978-0812974492
Review note: One of the staff members in the earlier days of Facebook had Hillenbrand as a friend. This book was not out at this point. Seabiscuit, however, was. –Booklight staff
Unbroken is a work that makes a person question the reasons why and how the universe works as it does. Perhaps the reason why this question is put so forcefully forward concerns the sheer amount of suffering present pressed between the front and back book covers on these pages.
Louie Zamperini begins life as a thief, although not an especially malicious one–more the kind that will steal a pie off a window sill and run–and by the way that running is going to prove to be rapid. Eventually, his theiving ways are turned into a possible useful focus in becoming a race runner as inspired by his brother. Zamperini runs all the way into the 1936 Berlin Olympics where he competes in the 5,000 meter distance race during a sweltering heatwave. To add a certain Ben Hur flavoring, some of the other runners attempt to remove him from the race by kicking him with their cleats. This bloodies him up, but he finishes eighth and manages to run the last lap in 56 seconds despite all the injuries he has received. This accomplishment, which was unheard of, attracts the attention of one certain Adolf Hitler who wishes to shake his hand for the feat.
Zamperini goes off to college, and there sets another racing 15 year record for the time it took him to run a mile. War breaks out, and this is actually where the story of Unbroken really begins and where Hillenbrand starts to hone her pen on the tale to follow.
Zamperini is placed in the position of being a B-24 bombardier. His job is to make sure the bombs hit their target. He does this job well and succeeds in undertaking many combat missions where his luck is put to the maximum test. He still makes it home. It is only when he and his crew are asked to go on a rescue mission that his plane goes down killing everyone but three of his crew that his luck runs out–at least in terms of the mechanical integrity of the plane. Thing is, the plane was not even shot at. It just stopped working.
From this point forward, everything that can go wrong and should kill a person happens. Forty-seven days are spent in a raft with sharks circling. Water runs out. The heat beats down oppressively. People hallucinate. Strafing by enemy zeros occurs. Then, the raft makes landfall, only to be welcomed by Japanese forces which are occupying the region. The raft, and its concomitant hardships, it turns out, are a vacation compared to what follows.
While the interview of Hillenbrand that occurs in the back of the work focuses on the theme of “forgiving the unforgivable”, it seems the bigger question is how Zamperini “endures the unendurable.” The psychological torture and physical stresses stagger the imagination. The Japanese have no intention of following any Geneva Convention war protocol, and are out to kill all prisoners one way or the other. Some are more sadistic than others. One specific guard who is called “The Bird” by the prisoners, is especially cruel and delights in inventing new tortures for the prisoners but especially, it seems, Zamperini. At each moment in this book when relief looks imminent, something much, much worse happens instead. This momentum continues for what seems like a small eternity and by the time the reader is done they feel as if they have gone through some kind of abuse simply by knowing such a chain of events occurred.
Nonetheless, Zamperini must find both the will to survive and the answer to whatever it is that faith means to him if he wishes to continue to move forward. How this story concludes and how the answers are found is incredible. If Anne Frank is the Jewish voice of World War II and its hardships, then Zamperini ought to at least be the voice of American POW’s who were taken captive by the Japanese–if not POW’s as a whole. You owe it to yourself to read this one if you want to be informed on how how the other prisoner’s of war fared and what that meant in the Asian theaters of World War II.
978-0241113370
Review note: A sister project, Nearly Sacred, a podcast just released an episode on Q and military intelligence. In a happy coincidence, this book review came in at almost the same time. –Booklight staff
John Pertwee, better known as the Third Doctor from the TV show Doctor Who, must have had his life setting set on legendary. Of course, since Pertwee is an actor, he might be acting having written this autobiography. Since he was also involved in military intelligence, it might also all be some part of an OP by Britain. Then, there is the possibility he is telling the unabashed truth, and it all sounds stranger than fiction. Probably, this analysis would delight him in any case.
The narrative format begins by discussing Pertwee’s early life and the decisions of his father who was working toward being a playwright. His mother and father split quickly, and Pertwee lives with his father with little to no knowledge about his mother. Later in the book, we understand why this is so. While living with his father, Pertwee moves through boarding schools and different estates–some of which are in France. He cuts his teeth watching World War I aces fly planes–sometimes to disastrous results. While in boarding school, he does not uphold the decorum expected of him as a student, and most often gets into trouble for playing pranks. He learns much about the opposite sex from an early age. This part of the book, in the current era, is unabashedly honest, but also would not be looked upon fondly. Indeed, Pertwee sounds much like James Bond if James Bond had a childhood. Of course, since Pertwee was hanging out with the writer of James Bond and worked in his later life in military intelligence for Britain, we begin to understand why this might be so.
After Pertwee narrowly escapes childhood, he starts a career in acting. This career has many memorable moments for him, but is interrupted by World War II. Pertwee joins the Navy. While in the Navy, Pertwee narrowly avoids getting blown up on the HMS Hood. It seems rather like destiny stepped in and pulled him away from the ship before its doomed encounter. Pertwee experiences this several times throughout the book. He has some premonitions and obeys them and discovers, for instance, that his idea to not leave a certain area during a pause in a bombing aerial raid results in his still being alive and not blown to bits.
There are many admissions of romantic conquests in the book. Pertwee was never short, it seems, on admirers or finding them. Certain low points are present in morale and character most apparently while in the Navy, as the reader might suspect. Pertwee is not usually the perpetrator in these tales, but one learns much about sexual attitudes throughout the book in England and the Navy in the early 20th century in particular. The premise to be understood is that it was “rough”.
Usually, one reads about Pertwee’s time in naval intelligence from an interview he gave two younger people in 1994 for a newspaper. However, the admission is present in the book, and Pertwee describes a kind of code that is used for communication during war time that is known within the military branches. Evidently, writing a letter to a loved one or mother and then using certain kinds of words was a way to encode information. This kind of coding has often been referred to as “Q code”. Therefore, it would seem Pertwee is indicating a familiarity with Q clearance. He speaks of several kinds of gadgets–like a pipe that shoots bullets or buttons that contain compasses–that he had to train others how to use. He was, in his early acting career, in plays with Winston Churchill’s daughter, and it is said that during his time in intelligence he spent time with Churchill and was directly answerable to him. Actors were perfect spies since they often moved around and people suspected them less since they were doing what their job required.
What this book does not discuss much is Pertwee’s time on Doctor Who. Indeed, there is another book that focuses on those years. Perhaps that will be a follow-up post here, at thebooklight! It is, nonetheless, an incredible account of the life and times of John Pertwee. How much of it is entertainment, or reality, or him acting is probably exactly why he was a spy. It’s hard to tell. Of course, to make up the material in here one would need to be a creative genius. Pertwee is clever, but some things are so strange that it can only be reality creating the narrative.
978-1892925008
Tadahiko Mizuno has had a long career with research that he had to pay for from his own pocket. The reason he had to pay for this research from his own pocket is typically blamed on scientific form. What is scientific form? The ability to replicate results, in this instance. Mizuno then publishes his book with a different kind of branding than the typical “Cold Fusion”. He tries to shift the conversation into a different linguistic domain. Why? Because EVERYONE knows cold fusion is a scientific fraud, right? No. Not exactly.Indeed, what everyone seems to agree on is that something can happen with the right conditions and the right elements. What is not certain is what those elements are, or the scale and outputs of the reaction. What can happen, when conditions are right, is that an excess of heat is generated by significant amounts. Sometimes, other elements or isotopes of elements are formed. At other times, nothing whatsoever happens.
The original discoverers of this interaction between heavy water and the metal Palladium rushed to publish probably for recognition and patents. The essential idea was to bombard Palladium with Deuterium so that the lattice of the Palladium would allow two molecules of Deuterium to bond and produce energy. This was attempted through electrolysis. The initial result was a ton of excess heat and possibly some neutrinos which are tell-tale signs that the interaction might be used instead of the kind of nuclear fission process which requires high temperatures and generates reactive, deadly waste. The excitement of the find created a panic to publish. In doing this, the operational definitions, which are to say in this case, the experimental definitions of amounts and substances along with procedure were not rigorously noted. Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons then spoke about their findings prematurely. Replication was difficult in part due to the above lack of documentation, so other scientists were not observing the same outcomes. Then, the press got involved and ran with the story and splashed it all over the place before science had really had a chance to do science. What follows are scientists that get some of the same results, some that get none, and a general consensus, weirdly, that the whole thing is made up. It is obvious, though, that SOMETHING is happening, and Mizuno devotes his life and his own money trying to figure out the conditions of what this is. He states that his held scientific bias kept him from understanding things along the way and making certain kinds of measurements and observations. When he did have verifiable outcomes the data was not documented in a way that the scientific community would accept. He could, for instance, document the evaporation of water in a bucket over a period of time required to cool off a cell used in a experiment that was generating, in his words, “heat after death” meaning that there was no longer any electrolysis being applied but heat was still occurring. This was not, however, a spreadsheet of data through something like spectral analysis. No one wanted to pay him any attention, and especially not after the press got done with it.
In our current era of fake news and fake publications, we have a different perspective than we did in 1989. It is easy to imagine, for instance, a world in which cold fusion is a verifiable, replicable phenomenon. The implication would be that nuclear fission plants would not need to be built and steel drums to store waste would be irrelevant. All the industry around those facilities and money spent toward them would be gone in an instant. Furthermore, the petroleum industry might die overnight. How many research grants come from developing these established technologies? What would true energy independence mean for society and the world at large?
From a scientific perspective, if we imagine that this boundary case does indeed happen as Mizuno and many other qualified scientists have observed, then should not the inquiry become under what conditions the effect does occur and not that it is not a real thing because of lack of understanding what is doing it and how? With the claims advanced in Mizuno’s book, that’s not what happens. Instead career suicide and professional ridicule and ostracism are the results. That strikes this reviewer as singularly odd.
It is little wonder that Mizuno tries to pivot the conversation into a more Alchemical avenue. Alchemy, “the previous to science, science”, that inspired and captivated minds like Newton, was often also sometimes difficult to understand. Not everyone would receive the same results since, in Alchemy, not everyone is at the same place with the same understanding. Location and intention matter to the experiment within Alchemy, as well as timing.
It is amusing, then, toward the end of the book when Mizuno gives us the more modern science explanation for what he thinks is happening in the reactions. For this, he relies on the wave function equation which is the scientific way of saying, according to some anyway, that intention and observation MIGHT indeed matter to experimental outcomes. Mizuno succeeds then in showing where modern physics is more like Alchemy than it might care to admit. The potential outcomes of the reaction can be statistically linked to the waveform which offers explanation through probability with no commentary as to mechanism as the wave function eschews the idea that a person can know why an outcome is doing what it is. One can only be “probably certain” about results.
The rest of the book tells of Mizuno’s experimental refinements and struggles with understanding what is happening. To be sure, he is rigorous and precise and ultimately he is undefeated or undeterred by the response from his academic community. He instead doubles down and tries to find a way to continue doing the research that he has observed himself and understands perhaps better than many. He may well be, in the field of research, one of the few, true, remaining scientists. He proceeds not out of recognition or reward, but to understand and document. It is a shame that he happened on the field at an inauspicious moment. Had things worked out a trifle differently, everyone in the world might have known his name along with Pons and Fleischmann. That world also might not know what nuclear waste or meltdowns are–except as a historical footnote. Maybe the world will anyway. If it does, it will have Mizuno, and others like him, to thank.