Hey, Hey, LBJ, How Much Did You Chafe Today?

Every now and then, it's nice to remember that president's are still people, who have the same problems as the rest of us.  And, the persistent use of secret recordings in the Oval Office from FDR up through the Nixon administration, gives us the ability to hear some of the more mundane difficulties that presidents face.  Such as finding a pair of pants with enough room to "let your nuts hang."  LBJ's call to his tailor is scandalous in a different sense than most secret white house recordings.

The Flynn Precedent

While there have been a lot of comparisons made between Trump and Jackson (by supporters and opponents), one important similarity keeps getting overlooked. As far as Jackson was concerned, there was only one quality that proved someone's character: Loyalty to Andrew Jackson. While this caused plenty of turmoil within the cabinet (most notably the Eaton Affair), there's one particular event I want to bring up.

Samuel Swartwout had a checkered past. A military man with plentiful New York political connections, he was rounded up as part of the Burr conspiracy but was eventually released. During the election of 1828, he was a vocal campaigner for Jackson, so the new president decided to give Swartwout a cozy patronage position, as Collector of the Port of New York. To quote from Remini's "Life of Andrew Jackson:"

"And when Van Buren learned that Jackson intended to appoint Samuel Swartwout to the office he almost collapsed. Not only did Swartwout have criminal tendencies but the [Albany] Regency detested him. Van Buren alerted the President immediately and warned him that Swartwout's appointment would 'not be in accordance with the public sentiment, the interest of the Country or the credit of the administration.' Unfortunately, Jackson refused to listen. He liked Swartwout because he had been an early supporter -- unlike Van Buren -- and so he went ahead with the appointment. In time, of course, Swartwout absconded with $1,222,705.09. It was a monumental theft...
When the scandal broke, Jackson's opponents doubled over with laughter. All the talk of rooting out corruption in government, they said, and here the greatest theft in the history of the Republic..."

Jackson, like Trump, campaigned on a promise of fighting corruption and waste in government, but, through his own shortcomings, appointed people who were more corrupt than those they replaced.  

Review: Krakatoa by Simon Winchester

I wrote briefly about an aspect of Winchester's popular history book last week, but I wanted to do a fuller review.

Despite the book's subtitle, The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883, comparatively little is about the eruption itself.  Winchester, who was a geologist before he became a journalist, goes into depth on the geological, ecological, and political history of the region surrounding Krakatoa, which lies in the Sunda Strait, between Sumatra and Java (or rather lied, until the eponymous date when it blew itself up and crumbled into the sea).  Most complaints I've seen about the book have been in regards to Winchester's digressive narration, but this is in keeping with one of the major themes in the book, which is Krakatoa's position as one of the first truly global modern events.  Global here being used in the McCluhan "global village" sense, as news of the eruption spread worldwide in hours via underseas telegraphy.  The effects of the eruption are as important to the story as the eruption itself.

More than just emphasizing the global nature of the event, Winchester's digressions tend to focus on the tangential but necessary results of the circumstances that made the eruption possible in the first place, from the strange biodiversity of the Malay archipelago (to the west of the Wallace line the islands are exclusively inhabited by Asian flora and fauna, while to the east is exclusively Australian. At their closest, these islands are only a handful of miles apart.  This odd ecosystem is the result of one tectonic plate moving west from Australia and another moving east from India) to the mythology of the native Indonesians.  But Winchester also likes to point out the neat coincidence, the way things affect or merely reflect each other.  Krakatoa wasn't just a volcano that erupted one day.  The eruption, what led up to it, why it was so well recorded, our attempts to understand it, one of these stories cannot be told without the others.  Winchester's approach to history is not one of discrete events occurring in sequence, but of thousands of events, happening simultaneously, all, to some degree, affecting each other.  Digression, then, is not a foible to be forgiven, but a necessary trait of this kind of history.  

Of course, those turning to Krakatoa primarily for descriptions of the eruption itself and its immediate aftermath will be disappointed.  The book is more accurately about the total history of the island of Krakatoa, not just "the day the world exploded."  As such, everything from movements of the lithosphere to Dutch colonialism need to be addressed.  Nevertheless, Winchester manages to consistently bring the story back to the titular volcano as it geared up for its big day.

If you're the type of person who likes to hop from idea to idea, and discover connections between disparate subjects (even if the connections are merely semantic), this is the type of history book that will be right up your alley.

Thoughts on what I'm reading

I'm currently reading Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883 (Harper, 2003) by Simon Winchester.  It's great, but something struck me as I was reading it, that speaks back to some issues I'd had with others and my own writing, specifically, how to deal with an audience with varying levels of knowledge in the subject you're discussing.  Winchester, originally trained as a geologist before becoming a journalist in the late 1960s, has to deal with this here.  Discussing the biodiversity and geology of Krakatoa necessitate a discussion of natural selection and plate tectonics.  The problem is that much of his audience will be well-versed in these subjects (i.e. the type of people who will actively seek out a book about Krakatoa) while many others will know little to nothing of the matter. So what do you do?  If you elide this information, you confuse the latter group, but if you go into detail, you bore the former.  Winchester manages to have his cake and eat it too.  What he does is couch the theory in anecdote, for example, explaining natural selection through the life and career of Alfred Russel Wallace.  While some points are necessarily dry (there's no other way to explain how a transform-fault functions than to just dive in) Winchester essentially manages to give the people who are already aware of the underlying theory something else to focus on while presenting the theory itself to those who don't know it.

2009: The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown

The Author:

Dan Brown (1964-    ) was born in Exeter, New Hampshire, where his father worked as a professor of mathematics.  Brown went on to study at Philips Exeter and later Amherst, from which he received his B.A. in 1986.  He moved out to Hollywood to pursue a career in music.  He released a few albums by 1994.  In 1993, he moved back to New Hampshire with Blythe Newlon, whom he married, and taught English at Philips Exeter.  He and his wife co-wrote his first book: 187 Men to Avoid: A Survival Guide for the Romantically Frustrated Woman.  Brown was credited under the pseudonym Danielle Brown. He quit teaching to work full time in 1996 and published his first novel,Digital Fortress, in 1998.  Angels & Demons (2000) was his first novel starring Robert Langdon.  His fourth novel, The Da Vinci Code (2003) was the bestselling novel of the year it was published and the following year.  His next two novels, The Lost Symbol (2009) and Inferno (2013) were the bestselling novels in the year they were published.

The Book:

Cover Design-Michael J. Windsor/
Cover photograph-Murat Taner

Length: 639 pages
Subject/Genre: Masonic 'symbology'/conspiracy thriller

The Da Vinci Code  The Lost Symbol starts when Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon is summoned to Paris Washington D.C. by an older, established symbologist.  After he arrives, he finds himself in the world famous Louvre U.S. Capitol Building, where he finds the older symbologist's corpse severed hand, surrounded by arcane symbols.  This older symbologist was a high ranking member of the Priory of Sion the Freemasons, and the location of a secret and powerful item is being sought by a deadly albino man covered in tattoos.  With a killer on one hand, and a detective CIA officer of questionable loyalties on the other, Langdon must find the secret with the help of the older symbologist's daughter sister, before it's too late.

On the one hand, Brown spent less time blatantly fabricating facts this time around.  Not that it did much good.  To clarify before I go into this, historical inaccuracy isn't itself the problem. The problem comes from the fact that Robert Langdon is supposed to be an expert, but consistently ignores, or rather, is unaware of, the obvious answer to questions when such answer would make things less mysterious.  I'm no expert on history, yet I still seem to know more than Langdon in some cases than others.  One common topic in the early parts of the novel is the Greco-Roman influences on D.C. architecture.  In addition to their masonic background, Langdon points out the most mysterious aspects of this influence, completely ignoring the fact that the Greeks and the Roman Republic were the first great democratic systems.  It ignores the rather interesting Society of the Cincinatti of which George Washington, James Monroe, and Alexander Hamilton were founding members.  The theme of apotheosis is also prominent, with Langdon describing The Apotheosis of George Washington and a statue of Washington as Zeus that used to be on display.  Somehow, he's completely unaware of the fact that the 'good' Roman emperors were elevated to divinity after their deaths by the Roman senate.  Because simply continuing the Greco-Roman motif isn't that mysterious.

There's a scene in the book where Langdon is giving a lecture to a bunch of college freshmen, and he just, like, blows their minds, by pointing out that taking communion and bowing before the cross consists of symbolic cannibalism and bowing before a torture device.  And I realized that this is Brown's attitude toward his audience in a nutshell.  Except Langdon would be less of a world-renowned Harvard professor and more of a low-tier community college professor, or a guest host on Ancient Aliens.  Because the fact is, Robert Langdon comes across as a guy who memorized a bunch of facts, but ignores the obvious explanations and relevant connections.  He's a hack.

But as to The Lost Symbol, it has some specific problems The Da Vinci Code didn't.  First, and I'm sorry if I spoil anything for you, but nothing is really at stake.  At least in The Da Vinci Code, the discovery of Magdalene or of Jesus' descendants would have massive implications, theologically and politically.  In The Lost Symbol what's being sought is, well, symbolic.  I mean, imagine if Langdon found what the Priory of Sion was hiding, and it turned out there was no grail, the real treasure was friendship.  It's basically that bad.  It also ends with a twist regarding the bad guy, except the twist is completely pointless.  Another spoiler alert.  The older symbologist was extremely wealthy, and his son was a irresponsible party boy.  After however many attempts to save him, he decided to let his son suffer the consequences.  His son was arrested for drug crimes in Turkey, and rather than bribe the guard to release the son into his father's custody, the father decided to go through the official channels with the embassy.  The son's cellmate and the guard killed the kid, and took his considerable fortune, and the cellmate then killed the guard.  The cellmate soon grew bored with the good life, and saw a special on the freemasons, talking about a secret masonic pyramid.  He remembers that the son told him he was offered a small pyramid by his father in lieu of his share of the family fortune.  This sets the cellmate off on his quest.  He gets some tattoos, changes his name to Mal'Akh, and starts killing people.  In the end, we find the twist:  Mal'Akh was the son the whole time!  He and the guard killed his cellmate, then he killed the guard and ran off with his money because his dad left him in prison.  So, this irresponsible millionaire playboy, who as far as we know has done nothing worse than some recreational drugs, decides to murder two people?  Especially considering he could have just bribed the guard and bought a fake ID, this makes no goddamn sense.  Twist endings are supposed to explain inconsistencies, not create them!

This book is, to borrow a phrase I used frequently in my review of The Da Vinci Code, bullshit.  Robert Langdon is to history and art what the cast of The Big Bang Theory is to math and science: caricatures that only make sense when you know absolutely nothing about the subject.

Bestsellers of 2009:

1. The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown
2. The Associate by John Grisham
3. The Help by Kathryn Stockett
4. I, Alex Cross by James Patterson
5. The Last Song by Nicholas Sparks
6. Ford County by John Grisham
7. Finger Lickin' Fifteen by Janet Evanovich
8. The Host by Stephenie Meyer
9. Under the Dome by Stephen King
10. Pirate Latitudes by Michael Crichton

Also Published in 2009:

The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood
The Women by T.C. Boyle
Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon

If High Schools Taught Philosophy

For some reason, I found myself thinking of my freshman sociology class.  The professor was dedicated to breaking down the assumptions college freshman tend to carry over from an institutional high school education, which, for me, meant it was pretty unexciting. (I went to a high school where we called the teachers by their first names, everyone cussed as they saw fit (teachers included), and all discussion was allowed, no matter how 'inappropriate,' so long as it was constructive.)  One thing that I remembered was the professor pointing out that high schools don't teach philosophy, and she claimed this was because of the institutional nature of high schools, and they didn't want students questioning the school's authority.  And I had an insight.  If high schools taught philosophy, nothing would ever get done.  It would be sheer hell for anyone who taught any subject besides philosophy.  Here are some examples of what classes would be like if high schools taught philosophy.

Physics

"...and therefore exposure to water causes the carbon to explode."

"But will it really? How can we know?"

"Well, if you'll remember the scientific method—"

"No, I mean, how can we say that one thing causes another?"

"We can discuss metaphysics some other time, but now—"

"But why talk about cause and effect when we can't even be sure it exists?"

"Interrupting like this will get you sent to the principal's office."

"... But will it really?"

History

"...leading to Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo."

"But how do we know this?"

"Well, there are plenty of first hand accounts, as well as—"

"No, I mean, how can we be sure that Napoleon even existed?"

"What?"

"We've never seen him, and even if we did, we'd need to consider the possibility that he's an illusion."

"Fascinating, but completely irrelevant to the discussion."

"Well, I guess I have to question the relevance of a lecture about a battle we can't really know ever happened."

"If you keep interrupting, I'm sending you to the principal's office."

"... But how can we be sure the principal exists?"

Gym

"For warm-ups I want one lap around the football field."

"But that's impossible."

"What?"

"Well, if I run one lap, first I'd have to run half a lap."

"So?"

"So, before I run half a lap, I'd have to run half that.  And before I run a quarter lap, I'd have to run half that.  Before I can run any distance, I'd have to run half that distance first."

"Look, either you run the lap or I send you to the principal's office."

"...But to get to the principal's office, first I'd have to go half the distance to the principal's office..."

2007: A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

The Author:

Khaled Hosseini (1965-    ) was born in Kabul, Afghanistan.  His father was a diplomat and his mother was a teacher.  His family lived in Tehran, Iran, from 1970 to 1973, when his father was stationed at the Afghan embassy there.  In 1976, his family left for a diplomatic position in Paris.  They were in Paris during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and applied for political asylum in the United States, which was granted in 1980.  The family settled in San Jose, California.   Hosseini earned a Bachelor's in Biology from Santa Clara University in 1988, and got his medical degree from UC San Diego in 1993.  He worked as an internist from 1996 to 2004.  His first novel, The Kite Runner (2003), was a critical and commercial success, and received a film adaptation in 2007, the same year A Thousand Splendid Suns was released.  He published his third novel, And the Mountains Echoed, in 2013.  He lives in Northern California with his wife and two children.

The Book:

1st edition cover
Jacket Design-Honi Werner/Jacket Photo-Andrew Testa

Length: 367 pages
Subject/Genre: Afghanistan/literary realism

A Thousand Splendid Suns takes its title from a description of Kabul in a poem by the 17th century Iranian poet Saib Tabrizi.  The novel is split into four sections, the first focused on Mariam.  Mariam's father was a wealthy business owner in Herat, and her mother was a maid in her father's household.  Her father and his wives came to an arrangement whereby Mariam and her mother lived in a small isolated home outside of the city, and the father visits once a week.  Mariam's mother is bitter and stubbornly superstitious, considering her epilepsy to be possession by a djinn, even though, as Mariam's points out, there are pills to treat her condition.  Mariam leaves her mother for her father's family, only to discover how unwanted she is and is soon married off to an older man from Kabul.  This man, Rasheed, is violent, overbearing, and religiously conservative.
The second section follows Mariam's neighbor's daughter, Laila.  Her father was a teacher and both parents were forward thinking progressives.  Her best friend, who she falls in love with, is a boy named Tariq, who lost his leg to a landmine.  The wars in the area tear her family apart, first with the death of her older brothers who had been fighting with the mujaheddin, which leads to her mother's depression and nervous breakdown.  The victory of the mujaheddin is only a brief respite from violence, as the different factions turn on each other.  Tariq and his family flee Afghanistan, and Laila's family is about to do the same when a rocket hits their home, killing Laila's parents.  Laila is rescued from the wreckage by Mariam and Rasheed, who decides to make Laila his second wife.  
The rest of the novel deals with the relationship between Laila and Mariam and the continuing strife in Kabul.

I'd like to point out that the thirteen books preceding this on the list consisted exclusively of Grisham, Brown, Albom, Waller, and LaHaye/Jenkins.  It's nice to read a bestseller that isn't pandering/pseudo-intellectual/boring/or mind-bogglingly stupid (Albom/Waller, Brown, Grisham, and LaHaye/Jenkins, respectively).  A Thousand Splendid Suns can be didactic at times, especially early on with language and culture, the characters are rounded, the prose is clean, the history isn't made up, and Hosseini manages to be make moral statements without being heavy-handed.  Well, generally.  The first section is pretty in-your-face with its message, but it still manages to avoid being patronizing.  The second section is less heavy-handed, but it often lapses into didacticism.  This is often understandable though, as the history of modern Afghanistan is complex and Hosseini is writing to a mainstream American audience, an audience which he hopes to teach about his home country.

Hosseini uses Mariam and Laila to contrast the radically different social and ideological backgrounds in Afghanistan, without resorting to caricature.  As opposed to someone like Michener or Uris, who would spend 367 pages covering a century of Afghan history via a family line acting as representative of an entire ethno-religious demographic, Hosseini views about fifty years of Afghan history through the lens of two individuals and their experiences, with much greater effect.

And Afghan history, for obvious reasons, was much on the minds of the American reading public in 2007.  Middle Eastern politics is a massive can of worms and seemingly impenetrable to the layman.  Tie this to the popularity and credibility Hosseini gained with The Kite Runner, and it's easy to see why A Thousand Splendid Suns was a smash hit.

While the beginning felt a bit heavy-handed, once I got past it I enjoyed the book and would recommend it.

Bestsellers of 2007:

1. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling*
2. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
3. Playing for Pizza by John Grisham
4. The Choice by Nicholas Sparks
5. Lean Mean Thirteen by Janet Evanovich
6. Plum Lovin' by Janet Evanovich
7. The Book of the Dead by Patricia Cornwell
8. The Quickie by James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge
9. The 6th Target by James Patterson and Maxine Paetro
10. The Darkest Evening of the Year by Dean Koontz

Also Published in 2007:

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson
August: Osage County by Tracy Letts


*Although Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows sold more copies, it was not included on the original Publisher's Weekly list, which is what my reading is based on.


Sources:

"Biography." KhaledHosseini.com. Khaled Hosseini, 2015. Web.

Hosseini, Khaled. A Thousand Splendid Suns. New York: Riverhead Books, 2007. Print.

"Khaled Hosseini." Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2014. Literature Resource Center. Web.

Lit Brick

I've recently come across an excellent webcomic by John S. Troutman called Lit Brick.  The premise, as stated in the first comic: "I'm gonna read the entire Norton Anthology of English Literature and draw comics about it."  It's a wonderful mix of archaic literature and modern pop culture.  For example, strip #2:

Included with each comic is a brief post about the source material.  The whole thing is pretty cool.  you should check it out.

What You've Missed When Reading Shakespeare

Poetry often relies nearly as much on the sounds of the words themselves as it does their meaning.  It is easy to forget that common pronunciation has changed drastically over the course of centuries.  Shakespeare wrote near the end of what is known as the Great Vowel Shift, a centuries-long process during which the English language evolved in a peculiar way, the pronunciation of vowels shifting away from French roots and thus, farther from the rest of the Romance languages.  One side-effect of this change is some nuance that gets lost when the writing of the time is read with current pronunciation.

1976: Trinity by Leon Uris

The Author:

Leon Uris (1924-2003) appears one other time on the annual best-seller list, for 1959's Exodus.    Leon Uris (1924-2003) was born in Baltimore, Maryland.  His parents were Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe.  Uris never finished high school, opting to drop out and enlist in the Marine Corps during his senior year.  He served in combat in Guadalcanal.  After the war, Uris moved to San Francisco with his wife, also a former Marine.  While there, he worked for a local newspaper.  In 1953, his first novel, Battle Cry, was published to huge popular success.  From there he was given a job in the story department of Warner Brothers Studios.

      In 1955, he released his second novel, The Angry Hills and, in 1956, penned the screenplay for Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.  In 1958, he published Exodus, which became a runaway success, becoming the first of two annual bestsellers on this list and earning him a considerable fan following. In 1961, Uris released Mila 18.  Trinity was published in 1976, and was inspired by a trip Uris and his third wife took to photograph modern Ireland.  Uris kept writing until his death in 2003.  He was married three times over the course of his life and had five children.  He died of renal failure.

The Book:

1st edition cover

Length: 817 pages

Subject/Genre: Irish history/historical fiction

Trinity primarily follows Conor Larkin, a poor Irish Catholic living in mid-to-late 19th century Ireland.  Much of the beginning of the novel is spent detailing the wretched conditions the Irish were forced to live in at the hands of the British, the local culture of small town Irishmen, and the history of attempted rebellion against the British.  Conor's story is the typical hero's journey of the historical fiction of an oppressed people.  Through personal strength and courage, Conor rises to fight the British rule as a leader of men.    

Published in 1976, and detailing a time period over a hundred years past, Trinity was still topical when it was written.  The period between the late 1960s and 1998 in Northern Ireland is referred to as The Troubles.  Violent attacks and acts of retribution were frequent between Irish Republican Army (IRA) splinter groups and British occupation forces, and between different splinter groups as well. The basis of the groups' attacks was the continued occupation of Northern Ireland by the British and a desire for Irish self-rule.  The conflict was a major subject in the news for decades.  The violence hit it's height in the 1970s, around the time Trinity was written and published.  

The novel puts the modern conflict in its historical context, as part of the Irish's centuries long attempt at overthrowing their colonizers.  When researching Uris, claims that he was merely a propagandist pop up frequently, mainly pointing to the one-sided good vs. evil, freedom vs. tyranny approach to the stories.  While I agree that Trinity is certainly one-sided, I don't think it would be propaganda inasmuch as it is an attempt to merely demonstrate the opposite side's view.  Trinity is also a product of the time it was written in, and functions as an attempt to explain and understand the perspective and history of the bad guys (i.e. IRA sects).

As far as the book itself goes, I feel Uris, like Michener and Hailey, gets too bogged down in detail.  Uris tries to function almost as a documentarian of 19th century Ireland, and the balance between providing mountains of information and storytelling is difficult to maintain for extended periods of time, leading to a narrative that moves in spurts.     

That said, if you are the type of person who likes your historical fiction long, winding, and full of detail, you'll probably like Trinity.  If you like Trinity, Uris wrote a sequel to it 1995, titled Redemption.

Bestsellers of 1976:

1. Trinity by Leon Uris

2. Sleeping Murder by Agatha Christie

3. Dolores by Jacqueline Susann

4. Storm Warning by Jack Higgins

5. The Deep by Peter Benchley

6. 1876 by Gore Vidal

7. Slapstick or Lonesome No More! by Kurt Vonnegut

8. The Lovely Lady by Harold Robbins

9. Touch Not the Cat by Mary Stewart

10. A Stranger in the Mirror by Sidney Sheldon

Also published in 1976:

Will You Please Be Quiet, Please by Raymond Carver

Ordinary People by Judith Guest

Roots: The Saga of an American Family by Alex Haley

Sources:

"Leon Uris." Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2007. Literature Resource Center. 
     Web.

Uris, Leon. Trinity. 1976. New York: Bantam, 1977. Print.

1965: The Source by James Michener

The Author:

James Michener (1907-1997) was adopted by a Quaker from Doylestown, Pennsylvania.  He attended Swarthmore college for English and psychology, graduating with honors in 1929.  After a couple years spent abroad, Michener returned to Pennsylvania to teach high school English.  In 1935, he married his first wife, Patti Koon, then earned his Masters and taught briefly at Harvard before becoming an editor for Macmillan Publishers.  

Michener served in the South Pacific during WWII.  His experiences there provided the basis for his first novel, Tales of the South Pacific (1947), which won the Pulitzer for fiction in 1948 and was adapted by Rodgers and Hammerstein for the stage, under the title South Pacific.  In 1948, Michener divorced Koon and married Vange Nord.  Michener appeared in the top 10 annual bestsellers list twice in the 1950s, and fifteen times over the course of his life, taking the top spot four times.  In 1955, he divorced Nord and married Mari Sabusawa.  In 1977, Michener recieved the Presidential Medal of Freedom.   He died of kidney failure in 1997.

The Book:

Length: 909 pages
Subject/Genre: Israel/Historical Fiction

The Source starts with a crew of archaeologists arriving at a dig site in Israel.  This archaeological dig serves as the frame narrative for a story that spans about five thousand years, starting in the Stone Age and the move towards an agricultural society up through the creation of the modern nation of Israel.

Michener's writing reminds me a lot of Irving Stone's, but whereas Stone novelizes the biography of individuals, Michener writes the biography of regions.  He does have some of the same problems as Stone, most importantly the rather dry prose.  The Source is exhaustively researched, and at many times reads more like non-fiction or a history textbook than a novel.    

This is the second novel about Israel on my list (not counting the novels that take place at or around the time of the Jesus), the first being Uris's Exodus, which is also based on exhaustive research.  Israel is still a hot topic today.

The Source is one of only a handful of novels so far on my list to have not had a film adaptation.  In this case, it's not surprising.  The Source functions in many ways like a novel in stories, that is to say, a novel comprised of a number of connected short stories.  

The Source is pretty darn long, which seems to be typical of Michener's work.  I feel that part of this is due to the novel's function as a history book, where details and explanations that are not really necessary for the story, or even slow the story down, are included for a sense of historical completeness.  This can be interesting, if at times a bit annoying.  

Overall, if you are interested in religious history or historical fiction, The Source  is a good, if long, book for you.

Bestselling Novels of 1965:

1. The Source by James Michener
2. Up the Down Staircase by Bel Kaufman
3. Herzog by Saul Bellow
4. The Looking Glass War by John le Carré
5. The Green Berets by Robin Moore
6. Those Who Love by Irving Stone
7. The Man with the Golden Gun by Ian Fleming
8. Hotel by Arthur Hailey
9. The Ambassador by Morris West
10. Don't Stop the Carnival by Herman Wouk


Also Published in 1966:

Frank Herbert - Dune
Jerzy Kosinski - The Painted Bird

Sources:

Michener, James. The Source. New York: Random House, 1965. Print.

1958: Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

The Author:

Boris Pasternak (1890-1960) was born into a wealthy assimilated Jewish family in Moscow.  His father was a painter and art professor and his mother was a pianist.  Leo Tolstoy was a close friend of the Pasternak family and his family became part of the Tolstoyan movement.*   Pasternak went to college to study music in Moscow, but in 1910 began taking studies in philosophy at the University of Marburg, in Germany.

Pasternak returned to Russia at the outbreak of World War One. In 1914, he also published his first collection of poetry, Twin in the Clouds.  Pasternak remained in Russia through the October Revolution and the Russian Civil War.  In 1922, as the Civil War ended and the USSR was formed, Pasternak published his collection of poems titled, My Sister, Life, which earned him massive acclaim.  In 1922, Pasternak married Evgeniia Lourie with whom he had a son.  They divorced in 1931. He married Zinaida Neigauz in 1934.

Over the decades following the Civil War, the Soviet Union began to institute stricter censorship and harsher punishments.  In 1934, one of his friends and colleagues, Osip Mandelstam, was abducted by the secret police.  More of his friends were taken in the Great Purge of 1937.  Pasternak believed he and his wife would be taken also, after he refused to sign a statement supporting the death penalty for those swept up in the purge, a statement which was signed by most of the Union of Soviet Writers.  

In 1946, Pasternak began his affair with Olga Ivinskaya, a single mother working for the literary magazine, Novy Mir.  By all accounts, Ivinskaya was Pasternak's muse and their relationship was incredibly important to both of them.  In 1949, Ivinskaya was arrested by the KGB and sent to the gulags for five years.    

In 1956, Pasternak finished Doctor Zhivago, but no Russian printing house was willing to publish it.  An Italian publishing agent in Russia managed to arrange an Italian translation which he brought back with him to Italy, where it was published in 1957.  The book was banned in the USSR, and a smear campaign against Doctor Zhivago and Boris Pasternak was launched by the Soviet press.  In 1958, the Nobel Committee awarded Pasternak the Nobel Prize for Literature, which he declined, fearing harsh reprisal from the Soviet government.  This inspired the Pulitzer Prize winning editorial cartoon by Bill Mauldin:

"I won the Nobel Prize for literature. What was your crime?"

Pasternak remained in Russia.  He announced plans to write a trilogy of plays, but died of lung cancer before the first was completed.

The Book:   

Length: 563 pages

Subject/Genre: Post-Revolutionary Russia/Historical fiction

What can I say about Doctor Zhivago that hasn't been said before?  The old paperback I picked up boasts on its cover that it's "One of the great novels of the century."  Which, along with some books on this list (e.g. The Grapes of Wrath, All Quiet on the Western Front), makes it a bit difficult for me to review.  But I'll try.  

If you're not familiar with the story, it follows Yurii Zhivago, the titular doctor.  Beginning around the Revolution of 1905, then skipping around up to the October Revolution in 1917, we see Zhivago's growth into adulthood as well as a parallel focus on Lara Guishar.  Zhivago is orphaned at a young age and sent to live with the Gromekos, a wealthy couple whose daughter, Antonina (aka Tonia), Yurii eventually marries.  Lara is the daughter of a widowed French émigré.  Her mother owns a dress shop which is abandoned in the revolution.  As a teenager, Lara has an ongoing affair with her mother's beau.  All in all, there are about half a dozen characters who show up frequently throughout the novel, fighting with or against each other as circumstances determine.      

One of the great things about this book, and one part of what makes the story so compelling, is the perpetual grey area the characters inhabit.  The novel is extremely political, as one would expect from the subject matter.  But Pasternak manages to capture the complexity of the situation, politically and morally.  When a violently oppressive system is overthrown, and a massive power struggle consumes a large nation, when dozens of competing factions vie for political and military supremacy, morality becomes obfuscated.  Zhivago is a rich Moscow intellectual, who supported the overthrow of the Tsar and had great hopes for a socialist state, yet the very fact that he is a rich intellectual from the capital makes him an enemy to many of the people he ideologically supports.      

But beyond the politics, there is a beautiful story about a man trying to survive a troubling and dangerous era.  I don't want to give away too much of the story, but suffice it to say that Pasternak succeeds in creating a character as multi-faceted and complex as his times.  

I want to include a particularly fantastic passage here, which has nothing to do with the review, except that I wanted to share it.  It's a bit long, so feel free to skip it if you want.  Yurii Zhivago, speaking of death:

"'You want to know my opinion as a scientist? Perhaps some other time? No? Right now? Well, as you wish.  But it's difficult like that, all of a sudden.' And there and then he delivered a whole impromptu lecture, astonished that he could do it.

"Resurrection.  In the crude from in which it is preached to console the weak, it is alien to me.  I have always understood Christ's words about the living and the dead in a different sense.  Where could you find room for the hordes of people accumulated over thousands of years? The universe isn't big enough for them; God, the good, and meaningful purpose would be crowded out.  They'd be crushed by these throngs of greedy merely for the animal life.      

"But all the time, life, one, immense, identical throughout its innumerable combinations abd transformations, fills the universe and is continually reborn.  You are anxious whether you will rise from the dead or not, but you rose from the dead when you were born and you didn't notice it.    

"Will you feel pain? Do the tissues feel their disintegration? In other words, what will happen to your consciousness?  But what is consciousness?  Let's see.  A conscious attempt to fall asleep is sure to produce insomnia, to try to be conscious of one's own digestion is a sure way to upset the stomach.  Consciousness is a poison when we apply it to ourselves.  Consciousness is a light directed outward, it lights up the way ahead of us so that we don't stumble.  It's like the headlights on a locomotive--turn them inward and you'd have a crash.    

"So what will happen to your consciousness?  Your consciousness, yours, not anyone else's.  Well, what are you?  There's the point.  Let's try to find out.  What is it about you that you have always known as yourself?  What are you conscious of in yourself?  Your kidneys? Your liver? Your blood vessels?   No.  However far back you go in your memory, it is always in some external, active manifestation of yourself that you come across your identity--in the work of your hands, in your family, in other people.  And now listen carefully.  You in others--this is your soul.  This is what you are.  This is what your consciousness has breathed and lived on and enjoyed throughout your life--your soul, your immortality, your life in others.  And what now? You have always been in others and you will always remain in others.  And what does it matter to you if later on that is called your memory?  This will be you--the you that enters the future and becomes a part of it."

Doctor Zhivago has a famous film adaptation.  The 1965 film version directed by David Lean and starring Omar Sharif (Lawrence of Arabia) was a giant financial success, remaining the eighth highest grossing film ever, after adjusting for inflation.

While this is certainly an excellent novel, I'm not sure I'd recommend it to everybody.  If you're looking for a light read, or have no interest in the politics and ideology of Revolutionary-era Russia, you probably won't enjoy it.  It's a very dense book (which is pretty characteristic of Russian lit) and requires at least a bit of knowledge of that time period (e.g., if you don't know the difference between the Reds, Greens, and Whites, you may end up confused), but this is nothing ten minutes on wikipedia can't help you out with.  

The Bestsellers of 1958:

1. Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

2. Anatomy of a Murder by Robert Traver

3. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

4. Around the World with Auntie Mame by Partick Dennis

5. From the Terrace by John O'Hara

6. Eloise at Christmastime by Kay Thompson

7. Ice Palace by Edna Ferber

8. The Winthrop Woman by Anya Seton

9. The Enemy Camp by Jerome Weidman

10. Victorine by Frances Parkinson Keyes

Also published in 1958:

Chinua Achebe - Things Fall Apart

Truman Capote - Breakfast at Tiffany's

Ian Fleming - Dr. No

Jack Kerouac - The Dharma Bums

Sources:

Pasternak, Boris. Doctor Zhivago. 1958. Trans. Max Hayward, Manya Harari, and Bernard 

          Guerney. New York: Ballantine Books, 1981. Print.

Judging More Books by Their Covers

Several months ago, I made a post about the particularly bizarre and awful book covers of Tutis Publishing.  If you thought that was the limit of the company's hilarious ineptitude, well, you know as little about Tutis as Tutis knows about literature.    
     
But literature isn't the only area in which Tutis Publishing is fantastically unknowledgeable.  They also have no understanding of history.  For example, Theodore Roosevelt's book about his experiences in the Spanish American War, The Rough Riders:

Fun Fact: Cuba used to be populated primarily by dwarves

Here, we see Teddy Roosevelt depicted as a pantsless Viking.  If you think that's anachronistic, you may be interested in how they depict Stephen Crane's Civil War novel, The Red Badge of Courage:   

Sparta was only fighting for City-State rights!  

I guess they got the "red" part right.  Still, it's surprising how many American history novels don't have anything on the cover relating to American history.  How would Europe feel if this happened to them?    

The Renaissance generally refers to a period between the 14th and 17th centuries in Europe.  I have a feeling that Tutis's cover design department (i.e. a hungover intern who speaks only in riddles) simply confused the words "renaissance" and "revolution."  But really, three down, and they haven't even managed to get on the right continent once.  Could it get any worse?

Holy crap!  Did anyone else know cyborgs fought in World War One!?!?   Based on the coloration, I think this actually takes place on Mars.  Not only did Tutis choose a random anachronistic image, but they set it on the wrong planet!  This makes sense, I guess.  If there's one thing they are as clueless about as literature and history, it's geography.  I'd like to introduce Tutis's new travel program, why not visit the marvelous deserts?

When you're done basking in the hot Illinois sun, why not visit New England's House of Parliament?

But now it's time to play our favorite game!  Tutis word-association!  Let's try to follow the reasoning behind each of these covers:     

A Stradivarius is a kind of violin. Violins and guitars have strings.  Sting sounds like green. A guitar with a green filter!

Airplanes!  Explosions!  Texas!!!!

I'm not sure if there's enough clarity of purpose for this to be racist.

Scarlet is red!

The real treasure is magic bicycles that can ride on water.

A hound is a dog.  Dogs are nice.

I can't really blame them for that last one though, because if there's one thing Tutis is as clueless about as literature and history and geography, it's animals.  There's nothing I can say about these next two:   

Goddamnit Tutis!  That's not a horse; that's a stack of poorly photoshopped books on a poorly photoshopped desk next to one of John Tenniel's illustrations from Alice in Wonderland on an entirely separate background.  That looks nothing like a horse!

1931-2: The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck

Who?
Pearl Buck (1892-1973), while born in Hillsboro, West Virginia, spent most of the first 40 years of her life living in China as the daughter of Presbyterian missionaries.  Affected by the Boxer Uprising and the race issues that were prevalent between Westerners and Chinese, Boxer still remained close to Chinese culture.  As an adult, she briefly returned to the United States and went back to China as a missionary herself and in married fellow missionary John Lossing Buck in 1917, both of whom became professors at Chinese colleges.  They had a daughter in 1920.  The Bucks ended up fleeing China for a year following the Nanking Incident, in which many Westerners were murdered. 

            In 1929, she published here first novel East Wind: West Wind and met editor Richard Walsh.  In 1934, she resigned as a missionary after scandal resulting from a speech she gave arguing against the necessity of an institutional church in China.  She left China in 1934, leaving John Buck behind.  She divorced and married Richard Walsh in 1935.  In 1938 Buck won the Nobel Prize in Literature, becoming the third American (and first American woman) to do so. 

            Buck died of lung cancer in 1973.

So what's this book about?

            The Good Earth follows the life of Wang Lung, a poor farmer in Northern China.  Starting with his wedding day as a young man, the novel spans the rest of his life, painting a portrait of rural Chinese culture at that time.  Wang Lung’s wife, O-lan, was a slave girl from the House of Hwang, one of the ‘great houses.’  Said House is in worsening financial conditions as the story progresses, slowly selling bits of land to Wang Lung. 

            The main story arc is Wang Lung’s rise to wealth and power, and how this affects him, his family, and Lung’s relationship with his family, neighbors, and the Earth.  One thing that comes through very powerfully is the love-hate relationship Wang Lung and the other families have with the Earth.  In a good year, the Earth will provide enough food to eat and sell; in a bad year, there will be famine and desperation. Overall, Lung’s connection with the Earth is, to him, the most important relationship he has. 

            His relationships with his wife and children are, from the perspective of a twenty-first century American, pretty terrible.  While we see that Lung is acting according to custom, and even then is not as bad as others, the culture’s misogyny is pretty unsettling.  Young girls are routinely bought and sold.  In some cases, the words “slave” and “girl” are used interchangeably. 

            The novel doesn’t glorify these cultural norms, nor does it outright attack them.  Rather, it serves more of a documentarian function.  It records both the good and the bad, the honest and corrupt, the noble and ignoble aspects of the culture as they appeared to Buck.  And in that regard, it is a success.  It also succeeds in creating an emotionally compelling story.  Even with the very negative cultural values Wang Lung embodies, he still manages to be a sympathetic character. 

Why was it so popular?

            One of the major through-lines in The Good Earth is a conflict between the rich and poor.  While millions of farmers and laborers are starving, the extremely rich are profiting or, in the case of the House of Hwang, deteriorating due to their own opulence, and, in the end, “when the rich are too rich there are ways, and when the poor are too poor there are ways…”

            The bestselling novel of 1931 and 1932, The Good Earth was released during the Great Depression, when millions were out of work due a combination of the collapse of the world economy due to (at least in part) the actions of bankers and government officers and investors, etc., leading to many banks going bankrupt, and millions to lose all their savings.  Additionally, a years-long drought began in Oklahoma in 1930, destroying the agriculture business in the region.  A story about a poor farmer who gains power and prestige by buying (or taking) it from the wealthy would be a popular story.  Perhaps it’s worth noticing that, of the eighteen other books reviewed so far, only Edna Ferber’s So Big is a rags to riches story, and one that also is based on farmers. 

I think I've heard of this one...
           The popularity of The Good Earth has surged and waned over the last eighty years, in 2004 reaching the bestsellers list again after an endorsement from Oprah.  Like most of the bestsellers I’ve covered, The Good Earth received a film adaptation. 

            Released in 1937, The Good Earth, starring Paul Muni as Wang Lung, won the Oscar for best actress (Luise Rainer as O-lan) and best Cinematography at the tenth Academy Awards ceremony.  It was nominated for best picture, but lost to The Life of Emile Zola, starring Paul Muni.

Should I read it?

            Yes.  Quite simply put, it is a good book.  It has an emotionally compelling story, a historical function, and themes that are still relevant today.

Also published in 1931 & 1932:  

Sanctuary - William Faulkner
Light in August - William Faulkner
1919 (second book of U.S.A. trilogy) - John Dos Passos
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
Mourning Becomes Electra - Eugene O'Neill