James Quinn

A marvelous kaleidoscope

Revisado: 02-15-25

I was a regular reader of Ms Boylan’s columns in the Times, so I was already well-acquainted with her prose and many of her points of view. What I didn’t know until I listened to this book was that she and I were raised as virtual neighbors at near opposite ends of Philadelphia’s Main Line (albeit a few years apart), and that as youngster she attended the Haverford School, my alma mater's CHIEF Inter-Ac League rival.

That aside, I thoroughly enjoyed and attempted to empathize with her emotional roller coaster of a ride through a life that, as a hopelessly straight old male WASP, I could only marvel at and loudly applaud without fully understanding.

What finally I came away with, though, was the utter conviction that her book should be required reading for all those self-proclaimed Christian/conservative legislators who think that the complexities of human sexuality can be so reduced to some binary certainty that they cannot countenance and must denigrate and deny anyone who sees it any other way. How could anyone fail to appreciate the emotional and intellectual honesty and richness of a life so well, thoroughly, and thoughtfully lived?

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An intricately woven tale of three sisters

Revisado: 12-10-24

Based on a fictitious best selling children’s book, The True History of the Mud Man, this is the tale of the interactions of a set of very disparate characters whose lives become intertwined over more than half a century, all centered in an old, decaying castle, a misogynistic father and author, a young journalist, her mother, two world wars, and three eccenteic sisters whose lives are the stuff of legend, guilt, mystery, and horror. A wonderful read!

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Well written and thorough, but a bit self-serving

Revisado: 10-18-24

I thought that most of the book was very well written and thoroughly worth reading. The military analyses of the wars the authors described seemed spot on. The last chapters, however seemed a bit self-serving as they described wars (Afghanistan and Iraq) in which one of the authors had been very involved.

I have no problem with the military aspects of both as described, but I think General Petraeus gives too short a shrift to the murky facts of the political and military quagmire in which we had gotten ourselves involved. Particularly in the case of Afghanistan, while he does mention that a good part of our problem was that we went in with a very incomplete understanding of the nation and people we encountered there, he fails to make as much of the fact as he might have that the Afghani’s were thoroughly unprepared for the kind of nation building into which we turned the war, and that the Afghani’s themselves neither sufficiently supported their own government nor were their own armed forces ever sufficiently ready or motivated to take on their own defense against the Taliban. One cannot take a nation so lacking in natural resources or so completely unused to anything like democracy and expect that within less than a generation it can become anything like the United States. We had over one hundred and fifty years of ‘practicing’ democracy as colonies distant from the mother country before we finally fought a war and wrote our Constitution, and even then the process of becoming a republic was a dicy one (as it still is). It is wholly unrealistic to suppose that our staying in Afghanistan (or Iraq) for some unspecified amount of time would have resolved these issues.

Perhaps the authors could have taken a lesson from our own Revolution. We could probably not have forced the British to give the attempt to retain their control over us without the military help of the French, but we needed no nation building efforts on their part, nor would we have accepted that effort if it had been either offered to or forced on us. We were determined to create our own country, and we had the will and the political wherewithal to do it. We just needed a temporary military boost to complete the job. The Afghani’s lacked both.

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Great potential harmed by too much angst

Revisado: 03-05-24

This was a story I wanted to love, but in spite of the truth of much of the author's take on the Vietnam experience, I felt that she overdid the series of tragedies encountered by her protagonist following her return from the war. I think the story might have been more effective if Frankie's struggles had not been continually added to by what might be considered gratuitous additions to her experiences in order to amplify her emotional stress. No one at all familiar with the experience of modern war could deny its awful impact on those who fight it, even those like Frankie whose experiences were terrifying and traumatizing if a bit indirect. But to continually add to her struggles with external events not really related to the trauma she experienced as a nurse seemed more about deliberatley adding to the tug on the reader's heartstrings than about a focus on the emotional and mental results of her service in the war and on the actual therapy she underwent in order to resolve them.

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Another wonderfully complex story.

Revisado: 12-28-22

I continue to thoroughly enjoy the books in this series. My only concern with this one is the narrator. His reading, while certainly clear and well paced does seem a bit too cute at times. I would have let Ms George's prose do most of the work without overdoing the British public school accents.

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What one does not understand, one cannot value

Revisado: 10-11-22

I found this the most valuable of the several books I've read about Trump and his presidency, mostly because of the background Ms Haberman provides. Apart from that, for those of us who lived through it, there is little new here, except for the thoroughness of her work. Whatever else one many take from the book, her most salient point mirrors what other authors have noted. Donald Trump had little or no comprehension of the office of the Presidency, nor did he have any interest in doing so, thus it would have been foolish to imagine he would either fulfill it with any semblance of understanding of its gravity, power, and purpose or, as some of his supporters hoped he would, grow into it. With the background she provides, Ms Haberman makes it more abundantly clear than most why this was true.

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Bolton on Bolton

Revisado: 07-01-20

A long, complex, and sometimes confusing political journey through the eyes of a man who assumes he's pretty much always right about just about everything on the world stage. While the book was trumpeted as a takedown of Trump, there's nothing really new here about the occupant of the Oval Office save in some of the details of conversations and actions. Trump emerges as the Trump we already know, a man dedicated to the greatness and advancement of Trump at the expense of the United States and anyone else involved.
The book is equally dedicated to showcasing the geopolitical expertise of the author himself. Although I have been a history teacher for over 40 years, I do not feel adequate to comment on whether John Bolton is as right about all this as he claims. What I did note, though, was a monumental lack of concern about the morality of the actions of the various players or much concern about the people around the world that those actions affected. It was as if actual human beings (except those described in the book) didn't really exist. Rather, Mr. Bolton seemed to feel himself and various other world leaders and their assistants acting on a grand stage for which the audience was a sort of undifferentiated vagueness existing outside of the drama. The only outside group consistently portrayed, always in unflattering terms, was the press.
One had the feeling that Mr. Bolton wished that the realities of life for most of humanity could be taken out of geopolitics so that brilliant, knowledgeable people like himself could run the place as a sort of equation in leveraging outcomes to suit their own national goals, and that the intrusions of the Fourth and Fifth Estates should be minimized as they just muddied the waters and mitigated the effectiveness of pure power diplomacy.

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An extraordinary and moving book

Revisado: 07-07-19

I've read a number of reviews of this book that claim to love the message but dislike the messenger (the author). I cannot imagine why. Dr. Lepore's clear passion for us and for her subject is a full part of the book's power. This is as much a story about, and a plea for understanding of, who we were founded to be and who we might become as it is a history. I have loved listening to all the volumes of the Oxford History of the United States, of which kind of rigorous and detailed history this is not. But this too is a form of history we badly need. The nature of the place where we began and the understanding of what increasingly divides us from that and from each other are facts and ideas we very badly need to explore, to think about, and to discuss; and this is where Dr. Lepore would lead us, should we have the patience and courage to listen with an open mind and an truly American heart.

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If only faith were rational

Revisado: 06-28-19

I thoroughly enjoyed the book, and I agreed heartily with all of Ms Nussbaum's thinking (except of course for the White Sox thing), but I fear that her very logical approach is at odds with the irrationality of far too many people of faith. What she leaves out of the equation of religious intolerance is any discussion of the problem of human beings who are convinced they can read the mind of god and are thus self-justified in their intolerance. It is one thing, as Pascal noted, to wager on the side of the existence of god for oneself, but quite another to decide that everyone else must make the same wager. My sense is that religious intolerance began with monotheism and is unlikely to wane as long so many insist that their version of god is the only one permissible.

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One of the great historical novels

Revisado: 05-26-19

The final scene in this extraordinary novel is worth reading by itself; both a paean and a warning at the very birth of democracy. The whole story is one which can be read over and over, each time to gain a greater appreciation of Renault's prose and her awareness of the nature of democracy. The book is full of moments of harsh clarity, beauty, despair, sorrow, anger, glory, and the power of human thought for both honor and horror. It is a book to be read carefully, for Renault's prose is can be dense and it is easy to miss the gems embedded in it. But to come to the end, in the full awareness of the historical moment she has so beautifully described is a pleasure that one can enjoy over and over.

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