[Books] Book Look: The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll, by Alvaro Mutis

I picked this up because it was mentioned in a couple of forgotten online comments somewhere as an unknown classic.  I don't remember the context, I just remember the references to this.  

Maqroll is a romanticized drifter.  He wanders the world, often at sea, engaging in various escapades from the lurid to the horrific.  Also known as the Gaviero (Spanish for a Lookout), he divides his time between wandering the seas as a freighter crewman and engaging in illegal activities on land.  He is not completely immoral, nor completely amoral, but he has no problem with grift and crime, up to a point.  He will pimp and con, but take care not to cause too much damage.  He is not adverse to shady dealings and making use of others, but he is also loyal to his friends and those he loves.  Along the way he is given to ruminations -- pensive half-laments about his compulsion to lead a life of wandering and discomfort.  His scams are often undertaken seemingly out of boredom, or perhaps more accurately, anger at the world for boring him, for giving him no purpose. 

Very much in the Latin American vein of long, florid descriptions and, frankly, superfluous detail.  Mutis can easily write page-long paragraphs describing the wind through a field or the countenance of a stranger.  You would think that would be anathema to my sensibilities, and it is, but over the years I have learned how to skim in the appropriate places.  That is not technically a flaw in the book.  That is a conflict with my personal sensibility.  Mutis is a poet and has a tremendous command of language and seems to have met an equivalent talent in Edith Grossman as translator.  Near as I can tell the stories are told as individual novellas out of time sequence.  I could not construct a clear timeline in my head as I went along, but that may just be due to my skimming.

At 700 pages it can easily exhaust a reader.  Although the characterizations are strong and the stories decently plotted, there is no one here to really like or sympathize with.  There is an occasional hateful villain, but the protagonists just do not engender concern. They, and the tales about them, are interesting to a point, but not deeply affecting.  There is more curiosity than connection.

Should you read the Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll? If you are an unseasoned reader, the answer is almost certainly no.  Read Don Quixote instead.  There are certainly rewards here for a more experienced reader.  Mutis' command of words is deeply impressive.  If you like authors such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, you will be very comfortable with Mutis and likely be one of the people who deem this a classic. And, as I said, the stories are interesting.  You kind of want to keep going to discover what happens, even if, when all is said and done, you don't really care.

[Books] The Wrecker, by Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne

This book should be portrayed next to the word sprawling in the dictionary.  Published in 1892 it is, in Stevenson's words, a "South Seas yarn" but there is so much more to it.  In the first section, our narrator, the Young Hero, is just starting out in the world and intent on becoming an artist and studying in Paris.  His loving father would prefer that he entered into business and they go back and forth, the young man pursuing his dream and the father using his purse strings to indulge young man enough that he can try his hand at art, but giving him a boundary on how long his father will continue support.  

While studying in Paris he forms a fateful friendship with an Idea Man: a high-energy, hype-man fellow who flits from idea to idea, scheme to scheme; not without success.  In time the Idea Man moves to San Francisco after losing interest in art.  The Young Hero soldiers on in Paris, his dream of being an artist suffering setbacks, until he gets the news that his father has made some bad investments and gone bankrupt.  No more money will be coming.  After struggling a bit more in Paris, he gets further communication that his father has died.

The Young Hero leaves Paris, gathers up what he can of his father's estate and heads to San Francisco to meet up with his old friend, the Idea Man, who has promised him work.  The Idea Man comes through and they run a successful boat touring business for a while before the story shifts gears again.

Note that we are nearly half way through the book at this point, and we have not yet started the main plot or been to the South Seas. Now, that is not to say the story is slow moving or this all doesn't work to set up the characters going forward.  It does, quite beautifully.  There is no shortage of interesting developments along the way.  In fact, it wonderfully sets up how the Young Hero and the Idea Man, by the nature of their characters, get involved in a shady and outright illegal scheme next.  The Idea Man is shown to have connections to what I think we would call a mob boss in San Francisco in the interest of his enthusiasm for successful business ventures.  The Young Hero is shown to be almost unaffected by his father's death other than in the way it upsets his life, suggesting his moral center is nebulous.

Also, the amount of time spent on florid descriptions of scenes and settings is about half the length of the book.  It's all marvelously written with sentences intricately constructed in a manner that is lost to us now. I suppose that in 1892, when you took to reading a book, you had patience.  Not only was there a lack of visual distraction.  You had to depend on the words to describe things you have never seen.  I can bring up any number of pictures and videos of San Francisco and its environs, and in fact it's not an enormous matter for me to actually go there to see what it's like (which I have).   In 1892, readers would have only had the description in the book to go by, so extended descriptions of settings and people were necessary and appreciated.  My lesson: reading old books gives you insight into what reading books was like for people centuries past.

Which leads to my next observation.  With the overwhelming majority of books I have read, I have had the reaction that it could have been shortened by a third.  (P.G. Wodehouse being an exception.)  A century and a half ago, I probably would have felt the need for more.  There is a think piece to be written about how the visual arts can stunt our appreciation for beautiful prose.  I am not going to be writing it, but there you are.

In any event, you can think of The Wrecker as almost 4 books in one. The first being the Young Hero in Paris.  The second being the adventures of the Young Hero and the Idea Man in San Francisco.

The third is where the South Seas adventure begins.  The Young Hero and Idea Man decide to try Wrecking.  A shipwrecked vessel was (is?) auctioned to the highest bidder to parties who speculate that the cost of purchase is lower than the value of what they can salvage from the ship.  Our protagonists enter an auction confident in the value of the bid, but when they get in a bidding war with someone bidding by proxy the auction price explodes by an order of magnitude. They are swept up in bidding and go deep into debt to win the auction.  They jointly come to the conclusion that if someone was willing to go so high on the bid, there must be something very valuable on board.  They presume: Opium.

With their last pennies they arrange for a crew and ship to reach the wreck, on Midway island, the Young Hero to join the voyage while the Idea Man hangs back in San Francisco to hold off the bankers as long as he can. 

The wreck salvage doesn't pan out as hoped.  They do find some opium, but not enough to save them from bankruptcy.  The Young Hero talks himself into betraying his partner and keeping the little opium money for himself, rationalizing that he would be making his partner party to criminal activity for a small amount of money that wouldn't save him anyway.

Perhaps more interestingly, papers and photos found in the wreckage suggest something else was going on; that the crew of this wreck were not who they say they were; that something more wicked that opium smuggling was happening.

In the fourth section the Young Hero is pursuing the mystery in competition with the Shyster, who was the agent making bids for the wreck with the other party and who has also reasoned out that something strange was going on.  After some machinations they travel to England and finally approach the family of the man who was counter-bidding for the wreck and discover they have no knowledge of him, that he was disowned long ago. The Shyster vanishes.  The Young Hero takes the opportunity to revisit Paris and, through connections, finds the other bidder.  

The other bidder relates a harrowing story of how he was made a Remittance Man by his family and recounts a tale of how he became involved with the wrecked ship and effective on the run.  I won't give the details away.  Our Young Hero, again demonstrating his moral flexibility, initially thought to gain from blackmailing the Remittance Man, but in the end, they become friends and fellows or a sort.  

While clearly a character driven story, the character arcs are not obvious.  I would guess most of the characters start and end in the same place. But then, Robert Louis Stevenson considered himself an entertainer above all else.  And this is indeed monumental yarn.

Should you read The Wrecker? You need patience, as discussed.  And you need to be able to deal with the complex sentences and vocabulary that people used to employ long ago (in contrast, it is near enough in history for you to recognize the personality types). If you have those things, it is quite entertaining and thought provoking. 

Aside: In reading about him, I stumbled on this Roberet Louis Stevenson quote:

The man is a success who has lived well, laughed often, and loved much; who has gained the respect of intelligent men and the love of children; who has filled his niche and accomplished his task; who leaves the world better than he found it, whether by an improved poppy, a perfect poem, or a rescued soul; who never lacked appreciation of earth's beauty or failed to express it; who looked for the best in others and gave the best he had.

Yes.

[Books] The Hawk Sahib, by David Mazzotta

Where to begin?  Here's the description from Amazon:

At the end of the 19th century an intrepid Tibetan youth from an Indian orphanage is enlisted in the name of Her Majesty to guide a mysterious Norwegian named Sigerson on a mission to the forbidden city of Lhasa. The clandestine operation leads to intrigue, danger, and ultimately, murder. In the face of mortal consequences, Sigerson must solve the crime from deep undercover.

Drawing on Kipling and Conan Doyle for inspiration, The Hawk Sahib represents a new direction for David Mazzotta. His sharply observed characters and economical style make for a breakneck-paced historical mystery.

This was a very difficult book to write.  In the process, I discovered I do not have a  particular talent for plotting.  That is to say, the bulk of the time I spent on this was outlining the sequence of events and inferences.  I gained a tremendous respect for writers of mysteries, and a certain level of awe for those who can string together something complex that does not come off as contrived manufactured.

The location and subject are quite esoteric and archaic.  Does anyone know who Kipling is anymore?  How about Conan Doyle?  A reading by a standard-issue woke college freshman would probably lose me my job, even though in the context of the era in which it is set it is fine.  Look at it this way: is there anyone alive under the age of 60 that can pronounce "Sahib'' and not find it troubling?  That is to say, the audience is, I'm afraid, very small. It is not a comedy, in fact it is likely the darkest book I've written, though still, I hope, very entertaining.  

It sets up a sequel as it ends, so evidently I want to torture myself by having to plot another mystery -- certainly not until I retire. I will say this:  If you recognize the name Sigerson you will probably enjoy it.  If you know, you know.  

Now for the personal stuff.  In the course of writing this I have come to some revelations about myself.  Firstly, once I do retire, I suspect I will write a lot.  I don't know if I can ever reach the level of output of 25 years ago, when I had this blog, books, and football column going all at once, but I will have time and when I have time, I write.  They say writing is only enjoyable in the past tense.  Writing is work, having written is fun.  In fact, writing is more of a compulsion.  There is no point in resisting it, as you would work, and there is no particular joy in completing it, since the compulsion is not relieved.  It just is, and I feel it will continue to be once I have time for it again.  Look, if I retire at 65, that gives me at least another 15 years of productive writing.  That's a gift.

The other realization is how self-indulgent my approach is to writing.  I write whatever I want.  I have no concern for sales or an audience or the opinions of others.  If over the course of its existence The Hawk Sahib sells no more than a handful of copies, I'm fine with that.  I write what I write and that's that. (I seem to be developing an affinity for tautology.  That makes three in this post alone.  Not good.) 

Contrast that with Lee Child, who writes the Jack Reacher series of manly thrillers, one of which I am ripping through now.  They sell billions.  They can at times be formulaic.  To me they are a bit wordy but I think that is true of just about every book.  What they are is perfectly targeted to his readers, of which I am one.  A common, rather smug belief might be that Lee Child is simply a commercial machine, his work eschews artistry for commercial reward.  That belief is wrong.  Lee Child is writing for other people.  He is a craftsman of the highest order and that takes talent.  In my juvenile years I might have deluded myself that, in a flurry of sophomoric editorializing, I was dedicated to the artistry of writing and it's the crass uncivilized world that makes him rich and me not.  The fact is he is giving the world what it desires, and I am giving myself what I desire. I am more selfish than authentic.

There is no room in the commercial book industry for me, nor should there be.  It is truly a blessing that there isn't.  Years ago, we're I to have become a successful mainstream novelist, I would have lived a very different life than I have.  I would have been brown-nosing the Upper West Side cognoscenti. Making dreary small talk with strangers who show up for a signing.  Trying to supplement my income by teaching creative writing.  And I also would have fallen to poverty once the well ran dry.  No, I definitely lucked out by failing as a novelist.

I can write the stories I want and ramble on endlessly in blog posts.  Who's got it better than me?  

Still, I am not entirely self-absorbed. I would like anyone who is moved to read my work to enjoy it.  And if you are so moved, I hope you enjoy The Hawk Sahib.

[Books] Farewell P.J.

The best line from Matt Labash's obituary for P.J. O'Rourke: "Good writers make you want to read, Great writers make you want to write."  P.J. O'Rourke made me want to write. He had one keen eye inherited from Tom Wolfe, and one gimlet eye inherited from Hunter Thompson. But he didn't eviscerate his targets like Wolfe or stink bomb them like Thompson.  He simply laughed at them. No -- scratch that. He laughed with them. However ridiculous his targets came out, he never suggested that he was any better, in fact he often targeted the man in the mirror.  He once pointed out that Hunter Thompson schtick was being a crazy guy looking at normalcy.  His schtick was being a normal guy facing all the crazy.  As a result, no matter how incisive and biting his critique, you had to love him.  In the end, this made his words all the more powerful.  It was a remarkable thing to see.

Me taking up writing back then was me saying "I want to be able to do that."  I am comparatively weak sauce, but I like to think my first three books were absolutely in that vein.  You can get a feel for how much he influenced me by searching the early days of this blog (largely greater than 15 years ago) for all the references to him.

I'm lucky to have lived during his tenure on Earth, and hope he's found all the good bars in Heaven.

[Books] Book Look: Piranesi, by Susanna Clark

This is a delightful book in so many ways.  Briefly described, a man is trapped in a sort of alternate reality which consists of a building of some stripe with an infinite number of cavernous rooms filled with gargantuan statues.  The building is such that it has its own sky, its own ocean, its own ecosystem.  The man, Piranesi, has completely acclimated to reality such that he never seems to question its existence or the existential contradictions of it.  Through his interactions with the only other person in the reality, a man he refers to as The Other, the mysteries surrounding the building resurface and he must face a disturbing new reality.

Yes, but.  The unravelling of reality is not where the beauty of this book is found.  The loveliness here is in the descriptions of the building (referred to as the House) and how Piranesi has adapted not only to survival in the House, but building a belief system and a scientific philosophy out of it.  It is both beautiful and, to my mind, quite realistic.  The house contains dangers, but also great beauty; natural rhythms and random surprises.  Confronted with this Piranesi has created both a scientific outlook -- he assiduously maps his world, tracks tides, observes causal connections -- and religious beliefs -- he has faith the house will provide for him, reveres the dead, accepts the fate the house grants.  Clark's prose builds a beautiful aesthetic for all this, as one would expect from the author of Jonathan Strange & Dr. Norrell, so much so that I was somewhat disappointed that actual reality had to intrude on it.

The other blessed aspect of this book is that it is short.  Clark offers no fluff, no padding, nothing to skip over.  My hobby horse over the years has been that books are almost universally 30%-40% too long.  Not Piranesi.  God bless Clark for that.

Should you read Piranesi? Yes. You may not be as touched by it as I was, but I can;t imagine you regretting it. If there is a larger moral to the story I can't see it, it's just a lovely and intriguing way to spend some time.

[Books] Book Look: Spring Snow by Yukio Mishima

Book Look: Spring Snow by Yukio Mishima
Mishima is a controversial character, partly because many on what is glibly called the "alt-right" have taken him as a bit of a role model. I leave it as an exercise for the reader if you want to read up on him. Like many reactionaries (that's not a dirty word to me, it's just an accurate description), Mishima looks back to a romanticized time of beauty, valor, and purpose. I am highly skeptical of that since I am old enough to remember a time that some folks think of as romantically idealized and it was no such thing.

Spring Snow is the first of a tetralogy of novels that Mishima meant to be his crowning glory; a sweeping overview of the changes in Japan over the course of a half a century, placing personal stories in the context of the sociopolitical. Authors have tried this many times, usually via a multi-generational family saga. Mishima attempts it by following a single character and his encounters throughout his life with a reincarnated friend who always dies before his/her twentieth birthday. The first death is in Spring Snow and each subsequent novel is a reincarnation.

Spring Snow centers around Kiyo, a diffident, detached, spoiled, 19-year-old son of a "new money" family scion. Kiyo's world is noticeably divided between fashionable attraction for western culture and the traditional imperial worship culture. Also in this mix we have Satoko, the beautiful daughter of a generations-old legitimately aristocratic family, though now fallen on hard times. The new-money and old-blood families have a symbiotic connection for the sake of each other's status. The son and daughter have a great attraction to one another in the juvenile manner of antagonizing each other and denying their feelings. At a time when they are bickering and distant, Satoko finds herself betrothed to a crown prince -- a relative of the Emperor. Like a child demanding a previously ignored toy once it is taken away, Kiyo sees the truth of his feelings and desperately desires her. They begin an illicit affair, cuckolding the crown prince. More star-crossed they could not be.

When Satoko becomes pregnant their affair is discovered. The public exposure of such wanton illicit behavior would be an insult to the Emperor himself and effectively the end of both families, at least as far as their status went. All the bitterness between the two families comes out, but they succeed in minimizing the damage and saving face, though they must scramble, connive, bribe, and lie to do it. In the course of things Satoko gets an abortion and enters a nunnery, never to see Kiyo again. Kiyo's soul is lost, he cannot return to his previous life. He attempts to see Satoko at the nunnery but is denied and falls ill from waiting for her in the cold weather and dies. As I alluded, it's all very tragically Shakespearean.

Throughout it all Mishima bends the narrative to hint at the lost qualities of the past in the face of what might be called cultural progress. In Spring Snow these are fairly subtle and more along the lines of s minor lament for those losses without outright condemnation of the present. My understanding is that this changes in the sequels.

Should you read Spring Snow? It is slow, especially at the start. Mishima does not subscribe to the "grab the reader's attention quickly" philosophy. He writes with a languid elegance that matches well with the overly formal era he is describing. He is absolutely not one to tell a joke. Aesthetics, sensuality, and romanticism dominate his approach. Not a blade of grass flutters without an ornate description. But, if he builds his story and characters slowly, he builds them with care and depth. There were a couple of times during the early chapters when I suspected he was going nowhere with this and nearly gave up, but by the middle of the book I was fully invested. Still, it is for the patient reader (but we all have time these days, don't we?) who has an appreciation of nuance and quiet action. In that sense, it is like Mishima himself: better suited for an earlier time. I am on the fence as to whether to dive into the remaining three novels.

[Books] Book Look: First and Last Men, by Olaf Stapledon

The best word I can think of to describe Last and First Men is "intriguing". It is a "future history", a book -- written in 1930 -- that imagines the upcoming two billion years of man's development. It contains many fascinating ideas, along with a fair amount of silly fantasy. In broad strokes, Stapledon foresees humanity as forever moving through eras of rising from savagery, building civilizations of various stripe, only to eventually descend yet again, either through folly or mishap. It is essentially a manifestation of Stapledon's personal cosmology. As such, it's hard to call it an artistic work, it is more a work arm-chair philosophy, although a very accomplished one.

We start out roughly in 1930, just after WW1 and naturally we are treated to all the socio-political credences of the time -- that value of the League of Nations, for example -- including a fairly poor image of the United States, which eventually destroys Europe via chemical warfare, leaving the US and China to effectively divide the world. So maybe right for the wrong reasons. In time the First Men -- that's us, Homo Sapiens -- achieves a single world government, heavily religious, and in time destroys the world through something along the lines of an uncontrolled nuclear reaction, leaving mere remnants which descend into barbarism. What follows is the evolution of the species through various forms, seventeen more incarnations in all, the 18th being the Last Men. After 10 million years the Second Men emerge -- a new species. They build a great civilization which perishes in a seemingly endless mutually destructive war with Martians. The Third Men are experts at biological manipulation and end up creating Fourth Men, the species that eventually replaces them. Earth becomes uninhabitable for the Fifth Men so they must terraform Venus and wipe out an pre-existing sentient species there for their own survival. The Eighth Men face destruction as the Sun expands and thus create the Ninth Men, specifically designed to inhabit the planet Neptune, which will be in the habitable zone of the expanded Sun. Starting over from scratch, the Neptunians evolve through a number of species, gaining a hive mind capability and eventually the ability to send their consciousness back through time to earlier men. By the time they hit the 18th species, they are as close to perfect as can be imagined, containing the best of all that came before them. And still they are to be destroyed in an astronomical cataclysm. They manage to send viral seed out into the galaxy before they are destroyed and the End of Man finally comes after two billion years.

Whew. As I read that, it sounds awfully trite, but it's not. It's really a springboard for observations about the nature of humanity. When species come into conflict it is often for reasons of class or narcissism. Aesthetic sensibilities and art persist in almost every species in some form or other, as does spirituality and prophetry, often intermingling. We find species suffering from collective guilt, which is not surprising for an author for whom WW1 is a recent affair. Sexuality remains and gets weird, and if you know anything about sexuality in the 1930s, that won't surprise you either. The Fifth Men are so thoroughly automated that their lives consist mostly of leisure (sound familiar?) bring a whole new raft of issues. Collective consciousness is explored as is atomic energy. Stapledon's take on human nature persists to the very end.

Still it is limited in ways. There are virtually no individuals and so no character arcs; I suppose you could say it is a biography of man so there is the arc of humanity. And like all science fiction, it cannot separate itself entirely from the concerns of the day in the time of the author's life. Still Stapledon does better than most at that. Even without individuals the book is humanistic.

A greater shortcoming is that Stapledon does go on. I often say most books could be trimmed by 30% with no loss to the reader. In Last and First Men it's probably over 50%. Descriptions get overly involved and repetitive. He writes with good style, but often it feels like he's spewing content to no end. This may be part and parcel without having character arcs to provide constraints.

Should you read Last and First Men. Probably not. It is really only for folks who might like to dwell on the nature of humanity and hyman motivation. Compared to traditional fiction, it is a setting without a plot. It is too ambling to be philosophy, to broad to be hard sci-fi, and too fantastic to be predictive. Still, like I said, it is intriguing. Though I spent more time thinking about what to think of it, than of the content itself.

[Books] What I've Been Reading

Spring Snow -- Yukio Mishima. Still slow going but I haven't given up. Still not sure what Mishima is driving at for the most part. The exploration of subtle motivations is elaborate and mildly fascinating to the point where I'm wondering where it will go. If it goes nowhere I will feel like a tool.

Rings of Saturn -- W.G. Sebald. This a book that garnered effusive praise from a number of big name writers. Hailed as an inventive masterpiece and blurbed endlessly by those who are spoken of breathlessly in high-toned literary journals. I gave up after about 90-ish pages. Sebald was a wonderfully skilled writer who can form a poetic sentence seemingly out of nothing. But the poetry of nothing is still nothing.

Sebald was German (born in 1944 and died in 2001 -- the prototypical lived-and-died-through-the-Cold-War life), so what we have is a translation which is always a bit of a wildcard. Ostensibly a novel following a troubled fellow as he travels along the eastern coast of England, although at times it seems clear that Sebald is writing autobiographically. What follows is a sort of stream of consciousness woven into an intricate web of factual and sentimental relationships. There is no observation too minor from which to build a florid allegory. Given the chance, he would take a random patch of gravel and turn it into an analogy for the sorrow of impermanence. He will sit on a park bench and intensely introspect on the gray skies which will remind of literary reference which caused him to intensely introspect on something similar in the past. He will encounter a piece of ephemera and be reminded of a historical reference hundreds of years in the past that caused him to wring his hands over something or other. Perhaps it is all just very German. The only overall sensation of it all was one of decay. Weird, that someone born into the ashes of post-WWII Germany who lived to see the Berlin Wall fall would be attached to the zeitgeist of decay, but there it is.

There is just so much pretentiousness one can take. The tortured ruminations, the reading of profound meaning into trivialities, the attachment to societal decline -- even the mechanics of it: Sebald will rarely drop a paragraph on you to take a breath, he just keeps going. But Kerouac, he ain't. His thoughts, though genuine I'm sure, don't have enough energy to sustain that. Woefulness does not create energy, it saps it. As I said, the praise from what I will sneeringly call the writerly community is effusive. Which makes sense, because it's written for them; it matches their own pretensions to a tee.

Still, I might be judging unfairly. It is possible that had I stuck it out all the superfluous decoration and sorrowful images would have gelled into something insightful and timeless. If so, it would have been nice to have a hint of it in less than 100 pages. I'm moving on.

Last and First Men -- Olaf Stapledon. A "future history" from back in 1931. It appears to be a vision of the future from the time immediately post-WW1 to some point wherein humanity evolves to its final form. Highly valued by many. I've only just started it but I am deeply impressed by the formal, yet completely readable prose. The subject matter seems kind of an odd mish-mash. He spends a long time speculating about various cultural forces and how they in combination with human nature and happenstance lead to war and it seems like some keen insights might be coming. Then he goes full on I-am-14-and-this-is-deep level fantasizing.

Fair warning: there are deeply racist and anti-Semitic sections. And the Americans are kind of the bad guys. I'm not sure he doesn't fall into the trap of making his future vision really about his opinions on the present. We'll see.

[Books] What I've Been Reading

Three escapes and one potential trap.

Maigret's Childhood Friend, by Georges Simoneon -- Delightfully prototypical Maigret. I continue to be enamored of Simoneon's marvelous economy of language and how he manages to engross without contrivance, just well-drawn characters, linear plotting, dogged police work. I will continue to pick off Maigret's for a while I think.

The Dreadful Lemon Sky, by John D. MacDonald -- There was a time, decades ago, when I worked my way through these Travis McGee books. I came to stop at one point because I found them hopelessly lurid and violent and generally dark-toned. Not sure what encouraged me to go back and read one besides curiosity, but it confirmed my impression. MacDonald writes well, but these modern-day, white-knight, noir-ish, hyper-macho books wear thin quickly. I can see the lineage passed down to something like the Doc Ford series from Randy Wayne White, but White has a much better sense of humor and Doc Ford is not dark-hearted. Probably a close modern day match would be Jack Reacher -- another series in which I'm in no hurry to indulge. Good for what it is.

No Hero, by John P. Marquand -- Marquand was a fairly renowned mainstream fictionalist. Winner of the Pulitzer, and so forth. His side gig was writing an espionage/intrigue series featuring a Japanese spymaster called Mr. Moto (eventually turned into a movie series featuring Peter Lorre). The plot is fairly standard -- down on his luck rogue stumbles into a spy-game that causes him to sort himself out and also gets the girl. The writing is direct and clear. The real treat here is the insight into the sentimentalities of the times. Written pre-WWII, when the political machinations in the Pacific between Japan, U.S., China, and Russia were still in flux and no one was really certain how it was all going to shake out. A fun book and very cool lens into the past.

Spring Snow, by Yukio Mishima -- definitely not escapist. Mishima was arguably the premier Japanese writer of the 20th century and led quite a life. He was shortlisted for the Nobel, hobnobbed with various elite personalities, eventually he attempted a coup and committed seppuku upon its failure. A half-century after his death he is now something of a cult figure in certain circles of what is inexactly called the alt-right -- primarily for his devotion to an aesthetic combination of classical beauty and nobility and masculine strength. Spring Snow is the first of a tetralogy referred to as The Sea of Fertility. It is said to be an essential summary of the evolution of Japanese culture into modernity. I have only just started it. It is slow. The emotional motives of the characters are pursued in intricate detail. There are flourishes of description and scene setting that, while nicely written, seem a bit overindulgent. In short, Mishima is not a writer whose style I am attracted to. Still there is a bit of intrigue building so we'll see how far I get. I do get the sense that there is much worth telling in this book.

[Books, Baseball] Book Look: Cubs Way, by Tom Verducci

Subtitled "The Zen of Building the Best Team in Baseball and Breaking the Curse", this is the story of how Theo Epstien, the man who found a way to break the Red Sox curse, turned around and did the same thing for arguably an even more deeply cursed franchise, the Cubs.

Most books like this tend to be more like puff pieces; sentimental memorabilia for folks who want to relive some previous glory and while there is some of that, Verducci does a much better job of providing some tactical and strategic angles to building a winner than most authors. You get some valuable glimpses into how much information is available in the contemporary stat-driven game. To wit:

• Video is so detailed that pitchers can be evaluated on the rpms they put on their breaking balls.
• The measurement of Exit Speed, or the speed of the ball off the hitters bat, has taken on a great importance.
• There is so much situational data -- how a player performs in specific circumstances (# of outs, # times through the rotation, how the hitter performs vs. pitcher's strengths, and all these in combination) -- that it needs to be reduced to a few simple numbers so in-game decisions can be made quickly.
• Incredible contortions are made for the psychological well-being of the players -- beyond just making should that all conceivable distractions are eliminated. Whatever elaborate mental preparations a player desires are supported completely -- everything from food choices to high end fitness equipment to personal psychologists.

And yet, when assembling his team, Epstien gives as much emphasis to character as skills.

Among the other interesting aspects on display is how Epstien (and presumably his peers) approached building the team in the same way you would build a business. You start with a plan -- a set of strategies and goals and an explanation of how that gets you to win the World Series. Here the book loses the thread a bit. We are given a brief outline of the plan as presented to the organization. We are then introduced to the players acquired to make it happen, often with very affecting biographical info, but we are not really given deep info on how it was decided these players were the ones to fulfill the plan. This leaves fairly sizeable hole in our picture.

And still you need luck. As Billy Beane pointed out in Moneyball, over a 162 games playing the probabilities works out. Over the dozen or so games in the postseason it becomes more of a crapshoot. And so, despite all the sharp and clever scheming and planning to build the team, the Cubs needed in the postseason too. They needed a clutch hit from a veteran on his way out. They needed their top reliever to keep his fragile emotional state in check and pitch more innings than he ever expected.

Should you read Cubs Way? If you are interested in re-living the Cubs World Series championship, then absolutely. I am still amazed at a single statistic: The celebration was attended by 5 Million people. One of the largest gatherings of the human species in all history. If you are looking for insight into the business side of baseball or you are a full on stats-head, it's not quite as satisfying, but still worthwhile.

Aside: If you've been reading along, you know I adopted the Astros as my back up baseball team, as I have been spending some time in Houston, have been to a couple of games, and the Tigers (always my first team) are dead in the water. The Astros lost the World Series to the Nationals -- I think the only Series where all seven games were won by the visiting team. Big disappointment, but the real story came later when they were accused of using electronic means to steal signs from opposing teams. As the narrative is currently formulated, during their World Series championship year, 2017, the Astros used a video camera to relay the opposing catchers signs then someone in one of the stadium tunnels would bang a trashcan to indicate the pitch such that it could be heard by the Astros batter. It is an important scandal, especially since the Astros won the series. As they say: Big, if true.

[Books] Book Look: A Maigret Trio, by Georges Simenon

This is my first encounter with Maigret, and do not even think to tell me to go watch some TV series. I have no intention of doing so. The Maigret that Simenon has formed in my head is just fine, thank you.

Police detective novels, eh? What's so special about that? I can think of two things that stand out as special. First, the cases Maigret finds himself with seem to have a personal twist or effect. In the first of three Maigret questions with whether he is really doing his best to find the killer of a reprehensible cretin that he knew from childhood. The second brings Maigret face-to-face with mores of a different era, causing him to wonder how much was lost in the march to decadence. In the third Maigret faces the contrast between a very important case and a case that is only important to him. All this allows Simenon to build Maigret's character as the anchor. The plots are police procedurals, but the stories are about Maigret.

The other virtue is that I have read no one short of the divine P.G. Wodehouse who writes with better economy. Not just in style but in plot. What would be multiple floridly written scenes with all sorts of descriptive trivia in anyone else's hands is a simple and direct exchange of dialogue for Simenon. It's wonderful to read a writer who chooses not to and, more importantly, does not need to waste your time to make his point.

Simenon wrote 76 Maigret novels and 28 short stories and these are my first three. I intend to read more just for the education in omitting needless words.

Should you read the Maigret mysteries? Yes. They are likely a lot better than whatever mystery series you are reading now, full stop. I'm starting another one today.

Late addenda: I started another one as promised (Maigret and the Headless Corpse) and to my shock it is, at first blush, exactly the opposite of the taught, economic prose I just wrote of admiringly. Lots of scene setting and dallying around. We'll see if it's an oddball or not; I hope it sorts itself out. I'm leaving the above evaluation in place for now, as it certainly applies to the specific book I read (A Maigret Trio), but I may have to change my full-on recommendation. They may be hit or miss.

[Books] Book Look: Voyage to Arcturus, by David Lindsay

This can only appeal on a single dimension, really, and that is as a curiosity. There is no coherent plot, minimal characterization, and to call the style workmanlike is to go overboard with praise.

I chose to read this for a number of reasons. Harold Bloom of The Western Canon fame claimed a lifelong obsession with it. C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien both claimed to be influenced by it. Horror writer Clive Barker called it a "masterpiece". Yet, I had never even heard of it. Also, its copyright is expired so it was free on Gutenberg.

We start with a seance and are introduced to a number of standard Edwardian British characters. One of the guests has invited a pair of strangers to join in. Then weird things start to happen which eventually end up with the two strangers and the medium taking a spaceship to Tormance, a planet circling the star Arcturus.

One of the strangers, Maskull, starts encountering the denizens of Tormance, each new encounter places Maskull in a strange new moral system. He immediately adapts to each one, his body literally transforming, as he moves seamlessly from total pacifist to murdering people with his mind, and various convoluted situations in between. I couldn't really follow the causal links because there weren't any that I could see.

In the end, Maskull appears to have come to the realization that all human morality is arbitrary, or at least no one moral system is provably better than others -- maybe. I'm not sure, and I don't think I'm supposed to be. The final actions are outright cryptic.

Should you read Voyage to Arcturus? No. It yields no particular rewards unless you have an interest in writerly techniques. It eschews most traditional qualities of good writing but does demonstrate how a reader can be drawn to see existential or spiritual concepts when confronted with an oblique, ambiguous, fantasy narrative. The tone was influential to writers mentioned above, who put it to use in more gratifying ways. Despite their praise, on its own merits, it's just a curiosity.

[Books] Book Look: The Courage to be Disliked, Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga

Somewhere in my digital wanderings, I stumbled across the description of this book as a "serious philosophical inquiry that is a best-seller in Japan." I found instead a somewhat ham-fisted attempt to advocate for Adlerian psychology in the form of a Socratic Dialogue. Which is not necessarily such a bad thing.

There is no subtlety in the formation of this Socratic Dialogue. The two characters speaking are simply named "Youth" and "Philosopher." So, points for directness. As a literary device the problem is that the Youth is naive and feckless, as are most youths, and the Philosopher is condescending and more than a little self-satisfied, as are most philosophers. It's all a bit on-the-nose. I understand the point is the exchange of ideas and not literary quality, but even if something is just pretending to be a work fiction, poor dramatics is distracting.

In any event, it seems the key difference between Adlerian and Freudian psychologies is in determining the cause of one's feelings. A Freudian might say something like, "Your dysfunctional behavior is caused by being abused as a child." An Adlerian might say, "You've chosen to behave dysfunctionally as a reaction to being abused as a child." The plain difference is that Adler says your behavior is your choice, Freud says it is thrust upon you.

In reality these are not as different as they seem. A Freudian would probably treat your dysfunction by invoking your ego (the thing that is not the id or the superego) to rationalize your way to functional behavior. Adler would say you need to find the courage to change your behavior. Either way the prescription is to decide not to be dysfunctional, roughly speaking.

There is a certain appeal to Adler in that he offers you no easy excuse for your behavior. With Adler, you have no opportunity to wallow in victimhood and self-pity. Lord knows that sort of positivism is needed in a world where being a victim, or rather being seen as a victim, is rewarded. Increasingly we are told we are helpless before the elite and privileged. Or perhaps science is explaining how our behavior is just an expression of our genes. Adler makes you responsible for you.

Setting aside how closely it matches reality or not, as an approach to living the one life you have been given, it's probably best to pursue a positive self-empowered course, and not to design lifestyle around dwelling on assuming you're powerless. Such assumptions can be self-fulfilling.

The core concepts that the world has taken from Adler are the fodder of the standard sermons you have heard from our endless self-help sources, from Dale Carnegie to the Serenity Prayer. And there is much wisdom in it, too: self-acceptance and self-value are intertwined with finding meaning in interpersonal relationships. It's good advice if a bit vague. I feel about it the way I feel about Jordan Peterson or any number of philosophers which is that if the bulk of people in the world were to try to live this lifestyle, the world would be measurably improved.

It is not scientific. None of the Austrian founders of psychology -- Freud, Yung, Adler -- were scientific in the sense of being verifiable via experiment. There was also no conception at the time of the dominant psychology model of today which is evo-psych. It would be fascinating to read a reconciliation of Adler and evo-psych. My own bias is that Adler's exhortations work for most everyone in the developed world, where we all run around trying find happiness and meaning. For edge case personalities and folks living hand-to-mouth the detachment from the negative experiences of life is probably not as feasible. I honestly can't say I buy the idea that everyone's unhappiness is due to a lack of courage to change. Maybe most people in most circumstances, but it's hard for me to imagine living an entire life and not having a unhappiness thrust upon you at some point. I have found that large stretches of life can amount to little more than doing crap I don't want to do. I have gotten out of those situations in time, which to Adler, means I found the courage to change. I'm not so sure I didn't just luck out.

Should you read The Courage to be Disliked? Probably not. If you are familiar with the self-help genre (and most people are) you will likely encounter little new information. It is interesting to follow the attempt to translate it into a more formal philosophy, but not especially rewarding. It may anger you because it can seem uncaring and cold-hearted, but that is likely because the vocabulary used for certain concepts, such as "courage" and "inferiority", is primed for misinterpretation. At worst it will be harmless, at best you may gain a nugget of wisdom. But considering the annoying format, you're better off looking elsewhere.

[Books] Book Look: Killing Commendatore, by Haruki Murakami

This one is both sprawling and intimate. It is Haruki as we know him: telling human stories through magic realism; the typical mix of spiritual conflict, eerie fantasy, and pop culture references.

Our protagonist is an artist, a painter who has made the compromise of spending his time painting portraits to support himself, suffers a fairly traumatic divorce. Lost in a fugue state, he spends an extended period driving about northern Japan with no destination in mind. In time he settles into a home belonging to a legendary elder painter who is no longer resident, being in the throes of dementia at the end of his life.

That's when the real weirdness begins. We encounter an cursed hidden pit, a rich and noble, but suspicious, neighbor, an undiscovered masterpiece, a mystery from the time of Anschluss, a precocious little girl, a two-foot tall manifestation of an idea, and more, not in that order.

Killing Commendatore is about believing in the face of unknowing. All the characters conflicts stem from not having a full understanding of things and, for that matter, the impossibility of having a full understanding of things. In the end, our protagonist comes to the conclusion that belief in the face of uncertainty is the blessing that gets you through. If you can't ever know the objective truth, belief it the thing that saves you.

Whatever twists and turns along the way -- and they are often entertaining -- Haruki is very good at directing his characters to the conclusion. It's also interesting to note that Haruki is nearly 70 years old, so it is a theme very fitting a man who has spent a life considering the nature of the world.

In reading, it is a mixed bag. Haruki is strong on visual description which makes the story quite vivid, but along with that is a nearly Russian level of scene description which can get tiring. The characters are given to self-exposition which can seem awkward, however the key ideas are well dramatised. The structure is odd in that important characters don't get mentioned or make an appearance until midway or later, but it is not jarring.

And, as I have mentioned, the humanity is there, which is really the most important thing. Should you read Killing Commendatore? If you enjoy Haruki then yes. It is another fine entry in a long and Noble-worthy career; you'll feel right at home. It is probably not as good for your first Haruki as its length and detail are a bit intimidating -- for that I would go all the way back to something like Norwegian Wood for something less fanciful (interestingly, it also features a protagonist who wandered about in a daze for an extended time) and move into the more fantastic stuff from there.

[Books] Book Look: Paris in the Present Tense, by Mark Helprin

At the risk of giving away the conclusion, I was disappointed with this book. Helprin is an author I admire greatly, he can form a sentence like few others and his skill at allegory and parable are second to none, but this one left me feeling unsatisfied.

This is the story of an old man, a 70-something French Jew, a survivor of the Holocaust as a child, who has devoted his life to art, specifically composing music. He has many regrets, not the least of which is that by pursuing his artistic dreams he has sacrificed any sort of financial well-being -- a thing that would be useful now that his grandchild has been given a cancer diagnosis. What follows is a string of deeply implausible incidents, including a 70-something man defeating three armed and violent young men in a street fight, killing two of them with his bare hands.

In the course of trying to set things right at the end our hero encounters lots of cliches. Eccentric egomaniacal corporate leaders and their stooges, pusillanimous and conniving intellectuals, ethnically appropriate buddy cops, a bullied and hapless loser, and assorted others of two-dimensions.

As a picture of old age, it only partially succeeds. To our aging hero, the underlying terror of old age is the world moving away from him. Technological advances coarsen the world (in his view), his job in academia is withering on the vine as he is slowly being phased out, worst of all the anti-semitism that so informed his childhood is resurging.

While all these things are true, they are superficial (except of course the anti-semitism). The real terror of aging is the irreversible decay of you body and skills and underlying fear of dementia or otherwise becoming totally dependent. No such fears affect our fit-as-a-30-year-old aging hero.

While our hero is nicely drawn and coherent. His need to fix things, to make things right, in view of what he sees as the costly decisions he may have made early in life is sharp and believable. The fact that his feelings and behavior toward women didn't change over the course of his life -- the child being father of the man -- also rings true. But it's not enough to overcome the dominant sense of implausibility.

Should you read Paris in the Present Tense? Nah. You could do worse, but you could also do better, including most of Helprin's other writings.

[Books] Book Look: The Third Policeman, by Flann O'Brien

I don't remember why I chose to read The Third Policeman. It has been on my reading list (which I keep in an amazon wish list) for a long while. I suspect I stumbled on recommendations from one or two trusted sources during my random internet ramblings. While it had points of interest, for me, it didn't pay off.

It is difficult to describe. Set in Ireland, the unnamed narrator is a naive man -- an amateur scholar of a fictional philosopher/academic named deSelby. He has written what he believes to be a authoritative account of deSelby's life and works (we are deluged with footnotes on deSelby throughout the book) but does not have the money to publish it. The narrator maintains a codependent relationship with a liar/con-man/thug named Divney who runs his failing farm for him. At Divney's suggestion, they plot to rob a local man who is thought to have a horde of cash. The robbery goes bad and the victim is murdered.

Then things get weird. The narrator encounters the ghost of the murdered man, crosses paths with a one-legged stranger, his conscience becomes an entity in itself who he calls Joe, he stumbles into a police station where they concern themselves of little else except bicycles: the theft of them, the nature of conscious connect with their owners, their variations and value. The cops also seem to have abilities to create paradoxical objects and events. In time, the narrator is sentenced to death by hanging, but is rescued. It is not too much of a spoiler to say that the hope that he gains after his rescue is dashed when it is revealed that he is actually in Hell and will be re-living the strange and terrible events of the book for eternity.

From a stylistic perspective a lot of the writing here is quite interesting. The early stretches of the book are written in as almost a recitation of facts of his early life. After that the prose in more engaging. There are some good humorous passages. The use of the fictional deSelby is almost Nabokovian. But overall the best way to describe this is that it is like the TV show Twin Peaks; it can grab your attention by challenging your expectations, but in the end you walk away only thinking "Well, that was different." Like the David Lynch creation, you won't get any real clarity of purpose. You will get flashes of brilliance, but mostly confusion, often of the sort where you get the sense that there may be more conventional meaning there and you are just missing it.

You're not. The point of these sorts of works is the experience of the work and not that you should get anything concrete out it. Should you read The Third Policeman? Probably not. It is thoroughly post-modern, mostly cryptic, and occasionally avant-garde. It is best for the dedicated reader looking for something out of the ordinary. Most folks are lucky to read four or five books a year and so don't have the time for something so far out on the edge of reason.

[Books, Rant] Tom Wolfe, RIP

I once spent a summer reading everything he wrote (this was prior to his turn to fiction). He was not just one the most astute observers of the 20th century, he was also a great explainer and dramatic license was his tool of choice. Like many young adults, I was inundated in the binary -- the tribal conflicts of the moment -- Tom Wolfe showed me they were merely symptoms of something deeper in human nature, simultaneously less important but more troubling. If you've been following any of the commentary upon his death, you can see I am not alone in being greatly influenced by him.

He worked both a lesser and greater theme. The lesser one was subcultures. His early work marked the "discovery" of subcultures, from cars to hippies to the Manhattan art world. What followed from that was the larger theme: status. With ideas from sociologist Max Weber he saw human interaction as, after life-or-death necessities, a striving for status. Looking at his subcultures he saw how the people within jockeyed to impress others and increase their perceived value through their words and deeds. It jibed not only with his reading of Weber, but also his personal experience in academia.

From this realization, casting his eye about the world he found endless fodder. Everywhere he looked he saw straight through the elevated and the pompous to see their narcissistic motives. Moreover, he described it all in lacerating prose that, to my ear, cut as sharply as Waugh or Trollope. Needless to say, this did not endear him to those he skewered. (Interestingly, one of the things he never got around to skewering was politicians. As a result folks in political circles often commented highly on him since he was always pointing and laughing at other people.)

We now have something that we haphazardly refer to as the Rationalist Community or the Intellectual Dark Web. You can get a taste for it by visiting sites such as Slate Star Codex and Overcoming Bias
, where a good deal of time is devoted to understanding the source of our behavior beyond the surface explanations. Robin Hanson, of Overcoming Bias, recently co-authored a book entitled Elephant in the Brain, devoted to understanding the "real" motivations behind our behavior (it's on my reading list). I can see a pretty straight line from Wolfe to Hanson and many others of the same stripe, suggesting to me that as much has he has been acknowledged as an influence, he is probably still underrated.
His fiction sold well, and is quite infamous, but I would start with his earlier work. General consensus is that The Right Stuff is the pinnacle, but Wolfe himself said his favorite was Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers. He said wouldn't change a word of it, so I would start there. In it, Wolfe made savage fun of the smug, oh-so-elite guests at Leonard Bernstein's party who, safe and wealthy on the Upper West Side, had adopted the loathsome Black Panthers as a cause du jour to demonstrate to the world their noble and progressive minds. Wolfe used them to turn his eye on how cultural elites were now using political extremists and screeching protesters, often violent, as status symbols. Hyperventilation ensued among the chattering classes. As cutting and foresightful as Wolfe was, it seems satire is not the deadly weapon it is made out to be. If you don't see the relevance to today's world you may be a lost cause. Now, you'll find the a lite version of the same behavior everywhere, from the boardrooms of multinationals to the PTO at your elementary school they find ways to link with fashionable sanctimony and victimhood through noble statements and activities. In some venues you will be punished for not displaying it such solidarity.

It tempting to say we need a new Tom Wolfe but like all phenomena, he was of his times. We no longer have time for satire and longer than a tweet or a snippet of newsertainment snark, or worse, a meme. Like Twain and Mencken before him, he used his gimlet eye to cast a light on humanity, and in his way, aided us in holding this cynical, subtextual world to some sort of standard of rationality. We were better for having him.

[Books] Tigers, Burning Bright

Suddenly I found myself reading about man-eating tigers. In my wanderings on the web I will occasionally encounter a conversation where multiple people chime in on the excellence of a certain book, often one I have never heard of. I will then immediately hit Amazon and read up on it. If it looks promising I usually add it to my wish list. When in need or reading, I'll revisit that list for ideas. (I should publish the list. It is remarkably eclectic.) Sometimes these finds don't pan out; I will forever be stunned at how many bad or pointless books get rave reviews. That was not the case at all with The Tiger, by John Valliant.

I did not realize there were any such things as Siberian Tigers left in the world. In fact, if you had told me they had not existed since the days of cavemen, I would not have doubted you. But there are. While not flourishing, they are not uncommon in the remote areas of Siberia, near the Manchurian border, and a reality of daily life in the hand-to-mouth villages that exist in their midst.

Valliant documents the story of one which had taken to not just opportunistically eating the local denizens, but seemingly stalking specific individuals out of malice and vengeance. A much-liked local, who often tested the poaching laws seems to have had an encounter with a tiger which appears to have angered the tiger to the point of stalking and killing him while passing up easier human prey. Of course, opinions vary as to whether the man brought on his own destruction or not, but in any case it is up to the local enforcers of environmental policy to deal with the situation. There is another kill, again with questions about cause and effect. In a dramatic finale, the environmental cops track and kill the tiger, but not without the tiger getting in a good lick or two.

It is within that skeleton of an outline that the magic happens. Valliant scores with this narrative on multiple levels. He nails the local flavor, highlighting the hard life of the people in this remote wilderness, who live and die with the land and for whom hunting is a matter of life and death. He nails the cultural conflicts of the desire of conservationist and the wildlife protection laws versus the poverty stricken who can make year's worth of income by poaching one tiger and selling it to the Chinese. He nails the politics and how perestroika effectively killed the mining in this region and the dismissiveness and contempt of the people towards a corrupt government half a world away. He nails the history with compelling profile of the early explorers and the sorts of circumstances that would cause people to settle in such a remote and terrible (though beautiful) land. He nails the psychology of man versus tiger by not just describing the terror of living amidst and man-eater, but also getting deep inside the tiger's head and it motivations. (It's worth noting that, although man, should he choose to, could easily wipe out tigers now, over the epochs back into prehistory, tigers have an insurmountable lead in the kill count.) He nails the tension of the hunt, the palpable fear of knowing the man-eater amy be lurking behind any bush or in any shadow and the incredible speed of their attack; less than five seconds can determine life or death. Lastly, he nails the aftermath, often tragic, of the people touched by the man-eater.

Should you read The Tiger? Yes, absolutely. It is riveting start to finish.

But that put me on a man-eating tiger kick, and it seems the classic of the genre is Man-eaters of Kumaon by Jim Corbett. Corbett was a legendary hunter operating in India betweens the wars. (Does it make sense to say "between the wars" anymore? For you young'ns, that's between WWI and WWII, or the 1920s and 1930s.) At this time in the remote areas of India, tigers were responsible for hundreds, if not thousands of human kills every year. Corbett was often called in to deal with beasts that had killed dozens of people.

Corbett himself, was one of those old school, understated, fearless subjects of the Crown that now exist only in stories found in used book stores. As a point of honor, he considered himself a sportsman and apparently an amatuer, taking pains to differentiate himself from a "reward hunter," saying he would prefer to be shot rather than hunt for reward. He wonders whether sitting up in wait for a tiger to return to a partially eaten kill is "cricket", i.e. unfair to the tiger. He regularly marches in to the jungle alone, effectively making himself bait. He sleeps in trees to the point of mastering the art -- in fact, killed a man-eater who attacked him after he had been sitting in a tree for over 15 hours waiting (I have trouble sitting still if a meeting runs longer than an hour). He lead a party to pursue a wounded bear, and after running out of ammo, killed it with rocks and an axe.

As riveting and compelling as Valliant's story was of the man-eating tiger in Siberia, such an escapade would have merited only a shrug and a footnote from Corbett. Dude was on another level. So much so that often his tales beggar belief. He writes of how he has developed instinct and intuition and occasionally "just knows" a tiger is lurking behind a certain rock. It sounds like witchcraft but the sincerity and authenticity of his voice makes you believe it. One assumes this intuition is nothing but reaction to stimulus such as scent or sound that is perceived subconsciously, thus it is perfectly possible. I mean, if anyone had hunting skills that transcend to objective and observable it would be Corbett. His understanding and application of tracking and hunting methods is masterly.

Should you read Man-eaters of Kuamong? If you ever want an example of totally unaffected prose, Corbett is your man. He puts on no airs and, apart from the understatement one expects from old, British adventurers, everything is face value. Stories are related in a straightforward way, without ornamentation or high-minded digressions. Corbett is truly authentic. That said, contemporary audiences will probably be looking for more bombast or for something to relate to great social themes or virtue signalling. You will find none of that. To me, that's a blessing.

Later in life, Corbett, who even in the course of his hunting years was often accused of preferring to photograph wildlife rather than shoot it, became a strong advocate of the preservation and protection of tigers. Valliant, for his part, after examining the terror a man-eater can inflict, took time to write an epilogue that is a strident plea for tiger conservation and the man tasked with killing the man-eater in his book expressed similar sentiments. I would guess that is probably the case more often than not: Surviving a deadly encounter with such a predator inclines one to want to preserve it. The psychology and science of that reaction are worth an essay in itself. Homo Sapiens has been relating stores of man-eaters for all of our existence. It seems even though we could end that, we don't really want to.

[Books] Book Look: The Second World Wars, by Victor Davis Hanson

The plural in the title is telling. In this 20,000 foot overview, Hanson sees very the various conflicts of the collective idea of World War 2 as more distinct than the popular imagining. The variations came over time, technology, and ideology as opposed to simple geography. Hanson starts with the fact that in any rational estimation of the situation, the outcome of the war was foreordained. Had anyone sat down in 1939 and tried to determine if the Axis powers could fight a war as it was to be fought for domination of the world it would have been objectively impossible to see them succeed.

Of course, no one did such a thing. Decisions were made based on delusion, many of them were in fact racist delusions. Axis powers often fell into the trap of believing their opponents were inferior in mettle and so a temporary tactical or niche strategic advantage would be enough to secure victory. After a few early victories by the Axis it became apparent that the Allies would readily adapt, and anything they couldn't adapt to they would just outproduce into oblivion.

Hanson shows how this played out thematically in chapters on air power, naval power, infantry, artillery, leadership, etc. and gives the numbers, sometimes exhaustively, to back up his ideas. He is also a classicist, so as an added bonus you get comparables from history for many battles and concepts, pointing out nuances in the historical effectiveness of siegecraft or the primacy of infantry no matter how strong your navy (or air force).

When it comes to leaders, he weighs in as pro-Patton, down on Bradley and MacArthur and Montgomery to some extent. Churchill comes out well, Roosevelt and Stalin (as war leaders) did OK if not stellar. Hitler was, of course, a disaster.

Like virtually every popular historian I have read he engages in judgements that can seem arbitrary. One campaign is faulted for being too timid while another for being too aggressive. One leader should have paid more attention to details while another could not see the big picture. There may be valid reasons for the judgments that time, word count, or narrative limitations do not allow, but in the absence of explanation these can see like simple ex post facto rationalization. Like I said, I have yet to read a popular history that doesn't involve this to some extent.

Hanson writes in a very clear, forthright style -- perfect for history or non-fiction in general. Should you read The Second World Wars? Yes, if you are curious about the topic or are steeped in it and want to know how the winds of opinion are blowing. WW2 was the most monumental event in human history and it is slowly vanishing from living memory. Even those who heard stories of it from their parents, like Yours Truly, are sliding into old age. The great mass of Millenials will be unable to distinguish it from any other war from the olden days, never bothering to wonder of the source of the epithet "Nazi" that they fling wantonly at each other over Twitter. One can only hope that in each succeeding generation there will at least be a few folks who maintain a weird interest in this obscure historical topic. I suspect The Second World Wars will be on their core reading list.

[Books] Book Look: Malice, by Keigo Higashino

Police Procedurals are such a well worn genre at this point that finding something new and different is very gratifying. Malice takes a lot of chances with form. There is a rather abrupt POV change early on, only later do we discover that there was a very good reason for it. More interestingly, the motive is one that is dangerously undramatic. That is to say, it is almost a "just because" sort of explanation, but the in the context of the story it plays alright. Also, a good deal of the plot revolves around writers and writing, and a writer writing about being a writer is usually the touch of death, but again, Kiego-san, manages to keep in relevant, primarily by making the detective into a sort of anti-writer and the story ending up by focusing on bullying in school not writing. (As described, bullying in Japanese middle schools sounds horrific, if this is an accurate depiction. Worse than anything I experienced in Southfield, Michigan.)

Higashino has a steady, no-nonsense prose style. He wastes few words and doesn't bother with too much scene setting. That is very nice; an author who respects your time.

The mystery itself is well thought out. It starts out like it's going to be locked room murder, then goes off in one direction, does a complete reverse, and then angles off one last time, doing a good job of keeping you on your toes. There are bits and pieces of blatant manipulation along the way -- terminating dialogue just before the big reveal, hiding important details, etc., but nothing that is out of the ordinary for a police procedural.

Should you read Malice? Sure. It's a page turner of a mystery and a fresh take on an old genre. Higashino is the premier mystery writer in Japan and is highly regarded in Edgar Award circles. He deserves it.