Naming the baby, making a word

Naming a child is the only opportunity that most people get to anoint an entity in the world with a word of their own choosing.

Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought

Genesis says Adam was charged with naming all the animals. The rest of us get to name our own kids, as Steven Pinker reminds us, but that is about it. New words are accepted into the language every year, but chances are you and I aren't responsible for any of them. We may not even think of a name as being a word, but of course it is. Some names even make it into dictionaries, but again chances are you and I are not among them. Names like Abraham Lincoln and Aristotle are.

Some names are one of a kind, or nearly so. Others are as common as John Smith and Mary Brown. Unique names stand out in a crowd or in a classroom, but at least John Smith and Mary Brown don't have to spell their names each time they say them. And they probably weren't ridiculed for their names in junior high.

Most parents take their responsibility in naming seriously, although some not seriously enough. I am thinking here of those whose children's names may bring difficulty later on in life. My son went to college with a girl named Lovechild, the daughter apparently of former hippies. Frank Zappa gave his children names like Moon Unit and Dweezil. Former heavyweight boxer George Foreman named each of his sons George and each of his daughters some variation of George. One wonders what happened each time the phone rang in the Foreman home and the caller asked to speak to George.

Parents may consider all kinds of things when naming a baby. Children are often named after parents or grandparents. Some are named after famous people or even places. Some think about how a first name will go with the last name. Some like alliteration, as in Peter Parker, while others want a single-syllable first name to go with a multi-syllable last name, or vice versa.

Most of us just go with names we like, which is why names go in and out of style. We tend to like the same names everybody else in our generation likes, those that happen to be fashionable at the time. We can often guess the age of a person by his or her first name. Harold or Dorothy? Probably a senior citizen. Jennifer or Jason? Probably in their 40s, give or take a decade. My grandchildren are called Aly and Max. When I was in school I knew nobody with those names, but they know several.

Some names never seem to go out of style, such as John and Mary, mentioned above. Or David or Robert or Steven for boys. We named our son Daniel, and that name seems to have aged well. For girls, names like Elizabeth, Anne and Sarah seem to be timeless.

We get only so many chances to pick a name, or to create a word, while some people, being childless, get no chance at all. We need to make the most of those chances. Those names, those words, will last much longer (on tombstones and in public records) than the individuals who temporarily possess them.

Settling old scores

If not the best of the Barker and Llewelyn adventures by Will Thomas, Old Scores (2017) still moves along at a lively pace and maintains reader interest throughout.

It is 1891 and a Japanese delegation has arrived in London. It is mainly a shopping trip, the Japanese eager to purchase items, including a battleship, that will help them become an Asian power. One of their first sightseeing stops is the Japanese garden belonging to Cyrus Barker, the private enquiry agent who smokes a meerschaum pipe, has his own Doctor Watson in the form of the Welshman Thomas Llewelyn and considers the word detective to be a pejorative. Barker, it happens, once lived in Japan and had a Japanese wife, foreshadowing the "old scores" of the title.

The assassination of the Japanese ambassador leads to Barker being hired to find the killer, as well as to Barker being considered the main suspect. The ambassador's embarrassed bodyguards target Barker and Llewelyn, and there is much involving members of London's Chinese community, who despise the Japanese. This community includes Barker's former ward, Bok Fu Ying, now married to a man involved in prosperous but barely legal activities. What was she doing at the scene of the crime?

The resolution Thomas gives us seems complicated and confusing, and all questions are not satisfactorily answered. Even so, this is an excellent series of mysteries. Just choose another book to start with.

The reluctant tourist

In espionage thrillers, agents may have lovers but rarely spouses and children they love and long to spend more time with. But in Olen Steinhauer's terrific The Tourist (2009), Milo Weaver just wants to take his family to Disney World. He wants to be a tourist, and not a "tourist," CIA lingo for agents who wander the world doing the Company's bidding. Under the name Charles Alexander, Weaver used to be a Company tourist. Now he has a desk job and prefers to keep it that way.

But then an international assassin chooses Weaver as his audience for his dying words, which suggest that the assassin was actually working for someone in the CIA and that Weaver had better discover who that is.

Soon Weaver, forced to abandon his family in Florida, must travel to Paris and elsewhere, trying to find the answers upon which his life may depend. Once again he finds himself a tourist, this time working on his own.

Espionage novels are traditionally filled with complexity, sudden turns, sudden deaths and betrayals. The Tourist has all that, and more.

Growing up in a drug store

Richard Armour's Drug Store Days: My Youth Among the Pills and Potions (1959) may be one of the funniest memoirs you will ever read, even if it is far from the funniest of Armour's books.

Armour grew up the son and grandson of California druggists. He did not follow the family tradition and instead became a college professor and humorist, author of numerous textbook parodies such as It All Started with Columbus and light verse.

Most of the humor in Drug Store Days comes at his own family's expense. Both of his quirky grandmothers complicated family life. His dad's mother had been married to the drug store's original owner and continued to act as if the store were hers, coming in every day and staking out a position near the ladies' restroom and making announcements whenever it was occupied. "Besides, as long as he owed her anything she felt that the store was really hers and that she was entitled to drop in and criticize and help herself to peppermints," Armour writes.

As for his maternal grandmother, she lived with the family for several years and insisted upon a nip of alcohol at bedtime. When Prohibition came in, she refused to change her habit, and in fact refused to go to bed without her nightcap. Fortunately his father, being a druggist, had remedies in his store containing enough alcohol to give his mother-in-law a good night's sleep and himself a little peace in his home.

Another frequent subject of Armour's memories is his Uncle Lester, his father's unmarried brother, who seem favored by their mother, at least as long as he stayed unmarried. She did her best to discourage any woman who might take an interest in Lester.

Armor's father was a tightwad who squeezed maximum profit out of everything, while refusing to install a soda fountain in his drug store at a time when soda fountains were a major source of revenue for his competitors. He probably didn't like the thought of his son, and perhaps his mother, consuming most of the profits. As for his mother, she had a jealous streak, especially after her husband installed a couch in the basement of his store.

Richard Armour had a gift for finding the humor in just about anything, including Christopher Columbus, Karl Marx and his own grandmothers. Thank goodness he chose not to become a druggist.

The thoughtless detective

Now, in the first place, I am not intelligent.

Inspector Maigret in Maigret in New York by Georges Simenon

Can you imagine a detective who not only claims not to be intelligent but also says he never uses deductive reasoning or even forms an idea, yet solves scores of difficult cases? Well Georges Simenon could, and from 1931 to 1972 in 75 novels and half as many short stories did just that.

In Maigret in New York (1947), the inspector is retired, even though the novel appeared fairly early in Simenon's career. Apparently the author never expected to still be writing Maigret stories for another 25 years. His retirement is interrupted by a young American who fears for the life of his father, a wealthy American. And so Maigret, perhaps proving he is not very intelligent, boards a ship with Jean Maura and sails to New York City. When the ship docks, however, the young man promptly disappears.

The father, known by all as Little John, shows no anxiety about his son, nor about his own life. He offers to pay Maigret handsomely for his trouble and send him back to Paris. Yet the inspector is bothered by another young man who seems to speak for Little John. It isn't even clear which of the two men is actually running the juke box business responsible for Little John's fortune.

Gradually Maigret gathers information, mostly about Little John's early life as a musician in New York. He uses the services of a private detective, a depressed and alcoholic former clown who is easily the novel's best character, Maigret included. Before long the questions draw the attention of the New York underworld, and one potential witness is murdered.

All this will get the reader thinking, but Maigret just lets the various facts percolate in his brain, letting his subconscious do the work, until all is revealed with a simple phone call back to Paris.

This is not a totally satisfying mystery novel, yet it is short (just 184 pages) and interesting even when one hasn't a clue about what is going on.

View from the trenches

Historians can give us a big-picture view of major battles, but big-picture views don't necessarily reveal what that battle was really like for those on the battlefield. For that you need to hear from the soldiers themselves. And that is what makes Richard Van Emden's The Somme: The Epic Battle in the Soldiers' Own Words and Photographs (2016) something special.

By the time the Somme offensive against the German lines began early in July of 1917 (it continued almost until the end of the year), British soldiers were forbidden to have cameras, probably because the military did not want people back in England to see just how bad conditions were on the front lines. Still a number of soldiers, especially officers, did take cameras with them, and the photographs that survive are often stunning. Van Emden also includes photos taken by German soldiers.

Between the photographs, Van Emden shows us the progress of the battle (not that there was much actual progress) via excerpts from letters, diaries and memoirs written by soldiers on both sides.

British soldiers, being British, enjoyed their tea time even with a battle going on. "Oh, what should we do without our tea here!" one man writes. Officers often refer to their servants, whose service included doing their masters' bidding with bullets flying.

The men write about their chances of surviving the next attack (slim in the case of those ordered to advance against German machine guns), about the terrible wounds inflicted upon their fellows, about the constant noise, about the mud and the rats, and about the stink of decaying bodies (something war movies never seem to mention).

Deadly combat actually seems to have been viewed as fun by a couple of the writers. One of them says, "I say that this feeling of joy and lightheartedness does not come from any pleasure in killing — that's the rotten part — but in the risk of being killed. My days in the trenches were days of utter content; I cannot explain why, even to myself." Yet another soldier writes, "War is indescribably disgusting. Any man who has seen it and praises it is degenerate."

One man tells of being hugged by a German prisoner relieved to still be alive. Another tells of trying to take pictures of some of the men. "The snaps are not very good as I could not ask the troops to stand still and look pleasant!"

In the snaps Van Emden has collected, few of the troops look very pleasant. Still, like the written commentary by the soldiers, they are quite good on the whole, making the book something that should interest anyone with an interest in World War I in general or the battle of Somme in particular.

Losing one's taste for authors

To me, some authors are like cantaloupe.

I thought about this a couple of times this week when I had meals that included a fruit cup. In both there were generous portions of cantaloupe. Cantaloupe usually tastes good to me on the first bite. On the second bite it's OK. After that it seems to taste a little worse with each bite until even the odor turns my stomach.

And so some authors are like that. They appeal to me at first, then gradually (or suddenly) lose their appeal.

James Lee Burke

One of these is James Lee Burke. At one time I was enthusiastic about his Dave Robicheaux mysteries. Then one novel — I've forgotten which one — made me realize I had had enough. As I recall it was the violence that turned me off. Robicheaux took a beating just one time too many. It's not that the detective wasn't tough enough, but he just seemed stupid, always saying and doing the very things that would set off the bad guys. Robert Parker's Spenser acts like this as well, but at least Spenser is smart enough to have Hawk around to back him up. Robicheaux, in this novel at least, just took the beatings.

Clive Cussler is another author who entertained me for a time. Then one day I realized his books were crap, and that was that.

I read quite a number of the Pendergast novels by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, including three in rapid succession three or four years ago. Then I realized the main mystery in the series, what really happened to Pendergast's wife, might never be resolved. It was just being used as a cliffhanger to keep me and other readers coming back for more.  I finally decided not to come back.

I stopped reading Jo Nesbo after just one novel for the same reason. The solution of the book's central mystery was left for another book, and probably another and another. I prefer mysteries and thrillers in which the heroes actually get to the bottom of things, then face another challenge next time around.

When Halifax exploded

I first heard about the Halifax explosion during a visit to Halifax in the 1990s. Why, I wondered, had I never heard of it before? In the United States we knew about the Chicago fire, the San Franscisco earthquake and the Johnstown flood, but just a few miles up the coast from Boston was the largest manmade explosion in history until the Hiroshima A-bomb, and I had heard nothing about it.

The 100th anniversary of explosion in 2017 resulted in two books on the subject, one of them The Great Halifax Explosion by John U. Bacon. Reading Bacon's book makes me wonder even more how an explosion that leveled most of a city could be remembered by so few people south of the Canadian border.

Two major factors led to the explosion: the First World War and carelessness. The explosion might just as easily have blown away a big chunk of New York City, for that is where the ship, the Mont-Blanc, was filled to the brim with explosives and ignitors. Crew members were forbidden to smoke or even to carry matches. Even a sudden bump could have set off an explosion.

Yet the disaster, which now seems all but inevitable, didn't occur until the ship was entering Halifax harbor on Dec. 6, 1917. It was intended as the last stop before the Mont-Blanc headed for the war in Europe. Had it been peacetime there would have been no need for a ship to be full of explosives, but if it had been, that ship would have had a red flag to alert other ships to stay clear. But they didn't want to alert any submarines or saboteurs that might be hanging about. So the Mont-Blanc looked no different than any other ship entering Halifax's near-perfect harbor.

The problem was there was another ship, the Imo, going the other way in the wrong lane at excessive speed. Its captain expected the Mont-Blanc to get out of its way, but the Mont-Blanc's captain didn't want to risk a sudden shift of its dangerous cargo. This game of chicken led to the collision.

Surprisingly the explosion did not occur immediately, but there was an immediate fire. The crew of the Mont-Blanc, knowing the danger, abandoned ship and got as far away as possible. Most survived, though officers were held accountable afterward. Others in the harbor, including those aboard the Imo and those responsible for fighting fires in the harbor,  moved in the opposite direction. Many people stood around the harbor to watch the ship burn.

The explosion killed nearly two thousand people and destroyed much of the city. Two days later a blizzard struck, burying the ruins under 16 inches of snow. Bacon is at his best detailing the extend of the damage to humans and to their property. Many survivors lost their eyes to the broken glass that flew at high speed from virtually every window in Halifax. Many children were left orphans; many parents were left childless.

Yet somehow over the century most Americans forgot about this disaster. The city of Halifax, however, has not forgotten the help they received from Americans at the time. Every December they still send the people of Boston a large Christmas tree to say thank you.

Actual bookstores

People still want books; I've got the numbers to prove it.

Ann Patchett, The Care and Feeding of the Independent Bookstore

Ann Patchett and friend at Parnassus Books

Ann Patchett is talking about the sales figures at Parnassus, the bookstore she co-owns in Nashville, Tenn. She wrote those words in 2012, but I suspect they remain true and are probably more true now than they were then. People do want books, actual books, and they are willing to pay for them, full price even, at actual bookstores staffed by someone who actually knows something about books.

Let's look at each of those three points:

1. Actual books

Just a few years ago it seemed that e-books read on Kindles, Nooks, phones, iPads, laptops and other electronic gear were the wave of the future. I own a Nook, but I haven't even turned it on in at least five years. I much prefer the feel of a real book in my hands. With a real book it is easier to take notes  and then go back to an important place in the text. So many other people seem to feel the same way. I've read that sales of e-books have been dropping, and I am not surprised. Real readers like real books.

2. Actual bookstores.

In the article Patchett wrote for The Atlantic Monthly, reprinted in The Care and Feeding of the Independent Bookstore, she mentions a Barnes and Noble, a Books-a-Million, a Costco and a Target that existed in Nashville at the time she and a friend opened Parnassus. Each sold a lot of books, but she asks if they counted as bookstores. "Not to me, no, they don't, and they don't count to any other book-buying Nashvillians with whom I am acquainted." Amazon doesn't county either. Why not? That probably has to do with ...

3. A staff that actually knows something about books.

I have met clerks at Barnes and Noble who struck me as professionals, but most of them seem to come and go like servers at Applebees, viewing the job as a steppingstone to something better. Sometimes they ask if they can help me find something, but usually I feel that I could better help them.

I like going into a bookstore, or a restaurant, and seeing a familiar face. I like having a little conversation about books, especially those I am thinking of buying. I can still remember a conversation I had with a clerk at Parnassus about the Norman Rockwell biography I purchased there.

Independent bookstores remain few, and if a city, even a large city such as Nashville, has even one, it is a fortunate community. But now, like Ann Patchett, I believe they have a future. A few years ago I wasn't so sure.

Hardly working in the hills

"It's about the same either way you look at it, starve to death or die workin yourself to death. We have these two kinds of people among these hills."

Jesse Stuart, Trees of Heaven

Are you working hard or hardly working?

To most of us, that is just a lame joke, but to Jesse Stuart (1906-1984), once the poet laureate of Kentucky, it was a literary theme that ran through his novels, from his first, Trees of Heaven (1940), to his last, The Land Beyond the River (1973), including his classic Taps for Private Tussie (1943).

Some folks struggle every day to scrape a living in those Kentucky hills, while others do just enough to get by. We find both kinds in Trees of Heaven.

Anse Bushman, although 70 years old, still prides himself on working harder than any other man in Greenwood County (stand-in for Stuart's Greenup County, where I bought this book). He lives humbly, forcing his family to do the same, so he can save money to buy even more land. Trouble comes, however, when he buys land occupied by squatters, the Tussies, known for their laziness, beautiful women and love of moonshine.

The trees of heaven of the title are among the few trees left in this part of Kentucky, the rest having fallen either to loggers or farmers like Anse. Under these trees is where generations of Tussies are buried, and Boliver Tussie, head of the clan, isn't about to leave, never mind who owns the land and pays taxes on it.

Boliver is capable of hard work, and Anse even marvels that Boliver's tobacco crop looks better than his own, but he would much rather make moonshine and then enjoy the fruits of his labor. Anse knows that any moonshine still found on his property could lead to the loss of his land. So we have a conflict that could easily turn violent.

All of Anse's many children have fled the endless work required on the farm except for Tarvin, the youngest, who works hard while admiring the carefree lifestyle of the Tussies. He is also hopelessly in love with Subrinea, Boliver's daughter and the hardest working member of the clan. Theirs may be a match made in the trees of heaven and the hope for a new tomorrow.

Jesse Stuart already had a literary reputation before Trees of Heaven, thanks to his poetry and his memoir Beyond Dark Hills. But with his first novel, written in just 72 days, he expanded his audience and became a significant American writer in the middle of the 20th century. Like Tarvin, Stuart worked hard but seemed to prefer the Tussies.

Cold case in Iceland

You don't have to know how to pronounce Arnaldur Indridason's name or the names of his characters to appreciate his novels, if that is your reason for avoiding them. The story is the thing, and his stories are superb, giving readers a peak into Icelandic culture along the way.

Into Oblivion (2014) ranks high among Indridason's mysteries, or as his publisher persists in calling them, thrillers. Most of them are about police officers attempting to solve murders, so I call them mysteries.

This story has two mysteries and two detectives. One thing Indridason tells us about Icelandic culture is that everyone is commonly known by his or her first name, so the police officers are Erlendur Sveinsson and Marion Briem, or 99 percent of the time just Erlendur and Marion. A man's body is found in a remote region, but an autopsy reveals the man must have fallen from a great height. Tall buildings are scarce in Iceland in 1979, when the story takes place, but there is a very large hangar at the U.S. Air Force base, and when the dead man is identified it turns out he worked as a mechanic on the huge Air Force planes serviced in that hangar. This leads to a turf battle between the local police and the Air Force.

Yet while this is going on, Erlendur is distracted by a cold case from the 1950s in which a teenage girl left for school one morning and never got there. Officially the police have abandoned the case as unsolvable, but Erlendur has a passion for missing person cases. As a boy he and his brother had been lost in a fierce winter storm. Erlendur was found, but his brother was never seen again. Now he wants to discover what happened to the girl before all witnesses are dead.

It turns out that the missing girl case is a better mystery, and more thrilling, than the other. Put together they make another excellent Indridason book. Or should I be calling him Arnaldur?

Finding home

The theme of finding home runs through Alexander McCall Smith's Precious and Grace (2016), the 17th volume in his No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series. So does forgiveness, or the need for forgiveness as much for the wronged as for the one who did the wrong.

This may sound like heavy stuff for a novel that seems light and fluffy when you are reading it, but that is often the case with McCall Smith's novels. There's usually a hard nut or two somewhere in his creamy mixture of chocolate and peanut butter.

A Canadian woman named Susan who spent her girlhood in Botswana comes to the detective agency asking Precious Ramotswe and Grace Makutsi to find the house where she once lived and, in particular, the woman who cared for her, someone named Rosie.

Meanwhile Fanwell, Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni's apprentice mechanic, returns with a stray dog. That dog, it turns out, needs a home even more than Susan does, thus giving Precious two assignments, even if only one has a fee involved.

Finding Rosie and the place where Susan grew up turn out to be relatively easy, even if the task does involve a close call with a poisonous snake. The real challenge becomes discovering why this woman wants to find Rosie and what she plans to do after she does.

What's really needed, Precious decides, is not reunion but forgiveness. Forgiveness is grace, and grace is a very precious thing.