Bob R. Bogle (Author of Frank Herbert)

Bob R Bogle rated a book it was amazing Notes for Joyce: Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by Don Gifford	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Beginning a couple weeks ago I’ve had occasion to briefly read small bits of a small and portable book here and there, so I picked one that met that description off the shelf and started carting it along with me. It was a first paperback edition of D ...more
Sep 08, 2024 09:39AM · like · see review
Bob R Bogle rated a book liked it The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
In the late 1970s I was in the vanguard of high school nerds who read The Lord of the Rings and such forbidden material as science fiction and fantasy. In the conservative little town where I lived, readers of genera fiction were pariahs. None of us ...more
Aug 09, 2024 01:20PM · like · see review
Bob R Bogle rated a book it was ok The Making of a Fly: The Genetics of Animal Design by Peter A. Lawrence	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
I'd heard this book praised on a certain science podcast, and I hoped it would prove to be one of those classics of biological literature written for the layman, on the order of James D Watson's The Double Helix, or Hans Zinsser's Rats, Lice, and His ...more
Aug 09, 2024 08:35AM · like · see review
Bob R Bogle rated a book really liked it The First World War by John Keegan	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
I picked up a copy of John Keegan's 1998 book a few years ago and finally got around to pulling it down off the shelf. I'd watched some general video series on WWI in the past but otherwise I knew little about the subject. Now, sometimes when I innoc ...more
Jul 21, 2024 02:35PM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of The First World War by John Keegan. Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — The First World War by John Keegan
Bob R Bogle rated a book it was ok Cellular and Molecular Immunology by Abul K. Abbas	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
In 1994 I bought my copy of the first edition of Abul K Abbas et al.'s Cellular and Molecular Immunology, copyrighted three years earlier. This reference text had proved invaluable to me during my work in histocompatibility in support of tissue trans ...more
Jul 21, 2024 01:17PM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Cellular and Molecular Immunology by Abul K. Abbas. Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Cellular and Molecular Immunology by Abul K. Abbas
Bob R Bogle and 5 other people liked engin's review of Cellular and Molecular Immunology: "this book is my villain origin story."
Jul 21, 2024 01:15PM · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Cellular and Molecular Immunology by Abul K. Abbas. Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Cellular and Molecular Immunology by Abul K. Abbas
Bob R Bogle rated a book it was amazing Mexico under Fire, Being the Diary of Samuel Ryan Curtis, 3rd Ohio Volunteer Regiment, during the American Military Occupation of Northern Mexico, 1846–1847 by Joseph E. Chance	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
From my own family connections (huzzah, 9th Iowa), I'm a fan of Samuel Ryan Curtis from his Civil War service at Pea Ridge and beyond, and so I was eager to read Joseph E Chance's 1994 volume Mexico Under Fire, in which Chance edits and annotates the ...more
Mar 25, 2024 07:24PM · like · see review
Bob R Bogle rated a book it was ok Work in Progress: Joyce Centenary Essays by Richard F. Peterson	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
In 1983, the hundredth anniversary of the birth of James Joyce, the Southern Illinois University Press published a slender volume (154 pages) entitled Work in Progress: Joyce Centenary Essays, edited by Richard F Peterson, Alan M Cohn and Edmund L Ep ...more
Mar 08, 2024 11:04AM · like · see review
Bob R Bogle rated a book it was amazing Epic Geography: James Joyce's Ulysses (Princeton Legacy Library) by Michael A. Seidel	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
I have a lot of books about, and related to, James Joyce and his works. Having recognized some time ago that my ability to distinguish among the Joycean books that I'd read was becoming blurred, I deemed it judicious to begin keeping notes on the book ...more
Jan 23, 2024 01:03PM · like · see review
Bob R Bogle rated a book really liked it To the Gates of Richmond: The Peninsula Campaign by Stephen W. Sears	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
In October 2018 I made a tour of the Virginia Peninsula between the York and James Rivers to visit the battlefield sites related to George McClellan's 1862 campaign through the region. I was already familiar with the stories and characters involved i ...more
Jan 19, 2024 08:29AM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of To the Gates of Richmond by Stephen W. Sears. Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — To the Gates of Richmond by Stephen W. Sears

Bob R Bogle rated a book it was amazing

Notes for Joyce: Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
by Don Gifford

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Beginning a couple weeks ago I’ve had occasion to briefly read small bits of a small and portable book here and there, so I picked one that met that description off the shelf and started carting it along with me. It was a first paperback edition of D Beginning a couple weeks ago I’ve had occasion to briefly read small bits of a small and portable book here and there, so I picked one that met that description off the shelf and started carting it along with me. It was a first paperback edition of Don Gifford and Robert Seidman’s 1967 classic Notes for Joyce. Sometimes I’ll save the receipt in a book so later I’ll know when I obtained it. In this case the book had been on my shelf since I purchased it at Dunaway Books in St Louis on Halloween 2017.

By irrelevant coincidence, the publication date of my last novel was also on Halloween, exactly four years after that purchase date, and I was busy working on early revisions to that text while I was living in Missouri. More on that in a moment.

Now I’ve always had a good memory: since early childhood I’ve engaged in deliberately committing to memory small, seemingly irrelevant details from life and experience, and rehearsing them over and over until they became fixed. It’s a habit that anyone can practice, I think, but few prefer to do so. It’s a hard enough burden to deal every day with the here-and-now. It’s also surprisingly easy to recover one’s past and to organize one’s recovered memories in chronological order. A great place to start is with old photographs, for example, which provoke a lot of auxiliary and lateral memories. The more of your biography you recover and order, first decade by decade, then year by year, the easier it becomes to add more detail in its proper place and time. Of course it’s also the case that we don’t have true memories but only reconstructions that our organic brains have abstracted into what we call memories, sifted and streamlined and cross-indexed, so the earliest versions of how events occurred are always to be much preferred to later retellings of events. All of this is unavoidably stained by personal bias, of course. And then there’s the whole Rashomon effect by which every observer of any given event experiences it from a unique perspective and in irreconcilable ways. Consideration of such matters causes prudent persons to bracket presumably objective observations within fitting bars of uncertainty. All of which is prelude to saying that, while I don’t know how universal the experience is, I find that as I grow older my relationship to ideas about historical truths, or to what words like “fact” may mean, but also to what they certainly do not mean, keeps changing. For some of us, the scales fall steadily from our eyes as we age, and we take an ever harder, more critical look at the lives lived by those around us who dwell in a world which has become a cartoon version of an earlier cartoon version of an earlier cartoon version of an earlier . . . etc.

Lately I’ve found myself wondering what, if anything, all this life experience means, of taking on culturally acquired “facts” from admittedly random sips from the firehose of world events unfolding, and assembling that hodgepodge into a more-or-less jumbled yet cross-referenced assemblage of memories which determines how we confront the world, and what expectations we form about the world, and how those expectations are so often dashed. That is to say, if we thinking entities are mostly composed of randomly processed exposures to the memes the world feeds us, then what is the point here? Aren’t we all designed by our biological heredity to be propaganda-fed taping and playback systems, programmed to jabber responses in response to certain stimuli based on what books we’ve read and what movies we’ve seen and what music we’ve listened to? One might conclude then that it matters a good deal which books we read, which movies we watch, and which music we listen to, but if that’s true, aren’t we really talking about seeking out a certain brand of purity in our echo chambers of choice?

Folks, what is it we’re doing with our lives? Or what ought we be doing? Or does the word “ought” betray fundamental misunderstanding? Or do those questions have any real meaning in a global, multidimensional-metacartoon landscape that has left Vonnegut and Orwell looking like rank amateurs in the soup well over their heads?

I built up a life over long decades from chaotically assimilated memes plundered from the cultural scrapheap as I lived it. In my novel I sought to document and preserve as many of those memes as I could, and I think the result may inspire some measure of fond recognition by those readers of a certain generation who passed through the same eras of cultural fruitfulness and terror and hostility and greed and noise. Already, however, those lived experiences are opaque to new generations. That doesn't lessen the validity, or the veracity, with which they inflate the text. I lose patience with least-common-denominator fiction which aims for universal understanding as if human lives are orderly start-to-finish affairs. We will always have to struggle to make sense of the forgotten memes which comprised the lives of earlier generations, and I want to encounter those bewildering puzzles in stories and novels. There is great joy in mining a story for its forgotten memes and trying to recover their native brilliance: that is one way of immersing one’s self more fully in the lapping tides of an ever receding past that just-the-“facts”-ma’am journalism can never do.

Which, by a commodious vicus of recirculation, brings me at last back to Notes for Joyce.

This is the first compilation of annotations by Giffford and Seidman, in this case of James Joyce’s books Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Not always exciting or epiphanic, nevertheless it is, of course, brilliant, maybe even necessary. The authors lay out for us the memes informing Joyce’s early books written before the Great War. Being very familiar with both books I did not need to read them side by side with Gifford and Seidman, but rather I read Notes for Joyce straight through by itself, start to finish. I admit I never before appreciated the full imprisoning effect of turn of the century Irish Catholicism before delving into page after page of Notes for Joyce. Also, although I’d long since been bemused by those who deny seeing politics in Joyce, Gifford and Seidman expose how his texts are absolutely slathered with and drip the enduring impacts of centuries of political intrigues. Folks, it is precisely for these reasons that Joyce left Ireland corporeally but remained ineluctably bound to it psychically for all his short life.

It is difficult for us today to grasp how Dubliners in particular could have been so feared as a literary property by publishers before it finally emerged into the light of day. A note about the virulent public reaction to the first performance of Yeats’ The Countess Kathleen in1899 at the Irish Literary Theatre (pp 174-5) is illuminating in this regard. The mimetic artistic tradition demanded only a certain kind of mirror to be held up to nature: a mirror which reflected an approved and disinfected storyline of history and current events (which reverberates with disturbing familiarity in our own time). The paralytic divide separating Dublin as Joyce lived it from a fanciful, mythic Dublin others insisted on seeing in artistic portrayals doomed Joyce’s book to a problematical gestation, and probably informs Stephen Dedalus’ famous recasting of Oscar Wilde (ah, another source meme) in Ulysses: “It is a symbol of Irish art. The cracked lookingglass of a servant.”

It is the evolution of the psyche of Stephen Dedalus, from very young child to very young adult, that is so strikingly depicted in A Portrait, and already I’ve made a case that this kind of evolution is one of taking on board and trying to make sense of a steady stream of randomly accumulated cultural memes. It is the intersection of the innate properties of Stephen’s mind with these externally originating memes which flowers into a remarkable young man indeed. In the novel the greatest intellectual leap occurs between the last two chapters as Stephen is approaching adulthood, and we can (some of us anyway) think back and remember that our own mental development was not a steady, arithmetic process but a geometric one. It’s unsurprising, then, that the greatest revelation I took from Notes for Joyce involves this final chapter of A Portrait. Having read A Portrait many times, I was still unaware of the depth of Stephen’s literary erudition as unpeeled by Gifford and Seidman: if nothing more, I will probably want to go back and read the last chapter of A Portrait side by side with this part of Notes for Joyce. A Portrait anticipates the subtlety of both the Stephen of Ulysses and of Joyce as a writer at this stage more fully than I had previously recognized.

So yes: if you already appreciate Gifford and Seidman’s masterwork Ulysses Annotated but you don’t have Notes for Joyce, you need to correct that omission. ...more

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The Silmarillion
by J.R.R. Tolkien

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In the late 1970s I was in the vanguard of high school nerds who read The Lord of the Rings and such forbidden material as science fiction and fantasy. In the conservative little town where I lived, readers of genera fiction were pariahs. None of us In the late 1970s I was in the vanguard of high school nerds who read The Lord of the Rings and such forbidden material as science fiction and fantasy. In the conservative little town where I lived, readers of genera fiction were pariahs. None of us could have anticipated the last few decades in our time, when big-budget science fiction movies are a staple celebrated by the masses. The bigger difference today is how few high school students appear to read books at all.

I bought a copy of The Silmarillion a year or so after it was published in 1977, and I think I was first able to work my way through it in about 1980. It's hard going. I think I re-read some or all of it again a few years later. I read The Lord of the Rings several times many years ago and listened to various audio performances a number of times, and watched the Peter Jackson movies far, far more times, but I'm far from being a Tolkien scholar. I always preferred science fiction, which was more plausible (see below). But a few months ago, when I had an opportunity to read a new (or old) book, I fondly reached for The Silmarillion, which I probably hadn't touched in, maybe, 20 or 30 years.

Already familiar with what I was getting myself into, I must say that this time around I was impressed, and a little surprised, with how coherent and harmonious the various tales which the book contains are in truth. Christopher Tolkien is to be congratulated for this achievement, regardless of the difficulties which the text presents to the reader. It's generally accepted now that these tales are foundational to understanding all of Tolkien's corpus, and easy or hard, The Silmarillion is a mountain which any fan or student of Tolkien must climb, even though it's also true that JRR Tolkien himself almost certainly (certainly) would never have authorized the book to be published. I'm most struck by the darkness of the story of Túrin Turambar, as it seems so out of step with the kind of story which Tolkien otherwise most often preferred: those in which light triumphs over darkness. I'm especially curious about the origins of this story, but as I said, I'm no Tolkien scholar. Still, several more volumes of Christopher Tolkien's contributions remain unread on my shelf, and maybe eventually I'll learn more.

Recently I've become aware of controversy concerning the literary credentials due JRR Tolkien according to those in the literary Establishment, and I'd like to address a few words to that dissonance. Specifically, it's said that those who refer to themselves as "the literati" in general reject Tolkien and what is referred to as "high fantasy" wholesale. Although jealousy is implied to be a cause of the conflict, inasmuch as The Lord of the Rings continues to enjoy broad appeal and to be a smashing success among the, er, "unwashed" book-buying public, it seems to me more probable that the root cause of the conflict is the nature of fantasy-writing itself. While the intelligentsia prize most literary heroes possessed of depth of character who confront the problems of a plausible world, high fantasy tends to be most concerned with intricately detailed worldbuilding and heroes who confront the problems of implausible worlds. The presence of fanciful races (Hobbits, Elves, Dwarves, monsters, etc.) are intrinsically fanciful and so are implausible. (Science fiction presumably bivouacs between these poles, as its most compelling works involve intricately detailed worldbuilding that produces presumably plausible worlds.) Another problem with Tolkien, or so I imagine the literati might argue, is the brooding presence of Fate, or a kind of constitutional Destiny, controlling all drama in the world. Surely WWI, if nothing else, annihilated any lingering reliance on a higher power guiding our sad world through its fits and pangs. Belief in, or reliance on, such antebellum belief structures absolves us of responsibility for the world we create, through our deeds and, more often, by our misdeeds, heedless of any but the most immediate consequences, usually measured in dollars. Doubtless it's startling to some that a WWI veteran, as Tolkien was, could have emerged from that carnage with such an antiquated belief system intact. It smacks, in a deeply psychological way, of the very escapist nature with which fantasy is often pejoratively branded. More importantly, an abiding sense of moral predestiny necessarily causes damage to the story-production engine which drives a writer of fiction. If the very nature of the universe conspires to inevitably overthrow Dark Lords, properly dressed in the mantles of those ultimate deus ex machinas, the Ainur of the Far West, the writer's task becomes easier to bear: create a depressing, disastrous landscape and send in the godly beings to restore order. Indeed, it could be argued that the rejection of Destiny is central to the project of the Lost Generation and all who came after. Few of today's politicians, however, embrace that notion that we've moved beyond primordial Good versus Evil, as doing so might require them to fulfill roles as stewards of the world rather than as both auctioneers and profiteers of dwindling resources.

Some readers possess a brand of monomaniacal fervor concerning the intricate details of their preferred texts: Tolkien, Joyce, Melville in Moby Dick, Frank Herbert's Dune universe, and so forth. I am attracted to such complex and multilayered texts, and probably that's what has appealed to me most about Tolkien. Still, I must admit that in my recent reading of The Silmarillion my mind wandered now and again, or maybe more than that, and the reason was because of the implausible world problem I mentioned before. I mean, I'm deeply vested in reading about and learning about history and science, and when I'm reading about Elves and imaginary worlds where all the rivers run north to south and the mountain chains show no evidence of underlying geophysical processes but only a need to fit the story being told, well, I have to ask myself: why am I bothering with this when I could be reading about something with a firmer connection to the real world? Even mainstream fiction takes place in a stand-in for the real world, or at least for a plausibly believable world. An intricate history is probably necessary for compelling fantasy, but is it sufficient? Or rather, can fantasy ever be made sufficient to stand on its own as creditable literature?

I'm not going to answer these questions, which many have already debated. I've already explained why my attention wandered while reading this book. This re-read I found to be better than I remembered, though not so potent to keep me spellbound. And maybe too that's partly because of the different seasons in life when I've come to Tolkien. ...more

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The Making of a Fly by Peter A. Lawrence

The Making of a Fly: The Genetics of Animal Design
by Peter A. Lawrence

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I'd heard this book praised on a certain science podcast, and I hoped it would prove to be one of those classics of biological literature written for the layman, on the order of James D Watson's The Double Helix, or Hans Zinsser's Rats, Lice, and His I'd heard this book praised on a certain science podcast, and I hoped it would prove to be one of those classics of biological literature written for the layman, on the order of James D Watson's The Double Helix, or Hans Zinsser's Rats, Lice, and History. Peter A Lawrence's 1992 book The Making of a Fly: The Genetics of Animal Design, purports to be something of an overview of what we'd learned about the developmental embryology of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster by the time of its publication. Having myself just finished reading a very complicated book about immunology, I was eager to zoom out on broader-scale issues in biology, which I expected to come as a relief.

Near the end (p195) of his book, Lawrence acknowledges that "embryologists and geneticists never used to see eye to eye," but he might better contrast the points of view of embryologists and molecular biologists. All these many schools of understanding have changed radically over the last many decades, with ever-increasing emphasis on molecular biology. The concern of the developmental biologist has been to try to account for the emergence of symmetry and patterns in a developing embryo, which might then suggest the emergence of asymmetric yet reproducible organ systems: consider, for example, the external symmetry of the human body in stark contrast to some (but not all) of the arrangement of internal structures. But traditionally developmental biologists have focused more (but not exclusively!) on metaphor than on mechanism, as Lawrence very much does in his book. One problem with The Making of a Fly is that such thinking now seems not simply out of fashion, as Lawrence asserts, but positively out of date. Except as a history of a relatively small group of investigators, the value of the book seems prohibitively and narrowly restricted indeed. At issue is not changing fads in science as Lawrence insists (although that is a true enough phenomenon too seldom acknowledged), but that teasing out molecular mechanisms now lies at the heart of biological science: this is the necessary scale at which organismic biology must be explored, no matter how difficult that makes laboratory experimentation. The metaphors cry out for molecular models featuring signaling pathways and genetic control systems, but this knowledge generally (but not entirely!) postdates Lawrence's story, and its absence here leaves a hollow space at the book's core. A distinctive spurning of molecular science prevails. In the end, without precise mechanisms, the models and metaphors around which Lawrence's whole book revolves tend to collapse into the naïve speculations of an earlier age.

Another important shortcoming of this book is its structure. Lawrence is aware of this, telling us in the preface of the "need to understand other things and these cannot always have been described previously." I certainly learned about this when tangled up in the aforementioned immunology book, and I was willing to accept this kind of approach in an admittedly technical book. Lawrence concluded: "By keeping it short, I hope the reader will be able to soldier through it without giving up." But the true problem is not the one Lawrence mentions: the true problem is that he has forgone any pretense of effort at creating a coherent, linear narrative so that the reader might acquire useful information and vocabulary that build steadily and lead to increasing understanding as he or she proceeds. Conveying meaning is perhaps the most critical job of any author. How easy, and at what reward, it would have been for Lawrence to have made the effort to provide definitions for complicated vocabulary as it first appeared. This is no book for the layman, but who is it for? It is for, I conclude, that relatively small group of investigators who had taken the same journey with Lawrence, and who already understood the vocabulary and concepts. Lawrence concerned himself very little with any helpful elucidation for the rest of us.

Also, when I took embryology in college, we spent a lot more time on the structured narrative that carried us from zygote to adult. Fruit flies pass from egg to larva to pupa to adult, and almost all of Lawrence's book is set in the egg, with a little in the early larva. There is no mention of pupation. Strange choices, given the book's title.

On another level, for various reasons, including the cloying scent of faddiness, I've been growing increasingly skeptical of our generally accepted conception of stem cell biology with its branching lineages of differentiation progressing forward in one direction. It seems to me that problems of regenerative biology and the relatively recent development of induced pluripotent stem cells ought to be causing more scientists to question the predominating stem cell dogma. Reading certain parts of this book reinforced some of my doubts. In a nutshell, regenerative organisms seem to survive quite nicely without adhering to the one-way stem cell catechism.

The Making of a Fly is perhaps best considered as a portrait of the mind of a certain kind of scientist who is, alas, not very proficient at conveying his knowledge and insights beyond a small cortège of peers. ...more

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The First World War
by John Keegan

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I picked up a copy of John Keegan's 1998 book a few years ago and finally got around to pulling it down off the shelf. I'd watched some general video series on WWI in the past but otherwise I knew little about the subject. Now, sometimes when I innoc I picked up a copy of John Keegan's 1998 book a few years ago and finally got around to pulling it down off the shelf. I'd watched some general video series on WWI in the past but otherwise I knew little about the subject. Now, sometimes when I innocently enough dip down into a topic like this one, I end up going all-in. So it's been with WWI. Besides Keegan's book I've also listened to some ridiculously extensive podcasts, I've dug relentlessly into maps, I've watched many more video series, etc., and so it's a little big of a challenge for me at this point to remember specifically what I've absorbed from Keegan and what has come to me from other sources. At least with the book close at hand I can skim the table of contents and flip through the pages for immediate reminders. So here goes.

I'm going to start by saying something that everyone knows but which has only truly been driven home to me in the last few months, which is that the Great War was godawful. I've spent an awful lot of time learning about the American Civil War in which you have a lot of campaigns across vast swaths of country, with armies led by colorful commanders, love 'em or hate 'em. Of course you have none of this epic composition in the Great War: only death, death, death, and mutilation. There are no heroes or villains, there is next to no drama, and it's all useless and depressing as hell. Things I've learned in the last few months have made ideas like Modernism and the Lost Generation far, far more meaningful to me. I now have some proper context. WWII also makes a lot more sense to me given my now expanded context of the Great War, needless to say. It seems there are people out there who spend their professional lives, or even personal lives, thinking and re-thinking the Great War. Sounds infinitely dreadful to me.

Anyway, I gather that some Great War aficionados are none too keen on Keegan. But Keegan is the first (and very likely last) book I've read on the war and I can't compare it to other books. For the most part it seemed pretty good to me, given that it's a short, general history. The maps are probably about as good as can be expected. There were two times when I was not satisfied. In the chapter "The War Beyond the Western Front" I could not always follow or imagine the conflicts being described in the East, but then again, the Great War was huge, and Keegan was writing a book of a certain length, and choices have to be made. In a similar vein, the last chapter, "America and Armageddon," was very, very rushed, but certainly it was severely compressed for the same reason: most of the space in the book is reserved for more famous events earlier on the Western Front. I get it. Still, the end was very hotfooted.

I am not, and have no desire to be, anything close to an expert on the Great War. Did I mention that it is godawful, depressing reading? Still, I'm glad I read Keegan, and that I now know enough about the horror to not spend a lot of time revisiting it in the future. ...more

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Cellular and Molecular Immunology
by Abul K. Abbas

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In 1994 I bought my copy of the first edition of Abul K Abbas et al.'s Cellular and Molecular Immunology, copyrighted three years earlier. This reference text had proved invaluable to me during my work in histocompatibility in support of tissue trans In 1994 I bought my copy of the first edition of Abul K Abbas et al.'s Cellular and Molecular Immunology, copyrighted three years earlier. This reference text had proved invaluable to me during my work in histocompatibility in support of tissue transplantation. But a great deal of advancement in cellular and molecular biology has happened since those earlier times. The major impetus for the enormous expansion of our knowledge was work on HIV, followed by the Human Genome Project and other associated omics studies, development of next generation sequencing, in our improved understanding of oncological processes, and in the still nascent field of epigenetics. My fond memories of the first edition therefore made me very eager to read the 10th edition of 2022 and to see how far we've come.

A common trope frequently repeated about the Human Genome Project is that while we finally found a parts list of how to make a human, it reveals next to nothing about how those pieces are assembled and work together in health and disease. I submit this problem is the Mount Everest confronting all biologists at this stage of the scientific endeavor. Most scientists, it seems to me, are very narrowly focused on their own intensely complex projects and scarcely have time to look up and see the harrowing bigger picture. This is not a bad thing: at this point in science very close scrutiny paid to all the moving parts is vital. But one consequence is that it becomes a serious challenge to discriminate between the near-trivial minutiae and more significant insights. We accordingly get fact-crammed books that are overloaded with both kinds of insights (doubtless more that's near-trivial, far less that's significantly insightful), and only with time will we be able to more fittingly winnow the wheat from the chaff. This is all probably an unavoidable outcome of the dispersive time in which we are living. It may be that artificial intelligence will be able to distill out myopic human biases and lead us out of this prevailing chaotic wilderness. For now though we must work with what we have.

Biologists are notoriously bad at coining useful terminology, having little or no sense of the importance of syntax or etymology. Whether consciously or no (and usually no), we rely on context all the time to infer meaning in conversation or in text, and the source of context is often related to either how the words are assembled in sequence (syntax) or in what other, more familiar words they remind us of (etymology). Biologists ignore such niceties and give important concepts sterile names like NF-κB, TLR, Th1, Th2, Th17, Tfh, CD16a (also known as FcγRIIIA), ADCC, CD247 (also known as TCR ζ chain), c-KIT ligand, TSLP, interferon-λs (also known as type III IFNs), and so on ad nauseam. This jargon is not, as is sometimes claimed, invented to conceal meaning from the layman, but has a more prosaic and all too human source: egotism. Names given by original sources tend to stick, even when the original assumed meaning of a name is later proved either wrong or a minor feature of a much broader physiological activity. That is to say, even if a covert etymology is present, it is often enough misleading. Toll was originally named for a gene involved in fruit fly development. Mammalian homologs to the Toll protein, which play a central and vital role in innate defense against viral invaders, thus became Toll-like receptors, or TLR, second in my list above: a role far more important than their relatively obscure original mention in fruit fly ontogeny. So it goes.

We can't blame Abbas et al. for the syntax- and etymology-free jargon with which the 10th edition is copiously littered, but this philological junkyard necessarily prejudices this book, and others like it, against comprehension by mere mortals. One simply cannot hold in one's mind all the diverse and unsystematic assemblages of molecular structures, molecular families, main cellular expression tissues or cells, and known or proposed functions of 369 or so cell markers distinguished only by the letters CD followed by a number, for example. The same kind of problem exists with interleukins, interferons, cytokines, etc. On the other hand, we can blame Abbas et al. for other shortcomings unique to this volume, which unnecessarily interfere with understanding. Unfortunately, the 10th edition is painfully, annoyingly, and irritatingly repetitive: in style, it is far from user-friendly. In the preface this repetition was presented as a feature, but don't be fooled: it's a bug. But even the repetition is nowhere near as annoying, irritating and positively infuriating as the recurrent tic of inserting a parenthetical "(described later)" on every second or third page of the text, particularly when what is to be "(described later)" crops up, more often than not, a few hundred pages further on, by which time you've encountered so many "(described laters)" that you've given up on trying to keep track of them all. This is sloppy writing in open rebellion against the usual goal of an author's attempt to communicate with his reader, who therefore only wants to fling the book against the far wall with every new iteration of "(described later)". This sin is so frequent in the text that if we take Abbas et al. literally, as we expect to do in nonfiction, then we cannot fully understand any of the book until we've read absolutely all of it and, presumably, have taken the relevance and meaning of all those infernal "(described laters)" onboard. Gah! Awful.

I come from a background in which I think immunology is about the coolest thing ever. A good immunology text ought to convey the majesty, almost the magical wonder, of the human immune system. Unfortunately, the 10th edition does the opposite of that. I read this book cover to cover and found it unbearably repetitive, with dull, tedious writing. The effect was often soporific. My guess is that after 10 editions of adding layer upon layer to the original skeleton, it's time to rethink the project in its entirety, scrap the old model and start from scratch. I'd also add that one of the things I loved about the 1st edition was the stylized line-drawing graphics: it was always easy to immediately recognize which cell types were involved in various intercellular interactions. The fancy, colored graphics now in use are far worse and are not immediately recognizable, again interfering with comprehension.

I really, really expected to like this book. I did not. This was a much more difficult slog than, say, was reading Finnegans Wake, where the etymology at least is always present, even if it takes a lifetime to dredge it forth. As I took some time here to point out, the complexity is not entirely the fault of the authors, but sadly for me, enough fault does lie at their doorstep to disallow a favorable review of the book. ...more

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"this book is my villain origin story."

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Mexico under Fire, Being the Diary of Samuel Ryan Curtis, 3rd... by Joseph E. Chance

Mexico under Fire, Being the Diary of Samuel Ryan Curtis, 3rd Ohio Volunteer Regiment, during the American Military Occupation of Northern Mexico, 1846–1847
by Joseph E. Chance

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From my own family connections (huzzah, 9th Iowa), I'm a fan of Samuel Ryan Curtis from his Civil War service at Pea Ridge and beyond, and so I was eager to read Joseph E Chance's 1994 volume Mexico Under Fire, in which Chance edits and annotates the ...more

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Work in Progress: Joyce Centenary Essays
by Richard F. Peterson

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In 1983, the hundredth anniversary of the birth of James Joyce, the Southern Illinois University Press published a slender volume (154 pages) entitled Work in Progress: Joyce Centenary Essays, edited by Richard F Peterson, Alan M Cohn and Edmund L Ep In 1983, the hundredth anniversary of the birth of James Joyce, the Southern Illinois University Press published a slender volume (154 pages) entitled Work in Progress: Joyce Centenary Essays, edited by Richard F Peterson, Alan M Cohn and Edmund L Epstein. The small volume contains 10 short essays concerned with Joyce's works and various concerns about them. While the rather severe space limitations placed on the individual authors might have inspired the composers to sharpen their focus to dazzling intensity, I fear the more common result was in the opposite direction, and the resulting essays did not rise to the occasion.

Some of the more compelling insights expressed here are in relation to Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Morris Beja's close examination of the familiar Joycean preoccupation with the senses of sight and sound, as found in Dubliners, is of surprising interest in this regard, and Beja points out that "a series of unanswered questions appears throughout" Dubliners, always being resolved in a moment of illumination, a vision, of epiphany. Richard F Peterson examines the often-mentioned contradictory dual way of reading the Portrait, whether as a narrative of the evolution of artistic genius or, ironically, as the bombastic, overinflated, uninformed blather of callow youth. An integrated conception of these two readings Peterson seems to prefer as being the better reading.

Edmund L Epstein has some interesting insights regarding etymologically precise use of common language, demonstrating how Joyce often distracts us with seemingly familiar vocabulary when he's actually reaching back to all-but-forgotten usages which end up undermining the apparent meaning of his sentences. "It is characteristic of Joyce," Epstein points out, "to ascribe drastic results to subtle ambiguities in English syntax." A single, grossly oversimplified example must suffice here. In the famous, mysterious, seemingly disproportionately melodramatic last line of "Araby" in Dubliners we read: "Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity, and my eyes burned with anguish and anger." Epstein argues that the use of "vanity" here is less self-chastisement than a callback to the distinction between the emptiness of a human breath, a mere exhalation, and more material content, which would rewrite the book of Ecclesiastes (and naturally we readers will relate "Araby" with Ecclesiastes) to say: "emptiness of emptiness" rather than "vanity of vanities." Such a (re)reading would cushion the end of "Araby" and so cause us to reconsider the entire story. Naturally, Joyce's multivalency is always at play, and the Araby bazaar is also a stand-in for Thackery's Vanity Fair.

Sheldon Brivic wisely points out that "Dubliners shows a group of minds controlled by a society, not suggesting any possibility of freedom until its last story," contrasting this with Joyce's later works. The colossi of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake extend more agency to many characters, but on such scales that their dedicated essayists fare less successfully in these abbreviated confines. Special mention must be extended to Robert Boyle who (among other insights) teases out interesting and amusing connections between 1 Corinthians and A Midsummer Night's Dream and Finnegans Wake. ...more

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Epic Geography: James Joyce's Ulysses (Princeton Legacy Library)
by Michael A. Seidel

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I have a lot of books about, and related to, James Joyce and his works.

Having recognized some time ago that my ability to distinguish among the Joycean books that I'd read was becoming blurred, I deemed it judicious to begin keeping notes on the book I have a lot of books about, and related to, James Joyce and his works.

Having recognized some time ago that my ability to distinguish among the Joycean books that I'd read was becoming blurred, I deemed it judicious to begin keeping notes on the books as I read them. At a later date I might refer back to these notes rather than being compelled to re-read entire books again in search of some skimpy but trenchant little quote. These notes can also be helpful when composing little reviewlets for the occasional interested party on-line. My note-taking began in September 2016. As I recall, this was not too long after I'd finished reading Michael Seidel's 1976 volume, 266 pages, entitled Epic Geography: James Joyce's Ulysses. I was then impressed with Seidel's book (which receives numerous call-outs in my novel Up the Creek), but eight years later I decided to re-read Seidel, taking proper notes this time round, to see how it holds up.

Unexpected insights crop up when one takes notes in this manner. A desire to jot down items which are of interest, literary nuggets which I want to remember, which are to some degree original in conception or, at a minimum, in phraseology, results in the discovery, sometimes, of which books are neither interesting nor original, which are half-baked or at least ill-expressed. You learn to tune in on precisely why these authorial failures have occurred. I've read quite a number of Joycean books of a few hundred pages in length which warranted only maybe four or five pages of notes: never a good sign. Some people, it turns out, really do have next to nothing worthwhile to tell us. Seidel's book is at the other end of the spectrum: I wrote 56 pages of notes, one of my lengthier note-taking efforts so far.

Joyce's Ulysses, as everyone knows, is a Modern Irishman's ironical rewrite of Homer's Odyssey. Simple enough so far. Now, it's easy to read Ulysses without knowing a single line of Homer. I know this because I've done it, to one degree or another, several times. (Indeed, I know a lot more about Homer and the Odyssey now than I did the first time I read Seidel, when much of what I was reading went over my head.) However, one's appreciation for Ulysses expands the more one learns about Ireland, about Dublin, about Joyce's own biography, and about the adventures of Odysseus. You'll find many of the best books about Joyce and Ulysses are chockfull of such considerations.

Seidel is particularly special, though. What he did was to closely read Victor Bérard's Les Phéniciens et l'Odyssée (Paris, 1902-03), which was a vitally important source for Joyce's composition of Ulysses. The fact that Bérard has never yet been translated into English (so far as I know) may in part account for it receiving far less attention by the academy than seems befitting. The preponderance of material found in Epic Geography is a continuing revelation of Seidel's discoveries found in Bérard, finely illustrated by Seidel's translations. Over the years many have tried to map out the voyages of Odysseus throughout the Mediterranean, but Joyce confines himself to the geography laid out by Bérard. It is immaterial whether Bérard is geographically "right": Odysseus was a fictional character, and the gods and monsters he encountered probably never existed, either. What matters is that Joyce grounds the Homeric geography on Bérard's claims regarding the journeys of Odysseus. This matters because Joyce has a precise reason for every sentence he constructs; so far as the Dublin geography navigated in Ulysses is concerned, Joyce can always refer back to the appropriate and corresponding passages in Bérard.

I may have 56 pages of notes, but my space in a reviewlet is limited. Generally speaking, Seidel matches up maps of pathways followed by characters in Joyce's episodes with the corresponding Odyssean pathways from Bérard's maps of the Homeric adventures, and maybe about 80% of the time the maps jibe remarkably well in range and direction. The sheer scale, from micro- to macroscopic, at which Ulysses rewrites Homer (and Bérard) is revealed to be more vast than mere tables of Homeric correspondences have otherwise suggested. Seidel's thesis is a masterful insight, but the bulk of his book consists of endless supporting examples that prove his point. ...more

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To the Gates of Richmond by Stephen W. Sears

To the Gates of Richmond: The Peninsula Campaign
by Stephen W. Sears

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In October 2018 I made a tour of the Virginia Peninsula between the York and James Rivers to visit the battlefield sites related to George McClellan's 1862 campaign through the region. I was already familiar with the stories and characters involved i In October 2018 I made a tour of the Virginia Peninsula between the York and James Rivers to visit the battlefield sites related to George McClellan's 1862 campaign through the region. I was already familiar with the stories and characters involved in the campaign, on both the Union and Confederate sides, and I'd previously visited some of the sites involved. But with my own interests centered more in Western campaigns than in actions in the East, for these several years since 2018 I've been eager to dive deeper into McClellan's grand campaign, and indeed Stephen W Sears' 1992 book To the Gates of Richmond: The Peninsula Campaign had been waiting on my bookshelf for a long time.

I try to maintain what objectivity I can about times and events I little know, and the "strategic skill sets" brought to the table by certain Civil War personalities often leave me filled with doubts. I've remained uncommitted concerning the balance of leadership merits and deficits of these Civil War participants for a long time, no matter what established opinion has to say about them. Yet I imagine I'm not alone among American Civil War aficionados who would assign such figures as George McClellan and Joseph E Johnston to this category of problematic figures. Of course many people do have strong, undeviating opinions about such personalities, but I've always found the historical evidence about some of these figures to be decidedly mixed. In fact I've put Robert E Lee into this ambiguous category, along with even such an almost universally despised figure as Braxton Bragg. I've been willing to give even overwhelmingly popular and unpopular generals the benefit of the doubt before learning more about them so I can pass more informed judgment. To the Gates of Richmond has allowed me to finally judge a few of these generals, and to better understand the confusing dynamics at play in these early stages of the War. Indeed, the greatest impact of Sears' book on me has probably been on my understanding of how the War was perceived by its participants, and how its prosecution evolved over time.

To the Gates of Richmond is somewhat unusual for a one-volume history of a major Civil War campaign. I anticipated that Sears would dig down deeper than he did into many important characters on both sides of the conflict who cut their teeth in this campaign and went on to bigger and (often) better things. Among this number I would include: Oliver O Howard, Thomas F Meagher, John Sedgwick, Daniel E Sickles, Daniel Butterfield, Gouverneur K Warren, Joseph Hooker, Darius N Couch, Henry W Slocum, George G Meade DH Hill, James Longstreet, AP Hill, George E Pickett, William Mahone, Lewis A Armistead, and even now less luminous players like Edwin V Sumner, Samuel P Heintzelman, Philip Kearny, Philip St George Cooke, George Stoneman and Theophilus H Holmes. How much I should like to know the opinions of these participants during various stages of the campaign, and more precisely where they were deployed at various times during its execution. I acknowledge that a detailed history including all such material would hardly fit into one volume; still, I would have appreciated having more such material occasionally peppered into the narrative that Sears delivers.

For the most part Sears reserves the limelight for his main characters: George McClellan, Joseph E Johnston, Robert E Lee and, to a lesser extent, Thomas J Jackson. Yet even these main characters tend to come through somewhat obliquely: the task of painting the grand scheme of the campaign occupie Sears the most. As a result, To the Gates of Richmond turns out to read something like a "Peninsula-lite" history. However, I judge that this may be the most "fun," or "enjoyable" Civil War campaign volume I've read to date. Sears certainly does not pull his punches when he criticizes his main characters. Cutting to the chase, Sears has little if anything good to say about George McClellan or Joseph E Johnston, and he gets in a number of cruelly cutting jabs at both.

A virtue of taking such a high bird's eye view of these battles is that by eliminating the subtle details we do get a better grasp of the leadership qualities of the main cast on display, and finally this book has allowed me to formulate more decisive opinions about both McClellan and Joseph E Johnston. For as I read this book and contemplated its lessons, I was struck by the notion that no one this early in the War (with the likely exception of US Grant, far away in the West) had a good grasp on how to fight it. To a degree, most of the commanding officers on both sides were still utterly preoccupied with theoretical aspects of warfare, and their theories were all either obsolete or were nearly impossible to execute given the limitations of lines of communication available. Those who became most successful as commanders would be the ones who were more comfortable with replacing theory with a combination of aggression and on-the-scene improvisation. Grant seems to have known this right from the start; Lee probably learned it very quickly during the Peninsula campaign, although his subordinates during this period did not. Jackson's poor performance during the campaign is well-known, and Sears shines no new light on that mystery.

My overall opinion about Lee as a strategian continues to be complicated, but my opinions about McClellan and Johnston have finally gelled because of Sears' book: both were far too theoretical for what this War required, and so neither can be viewed as a successful field commander. In the case of Johnston, it makes me most uncomfortable to side with the opinions of Jefferson Davis over those of William T Sherman, but so it goes. McClellan, however, has finally become transparent for me, and a Henry Halleck quote sums up the matter succinctly at the end of To the Gates of Richmond. General McClellan, Halleck wrote, "does not understand strategy and should never plan a campaign." That, I think, is exactly correct, and aptly encapsulates the entire campaign. ...more

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