The Housekeeper and the Professor

The Housekeeper and the Professor caught my eye in an airport bookstore recently for one reason and one reason only: it is a Japanese novel, and I was soon to be on my way to Japan. (Greetings from Kyoto, by the way.)

Unlike other Japanese fiction I have read (for example, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage or A Tale for the Time Being), it is infused with a sense of the Japanese, but not of Japan itself. What do I mean? "The truly correct proof is one that strikes a harmonious balance between strength and flexibility." That single sentence contains the essence of Japanese culture. Yet, there is no sushi in this book, no Ueno Park, no pulsing Tokyo just beyond, no temples or shrines, nothing more than the Hanshin Tigers and the occasional cicadas.

The Housekeeper and the Professor, it must be said, is a slightly odd book, at least to my American sensibilities. The pages are often filled with theorems and formulas, and the constant chatter of prime numbers, but this is a also a book that I can unironically describe as calm and peaceful - not my typical vocabulary when thinking about a book.

Yoko Ogawa's style - and here I must state the obvious - at least as it has been translated into English, is simple and understated. The plot is simple: the housekeeper, whose name we never learn, works for an agency, and is assigned to the home of an eccentric professor. He, too, is nameless, and also a brilliant mathematician, but without any memory past 1975, the result of a near-fatal car accident. As a result, he regularly writes himself reminders which he pins to his suit, giving his outward appearance a rumpled and confused look.

Examined apart, the story's elements make no sense. Together, though, the story is sweet and highly readable, although I will admit to only skimming the densest of the mathematical explanations. Ogawa's work is one of both mathematical fact and light fiction, an achievement which it its own right surely deserves several stars. Or, as the Japanese would say, this is a highly harmonious book.

Chicken Every Sunday: My Life with Mother's Boarders

Chicken Every Sunday is a marvelous little book. I first heard of it in the pages of When Books Went to War; it was described as being one of the absolute favorite Armed Services Editions, one that simply could not be published fast enough to meet the demand of the troops wanting to read Rosemary Taylor's memoir. As Books author Molly Guptill Manning explained, the troops craved not only Taylor's descriptions of the home front, but also and especially her descriptions of mealtimes. And no wonder.

Taylor's family, the Drachmans, were a family unlike most others. Her mother was a Claiborne from Virginia (an FFV, or First Family of Virginia, as Taylor explains) who had been weaned on a former plantation in the immediate post-Civil War South. Taylor's father grew up in one of Arizona's original pioneer families. The pair of them, and their three children - of whom Rosemary is the oldest - are wonderfully entertaining. More than the Drachman's though, are the boarders: since before Rosemary's birth, Mr. and Mrs. Drachman had boarders, both as a service, if you will to early visitors to the territory (for there were no good hotels in those early days before statehood), as well as to earn additional income (primarily on the part of Mrs. Drachman, who saw her husband's get-rich-quick-schemes for what they were).

Yes, the boarders. As Taylor wrote, "One of the boarders who ate Mother's chicken every Sunday summed it up when he said, "I was told that in your house I'd have good food and some fun." They all had fun, and they all became part of the family -- Jeffrey, who lost his front teeth and won his independence, Rita Vlasak, who loved anything in pants, including Father, Miss Sally, who loved Miss Sally and cold cream, the Lathams, who bought a mine, and even the hell-bent-for-heaven Woolleys, who were sure God had sent the skunk to hide under the house because the family didn't go to church on Sunday." Taylor's gift is for bringing them all to life, making the reader today as much a part of the family as the boarder's were 100 years ago.

All of which is to say, they don't make books like this anymore. Cheaper By the Dozen, The Situation in Flushing, All Creatures Great and Small, they are memoirs in the same vein as this one. If you read and loved any of them, Chicken Every Sunday will be soup for your soul; if you read this one and want more of the same, any of the others will provide the same sustenance.

Axis Sally: The American Voice of Nazi Germany

Axis Sally pops up continuously in my World War II readings, most recently in the last book I read, When Books Went to War, where her repeated appearances were enough to convince me to check out the Axis Sally biography at my local library. What I learned surprised me. Specifically, I was surprised to learn that while Mildred Gillars was officially Axis Sally, several women actually broadcast under the moniker. And Gillars was essentially made to take the fall for all of them: she was tried for treason and sentenced to a decade in prison for her broadcasts - in fact several women used the moniker, most notably Rita Zucca, who broadcast from Rome.

Gillars herself is both a fascinating and pathetic character. A failed showgirl, she appears to have got into the broadcasting business both to curry favor with her (already married) lover and to gain a level of fame that eluded her in Vaudeville and on Broadway. A college dropout, she earned her degree as an elderly woman, and spent much of her post-imprisonment life teaching in a convent. Reading the transcripts of her broadcasts from the distance of 70-plus years, and (as author Richard Lucas correctly points out), after the Vietnam protests and general coarsening of society, it is difficult to see how her deeds rise to the level of treason.

The book itself is fairly dry. Lucas wrote it, as he explains in the preface, upon discovering that no biography existed, and, while this will sound more uncharitable than I intend, it's not difficult to see why. Gillars is just not that terribly interesting. I was most interested in the hypocrisy and double dealing of the U.S. government that Lucas details throughout Gillars' trial, as well as the existence of Zucca. I mean no slight to Lucas, whose writing is clear and concise and research painstaking, but Axis Sally is a book that even the most devout history buffs can likely skip without missing too much.

Three stars for writing; one star for interest.

When Books Went to War: The Stories that Helped Us Win World War II

When Books Went to War is the fascinating (for book nerds) story of the creation and subsequent success of the Armed Services Editions, the pocket-sized paperbacks that boosted the morale of troops stationed around the globe, revolutionized the publishing industry, and led to an increase in literacy that lasted well beyond the war. And that's to say nothing of the fact that certain of the ASEs, The Great Gatsby, for example, rescued otherwise-forgotten titles from obscurity and turned them into American classics. Not bad for a day's work, no?

Molly Guptill Manning has done a fine job rendering readable the highly political wranglings and bureaucratic decisions that went into the development of the ASEs. She begins with a history of the Victory Book Drives, which aimed to both collect books for the troops, as well as showcase the value of books in the U.S., as compared to Germany, where extensive, state-sponsored book burnings had become the norm. (Manning devotes no small amount of ink to the number of volumes - roughly 100 million - destroyed during the Nazis European adventures. This is in no way a criticism; as I said earlier in the post, I find this fascinating.) She also details the changes to the publishing process that enabled the ASEs to become reality, and the resulting paperbacks that have filled bookshelves around the world in the decades since.

Most interesting to me, though, was the hunger to read that Manning highlights time and again. From Alaska to the South Pacific and Australia to Africa, and across the whole of Europe, GIs filled their hours reading these books, sometimes while waiting for the heat of battle to end so they could be medically evacuated from the field. Of all the World War II books I have read, this is the first I recall learning of the prevalence of books. It's no small wonder that men who sought solace in the page as battles raged returned home with an abiding appreciation for the written word and spread a love of books through their families and communities.

I recognize that the audience that can truly appreciate When Books Went to War may be somewhat limited. That said, those who identify as that audience will love this book and be fascinated by the stories Manning tells.

Four stars.

Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads

When I was a child, my grandparents lived in North Carolina and my aunts and uncles were scattered across the south, too: Atlanta, Chattanooga, even Charleston for a time. As a result, my family spent many school holidays criss-crossing that part of the country, and I mustn't have been more than eight when I learned that "Yankee" was dirty word. The South - and Southerners - were a region and a people apart, of that I had no doubt. The point was reinforced recently as I drove from Birmingham, Alabama, to Montgomery and a black and red, handmade billboard loomed into view. "Go to church or the devil will get you," the effect completed with an illustration of the devil, pitchfork in hand. In Michigan, this would have been a joke. I was in Alabama, though, and the friend I was visiting assured me the message was entirely in earnest.

All of which is to say that I was eager to read Paul Theroux's take on this part of the country. Theroux sets out to travel the south by backroads and forgotten routes, not anticipating that he will return repeatedly over the course of a year, forging friendships with a number of Southerners and developing a nuanced understanding of the region and the people. "In a place where everyone is armed," Theroux muses at a gunshow, "good manners are helpful, perhaps essential." Might this bearing of arms - obvious at a gunshow but equally prevalent virtually everywhere he stops - be at the heart of the gentility so much on display?

As is the case with virtually all good travel writing, Theroux devotes significant ink to both the historical context of the region, as well as the present-day issues. In case of the South, this of course means frequent conversations about race, which Theroux holds with everyone from former sharecroppers to white supremacists, to Indian motel owners. In that sense, Deep South is a bit of The Warmth of Other Suns meets After Appomattox. Time and again, Theroux's remarks are on the money, as when he notes that for many of the (white) southerners with whom he interacts, "the Civil War battles might have happened yesterday," and "the civil rights movement was another defeat for these Southerners who were so sensitized to intruders and gloaters and carpetbaggers, and even more so to outsiders who did not remember the humiliations of the Civil War." 

Perhaps my favorite person in the book was Floyd Taylor, the somewhat elderly former farmer who grew up on a farm plowed by mules, rather than a tractor, who spent many long years picking cotton and shooting squirrel, who noted that growing up "we done everything ourselves," - from making molasses to skinning game to smoking meat - and contrasted that with the fact that "people are hungry today but all they do is sit around." I couldn't help but assume the folks he was talking about are the same ones The Washington Post profiled recently in a piece on the rise in disability claims.

As is frequently the case with Theroux's work, at times, this book rambles. For example, Theroux spends far too much time dissecting William Faulkner for my liking, as well as any number of other writers and works. When Theroux is not feeling overly smug and self-satisfied (such as the time he recommends to an unsuspecting soul that they read Dark Star Safari), his observations are frequently amusing, as when the reader is reminded that "all air travel today involves interrogation, often by someone in a uniform who is your inferior." And while I did frequently find myself nodding along in agreement, I was also very conscious of the lens through which this was written. That is to say that while many of Theroux's observations struck me as astute and accurate, the author is nevertheless "a coastal elite," to use the phrasing of the day, wealthy, well-traveled, with good intentions, but a limited ability to truly shed any of these layers and see beyond "a bitter place of tombstones and memorials and ruins."

Theroux writes toward the end of this book that he "had not realized until I spent some time there how cruel it was that so many American companies had fled the South for other countries and taken the jobs with them." In this revelation and in so many others, Deep South serves as a reminder of how little we Americans know about one another and the pitfalls of our estrangement. 

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind is, in its simplest description, a memoir of author William Kamkwamba's early life as a poor (poor!) boy in rural Malawi, his hunger for knowledge, and his experiments to build an entire windmill for his home. This is all the more impressive as he faces famine, scavenges for the parts, and is forced to leave school because his family can no longer pay the fees. This book could just as easily have been titled, Improvisation 101.

Beyond the memoir aspects, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind is a fascinating look at life in Africa, written by an African (and in that sense is a wonderful contrast with Dark Star Safari). Kamkwamba succinctly relates the realities of life in Africa to his (presumably mostly Western readers) with candid and clear language, such as his passage describing a life without light. "Once the sun goes down, and if there's no moon, everyone stops what they're doing, brushes their teeth, and goes to sleep. ... Who goes to bed at seven in the evening? Well, I can tell you, most of Africa."

Beyond the voyeuristic pleasure of peering deeper into another culture, Kamkwamba's story is also incredibly inspirational. He built a windmill. Using a relatively ancient, English-language text designed for individuals with both fluency in English and advanced education, neither of which he possessed. And he did this because he hoped to expand upon his invention in order that his family could have water on their farm (rather than a two-hour walk from it), not so that he might become rich or famous, or make his life vastly different, but so that they would not starve in the next famine.  As in literally perish of hunger, something he knows too much about.

Kamkwamba also minces no words in describing the situation in his country, and to a certain extent, in Africa more broadly. He understands the scope and scale of the corruption, he knows how this directly impacts him, and he is determined to simply do what he can to bring positive change to his very small piece of his country. In this sense, he reminded me of Abdel Kader Haidara, whose story is recounted in The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu).

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind ends on a hopeful note, with Kamkwamba in South Africa at an academy with other equally gifted and visionary young Africans. One can but hope that together they will achieve Kamkwamba's goals of bringing Africa out of the darkness.

Empire of Deception: The Incredible Story of a Master Swindler Who Seduced a City and Captivated the Nation

Leo Koretz was a shyster of the first order. In a Chicago rife with corruption ("Only in 1920s Chicago could a public official prosecute criminals at his day job and in his spare time prepare the dead ones to face their final judgment."), Koretz was schooling them all. Mr Koretz, it seems, had found oil deep in the Panamanian jungle, oil he was selling to Standard Oil for a killing, and all of Chicago's hoi polloi wanted in on the easy money. Uh-huh.

Bernie Madoff would be proud.

Empire of Deception is part biography, part Chicago history, (Big Bill Thompson is there, of course, and Leopold and Loeb, and the 1919 race riots), and part early twentieth century guide to Panama and its canal. The book does begin a little slow, but it picks up once Koretz starts swindling - and more so once he's on the lam.

This is not a great, soaring biography in the style of Catherine the Great. It is more a history lesson of the ways in which man takes advantage of other men. Ultimately, Empire of Deception is a story as old as time: insatiable human greed. Koretz's greed, certainly, but also the greed of his (mostly wealthy) investors looking to make a little more money just a little faster, and also that of his prosecutors, though they were arguably more interested in power than in wealth.