Geraldine Brooks. People of the Book. Viking, 2008.

People of the Book has two meanings in this novel. Readers probably recognize the term. It is the Islamic term referring to the monotheists, Jews, Christians, and Muslims, since all three have scriptures they consider inspired by God. But in this novel it also refers to a group of people involved in a specific religious book, the Sarajevo Haggadah.

The gorgeous Sarajevo Haggadah actually does exist and has an interesting story behind it. However, this is a novel and is made up. Still, it does tell stories where the three faiths come together, as they did historically in Sarajevo. We also read about Spain before the Expulsion in 1492 and Venice in the early 1600s.

Nearly half the story takes place in 1996, where Australian manuscript restorer Hanna Heath has been summoned to Sarajevo to repair as authentically as possible this rare illuminated book.

A Haggadah is a book that outlines a liturgy for the Passover Seder, the ritual family meal that accompanies the Passover celebration (see Exodus 12:14-18). Not only is this Haggadah old, probably from the fifteenth century, but it is illuminated. It uses inks typical of Medieval Christian manuscripts and has pictures of the episodes from Exodus that the holiday celebrates and illustrations of a family or families observing the Seder.

That makes this book extraordinary. Jews traditionally took the Second Commandment about making idols very literally. Until the late nineteenth century, Jews did not participate in the arts other than design and calligraphy. But here is something from the Middle Ages that depicts people and historical figures.

The book’s survival is also something of a miracle. First, we read about the German invasion of Yugoslavia in 1940. Sarajevo notably had a Mosque, Synagogue, and Orthodox Church side by side in the same central square. Not only did the Germans round up most of the Jews and destroy the synagogue, but they specifically looked into libraries and museums for Jewish writings and other works by Jews. The Haggadah did manage to survive. Brooks shares a scenario that could have happened.

There we meet the Muslim curator of the museum. Though fictional, he is based on a real person who did help conceal the Haggadah and help some Jews escape. We also meet Lola, a Jewish teenager who manages to escape the Nazis and join a group of partisans in the mountains. Sadly, or ironically, the curator would be accused of being a collaborator by the Communists when they take over Yugoslavia. (When the truth comes out years later, he and his wife will be recognized as righteous Gentiles by Yad Veshem.)

We also meet a Father Vistorini in 1609 Venice. He is a linguist and is often asked by the Inquisition to determine whether certain books should be placed on the Index. He allows the Haggadah to pass muster. While the story is completely fictional, it is based on the fact that the real Haggadah had a note by a Father Vistorini that the Haggadah had been accepted to have nothing heretical in it. “Nihil obstat” as the imprimatur would say.

This also may be historically significant because Venice was where the original Geto was. Jews were tolerated in Venice as long as they lived in the part of the city that used to be an ironworks, or geto in Italian.

The Sarajevo Haggadah also says something about Seville. We know that before 1492 Jews, Catholics, and Muslims lived together somewhat harmoniously in Spain. When the Moors were driven out in 1492, both Muslims and Jews were forced to either convert to Catholicism or leave the country. We meet a Jewish calligrapher in Spain who does the Hebrew lettering for the illustrated pages he has received from a wealthy relative. No sooner is the job done than the order for expulsion comes. His daughter ends up fleeing the land with the manuscript and her baby nephew.

We also meet the Moorish teen girl who is captured and enslaved in the early 1400s and taken to Spain where she becomes the attendant of an Andalusian queen. Andalusia was Moorish as was its king, but the king favored his Christian wife out of all the wives he had. Zarah, the slave girl, has a talent for art which makes her favored. She paints pictures of the queen, which the king admires. This is somewhat scandalous to the stricter Muslims there in Spain at the time, not only because the king favors an infidel wife but because he tolerates making images of living people. Jews and Muslims traditionally have had similar proscriptions about making images.

We also meet a somewhat destitute binder in Vienna in the late nineteenth century. He is commissioned to rebind the Haggadah, but he takes some shortcuts, and his wealthy patron helps himself to the silver clasp that had been on the book. The Jewish patron has that converted to some earrings for his mistress.

Hanna, our Australian restorer, appears throughout the book as chapters go back and forth between 1996 and the past episodes. Besides the various challenges she has in restoring the book and trying to publish a piece on its history, she has a family problem to resolve. She was raised by a high-powered neurosurgeon single mother. She has no idea who her father is, and even though Hanna has an international reputation, her mother is disappointed in her. That conflict comes to a somewhat surprising climax.

There are also some interesting clues to the provenance of the Haggadah. The manuscript has tucked in it a hair, an insect’s wing, some wine spots, and some salt grains. Hanna consults various experts who can help her analyze these things and perhaps put together a story line about this unique piece.

Hanna’s mother is a feminist, so Hanna is raised that way. We would say she is “liberated.” Several of the males are Muslim. The Vienna patron is completely secular. There is a lot of sexual contact in story. I am happy to say this does not extend to the wartime museum curator, the rabbi, or the priest, but the novel is a product of its time.

The novel ends with a couple of short chapters set in 2002. These act as a kind of epilogue, but also as a resolution. There are some surprises.

One recurring theme is the same as the theme of Fiddler on the Roof. Living as a Jew is like being a fiddler on a roof. You try to keep your balance, but you never know what will happen. Persecution of the Jews is a recurring theme. If nothing else, it makes the reader understand why having a homeland in Israel is so important to many Jews today.

I had to laugh about one thing in this book. We had just finished The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. In the narrator’s ramblings on mathematics, he presents a proof of the so-called Monty Hall Problem. If your prize is behind one of three doors. You choose one door. Another door is opened to reveal that the prize is not behind that door. Do you keep the door you chose or choose the other door that remains?

Parade Magazine had a proof that the odds were better by choosing the other door. Many people wrote in to complain that the odds were fifty-fifty. Christopher in The Curious Incident tries to prove that the odds are better by changing your choice. In People of the Book a gambler is given a similar choice, but explains why the odds are still fifty-fifty! (186) Can this problem be resolved? Also, I have to say, what a coincidence that two books I read in sequence would have the same math problem but present the two different solutions. What are the odds of that?

Mark Haddon. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Vintage, 2003.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time had been on my to-read list for a while. The reviews all seemed positive, but the title caught my attention. Just as Infinite Jest gets its title by quoting Shakespeare, so this book’s title quotes a Sherlock Holmes story. There is indeed a mystery, but it is solved halfway through the book. Still, the story will keep most readers attention.

The narrator, fifteen-year-old Christopher Boone, is what we used to call an idiot savant, not unlike Dustin Hoffman in The Rain Man. Now we say he is autistic. He really is a fascinating character and a unique narrator.

The mystery happens right away. A neighbor’s dog is killed one night by someone impaling it onto the ground with a pitchfork. Christopher discovers the dog, picks it up, and continues to hold onto it while the police arrive. Being autistic, he hates to be touched, and hits the policeman who tries to question him. Christopher is immediately in trouble. His father explains his son’s condition, and he is released with a warning.

Christopher, a Sherlock Holmes fan, immediately wants to solve the mystery. Who could have killed (he uses the word murdered) the dog? The police and his father tell him to mind his own business. The single divorcee who owned the dog is not interested in his help either. Still, we can understand something of Christopher’s single-mindedness.

The narrative style is inimitable. That is the book’s real strength. We see things from an autistic youth’s perspective. Basically, he does not know how to filter things. He takes everything in at once. For example, on a vacation once many years ago, his family (father, mother, and him) stopped by a cow pasture. He can still recall there were nineteen cows, four brown and fifteen black and white. He begins to share the pattern of black and white on each of the cows.

That is why, for example, he hates crowds. There are too many people and too many things being said: He cannot keep track of them all. Once, he was taking a train from where he lives in Western England to London. He huddled on a bench in the station for hours because the stimulation was too much. He finally did get on a train, but it was a complicated procedure for him.

He also credits one of his teachers for telling him how most other people see things. He does not necessarily understand why or how they do filter things, but he does understand that most people are different from him.

He is very concrete. He hates metaphors because they are lies. However, similes are fine because they use like or as, so we understand the comparisons are not exactly the same. Although, his mother was part of the family when he was younger, he now lives alone with his widower father. The real crisis in his life comes not from the dog investigation but when he thinks his father has lied to him. How can he tolerate him?

Because he is very concrete, he is very good at math (maths in England). He hopes to pass his A exam in maths so he can go on to college. He prides himself in his logic, but his logic fails him with anything abstract or theoretical. For example, he takes certain theories of cosmology as fact, even though they are mere theories and not everyone agrees on them. He also is certain God does not exist. He has trouble understanding most jokes. And, as is true with many autistic people, forget facial expressions.

When discussing detective stories, he warns us about red herrings. He goes into some detail about The Hound of the Baskervilles, a story he really likes. He can identify with the intelligent but detached Sherlock Holmes. Yes, The Hound of the Baskervilles does involve dogs, but the story is a red herring. The title quotation comes from “Silver Blaze.” If the reader knows how Holmes solved that mystery, he would come close to solving the mystery of the neighbor’s dog. I can say no more.

The narration of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time carries us along. It does get complicated, and there is a lot more to it and to the conflict in the story than just the death of the dog. It is rich. I can see why it has been so critically acclaimed. It also is not afraid to challenge our current tide of relativism. This novel makes it clear that truth exists and that humanity is and ought to be committed to discovering truth, wherever it may take us.

Having said that, my library has this as a young adult (i.e., early teen) title. Considering that the narrator is fifteen, that is understandable. However, I could not help think of the film Billy Elliot. That is about preadolescent boys, but the foul language just keeps on coming. Do people in England really talk like that? The book’s narrator, very literal as he is, quotes a lot of foul language. Some young adult readers or parents of such youths may find the language distressing. If that does not bother you, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is a gripping narrative.

Leland Ryken. Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Crossway, 2014.
———. Homer’s Odyssey. Crossway, 2013.

These two books are like Christian Cliff Notes because they do follow the action of the two works they analyze scene by scene in Hamlet and book by book in the Odyssey. But they provide insightful commentary for any teacher or student of these two exemplary works. Ryken quotes one well-known critic that the Odyssey is the best story every told. Sandburg famously called Hamlet “the greatest play the inkfish Shakespeare ever wrote.” These two gems are cleanly dissected in these two books.

Both books have the same format: those step by step analyses come between and introduction and conclusion. In addition, there are marginal notes with specific observations about specific lines or happenings that provide a lot of the thought behind these books. The introduction includes a summary of what makes good literature, the same in both books, before it goes onto general observations about each work. There are plenty of references to other critics and opposing interpretations. There is also a short appendix defining relevant literary terms for each work.

Here are some of the observations I thought especially arresting, first about Hamlet.

If you think about it, early in the play Hamlet is being slandered by Laertes and Polonius when they both tell Ophelia to avoid Hamlet’s company. In Act 2 even though we are already seeing some of the corruption of the Danish court (Ryken does a good job of dissecting things politically), we do see some genuine grief and concern over Hamlet’s behavior. Ryken leaves the decision about whether or not Hamlet is really mad up to the audience.

Having said that, he notes that the Hamlet in the last Act is different. He is no longer acting crazy. He is no longer indecisive. Once he reads the king’s death warrant, he knows he has to take action. And he does.

Unlike some villains in Shakespeare plays, even Claudius has some conscience left. Yes, he stifles it, but the audience can see him perhaps as a little more tragic for that reason.

Ryken points out that Hamlet’s famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy is not just about suicide, but about taking “action against a sea of troubles” and “enterprises of great pith [or pitch] and moment.” This shows that he is already thinking about taking action against the king—and the price he might have to pay.

Ryken asks an interesting rhetorical question: Why so much loyalty to Claudius? The queen, Polonius, the ambassadors, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and all the members of the court treat him with respect and as the legitimate heir. Even Laertes comes around. Part of the answer is that that is the play’s conflict, plain and simple. But it also shows us that Claudius is a skilled politician and above suspicion.

Using contemporary sources, Ryken notes that the word closet meant a small sewing room or work room, not a bedroom. In many productions, inspired by Freudian interpretations, the scene between Hamlet and the queen takes place in her bedroom. He notes that when Ophelia describes first seeing Hamlet’s madness, she was sewing in her closet. No one acts shocked about that, only about Hamlet’s odd behavior.

Sometimes Hamlet is portrayed in productions as overly sensitive. Depressed, yes, but not wimpy. Probably the worst Hamlet I ever saw was a filmed theater production of a very effeminate Hamlet who was simply not believable. Ryken notes that at least two people call him a soldier, that he practices fencing daily, and he is confident that he can outduel Laertes in spite of Laertes’ reputation in Paris.

Recent productions often portray Hamlet and Ophelia as having a premarital affair. The Branagh film production has a silent flashback to that effect. In the most recent theatrical version I saw, Ophelia had a baby bump. Ryken says this about that:

These interpretations tell us more about modern sexual aberrations than Shakespeare’s play. The play leaves the question of Ophelia’s drowning uncertain and in the burial scene Ophelia is given “virgin” rites and “maiden strewments.” (64)

Some may ask, what about those songs she sings about unfaithful men? Her father’s death triggers her madness, and it was her father who warned her about men’s dirty minds. She had insisted that Hamlet’s intentions were honorable. Many have pointed out that Hamlet is a “mirror,” a word Ophelia uses to describe him. In that sense, he reflects—not partakes in—Polonius’ own youthful lusts, as Polonius himself admits to having had.

The duel at the end, among other things, shows us that life in this world is a battle between good and evil. It also sets up a scenario which gives Hamlet a chance to achieve justice—justice, which, in Hamlet’s words, comes from the direction of Providence.

The Odyssey, of course, gets some of its direction from Athena; other direction comes from mere fate. Still, Odysseus is resourceful and usually has a good understanding of his situation as he overcomes many adversities. (For what it is worth, Ryken tells us many names like Athena are spelled in various ways when transliterated into English.)

Traditionally Odysseus has been seen as a humble hero. Unlike an Achilles or a Hector, he is willing to disguise himself, to humble himself. He sees the long game. Ryken repeatedly takes that idea a step farther. Homer in the Odyssey values domesticity. Odysseus’ faithfulness to home and family is the epic’s “overriding virtue.” “Warfare destroys domestic values.” Homer compares Odysseus’s weeping at Demodocus’s tale to a widow weeping for a husband killed in battle.

Even when Odysseus appears unfaithful with Calypso and Circe, it is because they are goddesses. There are too many stories about what happens to people who try to thwart the gods’ desires. (I recall the story of Picus and Circe. Odysseus would rather go home than be turned into a woodpecker!)

This is why his shipmates fail. They are more concerned about the here and now rather than their homes or respect for the gods. Odysseus does not pass every test, but he learns from them.

Each of Odysseus’ twelve stops on his voyage home presents a test of vice vs. virtue. Here are a few:

The Cicones—The temptation to loot and take it easy on the beach vs. going home quickly. Odysseus learns from this mistake. His shipmates do not.
The Lotus Eaters—The temptation for an easy life and forgetting home vs. faithfulness to the family and homeland.
The Cyclops—Odysseus acts here like a true epic hero, unfortunately, that includes his pride. He announces his name to Polyphemus so Poseidon knows whom to attack. He should have kept with the name of Nobody.
Calypso—Becoming immortal with a life of ease vs. living like a true man with his wife and family.
Circe—She first gives men a drug to forget their homes and then gives them a drug to turn them to animals. “Forgetting one’s humanity” makes us less than human.
The Underworld—Very elemental: fear vs. courage. Odysseus honestly experiences fear, but he can overcome it.
The Phaeacians—There is a temptation to abandon home for an admirable younger “trophy wife.”

Books 8,9, and 12 each share three adventures, two briefly and one in more detail.

Though Odysseus is a relatively humble and domestic hero, this is still an epic. Odysseus has great adventures. Homer’s subject still is the warrior class. The warrior class is also the aristocratic class. That class is also his audience. That will be true through the Middle Ages (think the Round Table) until gunpowder helps democratize society. The Odyssey, though, is unlike most epics in that it celebrates the common as well as the noble. Argus the dog is a common touch. The swineherd and drover fight heroically, too.

I wonder if Elpenor and Palinurus are anagrams in Greek or Latin. Both were shipmates who had to be buried after Odysseus and Aeneas, respectively, return from the Underworld.

The bed made out of a live tree symbolizes Odysseus’s rooted marriage and the end of his wanderings. Of course, we are reminded many times of contrasting stories, especially the two sisters Helen and Clytemnestra compared to Penelope. “Agamemnon is right: ultimately, Odysseus owes the happiness of his return to the faithfulness of his wife” (72).

Homer gets it right in regard to the ideal of faithful and permanent wedded love, the importance of a harmonious and well-ordered family, the need for self-control in the face of temptations, and reverence toward the divine. (74)

Sumner Chilton Powell. Puritan Village: The Formation of a New England Town. Wesleyan U P, 1963.

Puritan Village is a close analysis of the early settlement of a Massachusetts town. It shows the problems and challenges as well as the vision of its early settlers. The book itself challenges a few stereotypes, and we begin to see that these were real people who did their best to get along with each other and live out lives that were much freer than what any of them experienced in England.

Sudbury, Massachusetts (modern Wayland and Sudbury), was settled in 1638 by people who had come across a few years earlier. Some had settled in Watertown, but all were looking for opportunities. Some were fairly wealthy, others were young men just starting out. Perhaps what is most interesting is that they came from a variety of places in England that had different local governments.

Some came from towns that had “open fields”; that is, the farmers and craftsmen could buy and sell land within the manor system. There were frequent transfers of land as people bought and sold. Much of the local government was involved with such property transfers. The earliest town leader of Sudbury, Peter Noyes, had come from Weyhill, Hampshire, and had served in various courts there. (By courts, we do not necessarily mean judicial positions but agencies or bureaus.) When he moved to North America, he was apparently used to and looking for opportunities to lead.

In the case of Weyhill, the actual lord of the land was a “near fiction.” He lived some distance and never did much except collect rents. The land belonged to the rulers, but people could buy and sell the shares of the land they worked or inhabited.

The second kind of town that the settlers came from was a manor type system where the lord was present and involved in the administration of the town. There again were a set of government workers, many part time or volunteers, to keep things running smoothly. The places where people could live and the land they could work was prescribed. The fields were not “open.” To work someone else’s allotted property was more unusual. The settlement’s namesake of Sudbury, Suffolk, in England was like that.

In some towns, much of the government was done by the church. Each village would have had its Anglican parish, and the Anglican Church was the state church. In some places the church not only gathered tithes and perhaps fined people for lack of attendance, but the church oversaw other more secular things such as the constables and maintenance of roads and bridges. A few settlers had come from Framlingham, Suffolk, which was organized this way. Sudbury’s neighboring city of Framingham, Massachusetts, was named for that English town. Apparently, even back in the 1600s, the l in Framlingham was silent.

Those who came from cities like London, of course, had a very different system with aldermen and a mayor and usually more specific laws.

One interesting detail mentioned in Puritan Village was that towns and cities that had ports were expected in time of war to provide vessels to help the navy. If they could not do that, they paid a ship money tax. Now King James I thought of levying the tax even though there was no war because the law said the king could do that without Parliament’s approval. That did not go over well, many towns ignored it, and eventually King James just let it slide.

However, James’s successor, Charles I, would try the same thing. He attempted to enforce it, and many places resisted it because England was not at war. One sees that the concept of taxation without representation was not merely an American idea. Their English forebears had already dealt with the issue. When Charles was eventually tried for treason, one of the counts against him was the illegal imposition of the ship money tax.

Puritan Village also mentions the King’s Book of Sports (a.k.a. the Declaration of Sports).This was originally published by King James I to delineate what type of sports and games would be permitted on Sunday. Charles I re-published this in 1633 and ordered that it be read in all churches. Puritan ministers especially opposed doing this because it was not related to church issues and because many of them believed all kinds of leisure activities were questionable on the Lord’s Day and they did not want to sanction such things. This would have implications for both freedom of religion and religious establishment.

If anyone has read John Bunyan’s autobiography Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, we learn that Bunyan was not especially religious growing up. He joined the Puritan army during the revolution for political reasons. When he eventually converted to Christianity, he tells us, the sin that put him under conviction was not drinking or gambling or one of the stories we often hear from those who converted as adults—it was playing sports on Sunday.

Much of Puritan Village describes the establishment of government in the town of Sudbury. It appears that for the first fifteen years, things were pretty harmonious. Most towns in Massachusetts were pretty much independent of the colonial government, so they could run things as they saw fit. There were elections and town meetings. All the citizens were much freer than they had been in England. There were no traditions or laws to which people appealed because of long tradition or “time out of mind.”

Despite all that has been written by historians damning early Massachusetts leaders for attempting to establish a “rule by Saints,” not enough attention has been paid to the essential fact that both the Bay government and the town government were accomplishing a virtual social revolution in the systems of social and economic status in each community. For the first time in their lives, the inhabitants of an English town were assuming that each adult male would be granted some land free and clear. Noyes, for example, was shifting from a village in which half the adult males were landless tenants paying yearly rents and feudal fees, to a Massachusetts town in which he had the power to grant lands to all inhabitants, according to “estates and persons.” (83)

We note that while land was allotted to adult males, widows could also receive land, and some did. The book also notes, as was typical of New England Puritans, that they did purchase land from the Indians who lived in the area. Part of the early taxes went to pay local Indians for the land.

Powell also notes that the town of Sudbury, like many town governments in New England, took care of things that churches in England often took care of. For example, weddings and births were recorded in the towns, not the churches. Those who have read Bradford’s On Plymouth Plantation note that this was a big issue. People who did not belong to the state church or did not believe in its teaching could not get married in many places in England because only the church did marriages. The secularization of such activities would also contribute to the principles of religious freedom observed by many Americans since.

A chapter titled “‘We Shall Be Judged by Men of Our Own Choosing’” notes that the churches in New England were largely Congregational. This was not just a reaction to hierarchies like the Church of England or the Catholic Church. It also was a reaction to reformers in England and Scotland who were adopting a Presbyterian system, where pastors in a region would oversee church polity and pastoral assignments. This concept was not applied just to church organization, but government as well. Yes, we can read of this in the Mayflower Compact, but it became a standard in local governments throughout New England and in many ways is the root of the representative republic Americans have today.

The issue of both religious freedom and representative government would come to a head in Sudbury around 1650. The pastor and founder of the Sudbury church, Rev. Edmund Brown, seemed to more sympathetic to the Presbyterian side. After all, shouldn’t trained and ordained ministers decide was is biblically best for the churches? By then, most of the inhabitants of Sudbury saw the Congregational model as the way to go. Since church membership also was a factor in handing out new parcels of land, this became a town issue for about five years. While the Congregational model won out, the vote at one town meeting often overturned the vote of the one before it depending on which faction could get more voters to attend. Plus ça change…

Some distrust among a few citizens developed. Powell shows that much had to do with not only the church government question, but whether people had come from an open field village or a closed field village in England. Eventually, a group of fifteen Sudbury men applied to the Massachusetts Bay Colony government to establish a new town. That was granted, and they moved a few miles to the west and began the town of Marlborough, which today is a small city.

One practice which was a holdover from English towns and villages was that any enrolled or voting citizen was expected to carry out certain duties if asked or elected to do so. These included such duties as the hay warden and the fence viewer. Powell notes fines people had to pay for not keeping up their fences and letting animals destroy other people’s fields—in both Old England and New England.

Sudbury, Massachusetts, used to have a weekly newspaper called The Fence Viewer. I had assumed that it simply referred to neighbors talking to each other over fences, but it actually referred to this old town position. Since the fence viewer would have to travel the extent of the town to inspect fences, he would be a source of news.

This also adds another dimension to Thoreau’s observation in Walden:

For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snow storms and rain storms, and did my duty faithfully; surveyor, if not of highways, then of forest paths and all across-lot routes, keeping them open, and ravines bridged and passable at all seasons, where the public heel had testified to their utility.

Towns often had such road inspectors along with fence inspectors. Thoreau’s “position,” then, not just demonstrates his interest in nature but would have had additional significance and a touch of humor to New England town dwellers even in his day.

Powell has done a thorough job of research for this book. He notes as best he can the history of each family that first settled and tries to discuss the significance of the things they did. It is a fascinating detailed study of the settlement of New England and an analysis of some of the roots of American freedoms.

Appendix
For anyone reading this book, there are references to British coins or currencies that are not familiar to many people today. While most people understand that before 1971 4 farthings equal a penny, twelve pence equal a shilling, and twenty shillings equal a pound, there are a number of terms in this book I had to look up. These are what some of the terms would have likely meant in the seventeenth century, though a few varied over time.

A mark is two thirds of a pound or thirteen shillings four pence.
A noble is eight shillings four pence.
A florin is two shillings.
A crown is five shillings.

Stuart Cohen. Invisible World. Regan, 1998.

I had read a recent article about Stuart Cohen which compared him to David Foster Wallace. I could not pass up a recent opportunity to read one of his works. Apparently, Invisible World was his first novel. I was not disappointed.

Invisible World is not for everyone. People who like Wallace or Neal Stephenson will probably get a kick out of it. It is intellectually stimulating and even philosophical, but in a very entertaining manner. In some ways it is hard to describe. It would be like saying Infinite Jest is about a teenage tennis player and some Quebec separatists. While it has no science or speculative fiction elements to it, Invisible World reminded this reader of some of the novels of Stephenson such as Cryptonomicon or The Diamond Age because of what some of the characters and the reader experience.

There is mystery. Andrew Mann’s childhood friend, Clayton Smith, now an accomplished artist in Japan but living in China, has committed suicide. Before he died, he sent plane tickets to Andrew in Chicago to attend his funeral in Hong Kong. This takes place shortly before the re-assimilation of Hong Kong into China. (The possible future of the city is a topic of discussion among a few of the characters.)

We also meet Jeffrey Holt who runs a textile import-export business out of South America and his co-worker Silvia. Silvia is a former girlfriend of Clayton. We meet a few other Chinese and Oriental acquaintances of Clayton, and we begin to see that his suicide was part of an elaborate plan.

When you were a kid, did you ever play go on a treasure hunt? Where you were given a clue which took you to another location where you got another clue, and so on, until you found your “treasure”?

Basically, that is what happens to Andrew. He goes to Hong Kong for Clayton’s funeral, where he is given directions to a place in Shanghai. The Shanghai location turns out to be an empty office of the Invisible World Trading Company, of which Andy has been told in a note from Clayton that he is president. In the Shanghai office he finds business cards to that effect.

He then goes to Beijing where he is told he will get something from an actress in a traditional Chinese opera company. And from there he ends up in Inner Mongolia. Each step reveals something valuable to certain people. Without going into it too much, the ultimate goal is a map of the Invisible World. (Gee, maybe its Andrew is a bit like the egg hunters in Ready Player One.)

Andrew means “man.” So Andrew Mann’s name simply means “a man.” At one point he is registered as A. Mann. He is a kind of everyman, an ordinary guy whose unusual childhood friend gets him caught up in some international intrigue. Andrew knows that we have to depend on other people, yet in the course of the story, nearly all the friends of Clayton he meets are out for themselves. Perhaps Clayton has seen this, and that is why he hypothesizes an invisible world. It is neither a utopia nor an escape. It can best be described as a work of the imagination, of art.

Clayton made a name for himself as a sculptor in Japan. Even Andrew, who knows little of art, appreciates their abstract beauty. But then Clayton started working in paper and cardboard and most of his newer stuff started looking like junk. Critics and art collectors lost interest.

Holt and Silvia and some of their Chinese connections specialize in cloth. While they deal in wool and silk and cotton from locations around the world, they are also collectors. Holt is caught in Peru with a piece of priceless pre-Columbian cloth. One of the “treasures” Clayton has for Andrew on his treasure hunt is a Chinese robe that was probably made for a Ming emperor—but it might just be a theater prop.

We also run into a few minority people in China such as Uyghurs and Mongols.

From my limited experience in China around the time this book came out, Cohen represents well what it would have been like to be in China in the 1990s and the motives of many people in China. Business is done very differently than in the West. So much of it is about the connections, the guanxi, literally “closed network.” How do we establish trust with others?

While this is by no means a political tract, there are some tyrants in the background. One of Holt’s friends “disappeared” during the rule of the military junta in Argentina. An older Mongol man had an American friend who fought with him against the Japanese. Certain priceless objets d’art were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution under Mao. There is a hint that Silvia’s father may have played a part in that Argentine junta. One of Clayton’s business associates belonged to the Khmer Rouge.

A recurring theme, though, is the settling of the empire. According to Chinese political philosophy, the God of Heaven sets up governments by settling a righteous person at the top. When the righteous cease to be righteous, the mandate of Heaven is lost, and Heaven has to settle a new emperor. So, Clayton seems to be saying that he wants “A. Mann” settled to rule the Invisible World. Nothing is permanent, though, in this world any more than in the real world. A Confucian explaining the mandate to Andrew, speaking of the imminent handing over of Hong Kong to China, says: “One could say the British have lost the mandate of heaven. And soon, so will the Communists” (102).

Similarly, Clayton speaks of the spirit, at least the human spirit, as an entity apart from the brain and body. The materialistic Silvia retorts, like Antonio in The Tempest: “What is a spirit? Do I need to take it out of my pocket when I pass through airport security? Maybe I did, and I forgot to take it back at the other side” (222).

I should note that Clayton has a lot to say in this story, even though he has died. Much of the story includes people remembering him and what he said. He also has left a few notes and letters to people on this treasure hunt. There is one small part in the last section where he seems to be speaking beyond the grave, but other than that, he still is the main character because what he has done motivates everyone else.

Mostly, though, the plot is a treasure hunt. We are looking for the Invisible World, the connections and places that have real meaning. At one point Clayton says we could write encyclopedias on virtually every object on earth. There is so much to learn and enjoy and discover. If the Beatles, under the influence of their oriental guru, say nothing is real, Clayton says everything is real. At times we may feel like we are trying to make sense out of randomness, but there appears to be an underlying order and purpose, even if we can only make out shadows.

At one point Clayton mentions “Sheng Du, the garden of Kublai.” Thanks to Coleridge, in English we know that as Xanadu. Does it exist? Did it? Coleridge got his information from a travelogue. But then he did something else with it. Is Coleridge’s Xanadu less real than the historical garden at Sheng Du? Ultimately, the novel Invisible World is a work of art about art itself—just like the poem “Kubla Khan.”

Michael Farris Smith. Nick. Little Brown, 2021.

I was looking forward to reading Nick. Critics seemed to like this novel supposedly about Nick Carraway, the narrator of The Great Gatsby, before he met Jay Gatsby. Perhaps my expectations were too high, but I was really disappointed.

We meet Nick on the battlefields of France in World War I. He is an infantryman and sees plenty of horror. He becomes emotionally detached from what was going on, but he tries to connect with a young woman he meets in Paris while on leave. Here they are both somewhat disconnected. They like each other, but the directions of their lives are aimed differently. Nick ends up becoming a sapper and barely manages to survive an explosion. Much of the story is really about PTSD, or shell shock, as they called it in the Great War.

This guy is not the Nick Carraway of Gatsby. First, Nick undoubtedly would have been an officer. He had graduated from college in 1915. When Jay Gatsby first meets him in The Great Gatsby, he recognizes him and tells him what unit he served with. Gatsby was a major by the end of the war. His dealings with other units would have been at the officer level. While he would have fought with weapons, he would not have been the forward sapper and otherwise basic peon that the novel describes. Anthony Patch, the Harvard-educated protagonist of The Beautiful and Damned, was a private only because he failed the officers’ physical.

There are a few minor details that appear to be anachronisms. Nick buys a cup of coffee that he carries through a railroad station. Paper cups had been invented by World War I, but cups for hot drinks did not appear until around 1940. Even in the 1950s, Dunkin’ shops had ceramic cups—it was the doughnuts that could be taken home, not the coffee.

Nick speaks of a man with a buzz cut. That term was not used for a close haircut until after the Vietnam War.

World War I provided an impetus for men to begin to use wrist watches rather than pocket watches. At one point Nick has a wrist watch, but it later gets changed into a pocket watch. My own grandfather fought in WWI. At the time he had a pocket watch. Later on, probably some time in the twenties or thirties, he started using a wrist watch. That was pretty typical. In this novel it is a bit confusing.

Instead of returning home to the Midwest, Nick decides to decamp in New Orleans. There he lives among charity cases and befriends Judah, a war veteran who had it a lot worse than Nick. Scars cover parts of Judah’s face and body. He coughs up blood and his lungs barely work thanks to an enemy chemical gas attack. Judah also understandably has PTSD, compounded by the fact that his wife has left him to become a madam of a brothel.

This second half of Nick’s story goes back and forth almost aimlessly. I guess it is to suggest a certain aimlessness of a few war veterans. Here we see the truly low side or underbelly of criminal enterprises. This is a story of thugs and street crime—not the more sophisticated side of criminal enterprises we see with Meyer Wolfsheim and the connected Jay Gatsby. There is perhaps an interesting contrast, but, again, this hardly seems to be the Nick Carraway we meet in The Great Gatsby.

There are few minor echoes of Gatsby in this story. Judah cynically says that Nick thinks he is the most honest person he knows, but Judah says he thinks the same way about himself. And the very last chapter takes Nick to West Egg and tells us how he finally met up with his family in the Midwest and decided to move to New York. It does jibe with Nick telling us in Gatsby that when he declared his interest in leaving the family business and go East, his uncles had a confab and gave him permission, and his father said he would support him for a year. There is no inkling that he had any relatives in Louisville like Daisy Fay or her parents.

No, Nick is jarring, and has little to do with the bond salesman narrator of The Great Gatsby and the cousin of Daisy Buchanan who talks about the people in Chicago whom he has recently seen—no mention of them in this book. He does pass through Chicago on his way home, but says little about it.

However, something else is going on. The sense of detachment as in “Soldier’s Home” or “In Another Country,” the failed love affair like “The End of Something” or A Farewell to Arms, the suggestion of a miscarriage/abortion as in “Hills Like White Elephants” or A Farewell to Arms, a mother with some mental problems like “Indian Camp” and others, the whole PTSD theme as in “A Way You’ll Never Be” and others, the drinking and oblivion of “The Three Day Blow” or The Sun Also Rises, the crude boxers or street fighters as in “The Battler” or “The Light of the World” tell us that this is not a prequel to Fitzgerald but to Hemingway. This “Nick” is not Nick Carraway but Nick Adams.

Spencer Quinn. Bark to the Future. Forge, 2022.

We have previously noted that since we have been reviewing books here (we started around 2010). we have read more Spencer Quinn books than books by any other author. There is a reason. We really like Chet and Bernie.

As usual, the title does not have a whole lot to do with the story, but in this case there is a hint. The film Back to the Future involves a high school student who time travels to the future. In Bark to the Future Bernie sort of goes back in time. He ends up connecting or meeting a bunch of people he went to high school with.

It more or less starts with Bernie stopping by the side of the road to help a homeless beggar that we sometimes see in such situation. I suspect it is probably more common in warmer areas like Arizona than where we live. It turns out that the scruffy beggar recognizes Bernie. Bernie does not recognize the beggar, now skinny with a beard and long straggly hair. It turns out that the man played baseball with Bernie on their high school team. He was two grades ahead of Bernie. Martin “Rocket” Saluka got his nickname because he was such a fast runner.

Clearly, Bernie is surprised at Rocket’s current condition. Slowly, he discovers that Rocket has made a mess of his life. Part of his problem is understandable. His father was connected with organized crime and was sentenced to life imprisonment for murdering his mother. Rocket now lives at a tent city behind a Catholic Church in a rundown part of town on the edge of the desert. The priest, Father Doug Plumtree, oversees the needs of the folks in the tent city and has been helping Rocket get his life back together.

Rocket has suggested to Bernie that something happened at a narrow canyon in the desert (they call them slit canyons) that is popular with hikers looking for a challenge. Bernie and Chet hike there only to discover the body of Father Plumtree. Bernie suspects foul play but the medical examiner rules it an accident. On the other hand, the sheriff there is an old acquaintance of Bernie’s who sides with Bernie’s understanding of the situation.

Bernie returns to the tent city to see how Rocket is doing, but Rocket has gone. A woman who was friendly with Father Doug and who helped at the tent city understands Bernie’s concern about Rocket. When they go to Rocket’s tent, Chet the dog digs up a distinctive switchblade knife, one that Rocket had shown to Bernie. Its handle has the image of a skull with jade green eyes. Much of the story from that point on involves the history of the knife. The woman hires Bernie to find Rocket and figure out what truly happened to Father Doug.

Bernie takes the knife to a friend who runs a pawnshop and who knows a lot about weapons. It turns out that the knife was made by the friend himself when he was fourteen years old. The last he knew, it had been owned by a chemistry teacher at Chisholm High, Bernie and Rocket’s alma mater. Everyone connected with the high school back when they were there remember them. Bernie pitched and Rocket played outfield for the baseball team when they won a championship.

Shortly after the only time that the chemistry teacher Mr. Kepler showed the knife to his AP chemistry class, the knife disappeared. Kepler is retired now, but tells Bernie some of the story of the knife. There were only six students in the class, and he only showed the knife to that one class, so he suspects one of the six must have had it. Rocket was not in that AP class; in fact, he dropped out before graduating. Kepler kept the knife locked in a cabinet in his classroom, and as far as he knew, he had the only key. There was no sign of the lock being damaged, so someone must have figured out how to unlock the cabinet.

That is the basic mystery.

Bernie then questions various people from his high school to find out more about Rocket and the AP class. He is able to question nearly everyone still living from the AP class. It turns out that one member of the class who has died was the sister of a girl who Bernie took his junior prom. Well, she has been declared dead since there was a witness who said that she fell or jumped from a cliff in the slit canyon though her body has never been found.

His former prom date is recently divorced and tries to flirt with Bernie, but Bernie needs information. Other members of the AP class include a woman who knew Rocket but, unlike him, cleaned up her drug habit and is now trying to operate a restaurant. There is also the former football player who now is a big real estate developer—not as big as Trump, but big in the region.

And then there is a guy that only Chet seems to notice because of the same scent appearing in several different places. Too bad Chet cannot talk to Bernie the way he talks to us.

That is, of course, the continued attraction of reading the Chet and Bernie mysteries. We see things from the dog’s perspective—scents, food, loyalty, suspicion of other dogs. One little gem:

Sometimes you’ll see humans sniff under their arms and make a face or say, yikes. Imagine not liking your own scent! Where would you go from there? (281)

It takes some sleuthing, some diving, some old photos to solve the mystery. Also contributing are regulars in many of the stories like Weatherly the police officer, Suzie the reporter, and Bernie’s son Charlie. We also meet the current principal of Chisholm High, the baseball coach (the same coach who coached Bernie and Rocket), and a few other residents of the tent city. There are organized criminals and a drug dealer, too. It makes for a varied and interesting search.

If there is a flaw, it is simply that one of the criminal actors was predictable early in the story, not because of any evidence, but because of who he was. Hollywood often types people with certain financial positions as criminals. It is a cliché. Nevertheless, Bernie and Chet do solve the crime. Indirectly, Chet also helps young Charlie overcome a social difficulty. The stories are still pretty rich.

Colson Whitehead. The Underground Railroad. Fleet, 2017.

The Underground Railroad novel won a number of prizes when it came out. I had an opportunity to read it to see what it was all about.

The Underground Railroad starkly tells a story of slaves in the ante-bellum South. It focuses on Cora, a field worker on a Georgia cotton plantation who manages to escape her bonds. But even after she escapes there is a question if she is really free. It is profound on the symbolic level.

Cora lives on the cotton plantation where she was born. She lived with her mother Mabel who told her stories about her own life and the life of Cora’s grandmother who was sold into slavery from Africa. When Cora is eleven, Mabel escapes, leaving Cora behind. Few slaves make it to freedom in this novel. The patrollers and slave hunters almost seem to have a sixth sense, yet they will find it harder to make a living as time goes on.

Of Mabel there was no sign. No one had escaped the Randall plantation before. The fugitives were always clawed back, betrayed by friends, they misinterpreted the stars and ran deeper into the labyrinth of bondage. On their return they were abused mightily before being permitted to die and those they left behind were forced to observe the grisly increments of their demise. (48)

With her mother gone, Cora is now a “stray,” a black slave with no attachments. She lives in a barracks type cabin they call the Hob with other stray women slaves. She makes few friends. She is beaten badly when she tries to intercede for a boy who is being beaten by the master. When even the boy has nothing to do with her afterwards, she decides it is hard to trust anyone. After all, her own mother left her.

Still, one slave convinces her to come with him to flee north. Caesar is different from the other slaves. His parents were the only slaves owned by a Virginia widow. He was taught to read and write, and he learned a trade. He and his parents thought that eventually they would be freed, but the widow died without a will and he was sold to traders who in turn sold him to the plantation in Georgia.

One night they escape through the nearby swamp and manage to find a station on the Underground Railroad. Here the magical realism kicks in. Readers of Going After Cacciatto might recall the underground tunnels dug by the Viet Cong that go all the way to Paris. Similarly, the Underground Railroad in this story is a literal railroad dug under the earth and maintained by abolitionist stationmasters. No one is in charge, no one knows who dug the tunnels or provided the trains. In other words, its conception is a lot like the actual Underground Railroad. It worked because no one knew anything more than they had to.

The adventures in various ways reflect the black experience in the United States. Even when free, there are obstacles to overcome. The railroad drops Caesar and Cora off in an “enlightened” city in South Carolina where blacks live in dormitories, receive an education, and have decent paying jobs. They are also encouraged to be sterilized so that they can have more opportunities in the future. “This is just a chance for you to take control of your own destiny” (135).

The language they use is precisely that of today’s feminists and others who promote abortion—but, after all, Planned Parenthood began as a movement to keep undesirables and “racial defectives” from having children. So Cora realizes this “liberation” was simply a way of keeping blacks down:

“Torture them as much as you can when they are on this earth, then take away the hope that one day their people will have it better” (139).

She also learns that some of the people the doctors are interviewing and studying are being infected with venereal disease—echoes of various experiments done selectively on blacks. When the railroad takes her to another spot, there are hangings and fear-mongering about Negroes. She manages to find freedom of sorts when she makes it North, but even there, in spite of private support and legal land ownership, things are stacked against her.

At one point we meet some black activists in a northern state who present different approaches to how free blacks should integrate or relate to the American culture at large. They in very general terms represent the positions of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois in the early Twentieth Century. Such positions change over time. When I was in college in the sixties and seventies, we all read Martin Luther King, Jr. A college student in the eighties told me that King was out—now everyone read Malcolm X. That was thirty years ago. But the King-X difference is not unlike that between Washington and DuBois. I wonder who they read in colleges now…

Going into more detail would give too much of the story away. We meet a few stationmasters—abolitionists in the South who do their best to help—but it is a struggle for them, too. We also meet some slave hunters, one in particular who at first is quite effective but gets caught up in his own evil. Sadly, no one repents. Starkly realistic, but there is a magical quality as well. There may be some hope at the end.

Because of the element of magical realism in the novel, the reader is tempted to compare The Underground Railroad to other books by African American authors, especially those using magical realism. It did not have the impact on this reader as Song of Solomon did. It does not have the beauty of The Known World. That perhaps is unfair because those two books are true gems. Song of Solomon led to Morrison’s Nobel Prize, after all.

The book I thought of was an earlier classic, namely, James Baldwin’s Another Country. The chief protagonist has spent a number of years in France and returns to America. The title is thematic. If a black man wants freedom, he must go to another country (as DuBois did). Cora is still searching.

While in no way pornographic, there are some sexual incidents and language that may not be everyone’s cup of tea.

Greg Mills. Author’s Guide to SuperComputer Translation. Amazon, 2022.

Author’s Guide to SuperComputer Translation is an introduction to the challenges of using available computer power to translate documents and books into various languages. This is meant primarily for self-publishing, but one would think that publishing companies would be interested as well.

The author explains that he only knows English, but he has figured a simple safeguard to insure accurate translation; namely, using the translation programs to translate the final result back into English and compare it with the original. If the translation programs are effective, there will only be minor differences.

The author has used this technique to translate a book he wrote that now sells on Amazon in numerous different countries in 70 languages. This accomplishes at least two purposes: It opens up opportunities to sell more copies, and it gives the chance for your ideas to spread to many cultures.

Using computers rather than translators can be quicker and it is free from bias. It is not foolproof, but it can be useful, especially when translating things into different cultures. Writers do want to choose the best original words they can, avoiding idiom when possible. The book itself, for example, has a foreword rather than an introduction because foreword means only one thing while introduction has several meanings. The translation will more likely hit the mark with the more specific term.

This book in some ways is an infomercial or advertorial. The author has been experimenting with this for several years and is now open for business. The book includes his terms and prices—compared to hiring a translator, they are very reasonable.

An acquaintance of mine, like Mills, has been in Christian ministry and wrote a book reflecting some of his teachings. He self-published and sold a few copies, but decided to make his book available in downloadable format for free. Readers from India and China translated the book into Hindi and Mandarin. Since then he has had over 190,000 downloads, most of them in the translated languages. Granted, there would be fewer downloads if he charged money for the book, but his experience shows that there is potential indeed for this kind of service.

Jack McLean. Loon: A Marine’s Story. Presidio, 2009.

The Loon of this book’s title is not the aquatic bird or a lunatic. It was the name the military gave to a hill in South Vietnam near the North Vietnamese and Cambodian borders. So, yes, part of this is a war story, but it is more. It is a nearly unique perspective on a way American culture changed in the 1960s. This is the author’s own story of how he enlisted in the Marines in 1965, served and fought in Vietnam, and how he attempted to adapt when he returned to the United States in 1968 and entered Harvard as a freshman.

Very simply, when McLean joined the Marines in 1965, there was a sense of patriotism and pride both about the military and the country. No one was using the word war to describe what was happening in Vietnam. When he was released in the summer of 1968, patriotism had died for many Americans, and the military was looked down upon if not reviled. In telling his own story, McLean shows us how this change in the country was happening.

On the draft, he writes:

If you were called, you served.
In the fifties, it was that simple.
The change began in the 1960s. The escalating war in Vietnam played a role, as did a feeling of privilege and entitlement among many in the baby boom generation. (11)

McLean himself came from what we would call an elite background. His grandfather was a Congressman. His father worked for John D. Rockefeller III. He attended the exclusive Phillips Andover Academy, where George W. Bush was one of his classmates.

By staying in school, manipulating the local draft boards, and exercising political influence, the country’s educated class was able to avoid war service almost completely. Thereby, the coming war in Vietnam would be the first American conflict fought almost exclusively by the lower classes of American society. (12)

College admissions back then was more elitist, too. Of the 251 boys in his academy’s graduating class, over 50 went to Harvard, 25 went to Yale, 20 to Princeton, and 12 to Stanford. Most of the others went to other prestigious schools such as other Ivies like Dartmouth, the “little Ivies” like Amherst, MIT, Duke, and so on. You get the idea.

McLean admitted he was not ready for more college. It took him five years to graduate high school, and he barely passed math even in the fifth year. He wanted to do something else. Because he knew he would be subject to the draft, he looked into the military. A good family friend and administrator at Andover had been in the Marines. McLean said that this friend not only supported him but “made a consoling telephone call to my stunned father” (25).

This friend wrote him a letter congratulating him and giving him a sense of what he was getting into. The Marines would turn him into “a vehicle to their own ends.” The Corps had been making marines for two hundred years. They knew how to do it.

To achieve these ends, it was necessary—critical—that each recruit be immediately and fiercely torn down as far as he could be taken and then slowly—ever so slowly—brought back up as an operating unit of the larger whole. (36)

I had a similar experience as I went through training in the Coast Guard. I recall writing a friend to tell him it was as if the first 21 years of my life did not matter. Whatever branch you enter, they want you to become one of them. It is important that you are able to work together. McLean would observe several times that a single marine was no different from anyone else, but two marines “are capable of anything,” that the “whole was considerably stronger than the sum of its parts.”

He shares an experience that was nearly identical to one I had. In 2002 the area in and around Washington, D.C., was subject to a total of 17 apparently random sniper attacks. News outlets and people I knew speculated that the attacks must have been done by a trained military sniper. Both McLean and I would try to explain to people that anyone in the military who used an M-16 or similar modern rifle could have done it. It turned out that most of the actual shooting was done by a seventeen year old high school dropout. It is not rocket science.

Most of the book is devoted to McLean’s experience in Vietnam. He saw some fighting shortly after he first arrived, but not much. Most of his tour he was stationed at an outpost near the DMZ (Demilitarized Zone, the wide border between North and South Vietnam) that the North Vietnamese did not seem interested in. Still fighting was never far away. Always in the background were exploding ordnance, flying aircraft, and shooting firearms. When he returned to the States, he found the relative quiet, even in cities, unsettling and taking some getting used to.

If there is a recurring theme in this book it is simply this—from the perspective of one of the men on the ground, it seemed that America had lost its desire to win. Indeed, the North Vietnamese would admit they lost their Tet Offensive in early 1968, but the news reporting made it appear America had lost. At the same time as the Tet Offensive, the USS Pueblo, a U.S. Navy spy ship, was captured by North Korea and its crew held for ransom.

What was up? we wondered. Those in command wouldn’t let us go up to Hanoi to finish the job for which we’d been trained, and now eighty-three of our navy and Marine Corps brothers were being held somewhere in North Korea with the United States powerless to take action. (123)

The focus, though, is on three days in June 1968. Both McLean’s company and his battalion were taken over by experienced men who wanted to win. So the brutal battle on Landing Zone (LZ) Loon those three days was an American victory.

It came at a price. Of the 180 men in McLean’s company, about 100 were killed or seriously injured. Still, many more North Vietnamese were killed, and their attack was completely thwarted. The details are intense, to say the least. In McLean’s words, it was nothing like the movies.

McLean takes some time to describe his new company commander, a Captain Bill Negron. He had enlisted in the Marines in the 1950s, attended college on the GI Bill. While in college as a civilian, he was recruited to take part in the infamous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. He and a few others managed to survive and escape back to America. Perhaps that was a sign of things to come—the United States did not provide any backup at all, let alone the support it had promised for that Cuban expedition. After graduating from college, Negron rejoined the Marines as an officer. When he took over the company, the marines knew things would be different—more serious but also more professional and more personal.

The marines were aware of things going on back home. Most of them did not understand the antiwar sentiment. The protestors to them were long-haired children of privilege. The assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were stunning and puzzling. Although all marines regardless of background, trusted each other in the field, he noted that after Dr. King’s assassination, the black marines distanced themselves a bit from the others. His death affected them in a distinct and different way. He noted that it was becoming nearly impossible to finance both “an increasingly costly war” and Johnson’s Great Society welfare programs.

There is almost a surreal quality about his return to the United States and entering college in 1968. While home on leave near the end of 1967, he had applied to two colleges in Boston, Boston University and Harvard. His family was now living in the Boston suburb of Brookline, and he thought that would work out. He could continue to follow the Boston Red Sox as well. (Bleacher seats were only a dollar back then.)

He described two college interviews he had, one at Columbia and one at Harvard. The Columbia interviewer said they did not like admitting freshmen who were older than nineteen. He also told him he was not impressed with his high school record. The interview lasted about fifteen minutes.

The Harvard interviewer asked him questions about the Marines and Vietnam, and wanted to learn what he thought about his experiences and what else was going on in the world. The subject of his high school grades or subjects he took never came up in the hour-long conversation. In April, while still in Vietnam, before LZ Loon, he was accepted at Harvard.

He arrived back in the states in San Francisco where his older sister was living. There was no support for the war there. People knew little of nothing about the military. Unlike when his parents’ generation returned from World War II,

…there were no crowds. There were no parades. Perhaps, we thought, all of that would come later. So all waited. Several million of us. It never came. (208)

From my experience, one who just missed Vietnam, it came in a small way after the September 11 attacks. People began to understand a little the need for a military. From that point till now, occasionally I will get a well-meaning, “Thank you for your service.” That never happened before. Still, as our mutual experience trying to get people to understand the D.C. Sniper shows, most people know even less about the military today. No, military men are no longer “baby killers” as they were called during Vietnam, but now it is as if everyone has PTSD or missing limbs.

Back then,

I did not have to be called a baby killer more than once to know that to openly discuss my military service in civilian circles in 1968 was a terrible idea. (211)

Shortly after he arrived at college, he tried to strike up a conversation with a girl he was sitting next to. When he said he had recently returned from Vietnam, she just said, “Oh.” End of conversation.

I had learned a valuable lesson. Few, if any, people at Harvard cared about military service—particularly Vietnam service. From that point on, for the next four years, and well beyond, I barely mentioned it. (230)

In some ways, he kept it in for years until he began writing this book.

Politically, he sums things up this way:

I am sad that Vietnam went the way it did, but in a country run by politicians, it fell characteristically, apathetically. We gave a weak body a false high so many years ago and…after the addict had reached a multimillion dollar a day habit, the supply was cut off—no public stances, no firm policy decisions—indeed, it occurred through the absence of any decisions. As the body began to shake with withdrawal, the pusher was far away enjoying spring recess at home with family and constituency, struggling for his tenuous tenure on national economic issues seemingly so far removed and yet so directly attached to that horror they created long ago. (223)

I did have to chuckle with understanding at one thing McLean shared; I do not entirely agree with him on this point. He described the outdated and substandard materiel that the Marines often had to work with. He writes that the Marines “were at the bottom of the military supply chain.” (151) I understand, but, no, the Coast Guard is lower still. The Coasties have a saying, “They want us to do more and more with less and less. Soon we’ll be doing everything with nothing.” And, for what it is worth, usually Coasties and Marines respect each other for any number of reasons including that sense that they are taken for granted by others.

That is about my only quibble with this book. It is a great and personal review of a rough time in our nation’s story. The battle scenes are intense. Perhaps Loon can get some of Americans to understand a bit more about the military in language they can understand.