I guess it's always fun to root for the bad guys. Here again Macklin is the antihero, a hitman now on the run because someone (he's not sure who) wants him dead. (The scene with the self-immolation of the guy with the flamethrower was a bit unclear, but...) His wife is divorcing him. His kid wants to kill people like his dad, and his job this time is to prevent a killing rather than cause one.
As with most Estleman novels, it's a good story and I like the Macklin character. The plot turns and twists and connections in this book however are hard to swallow, however. I had difficulty finding any good guys.
Sunday, February 11, 2018
Thursday, February 08, 2018
Review: The Lady from Zagreb by Phillip Kerr
Kerr has used his criminal detective Bernie Gunther to illuminate the German condition during WW II. Vigorously anti-Nazi, Bernie survives only by being an astute detective, and counter-intuitively by being excessively forthright with his evil bosses, Heydrich and Goebbels. In this rather horrifying volume of the series, Bernie is asked to carry a letter from an actress (a Goebbels' mistress) to her father, now a Croat colonel and ex-priest, who joyously runs a concentration camp for Serbs and dissidents, i.e. anyone opposed to Croatian nationalism, killing as many as possible.
The portrayal of the Ustase (it's handy to have access to Wikipedia while reading) is explicit and sickening. [ For those unfamiliar with the group, it was an odd combination of ultranationalism, Catholicism and fascism employing terror that enjoyed killing Jews, Serbs, and Roma. Very Roman Catholic, they condemned orthodox Christianity, the main religion of the Serbs, but did not oppose Islam which they considered nationalist and true Croatian where it was celebrated mostly in Bosnia and Herzegovinia. The religious aspect was downplayed in favor of nationalist Croatia.] It's rather amazing to me that Tito managed to hold Yugoslavia together as long as he did given the truly horrific slaughters that occurred between the Serbs and Croats, encouraged by the Nazis.
This is the 10th novel in the series of 11.
I've read a lot of Kerr's Bernie Gunther series. This one was OK but not as good as the original three volumes of Berlin Noir. The plot in this one was too unbelievable and the coincidences just too convenient. Still good compared to many others, just not up to his best. Perhaps the lackluster reading by John Lee, whom I usually like, had something to do with it.
The portrayal of the Ustase (it's handy to have access to Wikipedia while reading) is explicit and sickening. [ For those unfamiliar with the group, it was an odd combination of ultranationalism, Catholicism and fascism employing terror that enjoyed killing Jews, Serbs, and Roma. Very Roman Catholic, they condemned orthodox Christianity, the main religion of the Serbs, but did not oppose Islam which they considered nationalist and true Croatian where it was celebrated mostly in Bosnia and Herzegovinia. The religious aspect was downplayed in favor of nationalist Croatia.] It's rather amazing to me that Tito managed to hold Yugoslavia together as long as he did given the truly horrific slaughters that occurred between the Serbs and Croats, encouraged by the Nazis.
This is the 10th novel in the series of 11.
I've read a lot of Kerr's Bernie Gunther series. This one was OK but not as good as the original three volumes of Berlin Noir. The plot in this one was too unbelievable and the coincidences just too convenient. Still good compared to many others, just not up to his best. Perhaps the lackluster reading by John Lee, whom I usually like, had something to do with it.
Wednesday, January 31, 2018
Review: Walk Among the Tombstones by Lawrence Block
A Matt Scudder novel. It's always fun to run across anachronisms in books written years ago. The morphing into non-existence of pay phones, once a feature of hotel cubbyholes and conference centers, 800 # phone cards, calls for a dime, the elimination of pay phone numbers; all of that is so foreign to the current generation that can't understand not being able to make an instant 911 call with their cell phones.
Classic Block.
Classic Block.
Friday, January 19, 2018
Review: The Chalon Heads (Brock & Kolla, #4)
One interesting little thing is that the title of the print book is ..a Kathy and Brock mystery while the title of the Kindle book is a much more feminist ...Brock and Kolla mystery.
Brock is DCI Brock and Kathy/Kolla is his Sergeant Kathy Kolla. This particular one of the series will be of especial interest to philatelists. A very wealthy man, and supposed expert on the Chalon Heads, a series of valuable stamps, has had his wife kidnapped nd the demand is an extremely valuable Canada 12 Penny Black. When her head appears at the end of the lane, things start to get serious.
I thought the book got off to a slow start but then became much more interesting as it morphed into charges of fraud against Brock and an investigation into stamp forgeries.
Brock is DCI Brock and Kathy/Kolla is his Sergeant Kathy Kolla. This particular one of the series will be of especial interest to philatelists. A very wealthy man, and supposed expert on the Chalon Heads, a series of valuable stamps, has had his wife kidnapped nd the demand is an extremely valuable Canada 12 Penny Black. When her head appears at the end of the lane, things start to get serious.
I thought the book got off to a slow start but then became much more interesting as it morphed into charges of fraud against Brock and an investigation into stamp forgeries.
Sunday, January 14, 2018
Daniel Ellsberg and Doomsday
The principle behind MAD, mutually assured destruction, is that each side must believe that if they launch a nuclear attack, the other side will retaliate and both sides will be obliterated. Whether that scenario has prevented a world war since WWII is up for debate, but I think most people have generally bought into the idea that the presence of nuclear weapons has been a useful deterrence. Daniel Ellsberg's second volume of his memoirs discusses the truly mind-boggling discussions held at the RAND Corporation during the fifties, sixties and seventies, on how, why, and when nuclear weapons should be used.* Ellsberg notes the debate is not so clearcut:
“The declared official rationale for such a system,” Ellsberg writes, “has always been primarily the supposed need to deter—or if necessary respond to—an aggressive Russian nuclear first strike against the United States. That widely believed public rationale is a deliberate deception. Deterring a surprise Soviet nuclear attack—or responding to such an attack—has never been the only or even the primary purpose of our nuclear plans and preparations. The nature, scale, and posture of our strategic nuclear forces has always been shaped by the requirements of quite different purposes: to attempt to limit the damage to the United States from Soviet or Russian retaliation to a U.S. first strike against the USSR or Russia. This capability is, in particular, intended to strengthen the credibility of U.S. threats to initiate limited nuclear attacks, or escalate them—U.S. threats of ‘first use’—to prevail in regional, initially non-nuclear conflicts involving Soviet or Russian forces or their allies.”
Some of the stunning revelations are that the assumptions made behind these calculations may have been completely false. While we were assuming the offensive intent of the Soviets and that they had thousands of missiles, in reality they were obsessed with defense and had only four(!) ICBMs, all clustered at one location and liquid fueled, which meant it took quite a while to fire them up. Riven by bureaucratic envy and power struggles, the discussions and decisions promulgated in their reports often were influenced more by loyalty to one service or another rather than any rational view of nuclear weapons use.
Discussions of Trump's mental instability lead inevitably to concerns about the accidental use of nuclear weapons that would be ruinous. Apparently the "my button is bigger than your button" threat is not new if less scatological. [Trump seems to have the not atypical obsession with genitalia size but most men aren't quite so public in their concerns.) It was used by other presidents in efforts to manipulate other countries. Nixon also used the threat of nuclear weapons as has Trump.
Another interesting observation Ellsberg makes is that the truism that "everything leaks in Washington is just not true." There are so many categories of super-secret documents and information that we only learn about decades later, often thanks to people like Ellsberg who were in a position to work with and know the material.
His time at RAND was an intellectual paradise. There was an enormous mental energy with lots of "hands-off debate." But, Ellsberg has concluded that looking back over sixty years that if security were the goal then they were wrong all the time. They were all, knowing the facts, willing to risk a one in chance risk of nuclear war that they knew would kill hundreds of millions.
And accidents and unforeseen events happen. We have learned from McNamara's autobiography, In Retrospect,** that Kennedy and the U.S. military had the wrong information. The Soviets had 42,000 men in Cuba, not 7,000. They also did not know that there were hundreds of tactical nuclear weapons that Cuban officers had been authorized to use had the U.S. invaded. If another American reconnaissance plane had been shot at or Cuba had been invaded by U.S. military, or if Soviet submarines had decided to retaliate with nuclear weapons after being attacked by U.S. warships with practice depth charges (the Soviets didn't know they were not real.)
We came very, very close. And now our "very stable genius" has called for the production of more nukes.
BTW. If you have not yet seen The Post, Spielberg's exceptional movie about the Washington Post's decision to publish the Pentagon Papers after the injunction against the New York Times, run and go see it. Amazing performances by Hanks and Streep. If you want more information about Ellsberg and his role, see https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/.premium-1.834573
*The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner by Daniel Ellsberg
**https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/37580670?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1
“The declared official rationale for such a system,” Ellsberg writes, “has always been primarily the supposed need to deter—or if necessary respond to—an aggressive Russian nuclear first strike against the United States. That widely believed public rationale is a deliberate deception. Deterring a surprise Soviet nuclear attack—or responding to such an attack—has never been the only or even the primary purpose of our nuclear plans and preparations. The nature, scale, and posture of our strategic nuclear forces has always been shaped by the requirements of quite different purposes: to attempt to limit the damage to the United States from Soviet or Russian retaliation to a U.S. first strike against the USSR or Russia. This capability is, in particular, intended to strengthen the credibility of U.S. threats to initiate limited nuclear attacks, or escalate them—U.S. threats of ‘first use’—to prevail in regional, initially non-nuclear conflicts involving Soviet or Russian forces or their allies.”
Some of the stunning revelations are that the assumptions made behind these calculations may have been completely false. While we were assuming the offensive intent of the Soviets and that they had thousands of missiles, in reality they were obsessed with defense and had only four(!) ICBMs, all clustered at one location and liquid fueled, which meant it took quite a while to fire them up. Riven by bureaucratic envy and power struggles, the discussions and decisions promulgated in their reports often were influenced more by loyalty to one service or another rather than any rational view of nuclear weapons use.
Discussions of Trump's mental instability lead inevitably to concerns about the accidental use of nuclear weapons that would be ruinous. Apparently the "my button is bigger than your button" threat is not new if less scatological. [Trump seems to have the not atypical obsession with genitalia size but most men aren't quite so public in their concerns.) It was used by other presidents in efforts to manipulate other countries. Nixon also used the threat of nuclear weapons as has Trump.
Another interesting observation Ellsberg makes is that the truism that "everything leaks in Washington is just not true." There are so many categories of super-secret documents and information that we only learn about decades later, often thanks to people like Ellsberg who were in a position to work with and know the material.
His time at RAND was an intellectual paradise. There was an enormous mental energy with lots of "hands-off debate." But, Ellsberg has concluded that looking back over sixty years that if security were the goal then they were wrong all the time. They were all, knowing the facts, willing to risk a one in chance risk of nuclear war that they knew would kill hundreds of millions.
And accidents and unforeseen events happen. We have learned from McNamara's autobiography, In Retrospect,** that Kennedy and the U.S. military had the wrong information. The Soviets had 42,000 men in Cuba, not 7,000. They also did not know that there were hundreds of tactical nuclear weapons that Cuban officers had been authorized to use had the U.S. invaded. If another American reconnaissance plane had been shot at or Cuba had been invaded by U.S. military, or if Soviet submarines had decided to retaliate with nuclear weapons after being attacked by U.S. warships with practice depth charges (the Soviets didn't know they were not real.)
We came very, very close. And now our "very stable genius" has called for the production of more nukes.
BTW. If you have not yet seen The Post, Spielberg's exceptional movie about the Washington Post's decision to publish the Pentagon Papers after the injunction against the New York Times, run and go see it. Amazing performances by Hanks and Streep. If you want more information about Ellsberg and his role, see https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/.premium-1.834573
*The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner by Daniel Ellsberg
**https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/37580670?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1
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