When I first read Up in the Old Hotel, I was too young to appreciate the great beauty of the last, latest and longest essay, “Joe Gould’s Secret,” but I was immediately captivated by the eponymous piece, in which Joseph Mitchell and a friend of his, the owner of a Fulton Market seafood restaurant, decide to explore the upper floors of the restaurant building. The building was an old hotel, shut up for at least twenty years, accessible only via a ceiling trapdoor into a dark, dangerous-looking dust-buried hand-operated iron-cage elevator. Mitchell was the first person the restaurateur had ever met who was willing to give it a try. Mitchell loved unearthing the city’s secrets – even, or especially, those which seemed to be the least important.

The New Yorker under Harold Ross was a miracle of American writing. The three greatest contributors – the three greatest essayists of the twentieth century – were EB White, AJ Liebling, and Joseph Mitchell. Mitchell started out covering Police Headquarters at night for the Herald Tribune, and discovered that he was more interested in the people he met than the newsworthy items he was supposed to be investigating. Mitchell did not have EB White’s supreme ear for language (nobody did) but whereas White’s great essays are usually autobiographical, Mitchell prefers profiling other people who wouldn’t normally rate a biography: the detective who specialized in gypsies, the “High Steel” American Mohawks who built the city’s bridges, shad fishermen on the Hudson and fishmongers at Fulton Market, street-prowling preachers, movie theater ticket-takers, bowery bums.

Mitchell was an extraordinary listener, good at making friends in low places. He preferred talking to someone who worked with his hands and had spent his life absorbing the father-to-son secrets of his trade. He was also exceptionally, astonishingly observant: On a trip to the graveyard of an old Staten Island Negro community, he mentions that he and his guide stopped in front of a marble gravestone covered with different plants and vines: “I counted them, and there were exactly ten kinds – cat brier, trumpet creeper, wild hop, blackberry, morning glory, climbing false buckwheat, partridgeberry, fox grape, poison ivy, and one that I couldn’t identify, nor could Mr. Hunter.”

Mitchell makes one reference to taking notes during an interview, but in most instances it is impossible to believe he could simultaneously have his head in a notebook and still take in all that he did. He captures a character’s personality through conversation – including the minor but revealing digressions that build a rich and deep picture. Many of the places and all the people he wrote about are gone now. And the few places that remain are so changed that Mitchell would hardly recognize them. (“McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon,” for example, made famous by Mitchell’s essay, still does peppy business in the East Village, but is a traitor to its original self and now allows women on the premises.) But that makes this collection of essays even more valuable – it is a work of art, and an experience of times gone by. It was Mitchell’s time, and New York was his city.

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Prose: 9/10

Entertainment: 9/10

Fascination: 10/10

New Yorkness: 10/10

Overall Goodness Rating (OGR): 9.5/10

Up in the Old Hotel, by Joseph Mitchell.  Originally published 1964; this edition Vintage Books, 1993. 716 pages.

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It always struck me as remarkable that elementary and high school science textbooks could take their inherently interesting subjects and make them cataleptically boring. The authors of these texts understood the formulas and definitions alright, but, when they tried to apply the concepts to the real world, they were completely stumped. They didn’t have the imagination to know what the ideas might be good for – which, I assume, is why they were elementary school textbook writers instead of scientists. Let’s face it, I’m never going to set off 500 feet behind Bob but running twice as fast and with a two-second head-start and need to figure out how many feet I’ll run before I catch him.

To take just one example, I could never remember what the dew point was: though it was explained that a wet thermometer registered a different temperature from a dry one, I simply filed that under the category of the bleeding obvious and forgot the rest.

Now, however, the dew point concept is indelibly etched in my mind, because I’ve learned something pretty nifty: rising, cooling air catches up to the dew point – the temperature at which the air is completely water-saturated – at a rate of about 4.4 degrees F per 1000 feet. So, if you know the temperature and dew point on the ground, you can take the difference, divide by 4.4, and, voila, you get a pretty good estimate of how many thousands of feet above your head the lowest clouds are floating. If you want to be a pilot, which all little boys and many adult little boys do, the dew point cloud-calculation is not only nifty but handy. It’s a shame our elementary schools spent so much time teaching us how to determine the dew point and no time at all showing us what it was good for.

And that brings me to the FAA Pilot’s Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge, which in many respects would make a dandy textbook for introducing basic scientific concepts: physics and aerodynamics, why planes fly and how a moment arm (a force applied at a given distance from the center of gravity) can change its direction, how centrifugal force works, how air pressure can be used to measure speed and acceleration, how internal combustion engines and jet engines work, how the earth’s magnetic field is arranged and how and why compass readings can be corrected to give you a true direction, what causes different types of weather and how to decipher weather maps and predict near-term weather changes, and so on and so forth.

You see the formulas – and how they were derived – and then you immediately see them in action, not helping you figure out when you’d pass Bob in the footrace from Idiotville, but showing you how much runway distance you’d need to land safely at a given weight and altitude. It’s a more engaging approach. Basic physics wasn’t invented just as an academic exercise – it describes how the world works. Our schools’ textbooks should get out more.

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Prose: 4-6/10, variable

General Appeal: 5/10, limited

Interestingness: 10/10

Overall Goodness Rating (OGR): 9/10

Pilot’s Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge, published by US Dept of Transportation Federal Aviation Administration, Flight Standards Service.  This edition 2008, 471 pages.

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John Corey is the most wonderful serial character I’ve encountered in contemporary novels. Corey is a former NYPD detective – shot thrice and retired early on partial disability – who joins the Anti-Terrorism Task Force, which is Nelson DeMille’s fictionalized but impeccably researched version of the Joint Terrorism Task Force. Corey fights crime and international terror plots and has a wonderful time, in his entertaining, amusing, idiosyncratic way. Anyone who has a tendency to bend rules and get into trouble on a more or less continual basis will quickly grow fond.

Radiant Angel is the seventh – and may be the last – novel in this series. DeMille has been deliberately ambiguous about whether Corey will ride again. I believe that he will, because it’s unlikely DeMille will be satisfied with his latest effort. It is very good and extremely exciting. But it does not have the effortless effervescence of the best Corey books. Corey’s humor – the staple of his personality – is a little more strained and less successful than usual. The plot is inventive and genuinely worrying. But it is not as thorough or involved as it could be. The novel itself is only about half the length of the previous Corey book, and suggests the author’s enthusiasm for his longest-lived and most lovable character is waning.

Of the Corey series, the three that deal most imaginatively and viscerally with Islamic terrorism – The Lion’s Game (2000), The Lion (2010) and The Panther (2012) – are the best. By which I mean to say the old saw about not being able to put down the book is literally true. DeMille at his best is as exciting as print can be. His talent for the bullets-flying time-running-out action scene is unique. His pacing is unparalleled. And these aren’t toss-away airport-thrillers: They can be reread and re-enjoyed, which is part due to the vivacity of the characters and part due to DeMille’s extraordinary diligence working out his plot and researching his environment. I hate to use the expression “thought-provoking,” but that’s exactly what these novels are.

Read the first of the series – Plum Island (1997) – and you’ll want to read them all, this one included. But Radiant Angel does not feel like an appropriate end-cap to so fine a story. Even in terms of John Corey’s love-life, things are not left at a satisfactory stopping point – or at any rate not an adequately stable one. This book is a scherzo, not a finale. I don’t think Nelson DeMille is nearly finished with John Corey – in fact, I’d say the best Corey novel is yet to come. At any rate, this isn’t it.

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Plot: 8/10

Excitingness: 9/10

Satisfactoriosity: 7/10

Overall Goodness Rating (OGR): 7.5/10

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Every so often, Taschen produces a definitive and gigantic complete-works art book. The best of these was published in 2012 on Klimt and included absolutely stunning new photography of the Stoclet Frieze. It is almost certainly the greatest art book ever published. It also weighs nearly 20 pounds and comes in its own carrying case with a little handle, which I like very much.

The most recent addition to the series is a relatively modest 12 pounds, but it still has its own carrying case. It also comes with text by the great but long dead Velazquez scholar José López-Rey. His deadness has made it difficult to keep the text up to date as new information comes to light. The editors have done a good job with what is essentially a biography: the research is meticulous and overall it can still be considered definitive. But they have been rather cowardly in making any changes to the catalogue raisonné, and the wealth of new attributions made since López-Rey’s death in 1991 are stuffed noncommittally into a puffy preface.

The photography is very good, but not stunning as in the Klimt book. Of course it is vastly more difficult to rephotograph Velazquezes (permission-wise) so this isn’t a surprise. López-Rey’s interpretation of the paintings is reasonably good – hits and misses – and he does best in biography mode. He declares it impossible, for example, to say what Velazquez is painting in his definitive work Las Meninas – rejecting the obviously correct explanation that he is working on Las Meninas itself because, for such a scene to be physically correct, Velazquez would have to have his back to us so he could actually see the subjects he was painting. In reality, Velazquez never minded bending physics to create a better painting: In his fabulous and only surviving nude, the Rokeby Venus, a cherub-supported mirror allows us to see Venus’ face. It has been amusingly demonstrated that an actual mirror positioned as in the painting would show us a different part of the girl’s body entirely. Likewise, were the mirror on the back of the wall in Las Meninas actually to reflect the King and Queen at frame-filling size, they’d have to be standing right in front of it – not positioned as the painting’s viewers, visible in the mirror alone. Velazquez did what he had to do to make a brilliant composition – and so he faces the audience at his easel to save us the wretched and cloying frustration of Vermeer’s The Art of Painting.

 

 

Velazquez is among the greatest artists of all time. As a painter – a handler of oil paint – he is unsurpassed. He was accused of being lazy (“flemático”) because he could suggest detail without belaboring it. Look at Juan de Pareja, perhaps the greatest painting in this hemisphere: look at how Velazquez renders the texture of de Pareja’s hair (a black field, suggested only by detail at the edges, like an electron cloud). Look at the texture of the velvet sleeve, at the extraordinary use of white highlighting to create the lace collar.   Look above all at Juan de Pareja’s eyes and the supremely vigorous, commanding intelligence of the face. You not only see what de Pareja looked like – you can feel what it felt like to stand in front of him.

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Information: 9/10

Photography: 8/10

Massivness: 9/10

Overall Goodness Rating (OGR): 8/10

Velazquez: The Complete Works.  Text by José López-Rey with Odile Delenda. Taschen, 2014. 416 enormous pages.

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This is the second volume of Edmund Morris’ three-part Theodore Roosevelt biography. The first volume, reviewed here a few weeks ago, is generally regarded as the best. The other two books are, in fact, just as brilliantly researched and well-written, but the first volume has the inherent advantage of introducing TR; his delightful and extraordinary quirks of character are well-known to the reader by the time he reaches the second book. The first volume also covers the most ground, chronologically, and has better pacing as a result.

This volume is the story of the presidency. And we note here, coupled with all those admirable features so much in evidence at the Navy Department or charging up San Juan Hill, some more distressing tendencies. Roosevelt continually strengthened the power of the executive against the legislative and, in his final message to Congress, made the case for largely dispensing with congressional interference in the business of government. He argued that it was easier to hold power to account if all the power were centralized in one man’s hands. He, of course, was the only man up to the task.

TR made tremendous and dubiously constitutional expansions in the reach and scope of government. These were sometimes beneficent – as in the case of his imposing health standards on the meatpacking industry. But he was particularly likely to overstep the mark in his dealings with Wall Street, whose members he tarred more than once as “the wealthy criminal class.” Though he admitted he had no interest in or particular understanding of business, he regarded it as his duty to meddle. The aptly named “Roosevelt Panic of 1907” happened while he was off looking for bears to shoot, and the Roosevelt Economy was only rescued by the timely action of the Wall Street men he so disdained: John D Rockerfeller lead the charge by pledging (“incredibly,” to quote Morris) one half of all his securities towards propping up the sagging stock market.

One of the most tragic precedents was the establishment of the Interstate Commerce Commission and the premise that government has the right to tell a private railroad owner – who had built a railway with his own money and brought transportation to a remote area for the first time – how much he could charge for his tickets and when his trains should run.

These substantial faults are mitigated by a foreign policy that combined tremendous strength with almost unbelievable diplomatic tact. Roosevelt deserves credit for ending the Russo-Japanese War, diffusing Franco-German tensions in northern Africa, and for establishing a healthy balance of power in the Pacific with his Great White Fleet and – of course – the Panama Canal. The presidency was ascendant with Roosevelt, but so was the United States. And we have him to thank, as largely as any president since Lincoln (who laid the moral foundations) for the United States as the Greatest Nation on Earth.

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Information: 10/10

Importance: 9/10

Prose: 8/10

Entertainingness: 8/10

Overall Goodness Rating (OGR): 9/10

Theodore Rex, by Edmund Morris. Random House, 2001. 772 pages.

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Generally, when I read a novel that handles anti-Semitism or racism, I expect nauseating sentimentality and the psychological insight of a retarded two-year-old.  Granted, most of my experience in this department is from high school English classes, where retarded two-year-olds were choosing the curriculum – largely with the goal of inciting of race-hatred against white men.  (I could dexteriously charge public high schools with destroying a whole generation’s worth of race-relations progress, but that’s another piece.)

Shaw is not sentimental, and he is not cynical.  He can be tragic without being maudlin.  This is one of the only modern novels I’ve encountered that succeeds in being moving, and even uplifting, like a sorrowful but sympathetic smile.  (Most attempts at reaching this delicate area of the reader’s psyche are miserably maladroit, the sort of thing a spinster discusses tearfully with her cats.)

There are three separate stories – three main characters – and Shaw bounces around between them and gradually tightens the weave until they meet.  The American, the Jewish American, the German.  Shaw starts at Christmas, 1937, and works his way through the Second World War, advancing years, months or days with each chapter, arriving finally at the liberation of a concentration camp, by which point the American and the Jew are serving in the same infantry platoon and finally encounter the German.  But, despite the importance of the War to the story (just as in Lucy Crown), this is not a book about the War (and neither is Lucy Crown).  The Second World War was the perfect event for Shaw’s art – within living memory of the First, but different in character, with a deeper idea involved.  American men were sent away – and volunteered themselves away – to fight for an idea that many understood only imperfectly and some not at all.  And yet the sum, integrating over all of America, was a perfection of nobility, generosity, and gentleness of spirit.  Shaw’s examination of the American character – and the French, and the German – is astounding and honest.  Ruthlessly and yet non-cynically honest.

There are similarities to The Sun Also Rises – a book often misunderstood as anti-Semitic.  The Jew in the story has the greatest strength of character.  This rubs off on the other characters, sometimes repelling a bad character who becomes worse.  But also sometimes producing a dull but unmistakable resonance in the sleeping souls of less sensitive men.

When Shaw called himself a narrative, as opposed to lyrical, writer, he meant that he was more concerned with the onward rush of his story than with the inherent beauty of the English language.  This sets him up in opposition, stylistically, to Nabokov or Martin Amis.  It does not mean that he has a lesser grasp of his characters.  On the contrary, Shaw’s characters are as thoroughly, masterfully, deeply and feelingly wrought as those of any 20^th century novelist.  This is an extraordinary and extraordinarily entertaining book by as honest a writer as you will ever encounter.

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Entertainingness: 9/10

Prose: 9/10

Character: 10/10

Overall Goodness Rating (OGR): 9.5/10

The Young Lions, by Irwin Shaw.  Random House, 1948.  689 pages.

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Edmund Morris won a Pulitzer Prize for The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, and he deserved it. He might have deserved it for the prologue alone, which, in a scene set at the 1907 New Year’s reception at the White House (at which TR managed to shake, in the space of just a few hours, 8150 hands), conveys an extraordinary, gripping, vivacious character sketch which is the best I’ve ever read.

A young American boy who grows up without this book on his shelf leads a childhood deprived. You certainly won’t learn, in elementary school, high school, or college, anything at all of what the man was actually like. He was routinely described, by almost everyone who met him, casually or professionally or diplomatically and in any social sphere whatsoever, as “the most remarkable man I ever met.” In almost every respect, he is an ideal model of American manhood and manliness.

He was a scrawny and a sickly child – so asthmatic that he often had to sleep sitting up in bed. Being exhorted by his father to cure himself by building his body, he did so so obsessively that, many years later, veteran cowboys, mountain climbers, woodsman and soldiers all would contend that he was also the toughest man they’d ever met. A typical, but not unusual, story concerns a hunt where his horse pitched him into a wall, gashing his head and breaking his arm. He got back on his horse and galloped through fifteen more fields before the hunt ended, whereupon he could be seen riding home with a smile on his bloody face and his arm dangling at his side, the bones having slipped past one another. Another time, camping out west in the freezing cold rain, without shelter and in four inches of water, a comrade thinking on his own misery was astonished to hear Roosevelt saying, “By Godfrey, but this is fun!”

He combined a genuinely Navy Seal-like toughness and courage (he did not just lead the charge up San Juan Hill, but was quite literally the first man to get to the top) with equally extraordinary learning. He had read, by his early thirties, about twenty thousand books, and his photographic memory recalled every detail. He could discourse learnedly with French and German diplomats in their own languages, quoting their own publications back to them or reciting in full a poem brought up in passing. He could keep pace with technical experts in any field – indeed, in conversation at least, he outpaced all but the heartiest. As an author himself, with a forceful if not artful style, he achieved great renown starting with his very first book, The Naval War of 1812, which he published at age 26 and which remains the definitive history. It was immediately ordered stocked in the library of every US Navy ship.

Add to this the endorsement of professional politicians who – whether friend or foe – had to admit he was the ablest natural in their field they’d ever seen, and you begin to get a picture of Theodore Roosevelt. But now I’m beyond my word limit, so read the book.

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Entertainingness: 10/10

Well-writtenness: 9.5/10

Importance, historical and biographical: 9/10

Overall Goodness Rating (OGR): 9.5/10

The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, by Edmund Morris.  Published 1979 by Random House, 920 pages.

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The international competition in the greatest total-artwork of all time – the gothic cathedral – breaks down like this: the Germans and Netherlanders were too austere, the Italians too idiosyncratic, the Spanish too vulgar, the Baltics too close to Russia and the Russians too chaotic to understand gothic properly. England and France are the finalists, and they took completely different approaches:

The French built for height and the English for length. French cathedrals got taller and taller, culminating at Beauvais, where the interior vault from floor to ceiling is nearly 160 feet. (So tall, in fact, that almost the entire cathedral fell over, leaving us today with the somewhat embarrassed but nonetheless extraordinary chevet choir.) English cathedrals meanwhile stretched themselves out to create the impression of a forward-moving journey to God rather than a vertical ascent. This idea culminated at Winchester, whose nave is only 78 feet high but more than 240 feet long from the western doors to the central crossing and 400 feet from the western doors to the great east window.

The French are better known for their stained glass – though so much mediaeval English glass was smashed during the reformation that a fair comparison is impossible. The French at any rate had the rose window – the greatest examples are in the transepts at Chartres, Notre Dame de Paris, and Saint Denis – and this form never caught on in England.

But the early 13^th century French discovery of window tracery and the power of line and light in architecture was singular. By the mid-13^th century, the French Rayonnant style reached England, where it began its transformation into Geometric and then Curvilinear Decorated – together among the most astonishing and inventive discoveries in the history of art. By the end of the 13^th century, England had snatched the baton from France and would retain and gradually increase her stylistic lead until the gothic cathedral itself became extinct.

In the early 14^th century, the great achievements of Curvilinear Decorated – centering on the discovery of the ogee curve – were winding their way back to the continent where the French would transform them into the Flamboyant. But the English, while completing the incomparable Ely Octagon, where already racing on to a new invention: Perpendicular, which has one of its earliest and most remarkable expressions in the choir of Gloucester, where new Perpendicular walls were literally carved out of the original Norman ones.

The French continued for the most part to distrust decorative vaulting, which emphasized length rather than height by dissolving the distinction between individual bays. The English, meanwhile, had already gone through tierceron and then lierne vaulting to a final supreme discovery – the fan vault, as in Kings College Chapel Cambridge. (There was also the unfortunate episode of the pendant vault, which is too much of a party trick to be great art.)

English Decorated took a rather regimented and compartmentalized French invention and added the necessary freedom of imagination. The pinnacle of beauty thus reached was achieved never before, and only very rarely since.

–

Prose: 7/10

Substance: 9/10

Importance: 7/10

Overall Goodness Rating (OGR): 8/10

The English Decorated Style: Gothic Architecture Transformed 1250-1350, by Jean Bony. Phaidon Press, 1979. 315 pages.

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When I read Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago and Yevgenia Ginzburg’s Journey Into the Whirlwind, I gained the impression that the Soviets were even worse than the Nazis – that they were, at any rate, fully as bad as the Second World War Japanese in barbarism and depravity. I made a distinction between Second World War Germans and Japanese because the Nazis treated captured American soldiers, by and large, vastly better than did the Japanese. But this is not enough. Eugen Kogon’s book about the Nazi concentration camps – and about Buchenwald specifically, where he was a prisoner from 1939 until the end of the war – is a reminder that, in the race to the slimy bottom of bestiality, the Germans, Japanese and Soviets were all of a piece.

Kogon has a fascinating chapter on the psychology of the SS – the Exemplars of the Master Race. They were not simply psychotics – though there were plenty such: a certain Master Sergeant Sommer decorated his room with an illuminated skull and “at night would sometimes summon a victim from one of the cells and leisurely do away with him in the room. He would then place the body under his bed and fall asleep peacefully.”

But the average SS man cannot claim insanity as an excuse – Kogon tosses off the interesting observation that “unlimited quantities of liquor” were available to the men on the murder squads. Drinking quelled any residual sparks of humanity – the SS called this “beating the inner son of a bitch.”

The “inner son of a bitch” is more often called “the conscience” – which Hitler fascinatingly and remarkably called “a Jewish invention, a blemish like circumcision.”

The SS were not insane: they were extremely stupid. They were men who had failed at basic education and in society generally, and who often as not had petty (or serious) criminal pasts. General Intelligence Questions on the examination for promotion to SS sergeant included: “What is the difference between a child and a dwarf? Between a ladder and a stairway?” Knowing things like that made you an SS intellectual.

The SS replaced Christianity with a pagan German mysticism; they had noble ancestries invented for them (lacking even the imagination to invent their own lies – “the heraldic devices of Himmler’s elite guard units were designed by prisoners and then entered in the official heraldic rolls…”). They were then given control over the lives of men who, by their very existence – by their continued survival – made the SS feel their inferiority, in intelligence, in spirit and in everything they did.

The inferiority complex of the German People would make a fascinating study – Shirer wrote in his Berlin Diary that Germans were distinguished by an inability to understand anything but a master-slave relationship among individuals and nations alike.

Today’s resurgent European anti-semitism is not fundamentally different. As long as the Jews continue to excel in everything – in education, science, literature, business, building democracies in the Middle East and especially in survival against all odds, which is the story of Israel and of the Jews – lesser, smaller, meaner people will continue to hate them for it.

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Importance: 9/10

Engagingness: 9/10

Overall Goodness Rating (OGR): 9/10

The Theory and Practice of Hell, by Eugen Kogon.  Translation by Heinz Norden.  First published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc, 1950.  This edition 1982, 333 pages.

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Two weeks after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the American military was set to scratching its collective head by President Roosevelt’s order that we bomb the Japanese home islands immediately. There were no land bases in range, and Navy planes couldn’t carry enough bombs far enough to do the job.

Captain Francis S Low, a brilliant young submariner on Admiral King’s staff, was down at the Norfolk Navy airfield and happened to see some Army B-25s making practice attacks on the painted outline of a carrier. And in a moment of inspiration, it occurred to him to ask whether B-25s could fit on and take off from a carrier deck.

The question was answered just weeks later by another brilliant young officer, Captain Donald Duncan (both these men would finish their Naval careers as Admirals). He examined all the available American bombers and concluded that the B-25 – and only the B-25 – would in fact be able to take off from a carrier deck. But only just. The flight manual lists the take-off distance for a fully-loaded B-25 with a good headwind as 2000 feet. On the deck of the Navy’s newest carrier, the USS Hornet, the B-25 would have just 467 feet to get airborne.

And landing was out of the question. So, with extra fuel tanks fitted and the rear defensive guns replaced with black-painted broomsticks to save weight, sixteen B-25s would take off 500 miles from the Japanese coast, drop 2000 pounds of bombs each on Tokyo, and fly onwards to friendly airbases in China for refueling.

The fascinating story of the Doolittle Raid is not in the B-25’s flight manual, so why am I reading a book that tells you how to check the magnetos during engine warm-up and how much manifold pressure you should pull at minimum cruise?

In short, instead of reading about history, I’m reading history itself. These same pages were studied by the 20-year-old men of America, who often just a few months before had never flown any plane of any sort, and who would shortly be doing some of the most demanding, dangerous and noble work on earth.

Never before were average men made into pilots by the thousands, trained to fly in formations sometimes a mile long and to fight titanic battles five miles above ground. Never before and never again will ten thousand men fight in the air at once: the great air war, a terrible but indelibly romantic thing, is over for good.

The words of wisdom in the pilot’s introduction are striking: know your job, which is half the battle. Know your men – that’s the other half. Do you know where your tail gunner was born? Is your crew chief married? What was your navigator doing before he joined the Army? And so forth.

This is an extraordinary document, one of a great many small but elegant building blocks that made grander and better-known documents possible – that validated the phrase “unconditional surrender”.

So why should I want to know how much manifold pressure to pull at minimum cruise in a B-25? I think everyone should. It’s 27 inches at 2000 rpm.

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Freestanding Importance: 2/10

Representative Importance: 9/10

Interestingness and fascinatingness: 10/10

Overall Goodness Rating:  Honestly, if you love machines it’s a 9/10.  Everyone else, grab a history book instead.

Pilot Training Manual for the B-25, by Headquarters, AAF, Office of Flying Safety.  This revision, November 1944. 171 pages.

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Back when consumer internet was fledgling and Google didn’t even exist, David Gelernter wrote about the future of computing – which he saw as a gradual release from the constraints of physical metaphors such as desktops and folders, and the rise of web-based storage and computing. He predicted that speedy internet would soon be in every household, and that the likeliest candidates for its delivery would be either phone or cable TV companies – or some combination of both. He described a world in which all your files would be stored in the “cloud” (a term he coined two years later in a piece for edge.org) and would be available to you on any machine connected to the internet. He described a device that would allow you to rewind your TV and watch any previously broadcast program. He even described what Apple would eventually release as “Time Machine” – the ability to save and revert to previous states of your computer.   Except he called it “Time Travel.”

These and other predictions are almost incidental to a book on the importance of beautiful design in computers. The book was widely read at Apple, of course, inasmuch as Gelernter applauds Apple’s design approach in contrast to Microsoft’s. He does point out that Apple still has basic problems – most of all their continued reliance on the file-cabinet metaphor and their failure to design exteriors for their computers as attractive and elegant as their software. (Remember, this predates the iMac.)

A good design must be beautiful – the Hoover Dam, the Cesca Chair, Dreyfuss’ telephone and Loewy’s Studebakers are all in here as examples. A beautiful design beats an ugly one.

So why then, the reader may ask, is Microsoft beating Apple? Hard to say, Gelernter writes, though a general market resistance to new ideas is partly responsible, together with Apple’s advertising, which makes them appear too “cute” and not serious enough for businesses. But Apple will win in the end, because ultimately beauty always does.

Of course the book feels dated in some respects – principally because the author needs to explain a number of things which today are commonplace or universal. But one cannot help but be staggered by the vivacious vividity of Gelernter’s imagination. And yet his conclusions were roundly disputed at the time. His doctoral student Eric Freeman, the co-inventor of Lifestreams, came close to failing his dissertation defense because computer scientists thought there would never be enough storage or computing power to make it possible to search all your files (and not have to throw old ones in the trash). It was ludicrous to believe that such resources would ever be available to average people. Gelernter’s then is the traditional prophetic prerogative: not to be believed. Just to be able to say, “I told you so.”

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Machine Beauty, by David Gelernter.  1998, Basic Books, an imprint of the Perseus Books Group. 166 pages.

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Vladimir Dimitrievich Nabokov (1870-1922) was a wealthy barin and a good and courageous man, a member of parliament in Tsarist Russia, briefly imprisoned for attempting to reform that régime, and briefly Minister of Justice in a short-lived post-Tsarist and anti-Bolshevik government. He escaped abroad, following his family to Western Europe, and was murdered in Berlin in 1922 by a Russian Nazi, having heroically interposed himself between the assassin and his intended target.

His eldest son, Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (1899-1977), was the greatest novelist of the 20^th century. The junior Vladimir (henceforth our principal Nabokov) represents the last generation of intact pre-Soviet-era childhoods. He learned English and French before he learned Russian, and all but his early novels were written in English. The Tsarist aristocracy was astonishingly and obsessively cultured (and also wanted to carry on pas devant les domestiques discussions). Nabokov’s childhood had a princely sheen, fairytale flakes of which clearly rubbed off on Pale Fire and especially Ada. (Ada is essentially a female Nabokov, and the leading man, Van, a reflection of that reflection.)

Nabokov’s depth of reading and an unparalleled clarity in visual imagination yielded greatest command of English by any writer this side of Joyce. Readers will understand his style is lyrical, not narrative. His scenes are quiet, but they glow like stained glass. Certain passages recur frequently in my mind not as words but as images: the giant Faber pencil his mother bought from an art shop display window to cheer him up when he was sick; his bicycle light zig-zagging up a hill in the dark; his synesthetic alphabet. (Like his mother, he naturally associated colors and textures with particular letters.)

But I like Nabokov less, personally, than I did before I’d read Speak, Memory. Perhaps most honest memoirs produce a similar effect. In 1939, his mother expired alone and in greatly straitened circumstances in Prague. His younger brother Sergey figures so often in early stories that one is jarred by the bizarre nonchalance with which Nabokov mentions Sergey’s having died in 1945 in a Nazi concentration camp “of inanition.” (That is, he starved to death.) His first great love, “Tamara,” to whom he swore undying fealty, he left in Soviet Russia – leaving us to wonder what became of her. (He never found out.) These little items make an odd contrast to his unrelenting cross-continental obsession with chasing butterflies. At points, his sense of self-satisfaction, even his satisfaction at his ruthless self-honesty, make him sound like the sort of guy who could eventually be your good friend, but only after you’d had a serious fistfight. So it’s not surprising that Nabokov regarded writing as a chess-like battle of wits between author and audience.   If you just sit back and let his prose wash over you, you’ll miss most of it. Nabokov wants to be unlocked as much as read.

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Prose: 10/10

Engagingness: 8/10

Beauty: 9/10

Overall Goodness Rating (OGR): 9/10

Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited.  First published 1951.  This edition: Library of America, 1996. 270 pages.

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Martin Amis has a difficult subject here, but it’s not the first time he’s novelized a concentration camp – the central character in Time’s Arrow (1991) is a Nazi doctor in Auschwitz; House of Meetings (2006) is about a prisoner in the Soviet Gulag. In The Zone of Interest, Amis is back at Auschwitz (not named as such in the novel, but immediately recognizable and accurately rendered). And in this instance he cannot rely on the main device of Time’s Arrow – regarded variously by reviewers as either a well-executed party trick or an extraordinary coup – of telling the entire story in reverse, down to the tiniest details of the daily routine. (This reviewer falls into the latter camp regarding Time’s Arrow; it is well worth re-reading.)

In The Zone of Interest, Amis has made significant progress in his own understanding, as he discusses in his Afterword, which is one of the most fascinating parts of the book (though not technically part of the novel at all). Amis read extensively (the bibliography is staggering) and reached only the “negative eureka” conclusion that the Holocaust is simply beyond understanding. But in 2011 he encountered an addendum in a new edition of Primo Levi’s The Truce: an answer to a reader’s question, “How can the Nazi’s fanatical hatred of the Jews be explained?” Levi suggested that perhaps this hatred cannot and even ought not be explained, since an explanation implies a rationale. (“To understand is almost to justify.”) And neither can one say the Nazis were simply insane – this excuses them. So perhaps the Nazis are beyond any understanding we can reach of them as humans: they are inhuman or actually un-human.

Amis has no doubt this answer will seem to historians an evasion; for him it acted as a “spur” – not to understand, humanize or rationalize, but to find a new story in one of the most storied of all chapters in what Churchill finely called a tyranny “never surpassed in the dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime.”

Amis is here as well deprived of one of his greatest standards – his own voice. Which is only to say that he rotates through three different narrators: an awakening Nazi official, the camp commandant, and the Jewish head sonderkommando. He gives each narrator his own voice – on the whole beautifully done – but must therefore reign in the extremes of his own visual (yes, visual) virtuosity. Occasionally he can’t help himself – the camp commandant feels a certain fear as “a vacuum in my solar plexus, like a globe of hard air.” This is an extraordinary phrase; on reading it, I felt finally in possession of something long searched for. But one can hardly hear it passing through the mind of the character in question.

I have rarely read a book that produced a more intense (in this case almost euphoric) desire to speak with its author. It left me in a questioning state of mind. I will have to read it again before I can be sure what to make of it, but there is a depth in this work that will repay the re-reading.

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Entertainingness: 8/10

Prose: 9/10

Intriguingness: 9/10

Unusuality: 9/10

Overall Goodness Rating (OGR): 8/10

The Zone of Interest, by Martin Amis.  Knopf, 2014. 306 pages.

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There are a variety of great World War II memoirs: Vincent Fagan’s Liberator Pilot, Robert Johnson’s Thunderbolt!, James Fahey’s Pacific War Diary, and Eugene B Sledge’s With the Old Breed. The greatest of all is Quartered Safe Out Here, by George MacDonald Fraser, who fought with a Cumbrian infantry regiment in Burma. It is not just a genre masterpiece but a masterpiece period – beautifully written and extremely funny besides.

Helmet for my Pillow, by Robert Leckie, is often mentioned in conjunction with the above, particularly with With the Old Breed, since both Leckie and Sledge were US Marines fighting in the Pacific. They were on Peleliu (pronounced “puh-lay-loo”) at the same time, though they didn’t know each other – Leckie was in the 1^st Marines and Sledge was in the 5^th. Peleliu was Sledge’s first campaign; it was Leckie’s last.

On Guadalcanal, Leckie’s had been the very last battalion to come off the front lines, after four months of continuous fighting. He was hit on the second day at Peleliu and evacuated to a hospital ship; a shell landed so close to him that he could neither walk nor speak for three days as a result of the shockwave. Sledge survived Peleliu intact to fight on Okinawa.

Sledge’s book is brilliantly written, exceptionally vivid and totally unassuming and unselfconscious. Leckie’s book isn’t. Unfortunately, Leckie strains towards a prose style that doesn’t seem natural to him – he has a tendency to swan off into long and overwrought passages smattered with metaphors that almost never work. It sounds as though he’s trying to write like someone else. He regularly muddles the punchlines of what would otherwise be his most illuminating and entertaining anecdotes.

This is a damper on an otherwise fascinating account of an extraordinary moment in history. To witness these events from the lowest, most granular level – as an enlisted infantryman – provides the best view of what the fighting was like. And it is striking that all the best memoirs from the war were written by enlisted men, with the exception of those about the Air Corps, in which all flying men were necessarily subject to the same danger – and all the pilots were officers.

Leckie finally hits his stylistic stride in the last, shortest and most important section of the book – Peleliu – where he relaxes long enough to tell the story in a simple and straightforward way much more becoming to him, and that forges a deeper connection with the reader. This is aided by the gravity and tragedy of Peleliu, where in short order so many of the men we came to know over the course of the book are killed. The fighting there reached a unique level of horror and intensity, in part due to the hard coral ground which provided little cover and reflected rather than absorbed shrapnel. On the first day alone, the 1^st Marine Regiment suffered twenty percent casualties – two thousand five hundred men. But the Japanese got the worst of it, always preferring a suicide charge to surrender: Out of the original Japanese garrison of 13,600 defenders, only 202 were taken alive.

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Prose: 4/10

Engagingness: 7/10

Importance: 8/10

Overall Goodness Rating (OGR): 6/10

Helmet For My Pillow, by Robert Leckie. First published 1957.  This edition, ibooks, Simon & Schuster, 2004.  324 pages.

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Kafka writes dreams, which is why any attempt to describe the plot to a friend is bound to end in bitter frustration. To take a small example from Amerika: the hero, Karl Rossmann, has been invited to the country estate of a friend of his uncle’s, named Pollunder, so he can meet Mr Pollunder’s daughter, Klara. Karl wants to return to Manhattan. He is instructed to say goodbye to Klara, up in her bedroom. He is disinclined to do this since on their first meeting she overpowered him using some judo technique in her displeasure at his having wanted to see the room where he was to have spent the night. But he goes to say goodbye anyway, and he plays the piano for her. He hears applauding from the next room (via a hidden connecting door) and it turns out to be Mack, a friend of Karl’s, who is then introduced as Klara’s fiancée. Mr Pollunder’s friend, Mr Green, arrives with a letter which he was to give to Karl at the stroke of midnight. The letter is from Karl’s uncle, who announces that in visiting Mr Pollunder Karl has acted against the uncle’s wishes, and, therefore, Karl is disowned and banished forever. Mr Green returns to Karl his original suitcase and umbrella, as well as Karl’s cap, which Mr Green had stolen during dinner.

As far as reportage goes, this is an utter catastrophe. But when you actually read the Amerika, you are immersed in the dream and begin to accept the strange and inexorable march of events as though you yourself are the dreamer. And these events get at deep, hidden truths by some side entrance or hidden alley you never knew was there. Kafka is the ultimate prose poet.

When Kafka succumbed to tuberculosis at age 40 in 1924, he left instructions for his best friend, Max Brod: “Dearest Max, my last request: Everything I leave behind me…in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others’), sketches, and so on, [is] to be burned unread.” Fortunately, though it can’t have been easy, Max Brod ignored Kafka’s instructions. Otherwise, all three of Kafka’s novels – The Trial, The Castle, Amerika – would have been destroyed along with the balance of his short stories.

The writer Richard Howard chose a line from Amerika as an excellent description of the novel itself: “At the end of each flight of stairs, another would begin in a slightly different direction.” A constant, shifting anxiety is always being resolved in the most unusual way – by the introduction of a new and unrelated problem that makes the old one irrelevant.

This artform is unique: there is nothing like a Kafka story, just as there is nothing like a Joseph Cornell box. Cornell is the Kafka of the visual arts, who put dreams in boxes and is the only surrealist who can make pictures of the subconscious. Likewise, Kafka is the only writer who can make a story – a series of images – into a dreaming experience: Raskolnikov’s dreams in Crime and Punishment read like dreams. Kafka reads as though one is actually dreaming.

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Intriguingness: 9/10

Prose: 9/10

Depth and beauty: 9/10

Overall Goodness Rating (OGR): 9/10

Amerika: The Man Who Disappeared.  Excellent new translation by Michael Hofmann.  New Directions Publishing Co, 2002, 217 pages.

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