Nehru: the Invention of India

Nehru: the Invention of India
© 2003 Shashi Tharoor
282 pages
 

The movie Gandhi introduced me to many of the key figures in India’s independence movement and early political leadership, and beyond Gandhi no man interested me more than the Mahatma’s right hand, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru. Gandhi’s commitment to nonviolence stemmed from his near-mystic religious beliefs, but Nehru held fast to those convictions without religious training. The close relationship between the two men in light of their differing religious convictions fascinated me, so I decided to read a biography of Nehru,  India’s first prime minister,

Nehru emerges from this book as an iconic figure for Indians: their Thomas Paine, George Washington, and Abraham Lincoln all converge under his mantle. Nehru defined the necessity of independence, participated in the movement, and attempted to steer the ship of state around sectarianism and political subordination to the world’s superpowers. Nehru is in ways more western than eastern: largely nonreligious, educated in England, and valuing western political theory more than eastern religious principles. Interestingly, he and Gandhi come to the same conclusions from different approaches on various subjects.  For instance, Gandhi believes in self-sufficiency as a spiritual value while Nehru sees it as a Marxist necessity: without economic independence Indians are doomed to political bondage of one form or another.

Tharoor presents an easily digestible narrative here that is sympathetic but not protective of Nehru. Tharoor clearly admires him for his pragmatic idealism, integrity, and internationalism, but sees Nehru’s political leadership as flawed, particularly in the realm of economics and foreign affairs. The ending chapter – following Nehru’s death – attempts to summarize Nehru’s influence on the stated he helped create and dominated for so long. Regardless of Nehru’s administrative shortcomings, he is for me as interesting a politician as I’ve never encountered. He reminds me of Marcus Aurelius: thrust into the spotlight unwillingly, wary of the power he possesses, daunted by the responsibility, and yet determined to make his character prove worthy of the challenge. Most remarkable for me was the way he checked himself: at a time when no one would criticize him, he wrote to a newspapers anonymously warning that “Nehru has all the makings of a dictator in him”.

Teaser Tuesday (13-4)

A tease, a tease, a Tues-day tease....from Should Be Reading.

A well-worn story, perhaps apocryphal, has Churchill recalling the years Nehru spent in British prisons, saying, "You must hate us." To which Jawaharlal replied: "I was taught by a great man never to hate -- and never to fear."

p. 188, Nehru: Inventing India by Shashi Tharoor

Rally 'Round the Flag, Boys!

Rally 'Round the Flag, Boys!: The raucous, hilarious, big bestseller about sex, guided missiles, real estate, commuters, love and the U.S. Army in a Connecticut town
© 1957 Max Shulman
277 pages

There are some authors for whom I will buy or obtain a book blindly. Max Shulman is one of them, thanks in part of my extreme affection for his Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. A few weeks ago I read another of his works and enjoyed it -- well enough to look for another book, not knowing what it might be about.

As it turns out, Rally ‘Round the Flag Boys is an entertaining comic story about what happens when the US Army invades a small town in Connecticut in the late forties or early fifties. Shulman opens the book by introducing the reader to our viewpoint characters, most of whom live in the small town of Putman’s Landing. Their paths and plot threads will converge -- or collide with great drama --  in that town with comic results. Putman’s Landing was once a small fishing village turned into a bedroom community following a postwar building boom. ‘Round the Flag is definitely a product of the early Cold War period, particularly its emphasis on surburbia. 1950s stereotypes abound: one of the plot threads concerns an unhappy commuting husband whose homemaking wife is too busy running the PTA and a score of other civic organizations for romantic intimacy.

Part of the book’s humor consists in having these characters bounce off one another, like the staid but affable conservative father and his daughter, who speaks nothing but fifties jive. Shulman has a knack for dry and oblique humor that strikes from behind and kept me rolling. Unlike Tomatoes are Chapter, ‘Round the Flag’s characters are largely sympathetic and their tragedies are all the more effective at rendering gasps and laughs because of it.

Shulman provides a riot, and although the book is a bit dated that adds in part to its charm. Unfortunately for those who might be interested, this book is probably quite rare.

1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus

1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus
© 2005 Charles C. Mann
465 pages

1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus is an ambitious book that attempts to rout a host of assumptions about the land and people of the western hemisphere prior to European contact.  Author Charles Mann tackles a host of questions and beliefs, but most find their root in the idea that primitivism reigned supreme in the Americas -- that both the land and people were largely untouched by the passage of time until European exposure. Mann wishes to overturn the related ideas that the western hemisphere contain lands largely untouched by humanity  and that the people who lived here were relatively uncivilized, not far removed from hunting and gathering.  In their place, he sees the Americas as continents heavily modified by their original occupants,  densely populated, home to many more than the traditional "big three" organized polities. These polities were not just familial clans, but empires in their own rights with political dramas and ambitions that unfolded exactly as they might in Europe, China, or anywhere else.  Essentially, Mann sees the original Americans as humans -- not idealized 'noble savages' or ridiculed primitives.

To be sure, the civilizations of the Americas were limited  in some respects compared to Europe, Asia, and Africa. Without draft animals, people were unable to engage in the large-scale agriculture that almost defines the western idea of civilization. Mann’s account how people adapted to the environments of the Americas reminded me a quotation from an introduction to anthropology: people have found many ways to be human. Time and again, Mann makes the case that pre-European Americans were not strictly primitive, but that their history had simply developed differently from people living in the eastern hemisphere. They couldn’t farm in the way of the east, but they manipulated their environments all the same -- creating large, wild orchards in the Amazon and fish-trapping on a massive scale that required large public works.Technologically, their path simply diverged again. Metalworking in Mesoamerica, for instance, was as advanced as anywhere else, but it was put to different uses  -- as elaborate ornamentation instead of weaponry. The same was true of science, and Mann attempts to convince the reader that both European and American scientific progress had strengths and weaknesses compared to the other.

This is a fascinating work with massive scope, reminding me of Jared Diamond’s classic Guns, Germs, and Steel. Human history abounds here, but science -- particularly genetics and climatology -- have large parts to play. Mann sees the collapse of the Incan and Aztec empires as owing more to European disease and a relatively limited gene pool among American progenitors than to European weaponry. Interestingly, Mann’s narrative often includes his first-hand documentation. He records his experiences in gathering evidence, exposing himself to both wonders and perils. At one point in the work, the airplane he is in runs out of gas above South American jungle and he barely avoids catastrophe. (My Tuesday Teaser referenced another peril.)
1491 was well worth the time spent reading it, being endlessly fascinating. Mann presents a compelling and simple case, one I’m only happy to recommend -- particularly to history, geography, and anthropology readers. I can’t imagine Jared Diamond readers in particular not enjoying this.

Related Reading:

• Jared Diamond's magnus opus, of course.
• Brian Fagan's The Great Journey: Peopling the Americas, in part. Fagan addresses the Americas during initial settlement. 

Teaser Tuesday (6-4)

If it's Tuesday, I must be teasing like Should Be Reading. 

"The ticks are not bad, are they?" I asked him hopefully, viewing the tall grass and underbrush between the road and the mounds. "No," said the driving, beaming. "When full, like grapes they fall off and no harm is done." (1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus)

The perils of primary research....

Millennium Falcon

Millennium Falcon
© 2008 James Luceno
317 pages

Han Solo: Fast ship? You've never heard of the Millennium Falcon? 

Obi-Wan: Should I have? 

Han Solo: It's the ship that made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs!

The Millennium Falcon is almost a character in its own right in the Star Wars canon, perhaps beloved of by more than than perhaps some of the people in the franchise. In looking for an adventure story, I assumed Millennium Falcon would be a collection of short stories about the Falcon's former owners, but Luceno has delivered a novel with a more elegant structure. Although he opening chapters introduce us to a few of the Falcon's earliest owners and pilots, each merits only a chapter and each character will play a part in a larger story. The novel proper is set in the Expanded Universe, decades after The Empire Strikes Back and the Thrawn trilogy. The twins that Lei gave birth to there are adults now, who have been as involved in the history of the post-imperial universe as their parents were during the first three movies. Some of them have even died. When the novel opens, Han and Lei are preparing to begin a quest of sorts, along with their granddaughter: they're going to track down as many of the previous owners of the Falcon as they can. Across the galaxy, a man who has been kept in stasis since his supposed death at the close of the Clone Wars has just woken up to a galaxy very different from the one he grew up in. The Republic has fallen, as has the Empire that destroyed it. The decades between Jadak's "death" following the partial destruction of his ship The Stellar Envoy in the course of an intelligence mission have seen decades of brutal wars, but the disconnect does not prevent him from feeling the urge to complete his mission. Something aboard the Envoy was the key to fulfilling his mission, and so he must find it so that his last orders can be carried out. Only then can he move on with his life.

The Stellar Envoy would take on many names in the decades that followed as she was transferred from one organization or individual to another. Eventually, of course, she acquires the name Millennium Falcon and serves Han Solo through the wars that followed the destruction of the Empire. While Han works backwards -- beginning with finding out who owned the ship before losing it to the man who would lose it to Solo --  Jadak attempts to find out what happened to the Envoy after it was salvaged following his accident. Both men hear stories of their ship, serving both scoundrels and saints through the years. Eventually their paths will intersect, but in the shadows one man watches them both. The novel will eventually take both Solo and Jadak to a forgotten planet in its death throes, where the key to the mystery surrounding Jadak's mission waits.

I have read Luceno before, although not recently enough to have mentioned his work here. I enjoyed those, and Millennium Falcon is not an exception. The various stories in which the Falcon has played a large part were interesting enough in themselves, but the way Luceno fits them together is especially enjoyable. His use of a character from the past provides an interesting perspective, and the "history" he is filled in on also serves as background exposition,  helping readers alien to the extended universe establish context. As I have not read beyond the Thrawn series, I appreciated this.  I doubt Extended Universe readers would need a recommendation to read this, but even those who just enjoyed the movies will be able to pick this up and read it given the background exposition.

Captain Horatio Hornblower

Captain Horatio Hornblower
© 1937 C.S. Forester
504 pages

Captain Picard: Just imagine what it was like. No engines, no computers... Just the wind...and the sea... and the stars to guide you.

Commander Riker: Bad food, brutal discipline... no women. (Star Trek: Generations)

I've been itching for a read involving adventure, so when in the course of reading an interview with Sir Patrick Stewart wherein Stewart recounted Gene Roddenberry giving him a set of books about the seafaring adventures of Horatio Hornblower of the Royal Navy in the hopes that Stewart would find Hornblower's character of use in maturing Jean-Luc Picard, my interest was piqued and I decided to give the books a try.

Captain Horatio Hornblower is a collection of three novellas following the service of the titular character in the first decade of the 19th century. Post-revolutionary France is now ruled by Napoleon Bonaparte, who will soon attempt to turn all of Europe into his private domain. Great Britain stands nearly alone against his ambition. Lacking land forces on the scale of La Grande Armée , Britain must rely on its most powerful resource -- the Royal Navy. Beat to Quarters, known outside America as The Happy Return, begins with Captain Hornblower's arrival in South America to undertake a secret mission that may change the balance of power in Europe: plot twists abound.  In A Ship of the Line and Flying Colours, Hornblower and his men return to Europe to fight France directly. Although Hornblower serves as captains, the novellas are not entirely naval:  The Happy Return combines a sea story with political intrigue, while in Flying Colours Hornblower spends most of his time on land, save a daring river ride wherein he must flee those who would see him hang. I did not expected to be as gripped by Hornblower as I was: I hardly left the book while in the course of reading, as Forester constantly kept me thinking -- "What will the captain do now?"

Horatio Hornblower is certainty the star of the books, and in him Forester has created an interesting character. As a captain, Hornblower must maintain the respect and loyalty of his crew at all times. Though imperiled or frequently cast into difficult circumstances impossible to anticipate,  Hornblower must maintain a steely sense of calm and make decisions to face every crisis of command. This is especially evidence in The Happy Return, as Hornblower is forced to make possibly life- and career-ending decisions that will effect Europe's political scheme on his own, as he is separated from England by oceans that would take months to cross. Behind the facade of the perfect captain lies a flawed man who hides his blemishes as best he can, but who is haunted constantly by the idea that he isn't all he should be. Most endearing for me was his unrequited love for a certain nobleborn lady, which develops in the first novella and ripens throughout the latter two.

I have seldom been as enthralled as I have been in reading Captain Horatio Hornblower. I am presently engrossed in the eight-movie series about his early career, and will certainly be reading the rest of the series as I am able.

"What are we do?" he asked feebly.

"Do?" she replied. "We are lovers, and the world is ours. We do as we will." (p. 161, Beat to Quarters/The Happy Return)