I have only known one person in my life who died in war, that I’m aware of. His name was Gordon Gunhus, he graduated from high school with me, and he died in Vietnam. We weren’t particular friends, but I have every reason to believe that the life he laid down was a life of considerable promise. Blessed be the memory.
‘The Star Spangled Banner’ and ‘Taps’
Have a happy, God-blessed Memorial Day.
For the origins of “Taps,” the military song at the end of the day, see below. Continue reading ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ and ‘Taps’
What Would You Do with Two Free Hours a Day?
See some of the possibilities here. Apparently, one-third of high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives. 42% of college graduates never read another book after college. 80% of U.S. families did not buy or read a book last year. (via Mental Floss)
I wonder exactly what “read another book” means.
Literary notes
Our friend Dale Nelson informs me that this year is the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, which most American readers know from The Tolkien Reader. J. R. R. Tolkien wrote it at the request of his aunt, Jane Neave.
So, I finally read The Great Gatsby. I was motivated to do this by two circumstances. One is that I saw the trailer for the upcoming movie version, starring Leonardo DiCaprio. I won’t embed it, because frankly it doesn’t look all that promising. The second reason was that I finally found a cheap Kindle edition.
Some years ago, someone told me I ought to read Gatsby, because I had a lot in common with the title character. I guess that’s true, with the caveat that I’m not generally considered either glamorous or mysterious.
Anyway, it’s superbly written. I’m glad I waited till I was a grownup to read it. I might have appreciated it in college, but I’m not sure.
There’s a rumor abroad in the land, spread mostly by college literature professors, that Gatsby is a critique of the American dream. This is balderdash. It’s a critique of the human heart, and the illusions we build for ourselves, and the idea that money can remake the world to our personal specifications.
Great book. Hurt like the devil.
(Here’s something odd. If you see the trailer, you’ll note that the actress is playing Daisy Buchanan as a blonde. And Mia Farrow, in the Redford version, was also a blonde. I don’t know what the actress looked like in the Alan Ladd version. Anyway, in the book Fitzgerald says she had dark hair. I guess the mystique of the American Blonde trumps the text.)
A blessed Memorial Day holiday to you all.
Review: Groupthink Can Run Both Directions
Nutrition news is ripe for overstatement. You might say there are fruit flies of hyperbole swarming many popular reports on select health benefits. Take this example from a site I won’t name (not naming my source would be in keeping with many health reports): “In parts of China where people eat a lot of vegetables such as garlic and onions, villagers have one-quarter as many cases of cancer as people in the rest of the country.” Perhaps that’s true, but it doesn’t mean that the health claim the writer makes in using this example is true or as strong as he says it is. There are likely many combined reasons that guard these Chinese from cancer.
In popular news, nutrition reports can be maddening. Often, the news will simplify a report too far, like saying coffee is linked to hallucinations when the report is actually inconclusive. Or a report may be accurate and the study reported on simplistic. So when I began reading Ty Bollinger’s book, Cancer: Step Outside the Box
The first thing Bollinger wants us to believe is that pharmaceutical companies and certain medical groups do not want us to heal from cancer or find its cure. They want to make money off of our disease, so they have stifled real cures like apricot seeds in favor of their money-making treatments: surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. He argues that the FDA and other agencies are pressured by lobbyists to ban nutrition and promote manufactured drugs. Some leaders are pressed to promote something regardless of clinical evidence and others are steeped in a groupthink that prevents them from questioning the promotion. Continue reading Review: Groupthink Can Run Both Directions
Badge of Evil, by Whit Masterson
Badge of Evil is chiefly memorable as the source text for Orson Welles’s film Touch of Evil. It’s a competent mystery/thriller, written in the 1950s in a style that would be considered pretty languid today.
The film writers made a number of changes in the basic story, written by “Whit Masterson,” a pseudonym for the creative team of Wade Miller and William Daemer. In the movie, Charlton Heston played Miguel Vargas, a Mexican drug enforcement officer, married to an American woman played by Janet Leigh. This was a reversal from the book, whose hero was Michael Holt, an assistant district attorney in an unnamed California city, married to a woman of Mexican heritage.
In the book, Michael is assigned to assist in the prosecution of an heiress and her fiance, charged with the dynamite murder of her father. Michael is unsatisfied with the detectives’ case, and his own digging soon uncovers a different suspect who immediately confesses.
Michael becomes suspicious of the two detectives—heroes in the city—and begins to research other cases they’ve “closed,” to see if they’ve planted evidence before. Before long both he and his wife are under attack.
For a contemporary reader, there’s not a lot of punch here. The idea of corrupt cops who plant evidence was shocking in the 1950s, but has become a cliché in today’s fiction. Also, a district attorney with these kinds of suspicions would get a lot more support from a police department nowadays.
I was intrigued by the portrayal of Michael’s marriage. The authors make a special point of noting that Michael’s co-workers joke about his wife being jealous of his career, but in fact she’s extremely supportive. Michael’s marriage is portrayed as a genuine partnership, and his wife as a good friend as well as a lover. It strikes me that a modern writers would have given her her own career, and would have also ramped up the conflict between the spouses. What does that say about marriage, then and now?
Badge of Evil should be approached as an artifact of its time, and the reader had best not bring contemporary expectations to it. I found the prose a little flaccid, and the action a little tame, but that’s probably typical of the style of the times. Suitable for most readers, teens and up.
Tell Me the Story Upfront
This is common, perhaps, and fun. Readers have retitled works to better describe them, such as George Eliot’s “Why Be Nice To Your Siblings When You’re Just Going to Die in a Flood” (The Mill on the Floss) and George Orwell’s “If You Give a Pig a Windmill, He’ll Pursue Absolute Power.” This one from David Foster Wallace looks like a great title to me.
The Ninth District, by Douglas Dorow
Minnesota thriller and mystery writers, as you’ve probably noticed, almost always get at least one shot with me. Douglas Dorow is a Minneapolis writer (I’ve never met him, but then I’ve never met almost everybody), and I have a suspicion (based on hints in this book) that he’s a Christian. He’s written a promising, if not stellar, thriller in The Ninth District, and I think it will go over well with most of this blog’s audience.
The title refers to the Ninth District of the Federal Reserve Bank, which is located in Minneapolis. The story begins with the murder of a bank teller in suburban Wayzata. FBI agent Jack Miller, along with his junior partner Ross Fruen, are investigating it as one of a string of bank robberies in the Twin Cities area, committed by a gunman they call the Governor (because he wears a mask that looks like one of our former governors—Jesse Ventura, one assumes). The stakes are raised as they gradually come to realize that they’re facing a very clever, entirely ruthless criminal who has a much bigger score in mind than a few bank jobs.
I think Douglas Dorow has the makings of a first-class thriller writer, but he hasn’t yet mastered plotting. Although he ramps up the danger at regular intervals, as the genre demands, he makes the common mistake (I understand it well and am probably guilty of it myself) of not going full out for the climax. A master writer would have put Jack’s family (the portrayal of the family and his strained but loving marriage is one of the book’s strengths) in peril at the end, but Dorow chooses to take them out of the action and concentrate on the showdown between Jack and the Governor. That’s understandable, but it lowers the tension.
Still, not a bad summer read. The values are good, and it’s suitable for teens and up. Well worth four bucks for the Kindle version.
No more “House” calls
I can add viewing new episodes of House, M.D. to my list of things I can’t look forward to anymore. The last episode of the quirky, critically acclaimed FOX series aired last night. And all in all I thought the fat lady sang pretty well.
For eight seasons, the House series has been, if not always a pleasure, at least a thing to look forward to. Many fans say the series slumped after the first couple seasons, and they may be right. Personally, I didn’t notice. I didn’t mind when the cop (offended that House was rude to him and used an anal thermometer on him) threatened him with prison. I didn’t mind when House had to go to an institution to be weaned from his pain killer habit. I was fascinated by House, but I never liked him much, and I rather enjoyed watching him forced to confront his personal irresponsibility.
The final episode, “Everybody Dies,” (a word play on House’s motto, “Everybody lies”) had him facing the prospect of being sent back to prison for six months, for violating the terms of his parole (in typical irresponsible fashion, he calls his crime “just a prank”) just when his friend Wilson has cancer and only about five months to live. In between trying to get his friends to take the fall for him, he tries to treat a drug addict who appears to be dying. All this is in flashback. In the “present,” he’s lying in a burning building next to a dead man’s body, arguing with various ghosts from his past whether his life is worth living or not. Continue reading No more “House” calls
The Million-Dollar Wound, by Max Allan Collins
Train travel I was used to; plane travel was something new, and a little frightening. Truth be told, I slept through a lot of it. Twenty-five other hearty souls and I sat within the DC-3 “Flagship,” a noisy, rattling projectile that churned through the night sky like a big kitchen mixer.
I’ve praised Max Allan Collins’s Nate Heller novels here before, especially the early volumes. The first three in the series, True Detective, True Crime, and this book, The Million Dollar Wound, comprise what’s called the Frank Nitti Trilogy—three books that don’t necessarily focus on gangster Frank Nitti (whom, if you only know him from the movie The Untouchables, you don’t know anything about at all), but are set in the Nitti era of Chicago crime, and end—in this volume—with his death.
The Million Dollar Wound (military slang for a non-debilitating wound serious enough to send a guy home, see also, “Hollywood Wound”) begins with Nate Heller waking up in a military mental hospital, unable to remember his name or how he got there. A sympathetic doctor tries hypnotism on him, which allows us to flash back and learn how he—in spite of being old enough to avoid the draft—had enlisted in the Marines with his friend Barney Ross, the prizefighter, in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. We learn of the hell they endured on Guadalcanal, but most of the book concentrates on a post-war adventure, when Nate is hired by newspaper columnist Westbrook Pegler to investigate mob influence in motion picture unions, and then—dangerously—hired by those very labor racketeers to tell them if anybody is nosing around in their business. Famous people encountered include actor Robert Montgomery, fan dancer Sally Rand (Nate’s current girlfriend), Eliot Ness, and—of course—Frank Nitti.
Author Collins’s realistic—though sometimes far-fetched (the two things aren’t necessarily contradictory)–take on Frank Nitti and his era is fascinating. Nate Heller would deny being a friend of Nitti’s, or admiring him, but he sees him as far smarter—and less toxic to society—than his predecessor, Al Capone, or the lesser mobsters who followed him. This is Chicago, after all, Nate would say. There’s an element of tragedy in Nitti’s ugly end.
Recommended, with the usual cautions for language, violence, and adult situations.