Murder at Fenway Park

Murder at Fenway Park
© 1994 Troy Soos
252 pages

1912, Boston. The Titanic is only a few weeks lost to the North Atlantic bottom, but Mickey Rawling's mind isn't on one of the biggest maritime disasters of history. No, he's just been inducted into the Major Leagues, hired to play with the Boston Red Sox, and his first night he's stumbled upon a man beaten so badly the victim's face no longer exists. And then Mickey threw up on it, just for good measure. Murder at Fenway Park is the story of a rookie ball player who turns amateur detective when he realizes the police intend on fingering him for the crime. While the cozy relationship between the Red Sox and the police might protect him during the baseball season, come fall he'll be left to his own devices.

The first in Trey Soos' baseball-murder mysteries,  Murder at Fenway takes readers through a violence summer, in which Rawlings rubs shoulders with baseball greats like Ty Cobb,  and does his best -- with the aide of a nickelodeon musician and a Socialist working on the garment factory-version of The Jungle --  to figure out who did it before either being arrested or beaten to a pulp by the original murderer.   The writing is sometimes unpolished, but the opening framing device -- an old man wandering through the Baseball Hall of Fame, feeling he and the sport have become long-distant strangers, then flashing back to the murder story on seeing the victim on a baseball card -- was well executed.  I suspect readers will find the setting more interesting than the mystery, considering how dramatic this era was in baseball. This was the decade that produce legends who gave their names to awards -- Cy Young, Ty Cobb -- although we're two years away from Babe Ruth stepping up to the plate. This is technically alt-history, considering that Soos kills off a player who -- in reality, died of a heart attack in 1959.

Murder at Fenway Park is by no means amazing literature, but it's enjoyable if you like early-20th century mysteries, or golden age baseball.

Rescue Warriors

Rescue Warriors: The U.S. Coast Guard, America's Forgotten Heroes
© 2009 David Helvarg
384 pages

When Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast in 2005, the Coast Guard was the first on the scene, with helicopters in the air saving lives long before FEMA stirred. Though one of the United States’ military branches, the Coast Guard is an unusual institution;  best-known for its high profile search and rescue missions. Far and away the smallest military branch – and the most physically and academically rigorous in terms of its recruiting requirements --  the Coast Guard’s mission takes it far beyond safe and shallow coastal waters.   Rescue Warriors provides both a history of and a tribute to this oft-overlooked service, mixing history of its various missions and interviews with men and women working overtime to preserve lives and keep the coasts safe.

Although the Coast Guard was officially organized in 1915, it prefers to trace its history back to the revenue cutters of George Washington’s administration, which enforced and collected customs and tariff fees.  Another parent organization was that of the lighthouse and lightship service. The present Coast Guard has maintained that duel-purpose organization, simultaneously enforcing maritime law and rescuing those in danger.  Its mission portfolio is vast: in Rescue Warriors,  Helvarg interviews search-and-rescue teams,  drug-enforcement patrols,  counter-terrorism missions, environmental cleanup crews, science stations, and even more.  Helvarg spent time with servicemen and officers from around the United States’ territorial waters: the Gulf Coast,  New England,  California, Alaska, Hawaii, and even (with Canadian ‘permission’) in the Artic northwest passage.  Despite its ‘coast’ guard name,  Coasties may be found throughout the world: their boarding teams are especially relied upon in the Persian Gulf,  boarding local boats (with consent) to ask about  pirate concerns – and fishing for information on parties hostile toward the governments of Iraq and the United States.  (If the Coast Guard being a military branch simultaneously providing law enforcement seems constitutionally questionable, that isn’t surprising given that Wilson presided over their formal creation:  he never met a constitutional curb he wouldn’t drive over.)

The demands placed on the Coast Guard only seem to be increasing: a global economy means more ships to monitor, and with the Artic now open for commercial traffic and industry,  there will be still more ground to cover. The Coast Guard is much smaller than even the closest other service, the US Marines, but the gulf between its responsibilities and resources has demanded a great deal of efficiency. The average age of a Coast Guard ship is thirty-five years, and its officers’ training vessel, the Eagle,  was built in 1936.   That’s resource conservation, though when a helicopter requires 40 hours of maintenance for every hour of flight time.... The reason for the Guard’s physical and mental demands becomes obvious in reading this:  they are operational every day, not simply training for the next big conflict, and they often go against nature at its hairiest – flying helicopters into punishing winds to seek out those in peril on the sea.  They’re also up against human nature: in the opening chapter on rescue operations in Hurricane Katrina,  the Guard’s Seahawk helicopters took ground fire from locals; another man threatened to shoot a helo crew if they didn’t rescue him, and when they dropped people off at a CG station, it was promptly looted –  though the ammunition locker refused to give up its contents.  At least against cartel gunmen, the Coast Guard  is authorized for “Airborne Use of Force”.

Rescue Warriors  makes for encouraging reading, filled with  tales of rescue, of men and women stretching themselves so that others might live.  Helvarg sees the Coast Guard’s historical legacy and current role as exemplary, highlighting the early employment of women in the lighthouse service, and urges that the Coast Guard be given more resources so that it might serve the United States’ expanding needs.   Ultimately, this is a fun read, a mix of history, present-day history stories, and a fair bit of editorializing by the author whenever there is an environmental connection.


Related:
The Heart and the Fist, Eric Greitens. The memoirs of a humanitarian-turned-Navy SEAL, another mix of service and force.

When Tigers Fight

When Tigers Fight: The Story of the Sino-Japanese War, 1937-1945
© 1989 Dick Wilson
269 pages

"We Japanese cannot win here. We are trying to plow the ocean."

Before plunging into the abyss of hubris and attempting to claim the entire Pacific as its own  in 1941, the Empire of Japan was hard at work attempting to enlarge itself at the expense of its 'elderly, doddering brother', China.  China was, in the 1930s, in a weak state: riddled with outside colonies and barely unified after a period of feudal civil war, its only defense against Japan's increasing aggression being sheer size and numbers.  After reviewing the early stages of Japanese intervention in China, which included taking over Germany's colonial interests and asserting its own after the Great War,  Wilson uses the Marco Polo Bridge incident as the start of the war and delivers a straightforward military history, concluding in the epilogue that the Sino-Japanese war was a complete waste for both sides. China was ravaged, falling into the hands of an internal dictator, and would not emerge onto the global stage for decades thereafter -- while Japan would, astonishingly, bounce back as a commercial titan.

Before large-scale combat actually began, Japan had effectively annexed a portion of northern China, Manchuria, and placed a surviving member of the Chinese nobility there as their puppet. The armed conflict assumed an air of self-perpetuation escalation, as these things do, and soon Japan's goal was the complete military subordination of China. Its early attacks seized Beijing, in the north, and Shanghai in the south. (The infamous Nanjing sadism followed Shanghai.) From there, Japan labored to link  its spheres of power, resulting in numerous battles  in the mountains and vast expanses between the two cities.   China's Nationalist leaders were able to augment their meager defenses with men and material from the west: not just the United States and Great Britain, but Germany and Russia as well. One of the more interesting tidbits exposed in this book is that Hitler struggled to rid the army of its anti-Japanese types, so while Bavarian's most famous mediocre painter  was looking for alliance with Tokyo,  other German elements were supporting the Rising Sun's scorched victims!)  Once Hitler plunged into his foolhardy invasion of Russia, Japan felt free to  seize Anglo, Dutch, and American East-Pacific holdings and thus began a separate campaign for Burma, which lay between British India and the Japanese empire in China.  After a retreat, the Allies returned in a year to reclaim the territory, and by that time Japan was being slowly pushed back by the US Navy and Marines. Even as it was driven into defeat,  the somnolent internal war in China between Nationalists and Communists became much more active.

For me, this was only the beginning  in trying to get a handle on the Chinese side of the war. It seems like a good outline, and Wilson doesn't skip over important aspects like China's guerrilla warfare or the utter horror the war let loose in China: both from the brutal behavior of the invading army to the  grim measures the Nationalists resorted to, like flooding the country to stymie a Japanese offense but killing and displacing thousands in the bargain.




Related:
Forgotten Ally: China's WW2, Rana Mitter
The Rape of Nanking, Iris Chang

Killer Blondes and Killer Wheat

A few weeks ago I read Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man, a murder-mystery from the same Pinkerton agent turned author who produced The Maltese Falcon.   I was sold by the opening line:

I was leaning against the bar in a speakeasy on Fifty-second Street, waiting for Nora to finish her Christmas shopping, when a girl got up from the table where she had been sitting with three other people and came over to me. She was small and blonde, and whether you looked at her face or at her body in powder-blue sports clothes, the result was satisfactory.

The narrator will, in the opening act of the novel, consume a small truckload of spirits, and some fun lines follow. (Paraphrase: "'Practically'. Everybody's telling me 'practically' the truth. What I want is some impractical joker who will shoot straight!")  Alas, I didn't  care whodunit. The solution surprised me, though!

This Saturday, I wrapped up William Davis' Wheat Belly,  which I read more for inspiration than information. As someone who lost 120+ lbs in a half a year after dropping most processed food, I'm solidly in the camp the author was writing to. (I've also read Why We Get Fat, and that work by Taubes is in line with the Weston Price/Atkins/Paleo/Davis family of nutritional thinking.)  According to Davis, modern processed wheat is a frankenfood with no resemblance to natural wheat, and  responsible for obesity, diabetes, celiac disease, and even some mental problems.  As I said, I don't really need convincing that bread, cereal, etc. are bad for the waistline, but I've been unable to break 206  (March 2012) and it is utterly annoying.  I have weaknesses, you see --  like sweet tea and sweet potatoes. In the last couple of weeks I've actually cut out my 'sweet' tea altogether (which was lightly sweetened -- 1/4 cup in a full gallon of tea, but if you drink a pitcher a day it's a lot of sugar), mixing in lemon juice instead.  (I mostly drink water, of course, but one does like to taste something every once and again.)  Essentially I read this to psych myself up for valiantly saying "No" to the various little temptations -- tortilla chips,  blueberry waffles, that sort of thing.  The psychic game is the reason I've been reading the Stoics and WW2 history lately...it's all about trying to adopt that indomitable spirit. I've also resumed daily walks, which less about burning calories and more about mental focus -- I find it's a lot easier to exercise my will against cornbread if I've already exercised said will four miles in the rain.

What's coming up?  I'm chasing a few rabbits at the moment and need to focus on one them, really,  Gobs of history -- WW2, Spanish empire, Arab conquests -- a little historical fiction, and a few miscellaneous bits.

The Porch and the Cross

The Porch and the Cross: Ancient Stoic Wisdom for Modern Christian Living
© 2016 Kevin Vost
198 pages

Stoicism as a moral philosophy has had admirers through the ages, and especially during the medieval epoch. While modern snobbery tends to dismiss the medieval mind as intellectually somnolent, in truth the cathedral schools and universities of Europe were alive with discussion and engagement. Part of that engagement was with the classic tradition, which included not only the old masters but their progeny, like the Stoics.  Doctors of the church, like Ambrose and Aquinas, were especially interested in the Stoics'  understanding of how the mind could be entrapped by vice, or sin, and how people could resist such an influence.  Kevin Vost is a contemporary Christian whose faith is informed -- even formed -- at the Painted Porch. I recognized this when reading his Seven Deadly Sins, which frequently looked to the Stoics for advice, and so knew I had much to look forward to in The Porch and the Cross.  Here, he reviews the lives and principle ideas of four Stoics (Musonius Rufus, Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius), examines their legacies through history, and finally applies the lessons to Christian moral concerns.

The Porch and the Cross's format makes it immediately accessible to readers who have never heard of a stoic. The biographical intro chapters reveal first Stoicism's broad appeal, as the four authors spanned Roman societies, from slave to emperor.  Vost follows this with a summary or distillation of their major works, which concentrate the very best of Stoic thinking and practice for the beginning investigator.  If you have never heard of Stoicism before, here is the elevator version: the universe has a perceivable order, and the good life consists of conforming to that order, in part by recognizing that there are things within our control and things outside our control. To worry about that which cannot be controlled is self-defeating: we should instead focus on what we can do, like being prepared for what Fortune throws at us.

There are obvious points of agreement between Christianity and Stoicism:  for instance, both emphasize the preeminent importance of a soul squaring itself with the order of the cosmos -- or in Christian terms, in line with the will of God. Both view spiritual order as superior to the needs and appetites of the body, though Catholic orthodoxy cautions the faithful against holding the latter in complete contempt -- that's the sort of thing Gnostics, Manicheans, and Puritans get up to.  Vost instead looks to Stoicism as a guide for moderating the influence of  both inner turmoil and outside temptation.  Self-control is a virtue hailed by both Stoics and Christians, and Vost is especially pleased with Musonius Rufus' writings on sexual propriety.

Another common link is the Stoic conception of the cosmopolis, that all men hold within them a divine spark which makes them brethren. The well-ordered soul is not confined by tribalism, but can look beyond it -- just as the Christian life is not a nationalistic one, but one which brings together  all people ("Greek and Jew, Scythian, barbarian") into communion.   Communion is an important Stoic concept, as Marcus Aurelius often reminds himself: we are members with one another -- not units within a pile, as bureaucrats would have it, but discrete individuals with distinct jobs. We are, Aurelius said, like the fingers of a hand -- we can either work with one another, or put up with one another, but to antagonize the other is irrational and vice-laden.

At just under two hundred pages, The Porch and the Cross is a terrific little collection, bringing together the best-of  from the extant masters into one slim volume, with connecting commentary. I'd forgotten how truly bracing they could be, and must look into reading Musonius Rufus!

Related:

• The Seven Deadly Sins: A Thomistic Guide to Vanquishing Vice, Kevin Vost.  Makes frequent use of the Stoics. 
• A Guide to the Good Life: the Ancient Art of Stoic Joy, William Irvine. The definitive Stoic intro. 
• Virtual University: Marcus Aurelius, by Dr. Michael Sugrue. Four-part lecture (~30 minutes) on Aurelius and his Meditations,  Outstanding talk which I listen to every few months. It's even on my morning-walk playlist.

The Stoics themselves:

• The Meditations, Marcus Aurelius
• Discourses and the Handbook, Epictetus. The handbook has a 'modern' form, The Art of Living.
• Letters from a Stoic,  Dialogues and Essays, Seneca

The Cargo Ship Diaries

The Cargo Ship Diaries: 44 months, 37 countries, 0 flights 
© 2014 Niall Doherty
133 pages

A few years ago while looking for information on minimalism, I encountered the YouTube presence of one Niall Doherty, an Irishman traveling the world, living and working out of a backpack. Doherty left a comfortable but unfulfilling life in the nine-to-five world to live an adventure, instead. His throwing of himself into the world wasn't merely physical, as he also used new environments to experiment with his life, to impose new challenges on himself.  This is where I encountered him, as every week he seemed to be in a different place, invariably a cafe or club surrounded by laughing people (often women), and posing serious questions to the viewer, like "What would it take for you to change your most fundamental beliefs?"   As it turns out, he was in the middle of a purposeful quest: to travel the world without flying.   In The Cargo Ship Diaries, aboard a commercial freighter traveling from Yokohama to Peru, he shares both his experiences aboard the ship, and reminiscences on his Eurasian journey.  The book ends with his arrival in the Americas, though an epilogue shares diary entries about his time in South America, New Orleans, and later the return to Ireland.

Although his first book, Disrupting the Rabblement, captured his philosophy of life much better, some of it still comes through in this travel diary. As mentioned, it's a two-part book;  the framing narrative tells about life aboard the cargo ship, where for a month he explored, danced, wrote, and studied.   The 'writing' bit is this actual book, recounting his time in Eurasia. Landing in Amsterdam, he bused, biked, and ferried his way across the continent. He was not a 'tourist', and preferred to spend most of his time trying to interact with locals.  Much of that, he admits, was 'chasing tail'; in Amsterdam he challenged himself to flirt with 100 girls in a week, and the book is filled with one-night liaisons and brief relationships. Only when he found a friend to join him did he go on touristy adventures like visiting the Taj Mahal.  (His adventures tended to not be the usual kind: once, for instance, he climbed an abandoned skyscraper. Although reading about his sex life grew tiresome quickly,  I am always astonished at the amount of human goodwill global travelers run into. Doherty entered Iran despite being warned his bank cards wouldn't work, and found himself with the local equivalent of $10 to his name. Yet, through goodwill, local connections, and the internet, he was able to make his way through and out of the country, departing it with fond memories for the Iranian people -- who, he says, live double lives, defying the outside authoritarianism within the privacy of their homes.

Although I was sorely tempted to skim through the many dating episodes, I find Doherty's willingness to throw himself into the unknown admirable -- and of course, as someone who has read books on commercial shipping, this account of life aboard a cargo ship had a distinct attraction for me.

Doherty maintained a web presence throughout his travels, and produced a video about life aboard the ship below.

Miracle at Midway

Miracle at Midway
© 1983 Gordon Prange, Donald Goldstein and,Katherine Dillon,
512 pages

Miracle at Midway is a thorough history of the June 4-7 effort of the Japanese to simultaneously seize the most likely U.S. approaches to the Empire and lure the US Pacific Fleet into a general engagement wherein it might be destroyed in total. Though colossally outnumbered in ships, the US Navy and Army Air Forces on Midway island had a slight advantage in planes which was used to enormous effect; in this David and Goliath battle, the Japanese carriers were the object of a surgical strike, though one of dive-bombers instead of stones. While there was definitely an element of luck on the American side -- one Japanese carrier's planes were caught pants down, trying to refuel and re-arm -- Midway was a victory of intelligence and courage more than fate. Although suffering from a paucity of maps, the authors bring extensive analysis and heavy research into the Japanese side to the table as well. Midway is one of the more important battles of the second World War, at least for Americans: just six months after the humiliating surprise of Pearl Harbor, the Pacific Fleet had utterly reversed its fortunes, destroying in a day the pride of the Japanese imperial fleet. Dai Nippon lost not only four carriers, but hundreds of planes and thousands of veteran men whose talents and experience could not be replaced. It's also an extraordinary moment in the history of naval warfare, the first battle in which the competing surface fleets never saw one another but through their air wings.