Welcome to Tostada Speaks Blog.
I'm an avid reader and author, with a wide range of interests. Guest bloggers, most from fellow Taylor Street Publishing authors, will be here from time to time as well.
Stop by, look around, read what we have, and by all means, leave your comments for us.
My author's website is www.geogepolleyauthor.com, which also has its own blog.
I am willing to bet that most people know very little about the Ukraine and its history beyond the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster and perhaps the Ukraine's independence when the Soviet Union unraveled. Fewer still may know about Stalin’s brutal campaign to starve the Ukrainian people into submission in the years before World War II. That is the world into which Andy Szpuk’s father, Stefan, was born and where lived until, as a young teenager, he and his father were forced to flee their home village to avoid execution at the hands of the invading German army. After a few months with his father’s sister and her family in a town further west, the whole town was forced to flee to the west to avoid the now retreating Germans. From there, Stefan and his father are pretty much on their own.
Imagine being 14 or 15 years old, being on the run, wondering what has happened to your mother, and what will happen to you as you flee into the Carpathian Mountains, cross into Slovakia (Czechoslovakia), into the Czech region ... and then your father is killed in an air raid, leaving you absolutely alone and knowing only one thing: you must find food, and you must continue going west until you reach Germany just as the war has ended and you are at the very end of your rope.
This memoir is a page-turner that will keep you on the edge of your seat, make you cheer and weep and give a high five to Stefan when he makes it to England and begins a new life. Then another high five when he and his family visit his old home village to meet family members he has never seen.
My hat is off to his son Andy for writing his father’s story down so the rest of us can read it, and to the Ukrainian people for never giving up no matter what the obstacles are.
Robert Craven’s Get Lenin is the kind of novel that pulls you in the minute you pick it up and won’t let you leave until you’ve finished, it, sit back and say “Wow, what an adventure!” The title comes from a very intriguing and very mad idea: Seeking for a way to assure his place in Hitler’s inner circle, Dr. Joseph Goebbels hatches a plan so secret it is even kept from Hitler. The plan? To sneak into the Soviet Union ahead of Hitler’s armies, steal Lenin’s sarcophagus, and spirit it into Germany. What a trophy, and what a propaganda coup if it succeeds! Does it? You have to read the book to find out.
The book opens in Munich in1938 when a young Polish spy named Eva Molenaar stumbles onto the plot and reports it to her handlers. From there the story picked up speed and pulled me into it in a way that made me feel that I was a participant in the action. Robert Craven has created a story and cast of characters that are wholly real and believable in a setting that is so well-researched that reading Get Lenin was like watching a newsreel.
I’m glad I bought this book; I’ve been recommending it to everyone, and It’s certainly on my “read-it-again” list.
A review of “Tulagi Hotel”, by Heikki Heitala and published by diiarts.com, 12 April 2010. Available in hard cover, paperback and Kindle
Heikki Heitala has written such a fine novel that spans World War Two in the South Pacific to the decade after the war when one of the fighter pilots, Jack McGuire, buys a surplus float plane and returns to the Solomon Islands to find a life for himself. Originally from a Nebraska farm and terribly shy, Jack’s one excitement in life has since boyhood been airplanes and flying. In WWII he goes into military service and becomes a fighter pilot.
There is no Hollywood glamour and action-for-action’s sake in this fine novel. These are real people with real lives and real feelings who live in a real world filled with the pains of growing up as a shy kid on a Nebraska farm, is a nice guy, becomes an ace fighter pilot, tries to find love and fails at it, lives what most of us would think of as an idyllic life on an island in the South Pacific, and like so many men in his position, finds his closest friend and confidant in a bottle of alcohol. Utterly human and likable in spite of themselves, this is a story that, once read, is not forgotten.
Heikki Heitala is a fine writer. I look forward to seeing a next book from him. This is an unqualified 5 star read.
I found this book by accident. While doing research for my novel about a Tokyo artist who was getting married in Princeton in the summer of 1961 at PrincetonUniversity’s Chapel, I found that Ernest Gordon was Dean and that he had written a book about his experience as a POW of the Japanese in Thailand. In many ways his experience paralleled the artist’s, as he had survived the Tokyo firebombings of 1945. Another connection is that both men advocate forgiveness and compassion towards one’s enemies. So I chose Reverend Gordon to perform the wedding for Seiji and his fiancée, whose father was a PrincetonUniversity professor. And I bought and read his book. It is very worthwhile read.
If you’ve been in combat, suffer from Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), or know someone who does, Ernest Gordon’s “To End All Wars” is a book I heartily recommend. Though it makes for some searing reading, it is one of the most uplifting books on the subject that I have read.
“Selfishness, hatred, jealousy and greed [are] all anti-life”, he writes and “Love, self-sacrifice, mercy and creative faith … [are] the essence of life, turning mere existence into living in its truest sense” (page viii).
Ernest Gordon was a Captain in the 93rd Highlanders when he and some companions were captured at sea and taken to the infamous River Kwai, where thousands of men died building a railroad for the Japanese. The inhumanity of the experience is painful to read, and much, much worse to have lived through. Many of the men he knew had their humanity stripped from them and began treating one another in as beastly a fashion as they were treated. Conditions were appalling: starvation, diseases like beriberi, diphtheria, cholera, malaria, amoebic dysentery, malnutrition and a host of other ailments were rampant. As the prisoners lost hope, they lost their humanity.
And then something happened: the men began, one by one, to wake up and help each other. Almost at death’s door, two men – Dusty Miller and Dinty Moore – volunteered to nurse Gordon back to health. Serving others began to spread, the men began getting their self-respect back, and the mood (but not the conditions) began to radically change. In one especially ugly scene, a Japanese guard berates a group of prisoners for losing a shovel. When no one confesses, he threatens to shoot them all. One young soldier steps forward and says “I did it.” The guard flew into a rage and beat the soldier to death, “stopping only when he was exhausted.” “The men of the work detail picked up their comrade’s body, shouldered their tools and marched back to camp. When the tools were counted again at the guard-house no shovel was missing... “As this story was told, admiration for the [soldier] transcended hatred for the Japanese guard” (page 102). The prisoners won the day because they kept their self-respect and their dignity.
It is beyond high time that we put the foolishness and horror of war behind us and stop honoring it as we do. There are no clear winners in a war because the fallout is so damaging. Love, compassion, respect and treating one another as we would like to be treated is far more effective. “In the case of the Japanese, the effect on the perpetrators was to render them callous to man’s individual inhumanity to man. in the case of the West, the effect on the perpetrators was also that of initiating an ignoble callousness to human suffering” (page 49). I couldn’t agree more.
Cultures of War is one of those books that, according to reviewers on amazon.com, people will either love or hate. Out of fourteen reviews, seven give it a five-star rating, six give it a one star, and one give it a three. Right off the bat, I'll tell you what my rating is: it is a very strong 5. Generally speaking, if you're a person who regards criticism of the U.S. and its policies as treason, you will hate this book. (One amazon.com reviewer calls it "a hate-filled rant from an ultra left loon.") But if you're looking for one of the best analyses around on how militarism with its culture of war dumb-down analysis and result in "strategic imbecilities", as John Dower so eloquently puts it, then you will love this book. A winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his book Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II and the National Book Critics Circle Award for his War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War, and author of Japan in War & Peace, historian John W. Dower challenges conventional thinking about Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, 9/11/2001 and our war in Iraq. It was conventional thinking that got Japan in trouble prior to and during World War II, and it was conventional thinking that got the U.S. in trouble following the terrorist attack on 9/11/01 with its global War on Terror and its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
For example, in the run up to World War II, racism played a significant factor in dismissing the clear indication that Japan's leaders "were clearly poised for war" (page 15). The same was true with the fatwa declaring holy war against "the Judeo-Christian alliance" issued by Osama bin Laden and other Islamist militants nearly eight years before the events of 9/11/01. Rather than take them seriously, U.S. officials and military commanders dismissed both threats as unimportant, because they came from people who were non-white (Japanese and Islamists). If you don't believe this, take a look at racist U.S. World War II propaganda and the fact that "[n[o one at the top levels of the Bush administration ... had the imagination to take these warnings seriously." "In domestic policy projections, terrorism was not even included among the 'top-ten' priorities established for the Justice Department by Attorney General John Ashcroft. '9-ll' surpassed the Pearl Harbor debacle in exposing negligence and inability to think outside the box at the highest levels" of our government) page 16).
Does John Dower have a point of view? Oh, definitely ... and here it is. Prejudice and group-think prevent clear thinking and analysis. Reality is defined in categorical terms (nonwhite foreigners are irrational; whites, because of our Enlightenment ideals of reason, order, civilized behavior and our Christian history, are rational). Thinking outside the box (Asians are bright, intelligent people, as are Arabs and other non-whites) is discouraged and sometimes not permitted at all. The result? Well, we've been through that often enough that we shouldn't need to revisit it ... but it is clear from recent history that we must.
John Dower is very hard on the administration of George W. Bush, and for very good reason. His administration relied on beliefs rather than sound analyses (Donald Rumsfeld's remark than we'd be in and out of Iraq in a matter of 6 weeks or so after toppling Saddam Hussein is one example; having no plans at all for an occupation is another) and, when legal questions were raised about things the administration was doing, Bush's lawyers jiggered the law so that what was illegal could now be defined to fit within the "Rule of law" (see Chapter 14:"Convergence of a Sort: Law, Justice, and Transgression"). What happened after Iraq was defeated was just plain disaster for everyone concerned, especially the Iraqi people. The main problems? No real planning. Whereas in post-defeat Japan plans for an occupation had been worked out in detail long before the war's end, in Iraq's case, no planning had taken place at all. The occupation was run by "market fundamentalism" -- that sacred cow of George W. Bush and his people -- with unbelievable levels of corruption on all sides that ended in a huge mess. Dower devotes a whole chapter (15: "Nation Building and market fundamentalism") to this subject.
The lack of preparation and outright lying about the two wars George W. Bush got us into are nearly beyond belief. John Dower does a wonderful job of drawing all this together in a very readable way, contrasting it with what went right in our occupation of Japan ... and how we have worked that occupation to serve our global needs, often at the expense of the Japanese people, something that I have witnessed first hand now that I live in Japan.
Put Cultures of War with James Carroll's House of War, Chris Hedges' War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, Robert Scheer's The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America, and Richard H. Immerman's Empire For Liberty, and you'll have a comprehensive history of what has happened to the U.S. over the past sixty years
John Dower's book is not a light read. Drawing on a lifetime of study and masses of information (there are 100 pages of reference notes), it demands concentration, patience and a willingness to have your thinking challenged. You may quarrel with it and even hate it. My recommendation is that you read it with an open mind. You will learn things about your country that you may not wish to hear, but are valuable nonetheless. If you think the book is "worthless", I challenge you to think again.
A review of Kumiko Kakehashi: So Sad to Fall in Battle, An account of war based on General Tadamichi Kuribayashi’s letters from Iwo Jima.Ballantine Books, 2007.
As I Read Kumiko Kakehashi’s book about Iwo Jima’s commanding General Tadamichi Kuribayashi I had the feeling that, had we met, I would have liked him. He was a compassionate man who helped his wife, had their servant eat at table with the family, and worried about them right up to the final battle on Iwo Jima.
Kuribayashi was the kind of leader who commanded respect because he gave it to everyone, from the lowliest recruit to the top-ranking officers under his command. He cared about them, worried about them, and was attentive to their needs. “The army was an institution where social class distinctions were carried to an extreme … [F]or Kuribayashi to be so open and friendly with his ‘inferiors’ made him a most unusual officer (page xiii). This also made him unpopular with the military High Command in Tokyo.
Kuribayashi was meticulous in designing a plan that would protect them for as long as possible while at the same time inflict the most damage to the enemy. Though it “was completely contrary to the traditions of the Japanese army … and was derided as rash and aroused universal opposition at the time” (page 38), he held out for over a month and frustrated the goal of the Allied Command of defeating the Japanese in under a week. The Japanese military command lacked Kuribayashi’s grasp of on-the-ground reality and attention to detail. “The grimmer the reality,” Kakehashi writes, “the more commanders have to face it directly” (page 63) He “verified things with his own eyes, and never allowed preconceptions or wishful thinking to cloud his judgment. His strategy was effective in battle precisely because it originated from such a starting point” (page 63).
And in the midst of it all, the daily preparations, the sweat, the inadequate supplied and resistance from people in Tokyo, he wrote daily letters to his wife and family in which he expressed love and concern for them and their welfare.
Why, when he knew he could never win, did he keep fighting when he could have surrendered and saved the more than 20,000 men under his command that died in the battle of Iwo Jima? Honor aside, the reason was keeping the airfield on Iwo Jima from the Allied forces for as long as possible so they couldn’t use it to carry out massive attacks on Japan’s main islands. Sadly, with the advent of Boeing’s B-29 Superfortress bombers, these attacks had already begun.
If it dawned on him that these attacks had begun, it might have thrown him into despair. According to Kakehashi, there is some evidence that it did. Sergeant Ryumae Shinya, who was in close proximity to him, wrote: “When we escaped from the Command Bunker in the dead of night on March 17, he was not energetic… At first glance … he looked like some old man from the countryside being led outside by his children” (pages 189,190). “The sight of the weak, emaciated, and ghostlike soldiers dying in such number as they faced the terrifying intensity of the American assault on one hand, while suffering from hunger and thirst on the other, seems to have been a crushing blow for Kuribayashi” (page 191). “When he heard the news” (of the firebombing of Tokyo), (his) despair and sense of failure must have been tremendous. He did not even know if his wife and children were alive. They were, in fact, safe and sound – but he had no way of knowing that.” For a compassionate man, I don’t see how it could have been otherwise.
In his final telegram to Tokyo, with a copy to his wife, he wrote “so sad to fall in battle.” And indeed, as it always is, it was. General Kuribayashi’s body was never identified. He had removed all insignias of rank from his uniform before the final charge.
Quite a man and quite a book. I give it a hearty *****rating.
Howard Zinn: The Bomb. San Francisco, Open Media Series: City Lights Books, 2010, 91 pages. $8.95
Comprised of two previously published essays on the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the French village of Royan at the end of World War Two plus a new Introduction by the author. Both attacks were justified and defended as necessary in bringing the wars with Germany and Japan to an end. Yet, as Zinn and others have shown, not everyone was in agreement with that. More likely the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were done to show the Soviets that we had the ultimate weapon. On the incendiary carpet bombing of the little village of Royan Zinn writes that "The evidence seems overwhelming that factors of pride, military ambition, glory and honor were powerful motives in producing an unnecessary military operation" that, like the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, because of the lack of viable military targets, were carried out against civilian populations to make a point: Resist us and you shall die.
In Humanity: a Moral History of the Twentieth Century (Yale University Press, September 1, 2001), British ethicist Jonathan Glover writes about "the moral slide" in reference to the decision during World War One to block aid shipments to the German people that caused thousands to die of starvation. From there it was a simple matter to push the envelope a little further and allow the bombing of civilians as a means of crushing an enemy's spirit and defeating him. Civilians, in other words, were now players in a military drama. Once frightened non-combatants, they were now an element military strategic planning, bargaining chips in an endgame that they was chosen for them by people they did not even know.
What Glover did in his masterwork, Howard Zinn did years earlier in his essay on the bombing of Hiroshima. "The strategic argument ... that there was no military necessity to use the bomb, is not enough. We need to confront the moral issue directly: faced with the horrors visited on hundreds of thousands of human beings by the massive bombings of modern warfare, can any military-strategic-political 'necessity' justify that?" (emphasis added). It is a question that each of us needs to ask ... and answer for ourselves.
In the Introduction, written in late 2009, Zinn brings the discussion into the present: "What you see over and over again in the news reports is the words 'suspected terrorist' or 'suspected al Qaeda' -- meaning that 'intelligence' is not sure whom we are bombing, that we are willing to justify the killing of a 'suspect' in Iraq or Afghanistan or Pakistan, something we would not accept from a police operation in New York or San Francisco (emphasis added). This suggests, to our shame, that the lives of people other than Americans are of lesser importance" (page 19). I don't know if this hits you like it hit me, but when I read that I put the book down, looked out my window at my neighborhood, and thought. I thought about my country's actions in Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan and its support of Israel in its dealings with the non-Jewish residents of Palestine. I thought about its deadly "Operation Cast Lead" attack on the tiny enclave of Gaza that unleashed an overwhelming rain of fire and death on everyone living there, and justified it as retaliation for a few missiles Hamas fired in its direction. I thought about the Obama administration's rejection of the well-documented Goldstone Report condemning Israel's actions as unjustified and accused its leaders of war crimes. And our long support of Israel in spite of a growing mass of evidence that shows that its treatment of Palestine's non-Jewish residence has from the beginning been a program of ethnic cleansing and genocide. And I thought, as a citizen of the U.S.A., they are doing these things in my name. And by my silence I give my unspoken support to behavior that I do not agree with because it is morally reprehensible and wrong. It is this moral question -- are attacks against civilians morally acceptable or not -- that is the basic question for each of us.
In his book House of War about the Pentagon, James Carroll includes an anecdote about a group of American general officers thinking about nuclear war against the Soviet Union. One of them says that since the U.S. has more of them, we would win, even if there are only two of us and one of them left standing. This is not only irresponsible, it's insane. I remember thinking "You idiot! You haven't won a damn thing! All three of you are men!"
I give Zinn's little book a 5-Starrating. If the moral issues that he raises concern you, and if they don't, buy a copy and read it.
