Review: Papa Hemingway

Papa Hemingway by A.E. Hotchner
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

This covers 1948 and 1961 during which time Ernest Hemingway drew in fellow author, editor and playwright A.E. Hotchner into his inner circle. They traveled together, including raucous and risky forays into the bull-fighting ferias> of Spain (once Hotchner even was goaded into acting as a matador in an actual bullfight), fishing the waters off Cuba Papa had prowled seeking U-boats, hunted in Idaho, ran with the bulls in Pamplona, and more. For fourteen years, Hotchner and Hemingway shared their thoughts and careers with Hotch acting as agent and representative. As Hemingway reminisced about his childhood, recalled the Paris literary scene of the twenties, and recounted the many real events that lay behind his fiction, including The Sun Also Rises, The Old Man and the Sea, and For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hotchner took it all down.

What may have made this book controversial at the time is the final act. This part seeks to unravel why Ernest Hemingway took his own life, shooting himself at his Idaho home while his wife Mary slept. Hotch blames growing depression over the realisation that the best days of his writing career had come to an end and bolsters this with noted conversations and a couple of previous suicide attempts. Signs such a personality disorder of undetermined cause and the toil of hospitalization on the independent, free spirit. Dismissed as part of the end of life delusions is FBi surveillance, which apparently was true, after all.

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Review: Scottie the Daughter of: The Life of Frances Scott Fitzgerald Lanahan Smith

Scottie the Daughter of: The Life of Frances Scott Fitzgerald Lanahan Smith by Eleanor Lanahan
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Living a life with an arc covering a childhood from the world-travelling largess of her parents in the 30s to burgeoning women's liberation movement to Democratic Party efforts leading up to the Reagan Era, Scottie Fitzgerald had a rich life worth documenting. I am not sure her daughter's scrapbook approach presents it completely enough. Largely told through excerpts of Scotties own start on an autobiography, correspondence, and other pieces this is a mix of voicings and feels to me at times more like the raw material for a biography rather than a biography itself. The author brings in around the life of her mother the arcs of many other family members, including her troubled siblings Jacky and Tim.

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Review: A Time to Betray: The Astonishing Double Life of a CIA Agent Inside the Revolutionary Guards of Iran

A Time to Betray: The Astonishing Double Life of a CIA Agent Inside the Revolutionary Guards of Iran by Reza Kahlili
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is narrated by Richard Allen who I really enjoyed narrating Uncle Tom's Cabin and I think he would do a great The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. He sounds to me like a West Indian background with a jovially expressive delivery that in this work at emotional parts and with Farsi words strikes me as distractingly mawkish, like having Jar Jar Binks handle the material.

As for the spy memoir itself, covering the 80s and the Iran-Iraq war, etc. it is a fascinating view into Iran-U.S. relations or lack of them as well as lack of understanding at the time. By necessity, this is an anonymized account with fake names, including that of the author. That means perhaps significant parts cannot be independently verified. Also, it convenient for the author to depict himself as jumping in as a spy for the CIA betraying his country with little struggle and, of course, no interest for money or less lofty goals. Perhaps that is true, I would think motivations would be more complex and even contradictory on some level.

Parts of the actual spycraft: code books, radios, letters, and losing tails is all fascinating. It is hard for me to believe his wife could be misled that his regular late night radio and headphones time was legit work for Iran's Revolutionary Guard where he worked as a computer specialist.

These interesting things came out of this to me:

1. The secret sale of arms to Iran despite a U.S. arms embargo to, hopefully, free hostages so close after revealing Iran's role in the 1983 Beirut barracks bombings and the belief Iran was behind the death of William Buckley really seemed outrageous and nonsensical at the time.

2. In context, but not explicitly stated here, it seems like the downing of Iran Air Flight 655 was part of a tit-for-tat escalation of actions between the U.S. and Iran.

3. This makes at least two Iranian spies that say Iran was involved in downing Pan Am 103 in revenge for Iran Air Flight 655.

4. On 23 August 2009, ex-CIA analyst, Robert Baer, claimed that the CIA had known throughout that the bombing of Flight 103 had been orchestrated by Iran, and that a secret dossier was to be presented as evidence in Abdelbaset al-Megrahi's final appeal which was to prove this, suggesting that the withdrawal of the appeal to allow release on compassionate grounds was encouraged to prevent this information from being presented in court. This author makes the same claim.

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Review: Detour from Normal

Detour from Normal by Ken Dickson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This was a very easy and fast read, probably because it is the author's first book and he reports directly, with some inclusions from his wife's journal. This is a memoir of the mania he fell into after some emergency surgery and the institutional life he led while it was sorted out. This is very interested for the perspective on life inside a psychiatric facility, the straightforward account of his own delusions, and the untangling of what happened to him including the not too uncommon side effects of drugs used in his medical treatment, including steroids. This can be a valuable read for those that treat the manic, including bipolar, either professionally or not as well as someone trying to make sense of their own past incidents. An important sub-plot is the damaging effects of lithium the author experienced which resonated with me on the subject of mental health pills causing their own damage as covered in other books I have read: Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America and even Blood Money: Modern Medicine's Abuse of Power.

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Review: The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave, Now an Inhabitant of Canada

The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave, Now an Inhabitant of Canada by Josiah Henson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Josiah Henson (June 15, 1789 – May 5, 1883) was born into slavery in Charles County, Maryland. He escaped to Upper Canada (now Ontario) in 1830, and founded a settlement and laborer's school for other fugitive slaves at Dawn, near Dresden in Kent County. This autobiography is believed to have inspired the title character of Uncle Tom's Cabin which regardless of the truth thereof, it seems to detract from both sides unecessarily. Uncle Tom's tragic tale to highlight the institutionalized violence of salvery is unlike in shape the story of triumph and success lived by Henson. As a matter of fact, I think the (justified) attention to his supposed inspired novel overshadows his actually lived life, suitable for treatment on the big screen, I think!

The biggest connection between "'Siah" and Uncle Tom is more piety than life story. Like Uncle Tom based his acceptance to subjugation on his Christian beliefs, so did Josiah in acting as factotum and agent for his overseers. Henson's reluctance to take an opportunity to escape even furthered the enslavement of some of his fellows and it was only after further injustices, paying for his own manumission, and the threat of being sold "down the river" (Uncle Tom's actual fate) prompted his escape to Canada, community-building, and even travels back to America to inspire others.

Because of the Maryland and Ontario, there is a supposed Uncle Tom's Cabin "Historic" Site in Ontario and in Maryland. I'd like to see a respect paid to this pioneer so that there was worth seen in a Josiah Henson Historic Site in both places, some day.

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Review: Miracles and Massacres: True and Untold Stories of the Making of America

Miracles and Massacres: True and Untold Stories of the Making of America by Glenn Beck
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I see Beck getting knocked about it for his novelization of history here - imagined conversations, characters, and events, etc. Really, this is just presenting to the public at an 8th Grade reading level some jazzy rendition of past events - not unlike a popular movie "based on actual events." Beck backs up his tales with a long list of books, online sources, magazine articles, encyclopedias, etc. He comes clean in the end notes on everywhere he colored outside the lines, especially where we want pretty far off reservation like his imagined actors in the My Lai telling. I don't really get any right-wing preaching here - this seems like a history buff acting out his favorite stories, even when they are America certainly not at its best. This includes covering Shay's Rebellion, The Barbary War against African Arab pirates, Wounded Knee, the mystery of Tokyo Rose, 9/11, and among the history lessons he taught me: vets against the man in the Battle of Athens, TN (1946).

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Review: Tories: Fighting for the King in America's First Civil War

Tories: Fighting for the King in America's First Civil War by Thomas B. Allen
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Thomas B. Allen casts the Revolutionary War as a savage and often deeply personal civil war, America's First. This is a history of a well-worn area, from another vantage point. Among the things I learned is that the Revolution produced one of the greatest and least known migrations in Western history. More than 80,000 Tories left America, most of them relocating to Canada for the same global politico-military reasons thousands of Acadians ("Cajuns") had been ousted.

Also, this lament by British colonel Campbell occupying Georgia, of potentially etymological interest, about “irregulars from the upper country [of Georgia] under the denomination of crackers, a race of men whose motions were too voluntary to be under restraint and whose scouting disposition [was] in quest of pillage.” The crackers, he reported, “found many excuses for going home to their plantations.”

This is one of many primary source quotations that illuminate this book.

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Review: Second Suns: Two Doctors and Their Amazing Quest to Restore Sight and Save Lives

Second Suns: Two Doctors and Their Amazing Quest to Restore Sight and Save Lives by David Oliver Relin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It is amazing to read of the superhuman abilities and generous souls owned by mountaineer eye doctors Sanduk Ruit and Geoffrey Tabin. They delivered world-class cataract removal and other procedures to remote, impoverished Nepal and built an organization that reached in North Korea (!), Africa, India, and even to the Aborigines of Australia. They seem like the closest thing to superheroes we have. I, of course, was reminded of Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, A Man Who Would Cure the World. Indeed, these skilled humanitarians run into Dr. Paul Farmer's efforts in Rwanda in the aftermath of internecine genocide there. Like him, they built their own supply chain, including Nepalese doctors and a Nepalese lens factory. This is an inspiring and humbling account of real, selfless heroes.

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Review: Clams in a Glass

Clams in a Glass by Zoogz Rift
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

ZR's autobiography is a 102-page, spiral-bound book written by ZR in the late 1980s called "Clams in a Glass" and in this edition contains a 1991 postscript. It is an excellent pairing with the 4-hour, 3 DVD-R biography of Zoogz Rift, along with interviews with his band: Richie Hass, Willie Lapin, Tom Brown, Arthur Barrow and others. It’s called ZOOGZ RIFT: THE FIRESIDE CHAT and covers his aborted wrestling world career and some other things more than the book, which goes more in depth on his struggle with his weight and the allure he felt toward survivalism and objectivism. Both works plot the role of dadaism in crafting his artistic vision, move to California, troubles with SST, and line-up changes. The book contains many picture, which are unfortunately blurry B&W repros. The book does have a lot of other delightful additions, like flyers, ads, lyrics, his provocative "dadagram" press releases, and a 1988 European tour diary. John Trubee is more of a presence in the book which is also a very detailed assessment of each album's recording and the detail of each line-up change.

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Review: Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto

Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto by Stewart Brand
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Stewart Brand is part of a cohort of greens so alarmed at climate change as to promote rapid urbanization, nuclear power, and even geo-engineering to forestall biosphere calamity. This progressive and controversial collection of views is well researched and we can go upstream to the sources as well as chart Brand's evolving views online at his site for this book.

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Review: The Age of Daredevils

The Age of Daredevils by Michael Clarkson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I thought this was about an entire age of daredevils, wide in geographic scope, or at least American. Like the picture of the classic barrel going over Niagara Falls, this is about attempts and successes in going over that cataract as well as shooting the possibly more dangerous rapids below. The focus is on riverman Red Hill, his sons, and their legacy from their own feats to the heroes and victims they fished out. The focus is on the first six or so decades of the 20th Century, so there is a lot of detail on Annie Edson Taylor, Bobby Leach, Charles Stephens, Jean Lussier, George Stathakis, etc. in this well-researched treatise. This covers their preparations and lives afterward.

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Review: The Age of Daredevils

The Age of Daredevils by Michael Clarkson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I thought this was about an entire age of daredevils, wide in geographic scope, or at least American. Like the picture of the classic barrel going over Niagara Falls, this is about attempts and successes in going over that cataract as well as shooting the possibly more dangerous rapids below. The focus is on riverman Red Hill, his sons, and their legacy from their own feats to the heroes and victims they fished out. The focus is on the first six or so decades of the 20th Century, so there is a lot of detail on Annie Edson Taylor, Bobby Leach, Charles Stephens, Jean Lussier, George Stathakis, etc. in this well-researched treatise. This covers their preparations and lives afterward.

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Review: The Story Behind... The Strange World Inside The Atom

The Story Behind... The Strange World Inside The Atom by Harold Prince
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

A cursory overview of the history of atomic theory including Dalton, Roentgen, Curie, Becquerel, etc. A popular work made for a wide audience this seeks to wow with the tales of atomic power, miniscule atomic dimensions and the weird world of neutrinos, etc. new at that time.

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Review: Unanswered Cries: A True Story of Friends, Neighbors, and Murder in a Small Town

Unanswered Cries: A True Story of Friends, Neighbors, and Murder in a Small Town by Thomas French
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A well-written account about the murder perpetrated by the recently deceased George Lewis. It wasn't until two years after the crime, in March 1986, that Lewis was arrested by a detective who happened to be a close friend. (Hence "Friends" in the subtitle.) Lewis was convicted of first-degree murder and sexual battery and sentenced to life in prison and the Tampa Bay Times wrote at length about the case in a series published in 1986 and 1988, which was later turned into this book. Some of the interesting elements of this forensic and legal story is the racist/inter-racial element, unscrupulous defense tactics (apparently unsuccessful for the first time), the early use of Luminol and the general rising trend of popular belief in trace evidence over circumstantial evidence.

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Review: Somewhere Inside: One Sister's Captivity in North Korea and the Other's Fight to Bring Her Home

Somewhere Inside: One Sister's Captivity in North Korea and the Other's Fight to Bring Her Home by Laura Ling
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I read an aside in Second Suns: Two Doctors and Their Amazing Quest to Restore Sight and Save Lives that altruistic eye doctor Sanduk Ruit connived to get TV journalist Lisa Ling covertly into North Korea as part of his medical outreach team. This resulted in the National Geographic documentary Inside North Korea which was remarkable not only in being able to document his successful surgery in the highly controlled country, but the overt adulation given to the then-Supreme Leader of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea Kim Jong-il by the patients. Why did Ruit endanger the chance for future direct medical assistance efforts, let alone his person and crew? That is not the over point of this book, but it does hand over as Lisa Ling's sister becomes the first American sentenced to a North Korean labor camp. While she herself worked on a documentary about defectors, will North Korean officials lean of Lisa Ling's subterfuge and negative portrayal?

This is a tense telling of the capture, imprisonment and eventual release to a stoic, unsmiling Bill Clinton finally resolving the 2009 imprisonment of American journalists by North Korea. This was also with a backdrop of North Korea irritating the community of nations with a satellite launch, nuclear test, and missile tests. Very interesting here is how Ling's supporters had to navigate the rocky shoals of protocol and ego among the first-term Obama administration and potentially helpful outsiders as Gore and Governor Bill Richardson.

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Review: Scottie the Daughter of: The Life of Frances Scott Fitzgerald Lanahan Smith

Scottie the Daughter of: The Life of Frances Scott Fitzgerald Lanahan Smith by Eleanor Lanahan
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Living a life with an arc covering a childhood from the world-travelling largess of her parents in the 30s to burgeoning women's liberation movement to Democratic Party efforts leading up to the Reagan Era, Scottie Fitzgerald had a rich life worth documenting. I am not sure her daughter's scrapbook approach presents it completely enough. Largely told through excerpts of Scotties own start on an autobiography, correspondence, and other pieces this is a mix of voicings and feels to me at times more like the raw material for a biography rather than a biography itself. The author brings in around the life of her mother the arcs of many other family members, including her troubled siblings Jacky and Tim.

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Review: Nightmares and Dreamscapes

Nightmares and Dreamscapes by Stephen King
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Have you ever really been scared by reading a horror book, like the way a movie can make you jump or give you the creeps? I never have and sometimes I wonder if I am "broken" in some way. So, I periodically check by giving something a try like the trusted if formulaic H.P. Lovecraft (King adds to that body of work w/"Crouch End", here) or the commercially validated author here, but I never get the gee willikers off the printed page. Who should I read?

Admittedly, this collection of short stories proved a cornucopia of tales not all horror at all. There is even two baseball pieces (one non-fiction, one a poem)! I do like the King has a notes section on the end commenting on these pieces. Most of these stories strike me like long-walk shaggy dog tales - a trek to get to a groaner... Maybe that is the over-writing he has been accused of and defends in the intro here? The collection leads of with a nice revenant tale in "Dolan's Cadillac" (crime story, not horror) and when I got "Suffer the Little Children" I credit King with daring to take us into the mind of an infanticide (would he have published this post Sandy Hook?). My favorite tail is the vampire civil air pilot in "The Night Flier" which dovetails nicely into "Popsy" where a would-be child abuser agent gets his just desserts. I had to read the Wikipedia article on "Dedication" to make sure I was not misconstruing the MacGuffin here... So, he can do gross-out, too. I like the simple weirdness and mania of "The Moving Finger" but several stories like "You Know they got One Hell of a Band" just left me "meh".

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Review: Is That All There Is?: The Strange Life of Peggy Lee

Is That All There Is?: The Strange Life of Peggy Lee by James Gavin
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Wow, what self-made tragedy Lee comes across as here. Her talent launched her on an arc to dominate nightclub pop-jazz and to retain a draw after that era. However, in her personal life reckless spending, self-destructive business decisions, and substance abuse self-limited her ability to enjoy her success and realize even more of it. She also appears to have really taken advantage of anyone's willingness to assist her or work for her.

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Review: Dance of the Photons: From Einstein to Quantum Teleportation

Dance of the Photons: From Einstein to Quantum Teleportation by Anton Zeilinger
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Anton Zeilinger is an Austrian quantum physicist who in 2008 received the Inaugural Isaac Newton Medal of the Institute of Physics (UK) for "his pioneering conceptual and experimental contributions to the foundations of quantum physics, which have become the cornerstone for the rapidly-evolving field of quantum information". So, it is great that someone so close to this exciting topic of quantum entanglement has taken the time to author an explanatory tome for a popular audience. However, he chose to do much of the explanation in long stories about students doing experiments which the narrator L. J. Ganser makes to effort to enliven with different voices. So, it is like someone reading screenplay without differentiating the characters.

Some takeaway I did make:

Einstein's principle of Local Realism, the combination of the principle of locality (limiting cause-and-effect to the speed of light) with the assumption that a particle must objectively have a pre-existing value (i.e. a real value) for any possible measurement, i.e. a value existing before that measurement is made, is the key concept challenged by instantaneous information transmission in quantum entanglement.

And,

Bell's theorem (here Bell's Inequality) states that any physical theory that incorporates local realism cannot reproduce all the predictions of quantum mechanical theory. Because numerous experiments agree with the predictions of quantum mechanical theory, and show differences between correlations that could not be explained by local hidden variables, the experimental results have been taken by many as refuting the concept of local realism as an explanation of the physical phenomena under test.

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