D. E. MacIntyre. End of Steel (1973)

     D. E. MacIntyre. End of Steel (1973) A charming memoir, in the form of reminiscences. MacIntyre starts with his childhood in Montreal, but most of the stories are about his early working life as a clerk for the CPR. He worked in northern Quebec, on the Prairies, and on the CPR branch from Toronto to Sudbury (the Mactier division). He’s an unassuming chap, who obviously got on well with people, and would have risen faster had he been older. He left the CPR when he was barely 22, and set up in business; but this book does not tell of his later life. I enjoyed this book, and found a few nuggets, such as the fact that the CPR was replacing the 60lb rail on the main lines with 80lb rail. The lighter rail was reused on branches and sidings. *** (2008)

Herbert Fritz. KDL 11: Kriegsdampflokomotive 11 (1986)

     Herbert Fritz. KDL 11: Kriegsdampflokomotive 11 (1986) My cousin Roger gave me this book because KDL 2821 eventually became ÖBB 699.103. From 1971 to 1982 it was owned by the STLB, and in 1982 was bought by ÖGEG for use on the Steyrtal Lokalbahn’s Grünberg section, which they operate as a museum railway. Fritz has given as complete a history as was possible, considering the number of documents etc that went missing in the aftermath of WW2. A number of drawings and photographs complement his text. It seems he has found just about every extant photo of any interest of this class of narrow gauge engines. A few were rebuilt to standard gauge, and ungainly looking critters they are, as only the frame was widened to accommodate the longer axles. An interesting book, and an essential reference for anyone who might want to build or operate the engines. Maps of the lines that used them would help. **½ (2008)

Peter Wegenstein. Bahn im Bild 96: Die Salzkammergut-Strecke (1996)

      Peter Wegenstein. Bahn im Bild 96: Die Salzkammergut-Strecke (1996) Over 100 pictures cover this line from Stainach-Irdning to Attnang-Puchheim. A couple pages of text provide a brief history, which reveals that the kilometres are numbered from the south, not from the north as I had always assumed. I rode this line a couple dozen times or more when I went to school in Graz: it was the first or last leg of the journey, and I always felt I was home when I climbed aboard the 4-wheel passenger cars standing on Track 2 at Stainach-Irdning. Good photos, although too many of them focus on the locomotives at the expense of the surrounding landscape. Almost all photos are dated, but most were made in the 1980s and 90s. Earlier photos are hard to come by, probably because many of them were lost or confiscated during WW2. My cousin Dieter gave me this book. *** (2008)

Berke Breathed. The Night of the Mary Kay Commandos & Classics of Western Literature (1989 & 1990)

     Berke Breathed. The Night of the Mary Kay Commandos & Classics of Western Literature (1989 & 1990) Opus and his friends have given me many hours of pleasure, both the original strips that I occasionally came across in the newspapers, and these and other collections. Bloom County is a place of naivete and malice, of comfort and pain, of bloody-mindedness and co-operation. Like all great cartoon strips, it both documents and critiques the obsessions of the culture. The strip ran from 1980 to 1989. Apart from names, the politics haven’t changed much. They are merely more extreme, enough so that straight reporting of today’s US politics in the 1980s would have been read as satire.
   More here: Bloom_County ****

Sarah Paretsky. Indemnity Only (1982)

 

      Sarah Paretsky. Indemnity Only (1982) Searching for a missing young woman, V. I Warshawski stumbles onto a murder, and eventually links it to a scheme to use a trust account to deposit fraudulent workmen’s compensation claims. A crooked insurance excusive, a crooked banker, a crooked but naive union boss, a too-good-to-be-true young woman of 14, Chicago’s upper crust and its warts, and other such things mark this book as an adventure romance of the knight errant type. Vic is the knight, Chicago is the murky forest, the crooked executive is the dragon, the mob supplies various monsters, the young women are the princess, and of course there’s the treasure, a man’s soul.
     Nicely done, the book supplies a few hours of more or less innocent entertainment. Another of those books that would make a good TV series, but now original material in the same genre has supplanted adaptations. Pity. **½

James Clavell. The Children’s Story (1963)

     James Clavell. The Children’s Story (1963) A little fable demonstrating how easy it would be to change a whole society by taking over the schools. It’s clearly an anti-communist tract, but if it applies at all, it applies to all schools and societies everywhere, and as such does makes one reflect on how we establish and maintain social controls.
     But Clavell’s notion that a simple change in teachers and curriculum would bring about a change in values is so simplistic it’s not even wrong. It oversimplifies teaching and learning to a mind-boggling extent. Clavell has obviously never been a teacher. It also ignores the subtle but nevertheless powerful effects of culture, which always bend ideologies to a culture’s deepest values, not the other way round. Thus, the totalitarianism implicit in Lenin’s reading of Communism made it palatable to the Russians, who were used to tsarist tyranny, and to the Chinese, who were used to a central government exerting power via familial loyalties translated into hierarchy. * (2008)

H. Beam Piper. Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen (1964)

    H. Beam Piper. Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen (1964) Calvin Morris, a Pennsylvania state trooper, is slipped sideways in space-time, into a medieval version of vaguely Greek “Aryans” who moved east instead of west and ended up on the eastern side of N. America. He of course takes over, what with his superior knowledge of warfare, honed both in history classes and in combat in Korea, etc and so on and so forth. The local Prince not only takes him in, but promotes him, and eventually subjects himself to him! Kalvan also gets the girl, but apart from some comradely joshing (she’s good with a sword, and very, very smart), and a reference to how nice (!) it is to be married to her, there’s no hint of sex.
     Calvin/Kalvan’s predicament attracts the attention of the Paratime Police, who decide to leave him be, and study what happens when a disturbing factor is inserted into a time stream. Academics disguise themselves to blend in and insert themselves into the same “level”. One of them becomes a commander in Kalvan’s army!
      A typical adolescent nerd’s fantasy, IOW. A hero with close to superpowers, attractive to women, a natural-born leader, etc. Fun, and in a couple of places very funny, too. The book reads very much like a novelette that could eventually be expanded to novel length. It has a number of dangling plot lines, and the characters lack depth, but they feel unfinished rather than merely two dimensional. The Paratime motif is not well worked out. Presumably, some of the Level Five people who operate the Paratime Police will be seduced into staying in this primitive but exhilarating culture. There are hints of this, but the loose ends stay loose. The social and political consequences of Kalvan’s arrival feel like sketches towards a more thorough treatment. The locals accept Calvin too easily; there should be more resistance to his reforms and changes, not because people disagree with them, but because they are new. But pulp fiction moves fast.
       Piper takes a good deal of trouble describing the battle formations and developments, which sound like description of real battles. Has he used actual Civil War battles as his models? I don’t know enough to decide. He also tosses in all kinds of tidbits, such as the local word for mother: madh. He clearly despises anything that smacks of theocracy, or domination of state and society by a religion. He likes strong men, and clearly believes that strong men (and women, I suppose) make history, not the other way round.
        The book belongs to the alternative history genre, which since the 1960s has developed into very sophisticated and much more carefully thought out stories. I’ve started reading a couple of these, and find that compared to this swiftly moving pulp fiction, they are boring, with too much attention to making the alternative history academically plausible, and not enough interest in character and plot. Many of them read like the fictions based on games: the rules constrict and constrain, so that the stories feel more like puzzles and calculations than fictions. But I liked this novelette, it’s unassumingly designed to entertain. The hints of deeper themes and nuggets of fact are a bonus, just the kind of thing that feeds a nerd’s yearning for insight.
     This was Piper’s last book. He suicided shortly after finishing it, and before it was published. Pity. **½ (2008)