Tag: Allen Kopp

He Fell Over Dead

He Fell Over Dead ~ A Short Story by Allen Kopp

They lived on a small farm. They grew corn and wheat, strawberries, peaches, tomatoes, lettuce, eggplant, melons and cucumbers, among other things. Their chickens yielded four or five dozen eggs a week. They sold most of their eggs and whatever happened to be in season to two different stores in the town of Marburg twelve miles away. In the lush season, they set up a stand out in front of their property on the highway and sold whatever surplus they had to passing cars.

Lathrop was fifteen. He had gone to school through the eighth grade, and then he wasn’t obliged to go any farther. He wanted to go on to high school in Marburg but father said he was needed on the farm. Lathrop did the work of a hired hand without any pay. When he was younger, they had a hired hand, but his father fired him when he found he was stealing vegetables and selling them on his own in town. 

Lathrop liked working at the vegetable stand. It was easy work in the shade of an enormous oak tree, and it gave him a chance to see and talk to other people, who were mostly friendly and cheerful. Sometimes somebody he knew from his school days would stop by and he would talk to them, but most of the people he had never seen before. They were just passing by on the highway on their way home from wherever they had been. They would see the stand, and the idea of fresh tomatoes, corn or cucumbers for supper would make them stop.

On a warm Tuesday afternoon in the middle of June, Mr. Wessel, the nearest neighbor, came by. He was happy to see that Lathrop still had a dozen eggs left and some tomatoes.

“How are you doing today, Lathrop?” Mr. Wessel asked as he counted out his money.

Lathrop felt flattered, somehow, that Mr. Wessel would speak to him in this way. Nobody else ever did. “I’m just dandy,” he said jauntily, with a smile. He put Mr. Wessel’s purchases in a wrinkled paper sack and handed the sack over the makeshift counter. 

“Do you ever read books, Lathrop?” Mr. Wessel asked.

“I did when I was in school,” Lathrop said. He was reluctant to say that he lived in a house without books or that he had only gone through the eighth grade and would probably never go any farther.

“You seem like a smart boy. I have many, many books in my house. If you ever want to borrow, drop by and I’ll see if I have anything that might interest you.”

“Yes, sir! I’d like that!”

“You don’t have to call me ‘sir’. My first name is Eldridge, so you can see why people call me Wessel. It’s my handle.”

Lathrop smiled, even though he didn’t know what it meant. “I might just do that, sir,” he said. “Stop by and borrow a book, I mean.”

Late in the afternoon Lathrop was happy. He sold all the vegetables and eggs and had a cigar box full of change and one-dollar bills. He handed the money box over to mother.

“Mr. Wessel came by the stand today,” Lathrop said at the supper table. “He told me I could come over to his house and borrow some books to read.”

“You stay away from him!” father said.

“Why?”

“I don’t like him, that’s why!”

“If you don’t like him, does that mean I’m not supposed to like him, too?”

“If I find out you’ve been over there, I’ll knock your head off your shoulders and feed it to the hogs.”

After supper, when mother was clearing the table and father had gone outside, Lathrop asked her, “Why doesn’t he like Mr. Wessel?”

“He’s heard something about him, I guess,” mother said. “You know how he is.”

“What did he hear?”

“God only knows.”

“Well, I like Mr. Wessel. He’s nice to me. Most people don’t even look at me. I’m only Hodge’s kid and I don’t mean a damn thing.”

“I don’t like you to use that kind of language in the house.”

“Mother, when I was in school, I heard ten times worse than that every day.”

“I don’t want you to be like him.”

“Why did you ever marry him?”

“You never met my mother.”

She laughed then, something she hardly ever did, and Lathrop wiped the crumbs off the table onto the floor.

“I want to go back to school,” he said. “Eighth grade isn’t enough.”

“I know,” she said. “We’ll manage it somehow. And if you want to borrow books from Mr. Wessel, go ahead and do it. Just don’t let your paw find out. Keep the books hidden in your room.”

The next time father went to visit his ailing mother, a trip that always took all day, Lathrop, with his dog Ruff, walked the mile to Mr. Wessel’s house. His heart hammered in his chest as he knocked timidly at the door. He half-hoped that Mr. Wessel wouldn’t be at home. 

Mr. Wessel came to the door and when he saw Lathrop he smiled and motioned him inside. Ruff settled himself on the porch for a nap.

“I hope I’m not bothering you,” Lathrop said.

“Not at all,” Mr. Wessel said. “I’m always glad of visitors.”

The house was cool and dark. Lathrop sat in a large padded chair across from the couch. Mr. Wessel sat on the couch and crossed his legs. He wasn’t wearing any shoes.

After some polite talk in which Mr. Wessel asked Lathrop about his family, his dog Ruff, where he went to school and other mundane things, he took Lathrop into the next room, his “study,” where he wrote and had his books.

Lathrop never saw so many books in one place before. There were shelves and shelves of books, so many books that the ones that wouldn’t fit on the shelves were stacked neatly in rows on the floor.

“Where did you get so many books?” Lathrop asked.

“Some are mine and some belonged to my family. When you’re the last one left alive, you get, by default, everything that belonged to everybody who came before.”

Lathrop wasn’t sure what Mr. Wessel was talking about, but he smiled and nodded his head.

Lathrop looked over the books. There were novels, volumes of poetry, short stories, books on history and books that people had written about their own lives.  

“Do you have anything in mind that you’d like to read?” Mr. Wessel asked.

“I don’t know much about books,” Lathrop said. “In school, I only read what I had to to get by.”

“Have you ever read anything by Charles Dickens?”

“No. I’ve heard of him, though.”

“How about David Copperfield? Do you think you’d like to read that?”

“Sure, I guess so.”

“I read it when I was about you age. I don’t think you’ll have too much trouble with it.”

“Sure, I’d like to give it a try.”

With David Copperfield clutched tightly in his hands, he followed Mr. Wessel back into the front room. They sat again and after they had talked for a while Mr. Wessel got up and went into the kitchen and came back with two glasses of sweet cider and a little plate of walnut cookies.  

After an hour or so, Lathrop realized he had been in Mr. Wessel’s house for over an hour. He would like to have stayed much longer, but he didn’t want to overstay his welcome. He thanked Mr. Wessel for David Copperfield and walked back home with Ruff trailing along behind.

He showed mother the book when he got home and inside the front cover where Mr. Wessel had written his name.

“That’s so you’ll remember who the book belongs to,” mother said.

He hid the book in the bottom of his dresser drawer. He couldn’t let father see it. He would be mad at him for disobeying orders to stay away from Mr. Wessel’s house and would make fun of him for reading such a story book.

That might after mother and father had gone to bed, he began reading David Copperfield in his bed. If father came and unexpectedly opened the door, which he never did, Lathrop could easily thrust it under the covers and pretend it wasn’t there.

He considered himself mostly ignorant and uneducated, but he didn’t have any trouble reading David Copperfield or knowing what was going on. There were some words he didn’t know and the characters talked in a funny way, but Lathrop knew it was just because they were in a different country and the book was written a long time ago. 

The next time he worked the vegetable stand, he overhead two ladies from town talking as they picked out their vegetables. Lathrop didn’t care what they were saying, but when he realized they were talking about father he paid closer attention.

Lathrop gleaned from the ladies’ talk that father had a “girlfriend” in town and she had a small child by him. He paid the rent on the house she lived in and visited her regularly. The ladies had seen father, the woman and their child together at a fireworks display in the park on the Fourth of July. 

“That old coot,” one of the ladies said. “He ought to be ashamed of himself. And she’s half his age, too.”

“She’s the one that ought to be ashamed,” the other lady said. “Damned old home wrecker!”

“Well, you never know about people.”

In a little over a week, Lathrop finished David Copperfield and was glad for a reason to make another trip to Mr. Wessel’s house.

Mr. Wessel asked Lathrop how he liked the book and Lathrop said he was surprised he was able to get through such a big book so fast and with seemingly so little effort. He forgot about the time when he was reading it.

Next Mr. Wessel gave him A Tale of Two Cities, which, he said, was a little more challenging than David Copperfield but of moderate length. Lathrop agreed to give it a try.

When the conversation switched from books to other matters, Lathrop told Mr. Wessel how he hated his father and was sure his father hated him. His father was gruff with him and impatient and turned his head away whenever Lathrop walked into a room. The two of them had very little to say to each other and never talked about anything that mattered.

He told Mr. Wessel his father didn’t want him to come there and borrow books but that he was doing it anyway when his father was away. His mother knew about it and thought it was all right. To Lathrop’s surprise, Mr. Wessel smiled and nodded his head.

“I never got along well with my father, either,” he said.

“What did you do about it?” Lathrop asked.

“Left home and didn’t come back until after he was dead.”

“What did you do away from home?”

“Went to college. Taught high school. Worked in a lumber mill and as a copy boy at a newspaper. I was clerk in a book store. I was even a waiter for about ten months.”

“Did you like that?”

“It made my legs tired.”

“Then what did you do?”

“When my mother died, I got a little money. Not enough to make me rich but enough to keep me from having to work, at least for a while.”

Then, even though he was embarrassed to say it, Lathrop told Mr. Wessel what he had heard the town ladies say at the vegetable stand.

“Do you think it’s true or just gossip?” Mr. Wessel asked.

“I think it could be true. He’s away from home a lot.”

“Does your mother know?”

“I don’t think so.”

Then there were other books: The House of Seven Gables, The Scarlet Pimpernel, The Sea Wolf, The Red Badge of Courage, Life on the Mississippi. There was a whole world in them that Lathrop didn’t know existed.

On a stifling afternoon in August, Lathrop was sitting in the wagon in the barn looking at an old newspaper he had found when his father came in. Ruff went to meet him, tail wagging, and Lathrop’s father kicked him. Ruff yelped and leaped out of the way.

“What did you do that for?” Lathrop said. “He only wants you to notice him.”

“I’m going to take him out and shoot him!” his father said.

“What?”

“I can’t stand that dog and I never could.”

“The only reason you can’t stand him is because he’s mine and you know I like him!”

His father wiped the sweat from his mouth with the back of his hand and grabbed Lathrop by the arm and pulled him off the wagon onto the floor.  

“What’s the matter with you?” Lathrop said, trying to stand up.

“Yeah, what’s the matter with me? You’d like to know what’s the matter with me, wouldn’t you? The question is, what’s the matter with you?”

“I haven’t done anything!”

“You’ve been going over to that Wessel’s house. Don’t bother to lie about it because I know you have. What filthy things have you been up to with that man?”

“What?”

“What have you been up to with that Wessel?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about! He lends me books. I read them and then I take them back.”

“Yeah, and what do you do for him in return?”

“I don’t do anything!”

He grabbed Lathrop by the arms and turned him around and struck him on the side of the head with the flat of his hand.

“Let go of me, you bastard!”

“What did you just call me, you little chicken shit?”

Lathrop started to run and his father grabbed him from behind and slammed him to the floor. He was straddling him, undoing his belt to thrash him with it when Lathrop pulled himself up and started running again. He nearly ran into the wall of the barn and when he did he saw the big knife in the leather case his father used when he butchered hogs. He pulled the knife out of its case and when his father charged him he stabbed him in the throat. He then stabbed him two more times, once in the side of the neck and then just above the heart until he went down.

Right away Lathrop knew his father was dead. When he caught his breath, he took an old canvas tarpaulin and threw it over him so he wouldn’t have to look at him. Then he thought about all the blood that was leaking all over the floor of the barn that would be very difficult to clean up, so he wrapped his father in the canvas the best he could and pushed the body against the wall. Ruff jumped up and wagged his tail and seemed to think he was helping.  

After he got himself a long drink of water, he went into the house and told mother what had happened. She dried her hands and sat down at the kitchen table and looked at him and didn’t say a word.

He thought about what he could do with his father’s body so that nobody would ever find it. Just burying it didn’t seem the right thing.

Two miles away was an old homestead that had been abandoned for seventy-five years or more, people said. There was an old well that went down two hundred feet, maybe three hundred. Lathrop remembered seeing it when he was seven years old. It had given him bad dreams for a long time.

After midnight, while mother was sleeping the sleep of the innocent, Lathrop went out to the barn and, without too much effort, pulled his father’s body, using ropes, into the back of the wagon. He then hitched the sleepy mule, the one they called Timmy, to the old wagon and set off into the woods along a road that could hardly be called that.

There was no moon. Lathrop could barely see past Timmy’s ears, but he found the old homestead from memory. He pulled the wagon around to the back of where the house once stood and jumped down. The well was right where he remembered it.

A metal plate covered the well. He was able to lift it by one corner and, with a huge amount of effort, slide it to the side far enough to drop a body in.   

He pulled the wagon as close to the well as the remaining foundation of the old house would allow and, pulling on the ropes, maneuvered his father’s body to the opening and dropped it down, canvas and all. He listened for the body to hit bottom, but he heard nothing so he believed that meant the well was hopelessly deep.

He pushed the metal plate back into place and kicked the leaves and sticks that he had disturbed back so that the well would look undisturbed.

When he got back home, it was after three o’clock in the morning. He washed his hands and face and fell into bed, exhausted. He slept until nine o’clock and when he woke up breakfast was waiting for him in the kitchen.

For supper that day mother cooked fried chicken and mashed potatoes, Lathrop’s favorite. She baked a chocolate cake as a sort of celebration and put little red candy stars on top. It tasted so good that Lathrop ate almost half of it at one time.

In the evening it was rainy and cool and the dark came early, as if announcing the arrival of fall. Lathrop laid a fire in the front room, the first since April.

“You killed your father,” mother said, and it was the first words she had spoken about it.

“He was going to kill me.”

“Yes, but you killed him.”

“I couldn’t let him hurt Ruff.”  

“You killed him.”

“We don’t need him. We can get along with him.”

“You killed your own father.”

“He got tired of farming and ran off to California or someplace even farther. He hated me and I’m pretty sure he hated you. He doesn’t want us to find him. Anybody who ever knew him could easily believe it of him.”

“I don’t know what to think of a boy who kills his father.”

“You’re as glad as I am that he’s gone.”  

She looked at him in her quiet way and picked up her knitting and sat in her rocker near the fire. Lathrop lay on his back in front of the fire, a pillow from the couch underneath his head, and read a book. Ruff lay beside him. Now he could read all the books he wanted without having to hide. He was going to start to high school in September. It was a fine life.

Copyright © 2017 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

In the Garden of Beasts ~ A Capsule Book Review

In the Garden of Beasts ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp

In 1933, a new U.S. president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, appoints a new ambassador, William E. Dodd, to Germany. He is sixty-four years old, a history professor, scholar and writer. With his wife and adult children (Bill and Martha), he moves to Berlin to take up his duties. It is a tumultuous and transitional time in German history. The elderly president, Paul von Hindenburg, has recently appointed Adolf Hitler as chancellor, more as a move of appeasement than anything else. People feel uneasy about Hitler, with good reason. He rants and raves in his speeches. He is quietly and systematically arming Germany for war, in spite of protestations to the contrary. Hitler and his Nazi regime favor suppression of Jews, which manifests itself in beatings, intimidation, banishment to prison camps, and laws that forbid Jews from marrying non-Jews and from working in journalism and other jobs. Anybody, Jew or Aryan, who opposes Hitler and his government is subject to intimidation and professional ruin or, at worst, imprisonment or death.

Into this maelstrom, the innocent, well-meaning Dodd family is dropped. Ambassador Dodd’s twenty-three-year-old daughter, Martha, is a recent divorcee. Her favorite thing is men. In Berlin she gradually gains a reputation as something of a tramp. She goes from man to man, some of them Nazis and even a Russian communist, with whom is she is so much in love that she wants to tour Russia for a month to gain an understanding of his country. She is also an idealist who is slow at seeing things as they really are. When she first arrives in Berlin, she believes the Nazis are doing good things and improving life for all German people. Gradually she begins to see things in a different, more realistic way.

According to many observers, William E. Dodd is not a successful or effective ambassador. Being the American ambassador to Germany during the rise of Nazism is no easy task. Not only must he deal with radical Nazis, he must also deal with people from his own government who don’t like him and believe he was the wrong choice for the ambassadorial post in the first place. He seems to believe, wrongly and naively, that all he has to do is advocate moderation and common sense and the Nazis will “tone down” just because he thinks it is the right thing for them to do. This, of course, is not the way the world works. Secretary of state Cordell Hull and others in the U.S. government are mainly interested in getting Dodd to press for repayment of German debt, which Dodd does not consider as important as other matters.

During the early years of Nazism (early 1930s), many believed that Hitler and his inner circle (Goebbels, Goring, Himmler) were so radical that it was just a matter of time before rational people would see them for what they were and force them out of office. We know in retrospect, however, that this is not what happened. When President Paul von Hindenburg died in August 1934, Hitler assumed absolute control over Germany and proclaimed himself “Fuhrer and Reich Chancellor.” If it had ever been possible for anybody, any foreign power, to stop the Hitler juggernaut, now it was too late. The next ten years or so were going to be a very difficult time for the entire world. 

Ambassador Dodd proved to be more right about the threat that Germany posed to the world than a lot of people, during his lifetime, were willing to give him credit for. He and his family were in the unique position of viewing the rise of Nazism as outsiders. After Ambassador Dodd’s death, he was mostly vindicated as the lone voice who saw what was really happening in Germany, while most Americans were still hoping to remain uninvolved.   

In the Garden of Beasts is “nonfiction narrative” written by Erik Larson. It’s a chronical of true events, written in such a way that it seems to be a novel, a fictional story, but it’s all true and it really happened. If a fiction writer had written the story of Hitler, it would have been too fantastic and far-fetched to be plausible. What story of the twentieth century is more compelling and at the same time more frightening than the story of the small, mustachioed man who aspired to conquer the entire world and would stop at nothing to achieve his goals?

Copyright © 2017 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

The Mummy ~ A Capsule Movie Review


The Mummy ~ A Capsule Movie Review by Allen Kopp

An Egyptian princess from five thousand years ago thought she was going to be next in line for the throne of Egypt, but her father’s wife gave birth to a son who instead would become the next pharaoh. The Egyptian princess at this point embraced evil and murdered her father, his wife and infant son. When her crimes were discovered, she was entombed alive and, because she was a disgrace to Egypt, her body was laid to rest in a tomb in Mesopotamia, a thousand miles from Egypt, in what is present-day Iraq.

A crusaders’ tomb from the thirteenth century is found underneath London. One of the crusaders entombed there had a stone buried with him that he picked up while crusading in Egypt.

Nick Morton (Tom Cruise), adventurer and plunderer of antiquities in Iraq, just happens to accidentally find the forgotten tomb of the disgraced Egyptian princess while dodging bullets from insurgents. He is with a hapless male colleague and a curvaceous female archaeologist named Jennifer Halsey, who recognizes the significance of the tomb from an archaeological standpoint. They crate up the mummy case containing the remains of the Egyptian princess and are flying it back to home base, when the plane crashes over England. All on board the plane are killed except Jennifer Halsey and Nick Morton.

Opening the five-thousand-year-old tomb of the Egyptian princes has released her, or has at least has released her malevolence. She causes the plane to crash over England so she can reclaim the crusader’s stone that goes into the hilt of her magic sword. She recognizes Nick Morton as her redeemer, her restorer, and the new love of her life because he was the one who found her tomb. All he has to do is abide by her wishes and the two of them will enjoy a life together of everlasting evil.

The Mummy is a silly, summer, action-adventure movie, with the emphasis on action instead of on intelligence or subtlety. Tom Cruise seems to have forfeited all pretentions of being a good actor by making movies like this one. And what about (the now-portly) Russell Crowe? Is he on the side of good or evil? It’s hard to tell. He is wasted here as a character named Dr. Henry Jekyll, who seems to serve no purpose unless it was to add an extra male star to boost box office receipts.

The original The Mummy was made in 1932 and stars Boris Karloff. It is a creepily atmospheric excursion into horror, a truly memorable classic that spawned a spate of sequels and added to the horror lexicon. The new The Mummy won’t be a classic. It’s not terrible, just another forgettable summer movie. Check your brain at the door, or, better yet, wait for it to come to HBO and save your nine dollars.

Copyright © 2017 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania ~ A Capsule Book Review

Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp

The year is 1915. England and Germany are fighting a war that gets uglier and more vicious every day. America, with Woodrow Wilson as president, is trying to remain neutral, but how long that neutrality can last is questionable. Germany is trolling the waters of the North Atlantic with the Unterseeboot or “U-boats,” submarines that, under the right conditions, can deal a death blow to large ocean-going vessels. As the war progresses, Germany is inclined to ignore any laws or rules of decency and fair engagement. The ruthless U-boat commanders will torpedo any boat, especially those belonging to the English, but also any “neutral” boats. America is still neutral in 1915, at least on the surface. However, Germany attacking and sinking American ships—or ships bearing American citizens—almost guarantees U.S. involvement in the war.

The English ship, Lusitania, is sailing from New York to Liverpool, England, in May 1915. On board are many wealthy and important people, Americans and English. The Lusitania is the pinnacle of ocean-going extravagance and beauty. It’s like a floating luxury hotel. Most of the passengers are well aware that traveling through the waters of the North Atlantic is dangerous in wartime, but they believe they will be protected and guarded by the British navy. Many of them are not willing to let the threat of being torpedoed and sunk spoil their good time.

As the Lusitania gets closer to the British Isles, the chances of attack by U-boat increase. William Turner, captain of the Lusitania, gets warnings by wireless communication, but nothing too alarming. He too is lulled into believing that the Germans will not attack a British passenger ship, even one carrying a cargo munitions and materiel for England’s war effort. Germany is (wrongly) credited with having at least some respect for civilians, including many small children.

The commander and crew of U-boat U-20 have had a mostly unsuccessful patrol, meaning that they haven’t come across any “enemy” (meaning English or anybody on the side of the English) vessels to torpedo. (What’s important to U-boats is not the number of vessels they attack and destroy but the cumulative tonnage of those vessels.)

The bad luck of U-20 was about to change. On a bright afternoon in May, with near-perfect weather conditions, the commander of U-20 spies through his periscope the Lusitania, the ship that is the supreme symbol of British naval prowess. Ironically, it is only twelve miles from the coast of Ireland and in the last day of its voyage, only sixteen hours out of Liverpool.

U-20 is able to get a clear shot at the Lusitania, launching a torpedo into the hull of the gigantic ship, destroying and sinking it in a matter of eighteen minutes. There are 764 survivors; 1198 dead, including 123 Americans. Over 600 people on the ship are never found. America doesn’t enter the war for two more years, until German instituted a policy of all-out submarine warfare against any ship, no matter who it belonged to.

After the sinking of the Lusitania, a controversy arose (today called a “conspiracy theory”), as they so often do. The Admiralty (the arm of the British government that overseas shipping) failed to provide—when it might easily have done so—an escort of battleships for the Lusitania as it entered the “danger zone” of the North Atlantic, where U-boats were known to be operating. Many people believed—and still believe—that certain parties in the British government wanted the Lusitania to be attacked so that America would be sure to enter the war and come to Britain’s aid.

Dead Wake is a fascinating slice of twentieth century history, written, by Erik Larson, in a style known as “narrative nonfiction,” a genre originated (or at least advanced) by Truman Capote with In Cold Blood. It’s a story about the stakes that are involved in war, in this case the lives of innocent victims who just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The sinking of the Lusitania showed the war then being fought between Britain and Germany was to be a different kind of war, one in which nobody was to be spared.

Copyright © 2017 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

An American Tragedy ~ A Capsule Book Review

An American Tragedy ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp

The great American novel of the twentieth century—or at least one of them—is Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. First published in 1925, it is a very ambitious novel of monumental length (856 pages, originally in two volumes). It’s about one man’s misguided quest for the American dream. The title tells us it’s not an uplifting or a happy story.

It’s the 1920s or thereabouts, but the time doesn’t matter because it could be any time. Young Clyde Griffiths has a disadvantaged childhood. His parents are un-ordained “ministers” of the gospel. They travel around from city to city, saving souls and ministering to the needy by setting up “missions.” Clyde has two sisters and one brother. The family is poor and never has enough money to provide properly for Clyde and his brother and sisters. They don’t even go to school because the family moves around so much.

When Clyde is about sixteen or seventeen, he gets a job as a bellboy in a ritzy Kansas City hotel. With this job, Clyde is able to witness the world of wealth and glamor that he has never seen before. He makes more money through tips than he ever imagined possible. His friends, other bellboys, introduce him to the world of booze and loose women. Clyde realizes what a sheltered life he has been leading. His glimpse into this new world makes him know, for the first time, the kind of life he desires for himself.

A traffic accident killing a young girl in Kansas City causes Clyde to run away. He drifts from place to place alone for a couple of years, until he lands a job as bellboy in a Chicago hotel. There he meets his rich uncle, a manufacturer from Lycurgus, New York. The uncle agrees to give Clyde a tryout in his collar and shirt factory. Clyde arrives in Lycurgus and goes to work for his uncle in a menial job at first and feels neglected by his uncle’s family because they fail to “take him up” socially.

Eventually Clyde is given a better job in the factory and finds himself head of a department that employs young girls. He meets there one Roberta Alden, a poor farm girl who has taken a job in the city to help her family. Roberta is pretty and pleasing in her way and soon she and Clyde begin spending time together, keeping it a secret because of a factory rule that forbids any kind of socializing between employees and department heads.

After a few months of “dating,” Clyde induces Roberta to become “intimate” with him, which she agrees to do because she loves him and believes he loves her and will eventually marry her. Being innocent and not knowing the ways of the world, Roberta soon becomes pregnant.

While Clyde has been secretly dating Roberta, he has also been moving up in Lycurgus society, having been “taken up” by a sympathetic female cousin named Bella Griffiths. Through his good looks and gentlemanly manner, he soon becomes popular with the smart, young, society set and specifically with a girl named Sondra Finchley, beautiful, rich and accomplished. When she and Clyde fall in love, he can’t believe his good fortune. He is on the verge of having everything he ever dreamed of: wealth, comfort, ease, and a beautiful wife. He has a terrible problem, though: a pregnant girlfriend for whom he no longer cares. This situation can ruin everything he’s hoped for and aspired to. If Roberta “exposes” him to his rich relatives and his society friends, it will bring his world crashing down.

Short of marring Roberta, which Clyde doesn’t want to do, he tries to get her to abort the fetus, which she believes is morally wrong but which she is willing to do to get herself out of trouble. She can’t find a doctor willing to perform the operation and a medicine that Clyde gets from a druggist that is supposed to cause the fetus to abort on its own doesn’t work. She then demands that Clyde marry her to salvage her reputation and to give the baby a name.

With Clyde’s world being threatened in this way, he resorts to desperate measures to try to extricate himself. He hears about an accident on a lake whereby two people in a rowboat are drowned when the boat overturns. The body of the woman is found; the man is never found. Clyde believes that if he can get Roberta out on a deserted lake in a rowboat, he can cause the boat to overturn, drowning her. Clyde himself will get away, but people will believe that he also drowned, even if his body is never recovered.

Out on the lake with Roberta in the rowboat, Clyde has a “change of heart” (or so the defense wants the jury to believe). He can’t kill her; he feels sorry for her and begins to rediscover some of the old feeling that he had for her in the beginning. He decides he will go through with marrying her, thereby giving up his dreams of Sondra Finchley and her world of wealth and glamor.

Something happens in the rowboat, though. In an agitated state, Roberta stands up in the boat and attempts to move toward Clyde. He also stands and attempts to catch her. The boat capsizes and Clyde and Roberta both go into the water. Roberta drowns. Without attempting to rescue Roberta, Clyde swims to shore and walks all night to get to his society friends, encamped at a resort nearby.

Clyde isn’t fooling anybody, though. There are abundant witnesses to testify to his activities on the fateful day that he and Roberta go rowing, although no actual witnesses to Roberta’s drowning come forward. Clyde is arrested within a few days while he is cavorting with his society friends (not, however, with a clear conscience), and there begins a lengthy section of the novel that details his incarceration and trial for murder. He has two slick defense lawyers to try to get him off, but are the men of the jury really going to believe that Clyde, with all the damning evidence against him, didn’t mean to kill Roberta at all?

An American Tragedy is a minutely detailed story of a murder, the circumstances of a man’s life that led to murder, how it formed in his mind, the desperation that he felt before and after, how it was executed, what followed, etc. We see the murderer (if that’s what he is) from his own point of view. We gather from this story that just about anybody might commit murder if circumstances warrant it. Clyde is not a foul, dark-hearted killer as he is portrayed during his trial. He is confused, conflicted, and, as his defense paints him, a “moral and mental” coward. Not a bad person but pushed to do a bad deed.

Copyright © 2017 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

Alien: Covenant ~ A Capsule Movie Review

Alien: Covenant ~ A Capsule Movie Review by Allen Kopp

The year is 2104. A disparate group of characters are traveling on a gigantic spacecraft (called the Covenant) to a new, distant planet to start a colony. (Earth, you see, is dying.) It’s a long journey and a hazardous one because there’s no telling what these travelers might encounter in the vast, uncharted reaches of space. When they are still a long way from where they’re going, they receive a mysterious, seemingly human, transmission fairly close to where they are. They veer off-course for a few weeks to investigate the source of the signal and we, the audience, know it’s a mistake because we’ve seen this plot device before.

Some but not all of the travelers get on a smaller spacecraft and land on the alien planet where the mysterious signal originates, not knowing what they’ll find but hoping it’s something good, like an appealing, habitable place where they can start their colony and not have to go on to their original destination. Among the group is a “simulated human” (they never use the word “robot”) named Walter, the only non-human on the mission.

They find the alien planet earth-like but with no birds or animals. Soon two of their number become mysteriously ill and we witness, once again, the hideous creature come bursting out of their bodies. The thing has been incubating inside them, don’t you know, and when it comes out, it’s fully formed, though miniature-sized, and ready for killing humans. In this instance, it’s rather lizard-like, moves with lightning speed, has an elongated head, multiple limbs, a slobbering mouth, and a tail. If you’ve ever seen any of the Alien movies going back to 1979, you are familiar with this creature and hope you never meet one.

Once on this alien planet, the travelers discover the wreckage of an enormous spacecraft called the Prometheus. If you saw the movie Prometheus in 2012, you may remember what happened at the end of it. Well, this movie picks up the thread from that movie and continues the story in a way, or, as the saying goes, after a fashion. You may remember from Prometheus a “simulated human” named David. Well, it turns out that Walter, the simulated human from the current movie, is identical to David, meaning, I suppose, that they originated from the same source or the same creator. The only difference is that David can “create” and think on his own, while Walter is only compliant with the humans he works with. (You got that?) It seems that David, in the ten years since the Prometheus crashed, has become an amateur zoologist and, more to the point, he doesn’t think much of humans.

Alien: Covenant is pretty standard stuff. Nothing new here. After the initial banal “setup” that takes a half-hour or so and shows us lots of space hardware and contains lots of difficult-to-understand dialogue (and, really, who cares what they’re saying?), we find ourselves in another who-will-die-next situation. And, of course, there’s the usual claptrap about the “origins” or human life. (Will that question ever be answered to our satisfaction?) The most interesting characters by far are the two simulated human “men,” Walter and David (both played by Michael Fassbender), who show us the conflicting sides of good and evil. And, as you might expect, the story is left at the end for yet another installment to come in the ongoing saga.

Copyright © 2017 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

A Handful of Dust ~ A Capsule Book Review

A Handful of Dust ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp

English writer Evelyn Waugh lived from 1903 to 1966. His novel, A Handful of Dust, was published in 1934. The story is set in the late 1920s or early 1930s. Tony Last and his wife Brenda belong to the upper crust of English society. They have a country estate called Hetton, Tony’s ancestral home. Tony loves Hetton and is content to be there and no other place. Brenda isn’t happy with country life and loves to pop up to London on the train to shop and eat in smart restaurants and go around to the best nightclubs. In short, she is a social butterfly, while Tony is the more sedate, stay-at-home type. We see right away that they are mismatched. They have one child, an eight-year-old son named John Andrew.

Enter John Beaver. Tony and Brenda invite him down to their home for the weekend because that’s what these people do. He’s a rather dull, uninspiring young man, but Tony and Brenda treat him decently; the weekend ends and he goes home. We don’t know until later that he and Brenda have begun an unlikely love affair.

Brenda begins spending more and more time in London. She claims the need for a small “flat” so she can stay nights and not have to go back home to Hetton on the late-night train. She tells Tony she is studying economics but the truth is she’s carrying on with Beaver. Everybody knows it except Tony.

Finally things come to a head when a terrible riding accident claims the life of Tony and Brenda’s young son, John Andrew. Brenda is, of course, in London when it happens. After the dust settles, Brenda tells Tony that she is in love with Beaver, she’s through pretending, and she wants a divorce so she can marry Beaver.

Tony is perfectly willing to give up Brenda. He doesn’t have a lot of money, but he agrees to give her what he considers a fair amount in the divorce settlement. To Brenda, though—and especially to Beaver—it isn’t enough. Beaver will not marry Brenda, he says, until she is amply provided for. The amount Brenda and Beaver are asking for is ruinous to Tony. He refuses to grant them the amount they want and he tells Brenda he will not give her a divorce.

To try to escape his painful memories, Tony agrees to go on an ill-fated “expedition” to South America with a crackpot “explorer,” Dr. Messinger. The purpose of the expedition is not quite clear, except that Tony hopes to find a lost city. As might be expected, the expedition doesn’t go as planned and things turn very bad for Tony. Meanwhile, back in England, Beaver has abandoned Brenda and she is struggling to get by on the little bit of money she has. Tony is in South America, of course, and she can’t get in touch with him to ask for more.

A Handful of Dust is a satire on marriage and societal mores. We see how easily these people fall into infidelity and even encourage infidelity in one who isn’t predisposed to it. Brenda is a selfish bitch who cares more about her lover than she does about her son and husband. The ironic part is that her lover doesn’t care that much for her. She throws it all away for nothing and, through her selfishness and grasping for money, brings her world crashing down. If Tony had never married her, he could have had a happy life.

Copyright © 2017 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

Tobacco Road ~ A Capsule Book Review

1932 First Edition Cover

Tobacco Road ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp

Erskine Caldwell’s venerable American classic, Tobacco Road, was first published in 1932. It’s the story of a few days in the life of Jeeter Lester, a lazy, ignorant, starving, dirt-poor Georgia farmer. It’s spring and Jeeter wants nothing more than to plant a crop of cotton, but he doesn’t have any seed-cotton or guano (fertilizer), no money to buy it with, and no mule for plowing.

Jeeter and his wife Ada had seventeen children, but only two still remain at home: Dude, a witless lout of sixteen, and Ellie May, a girl who doesn’t have a chance in life because she has a harelip and Jeeter doesn’t have enough money or enough initiative to take her to the doctor and get the lip “sewn up.” Jeeter’s wife, Ada, has pellagra, a vitamin deficiency disease; her fondest wish is to have a “stylish dress of the right length” to be buried in. Jeeter’s old mother lives with the family, but she never says anything; if she speaks or tries to steal food, Jeeter or Ada will clop her on the head.

Jeeter and Ada have married off their twelve-year-old daughter, Pearl, to Lov Bensey. Lov is upset because Pearl sleeps on a “pallet on the floor” and won’t let him touch her and won’t get into bed with him. When Lov comes by the Lester home with a bag full of turnips that he walked seven miles to get (which Jeeter is trying to steal), he is crying over Pearl but is drawn to Ellie May, even with her harelip. Ellie May is also drawn to Lov because she is lonely and her prospects of getting a man are slim. You can feel the sexual tension between them.

Sister Bessie Rice is a self-styled preacher. She doesn’t have a nose, but she has two nostrils flat on her face. “No nose would ever grow on me,” she says. When people are talking to her, they find themselves “looking down her nose holes.” Besides not having a nose, she’s about forty and a widow with eight hundred dollars in insurance money from her deceased husband. When she catches sight of sixteen-year-old Dude and has a petting (and rubbing) session with him, she decides she will marry him and make him a preacher. Dude isn’t much interested in marrying Sister Bessie until she tells him of her intention to go to town and buy a brand-new automobile with her insurance money. They get married (or at least get the license) and, after Sister Bessie buys the automobile, they ride all over the place, with Dude driving and blowing the horn like crazy. The same day they buy the automobile, Dude crashes into the back of a wagon, and from there, they set about tearing up the car as if that had been there intention all along. Every time they get a new dent, they say, “It don’t bother the drivin’ of it none.”

Being dirt poor and not having anything to eat is tragic, isn’t it? A girl having a harelip or a woman not having a nose is also tragic. What happens to Jeeter’s mother at the end of the book is tragic, but also funny. We don’t take the Lesters seriously enough to feel sorry for them because they are so hapless and ignorant. There’s humor in pathos, and no American novel does it better than Tobacco Road.

Copyright © 2016 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

The Underground Railroad ~ A Capsule Book Review

The Underground Railroad ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead is this year’s winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and, finally, the winner is once again about American life. It’s set in pre-Civil War America, when Southern plantation owners were allowed by law to own slaves as property, while sympathizers in the North and elsewhere viewed slavery as an abomination and were willing to do all they could to aid black slaves in their quest for freedom. In these dangerous times, the “underground railroad” sprang up, a series of rails, sometimes crude, constructed under the ground, to give slaves a means of escape from their sometimes-cruel owners. The people who built and maintained the underground railroad, the “station masters,” were often white men. They risked their lives every minute they aided slaves in escaping.

The main character of The Underground Railroad is a young slave girl named Cora. At the beginning of the book, she lives on the Randall plantation in Georgia, where vicious cruelty toward the slaves is the order of the day. Running away, is, of course, a terrible offense in the eyes of the plantation owners. Slaves who run away are caught and when they are brought back they are tortured and killed as an example to the other slaves.

A young man named Caesar gives Cora the idea of running away. At first she doesn’t want to risk it or even think about it, but when she gets a terrible beating for coming to the aid of a small boy, she decides she must run or die. Her mother before her, Mabel, ran away when Cora was only about ten and they never heard from her again. Everybody on the Randall plantation holds Mabel up as an example of what is possible. Cora has feelings of resentment toward her mother for abandoning her at such a young age. (We learn at the end of the book the ironic truth of what really happened to Mabel.)

After Cora’s harrowing escape from the Randall plantation, she is living in a black community in South Carolina under the name of Bessie Carpenter. She lives in a dormitory with lots of other runaway slaves, but there are no beatings and the living conditions are much better than on the plantation. A “slave catcher” by the name of Ridgeway is after her, though, especially determined to catch her and return her to the plantation because it is believed that her mother, Mabel, got away from him; he can’t let Cora humiliate him in the same way. In trying to escape from Ridgeway, Cora spends months in a stifling attic space in the home of a sympathizer.

After years of running and living in fear that she will finally be caught, Cora ends up on the Valentine farm in Indiana, home to a hundred or so runaways. She has books to read and sympathetic friends here, and life and is not so cruel and hard. Everybody who lives on the farm knows, though, that they live a fragile existence and that hostile forces are aligned against them. The slave catcher Ridgeway, though temporarily sidelined, is not about to give up the search for Cora as long as he is alive. The two of them will have a final fateful encounter before the story ends.

There have been lots of books and movies about slavery days and about how slaves were beaten and generally mistreated and sold at the whim of their owners. The Underground Railroad is a familiar story, but it’s a story that never ceases to be interesting in the same way that stories of World War II are interesting and compelling. No matter how terrible Cora’s life is as a slave and then as a runaway, she never loses hope that she can have a better life and live free. It’s a story, then, about hope and never giving up.

Copyright © 2017 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

Napoleon ~ A Capsule Book Review

Napoleon ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp

Napoleon Bonaparte was born on the tiny island of Corsica in 1769 to a minor aristocratic family. Corsica is closer to Italy but was a French possession, so Napoleon was born a French citizen and will forever be identified as French, although he didn’t have high regard for France. As he grew into adulthood (he was only five feet, five inches tall), he became interested in all things military. At a young age he became a military man and was found to have an uncanny instinct for military strategy. He rose through the ranks and soon was in command of a mighty military force.

Napoleon filled the leadership vacuum left by the French Revolution and can be said to have ended the Revolution. When France was struggling to find a foothold after years of turmoil, he stepped in and filled the void, declaring himself Emperor. His ego and ambition knew no bounds. His goal was to conquer all of Europe, from Spain in the west to Russia in the east. His military venturing even led him to Egypt and North Africa. He saw himself as a conqueror in the mold of Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar.

He engaged in almost constant war. Hundreds of thousands of people lost their lives in Napoleonic wars, not to mention the vast sums of money spent to finance the war machine. People began to consider him an opportunistic lunatic who would sacrifice anything or anybody on earth to satisfy his ambitious goals. He was a man without sentiment, loyalty or religion. He had nothing to hold him back.

Of course, he was not without his shortcomings. (Every tyrant, dictator or despot has his downfall built in.) He was impatient, impulsive, lacking in subtlety, refinement or social graces, incapable of deliberative thought or action. Though a master military strategist, he was not a politician and knew nothing of tact and diplomacy. He was all about force, taking the enemy by surprise and gaining the upper hand through superior strategy and cunning. When he sold what became known as the “Louisiana Purchase” to the United States (an enormous area that became thirteen states) for fifteen million dollars (about four cents an acre) to continue to finance his war machine, it was seen (in retrospect) as one of his biggest blunders. He might have extended his empire to the North American continent but wasn’t visionary enough to do so.

His disastrous military campaigns in Spain and Russia—with staggering loss of life and destruction of property—signaled his end. People were sick and tired of almost constant warfare and chaos. Even his most ardent admirers were beginning to turn against him. He was forced to abdicate his title of emperor—leading to a restoration of the monarchy—and was exiled to the tiny island of Elba, seven miles off the coast of Italy. He was not to be contained, however; he was still burning with desire and ambition. He was bored and wasn’t given as much money as he thought he needed. He returned to France, where he once again established himself as emperor and marshaled a huge army.

He met in battle the Duke of Wellington, an Anglo-Irish soldier and statesman, at a place called Waterloo in present-day Belgium. After a bloody and horrific battle, he was defeated. This was to be his final battle and his final defeat. The Napoleonic age was at an end.

Napoleon Bonaparte was this time exiled to the tiny island of Saint Helena, located in the South Atlantic. While not exactly a prisoner or under house arrest, he was closely guarded and would not again be allowed to return to France of his own volition. As long as he was alive, he was viewed as a threat, especially since he still had many admirers and adherents all over the world who would have gladly helped him to escape. He was kept on the island for about six years until he died at the age of fifty-one in 1821.

Napoleon by English historian Paul Johnson is a concise (187 pages) overview of Napoleon’s life and times. While it’s a historical biography, it’s also a fascinating story. A small, pale, young man from humble beginnings becomes the leader of the army of a great nation and, after declaring himself Emperor of that nation, sets out to conquer an entire continent. Truth is stranger than fiction.

Copyright © 2017 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997