Review: The Little Drummer Girl

The Little Drummer Girl by John le Carré

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Having read several of John le Carré's works, I feel that his particular forte is creating for his characters environments that have an amazing amount of stress. He ratchets up drama by putting his characters in extremely difficult situations and then continuing to crank up the stress level. Of his novels that I have read, the previous epitome of these super stress levels was The Spy Who Came In from the Cold. However, I think the stress in The Little Drummer Girl tops even that work.

The title character in this book is Charlie, a aspiring English stage actress. While on holiday in Greece with some fellow struggling thespians, the young Charlie encounters a tall, dark and handsome stranger who turns out to be an Israeli spy. The job of Gadi Becker (aka Joseph) is to convince Charlie to take an unique acting opportunity. The Israelis know that Charlie has left-leaning views and through a previous boyfriend has had encounters with members of some extremist groups. The Israeli groups's plan is to have Joseph emulate a captured Palestinian terrorist known as Michel. In this role, he will train Charlie to infiltrate a leftist terrorist group with links to Palestinians. The Israeli spy group's ultimate goal is Michel's brother Khalil who is a major leader in a Palestinian terrorist group. Charlie accepts the opportunity and delves into what she terms "the theater of the real."

I think that the book does a great job of presenting both sides of the conflict between the Palestinians and the Israelis. There is much doubt as to Charlie's true sympathies. In the end, the central question of the book is not on which side of the conflict Charlie will end up or if her mission will be a success. The question is if Charlie will just survive the mission with her sanity intact.

View all my reviews

Number 500

While I was busy, I managed to blow past the nice round number 500 on my Beer List. The list currently stands at 505. I have previously lamented about not including dates on the list. I could have also maintained the list in a nice chronological order instead of alphabetical order by the name of the brewery and then the particular brew. Regardless, I believe I have done a good job of using Twitter to record my beer consumption.

Based on my Twitter account, beer number 505 was Fuller's Black Cab Stout. #504 was Fireside Chat from 21st Amendment Brewery located in San Francisco. Number 503 was Luciernaga (or "The Firefly") from Jolly Pumpkin Artisan Ales which is located in Dexter, Michigan. I enjoyed #503 at the Wine Merchant of Cary. Number 502 would be a bottle of Oatmeal Porter from Highland Brewing Company which is located in the up-and-coming brewery town of Asheville, North Carolina. Palate Wrecker from Green Flash Brewing Company in San Diego was number 501 on the Beer List.

Finally, number 500 on the list was Blue Law Porter from Epic  Brewing Company which is located in the not-so-well-known brewing town of Salt Lake City. According to the brewery's homepage, they are the first brewery in the state of Utah since Prohibition. Not surprisingly, this is the first beer on the list from that particular state. More surprising is that Utah made the list before 21 other states. Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Connecticut, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, West Virginia, and Wyoming are still missing from the list.

Random note #1, the single entry on the list for the state of Minnesota is Crispin Cider which is technically not a beer. Random note #2, Rhode Island, the smallest state by area, has one beer on the list, Narragansett Lager from Narragansett Brewing Company located in Providence. Random note #3, South Carolina does not have a beer on the list, but Hipster Ale from Evil Twin Brewing in Denmark is actually brewed by Westbrook Brewing which is located in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina which is right outside of Charleston.

Tour of Italy

Happy Washington’s Birthday/Presidents’ Day/President’s Day/Presidents Day or whatever this holiday in the middle of February is actually called. For this first time that I remember, the company for which I work has decided to include this day as a corporate holiday. Every year, our company give its employees twelve days off from work to celebrate holidays. Several of those days are fixed. The list of fixed holidays varies from country to country and from year to year. In the United States, the list of fixed holidays always includes Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving Day, the Friday after Thanksgiving, and Christmas Day. Other fixed days are primarily based on what day of the week holidays fall. In previous years, fixed holidays have included New Year's Day, the days before or after Independence Day and Christmas, and New Year's Eve. The remaining unfixed days out of the twelve are flexible holidays for the employees to use as they want. For some reason unknown to me, it was decided this year that today should be a fixed holiday.

I am using part of this day off from work to do a blog post. I have previously posted on and about holidays. I suppose that is when I have the most free time. In comments to my previous post, I mentioned that while I have not been posting as much as I did back in 2010 and 2011, I am hoping to post more this year than I managed last year. My stated goal was two posts per month which would be a total of 24 for the year. We are more than halfway through February, and I am working on only my second post. I will hopefully be cranking up my production in the following months.

I am titling this post "Tour of Italy" after the sampler dinner from the Olive Garden. I have never been to Italy however. Instead, I was recently on a business trip to Orlando, Florida or at least the Orlando area. The conference was at the Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin Resort. The conference was in the convention center connected to the Dolphin while I stayed in the Swan. Some of my coworkers enjoyed the local golf courses, but I am not much of a golfer. The conference also hosted a night at Universal's Islands of Adventure, but I passed on that opportunity.

After spending the day standing in a trade show booth, some of my coworkers and I would invariably end up at Il Mulino New York which is one of the restaurants in the Swan. Il Mulino is an Italian restaurant and thus features Italian wines and beer. Their bar menu included five different brews from Italy. I intended to try all five but instead only tried four. Three of the five beers were from Birrificio Ostiense Artigianale which is located in Rome, Italy. ("Birrificio" is Italian for "brewery.") I had two of the three. Pictured to the right is 'na Biretta Chiara which is a pilsner-style lager. As would be expected, I found it tasty. The second was 'na Biretta Rossa which is tasty bock. I did not try the 'na Biretta Kuasapa which is a pale ale.

The second picture on the right is a bottle of Taquamari which is a unique hefeweizen from Birrificio Pausa Cafe. One of the bartenders at Il Mulino told me about the organization that brews the beer helps rehabilitate inmates from local prisons by giving them an occupation. Pause Cafe is a cooperative located in Saluzzo, Italy that produces coffee, chocolate and beer. The beer itself is made from tapioca, quinoa, amaranth, and basmati rice. The bottle has a good bit of sediment at the bottom. I thought the other bartender had erred when she poured the whole bottle including the sediment into my glass. Interestingly enough, the sediment was not yeast (at least not all of it) as I had expected, but tapioca et al.

I also tried a bottle of ViaEmilia which is another pilsner. This one is from Birrificio Del Ducato which is a craft brewery located in Roncole Verdi Di Busseto, Italy. As I have previously stated, pilsners are easy to drink and this one was. Thus concludes my tour of Italian beers from a bar in a hotel located at Walt Disney World.

Beer List 2012

This post is ostensibly a summary of my consumption of new beers in 20012, but it is basically an excuse to show some leftover photos of beer bottles that I took during this past year. In 2010, I tried 148 beers. The next year, I added 150 different brews to my beer list. As I mentioned at the beginning of 2012, instead of having a separate list of beers for 2012, I created a new page that combined the lists from 2010 and 2011. Then I started adding new beers to the combined list. At the end of 2012, Jim's Beer List had grown to a total of 448. Subtracting the 148 from 2010 and 150 from 2011 results in another 150 new brews that I consumed in 2012.

The 448th beer is the top photo on the right. The bottle shown is Mokah which is from Southern Tier Brewing Company. Southern Tier was founded in Lakewood, New York. I did not find an explanation on their webpage as to where the name Southern Tier originated, but I did noticed on Wikipedia that the Village of Lakewood is located in the southwestern corner of the State of New York. The company's webpage for Mokah explains that it is from their Blackwater Series of imperial stouts and is actually a combination of their Jahva and Choklat brews. Since I really enjoyed this smooth and flavorful beer, I think I should add its two component beers to my currently non-existent "Beers To Drink" list.

To digress for a bit, one problem with my beer list that I originally decided to organize the list alphabetically by the name of the brewery. With many breweries combining (for the largest examples, see Anheuser-Busch InBev, SABMiller, and Molson Coors), the brewery included on the list can seem a bit arbitrary. When I first created the 2010 list, I wanted to have a sortable table. Those are familiar to people who frequent wiki-based websites such as Wikipedia. Needless to say, I never figured out how to do that with Blogger.

Another problem that I have discovered with the beer list is that I have neglected to include when I first drank each of the beers. I do not think this is a major oversight, but in hindsight, it would be nice information to know. In some cases where I took photos with my cellphone, the date can be found from the file properties of the photos. For instance, I can tell that I took the middle photo on November 9, 2012. I took the photo of this bottle of Singha Beer while I was having lunch with my manager and some coworkers at a Thai restaurant near our office. Singha is brewed by Boon Rawd Brewery which is headquartered in Bangkok, Thailand. I guess that made it appropriate for our Thai lunch.

Unfortunately, that solution does not work when I did not take a picture of the beer or when I take a picute of a bottle of beer but do not drink it until later. That gets us back to Southern Tier. I took the picture of the Mokah bottle on December 20, but I did not drink it until New Year's Eve. An even more dramatic example is their Crème Brûlée Stout. I took the bottom photo on August 19, but I did not get around to drinking the bottle until much later. I do not remember exactly when, but I know it was before I bought and took the photo of the Mokah. By the way, I actually liked the Crème Brûlée better than the Mokah.

Of course, another solution to the date problem would be to check my Twitter page for when I posted about the beer. Unfortunately, I never posted when I actually drank the bottle of Crème Brûlée. Oh well.

Numbers 400 and 401

Jim's Beer List recently passed a round-number milestone. The 400th addition to my Beer List was a bottle of Blowing Rock IPA from Boone Brewing Company. Not surprisingly, the company is headquartered in Blowing Rock, North Carolina. The town is in the western part of the state and in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The IPA was a mystery beer that I enjoyed with a plate of chicken wings at my local watering hole. I thought the brew was a respectable example of the style.

More notable than the 400th beer on my list was the next one to make the list which was also a mystery beer from my local neighborhood bar. Number 401 on the list was a bottle of Leinenkugel's Berry Weiss from Jacob Leinenkugel Brewing Company which is located in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. To put it simply, this was quite possibly the worst beer that I have ever drank. It was completely horrible. A few weeks ago,  I had another contender for the worst beer which was yet another mystery beer. Elder Betty is Magic Hat's summer seasonal offering, and that bottle tasted like Vicks 44 cough syrup. The Berry Weiss tasted like sour Kool-Aid. It was just not good.