The Black Marble

It's harder to do a book review of a book that you read almost 30 years ago. The Black Marble by Joseph Wambaugh was written in 1978. I probably read it within 5 years after it was written, I don't remember. I probably reread it 2 or 3 times.

It's a story about fate. The main character, Homicide Detective Sgt. Valnikov had recently lost his detective partner who had died. He was quickly drinking himself to death. He was assigned a new partner, Sgt. Natalie Zimmerman, who thinks he is going nuts. He's of Russian descent and so he drinks vodka. His new partner keeps coming this close to turning him in, but something always intervenes. Natalie gets him really drunk one night to pump him for information. She only finds that he enjoys Russian classical music and has a poetic streak. You can see her heart softening to the guy.

The story revolves around a dog groomer named Philo Skinner. This guy is down on luck, owes a lot of money to the mob for bad gambling debts. In order to get money to pay back his debt, he kidnaps a prizewinning purebred dog to ransom him back to the rich owner. The dog's owner, Madeline Whitfield, is actually not rich, she is practically broke, but maintaining a facade and holding out, waiting until she loses it all. She loves the dog like it is her child, but she is very unstable because she drinks excessively. Detective Valnikov finds a case he can really get into in this dog kidnapping, and even begins to sober up. In the course of helping her, they end up having sex, even though they are both over the hill lushes.

The icon of the Black Marble is from a saying, "Why do I always get the black marble?" That means why am I always getting the bad choices, why do I have such bad luck? The story is a black comedy. None of the characters is noble, perfect, or even completely respectable. The funny things that happen are usually painful or tragic to the people that experience them. Somehow, rather than becoming distressed and dragged down by the characters' pathetic lives, you find sympathy and humor for them.

Valnikov's problem ends up being that he has been slowly losing it over seeing too much death. Most cases he studies are actually suicides. His old partner seemed to be following a similar path before Valnikov. He was slowly getting more and more depressed by what he saw, people doing themselves in. He became an expert at recognizing it and eventually committed suicide himself. Many of Valnikov's random memories thoughtout the book are a series of flashbacks of the horrific ways that people did themselves in.

In the end, he solves the crime, saves the dog, saves his own life, and gets the girl. Strangely, the happy ending is not what you remember most about this story over the years, only the struggle to persevere when life hands you the Black Marble.

Adversity Makes Strength

Again with the Star Trek references!

People that are coddled their whole life would have a much more difficult time making something of themselves than people that are challenged and made to work through obstacles.

That may seem obvious, but really, we do not use this principle in helping people develop as well as we could. The old "teach a man to fish" proverb also holds true with education. You sometimes have to struggle through things in order to learn, adapt, enhance your abilities, or become better.

Star Trek Next Generation junkies remember well the continuing storyline of the Borg. The Borg were this advanced species, with a collective consciousness that assimilated races they encountered against their will. All individuality was stamped out and the race lost their freedom and what made them unique and special. While I could probably write several college essays on the parallels to various real life issues and the Borg, I'm concentrating today more on how the humans were introduced to them.

The future history of the humans in Star Trek was set to proceed so that the Borg would have invaded human space, caught them unaware, and probably wiped them out. Instead, a supernatural (maybe I should say very advanced) being called Q whisked the crew of the Enterprise out to Borg space and arranged for a premature meeting between the Borg and humanity. They barely escaped alive. However, they got back to Earth and warned the Federation (not just humanity) about the threat. Humanity was able to prepare and when the inevitable conflict arrived, they were able to hold off being assimilated.

You start off thinking that Q was a real jerk for putting the humans in harms way, but then you realize later that he interfered to help humanity prepare and survive. It sure didn't seem helpful at the time.

This is apparent in so many examples. If your parents are hard on you, and you end up succeeding and excelling, guess what? They did you a favor. Ask a football player if he likes two a day practices, but ask him if he likes the shape he's in afterwards. We don't coddle people through military basic training, we need tough and capable soldiers. And no one does your homework for you in college if you want to actually understand what's going on.

So the point here is that anything worth doing is worth struggling to do.

I listened to this scientific program about the bacterial content of the human body. Apparently, in sheer numbers, there are more bacteria than human cells in the human body (they didn't say how the balance works out in total mass, I assume the bacteria are mostly smaller than human cells). When you say "bacteria" to the average person, they think germs and they start asking their doctor for an antibiotic. The load of bacteria we carry around as humans is mostly beneficial to us. These "infections" do many useful functions as well as helping to fight off harmful bacterial infections. Pretty cool, huh? Yet on the face of it, we tend to see bacteria as harmful. For that matter, some harmful bacteria do us big favors too. Research is just out that purports that herpes infections probably keep us from catching the plague, among other things. The persistent low level response to the virus makes some other more deadly viruses easy prey to our immune system.

And so it is with crime and terrorism. For that matter, the threat of war, too. The total damage and loss of life and property from terrorism (yes, even the 9/11 attacks) is minimal compared to all of our human and property assets. But the response to the threat can help us better prepare for future threats. I think the point to emphasize is that chaos can occur naturally, but being put on alert by dissidents around the world about the potential for nuclear, biological, or good old fashioned explosive mayhem can help us prepare for disasters in a way to prevent them. What are criminals and terrorists other than an unwanted infection on society?