Bob's Books

Why this book:  This book had been repeatedly suggested by my friend Janar for our literature reading group. We had read Elliot Ackerman’s Waiting for Eden last year, and we were finally ready to select this book as well.  Glad we did.

Summary in 3 sentences: The story takes place in Istanbul in the last decade – between 2013 and 2016, and involves a female American expat married to a wealthy Turkish real estate developer, a male American photographer who has an affair with her, a female member of the US Consulate, and a Turkish avant garde art curator for museums.  The novel revolves around the relationships of these four very different people within the context of Turkish politics, American political influences on the Istanbul economy, and in the background but playing a significant role, the Gezi park demonstrations and riots that have had a profound effect on Turkish culture and politics – akin to Tiananmen square in China or George Floyd  in the US.  Character, values, principle vs expediency, Turkish and US cultural values in contrast – these all are key themes in this interesting novel set in a part of the world I know little about.

My Impressions: Very well done.  I wasn’t sure what to expect, and the book is full of surprises, and is very well written.  The characters are real, believable, and multi-dimensional, and I could relate to all of them.  Ackerman’s writing is simple and straightforward – his style has been called Hemingway-esque – and for each scene and setting he created a picture I could see and feel.  I listened to the book on audio and though it was well done, I wish that I had read it.   A good friend loaned me her copy after I’d finished listening to it, and after visually reading portions of it, I found reading it a more satisfying experience. 

The story takes place in Turkey in the 2nd decade of the 21st century, and the story is built around incidents related to a major anti-government protest in Gezi park in Istanbul by progressives protesting a wide variety of regressive and short-sighted government actions.  The police brutally repressed the demonstration, which led to a greater chasm between the progressives and Erdogan, and was truly a major incident in Turkey, the impact of which is still felt in Turkey today.  The story of the Gezi park demonstrations and their aftermath can be read about here.   There really was a lady in a red dress who became a symbol for the over-reaction of the police to the peaceful protests, which you can read about here.  The black and white in the title refers to a separate theme in the book – that people and events are influenced by being in tension with their opposites – in values, perspectives, life styles. We understand A best by seeing it in contrast with not-A.   The idea reminds me a bit of Hegel’s dialectic – a thesis in tension with an anti-thesis which results in a synthesis which becomes something new altogether – and becomes a new thesis, which generates its own antithesis. 

But the Gezi Park demonstration and riots are not what the story is about  – but it does provide the setting.  Red Dress in Black and White is about Peter an American photographer,  Catherine an American woman married to Murat a wealthy Turkish real estate magnate, Deniz, an avant-garde museum director, and Kristin a woman ostensibly serving as a Cultural Affairs liaison at the US Consulate, but clearly primarily working in an intelligence collection role, though “CIA” is not mentioned.  It is about how their lives become entangled and upended

Though for each of these characters their professional lives play a role, the story evolves as a character study of each of them, as they are confronted with challenges and dilemmas, usually of their own making, and all of it within the cultural landscape of modern Istanbul. 

There are many surprises in this novel – as it twists and turns, but most impressive to me in reading  it was Ackerman’s descriptions of the scenes and how he developed his characters with the dilemmas they faced and the sometimes reckless decisions they made.  This is no simple good-guys vs bad-guys novel; the characters are real, complex and each compelling in their own way.  I could relate to and had sympathy for each, though each also had their clear flaws and were in large part responsible for the dilemmas they found themselves negotiating.

Catherine is unhappy in her marriage with Murat and initiates an affair with Peter who allows it all to happen, and as it continues over time, it gets more complicated when Catherine decides she wants to leave Murat, return to the States with her and Murat’s adopted son – and she wants Peter to accompany her.  Catherine short sightedly believes this will solve all her problems – Peter isn’t enamored of the idea for a number of reasons.  Murat, Peter, and Catherine all find that their lives are connected through Kristin and Deniz in surprising ways. And in coming to understand these connections, we are introduced to some of the dirty underbelly of how the arts are promoted, how real estate deals are made, how the US influences events and people overseas, and how people react under pressure, in difficult situations of their own making.  It is a very well done character study of very different people making decisions that have impact well beyond themselves. 

Another key character in this book who, though in the background for much of the novel, is truly a lynchpin to all of what happens in the story:  Murat’s and Catherine’s adopted son William. He is a victim to the dysfunctional marriage of Murat and Catherine, as well as to Murat’s insecurity in his job leaving Murat little time or energy to give William the attention he deserves.  Questions of Willam’s biological parents take center stage later in the story as as Catherine seeks to escape with him to the US, and the parentage questions yield some surprises that involve and impact all the other characters in the book.  William himself evolves in the book from a nice but timid young boy into a promising young man.  One of the most creative and clever aspects of this novel is how Ackerman develops this theme from a side show to center stage in his story.

This is a story of people and their challenges and how they deal with the other characters.  In the background however, are the unstated sub-themes to the story: The Gezi park demonstrations, police corruption and brutality, progressives pushing for more justice, corruption and influence peddling in the real estate market, the US Embassy subtly injecting itself into various spheres of Istanbul life to maneuver events in ways that might benefit the United Staes, and the complexities of marriage and parental love. 

I enjoyed this book and recommend it to others and to other reading groups. Some in our group didn’t care for it – didn’t care for the characters, wanted more attention to culture and history of Istanbul. Others in our group loved it and gave it solid 9s on a scale of 1-10.  I enjoyed it, learned from it, found the discussion of it energizing and fascinating. I really liked the writing, it caused me to think and I gave it an 8.5.  

Why this book: I had been reading primarily non-fiction and was looking for a novel to balance my reading. My friend Francine told me she’d just read this one. I had read 5 other books by Doig, one of the pre-eminent authors of the 20th Century American West, centered in Montana.  I really like his writing, have very much liked all I’ve read by him, so I bought it on audible and listened to it. Really glad I did.

Summary in 4 sentences: The story is told as a retrospective by the Superintendent of Schools in Montana in the mid-late 1950s, looking back on his youth about 50 years earlier in the early 1900s when his widower father was a homesteader in Marias Coolie, Montana and he and his brothers rode horse back to a one-room school house. The story begins with his father answering an add from a woman in Minnesota  offering to work as a housekeeper, since he needed help taking care of their home while the boys were in school and he was working the farm.  Responding to the add, an attractive woman arrives on the train from Minneapolis with her brother, and between the adjustments required in the family and the household, and the various day-to-day dramas at school, the story twists and turns as we get to know the world of small town Montana homesteaders. Our narrator goes back forth between his voice as a young teenager in Marias Coolie, to his voice as a middle aged man looking back on his youth while dealing with the challenges of running a school system in the age of Sputnik. 

My Impressions: A.wonderful story beautifully written, that allows the reader to experience the charm and frustrations of frontier life in the early 20th century, as the narrator tells his stories from his life growing up in a very small town in Montana.  There are a number of intermingled mini-dramas that take place throughout the story and Doig weaves them seamlessly into his narrative about the main character’s experiences coming of age in this world that once was, but is no more.   

The story begins with the changes wrought by bringing an energetic and charming woman into a household of all men and boys and how they have to adapt. That brings drama at school as the boys are ribbed at school and the constant gossip about an attractive single woman working for their widowed father.  We get to know the other kids in the one-room school house and a bit about their families, and there is the inevitable bad boy who bullies the other boys, who himself is bullied at home by his brutal father.   Boys get beat up, kids get in trouble, or fall in love, relatives die, the weather is always an issue for farmers, people come and go, and the town changes and evolves, as life happens and Doig fascinates the reader with his descriptions of people, places, events that deserve to be appreciated and savored, but are truly normal. 

Key characters in the book are the book’s narrator and protagonist, Paul Milliron,  unusually precocious and gifted student in the one-room school house, responsible and mature beyond his years, but rather timid, cautious and practical in his approach to most problems and life.   Paul’s younger brother Damon is bold, aggressive and adventurous, a sports nut, always willing to assume risk and take on a challenge.  Their youngest brother Toby is  affectionate, emotional,  innocent and extraverted.  And father Oliver,  who is hard working, intelligent, sensitive and practical – kind of a Ward Cleaver in overalls.

We also get to know Paul a bit as a 60 something middle aged man, telling the story as he looks back, but also as he confronts his challenge as Montana School’s Superintendent under pressure to close all one-room school houses. 

Into young Paul Milliron’s family comes Rose Llewelllyn,  practical, bold, hard-working and ambitious, but mysteriously, she arrives dressed in satins, but with no money. She brings a new, positive feminine energy into the household and all three boys are captivated by her, and Oliver keeps his practical  distance but remains the head of the household.  Rose’s brother Morrie escorts her from Minnesota and plans to stay – he too is another enigmatic and interesting character, extremely well educated, articulate in the way of a Harvard professor, who knows a little bit about everything, is wise in the ways of the civilized world,  but not in the practical skills of the frontier. 

The story evolves as various challenges arise in the school and community – for example, we get to know Aunt Eunice,  a caricature of a judgmental,  guardian-of-social-propriety aunt, Eddie Turley the school’s big, strong, dumb bully,  Ms Trent, the school house’s one teacher,  who elopes with a revivalist preacher,  leaving the school without a teacher, and more.  Throughout the book we are treated with different stories of the three brothers, of various dramas at school, stories of Rose and Morrie, and Oliver Milliron.  As the community deals with various mini-dramas, we get to know the all these characters and the community better  – all through the eyes of our precocious narrator, Paul Millirone. 

Eventually Rose and her brother move onto center stage as Rose takes initiatives that change not only life in the Milliron family but in the community. Her brother Morrie steps in to fill the teacher vacancy and he transforms the school house and the learning environment. Through Paul, his prize pupil, we get to know him as a fascinating character.  And eventually the mysterious backgrounds of Rose and Morrie are revealed to Paul – and this become something of a crisis and a fork in the road for the key players in this story. 

The magic of the book is in the writing and the language.  Doig injects the sophisticated language of the narrator, as well as the almost classically refined language of Rose’s brother Morrie, into the simple western world of homesteaders in Montana.  The juxtaposition is striking and entertaining.  The language itself is  a prism through which we see the contrast between two different worlds – but Doig’s style does not in any way belittle the hardworking homesteaders of Montana.

The New York Times reviewer Sven Birkerts wrote in his excellent review of this book, that:  “Doig’s writerly ambition is less in plotting than evoking, and it is his obvious pleasure to recreate from the ground up — or the sky down — a prior world, a prior way of being.”

I think that puts it pretty well.  I really enjoyed this book and was again, impressed with Ivan Doig, one of my favorite novelists.

Why this book:  The author asked that I review this book before it was published. I declined, he politely persisted, I politely agreed to just take a look at it.  After I started reading it, I couldn’t put it down. I read a galley proof. It will be published and available to the public in July 2021. 

Summary in 4 Sentences: Ben Milligan’s intent was to explore how one of the nations and the world’s premier land commando units resides in the Navy, vice the Army, the Marine Corps or perhaps another government agency. He explores how the US military approached commando and commando-like (small unit raid operations) during WW2, Korea and ultimately Viet Nam, when the SEALs finally came into their own.  It is a story of individual champions in all the services arguing for a special capability, and repeatedly being shut down by leaders steeped in conventional thinking who could not imagine that  the value of such a force could be worth the costs. It is also a story of battles between staffs, as well as battles fought by intrepid early special operators, often under-trained, under-resourced, and poorly supported against our nations enemies in war. 

My Impressions: I wasn’t planning on reading this whole book -was planning to just read a chapter or two, skim the rest and give Ben Milligan an overall  impression.  But as I got started, I couldn’t put it down.  It is a great read – Ben Milligan has an engaging writing style that pivots back and forth between intense and serious, to humorous and even occasionally “snarky.”  Ben is a former SEAL with a BA in History and an MA in International relations and he successfully brings those worlds together in this book.  He is an outstanding researcher and a great story teller.  And though I had spent my career in the Navy SEALs and have read more military history than even most military officers, this book was full of new information and insights that give me a greater understanding of not only the history of the Navy SEALs but also of Special Operations.  His narrative extends from stories about leaders at the highest levels of power and authority in the military, those whose decisions shaped the direction of Special Operations,  down to the operators on the ground – their characters, experiences, decisions, frustrations and tragedies.

By Water Beneath the Walls is written in Five Parts:  Neglect, Opportunity, Relevance, Exigency, Culmination, and finishes with a Conclusion entitled:  Nature Abhors a Vacuum.  The chapters in the book have titles like:

• Chapter 1: The Reluctant Creation and Violent Demise of the Navy’s First Commandos, the Marine Corps Raiders; 
• Chapter 3: The Us Army’s First Commandos and the Raid That Wasn’t;
• Chapter 6: The Contest for the Guerrilla War in China and the Organization That Had  “No Damn Business” fighting in IT: The US Navy’s Army of Sailors; 
• Chapter 11: The First SEALs, Their Search for a Mission , and the Report That Found It for Them; 
• Chapter 15: The Navy’s Skeleton Key to Inland Combat, and the Final Against-the-Current Achievements in the War’s Ebb Tide That Exposed the SEALs’ Preeminence as the US Military’s Go-Anywhere Commandos. 

The unusual title comes from a brief story on the fore-page about how in 705 AD, Justinian II “led a small group of fighters under the impregnable walls of Constantinople by way of an unguarded aqueduct and captured the city. It was a victory that never should have been, by water beneath the walls.”  The analogy is obvious: How unlikely it is that the SEALs should become one of the worlds most successful and famous commando forces, while being part of the Navy (and not the Army or USMC.)  Perhaps this too “never should have been.”    So, how did that happen?   That is the question Ben Milligan and this book seek to answer. Most  of the story takes place well before there were any SEALs.   Indeed, the SEAL Teams didn’t simply spring onto the scene. 

There is a fascinating back story, and By Water Beneath the Walls tells it.   In this book we learn about the rise and demise of William Darby’s Rangers in WW2, of the formation of the Naval Combat Demolition Units, Scouts and Raiders, and Underwater Demolition Teams, as well as Marine Raider units, and how they fared in North Africa, Normandy, and the Western Pacific.  We learn of the Navy-run insurgency operation and network behind the lines in Japanese-occupied China.  We learn of early attempts at using UDT’s as raiders in Korea, then of the ill-fated but bold efforts to create out of whole-cloth, a joint team of insurgents to run operations behind China’s lines in Korea. And we learn how repeatedly, after such units were created to meet an immediate need in war, at the conclusion of that war, the services either disbanded them altogether, or scaled them way back,  and reverted to what they knew best how to do – train and resource traditional general military forces. 

The final two sections of the book appropriately focus on Viet Nam, where the SEALs initially earned their credibility.  I came into the SEALs just after the Vietnam War, and all of the experienced SEALs I worked with and for had fought in that conflict.  Though I thought I had a pretty good idea of what that war was about, By Water Beneath the Walls gave me context to help me better understand and appreciate the stories of my mentors.  I knew many of the people he portrays in the operations he describes, which made this section that much more meaningful to me. 

The last part of the book spotlights a single SEAL platoon from SEAL Team TWO in Viet Nam, which provides an engaging picture of what SEALs did in that war.   Milligan highlights some of the colorful stories about the members of this platoon, some of the operations they conducted, and gives a detailed description of one particularly harrowing operation in which much went wrong, and only through amazing heroism on the part of the SEALs and their supporting helicopter pilots did the platoon survive, albeit with several SEALs severely wounded. 

The book concludes with CNO Adm Jimmy Holloway at the end of the Viet Nam war confiding to SEAL Medal of Honor recipient Mike Thornton,  that the Navy’s long term intention was to “dissolve the Teams.”  Was it deja vu all over again?  It seemed that the SEALs, “like the Raiders and Rangers before them, would be disbanded at the apex of their achievements.”  p502  The irony is that this was the same Adm Holloway who led the Holloway Commission investigating the failure of Operation Eagle Claw (Desert One) in 1980. The resulting Holloway report led directly to justifying the establishment of US Special Operations Command which all but ensured that the services would not be able to disband the SEALs, the Army SF, the Rangers or other Special Operations Forces. 

By Water Beneath the Walls is not a quick read for someone wanting a SEAL book for a junk-food-read on an airplane ride.  It is a multi-course banquet – 500 pages long, covers a lot of fascinating history, and Milligan builds his case with engaging and often edge-of-your-seat examples of brave men learning hard lessons that will make current operators wince. It is a fascinating read for anyone interested in the history of not just the SEALs, but of Special Operations, and it is an engaging read for anyone who enjoys great story telling by a wonderful writer.  I really enjoyed learning so much from this book.

——-

The many fascinating things I learned in this book, include: 

…that there has been a tug-of-war going back decades and probably longer between some of our most senior military leaders who advocated for elite specialized commando forces, and those who either did not support the idea, were adamantly opposed, or distrusted or even despised the idea of such forces.

…how and why conventional leaders in the Army and Marine Corps repeatedly smothered healthy efforts to create creditable raiding forces in their services, in WW2, Korea, and even Viet Nam.

…about the backgrounds, personalities, and military experiences of some of those who were huge in the history of Naval Special Operations.  Such heroes as Buck Halperin, Draper Kauffman, Rear Adm John Hall, Phil Bucklew, Milton Miles, NCDU Bill Freeman, PO1 Bob Wagner,  Lt Pete Peterson, and many more – even Ernie King, Arleigh Burke and Elmo Zumwalt.   

…how Draper Kauffman, considered the Father of UDT, had been an ambulance driver in France in the early years of WW2 (shades of Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms,) was captured and became a Nazi PoW, then served in the Royal Navy –  all before becoming a US Naval Officer and a key leader in forming and shaping the NCDUs and UDTs.  

…about extensive and controversial US operations that the Navy successfully ran behind Japanese lines in China.  And how Wm Donovan and the OSS lobbied hard to take them over, and in failing that, sought to undermined them.  

…that the Navy’s China operations played a key but subtle role in the Navy’s eventual support for creating SEAL Teams.  Phil Bucklew, one of the key founders of Naval Special Warfare had been a China operator.  Adm Arleigh Burke, CNO of the Navy in the late 50s and early 60s, always an advocate for bold action, had been a fan of the Navy’s China initiative.  He was a strong supporter of creating a Navy unconventional warfare raiding capability, and his influence mattered.

…that the unlikely (even incredible) mission that Anton Myrer gave Sam Damon in Once an Eagle to serve as an advisor/observer with communist insurgents in China in the 1930s had to have been based on Marine officer Evans Carlson who indeed was assigned to accompany Chinese Communist guerrillas fighting the Japanese in the late 1930s.

…about efforts to resurrect raiding units and a raiding capability in the often overlooked war in Korea.   I learned about the Navy’s efforts to use commandos to prep the battlefield for the landing at Inchon, the initial and fumbling steps of UDT to do small raids beyond the shoreline, and the bold, but poorly planned and executed efforts to insert US forces in the rear of China’s forces to generate Korean resistance. 

…about the mistakes made by the early pioneers in raiding operations, learning everything by trial and error, without the benefit of decades of experience and lessons learned that have been passed down to current special operators.  These were painful to read. 

…how Phil Bucklew and Dave Del Guidice with the help of a very enterprising SEAL E6 (Bob Wagner) “fought” to get SEALs any role at all in the Viet Nam War, a role which expanded as their successes and contributions were recognized and were clearly disproportionate to their size. 

…how the SEALs developed the idea of “snatch” missions designed to capture VC in Viet Nam in order to interrogate them and get intelligence. As obvious as this may seem, others weren’t doing it.  For others, it was all about body-count. 

Some of the great catchy expressions I enjoyed in By Water Beneath the Walls (page numbers are from the galley proof I read, and may not be reflected in the published version)

“Edson was a perfect Marine, and no perfect Marine has ever used his imagination unless ordered to do so.” p16

“Courage is always strongest when not allowed too much time for thought.”p 81

(Howlin’ Mad Smith’s) “mustache trimmed equidistant from nose and lip, and a jowly face that relaxed into a scowl (as every good Marine’s does)….p 145

“When they finally breasted the surf, many LVT drivers, slightly braver than smart – the best ratio in combat – drove onto the beach…” p146

“‘After that, there was the Jesus factor – the unpredictable.’  Though Luehrs and Acheson had not walked on water, they had been baptized in it, and they returned as apostles for a new method.” p 154

“Now Theiss was giving Kauffman a choice, a military euphemism for an order.” p166

(He was accompanied by) “at least eight other high-ranking officers –  a saluting , murmuring,  pyramid of authority, deferential to (Gen Mark) Clark and imperious to everyone else.”  P309

“Secretary of Defense Louis A. Johnson, a bald and bulky West Virginia Lawyer whose glad-handing past as Truman’s campaign director concealed a mind that never saw an arm without considering how to twist it.”  p 237

“Wide mouthed as a duck and so bowlegged that one observer declared that he (Roy Boehm) wore his “balls in parentheses,”…p414

Why this book: Herman Lehmann’s story is briefly told in Empire of the Summer Moon and I was intrigued and wanted to know more.  I was pleased to find that he had told his own story, in this book, first published in 1927.

Summary in 3 sentences: Herman Lehman was captured as an 11 year old and spent the next 4 years living among the Apaches, eventually becoming a trusted member of the tribe. He then got in trouble with the Apaches, escaped and was taken in by the Comanches where he felt more at home, and stayed with them, fighting for their survival against the US Army and Rangers who were driving the Comanches onto a reservation. Finally he also submits to the reservation, and eventually chooses to repatriate himself to his original family and to white culture, though for the rest of his life he proudly retained his status as a member of the Comanche tribe.

My impressions:  Fascinating read – especially if you’re interested in the West, and true life stories of Indians and settlers, and how it was to live in that time.  It is short (97 pages) and powerful, like sitting at the knee of the old man Hermann Lehman telling of his youth as a boy captured by raiding Apaches, living with them for about 4 years, before escaping to live with the Comanches, participating as an Indian in the battles with the US Army, the Texas Rangers and other whites.  This book is him telling his amazing stories of survival, brutal killings and torture that he observed and participated in, and his eventual repatriation to white culture.  It provides great insights into the different cultures of Apaches and the Comanches, as well as insights into the antipathy between them and anglo settlers. 

Herman and his brother were captured when Herman was 11 years old and they were not treated well. A fluke opportunity allowed his brother to escape, but Hermann himself made a point of adapting in order to not be further tortured, and though he unsuccessfully attempted a couple of escapes (for which he was tortured again), he eventually became a trusted member of the tribe, in part by aggressively participating in raids against white settlers. He also began to see and take pride in himself as an Apache warrior and adopted and internalized their values and lifestyle.

The introductory page of this book is written by Mr l. Marvin Hunter in 1927 who it appears served as Lehmann’s ghost writer, and Hunter he says in this book, he is writing down the stories as Lehmann told them, and which he says are vouched for by living whites, and Native Americans who knew him then.  The book is also based in part on a book Indianology, published in the 1890s form which he Hunter claimed to have taken considerable amount of information on Lehmann’s captivity and life. 

Nine Years Among the Indians is composed of short chapters, each a vignette from Lehmann’s life, and which can be read as short stories almost independent of each other.  Reading this book feels like going to visit the old man Herman Lehmann and getting a good story or two with each visit.  It was perfect for me to take in the field on a NOLS expedition and read a chapter at a time with my headlamp at night before going to sleep in my sleeping bag. The chapters have titles that describe a specific vignette, such as: “”Fight with the Rangers,” or “I Make a Saddle,” or “Cannibalism of the Tonkaways,” or “I get shot in the leg,” or “Soldiers kill our women.”

Lehmann was forced to escape from the Apaches after killing an apache medicine man in revenge for the medicine man having killed  his Apache “father” or mentor in an internal brawl among the Apaches after an alcohol fueled argument and fight on one of the reservations.  Those in the tribe who were allies of the medicine man swore to kill Lehman, and Lehman had to run for his life.  Apparently for months, he was surviving alone – “as a hermit” he writes – and was pursued by Apaches seeking revenge for killing the medicine man.  Eventually he finds a camp of Comanches and convinces them to take him in, after which he earns their trust and becomes a member of that tribe.

Lehmann’s time with the Apaches and Comanches was during the window described in Empire of the Summer Moon in the 1870s, when the Comanches were trying to maintain their way of life and survive while being aggressively pursued by the US Army and the Texas Rangers.  Lehmann fought the whites who he had learned to hate, and became a committed Comanche.  He eventually connected with Quanah Parker who he greatly admired, and who eventually convinced Lehman to surrender and come to live on the reservation.

At which point Lehmann was unwillingly returned to his original white family. That is a fascinating part of the story – his resistance to reintegrating with his white family and culture.  Eventually his original family’s tolerance for his Indian ways and idiosyncrasies, and the love they showed him slowly won him over, and he decided to integrate with white society.  

That said, he still retained his status as a member of the Comanche tribe, and for the rest of his life, he was both white man, and Comanche.  He married a white woman and had children and the story in Nine Years among the Indians of his later years is a bit more peaceful than the bio of him I subsequently read in Wikipedia, which indicates his family life may not have been as peaceful and happy as his book would have us believe, and hints that he may never have renounced some of his Comanche ways that were not in synch with well-healed Anglo culture.  As in Memoirs of a White Crow Indian (my review here), at the end of his life, he went back to his Indian tribe -where he felt most at home. 

Fascinating and fun read – with great insights into life in that turbulent time. 

Why this book: Selected by my literature reading group after Patsy pushed for us to read it for at least a year. She hasn’t let us down yet with books she’s insisted that we read. This is a gem. I was going back and forth between the printed and the audible version, but ultimately chose to stick with the audible version; the reader Corrie James does a superb job of giving emotion and nuance to the characters. 

Summary in 4 sentences:  In a suburb of London, a history professor nearing the end of her career, is brought in with a graduate student to assess the value of some centuries old papers and letters found hidden in a locked compartment of a stately old mansion.   As they attempt to decipher the enigmatic letters and papers from an obscure rabbi and his household from the 2nd half of the 17th century, we are taken back to the world in which the letters and papers were written, and we get to know that world, and those we wrote the letters and papers.  There are two dramas occurring in The Weight of Ink, and they seem to be conversing with one another across the centuries and throughout the book – one drama taking place in the life of the rabbi’s scribe, a young precocious Jewish woman living in the harsh, bigoted world of restoration England and her challenges to support the rabbi while  struggling to create a role for herself, and to survive. The other drama is at the beginning of the 21st century as the historian and her intern work to understand what the papers might tell them about the lives and thoughts of those who wrote them, but they also struggle with their own personal issues, they struggle to connect with each other, and they struggle with the politics of the university’s history department, as they endeavor to bring the surprising insights they discover to light.  

My Impressions: For me, this was one of those powerful “Wow!” books that I’m fortunate enough to read every now and then.  I started saying “Wow!” about a quarter of the way into the book, and my “wow!” exclamations continued right through to the very last page.  Great writing, fascinating story, some powerful lessons on history and the human heart, three-dimensional and compelling characters – SO much richness in this wonderful book.  It may not be everyone’s cup of tea, because Rachel Kadish builds her characters slowly and deliberately,  and she paints a picture of her settings with detail and sensitivity.  She allows the drama to build slowly, all the way through to its rich and fulfilling conclusion, with many fascinating surprises along the way.  A great read. 

Each chapter begins with a date and a location telling us which part of the conversation we’ll be sitting in on in that chapter.  The papers from the 1600s include the Jewish date – for example November 12, 1657  6 Kislev, 5418 London – to tell you that this chapter is from that world, that period.  Then the next chapter may begin: November 4, 2000 London, and offering up that world, that perspective, that drama.    

There are three main characters in the book, of whom the most important is Ester, who lived in the earlier period.  The other two, who are seeking to understand Ester’s world and the letters she wrote, are Helen Watt, the stiff-upper-lip traditional British History professor,  whose health is failing as her academic career comes to an end, and Aaron Levy, a young American doctoral student floundering with his thesis who was sent to help Helen with evaluating and translating the papers.   Much of the richness of this book is in the relationships between these characters – the strained relationship between Helen and Aaron, and the evolving relationships between both Helen and Aaron and Ester as they conceive her, as they put together the pieces of the puzzle about who she was and unravel the mysteries in what she wrote. 

There are a number of important secondary characters who include the wise, elderly much-respected rabbi, who was blinded in the inquisition in Portugal; Rivka, the Polish Jewish housemaid who served and protected both Ester and the Rabbi;  Mary da Costa Mendes who Ester served as a companion; a couple of Ester’s suitors; Aaron’s girlfriend Marissa; Jonathan Martin, the smarmy chairman of Helen’s history department; and a  few other.   These and other characters play their role in The Weight of Ink, primarily to help us better understand our three primary protagonists. 

And much of the richness of this book is in the detail with which Rachel Kadish paints the world of London in the 1650s and 1660s.  We can feel the harshness of the bigotry toward Jews, as well as the caution and fear the Jews live with in that environment.  We get a sense of the city of London of the time, so different from what we are used to today.  And then came the plague, and the fear that gripped the city will feel familiar to us who are living through the COVID 19 pandemic – but back then, it was much worse, as the death toll was staggering, the city was essentially evacuated and no one understood what the plague was or how it was spread. And then most of the city burned. This section also recalled to me my recent reading of The Plague by Camus – another grim look at what pandemic panic can do to people.

Part of what I enjoyed about this book is how different all three of the main characters are from me. I was fascinated by their thought processes and decisions – all are very reserved in sharing their thoughts and feelings – yes even the cocky young American Aaron, an intellectually precocious young man, is secretly afraid of his own insecurities and lack of courage. Each of these characters, we eventually learn, is burdened by a different version of guilt or sense of regret for something they did, or didn’t do, or should have done – and this regret is a barrier to fully enjoying the good fortune they have. And each struggles in their own way to come to terms with it.

We see the ugliness of bigotry and prejudice, very much in the news in America today, expressed openly and much more viciously in 17th century Europe.  We learn of the horrors of the inquisition from the rabbi who barely survived it; we see how the Jews are treated in Portugal, Amsterdam and London by hateful Christians, and we see how the Sephardic Jews of Western Europe looked down their noses at Jews from Eastern Europe.  And we learn a lot about the restrictions women of that time faced – especially Jewish women, who were essentially either household workers or were the wards of their husband or a wealthy family.  There weren’t many other options available. Gifted and intelligent, Ester was told to marry, or else.  Or else what?  Rely on charity, or become a house servant,  or starve, or be forced into other unthinkable work to survive?

I realize also, that another thing that drew me to this book is that I so much enjoy the company of intelligent, thoughtful, independent, Stoic women, getting inside their heads and learning from how they think and perceive the world. Both Helen and Ester were these kind of women.   I really liked and  admired them, and enjoyed getting to know them.  The moment I realized the book had reached its conclusion,  I missed them.   Every day for nearly three weeks, I had really looked forward to spending time with them. 

Yes, I thoroughly enjoyed and will not soon forget this book.  I will look for another Rachel Kadish novel to read in the near future. 

 Why this book:  I had heard David Sinclair interviewed by Peter Attia and was impressed with the interview. I have just read The Longevity Paradox, and wanted to see what Sinclair had to say that might fit with, or contradict what Gundry had said in his book (they are pretty much in synch.)   Also, Sinclair and his views were among the original sources of my interest in the new longevity, about which I wrote in my essay a few years ago.

Summary in 4 Sentences: This book makes 4 important claims: First that aging is a disease and the symptoms of aging as we now know it,  are not pre-determined and can be delayed by decades or potentially indefinitely. Second, that research is progressing rapidly to better understand the biological processes of aging, and scientists are finding ways to arrest these process.   Three, there are cultural and institutional impediments to progress in this field, given that our medical system is invested in treating diseases, rather than preventing them and promoting vitality and longer health span. And Four, that it is inevitable that significantly increased life and health spans will be available to those who can afford the coming medicines and treatments,    but that change will cause some significant social disruptions, and the world is not ready.  

My Impressions: This is a wonderful book, exciting to read, even if I didn’t understand ALL  the bio physiology.  He explains why and how he is certain that in the next few decades, life expectancy for those living in healthy societies will increase by 50% and more.  Don’t believe it?  He uses the analogy of how in less than a century, we went from the Wright brothers to putting a man on the moon.  Or from a pocket calculator and a walky-talky to a cell phone connected to the whole world and the knowledge of the ages. Sinclair’s enthusiastic belief in this vision of significantly increased life and health span is infectious, but he doesn’t shy away from the challenges his prognosis presents. Lifespan is written in three parts: 

Part 1 WHAT WE KNOW (THE PAST).  In Part 1, he introduces us to some of the research that has led to the key bio-physiological bases for his predictions.  A key player in the Longevity drama is our sirtuins.  He describes how sirtuins ” order our bodies to ‘buckle down’ in times of stress, and protect us against the major diseases of aging: diabetes and heart disease, Alzheimer’s disease and osteoporosis, even cancer.   They mute the chronic overactive inflammation that drives diseases such as atherosclerosis, metabolic disorders, ulcerative colitis, arthritis and asthma. They prevent cell death and boost mitochondria, the power packs of the cell.” p 24  Activating and energizing our sirtuins is one of the keys to increasing our longevity and health span.  Sirtuins are a key player throughout the book.

He goes on to explain how our genes work in this process,  using analogies, such as, that our genome is like a grand piano, each gene is a key on the piano, and the pianist that plays this piano is the epigenome which determines which genes are expressed, when and how. The epigenome is very much influenced by our environment and things we do, choices we make, how we live, what we eat,  and our lifestyle decisions.  So the epigenome is fundamental to who we are. He states it directly, “Studies of Identical twins place the genetic influences on longevity at between 10 and 25 percent which, by any estimation, is surprisingly low.  Our DNA is not our destiny.” p37  The “epigenome” is actually more important. 

Much of the rest of Part 1 is Sinclair making the case that aging is something that we have assumed is the way it has to be, but aging can be hacked and “cured.”   He notes that while lifespans have increased, “health spans”  have not – we have kept unhealthy, unhappy people alive for decades longer than in the past. This is not acceptable.  He notes that many of the diseases that afflict the aged can be dramatically mitigated if not “cured,” by better understanding the microbiological processes by which we deteriorate.  He gives us numerous examples of research with mice and other mammals which have had amazing results, and that some of these insights are already moving into therapy for humans. 

PART 2. WHAT WE’RE LEARNING (THE PRESENT) This is a heavy chapter which outlines the many lines of research that are supporting his thesis that aging can be “cured” and he explains the steps that anyone can and should take to extend not just their lifespan, bur more importantly, their health span. 

He discusses the research about why creating healthy stress to the body creates long term resilience -stresses such as fasting, exercise, High Intensity exercise, heat stress, cold stress – anything which stimulates the body at the cellular level to make itself stronger and more resilient to prepare for such future stresses.  Our bodies have to be nudged, or even shoved to adapt, to become stronger and more resilient.  He writes that “ A bit of adversity or cellular stress is good for our epigenome because it stimulates our longevity genes.” (p112)

We learn that a molecule called “NAD is the central regulator of many major biological processes, including aging and disease” and serves as fuel for sirtuins to do their good work.  He talks about NAD boosters that are having a positive impact on many people,  resveratrol, MTOR inhibitors, NMN molecules, metformin as an anti-cancer drug that many are taking off label. He writes that an extensive study of metformin in 41,000 users between ages 68 and 81 “concluded that metformin reduced the likelihood of dementia, cardiovascular disease, cancer, frailty, and depression , and not by a small amount.” (p125)

 We learn about senescent cells – what he calls “zombie cells” that “might as well be radioactive waste.” Our bodies create senescent cells, that are still alive, but no longer reproducing, and as they live on without doing any work, they release tiny proteins called “cytokines” that cause toxic inflammation in our bodies. He notes that inflammation is also a driving force in heart disease, diabetes, and dementia, and cause other cells to become senescent, releasing more cytokines.  Inflammation is so much a part of age-related diseases, scientists and doctors often refer to “inflammaging.”   He  shares how research is developing “senolytic” drugs which may be able to kill senescent cells , by “inducing the death program the should have happened in the first place.”(p153)

He notes how our biology is designed for us to live long enough to reproduce and raise our young. After that our evolutionary/biological work is done. Some of what has evolved to help us survive and thrive while we’re young and reproducing and raising children,  is no longer useful and becomes counterproductive as we age.  Scientists are exploring how to identify and modify these biological mechanisms that have outlived their usefulness and can inhibit health and well-being once we’re beyond our reproducing and child rearing years.  For example, senescent cells are not normally a problem for young people.  But they apparently are an important part of the aging process for those of us who are older.  

MEDICAL INNOVATION:

Pharmacogenetics – the increasing realization that medication acts differently among people of different genotypes, including often having very differently effects on men and women.  “Eventually , every drug will be included in a huge and ever expanding database of pharmacogenteic effects.  It won’t be long before prescribing a drug without first knowing a patient’s genome will seem medieval.” (p184) 

With a simple blood test, doctors will be able to scan for circulating cell-free DNA.. and diagnose cancers that would be impossible to spot without the aid of computer algorithms…We’re going to get ahead of symptoms. Way ahead.  We’re even going to get ahead of “feeling bad,’  Many diseases, after all, are genetically detectable long before they are symptomatic.” p186

We will have clothing with sensors that can track biomarkers, and other devices that will send alerts to doctors if there is something amiss with your heart rate or breathing pattern. He predicts that bio tracking will help stop acute and traumatic preventable deaths by the millions. Bio tracking will “see you when you’re sleeping and know when you’re awake..<will> be able to identify through the data when  you are feeling sad, driving too fast, having sex, or had too much to drink. “p198  There are clearly problems which accompany the advantages of such bio tracking – someone will have to keep and store and regulate access to the data.  Who will that be? Who do we trust?  Are we willing to give up that privacy?  He has a whole section on how bio tracking will be key to defeating the next pandemic (this book was written before the COVID 19 pandemic)

He writes that”Once you recognize that there are universal regulators of aging, in everything from yeast to roundworms to mice to humans… and once you realize that it’s all one disease, it all become clear:  Aging is going to be remarkably easy to tackle.  p147-8

PART 3. WHERE WE’RE GOING (THE FUTURE) In this final part of his book, Sinclair gives warning – there are serious problems that accompany the opportunity to live decades, perhaps even centuries longer.  And he looks at social and political trends internationally that are related to, and will impact the movement toward increasing health and life span.

He writes, “Most people, upon coming to the realization that longer human lives are imminent, also quickly recognize that such a transition cannot possibly occur without significant social, political, and economic change. ..there can be no evolution without disruptions.”  (p219)

He points out problems with the American medical system that does not seriously promote healthy living, and is surprised at a general American unwillingness to look at and seriously consider systems that seem to better promote health and well being. The US is ranked 24th internationally on a rating of a Human Capital Index – a measure of knowledge, skills, and health that people in a nation accumulate over their lives.  China was 25th.” (p275)

This section is a fascinating potpourri of issues that he is concerned with, that are related to his work in defining aging as a disease and improving life and health span.  Problems/issues which he identifies and explores include:

• Environmental sustainability of increasing affluence and longevity across the globe. Environmental degradation continues, as does over-consumption and increasing waste.  He quotes environmental writer George Monbiot that “consumption bears twice as much responsibility for pressure on resources and ecosystems as population growth.”  (p283)
• 100 year old politicians? As people get older and healthier, they tend to hold on to power and influence.  It may be much more difficult for younger people to bring in new ideas, and influence positive disruption when octogenarians, nonagenarians or centenarians won’t give up positions of power and influence. 
• Social Security – The expected retirement age will have to evolve.  Do we push the retirement age out to 75 or 80 or beyond?   There is no economic model which allows for large numbers of people living 40+ years beyond their retirement age. 
• Increasing the gap between rich and poor.  Currently “the richest 10% of Americans live 13 more years than the poorest 10%.”  (p231) That gap will increase dramatically, as the wealthier have access to genetic testing, gene editing, and other tools for maximizing health and life span that the poor do not.  This will have predictable disruptive social consequences.  The Rich-Poor gap will be even more dramatic internationally. 
• Older work force. There willl be more older workers, and they are different from younger workers – offering different value and liabilities in the work place.   With more older workers remaining longer in the work force, our culture will have to more actively confront the issues of age-discrimination in the work place.
• The medical profession is NOT focused on disease prevention, or helping people to live well. “Research aimed at prolonged vitality is rather paltry; the biggest checks are still being written to supporting initiatives aimed at recognized diseases.”  (p268)  “Effective longevity drugs will cost pennies on the dollar compared to the cost of treating the diseases they will prevent. “ p273)
• Individual  choice. How do we attack preventable causes of aging, such as poor diet, poor lifestyle, obesity, lack of exercise, etc that are based on individual choice?  Each individual has choices to make daily that impact their health and longevity.  “The most critical daily decisions that affect how long we live are centered around the foods we eat.” p190
• He also argues for death with dignity, and argues against spending enormous sums to keep people alive, but miserable, when the prognosis is clear. 
• GMOs To solve our food shortages and other crises, we need to accept the strong evidence that GMOs are safe. 
• CRSPR gene editing will bring changes that affects longevity that we can’t yet predict.

CONCLUSION: He writes that “Although I’m very  optimistic about the prospects for prolonged vitality, I’m not that optimistic. I don’t know any reputable scientist who is. One hundred years is a reasonable expectation for most people alive today. One hundred twenty is our known potential and one that many people could reach – again, in good health if technologies in development come to fruition. If epigenetic reprogramming reaches its potential, or someone comes up with another way to convince cells to be young again, 150 might even be possible for someone living on this planet with us right now. And ultimately there is no upward biological limit, no law that says we must die at a certain age… But these milestones will come one at a time, and slowly. Death will remain a part of our lives for a very long time to come, even as the time of it is pushed out in the coming decades.”  p 247-8

 So, what does David Sinclair do? Since he is on the cutting edge of longevity research, he is often asked this question – what does HE do to increase his own health and life span.  Below is a copy of page 304, of Lifespan where he answers that question: 

Since reading this book, I’ve added NAD+ (an NMN Booster), Vit K, and Resveratrol to the supplements I take.  And in the other areas, I’m pretty close to what David Sinclair does.  Metformin, which he argues should be a standard longevity enhancing drug for most people, still requires a prescription, primarily for diabetes.  He notes that a large portion of those who study longevity are taking metformin – off label.  They either are doctors, or know doctors who will prescribe it for them. It is very inexpensive.  

Why this book: Recommended to me by my son Brad, who told me that if I liked Shantaram (which he knows is one of my top 5 favorite novels) I would like  The White Tiger – which is also written in a first person narrative, takes place in India, and provides a unique perspective on Indian culture.  

Summary in 3 Sentences:  A life story with an edge, from the perspective of a person from a lower class in India, writing a long letter to the Premier of the Peoples Republic of China about the reality of his life in India, to tell the “truth” and undermine the Public Relations white-washing that the Premier would certainly get on his up-coming visit to India. Our narrator describes his life and his difficult path from being the son of an impoverished rickshaw driver to becoming a successful business man and entrepreneur.  But this is NOT a Horatio Alger story; rather it is a description of the corruption and sense of entitlement of the wealthier classes, their indifference to the suffering and indignities of those in the lower classes, and we see that our narrator’s success seemed to demand compromising basic human values that he believed those in power use to keep the lower classes in their place. 

My impressions:  Powerful, engaging, fascinating, and a fun quick read.  It is told from the perspective of a smart, ambitious young man from one of the lower classes in India – the Halwai caste of sweet makers – observing, describing, and then breaking into the entrenched system in India which he argues keeps the poor poor, and the rich rich.  It provides great insight into a level of poverty that is hard for most westerners to imagine.  We see how a stratified caste-culture like India’s, demands a subservience of those in one caste to those in another that is difficult to for us in the West to contemplate, but which I suspect  people of color might say has had its analogues in America.  

The only voice we get from our narrator is in the letters he writes to “His Excellence Wen Jiabao, Premier of the Freedom Loving Peoples of China” in a long letter, composed over seven nights – promising that his life story will give the Premier a more accurate impression of life in India.   His supposed intent is unveil the truth behind the public relations images of India as a free, capitalist, democratic country that Premier Jiabao will certainly be presented during his forthcoming visit to India.    By his last letter he is addressing his letter simple to “Mr Jiabao.” 

Our narrator was named “Boy” when born – his parents too busy to give him a proper name. Later he gave himself the name Balram Halwai, but adopted as his identity what an inspector of his school said about him, that he was “an intelligent, honest, vivacious fellow in this crowd of thugs and idiots… a creature that comes along only once in a generation…The White Tiger.”  He says up front that his life’s story ought to be called “the autobiography of a half-baked Indian.”  (Which sounded to me very familiar to  The Absolute Diary of a Part-Time Indian, told from the perspective of an outlier Native-American Indian, which I just read!)

Balram and his family grew up living in what he referred to as “the Darkness” in a country village far from the centers of power, learning how to “faithfully serve your masters with absolute fidelity, love, and deviation.”  Unlike most born in his situation, who simply accept or surrender to their lot in life, Balram is relentlessly curious,  always seeking a way to learn the ropes, to ingratiate himself with those who can help him rise above his poverty, and cunningly seeking an advantage that will help him get ahead. 

Balram describes what he calls “The Great Indian Rooster Coop” noting that the trustworthiness of servants is the basis of the entire Indian economy – the sense of loyalty and servitude to masters that holds India together.  The “Rooster Coop” analogy refers to roosters who sit in their cages, calmly watching their brothers beheaded and chopped up to feed their masters, knowing they will be next, but doing nothing.   He notes that to break out of the Rooster Coop, one has to be prepared to see one’s family destroyed – literally killed – for upsetting the social order. “Servants have to keep other servants from becoming innovators, experimenters, or entrepreneurs.  The coop is guarded from the inside.”  p166

Initially, Balram is conflicted between the family values of the village he came from, and what he needed to do to get ahead.   As Balram moves away from his village, the simple values of his village, his grandmother’s exhortations,  and “the Rooster Coop” held sway, but they eventually lost their pull on him as he realized that those with power and the money play by very different rules.  Balram becomes a driver for a wealthy group of coal magnates and eavesdrops on their conversations, as he drives them to their various meetings to pay off politicians or to engage in their expensive debauchery.  And though some treat him with respect and dignity, he eventually comes to realize that they will throw him under the bus in a heartbeat to protect their wealth and status.

We get to know not only the cruel and vicious magnates, but also those liberal idealists who profess to be concerned for the inequities in the system, but don’t have either the backbone or the power, or are unwilling to make the sacrifices necessary to make any real difference.  And Balram meanwhile sits and listens, is ignored as a non-entity, and his attitudes begin to change. 

He not only begins to resent the power of his masters, and their indifference to those like him, but he also directly experiences their self-serving corruption.    And he also desperately wants to rise up to be someone others envy – and he realizes that to do this, he must become more like them.   

It is indeed a revolutionary book – told with an engaging personal style, bitter irony, and with a working class sensibility and smug humor.  He pokes fun at a political leader to whom he refers as “The Great Socialist,” who has duped the lower classes into thinking he is their defender against the greed and power of the wealthy, but indeed is in league with them, and just as corrupt as they are.  The Great Socialist, like so much else he sees is a sham meant to placate the poor, to keep them in their place, and protect the power of the elites. 

We also get to know the subculture of the drivers for the rich – how they carve out their own pleasures and satisfactions within the system, without threatening their own relatively privileged positions.  They refer to the idealistic Balram from a remote rural village as “country mouse.”

Balram is an interesting and complex character.  We admire his curiosity to learn, his unwillingness to surrender to the corruption and the fate of so many millions in his situation. We admire his cleverness, his initiative and ambition to learn and grow.  And he routinely  makes reference to the wisdom of the great poets – noting an understanding for a perspective that he seems to appreciate, but his very practical nature doesn’t internalize. Several times he quotes poets and icons of wisdom such as his quote of the Islamic poet Iqbal that ”The moment you recognize what is beautiful in this world, you stop being a slave.”  236  

Is he noting how he is straying from their wisdom, or Is he merely mocking them?  

But I couldn’t help but also be repelled by the “entrepreneurial” actions he takes – by necessity, he would argue – to get ahead and become the entrepreneur he is proud to have become.   We know throughout his long letter to Premier Jiabao that Balram has indeed found success as an entrepreneur.  What he had to do to achieve it is an important message of this book.

The Netlix Movie based on the book is quite a good representation of the book, its story and message.  As usual, I recommend reading the book first – it’s short – then watch the movie.  

My own “meta” view:  The White Tiger describes a phenomenon that can be seen in many parts of the world.  It is an example of what happens when leaders try to transpose a system and philosophy of human rights, human dignity, freedom and capitalism that has evolved over centuries in the UK, Europe and eventually the US, onto cultures with very different histories, values and social structures, that have evolved over millennia.  The shoe doesn’t always fit.

Below are some quotes I found interesting and which give a sense for the style of The White Tiger.

The one infallible law of life in the Darkness is that good news becomes bad news – and soon. 30 

To break the law of this land – to turn bad news into good news – is the entrepreneur’s prerogative.  32

I don’t keep a cell phone, for obvious reasons -they corrode a man’s brains, shrink his balls, and dry up his semen, as all of us know.  33

In the old days there were one thousand castes and destinies in India. These days, there are just two castles: Men with Big Belies and Men with Small Bellies. And only two destinies: eat – or get eaten up.  54

Is there any hatred on earth like the hatred of the number two servant for the number one?  66

Like eunuchs discussing the Kama Sutra, the voters discuss the elections in Laxmangarh. 82

Do we loathe our masters behind a facade of love – or do we love them behind a facade of loathing?  We are made mysteries to ourselves by the Rooster Coop we are locked in.  162

The rest of today’s narrative will deal mainly with the sorrowful tale of how I was corrupted from a sweet, innocent village fool into a citified fellow, full of debauchery, depravity and wickedness.” 167

Standing around books, many books in a foreign language, you feel a kind of electricity buzzing up toward you, Your Excellency.   It just happens, the way you get erect around girls wearing tight jeans.  Except here what happens, is that your brain starts to hum.  175

The poor dream all their lives lof getting  enough to eat and looking like the rich.  And what do the rich dream of? Losing weight and looking like the poor.  191

Referring to the Red Light District: “An hour here would clear all the evil thoughts out of my head. When you retain semen in your lower body, it leads to evil movements in the fluids of your upper body. In the Darkness we know this to be a fact. 213

Delhi is the capital of not one but two countries – two Indias.  The Light and the Darkness both flow into Delhi.  215

The history of the world is the history of a ten thousand year war of brains between the rich and the poor. Each side is eternally trying to hoodwink the other side: and it has been this way since the start of time.  217

Why this book: Mia recommended it in my literature reading group as something different and a bit shorter, after our previous, somewhat longer book.   It is also a National Book Award Winner.

Summary in 4 Sentences:  A fictional story told in 1st person by a teenage boy who lives on the Spokane (Washington) Indian Reservation, describing the relatively hopeless and resigned-to-failure-and-obscurity  world that he lived in, and his choice to leave the high school on the rez and attend the white high school, where people have hope, ambition and a belief in their future.  While that decision is supported by his parents, it is a regarded by his best friend and others in his tribe as treasonous, putting personal ambition above loyalty to his tribe and community, and was a statement that he somehow deserves “better” than others in his tribe.   The story is about his struggles to integrate into his white high school, while retaining his connection to the community of his Spokane Tribe.  It is about  his internal conflict between what he loves about the world he has grown up in, and his desire to get beyond the narrow parochialism of so many in the tribe who have no ambition to break out of the boredom and heartache of living and staying on the reservation. 

My impressions: A somber theme, presented in a fun, engaging and entertaining read which includes many profound insights that I look forward to discussing with my reading group friends.  The author captures the language and adolescent mentality of a precocious Native American teenage boy well – he is believable and brutally honest about his insecurities his fears, his desires, his pain and disappointments, and his few tentative hopes for his future.  It is a story of conflicting cultures, individual freedom, divided loyalties, and familial love. And more.  It is a short book, engaging and thought provoking. 

Our protagonist goes by Junior to his Indian friends, but at Rearden High School, his white teachers  preferred to call him Arnold, his given name. The story begins with Junior describing life on the rez, with his best friend Rowdy, who is somewhat his opposite.  Junior is small of stature, and timid, and is picked on and regularly beat up by the bigger kids. He accepts that as just part of his life. His best friend Rowdy is the opposite – mean, aggressive, fearless, and will fight anyone. Rowdy often protects Junior, and the bullies frequently leave Junior alone because they know Rowdy is not afraid of anything or anyone, and will come after them if they harm Junior.  

But Rowdy gets beat up regularly at home – by his alcoholic dad.  Rowdy comes to school wearing his bruises, cuts, black eyes as a badge of his toughness.  Junior’s parents are kind, would never hit him, but they are also a dysfunctional family – dad’s an alcoholic and out of work.  

Junior is frustrated by how things don’t seem to work on the rez; school is not taken seriously, by the students, or the parents –  not even by the teachers.   Junior senses the resignation – the general sense of: “What’s the point?”  Finally one of his teachers tells Junior he needs to escape –  get off the rez to attend Rearden, the white high school out in the community off the rez, and not succumb to the forlorn resignation on the rez.  The teacher tells him not to give up like the others.   Junior considers this, agrees, and decides to take that step – and there begins the story.  

Rowdy and his friends hate him for leaving their high school on the rez to go to Rearden high school.  They see that as a betrayal –  of them, their tribe, and their culture – going over to the other side.  This decision is hard on Junior for many reasons apart from his friends on the rez rejecting him.    Just getting the 20+ miles to and from school everyday is a challenge.  Not only won’t his former Indian friends talk to him,  the kids at Rearden don’t know what to make of a kid from the rez either.  He is ignored, eats alone, people don’t talk to him – they don’t know what to say.  He isn’t cool, not “popular,” not like them.    But he hangs in there,  eventually making a couple of friends, and the indifference of some of the kids slowly becomes grudging, but distant  respect.  He seeks out another nerdy kid who is also a loner and he and Junior become friends. Though his former best friend Rowdy won’t have anything to do with him any more,  his new friend Gordy enjoys his company. Gordy is very smart, curious, and well-read, enjoys and inspires Junior to open up his world even more.

And then Junior decides to go out for the basketball team,  even though he believes it is a futile effort.  But again, he persists, works hard, and the coach sees a spark in him, and to Junior’s surprise, he makes the team. Making the basketball team changes things for Junior, as we see him work hard, create an identity for himself at Rearden, and he begins to blossom.  But it also puts him in a difficult position; he eventually has to play against the team of his old high school on the rez.  And the star player on his old high school is none other than Rowdy.

This book has so much in it.  People from any group that feels disenfranchised and defensive about its identity, react strongly against those who leave it to find connection with the community they see as threatening.  It is about people feeling trapped and the challenges of leaving what is comfortable to try something new. There is a bit of Campbell’s Hero’s Journey in Junior’s decision to go to Rearden.  It is about leaving one’s tribe or culture, while also loving one’s tribe or culture. It is also about familial loyalty – his parents support him – though they are the only one’s who support him.  He loves his parents in spite of their problems and dysfunctions.  It’s about stepping out of one’s comfort zone, dealing with the difficulties, persisting, getting knocked down, and getting back up.  Anyone who has stood up against the forces of prejudice from people they love will feel for Junior – and admire him.  

Another interesting aspect of the book is that there is a “graphic” dimension to it.  The author posts drawings that Junior made to express his feelings and impressions of some of the key events he describes in his life – done as one would expect from a young teenage boy and adding to understanding the emotional dimension of his experience.  

It is a story that I’m told could be about many Indian reservations.  But its lessons apply to many cultural sub-groups in America. It is about Native Americans, about American culture, about people, about courage, about love and family.  I enjoyed and learned from this book. 

Some quotes I thought worth sharing: 

But I just kept thinking that my sister’s spirit hadn’t been killed. She hadn’t given up. This reservation had tried to suffocate her, had kept her trapped in a basement, and now she was out roaming the huge grassy fields of Montana. p91

“Listen,” Gordy said one afternoon, “you have to read a book three times before you know it.  The first time you read (a book) you read it for the story. The plot. The movement from scene to scene that gives the book its moment, its rhythm. It’s like riding a raft down a river. You’re just paying attention to the currents….The second time you read a book, you read it for its history. For its knowledge of history. You think about the meaning of each word, and where that word came from…p95

I suddenly understood that if even a moment of a book should be taken seriously, then every moment of life should be taken seriously as well. p.95

The world, even the smallest parts of it, is filled with things you don’t know.’p97

If you let people into your life a little bit, they an be pretty damn amazing. p 129

Ever since I’ve been at Reardan, and seen how great parents do their great parenting, I realize that my folks are pretty good.  Sure, my dad has a drinking problem and my mom can be little eccentric but they make sacrifices for me. They worry about me. They talk to me. And best of all , they listen to me….I’ve learned that the worst thing a parent can do is ignore their children.  p153

I mean, yeah, Indians are screwed up, but we’re really close to each other. We KNOW each other. Everybody knows everybody. p153

I used to think the world was broken down by tribes.  By black and white. By Indian and white. But I know that isn’t true. The world is only broken into two tribes: The people who are assholes and the people who are not.  p176

Tolstoy wrote: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”  Well, I hate to argue with a Russian genius, but Tolstyoy didn’t know Indians. And he didn’t know that all Indian families are unhappy for the same exact reason: the fricking booze.  p200

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.