Transfers & Vivid Prose

 

In Forgotten Land: Journeys Among the Ghosts of East Prussia by Max Egremont, the author visits, in a literal and historical sense, the long tongue of land captured by the Teutonic Knights in Slavic lands to the east.  East Prussia was absorbed by other countries after the war, and its German residents killed, sent to Soviet camps, or forced to flee to West or East Germany.

This fascinating work details the history of this complex land, where rulers changed with rapidity, and Slavic and German people rubbed elbows for centuries.  It would all end in the transfer of East Prussians from 1945-1948 – thousands, hundreds of thousands, sent away with very little.  Like the other large population transfers or exchanges in the twentieth century (India and Pakistan) the suffering was immense.

Egremont is fair is his presentation, detailed, and writes in vivid prose.

Remote: Finding Home in the Bitterroots

Remote: Finding Home in the Bitterroots, by DJ Lee, starts with a well-used premise in this kind of memoir: I will explore my family history and physical place in the world, and better understand myself, and ultimately, everything.

Lee takes this route but is very honest about the limitations of this pursuit.  She wants to understand her grandmother's complex life, her mother's emotional detachment, and her own yearnings, all against the backdrop of their family connection to the Bitteroot Mountains.  

She does in fact learn a great deal about the traumas inflicted on women (in the wilderness) that are passed down from mother to daughter.  Grandmother, mother, and author are both uplifted and scarred by life in the Bitteroots.

Ultimately Lee is a sophisticated enough thinker and a skilled enough writer to know that we can never understand a person in total no matter how many journals she reads or trails she hikes.  Mystery remains in the heart of all of us.

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.