Puttering in the Study

Mynd - calendar/daily management app

I am always looking for ways to be more productive, or at least more obsessive-compulsive, and this morning I spent a couple of hours trying to tweak my latest obsession, a phone app called Mynd that combines your calendar and locations - and contacts and a little bit of categorization and goal-keeping. It provides a useful interface for seeing what you have to do appointment-wise at a glance, but the real reason I got it was that it allows one-touch dialing of conference calls (it dials the phone number, waits, then dials the conference code) which is a godsend when you're out of the office. The program is trying to branch into helping you assess progress toward your goals by categorizing your events and assigning them to goals. If your time represents your activities, it works fine, but if your goals aren't really tracked by time but by tasks, it doesn't work so well. I know that time-based goals would be a good idea, so I am trying to accommodate it by adding yet another calendar (on top of work, personal, travel, Hub, and Jamie) for personal activities so I can track whether I am spending the amount of time I want on, say exercising, or reading, or time with family, or marketing for the law firm. This part of the program is new, and is not working well yet - it reports that I spent six hours the last couple of days with Jamie Noland Smith, two hours of which was also spent with a Jamie Smith. I"m not sure if I should be having a sense of regret that I apparently was part of a threesome yesterday and missed it, or I should be worried Jamie will find out I'm seeing this other Smith woman. I assume they'll work it out eventually.

Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War: Max Hastings

It took me several months to get through this book, and when I finally did, I didn't feel that I had learned much. The book is a lengthy recitation of facts about the first year of the first world war. The problem is that, since it is not a general history of the topic, the reader gets very little impression of what was happening when, and why that was the case. Instead, the reader is deluged with a flood of facts, including minutiae and details of the daily experiences of hundreds of individuals, from political and military leaders to ordinary soldiers and civilians.

For a World War I completist, anything by Max Hastings is a contribution, but unless you have a strong interest in the subject, this is just detail that you really don't need, and are probably not interested in. The detail just reinforces how horrible the exsperience was for most, but the sheer repetition of the same thing over and over was why I kept having to put the book down - when were we going to get to 1915 so it would be over?  

And again, like the recent book on FDR that I reviewed, it is irritating to have a book that stops arbitrarily at the end of the first year of the war. Fortunately, although Hastings tries to focus on that first year, he unavoidably spends a great deal of time talking about the long-term effects of the war on, for example public attitudes towards the government and the war. Actually, these are some of the best parts of the book, but they are not strictly speaking what the book is supposed to be about. There are other books about the war, and numerous celebrated books about the beginning of the war. A book about the first several months of the fighting, while defensible in terms of the point at which it stops, when the armies had settled down to the trench warfare that would occupy the next four years, doesn't end up being as satisfying as it sounds.

The Baklava Club: A Novel (Investigator Yashim) - Jason Goodwin

This is, I think, the fifth of Goodwin's inspector Yashim novels, and I think is an improvement other over the last couple. As I think I have posted on previously, my biggest complaint about this series is that the writing is sometimes so sparse that it becomes extraordinarily difficult to ascertain who in a conversation is saying what. I often find myself stopping and analyzing the passages word by word to try to get a clue who a particular line of dialogue should be attributed to, and often decide that there is no clear answer.

This book was better in that respect. I could tell clearly who was saying what, and who is doing what, and while I did still have some trouble keeping some of the characters straight, I could tell what was going on. I enjoyed the plot, and as always the scenes from late Ottoman Istanbul.

'The Mantle of Command: FDR at War, 1941-1942' by Nigel Hamilton

This is one of the better books I have read lately. Hamilton does a very good job telling the story of Roosevelt's first year as a war leader. The book includes a lot of useful insights into the people surrounding Roosevelt during that year, in particular Winston Churchill and Secretary of War Henry Stimson.

With respect to Churchill, this book made it more clear than any other I have read to what extent the politics over Churchill's commitment to preserving the British Empire affected relations between the allies during the war. To modern readers familiar with Great Britain, it takes some getting used to to realize that in 1940, Britain was only the center of a worldwide empire, and Churchill was working to salvage that empire, arguably to the detriment of winning the war.

An egregious example of this was in March, 1942, when, terrified of the Japanese Navy's raids into the Indian Ocean, which was a helpful sideshow in the Pacific war in that it gave the Navy the opportunity to mount the Doolittle raid as well as organize its forces to effectively defend Australia a few weeks later, and Midway the month after that, Churchill asked Roosevelt to send the U.S. Pacific Fleet to defend India. Thus the entire defense of the Pacific was secondary to him to preserving the crown jewel of the British Empire.

What I had never read before, and I thought was particularly fascinating was the way Hamilton describes Gen. Douglas MacArthur's role in all this. While making clear that MacArthur did an abysmal job defending the Philippines, Hamilton makes clear that in comparison to MacArthur, who was successful in getting America's allies the Filipino soldiers to fight alongside the American soldiers, Britain was unsuccessful in persuading its colonial ranks to fight the Japanese. So as bad is MacArthur's conduct in the Philippines was, it was still better than the showing by the British forces in Singapore at about the same time, where the colonial troops simply joined up with the Japanese soldiers.

The book also tells an interesting story about how Roosevelt tried to persuade Churchill to promise India its independence in order to give it soldiers an incentive to fight, noting that America had done this with the Philippines before the war, and it apparently was providing Filipino soldiers with motivation to stay in the battle. Churchill flatly refused.

Another interesting aspect of the book was the extensive discussion regarding Secretary of War Henry Stimson's disagreements with the president over war strategy, which at one point almost spilled over into outright mutiny. Roosevelt's management of Stimson was masterful, and kept all hands pulling toward the same goal.

Overall, one of the best books I have read lately, and an outstanding treatment of the subject. My only complaint was that it ended only year into the war. I look forward eagerly to the sequel that I understand is coming.

Cage on the Sea - Ohno, Kaoru (trans. Murra, Giles)

I recently ran across what looks like an interesting book for those interested in the Pacific War - "Cage on the Sea" which is historical fiction about Japanese soldiers who hid on islands in the Pacific after the end of the war, refusing to believe their country had surrendered.  The underlying story is true - the novel is historical fiction based on it.

The book has been met with favorable reviews in The Japan Times (http://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2014/05/03/books/book-reviews/homage-queen-anatahan/#.U-rqwa5cJGg) and by the Historical Novel Society (http://historicalnovelsociety.org/reviews/cage-on-the-sea/). Now, since August 14th marks the end of the anniversary of WWII, the publisher is running a sale on the book.  The digital, Kindle edition of the novel, which normally costs $9.99, will be available for $1.99 on 12AM on August 14th. Following that the price of the book will go up one dollar every 23 hours. This is called a Kindle countdown sale, and the prices and availability are listed in the table below.

I'll post a review after I've read it, but it does look interesting.