Puttering in the Study

Six Armies in Normandy : From D-Day to the Liberation of Paris - John Keegan

I got interested in the Normandy landings during our recent trip when we spent a day going to the various landing beaches.  As I will do, I started reading everything I could find on the subject, starting with a book on the landing beaches themselves (right) that I bought in Arromanche at our first stop.  A few days later I saw this at HP Books in Dallas and got it, as well as the audiobook since I was going to be on the road a lot.

Unfortunately, the structure of the book means that the landings and the run-up to the landings themselves is largely offstage.  The American activity is largely limited to the Band of Brothers paratroopers story, not the assault at Omaha and Utah.  And while the other five armies aren't rigorously segregated in their treatment, that's probably helpful because the book ends up telling a coherent overall story that's roughly chronological.  Keegan just can't write a bad story, and even the most tedious narration and attention to detail never stops you from being interested in the story. As an example, I remember navigating around an unknown section of Dallas looking for a specific diner, and I keep rewinding the book because I was missing an interesting account of the minutiae of the loyalty or lack thereof of various eastern European nation to Hitler's Germany.  Now that's when you know someone can tell a story.

This still isn't the best overall book on Normandy - and doesn't pretend to be - but it's never a bad investment of time to read something by John Keegan.

The Essex Serpent - Sarah Perry

I really enjoyed this book.  Good characters, and interesting story, complete with off-stage villain (the proverbial lake monster).  Towards the end the characters all fell dramatically out of character, and while it was entertaining watching several characters fall into bed with each other with no advance warning, it really didn't help the plausibility of the story very much.

But I still enjoyed it - especially the way that the title character made its appearance.  Very nice work by the author.

Chariots for Apollo: The Making of the Lunar Module - Joshua Stoff & Charles R. Pellegrino

First of all, this can be a misleading book.  It was originally published as Chariots for Apollo: The making of the Lunar Module in 1985, then was reissued as "Chariots for Apollo: "The Untold Story Behind the Race to the Moon" in 1999.  Well, no, it's about the history of the lunar module, and it was hardly untold since it was published 14 years earlier.  (There is an unrelated book Chariots for Apollo: The NASA History of Manned Lunar Spacecraft to 1969 by Courtney G. Brooks that came out in 2009).

It's one of the few disappointing books I've read about the space program.  Pellegrino has an annoyingly overused tendency to comment on text "in" the text - something I remember from his book on the Titanic, and it's distracting and often confusing, since you can't always follow his train of thought.  Second, in a couple of places he just gave up trying to write and included transcripts of interviews he had with participants - a real WTF moment for me.

I have a pretty good understanding of the story of the challenges the engineers faced building the lunar module, and this doesn't tell it.  It skips over development to the management of the lunar module at KSC, and while that's an interesting story and he has lots of good anecdotes, it's just not a well told story.  I've read (and seen) better accounts of the LM story, as well as the KSC story.  This is way too idiosyncratic a book - you never forget that it's an author talking about a subject.

Powers of Darkness: The Lost Version of Dracula - Bram Stoker / Valdimar Ásmundsson

Found this gem at a bookstore just outside Stoker's alma mater Trinity College in Dublin last month.  It's a new book - the first English translation of the Icelandic translation.  Now that would sound like a fool's errand - translating a book back into its original language, and that's why no one did it for over century, but I recently read some scholarship from a few months back in David Skal's new biography of Stoker Something in the Blood that I posted on last November.

What Skal noted that I'd never seen previously is track down what was apparently a dramatically different initial draft of Dracula which only exists theoretically as a potential source for an Icelandic ripoff. A "translation" of Dracula that was published in Iceland but which had never been completely translated into English has always been assumed to be simply a poor translation, but Skal theorized based on the characters and limited portions that have been translated, that the Icelandic version was actually taken from an early draft of the book, which bore little resemblance to what was eventually published.

The significance of this is that at the time Stoker was working on the book, his friend Oscar Wilde's trial for homosexual behavior was making association with him toxic in London society, and a number of the sub themes of the book, as well as the setting of the climax bore not-so-subtle indications of association with an Oscar Wilde –-ish character, or at least conduct. The differences between the earlier draft in the final draft indicate that it is at least possible and probably likely that Stoker intentionally eliminated much of the activity that might have evoked echoes of Wilde, giving us the novel that we know today.

This complete translation confirms that this isn't merely a translation of Stoker's book, and references to characters and themes that we know were in earlier drafts but later deleted make clear that it wasn't simply the Icelandic translator rewriting the story, although it is likely that the more overtly sexual references in the story are Icelandic in origin - and this is a far more overtly erotic book than Stoker's.  Skal suspects it was based on an earlier version of the novel which had been sent to an acquaintance of Stoker's friend Caine for substantial reworking.  The reworking didn't happen, but the draft could have become the basis for a knockoff when the book became a hit - although why the Icelandic translator would work off an earlier draft when the final version was available isn't clear.  Supporting that is the biggest difference between the two novels.  While the first half continues to be a first person account by Jonathan Harker from his journals, the second have is a third person summary of the action in what would later become the diary and other excerpts in the final novel.  And I use the word "summary" on purpose, because the book stops being a novel and starts being a story outline from which the chapters will later be written.  So wherever this book came from, it was not a finished novel when the Icelandic author started working on it.

As such, the book is a fascinating additional piece of the puzzle that's always interested me - how did Bram Stoker write such a masterpiece.  What were his sources, and why did he tell the story the way that he did.  Powers of Darkness tells us that he originally intended a very different story, and it's new twist that he appears to have bowdlerized his own novel to keep a sufficient distance from the scandal that was enveloping Oscar Wilde. 

 

 

Apollo 8: The Thrilling Story of the First Mission to the Moon - Jeffrey Kluger

This is a new book by Lost Moon coauthor Jeffrey Kluger that tells the story of America's first mission to the moon. While eclipsed by Apollo 11 seven months later in the popular imagination, Apollo 8 was a dramatic "swing for the fences" mission.  It was originally planned as Apollo 9, an Earth-orbit checkout of the Apollo 7-tested command and service module with the untested lunar module, but when the LM wasn't ready, planners decided to combine the tested CSM with the similarly tested new Saturn V booster and try a trip to the moon instead.  The gamble was in large part because while NASA didn't know exactly where the Soviet Union was as far as getting a man to the moon, they knew the Soviets were getting close - and had already sent  missions carrying small animals on circumlunar trajectories, i.e. around the moon and back.

The mission is best dramatized by the relevant episode of From the Earth to the Moon, and many of the stories have been told previously in other space biographies, memoirs and accounts, but Kluger finds new ones, and provides updated research into what exactly happened and why.  For example, Frank Borman's sickness en route was eventually determined to be one of the initial occurrences of space sickness as a result of the then-new CSM, which allowed astronauts to move about the cabin freely when their inner ear might have other ideas about whether that was agood idea.

Overall, I was a little disappointed in the book.  It was interesting, but really didn't tell the a compelling story in a compelling way.  

Apollo Pilot: The Memoir of Astronaut Donn Eisele

I'm back into spaceflight books - two read and two more underway or about to start.  This is actually a new one - a posthumous publication of a memoir by Apollo 7 command module pilot Donn Eisele published with an afterword by his widow.

What is interesting about this book is that it's the one memoir by the original (by which I mean Mercury/Gemini/Apollo) astronauts that wasn't actually published by its author - meaning that this short bio written with a palpable sense of anger towards NASA and others went into print without its author having cooled down and deciding later that he didn't want to blow the whistle on what was going on. So while we have numerous accounts by non-astronaut writers of the 1960's astronaut culture of womanizing and boozing, and some indirect references to it in film (From the Earth to the Moon specifically references Eisele's affair during the lead-up to his one flight with the woman who later became his second wife and who provided the papers for publication, and a later episode specifically focuses on the effect of the program on astronaut marriages, this is the first to directly acknowledge and describe it.

The writing is subpar when it comes to dialogue, especially during spaceflight where Eisele is relating the conversations generally accurately (according to the in-flight tapes) but using different words that make it sound more stilted than it was, but overall surprisingly good.  The story is a familiar one - test pilot gets rejected before being accepted as an astronaut, prepares for flights while competing for a spot on a mission, and drinks and parties as much as you might imagine.  The Apollo 7 flight, while overlooked today, was the indispensable checkout of the Apollo CSM after the Apollo 1 fire, and while the flight was a disaster from the personnel standpoint - the astronauts were sick, grumpy, and outright mutinous throughout the flight - from a technical standpoint it was flawless, and completely checked out the new technology.  It was so successful, that the next flight - Apollo 8 - skipped a redo of orbital testing and flew straight to the moon on only the second Apollo CSM (and first Saturn V) flight.

The Hanging Tree (Rivers of London) - Ben Aaronovitch

I got current on my Peter Grant series with this book, and a couple of months later I can't remember anything about it.  That's kind of a problem with this series - the universe is engaging, the narration is astoundingly good as an audiobook, but the stories don't really stay with you.

The Resurrectionist: The Lost Work of Dr. Spencer Black

I got this for Collin, thinking it was odd enough he might be interested.  He wasn't, and I read it anyway, and I wasn't either.

The book is a fictional biography of Dr. Spencer Black, from a childhood spent exhuming corpses through his medical training, his travels with carnivals, and the mysterious disappearance at the end of his life, and includes his supposed magnum opus: The Codex Extinct Animalia, a Gray’s Anatomy for mythological beasts — dragons, centaurs, Pegasus, Cerberus—all rendered in detailed anatomical illustrations.

It was an original book and I always like when authors try to fit a paranormal-ish story alongside historical fact, but it just never engaged me much.