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| 2007-07-03 | 0679740678 | The Man in the High Castle | Dick, Philip K. | | | | Apparently this book, while not the first instance ever of alternate historical fiction, was one of the first to sell well. I came across it after having read Fatherland by Robert Harris and searching for more such fiction. Both Harris's and Dick's books contemplate alternate histories in which the Nazis won WWII. In the former, the US stayed out of the war and retained its independence; in Dick's FDR is assassinated early in his term, leaving the country in the throes of the Great Depression and leading to defeat in WWII by Nazi Germany and Japan, who divide America between them. For whatever reason these stories of what might have been interest me, and Dick heightens his readers' interest by including another alternate history novel within his own alternate history novel. That novel within a novel, entitled The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, details a world in which Germany and Japan lost WWII, but that world is not our world. It is Grasshopper's author after whom Dick's novel is named, and the novel ends in an encounter with that author in which what is real and what is fiction come into question. The only other work of Dick's with which I'm familiar so far is A Scanner Darkly, the film based on his novel, another work in which what is real is not easy to discern. | | 2007-07-01 | 038505419X | Advise and Consent | Drury, Allen | | | | Advise and Consent I heard of in a review of Fellow Travelers, and so, having just read the latter, I was intrigued enough also to read the former. The books share similarities, both being heavily about Washington politics and the 1950s fear that the twin evils of Communism and homosexuality would destroy America, but, as is natural for two books whose writing is separated by almost 50 years, they are different as well. Fellow Travelers I could not put down, caught up in the story and wanting to know what happens next; Advise and Consent I almost stopped reading because its first section ("Bob Munson's book"), the introduction to Washington wheeling and dealing, just bored me. Knowing part of what would happen later in the book, I plodded forward, and, luckily, sometime in the second section ("Seab Cooley's book") and throughout the third part ("Brigham Anderson's book") I was as caught up by the story as I'd been in Fellow Travelers. A word of warning, however, is that the final parts of the book ("Orrin Knox's book" and following) include page after page which, had I been Drury's editor, I would have urged him just to drop.
Advise and Consent's primary focus is the machinations surrounding the confirmation of a proposed Secretary of State, Bob Leffingwell, unlike Fellow Travelers's focus on witch hunts for Communists and homosexuals. During his confirmation hearings, Leffingwell is accused by a witness of having been part of a Communist cell back in his college days. He denies it, but is he lying? The good upstanding senior Senator from Utah, Brigham Anderson, finds out that he is, but being an honorable man, Anderson gives the President a chance to withdraw the nomination, a bad call on Anderson's part since the President in turns comes across some dirty laundry from Anderson's past and uses it to destroy him.
What was the dirty laundry on Anderson? Apparently the good Mormon, now married with a child, had a homosexual love affair in Honolulu after having served his country in WWII. Advise and Consent, written in the 50s, cannot mention directly, however, the love that dare not speak its name. The Senator who is the President's henchman doesn't accuse Anderson of being a homosexual (the word never even appears in the book), saying instead only that Anderson is "morally unfit." The photo that tipped Anderson's opponents off to his gay love affair is not anything lewd, in one Senator's words, "innocent-appearing," although it bears a gaydar-alerting inscription.
Although Anderson meets the fate that befalls many pre-Stonewall homosexuals in American literature (it can't be too much of a spoiler to reveal he kills himself rather than let disgrace befall him and his family), I was surprised by the amount of sympathy Anderson's senatorial friends showed him, both before and after his suicide. Knowing the allegations against him and that, in Anderson's words, "they may be" true, his friends still vow to support him, and after his death they want to avenge his honor. I was also surprised by Drury's seemingly sympathetic view of homosexuality. In one passage, he has Anderson reflecting on his life and thinking that "he was a good father, a good [...] husband, a good servant, a good Senator, and a good man; and central to all this, in a way he understood thoroughly in his own nature, was the episode in Honolulu." Perhaps not such a radical message only ten years before Stonewall, but not one I expected to find in a book published in 1959.
Read what I thought about Otto Preminger's 1962 film version of this book. | | 2007-06-18 | 0375423486 | Fellow Travelers | Mallon, Thomas | | | | I'd never heard of Thomas Mallon before hearing about this book, one that apparently fits in with Mallon's other works of historical fiction, in which he sets a story he's created amongst actual events. In this case the story is a gay love story of sorts, and it's set in 1950s Washington in the midst of McCarthyism at its height. The book's title, Fellow Travelers, is a term often applied to Communist sympathizers, who were of course Joe McCarthy's primary target, but in this case the term applies more to the novel's protagonist, Hawkins Fuller, a WASPy State Department employee, and his Irish Catholic congressional staffer lover Tim Laughlin, examples of a secondary target of McCarthy's. Mallon does a good job of setting the tone of early 1950s America, and his characters are conveniently but realistically placed to position us amongst the players in the politics of the Army/McCarthy Hearings and subsequent events. I was quickly engrossed by the story, feeling sympathy primarily for Laughlin because of his conflictedness over his Catholicism and his growing love for Fuller. The last third of the novel, after the main activity both with McCarthy's hearings and between Laughlin and Fuller had subsided, I found less compelling, but even so, by the end of the novel I had some sympathy also for Fuller, a product of his culture and times. | | 2007-04-19 | 0807407488 | Aleph Isn't Enough: Hebrew for Adults (Book 2) | Motzkin, Linda | HEB101 | | | This is the second book used in the Hebrew class I'm taking. We don't use it until April 19th. I'll write more about it then. | | 2007-04-19 | 965403106X | Darkonim 1 | Kroin, Uri and Dolly | HEB101 | | | This is the third book for the Hebrew class I'm taking. This one focuses on modern Hebrew. We don't use it until April 19th, so I'll write more about it after that. | | 2007-04-01 | 0451412133 | The Old Contempibles | Grimes, Martha | | | | In Grimes eleventh Richard Jury novel, Jury takes getting attached to a figure involved in the case to the ultimate degree, falling in love with and intending to propose marriage to her before she dies. Grimes has her latest versions of her usual strong-headed independent children in this book, but it's still enjoyable. The ending has very strong echoes of a certain Agatha Christie novel set on a train. | | 2007-03-27 | 0807407267 | Aleph Isn't Tough: An Introduction to Hebrew for Adults, Book 1 | Motzkin, Linda | HEB101 | | | This is the first book for the Hebrew class I'm taking. It focuses on teaching us the Hebrew alefbet, but instead of doing it in order of the alefbet (Alef, Bet, Gimmel, ...), it does so by groups of sounds, for example, starting with Bet, Shin, Tav for consonants and Patach and Kamatz for vowels. The book also includes some basic Hebrew roots and vocabulary words. The back of the book has nice reference charts listing all the letters in typeface, block writing and script (cursive) writing. We're using another book later in the quarter to learn some conversational phrases in modern Hebrew. | | 2007-03-27 | 0451412079 | The Old Silent | Grimes, Martha | | | | Grimes' tenth Richard Jury book has the twist that Jury watches the murder being committed. | | 2007-03-25 | 0816638624 | A Single Man | Isherwood, Christopher | | | | A Single Man is the story of a man over a single day, from the moment he wakes up to his last moments of consciousness that night. Over the course of that day we're privy to all that man's thoughts and actions. Isherwood shows how much of our ordinary lives are based on acting and performing for one another, hiding our true thoughts and feelings, self-censoring in order to get along. It's amazing how well we get to know the protagonist of this book just from a day in his life. For me the book was also interesting as a snapshot of what life in Southern California in the early 60s was like, especially for gay men. | | 2007-03-18 | 0316328898 | The Five Bells and Bladebone | Grimes, Martha | | | | Grimes' ninth Richard Jury book | |
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