Tim O'Brien’s If I Die in a Combat Zone: Box Me Up and Ship Me Home still resonates with freshness and punch even now, more than forty years after the end of the Vietnam War. O’Brien is a gifted writer, and those gifts are on display here. Asking young men to risk their lives for a war they do not believe in – and guerilla war at that – is a recipe for defeat. We walk along with O’Brien and other men who fought such a war. His gifts bring us there.
Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age by Annalee Newitz is an informative and entertaining exploration of how cities rise and fall.
Newitz walks us through some obvious cases, like Pompeii, and those that are less well-know, like the city of the mound building people, called Cahokia, in the Saint Louis area; at its peak it numbered thirty-thousand residents, larger than contemporary, medieval Paris.
We all think and feel as if we are living in a closing age. Newtiz certainly does, and has written of this topic before. Their message in this book is more sanguine: the people of Cahokia, for instance, did not just up and die. They scattered from the city when, for various debatable reasons, until it was fully abandoned. The same goes for us. Newtiz sees the human future as less urban, and more contracted. They try to give us hope, but the message is still unsettling.
In a wider sense are we really doomed, or has every generation of people through the end was near?
We Have Your Daughter: The Unsolved Murder of JonBenét Ramsey Twenty Years Later by Paula Woodward is a very pro-Ramsey take on this infamous murder, whatever that might mean. I have not followed this case, so I bring no specialized knowledge to bear at all. Two things I can say:
1. Like many cases that go unsolved, the fault seems to lie in the first 24 to 48 hours, where the Boulder Police made critical errors that haunt the investigation till this day. For example, the police failed to treat the Ramsey house as a crime scene. Contamination was rampant.
2. The police (at least according to this book) became wedded early on to the narrative that someone in the house (a Ramsey) killed JonBenet. If you stick to this narrative, as the BPD appear to have done until recently, you will not be open to counter-examples (the intruder theory) and not follow those paths with rigor
In a wider sense, it should hardly come as a surprise to readers that police often abuse their power. Again, the fault can be found in the commitment to a certain narrative. Police will often work from a vantage of ethically questionable behavior (leaking info the press to put pressure on the Ramsey family) so they can rattle people they believe are guilty when they do not have evidence to press charges. They are shaking the tree to see what falls out. In the case, nothing at all.
Howard Axelrod’s The Point of Vanishing: A Memoir of Two Years in Solitude is a book that proves a unique point about life that I have discovered: we pay a psychological price for each and every injury we suffer. For Axelrod, it is the loss of an eye. For me, it was a diagnosis of thyroid cancer at 29. Axelrod, however, acted upon the impulses that often occur to people who suffer profound loss: he isolated himself to (ultimately) reorient to a new life.
This is not easy, or pretty, and at certain times I sense that Axelrod went too far in his quest. The loss of an eye is simply a metaphor for more profound, and hidden discontents within him: the Harvard student, the high achiever, the upper middle-class background. Yes, he lost an eye, and yes that is terrible, but there is more suffering here that goes unaccounted. There is other damage here that is not fully explained.
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (20th Anniversary Edition) by Jared Diamond was a sensation when it was first published, and since it has come under some justified criticism.
In the marshaling of such meta-historical information, the incentive to ignore counter examples is strong. Diamond sites the Viking abandonment of Greenland a few times. For decades, it was believed the Norse failed to adapt to an increasingly colder Greenland. They were farmers and herders and failed to hunt the abundant sea life like their Inuit neighbors. In recent years, we have learned that the Norse were involved in the ivory trade with Europe. They also ate arctic marine mammals. Greenland became a less appealing place to live not because of mal-adaption to climate, but money. When the African ivory market opened in the 1400s, Greenland became an unappealing place to make a living.
Also, the book is also highly repetitive. Diamond revisits topics at the end that he handled in the beginning, adding nothing to the discussion. I wonder why.
Despite all this, the book is thought provoking; a great jumping off point toward an examination of why cultures differ from each other. The topic itself is fascinating.
The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Sacred Texts by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman does an admirable job in presenting a possible ancient history of the people known as Israel. As a culture, we have gone from believing the bible told the entire truth about history as the unerring word of God, to seeing it as a human production that tells a story shaped by the time of its composition and redaction, and that bears no resemblance to what we consider modern history.
X Troop: The Secret Jewish Commandos of World War II by Leah Garrett tells the story of German Jewish (or Jews from mainland Europe, and some German dissenters) who fought as commandos for Great Britain. Most of these men were detained as enemy aliens when the war began. Some were sent to camps in Australia and New Zealand. Then they volunteered for elite commando training in the army of the country that imprisoned them. They fought in dangerous places with distinction. After the war many of them had difficulty becoming naturalized British citizens.
I see Garrett’s book as a one of those footnotes of the complex and tragic fate of many Jews in the twentieth century. These men gave up their identities, often did not marry Jewish women, and their children did not know of their Jewish origin until late in life in many cases. This is the story of Jewish commandos, but also the shifting foundations of modern Jewish identity.
