bookshelves: autumn-2011, published-1950, sci-fi, little-green-men, fraudio, autumn-2015, re-visit-2015, play-dramatisation, beautifully-put, author-love, radio-4, lit-richer

blurb - The people of Earth are preparing for war - a war that could potentially destroy the planet. Explorers are sent to Mars to find a new place for humans to colonize. Bradbury's Mars is a place of hope, dreams, and metaphor - of crystal pillars and fossil seas - where a fine dust settles on the great empty cities of a silently destroyed civilization. It is here the invaders have come to despoil and commercialize, to grow and to learn - first a trickle, then a torrent, rushing from a world with no future toward a promise of tomorrow.

The Earthman conquers Mars... and then is conquered by it, lulled by dangerous lies of comfort and familiarity, and enchanted by the lingering glamour of an ancient, mysterious native race.

This starts in Bradbury's future, January 1999 and his take on the first successful manned mission to Mars is splendidly irreverent. The Earthmen are so full up with their own importance, success and agenda that they are totally phased by the indifference they are greeted with - lot like some *cough* countries, eh?

"We'd like someone to give us the keys to the city and shake our hands"

There is a background noise where Bradbury is trying to tell us Earthmen that we already live a messed-up mentality and are trying to spread it around the universe and as such, this is a horror story written poetically, Bradbury's deceptive and descriptive narrative is beautifully penned.



http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0474xcb

Re-visit details: Derek Jacobi and Hayley Atwell lead an all-star cast in a thrilling new dramatisation, re-imagining Ray Bradbury's timeless fable of doomed Martian colonisation.

When the first expedition to Mars mysteriously disappears, Earth sends a second to find out what happened. But the real mission is classified. And only Captain Wilder knows the truth.

Dramatised for radio by Richard Kurti and Bev Doyle.
Original Music: Imran Ahmad

bookshelves: one-penny-wonder, published-1978, booker-winner, paper-read, autumn-2011, those-autumn-years, books-about-books-and-book-shops, summer-2015, re-visit-2015, radio-4, play-dramatisation, picaresque, lit-richer, lifestyles-deathstyles, lifesa-beach, memento-mori, mental-health, nowt-as-queer-as-folk, neo-platonic, dodgy-narrator, kidnap

[Bettie's Books (hide spoiler)]

Description: The sea: turbulent and leaden, transparent and opaque, magician and mother... When Charles Arrowby, over sixty, a demi god of the theatre -- director, playwright and actor -- retires from his glittering London world in order to 'abjure magic and become a hermit', it is to the sea that he turns. He hopes at least to escape from 'the woman' -- but unexpectedly meets one whom he loved long ago. His buddhist cousin, James, also arrives. he is menaced by a monster from the deep. Charles finds his 'solitude' peopled by the drama of his own fantasies and obsessions.



http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b066ttr9

Revisit comes from a R4 - two one-hour episodes:

BBC Description: Jeremy Irons stars in Iris Murdoch's 1978 Booker prize winning novel, dramatised by Robin Brooks - as part of the Iris Murdoch season on BBC Radio 4.

Episode 1 (of 2): Charles Arrowby, a distinguished theatre-director, decides to retire to a remote house by the sea in order to write his memoirs.

Episode 2/2: After encountering his adolescent love, Arrowby sets out on a mission to reclaim her and, in so doing, redeem the misdemeanours of his past. But a young man appears with a mission of his own.

5* The Sea, The Sea
TR Under the Net
5* The Bell
5* A Severed Head
5* The Black Prince
5* A Word Child
5* The Sacred and Profane Love Machine
4* Existentialists and Mystics Writings on Philosophy and Literature
TR The Nice and the Good

 

bookshelves: one-penny-wonder, history, nazi-related, paper-read, nonfiction, autumn-2011, under-20

Hardback, withdrawn from Surrey County Library. Quite a selection of black and white photographs included, mug shots of perfection. It is chapter 8 that I am most interested in,Maids of Norway, however it now looks as if the whole thing will grab me like the proverbial bunny in the headlights.

'For us the end of the war will mean an open road to the east, for the creation of the Germanic Reich in one way or another... the fetching home of 30 million people of our blood, so that during our lifetime we shall be a people of 120 million Germanic souls. That means we shall be the sole decisive power in Europe. That means that we shall be able to tackle peacetime, during which we shall be able for the first 20 years to rebuild and extend our towns and villages, and push the borders of our German race 500 kilometres father out to the east.' Heinrich Himmler, 14 October 1943

Reads like any Sword Religion manifesto really, doesn't it *shudders*

So this book outlines how the racial policy was arrived at, chiefly using passages from Darwin's 'Descent of Man', followed then by a swathe of Himmler's history (skimmed). I was a little uncomfortable to be told that some passages from H G Wells 1901 story Anticipations would have slotted right into Mein Kampf without a look back over the shoulder. Wells wrote:

The ethical system which will dominate the world state will be shaped primarily to favour the procreation of what is fine and efficient and beautiful in humanity - beautiful strong bodies, clear and powerful minds and a growing body of knowledge - and to check the procreation of base and servile types... The method that must in some cases still be called in to the help of man is death... For a multitude of contemptible and silly creatures, fear-driven and helpless and useless, unhappy or hatefully happy in the midst of squalid dishonour, feeble, ugly, inefficient, born of unrestrained lusts and increasing and multiplying through sheer incontinence or stupidity, the men of the New Republic will have little pity and less benevolence.

Page 53 - At the beginning of 20th Century German annual birth rate was a healthy 33 per thousand population. By the 1920's it was down to 20.3 and by 1933 only 14.7.

I had not previously known about kidnapping. The SS would wander through Poland and identify candidates of racially pure children then take them back to Germany to be raised. If the child 'reconciled' itself to this then it was given the best that the system could offer, however, if the child fretted then it was killed as a disrupting influence. Clollectively they are known as Children of Poznan.

The end of the book outlines racial extermination in today's world. Overall this is an informative read without any spark or energy from the author... 'just-the-facts-ma'am'. My specific copy has many pencil crosses against paragraphs in the section I was most interested in, so somewhere the stories out of Norway were of specific use to aother, and I like that.



from wiki, a well known lebensborn child - Anni-Frid Prinzessin Reuss von Plauen (born Anni-Frid Synni Lyngstad, 15 November 1945 in Bjørkåsen, Ballangen, Norway), is a Norwegian-born Swedish pop singer. She was one of the four members of Swedish group ABBA. She is formally styled Her Serene Highness Princess Anni-Frid Synni Reuss of Plauen following her marriage to a German prince of the former sovereign House of Reuss in 1992.

 

 

 

 

bookshelves: britain-ireland, shortstory-shortstories-novellas, published-1995, autumn-2011, dip-in-now-and-again, autumn-2014, tbr-busting-2014

Domestic anguish in different shapes, sizes and colours here. Will suit many however I cannot give this collection my all.

William Trevor is my short story writer