David,
I haven't given up on Weinberg's A World At Arms, but I needed a break from it
and a few other books I'm reading about WWII. As it happens, what I chanced
upon reminds me of you. There is a series of novels called Spot and Smudge.
These novels are hard to classify. Spot & Smudge are two dogs born under a
shed that their mother escaped to. She was part of a genetic experiment, got
out of her cage & hid in a barrel of genetic waste. Thus begins something like
a typical super-hero story. Spot & Smudge are from birth smarter than any
human & have other abilities as well. That part isn't what reminded me of you
however. The farm belongs to a family of Scots. The grandmother, Mimi was
born in Scotland. Her ten year old grandson is the one who discovers and saves
the pups. He is the first one who learns how to communicate with them. The
family members engage in a lot of humor and teasing, much of it in Gaelic. The
pups too have senses of humor.
The author, Robert Ululutch explains in his prologue that he unashamedly uses
Gaelic terms. Anyone who doesn't know them is invited to refer to the glossary
at the end of the novel (novels?); which may be okay if you have a hard copy
but doesn't seem worth the trouble of going there and finding your way back on
Kindle.
I just finished the second novel, The Glasgow Gray. Ben and the pups (now
fully grown) travel to Nova Scotia to visit Ben's Great-uncle Hamish; where the
pups have to use their super-hero abilities to defeat evil-doers dealing in
illegal genetic activities which are intended to create super-soldiers with the
pups abilities, but the bad scientists can't get their experiments to work.
They don't yet know that the experiments actually did work and Spot & Smudge
are the living proof. The Glasgow Gray is a female wolf, the only one to
survive after the bad-guys kill off her pack by means of genetically altered
killer wolves. The pups are not only able to communicate with coyotes (back in
the states) but with wolves, elkhounds (which Hamish trains) and guard-dogs in
Nova Scotia. They communicate with Ben via sign language. Spot convinced a
drug-addicted veterinarian surgeon to operate on the front legs of both Spot
and Smudge to install hand-like devices (that he invented) that can be
retracted when the pups need to walk and move about like ordinary dogs.
Maybe what I've written so far makes it sound like something you'd recommend to
a teen-ager, but you'd better not. It contains quite a lot of gore, brutal
mayhem, bad language, etc. Ululutch placed no limitations on what he wanted to
write and apparently it wasn't unacceptable to Amazon & indeed has created for
him a following. He originally intended as just a trilogy, but I gather the
popularity of these novels has inspired him to continue on. There are now
four.
Thus, if you ever resort to light reading to cleans your mind from something
like Weinberg's book, you might consider Ululutch's series. If you need to
look up Gaelic terms you would be better off with a hard copy. If you
understand Gaelic you can get by with a Kindle download. I'm getting by with
the Kindle download and ignoring the Gaelic. :-)
Lawrence
-----Original Message-----
From: lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On ;
Behalf Of david ritchie
Sent: Sunday, March 01, 2020 5:10 PM
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: On underestimating America
Lawrence,
I have given up on, “A World At Arms.” Maybe you have too? I worked my way
through what I think was a fair sample, but there are lots of books in the
world and many demands on my time.
I find myself engaged by another Second World War history I chanced upon at the
library, Eric M. Bergerud, “Fire in the Sky; The Air War in the South Pacific.”
What I like about it is that the author manages to maintain an emphasis on
logistics without making the account too dull. We all have a tendency to think
of war synonymous with combat and of combat as decisive. What Bergerud points
out is that the Allies were very good at building airfields and maintaining
planes.
And he reminds us that more pilots died as a result of accidents than from the
attentions of the enemy. He quotes vivid first-hand descriptions of some of
the accidents and explains what it was about the combination of airfield and
plane design that caused the issue.
David Ritchie,
Portland, Oregon
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