Breakfast with Seneca: A Stoic Guide to the Art of Living

 

Breakfast with Seneca: A Stoic Guide to the Art of Living by David R. Fideler is a gentle ride into Stoicism.  This is appropriate, as in many ways, Seneca is the most humane, approachable Stoic.  Fideler provides us an excellent overview of his famous letters – delving into the practice of this “late” Roman Stoic and how his thoughts and life can impact us.

I will admit that among the three “late” Roman Stoics, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, and Epictetus, Seneca is not my favorite.  Epictetus is stern and technical.  Marcus writes beautifully, and the form of his Meditations is perfect for quick dives into Stoic philosophy.  I read Seneca over thirty years ago – and found him too pedestrian.  I would read Epictetus and Marcus any  day. But now, older, perhaps I need the pedestrian.  So Fideler’s book has caused me to pick up my old copy of Seneca’s letters. 

Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire

 

Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire is David Anderson’s able history of the uprising of various factions of the Kenyan people in the 1950s, especially the so-called Mau Mau.  Anderson has written a detailed history – this is a book that goes in deep.  That said, if you are not interested in this topic, or looking for a gentle way in to the subject, perhaps this book is not for you.

Yet the Mau Mau Rebellion is part of the integral story of the colonial and post-colonial world of Africa.  If you are going to read this book, then study it deeply.  Anderson’s book will allow you to go waist-deep.

If I Die in a Combat Zone: Box Me Up and Ship Me Home

 

Tim O'Brien’s If I Die in a Combat Zone: Box Me Up and Ship Me Home still resonates with freshness and punch even now, more than forty years after the end of the Vietnam War.  O’Brien is a gifted writer, and those gifts are on display here.  Asking young men to risk their lives for a war they do not believe in – and guerilla war at that – is a recipe for defeat.  We walk along with O’Brien and other men who fought such  a war.  His gifts bring us there.

Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age

 

Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age by Annalee Newitz is an informative and entertaining exploration of how cities rise and fall.

Newitz walks us through some obvious cases, like Pompeii, and those that are less well-know, like the city of the mound building people, called Cahokia, in the Saint Louis area; at its peak it numbered thirty-thousand residents, larger than contemporary, medieval Paris.

We all think and feel as if we are living in a closing age.  Newtiz certainly does, and has written of this topic before.  Their message in this book is more sanguine: the people of Cahokia, for instance, did not just up and die.  They scattered from the city when, for various debatable reasons, until it was fully abandoned.  The same goes for us.  Newtiz sees the human future as less urban, and more contracted.  They try to give us hope, but the message is still unsettling.

In a wider sense are we really doomed, or has every generation of people through the end was near? 

Doomed from Day One

 

We Have Your Daughter: The Unsolved Murder of JonBenét Ramsey Twenty Years Later by Paula Woodward is a very pro-Ramsey take on this infamous murder, whatever that might mean.  I have not followed this case, so I bring no specialized knowledge to bear at all.  Two things I can say:

1. Like many cases that go unsolved, the fault seems to lie in the first 24 to 48 hours, where the Boulder Police made critical errors that haunt the investigation till this day.  For example, the police failed to treat the Ramsey house as a crime scene.  Contamination was rampant.

2. The police (at least according to this book) became wedded early on to the narrative that someone in the house (a Ramsey) killed JonBenet.  If you stick to this narrative, as the BPD appear to have done until recently, you will not be open to counter-examples (the intruder theory) and not follow those paths with rigor

In a wider sense, it should hardly come as a surprise to readers that police often abuse their power.  Again, the fault can be found in the commitment to a certain narrative.  Police will often work from a vantage of ethically questionable behavior (leaking info the press to put pressure on the Ramsey family) so they can rattle people they believe are guilty when they do not have evidence to press charges.  They are shaking the tree to see what falls out.  In the case, nothing at all.

The Point of Vanishing: A Memoir of Two Years in Solitude

 

Howard Axelrod’s The Point of Vanishing: A Memoir of Two Years in Solitude is a book that proves a unique point about life that I have discovered:  we pay a psychological price for each and every injury we suffer.  For Axelrod, it is the loss of an eye. For me, it was a diagnosis of thyroid cancer at 29.  Axelrod, however, acted upon the impulses that often occur to people who suffer profound loss: he isolated himself to (ultimately) reorient to a new life.

This is not easy, or pretty, and at certain times I sense that Axelrod went too far in his quest.  The loss of an eye is simply a metaphor for more profound, and hidden discontents within him: the Harvard student, the high achiever, the upper middle-class background.  Yes, he lost an eye, and yes that is terrible, but there is more suffering here that goes unaccounted.  There is other damage here that is not fully explained.