This nov­el pleased me. It’s well-writ­ten, the char­ac­ters come alive, and the author doesn’t pussy-foot. Cun­ning­ham takes three char­ac­ters from child­hood, bring­ing them up to youth­ful adult­hood. They end up form­ing a pre­car­i­ous fam­ily and raise a shild. Noth­ing very extra­or­di­nary hap­pens. But it is all done with great skill. The book is grown-up. As I turned the pages, I was remind­ed of my pro­tracted strug­gle with the cur­rent situ­ation in Sci­ence Fic­tion pub­lish­ing. I grew up with Sci­ence Fic­tion, and I would rather write in that genre than write the sort of thing that Michael Cun­ning­ham does. Read more »

14594. (Gavin Men­zies) 1421, the Year Chi­na Dis­cov­ered the World
14595. (Louise Levathes) When Chi­na Ruled the Seas
14596. (Bir­git & Peter Sawyer) Medieval Scan­di­navia From Con­ver­son to Reformation,
. . . . . cir­ca 800‑1500
14597. (Ellis Peters) The Sum­mer of the Danes Read more »

Far­ley Mowat engaged in some unre­strained spec­u­la­tion with his “Alban” pre­his­toric explor­ers. Now, Gavin Men­zies goes absolute­ly wild with spec­u­la­tion in his “recon­struc­tion” of a gigan­tic glob­al explo­ration by the Chi­nese admi­ral Zheng He in the year 1421.

It is well known that a large Chi­nese Impe­r­ial fleet, under the direc­tion of Zheng He (or Heng Ho), the eunuch aide-de-camp of the ear­ly Ming emper­or Zhu Di, under­took sev­en long voy­ages that com­bined trade, diplo­matic and explorato­ry motives. Chi­nese trade and explo­ration of the East African coast is well accept­ed by his­to­ri­ans. Zheng He’s voy­ages are well doc­u­mented by his sec­re­tary, Ma Huan, whose chron­i­cling of some of the voy­ages was wide­ly print­ed and dis­trib­uted, and there are col­lat­eral accounts by Fei Xin and Gong Zhen, both offi­cers on some of the voy­ages. There is also plen­ty of cor­rob­o­ra­tion in Ming dynasty pub­lic records. Zheng He’s celebri­ty was such that plays were being per­formed about him while the voy­ages were still going, and a cen­tury and a half lat­er, an immense­ly pop­u­lar his­tor­i­cal nov­el, Jour­ney of the Three-Jew­eled Eunuch to the West­ern Oceans by Luo Mao­deng, retold the sto­ry with embell­ish­ments. Read more »

(Stephen Lea­cock) Behind the Beyond 
. . . . 14545. (Don­ald Cameron) Intro­duc­tion [pref­ace]
. . . . 14546. (Stephen Lea­cock) Behind the Beyond, A Mod­ern Prob­lem Play [arti­cle]
. . . . 14547. (Stephen Lea­cock) With the Pho­tog­ra­ph­er [arti­cle]
. . . . 14548. (Stephen Lea­cock) The Den­tist and the Gas [arti­cle]
. . . . 14549. (Stephen Lea­cock) My Lost Oppor­tu­ni­ties [arti­cle] Read more »

This is Far­ley Mowat’s odd book about a pos­si­ble pre-viking Euro­pean pres­ence in the Cana­di­an Arctic.

Mowat is very care­ful to warn the read­er that he is engag­ing in a kind of spec­u­la­tive archae­ol­o­gy. He even inter­spers­es the text with lit­tle pas­sages of adven­ture fic­tion. But it is also clear that he has con­vinced him­self pret­ty thor­ough­ly that his spec­u­la­tions cor­re­spond to what actu­al­ly hap­pened. And the result is, of course, one of those books where a chap­ter begins with the asser­tion that some­thing might have hap­pened , which by the end of the chap­ter has been grad­u­al­ly trans­formed into what cer­tain­ly did hap­pen , and then becomes the premise for the next chap­ter, which begins with if that hap­pened, then this might have hap­pened , and so on. Grad­u­al­ly, a huge sequence of sup­po­si­tions begins to have the appear­ance of a frame­work of sol­id evi­dence, when it is most clear­ly not.

What he begins with is some­thing which is ver­i­fi­ably true. The east­ern Arc­tic of Cana­da is lit­tered with odd ruins and mega­lith­ic struc­tures that can not be eas­i­ly attrib­uted to the Inu­it, or to the ear­li­er Dorset or Thule cul­tures. Nor do they appear to be built by the Norse. They are def­i­nite­ly very old. The most inter­est­ing con­cen­tra­tions are on the west­ern shore of Unga­va bay, and in a bay imme­di­ate­ly south of the spec­tac­u­lar Torn­gat range, in Labrador. Read more »

This is a rea­son­ably inter­est­ing nov­el, though not eco­nom­i­cally writ­ten. It’s a sprawl­ing omnibus of digres­sions, com­bin­ing fan­tasy, mys­ti­cism, pol­i­tics and a kind of Jules et Jim tri­an­gle romance. Mulisch is intel­li­gent, learned, and absolute­ly sat­u­rated with con­ven­tional sys­tems and intel­lec­tual ortho­doxy. There is a lot of thought in this book, but not a par­ti­cle of orig­i­nal thought. This is, unfor­tu­nately, sup­posed to be the great mas­ter­piece of mod­ern Dutch lit­er­a­ture. Well, the Dutch have blessed the world with won­der­ful paint­ing and archi­tec­ture, and their trance djs are superb, but lit­er­a­ture just doesn’t seem to be their strong point. Nev­er­the­less, I might rec­om­mend it for a lazy afternoon’s read­ing. The inter­ac­tion of the char­ac­ters is some­times interesting.

An inter­est­ing his­tor­i­cal nov­el set in the peri­od of Romu­lus Augus­tus, the last Roman Emper­or in the West­ern Empire. The book is trans­lated from Ital­ian. It is fast-paced adven­ture fic­tion, writ­ten in the spir­it of Alexan­dre Dumas. There is a “sur­prise” end­ing, which the read­er will prob­a­bly see com­ing fair­ly ear­ly in the game. Though most of the action takes place in Italy, it is suf­fused with the “Mat­ter of Britain”. Doesn’t any­one ever write about late Roman Spain, or Nor­ica, or Africa?

Donne is best when he writes of love or death, dullest when build­ing “meta­phys­i­cal” struc­tures or play­ing games with theology.

Where, like a pil­low on a bed,
A preg­nant bank swell’d up, to rest
The violet’s reclin­ing head,
Sat we two, one another’s best.
Our hands were firm­ly cemented
With a fast balm, which thence did spring,
Our eye-beams twist­ed, and did thread
Our eyes, upon one double-string;
So to inter­graft our hands, as yet
Was all the means to make us one,
And pic­tures in our eyes to get
Was all our prop­a­ga­tion.

Vlad the Impaler rep­re­sent­ed as Pon­tius Pilate judg­ing Jesus Christ, 1463 (artist unknown)

This seems to be the best book on Vlad III of Wal­lachia, the his­tor­i­cal “Drac­ula”. It at least explodes the sil­li­est inter­pre­ta­tions, put for­ward by Marx­ists under the Ceauces­cu regime, that seem to have found their way into many sec­ondary sources. Vlad seems to have been a per­fectly ordi­nary lit­tle gang­ster, com­mit­ting plen­ty of atroc­i­ties, but not much dif­fer­ent in style and moti­va­tion from those of oth­er thugs rul­ing prin­ci­pal­i­ties. Com­pared to the colos­sal out­rages of the reli­gious wars that tore Ger­many apart, soon after, it was all small potatoes.

While Vlad enjoyed tor­tur­ing peo­ple and impal­ing them, he was no more vicious than, say, the Ref­or­ma­tion the­olo­gian John Calvin, who enjoyed tor­tur­ing peo­ple by slow­ly roast­ing them on a spit while their heads were soaked with cold water to pro­long the agony .… a tor­ture that he once con­demned two chil­dren to. And he isn’t any more of a mon­ster than Guata­mala’s dic­ta­tor José Ríos Montt, whom Ronald Rea­gan admired and called “a man of great per­sonal integri­ty and commitment.”