Hallowed Ground: A Walk at Gettysburg – Review

James M. McPherson. Hallowed Ground: A Walk at Gettysburg. Illustrated edition, Crestline, 2017.

Hallowed Ground started out in 2003 as a guide book for visitors to get the big picture of the Battle of Gettysburg. Author of Battle Cry of Freedom, McPherson is one of the most respected historians of the American Civil War.

This was written after many years of taking his students on field trips to Gettysburg. There are specific directions, for example: “A quarter mile north, across the road and next to Buford’s monument…” This book takes us by the hand, day by day and almost hour by hour. If visitors were to follow McPherson’s directions, they would be able take in the whole scope of the battle.

This edition is not a typical portable guide for walking around the battle town. It is illustrated with current photographs along with many engravings and photos from the 1860s. It is a great one both to read and to look at the pictures. Taken to the site, it would work in a motor vehicle or with a backpack.

With the popularity of Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels and the film Gettysburg, based on the novel, McPherson tries to bring some things into balance. There is no question that the disagreement between Lee and Longstreet makes for good drama and the courageous defense of Little Round Top saved the Union left flank. Still, there was an equally rigorous defense on the right flank around Culp’s Hill at the same time.

McPherson explains that Lee assumed that Union troops had been sent to reinforce the two flanks, and that is why the Confederate assaults there failed. Lee expected that the center ranks would be depleted and an attack on the Union center on the third day would succeed. A similar combination of flank attacks and a central assault worked at Chancellorsville.

Longstreet was not at Chancellorsville. He, Pickett, and Hood were in the Norfolk area at the time. The Union may have learned from its experience there. Lee was confident that what McPherson calls the Pickett-Pettigrew charge would work. Longstreet could not make himself give the order for Pickett to attack. He simply nodded his head when Pickett asked him if it was time.

Hallowed Ground also tells about the surrounding cavalry skirmishes. Jeb Stuart was out of communication with Lee for the first two days. One of the most successful cavalry leaders was George Armstrong Custer. Some years ago I read an account of a Michigan cavalry officer who served under Custer in the war. Custer was remarkably effective throughout. McPherson says that his debacle at Little Big Horn in 1876 was out of character.

McPherson also describes different things that the National Park Service are doing to make the geography more like the setting of the battle at the time. This means cutting down some woods that were fields back then, and planting woods that are open country now. McPherson expressed concern that the woods might be thicker than back then because in the 1860s most of the understory would have been grazed away by cattle. That is probably not an issue because if Gettysburg is anything like most of the rest of Eastern North America in this century, the understories of most woods have been browsed clean by deer.

Hallowed Ground includes excerpts from primary sources. We read parts of Lee’s orders, Meade’s report, and excerpts from various memoirs. It ends with Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

McPherson debunks a few legends about Gettysburg but does note at least two natives of the town who moved to Virginia and ended up attacking their native burg. He also tells a few stories about some of the monuments at Gettysburg. Many are pictured. He informs and entertains.

Hallowed Ground
is a great overview of the battle. It tells the story without getting bogged down in minutiae. With or without the illustrations, it should be a helpful guide for anyone visiting the battlefield.

Twice a minor detail spoke to me personally. McPherson tells briefly about two different young men who at one time or another were at Gettysburg to learn the craft of carriage making. My great grandfather Fridolin Miller, an orphaned immigrant from Switzerland, in 1863 was a fourteen year old apprentice carriage maker. He was in Gettysburg in the fall of 1863. He was not there for the battle, but everyone had a day off for the cemetery dedication in November. He climbed a tree to get a better look at President Lincoln and remembered the Gettysburg Address for the remainder of his long life (1849-1943).

The Last Dickens – Review

Matthew Pearl. The Last Dickens. Read by Paul Michael, Midwest Tapes, 2009.

The Last Dickens is an adventurous historical mystery surrounding a Charles Dickens mystery, namely The Mystery of Edwin Drood. James Ripley Osgood, partner of the Boston publisher Fields and Osgood (formerly Ticknor and Fields) tries to see if he can find the ending of The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

Readers may know that Edwin Drood was the novel Dickens was working on when he died. He had released six monthly installments, and his contract called for six more.

The novel has a good deal of material based on history. While it is set mostly in 1870 at the time of Dickens’ death, there are flashbacks to 1867 and Dickens’ second and last American tour.

The lively cast of characters makes for intriguing reading, and the pace increases as the novel develops. We know that certain places and characters in Dickens’ novels are based on real people and places. Inventing Scrooge, for example, tells us there was a gravestone Dickens noted to one Ebenezer Scroggie, “A Meal Man.” He imagined or misread the epitaph saying “A Mean Man” and changed Scroggie to Scrooge.

So here we discover the father of a deceased Edward True (or Trude, it was hard to tell since this was a reading). Edward was apparently murdered by a corrupt and devious uncle. Edwin Drood and his uncle both fall for the same woman, and then Edwin disappears. Because the story was unfinished, we never know if Edwin is dead or alive, if his uncle did indeed murder him, or if something else happens.

Even back in 1870, speculation was all over the place. A spiritualist claimed that the ghost of Dickens had dictated the ending to her. A play based on the novel had a different ending. In the novel, the pompous actor Grunewald does not like the ending written for the part of Drood because he dies too early in the play. The English publisher and Dickens’ agent disagree about it, too.

The situation is further complicated because there were no clear copyright laws in 1870. Though Fields and Osgood had the American publishing contract with Dickens, Harper Brothers would come out with pirated editions.

There was a small group of people working on the docks of New York and Boston known as bookaneers. Pearl, the author of The Dante Club, would later write a novel called The Last Bookaneer. They would steal manuscripts shipped in from Europe and then sell them to unscrupulous publishers who would then come out with competing editions earlier and cheaper because they paid no royalties. In the story, one of the Brothers Harper is not above employing bookaneers.

A courier for Fields and Osgood is murdered after picking up a manuscript from England on the docks. It is apparently the next installments of Edwin Drood. The lawyer who happens to discover the dead body helps himself to the manuscript, and soon someone murders him, too.

A society matron stalks Dickens in America, breaks into his hotel room, and apparently steals something. She may know something about Edwin Drood as well.

Lurking in the background is a cold-blooded killer who calls himself Herman. He nearly kills Osgood on a steamer that he and Rebecca Sand, a bookkeeper from the publishing firm and sister of the murdered courier, are taking to England. While there, they meet with Dickens’ British publisher and agent to see if there is any evidence for the final installments or what plans Dickens may have had for the characters.

He attends the Christie’s estate auction where Dickens’ possessions are sold. He meets a neighbor of Dickens who calls himself John Falstaff and runs an inn across the road from Dickens’ Gad’s Hill estate. Another person who appears helpful is a man whom Dickens helped (Dickens had a soft spot for charity cases) who calls himself Datchery—which the name of a character in The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

We also read fair representations of one of Dickens’ daughters and his sister-in-law who helped her sister raise Dickens’ family. Of course, by 1867 Dickens and his wife had separated. And we read quite a bit about Frank Dickens, a son who is stationed in India as a British constable.

The Mystery of Edwin Drood involves some opium addiction, and England at the time was trying to corner the legal market on the drug. Frank Dickens is investigating Indian opium smugglers who may be connected to some of the dockside action in England and America.

Although he is clearly beaten, the Fields and Osgood courier who is killed was was also given a lethal dose of opium hypodermically. His sister says he never touched the stuff, but the police wrote off his death as drug-induced.

When he visited America in 1867, Dickens was very interested in a famous crime committed at a Harvard laboratory. A Harvard professor murdered George Parkman, a prominent businessman and uncle of historian Francis Parkman. The professor was able to conceal the murder for some time because he had hidden the remains of the body inside a wall of the laboratory.

On that 1867 visit, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., the writer, took Dickens on a tour of Boston one day. Dickens wanted to see the laboratory where the murder had been committed. He also spoke to him about Poe and narcotics.

Did these things inspire The Mystery of Edwin Drood as well? What about Chapman, Dickens’ publisher, or Forester the agent? What do they know? Or the helpful British businessman who befriends Osgood on the steamer trip and then bails him out when he is arrested in London after investigating an opium den?

This is a very creative tale, a mystery, and a literary exploration. Readers of all types should enjoy it for a variety of reasons.

We listened to the recorded version which is very well done. Mr. Michael, the reader, does a terrific job with the voices of the various characters. The only quibble we have is that he mispronounces some of the Bostonian names: He got Quincy correct (kwin-zee not kwin-see) but missed Concord (sounds the same as conquered) and Houghton (hoe-ton, not how-ton).

We also note that the book was published by Random House. We cannot imagine why Harper wouldn’t touch it…

Act of Deception – Review

John Bishop. Act of Deception. Mantid Press, 2020.

Act of Deception is the second in what looks like will be a series on Dr. Jim Bob Brady, a Houston, Texas, orthopedic surgeon. We reviewed the first one. This has a similar tone, but quite a different story. This is more of a legal thriller than a mystery.

A patient of Brady’s had a “routine” knee replacement but the knee became so infected they had to amputate. Now Dr. Brady is being sued for four times what his insurance covers. Still, he is convinced he did nothing wrong. The patient, farmer Billy Jones, had tests done showing no infection. Two months later, he returns with the knee infected. Soon it becomes gangrenous, and the doctor has to amputate.

There is more, of course. The lawyer representing Mr. Jones is a very influential person in Houston and seldom loses. However, there may be a question about how he finds out about patients whom he can use to sue and collect big commissions.

One Sunday afternoon when Dr. Brady happens to come into the hospital, he notices that one of his patients was given a business card with a phone number to call if he wants to sue the hospital or one of his doctors. Depending on the state and how it is done, this is either unethical (soliciting) or illegal (barratry). A lawyer friend of Dr. Brady who figured in the first story tells him what barratry is but also tells him that it is nearly impossible to prove.

Now, the business card is not that of a lawyer, but identifies Mr. John Davis as a paralegal. He is a private investigator used by many lawyers—including Dr. Brady’s friend—but he may be soliciting clients for some of them.

Like the first book, Act of Deception has a leisurely tone. We get a sense of what it is like to be a prominent surgeon in a big city. Indeed, what Dr. Brady pays a year for malpractice insurance is about what your reviewer earns in a year as a teacher. Brady dines out frequently and drinks expensive brands of adult beverages. He and his wife also are involved in numerous charities along with other doctors, lawyers, and business executives in town.

Donovan Shaw, the big-time malpractice lawyer who is suing Dr. Brady on Mr. Jones’ behalf, shows up at many of the same social functions that the Bradys attend. This makes for some interesting conversations and threats. It also gives we mere middle class mortals an idea of how the upper classes live. Yes, you get to own a nice car, a swimming pool, a summer house on an island somewhere, but there is a price to pay. One thing Dr. Brady has going for him—his wife married him for love, not for money.

We also learn a lot about the malpractice business. Normally, the insurance company will try to work out a settlement before the case gets to court. Many times the settlement is all the plaintiff was looking for, so the plaintiff and the insurance company are satisfied. Of course, the doctor gets a black mark on his record. All it takes are a few settlements like that, and he is out of business.

In Dr. Brady’s case, he is convinced he did nothing wrong. He has documentation to show he was using the best procedures. But there are numerous doctors who are retired or no longer practice but who act as expert consultants and witnesses for lawyers. Mr. Shaw has found a well-credentialed doctor who is willing to testify that Dr. Brady made some mistakes.

There is more. As Mr. Shaw gets more ticked off because it seems like Dr. Brady is insisting on a court case, he raises the stakes and drops the suit against the hospital. The focus on Brady would put him out of business. Someone is looking for revenge.

There is more funny business. Dr. Brady is attacked in the hospital parking garage and is in a coma for ten days. He is recovering slowly but does have some time to look into more details about the Jones case. The name of a certain Dr. Johnson appears several times. There are a few other coincidences.

People of a certain age remember the Perry Mason television series. Perhaps they even read some Perry Mason novels (there are over eighty written by Erle Stanley Gardner). The Mason formula is that there is an investigation, facts are assembled, and attorney Perry Mason’s client virtually always seems guilty. But Mason orchestrates a climax in the courtroom that dramatically reveals the real criminal.

Well, Act of Deception is something like that. One difference is that Dr. Brady is involved in a civil lawsuit, not a criminal case. Still, there seems to be enough evidence to go to court rather than settle out of court, especially with Shaw’s new demands. The court scene is very tense, something that both Erle Stanley Gardner and Clint Eastwood would have commended.

One piece of trivia: At one point Brady, who sometimes play keyboard for a jazz combo in clubs, jokes about different names they could call their band. He says,”How about the Country Bumpkins? Or the Cryin’ Shames?” Well, there were actually two sixties rock groups called the Cryin’ Shames, one from England and one from America. The American group spelled their name as the Cryan Shames.

The Twelfth Imam – Review

Joel C. Rosenberg. The Twelfth Imam. Tyndale, 2010.

I confess to reading a series out of order. A friend lent me a copy of The Tehran Initiative, which I have already reviewed. The Twelfth Imam is the first in the series.

As noted in that review, the Twelfth Imam is the Shiite Muslim messiah, the Mahdi, as they call him. Unlike the Sunni Muslims, the term Imam is not used to describe any Shia clergy. That is an honorific only certain historical Shiite leaders who are descendants of Mohammad himself can have.

We meet David Shirazi, who is the protagonist of both novels, and learn his background. It is more intense than we realize from just the second book. We learn about his family, his education, his talents, his recruitment by the CIA from the time he was in high school. While an agnostic himself, he does begin to observe Shiite customs and attend mosques in the United States and Germany to establish his background.

When he finally gets “in country” in Iran, he learns that many people, including the top political leadership of the nation are getting excited about the coming of the Twelfth Imam. There is a man who has appeared mysteriously to seemingly random Iranians and performed miracles. Even the Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah, has come under his spell.

At one point this reader was reminded of a novel from the 1950s titled The Ugly American. It is actually a collection of related stories telling about different Americans working in some aspect of the foreign service and how they are clueless about the local cultures. They end up doing things that the local people either do not understand or find offensive. I seem to recall one, for example, was trying to help people in India by starting to import beef cattle.

Not only is Shirazi an Iranian-American whose first language was Farsi, but he reads up on the Shiite eschatology and realizes that the Twelfth Imam is a huge deal in Iran. But his superiors dismiss his reports even though it is the Imam himself who is encouraging Iran to ramp up its nuclear weapon program. Like the ugly Americans in that fifties book, some people just do not get it. Washington, D. C., is not the center of the universe.

We also get a back story to Shirazi’s sometime girlfriend, Marseille. Her family and David’s become friends because of some mutual aid they provide to escape Iran when the American embassy is seized in 1979. That is before either of them are born, but it becomes part of their family history.

So does September 11, 2001. That is a sudden surprise, but Rosenberg tells in the story such a way that it rings true.

Because of the back stories, The Twelfth Imam takes a little while to get going, but it all comes together. The last third of the book is a real page turner in the style of many spy or international thrillers.

Because of its subject matter, The Twelfth Imam gives the reader a lot to think about. Is the Twelfth Imam the real deal? Well, he is consistent with Muslim teachings. While the Persians have the tradition of the Twelfth Imam, as an alleged descendant of Mohammad, he is an Arab. He calls for unity among all the Muslim sects and sounds like he can make it happen. It is not secret that the Apocalyptic goal for Muslims is world conquest and a worldwide Caliphate.

There is one fascinating scene in the novel that truly makes a statement about that. Rosenberg describe a scene between the Imam and the Grand Ayatollah Hosseini (all the “current” government leaders are fictional). The Supreme Leader of Iran and his advisors are all bowing prostrate before the Twelfth Imam.

“Hamid,” said the man…”do you remember what happened on the mountain?”

“Yes, my Lord,” Hosseini said, his face still pressed to the ground. “You showed me the glories of the kingdoms of the world.”

“And what did I say to you?”

“You said, ‘All these things I will give you, if you fall down before me and do my will.’ And I have endeavored to do just that ever since, My Lord.” (293-294, cf. Luke 4:5-8)

Very pointed. Both Islam and Communism claim to be movements that the world is destined to adopt entirely. Both often use violence to gain power, but the ultimate goal is world domination, whether through the Caliphate or the classless society. I recall being surprised years ago reading something by Osama bin Laden. Even though he had fought the Soviets in Afghanistan, he believed he could get the Chinese on his side to help establish his Caliphate.

This also helps explain the unusual hostility both Communism and Islam have towards Christianity. Christianity has its own eschatology, but it does not involve world conquest in the manner of Marx or Mohammad.

The Kingdom of God is very different. Jesus gained his authority not by conquest of geographical territory, but by winning willing human hearts. He demonstrated His authority over sin and death by rising from the dead. Jesus says, “I stand at the door and knock,” not “submit or else” as both Communism and Islam insist upon (see Revelation 3:20).

Anyway, the Imam not only promotes Islamic unity, but he provides his backing to the Iranian nuclear weapon development. Shirazi, working undercover as a technician and salesman for a German telecommunications company, learns about some of this, and when an earthquake topples the Iranian city of Hamadan, he begins to suspect that the earthquake was caused by an underground nuclear test.

Meanwhile, the head of the Iranian nuclear weapons program is killed by a car bomb, and one of his associates wants out of the program before he is killed. While nearly everyone suspects the car bomber to be an Israeli agent, we really do not know for sure.

Shirazi gets involved in a plot almost as complicated as Argo. Indeed, the original Argo exploit is part of the back story. The Twelfth Imam gets exciting and truly apocalyptic. Even though I would recommend reading the tales in order, I am glad I read this one even if I did not read it first.

Gaijin – Review

Gaijin Book Cover

Sarah Z. Sleeper. Gaijin. Running Wild Press, 2020.

Gaijin means “foreigner” in Japanese. It does not have an especially positive connotation. There are several Gaijins in Gaijin.

The narrator, Lucy Tosch, is the primary gaijin. As an undergrad journalism major at Northwestern, she falls in love with a handsome, exotic student from Japan named Owen. Yes, his parents chose an English name for him. The author describes the attraction with a passionate intensity. At one point, she says she does not understand it, maybe it is pheromones. I said to myself, “With emphasis on the moan.”

Owen introduces her to his mother who comes with him to America. They have a few dates, but their relationship remains chaste. Suddenly, Owen leaves Illinois for Japan with nothing more than a text message saying goodbye and sorry.

Lucy, who was still struggling with the recent passing of her father, is heartbroken. I am not sure I ever in a novel read such a moving description of heartbreak. Perhaps I have red something similar in poems or heard it in songs, but not in a novel. We feel for Lucy.

Lucy continues to dwell on Owen and eventually ends up in Japan. Well, Okinawa, which has been ruled by Japan since 1879. Here, not only are there many American gaijins from the U. S. military bases, but we are told that the Okinawans consider Japanese foreigners, too. The Ryukyu Islands, of which Okinawa is a part, have their own language and distinct culture.

It turns out Owen’s family, though living in Tokyo for three generations, originated in Okinawa, and Owen’s brother is a photographer for the newspaper in Okinawa that hires Lucy. She hopes to perhaps connect with his brother Hisashi and find out what has happened to her first love.

The story gets complicated quickly. There has been an ongoing movement among some in Japan to have the American military bases leave Okinawa. Even a left-wing journalist like Lucy gets lumped with the American soldiers and sailors and experiences a terrible crime against her along with many threats. Even Hisashi gets threats because he is perceived as an outsider from Tokyo.

In some ways both brothers are outsiders, gaijins, in their family. We are told that their father is ashamed of both of them, though Lucy cannot see how that is possible. They are both intelligent, attractive, hard-working young men. It may have something to do with them not going into the family business. There may be other things.

There is more. An American sailor is charged with raping a teenage Japanese girl whose family is vacationing on the island. Anti-American demonstrations heat up. Lucy learns a little about the Americans stationed there and becomes acquainted with a few American families who, for different reasons, have retired to Okinawa when they left the service.

And then there is Aokigahara, the Suicide Forest. That becomes almost a subplot or secondary theme of the story, the practice of ubasute, “abandoning the weak.”

There is a lot to this intense story. It may begin as a love story but really turns into something else—strange, weird, and, yes, foreign. Foreign even to the Japanese, perhaps.

This reviewer does have one quibble with this book. It is odd, but another book we reviewed had a similar error. Lucy tells us she meets a Marine Corps medical doctor. Well, the Marines do not have doctors. The Marines are part of the Navy, and Marine bases use Navy physicians just as they use Navy medical corpsmen.

Also, the man she identifies as a Marine doctor has the rank of captain in her story and has been in the service for six years. The rank of Marine captain is the same a Navy lieutenant. For a regular officer, that would be a typical rank after six years, but because of their extra education, Navy doctors are commissioned as lieutenants when they first join. After six years, he would probably be a lieutenant commander.

The Age of Germs

This is a tribute to all the Advanced Placement English Literature Exam readers this year, especially those with Question 1 that had a passage from the recent novel The Age of Light. We note that back in 2003, the A. P. English Lit prose selection featured another North American expat woman in Paris.

The school is quiet, the only other workers the custodial staff, the lower half of their faces covered with N-95 masks. A couple of Dunkin Donuts paper cups curl around Mr. A. P. Little’s laptop with its built-in camera, which he has brought to school though the school has some PCs he could have used.

Just before he checked out of the hotel at last year’s A. P. reading, his roommate asked him if he wanted a set of range finders for Question 3. Not all of them had a score on them, but he could figure it out. When he got back home, he would sort them out as he sat in a lawn chair in his yard. Those plans did not work out as expected, though, because A. P. range finders (they call them benchmarks now) adopted the new 1-4-1 scoring system.

The maintenance supervisor stops by and tells him he is going on a Starbucks run and asks if he would like anything. A. P. hesitates, thinking about the coffee buzz he feels right now, but he says yes. Even though the Dunkin Dark Roast is still circulating through his veins, he needs a reason to stay awake this afternoon, especially if he gets two hours of mostly twos and threes as he did yesterday.

He decided to work from the school to do the Advanced Placement reading. He had done the last third of the school year doing Zoom classes from home with students who missed the school as much he did. The only advantage to being at home is that there are no study halls to monitor and no commute. He has been going bug-eyed putting electronic sticky notes onto Turnitin assignments. At least now all he has to do is press a couple of buttons after reading the essay—anything to pass the time and forget how lonely we all feel.

A. P. had never been great staying at home. Other than mowing the lawn, ogling his beautiful wife, and playing video games, there is not much to do when everyone is sheltered in place. As the weeks have gone by, he has learned to weigh himself daily to avoid gaining weight. Taking the laptop to the school is better for this job. Even so, he can see the icon for Minecraft on the laptop’s taskbar. He is conscious of its presence, almost like squishy tentacles with round suckers to pull him in and drown him.

But he knows that if he slacks off during the reading he will be demoted and get his blue stars taken away. The maintenance supervisor picks up his empty coffee cups, and A. P. can tell he is wondering why he came to school.

“Are you doing some kind of summer school?” he finally asks. A. P. is reading about Miss Lee’s complex conflicts and isn’t really paying attention to what was just said. When he doesn’t respond, the building chief nods his head toward the computer screen.

“No, I’m reading English Lit Advanced Placement essays.”

Since he’s started, he’s read lots of stories about the challenges of moving to a new city and read lots of essays that state the obvious: Lee is lonely, the waiter has a narrow mustache, Paris and New York are on different continents. He had one today that was blank. Another one ten minutes later he had to put on Temporary Hold. He couldn’t read it and wanted to see if his Table Leader could decipher it.

Ah, but then he had one that made him remember why he had signed up for the job in the first place: Five detailed paragraphs, explaining symbols, finding complimentary images, referring to two other relevant works of literature, making a solid thesis, and a conclusion discussing its significance for young Lee. It filled A. P. with pleasure that he would remember weeks later. A. P. silently confessed that even though he had been teaching literature for twenty years, he could not have written such a good essay in less than an hour himself.

He turned to his right where he subconsciously expected to see a table mate and say, “You’ve got to see this one!” Only there is no one there. There is not even a way to flag it to show to the Table Leader. At least the lockdown at the reading a couple of years ago was with other English teachers.

The maintenance supervisor has headed out the door with A. P.’s Starbucks order as the ONE program dinged to tell him someone has posted a chat. A. P. turned to his computer screen to read an essay exclaiming how challenging it is for someone to do things in a different way. Miss Lee, we have all run into that this year.

June 2020

For another work inspired by an A.P. Exam question, click here.

The House on Mango Street – Review

Sandra Cisneros. The House on Mango Street. 1984; Vintage, 2009.

The House on Mango Street was mentioned a number of years ago on the Advanced Placement English Literature Exam.1 I happened across a copy and decided to pick it up.

The House on Mango Street is a collection of sketches. Nearly all of them are three pages or less. They do not so much tell a story as give a sense of place and time. Mango Street in Chicago is where the narrator Esperanza and her family move when she is junior high age. It may have been set in a certain place and time (the sixties) but the tales are universal.

The sketches mostly describe the various people and families that live on the street and attend Esperanza’s school. She gradually becomes more aware of the world around her and more aware of what it means to be growing up.

Probably the most engaging chapter is entitled “The Family of Little Feet.” Esperanza and two of her middle school friends try on some high heels and strut around the neighborhood. It is the first time that some of the men and boys notice them. The experience is both exhilarating and scary. It shows her the effect a young woman can have on men, but it also suggests something that Esperanza is not ready for.

There are winners and losers. There is a young bride whose husband turns out to be abusive. (There is an undercurrent of abuse in a number of the sketches.) Some people in the neighborhood are destined to rise up and out as the American Dream comes true for them. Others, tempted by drugs and crime, will waste their lives.

Some of the people look back. Esperanza envies one friend who still speaks of her hometown in Mexico. They go back to visit, and some day, her friend tells her, she will return to live there. Others, like Esperanza herself, are not so much uprooted as unrooted, to coin a term. She rattles off all the streets they lived on before Mango Street. Now her family owns the house, but she is not sure that is where she belongs.

Cisneros at heart is a poet, and these sketches are more like prose poems. There is a tenderness and attention to detail that come through.

Back in the eighties, when Salinger was still very much alive, a student asked me why we did not read Catcher in the Rye in class. She loved the book and some of her friends at another school had studied it in their English class. I told her that it was written by a contemporary American, and you are a contemporary American. You do not need a teacher to understand it, other than maybe a few symbols you might miss. I would rather spend time with a book that you need a teacher for.

To illustrate, back in the eighties I used to feel that way about The Great Gatsby. I do not any more. Back then my students knew people who had fought in World War I and remembered the Roaring Twenties. Even many of the songs in the book were ones they had heard. A lot of them had seen gangster films set in the twenties. I have taught the book in some classes for about fifteen years now. Many of the students have not even heard of Al Capone these days.

Anyway, I would certainly recommend The House on Mango Street to any student taking the English Literature AP test or not, but I would honestly not know how to teach it. Cisneros is still with us. She is a contemporary American. The book speaks for itself.

Note

1 By the way, your reviewer will be taking part in the Advanced Placement Exam reading for the next week starting tomorrow. We will all have things to learn this year with the combination of the manner in which the test was given online and with the new essay scoring system.

The Last Sword Maker – Review

Brian Nelson. The Last Sword Maker. Blackstone, 2019.

At one point in The Last Sword Maker there is an epigraph that quotes H.G. Wells writing about “atomic bombs” in 1914. Thirty years before the first actual atomic bomb and only a few years after Einstein discovered the significance of E=mc2, Wells was imagining the potential destructive power of atomic energy.

The Last Sword Maker does something similar with nanotechnology. As Wells turned some of his speculation into popular fiction, so author Brian Nelson speculates on possibilities of nanotechnology as a weapon. In doing so, he has created a real techno-thriller.

As I write, I am still waiting out the coronavirus scare.

We read in the novel that hundreds of villagers in Tibet are dying of a mysterious disease that seems to be very selective about who is killed. It is as if the virus is political. We soon discover that the Chinese have created what amounts to man-made viruses, like invisible drones, that identify their victims by their DNA, enter their bodies, and duplicate themselves till the host dies.

At one point the author tells us “If you sat twelve Tibetan men down, all but two or three of them would have served time in Chinese jails” (87). He insists that what he shares about Chinese history is accurate, even if it is not well known.

Just this week I read an article, originally published in Foreign Policy, about Chinese abductions of political enemies from foreign soils. Nelson has the Chinese abduct a number of his main characters from the United States, not because they are political enemies but because the Chinese want their technical know-how. They want to beat the United States in creating a sophisticated man-made nanovirus weapon.

Their cause? The same cause that has been the cause for all brutal regimes in the last century and a half: “the tide of history” (268). But we realize its force comes not so much historical inevitability as it does from something else.

Yet, there was a powerful system controlling these people. And that was the other thing he felt in the Great Lab: fear. (316, Italics in original)

Why do we hear little about such things in the West? We all know the answer: “They were all too afraid of upsetting the great economic behemoth” (54).

The Last Sword Maker, though, is not a political tract.

Wunderkind Eric Hill, Admiral James Curtiss, and others are working on an American top secret project to create microscopic nanocomputers called nanosites that can replicate themselves, acquire information, and perhaps be used as a sophisticated and virtually invisible weapon.

There are many twists and turns. Admiral Curtiss carries some guilt for the loss of life in a successful war operation years ago in the Middle East. Now he may be faced with something similar. The Americans have spies in the Chinese facility; the Chinese have spies in the American facility. Will the Chinese steal American technology for their weapons the way the Soviets stole plans for the atomic bomb during the Cold War?

This is a big deal. Like some of Wells’ writings, there is an element of science fiction here, but this is not far-out technology like Star Wars hyperspace. We know that nanotechnology is real. Chips are getting smaller and more powerful. They make information-gathering drones that resemble insects. We really do not have much further to go.

The story is set in 2025, only five years away. Will there be such a weapon then? It is plausible. No, no one ever built a submarine like Red October, but the technology was plausible in 1984. It is scarily not much different now with the technology Nelson is looking into.

There is one term associated with artificial intelligence in this novel that is new to me. We have heard people like Ray Kurzweil speak of singularity—the point in history when artificial intelligence will behave identically to human intelligence. Here the computer techies speak of the Big Bang (268): When they develop artificial intelligence that communicates with human intelligence so that the brain can absorb and access all the information on the World Wide Web. That appears to be a step beyond singularity. Will we be able to handle it? Or will people like the X-Men actually come into existence?

Yes, The Last Sword Maker is a thriller, and most readers who read it for that will not be disappointed. But it surely raises a lot of other interesting questions and ideas as well. Read it for the adventure; think about it afterwards for the significance of the story.

Spy Master – Review

Brad Thor. Spy Master. Pocket Books, 2019.

Spy Master is another installment in the saga of Scot Harvath, one of the two spy masters in this story. The author expresses disdain for what the CIA has become: an established bureaucracy with a middle management doing nothing out of fear of rocking the status quo. (This reviewer recalls an old saying: “What kind of person do you never find in the CIA? A Republican.)

Harvath, then, works for a private firm that does intelligence outsourcing. In some ways Spy Master is an updated version of Red Storm Rising, Tom Clancy’s second novel. That story was about a Soviet plan to take out NATO, and much of the action takes place in Iceland.

Spy Master is set in contemporary Europe, but Russia is still trying to take out NATO. First, as always, sabotage and cyberwarfare get NATO nations arguing with one another. These are followed by plans to gain control of the Baltic Sea as in the old Soviet days.

Instead of Iceland, much of the action takes place on another Nordic island, the Swedish island of Gotland in the Baltic. Russia figures that if they can control this relatively sparsely populated landmass, they can control access to the Baltic Sea and the Baltic lands Russia still covets: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland.

Harvath develops a clever plan which not only thwarts a Russian planned tactical occupation of Gotland, but in doing so, he learns the identity of the Russian (the other spy master) behind the disruption of NATO and the planned invasion of the Baltic region.

Throughout the novel, Thor emphasizes the importance of teamwork. To do a good job, one has to have skilled and reliable people working together. Harvath is no lone wolf James Bond character. Success also requires a certain amount of luck. I have to confess there was one situation towards the end where the luck seemed unrealistic, but otherwise this is an entertaining tale.

Just as back in 1987 something like Red Storm Rising might have happened, so with our current international alignments something like Spy Master is within the realm of possibility.

The Jungle Book & The Second Jungle Book – Reviews

Rudyard Kipling. The Jungle Book. Amazon Classics, 2017.
———. The Second Jungle Book. Amazon Services, 2012.

Kipling’s Jungle Books are two collections of stories, but the majority of the stories tell us about Mowgli, “the man-cub,” raised by wolves in the Indian jungle. Those tales rightly deserve the credit for why we remember these stories. First, a few of the others.

The first non-Mowgli story in The Jungle Book is not even set in the jungle. “The White Seal” is set mostly on an island in the Bering Sea, about as un-jungly (if there is such a term) as you can get. The title character has a number of adventures as he searches the Pacific Ocean for a safe place to breed, away from the seal hunters.

Since the white seal ends up in a sea where sea cows (i.e. dugongs) live, he must end up in the Indian Ocean or nearby seas, so, I suppose, he cannot be too far from a tropical rain forest of some kind. The seals do not have a Law of the Jungle, but they do observe the Rules of the Beach.

“Quiquern” is a very entertaining Arctic survival story. There is no setting farther from the jungle than this one. Well, there is a convoluted explanation at the end that the author got the story from a walrus tusk with carvings that told the story that he acquired in Ceylon (modern Sri Lanka). Like so many of Kipling’s stories, there is a real appreciation and understanding for the culture and survival skills of the Inuit—and, yes, that is what he calls them.

The Second Jungle Book contains a sweet story called “The Miracle of Purun Bhagat.” Sir Purun Dass is high ranking government official who leaves it all behind to become a monk in the Himalayan foothills. He develops a kind of St. Francis reputation, though the author notes that people who stay still and quiet can have animals come close to them. There is no magic other than patience. Ultimately, his awareness of the local fauna provokes him to once again act like the political leader he left behind. That becomes the real miracle.

Other Jungle Book stories include the favorite about the mongoose, “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi.” “Toomai of the Elephants” relates a great story about elephant behavior. Is the elephant’s dance a legend, a prank played on tenderfeet, a silly cliche like saying “when pigs fly,” or is it something else?

“Her Majesty’s Servants” tells a story from the perspective of the various animals one might find in an English army camp in India in the nineteenth century including donkeys, horses, camels, elephants, mules, bulls, and dogs. This reminded me of Kipling’s short story “The Ship that Found Itself” where all the parts of the ship on its maiden voyage begin to work together as a whole. So it is with the military animals. Presumably, it will be so with the solders themselves.

Ah, but both Jungle Books mostly tell us about the growth and adventures of Mowgli. While a boy raised in the wild by wolves causes us to suspend our disbelief some, the character and experiences of the animals in Mowgli’s jungle are fairly realistic. It is, for example, much easier to picture Mowgli among wolves and the descriptions of how he survived and what he observed than it is to picture Tarzan and his apes and his fantastical ape-men. If Kipling had the same streak of humor that Twain did, he might have penned “Rice Burroughs Literary Offenses.” Kipling is the realist here.

While most of Mowgli’s adventures are in the wild, he does have some interaction with people. Human nature being what it is,some people think he is evil and try to kill him. Others are grateful to him for saving their lives. One long-lived crocodile enjoys the special treatment he gets from some villagers who think he is a god—even though he occasionally eats a child.

While Mowgli lives by the Law of the Jungle, he uses his wits in such a way that the reader realizes he is, indeed, a human being, a homo sapiens. Mowgli means “frog,” which resembles his state when the animals find him—small and hairless. We see his cleverness especially when he gets his revenge on Shere Khan the tiger or when he outwits a pack of nearly two hundred dholes. He begins to realize that he does not quite fit in when spring mating season comes and even his closest companions are otherwise occupied.

Kipling tells the stories and tells them well. We see the regal black panther, Bagheera; the observant python, Kaa; the various members of the wolf pack, including Akela the noble leader; the wise bear, Baloo; the anarchic monkeys who follow no law; and even the white cobra who guards a treasure the way dragons in Norse myths do. We learn to appreciate the animals for who they are, and even mankind for who they are. The Law of the Jungle teaches them to survive. We can learn a thing or two from it as well.

Book Reviews and Observations on the English Language