The Great Movies II by Roger Ebert
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"[Kieślowski] is one of the filmmakers I would turn to consolation if I learned I was dying, or to laugh with on finding I would live after all."

I typed the epigraph with a feeling of deep sadness. Roger Ebert, to me the best film critic ever, died in 2017. I do hope he looked to Kieślowski for solace in his most difficult moments.

Roger Ebert's The Great Movies II is a collection of 100 reviews of movies, which made a very strong impression on the critic. Few months ago I reviewed here the third set and in another few months I will review the original volume. As I explained in my review of The Great Movies III instead of reviewing the reviews, I will quote a few fragments of Ebert's analysis of four films out of the 100, which made the strongest impression on me, plus two "honorable mentions." Very few people can match the outstanding literary quality of Ebert's writings.

Let's begin with one of my most favorite films ever, Coppola's The Conversation, ostensibly a thriller, and a great one, but really a marvelous psychological drama, full of wisdom about human life. Ebert writes:

"The Conversation comes from another time and place than today's thrillers, which are so often simpleminded."

Then, for me, comes Kieślowski's Three Colors Trilogy, where

"Blue is the antitragedy, White is the anticomedy, and Red is the antiromance. All three films hook us with immediate narrative interest. They are metaphysical through example, not theory [...]"

Red is absolutely stunning in its depth of perception of randomness of human life. Blue, beautifully filmed, is painfully sad yet makes it clear that life is worthwhile at least to see films like that. I don't particularly like White, which I find not metaphysical enough and too topical in its plot. Mr. Ebert's review of Trilogy is the best film review I have ever read. Written in wonderful, evocative prose it virtually bursts with wisdom:

"On another timeline, in a parallel universe, the judge and Valentine might have themselves fallen in love. They missed being the same age by only forty years or so."

Now, Luis Buñuel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. Absolutely unforgettable film, even if based on rather absurd premise and surrealistic plot about people who

"constantly arrive for dinner, and sometimes even sit down for it, but are never able to eat."

I love how Ebert summarizes Bunuel's art:

"[...] the more I look at his films the more wisdom and acceptance I find. He sees that we are hypocrites, admits to being one himself, and believes we were probably made that way."

My fourth choice is Fellini's Amarcord, as Mr. Ebert writes, "a movie made entirely out of nostalgia and joy." A movie built of "memories of memories, transformed by affection and fantasy and much improved in the telling."

My first Honorable Mention goes to Nicolas Roeg's Don't Look Now, a classy horror/thriller, which transcends its genre in the same way as Let the Right One In, a vampire movie made 30 years later transcends the vampire genre. Ebert writes:

"I've been through the film with students a shot at a time, paying close attention to the use of red as a marker in the visual scheme. It is a masterpiece of physical filmmaking, in the way photography evokes mood and the editing underlines it with uncertainty."

And finally, one of the most haunting and enigmatic films, also by Nicolas Roeg, Walkabout, about failure of human communication. Mr. Ebert writes:

"The film is deeply pessimistic. [...] all of us are captives of environment and programming: [...] there is a wide range of experiment and experience that remains forever invisible to us, because it falls in a spectrum we cannot see."

Another great volume of reviews! Four stars.

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One Police Plaza by William J. Caunitz
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"[...] was down on one knee putting a new clip into his weapon when a spray of slugs tore into his body. His Uzi clammered to the ground. The last thing he saw before he slumped over was his right eye dangling out of its socket, held by a twisted white cord."

I don't have time to conduct a thorough analysis of the crime novels that I have read and determine the percentage of books that start well but then degenerate into an idiotic, ludicrous mess at the end, "enlivened" by a shootout or a massacre that produces geysers of blood, intestines popping out to see the light of day, arms and legs twitching after being separated from the body, eyeballs hanging by a thread, and other yummy cinematic images. I would guess that about 50% of crime novels follow this path.

One Police Plaza by William Caunitz (1984) is a well-known book, the so-called "national bestseller", set up in New York's Fifth Precinct. The beginning is intriguing and captivating. Lieutenant Malone is called to the precinct on his day off because his people caught a homicide that "could be a problem." The deceased is a priest and a transvestite prostitute was with him when he died. Malone "smoothes" the case for the priest's superiors. But this is just a "false start" of the plot, designed to show the pervasive corruption, where paybacks for favors replace the search for truth. I appreciate these layers of the novel; Mr. Caunitz, as an actual detective lieutenant in the New York City Police Department, knows well what he is writing about.

The main plot begins with discovery of a woman's body in a bathtub, in advanced stages of decay. The author titillates the readers by providing gross details of the physical decomposition of human body after death. I really don't mind gore as long as it is not gratuitous. Obviously not the case here.

The woman is an Israeli and connections with CIA are suspected. The author offers the readers another yummy bit: cops are watching an orgy through binoculars. Malone gets a clear warning from someone in the police force to stop the investigation. Being a hero, he carries on working on the case.

We have several cringeworthy, gratuitous sex scenes, very badly written. Sex scenes are extremely difficult to write, the author is certainly aware of this, yet persists, likely in pursuit of the lowest possible denominator for the novel. Towards the end clichés abound:

"[He] was shaken, his face drained. An adage came to mind: If you can't do the time, don't do the crime. [...]"

For comedy relief, the last page has a publisher's blurb that says "One Police Plaza is a first novel of rare authenticity." Yes, maybe in showing the ubiquity of corruption. But the characters are pure paper, ratcheting violence and gore replaces plot development, and the prose is mediocre at best.

Two stars.

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Gorbachev: Heretic in the Kremlin by Dusko Doder
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"There are two ways - one realistic, the other fantastic - for resolving the crisis of the Soviet economy. The realistic way is to have people from outer space come and straighten out the mess. The fantastic way is for the Soviet people to sort it out on their own. "

Yet another position in my ever-growing list of reads about Soviet leaders of the 20th century. This has always been a compelling topic for me as I had lived in the shadow of Soviet ideology for the first 31 years of my life. Gorbachev. Heretic in the Kremlin (1990) by Dusko Doder and Louise Branson is certainly one of the best - probably the very best - books that I have read on Soviet leaders. (An index of books that I reviewed on that topic may be found after the rating.)

The authors do not spend much time on the early life and career of Mikhail Gorbachev. The one aspect of his career that they do emphasize is the mentorship of Yuri Andropov whom Gorbachev met in 1971. It was undoubtedly Andropov who "propelled Gorbachev into a far higher political orbit than he would have been able to reach on his own." The authors also mention a curious historical tidbit: in September 1978, at a train station in the Stavropol region, four men met and talked on the station platform: Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko, and Gorbachev - these four men would rule Soviet Union in succession. Brezhnev will die in 1982, Andropov will succeed him and die after just 16 months in power. He will be succeeded by Chernenko, who will also die soon, and Gorbachev will be elected as the general Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in March 1985. It may be worthwhile to remind the young and middle-aged readers that in the 1980s Soviet Union was still one of the only two superpowers in the world.

The political biography follows Gorbachev's years in the Kremlin. Like Andropov, during his brief stint as the General Secretary, Gorbachev realized that the Soviet empire was doomed if it did not change. Over the seven decades of Soviet rule

"the system has degenerated into one that penalizes initiative, efficiency, decency, and responsibility while rewarding opportunism, laziness, sloganeering, and deviousness."

Gorbachev was acutely aware of various insanities of the Soviet centrally planned economy, nationwide corruption, cynicism, alcoholism, overall inertia, and, perhaps the worst of all, the unparalleled degree of resistance from the party bureaucracy. From the very beginning of his term Gorbachev wanted to reform the Soviet empire so that it could overcome the monstrous crisis and perhaps even thrive.

Gorbachev's first major initiative was 'perestroika' (restructuring, rebuilding), an extremely wide-ranging program of economic reform that just stopped short of a full market reform. Perestroika eventually failed, economy kept disintegrating, and society remained stagnant. Almost at the same time as perestroika, Gorbachev also embraced another major initiative, 'glasnost' (usually translated as 'openness', but the word has also a semantic component of 'loudness'):

"[...] the term has acquired more complex political connotations. It stands for greater openness and candor in government affairs and for an interplay of different and sometimes conflicting views in political debtaes, in the press, and in Soviet culture."

The authors show that Gorbachev used glasnost as a strategy to overcome the monstrously immovable, entrenched party bureaucracy, totally unable to change.

While perestroika, naturally and expectedly, failed - the magnificent joke quoted in the epigraph reflects the complete truth: the only realistic way of reforming Soviet economy was through supernatural intervention - glasnost remained. And it was glasnost that eventually led to the end of the Communist party's monopoly on power and the dissolution of the Soviet empire.

In liking this book I may be displaying a bias: I have always believed that the fall of Communism and Soviet empire was due to Gorbachev's actions much more than to anything else. I don't believe the American or any other nation's policy alone was sufficient to end Communism in the Soviet Union. This extremely well researched book seems to confirm the notion of Gorbachev as a revolutionary whose vision and charisma impacted history in an unprecedented way. What is most special is that his impact was almost entirely positive, unlike the way that mass butchers of nations, like Stalin or Hitler, influenced history by murdering tens of millions of people and taking hope away from hundreds of millions of others. In its ultimate effect, thanks to the fall of Soviet ideology, Gorbachev's vision, charisma, political talent, and energy gave hundreds of millions of people a chance. (Naturally they will squander the chance, but that's another story.)

Very good book! Highly recommended!

Four-and-a-half stars.

My previous reviews of books on Soviet leaders:

The Andropov File - by Martin Ebon

Against the Grain - An Autobiography - by Boris Yeltsin

Lenin to Gorbachev: Three generations of Soviet Communists - by Joan Frances Crowley

Brezhnev, Soviet Politician - by Paul J. Murphy

Khrushchev - by Roy Medvedev

Gorbachev and His Revolution - by Mark Galeotti

Andropov - by Zhores Medvedev

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Trunk Music by Michael Connelly
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

" The dead man was on his right side in the fetal position except his wrists were behind him instead of folded against his chest. It appeared to Bosch that his hands had been tied behind him and the bindings removed, most likely after he was dead. "

Detective Harry Bosch is back in Homicide after his involuntary stress leave and a stint in Burglary Division. Michael Connelly's Trunk Music (1997) begins with the body of a man shot dead found in the trunk of a Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud. The car is found on a fire road off Mulholland Drive, on a bluff above the Hollywood Bowl. In a curious coincidence a month ago I reviewed here the same author's The Overlook, where Bosch's first case after his transfer to Homicide Special involves a man, shot execution style, whose body is found at an overlook above Mulholland Dam. The scenic locations and the word 'Mulholland' evoke the Hollywood magic.

The similarities between both book go deeper. In Trunk the detectives immediately notice that the case has all the aspect of a mob hit. Bosch is worried that the case will be taken away from him by the secretive OCID (Organized Crime Investigation Division). In Overlook the investigation proceeds almost as a competition between Los Angeles Homicide Special department and FBI.

However, there is one significant difference between the two novels, separated by just nine years: Trunk is much better. In fact, the first half is an outstanding police procedural, very tight, fast, and well written. The second half, though... Technically, what I will write now is not a spoiler, so I am cautiously proceeding. The second half of Trunk Music is a completely different book. Basically a waste of time. Things become grossly implausible. Bosch and his team, with tacit approval of his superior officer, are conducting private investigation. Yeah, right. Double positive! There is a serendipitous meeting on Mulholland Drive. Sure, yeah, right! Triple positive. Bosch has a hunch... And so on and on...

I really wish I hadn't read the second half of the novel and finished somewhere in the middle where the book was still great. I am asking this for the tenth or twentieth time: why do crime novels have to be about 350 - 450 pages long? Why not 250 pages? What's wrong with a short novel? Why waste the writer's time to produce filler stuff to pump up the volume and the readers' time who have to plough ahead to get to the denouement?

I am still recommending Trunk Music because of the outstanding first half. Go ahead if you want to read the second half, but I have warned you!

Three stars.

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The Triumph and Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson: The White House Years by Joseph A. Califano Jr.
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"[...] I shall not seek - and will not accept - the nomination of my party for another term as your President [...]"

The above is the famous sentence from President Lyndon Johnson's speech on March 31, 1968 when he announced he would not be seeking the second term in office. I vaguely remember the surprised reactions of Polish press and TV (I lived in Poland then and was a high-school senior) and I mainly recall being aware that I was witnessing a historical moment.

Joseph Califano's book The Triumph & Tragedy of Lyndon Johnson. The White House years (1991) is an extremely detailed account of the author's three-and-a-half-year work for the President. Being one of the closest advisors Mr. Califano had the opportunity to talk to the President virtually every day, which explains the tremendous amount of factual material in the book.

The narration begins in July 1965 when Mr. Califano gets a call from the White House and learns that the President wants him to take on the job preparing legislative programs, manage domestic crises, "and act as a general utility infielder on the domestic scene." Two days later Mr. Califano joins the President at the pool in Lyndon Johnson's Texas ranch and gets driven around the ranch.

These are turbulent times for the country. The President issues a statement about escalation of American involvement in Vietnam - 50,000 young men are sent to the war, many of whom will return in caskets draped with American flag. Amidst this tragedy Lyndon Johnson continues implementing his Great Society policies and his push for civil rights: the Congress passes the Voting Rights Act. The list of Lyndon Johnson's legislative successes in 1965-1966, "taking the federal government on the side of the little person," is extremely impressive:

"the war on poverty, health care for the elderly and the poor; aid to education for poor children; voting rights; immigration reform; and regional heart, cancer, and stroke research facilities in every section of the nation [...]"

But then comes 1967, when the anti-Vietnam-war protests explode all over the country and the President appears powerless and losing his mandate to lead the bitterly divided country. 1968 is the "Nightmare Year," and Lyndon Johnson decides to do a honorable thing and not seek re-election.

On the lighter side, we read about the President's tendency to micromanage, for instance about his involvement with egg prices, and - on a larger scale - his successful fight against price increases attempted by aluminum, copper, and steel companies. We also read about President Johnson's views of other politicians. Mr. Califano uses three "d's": the President despises Nixon, detests Senator McCarthy, and distrusts Robert F. Kennedy. I will add the fourth "d" - the text makes it clear that he also continually demeans his own Vice-President Hubert Humphrey.

I do not buy the theory that a President should be a paragon of morality and ethics to lead the country. For instance, the ability to convincingly lie on demand is, to me, one of the basic requirements of being a successful politician. If one were to read Mr. Califano's memoir selectively and with a bias, one could form an impression of Lyndon Johnson as an arrogant, cheating, macho scumbag. While I do not share such an opinion, I certainly do not admire Lyndon Johnson as a person. Yet I certainly admire him as a president, in my view one of the better the country has had. And I admire him for his courage and wisdom to step aside.

And as to Mr. Califano's book, despite tremendous amount of information about the highest levels of US politics it provides I am unable to rate it higher than three stars. The reason is that it just overwhelms the reader with zillions and zillions of facts that are not filtered in any consistent way. It is like a huge database of tidbits with just a scant synthesis.

Three stars.

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The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams by Lawrence Block
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"[...] we were sitting in a Blimpie Base on Broadway, planning the commission of a felony. That set us apart from the other customers, who looked to have gotten well past the planning stage. "

I read Lawrence Block's "Burglar" series only for the wonderful prose and humor. The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams is not as great as my previous read in the series The Burglar In the Rye but still, I had fun reading this installment of Bernie Rhodenbarr saga and finding many jewels of witty prose. I also think that many readers will appreciate the meta-literary motif of this novel. While in the other novel You-Know-Who was constantly in the background (and in the rye, obviously), here we have recurring allusions to Sue Grafton's series. For instance, how about G is for Spot and D is for Cup?

The story begins when a customer visits Bernie's used book shop to buy Ms. Grafton's B is for Burglar. Yet the customer happens to be Bernie's new landlord, who announces that he is increasing the rent by 1200%. Poor Bernie! How can he get that much money to pay the rent! Wait! After all, Bernie has a real job in addition to being a bookseller! He is so accomplished at it that he could get a PhD in burgling!

Amidst the rent increase trouble, Carolyn, Bernie's best friend, gets him a cat. Bernie hires Raffles as an employee in his bookstore, responsible for rodent control. But where does Ted Williams come in? Well, baseball cards collecting is the other main motif in the novel. We also have a mysterious young woman whom Bernie meets at night and who asks him to walk her home. I will not explain any more of the plot; I could truthfully say that it is too complicated and has too many twists, but the real reason is that I totally don't care about what is happening and it is only the witty prose and instructional descriptions of burgling activities that keep me reading.

The novel ends conventionally, with the horrendous (for me) Wolfean-style gathering of all characters in one place, which allows Bernie to announce the guilty party. Yuck! Also, there is quite a bit less humor in this novel than in Rye, but still, I had lots of fun reading. How can one not smile when reading the phrase coup de foie gras. Or the following cute passage:

"The dress was a perfect choice; it made her look as respectable as a Junior League luncheon while leaving no doubt whatsoever that she was a female member of her species, and that it was a distinctly mammalian species at that."

Also, let me mention that the introduction of Raffles to the cast is not just a random component. The cat plays quite an essential role in helping Bernie solve the case. I don't have the faintest idea who did what in the novel but I certainly liked reading it! Recommended!

Three-and-a-quarter stars.


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The Andropov File by Martin Ebon
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"Andropov's experience in manipulating others, his shrewd appraisal of human nature and his quintessential toughness, are sharp weapons in the fights he has to wage. [...] A few spectacular cases of punishment - and in relatively high places, at that - can make routine [Soviet] corruption less brazen and less tolerated. No ruthless KGB methods need to be used; tried-and-true Andropov techniques will suffice. "

Yet another item in my series of reads and reviews about Soviet/Russian leaders of the 20th century and the second biography of Yuri Andropov that I am reviewing here after Zhores Medvedev's Andropov . Martin Ebon's The Andropov File (1983) descriptively subtitled The Life and Ideas of Yuri Andropov, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR is similar in that both were written very soon after Andropov was elected the General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party. (For younger readers: the party was the actual center of power in Soviet Union, which at the time was the only other world's superpower and whose military might equaled that of the United States.) Consequently, neither of these biographies provides a historical perspective. Not that such perspective is sorely needed. Andropov died only 14 months after assuming the leadership and did not have many chances to influence the course of Soviet politics or world events in a meaningful way. His most important contribution to world's history is mentioned later in this review.

Ebon's work is a traditionally structured biography. The author recounts the arc of Andropov's political career, beginning with his participation in partisan movement in Karelia in 1941 - 1945, and Otto Kuusinen's role as Andropov's first mentor. The years 1953 - 1957 mark one of the most important stages in Andropov's early party service: he was the Soviet ambassador to Hungary and his role in the brutal suppression of the Hungarian revolution of 1956 is still the subject of speculations. (It also connects with me, personally, as I still have vague memories of the drama of 1956: I lived in Poland at that time and I remember Polish people donating blood for victims on the Budapest massacre by Soviet troops.)

In the mid-1960s Andropov gains the most powerful supporter in the person of Mikhail Suslov, the Soviet Communist Party main ideologue. Andropov becomes the Candidate member of the Politburo in 1967. The trajectory of his career is not traditional, though. Andropov is named the Chairman of the KGB in 1967, the organization that had long been dreaded in the Western world. Andropov remains the KGB boss for 15 years and molds the organization in his "modern way": it begins to rely on more "sophisticated" methods of psychological and social harassment rather than on physical torture and outright murder of the olden days.

The author does not spend much time on "humanizing" Andropov's portrait. True, he quotes observations, stories, and anecdotes by other people who have worked with Andropov, but does not put much credence in them as possibly being created by sensationalism or even planted by Andropov people. We only get the image of Andropov as a "well-mannered workaholic" and his personal style is presented as "ruthlessly fastidious" or "fastidiously ruthless."

In the final chapters the author conveys his pessimism as to Andropov's chances of instituting substantial changes in Soviet politics, economics, and social life. We will never learn what might have happened had Andropov lived longer and had more time as the Soviet supreme leader. The book was written before Andropov's death, so the author did not have the opportunity to note what I consider Andropov's most important contribution to Soviet (and the whole world's) history: his mentorship and support of the future Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, who - partly purposefully partly accidentally - managed to dismantle Soviet Union (at least for a period of time until it is now restored under the Russian flag).

In Appendices the author provides full texts of many, many speeches given by Andropov between 1964 and 1982. This is most mind-numbingly boring reading and I have to admit I just scanned the pages. With the exception of one speech, honoring one of the early builders of future Soviet Union, Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the fist chief of Cheka, the precursor of KGB. The paean to Dzerzhinsky reads almost like a series of Chuck Norris jokes. I am now convinced that Dzerzhinsky could teach God quite a few tricks. And he was Polish by birth!

Two-and-a-half stars.

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