Thursday, March 18. 2010
Re:
Rangers Close Ranks Around Ron Washington After Cocaine Revelation
"I was an addict,'' said Hamilton
No, you are an addict. No past tense on this one.
This blog name came from a joke I am prone to telling at the race track.
As a technical inspector, I frequently find myself inspecting cars that have been involved in "events" on the track. We call it PAS ("Post Accident Inspection") and the purpose is to annotate the vehicle logbook, so the next tech inspector to review the car (presumably post repair) knows what we saw when we looked at it in the aftermath of the "event". Some times these cars have rolled. Most people who don't hang out at race tracks automatically assume that rolling must be bad, but for full bodied sedans, that is rarely the case (Cars that drove straight into guardrails are usually much more badly damaged than cars that rolled).
So PAS on a car that rolls is often an excuse for some comedy, there are times I don't even bother to write anything in the book, and on more than one occasion i've reissued a tech sticker and told them to go ahead and race the next day.
But I do tell them to put some "this side up" stencils on the side of the car because they seem to have trouble with that.
Books Discussed
The recent proposal by some Republicans that Grant's portrait on the 50 Dollar Bill be replaced by Reagan's has triggered some reevaluation of Grant. Others have discussed the trajectory of Grant's reputation, strong immediately after the war, and then apparently declining in response to the development of the "Myth of the Lost Cause". It may be time for a rebirth of Grant's reputation.
So the other day, I ran across Grant and Twain_, and had to get it. It is a very nice book, an excellent way to arrive at an understanding of Grant's final years, and how he came to write his memoirs - for those who are unfamilar with them, _Personal Memoirs is one of the truly great works of military autobiography, frequently compared to Caesar's Commentaries.
In the same time frame that Grant started on his memoirs, Twain was completely blocked, with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn half finished. In _Grant & Twain_, Perry tries to make the case that the two influenced each other, Twain persuading Grant to write, and Grant inspiring Twain to finish his masterpiece. Perry is not completely successful in making this case, but nonetheless the factual narrative is very well done and compelling, making this book well worth reading, as it helps a great deal in understanding the character of Grant. Those of us who have studied Grant are very familiar with the stubborn general, standing in the rain at Shiloh chewing on a cigar and telling General Sherman, "We'll whip 'em tomorrow". Those who aren't familiar with that Grant could stand to learn a bit from _Grant and Twain_.
some reviews that will be along momentarily...
_Grant and Twain: The Story of an American Friendship_, Mark Perry. Just finished, nice little book, shows how their relationship affected both Grant's classic memoirs, and Twain's great _The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn_.
_Islands of the Damned_, R.V. Burgin, another book related to The Pacific miniseries. Just about to start this one.
Wednesday, March 17. 2010
Books Discussed
I have been a student of WWII for many years. One of the things I'm always a sucker for are memoirs and small unit stories. I have a decent collection of books detailing the campaigns of various Fleet Boats. I thoroughly enjoyed Pegasus Bridge and Band of Brothers when those books first appeared, and the HBO miniseries of the latter when it came out.
Some years ago, I acquired a copy of E.B. Sledge's With the Old Breed when it was reprinted in the Naval Institute's series _Classics of Naval Literature_. It lived up to its billing as one of the finest combat memoirs ever written, it is well worth searching out. I will not provide a detailed review here, it's been too long since I read it.
When I found out that the producers of Band of Brothers had decided to do a followon series based on Sledge and on Robert Leckie's Helmet for My Pillow, well, I found that pretty interesting. I had heard about Leckie, but had yet to find a copy and read it. Well, I found one and read it. It is in the same tier as Sledge, a well written and memorable book about the personal experiences of an enlisted Marine in the Pacific. Leckie enlisted imediately after Pearl Harbor was attacked, and was in the initial landing of the First Marine Division on Guadalcanal. He was already a professional sports writer, and writes naturally and well. No ghost writer was needed here, Leckie was good, and he wrote about things that affected him very directly. One of the lessons we sometimes overlook is that the enlisted men have a very different picture of reality than the battle commanders, it doesn't extend much beyond their fighting hole sometimes. Leckie wrote about things like jungle rot, eating wormy rice captured from the Japanese, and stealing from the Army supply tents (after the Army finally showed up on the island.) Both Sledge and Leckie's accounts ring true, they were writing about things that were truly important to them.
The final book I am going to talk about is _I'm Staying With My Boys_, by Jim Proser (with Jerry Cutter). This book is somewhat difficult to review fairly, because of what it is and how the material is presented.
This section of the review contains spoilers for upcoming episodes of _The Pacific_. I'd prefer not to do that but to discuss the things I wish to discuss, I have to.
Sgt. John Basilone is a legendary figure in the USMC. A machine gunner in the 7th Marine Regiment, he arrived on Guadalcanal a little over a month after Leckie and the first wave of Marines. His unit was given responsibility for defending a key portion of the defensive lines on the ridge above the airfield. This ridge had already been the site of a major attack, _The Battle of Bloody Ridge_, when the position was defended by Merritt Edson's Raider battalion. The ridge was renamed Edson's Ridge, and when it was attacked again, the second, equally violent battle was called the Battle of Edson's Ridge. Basilone received a Congressional Medal of Honor for his actions during the Battle of Edson's Ridge, and returned to the US to go on tour selling war bonds. He found he much preferred to go back to the war, and eventually got himself assigned to a new unit. He was killed by a mortar shell on the first day of the US assault on Iwo Jima.
His story is inspiring and facinating. It fully deserves to be told. The issue is with how it is told. The authors (and Jerry Cutter is Basilone's nephew) decided to tell Basilone's story in the first person. It is well written, and effective as a story telling device. But, well, there are some buts. You can kind of persuade yourself that this is a book that Basilone might have written, but every so often you hit something like "... but I'm even worse at writing than I am at speaking", which coming in the midst of a well written book, kind of breaks the spell. We don't really know how articulate a writer Basilone might have been, but this is jarring. Secondarily, there is the obvious problem with writing a book in the first person when the book necessarily ends with their death. The authors address this by ending with Basilone writing "... the word was that you never heard the mortar round with your name on it", and then following up with an epilogue, not in the first person, summarizing the facts from that point on.
But those are not the real problem. The real problem is that the authors can't really say that they know enough about what was on Basilone's mind. Earlier I mentioned that Leckie discussed Jungle Rot, everyone on Guadalcanal had it, it was very much on everyone's mind. It is barely mentioned in the Basilone biography. Now maybe he wouldn't have written much about it, but I'm not so sure about that.
So what it comes down to is this: the problem with the choice of first person voice is really that it's well done, well enough done to cause you to almost forget that this is a fabricated account. It's well fabricated and based on the facts, but it still isn't a true personal account. And for this reason, I'll recommend reading Sledge and Leckie first.
May be found Here. At some point I'll go over there and publish a link pointing to this new incarnation.
This is a reintroduction of my motorsports blog, which I'm reinventing for general blathering. Stay tuned, I am going to start with some book reviews relating to the HBO miniseries The Pacific.
|