Walking on the Moon

Amity Shales’s The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression takes a critical look at the handling of the Depression by Roosevelt.  Assessing Roosevelt’s economic policy from the a laissez-faire position is timely, and much in vogue, but such an analysis runs counter to the conventional narrative of Roosevelt’s presidency.  It needs to be exemplary to be heard at all, and this work isn’t quite up to that level.

There are ideas worth hearing here, though.  Hoover and Roosevelt both misstepped on what we know to be fundamental economic principals now, including freeing up the money supply in a recession, and made good faith efforts to get people working again through public works. The difference between the two was the extent to which Roosevelt was willing to push his agenda.  Questions about how far he was willing to push constitutional limits of federal power and trade collective versus property rights are interesting to hash out.  It’s also important to try to assess the effectiveness of those actions – moral or immoral.

As a collection of facts and context, The Forgotten Man is fairly sound, and though Shales seems to be sympathetic to the property rights side of the arguments, there seems to be major hunks missing or taken on faith.  I know this is not an economics text or paper, but I would prefer more concrete facts on the table regarding outcomes.

Similarly, it would be helpful to understand the key personalities more clearly so that their decisions are more fathomable.  Arguments about the defensibility of these actions must have come from these actors, and understanding their motivations and justifications is of considerable interest.  Shales goes more for breadth than depth here, bringing many different players on stage rather than deeply analyzing a few.

The choices of the players who get the focus is pretty unusual.  There’s a running narrative thread centered on Wendell Willkie who opposes Roosevelt in the 1940 election.  Willkie seems to be an interesting figure, from roots in the power utility to the sorts of changes that make a man a political contender, but as a laissez-faire standard bearer he seems to lack conviction and success.  There’s also a sizeable amout of aside time spent on William Wilson, one of the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous.  Again, an interesting figure, but strangely out of place in an economic story.

Now, perhaps I am misreading Shales intent.  Perhaps she intended this as a broad history of this period.  If so, her sweep seems to stick on a few areas; if not there’s many a quirky point that doesn’t seem to belong.

As I say, there are many interesting points made in the work.  I definitely learned things reading it, but, for me, it raises more questions than answers.

After my recent good experience with Chandler, it seemed like another noir classic was worth a look.  And so we come to Hammett.

You can’t mistake Hammett for Chandler.  Hammett’s prose is more pedestrian and not inclined to the poetic – even the poetry of a tough guy in the rough city.  After the joy of finding Chandler, it was something of a disappointment to find that Hammett was something else entirely.  The disappointment wore off pretty quickly as I discovered the joys of Hammett.

Hammett is more grounded in the characters than in the literature.  His Sam Spade is a much more flawed character than Chandler’s Marlowe.  One gets the impression that at his core Marlowe’s a Boy Scout; no one gets that impression about Spade.  Spade’s a tough guy to get along with, and not always because there’s some principle at stake.  Sometimes Spade is just ornery.  You get the impression people are surprised when Spade does the right thing; you also get the impression that they’re surprised often.

It doesn’t help his likeability that my 21st century eyes see a pretty chauvinist guy.  I understand the differences of the times, but even accounting for that, Spade views women mostly as sex objects, and not often ones he enjoys being around.  He’s a well enough drawn character that one can dislike him honestly.  I don’t think I’d enjoy hanging out with him, but I believe him.

Some of the other characters are somewhat broad, but never overly so.  No one’s completely what they seem, and the plot twists a great deal more than The Big Sleep.  I definitely had to pay more attention to who was doing what to whom in Falcon.

Overall I enjoyed The Maltese Falcon quite a bit, but it was much less of a transcendent experience than The Big Sleep. An awful lot of this discussion has been comparing Falcon to Sleep, and that’s not particularly fair.  They’re different in focus and perhaps in goals.  I obviously incline toward Sleep‘s rich language and sense of place, but Falcon‘s unflinchingly real lead character and attention to plot is also rewarding.  Both are worth one’s time.

Recommended.

Yep, back to the Napoleonic Wars, with Bernard Cornwell.  It’s been a while since I’ve checked in with Sharpe and the boys, and honestly, they seem to have gotten a little whinier than I remember.  Sharpe’s always been worried about his fate and his love life, but I seem to recall more of this having been resolved last time.  This all felt more like a replay than new worries.

Overall this was much more like a Twilight book than I was expecting. Both of our leading men spend a lot of time weighing their motives in trying to join a Forlorn Hope, and primary meaning aside, it was rather more introspective than I wanted, and their concerns had been played before.

As much as I liked the Twilight series, I prefer my men of action to brood less and fight more.  Hopefully this was just a brief slacking of the action.  We did learn a bunch about siege warfare, though.

I’ve read a bunch of these, and I’ll probably keep doing so, even if a fair number of the stories in each are somewhat predictable formula bits, or somewhat over-engineered literary writing.  There’s always a gem or two in here.

I rather liked Galgut’s “The Lover,” which starts without soul and slowly won me over, and Rash’s “Into The Gorge,” which was solid and moving.  Alice Monroe and Annie Proulx are here again, turning in solid work, though I found Proulx’s “Them Old Country Songs” covered ground she’d covered better before.  Monroe’s “Some Women” was a really nice bit of work.  Probably my favorite was Ladsun’s “Oh, Death,” which manages to be elegiac without being overly sad.

Others will find different gold, I’m sure, but there is something to like in here if you’re interested in looking.

Recommended.

If you thought the first three books of Twilight were slow and melodramatic, Breaking Dawn is your cure.

We’re back in Stephenie Meyer’s world of vampires and werewolves, and the existing characters and histories from the earlier novels are all in place.  Right from the beginning, though, things happen much faster here than any earlier Twilight novel.  Meyer makes things happen fast without making them seem rushed, which is quite an achievement, given all that goes on.  I don’t want to give anything away, but character’s fates are decided in ways that are satisfying and logical – and often very funny.

Overall, it’s a satisfying conclusion to a fun series.  Even if you found the other books slow, you might enjoy this.

Strongly Recommended.

Raymond Chandler is one of those authors who you often hear transcends his genre; he writes mysteries, but is (today)well regarded by most readers.  I’m a man who likes genre fiction, so the genre thing isn’t really off-putting to me.  And yet, it’s taken me this long to read any Chandler.

That’s a mistake I regret.  It’s sad to have lived this long without meeting Chandler’s Philip Marlowe in the flesh before.

The Big Sleep is an impressive display of writing on many levels.  First is Chandler’s unique prose style.  Even if you’ve never read Chandler, you’ve heard echos of this; everyone writing a tough-guy spoof or a noir mystery has taken a swing at it.  Reading the original tells you why this voice has become so universally recognized.  Descriptions are minimal and impressionistic, and filled out with colloquialisms and apt but unexpected similies.  Anyone who’s ever read a mystery that’s vaguely noir recognizes the formula, but watching Chandler execute it is the difference between seeing U2 in a club and hearing a tribute band on the radio.

His prose is so minimalist and powerful that even with the concentrated text, all the images necessary to follow the story are tattooed into your mind’s eye.  With each word condensed to its most potent form, it would be easy to lose important detail, but I never needed to fill in any blanks here.

The use of the 1930’s slang could be distracting and confusing, but  the clear storytelling somehow makes the specific meaning of any slang unimportant.  Again, it shows how well constructed the prose is – the bits of verisimilitude don’t interfere with the meaning.  This frees the reader to enjoy the slang of a bygone era without reservation, and it is a source of great joy.  I hope that people really did talk that way in the 30’s.

There’s plenty of what modern readers would call period detail that’s just part of the story here.  I particularly enjoyed how Marlowe often comments about tough guys arranging themselves the same way as gangsters in the movies do.

Finally, people tend to think of noir dramas as taking place in generic dark cities – again the influence of the movies.  The Big Sleep is set in Los Angeles – west LA and Hollywood, really – and there’s never any doubt about it.  That’s where I live these days, and following Marlowe around my environs time-shifted 80 years gives the story a ghostly undercurrent.  I recognize settings despite the maze of time between me and Marlowe.  Even if you’ve never been to LA, that feeling of place comes through clearly.

There’s a mystery in here, too, if that’s your thing, and from what I can tell, a good one.  I won’t remember the details of the clues or when Marlowe figured what out for very long, but I’ll always remember The Big Sleep.

Strongly Recommended.

And so I find myself in Forks, again.

Eclipse is the third book of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series, and she continues to write well.  Part of the success in sustaining the quality is that she does seem to be telling one story with several arcs to it.

Here in the third book, the consequences of Bella’s decisions and mistakes begin to catch up with her.  Edward and Jacob the werewolf are fleshed out some more, and the plot moves forward in both drama and melodrama. We also get some interesting lessons in the history of vampirism and learn the secret origins of more of the Cullen family.  Everyone’s world is changing as they see their prejudices challenged, and feel the future coming to meet them.

I don’t want to get bogged down in the details of plot, and the writing style is the same.  If you like Twilight, you’ll enjoy this.

Strongly recommended.

There’s a whole lotta vampires around here lately.  (Not to mention the alternate history.)

Seth Grahame-Smith’s Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is a pastiche of Lincoln biographies (practically a genre of history unto themselves) and horror films, in the vein of the same author’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. It works better than it has a right to, really, and as long as one doesn’t think about it too hard, it’s a good time.

Grahame-Smith writes a gripping yarn well, and is adept at aping the genre conventions of both sides of his literary coin. Several chapter transitions seem taken directly from recent Lincoln bios, and the action is all fun and cinematic.  If you know who these historical figures are, it’s fun to see how Grahame-Smith recasts them.  If you’ve never heard of them, you still get a good story of war against vampires.

In this world, vampires are allied with the South for the access to food that slavery brings them.  Lincoln’s prosecution of the Civil War is not so much to preserve the Union as to stamp out the vampires. And therein lies the part of the book that’s problematical.

Certainly the nation’s motivations in the Civil War were complex and not always on the high road; more to the point, Lincoln’s own motivations were never cut and dried.  However, making actual inhuman monsters into the cause of Civil War cheapens the conflict a little more than I’d like for such a light book.  Furthermore, with the introduction of a national conspiracy of “good” vampires (called “the Union”), humans in general are made bit players in the struggle.

Now, there is something conceptually nice about tying slavery to vampirism.  It’s difficult to take an apologist for actual, actual, actual vampires seriously and one should consider slavery apologists in the same vein.  And yet, I still think it simplifies the struggle more than it should.

Now, I have a bad tendency to over analyze, well, everything.  I honestly don’t think that Vampire Hunter stands up to such scrutiny, but I don’t think it’s intended to.  Read as a rip-roaring vampire yarn with occasional winks and nods to our history, it’s a very good time, so I encourage you to read it that way.

Recommended.

Nikola Tesla is an interesting character and a brilliant guy who made significant contributions to early electrical engineering.  A brilliant showman, capable of dramatic demonstrations of the principles he discovered, he was also eccentric to the point of compulsion and naive in business to the point of incompetence.  This is a fellow who deserves a compelling biography.  Sadly, Margaret Cheney’s Man Out Of Time isn’t it.

To be fair, it seems that objective information about Tesla is thin on the ground.  He spent a fair amount of his life in obscurity and without close friends or relatives, which makes first hand accounts difficult to come by.  Piecing together the life of such a unique individual under those constraints certainly seems daunting.

Even given the problems, Cheney comes off much more as a cheerleader than a scholar.  She leans heavily on the collections of the Tesla museum and one other biographer.  More distressingly, the technical assessments of Tesla’s work seem to come primarily from folks who are willing to give him every benefit of the doubt.  Tesla is one of those people who have been overlooked by the scientific community and have attracted a cult of true believers who are vocal in trying to get his legacy restored.  One often gets the feeling that they’re overcorrecting.

Now, I may be biased toward underselling Tesla’s achievements, but one way or another he is certainly someone who polarizes (ha, ha) opinion among technical people. To write a biography and not mention the strong differences of opinion seems disingenuous.

Overall this did more to pique my curiosity about Tesla than to enlighten me.

I don’t have a whole lot to say about New Moon, the second book in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga, that I didn’t say about Twilight.

New Moon explores the world of Twilight more. We find out more about the balance of power in the town where the main characters live and we learn a little more about other vampires.  We get to know the third member of the saga’s love triangle, Jacob the werewolf.

And we get to suffer with Bella as she deals with the stresses being in love with an immortal seventeen year old.

Meyer does a good job balancing it all out, and keeping the pages turning, but it’s a hard ride for Bella. Meyer makes the reader sympathize with her, which is to say you relive all the times you broke up with a vampire.  The whole thing was draining for me, but in a good way.

If you liked Twilight, and I did, New Moon has a lot of the same things going for it, without anything getting stale.

Strongly recommended.