Understanding Health Care Reform
15 Mar 2012 Leave a Comment
in Books, Politics, Economics, Supreme Court, Health Care Reform Tags: Supreme Court, President Obama, Health Care, Mitt Romney, Jonathan Gruber, Health Care Reform
Health Care reform is coming before the Supreme Court soon and in an effort to really understand what it is all about I picked up a copy of Jonathan Gruber‘s book “Health Care Reform“
It is a nifty graphic novel which does an excellent job of explaining why we need health care reformm what the reform will do and when, and how is will help reduce the deficit. This last is the most complicated and I’m not sure I got it all in a single reading.
Gruber uses several characters in differing circumstances to illustrate the law’s impact. On the whole, very nicely done and highly recommended if you want to understand what the Affordable Health Care Act is all about. Gruber is an economist who worked first with Mitt Romney on reform in Massachusetts and then with President Obama and his team.
P.D. James and Jane Austen
21 Dec 2011 2 Comments
in Books, Fiction, Mysteries Tags: Jane Austen, P. D. James, Pride and Prejudice
I need to explain that I re-read Pride and Prejudice at least once a year. I loved the early PBS version of the book, but that has been replaced now by the Colin Frith version which I own on DVD. I’ve also dipped into some of the sequels and expansions (most are horrible) to feed by habit.
P.D. James is one of my favorite writers. I have read all of her mysteries. One of my favorites is An Unsuitable Job for a Woman which introduced the young Cordelia Gray. Adam Dalgleish her primary detective is not only a police inspector, but also a published poet. Her books are literate and the mysteries complex and interesting. So when I saw that James had written a kind of sequel to Pride and Prejudice I ordered a copy immediately. And I was not disappointed.
With her usual elegance, James tells brings us to the Darcy estate six years after Elizabeth Bennet married her Mr. Darcy. They now have 2 children and Elizabeth has clearly taken hold as mistress of Pemberley. All the other characters make their appearance including George Wickham who is still a wild neer do well and his wife, Elizabeth’s sister Lydia is still tends to hysteria. They are at the heart of the mystery.
Liesal Schillinger in her review last week in the New York Times book review writes
James clearly understands that many readers feel as close an attachment to Austen’s characters as they do to their own relatives and friends. So she cannily begins by furnishing answers to the natural question: “Where are they now?”
How right it feels to learn, as James informs us, that Bingley and Jane moved away from Netherfield soon after their marriage, wanting to put distance between them and the ever-querulous Mrs. Bennet at Longbourn. What a delight to read that tone-deaf, humorless Mary Bennet has married a “thin, melancholy” rector, “given to preaching sermons of inordinate length and complicated theology.” How apt that the evil seducer George Wickham, after marrying Lizzy’s frivolous sister Lydia, worked as a secretary for the foppish baronet Sir Walter Elliot (a character from Austen’s novel “Persuasion”) until Lydia’s “open flirtation” with the baronet and Wickham’s simpering attempts to ingratiate himself with his employer’s daughter met “finally with disgust.” And what a treat to see Bingley’s snobbish sisters, Mrs. Hurst and Miss Bingley, get their comeuppance — and Harriet Smith (of “Emma”) her reward.
Above all, James will delight Austen’s devoted fans by showing Darcy and Lizzy to be (if anything) more in love and better matched than anyone might have hoped, six years into their marriage.
If you love Austen and you love James or you love one or the other, I think you will love this book.
(Illustration by Skip Sterling)
Summer Reading
17 Aug 2011 Leave a Comment
in Books, Mysteries, Fiction, Children's Tags: Elizabeth Enright, Dorothy Gilman, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Brattleboro Books
I was away for a few days last week and did what I always do in Vermont: hike a little and read and relax a lot. There are several books in my sister’s library I re-read once a year: Understood Betsy by Dorothy Canfield Fisher and Gone-Away Lake by Elizabeth Enright.
This is the story of a little orphan girl around 1900 who has to leave the home of her aunt in an unspecified mid-western city and move to near Putney, Vermont. She learns self-sufficiency, kindness and, most of all, what it takes to be happy. My sister’s hardback is so old, it was published when Dorothy Canfield has not yet added the Fisher. It was published in 1917. The book is like the Little House Books by Laura Ingalls Wilder in the way in which they talk about how to do things like churn butter and make applesauce. And of course, it is about Vermont.
Gone-Away Lake is also a children’s book. First published in 1957, it tells the story of young, almost teens who discover an abandoned resort on a lake that became a swamp after a dam was built. They discover a brother and sister fallen on hard times who moved back to where they had once spent summers. They have adventures and keep the discovery a secret as long as they can from their parents. It is a book about accepting differences couched in a summer vacation story. There is a sequal, Return to Gone-Away in which one of the abandoned houses is purchased and restored by one of the families.
Elizabeth Enright won a Newberry Honor award for Gone-Away Lake.
My other favorite thing to do is to poke around a wonderful used bookstore in Brattleboro, Brattleboro Books. (They, like all bookstores, need a little press.) This year the treasure I unearthed by Dorothy Gilman’s The Tightrope Walker. I had not thought about it or read it in many years, but the minute I spotted the book, it all came back to me. It is the story of a young woman who solves a mystery and discovers herself. (Is there a theme to these books?)
The heroine finds a note in a hurdy-gurdy and follows a trail to uncover a the secret of the note writer’s murder. It is an old-fashioned follow the clues where ever they lead mystery with some romance thrown in. Gilman wrote the tightrope walker in 1979 in between writing her better known Mrs. Pollifax spy stories.
So now you know what I read on my summer vacation.
The facts against what people “know”
03 Sep 2010 Leave a Comment
in Books, Culture, Non Fiction, Politics Tags: Adam Gopnik, President Obama, Republicans, Vincent van Gogh
I’ve written several posts about this subject including the recent “Misinformation and the disappearance of the moderate Republican” and the earlier “Keeping the Faith”. Both discussed the uphill if not futile effort to fight misinformation with facts and the impact this has on democracy.
I have been reading Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life by Adam Gopnik. It has been my train book for the last month or so. Fascinating book and lots to think about. Coming home today, I came across this quote on page 186:
Science – scientific reasoning – seems to me an instrument that will lag far, far behind. For look here, the earth has been thought to be flat. It was true, so it still is today, for instance, between Paris and Asnieres. Which however does not prevent science from proving that the earth is principally round. Which no one contradicts nowadays.
But notwithstanding this they persist nowadays in believing that life is flat and runs from birth to death. However, life too is probably round, and very superior in expanse and capacity to the hemisphere we know at present.
Vincent van Gogh, June 1888
“Science – Scientific reasoning – seems to me an instrument that will lag far, far behind.” We still have people who believe the earth is flat, just as we have those that still believe that President Obama was not born in the United States and is a Muslim. Just a people still believe that the health care reform bill will lead to death panels for Grandma.
My point is that difficulty is using facts to persuade is not a new phenomena. Van Gogh, an artist not a scientist or philosopher or politician recognized this. I don’t know if this cheers me up or depresses me even more.
Thinking about the Supreme Court
19 Apr 2010 1 Comment
in History, Obama Administration, Politics, Supreme Court Tags: Civil Rights, Geoffrey R. Stone, Original Intent, Supreme Court, William Forbath
I’m not going to speculate (at least in this post) on who President Obama will nominate in a few weeks, but I am going to talk about two pieces discussing the Court itself and how decisions are made. The first by Geoffrey R. Stone in the New York Times, the second posted by William Forbath this weekend on Politico’s Arena in response to Stone.
Stone begins
AS the Senate awaits the nomination of a new Supreme Court justice, a frank discussion is needed on the proper role of judges in our constitutional system. For 30 years, conservative commentators have persuaded the public that conservative judges apply the law, whereas liberal judges make up the law. According to Chief Justice John Roberts, his job is just to “call balls and strikes.” According to Justice Antonin Scalia, conservative jurists merely carry out the “original meaning” of the framers. These are appealing but wholly disingenuous descriptions of what judges — liberal or conservative — actually do.
As both Stone and Forbath remind us, the Constitution is an 18th Century document. I believe that the vague yet sweeping language is why the Constitution is still a living and useful document. The question addressed by Stone and Forbath is how one interprets it to meet the modern age. Neither thinks much of the way the current conservative majority uses the constitution.
Stone
Rulings by conservative justices in the past decade make it perfectly clear that they do not “apply the law” in a neutral and detached manner. Consider, for example, their decisions holding that corporations have the same right of free speech as individuals, that commercial advertising receives robust protection under the First Amendment, that the Second Amendment prohibits the regulation of guns, that affirmative action is unconstitutional, that the equal protection clause mandated the election of George W. Bush and that the Boy Scouts have a First Amendment right to exclude gay scoutmasters.
Whatever one thinks of these decisions, it should be apparent that conservative judges do not disinterestedly call balls and strikes. Rather, fueled by their own political and ideological convictions, they make value judgments, often in an aggressively activist manner that goes well beyond anything the framers themselves envisioned. There is nothing simple, neutral, objective or restrained about such decisions. For too long, conservatives have set the terms of the debate about judges, and they have done so in a highly misleading way. Americans should see conservative constitutional jurisprudence for what it really is. And liberals must stand up for their vision of the judiciary.
Forbath
… Conservative judges use history to claim that when they strike down a law, they are merely applying the “original understanding” or “intentions” of the framers of the Constitution. This is bunk. But it is reassuring. It enables conservatives on and off the Court to claim that what liberal judges do is something different and illegitimate. Liberals are “judicial activists.” When liberal judges strike down a law, they are “making up” new law. They are “betraying” the Founding Fathers. This is also bunk. Conservative and liberal judges alike bring their own present-day values and convictions to bear on interpreting and applying the Constitution. Conservatives are wrong to deny it. But they are right that appealing to history and “keeping faith with the past” is an indispensable part of our constitutional tradition – and one that helps mobilize popular support behind the constitutional commitments a judge, lawmaker, or citizen may prize. So, liberals need to get a better handle on the way to use history.
So what should the role of history be? And how can liberal justices use it more to their advantage? Stone points out that
So, how should judges interpret the Constitution? To answer that question, we need to consider why we give courts the power of judicial review — the power to hold laws unconstitutional — in the first place. Although the framers thought democracy to be the best system of government, they recognized that it was imperfect. One flaw that troubled them was the risk that prejudice or intolerance on the part of the majority might threaten the liberties of a minority. As James Madison observed, in a democratic society “the real power lies in the majority of the community, and the invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended … from acts in which the government is the mere instrument of the major number of the constituents.” It was therefore essential, Madison concluded, for judges, whose life tenure insulates them from the demands of the majority, to serve as the guardians of our liberties and as “an impenetrable bulwark” against every encroachment upon our most cherished freedoms.
Conservative judges often stand this idea on its head. As the list of rulings above shows, they tend to exercise the power of judicial review to invalidate laws that disadvantage corporations, business interests, the wealthy and other powerful interests in society. They employ judicial review to protect the powerful rather than the powerless.
Liberal judges, on the other hand, have tended to exercise the power of judicial review to invalidate laws that disadvantage racial and religious minorities, political dissenters, people accused of crimes and others who are unlikely to have their interests fully and fairly considered by the majority. Liberal judges have ended racial segregation, recognized the principle of “one person, one vote,” prohibited censorship of the Pentagon Papers and upheld the right to due process, even at Guantanamo Bay. This approach to judicial review fits much more naturally with the concerns and intentions of people like Madison who forged the American constitutional system.
Where Forbath disagrees is with Stone’s reliance on James Madison and original intent. He points out
So, judges today must attend to the text the framers gave us, the general principles it enshrines, the Amendments Americans have added, and the meaning and range of applications generations of judges, lawmakers and citizens have poured into them. And judges must consult their own conscience and experience as they sift through these materials that history provides and decide how best to keep faith with the past.
As long as they hew to this honest approach to history, liberals often draw compelling lessons from it. But lately, liberals are being drawn into the fictions and falsities of the “framers’ intentions” in order to sound just as “true” to the Founding Fathers as our conservative foes. When we liberals play the “framers’ intentions” game, however, we end up sounding silly and disingenuous.
Take for example constitutional scholar Geoffrey Stone’s important op-ed piece in last Wednesday’s New York Times. Looking ahead to President Obama’s soon-to-be-announced nomination of a new Supreme Court Justice, Stone urges “a frank discussion .on the proper role of judges in our constitutional system.” He laments that for thirty years or so, conservatives have dominated the national conversation about the Constitution and the Court, and he rightly points out that they have done so “in a highly misleading way” by claiming that conservative judges just “apply” the Constitution by enforcing the “framers’ intentions.” Stone goes on to contrast the kinds of laws that liberal judges strike down – laws that burden racial minorities, the poor and the powerless, with laws that conservative judges strike down – laws that “disadvantage corporations, business interests, the wealthy and other powerful interests in society.” And he suggests that liberal judges surely have a wiser vision of the role of judges in a constitutional democracy, since they wield the power of judicial review to safeguard people most at risk of being shortchanged in the ordinary political process, while the conservative judges conjure up new safeguards for those who already enjoy ample sway in the political arena.
So far so good. But along the way, Stone proves unable to resist the siren song of “framers’ intentions.” He tries to turn the table on the conservatives. He goes to some lengths trying to cloak liberal constitutional values and commitments in the mantle of James Madison’s “intentions.” Stone has dressed up James Madison as a Great Society liberal. Says Stone, the “intentions of people like Madison who forged the American constitutional system” was to safeguard minorities like African-Americans, undocumented immigrants and the Guantanamo detainees against the tyranny of the majority. That is what liberal judges do. Conservatives, Stone declares, stand Madison’s “idea on its head.” They wield judicial review to overturn affirmative action, gun control, and restrictions on corporate speech; they “tend to exercise. judicial review to invalidate laws that disadvantage corporations, business interests, the wealthy and other powerful interests in society.”
Stone’s James Madison is bunk too. The real James Madison was largely hostile to any kind of judicial review. More important: while Madison did craft the Constitution to safeguard minority rights against the tyranny of the majority, and while Madison, the wealthy slaveholder, was concerned about protecting religious minorities, he had no concern for the rights of “racial minorities,” and it was mainly the rights of the wealthy over against the majority of Americans of modest means that Madison hoped to protect! Thus, the conservatives on today’s Court have about as good a claim to Madison’s mantle as we liberals do.
I think Forbath is right about history and original intent. As long as we argue about which view of original intent is correct, liberals will never prevail. We need to move on to take into about all the history since 1787. Forbath writes
History is on our side; but that has much less to do with James Madison and much more to do with the bloodshed of the Civil War and the Civil War and Reconstruction Amendments that made the Constitution a charter of equal rights for all Americans, including the former slaves. It was the Republicans of the Reconstruction Era, the New Dealers, the Civil Rights Movement, and the twentieth-century Court who gradually enlarged Madison’s original conception of minority rights and majority tyranny to make it a safeguard for the poor and vulnerable.
We do need “a frank discussion” on the Constitution and the proper role of judges, and we can’t be half-frank about it. There are good arguments why the liberals’ account is better. Stone offers a few. But wrapping ourselves in the mantle of the 18th century framers’ intentions as he tries to do is not one. Our constitutional commitments have emerged over two centuries of tumultuous change. The arc of constitutional history generally has bent toward a more inclusive and generous vision of rights-bearing membership in We, the People. Conservatives are bending it back. The 18th century framers might have agreed with them; but the Civil War, the Reconstruction Amendments, and much else have intervened in the mean time; and, in any case, the choice – about how to keep faith with our constitutional past – is ours.
We need a Supreme Court with Justices that are willing to grow, to learn and to change with the times. President Obama could do worse that nominate someone in the Earl Warren or Justice Powell or Justice Brennan mold. Those were men who learned to consider cases on their merits, who understood the need to connect decisions to real ordinary people. They were men with empathy.
Bipartisan book buyer?
26 Mar 2010 Leave a Comment
in Books, Obama Administration, Politics Tags: Karl Rove, Mitt Romney, Prairie Lights Bookstore, President Obama
After his speech on health care in Iowa, President Obama stopped at a bookstore. – an independent bookstore, Prairie Lights to browse and pick on some books for the kids.
I love this picture of the President holding books by Karl Rove and Mitt Romney taken by Doug Mills of the New York Times.
The accompanying story in the Times by Sheryl Gay Stolberg reports some very amusing dialogue between Robert Gibbs and the President. Here are some exerpts. (This is based in part on reporting by the pool reporter.)
A few minutes later POTUS stepped up to the cash register with two books in his hands: “Journey to the River Sea” by Eva Ibbotson and “The Secret of Zoom” by Lynne Jonell for his daughters.
Obama pulled out five $20 bills to pay for the two books. Your pooler couldn’t hear the exact price but the two books didn’t cost that much.
Obama also bought a book for Gibbs, who was holding a large Star Wars pop-up book for his six-year-old son, Ethan.
“It’s a little expensive, sir,” Gibbs said to his boss as he handed it over.
POTUS showed the book to pool as the cashier rang it up for $37.44.
“I can handle it,” Obama said as Gibbs suggested he pay. “It’s for keeping his dad away for too many hours a day.”
“I need more books than that, sir,” Gibbs remarked.
Then after he left Prairie Lights
Nothing for Mrs. Obama?” Bloomberg’s Ed Chen asked.Obama paused to think for a second. “Thanks for getting me in trouble,” he replied.
We know that Obama used to visit a neighborhood bookstore in Chicago often. I’m glad to see he still likes bookstores as they are among my favorite places. And I never heard of another President who carried cash. Obama buys shave ice in Hawaii, burgers in D.C. and now books in Iowa. I also wonder how many copies of the books he bought will now be sold. I know I will look into them for the grands. Can we get the Obama girls to write some reviews?
Josephine Tey and Dick Francis
16 Feb 2010 1 Comment
in Books, Culture, Fiction, Mysteries Tags: Dead Cert, Dick Francis, Josephine Tey, Miss Pym Disposes
I had just finished re-reading Josephine Tey’s Miss Pym Disposes when I learned of the death of Dick Francis. While they could not be more different, both are favorites of mine. Josephine Tey specialized in elegant stories with very little violence and no blood while Dick Francis always had a “tough guy” hero who at some point gets beaten up (or injured somehow) and has to be nursed back to health, usually by the love interest. Tey wrote only eight mysteries between 1929 (The Man in the Queue) and 1952 (The Singing Sands ). Francis, on the other hand wrote more than 40 beginning in 1962 with Dead Cert.
Dick Francis was the Queen’s Jockey and famous in British racing circles before he turned to write mysterties. According to his obituary in the New York Times
…Mr. Francis was already a celebrity in British sporting circles. Named champion jockey of the 1953-54 racing season by the British National Hunt after winning more than 350 races, he was retained as jockey to the queen mother for four seasons and raced eight times in the Grand National Steeplechase.When Devon Loch, the horse he was racing for the queen mother in the 1956 Grand National, collapsed in a spectacular mishap just before he would have won, Mr. Francis feared, as he put it in his autobiography, that he would be remembered as “the man who didn’t win the National.” This setback, along with the accumulated miseries of injuries, forced him into early retirement at the age of 36.
The New York Times published this well known picture of Francis on Devon Loch, the Queen Mother’s horse.
Drawing on his experiences as a jockey and his intimate knowledge of the racetrack crowd — from aristocratic owners to Cockney stable boys — the novel contained all the elements that readers would come to relish from a Dick Francis thriller. There was the pounding excitement of a race, the aura of the gentry at play, the sweaty smells from the stables out back, an appreciation for the regal beauty and unique personality of a thoroughbred — and enough sadistic violence to man and beast to satisfy the bloodthirsty.
…
Mr. Francis was a formulaic writer, even if the formula was foolproof. He drew the reader into the intimate and remarkably sensual experience of the world of racing. His writing never seemed better than when his jockey-heroes climbed on their mounts and gave themselves up to what he called “the old song in the blood.”
This self-contained world was, of course, a reflection of a broader universe in which themes of winning and losing and courage and integrity have more sweeping meaning. As the critic John Leonard wrote, “Not to read Dick Francis because you don’t like horses is like not reading Dostoyevsky because you don’t like God.”
Tey also created worlds. Each of her eight mysterties is set in a different world. Although little is know about Tey (Elizabeth Macintosh), she was born in Inverness and attended a physical training college in Birmingham. Miss Pym Disposes is set at a similar sort of college where the students (all young women) study to teach phys ed and practice what we would now call physical therapy.
The writer, Natasha Cooper, wrote in a short essay on Tey
Until I started to think about this piece I had always assumed that my devotion to Josephine Tey’s novels had most to do with the age at which I first read them. As an impressionable twelve- or thirteen-year-old I revelled in the gentle, unusually rational decency of her good characters and found the domesticity of her settings appealing. The elegant simplicity of her style makes her work easy to enjoy at any age and some of the novels, particularly Brat Farrar with its predominantly young cast, might well have been written specifically for teenagers.
But once I started to reread some of the novels the other day, I realised that there was more to my delight in her work. Her obsession with the masks people wear and the truths they hide is one that I share. All crime writers must be concerned with the ways in which criminals disguise themselves and are found out by their investigators, but Tey’s interest went beyond that.
…In Miss Pym Disposes she plays with the idea of misread identity in several different ways in the characters of the heroine, an easily mockable spinster who happens to have written a brilliantly successful psychology textbook, and the three physical training students who provide the murderer, victim and chief suspect.Like most of Tey’s villains, Pamela Nash in Miss Pym Disposes is beautiful, successful, adored – and so full of vanity that she cannot conceive of anything (even someone else’s life) being more important than her own wishes…
I also first read Tey as a teenager by discovering Miss Pym and Brat Farrar.
As the Grumpy Old Bookman said in his 2005 entry
Josephine Tey, the English crime writer, died in 1952; but if you go to Amazon.co.uk and type in her name, you get 172 results; and on Amazon.com you get 109. In other words, the lady is still in print, is still published in a wide variety of formats, still selling, and still being read. That being the case, it is worth having a look at her life and methods in order to see what might be learnt.
So celebrate Dick Francis by picking up one of his books (I particularly like the early ones) and rediscover (or discover) Josephine Tey both are well worth the time.
Virginia Sweet and Henry Allingham
20 Jul 2009 Leave a Comment
in Culture, History Tags: Apollo 11, Henry Allingham, moon landing, Virginia Sweet, World War I, World War II
Today, forty years ago, Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. In the last few days two pioneering pilots, one from World War I and the other from World War II have died.
Virginia Sweet’s obituary as published in the Boston Globe is short so here it is in its entirty.
Inspired by a story she read as a young girl about Amelia Earhart’s trans-Atlantic flight, Virginia Sweet became a pioneering female aviator in her own right.
She was a pilot with the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots, ferrying every imaginable type of military aircraft from factories to air bases during World War II to free male pilots for combat overseas.
Sometimes Ms. Sweet was assigned to fly shot-up, barely functional aircraft in for repair. Thirty-eight of her fellow female fliers were killed during duty.
After the war, when these Rosie the Riveters of the skies no longer were needed, the nation essentially turned its back on Ms. Sweet and hundreds of Women’s Airforce Service Pilots like her.
The longtime Schenectady resident died July 12 at 88, two weeks after President Obama signed a law that offered recognition and Congressional Gold Medals, the highest award Congress can give to a civilian, to the WASP fliers.
Ms. Sweet prided herself on a five-decade flying record without an accident
Henry Allingham was one of the few veterans of World War I still alive when he died at aged 113. The New York Times obituary tells his story.
An iconic figure to many in Britain, Mr. Allingham did wartime service including stints on land, in the air and at sea. In 1915, he flew as an observer and gunner in the Royal Naval Air Service, hunting zeppelins over the North Sea. He was aboard one of the Royal Navy ships that fought in the Battle of Jutland in 1916, in which Britain lost 14 ships and 6,000 seamen.
Mr. Allingham was born in London in 1896. He lost his father to tuberculosis the next year. After his mother also died, he was raised by a grandmother. He became a trainee maker of surgical instruments before moving into the motor trade, training as a mechanic. After his wartime service, he worked until retirement for the Ford Motor Company. Judged to be too old to serve in combat in World War II, he was assigned to a project that sought to neutralize German magnetic mines.
The Associated Press news account of Mr. Allingham’s death has this wonderful account
He spent the war’s first months refitting trucks for military use, but when his mother died in June 1915, he decided to join after seeing a plane circling a reservoir in Essex.
Only a dozen years after the Wright brothers first put up their plane, Allingham and other airmen set out from England on motorized kites made with wood, linen, and wire. They piled on clothes and smeared their faces in Vaseline, whale oil, or engine grease to block the cold.
“To be honest, all the planes were so flimsy and unpredictable – as well as incapable of carrying large fuel loads – at the start of the war that both British and German pilots would immediately turn back rather than face each other in the skies if they did not enjoy height supremacy,’’ Allingham would later write.
As a mechanic, Allingham’s job was to maintain the rickety craft. He also flew as an observer on a biplane. At first, his weaponry consisted of a standard issue Lee Enfield .303 rifle – sometimes two. Parachutes weren’t issued. He fought in the Battle of Jutland, the largest naval battle of World War I. He served on the Western Front.
We owe Virginia Sweet and Henry Allingham not only for their service during war, but for their part in advancing aviation. As anyone who plays Sid Meir’s Civilization knows: you have to have flight before you can get rocketry.
Nancy Drew, Cherry Ames, and Vicki Barr
18 Jul 2009 Leave a Comment
in Books, Culture, Fiction, Mysteries Tags: Cherry Ames, Nancy Drew, Vicki Barr
Nancy Drew figured in the recent hearings for Sonia Sotomayor to become a judge. It seems that Hillary Rodham Clinton, Ruth Ginsberg, and Sonia Sotomayor all read the series when they were growing up. I have to say that I hated the Nancy Drew books. Oh, I’ve read one or two when they were there and there was nothing else to read, but I much preferred Cherry Ames (the nurse who solved mysteries) or Vicki Barr (the flight attendant who did the same).
In her article in the New York Times, Jan Hoffman recounts the many successful women who read, enjoyed and consider Nancy Drew a role model.
Touchstone, pole star, reflecting pool. Often what women remember about the books speaks to who they were — shy girls seeking inspiration; smart girls seeking affirmation. The series even gave voice to girls who rebelled against the Girl Sleuth’s pearl-necklace perfection.
All told, the women’s recollections capture the impact of a formulaic, ghostwritten series approaching its 80th year.
…
Since its debut in 1930, the series has thrived in a germ-free bubble, scarcely brushed by time and social upheaval. Nancy Drew, 16 or 18, depending on the edition, is a daddy’s girl, living with her father, Carson, a lawyer — her mother conveniently died when she was 3 — and housekeeper, Hannah Gruen, in a comfortable home in River Heights where the words “Amber Alert” have never been heard.
With curiosity and confidence, she attacks mysteries and solves them, helped by her friends Bess, who is always “pleasingly plump,” and George, a slim tomboy. There’s a harmless boyfriend, Ned Nickerson, about whom the actress Ellen Barkin once snickered, “He was like her driver to me.”
But others feel the way I do about Nancy
“Nancy is too perfect,” said Laura Lippman, 50, who writes a popular series about Tess Monaghan, a detective with questionable taste in boyfriends and an aversion to rules. Even Nancy’s father “is helpless in front of her perfection. She requires Bess and George to constantly talk about her perfection. Bess is fat and George is unfeminine and they are not as fabulous as Nancy.”
In the very early days of the internet and email, I participated in a discussion group with a number of women. The topic of Nancy Drew came up and I famously wrote that I didn’t like her because you never felt she ever used the bathroom. This is the perfection Lippman is speaking about.
Vicki Barr and Cherry Ames were also mid-westerners with supportive families but they left those families to pursue their professions and dreams. They had interesting friends and were not the center of their own universe although they were the center of their cicles.
Cherry Ames became a nurse to serve during World War II. The first six books, Student Nurse, Senior Nurse, Army Nurse, Chief Nurse, Flight Nurse, and Veterans’ Nurse specifically discuss the war, the war effort, and her role. Her brother went to fight in the war. I liked her because she actually did stuff. Instead of Ned Nickerson, Cherry had doctors and other professional men hanging around. But Cherry also taught us that one has to study to achieve our goals. The first two books are set during her nurse training days.
But my favorite is Vicki Barr. The books are set just after the end of World War II when passenger flights were becoming more popular and less of a novelty.
She reads this ad and talks her way into the class as she in not quite old enough. In fact, she has to get a letter from her parents giving permission.
“If you are twenty-one to twenty-eight, and single – if you are a registered nurse, or if you have at least two years of college or of business experience in dealing with people – then here’s the most appealing job in the world! Apply tomorrow!”
Vicki Barr, like Cherry Ames. had a profession for which she had to be trained. She lived in an apartment in New York City with other stewardesses as they were then called. The first book is about their training which was quite extensive and talked about responsibility for passenger safety. The women who were Vicki’s frends and roommates were diverse, if not racially than in background and even age. She flew a lot of different routes and involved herself in the lives of her passengers which is how she came to solve mysteries. Like Cherry, Vicki had cool boyfriends like the pilot, Dean, and newspaper man, Pete. The boyfriends were always enlisted to help her solve the case, but not to rescue her.
I still read mysteries and I still prefer women sluths, but in response to Jan Hoffman’s question, ”And who was your Nancy Drew?” I have to say Vicki Barr. Besides, the first one was published the year I was born.
Reading Out of Time
23 Apr 2009 Leave a Comment
in Books, Culture, Mysteries Tags: Anne Perry, Annette Meyers, Dorothy Sayers, Mysteries
I often read mysteries set in historical times. Dorothy Sayers for example set her Lord Peter Wimsey/Harriet Vane stories during the time between the World Wars and into the Second. But my recent reading has started me thinking about the differences in investigations before and now.
The economic crisis caused me to re-read some of the Annette Meyer “Smith and Wetzon” books. They are set in the late 1980s and early 1990s. No cell phones, just answering machines. Early forensics help identify the bones of a dancer found in a trunk. No 24 hour news cycles – just the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal delivered daily. The books (Blood on the Street, These Bones Were Made for Dancing, and Murder: The Musical) seem more dated than Dorothy Sayers or what I am reading now, Anne Perry’s Buckingham Place Gardens which is set in Victorian England.
Why are stories set 20 years ago so old-school while Anne Perry and Dorothy Sayers are not? Is is because therre is so much that is familar in Annette Meyer’s that the reader expects Law and Order, CSI or Bones?
Something to think about. I will have to re-read some very early Robert Parker to see if I get the same feeling.
