NOTE: for whatever reason, Firefox and Opera – depending on your OS - disallow the images in this section.

 

Thomas Cahill’s Mysteries of the Middle Ages is fascinating, annoying, somewhat un-selfaware, and a terrific read.  Although Cahill excoriates the Catholic Church - his church - in a brutal and accurate coda in detail of the horrors revealed of late to have been suffered around the world, he feigns to not understand William Manchester’s notional but admitted prejudice against the Catholic Church in his histories. There’s probably a connection, Tom.

 

That said, the Church has no better defender of its good points in history than Cahill, and his choices for illumination are wonderful.  He vectors in on Eleanor of Aquitaine, the beautiful and long lived monarch of high accomplishment who had as husbands both Louis of France and Henry II of England, founded the Plantagenet dynasty, mothered ten children, and became wiser and compassionate in her dotage.  She also slept around previous to Henry, who was over a decade her junior, and this included an affair with Henry’s father.  Also, Louis’ uncle, but let’s let that go.  Cahill shows her as the ruler while her son Richard the Lion Heart was away, not his brother John as the Robin Hood stories claim, and a damned good one.

 

Cahill also brings forward Giotto, the greatest Italian painter before golden age of Leonardo, Michelangelo, and the Renaissance blooming. Giotto may have been the first to present accepted templates of the holy family as, well, human and recognizable to the public. In that regard, his innovations may have been more important than those that followed his lead.

 

All Cahill’s books are a joy to read.

 

 

Had never heard of Craig Nelson, but I have to say he’s a very good writer, especially given he’s covering a lot of old ground for folks of my age.  Rocket Men  is the story of the Space Race, and in context, with due credit to the Soviet team and a fair rendering of our own use of Nazi SS members like Werner Von Braun and others, at least one of which – after great effort and accomplishment in our space program – was summarily sent back to Germany for trial from his rest home in this country when NASA cut back.  I’m not sure that’s the way to say good-bye, and I’m not sure it’s entirely fair.  If I were Jewish and had come under their thumb, I’d likely feel more strongly and otherwise. 

 

That said, the story of Apollo and the race to the moon has been beefed up markedly by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the release of many, many secrets.  It wasn’t until, I think, Jim Oberg in the early 1980’s that the name of the Great Engineer who ran the Soviet program was identified.  Sergei Korolev was every bit as brilliant as Von Braun and our Nazi team of rocket men, and far sharper than the second tier left to the Soviets when they conquered the Germans and over ran the rocket bases.  The Soviets stole the atom bomb, but their rocket men were pretty damned good.  In fact, we’re still using their designs of near half century age to send up payloads to the Space Station.  Korolev, who was killed by a doctor’s vanity and incompetence in 1966, was irreplaceable. 

 

Still, it’s the story of the three very different brilliant Astronauts who did not get along all that well which anchors the book.  Incredibly dedicated and competent, Neil Armstrong was humorless and fixated.  Buzz Aldrin, who wanted to be the first on the moon but was relegated to number two and later – as could be predicted – sank into alcoholism and depression above the norm, managed to take three pictures of Armstrong on the moon.  Three.  The best photo Armstrong took of himself reflected in Aldrin’s camera.  Michael Collins, who had already told NASA he’d be leaving after this trip, remained the most centered.  Unlike the others, Collins never divorced, never hit the wall, seems to have scoped his life ahead far better than the others, and his job was just as tough without the rock star pay off.

 

President Nixon could be, needless to say, just as petty, and refused to allow the John F. Kennedy carrier to be the pick up vehicle when they returned.  Less the glow shift off him.

 

Of course, it happens that the whole thing has so faded in importance – or perceived importance – that it comes off as a near tragedy.  That this is a lack of imagination and education need not be overstated, but it is true.

 

 

This highly disturbing book by the author of Into Thin Air is an analysis of the fratricide that killed Pat Tillman, a NFL player whose sense of noblesse oblige – yes, really - led him to his death in Afghanistan while serving in the Rangers. Where Men Win Glory is a profoundly depressing experience in aggregate. Tillman is alternately impressive and not, unsurprising for a kid.  Overall, his warrior ethos is the actual subject, and his own ambivalence about it is his most striking characteristic.  And, it’s contagious.

 

Friendly fire is a common cause of death in combat, nothing unusual except that the civilians remain unaware how sloppy, scary, and dangerous – yes, I mean that because we don’t – combat is with automatic weapons.  When everyone has them, suppressive fire superiority first achieved is a good thing, so when an ambush opens up it’s to the victims’ advantage to unload hell in the direction of that fire to cover advance upon the enemy position.  Reaction time is essential, and it’s understood that soldiers, seeing their leaders fire, fire themselves in that direction whether told to or not.  There isn’t time, anymore, to discuss arrow direction, or where the single shot rifle fire is emerging from, or if they’re from Indians or ranchers trying to help.  There simply is not time.

 

Still, Tillman and his companion were not firing, but had their hands up, and they were riddled with high powered ordinance.  Whether this was an unforgivable error or just the way it goes is difficult for me or any civvy to say.

 

And it’s hard for the Army to admit, even before the issue of Tillman’s prestige to the Bush administration is encountered, the coverup, the disgusting lies, and the idiotic yet cruel valuations of evangelical Christians – so called – within the officer corps who fabricated a series of five increasingly truthful investigative tales to the public.

 

Among the things NOT discussed is why two brothers were allowed in the same combat unit.  Ever since the Sullivan brothers – all five of them – went down in WWII on a single ship, the USS Juneau or Margaret Calhoun lost an equal number of family (a husband, three brothers, a nephew) at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, this sort of thing should be easy to avoid.  And because Kevin Tillman had to be disarmed after he was told, we know this is the sort of thing that ought not to be allowed.

 

This isn’t an exciting book, as the author’s previous works were.  One gets the feeling of anger and depression existed for him as it does for this reader.  Some folks need to be walloped upside the head the publicly excoriated, and the insecure kid who may actually have killed Tillman may be the least guilty, however obnoxious he proved to be. 

 

 

A friend, just returned from Egypt, brought me an autographed copy of The Mountains of the Pharaohs, by Zawi Hawas, Egypt’s foremost Egyptologist.  I remain thrilled. 

 

First, because I love this stuff, and have since childhood with dinosaurs and astronomy and the cusp between literature and history.  Hawass is a pro and proudly Egyptian (the books reveals why he should be) and he takes no gas from idiots and/or religious fanatics of any breed.  Calling Islamic Brotherhood types ‘iconoclasts’ rather than the numerous and more attractive and applicable options, he was probably pissed off more than he’d admit about the Taliban detonating Buddhist statuary on the side of Afghanistan mountains little different from the ancient art he deals with daily. That takes the courage of character to stick with the facts, and actual physical courage because he celebrates things that fundamentalist Islam considers idols.  That they are the gods and spirits the Prophet replaced means they remain enemies today, and people are killed for less.

 

The book is the tale of the House of Sneferu, the Pharaoh who produced what is the Fourth Dynasty, which produced the Giza pyramids and the Sphinx.  And, as it turns out, much, much more.

 

                    

The author of Autism’s False Prophets, Dr. Offit, is a pretty convincing individual.  He’s right up front with his negatives, announcing he gets a lot of hate mail in the first paragraph.  And, he explains why.  I was already mostly on his side at the beginning, but I’m all there now. 

 

I’ve remarked before how the resentment in the population over the exclusion of the amateur in today’s world.  That’s not normal in our history.  This does not diminish the solid and often the only advances during some centuries were due to amateurs, the ‘pro’s’ being corrupted by church and idiocy institutionalized.  That said……

 

This is the story about how amateurs if not frauds have corrupted what started off as a rational argument about what causes autism.  On the surface, the assumption that inoculations or the liquid with which they were delivered could do it.  But actual scientific studies – not some of the bogus and sometimes laughable ones Offit remarks upon – have precluded any connection.  But scam artists, what appear to be mentally ill souls, and desperate parents, all empowered and encouraged by cock fight producers on ‘reality’ type television, now have stakes in confusing and misleading the public. 

 

The results have been awful.

 

In an age where multi level marketing scams and actual nonsense is treated as meaningful, much is excused because it doesn’t really hurt anyone but the get rich quick types who both compose and think they manipulate the market.  But here is an example of where it nearly went very, very wrong. 

 

Offit pulls no punches and explains medicines more awful errors of the recent past.  But his point is that it’s revealed by science as fraud, primarily when great results cannot be replicated by other doctors, not by divine intervention or ‘mothers’ intuition.’

 

A valuable read.  Highly recommended.  As all these are.

 

This is the most important book in many years.  No question.  We’re going to be a nation of mercenaries under corporate warlords, and religious fanatics.

 

 

On page 302 of Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, comes one of the more interesting and strangely pleasant details about the faux Christian-Neocon administration of George Bush.  It seems that a disgraced Pentagon Inspector General, one Joseph Spritz, son of John Spritz – a presidential candidate, Congressman, Joe McCarthy fan, and demented Christian hypocrite – was golden parachuted into Blackwater, the most prominent of the new ‘contractor’ mercenary companies that Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld championed.  He had a brother in the Bush/Cheney administration who also has issues.  But the good news is they have a sister.

 

Who is named Mary Kay LaTorneau, the married schoolteacher and mother of four who seduced a sixth grader, had two kids by him, one in prison, and married him at her release.  She’s extremely rich, something that the story in the MSM missed, along with her father, a prototype moral Republican with two children out of wedlock.  There is something so perfect in that this family is involved with Blackwater, whose founding leader, Eric Prince, is of not dissimilar background: publicly moral Christians concerned with variants of patriotism.

 

The story of Blackwater – how they appeared with no authorization in New Orleans after Katrina, appear where they can make money and sign contracts after – is pretty damned scary, no hyperbole.  They say – and idiot Congressmen believe – that they can do things cheaper than the military, absent the fact the military – ours and others – shell out for the basic training and weapons development that mercenaries are allowed to use.  Blackwater has planes, attack helicopters, armored vehicles.  They also have incompetence in proportion to the things they do well, but the money that is thrown at them – which Congress and the public may not know is hidden in ‘development’ costs for Iraq – is nauseating.  Blackwater isn’t yet the catastrophic threat to the Constitution and us it may well end up being, but the people that nurtured them already are.

 

Two books, both intimate looks at the biodegrading Bush Administration, and the difference in quality is so pronounced that it’s almost too comic to discuss them together.  So, only one of these must you read.

 

And the winner is Dead Certain – The Presidency of George W. Bush written by a fellow Texan with wit and remarkable detail for such a brief and light glance.  Robert Draper manages to obtain some pithy and essential takes on many of the key players while downplaying some of the more lurid and silly fantasies of the Left.  This has included me, so I’m not covering up. 

 

Draper gets it right without coming out and saying it: Bush is an addict, and as an addict he sees things in terms of danger to his present situation.  Can’t mess up, or you’re back in the old life.  Focus, let nothing deter you.  He still manages to present a group of highly competent people who came to serve a strong leader, and found to their sorrow Bush was all bluster, with little enough to propose beyond boilerplate panders to the religious conservatives, of which he actually isn’t one. 

 

Supreme Conflict – The Inside Story of the Struggle for Control of the United States Supreme Court by Jan Crawford Greenburg is actually much shorter than the page count would suggest, given it seems to replay different scenes in rapid succession, leading me to think I’d picked up the book and was rereading a chapter.  It also bears an uncomfortable resemblance – I suppose there had to be some – to The Brethren, Scott Armstrong and Bob Woodward’s treatment of the Burger Court thirty years ago.  Uncomfortable in that it isn’t anywhere near the same quality, and shows all signs of a great dramatic ending conceived and written before the book was researched.  This is only partially due to the fact that the Burger court had real giants upon it, with nobody suggesting that any of them were not fit by legal training to be there.  Greenburg differs from Draper in how they contend Karl Rove was involved with the Harriet Miers nomination.  Draper says that John Roberts suggested her.  Greenburg doesn’t. 

 

Greenburg also contends that it is Clarence Thomas who leads Anton Scalia by the nose, not the other way around.  Could be true, and the changed vote sequence supports her contention, but I remain to be convinced.  Pedestrian style, a real disappointment. 

 

 In Armageddon – The Battle for Germany 1944-1945, British historian Max Hastings has the advantage of distance and the release of information considered too pointed and valuable to be allowed in the public mind during the following years of the  Cold War.  Among other things, the rumors and unkind remarks about the overall ability of the American and British soldiers turn out to have more force than just disreputable General S.L.A. Marshall’s dubious figures that only about 15% of a combat unit would, in general, ever point their weapon at an enemy and fire.  That for both WWII and the Korean War.  It turns out that many American and British officers thought the number was down around ten percent, and the few others as high as twenty.  But the hagiographies of the Brokaws and the Ambrose lovin’ readers needs serious recalibration.

 

But there are reasons the American soldier wasn’t comparable to the German or even the Russian.  We had more to live for, we hadn’t been raised in a militaristic perpetual co-ed national boarding school like Russia and Nazi Germany, and we didn’t have to be as vicious as the other two.  We had guns and equipment out the wazoo, could call in the Air Force at the drop of a hat, and could afford to move slowly and methodically, something the Brits could not.  But after six years of war, the Brits could be forgiven, because after about 250 days of combat, a soldier is used up and so cautious he’ll take next to no risk.  We know this now.  We didn’t then. 

 

The gruesome war for Germany and western Europe was every bit as god awful as the much larger battles and horrors on the Eastern front, and if the ‘glory’ and the heroism of the war is patted back down into believable shape by Hastings, there are stories as uplifting and as unbelievable – both for the happy and gruesome endings – that supplant the clearly nonsensical fables we tell ourselves.  We are the first nation to have had a winning general admit that war wasn’t like Hell, it was Hell.  Yet, there are those Miniver Cheevies still trying to delude us today.  They’re called Chickenhawk neo-cons.  The Nazi leadership was full of them.

 

The Road   In the 1950’s, there was a spate of novels – On The Beach, et al – that described what was thought to be the end of the world, generally by nuclear holocaust, but possibly by alien invasion or scientific horror.  As a rule, they scared and depressed the hell out of me but were based on often highly unlikely scenarios that, coincidently, recalled more heroic books.  The result was melodrama with the last chapter starting “It didn’t work, and they prepared for the end as …..” best they could.  This always meant heartfelt pledges of love and devotion and a setting sun.  On a beach, with death coming the next day in a cloud of radiation.

 

Cormac McCarthy, an elegant and terrific writer, doesn’t grant us any unnecessary info.  A father and son have been on the road for years trying to stay alive after an unknown disaster never fully explained or much addressed.  Because, it doesn’t matter, really.  All that matters is the here and now.  There was, once, a wife and mother, but she died, and now it’s just the father and son.  They struggle, or rather the father struggles, with instilling the idea of good and evil into the kid when they have no visible landscape of any good whatsoever.  Everything sucks.  Like the Pilgrims, they can only feast on the leavings of the dead who, it seems, didn’t benefit from often intensive preparation.  Gangs of slavers and thugs patrol this world, herding women and children, which they eat.  There is no higher good at work.  No good at all.  But there are ‘good guys’ and the father and son believe they are among them, and in a journey to a coast, for which they have no expectation of finding anything good, they cling to this thread, this reason to live. 

 

And that’s the story.  There is no end.  The road goes ever on.

 

The Last Mughal is William Dalrymple’s lastest on the India we never knew about, and while it’s rather dubious to claim that here we have truth at last, it’s such giant leap from what was available before, hyperbolic enthusiasm can be forgiven.

 

Like Pre-Columbian America, everything I learned in school involving India was wrong.  Well, no, Alexander made it there, then nothing till the Black Hole of Calcutta, then Gandhi, and that’s pretty much all we learned.  And it was pretty much all wrong, written not so much by apologists for England and the west, but by those often striving for fairness and having no clue what still existed for research.  As Dalrymple’s energy has proven, there was much still available – first hand accounts and primary evidence – that essentially nobody knew, or cared, about.  The reason for this is that India preferred a simple, heroic accounting of the Army Revolt against the East India Company and the enabling British government just as much as the British themselves did.  There were atrocities aplenty all around, but contemporary western interest pretty much began and ended with the Black Hole.  That event is absent entirely from this book.

 

That’s because it’s about northern India, Delhi, and last of the Mughals, the Moguls, the successors of Genghis Khan and the actual orcs that terrified Europe from the East as much as the Vikings would from the North.  They lasted longest in India, where to survive they became remarkably tolerant Muslims who were as highly regarded by many Hindus as not, and who gave India much for which it is known in arts, learning, and skill.  The 1857 Mutiny was mostly by Hindu sepoys, but the Muslims got the entire blame.  In fact, as Dalrymple makes clear, it was the starting point for modern militant Islam, and the madrasas that eventually gave us the Taliban began in the residue of the Mutiny.  The metaphors are applied thickly, but they have turgor and truth, and this is an important book for the West to understand how and why things became the way they are.

 

The Wrong Stuff: The Extraordinary Saga of Randy “Duke” Cunningham, the Most Corrupt Congressman Ever Caught    The Pulitzer Prize winning team that broke the scandal and brought down this titanic mountain of sleeze did many good things.  They helped steer Carol Lam to the convictions, and it ended, one hopes, the automatic genuflection and syndrome of the public granting combat war vets the unchallenged image of selfless hero, because they all are not.  Cunningham loved to party – and is an undenied hero of air combat - but his Number One issue was himself in every sense, apparently always.  It’s not just that he was so easily corrupted, but that he was so stupid about it, and the very many in his clique and party did nothing to stop him or even call it to his attention, pathetic as that alone would have been.

 

There is lot new, some of it petty, in this book, but this is a functionally illiterate man who became a Congressman for his own profit.  He ain’t alone, and this is the sort of story that proves journalism has been missed for the years of the Bush/Rove empire. 

 

God is Not Great – How Religion Poisons Everything  Christopher Hitchens dripping with anger book is both long overdue and yet could not have come at a better time.   The idiots and scandals of the American Christian churches has demeaned any possible defense based upon fact.  The grotesque hypocrisy is manifest, the obscene money and squalor underwritten by churches obvious, the sick perverts who hide within their bureaucracies daring lay law to get them have never been more hated.  Long overdue.  Great time.

 

Hitchens swings a long claymore and he’s good at it, he manages to obliterate the obvious without getting bogged down in the numerous examples he could list but chooses not to, because he knows we have the same list, even the believers.  He does not take on the one thing I regret he did not.  The people are not innocently run over by the clerics: they choose to posture as believers because they expect to profit by being on a winning team, and in this world not the next.  It’s that lack I find somewhat annoying, because yes, you have to go after the reading public of your book, not ‘them.’

 

Hitchens is such a great writer, by any standard, as well as a prolific one that it is not wrong to count him among the pleasures of our time.  I hope his popularity fades in the years to come, because that will mean he’s won his points.  I disagree with him on many subjects – Bush, Clinton, to name two – but you cannot help but retain great admiration for someone so vicious and righteous in his anger. 

 

Good Mornin’, America, how are ya?

Say, don’t you know me? I’m a native son!

This was once The City of New Orleans….

….and it’s gone.

 

The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast by Douglas Brinkley.  For those of us who took an instant and insistent dislike to Mayor Nagin’s grandstanding and posturing, this book seals the deal.  There are no mutual exclusives: it’s not a question of blaming the feds, state, or the city, we need to blame them all.  But Brinkley is far less brutal to the state than against the other two, who simply failed to do even basic preparation for the job.  Nagin’s and Bush’s dereliction of duty is best viewed as criminal.  Governor Blanco’s as guilt ridden incompetence. 

 

New Orleans was, and perhaps is, a lost cause.  What made it miserable is what made it great, and Brinkley – a New Orleans native – doesn’t romanticize or sugar coat the corruption and the sleaze factor.  Does it make sense to dike in the city?  Holland can do it, but we cannot.

 

In any case, this is a book to shame us all.  Shame.  Us.  We used to be the United States.  We could do anything. 

 

 

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive  by Jared Diamond, isn’t as moving to me as 1491, which covers much of the same territory, but Diamond’s book is more detailed and has some clear conclusions he wants the reader to reach.  With them, I agree, and would hope that most would as well.  We live on a complicated planet, and things are never as black and white as both the extremes of the political right and left would have you believe.  It’s rarely just one event or catastrophe that dooms a society.  Or a species, for that matter.

 

Diamond is a wonderful writer when not in the first person.  It is ackward to feign interest in him or his friends, and thought his points better served keeping it all in the third person.  But it’s sold a gazillion, so what do I know?  Eh?  I ask you…….

 

Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq  by Thomas Ricks is the best book I’ve read on it.  I can’t improve upon Amazon’s praise here: In dovetailing critiques of the civilian and military leadership, Washington Post Pentagon correspondent Ricks (Making the Corps) contends that, under Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith, the Pentagon concocted "the worst war plan in American history," with insufficient troops and no thought for the invasion's aftermath. Thus, an under-manned, unprepared U.S. military stood by as chaos and insurgency took root, then responded with heavy-handed tactics that brutalized and alienated Iraqis.

 

Heartbreaking stories from the young men and women of the military asked to do not only what they trained for but later to cover the incompetence of the Bush administration, and way too many paid for it with their lives.  Of course, the casualties are much higher and the deaths much lower in this war because of medical and procedural improvements, but the per capita casualties of our military is simply staggering beyond the norm.

 

State of Denial: Bush at War III  by Bob Woodward is probably the book that will bring down the Bushies to history.  It’s not the most damning, and Woodward is late to the parade, and for that he’s being castigated by the Bushies and conservatives in general.  Still, on Meet the Press this past Sunday (October 8, 2006), he had this to offer:

MR. RUSSERT: Have you spoken to the president or the vice president since this book came out?

MR. WOODWARD: The vice president called me I guess as it was coming out 10 days ago.

MR. RUSSERT: And?

MR. WOODWARD: Well, he called to complain that I was quoting him about the meetings with Henry Kissinger that he and the president had. I had interviewed Vice President Cheney last year a couple of times at length about material I’m gathering on the Ford administration, on-the-record interviews, but he volunteered, he said, 'Oh, by the way, Henry Kissinger comes in' and he, Dick Cheney, sits down with him once a month and the president every two or three months. And Cheney was upset I was quoting him. And I said, 'Look, this—on-the-record doesn't have anything to do with Ford, you volunteered that.' He then used a word which I can't repeat on the air. And I said,'Look, on the record is on the record,' and he hung up on me.

MR. RUSSERT: What, what do you mean, he swore at you?

MR. WOODWARD: He, he said what I was saying was bull-something […] No, but he, but he hung up. Now, look, I can, I can see, I went back and looked at the transcript that he can—ever had a disagreement about ground rules with someone. Have you?

MR. RUSSERT: Well, he thought he was talking, he thought he was talking to you for one project and you used it in another project.

MR. WOODWARD: Well, exactly. But it had nothing to do with it, and it's clearly spelled out that it's an on-the-record interview. And so—now, what does he do instead of saying, 'Well, OK, I look at it this way, you look at it that way.' It’s a metaphor for what's going on. Hang up when somebody has a different point of view or information you don't want to deal with.

Enough said.  A good read.

The One Percent Doctrine by Ron Suskind gets its name from Dick Cheney’s theory that if the United States faces an improbable chance of receiving a serious blow, it should act proactively to prevent it.  This sounds good and quite reasonable but it fails because the terminology is not defined and, coincidently, under the cover of foreign threat conservative clamp down at home occurs.  To quantify threat is the issue.  Whatever it is, we cannot, apparently, do it yet.

 

That doesn’t negate good intentions and perhaps necessity behind it.  But as Ron Suskind points out, President Bush has good qualities as president and quite bad ones, and this from a former Wall St. Journal reporter of note.  Suskind says Bush has, in effect, a co-presidency with Cheney, and implies is in fact Cheney’s front man on security and foreign issues.   For the War Against Terror is Cheney’s war; it’s his strategic doctrine under which the one of Rumsfeld’s ‘smaller, more lethal’ tactic box operates.  It has definite plusses.  But also, a downside, and we’re now paying for it. 

 

The CIA and George Tenet come off well, and probably provided many of Suskind’s sources, but even if prejudicial against Secretary Rice and Bush himself, the book doesn’t appear out of line in its conclusions or malicious.  That it exposes as lies much past and current White House spin, and seems to have been the basis of the current interest in SWIFT and our finance war against al Quada, and deems much done in the way of foreign violence is for domestic appeal, is well based absent outright lie.  This is an important - and short – book to read this summer.  ASAP, in fact.

 

The Measure of Reality : Quantification in Western Europe, 1250-1600 by Alfred W. Crosby is older that 1491 by about a decade, but I consider it almost as important.  As someone who always considered music math made beautiful, I found the hypothesis that the first mathematical graph in Europe was musical notation likely and enjoyable.  But what caught me was how different civilizations are when they become linear over the more natural – and prevalent – cyclical interpretation of life.  Europe’s first hours were flexible, with the twelve hours of daylight in the summer longer than a winter hour: it was only necessary that there be twelve in daylight and at night.  The needs of religion changed all that, probably starting with the Gregorian Chants.  “Europe’s mental metronome began to tick…nearly a century before Europe’s first mechanical clock,” and that because religious music needed to be replicated, and that because Augustine of Hippo associated cyclic thinking with the godless as opposed to “the straight path, which is Christ.”  Our love affair with statistics and precision is what made the West the West, and the tools provided by science came from the liberal arts and their interaction with the metaphorical needs of Christianity.   I’ve found that this has affected the way I’ve read history, and makes much vastly more comprehensible.

 

Cobra II – the inside story of the invasion and occupation of Iraq  This remarkable summation of the horrendoplasty that is Bush’s Iraq War – and it is his – does little to discourage those who would impeach him.  His lies and the incompetence of Rumsfeld and others is pretty damning.  On February 14, 2003, Rumsfeld delivered a speech aboard the USS Intrepid, a WWII carrier and museum.  He damned Clinton and the Kosovo occupation – to date costing 0 troopers – for the “culture of dependency” that made it hard for Kosovo to move past their war.   Afghanistan, he said – apparently with a straight face – was an example of how to do it right.   That these were the learned conclusions of our Secretary of Defense pretty much sums up the level of incompetence and ignorance with which they have destroyed the US economic prospects for the decades to come.  This is a must read.

 

The Truth (and some jokes)  is the newest from the carefully moderate, always fair, always unbiased Al Franken.  Heh.  Ahem.  Tough room.  But he is about the best researched of these political slam jobs, especially compared to those of his right wing brethren, who are, for the most part, his feeding trough.   The proof is that everyone from Rush Limbaugh to the FoxNetwork have tried to sue Franken only to have been nailed by either having no case or because Franken’s facts are, well, facts.  Very funny and disturbing book and, it turns out, timely in that it shows Jack Abramoff and Tom DeLay protecting slave labor, prostitution, and forced abortions in the women involved all under the United States flag of Saipan.  You’d think this would arouse the conservatives, especially those of the religious right.  But you’d be wrong.  This edifying spectacle will, no doubt, receive much attention in this election year, and much good may, be there a God in heaven, be the result.

 

The Dominion of War – Empire and Liberty in North America 1500 – 2000  by Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton is a remarkably interesting four hundred year account of the United States and its military history.  It’s about the first history book I’ve read that openly discusses gender roles and role playing that clearly motivated the likes of a Douglas MacArthur.  Usually, the use of terms like ‘patriarchy’ sends warning flags up because they’re the traditional signs of the New Age and, almost by definition, Leftist revisionism.  But Anderson and Cayton have a well-researched set of quite coherent and cohesive strings of thought that permeate a book essentially concerned with how the American public has chosen to view the missions of its military.  It’s hard to shake the obvious: it’s designed to be a metaphor with how the Iraq War evolved, and as such there are no conflicts.      

 

The Reformation: A History by Diarmaid MacCulloch is a terrific read by any standard and surprising in exposing my deep and profound ignorance of something I talk about a lot.  I like that.  For example, between 1530 and 1640, African and Asiatic Muslim pirates captured about one million Europeans off their coasts and inducted them into slavery.  They went as far as Ireland – everybody’s favorite heavy bag and playpen – and even to Iceland.  That’s as large a number as those slaves heading to America.   Well documented – extremely well documented -  it’s a versatile explanation of how so many things in religion, sexual mores, legal thought, and physical history came to be.  It’s actually a must read for those interested in our current institutional attitudes towards Islam and each other.

 

 

I’ve been singing the praises for three years of an article from the March, 2002 Atlantic Monthly called “1491”, by Thomas C. Mann, comparing the world Columbus found favorably with the one he left, and advancing the current theories of Native American life.  If I may be blunt, till recently we knew virtual shit about

This is an important and overdue book.  A Must Read.

Native America, and virtually everything we thought we knew was wrong.  It cuts both ways, and current shills for either Indians or the Conquest should be deeply silent and read this.  We’ve only recently become acquainted with the exact plagues and the horror of their progress the Euros inflicted, unwillingly and unknowingly, on the Indians.  There.  I feel better.  In any case, Mann has now expanded it into a book, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus.  Buy it.  Buy it now, and when you finish it, perhaps we’ll talk.  Excellent work in a historic genre remarkably shallow and underwritten.  We’re so at the beginning of understanding all this, it is way embarrassing.  Like the increasing surety that the Americas had more people than Europe, that the ‘primeval forests’ of New England, and the Great Plains of the West, and the Brazilian rain forest are the result of the quick deaths of their hitherto keystone species: humans.   It is quite possible that environmentalists and the political battles raging about them are both bonkers.  This is an amazing and overdue book. 

 

I had mentioned Barbara Tuchman for her The Proud Tower, as below, but having found it necessary to reference her other works of late, I want to update it.  Tuchman, Barbara: The Proud Tower  Robert Massie revisited the same terrain a few years ago in Dreadnought, but it only showed just how brilliant and insightful Tuchman was in her much shorter, much better work.   She was the best writer of history in the last century, and is missed amidst the charges of plagiarism and cheating among the current crop.

 

In fact, taken as a whole, Tuchman’s work from Bible and Sword, written when very young, all through her last works, which were considerations of ourselves as a nation, might serve as a course in history, writing, and objectivity all at once.  Fearful of her biases, Tuchman cheerfully admitted to being prejudiced against Germans, and so chose those issues that didn’t reflect those things that had personally affected her.  She was witness, as a child, to a naval battle in the Mediterranean between the British and the Germans, and as by this time she was already an anglophile (her idea of a Halloween costume as a child was William Wallace), her rough edges were set.  She adored Balfour, a Prime Minister who had issued the proclamation upon which Israel was built.  Her maternal grandfather, Henry Morganthau, Jr., was a Cabinet member under FDR, and traveling with him in 1914 she witnessed a naval battle in the Mediterranean which appeared in The Guns of August.

 

Tuchman loved men of a certain type.  Her affection for Balfour was palpable, her admiration for the Lord of Coucy clear, and she made no bones about it.  Her personal attachments to people in history made her writing vivid and real.  She was accused of bias in Stilwell and the American Experience in China, but few volumes of such insight have stood up so well, few histories contain such gems of humor and brilliance and just exhilarating writing.  

 

Clarke, Richard: Against All Enemies   Admit it.  You’re not going to read it but just rely on clippings.  My intent as well, but I read it and am glad I did.  It raises far more questions about the people who review books and give such skewed reports that are suspiciously repeated.  For example, the now famous supposed canard about Condi Rice acting as if she had never heard of al Quada is framed much differently in the book, as if it were only an affected expression to convey polite surprise, and much less damaging to the Security Advisor. 

 

Further, if you wisely start your book in media res, as Clarke did, you can get those handy quotes into the press because nobody reads more than the first ten pages anyway, and then they riff through the index and that’s it.  Review written.

 

But I haven’t seen mention elsewhere of how bin Laden offered an alternative army to Saudi Arabia to fight Iraq’s near invasion in 1991: his mercenaries from Afghanistan.  That might have precluded the need for any US bases in Saudi Arabia, the supposed cause of al Quada’s annoyance with us.  Of course, it might have been far worse, with al Quada in charge of Saudi oil, but it’s still intriguing.

 

Nor have I seen much mention elsewhere of the disdain James Baker had for George W. Bush despite the supposed friendship.  Nor of Clinton’s winning over the Scots at a cairn dedication to those killed in Lockerbie in the middle of Monicagate.  Nor that it isn’t just Clarke’s opinion that the Iraq war was self defeating, but that our own Army War College calls it “a strategic error of the first magnitude.”  If the Bushies cannot blow this book out of the water – not wound it, but kill it – it is altogether possible the election will ride on it, especially as the ground in Iraq gets quagmire-ish. 

 

Mencken, Henry Louis: Vintage Mencken edited by Alistair Cooke –  As a start, anyway.  Mencken is America’s strange uncle kept in the attic, but any of his articles and books are worth the read.  He makes brilliant writing as natural as a sneeze, someone (I think Garry Wills) once said.  No kidding.

 

Mencken, without doubt the finest writer in American, or perhaps any nation’s, ranks of journalists, had his weak points.  He was brilliant and lonely, short and defensive, insightful and of German heritage in an era when we fought two world wars against the beloved land of his gene pool, and weathered revolting legislation in violation of our own Constitution throughout that time.

 

As for his strengths, let’s just say any of his weekly columns would be considered the career highpoint of most journalists or comedians today.

 

I won’t bore you further with my admiration beyond noting that between Voltaire and Mencken there is gulf of inferiority.  You cannot read H.L. Mencken without wanting to emulate him.  Gore Vidal, Christopher Hitchens, every generation since 1920 has provided heirs in clear dedication to his principles of clarity, great humor, insight, and surprisingly - despite all the bombast, the hyperbole (and Christ is he funny…) – much fairness and, more important, great accuracy.   And that though I disagree with him often.

 

In his declining years he became a more or less anti-Semite of the sort that plagued the times, and yet he received loving letters of respect from Emma Goldman and others for his rather heroic defense of herself and her work, which obviously impressed him.  She was a good writer, and so were West Pointers, and so were others he championed and was supposedly prejudiced against, like African American writers of the Harlem Renaissance which Mencken – the most powerful critic of the 1920’s and in our history - praised on merit, which was unheard of.  Alistaire Cooke pointed out that he himself embraced three entities Mencken famously hated as much or more than Jews: Cooke was British, Methodist, and an electronic journalist (“perfumed tonsils…”).  But Mencken was his friend and mentor.

 

By far, one of our most interesting countrymen and deserving of a one man Broadway play by an accomplished actor.  It is written already.

 

Cooke, Alistaire: Six Men  -  Cooke, who is entering a new century of life, was British correspondent for the Manchester Guardian and BBC during most of the twentieth century.  He was also the first host of Masterpiece Theater on PBS, and his presence is still missed, no offense to his successors, who suffer only because they aren’t he.  He had presence and, as this book reveals, much insight into his time and the men who made it, all of whom he knew.

 

They included the weak, ill educated, and stupid King of England, Edward VIII, whom Cooke summarized as only at his best when the going was good; Charles Chaplin, his chosen Best Man who failed to show for the wedding; Humphrey Bogart, who deeply resented people trying to impress him by being as tough as his screen persona; H. L. Mencken (see above); Adlai Stevenson, a good friend and one who Cooke earlier than any pointed out as a hidden hero of the Cuban Missile Crisis; and Bertrand Russell, who recalled childhood trauma dealing with Disraeli at the family home while feeling up the thighs of starlets in his eighties.

 

These short character sketches are worth far more than many tomes written about these subjects.  Shows you how it’s done. 

 

Franken, Al: Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them – A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right - Franken is an acquired taste.  On his first Saturday Night Live skits, he played himself as a self-promoting sleaze ending every possible sentence with “….me, Al Franken” which was irritating until you realized his point, which is that everybody does that in the media and his was barely an exaggeration, at which point I got REALLY annoyed.  Franken has always billed himself as a comedian but he’s really been a satirist, one of the best, and his biggest punchline until recently was himself, sorta an unfunny comic calling attention to his VERY funny points by emphasizing how unfunny – in the traditional ways – he was.  Or something.  Can’t put my finger on it, but I did not react to him as comic like Dennis Miller.  He worked beneath.

Then he discovered the Right in our politics.  It isn’t mentioned enough, but the decline of Rush Limbaugh came almost immediately after the publication of Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot which led to the decline of R on television and reduced his audience from inching into the common culture and keeping him where he belongs, entertaining the unemployable and not very attractive male audience of losers who have lots of time for talk radio.  He has applied, like Miller, to be a football commentator, but failed to attract interest.  He now has the percentage of audience, and virtually the same mindset, as Father Coughlin in the pre-WW II days.  Which brings me to Lies……

 

Franken is liberal, sharp, funny, and over-researched in his blistering satire, commentary, screed, and bitch slap (his preferred phrase) of some of the American Right’s most blistering morons.  If Anne Coulter survives his analysis of her book Treason, it’ll not be because the overwhelming amount of fact support is in her corner.  Sean Hannerty, who like many in the right favors the configured facial hair originated and preferred by French male prostitutes of two centuries ago, can never be looked upon again with any respect, and if Bill O’Reilly ever claims to have won a journalism prize again, double check it.  All lies.

 

Franken repeats his Chicken Hawk comix about how all the Right’s media hawks somehow never served themselves.  Yet, somehow, they retain the affection of significant numbers of white males who also never served themselves.

 

It’s an infuriating book and designed to be so.  Given the limp, pathetic response of the Democratic Party, unable to recover from Bill Clinton’s overpowering presence and competence, Franken may end up running for office himself someday.  Hey.  Look at California………….

 

Vidal, Gore: United States – Essays 1952-1992  -  Let’s be blunt: Vidal has irritating characteristics.  He has felt for years that the United States is a decadent Empire, and we are in its End Time.  He also feels that we as a nation are dense and given to war, or rather to giving over our affairs to those among us given to war.   And he takes deep pleasure, seemingly, in the failures of our nation almost as personal vindication for some series of slights and bruises he achieved on his own.  It is deep within him.  Burr, a great novel, at one point has the protagonist throw a hissy fit over, essentially, the fact that Democracy in republic form has edged out our genuinely Great Men from taking and remaining in power.  The author surely was making a character judgment on Burr, a distant relative.  He may not have been aware he made it for himself, as well.  Vidal is also gay, which he trots out at various points, but seems to deny it and prefer to insist that everyone is actually bisexual in inclination as if he cannot quite bring himself to say that about himself.  Or, if he actually is bi, he cannot but hope everyone else is.  In any case, these are issues that perk through all his writing, either the silly Myra Breckenridge or the excellent historical novels he writes better than anyone.  Or in his essays.

 

Vidal is such a good writer, such a beautiful stylist that anyone with any talent at all will begin to phrase his own sentences in unconscious emulation of Vidal after brief readings.  He is also hysterically funny and incisive in both criticism and analysis of his diverse and insane friends.  He is also touching and deeply sentimental, although I believe he might deny it.  His affection for Orson Wells, and his admiration, shines through an essay on the late, great artist whose final years were sad and, likely, miserable.  His pieces on politicians are often funny, but distinguished by their almost total error as to character and their future.  His analyses of literary figures are astute, gossipy, and brilliant.  You get the feeling that Vidal, having failed to win the world in a manner he would prefer, is trying to recast the memory of that world so that, in retrospect, he seems bigger than he was.  Even so, Vidal has been among our best writers for the last fifty years, and this volume proves why. 

 

Krakauer, Jon: Under the Banner of Heaven – There is something oddly unfulfilling about this recent book by the variously talented Mr. Krakauer.  At the same time, this is a timely, incredibly important book that, coincidently, puts me at ease about my own prejudices and the current War Against (allegedly) Terror, by which is meant against anti-occident, primarily Arabic Islamics.  I’ve said elsewhere that this is a war that ought to be retooled and announced as against ALL the world’s boney-kneed old men scared of sex, scared of women, scared of the future.  Mormons don’t actually – or, more accurately, rarely – fulfill that prejudice of mine, except, as Krakauer writes, the splinter groups given to kidnapping and murder and rape of their own by God’s order.  But there is something so misogynistic about their sex lives, so hateful, that perhaps it fits better than initial thoughts indicate.  In any event, the comparisons to In Cold Blood, sometimes made, is weak, although the reverse roles of the protagonists gives it a superficial similarity.  This is a brilliant diatribe against all patriarchal, woman hating religions, which could perhaps be said to mean against ALL religions.  Krakauer is never able to convince readers completely of his own sincerity, his own objectivity, which created a storm in his famous book on the Everest expeditions.  Here, it works against the reader being able to make the leap to understand his characters.  They remain too Other.   A fascinating and important book if it gets the readership and discussions it should.

 

Connell, Evan: Son of the Morning Star – It’s difficult to find ways to praise a book twenty years old, with its share of errors and ‘sampling’ techniques and reflective of insufficient research leading to strange conclusions, but I will.  I’m not alone, the book has never been out of print and deserves the acclaim and riches accruing to the author.  Like an epic story teller from centuries ago, Connell weaves such a lovely story, a true story for all intents, that he better than anyone else recreates a plausible world for the uninitiated to learn about Custer and his Last Stand.  Remarkably prescient about subsequent discoveries and conclusions, Connell creates vivid and brutal snapshots that often don’t come into focus till the book has been long put away.

 

Mclean, Norman: A River Runs Through It and Other Stories  I don’t like to fly fish, don’t like the time period, have no interest in Scottish homes of such repression the mother has no more of a personality than some of the lures they weave, but I wept at the end of this story as surely as I did at the end of A Tale of Two Cities.  Biblical in all ways, including cadence, language, and use, River should never have been made into a movie.  It’s a poem, it’s a paean, and it’s lovely.   The last pages are elsewhere on this site. 

 

Fussell, Paul: The Great War and Modern Memory  -  A literary expedition into the tools of memory.  How things are remembered become part of the memory and forever frame it; Fussell broke ground with this moving and scholarly review of the British trench experience in World War One and its poetic means of recollection...by historians.

 

It’s been in print since publication in the mid-70’s, and the reason is exemplified by its continued relevance.  The traumatized face on the cover – he’s just a kid, for God’s sake, living in a trench composed of rotting body parts obeying orders from idiots and all his friends are dead – is the same 1000 yard stare remarked upon by journalists witnessing men who survived initial attacks on European and Pacific beaches and knowing they’ll have to suck it in and run another 1000 soon enough. 

 

And it doesn’t end.  This is a photo of a Marine in Afghanistan in 2009.

 

Tolkien, John Ronald Reul: The Lord of the Rings  - A cliché in my lifetime, I am appalled that this great work is utterly unread today (as opposed to bought).   No book has been so relentlessly ripped off, so don’t mention Star Wars in my hearing.  Not a trilogy but one book in three volumes annoyingly named by the publisher, this book is of a pre-Christian Europe, a discussion of language, history, and myth.  Relevant, moving, and “a beauty to break your heart.” 

 

Ever wonder who inspired Worf’s native language?  You really do not understand Star Trek unless you understand Tolkien’s theory of sub-creation....or, as well, the history of World War II, which the Federation re-fights every week.  Did you know the Maquis was the name of the French Resistance? Or know how closely the space ships of the Klingons and Romulans resemble WWII naval design of Japan and Germany?  Look at the Bismark and the Yamato and it’s clear.  Anyway, since the movies, I know the books are bought and stared at but they need, really need to be read.  Big type, roaring fire, stiff drink, and enter a world you never knew before but…..you’ve longed for it deeply.  You truly have.

  

Eco, Umberto: Foucault’s Pendulum - I didn’t like The Island of the Day Before and I thought the Name of the Rose was only ok,  and I do like Baudolino a lot (because in some regards it recalls this previous book) but I have never read a novel that fascinated me as much as this one.  Brilliant, complex, and unique.  I am trying to enjoy The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, in the early fall of 2005, but it is so personal and strange it’s rather off-putting.  It’s a recasting of Belbo’s rural home from Foucalt’s Pendulum and a spate of free association with the fascist totems of Eco’s childhood, and hasn’t really grabbed me as yet. 

  

Torrey, Norman, ed.: Les Philosophes  It is altogether embarrassing that these guys were the gods of both the political and literary world in their own time and, if we had any honesty, in ours.  But because they are French and nominally Catholic they are not part of every high school curriculum.    Will Durant thought Voltaire the greatest writer ever, and based on the ease with which his humor and devastating sarcasm traverse language and years, it’s hard to dispute.  Very scathing and some very, very funny stuff.  Read this and Politically Incorrect and its descendents and all pundit TV seem like harmless frat boy giggles....which they are.  This is powerful – and bitterly funny – stuff.

 

Marquand, John: The Late George Apley  I’m from New England, and only clam chowder ranks higher with me.  Dated, but a sustained satire of a man trapped by convention and, well, a certain cowardice. 

 

The Poisoned Embrace by Lawrence Osbourne – The history of the mostly but not entirely Western association between sex and death.  This connection, euphemistically called sexual pessimism, has led to some of the most foolish and inaccurate correlations of which the human mind is capable.  From Aristotle to St. Augustine, from the gnostics to Don Juan, from the monks to Tom DeLay, the influence of this thought pattern has been infectious and awful.  A truly interesting and well-done short book of recent vintage for the lay reader.  Me, for instance.

 

Shardik by Richard Adams.  The author of Watership Down is a terrific writer, even if his plot devices are derivative if not stolen.  In this 1970’s novel he traces the establishment of a religion based upon ‘true’ events in an ancient community.  He has created a memorable and hideous villain (who prides himself on ruling children by fear…) and a virtuous cause against child abuse and along the way enters deep ethical and religious waters (“…and of what value is the grain of sand at the heart of a pearl?”), creating a beautiful, utterly believable world where even a burning bear begins to mean something to you.  Did to me, a true cynic.  I think of it often, and if I had the money I would make it into a movie.   I’ve cast it.  You’re not in it, but thanks for dropping by.  Leave your name.  Next?

 

The Nigger of the Narcissus,  by Joseph Conrad, is not a book but a short story by a Pole who didn’t learn English till late in life and didn’t start writing till he was in his forties.  His books can be tough going because nobody – absolutely nobody – wrote anything like him before or after and it takes a commitment to get into these beautifully realized creations; and it is worth it.  A true original.   The stories, often based upon his own sea days, are not really ‘sea’ books any more than Melville’s are.  They are deep, deep, deep as the Mindanao Strait.  Nigger is, oddly, both PC and un-PC but has the most beautifully written introduction which will make anybody break out the pencil and want to write.   Conrad’s effect on other writers continues to be immense, and so his plots – all stolen from him without enough gratitude – will seem periodically familiar.   Further, his stories, like Heart of Darkness, are based upon the true-life horrors found in the 19^th century Congo of King Leopold.  Conrad is only technically a fiction writer.  He dealt in truth, a clause that would gag if it were not so apt.  He bemoans the fate of his chosen language “the old, old words, worn thin by careless usage” and resurrects it.  Mencken, who championed him, said other writers have created greater art, but no greater artist ever wrote a novel.   

 

The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway.  I, by the way, was going to be the next Hemingway until I realized that 1.) the angel of talent had passed me by and, 2.) I wasn’t big on combat and, 3.) I didn’t really like his novels.  This was problematic, given that I was writing my senior thesis on Hemingway and the Necessity of the Spanish Bullfight.  I reread a bunch of his short stories in jail a few years ago and realized again why I originally was so enamored.  Though easy to satirize, easy to ridicule when he’s at his worst, in his short stories he shines brilliantly.  The he-man themes are the notions of hateful English professors, because Hemingway writes of strong women as well as strong men, is as sentimental as Dickens, and in one story the male protagonist loses his wife – none too gracefully - to….another woman.  Papa has more depth than realized, more heart and less muscle than his reviewers ever cared to note.  Read Big Two Hearted River One and Two and then A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean and see Hemingway’s influence.  Hell, see Hemingway’s disciple.  His only one.