Bob's Books

Why this book:  Jean Guerrero had been in our literature reading group a number of years ago, and when we learned that she had written this book, and one of our members had read it and commented that it was quite good,  we selected it to read and Jean agreed to join us to discuss her book.

Summary in 3 Sentences:  Crux is the memoir of a young woman growing up in a broken home and dysfunctional, cross-cultural family in San Diego; her mother was a physician who grew up in Puerto Rico, her father an entrepreneur who grew up in Mexico, who struggled with drug and alcohol dependency, and apparently some undiagnosed social-psychological issues. Her father was only an intermittent presence in Jean’s life as she grew up with the many challenges of a child in a broken home with a hard-working single mom, and a dad who was more often a liability than a support to the family.  In Crux, the author regularly returns to Mexico as she explores her disturbed father’s roots and how his past intersects with, and has shaped who she is.

My impressions:  Powerful book – a fascinating story which covers a lot of territory and kept me engaged throughout.  I was never quite sure where she was going, but as the story grew and morphed it all came together.   Jean Guerrero’s 29 years of life story, as narrated in Crux, is pretty remarkable, from childhood and her first memories, to elementary and high school, to college and beyond to becoming a successful journalist writing and reporting for some of America’s best known media.  It is somewhat of a labyrinthine journey, sometimes focusing on her childhood adventures and mis-adventures, sometimes on her father, other times on her paternal grandparents, other times on her trips to Mexico to explore her family’s past, other times to Mexico as a reporter, and other times, she simply recounts her own maturing process and experiences.  But the theme throughout is how all this has shaped and continues to shape the making of a pretty remarkable and resilient young woman.

Several of the people in our reading group called Jean a “hero” for her perseverance through the challenges of her childhood and young adulthood, to become a well-respected reporter in San Diego.  She was a bit embarrassed to be referred to as a hero.

She did a lot of research on her family to write this book, interviewing her parents, relatives, researching how her family’s history might be preserved in documents.  A couple of impressions struck me:

She tells the story of how her mother and her paternal grandmother met and chose to marry domineering and even abusive men.  This is not an uncommon story in any culture, but particularly in the Catholic Latino culture, which continues to be strongly patriarchal, and women are expected to be subservient to their husbands.  It’s easy to see how such marriages can lead to unfulfilling co-dependency relationships.  As a physician, Jean’s mother had the freedom that Jean’s grandmother and many women do not – a profession and an income that allowed her the freedom to get out of a bad marriage.  But as in any divorce,  a lot of pain and psychological damage – to both parties and the children – are involved.

Another aspect of this memoir that stuck with me was the impact of the loss of a prized parent can have on a child.  To Jean as a child, her father was something of an enigmatic hero, and she didn’t understand the dynamics of his departure, erratic behavior and distance from her and his family.   This is certainly no great revelation, but Crux is ultimately the story of how powerful the impact of a parent can be.  Jean shared with us how in reading a draft of her book, her mother was a bit surprised that Jean’s story focuses so much on her father, who had been a source of so much pain and turmoil in the family while he was with them.  But a father can have a huge impact on a child.  And Jean was seeking to understand the impact this enigmatic and largely absent figure had on her and who she has become.

There were a number of powerful vignettes in her story that stuck with me as well, from her own sexual maturing to a near drowning incident in Mexico, to her efforts as a journalist to explore the world of narco-trafficking in and around Cancun, as well as her exploring the stories of her relatives and ancestors as she sought to understand her family’s history.

Crux is very well written and a fascinating coming of age story of a young woman with a very non-traditional Southern California up-bringing.  Jean is remarkably honest and forthcoming, and I found her often disturbing story to be very enlightening, enriching and uplifting. It is a story so very different from my own, but reflects much of what is happening all around me, but which I do not see.

Why this book: In a reading group I participate in at my place of work, my boss suggested this as a change  from the types of books we had been reading.  He noted that it is one of his favorite most recent reads. So naturally we selected it to read. It was a good choice.

Summary in 4 sentences:  This is Peter Godwin’s personal memoir,  from approximately the mid nineties to about 2005, but there are numerous regressions going back as far back as prior to World War II. We see the rule of law deteriorate in Zimbabwe, with the rise of criminal gangs which intimidate and steal with impunity – in fact with support from the government.  The author  returns  to his home in Zimbabwe often to visit  his family and friends, and recounts his impressions of how they coped with the deliberate destruction of civilized values and culture in their homeland by the corrupt Mugabe government. And this book is also very much about Peter Godwin’s evolving relationship with his own father.

My impressions: Peter Godwin is an internationally recognized journalist, and his writing reflects his extensive journalistic experience and reputation  – in other words, this book is very well written.  When a Crocodile Eats the Sun is his very personal account of about 10 years of his life during which he returned regularly to Zimbabwe during its political, economic, and cultural decline under the Mugabe dictatorship.  He describes in very personal terms how the deterioration of Zimbabwe impacted his family, friends and his perspective on his own experiences growing up in what had once been Rhodesia.

It is also a cautionary tale about how a thriving country, once one of the most prosperous economies in Africa, can rather quickly be destroyed by a gang of thugs led by a dictator.    He described how Zimbabwe in the early 2000s had the most rapidly declining economy in the world, and yet the leadership didn’t seem to care – continuing to pursue their destructive policies.   This book is a dystopian vision of what a country can devolve into, if/when might-makes-right, good people have little recourse when they are intimidated, harassed, and murdered with impunity, and their property is essentially stolen by thugs operating with the authority of the government.

There appeared to be no government protected human rights in Zimbabwe.   The whim of Mugabe was law, and he pandered to the gangs who supported him, empowering them to loot, steal, and murder.  What was amazing to me was that so many whites and educated blacks who were being victimized by these people, clung to hope and stayed.  The ideals of justice, the rule of law, and human rights that had been (imperfectly)  imported from their British colonizers no longer carried any weight. Whatever values could be associated with the culture of the colonizers was automatically rejected, the good with the bad, the baby with the bathwater.  This was especially true if these ideals compromised, threatened or in any way limited the abilities of Mugabe and his cronies to enrich themselves.

The book covered a lot of territory. Godwin jumped from his childhood, to his young adult hood to his own evolution as a man, to his experiences as an adult, but he repeatedly returned to Zimbabwe – not only as a journalist, but also as a son helping to take care of his aging parents.    His parents had immigrated  to Zimbabwe from Britain after World War II, had worked hard and made a good life for themselves, and considered themselves natives.  They chose to stay and ride out the hardships, in the land in which they had lived their entire adult lives. Peter Godwin, the author, had left Zimbabwe after fighting in the civil war in the 1980s, and became a well-respected international journalist, eventually settling with his young family in NYC.  He visited Zimbabwe often to report on the dissolution of the country and to take care of his parents, as the nation and the rule of law crumbled around them under Mugabe’s dictatorship.

One of the most compelling parts of the book story is when he recounts his parents’ story – a story he had not known growing up.   Not until he was an adult, well into his 30s, did he find out who his father really was, how he had come to Rhodesia, and why he had been so secretive about his past.  Much of the book is about Peter Godwin’s evolving relationship with his father.  Peter Godwin’s personal journey of discovering his own personal identity is a sub theme of the book – not only who he is as a descendent of the white colonizers of Rhodesia, but also exploring his on-going relationship to Zimbabwe, as well as reforging a relationship to his parents as his parents reveal secrets of their past to him.

As his father ages and becomes increasingly debilitated as he approaches his own death, Peter Godwin naturally gives him a lot of attention in the book.  A weakness of the book to me is that his mother struck me as equally impressive and fascinating, but Godwin doesn’t give her, or his relationship to her nearly as much attention.  I would like to know more about her.

Fascinating book.  In our discussion of it in our reading group, all of us were amazed that  we were so ignorant of the horrors of life in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, and how such a thugocracy could exist within the orbit of Western Civilization with us knowing so little about it.  And how we all noted how quickly a highly civilized culture could fall apart and drift into near anarchy.  Fascinating – and disturbing.

Why this book:  I was preparing a presentation for the Unbeatable Mind Summit which included current efforts to extend life significantly. I saw this book on a list of the best books of 2018, checked the reviews and decided to give it a go.

Summary in 4 Sentences:  About 2000 years ago, near the time of Christ in Jerusalem,  a Jewish “priest” offers a woman the opportunity to trade her own death for the life of her dying child. She readily agrees, the child lives, but our protagonist, having traded away her own death,  goes on to live many lives – over the next 2000+ years, watching many many husbands, many, many of her own children and other friends live their lives, suffer and die, while she lives on, repeatedly in new incarnations.  There is a love story over the centuries with another such immortal individual – and while both have different attitudes toward their “predicament”, both are weary of living and collaborate to balance their desire to die with their continuing obligations to the living.

My impressions:  I took a chance on this book and I’m glad I did – I was very favorably   impressed.  It is well written, well-constructed, flows nicely, not overlong at about 300 pages and enjoyable to read.  Dara Horn presents a thoughtful story exploring the less appealing sides of fulfilling the immortality fantasy that many of us share, and which today is being discussed as potentially realizable.   In Rachel, the book’s protagonist, we get to know a sensitive but thoughtful woman who is nothing if not resilient – she’s seen a lot in two millennia of living, and has decided that she’s seen enough.  But she made the Faustian bargain to gain the life of her first born child, and then, over the millennia, repeatedly finds herself in the midst of life’s challenges, pain, and suffering.   She endures watching husbands and children making so many of the same mistakes, and suffer the consequences, again and again, simply in somewhat different contexts.

Rachel is pursued throughout the centuries by Elezar, a devoted lover and the father of the child who was about to die, and for whose life indeed they both traded their deaths.   Rachel’s relationship with Elezar is complex.  We don’t get to know him as well as we do Rachel, but he is an intriguing character – persistent, patient, optimistic, and a man of passion and integrity.  Rachel loves him, needs him, but avoids him when she can, because it seems that whenever he has entered her life over the millennia, things became more complicated than she wanted. And there is something that Rachel wants in life that she feels Elezar can’t give her – I’m not sure what that is.

There is much in this book about the perennial challenges women face in finding a mate, being a spouse, and then a mother.  Rachel has considerably more experience in this womanly endeavor than she wants.   While for Rachel, the context changes, and the names and faces change, the people and their struggles don’t.  Her children rarely listen to her wisdom.  She is compelled to keep her secret from all – except Elezar, who has different perspectives and priorities, and faces his own somewhat different challenges with immortality.

Rachel and Elezar are Jewish and their incarnations over the centuries seem always to  be part of the Jewish story.  That aspect of their multiple identities remained consistent throughout their many lives,  and we are treated to many insights about Judaism.

The multiple lives that Rachel and Elezar lived might seem similar to being “reincarnated,” but their new incarnations were significantly different from reincarnation theory as I understand it.  In “classic” reincarnation, individuals are not usually aware of their  previous lives and in each new life, must be born, grow, and mature anew.   Also most reincarnation theories are purpose-driven – the goal is to overcome one’s karma, to perfect oneself in order to get out of the continuous cycle of life and death.  Rachel and Elezar on the other hand, always find themselves alive again as young adults, in new settings with very clear memories of their previous incarnations.  Rachel and Elezar are more Sisyphean than Promethean – they are simply doomed to push the rock of life’s problems up the hill again and again, for eternity, with no “reward” of heaven or nirvana to strive for or to look forward to.  Their challenge is to learn to love their fate.

Rachel’s life in America in the 21st century is a key part of the story, and much of Eternal Life is a back and forth between her 21st century life and her life of 2000 years ago. There are references to her lives in between, and certainly references to lessons learned and experiences, but the author doesn’t offer us much detail – she makes her key points focussing on how Rachel deals with her challenges in these two lives in particular.

What were Dara Horn’s key points?  Here is my take:

•  Immortality is not all it may seem. One is reminded of the line out of the movie Troy in which Brad Pitt, playing Achilles, notes, “The gods envy us because we are mortal.”
• There are some common themes Rachel has seen in her many lives, with her many husbands, her many children:  She seemed to believe in her 21st century life, that there wasn’t much human folly she hadn’t seen or experienced.
• A mother’s love for her children is perennial and painful.  It was very, very hard for her to continue raising children and knowingly watching over-and-over again as they grew old, suffered, and died, while she continued to live.
• The Rachel-Elezar love story was interesting. It was deep and powerful.  Elezar was totally committed to Rachel.  Rachel loved Elezar, but her instincts as a mother were much stronger.  I sensed that this was a generalization that the author meant to make about all or most women.
• Love, family, and concern for the person one loves are what make the suffering and challenges of life worthwhile.
• Death eventually may indeed be a blessing.

The book is about a woman written by a woman – so that perspective is very well represented in the book. I would have liked a bit more about Elezar’s perspective.  I would also have liked more about Rachel’s lessons learned about how men and women relate, how she evolved and got better at love and marriage in her many marriages, about the men she picked to marry, how those decisions worked out.  Did she get better at picking a spouse, since that is such a key component to a happy life?  What were her lessons learned?  It would have added a few  more pages to the book, but would have added a lot – from my perspective.

I enjoyed this book, gained some interesting insights, and found Rachel’s and Elezar’s challenges thought-provoking and insightful.  Eternal Life is a good read for a thoughtful and intelligent reader – and would prompt a great discussion in a book club.  It can also be enjoyed simply as a good story.  I’d give it 4 stars.

Why this book: I teach Business Communications in the Master of Science in Global Leadership program at the University of San Diego.  I met Joe Sweeney  a couple of times when he was speaking for The Honor Foundation, really liked him and read his book. I have assigned it as required reading in my USD class for the section we do on networking.

Summary in 3 Sentences:  Joe Sweeney shares how he has used the philosophy and approaches in this book to help him make not just contacts, but friends all over the country. He describes networking as primarily an opportunity to deliberately meet and help others, to enrich their lives, establish credibility, and thereby earn and win their trust.    He offers advice for how to navigate awkward networking situations, how to avoid creating awkward networking situations oneself, and offers advice to those looking for a job, trying to find their way in new communities, as well as how quality networking can and should cross racial and gender boundaries.

My Impressions:  This book is  fun read and full of great stories.  Joe Sweeney’s enthusiasm for the topic, for meeting people, for making a positive difference in their lives, for sharing the joy and opportunities of a positive networking philosophy are contagious.  He recognizes that he may be blessed with an unusually upbeat and outgoing personality, so adapts his philosophy for those who may not be as sure of themselves socially in classic networking situations.  He has a separate chapter on networking styles for different personalities, and how to adapt one’s networking to the personality of those one meets and wants to interact with.  Lots of advice about asking the right questions and listening.    He offers great advice to anyone.

There is a separate chapter advocating networking outside one’s racial, ethnic or social group, a separate chapter on the special consideration women have in their networking efforts, and a chapter on networking in the world of social media (though this chapter is bit dated – having been written in 2010.)

The introduction and first chapters, and the final chapters entitled “The Master Networkers,” and “Networking Will Enhance Your Life” sum up Joe Sweeney’s philosophy on networking as a means of building bridges, making friends, helping people and becoming a resource in one’s community -and with that, the best things will come your way.

Like a lot of business books, it has a very handy summary of key points at the end of each chapter, which facilitates reviewing the key points of the book.

Networking is a Contact Sport is more than about networking. It is also espouses a philosophy of life -how to live well in a community.  And Joe Sweeney lives what he preaches.  He is definitely a giver, and it has served him well.

The below quotes give you a sense of for the book. My students in MSGL without exception have found this book very useful, and a joy to read.

NOTABLE QUOTES (with page numbers from the 2010 hardcover edition)

Networking is not about figuring out how to use business contacts for your personal gain. People can smell an agenda from one hundred paces, and if you strike up a loaded conversation with someone you barely know with the end goal of developing some sort of business relationship that lines your pockets, you’ll burn a bridge and never build a meaningful relation with that person.  12

I see networking in an entirely different light. I view networking as an opportunity to give, not to get, a way to make myself available to friends and contacts without any expectation of  reciprocity.  12

One day you’ll have to transition from the struggle for success to a quest for significance. 12

Touch triumphs over technology every time.  The hunger for human contact is universal and eminently more satisfying.  …I like people.  I like their stories. I like the contacts.   15

The main thing I’ve found in life is that success – and failure – leaves clues.  I’ve studied successful people, and they invariably have one thing in common: they saw themselves involved in something bigger than themselves.  19

Networking starts with introductions.  I love introducing myself – not because I think I’m anything special – but because I’ve learned the value of connecting with others.  31

I enjoy being on a first-name basis with breakfast waitresses, office janitors, and the guys at the street corner hot dog stands.  Treating these folks with respect is not only the right thing to do – because I’m treating them the way I would want to be treated – but I’ve learned that the people you meet while moving up the ladder will be the same people waiting for you if you ever have to make your way down the ladder. 31

Networking is like cultivating a garden: nothing will ever bloom if you don’t take time to water and weed, to give plants the proper amount of attention .  32

Good networking is also about being a good listener because if you wait long enough, people will leave clues about how things are really going with their lives.  32

Networking is about acting with confidence and exuding a self-assurance that you belong and are comfortable in your own skin.  33

Act like you belong, no matter where you are… a quiet assurance that you belong in the room – people will be attracted to you.  34

Talk to them like you would with your next door neighbor.  34

Good networking begins with the ability to start and carry on a good conversation…the ability to engage in small talk speaks well of you – and leads to engrossing exchanges that deepen a relation ship…staying engaged as an active listener is hard work, but well worth the effort. 41

The art of good conversation is very much like playing a game of backyard catch.  After you utter something, you’re tossing the ball of conversation to the other person, meaning it’s his or her true to say something.  43

It’s easier for me to be an active listener if I’m the one asking the questions.  45

…anything work-related, plus the always reliable kids, sports, and weather, are safe places to start a conversation.  46

When you attend a party, reception, or networking opportunity, act sas if you’re the host. Take time to introduce people to each other. Make sure others are having a good time.  Those at the party will gravitate toward you because they want to be near the “host.” 51

No matter what style or trick works for you, become good at learning names.  Never forget that one of the most impressive things you can do to become a good networker is to remember someone’s name.  51

The 5/10/15 program is basically an organized system that provides a structure and personal accountability.

• 5 means that I try to have five “meetings or “encounters” a day.
• 10 means I send out ten letters or pieces of correspondence on corporate or personal stationary , every single day.
• 15 means I make a minimum of fifteen phone calls a day

(Bob’s note:  This is a bit ambitious for me.  I have recommended to my students that they start with a 3-5-8 program and when that’s working, move to 5-10-15)

The difference between Networking and Not Working is one letter. 69

The only job security you’ll ever have is the faith and confidence you have in your abilities.  72

CEO’s and Presidents who pounded the table are now pounding the pavement.  78

Business is not about managing money; it’s about managing relationships and personalities.  91

Personality “types:”  Captain, Social Director, Steward, Navigator.  92-93

Networking from scratch:  Befriend everyone in your organization, volunteer for your company’s committees, eat lunch with others, work out with others.

Networking is a place you go to give, not to get.133

What matters is how you take the initiative to approach others, how you introduce yourself, how you listen carefully to discover shared interest or goals, and how you use your shared interest or shared values as the basis for sustaining a new relationship. 135

…something I call PFE – or Pay Forward Enterprises.  I got the idea for PFE after seeing the movie Pay It Forward a decade ago…”Paying it forward” meant the recipient of a favor does a favor for a third party rather than paying the favor back.  220

While we all agree that networking helps your businesses and advances our career, what gets overlooked far too often is that networking supplies you with a rich set of experiences, expands your contacts, and provides the framework for living a life of significance.  221

Joe Sweeney concludes Networking is a Contact Sport with the following summary of the key points he makes, but without the great stories he tells to make these points: 225-226

1. Relationships make the world go round
2. No matter where you are, keep an eye out for networking opportunities.
3. When you’re attending a mixer of social event, be intentional about meeting the right people, but don’t hand out business cards unless asked to do so.
4. Networking 101 is working the the 5/10/15 program, which means five meetings or encounters, ten letters or pieces of correspondence, and fifteen phone calls a day – which could result in five”engagements” or business making opportunities.
5. If you’re unemployed, remember that who you know is often more important that what you know. This is the time to let everyone you know know that you need a job.
6. Knowing what personality type you are can help you understand how you network best and how best to network with others.
7. Don’t fly solo through life. Ask someone – or several close friends – to be your wingman. Everyone needs a confidant.
8. If you’re new to a community, look for ways to get connected with others by coaching youth sports, volunteering with civic groups, signing up for the PTA, or joining a church. Identify what your passions are and do something that you’re passionate about.
9. Everyone needs a BWAG – a Big, Wild, Audacious Goal.  What’s yours?
10. If you’re a member of a minority group, learn the language of business. Networking can break down racial barriers.
11. Understand the differences in how men and women network.
12. Social networking on the Internet through platforms like Facebook and Twitter extend your outreach, but keep in mind that email messages and voicemails will never replace face-to-face contact and looking someone in the eye.
13. Find a mentor early in your career and become a mentor later in your career. One of the emails that gets forwarded around the Internet is the “Charles Schultz Philosophy,” even though the late creator of the Peanuts cartoon strip never said those words. Still the point was a good one. If you were asked to name the most recent Best Actor Oscar winner, or the last Super Bowl or World Series victor, or the last Dancing with the Stars champions, you probably couldn’t do it. No one remembers the headlines of yesterday very long.  But…
14. ….if you were asked to name the teacher who impacted your life the most, or the friend who helped you through a difficult time, or five people you’d enjoy spending time with, those are the people who’ve made a substantial difference in your life.  They aren’t lauded by Hollywood or given a ticker-tape parade down Broadway, but those were the people and mentors who cared about you and enriched your life.

Why this book: Recommended by Susan Chamberlain with whom I was hiking on the All American Leadership Expedition with NOLS.  Susan mentioned this book when I shared with her that I’d recently read The Iliad.

Summary in 3 sentences:  This novel is built around the scene in The Iliad in which King Priam of Troy sneaks into the camp of the Greeks (Achaeans) to ransom his son Hector’s body.  The book gives the reader a brief look at the events in The Iliad that led to Ransom‘s main story –  Hector’s death at the hands of Achilles, the mourning in the chambers of King Priam and his wife/Hector’s mother Hecuba, and Priam’s unlikely decision to visit the camp of the Achaeans to ransom his son’s body. It concludes with Malouf’s interpretation of the famous scene in which Priam begs Achilles to return Hector’s body to be buried with all appropriate honor and religious ritual, and then he and Achilles share their mutual grief at the loss of those closest to them in that war.

My Impressions:  This is a short book, more a novella than a novel, and it is powerful and beautifully written. Malouf is also a poet and that is evident in his writing.

The book begins with Patroclus’ decision to stand in for Achilles in battle with the Trojans and his death in battle at the hands of Hector, the leader and hero of the Trojans.   Then Achilles is distraught at the death of his closest friend Patroclus.  His grief turns to remorse and guilt for letting Patroclus stand in for him, and then rage and fury as he seeks and gets revenge, challenging and defeating Hector in battle, then desecrating his body by dragging his corpse around the walls of Troy – an outrage even by the standards of that time. These events are outlined in The Iliad, and set the stage for the rest of this story that Malouf so skillfully imagines and shares..

He takes us inside the court of King Priam of Troy and we are with Priam as he shares his grief with Hecuba, his wife and the mother of Hector.  We meet a Priam’s other sons – brothers and half brothers to Hector, the princes of Troy, who are in a sense anti-heroes to Hector’s heroism.   They are the “perfumed princes” of Priam’s court – not fighting themselves as Hector did.  We also meet Paris – one of Hector’s brothers, a warrior himself, but very flawed, his own self-indulgence a primary cause of the war itself.  We are reminded of the decadence of the court in Versailles in France – dandies, and self-indulgent royalty with little concern for anything other than their own pleasure, comfort, and power.   Hector was the shining star of Priam’s sons and of course they all resented him for it.

Priam is consumed with guilt for all that he did not do as a father to Hector, and feels that he can redeem himself to his hero son by retrieving his body from Achilles and giving him a proper burial, thus freeing his spirit to join his ancestors in the underworld world.

Hecuba and his sons seek to dissuade Priam from his crazy idea – the King of Troy going into the camp of the Achaeans to meet and bargain with Hector’s killer – a man they observed as a maniac, dragging Hector’s body round and round the walls of Troy.   But Priam is adamant.

Priam departs the walls of Troy disguised as a beggar with a cart full of ransom hidden under a blanket, and makes the trip to the camp of the Achaeans.  An interesting part of the story is Priam’s relationship with his cart driver -a poor commoner at the opposite end of the social hierarchy from Priam.  Priam is quietly impressed with this man’s simple courage and dignity, as the two travel together and quietly try to converse. They have their own “adventures” during this trip away from Troy, in which the King is dependent for his own survival on the practical skills of his cart driver.

Through luck they reach and enter the camp of the Achaeans, and we see camp and the world of Achilles through Priam’s eyes.  At this point in the war, the Trojans have the upper hand, but Priam senses that the Trojan cause is doomed.

Eventually we get to the powerful and emotional meeting between Priam and Achilles described in conclusion to The Iliad.  In Ransom, Malouf gives this scene greater depth and a richer context.

In this short book Malouf retells one of the great stories from one of the great books of the Western Canon. He breathes life into these mythological characters and we can identify with their grief and distress.  He beautifully touches many topics – grief at the loss of a close friend or of a son, a father’s guilt, family tensions in how to move forward, uncontrolled rage leading to poor and irrevocable decisions, the gulf between the elites and commoners, shared grief between enemies, and the the absurdity of war, .

Why this book: Selected by my literature reading group because of its focus on AI – a topic many of us are interested in.

Summary in 4 sentences: The story takes place about 150 years in the future, and follows three main and several supporting characters from very different social groups in a dystopian world that Mason predicts will evolve out of current movements to integrate biological humans with computers and artificial intelligence.   Several of the characters have memory implants that  can access the internet, and as we follow them in the story, we see the power and the challenges of this new capability.  As the story evolves, we meet a “business leader” who is seeking to  consolidate immense power through a very powerful network of AI servers.  The memory implant of one of our main characters is key to his ambitions, and the book evolves into a struggle between the business leader and our female protagonist for control of the world’s most powerful AI.

My Impressions: This is a complex and different book – not easy to get into, nor easy to follow.  But it poses some interesting questions about the direction our culture and civilization may be heading, as capabilities of Artificial Intelligence increase at rates we can hardly imagine.   The writing style is a bit cold and impersonal, and the characters are not particularly well developed nor easy to connect or empathize with.  But the story itself, and its vision of the future force the reader to confront possible implications of current developments in AI.    Some of these developments are exciting, but many are of concern.

Throughout the book, I was asking myself, “Is the world that Void Star describes credible?”   I believe so –  to a certain degree.  And at the conclusion of the book I was left with a lot more questions than answers about the world Mason was envisioning.

The story is set in the un-determined time in the future – sometime in 22^nd  or perhaps 23rd century (I figure about 150 years from now) – envisioning a future when great power is very much a function of control over Artificial Intelligence servers and the systems they control.  At this point, the human race has already begun the transition of merging human biological and computer power with cyborg-like computer chips implanted in the brains of those few individuals with the connections and money to afford them.   Early steps in this direction are already happening in the labs of some of our most advanced research institutes. Void Star takes the implications of these developments in a direction that many believe is indeed where we are heading.

The memory implants that Void Star  envisions can network with other AI  systems and even other humans, through wireless or even ethernet connections, and if one has one of these memory implants, one’s personal memories and essentially one’s identity, can be hacked and even stolen digitally.  In this world, as it increasingly is in ours today, privacy is a function of the security of networks, but  today’s privacy challenges and concerns pale in comparison to those in the world of Void Star.

We follow three main characters in Void Star, as the book builds to a major AI event in the future which affects the entire world. The chapters are short, and often rather cryptic.  Each chapter deals with one of the three main characters, and the chapters alternate between these three. This stylistic tool made it difficult for me to follow, and even to get to know each of the characters.  The characters are very different and their lives are separate and unconnected, though as we expect, they do eventually converge, but in ways I’m not certain I understood, much less could explain.

In following the lives of these three characters we get glimpses of the world Mason envisions a century or two into the future.   There are some predictable changes and improvements, such as faster transportation, the ubiquity of self-driving cars, and easy access to the “cloud” of information. Global warming has caused the oceans to rise to where today’s great coastal cities are flooded. New York City, Singapore, and many others resemble Venice as networks of canals, and many coastal cities have been abandoned.   For those who can afford it, advances in biomedicine have dramatically extended not only the years one can expect to live, but also the years of productive, youthful energy and working life.   As the well-off classes have taken advantage of these advances in technology,  health, and computational power, the gulf between the haves and have-nots in the world has widened, to where the privileged live in walled cities, and the poor and underprivileged are consigned to certain neighborhoods or territories where they live in violent and unregulated anarchy.

I did however regularly see what I considered  “anachronisms” – experiences and features in that world that are familiar to us in the early 21^stcentury, but which I can hardly imagine in this dystopia he describes in the 22^nd or 23^rd century.  For example, everyone is focussed on their phones.  The laptop is the main connector to the web.  WiFi is not always available.  At the end, one character’s daughter runs off with a guy to help run a car rental agency near the airport.  These seem to be convenient markers for the 21^st century reader to feel like we understand at least some of the experience of our characters.  There are many such anachronisms in the book, which I found amusing, and wondered if they were a joke, or perhaps reflected a lack of imagination, or perhaps an unwillingness to envision in greater detail this future world.

One concept I found fascinating is how in this AI-centric world, one’s identity is very much tied to one’s memory, and with an implanted chip, memory can be recorded, shared, downloaded, even stolen.  Our main character had two sources for her memories – her biological memory and her computer chip memory and her conscious awareness could go back and forth.  We also saw characters who internalized the memories of others.  This idea of merging different people’s identities by merging their memories is fascinating.

Also one’s mortality is also tied to memory.  If all of one’s memories – feelings, impressions, insights can be retained when the body dies, is one really dead?  This is a question Mason leaves hanging at the end, as he insinuates that self-awareness – consciousness – can continue with this intact memory that is retained after the body no longer exists.

As the book culminates, I indeed got confused as to what was “real” and what was someone’s imagination, or what was virtual reality or enhanced reality, generated by an AI.  It reminded me of some of the “magical realism” novels I’ve read, such as One Hundred Years of Solitude by Garcia Marquez, or The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman.

The issue/question of our mortality is a sub theme throughout the book.  Several of the characters have dramatically extended their lives and their youthful capabilities – looking, acting, functioning like people decades or even a century younger than their chronological age.    As the book concludes one of our characters seems to have defeated death from biological causes, but is paranoid about dying as a result of an accident or at the hands of a sinister force.  Rather than enjoying this everlasting biological life, this character lives in fear, and assumes no risk of accident or malevolence that might end their eternal life.

I also wonder whether one of the scenes at the conclusion of the book was a metaphor for a choice humans have to make – to continue down the path of increasing mathematical predictability of humans by merging us more with computers, or giving precedence to our irrational, “human” sides – heart, feeling, fear, joy, emotions.  There were only a few glimpses of such ultimately non-rational, human sides of our characters in this book.

Mason hardly mentions the role of the state in regulating AI or any of the challenges of this future world.  I wonder if this omission is intentional –  pointing to the continued weakening of governments as regulatory powers in the face of increasing power of private entities, especially those with access to great computer power and powerful AIs.

For a different view of how current trends may turn out, I listened to a podcast discussion between Sam Harris and Kevin Kelly in which Kevin Kelly shared a more positive vision of the future than Mason does in Void Star. Kelly envisions a global “organism” – a super-connection between people and their computers.  We struggle to imagine what this would be like – but Kelly reminds us that not long ago, we couldn’t imagine our current global economy or the development of extensive and global on-line shopping. Kelly calls this future interconnected phenomenon a “super-organism.”   He believes that there will be multitudes – thousands and millions of AIs in this super network.

Void Star is a challenging book – not an easy read, but it definitely stretches the imagination of the reader.  One has to be ready for that challenge before undertaking the challenge of reading this book. But if you’re ready for it, it can be very rewarding.

Why this book: Selected by my literature reading group, based on a strong recommendation from a friend of mine, and its Pulitzer Prize for fiction, 2016. My literature group is on a roll with great Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction.

Summary in 3 Sentences:  Written in the first person, from the perspective of the very intelligent and observant aide-de-camp of a Vietnamese General, it begins with the chaos surrounding the fall of Saigon, and then moves to arriving in the US as refugees and beginning a new life. But our protagonist is  all the time an agent for the communist regime, with divided loyalties –  to his mentor, the General, his friends and those who support him in the US, as well as to his commitment to the ideals of the communist revolution and his masters who remained in Vietnam.  This book is much more than a spy novel – it is  an insightful and biting look at both US and Vietnamese culture, about split identity, conflicting values, about loyalty and fanaticism, duty and friendship, violence and redemption, and concludes with a surprise that opens the door to a great discussion – what just happened?

My Impressions:  This book deserves its accolades.  I can’t think of any modern writing that has impressed me more.  At the bottom of this review, I offer a number of insights, expressions and turns of phrase that impressed me with their originality.

The beginning of the book is set in the chaos, and panic of the final days of Saigon, and we experience some of the desperation and sense of betrayal that people felt who had supported and fought with the US but were left behind, often to be tortured and slaughtered, by the victors in that war.  The first person account is remarkable – the language is remarkable, the sense of chaos is remarkable.

Soon we are in the United States and we experience the disorientation of the refugee for whom the world has changed, the rules have changed, and his/her own sense of identity and possibilities have changed.  The earth is figuratively moving beneath their feet as they struggle to find their balance. Naturally the refugees stick together and support each other, and also revert to practices that are inappropriate to our culture -like killing people who you believe have betrayed you.

A number of times throughout the book, we are led to believe that the story we are reading is being written or related to a commandant – someone who has control over our protagonist, who is telling his story.   These references to an authority are intermittent and not explained – until the end of the book.

The protagonist openly and unashamedly shares his challenges as a single man dealing with a healthy sexual appetite and attraction to women, but not often finding fulfillment of this biological drive.  Heterosexual men will be able to relate to much of what he shares of his private thoughts and activities, which will make some women uncomfortable or even incredulous.  This is not a key part of the story, but so much of what the author shares in the book is about the human, and not just the Vietnamese experience.  We men are not used to such candor in literature about such things – and I found his honesty both amusing and refreshing.

What I found most fascinating about the book was the author’s descriptions of American culture – his amazing, almost poetic use of metaphor and language.  These perspectives are from an intelligent and articulate observer, and his insights were sharp and on target Yes – more negative than positive, but these insights were from a disenfranchised refugee struggling to find his way.

He explores the dark side of human nature – and there are some disturbingly violent scenes in the book – which help him make the point of how depraved, violent and insensitive to suffering people can become when narrowly focused on their own goals. Cultures can become that way too – as we clearly see in both Vietnamese and American cultures.

There is also a whole section of the book in which he becomes an advisor to a movie based on Apocalypse Now – based on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.  It is a scathing while at the same time admiring critique of Hollywood and Francis Ford Coppola.

There are so many sub-themes in this book, it is hard to list them.  The book is very much about cultural and personal identity – their many layers and how they are inter-twined – and can even be in tension with each other.  The value of loyalty is also a key theme  – to causes, to countries, to friends and family, to values and principles and also, how these loyalties can be in conflict with each other.   The book actually begins with our protagonist expressing the challenge of being able to see complex issues from (at least) two sides.  He (and his loyalty) seems always to be torn between the multiple perspectives on an issue -each of which he understood, and for which he had sympathy.

The ending of the book is a surprise – and it is intense.  I will not spoil it for anyone who intends to read the book, but let me simply say that our protagonist does return to Vietnam.  And at that point the identity issue takes a turn in a very different direction. It becomes less about an insightful and articulate refugee seeking to find his place in both his Vietnamese community and American culture, but more about his human identity, beyond the various masks he had worn to that point.  More about ultimate values and purposes.

The Sympathizer is a very powerful book.  It offers biting satire of American culture, while also offering poignant insights about the experience of state-less and disenfranchised refugees living in America, about how suffering can open the door to a greater truth that transcends so much of what preoccupies most people in their daily lives.  A worthy recipient of the Pulitzer.

Notable quotes – page numbers refer to the Grove press paper back edition of 2015.  Some of these impressed me for their insights, others simply for their very clever and colorful use of language and metaphor or analogy.

Nothing, the General muttered, is ever so expensive as what is offered for free. 4

Even if they found themselves in Heaven, our country men would find occasion to remark that it was not as warm as Hell. 24

America, land of supermarkets and superhighways, of supersonic jets and Superman, of super carriers and the Super Bowl!…although every country thought itself superior in its own way, was there ever a country that coined so many “super” terms from the general bank of its narcissism, was not only super-confident but also truly super-powerful, that would not be satisfied until it locked every nation of the world into a full nelson and made it cry Uncle Sam? 29

I had an abiding respect for the professionalism of career prostitutes, who wore their dishonesty more openly than lawyers, both of whom bill by the hour.  37

(referring to a government bureaucrat:) A mid-ranking apparatchik in the Ministry of the Interior, he was neither too tall nor too short, too thin nor too wide, too pale nor too dark, too smart nor too dumb. Some species of sub-undersecretary, he probably had neither dreams nor nightmares, his own interior as hollow as his office.  p 42

(referring to the picture of Diem being shot) Its subtext was as subtle as Al Capone: Do not fuck with the Untied States of America. 46

He had an elaborate Oriental rug on his wall, in lieu, I suppose, of an actual Oriental.  62

…he reclined in an overstuffed leather club chair that enfolded him like the generous lap of a black mammy.  I was equally enveloped in the chair’s twin, sucked backward by the slope and softness of the leather, my arms on the rests like Lincoln on his memorial throne.  p 63

So it was that we soaped ourselves in sadness and we rinsed ourselves with hope. 71

I had been resigned to the consolation of man’s best friend, i.e., self pleasure, and certainly did not possess the wherewithal to consort with prostitutes. 76

…He swallowed his pill of Catholicism seriously. He  was more embarrassed and discreet about sex than about things I thought more difficult, like killing people, which pretty much defined the history of Catholicism, where sex of the homo, hetero, or pedaristic variety supposedly never happened, hidden underneath the Vatican’s cassocks.  …It’s hypocrisy that stinks, not sex.  77

This seed of sexual rebellion one day matured into my political revolution, disregarding all my father’s sermons about how onanism inevitably led to blindness, hairy palms, and impotence (he forgot to mention subversion.)  If I was going to Hell, so be it! Having made my peace with sinning against myself, sometimes on an hourly basis, it was only due time before I sinned with others.  78

Like a shark who must keep swimming to live, a politician – which was what the General had become – had to keep his lips constantly moving.  90

So the list went, a fair percentage collecting both welfare and dust, moldering in the stale air of subsidized apartments as their testes shriveled day by day, consumed by the metastasizing cancer called assimilation and susceptible to the hypochondria of exile. 91

…his honorable grandfather was insufferable, as most men of utter conviction are.  93

…The need to defend God, country, honor, ideology, or comrades – even if, in the last instance, all he really is protecting is that most tender part of himself, the hidden, wrinkled purse carried by every man. 98

Hardly any male travel writer, journalist, or casual observer of our country life could restrain himself from writing about the young girls who rode their bicycles to and from school in those fluttering white ao dai, butterflies that every Western man dreamed of pinning to his collection.  114

Madam would sit (her daughter) down and …lecture her on the importance of maintaining her virginity and of cultivating the “three Submissions and Four Virtues” – a phrase that calls to mind the title of a highbrow erotic novel.  The mere mention of her endangered or putatively lost virginity provided ample wood for the cookstove of my imagination, a fire I stoked in the privacy of my room.   115

Hollywood’s high priests understood innately the observation of Milton’s Satan, that it was better to rule in Hell than to serve in Heaven, better to be a villain, loser, or anti-hero than a virtuous extra, as long as one commanded the bright lights of center stage.  134

Most actors spent more time with their masks off than on, whereas in my case, it was the reverse.  136

….the land where the pursuit of happiness was guaranteed in writing…a guarantee to be allowed to pursue the jackpot of happiness?  Merely an opportunity to buy a lottery ticket?  Someone would surely win millions, but millions would surely pay for it.   142-43

Isn’t it funny that in a society that values freedom above all things, things that are free are not valued?  146

(referring to landing in the Philippines) …(I was) mugged by the full force humidity of a tropical climate.  It’s like getting licked from throat to balls by my dog every time I go outside…149

Some of us confidently declared that all high-end fashion models did was have sex with each other.  If we were high-end fashion models, so the reasoning went, with whom would we rather have sex, men like us or women like them?  160

…his fate was sealed with superglue.  165

The look in his eyes…which I assumed to be some saintly mix of exotic pain and painful ecstasy.  171

Hollywood functioned as the launcher of the intercontinental ballistic missile of Americanization.  172

…the hours dribbled away like saliva from a mental patient’s mouth…184

…that warm, sweet glow of affordable blended scotch really did help, as comforting as a homely wife who understands her man’s every need. 185

I laugh, even though inside me the little dog of my soul was sitting at attention, nose and ears turned to the wind…185

I was finally left with nothing but myself and my thoughts, devious cabdrivers that took me where I did not want to go.   186

They (most Americans) believe in a universe of divine justice where the human race is guilty of sin, but they also believe in a secular justice where human beings are presumed innocent.  You can’t have both. You know how Americans deal with it? They pretend they are eternally innocent no matter how many times they lose their innocence. The problem is that those who insist on their innocence believe anything they do is just.  At least we who believe in our own guilt know what dark things we can do.  190

But amnesia was as American as apple pie, and it was much preferred by Americans over both humble pie and the fraught foods of foreign intruders.  195

Resentment was an antidote to gloominess, as it was for sadness, melancholy, despair etc.  199

…his paisley tie as fat as Elvis Presley 200

…lying was a skill and a habit not easily forgotten.  This was true also for the representative, whose kindred tricky spirit I recognized.  In negotiations, as in interrogations, a lie was not only acceptable but also expected.  203

We would all be in Hell if convicted for our thoughts.  205

I had hit him where it hurt, in the solar plexus of his conscience, where everyone who was an idealist was vulnerable.  Disarming an idealist was easy. One only needed to ask why the idealist was not on the front line of the particular battle he had chosen.   215

Army surplus C-rations, which looked almost exactly the same entering the human body as they did exiting it.  221

Napoleon said men will die for bits of ribbon pinned to thier chests, but the General understands that even more men will die for a man who remembered their names, as he did theirs…all anyone ever wants is to be recognized and remembered. 222

Life is a suicide mission.  222

Usually Bon used words like a sniper, but this was a spray of machine-gun fire 223

If something is worth dying for, then you’ve got a reason to live….they now had something to live for if not to die for…

That was the subversive’s dilemma. Rather than flaunt ourselves in the sexually dubious costumes of superheroes, we hid beneath cloaks of invisibility .  225

Wars never die, I said. They just go to sleep.  225

…the bottle of scotch. Like me, it was half empty and half full.  231

After love, was sadness not the most common noun in our lyrical repertoire? Did we salivate for sadness, or had we only learned to enjoy what we were forced to eat?  These questions required either Camus, or cognac, and as Camus was not available I ordered cognac. 234

The hardest thing to do in talking to a woman was taking the first step, but the most important thing to do was not to think….being rejected was better than not having the chance to be rejected at all. Thus it was that I approached girls, and now women, with such Zen negation of all doubt and fear that Buddha would approve.  239

My first three principles in talking to a woman: do not ask permission; do not say hello; and do not let her speak first.  240

While I was critical of many things when it came to so-called Western civilization, cleavage was not one of them.  241

Principle Five: statements, not questions were less likely to lead to no.  242

What makes us human is that we’re the only creatures on this planet that can fuck ourselves. 245

Americans saw unhappiness as a moral failure and thought crime.  254

We were the greatest anthropologists ever of the American people, which the American people never know, because our field notes were written in our own language in letters and postcards dispatched to our countries of origin.  258

I wanted to replicate the oldest dialectic of all with her, the thesis of Adam and the antithesis of Eve that led to the synthesis of us, the rotten apple of humanity, fallen so far from God’s tree.  269

I thought with regret about all the things I would miss about America: the TV dinner; air-conditioning; a well-regulted traffic system that people actually followed;…..(and this paragraph goes on for nearly half a page listing things he would miss about America) 280

Your problem isn’t that you think too much; your problem is letting everyone know what you’re thinking.  281

We plucked off the leeches adhering to us with the stubbornness of bad memories. 304

The entire forest shimmered with the antics of death the comedian, and life the straight man, a duo that would never break up.  To live was to be haunted by the inevitably of one’s own decay, and to be dead was to be haunted by the memory of living.   305

Well, I said, gathering the tattered coat of my wits about me, I believe the unexamined life is not worth living.  311

I had developed feline feelings of both dependency and resentment.  317

What my time in the cave taught me was that the ultimate life and death struggle is with ourselves.  321

Eating (my mother’s) portion, I swallowed not just the food but the salt and pepper of love and anger, spices stronger and harsher than the sugar of sympathy.  327

I understand nothing! – Then you have understood almost everything, the voice said.  333

Certain things can be learned only through the feeling of excruciation.  335

Don’t you see how everything in need of confession is already known?  You indeed did nothing.  That is the crime that you must acknowledge and to which you must confess. 337

…a Cold War chess match played in air-conditioned rooms by white men wearing suits and lies.  361

What was it that I got?  The joke.  Nothing was the punch line, and if part of me was rather hurt at being punched – by nothing, no less! – the other part of me thought it was hilarious.  370

What had I intuited at last? Namely this: while nothing is more precious than independence and freedom, nothing is also more precious than independence and freedom.  375

Why This Book:  I had heard several years ago that this was a well-done personal story by a SEAL – which included a lot of humility – not often found in books SEALs write about themselves.  I lead a volunteer reading group for young men in the SEAL Basic Training Command’s Pre Training, Recovery and Rehabilitation (PTRR) phase, who are preparing to begin and go thru SEAL training.  We selected this book based on its reputation – I hadn’t read it yet – so that was enough motivation to finally get to it!

Summary in 4 Sentences: This is Jay Redman’s personal story of his journey to become a SEAL veteran, beginning with a brief look at his childhood, his journey to get into the SEAL Teams, his wild-man, undisciplined years as a cocky young SEAL enlisted man and then officer, and then his experiences in combat, both in Afghanistan and Iraq. What makes this book particularly compelling is that he shares how his cockiness and arrogance, and his lack of self-awareness cost him his reputation with his team mates, and nearly got him kicked out of the SEAL Teams.  He writes painfully and openly about his mistakes, his bad attitude, his long fight to better understand and take responsibility for being ostracized and then finally the long and difficult work it took to repair his reputation and regain the confidence of his SEAL brothers.  Jay was then severely wounded in Iraq and the last quarter of the book is about his long and painful recovery, with dozens of surgeries, how he depended on the love and support of his wife and family, and finally how he’s found a new, post-SEAL Team career to continue serving his country.

My Impressions:  Jay tells his story with candor and humility and it is very well done.  People often ask me to recommend a SEAL book for them to read, and The Trident is one of two that I recommend (the other is Fearless by Eric Blehm.)  Jay tells the story of being a young man who, to put it gently, was a bit too proud of himself and about what he’d accomplished, a bit too entitled and self-assured.  To put it less gently, he was  arrogant, cocky, and immature, and was angry, bitter and accusative when things didn’t go his way.

But it is a story of redemption.  When a pattern of bad behavior and poor decisions cost him the trust of his teammates, and he was about to be kicked out of the SEAL Teams, he was given a second, and then a third chance, and he finally began to accept responsibility – personal responsibility – for the “bad luck,” for the people out to get him, for the opportunities that didn’t come his way.  And with that acceptance of responsibility, with patience, hard work, humility, and good judgment, he was able over time to earn back the trust of his teammates.

The book begins dramatically with him lying severely wounded on the battlefield in Iraq, the battle raging around him, but with Jay in a daze and realizing that he was about to die.  He fought it, but as he was slowly bleeding out, he tried to stay focused on staying alive, but it was so hard, and it felt so easy to let go.  As he felt himself being pulled away,  one of his teammates taking care of him screamed at him to hang on, that the helicopter was just a few minutes out. This screaming and from his insistent teammate fortified Jay’s resolve – he knew that if he could get to the surgery unit, he would probably survive, but then he felt that gentle pull again, and how tempting it was to let go. And then the yelling again from his team mate.  It is a powerful story of a near-death experience.  Obviously he made it the battlefield ER – just in time.

Then the book goes back to what got Jay to that point, briefly outlining his childhood, how he got into the Navy and then became a SEAL and his crazy times as a young and irresponsible SEAL operator.  He did well enough to be recommended for the Seaman-to-Admiral program and was in college when 9-11 attacks occurred.  He wanted to leave college and go to war with his buddies, but his Commanding Officer talked him out of that – telling him that this war would go on long enough – he’d get his chance.

Then came the most difficult part of the book to read, as Jay outlines his series of mistakes, and his immature actions and lack of responsibility.  I wanted to crawl into the book and ring his neck!  But eventually he figured it out, when a couple of senior officers saw potential in him and gave him a second and then a third chance.  One of those officers was the same officer who told him to stay in school.

Then the story becomes inspiring, as Jay patiently and with maturity slowly does everything right to win back the trust of his team mates. He was a full-fledged and impressive member of his team, leading troops in battle when he got shot. And his teammates stood by him – and saved his life.

The last part of the book is about his fight to recover.  It has required amazing resilience. Literally dozens of surgeries.  Here the book really becomes a love story – as his wife Erica was a saint and indeed saved him from descending into despair, with her constant loyalty and support.

The rest of the story, which takes place after the book was written, I know from people who have known and worked with Jay in recent years.  He has provided heroic support to the families of SEALs wounded and killed in action and he continues to serve the SEAL community and other veterans.  The reputation he worked so hard to repair, continues to grow.

Great book, great story, by a man who has seen the depths of emotional and physical pain, and hung in there to come back – stronger than ever.

Why this book:  I recently began hearing or reading references to this book – and I’d never heard of it.  So I did a bit of research, was intrigued, and  pressed my literature reading group to select it – noting that though it is la bit longer (630 pages) than our normal selection, it was time to again read a book of substance.  Indeed Angle of Repose had won the Pulitzer Prize for literature in 1972 and was ranked one of the top 100 novels in the English language in the 20th century.

Summary in 3 Sentences: The “story” is of a wheelchair-bound retired history professor researching and writing a biography of his   grandmother who had raised him, based on  her letters to her close friend back east after moving to the west in the 1870s with her new husband, the history professor’s grandfather.  It is fascinating that Stegner used as the model for the fictional grandmother a real woman, Mary Hallock Foote, whose letters he had obtained from her family, and from which he quoted liberally – so Angle of Repose is indeed part biography of the experiences of a real “gentlewoman” and her family, who lived in some very untamed and not-yet-civilized circumstances in the West.  But the story is also about the history professor and his impressions of what he learns about his grandparents, his guesses and assumptions about what is left out of the letters and what all that might mean to him, dealing with his own challenges in 1970.

My Impressions: I loved this book.   I keep reflecting on it, and how and why it had such an impact on me.  This is part of what I believe makes Angle of Repose truly great literature.   A very well developed writing style, and a very creative approach to weaving stories of courage and resilience, cultural change, love, marriage, anger and forgiveness, into a story that opens the door to understanding how American culture evolved.  It moves from the the refined center of Brahmin culture in upper class New York City, to the raw and unrefined version of American culture that was emerging in the American West in the late 19th century.  The book is presented in 9 parts and as such, it is a 9 course feast.  Like a great meal, it starts out a bit slow, and then builds in momentum, with each course adding to the last, each course bringing a new dimension and new depth to the meal.   But unlike a great meal, it does not climax toward the end and finish on a soft note with a satisfied sigh and a sweet dish “dessert” as an epilogue. The  momentum in Angle of Repose builds right up to the last chapter and the last page.

The characters in the story are people I could relate to in today’s terms – and their world  was comprehensible to me as not fundamentally different from my own, though very different on the surface.  Though much of it takes place in the American West of the 1870s and 1880s, Angle of Repose does not describe the world of cowboys and Indians that many of us grew up with on television or in movies – it describes a world more familiar to us.  Technological advances have certainly made a difference: Communication was slow and uncertain.  Travel was long and complicated.   There were dangers and health issues, and uncertainties which our society and science have since significantly mitigated.  But the old saw that “people are people”  is very evident here.  These are Americans, and the challenges, the disappointments, the drives and impulses that are very familiar to me are very much a part of the lives of the people in this world of 140-150 years ago.

The various environments in which Angle of Repose takes place are part of what makes this book fascinating, and Stegner’s wonderful writing makes them real and almost palpable, allowing the reader to experience and almost sense them.  From the world of Milton, NY,  and genteel New York City in which the book starts, to a mining camp in New Almaden (near San Jose), California, then to Santa Cruz, California, then Leadville, Colorado, then Michoacan, Mexico, then Boise, Idaho, and finally to a farm in Grass Valley in Northern California in 1970 (yes 1970 -which is the time and place in which the fictional author of the biography is writing)  we come to know our characters, their thoughts, concerns, their lives.

The “jewels in the crown” of this novel are the characters and how Stegner develops them.  These are no simple two-dimensional characters – each is a complex human being, with strengths weaknesses, palpable emotions, flawed, yet strong.  None of them got what they really wanted in life – none of them had their dreams fulfilled. Yet by and large, they refused to be victims, and carried on with courage and determination to make the best of what they had.

Stegner uses an unusual literary device to describe and develop his characters.  The novel is written in first person by an author researching the life of his grandmother, with the intent of publishing it as a biography.  We get to know the main characters through the eyes of one of their descendants, seeking to uncover facts about their lives to better understand them, their motivations, their disappointments, who they were.   He struggles with gaps in what he is able to ascertain from the evidence he has, so he adds his own conjecture and judgments, and in so doing we get to know the character of the fictional researcher writing the biography of his grandmother.

The perspective and life of our narrator, that researcher biographer, is a key part of Angle of Repose.   This researcher narrator is clearly a version of Stegner himself, since Stegner was using essentially the same real letters as his fictional character to create the story.   The narrator of Angle of Repose is clearly sharing much of Stegner’s own perspective on the historical characters whose lives he is recounting, as well as on the world of 1970 in which he lives.

In writing the book,  Stegner argued that the main characters in the historical narrative – Susan and Oliver Ward – though built largely on the real-life characters Mary Hallock Foote and Arthur De Wint Foote in the letters he was quoting, are indeed fictional.  We learn in the introduction that Stegner made clear that as a fiction writer, he used his creative license to create experiences and aspects of the characters in Angle of Repose that were not reflected in the actual letters upon which he based his story; he bent and shaped the historical characters and their experiences to fit the fictional story he sought to tell. We also learn in the introduction, that some of the actual ancestors of the Foote family accused Stegner in his story of Susan and Oliver Ward, of plagiarizing the lives of Mary and Arthur Foote, since he had based so much of Angle of Repose on  their real stories and personal letters.  It is an interesting aspect of this book.

Let me briefly add here that Jackson Benson’s  introduction to the book, written in 2000, provides a great context for understanding Stegner, his style, why and how he wrote the book. It also explains some of the controversy around the relationship between the fictional characters in the book, and the historical characters on whom they are based.

So much is fascinating about this book.  But I will simply provide a brief synopsis of my impressions of the 3 main characters in Angle of Repose.

Susan Ward– Since we get to know the story of the Ward family almost exclusively through Susan Ward’s letters to her girlhood friend Augusta, it is Susan we get to know best.  She is the central character of the narrative that takes place in the 1870s and 1880s.  She was a well-educated and thoughtful young Quaker woman of her time, and grew up aspiring to a life of engaging and charming conversation in the well-appointed parlors of the upper class homes in New York City.  Her very close girl-hood friend Augusta indeed did marry into that life-style, and throughout the book, we sense Susan’s envy of Augusta, as well as her desire to convince Augusta that Susan continued to maintain her standards of civility and culture, even in places as uncivilized as the mining camps of  New Almaden, Ca, and Leadville, Colorado.  She always wanted to be welcomed and easily fit into that world of which she dreamed and to which she aspired to return.

Susan was very much a product of Victorian morality and sensibilities, and had always sought to emulate the civility and gentility in the world of the English upper classes that she had experienced as a young woman in New York. She marries the engineer Oliver Ward with the intention of going west to follow his “career” for a few years, and then return to the New York with fascinating tales about life in America’s outback.  For indeed this is what the upper classes of England did in her day – live for a few years in the uncivilized colonies, then return to their cultured roots with tales of life among the barbarians and savages.  Susan never was able to fulfill her dream of returning to that life of comfort in well-heeled society.   She did return to New York from time to time, but only for short visits.  Though her lifelong dream was never fulfilled, over time, she did indeed evolve to becoming more adventurous herself, quietly and unconsciously adopting some of the values of the world in which she lived, and began to truly value the hardiness and resilience she had acquired.

It is easy to ridicule Susan from our 21st century perspective – her Victorian morality, her occasional snobbery and pretensions to upper class gentility.  But she was courageous and resilient and sought wherever she went to make the best of where she found herself.  Her struggles with her Stoic husband Oliver, who was very much in love with her and who did what he could to cater to her refined needs, is a constant sub-theme of the book.  While some may find her narrow in her prejudices and lacking the courage to truly stand up for what she wanted, I think that is an overly harsh judgment of a woman raised in the Victorian era.  She is in many ways a tragic figure, but faced her circumstance with courage and resilience, and was stronger and more positive than most men or women I know. This complexity of character is an important part of what makes her such fascinating character.

Oliver Ward– We only know Oliver through what Susan says of him in her letters and through a few reminiscences and comments of our narrator, who remembers his grandfather from when he was a young boy.  Oliver Ward is a very intelligent and honorable man, a man of great integrity and humility, conscientious and hard working, capable of great love and friendship. He is clearly an admirable character. And he is also a tragic one, since those virtues also made him vulnerable to opportunists and scalawags, and more than once he was a victim of betrayal, corruption and perfidy, which leads to sadness, disappointment and heart-ache both for him and for Susan and their family.  It is frustrating to see this good and innocent man miss opportunities, to see him be manipulated and his trust and good nature taken advantage of by selfish and unscrupulous opportunists.  At the same time, his virtues also brought him great friends, trust, support and other opportunities.  He too is a complex character who it is easy to love and admire, while also finding him frustrating.

Lyman Ward– is the biographer and narrator of this book, and it is through his eyes and voice that we get to know the world of Susan and Oliver Ward.   As he tells the story of his grandparents,  we also get to know him and his world.  The perspective of the book goes back and forth from lives of his grandparents in the 1870s and 80s, to 1970, when he is writing their biography.   From his insights and comments on the lives and circumstances of his grandparents, we also get insights into his character and values.  But we also watch him deal with being painfully confined to a wheel chair, unable turn his head, unable to do for himself much of what most of us take for granted in our own lives. He needs others to prepare his meals, to bathe him, to prepare him for bed, to get him dressed in the morning.  He is curious and conscientious about exploring the lives of his grandparents, but he is also angry and opinionated about his own life and times.   He is not at all shy about sharing his thoughts about the 60s culture in California and what he believes it is doing to America.   He is indeed something of a curmudgeon – a very intelligent and articulate one, and his sarcasm and cynicism are often amusing while also well informed and insightful.

I hope I have left no doubt that I truly loved this book and highly recommend it – but like all great literature, it is not a quick, light read. But it is very much worth the time and effort.

A few quotes that I thought I’d share, (page numbers from the 2014 Vintage paperback edition.)

Lyman Ward: There  was no reason Oliver Ward should not have been, except character. Pioneer or not, resource-raider or not, afflicted or not with the frontier faith that exploitation is development, and development is good, he was simply an honest man. His gift was not for money-making and the main chance. He was a a builder, not a raider. He trusted people (Grandmother thought too much), he was loved by animals and children and liked by men, he had an uncomplicated ambition to leave the world a little better for his passage through it, and his notion of to better it was to develop it for human use.            p 206

Lyman Ward:  I wonder if ever again Americans can have that experience of returning to a home place so intimately known, profoundly felt, deeply loved and absolutely submitted to?  It is not quite true that you can never go home again. I have done it, coming back here. But it gets less likely.  We have had too many divorces, we have consumed too much transportation, we have lived too shallowly in too many places.        p 303

Lyman Ward: What she resisted was being the wife of a failure and a woman with no home.  p 303

Lyman Ward: She came before the emancipation of women, and she herself was emancipated only partly….  The impulse and the talent were there, without either inspiring models or full opportunity.  A sort of Isabel Archer existed half-acknowledged in Grandmother, a spirit fresh, independent, adventurous, not really prudish in spite of the gentility. There was an ambitious women under the Quaker modesty and genteel conventions.   The light foot was for more than dancing, the bright eye for more than flirtations, the womanliness for more than mute submission to husband and hearth.                               p 350

Lyman Ward: One of the charming things about nineteenth-century America was its cultural patriotism – not jingoism, just patriotism, the feeling that no matter how colorful, exotic, and cultivated other countries might be, there  was no place so ultimately right, so morally sound, so in tune with the hopeful future as the USA. p 352

Lyman Ward: As a practitioner of hindsight, I know that Grandfather was trying to do, by personal initiative and with the financial resources of a small and struggling corporation, what only the immense power of the federal government ultimately proved able to do. That does not mean he was foolish or mistaken.  He was premature. His clock was set on pioneer time.  He met trains that had not yet arrived, he waited on platforms that hadn’t yet been built, beside tracks that might never be laid. Like many other Western pioneer, he had heard the clock of history strike, and counted the strokes wrong.  p 423

Lyman Ward: They were in no race for wealth…they were makers and doers, they wanted to take a piece of wilderness and turn it into a home for a civilization.  I suppose they were wrong – their whole civilization was wrong – but they were the antithesis of mean or greedy. Given the choice, any one of them would have chosen poverty, with the success of their projects, over wealth and its failure.  p 427

Lyman Ward: We have only switched prohibitions and hypocrisies with them.  We blink pain and death, they blinked nudity and human sex, or rather, talk about sex.  They deplored violations of the marriage bond and believed in the responsibilities of the unitary family and thought female virginity before marriage a guarantee of these, or at least a proper start.  But wild boys and young bachelors they winked at because they must, and both wandering husbands and unfaithful wives they understood, and girls who “got in trouble” they pitied as much as they censured. They could tell a good woman from a bad one, which is more than I can do any more.   p 498

Susan Ward: He is so good a man I want to weep, and what makes me want to weep most of all is my failure of faith in him. For I cannot help it.   p 537

Oliver Ward: But this general business of trusting people, I don’t know. I doubt if I can change. I believe in trusting people, do you see?  At least till they prove they can’t be trusted. What kind of life is it when you can’t?  p 551

Why this book: I was about to leave with a number of friends to do an 8 day bicycle tour of Burgundy, France, one of the worlds most famous wine regions.  My wife handed me this book and suggested I read it to learn more about the region I would be traveling through.  So I did.  And I’m glad I did.

Summary in 3 sentences: Germany had always recognized France as the world leader in cultivating and distilling fine wine, and when Germany occupied France at the outset of World War II, one of their many objectives was to control and exploit the French wine industry, plunder their stockpiles of great wine and champagne, and subordinate France’s legendary wine industry to the goals of the Third Reich. This book outlines how Germany sought to brutally fulfill that goal, the damage they did, as well as how the extensive network of French grape growers and distillers, from small farmers to the great houses and brokerage firms sought to and with some success thwarted Nazi efforts. There is much in the book about the large scale participation by those in the wine industry in the Resistance, but also addresses the uncomfortable issue of collaboration of some in the French wine industry with the Nazis and the Vichy government, and how it all turned out in the end.

My Impressions: Wine and War is meant to be a quick fun read for those interested in the topic – specific to France and World War II.  Though it is well researched and lists sources at the end, it is not meant to be an academic treatment of the subject.  It tells the story, with some history and background, largely through vignettes and stories of individuals wine growers and leaders in the wine industry who experienced and suffered the trauma of Nazi occupation, primarily in the Bordeaux, Burgundy, and Champagne regions of France.   The book would be more meaningful to someone who is already a wine connoisseur than it was for me, for whom wine is either red or white, tastes good or doesn’t.  But I learned a lot about wine, its history,  and the processes and challenges of creating fine wine with varying nuances that I didn’t know before. I know have a greater appreciation not only for the role of wine in World War II, but also for the art of selecting just the right wine to go with different types of food, and the art of the sommelier.

The individual stories were most interesting.  The book includes stories of grape farmers  who at great personal risk hid Jews and downed allied pilots from the Nazis, stories of the sons of these farmers who were conscripted into the German Army (from Alsace Lorraine) or were conscripted to work in factories in Germany. I read about leaders in the communities in the wine growing regions who through deception and subterfuge placated their new German bosses while also protecting the long term interests of the wine growers and distillers in the region.

Wine and War includes a lot about how many of those engaged in France’s wine industry supported the French Resistance during the war.  Their resistance to Nazi leadership and policies took many forms, from conducting sabotage operations, to less aggressive acts of non-support to Nazi programs, to passive resistance, to providing the Wehrmacht with poor quality wine in bottles with the highest quality labels.  The participation in Resistance operations increased  after they realized that the Vichy French government of Marshall Petain was not going to protect them from Nazi plundering and exploitation.  By 1943-44 the wine industry was broadly complicit in Resistance operations, which resulted in harsh reprisals by the SS and the Wehrmacht.

But the authors also give credit to some of the Germans who were sent by the Nazi regime to oversee the plundering and subordination of France’s wine industry. The Nazi regime sent experienced German wine merchants to France to be responsible for carrying out Third Reich orders regarding wine in France – and these key leaders were called “Weinfuhrer.”  In several cases, these Weinfuhrer had long standing family ties to the French wine growers and distillers in the regions assigned to them, and had a great appreciation for the history, traditions and quality of wine making in France.   Some of them insisted that Wehrmacht soldiers and other functionaries refrain from stealing and active sabotaging of French property, and that French wine makers be respected.   They walked a fine line between protecting their old friends and a tradition they respected, while also placating their Nazi bosses in Germany.   These Weinfuhrer recognized the imperative of protecting the traditions and quality of French wine, and of protecting their own relationships and credibility with those with whom they’d want to do business after the war.

The authors also shared the story of how, as the Allies were closing in on Paris toward the end of the war, the acting Mayor of Paris prevailed upon the German General von Choltitz, an old-school Prussian military officer, to not comply with Hitler’s direct order to destroy Paris upon withdrawing.  Against all his military training, he disobeyed Hitler’s order, and thereby preserved for humanity the integrity and beauty of much of Paris.  And then we read of his return visit to Paris 15 years after the war,  to the city he could have significantly destroyed, but which because of his insubordination, remains one of the great cities of the world.  It is an incredible story.

The villages I rode through on my bike tour of Burgundy that were mentioned in Wine and War as playing a role – greater or smaller – in the battle between the French and the Nazi regime over French wine:  Close de Vougeot, Santenay,  Chassagney Montrachet, Vezelay, Avallon, Saulieu, Nuits St-Geores, Laxe Corton, Auxerre, and the city of Beaune where we finished our tour, and which was and is a key city in Burgundy’s history.