Category Archives: Books

Are you having fun?

So, I’m down visiting my parents who are ailing a little bit, and helping out by doing a bunch of house cleaning. In addition to the usual cleaning tasks, this also includes rummaging through some old piles of books that need to be put up. If you know me, you know that’s my kind of cleaning 8).

Digging through the piles and run across an old leather-bound book from 1926 called “As A Man Doeth”, that belonged to my grandfather. It’s the collected Monday morning motivational writings of William Danforth, the founder and president of Ralston Purina, of animal feed fame. I open the book to the first page, sneeze a few times from the dust, and encounter this:

Oh Texas!

“One Deputy Sheriff trailing you,

and another hid in the bushes in front of you,

Say! That’s Living!”

This was an exclamation of Texas, a bootlegger in Alice Brady’s play, “Zander the Great”. Texas was a bootlegger, but it wasn’t the profits that attracted him; it was the game.

Is business to you an adventure and a game? If not, check up; you are slipping. Our business, with its problems and its responsibilities, is to me the greatest game in the world. I wonder if in your week’s work there aren’t dangers trailing you, and obstacles hidden in the bushes at every turn. Lack of initiative, lack of self confidence, laziness, or inattention – sly, insidious foes ready to arrest your progress and deter you. But, in overcoming your obstacles, remember what Texas said,

“ Say! That’s Living!”.

 

If the man making dog food can feel this way about his work, I bet you can too. Life’s too short not to love what you do. If you don’t love what you’re doing, do something else.

 

A Spy Among Friends, by Ben Macintyre

Imagine if the number 2 or 3 person at the CIA was a Soviet agent. Sounds impossible, right? Not so. Kim Philby was responsible for counter-intelligence for MI-6, the home of James Bond and England’s equivalent to the CIA. Philby was a life-long communist agent, a mole in Britain’s intelligence establishment.

A Spy Among Friends, by Ben Macintyre, joins the ranks of many non-fiction books about the master spy Kim Philby (the above line from my review of Knightley’s The Master Spy, so far the definitive biography of Philby). As an avid reader of those, as well as the more fictionalized accounts (including the simply amazing Declare by Tim Powers), I was delighted to receive a copy of A Spy Among Friends from the Library Thing early reviewers program.

A Spy Among Friends is a deeply researched and footnoted work that covers the entirety of Philby’s career as a mole or double agent. With so many works about Philby available, including Philby’s own (likely disingenuous) autobiography, why write a new one? Or as a reader, why read this one?

What is unique about A Spy Among Friends is the deep focus on the relationship between Philby and Nick Elliott, the MI6 Officer who was life-long friend and protector of Philby, until he ultimately came to believe Philby was a traitor and confronted him for a confession in Beirut (or, allowed him to escape to Moscow as some believe):

As night falls, the strange and lethal duel continues, between two men bonded by class, club, and education but divided by ideology; two men of almost identical tastes and upbringing but conflicted loyalties; the most intimate of enemies. To an eavesdropper their conversation appears exquisitely genteel, an ancient English ritual played out in a foreign land; in reality it is an unsparing, bare-knuckle fight, the death throes of a bloodied friendship.

Macintyre’s focus on this relationship allows him to provide significantly more color than other works on Philby. He also captures the deep “Englishness” of the entire affair – the social strata, the clubs, the schools, the relationships that would allow Philby to escape unnoticed in plain sight for so many years, because simply nobody would believe a member of their “set” could do such a thing. Even the names ring with “Englishness” – Albania revolution trainer Lieutenant Colonel David de Crespigny Smiley; journalist Hester Harriet Marsden-Smedley; MI6 Chief of Staff Sarah Algeria Marjorie Masse and Ambassador to Turkey Sir Hughe Montgomery Knatchbull-Hugessen.

The intelligence community in Britain at the time was intimately intertwined with high society and high achievers and Macintyre captures this well. Flora Soloman was an early friend to Philby and ultimately responsible for outing him; her son went on to found Amnesty International. Elliott knew Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, and put ashore an operative in full evening dress inside a rubber diving suit, an escapade which more or less made its way into the Bond flick Goldfinger. Both Philby and Elliott knew Graham Greene, the famous novelist. Elliott had drinks in Sierra Leone with Greene, who set up a roving brothel to spy on Germans, and needed contraceptives from Elliott as they were demanded by the brothel workers. Elliott collaborated with CIA agent Miles Copeland, whose son Stewart went on to be the drummer for The Police!

Macintyre prefaces his book with the famous E.M. Forster quote:

If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend I hope I should have the guts to betray my country. Such a choice may scandalize the modern reader, and he may stretch out his patriotic hand to the telephone at once and ring up the police. It would not have shocked Dante, though. Dante places Brutus and Cassius in the lowest circle of Hell because they had chosen to betray their friend Julius Caesar rather than their country Rome.

Of course the irony in this quote is that a traitor must in the end betray both. Philby betrayed his life-long friend Elliott and (in details I have not seen elsewhere), spied on his father, the noted Arabist St John Philby as well as his wife Aileen. Macintyre captures this well. There are two things I wished for more on. The first was the ultimate subject of Why? Why did Philby become a traitor, and when it was clear that Soviet communism was ultimately evil (which was clear during Philby’s career), did he not abandon his role? A Spy Among Friends covers the relationships that led to his betrayal, but did not seem to build a convincing case for Why he did it. The second was more on Philby’s time in Moscow, which merits only a short chapter (Knightly spends significantly more time on this).

Despite these two small areas where I wished for more, A Spy Among Friends gave me more insight into the social conditions around Philby and more color about him than any other book I’ve read on him, and for that alone it’s worth reading, even if you don’t know the story. If you know nothing about Philby but want to learn, A Spy Among Friends is easily the most accessible non-fiction book on the subject.

1356, by Bernard Cornwell

1356 (The Grail Quest, #4)1356 by Bernard Cornwell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

4th in the Thomas of Hookton series, set during the Hundred Years War. Thomas is a great character, a British longbowman who’s risen to lead his own mercenary band. In previous books we’ve met Thomas at the historical Battle of Crecy (1346) and later battles as he searched for the holy grail. In 1356, 10 years later, we find Thomas older, gruffer, harder, and yet more determined lead his men in “honorable” war, rather than rape and pillage as was common. The (again, historical) Battle of Poitiers is looming. Thomas is following Edward, the Black Prince, and seeking La Malice, the legendary sword Peter used to defend Christ at Gethsemane. Caught between French soldiers on one side and a malevolent, ambitious Cardinal on the other. Thomas must find a way to survive both.

Cornwell’s writing is always “easy on the eyes” and I found 1356 to be a fast, engaging read, filled with history but not beating you over the head with it. I love the Thomas character, and am looking forward to another book in the series.

View all my reviews

My favorite books of 2013

2013 was a year where I spent a lot of time on a plane, with the resulting extra time to read a lot of books. I also built the first version of my experiments with blog-driven book recommendations, which generated a lot of recommendations for things to read.

This year I re-read a lot of old favorites, or works by authors I love that I’d not gotten around to. With The Hobbit Part II coming out, of course I had to re-read The Hobbit (with all 3 volumes of the Lord of the Rings thrown in for good measure). Following on the fantasy theme, I particularly enjoyed Betsy Tobin’s Ice Land, a creative re-telling of the Norse myths, in a parallel storyline to a more historical storyline of medieval Iceland. Great characters, and reasonably faithful to the old norse myths. Heart of the Ronin is a fun samurai fairy tale for adults – if you liked Across the Nightingale Floor, you’ll love Heart of the Ronin. Wrapping up the “medieval” (ok Tudor in this case) stuff, one couldn’t really get away from Hillary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, it was in every airport, in every bit of news about books and so on. I enjoyed it, although I admit I struggled to get through the ending parts. Nevertheless her inside-out portrayal of Thomas Cromwell as “the good guy” was quite enjoyable.

In a more modern fantasy vein, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore will delight book lovers and geeks both – it combines one of the most interesting bookstores in fiction together with a girl-geek who wields the cloud-computing power of Google to solve a bookish mystery.

I did quite a bit of spy-reading this year. In addition to re-doing Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy yet again, I read for the first time Le Carre’s Our Game, and I think it’s one of his most under-rated novels. In a more recent vintage, I received a copy of The Crook Factory by Dan Simmons as part of Librarything’s Early Reviewers program, and devoured it. Dan Simmons is a fine writer, who seems to tackle few things more than once. Fantasy, Horror, Spy Novels, historical fiction, crime drama…In this case Simmons isn’t channeling the supernatural, just the world of 1940s Cuba and J Edgar Hoover – and yes Nazis and Marlene Dietrich too. Oh, and Ernest Hemingway. Did you know that Hemingway was a spy? Me neither. The Crook Factory will tell you all about it. (separately, Simmon’s book Darwin’s Blade is another really fun book, worth the read). I was also introduced to the pleasures of Mick Herron’s group of loser-spys in Slow Horses, and Dead Lions. Delightfully droll.

Finally, I love reading books about the “real” Hawaii, not the picture-perfect beaches you read about in travel magazines. When The Shark Bites gives a true look into native Hawaiians and some of the history around the Hawaiian sovereignty movement.

The Dark Labyrinth, by Lawrence Durrell

Lawrence Durrell is best known for his Alexandria Quartet, and his writings about travel in the Greek isles. As a long time resident of the islands and a diplomat in war-time Greece during World War II, he came to know and love the islands. I’m a huge fan of his Greece travel books, in particular The Greek Islands.

Some time ago I learned of The Dark Labyrinth, a novel set on the island of Crete (originally published under the title Cefalu). I bought a copy a long time ago and finally got a chance to read it, it’s been out of print for a long time. A group of travelers head to Crete to explore the Labyrinth and find the rumored Minotaur.

The early part of the novel has the travelers on an ocean liner headed to the Mediterranean, each for their own reasons. Durrell gradually exposes us to the travelers, their lives and reasons for heading to the Mediterranean. Durrell absolutely skewers the pretensions of the passengers. The first half of the book almost feels like a comedy of manners or an A. S. Byatt novel fifty years early. I found myself laughing out loud, which doesn’t happen to me very often.

As the ship stops at Crete and the passengers sign up for a tour of the Labyrinth and to search for the legendary Minotaur, we enter Durrell’s Greece. The thyme-scented mountains, the stories of the Greek resistance’s mountain hideaways, abbots and monks and peasants, and the natural beauty of Greece come to the fore. The passengers encounter a disaster while in the labyrinth, and each finds their own fate while trying to escape. A bit of Greek legend, and bit of “Lost Horizons” bring the novel to an interesting philosophical close.

The Dark Labyrinth doesn’t rise to the level of the Alexandria Quartet, but it’s good read, particularly for those who are interested in Durrell or the Greek islands.