“Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.” - H.L. Mencken
I’ve just published the second edition of the Guide. Quite a bit new. You can look at the table of contents in the “preview” function at the book’s page on Lulu. It will take a while for the new book to trickle down to Amazon, so for now if you want the new edition, order it from Lulu.
A good walk on Monday, and excellent weather for it: clear, sunny, slightly cool, occasional breeze. I’m listening to Wuthering Heights, which makes me eager for the next day’s walk. (I’ve not read the novel.)
At FullBooks.com, you’ll find thousands of books in copyable full-text (not PDFs). For you eBook fans.
Thomas Hicks, the Washington Post’s military reporter, is most recently in the news for his book Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, a history of how the situation in Iraq degenerated to the current state. (At the link, you’ll find a very good interview with Hicks.) But I’m mentioning him here because of his earlier book, Making the Corps.
He decided to write Making the Corps when he was with a Marine Corps unit facing action in one of our wars. He didn’t quite understand what was going on, and a corporal explained to him the unit’s objectives and how that fit in with the overall strategy. He was so impressed by the corporal’s demeanor and knowledge that he decided to look into the process by which the US Marine Corps trains its men.
Making the Corps is the result, and it’s a fascinating read. Among other things, he discovered that Marines routinely write and publish articles in their magazines that critique (i.e., criticize) specific actions and decisions that were made by current officers—a practice that, when Hicks mentioned it to an Army officer, made him blanch and say that, in the Army, this would be a career-ending move. Read the rest of this entry »
This was news to me, but absolutely fascinating. Via My Mind on Books, I found this fascinating video (click to watch—I can’t embed this one—and note the “related content” links to the right of the video). Here’s another, a talk Shirky gave at Google:
His book, Here Comes Everybody, looks to be extremely interesting, and I’m recommending that the library get a copy (and put it on hold for me).
UPDATE: This paper is on the same general topic.
New Scientist has a list of life-changing books nominated by various scientist. At the link, you can nominated your own life-changing book—perhaps Leisureguy’s Guide to Gourmet Shaving, eh? 
1. Farthest North - Steve Jones, geneticist
2. The Art of the Soluble - V. S. Ramachandran, neuroscientist
3. Animal Liberation - Jane Goodall, primatologist
4. The Foundation trilogy - Michio Kaku, theoretical physicist
5. Alice in Wonderland - Alison Gopnik, developmental psychologist
6. One, Two, Three… Infinity - Sean Carroll, theoretical physicist
7. The Idea of a Social Science - Harry Collins, sociologist of science
8. Handbook of Mathematical Functions - Peter Atkins, chemist
9. The Mind of a Mnemonist - Oliver Sacks, neurologist
10. A Mathematician’s Apology - Marcus du Sautoy, mathematician
11. The Leopard - Susan Greenfield, neurophysiologist
13. Catch-22 / The First Three Minutes - Lawrence Krauss, physicist
14. William James, Writings 1878-1910 - Daniel Everett, linguist
15. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep - Chris Frith, neuroscientist
16. The Naked Ape - Elaine Morgan, author of The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis
And also:
I have noted over the past few weeks that stores are carrying a new (and better) variety of garlic: the central stem, instead of being papery leaves, is a definite woody stalk. In addition, the garlic cloves are well separated in the bulb and much easier to peel. I’m very pleased by this.
For an entertaining look at the varieties of garlic, and the raising of them (cats help a lot by killing garlic marauders), I refer you to the book Garlic is Life: A Memoir with Recipes, by Chester Aaron.
Just finished the latest novel by Alastair Reynolds, another in the Revelation Space series. The Prefect is a mystery, more or less, and another enjoyable read. It’s not yet published in the US—I got it from Amazon.co.uk—so I took it to the PG Library, which has most of Reynolds’s book, and gave it to them.
At last, Shakespeare for today’s youth:
Generations of schoolchildren have complained of the inaccessibility of Shakespeare’s classic works.
However, with the help of a British satirist, the Ali G generation will have no trouble relating to Hamlet’s woes when they read: “Dere was somefing minging in de State of Denmark.”
In Martin Baum’s updated version of 15 of Shakespeare’s classic plays in “yoof speak”, the Danish prince, who is re-named ‘Amlet, asks: “To be or not to be, innit?”, and Romeo pines for his “fit bitch Jools”.
Mr Baum’s chav-speak Shakespeare, which takes its title from ‘Amlet’s query, includes titles such as Macbeff, Much Ado About Sod All, De ‘Appy Bitches of Windsor, De Taming of de Bitch, Two Geezas Of Verona and All’s Sweet That Ends Sweet, Innit.
Following the well-trodden path of modern interpretations of the Bard’s works, Mr Baum, 48, says his versions, while abridged, remain true to the original formats of Shakespeare’s classics, retaining “the important sexist, duplicitous, cross-dressing and violent moments that made William Shakespeare well wicked.”
Mr Baum’s version of Romeo and Juliet sets the scene for the star-crossed lovers with: “Verona was de turf of de feuding Montagues and de Capulet families.
“And coz they was always brawling and stuff, de prince of Verona told them to cool it or else they was gonna get well mashed if they carried on larging it with each other.”
If the Bard was living today, Mr Baum writes on his website, he would “still be writing in the Globe turf, getting loads of respect from the Stratford upon Avon massive and producing works of pure genius.”
Respect.
Good article by David Mendelsohn on good old Herodotus. Article begins:
History—the rational and methodical study of the human past—was invented by a single man just under twenty-five hundred years ago; just under twenty-five years ago, when I was starting a graduate degree in Classics, some of us could be pretty condescending about the man who invented it and (we’d joke) his penchant for flowered Hawaiian shirts.
The risible figure in question was Herodotus, known since Roman times as “the Father of History.” The sobriquet, conferred by Cicero, was intended as a compliment. Herodotus’ Histories—a chatty, dizzily digressive nine-volume account of the Persian Wars of 490 to 479 B.C., in which a wobbly coalition of squabbling Greek city-states twice repulsed the greatest expeditionary force the world had ever seen—represented the first extended prose narrative about a major historical event. (Or, indeed, about virtually anything.) And yet to us graduate students in the mid-nineteen-eighties the word “father” seemed to reflect something hopelessly parental and passé about Herodotus, and about the sepia-toned “good war” that was his subject. These were, after all, the last years of the Cold War, and the terse, skeptical manner of another Greek historian—Thucydides, who chronicled the Peloponnesian War, between Athens and Sparta, two generations later—seemed far more congenial. To be an admirer of Thucydides’ History, with its deep cynicism about political, rhetorical, and ideological hypocrisy, with its all too recognizable protagonists—a liberal yet imperialistic democracy and an authoritarian oligarchy, engaged in a war of attrition fought by proxy at the remote fringes of empire—was to advertise yourself as a hardheaded connoisseur of global Realpolitik.
Herodotus, by contrast, always seemed a bit of a sucker. Whatever his desire, stated in his Preface, to pinpoint the “root cause” of the Persian Wars (the rather abstract word he uses, aitiē, savors of contemporary science and philosophy), what you take away from an initial encounter with the Histories is not, to put it mildly, a strong sense of methodical rigor. With his garrulous first-person intrusions (“I have now reached a point at which I am compelled to declare an opinion that will cause offense to many people”), his notorious tendency to digress for the sake of the most abstruse detail (“And so the Athenians were the first of the Hellenes to make statues of Hermes with an erect phallus”), his apparently infinite susceptibility to the imaginative flights of tour guides in locales as distant as Egypt (“Women urinate standing up, men sitting down”), reading him was like—well, like having an embarrassing parent along on a family vacation. All you wanted to do was put some distance between yourself and him, loaded down as he was with his guidebooks, the old Brownie camera, the gimcrack souvenirs—and, of course, that flowered polyester shirt.
Have you read any of Dorothy M. Johnson’s stories of the American West? She can really touch your heart. I just read “A Time of Greatness” in her book The Hanging Tree and almost cried. Here are the books that I have (all trade paperbacks):
The first two are short-story collections, Buffalo Woman is a novel and All the Buffalo Returning is the sequel, and the last is a nonfiction work that describes various women who went West. More titles at the Wikipedia article linked to above. And here’s a brief biography.
You owe it to yourself to read some of her work. Your library undoubtedly has some titles.
I just finished reading Robert L. Forward’s Dragon’s Egg, an absorbing science-fiction novel about life on a neutron star. The style is rather clunky, but the ideas keep pulling you along. The different pace of the cheela on the neutron star and the humans observing them makes for interesting developments. I realized somewhere along the way that I read this years ago (it was first published in 1980), and some scenes I vividly recalled. Very satisfying to revisit.
Phillip Carter has an excellent column in the Washington Post, “Intel Dump.” Here’s a recent column:
Military transformation is seductive. The idea that you might see through the fog of war to assess the terrain, friendly forces and enemy forces on a battlefield is a powerful intoxicant that can lead to fantastic, almost God-like visions of military power. Those visions, in turn, inspire dreams of how a nation might harness military force to reshape the globe.
It’s heady stuff. Unfortunately, as Fred Kaplan writes in his new book Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power, it’s also nearly entirely fiction. Innovations in battlefield surveillance, communications and computing do make a difference on the battlefield. But they are more evolutionary than revolutionary, at least as presently employed, and they do little to change the fundamentals of warfare that have remained constant for thousands of years. Further, these techno-centric systems have far less utility for counterinsurgencies and small wars than they do for conventional wars like Desert Storm — and so, they have had only a marginal impact on the post-combat efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Kaplan explores the history behind these transformative ideas and technologies, and lays bare the reasons why they have not borne fruit. (Full disclosure: Fred is my colleague at Slate, and we have occasionally collaborated on articles.) His slim volume is smoothly written, in the style of several long New Yorker articles connected by a common narrative, and it should be of interest both to military intellectuals and laypersons. At the core of his book is a powerful critique of the Bush administration — which he labels a group of “daydream believers,” paraphrasing a quote from T.E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia — for its unwavering and irrational faith in American military power and omnipotence.
I mentioned bringing home four Dan Fesperman books, of which I’ve now read two, which I recommend.
The Prisoner of Guantánamo is set, for the most part, inside the wire—i.e., on the Guantánamo base. It includes a fairly detailed map of Guantánamo (developed from public sources) and a good look at the cross purposes of the various interrogating agencies and the undercurrents of conflicting agendas.
The Amateur Spy gives a look at the details of non-governmental relief organizations and also at the various sorts of conflict among neighbors in the Middle East.
Both are fascinating in their detail and gripping in plot, and both have a kind of flat affect in the ending, reflecting the way real life episodes often end, rather than the way movies end. Worth reading, and your local library probably has them.
The current issue of the New Yorker has some excellent articles, all of them worth reading and (thankfully) all but one available online:
Camp Justice
by Jeffrey Toobin
The next stage at Guantánamo.
Somebody Has to Be in Control
by Ian Parker
George Clooney and the art of fame.
The Petition
by Jane Kramer
Israel, Palestine, and a tenure battle. Not available on-line but definitely worth seeking out and reading.
The Founders’ attitude toward religion.
by Jill Lepore
Ornette Coleman at Town Hall.
by Gary Giddins
“Dancing with the Stars.”
by Joan Acocella
“South Pacific” back on Broadway.
by John Lahr
Sounds like a very good book. I do like to quote one evangelical, who said, “When you mix religion and politics, you get politics.” From the review:
… Charles Marsh’s Wayward Christian Soldiers may lack the gossipy appeal of Kuo’s White House exposé, but it is in every way the better book. A professor of religion at the University of Virginia and a devout evangelical, Marsh believes that the politicization of Christianity in recent years — using the good name and moral commandments of the church to “serve national ambitions, strengthen middle-class values, and justify war” — has been spiritually disastrous for evangelicalism in the United States. Conservative American Christians, he claims, have forgotten the difference between “discipleship and partisanship.” They have “seized the language of the faith and made it captive to our partisan agendas — and done so with contempt for Scripture, tradition, and the global, ecumenical church.” The result has been a collapse into spiritual unseriousness, as Christians have “recast” their faith “according to our cultural preferences and baptized our prejudices, along with our will to power, in the shallow waters of civic piety.” Resisting despair, Marsh hopes that his book might inspire some of his fellow believers to repent of their recent ways — to “take stock of the whole colossal wreck of the evangelical witness” and then try to rebuild a more authentic Christianity in its place.
Unlike most books about the religious right, positive or negative, Wayward Christian Soldiers is addressed primarily to the movement’s most devoted members. Accordingly, much of the book is written in a prophetic register, alternating between rebuke and exhortation, as Marsh tries to persuade his readers of the enormity of their transgressions. He employs a rhetoric of outraged denunciation most effectively in his introduction, where he recounts visiting a Christian bookstore near his home in the spring of 2003, shortly before the start of the Iraq war. The store was stocked with “a full assortment of patriotic accessories — red-white-and-blue ties, bandanas, buttons, handkerchiefs, ‘I support our troops’ ribbons, ‘God Bless America’ gear, and an extraordinary cross and flag bangle with the two images welded together and interlocked.” By the cash registers, he found numerous books about the faith of George W. Bush. In Marsh’s words, “It looked like a store getting ready for the Fourth of July, although Easter was just weeks away.”
Of course, one immediately starts looking for the titles inexplicably missing from the list—and wondering about other titles inexplicably included. But, still, a good effort. Here it is. Please finish reading the books by the end of the year. Thank you.
110 best books: The perfect library
CLASSICS
The Illiad and The Odyssey
Homer
Set during the Trojan War, The Iliad combines battle scenes with a debate about heroism; Odysseus’ thwarted attempts to return to Ithaca when the war ends form The Odyssey. Its symbolic evocation of human life as an epic journey homewards has inspired everything from James Joyce’s Ulysses to the Coen brothers’ film, O Brother Where Art Thou?.The Barchester Chronicles
Anthony Trollope
A story set in a fictional cathedral town about the squabbles and power struggles of the clergy? It doesn’t sound promising, but Trollope’s sparklingly satirical novels are among the best-loved books of all time.Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen
Heroine meets hero and hates him. Is charmed by a cad. A family crisis – caused by the cad – is resolved by the hero. The heroine sees him for what he really is and realises (after visiting his enormous house) that she loves him. The plot has been endlessly borrowed, but few authors have written anything as witty or profound as Pride and Prejudice.Gulliver’s Travels
Jonathan Swift
Swift’s scathing satire shows humans at their worst: whether diminished (in Lilliput) or grossly magnified (in Brobdingnag). Our capacity for self-delusion – personified by the absurdly pompous Gulliver – makes this darkest of novels very funny.Jane Eyre
Charlotte Brontë
Cruelty, hypocrisy, dashed hopes: Jane Eyre faces them all, yet her individuality triumphs. Her relationship with Rochester has such emotional power that it’s hard to believe these characters never lived.War and Peace
Tolstoy
Tolstoy’s masterpiece is so enormous even the author said it couldn’t be described as a novel. But the characters of Andrei, Pierre and Natasha – and the tragic and unexpected way their lives intersect – grip you for all 1,400 pages.David Copperfield
Charles Dickens
David’s journey to adulthood is filled with difficult choices – and a huge cast of characters, from the treacherous Steerforth to the comical Mr Micawber.Vanity Fair
William Makepeace Thackeray
‘”I’m no Angel,” answered Miss Rebecca. And to tell the truth, she was not.’ Whether we should judge the cunning, amoral Becky Sharp – or the hypocritical society she inhabits – is the question.Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert
Flaubert’s finely crafted novel tells the story of Emma, a bored provincial wife who comforts herself with shopping and affairs. It doesn’t end well.Middlemarch
George Eliot
Dorothea wastes her youth on a creepy, elderly scholar. Lydgate marries the beautiful but self-absorbed Rosamund. George Eliot’s characters make terrible mistakes, but we never lose empathy with them.
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