The Prisoners of Breendonk: Personal Histories from a World War II Concentration Camp

James M. Deem’s The Prisoners of Breendonk: Personal Histories from a World War II Concentration Camp is an account of a relatively small prison in Belgium during the Second World War.  Deems takes the investigatory path of many recent Holocaust scholars: he concentrates on a few individuals in a camp, both the victims and the tormentors, and through their story, tells the story of the camp at large.

What we get is almost a day-to-day account of life in Breendonk.  He charts the course of the prison as the war proceeds, details how prisoners were tortured and killed, what they ate and where they slept.  The prison was photographed for propaganda purposes, to show how well treated the inmates were.  Despite this, the wealth of photographs can’t hide malnutrition and physical abuse.  One prisoner was an artist, and the camp commander commissioned him to sketch prisoners for his private collection. The artist drew one for the commander, and one for himself.  These drawings are startling, giving an inside, unexpurgated view of camp life.

Suddenly, reading about the Holocaust is quite important again.  As the world contracts toward ridged nationalism and parochialism – reading accounts of the end result of this process, its most raw and inhuman form, is extremely relevant.

The Mindfulness Solution to Pain: Step-by-Step Techniques for Chronic Pain Management by Dr. Jackie Gardner-Nix

The Mindfulness Solution to Pain: Step-by-Step Techniques for Chronic Pain Management by Dr. Jackie Gardner-Nix has a simple theoretical premise which is difficult, but not impossible, to put into practice.  This is necessarily the case, for mindfulness demands a great deal of focused attention.  It takes practice and work.

One of the chief insights in this book is that physical pain and our mental states go hand in hand. Pain is a physiological response to something wrong with our bodies, certainly, but equally important in this equation is how we frame the experience of pain in our minds. 

This book sets out many techniques on how to frame, or re-frame, our experience of pain.  This is helpful for alleviating our pain level.  Even sitting still with our pain, allowing it to happen, not fighting it or judging it, is helpful, and a great start.

Birds of America: Stories

Lorrie Moore’s Birds of America: Stories is a compelling read, but not for reasons that most readers may find.  Almost all the stories start off on very unpromising notes.  Moore veers this way and that, and the reader may wonder where she is going and what she is doing.  There is unfortunate goofy descriptive language.  Most of the stories, with an exception or two, begin this way, and it is perplexing.

But Moore has the very strange ability to “turn” her stories around, often in the last few pages.  She veers us away from the verge of doom again and again, creating stories with great insights and pathos. So, if you read this book, stay with the task.  You will be rewarded in the end.

Empires of the Word

Nicholas Ostler's Empires of the Word is wide ranging examination of how languages evolve, spread, and die out.

Ostler takes a wide view: we move from India, to China, to Arabic speaking countries, to Europe and end on English, the current lingua franca.

Ostler’s book is fascinating, and VERY detailed, so it demands some patience on the part of readers.  But readers will be rewarded for their effort with some firm analysis of the complexities of how languages live and die. 

Ostler does not leave us with any hard and fast rule about why some languages spread and others do not. Often, language spread because of conquest, as Latin did; or through a combination of conquest (British English) and prestige (American English).

Language is as complex and as multivariate as we are; really, we should expect no less.

The Hunger Games

This has all been commented on before, and Suzanne Collins has long pointed out that The Hunger Games owes a great debt to the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur.  

Katniss, like Theseus, volunteers to become a tribute in the King of Crete’s intentionally cruel, and unwinnable, tangle with the Minotaur in his maze.  He defeats the Minotaur, and becomes King of Athens.  

Katniss confronts an equally, if not more senselessly cruel state (more like Rome, as the name of the nation Panem, as in Panem et Circenses, Bread and Circus, alludes to). It is a country where blood sport is both a reminder of a rebellion long crushed, entertainment, and social distraction.

Of course, these is more here.  But I’ll leave it at that.  Reviewing YA books is not part of my bailiwick, and this book has already commented on extensively. 

Wuthering Heights & Die

Wuthering Heights is a Romantic novel with the capital “R”.  The Age of Reason is over, and Emily Bronte seeks, and succeeds, in exposing our most irrational natures.  In this novel, characters just speak about their great passions, and get sick, and die.  

Heathcliff and Catherine are the prime exemplars of this; Catherine’s love for Heathcliff is strong, but inchoate. She dies.  Heathcliff is constitutionally stronger than Catherine, but after years of tormenting, both emotionally and physically, those around him, he suffers death by Romance as well.

I write this tongue-in-cheek.  Wuthering Heights is a novel that should be read.  Certainly it makes demands on its readers.  But we should rise to meet its high mark.

A Book I’ll Never Read

I am not disposed to discuss books I have never read.  I shouldn’t have to explain this, although it is a habit many people have – in so much as they read anything at all.

But any book that laments the loss of a version of New York City has no appeal to me and I will never break its spine.  Vanishing New York is such a book (and blog).  

From viewing the author’s blog, it chronicles the closing of every semi-landmark diner, café, or flower shop. This is an old motif: New York was better in ________ (fill in the decade or year).  

As a boy "Regis and Kathy Lee" where always on in my house, every week day morning.  Regis would fill in the blank at “New York was better in the 1950s.”  No doubt he had good reasons for this stance.  The city had yet to enter its long decline through the 60s and 70s.  He was young, hopeful, and the city reflected his dreams and aspirations and could fulfill them.  Who  can blame him for thinking this?

In a round about way, this is the shadow side of that old saw that "New York City is the greatest city in the world". With that as a premise, NYC is always primed to topped from that lofty perch. The shadow version says the same thing, but on the other side of the coin, in whiny and nostalgic tones, that the city was better in _________ (fill in the decade or year).  The New York City you know and experience is but a shadow city.  You should have lived in the real city. As far as I can tell, this yardstick has always existed and is distinctly a New York historical dynamic.

The problems are self-evident.  The voices that lament the town’s gentrification in the late 80s and 90s (my generation) laid its groundwork.  They came in as “artists” whether they were or not, and laid the foundation for pushing low income people out of the Village or Alphabet City.  They planted the seeds of gentrification – and then bitched when those plants grew and morphed beyond their comfort or control.

My sense is that all this fuss has more to do with aging, articulate people afraid of what they have lost over the years, and we all lose something – who use NYC as a symbol or token of loss. I sympathize.  Loss is difficult.  As we age, the world feels less and less made for us.  It muscles us out. This hurts. New York leaves us behind.

But ultimately, NYC is good or bad according to a sliding rubric that can satisfy no single group, or even person.  If you want to jack off in a porn theater in Times Square, clearly that is a loss.  If you wanted to buy crack in Washington Square Park – yet another check in the loss category.  If you are an artist who requires a minyan of like-minded folks to sit in diners and drink old man coffee as you express ideas or concepts, clearly something vital is long gone. 

Ultimately, people will write eulogies to dying worlds.  Why not? You can no longer get a sandwich at the Carnegie Deli (as if delis were ever eternal?)  So lament and cry.  Write books about it. Despite being born in NYC, this is not my concern.  I try not to fall into the trap of narrowly defining my worth or joy to a place. In our world of rapid change, to do so seems masochistic.