Puttering in the Study

Days of Infamy - Newt Gingrich & William Forstchen

This book really, really ticked me off.  I'm in the Houston airport yesterday and I see this book about an alternative history to the days after Pearl Harbor.  The "alternative" is Japanese Navy commander in chief Yamamoto Isoruko personally commanding the strike on Pearl Harbor and deciding to send in a third strike on Pearl Harbor, which destroys the U.S. Pacific Fleet's fuel supplies, communications, and drydock facilities.  He then hangs around to try to locate and destroy the U.S. carriers Enterprise and Lexington.  Such a strike would have been far worse for the U.S. Navy than the destruction of the battle line in the first two strikes, as this book makes clear.  I didn't realize till after I finished this book today (your first hint that I liked it) that the third strike actually occurs in the authors' Pearl Harbor: A Novel of December 8th, but as reader and sometime author on Pacific War topics, I was immediately interested in a book that posited the worst-case scenario for the Navy after Pearl Harbor (no fuel, communications or repair facilities, and an opponent led by a commander who was willing to fight) and relied on the Enterprise and Lexington - far and away this carrier enthusiast's favorite ships - to save the day.
As much as it infuriated me to buy a book by someone whose political views (at least some of) I dislike as much as I do Gingrich's (although we have similar historical tastes and I'd actually really like to have a beer with the guy and talk history), not to mention to endure what I assumed would be the political lecturing the book would contain (which was admittedly substantially tempered by my knowing that Gingrich thinks a lot of FDR) I just couldn't stand not reading about my beloved Enterprise and Lexington duking it out with the Japanese fleet.  Maybe the Lexington would even survive!
To my surprise, the book was very, very good.  It started out a little florid with FDR's internal thought processes having to lay out the situation, but quickly settled into a good solid narrative.  It's uniformly well-written, and the authors are true - often painfully so - to the realities of what would have happened if the U.S. carriers had tried to pit their inexperienced aviators, with inadequate aircraft, and  often worthless (literally) ordnance against the finest carrier fleet in the world.  The pilots and crew facing almost insurmountable odds lose their bravado very quickly, and even the best toy with the idea of simply not going out to face almost certain death one more time.  The accuracy of the fictional narrative and the quality of the writing made this a very good read indeed.  The authors didn't flinch from the unpleasant reality of what would have happened if either carrier had tried to engage the Japanese, and as a result when you finish the book you feel like you have a good idea what really would have happened.  One comment about the conversations between the political leaders.  Reviewers of the previous book thought they weren't very good - I thought they were actually okay - and I particularly liked (oddly enough) the political background that was provided.  It was probably something FDR continually thought about that his War and Navy secretaries were Republicans - the party which had been isolationist - and that they'd worked previously for cousin Teddy when he was president.  And until the very end the book is - I have to admit - completely bereft of any political commentary or analogies to the present day.  At the very end some of Yamamoto's thoughts that the U.S.'s war leadership might be made to dissolve into political infighting by reversals in the war can be read as applied to the current situation in Iraq, but they are also accurate to the man and to his nation's foreign policy at the time, which depended on such an outcome.
The factual narrative appears to be helped by an awareness of recent scholarship on the Pacific War, specifically the Lundstrom's Black Shoe Carrier Admiral and Parshall and Tully's Shattered Sword, which of which I have reviewed on my weblog recently.  Both sides - but particularly the Americans - are constantly worrying about fuel, with the Americans horrified that the wartime usage rates are far worse than what they'd planned on.  But it is Yamamoto that consistently takes risks with this issue - and the book doesn't go far enough in time to finish the story of whether he pays a price for it - although that could certainly start the next book in the series with a bang.  The significance of fuel as a concern for fleet commanders is something we are only recently beginning to fully understand, and this book includes it, as it should.
The book does have a number of failings, however, all of which I track back to a need for additional editing, as well as a more thorough historical scrubbing.  First of all, while the narrative was almost uniformly very good, there were times that the narrative dropped in facts that were not apparent to the viewpoint of the person whose experience was being narrated, thus damaged the "you are there" feel unnecessarily.  The best example I can think of is when the destroyer Ward is hit while executing a torpedo attack on a Japanese battleship, the story is told from the perspective of the admiral on the bridge.  While I think it's okay to point out that the ship then took a fatal hit, it isn't okay to observe that its valiant heart was stopped, and only twenty of its crew survived.  That's probably an accurate observation - but not where it is included.  There are some florid touches, as I mentioned, but not nearly what you'd expect.  And the references to a character losing a hand on the Panay are repeated three times on two pages - I think we got the picture the first time.  Those sorts of editing and continuity issues crop up, albeit only occasionally.
Several other historical errors - admittedly all (remarkably) minor are present.  For example, the Enterprise air boss is Wade McCluskey, not McCloskey, as he's repeatedly named.  The error is noticeable to readers, since six months later (in the real war) McCluskey, as Enterprise CAG, is the pilot who locates the Japanese fleet at Midway.  The mounts on the Enterprise's bow were not 40mm until late 1943 - they were 20mm in 1942 and at this time I'm not sure they were there at all, and even if they were they were likely only .50 cals.  More egregious was the reference to the Lexington (and perhaps the Enterprise too - the narrative is unclear) having giant hull numbers painted on the deck.  Such numbers didn't come into use until  late 1943.   The cover photo as well, while an ingenious computer enhancement (flipped and bow wave added) of a well-know picture of the Lexington in late 1942, is also not only inaccurate as to the Lexington's starboard side, it's also the wrong camouflage for December 8, and misses using a picture of the Lexington that is from exactly the same angle, with the right camouflage and a bow wave already present - in other words it used the lower instead of the upper of the attached images from p. of the Warships Pictorial #11 on the Lexington class carriers.    (Admittedly the captions to the attached aren't clear as to which camo is later, but when you look at pictures of the camo being painted over in March 1942 it's clear that the Ms. 12 two-color scheme had to be the later one).  All of these could have been corrected with a little more editing, and probably no one except me, who's studied these sorts of things in detail for books and modelmaking purposes would notice. 
The most important thing about these errors is probably how minor they are - the plot, the characters, the factual detail, what the characters do is all so well handled that it's nitpicking to complain about any of it.  None of it detracted from the story, certainly.
In the end, I thought this was a really good book, and I am looking forward to reading the next installment.  I might even go back and pick up the first one.  And for a book by Newt Gingrich, that's really saying a lot. 

The Ruins - Scott Smith

Well this was just about the most depressing book I've ever read.  Lots of character development and detail, but absolutely depressing, and the anticipated action never happened.  I say "action" because based on the title of the book you'd assume the characters encounter ruins at some point, but they never do.  That really annoyed me, because I expected that at some point the story would resolve into some ancient horror lurking in Mayan ruins, a la Lovecraft.  Maybe because that's what the book's cover said.  Well, no such luck - no ruins ever appear, and the villain is never explained.  Well written book, but a disappointment as a read.

Speed Racer

Speed Racer was one of my favorite animated series growing up, and I've been looking forward to what the movie would be like.  I wasn't disappointed.  I thought the movie was terrific - in most of the car scenes the action moved too fast to really understand what was going on, but it looked great.  The characters were actually awfully good I thought, and I thought the actor who plays Speed's comic relief little brother was phenomenal.  In what is literally a cartoon character he had great facial expressions and really made the character work in a live action movie.  The casting of John Goodman and Susan Sarandon as Speed's parents surprised me, since they're a little on the old side, but I eventually backed in what their age had to be to have a son who's in his early 30's, and they're not that old.  I still want to know what they did to Sarandon's face because she has zero wrinkles throughout the movie.
Great movie - and absolutely perfect for kids.

Iron Man

Flat-out terrific movie.  This is the first super hero movie where the lead character was more interesting than the suit.  Great job by Robert Downey Jr., and this is probably the best character I've ever seen for Jeff Bridges.  The beard and bald head just worked really well for him.  To my surprise, the action scenes - which were terrific - were not the heart of the movie - Downey's character is.

The Golden Compass

I got this DVD as soon as it came out, interested in the movie now after reading Chabon's reviews of the original books.  I didn't much care for the movie on first watching - nothing particularly bad - just unfamiliar and a little difficult to take seriously (as opposed to Lord of the Rings, for example, which is much more believable, of course).  But on second watching, a lot of the things made more sense.  The documentaries were very interesting, but conspicuously absent was any indication that the book itself had undergone a major change on its way to the screen by changing the villain from "the Church" to "the Magisterium".  I didn't mind it at all, and thought that with the exception of a Siberian office that was obviously an Orthodox church, complete with painted icons of saints on the door, the movie portrayed the villain as a political and not a religious entity, thus sidestepping the controversy.  But I would have liked to see a frank admission of the change and why.
Jamie liked it better than I did, and Parker loves watching the ice bears fight, so we'll probably be watching it a few more times.

The Good Liar - Laura Caldwell

I had enjoyed Caldwell's Burning the Map several months ago, and when I read she'd migrated from chick lit to thrillers thought I'd try one before working my way back through her CL books (not that I'm trolling for hot sex scenes in books, but if I were, they seem to be pretty fertile ground).  The best part of a Caldwell book is the authenticity of the female characters, and detail of place and things which really grounds the narrative.  This book is told from about four points of view (may be more - I lost count) and the odd twist is that one is first person.  Interesting tactic, but it helped me because in the early chapters where I couldn't keep track of the characters I was relieved to see "I" because at least I knew who that was - and starting very early I really liked her.

It got to be a hard story to read halfway through because of the secrets at the heart of the central relationship in the book, but that ended earlier than I expected (thank God) and you could watch the hero and heroines deal with the bad guy.  But that's when things got a little weird, because the plot went into warp drive - the major action of the book took a couple of pages, it seemed like, and the most uncanny things in the world happened in one or two sentences - literally.  For example, the experience of requiring your parents to conduct your funeral as though you'd really died for security reasons is dealt with, literally (as I recall) in two sentences.  That's a book in itself, and the way the plot just flew over that was really surprising.  I ended up not minding all that much, because I was anxious for the good guys to extract themselves from the villain's clutches (see above about the good characters and why the book got hard to read) but still, it was a bit of a surprise.  It was very much like a couple of chapters of the novel's outline never got fleshed out - the action was listed, but there was virtually no description of anything.  Although I did like the narrative tactic of describing what happened, and then - when the bodies are on the ground, so to speak - going back and explaining what had happened.  Battlestar Galactica does something similar frequently, with an opening scene, then a second scene that is subtitled "two days earlier" which eventually not only explains how the opening scene came about, but also why it doesn't mean what it appeared to initially, out of context. 

Caldwell did something very similar here, but the device may have betrayed her somewhat because the explanation was by the first-person narrator - and her ability to recount things in a more protracted format may have been limited by the fact that unlike narrating what was happening as it happened, she was now explaining what had happened - thus no dialogue, and no exposition of things that would have been difficult for her to recount - like the aforementioned "hey mom, I've got people out to kill me and we've faked our deaths, so would you and dad mind having a funeral for me and pretend I'm really dead.  Love you - see you soon - b'bye."  How you get out of this I'm not sure offhand - but this book didn't.  You just had to like the characters enough to not mind being spared the suspense and drama of watching them extract themselves from a life-threatening situation.  I did, but that's an odd request for an author to make of a reader.

But I do enjoy the way Caldwell writes, because you can really enjoy the scenes between people and since her characters have a healthy interest in sleeping with each other, it's kind of a voyeuristic experience at times (not that that's a bad thing).  Maybe that's what chick lit is like, but if so, it brings a useful spice to the genre, because the other authors I'm reading at the moment (Steve Berry, James Rollins, etc.) don't handle the inner conversations and interpersonal scenes nearly as well as she does.  Their plots and technology and backstory are detailed, but the characters interact in a far less "described" way.  I'd never forgive Berry for skipping the denouement of one of his books like this, but then, I really don't care much about his characters - I'm still waiting for any of them to have sex, and I've read three books now.  (One exception - I really liked Miles Lord, Michael Thorn, and Tsar Nicholas and in The Romano\v Prophecy.  But there still wasn't any sex - even with a Russian gymnast.  Talk about missed opportunities...).

Anyway, I've already bought Caldwell's The Rome whatever to read next.  I'm on the road so much these days that although I had hunted for some time for hardbacks of her books (with no success) the paperbacks are actually better for traveling.  Only bad thing is that I now have this indelible association between this book and the back of an airline seat.

The Last Lecture - Randy Pausch

I saw this book  at a  news stand in Corpus Christi two weeks ago, and finished it only a couple of hours later while on a layover in DFW.  I really never paid attention to what a "last lecture" was supposed to be about, and thought that if I could ever learn anything about what is and isn't important about my life, this ought to be  the book that teaches me, since Pausch and I  have a similar situation and  background.  I had no idea Jamie  knew about this already, as a result of  the sensation the lecture has created (including the release of this book).  This is a book that will break your heart as you think about what Randy and his family is going through, and what his kids will endure for the rest of their life.  It really puts a lot of things in perspective, if you didn't have them there already.

The Venetian Betrayal - Steve Berry

I continued my Steve Berry tour with the sequel to  The Alexandria whatever. While I liked the characters, I really liked the inventiveness of creating a new empire of sorts in the former  Soviet republics, and it read okay, the connection to Venice was really contrived.  The latter was based on the historical coincidence that the body of Alexander the Great disappeared from its tomb in Alexandria at about the same time the body of St. Mark appeared.  The Venetian stole the latter, and this book uses that theft as its takeoff point for a trek to find the final resting place of Alexander and a cure for AIDS.  I never really got over that, so although I liked the book okay, it was a bit of a disappointment.

Sailing From Byzantium - Colin Wells

The focus of this short book on Byzantium is the Byzantine Empire's effect on three of the cultures that surrounded it - the West via Italy, which is a fascinating story, the Islamic world, and the Slavic world, including Russia.  The degree to which the legacy of ancient Greece was unknown in the West surprised me, but it was a side effect of the loss of Greek literacy in the West.  The West knew of Greek authors and knew the importance of them from the Latin authors' high regard for them - but they didn't have the Greek originals, and couldn't have read them if they did.   But their interest in them eventually paid off, when Greek scholars from a fast-dissolving Byzantine Empire began to transmit their knowledge of to to the West in the last 150 years of the empire.
The effect of Greek knowledge on the Islamic empires that surrounded it through the early Middle Ages was also a story I'd never read.  Briefly, the Byzantines transmitted a respect for and interest in the classical authors to the early Islamic empires, which had a major impact of the cultural and scientific achievements of these entities.  As far as the Slavic legacy, that seemed to be largely a religious influence, and the book really started losing me here, as Byzantium's influence on the Slavic cultures seemed less a matter of transmitting ancient knowledge, and more a matter of deliberate cultural, well, imperialism, using religious influence to create a source of political influence.  That just seemed to be different in character from the other two that Wells talked about.

Maps and Legends: Essays on Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands - Michael Chabon

I confess the whole reason I bought this book was the terrific cover art, which consists of three belly bands over a gold-embossed cover.  The design was by Jordan Crane and is described here.  All I could figure out initially was that it had something to do with writing, and that - and the cover - was enough to convince me to buy it.  It turned out to be a series of previously-published essays in reading and writing that I learned a lot from.  It had an essay on Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories (which got me started - after over twenty years - reading my Annotated Sherlock Holmes) and on the books that inspired the recent film The Golden Compass (which I promptly went out and bought on DVD and watched with Jamie and Grayson).  It also had interesting sections on genre fiction and various other interesting subjects, all of which I enjoyed.