Since my last report, I have managed to plow through 8 audiobooks. As always, I have worked hard to stay out of the ruts that I tend to find myself in, and have kept things fairly well mixed and varied. Here they are, with a little something for almost everyone.

First up: The Devil’s Chessboard, David Talbot (2015). The rest of the title of the book is descriptive: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government. I had read virtually no history about the Central Intelligence Agency until I stumbled across this one. It is a fascinating look at the man who was as identified with the C.I.A. in its early history as J. Edgar Hoover is identified with the F.B.I. Dulles, the brother of Eisenhower’s Secretary of State John Foster Dulles (for whom Washington D.C.’s airport is named), is the main subject of this treatment that is not at all flattering. The book is a fascinating look inside multiple Presidential administrations (from FDR to Nixon) as they navigated a world often manipulated by Dulles. The author also presents a convincing case that Lee Harvey Oswald was a dupe used by Dulles (following his ouster) and a rogue faction of Dulles loyalists at the C.I.A. to take the blame for Kennedy’s assassination.

Talbot writes as a man of the political left, and what made the book particularly interesting to me is his outlook from the BDT (before Donald Trump) era. Talbot’s 2015 views of the intelligence community (it is too strong and commits much abuse) and of Presidential unwillingness or inability to rein it in (which he sees as failures) track quite closely to many of the views that are now anathema to those who share Talbot’s politics because they are views common in the current administration. I found it an interesting and thought-provoking read on multiple levels.

The Magician’s Nephew, C. S. Lewis, (1955) & The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, C. S. Lewis (1950). C. S. Lewis wrote a series of 7 books, generally lumped together under “The Chronicles of Narnia”. I had read Tolkein’s “Lord Of The Rings” series, and the Narnia books seemed to me of the same general fantasy genre, only aimed primarily at children, and therefore simpler. Having never read them, I dipped in. (1)

The story is of a parallel fantasy world called Narnia, which is visited by children from modern day England. Lewis is well known for his religious writings, and the Narnia books are full of Christian symbolism and themes. I found both books to be an entertaining fantasy read with all the things we look for in a good, old-fashioned story. They are not as ambitious as Tolkein’s works, but then they are not meant to be. I have the other five books in my Audible library, and perhaps I will go back and try them.

The Bomber Mafia, Malcolm Gladwell (2021). This book came on the recommendation of a friend (DougD who has occasionally commented here) and was quite interesting. It is not the typical story of the development of bomber aircraft as the story about how those aircraft could be most effectively used.

The main arc of the book compares two competing ideas of how aerial bombing should be conducted. One was was the precision aerial bombing as championed by General Haywood Hansell. The idea is that with a high quality bomb sight, relatively few bombs can be dropped with great accuracy. This way, strategic targets are destroyed and other (mainly civilian) areas are left alone. The other idea is to drop as many bombs in as many places as you can, to make the enemy’s life so costly and unbearable that they will give up. This was the idea pushed by General Curtis LeMay. It turns out that because of difficulties with weather and technology, precision bombing was not as effective as its proponents had hoped, with “carpet bombing” taking its place as the war progressed.

One section of the book went into a topic I had not read about previously – the large-scale nighttime firebombing of Japanese cities that occurred late in the war, which led to great losses of civilian lives and property. I have to wonder if the people behind that strategy might have been the ones in the dock at a place like Nuremburg had the war against Japan gone the other way. Gladwell is best known for a podcast (“Revisionist History”) and has taken some arrows for his presentation style, but the book was interesting nonetheless and I am glad that I read it.

All The Lights Above Us, M. B. Henry (2022). Another blogger wrote about some historical fiction she had read, and it occurred to me that I have avoided this genre quite effectively. But I decided to give it a try, and remembered that blogger and historical writer M.B. Henry (whose blog I read and who has been known to comment here occasionally) has published a couple of them. This one is the intertwined stories of five women in Britain, France and Germany during WWII, who are strangers to one another and who deal with the fallout from D-Day in their own situations and their own ways. I found it to be an engaging story (or five of them, actually).

The book reminded me of an idea that has been floating around in my head for quite awhile now – with rare exceptions, male authors write the best male characters while female authors write the best female characters. I found M.B.’s five primary characters to have a depth beyond those in the male-authored books that I have gravitated towards. The five women who are the centers of these stories seemed highly authentic to me, and made the book one that I enjoyed. I must confess that historical fiction is still not a go-to genre for me, though it was far from the hard slog that followed this book.

Candide, Francois Voltaire (1759). I went back to my shelf of classics for this one, in my long-delayed campaign for literary self-improvement. Candide is a work of satire by a French philosopher of The Enlightenment. I guess we could call this a different kind of historical fiction. The title character is a simple fellow who has been taught the optimistic philosophy that everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds. The author, of course, goes on to show the stupidity of our hero’s view, by a nonstop series of catastrophes which befall him, and which finally convince him that this is probably not the best of all possible worlds.

The book was considered subversive in its day, no doubt because of the nonstop derision of tradition, authority and religion – both generally and of the Catholic Church in particular. Like Swift’s book, Gulliver’s Travels, this book is best appreciated by those with a deep knowledge of history and events of the period. I am not among that group, and was happy to reach the end of this volume.

Slow Horses, Mick Herron (2010). This was, without doubt, the high point of this group for me. I was given a paperback of this one by one of my kids, and finally cheated by going with an audio version. This was a thoroughly enjoyable spy novel, but an atypical one. Instead of being about the James Bonds and the Ethan Hunts of the spy world, it is about a collection of British MI-5 agents who have been cast into a purgatory maintained for screwups, drunks, and misfits of various kinds. The title comes from a line early in the book, which describes how there comes a time when the race horses are separated from the slow horses. These misfit spies are the slow horses, who are tasked with busywork, if tasked with anything at all.

This was the first of a series of books, which generated a television series on Apple TV (and which I have not seen). I cannot recommend this book enough. The plot involves one of the slow horses who is assigned to the place they call Slough House for an error he doesn’t believe was his own, and who wants “back in the game”. An unlikely set of circumstances brings this disparate group together for a chance at redemption. In addition to an intricate, well-crafted plot, the writing simply sparkles in the way that only an author with a dry, British wit can manage. If you like a good spy novel, this is a must-read.

My last book for this installment was Great Society, A New History, by Amity Shlaes (2019). I had previously reported on two of Shlaes’ earlier books – an excellent bio of Calvin Coolidge and The Forgotten Man, a fresh look at the Great Depression which questions the conventional wisdom about the effectiveness of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. This book follows up on the latter with an examination of the anti-poverty initiatives that blossomed under Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon.

This book is a great look into the history of that time, including the inner workings of both the Johnson and Nixon presidential administrations. Johnson believed that New Deal-style programs (if they were big enough) could solve any problem. Nixon, on the other hand, acted on a core belief that he could be most effective if he kept others off balance by pursuing unexpected policies. Of course, both of these Presidents had one thing in common – they were both bare-knuckle politicos who were far more interested in electoral successes than in good or effective policy. The book also looks at some other important characters who played roles in this long saga – UAW president Walter Reuther, activist Tom Hayden, and Federal Reserve Chairmen William McChesney Martin and Arthur Burns.

Schlaes thesis is that despite mushrooming Federal agencies, initiatives and (especially) expenditures, the targeted poverty turned out to be a difficult foe, which has remained with us despite (mostly) good intentions and ever-increasing gobs of money being thrown into the effort. And without “solving” the poverty problem, many new problems were created along the way. I was, however, disappointed in an ending that seemed abrupt. It was almost as though the author had waded so far into the swamp of failed policies that despair led her to just throw up her hands and call it done. But then, I suppose there really is no good stopping place when writing about a process with failures and disappointments that have continued to the present day.

Whew – that was a lot, wasn’t it! What a great life I lead that allows me to listen to a steady stream of audiobooks while I work. It sure beats lawyering!

(1) There is evidently a dispute over the order in which the Narnia books should be read. Some prefer reading in an order that is chronological by publication. Others argue for an order that follows the order of the events in the books. Lewis did not intend a series when he wrote the first book, and some later volumes are like “prequels” to Star Wars fans. There is some evidence that Lewis preferred the latter order, so I decided to try this way in which the original book comes second in the order.