Bob's Books

Why this book:  Recommended by Janar in my literature reading group.  Janar lives in Brazil, and Jorge Amado is very well known author in Brazil, but not in the US. This novella – only about 70 pages – is a well regarded book of his,  so we added it as an  additional option to another book we were reading.

Summary in 4 Sentences:  A well established respectable, church going family man suddenly up and leaves his family, and not only joins the ranks of carousers, partyers, and deplorables in Bahia, Brazil, he becomes a leader and hero to those whose lives revolve around the bars,  the red-light district, the docks, and the lower class speak-easys.  His family is appalled and embarrassed, choose to pretend that he doesn’t exist, don’t speak about him to their friends or around the children, until they are told that he was found dead in his cheap and dirty cold water flat,  and now they have to claim the body and bury him.  Meanwhile his many admiring friends and fellow carousers want to appropriately mourn the passing of the chief partyer, much to the chagrin of his family.   It is a hilarious story of the clash of cultures between the world of strict adherence to conventional morality, and the world of those who don’t care a whit for conventional morality, preferring to live for today’s more immediate pleasures and friendships.

My Impressions: Very clever, well written and well translated.  Worthy of Steinbeck or Hemingway – both of whom would have very much enjoyed this book, as did I.   We only get to know our protagonist after he is dead, from the sad recollections of his very conventional daughter, and the happy recollections of his friends and fellow carousers.   He is dead, but is he really?  He had been a model upper middle class bureaucrat in the town of Bahia, Brazil, respectable in every way: Joaquim Soares de Cunha, a husband, a father, with a nice home, nice family, church going, doing well in his civil servant career, well-liked and well-respected among respectable people in the community.  Then, at one point, one day, something snapped.

 He got up from his chair, called his wife and daughters “vipers,” and walked out,  and joined the ranks of the carousing dispossessed in the barrios of Bahia, Brazil, consorting with those who respectable society preferred to pretend didn’t exist.  He reinvented himself as Quincas Water-Bray and became  a well-loved and well-respected member of a different community – one that didn’t have nearly so strict (if any) rules of propriety – beyond fun, friendship and taking care of each other.  When after 10 or so years he died, the papers referred to him as the “boozer in chief of Salvador,” the “tatterdemalion philosopher of the market dock,” the “senator of honky-tonks,” “tramp par excellence.” 

HIs wife, daughter, family and friends were horrified and scandalized, and of course, embarrassed by his leaving and his behavior afterward.  For them, the husband/father upstanding member of the community they had known was dead. His name was not spoken around the grand children, nor among each other. When they did speak of him, it was in the past tense,  and they lived in constant fear of being associated with the scandalous tramp whose name occasionally appeared in the papers as part of some drunken act of debauchery that shamed the family.    Leaving his family was of course, his first death – symbolically speaking – the death of Joaquim Soares de Cunha

But now Quincas Water-Bray is lying cold with a smile on his face in a filthy room in a poor part of town.  This creates an embarrassing dilemma for his daughter and family.   It forced them to acknowledge their connection to him, and to undertake the appropriate rituals for claiming their family relative and arranging a funeral that would be “appropriate” for people of their class – but they insisted on honoring the man he had been before, with a proper Catholic funeral that a good family would sponsor to grieve the passing of respectable member of the community.   BUT they and everyone knew, that is not who he’d been for years.   And in every decision, how much it would cost was always an important factor – from the clothes he’d be buried in, to the coffin, to the limousines that would drive people to the cemetery.   

The family’s desires for a proper Catholic burial did not involve his more recent friends – those of the community to which he’d escaped their more uncompromising standards of propriety. It is customary in that part of the world for someone in the family to sit up with the corpse all night, before the burial, but the family members were tired, it was not in a good part of town to be in at night, so late that night, Quincas’s brother chose to leave the corpse in the care of several of Quincas’s friends, who were grieving with them, so that he could go home and get some sleep.

Quincas’s  friends had been drinking much of the day, drowning their sorrows while celebrating Quincas’s life in the way they celebrated everything.  The drinking and story telling led to the the ingenious idea to take the celebration outside the room and into the community where Quincas had been so happy, AND TAKE QUINCAS WITH THEM to celebrate with and say goodbye to his friends and members of his community.  They noted that Quincas was so drunk, he couldn’t stand up or walk on his own, so they held him up and went into town.

We are thereby introduced to the rogues gallery of Quincas’s life, the ladies of the night,  including Quincas’s favorite Quiteria Goggle-Eye, and his many other friends with whom he had partied and associated.  There follows a revery which is reminiscent of Weekend at Bernies or Waking Ned Devine.  It is a slapstick scene but well done, as Quincas’s corpse has a smile on its face and the author has him making (imagined?) comments to those around him.  It is not overdone, and one can’t help but celebrate along with his friends, and even think to oneself “this is how I’d like to go.”   Finally,  they find a conclusion for Quincas on this earth which he would find much more to his liking than a proper Catholic burial. 

The Double Death of Quincas Water-Bray is a fun novella that highlights the hypocrisy of the respectable middle-class through the life and death of one who rejected their values and goes over to the other side and joins with those who celebrate life and each other, and thumb their noses at death. In this book we are given a humorous but insightful story of a clash of cultures..

Why This Book: Selected by the SEAL reading group I’m in as our choice for “a novel about war” to read and discuss.   I had already twice read Marlantes book What it’s Like to go to War  (my review  of it here)  was quite impressed, and I’d heard really good things about Matterhorn.  

Summary in 3 Sentences. This is a novel about a  US Marine infantry company in Vietnam, fighting the North Vietnamese Army over a period of about 2 months in and around a fictional isolated outpost named Matterhorn. The protagonist of the novel is a young newly- arrived-in-Vietnam second lieutenant who we follow from his arrival with B Company at Matterhorn through several intense combat operations, the loss of several men in his company, the restructuring of the company and his platoon after losses, and eventually with experience, both tragic and heroic, his promotion to positions of greater responsibility.  The book is a brutally honest look at how marines deal with each other, the stresses of combat, the loss of their platoon and company mates, racial tensions in the company, and the apparently arbitrary orders that they must carry out in fighting an implacable enemy in a war they don’t really understand.

My Impressions: POWERFUL. One of the best novels I’ve read about men at war.  Marlantes puts us inside the perspective of 2nd Lt Mellas, newly arrived in Vietnam, uncertain, and inexperienced.  He had recently been commissioned after graduating from Princeton; coming from a liberal elite university education, he now found himself working with and leading marines who were mostly from poor, broken or working class families without the means to avoid the draft.  Mellas is trying to figure out his role, lead with confidence when he didn’t have much, keep his men and himself alive, under circumstances that just didn’t make much sense to him. The environment he entered was brutal, primitive, and unforgiving; the men, their language and their tasks profane and uncompromising.  He had to adapt. 

Through his eyes we experience how he comes to learn the formal structure of his marine platoon and company, as well as the informal structure of who has what and how much influence.  We experience his uncertainty and anxiety as he steps into his leadership role when he doesn’t really know what to do, and desperately wishes he were somewhere else when faced with grueling conditions and really tough dilemmas. We see how he makes mistakes, recovers, and grows in confidence and maturity, slowly wins the respect of his men, becomes attached to them and suffers when they are wounded and killed.  

We also get inside the perspectives of some of the leaders of the Marines Regiment -those who make the decisions that Mellas and his company had to carry out.  We get to know the ambitious and glory-seeking battalion commander, LTC Simpson and his lackey S-3 operations officer Maj Blakely, whose decisions are driven by how they will appear to those above them in the chain of command, men who are even farther away from the fighting than they are.  And we are shocked at some of their decisions, and are sympathetic to Mellas when he becomes disillusioned with the Marine Corps and his mission there – but he must continue, because of his training, and out of loyalty to his men. 

We also get to know his fellow platoon officers in the company – a diverse group with whom Mellas is trying to fit in.  1st Lt Ted Hawke is the most practical and best suited to the war – admired by the men, empathetic to them, best able to maintain his equilibrium in the face of the capricious decisions of  the leadership. Mellas looks up to Hawke, admires him and wants his respect. Eventually he earns it.

Matterhorn is a roller coaster ride – the platoon goes from one in-extremis situation to another.  And about time they (and we the readers) think they are at the end of their rope, have accomplished the near impossible and earned a break, their leadership gives them an even more daunting task.  We suffer with Mellas and his platoon as these decisions come down. We grieve for the men lost.  The role of luck in combat and the senselessness of so many deaths is a theme.  Mellas, who had never seen a dead body before coming to Vietnam, becomes very familiar with death, facing the likelihood of his own death, as well as having to deal with the consequences of the deaths of those close to him.  It is a powerful book.

The role of morality in war is a sub theme in the book – how in fierce combat, values change and the rules of civilized society just don’t seem to work – and Mellas had to figure out the different rules.   Mellas and his fellow officers had the primary imperative to complete their assigned mission while also taking care of their marines – all other considerations were a distant second.   In order to do this well, officers must establish and protect their reputations as tough leaders and fighters.

Mellas initially struggles with this.  He struggles with leaving a wounded NVA soldier to die in the jungle – there was no real alternative.  How hard should he punish the infractions of his young marines, few of whom are over 20 yrs old?  Should he reveal crimes he’s aware of to the leadership, whose reaction he knows will undermine the combat effectiveness of his men.  His loyalty to his men overrides his loyalty to his leaders and the Marine Corps, including some of the values he had when he entered the Marine Corps.

At the beginning of the book Mellas truly hopes to minimize suffering, and views his enemies as human beings.  By the end of the book, the brutality of the battles he’d fought in, the killing he had seen and participated in, and the capriciousness of death he had witnessed had transformed him from a civilized citizen soldier to a primal fighter, focused on simply protecting his men and staying alive while satisfying the whims of his leaders and the war.  His world had devolved into what reminded me of the primal state of nature Thomas Hobbes described in his classic Leviathan;  where there are  “no arts; no letters; no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death” and life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Another key theme in Matterhorn is the racial tension between the black and white marines in Bravo Company.    There are racist blacks and racist whites, some of whom hate each other, some of whom tolerate each other, and some of whom have friends across the racial divide. But they all must learn to set these differences aside and fight together as a team, and take care of each other under the worst of conditions.

This part of the book will be shocking to some of today’s readers, as this sort of racial animosity is certainly much less in today’s military.  Marlantes helps us understand the perspectives and anger from both sides of this issue – as the enforced intimacy between blacks and whites brings simmering issues that they brought with them into the Marine Corps to a head – all complicated by the culture of the Marine Corps which demands unquestioning obedience to the chain of command.   The problems are in garrison, in the firebase; in the field, black and white marines work together and support each other when patrolling or fighting the enemy.  As one of the sergeants said, in the field, they are all green. 

The North Vietnamese enemy is dehumanized in a racist way, always referred to as gooks as  GIs had referred to Japs, Nips, Krauts, and more recently, rag-heads.  Mellas had several realizations that these gooks he was fighting and killing were human beings as well – but this insight complicated his role of leading marines in combat.    He did not linger there. Nor can any soldier really. 

When I spoke to Karl Marlantes prior to our discussion of his book, he shared that Matterhorn is modeled loosely on the Parsifal myth, which is the story of a thoughtful young man becoming a warrior within the Arthurian legends around the Holy Grail. Indeed Matterhorn can be seen as Mellas’s baptism by fire, and evolution from an idealistic ivy league-educated junior officer into a somewhat cynical and hardened warrior who is trying to hold on to his humanity in the midst of so much brutality and violence.  Marlantes also mentioned Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey in our discussion of Mellas.

Undoubtedly Matterhorn has some autobiographical qualities to it: Mellas was from Princeton; Marlantes from Yale and Cambridge.  I could relate – I signed up with some trepidation to join the SEALs during the Vietnam War while studying liberal arts at Stanford and all my friends protesting against the war.   Saigon fell while I was in SEAL training. My combat experience would have to wait a couple of decades, but it was nowhere near as intense as what Matterhorn portrays. 

There were a number of really powerful scenes in the book.  A few that really struck me were:

• When Mellas struggled with what to do with the mortally wounded North Vietnamese soldier.
• When Parker died –  a black marine who had been a racial instigator, but became human and won Mellas’s (and my) respect and sympathy.
• When Col Mulvaney gave LTC Simpson a much deserved ass chewing and described the Marine Corps as America’s whores.
• When Mellas reflected on his time at Princeton with his well-to-do university friends righteously  wondering how anyone could be so foolish as to join the military and fight in this war, and Mellas saying nothing about his having signed up for the marines – to help pay his tuition.  
• When Jancowitz defused a potential racial brawl at a movie, by starting the movie, without a reel.
• The Incongruity of Simpson’s mess night.
• Vancouver – who he was, how he fought, and how he died.  
• Mellas’s meeting w Sgt Major Knapp requesting that Cassidy be transferred.
• Bravo company standing by to go on the Bald Eagle mission, when they all expected to be inserted into a raging battle and many would not come back. 
• When Hawke walked out to join the Bald Eagle Mission.
• When Mellas lay behind a log, scared stiff, knowing he had to do something, and had a near out of body experience before he took action.
• The drinking scene wth all the officers together before being inserted onto Fire base Eiger, and the officers waxing drunkenly poetic about themselves, the situation they were in, each other, and the Marine Corps.
• The final section, with Mellas looking up at the shadows of the clouds crossing the mountains. 

Why This Book:  I work pretty hard – at least harder than most without being obsessed with it – to build a foundation of health, wellness and fitness that will allow me to live well and pursue my adventures well beyond middle age.  I wrote a piece on longevity in my Bob’s Corner Blog a few years ago which peaked my interest. I read this book while attending a total immersion program in health, wellness, and fitness in Virginia Beach, also intended to increase health and wellness. 

Summary in 4 Sentences:  This is a book about nutrition and the gut-biome – Gundry makes the convincing case that our gut biome, or microbiome – the bacteria that lives in our stomachs and small intestines – is a fundamental source of our health, wellness, or alternatively, our disabilities and maladies.  He argues that certain foods make our “gut-buddies” happy, others make it difficult for them to to their jobs, or help the bad bugs in our gut thrive or make it possible for bad nutrients to pass through the stomach lining and activate our immune system to attack them, which over time, is the source of much our inflammation, arthritis, and degeneration of our physical and mental capabilities.  He argues – again rather convincingly – that a diet that takes care of our gut-buddies and excludes or severely limits foods that support our bad bugs and/or can get thru our stomach lining, will extend health, well-being and life.  He tells us which foods to eat, which to avoid, how best to fast occasionally and why, and gives a whole chapter on meal plans and recipes for longevity enhancing dishes. 

My Impressions:  Fascinating book, easy to read, convincing and inspiring. Gundry is a well known cardiologist who has become something of a nutritional expert. His book The Plant Paradox was an opening salvo (I haven’t read it) in his efforts to explain and  improve people’s diets.   His focus is on the microbiome – our gut and stomach lining.  He writes for the lay person, but most lay people will not be familiar with some of the biology and the names of some of the enzymes and molecules which he uses to explain his arguments – but he makes it easy to overlook that. This book expands and explains the role of dietary consideration in explaining longevity, health span and wellness with a different approach – taking care of our microbiome means taking care of our long term health.  His explanations are convincing and he makes it interesting and even fun – and includes a lot of surprises.  

His recommendations are consistent with much of what I’ve heard from other nutritionists, and are very consistent with Michael Pollan’s simple seven word guide to healthy eating:  Eat Food, not too much, mostly plants. “Eat food” means eat primarily fresh – not processed, packaged, or canned food.  His recommendations will not be controversial with most nutritionists or doctors, though he does argue against the Keto and protein focused argument for more meat and saturated fats.  

What is different (for me) about his approach is the focus on the microbiome, how critically important it is to our health, how broad ranging and impactful the effects of a healthy (or unhealthy) microbiome can be, and how our diet should take care of it.  Some may argue with some of his recommendations, but the biggest question for most people will be: How important is my LONG TERM health to me, and what changes and inconveniences am I willing to put up with in order to invest in it?  Long term health is like a lot of things that are truly good in life – it requires discipline to invest in delayed gratification.  To attain long term health and wellness requires a willingness to endure some short term discomforts and give up some impulsive short term pleasures (junk food, fast food, sweets, easy, fast calories.)  Like working out when I might prefer more comfortable alternatives – like eating, drinking, watching TV. 

He argues that heart disease is largely an auto-immune disorder, brought on by inflammation caused by a diet which promotes inflammation.  He says that cholesterol is NOT the enemy – it is Triglycerides and  he gives an argument that only a cardiologist could give.   He has a whole chapter on memory and brain health and ties that again, to our microbiome and reducing inflammation in the brain. He offers some novel ways to maintain brain health in addition to diet – he argues that our last meal should be four hours before we sleep so that our body’s resources and blood are available to heal and take care of the brain at night while we sleep, instead of digesting our meal.  He argues for intermittent fasting, and occasional fasts or fasting mimicking diets to give the brain and the body an opportunity to cleanse themselves of dead and inefficient cells in the absence of calories.  He clearly believes that over time, dementia and Alzheimers can be significantly reduced if not defeated by a healthy diet that takes care of the brain and reduces inflammation.

He believes that the epidemic of cancer can also be traced to a diet which does not support a strong and healthy microbiome.  He writes that, “The standard Western diet promotes cancer growth at every turn.” p115

He also offers lifestyle changes and challenges to promote longevity and longer health span, to include a simple daily 5 minute exercise program, sleep advice, advice on timing on eating and fasting, as well as an abundance of recipes that follow his plan. He also gives specific guidance on supplements – some of which I’ve never heard of or are probably hard to find.  

He has a section on the 7 deadly myths about longevity – and he debunks them. He’s carefully studied the people in the Blue Zones and found that they largely live on plant based diets, not much meat, lots of healthy oils, regular exercise outdoors, and damn little sugar and simple carbs.  He says, “It’s very simple: if you want a healthier microbiome (and therefore a healthier brain and body), eat plenty of olive oil!” p157

He has many lists and explanations of foods we should eat to support our microbiome and many that we should avoid – quite a few of which conventional wisdom has taught us are good and healthy. But he disabuses us of some this outdated wisdom we got from our grandmothers.  In his arguments though, he gives explanations based on molecules, enzymes, activating inflammation,  gut biome response.  For example, he says “Consumption of dairy products is not conducive to a long life and health span” P90  

A very limited list of his Dont’s and Do’s is below. His complete list is on pages 225- 233 of his book: 

SOME FOODS TO AVOID/minimize:                        SOME FOODS TO EAT PLENTY OF

• Animal protein (some is permitted)                       * Olive Oil
• Any dairy products from cows                                 * nuts and seeds
• anti-biotics                                                                  * cruciferous vegetables
• wheat and all grains                                                   *Avocados/guacamole
• most breads                                                                * Extra dark chocolate
• simple carbs                                                               * Purple sweet potatoes
• sugar                                                                           * Red wine (some; not “plenty of”)
• Ripe Fruit (too much sugar)                                    * Coconut/MCT oil
• Egg whites                                                                  * Spinach
• Rice brown or white                                                   * Black Pepper
• soy products                                                               * Green vegetables
• Most artificial sweeteners                                          *Stevia 

I really liked this book, but to follow all of his guidance would be a full time job and would require giving up some things I am unwilling to give up entirely – but I can certainly significantly reduce how much of them I eat (for me, that’s a pretty long list, and includes key lime pie, ice cream, pizza).  He gives a number of examples of unwell people who’ve switched to and followed his program strictly and had pretty remarkable results, significantly reducing and even eliminating their “co-morbidities.”  

I’m pretty healthy now, but he has convinced me to make a number of changes to my diet that won’t be too hard, but could make a lasting difference – especially in reducing inflammation and improving brain health. As I get deeper into middle age, and in a few years will be knocking at the door of old age, I’m willing to invest more in maximizing my health span and agility to be able to continue to be healthy and physically active to extend my health span and enjoy life into my 90s. I’d recommend this book to anyone who is willing to sacrifice a few short term pleasures and start making investments in their own longevity and life and health span.  The Longevity Paradox may not be a comforting read, but it is convincing.  

Why this book: I’ve been practicing Wim Hof breathing method for nearly 4 years now, and so was particularly interested in learning more about breathing as a  means to achieve greater health and improved performance. I was impressed with Joe Rogan’s interview with James Nestor about this book, and when my friends Jay and Luke both  spoke highly of Breath, to include changing the way they performed some basic activities, I was intrigued.  I didn’t read it; I listened to the audio version.

Summary in 4 Sentences: This is an autobiographical account of the authors exploration into breathing as an avenue toward good health, and why and how poor breathing has contributed to many health maladies in modern civilization. He explores the art and science of the simple act of breathing, going back thousands of years and notes that in some cultures, shamans and mystics knew that breath and proper breathing were key to good health.  His main points are that nose breathing is what we are meant to do, that there are a multitude of breathing techniques, each with a different purpose and effect which can positively impact our health and wellbeing.  He also explains how our jaws, skulls, and faces have changed shape since the advent of soft easy-to-chew food, which has shrunk our mouths, jaws and nasal cavities and negatively affected how we breathe  – but all of this can be reversed with a renewed attention and effort given to how we breathe. 

My impressions:  I was surprised at how fascinating this book was. Nestor is a very engaging writer – this is HIS story about his explorations, about the fascinating people he met on this journey, to whom he referred as “pulmonauts,” how he did his research, complete with engaging anecdotes from his travels and explorations. Not only was it fun and engaging – I was surprised and amazed at every turn to learn something new and fascinating about this simple act that we all practice 24/7/365.  

I listened to the audible, which Nestor himself reads, which has the disadvantage that I couldn’t make notes and underlines to help me with this review.  But it had the advantage of me hearing the author himself tell his story with enthusiasm and inflection, and at the conclusion, one of his main colleagues walks us through a number of breathing exercises.

Here are a few of the main points that I got out of his book: 

NOSE BREATHING We should all primarily be breathing through our noses.  Mouth breathing apparently has lots of downsides and he lists them pretty comprehensively. He surprised me with studies and experiments with top athletes which showed that after learning to nose breathe, they performed better nose breathing while performing their sport.  (I’ve begun experimenting with this and after a life-time of mouth breathing during exercise, I’ve realized that it takes practice and adjustment and conditioning.  I’m working on it.)  Nose breathing is optimal for sleeping, and mouth breathing he argues is a key contributor to a number of sleep disorders including apnea as well as chronic snoring.  He recommends (and several of my friends have taken him up on it) purchasing a special tape (Somnifix is one option) to tape the mouth closed as one goes to bed, to force nose breathing while sleeping. 

SKULLS and JAWS  Nestor explored why and how we have become largely mouth breathers by looking at skulls from hundreds and thousands of years ago, and determined that our human ancestors had larger jaws, larger nasal cavities and better teeth than we have had for the last few hundred years.  He argues that this is due to our civilized kitchens preparing softer food requiring much less chewing, which stunts the growth of jaw bones, resulting in smaller mouths, and smaller nasal cavities.  He says that we should be chewing more.  He personally used a device to increase the size of his jaw and mouth which he says has improved his breathing and thereby, other aspects of his life.

CO2 –  I had always believed CO2 to be simply a waste-product of breathing, something that the body was simply trying to get rid of, like cleaning out the ashes in the fireplace.  But it is much more important than I had realized.   CO2 is apparently key to the process of oxygen uptake by our tissues, in that its presence triggers the hemoglobin cells to deliver the O2 that hemoglobin cells are carrying, and then to pick up and replace the O2 with the CO2, to carry it to the lungs for exhalation. (At least that’s what I understood.)  Deficiencies in CO2 in one’s system inhibit delivery of O2.  This section was complicated and I need to review it, but I had been unaware of the importance and value of managing CO2 and keeping it in balance in the process of maximizing performance. There is much more in this section that I need to review. 

SLOW BREATHING.  Nestor makes the case, based on not only his review of scientific literature but also ancient breathing practices, that slow and relatively shallow breathing has advantages in modulating CO2 levels and increasing uptake of O2.  Yes, even when working out.  Also separately,  deep inhale followed by long slow exhale breathing has been a tool for millennia to activate the parasympathetic system, calm the nervous system, and manage stress and anxiety.  For regular daily breathing, he recommends we slow down – and recommends 5.5 – 6 second inhales and the same time for exhales as an ideal breathing rate for someone not engaged in heavy physical exercise, noting that this is the length of time monks used for the Buddhist mantra Om-mani-padme-hum,  and Catholics use for saying the Rosary.  This breathing rate he claims is optimal for calm and focus.

TUMMO BREATHING – He also discusses Tummo breathing, the opposite of slow breathing.  The  Wim Hof method I’ve been practicing for several years is a modern and popularized version of Tummo and involves a series three cycles of 30 or so very deep, fast inhales and exhales, followed by breath holding.  Tummo breathing  has various modalities and versions, and is associated with certain Buddhist meditation practices, and it definitely engenders a different state of mind. Nestor does not advocate rapid breathing in general, especially when it is unintentional or in response to stress, noting that it  stress to one’s bio-system and can have deleterious health consequences.  But he does advocate intentionally choosing to do rapid breathing for short periods,  such as Tummo or Wim Hof Breathing, in order to purposely stress and strengthen one’s cardio system.

BREATHING EXERCISES He concludes Breath with an appendix which outlines about 10 different breathing exercises, each of which has a different purpose in improving or changing one’s health or mindset.  The explanations are simple and easy to practice. For these, the audible version of the book would certainly be preferable to the print version. 

Why this book: I just finished Empire of the Summer Moon about the Comanches and it revived my long term interest in Native American culture.  I have been carrying Black Elk Speaks around with me for nearly 50 years. and  the SEAL reading group I’m in had selected Native American history/culture as a genre for our next session.  After reading Empire and a great discussion I was inspired to finally read what Black Elk had to say. Glad I did. 

Summary in 5 Sentences: This book is Black Elk as an older Oglala Sioux medicine man (in his 60s) relating  his life story to a trusted “Wasichu” (white man – John Neihardt) in the presence of a couple of his friends and contemporaries, with his son translating.  It begins with him describing an incredibly detailed and powerful vision he had while he was a very sick and unconscious 9 year old boy – a vision that shaped the rest of his life.  Then he tells stories about his boyhood growing up in his Sioux tribe, his participation as a teenager in the Battle of Little Big Horn, followed by the subsequent difficult and unpleasant period his tribe experienced trying to maintain their way of life while being pursued and and pressured by the US Army.  He subsequently participated in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show traveling in Europe, returned and also fought US soldiers during the slaughter at Wounded Knee. It’s a sad story about his unsuccessful efforts as a Sioux medicine man and shaman to forestall the demise of the Sioux Indian Nation.

My Impressions: This is one of the most powerful and personal first person stories I’ve read from a Native American growing up and living in the northern plains of America during the final years of the Sioux nation.  It is also a powerful story of a Sioux medicine man, his spiritual values, his mystical view of the world, and of his role as an intermediary between the world of spirit and the world of the earth, of nature, of man.  

When the story begins in the 1870s the Sioux were still living more or less the life they’d lived for centuries, but it was all about to end.   Treaties with the “Wasichus” – the Whites – were being made and regularly broken and the floodgates were open to more and more settlers moving into the region.  And then they discovered “the yellow metal that makes Wasichus crazy” in the Black Hills, which were supposed to belong to the Sioux.   When it became clear that the US Army was not going to keep the whites out, the Sioux didn’t feel obligated to stay in their assigned areas either, which ultimately led to Custer, Generals Crook and Terry being dispatched to discipline them and the Battle of the Little Big Horn. 

The life Black Elk describes as a boy growing up prior to Little Big Horn sounds idyllic in a very communal and safe way – how the young men prepared themselves to be hunters and warriors, and the community by and large felt safe and at home in the mountains of what is now Wyoming, Montana, and South Dakota. The power of his boyhood vision, which he took very seriously and literally but kept to himself, made him feel separate and different from the other boys as he grew up, but otherwise he had a normal Sioux boyhood.  As he got into his teens, tensions with the whites were escalating and there were battles and killings, and at age 14, he finds himself in his first warrior role responding to Custer’s attack on his village at the Little Big Horn, and his description fits other accounts I’ve read. It it was truly a baptism by fire.

All through the book he recognizes that during his vision, “the six Grandfathers” he encountered had given him special power and a mission to fulfill during his lifetime.  For a long time, he didn’t know what to do with the vision or his power, and he felt it was a burden.  Finally with the help of some other Sioux medicine men, he undertook a ritual with his tribe which gave him clarity on who he was and what he was supposed to do, and he became a healer of sick people. He didn’t know how his power worked, but he felt that he was only a conduit for a life force – a power that was much greater than he. 

Other well known Sioux leaders play roles in his story, most notably Black Elk’s cousin Crazy Horse who the Sioux regarded as a truly gifted and mystical warrior and a leader.  Crazy Horse had also had a powerful vision and spent much time alone and apart from his tribe, where he communed with the spiritual world.    He was murdered by the Army during negotiations, not killed in battle.  Red Cloud was a Sioux chief who sought to reduce the violence between the whites and the Sioux by trying to find compromise to help save his people.  Red Cloud was seen by some as overly compliant to the whites, and seen as the leader of those referred to as the “hang-aournd-the-fort people.”

As an adult, Black Elk had several other powerful visions he describes in the book, reinforcing his reputation as a mystic and powerful medicine man.  In each he would have a sudden “queer” feeling,  became unconscious and had very clear visions of a spiritual world, or of events/people who were not colocated with him.

Black Elk Speaks is ultimately a sad story, as Black Elk considered himself a failure for not having fulfilled the mission of saving the Sioux nation given to him by the Six Grandfathers in his vision.  It is interesting that the biography of Black Elk in Wikipedia notes that in his later years, he converted to Catholicism and became an important teacher and catechist teaching others about Christianity, and was nominated for beatification. On his death bed he is said to have told his daughter that the only thing he really believed in was his original Sioux beliefs about the nature of the world and “the pipe religion.” 

At the conclusion of my copy there is a short chapter “About this book and its Author.”  It notes that  “Black Elk’s personal story, spoken in Sioux and translated by his son, wasn’t a chronological cohesive, organized account of his life and vision….Black Elk Speaks is actually a re-creation in English of the holy man’s account of his life and vision, given form, coherence and choronogy by Neihardt (who was) an adopted member of the Oglala Sioux, chosen by Black Elk as heir to the seer’s mystic powers. “

SOME QUOTES FROM BLACK ELK SPEAKS that I found notable (page numbers for my reference only, they are from my no-longer-in-print version.)

“(The spirit world) is the real world that is behind this one, and everything we see here is something like a shadow from that world.”  p71

“I always got up very early to see the rising of the daybreak star. People knew that I did this, and many would get up to see it with me, and when it came, we said: ‘behold the star of understanding!’” p148

“Men and women and children I have cured of sickness with the power the vision gave me; but my nation I could not help.  If a man or woman or child dies, it does not matter long, for the nation lives on. It was the nation that was dying and the vision was for the nation; but I have done nothing with it.” p152

“You have noticed that the truth comes into this world with two faces. One is sad with suffering, and the other laughs; but it is the same face, laughing or weeping.  When people are already in despair, maybe laughing is better for them; and when they feel too good and are too sure of being safe, maybe the weeping face is better for them to see.  And so I think that is what the heyoka ceremony is for.”p159-60

“The Six Grandfathers have placed in their world many things, all of which should be happy.  Every little thing is sent for something and in that thing there should be happiness and the power to make happy.  Like the grasses showing tender faces to each other, thus we should do, for this was the wish of the Grandfathers of the World.”p163

“We made these little gray houses of logs that you see, and they are square. It is a bad way to live, for there can be no power in a square.  You have noticed that everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because the Power of the World always works in circles and everything tries to be round.” p164

“Behind the woman’s power of life is hidden the power of man…The woman is the life of the flowering tree, but the man must feed and care for it.” p178

“Nothing can live well except in a manner suited to the way the Power of the World lives and moves to do its work.”  p180

“I could see that the Wasichus did not care for each other the way our people did before the nation’s hoop was broken. They would take everything from each other if they could, and so there were some who had more of everything than they could use, while crowds of people had nothing at all and maybe were starving.  They had forgotten that the earth was their mother.” 184

1. Why this book: I had invited the author Rich Diviney to be a guest speaker on the Mental Performance Working Group that I host to discuss his work on The Attributes. Naturally, I thought it would be good for me to read his book first. 

Summary in 3 sentences. Rich Diviney developed the idea of attributes as a means of better selecting candidates for intensive SEAL training, after realizing that assessing for skills was not useful -skills could be taught; he realized that they were actually selecting for attributes which are more innate and determine how a person will react to uncertainty, challenge, and stress.  He and his team were looking for attributes that indicate how a person will perform in uncertain, challenging, stressful environments, often with little warning or time to prepare, and perhaps with little previous experience.  He discusses each of 25 attributes which he breaks down into five categories: Grit, Mental Acuity,  Drive, Leadership and Teamability and offers advice on how a person might  develop attributes, as well as how to use attributes to make oneself and one’s organization stronger.  

My impression:  Really fascinating and well written book.  Easy and enjoyable to read, and a fascinating new concept for selecting, assessing, personnel for hiring and for promotion.  There is a lot of content – each of 25 attributes gets about7-10 pages which flow quickly and easily as he provides fascinating examples from his and other people’s experience to explain each one. I started losing track of attributes after getting thru the first 10 or so – and felt that each attribute could almost justify a whole discussion; but Rich’s intention was to introduce the concept and get the discussion going. 

He discusses the difference between Skills and Attributes:

• Skills In short,  can be taught, like driving, shooting, accounting, language, climbing etc.
• Attributes are more inherent.  People have different base-line strengths and weaknesses in their attributes, but with intention a person can develop their  attributes.  Kinda like athleticism or humor- everybody has some, some are stronger/more gifted than others, and everyone can get better. Attributes for Diviney are those qualities that inform a person’s behavior under conditions of Uncertainty, Challenge, and Stress.

He discusses the difference between Peak and Optimal Performance.  

• Peak performance is the apogee of one’s very best performance, and one can prepare for peak performance,  by targeting one’s preparations to perform at one’s best during a specific time window under specific conditions;
• Optimal performance means doing the best one can, with whatever one has,  whenever called upon, and under whatever conditions may present themselves. 

The SEAL Teams and other first responders need to select for those with attributes that support primarily “optimal” performance. Peak performance is more applicable to athletic competitions or other performances under predictable conditions.

Attributes for selection?  He described how he and his team working with the selection and assessment team at a SEAL Team, came up with the idea of focusing on attributes. He and his team realized that they were testing candidates under conditions of Uncertainty Challenge and Stress to identify whether a candidate had the baseline attributes adequate to make that person a good candidate for the work they are being selected for, to include capacity to learn the necessary skills.  They realized that a candidate’s skills were not nearly as relevant as their attributes They sat down started listing those attributes that they needed.

 For The Attributes, he distilled several long lists of attributes down to 25 attributes, which serve as a taxonomy for his book. He broke 22 of those attributes into FIVE broad categories: Grit, Mental Acuity, Drive, Leadership, and Teamability. His book is divided into sections – one for each of these categories, and each section devotes a chapter to describe and explain each attributes within that broad category.

• Grit –  which includes the attributes of Courage,  Perseverance, Adaptability, Resilience – and he does reference Angela Duckworth’s work.
• Mental Acuity – which includes the attributes of Situational Awareness, Compartmentalization, Task Switching, Learnability 
• Drive – which includes the attributes of Self-efficacy, Discipline, Open Mindedness, Cunning, Narcissism (as a positive, vice negative attribute).  
• Leadership –  which includes the attributes of Empathy, Selflessness, Authenticity, Decisiveness, Accountability
• Teamability – which includes the attributes of Integrity, Conscientiousness, Humility, and Humor.

Three other 3 attributes which he describes and which he argues don’t fit into  any of his  5 categories are: Patience/impatience, Fear/insouciance, Competitiveness/non-competitiveness. 

Though inherent in  “who we are,”  one’s attributes are malleable and can be developed, but not as easy as skills.  Attribute development must be self-directed and deliberate and with conscious effort.  It takes work.    Attributes  have to be seen in different contexts to be understood and assessed. 

To give an example of one of the five categories, Mental Acuity, here’s a bit more detail:

MENTAL ACCUITY refers to how the brain functions and how it processes the world. He got a considerable amount of help from Neuroscientist Andrew Huberman in exploring and describing the attributes under “mental acuity.”   In fact you can view a discussion between Rich and Andrew about the book on Youtube) All four of the mental acuity attributes are inter-related and all work together and in part, depend on each other.

• Situational Awareness – this is noticing one’s environment and includes “vigilance,” People strong in Situational Awareness notice more things than others. They notice A LOT. Bringing information from the environment into the mind.
• Compartmentalization – organizes the information that we are noticing with our Situational Awareness.   Compartmentalizing focuses, organizes and prioritizes what matters most and what doesn’t, in what our senses are perceiving.
• Task Switching – ability to shift focus among tasks back and forth. Shifting focus from one activity to another. Ability to do this quickly and efficiently measures our Task Switching attribute. Task switching costs the brain energy. Ease and efficiency are important. Multi-tasking is a myth.
• Learnability – neural plasticity – learning to apply new neural networks to new situations. How easy or difficult it is for a person to learn, absorb new information, and use it. 

Rich argues that the Mental Acuity attributes are more interconnected than those in any of the other categories because they are so dependent on the brain,  which functions as an interconnected system. 

A couple of additional interesting pieces that I found in this book:

Empathy (part of Leadership)- like most attributes, it can’t be developed in a classroom. One can learn “about” it, but it requires deliberate work and effort and intentionality to develop it.

Humor (part of Teamability) is a neurological hack into perseverance and courage.  Humor and laughter (jokes)  inundate our brains w dopamine and endorphins.   All high performing teams he argues, have a “class clown.”

Narcissism -(an attribute of Drive) Though normally a pejorative term,  Rich insists that a healthy degree of narcissism is a powerful motivator – it motivates people to work hard, take on new challenges, become the person they are proud of being.   

Self designation He notes that in several of the attributes it is not legitimate to self-designate, or judge oneself in that attribute. Wheras one can, with some degree of subjective accuracy designate oneself as having a high degree of situational awareness, or accountability, but one cannot designate oneself with any real credibility as a strong leader, or a good teammate,or a humorous person. Others must designate you and grade you on those attributes. 

Balancing Attributes – Almost all attributes can be taken to excess – narcissism comes to mind – but to be healthy, they need to be balanced with other attributes (eg humility for narcissism).  Too much compartmentalization and a person loses situational awareness. Too much situational awareness can lead to hyper-vigilance and anxiety.  

Which are the “real” attributes, or the best list?  Rich points out that his list is a distillation of what he and his SEAL team partners came up with for their needs.  He insists that each organization look at which attributes are most important for the positions in their organizations.  His list may be a good starting point.  Empathy for example, will be much more important for a nurse, or child care specialist,  than for a computer programer, or an auto mechanic. He encourages organizations to consider those most suited to their organization, and perhaps for different jobs in their organization and to hire more for attributes than skills, which can be taught.  Organizations which hire for attributes are playing the “long game.”

 Aristotle’s Virtues and Attributes: Those of you who know much about Aristotle’s Virtue Ethic will see parallels between Aristotle’s virtues and Diviney’s attributes.  They both are flexible, based on an individual’s natural proclivities, and they both seek a mean between excess and deficiency that is individual and context dependent.  Aristotle’s “proper pride” which he calls the lead virtue, because it motivates us to strive to achieve the others, is very similar to Diviney’s attribute of narcissism.  The key difference that I see is that Aristotle’s virtues are prescriptive and give guidance to an individual seeking to be the very best version of him/herself possible, given their genetics, family, social class, community, culture.   Diviney’s attributes are more descriptive as an attempt to understand a person as they are, as well as the requirements of a particular position.  Attributes point not to individual virtue in society as much as an individual’s fit for a particular context.  Diviney’s attributes are more practical tools to apply to solving selection and assessment problems than I believe Aristotle’s virtues would be.  

Diviney notes that a person can intentionally seek to develop certain attributes to better fit a role, but as soon as s/he is  trying to develop such attributes to become their ideal person, Aristotle provides guidance on how best to to that.  To become more courageous, do more things that require courage, to become more humorous, listen to and tell more jokes, seek opportunities to appreciate and exercise humor, to develop more perseverance, take on increasingly demanding tasks that require perseverance. That’s why Aristotle was called the common sense philosopher. 

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The Attributes is an interesting book with a valuable and insightful approach to assessing qualities of people for specific jobs. Though inspired by SEAL team selection and assessment, it is a tool that can be widely used in hiring, and in deciding promotion – by matching a person’s attributes to the requirements of their potential job.  

Why this book:   Given to me as a gift several years ago, and then when the SEAL reading group I’m in chose to read a book regarding Native American culture/history, I figured it was a good time to read it. I’d heard great things about this book.  While  reading it, I wasn’t surprised that it was a finalist for the Pulitzer prize in History.

Summary in 3 Sentences: Empire of the Summer Moon provides the history of the Comanche wars in Texas and the southern plains in the 19th Century, using the life of one particularly notable Comanche Warrior as a lens through which to look at the many dimensions of the Comanche culture and the collision it had with the white settlers intent on claiming Texas for themselves.  The story begins with one of the early raids and “depredations” of the Comanches upon settlers  on the frontier in the 1830s, and then tracks the continued war between the anglo culture in Texas and eventually, the ham-fisted US Federal government efforts to tame the Comanches, the most violent and warlike tribe in the Americas.  We get to know a number of fascinating personalities on both sides of this conflict, are appalled by the brutality on both sides, and eventually over decades, see how the inevitable end of this war evolved into the ultimate domination of white American culture over the world the Comanches had commanded for over a century in Texas, and parts of Oklahoma, New Mexico and Kansas.

My Impressions:  Really Impressive!  A great read and a fascinating look at a part of American History that few of us know.    How did I grow up in this country and not know about this protracted brutal war that took place in Texas and neighboring territories for half a century?  And how did I grow up never having heard of  Jack Hays, Randal Mackenzie, or Quanah Parker?  

Empire of the Summer Moon is written as a history of the Comanches and includes  profiles of some fascinating people from that era: The three I mention above, a number of others, plus Cynthia Ann Parker, Quanah Parker’s white mother who was taken hostage as a young girl, fully adopted Comanche culture, became wife of a Comanche chief,  and after she was forced unwillingly to return to her white origins,  her son eventually became the most prominent Comanche chief fighting the whites toward the end of the Comanche wars, and a leader in the post-war aftermath.

The subtext in the title of this book is: “Quanah Parker and the Rise and fall of the Comanches, the most powerful Indian Tribe in American History.”  Quanah Parker appears briefly in the early parts of the book as a child, but then gradually his profile increases as he matures into a notably courageous and brutal warrior, hating whites for killing his father and others, ultimately becoming the chief of the most recalcitrant and independent of the Comanche tribes.

Early in the book, the author explains how the Comanches came to prominence among Native American tribes in the late 17th and 18th centuries, as escaped wild Spanish horses became part of the American landscape. The Comanches eventually became the best horse mounted warriors in the world, were able to accurately shoot 20 arrows or more in less than a minute while riding, displaying incredible horsemanship and proficiency with bow and arrow.  With these skills they developed a nomadic culture built upon aggressive hunting and courage in fighting.  For over a century they dominated and decimated other tribes on the southern plains.  White warriors (Spanish, and American,) trained to fight on foot with their single shot pistols and muzzle loading rifles were no match for them.

Then a number of factors began to converge that would spell the end of Comanche freedom and dominance.  These include the advent of the rapid fire revolver pistol and eventually the repeating rifle, the ever increasing numbers of white settlers moving into Texas coinciding roughly with the decimation of Comanche tribes by the white diseases of measles, smallpox and cholera.  The rapid killing of the buffalo herds by white buffalo hunters made hunting and finding food increasingly difficult.  And white military leaders emerged who learned to use Comanche methods against them and learned to counter Comanche tactics with effective tactics of their own.  By 1875 most of the Comanches who had not been killed, or were not already on reservations, had surrendered. 

The book can often be difficult to read in that the author minces few words in describing the atrocities and “depredations” that the Comanche committed against white settlers during their raids.  Thousands and thousands were killed, tortured, raped, and scalped.  He also makes clear that torturing prisoners of both genders, gang raping women, killing children or taking them captives as slaves or even adopting them into their own tribes was part of Native American culture – not just Comanche.  What Comanches did to whites they also did to other tribes, who did the same to them – this was how Native Americans in the West fought each other.  

But it appalled “civilized” European Americans doing what they believed was God’s work – tilling the land and farming peacefully  And reading about it appalls today’s reader.  But it is what happened and Gwynne doesn’t sugar-coat it. 

That said, the Americans fighting them, with indeed a few exceptions, reciprocated in kind.  Their Tonkawa allies never hesitated in following their normal practice of butchering anyone they caught, regardless of age or gender. It was ugly, cruel and horrific fighting.  If a fighting age male (above about 13 yrs old) were to be captured alive by the Comanches, he could expect to be brutally tortured to death.  For women, it was worse.

During the height of the Comanche wars, Comanches were raiding and stealing horses and cattle, and killing torturing, and taking white settlers captive with impunity across Texas.  That is difficult to read.   But it is almost as difficult to read about the gross incompetence and inability of the US government to respond effectively.   Government and Army incompetence, and  unwillingness to adapt to and respond to the demands of a war against a brutal enemy fighting to defend his way of life in his own territory reminded me of Vietnam and Afghanistan.  

Policies and decisions were made in Washington and San Antonio often by men with little understanding of the nature of their enemy nor of the environment they were fighting in.  They tried to apply solutions that made sense in the civilized and structured world in which they lived, but not in the no-holds-barred world of fighting Comanches.  Treaties created a pause in the fighting, but neither side took them seriously, nor intended to honor them.  

Comanche Camp Culture doesn’t get a lot of attention in Empire of the Summer Moon – given that the focus of the book is on the conflict between Comanches and whites.  But what we do learn indicates that life in the Comanche villages was very communal.   The woman worked hard – to them fell a large part of the work of camp maintenance, food prep and cooking,  and breaking down and setting up of camps, which they did pretty regularly.  Men’s duties were largely restricted to hunting and raiding.  Polygamy was  an accepted practice – powerful warriors usually had more than one wife to help with their many chores and to manage their wealth – usually in horses.  

Up until about age 10  children were given ALOT of freedom to play  – after which they began preparing for adulthood – girls were expected to help their mothers with their many chores, and boys were expected to be playing a rough game of “Cowboys and Indians” (Indians being the good guys!) and practicing the skills needed to become great warriors and hunters. My sense was that life in the Comanche village, camped along a creek, in a canyon, or near a river was pretty idyllic.  When the whites attacked Comanche villages, Comanche men fought viciously to withstand or divert the attack to permit old folks, women, children to escape.  

 We learn about the stumbling origins of the Texas Rangers, who for a short while became an effective force fighting Comanches under the captaincy of Jack Hayes. But when Jack Hayes left, his lessons went with him and the Texans went back to their ineffective and incompetent tactics and the world’s most vicious and competent warriors again had almost free rein.

 We learn about the Buffalo Hunters who killed hundreds of buffalo a day in a few years bringing the buffalo to the brink of extinction.  Buffalo hides were in demand, they made a lot of money,  and the Army did not discourage them, because decimating the buffalo herds took away the main source of Comanche livelihood.

We learn about the Comancheros – mixed-breed Comanche-Mexicans –  who were the business middlemen who assisted the Comanches in selling stolen cattle, horses, and  captives – often back to the people from whom they had been stolen. 

We learn how the  Civil War had a huge impact on the war against the Comanche – to the advantage of the Comanches.  When Texas seceded from the Union, it became part of the Confederacy.  The Union abandoned it, and the Confederate government was way too busy fighting Yankees to give attention and resources to fighting Comanches. When the war was over,  Texas was part of the losing South, and the resource-strapped Union initially had little concern and few resources to fight Comanches at the edge of the frontier where people had seceded from the Union. So the Comanches had a field day, and believed that the war had turned in their favor – for a while.  

Then after a few years, several of the Union’s finest Civil War fighters were sent to  engage in fighting the Comanches. General Sheridan, Col Randal Mackenzie and other experienced, battle-hardened, disciplined and well resourced warriors took it upon themselves to pull out all the stops and bring the Comanches to their knees. And they did. By 1875 all the significant Comanche bands had surrendered.

The last part of the book is very much about Quanah Parker –  one of the last hold-out Comanche Chiefs – an extremely resilient, courageous and capable warrior and leader. He and his band were chased around Texas, stymying the Union army for a while, but the end was inevitable.  We read what drove him finally decide to surrender, and then remarkably, unexpectedly and unusually for a Comanche warrior, he challenged himself to adapt to white culture, to become a leader and succeed in that world as well. He befriended his old enemies, did business with cattle ranchers, hosted Teddy Roosevelt at his home, and fought hard for the rights of Comanches against the federal government’s continuing efforts to take advantage of Native Americans on behalf of American commercial interests and Manifest Destiny.  He remained true to himself while succeeding and becoming a highly respected leader in both worlds.  A Nietzshean übermensch if I’ve ever seen one. 

Empire of the Summer Moon is about the Comanches fighting in the only way they knew how, to retain their way of life.  They had fought other tribes and won control over huge areas of the southern plains, and they believed they could hold off the waves of white settlers who were moving West, to fulfill the American dreams of Manifest Destiny – the belief in the destiny of America to own and settle the entire North American continent, from sea to shining sea. 

Fascinating story, and very well written, but one must be willing to read about, confront and acknowledge the violence and brutality that opened the West up to American settlers and European American civilization and values.  

 Why this book. Selected by a reading/discussion book I’m in, as a good follow up to Descarte’s Error.  One member of our group pointed us to a Lisa Feldman Barrett Ted Talk which impressed us all, then an interview with her on youtube, and as a group, we decided then to read this book. Good idea.

Summary in 3 sentences;  Lisa Feldman Barrett begins with a brief explanation of the evolution of the brain from a mini-worm amphioxus 550 million years ago, through many evolutionary iterations, until one of evolution’s branches and sequels, led to the human brain.  She then spends the next 7 1/2 chapters debunking  myths about how the brain works, and instructing us in the fundamental biological processes that govern our cerebral functions. And she makes clear that understanding these functions and processes are key to understanding why we are like we are, why and how people interact with each other and their environments like they do, and she offers a few ideas for how we can use that understanding to take some steps that could  help  us improve our lives.  

My impressions. A really well done overview of the role that our brain’s biology plays in how we think, behave, and live.  It is a short, easy, enjoyable read.  Professor Barrett takes some of the cutting edge insights about the human brain and mind (they are not the same) and shares them with us in language and conceptual descriptions that are easily understandable and accessible to someone with a  high school education or better, but not necessarily a strong background in brain biology.   She distills the insights of neuroscience and biology about the brain into insights that are useful for the rest of us. 

There is a lot to understand here – she presents her case simply and clearly, but the implications are mind bending.  She makes clear that we ARE biological creatures and the biology of the brain that we are born with very much influences how we perceive ourselves, the world, our relationships with others, and how we live.  That is such an important insight – and  I’m not even altogether sure what to do with it.  This book is a great primer on the brain and catalyst for reflection – as I try to understand how these insights should change and enhance my understanding of my own potential, my relationships to the people in my life and my environment, my “spirituality,”  my moods,  how I live.  Rereading my review of Sam Harris’s book Waking Up tells me that Waking Up would be a good companion book to 7 1/2 Lessons.  

A few of the Key insights I got from the book:

• Body Budget.  A new concept for me, that makes sense. One of the brain’s key functions is to manage what she call the “body budget” and the brain spends or saves our mental and physical energy,  similarly to how we spend and save money.  Stress, busy-ness, physical exercise draw down our accounts, while rest, relaxation, nutrition and sleep replenish them.  The brain’s default mode is to be efficient and lazy – to save energy – but it develops strength and resilience by spending energy and then replenishing it.    

“your brain continually invests your energy in the hopes of earning a good return , such as food, shelter, affection, or physical protection , so you can perform nature’s most vital task: passing your genes to the next generation.” p10

• Like a muscle, we keep our brains healthy by challenging them – this develops and strengthens neuro-networks, which if not used, atrophy.  Novelty, facing new challenges, learning new things strengthens the brain and its neuro-networks. The brain, like one’s physical muscles, is a “use it or lose it” organ.  But a constant diet of novelty and “resilience-building” experiences without  adequate rest and recuperation can create a chronic stress that is damaging to the brain.  

• I kinda already knew this (from reading Descarte’s Error,) but LFB reinforces the point in terms that are easier for me to digest:  that the brain is a complex network of inter-dependent parts that work together in mysterious ways to give us our experience, AND the rest of the body is in on the conspiracy, sending and receiving signals that are outside our consciousness. There is an ecology to the brain whereby what happens in each part affects all the others.   AND the brain has a self-regulating adaptability that is key to survival, in which it constantly seeks to adapt to any change, injury, interruption that could hurt its chances to survive.  

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A brief summary of the 7 1/2 lessons – each Lesson gets its own chapter.

The Half-Lesson – your brain is not for thinking: this chapter walks us thru how the brain has evolved over the last half billion years.  She debunks the myth that our brain is for thinking – no, she says, its for optimizing our adaptation to our environment to help us better survive and pass our genes on to the next generation. 

Lesson 1: You have one brain, (not three) This chapter debunks the mythology of what she calls the “Triune” brain – broken up into three parts: a reasoning brain (prefrontal cortex), an emotional brain (limbic system), a primal or “Lizard” brain (amygdala).   Likewise, she debunks the Left-Brain/Right Brain dichotomy which I had take for fact, much influenced by my reading of Daniel Pink’s book A Whole New Mind.  We do not store memories on our biological hard drive.  Nor does “System 2/System 2 thinking,” popularized by Daniel Kahneman reflect the biology of the brain.  She describes these as useful, but misleading metaphors. 

Lesson 2: Your Brain is a network:  This chapter like the others elaborates on its title. She describes the “network” as integrated, functioning as a single whole, and is  not separate sections functioning independently.  While she debunks useful but misleading metaphors as not reflecting how the brain works, she says that it is NOT a metaphor to say that the brain is a “network.”  To make her point she creates her own different metaphor – the global air travel system with hub and spoke airports.  Information can travel from one part of the brain by many different routes – it seeks the most efficient route, but if that’s broken, it finds another way. She calls our neurotransmitters the metaphorical airport staff.  

She defines neuro-plasticity as the ability of the brain to create new neurons and neuro-pathways that find ways to fire together to adapt to new requirements, new environments, new stimuli. She concludes this chapter by explaining how complex the brain is – it is more than the sum of its parts and can reconfigure itself to deal with new challenges and new stimuli. She also notes that the human brain is NOT the pinnacle of evolution; it has simply adapted itself to the environment it has found itself in over thousands of millennia.   She points to the Octopus with a complex brain distributed throughout its body – much better adapted to its environment than a human brain would be.

Lesson 3: Little Brains wire themselves to their world: This chapter is about the developing brain of the baby and child.  Her main point is in the title – the brain adapts itself – wires’ itself – to the world it finds itself in. She points to the false dichotomy of nature and nurture, noting that a child’s nature is to adapt to its environment (nurture), whatever it may be. “Genes play a key role in building a baby’s brain wiring, and they also open the door for us to wire her newborn brain in the context of her culture.”  The child’s brain changes and adapts to its environment – plasticity – and care givers are tuning and pruning the brain by conditioning it to budget its resources to survive and thrive.  The “pruning” is letting unused neural connections die off, to save energy and keep brain functioning as efficiently as possible.  

She talks about caregivers creating a niche that helps the child make sense of its world, and create an optimally efficient body budget of energy as it adapts. “Caregivers curate a baby’s physical and social niche, and the baby’s brain learns that niche.”- which becomes its “cultural intelligence.”  She also addresses how long term stress and neglect negatively influence the development of a child’s brain, and the potential role that generations-long poverty can play in stymying brain development. 

Lesson 4: Your brain predicts (almost) everything you do:  What we see, feel do in any situation is usually a result of predictions that our brain makes as a result of past experience.  “The last time I encountered a similar situation, when my body was in a similar state and was preparing this particular action, what did I see next? What did I feel next?….your brain combines information from outside and inside your head to produce everything you see hear, smell, taste, and feel.” p 67  It predicts what will happen next, based on subtle cues outside of our awareness, and also launches our next set of actions, often outside of our awareness.  

But she makes the point that we are not necessarily puppets on a string.  By broadening our horizons, knowledge and experience we can teach ourselves to intercept many of these automatic responses consciously.  “This is a form of free will….We can choose what we expose ourselves to.”p80   And this puts the responsibility on us to change how our brain automatically sees the world – we ourselves are the only ones who can choose to change these automatic perceptions. 

Lesson 5: Your brain secretly works with other brains:  We know that we are social animals but this chapter reinforces how our social interactions actually “tune and prune” our brains and the various manifestations of this “herd instinct” we have which is built into our DNA. We adapt ourselves unconsciously in many ways to the social environment we live in, even mirroring what we see, because we need and find a connection to other people in order to live. This  behavior is “choreographed” by our brains, outside of our daily awareness.

She points out that it is natural to have empathy with people who are iike us; a lot harder with people who are very different from us.  It’s harder to predict how people who are different will react, and metabolically it uses more energy for us to try to imagine someone’s suffering who is not like us. And metabolically, it much easier to be with people like us, who think and believe like us, which that leads to the “echo chambers” we read so much about in political discourse.  “Birds of a flock….”

She also talks about the power of words to impact our brains – the impact of the things we say on others – all based on our socially dependent nervous system. Being outside our comfort zone is like an exercise in learning and can be good for us.  To a point, stress can be good, we get better at learning and become more resilient.  New, unusual, or uncomfortable experiences help us to maintain that plasticity that we need to adapt; However, constant change and stress without recovery creates a deficit that can hurt us in the long run. 

Lesson 6; Brains Make More than One Kind of Mind: Interesting chapter in that it goes into the difference between “brain” and “mind.”  She tells us that “…a particular human brain in a particular  human body, raised and wired in a particular culture, will produce a particular kind of mind….We come into the world with a basic brain plan that can be wired in a variety of ways to construct different kinds of minds.” p100/101  She discusses “mood” as something common to all humans as a mental feeling that comes from how we feel – in mind and body. This is scientifically called affect which is the source of joy, sorrow, enjoyable or unpleasant experiences, profound or trivial experiences, transcendent or skeptical experiences. “Affect” is a sumary of what your body tells your brain is going on in the moment. “Affect is like a “barometer” for how you’re doing.” p106 

..this transformation from physical signals to mental feelings remains one of the great mysteries of consciousness..”p107 

And she discusses acculturation as adapting to changes in our environment – from work to home, as well as between greatly different cultures in the world.  And of course body budget plays a role – the brain struggles, uses energy, wants to be where things are easier, using less energy.  “Human Nature” is the exceptionally complex brain adapting itself as efficiently as it knows how, to its physical and social environment

Lesson 7:  Our brains can create reality:  “We live in a world of social reality that exists only inside our human brains.”p111   “Social Reality” is unique to humans and she attributes this reality to the 5 Cs:

• Creativity – our ability to create systems to make things that work, but which simply exist by agreement (eg, borders, money);
• Communication, our ability to communicate ideas such that people actually understand each other and thereby can co-create new realities;
• Copying, how we copy one another’s behaviors and actions to create norms that allow societies to function;
• Cooperation, our ability to work together to create economies and society – which are increasingly complex in the global environment; 
• Compression. A neural processes that filters, and summarizes massive amounts of neural (sensory) data as it gets sent to the frontal cortex, thus making it useful to interpret, understand and act on what we sense.  “Compression makes it possible for your brain to think abstractly, and abstraction, together with the rest of the Five Cs, empowers your large complex brain to create social reality.” p116

Abstraction is the ability to perceive meaning in symbols, art, other facets of our lives. 

“Compression enables sensory integration. Sensory integration enables abstraction. Abstaction permits your highly complex brain to issue flexible predictions based on the funcion of things rather than on their physical form. That is creativity….humans are the only animal whose brains have enough capacity for compression and abstraction to create social reality.”  p118-119

“Social reality is a superpower that emerges from an ensemble of human brains …We have more control over reality than we might think. We also have more responsibility for reality than we might realize…A superpower works best when you know you have it.”  p123 

Epilogue:  The Epilogue is a brief (2 page) overview, beginning with a list of 7 misunderstandings that most people have about themselves and “reality” based on misunderstanding of how the brain functions. She concludes that there is much still to learn about the brain.  But first, we must understand that the structure and functions of the brain itself are the source of our human strengths and foibles, and,  as she concludes, are  what “makes us simply, imperfectly, gloriously human.” p125. 

Why this book: As a boy and a young man, and like many young men and women then and since,  I loved reading Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books about her life growing up on the frontier.  I had read another biography of her (by Pamela Smith Hill) which provided some interesting background, but didn’t particularly grab me.  This one kept popping up on various lists of great books,  and as I was looking for a book to listen to on a long road trip, I thought I’d enjoy revisiting LIW again, so I bought it on Audible.

Summary in 3 sentences:  This is part biography of LIW, part a Life-and-Times description of America and the American West from the 1870s into the 1940s, and part a parallel biography of her daughter Rose Wilder Lane who played such an important role in LIW’s life and writing.  Because LIW’s parents play such important roles in her books, Prairie Fires begins with the lives of LIW’s parents, and their early lives in Minnesota and Wisconsin, and then moves on to the stories behind the autobiographical novels LIW wrote as the Little House series. The final part of Prairie Fires describes the last 25 or so years of LIW’s life, when she turned to writing her books, how the depression and Roosevelt’s New Deal impacted her and her daughter, their tempestuous but co-dependent relationship, and how it all fits into a fascinating period of American history.

My impressions.  Superb!   Fraser’s biography of LIW and exploration of her roots, her family and the challenges they had to overcome is a lens through which we look at the maturing of the American West from the 1870s into the first 5 decades of the 20th century.   Prairie Fires is the best biography I’ve ever read – right up there with David McCullough’s John Adams for thorough research, a life-and-times story told with sensitively, insight, empathy, and humanity. This is a book about the life of a woman and her daughter – written by a woman – but I didn’t feel like I was reading a book written “for” women.   As I got into it, I looked it up, and was not surprised to learn that it received the Pulitzer Prize for biography, and many other awards. Well deserved.

In addition to the “facts” about LIW’s life as she thoroughly researched them, Fraser is not afraid to share her own  personal views and perspectives regarding LIW’s life and decisions, decisions and actions of others in her life, and the politics of her times, for which a number of reviewers on Amazon castigate her.  Her “warts and all” look at the life of an American Icon did not please some readers. I found her editorializing fair and discerning, evident enough for the reader to sense her judgment, but not at all sanctimonious, and her perspectives are rendered with empathy and understanding.  Caroline Fraser is an amazing writer, and in addition to the fascinating story she tells, I loved listening to a master craftsman of English Language.   

Audible. I listened to the audible which was excellently rendered, but wish I’d read the book –  I can savor a great book better in print; I  can mark passages which I find particularly good, which I can’t do on an audible.  Fraser refers to a lot of pictures of Wilder and her family in her Prairie Fires, and of course, one doesn’t see those in the audible. I was hoping they’d be in the paperback, but no pics in the paper back – I am not sure about the hardback, but it doesn’t appear so.  That is a disappointment. 

Fact or Fiction.  One of the constant issues in the Prairie Fires story of LIW’s rendering of the Little House book series, was how much truth she should tell in her stories. The Little House series is listed as novels.  LIW always insisted that the stories within the books were all true, but not the whole truth. Since she was writing for young audiences, she studiously avoided much of the suffering and hardship she experienced and she didn’t include episodes or experiences which she thought might overly trouble or shock young audiences.  Her daughter actively encouraged her to shade the truth to help the books sell better, and Fraser actually found several fabricated incidents in the books, undermining LIW’s claim that it was all “true,” just not the whole truth.  It’s evident while the Little House books did include some of the hardship the Wilder family experienced, the true suffering and hardship she and her family experienced were significantly diluted in order to tell an uplifting, happy, and inspiring story.

Suffering.  In fact LIW herself and her whole family struggled and suffered a lot – much more than one would think reading the Little House books. That was one of the key messages of Prairie Fires – how indeed hard life was back then, living constantly on the edge, with little or no money in the bank, very little social safety net, vulnerable to the vagaries of weather, nefarious manipulators, the banks, the commodity markets, locust plagues as well as disease and hunger.  The Wilder family was often barely one step ahead of destitution.  Fraser makes clear that this was sometimes a result of poor decisions on the part of LIWs father – Pa in the books – an otherwise model father and all-round good guy.  LIW herself had to work for pittance pay in often unpleasant settings from the time she was about 10 until she married in order to supplement the family’s meager income, to help the whole family survive.  

Wilder’s daughter, Rose Wilder Lane.  The last half of the book is almost a dual biography of LIW and her daughter Rose Wilder Lane (RWL)   This in part because their correspondence is the source of much of Fraser’s content for the biography, but more importantly, RWL was a key collaborator and resource for LIW in editing, shaping and getting the Little House books off the ground and published.  It was RWL who inspired and encouraged her mother to write the books; she edited them for her, often improving the quality,  and provided valuable suggestions. She was also extremely mercantile and was less interested than her mother in a faithful rendering of what actually happened in her mother’s pioneering experience, ever ready to romanticize and even alter the stories to fit what she believed would best sell. In fact LIW supported much of this “white-washing” of her difficult youthful journey. 

One cannot fully appreciate LIW or her work without getting into this very complicated mother-daughter partnership.  In fact, it was often difficult for me to read about RWL and her capricious and self-serving decisions, her callously manipulation of her mother, and her calculated use of her mother’s success as springboard for her own career ends.   Fraser argued that without RWL, LIW would not have written the books she did, and they probably would not have been as successful nor as widely read as they were.  So credit given, where credit is due.  

That said, RWL’s bipolar and manic-depressive episodes caused real issues in her relationship not only with her mother, but with others in her life, and her impulsive manic energy routinely seemed to sabotage her relationships.   In her manic moments, she charged after new opportunities and new adventures, with apparently little regard for practical matters, and aggressively attacked those who disagreed with her or stood in the way of her projects.  In doing so, she spent money she didn’t have, was always in debt, and when the mania subsided, would retreat into suicidal depression.  When not depressed and blaming or feeling sorry for herself, she viciously blamed other people and institutions, and circumstances for her problems.   She also became a well known political figure in libertarian circles and a great proponent of individual freedom and independence, an opponent of government  regulation and intrusion into people lives.   

Rose Ingalls Wilder was indeed an intelligent and talented but troubled and unstable woman.  As a daughter,  as well as an agent and collaborator,  she was both a great resource and significant challenge for Laura ingalls Wilder.   The  tension between mother and daughter in the nurturing along, editing and publishing of the Little House books is an ever-present theme in Prairie Fires.  There was mutual love and respect, and at times a co-dependency between the two, but it was very often difficult for both of them.

Politics, then and now.  As Fraser describes RWL’s libertarian crusades and LIWs general agreement with her philosophy, I was struck by similarities with today’s philosophical tensions between the left and the right. Though LIW was not as strident nor proselytizing about her political beliefs as RWL, both were strong opponents of Roosevelt’s New Deal. Fraser describes how their anti-New Deal politics were part of a strong midwestern sentiment that hated Roosevelt and his relentless expansion of his and the US Government’s authority and reach.

LIW grew up in a world of small and limited government, few government programs for the poor and working people, and therefore, people made their own decisions, and were expected to live and deal with the consequences – relying on family, friends, and neighbors for assistance if needed.  Fraser offers many examples of “government men” intruding into the lives of farmers and working people, telling them what they had to do, how they had to live, because the the bureaucrats in government said so. LIW stoically believed in the basic independence and responsibility of individuals and resisted and resented governmental intrusion into their lives except to provide basic services for the common good, and to level the playing field.  RWL took that sentiment to the next level, writing editorials and books extolling the free American spirit and eviscerating New Deal and government over-reach.  The mistrust and antipathy between both sides in this debate was extreme.  Sound familiar?  

Mansfield Missouri. In Prairie Fires we learn of how the Ingalls family of Laura’s youth and later the Wilder family of her, Almonzo (her husband,)  and Rose, dealt with setback after setback, relying on friends and family to get by day-to-day,  frequently having to pack up and move to start all over again.  During the depression of 1894, when much of the country was barely surviving, LIW and her husband and daughter finally gave up trying to make a living farming in South Dakota, and left De Smet, South Dakota with little more than a horse and covered wagon to their name, and headed for Mansfield, Missouri where they settled down and lived for the next 60+ years.   In Prairie Fires we learn of life on a farm outside of a small Missouri town and how the Wilders barely scraped by for decades, until finally in the last couple of decades of their lives, they achieving some financial security, after LIW in her 60s, published The Little House in the Big Woods, the success of which spawned eight follow-on novels.

End of Life and Legacy. The final part of the book tells the story of  LIW in her 70s, and Almonzo in his 80s finally having the freedom to live without great concern for money to pay the bills.   LIW gets recognition and accolades from all over the world, and she and Almonzo are able to travel a bit by car to visit friends and family in South Dakota and even to go out to California.  As they both got older and energy waned,  these activities subsided.   Almonzo’s health begins to fail and he dies at age 92,  and LIW spends her last 10 years comfortable but in poor health, with little energy to take advantage of many offers she receives to bask in her success and public acclaim.   Living alone but with support from friends, she spent her last years enjoying her farm, answering fan male and reflecting on her life.  She died in 1957, a few days after her 90th birthday.

The last chapters of the book are about her legacy and the how her estate, inherited by RWL ended up after RIW’s death in the hands of one of RWL’s protégés, who was a lot like RWL – ambitious without conscience.  He personally profited from the Little House books for which he had done nothing, and ignored the desires LIW stated in her will  for how the long term proceeds and royalties from her work were meant to support the library named for her in Mansfield. Mo.    All of this eventually led to the Little House on the Prairie television series  in the 1970s, which, though it distorted much of LIW’s work and message, it significantly increased her popularity and readership. The stories Fraser tells of the television series are amusing and don’t reflect well on Michael Landon. 

In conclusion,  I was really impressed with this book, and in addition to learning a lot about the life of a girl I had a school-boy crush on from reading her books, I also learned a lot about America – some of the ugly truth about our frontier heritage, and life in midwest America in the later 19th and first half of the 20th century. 

Why this book I read it 25 years ago, remember loving it, though I didn’t remember the story very well. I have been wanting to read it again for quite a while, and prevailed upon my reading group to pick it for our annual long-book-over-Christmas selection.

Summary in 3 sentences Two former Texas rangers in the 1880s are living in Lonesome Dove, a small town in South Texas and decide to gather up some cattle and horses and be among the first cattle ranchers in Montana, which they’d heard was a paradise, compared to South Texas. They put together a crew and head north, finally arriving after several months on the trail.  But the story is about the rich tapestry of characters, their relationships to each other, how each individually and the group as a whole confront the various hardships and challenges along the way, and how the characters grew and evolved.

My Impressions: What an Epic! Reading it for the second time, I realize that there is so much in Lonesome Dove beyond “merely” a great story.   Friendship, Love, romance and sex (it is decidedly NOT pornographic,) human resilience, good and evil, the history of the American Frontier and the courage and adaptability of those intrepid pioneers who chose to venture into ungoverned and often lawless territory,  inhospitable terrain and climate,  where criminals roamed and often acted with impunity.    There was still a threat of hostile, Native Americans, wild animals, raging rivers, bugs, snakes, critters, and many more threats and challenges.   I  loved this book the first time, and even more the second.

The characters are interesting – some unforgettable, and we get to know them almost as if we were with them on the cattle drive

It’s a book written by a man focussing primarily on a group of men, mostly young, a few more mature,  working and living together on a mission which many don’t understand nor particularly believe in – moving a herd of cattle and horses from south Texas to Montana. They are there for a variety of reasons – adventure, the pay, or because they don’t have anything better to do.  They are confronted with a wide variety of unexpected and harrowing challenges in the months their cattle drive takes – and in the process several lose their lives. 

And because it’s a man’s book about men, there is a lot in it about women – since women are very much the focus of men’s thoughts and repartee.   There are weak and strong women in the story as well, arguably the strongest character in the books is a woman – the love interest of (arguably) the most interesting male character in the book – but she won’t have him. 

This book is a great story – but the theme is the strengths and weaknesses of men and women without many choices in a primal often hostile environment and where survival is often a day-to-day struggle,  and they must depend on each other to survive. 

Without giving away some of the key  events of the story, here are a few areas I found most interesting: 

The Two Protagonists – Woodrow Call and Augustus (Gus) McCrea  are the leaders of the men and the cattle drive. They are a more mature experienced pair of old cowboys who were partners in the Texas Rangers during the settling of Texas in the 1860s, and 70s.  They are very different from each other.  Gus is very relaxed, enjoys his whiskey, women, relaxing, thinking and talking, and is curious and humorous. Call is stern, stoic, duty driven, mission focused, has no impulse toward fun and prefers to be alone.  They chide each other constantly, like an old married couple, but there is HUGE trust between them – that is evident anytime there is a real problem or challenge. And they don’t/won’t let each other down.  This makes for a fun pairing. There is much to admire in each of them, and while I didn’t find anything particularly distasteful in either of them, they each had qualities that I would have difficulty calling “virtues.”  “The men looked to Call for orders, and got drunk with Augustus.”

Two other very interesting and important male characters in the novel are Jake Spoon and Newt. But you’ll have to read the book to explore the roles they play.

The Three Wise Men  There are three men in the story who seem to remain emotionally detached from the day to day chaos and challenges that others in the story struggle with but are key enablers to the success of the men.  When things got tough, those around them expected each of these three  to have a reasoned and healthy perspective and each could be counted on to do the right thing.   And each of these is a non-Anglo outsider.  Deets is an African American, trusted and even admired by all – which causes a bit of cognitive dissonance in some of the men.    Po Campo the cook on the drive is Mexican with an almost shaman-like wisdom and connection to nature.   Cholo an older (70s?) Mexican ranch worker who is a quiet and steadying presence helping Clara with her horse ranch and to deal with the challenges that arise for an isolated single woman running a ranch.  It is interesting that each of these would be considered among the more admirable characters in the novel, and none were part of the mainstream Western cowboy culture. 

Three Women  Though the book centers on men and their thoughts and actions, there are three women who have center stage in the epic. Lorena, a simple good hearted,  tough and resilient woman, who is regarded by nearly every man who sees her as the most beautiful woman they had ever seen.  Lorena is a prostitute, In the vernacular of the time, a “whore,” which she deals with be remaining completely emotionally detached from men.  Until….  Elmeira, a former prostitute, who after impulsively marrying a quiet, naive, and very unworldly  sheriff,  remains drawn to the dark and wild side. And Clara, one of the strongest and most independent characters in the book, the long time love interest of Gus.   Clara runs a horse ranch in Nebraska while taking care of two feisty daughters.

The banality of Sex  There is a lot of sex in the book, but it is not related to love, nor is it erotic.  It is what cowboys seek when they have a bit of money and time to go into town, to drink, play cards and find a whore.  Sex for most of them is a transactional event, a “poke” which whores do to service the cowboys or other men.  There is one scene whereby the young (teenage) cowboys go into town to have their first experience of sex with the whores working in a saloon.   It’s comic, banal, and decidedly not erotic.  Sex is something the men compulsively want,  and which some women do for them – for money, or to lure men into marriage, and after marriage, to have children and perhaps to keep the man at home.  There is only one woman in the book who seems to have sex for fun – a highly charged, somewhat unhinged whore who one of Gus and Call’s cowboys temporarily shacked up with. The concept of “love” was not associated with the act of sexual intercourse in Lonesome Dove.

Evil and Empathy The characters McMurtry gives us in Lonesome Dove are multi-dimensional and very human.  Each has their faults and strengths.  There are only three men who are clearly evil, and in whom we see no redeeming qualities – Blue Duck, a renegade Comanche, Dan Suggs a scheming and evil criminal, and Dixon, an arrogant scout who tries to take Dish’s horse. Otherwise, it was easy for me to appreciate and often admire the various characters, to empathize with their failings and their struggles to overcome challenges and difficulties, usually of their own making. 

Marriage, love, and infatuation. Marriage gets a bad rap in Lonesome Dove. We don’t see any marriages that we can admire, and few of the men aspire to the domestic life of a married man, not while there was fun, adventure, and good times to be had with one’s buddies, and whores were readily available for sex, for just a few dollars.  There was a lot of infatuation in the novel though,  which was routinely confused with love –  Dish for Lorena; Lorena for Gus, Elmeira for Joe Boot. Xavier and Lippy for Lorena,   July for Elmeira and Clara, Gus for Clara, even Clara for Gus….  None of these infatuations were given an opportunity to mature into “love” as I understand it, though there were a couple that I believe had potential.  My good friend Yolla pointed out to me that several of the unrequited infatuations in this novel showed how such disappointments can damage or even devastate a life – if the individual is not mature or otherwise equipped to deal with the disappointment of unfulfilled dreams.  

In my opinion, one of the most interesting sub-themes in Lonesome Dove was the relationship between Gus and Clara – which included elements of both infatuation and what I would call love.  The TV miniseries emphasizes their attraction for each other – certainly her attraction to him a bit more than the book.   But it seems they both ultimately realized that being married probably wouldn’t have worked – in that “successful” marriages require compromises and other dimensions apart from being “in love” that they may not have managed well.   

Life, Death, and Meaning The story begins with the characters living a squalid, boring existence in the small South Texas town of Lonesome Dove, and through a strange series of events,  become engaged in a major cattle drive for over two thousand miles into Montana.  The cattle drive and making it to Montana was a goal – but the characters had no real vision beyond that beyond Call wanting to be the first cattle rancher in Montana.  For Gus, it was an excuse to see Clara again, and an adventure.  For most of the men, the drive had no real meaning other than to get there and survive. There was little thought given to what it would mean to get there, and what that goal was in service of.  A number of the characters in the novel lost their lives along the way – and death became a constant companion.  Life was life and had inherent value – death was not so mysterious when it was such a constant presence – but it was feared.  Much of the death was just the result of accident, serendipity, and bad luck.  There was no overriding redeeming value in the cattle drive or the deaths that occurred along the way. It was something  most of the men just fell into, some people made it some didn’t ….and then what?  

The Lonesome Dove 1989 Television mini-series, available in the library or (to rent) on Amazon Prime, is unusual in that it indeed seeks to stay pretty close to the book and is very well done. It is altogether over 6 hours long and very much worth the time. The casting is quite good, starring Robert Duvall as Gus, Tommy Lee Jones as Call, Diane Lane as Lorena, Danny Glover as Deet, and Angelica Houston as Clara, but unlike most films based on novels, I believe this one is best appreciated after reading the book and I recommend a bit of a break between the book and the mini-series.  

The language of the West I loved how Lonesome Dove is written – McMurtry’s language is simple and profound, and fits the setting about which he writes.  Great wisdom is mixed in with the colorful and simple language of the cowboys, in their repartee with each other and their descriptions of what they see, describe and think.  Here are a few examples: (page numbers from my old beat-up paperback edition I include only for my own reference) 

Gus would rattle off five or six different questions and opinions, running them all together like so many unbranded cattle.  11

Gus:  “Call’s got to be the one to out-suffer everybody, and that’s the pint.  Glory don’t interest Call. He’s just got to do his duty nine times over or he don’t sleep good.” 26

Looking at Lorena was like looking at the hills. The hills stayed where they were. You could go to them, if you had the means, but they extended no greeting.   45

Jasper had a mustache not much thicker than a shoestring and a horse not much thicker than the mustache. 175

Deets had known several men who blew their heads off, and he had pondered it much. It seemed to him it was probably because they could not take enough happiness just from the sky and the moon to carry them over the low feelings that came to all men.  204

Gus: “Jake was up to being Jake. It’s a full-time job. He requires a woman to help him wih it.” 298

Gus to Call:  “If you got enough snakes around the place, you won’t be overrun with rats or varmints….Me and you done our work too well. We killed off most of the people that made this country interesting to begin with.” 349

Gus: “It ain’t dying I’m talking about, it’s living.  I doubt that it matters where you die, but it matters where you live.”  389

They stared at Roscoe and Janey, silent as owls. 439

In the morning they were right where they had gone to sleep, wet as muskrats but ready to drink a pot of coffee. 463

Call began to wish that somehow things could have been rounded off a little better. Of course he knew death was no respecter.  People just dropped when they dropped, whether they had rounded things off or not.  512

Gus: “Yes, but what’s good for me ain’t necessarily good for the weak minded.” 698

All of them envied him because he had a woman and they didn’t.  He envied them back, for they were carefree and he wasn’t….He would be lucky to get again such easy pleasures as the men enjoyed, sitting around a campfire swapping jokes. 722

Gus:  “It’s hard to enjoy a metropolis like this if you’ve got nothing but your hands in your pockets.” 743

He had seen many men die of wounds, and had watched the turning of their spirits from active desire to live, to indifference. With a bad wound, the moment indifference took over, life began to subside…most lost all impulse toward activity and ended by offering death at least a half-hearted welcome. 866

Gus about Call: “It wouldn’t be his way, to mention it. Woodrow don’t mention nothing he can keep from mentioning. You couldn’t call him a mentioner.” 833

Gus to Call on leadership:  “It ain’t complicated.  Most men doubt their own abilities. You don’t. It’s no wonder they want to keep you around. It keeps them from having to worry about failure all the time.”863

They were a young couple with two or three children peeking around them, narrow-faced as young possums. 941