Sayonara

 

Sayonara – James Michener

If you’re a lover of books, I mean a REAL lover of books – especially of the historical fiction genre, no one has ever done it better than James Michener.  He’s well known for his thick, massive tomes. Each of these are usually centered around a distinct geographical location. He then tells of the history of the place through people, often spanning thousands of years.  I would think it would take a lifetime just to write ONE of these books. James Michener wrote over a dozen.

Yet sprinkled within these behemoths, mostly early in his career, he wrote a lot of lighter pieces as well.  Sadly, these books don’t quite give the same satisfying scratch to the proverbial itch.  Perhaps he was still learning his craft?  Quite possibly.  In addition to having the determination to the above-mentioned goliath-like novels, he didn’t begin penning them until late in his career. 

Sayanora was written earlier in his career and was, well, kind of contrived and formulaic. It’s at the tail end of the Korean conflict.  Lloyd Gruver is an officer who has flown several successful bombing sorties against the enemy.  He’s now ready for lighter duty.  He’s kind of the All-American boy who happens to be seriously dating a very attractive young debutante from another powerful military family. Marriage is in the works. So soon Gruver will be wealthy, with a beautiful wife, and have in-laws who are definitely well connected.

So early in the story, one of Gruver’s new ‘duties’ is to attempt to prevent a marriage by a young GI named Joe Kelly. It seems Kelly wants to marry a (gasp!) indigenous Japanese woman.  The horror!  A nice, respectable white soldier wants to marry……one of them??  Yeah, the world was still a pretty racist place back in the 1950s.  So Gruver does what he can once he gets transferred to Japan where all of this drama is occurring.

Well, let’s just say that Gruver begins to discover things about himself that he never fathomed.  As the pages turn, we see a changed man begin to occur.  I probably don’t need to describe much else here.  A liberating story, for sure, but one that’s a bit bland and predictable.

As we read about the Japanese culture and see many of the sights and imagine many of the sounds, we can at least begin to see the inklings of what this author would later become.  You can’t tell massive stories about places without knowing their history and culture and we at least see some of that within this story.

So I didn’t care for the story overall as it was too predictable. It would make great sappy Hollywood fodder had they made a film (maybe they did? I don’t know) around the 1950s even with its somewhat liberal ideas.  This book probably read much better half a century ago than it does today.  Nice ideas, nice lessons, but not necessarily an enrapturing read.  Decent, I suppose, yet nowhere as good as his later works that sucked you in so magnificently.

Golda

 

Golda – Elinor Burkett

I don’t think I’ve ever read a biography about someone with such a strong, overpowering personality as this effort about Israeli Prime Minister Gold Meir than this effort by author Elinor Burkett.  Golda Meir was fierce, opinionated, determined, yet mainly she was simply a human being who wanted the world to treat her and the Jewish people with dignity.

Meir was actually born in Kiev, part of the Russian empire right around the turn of the 19^th century.  For those who know history, they know that very few places and times have ever been kind to the Jewish people, and Russia was one of the worst.  As an introduction, we learn of young Golda’s torrent life; always fleeing from persecutions and pogroms, so much that her family, like so many of others, come to America to search for a better life.

Being a Jew has never been easy, regardless of locale. Yet Milwaukee is far better than Russia. Golda becomes a young adult right around the end of the first World War and the Balfour declaration which, well, I guess you could say was advantageous to the European Jewish population.  Golda quickly becomes an activist, and with her new young husband, sets off to Palestine to help the fledging young locale.  Such an effort demands grit and sacrifice.  She soon becomes a mother, yet Golda isn’t particularly suited for home life. As great as a leader as she would come to be (and we already see examples of this in her young adulthood) she wasn’t a very good wife and mother.

We can almost excuse this, though. There is a lot of work forming a nation for her dispersed people, and through a lot of coffee, cigarettes, and various ailments, Golda Meir has what it takes.  It’s not easy. It’s never easy. Being a woman definitely doesn’t help, but such a handicap is quickly overlooked due to her ferocious persistency. There is an awful lot of politics here, but that should be expected.

She rises in the ranks; eventually becoming Prime Minister, but again, nothing is never easy. We then must remember the turbulent history of Israel once it becomes a state. Imagine the whole world bullying you when the only thing your country is really guilty of is winning wars that other countries keep starting.  So Golda perseveres. She has a sharp mind and an acerbic tongue, yet she never really says or demands anything out of the ordinary that someone in her position would want.

A book that’s both sad and yet somewhat uplifting.  Sad because of the history of the Jewish people; never easy even in the twentieth century. Yet uplifting when someone with so much determination is able to make positive dents despite the insurmountable odds.  An incredible figurehead.

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

 

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle – David Wroblewski

A mistake. Partly my fault.  My wife read this book along with another by the same author.  She told me she really liked one, but not the other.  I thought THIS was the one she liked.  It wasn’t.  I didn’t like it either.  Once I was about 100 pages in (which, sadly, was only about 1/6 of the length.), she warned me to stop. She warned me it would be a waste of time.  I’m stubborn. I pushed on.  I shouldn’t have.

The good news is that once I put in ANOTHER 100 pages, I realized this was a loss cause, and just proceeded to ‘skim’ each chapter.  It still took forever.  And to top it all off, a winner of the Oprah Book Club thingy.  Well, I’ve learned there is never an overwhelming consensus as to what people’s tastes are.  Many liked this.  Many did not. I’m of the latter.

This is one of those introspective stories that takes place out in the country where a family owns a dog farm.  I don’t think I’ve ever read so many boring accounts of dogs doing what dogs do.  Unlike the charming “The Art of Racing in the Rain” (it featured a dog with human thoughts), this one simply plods when the dogs enter the picture.  Oh sure, dogs are lovable, but reading about them walking, scratching, and barking doesn’t necessarily equate to good literature.

To top this off Edgar (the young boy and main character) is mute. Since he can’t speak, it somehow takes the author twice as long to convey Edgar’s thoughts whenever he’s having a ‘conversation’.  We have to read about how he used sign language, points to things, etc. and it just slows up the reading.  I’m not sure why it’s important that Edgar is mute.  Maybe more astute readers will pick it up, but as I said, I gave up about 1/3 of the way through the book.  So there’s stories of unexpected death, a family burdened by too many bills, sickness, and other things, but the whole thing just plodded.

It’s been said that everyone thinks that their own life is pretty interesting. But if you try to sit down and tell someone else (particularly a stranger) about, say, your childhood, you’ll probably bore them to death unless you have a rare interesting life.  This was the problem with this book.  This book told way too much about young Edgar who really lived rather a boring life.   And why did it have to be so long? The book, that is.