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Class of 1957 Book Review Site. ©2007. To add a Book Review, or to comment on a book already in this listing, send your material or review to Sam Coulbourn at Persnav@shore.net. Photo at top of each page shows VADM C. Turner Joy (1895-1956). Joy was Commander Naval Forces Far East for most of the Korean War, presided over Armistice Talks with the North Koreans, and then came to Annapolis to serve as Superintendent. He was our Supe during our plebe year. Revised 3 August 2008. |
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BIOGRAPHY 20th Century Journey; A Memoir of a Life and the Times, Vol. II: The Nightmare Years
By William L. Shirer, 1984. Boston: Little, Brown & Co. 654 pp.
Now, in 2007, even if you lived through the years of World War II, it is hard to imagine how a little man like Adolf Hitler could ever have gotten himself elected chancellor of Germany, and then systematically converted the country to the Nazi Third Reich. Bill Shirer was a young correspondent for the Chicago Tribune at the start of the 1930s, but just after he had married a pretty young Austrian woman, he was fired. He had been sending back stories that warned of Hitler and his struggle for power. Colonel McCormick, like a lot of influential Americans in those years, was so dead-set against Bolshevism that he saw the rising star of Hitler as something to be nurtured and encouraged. Hitler had written Mein Kampf, his blueprint for Nazism, dictating it to Rudolph Hess while he stamped around his prison cell in 1924. His first goal in that book was to re-unite Germany with Austria. Shirer relates how Hitler used his hoodlums in Germany and Austria to stir up emotions, how he appealed to a population suffering from all the indignities of losing The Great War of 1914-1918, how he blamed so much on the Jews. Shirer went to work for Universal Service, a wire news service, and then in 1937 Edward R. Murrow hired him for the Columbia Broadcasting System, which was just starting the experiment of broadcasting news live from Europe. Shirer is there as Hitler delivers speeches and stirs the German people to frantic furor. His troops march into Austria, while the leaders of other nations in Europe look on with anxiety. Hitler’s troops march into Czechoslovakia, while the leaders of other nations look on. Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister, is someone we remember today for his “Peace in our time” speech as he tried to “negotiate” with Herr Hitler to save the peace in Europe. Shirer describes how Hitler bullies his way into war, cooking up lies for excuses to conquer nations. Next come Poland, and then Belgium and Holland and France. Even though France and Great Britain could have applied massive power to stop Hitler at any point, they relied upon hope and love of peace and wishful thinking, and Hitler made fools of them. The Nazis flew the war correspondents to France to observe the French surrender, and to watch as the Germans began their operation to invade Great Britain. Usually Shirer uses the German official radio system to transmit his news broadcasts to New York for re-broadcast on CBS. The Nazis are happy to have Shirer use their service as long as he is saying what they want the Americans to hear. Of course, this is all while America is still neutral. Shirer figures ways to get across his message, but with the heavy German censorship and the threat of being thrown into jail or simply killed, it eventually becomes too much. Finally, he sends his family to America, and then he leaves Europe.
Review by Sam Coulbourn, February 2007.
BIOGRAPHY Virginia Woolf
By Hermione Lee, Alfred Knopf, 1997
This is simply the finest work of biography that I have ever read. The subject, Virginia Woolf, was a woman of immense complexity, and Hermione Lee does a superb job of plumbing the depths of her variegated life. Woolf was born into a family that mirrored the upper-class world of mid-to-late nineteenth century England. A brilliant child, Virginia was denied the right of a college education by a patriarchal father who didn't want to waste his money on education for his daughters, though Virginia's brothers went to Cambridge. The myriad circumstances and interactions of siblings, parents, and relatives receive extensive coverage in the forty chapters of this nearly nine-hundred-page volume, but the volume retains for the reader a sense of anticipation and interest throughout. For me the fascinating aspect of the book is the extensive insights it provides on English life and society in that age. Obviously the work focuses on Virginia Woolf, but is gives extensive coverage to all the members of her family over several generations. In the process it is possible to grasp something of the mores, fashions, class relations, even architecture of the times. Woolf was a part of the "Bloomsbury Group," (most of whom were homosexuals or went through phases in which they engaged in homosexual behavior) a collection of brilliant thinkers that included Maynard Keynes, whose economic ideas would later have a significant influence on the world's economies. Lee's work gives sufficient coverage to the ideas of the group's members that it was possible and exciting to obtain a running commentary on the philosophical debates that raged over a period of decades, debates that involved such events as socialism, capitalism, pacifism, World War I, the great depression, the rise of fascism, and the early years of the Second World War. The book also provided exceptional glimpses into the changing medical world of the time, particularly in terms of the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness. Virginia Woolf experienced several episodes of very serious mental illness, resulting sometimes in lengthy hospitalization. Eventually, of course, the illness overwhelmed her and she took her own life by drowning, as she was convinced that she would not recover from the latest episode. Ms Lee explores sexual issues that possibly were contributors to the mental difficulties, including apparent sexual abuse by a step brother. At any rate, Woolf spent an entire lifetime with sexual frustration, including forty years of unconsummated or seldom-consummated marriage. Her marriage and a number of affairs with various women also receive extensive coverage by the author. My interest in the work of Virginia Woolf began with a short non-credit course at William and Mary this spring, and now I'm hooked. I'm also hooked on Hermione Lee. This morning I began reading her newest volume, this one entitled Edith Wharton. Since it's also nearly 900 pages long it will be a while before I have an assessment.
Review by Paul Roush, July 2007 __._,_.___ BIOGRAPHY Wisdom of Our Fathers
By Tim Russert, 2006
This is a great book containing short letters about fathers. If you don't shed a few tears reading these stories you are a pretty tough character. Russert also adds some stories about his Dad and son.
BIOGRAPHY Witness
By Whittaker Chambers, 1952.
Despite the exposure of Alger Hiss, a key State Department adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt at Yalta and an architect of the United Nations, as a member of the Communist Party and his conviction for perjury, “widespread lingering belief in Hiss’s innocence” persists. As Whittaker Chambers’ memoir testifies: “It was, not invariably, but in general, the ‘best people’ who were for Alger Hiss ... prepared to go to almost any length to protect and defend him. It was the enlightened and the powerful, the clamorous proponents of the open mind and the common man, who snapped their minds shut in a pro-Hiss psychosis, of a kind which, in an individual patient, means the simple failure of the ability to distinguish between reality and unreality, and, in a nation, is a warning of the end.” Witness reminds us that only then-Senator Richard Nixon stood with Chambers when the press was hailing Hiss’s innocence, and who rallied support for a beaten Chambers, eventually exposing Hiss’s perjuries. This is a lengthy and difficult book. It outlines the evil that Chambers withstood at so great a cost. It helps explain some of the press perspective today even though it was written more than 50 years ago. It’s part of history. It’s worth our time to read.
BIOGRAPHY Churchill, a Biography
By Roy Jenkins, 2001.
This is a monumental biography and a sweeping study of the history of Britain during the long life of Winston Churchill (1874-1965). Churchill lived his life with a destiny for greatness. He was a soldier, but unlike nearly any other. He managed to position himself where he would experience danger, and then he managed to capture the exclusive rights to the story. Even when he was on the Queen’s list as a young soldier, (in India, Sudan and South Africa) he was mailing back thick dispatches to London newspapers. Roy Jenkins wrote this voluminous engorgement of parliamentary history in two and a half years, when he was in his eighties. At every point one can sense Jenkins’ rather tart view of Churchill. He gives Winston his due, as a statesman, elegant speaker and writer, but also as an almost mythical character, who always, in the direst of times, manages to sit down to a well-laid table and enjoy a fine meal, with plenty of champagne, port, brandy and a good cigar. Jenkins’ account of Churchill’s leadership of Britain after he became Prime Minister in May, 1940 is particularly interesting. Winston flew to France numerous times to try to give the French leaders (PM Paul Reynaud et al) encouragement to resist Hitler. At the same time, Churchill was trying his best to bring the United States into the fray, so once he promised the French that American intervention was nigh. Jenkins called Churchill’s hopefulness of that “living in cloud-cuckoo land”. Churchill tried everything to get Roosevelt to commit to U.S. intervention. Roosevelt sent Harry Hopkins to visit Churchill early in 1941, and Hopkins spent a month with him. The two formed a fast friendship. Jenkins notes that Churchill’s and Roosevelt’s relationship was never that warm sort of friendship. This is a marvelous, albeit very fine-grained, study of one of the great men of our times.
Review by Sam Coulbourn, May 2006.
BIOGRAPHY Secret Life, A
By Benjamin Weiser, 2004.
A true story about a Polish Officer who decided on his own accord to give military secrets to the US during the Cold War in order to save Poland from catastrophe. He was considered our top source of intelligence about the USSR War plans during the 70's and early 80's. Reads like a spy novel.
BIOGRAPHY Subway Music By Joe Junker (Class of ‘57), 2005. Joe Junker takes us on a journey into his past, which is the sentimental if not actual past of so many of us. The title says it all: Subway calls to mind movement, interaction, “underground” motivations, displacement—from Manhattan where this autobiography begins, to Brooklyn, a haven of family and friends, to Annapolis, to California, and to the world beyond. The Music of New York, its many accents, its hilarious tales, its pulsating rhythms play against the backdrop of the diversity of the City as young men of modest origins seek to leave the cultural confines of families and neighborhoods to become actors on a larger stage. But it is New York of the 1950s that gives Junker’s work its flavor. Junker revels in recollections of friends and companions, sights, scents, smells, songs that were his and ours. While the novel is very personally inspired, it should resonate for anyone who wants to recapture a past worth recapturing. Thomas Wolfe’s famous posthumous novel proposes that You Can’t Go Home Again. Joe Junker would add: except in your dreams.
ART
The Steinway Collection- Paintings of Great Composers with essays by James Huneker
Published 2005
Beautiful color paintings by prominent American artists and eloquent prose portraits by renowned music critic James Huneker celebrate lives of Chopin, Wagner, Liszt, Beethoven, Mozart, Verdi, Mendelssohn, Schubert and Handel. The Steinway Collection was originally published in 1919 as an in-house publication and until recently had never been released to the public.
FICTION FICTION Balzac and the little Chinese Seamstress
By Dai Sijie, 2002.
This book provides significant insights into the Cultural Revolution in China. Here’s how Publisher’s Weekly describes it. “The Cultural Revolution of Chairman Mao Zedong altered Chinese history in the 1960s and '70s, forcibly sending hundreds of thousands of Chinese intellectuals to peasant villages for "re-education." This moving, often wrenching short novel by a writer who was himself re-educated in the '70s tells how two young men weather years of banishment, emphasizing the power of literature to free the mind. Sijie's unnamed 17-year-old protagonist and his best friend, Luo, are bourgeois doctors' sons, and so condemned to serve four years in a remote mountain village, carrying pails of excrement daily up a hill. Only their ingenuity helps them to survive. The two friends are good at storytelling, and the village headman commands them to put on "oral cinema shows" for the villagers, reciting the plots and dialogue of movies. When another city boy leaves the mountains, the friends steal a suitcase full of forbidden books he has been hiding, knowing he will be afraid to call the authorities. Enchanted by the prose of a host of European writers, they dare to tell the story of The Count of Monte Cristo to the village tailor and to read Balzac to his shy and beautiful young daughter. Luo, who adores the Little Seamstress, dreams of transforming her from a simple country girl into a sophisticated lover with his foreign tales. He succeeds beyond his expectations, but the result is not what he might have hoped for, and leads to an unexpected, droll and poignant conclusion. . . . Sijie's debut was a best-seller and prize winner in France in 2000, and rights have been sold in 19 countries; it is also scheduled to be made into a film.”
FICTION I Am Charlotte Simmons
By Tom Wolfe, 2004.
This is a book about the role of status in today’s modern university. The heroine is a brilliant student from a very poor family in North Carolina, whose academic prowess lands her in an elite university. Unfortunately, prepared as she is academically, she is from a different world than her affluent peers when it comes to the current social mores of the university. Wolfe spends considerable portion of the book exposing the hypocrisy of big-time collegiate athletics, basketball in this case. He lays bare the realities of life in co-ed dorms and the excesses of the fraternities/sororities. A splendidly written book, based on extensive research at numerous universities across the nation.
Reviewed by Paul Roush.
FICTION Exile
By Richard North Patterson, 2007. (Henry Holt, , 562 pp.)
I would give five stars to any of the author's thirteen prior novels. He is absolutely the best in bringing readers into the multi-dimensional world of law and its negotiations among lawyers about evidence, with judges about politics and with clients about the elusive concept called the "truth." (Yes, clients do ration the "truth.") This book opens with three questions: First, will a successful attorney throw aside his career and his rich fiancée to take the case of a Palestinian woman who is accused of assassinating the Israeli Prime Minister and with whom he had an intense affair while both were at Harvard Law? Second, will he be able to get her off? Third, who killed the Prime Minister and how will he prove it? The answer to the first is "Yes" as the book would otherwise be over at page 20. The next is also a "Yes" as, in view of his preceding novel on the death penalty, this book would be over a thousand pages if she were found guilty. As to the third, I have no idea as I gave up around page 300. I recommend the earlier books.
Review by Tony Crowell, February, 2007.
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