The Moscow Option

Posted on April 20, 2009 by smellincoffee

The Moscow Option
© 2006 David Downing
256 pages

Working in a university setting means being surrounded by readers, and this occasionally gives rise to book recommendations. This week, I read a brief alternate history book from the library of my boss, who thought I might be interested in it. Written by David Downing, The Moscow Option is a summary of what happened in different World War 2 in which Germany and Japan are given advantages they did not hold in real life — twists of fate that went their way and not the Allies’. While I am a touch weary of “Nazi victory” scenarios, seeing Wehrmacht troops marching through Moscow on the front cover piqued my curiosity. More than a little of my interest stems from the treatment of east Germans under the Soviet puppet government during the Cold War, I must admit.

Surprisingly, the book isn’t a “Nazi victory” scenario: the book ends in 1942 with neither side victorious, although the reader is given an impression of who will triumph in the end. The “surprisingly” part is even more so because — not only is that the way books are written — but because the book is written from the perspective of a historian, who is seeing these events as the past. He knows what’s going to happen: he just doesn’t finish the entire story for the reader. This is apparently a “Why did the war go that way instead of another?” book written for people living in an alternate universe.

Downing begins the books by writing that he wanted to modify the direction of the war by adjusting subtle things after it had already started. There are two major points of deviation that I observed: firstly, Hitler is rendered comatose after a plane crash on the Russian front, thus preventing him from interfering in the various Wehrmacht generals’ plans for bringing the USSR down. Secondly, the Japanese figure out that their codes have been broken shortly before Midway. The book’s writing is a bit technical: it isn’t a narrative. This is a nonfiction book of military history written about a fictional event, and it reads like a military report with some literacy devices thrown in. I often read through passages of short sentences that could have easily been linked with commas and conjunctions, and should have. In other passages, the author linked sentences together with commas but nothing else, forcing the reader to mentally add in the phrases that tie sentences together. There were a few highlights: alternative historians like to wink at real history by hinting at what-might-have-been, and in a few cases Downing adds a good bit of humor and muscle to the skeleton of a historical account he has rendered. In writing on a Japanese air attack on Los Angeles, for instance, Downing writes that a stray bomb knocked the “H” and the “Wood” off of the famous Hollywood sign, and then cites Oliver Hardy claiming that the Japanese recognized his artistic merit. (Granted, this joke is only amusing to those who are familiar with the work of Laurel and Hardy.)

The history rendered is interesting, and probably plausible in most aspects. (I don’t know enough about the minutia of the war to grouse about anything, anyway.) The writing itself, however, needed work.

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The Guiding Light of Lao Tzu

Posted on April 20, 2009 by smellincoffee

The Guiding Light of Lao Tzu : A New Translation and Commentary on the Tao Teh Ching
© 1982 Henry Wei
234 pages

In the interests of cultural literacy, I’ve been trying to get a handle on major religions I have little knowledge of: this mostly extends to the “eastern” religions, as I’ve read on Judaism and Islam in the past — although my Islamic literacy is still quite limited. As evidenced by previous’ weeks’ reading, I’ve been poking into Buddhism. Now, my interested piqued by a quotation from Lao Tzu posted in someone’s forum signature, I turn to Taoism. The book is divided into two sections. In the first, the author addresses various topics within Taoism. Wei begins with an introduction to Taoism. The “Tao” is alternatively the way people should follow and some thing behind or underpinning the universe, although it seems to be separate from the idea of God. It is described in various “mysterious” ways.

Although I found the first section cumbersome, my interest picked up after he began writing on topics relating to meditation. Throughout this section — and indeed, throughout the book — Wei tries to connect the Tao Teh Ching with scripture from the Judeo-Christian bible. The second section of the book consists of the Tao Teh Ching itself with annotations and explanations provided by Wei. Because Wei had already talked about interpetations of topics within the text, I wasn’t quite as confused as I might have been when reading the poetic and “mysterious” passages. The book seems to have been written for the benefit of rulers, so some of the advice is impractical for those of us who don’t manage kingdoms of peasants. There wasn’t as much ethical philosophy as I expected, but it wasn’t terrible reading.

When the world goes in accord with Tao,
Horses are used for hauling manure.
When the world is out of keeping with Tao,
Horses are raised in the suburbs for war.
No sin is greater than yielding to desires.
No misfortune is greater than not knowing contentment.
No fault is greater than hankering after wealth.
Therefore, know contentment.
He who knows contentment is always content.

This was the only bit of the translation I copied, although there were other bits and phrases “a hallway filled with jade is not easily guarded” that I liked. I’m not exactly sure why I copied the above down: I don’t agree with it fully*, and parts of it like the last line seem to state the obvious.

*Desires aren’t always unhealthy to fulfill.

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Kingdoms of Gold, Kingdoms of Jade

Posted on April 18, 2009 by smellincoffee
Kingdoms of Gold, Kingdoms of Jade: the Americas Before Columbus
© 1991 Brian M. Fagan
240 pages, including 180 photographs set into the text

I’ve had a fascination with the Aztecs for most of my life, since I first saw pictures in second grade depicting their water-city Tenochtitlan. Growing up in Alabama, my fourth-grade history text also introduced me to the fascinating lifestyles of the various indigenous people living here before European colonization. As such, I looked forward to reading this, which I figured would deal heavily with the Aztecs, Maya, and Inca. My interest in getting a book by this particular author stems from a lecture he gave at my university a number of weeks back, in which he described the Mayan temples as both sacred places and ways to catch and channel water. Although the book does address the three cultures I expected, the book’s scope is more broad than that and so Fagan does not go into a lot of detail — there are many other cultures to visit.

Although he begins with brief chapters on the Aztecs and Incans, he quickly moves to the beginning of human settlements in the Americas. I’m hard-pressed to make sense of his organizational scheme: although writing on civilizations and cultures all over the Americas, he tends to move back and forth through time. The smaller cultures are not ignored in favor of the more memorable ones, an approach I grew to like. Although the information I was expecting was not in here — the water-channelling rule of Mayan temples — there is a wealth of information on the various cultures of the pre–Columbian Americas. Fagan writes on politics, agriculture, religion, symbolism, and history. He ends the book with a quick lecture on what the Americas gave the world in terms of foodstuffs and medicinal knowledge.

The book is well-written, provides ample pictures for illustration, and provides what I think is a generally good survey of the Americas. I enjoyed this book more than The Great Warming, at any rate, and will continue reading Fagan.

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Shattered Mirror

Posted on April 17, 2009 by smellincoffee

Shattered Mirror
© 2001 Amelia Atwater-Rhodes
227 pages

Given the current Twilight mania, I am just a touch self-conscious about reading a vampire novel written for young adults. Back in high school I read Atwater-Rhodes’ In the Forests of the Night, and found it entrancing. Her world was different from the fantasy settings I’d read about before, and her rules seemed to make more sense. It was also dark, but not off-puttingly so. A few months back I finally got around to reading another novel of hers, and here I read a third. The book is written in the third-person, but sometimes seemed like first-person, as most of the book is spent in the protagonist’s — Sarah Vida — head. Interestingly, Sarah is very much like Rhodes’ previous protagonists: teenage, female, living on the fringes, “dark”, strong, and very stubborn and independent. Despite this, Sarah is fundamentally different from the other protagonists: Risika was a vampire, Jessica Shade a human, and Sarah a witch.

Witches were mentioned in In the Forests of the Night as being vampire-hunters, but in Demon in my View, we learned through the story of Jessica Shade that witches seek to protect humanity from the vampires who prey on them — although it is clear that some witches enjoy killing vampires for the sake of killing. I found this idea very intriguing, so I was delighted to learn that this book’s protagonist was a witch — and specifically, a hunter. Using an ability to detect vampiric auras, superhuman strength, and magic knives, she and her kin seek out vampires and kill them. As the book begins, Sarah and her family have recently moved to a small Massachusetts town, prompted by Sarah accidentally destroying part of her school in a recent hunt. (This reminds me of Riordian’s Percy Jackson series, in which Jackson seems to switch schools every book after destroying part of each school he visits by defending himself against monsters. ) As soon as Sarah enters her first classroom, she immediately catches the attention of two teenage vampires.

Sarah’s life and the lives of the two vampires — Nissa and Christopher — will be drawn into friendship and conflict as Sarah tries to reconcile the rules of her family, her moral imperative to kill vampires, and the confusion that is wrought when her family’s leading target turns out to be connected to the two vampires Sarah meets. Atwater-Rhodes expands her universe in this book, adding in a “SingleEarth” organization — a union of vampires, witches, and humans who want to live peacefully together. Compared to the two other books I’ve read by her, this one was “busy”. I think this is so because there are more principle characters. In the Forests of the Night had two, Risika and Aubrey: their power conflict constituted the plot of the book. Demon in my View had three: Jessica Shade, Aubrey, and a teenage witch who tries to protect Jessica from her and Aubrey’s increasing interest in one another. This book has four principle characters and three more who cannot be ignored. Consequently, there were times I had to pause and re-read parts of the book to keep track of what was happening. Regardless, the book was a quick and enjoyable read.

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Persian Fire

Posted on April 16, 2009 by smellincoffee

Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West
© 2005 Tom Holland
418 pages

After reading Holland’s Rubicon, blogger ResoluteReader recommended that I read Persian Fire as well. I have an interest in the various Persian and Babylonian empires that rose and fell thousands of years ago, and given my strong interest in the ancient Greeks, the book was thus quite appealing. Holland begins his narrative by establishing the early histories of the Persian Empire, Athens, and Sparta, including Persia’s absorption of the Babylonian and Egyptian polities. I knew very little about the various empires in “Iran”, and was especially surprised to learn about the religious aspects of the Persian emperors. Holland will frame the emperors’ religious views in explaining their decisions to move to the east. A couple of them seem to think of themselves as Plato’s philosopher-king’s. In telling the story of the Greeks, Holland is especially through in detailing their petty quarrels with one another.

Roughly around the three-fifths mark, Greece and Persian come into conflict and resulting chapters detail the Persian Wars that Darius and Xerxes carried out against the Greeks. The Persian motivations are quite romantic: they intend to show everyone that Ahura Mazda is not mocked, nor is his Empire scorned, and neither will either tolerate “evil”. The classic battles of the wars — Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis — are all included, typically given a chapter all of their own. The book is quite thorough and very readable. Although its level of detail amounts of a somewhat imposing read, it’s fairly easy to get through. He does persist in using modern terminology — putsch, generalissimo, and so on — but that’s just a trifling matter. The book ends by hinting at the conflict between Athens and Sparta — the “Peloponnesian Wars”.

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This Week at the Library (13-4)

Posted on April 13, 2009 by smellincoffee

Books this Update:

  • Gang Leader for a Day, Sudhir Venkatesh
  • Arms of Nemesis, Steven Saylor
  • The Universe in a Single Atom, Tenzin Gyatso

This week’s reading started off on a high note, with Sudhir Venkatesh’s Gang Leader for a Day, an account of how he spent six years spending time in a Chicago in the midst of a gang of drug traffickers, making their base the Robert Taylor housing projects. Although the book does serve to give the reader an idea of what life is like for gang members, it isn’t really a work of voyeurism. It reflects his dissertation in that it does show how impoverished people are struggling and adapting themselves to their situation. In a place where the federal government doesn’t exist and the city government is negligent when not impotent, people make due with what they’ve got, leading people to make what an outsider would see as morally questionable choices. I found myself both sympathizing with and slightly put-off by some of the people who emerged. At the same time Venkatesh is writing about this community in the projects, he also labors to connect it with the greater context of the late 20th century and especially the early 1990s. It was a very readable book.

Next I read Steven Saylor’s Arms of Nemesis, another mystery novel set in ancient Rome starring the classical detective Gordianus the Finder. After being pulled out of bed in the middle of the night and offered enormous amounts of money to take a job, he finds himself on a ship leaving Rome and headed for the “Cup” of Italy, where all the patricians keep their villas. One particular patrician, Marcus Crassus, has recently lost a family member: his brother, who manages one of his estates, has gotten himself killed. Two slaves have also vanished, and a message on the floor near the fallen body implies that they have revolted and run off to join Spartacus. Crassus, who wants the Senate to grant him an army to destroy Spartacus with, declares that in five days his remaining slaves in the villa will be put to death if Gordianus does not find that they are innocent. Gordianus soon realizes that Crassus neither expects nor wants the slaves to be vindicated: he is in fact disturbingly anticipating the opportunity to show how tough he is by putting them to the death. When Gordianus finds hidden piles of weapons and gold in the villa’s port, he begins to suspect that something larger is happening — and it may be large enough to get Gordianus himself killed. The book was quite enjoyable, more so than Roman Blood in my opinion.

Lastly, I read the Dalai Lama’s The Univere in a Single Atom, in which he attempts to connect Buddhist ideas like “emptiness” and “the beginningless universe” to quantum theory and the big bang. He also reflects on Buddhist and scientific ideas concerning consciousness and writes about possible problems with genetic engineering. The chapters on consciousness were interesting, but overall I could have given the book a pass.

I almost finished with Persian Fire, but my busy schedule — tests and papers — stopped me from that.

Pick of the Week: Gang Leader for a Day, Sudhir Venkatesh

Quotation of the Week: “Decapitation has a way of making even the most powerful men irrelevent.” – Steven Saylor, commenting on Crassus‘ eventual fate in his epilogue.

Potentials for Next Week:

  • Persian Fire, Tom Holland. I’ll finish the last fifty pages or so.
  • The Guiding Light of Lao Tzu, Henry Wei
  • Kingdoms of Gold, Kingdoms of Jade: the Americas Before Columbus, Brian Fagan
  • Shattered Mirror, Amelia Atwater-Rhodes
  • Embroidered Textiles (I thought this would be a book on world religions for some reason.)
  • The Moscow Option, David Downing
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The Universe in a Single Atom

Posted on April 13, 2009 by smellincoffee

The Universe in a Single Atom: the Convergence of Science and Spirituality
© 2005 Tenzin Gyatso
224 pages

This week marked the first time that I read something by the Dalai Lama that was not concerned primarily with ethics. The book begins with “Reflections”, as author Tenzin Gyatso tells of how he became fascinated by the world of science and technology. He then launches into the book proper, looking for connections between Buddhism and modern science. His opening chapters deal with “Emptiness, Relativity, and Quantum Physics”, which reminded me of Doug Muder’s essay Humanist Spirituality in which he begins by dispelling the idea that quantum mechanics is mystical. (I have run into this attitude myself, in meditating with a friend. When I asked him to explain his belief in chi, he asked me if I believed in quantum mechanics.) His next chapters deal with the evolution of sentience and cosmological evolution, in which he compares the Buddhist idea of the “beginningless universe” to the big bang. Several chapters on consciousness follow, and he ends with a chapter on the ethics of genetic manipulation.

It’s hard to comment on the book: doing so would require greater understanding of the ideas he is comparing. I thought the chapters on consciousness were interesting, and he seems generally fair about the idea of genetic engineering in plants. He’s also critical of “scientific materialism” and enjoys using “reductionism” and variations thereof. I didn’t find what I was expecting in this book, namely biological reasons for acting ethically. I suppose I shall have to stick to Richard Dawkins‘ The Selfish Gene, since in it he explores the idea of altruism being beneficial to us.

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Arms of Nemesis

Posted on April 12, 2009 by smellincoffee

Arms of Nemesis: A Mystery of Ancient Rome
© 1992 Steven Saylor
318 pages

Two weeks ago I read Roman Blood, a mystery novel set in late-Republican Rome. It was the first in the series Roma sub Rosa, and Arms of Nemesis is the second. Both are written in the first-person from the perspective of Gordianus the Finder, the era’s version of a private detective. The book begins with a rude awakening: Gordianus is summoned by gladiators to enter the service of an as-yet-unknown benefactor at five times his usual rate. Gordianus, being curious and in need of the money, agrees. Soon he finds himself on a ship headed for the “Cup” of Italy: the arch of its “boot”. Along the way, Gordianus muses himself about the ill treatment of slaves, which hints at the plot.

Once arriving in the Cup, Gordianus confirms what he already suspects: he has been hired by Marcus Crassus, the richest man in Rome. Crassus is a mysterious and potentially dangerous man to work for: he is known as the richest man in Rome and has a private army. He is also in the middle of a power struggle with Pompey the Great, which I’ve read about in Rubicon and Imperium. Crassus‘ brother, who managed one of Crassus‘ many villas, has suddenly turned up missing half of his head. Two slaves are also missing, and the presumption is that the two slaves murdered their master and then ran off to join Spartacus, who is at the present time terrorizing the patricians of the Republic with his army of slaves-turned-revolutionaries. The dead man’s wife doesn’t buy the idea that the slaves of the house did this, and so at her bidding Crassus has agreed to allow someone to investigate the matter. That someone is Gordianus, and he soon finds out that if he does not find out who is responsible for this in five days, the remaining slaves of the villa — 99 in all — will be butchered as an deterrent to other patricians’ slaves and to prove the manliness of Crassus.

As Gordianus develops his investigation, he begins to suspect that Crassus has no real interest in questioning the supposed guilt of the slaves, and realizes that Crassus may want to make an example out of them just to prove to the Senate that he is quite the embodiment of Roman virtue and thus perfectly fit to be given command of the army being raised to fight Spartacus. The plot further thickens when Gordianus discovers bags of swords, shields, spears, and money hidden in the port of the villa: clearly, there is something else going on here other than revolt by two slaves.

The book was very enjoyable to read, and I must say that I like it over Roman Blood. I was not expecting the plot to end the way it did, but it ended well.

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Gang Leader for a Day

Posted on April 8, 2009 by smellincoffee

Gang Leader for a Day: a Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets
© 2008 Sudhir Venkatesh
302 pages

One of my ways to find reading related to my interests is to visit Amazon and search for books I have read before and liked: I then browse the “Related Books” section. It was in this way that I found Gang Leader for a Day, having searched for Freakonomics. One particular section in Freaknomics — about a young University of Chicago graduate student who spent years associating with a Chicago gang, whose research showed how little money most crack dealers actually made — intrigued me, and after I began reading Gang Leader for a Day I realized that this was the very same graduate student.

The story goes that while a grad student at UC, Venkatesh joined a project overseen byDr. William Julius Wilson and was tasked with visiting a housing development and asking a few questions. Venkatesh does so, and immediately draws the attention of several gang members who believe him to be a spy from one of the Mexican gangs in the city. They force him to stay in one of the buildings under their paranoid eyes while they wait for their boss (a man Venkatesh will name “J.T.”) to arrive. When J.T. he arrives, he asks Venkatesh about his studies, and bursts into laughter when Venkatesh begins to ask him questions from his survey — “How does it feel to be black and poor?” J.T. quickly informs Venkatesh that if he wants to find out about life in the projects, he has to spend time with the people who live there — not walk around with a clipboard asking census questions.

So begins an at least six-year project in which Venkatesh spends time with people living in the Robert Taylor housing projects in Chicago, a a major source of drug trafficking. While Venkatesh’s initial years are spent with J.T. and other members of the BK gang, his research — which eventually assumes the form of exploring how people living there respond to poverty — takes him into the community of the housing projects. The distinction between the two is very vague: the gang members are quick to assert that the gang is a community-building project, hosting parties and helping out people who need a hand, and as Venkatesh will see, community leaders from tenant presidents to local ministers have to deal with the gang as if they were a “legitimate” part of the community. Indeed, Venkatesh documents the power conflict between J.T. and Ms. Bailey, the tenant president.

This is not a Goodfellas–esque work of voyeurism: Venkatesh’s book does more than just showing the “secret work of drug leaders”. It reflects his dissertation in that it does show how impoverish people are struggling and adapting themselves to their situation. In a place where the federal government doesn’t exist and the city government is negligent when not impotent, people make due with what they’ve got, leading people to make what an outsider would see as morally questionable choices. I found myself both sympathizing with and slightly put-off by some of the people who emerged. At the same time Venkatesh is writing about this community in the projects, he also labors to connect it with the greater context of the late 20th century and especially the early 1990s.

The book makes for gripping reading. It’s an easy narrative to read through, even when Venkatesh is trying to relate what he’s seeing to the outside world and thus giving the reader background information. It’s also extremely thought-provoking. I’m not reading the book at a very deep level, but even in my relatively casual reading experience a lot of questions surfaced. It changed my idea of what Chicago gangs were like — I am only familiar with the old Italian gangs of Prohibition and to a lesser extent the modern drug gangs in Los Angeles — but it also showed me how deep the problem of inner-city decay is. It also helped me to understand a little of the racial divide in Chicago, something I hadn’t thought of until last Saturday when I listened to a This American Life show called “The Wrong Side of History”. It gives me a new respect for what President Obama and his colleagues must have had to go through when working in Chicago, and now I want to read about his work there.

I definitely recommend this.

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This Week at the Library (6/4)

Posted on April 6, 2009 by smellincoffee

Books this Update:

  • Through a Window, Jane Goodall
  • The Book that Changed My Life, ed. Roxanne J. Coady
  • The Great Warming, Brian Fagan
  • The Ghost, Robert Harris
  • The Words of Martin Luther King, ed. Coretta Scott King

Four out of five authors recommend starting book titles with “The”. Jane Goodall, the lone voice of opposition, is mildly famous for her experiences living among chimpanzees, and in Through a Window she records some of her experiences. I’ve never read any Goodall before this week, but I must say she’s earned her reputation for being enjoyable to read. She has spent decades of her life among the chimpanzees, watching generation turn into generation and leaders rise and fall. Her book explores themes as they relate to chimpanzee society — war, family, sex, etc. — and devotes specific chapters to certain chimpanzee individuals that made a larger-than-normal impact on their communities or were of particular interest to Goodall and her colleagues. She also compares chimpanzee behavior to human behavior and chastises humanity our unneighborly behavior.

Next I read The Book that Changed My Life, a collection of essays by seventy-one authors on the books that had a profound impact upon them. Perhaps the book gave them a love for reading, made them think a new thought, or led them to making life choices that they might not have otherwise made. Being the philistine I am, I recognized only two of the essayists — Senators Joe Lieberman and John McCain. The books the various authors chose are mostly literature, although there a few nonfiction titles thrown in here and there: Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August, for instance, or Ernst Becker’s The Denial of Death.

A couple of months ago or so, professor Brian M. Fagan spoke at my university on the topic of climate change and its influence on human history. While his lecture and The Great Warming began with the positive effects of the “Medieval Warm Period” on Europe’s climate and civilizations, the net effect on humanity does not appear to have been positive. Most of the book is concerned with droughts, flooding, and mudslides. There are not isolated affairs, either: Fagan places special emphasis on the fact that these drought periods were extended, wreaking havoc across generations. While the information presented was disturbing and interesting, it wasn’t the strongest narrative I’ve read. I will be visiting more Fagan, though.

What is a strong narrative is Robert Harris’ The Ghost, a short novel about the mysteries that surround the United Kingdom’s retired prime minister after he announces he intends to publish his memoirs. After Adam Lang’s ghostwriter strangely washes up on a beach, his lawyer contracts our narrator to edit and build on the work already done. Because the memoirs are supposed to be written in Lang’s voice, the narrator must find Lang’s voice — but Lang is both a politician and a man, and the ghostwriter struggles in finding who the real Lang is. While he investigates into Lang’s past to find reasons for his taking up the vocation of politics, he is bothered by the mysterious death of his predecessor and the feeling that something isn’t right. He soon finds himself in the middle of a mystery/political thriller that has lethal consequences — possibly for himself. I enjoyed it immensely.

Lastly I read a collected set of quotations by Martin Luther King Jr, compiled by his now-late wife Coretta Scott King. I don’t have much to say about a book of quotations: it’s not a very cohesive source. Bits of his two most famous speeches are added at the bottom, but not the full text of either. I saw no selections from “Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam”, the speech that made King come alive for me. This was somewhat disappointing.

Quotation of the Week: “What Camus is saying is that there is reason to be hopeful, that man must understand his condition and must struggle, fight, and rebel against the absurdity of life. There is hope, and hope is to be found in man and in man only. Man defines himself, gives himself an identity through his actions. Even though the futility of our condition leads us all to the same end, we must and can dignify life through our needs and behavior.” – Jacques Pepin, commenting on Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus.

Pick of the Week: Tie between Through a Window and The Ghost.

Next Week:

  • Arms of Nemesis, Steven Saylor. I’m continuing in the Roma sub Rosa series.
  • Gang Leader for a Day: a Rouge Sociologist Takes to the Streets, Sudhir Venkatesh
  • Persian Fire, Tom Holland — a recommendation from “ResoluteReader“.
  • Scientific Explorers: Travels in Search of Knowledge, Rebecca Stefoff
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