The Quiet American by Graham Greene

Graham Greene is one of those authors whose works always hover somewhere in the background of my ‘to-read’ list but very seldom end up in my hands. Fortunately, a friend of mine had a copy of this particular book, and lent it to me after I’d expressed an interest in reading it. I had some good advice and feedback on this review from another friend — the third paragraph owes a good deal to her questions to me, and I’m quite grateful for the consideration.

The Quiet American by Graham Greene

In the early 1950s, French colonial military forces are bogged down in an increasingly brutal war for control of French Indochina, and the possibility of a Viet Minh victory has begun to attract the attention of certain sectors of the American military and political establishment. But for Thomas Fowler, a middle-aged British journalist who has been living in Vietnam and reporting on the fighting between the Vietminh and the French, the grander political games are of relatively little interest. Fowler is mostly concerned with his ability to live as comfortable a life as possible in Saigon, filing the occasional piece of copy for his newspaper but preferring to spend his time smoking opium and enjoying the company of Phuong, the young Vietnamese woman he has taken as a lover. Fowler has no real ambitions (except to avoid being sent back to England and to the wife who will not give him the divorce he wants) and is more than content to take no part in the Indochina conflict, but his intentions go abruptly awry when he makes the acquaintance of Alden Pyle, a young Harvard-educated American of New England stock who arrives in Saigon as part of an American aid mission. Pyle, in contrast to many of his fellow countrymen in Saigon, is a ‘quiet American’: soft-spoken, idealistic, and earnestly interested in finding a solution to the war. He is convinced that a ‘Third Force’ will be able to form a legitimate government in Vietnam, routing both the colonial power and the left-leaning nationalists. Yet Fowler soon begins to suspect that Pyle’s presence in Vietnam has a sinister component to it, and his quasi-friendship with Pyle becomes all the more complicated when Phuong leaves him, seduced by the quiet American’s promise to marry her and take her back to America. As the violence in Saigon continues to escalate, Fowler begins to rethink his personal policy of not getting involved in the Indochina conflict — although he himself would have to admit that his motivations, in this instance, may have less than altruistic intentions.

The underlying plot of The Quiet American is drawn from Graham Greene’s experiences as a reporter in Saigon during the early 1950s and to a lesser extent on his time as a British intelligence agent in Sierra Leone in the 1940s. Upon publication, the book’s unflattering depiction of the Americans and American intervention in the early stages of the Vietnam conflict prompted some reviewers to denounce Greene as anti-American and to claim that he had used the character of Thomas Fowler as a mouthpiece for his own leftist sympathies. Though one might suspect that Greene took a bit of pleasure in using Fowler to skewer some of the more egregious behaviours and attitudes he had observed during his time in Saigon, a closer reading of the text suggests that Greene found Fowler an equally unsympathetic character, one among the many unsympathetic characters in the novel. The one character who even seems to come out as a mildly respectable figure is a very minor character: Phuong’s older sister, who clearly disapproves of both Fowler and Pyle as suitable partners but who sees in them a chance to provide her little sister with stability and protection, both of which are in short supply in war-torn Vietnam. Fowler is not necessarily more observant or ‘correct’ in his thinking than any of the other characters, though his standing as both the narrator and as a foil for Pyle’s radically different beliefs does give him a more authoritative (if not necessarily authorial) voice.

Most analyis of The Quiet American tends to focus on the broader moral questions related to Cold War politics, but other questions raised by the book deserve equal consideration. In particular, the character of Phuong raises several complicated points about gender issues and Orientalism, both topics that deserve greater consideration. The trouble with considering these issues is the fact that they are both so blatant, unsubtle almost to the point of caricature, that looking deeper into them is somehow made that much more difficult. One attempt to simplify the gender issues, for instance, would say that the women of The Quiet American seem to represent marked extremes of the virgin-whore spectrum, with Fowler’s wife and Phuong at opposite ends. Yet the very obviousness of the extent to which Phuong is objectified by both Fowler and Pyle (in different ways, but with the same result) and even by Phuong’s own sister makes it difficult to tell, I think, the extent to which it’s been done deliberately. Any thoughts on Orientalism would have to take into account the Chinese and other Vietnamese characters in the book, but again Phuong dominates this theme — as in Fowler’s description of how ‘[taking] an Annamite to bed with you is like taking a bird: they twitter and sing on your pillow‘. Attempting to extract Greene’s message on Orientalism and gender issues is further complicated by the Greene-as-Fowler question, and the problem of separating Fowler’s voice from Greene’s. Awareness may be a poor substitute for analysis, but on these issues awareness is at least likely to provide some semi-satisfactory answers.

In both a Cold War and post-Cold War context, The Quiet American tends to be brought up in connection with the idea of American naïveté regarding foreign affairs, a blend of good intentions and ignorance that happens to prove particularly lethal over the course of the book. Yet Greene’s novel also brings up the question of individual moral choices and the difficulties that accompany a professed belief in remaining uninvolved in a conflict. The Quiet American isn’t one of Greene’s ‘Catholic novels’ (which include The Power and the Glory and The End of the Affair), but those who simply treat it as a piece of topical political commentary and downplay everything else sadly ignore the complex moral questions that provide much of the driving force of the story.

In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 by Mary Beth Norton

Slipping this in a little late for a Sunday. I have a few other books I could add to my review list of other books on witchcraft, though I don’t happen to have any of them to hand at the moment. Possible notes for a future set of reviews, once I clear out a bit more of my existing backlog.

In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 by Mary Beth Norton

Mention ‘Salem’ nowadays, and the first thing that tends to come to mind is ‘witchcraft’. In the early months of 1692 (actually the later months of 1691, by the old Julian calendar), a small group of girls and young women in the Massachusetts Bay Colony settlement at Salem Village fell ill with a number of strange ailments. When the local physician was called in to look at them, he speculated that the illnesses were not natural and might have been caused by bewitchment…a diagnosis that was later to prove fatal for the 14 women and 5 men who would be hanged for maleficium, the practice of diabolic magic intended to bring harm to others. Several other accused witches died in prison without ever coming to trial, dozens of men and women (and even children as young as four or five) were arrested or fled the colony to avoid arrest, and still more bowed to outside pressure and confessed to being witches, implicating neighbours and family members in the process. Not even the wealthy and powerful of the colony were completely immune to being ‘cried out on’ as witches, a most unusual circumstance in the days when the most commonly accepted profile of a possible witch was a poor to middling older woman who had neither the friends nor the financial wherewithal to preserve her good name. The Salem outbreak was the largest of its kind in New England, and the records kept on the accusations and trials have been relatively well-preserved, making the study of the Salem witchcraft cases both popular and constantly open to new, revisionist perspectives — most of which attempt to make sense of why a few random accusations spread into a full-on outbreak.

Mary Beth Norton approaches the trials from a slightly different angle than previous works. Most books about the trials tend to focus on social aspects of the accusers, the accused and the accusations; why certain people were accused and others not, why certain people confessed or refused to confess, why the most powerful people in the colony were so willing to believe that Satan could be thoroughly bent on the destruction of the Massachusetts colony. Norton’s premise is less centred on social history than it is on politicial and military history. She argues that the Salem witch-trials cannot be studied without extensive reference to the ongoing wars between the settlers and the Indian population of New England, particularly the Wabanaki tribe of Massachusetts and New Hampshire. In her closely-argued book, she draws connections between the Indian wars and the effect the wars had on many of the key players in the trials. The connections might be a little hard to follow (or credit) at first, but as Norton lays out and piles up the evidence, her conclusions seem very reasonable. What’s more, they take social history to a new level by showing how closely-knit the communities of settlers were, and how children and younger adults were often easily manipulated to settle long-standing grudges between their elders.

One important caveat, first and foremost: To get the most out of Norton’s research, it helps to have at least a passing familiarity with some of the primary participants in the Salem witch trials. Anyone who has read or seen Arthur Miller’s The Crucible will know of condemned witches John and Elizabeth Proctor, Rebecca Nurse and Martha Corey, as well as the awful death of Martha’s husband Giles Corey, who refused to consent to a trial and was pressed to death with heavy weights in accordance with current English law. The names of Abigail Williams, Ann Puttnam and Mercy Lewis — three of the ‘afflicted girls’ — also appear frequently in the text, for they and their relatives were instrumental in the spread of accusations. There are several good general books on the trials that would work as an introduction, and reading one or two of those before looking at Norton’s work is likely to make Norton’s analysis and conclusions a good deal easier to follow. (I consider myself fairly well-acquainted with the standard literature on the trials, and I still had to stop and go back in a few places to ensure that I hadn’t missed something crucial in Norton’s dense narrative.)

That said, Norton’s book is a superb addition to the existing literature, exploring a side of the trials that has only been vaguely considered in the past. Granted, there are times when some of her arguments seem a little too tenuous, and she has a habit of making conjectures which she feels are warranted but which I feel make for awkward reading. But In the Devil’s Snare is one of the better books available about the Salem outbreak and the history of witchcraft in colonial New England, if nothing else for the extensive footnotes and solid historiography that underpins the text.

A Beautiful Mind: The Life of Mathematical Genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash by Sylvia Nasar

I’ve been meaning to acquire this book for a while, but it was one of those books that tend to sit on the ‘to buy’ list for ages without any action being taken on it. Thanks to BookMooch, though, I received a nice (and pretty much free!) copy only a little while ago.

A Beautiful Mind: The Life of Mathematical Genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash by Sylvia Nasar

Game theory, the branch of applied mathematics that looks at strategic choices and interactions within social situations, is a key field of study in many different social sciences and other academic fields. One of the creators of the founding principles of game theory was an eccentric but brilliant mathematician who had made a name for himself among the young, up-and-coming scholars at Carnegie Mellon and Princeton in the late 1940s and early 1950s: John Forbes Nash, Jr. Nash’s publications and theories were (and still are) regarded as mathematical breakthroughs, but by the latter half of the 1950s Nash’s eccentricities began to reveal a deeper disturbance in his mind. Wild flights of fancy regarding secret numerical patterns and codes that only he could detect gave way to outright delusions of sinister worldwide conspiracies. In the frightening grip of paranoid schizophrenia, Nash all but vanished from academic life, drifting in and out of mental hospitals and fighting against his family’s attempts to get him to stay in treatment. A new generation of students who read his articles and studied his theories often assumed that he was either dead or locked up in an insane asylum somewhere. But as the years passed, Nash struggled to work through his mental illness and gradually regain his ability to function in society — and by the time his name was given as one of the winners of the 1994 Nobel Prize in Economics, he had recovered enough to work on mathematics once more.

Sylvia Nasar’s biography of Nash has won any number of awards and has been adapted for a well-known film, and it’s not difficult to see why; Nash’s story is by turns fascinating, sad, tragic, and powerful. The book has a light, conversational voice, almost chatty in tone, but the writing style by no means detracts from the solidly written prose and the easy flow with which she carries the narrative of Nash’s life — quite the contrary, in fact. Mathematics can be a daunting subject to approach even when the calculations involved are simple ones, and Nash’s work dealt with highly technical proofs and complicated equations that could easily frighten off a casual reader. One of the best aspects of Nasar’s book is how she handles the mathematics to ensure that the ideas remain comprehensible to a lay audience. She mentions the basic principles of the proofs and equations that Nash and his colleagues developed, but she generally avoids trying to delve too deeply into more technical language for her explations and descriptions. The overall effect seems to encourage truly interested readers to look to other sources for the actual mathematics, while at the same time allowing the rest of her audience to feel informed and aware, if not absolutely initiated into the details of Nash’s work. It’s a difficult balance to strike, and Nasar manages it well.

Fans of the movie starring Russell Crowe will note the many changes that the filmmakers made to adapt Nash’s story to the screen. The movie is more of a revisioning than a true adaptation — among the biographical details left out of the movie were Nash’s bisexual proclivities, his troubled relationships with his sons (one born to his wife, the other born to a girlfriend he had had before marriage), and some of the more unsavoury remarks he made during the worst times of his illness. But as far as biographies go, A Beautiful Mind is an intriguing story of a remarkable man, who even today works hard to keep the upper hand on a mental illness that nearly shattered his career and his life beyond hope of recovery.

Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books by Maureen Corrigan

I may be able to move back up to three review posts per week fairly soon, depending on how the backlog looks. Right now I have several reviews waiting to go, so it’ll be a matter of spreading them out and pacing them accordingly.

Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books by Maureen Corrigan

Maureen Corrigan, book critic for National Public Radio’s Fresh Air and mystery columnist for the Washington Post, knows the importance of examining and evaluating the books that she has read over the years. Books have been the centre of her life for a number of years now, so perhaps it is only natural that she would write a book that looks at her life as a reader and how certain books and genres have shaped her reading experience and her approach to life. And in Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading, Corrigan attempts to explore her longstanding and complex relationship to the books in her life, from her early childhood favourites to the books she comes back to time and again as a adult. As she says in her oft-quoted introduction: ‘It’s not that I don’t like people. It’s just that when I’m in the company of others –- even my nearest and dearest -– there always comes a moment when I’d rather be reading a book.‘ It’s a sentiment that a number of readers share, certainly.

Quite possibly the best section in the book is her paean to hard-boiled detective novels, a genre that she believes has been overlooked and underappreciated by critics and academics. Corrigan delves into the world of noir, the stories of Dashiell Hammet and Raymond Chandler, and provides some interesting insights into how the traditional detective novel’s perspective on class and society makes it a quintessentially American work of fiction. She also has a few words to say about what she calls the female version of the ‘extreme-adventure story’ — where the gruelling experiences and hardships of a man climbing a mountain or facing death on a battlefield are mirrored by a those of a woman fighting to escape an abusive husband or devoting her energies to caring for an elderly relative on her own. (I’m not quite sure that I agree with all of her thoughts on this subject, but I’m still attempting to figure out where my reservations come from.)

That said, it should be noted that Corrigan’s attempt to describe her passion for books and illustrate the influence of literature on her everyday life becomes increasingly strained the farther away she goes from the books. As the distance from the literary analysis increases, the more her prose starts to drag and the less careful her word choices become. In one section, the term ‘WASP’ — with all its vaguely perjorative connotations and its feel of inverted snobbery — shows up four or five times in about as many pages as Corrigan talks about her Irish-Polish Catholic childhood and heritage. I ended up barely skimming Corrigan’s account of her travels to China to meet and bring back her adopted daughter, and the section in which she recalls her feelings of disenchantment and isolation during graduate school had me biting my lip in exasperation by the end of it. I won’t go quite as far as Corrigan herself does by summing up her book with her suggestion for a one-word negative review if Leave Me Along, I’m Reading — ‘Gladly’ — but I do think that some book-centric memoirs such as Corrigan’s have a tendency to blur the line between the books and the memoirs a little too much for my liking at times.

Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin

I actually picked up this book from my father — he bought it after seeing an TV interview that mentioned it, and suggested that I should read it once he’d finished with his copy. Which meant that I had to wait for a bit, as he took his time reading it…but it was worth the waiting.

Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin

At times, it seems as if everyone and his or her mother has written a book about Abraham Lincoln. Hagiographical biography, revisionist history, stacks of dense tomes trying to prove that he was a genetic freak or clinically depressed or homosexual or secretly racist or made out of jam or any number of other shocking revelations. And that’s not even to start talking about the books about Mary Todd Lincoln and her forays into wacky behaviour. So at the outset, it might seem that Team of Rivals is just another Lincoln book to add to the towering pile. But Doris Kearns Goodwin takes a slightly different tack by looking at Lincoln in the context of the men who formed Lincoln’s cabinet during his five years in office — particularly the three men who had actually competed with him for the Republican presidential nomination in 1860. Not only did Lincoln bring these former rivals into his cabinet, but he also sought to include the strongest political players from all factions of his fractious political party: former Whigs, hardcore anti-slavery Democrats, and others who were less interested in what Lincoln had to say than in what his political clout could get them. But the new President wanted the best men (as he saw them) surrounding him, and he was prepared to assemble a team of his own former rivals and even enemies if it meant that he got the best men for the job. Managing such a complex jumble of egos and rivalries would seem an impossible task, and Goodwin shows that at times it nearly was — and yet Lincoln was able to do so, in the middle of attempting to fight and win a devastating civil war.

Goodwin draws on reams of correspondence and diaries of the period, sketching images of the nonstop life that Lincoln and his contemporaries led from the frontier circuit courts and smoke-filled back rooms to the glittering drawing-rooms of fashionable Washington mansions. Goodwin’s subjects really come to life on the pages as she compares and contrasts their family backgrounds, their lifestyles, their personal and political beliefs, and their ability to move in the political world of antebellum America. What interested me most in reading Team of Rivals was the stark contrast (which Goodwin doesn’t emphasise nearly enough) between Lincoln’s ability to wrangle his cabinet members and the bigwigs in the Republican party, and his seeming inability to find a decent general for the Union armies. It’s a very odd contrast, and one worth pondering on, because Goodwin doesn’t really elaborate on what might seem to be a noteworthy contradiction.

Team of Rivals is a fairly ambitious book, encompassing pretty much the whole of Lincoln’s life and the lives of his contemporaries and family members as well. There are places where it’s rather slow and clogged with detail, and sometimes it’s hard to keep track of who’s who and what position they hold. But there’s plenty of gossipy details about family life and Washington society, and Goodwin does an excellent job at times in showing just how complicated Lincoln’s task was in keeping the White House running smoothly and still keeping one eye on political currents and undercurrents in state and local politics as well. It’s a good solid history book, and remarkably enough it says something new about a president who has been the subject of many a good book (and many a bad book) in the last century and a half or so.

Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima by Stephen Walker

Occasionally, I do try to post reviews of books that I didn’t really care for. This book happens to be one of them.

Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima by Stephen Walker

Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima is a historical account of the events leading up to the dropping of the ‘Little Boy’ atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, often told in the words of the participants. Walker tells the story in a vaguely narrative form, fleshing out the identities and characters of the scientists and military experts who worked on the bomb, the crew who flew the actual mission, and assorted Japanese civilians and military personnel whose stories illustrate what life was like in Hiroshima shortly before the city was levelled.

I spent a little too much time on my postgraduate work delving into the historiography and vast amount of literature on the end of World War II to make a book on Hiroshima my first choice of reading material. But the book looked interesting enough, and so I started reading through it to see if there was anything new or interesting that Walker mentioned that I might be able to pick up from the text. I was going along quite fine, until I reached the following passage:

Of course, the decision was always inevitable. So inevitable, perhaps, that it could hardly be called a decision. There were so many urgent reasons to drop the bomb. Together they made an irresistible cocktail. It would have been far more remarkable had it not been dropped.

Setting aside the idea of an ‘irresistible cocktail’ of reasons, this passage made me stop and stare. I may or may not have mentioned this in previous book reviews, but I’ll say it now: there is nothing that kills my interest in a history book faster than the author’s use of the word ‘inevitable’ in the context of crisis decision-making. I hate the use of the word ‘inevitable’ by historians because it is beyond sloppy, the equivalent in my mind of a vague handwave accompanied by an ‘enh’ sound. And to see ‘inevitable’ placed in the context of Hiroshima and the dropping of the atomic bomb…I will admit that I actually had to close the book and walk away from it in order to calm myself down. A visceral reaction, to be sure — almost certainly influenced by the fact that I’ve visited Hiroshima and seen the results of the bombing — but that one word infuriated me precisely that much.

There isn’t much more I have to say about the book after that. A little outside research would have me point to Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb and Shuntaro Hida’s The Day Hiroshima Disappeared as better alternatives to Walker’s book. Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima has its good points and interesting sections…but this is a subject that in my opinion deserves rather more thought and attention than Walker has given it.

Bobby Fischer Goes to War by David Edmonds and John Eidinow

After reading about the arrest of Garry Kasparov at a protest rally in Moscow, I was reminded of this review that I’ve been meaning to post for some time now. Chess-related, understandably.

Bobby Fischer Goes to War by David Edmonds and John Eidinow

David Edmonds and John Eidinow co-authored Wittgenstein’s Poker, an analytical study of an altercation between the philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper (allegedly involving the brandishing of a fireplace poker). As might be gathered from this book’s title, Bobby Fischer Goes to War is about more than just a single incident — it’s the story of the 1972 World Chess Championship match played in Reykjavik, Iceland, between reigning chess champion Boris Spassky (of the Soviet Union) and challenger Bobby Fischer (of the United States). At the time, and even into the present day, the championship was touted as yet another Cold War confrontation between the US and the USSR, the plucky young American wunderkind standing up to the Soviet chess machine. Edmonds and Eidinow do their best to pick apart that Cold War myth by setting out the history of the players, the modern chess tournament system, and a near play-by-play account of the match itself.

Edmonds and Eidinow also do a marvellous job at explaining chess in terms that even non-chess players can understand. But the chess comes almost secondary to their description of the events surrounding the match itself, particularly the insane antics of Bobby Fischer. Some accounts of the match claim that Fischer’s constantly changing demands and prolonged temper tantrums over nearly every single aspect of the tournament were in reality a carefully planned psychological attack on Spassky…but reading Edmonds and Eidinow’s account, there seems to be very little question that Fischer’s behaviour was unsporting, uncivilised and just plain bizarre. Complaints about the lighting and the presence of television cameras seem understandable, but when Fischer refused to use the handcrafted marble chessboard made expressly for the match because he claimed that minute imperfections in the stone would distract him during match-play, it is difficult to feel anything but sympathy for anyone who had to spend more than five minutes in Fischer’s presence. Spassky definitely comes out as an unfortunate victim in Bobby Fischer Goes to War, conducting himself with good grace as best as he could — and then returning to the Soviet Union to face an official enquiry as to why he had lost to the brash young American.

My copy of Bobby Fischer Goes to War is subtitled ‘How a Lone American Star Defeated the Soviet Chess Machine’. The subtitle might better read ‘How a Deranged American Star Bullied His Way to Victory’. The book is definitely a gripping account, thoroughly entertaining and well-paced. I certainly came away knowing more about chess and chess play than I ever thought I could learn from 300-odd pages. The book could be made into a fantastic feature film — and if it ever is, I will definitely be there on opening night.

Rich Relations: The American Occupation of Britain, 1942-45 by David Reynolds

I first picked up this book for a course on Anglo-American relations from World War II to the end of the Cold War. I don’t normally look into military-type history, but I suppose it helped that this book happens to be more about military culture than on campaigns and battles.

Rich Relations: The American Occupation of Britain, 1942-45 by David Reynolds

The story of American GIs in Britain has two sides: that of the British military and civilian population, who often dismissed the GIs as ‘over-sexed, over-paid, over-fed, and over here’; and that of the GIs themselves, who returned the cutting remarks by claiming that the British military were ‘under-sexed, under-paid, under-fed, and under Eisenhower’. Some American soldiers got on very well with the British people they met, quite often with young British women whose heads were turned by the smartly-dressed Yanks. But the problems and conflicts between the British and the GIs created some very ugly incidents, especially when black GIs were involved. The official segregation of the American forces forced both the Americans and the British to go to extraordinary lengths to keep the races separate — because the sight of a white British woman and a black American soldier walking out together was all too often the spark for an explosive confrontation.

David Reynolds has done his research well for Rich Relations, and does his best to be balanced in interpreting the often conflicting information that comes out of official memos and personal recollections. He separates the book into sections devoted to the official information from the top brass and the collected experiences of the individuals involved. Some of the stories are funny and many are sad, but some are particularly touching — one black GI recalls how he became fast friends with an older British couple who lived near his base camp, including the birthday party they gave for him which featured a small iced cake they had baked from their meagre rations (no sugar in the cake, only in the icing). There are quite a lot of good stories of this nature, and the book is rich in detail and interesting to explore.

Rich Relations does suffers a little from repetition in certain parts — do we really need to be reminded four times in the space of about two hundred pages that the pre-war black population of Britain numbered around 8,000 people? I must also admit that I skimmed through the parts dealing with battles and troop mobilisations, the parts that a military historian or World War II buff would probably find more interesting. I would not have minded if the sections about the D-Day invasions had been trimmed slightly; after all, the book is supposed to focus on the experience in Britain, rather than on the Continent. Yet the book does its job extremely well, shedding light on a fascinating time in Anglo-American (or should that be ‘Yank and Limey’?) relations.

Letter from America by Alistair Cooke

I thought I’d posted this already, but it seems that I hadn’t yet. I need to start keeping closer track of the reviews I’ve posted compared to the ones I still need to post — now that I’ve cleared out a bit of my backlog, I may soon be able to start posting reviews of books I’ve read more recently.

Letter from America by Alistair Cooke

Depending on which side of the Atlantic Ocean you’re from, the name of Alistair Cooke conjures up a different set of sounds and images. For most people in the States, Cooke was the voice and image of PBS’s Masterpiece Theatre, his plummy tones borne through the television set on the regal trumpet fanfare of Jean-Joseph Mouret’s ‘Rondeau’. And because he hosted Masterpiece Theatre for the better part of two decades, to most Americans Cooke’s name is synonymous with high-brow costume dramas and classic British television imports. But for many British people, Alistair Cooke is best known for his ‘Letters from America’ — his weekly 15-minute broadcasts on Radio 4, a stunning 2,869 broadcasts in total that ran from March 1946 to March 2004. And it is these ‘letters’, or a good selection of them, that make up this book.

Five decades’ worth of broadcasts leaves a lot of material to choose from. Some of his letters had been published earlier, in books that are now out of print, but the letters from the 1990s and 2000-2004 had been uncollected previously. And it’s a sign of the editors’ skill in selection that there’s no sense of repetition in the selected letters, and that some of Cooke’s most powerful letters have their rightful place in this collection. His letters concerning the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy are masterful — particularly the latter, since Cooke was present in the hotel kitchen when the younger Kennedy was shot. He wrote about Vietnam and Watergate, about September 11th and the war in Iraq…but he also wrote about the beauty of Christmas in Vermont, about family holidays on Long Island, about life in America and how it changed in the years he lived there.

Letter from America is probably one of those books that you’d think to buy for someone else, or might see on a table in a bookshop and wonder if it’s worth purchasing or merely flipping through. But I’m glad to have purchased this book, because Alistair Cooke was, if nothing else, a cherished institution for Americans and Britons alike. And a collection of his broadcasts, even a partial one such as this, is fine reading material.

Metro Maps of the World, 2nd Edition by Mark Ovenden

I freely admit to being something of a trainspotter. Not in the sense that I write down engine numbers in little books, but in the sense that I admire the organisation involved in the smooth running of public transportation. I do hope that this review doesn’t make me sound a complete anorak.

Metro Maps of the World, 2nd Edition by Mark Ovenden

I’m fond of maps, and the development of maps and map design. The ways in which we display information intended for public use is a particularly fascinating subject, bringing together all kinds of aspects of semiotics, information management, graphic design, and overall aesthetics. So Mark Ovenden’s Metro Maps of the World sets my heart a-fluttering in a way that rather defies its status as a book that seems to be meant for display on a coffee table.

The book shows the development of underground/metro systems in cities all over the world, and more specifically, the development of their mapping systems. Due reverence is paid to Harry Beck, the Englishman who revised the way that metro maps were created — instead of showing how the London Underground lines really looked to scale with a London street map, he simplified the design into a cleaner, more readable format that is more of a diagram than a proper map. (Here’s an image of Beck’s revised Tube plan from the early 1930s; compare it to one of the pre-Beck maps.) But Metro Maps of the World covers more than just London. Ovenden’s book compiles historical maps of the world’s major metro systems, from the Moscow Metro to the New York City subway, from Berlin’s U-bahn to Tokyo’s TRTA/TOEI system. There are sections in the book devoted to smaller systems that are no less intricate in design, as well as metro systems whose construction is still being planned.

Gorgeously illustrated and rich in detail, Metro Maps of the World is utterly fascinating to anyone who has attempted to navigate the metro system of a major city. And if you plan to visit any major city in the near future, the book might also be terribly useful from a practical standpoint. Better to get an idea of how the maps work when you’re still at home, after all — it certainly beats standing in front of a metro map and feeling panic rising in your stomach when you realise that you’ve no idea how to get where you want to go.