But in the end, I only liked the book. Penman does what I call big character historical fiction. Big character and small character historical fiction is the difference between writing something like “Abraham Lincoln felt an icy despair as he reviewed the casualties list from the battle of Cold Harbor” and “As Private Jim johnson pinned his folks’ name and address on a piece of paper to his uniform ahead of the charge against the confederate trenches, he wondered whether if Lincoln were here, he’d order the charge cancelled.”

Big character historical fiction has a lot of advantages. We’re all curious about what makes a man like King John, who has gone down in history as one of England’s most reviled kings, tick. An intelligent and subtle portrayal helps even if it is a product of imagination. But the author also then gets confined by the strait jacket of historical facts. If in reality, King John pledges to go on a crusade in the East, but never actually fulfills his vow, it’ll come off pretty badly if the author has a chapter about how he is fighting the Saracens before the ramparts of Jerusalem.

But more to the point, you are confined by the limitations of the character’s life. King John lived a perilous life coping with the fact his older brother Richard the Lionheart had completely bankrupted England. He wanted to hold his Norman land holdings while battling the Scots, the Irish and the Welsh. In the end even his own barons turned against him. But this played out over decades. To overcome this, Penman jumps from one year to the next in her chapters, highlighting the important turn of events.  The result is a somewhat jumpy flow to the book. Needless to say, no one lives their life as a smooth, discernible plot, and John’s adventures come to an end with his death. Penman highlights the fact John died alone, neglected in an abbey’s bed, but it’s not quite enough to be satisfying. Especially since the book has to continue to wrap up the lives of two other major characters.

As a counterfoil to John, she uses a Prince of Wales, Llewellyan, The dramatic charge in the book is the fact that Llewellyan is married to John’s bastard daughter, Joanna, whom John loves as his child and Llewellyan loves as his wife. Their constant warfare tears Joanna apart emotionally. But these three major characters also fight for the reader’s attention.  Is the focus John, Llewellyan, or Joanna?  Adding to the problem is the Norman habit of naming children after grandparents and uncles and aunts. Might have been clear to them, but to a modern day reader, it’s distracting to have to remember which Joanna we are talking about. The bastard daughter or the King’s sister?

On the positive side, the book is incredibly well researched but this strength is also the book’s weakness. It’s not so much a novel as a history with a fictional flair for conversations no one can possibly know took place. That and the title which I never was able to link to anything in the book.  

But plenty of other people love her books and her latest, Lionheart is on the NYT bestseller list.

Here are some basic guidelines on to how to deal with riots.

1)      Are people throwing Molotov cocktails or stones large enough to cause brain surgery after impact? If the answer is yes, you have a serious riot. If no, this is just people bitching.

2)      If you are covering a riot, you are not involved. Whatever the point is, you are neutral. Remember this!

3)      If you are neutral, the safest place to go to is the neutral zone between wherever the cops are and the protestors are. This is counter intuitive but you want to be in the empty space. There is usually a thirty yard gap between the lines. Try to be between them.  The reason is, when the shit hits the fan, you can high tail it without a crowd around you,

4)      Always calculate an escape route. If people are crowding you, this is way bad news. People crowd just before they strike. Think about protective camouflage. A sport coat and chinos usually works against the cops. For women, something similar.

5)      Are the protestors turning on you if you are in the neutral zone? If yes, spend 5 minutes trying to argue the point and figuring it out.  Are the cops turning on you? If yes, get the fuck out of there.

6)      Know your cops. The way U.S.  or European cops cope with riots is way different from third world riots. In third world riots, you’re part of the bang bang club.

7)      Both first world and third world cops like tear gas. Learn to deal with tear gas. A wet towel on the face helps. Either that or throw the cartridge back, which makes you a protestor. The best deal is to suck it up. Same with pepper spray. Acting helpless after you are blind from pepper spray usually helps with the first world cops. Not always though.

8)      Do not look at anyone with a full frontal stare. This is a known behavior deal with primates. You stare at someone, and they become edgy. At the same time, smile, this prompts people to believe you are not a threat.

9)      Be mobile. Constantly shift your position.

10)   Finally be a total goof. No one walks through a riot with a pen and paper taking notes. Except journalists.  This works except when it doesn’t. Your call. In Yugoslavia they shot people like this.

As they say, nothing could fin-ah back in Carolin-ah than a chance to walk past the coliseum at twilight. Since we were flying to Paris the next day amid repetitive and lame jokes about staying in the Paris, Hilton, I left my suitcase down with military guys who did logistics. Yes, I had it all planned out how I was going to gin up a modest charge and present the bill to my bureau chief with the deadpan explanation that I need to be reimbursed for drinks in Paris, Hilton. The idea was to mumble the “in” part so it sounded like “with.” However, the surprise came in Orly airport when the military guys, after much scratching of their heads and searching the baggage carts, announced apologetically that my clothes had been sent back the U.S. along with certain other things like soap, toothbrush and what not. Which is how went through the next several  days wearing cheap t-shirts featuring the Eiffel tower and the image of Le Chat Noir I picked up from a street vendor over increasingly grungy pants. Naturally, I took some ribbing for this but my main worry was there wouldn’t be a press conference.

All right, so that story was only partially interesting. I can see that. The problem was the destinations, Rome, Paris and various other cities where things happen as you more or less expect them to happen.  If you want a good yarn, first you have to go some place where life is, by definition, always weird and most of the people are drunk or insane or both. Which brings to mind Moscow.

Yes, Boris Yeltsin had faced down the Communist counter-revolution, shoved aside Gorbachev, and we were all flying in to see the world’s latest experiment in liberal democracy capitalism. But, once on the ground, it became fairly clear while somethings had changed, others hadn’t. Taking a walk from the National Hotel, the place where decades of communist leaders had hosted foreign dignitaries, I saw a bum or a drunk or maybe just a run of the mill Russian, it was hard to differentiate at the time, fast asleep on a granite stone bench when a Russian police van screeched to a halt. A squad of four or five policemen spilled out with batons drawn and proceeded to beat the poor bastard bloody. Knocked out cold, or perhaps never even waking up, they threw him in the back of the van and roared off. This was their way of preparing for state visit and was my first hint that the idea of liberal democracy capitalism Russian style still had some rough edges.

Retreating back to National and still jet lagged, I dodged an invitation to go to what was then the roaring Moscow night club, the Hungry Duck. Why the name? Beats me. But something spelled out trouble in my mind in capital letters. Instead, I sat in the upper atrium of the National’s bar and spent a leisurely evening with a couple of other hacks counting the prostitutes who were catching the eye of the German business men. Now, for the record, Russian women are very attractive and whatever defenses the German business men had were overrun as pretty effectively as the Red Army overran Berlin. One by one, they wandered off escorted to the elevators.

Which, in my opinion, was sort of ballsy, so to speak. I mean we all knew the rooms were still bugged. But maybe the Germans just didn’t care what the security folks overheard. Probably the security types had heard it before, anyway.

The next morning, those of my comrades who had dipped their beaks into the drinks trough at the Hungry Duck were a bleary bunch to be sure. Several were the finest shades of green. There is no better or more evil satisfaction than acting really bright-eyed and bushy tailed when you’re at a table full of people who look like there is nothing they would rather do than die once and for all on the spot.  But one fellow lurched up, let’s call him Network James, with the stupidest expression I’ve seen in a long time. He was wearing what was clearly a new shirt just fresh out of the box with the folded starch lines still visible. Then I noticed his pants also had the precise crease you only get hot off the shelf.

James proceeded to regale us with his exploits of the previous night and how he’d picked up not one, but two, of Russia’s beauties. Charmed them right off their feet, he said. Then he’d wink, strike a pose which was supposed to show us how handsome he was. Now, I’ve met vain when it comes to what the TV crew disparage as the talent, but even by network standards, this was off the rails. Around the table, eyebrows began to rise and people began shooting each other quizzical looks.

“But when we got back to the room, I just don’t remember anything. I woke up this morning, and all my stuff was gone. Wallet, passport, clothes, goddamn everything.” James looked offended as only an incredibly naïve and dim person can. Later, I heard him wandering around telling other people his tale of woe, looking for sympathy. I shook my head in puzzlement. It’s one thing to do something really dumb, but generally, I don’t try to make sure everyone knows how idiotic I am. I let them figure it out for themselves.

But thoughts of Network James and his travails passed quickly from mind. As I recall, we had a press conference to cover in the morning and then a bit of work late in afternoon.  During the press conference, Clinton and Yeltsin both made news which meant flash headlines onto the wire which doubly meant the story had to be written immediately afterward, as fast as humanly possible. On these sorts of things, I worked in our temporary press center and listened to conference on a live feed. Speed was the key issue, but no sooner than the two presidents walked off stage,  but who bursts into the press center but six buxom platinum blondes wearing what must have amounted to enough material to make two standard -sized dinner napkins between all of them. Behind them strode in Uncle Sam. Or what some Russian thought Uncle Sam looked like. And two waiters with huge trays of vodka glasses and bottles. The Uncle Sam character proceeded to announce in loud, heavily accented English that he was here to show us the world’s finest vodka. And, of course, we would write stories about it because everyone would “hef a goodt time!”

Now writing a story under immediate deadline is usually a challenge, but when you have a buxom blonde strategically leaning over the top of your laptop giggling and trying to get you to down what looked like a Big Gulp glass of vodka, it gets pretty distracting. Then they cranked up the boom box with pop Russian tunes.  A lot of the off duty tv crew guys began to dance with some of the girls and, being the sort they are, there was some whooping and pointed comments which they assumed the girls didn’t understand.  Which they didn’t. But the girls did understand a finger pointed at their breasts, so they obliged and flashed.  Somebody had apparently told the Russians that sex sells and they took the idea to heart. And, naturally, it’s at this precise moment that my phone rang. From New York. The Editor. With… A… Couple… Of... Questions.

So with the blondes giggling, the napkins being tossed up and down, the crew guys whooping and cheering,  and some Leningrad heart throb crooning breathy Russian love songs, I did my best to go over the ins and outs of the newly announced nuclear weapons cuts and some arcane trade issue. At the end, my editor casually asked me if I was in the press center. I told him I was. I could tell he didn’t believe. Later, when I got back to DC, I explained it again. He still didn’t believe me but he took it like a man because the copy was good.      

The party in the press center was still going strong when I fled. I had a few hours before the next event and wanted to see Moscow. A bus with a minder waited outside to take anyone who wanted to a famous flea market, the name escapes me right now. Along with me was a woman reporter who, while she could appreciate the enthusiasm of the tv crews, also said she needed a break.  We spent a couple of hours looking at more hand carved wooden birch boxes and nesting dolls than I knew existed on the planet and walking the surrounding streets. Then we realized we had only fifteen minutes to get back to the National. We tracked down the minder and explained that not only us, but all the reporters needed to go back.

“Nyet, bus leaves in one hour,” the minder announced to the growing mob of frustrated journalists.

“Fuck this,” I hissed to my friend. “Let’s get a cab!” I mean there is nothing worse in journalism than missing the news. Sort of what we are there for.

She nodded but we both knew we had no idea how to hail a cab in Moscow. Hell, we didn’t even know what a Russian cab looks like. We made it out to one of Moscow’s eight lane boulevards and stared dumbfounded at a huge roar of traffic going by. Not knowing anything better to do, I raised a hand as if I were in DC or New York. Immediately, a guy pulls over in some rattle trap car built by the Volga Auto Factory number 42.

“Taxi?” I asked.

“Da!  Taxi!”

No sign on top. No lettering on the side. My friend said it didn’t look like a taxi. I agreed. But we now had ten minutes and the clock was ticking. I sat down in the front seat. The guy grinned at me with his stainless steel teeth and four days of beard. Stainless steel teeth were another communist idea that sounds better on paper. My friend got in also.

“Hotel National,” I say.

“Da! Hotel National.” The driver grins some more. “Rubles!”

How much do you pay a Russian to drive you across town, I wondered. I figured ten bucks would do it and told him whatever the amount was in rubles.

The driver breaks out in a stream of fast Russian, leans over and yanks my door shut. He pops the clutch in a whiplash take off and careens back into traffic without bothering to check. He drives like a maniac, both hands with white knuckles gripping the steering wheel while spouting a constant stream of the Russian equivalent of “bastard” as he cuts people off right and left. I look down and see the pavement speeding past through a hole in the floor.

Well, we made it on time. The guy gave me the double clutch hand shake when I handed over the rubles and laughs loudly as he counts the money. With the Russian economy in free fall back then, it was probably a lot. Back inside the temporary press center, the platinum blondes were gone and the tv crew guys were sprawled out snoring.

Oh yeah, network James was never heard from again after that trip. I guess he told one too many people his own story.

Back in the 1980s, when I was working as a reporter in New York, I and other budding hacks had a habit of going to a dive bar called Monteros down on the Brooklyn waterfront to get stupid. The main appeal consisted of one immutable fact: the bar was an easy stumble home to my apartment, and by the time it closed at 4 am, as the law required, this feature played prominently in my mind, assuming I was thinking of anything at all.

All this comes back to me because one of those friends from back then sent me a New York Times obituary of Pilar Montero, the doyenne of her establishment. If my memory serves, she was just the sort of a person you would expect who ran a waterfront bar in Brooklyn starting in the 1940s when her main customers were merchant seamen: tough, cranky but probably with a a heart of gold. I don't know about the heart because I never talked to her that much. I did chat up her waitresses but that was more out of habit than desire. I couldn't then and can't now actually imagine dating any of them. Like their boss, they were tough, cranky and likely had a mean right hook if provoked. I never dared find out.

Pilar and what she called her throne

The literary greatness aspect of the seedy little bar comes from the fact it was a hang out for Frank McCourt. He lived in an apartment just upstairs and noted in his book "Teacher Man" that Montero's blinking red neon sign turned his living room from "scarlet to black to scarlet." Frank may have been sitting at a table when I walked in in the wee hours, but, of course, I wouldn't have known then I was in the presence of a writer who would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize. I wouldn't have asked either. Brooklyn bars aren't a place where you strike up conversations with strangers unless you want more trouble than you had before you opened your silly mouth.

So there you have it. I did, at one point, manage to lurch into what could, with some imagination, be viewed as a literary salon of sorts but never even knew. Probably would have overlooked Hemmingway and Fitzgerald, too, if they, against all odds of mortality, had been there too.  

the obit

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/nyregion/pilar-montero-bar-owner-and-link-to-brooklyns-seafaring-past-dies-at-90.html?_r=1

Yep, at nearly a thousand pages, this is one serious, honcho book. But over the four days in Austin, I pretty much devoured it. The book follows the course of five families –one American, two British, one German, and one Russian – from 1910 through 1920 which, of course, covers the great cataclysm of the 20^th century, the First World War.  This was the war that spawned every other conflict that followed from the creation of the Soviet Union to the rise of Hitler’s Germany. The full cycle only concluded with the fall of the Berlin Wall. The war also swept away the old order in Europe which was largely feudal and little changed for the past 1000 years.

So Follett is mining a pretty rich vein of history and he strikes gold with this book. Here, though, I’m going to put in a caveat. I checked the 900 and something reviews on Amazon, and Fall of Giants gets almost an equal number of five star hits and one star hits. Because he also garners a bunch of 4 stars, the overall rank is 3.5. You will either love this book or you will find it a thousand page long death march across a barren plain with hardly a plot in sight.  Probably depends on whether you like the period.

Follett’s greatest sections tend to center on the characters of a Welsh mining town whose only options in life are working in the coal pits. At least, until 1914, when they can enlist and become cannon fodder in the great slaughters of the Western front. Like a lot of English writers, he doesn’t do too well with his American characters. We are apparently too strange a people for our cousins across the pond to comprehend. But he portrays the Germans and Russians well. The one dull note is his English aristocrats which do about every cliché there is for upper class twits.

Still, Follett does one thing really very well. He is able to bring across the brutality of a class structure in Europe that would have been familiar to William the Conqueror and his Norman knights. He shows there were two types of people: the wildly rich and the appallingly poor. Not so much in between. And accurately portraying  one complex idea is about one more than most historical fiction writers can accomplish.  I’m in the five star crowd on this one.  

This is a night shot in Goblin Valley National Park, Utah

Ice cave in Iceland

June 20, 2009 in Tehran:  Arash Hejazi is on the right. Neda is dying. Her father is on her left.

I’ve lived pretty much my whole life without knowing much about Iran other than what I read in the newspapers and some camera footage of wild-eyed people shouting “Death to America.” It wasn’t on my must -see tourism list.

But a month ago, I happened to hear an interview with Arash Hejazi, an Iranian dissident, who spoke about his memoir of growing up in Ayatollah Khomeini’s kingdom.  Much of the interview, concentrated on the fact that Arash was the man in the white shirt who was trying to save Neda Agha-Soltan, a young woman shot by a member of the Basij. For a brief time in June 2009, Neda became the global symbol of the failed Green Revolution which erupted after Mahmoud Ahmajinadad stole the presidential election.

Arash sounded reasonable, educated. On a whim, I ordered his book, The Gaze of the Gazelle, The Story of a Generation. What I received was an introduction into the kaleidoscope world of Iran, and most surprising, a memoir aimed right at someone who loves books. Contrary to what comes across in the news, Iran is a highly fractured society dominated from the top down by a band of mullahs with an apocalyptic world viewpoint. They are literally waiting for the return of the 12^th Iman when the end days will arrive.

Arash recounts the fear and terror the mullahs use to inflict their viewpoint on society as a whole including Khomeini’s orders to summarily shoot thousands and thousands of dissidents in the 1980s. What make it particularly poignant is Arash is a teenager at this time and some of the people executed were his friends.

At school, Arash discovers a love of books and starts a lending library stocked with sort of books the mullahs are trying to stamp out such as John Steinbeck, Leo Tolstoy and other Western authors. He is forced to close it down when a mullah at his school suggests that a book burning party is probably a good idea followed by some orders to send Arash to the frontlines of the Iran-Iraq war where the military commanders use young men as human mine detectors.

Arash reforms enough, at least publicly, to make it to Tehran University, but there, he runs afoul of the mullahs again. Although he is trained as a doctor, it’s made clear to him he will never practice medicine. Instead, he turns to writing novels, and like most writers starting out, can’t find a publisher. Of course, that is, in part, because this is Iran. Books other than religious books aren’t seen as needed. Undaunted,  Arash starts his own publishing company and his books begin to sell. He branches out, attends the Frankfurt Book Fair, and searches for Western authors to introduce them to Iranian public. He links up with Paulo Coelho, a Brazilian writer, just as the lid on Iranian society is about to blow off.

After the mullahs announce a shoot-to-kill policy on protestors, one of Arash’s young employees, Hassan, insists on going to a demonstration.  Arash doesn’t want to go but does so to keep an eye on Hassan.  Which is how he found himself on a Tehran street standing next to a young woman named Neda and moments later desperately trying to plug the gaping hole in her chest from a bullet wound.  Hassan, paralyzed with fear, films the event on his cell phone. Arash, outraged, loads the clip into an email and sends it to a few friends to show them what is really going on.