King Solomon's Mines

When H. Rider Haggard titled this book “King Solomon’s Mines” he could have easily called it “Allen Quartermain” one of three main characters in the story. Allen Quartermain was to have his own title of his own book but that was after he’d survived the adventure in this tale.

Almost like Ishmael in “Moby Dick” Quartermain was at loose ends when he was introduced to the other two characters in the story. He’d been a hunter of some note in Africa but becoming a bit tired of safari he nonetheless signed up for a trek that would almost be the end of him.

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The God Delusion

Richard Dawkins chose this title well for his discussion of what most people call “God.” He makes a clear distinction between the Deity that provides comfort to a person in need and the Supreme Being that is the result of belief in a creator responsible for the universe we inhabit.

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She

H. Rider Haggard knew Africa and he knew how to tell a story. She is set in Africa although it begins in London. A mysterious iron box contains something that must await the 25th birthday of a man (Leo) who has been given to the guardianship of one of the ugliest men in the world (Holly), a man so unattractive that a woman who attempted to have a relationship said of them “If I am beauty then who are you?” meaning that he was indeed the beast.

When Leo reaches his 25th year Holly and he set off to find out whether the mystery contained in the iron box was a fantasy, a hoax or a reality.

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The Yellow Lighted Bookshop

If you’ve ever wanted to delve into the reasons why people who work in bookstores do then this is the book for you.

Lewis Buzbee gives you trivia about the books that survived the destruction of the Great Library of Alexandria, how books came to be printed on paper, what all those symbols on the back of modern books mean and lots more as he recounts his journey from being a high school book lover to a sequester of knowledge about bookstores. He recounts the ins and outs of how a bookstore functions, why he was so enamored of working there and what the future holds for them.

Reading this book is enlightening, enthralling and depressing all at nearly the same time. You are enlightened about the history of books, enthralled at how easy it is today to acquire one that demands your time but depressed about how much more time people are spending on computer games, cell phones and electronic gizmos in general.

You finally put the book down and think about your own bibliophile tendencies. In the end you have to agree with Emily Dickinson who put it as succinctly as possible when she wrote: “There is no frigate like a book to take us lands away…”

The Fatal Shore

39 shillings. A paltry amount in today’s coinage but in the late 18th century it was enough to send you to the gallows if the crime you committed was judged to be worth more than that figure.

Because there were so many corpses dangling from gibbets around the English countryside juries became averse to sending more to the gallows and since the threshold for a gibbeting was 39 shillings juries started finding that the crime in question did not meet that fatal amount.

With fewer going to the gallows the result was that more had to be imprisoned in traditional cells. The problem was that nobody wanted to build more prisons. What to do? One enterprising bureaucrat suggested that the old hulks rotting on the Thames River would do to encapsulate the criminals. That the hulks had no sanitation, were leaking both river water and rainwater and were infested with rats made no difference to the authorities that were charged with finding somewhere to house the convicts.

In spite of the benevolence of the juries the hulks began to fill to the point where the only way to take up the ever increasing number of convicts was to push more and more into the same spaces. This overcrowding resulted in early deaths for some and the desire for an early death in others.

While the hulks were keeping the convicts out of sight of the nobility and landed gentry some in the government wondered about perhaps transporting the wretched refuse to the antipodes, which was what the land of Australia was considered. The Royal Navy was adamantly against using their ships for such duty. The economic squeeze of how to pay for the transportation and the social necessity of doing something meant that some way to justify the expense of transportation had to be found.

If the prisoners could be put to work harvesting the timber that was known to be in great quantity in Australia then selling that timber would offset the cost of transportation. As with many governmental justifications this was more a hope than a reality.

The first transport was partially successful. It removed a few hundred prisoners from the hulks. However, only half of them survived the trip from their decaying home on the Thames River.

When the arrived in Australia they immediately started to replicate the society they had been part of in England. If the aborigines got in their way they simply slaughtered them.

Flogging as well as hanging were two of the methods of maintaining civil order that were used extensively by the overseers of the transportees. Applying the cat-o-nine-tails until a back was nothing more than ribbons of flesh covering bloody ribs was as much a part of the transported felons' daily lives as was the endless slave labor they were thrust into.

Punishment and slave labor were the two standouts for the first fifty years of settlement in Australia. Cannibalism, sadistic cruelty and madness were also extant during the early years of Australian settlement.

John Hughes, an Australian, has written a very detailed account of the English judicial system, the social niceties of the time and the transportation process. Not a page turner but you will have a better understanding of what Australia is all about when you finish it.

Wild Blue

This book could have been titled “Dakota Queen” because that was the name that George McGovern applied to any B-24 he flew during WW2.

Stephen Ambrose wrote this book at McGovern’s insistence even though another writer had started it. The result was that Ambrose not only got intimate details from McGovern but also interviewed other members of his crew and other crews who flew with him in Italy.

The training of a pilot is presented in great detail from flying the simplest of aircraft to the most advanced four-engine type of WW2. McGovern was introduced to flying before he joined the Army, which was the way you got into the Army Air Corps in WW2. His initial civilian training in an Aeronca tandem stood him in good stead for his later experiences as a fledgling bomber pilot.

Ambrose shows how the war necessitated a rapid change in both aircraft construction and also in pilot training. Initially pilot training was rigorous and lengthy but as the war dragged on the time spent training pilots was lessened so that they could be sent to replace those men who had been either killed or captured. One sobering statistic was that the casualty rate for bomber crews was significantly higher than for any other branch of the armed services.

After his training in the United States was completed McGovern was sent to Italy to become a member of the 15th Air Force. Their job was to attack German targets from the south compared with the 8th Air Force’s job of attacking from the west. In both cases the flak and fighter attacks were devastating to the American effort.

Day after day with no letup except for the weather McGovern and his fellow pilots flew across the Alps to drop their bombs on rail yards, oil refineries and other strategic targets.

Periodically a bomb would hang up in the bomb rack of a plane necessitating the gunners to try to free it before the plane attempted a landing. On one mission McGovern had that happen to him after his plane had been damaged and was losing altitude. The gunners tried and tried to free the bomb but couldn’t. McGovern was extremely worried that they would have to bail out of the airplane since landing with a live bomb would be fatal. Finally the bomb was freed to fall toward a farm in Austria. McGovern was sickened because he knew as a farm boy that the people in that farm were probably eating lunch. As they watched the bomb fall and strike the farmhouse it exploded and blew the farmhouse and other buildings to pieces. McGovern carried that image in his mind for the rest of the war.

Sometime after the war McGovern was interviewed by an Austrian TV station and was asked about how he felt about bombing the people there. He said that it was necessary because of the inhumane things the Nazis were doing. He finally had to mention the incident of the hung bomb and destruction of the farmhouse, saying that he still carried that horrible image with him.

Sometime after the broadcast the farmer whose house had been bombed told the TV station that when they saw the bomber approach they immediately left the house so none of his family was hurt during the explosion. He added that if that event caused Hitler and his followers to be defeated even one minute sooner then he was happy to have had his house destroyed.

The TV station passed the news on to McGovern who said that he finally was able to remove that terrible image from his mind.

If you want to get a real sense of what B-24 bomber pilots and crews went through in WW2 this is the book to give it to you.

Public Enemies

Public Enemies details the depredation of the famous criminals during 1933-34. Without the activities of those criminals, particularly John Dillinger, the FBI would not have become the all-powerful national police force.

In the beginning J. Edgar Hoover was a minor official in the Justice Department. With a keen sense of how he could advance his position he picked the investigatory arm of the department to be his vehicle for advancement. The original investigators had no police power and didn’t carry weapons. When they were told by Hoover to go after a particular criminal they had to enlist the help of local law enforcement.

Hoover did not like the results that he saw from his operatives. From his headquarters in Washington, D.C. Hoover sent memoranda, notes and phone calls to various members of his investigatory team. They, in turn, were expected to keep Hoover informed of every turn of events in the case they were pursuing.

The critical event in the development of both Hoover and the FBI came when the Valentine’s Day massacre occurred. This was a golden opportunity for the national news coverage to be turned to his advantage. The only problem was that there were few leads and no suspects.

In the meantime, Dillinger was gearing up to become the notorious bank robber that history has recounted. Some of the other “yeggs” (a term that was used by the criminals to identify themselves) that were not as well known but almost as destructive to local banks were Machine Gun Kelly, Baby Face Nelson, the Karpis/Barker gang, and Pretty Boy Floyd.

With the use of the Thompson sub-machine gun by the criminals local law enforcement with their .38 caliber pistols and shotguns were outgunned. Hoover decided after much haranguing that his men would have to be armed as well. The only problem was that they had little training in the use of firearms and even after training they were incompetent in the use of the weapons.

As their stakeouts and shadowing’s continued the FBI men made some costly errors that resulted in innocent people being gunned down and yeggs escaping to maraud the countryside again.

One man who was getting a lot of publicity (much to Hoover’s dislike) was the man in charge of the Dillinger hunt, Melvin Purvis. Even though the newspapers thought Purvis was doing a great job the truth was that he was a sloppy and somewhat incompetent leader. If he had done all the things that the papers said he did Hoover would have been even more incensed at Purvis.

Hoover finally sent a somewhat nondescript man to be Purvis’ boss. Hoover didn’t bother to tell Purvis that he had a new boss and the relationship went on in a very murky fashion with men not knowing whether their orders were “official” or not.

The gunning down of two very petty gas station and grocery store robbers who lived in their car or camped in the rough: Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker sensationalized the hunt for the marauders of the Midwest.

Since the heat was on many of the yeggs lit out for less heated space, ending up in Reno Nevada and San Francisco.

Ultimately the call of the home territory brought the criminals back to the Midwest and ultimately to a very bloody end. Dillinger was betrayed by a girlfriend and killed near the Biograph Theater. The others died ignominious deaths from multiple gunshot wounds except for Alvin Karpis who was tried, convicted and sent to Alcatraz to spend many years for his crimes.

The book is a fascinating and thoroughly documented look at a short period in American history in which one of the most well known of Federal institutions got its start.