Books

JAN 16, THE RAPHAEL AFFAIR by Iain Pears. A painting has been exported from Rome to a collector in London. Underneath the rather ordinary portrait by Mantini is (perhaps) a lost painting by Raphael. Expertly written by Pears, a journalist and art historian.
Jan 20. THE MURDER ROOM by PD James. The first 100 pages are boring, as Ms James grinds away at the setup.Jan 26. Once the murder takes place Ms James gets into her stride; Adam Dalgleish, every woman's idea of the perfect man takes over the investigation. The story: The Board of the Dupayne Museum in London, a museum devoted to the twenties and thirties, including murder and mayhem, as illustrated in its Murder Room, disagrees on its future. One of the sons of the founder, who thinks the museum should be sold and disbanded, is burned alive by an arsonist. The obvious suspects are the other Board members, who want the museum continued and the staff members, who believe the museum is a vital part of their lives. Best aspects of book: the wide spectrum of British society is carefully portrayed. James knows police procedure well. Some aspects of case unlikely and unconvincing, but this is to be expected in an involved case featuring dozens of well-developed characters.
Feb 9. STARLIGHT ON THE VELD by Herman Bosman. Just became reaquainted with the master Afrikaan short story writer, Herman Bosman, whose books have recently been reissued by Human & Rousseau. His books were strongly recommended by Peter Barrett, a colleague at the University of Natal in Durban. Two of the tales in this book are master works: Starlight on the Veld and Mafeking Road. The latter brought him fame in South Africa and England. Words peculiar to South Africa:
mealies = corn
koppie = a small, raised piece of land, ofter occupied by rocks and trees
outspan = unhook the oxen (used by Afrikaans to wander around the veld
veld = a grassy plain, dotted with trees and bushes
voorkamer = front room or living roomkaffir = black person, definitely politically incorrect nowadays
stoep = front steps
trek,trekkers = When the rains stopped or the English became too threatening, the Boers placed their belongings in their wagons and trekked to another site
assegai = spear, often thrown by Zulu warriors
kloof = a deep ravine
kraal = native settlement, usually a circle of huts

Feb 23. RECOGNIZING BLUES by Herman Bosman. Another collection of short stories by Bosman. Especially noteworthy are the prison tales, replete with prison slang. Bosman was sent to jail for killing his step brother.

Herman Bosman

Mar 11. RUMPOLE and the PRIMROSE PATH by John Mortimer. A new selection of stories about Rumpole and his fellow hacks in the Old Bailey. The first story is a real gem, with great dialogue from the old and the new.
Mar 17. PREY by Michael Crichton. Another chiller by the master science fiction writer. The military has funded a secret laboratory in the California desert. A private company is attempting to develop a swarm of nanoparticles that can spy on an enemy and radio back their position and activities. As in all Crichton's thrillers, the execution is flawed by human mistakes and the computer directed swarm of particles seems destined to take over the world. Chilling indeed

Mar 29. OUR GAME by John Le Carre. The Cold War has ended. What are the British spies to do in this post CW era? Larry, a double agent run by Tim Cranmer from London, returns and runs off with Emma, Cranmer's under age lover, stealing millions of pounds to finance the Muslim rebels of Ingushetia, who are beset in their mountain strongholds both by the Ossetians and the Russians. Le Carre tries to wring one more book out of the dregs of the CW. The latter part of the book is unbelievable. Not in the same league as Tinker, Taylor.

Apr 5. SINGLE & SINGLE by JL Carre. Another adventure with the Russian mob and the Georgians. Some good dialog, but the characters are unlikeable and the adventures unbelievable. In this one the auther approaches--but does not descend to--the James Bond level. I think he has written out.

Apr 16. IRELAND by William Trevor. A book chock full of classic stories by one of the great--if not greatest-- short stories writers in the English language. My favorites: The NEWS FROM IRELAND, set in the famine years, as the Irish ascendency (English settlers) wrestle with keeping the peasants alive after the second failure of the potato crop; TWO MORE GALLANTS, In a reprise of the Joyce story, Two Gallants, two Irish chancers take the mickey out of a professor by producing a bogus woman who had (apparently) slept with James Joyce; KATHLEEN'S FIELD, in which a young girl from a farm is forced to slave as a live-in maid to a family who give her father a mortage on a second piece of farmland. Her brother will inherit the land; she will work for nothing until old and gray. A very sad, and not uncommon story.

Apr 28. AUTOPSY ON AN EMPIRE. An account by Jack Matlock, our former ambassador to the Soviet Union, of the last days of the Soviet Union. It's very complicated, especially when he relates the role of the breakaway republics in tearing down the underpinning of the empire. He had close ties to Gorbachov, so that his analysis of Gorbachov's personality and abilities is very revealing. As far as I understand, Gorbachov tried to do the impossible: take a monolithic organization like the Russian Communist Party, pull its teeth, and make it a purring pusycat. He started the breakup process and then was overwhelmed by the passions aroused, both for and against the Union.

June 5. APPLE CONFIDENTIAL 2.0, by Owen Linzmayer. A lively, interesting history of Apple Computer, the company born in a garage, whose parents were school dropouts and countercultureists. Apple popularized the graphical interface for personal computers, in contrast to the text-driven DOS of Microsoft. In spite of being years ahead in their development, they lost out to Microsoft because of bad timing, bad luck and poor management. Each time they have been consigned to the tech graveyard, however, they pull a rabbit out of their hate and recover. Their latest coup is the iPad, which at the moment is the preferred (legal) method of downloading music from the Internet.

June 13. EATER by Gregory Benford. A sci-fi thriller about how to get rid of a black hole if it should show up in your back yard--the black yard of the protagonists being the big telescopes in Maui, Hawaii. Of course, you do what any red-blooded American would do; throw a few nukes at it. The world survives in this completely unbelievable thriller.

Aug 11. THE RULE OF FOUR, by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason. A mysterious, coded manuscript is studied by two students in Princeton, Tom and Paul. Both of them become obsessed by the MS of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphi, a Renaissance text that has baffled scholars for 500 years. Within the text is a coded description of the location of a crypt full of treasures near Florence. Its unraveling leads to two more deaths to add to the 4 killed by the nobleman who wrote the book. The passion and murder of the Princeton scholars seems way over the top. They tend to destroy by a cutting phrase. A theme running through the novel is the destruction of love by obscessive study. Very appropriate for the two authors, recent graduates of Princeton and Harvard. Took them 6 years to write this, their debut novel.

Sept 7. THE SECRET OF SANTA VITTORIA by Robert Crichton. Found this little gem by accident, mistaking it for a Michael Crichton sci-fi book. It's the story of the Italians living in a small hill town south of Rome as the allied forces grind up the Italian peninsula. Basically, the lives of the peasants revolve around the growing of grapes and the making of wine. The local characters are beautifully drawn with a light, humorous touch. You are introduced to all elements of society, from the half-witted peasant to the ruling Fascist class, all of whom try to protect their precious wine from the Germans. Highly recommended.

Sept 18. SHADOW DIVERS by Robert Kurson, a page-turning novel about the discovery in 1991 of a sunken German U-boat off the Jersey coast near Brielle. The exploration and identification of the sub was carried out not by navy teams, but by scuba divers operating 230 feet below the surface, at the limit of human endurance. During the six years of exploration, three men died from complications of narcosis, the overloading of the blood by nitrogen. The story grips one because of the obsession of the principle diver, John Chatterton, who lost his wife during the extended diving. The book was recommended to me by Sam Hand, a friend from PPL, who pointed out that one of the divers was Dick Shoe, an administrator at the lab.