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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 ENS Arleigh Burke beneath 14-inch gun aboard Battleship USS Arizona, 1923. Revised 27 March 2008. |
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FICTION Everyman
By Philip Roth, 2006.
A bittersweet short novel of a 71-year old man reviewing his life in our contemporary America. Sort of an updated condensation of his American Pastoral.
FICTION Terrorist
By John Updike, 2006.
Another very contemporary novel which might give some insights into how people of different backgrounds actually think and reason. Vivid characterizations from this modern master.
FICTION To the Last Man: A Novel of the First World War
By Jeff Shaara, 2004.
It is a novel on WWI with fictionalized characters being exposed to some of the actual events which occurred in the Great War. There are realistic explanations of air warfare duels with the German Red Baron. It provides insight not only from the allied side but from the German side as well. The 500 + page book also provides the reader with some of the issues and the ordeal facing the common doughboy in trench warfare and the frontal assault concept. It is an easy to read book which I highly recommend. As an aside Jeff Shaara has just released his latest book, The Rising Tide which is his first of a trilogy on WWII. I have purchased the book but have not yet started it. I will let you know what I think on a subsequent report
FICTION Haj
By Leon,Uris, 1984.
Historical novel written from Moslem perspective covering the origins and perpetuation of Arab-Jew antagonism. Main character is chieftain of an Arab village. Tale relates his and his people’s trials and tribulations preceding and subsequent to the formation of Israel and the inter-Arab influences which militated against an early resolution of Arab-Jewish animosities. While essentially a period peace(1920's-1956), the author provides an historical basis for the current cultural and religious mindset of the Arabs and their preference to adopt and practice self-destructive measures rather than bring themselves to enter into co-operative ventures with the Jewish state. The story is held together by the introduction of real people and historical events.
FICTION Mission Compromised
By Oliver North, 2002
Set during the Clinton administration. A former KGB general holding a high UN position chooses between losing a profitable but clandestine deal involving the sale of nuclear weapons to Saddam Hussein and executing a successful, UN sanctioned multi-national, military special ops assassination plot against the Iraqi leader, OBL, and other terrorist chieftains. He opts to compromise the mission. He is joined in his objective by the President’s National Security Advisor. Working in concert, they intimidate or otherwise bully members of the NSC and UN staffs to unwittingly cooperate in sabotaging operations. Their duplicity is facilitated by the indiscriminate, surreptitious sale of US developed high tech encryption equipment to foreign organizations without the knowledge of US control agencies. These devices allow the precise location of the special ops groups to be disclosed to the intended targets. There is an eerie sense that this sub-plot is reminiscent of the sale of high tech guidance system technology to the Chinese. The hero is, not surprisingly, a Marine officer.
FICTION Joe Cynik: Don't get me started
By Petro, Bill (Class of ’57), 2006.
Joe Cynikowski is a fifty-five-year old cynical, Republican conservative who is an investigator for the U.S. Navy. He meets thirty-year-old Frank Goodman, a liberal Jewish post graduate student in a Tempe, Arizona bar. Frank is trying to write a thesis for his doctorate degree in philosophy and has chosen “Cynicism” as his topic. Frank and Joe begin bantering about the current social climate in America and they discuss the views of conservatives, liberals, and the effects of media slants. Frank convinces a reluctant Joe to ride along with him on his business trip to continue the discussion. During the trip, they rescue a battered woman from her violent husband and with the help of the Border Patrol, they save a young Mexican illegal immigrant whose parents have been kidnapped by Mexican coyote slavers. The story contains severe criticisms by Joe about the ethical and moral decay in America, and discusses bigotry, racism, and religion. Joe explains the reasons for his cynicism and Frank counters with a liberal, more positive view. They team up together to do a few good deeds by helping those in distress and hope that their actions will make things better in some small way. During the course of their shared experiences, each of them considers the other’s views and moves toward a more acceptable explanation for cynicism and the polarization of our political structure. It is a story with a powerful message. The message is that individuals at opposite ends of our social structure can gain mutual respect for one-another and live together in harmony while our current institutional breakdowns tend to polarize us and tear us apart. Certain passages might offend some readers, even though they contain moral discussions and conclusions.
FICTION Suite Française
Irène Némirovsky, 2006
The author was a Ukrainian-born Jewish woman living in France, having fled her native country at the time of the Russian revolution. She intended to write a five-part novel describing life after the Germans overran and then occupied France during World War II. Two of the parts were finished when someone reported her to the Nazi authorities. She was deported to Auschwitz and died a month later. Her daughters hid the manuscript containing the finished parts of the novel, and it has now been published more than sixty years later. The first part of the book describes the flight of the civil population in a desperate attempt to escape the onslaught of the German armies. The breakdown of the entire system that sustains life in a civilized society is very thorough, with vignettes of remarkable courage and acts of incredible kindness intermingled with acts of violence, deception and barbarity in the struggle to survive in the midst of massive dehumanization. The second part of the novel describes life in the midst of occupation. Families whose sons, husbands and fathers were killed or taken as prisoners of war are forced to co-exist and in many cases share living quarters with their German conquerors. A thought-provoking work that makes the reader yearn to know what might have constituted the next three parts, had the author been able to conclude her work.
Reviewed by Paul Roush, March 2007.
TRAVEL TRAVEL Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Capetown
.By Paul Theroux, 2003. New York: Houghton-Mifflin. 496 pp.
This is a fascinating account of Theroux’s journey on every dirtball pickup truck, ratty train, tramp steamer on Lake Victoria, broken down taxi cab and atop various animals, all the way through deserts of Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, through jungles, beautiful green of Ethiopia, Uganda, amidst the signs of pillage and destruction of Zimbabwe. He visits his old Peace Corps stomping grounds in Uganda and Malawi, and delivers a colorful, albeit somewhat somber, picture of life in Africa today. The trend—from rape and pillage by the white man to succession by black men, who now rape and pillage their own nations and people—is not one that gives cause for optimism.
Review by Sam Coulbourn, April 2006.
TRAVEL The Kingdom By The Sea: A Journey Around Great Britain
By Paul Theroux, 2003, Penguin
Paul Theroux took a train from London to the Thames estuary on May Day, 1982 and began a two-month journey around the whole of Britain, walking, riding trains and buses, and walking some more. Theroux writes about ordinary Brits he encounters, from Skinheads looking for a fight, to Cockney couples bundled up in lounge chairs at a bleak, windswept beach “shally”. He seems to find more than his share of depressed, dirty, desolate former industrial towns, with demoralized people passing the hours aimlessly during a time of Britain’s recession. You can smell the beer and the fried fish and chips. Britain is engaged with a war with Argentina in the Falklands, and as he walks and rides through south shore ports he absorbs the British spirit of support for their servicemen. He stays at dowdy bed-and-breakfast homes and drops in on sprawling seaside holiday camps for working class Brits, who are now largely on the dole. He walks around Cornwall, and up through Wales, and then across to Northern Ireland, then back to Scotland, up to Cape Wrath and around to Aberdeen. Belfast is dark and dismal, Scotland is robust, with much less of the recession climate of the rest of the country, but always Theroux manages to chat up local people and capture the local color. Theroux, a native of Medford, MA, had lived in London for several years when he wrote this book, and he paints a fascinating picture of the Kingdom by the Sea.
Review by Sam Coulbourn, March, 2007.
TRAVEL A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
By Henry David Thoreau. Edited by Carl F. Hovde, William L. Howarth, and Elizabeth Hall Witherell, with a new introduction by John McPhee; 2004, paper, Princeton University Press, 440 pp..
Thoreau writes about a two-week trip he and his brother John took from home in Concord, MA, up the Concord river and then onto the Merrimack river in August 1839. John died in 1842, and Thoreau went to work on this book as a memorial to his brother. He published it in 1849. McPhee sets the stage for the trip his introduction, writing of his modern-day voyage over the same rivers, comparing what he experienced with Thoreau’s observations. Thoreau spends little space writing about the trip, however. This book is Thoreau’s chance to comment on nature, and philosophy, his own brand of religion, and literature. His breadth and depth of classical learning, botany, and biology is remarkable.
Review by Sam Coulbourn, March, 2007.
THE GREAT BOOKS Why Read Great Books? by Mortimer Adler, Ph.D.
GREAT BOOKS OF THE WESTERN WORLD
A Collection of the Greatest Writings in Western History
VOLUMES 1 and 2 The Syntopicon This unique guide enables you to investigate a particular idea, such as courage or democracy, and compare the perspectives of different authors.
VOLUME 3 Homer The Iliad The Odyssey
VOLUME 4 Aeschylus (C. 525-456 BC) The Suppliant Maidens; The Persians; Seven Against Thebes; Prometheus Bound; Agamemnon; The Libation Bearers; The Eumenides Sophocles (C. 495-406 BC) Oedipus the King; Oedipus at Colonus; Antigone; Ajax; Electra; The Women of Trachis; Philoctetes Euripides (C. 480-406 BC): Rhesus; The Medea; Hippolytus; Alcestis; The Heracleidae; The Suppliant Women; The Trojan Women; Ion; Helen; Andromache; Electra; The Bacchae; Hecuba; Heracles; The Phoenician Women; Orestes; Iphigenia in Tauris; Iphigenia in Aulis; The Cyclops Aristophanes (C. 455-380 BC): The Acharnians; The Knights; The Clouds; The Wasps; Peace; The Birds; The Frogs; Lysistrata; The Poet and the Women; The Assemblywomen; Wealth
VOLUME 5 Herodotus (C. 484-425 BC): The History Thucydides (C. 460-400 BC): The History of the Peloponnesian War
VOLUME 6 Plato (C. 428-348 BC): Charmides; Lysis; Laches Protagoras Euthydemus Cratylus Phaedrus Ion Symposium Meno Euthyphro Apology Crito Phaedo Gorgias The Republic Timaeus Critias Parmenides Theaetetus Sophist Statesman Philebus Laws The Seventh Letter
VOLUME 7 Aristotle I (C. 384-322 BC) Categories On Interpretation Prior Analytics |
