Puttering in the Study

The Smith frat house

We are officially running the equivalent of a frat house here out on Harris Lake Road.  The only difference is that the cans that litter the house the next morning are Coke (which in Texas means Dr Pepper and Sprite as well) instead of beer, and I'm more likely to catch them with an iPad in their bed than a coed.

Yesterday was C & P's last day at Trinity, and Grayson's been finished with Loyola for a few days now, so they are in full summer mode already - sleep past noon, no clothes past pajamas, no showers, food trash and toys all over the place, and good luck getting their attention unless you're a video game.  Well, except for blowing stuff up - Grayson's always up for that.  They are so lazy I can't get them to make the 12 minute trip out to the lake where they could do, well, summer kinds of things.  On the bright side, mornings are quiet, with Sleeping Bear up in my bedroom and the herd down the hall.  Well, except for snoring, that is.

It's going to be a long summer.

Duma Key - Stephen King

Had this book recommended to me as good vacation reading last week, and I really did enjoy it.  I'm way out of practice reading full-length King novels, but this one didn't drag a bit - always something interesting going on, and if I couldn't quite place the genre (are we talking zombies, vampires, or what?  Shape shifters, maybe?) it made for a more interesting read.

The Colorado Kid - Stephen King

I've become a big fan of the series Haven which claims it's based on this Stephen King short story, so I read it last week while on vacation.  Short and not entirely satisfying, but a beautiful little piece of writing. For more details, see the entry on Wiki.

The Twilight Warriors - Robert Gandt

This book is about the naval side of the Okinawa campaign, and focuses on the youngest naval aviators, who caught the final action in the Pacific War.  It's interesting, but there isn't a great deal of drama, since the Japanese forces were so overhelmingly outnumbered that the outcome was never in doubt.  But what the book does make clear is that no one on the Japanese side seriously disagreed with that appraisal - but they would have considered it beside the point.  The point was to underscore that an invasion of the Japanese home islands would have incurred similar rates of losses, and caused the Allies to avoid invading Japan proper due to the enormous cost in lives.  

The problem with that is that while it certainly creates drama, that drama is wholly outside the scope of this book.  Essentially, the Okinawa campaign, when considered in isolation, which is what this book does, doesn't have a lot of larger significance in the same way that a Midway or a Guadalcanal did (admittedly I have a prejudice for 1942, when the forces were more evenly matched and the outcomes were always in doubt).  It was its effect on major strategic decisions that gave it its importance and - again - that is largely outside the scope of the book.  Offhand, I can't recall that the book even discussed that, although it did make clear the the island's defense was hardly pointless - it was the single best opportunity Japan had to deter the Allies from invasion of the home islands - something they could do if they chose.  And in that light, what otherwise appears to be pointless suicidal sacrifice actually had a extremely significant strategic meaning.  That was something I took from the book that I had not fully appreciated previously.

I also took from it that Army Gen. Buckner was not shot surreptitiously by the Marines because he was issuing orders that was putting them in danger.  I had actually been told (implicitly) that by a Marine veteran of Okinawa years ago, but this book's detailed reciting of his death by a sniper doesn't leave much room for the argument that it was friendly fire.

The Parthenon Enigma - Joan Breton Connelly

Anything about the Parthenon I'll buy.  Especially a recent analysis that proposes a radical new rethinking of what the celebrated frieze that capped its walls represents.  It's not the contemporary Panathenaic event that historians has assumed in recent decades, but instead a graphic representation of an ancient Athenian princess' sacrifice to save the city, the author claims, using recently analyzed fragments from a partially recovered play that tells this story - one we did not know until recently.

The princess Pandora's (not the box one - a different one) willingness to sacrifice her life for the benefit of the city was an illustration of the Athenians' commitment to their city that was apparently chosen as the story that the builders of the Parthenon chose to commemorate in their building.  It also explains and aligns the major structures on the Acropolis with what they commemorate - the Erechtheion commemorating the tomb of the ancient king Erechtheus, which was associated with Poseidon, and the Parthenon (which means house of the maiden, which didn't make a lot of sense previously) which Connelly posits is actually commemorating the tomb of the king's daughter (actually her two older sisters that sacrificed their lives as well) and which was then similarly associated with a god, in this case Athena.  It explains some characteristics of the existing building which logically commemorate a prior shrine beneath it.

Really interesting book - made me want to go back and study the caves on the hillside to get a better feel for what she's talking about.

The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible - Simon Winchester

Just finished listening to this.  One of the major pluses is that you could listen to anything the author (who narrates the book) says all day long.  He just makes everything sound interesting, and his extraordinary skill at choosing words and crafting sentences makes him a distinct pleasure to listen to.

The book itself covers a broad range of historical subjects about the nation's exploration and settlement, and Winchester weaves some of his own experiences in with it, which perhaps only he can pull off.  But I really enjoyed it - there was a wealth of information in every chapter and there were only small parts that I'd heard before. I highly recommend it.