Jewish Cossacks and then a Jewish State

 

The Sword And The Olive: A Critical History Of The Israeli Defense Force by Martin Van Creveld delivers just what he promises in the title.  Van Crevald takes focues an historical mircoscope from the rise of a Jewishself-defense organizations in Palestine, right to the end of the Lebanon War. 

While the author tries to distance himself from post-Zionist historians, he strips quite a bit of myth and legend surrounding Israel's fighting forces himself.  Take one of the earliest forms of Jewish self-defense in Palestine, Hashomer, the Watchman.  We are told they lacked discipline, wore Arab garb, modeled themselves as Jewish Cossacks, and rode horsese, often letting style rule over substance.  Van Crevald suggests that some Watchman may have been involved in protection rackets against their fellow Jews!

This is a fascinating book about a stateless people who build a state and an army from the ground up.  Van Creveld details the good and ugly of this process – and all shades between.

Lost Girls and the Other

Lost Girls and Love Hotels: A Novel, by Catherine Hanrahan, is a rather standard expat novel, both in form and tone.  The main character is lost, drifting, and buries her pain in booze, drugs, and transgressive sex in Tokyo – which obliges her needs.  

We have seen and read this before.  But Hanrahan has a snappy prose style, and wit, so this novel, while sticking to the “script” is never uninteresting or even fully predictable.

As an expat novel, some people will wonder if the Japanese are treated like the Other, just players in the background of a westerner’s narcissism romp. Maybe. If I was Japanese or Asian I would probably think as much.  Which opens up a wide field of questions about how we treat characters and cultures in our art.  I have no ready answers to this kind of complexity.  This is the beginning of a long discussion.

The Pain of Not Speaking a "Dialect"

Yorkshire Dialect Poems (1673-1915) and traditional poems, compiled by Frederic William Moorman, gives the reader a wonderful flavor of the Yorkshire form of English.  Both familiar and extremely dissimilar from the Standard English we speak today, at times, Yorkshire reads like another language.  I suggest reading the poems aloud.  This way, even if you don’t understand the words (some words are translated in footnotes, others are not) you get the taste of the words in your mouth.  You hear their musicality.

I envy those who can speak this language; how wonderful it would be to speak a Standard English and a so-called dialect like Yorkshire.  What a far more expansive world.

Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo by Zora Neale Hurston

Barracoon: The Story of the Last "Black Cargo" by Zora Neale Hurston, tells the story of Kossula Lewis, kidnapped from West Africa in 1860, and interviewed by Hurston in the 1930s. Lewis, and the others from his ship, formed the nucleus of Africa Town, near Mobile Alabama (which still exists today).  

His memories mainly focus on like in Africa, and the collusion of fellow Africans who captured and sold Lewis to white slavers.  This is a part of the slave trade that is often not discussed: the active collusion of some Africans enslaving other Africans for profit.  This should not be a surprise; African were and are many people, and not one.  There was not a Pan-African sentiment.

The number of narratives such as this, where an African is captured, enslaved, and brought to America, can be counted on one hand.  Yet, the story of Lewis is the story of all Africans in America. Therefore, this work is vitally important; it gives a voice to millions were deprived of a voice.

The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper

 

The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper, by Hallie Rubenhold, is an important book, as it shines a desperately needed light on the women killed by the notorious White Chapel serial killer.  Rubenhold gives these woman what they have long deserved: their humanity.  They were not merely victims of murder, but people living as best they could – and nearly all these women suffered from unfortunately circumstances.  They were people, and the author treats them as such.

Rubenhold claims that there is no evidence that three of the five women were involved in sex work.  This is a startling, as for over a hundred years these woman have been labeled as prostitutes.  In fact, Rubenhold tells us, they were called prostitutes because Victorian England had no other category for women who were essentially homeless, not married (either divorced, or estranged from their husbands) and destitute.  The five were homeless people.  Every day they scrambled money for a bed that evening. The serial killer may well have picked them some appeared sleeping in lanes, doorways, and backyards.

This is the story of the failure of a society to care for its working class women.  Most women were one step away from destitution.  There was no real safety net to keep these woman off the street and protect them.  Law were meant to protect men.  What was true in Victorian England is true today: poor women suffer higher percentages of  disease, mental health issues, substance abuse, and crime.   

One thing all five had in common was addiction to alcohol.  In a world with little pleasure, it was a cheap and fleeting away to avoid pain and anguish.  These are sad, but important stories to read.

Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Hermits

 

Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Hermits, by Red Pine (Bill Porter), is a fascinating look at Daoist and Buddhist hermits just as China was “opening” in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

After the havoc of the Cultural Revolution, Porter was unsure if a hermit tradition still existed in China.  In the middle of the tumult of 1989, he travels to the country to see if there are still religious isolates.  With great physical effort, he does find some, mostly old men and women who live in isolation, mainly in the Zhongnan Mountains.  This mountain range has a centuries old tradition as the site of Daoist and Buddhist temples, and hermits from both traditions.  Against the odds, they survived the purge of the Cultural Revolution.

Now that China has experienced its capitalists explosion, many millennials, disenchanted with materialism, have joined the hermits in Zhongnan. The lure of these mountains continue to call, despite the erosion of personal freedoms under Chinese government rule; and attempt by the government to keep people "on the grid" to track their movements.

As much as any human institution or inclination is ineradicable, the hermits of Zhongnan are close to being what legend purports them to be, immortal.

A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes

 

A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived: The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes, by Adam Rutherford, explores the promise and disappointments of the project to map the Human genome.  The story is interesting, and pops the bubble of the early days of the project, with the heady promise of genetic determinism. We can cure diseases!  We can link genes to criminal tendencies!

No, we can't.  Two decades out, the picture is considerably more muddled.  Most questions about genetics and individuals can’t be answered with certainty.  We can know about populations; we can talk broadly.  Genetics is about statistics, not Newtonian physics.  We are not our genes, but a complex interplay between our environment and our genes.

This book is informative, if at times muddled.  I found the author’s organizing principle behind the work a bit confusing.  There does not appear to be an overarching organization.  This book is more an interconnected series of essays on the topic.  At times, it lacks thrust.

Talking Back, Talking Black: Truths About America's Lingua Franca

 

Talking Back, Talking Black: Truths About America's Lingua Franca by John McWhorter is fascinating exploration of  the use of “Black English” in the United States, and how this form of English is simply a natural and normal part of how languages exist and develop.  

In almost every country, more than one language is spoken.  In Switzerland, the local Swiss dialect is used at home, on the streets, and in casual settings.  In school, the quite different version of “standard” German is taught, and used during formal occasions.  No one thinks this arrangement is bizarre or unnatural. 

“Black English” is much the same, McWhoter tells us.  It is simply another way to speak English, along the great sweep of language differences among all English speakers.  The distorting lens of racism has cast “Black English” as some degraded form of expression.  Which  it is not.

Stamped from the Beginning

Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, by Ibram X. Kendi, was written before How to be an Antiracist and in it you can see where many of the ideas and theories of that book were first fleshed out.  This book is detailed, intelligent, and insightful.  The American nightmare of racism, and its intersection with sexism, heteronormativity, and  white patriarchy, is shown in its various guises throughout our history.

In the end Stamped asserts that American racism only benefits the small number of white men who control the wealth and political structures of our country.  This is kind of a Marxist conclusion to the problem of race in America.  Race is used by the elites to cloud our real interests and protect theirs.  For Kendi, that is how racism in American will end; when economic disparities are addressed and fixed.