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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HISTORY

Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II

 

By  John W. Downer, 1999.

 

             This book begins on August 15, 1945, when, all across Japan, the people heard their emperor’s voice for the first time.  He announced that Japan had capitulated. It was the end of a “holy war” for the Japanese.

             Victory for the United States and her allies had come, but the Japanese people were shattered.  Not only were Hiroshima and Nagasaki devastated by two atomic bombs; other cities were heavily damaged by allied bombing; Japan’s Imperial Navy had been wiped out, and its army, spread out all across Asia and the Pacific, was demolished.

The Americans came shortly after the war and began to install a parallel government, headed by Gen. Douglas MacArthur.

             It’s hard for us to recall, or to visualize the despair and the destitution of the Japanese people after the war. They were exhausted. Those who could, pillaged military and government supplies and stole millions of yen.  For the rest, there was starvation.  People were eating rats and sawdust, acorns, grain dust, peanut shells. Magazine articles cheerfully showed how to catch grasshoppers.  People sold whatever clothes they could to eke out an existence. People died of dysentery, tuberculosis, and alcoholism.

MacArthur was a very detached, insular figure.  He was good at talking, but not good at listening.  He did not attend many social events with the Japanese or even with Americans, and he didn’t make any effort to get around the country or to learn more about the Japanese, so that after he left and returned home and testified before Congress, he described the Japanese people as “easily  led… good followers… like a 12-year-old boy….” [Note: Pres. Truman dismissed MacArthur on April 11, 1951, which precipitated his appearance before Congress.]

             We were introducing democracy to a country that had never known it… but we were doing it autocratically.   We had heavy censorship, and permitted only obedience. Young Americans who spoke only English were administering, and joked about the pidgin-English of the Japanese.  We saw white supremacism in full flower.

             This book, published in 1999, highlights the end of the Showa era, the reign of Hirohito (b. 1901, ascended throne Dec. 1926) which ended with his death in 1989.  This historic epoch began with Japan quickly ascending in world importance and power; defeat by the U.S., then “victor and vanquished embraced Japan’s defeat together.”              This year—1989—marked the bursting of the “Japanese bubble” of technical and industrial supremacy.

 

Review by Sam Coulbourn, July, 2006.

HISTORY

Why Geography Matters -- Three Challenges Facing America:
Climate Change, The Rise of China, and Global Terrorism

 

By Harem de Blij,  2005.

             The Dutch author, a Distinguished professor of geography at Michigan State University, wrote the book to confirm "...the vitality and utility of geography as a way to understand our complex world".  He does an excellent job of bringing geopolitics forward as an accepted term once again.  (It was long-tainted as Hitler's big issue.)
             We all appreciate geography and its implications more than most Americans, just by our common background.   Although "Geography" starts with a discussion of maps and projections--old hat for us--it rapidly expands to geological events over the millennia, human migration, evolution of civilizations, political development and contemporary challenges.  Mostly, though, he focuses on changes in the past decade as indicative of future trends--the three he points to in the title.
             The author does a fine job with maps showing migrations, border dispute areas, population densities, resource concentrations and political divisions.  His discussions of Africa, Middle East and China are particularly good.
             I can't help but superimposing Thomas Friedman's "First Law of Petropolitics:  The price of oil and the pace of freedom move in opposite directions in oil-rich petrolist states", as a fourth dimension to de Blij's three future trends.
             To conclude:  the world is far more complex now than when we were commissioned...and it ain't going to get any simpler in our lifetime.

 

 

HISTORY

 Darwinism under the Microscope
 

By James P Gills, M.D. and Tom Woodward, PhD., 2002.

             "The whole point of Darwinism is to explain the world in a way that excludes any role for a Creator", says Phillip Johnson, professor of law at UC Berkeley. "What is being sold in the name of science is a completely naturalistic understanding of reality" he said.
             "Darwin said one thing pretty strongly in The Origin of Species. He said that if it can be shown that any system or organ could not be produced by many small steps, continuously improving the system at each step, and then his system would absolutely fall apart." Quoted from Michael J. Behe, Department of Biological Sciences, Leigh University.
             "Behe's work on irreducibly complex systems inside a single cell has shaken the foundations of evolutionary biology and generated a tidal wave of published responses", this quoted from the book Darwinism under the Microscope.
             Irreducibly complex? An "irreducibly complex" system is one which consists of several or more parts all of which must be present at the same time for the system to work. This would be the antithesis of Darwin's evolution by a series of small steps.
             Think of a mousetrap. It has five parts. If any of the five is missing, the mousetrap will not work. Very simple to understand. Without intelligent design, a mousetrap could not have evolved by chance.
             Behe contends that without intelligent design, such things as a living cell, sight, and the body's system to repair and regenerate damaged tissue, and others could not have been evolved. Personally, I think that Darwin would agree, if he knew all that we know today, that evolution has fallen apart. In his time, living cells were thought of as very, very simple things -- like little blobs of gel.
             Wow, has that ever changed. Now we know that each person started from a single cell, the nucleus of which contains 23 pairs of chromosomes, one pair from mom and one from dad, by which each of us was defined. These chromosomes are parcels of coiled DNA organized as stretches or sentences of code called genes. This DNA determines your humanness and also your eye color, to what extent your hair is curly, the sound of your laughter and much of your personality.
             The DNA from a single cell stretched out would extend over 5 feet. One strand is only 50 trillionths of an inch wide. Removal of DNA from all ones cells and stretched out end to end would extend in a strand from a minimum of 10 billion to a maximum of 170 billion miles. A strand of DNA stretched from you to the sun would weigh one fiftieth of an ounce or one eight hundredth of a pound.
             DNA is astonishingly delicate and yet contains vast stores of information which make proteins, and proteins do everything. This cell with its DNA, though far more complex, has far less chance of being created by evolution
than a digital watch that you might find in the sand on a beach. I am sure you realize that intelligent design created the watch and caused it to be in the sand on the beach. Why not the single cell from which you came?
             Is this enough irreducible complexity to disprove evolution?
             If not, let's examine the body's ability to repair and regenerate damaged tissue. This ability stems from a specific series of ordered reactions that is a remarkably potent manifestation of irreducible complexity and a Creator's intelligent design. The following is quoted from the book:
             "Though healing begins at the edge of a wound, new tissue must form at the site of loss, not in surrounding undamaged tissue. The metaphor of immediate response toward and reconstruction of, a bombed building is an apt illustration of what goes on in tissue repair. Within the first five minutes after trauma, platelets are hustled by the bloodstream to the scene of damage where coagulation in the presence of fibrin begins to staunch the
blood flow. You may imagine this as the rapid response of fire engines and crews arriving to extinguish ravenous flames minutes after the initial incendiary event at the building.
             “Within one to six hours, polymorph nuclear leucocytes - white blood cells - are mobilized to the site to fight bacteria and remove debris much as ambulances would soon arrive at our allegorical building to start digging in the rubble and removing the injured. Then macrophages, the third tissue response, present themselves within 24 to 48 hours to remove clotted blood and damaged tissue in the way front-end loaders would arrive at the building site to clear the broken walls and damaged foundation.
             “Next, fibroblasts bring their ability to manufacture collagen, which is a major constituent element in all parts of the body, to the area; these are our metaphorical architectural planners and construction engineers. That stage invites the next phase of reconstruction with the introduction of the vascular endothelial cells, upon which fall the burden of angiogenesis - the formation of new blood vessels. With the task of delivering nutrients to and removing waste from the new tissue, these vessels are equivalent to the water and sewage lines for the new building. And then the body starts the bricklaying by stimulating mitosis, the division of cells into daughter cells.

             “Intricate, beautiful and replete with many interconnected dependencies that display the irreducible complexity of an intelligent design, the tissue repair process shares the faculty of demonstrating God's handiwork with a variety of other specialized cells."

 

Review by ____________.

 

HISTORY

China Shakes the World: the Rise of a Hungry Nation

 

By James Kynge, 2006.

             The author does a nice job of discussing China, its successes and
failures, in 200+ pages. He's fluent in Mandarin, well traveled in the
country for about 20 years, and was the Financial Times' China Bureau Chief
from '98-'05.
             Kynge starts by describing the Chinese purchase of the ThyssenKrupp
Hoerde steel mill in Dortmund, Germany--all 250,000 tons. everything down to
the last screw, and 40 tons of documents. It was reassembled, and renamed
Shagang (sand steel) on the banks of the lower Yangtze; from the initial
contract in 2001: disassembly, shipping 5,600 miles and reassembly occurred
in about four years beginning in 2001. He goes on to describe similar
acquisitions of machine/die works across Middle America. It's a chilling
account. He ends by painting some of the warts resulting from China's rapid
expansion over nearly three decades.
             The 2008 Olympics will be the real test!

 

 

HISTORY

Guns, Germs, and Steel

 

By Jared Diamond, 1999.  496 pp. Trade paperback. Includes a 2003 Afterword.

 

             Diamond leads us on a journey of 13,000 years, since the last Ice Age, across all the continents, as he answers the question which one could interpret to be quite racist:  Why do the white Europeans do everything, know everything, have everything.  Are they better than Africans… or American Indians?  Is there a “master race”?

             The answer that Diamond develops over some 400 pages is “no.”

             It all started in what once was “The Fertile Crescent” – Mesopotamia, or the lush, green lands between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers, and it all started with food production.

As long as men the world over spent their lives as hunter-gatherers, things stayed fairly static.  In the Fertile Crescent there were more crops that could and did get domesticated. There were more animals that the people could –and did—domesticate.  Cultivating crops and raising animals for food, clothing, transportation and traction meant that men had to become sedentary.   They had to settle down.

             In the land that is now the very fertile state of California, there just weren’t as many crops that could be domesticated, nor were there animals.

             The people of the Fertile Crescent got the head start on settling down, to become farmers, to develop communities, and states.  This spread west to Europe, and east to Asia.

             Guns:  Diamond tells about “The Collision at Cajamarca” in 1532, when the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizzaro and a ragtag group of 168 Spanish soldiers ran up against Atahuallpa, the absolute monarch of the Incas in the Peruvian highland town of Cajamarca.  Atahuallpa had 80,000 Indians all ready to do his bidding. In a narrative by one of the Spaniards on the scene that day, one said “Many of us urinated…. Out of sheer terror.”  One hundred sixty-eight vs. 80,000 sounds like terror.

             However, the Spaniards fired their cannons, and rode their horses (the Indians had never seen horses), blew trumpets and created such a commotion that the Indians panicked, and the Spaniards killed thousands of Indians. The rest disappeared, and so Atahuallpa was captured, and the Spaniards were the  victors.

             Germs: Populations that had developed, with large numbers living together, had evolved because they were survivors of various diseases. When these people arrived in the New World, for instance, the native populations had never been exposed to these diseases, and whole villages were wiped out.  Spanish microbes decimated the population of native Americans.

             Steel:  Diamond refers to Pizarro’s stunning victory at Cajamarca again, noting Pizarro’s military advantages lay in steel sweords and other weapons, steel armor, guns, and horses.  His enemy had only stone, bronze or wooden clubs, maces, hand axes, slingshots and quilted armor.

 

Review by Sam Coulbourn, February, 2007.

 

 

HISTORY

The Scramble for Africa: The White Man’s Conquest of the Dark Continent from 1876 to 1912

 

By Thomas Pakenham, 1991. New York, NY: Random House.  738 pp.

 

             The Scramble for Africa starts with a journey of David Livingstone (1813-1873).  Livingstone was a Scottish missionary who spent 30 years exploring Africa, from the Cape to the Equator, and was the first white man to see Victoria Falls, and the first white man to travel across the continent from west to east.

             Henry Stanley (1841-1904) was a different sort.  On a trip sponsored by the New York Herald Tribune he spent a year searching for Livingstone, and found him just before the famed missionary died.  At his request, natives cut out his heart and intestines, buried them in the jungle, under a mpundu tree, and dried out his remains like a cowhide, and shipped it back to London, to a fine funeral in Westminster Abbey.

             Stanley went on to make his own important discoveries in central Africa, and was a key player in the Scramble, which was a hell for leather race to see which European country could slice up Africa, and suck it dry of its wealth.

             Livingstone had advanced the idea of the 3 C’s—Commerce, Christianity and Civilization.

             King Leopold II (1835-1909) of Belgium was a major player in the Scramble, and this book devotes a lot of space to his exploits.

             Leopold had had his heart set on a colony or two for tiny Belgium for some time, and he managed to work his way between the two big colonial powers of the time, Britain and France, to win the Congo.  He did this by hiring Stanley away from the British, and by some masterful diplomatic maneuvering and a solid con-job with Germany, France, Britain, and even President Chester Arthur of the United States.

             Leopold was masterful in selling the world on his love of these poor black brethren, helping to bring civilization and Christianity to them, mainly as a masterful philanthropy.  What this master charlatan really did was squeeze copper, diamonds, gold, rubber and much more out of this rich heart of Africa, by using slave labor.  He managed to co-opt the Christian missionaries in the Congo, so they were largely silent about all the atrocities they saw and heard about.

                 Scramble for Africa does a wonderful job of telling the story of the slicing up of the African cake by greedy men from many nations, starting with the Phoenicians who established bases on the east coast 3000 years ago, followed by the Arabs and Chinese, and  the Portuguese, who established bases on the western coast in the 15^th century.

             The French staked out the west coast, led by a young Italian in the French Navy named Piere Savorgnan de Brazza, and Algiers, as well as a hand on Egypt; and the British were entrenched in Egypt, Sudan, South Africa and East Africa. The Spaniards had parts of the Western Sahara; the Ottoman Turks had Tunis, Tripoli and the Nile valley down to Lake Victoria. The Portuguese had Angola and Mozambique.

             Leopold’s masterly sleight-of-hand took place at the Berlin General Act of 1885, a hollowed-out, phony agreement between 30 nations that gave him license to acquire the Congo and start the process of exploiting men and land. Germany gained what is now Namibia and Tanzania, Cameroon and Togo.  Italy gained Libya, Eritrea, Somaliland and for a short time, Ethiopia.

             The story of the Scramble for Africa is a story of enormous greed.  It is ironic that the man that really kicked the scramble into high gear was a genuinely good man, David Livingstone.  He exposed the horrors of the African slave trade in progress in the 1870s, and called for Africa to be redeemed by the three C’s….

 

Review by Sam Coulbourn, April, 2005.

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