The Erstwhile Hawk

What is the Erstwhile Hawk? It is the ramblings of a middle-aged man. Why am I trying blogging? My work friend, Rama, enjoys my stories of what I consider to be a rather humdrum life. He has been encouraging me to write down my memories because they are so vivid. Well, after procrastinating for months, I'm giving it a try. Why the name? The Hawk was my nickname during my college years by which my hometown friends knew me. My college friends never called me The Hawk.

Monday, August 17, 2009

Books read in 2008

I figure that moving the books I read less recently off the sidebar would improve the look of the blog.

President Lincoln: The Duty of a Statesman 4/4
William Lee Miller
Fascinating look at the moral underpinnings of Lincoln's decisions

The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York 3.5/4.0
Robert A. Caro
Prepare for a long hard but worthwhile read

The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg 3/4
Nicholas Dawidoff

Winning the Peace, the Marshall Plan & America's Coming of Age as a Superpower 2/4
Nicolaus Mills

Taking on the Trust, The Epic Battle of Ida Tarbell and John D. Rockefeller 3/4
Steve Weinberg

The Jedburghs 2.5/4
Lt. Col. Will Irwin (Ret.)
Higher if you are a big WWII buff

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information 4/4
Edward Tufte

Now, Discover Your Strengths 3/4

Baseball Prospectus 2008 3.5/4
Hate the font

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford 3/4

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Recent Movies (only those I saw in a movie theater)

Red 3.0/4 (Sandie described it as a laugh-filled bulletfest, a description that I can’t top. Comedy/suspenser, with a killer cast. Willis, Mirren, Freeman, and Malkovich look like they are having a blast as a black ops team getting together for one last time, with a holds-her-own Mary Louise Parker in tow, albeit most reluctantly at first. Don’t look for anything deep and don’t probe too far into the plot but you will have fun nevertheless.)
The Social Network 4/4 (The presumably close to the truth story about the founder of Facebook and the people he walked over. It’s a tour de force of the creation and growing pains of a modern phenomenon. Jesse Eisenberg shines as the lucky to have a friend Mark Zuckerberg and the other actors all hit the right notes too. )
Despicable Me 3.0/4 (Rival wannabe super villains try to outdo each other. However, the latent humanity of one is drawn out ever so slowly by three irresistible little girls. Stays just on the good side of too cute; even a saccharine intolerant movie watching grump like me had my heart captured by the animated little ones.)
Cyrus 3.0/4 (Quirky dark comedy about a suicidal loser (John C. Reilly) who meets a gorgeous woman (the getting lovelier every year Marisa Tomei) who has to be too good to be true. Well, guess what, she is. Slowly the romance becomes ever more endangered by the man-boy child (Jonah Hill) of the woman and competition for her love escalates in very uncomfortable ways. A little contrived but pretty true to itself. Reilly and Hill bite into their roles and chew them up with great relish; Tomei’s character just doesn’t get developed as much as I wanted it to.)
The Micmacs 3.5/4 (A French black comedy about a man who suffers physical and emotional trauma, thanks to weapons produced by a pair of archrival munitions manufacturers. After falling in with fellow misfits, each of whom has one and only one singular talent, our hero plots his revenge. Unique in every way, clever, with great twists, this movie is sparse in (subtitled) dialog, which gives it a very silent movie sensibility.)
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo 4/4 (Slow-paced yet taut, violent but not prurient, sexual but not very sexy, this is a gripping and chilling Cold Case detective story. Set in Sweden, a soon-to-go-to-jail financial reporter is hired by the scion of a family industrial empire to find out which of the family killed his favorite niece 40-odd years ago. She so happened to have babysat the reporter right at the time of her disappearance. Meanwhile a Goth hacker has been tracking the reporter on-line for her shady company. The dragon-tattooed Goth has lots and lots of serious problems of her own. One day she makes the mistake of emailing him about a clue he's been puzzling over... and the plot takes off from there. A wonderfully different movie but definitely not for the faint of heart; some of the scenes are quite graphic.)
Avatar 3D 3/4 (Sandie and I moved from the 2% who hadn't to the 98% who had seen it. Stunning technical work; I slipped off the glasses and the movie lost a lot without the 3D. Pedestrian story with characters less developed than Star Wars. That I rate a movie with lousy plot and characters a 3 is testament to its technical greatness.)

Recent Books

The Civil War of 1812 by Alan Taylor 3.0/4 (The author establishes the conceit that the War of 1812 was mostly a civil war, with switching loyalties, loose boundaries, tories and republicans on both sides of the border of the nascent U.S. and a rather fetal Canada. Taylor pulls off his premise with meticulous detail and concludes that this war actually established separate U.S. and Canadian identities. The book focuses on the Great Lakes/St. Lawrence border fighting, a very confusing and mostly inept set piece of fighting. Not for the faint-hearted, this is a slow but enjoyable read.)
Let Our Fame Be Great by Oliver Bullough 3.5/4 (Ever hear of the Avars? Dargins? Circassians? If you have not been in a cave in the last 15 years you HAVE heard of Chechens. This is a sweeping tale of the last 200 years of the peoples who lived in the wilds of the northern foothills of the Caucasus Mountains. By turns warm and brutal, the author chronicles the pain, suffering and horrors endured by these peoples, mostly thanks to the Russian “need” to control this sensitive area.
The Bridge on the Drina by Ivo Andric , Lovett F. Edwards (Translator) 4/4 (1961 Nobel Lit winner, a wondrously descriptive and masterful story in which a bridge is the hero, from its creation in the 16th century up into WWI. Various folk pass through the life of this bridge, be they Moslem or Christian, with a sprinkling of Jews and Gypsies – complicated by the mix of the various nationalities that make the Balkans such a confusing place for those of us who would like a more orderly distribution of peoples. The affairs of the world impact the bridge and locals, as they do their best to live their lives as they want, sheltered, mostly peaceful and resistant to change, within the strictures that the ever changing affairs of state impose. The only drawback is that it was a very slow read for me.
Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an America by Robin Kelley 3.5/4 (incomplete, I finished about ¾ of it) (At 500ish pages of story, it was a little bit more about TM that I needed, especially trying to read it during baseball season, when I am distracted most evenings. That said, an evocative look at a strange but not so strange musician. Monk followed his own muse and lived his life following that muse. Keeley had access to the all the family records and paints a lushly detailed account. To paraphrase one of the Amazon reviewers, you can smell the smoke in the jazz club and visualize the grand piano in Monk’s tiny bedroom. This would be for jazz fans mostly, although it might be of interest to Civil Rights Era aficionados.)
The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England by Ian Mortimer 3/4 (Subtitled "A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century", a clever exploration of life, death, health, economics, religion and more religion, cleanliness, fashion, indeed everything imaginable about life in England.)
The Vikings:A History by Robert Ferguson 3/4 (Somewhat tangled but always interesting and informative tale of the the raiders and conquerors from Scandanavia. These folks ruled Greenland, Iceland, varying bits of Great Britain and Normandy through the centuries and provided the original form of Russia.)
The American Civil War: A Military History by John Keegan 3.5/4 (The pre-eminent military historian turns his Anglo vision on America's great conflagration. Very probing look at the battles, politics and especially the psychology of both sides. A great book lessened slightly by poor editing. Really, Americans refer to conscription as "the drafts"?)