This week: wrapping up with history and science

This last week in 2014 I am spending with Lives of the Planets, a natural history of the solar system. It's proving to be the most enjoyable science book I've encountered in months, and will probably take me into the  New Year.  The last few weeks have been varied:

* Amazing Grace,  a history of William Wilberforce and his quest to end the British slave trade,  proved fascinating if disappointing. It's a chatty, casual kind of history, and refers to various historical personalities as freaks, nuts, and creeps. Mr. Wilberforce is such an engaging character, though, that this story of his and his allies' campaign against institutionalized evil  succeeds nonetheless.

* Galileo's Finger reviews the ten most important concepts in science,  moving from the practical to the abstract. I bought this several years ago, and found it considerably more daunting than expected,  more technical and focused on areas of science I don't have a great deal of interest in, like energy and physics. (There is a reason most of my science reading is in natural history or animal behavior!)

* Why Things Bite Back looks at the many ways that technological solutions to problems cause problems of their own.  It's not an anti-anything book, but the idea delivered is that life is complicated and there are  no easy fixes.

My last Great War read turned out to be photo-heavy: Homefront, 1914-1918 looks at the lives of British civilians during the war. The author makes the curious claim that the standard of living for British subjects increased during the war, which no one would predict (aside from arms manufacturers)  I'm not sold on that. Most interesting to me was the chapter on labor during the war; I've always assumed working conditions declined during the two world wars, given the booming demand and the presentation of both as  dire national crises; who could go on strike when the Future of Civilization is at stake?  Not only did strikes occur throughout the war, but some sectors found success in them.

Gray Mountain

Gray Mountain

© 2014 John Grisham

384 pages

 In late 2008,  New York’s financial sector and the economy built around it began hemorrhaging jobs. Among the casualties were the junior ranks of  lawyers at Samantha Kofer’s firm,  including herself.  Reduced from six figures to none in a blink of an eye, the only thing Samantha was left with was the promise of health insurance – if she agreed to a year of pro bono work while the economy healed.  Leaving New York behind for a small mining town in Virginia,  Samantha discovers  a different world, one of grinding poverty amid the mesmerizing beauty of the mountains.  Having never stepped inside a courtroom before,   she is introduced to the spectre of ordinary law: helping real people with real problems. Every aspect of Gray Mountain is one Grisham has played with before, in The Street Lawyer, The Rainmaker, and The Pelican Brief;   despite those successes, however, the story never takes off here;   there are pieces of a good story, but no structure. Throughout, Samantha's attention is taken up with a handful of small cases, while an epic trial builds in the background. The suspense bursts with a plot twist that could have gone places, but instead leaves Samantha leading the reader in circles as she tries to make up her mind -- which she never does.  The chief problem is that Sam isn't especially active in the story; she is passive and ambigious; things happened around her and to her, but she doesn't know what to do herself, so she just drifts back and forth with the tide until the sun does down and the novel is over, with the great conflict never having been realized.  If the aim of the novel was to depict a young professional adapting to strange new circumstances and developing some measure of self-direction, the execution is lacking.  The only passion here is Grisham's own: he's  no stranger to political themes in his work, but Gray Mountain is as subtle as a strip-mine in indicting Big Coal.  If the denizens of town aren't dying of blacklung, they're being run over by coal trucks, struck by flying  boulders from the mines,  or being driven into bankruptcy by the coal companies' lawyers. The economic devastation of the Appalachians -- the tragic ruin of its people and the mountains --  is a story that needs to be told but having Snidely Whiplash as a villain won't invite anyone to consider people's plight here; it's a case of preaching to the choir and running off the visitors.  The backdrop and some of the minor threads go a long way to making this of interest, but Gray Mountain remains second-rate. 

Mission Accomplished

To Be Read Takedown Challenge

Antifragile, Nassim Nicholas Taleb (7/18/14)
The Vikings, Robert Ferguson (6/7/14)
Power, Inc; David Rothkopf (6/14/14)
An Edible History of Humanity, Tom Standage (7/8/14)
Small-Mart Revolution, Michael Shuman (7/12/2014)
The World Until Yesterday, Jared Diamond (5/29/14)
Fighting Traffic: the Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City, Peter Norton (7/21/14)
Earth, Richard Fortey (9/7/14)
Good Natured, Frans de Waal (6/27/14)
Galileo's Finger, Peter Atkins (12/23/14)

NOW I CAN BUY BOOKS AGAIN!

The Great War: A Christmas Pause

At the beginning of January, I decided to devote part of the year's reading to the Great War, in recognition of its 100-year anniversary. I created a list of books that would address some areas of the war I was wholly ignorant of, given that I tend to focus on not only the western front, but aeronautics.   Early this morning I finished Homefront, 1914-1918,  and with it, this year's Great War reading will be drawing to a close.   2015 will bring plenty of reading in this area -- a great many books were published this year and will be next year that I'm excited about -- though I don't know if I'll be doing as many as one per month.

On the whole, I'm generally pleased with how the year went; I covered some new ground, even if I didn't read two books I've had 'intentions' of reading for far too long now, La Feu and The Great War in Modern Memory.  Below are this year's and possibly next year's lists:

1. The Great War, John Keegan
    I started off with a survey of the war to set the big picture.

2. Forgotten Voices of the Great War, Max Arthur
Before getting distracted by all of the more detached histories, I wanted to encounter the soldiers speaking for themselves. Forgotten Voices uses the letters and diaries of British, American, and German soldiers and civilians to deliver a chronicle of the war as it unfolded.

3. An Ice Cream War, Max Boyd
The sole fictional entry, this was not an intended read;  I grabbed it just to fill some time. It does have the novelty of being set in southern Africa, on the border of British and German colonies.

4. Conscience, Louisa Thomas
Conscience is the story of a pacifist who resisted the war's fervor despite having brothers in uniform.

5. The White War, Mark Thompson

It wasn't until May that I started really learning about different theaters of the  conflict,  beginning with the commendable White War, a history of the Italian front.  Although depressing, considering how truly -- astonishingly -- purposeless each of the twelve major campaigns between Austria and Italy were, the book threw a lot of light on a dim area for me.

6. The Great War at Sea, A.A. Hoehling
Not the book I'd intended to read on the naval war, but it served well enough.

7. Castles of Steel, Phillip Massie
Another naval war survey, this massive tome focused on the British-German war and included some avitation to boot.

8. The Red Baron, Manfred von Richthofen
Like An Ice Cream War, this was a case of my running out of time and just grabbing a smaller work from my home library.

9. Collision of Empires, Prit Buttar
Collision examines the first few months (ending in December 1914) of the war in the east. Its take on the preparedness of the major powers is quite thorough, but once the conflict starts there are precious few maps and a massive front being considered.

10. The Unknown War, Sir Winston Churchill
A more thorough survey of the Eastern Front,  Unknown War brings a lot of dramatic narrative (and some kid gloves) to the table.

11. Life, Death, and Growing Up on the Western Front,  Anthony Fletcher
A return to the soldiers, this is an intimate history of six men and their families through the war, taken from the letters and journals of the men and boys at the front.

12. Gallipoli, Alan Moorehead

The most narrowly-focused of the books I read, Gallipoli handily delivered a sense of the battle's potential and horrific waste.

13. Homefront 1914-1918, I.F.W. Beckett
This light pictorial history of the British homefront completes my reading for the year. The use of photos is lavish, the subjects being people, letters, and government notices.

As mentioned,  I will be continuing to read in this theme next year.   Here are some of the books which I have captured my attention...

1. Ring of Steel: Germany and Austria in WW1, Alexander Watson
2. A Box of Sand: the Italo-Ottoman  War 1911-1912, Charles Stephenson
3. The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East, Eugene Rogan
4. Imperial Apocalypse: The Great War and the Destruction of the Russian Empire,  Joshua Sanborn
5. Pyramids and Fleshpots: The Egyptian, Senussi and Eastern Mediterranean Campaigns, 1914 - 16, Stuart Hadaway
6. The Other First World War: The Blood-soaked Eastern Front, Douglas Boyd
7. The First World War in the Middle East, Kristian Ulrichson
8. Prelude to the First World War: The Balkan Wars, 1912-1913, Edward  Robert Hooton

These are either new releases or will be published next year.

This week: Christmas

With the fourth Sunday of Advent behind us, I suppose it is  liturgically safe to bid one and all a MERRY CHRISTMAS.  I work all of two days this week, the rest of the time being spent feeling somewhat sorry for those in the kitchen.  (I may make a tomato pie, out of solidarity.) With the year’s end closing, I’ve decided to put aside all other reading and focus on Galileo’s Finger, so I can finish off that to-be-read list, that ‘read-what-you’ve-got-before-buying-anything-else’ challenge I imposed on myself back in May, before 2015 starts.   I’m halfway through, presently, and that’s further than I forged ahead the first time before getting distracted. (I'm started a thirty-page chapter on "The Quantification of Beauty". ) December has been a strange month to end the year with, what with all the devotionals and YA literature, but I was in the mood for outdoorsy stories and those were the ones which came to mind. It’s not over yet, though.  There's the Finger and at least that little book on the British home front during WW1 to look forward to. 

Happy reading, merry Christmas,  and don't eat too much!

Brian's Saga, continued: Winter, River, and Return

Brian's Winter /  The River / Brian's Return
© Gary Paulsen 1996, 1991, 1999

            Hatchet told the story of a young teenager named Brian who survived a crash landing in the middle of the Canadian wilderness.  Forced by the pressing urge to avoid death to become student of the landscape and a tinkerer, Brian discovered and invented ways to provide food and shelter for himself for over two months in the wild. The story ended when he triggered an emergency transmitter, and for some readers this felt like a bit of a cheat. What would have happened had Brian not stumbled upon the transmitter in the plane wreckage?  Brian’s Winter is an ‘alternate’ history that picks up after his dive into the lake to rummage through the plane, and sees him continue to mature as a woodsman, as he must to survive the Canadian winter. As with Hatchet, Paulsen takes readers through Brian’s thinking as ideas come to him, and as he struggles to turn them into fact. The River is the first sequel to Hatchet, and begins with a trio of men from the government asking Brian to return to the wilderness, this time with a psychologist in tow. They want to understand the mindset that makes survival possible -- how can it be taught, ahead of time?  Their mission goes the way of most well-thought plans: within days, the psychologist is in a coma, and Brian must construct a raft and get his deadweight companion back to some semblance of civilization before he dies.  Brian's Return is a sequel to both of these,  and depicts Brian's inability to cope within the zoo that is domesticity after having sucking all of the marrow out of life for months in the wilderness.  After realizing the woods are in his bones, he decides to return -- and there the novel ends.

     Although these three books don't complete Brian's saga (there is a fifth novel, Brian's Hunt), I bundled them together here because the last two are so minor. Brian's Winter is  almost as fascinating as the original novel, forcing Brian to adapt to completely new circumstances.  The larger animals that ignored Brian in Hatchet, like bears,  become far more interested in him as summer gives way to fall and they must prepare for hibernation. In addition to having to learn new skills -- weatherproofing his shelter,  creating winter clothing out of rabbit skins, fabricating snowshoes --  Brian takes on larger challenges, like hunting moose and deer. He does this not for sport, but out of necessity:  the Canadian winter storms are so savage that he is safer taking the occasional big kill than risking exposure every day looking for rabbits and grouse.  In River and Return,  river navigation gets some attention but wilderness survival plays second fiddle to the book's respective little plots.  Far more interesting than the plot of Brian's Return, I thought, was the author's note that almost everything that happens to Brian within the novels in the wild happened to him during his twelve years of living in the wilderness, including deer jumping into his canoe and skunks rescuing him from bears.  Brian's Winter  is a strong sequel to the fascinating Hatchet, but the other two seem more like extras than anything else.

           

Lord of the World

Lord of the World
© 1908 Robert Hugh Benson
352 pages

At the turn of the 21^st century, war between the states of Europe and the East threatens; at the midnight hour, however, comes an obscure American politician, a senator of no fame, whose cosmopolitan charm allows him to calm the troubled diplomatic waters and prevent a century of peace and prosperity from being overturned by strife.  Hailed as a savior, the rising star becomes a pivotal figure in world affairs – but the epitome of modernity, this senator has a far darker role to play in cosmic history. He is the Antichrist, and his triumph means the end of the world is at hand.

Published in 1908, Lord of the World is a piece of Catholic fiction driven by conflict between Christian tradition and modernity. The prevailing drives of the 19^th century seem to have achieved fruition in Lord of the World; democracy has triumphed over monarchy, social programs and psychology over religion, and --   in general – the material over the spiritual. Europeans across the board are irreligious, with the exception of what is left of the Catholic church, concentrated in Ireland and the City of Rome.  There is a religious sentiment alive in the Europeans, a worship of the human soul, a sense of human beings as divine; this ‘humanitarian’ religion achieves deliberate expression when the American becomes President of Europe and institutes, French-revolution like, a Cult of the Supreme Being – a Cult of the Human.  Initially harmless, it quickly becomes the state religion, mandatory and supreme. Catholic resistance is answered by the obliteration of  Rome, and a new pope-in-exile flees to Judea, there to await the end.

Although the depiction of an Antichrist figure and the ‘Endtimes’ may bring to mind thoughts of the Left Behind series. Lord of the World is far better done.  Each viewpoint character struggles with self-doubt; even the man who ends as Pope begins questioning his own faith.  The spirit of Antichrist is patently seductive;  this 'dystopia' is a progressive dream-world,almost like Star Trek's Earth but without warp drive. But whereas Star Trek's humans have a 'more evolved sensibility'*, Lord of the World's humans are just like us; imperfect.  When a few disturbed individuals mount another failed Guy Fawkes plot against the center of the new cult, Westminister Abbey, the new European president' response, and that of his followers, is far from humane. Violence fills the streets, and a vicious persecution of all remaining Christians ensues.  Simply 'believing in themselves' did nothing to better the people of Earth; it is in fact their perfect faith in themselves that makes them so vicious. Utterly convinced that their cause is righteous,  those who oppose the dream count for nothing, and no action against them is beyond the pale.  Even as the world at large becomes increasingly awestruck by the dear leader's accomplishments, the most idealistic of the viewpoint characters find their faith in him shaken by his cold-blooded savagery.

A century after its publication, Lord of the World seems in part prophetic. Christianity has waned fast in Europe, and rampant consumerism abounds worldwide.. Moderns chase material hopes instead of spiritual succor, ignoring practical philosophy and religion alike for the distracting allure of stuff. From Benson's point of view, however, the west today is not as in as dangerous a position as the west of his book; we are in no danger of being fulfilled. Every commercial and every election reveal our constant frustration and dissatisfaction;  Benson's dread was a drowsy contentedness with the way things are that masks spiritual hunger, something definitely not present in our own lives.  The meat of Lord is not hackneyed attempts to force current events into the poetic prophecies of the Hebrew scriptures, or  action movie thriller antics like the Left Behind novels, but soul-searching. While Benson's Antichrist allows everyone to reassure themselves of man's moral perfectibility, his Christian characters understand human nature as frail. When an English priest  arrives in the City of Rome, where many of the trappings of modernity are kept outside the city walls to preserve the interior, he breaths a sigh of relief at the messiness of it:

Yet Percy, even in the glimpses he had had in the streets, as he drove from the volor station outside the People's Gate, of the old peasant dresses, the blue and red-fringed wine carts, the cabbage-strewn gutters, the wet clothes flapping on strings, the mules and horses -- strange though these were, he had found them a refreshment. It had seemed to remind him that man was human, and not divine as the rest of the world proclaimed -- human, and therefore careless and individualistic; human, and therefore occupied with interests other than those of speed, cleanliness, and precision.

Rome's Christianity assures the priest that while he is not perfect, he does not need to be. Human redemption does not stem from machine-perfect order.   Just as The Iron Heel put forth numerous arguments for a democratic-socialist state in the context of a revolution against corporate rule,  Lord's searching sets two different perspectives about human nature against one another; one, optimistic but unyielding; the other, pessimistic but forgiving.  The moral discussion is the heart of the book, though there are minor points of interest for those interested in comparing 'futurist' or alternate histories. Aspects of it are very dated, like the heavy use of zeppelins and telegraphs, and Benson's belief that total command economies would triumph is not dissimilar to H.G. Wells and Jack London's futurecasting, though he's more skeptical about its merits. One peculiarity of this being Catholic fiction is the fusion of the church's foes -- Freemasonry and Marxism have merged here, and Mason lodges have taken over most churches.  I don't know if anyone takes the freemasons as seriously as the Catholic church does, with the exception of the freemasons themselves.

Lord of the World is an altogether different 'endtimes' story, more theologically driven than driven on action.  It is far more humane than 1984 or Brave New World -- whereas those and other dystopias invent worlds where the human spirit has been utterly crushed by systems, in Lord things are more promising. Man is far from God, yes, but not abandoned; unlike those thrillers, where man is left alone to fight against a machine beyond his fathoming, the persecuted Christian remnant awaiting salvation in Nazareth have the hope of resurrection;   God is with them throughout the struggle; as St. Paul noted, even if they die it will be to their gain; even if the world perishes, it will be reborn anew.

For me, Lord is provoking, finding as I do some limited appeal in both temperaments.  Believing in one's self, one's own power is invigorating, and yet it is all too easy to become self-righteous or fatigued by the challenge.  On the other hand,  there is a certain comfort in accepting that one will never be perfect, and such an attitude can lapse into chronic indulgence and excuse-making. Either way, there's a lot of food for thought.





* Star Trek: First Contact