. It starts with a museum of antiquities in Cambridge England among myopic bookworms and nerds, along with some shadowy figures who turn to kidnapping when Google Translate fails, and a dark prince. In addition, far away there is a newly discovered and untouched tomb in the Egyptian desert. With these ingredients the ride should be fun! It is a mile a minute once the big gong sounds! The prize Mummy in the Cambridge Museum breaks out of the glass case that has held its year old remains.

He staggers around with an ancient hangover. Woe to anyone who gets in his way. Careful, all ye who look upon Mummy! Soon the Brotherhood of Wannabe Villains appears to assist Mummy, while the Librarians rally to oppose them. Caught between are assorted Gypo nerds. There is a demonic cat. The cast assembles in the desert where they find the requisite dusty diggers under the direction of Maggie, a fiery site manager, who scares the Mummy. In a straight-up no-holds-barred fight Maggie against the Mummy, the fraternity brothers bet on the Mags, but then changing the odds, the evil queen-pharaoh is reanimated for the showdown in a gore feast.

Turns out, at the moment of truth it was the wrong Mummy! It is so hard for evil queens to hire good help for an eternity. There are flash backs to the Lost Dynasty Egypt to explain the shrouded players: These seem to go on a little but it is all relevant at the end. The prose is expository, no flourishes, no elevation, no psychological depth, no big words, but well paced.

The characters are differentiated in manner and speech. It reads like a film script to some extent, a comment that would please the author, I expect. The man has a razor tongue and a mastery of the form with few equals. His five-minute reviews are informative, amusing, insightful, and devastating. Other reviewers on You Tube are, by comparison, self-indulgent, verbose, unfocused, and boring. Better yet, I lodged a suggestion for a film to review and he replied, and later screened the review acknowledging my suggestion.

That feedback loop worked, a rarity that. I signed on as a You Tube follower, became a regular hit at his web site, donated to his cause at Paetreon, and now bought this, his first novel, does all of this make me a Bailesee? Deep space travel is routine and many planets have been surveyed. There was nothing of interest about the planet Solaris and so it was ignored for years. An astronomer then noted that its orbit was odd. Because it circles a double star, one red and the other blue, its orbit should be erratic but it does not confirm to the laws of physics.

Full text of "A Puritan In Babylon The Story Of Calvin Coolidge"

The same is often said of the fraternity brothers. Solaris receives closer inspection. It is nearly completely covered by an ocean with only a few rocky outcrops like a few tufts of hair on a bald man's head. Again they wonder about the laws of physics. After years of study, the field of Solaristics concludes there is an intelligence in the ocean regulating the orbit by some means.

The book is replete with a gentle satire about academic specialisation as an end-in-itself. More studies fatten cvs and efforts to stimulate communication are made using radio waves, ion streams, pictures of Mother Teresa, neutrino bombardments, pamphlets, and an unauthorised use of intense x-rays and other more destructive means to no avail. Solaris seems immutable like reasoning with a Republican. A research station is placed in orbit to observe with a crew of three on a three-year stint and has been there for years. Then the one day commander of this station a the time requests base to send a psychologist.

Isolation in space does lead to mental problems so shrink Kris Kelvin is dispatched. The novel opens with his arrival and the preceding information emerges piecemeal. No one greets him. No one seems to be about. Moreover, there is disorder everywhere. This is no way to run a space station! He finally finds one of the scientists cowering behind a barricaded door. The other scientist will not leave his lab and speak to Kris.

The commander who asked for the visit committed suicide that very morning. Kelvin decides to examine the corpse in the best tradition of the police procedural. En route he hears barefoot steps and passes a large black woman in tribal dress. She blankly ignores him. That is only the beginning. Cutting to the case, each member of the crew has a spectral guest. It is someone a memory of whom is found deeply etched in his psyche.

This is not necessary someone he wants, but it is the deepest, most ingrained memory. These guests, the crew concludes, are from the Solaris ocean which is engaged in a Communicate with the Humans Project of its own. The Solaris guests have assumed the identities they have because of the importance of the memories to each scientist.

Once embodied the guest seems to know a lot but have no memories of specifics. Harey is sweet and clingy but has no idea how she came to be there, but strangely she knows things about Kelvin that occurred after her own death. Talk about overstaying a welcome! Various methods are tried to analyse the guests and to eject them from the station but they keep coming back. Meanwhile, Kelvin finds it easy to have Harey around. They engage in many conversations as she becomes aware that she is some kind of aberration, clone, replicant, or dream.

She is a virtual reality girlfriend. In that way she is limited, and realising all of this she grows despondent. Of course the fraternity brothers wanted to know whether she is full functional but that is not made explicit. There are many conversations with one of the scientists about the ocean, god, creation, Amex bills, morality, metaphysics, ontology, bratwurst, on and on.

Book Review

We never find out about the other guests, nor is there any contact with the ocean. It is all trip and no arrival. Is the omnipresent but uncommunicative behemoth of the ocean of Solars a metaphor for Soviet Communism viewed from the observation platform of Poland? Or just a yarn? It is a meticulously written and original work to read it today, let alone more than fifty years ago. The Grand Jury at Cannes is made of stronger stuff than am I. No, I have not seen the Yankee version either, well, except for some scenes that I came across somewhere. A bildungsroman of sorts as Gully Foyle grows and changes with his experiences, and the greatest changes occur at the instruction of women.

The first is the one-way telepathic black woman whom he rapes and, in a way, sets free. Later they form a team of convenience. The second is Jiz whose influence on him is considerable, making him grow and change. Finally is the White Icicle who attracts and repels him in equal measure. Least influential but last is Moira, the stay at home.

Gully begins the story as an uneducated barely verbal spaceship hand on the Nomad. Think of the channel 7Mate demographic without the drooling and scratching and you have him. By the end he is richer than all the cynics who own Channel 7Mate put together. The Nomad is a wreck floating in space and Gully alone has survived the attack by dumb luck and a resourcefulness he did not know he had. A friendly spaceship hoves into view and he signals it, quickly and repeatedly.

Yet it passes him by, contrary to all the laws, rules, norms, and ethics of spaceflight. Thereafter he swears revenge on that ship. Driven by that desire he survives, and later prospers, and learns, and seeks the guilty ship. The adventures are many, the plot twists are deft, the characters differentiated, the settings detailed and followed through, and the science fiction is etched into the story and the characters. The first, and as it turns out, the last key, to the narrative is that in this world of teleportation is as common as walking is today.

To move from one place to another one teleports oneself, clothes included and anything one is carrying or holding. Distance varies with ability and practice. It is safer than walking since there are no crazed drivers on King Street to dodge. The method is a mental discipline developed by a Mr.

There are three treasures in this quest. First is a vast fortune of Credits 20 billion, where a hundred credits is a great deal of money. Third is Foyle himself, much to his own surprise, and to the reader, too. There is much satire of the super rich, so much it grew tedious to read, but it is fitted to the overall plot like a jewel in a ring.

Although his choice of an alias was a quick and certain give away it took the villains a long time to figure it out. There are also a couple of surprising passages for a publication about the role of women in this wealthy society, sequestered, hidden, and rather like pets in a zoo.

None of that applies to the first three women whom he encounters, though the last one is of that sort of society. Finally he returns to Moria as we all do. One is an illegal immigrant and the second a convict. Without any explicit comment, Bester also shows a society with deep, very deep class divisions so that members of the working class where Foyle started, are barely educated, civilised just enough to do a job like living machines.

Indeed he is so dense that at first the target for his vengeance is the spaceship itself. Only later does understand that the crew made the decision and then he targets them, but in time the realises that the captain gave the order. So much Sy Fy is spoiled by childish preaching by the author using the keyboard as if it were a sledgehammer to drive points home to the dense reader all too much like the morons on Fox News yelling at the camera. This title is free of that egomania. By the by, holding physical objects accountable for the consequences arising from them may seem absurd to us — we know the spaceship itself did nothing — but Athenians did not.

A building block that fell and killed some would be tried, sentenced, and smashed. The spaceship Invincible with its formidable array of technologies and a very experienced crew of space explorers arrives at Regis III to find its sister ship Condor which landed there two years before and has since failed to report. Great precautions are taken. Force fields and robots are deployed. There is a lot of science in the text about these machines and their programs. The crew numbers about eighty. They find Condor and most of its like-numbered crew are dead.

Despite full larders on the ship the doctors are sure most of the Condor's crew starved to death. High to Low Avg. Rights of Power Apr 19, Available for download now. Available to ship in days. Provide feedback about this page. There's a problem loading this menu right now. Get fast, free shipping with Amazon Prime. Get to Know Us. English Choose a language for shopping. Amazon Music Stream millions of songs. Amazon Advertising Find, attract, and engage customers.

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