Do Nothing & Do Everything: An Illustrated New Taoism

Qiguang Zhao’s Do Nothing & Do Everything: An Illustrated New Taoism is a chatty, comfortable exposition of Taoism.  

Zhao uses a great many examples from everyday life; he is showing us, quite clearly, that Tao is about living.  It is a philosophy or religion to take everywhere in existence, because the Tao, the Way, is everywhere in existence (and nowhere too, but that is another story). 

Zhao’s book is a pleasant and often corny read.

Everett Ruess: His Short Life, Mysterious Death, and Astonishing Afterlife

Philip L. Fradkin’s Everett Ruess: His Short Life, Mysterious Death, and Astonishing Afterlife is the third book I have read about

Woodcut, Monument Valley, Everett Ruess

the legendary Ruess, a young man wandering in the American

Southwest in the early 1930s, writing passionate letters to family and friends, keeping a journal with pantheistic leanings, drawing and painting canyons and washes. In 1934 he entered Davis Gulch in Utah and was never seen again.  This is one of three books written about Ruess.  The others can be found here, and here.

Fradkin’s treatment is brisk, factual, and avoids flights of fancy.  He realizes that after Ruess went missing in 1934, and initial searches were made for him, what actually occurred to him will never be known.  The author does go into some of the theories, but comes out, in the end, with the wisest conclusion of Ruess and his life. 

In death, Ruess achieved a kind of legendary immortally he may well have never received had he lived beyond twenty.  His intensity and drive were so bright that, like James Dean, his disappearance

A stretch of Davis Gulch

and presumed death makes painful sense; he may have been done with his mission.  He died as he should have.  Edward Weston, who knew Ruess, summed this on a postcard he wrote Ruess' parents after his disappearance:

"I don't forget Everett - it was kind of you to include me as one of his friends. The way of his going, I feel, is the way I would like to depart - close to the soil. But he was so young."

The Death Bed Wisdom of the Hasidic Masters: The Book of Departure and Caring for People at the End of Life

Like most Jewish Lights books, The Death Bed Wisdom of the Hasidic Masters: The Book of Departure and Caring for People at the End of Life sets out to accomplish two things. It gives readers a distinctly liberal and modern format to read otherwise conservative religious Jewish texts. It also seeks to tie texts from the Jewish past to our time.

The Death Bed Wisdom of the Hasidic Masters largely accomplishes these goals. The fit between modern practices at death and the sages of the Chasidic movement are not always a great fit; but these tales are worth reading nevertheless. The very humanity, and moral rigor, of these masters in their final moments of life is inspirational.

Sugar in the Blood: A Family's Story of Slavery and Empire

Andrea Stuart’s Sugar in the Blood: A Family's Story of Slavery and Empire, like so many family histories of and by African Americans (or in the case, African Caribbeans), is really the story of America.  The kidnapping, enslaving, and abuse of Africans in North and South America is one of our founding original sins. What it says about power, race, gender, and capitalism still informs our world today.

Stuart has written a work which explores all this through the lens of her multi-racial Barbadian family.  Her research into the island’s history gives voice to the voiceless, the slaves in her background.  Barbados and its people come alive in her prose.

House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest

Craig Childs’ House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest is an exceptional book, handling the history of the so-called Anasazi people.  Childs truly knows the material culture of this people, and has been to the ruins and sites. He has a vivid and strong use of language in conjuring up such places as Mesa Verde and isolated kivas in canyons in northern Mexico.

We get the sense in reading this book the Childs is our guide, and is guiding us well.  He is not afraid to introduce us to him as an author, explorer, and man.  The next best thing to reading this work is going out to the desert ourselves.

The Second World War: A Complete History

Martin Gilbert’s The Second World War: A Complete History, is indeed a complete history.  This an all-encompassing book, but Gilbert does leave out some crucial parts of the war.  He does not begin World War II with the hostilities between Japan and China.  This is a general trend in this work: the Pacific theater gets short shrift; Gilbert is far more interested in Europe.  Gilbert was British, and this book is also written far more from the British prospective than any other.  At times, it seems Gilbert forgets the American involvement in the war.

His prose is also flat and uninspired.  Often, it reads with all the verve of a Wikipedia entry.  For such a long work, some clever use of language would have been a welcome element.

SS-GB a novel

SS-GB, an alternate history novel by Len Deighton, takes place a year after Great Britain capitulates to Nazi Germany.  As an alternate history genre book, this work is of high quality.  Deighton has a precise and controlled prose; his powers of observation and description are high.

This book is also a mystery novel, so it follows the conventions of that genre.  Not a big fan myself; these novels always feel compressed and forced at the conclusion (as does this novel).  But overall this novel is expertly wrought and masterfully written.