Tiny Slivers of our Existence

The older I get, the more I am convinced that we do not have a central, organizing element, principle, or object called a self.  There Is No You: Seeing Through the Illusion of the Self, by Andre Halaw, presents many ways of viewing this scenario.

Perhaps the most compelling is the constantly changing nature of everything.  We expect our entire world to change, often quickly and sometimes to our detriment.  We expect our bodies to change.  If we eat too much we grow heavy.  As we get older, our bodies age. But we expect some timeless and essentially unchangeable thing as the self to exist.  I am the same self I was a three, we say, with some adjustments.

Halaw explains in patient, clear prose, how the sense of self is an illusion – often a necessary one, but only for certain tiny slivers of our existence. We are much more.

The Road to Jonestown

 

The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple, by Jeff Guinn, is a fascinating read.  It is harrowing to watch as Jones begins his career of good deeds among the poor and disenfranchised to grow, by degrees, into a monster.  Regardless of his motives, and Guinn shows us how difficult it is to understand a complex man like Jones, he cared deeply for social justice in the early years of Peoples Temple.

So, how went from this point to a mass suicide/murder in the jungle of Guyana is the topic of this book.  Guinn explores how Jones the man and Jones the social mission were never separate.  Like brutal leaders everywhere, the people were only valuable in so far as they brought his vision to reality.  When they failed to, their lives were expandable.  He is not so different than Stalin, Mao, or Hitler.  He just worked on a smaller scale.

War: How Conflict Shaped Us

 

War: How Conflict Shaped Us, by Margaret MacMillan, takes a novel approach to the study of war, framing it not as an anomaly of human behavior, both on the micro and macro level, but part and parcel of the human experience.  War has molded us and our societies, and has a particularly strong outcome on the rise of technologies.  In the end MacMillan cannot (and no one can) say if the benefits war brings outweigh the costs.  But that hardly matters, as we still engage in war, and do not seem likely to stop anytime soon.

An Uneven Future

 

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson is a novel I have heard about for years, so I finally decided to read it.  Written in 1992 at the beginning of the information age, it depicts a world both connected by internet type technology, but also fractured into “tribes” by the same technology.  Sound prophetic? 

There are many examples like this, but some that miss the mark.  Folks are still using videocassettes?  Interesting.  The plot is also opaque.  What does any of it mean?  Hero’s conversations with the librarian go on for far too long, and stalls the action.

Y.T. is the most interesting character, but she is underutilized simply because she so strongly written.  She is fifteen and has consensual sex with an adult man.  So there is that.

Overall, Snow Crash is good but uneven.  Stephenson tries to spin a lot of plates, and many of them fall.

Strategic Retreat

 

Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May is certainly a book we all need.  All of us experience difficult times in life, and the necessity to retreat into ourselves when we take a savage blow is, in many instances, probably the only path to take.  Our society demands outward forms of expression and behavior all the time.  This book gives us ‘permission’ to retreat, reflect, and lick our wounds.  I'm all for it and do it all the time.

Invisible Countries: Journeys to the Edge of Nationhood

 

Invisible Countries: Journeys to the Edge of Nationhood by Joshua Keating is a fascinating exploration of the places around the globe which could be nations, and under some definitions are, but still are located at the margins of the nation-states.  Keating’s point is that we are currently in a period of time where the international community seeks to maintain the status quo, even if the boundaries of many countries fail to make ethnic or religious sense.  The author explores the reasons for this, in this well researched, entertaining and fascinating book.

Contemporary Israel: New Insights and Scholarship

 

Contemporary Israel: New Insights and Scholarship (Jewish Studies in the Twenty-First Century Book 3) is an interesting series of books edited by Frederick E. Greenspahn.  Like all the works in this series, a variety of voices are heard between two covers.  If you want to get a taste of the work very recent scholars are doing on the scene in Israel (and Palestine) I can think of no better book.

Fascist Romanticism

 

Growth of the Soil by Knut Hamsun is a strange, somewhat off kilter story about Norwegian peasants settling the far north of the country, creating homesteads from wilderness.  The main character is Isak, and it is obvious that Hamsun considers him a kind of peasant/messianic character.  Halfway through this book I felt some fascist vibes here.  I knew nothing about Hamsun, and then found out he was an enthusiastic supporter of Hitler and Nazism.  That took the steam out of the book for me.  It also explained a great deal about the philosophy exposed in the novel.

That aside, it seems Hamsun should have stuck with Isak’s family in the next generation for the second part of the book.  He veers away from them, impeding the flow of the novel.

An Obtuse President

 

1858: Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant and the War They Failed to See, by Bruce Chadwick, is a decent work of history / entertainment.  Ultimately the book revolves around the disastrous presidency of James Buchanan.  While it is unlikely that Buchanan could have stopped the Civil War, as many men of greater talent and ability failed as well, he certainly sped it along with his obtuseness and obstinacy.