Category Archives: Rants and Raves

Here’s where my thoughts go.

Thinking About Thinking #39 – Submission – The second French Revolution?

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Here’s my book review of Submission by French novelist Michel Houellebecq.

Submission is a cautionary near-futurist tale about the quiet takeover of the French government by a new political faction led by the Muslim Brotherhood. The book is both fact-based and speculative. Following in the genre of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, George Orwell’s 1984, and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the year is 2022. The book’s narrator Francois is a middle-aged professor of literature at the Sorbonne in Paris. In his personal life, he’s lost interest in most people and things, and he is a member of his community. He is both politically apathetic and spiritually atheist. He represents the bored, educated class, which lacks nothing in material comforts and feels detached from any form of social participation.

The Islamist takeover occurs when the routine electoral process goes haywire. In the parliamentary system of France, as in many other democracies, multiple political parties are both sizeable and factional. As a result, it is rare for any single party to garner more than half the popular vote. So after the election, the candidate with the most votes must negotiate with the leaders of the opposing parties to build a consensus – a working majority in a process called forming a government.

And that’s what happens here, except that the Muslim Brotherhood now has about 20% of the electorate, a share comparable to the predominant right-wing party and to the Leftist progressives. The progressives want nothing to do with the other two. And so they link up and in a parallel that will not be lost on anyone in Europe or the United States.

It turns out that, other than religion, the Islamists and the Rightists have a lot in common. They both want to return to patriarchy, reassertion of family values with the wife’s role primarily as homemaker, and mistrust if not hatred of nonbelievers. And that’s just what France gets in their new leader, Mohammed bin Abbas, whom the narrator describes as looking like a kindly fat grocer. But bin Abbas is not only an Islamist. He’s also a crafty politician, a capable and pragmatic diplomat, and an ambitious dictator with an ego the size of Napoleon’s.

His backers. It turns out, include the Saudis, who proceed to buy up even more of European state assets, including the Sorbonne itself. Professors must now convert to Islam, as historically they had to profess Catholicism. If they do, their salaries are tripled, and matchmakers are appointed to find them multiple teenage wives, recruited from the student body. Women are forbidden to hold jobs in the state. This attracts them back into the home by paying generous stipends based on the number of children. Unemployment plummets as more men return to the workforce. Crime also drops and the economy improves.

That should be enough to get your least curious and unlikely story.

Perhaps not (if you think it can’t happen here – and not necessarily precipitated by Muslims).

Follow Kenyan current events in the run-up to the general elections in August of 2022. Names changed to protect the guilty!

Thinking About Thinking #38 – The Gravity Well – A trap or a dwelling place?

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Here’s my book review of The Gravity Well: America’s Next Greatest Mission by Steven Sanford.

Steven Sanford was trained as a research engineer and spent almost three decades as a NASA employee when he left the agency recently to work for a contract engineering firm. He was Director for Space Technology and Exploration at NASA’s Langley Research Center. The gravity well refers to the huge physical effort required to overcome the Earth’s pole and climb into space. It is the first and most significant challenge of space travel. Having attained escape velocity from our planet and venturing far enough up and out, a space vehicle will have the option to park in one of several fixed locations called Lagrangian points. At these distances, gravitational forces are balanced, such that location can be maintained indefinitely, with no further expenditure of energy.

This is the logical place to build space stations. The Gravity Well, the book, is in effect Sanford’s heartfelt, elaborately reasoned letter to US taxpayers and members of Congress. The single most beneficial thing we can do to stimulate the economy and reset national priorities would be to augment the relatively modest NASA budget by a third.

The current authorization is about $19 billion. Sanford argues persuasively for $30 billion.

He doesn’t even propose we take the hit all at once. His proposal is for Congress to increase that budget by $1.2 billion per year for 8 years. His proposal is precise, achievable, and modest. Its diminutive fiscal size becomes apparent when you compare it with the voracious requirements of the Department of Defense, which exceeds a half-trillion dollars per year. And that’s not counting the supplemental allocations for various wars.

Sanford’s argument is also straightforward: No single expenditure by the federal government holds the prospect of producing such generous returns.

For example, he points out, “A single asteroid, no wider than your living room, can contain $10 billion worth of gold, along with platinum, tungsten, and the rare-earth metals we desperately need here where supplies are running low.”

And you don’t even have to conquer a third-world nation or fight a war with some other superpower to grab this stuff. (That’s my inference, not his explicit point.) Your tightfisted representative might well ask, “Why can’t private industry do this?” Well, it can and it will. But the history of all major technological advances is marked by government taking the early steps reducing risk and forging a path of entry for private investment. Computers, micro electronics, the Internet, and the telecom backbone all have their origins in broadly funded government initiatives bold. Brash and ambitious as are Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk, none would have dared invest in advanced rocketry if the basic engineering were not already mature.

Sanford cites a little-known example that aviation itself might have taken much longer to evolve – if at the end of World War I the US Postal Service hadn’t gambled the then-colossal sum of $5 million to fund transcontinental airmail service.

Let’s start by making every member of Congress aware of the gravity Well. Let’s also make it required reading in high school – and our manifesto for a grassroots political movement. Let’s inspire America to a new vision of world leadership that emphasizes international cooperation for mutual benefit. And dare we hope for not just survival but a grander destiny.

However, I’m not predicting immediate success. I hope I’m wrong. But Sanford’s proposal seemed to well reasoned and too eminently logical to have any effect on public policy in the near term. If national pride drove the swelling of the defense establishment. reallocating money to space would be easy. But it’s widespread fear that motivates the building of redundant piles of weaponry. Congress today is full of unscrupulous, self-interested politicians who, despite their patrician educations, find that sneering at science and leveraging the public’s fears get them votes.

Can we seriously believe that an Ivy-League trained-lawyer has so little understanding of science as to scoff at evolution, climatology, and the obvious need for population control? For Sanford’s plan to work, the likes of Neil deGrasse Tyson and Laura Sinclair (that’s the January 2017 Woman Physicist of the Month) need to run for office.

And sooner rather than later, we need a better educated electorate that respects learning more than celebrity.

Intrigue on the white sands of the Indian Ocean. Maybe the next best thing to being there?

Thinking About Thinking #37 – Forever Panting – Funniest book ever!

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I coined the term boychik lit after the Yiddish word for a young man with more chutzpah than brains. It’s a counterpoint to chick lit – humorous novels like Bridget Jones’s Diary and Sex and the City – about young women on the make. Boychik lit is about young men on the make, but also popular with mature men who want to remember being young and on the make, as well as women of any age who apparently find the foolishness of all men funny.

Classic as boychik lit – which I recommend for a short read and a good laugh – is the 1973 novel Forever Panting by that master, Peter De Vries. It’s about an out of work actor who divorces his wife and marries his mother-in-law, putting real spin on the old adage, “Careful what you ask for.”

And here it is. Not easy to find. Some public libraries will have it. Some banned it long ago, and perhaps no one there remembers why.

Forever Panting, one of my all-time faves, was first published in 1973. The godfather of boychik lit, De Vries is hopelessly politically incorrect these days. For example, his Slouching Towards Kalamazoo is about a high-school boy who runs away with his comely teacher. You simply cannot go there now, so have life and lawsuits imitated art in the years since.

Raised in a Christian fundamentalist Dutch Reformed family in Chicago, De Vries held notions of humor that typically involved religious hypocrisy and suburban adultery. His Mackerel Plazais about a widower minister whose late wife was so saintly and highly regarded, he fears her reputation might get in the way of his plans to marry the church secretary.

For extra credit: Who is writing such stuff now?

All three Rollo Hemphill misadventures in one ebook (Kindle or EPUB). This answers the question, “Who is writing boychik lit now?”

Thinking About Thinking #36 – 13 Reasons Why

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Here’s my book review of Thirteen Reasons Why, a novel by Jay Asher.

Thirteen Reasons Why is the fictional story behind a teenage suicide. It has two first-person narrators – Hannah Baker, the girl who decided to end her own life, and Clay Jensen, who presumably was one of the thirteen 13 motivations for her tragic choice. Clay comes into possession of a box of audiocassette tapes – an outdated format in this age of mp3 – but it’s relatively secure because the analog recordings can’t be copied as easily and shared at a click with your thousand closest friends on Facebook.

Hannah dictated the tapes to tell the story behind her decision to end her life in an odd – and you could well say pointless – act of revenge. She has devised a routing plan so that each of the people who wronged her will be forced to listen. And she has included a scheme to betray their guilty secrets if any one of them goes public with the information – or doesn’t keep this audio chain-letter moving from one perpetrator to the last – at which point the tapes must be destroyed.

Hannah’s story unfolds to us (the readers), as Clay plays the tapes in sequence for himself. All along he’s wondering about – and dreading – what role he had in, and what responsibility he might hold for, her death.

What’s striking to me as a mature adult – mature, at least in years – is how mundane and relatively innocuous these slights seem. I don’t think there’s much here that would cause an adult to take the high jump to oblivion. There’s bullying of various kinds, sexual and emotional abuse by young men, along with snubs and betrayals by her female peers. Hannah seems to fear she’s an ugly duckling. But she’s hardly thinking that the boys seem drawn to her by her sheer attractiveness. She doesn’t provoke their advances, and for the most part, she doesn’t give into them.

There is an incident of date rape, but Hannah is not its victim. She’s a witness, and she blames herself for its happening. But it’s not necessarily one of the reasons she decides to end it all. I’m not sure why she does. In the world of adults, traumas like divorce, job loss, financial insolvency terminal illness, and death can trigger severe emotional breakdowns. But there’s none of that in Hannah’s background. In general, cruel gossip can be a destroyer of egos, but not the basic will to live.

I’ve heard it said that deep despair is the result – not of losing happiness – but losing the hope of ever having any happiness. And I suppose that’s what destroys Hannah.

I won’t insert the spoiler here of how Clay was or wasn’t involved. But I wonder about novelist Jay Asher. This was his first fiction book, and some would say he hit the ball out of the park. The book and the audio book have been bestsellers. It’s won all kinds of awards, and it’s been made into a cable series on Netflix. So he knows how to tell a story, one that engages the angst of tweens and teens. I’m no mental health expert, but I don’t think Jay Asher’s understanding of clinical depression or suicide is particularly deep. He said in interviews that he had a close relative who considered suicide but survived. If any of his young readers think Hannah’s are compelling reasons to just give up, I think that’s more than a shame.

Intrigue on the white sands of the Indian Ocean. A great “beach read” even if you won’t actually be camped out on the shore.

Thinking About Thinking #35 – A Nasty Piece of Work – Should old spies just stay home?

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Here’s my book review of A Nasty Piece of Work: A Novel, a crime thriller by Robert Littell.

Littell has written sophisticated spy novels, including The Amateur. It would be glib to say A Nasty Piece of Work literally lives up to its title. It is a workmanlike, formula-gumshoe detective novel. The protagonist Lemuel Gunn is a worn-out, burned-out, world-weary intelligence operative. He’s retired to the desert. He gets dragged into a case and a buddied-up search by a beautiful young dame, Omelia Neppi.

The bad guys are unscrupulous and vicious, with mob ties embedded in the gambling racket. In the formula detective novel, the beautiful girl is trouble. In this case, our Omelia comes on like an ally, acting as an assistant investigator who knows where to find the crumb trail. Gunn eventually learns that she’s embroiled him in her plot to seek revenge on the perps.

The ending dishes out great gobs of graphic violence – justified Charles-Bronson style – because the guy by now has permission to give back as good as he and his client have gotten.

If you like pulp fiction – and a new idea that has withstood the test of time – go for it. Granted, authors of spy thrillers have had to rethink their missions since the Cold War, but this one in my opinion was a wrong turn for Mr. Littell.

What will you be inspired to do? Venturing to East Africa, Harry goes from being a passive observer as a tourist to an involved and committed resident. Two book awards (so far!) in 2021.

The Sociopolitical Climate of Kenya: My Interview with Rose Colombo

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Thinking About Thinking – On My Experiences Living in Kenya

I discuss wide-ranging issues about corruption, love, and loyalty with Rose Colombo, host of the Blogtalk Radio show “Colombo Chronicles.” And I explain how these themes are woven through my novel Harry Harambee’s Kenyan Sundowner.

What parallels to current events in the U.S. can we see in Kenya’s recent political history? What’s happening there now that deserves close attention? For one thing, the country is trying to rewrite its constitution at the same time candidates are declaring for the next general election in August of 2022.

What cultural issues in Kenya might be surprising to American or European tourists?

How do “unintended consequences” of aid programs and charities often cause results in-country to go awry?

Listen Now

As he transforms from passive tourist to resident, Harry must decide how much he’s willing to commit. He wonders whether he’s being played. Then he wonders, ‘Do I mind?’

Thinking About Thinking #34 – Cutting for Stone – Would you trust your barber to cut you open?

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I have to start by clearing up the confusion I had with Abraham Verghese’s title, Cutting for Stone. As the book mentions several times but never precisely explains, the reference is to the Hippocratic Oath, “I will not cut for stone.” However I had to look it up in Wikipedia to find the meaning, which is probably apparent to medical professionals. It was a prohibition from operating on stones, or calcified deposits, in the kidney or bladder. The ancient Greeks apparently thought surgeons should leave this menial procedure to barbers. The modern meaning seems to be that doctors should recognize they can’t specialize in all areas. But I’d say closer to the original intent, and perhaps more relevant to today’s medicine, would be: “I won’t perform treatments just for the sake of making money.”

Okay, I got that off my chest!

The title has at least a double meaning. The story flows from the unlikely and surprising conception of a pair of twins by an English surgeon, Thomas Stone, and an Indian-born nun, Sister Mary Praise, in Ethiopia in the mid-twentieth century. The story is narrated by one of the twins, Marion, who eventually becomes a surgeon himself.

Verghese is likewise a practicing surgeon, now living in the U.S., who grew up in Ethiopia. His account seems autobiographical, but much of it is invented, as he explains in detail in his Acknowledgments.

If I say too much about this book, I’ll have to throw in a lot of spoilers, and suspense has its delicious rewards in this leisurely paced plot. So I won’t. Suffice it to say, I believe your patience with Verghese will be rewarded.

I heard him speak at a book signing at an Ethiopian restaurant in Los Angeles, and he mentioned that he admired W. Somerset Maugham. This book does remind me of Cakes and Ale, in more ways than one, including the crafting of its sentences. (Maugham also studied medicine.) It’s not the page-turning, plain-vanilla, cliffhanger prose of Tom Clancy or Dan Brown. It’s thoughtful, colorful, and literary. Slow down and enjoy it.

This novel is about family, community, betrayal, parental love and estrangement, sibling bonding and rivalry, personal bravery, not-so-uncommon acts of kindness, the heroic practice of medicine, suffering and compassion–and irony.

Lots of irony.

Cutting for Stone is selling well, so lots of other people must think it’s worthwhile. The story doesn’t read like a movie plot, but neither does The English Patient. Yes, this book is that big–in its scope and its ambitions, and in the magnitude of its achievement.

Intrigue on the white sands of the Indian Ocean. Two book awards this year in literary fiction.

Thinking About Thinking #33 – The Girl on the Train – Does betrayal justify revenge?

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There was such a buzz about The Girl on the Train, I couldn’t help myself. Especially since, after I’d downloaded the ebook sample, that Buy Now button was burning a hole in my digital wallet.

Yes, I was engrossed. But before you rush out to the e-store, be warned.

Right off, this is a book for and about women. The two male main characters – both thirty-something husbands – are strapping hunks of man-flesh. They exude charm and flash winning smiles. And they are both abusers. Several walk-on male characters are nicer, sort of metrosexual candidates. But one has a drug habit, another is a drunk, and the third is a spineless shrink.

The wives and ex-wives are smart but vulnerable, emotional sponges thirsty for guy-sweat. They spend a lot of their emotional energy in cat-fights with each other.

Okay, here’s the gist of it. The Girl on the Train is a chilling psychological drama centered – not on a love triangle, but a pentagon – or is it a hexagon? Anyway, the permutations and combinations don’t quite include the entire neighborhood.

Main character Rachel is recently divorced from Tom, who seems like a nice guy who just couldn’t put up with her drinking habit. (She had her reasons.) He’s now married to Anna and they have a new baby. The couple live in a the same bungalow where Tom and Rachel once thought they were happy. A few doors down, Scott and Megan seem like childless lovebirds. Megan occasionally babysits for Anna.

Although it’s been a while since the breakup, Rachel can’t help spying on her old house from the commuter train she takes to work in London every day. She occasionally catches sight of Megan and Scott lounging on the porch of their cookie-cutter cottage. She doesn’t know them well, but she develops a fantasy about their perfect relationship. It’s the relationship Rachel thought she had with Tom, a love now presumably lost.

It turns out that Rachel is more than casually curious about Tom and Anna. Rachel is a stalker. She phones him at all hours, she leaves notes at the house, and she wanders the neighborhood as she stares at the front door.

One night when she’s there, neighbor Megan goes missing.

A problem is – and it’s huge – when Rachel has been drinking she’s prone to mental blackouts. There are whole chunks of time – from minutes to hours – for which she has no memory. So combined with her guilt and self-loathing over her failed marriage, Rachel begins to wonder whether she’s been bad. Maybe really, really bad?

Like, maybe, did she somehow hurt perfect-housewife Megan? And what happened to Megan, anyway? Did she run off with a lover, or will they find her body in a ditch?

That’s as far as I’ll go. No more spoilers. But I’m just priming the pump. This is a big book, and, by turns, Rachel, Anna, and Megan tell their first-person stories.

Debut novelist Paula Hawkins knows her craft. At its basis, The Girl on the Train is an ingeniously twisted  mystery. It’s a woman-jeopardy plot with multiple victims. But, be warned, there are occasional bouts of intense domestic violence.

You might wonder whether this bestseller will be a movie, and apparently it will. DreamWorks has it in pre-production with Tate Taylor (The Help) to direct. Emily Blunt has been cast in the title role of Rachel. In the book she’s described as pudgy and somewhat homely. I guess Hollywood (UK office?) thought that was a bad idea. I doubt if the svelte Ms. Blunt will be donning a fat-suit or actually putting on weight for this role. Perhaps a touch less makeup, dear? [Update: The movie has been released.]

As I say, this is a big book, and what probably won’t make it to script or screen are Rachel’s agonizing internal monologues.

But what you will see, I can predict, is every one of those wife-battering fights.

Even more titillating to movie audiences than a good wartime firefight with semiautomatic weapons is to see some sweaty guy slapping his hot babe around.

  When no one else seems to care, Evan Wycliff wants to know why his friend died. Behind the sleepy life of a farm town in Southern Missouri, century-old plots and schemes play out.   Intrigue on the white sands of the Indian Ocean. A lonely widower makes the difficult transition from passive-observer tourist to committed resident.

Thinking About Thinking #32 – A Spool of Blue Thread – Can a house be the main character?

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There’s a saying in show business: Give them a new story that’s stood the test of time. Anne Tyler, who is possibly America’s most revered living novelist, has done just that. She’s presented us with a new, fictional extended family with all their foibles and melodrama, and placed them in the setting we know well from so many of her books – in the community of Roland Park in North Baltimore and in a hand-crafted old home with varnished hardwood floors, meticulously hung pocket doors, and vaulted ceilings. The Whitshanks are a quirky, close-knit family of builders, craftsmen, and nurturers. And this house is their pride and joy. Its stately endurance through a family saga of three generations lends a sense of timelessness – but Tyler’s story is all about the passage of time and the influences our short lives have on each other.

Another time-honored Hollywood maxim: The main character grows stronger as his villain opponent becomes meaner and stronger. To her credit, Tyler not only ignores this rule, she defies it. This story has no single main character – unless it’s the house. And, as in all of her books, there are no vicious opponents. The engines of conflict whir almost entirely within the family. Adversaries that seem the most obnoxious, inconsiderate, and spiteful ultimately show us their redeeming qualities.

In every Anne Tyler novel there’s a conspicuous bad boy. In A Spool of Blue Thread, Denny shows up on the first page. And throughout the story, he’s obnoxious, inconsiderate, and spiteful. And he’s the one his saintly mom loves best, and eventually, we do, too.

Authors, your Hollywood agent or your book editor will tell you to raise the stakes to life and death. The dreary result is on-screen violence – shootouts, and fiery crashes, and bloody mayhem. But Anne Tyler quietly and bravely won’t go there. She gives us a no-fault auto accident and a sibling quarrel that ends with punch in the nose.

So how does Tyler do it? How by defying the rules does she engage us? Her narrative slows down to the pace of daily life. She gives us none of her own opinions, but a stream of meticulous detail about meals, clothes, woodwork, plants, weather, money problems, idle thoughts, and petty grievances. And in focusing the marvels of the mundane, she helps us appreciate the joys of living our own ordinary and wonder-filled lives.

  When no one else seems to care, Evan Wycliff wants to know why his friend died. Behind the sleepy life of a farm town in Southern Missouri, century-old plots and schemes play out.   Intrigue on the white sands of the Indian Ocean. A lonely widower makes the difficult transition from passive-observer tourist to committed resident.

Thinking About Thinking #31 – The Professor of Desire – Male-centered fiction – So yesterday?

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Philip Roth is best known for his classic boychik lit coming-of-age story, Portnoy’s Complaint. Remember boychik is Yiddish for a young man with more chutzpah than brains. And, all of Roth’s novels since then seem to be about self-centered males who are thinly disguised extensions of his own fragile ego.

The Professor of Desire is the first-person confession of David Kepesh, an English professor like Roth himself, who obsesses, not about finding love so much as gratifying his urges without feeling too guilty.

We meet him as overprotected young man working in his family’s business. When he wins a scholarship to attend university in London, he has his first adult relationships with a pair of Swedish girls, Elisabeth and Birgitta. Ideal as the situation might seem for a man of his age and lusts, he’s miserable. Elisabeth moves out because he’s inconsiderate. Birgitta stays and is more than willing to please, but her eagerness turns him off.

Flash forward, and David falls for gorgeous supermodel Helen, who led a shadowy past life in Southeast Asia. Ignoring the fact that she must have left her heart there, he worships her, and they marry. One day, she leaves him abruptly for Singapore to take up with her former lover. And not so much because of anything David did or didn’t do, but because she simply doesn’t care enough about him.

Now entering his forties, David takes up with Claire, a sweet shiksa from New England, a caring, sensible woman, and the relationship is too good to be true. Just when David is beginning to suspect he can’t go the distance, his widowed father shows up all excited that his son will finally make a happy marriage.

We don’t get to find out. That’s where the book ends. The Professor of Desire was published in 1977, about the time activists like Germaine Greer and Gloria Steinem were redefining feminism. They were mostly successful inspiring a new generation of young women. But Roth seems to be stumbling around, muttering to himself about what it means to be a man. He really doesn’t have a clue.

I didn’t have a chance to include this comment in my radio podcast review, but revisiting this book decades later doesn’t bring any surprises about gender roles in today’s society. But what is striking is the ageism that becomes apparent in Roth’s work. At the end of the novel, David is about forty and his father is past sixty. Roth describes the older man as doddering, forgetful, and foolish. And David’s second-worst fear, after doubting his own worthiness as a companion for Claire, is that his father will die soon. If this book were written today, the portrait of the father would not be credible unless the man were in his eighties. Even then, many mature readers whose minds are still sharp would find the caricature of the senile dad distasteful.

  When no one else seems to care, Evan Wycliff wants to know why his friend died. Behind the sleepy life of a farm town in Southern Missouri, century-old plots and schemes play out.   Intrigue on the white sands of the Indian Ocean. A lonely widower makes the difficult transition from passive-observer tourist to committed resident.