nwhyte's reviews
4413 reviews

Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator by Roald Dahl

A rather surreal follow-up to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, featuring very nasty aliens!

Charlotte's Web by E.B. White

Such a beautiful story of childhood! Each character is memorable in so many ways, with Charlotte herself being the key.

A Treasury of Great American Scandals: Tantalizing True Tales of Historic Misbehavior by the Founding Fathers and Others Who Let Freedom Swing by Michael Farquhar

http://nhw.livejournal.com/197514.html[return][return]Lots of fun gossip and trivia, with a cut-off date of 1980, and a slightly contrived reaching back to cover the Salem Witch trials. But generally entertaining.

Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow

http://nhw.livejournal.com/623976.html[return][return]I have finished this massive biography, which would have taken me otherwise another couple of weeks. It is insteresting to compare with Amanda Foreman's biography of a late 18th-century political figure, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. In fact she and Hamilton were almost exact contemporaries, he born in 1755 and she in 1757; and both died aged 49, Georgiana of natural causes in 1806, Hamilton killed by the Vice-President of the United States in 1804. They never met - neither ever crossed the Atlantic - though they would certainly have had acquaintances in common - Hamilton's brother-in-law was an English MP who was in with the Prince of Wales/Charles James Fox set of which Georgiana was the leading light.[return][return]Hamilton is unquestionably the more important figure historically. Georgiana was an important cultural reference point and a back-room political player in a not especially important phase of English history, whereas Hamilton was deeply involved in setting up the administrative infrastructure for today's only superpower. Chernow suggests that "Alexander Hamilton is the foremost political figure in American history who never attained the presidency" and indeed it is pretty difficult to think of anyone else who could come close to matching that - Henry Clay? Martin Luther King? Chief Justice Roger Taney (and not in a good way)? Although I wish the book had been a bit shorter, it is every bit as good as Georgiana, and far better than McCullough's Adams - indeed, I felt I got a better idea of Adams from the few dozen pages Chernow spends on him than in McCullough's 650.[return][return]The start of Hamilton's life is pretty dramatic: he was born into a white trash background in the West Indies; his parents were not married and he spent his early life wandering around the Leeward Islands, between Nevis, the Dutch possession of St Eustatius, and the then Danish possession of St Croix - now one of the US Virgin Islands; I have to say that between this and Stross's The Jennifer Morgue I have come to realise just how little idea I have of the geography of the Caribbean. He lost almost all his family through death (or in the case of his father desertion) by the time he was 14; but fortunately fell on his feet, found himself a wealthy patron (possibly his real father) who recognised his ability, and got sent to New York to complete his education. He never went back.[return][return]Hamilton's achievements are significant, as aide to Washington during the war, joint (indeed main) author of the Federalist Papers, New York political activist, and most particularly as the first ever Secretary of the Treasury. 200 pages of the book are devoted to his term of slightly more than five years in that office, and Chernow makes a very good case for Hamilton's crucial importance in producing a government of the United States that actually worked by creating a financial administration that was clearly superior to that of the states and (more importantly) that worked; when Jefferson and his supporters took over in 1801, having sworn to dismantle the system, they found it was simply impossible. Had there been no Hamilton, the United States of America could have gone the way of the Leeward Islands federation or the United Arab States.[return][return]Indeed, without Hamilton and the Federalist Papers, it might not have even got off the ground. One part of the story that was wholly new to me was the difficulty of getting New York to buy into the project in the first place. At the Constitutional Convention, Hamilton was the only one of three New York delegates at all keen on the idea of revising the Articles of Confederation, and his only significant contribution to the debate is described by the normally sympathetic Chernow as "daft". But once it was over he put all his efforts into getting New York to ratify. Even that might not have worked, if the critical number of nine states had not been reached elsewhere so that the debate in New York shifted from whether or not the Constitution was a good idea in the first place, to whether or not New York could afford to be left out.[return][return]New York itself, incidentally, comes across as a major character in the book - Hamilton's true home, despite having to leave it during the war (when it was under British occupation) and for the remaining time of his service in the federal government after it moved to Philadelphia. It is interesting that Hamilton's track record in New York electoral politics was pretty poor. He was obviously a man who was great at intellectual argument and wearing down opponents who would engage with him on his own terms. But in New York he was consistently outmanSuvred by the likes of Aaron Burr, who eventually killed him, and even more so by Burr's successor as Vice-President, George Clinton. Hamilton distrusted the mob and was no good at street politics. But he was fascinated by the city where he was educated, married and died. He had almost no knowledge of the South. (Oddly enough one of Burr's first refuges after the duel was on the Carolina plantation of his friend Pierce Butler, whose grandson was to marry Fanny Kemble.)[return][return]Flawed characters are always much more interesting than saints. Hamilton was at the centre of the first sex scandal in American politics, and paid for it dearly with his political reputation. He had a knack of alienating people at just the wrong moment - Madison, Adams, and then Burr. Chernow concludes that he could never have become President. I don't know; certainly his political fortunes were at a nadir in 1804. But had he managed to make and keep an alliance with some more stabilising figure, things could have been different. When he died he was still younger than anyone who has come to the presidency except Polk, Garfield, Pierce, Cleveland, Grant, Clinton, Kennedy or Teddy Roosevelt. Richard Nixon was 49 in 1962; Ronald Reagan was still an actor in 1960.[return][return]Anyway, this is a great book. It's just a shame it is so loooong.

Casino Royale by Ian Fleming

http://nhw.livejournal.com/786514.html[return][return]This, not the film, is the real thing. No silly Caribbean escapades to fill in space and use budget, we are straight in with the gambling, the defeat, the bail-out by allies, the victory at the table, the kidnapping, the torture, the escape, the betrayal.[return][return]What surprised me a bit is that I don't think Bond's amoral, exploitative attitude to women is presented at all in an approving way. He has been dehumanised by his work, and this is his tragedy; one of his colleagues tells him, at the end of a chapter which has had a surprising discussion of good and evil, "don't let me down and become human yourself. We would lose such a wonderful machine." And indeed when Bond ought to be displaying due care and suspicion in the last chapters, he is distracted by unaccustomed emotion, and misses the clues obvious to the reader.[return][return]Anyway, a very good, quick read.

The Fountains of Paradise by Arthur C. Clarke

http://www.nicholaswhyte.info/sf/founp.htm[return][return]In the late 1970s, in this, the third book in a series of three for which he had reputedly received the largest advance ever paid to a science fiction author, Clarke developed a grand scale extension of his communications satellite: the space elevator, skyhook, or beanstalk, a tower thousands of kilometres in height, fixed to the earth's surface, that can be used to ship freight and people to orbit at a fraction of the cost of a rocket.[return][return]Great minds think alike. The book came out within months of a similarly themed book by Charles Sheffield, The Web Between the Worlds. They make an interesting pair. Sheffield's book has everything - young hero overcoming a disability; attractive girl with drug-addict mother; obsessed millionnaire in orbit with his mad scientist sidekick; oh yes, and the actual construction of the space elevator itself, built in space but attached to the Earth by an implausibly risky manoeuvre. Clarke's book is much less rushed. He gives us the idea of the orbital elevator and the story of its construction, against a rich background that adds to the main theme rather than distracting.[return][return]One aspect of that richness is the very name of the central character, Vannevar Morgan. "Vannevar" is clearly Clarke's homage to Vannevar Bush (1890-1974), not just a famous inventor in his own right but the man who successfully linked state and science during WW2 under Franklin D. Roosevelt, and who these days is often mentioned as a spiritual godfather of hypertext due to his 1945 essay As We May Think (published the same year as Clarke's own "Extra-Terrestrial Relays"). I am sure that "Morgan" is also intended as a tribute, but to whom? One attractive possibility is Garrett A. Morgan (1877-1963), African-American inventor of the gas mask and the traffic light. But given the circumstances, it seems more likely that the reference is to a man who, like Vannevar Bush, was appointed by FDR to head a massive project of state investment in applied science (though with more of an engineering bent), Arthur E. Morgan (1878-1975), the first chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority, who (like Vannevar Morgan in the novel) was eventually relieved of his responsibilities for largely political reasons.[return][return]Clarke's characterisation is not always his strong point (indeed Vannevar Morgan remains rather a cipher who seems to have regretted losing his childhood kite more than his girlfriend), but this book contains some of the most interesting personalities in his oeuvre. Johan Olivier de Alwis Sri Rajasinghe, the viewpoint character of the first few chapters set in the near-future time of the bridge's construction, is a former senior UN official retired to the island of Taprobane (the slightly altered Sri Lanka where the book is set). Rajasinghe is at least partly based on reality. But he also of course represents Clarke's own aspirations for a peaceful retirement and dignified acceptance of old age on the island he loves. The author had just entered his seventh decade, and had just lost his "only perfect friend of a lifetime" (to whom the book is dedicated) in a motorbike accident, so his reflections on mortality are understandable. It is comforting to reflect that, almost a quarter of a cenury on, he apparently enjoys the same comforts he had imagined for Rajasinghe.[return][return]Rather more intriguing, though sketched in less detail, is the brilliant mathematician Choam Goldberg, who when we first encounter him has joined a Buddhist monastery and been renamed the Venerable Parakarma. The epigraph to the book as a whole is a quotation from Sri Jawaharlal Nehru, "Politics and religion are obsolete; the time has come for science and spirituality." Goldberg/Parakarma looks at first like he may turn out to be an embodiment of the author's often expressed desire to explore both science and spirituality. But in fact it becomes clear that he represents (to use a phrase introduced to science fiction in 1977) "the dark side of the force". He becomes obsessed with protecting the monastery against Morgan's plans to build the space elevator on its mountain, even after suffering a spiritual crisis and leaving the order; he then sabotages a weather-generating satellite in order to try and wreck one of Morgan's publicity stunts, but with the unexpected result that the change in wind direction floods the monastery's mountain top with the butterflies whose arrival has long been prophesied to inevitably mean the monks' departure.[return][return]Most memorable of all - I think the most intriguing artificial intelligence in Clarke's fiction, including HAL - is the Starglider. Many of Clarke's novels have as main or subsidiary theme humanity's contact with an elder, more spiritually developed race. In The Fountains of Paradise the means of contact is the alien probe Starglider, which decades before the time the main part of the novel is set has swept through the solar system and used the brute force of scientific logic to disprove Thomas Aquinas and thus abolish religion, generating Clarke's favourite humanist utopia setting before the story even begins. Of course it is absurd to imagine that the world's religions, Buddhism apart, would ever "vanish in a puff of logic" (as Douglas Adams put it in 1978), but this is a point where we readers have to suspend our disbelief and enjoy Starglider's dissection of its (voiceless) opponents.[return][return]There's much more to write about here - Mars, the historical tale of Kalidasa, the role of sunspots - but will have to leave it here for now.

In the Land of Israel by Amos Oz

http://nhw.livejournal.com/1097337.html[return][return]A very interesting account of attitudes in Israel in the winter of 1982, just after the first invasion of Lebanon; the leftish author mainly reports on right-wing voters who disagree with him, though he has a couple of short chapters with Palestinians in Ramallah and Jerusalem. I must say that my main reaction, having read this en route from Switzerland to Belgium after giving a conference presentation on the Balkans and the Caucasus, is that actually the Israel / Palestine conflict is a lot less special than its protagonists like to think it is.

Satires and Personal Writings by Jonathan Swift, William Alfred Eddy

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1293335.html[return][return]Passing through Dublin today we paused in St Patrick's Cathedral to see the purported origin of the phrase 'chancing one's arm', but also to pay homage to Jonathan Swift, resting where wild indignation can no longer tear at his heart. I've had this collection of his satirical and other writings (first published by OUP in 1932) on the shelves for years, and finally worked round to it this week.[return][return]I have to say that very little of it survives the three centuries since original composition particularly well. There were no more than half a dozen pieces that I felt really shone at the same level as Gulliver's Travels: 'A Modest Proposal' and the last Drapier Letter, of course, but also 'A Meditation upon a Broomstick' (a brief but effective parody), and 'A Letter to a Young Gentleman, Lately Entered into Holy Orders' (which has some excellent direct advice on writing sermons, or any public presentation); and also the random thoughts such as 'Resolutions When I Come To Be Old' (which concludes that he also should not resolve to keep all the resolutions) and 'Thoughts on Various Subjects', the first of which is:[return][return]'We have just enough Religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another. '[return][return]Though actually that quote also illustrates some of the problems with Swift which make him unattractive to today's reader. The sense is cynical, pessimistic and misanthropic (often misogynistic as well); also we are at risk of category errors - by 'religion' and 'we'/'us' does he mean any belief, and all of humanity? or just the Established Protestant Church of Ireland, and the Chapter of St Patrick's Cathedral? The truth is probably somewhere in between but one can't be certain about where.[return][return]Some of the choices of text are also rather odd. The extracts from the 'Journal to Stella' are rather dull and exclude the most interesting political act Swift ever did, when he foiled an attempt to assassinate the prime minister of the day by means of a booby-trapped hat-box. (I am not making this up; his letter to Stella about it is online here, but not in this book.)[return][return]I probably paid about

Middlemarch by George Eliot

One of the greatest books ever.

Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope

http://nhw.livejournal.com/853097.html[return][return]Having read and enjoyed The Warden last summer, I asked for and got this as a birthday present. Hmm, not really sure what I think. I found the politics rather more objectionable than in the previous book - most of the central characters just want to do nothing in particular and get rewarded for it by the state, and there seemed a lot of casual anti-semitism which put me off. But this is slightly off-set by the glamorous Signora Neroni, a woman with a Past who nonetheless seems to me to be portrayed positively and sympathetically. And the unexpected beneficiary of her schemes turns out to be the quiet character who has just turned 40, a theme that appeals to me right now (and indeed Trollope himself turned 40 while writing this book). But Obadiah Slope is such a cardboard cut-out of a villain that I suspect Alan Rickman's brilliant portrayal of him in 1982 was better-rounded. And I didn't like the author's occasional interventions to remind you that he is writing a novel and has to fill up the pages somehow. I'll look out for the other volumes in the series as I see them, but won't bother putting them on my wishlist in future.