Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy, 1945-1975 by Max Hastings
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Comprehensive, Balanced, Absorbing, and Well-Written When two Vietnamese girls joined my high school French class in 1977, my classmates and I admired their beauty and cheerfulness and excellent French language skills, but we never thought to ask them why they had come to Orange County or what they had experienced before coming or if they missed their original country or if their families were all together or if they were fitting into school OK. Listening to Max Hastings’ Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy 1945-1975 (2018) made me regret my incurious teenage ignorance. I wish I could talk with them now. Hastings’ book provides a comprehensive and balanced account of three decades of the appalling wars in Vietnam, involving the French, Americans, Russians, Chinese, and, of course, North and South Vietnamese. He recounts corruption, incompetence, folly, carelessness, cruelty, atrocity, duplicity, and pusillanimity, but also integrity, sympathy, bravery, loyalty, capability, generosity, and understanding. From members of all sides and cultures, the full range of human behavior is on display. One of the most interesting things about the book is Hastings’ many quotes from diaries, letters, novels, documents, songs, poems, and interviews, from North Vietnamese, Viet Cong, South Vietnamese, and American soldiers, officers, doctors, leaders, advisors, politicians, etc., giving a comprehensive, absorbing, and poignant overview of what the people involved experienced and thought and felt about it. Hastings has his own view of things, presenting accounts of representative or (in)famous events and interpretations of them from the different sides involved and then giving balanced consensus or convincing conclusions. He evinces sympathy and empathy for nearly everyone, especially for the soldiers and civilians caught in the thirty-year hell of war. He is more critical of leaders, but still aware that they are human beings. He details many aspects of the war, like-- The different aircraft used (fighters, bombers, helicopters, etc.) and pilots and bases and aircraft carriers and sorties flown over hostile territory with “perilously beautiful” flak and SAMs, trying to avoid being hit and to decide when to eject from damaged planes. Being bombed, caught in an apocalypse, 30-feet in diameter bomb craters, everything shredded to pieces, ear drums bleeding, the shock and terror leading to a serene fatalism. Patrolling the jungle, foliage, rain, leeches, boobytraps, ambushes, poisonous insects, malaria. Comparing the communists’ AK47 to the Americans’ M16 (the former being superior for jungle fighting, the latter inferior for jamming). The Russian advisors teaching the North’s soldiers how to use SAM batteries. The Australian and New Zealand soldiers in the war (more careful than the Americans). The emotion felt toward a wounded soldier changing when he became KIA. Counting the days until one’s tour would be over. Using drugs, dividing by race, fragging officers, etc. Being an American prisoner of war or a South Vietnamese prisoner in a post-war re-education camp. Many appalling moments recounted by survivors: “No matter what their skin color had been in life, it all turned to tallow [in death],” looking like wax dummies. “The acrid stench of burning flesh mingled with that of cordite.” A U.S. soldier urinating into the mouth of a dead NVA soldier. A US soldier’s elbow getting shot and shattered, collapsing him in pain persisting through morphine. A U.S. soldier watching a comrade’s leg “cartwheeling through the air” after a shell hit their position. “The stench of death was everywhere. When you were eating your rations, it was like eating death.” Many memorable, impressive lines by Hastings: “Yet both Langlais and Bruno were better suited to enduring a crucifixion than inspiring a resurrection.” “Yet they persevered because a lethal cocktail of pride, fatalism, stupidity, and moral weakness prevented them from acknowledging their blunder.” “Some [US commanders] displayed folly of Crimean proportions.” “The vast majority of the three million Americans who eventually served in the country departed without holding any more meaningful intercourse with its inhabitants than a haggle about the price of sex.” “[McGovern was] oblivious to the fact that his opponent [Nixon] was at that very hour marinating the South Vietnamese leader to provide the principal dish at a communist barbecue.” “…information on North Vietnam’s wartime processes is spooned forth as meanly as gruel in a poor house.” “The just measure of any society at war is not whether soldiers spasmodically commit atrocities, but whether they are judged institutionally acceptable...” “Americans will forgive almost anything, save failure.” More things from the book will stay with me: The great degree to which decisions on the Vietnam War (by both sides) were made with an eye to domestic US election cycles. The American obsession with counting bodies (not taking and holding territory) as the measure of success, leading to falsely inflating numbers and counting peasants but not weapons among the enemy dead. The callous and duplicitous “real politic” of Kissinger. The intelligence gap whereby Saigon was a “Swiss cheese” of communist informants at every level of government and military, but the Americans had no assets in Hanoi. The North turning diastrous debacles like their botched invasions of the South in 1968 and 72 into PR victories. The ignorant, arrogant, and irresponsible behavior of the USA vis-à-vis Vietnam, leading to eerily similar tragedies in Iraq and Afghanistan. The reader Peter Noble reminds me of the superb Simon Prebble. He doesn't do anything fancy and doesn't change his voice for different figures and doesn't assume foreign accents for Vietnamese or French or Russian or American or British figures or imitate people with distinctive voices like Kissinger or Nixon. Instead, he just reads everything with great understanding and compassion. The book ends with these sobering lines: “’What was it all about,’ muses Walt Boomer. ‘It bothers me that we didn't learn a lot. If we had, we would not have invaded Iraq.’” View all my reviews
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Beaks, Bones and Bird Songs: How the Struggle for Survival Has Shaped Birds and Their Behavior by Roger Lederer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars A Compact and Fascinating Overview of Birds Beaks, Bones, and Bird Songs (2016) by Roger Lederer is all about its subtitle: How the Struggle for Survival Has Shaped Birds and Their Behavior. Lederer covers Foraging, Sensory Abilities, Flight, Migration and Navigation, Survival Strategies for Weather, Communities, and Human Influence. The book percolates with interesting information on birds in general and on particular species. As he proceeds, Lederer also covers a bit of the history of ornithology, citing earlier landmark studies and explanations of birds that according to contemporary science are either woefully incorrect or still accurate. Throughout, the main point Lederer repeatedly demonstrates is that birds are amazing creatures of incredible diversity in their habitats, sizes, shapes, physiologies, lifestyles, abilities, and so on. While being perfectly adapted to their environments over millennia and even millions of years, birds’ existence is increasingly threatened and changed by human activity (cities, habitat degradation, hunting, etc. etc.). Everyday life is a struggle for survival which birds negotiate with all their intelligence, learning, and senses, making choices about how and where and when to forage for food, to nest and raise young, and to migrate, etc., all to maximize chances for success and minimize chances for failure. Although he does not push a didactic conservation agenda, he does reveal ways in which humans harmfully or helpfully affect avian life and concludes that “We have to be partners with birds.” Here are some examples of the interesting things I learned from the book: Why birds don’t have teeth and how gizzards partially replace them. How sandpipers detect prey deep in sandy mud without seeing or smelling them. Why woodpeckers don’t get headaches. Why vultures defecate on their feet and have bald heads. How birds see colors and UV etc. and use one eye or both eyes etc. Why birds sing (it’s not for joy). How birds fly (including soaring, gliding, diving, etc.). How flocks and formations work (including how birds in dense flocks avoid flying into each other). Why some birds migrate (and how they know when to go and how they fly such long distances). How birds use sun maps, star maps, geomagnetic crystals, olfaction, infrasound, and landmarks to navigate. How birds adjust their body temperatures to deal with cold and heat. How and why birds mob (gang up on larger predators). The Arctic Tern flies to the Antarctic and back, up to 66,000 miles per year, enough for three round trips to the moon if they live full life spans. Acorn woodpeckers wedge acorns into trees so tightly that no other animals or birds can remove them, so they themselves can later break them open to get the nuts. If other jays see them hiding their acorn caches, they’ll hide them again later, but only if they themselves are cache robbers. Babies still in eggs tell parents to turn them right side up or make them warmer etc. In each ecosystem and niche and guild, each bird plays a particular role in relationships with the other living parts of the environment. Birds can get drunk on fermented fruit. Diversity in an ecosystem is necessary, like a sophisticated and complicated watch with many functions and parts: remove enough of the parts and it will finally stop working. Evolution and natural selection are good at making creatures change to suit changing environments etc., but since industrial revolution the pace of change has outstripped what evolution can do. Birds in cities develop differently (behavior, color, wing size, song frequency, egg laying, singing, migrating or not, viability, etc.) from the same species in the country. Global warming is making birds migrate earlier and fly farther north and breed earlier, etc. Anyone interested in birds should read this book, though perhaps ornithologists and other experts might not find as much new interesting information as I did. The audiobook reader Charles Constant is professional and smooth, though perhaps he reads a touch more speedily than I’d have liked. View all my reviews
Malcom and Me by Ishmael Reed
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Revising “Cotton Patch” African American History Malcom and Me (2020) is Ishmael Reed’s concise memoir of his time in the early 1960s trying to make a living in NYC while trying to become a writer in the rich cultural milieu for African Americans then and there, particularly as all of the above were influenced by Malcom X. Reed has searing things to say about race relations and black history as lived and taught in the USA (“cotton patch history” as Malcom X called it or “We were taught that we had no history or culture” as Reed puts it), about the Nation of Islam (and its core creation myth), about police brutality in NYC, about the media’s depiction of Malcom X as a hater even after his post-Mecca transformation and assassination, about the divisions within the black community then as to whether to integrate with white culture or to separate from it, about the Europeanization of many African American writers and artists and activists in the 20th century, and so on. He recalls and recounts what forces drove many black people in the 60s to embrace Malcom X’s pre-Mecca, Nation of Islam messaging: “We wanted revenge” for a hundred years of white hate, brutality, rape, murder, and experimentation on black bodies. Here and there Reed does some name dropping, but it’s usually in the service of his memoir, and it’s good to learn the names of influential African Americans that one (from a position of white ignorance) doesn’t know about. And some name-dropping he does in the epilogue turns harrowing and inspiring as Reed introduces two of the original targets and unsung heroes of the appalling 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre and its aftermath. There is dry humor here, as, for instance, when Reed confides that a DNA test revealed that he has more Nordic genes than Steve Bannon. Reed reads his text with an appealing voice and manner: gravelly and witty and savory. I do have some sympathy with the criticism of this short (90 minute) audiobook that Reed after all doesn’t say SO much about Malcom X that one wasn’t somewhat aware of before and doesn’t go into SO much detail about him or about his interactions with him. But, again, the memoir is absorbing and illuminating about many important issues in African American culture in the 20th century. And he does convey how charismatic, articulate, and intelligent (“electrifying”) Malcom X was. And how photogenic and addicted he was to media coverage. And how complex and ambiguous his memory is: was Malcom X motivated by idealism or by ambition? And Reed has made me want to listen soon to The Autobiography of Malcom X. View all my reviews
The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic by Mike Duncan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Clear, Concise, Appalling, and Relevant Roman History In The Storm Before the Storm (2017) Mike Duncan recounts the chaotic and important years in the Roman Republic from 146 to 78 BC, because, he says, that era just before Rome became a full-blown imperial empire contained the seeds of its later decline but has not yet been given enough attention. His account begins with the nearly simultaneous sacking of Carthage and Corinth in 146 BC, which made Rome the preeminent Mediterranean power, then sets forth some of the problems besetting the fledgling empire (unhappy legions, bitterly opposed Patrician Senate optimates and Plebian Assembly populares, transformation of many independently owned small farms into vast oligarchical farms, ever thorny question of citizenship for non-Roman Italians, restive provinces, migrating barbarians, etc.), and then relates the increasing breakdown in the Roman political process to include ever more thuggish behavior and mob violence as the optimates and populares became ever more at odds over social and political reforms. Interesting figures that Duncan introduces include the Gracchi (Tiberius and Gaius), Gaius Marius, Sulla, Cinna, and Jugurtha. Outstanding wars that he recounts include the two Servile Wars of Sicily, the Jugurthine War in North Africa, the Cimbric War in Gaul and Northern Italy, the Social War in Italy, the war against Mithradates in the east, and the Civil War between Cinna’s and Sulla’s factions. I was mostly ignorant about all this history, having learned more about Rome from Augustus to the decline and fall, so I found Gaius Marius and Sulla compelling, as well as the descent from traditional rules into demagoguery and violence in the Roman political sphere, with street-fighting, stone-throwing, assassination, massacre, and the like becoming common (with victims being murdered in sacred temples, heads being posted in the Forum, and bodies being dumped in the Tiber). It doesn’t seem SO far from what might have happened on January 6. Sulla’s reign of terror is truly appalling… Marius the sexagenarian stubbornly doing morning calisthenics in the forum to show (the jeering) people that he’s not too old to take a command of legionaries on campaign is cool. The long-suffering massive horde of Cimbri (northern “barbarians” from around Denmark) showing up on the edges of Roman influence just wanting a place to live in peace is sad… Duncan is a popular podcast host, and his concise and clearly communicative prose is a virtue of his history book. He defines key Latin terms when first introducing them, keeps us grounded in the timeline, and injects some dry humor now and then. Perhaps I sometimes found his idiom a bit too modern and colloquial, as when he says things like, “Every slave in Sicily now believed their ticket to freedom was in the mail,” or “The effective strategy caught the Romans with their togas down.” But he also has some fine lines that ring true and that from 2017 apply prophetically to the post-2020 election travesty in America: “But this was an age when a lie was not a lie, if a man had the audacity to keep asserting the lie was true.” View all my reviews Arabs: A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes, and Empires (2018) by Tim Mackintosh-Smith5/22/2021
Arabs: A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes and Empires by Tim Mackintosh-Smith
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “The hourglass that swallows you” or "I am done with digging" Whereas other history books I’ve read focus on Islamic history, Arabs: A 3,000-Year History of Peoples, Tribes, and Empires (2019) by Tim Mackintosh-Smith details Arabs and their history and culture. The book of course has lots on Mohammed and his successors and their initial great wave of expansion and early division and dynasties and declining periods and reawakening periods and modern situation, but it interestingly starts the history of Arabs 1000 years or so before Mohammed. “When we do take that longer, wider view, we find that Islam was not something that shot up suddenly in Mecca. It is a vast slow growth whose roots lie deep in time and all over the Peninsula, particularly in its South, where they cultivated by a people who did not even call themselves Arabs.” And Mackintosh-Smith’s book is illuminating and entertaining. I learned many things from it, like the following: --Arabs had no identity as Arabs until outside imperial forces (e.g., Rome and Persia) started meddling and exploiting and being manipulated by them etc. --The Arabs’ unique combination of the camel (to carry supplies) and the horse (to charge into battle) led their nomads to become formidable mercenaries and then power brokers and then power breakers. --Arabs tend to value rhetorical truth more highly than empirical truth, the way one says things (especially in high Arabic) being more important than what one says, with great Arabic leaders usually being eloquent (“swordsmen and wordsmen”), for words were and still are seen as cultural products and defensive walls and tools of war. --The great glue holding Arabs together in their fractious identity—along with the Koran and Islam—has been high Arabic language (fusa, or pure milk). --Arabic did not originally show vowels and has no capital letters, and due to its cursive calligraphy was very difficult to print with moveable type, which limited and slowed Arabic development during the time of the western Renaissance. --One vital Arabic quality (linguistic and cultural) is a dualistic yin-yang ethos, which manifests in the fluid interaction between nomad and settled (Bedouin and citified, tribes and peoples, raiders and traders, etc.) and in the many cases in Arabic of the same words being used for opposite (or very different) things like black and white, big and small, unity and division, tradition and modern, collection/union and disunion/division, voice and vote, master and dependent, martyrdom and school certificate, bad regime and order. Mackintosh-Smith provides other interesting etymological features of Arabic, like the same word meaning herd and citizens, or the word for politics deriving from the word for the management and training of camels and horses. He also points out that Arabic is a language of many synonyms: eighty synonyms for honey, two hundred for beard, five hundred for lion, eight hundred for sword, and at least a thousand for camel. (Arabists say that every word in Arabic has at least three meanings: itself, its opposite, and a camel!) Indeed, Mackintosh-Smith really likes language in general and Arabic in particular, and brings it all vividly to life as he tells the history of the Arab people, whether in his translations of Arabic texts (poems, sermons, speeches, letters, books, etc.) or in his own prose, for he often coins nifty words (e.g., demonarchs, anarcharchs, and tyrannosaurs/tyrants) and turns a fine phrase, like the following: --“In my first book, I wrote that in Yemen I felt like both the guest at the feast and the fly on the wall. Nowadays, I feel more like the skeleton at the feast and the fly in the soup… Seeing the land I live in and love falling apart is like watching an old and dear friend losing his mind and committing slow, considered suicide.” --“Like so many revolutions, Mohammed's included, it was begun by those who are hungry for justice but was hijacked by those who are hungry for power.” --“Meaning was mummified.” --“No checks and balances, only checkbooks and bank balances, held ultimately by one man, but if nothing else, the system has the imprimatur of long usage.” --“A strange dark symbiosis, the continual presence of an aggressive Israel, behaving with grotesque injustice towards the people of the territories it occupies in the face of international law, merely prolongs the life of Tyrannosaurus Rex Arabicus, also aggressive, also unjust towards his own countrymen.” One interesting, at times devastating feature of the book is the way that Mackintosh-Smith—who’s lived in Yemen for decades—links the past to the present, often saying things like, “Outside my window now, poets are persuading fourteen-year-old boys to blow themselves up while killing other Arabs.” Ralph Lister reads the book with gusto. Because I don’t know Arabic, I can’t vouch for the accuracy of his pronunciation of the many Arabic words, phrases, and names, but it all sounds exotic and consistent. However, Lister sometimes swallows or quickens (English) words or syllables at the ends of sentences or phrases, such that I sometimes miss the last word in such a case. Otherwise, he's a good reader with an appealing quality to his voice. Readers interested in Arabs, Arabic, and Islam in relation to other cultures and religions in the past and present should find much to learn and think about with this book. View all my reviews
American Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West by Nate Blakeslee
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Absorbing, Illuminating, Devastating American Wolf: A True Story of Survival and Obsession in the West (2017) by Nate Blakeslee begins in December 2012 with Wyoming hunter “Steven Turnbull” (not his real name) about to shoot a magnificent gray wolf or her big black mate. Blakeslee reveals the mindset of such a hunter, who blames the 1995 reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone National Park for the decrease in the elk he loves to hunt, possesses a license to kill a wolf, uses a dying rabbit call to summon predators, and is generally a capable, efficient, law-abiding guy who loves hunting (and who supported Obama Care so he could finally get health care). Blakeslee’s book then goes on to relate how wolves were returned after nearly seventy years to Yellowstone, to set forth the controversy surrounding it (anti-wolf hunters and ranchers vs. pro-wolf biologists and wolf-watchers, with state and federal governments in between), and best of all to describe the seasonal and daily lives of the wolves of Yellowstone, focusing on a few “star” packs and individuals, especially the capable, charismatic, intelligent alpha-female 0-Six. We learn much about gray wolves, their physical attributes, their personalities, their hunting, their howling (warning, communicating, threatening, morale raising, celebrating, mourning, bonding, etc.), as well as their mate-finding, pup-raising, pack-making, turf warring, environment enriching, and history in the US. We also learn about the obsessions of people who love wolves and of people who hate them. Although Blakeslee refrains from demonizing (or even really criticizing) wolf hunters, his heart is in the wolf camp, and he spends most time with figures like the Park’s interpretive ranger Rick Macintyre (an “ironman” wolf watcher who for over a decade rarely missed a day in the park watching wolves and then writing meticulous notes about his observations) and his friends. The stories they tell of 0-Six and her forbears and pack-mates and rivals are riveting and moving and express how individual and collective wolves are, how adaptive and intelligent, how perfectly suited to a wild environment, and finally, yes, how they must feel joy and grief. The Epilogue (read by Blakeslee) picks up where the prologue left off and depicts the aftermath of the killing of the most famous wolf in Yellowstone (and in the world). The book gives us a glimpse of what it must be like to watch these beautiful and formidable creatures in nature and to come to love them as individuals and then to mourn them when they die, whether from natural causes in their environments or, especially painfully, when they are killed by hunters. It is thus at times a devastating book, especially the last chapters, but also the parts detailing the politics behind wolf policy, such that, for example, the democrats’ desire to hold onto the senate in the 2012 elections led to a sneaky rider being inserted into a vital budget bill that enabled wolves to be hunted at the discretion of certain states, the matter boiling down to protecting Obama Care or wolves. Blakeslee also explores how wolf policy at the state level and even at the federal level tends to ignore inconvenient science and is often guided by emotion, namely hatred for or envy of the super predators. Reading the book made me hate hunting even more than I already did, but also made me hate hunters less, because Blakeslee does present their human situations and world views. The book of course increased my already big love for wolves (a high point of my life was seeing wolves playing and howling in a sudden summer snow in Denali National Park). I suspect that people who hate wolves will not be able to read this book; but they should know that it does not shrilly condemn them. Rather, it celebrates the intelligence and beauty and fierceness and playfulness and loyalty of wolves, and the wonder and mortality of life and the natural world. The audiobook is well read by Mark Bramhall and closes with fifteen seconds of uncanny and beautiful howling that raised bumps on my skin and brought tears to my eyes (I would have liked it to go on much longer and wished I could hear it in person). View all my reviews
American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804 by Alan Taylor
My rating: 4 of 5 stars If You Think America is Polarized Now… In American Revolutions: A Continental History 1750 to 1804 (2016) Alan Taylor relates the events and situation in the colonies and the world leading up to the Revolutionary War, the progress of the eight-year conflict, and the aftermath and influence of the revolution on the continent and the world. Taylor casts a broad focus, going deepest into American topics but not ignoring global ones (the Revolutionary War was part of a world war). He reveals things like the elite founders of the USA fearing too much democracy and liberty for common people and not wanting any for blacks or Indians, and the very contingent nature of the US success in the war, depending at key points on bad decisions by British generals, vital help from Spain and especially France, stalwart leadership from George Washington, plenty of patriot propaganda and public acts of “theatrical humiliation” like tar and feathering, plenty of white unity at the expense of Native Americans and African Americans, etc. He exposes how the USA was born with greedy, hypocritical, and thuggish behavior, violence (house burning, mob mayhem, lynching, etc.), political division, conflict between states’ power and the State’s power, etc., and with consciously strengthening white supremacy to bridge class division. He demonstrates how un-unified the revolution was, with the colonies divided among loyalists, patriots, and waverers, as well as slaves and Indians. Taylor has an eye for the complexity of “our contradictory revolutionary history.” I had been vaguely aware of such things before, but Taylor’s book makes them vividly convincing and introduces some elements that were new to me, like the importance of westward expansion into Indian lands as a key driver of the Revolution and of the post-Revolution growth of the USA, with Washington and Jefferson and other slave-owning founders being involved in land speculation, as well as the proliferation of evangelical Christianity, the relation of the continental colonies to those of the West Indies, the relatively low taxes that so outraged the leaders of the Revolution (“We won't be their negroes”), and the post-Revolution worsening of the slave system in the south and the environment for free blacks in the north. Some of the best touches come when Taylor explains how early divisions (states vs. the State, elites vs. commoners, whites vs. blacks/natives, Federalists vs. Republicans, established churches vs. evangelical churches, etc.) are still with us today: “Like a kaleidoscope we continue in every generation to make new combinations of clashing principles derived from the enduring importance and incompleteness of our revolution. The revolution remains embedded in selective memory in every contemporary debate.” Other memorable parts occur when Taylor points out the hypocrisy of the war for liberty (“In the name of Liberty, Patriots suppressed free speech, broke into private mail, and terrorized their critics”) and the roles played and lives led by people usually given short shrift in histories of the Revolution, like women, blacks, and Indians. Taylor writes clean and clear prose punctuated with occasional outstanding witty lines (e.g., “’He [George Washington] possessed the gift of silence,’ said John Adams, who did not”), and he incorporates plenty of quotations from (mostly) the men who lived and made and recorded the history. He brings history and its people and events to life and evokes suspense even when the reader generally knows what’s going to happen. I liked his War of 1812 book The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832 (2013) and this one as well. The audiobook, of course, lacks the illustrations, maps, notes, and bibliography of the physical book. The audiobook reader mark Bramhall is fine, but presumably in an attempt to inject excitement and character into the history as well as to make it easier for the listener to know when Taylor is quoting someone, Bramhall assumes rather hokey British or Irish or German or French or Spanish accents and slightly pompous attitudes when he's reading quotations. Otherwise, he does a good job reading the book. Taylor opens his history with a devastating summary and explication of Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story “My Kinsman Major Molineux” (1832), and he closes his book with a provocative quotation from the story: “May not a man have several voices, Robin, as well as two complexions?” View all my reviews
The Age of Faith by Will Durant
My rating: 5 of 5 stars The “Country of the Mind,” from Julian to Dante The fourth volume in Will and Ariel Durant’s epic Story of Civilization, The Age of Faith (1950), begins with Julian the Apostate (332-63) and ends with Dante (1265-1321). The tome (a 60+ hour audiobook) is divided into five books, The Byzantine Zenith, Islamic Civilization, Judaic Civilization, The Dark Ages, and The Climax of Christianity. There are seven chapters on Islamic history and three on Jewish, while twenty-eight chapters concern Christian history. Nonetheless, the Durants often stress the vast and deep influence from Islamic and Jewish cultures on Christian cultures in everything from language, religion, poetry, and music to agriculture, architecture, science, and medicine, demonstrating that “The continuity of science and philosophy from Egypt, India, and Babylonia through Greece and Byzantium to Eastern and Spanish Islam, and thence to northern Europe and America, is one of the brightest threads in the skein of history.” They are humanist citizens of the globally connected “Country of the Mind,” optimistically believing that “Civilization … is the co-operative product of many peoples, ranks, and faiths; and no one who studies its history can be a bigot of race or creed.” The Durants are much more interested in religion, art, architecture, music, writing, calligraphy, history, philosophy, medicine, textiles, ceramics, metal and wood working, and culture generally, than in the war strategies, generals, armies, and battles. In a sentence or two they glide by turning points of history battles like Tours (where the Franks destroyed the Umayyad army in 732 and stopped the spread of Islam in Europe) or Manzikert (where the Seljuks destroyed the Byzantine army and opened up Anatolia to the Turks in 1071) only to spend pages detailing the construction and decoration of beautiful and sublime mosques and cathedrals or quoting sensual love poetry or inspiring letters or sublime hymns or secular songs or explaining efficient irrigation systems or the crafting of illuminated books or the making of stained glass windows or the encyclopedic and exuberant nature of Gothic cathedral sculpture, etc. This is no military history of the Age of Faith! Perhaps that’s because, as they say, “The ardor that destroys is seldom mated with the patience that builds.” That is, the Durants serve culture rather than celebrate (or even deplore) war. As they go, the Durants put their belief that “He who would know the history of words would know the history of the world” into practice by revealing many interesting etymologies, like “sterling” deriving from “Easterling” (Hanseatic League members being perceived to be trustworthy) and curfew from French “cover fire” (due to William the Conqueror’s law to reduce fires in English cities). The Durants are not free from condescension to women, referring at one point to "a command sorely uncongenial to the gentle sex" to speak only when absolutely necessary in nunneries. And their homophobia (or that of their 1950 era) shows up here and there, as when they say that Jews had “wholesome” sexual morals because they were “less given to pederasty,” or that one of the things brought back to the west from contact with Islamic civilization was “sexual perversion.” Their demotic bias manifests sometimes as well, as when they refer to Paradise Lost as “dull.” The Durants have a refreshingly humble opinion of their own profession, more than once denigrating “the historian” in asides, as when, describing a free hospital in an Islamic city, they say, “The sleepless were provided with soft music, professional storytellers, and, perhaps, books of history.” Indeed, at times the book is fatiguing because of its many excerpted letters, poems, tales, songs, and the like, often given both in their original languages and in their English translations. But mostly the Durants’ book is an illuminating pleasure to read, because of their open-minded, curious, critical, humane, objective, sensitive, modest, and ambitious vision of human nature, civilization, and history. And because of their writing style: rolling sentences with comma-separated clauses and witty, pithy, ironic comments. They love their material and enjoy telling it, coloring everything with their twinkling eyed, sardonic, too tolerant to be cynical take on things. Like Edward Gibbon, they are informative and entertaining and write in an elegant and strong style (though Gibbon cannot be matched by twentieth-century writers.) From the first sentence of the book (“In the year 335 the Emperor Constantine, feeling the nearness of death, called his sons and nephews to his side, and divided among them, with the folly of fondness, the government of the immense Empire that he had won”), there are many memorable lines. Here are ten: 1. Left sole Emperor, he returned to Constantinople, and governed the reunified realm with dour integrity and devoted incompetence, too suspicious to be happy, too cruel to be loved, too vain to be great. 2. Congregations like to be scolded, but not to be reformed. 3. Statesmen who organize successful wars, just or unjust, are exalted by both contemporaries and posterities. 4. Sadi was a philosopher, but he forfeited the name by writing intelligibly. 5. Beliefs make history, especially when they are wrong; it is for errors that men have most nobly died. 6. It is the tragedy of things spiritual that they languish if unorganized, and are contaminated by the material needs of their organization. 7. Intolerance is the natural concomitant of strong faith; tolerance grows only when faith loses certainty; certainty is murderous. 8. Virtue makes no news, and bores both readers and historians. 9. There are few things in the world so unpopular as truth. 10. Modernity is a cloak put upon medievalism. With his rich bass voice and clear enunciation, Stefan Rudniki gives a fine reading of most of the text, but he tends to deliver poetry, songs, and impassioned letters in a too uniform declamatory mode. View all my reviews
Dust Tracks on a Road by Zora Neale Hurston
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “I feel that I have lived” Zora Neale Hurston begins her autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road (1942) with a historical overview of her hometown, Eatonville, Florida, the first officially sanctioned all-black town in America, including details on the conflict between the USA and the Cherokee and Seminoles and the runaway black slaves they adopted into their tribes. She then describes the backgrounds, personalities, courtship, marriage, and children of her parents; recounts her childhood (the most interesting chapters in the book for me), including her questioning, creative, and wandering mind and love of stories (which led her to chafe at the standard “pigeon hole way of life”); her vivid visions of future turning points in her life; the breakup of her family with the death of her mother; her education; her professional career (as ethnologist and writer); her love life and friendships; and her thoughts on race and religion and America, etc. The book ends well, but the audiobook—finely read by Bahni Turpin—adds an Appendix featuring a series of essays and short pieces, many of which repeat anecdotes, parables, ideas, and turns of phrase that she uses in her autobiography, such that I began feeling a chafing redundancy. After the Appendix comes a Chronology by Henry Louis Gates that ends with the sad fact that Zora Neal Hurston was buried in an unmarked grave in 1960, and that Alice Walker discovered and marked her grave in 1973, launching a Hurston revival. Hurston’s writing, as in her splendid Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), is savory and rich, refined and earthy, witty and concise, including colorful utterances by her family and friends, as when her father became enraged when she asked for a horse for Christmas: “It’s a sin and a shame. Let me tell you something right now my young lady. You ain’t white. Ridin’ a horse. Always trying to wear the big hat.” She can write a lyrical sensual poetry in prose, too: “I was only happy in the woods and when the ecstatic Florida springtime came strolling from the sea, transglorifying the world with its aura. Then I hid out in the tall wild oats that waved like a green tea veil. I nibbled sweet oat stalks and listened to the wind soughing and sighing through the crowns of the lofty pines.” And an earthy pithy writing: “This was the very corn I wanted to grind” (i.e., an excuse to physically fight her stepmother). And great similes: “Strange things must have looked out of my eyes like Lazarus after his resurrection.” And she writes great lines about-- Feeling different: “If the village was singing a chorus, I must’ve missed the tune.” Prayer: “Prayer seems to me a crying of weakness and an attempt to avoid by trickery the rules of the game as laid down… I accept the challenge of responsibility. Life as it is does not frighten me, since I have made my peace with the universe as I find it.” Religion: “Mystery is the essence of divinity.” Love: “Much that passes for constant love is a golded up moment walking in its sleep. Some people know that it is the walk of the dead, but in desperation and desolation they have staked everything on life after death and the resurrection. So they haunt the graveyard. They build an altar on the tomb and wait there like faithful Mary for the stone to roll away. So the moment has authority over all of their lives. They pray constantly for the miracle of the moment to burst it’s bonds and spread out over time.” Patriotism: “I will fight for my country, but I will not lie for her.” Poverty: “There is something about poverty that smells like death… People can be slave ships in shoes.” Hurston would disapprove of the current movement for reparations for slavery. She says that although slavery and reconstruction were “sad” and that America would be better off without them, they are in the past, and she is a forward-looking person who does not want to go around beating on the coffins of our unpleasant past and does not want to confront descendants of slaveowners to blame them for the actions of their ancestors. She also argues that there is no such thing as race and that she does not like constructions like “race consciousness” or “race pride” or “race problems,” and that after all everybody is an individual and is not determined by the color of his or her skin and that there are good and bad people among the members of every skin color. In this, she does not acknowledge the stacked deck with which black people must play the game of life in America or the racist environment in which they must try to survive in the USA. And when viewed from the current context of Black Lives Matter and the police shooting of unarmed black men, she seems a little disingenuous and out of date when saying that everyone has a chance to do what they want to do if they work hard. At the same time, in great detail she lists multiple criteria you can use if you want to determine what a black person is, and I would imagine that some of them must seem stereotypical and offensive to Black people. E.g., if the person likes making up words that sound good in context, if the person likes imitating others, if the person cannot agree with their friend, if the person likes acting dramatically, etc., then the person is a “Negro.” I think she only partly has her tongue in cheek as she undercuts her claims elsewhere that there’s no such thing as race, especially when you take into account her compelling account of organizing “natural Negro songs with action” in which she says she wanted to present and promote the “real music of my people.” I did like the book a lot, though not so much as Their Eyes Were Watching God. But fans of that book or of Hurston should read her autobiography. View all my reviews
How Great Science Fiction Works by Gary K. Wolfe
My rating: 4 of 5 stars A Lively Historical Overview of SF Yes, as other reviewers have noted, How Great Science Fiction Works (2016) is an inaccurate title, as Professor Gary K. Wolfe really is giving an entertaining survey of the history and nature of sf rather than telling how great sf works. He does sometimes say why less than stellar sf is inferior, as when he criticizes poor plotting or cardboard characters or absurd premises or cheap tricks (I felt sorry for Hugo Gernsback’s early 20th-century novel Ralph 124C41+, which I think is much better than scholars like Wolfe always describe it), so we may infer that great sf avoids such things. But really his emphasis is on telling an interested reader what sf is, where it comes from, how it has changed, and so on, surveying the genre and its major sub-genres, works, authors, and “icons,” as Wolfe calls spaceships, robots, aliens, and artifacts etc. that accrue meaning and appear in multiple works. This is one of the Great Courses series of lectures by professors, Wolfe giving twenty-four roughly half-hour lectures devoted to topics like the Birth of Science fiction, Science Fiction Treatments of History, Utopian Dreams and Dystopian Nightmares, the Golden Age of Science Fiction, the Spaceship, the Robot, the Planet, the Wasteland, Invasions, Religion, the Alien Other, Environmentalism, Gender, Cyberpunk, the New Space Opera, Urban Landscapes, and Science Fiction in the 21st Century. Wolfe is informative and wide-ranging, though probably about 95% of his examples are anglophone SF. I probably learned most from the chapters dealing with more recent sf near the end of his lectures, because about twenty-thirty years ago, I read some histories of the genre, and I have not kept up so much with developments since 2000. Thus, I probably learned more from his late lectures like the ones on Cyberpunk and the 1980s, the 1990s: the New Space Opera, and Science Fiction in the 21st Century (in which he introduces Nalo Hopkinson, Nnedi Okorafor, and Lavie Tidhar), than from his other lectures, but it was still good to brush up my partially forgotten awareness of many classic works by the likes of Wells, Heinlein, and Le Guin. He also covers sf works by mainstream authors like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. And neat background details here and there make all the lectures worth listening to even for people quite familiar with the SF genre and its history, like Walter M. Miller’s experience in WWII bombing an Italian monastery inspiring his writing of A Canticle for Leibowitz. And Wolfe helpfully sums up sf trends and motifs in cogent and convincing ways, as when he refers to sf as a family and the classic space opera subgenre as its eccentric and embarrassing old uncle who finally surprises us with something interesting to say, or as when he concludes that “The [sf] artifact embodies three distinct historical systems: the system surrounding its manufacture—who made it and why; the system of its own history—how it got from its point of origin to its point of discovery; and the system of the culture that discovers it—what it means to us.” Or as when he sets forth the basic template of post-apocalypse stories: 1) The first portents of the catastrophe arrive, or the protagonist gradually becomes aware of the extent of it. 2) The protagonist undertakes a journey through the wasteland left behind by the disaster, perhaps finding a few other survivors. 3) The few survivors and, perhaps, their first children establish a kind of stable community. 4) The community is threatened by the reemergence of the wilderness and the problems of establishing a stable home. 5) An antagonist or warlord emerges who challenges the community, leading to a contest over which values will prevail in the new society. Wolfe is not a professional audiobook reader, and I never got used to his habit while lecturing of pausing when no pause is called for by punctuation, rhythm, or emphasis: e.g., “That gave the field [pause] its first [pause] clearly defined markers for writers and readers.” He also often says the wrong word or fuses the present word with the one he’s about to say next and then quickly corrects himself to say the right word clearly. This is to be expected when one is lecturing, but for an “audiobook,” such mistakes should have been edited out. On the plus side, Wolfe is an utterly unpretentious professor, using no jargon, speaking clearly and simply and wittily, and sharing his enthusiasm for his subject. Despite my criticisms, I enjoyed listening to his lectures. As for the audiobook product, each new chapter is introduced by hokey vintage radio space opera music, and, more helpfully, a 200+ page pdf file is available for free download with the audiobook, including most of the key points from the lectures, a pair of discussion/review questions after each lecture, and monochrome illustrations. The pdf file closes with a substantial annotated bibliography of works about sf (mostly histories of the genre) and of key sf works (including representative classics and 21st-century standouts). So if you’d like an interesting overview of the history, sub-genres, motifs (“icons”), and important works and authors, you should give Wolfe’s course a listen. He does a good job of demonstrating the truth of what he says at the end of his last lecture: “At its best, science fiction can be as artful and accomplished as any other kind of fiction, and it can take us places where no other form of fiction can.” View all my reviews |
Jefferson Peters
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by Sabaa Tahir
A Young Adult Epic Fantasy with Lots of Violence & Romance
Elias is an elite Martial soldier, Laia a naïve Scholar slave. As they alternate telling their stories (in trendy Young Adult first person, present tense narration), we soon rea...
"It must be due to some fault in ourselves"--
George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945) is an anti-totalitarian-communist allegory in which the exploited animals of the Manor Farm kick Farmer Jones out and set about running the farm. At first...
by Lu Xun
Perfect Stories of Life in Early 20th Century China
Chinese Classic Stories (1998) by Xun Lu is an excellent collection of seven short stories by perhaps the most important 20th century Chinese writer of fiction. Lu Xun (1881-1936) stu...
Fine Writing, Great Characters, Immersive World
The Surgeon's Mate (1980) is the 7th novel in Patrick O'Brian's addicting series of age of sail novels about the lives, loves, and careers of the British navy captain Jack Aubrey and the ...
An Overwritten, Oddly Compelling Gothic Father
Matthew Lewis' notorious and influential Gothic novel The Monk (1796) takes place during the heyday of the Spanish Inquisition. Ambrosio, the monk/friar/abbot/idol of Madrid, is nicknamed ...
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