Musings from Brian J. Noggle

I bought this book last summer in Berryville, Arkansas. Whilst I am bogged down and bored with the children’s book I’m reading, I have been looking for various other things to read between chapters, and I settled on this volume, especially as I recently succumbed to latent nipponphilia when listening to Understanding Japan: A Cultural History.

However, this is a Barnes and Noble book, so it’s more of a coffee book akin to Samurai Warriors than an actual history. It is lavishly illustrated, which unfortunately often means watermarking images behind the text that make it hard to read in spots, and its text relies heavily on Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai and The Book of Five Rings, texts which Professor Ravina tut-tuts because they’re written a bit anachronistically.

At any rate, it collects some aspirational material about how to live like a samurai, the warrior code and whatnot, interspersed with some stories and legends of samurai. Unfortunately, many of the non-Hagakure and Five Rings sources are unattributed, so one cannot look for those source materials for further reading.

So a bit thick for a simple browse, and not detailed enough for real study. But, I suppose, if you’re looking for a bit of self-help in how to live well, you could do worse.

I thought this might be the first of the Executioner novels I’ve read this year, but apparently I read Terror Intent to start the year. Which proves, I suppose, either how forgettable the later Executioner novels are or perhaps how long ago January was from now in my mind.

At any rate, this book is a rare artifact in the Executioner series in that the title kinda refers to the plot: Mack Bolan goes to Sri Lanka to find an American diplomat held by the Tamil Tigers. C’mon, man, if you’re of colonoscopy age like me, you cannot read Sri Lanka without a muddy British accent and pronouncing it Sri Lanka, formerly Ceylon, can you?

Spoiler alert: Mack Bolan does not beat any shopkeepers to death with their own shoes, although this book was written long enough after the film came out that the author could have inserted such a scene. Or perhaps dropped in a Sri Lanka, formerly Ceylon for us. But no.

So Mack Bolan meets up with an intelligence counterpart who is playing all three ends against the middle: the government of Sri Lanka, the Tamil Tigers, and the Americans–I have not done the calculations to determine exactly what number of agent that makes her. She’s ostensibly in the service of India’s Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), but she’s sleeping with the head of one of the factions of the Tigers. So when I read Pergelator yesterday, and he mentions RAW in terms of a film he watched, I was all like oh, of course I know what that is. So these books have some small educational value.

Bolan, like my middle school (and high school) Dungeons and Dragons group, does not use the encumbrance rules. Check this out:

A large canvas carryall at his feet contained more gear, including extra clips for the Uzi, as well as for the Beretta and Desert Eagle. Additionally, a 5.56mm M-16 A-2 assault rifle, fitted with an M-203 single-shot grenade launcher, lay beside a small radio transceiver to send messages to the fishing boat waiting in a port in India just across from Palk Strait. An assortment of M-40 and 40mm fragmentation and incendiary grenades, C-4 plastic explosive, miniaturized detonators, trip triggers and timers, and three compact missile-launching LAW 80s completed the portable armory.

He’s carries this bag various places, but it’s well over a hundred pounds of equipment easily, so he should not be carrying it with one hand. I don’t know how big of a carryall that is, but that’s a lot of weight and cubic dimension for a single bag. But I can’t talk. It was not uncommon for my fighters to go into a dungeon with a 10′ pole, 50′ of rope, carrying a pole axe, two handed sword, long bow, and food and water for a week (plus whatever loot we found).

A serviceable book in the series, torn from the headlines of 1997–and the civil war in Sri Lanka, which began in 1983, would last until 2009.

So maybe one can learn things even from these men’s adventure paperbacks from time to time.

Well, it only took me a week to read this book–I bought it at ABC Books a week ago Saturday, and it was a nice book to intersperse with my reading of The Red Badge of Courage.

The book is a series of very short stories–most of them are only a couple of paragraphs long, but they’re not broken into individual chapters–dealing with animals and zookeeping and talking a bit about the evolution of zookeepery over the last fifty years, from the concrete cages of the 1970s–heaven help me, but I kind of remember those kinds of exhibits at the Milwaukee Public Zoo when I was but a kid and Chandar, the white tiger, was there–to the more lavish and proper habitat that you see these days.

Crocker specialized in snakes, so a lot of the stories deal with the slithering fellows, but many of the anecdotes that do not feature snakes indicate how dangerous it is to work at a zoo.

I did flag a bit in the book:

One weekend day in the early ’80s, I got a phone call about a lion loose on North Glenstone in Springfield. I think people had called 911 to report spotting a lion. At that time, I lived not far from the location, perhaps a two-minute drive. By coincidence, another zookeeper, Terry Letterman, was at my house.

Terry and I jumped into a vehicle and headed to the location, which was a motel just south of the intersection of Glenstone and Kearney, on the west side of the road. By the time we got there, animal control had already caught the cat and had it in one of the holding units in their truck. It was an African lion, about one-third grown by my estimate, and weighed perhaps seventy-five to one hundred pounds.

The animal was not aggressive. Animal control drove to the zoo with Terry and me following behind. Once we arrived, animal control let the cat out. I straddled the lion, grabbed it by the scruff of the neck, and walked it into a stall in a building located in the southwest corner of the zoo property.

It didn’t take long to locate the owners. They were traveling through Springfield with the cat and had stopped at a motel at the corner of Glenstone and Kearney. They left to eat, and while they were gone the lion got out of its crate and wandered into the swimming pool next door. I’m sure this caused a bit of panic as the people evacuated the pool area.

That motel has been in the news recently as it was closed, and the corner slated for redevelopment, but squatters on the property had caught bits of it on fire in March, and it was torn down while I was reading this book.

I passed the property several times recently as it’s just north of ABC Books.

Also, I could have stopped the quote with the mention of the motel, but I finished out the story to give you a sense of how long the individual anecdotes are. Not especially detailed; more spoken history written down than anything else.

So a quick and amusing read. As I mentioned, this is the second copy of the book that we have at Nogglestead–my beautiful wife got a copy first, and she read bits of it to me, so when I saw that the author was going to be at ABC Books, I made sure to go up there and get my own signed copy.

I am going to go out on a limb here and say that the text comes from the 1895 publication of this book; in 1982, Norton came out with a longer version based on Crane’s “original manuscript,” and I doubt they would have shared that copyright with Reader’s Digest the same year (the Reader’s Digest The World’s Best Readers edition came out in 1982, and mine is a second printing from 1983). Not that it matters except for purists. But I am throwing it out there because I read the Wikipedia article.

At any rate, this was my first reading of this book. I understand, or at least my beautiful wife told me, that some people read this book in elementary school, or perhaps their mothers’ wombs, but I came to it late, and I am pretty sure that I have mentioned once or twice that I confused this book with Where The Red Fern Grows because they both have the word Red in the title. So, alright: Even though I came from an era where they read novels in school, the schools I attended did not read either of the red books. Nor The Little Red Book, which they might teach in TikTok form to modern students, but that’s neither here nor there. Also, that might remind me of a story, although I don’t need much reminding as it’s recent, but perhaps I will tell it someday.

Where was I? Oh, yes. This is a Civil War book about a young man who goes to the war over the objections of his mother, who does a bunch of marching and bivouacking and thinking, and when he encounters battle for the first time, he gets caught up in a disorderly retreat, and he runs away. He spends a couple of days out of the fray, running then meeting up with a rearward march of the wounded, and he gets a bang on the head which he presents as his war wound to have taken him out of battle. Then, he returns to his unit, and they have a battle, and then they’re ordered to a charge he knows is a distraction which is expected to lead to many casualties, he performs well, and he does not die.

Um, spoiler alert retroactively.

I had a bit of trouble with this book because I’m from the 21st century (well, I am from the 20th century, but I’ve been here in the 21st a long time now). As I read it, I kind of expected that the main character would die and/or the book would veer into anti-war or anti-patriotism, but it doesn’t take a more modern turn. Instead, it tries to re-create what it was like in the Civil War even though it was written twenty years later by a man born after the war.

The prose is a bit purple. And red. And yellow. You don’t go more than a few sentences in dry spots where a color is not mentioned, and the prose is measured for its own sake, not the service of the plot. So it was a bit denser of a read than a thriller or genre book, but not as dense as Georgian prose or self-indulgent high literature.

So not one of my favorite books, but I’m glad to have read it as it offers some light classical literature amid this year’s children books and Star Trek short storification collections.