Dreams from My Father

The story of Barack Obama’s life, from the beginnings to just before he went to law school at Harvard, subtitled A Story of Race and Inheritance. Raised by his white mother and grandparents, he had to deal with the problems faced by most black people in America while growing up, though in varying degrees, along with the question of his absent father from Kenya. From Hawaii where he was born, to Djarkata where his mother moved to after marrying an Indonesian, then back again to Hawaii for secondary school. His mother and grandparents made sure he got a good education and this probably saved him from the fate of crime and poverty of many black people.

He had always this problem of reconciling his white mother and grandparents in the house, with being regarded as black outside the house. This led him to want to work as a community organizer in Chicago after college, where he proved rather successful. And after a sister studying in Germany visited and told him about their father, he became more interested in finding out more. And so he went to Kenya to meet the African side of his family. There he learns about the exceptional Obama people, from his father to grand-father and beyond, and he finally shed tears for the father he never knew. Very moving indeed!

Contents:
Preface to the 2004 edition
Part One, Origins
Part Two, Chicago
Part Three, Kenya
Epilogue

From the accounts of life in Kenya and the Luo tribe of his father, Kenyans and Nigerians have a lot in common. One of his relations even quoted famous Nigerian author Achebe.

January 28, 2015. Review initially written in 2008. Work first published in 1995 by Times Books, this Three Rivers Press edition being published in 2004, ISBN 978-1-4000-8277-3.

The Odessa File

A freelance reporter Miller comes across the diary of Salomon Tauber, a German Jewish survivor of the concentration camp at Riga. The diary describes the horrors committed by the Nazi commandant of the camp, the Butcher of Riga, Eduard Roschmann. Miller’s father had been a member of the German army during World War II and had been reported killed in action with no details.

 Incidentally Roschmann had been responsible for Miller’s father’s death and Miller was shocked to read an account in the diary of the quarrel between his father and Roschmann before Roschmann shot him. He then resolves to find Roschmann, without telling anybody the real reason. Agents of the Odessa, a secret organization of former Nazi SS men, try to discourage him, particularly as Roschmann is overseeing a project for developing a device for use by Egypt in destroying Israel. In the course of Miller’s search, he barely escapes death on two occassions. Miraculously, he uncovers a file of fugitive Nazi men. He also finds Roschmann who had changed identity twice, and confronts him with the murder of his father. Roschmann however manages to escape to Argentina, leaving his precious project to collapse.

January 28, 2015. Review initially written in 1991. Novel first published in 1972 by Hutchinson, this Transworld (Corgi Books) edition being published in 1990, ISBN 0-552-09436-6.

The Man Died

This condemnation of dictatorships by the Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka was written from secret prison notes he kept while under detention by the Yakubu Gowon regime during the Nigerian Civil War. While showing how he was able to endure and survive the detention, it gave me a new insight into the character of Gowon: From what I’d read of him before he was supposed to have been too kind to have declared “No victor, no vanquished” at the end of the war; too naive and innocent to stop corrupt people in his government. Well, Soyinka has shown in this book that Gowon could have stopped the mass murders of Igbos in the North if he was determined for justice and fair play at the time, that he’d regarded the war as a David and Goliath little game from the boastful way he talked about it during his wedding, and he had squandered the country’s riches in the name of a wedding ceremony marked in the three cities of Lagos, Kaduna and Zaria while the war was raging.

The book has several revelations. Recently a court awarded millions in damages to a lady that was humiliated and beaten up by orderlies of a naval topshot, for not getting out of the way for their siren-blaring convoy quickly enough. This may never have happened under Gowon. His security men would never have been challenged in court, if the lady wasn’t made to “disappear” in the first place. Gowon had personally ordered the beating up of some journalists just because his wife had complained about their coverage of her dancing at a party. This assault eventually led to the death of one of the journalists, giving rise to the title for the book, “The Man Died.” Also, the Sardauna of Sokoto had brought in a hospital orderly from one of his visits to Pakistan, a relation of his hosts, and made him the chief medical officer in the North, thus enthroning a culture of mediocrity in the land. After Igbos were purged from the North, their professional positions were mainly taken over by other southerners. This caused another pogrom to be planned against southerners while the war raged in 1968, though the military governor in Kaduna got wind of it and nipped it in the bud. The purge this time was also targeted at Chadians that were mainly in the army, police and prisons. (They were supposed to have been fighting the war for the North.)

January 26, 2015. Review initially written in 2010. Novel first published in 1972 by Rex Collins, this Spectrum Books edition being published in 1993, ISBN 978-246-012-5.

The Man From St. Petersburg

A European historical thriller set around 1914 with background events happening the previous 18 years. It was quite hilarious at the beginning, as Charlotte heard about sex and the lives of poor people that had been kept from her in her protected upbringing. But then the main dangerous plot starts to unfold.
 

The Past: Feliks, a poor Russian teenager, and Lydia, daughter of a Russian aristocrat, fell madly in love when they first met. A tempestuous affair lasting weeks followed, before it was terminated by her enraged father who had Feliks arrested and tortured. Along comes Stephen Walden, a British prince waiting for his disliked but titled father to die. He gets news of the father’s death and needing a wife urgently, approaches Lydia’s father. He had only met Lydia once at the British embassy. Lydia’s father seizes on this and gives his daughter one condition to stop the torture of Feliks, she must marry Stephen and relocate to England with him. After recovering from his torture wounds, Feliks has a hard life culminating in being sent to Siberia where he had to fall to savage animistic habits to stay alive. He manages to escape and continues life as a fearless and violent anarchist, opposed to the rule of the Russian aristocrats and working hard towards seeing a revolution happen, killing and robbing at will. 

 

The Present: Lydia’s and Stephen’s only child, Charlotte is about to turn 18 and become presented at the court of the King and Queen as a “debutante.” Stephen and Lydia’s cousin Aleks, a nephew of the Russian Czar, now a prince as well as naval officer, are about to negotiate a treaty between England and Russia. Feliks has joined up with a group in Switzerland and when they learn of the plan for England and Russia to secretly sign a military treaty that would have Russia fighting wars alongside England against Germany, Feliks decides the best way to stop the future alliance is to assassinate the Russian envoy in England who was saddled with the treaty negotiation. So to England Feliks heads and as soon as he arrives he sets to the task of finding and killing his prey.

At a point a big change comes over The Man, Feliks, on realizing that Charlotte, the female relation of Aleks, the Russian prince he’d gone to England to assassinate, should in fact be his daughter, the product of his only romance with Lydia from the past. He doesn’t rush to tell her his rightful guess though, but he no longer was his old fearless self that cared not if he died. He gets her to assist him find where Aleks has been hidden away, but as he travels to the place the police are also on his trail.

The Conclusion: The Man From St Petersburg did succeed against all odds in assassinating Aleks, the Russian prince at the end. But his victory was in vain as he himself died in a fire he’d caused and then, because Aleks and Winston Churchill had already signed the treaty between England and Russia hours before, Churchill decided on the spot that his death be reported to the Russians as an accident in the fire and no reference should ever be made to Feliks the assassin. This cover up achieved the main aim of not jeopardizing the treaty.

Another result of the cover up was that the integrity of the Walden family remained intact as well, Lydia’s past and Charlotte’s real father not coming to public light. Lydia had confessed everything to her husband at the dying minutes, and he’d been magnanimous. He’d recalled that he too had married her not because he loved her just as she had agreed to marry him because she was forced into it by her father. With no more need to hide her sexuality, they even go on to have a much desired son the following year. Though that son could also have been Felik’s child as he’d had sex with Lydia one last time before he died, but this was never alluded to by the author.

January 11, 2015 (2nd reading completed on August 19, 2014. Novel first published in 1982 by William Morrow and Company.)

Rising Sun

This story is an eye-opener into the nature of Japanese closed-in society and their economic superiority over the US. They have a saying that “business is war,” and so they go all out to win, buying up businesses in critical sectors of the economy in the States, investing heavily in the research institutions and even police services and political structures. The final outcome: They can control the national affairs simply by wielding their economic options, with Americans being afraid of going against their wishes. While the Japanese can invest in America, in Japan they make it virtually impossible for outsiders to do the same. Their business strategies of war are rather unfair though—bribing people to get favorable treatment, price fixing and dumping of products: Japanese products are cheaper in America than in Japan but only so as to drive out local American competitors.

All this gradually come to light during a police investigation, led by Connor, a Japanese-speaking detective of long standing that very much understands their culture and way of doing things. During the grand opening of the skyscraper headquarters of Nakamoto, a Japanese corporation, a young woman is found dead on the 46th floor just above the partying. Connor and his assistant Peter Smith have to quickly uncover the cause of death and the killer, against mounting pressure from the Japanese to do a rather shoddy job. After a couple of wrong suspect selections—first Eddie Sakamura, from a competing business to Nakamoto’s, then Senator Morton who didn’t want Nakamoto to buy yet another American high-tech company—they finally find that the real killer was an employee of Nakamoto named Ishiguro. He did the killing in order to pressurize the senator into changing his position, having spotted the senator having sex with her minutes before she passed out, with the senator not knowing she really wasn’t dead.

Reading the story a second time a year later, I thought, Interesting! So the Japs now regard all Americans as “niggers” because of their better educational, industrial and economic systems!

January 13, 2015. Review initially written in 2011. Novel published in 1992 by Ballantine Books, ISBN 0-345-38037-1.

Rich Man, Poor Man

The story of the Jordaches, a poor German-American non-religious family living in small towns near New York City, spanning over two decades from 1945 to 1968. The father is Axel Jordache, a violent German that ran to America with money he robbed and murdered a British visitor to obtain. In America he hid his violent past while courting his future wife Mary, an orphan raised in an orphanage, parents unknown, mother thought by some to have been a prostitute. The children are Gretchen, already a working young lady at the start of the tale, Rudolph, the favorite child of the family and a high school student, and his slightly younger brother Thomas.

Rudy is the bright one that goes on to amass considerable wealth even before he marries in his thirties—the Rich Man. Tom is the wild and violent one, taking on the violent trait of his father, the one that did poorly in school and was always fighting—the Poor Man. The tale follows the lives of the children (not only Rudy’s and Tom’s but also Gretchen’s) to middle age, highlighting their love lives, fortunes and misfortunes, initial rivalries and eventual reconciliation, ending with Tom’s sudden death from injuries sustained as a revenge-inspired consequence of the last fight he is involved in, a fight funnily over Rudy’s wife’s honor.

In the course of the tale are several deaths and births: Axel first disappears in a river during a storm, and it is not clear if he just ran away as his wife believes, or if he’d drowned. Gretchen’s child Billy is born, then later Tom’s child Wesley is born, both conceived before marriage. Then Mary dies in a hospital, before Rudy’s child Enid is born. The tale moves from New York to Hollywood to the south of Europe, with a brief touch down at Dallas. At the peak of his success, Rudy becomes the mayor of the small town where he went to college, while Tom becomes the owner of a cruise boat along the coast of France.

There is brief mention of America’s racial attitudes of the time, like the Irish looking down on the “dirty” Italians; an appearance of a black character here and there. The lives of the rich are dealt with in detail, and then juxtaposed with that of the poor. Mention is made of President Kennedy and the renaming of an airport in New York after him following his assassination, along with the student demonstrations and unrest of the 1960s. You get to see how the rich and powerful are liable to use their connections for the advancement of the personal interests of those close to them or their friends and associates, like getting accepted by a college when your grades weren’t good enough, like getting an army posting that would ensure you did not get sent to the jungles of Vietnam.

January 17, 2015. Review initially written in 2011. Novel first published in 1969; this New English Library (Hodder and Stoughton) edition published in 1991, ISBN 0-450-02089-4.

Sula

Written by Toni Morrison, this tragic tale is woven mainly around two families in the black section of a small Ohio town in the USA, spanning from 1919 to 1965: Eva Peace and her family; Helene Wright and her family. Sula is Eva’s granddaughter, while Nellie is Helene’s daughter. Their tight childhood friendship is marked by a shared secret—the accidental drowning of a young boy who slipped from Sula’s hand while she was playfully spinning him around in the air close to a river. After high school Nel marries and settles down to have kids, while Sula goes off to college and the cities. Ten years later, Sula turns up unexpectedly in town, apparently a totally changed woman, independent-minded and not eager to please anyone. For the period covered, the tale is rather short, the chapters spaced one to several years apart, reading more like snapshots.

Apart from the accidental drowning, there are other unexpected violent deaths and revelations as well. Sula’s brother Plum after returning from World War I mentally and psychologically changed, lived a withdrawn life, until Eva’s patience ran out with him and she decided to terminate it with her own hands, setting him afire on his bed. Eva herself, had come into a little money within a year under suspicious circumstances, after her husband fled leaving her with three kids and no money. Sula overheard her mother admit to her friends that she loved her dutifully but didn’t like her. So when her mother’s dress caught fire, she felt no qualms watching her burn to death. Sula’s notorious life after returning to the town, such as sleeping freely with the men including her friend Nel’s husband, led the entire black population to consider her an evil outcast. Years after kicking Eva out of her own house to an old peoples’ home, there was no one with her at her time of sudden death from an undisclosed illness. She had to be buried by strangers, the white people. To cap it all was the closing tale of the mass death of several people in an uncompleted river tunnel, during a sudden fit of violent demonstration of their frustrations from being excluded from the building of the tunnel.

Sula is the shocking tale of what life could be like in poor black communities, especially for the women: Absentee husbands, the struggle to make ends meet, sometimes by any means, white racial discrimination, the pursuit of straightened hair, sex and relationships with men. It was an Oprah Book Club selection.

January 12, 2015. Novel first published in 1973 by Knopf; this Penguin Books (Plume) edition was published in 1982, ISBN 0-452-26349-2.

The Dogs of War

The story of how military coups are made, and the motives behind such especially when instigated by foreign powers, which ultimately is tied down to the economic interests of a few faceless individuals. It begins with a scene reminiscent of the end of the Nigerian Civil War: Respectable shaggy bearded general boarding an aircraft in the bush to take him to exile; white mercenaries, diseased babies being taken to an orphanage in Gabon. The dogs of war are the mercenaries.

Zangaro is the (fictitious) African nation that is the object of the coup in this story. An accidental geological survey of one of its mountains turned up solid gold—the mountain contains precious and expensive platinum with economic value of about ten billion dollars. Sir James Manson is the British head of the conglomerate whose employee did the survey. Rather than reveal the truth to Zangaro’s dictator, he decides it would be more profitable for him to have the man overthrown and then install a puppet leader who would sign away mining rights to his company for peanuts. He is a ruthless sort of fellow—nice public face but ugly private dealings—whose wealth began in questionable circumstances, who believes all men have a price, if not in money then in the level of fear they would bear. Through his hatchet man Simon Endean, he hires a reputable Anglo-Irish mercenary in the person of C.A.T. Shannon.

But unknown to Manson and Endean, Shannon is not just a stupid soldier for hire. He is a man of his own mind, who has asked himself why millions of kids had to die in war, and had gotten to the answer that ultimately it was to massage the economic egos of men like Manson. So while he accepts the job from Endean, first to go to Zangaro and assess their military strengths, then to plan and wage the coup proper, he decides on his own agenda, after finding out the identity of Endean’s boss and his business. While screwing Manson’s only daughter without his knowledge, he contacts some black African friends to provide some backup force for the coup. He also learns about the platinum, and swears that Manson would not have it cheap.

Most of the story is taken over by the planning stages of the coup on one hand; procuring hardware and other logistics including the vessel to take the team to West Africa, with some crew, and the technicalities involved in this: “end user certificates” for procuring arms between governments, the politics of arms export and the black market dealings, the bribery and corruption that has to be done. On the other hand Manson and Endean plotted on secretly acquiring one of the vehicles they would use to enrich themselves from the coup, a public company with lowly-priced shares. They calculated on making at least 80 million pounds from the rise in share price of this company after it becomes public that the company has discovered platinum in Zangaro after the coup.

The coup is executed successfully. Shannon and his team of mercenaries and their African backups attacked the dictator’s presidential palace, killing him and most of his guards, and also the nearby military barracks, killing or scattering the soldiers there. And Shannon imposes his own agenda over that of Manson. When Endean turns up with the illiterate man that Manson had wanted to install as president, Shannon shoots him dead. In self-defense, he also shoots the notorious bodyguard Endean was banking on. Shannon tells Endean to tell his boss that if he wanted the platinum he should be ready to pay a fair price for it, as the country would now be run by a more representative and responsive government. Endean is forced to leave the country in defeat. His vow that they would deal with Shannon back in the UK is useless as Shannon had no intention of returning.

So at the end it is the people from which Shannon’s African friends came that took up the formation of a new government and policing of the country. These were from a migrant population, as opposed to the two native ethnic groups in the country. The ethnic identity of this group was not spelt out, but several pointers make this clear. One of the men that accompanied Shannon to Zangaro was named Dr. Okoye, with a PhD from Oxford. All but one of the African backup soldiers that joined the mercenaries with Okoye bore English names. Finally, the group was said to be scattered over Africa and being referred to as the Jews of Africa.

January 16, 2015. Review initially written in 2010. Novel first published in 1974 by Hutchinson, this Transworld (Corgi Books) edition being published in 1990, ISBN 0-552-10050-1.

Arrow of God

Examines the private quarrels and conflicts between established government authority, represented by village elders, in early colonial eastern Nigeria. Also, what happens when the representative of a God decides to abandon his duty to the followers as a personal revenge? Desertion of the religion?

One of the elders and the key actor for whom the book was named was Ezeulu, a prophet of the powerful village god named Ulu. His detractors accuse him of being against their clan and befriending the Europeans, by not supporting a war over land that didn’t belong to them, by telling the truth to the Europeans about this war, and by allowing his son to go to the Europeans’ school and church. But to prove them wrong, he refused the offer of the Europeans to be a warrant chief for his clan as it would mean he’d be serving the Europeans as well as Ulu. He was punished by the colonizers by being detained away from his home for two months. His fellow elders didn’t do anything for his release and he felt bitter towards them. His revenge was to refuse to announce the date of the new yam festival. This caused famine and division in the village, as the yams of the villagers were not supposed to be harvested until the festival was done. By the time he announced the festival weeks later, it was too late. Many villagers had abandoned the traditional religion and embraced the Christian church so as to harvest their crops. Finally, the abrupt death of his favorite son was taken by the villagers as punishment for his intransigence; hence his ruin in the end.

The story is mostly a slow-paced account of traditional African village beliefs, life style and customs, and how these customs and beliefs were systematically being challenged by European ones of the colonizers.

January 15, 2015. Review initially written in 1999. Novel first published in 1964. Image source: Yahoo Images.

Walking With Shadows

The story of Ebele Njoko who thought he was leaving his unhappy past on being baptized Adrian Njoko. From being attracted to boys in his youth he grew up to live a gay lifestyle, changing partners regularly until he really fell in love with a European man named Antonio. His heart was broken when Antonio started seeing a friend of his, so when Nkechi, his female colleague at the office introduced her cousin Ada to him he decides to put an end to the gay life and turn a new leaf. He courted Ada and they married, and had a beautiful daughter. Everything was fine, or so it seemed. He was successful at work and he’d been successful in denying himself the sexual need of men. Until some fraud was uncovered at work and one of the affected people decided to bring him down as well, by revealing his secret past to everyone, his wife and family, people at work. This is the point at which the story takes off.

For the next two weeks, Adrian and Ada and others concerned do some serious soul searching, trying to fight and deal with the situation. Ada’s first fears was of HIV infection, taking their daughter first thing the next morning for a check up. Ada and cousin Nkechi try to see why they had not suspected despite all the “signs.” At home Nkechi hits her son because he liked playing with dolls, something girly that if unchecked might mean he’d turn out gay. Adrian’s brothers are also at a loss as to how he could have been gay, forgetting that when they were kids Adrian had been the quiet one that nobody wanted around or showed any love to. His older brother lures Adrian to the opulent home of a Pentecostal pastor who used the unorthodox method of flogging and bruising naked skin in his mad fervor to get the presumed devil out of Adrian. Ada’s friend Iheoma on the other hand lets her realize that she would not be the first to have a gay husband, making her find out that the husbands of some rich society ladies were actively gay, with one of the ladies being lesbian to boot. On the other side, some gay friends of Adrian from the past were also featured, including the couple Abdul and Femi still together. At work there were conflicting rumors and Adrian’s popularity plummeted overnight, with only his protege Rotimi still sticking by him, even to the extent of telling him he too had fucked a man before and then wanting to kiss him, like it was expected of him. His boss asked him to take paid leave until matters cooled down. Eventually, Adrian makes peace with Ada, but their marriage could not be saved. Ada wanted a divorce, which went through easily. Adrian decides Nigeria was not tolerant enough for gay people like him, and after their divorce heads out to London.

Written by Jude Dibia, this is the first novel I would read that gay people in Nigeria would feature along with the problems they face.

January 15, 2015. Review initially written in 2007. Novel first published in 2005, ISBN 978-1-4116-1934-0.

Purple Hibiscus

Written by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, this is an emotional tragic story about how a Nigerian Catholic Igbo family revolted against the tyrannical head of the family, ending in his demise. Eugene is a rags-to-riches, British-educated man with a colonial mentality of the highest degree. He would rather his children spoke English in public as this was more “civilized” than his father’s language. He cut ties with his own father because the man refused to be converted to the Catholic faith, even to the extent of barring his children from visiting the man. He would give out money to people and fight against shortcomings of the government, but there was no happiness in his house because his wife and two children feared him. He played God in committing atrocities against his wife and kids, to the extent of physically assaulting them severely. The wife would often bleed and lose her pregnancies, while the children would spend days in hospital recuperating from the injuries he caused. All in the name of punishing them for their perceived sins. The kids lived a sheltered life, with carefully made out time tables which they must strictly follow, with virtually no social life outside the family.

When the two kids get to spend a few days in the home of their aunt Ifeoma, it’s like they were released from a dark prison into fresh air for the first time. They learn what happiness means in a family and how to live like normal people. Ifeoma talks to Jaja about how good revolution could be, if done for the right purpose. So on getting back home, Jaja revolts against their father, and their carefully controlled lives came tumbling down. The usually acquiescent mother takes the cue from her son, and after the man assaulted her and she lost another pregnancy she decides to put poison in his tea. Nobody cries except the house help. It is Jaja that protects her and takes the responsibility, going to live the hard life of Nigerian jails, until the military government was changed and release became imminent.

The story is also a commentary on the military governments of Nigeria, of bribery and corruption in high places. A journalist was murdered by a letter bomb from government sources because of his criticisms, reminiscent of how Newswatch magazine publisher Dele Giwa was killed. And the military dictator reportedly died atop a prostitute, again reminiscent of how ex-dictator Abacha supposedly met his end.

Set in Enugu and Nnsuka, it is a tale of the new Igbo society and the religious and cultural divisions within. It reflects cultural values, with Igbo expressions generously sprinkled in. The narrator is Kambili, Jaja’s sister, a teenage girl who while at her aunt’s falls in love with a handsome Catholic priest. She has to come to terms with the fact the man will never marry.

January 12, 2015. Novel first published in 2004 and was read the following year. Image source: Yahoo (Images)

The Godfather

This is the tale of the mafia in the US, spanning two generations from the 1920s. In Italy, the mafia sprung up as a sort of grass-roots political movement to protect the interests of locals from foreign invaders. It was thus an alternative government, an alternative social order with its own systems of laws and punishments. Typical of its culture was the idea of omerta or silence, not talking to strangers and especially the police. Transported to America by Italian immigrants, the mafia also became an alternative secret society distrustful of the wider society. Several mafia families sprung up in New York and across the States, each headed by a “Don” that operated through a layer of people in carrying out activities both legitimate and often criminal and illegitimate. Each don had his consigliere, the highest-ranking officer in the family that assisted and advised him and issued his orders to the people below; and then one or more caporegimes, men that headed armies of men for the purposes of waging war, or carrying out specific assignments. These families of mafia secret societies flourished because they were able to buy favors from important members of the bigger society, like judges and politicians. And they employed often violent means to get their points across and promote their businesses: If persuasion failed they resorted to physical assault, arson or even professional killers.

The Godfather is Don Vito Corleone, an Italian immigrant from Sicily. So called because—as head of the mafia political unit called the Corleone Family—he lives a life of dishing out favors to people (of Italian descent). Such as helping someone in need of money, either giving cash directly or getting a bank to give a loan; or getting a judge to give a favorable ruling or even withdrawing an unfavorable one; or having more appropriate justice dished out to injured people when the regular justice system fails to do so; or even getting a shy-lock landlord to re-admit an evicted poor tenant. But all these favors put one in debt to him, and so should be prepared to render some needed service to him in future. Corleone’s consigliere is Tom Hagen, unusual for the post in that he is not of Sicilian or even Italian descent. His two caporegimes are Tessio and Clemenza.

The story opens with instances of how the services of a don become necessary: A trial of two young men that physically assaulted a young woman, their being set free because one had a father in a powerful position; a declining musical legend whose boss is denying a desired role in a new movie; an Italian boy in love with his baker boss’ daughter but in danger of being deported to Italy. All these go to see The Godfather, and he helps them out one by one. He is able to do this through his personal army of violent men or his contacts in high places in the bigger society. We are then taken through an odyssey of his rise in America, the lives of his children, and life in Italy where one had fled to escape being murdered by the mafia. Officially, his family is into the business of olive oil imports. But more lucrative is the organized gambling they control. They compete for spheres of influence in the city of New York with other Italian mafia families. When he is shot and bed-ridden in hospital, his first son Santiano takes over the running of the family, waging war against the offending families, until he is gunned down to death. The youngest son Michael that has kept aloof from the family business, finally gets involved, and he is the one to shoot down the masterminds wanting his father dead. Then he has to flee to hide in Sicily, coming back years later to take up the leadership of the family.

While in hiding in Sicily, Michael realizes that the mafia system bred mediocrity: People that were not qualified for professional positions got there on the whims of the local mafia don. So when he takes over from Vito as the head of the Corleone family, he decides his children would not follow after him and his father, but would enter the broader American society carrying out solely legitimate business and work, but of course retaining the insurance of political and financial power the family has amassed over the years. But first, he must consolidate the family’s power and influence, and relocate them to Nevada to take up the more legitimate business of casino and hotel operators. Shortly after The Don dies from a heart attach, he leads a campaign that saw the elimination of the heads of two other families and his own sister’s husband that had been instrumental to Santiano’s ambush. Realizing this brutal part of her husband, Michael’s wife is suddenly driven to the Catholic faith as the only way of still remaining with him, to go to church daily to pray for his soul, just like she observed his own mother doing for the soul of his late father.

In telling this tale the author was probably frank in mentioning the racial prejudices against blacks by the Italian mafia families and probably most Italian Americans at the time (1930s to 1940s). To them, blacks were of no account having allowed “society” to keep them down for so long; they were drug addicts and criminals that did not value their wives, family or children. And I guess this story was the genesis (or a good part of it) of titles and terms popularly used now, especially by musicians, like The Don, Don Corleone, Godfather. Some Nigerian radio personalities now bear these names.

January 13, 2015. Review initially written in 2010. Novel first published in 1969, this Signet edition being published in 1978, ISBN 0-451-16771-6.

Holiday Blues

Take two teenage friends, cross their paths with two bad brothers during one holiday break, and what you get is Holiday Blues. The secondary school-attending friends are Jon, schooling out of town at Port Harcourt, and Lasy whose school is closer home to their small town of Aboh near Orlu in eastern Nigeria. Jon’s story is one of mistaken identity and is tied to his older sister Mary to whom he has an emotional attachment. Returning home from school after two years he finds that Mary has changed in a way he doesn’t like, and blames her friend Matty for spoiling her. On a vacation trip to Lagos he gets to hear things about bad brother number one whom he mistakes for Matty, then decides to do something about it. Lasy’s story is that of pursuit of local fame that puts him in direct competition with bad brother number two, Chamberlain. Feeling humiliated by Lasy’s rising popularity, Chamberlain executes a plan to teach him a lesson he would never forget.

Set in early 1980s Nigeria, Holiday Blues captures a bit of the culture and social issues of the time: Juvenile delinquency, exam fraud, poor infrastructure, bad electricity, corrupt policemen at road checkpoints, chaotic traffic, malaria, ghetto jungle justice, traditional customs and beliefs. You are also taken on panoramic trips within a rural setting in eastern Nigeria, from east across the River Niger to Lagos in the west, and within Lagos itself.

January 15, 2015. Review initially written in 2008. Novel published in 2008 by Lulu.com, ISBN 978-1-4357-6024-0.

Break No Bones

A Dr Temperance Brennan story, dealing with the work of forensic anthropologists. While pathologists examine soft tissue and organs to unravel a death, forensic anthropologists work with hard tissue (bones) towards achieving the same aim, establishing cause of death.

This story starts with Dr Brennan and her students doing some field work on an island in South Carolina suspected of being a burial ground for ancient Native Americans. The discovery of a relatively fresh corpse going back only a few years starts a gradual investigation that ends up unraveling a professional serial killer. As the skeleton is being examined, two other bodies quickly turn up. All bear similar odd marks on the skeleton, eventually turning out to having been made by a scalpel. A doctor running a “free” medical clinic for the poor has been killing some of his patients (that he figured won’t be missed) by strangulation, harvesting their organs for use in transplants across the border in Mexico, with wealthy sick Americans benefiting. He was caught at the dying moment, but then made a deal with the authorities escaping death penalty in exchange for identifying his victims and accomplices and how their scheme was hatched and operated.
This is actually an eye-opener into the international organ transplant business, in which people from poor countries either get killed for their organs or are encouraged to donate them for peanuts while the middlemen and professionals carrying out the operations profit greatly.

January 17, 2015. Review initially written in 2014. Novel first published in 2006 by Scribner, this Pocket Books edition being published in 2007, ISBN 0-7434-5303-4.