Boy Toy

The book begins with 13-year-old Josh Mendel playing spin the bottle in a basement closet, the girl bolts when Josh gets aroused. Five years later cut to Josh decking his baseball coach. The background is of a boy molested by his middle-school teacher. Josh, a senior of above average intelligence, narrates the story.

In the arrogant, self-centred, naïveté of childhood the victims of sexual abuse often hold themselves responsible for their sufferings just as the children of divorce often blame themselves for their parent’s breakups. Every boy should have a best friend as understanding and loyal as Zik and a girl friend willing to wait 5 years for their beau to get over himself. The book tackles a delicate subject with deep if rather mature understanding. It is rather full of baseball statistics for anyone lacking the interest but otherwise it is well-written. It seems to be current style to write stories in a non-linear fashion but given Josh’s costant flashbacks it seems only appropriate and here it is easy to follow.

The Day of Battle

Atkinson spices up what could be a dry military history with biographical information on the principal players, historical background on the lands they invade, and notes from diaries, letters, and memoirs that draw on the experience of the people back home. Ike’s chief challenge was running interference between Monty and Patton, FDR and Churchill. To quote one of his generals: Running a war seems to consist in making plans and then ensuring that those destined to carry them out don't quarrel with each other instead of the enemy. Reading this account one comes to understand that ‘military intelligence’ become a term of derision. In so many ways this became a war of attrition in which men’s lives were thrown away in battle plans that had little chance of success. The terrible human cost of war both to the soldiers who fought and the civilians whose homes were the battleground is made plain. Even in WW#2 the financial costs of war are staggering. When an artillery captain reported that one million dollars worth of ordinance had been thrown at the enemy he was reportedly told to throw a million more. Those were 1944 dollars, today a single jet costs $20 million. Interesting to read that racism made black soldiers a rarity whereas today poor blacks complain that war is a black man’s trade as white boys evade service and draft boards. Everything old is new, Allied troops killed by their own mine fields and by friendly fire.

We know the outcome of the battles described here but even so the author manages to generate suspense in describing them. The overall impression the reader receives is one of the futility and terrible human cost of this campaign. Hundreds of thousands of lives were thrown away in a war of attrition in an effort to divert German troops from the Eastern Russian Front and the eventual D-Day invasion of Western Fortress Europe. The Generals who oversaw this campaign learned on the job at the cost of the lives of the men they led. Those who had fought in North Africa were unprepared for the mountainous terrain that was the Italian Boot where uneven ground made the use of tanks ineffective and the shock and awe bombing campaign used later by a general named Schwartzkopf less devastating. I would not presume to claim that reading the 677 pages that constitute the account equates with the emotional impact on the men who suffered disease, hunger, bombardment, injury, emotional stress, and death but no caring individual can read this account and not feel its effect. Those who ignore history are fated to repeat it.

Tobacco Road

Little doubt in my mind as to why a twelve-year-old would balk at sharing a bed with her new adult husband. Especially knowing of her mother’s 17 pregnancies. Her father, Jeeter Lester and his wife Ada specialize in avoiding work, chewing “snuff”, stealing, and making babies. Their children, once old enough, leave home without ever looking back and move far enough away to avoid visits from Pa to put the touch on them. The action takes place on Tobacco Road in a part of Georgia on the Savannah River Marshes where tobacco and cotton once grew on soil now too depleted to grow anything without liberal applications of “guano” that washes out of the sandy soil when it rains.

I have always asserted that poverty is a state of mind. In this novel lack of education, malnutrition, ill-health, unemployment breed poverty, ignorance, racism, and crime. Erskine Caldwell does for the Low Country of the East Coast what John Steinbeck does for the migrant workers of the Salinas Valley in California or Ivan Doig for settlers in Montana. Published in the depression years of the “Dirty Thirties” this novel documents a time and place but could hardly be termed uplifting.

Lone Survivor

The writing style here is not unlike that of his buddy Chris Kyle who referenced this work in his own autobiography. Did they use the same ghost writer? Luttrell does spend more time describing his fellow Seals, the fact that all are dead allowing him to mention them by name in effect memorialising them. He also gives better historical background.

When a four-man Navy Seal Team calls for backup the situation is truly desperate, so bad indeed the 16-man backup team died when their helo crashed into a mountain.

Lutrell survived because he was blown into a crevasse from which he eventually crawled badly wounded 7 miles to seek aid. His physical wounds may have healed but the mental ones are not as easy to assuage. He suffers from the dislocation from civil society common to most returning vets with the added stress of his terrible loss and not a little survivor’s guilt. It is sad that a society that finds it necessary to train men to be such warriors feels uncomfortable about having them around. They are both lionized and feared.

The movie version of this action is in wide release as of January 10, 2015. Both the movie and the book are macho and jingoistic. Lutrell decries politicians and desk jockeys who set rules of engagement that endanger the lives of men in the field and make their task more difficult. Much has been made of the ‘fact’ that similar rules of engagement made the war in Vietnam unwinnable. Lutrell goes as far as to blame the rules of engagement for the loss of his team. In Afghanistan War Lords have held power and fought civil wars for millennia. The locals are loyal to whatever power is seen to be in control at the time. In that sense there are no non-combatants. In that sense the troops are being asked to fight a war that cannot be won and have their hands tied in the process.

The reader can understand that this writer is bitter about Rules of Engagement he sees as being directly responsible for the loss of his team. Beating his readers over the head with it repeatedly does not strengthen his argument. What I really hear him saying is that an elite fighting squad should not have been deployed in a war zone if you didn’t want dead bodies. Unfortunately soldiers do not get to pick their wars and rear-echelon desk jockeys don’t have to face battlefield conditions. This reader still wonders if deploying any troops in Afghanistan was a wise move. Luttrell’s own historical background argues against it.

Unbroken

Laura Hillenbrand is an engaging writer. The 487-page book reads quickly supplying the reader with more than a few laughs. It tells the life-story of Louie Zamperini who in today’s parlance would be termed hyper-active or suffering attention deficit disorder. His deliverance came in the form of running. His Olympic Medal hopes dashed when the 1940 Olympics were cancelled due to WW#2.

A bombardier on a dubious plane they are ordered up in spirals into the Pacific. What follows is an epic tale of survival and the indomitable human spirit that survives despite all odds. A pair of buddies survive ditching in the ocean; 2000-miles adrift surrounded by sharks in an ill-equipped leaking raft; solitary confinement and torture by sadistic, ignorant Japanese captors; and finally release at the end of the war. What follows is the trauma of return and the adulation of a public where everyone wants a piece of you. The nightmares and the panic attacks continue even while you put up the brave front everyone expects.

There are nearly 100 pages of footnotes at the end of the book; pictures are interspersed in the text. Although the book follows the life of Zamperini it includes the stories of many of his comrades and those of his captors. It also adds facts and figures along with not a little historical background.

Going After Cacciato

Written by Tim O’Brien the author of The Things They Carried. The war in Vietnam, for those who served was a trip to insanity. Not a big leap for a squad to go marching across Asia and Europe after a deserter named Cacciatio the route to Paris, France plotted on his Atlas. The book documents  their journey interspersed with descriptions of the soldiers, their missions, their dreams and snippets of days on leave, calls home, nights spent on watch, boredom, and the sheer terror of checking tunnels. So what is fact and what is fantasy. Dropping the grenade in the tunnel a despised Lieutenant entered after all his men refused a direct command?

The Perks of Being a Wallflower

The book is a series of letters to a friend written by a 15-year-old boy. Were this a girl they’d have been Dear Diary entries. Since the friend to whom all this soul-baring information is addressed is never identified one can only assume it is we the readers.

One wonders how many of the parents agitating for the censorship of this book have actually read it. The book does begin by talking about a student’s suicide. It mentions teenage sex and masturbation in discrete terms. The quarterback football jock is a gay bottom. The kid sees a psychiatrist, takes prescribed and other drugs, smokes, and drinks.

A stream of consciousness novel reveals the intimate details of a teen’s angst, mood swings, fantasies, depression, and exuberance. The ideal childhood doesn’t exist. Parents raise children with no clue what they’re doing and sooner or later every child finds them out and becomes disenchanted and rebellious. Through it all knowing they are loved seems of paramount importance.

The Maze Runner

This book reads like the script for a reality TV programme. Or a riff on Golding’s Lord of the Flies. Teenaged Boys lacking any knowledge of their past lives save a first name arrive disoriented in the glade which is surrounded by a maze with 50-ft rock walls not unlike a lab rat’s maze. We learn of this organized society through the eye’s of its latest arrival Thomas. Takes a while to warm to this book but it grows on one as the read progresses. As usual best to read the book before seeing the related flick.

The maze has its own jargon but the substitutes for profanity such as klunk for ‘shit’ in a book aimed at young adults tends to get tiresome quickly. This  book is volume one of a series. Book one is enough for me.

American Sniper

The Author Chris Kyle died in his 39th year proving once more the strains of returning from the field of battle can be more stressful than the fight itself if not for this individual then for the fellow soldier he tried to help. Here we have a lover of guns who literally wrote the manual on Navy Seal Sniper Fire plus a History of the US in 10 guns for good measure. A good old boy from Dallas Texas who shoots best with a wad of chewing tobacco in his cheek; his friends were military and law enforcement. Lets be up front, this reviewer is a pacifist whom the NRA would term an ardent enemy. There are those who would not feel safe without a handgun in their night stand, having one in my home would make me feel uneasy.

The author has the ego and arrogance of the true believer but he can also laugh at himself and invites the reader to laugh with him. He is good about translating the military jargon into plain English or his editors and advisers have prompted him to.

An Army at Dawn

“An army at dawn” appears on page 64 as the expeditionary force leaves Hampton Roads. “Young men,... ....would remember this hour, when an army at dawn made for open sea....” What stands out as in every military history I’ve ever read is the utter incompetence and chaos that surrounded this action. Attention to detail in loading the ships is totally lacking helped little by the need for secrecy. Makes it appear that the winning side did so because their planners made fewer errors than the enemy. The other salient point involves leaders more interested in promoting their own careers than in advancing the cause, who would do nothing to correct a situation if it could be used to make their competition look bad. Or, as a friend puts it, “Wars are lost not won.” The French in North Africa regarded the British with equal antipathy as the Germans, the British looked down their noses at their American Cousins.

Wars may be lost rather than won but as a props person in theatre I would say they are lost on supply lines and logistics. Without food, water, proper clothing, fuel, ammunition, and weapons soldiers cannot fight. Why should reality interfere with policy. High Command demanded that Rommel hold onto the African Front but failure to supply replacement troops and materiel told another story. The ineptitude and lack of communication on the Allied Side threw away thousands of soldier’s lives to no good purpose. Hindsight may be 20-20 but these military planners ignored good tactical advice when they were given it. Obviously they’d never played chess. At 830 densely packed pages this is a major undertaking. The last 230 pages contain footnotes and captioned photos. For War Buffs a good read.

The Horse Boy

Science understands little of how our minds work. Autism is a malfunction of the mental system about which there is no clear knowledge of cause, treatment, or outcome. There are no experts in the field and most evidence is anecdotal. Among those who have studied the syndrome there are conflicting opinions on all counts leaving the parents of children so affected to fend for themselves leading to a pragmatic, if it works lets keep doing it, approach. Dealing with a growing energetic six-year-old who refuses to be toilet trained, throws screaming, flailing tantrums for hours, and cannot communicate his/her needs, fears, desires is beyond exhausting. It obviously takes over one’s life. Little wonder 80% of parents’ marriages end in divorce.

One facet of the syndrome is an affinity for animals which is mutual in this case a bond being forged between boy and a particular horse. We’ve read of horse whisperers but here we have a boy who communicates with animals on a non-verbal level. His parents travel to the ends of the Earth to ride horses and find Shaman whose own people have largely ignored whose prayers and rituals work an uncanny healing. There is no cure for this condition but anything that can ameliorate the stress and help parents and child cope is welcome. Reading the book will take you along for the ride.

The Giver

Jonas’ is a controlled and regimented society. Birth mothers produce children raised by Nurturers. The babies turn One in December and are assigned to a couple--one boy and one girl each--50 per year. At Eight a child’s comfort toy is taken from them. At Nine they are assigned a bicycle and at Twelve their life’s assignment. Anyone not conforming to societal norms is released. Although I realize this is a fictitious world the children seem severely genetically altered to mature in a rather accelerated manner--walking and talking in their first year of life, being selected for careers at 12. The horror of a world devoid of choice, of love and emotion where positive eugenics is the norm and euthanasia is given euphemistic innocuous terminology. As the receiver of memories Jonas becomes the vehicle by which we learn the menace that underlies this ordered society.

Dancing at the Rascal Fair

The title refers to the farmer’s market in the narrator Angus McCaskill’s home town in Scotland. This is book 2 of Doig’s Two Medicine Trilogy. We have jumped back several generations to the first McCaskill to immigrate from Scotland to Montana with a friend. The story begins in the hold of an steamship amid single males in the forward steerage compartment of the ship where they are packed in little better than cattle. We follow the pair across America by train, stage coach, and freighter wagon. What follows is the story of how two 19-year-olds who emigrated from Scotland homesteaded in Northern Montana and helped found a nation. Had I known this book should have come first. It will take longer to read than the book’s 373 pages would first suggest as a lot happens in these pages as they tell the decades of a community’s life. Ivan Doig’s turns of phrase will give you pause to stop and think, “What did he just say?”.

SPOILERS FOLLOW

This book 2 in the series is narrated and tells the story of Jick’s, of books 1 & 3, grandfather. It explains how the man Angus, fell in love with a woman who became the mother of Jick’s father’s wife by another man. Why that grandmother returned to Scotland when her husband died. Marrying your best friend’s sister leads to complications when that relationship and business partnership sours. All three books examine the often inharmonious relationships between fathers and sons.

A dissertation on farming.

My reading brings to mind the precarious nature of farm life. There is Davie, the young lad who gets thrown from his horse and dragged by a boot caught in the stirrups under the animal’s heels and survives to be maimed for life. Or Barclay who drowns with Angus’ old horse for similar reasons. The National Forest that gets imposed on the region restricting the sheep-herder’s grazing rights. [Think Brokeback Mountain and Annie Proulx.] The plus side being employment for Varick and a stop to the herds of cattle the local conglomerate was sneaking onto those grasslands. The hundreds of thousands of (home)steaders who settled on marginal land and were starved out when the drought years came. Read Steinbeck. The hot dry summers when grazing land was sparse and the following long cold deep winter when feed was scarce for sheep and cattle alike that died of starvation and exposure. The crash of prices when the War ended and the later depression years.

The Raven Boys

Made it fifty pages into this book before I bogged down. The writing style is reminiscent of a newspaper report and the author seems to lack any sense of tense for the verbs she uses making for reading discomfort. The subject matter is fantasy and ESP but the writing style serves to destroy the reader’s suspension of disbelief and therefore fails to draw one in .

Ride with me Mariah Montana

In book 3 of the Two Medicine Trilogy fifty years have passed. Jick has been married, divorced and Marcella, his second wife has died of cancer. Their farm is being run by a younger couple and Jick in his Winnebago is setting out on travels with his middle-aged newspaper photographer daughter and the reporter husband she divorced. We learn the details by means of Jick’s memory flashbacks. This is a good read but not as engaging as book one in the series.

Stranger at Sunset

This is a requested review of a freebie described as  a psychological mystery/thriller, not my normal genre. The book is well-edited often the bane of e-books that were OCR-scanned and/or self-published. From the elaborate descriptions of both men’s and women’s bodies and the mentions of sex the author’s usual concentration on writing erotica is apparent. The prologue has a voyeur see what appears to be a body drop from  a balcony into the sea but the voyeur with his binos is more interested in the fact that the woman on the balcony is naked. As the story unfolds the mystery seems to be who gets killed and who is walking around sans attire thinking her suite is private. Later the question becomes will she get away with it. There are a few awkward turns of phrase in this book but it is better written than most I’ve read lately. If you like the genre you should enjoy this read.

The Moon is Down

We’ve crossed the Atlantic and the action of this piece takes place in Europe in an unnamed country invaded by a superior opposing force. The novella is totally out of touch with the other short novels set among paisanos in Southern California. What it shows is the means a conquered people use to resist their captors. The culminating scene in which sticks of dynamite dropped bundled with bars of chocolate blow up rail lines and other key points while the town leaders are lined up to be shot figures in a famous movie.

The Red Pony

Steinbeck’s is no fairy tale world. His stories report the harsh realities of life where happily ever after rarely exists in the lives of his characters. Farm boys see hogs slaughtered, animals give birth, get sick and die. Discipline is harsh and obedience expected without question. There’s an episodic feel to this novel, the common theme of the vignettes being 10-year-old Jody’s discovery that adults are not perfect infallible beings. One is left wishing Steinbeck had written more.

The Pearl

A Steinbeck novella set among simple Mexican divers who seek for pearls while diving for oysters. A pearl is the oyster’s reaction to the discomfort caused by a grain of sand inside their shell. The peasant fishers react in similar fashion to the vicissitudes of their lives. When the young pearl fisher discovers a magnificent pearl all the powers that be seem poised to cheat and rob him of the rewards of his discovery. His greatest success becomes his greatest tragedy, one of Shakespearian proportions.

Tortilla Flat

The title seems a play on words a tortilla being Spanish flat bread the flats in question being the two houses Danny inherits from his grandfather. Danny is a paisano, a mongrel Spanish peasant of dubious parentage. There are no good guys here, ever it is a matter of the level of larceny. Money, should any of these characters acquire it burns a hole until it can be spent on alcohol, wine being the poison of choice. Anything not nailed down is fair game. Only the rich can afford a conscience. Steinbeck seems to have a unique sympathy for the mentality of the people about whom he writes. I would not call these people downtrodden for aside from their addictions they have chosen the lifestyle they lead and wouldn’t be happy living any other way.