A Son at the Front (1923) By Edith Wharton

 

I have never read anything by Edith Wharton before, even though her Age of Innocence book won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1921, the first woman author to be so honored. I always considered her just another “gilded age” writer, along with F. Scott Fitzgerald. How wrong I was.

This week I read her 1923 novel A Son at the Front, a title borrowed from the parents of soldiers in the first World War. Wharton lived in Paris throughout the War.

A focal point of the story is a young man named George, his parents are Americans, but he was born while they were in France making him a French national subject to the French military mobilization guidelines even though everyone considers him to be an American.

His father John Campton is a successful portrait artist who went to Paris along with his wife Julia (because do not all artists end up in Paris?). His socialite mother tired of being an artist’s wife, divorced him, and married Anderson Brant, an extremely rich banker.

Campton has spent much of his life bitter that George as a child lived with his mother and her new husband. To put it mildly he hates Brant for being able to provide George with every material thing and all the connections he needs.

Much of the storyline deals with the dynamic between Campton and Brant, who begin the story conspiring, each in his own way, to keep George out of the military. George is indifferent to the service though his thoughts on the “war to end all wars” evolves during the war and he enlists. Over the course of the book Campton and Brant will learn they each care only for George and learn to respect each other for the roles they play in his life. And although they want to protect him realize that he has a right to make his own decisions – a point his mother never concedes.

There are many other characters entailed in this story, all interesting subplots, weaving them together is done masterfully.

Recommendation:  Highly Recommended, the book is pure genius.

Double Star (1956) By Robert Heinlein

 

You know, Science Fiction written in the 1950s can be quite fun. Case in point, Double Star by Robert Heinlein which was published in 1956.  The novel is contemporary to The Martian Chronicles, predates-the original Star Trek television series, and is what seems like “light years” ahead of Star Wars.

As I read it in 2023 it is difficult to discern whether it was knowingly comic in parts or if that developed as the novel has aged, regardless it is quite funny poking at events “back then” that are still entirely relevant today.

The big picture of the story concerns the internal/external politics of The Empire, set in intergalactic space (or what was known at the time mainly Earth, Mars, Venus, Saturn). The government is headquartered at Batavia, on the Earth’s moon.  It operates in a parliamentary form of government, with multiple representatives from various planets, and more divisions within. The two major parties are the Expansionists -- think America’s manifest destiny history; and the Humanity Party, the more isolationist one.  The Humanity Party currently holds the Supreme Minister (prime minister) slot.  An election is coming up however and John Bonforte, a former Expansionist Supreme Minister, is thought to be the likely winner.  To block that, allies of the Humanity Party have secretly kidnapped Bonforte and are holding him captive until after the election so that he can’t campaign.  In response, Bonforte’s team hires an actor named Lorenzo Smyth to impersonate him on the campaign trail and also at an upcoming diplomatic meeting on Mars.  They have only days to pull this off.

One of the more humorous parts of the book is when Bonforte’s team have to stop for a phone book to try to find an address, before they head back from Mars.  Opposition research is done using the Encyclopedia Batavia – what older people reading this will recognize as the Encyclopedia Britanica.

Bottom line: it’s a fun read.

Eight Months in Illinois (1843) By William Oliver

 

A few weeks ago, I took a ride in the country, a favorite pastime I inherited from both my mother and father. Ever since retiring to southern Illinois, I have been putting the miles on the car just driving around. As a history buff I’ve long noted Illinois was not settled from Chicago and then southward, but in deep southern Illinois and then northward.

I set out for the town of Chester, Illinois in Randolph County on the Mississippi River. It is home to a Popeye The Sailor museum (the cartoon’s creator is from Chester). I also visited nearby Kaskaskia, named the territorial capitol of Illinois in 1809). Then on a recent trip to my local library, I came across a book titled Eight Months in Illinois by William Oliver. It is a “how-to” book on immigrating from Britain and Scotland to the U.S. where the Northwest territories had recently been opened up to settlement.

Oliver traveled to Illinois for his research and published it in 1843 when he returned to Scotland. He was in Illinois for eight months at Kaskaskia unable to travel further north because ice on the Mississippi River blocked progress. He spent this time gathering first person (settler/pioneer) narratives and observations on agricultural crops that did well, hunting and fishing opportunities, the burgeoning development of social and cultural institutions. It includes a fascinatingly detailed account of how one bought land to settle on, how townships with future school districts set aside were formed and how it all would be financed.

Recommendation:  Good stuff if you are a history buff.

Related posts:

The Ohio River and the American Experience (1991)

https://tedrakebookblog.blogspot.com/2019/10/always-river-ohio-river-and-american.html

Afloat on the Ohio (1897)

https://tedrakebookblog.blogspot.com/2015/08/afloat-on-ohio-1897-by-reuben-gold.html

SAVED: A War Reporter's Mission to Make It Home (2023) By Benjamin Hall

 

Recently I received the book SAVED as a gift from my dear friend Angela.  While not my usual kind of read, it is immensely compelling.  It is not for the squeamish.

The book is a memoir by Benjamin Hall, a young man who worked as a war correspondent across the globe, a dangerous occupation.  Each assignment takes a toll on you when you are single, an even higher toll when you are married with three children. It is one thing to routinely put your life in harm’s way, quite another to put your future with your family on the line.  But that is what happened in February of 2022 when Russia invaded the Ukraine.  Hall volunteered to report from the frontlines where on March 14^th his life would change forever when the car he and his crew were in was struck by a Russian bomb.  He was the only survivor, using “survivor” as a term meaning he did not die.

The story follows the extracting of Hall from the immediate battlefield to a hospital in Kyiv which was actively being bombed at the time, electricity was sporadic, and a 72-hour curfew was in place.  He would lose one leg, and most of the other.  He had burns over 90% of his body, and multiple major “other” problems.  Doctors quickly determined they were not equipped to provide the immediate care he needed.  In a fascinating action sequence worthy of an espionage thriller, he is put on a train headed for Poland, stopped before the border and “smuggled” across the line where a helicopter was sent to convey him to an airport and then on to Landstuhl, the American military hospital in Germany.  From there to a stop over at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington DC, and then transferred to Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas for recovery and rehab.

If one was horrified by the battlefield chapter, the detailed description of his medical rehab is even more harrowing.  Hall survives through sheer willpower, faith, an endless desire to see his family, and is helped by a huge network of people across the globe, from medical staff, war correspondent colleagues, with political and medical assistance from several places, veteran groups and importantly with strings pulled by his employer. The cooperation (some official, some not) is an amazing tale.

I hesitate to mention this, but credit must be given where it is due:  his employer is Fox News (the Network of Lies).  They, as friends and colleagues, were there for him every step of the way, including extracting him from the Ukraine, and arranging for him to be served by U.S. military hospitals.  Hall heaps praise on Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott who was/is at the center of the election lies scandals which cost Fox $787.5 million in a defamation lawsuit a couple of weeks ago.

Recommendation:  Get over your justified distaste for Fox, this is a very good book.

Code Talker (2011) By Chester Nez, with Judith Schiess Avila

 

Non-fiction: The author of Code Talker is Chester Nez, a Native American who was born and raised on the Navajo reservation in the Four Corners region (AZ, NM, CO, UT). As such, he was a citizen of the United States, yet not allowed to vote until 1948 due to state-enacted voting restrictions (sound familiar?).  

Like many Americans, Nez enlisted in the Marines after the attack on Pearl Harbor (ironic when one considers he grew up in the desert).  As history now knows, Nez was one of the original 30 “Code Talkers” – Marines who were fluent in speaking Navajo, a language barely used on the reservations anymore, and completely unknown in Japan and the rest of the world.  They were charged with developing a secret code in the Navajo language for use in battlefield radio transmissions.  Their code would be successfully field tested in the battle for Guadalcanal and remain in use, never broken, throughout the remainder of the war. Their code, and their involvement in it, would be classified until 1968 -- by which time many of them had passed away – long before being publicly honored or even acknowledged.

This memoir has several interesting storylines, not the least of which is growing up in the reservation/checkerboard culture, how the Native religions interplayed with one’s world view, particularly as it pertains to death, and includes how the Code Talkers (420 by the end of the war) faired after the war.

The now declassified code itself, and how it was developed is a completely interesting story.  It details how the little-known Navajo language, without words for such things as battleship and aircraft carrier, was updated, then embedded in a secret code.

Giving appropriate credit.  Judith Schiess Avila interviewed Chester Nez for what was to be a biography.  Since most of the narrative involves Nez telling his story, she changed the format to that of a memoir.  Crediting Nez as the author of his story.   

Recommendation:  Yes. Not just for history buffs.

Herland (1915) and With Her in Ourland (1916) By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

 

Charlotte Perkins Gilman is an author I was completely unfamiliar with until I picked up an 833-page collection of her works published in 2022 by the not-for-profit Library of America. Gilman (1860 – 1935) is often categorized as an “utopian feminist” writer.  She’s an excellent read.

The LOA collection contains most of her novels, short stories, and essays. Her works remain thought provoking today, and were clearly revolutionary when written. At times her works crossed over to science fiction. Finding a publisher for Gilman’s early works was difficult.  Many appeared first in a magazine Gilman founded expressly to bring them to print.

The novel Herland commences when three adventure seeking men go exploring in what is presumably the Amazon basin.  On the trip they hear about a lost civilization run by women, but they can’t find it.  They dubbed it Herland and return a year later determined to find it, and do.  They are captured and at first held under house arrest.  The story of how these very different men (one a chauvinist, another a “good” guy, and the third a sociologist) get along in a matriarchal environment is an intriquing analysis.

They eventually learn from their captors that 2,000 years ago while all the men were off on their nonstop warfare, a catastrophic geological event occurred causing their homeland to be cut-off from the rest of the world (think Journey to the Center of the Earth without the dinosaurs). Left to themselves, the women create a utopian society without warfare, famine, disease and even learn how to reproduce without men.

Eventually Van, the sociologist who narrates much of the book, will pair with a studious woman named Ellador.  The leaders of Herland agree to help him and her get to the outside world with the stipulation they must never reveal Herland’s location.

Gilman’s next novel With Her in Ourland is a sequel detailing Ellador’s trip to the outside world. With charm and clearly defined logic, Ellador discovers the patriarchal political and religious worlds are a poorly run disaster.  Her commentary is biting and on target. Van tries to justify the actions of the world but must acknowledge her superior arguments.

Gilman’s writing in parts is compelling, and in its intensity reminds me of Ayn Rand’s book Atlas Shrugged, though while their intensity is similar, their political ideology is not even remotely similar … other than acknowledging that “mankind” has made a mess of everything.

In addition to these two novels, the LOA collection includes:

·        27 short stories, with both the original of Gilman’s classic The Yellow Wallpaper and also its heavily edited (sanitized) version published without her approval of the edits.

·        over 100 poems; and

·        17 short stories written by Gilman in “the style of other authors” including Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott, Charles Dickens, and Nathaniel Hawthorne.  These are excellent.

One final interesting thing about Gilman:  she is a niece of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of the American literary classic Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Recommendation:  Yes, all of it.

Nights of Plague (Turkish 2021, English 2022) By Orhan Pamuk

 

I am a big fan of Turkish author Orhan Pamuk, a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. I’ve just finished reading his latest novel Nights of Plague, an English translation of which was published at the end of 2022.

Nights of Plague is fiction, very thinly disguised fiction.  Some names and places have been changed to “protect the innocent,” though there aren’t many of those to worry about. It is set in 1901 during an outbreak of the plague on the island of Mingheria, a state of the Ottoman Empire which has already entered its final decades. Mingheria, like many islands in the Eastern Mediterranean, has a population which is nearly evenly split between Greek Christians and Muslims who do not like or even trust each other.  That Mingheria looks and sounds like Cyprus and/or Crete, is a part of the thinly disguised fiction.  

The novel has a complicated plot, or should I say plots. Pamuk tells his story from the perspective of a historian researching the plague.  His primary source materials are the letters written by Princess Pakize (the daughter of the deposed Sultan, and niece of the current Sultan) to her sister.  Princess Pakize is married of to a doctor, an arranged marriage that actually works out well. He is what we today would refer to as an epidemiologist.  The Sultan sends them off to Hong Kong, to study the plague outbreak there. Once onboard ship however they are rerouted to Mingheria where the Sultan’s chief epidemiologist (a Christian) has just been murdered. The Princess and her doctor husband are protected by a bodyguard, “the Major,” who plays an outsized role in this story.

Pamuk continues the story splitting it into multiple plots.

First of course is the plague itself which has begun to spread wildly on the island as both Christians and Muslims routinely resist all efforts to quarantine.  The similarities between the spread of the plague in 1901 and the resistance to quarantine during the Covid pandemics in 2019 are real, as is the economic impact of both.  Keep in mind that Pamuk started this book in 2016, before the Covid pandemic was even known. 

Second, and vintage Pamuk, is the political intrigue taking place in the Sultan’s family, and the ever-worsening decline of the Ottoman Empire, as international powers prepare to move in for the “kill” enacted at the end of World War I.

And the third major plot is the murder mystery aspect of the story which remains just somewhat unresolved at the end of the book, without enough evidence to be certain. Pamuk’s references to the “Sherlock Holmes” method of solving mysteries are great, as is the teasing “Chapter 51” from Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo.

Recommendation:  Absolutely, though a knowledge of Ottoman and Turkish history is almost a requirement.