Puttering in the Study

Rereads: "Dune", "Declare", "Battle of Britain" and "Overlord" on Audible

I have recently noticed a tendency to reread books that I think I might enjoy - and more often, to start listening to them as audiobooks.  

Most recently, I decided to reread Frank Herbert's Dune in advance of the new film.  I knew I had not read it since the mid-'90s, and that reading had not been especially successful, I remembered. 

The new reading was a disaster.  I was completely unable to read the book without seeing the visuals of the 1984 David Lynch film which, although I love it, was definitely getting in the way of experiencing the novel.  I also could see the tendency to want to skip over narration to get to dialogue, and suspected I was missing important parts of the book as a result.  I could already tell that I was not able to absorb anything of the characters in the book that was not from the movie.

To try to get around this, I downloaded the audiobook and began listening to that.  I can't say that I liked the audiobook per se – dialogue was mostly narrated, but occasionally characters would come in and be voiced separately, and to my taste poorly - but what it did was eliminate any carryover from the earlier film and allow me to focus on what the book and the characters were actually saying.  It's like watching a play – the actor can be doing an inferior job, but it's still Shakespeare.  I did end up reading the last few chapters in the hardback version, but by that time the characters were almost completely divorced from the movie's incarnations.  And I was getting impatient.

While I was reading Dune, I also remembered that I really didn't think I had adequately understood Tim Powers' Declare the first time I read it, and had probably skipped over important parts looking for scenes that had more action or supernatural involvement.  So I got the book for that and listened to it over the next several weeks.  Again, I think I got a much better understanding of the book, as I was forced to listen to everything in it, and not skip over parts that seemed duller.  At least now I know that I actually listened to everything in the book, and didn't skip over any important parts.

The next book, James Holland's Battle of Britain I started in hardback with the copy that Mr. Holland inscribed for me at the World War II conference in 2019.  I had just finished building a new tool Airfix 1/72 Hawker Hurricane and was starting on a new-tool Spitfire and wanted to reread a good book on the subject.  Within a couple of chapters I realized that I was not able to read as much as I wanted in the limited time that I have to read in the study in the evening, and instead got the audiobook and listened to most of the book that way.  The individual accounts got a little tiring after a while, but it ended up being an efficient way of getting the book read.  The hardest part was that a substantial part of the book deals with the battle of France, and it is almost midway through before you get to Fighter Command engaging the Luftwaffe over Britain beginning in the late summer of 1940.  Which began to conflict with the next book I listened to ...

Finally, several years ago I listened to Max Hastings' Overlord because I wanted to read something about the actual D-Day landings.  This is not the best book for that – it focuses on the battle for Normandy instead, and is similarly full of individual accounts that are not exactly what I was looking for – but Hastings does eventually provide commentary and analysis on the major questions surrounding the campaign. 

Central here is British general Sir Bernard Montgomery.  It is pretty well agreed that Montgomery made major mistakes in how he characterized and promised his forces' activities from D-Day to the end of the campaign, but Hastings takes the position that there was in the end nothing lost as a result, because neither Montgomery nor Bradley could actually have done anything earlier than they did that would have generated a faster, or better result.  Hastings is adamant that no advance against the German forces could take place until they had been written down by weeks of attrition.  If you agree with this viewpoint – and it seems sound to me – then much of that heat directed at Montgomery is warranted, but in the end irrelevant.  (Something you can't say about the German leaders and generals' action, I note).  He overpromised and did not manage expectations regarding what he was actually going to be able to do, but in the end it is difficult to see how that had a negative effect on the final outcome.  Hastings even goes so far as to decline to call the failure to close the Falaise pocket an error that had any effect because he believes that even if the forces allotted had closed the pocket, the desperate German forces would have blown through them anyway.

That's what I was in the end looking for.  What were the actions taken, are they subject to criticism, and what effect would different actions have had.

 

Eagle Against the Sun: The American War With Japan – Ronald Spector

I ran across this on Audible and decided I'd give it a shot.  It's a little older - 1985 - but provided a thorough and not-too-lengthy overview of the war in the Pacific. I ran across a used hardcover of it in Dallas a few weeks ago, but it was a little on the expensive side and wasn't a first edition, so I held off adding it to the paper library for the time being.

Brothers, Rivals, Victors: Eisenhower, Patton, Bradley and the Partnership that Drove the Allied Conquest in Europe Paperback – Jonathan W. Jordan

I finished this book a month ago, and really enjoyed it.  As I mentioned about Jordan's subsequent book American Warlords, the prose is a little over the top at times, but it seems to fit this book better, since the three generals tended to speak to each other in language that is slightly stilted to modern ears.

The choice of story is magnificent. While I knew something about the three and their prior acquaintanceship in the peacetime army, the anecdotes of Eisenhower and Patton's time together at Fort Meade in the 1920's with their families were incredible.  Remember the scene in The Incredibles where Bob and Frozone are sitting in a car at night waiting to catch criminals? 

Patton and Eisenhower literally did this for fun at night with loaded pistols looking for "highwaymen."  Another time they wanted to see if a machine gun's accuracy would be affecting by it overheating, and accidentally causing it to go on full automatic with no one at the controls, spraying bullets everywhere and threatening to cook off boxes of ammunition and had to crawl through their own fire to get close enough to shut it off.

I learned a lot about the levels of corps and army group commander - something I wasn't previously familiar with.  But the best part of the book was that on almost a page by page basis, which of the three was talking sense and which was doing something dumb, or at least inadvisable would change. There wasn't a clear-cut presentation one that was always right and one that was always wrong. Eisenhower grew throughout the book, both in his ability to lead and his decisionmaking.  Bradley was almost always the most competent and reliable commander to both Eisenhower and Patton.  And Patton was the preeminent field general on the American side, but with equally great shortcomings.

The real story of the book is Eisenhower's willingness to tolerate Patton's constant incidents during the war, which was in part due to their friendship, at least early on, but later was because he knew that he would need Patton as a field commander, a decision that paid off handsomely in the fall and winter of 1944.

Again, a really good book.

American Warlords: How Roosevelt's High Command Led America to Victory in World War II - Jonathan W. Jordan

Just finished listening to this book and really enjoyed it.  Although I've recently read at least four or five books on virtually the same topic, there was almost no overlap in anecdotes.  The only caveat is that this book is the worst offender at overuse of metaphors and simile.  It starts with the attack on Pearl Harbor and was so melodramatic I started wondering if I could make it through the whole thing.  About the only metaphor it didn't include was the standard comparison of the capsized battleship Oklahoma to a beached whale.  But it did seem to get better (or I just used to it) and it was worth it for the many. many new insights and observations about the various actors.

Interestingly, Jordan does not tell anything like the same "near mutiny" story about Stimson and Marshall that Hamilton has in Mantle of Command, nor does the book provide Hamilton's insight into MacArthur during the 1942 Philippines campaign.  I don't count that a negative - it just means Jordan told different stories.

Churchill - The Teaching Company - Prof. J. Rufus Fears

I downloaded and listened to this relatively short set of lectures recently, and it wasn't one of my favorites.  While I liked the subject matter and learned a lot about Churchill, Fears' treatment is pretty uncritical, and at times inconsistent.  For example, at one point he calls Churchill a political genius and then within only a few moments points out what terrible political decisions he made.

More important, while there is much to praise, of course, his principal thesis that a great leader must have a moral compass, that Churchill did, and that it was the defense of freedom, he never even attempts to really reconcile Churchill's alleged commitment to freedom with his even greater commitment to the preservation of the British Empire during World War II and after.  Freedom from Nazi tyranny was all very fine, of course, but freedom from political and economic domination by Great Britain - that was a different matter entirely.  It may be, as he has Churchill saying, that allowing colonial peoples independence was not likely to result in a better outcome for them, but it is hard to reconcile that statement with Fears' claim that Churchill was, first, last and always, committed to freedom.  

But I did learn a lot, and the lectures provided a good framework for diving into some of the biographies that I eventually need to get around to reading.

Saturn's Children - Charles Stross

As I have posted previously, I have really enjoyed Charles Stross' Laundry novels, so I thought I'd try some more.  My first was Saturn's Children, which is a sci-fi set in the future, where humanity has ceased to exist, but our robots have remained.

The heroine is one of a series of sex bots (what a novel idea - she actually has retractable stiletto heels in her feet) that is trying to eke out a living and has an adventure.  With the function for which she was made being obsolete (there are no humans left for her to service, but her skill set as basically a robotic courtesan can come in handy for other uses, such as, potentially, spying for various interests).  The best parts of the novel for me were the ways the characters have to put up with the enormous inconvenience and times involved in travel within a solar system inhabited exclusively by various robots who are building a civilization without humans to serve.  And since they're all designed and conditioned to obey humans, the political gains of recreating an actual human would be enormous, which is a subplot in the book.

Anyway, pretty good book.  I like it better than the next one in his Singularity series. It's a bit dense and really difficult to follow.  Not that I understood the plot of this one all that well, but the characters were memorable and as it was told from the first person perspective, it was not as easy to get lost.

The Rosetta Key (Ethan Gage Adventure) - William Dietrich

This book is so old I started with the paperback before I started listening to books on audio.  There are already two sequels.

Read the first one in the Ethan Gage series (Napoleon's Pyramids)in 2008 and it was okay, so I started on the second.  It just got old after a while.  I finally finished it right after our trip when I was running low of trash fiction, and I'm probably not going to pick up 3 or 4.  Just don't much care what happens.  At the end of this one you could see the girlfirneds peeling away to clear the decks for the next book (plausible or not) and I decided I'd already read this story.

Oh well.

Star Trek Into Darkness - Alan Dean Foster (audiobook)

I just finished listening to this novelization of the new movie by Alan Dean Foster, read by Alice Eve (actress that plays Carol Marcus in the movie), and I really didn't like it.  I mean a lot.  Here's why.

The thing I've liked about Foster's novelizations, going back to his Star Trek Log books, which remain some of my all time favorites, is that he sketches in lots of extra detail.  Extra facts, extra dialogue, extra detail, all of which is very interesting when you're reading it, and going fairly quickly.

The problem is that when it's a fast-paced movie, which you've seen, the book drags by horribly slow.  And it's worse than that - although the same action is taking place on the page, characters are engaging in extended repartee and observations when it's completely inappropriate and unrealistic.  When lives are at stake and seconds count, Spock would not stop to express his opinion on a human characteristic.  Yet that happens over and over, and even when the action is only in their head, it's excruciating to listen to it read.  I'd probably like it a lot better reading it.  Also, Foster takes time to try to plug plot holes as he goes through, but all that does is highlight the plot hole - not fill it.  It's helpful, but usually unsatisfying.

And some of the discussion is just not worthy of a Trek novel - the book goes into an extended riff on the importance of the captain's chair as a metaphor for leadership, but takes it to a silly extreme.  For example, Sulu is afraid to sit in "the chair" when he needs to fill in, and verbally says as much.  I don't think that was in the movie, and I disagree with Foster's decision to highlight it.  It was inconsistent with Sulu's character and, frankly, with the job of a naval officer.  By that point in his career he would have stood watch in the chair repeatedly - it wouldn't be magical, and he certainly would not be afraid it.  Uhura is similarly ill-used by having her whine about her man in the open, failing in some cases to recognize that this is a dangerous job, and her boyfriend just might get killed, and she shouldn't get quite so overtly upset about it.  In the movie she plays it low key, and it works,  In the book it's a soap opera and about as believable.  Again, she might think this, but she would never say it.

To me that underscored just how out of whack this Trek universe can get in terms of its leadership.  Neither Kirk nor Uhura not McCoy graduated from Starfleet, and after a demotion Kirk is dropped not to commander but back to the Academy as a student - then zings back up to first officer, Sulu has one cruise on a starship bridge (it's unclear whether he's been on a ship before Enterprise last movie)Scotty's background is unclear - but he's instantly chief engineer and when he leaves they toss it to 17-18 year old Chekhov.  What, no other senior engineering staff - you trhow the navigator down there?  Whiz kid - I get that, but it's odd this universe has one admiral, one captain, one commander and half a dozen college kids - and that's it.  Only Spock has apparently earned commander rank through actual service.  Now all these people with no experience - and I mean none - are running things, and when they need replacing (as they often do) there are no senior officers under them to take their place.

The reason I point this out is that it becomes increasingly unclear how the chain of command works in this outfit, and what credibility this Jim Kirk has.  It looks more and more like the cast of Friends on a starship, with no one bringing any experience to their position, Kirk the most notable.  The decision to start Kirk out at the Academy and then accelerate him from student to first officer, to captain of StarFleet's flagship in a day was always one that strained credulity in the first movie, but bouncing him around here, and making it look like there's no alternative but Spock started getting old.  Not that I disliked the movie or the plot - it's just that when exposed in book form, it starts to come apart.  Kirk just has no credibility as a senior officer the way Foster presents it.  (It also makes me see that the movie similarly struck a false note when Kirk is "sent back to the Academy" after demotion.  It implied he was resuming his career as a student and didn't take the opportunity to put a floor of experience under him.  Demoting him directly to captain of a smaller ship, or first officer, and then having Pike bring him back as first officer on his ship would have made more sense, and made him a little more credible as a leader.  Instead he heads back to the frat house, then is back at the top of the heap in a day.

All that having ben said, Eve is not my favorite narrator - an English accent narrating Star Trek is a novelty, but she adopts the right accents for the characters.  But I found her Admiral Marcus over the top, and her John Harrison was uniformly a parody of Benedict Cumberbatch.  I don't know why she went to over the top on them, especially Harrison.  I also had problems with her voice getting too soft for an audiobook, where (in the truck) I have a lot of ambient noise, but that's a minor detail.

Can't wait for the movie to come out on digital.  I enjoyed it far better than the audiobook.

 

Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English - John McWhorter

I just finished this as an audiobook and found it really interesting.  Lots of information about the odd characteristics of English and where they may have come from, including Celtic and Phoenician (seriously).  The author seems to relish attacking the conventional wisdom on some points, and made it really entertaining to listen to (the author was the narrator).

Citizens of London: The Americans Who Stood with Britain in Its Darkest, Finest Hour - Lynne Olson

I listened to this lengthy book in the truck in recent weeks, and ended up really enjoying it.  It is about the great time Pamela Churchill had during World War II as Winston Churchill's daughter in law, and lover of Averell Harriman, Edward R. Murrow and God knows who else.  Oh, and there was a war on too.

The book is about the Americans that came to London during the war to assist in the war against Hitler's Germany, most notably, the U.S. ambassador following Joe Kennedy, John Gilbert Winant (a towering figure, who I'd never even heard of before), Harriman, and Murrow, as well as others.  It's a great, great read, and tells you about aspects of the wartime experience in Britain, and America's entry into the war.

Although it's impossible to overstate the contribution Winant made, the story of Tommy Hitchcock, Jr. is what blew me away.   Hitchcock was the golden boy of interwar America, a World War I fighter pilot who was a polo champion during those years.  When the new war started, he became a military attache in London, and campaigned for high altitude, long range fighters to escort American bombers on raids into Germany, specifically the P-51.  Prior to that time, the unescorted bombers were suffering horrendous losses on missions into Germany, and the "bomber mafia" was actively opposing development of fighter escorts because it claimed the bombers didn't need them.  Hitchcock thought otherwise and used a lifetime's connections to lobby for the fighters. 

The story of the first P-51 to see combat - a single plane from a formation that was otherwise lost and which charged into an attacking formation of Luftwaffe fighters which had never seen a fighter anywhere close to that far into Germany, will bring tears to your eyes.  The pilot, James H. Howard, on January 11, 1944 charged some thirty Luftwaffe fighters that were attacking a formation of B-17 Flying Fortress bombers.  For more than a half-hour, Howard defended the heavy bombers of the 401st Bomb Group against the German fighters, repeatedly attacking the enemy airplanes and shooting down as many as six.  Importantly, none of the bombers he was defending were shot down.  Howard was awarded the Medal of Honor.  From what I've been reading, the normal attrition rate was 10-20% at this time.  That was the value of long range, high altitude escorts - and that was what Hitchcock had been aggressively lobbying for. 

This book is full of great stories like that.  I really, really enjoyed it.