BOOKS & eBOOKS

Lots of music lovers would have met Richard Gill via the Oz Operatunity TV show a few years back. He was the head judge in that process of assessing newbies to the world of opera, all of them hoping to get a chance to appear in a production at the Opera House in Sydney. In the end, two were chosen, one soprano and one bass, and both appeared in Rigoletto for at least one act.

Gill's own story is just as compelling. He takes us back to Sydney in the 1940s and 1950s, when attending a Catholic school meant run-ins with stern disciplinarians, particularly for a boy who pushed the envelope a bit! Some of those teachers crossed the line into harsh, perhaps even sadistic territory, and some of them met the protective fury of Richard's strong, even daunting mother.

His entry into the world of music was via choral singing, then piano lessons, and onward to a music-oriented teaching course at the Sydney Conservatorium. While teaching was not his first choice, he threw himself into it with such determination that he succeeded in making a big impression wherever he went.

A career in music is never going to be a cakewalk, but Richard's path has been of such peripatetic variety, not just across Australia but around the world, that his family must have been very resilient to stay on an even keel. He pays tribute in his summary "Heaven is your family, Hell is within you, and Purgatory is writing your memoirs". There is indeed a lot of honesty in this book, and while he has a lot of good things to reflect on, he doesn't shy away from about telling of failures as well.

Carl Orff is most famous for his rather dramatic work "Carmina Burana" for orchestra, chorus and vocal soloists. My first experience of this was a production for television made in Germany in the 1970s. It is still a marvellous piece of production, and was intended as a tribute to Orff by being done exactly as he would have wanted it. There have been numerous live productions around the world and around Australia, often harnessing local talents both professional and amateur, but this one for TV must be the benchmark. It is very special indeed.You might care to watch it on You Tube here.

Gill's encounter with Orff was in the master's somewhat less famous but very worthy project known as Orff-Schulwerk, a system of early music education for children. The Australian product, all arranged by Richard Gill, is called Have You Any Wool? Three Bags Full. It's a collection of nursery rhymes and traditional songs, many of which you'd be familiar with, but re-arranged to give a series of tempi, percussive and other instrumental textures, melodies and harmonies. My copy has some sixty tracks, originally issued on LPs, and it arrived in the house way too late to be used on our children, so the grandson was the first guinea pig. He loved it. We started out by making it the soundtrack to his meal times when he was about one year old, and he showed such obvious enjoyment that this continued until he became, eventually, more into Thomas The Tank Engine and Fireman Sam. But the groundwork has been laid by Schulwerk. He has been indoctrinated, and there can be no escape from those silken, sonorous chords.

Opera is regarded by many as the pinnacle of the musical arts, combining orchestra, voices and dramatic content. This is where Gill is most at home, as a vocal coach, conductor, producer and whatever else he chooses to do. Opera is not the easiest part of the classical spectrum for beginners. It's very difficult for singers, and can be quite challenging for newcomers in the audience, live or on record. I've been trying to broaden a friend's horizons musically for a couple of years now, suggesting a mixture of works that he should get to know. I count it as a huge compliment that he says I have rekindled his deep love of music, and he is most grateful for that. But I have not been able to get him over the line to loving or even tolerating opera. Perhaps we'll get there yet, but it has been the most definitely rejected form to date. Not even Carmen could get him to listen and enjoy.

So, like Richard Gill, I have to be thankful for the good, and leave the bad behind. I can thoroughly recommend his book. There's a wealth of humour there to leaven the mix. It's easy reading, episodic and something you can dip into repeatedly, a bit at a time over time, without losing the plot.

*I have endeavoured all my adult life to have an excess of music, but as yet the "surfeit" has done little to reduce the appetite.

Chesapeake - by James A. Michener

The last in my series of Michener works, and in many ways the most satisfying. Perhaps I find the area more interesting than Alaska or Texas. Michener's approach remains similar in that he starts early, before the Europeans arrive, and stays with the individual families through generations. The timeline is from the 17th Century all the way to the Nixon era. I thought he went a bit too far back in Alaska, to pre-historic times, but with this one he was almost restrained. I say almost, because he doesn't quite know when to stop. It's a bit like some composers having an over-long coda.

There's some resonance of Tess of the d'Urbervilles (Thomas Hardy) in the finale. Instead of Hardy's "… the President of the Immortals, in Aeschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess", we have the suicide of a man, a Quaker, who had fallen short of his own ideals when involved in politics. It's a downbeat ending to an epic tale, part farming, part seafaring, part American Revolution and the eventual conflicts around slavery that led to the Civil War.

But back to the locale. Chesapeake Bay is a vast inland body of water, with many inlets, many rivers flowing into it, some islands, and originally teaming with wildlife. People settled at various points in the early days, claiming land before there was anyone except the Indian tribes to contend with. Some of these were passive, others aggressive. As has been repeated all over the world, the Europeans become dominant while the native population shrinks and eventually is eclipsed by the new culture.

Agriculture had its phases. Initially food crops, then cotton became king, with slave-labour allowing large production with a view to supplying England. Later it was back to food. Fishing was a central occupation, with fish, lobsters, crabs and oysters all plentiful. If you have watched "Carousel" and remember the boating scenes, it's pretty much the flavour I imagine existing on Chesapeake Bay, with the locally developed skipjack boats - see below. In the early days, and really until a modern road system happened in the 20th Century, everyone went around in boats of some sort. A trip to Baltimore was a boat trip, not road or rail.

Ship-building has an important place in the narrative, as it did in the time of sail. The evolution of better, faster cargo-carrying ships, warships and fishing boats all feature here, but could have done with some illustrations. The comparatively cumbersome sailing ships of the 17th and 18th Centuries were made obsolete by the sleeker lines (and more sails) of the 19th Century clippers, which cut down trans-Atlantic times and aided the trade in both directions.

Slavery vies with the Chesapeake Bay itself for top billing. Michener's social justice conscience is always present, as are the Quakers with their determination to do the right thing. Helping slaves to escape to the north was risky, but these people were at the centre of the "underground railway" as it was called. At times you might feel that it's less a story about the locality, and more about the human interest, but that's Michener's way.

As with the other books by Michener, this one is easy to dip into as a bedtime read, being episodic in structure. You can interrupt this process as often as you like and not really lose the plot. Again, he has a Dickensian touch in his characterisations and the pursuit of family histories through good times and bad. We get to know the Steeds, the Paxmores and the Turlocks, and many others. They are a varied bunch, from gentlemen farmers to backwoodsmen, fishermen, and in some cases pirates and slave ship owners.

A recommended "good read", as are his other works.

With that, I, the president of this website, have "finished my sport with Michener". (hat tip to Thomas Hardy, last page of Tess of the D'Urbervilles)

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17/11/2015 - Every Spy A Prince

Much has been written about the Israeli secret services for many years. Their achievements have at times been epic victories, and at others epic fails. This book has an incredible amount of inside info, and starts in the beginning, in the days following the declaration of the state, with "the old man", David Ben Gurion fully in charge.

What you'll read about is firstly the procession of heads of the various branches. Most served their time with distinction and dedication, many went on to higher office. Everyone knows the name Mossad, but there are other entities like Shin Bet, Lakam and Aran, each with their own baileywick, and each with tales to tell. In this volume you'll get a lot of extra detail about some events, but it is chiefly about the organisations and their personnel rather than a case-by-case examination of operations. We do, however, get enough case studies, and a lot about one famous spy, an American (Jonathan Pollard - see update below*) who offered his services to Israel. The acceptance of that offer was unwise, probably counterproductive, and is a central plank in the authors' thesis on Israel/USA relations since that time.

A lot of Israeli leaders over the decades have come to power with a background in the security or espionage network. It may be a good thing for leaders of such an often threatened state to be well aware of the constant machinations against them, and the various means of countering them. It also gives them a more realistic feel for the value of the advice coming to them as members of the executive, or even Prime Minister. It's a lot harder to do a snow job on a former head of Mossad - or the CIA for that matter - re the practicality and value of a planned operation which seeks his or her approval.

There's an Australian connection too, for it was here in Sydney that Mordecai Vanunu came to live, converted to Christianity and might have faded from view. But someone convinced him to go to London to get his story published in a high-profile UK paper. Bad move: they found and (to cut a long story short) abducted this guy - who had spilled the beans about Israel's nuclear facilitya at Dimona. After reading this section you might wonder why he was hired to work there in the first place, being the wrong sort of character. That's part of the charm of this book - it doesn't gloss over the failures. It isn't just about the successful ops, but genuinely tries to be a comprehensive history - up until 1989 at least.

There are quite a few positive reviews at Amazon, and the book can be obtained fairly cheaply from there or from ebay - UK sources are best, their postage is much better.

*UPDATE - 21/11/2015: Jonathan Pollard, a US Navy intelligence officer who fed secret material to the Israelis, has just been released from prison after 30 years.

7/8/2015 Texas - by James A. Michener

James A. Michener has an enviable record of achievement as a writer, and as a purveyor of popular tales that succeeded in other media. His tales of the South Pacific became the Rogers and Hart musical "South Pacific". An offshoot in the 1960s was the TV series "Adventures In Paradise", which strictly speaking owed little to Michener's book (it was under embargo due to rights sold for South Pacific anyway) but benefited from having his name under the title.

I've previously reviewed his book about Alaska, and next up is Texas. Michener blends well-researched historical facts with carefully woven strands of fictional characters. He makes history come alive, and the subjects he chooses are worthy of that detailed attention. I'd call him the American Dickens for his many characterisations of persons large and small, and his ability to keep you interested in the evolving story lines. Michener carefully links his books to real places, to real history, and then fleshes out the story with his adroitly chosen fictional characters.

Dickens, whose evocation of a period and its inhabitants is quite marvellous (he was admired even by Tolstoy) creates his own world, often dreary, but always fascinating in its starkly drawn pictures. Dickens mixed comedy and tragedy with hardly a hair's breadth between them - foreshadowing the films of Chaplin in a way. Michener is not often comedic, but mixes the good times and the bad with sometimes alarming proximity and transitions.

His array of characters in Texas covers a wide canvas. There are the Spanish, always endeavouring the keep their society "of a type", with daughters preferably married off to those with solid Spanish forebears rather than those with mixed blood. The Mexicans become the major antagonists as the story progresses to the fighting at The Alamo and subsequent battles. But in the early stages there are also the frightening Indians of the Apache and Commanche tribes. They were vicious, ranged widely on horseback and killed many settlers, often brutally.

The "Texicans" are the new arrivals from the north, often via Louisiana, who can hail from just about anywhere. There are Americans, Irish, Germans, and whoever heard that land was fairly freely available in this new frontier area. To begin with, it was a province of Mexico. After the battles which were fought against Santa Anna, Texas became a rough sort of Republic before being eventually absorbed into the USA. You mightn't have heard of President Polk, but he was a dab hand at adding territory to the USA.

In this book, as with Alaska, Michener establishes a connection between past and present. In Alaska it was more linear, but in Texas he jumps backwards and forwards using a present day panel of academics and prominent people to discuss what went before and how to interpret it. They have been taskeded with re-telling Texan history, and Michener uses them as a linking device.

This is a fascinating book which covers a lot of ground, all the way from the Spanish explorers to the oil millionaires. I've been reading it in short bursts, and it lends itself to that approach, being rather episodic in nature.

Next it will be Michener's Chesapeake, about another area rich in history.

14/6/2015 - Decoding Alice in Wonderland

Most of us are familiar with the story of Alice in Wonderland, and we may even know a bit about Lewis Carroll (more correctly, Charles Dodson). But the full story of how his mind worked, the society he came from, and who all those strange characters represented has become a book in itself, and a very interesting one, by David Day.

Dodson was an Oxford scholar who may have been set on becoming a priest, but didn't follow that course beyond passing his deacon's exams. He did succeed in becoming a lecturer in mathematics at Christ Church College, having no doubt inherited a talent from his father, who had two first class degrees in Maths. He was also a keen photographer, and photographed many of the people who later have been identified as characters in the fantastic story of Alice.

Rather than tell you the details here, I recommend that you listen to the podcast of the interview Rachel Kohn did with David Day, as part of her radio series The Spirit of Things, ABC Radio National. It covers a lot of ground apart from the characterisations, drawing into the narrative the philosophical outlooks of Theosophy, Rosicrusianism, and Victorian morals. The connection made between Dodson's risqué photography of young girls and the segment of the Alice story about the Knave of Hearts stealing the tarts is really something!

Given the dual nature of this posting, I'll have to put it on both the Book and Radio pages.

Alaska by James A. Michener

I'm old enough to have seen many of the TV episodes of Adventures in Paradise, set in the South Pacific, and bearing James A. Michener's name prominently. You can find some examples on You Tube if you're interested. The back story is that he sold the rights to his first book, Tales of the South Pacific (which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 1948) to Rodgers & Hammerstein, who turned it into the hit musical South Pacific. It couldn't be used for Adventures in Paradise. It's unlikely that he wrote any of the TV episodes, which were fairly vacuous, but having made his name as a novelist based on events in that part of the world - he'd been a Navy Historian there during WW2 - his name on the TV screen was worth something to the producers. I believe a lot of it was shot around Fiji, and I once met briefly the family who owned the lovely sailing vessel used in it.

He set a lot of his major books in locations around the US, such as Texas, Hawaii, and Chesapeake. Alaska sets out to tell the entire story of this frozen frontier territory, and I mean entire. It commences in pre-historical, pre human habitation times. This is a bit tedious at first, but lesson number one is to take this book in smaller doses, as it is both episodic in structure and densely packed with information. How much is fact and how much is fiction? You'd have to have a lot of background knowledge to be authoritative on this, but I'll take a stab at it and say many of the characters are inventions to suit the narrative, but scattered through the long story are actual events, some of which are legislative matters pertaining to the territory's eventual statehood.

The early habitation of native tribes who migrated there from Asia gives way to Tsarist Russian colonisation, and that in turn becomes half-hearted American administration when the territory is sold to America. A large segment of the story concerns the gold rush days along the Yukon, its tributaries, and even a surprise find at Nome, where gold was literally there to be scooped up from the beach sand. Those were frontier days as wild as any in the Wild West.

The beginnings of the Alaskan Salmon industry is also covered in detail, with a lot of feeling for the environment and the impact on the tribes that remained in the pristine wilderness. It coninues on through WW2 and comes up to the modern era.

At every turn there is a human interest aspect, triumphs and failures, love won and lost, wars fought on various fronts. This is a book that HBO or Netflix (or anyone with the resources) could turn into a series and find a ready market. It is made for serialisation, with the proviso that the early pre-history needs to be edited severely for that medium. Lavish production, intrigue, sex and violence, all the ingredients of successful series such as Game of Thrones or Marco Polo, are there to be utilised.

I read Hawaii many years ago. But next, having quite enjoyed this one, I think I'll go on to Texas next, then perhaps Chesapeake, which is an interesting maritime location with an equally interesting long history.

Michener decided in 1997 that at age 90 he'd achieved everything he wanted to, and switched off his dialysis machine. He'd become wealthy and in the American tradition also became a philanthropist, endowing universities and special book prizes for new authors.

I've started Texas - another long story!

The Life of Tolstoy

This will have to be a two or three part review, as the book is 900+ pages of densely packed info.

As soon as I mentioned to my wife that I was reading a book on the life of Tolstoy, she asked how authentic it was. Good question. He lived from 1828-1910, and there are obvious obstacles to anyone trying now to do such a book. Access to documents is one, and the Russian language is another.

Aylmer Maude is probably not a name you'll know, but he and his wife lived in Russia for many years, were fluent in Russian, and had superb access to personal papers. Aylmer Maude stayed with, interviewed and corresponded with Tolstoy himself, translated a number of his works into English, and later had co-operation from family members in providing not just documents but personal recollections, such as from Tolstoy's daughters and friends. The amount of personal correspondence in this biography is staggering. There are many from Tolstoy to all and sundry, but also responses from the others, and commentary from third parties. It is an absolute goldmine of information.

But what sort of picture does it paint? This man is revered as one of the greatest novelists in any language, the creator of War and Peace, and Anna Karenina. So far I have only read about his life as a child, then adolescent, and onwards to young adulthood, with transitions to writer - firstly about himself - then novelist and landholder - in fact farmer.

It's probably not appreciated by anyone familiar only with those great novels that he was in the military for some years, including the famous Crimea campaign. He commanded an artillery battery in the southern areas in and around what we now refer to as Chechnya, and was in a frontline position during the siege of Sevastapol. He saw from a distance the French attack (it was the Russians against a coalition which included Britain and France) which breach the Russian lines, and led to the crumbling of Russian resistance there.

His soldiering days were littered with misbehaviours. He was addicted to gambling, drinking, and womanising. He rebuked himself often, and promised to reform, but it was a long and mostly unsuccessful battle against these habitual failings.

He was very opinionated, and got into arguments with anybody at all, over anything at all. He thought himself right and therefore spoke his mind as he saw fit, which was most of the time. His antagonism towards Turgenev, ten years his senior and Russia's foremost writer of the day, was at time so intense that they nearly came to the point of duelling.

At other times he could be charming and the life of the party. He was interested in the education of children, and spent time abroad studying the education systems in France, Germany and England.

He wanted to free the serfs, but when he became the overlord on the family estate was still capable of meting out punishments to them! Getting married became an objective, as he started to mature, but he was not sufficiently in love with any woman for a long time. This will (I hope) happen in our next episode!

Part Two

Tolstoy did mature and marry, to a lady some sixteen years his junior. By the time he was sixty and she forty-four, she had given birth to 13 children. Some died in infancy and there were also some miscarriages. The countess became for many years indispensible to him in eveyr way, not just as wife and mother but also as assistant in his literary pursuits and business management.

The extended middle period of his life was productive in many ways. He accumulated estates and set up schools for the children of his peasants. He wrote a great deal and started to philosophise more on the subject of social inequity - so much so that I consider him to be a forerunner of the Russian revolutionaries, and perhaps of Ghandi too. He was often censored for writing things against the prevailing conditions and the government. His despair at the problems of the world was deep and abiding, and depression set in until he went back to religion. Russia had (and has rediscovered post-communism) a strong Orthodox Christian tradition. But that wasn't enough for Tolstoy. He had to rewrite everything.

He studied Greek and Hebrew in order to read and retranslate the gospels to his own satisfaction. Such was the power of his image as a saint, a man who despite his wealth and wanted everyone to live with the peasants and forego the modern world's fripperies, there arose a series of "Tolstoyan" communes. Aylmer Maude is at times quite direct in criticising Tolstoy (deservedly so!), and he notes that all of the communes failed, and that city people who went to them and lived the rough life often suffered badly. But such is the power of ideology.

The Count (for a Count he was) became so negative about wealth and property that he tried to give it all away to his family. They were reluctant to take on the burdens he had accumulated. He had not only inherited property and a title but of course also earned income from his writing. He was dismayed when at least two of his sons rejected his world view, which apart from disdain for property, wealth and luxury, also embraced non-violence. They went and joined the army! He expressed some gratitude that his daughters, again at least two of them, supported his views and were a great help to him.

The Countess was concerned that her children needed a base in Moscow so they could be properly schooled, go to university, and generally participate in society. A house was bought there, and she spent more time in it while Tolstoy himself grew tired of the city and retreated as quickly as possible to the main family estate of Yasnaya Polyana. Here he would live simply, take long walks or ride, wash in a nearby river, wear peasant clothing and eat simple foods. One visitor related how he arrived to find Tolstoy making a pair of boots for himself. He was proud of his efforts, but they were not such good boots! From time to time he would go to the distant estates in the provinces like Kazahkstan and take a health cure based on yoghurt drinks called kumis.

At ploughing or harvest times He would join in and rope in anyone else around the place, be they artists or city folk, and get them out in the fields too. He said a hard day's work made him sleep better, another indicator that his active mind needed to be quietened by a heavy hammer, lest he again wander into anxiety and depression.

As mentioned above, there is so much in this book that I have not been able to rush through it. I'll leave the last stages until next time - I still have some more reading ahead of me, some of which will cover the territory shown in that movie "The Last Station" - see the Movies page. It is a story of decline in many ways.

Part Three

As he aged, Tolstoy became more adamant about his basic principles of "passive resistance" and the evils of property ownership. This caused his wife a lot of concern. She had done a lot of work on his manuscripts and saw to their publication. He looked like writing the family out of any ongoing benefit by a series of revised wills, some drafted by the head Tolstoyan, one Chertkov. The later section of this book has a lot to say about the various wills and the machinations as to how Tolstoy's literary legacy was to be handled. It was a very twisted plot, and was always subject to change. He may, some surmise, have been intending to change his will again when struck down by bad health after leaving home precipitously. Tolstoy wanted to be free of all the management of everyday things, leaving him able to think and to write. He cared little for comfort or luxury, but a great deal for principles and his fellow man, particularly the peasants. Even so, it's fair to say he lived in something of a self-made bubble.

If we take Aylmer Maude's sober assessment of each of the main characters into account, there appeared symptoms of poor mental health in all of them over time. He had run-ins with Chertkov over publication of his (Maude's) translations of works into English, and found the man to be unreliable, arrogant and deceptive. Those who could be suspected of having mental issues included the Countess, Chertkov and even Tolstoy himself, whose final chapter is akin to King Lear's leaving home with no clear destination and succumbing to his basic ill-health made worse by exposure.

It was a quite bizarre finale. This man, who was regarded as a saint by many, but who was excommunicated by the church, a man who didn't want any fuss made over him, ended up seriously ill and bedridden in the station-master's home at Astapovo. Even the government, always sensitive to his revolutionary writings, and often banning them, sent representatives. The nature of it requires a quote from the book.

During the week of his illness at Astapovo that country station had been thronged by representatives of the government, including the governor of the province, a special official sent by the Prime Minister, gendarme officers, important railway officials, swarms of pressmen, photographers, cinematographers, and many others.

Having left the dearly loved place of his birth, a tragic fate decreed that Tolstoy, instead of leading the quiet life of poverty and tranquillity he had often longed for, was to give more trouble and be the occasion of more labour to his fellow men than at any previous moment of his life. Besides his family and friends no less than five doctors were in attendance; the station-master had been turned out of his house, many people were living in railway carriages side-tracked at Astapovo for their accommodation; the local telegraphic arrangements almost broke down under the pressure of work upon them, while the telegraph wires and cables of the world were kept busy with messages concerning the great man who lay dying amid such unusual circumstances, and thousands of columns of printed matter about him were written, set up in type, printed and circulated. Never before had the deathbed of a recluse received such publicity.

This book is a lengthy saga, replete with detail and redolent of the authority that Maude has by virtue of his close relationship with Tolstoy and his family as well as his intimate knowledge of the written works, a number of which Maude translated into what I'm sure would be definitive English versions. It's not an easy book to knock over quickly, but is a fascinating and necessarily long one, covering Tolstoy's life entirely, as well as having many glimpses into the lives of others in that time, both well-to-do and peasant people. It would be difficult, probably impossible for anyone else to improve on it.

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Citizen Soldiers by Stephen E. Ambrose (1997)

The author is known for his Band of Brothers series, one of the best ever TV programs about WW2. In it, we follow one company of the 101st Airborne from training to D-Day, and onwards via Bastogne all the way to Germany and Hitler's alpine retreat at Berchtesgarten.

At 528 pages including index, Citizen Soldiers is a hefty paperback. The brief here is much wider than what we saw in Band of Brothers. He ranges across all the armies and their commanders, Patton, Bradley, Montgomery and Eisenhower, and goes right down to frontline infantry level with hundreds of firsthand anecdotes and records of engagement. Some of the narrative is drawn from official unit records, otherwise much is told to him personally or taken from other similarly realistic books.

What emerges is for the most part pretty grim. German defence was in-depth all the way from the hedgerows of Normandy to the borders of the fatherland. Some myths are busted along the way. How often have we heard that the Siegfried Line and the Maginot Line were useless relics of WW1 thinking? The allies got to the Siegfried Line and were stopped by it long enough for Hitler to launch his Bulge offensive. It took months of hard winter slog to rebuff that offensive, and then get back to the Siegfried line again! These fortifications and pillboxes on both sides were so strongly built that they could take a direct hit from large field artillery and not crack. The men inside suffered, though. Similarly, the Germans found the Maginot Line to be a tough ask. Both were ultimately breached, but not without great effort and loss of life.

Natural barriers were also devastating, and the Hurtgen Forest became infamous for inflicting losses on both sides. Ambrose is very critical of the lack of good training given to replacements, who often died before they got wise to the ways of the front, within days of getting there. If you survived a month you were a veteran already. There are, however, some notable accounts of actions like one where US soldiers of no great experience but good basic training set up a lethal reception for a column of unsuspecting Germans marching along the road towards a village.

The Bulge was lost despite Hitler diverting plenty of new equipment and men to it. They were supposed to advance and take the copious fuel supplies dumped by the roadside by US supply battalions, and this did work from time to time. But they still ran short of fuel and ammunition, and the resistance of the (to them) inexperienced GIs was much greater than anticipated.

Air power was such that the Germans dreaded moving around in daylight. P-47s did daily ground attacks (weather allowing) on anything they came across, tanks, trucks, trains, artillery installations. US Artillery support could be called in very quickly too, with communication the key to that, as well as accurate co-ordinates, of course. In the end it was a numbers game, and the allies had the numbers of everything. The new German weapons V-1 and V-2 were deployed, as were some superior jet fighters. But too few, too late.

There are statistics galore, and photos from the front. Germans were surrendering in large numbers towards the end, after fighting strongly for way too long. They themselves often questioned the wisdom of diverting forces away from the Russian front to fight the US and Brits, who they'd prefer advanced faster and took over Germany rather than let the Russians have so much of it. Surrendering to the US or British became the most desirable outcome for many.

This is a book which pulls no punches when being critical. It exposes some commanders as being too careful and cautious, others as wasting men unnecessarily. It doesn't glorify war, but reports the successes and the failures. It is highly recommended, a very good survey of the European Theatre of Operations, and the stories straight from the men and women themselves are fascinating.

Chaplin's Girl

The title might be a little misleading, or at least ambiguous, since Chaplin's liking for young women got him into a spot of bother here and there. Virginia was not one of those conquests.

Chaplin's Girl by Miranda Seymour is based on recordings made by a friend of Virginia Cherrill when that lady was quite old, and recounting her many lovers - who were in some cases her husbands! The title alludes to her start in films, which was notably as the blind flower girl in Chaplin's "City Lights". The two were not friendly. Chaplin was a hard taskmaster and required so many takes it must have driven both cast and crew to distraction.

She hailed from Illinois, and some of her antecedents may have had a role in the death of Mormon founder Joseph Smith, but it was a matter of chance that she ended up in Hollywood and made it (to some degree) in the movies. She was never that keen on the profession, but was certainly keen on the social life. Cary Grant was obsessed by her and wouldn't rest until he'd pursued her to England and achieved a registry office marriage. She was close to Marion Davies (William Randolph Hearst's well-kept mistress) and to Edwina Mountbatten. Her lovers ranged from the unlovely but very witty Oskar Levant to the dashing, polo playing Maharaja of Jaipur. This affair continued before and after her next marriage, to the Earl of Jersey, and wasn't disapproved of by either the Earl or the Maharaja's wife.

Kiss and tell biographies don't come a lot more colourful than this one, and I've recommended it to my wife as a good follow-on from her recent reading of Aunts Up The Cross (see review down the page). It's lightweight entertainment, but offers insights into those times and moves between Hollywood, England and India. In passing, amongst much background info, it deals with some of the rumours of gayness in leading men rather well. More than one woman was able to report that she didn't notice if X was gay, because they were too busy screwing. Read it to find out who.

It would be a mistake, however, to judge Virginia before the book ends. Throughout the narrative she is shown to be a great friend, brilliant company, and still retained the simple down-to-earth character of a country girl. Her work in the UK during WW2 showed strength as well. Many would have stayed in the USA for the duration, particularly if they were American born and raised. Her husband at that time, Grandy Jersey, didn't want her risking the passage across the Atlantic to return. But return she did, via Lisbon, on a strange sort of ship.

Her story is one which has much to recommend it, and it can be enjoyed by just about anybody.

Booktopia have it here, and there are various copies (some in hardback) on ebay at wildly varying prices!

Christopher's Ghosts - by Charles McCarry

I first encountered McCarry via his novel The Tears of Autumn (1974), which examined the assassination of JFK from a totally different viewpoint to those which are once again being hawked around. It was written before Mr. Zapruder's home movie became common knowledge, and may not be as believable now, but should still be well worth getting for its many interesting "insider" bits. I won't give away the plot of that one, which is a good read even if you don't agree with his hypothesis.

His credentials as a writer of espionage novels are impeccable. After military service and a stint as a speech writer for the Eisenhower administration, he was in the CIA from 1957 to1968. He's sometimes referred to as the American Le Carre (even the names are similar!), since his narratives rely more on the psychological aspects and the everyday minutiae of his subjects than on spectacular action.

But make no mistake, he can create plenty of tension while he does that. I haven't read all of his novels, but after revisiting him in this 2007 effort, I think I'll have to backtrack and find some of the others. His main character, Paul Christopher, is featured in most of them, just as Le Carre uses George Smiley throughout his series - although Smiley starts out as a relatively minor character in The Spy Who Came In From The Cold.

Christopher's Ghosts takes us back to Paul's childhood, when he lived with his parents (she from a noble German family, the dad an American writer) under the shadow of the nascent terror of the Nazis. An early dust up with the Hitler Youth establishes Paul's courage, while the young and lovely Jewish girl Rima provides the mainspring for the romance and the drama to follow.

The portrayal of Lori, the well-to-do horse-riding mother who is lusted after by none other than Reinhard Heydrich, is intriguing, making you, the reader, try to visualise which actress might play her in a movie. This is a very visual book, and would make a fine movie. But it would have to be made the old way, with a proper perspective on who are the good guys and the bad. Today, I can imagine that our sympathy with the Jews and with the shadowy Mossad operatives, who come into the story much later, might be twisted out of recognition by a Hollywood where political correctness plays awful tricks with story lines.

There's a central villain, and it's not Heydrich. Herr Stutzer is a middle-ranking interrogator and torturer. Paul as a grown man is still after him many years later, and I won't give away any of the later plot. It kept me glued to the pages until the sudden end.

More about McCarry at wikipedia.

American Sniper, by Chris Kyle

Kyle was the most successful US Forces sniper ever, which means more confirmed kills than any other. 160 confirmed out of 255 claimed. He was a SEAL, which are the Navy's Special Forces guys, expected to operate in all areas, Sea, Air, Land, hence the acronym.

His book is not what you'd call well written, and the philosophical content is not deep, but it is a singular narrative which gains credibility by being from the man himself. To be more precise, it's really a dual view, as he has included segments written by his lovely wife Taya, giving her side of the story. That's a nice touch, even though their relationship is shown to have some problems. The stresses on a marriage of this sort are understandable, and Kyle was nothing if not single-minded in his chosen career. It was more of a way of life for him, even with the constant threat of death.

Snipers don't just sit at a safe distance and fire away without risk to themselves. Kyle operated as an advance guard while other troops moved into an area. He was in the battle for Fallujah, and then Ramadi, which he says was worse! He'd set up a spot where he had a good view of the area the house-to-house teams were going to clear, and then pick off any enemy coming into view with bad intent. He was also at times in the clearing team as well. Such are the PC rules of engagement these days that the enemy had to be observably gunning for the US troops, not just out for an unarmed reconnaissance, for him to take a shot - each kill had to be documented and verified as kosher from an ROE perspective. Many shots weren't taken if these rules couldn't be shown to be complied with - and he had to have a witness.

Some of Kyle's shots were also the longest on record, although he admits that luck plays a large part in these ones. He used a variety of weapons in different circumstances, and gives a good run down on their relative merits.

The training that any special forces personnel go through is punishing, and the SEALs were no exception. You have to be able to take the physical demands of the training and then the violent hazing that they put each other through. At the end of this process, and after actual battle experience, you have highly trained, highly effective men who dispose of large numbers of the enemy in an efficient manner. He became known to them as el shaitan, the devil.

Having nothing to do was his worst fear. He met an untimely end at the hands of another ex soldier back home on the local rifle range.

On Saturday, February 2, 2013, Kyle and a companion, Chad Littlefield, were shot and killed at the Rough Creek Ranch-Lodge-Resort shooting range in Erath County, Texas by 25-year-old fellow veteran Marine Eddie Ray Routh, whom Kyle and Littlefield had purportedly taken to the gun range in an effort to help him with what they were told by his mother was post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).