Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis by Robert F. Kennedy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"[...] we can say authoritatively that the world came closest to blowing itself up during thirteen days in October 1962. Two superpowers overarmed with nuclear weapons challenged each other in what could have spiraled so easily into the ultimate catastrophe. "
(From Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s Foreword)

I have a personal recollection of the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962: I was 11, beginning the sixth grade of the elementary school in Warsaw. I exactly remember where I was sitting in the classroom when one of the teachers came in, very serious, and told us that there may be a war. She was so somber and so serious that even I, the class clown, stopped giggling. Only for a while, of course; after all, death does not exist when one is 11.

On October 16, 1962, the U.S. intelligence finds out that Soviet missiles and atomic weapons are being placed in Cuba. This poses the most direct and serious threat to the security of the country in the entire history of the United States. President J.F. Kennedy understands that he has to react and that how he reacts may affect not only the U.S. and the Soviet Union but also the entire world. The 13-day "game of chicken" begins between JFK and the large group of his closest advisors, members of the Executive Committee of the National Security Council, on one side, and General Secretary of the Soviet Communist party, N. Khrushchev, and his closest advisors, on the other.

Yet this is not an ordinary, simple "game of chicken", where the "winner", if any, is the player who does not blink first. During the Cuban crisis both players know that since they are not allowed to lose, they must not attempt to win either but instead try to exit the game without claiming victory or defeat. At least this is what rational players should do. Humankind can be thankful to both J.F.K. and N. Khrushchev that they were rational players and managed jointly to find an exit from the crisis without any side having a right to claim victory. On the other hand, imagine (completely hypothetically, of course) that the President of the United States is a complete idiot. Hundreds of millions of people would be likely to evaporate in nuclear blasts if such a hypothetical moron serving as the president were trying to win the game.

Thirteen Days. A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis is written by Robert F. Kennedy, JFK's brother, closest advisor, and the Attorney General at the time of the crisis. This is an extraordinary document of one of the most crucial episodes of the 20th century. The narrative is wonderfully concise, clear, compulsively readable, and even if the positive aspects of JFK's handling of the crisis may perhaps be a little overstated, RFK manages to keep editorial balance and also present Secretary Khrushchev in quite a positive light.

I very much admire various observations and recommendations by RFK. For instance, if what he writes about several highest-rank military commanders and their pressure to attack Soviet Union immediately is true, this is really scary and puts a huge dent in my rather positive opinion of the military. I would also like to emphasize one of the most crucial passages in the book:

"The final lesson of the Cuban missile crisis is the importance of placing ourselves in the other country's shoes."

The text is very well written and reads like a first-class thriller. The tension peaks at two moments: on Wednesday, October 24, 1962, when the naval quarantine goes into effect and when the world gets “the first glimpse of the brink of war”. The second peak occurs on Saturday, October 27, night; both JFK and RFK are now pessimistic about chances of avoiding war. Still, the rationality of both K's (Kennedy and Khrushchev) prevailed.

RFK's text is quite short, about 80 pages. It is accompanied by a lucid Foreword written in 1999 by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and an Afterword, written in the early 1970s by two eminent political scientists. The Afterword is a deeply specialized study of various aspects of the conflict, particularly the role of checks and balances in foreign policy and the respective roles of the President and the Congress - not for a casual reader like myself.

The slim volume ends with the full texts of President Kennedy's speeches and several letters exchanged during the crisis between JFK and Khrushchev. An extremely interesting and very highly recommended book.

Four-and-a-quarter stars.


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C is for Corpse by Sue Grafton
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

""[...]making a low sound in her throat, not even a clearly articulated cry. It was a sound more primitive than that. She started to speak, but she could only manage a sort of a dragged-out stuttering phrase, sub-English, devoid of sense. [...] She began to cry as children cry, deep shuddering sobs that went on and on."

After very good A Is for Alibi came much weaker B Is for Burglar . Fortunately, C Is for Corpse (1986) is almost on par, quality-wise, with the impressive first novel in the series. So the failure of B can be blamed on the proverbial "sophomore jinx."

Bobby Callahan is a victim of a horrible car accident on a tall bridge nine month ago. His friend died in the accident and Bobby, seriously disfigured, works out in the gym trying to regain basic functioning of his body. Kinsey meets Bobby in the gym and he hires her to find whoever tried to kill him. He believes another vehicle was ramming his car from behind to eventually force it off the bridge.

Bobby is an unforgettable character; Ms. Grafton does a great job in subtly portraying the rapport between him and Kinsey. The author uses a clever device to focus the reader's attention on Bobby by announcing already in the second sentence of the novel that Bobby Callahan will die soon. Yet even without this, I am sure the readers will be captivated by dialogues between Kinsey and Bobby.

The cast of supporting characters is also impressive. I very much like the portrayal of Kitty, Bobby's stepsister, and his mother, Glen, a very rich and powerful woman, yet believable in her grief and humanness. Even the second-plan characters are well written in this novel: fleshed out and realistic.

The dramatic tension of the main plot is lightened by two side threads: in one we have a reappearance of Jonah Robb from A, again a believable portrayal of a minor character, in the other, quite comedic, we learn about romantic adventures of Kinsey's landlord and their unexpected consequences.

C would be a four-star novel for me if not for Ms. Grafton's use of rather cheap literary components of the plot, like memory loss

"I hate knowing I once knew something and having no access to it. [...] It's like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle with a whole hunk knocked off on the floor."

and other forms of artificially postponing major revelations of the plot. We also have a cliché "A-ha moment":

"I suddenly retrieved some data from my memory bank and it appeared on my mental screen just as clear as could be... not the whole of it, but enough."

While the ending is rather cliché and cinematic rather than literary, at least the location of the final scenes is unusual and fitting the grim overall tone of the novel.

Three-and-a-half stars.


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Believe Me: A Memoir of Love, Death, and Jazz Chickens by Eddie Izzard
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"Most of us think that while we are here on Earth if we eat cake and watch television, that's fine. That's what we're supposed to do. But that's not what our bodies are built for. I believe we can all do more than we think we can do."

These lovely words come from Eddie Izzard, an extraordinary British stand-up comedian: one can find zillions (at least a hundred, anyway) of snippets of his performances on YouTube. His autobiography Believe Me (a memoir of love, death, and jazz chickens) (2017) is a better read than I expected, totally enthralling at places.

First of all, the childhood chapters of the autobiography are totally, and I mean it, outstanding. Yes, I have read more stunning accounts of childhood, like Joyce's and Coetzee's, but these are so-called giants of world literature. Not only is Mr. Izzard's narration extremely funny but also it seems to accurately reproduce a child's way of seeing and describing the world. While the autobiography is co-authored by a professional writer, Laura Zigman, it would be hard to believe that Mr. Izzard did not have significant input into the style and mood of the writing.

Several passages are hilarious. Like the one about finding a wad of used chewing gum in a hedge, washing it thoroughly, and then enjoying "chewing the pre-chewed gum" for weeks on end. Mr. Izzard is very fond of footnotes: they adorn majority of pages in the book. For instance, he remembers getting a "very small third of a pint of milk they would give you at break time" at school and then adds a hilarious footnote: "Mrs. Thatcher eventually got rid of those little third-pints of school milk because she hated children." I ROFL'ed having read this; well, I did not like Mrs. Thatcher either...

The passages about the author's evolution as an entertainer and comedy performer are captivating as well. The reader learns about Mr. Izzard's first experience of saying funny lines in his chemistry class at school, his first public show at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1981, then street performing in the mid-1980s and, finally, the beginning of stand-up comedy performances in the late 1980s. The accounts of street performing "escapology" routines (getting tied in ropes and chains and then managing to get out) are particularly fascinating.

There is an unexpected richness of wisdom in Believe Me. One will find seemingly off-hand yet deep remarks about human nature and interesting self-observations that do not seem to be pumped-up to impress the reader. Like the fragment where he muses about what his life would have been had not his mother died early, when he was just six years old:

"[...] I do believe I started performing and doing all sorts of big, crazy, ambitious things because on some level, on some childlike, magical-thinking level, I thought doing those things might bring her back. Might make her come back."

I also wonder if I may be biased towards liking Mr. Izzard because of his long-distance running extreme achievements. Not having any practice in his youth he managed to run 43 marathons in 51 days in 2009 and then 27 marathons in 27 days in South Africa in honor of Nelson Mandela and to raise money for a British charity. Although on dramatically smaller scale I am a long-distance runner too and I think both he and I believe that people can do more than they think they can do.

Finally two things I have not enjoyed in the autobiography: the overlong fragments about his coming out as a transgender person: to me Mr. Izzard makes too much of a deal out of a perfectly normal - if not quite common - condition. Well, maybe some readers will be titillated by glimpses into psyche of a man who alternates between "boy and girl moods"; I would rather read more about the stand-up comedy techniques - how he manages to captivate the listeners. The worst thing in the autobiography, though, is the name-dropping: names of celebrities appear in the latter part of the book with increasing frequency.

For the childhood part, for the long-distance running and for the refreshing wisdom it would be an over-four-star autobiography. Even with all the nauseating celebrity stuff it is still a very good book.

Three-and-three-quarter stars.


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Bad Lawyer by David Cray
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"'[...] juries are mostly too stupid to follow what witnesses actually say. They rely on manner, like they were at home watching television.'"

I suspect I like David Cray's Bad Lawyer (2001) so much because it pushes several of my 'hot buttons.' Serious flaws of the jury system are my main concern as to the American justice system: based on my personal observations I would rather have a trained judge decide my case than a panel of my "peers" who treat jury service as entertainment in their empty lives or, even worse, who yearn to be in a position of power to mete punishment to others.

Yet in my view, Bad Lawyer also delivers in suspense, tension, plot structure, and - many readers will probably like it - major, major plot twists. The story is narrated by Stanley Kaplan, a once extremely successful lawyer, with a 450SL and a co-op on Central Park West, whose career was destroyed by booze and cocaine. After a full-year rehab, Mr. Kaplan is starting again; his team includes an investigator and a legal secretary: the three of them are united by each having had a very painful past. They are so tight that, in the narrator's words, they form

"a curiously asexual menage à trois that maintained itself through a tyranny of memory, a pure terror of the past."

A woman hires Mr. Kaplan to defend her daughter who has been arrested and accused of murdering her husband. There has been a documented history of serious physical abuse by the victim, so Mr. Kaplan's is planning the prove self-defense. There are serious complication as the case seems to be connected with drug dealing and the accused had had three drug convictions in her past.

The case has been picked up by the media and it is being tried in the court of public opinion even before the criminal trial begins. This is another of my hot-button issues: not only do the media have the potential to pervert the course of justice but they frequently do it, ironically, in the name of justice. What right do the journalists or TV people have to shape the public's perceptions of the case by using trigger words, phrases or images?

Not only is the case tried in the media but there are two opposing camps trying to convince the public to their angle of looking at the case: on one side we have organizations that advocate women's rights - they focus on the history of physical abuse. On the other side we have the black community - the victim was an African-American - whose members claim that the white-owned media are trying to exonerate the killer before the trial begins. This is yet another of my hot-button issues: the near-automatic jumping of various social advocacy groups on the bandwagon of any event that achieves a degree of notoriety.

Anyway, the media battle is raging, which has absolutely nothing to do with truth or justice but all with entertainment. The plot takes several dramatic turns, which - for once - are mostly plausible. I will not provide any spoilers - as opposed to the usual explicit hints given by the publisher on the sleeves of the dust jacket. I highly recommend this legal thriller which, to me, is exceptional among the usual bestselling and totally cliché novels of this genre.

Four-and-a-quarter stars.


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Brezhnev, Soviet Politician by Paul J. Murphy
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"[Brezhnev] survived on the obstacle strewn path to power because he possessed the right mixture of tenacious energy, drive, cunning, discipline, ruthlessness, concealment, a polemic-sharpened intellect and a healthy respect for the Soviet political terrain."

My fourth read in a series about Soviet Communist party leaders is a biography of Leonid Brezhnev, a man who held the reins of power of the entire Soviet empire for 18 long years, between 1964 and 1982. Paul J. Murphy's Brezhnev. Soviet Politician (1981) was published while Brezhnev was still the Supreme Leader but it was already clear that his days were numbered because of massive health problems. The biography is not a particularly enthralling read, which may not be the author's fault: Brezhnev's is not a fascinating personality. He is not a ruthless murderer and torturer of untold millions like Stalin, not an enigma like Andropov, and not an accidental revolutionary like Gorbachev. Brezhnev is precisely like his characterization in the epigraph - a skillful politician, a clever party bureaucrat:

"[...] a safe Party man with practical experience who, though a trifle lackluster, had the requisite drive and leadership ability. [...] Brezhnev had proven himself to be a 'pragmatist' and a 'political engineer.'"

Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev, born in 1906, grew up in the times of the October Revolution, and - along with his family - survived the horrors of the bloody civil war in Ukraine that caused mass hunger and even occasional cases of cannibalism. The author claims that the estimated total of 14 million people died from starvation. After Brezhnev had joined Komsomol (The Young Communists League) he actively participated in "land consolidation" decreed by Stalin. Brezhnev was an eager enforcer of collectivization, forcefully taking land from the peasants to create "collective farms". Young party activists had to participate in the brutal process; otherwise they would be denounced as lax in enforcing the policies by more eager young party activists, and then executed.

In 1935 Brezhnev graduates from an engineering university and begins his rise in the party bureaucracy as a protégé of Khrushchev (see my review of his biography Khrushchev ), who succeeded Stalin in 1953). When the Germans outfox and surprise Stalin (the "Genius of Strategy") with the attack in 1941, Brezhnev distinguishes himself in military service during the Great Patriotic War and, after the war, along with Khrushchev organizes the efforts to rebuild the country.

It is during the momentous Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in 1956 (Krushchev gave his famous "secret speech" denouncing Stalin's murderous regime) that Brezhnev firmly becomes a member of the top Soviet leadership and, in 1960, the President of the Soviet Union. The Berlin Crisis of 1961 and the Cuban Crisis of 1962, when the world is as close to the all-out nuclear war as it has never been before, shows the divisions in the Soviet leadership, and the power struggle begins in earnest.

Khrushchev is ousted in 1964 and the 18-year-long Brezhnev era begins. The author characterizes these years focusing on three aspects. Soviet Union becomes the only other superpower, with political and military might equal to that, if not greater than, of the United States. Second, this is the era of very active Soviet foreign policy and those are the years of détente the general easing of international tensions. Soviet Union, unable to compete economically with the Western world is trying to outdo the West in so-called "peace efforts." Finally, in 1979 the Soviet forces invade Afghanistan; the war becomes a sort of Soviet Vietnam and contributes to accelerating the decline of the Soviet empire. The arrival of Mikhail Gorbachev in the top leadership in 1978 is a harbinger of changes to come (I am planning to review another biography of Gorbachev soon).

There are numerous typos in the book; I don't think I have ever read a book with so many typos - not the author's fault, I guess. Anyway, even with the sloppiness, it is an worthwhile if not that captivating read.

Three stars.

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B is for Burglar by Sue Grafton
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"Most of my investigations proceed just like this. Endless notes, endless sources checked and rechecked, pursuing leads that sometimes go no place. Usually, I start in the same place, plodding along methodically, never knowing at first what might be significant. It's all detail; facts accumulated painstakingly. "

B is for Burglar (1985) continues my "Re-Read Early Grafton" project. Following a pattern that seems to be common for series of novels, after the great first effort of A is for Alibi, which I like a lot and quite enthusiastically review here , comes the sophomore-jinxed disappointment of the second installment in a series. However, I need to disclaim a clear bias of mine: B has some touches of "mystery coziness," and I intensely dislike the "cozy subgenre." Ms. Grafton's plot includes an amateur octogenarian sleuth trying to help Kinsey solve the case, which significantly cools my enthusiasm. Yet even without the Granny Sleuth thread B feels lightweight compared to its groundbreaking predecessor.

Briefly about the plot: Kinsey is hired by one Ms. Danziger to find her sister, Elaine, who is needed for a signature on some inheritance document and is nowhere to be found. The missing woman is known to alternate her residence between Santa Teresa and Florida; thus, after talking to some of Elaine's acquaintances in Santa Teresa, Kinsey flies to Florida where she talks to a woman who lived with Elaine in her condo. She also meets the nice and inquisitive 80-something Mrs. Ochsner, the Granny Sleuth later in the plot.

Back in Santa Teresa Kinsey continues her inquiries. A connection emerges with a local murder that happened several months earlier. To my taste there are too many serendipitous occurrences that help Kinsey with the case. However, a neat thread that involves the missing luggage nicely ratchets up the suspense. The denouement, though not particularly surprising, is logical and does not feel too contrived.

I like few passages in the book. The lush yet understated quiet elegance of Santa Teresa (Santa Barbara, really, from the early 1980s) is well portrayed:

"Everything is stucco, red tile roofs, bougainvillea, distressed beams, adobe brick walls, arched windows, palm trees, balconies, ferns, fountains, paseos, and flowers in bloom. Historical restorations abound. It's all oddly unsettling - so lush and refined that it ruins you for anyplace else."

The reader will find some gently sarcastic humor:

"There's no place in a P.I.'s life for impatience, faintheartedness, or sloppiness. I understand the same qualifications apply for housewives."

Ms. Grafton's words about people losing their privacy in the world of data are prophetic:

"Most of our personal data is a matter of public record. All you have to know is how to look it up."

Thirty-four years later millions and millions of people voluntarily relinquish their privacy, offering their innermost secrets to business scams known as Facebook or Instagram.

I hate guns and am apprehensive about people fascinated with weapons and shooting. So I am queasy about the passage where Kinsey confesses:

"I have fallen in love with the smell of gunpowder [...]"

Napalm in the morning smells good too, doesn't it? Well, to each their own. B is quite a readable mystery yet way below the level of A. Let's see about C.

(By the way, in 2012 I rated the novel with rounded-up four stars, based on memory of my first read in the 1990s. Well, obviously I am maturing...)

Two-and-three-quarter stars.

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