An Excerpt

"But then that's the problem, isn't it? We get older, we get no wiser, the wars of FDR and Truman turn into the wars of Kennedy and Nixon, the Gulf War of Bush I reappears as the Gulf War of Bush II, an we the people never do get together, except as atomized watchers of Desperate Housewives. We are, in the main, sitting fat and happy in what Robert Nisbet, in his splendid The Quest for Community, called 'the heart of totalitarianism': for we are 'the masses; the vast aggregates who are never tortured, flogged, or imprisoned, or humiliated; who instead are cajoled, flattered, stimulated by the rulers; but who are nonetheless relentlessly destroyed as human beings, ground down into mere shells of humanity.'  The totalitarian, wrote Nisbet, seeks 'the necessary destruction of all evidences of spontaneous, autonomous association,' leaving us a mass of anchorless individuals whose wasted lives are lighted only by the hideous bluish glare of the TV set.
Hey, what's on tonight?"

-  Bill Kauffman, Look Homeward, America! In Search of Reactionary Radicals and Front Porch Anarchists  p. 141

This week at the library: desire, war, and traditions

Dear readers:

It's been a slow start for February despite the miserable weather that keeps everyone indoors, possibly because I've spent the last week nursing a cold and it's easier to watch movies than to coordinate book-holding, page-turning, and nose-tending all at the same time. I've finished off season one of The Vikings, which I would have never been interested in were it not for Bernard Cornwell waking me up to how fascinating their culture was.  Earlier in the week I did read his The Pagan Lord, the latest book in his series about the wars between the Saxons and Danes for control of Britain; that was another fine adventure. Toward the latter part of the week I became interested in And Then There Were Nuns, which is not an Agathie Christie mystery but a Jane Christmas recollection, the story of a woman who spends a year living in convents and a monastery.  Comments will follow for that this week, but yesterday I read Michael Pollan's Food Rules, which is not so much a book as it is a pamphlet that looks like a book. It essentially distills his argument in In Defense of Food into 60 rules-of-thumb for eating. If you have read Pollan, most of the rules bear out specifically what he's written about previously: he emphasizes eating whole, organic foods in moderation, but also works in advice for building a personal food culture -- eat meals, not snacks; eat at a table, not just anywhere; eat with friends, not alone.  All good advice, it struck me, but $11 is a lot to pay for a collection of rules when many of them don't have extensive explanations because they're similar to one another.

This week I'll be finishing Forgotten Voices of the Great War, which is a collection of first-hand recollections of the conflict,   and then -- who knows? I'll be doing a review for Wendell Berry's The Gift of Good Land ,which is about the virtues of traditional farming and the importance of treating the land arightly,  and yesterday at the university library I found a book entitled dirt: the erosion of civilization which may be similar. That was a book picked up in afterthought, though; the main reason I went to the library was to check out On Desire: Why We Want What We Want, by William Irvine. Some readers may know him as the author of A Guide to the Good Life:  The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy. 

I also came home with:

• Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Nino and the Fate of Civilizations, Brian Fagan, on the historical impact of sudden climate shifts
• The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society, Frans de Waal, and;
• What's Wrong with the World,  G.K. Chesterton. This is one of the books that introduced Chesterton's advocacy of distributism, so I want to tackle it to both read something by the man (given his reputation) and to ponder his response to industrialism as it was happening. This book was published in 1910. The language looks heady, but if I can get through Augustine I can get through anything. 

One book I was sorely tempted to buy was Alain de Botton's The News: A User's Guide, but I'd rather pair it with Neil Postman's How to Watch TV News.  Right now I have entirely too much unread books sitting around, including The World Until Yesterday by Jared Diamond.

Well, happy Valentine's Day to those who have been Cupid-stricken, and happy reading to the rest!

The Pagan Lord

The Pagan Lord
© 2014 Bernard Cornwell
320 pages

Uhtred of Bebbanberg is having a bad week. First his hall was burned by an old rival-enemy, Cnut Ranulfson, in retaliation for Uhtred kidnapping his children, which Uhtred did not do. Uhtred of Bebbanberg is many things, but he doesn't kidnap kids. After clearing that little mess up at Cnut's place, he returns home to find the rest of his estate burned down by the church in retaliation for his accidentally killing a priest who attacked him when he attempted to prevent his eldest son Uhtred from becoming a "Christian wizard". Uhtred didn't mean to kill the priest; he just has that effect on them, like carbon monoxide.  Driven from Christendom by an excommunicated mob and hated by the Danes,  there's really no place to go but up -- up into Dane-held Britain, to the fortress Bebbanburg, his ancestral home stolen long ago by a treacherous uncle.  It could be all so simple:  take the fortress with a little derring-do and turtle up, allowing his enemies to cut one another to pieces. Alas, Cnut Ranulfson has complicated schemes afoot, and to get out it and lead the Saxons to triumph will involve a ship,  borrowed children, and a dead priest on a stick. That's life in Anglo-Saxon Britain, and the tale of The Pagan Lord.

Cornwell's Saxon Stories series, featuring a warlord of divided loyalties -- a Saxon raised by Danes who served the Saxon king Alfred in his quest to defend Britain against Danish invasion - has so far consisted of superb odd-number books bridged by good even-numbered books. Pagan Lord is a bridge despite its odd-numbered status, but as solid as the Roman span Uhtred uses here while being pursued by an army five times his size. Pagan Lord is battle- and politics heavy, and consists largely of travel: Uhtred's first response is to buy a boat and go 'viking', but as he begins to put together the pieces of whatever diabolical scheme his Norse rivals are up to.  In younger years Uhtred might have abandoned the Christian Saxons altogether and taken his home fortress with  Danish help, but his lingering attachment to his 'own' people is magnified by his love for a Christian woman who stands to be treated badly if the Danes win.  So once again he kills men he admires and aides men who despise him, because of a woman; Cornwell's heroes tend to have that honorable flaw.  The Pagan Lord wasn't quite the novel I expected: happily, it's not the conclusion of the Saxon stories, even though Uhtred advances into the gates of his ancestral home.  The novel seems to move toward its conclusion in the middle before Uhtred's plan goes awry, and he has to retreat into the mouth of Chaos, where he and all of Saxon Britain engage in war against the schemes and horde-strong armies of the Danes.  The Pagan Lord is on the short side, but's a fine tale of adventure set during the Viking age.

Teaser Tuesday (4 Feb)

"We asked for help," said the other priest, "to ensure that the light of the gospel isn't extinguished from Britain, so that the pagans defeated utterly, and so the love of Christ will fill this land."
"What he means," Pyrlig explained, "is that he knew you were in the shit, and so he came to me and asked for help, and I had nothing better to do."

p. 275, The Pagan Lord, Bernard Cornwell


Teaser Tuesday is a weekly event in which people share teasers from their currents, hosted by Should be Reading.

When Elephants Weep

When Elephants Weep: the Emotional Lives of Animals
© 1995 Jeffrey Masson and Susan McCarthy
291 pages

Humans pride themselves on not being  animals,  going so far as to describe any behavior we’re shamed of as ‘animal’.  Beasts have rude instincts; we have exalted Emotions,  gifts of the gods.  We may begrudgingly grant animals fear, or perhaps even affection – but love? Joy? Aesthetic reverence?   In When Elephants Weep, authors Masson and McCarthy explores the spectrum of animal emotions, from recording the patently obvious to flirting with anthropomorphism.  In their view, animals across the kingdom  can share the same basis emotions, and offered as evidence are hundreds of anecdotal claims of animals expressing behavior interpreted as emotional. Most of the subjects are mammals, but birds pepper the text and even insects make a stray appearance. Although anecdotes  are dismissed as evidence among purists of the scientific method,  many of the primate examples are corroborated in Jane Goodall and Frans de Waal’s work, and considering their frequency and similarity – and the fact that these two scientists made observations on different populations of chimpanzees --  many of the examples are respectable enough. The author does reach  sometimes, but the agenda here isn’t so much as to present an body of evidence convincing skeptics that  animals have emotions as it is to create room for suspecting they do; in the book's conclusion, the author argues that considering the diversity of emotions animals seem to display, we should treat them with more consideration; if they are capable of loneliness, despair, grief, and the like, perhaps keeping them in captivity or experimenting on them at length is more than problematic.  The variety of examples is commendable; there are primates, cetaceans, elephants, lions, tigers, and yes even bears.   Emotions are easier to believe among the higher mammals, and some -- anger, happiness, sadness -- more likely than more esoteric feelings, like awe at a sunset. The authors use any account that brings to mind human emotions, but

When Elephants Weep is enjoyable more as a reflection on animal behavior and than a sterling scientific enterprise, but enjoyable all the same. 

Related:
Any work by Frans de Waal or Jane Goodall
Silent Thunder: Among the Elephants

Poor But Proud

Poor but Proud: Alabama's Poor Whites
© 2001 Wayne Flynt
488 pages

We might be poor but we’re proud

And we’re living the best way we know how

We don’t have much but we don’t look for pity

Cause we’re country poor and country proud

Poverty, unlike politics, is color-blind; despite the association of US poverty with urban blacks or migrant workers,  poverty is alive and well in 'majority' whites.  Poor But Proud is a social history of Alabama's working poor, beginning with the state's early settlement and continuing onward through the 1980s, though the chief focus ends with the Great Depression. In addition to covering the primary occupations of the poor (farming, textile mills, timbering, and coal mines), Flynt addresses the political issues they raised, and explores poor white culture, particularly religion and folk traditions. He also gives special consideration to conditions like tenancy farming and milltown paternalism, probing the question of why they developed as they did. Flynt draws extensively on interviews with living witnesses as well as studies done by concerned sociologists and economic developers who viewed the impoverishment of the south and Alabama in particular as a national burden to be recitifed. Though derided as lazy, shiftless, and vulgar, the poor themselves did what they could to alleviate their circumstances, joining together in unions and driving the Democratic party toward more populism through the Grange movement.In other areas, like education, they were dependent on outside help; Episcopal missionaries served as teachers, but their structured and serene religion as quite different from the enthusiastic sects the poor embraced, like Pentecostalism. Race religions are touched on, expressed in conflict and cooperation, but not emphasized. Poor but Proud impresses with its heft; being weighty in detail, it's a first class source for anyone interested in the lifestyle and occupation of the working poor in Alabama before the world wars. While not a drama-laden narrative, it doesn't lose readability for substance. Flynt has authored similar works and is the editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of Alabama.

An Officer and a Spy

An Officer and a Spy
© 2013 Robert Harris
496 pages 

  In the late 19th century, the Dreyfuss Affair shook France when one Captain Alfred Dreyfuss, accused of selling French military secrets to the Germany General Staff.  Declared guilty, publicly disgraced, and dramatically exiled, Dreyfuss’ name became a lightning rod of controversy. On trial, more than Dreyfuss himself, was the pride of the army and the Jewish question. Could a Jew  be a loyal citizen of the Republic?   An Officer and a Spy is a history of the affair in novel form, from the perspective of Colonel Marie-Georges Picquart, who observed the trial in its entirety and who, upon becoming an intelligence master,  began to realize that something was amiss. Though Picquart begins as hostile to Dreyfuss, his investigation of ongoing security concerns reveals that not only is there a spy still operating within the General Staff, but the case against Dreyfuss was based on ‘evidence’ too flimsy to be respectable. When he attempts to call his superiors’ attention to this miscarriage of justice and take down the real spy, however, Pichquart becomes another target of an entrenched institution desperate to save face: the French army.

            Robert Harris has displayed his strengths as a writer of fiction, with books as diverse as political thrillers set in ancient Rome  to modern science-fiction thrillers set in financial markets. After books like The Fear Index and The Ghost, An Officer and a Spy is a return to the genre in which Harris proved his writing mettle: historical fiction.  Its integration of source material and narrative is impressive, drawing extensively on Dreyfusses' letters but never obtrusively. Trials are a mainstay here, as not only Dreyfuss but various suspects are dragged before courts-martial and forced to defend themselves. Picquart himself is never officially tried, but when his associates are he might as well be, for he is exiled to Africa and given a pointless and likely suicidal mission.  Being a few years removed from my French history courses, I don't know how the development of Picquart's case aligns with reality, but it's excellent fiction. I suspect Harris stays close to the facts, because certain characters, like the 'real' spy, aren't as overblown as they might be in a purely fictional novel:  the real spy isn't particularly sinister, but in pure fiction he could have been developed as a mastermind. Because in reality he managed to stay hidden accidentally, the true villain of the piece is the French army's distrust of Jews and their obsession with protecting themselves from additional controversy.  Considering how rich in detail this book is about life during the 'beautiful epoch', before the great war, and about the craft of intelligence in particular,  it's an attractive historical piece while doubling as a fascinating political and legal thriller.