Christopher Buckley. Make Russia Great Again. Simon & Schuster, 2020.

The last book I read and reviewed was pretty intense, to say the least. I needed something a little lighter, something that might make me smile. I had heard that Christopher Buckley was funny, and this was a book of his that the library I was visiting owned.

As could be gathered from the title, Make Russia Great Again is a satire on the Trump administration. It is funny, and the satire is light enough that even fans of our former president would get a kick out of it.

While a few of the characters have their real names (Trump, Mike Pompeo), most are slightly disguised, though anyone who reads the news can figure out who they are, e.g., Vice President Pants.

Our narrator, Herb Nutterman, was a top manager at a Trump hotel whom the newly elected president has asked to serve as chief of staff. He has a view of nearly everything that is going on, even things that he wishes he did not know.

There are a number of recurring themes, Trump’s inclination towards “good-looking” people, his dependence on the Fox News commentator “Seamus Colonnity” for media support, his lack of filter, and the hostility of the mainstream media. All of these have the potential for humor, and Buckley makes the most of them.

The basic plot itself is silly enough, but perhaps believable. A Russian oligarch named Oleg Pishinsky is blackmailing President Trump. Pishinsky has numerous business ventures, but he is known for patenting the poison that has been used to assassinate journalists and former Russian officials that have run afoul of Putin. As a result Pishinsky is persona non grata in most countries.

Nutterman has to meet with him in the Vatican—one sovereign nation that does not belong to Interpol. To avoid attracting attention, the CIA has Nutterman, who is Jewish, dress as a Catholic Monsignor. What could go wrong? Especially as someone uses their meeting to attempt to kill Oleg. (Later a submarine will sink Oleg’s yacht in the Black Sea.)

I recall back in the sixties, Russian spies had tried to blackmail President Sukarno of Indonesia by filming him with prostitutes. It backfired. Sukarno, a Muslim, wanted them to show the films to his wives to show that he was still manly. Something similar happens with the plot to blackmail Trump.

There are a whole cast of characters, many of whom we recognize such as the former ambassador to the United Nations and governor of South Carolina, Trump’s son-in-law “Jored” who resembles a figure in a wax museum, and sleazy government bureaucrats of all persuasions.

The plot that inspired the title in part is because of Oleg but also because of a rogue Artificial Intelligence program sponsored by one of the seventeen American intelligence agencies. It is programmed to kick in automatically whenever an American election has been tampered with by foreign powers. It avenges America by tampering with the election of the meddling nation. So the opposition Communist Party in Russia defeats Putin in a landslide.

While America is no friend of Putin, it certainly does not want a return to Soviet Communism. As they say, politics makes strange bedfellows. In this case, the result is a political farce that, I suspect, people of all political persuasions outside of Russia will enjoy. I suspect even former president Trump might get a laugh out of it. He does not take himself that seriously, does he?

Elle Marr. The Alone Time. Thomas & Mercer, 2024.

We experience terrible things, and in hindsight, our paths seem to drive us toward our individual narrow valleys where we either push through to reach the open air of the other side, or we become stuck forever pressed at all angles by our faults and sheer bad luck. (1722)

The Alone Time is not about what the reader might think it means. It is not about someone demanding his or her “space.” It is about a time when the protagonists and narrators of the novel were alone, apart from the rest of the world. The four members of the Seng family, father Henry, mother Janet, and daughters Fiona and Violet, were flying together in a small plane when it crashed in the wilderness of Washington State.

For much of the tale, the reader is led to believe the crash happened in Oregon, but we learn that the location was actually in the Olympic National Park. I mention that detail only to illustrate how readers learn details in the story—very gradually and not in a linear manner.

The novel unfolds the way many contemporary works of fiction do. Chapters are narrated by different characters, in this case the four members of the Seng family. Most are told by the two sisters, now adults of thirty-eight and thirty-two. The elder of the two, Fiona, is a sculptor who appears to be on the threshold of success in the art world. Violet, the younger, has led a somewhat aimless existence, currently enrolled in college for the third time. Even so, she is mulling the pros and cons of dropping out again.

The parents were both lost in or shortly after the crash. The chapters from their point of view are flashbacks from twenty-five years before leading up to the crash and some of the drama that happened after the crash in the remote forest. The two girls were rescued after twelve weeks; somehow they survived. At the ages of thirteen and seven, they became media darlings for a while and were raised by an aunt. Even twenty-five years later, some critics say that Fiona’s artwork would not have sold at all if it had not been for her well-known backstory. As it is, Fiona uses her sculpting as a way to heal and overcome her trauma.

Like the other Marr tale we have reviewed here, there is much intrafamily conflict. In this case it is more pedestrian than criminal. Henry has been unfaithful, appears to regret it, and wants to make it up to Janet by taking the family on vacation from Southern California to Canada. Thirteen-year-old Fiona figures out enough of what it going on. Violet would probably have been innocent of everything except that one time she answers a phone call for her father from a woman named Alicia.

This in itself has the potential for a lively story. But other things complicate the plot even more. Because Violet has been drifting and at times exploiting her sister’s concern for her, the two sisters have not had much to do with each other for the last six years. They are trying to reconnect, though both have some reservations.

Meanwhile, after twenty-five years, the woman who claims to have been Henry’s mistress comes forward. She is being interviewed on many television talk shows. The timing seems more than mere coincidence since Fiona is beginning to get serious attention in the art world and is having her first solo exhibit. The woman seems to be in it to get attention and make the sisters look bad, even suggesting that they were somehow responsible for their parents’ deaths. And her name is Geri, not Alicia.

Also there is the documentary filmmaker Daley. He at first seems genuinely interested in the sisters’ story and wants to tell their side of it. They trust him at first until they see him with Geri and begin to realize he is more interested in sensationalism than truth.

Of course, the whole time, the reader is wondering what is the truth anyhow?

Marr knows how to pace a story well. Along with the current art world and college drama of the two sisters, we get chapters telling the parents’ stories while trying to survive in the wilderness as winter is coming on. We know that Janet and Henry really do not completely trust each other, but they do want to survive and they need each other for that.

Both have some background which could help them survive. Each has relatives who know traditional Chinese medicine, so they know something of what wild herbs and plants are edible and what ones are not. Henry was a Marine who served in Iraq in Desert Shield (1990-1991). He admits to having PTSD as a result. However, we will also learn that he received a dishonorable discharge. Usually victims of PTSD get a medical discharge or an honorable discharge. There is clearly something else going on here. But he also knows how to hunt and forage. There is chance they can survive if they can overcome both their inner and interpersonal conflicts. There is also at least a suggestion through this idea that perhaps the sisters each in her own way are suffering from some kind of PTSD after their wilderness ordeal,

By the way, Henry keeps saying he needs to protect the girls from wolves. While wild wolves do roam in parts of the mountains of the American West, the last wolf spotted in the Olympics was in 1935. Also the trip was planned to end in Calgary, but where the plane crashes suggests Henry was headed towards British Columbia. What is going on here?

There is a lot going on. The plot takes the reader step by step to an intense climax. But even at the end, loose ends are still floating around—which is truly more realistic. Does anyone know what really happened? As in real life, no one knows all the details, but we can figure enough to move on and perhaps look forward to what the future may hand us.

N.B.: The reference in the quotation is a Kindle location, not a page number.

Victor Davis Hanson. The Second World Wars. Basic, 2020.

That is right, the title pluralizes the conflict: The Second World Wars. The author spends little time on that idea, but points out that that there were two conflicts one in Europe and the Mediterranean basin and one in the Indo-Pacific. While the United States and Britain were involved in both places, there was virtually no overlap. The Soviet Union had a non-aggression pact with Japan as well as Germany, only the Japanese pact was not broken until the very end of the war when Stalin broke it.

Now that we have that out of the way, The Second World Wars is a modern classic. It is not a history of the war but an analysis of what happened. I would recommend it for any student of history, but perhaps more importantly, any political or military leader.

One recurring theme, one which we heard a lot about during the Vietnam War, is that there is a temptation to fight the last war. The American Civil War began with battlefield strategies from the Napoleonic wars, but with rifling, breech-loading, and other new technologies, the Civil War was much bloodier. In Vietnam, the American military was doing saturation bombing and napalm as if it were World War II instead of a guerrilla war.

In the case of World War II, the main strategy of Hitler was logical in the light of World War I. In that war, Russia surrendered to Germany, and France held out in trench lines for four years. Germany never made it much past the Rhine. On the other hand, the blitzkrieg in France in 1939 worked so well, Hitler thought the Soviet Union would be a pushover if France was so easily defeated this time. Indeed, if Hitler had been satisfied with what he gained in Poland, kept the nonaggression pact with Russia, and otherwise stayed out of war and tolerated Jews, he would have likely had a larger and prosperous Reich.

Something similar would have been likely with the Japanese, if they had not felt it necessary to get the United States involved. The Axis powers misunderstood their opponents in large part because of American isolationism, British appeasement, and Soviet collaboration. One interesting detail Hanson notes is that because of the Soviet-Japan nonaggression pact, Japan let many vessels originating in the United States carrying supplies to the Russian Far East to help the Soviet war effort. Although they were technically allies, Japan and Germany did little to help each other. In 1939, before the pact, Japan and the Soviet Union were fighting along the China-Russia border. The Japanese were not doing so well with them, so they were happy to leave Stalin and Zhukov alone.

When Japan launched its main Pacific attacks in late 1941, it had the largest and most modern Pacific fleet. But Japan also was thinking of its last war, the Russo-Japanese War of 1905. In that war, battleships were significant, and there were no such things as warplanes, let alone aircraft carriers. If Japan had devoted more resources to carriers and amphibious training, Hanson hypothesizes things might have been different—at the very least the war might have lasted into 1946.

This is a book for thinkers. Allied landings in North Africa were practices for the Normandy invasion. Yes, Stalin complained that England and America were not doing enough in the West while his army was fighting on the Eastern Front, but who was doing bombing runs over Germany and its industrial power? Who was fighting in Africa and Italy?

As with any war, there are many ironies. If we speak of imperial expansion, Stalin made out the best. He kept the Baltic states and Poland, which were obtained during the nonaggression period with Germany, but then the Red Army obtained much of the rest of Eastern Europe when the U.S.S.R. began fighting Germany. By joining the war against Japan at the end, it also benefited from China, Mongolia, and North Korea going Communist. Between war casualties and the brutal occupation by Axis armies, millions of Soviet and Chinese lives were lost, but more were lost at the hands of the national leaders Stalin and Mao through purges and government sanctioned famines.

One basic truth seems universal: Infantry still wins wars. However, the winning armies on the ground in World War II had very important support from the air and from the navies.

Morale is important but can be overrated or underestimated. The Germans and Japanese both benefited from poor enemy morale in some of their encounters, especially in France and Singapore. However, they also saw Britain as weak and America as decadent and thereby underestimated British resistance and American strength.

There are also some analyses of battle plans, especially as they relate to materiel. While Germany may have had the best tanks, the Soviet Union was able to make many more tanks, and American tanks were supported by both infantry and air. Also both countries had dependable supplies of fuel. The plan to take Sevastopol by Germany worked, but Germany did little with its success. It had trouble linking the Crimea with the rest of the Reich, so it never was able to use it as a foothold to get oil from the Caucasus.

While the atomic bomb truly brought an end to the war, the worst bombing of Japan was the saturation bombing of Tokyo on March 9-10, 1945, which remains the deadliest twenty-four hours in the history of warfare. Although kamikaze attacks could be deadly, only about ten percent succeeded. At the beginning of the war, Japan had the best trained pilots, but by 1943 America had superseded them in training, and many of the original Japanese pilots had been killed. By then Japan was having trouble getting oil, mostly because of Allied submarines, so their newer pilots had many fewer hours flight time. While portrayed as honorable, the kamikaze was really a measure of desperation.

Hanson has written extensively on other wars, especially the Peloponnesian War and the Punic Wars. He makes numerous comparisons, things we learn or could learn from them. When Athens attacked Sicily, there was an obvious problem of supply lines and overextending itself. Something similar happened when Germany attacked Russia.

The Second Punic War was a Roman victory, but Carthage sued for peace and remained relatively intact. During the Third Punic War, Rome decided to truly conquer Carthage, and that put an end to any threat from Carthage. There is an obvious parallel to the First and Second World Wars, especially with respect to Germany.

Hanson also mildly objects to the name of First World War. The First World War was a European war like many others. The only reason other parts of the world were involved had to do with empires. Britain, France, Germany, and Turkey all had imperial possessions in other places, so, yes, there was some fighting in Africa and Arabia, and there were soldiers from Down Under and India and North America, but until the United States entered the war, such worldwide participation was from European subjects. With World War II, however, all but about a dozen independent countries in the world got involved. And even some of the neutral countries leaned one way or the other.

There is much more. This review barely touches on the analysis. There is much we can learn. Before any country goes to war, it may be a good thing for at least some of its leaders or advisors to read The Second World Wars. It is about the historical actions of armies and politicians and (and this is paramount) the significance of their actions. As Santayana so famously said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

J. R. R. Tolkien. The Silmarillion. Edited by Christopher Tolkien, Houghton, 1977.

When Peter Jackson began filming his famous Lord of the Rings trilogy, he told the actors, “This is not fantasy, this is history.” That no doubt helped his actors get into their parts, but it also says something about the whole Tolkien mythos, or as Tolkien fans say, the legendarium.

So The Silmarillion is not so much an adventure story or prose epic like The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (LOTR) as it is a history book—in this the case, the history of Middle Earth leading up to the time of The Hobbit and LOTR.

I purchased The Silmarillion many years ago but never completed it. Each chapter pretty much tells a single discrete story. There are many names to keep track of and not a whole lot holding it together as a single work. Indeed, it was not written as a novel but was assembled by Christopher Tolkien, John’s son, from notes and individual tales his father had written but never published.

I discovered recently, though, a different way to read this book. It took a long time. I started in September and just finished this week. A pair of hardcore Tolkien fans have put together a podcast series called the Prancing Pony Podcast. They have posted chapter by chapter commentaries on Tolkien’s works. So I would read a chapter and then listen to their discussion of that chapter. Most of the chapters in the book are quite short, but the podcasts usually last anywhere from an hour and a half to three hours. A few chapters have two or three podcasts devoted to them.

I found the Prancing Pony Podcasts very helpful. They made some of the drier mere history come alive and provided many connections with other works by Tolkien. The also made connections to works that influenced Tolkien or that he liked to read or study himself. Because of the length of each session, it takes over sixty hours to listen to the podcasts in order to cover the whole book. That time commitment may be an understandable deterrent, but for this reader it was worth it. It also explains why it took nearly three months to get through the book.

The book is divided into four parts. The first twenty pages or so is called the Ainulindalë which is about the original creation of Middle Earth. The vast bulk of the book is the Quenta Silmarillion, the tale of the Silmarils, 24 chapters and about 230 pages. This is followed by the Akallabêth, which is the story of the fall of the city of Númenor—an epochal disaster mentioned in LOTR. This runs about fifteen pages. Finally there is an overview of the Third Age, which includes the era that The Hobbit and LOTR take place in. This is about twenty pages.

The book covers millennia leading up to the Third Age, so there are hundreds of names of places and people and genealogies that compete with the Bible and royal families for their detail. Fortunately, the editor included a few genealogies, a dictionary of names that runs over forty pages, and a glossary of terms from the Middle Earth. While The Hobbit and LOTR might be compared to medieval Norse eddas or epics, The Silmarillion takes after a medieval chronicle like that of Froissart—maybe a little dry, maybe based a little on hearsay, likely condensed, but a source of what we do know about the time period it covers.

The rest of this review are thoughts or reactions to certain things within The Silmarillion. Some were inspired by questions raised in the Prancing Pony Podcast.

The Silmarils were three enchanted jewels crafted early in the history of Middle Earth. They emitted light from the original white trees and appeared to have some supernatural powers. Though different in character from the rings of power, elves and other creatures lusted after them. One of the Silmarils figures prominently in the story of Beren and Lúthien ( a brief version of their story is told in The Silmarillion). Wars are fought over them, but in the end (and this is not really a spoiler) one ends up in each of the three realms of the universe—the land, the sea, and the sky.

One of the other heroes towards the end of the story is Eärendil. His name in Tolkien’s elvish language means “lover of the sea.” However the name is originally found in Old English. The “First Christ Poem” (a.k.a. “Christ A”) speaks of Ēarendel, the morning star:

Ēala ēarendel, engla beorhtast,
ofer middangeard monnum sended…

Hail Ēarendel, angel brightest,
Over middle-earth, sent to men…(ll. 104-105)

The earliest reference we have in Tolkien’s notes (from 1914) to anything connected with Middle Earth is an observation he made on these lines. Middle Earth was the Old English term for the earth, the same as the Norse Midgard. Tolkien wrote “There was something very remote and strange and beautiful behind those words, if I could grasp it, far beyond ancient English.”

In the context of the “Christ A” poem, Ēarendel seems to refer to Christ Himself who calls Himself “the bright morning star” in Revelation 22:16. Tolkien clearly saw something else as well, as he apparently began to imagine his own Middle Earth.

The Prancing Pony Podcast does a pretty good job of making connections with the Bible in different stories, especially the rebellion of Morgoth (a.k.a. Melkor) as it parallels the fall of the devil. I might suggest to them that they check out Paradise Lost as well for it records both the fall of Satan and the fall of man. Some of the specifics in The Silmarillion seem to be inspired by Milton. Any professor of English like Tolkien a hundred years ago would have known that epic well. The Silmarillion has a lot to say about temptation, especially the temptation of pride.

Like the Bible story of the Fall, Tolkien tells us there was no death in Middle Earth until some of the “ancient ones,” the first elves and other creatures, rebelled. The podcasters seemed to have a little trouble when Tolkien called death a gift. After all, the Bible calls death “the last enemy” (I Corinthians 15:26). Now Tolkien was Catholic, but he did not go as far as Francis of Assisi who called death a brother. Still, we understand that after the Fall God caused things to die because it was better for everyone. If sinners lived forever on the earth, the evil would be truly unbearable because there would be no end to the sin. In that sense, it was a gift to us.

Tolkien also raises interesting question about fate and free will. The devils in hell in Paradise Lost discuss the potentially “vain” circular reasoning of this subject:

Others apart sat on a hill retired,
In thoughts more elevate, and reasoned high
Of Providence, Foreknowledge, Will, and Fate—
Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute,
And found no end, in wandering mazes lost.
Of good and evil much they argued then,
Of happiness and final misery,
Passion and apathy, and glory and shame:
Vain wisdom all, and false philosophy!—
Yet, with a pleasing sorcery, could charm
Pain for a while or anguish, and excite
Fallacious hope, or arm th’ obdured breast
With stubborn patience as with triple steel. (2.557-565)

Unlike such discussions, Tolkien presents what amounts to four different life principles all working together in the story of life. First, Providence, what the Creator (named Eru or Ilúvatar in Middle Earth) creates for men (and elves, maiar, valar, and dwarves) to inhabit and to react to. Then, there is Fate, prophecies that show God’s final intent and purpose. Fate reacts to mankind and mankind reacts to fate. There is also Free Will. Man (and maiar and elves, etc.) can choose to follow God or not. God may provide things to challenge the will, but He does not override it.

A biblical example (one used in the podcast) is the Pharaoh in Exodus. The Lord tells Moses He will harden Pharaoh’s heart (cf. Exodus 7:3). It also says Pharaoh hardened his heart (cf. Exodus 8:32). Basically, the Lord’s plagues caused Pharaoh to harden his own heart (Exodus 4:21). God was no puppet master, but he knew Pharaoh’s heart. By the way, the podcast suggests that the name of Ar-Pharazôn, the last king of Númenor, echoes the word Pharaoh. Ar-Pharazôn also hardened his heart and ended up seduced by Sauron.

And finally, there is Chance, occurrences that happen but seem to be apart from any plan other than simple physical cause and effect. Of course, in Middle Earth, and in our world, some things may appear to be chance, but they are working out something else. In the legendarium, the classic case of chance is in The Hobbit when Bilbo finds the ring. It is truly a kind of random encounter, but the LOTR certainly makes us realize that it is very significant and full of purpose.

There is a lot to consider here. If any readers are curious about the background of Tolkien’s Middle Earth and the “history” before LOTR, then The Silmarillion is for you.

N.B. In the now-legacy program Spelling Slammer by English Plus, we noted that the traditional spelling of the plural of dwarf is dwarfs as in “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” However, Tolkien spelled it dwarves. This has caught on, and it really makes sense in Middle Earth because the plural of elf, after all, is elves. Shouldn’t the plurals be parallel? (Not to mention that the plural of the one noun that rhymes with dwarf is wharves, also ending with -ves.) It also makes a helpful distinction between the third-person verb and the plural noun.

Jon Spoelstra. Who’s Killing the Old (and mostly lovable) Mystery Writers? Spoelstra, 2023.

Who’s Killing the Old Mystery Writers has some echoes of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None (a.k.a. Ten Little Indians). In this case, however, we know who the host is, and some of the guests know each other. Samson Aitch, “a massive name in mystery writers…second only to James Patterson,” has invited a group of seven mystery writers to a retreat in rural Oregon to collaborate on a mystery novel together.

Most of them had worked together on another novel which had become a bestseller. Except for Aitch, it was the most money any of them ever made on a book they had written. All of them were looking forward to the chance to duplicate the success of the first one.

There was perhaps a slight catch. In their first novel, one of the characters dies of snakebites by when he drives a car full of poisonous snakes. One of the contributors ended up dying the same way. Once his death made the news, the book sold like hotcakes.

As you can guess from the title, something similar begins happening at the retreat. One of the writers is killed by a long-range rifle shot while teeing off in a golf game. Something like that also happened in the first book. By various other means not mentioned in that first novel, some of the other writers die. Everyone starts suspecting everyone else.

Charlie North, our narrator, writes, but he writes nonfiction. He is a retired columnist and journalist from Chicago who covered the crime beat. He and his friend Ben, a retired police detective, were invited as keynote speakers to share some of their experiences in writing about and solving real crimes. Of course, they end up looking into the murders at the retreat.

For people who enjoy mysteries, this one is fun. Each writer has a different specialty: one writes cozies, one writes hard-boiled, one writes thrillers, one specializes in murders in Maui, one writes steamy tales featuring lesbians. Each day one is assigned to work with Samson and his assistant, Ichabod Crane (yes, that is his legal name), on a chapter. The goal is to have a novel of 28 chapters written in 28 days. But as some of the writers get knocked off, the plans keep changing.

The supporting cast is very good, too. Aitch has a staff that helps him. Is that attractive woman in her twenties really just his proofreader? What about his bodyguard? Charlie enlists some help over the phone, a private investigator from California and a dark net researcher from Oregon. Both seem to have ways of finding information others miss.

Our narrator has a sense of humor and is able to detach himself somewhat—but not entirely—from the goings-on and the rivalries of the different writers. All of the writers are at least fifty years old. Samson Aitch is seventy-seven. So there are certain humorous nods to being seniors, e.g., “old guys have plenty of open spaces on our calendars except for all those doctor appointments.” (175)

There are nods to a number of mystery writers in this book, but James Patterson gets the most mentions. Nor surprisingly, Who’s Killing the Old Mystery Writers? suggests Patterson’s techniques. His narrators are often detached and even unreliable. While Charlie seems to be reliable, he might be covering up something. Like some of Patterson’ stories, not all the loose ends get tied up nicely.

One great feature of this book, which will give most readers pleasure, is its epigraphs at the beginning of each chapter. These are not mere quotations as we often see in books, but very funny jokes or sets of one-liners about old people. Here is one example (I am putting it in my own words to condense it):

A wealthy seventy-two-year-old widower arrives one evening at his country club with a gorgeous twenty-five-year-old blonde on his arm. When she exits briefly for the ladies’ room, one of the other men at the club says, “Your date is very attractive.”

He replies, “That’s not my date. That’s my wife.”

“How did you ever get a young woman like her to marry you?”

“Easy, I lied about my age.”

“What? Did you tell her you were fifty-two?”

“No, I told her I was ninety-two!”

Some are even funnier. A couple had us literally in stitches. Sure, read it for the mystery, but enjoy it for the jokes—or maybe vice-versa.

P.S. One interesting detail from the story: Mr. Aitch says he was in rural Vermont near the Canadian border in 1995, isolating himself to write, when the Grateful Dead came to town. Bob Dylan opened for them. It was their last tour and a month from their last concert. This really did happen. Apparently, it was quite an event!

S. F. Baumgartner. Living Secrets. F.B. Publishing, 2023.

The author of Living Secrets seems to like people whose background becomes a surprise even to themselves. The two main characters of the novel both have learned that their parents are not who they thought they were. Dylan Roche of Florida discovers that he is the heir to a fortune that apparently was largely funded from the rackets. Lily Tso of Hong Kong learns that her birth parents, whom she had never met, were an international spy known as Phoenix and a man who is now a U. S. Senator.

Twenty-two year old Lily has a documents job in a Hong Kong hotel that is partly owned by Dylan’s family. Through Dylan she meets some people who want her to take some classified information from China to the United States. They tell her that she may finally meet her birth mother, someone she and the uncle who raised her thought was dead. To paraphrase Homer, that was the beginning of all her troubles.

Lily arrives with Dylan to Florida where they meet with some FBI agents including a father-son team. They make arrangements to meet both of Lily’s parents, but things do not go according to plan. There are so many people tailing other people it is almost hard to keep track of them. And it is certainly difficult to tell who the good guys are—if there are any. After all, Dylan has an aunt who is still with the criminal organization, and Lily’s mother has been operating as a spy for years. Whom is Phoenix spying for?

A criminal known as the Ghost seems to pulling the strings behind everything. We learn that Phoenix and Ghost know each other, too. There are also some Chinese spies and tong members. It gets complicated and interesting. The chapters are short, the action does not let up, and readers will be compelled to keep reading.

Oh, yeah, there is some kind of germ warfare going on as well. A deadly microbe originated in China, but some Chinese doctors have risked their own lives and reputations to try to get word of an antidote before it creates havoc in places that China considers rivals if not enemies. Hong Kong was where East and West met for a century. Are East and West still compatible there? Anywhere?

Richard Henry Dana. Two Years Before the Mast. 1869; Third Edition, Edited by Chris Thomerson, eNotated Classics, 2011.

A sailor’s liberty is but for a day; yet while it lasts it is perfect. (1964)

Yet a sailor’s life is at best but a mixture of little good with much evil, and a little pleasure with much pain. The beautiful is linked with the revolting, the sublime with the commonplace, and the solemn with the ludicrous. (741)

This seafaring memoir is a classic. After reading it, I can see why. It had an impact during its time, and its story endures.

Two Years Before the Mast originally came out in 1840. It describes the two-year adventure of the author sailing from Boston around South America to California and back on two different sailing ships from 1834 to 1836. At the time, this book was unique. There had been virtually no books about sailing on the oceans written by ordinary seamen. The perspective was very different. To use a term from land-based military, the seamen were the “grunts.” In those days they had virtually no rights. They worked hard, were fed poorly, and could be beaten (sometimes brutally) for many reasons, or for none at all.

Some “reforms” were hardly changes for the better. Dana tells us that, unlike the officers, the sailors were limited to what they could drink—even water was rationed. On one ship the sailors would observe the captain drinking coffee, cocoa, or grog, but the sailors were not allowed even water while they were working. As the temperance movement grew, some merchants began “virtue signaling” by dropping rum or other adult beverages from the supplies on board the ship. Dana saw this cynically: It was simply a way to economize and did nothing for morale or morals.

Dana’s background was different from most sailors, too. He came from a prominent Boston family. He had spent two years at Harvard as an undergraduate and decided to take some time off to explore the world. He was observant and literate. He writes of reading numerous books in his spare time while on the voyage. But most of the time he and his shipmates were working hard.

To illustrate the division of labor and status on board the ships, when his ship finally was full of cargo and returning to Boston, they took on a passenger. The passenger was the famous ornithologist, Thomas Nuttall. Nuttall was a professor at Harvard, and he and Dana casually knew each other, but while on the ship, they were separated and Dana and the other seamen were not permitted to speak to the passengers. Occasionally, the two men were able to have short conversations, but Dana tells us that they rarely saw each other on the long voyage home.

One secondary reason they did not see each other was the nature of the voyage, especially by Cape Horn. The weather there is notoriously rough, and they were traveling there in the austral winter. There were ice fields, icebergs, and almost constant gales. The sailors got very little rest during that part of the voyage. It really is quite exciting to read about the sailing around Tierra del Fuego.

The two ships Dana worked on both came to California for the same reason: to gather leather hides to bring back to Boston to sell. The descriptions of California in the 1830s is fascinating. Back then it was part of Mexico, so it was Spanish and Catholic. Dana picked up Spanish fairly well, having studied French and Latin. The ships sailed back and forth in Upper California between San Diego and San Francisco.

Dana describes the harbor at San Francisco as having the most commercial potential, but at the time there was just a Mexican fort, the Presidio, and one frame house. Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, and San Diego were not much more than villages. Ranches provided the hides of cattle that the men bought or traded for. In spite of the sparse population, there were some families with noble backgrounds, though Dana observes what Weber would call the Protestant work ethic. The most successful businessmen, he writes, were Yankees who came to California and settled there.

One interesting observation concerns the Mexican view of race. The Mexicans considered people with Spanish blood to be citizens and superior to the Native Americans. However, even someone who had just one Spanish great-grandparent was considered Spanish. That was and is notably different from the way Americans viewed people with any African ancestors.

While the book originally came out in 1840 and was a bestseller by the standards of the day, Dana published a revised edition in 1869. In 1859, twenty-years after he first visited California, he revisited it. Now it was a state of the United States, and it was a very different world. San Francisco was now a city of about a hundred thousand, and the other ports were all much more populated. Some of the Mexican families he knew still lived there, and he visited some of the folks he had met a quarter century before. California was on its way to becoming the state we know today. It was already another country in more ways than one. And there was very little leather trade any more. The railroads had opened up the cattle country of the Plains.

One caution: Years ago I read a diary of someone who read Two Years Before the Mast, and he had this observation:

Finished Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana – to my mind a very dull book, entirely too full of foreboom, royal spinnakers, and top gallant yardarm try sails.

The reaction might be a little surprising considering the author of the diary had lived in San Francisco. However, his critique cannot be entirely ignored. The book is full of nautical terms. Now, I was in the Coast Guard and was familiar with many of them, but not the specialized jargon of sailing ships. I did have to look up a number of terms.

I had a break, however. I started reading the book in a printed edition, but I was going on a trip, so to pack light I downloaded the Kindle version mentioned in the header. I recommend that version. It has a very thorough set of hyperlinked footnotes that define those terms that the above diarist complained about.

I think that note also tells us that Dana had in mind an audience of seafarers. Gradually, the plight of ordinary seamen and boatswains came to the greater attention of the public and the merchants who hired them. Gradually, reforms were made. My mother’s stepfather was a merchant mariner from the 1920s to the 1950s, and he would testify that the union took good care of him.

N.B.: References are Kindle locations, not pages.

F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Pat Hobby Stories. Scribner’s, 1962.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s reputation grows out of his stories of the 1920’s “Jazz Age,” especially the upper classes, or as some like to say, the rich and the rotten. That is true of all his completed novels and most of his better known short stories like “The Rich Boy” or “Winter Dreams.” They all seem to have a Gatsby, Daisy, or Tom type character somewhere in the tale. The Pat Hobby short stories are quite different. Except for the fact that they still have allusions and deliberate name choices, they hardly seem to be products of the same person who wrote The Beautiful and Damned.

Part of that, no doubt, reflects the changes in Fitzgerald’s own life. His first three novels—This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, and The Great Gatsby—all reflect something of his background at the time: a preppie, an Ivy Leaguer, and an army officer observing the upper classes. In the mid 1920s he spent a lot of time in Europe, hanging out with other American ex-pats like Hemingway. That would be reflected in Tender is the Night, whose ex-pat main character travels around the continent. While Fitzgerald did spend a year in Hollywood in the twenties, he returned there to write screenplays in 1937. His last writings, then, tell of a Hollywood screenwriter of questionable skill and character.

The introduction to the published collection of stories is quite helpful. It is written by Arnold Gingrich, who was Fitzgerald’s editor at Esquire magazine during the last two years of Fitzgerald’s life. FSF died in December 1940, so five of the stories were published posthumously in the magazine’s January through May issues.

It is simple enough to sum up Pat Hobby—an over-the-hill Hollywood screenwriter who is hard up for money and addicted to the bottle and the horse races. He apparently had a few successful screenplays during the silent era, but has never really made the grade since the advent of talkies. He manages to barely hang on by getting a few jobs that last a few weeks and also by cadging money off people he knows.

At one point, he comes up with a great line in a script with a doctor trying to save a life: “Boil Some Water—Lots of It,” which is, by the way, the title of the story. Back in the twenties that would have been a title card for five or ten minutes of action, but now it is just one line. It might be a good line, but the story needs a lot more dialogue. The writer’s work clearly was simpler back in the day.

Nearly every tale reminds us that Hobby is forty-nine years old. He has worked with some well-known actors. A few, like Ronald Colman, remember him, though most do not. He names Colman and Claudette Colbert in his speech and memories more than anyone else. Colman actually appears in one of the stories. Colbert does not. (For what it is worth, back in the 1920s in their wilder days, FSF and Zelda played a prank on Colman, but Colman apparently took it in good humor.)

The stories are quite short, no more than ten pages or so. While nothing like what Fitzgerald is known for, they do entertain us, especially those who enjoy ironic humor. It seems like Pat Hobby is always trying to get something for nothing. Yes, that is why he gambles, but also why at best he is a Hollywood hanger-on.

Some of Hobby’s experiences are likely based on things that Fitzgerald himself may have witnessed while a screenwriter in Hollywood. (For what it is worth, FSF only received screen credit for two films, neither of which made much of an impression on either the box office or the critics.) Gingrich’s introduction makes us believe that Fitzgerald himself was hard up during the time he was writing these stories as he always asked that his payment be wired to his bank account rather than having a check mailed.

Some situations themselves are funny. People on the lot get excited when Orson Welles comes to town. All Hobby can think is what’s the big deal? Another story has a surprise when Hobby learns that one of his ex-wives married a rich potentate from India. The son of his ex and himself has been raised in luxury. Since the boy has been adopted by her new husband, the family wants to give a small allowance to Hobby. Finally! He can survive without working or having to pretend to work. Of course, there is one condition to the terms of the contract…

The backdrop to all this is the war in Europe, which began in September 1939. A few of the stories have actors and actresses who are refugees. But most of the characters are the “little people” at the studio: the writers, the secretaries, the callboys, the security guards, and the bookie. Lou the bookie manages to hang on at the studio as well. Maybe Pat Hobby has yet to learn from gambling that the house always comes out ahead.

Aurelius Augustinius [St. Augustine]. The Confessions of St. Augustine. 395?; Translated by William Benham, Collier, 1909. The Harvard Classics.

The Confessions of St. Augustine is different from any book I have ever read. Unlike the Confessions of Rousseau or Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Augustine presents this book as an actual confession to God. It is not written in the second person like Bright Lights, Big City, but the second person is very common. The second person is God. The book is addressed to Him as the ultimate Father Confessor.

While the vast majority of the work focuses on sin, especially Augustine’s own sin, it does not deliver great details. He confesses that he had a long relationship with a “concubine,” and that as a boy he stole some things, but mostly it examines his sin nature and his motivation for sin. At the same time the book discusses the various belief systems he examined—he embraced the Manichaeans for a few years—and rejoices over the truth and salvation that he found through Jesus.

Although the Roman Catholic Church considers Augustine one of its doctors, he comes from a very different philosophical direction than Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas developed his theology by examining Aristotle and Aristotelian logic. Augustine considered Aristotle “vain” because he did not acknowledge the supernatural or see the moral law as God-given.

The attraction of the Manichaean system for Augustine was similar to that of certain views we hear today. The followers of Mani taught that the cosmos exemplified a struggle of good versus evil, with the evil being the material world and the good being he spiritual world. This is not unlike the Orientalist or New Age view of the material world being illusory and the spiritual realm being real; or again not unlike the Daoist concept of yin and yang, good and evil being two sides of the same coin. It even suggests the Mormon idea that Jesus and the devil are brothers. Like other adherents of such belief systems, Augustine found it satisfactory for a while because it explained good and evil.

He rejected Christianity in spite of his mother’s prayers and pleas for two reasons. One was the basic reason for many: He enjoyed sinning, especially concupiscence. (Although the root of concupiscence is Cupid, he points out that, as in I John 2:16, all “worldly” desires are sin: Cupid’s lust of the flesh, but also greed, and lust for power.) The other reason was that if there were a good creator God, then why does evil exist? That, of course, is a common philosophical objection to Christianity or Judaism today. It became known as Friday’s Question because Friday asks Robinson Crusoe virtually the same thing.

Eventually, he was persuaded or realized that Platonism, not Aristotelianism, had an answer. There was an ideal. Because we understand the moral law, even though we do not always keep it, we can see that there is an ideal Creator, one who is good. Augustine notes the similarity between the Platonic ideal and the opening verses of the Gospel of John:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. (John 1:1-4)

Once he overcame the philosophical objection, it would be only a matter of time when he would embrace the Gospel of Jesus. Jesus, as John goes on, “became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14) to save us from our sins and deliver us from that sin nature. Not only is God good, but He shares His goodness to all who follow Him and acknowledge His Son. To Augustine that included the gift of continency, the self-control needed to deal with those worldly temptations (189, cf. I Corinthians 7:6-7, Galatians 5:22-24).

As I read this, I was struck by two things from my own reading of other works. I realize that is no coincidence that Martin Luther was an Augustinian monk. Wittenberg was an Augustinian university. Most of the other universities in sixteenth century Europe were Thomist. Wittenberg was different.

We are told that many days Luther would spend three hours in confession. His confessor and other monks and priests at Wittenberg thought he was excessive, but he was searching for righteousness. But anyone who has read The Confessions of St. Augustine can see where that came from. This two hundred page book is one confession or analysis of personal sin followed by another and another and another. Luther was seeking righteousness just as Augustine was.

Augustine would hear a voice tell him “take and read,” and he picked up a Bible and turned to Romans 13:13-14, which spoke directly to him:

Let us walk properly as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in sexual immorality and sensuality, not in quarreling and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.

He repented, the Holy Spirit changed him, and the rest is his history.

Luther also was converted by a verse in Romans. Now, in his case, he was a monk and took his vows seriously. If his confessors are to be believed, he did not have much sin to turn away from, but he still needed God’s assurance of salvation. He was also reading the Book of Romans, notably chapter 1 verses 16 and 17:

For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, “The righteous shall live by faith.” (Romans 1:16-17, cf. Habakkuk 2:4)

The righteous live by faith! It is not our own doing, but faith in the salvation that Jesus provided by dying on the cross! Luther would write that when he accepted this, he was born again. It was about five years after this experience that Luther’s questions about church teachings gained the attention of others, and the Reformation followed.

Luther noted in one of his writings the irony that the universities in his day taught Greek, not to read the New Testament in its original language, but to read Aristotle—and Aristotle was a pagan who only believed in the material world. In other words, he rejected the roots of Thomism for a reason similar to why Augustine saw Aristotle among the vain philosophers. (See, for example, To The Christian Nobility of the German Nation §25)

(As an aside, even today, scholarly Catholics are encouraged to read Aristotle to help them understand Aquinas. I was assured this was the case by an acquaintance who was a member of the Catholic lay order Opus Dei.)

Augustine also quotes and alludes to Scripture after Scripture. I give credit to the translation I read. Its language may be a bit dated, but it italicized nearly every Bible allusion and quotation. We begin to see how much Augustine relied on the Bible, even when describing his life before his conversion. We see a similar use of Scripture in much of Luther’s work as well.

Not only did The Confessions of St. Augustine remind me of Luther, it reminded me of one of the most famous fictional characters of all time—Prince Hamlet. Hamlet, after all, attended Wittenberg. He was trained in Augustinian theology. I suspect Shakespeare may have been familiar with The Confessions. We can be pretty well assured he knew Latin. He attended grammar school where Latin was taught from an early age. We know he knew Ovid. If they taught The Metamorphoses, they likely taught The Confessions as well.

So Hamlet expresses his depression in a manner similar to the way Augustine described his when he was going through a period of similar stress. Hamlet says, “Denmark’s a prison.” So Augustine writes, “My native country was a torment to me” (51). And as Hamlet finds little pleasure in distractions and entertainments so Augustine writes about his melancholy:

O madness, which knowest not how to love men, like men! O foolish man that I then was, enduring impatiently the lot of man! I fretted then, sighed, wept, was distracted; had neither rest nor counsel. For I bore about a shattered and bleeding soul, impatient of being borne by me, yet where to repose it, I found not. Not in calm groves, not in games and music, nor in fragrant spots, nor in curious banquetings, nor in the pleasures of the bed and the couch; nor (finally) in books or poesy found a repose. All things looked ghastly, yea the very light…(53)

He could be describing Hamlet’s madness as well as his own.

Yet like Augustine, Hamlet was spiritually aware. He understood that the devil or another spirit could be exploiting his grief and “abuses me to damn me.” We are indeed in a spiritual battle, sweet prince. Yes, “there is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.” God sees. He is the Omnipotent Word. He knows what is going on better than we do.

Augustine shares something of his battle and what he learned from it. Over the centuries he has spoken and still speaks to those who understand what is at stake. Some readers may want a more contemporary translation than the one quoted here, but don’t pass it up if you are concerned about the condition of your heart or soul—or if you want a little more insight into Hamlet.