Monday, April 30, 2018

The Last Road Home

No one could claim Junebug Hurley has had an easy life. Following a fairly hardscrabble start in rural North Carolina, he goes to live with grandparents when his parents are killed running moonshine. His grandparents' closest neighbors are black sharecroppers; twins Fancy and Lightning quickly become Junebug's best - and only - friends. The situation is fraught, particularly as they come of age in the Jim Crow south where each child must determine how best to face - or flee - the bias and violence that infuses everyday life.

The Last Road Home, if I'm honest, is middling fiction. The story is fine, the characters are fine, there's nothing too much wrong, and yet. I've had a hard time putting my finger on the pulse of what left me less than completely satisfied. I think I've got it: in the end, I think Danny Johnson tries to do too much. The dichotomy between the urban cities withe their guns, drugs, and unrest and the mule-drawn tobacco farms left me with a case of whiplash.

Similarly, the last, and shortest, part of the book that covers Junebug's time in Vietnam felt too disconnected from the rest of the book. Perhaps that was Johnson's intent. Perhaps the disconnect was intended as a literary device to signal to readers the extent of the disconnect between soldier and civilian. If so, it's hard to criticize the intent. In the end, though, it left me feeling that I was reading two novellas, neither of which was as fully developed as it could have been.

Two-and-a-half stars.

Wednesday, April 25, 2018

The Great Halifax Explosion: A World War I Story of Treachery, Tragedy, and Extraordinary Heroism

Several years ago, Ben and I visited Halifax, where we learned about the Great Halifax Explosion of 1917. The explosion, which was the largest man-made explosion of any kind until Hiroshima, was caused by a small collision between two ships in the Halifax harbor, one of which happened to be a munitions ship that doubled as a floating bomb. In any case, I knew nothing of it before this visit, and hadn't given it much, if any, consideration in the ensuing year - until the University of Michigan alumni magazine reviewed John U. Bacon's The Great Halifax Explosion: A World War I Story of Treachery, Tragedy, and Extraordinary Heroism and I decided I needed to learn the details.

Essentially, they are this: World War I was the quintessential desperate time calling for desperate measures. As such, an old, slow tub of a ship was commissioned to carry desperately needed ammunition, explosives, and fuel to the front. It was loaded to to the gills with the full knowledge of the crew that one little spark is all it took to send them all skyward and to the bottom of the sea - simultaneously. The little spark was supplied by the fender-bender Mont Blanc suffered as she entered Halifax harbor; when she did explode, she took with her the better part of the city, and several thousand souls.

Bacon naturally expounds on all of the details, from the loading of the ship in Mont Blanc to Halifax's history of antagonism with the U.S. (in all fairness, Representatives from New England were arguing for the annexation of Canada on the House floor as late as 1911) to the background of the individuals touched by the tragedy. Bacon also delves into the aftermath, from the advances in pediatric medicine that came out of the explosion to the relationship between Boston and Halifax.

The Great Halifax Explosion is a truly excellent work of non-fiction. Like the best narrative non-fiction, it reads almost like a novel; while any reader should appreciate Bacon's research and writing, this book is especially fine reading for those with an interest in the more forgotten elements of World War I.

Saturday, April 21, 2018

Last Bus to Wisdom

Ivan Doig's Last Bus to Wisdom is fiction writing at its finest: colorful characters, intriguing plot, plenty of surprises, and beautiful writing.

Eleven-year-old Donal Cameron (not Donald, mind you!) is rather dreading the summer of 1951. Instead of staying on the Double W ranch in big sky country, Donal is being shipped east to relatives he's never met while his grandmother undergoes an operation and is nursed back to health by the nuns. Actually, he's taking himself east, heading there by way of the "dog bus," as he and his grandmother call the Greyhound, which he'll ride deep into Wisconsin.

Once in Manitowoc, Donal is faced with a formidable great-aunt and the enigmatic Uncle Herman, aka Herman the German. After a few too many adventures and a particularly harrowing afternoon of canasta, Kate packs Donal off to whatever fate awaits him (a foster family? an orphanage? Donal hasn't quite worked out the details, but he knows it will be awful) by way of the same dog bus that brought him. Much to his surprise, though, Herman has decided he's had enough, too, and catches the same bus west. And here the fun really starts with one improbable, but wonderful, adventure after the other.

No doubt, Last Bus to Wisdom feels improbable, but Doig so captures his characters, their surroundings, and the entire zeitgeist that everything come together in the most delightful way possible. This is truly one of the most fun books I remember reading and I heartily recommend adding it your summer reading list if it's not there already.

Five stars.

Sunday, April 15, 2018

Midnight in the Pacific: Guadalcanal - The World War II Battle That Turned the Tide of War

Add Joseph Wheelan's Midnight in the Pacific: Guadalcanal - The World War II Battle That Turned the Tide of War to the canon of outstanding World War II narrative non-fiction.

Wheelan offers readers an in-depth exploration of all phases of the battle, from the initial confusion by the Japanese army of U.S. interest in the island (the Japanese navy had failed to tell their land-based counterparts that they had nearly completed a massive airfield on Guadalcanal) to the final escape of roughly 10,000 emaciated, diseased soldiers from the island. There is good reason for the doggerel "And when he gets to Heaven | To St. Peter he will tell: | One more Marine reporting, sir — | I've served my time in hell.

 In between he recounts the individual battles that comprised the campaign, the hellish conditions faced by men on both sides (it wasn't uncommon for a soldier to know the agonies of dysentery and malaria, often simultaneously - to say nothing of the tropical conditions that caused clothing to literally disintegrate), and the cultural divide that so drove strategy on both sides of the war. Probably my favorite example is the Japanese Vice Admiral's report on a particularly brutal battle (for the Japanese) in which he wrote: "The situation isn't developing to our advantage." Indeed. Likewise, Wheelan enumerates the differences between American and Japanese soldiers in which he notes that the Japanese pilots rarely used their parachutes, in stark contrast the Americans who did everything possible to live to fight another day...and to live, period.

As I said, this is one of the great World War II works out there, along with the likes of Lost in Shangri-La, On the Eve of a Hundred Midnights, Flyboys, and Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors. Perhaps even more than the others, Wheelan captures the hellish environment in which such hellish battles were fought. Coupled with the fact that the Marines' average age was 20, it's easy to see why this was the greatest generation.

Tuesday, April 10, 2018

Waves of Prosperity: India, China, and the West: How Global Trade Transformed the World

Greg Clydesdale's Waves of Prosperity: India, China, and the West: How Global Trade Transformed the World is only the latest in a rather long line of popular press titles exploring the history and trends of international trade and globalization. (Borderless Economies, The Ascent of Money, and A Splendid Exchange are just some of the others that come to mind, for those who want to explore the genre further.)

Clydesdale uses the shipping industry as a proxy for globalization and explores its evolution over the last thousand years. In particular, he explores the ways in which a country exploits its natural advantages - whether geographic, demographic, resources, or so on - to take a definitive economic lead, only to then rest on its laurels while other countries catch up through a process of imitation and innovation until the trailing country(ies) takes the lead. In this way, he travels from Gujarat and China to Malacca and on to the Spanish and Portuguese, the Dutch, the British, the Americans and Japanese and back again to China.

Clydesdale also explores the ways in which culture shapes government actions and, ultimately, trade itself. These forces are educational, but also as inherently ingrained as the populace's attitudes toward individualism and free markets. As shown time and again, social structures impact economies, sometimes subtly and sometimes starkly. Nowhere is this illustrated more clearly than when Clydesdale sets out to compare the Japanese and American approaches to trade in the late twentieth century: amalgamation vs. anti-trust; cooperation vs. competition; MITI vs. free markets.

Unfortunately, I imagine Clydesdale is largely preaching to the choir here. The globalists, who surely comprise the overwhelming number of readers, won't find much new here, while the isolationists are unlikely to crack the cover. Which is too bad, because there's a lesson on innovation and economic decline here as much as absolute and comparative advantage.

Thursday, April 5, 2018

Astrophysics for People in a Hurry

At least it isn't called Astrophysics for Dummies. 

Neil deGrasse Tyson's Astrophysics for People in a Hurry might be a best seller, it might have racked up thousands of high-star reviews on Amazon, it might be a slim little hundredish pages, but, people, it's still astrophysics. Dark matter, quarks, general relativity. I tried. I am a regular at the planetarium, I find space and time and space and the space-time continuum fascinating (if above my head) and I really thought this quick little book would make it all a little clearer for me. Instead, I fought sleep or boredom or both every time I picked it up. Regularly deciphering the likes of "To invoke an unstable condition as the natural state of a physical system violates scientific credo." is simply asking too much of me. The text is dense, the terminology is dense, and at the end of the day, perhaps there's a reason I'm not a physicist.

Final verdict: spend an hour at your local planetarium.

Monday, April 2, 2018

Promised to the Crown (Daughters of New France)

King Louis needed ladies for his colony, so he shipped off as many volunteers as he could - les filles du roi, as it were. On this single historical fact rests the entire premise of Aimie Runyan's Promised to the Crown. I don't mean to sound snarky - this is a great read and the three main characters - Rose, Elisabeth, and Nicole - are, for lack of a better term, lovely. Runyan has given each of them an interesting backstory in France - there's the beloved farmer's daughter who has left reluctantly so to spare her parents a mouth to feed and a dowry to meet, the abused former aristocrat whose past has scarred her into taking the vows of a nun, and the daughter of a Parisian boulangère who dreamed of inheriting the family business. Once in Quebec, Runyan endows each with a similarly varied and intriguing life. 

Though it could easily be classed as a tale of hardship on the frontier, Promised to the Crown is more the story of the bonds of friendship. (In that way, it reminded me regularly of One Thousand White Women, though I much preferred Promised to the Crown.) All three of the protagonists are genuinely likeable; if I were to quibble over anything in Runyan's work, it is the fact that despite the hardships that are introduced, the story does seem a teensy bit too happy-happy and I had a hard time believing their lives really could have turned out just so. Although of a different time and place, the lives in Gentle Tamers and Plantation Mistress seemed far more realistic than those that Runyan's ladies lead. For that reason, I lean more toward three-and-a-half stars than four, but in the scheme of things, this isn't a major complaint.