The KunstlerCast

Posted on November 9, 2011 by smellincoffee
The KunstlerCast: Conversations with James Howard Kunstler
…the tragic comedy of suburban sprawl.
© 2011 Duncan Crary, James Howard Kunstler
300 pages
James Howard Kunstler is a journalist turned social critic and the author of numerous books, most prominently The Geography of Nowhere and The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century. These two books address the seemingly disparate topics of urban planning and the global oil economy, but to Kunstler and like-minded readers, they are troublesomely knit together, intensifying the problems that each causes. For the past three years, Kunstler has talked each week with on these and connected topics with his co-host, Duncan Crary, who has now produced a partial record of their discussions — a collection which will no doubt please Kunstler’s fans, while offering those unfamiliar with his work their first taste of it.
Although his modern work ties to his predictions for the post-oil future, most of Kunstler’s nonfiction works fall within the realm of urban criticism. Americans who have never encountered his ire may be staggered by how much of their world he holds in scorn. Just what is it about the modern city and suburban sprawl that he finds so appalling?  In a word, everything. The opening sentence of The Geography of Nowhere, in which Kunstler attempts to summarize why he wrote the book, is a paragraph long.  The growth of American cities and later,  the ‘edge’ cities that grew out of suburbian sprawl, has centered on the automobile, and the result is the decline of public transit like rail lines in favor of highways — infrastructure built on the promise of cheap gasoline, and frightfully ugly to behold. Its decentralization destroys the integrity of human communities and is in part responsible for the rising obesity problem in the U.S:  our automobile-fixated culture gives people few opportunities to incorporate activity like walking into their everyday life, for now every trip anywhere demands the car. The results are hideous: compare an eight-line commercial strip lined with box stores,  oceans of pavement, and offensive, neon-colored signs the size of trucks to the charm of what once was, to the tree-lined American Main Street with its cozy stores and pedestrian focus.  The good news, for Kunstler and those who sympathize, is that this horror cannot long remain: it is doomed by its dependency on oil.

The second half of Kunstler’s legacy, originating in The Long Emergency and a source of constant chatter among the author and his co-host, is the idea of peak oil and its ramifications. The cancerous growth of urban sprawl has been enabled by the abundance of cheap oil, but that era is drawing to a close. The United States’ oil reserves have already dwindled, and soon enough the oil wells of the middle east and Russia will dry, too. The consequences for a global economy built on oil — oil to run the ships and trucks that connect manufacturing and distribution, oil to process food — for food is an industrial, not an agricultural product these days — are dire. Kunstler sees the fabric of globalization partially disintegrating, and local economies reviving. Everything, including the cities, will shrink to a smaller scale — a human-sized scale. The unviable sprawl will die, and authentic human communities will prosper once more, while bemoaning the amount of resources that were wasted  in the “cheap oil fiesta”.

KunstlerCast‘s conversations tend to focus more on Kunstlers’ urban critiques than the peak oil scenario, though the two are connected to the point that the whole of the book flows together well, aside from some small deviations wherein Kunstler takes time to grouch about tattoos. I found these breaks more amusing than anything, and the book as a whole a positive delight, one which prompted me to begin re-reading The Geography of Nowhere.  While Kunstlers’ arguments as a whole are more thoroughly presented in the two books previously mentioned, the format of KunstlerCast allows the author and his host to discuss contemporary, related, and specific issues not mentioned in the 1993 book, or only mentioned in passing, like the health consequences of an automobile-centered society or the work of other critics like Jane Jacobs. They also cover ground visited in its lesser-known books, like Home from Nowhere and The City in Mind. I especially enjoyed these sections, as I’ve not been able to get my hands on these books despite my interest in them. Thus, while covering familiar ground the conversations also introduce new material, making them of interest to Kunstler fans. Newcomers may appreciate a less formal introduction to these issues, especially given how easy it is to “listen” to the banter-filled conversation between these two intelligent and thoughtful men.

Given the present economics of the world, Kunstler’s work has never been more relevant, and is now all the more accessible. This is a hit for old fans and the newly interested alike. The KunstlerCast may be found at KunstlerCast.com,  with archives as far back as 2008.

Related:
The Geography of Nowhere, James Howard Kunstler
The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan
American Mania: When More Isn’t Enough, Peter Whybrow

Posted in Reviews | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Sharpe’s Sword

Posted on November 8, 2011 by smellincoffee

Sharpe’s Sword
© 1983 Bernard Cornwell
319 pages

The year is 1812, and the Napoleonic wars are broadening. After retreating to Portugal, the British army is once again on the move, now pushing into Spain to confront Napoleon’s armies in Salamanca. As much as Wellington desires to draw the French army into an engagement, his opposing counterpart is content to block the English army’s advance into Spain and threaten their supply lines,  always obstructing the English but never giving Wellington the chance to use his wiles against them. For the moment, Sharpe and his men are without battle to engage them — but not without a mission, because someone is killing England’s spies and threatening a continent-wide intelligence network. Sharpe and his comrades know who the man is, but first they must find him hiding in the city — and do so quickly, before he strikes at Wellington’s master spy.

Sharpe’s Sword is a rich, full Sharpe novel containing several military engagements — including the big battle Wellington wanted, a superior tale of the event — in addition to a plot of espionage. Cornwell thoughtfully threw in a few twists and turns, and while Sharpe’s foe is largely absent in hiding, he proves to be one of most difficult for Sharpe to defeat, nearly killing our hero — but he recovers, his faithful friend Patrick at his side, and the attention paid to their friendship is one of the book’s better moments. When reading Sharpe, I prefer his solitary adventures to the tales of battle, but Wellington’s daring attack enthralled me here. Sharpe’s Sword delivers fully.

Next up: Sharpe’s Skirmish.

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

Teaser Tuesday (8 November)

Posted on November 8, 2011 by smellincoffee

Teaser Tuesday is a bookish event in which participants share excerpts from their current reads, hosted by ShouldBeReading.

“But then Paris was a continuing lesson in the enjoyment to be found in such simple, unhurried occupations as a walk in a garden or watching children at play or just sitting observing the human cavalcade. One learned to take time to savor life, much as one took time to savor a good meal or a glass of wine. The French called it ‘l’entente de la vie’, the harmony of life.”

p. 44, The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris, David McCullough

“The problem in America is not that we’re driving the wrong kind of cars. The trouble is we’re driving every kind of car incessantly. […] Let the car die. Let the motoring system die, and let’s move on to the next thing — which ought to be good urbanism, walkable neighborhoods, walkable cities that are scaled to the true energy resources of the future, not just wishes and fantasies.”

p.11, 12  KunstlerCast: Conversations with James Howard Kunstler. Quoted from The Geography of Nowhere


And because it gives me such pleasure to read it, another from Kunstler:

Eighty percent of everything ever built in America has been built in the last fifty years, and most of it is depressing, brutal, ugly, unhealthy, and spiritually degrading — the jive plastic computer tract home wastelands, the Potemkin village shopping plazas with their vast parking lagoons, the Lego block hotel complexes, the ‘gourmet mansardic’ junk-food joints, the Orwellian office ‘parks’ featuring buildings sheathed in the same reflective glass as the sunglasses worn by chain-gang guards, the particle board garden apartments rising up in every meadow and cornfield, the freeway loops around every big and little city with their clusters of discount merchandise marts, the whole destructive, wasteful, toxic, agoraphobic-inducing spectacle that politicians proudly call ‘growth’.”

p. 2,.  KunstlerCast, quoting The Geography of Nowhere.

Posted in General | Tagged | 5 Comments

Literature, meet music!

Posted on November 7, 2011 by smellincoffee

Tonight a group of history alumni from my university have been discovering a YouTube account called “thehistorians”, in which history is told in the form of pop music parodies. I’m overwhelmed with giddiness at the find, and there’s also some devoted to classics of western literature!

Posted in General | Leave a comment

This Week at the Library…

Posted on November 2, 2011 by smellincoffee

Well, welcome to November! October seems to have been a busy month for reading, as well as a satisfying one. In addition to the books which I commented on in the last week, I also read The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, as well as The Astral by Kate Christensen. I’ll be giving The Astral more extended comments later, but suffice it to say, the book proved a most intriguing novel and I would have checked out another by Christensen if I could have remembered her last name’s spelling while in fiction.

As for The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: it collects a dozen or so Holmes stories, most set in the latter part of the great detective’s career, including  the chronologically “last” in the series in which Holmes foils a German spy on the cusp of the Great War. The afterward comments that such a story is a fitting end to the Holmes series, as the Great War completely destroyed the Victorian world that Holmes was most at home in.  In addition to conventional mysteries, the collection included four rather usual stories. Two were mysteries that Watson reports on, but not as Holmes’ assistant: indeed, Holmes never appears by name, and his anonymous attempts to solve the mysteries both propose solutions which turn out to be wrong. They’re impressive guesses, but wrong all the same. One of these stories, involving a missing train, happened to be my favorite — largely because how does a train go missing?  The last two stories, including “How Watson Learned the Trick”, were almost disappointing in their brevity. Indeed, they’re not stories so much as brief scenes in which Doyle pokes fun at his detective’s style of logical deduction — or so the afterward tells me.  Even so, that style is most impressive: in a story I’m reading now, Holmes figures the speed of the train by noting the rate at which telegraph poles are passing by. Since he knows the distance between each pole,  he can count the miles and speed without reference to a speedometer or mile posts.

At the library this week, I picked up…

  • The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, which is another Readers Digestion collection of Holmes stories like the last two I read, in the same handsome binding with an attractive font and illustrations. 
  • The Age of Louis XIV, Will Durant. Time for another big helping of European history.
  • Sharpe’s Sword, Bernard Cornwell. I’ve watched the movie version of this before,  but the Sharpe movies and Sharpe books vary wildly so I don’t think I’ve been too much spoiled beyond “Sharpe deals with loathsome aristocrats, Sharpe fights a really big battle and almost dies”…but those are elements of every Sharpe novel. 
  • The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris, David McCullough. McCullough is a popular and well-acclaimed historian, most famous for his 1776 and a large biography of John Adams.  This appeared in the library’s new acquisitions section, and I picked it up out of curiosity.
  • The Book of Guys, Garrison Keiler. As a regular NPR listener, I’m accustomed to his voice and humor but have never read one of his books. 

Since we’re coming up on 5 November, I really should have checked out something on English history to continue my yearly tradition of reading culture-related books on nationalish holidays.  I’ve been struggling to get that tradition off the ground — there hasn’t been a year when I’ve done all four (American, 4 July; French, 14 July;  German, 3 October; England, 5 November) successfully, this year included. I never finished my Fourth of July Reading, didn’t finish my Bastille Day Reading until August, and now don’t have a proper Guy Fawkes reading. I suppose Sharpe could count, being a work by an English author and starring an English main character,  and Sherlock Holmes is an English creation as well…but it feels like cheating, because I would have read them anyway.

A question to English readers — might St. George’s day be more appropriate for me to do an English-culture related reading?  I know Guy Fawkes Night isn’t a “national” holiday, but I chose it because it was the only national-ish holiday I knew of.  Whenever I mention this book/culture project of mine at forums, English commenters seem to think my choice of dates is an odd one.

Posted in Reviews | 1 Comment

Sharpe’s Company

Posted on October 31, 2011 by smellincoffee

Sharpe’s Company
© 1982 Bernard Cornwell
280 pages

Spring 1812. After wintering behind its protective battle lines, the British army is ready to begin driving Monsieur Bonaparte out of Spain — but first, there’s a great big fortress at Badajoz to capture. The fortress has thwarted previous attempts at seizure by the British, but it must be taken….and Richard Sharpe must take it, for his promotion to Captain was refused and now he is but a lowly lieutenant, separated from his friends and his company. Only through some glorious triumph can he salvage his wounded pride and restore his proper rank. Worse yet, he’s forced to contend with  an old nemesis, Sergeant Hakeswill, who must be one of the most perfectly loathsome men in all of English literature. Hakeswill is a malevolent force that Sharpe must destroy, for the contemptible sergeant has his eyes set on destroying Sharpe’s love Teresa….and their daughter.

 The personal odds are as high as they’ve ever been for Sharpe, and the final battle one of his most difficult.  The prospect of Sharpe losing his company and his best friend should strike a chord with readers, for we have seen his bond with them grow throughout this series. Originally, Sharpe was assigned as their quartermaster, and when he presumed to take actual command the men hated him for it. Now Sharpe and his company are as loyal to one another as is humanely possible, and though fate and war would seem to drive them apart they will defy both and reunite to help accomplish one of Britain’s most memorable victories — one again, as an American, I’ve never heard of.  Company is one of the more intense Sharpe novels, although it does not quite satisfy in the matter of Obadiah Hakeswill. Still, I look forward to Sharpe’s Sword.

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

Clash of Wings

Posted on October 31, 2011 by smellincoffee

Clash of Wings: World War II in the Sky
© 1994 Walter J. Boyne
415 pages

Although European powers employed aircraft during war early in the 20th century, and they saw widespread use during the Great War as tools supplementing armies, not until the Second World War did military aviation truly come into its own. Who can think of those years and miss the Battle of Britain and the Blitz, or the furious carrier battles in the Pacific like that of Midway? During World War II, aircraft were manufactured at a rate never before seen and the respective powers turned them into weapons in their own right, leveling cities with bombers and making command of the air as crucial as command of the ground. In Clash of Wings, aviator and military historian Walter J. Boyne explores every aspect of the war in which aircraft were involved, from the large battles in which they dominated to the smaller affairs where they only assisted. He examines not just the planes, tactics, and strategy of various European powers, but the organizational strengths of the contending air forces. The result is a thorough guide to World War II’s skies, a gold mine for students of the period.

Boyne leaps into the action straightaway, focusing immediately on the outbreak of war in Europe, though he does explain how history influenced every nation to develop the air strategy it did. Necessity also shaped strategy: while Britain’s air policy may have been influenced by the memory of Germany’s bombing raids in the first world war, it focused on long-distance bombers because bombers were its primary means of fighting Germany until the Axis began stumbling around in northern Africa. Japan’s small  but elite air arm evolved to destroy inferior opponents, like the Russians and Chinese, but  proved to be insufficient for long-term war with a fully industrialized power like that of the United States.  This is an incredibly busy history, as airplanes were ubiquitious during the conflict and were the main contendors in some campaigns:  it is hard to imagine any conflict out-doing WWII in putting airplanes to tactical and strategic use, winning both battles and destroying Hitler’s means of fighting. Boyne even devotes chapters to airplanes’ use in fighting submarines, or supplying Chinese nationalists in their fight against the Japanese.  As an aviator himself, he’s always kind to the airmen of every country, saving his harshest criticism for those high in the organizational ranks who failed to provide just or competent leadership. He also evaluates the machines themselves from a technical point of view,  where his own piloting experience proves useful.

I have been reading books about military aviation for over a decade now, and the quality of this book astonishes me. The wealth of information should make it staggeringly valuable to someone writing a paper on the subject, for Boyne’s history not only covers every conceivable aspect of the air war but also includes production and loss numbers throughout, in addition to several appendices. The book’s organization keeps all this information nicely contained and quickly accessible, and Boyne’s passion for the subject makes his tale an engaging one to read.  I must read more Boyne, and strongly recommend this work.

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

The Rapture Exposed

Posted on October 31, 2011 by smellincoffee

The Rapture Exposed: the Message of Hope in the Book of Revelation
© 2004 Barbara R. Rossing
224 pages

“When evil men plot, good men must plan. When evil men burn and bomb, good men must build and bind. When evil men shout ugly words of hatred, good men must commit themselves to the glories of love.”
– Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

I am amazed that so much of the horror of my youth was built on so pathetic a foundation.  As a child growing up in a fundamentalist Christian sect,  I was promised a future filled with horror and dread if I was not a perfect child. Any day now, any moment,  all the “real” Christians would float into the sky and the rest of us would be abandoned to seven years of war, chaos, pestilence,  and an evil totalitarian state that encompassed the entire earth. During my adolescence, I frequently panicked and grew fearful if I lost communication with my parents, and often had nightmares about the world to come. Not until I left religion in 2006 did this fear subside, but now that I find that not only is this interpretation of Revalation badly assembled, but that an alternative interpretation carres at its heart what attracts people to Jesus and Christianity: the message that love and peaceful action can overcome evil. In The Rapture Exposed, Barbara Rossing tears apart the Left Behind story, urges readers to combat its political influence in the middle east, and explains her own view.

Around fifteen years ago, the Left Behind series became enormously popular in the United States. The series began with the Rapture spiriting away all the real, true Christians in addition to every child on earth, and then followed a collection of fairly cretinous heroes as they dedicated themselves to God in the aftermath and sought to effect his will throughout the Great Tribulation. The books were fairly terrible (and I say that speaking as someone who read all sixteen), but benefited from the kind of dread and expectation that the coming of a new Millenium brought with it. The series offered Christians horror and drama withotu sex and ‘bad words’, and is dominated throughout by a self-congratulatory spirit. Despite this, the worldview is distressingly influential.   Rossi opens by first pointing out that this great horrible story of the Rapture has no genuine biblical basis. While its proponents use a collection of Biblical verses from Revelations, Thessalonians, and Daniel to tell their story, that collection is a patchwork fraud — like a randsom note  written by cutting out letters from magazine articles and gluing them together to turn cheerful advertisments into death threats.  That is essentially what Rossing believes Rapturists have done with Revelation, a book written in her view to offer encouragment to Christians under persecution. She delves into the history of Rapture belief, as well as the history of the early church, pointing out that Revelation belongs to a genre of literature known as Apocalypses, and she uses an excellent metaphor (Scrooge’s vision in A Christmas Carol) to  point out that its story need not actually happen for its meaning to be significant.

That meaning, for Rossi, is not one of dread and horror, but of the victory of love. As she guides readers through the book of Revelation, we see that the predominant portrayal of Jesus is one of a slain lamb. She urges readers to  use Revelation’s story to help them see the here and now as the Kingdom of God, and their Christian duty in fully realizing it by fighting injustice, serving others, and making this world as best as it can be. In Rossi’s view, debunking Rapture mythology is essential not only in fighting escapism or perverting a message of hope into one of horror, but in ending its current political influence as politicians like George W. Bush, Sarah Palin, and other members of the self-proclaimed moral majority allow Left Behind mythology to influence their potential policy decisions in the middle east.  She ends by offering a selection of verses which Rapture-believers bank on, and then commenting on their meanings within their actual literary or historical context.  The book isn’t as thorough a resource as someone struggling with the rapture might like — there’s no mention of how Christians have historically viewed Revelation outside of the brief 200 years the Rapture has been around — but it should suffice as a wake-up call, or at the very least allow readers to appreciate Revelation for the first time as something other than the work of a madman on a “bad trip”.

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

The Lost Hero

Posted on October 31, 2011 by smellincoffee

The Lost Hero
© 2010 Rick Riordian
557 pages

Rick Riordian’s debut novels introduced us to Percy Jackson, a half-mortal half-divine Demigod destined to save the world. Now the hero of heroes has vanished — and three new demigods have come into Camp Half-Blood’s care,  all older than the usual freshman camper and all with troubled histories.  The oldest, Jason, doesn’t even know who he is.  These are dark days for the kids of Camp Half-Blood: their leader has vanished,  Olympus is closed, the gods are silent, and strange things are rumbling in the darkness. A great conflict is a-building, and it will test the mettle of three new heroes — Jason, Piper, and Leo.  The result is an exciting, unpredictable story that’s left me looking to a sequel with eager anticipation.

The Lost Hero is most impressive. Although I looked forward to revisiting the Greek gods, I did have concerns that it might be repetitive. This isn’t the case. Three distinct viewpoint characters tell the story, and each have a history that has set them up for conflict with one another and their allies in the story; they all start out compromised, unlike Percy and Annabeth. Riordan is clearly writing for a more mature audience here: there’s more work put into the long-term story, and the writing itself isn’t as light-hearted in nature as with the kids’ series. The reader is treated to two stories — not only the action-adventure thriller, as the three struggle against monsters to prevail, but a darker mystery:  there’s clearly a larger story behind this one, but we have no idea what role Destiny has in mind for the heroes. This mystery is gripping and the ending a spectacular reveal. I’m quite excited about future offerings in this series.

———-

I wrote this on 6 October, but for some reason never got around to posting it.

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

The Age of Reason Begins

Posted on October 26, 2011 by smellincoffee

The Age of Reason Begins
© 1961 Will and Aerial Durant
729 pages


“We are all citizens of one world, we are all of one blood. To hate a man because he was born in another county, because he speaks a different language, or because he takes a different view on this subject or that, is a great folly. Desist, I implore you, for we are all equally human…Let us have but one end in view, the welfare of humanity; and let us put aside all selfishness in considerations of language, nationalism, or religion.” – p. John Comenius, b. 1592

After struggling through two centuries of Catholics and Protestants screaming at each other in The Reformation,  The Age of Reason Begins promised deliverance:  bring on the Enlightenment!  The opening chapters encouraged those newfound feelings of belief: enter Queen Elizabeth and Shakespeare!  Look, in the table of contents — there’s Montaigne! An a full section devoted to science. Glory, hallelujah. And yet,  The Age of Reason Begins is just as dominated by religion as The Reformation; almost moreso, because its contents are almost wholly devoted to religious wars and interdenominational persecution.  England and France’s wars are followed by the Thirty Years’ War, to the point that I began to look forward to sections on architecture and literature because they promised some relief from the constant bloodletting. And yet, as Durant points out, these conflicts helped clear the way for the Enlightenment. The utter savageness and prolonged nature of these conflicts  —  and the fact that there were no good guys, only a multitude of opinionated, bloodthirsty cretins who caused me to yell “A plague on ALL YOUR HOUSES!” at least once while reading —   sapped faith’s credibility in the minds of Europeans. In desperation to escape the insanity, they turned intstead to philosophy and science.  Thus a grisly read offers relief by ending on a happier note.

Posted in history, Reviews | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment