The Miracle of Dunkirk

Posted on October 23, 2015 by smellincoffee

The Miracle of Dunkirk
© 1982 Walter Lord
323 pages

In September 1939, British troops arrived in Europe to defend France against a rapidly expansionistic Nazi regime.  Germany’s leader of six years, Adolf Hitler, had already annexed Austria and Czechslovakia, and following his invasion of Poland, the western powers had no choice but to declare war. For eight months following, however, Hitler’s tanks were quiet, the only action being at sea. In May 1940, however, they sprang into action and with such ferocity that the entire Allied campaign seemed doomed.  Roaring through the Ardennes Forest, thought impassable by tanks, the German blitzkrieg quickly claimed northern France and surrounded entirely the British forces.  As a stream of routed and retreated Franco-English forces converged on what few port towns were yet untaken, their defeat seemed imminent.  But loss was not to be:  the tanks would stop, the  English would regroup, and in a brief snatch of grace they would organize a plan to evacuate the army from France so that it might live to fight another day.  Under the very nose of the Wehrmacht, amid the bombs of the Luftwaffe,  the British admiralty and its merchant marine stole a march and saved not only the British expeditionary force, but over a hundred thousand French soldiers as well. The Miracle of Dunkirk  tells a story of salvation in a dark  hour.

Walter Lord is best known for A Night to Remember  a narrative history of the Titanic disaster based on extensive interviews with survivors. The same style is employed here,  an easy kind of story-telling strengthened by the constant presence of the participants’ accounts.  Like Washington’s retreat from New York,  Dunkirk is a strange duck, a victorious defeat. What most impresses a reader in Miracle is the fact that the admiralty was able to effect a rescue amid so much confusion. The invasion of France  struck through Allied lines so abruptly that unit cohesion was virtually a lost cause.  The cry was, “Every man for himself — make for Dunkirk!”.   At first, Allied command waffled on what to do:  attempt a breakout and  rejoin the French army in the south,  or quit the continent altogether?  Fortunately for free Europe,  they chose discretion.  Equally impressive is how quickly a rescue fleet was cobbled together, made of not just whatever ships of the Royal Navy could be spared, but of whatever could be found that floated. Tugs, barges, ferries, fishing boats, pleasure yachts — the whole of the English marine seemed present.   

Despite the chaos the admiralty had to manage,  some circumstances favored the evacuation. Smoke from burning oil tanks shielded parts of the beach and harbor from Luftwaffe attacks, at least part of the time,  and the German pause had given the BEF time to establish a few strongholds.  When the German advance continued, it was without much of its strength, with far fewer tanks:   most were being re-concentrated and repaired for the drive south.  In the nine days it took for the Wehrmacht to take Dunkirk,  the British marine managed to evacuated over 300, 000 British troops and 100, 000 French troops.  Miracle is replete with fascinating stories, like the presence of Charles Lightoller:  the only officer on the Titanic to survive its sinking, he commanded his ship to France and back, rescuing another generation from the perils of the sea and war.   Lord’s heavy use of first-hand experience and storied style commend Miracle to readers with an interest in learning how the British and free French lived to fight another day at the port of Dunkirk.

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Reads to Reels: The Martian

Posted on October 21, 2015 by smellincoffee

It has been seven weeks since I ran out of ketchup. 

Last week I stopped at Books-A-Million while waiting for the 3:00 showing of The Martian, and thought of purchasing a shirt — “THE BOOK WAS BETTER THAN THE MOVIE” —  and wearing it to the theater as a joke.  I’m glad I didn’t, because The Martian is a rare movie that not only lives up to the book, but improves upon it in some ways. True, it is a slightly different story, with less explanation-rich attempts to figure out science problems and more emphasis on emotional drama. The science is abundant, but scaled back to a level that movie-goers —  encountering it in quickly-passing lines of dialogue and narration — can appreciate on the fly.  This is a genuine science-fiction movie, however; every problem Watney encounters is of scientific nature.  He is a botanist and biochemist,  a master of ad-hoc engineering. Eventually NASA realizes there’s something alive –and something familiar — on Mars, and attempt a rescue, but they too have problems to puzzle through. So it goes, trial after trial,  one solution leading to another dilemma until at long last the end is reached.  The Martian communicates the emotional drama more than a book,   the anguish read on the faces of his crewmen who realize they left a man behind, the awe of a satellite-monitoring intern who realizes Watney isn’t giving up.  There’s little to no trace of convenient movie physics;  I was especially impressed by the fact that when NASA spots Watney on satellite, they were dealing with very pixelated footage; no CSI-magic to zoom in and enhance! Though this is science fiction, in the end what finally triumphs is the human spirit – Watney’s refusal to give in to apathy, and his crewmates’ decision to take part in a rescue attempt at peril of their own life. In translating The Martian from pageleaves to reels, nothing has been lost save a little gratuitous language — and the reader turned viewer gains astonishing landscapes in the bargain.  Very well done, I think. This adapation of one of my top five favorite books in 2014 is a movie that will no doubt find its way into my DVD collection when it comes out.

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Dawn of the Eagles

Posted on October 17, 2015 by smellincoffee

Star Trek Terok Nor: Dawn of the Eagles
© 2008 S.D. Perry and Britta Dennison
435 pages

The days are dark for Bajor. More than thirty years into the Occupation, the once-promising Resistance has very nearly been broken by a planet-wide surveillance system that restricts the movement of Bajorans on the surface.  Some of the rebellion’s best leaders have fallen victim to it, and there seems to be little to do but hide in what few caves and similar sanctuaries that remain hidden from the Cardassian state’s sensors.   And yet resistance festers, not only a  stripped Bajor but among the Cardassians as well.  Religious dissidents, ordinary citizens, and even members of the military are weary of the toll occupation has taken on Cardassia:  decades have been squandered in which Cardassia could have fostered a sustainable economy, wasted instead on the short-term remedy of taking Bajoran wealth. But now Bajor is largely ruined and the occupation nearly costing more than it provides — in lives and finances.  Even the architect of despair, Gul Dukat, pays the price for his Pyrrhic victory,  increasingly isolated and made miserable by the fact that no one really appreciates him.  Dawn of the Eagles chronicles the downfall of the Cardassian occupation, completing this epic of Deep Space Nine’s backstory. Mixing the familiar and the new, it is the story of a people’s liberation; the Bajorans, from Cardassia; the Cardassians, from the depravity that Empire has led them to.

Like those before it, Dawn of the Eagle relies on viewpoint characters familiar from the show — Dukat, Kira, Odo — supported by original characters. Many of the threads continue from the preceding books , like the struggle of the resistance (mostly focusing on Kira’s cell) against occupation. Others are new: Odo is a major character here, having left the science lab behind him to search for the meaning of his existence. His skill at mediating disputes, and potential as a weapon in Cardassia’s pocket, attracts Dukat’s eye, and eventually the lonely shapeshifter finds himself as Terok Nor’s security chief,  ostensibly serving Cardassian interests but more often than not indulging a soft spot for the Bajoran oppressed.  Several of the more interesting characters are Cardassian women, all dissidents to one degree or another. One, Natima Lang,  appeared onscreen (…as a dissident, since Cardassia’s government is perennially objectionable), but the others were more or less loyal to the state until their work forced them to confront the fact that they were helping perpetuate evil. (One, for instance,  is a disgraced weapons scientist who realizes the new project she’s been assigned to involves the stealth sterilization of the Bajoran populace.).  That tension — working through the question of how far one takes ‘my country right or wrong’  — makes for a compelling story, and truly sympathetic Cardassians.  This is a fitting end to the trilogy, making the miniseries tie together by ending with some of the same original characters and on the same Bajoran holiday that Night of the Vipers began with.  For Deep Space Nine fans,  this is a true preface and  wholly worth reading.

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Science TBR

Posted on October 17, 2015 by smellincoffee

Every time I write down a list of books to go after, I lose the darn thing, so I’m posting this one!

  • 10% Human: How Your Bodies Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness, Alonna Callen
  • Domesticated: Evolution in a Man-Made World, Richard Francis
  • Humankind: How Biology and Geography Shape Human Diversity, Alexander Harcourt
  • Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Haroni

  • The Invaders: How Humans and their Dogs Drove Neaderthals to Extinction, Pat Shipman
  • Lone Survivors: How We Came to the the Only Humans on Earth, Chris Stringer
  • The Intimate Bond: How Animals Shaped Human History, Brian Fagan
  • Into that Silent Sea: Trailblazers of the Space Era, Francis French
  • The Social Conquest of Earth, E.O. Wilson
  • Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them, Joshua Greene

Mostly biology/anthropology, with an odd space book thrown in. Into that Silent Sea is  a special one because I’ve been forgetting it for three years now.  None of these are immediate reads, though I’ll go after at least one before this year is out.  I’m nearly done with my trilogy for the 2015 Reading Challenge, and after that my only real target will be the book with antonyms in the title. After that it’s mopping up, really.

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Night of the Wolves

Posted on October 17, 2015 by smellincoffee

Star Trek Terok Nor:  Night of the Wolves
© 2008 S.D. Perry and Britta Dennison
458 pages

Eighteen years ago, the Cardassian Union abandoned pretense and formally annexed the planet it had already manipulated and tricked its way into dominating.  Bajor has suffered greatly at the hands of the military dictatorship since, its economy cast into ruins as the Cardassians impose a kind of mercantilism that destroys the environment and shifts most resources to the Union.  Not content to complain and malinger in refugee camps, however, many Bajorans have taken to active rebellion. Hiding in the wilderness, they wage war against the oppressor — and if collaborators get in the way, so be it.  Night of the Wolves, from the pen of an already-accomplished DS9 author, chronicles the Resistance’s emergence as a serious threat to Cardassia’s triumph. It is told principally through the lives of screen-established characters — Gul Dukat, Kira, Ro Laren, Dr. Mora —  while incorporating a few new faces. The heavy use of canon characters, with subtle links to  Deep Space Nine’s episodes, makes Night an ideal Trek series book, easily  read on its own regardless of its place in a trilogy.

While Night doesn’t have the same climatic structure as Day of the Vipers, simply chronicling twelve years of the occupation in which both the resistance and players within it come of age, the depth it adds to established characters makes it a commendable read. The plot threads within don’t intersect too much, but here we see both Kira and Ro’s introduction to the resistance –and for Ro, her motive for seeking a life beyond Bajor, haunted by the fear of falling prey to the idea that the ends justify the means.  Here, too, is Odo’s birth as a sentiment being, his coming of age within a Bajoran-Cardassian science lab.   The pages flew by for me, featuring as they did some of my favorite characters — Dukat, Kira, and Ro Laren — but even some of the new characters with stories independent of the DS9 shows took my interest. One of note is a Cardassian grad student who, after having an Orb experience while attempting to translate the writing on an artifact, travels back to Cardassia and discovers her people’s life prior to the military takeover. Dukat is here in all his pre-Waltz ambiguous glory,  One matter of concern is the early introduction of some characters, namely Damar and Ziyal, and the fact that one character says “The middle of the occupation is no time to be having a child!”.  Unless he’s had an experience with the Orb of Time, which is lost, he probably shouldn’t know he’s in the middle of the Occupation. (To make matters worse, he’s not even in the middle of the occupation; it’s barely a third of the way through.)  This seems to make Ziyal far older than she appears onscreen, and Damar’s career somewhat pathetic. Thirty years before we first see him onscreen, he was still a low-grade glinn worshiping the ground Dukat walks on?  That’s Harry Kim-style career doldrums.

Though not as tight a story as Day, I liked it better —  such is the draw of its characters.

One interesting bit of story: Kira is literally the first Bajoran woman Odo sees. At one point she and her cell sneak into the science lab to do a little sabotage work, and he watches her from his goo tank. 

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Day of the Vipers

Posted on October 15, 2015 by smellincoffee

Star Trek Terok Nor: Day of the Vipers
© 2008 James Swallow

When a Cardassian warship arrived at Bajor carrying the dead bodies of Bajoran traders, that should have counted as ominous. Bajor and Cardassia were distant neighbors without formal contact until the Cardassian military found a Bajoran merchant ship adrift and decided to return the dead home to be laid to rest.  Despite their seeming benevolence, however, within a decade’s time the Cardassians had proven to be very strange friends, the kind who don’t leave people alone and level guns at their head — for their own good, of course. Terok Nor: Day of the Vipers begins a trilogy covering the fifty-year military occupation of Bajor,  being the story of a peaceful planet’s woe, its seizure and plunder.

The Occupation formed the background of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. In its very first episode, the Federation was invited to Bajor to help pick up the pieces. A ferocious military resistance had sapped Cardassian resources and prompted them to leave, but creating peace between now bitter-enemies would not easy, not when the villains who perpetuated the occupation were for the most part still up and kicking. Chief among them in the series, and here in Day of t he Vipers, is Gul Dukat.  He begins not as a gul, but as a younger subordinate.  Although Dukat is not the only Cardassian viewpoint character, he is the one through whom we see most of Cardasia’s foreign policy effected. Swallow creates an occupation arrived at through subtle measures, mixing in a few familiar faces with a host of new ones.  Dukat and his grey brothers do not arrive with a fleet of warships, roaring demands for surrender; they arrive as friends bearing gifts and ask for nothing but trade in return.   Swallow further develops traces established by Andy Robinson in his A Stitch in Time of Cardassia’s culture before civilization collapse and military takeover created the Cardassia familiar to viewers through ST TNG and ST DS9.  Of particular interest is the use of religious Cardassians: though the Union is a predominately secular state, ruled exclusively by the military and its ethos, a small minority still hold on to Cardassia’s pre-junta traditions. They come in handy; since the Bajorans are devout, the ‘Oralians’ serve as goodwill ambassadors of sort, even though Dukat and the other officers despise their traditional fellow nationals and work for their forceful extinction back home. When the Oralians and Bajorans hit it off, establishing an Oralian embassy of sorts on the planet. Cardassian culture gains a toehold on the planet, one used to great effect despite the acrimony between faith and state.  Bit by bit,  the Cardassians expand their influence on the planet, using the spectre of shared mutual enemies  to accustom the Bajorans to relying on the Cardassian military for protection and ‘guidance’.  The full arrival of the Occupation proper doesn’t arrive until the very end, and the last word — “RESIST!” sets the stage for the birth of the Bajoran rebellion in Night of the Wolves.

I’ve long looked forward to reading this series, Deep Space Nine being my favorite of the Trek shows, and so far it does not disappoint, though the early inclusion of Dukat is strange given how long the Occupation lasted. (He’s also the Dukat whom we’re familiar with, as opposed to a younger man whose personality is still being formed.)   I thought the slow but subtle creep of Cardassia into Bajor was handled well, especially because it was executed not by one man with an evil plan but by several officers who had competing ideas on how best to expand their influence.  As bonus, we get a young Admiral Nechayev and a Welsh ridealong!

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Called to Serve

Posted on October 14, 2015 by smellincoffee

Called to Serve: A History of Nuns in America
© 2013 Margaret McGuinness
277 pages

Long before the suffrage and feminist movements allowed women to assume a more publicly active role within society,  women religious were taking an active role in shaping the American landscape.  Although predominately a Protestant country, the United States was never without Catholic citizens,  whether through acquiring land originally settled by France and Spain, or by developing its own through immigration from Italy, Poland, and other parts of Catholic Europe.  The American landscape was for all a great mission, a place to build civilization anew, and  nuns were there nearly from the beginning.

Though some orders restricted themselves to prayer,  more active communities bounded, providing teachers and nurses to areas just being settled, which would have otherwise gone without. The sisters provided religious instruction, naturally, but also taught reading, mathematics, and other educational fundamentals. They also trained people for work, giving the margins of society — impoverished freedmen and immigrants. especially their women —  the resources to begin building a life for themselves. America’s religious sisters were not simply Europeans transplanted to the frontier; their rules of life had to be altered to take the harshness of the wilderness into consideration, though some adaptations were perverse. In the early 19th century,  religious orders owned slaves, for instance, even orders which were filled only with African-American nuns The nuns were far more conscious of the evil nature of slavery, however, ameliorating it as best they could and agitating for abolition much earlier than society at large, or even the Church proper.

Nurturing the margins — the least of these — was truly the prevailing mark of American nunneries.  When contagious disease swept American communities, women religious were often the only people willing to nurse the afflicted, sometimes at the cost of their own lines.  The rapidly urbanizing eastern seaboard provided plenty of diseases to battle, and nuns were at the forefront,   managing Catholic hospitals at every level and developing new methods to prevent infection.  As waves of courageous or dispossessed people from Europe swept America, nuns provided settlement houses that welcomed newcomers and helped them find a place for themselves in a new country. Nuns were strangers themselves, often ridiculed and sometimes even attacked by nativists who feared their papish influence.  Ultimately, though, their extraordinary compassion  and proven talent won respect — and sometimes, even converts.   Despite these accomplishments, however, as the 20th century continued the ranks and influence of religious women fell precipitously, possibly because the gap they served was filled in: religious orders were no longer the sole means of a meaningful career for women, for instance. America’s rising  secularization — both in the sense of diminished religiosity and  the growth of medical, educational, and immigrant-handling government programs — also diminished their attraction. They continue to serve America,  but frequently have been reduced to the rule of mere social activists, instead of the very creators of civil society as they once were.

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Tom and Viv

Posted on October 10, 2015 by smellincoffee

Tom and Viv is not based on a book, and I cannot even say that I have read the first bit of T.S. Eliot.  But this movie haunts me in such a way that I figure it’s worth saying a few words about, and since the movie has such obvious literary connections, why not here?  Tom and Viv is a British drama about the first (failed) marriage of Tom Eliot, better known as T.S. Eliot, whose famous work is The Wasteland.  This is an extensive poem I’ve also not read, but I have heard about it, and the sentiment expressed was that the world is going to pot.  I mention The Wasteland because it features in Tom and Viv, as a work of collaboration  between Tom and his wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood.   The two are from different worlds; Tom is an American poet with no social status whatsoever, while Viv is a society daughter from a line that goes clear back to the Norman conquest.  In the film’s opening lines, Tom’s future brother-in-law Morris ponders that Tom desperately wanted to be English, so infatuated was he by England’s rich traditions. This is unfortunate, because Viv saw in Tom someone who could take her away from high society, allow her to escape it. She had such hope for him  — he lived in the attic of the most hated man in Europe, Bertrand Russell! She didn’t expect that Tom would become utterly respectable, and worse yet through the most ploddingly civilized ways — through ordinary  work at a bank and joining the Church of England.  And for his part, Tom didn’t expect that she was absolutely mental.  What exactly the matter is with poor Viv is never really nailed down; there’s speculation that she’s manic-depressive with unfortunate hormonal balance issues, but more accurate diagnoses don’t emerge until it’s too late for her.  The pair’s whirlwind courtship gives them no clue that one day Tom will be attending dinner parties with Virginia Woolf, or that Viv will be forcing Ms. Woolf out of her taxi at gunpoint and taking it to Tom’s office, where she will pour melted chocolate into the mailbox because TOM NEEDS HIS CHOCOLATE and that wretched secretary won’t let her in.  The movie spans over fifteen years, through which the two make one another steadily more miserable, worsened by the fact that they really do love one another. Or at least they’re devoted to some ideal of the other – the idea that Tom loves Viv is put into question by the fact that he sticks her in a lunatic asylum and never sees her again, going to to marry some other woman and leave her to sit in a garden with other lunatics, baking chocolate cake for the husband she will never see again. Her brother’s no better, wandering off to Africa and never writing.  At the end the viewer is left with two every depressing bits of speculation: Viv and her entire family were made miserable by erratic behavior that could have been ameliorated by medicine, and that Tom was mostly attracted to Viv  for selfish reasons.   I have watched it perhaps four times in the past year, and every time it leaves me sad — yet there is something compelling about the unhappy couple’s contradictory cries of the heart.

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Carrie

Posted on October 7, 2015 by smellincoffee

Carrie
© 1974 Stephen King
199 pages

A word to the wise: if you’re going to execute a horrific public prank on the school outcast, like having her elected prom queen and then dumping a bucket of freezing pig blood on her, make sure she’s not secretly telekinetic. Otherwise, she might trap the entire senior class in a burning gynasium, then become a one-woman reenactment of the Dresden fire bombing just for good measure.

Carrie was Stephen King’s first horror novel, and it is, truly. The title character is Carrie White, a teenage girl raised by a deranged mother who regards anything connected to sex (including the existence of genitals,  curves, and menses) as evil.  Carrie is the soul of psychological isolation, spending much of her time in a locked closet as punishment, and so warped by her mother that she has virtually no way of relating with her peers. She’s also oblivious to the facts of the life, and when she has her period for the first time, it couldn’t come at a worse point: the school locker room, in full view of her school’s clique of Mean Girls. High schoolers being what they are, she is immediately subject to public humiliation. The Mean Girls receive a little comeuppance; they are barred from the prom and one manages to be genuinely remorseful, asking her boyfriend to take Carrie to the prom in her stead. Carrie deserves one night of happiness before high school is over, she thinks — but this moment of good intentions is turned into hell.

Unfortunately for…everyone, at least those outside the funerary trades,  Carrie’s one night of happiness is turned into one of horror when the barred mean girls decide to strike back.  Carrie, who spends the entire book being mentally tormented either by her mother or the bullies, snaps. She has a gift, or a curse, of telekinesis; she can make things happen with her mind.  (Her mother was already crazy before she was born, but having a child whose mood swings manifest themselves as a poltergeist probably didn’t help..)   On the night of the prom, when she is drenched with blood and the entire school laughs at her, with the potential of happiness turned to utter degradation, Carrie decides to wreak havoc.  Whatever fragile grasp she had on sanity evaporates away under the boiling outrage, and she stalks through town blowing things up. Eventually she succumbs to the physical toll her powers took on her body, as well as an injury and even further mental trauma, but not before killing four hundred people and turning a quiet Maine city into a ghost town.

Carrie is fairly gruesome; definitely not the sort of thing I’d read twice, between all the murder, mayhem, and insanity.  Interestingly done, though;  King breaks from his narrative to insert clips of scientific articles, news reports, legal commissions, and survivor accounts that tell more of the story.

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The Kite Runner

Posted on October 7, 2015 by smellincoffee

The Kite Runner
© 2003 Khaled Hosseini
400 pages

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The Kite Runner is a stirring story of betrayal and redemption set in Afghanistan as the country is destroyed through revolution, war, and the takeover by Taliban militias.  The novel rests on the relationship between Amir and Hassan, two young boys growing up together in the same household — but separated by class.  Although theirs is a brotherly friendship, it is put to the test by intense social pressure, Amir’s own fears, and the outbreak of war.  As the novel progresses, emotional and physical distance grows between the boys;  Amir, burdened by the shame of not defending his friend as he should when horror lashes out, pushes Hassan away, and eventually Amir and his father emigrate to the United States to flee the destruction of Afghanistan.  Fifteen+ years later, however, when Amir’s father dies, he is called back to Afghanistan to visit an ailing friend of the family, There, in the rubble of his hometown, he must find the courage to atone for the selfishness and cowardice of youth. Once he hid before bullies and allowed others to be beaten for his sake; now he steals into the center of Taliban power to beard the lions in their den and rescue an innocent child.  The endgame has the kind of poetic justice found only in fiction,  with the same monster who tormented Amir and Hassan when they were all boys returning as the chief Talib. However improbable it is in real life, it succeeds wonderfully as a story, delivering the full impact of how Amir has changed since leaving Afghanistan. Few people get to fight their childhood memories so directly, and  it’s utterly satisfying — not the dispatch of the villain, but Amir’s trial by fire. For most of the book, he is a weak character who shies away from responsibility, and  the ending chapters are a gauntlet that makes him honorable.  Although most of the book is tragic, such is made good by the finale.

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