Review: Rampage: MacArthur, Yamashita, and the Battle of Manila

Rampage: MacArthur, Yamashita, and the Battle of Manila by James M. Scott
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Thanking of MacArthur and the Philippines, I previously thought of: Corregidor, flight before fall w/"I shall return", followed by the Bataan Death March. Well, all that is merely a few paragraphs of the several hundred pages of WW II scholarship here.

Instead, Yamashita and Sanji Iwabuchi (Rear Admiral in the Imperial Japanese Navy) lead Japanese marines etc. in a ruthless and hopeless defence of Manilla while exacting a rape and rampage holocaust on internees and civilians during the Battle of Manila recalling The Rape of Nanking. So, this is much more about the grim realities of those left behind waiting for the "return", many of which died in the crossfire and cruelties. The closing act is the hasty trial of Yamashita with its questionable process and conclusion.

[I obtained an ARC to review]

View all my reviews

Review: God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian

God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian by Kurt Vonnegut
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I recently re-watched You Don't Know Jack (2010), one of my favorite Al Pacino portrayals. It got me Googling about on Dr. Jack Kevorkian who hear appears as a sort of Virgil-like enabler of 'controlled NDEs' ("Kevorkian has just unstrapped me from the gurney after yet another controlled near-death experience.") allowing Vonnegut to interview dead people of Public Radio station WNYC from the "end of the blue tunnel of the Afterlife." interview with dead historical figures are witty and brief, such as this one about a personage he personally admired:

During what has been almost a year of interviewing completely dead people, while
only half dead myself, I asked Saint Peter again and again if I could meet a particular hero of mine. He is my fellow Hoosier, the late Eugene Victor Debs of Terre Haute, Indiana. He was five times the Socialist Party's candidate for president back when this country still had a strong Socialist Party.

And then, guess what, yesterday afternoon none other than Eugene Victor Debs, organizer and leader of the first successful strike against a major American industry, the railroads, was waiting for me at the far end of the blue tunnel. We hadn't met before. This great American died in 1926 at the age of seventy-one when I was only four years old.

I thanked him for words of his, which I quote again and again in lectures: "As long as there is a lower class, I am in it. As long as there is a criminal element, I am of it. As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free."

He asked me how those words were received here on Earth in America nowadays. I said they were ridiculed. "People snicker and snort," I said. He asked what our fastest growing industry was. "The building of prisons," I said.

"What a shame," he said. And then he asked me how the Sermon on the Mount was going over these days.

And then he spread his wings and flew away.

Also present are historical villains like a trite but remorseful Hitler who Vonnegut suggests deserves a statue and "James Earl Ray, confessed assassin of Martin Luther
King" spewing racism. I wonder how many complaints went into the formidable WNYC about these...

I actually like more -- and due to the longer length it appears he did, too -- the ones on fellow writers like Shakespeare:

We did not hit it off. He said the dialect I spoke was the ugliest English he had ever heard, "fit to split the ears of groundlings."

...I congratulated him on all the Oscars the movie
Shakespeare in Love had won...

He said of the Oscars, and of the movie itself, "A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

Also, there is a lauding piece on Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley:

...author, again before she was twenty, of the most prescient and influential science
fiction novel of all times...

and similar praise for Isaac Asimov. Vonnegut uses Kevorkian's then contemporary murder conviction as the excuse to end this series, done about a decode before his own death.

View all my reviews

Review: Playing God

Playing God by Charles L. Mee Jr.
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Combined with the title, the subtitle "Seven Fateful Moments When Great Men Met to Change the World" makes this seem like a total buy-in to the Great man theory. However, it as much undercuts that as supports it.

Each and all of these figure among the contingencies that operate in the production of historical events, and yet they do not form a complete set of causes. Even if we were to identify all the classes of cause of historical events, we could not construct a complete causal explanation of any given moment. Because each cause has a previous cause, if we were to attempt to explain the complete causes of events, we should soon become trapped in an infinite regression of explanation

An accomplished author of several noteworthy histories, I really enjoyed the context and flavor added to significant events, such as:

* The nature of accomodations Pope Leo would have used enroute to his confrontation with Attila the Hun outside Rome
* The symbolic pageantry and theater of Henry VIII and Francis I's meeting on the Field of the Cloth of Gold where even costume accessories spelled out messages to the initiated
* The complexities of religion and smallpox behind the tragic meeting between Cortes and Moctezuma
* The ailing Woodrow Wilson with Clemenceau and Lloyd George at the Paris Peace Conference

Basically chronological, this brings us to the unintended consequences of Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt's gathering at Yalta and Gorbachev desperate at the G7 nations in London. For the last half of the Twentieth Century, there is so much about those events relevant to today, that Mee can't abstract out circumstance and flavor and this detailed reportage starts then to read more like a textbook. Another thing keeping me from saying four stars is the poort audiobook production: an unimpressive narrator and audio quality that makes me think it the microphone was across the room... in the parka pocket of a man eating potato chips.

View all my reviews

Review: They're Playing Our Song

They're Playing Our Song by Carole Bayer Sager
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Bayer Sager wrote the lyrics for the stage musical They're Playing Our Song, which was loosely based on her relationship with Marvin Hamlisch. However, that musical and its background is just part of one chapter of this book. Basically, there is a chapter on every significant relationship and marriage in her life, including:

* She married record-producer Andrew Sager in 1970, and they divorced in 1978.
* On April 3, 1982, she married composer and pianist Burt Bacharach after over a year's co-habitation. The couple adopted an infant son, whom they named Cristopher Elton Bacharach and divorced in 1991.
* Since June 1996, Bayer Sager has been married to Robert Daly, former chairman of Warner Brothers and former chairman

Mere dates and less serious relationships get covered, including those with George Lucas, Davy Jones of The Monkees. Not all the relationships covered are intimate, some are mostly professional although there always seems to be a blend with her. On the more professional side, there is writing songs with Bob Dylan and a neurotifcally shy Michael Jackson.

More than a songwriter history, this feels more like a romance history. It does cover her career from her first pop hit, "A Groovy Kind of Love", with Toni Wine (Bayer Sager prefers writing partnerships), to "The Prayer (theme from Quest for Camelot)", performed famously by Céline Dion and Andrea Bocelli.

More detail is about how she enters relationships with her own fears and insecurities about her weight and shape and height. This includes a lot of first-sex details with men. She often has been concerned she is being taken advantage of for her songwriting abilities, which perhaps was the case with a porn-addicted Bacharach. She characterized this relationship as abusive, albeit not physically.

View all my reviews

Review: The Last of the Mohicans

The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It's been a long time since I read this. I was last spurred to read it by The Last of the Mohicans (1992), starring Daniel Day-Lewis . That film adaptation impressed me for showing the Indians as sagacious, valiant, etc. and not just craven thugs familiar from many oaters. On this reading I was impressed with the high level of literary achievement -- certainly could be the first modern American novel. I love the epigrams on each chapter pulling quotes from Shakespeare, Pope, etc.

Also, the idealistic, proto-abolitionist ideas emergencing in such anti-racist notions as:

"Should we distrust the man because his manners are not our manners, and that his skin is dark?" coldly asked Cora.

and

"You'll know, already, Major Heyward, that my family was both ancient and honorable," commenced the Scotsman; "though it might not altogether be endowed with that amount of wealth that should correspond with its degree. I was, may be, such an one as yourself when I plighted my faith to Alice Graham, the only child of a neighboring laird of some estate. But the connection was disagreeable to her father, on more accounts than my poverty. I did therefore what an honest man should—restored the maiden her troth, and departed the country in the service of my king. I had seen many regions, and had shed much blood in different lands, before duty called me to the islands of the West Indies. There it was my lot to form a connection with one who in time became my wife, and the mother of Cora. She was the daughter of a gentleman of those isles, by a lady whose misfortune it was, if you will," said the old man, proudly, "to be descended, remotely, from that unfortunate class who are so basely enslaved to administer to the wants of a luxurious people. Ay, sir, that is a curse entailed on Scotland by her unnatural union with a foreign and trading people. But could I find a man among them who would dare to reflect on my child, he should feel the weight of a father's anger! Ha! Major Heyward, you are yourself born at the south, where these unfortunate beings are considered of a race inferior to your own." "'Tis most unfortunately true, sir," said Duncan, unable any longer to prevent his eyes from sinking to the floor in embarrassment. "And you cast it on my child as a reproach! You scorn to mingle the blood of the Heywards with one so degraded—lovely and virtuous though she be?" fiercely demanded the jealous parent.

"Heaven protect me from a prejudice so unworthy of my reason!" returned Duncan, at the same time conscious of such a feeling, and that as deeply rooted as if it had been ingrafted in his nature. "The sweetness, the beauty, the witchery of your younger daughter, Colonel Munro, might explain my motives, without imputing to me this injustice."

I was surprised to learn Cooper wasn't that committed of an abolitionist:

In his essay on slavery and his book about American notions, Cooper repeatedly stated that slavery was “evil.”19 However, he opposed immediate abolition. The stumbling blocks for him were states’ rights and property rights. He noted that the northern states had pointed the way, and naively assumed that southern states would shortly follow.

-- "Historical Contexts of The Last of the Mohicans: The French and Indian War, and Mid-1820s America", Allan M. Axelrad

Still, this is a literary achievement worth revisiting. I love the footnotes showing the historical research and knowledge poured into setting this during the French and Indian War, and in a region the author knew well. Next time, I will pick an edition with larger type!

View all my reviews

Review: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Narrator Scarlett Johansson does an excellent job narrating this classic. This is something that always bothered me: all this "eat me", "drink me", exploring underground passages. Is this really implicit advice for children? I guess few fairy tales really hold up as solid morality. I commend Carroll for creating an entry in that hallowed canon. I really like the quicky poems the most, then the characters themselves and their vignettes poling fun a the the adult world of caucuses, etc. ... not so much the loose adventure tale as a clothesline to hold it all together.

View all my reviews

Review: Metaphors for the Musician

Metaphors for the Musician by Randy Halberstadt
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

With a quarter-century of experience teaching jazz piano, Randy Halberstadt approaches the subject of learning music (music in general, not merely jazz piano) sagely and philosophically. While the book's kernels of wisdom can be of benefit to any music student, there does remain a focus that makes Metaphors primarily a useful adjunct to the study of jazz piano.
Halberstadt's personal remembrances, framed to showcase lessons learned, invite the reader to benefit from his experience. Through colorful, imaginary examples, Halberstadt seeks to jumpstart the brain into degrees of freedom required for a successful jazz state of mind. Along the way of fun and prose come well thought-out examples. Embedded in these sophisticated studies is the knowledge of years that makes practice more productive. Halberstadt's method moves away from rote rehearsing simple building blocks into shorter steps of logical progression that add variety to the learning process. To bring it all together, the volume includes sheet music for several tunes, among them "Embraceable You", "How Long Has This Been Going On?" and "My Foolish Heart." From fast fingerings to proper professionalism, Metaphors is a cornucopia of talent catalysts.

View all my reviews