Skip to main content

Live and Let Die by Ian Fleming [review short]

These are fun throwaway novels. Occasionally a really well-turned phrase, interesting settings, good plots and memorable villains. The book Live and Let Die is so much better than the movie featuring Roger Moore that I almost feel pity for my generation who grew up thinking that was James Bond.

The allegedly racist parts of the novel (the parts that are shortly to be sanitized) aren't particularly racist, with the unfortunate exception of Chapter 5 (lamentably titled "Nigger Heaven"). This chapter is actually rather tone deaf: Fleming did not appear to know Harlem all that well, he attempts to write in a sort of dialect... He tried. It's presumably with the aim of creating what would feel like a thrilling, exotic atmosphere to his 1950s-era readers in England, but it's beyond his ability as a writer to do it convincingly. 

Notes:
* "I smoke about three packs a day." The James Bond of the novels remains far more interesting than the modern smoke-free and vice-free Bond of the movies. The modern movie Bond obviously can't smoke; he can't even womanize. 

* Funny subtle reference here to the OG of the USA's Deep State, J. Edgar Hoover: "Bond laughed. 'What an organization!' [the FBI] he said. 'I'm sure it's all beautifully covered up and alibied. What a man! He [Hoover] certainly seems to have the run of this country. Just shows how one can push a democracy around, what with habeas corpus and human rights and all the rest. Glad we haven't got him on our hands in England." 

* Note Bond and Leiter's abject horror at all the old people in southern Florida. Quite a contrast with today's forever young Boomers teeming all over places like The Villages.

* Also an offhand reference to NJ before it became overrun:


* Interesting (pseudo-?) history about the pirate Captain "Bloody" Morgan, who practiced his piracy on Spanish shipping in the 1600s, and whose activity England indirectly supported, but later disavowed in order to avoid a war with Spain. It does make you think about different types of non-governmental "hard" and "soft power": where countries will use indirect instruments of power to project force, destabilize shipping lanes, etc. It's interesting to think about how piracy would actually be supported by a government if it helped that government's interests. Makes you think.

* "This was Quarrel, the Cayman Islander, and Bond liked him immediately. There was the blood of Cromwellian soldiers and buccaneers in him and his face was strong and angular and his mouth was almost severe. His eyes were grey. It was only the spatulate nose and the pale palms of his hands that were negroid." It's always striking to read how much English writers (and presumably English culture) used and depended on physiognomy to describe and predict behavior. You see it from Shakespeare to Austin, to Dickens and right up until the mid 20th century... where all notions of physiognomy suddenly disappear from the record. 

* The climax happens in the last ten pages and it requires an unbelievably lucky coincidence of timing.

To Read:
Wilfred Trotter: Instincts of the Herd in War and Peace

More Posts

Reminiscences of a Stock Operator by Edwin Lefevre [fictionalized bio of Jesse Livermore]

"History repeats itself all the time in Wall Street." A fictionalized biography of Jesse Livermore, one of history's most famous speculators. This is an enriching book, worth reading every decade or so across your investment career. And it's a genuinely fun read, conveying the free-wheeling investment culture of the days before the Securities and Exchange Act. When you're young and beginning to invest, this book thrills you with all the bravado of speculating. When you're older, after you've seen a few things and learned many of the manipulations and other techniques the investment industry uses to extract money from you, the book becomes more of a cautionary tale of things not to do, traps not to step in, things to avoid. This is the third time I've read this book (I'm now in my fourth decade as an investor, so I guess that makes me one reading behind schedule), and what struck me most this time around was Livermore's self-admitted weaknesses:...
Read more

The Retirement Myth by Craig S. Karpel

A 1995-era book for Boomers by a pre-Boomer (the author is technically a tail-end Silent, but he writes and thinks like a Boomer) who is dismayed at the Boomers' complete unpreparedness as they Boom their way towards an imaginary retirement in a system the author thinks is about to collapse.  Let's get the bottom line out of the way. This is a bad and boring book with incontinent logic.  Then why read it? You  don't have to, and shouldn't. But I often review bad books as an intellectual exercise: to think about what is wrong with a book, what should and should not have been done in writing it, where the errors (of, say, conception, of structure, of logic, of rhetoric) are, and so on. And with books that make predictions, it's a glorious opportunity to practice epistemic humility to read that book after its predictions should have (but didn't) come true. Finally, you can mine even the worst books for useful insights--or in this case contra-insights, since the in...
Read more

Confessions of a Medical Heretic by Robert S. Mendelsohn, MD

"I have written this book precisely to scare and to radicalize people before they are hurt. Let this book be your radicalizing experience." The more I come into contact with modern medicine, the more I've watched my elders' lives intersect with it, the more I've observed the field's neomania and accompanying iatrogenic harms, the more I realize that everyone--everyone!--should read the following four books: H. Gilbert Welch: Less Medicine, More Health Ivan Illich: Medical Nemesis Dr. John Sarno: The Divided Mind Robert S. Mendelsohn: Confessions of a Medical Heretic While reading these works, it will be worth noting your internal reaction to them. Do you agree? Do you strongly reject? Why? And what might this indicate about your attachment to your existing beliefs about medicine? In Confession of a Medical Heretic , author Dr. Robert Mendelsohn frames up modern medicine as a type of religion, complete with priests (read: doctors), sacraments, rituals, and even...
Read more