Bob's Books

Why this book:  I had read a number of reviews of this book,  and thought it would be good to learn more about the war in Afghanistan from a respected journalist on the ground there.  I also agreed to read it with two of my friends still serving with the Naval Special Warfare community.  One would read War, by Sebastian Junger, one would read,  The Warriors, by J.Glenn Gray,  and I would read The Wrong War.

My Impressions:  The Wrong War is about our ongoing war in Afghanistan, and is essentially a compilation of Bing West’s personal experiences as an embedded reporter with US Army and Marine ground units in eastern Afghanistan on the Pakistan border, and in the south during the battle for Marjah.   He writes convincingly in the first person of battles he witnessed and participated in, offering anecdotal descriptions of his experiences with the troops, and he makes comparisons with his own experience as a marine in Viet Nam 40+ years ago.  He also offers his views on the political climate, not only in Afghanistan, but also in the US.   He has several messages that he reinforces throughout the book:  first, that nation-building is not an appropriate mission for line troops; it erodes their combat skills and requires skills the military generally doesn’t have, and nation building is a long term commitment that the military is inappropriate and unable to fulfill. Secondly, he challenges the current orthodoxy that we can win this war by winning the hearts and minds of the Afghan people.  He makes this point with numerous examples that show that the cultural divide between our military troops, and the relatively primitive agrarian world they are fighting in is a gulf that is almost too wide to breach.  Thirdly, he believes that our senior political and military leaders are out of touch with the realities on the ground, and their policies and strategies are born of wishful thinking rather than the ugly truths that the soldiers on the ground see every day.  And fourth, our troops are doing an extraordinary job carrying out a thankless and probably hopeless mission.

He offers a simple solution for how to get out – though for me and for other reviewers of this book – it is too simple:  turn this baby over to the Afghans as fast as we can and get the hell out of there.  He comments on the commonly articulated position that we cannot kill our way to victory, by noting that we will not win unless we kill a lot of bad guys who are intractable enemies of the West and all that we stand for.  Yes, the “accidental guerrillas”  described by David Kilcullen in his book of the same name  are there as well, but the Taliban is indeed fueled and led by people who are fanatic in their ideological  commitment to their cause.

Bing West reminds me somewhat of David Hackworth, the most decorated officer of the Vietnam War who became a renegade and then an iconoclastic journalist.  His book About Face was read by many of  my colleagues 20 years ago and it is still widely read by young men in the military.  Like Hackworth, Bing West has the going- in position that the troops know the truth, and their leaders, the ‘political generals’ are not worthy of them.  West, like Hackworth before him, derides the political and military leaders (who Hackworth called ‘bureaucrats in uniform’), without making any real effort to understand their perspective and their dilemmas.   Life on the front can indeed be very simple: Take care of your buddies, take care of your mission, write and call home, survive.  It can be much more complicated at the national strategic and political military arena with conflicting missions, conflicting principles, a complex and uncertain group of stakeholders.  This book is about the view and experience of the soldier or marine on the ground – a reality that West does a pretty good job of convincing me is not sufficiently taken into consideration by our policy makers and strategists.

Why this book:  Selected by my reading group.  I vaguely remember reading it in high school.  It is so often referred to I thought it would be a good book to read again.

My Impressions:  This is not the same book I read in high school. Or at least it didn’t seem to be as I read it- obviously I read it with a whole new perspective.  I guess I understand why high school English teachers assign this book – it is short and on the surface a simple morality tale about how decadence and self-indulgence don’t pay.  On the surface it provides a glimpse into the debauched lives of wealthy young people, with the satisfying conclusion that wealth doesn’t make us happy, and that people who live as if middle-class morality doesn’t apply to them, suffer in the end.  Ok, maybe.  But I think that is a very limited perspective on this fascinating little book, and that is NOT what I read this time through.  This is a much more interesting book than that, and I think Fitzgerald had a different message.

The story is told from the perspective of Nick Carraway,  a cautious, but thoughtful  go-with-the-flow  kind of guy.  He is a somewhat dispassionate, sensitive and insightful observer of others, but not very engaged or engaging himself.  Carraway reminds me of the narrator in Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men.  The Great Gatsby and All the King’s Men are stories told in the first person by shy, thoughtful, somewhat retiring narrators about larger than life protagonists who meet  tragic ends.    We get to know Jay Gatsby through Carraway’s eyes and Gatsby is much that Carraway is not – self-possessed, wealthy, confident, somewhat narcissistic.  Gatsby is an enigmatic intriguing character from the beginning, and we get to know him little by little throughout the book.  Fitgerald also introduces us to Daisy and Tom Buchanan, and Jordan Baker to round out this group of well-to-do  twenty-or-early-thirty somethings with money and time to burn, living on Long Island, a short distance from NYC.   We see in their relationships with each other hypocrisy, pretense, confusion, disillusionment, resignation, and grudging admiration.  Gatsby is an admirable and tragic figure who succumbed to a passionate infatuation with a dream, embodied by poor Daisy, who was hardly worthy of his attention, but embodied his own dreams for himself and his future.   Poor Daisy, young, impressionable, beautiful,  charming, but not-too-bright, and not yet too worldly-wise.  She wanted something, but she wasn’t sure what – love, security, stability, a comfortable place in society, a good man to be married to?  Things that most women want? Gatsby surely wanted love and respectability, and was willing to go to great lengths to get it. 

I had to respect and admire Gatsby – in some ways more so than our cautious and moralizing narrator.  We know how Gatsby ended up – Fitzgerald does not leave us with the impression that the other characters would find happiness and/or fulfillment, though it is easy to predict that they would continue looking for it, in all the wrong places. 

The over-riding theme that I saw was the under-lying superficiality in the lives and relationships of people who take themselves and their good fortune entirely for granted, and give little thought to anything beyond fulfilling their own selfish fantasies.  The other sub-theme to this superficiality was how it leads to dysfunction and even toxicity in love relationships.  Gatsby and  Daisy, Tom and Daisy, Myrtle and  George Wilson,  Carraway and Jordan, Gatsby and his father, Carraway and Gatsby.

Beautifully and efficiently written, this deserves its place among the classics of American literature.

Why this Book: I read a fascinating review of this book in the Wall Street Journal. Went right to my Kindle and had it downloaded.

My Impressions: I really enjoyed this book. The author of the WSJ book review is a classics scholar at Stanford, and though he pointed out some of what he called factual errors, he strongly recommended the book, and he was right to do so. Bettany Hughes writes very well, and she brought this fascinating and key period in our Western tradition to life.

The book looks at life in Athens during the Golden Age of Greece through the prism of Socrates’ life.  He fought in most of the wars and key battles of the era, knew and was well known by all of the influential people of Athens at the time.  Ms Hughes is able to connect Socrates to nearly everything that happened of significance during Greece and Athens’  golden age – the last decades of the 5th century BCE.  I was surprised to find that in some ways the turbulence Athens experienced at the end of the 5th century BCE has some parallels with our own.  The Athenians strongly believed in themselves as the most enlightened country in the world, and aggressively sought to expand their influence and their idea of democracy.  Pericles was a Bill Clinton-esque character; his mistress Aspasia was very controversial and hated for the power she exercised over and through him , and she was accused of corrupting the women of Athens.   The intrigue and back biting and viciousness of the era surprised me, while at the same time these people created perhaps the most enlightened government and culture in history to that point.  But most of the people in Athens and Greece were simply trying to live their lives and get along, as are we today.  And reading about how they lived, it doesn’t seem that they were much different from us in temperament.   I also enjoyed learning how much new material about this era is coming to light every year in archeological excavations.  Many of the most interesting facts and insights were based on findings in the last 10 to 20 years.

She offers an explanation as to why Socrates was such a controversial character and why he was sentenced to death. He drank the hemlock in 399 BC just after democracy had been restored after the infamous year of so of the Thirty Tyrants.  The Thirty Tyrants, led by Critias,  a former student of Socrates, overthrew the Athenian democracy and ruled Athens with terror, seeking to purge Athens of their enemies and to even-up old scores.  Shortly before Socrates’ trial, they were themselves overthrown and a fragile democracy was restored to Athens.  But , after so much internal blood-letting and terror, people were jumpy and scared, which in part explains why they were in no mood to continue to tolerate a Socratic gadfly. 

Yes, this was a short, easy to read, and very interesting book.

Why this book: My wife read this book and told me that I definitely needed to read it.  She reads more than I do and she doesn’t make that recommendation very often.  My friend Liz Train, a voracious reader herself, also suggested that I read it and that I would enjoy it.  But I was into about 4 books at the time, and knew that I might never get to it, so I purchased the CD version to listen to in the car while commuting.  So I didn’t really read the book, I listened to it, and listening to the story was a great way to enjoy this book.

My Impressions:  The book is written by a Laura Hillenbrand, a master story teller (Sea Biscuit), and belongs in the classics of survival literature about the triumph of will and the human spirit.    The book begins with stories of Louis Zamparini’s misadventures as a juvenile delinquent, then progresses to how he becomes a record setting distance runner and Olympian (1936 Berlin.)    After the war begins, he becomes an Army Air Corps officer, and when his plane goes down in the Pacific, the meat of the story begins.  The next section of the book describes how he (with two other men) survived 47 days adrift in the Pacific on a tiny rubber raft.  As they finally reach an island, they are taken prisoner by the Japanese, and the next section of the story is about his nearly 3 horrific years as a Japanese Prisoner of War.  At the end of the war, we learn of his liberation, his repatriation, and joyful reunion with his family.  Then more struggles ensue with his descent into alcoholism and other destructive behavior as he continues fighting the demons that he carried with him from his time in the Japanese Prisoner of War camps.   He eventually has a spiritual re-awakening, and creates a new life for himself– a life that still continues.  He was one of the torch carriers in the Olympics in the 90’s, became a prolific supporter of not-for-profit causes, and was an inspirational public speaker for decades.   Liz Train emailed me that she had lunch with him in April while he was in Hawaii promoting the book.

One of the shocking insights to come from this book was how the atrocities and humiliation that the Japanese inflicted on their prisoners rival the horrors the Nazis inflicted on their victims in the concentration camps in Germany and Poland.  Apparently because of his celebrity as an Olympian, Zamparini was allowed to survive when others were murdered; also perhaps because of his celebrity, he was targeted for even more concentrated and degrading abuse.   The dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki came two weeks before PoW camp commandants had been ordered to murder all their prisoners.

The books makes clear that Zamparini and other PoW’s realized that maintaining their sense of human and personal dignity, in the face of extreme and persistent degradation and dignity-robbing abuse, was key to their survival.  This point echoes Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning.  Zamparini’s defiance in the face of brutal and degrading treatment was key to his survival.  He fought and struggled to maintain his human dignity in the most dehumanizing environment imaginable.  And somehow, he succeeded.  Laura Hillenbrand now calls him the Ambassador of Joy.  This is also a story of forgiveness and redemption.  A wonderful book.

Why this book: I’ve always been interested in The Unseen Order of Things and have found the idea of reincarnation an interesting possibility.  I’ve done a fair amount of reading on the topic since reading the (now discredited) Search for Bridie Murphy, and visiting the Association for Research and Enlightenment in my home town of Virginia Beach, Va.  It’s hard to explain what Edgar Cayce was able to know, see, and do without at least considering the ‘truth’ of his claim of reincarnation and the evolution of the soul.

My Impressions:  The book tells the story of a young child who has uncanny knowledge of and interest in airplanes.  He also has nightly recurrent nightmares, in which he screams something to the effect, “Plane on fire! Plane on fire! Little man can’t get out!” during which he thrashes around and screams in his crib.    With this nightmare ocurring almost nightly, during the day, this young child makes statements about what airplane he used to fly, the aircraft carrier that he flew off of , the Pacific battle he fought in – history of which  his parents were unaware and to which this 3 year old boy had  never been exposed.  The father was a Christian with very strong traditional beliefs and embarked on a campaign of research to basically discredit this ‘fantasy’ by finding flaws and historical inaccuracies in his son’s story.  The book is largely about his extensive research, about the strain it put on the marriage of the parents, as well as about the mounting evidence that this young boy knew things that were very difficult to explain without believing in reincarnation.   The father learned the identity of the young naval aviator who the boy claimed to be when he was shot down, found friends and family whose names the boy mentioned.  The extensive research allowed them to introduce their 5 year old son to the people who were close to and still had vivid memories of the naval aviator who had died in 1945.  The boy knew things about this earlier man that people said only the man himself knew.  The stories are amazing, but the book is almost as much about the father’s struggle with his faith, and how the parents coped with this very inconvenient and awkward prediliction of their son.  My wife Mary Anne and I were a bit put off in reading so much about the parents, but in the end, the story was almost as much about them and what this story did to them as it was about a young boy who apparently had vivid and verifiable memories of a previous life.  There was a dateline story on this case several years ago that can still be viewed on-line.   Yes, after I got over learning more about the parents than I wanted to know, I very much liked the book.

The Greatest Pearl in the world

Why this book: A selection for our book club – we decided to explore some of Steinbeck’s less well known novels.

My Impressions: ..for the evil song was in his ears…”  This is one of Steinbeck’s very short novellas in which he reveals his admiration for the strength of the poor, and his antipathy toward the upper classes and their natural propensity to exploit the poor, and keep them poor.   It is also a story about greed, and love.  The story is simple, and profound. 

In a small village somewhere on the Caribbean coast (one assumes Mexico), Kino, a young pearl diver and his wife Juana and their newborn son Coyotito, are living a simple life, working each day to meet their basic needs. They live in a thatch hut, have just enough to eat, and have almost no personal possessions, except for the small boat upon which they depend for their living.   The village is near and depends upon a nearby town, which appears to have the social structure that one finds in most towns.  In the village the pearl divers and fisherman all live on the edge of subsistence, and take care of and support each other.

One day when diving for pearls, Kino finds an oyster with a very large and nearly perfect pearl “…as large as a seagull’s egg. It was the greatest pearl in the world.”  This pearl will be worth a small fortune, and Kino and Juana see it as the key to opportunities that the middle class take for granted – a nice wedding for themselves, schooling for their new son, and the opportunity for their son to grow up in society, and not have to struggle to find food from day to day.

As soon as Kino and Juana find the pearl, they realize that the possibility of relative wealth separates them from others in their village, and they are no longer sure who they can trust.  Their simple life becomes complicated. Everyone wants a piece of the wealth the pearl promised.   Envy infects their relationships within the village, and they are targeted by the wealthier people in town to be exploited, even the priest.  They see Kino and Juana as vulnerable and are only too willing to take advantage of them.   Thieves try to steal the pearl. Kino and Juana are attacked at night, are injured and almost killed. As Kino recognizes their vulnerability, and that he cannot protect his family or the pearl, he takes his family and they flee on foot, across the mountains toward another town or city where he feels they may have a chance.  But they are pursued, by the forces of greed and treachery.  Juana had recognized early on that the pearl was only bringing grief and threats to her family, “This thing is evil. The pearl is like a sin!  It will destroy us!”  She argued that they should get rid of it.  But Kino had been captured by his dreams of a better life for himself and his family, and he refused to give up on this dream.   

Reading this story, one knows that it will not end well.  Steinbeck seems to be saying that justice clearly takes a back seat to power and greed, and the poor will always lose when confronted by the greed of the rich.   But it is also a story about the relationship between Kino and Juana – inspiring, intense, primal and powerful.  The reader understands and admires each of them, for different reasons.  Also, throughout the book Juana and Kino tune into their environment with a sixth sense, and Steinbeck uses the metaphor of music to describe it.  This is particularly striking throughout this parable:  “In Kino’s head there was a song now, clear and soft…the Song of the Family.” “Juana sang softly an ancient song that had only 3 notes, yet endless variety of interval.”   “…a new song had come, the Song of Evil, the music of the enemy, of any foe of the family …and underneath, the Song of the Family cried plaintively.” “…he could hear the evil music of the enemy..” “the pounding music of the enemy beat in his ears..” “…the Song of the Family had become as fierce and sharp and feline as the snarl of a female puma…<and> was alive now and driving him…”

It was ironic to read this book right after reading ‘The Alchemist’ – it almost has an anti-Alchemist message.  Whereas The Alchemist’s message is ‘believe in your dream, and the whole world will conspire to make it a reality’ – The Pearl’s message seems to be ‘dare to dream that you can break out of your social class, and the whole world will conspire to crush you.’  It is important to read and understand both of these perspectives – we can learn from them both.

Why this book:  It was suggested by a member of my reading group.  I had read it before and had found it ceative, inspiring and meaningful, and looked forward to reading it again.

My Impressions:  It is a seemingly simple little fable, that becomes a spiritual, and multi-cultural  rags-to-riches ‘Horatio Alger story,’ but the riches represent both financial as well as spiritual wealth.  While the theme is a common one – follow your heart, don’t give up on your dreams, ‘The Alchemist’ is beautiful in its simplicity and multi-layered complexity, and can be appreciated on many different levels. Wikipedia notes that it is one of the most widely translated book by a living author and has been on best–seller lists in 74 countries.

In brief, it is about a young shepherd in Spain, one assumes in the 19^th or early 20^th century, who has had a recurring dream, and then meets an enigmatic man who claims (and somehow appears) to be a wandering and wise ‘king.’  This man inspires the young shepherd to sell his sheep and follow his dream to travel to Egypt to find his ‘treasure.’  There are many references in the book to fate, destiny, and reading of omens, all of which point to an ‘unseen order of things’ and the author’s belief in the basic goodness of the Universe.  He refers throughout the book to such things as ‘the Soul of the Universe’ and the ‘the Language of the World’   The shepherd learns that he can access the wisdom of this unseen order by listening carefully and quietly to ‘the Language of the World’ to access its wisdom.   One of the key messages of the book is this need to listen and pay attention to the greater world around us in order to tap into its wisdom.   Another message is a faith that ‘When you desire something with all your heart, the whole universe conspires to help you achieve it.’

The shepherd boy follows his dream, and though numerous setbacks test his determination, he persists and eventually realizes that these apparent setbacks indeed forced him to become stronger and more resilient, and put him on pathways that were key to helping him fulfill his dream.  He is constantly tempted to take an easier path, to give up and return to a simpler and more comfortable path, but he persists, and with a strong will and a good heart, and some luck and cleverness,  eventually he fulfills his dreams.

There is a lot in this simple story to discuss and to argue about, which we did in our reading group.  The young shepherd has a couple of love interests – the role they play is peripheral, but important.  Some in our reading group did not appreciate the spiritual under-currents; others found the spiritual aspects most appealing.  The story brings in metaphors from the Christian, Muslim, Mormon, and Jewish traditions. Given that I am approaching a transition in my life, I found inspiration in this little story which has helped me to continue to refine, believe in, and pursue my own dream.