Raiders of the Nile

 Raiders of the Nile

© 2014 Steven Saylor

352 pages

  If fortune favors the foolish, young Gordianus of Rome must be foolish indeed. On his 22^nd birthday, he lavishly adorns his slave-turned-love-interest, Bethesda, only to see her kidnapped when she is mistaken for a rich man’s companion.  The kidnappers, a notorious gang of thieves, cutthroats, and miscellaneous scoundrels intending to hold her for ransom, operate out of “The Cuckoo’s Nest”, hidden somewhere amid the Nile Delta.  To rescue his love from abuse and execution, Gordianus must track down outlaws even the king of Egypt is quailed by Soon wanted for murder and navigating the backside of a country on the verge of civil war, Gordianus is forced into trusting strangers at his peril. Although the young main character will later be wise and street-savvy, here he’s giving his real name to barkeeps at mysterious tarverns and accepting drinks from smiling strangers.  Such things generally lead to death, enslavement, or other misfortune in novels, but Gordianus lives a charmed life.  The book opens with him taking part in a grave robbery (the sacking of Alexander the Great’s tomb) , in a splash of action that introduces a mood that remains throughout. While most of Saylor’s novels are political-legal mysteries, Raiders of the Lost Nile is thoroughly a light historical action-adventure novel with a twist at the end. It’s highly speculative, of course, but enjoyable.

This week at the library: the South and the search for meaning

Dear readers:

Spring is finally here, and with it, April.  As is my custom, I'll be doing a special set of readings relating to English history or culture as we near St. George's Day on the 26th.  While nothing is finalized, I'm planning on two history books and two historical novels.  The past few weeks have been taken up with the South, what with Redneck Manifesto, I'll Take my Stand, and Confederates in the Attic. (I finished that just this morning, so look for a review later in the week.)  I anticipate that trend continuing somewhat as April marks the big Civil War reenactment. A growing interest in appreciating the South's history and culture is dangerously closed to reigniting my high school obsession with the Civil War.  (I don't say 'obsession' lightly; I used to go to sleep to Civil War music and had an AIM profile as done by a member of the "Coffee Rangers", an old Alabama regiment, complete with appropriate away messages and sounds pulled from my much-played copy of Sid Meier's Gettysburg.)  Speaking of wars, I've not yet decided on my Great War book for April, though there are a couple I am leaning toward.

Obsessions aside, the month won't just be taken up with the South, England, and the Great War (as themes collide...) I also wanted to do a few books on trade, commerce, and the like, including Why We Buy.  It's going to be a good month, I think. Happy reading!

Recent reviews:

• An Ice Cream War,  William Boyd (historical fiction set in the Great War's African front)
• I'll Take my Stand: the South and the Agrarian Tradition (collected essays defending the South's agrarian tradition against industrialism)
• The Long Loneliness, Dorothy Day (Biography of the anarchist activist turned near-Catholic saint)
• Star Trek: The Body Electric, David Mack (conclusion of the Cold Equations trilogy)

An Ice Cream War

An Ice Cream War
© 1982 William Boyd
408 pages

Although most of the action of the Great War took place in Europe, it spread throughout the world wherever Europe's nations had allies or colonies. An Ice Cream War is a novel of the first world war set in southern Africa, with the battles between British and German colonial forces serving as background for all of the plot threads, and the active component of many. Its principle characters include an English farmer who is displaced and ruined by his German next-door neighbor, for whom the war becomes a personal vendetta, as well as two brothers who come of age as a result of the war and its human cost.  Its title not withstanding, An Ice Cream War is a tragedy with some comic elements.  Both the comedy and tragedy stem from the same root source, the vagaries of fate. Life is unpredictable enough without the chaos of war, but amid it the characters can only respond in absurd ways. The bewildered mirth is overrun by sorrow and horror later in the book, as it waxes depressing. An Ice Cream War can be considered an anti-war book, given that a main character is an ardent pacifist until he joins the Army to flee heartbreak, but only meets more sorrow as he realizes that the war is just a pointless and obscene in fact as he long held it in theory.  An Ice Cream War features an interesting and extravagantly detailed setting, but is definitely on the despairing side by the end.

A reading from "Confederates in the Attic"

Awakening the next morning in a $27 room at Salisbury's EconLodge, I recognized the appeal of dwelling on the South's past rather than its present. Stepping from my room into the motel parking lot, I gazed out a low-slung horseshoe of ferroconcrete called Towne Mall, a metal-and-cement forest of humming electricity pylons, a Kmart, a garish yellow Waffle House, a pink-striped Dunkin' Donuts, plus Taco Bell, Bojangles, Burger King, the Golden Arches of McDonald's and the equally gaudy signs for Exxon, BP and Shell hoisted like battle flags above the melee of competing brands. A few exhaust-choked bushes poked up from the greasy asphalt. 

I'd gone to bed reading about the Confederate general Albert Sidney Johnston, who urged his men into battle at Shiloh by declaring 'Remember the fair, broad, abounding land, the happy homes and ties that would be desolated by your defeat!'. I wondered sleepily what Johnston would make of the view of the EconoLodge.  

Over coffee at the Waffle House, I also began wondering about the crowd I'd met the night before. It had included not only the doctor and pastor, but also a textile worker, a rose grower, a gun-shop owner, a state bureaucrat, and several farmers in overalls. Apart from sports, I couldn't think of many interests that comfortably bridged such a wide range of people. I was curious to know more of what drew them together. 

p. 27, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War Tony Horowitz.

I'll Take My Stand

I'll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition

© 1930 various authors.

410 pages

 "There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called The Old South...Here in this pretty world Gallantry took its last bow...Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their ladies fair, of Master and of Slave.Look for it only in books for it is no more than a dream remembered. A Civilization gone with the wind.

For most the Roaring Twenties were a celebration of the triumph of progress. The Great War in Europe was over, and its conclusion saw many of the old empires and forces of conservatism defeated by the liberal-democratic allies (or in Russia’s case, by soviet revolutionaries). In America, business was booming; the cities were swelling with people streaming in from the impoverished countryside, going to work in factories and celebrating American triumphs in war and peace by purchasing as many of the new gadgets that filled the stores as they could, and using credit to acquire those they couldn’t afford. But in the late 1920s, on the precipice of the Great Depression, twelve men of letters looked to the future and saw a vision of despair: the Old South’s final defeat by the forces of modernity, and with it the loss of genuine civilization.  I’ll Take My Stand collects essays defending both the South as an entity apart from the rest of the American nation, and the agrarian system of life that for so long was its defining characteristic. Nearly 85 years after its release, their  fears have been realized. Southrons are just as removed from farming as any other Americans, and the interstates  and cookie-cutter subdivisions have reduced the southern aesthetic into the same bland sprawl that plagues the rest of the nation.  Their call to arms urges a defense for a way of life that is now passed. I'll Take My Stand remains of value to modern readers, however, in offering  both an appreciation of the Old South's culture beyond stereotypes and a critique of the automatic cheering-on of anything called progress.

I first heard of the 'Southern Agrarians', the symposium gathered here, in Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind, and the books are of like temperament in promoting an measured conservative response to cultural change.  Both look for inspiration in tradition, both the rich intellectual, moral, and artistic traditions of the west, but are averse of the modern embrace of the conservative label with the forces of big business.  The gentlemen gathered here are most certainly not fans of business;  they are 'men of letters', intellectuals and artists, who share the old gentry's contempt for the naked materialism of business. A farm is a place to grow corn, not make money, one writes. The authors and those who they look to for inspiration, men like John C. Calhoun, believed in a 'graceful' life;  one supported by work, of course, but devoted not to profit but to the pleasures of a good life;  time with family, living out old traditions;  the art of conversation; music,  and art.  Where Kirk and the Agrarians differ is emphasis on farming;  the southerners see the South's agricultural basis as vital to maintaining civilization, which draws wisdom from the seasons to realize there are limits to everything, and a time and place for everything under the sun.  The north, with its towns and factories, long abandoned the settled wisdom of Europe, which then lived on in the South, wrote the authors; they were given way to madness, to pursuing phantasms.

All this sounds rather lovely, but  the appeal of their Southern Civilization is itself limited; although they look with fear and contempt upon the centralization of wealth in the north, they defend it in their own massive plantations. Farms function better at that large scale, one writes. The virtue of economics vanishes, however, when it threatens them, and the fact that a factory can produce goods more efficiently  than a homestead is dismissed as being beside the point.  That's not to say the agrarians are hypocrites; another praises the Gracchus brothers, the classical heroes of the left, who wanted to break up Rome's great plantations and restore the land to the common man. They are twelve individual authors of varying sentiments and approaches; most write conventional essays, but two tell stories that illustrate the points they intend to make. On the whole, however, they lean toward  'elitism'; this is not just implied given their praise of a life of culture and leisure practiced by very few (yeoman farmers given passing mention, but), but in their disdain for the masses.  One dismisses the people as superstitiously religious Anglo-Saxons who need guidance, as if the southern gentry were Norman lord. If they have that level of disdain for the Saxons, woe betide the Scots-Irish working poor! There's also the matter of race and slavery. Slavery is not quite defended, but blows against it are certainly cushioned as the institution is described as obscene more in theory rather in fact.

I'll Take my Stand is a difficult book, not so much for its writing (some pieces lean toward the abstruse, but not most)  or its arguments, but for those old biases. These are not twelve members of the gentry writing, but intellectuals, and even though some of them rose to culture from farming stock,  their vision of the past is more idealistic than an argument for restorative action can be based on. It's intellectual and cultural history with a little too much romance, rather like the opening of Gone with the Wind which is quoted at the lead.That farming has become the province of industrial corporations is a severe loss for the American people; that our cultural links to the past, in the form of tradition, has been shredded is likewise a tragedy;  we live in an age where home skills like sewing and canning are taught not by family elders, but by government bureaucracies. Yet these arguments will not take root in the modern readers' mind, accompanied as they are by noxious weeds like elitism.  It's a shame, too, because many of the ideas expressed here ought to be considered, especially the notion of a simple life versus one of acquisitive materialism. Given that such ideas are argued in other books, by less impeachable authors,  I'll Take My Stand's greatest enduring appeal is in the area of intellectual history, of understanding the southern mind as it attempted to find the best response to industrialism pushing its way under the Mason-Dixon  line.

Related:

• The Conservative Mind, Russell Kirk
• Any of Wendell Berry's books on agriculture or economics, including: The Unsettling of America, The Gift of Good Land, What Are People For, and Home Economics. 

 

Bookshelf Organization

Yesterday Daisy  at the Broke and the Bookish asked about bookshelf organization.  Aside from two large collections, all of my books are organized by  general subject. This is perfectly sensible for the most part;  no one is surprised to find my science books together, or those on politics.  If a given subject has a lot of books in it (like my two European shelves), I organize by subcategories, so that my books on France are together, as are my books on Germany and the like. There are odd instances, I suppose; I put my books on the German language in with German history/culture, and ditto for my book on the French language.   I suppose I could have a language section, but for me it makes as much sense to put French with France, and German with Germany.  Fiction and nonfiction are interwoven at the moment;  Robert Harris' Pompeii is in with my Roman history books. The only exception to this sorting-by-general-subject is that I have two special collections; my Isaac Asimov collection, which is in a case of its own and encompasses everything from science fiction to history; and my Star Trek collection, which also has a case of its own albeit a smaller one.

There is of course another exception, and that is the great giant box of books that hasn't been sorted because I am out of shelf space. I do have a bookcase waiting to be put up, though...

The Long Loneliness

The Long Loneliness
© 1952 Dorothy Day
288 pages (Harper Collins, 2009(

            Dorothy Day came of age amid the Great War, a child of struggling parents whose labors to make ends meet stayed with her even after they had achieved some success. Caught up by the social upheaval of the early 20^th century, Dorothy moved among the ranks of Communists, anarchists, and draft-resisters. Her determination to fight for the poor changed directions after she joined the Roman Catholic Church, however, and in The Long Loneliness she recounts the efforts of her comrades, both radical and Catholic, as they worked to create a better world for the impoverished. Day’s autobiography is a beautifully written response to the early 20^th century’s social turmoil, the story of a hell-raiser on the verge of sainthood. 

            Although overtly pious as a child, Day recounts here falling away from religion as she aged;  what did faith have to offer the poor, she thought, except meaningless promises of a happier afterlife?  Why should the impoverished and oppressed remain meek and serene when they could throw off their chains? Dismissing religion as the opiate of the people, Day recounts how she threw herself into the struggle for social justice. Her faith in inexorable progress was tested, however, during repeated periods of imprisonment, periods which she worsened by engaging in hunger strikes. In the despair of those hours she turned again to the God of her childhood, and when she was finally set free,  her Christian faith would be reborn and strengthened. Ultimately,  her yearning for comfort and  order led her to the Catholic church, and so strong was her desire for inner peace that she converted despite knowing it would mean leaving her common-law husband, who refused to submit to a church marriage. 

            The Long Loneliness is by no means a comprehensive biography; even if Day were blessed with total recall, constructing a narrative means leaving some facts behind to focus on others.  From this account she seems to have accepted the Church on its own terms, rather than being able to embrace it after learning about its social doctrine, which is by no means passive concerning poverty. I suspected the social doctrine might be the  draw for her, but she gives it scant mention and indeed passes over a discussion of Distributism. Instead, she mentions its similarity to the Southern Agrarians and similar movements as her own. The distributist ideal is hers, “a world where it is easy for people to be good”, where people are not destroyed by their work but ennobled by it. There is no escaping poverty in The Long Loneliness, either material or spiritual; it is to escape spiritual poverty that Day finds herself almost revering the material. She and her great ally, Peter Maurin, both emphasize voluntary simplicity as a means of not only focusing on what really matters, but in saving money to create self-reliance. “Self” is misleading, however:   The Long Loneliness is often a book about creating community.  Her rich collections of her neighbors, regardless of where she moved,  and the emphasis she and Maurin both place on experience life communally – through group discussions on philosophy, or establishing cooperatives and charity houses – demonstrate how  vital being with and working with others was to her life, to her worldview.  Day’s journey here ends on a farm, where she, Maurin, and other staffers of The Catholic Worker would be self-sustainable, she writes, if they did not give so much food away.  

            What a fascinating work this is, quoting from church fathers and personalities like Emma Goldman in the same breathe; what a life she lived,  as a journalist and nurse and agitator during a most interesting period of the 20^th century, when workers were brawling in the streets with the forces of  establishment and winning victories even as they were imprisoned and beaten en masse. Many of the  laws they fought for, Day writes, are now on the books.  At the time of this writing she was no doubt by what had been achieved, not by her but by the people she served, the people who took the ideas of The Catholic Worker – pacifism and libertarianism among them --  and spread them across the world.  Hers is a dream still unrealized, but a life such as hers is a testament as to what is possible. 

Related:

• A Life of Her Own, Emile Carles. Also the biography of a driven young woman whose response to seeing her village and its boys swallowed up by the national government during the Great War is to become increasingly sympathetic toward anarchism and the libertarian left. 
• The Story of my Experiments with Truth, Mohandas Gandhi, which also ends in a newsletter staff being run from a communal farm. Pacifism and self-reliance are also common motifs, though Day is more sensual.
• Becoming the Answer to Our Prayers, Shane Claiborne, whose 'new monasticism' brings Day to mind..
• I’ll Take my Stand, various authors. She frequently mentions the southern agrarians who penned their defense of a culture rooted in the land.
• Red Emma Speaks, Emma Goldman