A Man Called Intrepid

I just finished reading William Stevenson’s A Man Called Intrepid. Published originally in 1976, this is a gripping account of the World War II service of British spy-master William Stephenson. (In spite of the similarity of their names, the two men are not related.) The Allies clearly out-spied the Germans during the war, and this was in no small part due to Stephenson, whose code name was “Intrepid.” (The Soviets may well have out-spied their own Allies, but that is another story.)

There are a couple of passages which particularly caught my attention, both from Intrepid himself. First, on the necessity of spying:

The weapons of secrecy have no place in an ideal world. But we live in a world of undeclared hostilities in which such weapons are constantly used against us and could, unless countered, leave us unprepared again, this time for an onslaught of magnitude that staggers the imagination. And while it may seem unnecessary to stress so obvious a point, the weapons of secrecy are rendered ineffective if we remove the secrecy. One of the conditions of democracy is freedom of information. It would be infinitely preferable to know exactly how our intelligence agencies function, and why, and where. But this information, once made public, disarms us. (p. xv)

Stephenson made this argument during the Cold War, when the threat of nuclear war seemed ever present — hence the reference to “an onslaught of magnitude that staggers the imagination.” But the end of the Cold War — (it did end, didn’t it?) — has not brought an end to the threat of terrible onslaught, as the events of September 11, 2001 made so very clear. In some ways, the threat is worse. The beautiful thing about the Soviets was that they did not want to die, and thus could be blackmailed into peace. But Islamic terrorists desire death, and want to take you with them.

Not all Muslims are terrorists, of course; but a distressing number are, and it does not take many to cause great evil. (Nineteen, I think, was the number.) There are too many today who want to pretend that there is no threat, that claims to the contrary were merely a pretense by an evangelical president to settle old political scores and spy on his own people. Another passage from Intrepid is, I think, applicable to this sort of nonsense:

The easy way out is to pretend there are no crises. That’s the way to win elections. That’s the way we stumbled into war in the first place — there were too many men in power who preferred to see no threat to freedom because to admit to such a threat implies a willingness to accept sacrifice to combat it. There’s a considerable difference between being high-minded and soft-headed. (p. 466)

For all of its political appeal, we cannot afford soft-headedness in the Long War we find ourselves now in.

Garden of Beasts

I just finished re-reading Jeffery Deaver’s novel, Garden of Beasts, set in 1936 Berlin, as the Germans are preparing to host the Olympic Games. Deaver tells a riveting story, featuring two very compelling characters.

One is Paul Schumann, the main character. Schumann is an American hit man (“button man”), who is arrested and given a chance at redemption. If he will go to Berlin and assassinate Reinhard Ernst, the man in charge of re-arming Germany, then his past will be forgiven. Schumann is a surprisingly moral hit man who adheres to a code; he kills only the guilty. He is good at his job and hard to catch; think Jason Bourne vs. the Nazis.

No less compelling is Willi Kohl, a quick-witted and humane German policeman charged with finding Schumann. (If Schumann is Bourne-like, then Kohl is a German version of Chief Inspective Foyle.) Kohl’s humanity is clearly on display as he and his young assistant, Konrad Janssen, are called upon to investigate a murder. Janssen makes the mistake of complaining about exerting so much “effort for a fat dead man.” This earns a reprimand from his boss. The victim was not just a “fat middle-aged man,” Kohl tells him, he was also “somebody’s son.” Kohl continues:

And perhaps he was somebody's brother. And maybe somebody’s husband or lover. And, if he was lucky, he was a father of sons and daughters. I would hope too that there are past lovers who think of him occasionally. And in his future other lovers might have awaited. And three or four more children he could have brought into the world. So, Janssen, when you look at the incident in this way we don’t have merely a curious mystery about a stocky dead man. We have a tragedy like a spiderweb reaching many different lives and many different places, extending for years and years. How sad that is … Do you see why our job is so important? (pp. 122-123, paperback version)

Kohl is not the only good German in the book. Another, heartsick at what the Nazis were doing to her country, mourns:

I don’t understand what has happened. We ware a people who love music and talk and who rejoice in sewing the perfect stitch in our men’s shirts and scrubbing our alley cobblestones clean and basking in the sun on the beach at Wannsee and buying our children clothing and sweets, we’re moved to tears by the ‘Moonlight’ Sonata, by the words of Goethe and Schiller — yet we are possessed now. Why? (p. 291)

Garden of Beasts is both a gripping page-turner and a brooding meditation on the subject of good versus evil.

Piece of Cake

I recently watched Piece of Cake again, a British-made miniseries about the Battle of Britain. I originally watched it several years ago while I was in high school, when it played on PBS’s Masterpiece Theater. I enjoyed it then, and enjoyed it again.

The six-part series details the service of the fictional Hornet Squadron during the first year of World War II. The pilots — Churchill’s fabled “few” — find themselves in a near impossible battle for survival.

The series is based on a novel of the same title by Derek Robinson, which I also read — several years after watching the series the first time, but several years before watching it the second time. These gaps of time are sufficient to make it hard to compare the two works, though I do remember there being significant differences between book and movie concerning my favorite character, the American pilot Chris Hart.

Without giving too much away, the title is ironic. Stopping the Luftwaffe was anything but a piece of cake.

The Teammates

At my brother’s suggestion, I recently read The Teammates by David Halbertstam, a book about the remarkable friendship between four ballplayers, Johnny Pesky, Dominic DiMaggio, Bobby Doerr, and Ted Williams.

Halberstam was not your typical sportswriter. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting during the Vietnam War, and published a famous book about Vietnam entitled The Best and the Brightest, which I probably ought to read. Tragically, Halberstam was killed in a car wreck in April, 2007.

Luke has already blogged about the book, so I won’t cover the ground that he did. But there are a couple or three other things which also stood out to me. One was the fact that Williams — who is one of two finalists for the distinction of Greatest Hitter Of All Time, with Babe Ruth being the other — was a quarter Latino; his mother was half Mexican.

Williams and Joe DiMaggio are the two great icons of 1940s era baseball (though I think I would take the amazingly classy Stan Musial over either of them; but that is another story). Dom DiMaggio had the unique distinction of being the brother of one of these icons and a very close friend of the other. No slouch of a baseball player himself (a .298 career hitter who played a magnificent center field), Dom had a more successful life than either Joe or Ted, according to Halberstam. He quotes Dick Flavin, who observed, “I think both Ted and Joe were aware of it, how well he had dealt with his life, and what a complete life it had been, and Ted to his credit admired him for it, and Joe, I am afraid, resented him for it.” (p. 22)

The Sox met St. Louis in the 1946 World Series. The climactic Game Seven was tied 3-3 going into the eighth inning, the Cardinals’ half of the inning. With two outs, Harry Walker was up, trying to advance his teammate Enos “Country” Slaughter, who was at first. Walker hit a bloop to left-center, which the official scorers recorded as a double, even though Walker himself admitted it was a “dying seagull.” Slaughter, who had broken for second with the pitch, managed to come all the way around to score what would prove to be both the game-winning and series-winning run.

Sportswriters would blame the run upon Pesky, the Sox shortstop, who, they felt, hesitated before throwing an errant relay throw home. More at fault than Pesky, however, was back-up centerfielder Leon Culberson. Culberson was filling in for Dom, who had injured himself earlier in the game, and failed to position himself appropriately for Walker, who had a penchant for punching the ball to left-center. Making matters worse, Culberson approached the ball tentatively and then made a throw to Pesky that was both soft and low. A third Sox player, hurler Bob Klinger, also deserves a measure of blame for the play, because he neglected to hold Country Slaughter at first in the first place.

Perhaps the play was caused not so much by what the Sox did wrong, but by what Slaughter did right. It was Slaughter who had broken with the pitch; it was Slaughter who had blown through the stop sign that his third base coach had thrown up. Marine general Archie Vandegrift, hero of Guadalcanal, once noted, “God favors the bold and the strong of heart.”

But in the hands of sportswriters, all of the blame fell upon Pesky. Rather than giving up Culberson — the most culpable Sox player — Pesky simply shouldered all of the blame himself. “By the time I turned and picked up Slaughter, he was virtually home,” he finally admitted in 2002, fifty-six years after the play, and several years after Culberson’s death. “They decided to make me the goat afterwards, and I decided I could take it — I could live with it. If they want to blame me, they can blame me. Because none of it changes what happened on the field.” (pp. 157-158)

How refreshing to those of us who live in an era where accepting personal responsibility is the exception, not the norm.

Sixty-Four Thousand Words

On Wednesday I wrapped up the rough draft of my dissertation, the working title of which is “Quick On His Feet, And Even Quicker In His Brain”: Lightning Joe Collins at War. Collins served as the commander of the 25th Infantry Division in Guadalcanal, before shifting to the European Theater and heading up VII Corps. He was the commander at Utah Beach, captured Cherbourg, and later busted the Allies out of Normandy.

Dr. Sutherland, my advisor at the University of Arkansas, has informed me that major revisions will not be needed. There are a few revisions I want to make, but hopefully it won’t be very long before I am ready to defend.

For what it’s worth, the rough draft was 64,004 words long, and 311,230 characters (not counting spaces).

As of November 7
Written: 196 pages; 10 chapters
To Go: 0 pages; 0 chapters

Unmet Goals

It was about the spring of 2004 that I began research for my dissertation. But work progressed very slowly, so slowly in fact that by the first of July I had only about 63 pages written. But suddenly I was spurred on and, however, and in the subsequent four months I have almost tripled that total.

Back in early August, after about five weeks of my suddenly frenetic pace, it occurred to me that I had a chance to finish the rough draft by Halloween. That was my goal.

Today is Halloween, and frankly, I have failed to meet that goal. My rough draft manuscript stands at 180 pages (with roughly 20 to go); eight of the ten chapters are written.

In spite of not meeting my goal, I am anything but depressed. Giddy would be a better description. I should be able to wrap up the rough draft by Thanksgiving. If you would have suggested to me that this was possible back at the beginning of July, I would have thought it was too good to be true.

There is something to be said for almost meeting lofty goals.

As of October 31
Written: 180 pages; 8 chapters
To Go: 20 pages; 2 chapters

Dissertation-o-Meter

Obviously I have not been blogging for the past few months. During this time I have (finally!) been making progress on writing my dissertation, a biographical study of the World War II career of Lightning Joe Collins, who commanded the 25th Division at Guadalcanal before commanding the VII Corps in Europe.

Though I realize this is a bit irrational, I am not real comfortable blogging while I am trying to wrap up my dissertation manuscript, as if my writing output is a zero-sum gain and blogging will delay completion of the dissertation.

My goal now is to complete the rough draft by Christmas. (Perhaps then I will blog again.) After the rough draft is finished, I will have to make some revisions, of course, but hopefully I will be able to walk and receive my diploma in May.

As of October 14
Written: 157 pages; 7 chapters
To Go: 43 pages; 3 chapters

As of September 25
Written: 144 pages; 7 chapters
To Go: 56 pages; 3 chapters

As of September 10
Written: 140 pages; 6 chapters
To Go: 60 pages; 4 chapters

As of August 21
Written: 124 pages; 5 chapters
To Go: 76 pages; 5 chapters

As of August 5
Written: 103 pages; 4 chapters
To Go: 97 pages; 6 chapters

As of July 20
Written: 82 pages; 4 chapters
To Go: 118 pages; 6 chapters

Superhuman Speed

One of my former students at the University of Arkansas, Tyson Gay, is currently the fastest man in the world in 2007. He recently ran the 100-meter dash in 9.84 seconds into a headwind.

Not only is this the fastest time in the 100-meter dash by anyone in the world this year, it ranks as the second-fastest time ever run into a headwind. The fastest time ever run into a headwind was by Maurice Green in 2001 when he ran a 9.82 into a headwind of 0.45 mph. Tyson ran his into a wind of 1.12 mph.

Tyson took my Western Civ II class in the spring of 2005. I gave the class the assignment of reading the novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, in order to illustrate the Romantic time period. One of the interesting aspects of the novel is the way that Shelley actually portrays her monster, in contrast to the way the monster is perceived in popular culture. In our class discussion we talked about the monster’s characteristics. Tyson raised his hand; the thing which stuck out in his mind, naturally enough, was how fast the monster was:

“As I said this, I suddenly beheld the figure of a man, at some distance, advancing towards me with superhuman speed. He bounded over the crevices in the ice, among which I had walked with caution; …” (Frankenstein, Chapter 10)

Tyson Gay knows a thing or two about speed himself.

Replacements for Jesus

In the novel Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor, there is a street preacher named Hazel Motes who preaches the “Church Without Christ” and speaks of the need for a “new jesus”:

“What you need is something to take the place of Jesus, something that would speak plain. The Church Without Christ don’t have a Jesus but it needs one! It needs a new jesus! It needs one that’s all man, without blood to waste, and it needs one that don’t look like any other man so you’ll look at him. Give me such a jesus, you people. Give me such a new jesus and you’ll see how far the Church Without Christ can go!” (p. 80)

A follower of Hazel’s named Enoch takes it upon himself to bring a “new jesus” to Hazel. The new messiah? A shrunken, 3-foot-long embalmed corpse, of a “dried yellow color.” (p. 56) Needless to say, the Church Without Christ did not go far.

Oh, but don't we like to try and find replacements for Christ? Don’t we place our trust in stock portfolios and IRAs? Don't we give our time to reality television, or shaving a couple of strokes off our golf games? Don't we seek happiness in buying more knick-knacks and baubles for our already cluttered houses?

And some of the things we try to replace Christ with are even worse, things such as drunkenness and carousing, porn and illicit sex—the very sorts of things which Paul warns in Galatians 6.21 will keep a person from inheriting the kingdom of God.

Whether a thing is wicked in its own right (porn) or merely neutral (shopping), when we turn to it in place of Christ, it becomes just as ugly and dead as the shrunken corpse which Enoch brought to Hazel. God said, of Jesus, “This is my beloved Son… hear ye him.” (Matt. 17.5)

Used Book Store

Several months ago I went through a self-righteous anti-materialistic phase, the main feature of which was getting rid of about a third of my books. Most of the books I don’t miss. But one of the books I divested myself of was Clark Emery’s The World of Dylan Thomas, given to me by my kid sister on my 23rd birthday, when she was a precocious 17. I discovered that I missed the book, not so much for its scholarly merit, but because of its sentimental value.

Yesterday I went to the used book store on Dickson Street where I had sold the book, and there it was, with my name still written inside. The price was $7.50, and I bought it back. I don’t know how much credit I was given for the book when I sold it to the store, but I’m sure that I suffered a net loss of three or four dollars.

Would that all mistakes were undone so cheaply.

Climbing Out of the Pit

I just finished re-reading an Ellis Peters novel, Fallen Into The Pit. The novel is set in post-World War II England and concerns three murders which take place in the normally sleepy village of Comerford. The solution to the mystery is mostly worked out by the police sergeant's son Dominic Felse, who, frankly, is unconvincingly omniscient for a 13-year-old boy. What I found more compelling than the mystery itself was the way in which Peters (actually Edith Pargeter was her real name) deals with the tough adjustment that World War II vets must have experienced coming home. A few passages to this effect:

“The war ended, and the young men came home, and tried indignantly to fit themselves into old clothes and old habits which proved, on examination, to be both a little threadbare, and on trial to be both cripplingly small for bodies and minds mysteriously grown in absence.” (p. 3)

“…some came haunted by the things their own hand had done and their own bodies endured, growths from which no manner of amputation could divide them, ghosts for which Comerford had no room. They had been where even those nearest to them could not follow, and daily they withdrew there again from the compression and safety of lathe and field and farm, until the adjustment to sanity took place painfully at last, and the compression ceased to bound them, and was felt to be wider than the mad waste in the memory.” (p. 6)

“In time of war countries fall over themselves to make commandos and guerrillas of their young men, self-reliant killers who can slit a throat and live off a hostile countryside as simply as they once caught the morning bus to their various blameless jobs. But to reconvert these formidable creations afterwards is quite another matter. Nobody ever gave much thought to that, nobody ever does until their recoil hits the very system which made and made use of them. Men who have learned to kill as a solution for otherwise insoluble problems in wartime may the more readily revert to it as a solution for other problems as desperate in other conditions. And logically … who has the least right to judge them for it? Surely the system which taught them the art and ethics of murder to save itself has no right at all. The obvious answer would be: ‘Come on in the dock with us!’”(p. 195)

The most tortured of all of Comerford's returning veterans is Chad Wedderburn, whose service with the Yugoslavian rebels is the stuff of village legend. Chad, who is Dominic's school teacher, is very much in love with Io Hart, the daughter of Comerford's widowed tavern owner; Io “could manage the whole diverse flow of customers year in and year out without disarranging a curl of her warm brown hair, and make her father, into the bargain, do whatever she wanted. When she knew what she wanted, which wasn't always.” (p. 48)

But Chad thinks himself too flawed ever to marry Io; “He had suffered, whether by his own fault or the mismanagement of others, injuries to his nature which unfitted him for loving or being loved by an innocent like Io…” (p. 277) Dominic, (too) wise beyond his years, senses Chad’s self-loathing and wonders, “Was it really possible to feel yourself maimed for life, merely because you had been pushed into killing other people in a war in order to stay alive yourself? In a war, when most people thought themselves absolved for everything? But the fellow who goes the opposite way from everyone else isn't necessarily wrong.” (p. 258)

A moment of emergency forces Chad to ask Io for her counsel, and this clears the mist between them. “She did not stop to argue, but did exactly as he asked her; she had been ready to do exactly as he asked her for quite a long time, and the real trouble had been that he had never asked her.” (p. 285) At the end of the novel, the two make a quiet trip to the registry office to become man and wife. We are left to reflect that, in spite of Chad's past and self doubts, really because of them, he was in the end most fitted for loving and being loved by an innocent like Io.

I have often been drawn to fictional characters like Chad Wedderburn, men who are admired by everybody but themselves. Other examples in this motif are the whisky priest in Power and the Glory, the savage in Brave New World, and, above all, Prince Hamlet. If Peters had been a Graham Greene or an Aldous Huxley or a Will Shakespeare, she would have given Chad Wedderburn no relief short of the grave. But instead she took compassion on Chad—and, I suppose, on her readers—and showed instead how the World War II vets actually dealt with their trauma. Having seen enough of hatred, they found wives to love; having seen enough of death, they brought children into the world.

Lost Among The Angels

Alice Duncan, Lost Among The Angels (2006).

I just finished a perky little detective story by Alice Duncan, entitled Lost Among The Angels. It is set in 1920s Los Angeles and details the adventures of the young Mercedes Louise Allcutt. Mercy (as she would rather be called) is all of 21 and has just come west to live with her sister and brother-in-law, after growing up very rich and even more sheltered in Boston. Mercy finds life in L.A. to be a major adjustment, as for instance when her sister insists that she bobs her hair.

“Mother and Father would disown me if I had my hair bobbed,” I said.

“Mother and Father aren’t here.”

Even as she stated the obvious, my heart soared. I told it to stop doing that. Such behavior on its part was extremely unfilial and in very bad taste.

Mercy decides to find employment, not because she needs money, but because she wants to mingle with people in order that she might find grist for the novels she yearns to write. She goes to work for Ernie Templeton, a detective who is as worldly wise as Mercy is naive. They quickly develop strong feelings for one another, a fact which Mercy is reluctant to admit to herself. At one point in the story, after she has just survived a harrowing moment of danger, Ernie affectionately embraces her. Mercy provides narration:

Personally, I didn’t mind the embrace. It showed proper managerial anxiety over the welfare of a person in his employ.

Mercy’s continual incredulity at the modern world around her, coupled with her surprising effectiveness in spite of her naivete, makes this a very fun book. Hopefully it is just the first installment in a very long series.

The Last Days of Summer

Steve Kluger, Last Days of Summer (1998)

This touching novel is set in New York in the early 1940s and tells of the friendship between Joey, a brilliant Jewish kid who is picked on because of his religion, and Charlie, the not-so-dumb third baseman for the New York Giants. I found the ending to be predictable, even inevitable, but it still brought tears to my eyes.

One interesting feature of the novel is that Kluger does not rely upon normal narrative to tell his story, but instead relates it using letters, telegrams and newspaper articles. The book reads very quickly; I devoured its 353 pages in one sitting.

Of these 353, I particularly liked page seven, because it contained the following cool words:

rotogravure - a type of printing system using a rotary press, or something printed with such a system

hartebeest - a type of large antelope native to Africa

hop-o’-my-thumb - the name of a little boy in a folk tale

The language is rough at times, but still the story is beautiful. I recommend it to anyone who believes in baseball, or heroes.

Arbeit macht frei

Elie Wiesel, Night (new translation, 2006)

Perhaps Elie Wiesel is the poet laureate of holocaust survivors. Night is, by his own admission, his most important work. To say the book is powerful is understatement.

The book is Wiesel's memoir of the holocaust, during which he was just a teenage boy. He wrote this book in Yiddish. His wife Marian — “who knows my voice and how to transmit it better than anyone else” (p. xiii) —has recently retranslated it. He uses a very simple and eloquent writing style; the beauty of his prose and the ugliness of his story are perfectly juxtaposed.

Wiesel means to haunt you, and he succeeds. He writes of a tramp in town, dismissed as a madman, who accurately warned of what was to come; of a hysterical lady in the cattle car, dismissed as a madwoman, who had premonitions of all-consuming flames; of his last glimpse of his mother and sister, as they were herded to their deaths at Birkenau the first night; of the sign over the gate at Auschwitz, Arbeit macht frei (“Work makes you free”); of his silence, even relief, the night his father was beaten to death in Buchenwald.



Wiesel felt called to write this memoir in order to make people remember what happened. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. The volume closes with his acceptance speech, in which he spoke of the sinfulness of remaining aloof:

“We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must — at that moment — become the center of the universe.” (p. 118-119)

“As long as one dissident is in prison, our freedom will not be true. As long as one child is hungry, our life will be filled with anguish and shame. What all these victims need above all is to know when their voices are stifled we shall lend them ours, that while their freedom depends on ours, the quality of our freedom depends on theirs.” (p. 120)

In one sense, work did make Wiesel free. Because he was given work as a laborer, the Germans never got around to murdering him. The day came when an American tank rattled its way to the gates of Buchenwald, and he was finally free.

But not really free. Not free from the memories. Not free from the sorrow. Not free from the duty of making the world remember.

Justice is a terrible thing...

Dorothy Sayers and Jill Paton Walsh, Thrones, Dominations (1998)

I have lately been in a reading mood. After reading three novels I was less than impressed with — The Company of Strangers by Robert Wilson, And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie, The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown — I turned to this book. Sayers is one of my favorite authors (her Nine Tailors is marvelous) and I was not disappointed with Thrones, Dominations.

One interesting aspect to this novel is that Sayers left the work unfinished; Jill Paton Walsh completed it, and quite recently too (1998 was the publishing date). I could not tell where Sayers’ prose ended and Walsh’s began.

The novel concerns two deaths, the first an accidental killing because of a misunderstanding, the second a deliberate murder. The hero of the novel is the amateur detective Lord Peter Wimsey, who has recently married Harriet Vane. (The fact that Harriet is herself a mystery writer allows Sayers and Walsh to have some fun discussing the art of writing detective fiction.)

The best parts of the novel are the conversations between the two highly intelligent newlyweds. Sometimes the banter back and forth strains credibility, especially when Harriet mentions that away from Peter she is “just sitting in the centre, like the fixed foot of the compasses, and doing a little sublunary leaning and hearkening” — which (Peter realizes instantly) is an allusion to John Donne’s “Valediction Forbidding Mourning”. He replies with his own allusion to the same poem. (p. 168)

But even though the conversations between Peter and Harriet may be full of obscure references to John Donne and other esoteric allusions, the discussions are often touching. At one point, Harriet asks Peter if it is right to bring a child into the world. The times are perilous; Hitler has just remilitarized the Rhineland. Peter’s reply contains hope and vulnerability. “There’s what we can do for any child of ours,” he says, “and there's what no one can do for any child at all.” (p. 302)

At another point in the book Harriet and Peter discuss Peter’s detective work. Harriet assures him that she thinks it is a very “serious” and important undertaking. She also expects that it is tied to his war-time service (during the First World War) but can’t quite see the connection. “When you have seen people die,” he replies, “when you have seen at what abominable and appalling cost the peace and safety of England was secured, and then you see the peace squalidly broken, you see killing that has been perpetrated for vile and selfish motives...” Now she sees the connection and he adds: “Justice is a terrible thing, but injustice is worse.” (p. 131)

In a day when Al Qaeda terrorists crash people-laden planes into crowded buildings and Hezbollah terrorists fire rocket into Israel, this is something to remember. I enjoyed reading Thrones, Dominions.

Fridays with Red

Bob Edwards, Fridays with Red: A Radio Friendship (1993)

Every Friday morning for 12 years (from 1981 to 1992) National Public Radio’s Bob Edwards would speak with former Dodgers’ announcer Red Barber in a four-minute segment which quickly became the most popular segment of NPR’s Morning Edition. Not only would Barber talk about sports headlines of the day, he would also reminisce about his days as the announcer for the Reds, Dodgers (with whom he gained national prominence) and Yankees, and discuss just about anything that popped into his head — he was particularly fond of discussing his garden, his cats and the Psalms. After Barber's death in 1992, Edwards wrote this little book, memorializing their friendship.

For a brief taste of Barber’s perspective on life, consider this exchange in November 1991 after Florida State lost to Miami in football...

Bob: Are hearts still heavy in Tallahassee this week?
Red: Well, I’ll tell you something. I was around the Ohio State-Notre Dame game in 1935, and the Bobby Thomson home run, and the Mickey Owen dropped third strike and the Chicago Bears’ 73-0 win over the Redskins. And I saw the FSU-Miami one-point game, and you know what happened the next morning?
Bob: What?
Red: The sun rose right on time. (p. 131)

Though Edwards admits that Barber was not always easy to work with, the younger man (nicknamed “Colonel Bob” by Red) clearly idolized his elder. In a eulogy which Edwards prepared for NPR, he noted that Barber “taught us respect for the listener, respect for the language and respect for the truth.” (p. 219)

The book is a must-read for anyone interested in sports journalism. Edwards’ prose is fun to read (especially the humorous little digs he takes at fellow NPR announcers), but near the end it reaches a height of poignant eloquence. “Red Barber’s ashes now are part of the Florida soil,” he writes. “His body couldn't last, but there's not another thing about him that has to die.” (p. 231)