New in Crime, NYTBR 19 August 2012

You see how self has caught up with her “pile of stuff,” dear blog readers?  She’s now only two weeks behind in her reading of the NYTBR.

Most of the 19 August 2012 issue is boring stuff (like Martin Amis’ new novel, which is about a lout, what else is new).  But self takes heart from the fact that Marilyn Stasio reviews a new thriller by Norwegian crime writer Karin Fossum.

Last year, or was it two years ago, self’s life seems on such a hectic trajectory lately that she loses track, she read Fossum’s The Indian Bride and was transfixed (to know just how transfixed, read self’s Amazon.com review of same).

Fossum’s new book is about a creepy teen-age sadist who thinks of ever more inventive and dangerous ways to torture other children.  Oyy, self knows that sounds exceedingly dark.  But you should see what Stasio has to say about Fossum’s other thrillers:  The Water’s Edge is about “a sympathetic pedophile” (!!) and When the Devil Holds the Candle is about monstrous “old people.”

Another mystery Stasio reviews is Michael Koryta’s The Prophet, and although self is irritated by the fact that the book has the same title as the other book by Khalil Gibran, she wants to read Koryta’s because it is “about two estranged brothers,” one of whom is “a practiced bail bondsman but an inept private investigator” who “unintentionally delivered” a teenage girl “into the hands of her homicidal stalker.”  Yikes!  Dark to the nth power!  Just self’s cup of tea.

(Of further interest in this NYTBR is a review of a book that sounds like “Hurt Locker” circa London 1940:  The Long Walk: A Story of War and the Life That Follows, by Brian Castner.  And a slashing attack by a male reviewer of a young, female writer, an attack that lays her out, a killing blow.  Self will leave reviewer and reviewed un-named.  Suffice it to say, the publisher will not be long in responding, self is sure)

Stay tuned, dear blog readers.  Stay tuned.

On Searching for Jesse Kellerman in the Library, and NYTBR 27 May 2012

Self is definitely on a roll.  Yesterday, she received yet another story acceptance, this one from J Journal.

It is Thursday, self missed the San Carlos Farmers Market.  But she did cook up a passable dinner of baby back pork spare ribs, and green salad, and fried rice with mushrooms and green beans.  No dessert, sorry.

Earlier, she dashed to the downtown Redwood City Library and looked up a mystery called Trouble, by Jesse Kellerman.  In trolling the web last week, she stumbled on the author’s bio, and she also happened to remember hearing his name from somewhere (probably from an old NYTBR), and she discovered that there were 8 copies in the Peninsula Library System, all of them checked out.

Then, because self is ever hopeful, she decided to check and see the status of her own Mayor of the Roses.  The Peninsula Library System has six copies, of which none are checked out.

Onward.

In The NYTBR of 27 May 2012 (Hey, that was only a few days ago!  Way to go, self!  You are on a roll!), there is an interview with a very special woman (President of Harvard) with a very special name, one that has three parts:  Drew.  Gilpin.  Faust.  Self particularly loves the “Faust” part.

From this interview, self derives the titles of six books she is now interested in reading (In contrast, the interview with Hugh Dancy only produced two):

• The Stranger’s Child, by Alan Hollinghurst
• Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman
• Behind the Beautiful Forevers, by Katherine Boo
• the Library of America’s The Civil War:  The Second Year Told by Those Who Lived It
• Albert Camus’s The Plague (Self read this many years ago; it’s probably not a bad idea to give it another go-round)
• What It Is Like to Go to War, by Karl Marlantes

And there is also the enormous pleasure of reading “A Bloody Season,” Charles McGrath’s review of Hilary Mantel’s latest novel, Bring Up the Bodies.  In his review, McGrath pays Mantel the ultimate author accolade:  “Mantel has no consistent, easily identifiable set of novelistic preoccupations —  unless it’s the persistence of evil in a world that doesn’t always recognize it —  and no fallback kit of stylistic tricks.”

There is also “Family Secrets,” a review by Emily Cooke of Aerogrammes, a debut short story collection by Tania James.  And “Thank You for Your Service, Sort Of,” a review by Andrew J. Bacevich of Those Who Have Borne the Battle:  A History of America’s Wars and Those Who Fought Them, by Dartmouth College President James Wright.  Bacevich says of Wright:  “In the aftermath of 9/11, Wright began periodically visiting military hospitals, not standard fare for an Ivy League president.  His encounters with severely wounded soldiers —  and his discomfort with present-day civil-military relations —  spurred him to write this book.”

Stay tuned, dear blog readers.  Stay tuned.

Memorial Day: Reading “War, Literature and the Arts”

This past weekend, the History Channel showed a number of war documentaries.   Yesterday, self finally got to watch Clint Eastwood’s Letters From Iwo Jima.  She had refused to see it when it was showing in theaters, out of some vague, unfocused sense of loyalty to the husband, whose grandfather, a brigadier general in the Philippine Army, was taken from his family by the Japanese and never returned.

But, darn if she didn’t find herself so absolutely moved by the film.  In fact, she told the husband, she was more affected by that movie than she was by Saving Private Ryan.

Self is on the War, Literature & the Arts e-mail list, and this evening there was a message in her “in” box about a new post.  So she eagerly went to read it, and it was absolutely fascinating.  James Moad II, who edits the blog, used to teach in the Air Force Academy.  Self thinks he is very brave.  He writes, “Of course, war is not moral, and maybe that’s the tragedy of it all for those who have to fight.”

He recounts a time when he was still teaching in the Air Force Academy, and he got a call from a concerned parent whose daughter was experiencing nightmares after reading one of the books Moad had assigned in his War Literature course.  The book was called Tiger Force and dealt with American atrocities in Vietnam.  Self has read quite extensively about American atrocities in Vietnam, and can certainly see why a young person might suffer nightmares after readings like that, but Moad reminds his readers that the student was enrolled in a Military Academy, after all.

Moad (in passsing) mentions “the anger of Odysseus upon his return home in The Odyssey” (which reminds self very much of the anger of returning Vietnam War veterans, whose sacrifices went largely un-recognized), and about Plato’s The Cave (“about how focusing on moral certainty can keep us from seeing reality”) and it’s just a really great essay, which reminds self that she took son and Niece G on a tour of Corregidor when they were about seven or eight years old.  That was a great tour.  The guide seemed to speak with such passion about the events of a long-ago time.  The tour ends at a memorial, on a bluff overlooking the sea.  And what self remembers most clearly were that there were a few very old American veterans on the tour.  At that memorial, they all broke off to stand singly, and stared out at the sea, and some were visibly weeping.

And self thinks that every returning Filipino must be required to take this tour.  But why leave out the rest?  Let’s just say, every Filipino who is in high school or college in the Philippines, must be required by their schools to take the Corregidor tour.  If Israel can require its citizens to spend time on a kibbutz (or the Israeli army), certainly the Philippine government can require its people to honor the sacrifices made on Corregidor.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers.  Stay tuned.

Books of Self’s Recent Life (to April 30, 2012)

Biographies:

• Laurence Bergreen’s Marco Polo
• Adrian Goldsworthy’s Caesar:  Life of a Colossus

Books About 9/11:

• Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children (This is a novel)
• Lawrence Wright’s Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11
• Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower:  Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11

Books About Iraq:

• Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City

Books About World War II:

• Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke:  The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization
• Ben Macintyre’s Agent Zigzag:  A True Story of Nazi Espionage, Love, and Betrayal
• Hugh Sebag-Montefiore’s Dunkirk:  Fight to the Last Man

Collected Essays:

Finally: A New NYTBR Post!

These are the books self is interested in reading, after perusing the 19 February 2012 issue of The New York Times Book Review:

1.    After reading Candice Millard’s review of Gregg Jones’ Honor in the Dust:  Theodore Roosevelt, War in the Philippines, and the Rise and Fall of America’s Imperial Dream (published by New American Library):

• Gregg Jones’ Honor in the Dust:  Theodore Roosevelt, War in the Philippines, and the Rise and Fall of America’s Imperial Dream — No explanation needed: self is Filipina, after all!
  

2.    After reading David Leavitt’s (negative, self thinks) review of Olaf Olafsson’s novel, Restoration (published by Ecco/ HarperCollins), about a young Icelandic artist who served as “both apprentice and lover” to a famous (and married) restorer of “Italian Renaissance masterworks,” and how she exacts revenge when it becomes clear that the master has no intention of leaving his pregnant wife for her, two books by a member of “the early-20th-century English colony in Florence”:

• Iris Origo’s The Merchant of Prato, “a vivid portrait of daily life in medieval Tuscany”
• Iris Origo’s War in Val d’Orcia, based on Origo’s experiences during World War II, which she spent in Italy on property she and her husband owned, La Foce: “a self-sufficient community incorporating 57 farms, a school and a hospital.”

3.   After reading Allison McCulloch’s short reviews in the Fiction Chronicle, the following novels:

• Chan Koonchung’s The Fat Years, translated by Michael S. Duke (published by Nan A. Talese/ Doubleday), which sounds vaguely magical realist:  The protagonist’s “old friend Little Xi is dissatisfied, distrustful and increasingly disturbed by a strange amnesia that seems to have gripped the population, while another acquaintance insists an entire month has gone missing from the country’s collective memory.”
• Liz Moore’s Heft (published by Norton), which “tells the stories of Kel and Arthur, two tender, thoughtful souls, adrift in life for want of the anchor of family, slowly being drawn toward each other”

Stay tuned, dear blog readers.  Stay tuned.

9/11: Other Remembrances

This weekend was the Palo Alto Art Festival.  It takes place every August.  As we strolled around, looking at the booths, we arrived at Borders.  “60 to 70% Off!” screamed large signs.  Self suggested to hubby that we scope out the merchandise, and hubby agreed.  If there is anything guaranteed to restore hubby’s equanimity, it is the prospect of anything “70% Off.”

The last time self had been in this Borders, the sell-off sale was just beginning.  Back then, the signs advertised “30% Off!”  Amazingly, yesterday there was still a lot of merchandise on the shelves.  Hubby went straight to the military histories.  Self browsed the maps and travel books and then the blank journals.  Somehow, hubby and self ended up at the “U.S. History” section almost simultaneously.  Self didn’t expect to find anything, but then she did:  a single copy of Dexter Filkins’ The Forever War, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Self has been exceedingly curious about this book!  She began to read the Prologue:  Falluja, Iraq, November 2004.  It is 2 a.m., and the Marines have just landed.  Mosques all over the city issue the call to the Faithful:  “The Holy War!  The Holy War!  Get up and fight for the city of mosques!”

But over the din, a new sound.  Filkins looks back, to the vacant lot where the American helicopters had landed minutes earlier, and he sees a group of marines setting up a gigantic loudspeaker.  Suddenly, the sound of AC/DC blasts over the minarets, the mosques, the calls to the Faithful:  I’m a rolling thunder, a pouring rain/ I’m comin’ on like a hurricane/ My lightning’s flashing across the sky/ You’re only young but you’re gonna die.  AC/DC and the muezzins shriek at each other in a bizarre contest, each side ramping up the volume until everything is subsumed in the noise of a terrific artillery barrage.

Filkin’s next chapter is Kabul, Afghanistan, several years earlier, in 1998.  He describes an eerie city:  at twilight, a ghost town, only the shadows of women, “floating silently in their head-to-toe burqas.  Old meat hung in the stalls.  Buildings listed in the ruins.”

He writes:  “Kabul was full of orphans . . .  woebegone children who peddled little labors and fantastic tales of grief . . .  If a war went on long enough, the men always died, and someone had to take their place.  Once I found seven boy soldiers fighting for the Northern Alliance on a hilltop in a place called Bangi.  The Taliban positions were just in view, a minefield in between.  The boys were wolflike, monosyllabic with no attention spans.  Eyes always darting.  Laughing the whole time.  Dark fuzz instead of beards.  They wore oddly matched apparel like high-top tennis shoes and and hammer-and-sickle belts, embroidered hajj caps and Russian rifles.”

Where are these boys now?  It is 2011, 13 years later.  Self can hardly dare to hope that the children Filkins wrote about have recovered:  that, for instance, their attention spans have improved, and that they now no longer speak in monosyllables.  But, more likely, they have become angry 23-year-olds, skilled in the use of weaponry.

Naturally, self had to buy Filkin’s book.  And she also happened on another by Jim Sheeler, Final Salute:  A Story of Unfinished Lives.  It’s about the men who have to deliver the news of American casualties to their families back home.  The first chapter is called “The Knock.”  It contains a list of instructions for delivering news to the NOK (“Next of Kin”).  For example:

• Item # 3:  If the NOK does not offer entrance into the home, ask permission to enter.  It is helpful if the NOK is seated prior to delivering the news.”
• Item # 4:  Use good judgement and do not pass gory or embarrassing details.

Self has seen a movie based on material that might possibly have been taken from this book:  It was called “The Messenger,” and starred Ben Foster and Woody Harrelson.  In fact, self thinks Harrelson was nominated for an Oscar for his performance in that movie.  Self decided to buy this book, as well.  Both were 50 % off.

*     *     *     *

Other Literature on 9/11:

• The 9/11 Commission Report:  The Attack From Planning to Aftermath.  The 2004 commission report is being re-released in a new commemmorative edition, with an afterword by Philip Zelkow, the executive director of the commission.
• And self highly recommends this book, which she has blogged about a few times:  102 Minutes:  The Unforgettable Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers, by New York Times reporters Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers.  Stay tuned.

Reading “War, Literature & the Arts” Again

Here’s an excerpt from another post on the blog I quoted from a few days ago, “War, Literature & the Arts.”

This post is by the same person who wrote the post I quoted from a few days ago: James Moad II. From what self gleans from his posts, he is apparently stationed at a U.S. base in Germany. The title of this post is “The Poet and the Wounded Warrior’s Return.” Moad had to visit a military hospital for damage to a rotator cuff, and here is what he witnessed:

As I left the hospital, passing by the ER, I watched a crowd of medical personnel gather around a bus that had just arrived. They began offloading stretchers, one after another, filled with the wounded warriors who’d arrived at Ramstein Air Base just a few hours before on C-17s. I examined their faces, and after twenty years of service, many looked like little boys to me. With IVs hovering above blanketed bodies, the stretchers moved briskly past me toward surgeons and doctors waiting to treat the physical wounds of war. After watching the scene unfold before me, returning to the U.S. for surgery seemed like a modest inconvenience.

Moad goes on to recount watching an episode of Frontline while recuperating in Colorado Springs. From there, he discusses post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It is a very, very interesting post.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.

Paul Fussell’s THE GREAT WAR: What Is a Poet? (And: Saw Great War Documentary, “Restrepo,” Today)

A poet, we remember Aristotle saying, is one who has mastered the art of telling lies successfully …

— from Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory, Chapter VI (“Theater of War”)

In the same chapter, Fussell quotes the World War I writer Robert Graves (BTW, this is the reason Tim O’Brien’s short story, “The Things They Carried,” about the Vietnam War, is classic):

The memoirs of a man who went through some of the worst experiences of trench warfare are not truthful if they do not contain a high proportion of falsities.

Paul Fussell Biographical Note (Dear blog readers take note: the bio is from the book jacket of the copy self has had in her possession since her Stanford grad school days, so it is wildly out of date!):

Paul Fussell, author and editor of many books on literature, is John DeWitt Professor of English at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. His most recent books are Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars, The Boy Scout Handbook and Other Observations, and Siegfried Sassoon’s Long Journey.

* * * *

Since self is so into the war stories, what with the Fussell book, she persuaded hubby to see “Restrepo,” based on the months Sebastian Junger and cameraman Tim Hetherington (partly financed by National Geographic, whose embedded reporters, incidentally, have been filing the best stories of the war — check out the NatGeo channel, dear blog readers!) spent embedded with an American platoon in one of Afghanistan’s most hotly contested combat regions, the Korengal Valley. Unforgettable. Will blog about movie shortly!

For now, self would just like to say that those soldiers fighting and dying in Afghanistan look like absolute babies! Younger even than son! What are they — 18? 19? One said he was raised by a mom who was a “f—ing hippie” in Oregon: she wouldn’t even let him play with toy guns!

The movie is currently showing in Palo Alto Square, off Page Mill Road (which incidentally is where self first saw “The Hurt Locker” — before it went mainstream and found its way to the Redwood City Century 20!)

Stay tuned.

Siegfried Sassoon: Echoes of a War Long Past (World War I)

Self’s fascination with war literature came when her friend Penny Jackson told her about a class at Stanford on Literature of World War I, taught by the late Albert Guerard. Until that class, she had never heard of Ford Madox Ford or Siegfried Sassoon. He also made required reading The Great War and Modern Memory, by Paul Fussell.

The raw material to be trained was growing steadily worse.  Most of those who came in now had joined the Army unwillingly, and there was no reason why they should find military service tolerable.  The war had become undisguisedly mechanical and inhuman.  What in earlier days had been drafts of volunteers were now droves of victims.  I was just beginning to be aware of this.

—  Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer

Here’s a further quote from the same book:

In 1917 …  I was only beginning to learn that life, for the majority of the population, is an unlovely struggle against unfair odds, culminating in a cheap funeral.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers.  Stay tuned.