Bob's Books

Why this Book: Selected by my literature reading group, based on 1. strong recommendations from a couple who’d read it, and 2. our group had loved Towles book A Gentleman in Moscow. Several had also read his Rules of Civility and spoken highly of it. 

Summary in 2 Sentences:  The Lincoln Highway was  the first trans-continental highway in the US, and the book begins in 1954 when a group of young men decide to travel the highway from Nebraska to California.  However it turns out that each of the young men have different agendas for making the trip, and as things evolve, these different agendas define the characters, define the trip on which they have embarked, and create a much different adventure than any of them had counted on.  

My Impressions:  An enjoyable, easy and interesting book to read – I’ve described it as “comfort food” reading; Towles style is engaging, and the characters are interesting, believable and fun to follow.   The perspective changes with every chapter – the chapter titles are the names of the characters from whose perspective the story is told in that chapter. Only three of the characters tell their story in first person; the others are told in the third person with a “God’s eye” view.  This varied narrative technique is at first a bit awkward, but as I got used to it, it provided a nice change.

The story begins with Emmett, an 18 year old young man returning home to his farm from Reform school/juvenile work camp to which he was sent for having inadvertently killed another young man in a fight.  Emmet’s father has died, his younger brother Billy had been cared for by Sally, a young woman on a neighboring farm, and the farm is about to be foreclosed.  Emmett has no intention of being a farmer, signs the farm over to the bank and is about to embark with brother Billy on a trip to California in Emmett’s Studebaker to find their mother, when two of Emmett’s pals show up, having escaped from the reform school where they were Emmett’s pals, and they decide to accompany Emmett on the trip. Emmett reluctantly agrees, believing he has put the necessary caveats in place – but then things start going a bit awry.  

Now the group leaving Morgen Nebraska is no longer Billy and Emmett, but three young men and a boy, and Emmett begins to lose control of his careful and deliberate and fairly well thought-out plan.   The trip (and the book) then embarks on a variety of branches and sequels from the original plan, and it reminds me of the old insight:   Do you want to hear Gold laugh?  Tell him your plans! 

Key Characters

• Emmett A practical quiet and thoroughly competent and honest young man, who is confident in himself and his pragmatic abilities to plan and get things done.
• Duchess A charismatic character full of charm and self confidence but who sees immediate advantages without thinking through long term possibilities, risks or consequences.  Basically honest and honorable, with a rather primitive sense of justice and fairness, but a dream of getting rich the easy way.
• Billy  An eight year old boy, a precocious and idealistic dreamer, always asking questions, who trusts and believes in the good in people.
• Woolly – A dreamy distracted type who has almost no common sense, but not an evil or selfish bone in his body.  Loves to listen to commercials on the radio.
• Ulysses  An African American man, a loner, honest and good,  who befriends and protects Billy.  Ulysses is adrift in America, riding the rails since returning from WW2 and finding his wife and child gone, and he has no idea where they are or how to find them. He is running from the sadness at his decision to leave them and go to war. 
• The Pastor A so-called man of God who uses the scripture to justify whatever he can get away with.  A conniver whose one goal is to feather his own nest.  
• Sally A confident young woman who insists on order and cleanliness, always insists on the reasonable and practical solution, religious in her values, and confident in her prejudices. She abhors chaos and demands an explanation for anything that is out of the ordinary.  Her mothering instinct is completely at odds with the spontaneous chaos that follows the four boys.  
• Other significant characters who don’t get their own chapters would be  Townhouse – an African American pal of Emmet’s who they seek out in Harlem; Sister Agnes, who ran the Christian orphanage where Duchess went to school; , The Professor, who wrote the book that inspired Billy and Ulysses; Dennis, Wooly’s brother-in-law who is a self-righteous and ambitious social climber;  Sarah Wooly’s sister, who recognizes Woolly’s strengths and weaknesses and loves him. 

The real charm in this book is in the diversity and idiosyncrasies of the characters, as we get to know them.  Each of them remind me of someone I have known.   They are interesting, funny, frustrating,  have notable strengths balanced by notable flaws – distinctly human. The Pastor is perhaps the only character without redeeming virtues. 

In the course of the branches and sequels that emerge from the original plan to drive across America on the Lincoln Highway, there are some wonderful stories told, and the characters have some memorable conversations.  A few examples: 

• Emmett talks about how his father always used “mollifying” words, to reduce the seriousness of whatever calamities were befalling him or his family. Emmett never trusted those mollifying words. Things were always worse than his father made them out to be. 
• Emmett didn’t like preachers because “half the time it seemed like a preacher was trying to sell you something you didn’t need; and the other half, he was selling you something you already had.”  p126
• Emmett and Billy  “Emmett figured rules were a necessary evil. They were an inconvenience to be abided for having the privilege of living in an orderly world.  But when it came to rules, Billy wasn’t simply an abider. He was a stickler.”  p145
• Woolly loved the Dictionary, but hated the Thesaurus. “How was one to communicate an idea to another person if when one had something to say, one could choose from ten different words for every word in a sentence?” p 290  It appalled him that the same event could be referred to as a fire, a blaze, or a conflagration.
• Duchess’s description of Howard Johnson’s: “The cuisine was a gussied-up version of what you’d find in a diner and the defining characteristic of the clientele was that with a single glance you could tell more about them than you wanted to know.” p180   
• Duchess’s insight that “when circumstance conspire to spoil your carefully laid plans with an unexpected reversal, the best thing you can do is take credit as quickly as possible” p406
• Ulysses to the Professor: “I believe everything of value in this life must be earned…because those who are given something of value without having earned it are bound to squander it.” p421
• The Professor: “Then surely, I am among the squanderers. One who has lived his life in the third person and the past tense. So let me start by acknowledging that anything I say to you, I say with the utmost humility.” p422
• Woolly’s word for not noticing or overlooking something important or beautiful an “undersight.”  p415
• Woolly’s distinction between his brother-in-law Dennis who felt morally obligated to “sit you down and set you straight,” and the Professor whose kind demeanor indicated that he was “not the sort who would want to sit you down and set you straight…not the sort to hurry you along because time was money, or of the essence or a stitch in nine, or what have you.”  p417

In considering my favorite characters in the book I’d begin with Duchess – a quintessential “artful dodger,” such a clever showman and extravert, trying to be honorable, but unable to overcome his dream to ultimately be the big cheese on easy street.  Next I’d list Ulysses, so sincere, so strong, so powerful and suffering so.  Then the Professor, old, wise and sincere, ready to take a chance and learn, whose humble efforts as an academic had made such an impression on Billy and certainly many others. Then Billy, who found his ideals in the Professor’s book of heroes and did all he could to live up to those ideals. who saw the best in people, but was ready to act when he was wrong.  And finally Woolly, probably somewhere on the spectrum, but good, innocent, well- meaning, wise in his own impractical way – reminds me of “the fool on the hill” in the famous Beatles song.  

Not to be overlooked in describing the merits of this book is Towles writing – smooth as butter, easy to read and follow. Additionally there is a nice retrospective to America in the early 1950s, not long after WWII and just after the Korean War.   America coming back to life again, full of confidence and possibilities, but also facing different versions of the challenges we face today – people struggling, not trusting nor being trustworthy, many taking whatever shortcuts they can find, and others doing their best to be good citizens,  trying to find their way in a confusing world, where things just don’t seem to go as planned – like a trip across America on The Lincoln Highway. . 

Why this book:  I have been very interested in brain function, health, and dreams for much of my life. This book was strongly recommended by my friend Mike Gosh.  It is related to other books I’ve recently read, to include: Descartes Error,   7 1/2 Lesssons about the Brain, and The Intention Experiment.

Summary in 4 Sentences:  The two authors of When Brains Dream are scientific dream researchers who chose to write a book on dreaming in language and style that would appeal to the educated layperson, and in it, they explore the mythology  about dreams and the history of more recent scientific research into the dream experience.  Scientific research has found some validity in conventional wisdom about dreams and dreaming, but also much that doesn’t necessarily or certainly not always stand up to scientific scrutiny.  The authors go into all of the things that I find interesting about dreams and they introduce me to other aspects which were unfamiliar to me.   The authors make a clear attempt to be fair in describing different theories about the purpose and sources of dreams, and offer simple advice for how do deal with pathological sides of dreaming (nightmares, recurrent dreams PTSD) as well as how to most effectively use dreams to enhance one’s life. 

My Impressions:  Fascinating and thorough look at the phenomenon of dreaming for the educated layperson.  I listened to it rather than read it – it is a short read at 336 pages, and 9 hours to listen to it.  There is so much content in this short book, that it was sometimes difficult keep up with while listening to it.   It is a current (as of 2021) review of the state of research into various aspects of dreaming and the potential significance of dreaming to our lives.  In listening to it, the challenge was that with so much new information (for me) and content, I was unable to highlight or mark sections I would have liked to have returned to for a review.  That makes this review more difficult to write, given that there was so much new and I could only absorb and retain so much as I listened.   For someone who is really interested in exploring dreaming, I’d recommend reading the book, rather than listening to it – though I did truly enjoy the listening experience. I just wasn’t able to retain as much as I would have liked. 

Given that I don’t have a hard copy to review, I’ll simply list some of the topics and impressions I recall from listening to the book, that I found most interesting:

• History of theories of dreaming.  The authors look briefly at various theories that have existed in (mostly Western) cultures about dreaming over millennia, but explore in more depth the key researchers starting in the 18th century, continuing into the 19th and 20th centuries, with an emphasis on those best known – Freud and Jung – but also including many whose name and work were unfamiliar to me.  The most serious and scientific dream research took off in the mid 20th century with the “discovery” of REM sleep in the 1950s, and continues to this day.
• Why we dream.  They explore various theories about why we dream, the evolutionary and biological components, how dreaming may serve brain health as well as deal with unresolved issues in our conscious life, aid our memory functions and integrate disparate thoughts and experiences into our memories and consciousness. 
• Sleep.  They take a detour to explain and explore sleep itself – its purpose in health and wellness, the various stages of sleep and their purpose.  This is important because later they describe different kinds of dreams that we experience in different stages of sleep. Apparently, we dream in ALL stages of sleep, but those dreams we most remember normally occur in REM sleep.
• Hypnogogic dreaming.  This is the dreaming we do just as we’re falling asleep.  In my own case,  these little dreams are what tell me that I’m indeed falling asleep.  This a very different stage of dreaming from normal REM and non-REM sleep dreaming, and these dreams have their own characteristics and often can serve us differently.
• Dream Incubation.  They offer techniques for inducing dreams we would like to have in order to explore feelings or reactions to things that are occurring in our conscious life, or perhaps to help us solve a problem. That dreams sometimes open the door for the subconscious mind to help solve problems that are confounding us in our conscious lives has a long history, and the authors tell us how to increase the likelihood of effective dream incubation. 
• The “NEXTUP” model. The authors developed their own model to help explain the function of dreams.  Their  NEXTUP (Network EXploration To Understand Possibilities)  model is referred to frequently in discussing ideas about why we dream what we dream.  The NEXTUP model claims that the brain sorts through our its network of memories to help process, explain and understand the past and prepare for/predict the future. This model explains that “While dreaming, the brain identifies associations between recently formed memories (typically from the preceding day) and older, often only weakly related memories, and monitors whether the narrative it constructs from these memories induces an emotional response in the brain.” (from an article written by the two authors in The Scientist, available here.)  Whether there is an emotional response to a memory tells the brain whether a memory is significant.
• Meaning of dreams and dream content- theories  There are many and conflicting theories of what and how much meaning one should give to the content of dreams.  The standard answer is “It depends.” Their discussion of NEXTUP begins this discussion.  Sometimes dreams provide powerful input clearly relevant to our conscious lives. More often than not however, dreams are gibberish, a potpourri of random and crazy impressions and bizarre incidents that make little sense to us – and indeed, that characterizes most – but not all – of the dreams I remember.  The authors generally agree with the “widely held view that dreams reflect the dreamer’s current thoughts and concerns as well as recent salient experiences,” but they doubt that most dreams carry important messages or deserve careful interpretation.  This is a fruitful and fascinating discussion led by two scientists who’ve been exploring dreams and dreaming for decades. 
• Creativity and problem solving.  Related to dream incubation, the authors explore how dreams have enhanced creativity by being unconstrained by our daily prejudices and social conditioning, and therefore can open the door to solutions to problems or ideas that are somehow difficult to access when we are awake. He shares how a number of great inventions have their origins in the dreams of inventors, from Edison, to Einstein, and artistic creations from Dali to Paul McCartney.
• RBD -REM-sleep Behavioral Disorder – Most of us have a biological switch that makes us immobile or essentially paralyzed when we are in REM sleep. But this mechanism malfunctions for some people, and during a violent dream, people have been known to physically hurt themselves and/or others, acting out bizarre or violent dreams.  The authors explain what current science believes is happening here and what are some of the current treatments.
• Sleepwalking (somnambulism)  Another strange phenomenon in which the person shows qualities of being both asleep AND awake simultaneously. Again, they share what the science says about this state and the current state of treatments.
• Nightmares, PTSD, Narcolepsy – these are among the sleep dysfunctions that they explore in significant detail, as well as various therapies that have worked in helping people move beyond these challenges.  We all have nightmares – and their sources are varied. They also address recurring nightmares, and how these are often different from nightmares originating in PTSD, which have their own specific characteristics.   Narcolepsy is just falling asleep suddenly at inopportune times.  I learned a new term for nightmare: “dysphoric dreaming.”
• Lucid Dreaming – Because this has gotten so much attention in recent years, they spend a lot of time exploring the myths, science, reality, and controversy surrounding lucid dreaming, as well as the ongoing research.  They describe how there are different levels of lucid dreaming, from momentarily knowing that you are dreaming, to being consciously aware throughout a dream and being able to direct actions and ask questions of characters in one’s dream.   They claim that most of us are capable of developing the capacity to have some aspects of lucid dreaming with a certain amount of practice, and they provide guidance for how to become a lucid dreamer. One has to begin by training oneself to remember one’s dreams, and they provide guidance as to how.
• Telepathic, pre-cognitive and clairvoyant dreaming – Another fascinating topic associated with dreaming to which they give a lot of attention.  They discuss the controversy surrounding  the validity of telepathic dreaming, describing experiments that have been taking place for decades that convince these authors that, thru mechanisms unknown, other people can intentionally and telepathically impact other people’s dreams.  In fact I participated in an experiment like this when I was an undergraduate 50 years ago.  The authors describe The Grateful Dead experiment that gave evidence to support that there is something to it.  Regarding pre-cognitive and clairvoyant dreaming, the authors are skeptical – arguing (along w Gary Klein in his Sources of Power) that subconscious awareness of environmental clues probably have informed dreams that appear precognitive. One of the authors is a complete non-believer in the ESP of dreams; the other is skeptical but more open to the possibility. They both note that such metaphysical issues don’t lend themselves well to scientific experiments. 

When Brains Dream is a fascinating look at this aspect of our creative lives – in which, while we sleep, we create realities and activities that we could never imagine in our waking conscious lives.  The authors claim that the dreaming brain attempts to represent to us in different forms what has been and what might be in our lives – in the same way that artists – painters, composers, novelists attempt to create images that reflect aspects of our lives that we may be too preoccupied to see for ourselves.  . Dreams are puzzling indicators as to who we really are, beneath the masks we show to the world every day, and given how much of our lives we spend sleeping (and dreaming) it is a worthwhile topic to study. Given that the  authors offer and respect different perspectives and counter-theories to their own, and openly admit that there is so much that we still don’t know,  I have faith in what these authors present in When Brains Dream.

Why this book;  I was on a zoom discussion session and this book was mentioned and I was intrigued – so I bought it and read it. 

Summary in 3 sentences:  In this short book (135 pages) the author describes his experience tracking a lion in one of the game preserves in South Africa with two other expert trackers – even more experienced than he.  He uses the tracking experience as a metaphor to relate to our relationship to nature, to the wild and natural world in which we as human beings evolved, and which he notes still lives inside of us.  He describes how finding and following the track of the lion becomes a metaphor for finding one’s path in life.

My Impressions:  I loved this book.   There are only three characters on a one day “adventure” tracking a lion in one of the game preserves of South Africa.  The author introduced us to his two mentors in the world of tracking, and then takes us along on the adventure.  And as we walked the trails, searched for, found, lost, then found again signs of the lion they had heard howling the night before, we learn about the “art” of not only tracking but living in and as part of nature, part of the food chain, as both predator as well as prey, alert, listening with one’s whole body, following one’s intuitions, while also keeping one’s rational mind engaged.  It is a process of constant learning, accepting, deciding and living with those decisions.  Kinda like life – but more natural and somehow more alive than how most of us live. 

“I don’t know where we are going, but I know exactly how to get there” This enigmatic statement he says might be the motto of the great tracker.  It might also be the primary theme of this book. His focus is on process, not outcomes. 

His two mentors with whom he shares this adventure are Alex and Renias.  Alex he describes as white, grew up initially in wealth, and then as a young boy he had to live by his wits in poverty, becoming “one of the best trackers in southern Africa, ten years older than me, close enough to get into trouble together, old enough to guide me out of it. p2

 Renias, a native African, he describes as “to the bushveld what Laird Hamilton is to the surf of Hawaii.  He has a skill and know-how that is beyond anything that can be taught, an innate sense of how the environment works, laid down in the fertile learning grounds of childhood, (who) grew up hunting and gathering, in tune with the old ways.”   Renias, he says, “has achieved one of the hardest things to achieve in our time:  a freedom from judgment about how and who he should be.” p 9-10

In The Lion Tracker’s Guide to Life, Varty  follows the tracks of the lion with his mentors, and in the process, he teaches us that in order to become fully human again, we need to reconnect with nature, our natural wild selves, which are the truly authentic versions of who we were born to be, before the chisels of civilized culture shaped us into the people our cultures and societies want us to be.  Many of us have lost touch with our “wild” selves which are often at odds with what our social programming wants us to be – and consequently, we live in that tension, and struggle to find our way. 

Varty’s bottom line message in this book – after all the metaphors which connect lion tracking to living in the modern world.  “Step off the superhighway of modern life and go quietly onto your own track.  Go to a new trail where you can hear the whisper of your wild self in the echoes of the forest.  Find the trail of something wild and dangerous and worthy of your fear and joy and focus.  Live deeply on your own inner guidance. There is nothing more healing than finding your gifts and sharing them. “ p 122

SOME GREAT QUOTES: Going back through this book and reviewing what I had highlighted re-inspired me.  So I include many of them in this review.  Scan them, get the gist of Varty’s message, and then read the book. And ask yourself –  What am I doing to stay in touch with my wild/natural self, and is it enough? 

-To Renias and Alex, the unknown is a discipline of wildness, and wildness is a relationship with aliveness.  Too much uncertainty is chaos, but too little is death. p 14 

-Nature does’t care about wealth or social position. It cares only about presence, one’s ability to read the signs, navigate the terrain, and translate the language of the wilderness. Nature is the great equalizer.p17

-No wild animal has ever participated in a “should.” p 18

-The art of the way the tracker sees is the way he can look at the thing he has seen a thousand times and always see something new. p 25

-Obsessed with perfection and doing it right , we want to go straight to the lion.  We don’t realize the significance of the path of first tracks, and how to be invested  in a discovery rather than an outcome. p25

-(We were ) in a wild place where few people will ever venture; where the environment conveys a nature deep within your own being.  p26

-Alex sits quietly beside me in the easy silence of old friendship.  p 27

-You cant think your way to a calling.  Finding what is uniquely yours requires more than rationality. You have to learn how your body speaks. You have to learn how you know what you know. You have to follow the inner tracks of your feelings, sensations, and instincts, the integrity and truth that are deeper than ideas about what you should do. You have to learn to follow a deeper, wiser, wilder place inside yourself. p30

-We are a part of nature, and inside each of us is a wild self that knows deeply what it is meant to do.  Inside each of us is a natural innate knowledge of why we are here. Tracking is a function of directing attention, bringing our awareness back to this subtle inner trail of the wild self, and learning to see its path. p31

-We lose ourselves in shoulds. Shoulds are full of traps – traps laid by society and your limited rules for yourself.  No wild animal has ever participated in a should.. What you know to do is deeper than that.  p31

-Attention shapes the direction of the tracker’s life.  We must turn our attention back to the wild self. p32

-Tracking is very much like learning a foreign language. Singe tracks are words.  p 39

-The rhino and the path he walked told me something different: don’t try to be someone, rather find the thing that is so engaging that it makes you forget yourself. p 41

-The track of the father is to find him within you. To find what he gave you and what he didn’t give you. You must use both sides.  p42

-Renias knows the instrument of the body as wild and natural and full of instinctual wisdom.  He knows to think but also to feel.  He uses the way this body feels moving on the track to feel the lion….we have been disconnected from our instincts.  Bringing attention back to the landscape of the body allows you to find the trail of the wild self.  p44

-Joseph Campbell said, “If you can see your whole life’s path laid out then it’s not your life’s path.” p47

-I had to learn to be in the process of transformation, not trying to be transformed. You can’t skip past creating to the creation.  p 48

-Obsessed with perfection and doing it right, we want to go straight to the “lion.”  We don’t realize the significance of the path of first tracks and how to be invested in a discovery, rather than an outcome.  p49

-Here the margins for error are small, and the way one behaves in a high-risk situation is critical.  Yet for all of us, a life with no sharp edges would be worse.  The hazard of modern times is the danger of no danger. p 51

-Seeing someone who simply doesn’t have the social programming you do is profound, because it forces you to see that a huge part of what you might think of as “this is how I am” or “this is what you do” is not you at all, but patterns of behavior and thinking you have adopted from the cultural story.  p54

-I think of all the angst I have felt between choices. I’ve been paralyzed by options and the idea that there is a single right way.  Renias is more Zen; for him the only choice is the one he has made. He knows any choice will set something in motion. This is the magic of the bush and life.  p59

-Renias isn’t trying to do anything. By being himself, free from roles, rules, obligations, he is in a state of complete naturalness. Lao Tzu said in his ancient text the Tao Te Ching, “when nothing is done, nothing is left undone.”  The mastery is that there is no trying.  p61 (reminds me of Mo Norman – professional golfer)

-As paradoxical as it sounds, going down a path and not finding a track is part of finding the track…. the path of not here is part of the path of here.  p 68

-There is an intelligence that runs through things.  To be a tracker is to be aligned with that intelligence.  Carl Jung referred to “synchronicity” as a simultaneous co-arising of something in the outer world with something deeply meaningful to your inner life.  The place in space and time where your non-local spiritual self, vast and unhindered, meets your human self in a moment of meaning specific to you. p71

-If we are to become trackers, all of us need to ask ourselves: Trackers of what?  New ways of living?  A new set of metrics of what a successful life actually is?  Can we, with the eyes of a tracker, see deeply into life and our own being and recognize a trail of intricately connected happenstance on which we know to move forward toward a new, more connected experience of life?  p 72

-I think of all the people I have spoken to who have said, “When I know exactly what the next thing is, I will make a move.”  I think of all the people whom I have taught to track who froze when they lost the track, wanting to be certain of the right path forward before they could move.  Trackers try things.. The tracker on a lost track enters a process of rediscovery that is fluid.  p75

-We have become so unnatural and patterned and socialized that some of us don’t even know what feels good or bad. We operate on autopilot. We are in our lives, but we are not alive.  p 75

-I have come to learn that losing the track is not the end of the trail, but rather a space of preparation….Prepare yourself to hear the call, invite the unknown, look for the first track, tune in to the instrument of the body, and learn to see the track amidst many that brings you to life. p77

-There is a wilderness in each person waiting to be brought back to life.  p 84

-As a safari guide I had been taught not to anthropomorphize.  The clinical eye of the scientific observer should not project human charctereistics onto the animals   What isolation not see our trickery in the jackal of the courage of a mother in a lioness around her cubs. As a tracker I wanted to take off the eyes of the superior impartial observer so the animals could inhabit me. I wanted to step toward kinship, not science. p 89

-The deepest lessons must be lived.. The wild self, the part that is in touch with instinct and needs and purpose, the part that can feel shades of emotion  and is natural, is lie that. It must be awakened, followed, listened for – tracked.  Men and women search for intimacy, but what they really need is wildness.  p 89-90

-In our encounters with the edges, we come to know ourselves more deeply. Neurosis is a substitute for real suffering.   Fearfulness is the most common state in a life that asks for no real courage.  p 103

-In truth, while a trail can flow under the eye of a master, it is often a process of nonlinear problem solving. The story never goes like you want it to.  p105

-Deep inside, we want to belong.  This remains true today, but maybe for the first time in human history, modern society – the dominant culture -has become the thing that isolates us.  p108

-Joseph Campbell:  “People are not looking for the meaning of life, they are looking fore the feeling of being alive.” p113

-It is a kind of energy I have witnessed in people who have merged “work,” “mission,” and “meaning.”  These people don’t take holidays or need days off. They outwork everyone, not from some kind of gritty determination, but from a place of pure pleasure.  p115

-To live as a tracker is to know your track when it passes you.  p116

-Suddenly, I feel an old friend who has walked with me for years arise. Each one of us has these friends; mine is called self-doubt.  I have learned rather than to resist him, to invite him in, welcoming him as a t-eacher of humility. Together, we continue.  The first track, and then the next first track.  

-At high levels of any art form, the practical gives way to the mystical. p 122

-More and more, the message lands. We are a society that lives in denial of death and so we are a society that denies life. But out here, how flimsy we are, with no boundaries between us and nature. What a wonderful teacher of how to live. In the face of fear is also something like awe. Then after awe,  humility.   Humility is the liberation from illusions of dominance, control, and power. I give up the importance of my life to instead become a part of life.  p 128

Great little book.  A great book for a discussion group.  Highly recommended.

Why this book: Recommended by my friend Jay and by other members of a discussion group we’re in together.  I wasn’t going to read this book, until to a person, the others in our group raved about it and said they were using it in their work and were having others they work with read it. Given that the people in this group are very smart and whose judgment I respect enormously,  I changed my mind, got the audio and listened to it. 

Summary in 3 sentences.  Jones is arguing for a slightly skeptical view toward the “unimpeachable authority’ of data and analytics.  He is a great story teller, and in the book he tells multiple fascinating stories of how people who believed they were using  the unimpeachable authority of analytics and data to make decisions,  have gotten results that shocked and disappointed them, or in some cases were tragic.  The title “Eye Test” refers to what one sees, senses, intuits based on human experience, and his point is that while using data and analytics is strongly encouraged, our human senses, experience and instincts provide valuable input that one ignores at one’s peril. 

My Impressions: The summary above is what I took as the “bottom line” message of this book.  His message is NOT against analytics and data – he believes they add an important component to decision making, and sometimes may even be the most important component.  But he warns, they should not be the ONLY component, and he makes the case from a variety of perspectives and in a variety of contexts that our basic human experience and instincts should be respected, given due consideration and certainly not ignored, even if they may contradict what the analytics are telling us.  The data can miss things.    

If you say, “Yeah, I already know that,”  it is still very much worth reading the book to see how he makes his point, in worlds as different as entertainment,  sports, finance, law enforcement, government and medicine.  Chris Jones is a great story teller and he reads his book himself –  I listened to the book on audio, and couldn’t wait to get onto my bike or into my car to listen to his stories as I rode or drove, stories that reinforced his point that while analytics should be and an important part of the equation in decision making, they should NOT the whole story or even the most important part, as some would want, and they do not obviate the need for human judgment.  He repeatedly makes the point that data, statistics and analytics are not inherently objective – they are the result of human processes which necessarily include – usually unintentionally – bias, prejudice and error, and he gives many examples to make his case.  

The Book’s Conclusion – He concludes his book with an impassioned and articulate plea for humility.  There is a uniquely human hubris in claiming authority for AI and human created analytics, and he gives multiple examples of questions the answers to which we just don’t or can’t know, and which, while science, AI and analytics may help find some answers, some of the questions he asks are simply a part of the wonder of human existence.   

It is a profound book making a simple point eloquently, powerfully and convincingly –  at least to me, a right brain guy, who is inherently part of a choir he may be preaching to.

Why this book: Selected by my Navy SEAL reading group, and Steven Pressfield agreed to join us for the discussion.  

Summary in 4 sentences:  This is Pressfield’s life of Alexander novelized,  told in the first-person from Alexander’s perspective, as if he’s relating his life, his challenges, and various campaigns and lessons learned to his wife Roxanne’s young brother Itanes, during his campaign to conquer the known world. The book begins with a description of Macedon and Macedonian culture, a brief look at Alexander’s boyhood in Macedonia as the son of Philip of Macedon, being taught “to reason” by Aristotle, and “to act” – physical/mental toughness required of a soldier by Telamon, to become Philips’ successor, and King of Macedonia.  Then after Philip’s assassination,  the large majority of the book is Alexander relating the highlights of his campaign thru Persia and into India, his philosophy of leadership and warfare., and .  There is an epilogue which describes the drama that led him to turn back before he reached the Great Sea, what happened immediately afterward, and describes his death. 

My Impressions:  A powerful portrait not only of Alexander but of the nature of warfare in that time and place, and the genius of Alexander in how he conquered the known world with an army inferior in size and resources to those he met and defeated. But more so, it is about Alexander the man, who struggled with his genius, his “daimon” which drove him to supersede all others, as he also struggled to be a man and a human being.  In this book, and there is some evidence that this was also the case for the historical Alexander, his close friend Hephaestion and confidant was his conscience in this regard, though warfare in that time, perhaps even more than now, required setting one’s humane instincts aside in the interest of survival and domination – though Alexander and his generals would argue that that drive for domination is indeed human, all too human. 

The book has an interesting structure.  It is mostly chronological, but early on we have a coupld of chapters in which Alexander is confronting an Indian King near the end of his campaign, which sets the stage for the final chapters and battle of the book.  Pressfield does not take us down the coast of the Eastern Mediterranean to Egypt, concentrating instead on the conquest of Persia, then Afghanistan and finally into India.

Battles: There are several battles that we experience in this book and Pressfield teaches us about Alexander’s  strategy and tactics as well as his philosophy of fighting associated with how he deployed his forces and earned his victories. The battles this book describes are:

• Battle of Chaeronea in which the Macedonians under King Philip defeat Thebes, their only true rival in Greece, and which was Alexander’s first command in battle.
• Battle of Granicus,  Alexander’s first battle against Darius and the Persians.
• Battle of Issus near the coast, Alexander’s 2^nd battle against Darius, in which over confidence led to  Alexander being surprised from behind, but still yields a convincing, if surprising victory
• Battle of Gaugamela – Culminating battle for his conquest of Persia, which sees Darius flee and after which he takes Babylon.
• Battle of Hydaspes – in India against the enlightened King Poras who offered to teach Alexander how to be a king, not just a conqueror..

The Books of Virtues of War: The titles of the “books” within Virtues of War offer a clue as to how Pressfield uses this narrative to explain Alexander’s philosophy of war, as Pressfield was able to deduce it from the many sources upon which he built his understanding of Alexander and his campaigns. There are separate chapters within the “books” but the story continues chronologically and there is only a loose connection between the titles of the books and the contents within them. 

•  Book One: The Will to fight
•  Book Two: Love of Glory
•  Book Three: Self Command
•  Book Four: Shame at Failure
•  Book Five Contempt for Death
•  Book Six: Patience
•  Book Seven: An Instinct for the kill
•  Book Eight: Love for one’s comrades
•  Book Nine: Love for one’s enemy

Pressfield’s comments:  Steven Pressfield graciously agreed to join us for our discussion.  I didn’t take notes but below are a few highlights I recall (perhaps imperfectly) from our discussion with him:

• He read everything he could find on the historical Alexander to create in his mind a three- dimensional idea of Alexander the man.  In his acknowledgments at the conclusion of the book, he lists many of those sources.
• When I asked him how he got into Alexander’s head so well, he said that when he sat down to write, the words, the language, the story seemed to come from outside himself. 
• He believes in an alternate reality which somehow we can bridge. He felt that when he writes, the words and stories seem to come from it to him.
• Alexander was a truly gifted but conflicted man, between his human impulses and his daimon and drive to conquer.
• When asked why he chose to write this book in the first person, (unlike his other historical novels,) he responded that a phrase had occurred to him that stuck in his head,  “I have always been a soldier.  I have known no other life.”  Thinking about it, he realized that that phrase applied very much to Alexander, and that inspired him to write the book.  And following that “message”  which occurred to him, those two sentences are in the first person – thus the book would be written in the first person. Indeed, the book opens with those two sentences.   

Daimon: The concept of the “Daimon” (pronounced day-moan) is key in the book to understanding Alexander as Pressfield portrays him.  Much of Alexander’s challenge is his effort to manage and control his daimon.  In Latin, “Daimon”  is “genius” and is often used to refer to a supernatural power.  Alexander realized that he had a power that was somehow separate from his own person or personality  – almost an alter-ego.  Part of Alexander loved people, wanted to be loved, and hated killing; his daimon on the other hand, dispassionately drove him to dominate and conquer the world, which included much killing, retributive slaughter and destruction. He truly believed his daimon was a part of and driven by his destiny.  In Virtues of War, Hephaestion and Telamon caution him about managing his daimon.  You’ll see in the quotes below, many references to Alexander’s challenge to manage his daimon.

Breakdown in Discipline: There is an interesting scene after the victory at the key battle of Issus when discipline broke down in Alexander’s army, and his men engaged in a bacchanalia of looting and destruction of the Persian King Darius’s treasures, which were suddenly theirs.   Alexander was mortified by the primitive expression of this undisciplined will to destroy,  and forced his army to stop and undergo brutal military training, to restore discipline and get them under control, after just winning one of the greatest military victories in history.  He berated them, that their lack of discipline in victory had disgraced him, disgraced Macedonia, and shamed their colors and country. p 154-56

Babylon: When Alexander conquered Babylon, he kept in power many of Darius’s leaders and functionaries and showed respect for their religion and culture, which won him the enmity of many of his Macedonian generals, officers, and men, who had been brought up to regard Persian culture, as weak and effeminate, and therefore inferior to the warrior culture of Macedonia.  Even though the soldiers had engaged in and enjoyed the debauchery that Babylon had offered in celebration of their new dominance, they resented that Alexander had shown respect for and adopted some of the practices of Babylonian culture, apparently in preference to cultural practices of his native Macedonia.  This open mindedness toward Persians was not appreciated nor respected by most in his army. Alexander ignored these objections, but he knew he had to get his army out of Babylon and back on the campaign again soon, to keep them focused and under control.

Telamon  In Virtues of War, Telamon had been a soldier for King Philip and had been assigned to teach the young boy Alexander about war and discipline, and to have him undergo hardship to make him tough and resilient. Telamon continued to serve Alexander throughout his campaign and at the end, when Alexander was forced to turn around before reaching the Eastern Ocean,  Telamon  chose to leave Alexander’s service and head East and follow the path of the yogi they had met, who had “conquered his need to conquer the world” (see quote below.) Unlike most of the generals in Pressfield’s book, Telamon was a made up character, based on a mythological figure, and according to Pressfield himself in our discussion with him, Telamon is his favorite character, one who he brings back in his other historical novels that take place in ancient times.  In fact, in a different incarnation, Telamon is the main character and protagonist in Pressfield’s latest novel, A Man at Arms.

Conclusion and Epilogue  Alexander’s first person narrative in Virtues of War concludes with his great victory after the battle of Hydaspes, prior to which his army had been on the verge of rebellion.  Alexander declares, “This victory has brought us back. We are ourselves again. Nothing else matters.  Believe in our destiny and press on. No force on earth can stop us now!” p 335. The next chapter in Virtues of War is the Epilogue, told in the voice of Itanes, his brother-in-law and page to whom he had narrated his story thus far in the book.  The Epilogue recounts briefly how, after continuing East after Hydaspes, his army eventually insisted on going home.  Though Alexander still was driven to conquer on, and to reach the great Eastern Ocean,  he reluctantly acquiesced to their desires, and turned back to the West.  Itanes recounts how Alexander continued his conquests, but this time heading West back toward Macedonia and Greece,  touches but briefly on the horrors he and his army experienced on their return to Babylon, how Alexander was never the same after losing his closest friend Hephaestion to disease along the way, and finally after returning to Babylon, succumbed himself to disease at the age of 32 years. 

QUOTES FROM THE BOOK  Probably the best way for me to review for myself Virtues of War, and convey to others a sense for the key themes of the book is to offer some of the quotes I found most compelling.  Many of them are below (page numbers refer to the paperback copy, pictured above.)

On his close friend Hephaestion: “Only one thing keeps him from being my equal.  He lacks the element of the monstrous.  For this I love him. ” p14

Soldiers the proverb says, are like children .  Generals are worse.  To the private soldier’s fecklessness and ungovernability, the general officer adds pride and petulance, impatience, intransigence, avarice, arrogance and duplicity.  p15

Such virtues of patience, courage, selflessness, which the soldier seems to have acquired for the purpose of defeating the foe, are in truth for use against enemies within himself – the eternal antagonists of inattention, greed, sloth, self-conceit, and so  on.  p22

War is theater, I have said, and the essence of theater is artifice.  What we show, we will not do.  what  we don’t show, we will do.  p52

My daimon was and is, so strong that I am at times possessed by it.  p67

I feel my daimon as I read.  The sequence of experience is this: a flash of rage, succeeded immediately by a chill, then a state of pure, detached objectivity,.. Emotion has fled. My mind is pellucid I am thinking the way an eagle thinks, or a lion.  p 73

As boys we were taught, in our tutor Aristotle’s phrase, that happiness consisted in “the active exercise of one’s faculties in conformity with virtue.”  But virtue in war is written in the enemy’s blood.  p81

When a champion of Persia charges, he cries out his name and his matronymic.  This is so that if he achieves glory, his fellows know whom to honor, and if he falls, whom to mourn.  p101

So potent is my daimon, my countrymen believe, that not only will it preserve me but it will make them whole as well…I strip articles of my kit – dagger and shin guards even my boots, – and give them away.  The men beg me not to risk my life so recklessly. “for even luck as powerful as yours  cannot be tempted forever.”  p105

(I tell my men) “I honor, too, the foe. Let us never hate him.  For he also has willingly undergone a trial of death this day.  Today the gods have granted us glory. Tomorrow, their mill may grind us to dust.  Thank them for your lives brothers, as I do for mine.”  p108

It is my daimon the men see, not me.  It is he who has brought them victory, he to whom their hopes have become attached, and he whom they fear to lose.  I must embrace this, Telamon declares, as a consequence of triumph and celebrity. “You have ceased to be Alexander” Telamon says , “and become ‘Alexander.’”  p110

The enemy are hill tribes mostly, wild free fellows who value liberty before life.  I love them. What do I want from them? Only their friendship.  When at last they believe this, they come in trailing gift colts and bridles of gold.  p126

(A soldier breaks apart priceless booty after Issus) and looks up grinning, as if to say, “See, we are conquerors; we are beyond law or consequence.”  p154

“The life of peace is fitting for a mule or an ass. I would be a lion! Who prospers in peace,”  Philip demanded, “save clerks and cowards?  Glory and fame are the only pursuits worthy of a man.  Happiness?  I  piss upon it!”  p169

I used to be able to separate myself from my daimon. It’s harder now.   I can’t tell sometimes where he leaves off and I begin.  Hephaestion responds: “You are not your gift, Alexander. You employ your gift.” p170

One cannot be a philosopher and a warrior at the same time, as Parmenio has said.  And one cannot be a man and a king.”p174

Chapter 19 offers Alexander’s Maxims of War – some of which: Speed is the greatest advantage in war and the crucial importance of winning at the decisive point in the battle. The role of the officer is to control the emotions of his men. It includes practical wisdom such as: A cavalryman’s horse should be smarter than he is. But the horse should never be allowed to know this.  p183

My envoy sought to make the leading men of Tyre and Gaza see reason; I dispatched letters beneath my own hand. I pledged to make their cities richer, freer, safer. Still they  resisted.  They compelled me to make examples of them.   What I abhor most about such obduracy is that it robs me of the occasion to be magnanimous… The enemy will not see chivalry. He obliges me to fight not as a knight but as a butcher – and for this he must pay with his own ruin.p188

I felt at home in Egypt. I could happily have been a priest.  In truth I am a warrior-priest who marches where the Deity directs, in the service of Necessity and Fate. p188-89

Here is something the instructors of war do not teach: the art of confronting the irrational, of disarming the groundless and the unknown….A racehorse cannot gallop the column’s length faster than the newest rumor or the freshest fear.  p197-98

Can you  please your constituents? Never let me hear that word! The men are never happy with anything. The march is always too long, the way always too tough.  What works with them? Hardship. p201

The lion never makes a bad decision. Is he guided by reason? Is an eagle “rational”?  Rationality is superstition by another name.  Go deep my friend. Touch the daimon. Do I believe in signs and omens?  I believe in the Unseen. I believe in the Unmanifest, the Yet To Be.  Great commanders do not temper their measures to What Is.  They bring forth What May Be.  p201

Sweat, speed action.  These are the antidotes to fear. p206

The material a commander manipulates is the human heart. His art lies in producing courage in his own men and terror in the foe.  p211

When men know they will be attacked, they feel fear; when they know they will attack, they feel strength.  p 213

Do I feel fear, my friends?  How can I?  For to stand in ranks with you, to contend for glory at your side, is all I have ever wanted.  I shall sleep tonight with the bliss of an infant, for I possess in this hour all I have ever dreamed of:  a worthy foe and worthy mates to face him with. p215

I am the living soul of the army. As blood flows from the lion’s heart to its limbs, so courage flows from me to my countrymen.  p215

To lose a brave horse is almost as bad as to lose a man; worse in its way, for no horse understands why he fights; he does so only for love of us.  His loss is as cruel as the death of a child.   p 232

The ordeal of command consists in this:  that one makes decisions of fatal consequence based on ludicrously inadequate intelligence.  p233

Great prizes are won only at great hazard.  p 235

The tribesmen of Afghanistan were the fiercest fighters I ever faced, and their general, the Grey Wolf, the only adversary I ever feared.  The wolf warriors’ religion is fatalism.  They worship freedom and death. The language they understand is terror.. To prevail, one must be more terrible than they….They are capable of endurance beyond all human measure and can bear such suffering, of both flesh and spirit, as would break a block of stone.  p290

And yet, despite their treacherousness and duplicity, one could not help but admire these fellows. I came myself, to love them….Their women were proud and beautiful, their children bright and fearless; they knew how to laugh and how to be happy.  p291

The instrument of counter guerrilla warfare is the massacre. One must learn this art if he hopes to prevail. ..It is combat shorn of chivalry. Telamon called it “the Butcher’s War.”…You cannot fight guerrillas with ordinary forces, and you cannot fight them with ordinary men.  p292

The daimon and the self are subordinate to the soul, but the daimon, should he overcome the self, may abrogate the soul. At that point, a man becomes a monster.  p295

Agathon stood in spirited exchange with the eldest of the yogi wise men. Indicating me,  Agathon declared, “This man has conquered the world! What have you done?”  The yogi philosopher replied without an instant’s hesitation,  “I have conquered the need to conquer the world.”   I laughed with delight.  p 300

Telemon: “The yogi’s remark that he has ‘conquered the need to conquer the world’  means that he has mastered his daimon. For what is the daimon but that will to supremacy which resides not only in all men but in beasts and even plants and is, at its heart, the essence of all aggressive life?… The daimon is inhuman.  The concept of limits is alien to it. Unchecked, it devours everything, including itself. Is it evil? Is the acorn evil, aspiring to become the oak?… In nature, the will to dominion is held within bounds by the limited capacity of the beast.  Only in man is this instinct unrestrained and only in that man like you, my friend, whose gifts and preeminence transcend all external governance.  We have all known suicides, whose stem was this:  A man must kill himself to slay his daimon.” p312

Why this book: I had read  the novel The Overstory by Richard Powers,  the 2019 Pulitzer prize for fiction winner, and was very intrigued by a character in the book who had explored the connections between trees and within forests, who had been ostracized and viewed as a crank – until her ideas were validated.  That character was based on Suzanne Simard. When I saw that she’d written her own book telling her story, I was intrigued and chose to read it. 

Summary in 3 Sentences: This a combination personal memoir and a recent history of how forest ecology has come to accept that trees are connected communities and communicate with each other in ways previously unknown to biologists.  Suzanne Simard shares her life story, intermingling major events in her personal life with discoveries her professional research has made into the many ways in which trees and plants communicate and share resources with each other.  As the data from her research picks up momentum, she struggles to gain acceptance of her ideas in traditional forestry, and all along, she shares the struggles and joys she experiences in her personal life – a wonderful combination ground-breaking biological insights and personal memoir. 

My Impressions:   Loved this book.  I really liked the woman Suzanne Simard as she presents herself in this memoir – a shy, humble, very dedicated scientist, also a hardy backwoods woman who is comfortable in tough environments, having spent much of her life hiking in the mountains and rain forests of British Colombia.    Her ideas in which she believed passionately, were rejected by traditionalists in the very powerful forestry lobby in Canada, but though it was painful and frustrating, she kept at it, and over time has won great respect, not only for her ideas but for her persistence in advocating for them, and has won redemption as her theories have proven correct.   Suzanne Simard is open in sharing her life with us the readers, while also using her story to educate us about her amazing insights about the life and community of trees, and plants, and fungi that populate our forests.  

She grew up in a small rural town in the mountains and forests of British Colombia, the daughter of loggers and foresters, and cowboys.  In the first couple of chapters we learn something of what it was like to grow up in that small idyllic town surrounded by close family, forests, rivers, and mountains and how she developed her interest in and love for the forests. As she reached adulthood she was happy  and felt privileged to get a job in the powerful and well regarded Forestry service. 

Along the way she shares the pain she and her siblings experienced when their parents divorces.  She painfully recounts an inebriated argument she had with her beloved brother, a cowboy rodeo-rider.  She felt the silly argument was her fault, but before she could get around to reconciling with him, he is killed in an accident.  (She shares a fascinating story of his premonition of his own death. (p162)  Page numbers refer to Knopf Hardcover published 2021)   

As a young adult and researcher for the Canadian forest service, she begins to get insights into how trees and plants interact that became the theory that then became her life’s work – to better understand the “community” and ecology of the forest, as well as to change forestry policies and practices based on a new and different understanding about how trees grow, support each other and thrive. Traditional forestry was based on the theory that trees competed with each other for light, water, nutrients.  Simard’s theories stood that idea on its head, claiming that trees in the forests she was studying actually cooperate and support each other.  “Roots didn’t thrive when they grew alone.  The trees needed one another.”  p161

She eventually chose to leave the Forest Service (she assumed she would be fired for her unorthodox ideas) and pursued a PhD at Oregon State in Corvallis, which opened doors to research grants and other opportunities to explore her passion.  She shares how she met and fell in love with her husband,  another biological researcher, they married, had two daughters, and moved back to Canada where they began raising a family, and continued her research, but now also as a wife and a mother.  

Then as her career took off,  she chose to accept a position as an associate professor at the University of British Colombia in Vancouver, but after a couple of years, city life did not agree with her husband, and the family eventually chose to return to their small town home near Nelson BC, a nearly 9 hour drive from Vancouver.   Suzanne stayed on in her position, and her weekly commutes from Vancouver put great strain on her energy, and on her marriage and family.  She describes how she coped, until the struggles to align her and her husband’s careers, and their conflicting lifestyle desires finally ended their marriage.   She eventually developed a close friendship with a woman friend who helped her cope and deal with the the challenges of now being a single mother,  as her research continued to uncover new truths about the community of plants and trees in the forest.

She found that different fungi support different kinds of plants and trees. They might appear to some to be parasites, but actually are symbiotic helpers, helping trees to share nitrogen, carbon, water and other nutrients. There are a hundred or more species of fungi that support trees in the forest,

“About half (of the fungi) were generalists, colonizing both paper birch and Douglas fir in a diverse network. An intricately woven rug.  The other half were specialists, with fidelity to either birch or fir, but not both….  Some were good at acquiring phosphorus from humus, others nitrogen from aging wood. some sopped up water from deep in the soil, others from shallow layers. Some were active in spring, others in fall …Some produced energy-rich exudates that fueled bacteria performing other jobs, while other fungi produced fewer exudates because their jobs required less energy.” p168

Trees seemed to have a reciprocity arrangement, in which during windows when one species or tree had an abundance of life-nurturing carbon, nitrogen, water, or other key nutrients,  it would share with other surrounding trees, and when those trees were doing well, they would give back.  “This trading system between the two species  (birch and Douglas fir,)  shifting with the seasons, suggested that the trees were in a sophisticated exchange pattern, possibly reaching a balance over the course of a year. “ p175

Also she found that “Mother Trees” were most generous with their own seedlings, though they shared with other species and trees as well.   In older trees, she found what seemed an almost intentional speeding up of sharing of nutrients before they died, as though gifting to their progeny resources they wouldn’t need anymore. And when the older trees died, their roots and rotting trunks and branches sustained the same trees they had supported in life – including and especially their own seedlings. 

“Our modern societies have made the assumption that trees don’t have the same capacities as humans.  They don’t have nurturing instincts. They don’t cure one another, don’t administer care.  But now we know Mother Trees can truly nurture their offspring.  Douglas firs, it turns out, recognize their kin and distinguish them from other families and different species. They communicate and send carbon, the building block of life, not just to the mycorrhizas (fungi) of their kin, but to other members of the community.  To help keep it whole.   They appear to relate to their offspring as do mothers passing their best recipes to their daughters.  Conveying their life energy, their wisdom, to carry life forward.” p 277

She shares many stories of going into the forests to explore the intricate functions of different trees and ecological systems in the forest, walking, often alone, near-miss encounters with bears, and other hazards of the forest – but she was at home in this world.  She spent time with native Americans who have lived in harmony with the forest for millennia;  their wisdom helped inform her work and they gave her the term “Mother Tree,”  since they had long before seen the special relationship that exist between trees in the forest.   

Later she shares how she developed breast cancer, learned that it had already metastasized, and the brutal treatment she underwent to be able to survive.  She assumed that her early extensive exposure to Roundup with he Forest Service to kill weeds around seedlings, as well as her academic work with radioactive carbon isotopes to track movement of nutrients in plants likely contributed to her cancer.  She was able to survive and continue her work with the support of her woman friend, her ex-husband, other friends and family, and  her daughters.  She realized that she survived with a support network similar to the type of community support that trees in the forest offer each other to survive the various traumas and challenges she describes in her book.

The book concludes on a positive note as she and her teenage daughters continue  their research walking in the woods and exploring different ways trees and plants, and fungi, and environmental conditions interact.  The hard-cover book includes impressive color photos of different trees and fungi that she describes in the book, as well as black-and-white pictures of Suzanne with her family engaged in the more personal dimensions of her story.  

I found her story fascinating, and I really liked the humble and honest and passionate woman who told it.   More is available at http://mothertreeproject.org as well as various Ted Talks and interviews with Suzanne Simard on Youtube. Two final quotes probably sum up her insights pretty well:

“Ecosystems are so similar to human societies – they’re built on relationships.  The stronger those are, the more resilient the system.”(p189) 

“Scientists now are more willing to say that forests are complex adaptive systems, comprised of many species that adjust and learn, that include legacies such as old trees and seed banks and logs, and these parts interact in intricate dynamic networks, with information feedbacks and self-organization. Systems-level properties emerge from this that add up to more than the sum of the parts.” (p300)

For another perspective on Finding the Mother Tree, read a great review by Eugenia Bone from the WSJ in 2021, which you can find here  

Why this book:  I had just read and been fascinated by The Circle.  I wanted to read the sequel and this is that sequel.

Summary in 4 sentences.  The book The Every picks up the story of the corporation The Circle eight  years later, after having acquired “The Jungle” (Amazon), and having changed it’s corporate name from “The Circle,” to “The Every,” as it continues to expand and increase in power and influence, acquiring several  new companies every week. Delaney Wells had grown up in Idaho active in the outdoors when she became  addicted to social media and a rehabilitation program helped her realize the insidiousness of not only social media but all of the different ways in which The Every was quietly taking over the lives of people all over the world.  She makes it her life’s mission to stop this juggernaut, and decides to try to find a way to destroy The Every from within.  She eventually is able to get work inside The Every and her plan is to keep suggesting new ideas to help The Every reach deeper and deeper into people’s lives, each idea more outlandish than the last,  until there would be a blow-back reaction and the public would rise up and resist. 

My Impressions:  Powerful! Impactful! Highly recommended – not only as a good story but VERY relevant to the world in which we live day.  A satire of people’s willingness to hand over their lives to technologies, computers and smart phones, and a dystopian look at where current trends are leading.

The Circle was published in 2013, and this sequel was published in 2021 and includes many of the same characters, and The Every is farther down the path that The Circle was on in 2013.  And indeed, I read nearly everyday in the WSJ or NYT of new steps and developments in our culture of oversight and safety that relate to the world that Eggers foresees and warns against in his book The Every. 

The Every is The Circle “on steroids” – both as a novel and as an organization.  As a novel, it is more complex and ambitious than The Circle. “The Every” is also the name of the organization into which The Circle evolved, after it purchases “The Jungle” a thinly veiled reference to Amazon, and integrates it into its vision and operations.  The Every is Google, Facebook, Amazon all in one organization, sharing data, goals, plans objectives – with an enormous amount of information, wealth, power and influence.  The Every becomes a monopoly that would “make the Dutch East India company look like a lemonade stand.”  As with The Circle, I listened to The Every – about 14 hours, which went by pretty quickly – well-narrated and compelling.  

Delaney Well’s plan, with help from her housemate and good friend Wes, is to win credibility within the The Every organization by proposing increasingly preposterous ideas that would increase its power and support its vision of creating its “perfect world.”   Delaney hoped The Every would embrace and implement these preposterous ideas and that they would snowball to the point that reasonable people would rebel and either bring The Every down or somehow significantly limit its power and influence.  When she and Wes proposed an idea, she feared that it was going too far, but each time, the crazy idea  was embraced and even taken further in the degree to which it would invade people’s privacy, increase oversight and social pressure, and  reduce their autonomy.  To her surprise and disappointment,  there was little resistance from the public when these ideas were implemented – all because they offered increased safety, transparency, social accountability, and protection of the environment.  All good things, right? No “insurrection” ensues.  

There are certain going-in assumptions that drive The Every and all it does. People want order, safety, predictability, and comfort, at almost any cost.  And they want to be told what to do in order to achieve  these things. The Every seeks to provide that guidance. They also want accountability (of others) and justice, so that those who transgress against the law and social norms will be caught, corrected and held accountable.  Ideally the thought is that with near total accountability and surveillance, people will be deterred from committing these transgressions in the first place – another reason why The Every’s initiatives win support.   The Every considers it completely appropriate and effective to shame people publicly to inspire proper and virtuous behavior.  People comply primarily out of fear.

The Every also seeks to mobilize the civilized world to save the planet, by reducing waste of food and other resources, and by dramatically reducing the use of carbon fuels.  Every person gets a Personal Carbon Impact score, based on the decisions they make and that score is made public.   All of these initiatives require data, which needs to be measured, tracked and interpreted, in order that behavior can be improved. Numbers provide clarity. “There’s never been any resistance among any significant part of the human race to attaching a number to any aspect of their existence. People want order.  Above all things, people want order.”

On the surface, it may sound like a good idea.  Protecting the environment and helping people improve their lives through technology are not evil goals. Imposing virtue thru shame and fear, however, eventually creates Stasi-like oversight, or a CCP-like system of social credits and behavioral compliance.  Delaney Wells is horrified by such privacy-invading surveillance, and the practice of dehumanizing human behavior into quantifiables that can be dissected, measured and  graded.  Most people however do not place great value on their independence and privacy, and are often too ready to give up personal liberty and privacy for the free stuff, comfort and security that The Every offers, and for convenience, safety, and order.   

One of the most interesting characters in the book is Delaneys college professor Professor Agarwal who regularly writes Delaney about the dangers of big tech, of people ready to sacrifice their humanity and personal lives for the conveniences that Big Tech offers, noting how such conveniences and apps are destroying the best parts of our culture. Though Delaney agrees with her, she can’t communicate with her because she knows that everything she does is monitored by The Every, and contact with Prof Agarwal would compromise her and her intent with The Every.  Agarwal’s voice serves as the conscience of traditional American values speaking out against the new Tech.  One of the reviews of The Every that I read noted that thru Agarwal,  Eggers was really channelling  the voice of Shoshana Zuboffs – the author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.

The Every is a satire of very politically correct woke culture, but it is also a warning against  the world that those who would impose their brand of virtue on the rest of us could look like.  There were a number of laugh-out-loud moments, but then I would read in the paper that something similar is being proposed or implemented somewhere in our country.  It is full of bumper stickers such as “Limitless choice is killing the world!” or “Fewer Choices, Everyone rejoices!”  It is also full of new-age politically correct language – to fire someone is to “dehire” them. There are no “homeless:’ there are the “unhoused.”  People who worked at The Every were referred to as “Everyones” and many words that referred to disapproved activities were banned within The Every. The Every did not receive glowing reviews from the Washington Post or New York Times, but did from The Guardian.  I loved it and would highly recommend it. 

The Every includes initiatives and apps such as:

Shaming – posting videos of people doing anything that might justify public chastising – littering, jaywalking, speeding, changing lanes without signaling, talking too loudly, or berating a waitress. These are meant to shame people into better behavior and add up to one’s personal shame aggregate.

Are You Sure? (AYS?)  Every time you make a decision which requires an online component, such as purchasing something, or buying an airline ticket. a pop-up comes onto your computer or phone asking “are you sure” you want to buy that item which you may not need, or make that decision which is not socially appropriate, or may increase your carbon footprint and have negative environmental impact?  And then it gives you more ecologically/socially appropriate alternatives. 

TruVoice – When speaking or writing, TruVoice monitors your language and offers you better alternatives to pronouns, or potentially racist or demeaning language, or other terms which are not consistent with virtuous, socially acceptable, or well-educated behavior. 

Thoughts, NOT Things which offers to help declutter people’s lives by creating archives of pictures of things you own, and suggesting that you keep the photos as memories, and then therefore, destroy the unnecessary wasteful items. 

Stop and Look – a movement to discourage (with shaming) travel which increases carbon in the atmosphere, and tourism which has had negative impact on other cultures. Stay and Look offers the more virtuous alternative of staying home and visiting other places w VR glasses.  

Friendie – is an AI app which interprets the other person’s facial expressions and tones of voice in video phone calls for honesty and sincerity.  As you’re speaking with someone, the app gives a score as to the honesty and sincerity of the person with whom you are talking in real time as they’re speaking.  You can do this with or without their permission.   

Personal Carbon Impact score measures what carbon impact one’s purchases and activities are having on the planet and climate.  One’s PCI score is public, changes with one’s decisions, and gives credit to those with a low PCI score, and shames those with a high PCI. 

Own Self  a health app which constantly monitors your health and reminds you of what you SHOULD be doing to maintain optimal health – when you should be going to bed, interrupting your day to do specific exercises to maintain an adequate level of fitness,  monitoring your blood,  heart rate, stress levels and other biometrics to tell you what to do to be healthy, what to eat, when to exercise, etc

Did I? measures a climax during sex, to validate that an orgasm did occur, to permit comparison w previous orgasms or those of friends. 

Fixfict – an AI that improve fiction -taking out obsolete or offensive language and updates it to meet today’s norms and standards, improves the plots so that they better fit today’s norms for “good literature.”

Why this book:  Selected by my literature reading group at the insistence of one of our members that it would be a mind-bender. She was right! 

Summary in 5 Sentences: This books is like a homeric myth set in the 21st century, with fairies – which Rushdie calls “jinn” – from another dimension of reality breaking through whatever barrier separates their reality from ours,  and coming to earth to enjoy themselves, act out their impulses, anger, fantasies at the expense of hapless and helpless humans – very similar to the gods of Ancient Greece.  The story begins with Dunia, one of the female jinn sneaking through a wormhole between the two worlds, coming to earth, falling in love with a  philosopher in Arab conquered Spain around 1200AD and having a large number of children with him. When the philosopher dies, Dunia returned to Peristan or “Fairlyland” – the other dimension –  but her children and their descendants, a number of whom we get to know in the book, unknowingly carry Dunia’s gene of jinn capabilities.  The book is about the War of the Worlds that the malevolent male leaders of Peristan – the dark Jinn – wage on earth to amuse themselves and carry out their own agendas, while Dunia, also a very powerful jinn seeks to save human civilization from them, battles them on earth, using as her soldiers her descendants, whose genetic but dormant jinn powers she is able to activate with her own power.  As crazy as the story sounds, it is like most myths and fairy tales –  a clever metaphor to expose our own human foibles, to offer us insights from another perspective,  and perhaps enlighten us with new wisdom. 

My Impressions:  Whew!  An interesting book – not my normal fare – but definitely an interesting change.  It is part mythology, part fairy-tale, part social commentary, part morality tale.  It fits into the genre “magical realism” in that the reality rules of the world we live in are warped, and sh!# happens that defy the laws of reality that we have grown up with.  I have described this book to friends as the Homeric world  comes to life in the 21st century with a somewhat different set of  gods.  In this book, the serendipity and capricious gods of Homer’s world descend to wreak havoc in the world we live in.  And we mere humans are at a complete loss as to how to deal with the chaos, death, destruction and tragedy that ensues from their amusement.  I found many interesting moral lessons and messages from Rushdie in the book.

Two years, eight months and twenty-eight nights, amounts to “One thousand and One Nights” the title of a collection of Middle Eastern folk tales compiled in Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age.  Rushdie refers throughout the book to obscure but interesting literary, historical, cultural icons from the past. Also he notes that in the middle east, round numbers “are ugly,”  – always add one.  Not 50, but 51; not 200, but 201, not $100, but $99.99, not 1,000, but 1,001.  Here after I will abbreviate “Two years, Eight months, and twenty-eight nights” to “2-8-28.”

Rushdie is writing the book from the perspective of someone who lives 1000 years in the future, looking back and trying to relate what happened in this epic time of what is referred to as “the strangenesses” that occurred when life as we knew it, the expectations and rules, and truths (including the laws of physics) that we had taken for granted, suddenly didn’t work and the world became truly chaotic – in a way that is hard for us to imagine – outside of a very weird Sci-Fi movie.  The “Strangenesses” lasted two years, eight months and twenty-eight nights.  But Rushdi uses this book to share many interesting and larger messages 

In the first chapter Rushdie tells us a lot about this book and the characters and themes in it.  He writes:

This is the story of a jinnia, a great princess of the jinn, known as the Lightning Princess on account of her mastery over the thunderbolt, who loved a mortal man long ago, in the twelfth century, as we would say, and of her many descendants, and of her return to the world, after a long absence, to fall in love again, at least for a moment, and then to go to war. It is also the tale of many other jinn, male and female, flying and slithering, good, bad, and uninterested in morality; and of the time of crisis, the time-out-of-joint which we call the time of the strangenesses, which lasted for two year, eight months and twenty-eight nights, which is to say one thousand nights and one night more. And yes, we have lived another thousand years since those days, but we are all forever changed by that time. (p 4-5)

I found many similarities between the jinn in Rushdi’s novel and gods of Ancient Greece. They both

• can have children w humans (though they rarely do) – their progeny are half god, half human (eg Achilles);
• can change shape and become other creatures at will;
• have supernatural powers;
• are quasi immortal – have lived for eons;
• squabble among themselves and hold grudges and seek to get even;
• embody the best and worst of human qualities – mostly the worst.

In the first chapter we are introduced to the philosopher Ibn Rushd in the year 1195 in Muslim occupied Spain,  who was silenced because his tolerant philosophy and belief in a kind and loving God were not accepted, and therefore he had to keep quiet or face an inquisition.  He had been unsuccessful arguing against the philosophy of Ghazali, another philosopher who had lived some 80 years before him in Persia, who preached a philosophy of an all-powerful and angry God and that people should live and behave out of fear of God.  Ibn Rushd argued that God was the source of reason and cause and effect, and it was his gift to us that we could learn the laws of the world and physics, adapt and live well.  Ghazali preached that there were no such laws – that there was only one law – what God wills. The apple does not fall from the tree because of gravity, rather only because God wills it. 

It occurs to me that Ibn Rushd represents Rushdie in his argument with fundamentalist Islam, and why he still has a Fatwa against him.  He grew up in a liberal Muslim family in India and later became an avowed atheist.   In the novel, Dunia, the jinn Lightning Princess comes to earth, falls in love with Ibn Rushd bears him many children, but the husband-wife relationship between the older Ibn Rushd and the younger, high energy jinn Dunia is fraught with tension.   Ibn Rushd eventually leaves her, but she remains deeply in love with him even long after he dies, and this love brings her back to earth in the 21st century. Rushdie himself has been married 4 times – and certainly some of his own life experiences show up in this unsuccessful marriage.  

The key protagonist in the novel is Dunia – the jinn Lightning Princess, though we see little of her through much of the novel while we are being introduced to some of the many descendants of her liaison with Ibn Rushd.  The  descendants we get to know are a pretty eclectic group, as one might expect from the descendants some 250 generations past when Dunia and Ibn Rushdi conceived their children and these children became the progeny of these hundreds of descendants.   The 21st century descendants include an avid and professional gardener, a well-to-do ladies man who seeks out affairs with unhappy housewives, a narcissistic woman who preys on wealthy older men,  a teenager who fantasizes about monsters and super-heroes, and uses them to populate  fantasy comic books he writes.  We get to know all these characters and we see how the chaos unleashed by the dark jinn upon their world affects and disrupts their lives – in this, they represent all other humans.  

The dark jinn themselves are selfish, petty and childish, very individualistic, and superficial.   Profound emotions or thoughts do not interest them. They are easily amused, have no concern for the consequences of their actions, no concern for human life, are drawn to shiny objects, thoroughly love sex, but without emotional content or commitment.  Like children, “they live in the moment, have no grand designs, and are easily distracted.” (p137) In this they resemble the gods of Homer’s world. 

The book 2-8-28 culminates in a “War of the Worlds” in which the dark jinn from Peristan  amuse themselves by shaking up the complacency of the humans on earth.  Why?  There had been a debt that one of the most powerful of the dark jinn had to pay to Ghazali the philosopher/theologian who believed in an angry God.  For repayment of that debt, Ghazali demanded that the jinn instill fear in human beings to bring them back to the God he believed in.  He directed that they “Go where man’s pride is swollen, where man believes himself to be godlike, lay waste his arsenals and fleshpots, his temples of technology, knowledge and wealth. Go also to those sentimental locations where it is said that God is love.  Go and show them the truth.”  (p126)  There followed a power struggle in Peristan, between the male “dark jinn” and Dunia the Lightning Princess, and since the dark jinn knew she had a soft spot for humans, they sought to get at her by asserting their will and power over a world they knew she loved. The lives or sufferings of humans meant nothing to them. 

After the dark jinn begin creating chaos and confusion on earth, Dunia comes to earth, introduces herself to her descendants as their jinn ancestor, and recruits them to join her in her fight against the dark jinn to help her restore the status quo ante.  She then activates their dormant jinn powers, and the game is on.

So what chaos did the dark jinn create?  The laws of physics suddenly don’t work, crazy shit just happens – a sea monster comes up out of the water in NYC harbor and swallows a ferry boat whole; people come untethered from the gravity that holds them on earth and they float away;  or gravity becomes so powerful that it crushes some individuals;  some people’s personalities change dramatically and for no apparent reason; some people crave things they never liked before; there are huge senseless tragedies that infect entire cities with fear.  Rushdie must have had fun coming up with some of these wild “strangenesses”.  While I was reading this book, I stepped into our family room and Mary Anne was watching the most recent version of the Godzilla story on Netflix.  In “Godzilla,” huge pre-historic monsters were devastating American cities and creating chaos and panic which to me were very similar to the havoc the dark jinn were wreaking in Rushdie’s book.  

As panic consumed the main population centers where the dark jinn focused their energy, anarchy prevailed as the economy quit functioning, as there was no predictability. People hunkered down and simply tried to survive.  Sounded to me a lot like our response to the pandemic. 

Some of the themes/metaphors that I saw in this book:

• Two Realities: In 2-8-28 there is a separate reality from the consensual reality we live in. I see this as a metaphor for the possibility (likelihood some say) that there is an unseen world or reality that has more influence on our consensual reality than we realize.  There are a lot of things that happen in our world that are considered bizarre, unexplainable, or miracles which science doesn’t understand and most people dismiss. 
• Hidden Powers. The descendants of Ibn Rushd and Dunia had powers that they were unaware of and had never realized or developed.   This reminds me of what Eastern mystics say of all of us. In 2-8-28, Dunia herself had to activate these powers in her descendants to help her fight the dark jinn, and when she did, these powers were dramatic and significant, and approached what Eastern practitioners are able to do, and claim that all of us could have these powers with proper training and discipline. 
• Complacency. Before the War of the Worlds, people were complacent and took for granted simple things like the laws of physics.  In this book people are forced to confront chaos and uncertainty beyond anything we can imagine.  Rushdie’s message (to me) is that we take our orderly and predictable world for granted.  The COVID pandemic was an example of the assumption of continued order and predictability being disrupted.  What might be next?  Alien invasion? Or a nuclear war with Russia or China?
• Connections.  We are connected through common ancestors with people much different than ourselves. Ibn Rushd’s and Dunia’s descendants were scattered all over the world, 800 years, 200+ generations later. 

In the end, with the assistance of her descendants, Dunia, the more intelligent, compassionate and humanlike of the jinn prevails through cleverness against the clumsy short-sightedness of her rivals. And then there is a (more or less) happy ending, normalcy and peace are restored, and Dunia becomes the main power in Peristan and will ensure that the world of humans and jinn are kept separate.  Rushdie concludes his novel, speaking from a millennium in the future, writing that  “Sometimes we wish for the dreams to return. Sometimes, for we have not wholly rid ourselves of perversity, we long for nightmares.” p.286

This is not a book I’ll recommend to most of my friends.  It was definitely provocative and Rushdie is an eloquent writer. The story does not flow easily; I was best able to appreciate the nuances and subtleties of this  book after concluding it, and then going back and reviewing my underlines.  Only then did it make more sense, and I was better able to appreciate some of the interesting dimensions and hidden messages of this creative story.  

A few interesting quotes from the book: 

“The rich are obscure to us, finding ways to be unhappy when all the normal causes of unhappiness are removed. p 42

At the moment of dying, we are all penniless. p 42

He placed himself in the soil of time and wondered, godlessly, who might be gardening him. p 39

If my enemy is correct Ibn Rushd told her, then his (Ghazali’s) God is a malicious God for whom human life has no value; and I would desire my children’s children to know that, and to know my enmity toward such a God and to follow me in standing against such a God and defeating his purposes. p 59

And after that, she (Dunia) began to love love itself, to love her capacity for love, to love the selflessness of love, the sacrifices, the eroticism, the glee. p 61 

The story parasite entered babies through the ear within hours of their birth and caused the growing children to demand much that was harmful to them: fairy tales, pipe dreams, chimeras, delusions, lies. p 113

Why this book:  I talked some of my friends in my literature reading group into reading this with me when I failed to get the whole group to agree to read it.  I was impressed with an  interview I’d heard with Dave Eggers, and additionally after listening to Yuval Harari’s  21 Lessons for the 21st Century, warning about the insidious and ever increasing power of the tech world over our lives, I was intrigued by this book.

Summary in 3 sentences: Mae Holland is excited to be hired by the most prestigious tech company in Silicon Valley and as she becomes acquainted with the company, the culture, the perks that come with the job, she feels like she is in heaven.  As she works to become integrated into the culture, she sees that its demands of total engagement, total commitment, and total transparency have unexpected impacts on her private life, but she chooses to adapt to their demands in order to earn and deserve her membership in this ideal community. Eventually she begins to rise in the hierarchy of The Circle, and agrees to serve as an example of complete honesty and transparency in her life, which creates new challenges. 

My Impressions: Really interesting, fun, easy, thought-provoking read.  I actually listened to rather than read The Circle and found the audible version to be an entertaining and acceptable way to experience this book – but it precludes highlighting or taking notes as I listen, so this review is my overall impressions.  Though it was published in 2013, the issues surrounding the ever-increasing influence of google, facebook, social and info media are still very much in the news, and this book continues to be very relevant.  The concerns Eggers warns us about in The Circle are indeed of greater relevance today than when he wrote the book.  

The Circle is the name of a private company which is a thinly disguised version of Google.  The protagonist in The Circle is Mae Holland a bright young woman from the Central Valley of California whose close friend Annie had risen to a senior rank in The Circle and was able to get her a job at the world famous, cutting edge company in Silicon Valley.  Mae had been bored and uninspired in her previous job working for the municipal government in the small town where she had grown up. Jobs at the Circle were highly sought after, prestigious and offered the best pay and perks in the industry. 

Her early days in the company are like a dream – she is ecstatic with the support and the amenities that go with working at The Circle – and indeed it is a very seductive picture – almost too good to be true – the free this, the free that, an extensive employee support infrastructure, the nightly parties on the “campus.”  The Circle would be fun, with an engaging social environment, and would take care of her every need. She’d found a family and a fully energetic, young and supportive community.

But there were also different kinds of challenges she had to meet in order to fit in and earn her full membership – challenges that were new and caught her by surprise.  She learned that she was expected to be FULLY engaged, not just in her job, but also in the lifestyle and culture that The Circle promotes. She also learned that she was being judged and graded –  constantly – on her level of participation and her demonstrated enthusiasm for the lifestyle and culture that The Circle promotes.   It seemed like every time she turned around there was a surprising new challenge she had to meet if she was going to stay in good graces with her new “family.”   She struggled a bit, but adapted and rose to meet every new challenge.   She was expected to post regularly, and the AI algorithm graded her on the number of posts on the company’s social media site, and her grade, which changed daily, even hourly based on her behavior, was available for everyone to see.   She was expected to respond to other posts, attend as many functions as possible, support as many philanthropic causes as possible, and share her life and what she was doing on the company’s social media site.  She did – and better than most – and in the process, she became widely known, respected and admired in the organization.  

Mae was extremely grateful for all that she got from The Circle – great health care for herself and her parents, a sense of purpose and membership in a community of people who were enthusiastic – or at least seemed to act that way – about everything associated with working at The Circle.  And Mae was committed to prove herself worthy of being there. 

Many of the characters in The Circle are realistic caricatures of techies working in Silicon Valley  – young (most in their 20s or early 30s,) many from overseas, extremely idealistic and optimistic all the time – because that was what was expected.  She developed a relationship with a young man who’d had a troubled youth, but who found solace in metrics – about everything.  He seemed to have no emotional intelligence, and wanted to put a number value on everything he did, including a grade on his interactions with her, to include on his sexual performance. Mae later had another boyfriend who was mysterious, wouldn’t share his name or background with her, and she couldn’t contact him, which put Mae in a bind – because her best friend Annie was suspicious of his intent, kept pressing her for details and Mae felt she had to lie – or at least not tell the whole truth – to protect her relationship with her mysterious partner. 

A turning point for Mae came when she borrowed (without permission) a kayak, went into San Francisco Bay with it, but was caught by the now-ubiquitous cameras that The Circle was dispensing, nationally and internationally. Mae was arrested and faced the possibility that this transgression would cost her her job.  By apologizing for her poor judgment in front of the whole company and agreeing to become a role model of complete transparency in her personal life, she was given a second chance.  This unexpectedly made her an international social media star, and a rising figure within The Circle.

In the end, Mae completely buys into the vision of The Circle, that civilization will only be saved when there is complete transparency in everyone’s lives – that way, each of us would have to be completely accountable for our lives and all our actions to everyone else.   That complete accountability would end crime, corruption, deceit, dishonesty and the world would be a better place. And The Circle with all its money, technology, influence and idealism was on a path to to making that happen. 

Some of the maxims that The Circle repeats and enforces, meant to promote complete transparency;  

• • Secrets are Lies
  • Sharing is Caring
  • Privacy is Theft.
  • All that Happens must be Known

The Circle through its access to data, information, with its technology and its enormous resources and the political influence that brings, was well on the way to realizing its vision.  And when Mae became one of the exemplars of the complete transparency movement, it cost her some of the most important relationships in her life.  In the book The Circle we see the utopian idealism of the left, given huge resources and power, using technology to fulfill their vision for the world, in confrontation with the reality of how most humans are trying to live their lives. Eggers is subtle in his satire of this utopian vision – which we come to understand through the voices of the starry-eyed idealists at The Circle.

That said, I recognize a similar, but much less intrusive version of The Circle in the military, where I spent the majority of my adult life.  Similarities include an extensive on-boarding process, a forced acculturation, an expectation of complete commitment, a strong culture with specified norms that can be pretty strict, an intolerance of behavior outside those norms which include one’s private life.  The military specifically states that one is accountable to one’s service 24/7/365.  The Circle similarly rejects the idea of a life bifurcated between private and work.  There is also a self-righteous idealism – even arrogance  – in both cultures, regarding the superiority and virtue of their values, and a willingness to impose those values on others.   As conformist as the military is in minor matters such as haircuts, uniforms, and social behavior, the drive to conformity in The Circle is even greater, indeed becomes cult-like in its pressure to conform – Jeff Jones (just drink the Kool-aide!) or Scientology come to mind.  

The Circle is a very clever dystopian look at current trends in American society.  It was published in 2013 and so much of what Eggers predicts through the book is indeed coming true – to the horror of many of us,  who hate excessive intrusions of self-righteous individuals, the government, and/or the larger society into our private lives.  I found The Circle to be a very clever and well-written warning about the dangers of the increasing trend toward using Big Data to build connections between all of us, and the dangers of Silicon Valley tech firms maintaining data bases of information on all of us, with which to manipulate us to buy, behave, and live in ways that fit their vision of America. 

Why this book: Selected by our SEAL reading group. Also, I’ve met General Mattis, seen him speak several times and looked forward to reading his book.

Summary in 3 sentences:  Call Sign Chaos is both a memoir and a book about leadership.  After a brief chapter on his boyhood, Gen Mattis writes about his time in the Marine Corps – each phase of his career from what he calls “direct leadership” to later in his career where he is called upon to exercise “executive leadership,” and finally toward the end of his career, “strategic leadership.”  He tells us stories of what he observed and experienced, decisions he made and the leadership lessons drawn from those experiences. 

My impressions: Full of great stories and great leadership insights.  A “MUST READ” for anyone in or aspiring to leadership positions in the military, or for anyone outside the military looking for great lessons on leadership from a great military leader sharing insights from the military context that translate well into any context. These are stories from the life and career of a very successful marine officer – arguably the most successful and inspiring marine officer in generations.   His ghost writer was Bing West, a former Marine and a good friend of General Mattis. Bing West did an excellent job putting the General’s thoughts into a coherent and articulate book. Bing West is himself an author of several well-respected books on different wars, from Vietnam to Afghanistan.

Call Sign Chaos is written as an autobiography – of his career in service to his country – but it is primarily about leadership based on his own experiences – successes and failures.  He breaks his career, his experiences and his lessons learned and insights about leadership into three parts: Direct Leadership, Executive Leadership, and Strategic Leadership.  He begins the book with a brief chapter covering his youth and background entitled, “A Carefree Youth joins the Disciplined Marine”  and then gets into his life in the Marine Corps and the process and adventure of learning about how to motivate and lead people in difficult, challenging, and sometimes life threatening environments.  

Direct Leadership briefly covers his time as a junior officer in the Marine Corps but by page 20 he is already what he calls a totus porcus (whole hog) marine and a battalion commander in Operation Desert Storm.  Then, in the inter-war years he offers us a chapter on “broadening” which includes serving as Executive Assistant to Secretaries of Defense Perry, Cohen, and Rumsfeld – what he called “a PhD-level course in running large organizations, witnessing how civilian control of the military actually works.”p49  The section takes him to his promotion to Brigadier General and a full chapter on his operations in the initial phases of our efforts in Afghanistan right after 9-11. 

Executive Leadership begins when he is a Division commander leading Marines in Iraq marching toward Baghdad,  where he says, “At this stage of executive leadership, I delegated routine chores of management  – filling personnel gaps, requesting equipment, etc. – to my chief of staff.  I reserved for myself and my subordinate commanders the design of the plan for how we would fight.” p81 Included in this chapter were his experiences and leadership lessons learned as a two star Division Commander and a three star Expeditionary Force commander during three different combat tours in Iraq.  He concludes his Executive Leadership section with his insights leading Joint Forces Command as a four  star General.  In this section, some of his most interesting comments are about the challenges he had trying to keep the NATO partnership working together.

Strategic Leadership began when he was selected to assume command of US Central Command and essentially oversea the US efforts in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Here he was closely integrated into the political process, dealing regularly with ambassadors, congress, the press.  “I decided that, while my official job was to coordinate the activities of our U.S. and allied troops across the region, my real role was to fight for a better peace – or what passed for peace – in the region for one more year, one more month, one more day… until diplomats could direct us to a better path.”  p195-6 In this role, he concerned himself with the long term goals of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and coordinating with our allies and with our relations with Pakistan and other countries in the middle east to achieve US objectives.  

He concludes this section and the book with two short paragraphs about his time as Secretary of Defense.  “On a Saturday morning in late January 2017, I walked into the Secertary of Defense’s office, which i had first entered as a colonel on staff twenty  years earlier. Using every skill I had learned durin gmy decades as a Marine, I did as well as I could for as long as I could….When my concrete solutions and strategic advice, especially keeping faith with allies, no longer resonated, it was time to resign, despite the limitless joy  I felt serving along side our troops in defense of our Constitution.” p244-245

Epilogue Call Sign Chaos concludes with an Epilogue which is a call for civilized discussion and a rebuke of the tribalism he sees in America today.  He expresses his faith in our constitutional democracy which he reminds us is still an experiment, and is not to be taken for granted.  He concludes with “E pluribus unum.” 

Appendices Call Sign Chaos includes appendices A thru G which are different letters from his career, which he felt help make his points.  My favorite is Appendix B which is about why professional military personnel should make reading a priority, and he provides us a list of his favorite books.  

Footnotes: Extensive and fascinating footnotes follow the appendices, which give additional background to some of the many quotes he provides, as well as some of incidents he describes.  The footnotes are also testament to how extensively General Mattis has read about and studied his profession.  

Quotes: The book is full of great bumper stickers and one liners that one can remember and apply in so many contexts, as well as other memorable quotes. Here are just a few of the many that I underlined:

• Attitude is a weapon system. p17
• Attitudes are caught, not taught. p81
• In great units, everyone owns the mission. p16
• You can’t have an elite organization if you look the other way when someone craps out on you?  p18
• Never advantage yourself at the expense of your comrades.  p23
• If you haven’t read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren’t broad enough to sustain you.  p42
• Developing a culture of operating from commander’s intent demanded a higher level of unit discipline and self discipline than issuing voluminous, detailed instructions. p44
• If the risk takers are punished, then you will retain in your ranks only the risk averse.  p45
• At the executive level, your job is to reward initiative in your junior officers and NCOs and facilitate their success.  p45
• Doctrine is the last refuge of the unimaginative. p54
• Business management books often stress”centralized planning and decentralized execution.”  I believe in centralized vision, coupled with decentralized planning and execution. p59
• My aim was to create a restlessness in my commanders and make the learning environment contagious.  p81
• Note to all executives over the age of thirty: always keep close to you youngsters who are smarter than you. p88
• Our campaign’s success was based on not giving the enemy time to react.  p90
• As (British Field Marshall) Slim made clear, any general who isn’t connected spiritually to his troops is not a combat leader.  p92
• Cynicism too often passes for critical thinking. p94
• Field Marshall Slim wrote in WWII:  “As officers you will neither eat, nor drink, nor sleep, nor smoke, nor even sit down until you have personally seen that your men have done those things. If you will do this for them, they will follow you to the end of the world. And if you don’t, I will break you.” p98
• I’ve always tried to be hard on issues, but not on spirits. p104
• (In Iraq, one of his soldiers said)  “We’re taking the “fun” out of “fundamentalism.” p127
• (In Iraq, talking to village elders) As the negotiations turned into a kabuki dance, I warned my interlocutors: ” I come in peace.  I didn’t bring artillery.  But I’m pleading with you, with tears in my eyes: If you fuck with me, I’ll kill you all.”  p132
• As Churchill noted, “A lie gets halfway around the world before truth gets its pants on.” In our age, a lie can get a thousand times around the world before the truth gets its pants on.  p141
• It was refreshing to listen to a gunnery sergeant or lieutenant verbally spar with his men in the casual but respectful manner that reflected mutual fondness. That told me the lads’ hearts were still in the game.  p145
• For me, “player-coach” aptly describes the role of a combat leader, or any real leader. p151
• There’s a profound difference between a mistake and a lack of discipline.  p166
• The underlying problem with NATO transformation was…a lack of energy and initiative, resulting from a process-driven culture. Entropy prevailed; process had replaced output.  p173
• It’s easy to get into a bureaucratic rut where things are done a certain way because they’re done a certain way.  p 175
• Every institution gets the behavior it rewards.  p 179
• Powerpoint is the scourge of critical thinking. p182
• I told my one-star admirals and generals: “You’re still low enough in rank to be in touch with your troops, but senior enough to protect our mavericks. That’s your job.”  p184
• Secy Gates: “The only thing that allows government to work at the top levels is trusted personal relations.”  You can’t achieve this leading by email.  p201
• Rules of Engagement are what separate principled militaries from barbarians and terrorists.  p211
• We must sustain trust, from the general to the private, as the most effective route to winning battles with the lowest cost to noncombatants. p212
• If a democracy does not trust its troops, then it shouldn’t go to war.   p212
• Our military is hardwired with a can-do spirit; otherwise we could not take on what war requires of us. p214
• John Toolan on the challenge of fighting in Afghanistan: “The Muslim religion isn’t the barrier to progress here.   The problem is a whole culture that rejects Western concepts of playing by the rules and cooperating with each other.” p219
• After a rebellion, power tends to flow to those most organized, not automatically to the most idealistic.  p 222
• When tensions develop between friends, extraordinary effort must be made to keep those friends close. p225
• It is better to have a friend with deep flaws than an adversary with enduring hostility.  p227
• On President Obama’s decision not to respond to Assad’s use of chemical weapons. “This was a shot not heard around the world.” p 228
• Acting strategically requires that political leaders make clear what they will stand for and what they will not stand for. p234
• Our military exists to deter wars and to win when we fight.  p236
• There’s no substitute for constant study to master one’s craft….there are lots of old solutions to new problems.  If you haven’t read hundreds of books, learning from others who went before you, you are functionally illiterate – you can’t coach and you can’t lead. p237
• I  stressed to my staff that we had to win only one battle: for the hearts and minds of our subordinates. They will win all the rest – at the risk and cost of their lives.  p239
• Trust is the coin of the realm for creating the harmony, speed and teamwork to achieve success at the lowest cost…..Yet it’s not enough to trust your people; you must be able to convey the trust in a manner that subordinates can sense. 240
• I had also found , in Tora Bora’s missed opportunity to prevent Osama bin Laden’s escape, that I had to build awareness and trust above me. This takes significant personal effort, and the information age has not made this easier,  or removed the need for face-to-face interaction. p240