Birthday present

I don't read many new novels, and I usually regret it when I do. However, Helen Fielding has announced a third Bridget Jones book, due out on my birthday.

For anyone who also likes Bridget, you could do a lot worse in the meantime than read Fielding's first novel, "Cause Celeb," whose heroine is very Bridget-like. The book packs a punch, too, it's not just a novel of manners.

It was so little regarded that it wasn't even published in the US until after "Bridget Jones' Diary" became a big success.

I learned from the Guardian story that the Bridget movies were not popular in the US. Can't say I'm surprised. The books were much funnier.

Book Review 280: Enemy at the Gates

ENEMY AT THE GATES: The Battle for Stalingrad, by William Craig.  457 pages illustrated. Konecky

I read William Craig’s “Enemy at the Gates” when it was published in 1973. Rereading it 40 years later, I was struck by how sketchy the military history is.

It’s there, but details are lacking. In part this was because the Russians had not revealed that much about their great victory. Walter Kerr, who was a correspondent during the battle, did not publish “The Secret of Stalingrad,” based on a visit to the then-new battle museum, until 1978.

But Craig’s outline of victory and defeat stands up well.

Another reason for his approach could have been Cornelius Ryan. Ryan’s “The Longest Day” was a huge bestseller. Craig adopts his technique – then novel but now practically obligatory – following the adventures of a few dozen men and women, with minimal connecting narrative.

Stalingrad may have been, as Craig says, the biggest battle of all time. It provided plenty of incident. Some were memorable. The pilgrimage of the lonely, trapped German soldiers to worship – there is hardly a better word for it – a lathe made in Germany that they found in a Russian tank factory stuck in my mind for four decades.

Yet another reason for the presentation of Stalingrad as a human rather than a political drama may have been less consciously chosen. In 1973, American triumphalism was still near it peak. We had defeated Hitler, and the Eastern Front was mysterious, less important and slightly ridiculous sideshow to the main event in France.

Only a few westerners, mostly European leftists, bought the USSR’s claims that it had been the dominant foe in the fight against Hitlerism.

To accept that stuck in the craw of proud Americans, and especially of the 100% Americans who would (in many cases) have preferred making common cause with Hitler against Russin Bolshevism.

Nonetheless, history really is on the side of the big battalions  and today most historians have come around to the realization that Russia had defeated Germany in 1941, before the United States had begun to fight.

Most ridiculous spiritual belief?

So much to choose from, but right now I'm leaning toward "god never sends you more adversity than you can deal with."

A man I went to high school with has been spamming Facebook with this version:

How many of you want to succeed? Embrace adversity. It is your preparation for greatness. Did you see that one coming? God is the ultimate strategist. His way will pave the way for us not the other way around. But we must TRUST Him no matter what we face! Trust is the key.

I blame global warming

From the Guardian:

A beaver has attacked a 60-year-old fisherman in Belarus, slicing an artery and causing him to bleed to death.
It was the latest in a series of beaver attacks on humans in the country, as the rodents, who have razor-sharp teeth, have turned increasingly aggressive after wandering near homes, shops and schools.

Why regulation is good

Bloomberg's Craig Torres has an excellent little history of the demand to create a national reserve bank.

It was one of the sorest political points in early United States history, with populists against it, but eventually they bowed to reality. This is the reality they bowed to:

America was caught up in an industrial revolution that its banking system couldn’t sustain, as the letter from Gleason emphasizes. Glass and his Senate partner on the bill, Robert Latham Owen Jr. -- a lifelong friend and Oklahoma Democrat who, like Glass, was born in Lynchburg -- would watch the banking system trip the economy time and again.
Between 1890 and 1914, there were eight recessions lasting an average of 18 months, including banking crises in 1893 and 1907. Shopkeepers, factory owners, farmers and even bankers had identified the U.S. financial system as a matter of national importance.

Teaconomists please note: in a low-debt, no regulation, small gubmint environment, the economy failed to grow, it crashed every seven years and it did not rapidly recover if left to itsself.

After the New Deal, the economy grew steadily, it never crashed. That's why I'm a New Dealer. The New Deal made capitalism work.

Quite apart from the conspiracy theorists (who when examined under a lens often turn out to be Jew-haters) who think the Federal Reserve and other reserve banks are private enterprises secretly controlling the world, the only slightly less eccentric Teac nomists for some reason want to go back to the pre-1913 condition.

And they pretty much have the Republican Party in a headlock.

I sometimes hear it said that there is no impersonal "market," only real people running businesses and households. True enough so far as it goes. But if you insist on looking at it that way, it puts a dfferent light on Andy Mellon's advice to Herbert Hoover in 1930 to "liquidate labor" etc.

Few if any 21st century rightwingers are as honest as Andy Mellon was, but that's what they were advocating in lae 2008 and 2009.

Evolution of a song title

It occurs to me that Bob McDill's song title "Good Ole Boys Like Me" is more ambiguous in the age of all-comers marriage than it was when Don Williams sang it in 1979.

Miss Atomic Energy of 1948 turns 90

She outlived the nuclear power plant construction business.

(Hat tip: conelrad.com)