H. Rider Haggard. “Hunter Quatermain’s Story.” Amazon Digital Services, 17 May 2012. E-book.
—————. King Solomon’s Mines. 1907; Amazon Digital Services, 17 May 2012. E-book.
—————. She. 1886; Gutenberg.org, 30 July 2010. E-book.

King Solomon’s Mines is one of those books I wanted to read for years. Since I was doing some Doyle, I got inspired to read some other Victorian adventure stories, so King Solomon’s Mines beckoned.

King Solomon’s Mines is a solid, if slightly imperialistic, yarn. It introduces us to the “great white hunter” Allan Quatermain, who would become the hero of a number of Haggard’s books. It helps us to remember that at the time this was originally written in the 1880s, the middle of Africa was, in the words of Thoreau, still “white on the chart.” Much of the continent was still not mapped or explored by Westerners.

As in Treasure Island or many gothic novels, South African Quatermain possesses a three century old manuscript that describes a diamond mine of untold wealth that the Portuguese writer believes were first discovered under the reign of King Solomon. Indeed, the traditional monarchy of Ethiopia claimed descent from Solomon, though the mines in this novel are well to the south.

Quatermain, Sir Henry Curtis, Captain John Good, and a hand-picked native crew have to trek across a desert (unnamed, but presumably the Kalahari) and climb snow-capped mountains to get the isolated and uncharted land of the Kukuanas. The name echoes the Bechuanas, now called Botswana.

There is a certain exotic quality to the story; e.g., Captain Good falls in love with an attractive and kind Kukuana woman. Of course, there are caves, stone portals, and secret passages that take us to the mines. But King Solomon’s Mines is primarily a survival story.

On their return trip to Natal (this is before the country of South Africa was born), the survivors come across an oasis in the desert where two men, thought dead, have been living for a number of years. The narrator compares their lifestyle to that or Robinson Crusoe. While there is a treasure hunt as we see in Treasure Island, King Solomon’s Mines is not so much a swashbuckling adventure as it is a pure survival story. Lesser men with less experience and skill would have perished.

While the primary conflict is indeed man vs. nature, there is plenty of other action, too. At one point our adventurers find themselves in the middle of a Kukuana civil war. Quatermain’s most trusted African worker turns out to have Kukuana connections.

The men are able to communicate with the Kukuana because these people speak a language related to Zulu which Quatermain and some of the others speak. Quatermain hypothesizes that the Zulu may have originated to the north among the Kukuana. This may be set in Victorian times, but the perspective is African.

“Hunter Quatermain’s Story” is a short story that may be of some interest to Quatermain fans. It is set in London after the events of King Solomon’s Mines, but tells a brief hunting tale that took place before the novel.

Allan Quatermain is an African Natty Bumppo. Like Cooper’s hero, he prefers the uncivilized and wild. Like Bumppo, he is a good shot. And as Bumppo admires manly American Indians like Chingachgook, so Quatermain admires manly native Africans like the Zulu Umbopa.

I have never read a book quite like She. Compared to the other two works by Haggard, it is far more original at its core.

There are certain similarities to King Solomon’s Mines in She. There are a few ancient family letters and an inscribed potsherd that tell of an African queen of unusual beauty and magical power that have come down to Leo Vincey, a recent Cambridge graduate. He and the narrator, his guardian and Cambridge professor L. Horace Holly, sail to East Africa and with a small crew go to the interior to try to discover the lost kingdom mentioned in those ancient writings.

Rather than a desert, their chief obstacle is a vast swamp. When they do arrive at the land of the Amahagger, an isolated people group that inhabit an area unknown to the outside world whose ruins show it was once a great civilization. These people speak a form of Arabic, a language that both Englishmen studied at the university, so they are able to communicate using that language just as Quatermain could use Zulu with the Kakuana.

Compared to the Kakuana, the Amhagger are uncivilized. Quatermain understands their name to mean “People of the Rock,” suggesting the so-called Stone Age. They practice cannibalism—they attempt to kill and eat one of the men in the Holly party. The only thing that restrains them is the authority of their mysterious and apparently immortal and beautiful queen, She who shall not be named, or simply She. They fear her magic, and they know that she has a sense of justice that keeps them in line.

If King Solomon’s Mines is an adventure and survival story, She is something else. She is at its core fantasy. It might not come across as a total fantasy like Lord of the Rings, but that is only because it takes place in the contemporary world.

She who shall not be named tells her visitors that she has no magical powers. She has learned to do certain things, but others have done them before her. She has learned to keep herself young-looking and beautiful though she is two thousand years sold. Still, she admits that she is both human and mortal.

And she is a woman. Holly and Leo both confess they have never seen anyone as beautiful. We also find out that Leo is a dead ringer for an apparent ancestor that She was once in love with. Leo and Holly spend most of their time just observing and trying to figure out what is going on. She tries to win Leo’s love.

The ruined city of Kôr and She are fantastic. There is an air of mystery about both that the two men never attempt to solve. I read that both C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien were influenced by She. She herself, though morally more ambiguous and human, is a model for Jadis, the white witch. If you read chapters 24 to 26 in She, you have discovered the model for Mt. Doom.

The difference?

Haggard builds his fantasy of what he knows of the classics, Africa, and the Arabs of East Africa. Lewis builds on his knowledge of the classics and fairy tales. Tolkien builds on the Old English, Nordic, and Welsh folklore he studied and loved. I suspect that fans of Lewis and Tolkien will get a kick out of She.

P.S. As noted above, this reviewer used the Kindle editions of these stories. The online reviews posted on Amazon said that the edition of She available from Amazon had serious formatting problems. The Project Gutenberg version of She was fine. There were some minor formatting problems with a few footnotes, but otherwise it was a clean presentation.

Arthur Conan Doyle. Tales of Terror and Mystery. Amazon Digital Services, 2012. E-book.

Having recently read the Sherlock Holmes Stories, why not a stab at other stories by Doyle that do not involve Mr. Holmes? Tales of Terror and Mystery is a collection of some of Doyle’s other stories. They fall into two types: science fiction and mystery. Considering Doyle’s skills, the best ones tend to be those involving some kind of mystery, though in his own day his Lost World was a popular science fiction novel.

“The Horror of the Heights” and “The Terror of Blue John Gap” fall into the science fiction world. In the first, an early aviator discovers monstrous life forms in the sky; in the second, someone discovers a legendary monster in an English cave. These are mostly curiosities today, but they are interesting for their early attempts at science fiction.

Most of the stories are mysteries. The reason that these mysteries were not adopted for Sherlock Holmes is that most of them were written from the criminals’ or potential victims’ point of view. In a few the perpetrators literally get away with murder.

The tale of “The Man with the Watches” is the closest to a Holmes story. It mentions an anonymous London expert who was consulted but unable to shed any light on the mystery as does “The Lost Special.” Both stories involve very clever crimes. Any Holmes or Arsène Lupin fan would enjoy these.

“The New Catacomb” has some echoes of Poe, and for that reason is probably the most predictable of the stories. It also was written from the perspective of a successful criminal. “The Brazilian Cat” is told from the point of view of a victim of an attempted murder. One interesting side note: Lost World is set in Brazil as well. At the time Doyle is writing, the Amazon Basin may have been the least explored and least known part of the inhabited world. After his presidency, Teddy Roosevelt would explore that region. It had the potential that “darkest Africa” had to an earlier generation of storytellers.

“The Japanned Box”, “The Black Doctor,” and “The Jew’s Breastplate” are other stories that are reminiscent of Holmes stories. The first, like some Holmes stories, concerns a mystery which, we discover, is based on a misunderstanding. No actual crime was committed. The other two describe criminal investigations which we like to think Holmes would have solved but which the investigators assigned to the cases do not.

“The Case of Lady Sannox” may be the most bizarre story in this collection. It concerns a clever criminal and a magician’s sense of misdirection. Both this story and “The Beetle Hunter” concern observers who are medical doctors like Watson. “The Beetle Hunter” is reminiscent of “The Red-Headed League” in that a newspaper advertisement seeks a man with an unusual qualification—an M.D. who also collects beetles. As with many of the other mysteries in this set, we see the tale from the perspective of the perpetrator and victim, not the investigators.

Probably the most distinctive tale, one that might have elements of both sci-fi and mystery, is “The Leather Funnel.” A museum piece from the 1600s, a large leather funnel, causes grief to a number of people. Such funnels might have been used in wine making, but this one has a brass rim with a coat of arms and scores or cuts a few inches above the end of the spout. The tale brings in French historical figures, including a famous criminal mentioned in “A Family Crime”: a collected account of a crime committed in eighteenth century Paris that inspired The Count of Monte Cristo and that this blogger translated into English a few years back.

Reading these stories, we can perhaps see why Doyle remains best known for Sherlock Holmes. Having said that, most of these are clever tales on their own, and the best show off Doyle’s trademark ingenuity, even if the criminals get away with the crimes. As one criminal says at the end of his tale about the wife of one of his victims: “I have sometimes thought that it would be a kindness to write to her and to assure her that there is no impediment to her marrying again.” (1588) How thoughtful!

[Reference is a Kindle location, not a page number.]

Robert Lampros. Eleven Floors. St. Louis: JBS-Publishing, 2015. E-book.

Eleven Floors was promoted to me as a young adult book, i.e., appropriate for middle school. While the length and reading level certainly fit that, I suspect that middle schoolers might not consume it heartily. The main characters are college students who are really outside the usual YA orbit (or what one book series called the junior high Magic Bubble).

While the main character appears to be more or less a straight arrow, there is casual drug use and sex, and the audience that could likely relate to it would be college students or college grads.

Because this is a very short novel, it is hard to say much about it without giving much away. College freshman Charles falls for classmate Lynn. Charles is a Christian who likes to talk about God. Lynn listens. Charles likes to go to the quiet tenth floor at the top of the library where there are few people so he can quietly pray and read the Bible. Guess what the eleventh floor is.

Besides a number of Bible verses and a seedy street “prophet” who says the end is near, there are also references to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Unlike The Double Bind or An Authentic Derivative, the allusions are less significant. Charles briefly mentions The Great Gatsby, but Lynn does not leave Charles.

At Lynn’s suggestion, Charles reads “Babylon Revisited,” which may suggest that the college campus is a stand-in for the Biblical and prophetic Babylon. He also read “Jemina,” where a couple who have just discovered one another die side by side. That may be a bit of indirect foreshadowing—but let’s just say no one dies in Eleven Floors, not really.

When Fitzgerald put some of his stories together in a collection called Tales of the Jazz Age, he wrote a brief introduction to each story. He tells us that he wrote “Jemina” when he was still in college. There is a sense that Eleven Floors likewise is a college production. We are supposed to write what we know, yes?

There is a cool image at the end. Imagine the so-called rapture (see I Thessalonians 4:15-17) in which the vehicles or vessels people are riding or sailing in rise with the people themselves who are raptured. In other words, not like Left Behind, where the airplane goes out of control because the pilot suddenly disappears. If you were on a motorcycle or a sailboat, that might be a cool ride to the Promised Land.

This is a different apocalypse from what we usually read about. This is not World War III or a bombed-out Chicago (or zombies). Eleven Floors is more like Fitzgerald’s Babylon: people having careless “fun” in spite of consequences. Rather than emphasizing the devastation of Revelation (which in the original Greek is Apocalypse), it more like the end times of Matthew 24:37-39 “eating, drinking, marrying, giving in marriage.” It is just as biblical, is it not?

Jules Verne. 20 000 Lieues sous les Mers [20,000 Leagues Under the Sea]. 2 vol. 1871; Editions Norph-Nop, 2011. E-book.

In honor of Marie-Laure of All the Light We Cannot See, I had to read 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. There are actually a few connections that make this novel an appropriate backdrop to All the Light. But 20,000 Leagues is a great story in and of itself.

Jules Verne is often rightly called the father of science fiction. Though we can point to other writings—the author Cyrano de Bergerac wrote about travel to the moon and sun while Verne here credits Poe—but Verne really brought science into fiction to create a plausible if slightly fantastic story.

Today we often think of science fiction of having to involve space travel and hypothetical means of propulsion. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is not that different. It describes underwater travel before anyone had actually done it (1871) with propulsion that at least works on paper and which tells about some things that submarines actually have used since they were invented.

Verne describes the propulsion of the Nautilus, Captain Nemo’s underwater craft, as coming from batteries. All submarines use batteries, whether they have diesel engines or nuclear reactors to charge them. The Nautilus’s batteries are somehow refreshed by salt water and carbon. In Verne’s day, people experimented with batteries using a variety of solutions. Why not sea water? It makes more sense than hyperspace or wormholes for space craft. What is hyperspace anyhow?

There is also a lot of science. Very frequently our narrator, Professor Aronnax, describes the marine geology and life he encounters. The rock and sea floor formations, the seaweed and algae, the mussels and crustaceans, the fish and cetaceans, the seals and seabirds are all described in detail according to each location the boat spends time in. It becomes easy to see how Marie-Laure, who read the novel repeatedly, would learn a lot about sea creatures.

Between Aronnax and Captain Nemo, we also learn a lot about sea exploration and the naturalists who described many of the creatures. It is clear that 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is not only an adventure story but also a research paper. The novel, for example, mentions hundreds of explorers from the sixteenth century to the 1860s. It even discusses the laying of the Transatlantic cables.

20,000 Leagues, for example, mentions Darwin three times, twice in reference to the Beagle voyage and once concerning his theory about coral atolls. Though written after the Origin of Species, there is no reference to Darwinism. Professor Aronnax appears to accept the more traditional idea that fossils were largely laid down by a worldwide flood, though he says he subscribes to the day-age theory: that the days of creation in the Bible refer to eras, not literal 24-hour days.

Aronnax is recruited by the United States Navy to help it investigate reports of a sea monster that has been sinking even ironclad steam vessels. Of course, the monster turns out to be a submarine. Aronnax and two associates—Ned Land, a Canadian harpooner, and Conseil, the professor’s trusty valet—find themselves on a whaleboat separated from the navy ship and rescued by the Nautilus.

Their lives are saved, but they are told by its captain, “Whoever comes aboard the Nautilus must never leave it.” Aronnax has access to a thorough library and an unparalleled collection of sea life—shells, skeletons, skins, algae, and so on. Aronnax makes new and exciting scientific observations, but will he ever have a chance to share them with the outside world?

Back in France, Aronnax was a botanist and lived at the Jardin des Plantes, the garden that Marie-Laure and her father liked to visit.

The adventures do make for exciting reading. Most are realistic in the sense that it is easy enough to imagine them. Many are based on observations made by earlier scientists and explorers. Aronnax and Captain Nemo both cite ancient and modern authors. So they do visit the site of Atlantis. They see many different kinds of reefs. And they encounter monsters of various kinds: giant squid, giant crabs, a pearl oyster two meters across.

Curiously, until they encounter one, Land and Aronnax are skeptical that giant squid exist. In a connection that Marie-Laure might have made from her time in Saint-Malo, Conseil insists that he has seen one. When Land and Aronnax challenge him, he says he saw one in Saint-Malo.

“Where?” Ned asks.

“In a church,” is the answer.

Conseil tells them that there is a painting of one in a church in Saint-Malo.

They go on to discuss how Olaus Magnus, two bishops, and Aristotle all claim to have seen them, and how museums in Montpellier and Trieste contain skeletons of giant squid in their collections.

A few interesting episodes have proven to be impossible. The Nautilus sails from the Gulf of Suez to the Mediterranean via an underwater tunnel. This is set just about a year before the Suez Canal is completed. The Nautilus reaches the South Pole by water. Back then, it was unclear how much of Antarctica was land and how much of it was an ice cap like the North Pole.

One exciting episode finds them under the South Polar icecap and running out of air. Finally, the submarine breaks through the ice cap in a manner resembling a fish jumping out of water. The USS Nautilus broke through the North Polar icecap some ninety years later. By the way, submariners sometimes talk about a breach, where the sub actually jumps out of the water, but they are supposed to avoid doing it if at all possible.

Captain Nemo has developed some underwater suits. They are not unlike the diving suits of Verne’s day except that Nemo uses pressurized air tanks so men can walk underwater without being tethered to an air hose. In other words, these are a lot like scuba tanks. Aronnax on several occasions walks out to view some gorgeous coral, to view an underwater “forest” of kelp, to explore Atlantis, among other things.

One curiosity is the great kelp forest by the Isle of Crespo in the Pacific Ocean. They never go ashore, but explore the sea floor next to this island. The novel, which bases its information on other sources, locates the island in the North Pacific, north of Wake Island and west by northwest of Midway Island. There are no islands there, but there are several descriptions extant which would have led nineteenth-century readers to believe it existed. Indeed, a Wikipedia entry on the Anson Archipelago notes there are two actual islands in this group, Wake and Marcus Islands (they are not close to each other), but most of the other islands are “phantom islands.” The listing even has a map from an 1891 atlas that includes Crespo Island (a.k.a. Roca de Plata) and others that do not actually exist.

The professor would also have us believe that walruses were found in Antarctica. Most of his observations appear sound, but he misses a few.

Much of the tale focuses on the mysterious Captain Nemo. He tells his visitors directly that they speak English, German, French, and Latin on the boat. Nemo means “no one” in Latin, and he tells them that it is not his real name. At one point he says that he was from India, but when he cries out for help, he cries out in French, leading Aronnax to believe that Nemo is a Frenchman. Nemo also appears to harbor a bitter hatred towards a French ship they come across. He also at one point donates some gold to a Greek freedom fighter.

Even though the three men are on board the vessel for a year, they only talk to the Captain. Even the second in command has no name but is simply called the Second. Aronnax does not recognize the language that the crew speaks to one another, so he knows it is something other than the four languages the Captain named.

The Captain and the crew all seem to be content to never go on land. We never find out why Captain Nemo wants to stay at sea, although he suggests he made some people with political clout unhappy. When Aronnax is first investigating the alleged monster sightings, he contacts virtually every seafaring government. He knows that a submarine vessel would not be a complete secret if it were being built in a government shipyard.

Nemo seems independently wealthy. We do find out where at least some of his wealth came from. He apparently built the Nautilus and gathered a crew (maybe Indian?) without drawing attention to himself.

It is also clear that he carries a chip on his shoulder. At times he gets bitter. He seems to enjoy stories of revenge. Maybe a bit like Captain Ahab, he takes predatory sea creatures personally. When they come across a pod of sperm whales, he tries to kill every one. He reminds Aronnax of the sinking of the Essex by a sperm whale and calls the creatures “vermin.” Similarly, he attacks the school of giant squid that they come across. When the cephalopods go after him and his vessel, it is hardly unprovoked.

At the same time, Captain Nemo does have a respect for most sea life. All the food and most of the materials used by the Nautilus come from the sea. The paper they use is made from kelp. The coal they refine for propulsion comes from a mine inside an island formed by an extinct volcano. Ned Land gets tired of always eating seafood, and the three friends are allowed to go ashore on an island off the coast of New Guinea where they get some coconuts and fowl.

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is a kind of Odyssey around the world. We visit an underwater graveyard constructed of coral. We navigate the treacherous Torres Strait north of Australia. The writer really takes us with him, so we share in his adventure. It is a lot of fun. We learn a lot about the world and its waters. Even if it is not 100% true, it is good fiction.

P.S. In tribute to Marie-Laure, I did read this in French. As with Marie’s Braille edition, the free download from Amazon came in two volumes. Most of the time in recent years I have had to read scholarly things in French. I found that slow and specialized work. That was not the case with 20,0000 Leagues [20 000 Lieues]. It was direct and clear even for a non-native speaker like me. Sure, I had to look up a few words, but it really was worth it. If you have studied a foreign language; try reading some entertaining stories in that language. You will be glad you did.

It has been noted by some critics that All the Light We Cannot See includes recurring images of spirals which all echo the design of the Chambered Nautilus, the sea creature the submarine is named after.

Anthony Doerr. All the Light We Cannot See. New York: Scribner, 2014. Print.

This book won accolades from critics all over. The cover of the edition I have tells us that the New York Times named it one of the ten best books of the year. And it received a Pulitzer Prize, not a guarantee that the work is great, but a good sign. Was it worth reading? Yes, most definitely, yes.

Even the title, All the Light We Cannot See, suggests the nature of the writing. There is a mysterious quality to it, yet it makes sense. It is rhythmic, even poetic. The title echoes the famous line from The Merchant of Venice: “All that glisters is not gold.”

Instead of a gold casket, part of the tale involves a priceless diamond said to have originated in Borneo called the Sea of Flames. It has supposed occult powers, making its owner immortal but those around the owner accursed. It has been the property of the Museum of Natural History in Paris until World War II when much of the museum’s mineral wealth is dispersed among the French countryside to avoid appropriation by the blitzing Germans.

As with other such jewels, copies have also been made, so no keeper of gems knows whether he has the originals. One of the story lines tells of the search of a Sergeant Major von Rumpel for this stone. He is one of the few Aryan gemologists in Germany, so he is commissioned to locate valuable gems for the Reich just as others were commissioned to capture valuable works of art for the country.

Von Rumpel may only have a few months to live because of a cancerous tumor. He hopes to find the Sea of Flames not so much for the fatherland but so that he can live on. Ironically, as secularists like Hitler or this character reject the historical faith in God, they grasp at superstitious straws. He who believes in nothing will fall for anything. Alas, when such a person has the power of a Hitler that can devastate the whole world. (There is a brief description of the mustard gas treatments Von Rumpel was given for the cancer. Those reminded this reader of John Gunther’s Death Be Not Proud who described in some detail the mustard treatments his son would be subjected to for a similar tumor.)

One of the people who is apparently given one of the stones (whether the original or the copy, we have to read to find out) is the museum’s locksmith, a M. LeBlanc. He has created some unique devices for safely storing some of the museum’s valuables. He also has made a scale model of the Latin Quarter of Paris where he lives with his daughter Marie-Laure, who is blind. She learns her way around by touching the buildings, sidewalks, lampposts, storm drains, and other features of the model and then using it as a map she has memorized to find her way around the city.

When it becomes clear the Germans will occupy Paris, most of the museum’s employees are told to flee. M. LeBlanc and Marie-Laure, with some adventures on the way, flee to Saint-Malo where M. LeBlanc’s eccentric Uncle Etienne lives.

Saint-Malo is an exotic location even for the French. It is in Brittany in northwest France and is an island citadel just off the coast. At low tide, people can walk the causeway to the city, but at high tide, it is completely moated. Its residents also consider themselves a people apart to some degree. We are told that they are first Malouin, then Breton, and finally French if there is anything left over.

Much of the story focuses on Marie. The writing is exquisite. Doerr’s imagery is unsurpassed in prose. Marie’s world is one of touch and sound and occasionally smell. She understands light and color because she went blind at age six, so her ways of visualizing are distinctive.

When they move to Saint-Malo, her father makes a model of the island similar to the one that he made of the Latin Quarter. Twelve-year-old Marie-Laure, thanks to associates at the museum, has also developed an interest and knowledge about mollusks. She can feel the shells and in many cases tell what they are. She is overjoyed when at Saint-Malo she discovers a place where thousands of snails find shelter on the water’s edge.

She loves stories. Her Uncle Etienne reads her stories. She reads and re-reads the few Braille books that she owns. Her favorites are two by Jules Verne: Around the World in Eighty Days and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. The second book is longer, and for a long time she just owns volume one, which she has practically memorized.

Marie’s story is told parallel to the story of Werner Pfennig, a German orphan who is fascinated with radio and electricity. Though the orphanage only has a handmade crystal set, he is able to hear faraway places and broadcasts in different languages. He grows up in the Ruhr Valley. Elena, the mistress of the orphanage, grew up in disputed territory just to the West, so her first language was French. The orphans, then, pick up some French along with their German.

Werner knows that most of the boys in his town are fated to work in the coal mines, where his father worked and met his death. Werner believes that if he learns enough about radio, he can perhaps go into a different line of work.

That is indeed what happens. Locally, he is treated as kind of boy genius because of his ability to repair radios. When he is fourteen, he is called away from his home town to a special military school. Most of the boys there are sons of government or military officials, but some like Werner get scholarships because of athletic or intellectual abilities.

Not only does this military school indoctrinate the boys into Nazi beliefs, it practices them. Weakness is not tolerated. The slow runners and the physically smaller and weaker boys are weeded out. It is pure Darwinism—the survival of the fittest. Lord of the Flies with adult supervision.

Werner is small for his age, but he is quick. And every evening a colonel brings him into his house so he can study radio, trigonometry, and repair broken radio sets. Even among these more elite adults, he has a reputation of being a genius when it comes to building and fixing radios. He ends up constructing a radio direction finder (RDF) that is more effective than the types that the German military has been using.

Eventually, the colonel declares that Werner is eighteen, not sixteen, and sends him to the Eastern Front and then to France to locate and silence partisan and underground radio broadcasts, which he does with great success. We see that eventually he will meet Marie-Laure in Saint-Malo as he tracks down the resistance radio station there which Uncle Etienne operates.

One of the most striking themes, perhaps contrasts, are the descriptions of natural scenes like the grotto of shells or a field of Queen Anne’s Lace with scenes of savagery at the military school and on the battlefield. Since Marie-Laure likes the two adventures Verne about world travel, Uncle Etienne reads to her Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle. There is a gorgeous passage from this book describing Darwin’s first awed impression of seeing the Amazon rain forest.

Of course, The Voyage of the Beagle was published in 1839, twenty years before On the Origin of Species, and nineteen before Darwin’s first published article hypothesizing evolution. In Walden (published in 1854) Thoreau speaks highly of “Darwin the naturalist.” That, too, is before The Origin and when the name Darwin became loaded.

This becomes one of the themes of All the Light We Cannot See. We hear the young Darwin, Darwin the naturalist, telling us the beauties of the natural world. We get this through Marie and her fascination with shells and Werner’s friend Frederick who loves birds and observes the living world around him while the bullies are devising ways to intimidate him because he is “weak.”

So then we see the effects of the older Darwin, Darwin the theoretician, giving a “scientific” justification for cruelty and amorality: Orwell’s vision of the future, “a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” Survival of the “fittest”? Fit for what?

Doerr does understand one thing. While there are books and articles refuting virtually every claim made by Darwin and his disciples, an intellectual case against Darwin in and of itself is not generally effective. It is, as always, a question of the human heart. Pride is such a terrible beast to bring down. What price will it take? Unsettling stories like this that remind us of how a good naturalist got corrupted who knows how just as a civilized country got corrupted by his philosophy—and it is a philosophical tautology, not observable science.

I am not aware that Doerr knew this, but the passage from The Voyage of the Beagle about the Amazon rain forest is cited in Darwin’s own autobiography, which he wrote much later, after he had become an atheist and published his theories. He said that when he saw the majesty of such a creation, that he could not help be a theist, a believer in God. He said he thought then that “there was more to man than breath of his body.” It was only later that he was able to suppress such thoughts. A very significant quotation. “It may be truly I am like a man who has become color-blind,” he noted when looking back on that time. Didn’t Jesus say something about the blind leading the blind?

There is a lot more. The title also suggests the lessons in physics that Werner hears over the radio coming from France. Scientists are learning that light is just a small part of a much larger electromagnetic spectrum we cannot see including the electric waves which operate turbines and electric motors, magnetic waves which create electrical currents, and radio waves which we can send long distance through the air and change into sound waves.

Doerr deliberately includes a contemporary scene with people talking on cell phones, sending text messages, and accessing the Internet to show how the technology continues to change us.

All the Light We Cannot See, though fiction, is quite realistic. Some of the war descriptions are not for the faint of heart. The book does not sensationalize them, but it is direct. We appreciate all the more those who do survive, and what they had to go through to eventually lead a normal life in pursuit of happiness.

All the French, except perhaps one very old woman, seem to be existentialists. Was that way of thinking that prevalent in France? Even before the war? Perhaps so, but I am just asking that. I do recall reading Georges Bernanos’ La Joie (Joy) and Journal d’un Cure de Campagne (Diary of a Country Priest) or Andre Maurois who were contemporaries of Camus and Sartre and hardly thought as they did. Eh, well.

Doerr’s narrative technique is a little different, and some readers may find it unsettling. The chapters are very short and alternate among various characters, usually between Marie or some other French person and Werner or some other German. On top of that, the chapters wander all over time. Even the section headings which give dates really only apply to the first chapter in that section, and not always even then.

Still, there are enough context clues that the reader can usually clearly figure out where and when the episode is taking place. And together, the chapters do progress in such a way that we see that the main story begins in 1939 right before the German occupation and ends in 1944 after the liberation of Paris, but it has a good deal of prologue and some epilogue as well. It all works together. All the Light We Cannot See is a pièce de résistance if not a chef d’œuvre.

Linda Sue Park. A Single Shard. New York: Houghton, 2001. Print.
—————. A Long Walk to Water. New York: Houghton, 2010. Print.

Both of these books by Linda Sue Park tell the story of orphans who overcame great odds, one in twelfth-century Korea and one in contemporary Africa. The author presents both stories in a bare, realistic manner, yet they are meant to inspire.

A Single Shard is the story of Tree-Ear, who lives under a bridge with a lame homeless beggar named Crane-Man. The village where they live is known for its clay which is used to make very distinctive celadon pottery.

Tree-Ear manages to get a job, for no pay but with a good meal, as a go-fer for Min, the potter whom Tree-Ear considers the best in the town. He mostly cuts wood for the kiln and digs clay for the pottery. He learns about taking the raw clay and refining it.

The details about ceramics and the life of beggars are carefully and lovingly set out. Tree-Ear sees how only about a fifth of the items taken to the kiln are good enough for Min. But he will learn also—as the title suggests—even a shard of high quality has value.

While most of A Single Shard is set in Tree-Ear’s seaside village, the boy at one point has to make a long overland journey to the capital city. (This is a few centuries before Seoul is even founded.) The story focuses on art but includes adventure.

The ending reminded me of other stories where the protagonists had to overcome great odds but left behind something of great value or beauty. While the tale is quite different, I could not help thinking of The Cloister and the Hearth. Similarly, I was reminded of Amos Fortune: Free Man, a book of the same reading level featuring a protagonist who overcame long odds.

A Long Walk to Water focuses on Salva, one of the Lost Boys, victims of civil war in southern Sudan in the 1980s. His story is primarily one of survival—guerillas, crocodiles, lions, desert. It is intense and not for the weak of stomach.

The story begins when he is eleven. While school is in session, his village is attacked by some soldiers. His teacher tells all the students to escape to the bush: the village means certain death.

So he goes east for months, crossing savanna, the Nile River, and desert, eventually making it to a refugee camp in Ethiopia where he stays for six years. When that camp is closed down, he becomes a leader of a group of over 1,000 boys from the camp who make a trek to a camp in Kenya. While slightly fictionalized, A Long Walk to Water is based on the true story of Salva Dut.

Interspersed with Salva’s adventures are brief descriptions of a girl named Nya in a Sudanese village in 2008. She spends half of most of her days getting water for her family. Curiously, some of her experiences of extracting water from clay soil are similar to Tree-Ear’s as he extracts impurities and water from the clay he works with.

Both of Mrs. Park’s stories have very moving conclusions. These are sophisticated young adult books—relatively short with main characters in their pre-teens or early teens. A Single Shard won a Newbery Award, which places the audience at late elementary or middle school. But do not be fooled, older readers will be moved as well.

Arthur Conan Doyle. Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Collection. Amazon.com. 15 March 2015. E-book.

It has been a long time since I read any collection of Sherlock Holmes stories. This one is billed as complete. It does include a few stories that are often overlooked such as the two Holmes stories narrated by Sherlock Holmes himself rather than Watson. Since there are over 50 stories in this collection, it would serve no purpose by reviewing them all, but this collection is fun.

Like someone’s favorite TV show, there are a few episodes in which it appears that a very similar plot has been recycled. Doyle seemed to like backstories with complicated family relationships. People from foreign countries (i.e., not England) seem to have a penchant for crime. Still, Holmes’ aplomb and cool temperament while on a case are very entertaining. Watson always seems dazzled, even when he contributes a lot to the solving of a crime.

Not all the stories investigate crimes. There are other mysteries occasionally. For example, in “A Case of Identity,” Holmes is hired to try to make sense of an affair of the heart. No actual crime was committed, but there is certainly questionable behavior.

Some stories I remembered from previous readings years ago, but most were somewhat new to me. As with many mysteries, part of the enjoyment is trying to figure out the mystery before the sleuth reveals the solution. In “A Case of Identity,” for example, I did figure out the motive for the unusual circumstances, but the actual method was still something of a surprise. And in so many of the stories, as in true life crimes and mysteries, money is a motivator.

I had read The Hound of the Baskervilles at least twice in the past, and I did have a vague recollection of the plot, but it was still fun to read. That story had a little bit of everything, and probably deservedly is considered Doyle’s best. It is a page-turner with a number of surprises and terrors. I remembered some things about the hound and about the Baskerville family, but there is a fascinating supporting cast such as the escaped criminal Selden, the Baskerville’s housekeeper, the local entomologist and his sister, the country doctor whom Watson naturally takes to, the shepherd boy who spies on Watson, the missing boot. The plot truly does thicken.

There are four novels or novellas in the Holmes corpus. Three are well known. Besides The Hound of the Baskervilles, there is A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of the Four. A Study in Scarlet was the first Holmes story, where Watson meets Holmes and shares an apartment with him until Watson’s wedding.

As a kid, I recall enjoying The Sign of the Four, probably because of its exotic Indian characters and backstory. The woman who becomes Mrs. Watson is Holmes’ client in this one. Re-reading it made me think of Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone which also involves a theft of Indian jewels.

The fourth novel I do not recall ever reading before. The Valley of Fear may have been the best mystery, but it had a weakness. The main mystery is solved in about the first third of the book. It was a very clever story. The murder victim and his widow had come to England from America. He apparently was involved in some criminal activity in Chicago and the West, but had gone straight and was trying to start a new life in England.

About half of the novel after the mystery is solved tells a discursive story about the victim in America before he left for Europe. It adds little to the story and almost seems purposeless.

The backstory in A Study in Scarlet is similar in that it tells of the three main characters in that story when they all live in the American West before coming to England. That is tenser and quite entertaining. It reminded me very much of Zane Grey’s The Riders of the Purple Sage with its Mormon vigilantes. It also relates more directly to the mystery Holmes is trying to solve.

The ultimate purpose of the rambling backstory in The Valley of Fear, without giving away too much, is to introduce the reader to Professor James Moriarty. There is not much more than a mention of him in this story, but Holmes expresses his belief that the professor is the Napoleon of Crime who is behind most criminal activity in England.

Moriarty is really only a living character on the pages of one story, namely, “The Final Problem.” The Valley of Fear was apparently written to lead us to Holmes’ “death” in Switzerland. Four other stories mention Moriarty in passing, but always with the understanding that he is dead. Holmes returns in “The Adventure of the Empty House,” so that tale tells the Reichenbach Falls story from the detective’s point of view. Three other later stories mention Moriarty briefly.

In other words, Moriarty is perhaps the most powerful criminal Holmes encountered, but Moriarty does not figure in too many stories. He is no Brainiac or Joker.

“The Five Orange Pips” also has a victim who came from America to straighten out his life. In his case, he belonged to the Ku Klux Klan and wanted to break free.

Holmes also comes across as a rather kindhearted. If he was working on a case apart from the police, he frequently let the perpetrator of the crime go. This was not always true, but he seems easily persuaded that the criminal has learned his or her lesson and will not be a repeat offender. In some cases—Irene Adler, for example—it is easier to simply let them leave the country, so at least they will no longer be bothering any Englishmen.

“Silver Blaze” was worth re-reading. I did recall the basic details about the stolen horse, but I had forgotten there was a murder and some other unusual goings-on. “Silver Blaze” has the line which has become a cliché in recent years about “The curious incident of the dog”:

“Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”
“To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”
“The dog did nothing in the night-time.”
“That was the curious incident,” remarked Sherlock Holmes.

This collection claims to be complete with 57 stories. Other collections have 56, apparently there are some questions about the provenance of one. It also claims to be unabridged.

I recall being skeptical in the seventies when the Seven Percent Solution came out as a novel and then as a film. In the seventies the hippie drug culture was still something new, and here was a claim that the very brainy Sherlock Holmes used cocaine recreationally. I just figured it was from someone trying to cash in on hippies.

My experience with Holmes stories had been mostly from a collection entitled The Boys’ Sherlock Holmes. Some of those stories I realize now had been edited to pare down some of the chitchat but also to get rid of the drug references. We also know that some American versions of the stories were abridged by American publishers.

This collection does contain several stories which describe Holmes’ use of cocaine. Watson expresses his concern over this in a friendly bedside manner. There is also a sense that Holmes may be manic or bipolar. When he is not on a case, he gets depressed easily; however, that could also be caused by mere idleness.

Because this is a Kindle edition, there is one thing lacking in this collection. None of the drawings which contribute to the stories are included. I seem to recall a drawing in “The Sign of the Four” of the letter the Four signed in one edition I read. The most glaring omission is the dancing men in “The Adventure of the Dancing Men.” These were simple stick figures used in a secret code. The original had the various messages using the code drawn in the text. Perhaps a reader could solve the mystery with Holmes. In this edition there is simply a blank spot where the pictures should go.

As is often the case with low-cost and public domain e-books, there are a handful of typographical errors, nothing major. The only one that puzzled me was in The Hound of the Baskervilles when Holmes referred to a “bogie hound.” An Englishman would have recognized immediately that it should have been “bogle hound.” A bogle in England is a ghost, goblin, or scarecrow. It is a very precise word in this instance.

I found one thing a bit curious myself. Three times in all the stories do we see Watson’s first name. Twice it is John. Once it is James. We are told in the Wikipedia entry at the back of the book that Doyle had a friend named Dr. James Watson. Perhaps in “The Man with the Twisted Lip,” Doyle was thinking of him. He is John in the subtitle of a collection and in “The Problem of Thor Bridge”—an effective story in which this reader confesses that he missed a couple of significant clues.

Still, have fun. Relax. Be amazed. Sherlock is guaranteed to entertain and get his readers to think.

P.S. I learned eight years after posting this and reading the collection that this collection was missing about half a dozen of the stories. If you read this collection and want to have all the Holmes tales covered, you need to pick up His Last Bow: An Epilogue of Sherlock Holmes.

Mark Greaney. Tom Clancy: Commander in Chief. New York: Putnam, 2015. Print.

Commander in Chief is the latest “Tom Clancy” novel, and it is the best since Clancy himself passed away. This is the kind of yarn (to use President Reagan’s term) that made readers fall in love with Clancy’s books. It even has Russian submarines!

Russian Premier Volodin, a stand-in for Putin, is trying to build on his successes in the Ukraine and getting NATO to stand down in Eastern Europe. His only problem is that the prices of oil and natural gas have tanked, so the country and its billionaires are not prospering.

An explosion at a natural gas facility in Lithuania, the assassination of a Saudi oil minister in Los Angeles, even the apparent harassment of the President’s son Jack Ryan, Jr., by an Italian paparazzo are all attempts to raise the price of oil and natural gas by Russian surrogates. When a Russian military train en route to the Kaliningrad Oblast is attacked in Lithuania, Russia uses this as a grounds for war—even though they instigated the attack as well as an attempt to kidnap an American diplomat in Lithuania by Russia-trained Serbians.

Yes, there are echoes of Red Storm Rising here, though now there is no international Communist cause, just the desire for money and power. Russia has developed submarines and tanks more sophisticated than any in the West. Volodin is confident.

Typical of the Clancy style, there are multiple interconnected plots. Dom Caruso and Ding Chavez are in Poland, Germany, Lithuania, and Brussels. Jack Ryan, Jr., goes from Italy to Luxembourg. Jack Clark is in the British Virgin Islands. War, espionage, diplomacy, and high finance all appear in this novel.

Jack, Jr., is a forensic economist. He is tracking laundered Russian money through Italian art galleries when he stumbles upon something bigger. Volodin himself is putting away much of his own billions through untraceable Bitcoin transactions. Is this a Plan B or just a sign that Volodin really does not trust anyone?

Besides some new submarine technology, which may or may not be real, we get hints of some more sophisticated ways of waging war. Not only do we have crypto-currencies like Bitcoin which are nearly impossible to trace, but there is also a new GPS-based mapping technique in which computers can help station soldiers in very specific positions in anticipation of the likeliest direction and type of attack on any geographic position.

Greaney’s writing style is a bit different from Clancy’s, and that is fine. He has found a voice. And he wisely does not focus too much on Jack Ryan, Sr. Ryan will always be Clancy’s creation, and he cannot change him too much. Alas, Jack Ryan is probably a far superior president than any the United States has had in recent decades. Fiction is the stuff that dreams are made on.

The title might be a bit ironic. The book is far more about Volodin, the Russian Commander in Chief, than it is about Ryan. However, Ryan appears to have better advisors and is clearly more interested in the well being of the United States than any personal power, reputation, or wealth.

A couple of things that longtime technodudes and technodudesses will enjoy: One featured naval vessel is the USS James Greer, named for one the main characters in the early Clancy novels, Admiral Greer. And one line of realpolitik given by Volodin when asked by a Russian news reporter if Lithuania would accept the presence of the Russian Army in their territory: “Tanks don’t need visas” (303)—echoes of Stalin’s remark, “How many divisions does the Pope have?”

A Treasury of Old-Fashioned Christmas Stories. Ed. Michele Slung. New York: Carroll and Graf, 2006. Print.

A Treasury of Old-Fashioned Christmas Stories lives up to its title. In our English-speaking world, the term old-fashioned Christmas story suggests two tales above all: “A Visit from St. Nicholas” (a.k.a. “The Night Before Christmas”) and A Christmas Carol. Both of them were written in the first half of the nineteenth century and represent a certain culture and tradition. So the 21 stories in A Treasury of Old-Fashioned Christmas Stories were all written some time between about 1850 and 1920 and evoke some of the same sense as those two classics.

There are a few of the sentimental Christmas stories, always popular, that one could see being adapted for the Hallmark Channel. There are a few that tell of Christmas-related conversions that echo Dickens’ classic. There are a few sad stories as well, notably “A Bird in the Snow” by Spaniard Armando Palacio Valdés that could have been written Ambrose Bierce with some help from Theodore Dreiser. The period that the editor drew from is reflected in some ghost stories involving haunted houses. Some have real literary quality.

Though more didactic than sentimental, William Dean Howells’ “Christmas Every Day” was made into a television film. It also reflects the pre-Coca Cola Santa Claus. Here Santa is still as described by Clement Clark Moore, an elf, not a full-size human. This story was the only one in this collection that the reviewer has seen in other collections. Slung tried to find an eclectic set of stories that readers were likely not familiar with.

One surprise was “Jack’s Sermon,” perhaps the most treacly of all the sentimental selections in this collection. Jack is a dog. It is a Christmas story. Need I say more? The surprise is that its author is Jacob Riis, known as a hard-boiled muckraking journalist. Even tough guys have tear ducts.

Here are a few of the other stories. While some are by writers who are not otherwise well known today, we will be mostly noting those who are.

Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s “The Christmas Masquerade” is set like most of her stories in a small New England town. However, rather than a realistic tale like most of her work, it is a fairy tale. (One could argue that it is a fantasy, I suppose.) It is perhaps the most imaginative story in the collection, more like a Narnia story than “The Revolt of Mother.”

Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “The Colonel’s Awakening” is a thought-provoking almost gothic tale of a post-Civil War Southern family trying to hang on to vestiges of the old ways. From the narrator’s perspective, it is both tender and pathetic. The war is over. Your side lost. Let’s move on.

Anthony Trollope’s “Not if I Know It” is fun. Trollope is mostly known for long sets of novels. This short story could fit right in with one of his family sagas of the British upper classes. According to some sources this is the last story Trollope wrote before he died. It has an ultimate theme of “good will to men,” but in a veddy, veddy British stiff-upper-lip manner.

“The Feast by J*s*ph C*nr*d” by Max Beerbohm is a sarcastic satire on—can you guess?—Joseph Conrad. It is all in good fun if you like black humor. Of all the stories, the Christmas setting in this one seems merely incidental or, perhaps, makes the humor that much darker.

W. A. Wilson’s “A Christmas White Elephant” is one of the sweet sentimental stories. Apparently W. A. Wilson is a nom de plume, for the editor could not find out anything about this author’s identity. The story was published in the 1880s, so it is not the same person who wrote The Accidental Hitman. All I could think of was Poe’s story “William Wilson”; that, however, is a creepy horror story. Still, William Wilson may be the name of a doppelganger in the Poe story, so maybe the writer thought it as an appropriate pseudonym.

O. Henry’s “Christmas by Injunction” is different O. Henry Christmas fare. His “The Gift of the Magi” is a Christmas story almost as well known as the two mentioned in the introduction above. This story involves tough guys from a mining town in the Wild West, but it has a typical O. Henry twist.

To this reader probably the biggest surprise and the most subtle story was “Rosa’s Tale” by Louisa May Alcott. The narrator uses the old legend, suggested in the last century by Thomas Hardy, that animals can talk on Christmas Eve. We then hear the story of what the horse Rosa told the narrator during that magic Christmas hour. Rosa has been sold and resold a number of times. She has been in races and survived the Civil War. She has lived with some very appealing families and also had a few cruel masters that she thought would kill her.

I have read some short stories by Alcott. They tend to be didactic. At least twice I have attempted to read Little Women but could not get through it. It is a favorite of my wife’s but must be too much of a chick book for me. “Rosa’s Tale” was really different. When we realize that Rosa’s tale is not so much that of a horse but the tale of an American slave, the story takes on a new and richer meaning.

Bruce Markusen. The Team that Changed Baseball: Roberto Clemente and the 1971 Pittsburgh Pirates. Yardley PA: Westholme, 2009. Print.

The Team that Changed Baseball is a baseball history book for baseball fans. It is direct, clear, and well written, but it mostly summarizes the 1971 season of the Pittsburgh Pirates which culminated in an exciting seven-game World Series.

There is a chapter devoted to each month of the season; then, a chapter for the National League Championship Series—back then each league had two divisions and no wild cards. The winner of each division played for the league pennant. Then there are four chapters devoted to the World Series. The last chapter is entitled “The Legacy” which actually deals with the thesis of the subtitle, why the 1971 Pirates were significant.

As has been mentioned elsewhere in this blog, this reviewer is a Pirates fan. I recall being in New England during the 1971 season, but I followed the playoffs and World Series as best I could when I could find an available television. Also, as a boy, my baseball hero was Roberto Clemente. I always felt he was overlooked because Pittsburgh is a small market city. Markusen writes that after the 1971 World Series Clemente felt for the first time that he got the respect he deserved.

Markusen also tells of Clemente’s reputation as a hypochondriac. He quotes a few people who criticized Clemente for that, though he also explains that Clemente injured his back in a serious auto accident in 1954 and lived the rest of his life with three damaged spinal disks. Perhaps because I was a kid, I remembered it differently (I never knew about the car accident till I read this book). I recall people saying that Clemente only played well when he did not feel good. It was more like, “Clemente’s sick today—wink, wink, nod, nod—thank goodness!”

The Team that Changed Baseball also notes that the then Brooklyn Dodgers first signed Clemente and then tried to hide his talent. They were afraid their rivals the New York Giants would sign him. Even then, though the Dodgers were the first team in the modern era to sign a black player, they also had a quota which limited themselves to four minority players on their roster of 25.

By the mid-fifties Branch Rickey, the Dodgers’ general manager who had signed Jackie Robinson, was working for the Pirates. When a Pirate scout visited the Montreal minor league Dodgers’ affiliate to watch Clemente, the Montreal manager pulled Clemente from the lineup. Still, the scout saw Clemente throw a baseball nearly 400 feet and knew he was looking at some real talent.

The reason that the 1971 Pirates changed baseball was that it was a truly color blind team. For most of the season a majority of its starters were African American or black Hispanic. Even a couple of its starting pitchers were. For the first time in major league history for any team, on September 1, 1971, every starting player for Pirates was black.

I recall Sports Illustrated pointing this out, but no one on the Pirates made a big deal of it. It was not done to make a statement or prove a point like, for example, the Bobby Riggs-Billie Jean King tennis match. It happened to be the best lineup of healthy players available for that game and situation. Manager Danny Murtagh downplayed it. It was only about the third or fourth inning that third baseman Dave Cash noticed it and pointed it out to the others. Murtagh just said, “I had nine Pirates out there on the field.” (109)

Markusen notes that as early as 1967 the Pirates had fielded a starting lineup that had eight black position players with the pitcher as the only Caucasian. Markusen also states that most teams would have black starters but their bench players would be all white. Minority players had to be exceptional to make it to a major league roster.

Markusen had apparently overlooked earlier Pirates teams. Indeed, their previous world champion team from 1960 had only one black player as a regular starter, namely Clemete; but they had seven black bench players: Bennie Daniels, Earl Francis, Diomedes Olivo, Gene Baker, R. C. Stevens, Joe Christopher, and Roman Mejias. Joe Christopher pinch ran in game seven of the World Series and scored a run. R. C. was Stevens’ given name, just the initials. Even a decade earlier the Pirates were filling their roster against type.

Markusen tells us “the 1971 Pirates proved conclusively, and really for the first time, that a pool of athletes representing a variety of backgrounds and nationalities could work together effectively and win a World Series championship.” (189) By the end of the decade other championship teams, notably the Oakland Athletics and the New York Yankees, would be following the same pattern. “There was no pendulum swing back and forth.” (188)

There is something else Markusen notes. Like the 1960 and 1979 World Series which featured the Pirates, the 1971 World Series had some exciting games. That is why the author devotes whole chapters to games six and seven. They were close nail-biters. Willie Stargell said of the underrated Pirates, “When it [the World Series] began you would have thought the Pittsburgh Pirates were nothing more than the invited guests at the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.” (181) It did not turn out that way, but it was no cakewalk, either.

The Team that Changed Baseball reminds us that baseball is exciting. A column in the New York Daily News said, “The 1971 World Series renewed for most people the assurance that baseball is indeed an exciting game, something, for some reason, they had been brainwashed into doubting.” (186) Even this year (2015) the ALDS between Texas and Toronto reminded us of this. As longtime Pirate broadcaster Bob Prince would say of the 1960 Series: “It makes baseball unmatched in the world of sports.”

P.S. As a kind of postscript there is an interesting appendix, a kind of “Where are they now?” which lists the subsequent careers of many of the 1971 Pirates and what they were doing as of the time the book was published. The Team that Changed Baseball could also be a companion to Color Blind, about a pioneering integrated minor league team from the 1930s.