Category Archives: Books

Blitz

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London’s Blitz

England in 1940 was a tumultuous time. The country was at war with Nazi Germany. France soon fell, followed by Britian’s retreat to the sea at Dunkirk. The Battle of Britain raged all summer, in the skies above. By the fall of 1940 the Nazis had given up trying to defeat the RAF and turned their ire on London, launching a campaign of terror bombing on the city that was known as the Blitz.

I have always been fascinated with this time period. This fascination has extended beyond youthful enthusiasm with roaring Spitfires dogfighting overhead. Even the nasty business of war that was the Blitz held my interest. Enough so, that I managed to plow through the 1,000 pages plus (each), Connie Willis time-traveling two volume set on the subject (Blackout and All Clear).

Her way too long novel portrayed the people’s suffering but also extolled their virtue. For the British people, this time of standing together, standing alone, really was their finest hour. In the movie Blitz, writer and director Steve McQueen (Academy award winning 12 Years a Slave) captures this sentiment, pays homage to these virtues, but then layers-on upon them the sin of racism. This story centers on Rita Hanway (Saoirse Ronan), a young London munitions worker and her nine-year-old biracial son, George (Elliott Heffernan). Because of the bombings, to protect her son, like a million other Londoners she puts her child on a train for the relative safety of the countryside. Things do not go well.

Immediately, George decides that he will have nothing to do with his evacuation. He quickly jumps from the train and begins making his way back home. His travels and travails makeup the heart of the movie, as he soon finds himself in one situation, only to fall into a worse one next. There are terrifying moments along this trip. Through this Odessey we see that Blitz is really George’s story. It is through his experience that we witness the racism that is central to this story.

In Blitz, Ms. Ronan returns to the same time period where her breakout role as Briony, in the movie Atonement was set. At age 13 she plays an even younger girl who witnesses sex between an adult relative and her male guest. Either she misinterprets what she saw, or her underage jealousy motivated her to send an innocent man, first to prison and then due to the extremities of war, eventually his death. Seventeen years later, in Blitz she plays the mother of a child who war thrusts into an untenable position. As an actress she has come a long way and by returning to 1940 she might snag yet another Oscar there again. On Apple TV.

Green Eggs and Ham

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Green Eggs and Ham

I learned to read in the 1950s. Back then I was not a good reader and required extra help from a tutor, just to get started. I am sure that some of my problems started with the choices others made in curriculum. Certainly, at the time the Dick and Jane books were the most popular among educators. Like most of my classmates, I found these books totally boring, but even they were better than the alternative, the McGuffey Readers. These 19th-century textbooks were archaic long before me, and I hated them even more.

About this time, a little late for me, because I had already begun to read, a new author arrived on the scene, Dr. Seuss. Its rhymes and graphics were both captivating. First challenged by his publisher to create a book for children, Dr. Seuss wrote The Cat in a Hat. Part of this challenge was a stipulation that all of the book’s vocabulary be chosen only from a list of educators approved words. Seuss soon became frustrated with this list and finally decided to choose the first two rhyming words on the list, cat and hat and the rest is history. The Cat in a Hat has a vocabulary of about 300 words. Trying to press the good doctor even further, his publisher asked him if he could write a book with a vocabulary of only 50 words. That is how we got Green Eggs and Ham.

When we went to go vote last month, we stopped to sit on a bench. There was a little free library nearby. There Anne found this book and many thanks to her for reading it aloud and for allowing me to film her doing it.

Bad Monkey

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Key West Chickens

Carl Hiaasen, a reporter turned writer is all about South Florida. He used to write for the Miami Hearld, before he turned to writing books. His bound works can be loosely divided into two categories, young adult fiction and crime stories. All set in Florida. In the first category, Hoot, a story about burrowing owls and the ecologetic fight to save them has already been made into a movie. In the second category, Bad Monkey appears to be the first of these works to be getting the Hollywood treatment. While not actually having read either of these stories, I have had them both read to me via books on tape, all the while driving on cross country road trips. For Bad Monkey we were even going to Key West where that novel is set. In the early days of post-retirement road trips, we would often choose an audiobook to listen to that was set in the locale of our destination. Now we have satellite radio and just blast tunes as we trundle on down the road. Here is a link to the raving New York Times review of this book.

Bad Monkey is scheduled to begin streaming on Apple TV in August. It will star Vince Vaughn as Andrew Yancy the Key West detective who has been demoted to food inspector. I have high hopes for this series, because this show is being created by Bill Lawerence of Ted Lasso fame. Hiaasen has already written a slew of Yancy detective stories, making the possibility for multiple seasons.

Category 7

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Johnny, Susie J Lee, 2013

Johnny, an oil worker in the fracking fields of North Dakota, was asked to sit quietly for a video portrait, a portion of which is seen here. Sitting for thirty minutes, the video can be uncomfortable to watch, but once the awkwardness has passed, the image creates an awareness of a shared humanity.

Our trip to the Gulf, with its attendant oil and gas industry was eye opening. Its breath of scale was more than I had been prepared for. Oil has always been king in Texas, but fracking has renewed its reign. On our drives to and fro along the Gulf, I was a gaga over the size of this industry. Mile after mile, for hundreds of miles, the pancake flat landscape was punctuated with oil derricks, pumping stations, and the fiery towers of flaring refineries. No global warming here. No climate change to worry about either. Nothing to see here. Just move along down the road. Who cares if it turns eighty degrees in February?

One of the forecasted results of climate change are storms of increased severity. Currently, the Saffir-Simpson scale for measuring the intensity of hurricanes only goes up to five. Any storm with winds over 252 Kph is a class 5 hurricane. Some storms with significantly stronger windspeeds have been informally classified as six. In the future though stronger storms may broach category 7.

Thirty years ago, science fiction writer John Barnes hypothesized such storms in his novel Mother of Storms. In this book an environmental catastrophe unleased rapid global warming. Huge storms were precipitated. Storms powerful enough to scour Florida clean. We are not there yet, but we are headed in that direction.

A Man Called Otto

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Married my father-in-law.

A Man Called Otto has dropped on Netflix. This is the Americanized film version of the Swedish novel, A Man Called Ove. I suggested to Harry that we watch the movie together, but he informed me that he had already seen it and did not like it. It was “too perfect,” whatever that means. I was surprised by that comment, because when Ove first hit the scene, I immediately thought of Harry and like everyone else in the family, he loved the book. Maybe he saw some of himself in Ove, maybe not. In truth, I am older than Ove, making Harry way too old to conflate him with Ove. In Otto, an even younger than me Tom Hanks plays the title character, assisted by his son as the young Otto in flashbacks. The movie’s reviews have been tepid, but I still blubbered through its ending.