Books I have Read

      There used to be (maybe still is) a program on National Public Radio called “The Radio Reader”.  A fellow named Dick Estelle from the University of Michigan, I think, would read books in 30-minute installments.  It was a bit like the old radio soap operas where you tuned in the same time every day to keep up with the story.

      When our local NPR station stopped carrying “The Radio Reader”, Dick was a few days into a book, Pompeii by Robert Harris.  The fictional story takes place a day or two before and during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.  I was hooked, but only recently did I check out Pompeii from the local library.

      In the story, the hero is put in charge of the aqueduct that supplies water to Pompeii and other communities.  The old overseer of many years has mysteriously disappeared.  The aqueduct breaks down and the new “Aquarius”, the overseer, has to find the problem.  In the process, he stumbles across corrupt politicians and a scheme by a former slave who has established himself as a power broker and the richest landowner in Pompeii. 

      The former slave bribed the former Aquarius so that his many holdings, including swimming pools and baths, pay little or nothing for their water.  Repairing the aqueduct takes the Aquarius to, you guessed it, Mount Vesuvius.  Having restored the aqueduct to service, he releases his crew and heads for the summit of Mount Vesuvius to try to find the cause of the aqueduct failure.

      He finds in a pit on the summit the weeks-old-dead former Aquarius.  The fumes from the pit nearly do the new Aquarius in.  The fumes do get the assassin hired by the ex-slave to kill the new Aquarius.  The Aquarius is an hour or so down the hill when Vesuvius begins its eruption.  Will he make it?  I don’t know.  I haven’t read that far.  Sorry.

     The book I just finished was a page-turner that was difficult for me to read.  QB VII by Leon Uris has two heroes, the first a Polish doctor who was imprisoned by the Nazis in a concentration camp.  Upon being released from the concentration camp by the Russians, he relocates to England.  He marries and has an infant son when Poland, now under communist rule, tries to extradite him to be tried for war crimes.  He is accused of helping the Nazis carry out medical experiments on Jewish prisoners. 

      Having spent three years in the concentration camp, he now spends two years in a British prison awaiting the results of his extradition hearings.  He maintains the accusations are all a communist plot to do away with everyone who opposed the communists.  When a witness who was sterilized by the Nazis fails to pick the doctor out of a lineup, and when confronted face-to-face with the doctor, the witness maintains that the doctor wasn’t the man who castrated him, the good doctor is finally released from prison, extradition denied.

    The doctor takes his wife and two-year-old son he has never seen and heads for deepest, darkest Borneo where he can practice medicine out of the limelight and underneath the radar of the Nazi hunters.  There he manages to discredit the witch doctor and convert the natives to modern medicine and modern sanitation methods. 

     His son is not interested in medicine at all, but the son of a Scotsman also living in the jungle, is interested and attaches himself to the doctor, becoming an adopted son and apprentice.  The doctor rises in the ranks, becomes the head of all the jungle hospitals and medicine in general in the area.  Eventually he is knighted for his work.  He returns to England with the adopted son while his own son moves to America to complete his education.  The adopted son attends medical school in England.

      The second protagonist is a Jewish kid in America.  He and his older brother hang out at an airport near their home.  The brother learns to fly and joins a foreign air force (not sure which one) when World War II breaks out and American is not involved.  The younger brother also learns to fly, but is too young to fight.  He leans towards journalism, writing. 

      The older brother is killed in combat.  The younger brother bides his time until he is old enough to join the army.  He becomes a fighter pilot and is badly wounded in combat.  He is temporarily blinded.  He is befriended by a British lass and they fall in love.  She disappears when the bandages come off his eyes, thinking he will find her ugly.

     The writer’s friend, also his publisher, arranges for a “blind date” to help the writer forget his lost girl.  Of course, the blind date is the missing girlfriend.  They get married and have a son and daughter, but they don’t live happily ever after.  The British lass isn’t happy away from her England home, even though they live in some luxury near Hollywood where the writer makes a good living prostituting himself to the movie industry.

      Goaded by his friend and publisher, the writer decides to write the good work he is capable of.  To do so, he must forsake Hollywood.  His chosen subject, the Holocaust, becomes the title of his book.

   The two stories come together when the doctor’s adopted son and understudy reads the book and finds a paragraph, only one paragraph, where the writer accuses the doctor, by name, of collaborating with the Nazis on medical experiments on Jewish victims, specifically, sterilizing them.  The adopted son confronts the doctor who denies the charge.  The adopted son convinces him he shouldn’t put up with the false accusation.

      The doctor sues the writer for libel.  The trial takes up the second half of the book.  It is conducted by the most famous lawyers in London.  The writer’s lawyers dig up many former concentration camp victims.  They are hard to find because most of them, having discovered after their release from their prisons that their families are all dead, they have moved to a new country and have changed their names in an attempt to  forget the past and start a new life.  It is very painful for them to dredge up the past and to recall what they have tried to forget.

     Another difficulty in reading the story is the knowledge that one of our heroes will lose.  In the end, there are no winners.  The jury finds in favor of the doctor, but in light of some very damaging testimony, they award him one half penny in damages.   The writer’s son, a pilot in the Israeli air force is shot down and killed in the six-day war shortly after the trial ends.

     So why did I read that book?  Leon Uris has a way of making you understand someone else’s point of view. The best example of that would be Trinity, a book about Northern Ireland and the conflict between protestant and Catholic.  I never understood the Irish Republican Army and its tactics until I read that book.

     QB VII gives you another look at the Nazis, the Nazi hunters, and the post-World War II era.  It will take tour mind off your own troubles.