This week at the library: NaNoWriMo, rebels against the rebellion, death on Everest, and maaaaybe Richard Sharpe

Posted on November 12, 2013 by smellincoffee

Dear readers:

For the first time in the five or so years I’ve been aware of NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, I am attempting to participate. For those who have not heard of this, it’s a challenge in which participants commit to write, in the month of November, a 50,000 word novel. This amounts to writing ~1700 words a day,  which is more difficult than it sounds considering not only the tendency of life to pop up and claim time meant for writing, but the fact that you have to have something to write about.  I’m participating not because I have a coherent novel to write, but because  I like the idea of forcing myself to sit down every night and work on on growing one thing. I’ve missed two days, but am off this Saturday and intend on catching up…providing I think can of something to write. At present I have decided to have my main character chased into the woods by dogs. I assume I can get a few thousand words out of him trying to get back to civilization.

Over the last week or so I’ve finished a handful of books, both fiction and non-. I resumed Wendell Berry’s “Port William” series with Nathan Coulter, which was the first book I’ve read by Berry that didn’t bowl me over. It’s the first book in the series, and is principally about the relationship between three generations of Coulter men after Nathan’s mother dies. Nathan is a short novel, and lacking completely the commentary characters add in Jayber Crow and Hannah Coulter on the changes they see in town. It helps that very little time passes in Nathan Coulter, for the title character is still a boy at its end.

Another book I’ve finished with is The Last Human, a “guide to 22 species of extinct humans”.  This work is essentially a catalog of fossils, with a few brief documentary ‘stories’ about the man-apes included, and supplemented with lots of fetching photos. Each chapter details the fossils for a given species (which can be very scant; sometimes amounting to nothing more than bits and pieces of a skull), technical descriptions of the remains (describing, for instance, the thickness of brow ridges or the orientation of a given orifice), and speculations on their behavior and diet given their bones as we have them, and the environment of the time. It’s more suitable as a reference, a snapshot of how little we know presently, than as a popular introduction to the natural history of humans.

I also finished two works which will get comments: CS Lewis’ Screwtape Letters, which I was taken by, and Train Time, a bit of business projection.

In the next week, I intend for my reading to remain light: I have a book on interlibrary loan, The South vs. The South, and have checked out Sharpe’s Revenge. However, earlier today someone posted a link to a story detailing — of all things — the number of bodies laying about Mount Everest of would-be climbers who succumbed to the elements, and who are not retrievable because of the ravages of the environment. Because of the extreme cold, there are people up there who’ve been deceased for nearly a century. Anyhoo, after that I spent several hours reading about Mount Everest expeditions and learned that not only is it very dangerous and wretchedly painful, but costs $25,000 for permission from the Nepalese government to try. I may be reading Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer, who participated in an infamously lethal expedition back in 1996.   If I had that much money to spend on one recreational trip, I would not use it to climb a mountain that killed one in four people . I’d learn to fly and rent a P-51, I think…

Happy reading — and happy writing, to my fellow nanowrimo participants.

Posted in Reviews | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

A Consumers’ Republic

Posted on November 9, 2013 by smellincoffee

A Consumers’ Republic
© 2002 Lizbeth Cohen
576 pages

What is the meaning of citizenship? To the Romans, and to the early Americans, citizenship was an exclusive state of being that depended on owning land, and so a stake in society. In the early twentieth century, however, as suffrage waxed more universal and markets were flooded with goods made for the masses, citizenship took on a different meaning. To be a citizen of a modern, capitalist  democracy was to be a Consumer;  voices rang out most strongly at the marketplace, not the ballot box.  In A Consumer’s Republic, author Lizbeth Cohen examines the way the burgeoning consumer market effected political activism.  Beginning with consumer activist groups who protested high prices amid the Depression, her history examines the Civil Rights and feminist movements through the lens of consumption.  Consumer equality, not income distribution, would create a classless society. Women fought for the right to have their own bank accounts and lines of credit in addition to equal wages;  blacks labored for just prices in stores as well as unhindered access to the vote.  This is an account of social, political, marketing history, intertwined together.  Consumption didn’t just serve individual desires; as Keynsianism became the dominant economic philosophy, intellectuals and citizen-consumers alike saw their compulsive buying as not only fun, but patriotic: their every new gadget grew the economy.  The consumers’ republic began to die in the 1970s  and 1980s amid economic turbulence; even though people continued to buy more and more,  the political aspect of their purchasing, the meaning they had given it, fell away, both because the economy no longer responded as Keynes promised and their motives became more purely self-focused and only tangently connected to the thought of improving the nation’s fortunes.

  Although occasionally touching on the negative aspects of the rapidly expanding consumer culture — the growth of suburbia, for instance —  A Consumers’ Republic is not a polemic raging against consumerism, and effects open to interpretation,  like the consequences of consumerism on citizens’ peace of mind, are not touched on. It has a scholarly feel, though a ‘popular’ look;  the art is well-done, including plenty of large black and white photographs that demonstrate the point at hand, and stylized headings that bring to mind advertisements from the 1950s. One particularly effective illustration shows the evolution of advertising in Ebony magazine from the 1950s to the 1970s, as white-owned haircare manufactures realized that (1) blacks were a market and (2) that black people were a different market. They gradually transition from a white model demonstrating hair treatment lotion to a black model advertising products related to ‘natural’ hair.   Republic is a fascinating look at another side of the rise of consumption,  impressively thorough in that respect, and free of scathing criticism if not critical substance.

Posted in history, Reviews | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Sharpe’s Siege

Posted on November 6, 2013 by smellincoffee

Sharpe’s Siege
© 1987 Bernard Cornwell
352 pages

               Napoleon may not realize it, but his wars are lost. The English have achieved total naval supremacy,  and are free to raid the coasts of the imperial hexagon at their leisure. Richard Sharpe, whose sturdy Riflemen are in part responsible for l’Empereur’s imminent job loss, has been dispatched on one such raid. His orders are to capture a small but potentially bothersome fort, and possibly wander over to Bordeaux, where it is said the people are clamoring for the restoration of the Bourbons. Alas for Sharpe,  he is a pawn twice over; he has been invited to join the raid only so the bumbling generals in charge of it will have hope of victory, or at the very least a good scapegoat – and the generals themselves are operating on suspect intelligence fed to them by French counterintelligence mastermind, Pierre Ducos.  When Ducos learns that the redcoats are up for a little raiding and Sharpe is with him, he takes a personal interest in not only rendering their plans moot, but condemning Sharpe to die.  In short order, the good rifleman is trapped in France with no hope of escape but an American pirate who was to have hung for crimes against the Crown.   Sharpe’s  Siege distinguishes itself from many other Sharpe novels in that the military action is wholly fabricated; the raid he participates in never took place.  Although the military scenes are full of excitement and explosions and the like,  they take second place to Ducos’ scheming; there’s no doubt that Sharpe will capture the fort and then defend it against a host of embarrassed Frenchmen, but getting out of the greater trap is an altogether different feat. What I appreciated most about it was the mixing-in of naval action. Alas for me, there are only two more Sharpe books waiting – Sharpe’s  Revenge, which is next, and then  Sharpe’s Waterloo.

Posted in historical fiction, Reviews | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

Hitler’s Peace

Posted on November 6, 2013 by smellincoffee

Hitler’s Peace
© 2006 Phillip Kerr
464 pages


Willard Mayer has the strangest luck. How many people get to dine with FDR, talk about the worries of life with Winston Churchill, annoy Joseph Stalin, and shake hands with Adolf Hitler? And this after they’ve  been arrested several times for espionage given a string of bodies trailing behind them. Mayer’s no murderer or spy, even if once in his impressionable youth he was a member of the Communist party and passed information to the Soviet intelligence service, the NKVD.  The year is 1943, and Mayer is a philosopher-turned-OSS agent who is accompanying FDR to an ultra top-secret conference as a German translator/intelligence strategist. The confidential conference in Tehran — the one so concealed that everyone and their twitchy uncle knows about – is the first coming together of the Big Three: FDR,Churchill, and Stalin. But more will happen there than will ever be publicly known, for while some Germans are planning the assassinations  of the allied trio, others intend to entice them into an early peace.

Hitler’s Peace is exciting from beginning to end, a bit of historical fiction that occupies a grey area between historical and alternate fiction. Although history is fundamentally unchanged, Kerr’s plot explores facts considered odd and provides a highly speculative explanation. Truth is stranger than fiction, however; I was astonished to learn that some events within the novel which strained credibility actually occurred, like the string of calamities that beset the Willie D. Porter, one of the ships escorting FDR to the conference. Within hours, the ship backed into and destroyed another ship, saw a man vanish into the sea, blew a boiler, dropped a depth charge, and just for good measure, fired a torpedo directly at FDR’s ship. “She’s not what you would call a lucky ship”, the baffled president noted shortly before ordering the ship to detach itself from the convoy and deliver its crew for total arrest at the nearest port.  The cast of characters is largely German (Mayer is the son of German immigrants),which is a refreshing change.  They’re all antagonists who are neither sympathetic nor overtly villainous; the Nazi regime’s crimes against humanity are not ignored, but neither are those of the Russians, and the revelation of several Soviet slaughters features as a plot point. The novel plays fast and loose with history, but touches on aspects of the war largely ignored (Soviet war crimes, for instance, or “Operation Long Jump”). I found it entertaining, though Mayer is only marginally more sympathetic than the book’s ‘baddies’.

Posted in Reviews | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

This week at the library: airborne hell, David Sedaris, and coffee with evil

Posted on November 4, 2013 by smellincoffee

Last week I broke off from The City in History to do some light reading, beginning with Phillip Kerr’s Hitler’s Peace, a bit of speculative historical fiction which will be getting full comments tonight. The novel features an Office of Strategic Services agent accompanying President Roosevelt to the Big Three conference at Tehran in 1943, where he keeps getting arrested after insisting there are German spies at work. Considering the string of murders and catastrophes that follow him and Roosevelt,  he might be on to something.  It’s a fun WW2 thriller, but the big attraction is how often the lead character rubs shoulders with titanic personalities —  and not just the Big Three.

After that I read through Elliot Hester’s Plane Insanity, which collects outrageous tales taken from his years of service as an airline steward. Most of the stories concern the bad behavior of passengers –who break into fist fights and sneak pythons aboard — though there are some involving the airline crew’s own flubs, like the time the author opened an emergency door and witnessed the jump chute (the inflatable tube that allows passengers to escape).   It’s an entertaining enough read, though it certainly makes the life of airline service unappealing: Hester’s experience reveals  nothing but fourteen-hour days filled with the worst experiences in customer service, with air turbulence thrown into the mix, and a life lived in hotel rooms and buses sometimes enlivened by raucous parties and meaningless sex. Neither Hester nor any of his coworkers seem to take much pleasure, let alone fulfillment, from their jobs.

After that I enjoyed thoroughly David Sedaris’ Lets Explore Diabetes with Owls, a curious collection of essays and short pieces of fiction. The fiction defies classification;  the only stories told are presented as true tales from Sedaris’ life (delivered in his dry, inappropriate, and pathos-inspiring way) , but mixed in with them are oddities like a letter written from a lady to her sister, chiding her for giving a pizza coupon as a wedding gift. (Nevermind that  the lady’s driving led to her sister being crippled and dumped by her boyfriend, and that said boyfriend just happened to be the man the lady was marrying..) A few of the pieces can be tenatively tied together under the heading travel, but it’s largely a collection of miscllenaeous pieces. Sedaris writes on the usual topics: his dyfunctional family, the oddities of life, and the ocassional animal fixation. It’s a second-tier Sedaris book, I think; far better than Holidays on Ice, which I read for the Santaland Diaries and nothing else,  but not quite as funny as say, Me Talk Pretty One Day. 

This week, I am engaged in Sharpe’s Siege, where the good rifleman is once again running around doing the impossible with thrilling heroics and not a few one-liners from his compatriots. This one mixes in naval action with the land engagment, and features an American privateer.  So far, so good. Once that’s finished I”ll return to The City in History. I think if I can make it to the medieval epoch, I’ll be all right.  Waiting in the wings is Wendell Berry’s Nathan Coulter, which is not at all as spellbinding as Jayber Crow and Hannah Coulter were.

Posted in Reviews | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Zealot

Posted on October 29, 2013 by smellincoffee

Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth
© 2013 Raza Aslan
337 pages

Reza Aslan’s Zealot searches for the historical Jesus and finds him as a religious revolutionary, one who anticipated the imminent demise of the Roman Empire. No gentle Jesus meek and mild, nor Buddha-like figure whose notion of the kingdom of God was a metaphor for enlightened living, Jesus was a man of his times – a working-class carpenter who saw no distinction between the oppressive Romans and the corrupt class of priests in the legalistic Temple who were their lackeys. Preaching about the end of days in an province of the region frequently wracked by would-be messiahs inciting rebellion, Jesus of Nazareth was promptly executed in the style reserved for ‘bandits’,  crucified publicly as an example  of what happened to those who defied Rome.  The city of Jerusalem, and the Temple, joined him in destruction decades later, in a war in which the Christians took no part, seeing in the Romans’ rage evidence that the End had finally begun – and shortly thereafter,  the Gospels were written, and increasingly in such a way as to hide Jesus’ original message. But the historical facts that can be beaten out of the gospel accounts, writes Aslan, and they reveal him to be a passionate foe of the then-status quo, and one taken seriously as a secular, not a spiritual, threat. Aslan doesn’t delve into what role if any the historical Jesus was to play in the end of things, but his aggressive forecasting certainly brought his own: in an state in which casting the Emperor’s horoscope was treason, predicting his imminent fall was sure to make Rome irritated. What sets Aslan’s account part from many other works is its style; though versed in theology and textual criticism (Aslan was a Muslim convert to Christianity,  and reverted while becoming a biblical scholar), this is no academic work. Aslan writes like a novelist, in which Jesus and his disciples are the reader’s intimates and the events of their lives are happening now, in the present tense. I suspect this is why it’s so popular, for Aslan is less a lecturer and more a storyteller.

Aslan’s conclusion is similar to Bart Ehrman’s, who in Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium concluded that Jesus was one of many powerfully charismatic Jewish teachers forecasting the end of the world tomorrow, though in Aslan’s view he was seen as a threat to personally ignite the power keg that was first-century Judea. Zealot is worth reading if for no other reason than to appreciate how much anxious energy rippled through the world of the gospels. No static background for nice stories about good Samaritans and healing the lame: first-century Jerusalem was a literal battleground — between warring sects, the sects and the authorities, and between the authorities.  On the whole, it’s quite riveting. but I’m uncertain about the scholarship. I’m sympathetic to his view because I’ve read one similar to it, but one better established (again, Ehrman), but the book is dotted with odd translations and sweeping statements like “the gospels were never meant to accurately portray Jesus’ life’.   To be sure, the Gospels are loaded with shall we say, extra-historical content, but that doesn’t mean they’re the equivalent of stories about George Washington cutting down cherry trees.  The novel-like aspects of the book fascinated me, but were also bothersome upon retrospect; I suppose I’m a bit of a snob in that I think serious, academic work has to be just a little bit staid.

Ultimately,  Aslan’s claims are noteworthy, but ought to be considered carefully.

Posted in history, Reviews | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

This week at the library: Jesus, bikes, and Greeks

Posted on October 28, 2013 by smellincoffee

In recent weeks I’ve finished up an unplanned series of readings on first-century Judeo-Christianity.  Shortly after checking out The Origin of Satan for some historical research, two seperate people happened to reccommend Misquoting Jesus and Zealot at the same time, meaning my head is just swimming with facts on the destruction of the temple. Comments for Zealot will follow tonight.

Outside of those, I read Bruce Thorton’s Greek Ways, which defends the primacy of Greek contributions to western civilization. His basis is that while many cultures had similar ideas to the Greeks — a semblance of science, the beginnings of democracy, and so on — none of them developed as fully or magnificiently as they did in Greece. Further, while the Greeks were seriously flawed, their limitations were those of the human race, while their triumphs were culture-specific. He draws extensively on Greek poetry and prose to put their ideas and behaviors into historical context, and to argue that ideals of western civilization, like political liberty and religious skepticism, were first expressed in their fullest form in Greek minds.  Being hopelessly biased toward the Greeks,  I don’t trust myself to do a proper review, but I was impressed by his research.

Additionally, I read through Just the Two of Us, a travel memoir by Melissa Norton, who with her husband  cycled across North America, from the Pacific to the Atlantic. I enjoyed it well enough, but it wasn’t a standout for me, at least not when compared to Hey, Mom, Can I Ride My Bike Across America?  I’d been told that Just the Two of Us contained a lot of information on bike mechanics, but my source must have been thinking of another book altogether;  this is a travel diary, and rather complete at that, with the inclusion of mileage logs. (David Lamb’s Over the Hills was bike-info heavy, because it had to be; aside from a dog chasing him, nothing happened on his journey. Compare that to John Siegel-Boettner’s trip with middle-schoolers, where they were chased not by dogs, but by tornados!

Yesterday I finished Bill Bryson’s The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, a memoir of a baby-boomer childhood. I’d say it’s one of Bryson’s funniest pieces, but they run together in one long string of belly laughs. More comments on it may follow later.

This week I am attempting to finish, or at least make some progress in, Lewis Mumford’s The City in History. After that I have The Consumers’ Republic and The Last Humans, and I’m intending on reading a bit more fiction as the year is winding down. I’ll probably be resuming Sharpe’s series; I believe I left the good rifleman perched at the edge of the Pyrenees, poised to invade France and send Napoleon packing.

Posted in Reviews | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

The Origin of Satan

Posted on October 26, 2013 by smellincoffee

The Origin of Satan: How Christianity Demonized Jews, Pagans, and Heretics
© 1996 Elaine Pagels
240 pages

Although Christianity sprang from Judaism, the two religions have sharply different conceptions of Satan. Christians view him as the prince of evil, the enemy of all that is good and holy. Jews, however, see him as a faithful servant of God: the Almighty’s quality-control agent who tests the faithful’s integrity by opposing them. We can plainly see that there were once Jews who held a view similar to the Christians: Jesus, his disciples, and followers like Paul saw Satan as a wretched foe. How was Satan transformed from servant to foe of God? The root lies in the influence of Apocalyptic dualism, but Elaine Pagels sees Satan’s descent into evil as inspired by the desire of some Jews and the Christians to literally demonize their opponents. In elaborating upon this she delivers a fascinating partial history of late-Temple Judaism and early Christianity as one transformed into another, and Satan fell from light into darkness.

It began with the Greeks, those venerable fathers of western civilization who seduced the Jews with their philosophy, gymnasiums, and three orders of pillars. While the Jews had fallen under the control of various powers before — the Egyptians, Babylonians, and Persians before Alexander and his generals bought Hellenic culture and rule to Palestine — never before had the people of Moses been so open to assimilation.  They began avoiding circumcision and nibbling on pork, to the horror of traditionalists. The increasingly-Hellenized Jews, in rejecting their cultures’ norms and embracing those of the Greeks, were seen as even worse than old-time idolaters: they were race-traitors, and the direct agents of Satan.

Historically, Satan’s role was to oppose the chosen people, either to force them to prove their worth, or to hinder them from really making a mess of things.As the Jewish people became increasingly divided  between their own ways and the Greek, his resistance gained an edge, and stories emerged in which his motives were changed. Satan was increasingly believed to oppose the Jews not for the greater good, but to spite God. Pagels details the various narratives that were co-opted or created to establish his going into business as CEO of Evil, Inc. The story of Babylon’s fall — its description as Venus/Lucifer,  Star of the Morning, attempting to surpass God/the Sun’s glory and being crushed — is turned into the story of a rebellious angel. Satan’s origin also appears in texts not accepted by the Christians, wherein he and other angels are introduce to Adam and Eve and told to worship them. Upon refusal, they were exiled.  The common thread in these origin tales and another is that of disobedience, and since the Hellenized Jews were no longer obeying the rules  regarding pork and circumcision, they were Of the Devil.   The early Christ-followers later turned the table on the traditionalists by accusing them of not obeying God through his messiah/incarnation,, and thus being agents of Satan if not demon possessed. This same belief was targeted against pagans who would not convert, as well as against Christians who had slightly different views on issues from the fundamental to the seemingly esoteric.  The book ends with a hopeful plea that disagreeing with someone need not mean accusing them of being worse than Hitler.

The Origin of Satan is an interesting book, though not very true to its title. Pagels never mentions the influence of dualism and apocalypticism altogether, with the effect that she addresses Satan’s flowering as the prince of darkness, not the origins, the seed, of his evil. On the other hand, Origin covers the tension between the Jews in this period of cultural conflict quite well, and the strength of the book is its history of Judeo-Christianity in transition, with Satan’s own transformation being used as the lens. On the whole, Pagels has thus produced a fascinating work, but if you were really interested in the history of Satan, it’s not quite comprehensive.

Posted in Reviews | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Misquoting Jesus

Posted on October 18, 2013 by smellincoffee

Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why
© 2005 Bart Ehrman
256 pages

Contrary to popular belief, the King James Bible did not fall out of the sky, a gift from a loving deity to his people below. In Misquoting Jesus, Bart Ehrman delves into the human side of the Christian New Testament, introducing lay readers to textual analysis and demonstrating how scribes and theologians in the early centuries of the church tweaked verses while copying them, either to correct mistakes as they saw them or to stress a theological point.  Ehrman writes not to attack the New Testament’s credibility, but rather to make readers aware that the text they cherish has a life and history of its own.  Understanding that history means gleaning new insight into early Christianities as well, for even after one theological view won out over another, the evidence of battle lays in subtle alterations. Some are subtle indeed: changing a single brushstroke in one word (changing an O into a Φ ) could assert Jesus as God made manifest. Others are more obvious, like Jesus’ “anger” at a leper being converted into ‘compassion’ for him, even though later in the same story he harshly rebukes said leper and his inserted  compassion seems out of place.  Ehrman almost avoids arguing for any sweeping changes; the broadest alteration of text he observes is that Paul seems to contract himself about the role of women in the church within the same book (1st Corinthians), indicating that a later follower might have put words into his patron’s mouth.   Only the strictest literalist would be made uneasy by  Ehrman’s revelations.  For the rest of us,  Misquoting Jesus is a fascinating work that makes one appreciate how much passion has been poured even into making copies of texts,

Posted in Reviews | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Bicycle: the History

Posted on October 18, 2013 by smellincoffee

Bicycle: The History
© 2006 David Herlihy
480 pages

Where did the bicycle come from? Bicycle: the History tells the story in exacting detail, beginning in the 19th century. An age of progress  and scientific triumph, wherein everyday life was constantly being revolutionized by inventions, it set many people to work finding a way to improve personal transportation. Surely we could do better than moving our feet back and forth — so primitive! Why not do that on a set of wheels, instead? The first bike-like things were conceived as mere aides to running, driven by their riders striking the ground with their feet.  It took decades before pedals, brakes, comfortable seats, and the like were added to those first frames to make what we could recognize as a bike. In the intervening half-century, inventors pursued other avenues, coming up with bizarrely huge machines driven forward by people turning cranks with their hands, or the amusing high-wheeled bicycles, which required a ladder and the 19th century equivalent of an oxygen mask to cope with the thinner air.  Most of the improvements made to these early bikes, or velocipedes, created faddish vehicles that became national obsessions that lasted for a year or so before suddenly fading away into oblivion. The high-wheels had more staying power, but eventually they were humbled by simple improvements made to the original idea — and lo, the  Safety Bicycle.  Alas for it, it had scarcely come onto the scene before the motorized, horseless carriage also came sputtering and coughing onto the road, and the 20th century belonged more to the automobile than the humble bicycle. This was especially true in the United States, but not quite as much in Europe or in China, where space and poverty (respectively) limited motoring’s expansion.  Bicycle is  most thorough, at least in covering the 19th century: at times it offers a year by year account of the velociopeding fads, at times verging on plodding when it fixates on patent battles. Though sometimes technical, Bicycle also covers the human aspect in full, demonstrating how bicycle usage changed patterns of dress and social mores, and began working the general culture. The text is also replete with scores of historical photographs, many gorgeous, which liven up any dry spots. Though it could have used more information on the 20th century, on the whole this is an impressively thorough history.

Related:
Pedaling Revolution: How Cyclists are Changing American Cities, Jeff Mapes

Posted in history, Reviews | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment