Bob's Books

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

Why this book: I kept seeing this book pop up on lists of the best books of 2021 and the story intrigued me. I had read his Nickel Boys and was impressed, and wanted a bit of escapist fun, while also learning a bit about the black experience in Harlem in the 1960s.

Summary in 3 sentences:  The period is early 1960s and Ray Carney is an African American who owns a furniture store and is trying to make a living as a small business owner in the black community of Harlem.  He had grown up the son of a small time hustler and crook and found that, though as an adult he was trying to go straight, his cousin with whom he’d grown up kept pulling him into the world of small time crime, serving as a fence for guys who were stealing,  which also provided Carney much needed extra money.  Meanwhile he had a nice family, things were going well, but he starts losing control of the small time hustling and the fencing he is doing on the side, and eventually, everything he’s worked for – his business, his family, his life are at risk. 

My Impressions:  I listened to this book and it captivated me from the start.  Whitehead creates the world of Black Harlem in the early sixties and it is VERY different from the world I grew up in.  We get to know a wide variety of characters in the community.  The protagonist Ray Carney is at first a struggling small business owner, and then over time and with some success, his business grows and his status starts to climb in the local community.   The story is told from a third person narrator but with a God’s-eye spotlight on Carney, his life, his thoughts, his dreams, his fears.  And through him, we get a perspective of what it was like to grow up and try to make a living in Harlem in that period.

This is not a book about race or prejudice or white privilege – those things are there, but are incidental, like the weather, or the geography – a reality that someone who lived in Harlem had to accept and deal with.  During the story, there are race riots in Harlem after a policeman shoots an unarmed youth, but for Carney, the riots and violence are very inconvenient, and simply create obstacles to his business and the plans he has.  He is angered by white prejudice, but has reconciled himself and accommodated his life to its reality – he is not an activist. His cousin and others are on the make to find ways to capitalize on the rioting – when all the police are fighting the riots, that’s a good time to burglarize black businesses as well as white communities in Manhattan.  

In Harlem Shuffle, we see Carney caught between two worlds in Harlem – on the one hand, those who make a living on the edges of “legitimate” society, with crime, preying on white (and black) people of means.  On the other hand, there are those who have “made it” in the so-called legitimate and more well-to-do classes of Harlem society –  attorneys, bankers, successful businessmen, politicians within the black community.   And then outside of that world is white society, downtown, those who own the political machine, the police and the wealth of New York City.    Within Harlem, Carney has interactions with both the legitimate powers and the underworld, and as the story progresses, he also has interactions  with those with wealth and power in white Manhattan.  He comes to realize that those in the “legitimate” world, both black and white, were not so virtuous as they presented themselves to be.  In Harlem, Carney refers to people as either crooked or straight, and guys like him, who are not quite either, are “bent” – not really crooked, but their straightness is compromised.  

Harlem Shuffle is full of colorful and believable characters. 

• Ray Carney himself is who we get to know best. He is self-aware and Whitehead’s narrative gets inside his head and heart. He grew up without a mother, an absentee father who was a hoodlum bad guy, and Carney was on his own a lot, sometimes living with his aunt.   He stayed straight in school, and on his own and with no support from his father, got an undergraduate degree and then a graduate degree in business, and was working hard to make his furniture business succeed. 
• Carney’s cousin Freddie, with whom Carney grew up almost as a brother, is a n’er do well opportunist, living on the dark side, hanging with thieves and punks – not really a bad guy, not evil or cruel, but an easy mark for bad guys, since he was always looking for a way to get something for nothing, whether it be money, pleasure, prestige.  He routinely pulls Carney into criminal or sketchy deals to bail him out of some trouble he’s gotten himself into, which then associates Carney with Freddie’s crime(s) and misdeeds.  Carney is frustrated with Eddie’s decision making, but loyal to him, and puts himself at great risk to protect him.
• Carney’s wife Elizabeth grew up in a straight upper-middle class Harlem family, and has little inkling of Carney’s escapades on the dark side.  She is a dedicated mother to their two children and has hopes that Carney’s business will move them up the social ladder and improve their standard of living.   Her parents were disappointed when she married someone from the lower classes like Carney, but Elizabeth doesn’t share their prejudices and defends Carney against her parents’ condescension.  She is clueless about Carney’s illicit work that was helping to finance their improving life style.
• Pepper, a bouncer and underworld hit-man is practical and fearless, with an interesting past from WW2. He had done work with Carney’s father in the past.  Pepper became an unlikely ally of Carney’s when Freddie pulled Carney into a caper that almost got Carney killed – and then Pepper saved Carney’s life.

There are of course a lot many more colorful characters in the book, and Whitehead brings each of them to life, and through getting to know them, we get to know more about life in Harlem in the 1960s. 

Harlem Shuffle is a good read, an engaging and good story and provides what seems to be a well researched and accurate picture of life in a different culture in American in a different time.  I can imagine that there are rather close analogies to that world in todays inner cities, where good people are trying to have a life, and it is very difficult to go straight when crime is rampant and law enforcement spotty or corrupt. 

It is also a morality tale, as we see Carney step onto the “slippery slope” of small-time criminal activity  to help out his cousin and to make a few extra dollars. Then, without his intention, he becomes involved in more serious criminal activity, and before he knew it,  he was in way over his head, and everything he truly valued and worked so hard to achieve was at risk.  It’s like Serpico (convicted NYC cop for corruption) said: His biggest mistake was accepting that first piece of free pizza. 

As noted, I listened to rather than read the book.  That was a really good experience.  The reader had the black inner-city dialect and accents down, used different voices w different accents for the different characters – it was engaging and a pleasure to listen to.  I suspect that the emotion that the reader gave to the voices and the story gave Harlem Shuffle more immediacy and power than the printed word would have.  I recommend listening to Harlem Shuffle. 

NOTE:A more complete summary of this book is here on Super Summary

Why this book: George Worthington was one of the senior officers in the Navy SEALs as I was growing up during my career.  He was the second Admiral to command Naval Special Warfare Command. He recently died, and I learned of the existence of this memoir only after going on-line to find a brief bio and picture of him to notify the community of Old Frogs and SEALs of his passing.  I had not known of this memoir, nor had most of my friends.  I bought it and read it.

Summary in 3 Sentences:  George is telling his life’s story – beginning with his childhood, schooling, and then after graduating from the Navy, focussing almost entirely on his professional life.  He describes the many things he learned as a Surface Warfare Officer driving ships and working for an Admiral in the surface navy before becoming a SEAL, at what was then the very senior rank of Lieutenant.  Then he skips pretty quickly through his tours in UDT and SEAL Team One, his time in Vietnam, his command of SEAL Team ONE and eventually Naval Special Warfare Group One.  He spends a good part of the book on his 6 years in the Pentagon on the Navy Staff protecting and fighting for the continuance of and support for Naval Special Warfare in a time when the Navy was not convinced we needed SEALs. 

My Impressions:  This little memoir (205pages) had the potential to be really good – and as it is, with all its flaws, it is still a valuable addition to the history of how the SEALs came to be what they are today (2022.)  There are also some great lessons learned for junior officers who plan to make a career of being a Naval Special Warfare (SEALs/Special Boats) officer in the US Navy – and at the bottom of this review, I list a few key lessons from his memoir that occur to me.  Each of his chapters covers a window of his life, and most conclude with a paragraph: “What’d I learn?”  in which he shares a couple or several of key insights that came from the experiences he describes in the chapter he is concluding.

George Worthington enlisted in the Navy in 1957 and attended the Naval Academy, getting commissioned as an ensign in 1961.  He initially served on surface ships and then transitioned to Naval Special Warfare with over 30 years of commissioned service (1961-1992)  during a key period of change for the Navy and Naval Special Warfare.  He was one of the very few officers in that era (early 60s) who went thru BUD/S as a lieutenant, and was one of the very few Naval Academy graduates allowed to become a frogmen at that time, given that serving in the UDT/SEAL Teams was not considered career enhancing. He graduated from BUD/S so senior that he immediately became the Operations Officer of UDT 11 and then “fleeted up” to become the XO, and deployed with his team to Vietnam.    At that time, a tour with a UDT or SEAL TEAM was viewed as a brief hiatus for a naval officer, so after serving as XO of UDT 11, he had to get back to the real Navy, and was sent to Destroyer School and then back to sea as the operations officer of a surface ship.  He was clearly good at surface warfare skills and ship driving, and enjoyed this assignment – it was full of engaging challenges and opportunities.  When he completed that assignment in 1970,  he was sent to Vietnam to a major Navy staff – Naval Forces Vietnam –  where among other things, he served and represented SEALs and Special Boats in the Navy’s piece of the fight against the Viet Cong and the NVA. 

By the time he concluded his Vietnam assignment, Naval Special Warfare had matured, and offered officers a career path, and Worthington was able to spend the remainder of his career in Naval Special Warfare. He recounts stories and lessons learned from his assignments as Commanding Officer SEAL Team ONE, Commander Naval Inshore Undersea Warfare Group ONE and then later, Naval Special Warfare Group ONE.  He also spent 6 years in the Pentagon, and much of his narrative was about the battles he fought and the successes he had defending and resourcing NSW programs in the budgeting and planning processes in Washington DC.   During this window, I was a junior officer in NSW, and as new force structure initiatives,  new equipment, and new opportunities kept positively affecting my professional life,  I had no idea how they came to be, nor of the work and struggles that George Worthington and other SEALs in Washington had undergone in order to achieve these results. This was one of the most enlightening aspects of the book for me.

His first flag assignment was to stand up, and serve as the first and interim Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations, in 1988-89.  From there he was called upon in 1989 to serve as the 2nd Admiral to Command Naval Special Warfare Command which owns and resources all the SEALs and Special Boats in the Navy, and he shares many of his successes and adventures from that time.  At the end of that tour in 1992, he retired from the Navy.  The last of chapter of his book briefly covers his life and activities after retiring from the Navy.  George died from complications from Parkinson’s Disease in December 2021. 

Shortcomings of the book: While I found much of the content of this book of great interest to me as a retired Naval Special Warfare Officer, I found a couple of key shortcomings to his book: 

• First, it is very poorly edited. The book is full of mis-spellings, typos, cut-off sentences and in some cases redundancies.  He may have been deeply into his Parkinson’s when he was ready to self-publish the book and unable to give it the detailed editing it deserves.  But it badly needed a good editor to put the excellent content into a more professional form.
• Second, he includes very little about his personal or family life in his memoir.  There is no mention of Sydna, his first wife, little about their 3 kids, nor does he mention his divorce from Sydna, or his  30 years spent with his final partner and wife Veronica. Nor does he mention a messy incident or two that I understand hastened his retirement, when he still had plenty to give the Navy and the SEALs. 

My impression of George Worthington is that he was an extremely talented and very energetic man who led a full, active, and very engaged life.  He was a clearly a gifted naval officer who loved the Navy and was fully committed to serving Naval Special Warfare.  George was known as a good shipmate, loyal and generous to his friends, a fun guy to be with whether at a party or in tough circumstances.    He was irreverent, funny, and had a biting sense of humor.  He could also be vain, irascible, and impulsive, often sharing his views and acting on impulses without due consideration to context or impact.   This was a darker side of his positive enthusiasm, intense energy and passion.  His final years with Parkinson’s were very difficult for him, as his energy and freedom of action diminished, his athletic abilities and physique withered,  and he struggled to maintain his joy and positive energy.  By all accounts he faced these difficulties with great courage and humility to the end. 

I attended George Worthington’s memorial service and celebration of life on 27 January 2022 in Coronado and it was well attended by members of the Coronado community, and by active and former SEALs who wanted to pay their respects to him, his service and his family.   He had led an amazing and full life and contributed enormously to the success and growth of the Navy SEAL community, and he deserved to be so honored.   Most impressive at the event was the eulogy that his son Rhodes, now a Chief Petty Officer in SEAL Team SEVEN, gave at the memorial service – about what a great Dad he’d been – compassionate, engaged and loving, always sharing his enthusiasm for trying new things, and embracing the joys of life. At the celebration of life afterward, his daughter Greer, reiterated the points made by her brother Rhodes, and gave examples of how he’d helped her be strong when she was down. Both Sydna, his first wife and mother of their three children, and Veronica who was his partner and then his wife over his last 30 years, were very gracious at his memorial, and celebration of life.  

One of the quotes Rhodes shared in his eulogy of his dad is practical and profound: “In life when faced with two choices, the choice that is most personally difficult will never fail you.” 

Lessons from Runnin’ with Frogs for aspiring SEAL officers:

1. The value of experience outside NSW.  He regularly referred to the value of his time in the Surface Navy in his later NSW career, and the contacts he had from that window gave him credibility with the Navy and with key decision makers in the Navy.
2. The importance of working in the Pentagon – he made a HUGE impact on NSW by the work he did and the connections and credibility he established in Washington, which translated into increased force  structure and money for the Teams.  The credibility he earned with the Navy was key to his getting selected for flag. 
3. Don’t whine.  Get to work. He often didn’t get the assignment he wanted or felt he deserved.  But by making top performance in the undesired assignments a priority, it led to bigger and better things. He realized that he got what he needed, rather than what he wanted. 
4. Build bridges with the civilians.  He shared how important it was for him to make friends with the civilians and civil servants in the big staffs to get things done.  He had sympathy for the reality that they were there for years, while officers like him came and went, full of urgency and impatience to make an impact during the short window of their assignment. 
5. Learn to play the game.  He tells us in the “What’d I learn” section after his Pentagon tours  how important it was to not try to end-run the process, have your facts right, and maturely accept what the process gives you, work with and try to modify/improve it, rather than fight it.  Have a plan, sell the plan to others, and then refer to your plan as you campaign for the things you want. 
6. The importance of good staff work.  The operators in the field need competent and very engaged staff officers supporting them in higher headquarters, to get the coordination and support they need. Without competent, engaged, and credible representatives fighting for them on the staffs above them, the operators don’t get the intel, equipment, coordination, support they need to succeed. 
7. Stay active and build your network.  He found a way to stay active with his athleticism – swimming, sky diving, etc, even when assigned to remote areas. His involvement with athletics and other outside activities built his network of friends and allies which served him well professionally and personally. 

Why this book Selected by my literature reading group, based on our appreciation for Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow, and Children of God, and our enjoyment of McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove last year. Also it is the sequel to the novel Doc which we read in conjunction with it.

Summary in 3 Sentences: This is a novelized version of the story of Wyatt Earp and his brothers, and Doc Holiday and the circumstances that led up to the gunfight at the OK Corral, what happened that day in 1881, and the brutality that followed it.  Russell says she did extensive research and her novel is based as best she can on the facts as she understood them, though there remains some controversy about many aspects of this legend.  The book concludes with “the rest of the story” about what happened to the main characters in the drama after that dramatic window of time in Tombstone Az in the 1870s and 80s.

My Impressions: I really enjoyed this book – it’s a fascinating period in our history, and these incidents did a lot to create and sustain the image of the Wild West that I grew up with.  Epitaph gives the reader a  look at life in a Western boom town in the 1880s, as well as the “pretty true” story behind the mythology that has grown up around Wyatt Earp, Doc Holiday, and the shoot out at the OK Corral.   Russell clearly did an amazing amount of research – in the acknowledgments she says she “absorbed nineteen linear feet of background books for this novel”  but she also spent a considerable amount of time in Tombstone and traversed on horseback some of the areas where her stories take place, noting that “the five day Wyatt Earp Vendetta ride was the hardest fun I ever had.”

This book flows and follows easily from Doc, though it’s not necessary to have read Doc to thoroughly enjoy the story, characters, setting and insights about life in remote Arizona in the late 19th century.  Epitaph includes just a few of the same characters as Doc, most notably the Earp brothers and their ladies, and Doc Holliday, but it adds many new and interesting additions to the story – people who were part of the historical reality that Russell is novelizing. 

The Story is about the characters and the setting and background that led up to the famous gunfight at the OK Corral, which mythology, several books, and multiple movies have dramatized and exaggerated over the 140 years since it occurred.  A lot of what has been written is conflicting, since there were many different agendas behind the retelling from various sources.  The movies naturally exaggerate and amplify those aspects of the story that will appeal the most to a public paying for a couple of hours of entertainment. In Epitaph, Russell takes the various versions of what happened in Tombstone in the 1880s, and the different stories about the lives of the characters in the drama, and distills them into what she believed was pretty close to the truth, and then with a bit of poetic license added color, context, emotions and dialogue that support the version that she is telling. And in so doing, brings the story to life.  

Epitaph begins describing the childhood of a young girl Josie Marcus, one of the key protagonists in Epitaph who later became Wyatt Earp’s mistress.  She grew up a Jewish immigrant in a NYC tenement and moved with her family to San Francisco. The story progresses by looking individually at several of the characters whose lives converge in Tombstone, and then we get to know the other players in Tombstone, as well as the politics and economy of the boom town, flush with money from recently discovered silver deposits, as well as an influx of ranchers and others hoping to strike it rich, or at least make a living.  Tombstone is rather chaotic with an under developed local government and justice system, and a very strong criminal element used to getting its own way.  All of those factors lead to the OK Corral incident and the bloodshed afterward.  We also get to know the various antagonists – the so called “Cowboys” who are rowdy criminals and cattle rustlers who are generally doing whatever they like around Tombstone and getting their way with impunity  – they have the local authorities intimidated, and the support of local ranchers who are benefitting from their cattle rustling raids into Mexico.

As the story picks up, the details and interactions between the close associates of the Earp brothers – there are four in this story – and the Cowboys led by the infamous Johnny Ringo get more intense as we approach the Ok Corral.  The actual gunfight itself goes pretty quickly – it is said to have only lasted 30 seconds, leaving Virgil Earp and Doc Holiday wounded and 3 cowboys dead.  But the story AFTER the gunfight is even more intense, as the Cowboys vow revenge on the Earps and Doc Holiday, and begin a campaign of disinformation about how it happened, who started it, and partly thru intimidation and disinformation, gain their allies.   Their cause is aided by the sheriff of Tombstone who is an ally of the Cowboys.

The Cowboys nearly kill Virgil, and they do kill Morgan Earp, and are intent on killing Wyatt and Doc Holiday.  At that point, Wyatt gives up on the justice system holding these murderers accountable, and decides to take justice into his own hands.  He, his brother Warren, Doc Holiday and a couple of their other allies begin what is referred to as a Vendetta Ride to hunt down the Cowboys. They do in fact kill three of them – and that is an engrossing part of the book. Wyatt is then indicted for murder but leaves Tombstone before he could be arrested, to follow Josie, his lover to San Francisco.

The last 50 or so pages provide a fascinating look at the lives of Wyatt and his common law wife Josie after leaving Tombstone.  By that time, the story of the OK Coral and Wyatt’s Vendetta Ride have already become mythology in America.  Wyatt and Josie are on the move, trying to make a living, establishing saloons and gambling parlors in numerous towns and cities, including heading North to Nome Alaska during the gold rush.  For a while, they are quietly out-running the legend of the OK Corral, while also looking to profit from Wyatt’s notoriety.  At the end of their lives, their health is failing, and they are strapped for money.   Wyatt is ill and Josie has symptoms of dementia as they’ve entered into the cinematic era.  They are approached by numerous authors and journalists wanting to interview them and write their story, but Josie insists that it be told in a way that leaves out anything she believes doesn’t reflect well on her or Wyatt.   Wyatt dies before Josie, who lives another 10 yrs campaigning to air-brush the truth about her and Wyatt’s lives in Tombstone, giving revised and cleaned up versions to authors and screen writers anxious to capitalize on the legends, to entertain America with a story America wants to believe. 

What I liked about Epitaph

• The Writing This is the fourth book I’ve read by Mary Doria Russell.  I like her writing, her literary eloquence and how well she tells a story.

• The History – I believe her version of the story of the Earps, Doc Holiday, Tombstone and the OK Corral are pretty accurate, and follow pretty closely the contours of the known history.  It’s fascinating to step back into that world, painted in pretty good detail by MDR in Doc and Epitaph.

• The Context – What would it be like to live in a world with little law and order and that much corruption?  We certainly have places in America today that have a lot in common with Tombstone in those days – Chicago?  Baltimore?  How would I behave? What choices would I make?

• The Characters –  I really liked the characters, and though MDR does well at giving them each a personality and character – the book could have been better (IMHO) had we gotten more deeply into the perspectives of one or two of the characters and seen the world more from their first person perspective.  The book is written from a narrator’s view.  

• The Final Years – she took the story all the way to the end – the last years of Wyatt and Josie’s lives and we learned briefly about “the rest of the story” of other characters.  That took us into the 20th century – across that great transition in America from the Wild West of Tombstone and other parts of Arizona, to Los Angeles, Hollywood and the beginnings of the modern era. 

• Relevance to Today – MDR made numerous comments that invited comparisons and perspectives to life in our world today.  These include the struggles of the poor especially in the big cities (NYC and San Francisco), how scandalous and false rumors spread in Tombstone, were believed and shaped the views of the public (similar to what social media does today),  how public anger can become infectious, build momentum, and motivate acts of violence, the role of the press in political activism and shading how events are perceived by the public,  and in Josie’s case, how dementia can amplify strong feelings that can fuel poor judgment.

  Just a few quotes that I liked and that represent Russel’s writing in Epitaph: 

• A man might wind up in Texas for any number of reasons, but few of them were based on solid achievement elsewhere.  In Texas your Pilgrim Fathers were leftover Mexicans, a bunch of land hungry German immigrants, and hardscrabble Scotch-Irish backwoodsmen.  After the war, you added your white trash and bankrupt planters driven off their land by Yankee troops and carpetbagger taxes – all of them resentful about the way the war had ended. Of course, there were Yankees in Texas, too.  They were apt to be cheerful about the outcome of the conflict, but generally arrived in Texas just as broke….Round the population out with orphans, and runaways looking for others of their kind to gang with – Johnny Ringo was a fair example of that. Anyway, “failure” might be too hard a word for those who’d come west. Unlucky, maybe.  p144

• Tommy sighed, for there are people – his brother <Frank McLaury.> was one of them – who can become so convinced of their own rendering of events that believing something is tantamount to proof.  Arguing only makes them dig in deeper.  p148

• Bob Paul: “Crime is compounded by vengeance and brutality.  The law and its strict enforcement are all that separate civilization from barbarism.  That’s why I’m running for sheriff, Wyatt, and I’d like to have your support.”  There were very few men Wyatt Earp looked up to, morally or physically. Robert Havlin Paul was among them.  p 212

• Seven years after the Crash of 1873….Do what works.  That was the motto. Grab what you can when you can. That was the plan.  It was not a golden age, as Mr Twain had recently pointed out, but a cheap and flashy gilded one.  A time of fakery and exuberant corruption, of patronage and cronyism, and every species of shameless self-seeking .  In such times, even honorable men give up trying to draw the line…p220

• Sheriff Behan during the Vendetta Ride:  Even if he brought the Earp riders in, what good would it do?   The Arizona justice system was corrupt, top to bottom and all but impotent. Between allies and alibis, nobody was ever convicted of a serious crime. p 498

• Opinions about the events in Arizona had divided predictably along party lines.  The  Earps were stage robbers, thugs, and murderers; Doc Holliday was worse than any of them, a  quarrelsome drunk and a killer.  Or, the Earps were incorruptible lawmen; Doc Holliday was their loyal friend, a gentleman, and a scholar. There was a reliable market for either version and editorials were easy to write. p520

•  Doc Holiday; “I don’t believe I shall mind bein’ dead. Gettin’ there has been a trial.”  p526

•  That’s when his <Bill Hart, movie producer> career really took off, for his films portrayed the Old West with a zeal for authenticity that was immensely appealing to those who were sentimental about a by-gone era, which had lived ugly, but read romantic and ennobling. p 550-51

Epitaph is a fun and captivating way to learn about Wyatt Earp, Tombstone and the end of the crazy Wild West era.  For those who’d like to read more about Earp, Tombstone, and the Ok Corral, I recommend Wikipedia’s article on Wyatt Earp, and  American Heritage’s article on Wyatt Earp .

Why this book: Selected by the SEAL book club I’m in.  I wasn’t keen on reading another specops book, but this one was really well done and enlightening.

Summary in 4 sentences; The book begins in North Africa, with David Sterling, generally recognized as the father of the SAS, coming up with a non-standard tactic for intrepid men like himself, who felt stifled by traditional military bureaucracy, to go behind Rommels forces and wreak havoc in their comfortable safe spaces in the rear.  The first half of the book is about their steep learning curve and accounts of their multiple successes as well as some of their tragic failures in North Africa.  In the second half of the book, the British Army and the SAS are applying their lessons learned in Africa against the Germans in Italy and in France, working with local resistance fighters fighting in Italy and in support of the D-Day invasion and the move through France to Germany. The book then moves to operations inside of Germany before the final surrender, and concludes with an interesting section about what happened to the many heroes in the book, after the war.  

The Book:  Copyright 2016, Paperback published by Broadway Books, 351 pages. 

My Impressions:  Rogue Heroes tells the improbable story of the formation of the SAS, their initial challenges getting started, and provides great stories of brave men breaking new ground in warfare,  conducting daring operations behind the lines in World War 2, the likes of which I have never heard of or read before.  There have always been daring commando units; what was new here, was small units over months and years, successfully applying stealth, surprise, and hit and run tactics to destroy supply lines and disrupt enemy operations,  against an enemy as powerful and sophisticated as the Wehrmacht, in an environment as unforgiving as the North African desert, in a war with new technology on both sides.   

MacIntyre was the first author given access to the SAS war diaries for his research.  He not only had access to the facts, the archives, and other documents, and did extensive additional research not only on the operations conducted, but on the individuals who conducted them.  And importantly, he is a great story teller.  This book is a great read and was hard to put down.  

In the early days of the SAS, there was a steep learning curve.  Parachuting was a new tactic, and they made a number of serious and sometimes tragic mistakes in learning how to apply it to their needs.   Using vehicles to insert commando raiding forces over hundreds of miles of desert required learning new lessons from the beginning, many the hard way.  They also established their own operating bases behind enemy lines and operated out of them for weeks, vulnerable to air reconnaissance and attacks, as well as betrayal from indigenous herders.  They lost many men in learning their painful lessons, but they kept at it, focused on the mission, the enemy, and learning from their mistakes.  Eventually they started racking up enormous successes, way out of proportion to the size of their force.  And they never stopped having to fight the traditionalists in the British Army who felt that what they were doing was somehow not proper, not sporting, not….military.  

MacIntyre gives us a look at the men who made up the SAS in these formative years – their quirks and strengths, their fears, and weaknesses, their backgrounds and personalities – and this makes his stories that much richer.  We follow several heroes until they are killed or captured – and only a few of the originals were leading and fighting with the SAS through to the end of the war.   Many of them then struggled after the war to find a life and an environment that was as engaging as being an SAS commando fighting alongside similarly motivated men, against an evil foe.  Navy SEALs and Army Special Forces operators often have the same challenges upon leaving the military – some adapt well, many do not. 

At the conclusion of the North Africa campaign, the SAS had to shift focus to support the main allied effort against the Nazis in Europe.  It took the SAS some time to adapt their desert tactics to fighting the Nazis in Italy and France – in much closer proximity to conventional forces and civilian population centers.  They played key roles in support of conventional operations in Sicily, and afterward in support of the allied campaign to defeat the Germans in Italy.  Then later, MacIntyre gives us stories of SAS teams parachuting behind German lines in support of the Normandy invasion, and then continuing operations in different parts of France supporting the French Maquis – the French Resistance – attacking supply lines and creating havoc in the Wehrmacht’s rear, as Allied forces drove the Wehrmacht out of France and across the Rhine into Germany.   This was a very different type of warfare, and it took some time to learn to  fight along side and in support of  maquis operations.   Developing trust with the maquis was often a challenge – there were informers everywhere, and they were often compromised with tragic results. 

Hitler’s Kommandobefehl issued in October 1942 directed that any allied forces captured doing commando operations behind German lines were to be immediately executed, even if in uniform and surrendering.  This meant that any captured SAS operator had no Geneva convention or POW rights, and many SAS operators were executed under this order.  The Nazis were also exterminating entire villages in France as reprisals for SAS operations, on the assumption that French Resistance had assisted.  This did not inspire the SAS to take prisoners or treat German prisoners with Geneva Convention protocols, though they often did.  At this phase of the war, the Nazis were increasingly desperate, and the killing became more vicious, cruel, bloody and brutal.  

Some of the parts of this story that resonated with me and my time with the SEALs (though I have never been, nor have any SEALs I know ever been in a war as all-encompassing and brutal as WW2).

• RESISTANCE from CONVENTIONAL FORCES. David Stirling faced stiff resistance from the staffs of conventional forces to his proposal to create a specialized commando raiding force.  He referred to these staff officers as a “freemasonry of mediocrity” and “layer upon layer of fossilized shit.”  Establishing the SAS required General Auchinleck, Commander in Chief of Middle East Command, to over-ride his staff officers, who hated that an upstart young 1st Lt would be allowed to create a unit of what they saw as renegade, ill-disciplined commandos, not required to submit to the rigid standards of in-garrison military discipline. This challenge is familiar to all special operations forces and inhibited the development of Navy SEAL forces for decades.  Just like for the SAS, the establishment of the Navy SEALs required a few imaginative senior leaders to over-ride the resistance of their conventional staffs.  This story for the Navy SEALs is beautifully told by Ben Milligan in his book:   By Water Beneath the Walls.  
• THE MEN WHO VOLUNTEER –  The men who volunteered for the SAS knew they were volunteering for hazardous work against a brutal enemy, to operate often unsupported behind enemy lines, and while in garrison, receiving poor logistical, food, billeting and other support, and few of the amenities that are available to most conventional forces.  This has been the case when volunteering for special forces in the US and in the case of all elite forces I have worked with, especially in Europe. 
• SCREENING and THE NATURE OF THE TRAINING. Screening of potential SAS operators didn’t appear to be very sophisticated.  Most importantly they had to volunteer, and have a reasonable idea what they were volunteering for.  Many were recruited based on personal reputation and connections with those already within the SAS, and  a brief interview.  It didn’t appear that there was a physical or fitness test.  Physical and mental fitness were determined during prep training – those who were not be mentally or physically fit enough or otherwise didn’t fit, either dropped on request, or were not allowed to go on operations. This is not unlike the screening in the early days of UDT and SEAL training, or as I understand it, Special Forces training.   A candidates performance during basic training was the primary screening tool.  Today most Special Ops Forces have  extensive and sophisticated screening protocols to best determine who will succeed as a Special Operations operator or leader PRIOR to beginning basic training. 
• ETHICS ON THE BATTLEFIELD – The SAS killed or wounded hundreds of Wehrmacht soldiers during their operations.  MacIntyre related several cases when they did killing that some felt was not strictly necessary,  and there were mixed feelings about that – many were uncomfortable with killing that wasn’t critical to the success of the mission. Later, when fighting in Europe and after Hitler’s Kommandobefehl was in full force, it became more difficult for SAS leaders to enforce discipline on SAS troops when taking German prisoners.  MacIntyre notes how “The distinction between rough justice and murder was blurring” and “an eye for an eye brutality <was> met by greater brutality…The gentlemanly, jovial, dangerous, and exciting warfare pioneered by Stirling was evolving into something harder and cruder under the pressure of  long and horrific conflict.” p271
• POST TRAUMATIC STRESS – MacIntyre concludes the book with a chapter entitled “Afterlives” in which he gives us brief post-war biographies of the many SAS operators who survived the war.  Many did not do well adapting to peacetime and civilian life.  Many had internal demons which gave them the energy and drive they harnessed to fight and survive against an implacable enemy during the war, but which after the war, were much more difficult to deal with. Paddy Mayne, one of the SASs’s key leaders had, according to MacIntyre, “enough internal demons…to populate a small hell,” (p272) and after the war “drank far too much, and not happily.” (p346  He was not atypical.  This has been an issue after any war; Britain had struggled with this phenomenon after the first World War, as soldiers in the US, Australia and other countries are struggling with it now after nearly 20 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan.  

This book is not only a great compendium of stories of acts of heroism by brave men in war, but also a clear-eyed look at the types of men who repeatedly volunteer for and conduct very high risk operations in small groups, unsupported in the enemy’s back yard.  It is an excellent look at the beginnings of one of the world’s premier special operations units, but also a look at special operations in general – capabilities, limitations, and possibilities.  

Why this book: Selected by one of the book clubs I’m in at the strong recommendation of Jay.  So we all read it, and it has generated some great discussions, and it will continue to do so. 

Summary in 3 Sentences:  The basic theme of this book is that there is scientific evidence that supports the proposition that has existed for millennia in native cultures and even in religious traditions, that with intense thought and focus (eg, prayer, chants, rituals) we CAN and do impact the world around us.  And that we are all connected  and are always communicating with and affecting each other in subtle ways of which most of us are not conscious and which science is still trying to understand.  Though most of the book explores the wide variety of scientific experiments intended to explore and better understand such psychic phenomena as psychic healing, psycho-kinesis, and the impact of thought and intention on the world outside of the individual’s own thinking or intending, she also looks at some of the metaphysical and moral implications of what scientists are uncovering.  

My Impressions:  Fascinating book, written for the educated layman who is interested in, and open to the idea that reality may be more complicated than Newtonian physics implies, and that it is worth exploring the implications of phenomena which are not explained by traditional laws of physics.  The “experiment” in The Intention Experiment refers to a series of experiments that have been taking place for decades and are continuing, that explore uncanny connections between living organisms and even inanimate objects that defy rational (by current standards) explanation.  At the end of the book she invites the reader to participate in ongoing and planned experiments.  She explores and describes experiments that seem to validate that our minds, with focused attention have an impact outside of and beyond the thinker him/herself.  “Even your current state of mind carries an intention that has an effect on life around you. The mind continues affecting its surroundings, whether or not we are consciously sending an intention. To think is to affect.” p155

The Intention experiment begins with a look at quantum theory, describing some of the experiments and observations that indicate that what we believe regarding space, time and relationships between individual people and objects, is not as it may seem.  Quantum reality, the book argues, includes a network of subtle energetic connections between all things – alive and even inanimate – a rather daunting proposition.  That idea sets up the following chapters which describe experiments that explore the implications of the statement that “Every organism, from bacterial to human beings appears to be in a perpetual quantum communication.”  

What does that mean?  McTaggart systematically explores dozens of experiments in which physicists, psychologists, scientists from a number of disciplines try to measure and replicate these strange phenomena that would seem to tell us that people and things have connections we don’t yet see or understand.  Shamans, psychics, and religious leaders over the millennia have always “known” the power that some people have of using focused thought, prayer, rituals, and strong intention to affect outcomes in the physical world in ways that have been inexplicable to Western science.  She describes how we are all caught up in a web of “quantum entanglement” which transmits energy between people and objects in ways we don’t yet understand, and which she says, “could well be the key to life itself.” p11. The Intention Experiment surveys the scientific efforts to explain and better understand these phenomena.  It is very well footnoted, for those wishing to know more about the experiments she describes.

One of the early efforts to measure these psychic connections came after, Clive Backster, one of the early developers of the polygraph, on a whim hooked up his sensors to a plant and found that the polygraph indicated that the plant responded to physical distress similarly to how humans respond.   But what truly surprised him was that it also responded to intention as yet unexpressed, and that time and distance didn’t seem to matter.  “At the very moment that he had the thought, <to burn a leaf> the recording pen swung to the top of the polygraph and nearly jumped off.  He had not burned the plant; he had only thought about doing so.  According to his polygraph, the plant had perceived the thought as a direct threat and registered extreme alarm.” p37  When he changed his mind and decided not to burn the plant, the polygraph went back to normal.  The Intention Experiment describes a multitude of experiments that further explore the implications of Backster’s experiences. 

The Intention Experiment covers a lot of ground.  It describes experiments in which people’s bio-physical processes came into synchrony, how clocks in the same room would eventually synchronize and stay synchronized. She has a whole chapter which explores what she calls “The Voodoo Effect” – intending negative effects or harm to another.  She looks at the implications of how the art of visualization can affect outcomes and other people.  She also looks at the  mysteries of remote viewing, and the implications of people able to “see” places they’ve never physically been.

She also explores another aspect of “non-locality” not only in space, but also in time – a concept which still confuses me. Scientists are challenging such foundational principles as cause-and-effect, and she looks at what is called “retro-causation” – how the future may impact the present, and how we now, with intention,  might impact the past.  (yep, I’m confused too, but theoretical physicists are convinced that time and space are not stable truths in the universe.)  There have also been experiments that show that psychic, psychokinetic and healing outcomes are also influenced by fluctuations in the earth’s magnetic field and by sunspots and other such esoteric phenomena that also affect other energy sources on the electro-magnetic spectrum.  This has led to scheduling such experiments around these variables. 

The book explores “faith healing” and describes experiments that attempt to validate (or not) whether and how prayer or focused intention can heal the body – not only of the person praying, but remotely of another person separated in space.   She’s found that someone else’s healing intentions for us may be as powerful as our own.  McTaggart explains efforts to find the variables – such as the well-being of the healer, whether the healer and person being healed have a shared belief system, variables such as time, distance, the placebo effect, the electro-magnetic spectrum, sun spots, etc   She also explores what well known healers say about what they do, how they do it, why they think it works, and what might be impediments to building connections that can have a positive effect on the person being targeted.   After looking at her evidence, her conclusion: “Repeatedly, the mind has proved to be a far more powerful healer than the greatest of breakthrough drugs.”  p195

The last chapter of the book, written in 2007, describes future experiments and invites the reader to participate. Her research shows that in general, a group of people desiring a specific outcome with focused and coordinated attention, seems to have more power and impact than a single person.  When she wrote the book, there were ongoing efforts to recruit people to focus attention on a specific desired outcome, at a specific time, to concentrate and coordinate efforts to further test and better understand this phenomenon.   For those interested in participating, she offers up the website theintentionexperiment.com, which I found does not work in 2022, but to get updated on what she’s doing, lynnmctaggart.com does work. 

HER BOTTOM LINE: 

“Our definition of the Universe as a collection of isolated objects, our definition of ourselves as just another of those objects, our most basic understanding of time and space, will have to be recast. At least forty top scientists in academic centers of research around the world have demonstrated that an information transfer constantly caries on between living things, and that thought forms are simply another aspect of transmitted energy.   Hundreds of others have offered plausible theories embracing even the most counterintuitive effects, such as time-displaced influence, as now consistent with the laws of physics.”  p194

Implication: “All these possibilities suggest that we have an awesome level of responsibility when generating our thoughts.  Each of us is a potential Frankenstein, with an extraordinary power to affect the living world around us. How many of us after all, are sending our most positive thoughts?  p144

MY BOTTOM LINE – McTaggart tries to be even handed and objective in making her case, though she is clearly a true believer – and her book and views have credibility with me.  I have long believed in such phenomena, and that there is an “unseen order of things” which drives the world we experience every day.   I must admit however that I have not “operationalized” this belief – that is, built it into an active principle in my life.  Reading this book has inspired me to further explore how focused attention, prayer, visualization, strong intent in my own life might help me make the most of the time I have left – for myself and others.  Because I have dabbled in this area over the decades, I have found a number of books in my library which speak to McTaggart’s thesis, most of which make little effort to explain their positions scientifically, rather, merely state their “truth” and give examples that support it.   That said, what these books claim about reality and peoples’ ability to influence it, and what Mctaggart’s book explains are in almost perfect harmony.  If you are interested in what books I am referring to, contact me.