4 comments about Terror in the Starboard Seat.

1. This non-fiction account of wartime activity is brilliantly written and historians should take note - Although this is a historical document, McIntosh grabs his reader by the throat in a page-turner that reads like a No. 1 best-selling thriller - but with such unusual tenderness. Whatever you like reading, you're almost certain to love this. It is an excellent read and I can guarantee that long after reading this book, you'll still be thinking about it. Outstanding.



2. This book ranks among the best--Farley Mowat's "And No Birds Sang", included--about a Canadian's experiences during the Second World War. It is, however, not always a light-hearted account, and by no means a glorification of war. As is readily clear, McIntosh--like many of his peers--was not an overly enthusiastic participant, yet undertook his duty with much courage. Terror in the starboard Seat is a fine testament to this courage as well as the sacrifice that so many made in order to rid the world of Naziism.



3. Perhaps it comes from living next door to Americans, but Canadians have a knack for staring tragedy in the face and remembering something to laugh about afterwards. It's little wonder that many of the funniest modern comedians, from John Belushi to Peter Jennings, are Canadians.

   World War II produced "the greatest generation," says Tom Brokaw, who wasn't there. Dave McIntosh was there, flying 41 combat missions in the navigator's seat of a Mosquito night fighter, and he calls it "the scardest generation." It takes common sense to be afraid; fear is often the one element that provides the extra margin of caution needed for survival.

   It helps explain why the 24 Mossies of 418 Squadron achieved the highest scores in RCAF history, with 105 aircraft destroyed in the air, 74 on the ground, 9 probables, 103 damaged and 83 V-1s destroyed. Not bad for planes built of Ecuador balsa, Alaska spruce, Canadian birch and fir, and English ash, often by furniture makers. The twin engine Mosquito had a crew of two, but it carried the same weight of bombs as a B-17 and could fly at 400 miles an hour.

   Granted, McIntosh volunteered for the RCAF. He schemed to get into 418 City of Edmonton squadron, which flew night intruder missions. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, one of Canada's highest awards for valor. He wasn't looking for a safe and comfortable seat to sit out the war. Most veterans who've been in actual combat have little to say; those who do talk often emphasize the humor. One of their favorite songs had the lines, "When the compass course is west, that's the time that I love best" -- in other words, heading home, away from the enemy. It's little wonder he took until 1980 to write this book.

   It's a different kind of war memoir. Americans brag, Brits keep a stiff upper lip, Germans are betrayed heroes, Russians are `zhlobi' -- crude and uncouth. Canadians are like hockey players in a power play on the goal -- all of the above, and then some. It has the same mood as `The Corvette Navy' by J. B. Lamb, the loneliness of fighting men who are trivialized by everyone not in combat. Only the Canadian military trains "zombies." There's a common feeling the government compromises anything to avoid upsetting anyone on the home front -- an attitude American soldiers didn't acquire until the Vietnam.

   Sidney Seid, a San Francisco Jew who joined the RCAF before Pearl Harbour, was the driver (pilots were never called pilots) for McIntosh. Seid loyally stayed with the Canadians even though he could have doubled his pay by in the US forces. It wasn't an easy life. McIntosh tells of one crew that spent its ops circling off the coast of Holland, afraid to cross into enemy territory, faking complete combat reports including targets visited, burning bombers, fires, weather, the whole thing. It was one way to cope with the terror of facing the enemy.

   Canadian aircrews flew operations, or "ops." The American "missions" sounded too much like a crusade. On one occasion, on night ops over Holland, McIntosh and his driver suddenly heard a English voice in their earphones, "Waggle your wings . . . or you'll burn." The driver waggled. Wildly. "OK, son" the voice added. A British night fighter had found them in the dark; had they been caught by a German plane, they wouldn't have heard the bullets hit.

   No wonder McIntosh was scared. But, as he told an army friend just back from the D-Day landings, "At least when I'm shot at I can run away at 400 miles an hour." His friend replied, "Hell, that's nothing, you should see me." Yet, for more than 41 ops -- if they were chasing Buzz Bombs, or only went a short distance over Europe, it was only half an op -- they went back again and again.

   Any veteran will sympathize. Non veterans can only wonder how they did it.

   McIntosh, who became a Canadian Press reporter after the war, presents a vivid story of the deadly realities of war. It's too good of a story ever to be made into a movie; but then, life is generally far better than any movie. So is this book.




4. This book kept me up until 4 in the morning, laughing, crying. It's got it all. RCAF navigator McIntosh wrote with pathos and honesty. He puts you right inside the Mosquito with his Jewish/American pilot, with whom he had a kind of Butch & Sundance relationship, all that same kind of loyalty and snappy reparte. This is one of the best WWII books I've ever read. Just like with a great suspense novel, you'll find yourself really whipping those pages over. And yet, I was sorry it had to end.

1 comments about Voice of the Plains Cree (Canadian Plains Studies(CPS)).

1. I got the book in excellent condition and was very professional and fast and I would do business with again.
   Thank you.

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5 comments about The Loser: A Novel (Phoenix Fiction Series).

1. Read about Thomas Bernhard from an article on Susan Sontag. She was effusive about his work.
   
   The Loser is a meditation on the plight of the genius and his pursuit of artistic perfection. It's a dense novel--be prepared to trudge through a non-linear narrative and condensed prose. Indeed, as the translator points out, Bernhard doesn't use the language in a conventional way. His sentences are extended, complex, and the verb tenses are rarely in agreement. His narrator reminisces incidents from the past based on fragments of thoughts, freely skipping from one event to another, and often recounting an event numerous times.
   
   The Loser in the novel refers to Wertheimer. Both the narrator and Wertheimer were promising classical pianists before they met Elliot Gould in a seminar with Horowitz. Gould's sublime rendition of Bach's Goldberg Variations ended any illusion about their musical talent--not that they're without talent, but they fall short of the defining quality of a genius. For them, they're either the best or they're nothing.
   
   The narrator survives the trauma by building a wall of indifference around him. He gives away his Steinway piano to a girl student without talent and writes thesis and books that have no literary nor scholarly worth. Wertheimer can't deal with living under the shadow of Gould and takes a more drastic way out.
   
   Much of the most illuminating thoughts of the novel are couched in aphorisms. This is a reflection of Wertheimer's ultimate talent--he's a genius of aphorisms and not sustained argument. Wertheimer is supposedly based on Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose best works are extended aphorisms. Be patient with the novel and one or more of these aphorisms would strike you with a truth that holds you breathless.



2. apparently other people think like me! this novel is a witty stream of counciousness writing that happily mimicks the things that run through my head, only in someone else's life. taken without the political context, it is an amusing way to spend a couple of hours, if you are interested enough to spend a moment getting the actual context of the book, it is a steller and intelligent snub. i was pleasantly entertained.



3. I read through the first 90-100 pages of Thomas Bernhard's "The Loser" in one sitting. I enjoyed it that much. However, the second half of the novel was much harder for me to get through. "The Loser" is written as an unbroken, 170 page paragraph in monologue style told by a fictional student of piano virtuoso Glenn Gould about how Gould's greatness drove him and his friend, Wertheimer, to abandon their pursuit of the piano since they believed that they would never attain the greatness of their teacher and friend. The prose is dark, dismal, pessimistic and depressing. But the prose is also quite humorous. The first half of the novel is absolutely wonderful, but somehow, I could not easily navigate my way through the second half. The style of the novel changed from engaging to trying. Just getting through the prose seemed like an impossible task. The style of this novel is innovative and very interesting, but somehow, I could not stay engaged through the whole thing. Bernhard's rambling would have been far more easily tolerable in a shorter novel. The book is an interesting exploration of genius, obsession and greatness, but if you're like me, you may think that after 90 pages you've gotten the point and had enough.



4. 
   
   
   Open to the first page, take a deep breath, and begin reading--if you do it just right, it'll be hard to stop until you reach the end of this extraordinary 170-page diatribe of envy, spite, self-loathing, and misanthropy that plumbs the depth of the narrator's all-inclusive contempt for life and practically everyone living it, including himself. We're talking a novel that is one uninterrupted paragraph from beginning to end, spoken by one character, who's not very reliable, and quite possibly entirely demented. It's as if one of the more troubled heroes of a Dostoyevsky novel escaped to deliver a monologue written by Samuel Beckett. That'll give you an approximate idea of the style of *The Loser,* which is definitely not for everyone, the novel being more about the labyrinthine workings of an obsessed mind than it is about the ostensible events of the so-called "plot." This plot--the intertwined fate of three young musicians, one of whom happens to be the famed piano artist Glenn Gould, and another who commits suicide--becomes the touchstone Bernhard uses to explore his themes of artistic ambition and the destructive power of genius, as well as the double-sided nature of friendship.
   
   Bernhard, like Beckett, was a playwright, and it shows in the intricate, serpentine "speech" the narrator delivers in *The Loser*--in fact, it might even be more rewarding if one were to read the text out loud to better "hear" the full intent of Bernhard's lush and cadenced "madman's" prose. For the novel is indeed a soliloquy: contradictory, ironic, by turns concealing and revealing, a confession that confesses the very impossibility of telling the absolute truth.
   
   *The Loser* is ultimately a novel for those who find language more intriguing than story, the mind's interior struggle for meaning more dramatic than physical incident. As such, it's a work of the first order. I cant recommend it highly enough.



5. Nothing great; the most distinctive feature of the book is the run-on sentences, and the fact that the whole thing is one long paragraph. The narrator's repetitions & constant returnings to things already said in earlier pages gets a bit tiring. The subject matter (failure, obsession, suicide) could have been approached in a more interesting, detailed way, but we just hear the narrator repeat the same things again & again, "Gould destroyed him, hearing Gould play was the end for him, after hearing him he couldn't go on..." etc. The Afterword tries to speak well of the author's reputation, but doesn't have much to say about _The Loser_ except how it's a comment on Austria and a semi-autobiographical exercise for Bernhard... Well, so what? I didn't read this to find out about Austria (which I didn't) or about Bernhard, so I find this book lacking (the Afterword even admits that most of Bernhard's works are re-workings of these same themes, so it sounds like this book is more of the same from Bernhard, which makes its repetitions seem all the more repetitious!). I wouldn't recommend it to any friends, and I wouldn't bother reading it again, so I give it 3 stars. The narrative style is entertaining at times, but seems a little superficial at others--as if he's not writing anything particularly deep, so he keeps distracting us with these run-on sentences.

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