A Separate Peace

Wilson's Weblog Posted on by

by John Knowles, 1960, The Macmillian Company 4.0 stars

This was always one of my favorite books and I saw it in my bookcase so I thought I would read it again.

I believe the books hold on me was due to its setting in a prep school. The time of the book is in 1942 and the war is a prominent theme that pervades the book. While the Viet Nam war was cranking up during my prep school days, it wasn’t really a concern of mine until I arrived in college, but the thoughts and feelings of the young boys in the book relating to the ware were similar to mine while I was in college.

The characters in the book seemed very familiar to me as I was in very close contact with my schoolmates while at my high school boarding school. I must say though, with an intervening period of 50 years or more since I last read it, the book didn’t have the same impact as it once did. I guess that’s to be expected as I have had a multitude of other life experiences over time. I felt the same when I read Catcher in the Rye a few weeks ago. Now I apparently tend to take youthful perspectives with a little more skepticism than I once did.

One thing that I observed now was how self-centered the main character, Gene Forester, was. When he visited his friend, Leper, who had enlisted in the army and suffered a nervous breakdown, he had not an ounce of empathy or pity for him. He just wanted to get away from as quickly as possible and put him out of his mind. I guess i didn’t pick up on this when I read the book years ago. Now I didn’t feel much sympathy at all for Gene. I felt rather that Gene wasn’t a particularly good person. It is interesting how time can change one’s perspective.

The book still seems like a great book to me. The writing is great, particularly his descriptions of the surroundings. The characters are believable, and I can relate to the boarding school environment, even though the strength of my connection has waned considerably.

Zero Fall: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service 

Wilson's Weblog Posted on by

Zero Fall: The Rise and Fall of the Secret Service, by Carol Leonnig, 2021, Kindle Edition, Random House 3.5 stars

This book is pretty good as it gives a lot of detail about the problems within the Secret Service over the years. It tracks various failures of the Secret Service to protect the President and his family and what the agency supposedly learned from each of these incidents.

Whil the book is easy to read and well researched, I think it suffers in that it is a very long book, almost 500 pages. When I finally got through reading it, I thought I was glad to be done with it.

What did I take away from this book? I, unfortunately, came away with a sense that the Secret Service as an organization is really in bad shape. There have been numerous efforts by numerous directors to put in place various reforms. Despite these efforts, today’s Secret Service isn’t being run any better than it has in the past. This sad state of affairs is due to poor management, in-bred culture, ineffective recruiting, and chronic underfunding. Prospects for improvement are dim.

So, in spite of the book’s being a pretty good book, it portrays a sad picture and suggests that it isn’t going to get any better in the near future.

J.D. Salinger: A Life

Wilson's Weblog Posted on by

by Kenneth Slawenski, 2012, Random House eBook Edition

While waiting to get my library copy of The Catcher in the Rye, which was the next book selection for our book club, I inadvertently borrowed this book thinking it was Catcher. When I saw it was a biography of Salinger, I thought what the heck, I’ll read this while I’m waiting. I eventually went to the library to get The Catcher in the Rye and read it, then returnd to this book to finish it.

It actually worked out a bit better to finish this book after reading The Catcher in the Rye as it gave me some insights regarding its meaning. It also gave me a great deal of insight regarding all of Salinger’s writings and thoughts. The biography was published a couple of years after Salinger’s death, so his memory was no doubt fresh in many individual’s minds.

I found this book to be interesting regarding Salinger’s life and philosophy, but it had one large drawback. The author dove into each of Salinger’s writings with a multi-page, blow-by-blow telling of each one. I finally resorted to skipping these pages until the book returned to Salinger’s life. The book, in my opinion, would have been much better if the author had offered only concise descriptions of Salinger’s writings rather than comprehensive retellings. This is especially the case when I might want to read a few of those works and I wouldn’t want the whole story revealed prior to reading it myself.

So, the book gave me a lot of insight regarding Salinger and his works, but I certainly didn’t need the level of detail he included for each of those works. 2.5 stars 

The Catcher in the Rye

Wilson's Weblog Posted on by

The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger, original publication 1951, Back Bay Books Paperback edition 2010, Little Brown and Company, New York

This book, for some reason, was chosen by our men’s book club. It was interesting to go back and read it as I wasn’t sure that I had read it so long ago. I’m also reading a biography of J.D. Salinger so I have a little knowledge of him and how the book came to be written. That extra knowledge gave me an appreciation of his life and some inkling of where he was coming from when he wrote the book.

One thing I learned was how the book was received when it was first published back in 1951. It was immediately praised as a masterpiece and came to be considered one of the really great books of the twentieth century. Reading it today, I can see some of the qualities of the book, but I can’t quite get my head around its being all that great. It now seems somehow dated but I think it’s probably still relevant given the mental struggles that the youth of today are experiencing. Holden Caulfield suffered from a total lack of direction in his life which may be inflicting many of our young individuals today, although Holden didn’t seem to be contemplating suicide as seems to be the trend today. It would be interesting to hear how a young person would react to reading it today.

Holden, even though he seems to be totally lost, has some redeeming qualities. I was amazed when he held to his principles when he disputed the charge for the prostitute that was sent to his room. The easy way out would have been to just hand over the extra five dollars (which he ended up losing anyway. Instead, he chose to have himself severely beaten just because he determined that he was right and the other people were wrong. I suspect that most individuals would take the easy way out to avoid being hurt. He also showed a great deal of empathy for some others and felt sorry for them, even after excoriating them for being phonies.

It was frustrating to read because I kept wanting Holden to wake up and change his ways while, at the same time, knowing that he wasn’t going to. I’m glad I read it, but I’m not able to rate it as one of my all-time favorite books. 3.5 stars

Earthly Remains (Commissario Brunetti Book 26)

Wilson's Weblog Posted on by

A Commissario Brunetti Mystery, by Donna Leon, 2017, Audiobook narrated by David Colacci, Recorded Books

This is a well-crafted mystery that unfolds very slowly. Commissario Brunetti tries to take a little time off to regroup by going to a relative’s unoccupied house on an island to read and do a little rowing, but he is drawn into a mystery when his rowing partner fails to return after a storm.

The writing in this book and the dialogue are very good, and the characters are great. The only thing holding this back from being a really great novel is its slow pace. Also, the ending did not satisfy.

Also, the narration is excellent, probably one of the best done that I have heard. 3.5 stars

The Midnight Library: A Novel

Wilson's Weblog Posted on by

by Matt Haig, 2020, Kindle Version, Viking3.5 stars

This was an interesting book for me. It’s about a young woman whose life is a mess, so she attempts to end it by taking some pills. She didn’t, however, take enough and ended up in a state somewhere between life and death and she arrives in a library full of books. The librarian is a woman who was the librarian of her school library when she was a kid.

The books in the library are books that provide her with lives that she could have lived had she made other choices. There is also a book of regrets which is rather large because she basically regrets all the choices she made in her life.

She then experiences other lives, but they don’t seem to work out very well and she is returned to the library when she discovers that the alternate choice isn’t providing the happiness she thought it would.

The books is well written but bogs down a bit when it describes a large number of lives. Most individuals make a very few life-changing choices and I think it would have been better to explore a few of these lives in greater depth than flit between a larger number. At one point, the author said she had experienced thousands of alternative lives.

It did cause me to go back and think about the choices I had made in my life. Just about all of those choices turned out well for me so I don’t have much to regret in that vein. I do have other regrets, however, that I wish I could have a second change, but there’s no guarantee that I would do any better the second time around so it’s better for me to focus on the present and future.

For Whom the Bell Tolls

Wilson's Weblog Posted on by

For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Ernest Hemingway, 1939, Kindle Hemingway Library Edition, Simon and Schuster

This book is our book club’s selection for January of 2022. It was a difficult book for me to get into. The first 200 pages or so were all discussion and conversation that I had a hard time relating to. As the book progressed, however, I began to understand the characters better. I only wish I knew a bit more about the Spanish Civil War so that I could better understand the background and conditions in which the book was written.

I had always thought that Hemingway was a master of keeping his prose compact, but in this book there are many details on each page that seem to drag out the story a bit much. I must say that I’m glad I read all of it as it gives me a better picture of the author.3.5 stars

The Madhouse at the End of the Earth: The Belgica’s Journey into the Dark Antarctic Night

Wilson's Weblog Posted on by

by Julian Sancton, Crown Publishing, 2021

When I started this book I thought it was going to be another book about Shackelton’s ill-fated adventure in Antarctica, but it turns out that this expedition was a totally different one. Rather than sponsored by the British, this was a Belgian expedition that occurred many years earlier. The expedition was headed by the Belgian Adrien de Gerlache who was from an apparently famous family in Belgium. I had never heard of him or his expedition.

After describing the difficulties de Gerache had in financing the expedition and recruiting a crew, the author launches into the story of the expedition and the difficulties it encountered. There was not much that could have gone wrong that didn’t go wrong.

The chapters covering the wintering over dragged a bit, making me feel a bit like I was wintering over while reading it. Despite the tedium induced, Sancton accurately depicted the story of this situation. The passages regarding the long winter’s night were extremely descriptive, but then he related the difficulties of having the sun up all the time when it finally emerged in the summer. This brought back my memories of suffering from “The Big Eye” during the months I spent in Antarctica during their summers of 1970-71 and 1971-72. I recall my biological clock being totally out of whack and being totally exhausted. I would flog down in my bunk and go immediately to sleep, only to wake up a couple of hours later with “The Big Eye”, an affliction where one’s eyes open wide and there is no chance of going back to sleep. Thank you, Sancton, for bringing back those cherished memories!

One aspect of the book that I really liked was the final chapters in which the author recounted the events in the lives of the various individuals after the voyage. This narrative seemed to complete the total story of the expedition and was something I found missing in the previous book I read. Well done! 3.0 stars

The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War

Wilson's Weblog Posted on by

by Malcolm Gladwell, 2021, Kindle Version, Allen Lane

This book is about a group of Army aviators in the bomber school in Alabama. The thrust of the book is that General Haywood Hansell, who was in charge of the school, became enamored with the capabilities of the Norden bombsite and its potential for precision bombing. He felt that, by using this device, it would end the need to bomb civilian populations in order to bring the enemy into submission.

The problem with the bombsite was that, while it worked in ideal conditions, it didn’t work very well in actual high-altitude bombing situations. The bombsite was affected by cloudy conditions, high winds, turbulence, and operator error. Enter Curtis LeMay and his preference for saturation bombing which he used to great effect in Japan where it created more casualties than the two atomic bombs combined.

The book is pretty sterile in that it really doesn’t compare and contrast the two approaches in detail. Gladwell relies generally on reporting the information but doesn’t seem to draw any conclusions. In addition, he doesn’t fast forward to the current day to give the reader a overview of the impacts of the two schools of thought, given the current stage of technology. It was an interesting book to read but falls short on insight into current day warfare. 2.5 stars

The Lion

Wilson's Weblog Posted on by

The Lion, by Nelson DeMillie, audiobook narrated by Scott Brick, 2010, Hachette Audio

We listened to this book over three days while we drove from Rhode Island to Florida. I don’t have much to say about, either positive or negative, other than it gave us something to pass the time. The book seemed to be enjoyable but didn’t stand out as a great story.3.0 stars