Review: Killing Dragons: The Conquest of the Alps Fergus Fleming

 When I was in high school many years ago, we lived for a couple of years in Neuchatel, Switzerland, in a 13-story building.  On a very (very) clear day, we could see Mont Blanc far in the distance. Even at that distance, it was a majestic site. I like looking at mountains, but the idea of climbing would never enter my mind. The thousands who have now climbed Everest, with the help of guides to carry their bags and technology, have trivialized what once was an extraordinary accomplishment.

So it was for the Alps in the 18th and 19th centuries.  They were considered unclimbable, harsh, and forbidding monuments to death and destruction.  Avalanches regularly killed many, and the physics of glaciers were not understood. Fleming has written a detailed examination of how and why that all changed.

It was a combination of thirst for scientific knowledge about the Alps coupled with myth that was layered with romantic views of Byron and others. Killing the Dragons refers to the legends that the Alps were populated by Dragons. Crossing the Alps was a very hazardous undertaking because of swift changes in the weather, glacial crevasses, and falling rocks.  (One avalanche sent boulders into a lake creating a tsunami of epic proportions inundating a town.

After Mt. Blanc was climbed successfully, the story continued, moving from dragons to a virtual advertising campaign. Much lie Everest today, climbing Mt. Blanc became the thing to do. The Alps were transformed into a thing of beauty and respite, attracting hoards of visitors, rather than something to be feared. 

Before you know it, the Alps and Switzerland benefited from another kind of myth, that of the health giving clean air and wonderful resorts. Towns and villages that had been considered mere provinces of swine, were now sought after resorts and the Swiss, clever people they are, soon had a train (!) running up though the Matterhorn close to its summit for people like me who would rather ride than climb.*

It’s a fun read (I listened to the well-read audio version)

 

 

*The train continues up inside the Eiger and Mönch mountains, with another 5 minute stop at the Eismeer (Ice Sea) viewing point until it reaches Jungfraujoch, 3,454m or 11,333 feet above sea level, the highest railway station in Europe and billed as The Top of Euro.

 

Review: Night Bird by Brian Freeman

 

I read the second in the Frost series first.  Had I read it in order after this one, I would have noticed the psychological connection. In Voice Inside, Freeman’s killer was obsessed with a memory and acted on it. Memory is also a prime mover in Night Bird.

Memory is a very tricky thing as we have learned in the past few decades.  It’s malleable, easily fooled, and extremely fallible. Ask an eyewitness to an accident how fast a car was going as he went through the stop sign, the witness will implant the image of a stop sign in his memory even though there may not have been one there.

Here a memory expert (Francesca Stein — get it? Frankenstein) uses images to change a client’s remembrance of a traumatic experience in order to eliminate a phobia.  She maintains that every time you haul up a memory from the repository in your brain you alter it in some way.

If you are interested in how memory works and its experience in the judicial process I recommend The fallibility of memory in judicial processes: Lessons from the past and their modern consequences Mark Howe and Laure Knott. *

A salient paragraph:

When memory serves as evidence, as it does in many civil and criminal  legal proceedings, there are a number of important limitations to the  veracity of that evidence. This is because memory does not provide a  veridical representation of events as experienced. Rather, what gets encoded  into memory is determined by what a person attends to, what they  already have stored in memory, their expectations, needs and emotional  state. This information is subsequently integrated (consolidated) with other information that has already been stored in a person's long-term, autobiographical memory. What gets retrieved  later from that memory is determined by that same multitude of factors  that contributed to encoding as well as what drives the recollection of  the event. Specifically, what gets retold about an experience depends on  whom one is talking to and what the purpose is of remembering that  particular event (e.g., telling a friend, relaying an experience to a  therapist, telling the police about an event). Moreover, what gets  remembered is reconstructed from the remnants of what was originally  stored; that is, what we remember is constructed from whatever remains  in memory following any forgetting or interference from new experiences  that may have occurred across the interval between storing and  retrieving a particular experience. Because the contents of our memories  for experiences involve the active manipulation (during encoding),  integration with pre-existing information (during consolidation), and  reconstruction (during retrieval) of that information, memory is, by  definition, fallible at best and unreliable at worst.

 

Lots of plot summaries. No point in me adding another.  I suggest reading them in order and I will certainly now move on to the 3rd.

*Memory. 2015 Jul 4; 23(5): 633–656. Published online 2015 Feb 23. doi: 10.1080/09658211.2015.1010709 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4409058/

Elizabeth Loftus gained considerable fame (and fortune) for her research into the fallibility and manipulatability (if that’s a word) of memory.

https://www.amazon.com/Eyewitness-Testimony-With-preface-author/dp/0674287770/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0520271440&linkCode=as2&tag=teco06-20

https://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_loftus_how_reliable_is_your_memory?language=en

An interesting article on Loftus’ research and the Weinstein trial. Physical evidence should always be required in any case involving memory. When you have prosecutors and victim’s rights advocates, all of whom have their own agendas, juries need to be very careful in evaluating eyewitness and memory testimony.

https://www.scribd.com/article/446066265/Expert-Testifies-About-false-Memories-In-Harvey-Weinstein-s-Trial

 

Review: Project Azorian: The CIA and the Raising of the K-129 by Norman Polmar, Michael White

 "The bubble burst on Friday morning, February 7, 1975, with a front page story in the Los Angeles Times revealing that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had  salvaged a sunken Soviet missile submarine."  So begins the fascinating account of the attempt to raise the K-129, a Russian submarine that had disappeared in 1968.

The Russian submarine K-219 left its home base and then disappeared somewhere near the Hawaiian Islands.  In a spectacular feat of engineering and spy craft, the Navy working with Hughes Aircraft designed a special ship, in the guise of a deep sea mining project, to retrieve the sunken Russian sub that was lying on the bottom 16,000 feet below the surface. How they did it boggles the mind.  

The K-129 was a Golf II diesel-electric sub carrying nuclear weapons. The CIA knew exactly where it sank thanks to the Halibut (https://www.goodreads.com/review/edit/42343) .  The CIA was anxious to get it’s hands on one of those nuclear tipped missiles and any codebooks or other secret documents that might have been on the sub. Just one problem; it sank in 16,000 feet of water.  In order to help hide what they were doing, the CIA contracted with Hughes, famed for concocting bizarre schemes, to design and build the Hughes Glomar Explorer ostensibly a deep sea mining ship. The plan was to use 16,000 feet of pipe connected to an enormous grappling hook to grab the forward part of the sub and raise it into a specially designed “moon pool”, as it was called, part of the ship open to the sea, to prevent anyone from seeing what they were up to. Josh Dean*** in his book on the project described it in these terms: "Imagine standing atop the Empire State Building with an 8-foot-wide grappling hook on a 1-inch-diameter steel rope. Your task is to lower the hook to the street below, snag a compact car full of gold, and lift the car back to the top of the building. On top of that, the job has to be done without anyone noticing.”

In a review of Polmar’s book by the Naval Historical Foundation, Captain James Bryant write that Polmar told him it was a very difficult book to write because 90% of what he knew was incorrect. “Bruce Rule** was the leading acoustic analyst for the Office of Naval Intelligence for 42 years.  In May 1968, the Navy took the acoustic data and compartmentalized it so that not even the Navy’s experts could review it.  Consequently, it was not until 2009 – forty-one  years after the event – that Bruce’s analysis of the data from open sources determined that the K-129 was lost when two ballistic missiles’ rocket motors fired, melted the launch tubes and filled the boat with burning exhaust.  This book gives details of the probable causes.”*

Of course, the sinking gave rise to all sorts of conspiracy theories. John Craven who had been very involved with the Halibut —among others like Kenneth Sewell—came to believe that the K-129 was in the process of launching a nuclear-tipped missile against Hawaii at the time of the submarine’s “explosion” and sinking.  Palomar deals with this view in Chapter 11.

*https://www.navyhistory.org/2011/09/book-review-project-azorian-the-cia/

** Regarding Bruce Rule’s role, Mr. Role wrote a comment on the review by Capt. Bryant. I quote in full:

In his excellent review of “Project AZORIAN, the CIA and the Raising of the K-129,” CAPT Jim Bryant discusses this writer’s analysis of acoustic detections of the loss of the K-129 first completed in 2009 because the Navy compartmentalized the acoustic data so that not even their own experts at the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) could analyze it.

I thank CAPT Bryant for his acknowledgment of my analysis; however, the basic conclusion (two R-21 missiles fired within the K-129 for 96-seconds each with ignition separated by 361-seconds) was so straight-forward (obvious) that it took less than an hour to come to that conclusion.

There were at least six acoustic analysts at ONI in 1968 who could have derived that assessment with the same facility. Such was the dark side of the Navy’s obsessive compartmentalization which prevented those involved in the approval of the AZORIAN recovery effort from knowing that the area within the K-129 from which they hoped to recovery crypto-equipment and associated documents had been exposed to 5000-degree (F) missile exhaust plumes for more than three-minutes.

Bruce Rule
Louisville, KY
14 September 2011

Those interested in irony will find it in https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/sinking-soviet-submarine-k-219-cold-war-conspiracy-189608.  Note the similarity between 129 and 219.  See also In feindlichen Gewässern. Das Ende von K-219 by Peter Hutchhausen.

***https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33864783-the-taking-of-k-129?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=f4PyDsovtq&rank=1

Why I love Amazon

 I know it has become fashionable of late to bash Amazon and how it has destroyed the local bookstore, that mythic center of culture in small towns. We hear how the independent bookstore (otherwise known as chain “wannabes”.  Here’s why Amazon will always be better:

 

1. I get to read what I want to read, not just what might be available in the bookstore. I don’t need recommendations from a clerk or bookstore owner who, in spite of what they would have you believe, will never understand my shifting interests. Used bookstores are even more limited; you’re only getting access to what other people and libraries didn’t want. 

2. Amazon has the best of both worlds:  new books and access to hundreds of used book dealers for those books that are no longer in print.

3. E-Books. I can make the print larger, smaller, and choose fonts. I can carry around almost my entire library in my pocket. Amazon didn’t invent them, just made them inexpensive, readable, and with magnificent reading software.

4. With its connection to Goodreads, you can connect with other innumerable other readers to discuss books and share ideas in a multitude of different groups. By not meeting face-to-face, you are forced to think about what you want to say, rather than blurting it out to a few others, often without formulating it thoroughly.

5. I love authors. I want to support them. Amazon offers them the widest audience possible in addition to connecting with them online.in a multitude of different formats. Not to mention, Amazon offers authors the possibility of bringing back books into print via on-demand publishing that means their books will never go out-of-print.

6. Customer service.  Ever try returning a book to an independent bookstore? If it’s a special order (always costing more) they won’t do it, usually won't ever anyway. You can return anything to Amazon for immediate refund and they will pay the return costs.

7. Amazon is ruining small towns.  Another myth.  Amazon has killed off Borders and is hurting Barnes and Noble, hardly the small independent that has never been able to survive by selling only books.  Coffee or tea, anyone?  If anything, it’s the Post Office killing off small towns. Sears and Montgomery Wards were able to destroy small town stores because the Post Office began rural delivery.

8. Another myth is that local independents support local authors. My wife is a successful children’s author, but in the beginning is was only Borders and Barnes and Noble that would even consider ordering her books and having a book signing. It’s expensive and time-consuming.  Small independents don’t have the resources to do this, and they’ll usually require the author to supply the books and will take them only on consignment. Amazon at least provides a venue for unknown authors to connect with the public and they provide free webspace to promote your books. 

9. I read a lot and have eclectic interests. On Amazon I can find exactly what I want, without having to travel miles, spend less money, and have it in two days, (instantly in the case of e-books.) They do it better and cheaper. What’s not to love?

 

For some reason, Americans hate successful enterprises, all the while wishing they had thought of the idea first. It may happen that Amazon, like Sears and other large enterprises will overreach and stumble (Fire phone, anyone?) and someone else with a better idea will come along and replace them That’s OK. If they do it better and cheaper, I’m all for it.

 

In the meantime, no one does it better than Amazon.