Karl Kuzmich's Journal

Disclaimer
To avoid misunderstanding:

1. My LJ friend-list has no relation to my personal feelings. If I excluded you from my friend-list, that only means our interests have drifted apart. If I included you into my friend-list, that means I wish to read or monitor your postings, but you should not assume I like your postings or agree with them.

2. Reciprocation is not expected, nor should be expected by you.

3. This far, there are no friends-only postings in my LJ, therefore an exclusion from my friend-list prevents nobody from reading my log.

4. I do not monitor the list of those who "befriend" me. When I notice you among my friends, I'll check you out, but there is no telling when it could happen. If you think I might be interested in your (or someone else's) LJ, please tell me.

5. I'm aware that there are tricks to make different categories of friends, but I don't want to mess with that.

The Children of Sderot
Technically, it probably was the worst play I've seen in my life, but it was one of the most impressive.
After spending a few weeks in a camp in New Hampshire, these kids are going back home, where more rockets kept falling during these weeks. Meanwhile, their government is doing nothing to protect them, and we here keep saving Darfur. It was good to see that among all of us who say that "nothing can be done", some folks decided to do something, and did it.
Donate here: http://www.rjcf.com/ChildrenOfSderot3.html

ФЛЕЙТА ЕВТЕРПЫ
Благодаря снисходительности

margovsky, ваш покорный слуга оказался в компании заслуживающей более достойных участников.

Corelli's Mandolin by Louis De Bernieres
Finally -- a book worth writing about!

A magnificent novel. Set on a quaint Greek island of Cephalonia before and during the WWII, the first half kept reminding me of Marquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude". With coming of the German occupation the book became more predictable, less detached and less satisfying. Still, a VERY good book overall.

Superbly narrated by Michael Maloney -- at least half of the pages are spiced with either Greek or Italian accent.

Looking forward to the "Birds without Wings" -- but later.

Grade A
17 hours

Life and Music of D. Shostakovich, lectures by Prof. Greenberg
Here is the letter I've sent to the Teaching Company a few days ago:
=======================
Dear Teaching Company,

We have been listening to your courses for a long time without much feedback. However, the Prof. Greenberg's lecture series on Life and Music of D. Shostakovich that our entire family listened to on our recent vacation drive compels us to write.

The course exceeded our expectations many times over. We think, you can trust this wonderful lecturer not only with musical, but with historical and probably psychological courses as well.

Thank you and Prof. Greenberg for making our vacation more enjoyable,
=======================
8 lectures x 45 min.

Predatory sales tactics
Spent most of the day at the new-hire sales training class. One of the newly hired sales girls is a knock-out who hardly needs any training. If she, God forbid, tries to sell anything to me, I think I'll just hand her my checkbook and put my credit card on top of it. Judging by her colleagues behavior, most of the straight males will do the same.

Current Mood: impressed

ATTACK by Yasmina Khadra
Written by an exiled Algerian army office who assumed a female pen-name to avoid the military censorship.

Dr. Jaafari is a surgeon in a Tel-Aviv hospital. After a hard day of curing the wounds of a youth cafe bombing victims, he learns the "martyr" was his wife, who seemed to be a happy wife of a successful Israeli citizen. After Shin-Bet lets him go because he knows nothing, Dr. Jaafari goes to a quest to learn something...

First of all, this is not a balanced account, as you may conclude reading other reviews. Almost all Arabs are reasonable, sensitive, and nice. Almost all Jews are callous brutes. OK, maybe this is what the author really thinks, so I'll stop short of calling it dishonest. Still, lots of fantasy is going on there. If Israeli raze the suicide bomber's houses, why Dr. Jaafari's house was still standing last time we checked? Probably the author needed a setting for the dead martyr ghost's visit to her widower.

The book fails to explain -- why did this lady kill 19 children? She seems to be intelligent enough to understand that's the surest way to prolong the occupation. Did I miss the explanation when I fell asleep? Did I mention the book is boring? Yawn.

Still, the book exceeded expectations. I was afraid Dr. Jaafari would become a "martyr" himself. Mercifully, the finale was different (though no less improbable).

Grade C
7 hours only, thank G-d

The Thief Lord, by Cornelia Funke
It took a while to listen to this 8.5 hour book -- during our trips with D., but it was not bad. It started as a detective story, then turned to a drama, and ended as a fantasy -- and still managed to be a bit slow-paced in some places.

Set in Venice, it probably will be of interest for those who know the city. Those who do not, should not rely on this book. Kids who think that running away from home is fun shouldn't even touch this romantic glorification of noble street kids. Yes, these kids do steal, but for survival only, or manipulated by bad adults. Anyway, by the end of the book you will learn there is no difference between the kids and adults.
Grade B.

Blue Horizons, by Wilbur Smith
Usually I don't listen to abridged fiction, but this 5-cassette book was never marked as abridged anywhere, inside or outside. By the time I realized it must be abridged, I was too deep in African bush or some unnamed opulent oriental slums, and decided to finish it, even though everything was pretty obvious. Good guys are noble and generous, they don't care about treasures, but somehow the treasures flow to them anyway. Bad guys die the most horrific deaths that serve them right. There is no middle ground for human character, though some secondary characters sometime realize that they serve bad guys and switch their allegiance to good guys.

I thought they stopped writing this romantic nonsense in the 19-th century, but I was wrong. Of course I wouldn't have been able to finish the full 800-page brick.

Stolen Lives, by Malika Oufkir
Malika Oufkir is the oldest daughter of General Oufkir, second man after the king in Morocco until 1972 when he decided (I never learned why) to assassinate the king and died in the failed coup. Why he didn't take any precautions to protect his family also remains unknown.

5-year old Malika (born in 1953) was adopted by Moroccan king Mohammed lived in the palace as a playmate of the princess for about 10 miserable years. King Mohammed died soon, and his son Hassan II used her as a pawn in political games. At the age of 15 she was let go from the gilded cage, only to be in four years time thrown to a much worse jail, where general's widow and six children (age 19 to 3) spent some 15 years until four of them escaped in 1987. Even though in a few days they were caught, they managed to remind the world that they are not dead. They were transferred to much better condition, and their treatment started getting milder until they were allowed to go abroad in 1994.

The book is horribly written (albeit with a "professional" help from Michele Fitoussi). Especially appalling are the helpless paragraphs trying to describe the feelings of the 18-year old boy, who have seen only the prison walls since the age of 3, when they escaped. I'm not sure it is completely honest too. Still, it was an engrossing listening. And it speaks volumes about European human rights politics (which was mostly outside the author's intensions).

Grade B-, 6 hours (abridged)

Whiteout, by Ken Follett
A bio-terror thriller that doesn't thrill.

Follett is an author I never skip; I think I've listened to all his books, and some of them I recommended to others. But this one was a disappointment. I don't expect KF to deliver life-size characters or top-notch psychological drama, these are not his forté, but here the character are simply made of plywood.

To be sure, some pages do deliver the entertainment, but the characters are very bland, some props that I would expect to fire don't even fizzle (for example, the demented mother and the puppy could have been removed from the pages without any harm to the plot).

The most disappointing was the ending. The final family reunion is cloying to the level of disgust, but the worst is that usually straight-talking Follett cannot bring himself to name the real buyers of the deadly virus. A British banker with an unfamiliar bland name paid a few million pounds - that's all we learn. Oh, please!

No match to the "Pillars of the Earth" or "Night over Water".

Grade C+, 11 hours

the Tempting of America, by Robert Bork
This is a very dense abridgment of a 400+ page book into 3 hours, read by his Honor himself. It confirmed what I suspected for a long time: you may think whatever you want about abortions, and I'm not going to judge you, but please don't tell me the right to abort is guaranteed (or prohibited) by the Constitution.

Written in 1989, it didn't lose an ounce of urgency today. I'm afraid it's not a mandatory reading for the Constitutional Law students in our law schools, but many writers of the Amazon customer reviews, including lawyers agree it should be. I wish the first commandment of our Supreme Court judges would be "Do not judge."

Grade B (it's too dense for listening)

Icon, by Frederic Forsyth
Written in 1996, it envisions Russia falling apart in 1999, but saved by British and American spies who cleverly manipulate a bunch of clueless Russian functionaries. Long and often too tedious (even the narrator, David Case, seemed to be bored), this is probably the worst of Forsyth's novels so far. The plot is uncharacteristically loose, and the research is uncharacteristically sloppy. In his earlier novels he wouldn't confuse the "Katyusha" and "Kalinka" songs, but I can forgive that; his laughable usage of Russian profanities (imagine that rendered in refined British by David Case!) is unforgivable. Still, FF remains one of the best in the trade.

18 hours, Grade C

Stormbreaker and Point Blank by Anthony Horowitz
Daniel suggested these books to me, then he wanted to join me in listening, therefore it took quite a while to finish these pharses. These short (4 and 6 hours) parodies are packed with what seems to be the full arsenals of John Wayne, Sean Connery, and Clint Eastwood combined, all happening in a few days time to a 14-year old boy.

Grade B -- for age 10-12

My brush with history
In today's news:

Former East German Olympic swimming champion Petra Schneider would like to wipe out her national record because of doping ... she had been on drugs since the age of 14 and was suffering from heart problems and other side effects.

At the same time when she was being poisoned, I was working for the Sports Research Labs in Moscow. The sparkling new 10-story high Biomedical Research building was finished just in time for the 1980 Moscow Olympics, but I was not admitted there, because one had to have a security clearance to enter the building, and I had no business to go there. I was working on statistical analysis of the sports results, especially of the amazing East German women swimming team. Take back the "women," the girls were all between 14 and 16, they were snapping medals like hungry sharks, and our bosses officially declared them the models of Socialist Sportsmanship. Unofficially, we all knew they were Guinea pigs for our Doctors Mengeles from the Biomed Lab.

Sorry, Petra, I must have analyzed the effects of Soviet wonder drugs on your speed and stamina, but our statistical models didn't take your ruined life into account...

Esau, by Meir Shalev
This is a real book that I've read with my own eyes, though it took a few months. This saga of a family of settlers in Palestine is full of delightful biblical allusions. The novel consists of many separate stories/fables/parables, reminding me of both "One Hundred Years of Solitude" by the manner of narration, and of "Joseph and his Brothers" -- by the absolutely opposite approach to the biblical material.

By the way, Thomas Mann's "Joseph and his Brothers", an absolutely first-rate 20-th century literature, has remained relatively obscure in the anglophone world, probably because of an atrocious translation of the 1940-s. Not anymore - a new translation by John E.Woods is reportedly much better.

I've read "Esau" in a Russian translation, but it's available in English (though I doubt a sound recording exists), and it seems to be not so easy to lose its charm in translation.

500 pages, grade A.

The Downing Street Years, by Margaret Thatcher
With all my deep respect to Margaret Thatcher, I didn't expect much of the book; she is not a writer after all. As often happens, low expectations help. The book turned out to be quite informative and deepened my respect even more. Especially good are the Falkland Islands crisis and the miner strike chapters.

6-hour abridgement read by the Iron Lady herself.
Grade B+, not quite enough to induce the desire to check out the full-length book.

One for the Money, by Janet Evanovich
The first half is very funny; it would have been great if it were like that all the way. Sadly, the author decided to get serious about the "action" aspect and became too grizzly and predictable.

9 hours, B-

Patton: the Man Behind the Legend, by Martin Blumenson
This short (9 hours, could have been even shorter, if you ask me) biography served its purpose. Now I understand why this most charismatic and talented military leader was relegated to secondary roles in the WWII. He performed brilliantly in his position, but didn't have the vision to fill Marshall's or Eisenhower's shoes. Grade B.

While I listened to this book, the "World War II in Pictures" served as a backdrop. Printed in 1945, it is an amusing piece of propaganda. Theories of Stalin luring Nazis in Russian steppes to trap them there in 1942 are beyond the wildest fantasies of my Soviet school history teacher. If you ever come across these volumes, look at the pictures and don't read the captions.

Pushkin and the Queen of Spades by Alice Randall
The title is intriguing, and the plot is promising.

A black professor of Russian literature named her son Pushkin X after the great Russian writer whom she considers black (and who was, of course, 1/8 Ethiopian, but brought up in entirely Russian aristocratic settings). Pushkin X becomes a football star, and presently is going to marry a Russian lap dancer Tanya (a wink to all the Tatyanas of A.S.Pushkin's oeuvre), who was, incidentally, born in the city of Pushkin.

However delightful all these hints, winks, and nods are, the book is badly written and is fraught of unfortunate and counter-productive black self-pity and chauvinism. I couldn't finish it.

Commending the excellent editing and production jobs, I give no grade for unfinished books. 9 hours.

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