Vietnam Up Close

 

Dispatches, by Michael Herr, is perhaps the best first-hand account of the Vietnam War that I have read.   As a reporter in the field, Herr was in Khe Sanh, Hue, the highlands, and many other places, mostly with Marines on the ground and in choppers.  His first hand experiences give these pieces a gritty realism.   Herr does not hold back on the horrors of war.  

He steps back to examine the meta-narrative of the war in Vietnam, the Sixties, and the post-war period.  He does not glorify war, except in the last essay, where he starts slinging around Sixties slang and post-adrenaline nostalgia for a war that killed millions. This is an unfortunate part of this otherwise excellent book.

The Ravine

 

We have mostly become immune to harrowing photos of mass murder.  With repetition, the horror is rendered somehow mundane. Wendy Lower in The Ravine: A Family, a Photograph, a Holocaust Massacre Revealed, sets out to contextualize a photograph of Jewish woman being killed by German border police and Ukrainian militia.  The photo catches the moment the woman is shot; her head is haloed by smoke, her two children, one not completely visible, the other holding her hand.

Lower sets out to put the photo in the context of the war, the Ukraine, the Jewish community where this mass murder occurred, and even the people in the photo.  She finds the identity of some of the shooters.  She valiantly attempts to identify the victims and perhaps she does.  This humanizes mass-murder by treating the photo as an piece of evidence of a crime – and trying to piece together the circumstances of this murder from every available source.

I hope Lower and others set out do this with other holocaust photos – both well-known and lesser known examples.  This is a fruitful area of study.

The Language of Thieves: My Family's Obsession with a Secret Code the Nazis Tried to Eliminate

 

The Language of Thieves: My Family's Obsession with a Secret Code the Nazis Tried to Eliminate, by Martin Puchner, is a fascinating book about one family and their ambiguous relationship to the German language and Nazism.

Pucher explores Rotwelsch, a so-called language of thieves, or better yet a language of a marginal group (or groups) of people who were homeless or otherwise unsettled.  The language has as long history.  It was noted by Martin Luther and remained well into the twentieth century.  It contains many Hebrew words through a Yiddish lens, some Romani expressions - but is basically German in structure and vocabulary.

I expected some big reveal from Pucher about the fixation of certain members of his family toward Rotwelsch.  Where they once part of this sub-world?  Secret Jews or Roma?  No.  They were just caught up in complexity of German identity in the twentieth century and this is their story.  And a fine story it is.

My Dark Genre

 

As a writer, I have a certain respect for James Ellroy’s My Dark Places.  This account of his mother’s unsolved murder reads like an object lesson in uncompromising engagement with the writer’s deep self.  There is a less appealing part of this work as well; as he is a mystery/detective writer, this book goes places I never would, uses language that is not suited to our time, and in the process, no doubt, is insulting to many people.  Yet I am drawn to the brutal honesty, as I am repulsed by many of the characterizations.

Lost in the Indo-European Weeds

 

The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World by David W. Anthony, is a long book, and not for the beginner to the subject, or someone not completely dedicated to the topic.  

The first part of the book handles the reconstructed language of Indo-European based on its descendant languages.  After that, Anthony provides a detailed overview of many, many, far too many, archaeological Bronze Age sites.  At this point, the urge is to skim is great, the sections are so similar. 

For me, this book went into the weeds.  The author got caught up in detail and lost forward momentum and fatigued me.

The Age of Reevaluation

 

Toward the end of The Ground Breaking: The Tulsa Race Massacre and an American City's Search for Justice, author Scott Ellsworth correctly says that we live in the Age of Reevaluation.  This is an apt term for our times.  This book explores the myriad ways white Tulsans tried to forget or otherwise cover up the sacking of the black Greenwood neighborhood and the murder of hundreds of its residents.  The recent drive to find mass graves in Tulsa is part of a wider trend: a revaluation of the crimes and sins of the past by white citizens of this nation against people of color.  This is long overdue.    

Really Far Gone

 

So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell is one of those novels that is evocative of another time, yet has a “modernist” structure.  A “broken” narrative, where subjectivity and faulty memory create a Citizen Kane landscape.  Truth is written with a little t.  Despite this the novel is old-fashioned.  The world whose passing it laments is so far gone it is hard to feel bad about its fate.  Everything passes: why get so upset about it.