THE CULTURE OF CONTENTMENT (1992)
An essay by the well-known economist, arguing that the US is dominated by a moderately well-off class of citizens who embody "the culture of contentment"--a smug willingness to wall themselves off from the major problems besetting the society today. He views the US military as having an alarming independence and power and is concerned about the lopsided budgeting of vast amounts of resources on largely unnecessary defense buildups. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US has had to look for "threats" elsewhere to justify the continuing outlay of resources for national defense. Galbraith regards the US as being in an increasingly untenable position when it comes to defense spending and the failure to address fundamental socioeconomic problems.
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GARR, TERI
SPEEDBUMPS: FLOORING IT THROUGH HOLLYWOOD (2005)
This account of her life by the actress/dancer Teri Garr interested me primarily because she has multiple sclerosis and became an MS "ambassador" for a large pharmaceutical company that produces one of the immunomodulatory injectable drugs now being widely used to retard the progression of the disease.
Her account treats the MS rather lightly and in passing, it seems to me. Mainly her story concerns her career in acting. She comes across as a likable person, one who can laugh at herself.
She maintains that a couple of her friends decided that she had MS before she was even diagnosed with it--and that they spread this rumor around, thus impeding her chances of getting more work in Hollywood as an actress. This backstabbing by her presumed friends must have been hard for her to tolerate. The more usual course of events is for the person who finds out he/she has MS to try to conceal it from employers for as long as possible--and to find that friends and relatives remain in denial about the diagnosis even after they've been told about it.
15 November 2007
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GAWANDE, ATUL, MD
BEING MORTAL: MEDICINE AND WHAT MATTERS IN THE END (2014)
Although sometimes harrowing, the accounts presented by the author here are meant to illustrate an important point--that modern medical care as practiced in the US (and probably in quite a number of other countries) places too much emphasis on doing everything possible to save a human life.
Dr. Gawande is in favor of more knowledge about when to back off, when to let a patient live out the remaining time in peace, without having to endure the many hospitalizations and ICU stays, surgeries and other procedures that are so often part of a seriously ill person's life towards the end.
He also stresses that sometimes the patient would prefer palliative care to the more drastic measures that could be taken to save his life, but the family, in their zeal for keeping their loved one alive as long as possible manages to overrule that preference.
He cites cases from his own experience and especially from his own family's, closing with a moving account of his father's traditional Hindu funeral.
22 September 2022
COMPLICATIONS: A SURGEON'S NOTES ON AN IMPERFECT SCIENCE (2002)
A surgical resident reflects on several instances where medical mistakes were made--and on the difficulty of finding the right treatment for a patient in a world where there are so many variables.
3 September 2005
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GEORGE, ELIZABETH
A GREAT DELIVERANCE (1988)
A detective story set in England though the author is American runs the risk of getting customs and language wrong but Elizabeth George seems to have no problem making her situations British enough to be believable, but that is just one ignorant American opinion. She is particularly aware of the class consciousness in the UK--and, incidentally, the two characters who turn out to be the most understanding and compassionate in the book happen to be members of the aristocracy--Inspector Lynley and his friend and lover, Lady Helen.
Lynley is quite a stud, in addition to being so patient and big-hearted that even Barbara, his reluctant assistant who has an unfortunate history of dealing with him, is managed with finesse in spite of some outrageous outbursts on her part.
Barbara is trying hard not to ruin her chances in her chosen occupation--police work--by ingratiating herself with Lynley. But she keeps forgetting herself.
The two have a murder to solve, and they solve it. A man has been found beheaded, and his younger daughter is at the scene, saying she did it. Nobody who knows her believes that she could have. The reader goes along hoping that somehow she isn't guilty, but this reader began to suspect early on that she did kill her father but that there are dark secrets about the father-daughter relationship lurking in the shadows.
They would need to be very dark indeed to explain such a brutal murder but they do turn out to be. In fact, towards the end, when the truth about the father is coming out, the sordid details are almost unbearably grim.
I wonder about Barbara--whether she is believable. Her long tirade directed at Lynley at the end, just after Lynley has had a "gotcha" moment, seems overdone even for the Barbara we have come to know throughout the narrative--harshly judgmental in the extreme.
However, it was an absorbing story. It did remind me somewhat of Dorothy Sayers (Nine Tailors) with its use of literary allusions and ecclesiastical knowledge, and at times these seemed like somewhat pretentious add-ons that didn't contribute much to the story, but that is a minor quibble.
5 November 2022
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GILBERT, SANDRA M.
WRONGFUL DEATH: A MEDICAL TRAGEDY (1995)
An English professor is suddenly widowed when her husband--also an English professor, at the University of California at Davis--dies just after successful surgery for prostate cancer. This is her account of the probable hospital/doctor errors responsible for his death and of her malpractice suit.
15 May 1998
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GINTHER, JOHN ROBERT
BUT YOU LOOK SO WELL (1978)
I read this book in 1980.. The author, a professor of education at the University of Chicago, was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis but was not told of the diagnosis until many years later. The diagnosing doctor told Ginther's wife, who agreed to withhold the information from him. This book is out of print now but is an instructive eye-opener when it comes to the way things are sometimes done in medicine.
1 August 2004
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THE WOMAN WITHIN: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY (1954)
Ellen Glasgow is probably not as well known as she should be. Her novel Vein of Iron has virtues that many American novels lack--not the least of which is a firm entrenchment in a realistic view of the world that doesn't dwell on the sordid or the sensational but that quietly stresses some hard truths about life as it moves forward for most people.
She wrote this autobiography piecemeal in her final years and intended it for posthumous publication. She was a native of Richmond, Virginia, and knew at first hand the way in which the Civil War was affecting both the southern landowners and former slaves.
She tended to be sickly as a child, and was probably more cosseted than a child in a less prosperous family would have been. There is a strain of self-pity running through this account but it is muted and--to me anyway--tolerable.
In her literary career she knew many eminences on the American and Anglo-American literary scene and she provides vignettes of James Branch Cabell (a lifelong friend), Henry James, and others.
22 October 2009
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GODWIN, GAIL
FATHER MELANCHOLY'S DAUGHTER (1991)
This novel concerns a central character whose mother leaves her and her father for no clear reason—and is later killed in an accident.
While reading the book I had hopes of finding out why this clergyman’s wife left her husband and daughter to go off with a woman friend. But now I’ve finished it, and only one question was resolved: by all accounts the two women weren’t lesbians. That hadn’t been my concern. I was wondering how the mother could justify just taking off like that. Over a year passes before the fatal accident—and during that time she and the woman friend go to England for an extended stay. In other words, enough time without visits has passed so that it is clear that the break will probably be permanent.
The story ambles on through the daughter’s life, taking her up to her early twenties and her father’s sudden death. There is a long segment about a community issue, with the parishioners and the various clergymen all getting into it, and I don't know if the author intends us to sympathize with the Episcopal church’s extremely emotional reaction to a threat of losing their cherished hundred-year-old Christ figure that adorns the church’s front yard. All of these people can get worked up about: saving this piece from demolition by land developers. As the plot thickens and the statue is vandalized by being hacked to pieces—leading fortuitously to a wondrous ecumenical reconsecration service—I felt sure Godwin wrote this part with a straight face. We’re not supposed to be sitting there as readers saying, “Is this what matters to Christian folk? Statues and buildings, the priestly stoles and chasuble, this fascination with rituals and holy water?” We never learn who the vandals were, either, though for a while there is much speculation.
This is the way the whole book is: It raises questions, then cheats us by dropping them and trusting we won’t notice this sloppiness. And it isn’t an open-ended novel the point of which is that there are no answers. Not at all. At the end Godwin appears to be very neatly tidying up all the loose ends—except that she isn’t. She tidies up only those of the most recent sections of the book, leaving all the earlier ones untended to. Such a book is an insult to the reader.
20 February 1992
EVENSONG (1999)
This novel, the sequel to Father Melancholy's Daughter, rubbed me the wrong way and went on too long. The married couple, both of whom are members of the Episcopal clergy, are a bit too angelic to be interesting. Also, the author seems primly intent on demonstrating that she can write a "respectable" novel about "nice," "caring" people and still coyly toss in a few reminders that she knows the facts of life.
In places, this novel reads like a sermon. It is replete with high Anglican theology, and its characters have a laughably prosperous life in spite of a welter of problems thrown at them as the novel proceeds.
There are some very obvious flaws in plot development, too: a problem with which the main characters wrestle for a large part of the story is whether a lay-brother "monk" who descends on them from a known monastery is who he claims to be. Had these characters taken the obvious step of contacting the monastery--easy enough in 1999, surely--to check out his story, there would have been almost no plot to this novel. Why did these supposedly eminently sensible and intelligent characters not do so? Why was the possibility never even broached? If Gail Godwin is trying to be the American Barbara Pym, she fails at it.
24 August 2001
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GOLDHAGEN, DANIEL JONAH
HITLER'S WILLING EXECUTIONERS: ORDINARY GERMANS AND THE HOLOCAUST (1996)
This study of the Germans' behavior during the Nazi Holocaust is an angry book, and I'm not sure how fair it is. Goldhagen is trying to answer the question that has troubled many people ever since the Holocaust: How could ordinary Germans not have known that Jews and other "undesirables" were being slaughtered by the millions right in their midst? And if they knew, why were there almost no protests?
Goldhagen's answer is that ordinary Germans did indeed know. In fact, he claims, many were all-too-willing participants in the slaughter. One of his chief points is that although the Germans charged with the responsibility for the actual killing often could have opted not to do any killing of Jews, they went ahead anyway and took part in the brutal murders. He maintains that the typical German had been taught a virulent form of anti-Semitism from birth--and therefore had no problem at all with falling in with the murder of the Jews. The goal of the Nazis was the total annihilation of all Jews, all over Europe. The ordinary German subscribed to this goal whole-heartedly, or so Goldhagen says.
Moreover, the Christian churches either went along with the Nazis' programme or were silent about it--a silence that was assumed to mean assent.
Another of Goldhagen's points is that the Nazis backed down when people protested enough--and here he uses the example of the Nazis' euthanasia plan. Therefore--he argues--if some Germans had objected as they did to the euthanasia plan, they could have persuaded the Nazis to put a halt to their plans for annihilating the Jews.
This book is a damning indictment of the German people before and during World War II. The author stresses that Hitler was putting forward an anti-Semitic programme as early as 1920 in his public speeches and writings. The passage of time (over 20 years), with Hitler and his followers constantly hammering home their message of hate, seems to have persuaded most Germans to go along with the ideas of National Socialism.
I do not know enough about the impact of the resistance and protest movements that did exist in Europe and even in Germany at the time, but the White Rose is one group that has been celebrated ever since the end of the war. Surely people must have known at the time that the three young people who were arrested in connection with this group's efforts--at passing out anti-Nazi leaflets--were beheaded the day after their sentencing. This fact alone says something about the atmosphere of repression that must have prevailed in Germany at the time.
Goldhagen does not deal with any of the protest movements except for a couple of passing remarks--for example, one about the attempt on Hitler's life.
The author does not simply report that a certain number of Jews were shot at a certain camp during a certain time. He gives us the reactions of some of the officers who were in charge of the actual shooting.
He devotes particular attention to the death marches--emphasizing how pointless they were unless the objective was to kill Jews by wearing them down, gradually and with bestial cruelty.
The reader can only conclude that Germany must have been ruled by a collection of extremely sadistic madmen who were fiendishly clever in their methods of persuading other Germans to take part in torture and murder.
There can be no adequate response to these grim facts.
5 March 2007
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GOLDSMITH, MARTIN
THE INEXTINGUISHABLE SYMPHONY: A TRUE STORY OF MUSIC AND LOVE IN NAZI GERMANY (2000)
The author tells the story of his parents--both musicians who fled Hitler's Germany after spending some years playing in the Kulturbund, a showcase cultural group made up entirely of Jewish actors and musicians. They were able to escape the worst horrors of Nazi Germany for this reason--and eventually they came to the United States, where his mother played viola but his father gave up the flute.
The author's grandfather was aboard the St. Louis on its voyage (with 900 Jews aboard) to Cuba, where it was turned away, and no other country would take in the Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. Since my piano teacher was among those on board the St. Louis, I have always had a horrified interest in its sad story. Goldsmith's father and brother eventually found a "home" in France, where they lived on the brink of starvation--and sent beseeching letters to George and Rosemary (the new American names for Martin Goldsmith's parents) in America, pleading for liberation from their tormented existence.
This part of the story left me puzzled. Clearly some of the correspondence never reached the persons involved--possibly because of the intervention of the Nazi censors.
2 October 2008
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GOOD, JEFFREY AND GORECK, SUSAN
POISON MIND (1995)
True account of a Florida family poisoned by their next-door neighbor, a Mensa member. Appalling but absorbing.
1 February 1999
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GORDIMER, NADINE
WORLD OF STRANGERS (1958)
I've become fonder of Nadine Gordimer's writing after reading this novel.
I'm not sure how much the reader is supposed to like the main character, Toby Hood, who has come to Johannesburg because his family's publishing business has sent him there. I didn't like him much, but the story being told is an interesting one.
Toby becomes friends with an angry African man and with some of his friends as well. The author describes in considerable detail a world most readers won't have known--where even friendship between the black and white races was illegal.
Surprisingly, though the book was banned in South Africa for 12 years, it is not even a thinly veiled polemic for an end to apartheid. Gordimer is simply telling a story and rooting it in the real world as she's known it.
One of the last segments of the book, in which Toby goes on a hunting trip with some other men, contains some powerfully understated scenes that will probably impress upon the reader's mind the cruelty and senselessness of the whole custom of hunting. There is no preaching here, and the blood and gore involved aren't highlighted.
But the point is beautifully made.
And, since Toby is perhaps the most liberal white man in the story, what does his participation in the guinea fowl hunt say about white men except that the best of them are still cruel?
Perhaps I am reading more into this story than is there, but if that isn't what it is suggesting, then what is the hunting scene doing in the story?
Before that there are some scenes involving horse racing. It looks as if Gordimer is saying that the sports indulged in by white people in South Africa are the expensive domains of a cosseted few and often have their basis in cruelty to animals.
In the meantime, the black Africans, whose country it was in the first place, are being treated almost like slaves. Their country has been usurped by a foreign power.
Courageous people like Nadine Gordimer have persisted in spelling out what apartheid really has done. She has told an interesting story that has important things to say.
21 June 2010
THE HOUSE GUN (1998)
I probably haven't read enough fiction by Nadine Gordimer to be able to comment meaningfully about it, but The House Gun bothered me.
Yes, it's excellent that she's a white South African writer who is portraying the "new" South Africa, where blacks are prominent lawyers and have whites as their friends. But there is more to this story than its depiction of a new order, with the old one still poking through in the form of older people who haven't yet acclimated themselves to the changes.
There is a story about a young white man whose parents believe in his goodness. He has been an only child, been raised by two intelligent, well-educated parents, who have assured him that they will always be there for him, no matter what happens.
His mother is a doctor, and humanitarian concern plays a large part in his parents' lives even though they haven't been political activists. When it turns out that Duncan, the son, seems to have murdered a young man with whom he was living, the reaction of all who knew Duncan is that he could not have done violence to another human being.
That being so, and we are made to believe that, why does Gordimer allow his case to be so flimsy? There are no witnesses to the crime. The only "evidence" is that the gardener on the premises (one of the least important characters in this book) saw him coming from the house and saw him drop "something" in the grass. Later the house gun was retrieved from the grass, and Duncan's fingerprints were on it. That is the sum total of the evidence.
The house gun, however, has been handled, possibly by everyone in the house the night of a party the previous night. Duncan has no recollection of the shooting or of wanting to kill Carl Jespersen, the victim. The psychologists theorize that he "blanked out"--was under stress so great that he was acting rationally but with loss of memory for what he did.
The case for his extreme stress is very convincing. But I'm not persuaded that, given the information we are given, he committed the crime. I kept waiting for the author to give us more information, but it is never forthcoming.
At one point Hamilton Motsamai, the lawyer for the defense, mentions in passing that someone of Duncan's personality type might actually be willing to admit to committing a crime committed by somebody else--for altruistic or romantic reasons, for instance. However, this possibility is dropped as the novel proceeds, and it never comes up again.
I still think that is exactly what might have happened. We never find out much about the relationships among the four other people living on the premises--except for Duncan's affair with Natalie. Carl Jespersen is fleshed out slightly towards the end, but the others are shadowy.
Any one of them might have killed Carl Jespersen. Or some unknown person, even the gardener, might have had a reason to want him dead--and been happy to see Duncan take the rap.
The story, if it is supposed to move forward like a murder mystery, doesn't answer some basic questions. Instead, Gordimer uses the judge and the lawyer as mouthpieces for long-winded opinions on current economic and sociological problems.
At the end of the story we are seeing Duncan serving time for a crime I'm not sure he committed--and yet the book is set up so that we are supposed to believe that he did kill Carl. I just can't buy it.
28 January 2010
"LOOT" AND OTHER STORIES (2003)
I found these stories very hard to follow, but I have a strong hunch that their effect may depend largely on the way they are laid out on the page--the paragraphing, for instance.
It isn't always clear who is talking or thinking what in a recorded version of this book.
The stories often deal with race in South Africa. One story, for example, tells of a "coloured" (mixed-race) couple who adopt a white baby who was left anonymously at a church.
Nadine Gordimer deals with important themes, and I'm sorry to say I didn't like these stories more. She seems almost to be writing a sociological treatise at times instead of telling a story. I found her style tiresome.
14 November 2009
THE PICK-UP (2001)
Julie is a member of the privileged, well-off, white class in South Africa but is inclined to conceal this fact from her friends--including, at first, a garage mechanic who fixes her car in an emergency, a young man from an unnamed country that may be Pakistan, who goes by the name of Abdul though his real name is Ibrahim.
Her real background soon becomes clear to him, however, when she turns up in her father's much fancier car. From this point on the reader might suspect that "Abdul"/Ibrahim is on the lookout for people to exploit on his climb up the economic ladder.
He latches onto her, even likes her considerably though the word "love" doesn't mean much to him. They are both nearly 30 and already have histories. Ibrahim's has been a checkered career, spent bouncing from one country to another in his quest to escape from the less developed world of his roots. Deceptions and deportations have been a routine part of the picture for him.
But Julie is quite enamored of him. And he is said to have university training in economics--though from an unknown institution in his native country. This isn't mentioned again after the beginning of the novel, but Ibrahim's persistent willingness to go to prosperous countries (Australia, the UK, the US) and work at menial jobs seems to indicate that he has been waiting patiently for his big chance at something better--that he trusts that his professional training will some day be put to use.
The romance is going along nicely enough when he's again facing deportation. Julie surprises him by buying not only his airfare back to his native country but her own.
We see Julie making earnest efforts at assimilating herself into the society of his family--learning Arabic, teaching English to many of the women relatives, joining in the chores.
He, meanwhile, is out among the men all day, which is the way men behave in this country, without necessarily telling Julie everything he has been doing. She is aware, however, that he is constantly applying for visas and filling out papers so that the two of them can get away--to some country, any country that will accept them. He keeps getting turned down.
Then his big break comes, partly with help from some of Julie's family. Her mother has remarried and is in the US, and the US turns out to be the country that looks as if it might accept Ibrahim and Julie.
She goes along with this, the papers are filled out, the two plane tickets are bought. Then she announces that she's not going.
He has arranged for her to stay with her mother "for a couple of weeks" while he lines up work in Detroit. She probably senses that it might be much longer than a couple of weeks and that the work he will find in Detroit is probably going to be the uncertain, poorly paid labor involving working under cars that he has been doing. In any case she resists the idea of staying with her mother, whom she doesn't know well.
We watch while Ibrahim spins this to his family so as to make it look acceptable: she will stay behind for a few weeks and then join him, after he has work lined up.
We have a pretty good idea that that isn't the way it will work out. By now we have perceived that Ibrahim is pursuing an impossible dream and that Julie has made the one choice that reveals him for what he is: an opportunist who has used her for whatever funds and influence she could provide.
Luckily, she seems to like and get along with his family. We are left hoping for the best for her but fearing that she will be very much alone there without him. Sooner or later perhaps she will return to her South African friends and family, as Ibrahim has predicted all along that she would do.
She has been used, but she has also allowed herself to be used. She brought with her an attractive personality, with the added asset of people in her background who could supply funds and contacts. When it was economically to Ibrahim's advantage, she was his wife. Now that he has used her to make his getaway, she will probably be cast aside.
For Ibrahim's obvious alternative--cancelling his emigration plans and deciding to stay near his wife, the future mother of his children--isn't mentioned but is probably very much present in the reader's mind. His family members don't mention it, but they seem to assume that a chance to emigrate to the US trumps everything else.
This is a thought-provoking story about one woman's surprising choices. One has to admire Julie's clear-headed approach to her situation. She must be aware that she has been exploited and yet she goes forward with her life uncomplainingly.
The story raises questions about nationality and citizenship that are hard to answer in an age of easy mobility.
25 January 2015
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GORDON, LYNDALL
A PRIVATE LIFE OF HENRY JAMES: TWO WOMEN AND HIS ART (1998)
Lyndall Gordon has enhanced the vast Henry James industry with a seemingly well-documented study and a somewhat original theme: that the inner life of Henry James may have been shaped by the untimely deaths of two women who were clearly important to him, though not necessarily in a romantic way (this question is left undecided)--his cousin Mary (Minnie) Temple, who died very young, and the writer Constance Fenimore Woolson, with whom James may or may not have had a romantic liaison in middle age--who either fell or threw herself from a window in Italy and died.
Gordon makes a considerable case for these two women's strong influence on Henry James. She also wisely leaves the matter of James's possible homosexuality in the realm of the possible but probably unknowable.
However, I have a quibble with this book that casts some doubt on the validity of her research and her thesis, and that is her treatment of Willliam and Henry James's attitudes toward Jews. She quotes (in passing) a remark by William James where Jews are compared to "maggots," and later, in a different context, she makes the unsubstantiated remark that Henry James was anti-Semitic--and lets it go at that. Nowhere in this book, or in its bibliography, is there any evidence of Henry James's anti-Semitism. Is the reader to assume that Gordon has such evidence? Why should the reader assume this?
It would not be so very surprising if evidence of Henry James's anti-Semitism would turn up. But where has it turned up for Lyndall Gordon?
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GOUDGE, ELIZABETH
THE SCENT OF WATER (1963)
This British author, who died around 1984, has written a quietly remarkable story of a few people in a village--one a middle-aged woman who arrives there to settle after inheriting property from a cousin she hardly knew. The story revolves around her attempt to find out more about her cousin through reading the journal she left, and to come to terms with her own faith, as well as to care for the cousin’s collection of charming "little things"--miniatures.
What starts out to be a rather pedestrian tale about things turns out to be much more--a story with an underlying symbolism that doesn’t hit the reader over the head but runs subtly through the narrative.
12 March 2003
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GOULD, JENNIFER
VODKA, TEARS, AND LENIN’S ANGEL: MY ADVENTURES IN THE WILD AND WOOLLY FORMER SOVIET UNION (1997)
The author, a reporter for the Village Voice, relates her many and varied experiences in Russia and some of the Caucasus regions, including Georgia. Interesting but not always well written.
23 October 2001
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GRAHAM, KATHARINE
PERSONAL HISTORY (1997)
Autobiography of the woman who owned and ran the Washington Post, a family-owned enterprise, during the Watergate era and later, through a long and bitter pressmen’s strike. In spite of some friends of dubious value--Henry Kissinger, Clare Booth Luce, and others--her life has been influential and useful, and she has approached it with a balanced perspective and humor--even when dealing with her husband's suicide.
2 December 1999
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GRANN, DAVID
KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON: THE OSAGE MURDERS AND THE BIRTH OF THE FBI (2017)
In the 1920s the Osage tribe, after having been forcibly relocated to an unpromising region of Oklahoma, became very lucky--or maybe it was unlucky. Oil was discovered in the region, and because the Osage owned the land and its resources, they received a large fortune for their oil.
In came the huge oil companies with their drilling equipment, and the slow but sure depletion of that region's oil went on--while the Osage people didn't quite know what to do with their unexpected wealth.
The leasing of the Osage nation's headrights caused conflict, tension, and even murder, as this book chronicles in its focus on some 24 murders that occurred among the Osage in the early 1920s.
Grann traces the sad story of several of these murder victims and their families. He also gives an account of how some of the murderers were ultimately tracked down and convicted--thanks largely to the efforts of the FBI, which was just taking shape under the leadership of J. Edgar Hoover.
The book is not a tract in praise of Hoover. In fact, the author is well informed about Hoover's sorry record but sets those facts in the background and concentrates on the individual agents who were instrumental in piecing these cases together.
30 September 2018
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GRAY, FRANCINE DU PLESSIX
THEM: A MEMOIR OF PARENTS (2005)
Francine du Plessix Gray has written a lively and graceful account of the lives of her parents--her father, her mother, and her stepfather, Alexander Liberman. After leaving Europe during the war, her mother (Tatiana) became a highly regarded milliner for Saks Fifth Avenue, and her stepfather soon established himself in a position of considerable authority at Vogue magazine.
Many names are dropped in this account, for Gray's parents were keen participants in the world of high fashion and celebrity. Marlene Dietrich, for instance, was a close friend of theirs. But Gray drops names in ways that make it clear that she isn't trying to impress her readers.
In fact, she takes a dim view of her parents even while being very fond of them. She knows them to be vain, cowardly people who have often kept much too close an eye on the main chance--discarding friends when they cease to be of use to them and partying away their lives. The care of the child Francine was often in the hands of other people, but this book isn't about accusing her parents of neglect.
She seems to have accepted her childhood for what it was, taking the good with the bad and graciously giving her parents the benefit of the doubt.
Her mother had been the great love of the Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky before marrying du Plessix. The book gives glimpses into life in revolutionary and Soviet Russia that are perceptive and extraordinary.
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GREENE, GRAHAM
THE COMEDIANS (1966)
This novel takes place in the Haiti of Papa Doc Duvalier’s reign of terror and is about a man who inherits a hotel in Port au Prince and his adventures with Jones and Smith, two men he met on the voyage to Haiti. Perhaps a bit too obviously oriented toward a Hollywood version but still a thoughtful work.
12 October 1999
TRAVELS WITH MY AUNT (1969)
In this very funny novel the narrator, Henry Pulling, has led a routine life as a bank manager until the death of the woman he had always known as his mother. This woman's sister--his Aunt Augusta--attaches herself to him at this point and reveals that her sister was not Henry's real mother.
For most of the novel we do not know who his real mother is, and the questions connected with this mystery would occupy most readers' minds although they do not form the core of the story. (Is his mother someone we already know? Why was the secret kept for so long?--and so on.) Instead we find out more about the intrepid Aunt Augusta and her lovers--especially "Wordsworth," as she calls Zachary, a West Indian black man.
Aunt Augusta, who tends to be involved in somewhat shady international escapades, is a globetrotter, and so we are taken to Istanbul and Uruguay as her mysterious missions occur.
The question of Henry's real mother ceases to matter much--though most readers will have figured it out long before the story ends--and the revelation comes in an oblique, offhanded way, as if to emphasize how little it has to do with the lives being played out in the story.
THE CONFIDENTIAL AGENT (1939)
This novel was written as a potboiler, by the author's own admission. He was working simultaneously on The Power and the Glory but needed more money--and cranked out The Confidential Agent at the rate of 2,000 words a day.
Maybe Graham Greene was incapable of writing a bad book, for this thriller has much to recommend it--though it isn't among my Greene favorites, which include Brighton Rock, A Burnt-Out Case, and The Heart of the Matter.
The story centers around D., who enters England from an unnamed country that is at war (Spain?) as a former professor of Romance languages of some distinction, now charged with a mission of procuring a coal contract for his country. His is a dangerous job, as we soon learn, and he is being careful.
A love story is combined with a thriller here, and perhaps it is this combination that prompted Greene to designate this novel as one of his "entertainments."
There is a seedy, tired atmosphere pervading the action in this story--an atmosphere Greene excels at creating. It is somewhat like the seediness in Conrad's spy story, The Secret Agent. Greene isn't borrowing from Conrad but mining the same territory, which must be a fertile ground, for it also attracted Henry James, in The Princess Casamassima.
14 January 2009
ORIENT EXPRESS (STAMBOUL TRAIN) (1932)
This comes pretty close to being a bad novel by Greene. However, it is a very early work, and he considered it one of his "entertainments"--not to be taken as seriously as his other novels.
Rumor has it that he had his eye on the movies when writing this story. When writers have a movie bee in their bonnet as they write, it often shows, to the detriment of the story they're telling.
There is a love interest, of sorts, and that is where one of the biggest problems lies. Coral Musker, an English chorus girl traveling alone to Istanbul because she's been sent to take a job there, happens into bed en route with Myatt, a young Jewish businessman. She falls in love with him--or thinks she is in love--and would like to think that he cares about her too.
He does, in fact. He even goes looking for her when she disappears and is in danger. That the story ends without their finding happiness together is to the author's credit. It would have been a much sappier story if they had walked away into the sunset together, and very unlike Graham Greene.
The biggest problem with this novel, which came out only a year before Hitler came to power as Chancellor of Germany, is its anti-Semitic flavor. To be sure, the most virulently anti-Jewish sentiments in the story are voiced by characters who are very unlikable and untrustworthy. We can assume that Greene isn't promulgating their views.
But what to make of remarks about a "hand gesture" that is said to be "characteristic of his race"? And other references to Jews as a "race"? Even in 1932 Jewish people weren't usually regarded as a "race," and the whole idea of "race" was about to be called into question as an outmoded concept, one with no meaning. As for hand gestures, some ethnic groups--Italians come to mind--seem more inclined to use expressive body language with their speech, as students of language have often noted.
An introduction, written many years later by Christopher Hitchens, makes no apologies for Greene. This is probably a book Greene's fans would prefer to forget about.
22 May 2012
THE HONORARY CONSUL (1973)
Contemporary authors so often seem to have their eye on possible film versions of their novels that the reader can almost see the telltale signs. I had this feeling as I was reading The Honorary Consul--and, sure enough, it was made into a movie, Beyond the Limit, which I haven't seen.
Greene isn't at his best here. Sadly, he seems to be going over territory he has covered before--and far more compellingly.
That Catholicism is going to enter into the story become apparent early on, when we find this sentence: "The Three Marys hung in the sky, like all that was left of a broken rosary chain. The cross lay where it had fallen elsewhere."
The story involves Charley Fortnum, the "Honorary Consul," who is kidnapped by mistake by a gang of ne'er-do-wells. Dr. Eduardo Plarr, a medical doctor who is half Paraguayan, half English, is bedding his friend Charley's wife Clara, unbeknownst to Charley. Clara has been plucked from the world of prostitution, with which Plarr is familiar.
There is suspense, and there is shooting, and there is much discussion of machismo. But most of all there are long segments of dialogue about Catholicism. Leon, a childhood friend of Plarr's, is a former priest who is now part of the gang.
Greene tries to be straining for the kind of combination of seedy atmosphere and lost souls grappling with questions of faith that he achieved in his better-known works. But this story lacks the impact of those works.
For one thing, the dialogue on faith seems too long and not well integrated into the rest of the story. And I found it hard to become particularly interested in any of the characters. They aren't well fleshed out, and there are too many of them--at least 28 by my count. With so many people on the stage, there should have been a longer book--or at least a meatier one, with less discussion of the Church.
10 September 2012
GREGORY, DICK
NIGGER (1964)
Here we have the well-known comedian’s autobiography, telling of a fatherless childhood in desperate poverty, his struggle to make a living as a comedian, his marriage and children, including the loss of an infant son, and his involvement in the civil rights movement both in Chicago and in the South.
_______________________
GREIDER, KATHARINE
THE BIG FIX: HOW THE PHARMACEUTICAL INDUSTRY RIPS OFF AMERICAN CONSUMERS (2003)
This book has some rabble-rousing features but it rests on a foundation of apparently solid facts. And maybe rabble-rousing is what is needed.
The book came out eight years ago. The author would probably find more horror stories now because I don't think that the situation has changed for the better since 2003.
Greider explores the ways in which drug companies pursue sales of their products through aggressive marketing to doctors--and through elaborate legal maneuvers that result in bigger profits for the drug companies. Her point is that drug companies should be working in the public interest since their products affect people's health, and yet they are often working against the public interest.
She also discusses DTC (direct-to-consumer) marketing, which has been responsible for the costly attention-getting ads that are flooding the airwaves and magazines.
This is an informative book.
14 May 2011
________________________________GRISHAM, JOHN
THE INNOCENT MAN: MURDER AND INJUSTICE IN A SMALL TOWN (2006)
I'm not usually a fan of John Grisham works, which are usually best-sellers. But since this one is an account of an actual case.
There's some stylistic sloppiness in the writing--Grisham is much too fond of using "and such" for my taste, for instance--but it's an absorbing story highlighting the US justice system's extreme unfairness in some instances.
Ron Williamson of Ada, Oklahoma, served more than a dozen years, many of them on death row, for a murder he hadn't committed. So did another man--while the actual murderer wasn't discovered, even though there was considerable evidence pointing toward him.
Ron Williamson had had a drinking problem before his imprisonment for murder in the early 1980s, but because a psychotic condition seems to have developed during his prison stay, he was sometimes medicated with psychotropic drugs that took their toll on his health. For many years he was subject to fits of screaming protests of his innocence, but nobody was listening--and the only effect his protests had was (sometimes) to land him in a treatment center for a while. As a rule, though, his mental derangement was left untreated.
When the case was finally corrected and Ron was freed, he won a sizeable settlement by suing the legal system. His alcoholism continuing, he gave money away with a liberal hand, moved around frequently, and in general was a pathetic figure. It wasn't long before liver cirrhosis caught up with him, and he died, in his early 50s, a victim of the justice system.
The real killer and rapist of Debbie Carter was a man who had been helpfully supplying the local police with drugs like cocaine. The police and apparently some lawyers and judges were instrumental in ignoring or covering up mountains of evidence that would have brought this man to trial--and exonerated Ron Williamson and the other man.
This is a tragic story from beginning to end--and a damning indictment of the way the US justice system functions.
22 May 2008
___________________________
GROOPMAN, JEROME, MD
HOW DOCTORS THINK (2007)
The author is a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and has had a distinguished career in medical research as well as in his writings about medicine.
In this book he isn't protecting his colleagues from criticism. In fact, he often subjects them to criticism, and it is refreshing in a time when the medical profession often seems like a closed circle of people determined to defend their turf.
Are doctors wrong in their diagnoses? Surprisingly many are, according to this book.
Are doctors influenced in their choice of treatments by the lavish gifts showered on them by the pharmaceutical and medical equipment industries? Yes indeed, Groopman demonstrates--singling out spinal fusion as an example of a procedure that is often done unnecessarily for the relief of low back pain.
Are entirely too many MRIs being ordered? Most definitely. And just how accurately are MRIs read by the experts? Tests have been done that have shown that MRI readings are often astonishingly inaccurate.
The author analyzes ways doctors think because they're in the habit of thinking in those ways, and ways in which better doctors think because they are curious enough and daring enough to venture into the realm of less obvious possibilities when it comes to diagnosis and treatment.
This was an interesting and valuable book.
18 March 2009
with PAMELA HARTZBAND, MD, co-author):
YOUR MEDICAL MIND: HOW TO DECIDE WHAT IS RIGHT FOR YOU (2012)
A book that may be disturbing to read because it gives details about medical procedures among the critically ill. However, it is unusual in not being completely favorable toward living wills/advance directives.
The authors point out some of the problems that have arisen in dealing with carrying out the specifications in living wills--most notably, the confusion that results when family members or loved ones disagree about what a patient would want.
The book provides a view of modern medical care from the perspective of the providers--and should make readers more aware of how very complex a matter it is.
27 July 2015
______________________________
GUTERSON, DAVID
PROBLEMS WITH PEOPLE: STORIES (2014)
These ten stories concern people with problems, and none of them pretends that the world is a happy, rosy place. Many are set in the Seattle area. One, "Photograph," concerns a man whose son was killed when a salmon-fishing boat near Alaska went down. In more than one story, a man is married to a bossy matriarch. Life isn't easy for Guterson's people.
The author has a special gift for dialogue. The characters' conversations are so realistically set down that the reader might easily have overheard them in real life.
David Guterson became well known with his novel, Snow Falling on Cedars (1994), which I haven't read. This story collection has prompted me to find it.
29 April 2016
SNOW FALLING ON CEDARS (1994)
Finding out that a book has been a best-seller and then a movie has a red-flag effect on me all too often. Armed with this knowledge about Snow Falling on Cedars, I kept finding passages in the book that indicated that the author was aiming carefully at best-sellerdom and the movies. These indications made it harder for me to appreciate the book.
It is accomplishing a valuable social objective by calling attention to the plight of those Japanese Americans who were herded into camps in the atmosphere of panicky paranoia following the attack on Pearl Harbor. There are some clear descriptions of what life was like for families in Manzanar, and the horrific injustices suffered by the Japanese Americans--their need to forfeit their property, often farms on which they had labored diligently for many years, for instance--are highlighted.
I wish that the author had been content with telling this story and the related story that is central to the plot--whether Kabuo Miyamoto killed Carl Heine--set in an island community in Washington state.
It would have been a good, compelling story, and the reader could have focused on it. But Guterson dresses it up with an unusual snow storm and power outage right in the middle of the trial of Kabuo Miyamoto. And, as if that weren't enough drama, there is a story that is explored in considerable detail: the close childhood relationship between Kabuo's wife Hatsue and Ishmael Chambers, who became a local reporter.
Guterson doesn't seem to have made up his mind about just what happened in a hollow tree between Hatsue and Ishmael in their early teens because he presents two different versions of it, the second one laden with sexual explicitness, but then he's a bit vague about the date of the trial too. It appears to be 1954 but there are times in the first part of the novel when it seems to be 1961,
Then there are several passages of lengthy descriptions of very ghastly combat scenes, probably included to remind us of the horrors of the Second World War and the anti-Japanese sentiment that anyone fighting on the Allied side would have been encouraged to feel. But one wonders whether Guterson needed to give us quite so much gore.
But gore and sex are known to sell, and this novel seems larded with both.
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