Book: Legacy by James Michener

We have reviewed some Michener books earlier. See Alaska or Texas for instance. I must say that this is the shortest book he has written! He wrote it later in life, when he was eighty  (I am not insinuating any connection between the last two sentences!) 

The narrator, Norman Starr, cut his teeth in Vietnam and won medals. On his return, he, with his knowledge of Spain (gleaned during Panama duty) is useful in South America and is sent there by the US government. They are trying to prosecute him for his involvement in the Contra affair of Nicaragua. But this is just a scaffolding for the real story. In preparing for his defense, which requires proof that he and his family are true patriots, he remembers his august lineage. 

Originally, his ancestor Jared Starr fought with Washington in the country’s independence battle with the British, but earned the friendship and admiration of Hamilton. Seeing the chaos that ensued after the victory, he helped draft the new constitution of a Federal United States but was killed trying to suppress a rebellion just three weeks prior to the conference. 

He asks his son Simon Starr to take his place in the conference. Like all stories of Michener, this mixes amazing historical facts with fictional characters. For instance, the conference was to determine the form of government that the United States should take after winning its independence. Lots of tidbits there that you probably would not have known. 

For instance, for this viral conference, only eleven of the states even agreed to send delegates. They authorized 77 man in total to come to the Conference in Philadelphia. Only 45 persons were there in any one session and out of those only 41 stayed till the end. Can you believe it? 

It gets better. John Quncy Adams and Thomas Jefferson did not appear there! Benjamin Franklin, who appeared, was so fat and old that he could not walk and had to be carried on a chair attached to poles by ‘eight prisoners taken from the local jail’. He played the role of the senior elder and took no part in the deliberations. 

The New York team consisted of Alexander Hamilton and two others. The other two, scorning the attempts at determining a government stalked out. That left the great Alexander Hamilton without a quorum and a state that has no quorum is ineligible to participate in the debate or vote in the final decision! So Hamilton was functionally crippled by his own team!

As befitting the pre CNN times, the deliberations were conducted in total secrecy. No press was allowed and there was no premature leak of the discussions. 

There was a standoff until the very end between large states like Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Virginia wanted more representation on the basis of their population and small states like Delaware and Rhode Island bitterly opposed.

Finally they chose a bicameral government, with the Senate having equal representation for all states and the Assembly having representation by population – albeit with an initial odd allocation. 

Rhode Island refused to participate in any way and poor New Hampshire could not find enough money to send its delegates to Philadelphia and so they did not come!

This almost did not come to pass as there were divisions among the states. Finally, the author states, ‘In what was arguably the most important vote in the history (of USA) only nine states took part’ and even within it, it was a narrow victory which decided the current form of US government!  And Alexander Hamilton watched helplessly as he could not vote, denied the quorum required by his own team. 

But they declined to do anything about the scourge of the times, slavery. Of the original fifty five who came, eighteen owned slaves. George Washington had slaves. George Mason, who abhorred slavery, owned many. Washington had released ‘some of his slaves’ to freedom to express his support of abolishing slavery. (But not all his slaves). 

The discussions around slavery were equally bizarre. Slavery should be seen purely in an economic context as it is vital for the cotton industry. In fact, this would only help the North to sell their goods to the South and make money. Should slavery be abolished? (No if you want any final vote on the government). Should they at least stop importing fresh slaves? (No, not at all). The only decision taken was to kick the can and ban any act abolishing slavery until 1808 and then review the situation at that time. 

His son, the Judge seems to be a bit of a dullard but also was a Chief Justice who passed some landmark laws to get the United States going in the present course. 

Hugh Starr, the General, is next. Actually during his story there is yet another interesting case. A freed slave, who went to the North (USA) came back to the South voluntarily was immediately claimed by the wife of his past owner as her property. The Supreme Court adjudicated in her favour, The judge gave the shocking verdict that no black person, slave or free, can ever be a citizen and if he goes back to his former abode, he becomes a slave once again, automatically. Slaves are property and should be protected as the property of the owners. And so on. 

He then goes on to talk about the election of an unknown candidate called Lincoln and how Civil War happened. 

As you read on, you realize that the Starr family history is another layer of scaffolding inside the main story of the inquiry. Each generation contributed in some way to the US history. 

Emily Starr, the daughter of the General fought and won woman’s suffrage rights in America, even alienating her outraged family in the process. 

The nephew Richard Starr fought bitterly against President Roosevelt’s ‘communist tendencies’. 

You read through major events in US history from the eyes of the Starr family – This definitely conforms to the pattern Michener has successfully employed elsewhere (For instance, in Texas).

Next is the mother of Norman, Rachel Denham Starr who fought for proper representation of the legislature by population to be fair to the cities. 

The story ends with a  decision that is left to the imagination of the reader. And that, I think, is the right way to end the story. 

Short it may be but brilliant, and a joy to read. 

8/10

== Krishna

Book: Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari

As usual, the arguments are astounding. He talks about history and how people are infinitely better off, having vanquished the main perils of old times, famine, disease and poverty. He qualifies it by saying that individual sections of people and countries still suffer from it but on the aggregate, nowhere even close to the levels suffered in medieval times for example. 

He also talks about how war, famine and disease have largely been conquered in modern times. This was written before the pandemic of 2020 so there is no reference to Covid 19. It would not have changed the argument much, given the response of the world, but leaves out the most virulent pandemic to strike the globe. 

The arguments are all there, in the style we have come to see in both Sapiens and 21 Lessons for the 21 Century. Powerful, supported by facts – look up all those footnotes for reference if you really want to check up – and cogent. It is a pleasure to read. 

Here let us digress a moment : When I looked at the three books (the two mentioned above plus this one), I expected this to be least interesting because, in my mind, this was pure speculation about the far future. However, it turns out that to me as a reader, it did not prove itself that way. 

Sapiens, of course, is still the masterpiece. I would rank this one as the second best because of the subject matter and how he analyzes human progress up to now. The 21 Lessons for the 21 Century brings up the rear. To see why, read those other reviews presented earlier. 

He talks about minds being improved by genetic engineering, or through bionics. Fascinating possibilities are trotted out for you to view and savour. Makes you think in directions you had not imagined so far. This seems to be his speciality in all three books. 

He talks about happiness and how it is fleeting. Every win creates happiness but it palls quickly. So he speculates about inducing continuous happiness through drugs or alterations that do not exist yet. 

He talks about how laws, once learned cease to be effective. When communism started to spread in the west, the elites borrowed ideas from it (employment security, welfare) to ensure that the labourers enjoyed benefits so as not to rebel, even giving rise to labour parties which captured power. 

He then goes back to the past, a period he calls anthropocene, and repeats one idea from his earlier Sapiens. How mankind made several animals, including other erect ape species like Homo Erectus and Neanderthals, extinct. 

He also talks about how humans feel they are superior to the animals and how monotheist religions explicitly give man dominion over animals. He then piles evidence after evidence that animals are sentient. 

Why are religious people so against Darwin’s Evolution but not, say, against the Quantum Theory or The Theory of Relativity which is even more bizarre in their explanations than the simplistic Darwin’s theory of evolution? Because if they are to buy into it, and if man evolved from animals (lesser beings) then they have to admit that humans do not have a soul, and this goes against all of their beliefs in the hereafter, reincarnation and much else. Whereas the theory of relativity simply says that, for example, ‘you can bend space and time’. They nod and say ‘Be my guest, bend away!’

Also amazing is his description of the fictions that are necessary for organized life – he means money, laws, nationality, religion and almost everything else! This idea is repeated in his later book 21 Lessons for the 21 Century which we read and reviewed in reverse order, but still impressive to read again. Also his distinction about what is religious and spiritual is fascinating. (One quote from Zen Buddhism : ‘If you are travelling and meet Buddha in your travels, kill him!’. Why,  you ask? Read the book to find out.)

He goes into more amazing revelations about free will and how it can be induced in mice using electrodes. When he argues that the individual is not ‘in-dividual’ but is an amalgamation of multiple selves in one (at least two – a right brain self and a left brain self) the arguments, even supported by the strong evidence he musters, sound a bit bizarre. But still interesting. 

He goes into some of the arguments that are expanded in his later book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century – the fact that almost all jobs could be automated away by AI technology etc. 

This book goes into speculative future scenarios. The title Homo Deus is a deceptive one, reminiscent of the click baits of the internet algorithms. Rather than speculating about a future, as the title would have us surmise, he talks about a future where humans become obsolete. 

Some of the attributes he gives the future (expected to be ubiquitous) Internet Of Things stretches the realm of possibility. But, I admit that it only does so based on the current level of technology and what the network and algorithms embedded in are capable of, as well as to what purposes they are intended for. However, future technology can have its own momentum and in a sufficiently far future, the speculative predictions of the author could indeed come true. 

It makes us think in a different dimension, and plants ideas in our minds that were never there before. In that alone, this book is immensely interesting. 

8/10

== Krishna

Book: The Island Of The Day Before by Umberto Eco

In the early days of this blog, we have reviewed The Name Of The Rose by the same author. This book feels and reads very different. Let us jump right into the story.

Roberto della Griva was thrown from the deck of the ship Amaryllis and survived by sticking to a plank in the rough seas. He dozed off, near death, and came to near the ship Daphne. He managed to climb aboard with what remained of his strength and revived himself by drinking water that was on Daphne’s deck. 

We learn that he survived his shipwreck by lying on a plank, with no control over the raging sea but to go where it took him. He also is surprised to find that the new ship, Daphne is abandoned with no explanation of why or where the crew went. 

As for backstory, we learn that Roberto was a boy with mischievous behaviour, even spiteful, and attributed all his bad deeds to his nonexistent twin Ferrante who did all the deeds and disappeared so that the blame would fall on Roberto. 

Then the story shifts to Duke of Mantus, Vincenzo II was dying heirless and there was a succession battle raging. They try to convince Vincento to give it to Charles de Gonzaga the duke of Nevers. He is married to a niece of Vincenzo to get this ‘official’. Nevers is French now owning an Italian province. Infuriated, the Spanish duke besieged the town of Casale, hoping to get Mantus assigned to the Spanish. 

After a confusing melee the French capture many towns. The story wanders a lot, with him meeting a priest who does not believe in God and another priest who has created a ridiculous looking ‘machine’ which is really a catalog of everything on earth – controlled by dials with letters on them. Sounds ridiculous. 

He ruminates in the ship some more and the story shifts back and forth between the past – the siege of Calais – and the present which is his life in an abandoned ship. 

He is in love with a lady whom he has only seen through a window. (Once when an older person was removing lice from her blond hair). He is deeply in love and his priestly friend dictates a love letter with such ardor that he trembles and asks him to give it to the lady. When Roberto really meets her next, he is overcome with shyness and misses the opportunity. 

The story keeps alternating between the Calais politics and the ship life. The former with French siege, Spanish resistance and finally peace and liberation with practically no major events happening and the latter with his thoughts and spying of the island that seems unreachable, again with nothing happening. 

You start getting bored with nonevents, even though some of the descriptions are interesting. You cannot have nice language about nothing, which is what the book seems to be all about. 

He talks of Paris where Roberto had yet another infatuation with yet another girl and waxed eloquent (and somewhat stupid) about love in a party. 

He is then (possibly) mistaken for another, arrested and Cardinal Richelieu’s successor sends him on an espionage mission to learn the secrets of how longitude is calculated – they have a way of calculating this that no one else has and it is Roberto’s mission to get as much information as possible. He goes as a prisoner, watched by his companions on the same ship. 

Why was he suspected? What was he suspected of to be blackmailed? It is all confusing and left unsaid. 

Umberto seems to take us into too many diversionary paths. A story that is already confusing enough with the twin stories of his exploration in a ship where he knows there is at least one more unseen stowaway and his past adventures is confusing enough without all these diversions that come and go; for instance the priest who likes to say shocking, almost blasphemous things is suddenly killed in the siege and is spoken of no more. What was he doing in the story in the first place? 

It turns out that the secret of longitude is an absurd theory that a dog that is being deliberately kept wounded in the doctor’s quarters will ‘feel’ the sword being put in fire in England – as the dog’s blood has been previously rubbed on it before it left England and thus they can synchronize the time between England and wherever they were and therefore figure out the longitude of the place. Go figure. 

The story catches up with the present time now because right after that, the ship got wrecked and Roberto escaped from the wreck of Amaryllis and reached Daphne. 

The secret intruder in Roberto’s ship turns out to be a priest who had originally come from the ship in search of a similar goal. However, the crew shunned the priest because they thought he had the plague. They evacuated with tools and wood and supplies to the island, not realizing that there were savages who came in the night, slaughtered the group to a man and ate them. When they tried to come to investigate the ship, one cannon shot from the priest convinced them that this is a powerful monster. They ran back to the island and disappeared, after offering the monster (from afar, on the island) flowers and bowing to it to show that they seek peace. 

There is another absurd theory of trying to mix science with theology when the priest explains where the water that drowned the entire world during Noah’s flood (which submerged the tallest mountain for one hundred and forty days) came from. Scientifically absurd but interesting thought process. One gets the impression that Umberto is mocking religiosity, having met the Catholic priest earlier who blasphemes and this priest trying hard to explain where so much water to drown the world came from and where it disappeared to one hundred and forty days later, leaving the world as we find it today.

The story is full of weird theories and contraptions that make no sense. Anyway, the priest and Roberto engage in constructing a pan with oil in which the priest sits on a chair to look at the stars ‘as the oil keeps the level always stable’ so that they can determine latitude calculations. Despite the hilarious failure of the experiment, this thing sounds wrongheaded or maybe it is I who cannot appreciate the intricacies of this storytelling. 

There is a whole lot of blather about why earth is the geocentric locus of the universe and why Galileo and others were wrong – as a conversation between Roberto and the priest and more blather about universe being a pentagon on whose each side crazy things like pyramids are assembled. I don’t see the point of any of these to the story or even the advancement of ideas so was fairly switched off during the pages and pages of conversation with apparently no point. 

There are comedic moments where Roberto waits for the priest who went underwater to emerge on the island. Since the island is on the other side of the International Date Line – and hence the book’s title of The Island Of The Day Before – he knows that it is ‘yesterday’ there and when the priest does not come out at all, he assumes that he needs to wait a day because it will be today on that island that is visible from here only tomorrow. 

If it is intended as a humorous book, which I suspect it partly is, the humour does not stand out and so you are confused as to what the point of all the conversations are.

Now, after the priest’s ‘exit’ he is obsessed with going to the island to site the rate ‘orange dove’ that the man spoke of. 

There is a whole pile on dove, from various ancient writings from various places. All in support of Roberto now wanting to see the exotic Orange Dove. Weird things happen. First Roberto is determined to learn swimming by himself and reach the island. When that fails, he wants to write a story about his rival in love Ferrante, imagining his life in Spain while he is here, stranded aboard the Daphne. 

Ferrante poses as Roberto and wins the heart and the body of the Lady, tormenting Roberto (who is writing the story!). He goes too far and is thrown into prison being mistaken for Roberto. (They look alike as Ferranto is Roberto’s brother). 

He makes up a story where Roberto imagines that Ferranto is rescued by the lady and they fo off in a boat to a chain of islands – each more weird than the others in terms of inhabitants – a crazy imagination from the author – and make incessant love in all of them. 

Purpose, you ask? Who knows? Perhaps only the author. 

Sometimes his chatter is absolutely meaningless. Roberto imagines all materials – for instance a gold piece that can be drawn like a thread. Perhaps insects can draw it further into thinner and thinner threads; the insects on those insects can draw these into even more refined threads, at the subatomic level, ultimately into nothingness and a void. Does any of these make sense to any of you even in a story? 

Or, this gem : I think but my body is made of parts, hands, legs etc and blood. Does the blood think of itself as “I”? All beings think to varied levels, animals less and plants even less. Even stones may think. Perhaps all they can think is “I stone, I stone, I stone”. Or maybe they cannot think of themselves as I so they think “stone stone stone”.

Yeah, right! What kind of drivel is this? It goes on and on, with Roberto trying ‘to be a stone’ and rolling down the slopes. He then in his story, kills Ferrante and sends him to an afterlife of rotting flesh and exposed innards – a life of eternity in an island with other dead people. 

The book then ends in a bizarre note with the fiction that Roberto created and the real fact of his existence aboard the stranded Dahphe merging (in his mind) to one fluid story. The ending is hinted at but left to the imagination of the reader. 

I would have normally said that this is all nonsense with no purpose, but the prose, the thinking, the explanations grow on you as you read the book (even though they all remain nonsensical to the end) and you begin to think that you do not mind reading it so much. You will remember the story for a while because of the strangeness of it. 

But nowhere near his best work, The Name Of The Rose. 

5/10

= = Krishna