Surge by P. Mansoor (2013)--

I’ve finished reading the book, Surge. Some comments:

1.       P has a direct staff of perhaps a dozen+ with distinct duties, and those duties take up all their time. Little overlap. There are as well protective staff, etc.

2.       Yes, it is a matter of Anbar Awakening and P’s COIN strategy, and of course luck and …  That it was not permanent, with Maliki going back to his ethnosectarian roots is a problem. The US is a remarkable country in its believe that none of those should define loyalty. We’ve worked hard of late to make that case for Muslim US citizens.

3.       People worked very hard, subordinates were inventive, Odierno was a good complement to P, and lots of work needed to be done in DC so that the strategy was not undermined. It’s important to realize that just because you have the President on your back, does not mean subordinates with power will follow through. Admiral Fallon was especially difficult for the first half at least.

4.       This is not a history. It is a memoir and chronology. Mansoor is now a professor of military history, but this would not quite qualify as such. There is no attempt to be unbiased.

5.       Anyone who works for P, or for folks like him, should read this book. P is hard driving, hard working, and unrelenting, it would seem. He must have a flaw, but none revealed here. (The Paula Broadwell stuff does not count in my book—other than why do it on your office computer and file. Telephone from payphones, please. I have nothing to say about faithfulness, given what people do.)

What’s also interesting is that they went for three years without a successful strategy, until P offered one up. When you think about innovation and adoption, keep that in mind.

Yes, this was people intensive. But it depended on having all the best technology, MRAPs, communication gear, and various experts. I read an article recently that transformation was successful, in the initial taking over of Iraq. It then said the COIN failed since the subsequent years, post P, things fell apart again. I suspect this is not a good judgment. No one claims to be able to get rid of tribal and ethnosectarian conflict with COIN. You are just trying for  some order and security. It took many wars and many dead for the Catholics and Protestants to make a peace in Europe, and in Ireland that is still shaky.

Stephen Biddle: Military Power (2004)

The "modern system" of battle and strategy is meant to prevent offenses from destroying too many of your troops and materiel, to make it difficult for them to advance, to make it hard for them to locate their concealed and covered and dispersed opponents. And if you are an offender, you want to penetrate the defense to cut off the defense's supportive troops and logistical support so starving them in place. And in any case suppress fire, or make it much less effective if there is enough dispersion of defenders or focus of offense.

So roughly argues Stephen  Biddle in Military Power (2004), through case studies, statistical analysis, and gaming simulation. It's detailed interesting argument, and there has been substantial criticism and support (for example, in about 2006 in the Journal of Strategic Studies). But in reading it, the argument is impressive, the care is impressive, and the scholarship is methodologically catholic.

Americanah and Pericles

I finished off two excellent books this week, one fiction and one nonfiction.  Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie  is a sprawling, big novel that moves across continents and time to tell a story about two people who lose each other and themselves in the quest for opportunities in England and the US, only to find themselves again back home in Nigeria--one by choice, and another by force.  I am still not sure how I feel about the ending, but Adichie is a marvelous storyteller and a brilliant prose stylist.  I was seething with frustration with her main character who stubbornly refused to grow in any way--Ifemelu is a watcher and a judger of other people, and she uses her brain to critique rather than to build--until she is by herself in the United States. She is a character who changes fast, by leaps, even as she possesses a writer's detachment.


Mike Peed gives a terrific overview in his NYT review. 

I also finished Pericles of Athens and the Birth of Democracy.  My edition appearse to be the 1990 edition, as I picked it up at a used bookstore.  In this book, Donald Kagan, of whom I am an unabashed fangirl, writes about Pericles in his various roles: Strategist, Statesment, Hero, Democrat, Imperialist, Peacemaker, etc. It is a study of leadership. Kagan is a historian, and he doesn't have that much to work from for Pericles: Plutach and Thucydides  are his main sources.  This books feels a little self-indulgent, and that's ok: Kagan is a fan of Pericles (there are worse leaders to admire), and Kagan allows himself to praise what he finds admirable. He can't escape the obvious problems of Pericles as a military strategist, and Kagan's assessment is sad and fair.   There are some bumps in the book, which are quite dated: Kagan doesn't have a terribly deep read of Marx or Plato, and he drubs both of them for their anti-democratic visions.  Still, his writing on democracy and the Periclean vision is breath-taking.

I'm traveling this week so there will be lots of time for reading.

The Dupin Novellas by Edgar Allen Poe

I have a weakness for books about books, and I just picked up Books to Die For, a collection of writing by contemporary fiction writers about the most important or best mystery novel of roughly each year from 1841  to 2008. The early years skip because the mystery novel had not yet become a genre; there is nearly a ten-year gap between the first entry, Edgar Allen Poe's Murder in the Rue Morgue and the second entry, Charles Dickens' Bleak House.

Because, of course, I don't have enough reading to do, I am going to try to read them all in order, except for the ones I've already read, and perhaps revisiting some of those.

That means I started out with Poe, who is IMO unreadable except for poetry. I have large bits of The Raven memorized because as a poem it is awesome-gnarly and I love it.  His prose leaves me cold, and much as I wanted to like the Auguste Dupin stories, I didn't. They were tedious and turgid, and I am glad to be done with them and scratch that particular book off the list. I doubt I will have such trouble with Dickens, whom I've always liked.

The Four Loves by C.S. Lewis

The Four Loves is a deeply flawed book with many problems, particularly in the first chapters. Whenever I read him, I generally come to the conclusion that Lewis isn’t all that good at writing about people and their relations. And at the time of writing the Four Loves, he’s a grumpy old misogynist who seems never to have a met a woman he liked unless she was silent and scurrying around bringing him sandwiches, but only when he wants sandwiches, and only the kind of sandwiches he likes. If a man is less lovable than he might be, it’s probably a woman’s fault.

His many unkind portrayals of women in this book made it an irritating read. But I try to read with those allowances; if you were to avoid reading misogynists, you wouldn’t have much to read. Since it’s a short book and I was reading it for a book chapter I am writing, I made myself just slog through the first chapters to the last, which I later read in the Publisher’s Weekly review is considered some of his Lewis’ best nonfiction writing. It’s breathtaking:

There’s no escape along the lines of St. Augustine suggests. Nor along any other lines. There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with little hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket–safe, dark, motionless, airless–it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, of at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.

A Fairly Honourable Defeat by Iris Murdoch

I start out with Iris Murdoch how I always start out: I don't want to like it.  It's about a bunch of annoying English intellectuals who don't have much to do besides jump in and out bed with each other.  But for some reason, it all remains interesting and you have to figure out what is going on with these people anyway.  In A Fairly Honourable Defeat, Julius is the Uber; he's handsome, celebrated, and rich, a scientist amidst a bunch of people who are not, with their unfinished books and whatnot. (It might be the best idea to, while I am struggling with my own manuscript, to read about people with perpetually unfinished books.)

Anyway, a lovely read.

Meh...too depressed to read, but I did see a good film: Smash His Camera (about celebrity culture and the paparazzi

Phhhhhhhhhbttttt.  I have been depressed, and when I am depressed, I don't get much done. However, I did watch an excellent document on paparazzi Ron Gallela.  You can see the trailer here. 

Up from Silence, Reading what I barely understand, barely understood generously. Martin Krieger

I've not posted much here, since I have not been reading books per se. Lots of detective novels, mostly forgettable but pleasureable. But mostly reading stuff for my research projects. I am doing a revision of my Doing Mathematics, and so I have been trying to understand stuff from the last 15 years. Most of this is well beyond the edge of my understanding. But I see that Edward Frenkel (Berkeley, Mathematics) has many parallels to what concerns me, the famous Andre Weil letter to his sister Simone providing an account of the connection of geometry/analysis with arithmetic and function theory* being on his mind, as well as mine.

Frenkel is working, really working, within the Langlands Program. I just know lots about various practical solutions to the Ising model in two-dimensions--a very nice model of nearest neighbors influencing each other within a general environment characterized by a temperature that causes the individuals to ignore their neighbors' interactions with them---at low temperatures, the ignoring is much weaker and neighbors really do influence each other, dramatically.

My other reading is preparing for my course on defense policy. Much of the literature here is ideological and not meant to be balanced. (Even) The professors have their idees fixes, since in part they may have public roles in which they have a particular point of view where subtlety would  be taken as weakness.

What's funny for me about the math and physics I have been reading is how far it is from the way I was taught 40-50 years ago. Quantum field theory has become more complex to deal with what nature sends our way, or invent ways that nature might work (eg supersymmetry), while at the same time we have a very robust model, the standard model of nature, that we could not imagine when I finished graduate school in the late 60s. Better put, we could imagine how systematic and organized the story could be, although it is just like electromagnetism, where "just like" is of course is saying that we see in the current theory an echo of Maxwell's account.

MK

* Recall from high school that

geometry:  sin (x + pi)=sin x and that undulating curve that is the sine function
function theory: sin (2x)=2 (sin x) (cosine x) 
and number theory: that sin x = x + x^3/3! + x^5/5! and so forth, so that the sin function packages, so to speak, the factorials of the odd numbers.

Aquinas on the Beginning and End of Life by Fabrizio Armerini

Those interested in ethics and public policy have to grapple with the problem of when life begins or ends.  A good deal of the Christian doctrine comes from the thought of Thomas Aquinas.  I am a newbie to reading about all of it because I skipped over a lot of the reading in my western civ class on Aquinas, thinking him a bore.  As a result, I wasn't terribly well prepared to read this book,  from Harvard University Press. This is a translation by Mark Henniger, who is a professor of philosophy at Georgetown.

This is a  technical bit of philosophy, and a person who really wants to understand it should have paid more attention to Aristotle on the soul than I ever did. Thus, I am struggling. The argument goes something like this: the life begins at conception, but what is present is a vegetative soul; the progression from vegitative to sensitive soul would take longer; this sensitive or animal soul consumes the vegetative soul in becoming itself.  Then, of course, the soul becomes rationalized, in shorter order (natch) for men than women.

The key point is just how deeply these ideas influence our understanding of abortion.  On the one hand, even among those who treat abortion as a very grave wrong, it is usually treated as something less than straight homicide (not always).  That appears to be straight out of Thomist philosophy. Amerini's contribution here is to contest the claim that had Aquinas had our contemporary understanding of genetics, Acquinas would have modified his position in favor of seeing the moment of union as the time life begins, not conception.  Amerini is not convinced that the science would have changed Acquinas' mind on much.

  Inevitably the parts of Thomism that most fascinate contemporary readers concern the first question: about when life begins. Nonetheless, I found myself more interested in the second question: Acquinas on when life ends, largely because I knew nothing.  Here you have the three major points: First, that all parts of a person end, in a unified manner. That is, when the body shuts down, the soul itself has no further need of it. Second, that there is a practical unity to life such that there is a singular end to it, and third, that death is the same for all that lives.

I'm in no way convinced I have that right. I am going to have to reread and learn more.

Gardening books read over the summer

I love to garden, and I'm a sucker for garden books.  If there is any possible way you can have a dithery Miss Marple-ish lady solving mysteries while pottering around in her rose garden, I'm totally buying and reading that book.  But I also read just general gardening books. Three that I have read this summer are listed here. All of them are excellent.

Two Gardeners: Katharine S. White and Elizabeth Lawrence--A Friendship in Letters

The collected letters of two gardeners, one an editor at the New Yorker and the other one of the original writers about southern US gardens. Both women are delightful.  One is lured into buying even more hellebores  for one's north-house beds. 

One Writer's Garden: Eudora Welty's Home Place by Susan Hanson and Jane Roy Brown

A sumptuous, beautifully researched book about Eudora Welty's magnificent garden.  Buy the hardcopy of this one, as the photographs are so worth having. 

Tell about Night Flowers: Eudora Welty's Gardening Letters, 1940-1949 

The most wonderful book of the lot, which is saying something, because they are all wonderful.  I fervently wish I could write letter to Eudora Welty about my garden. 

I had a deadline for a book chapter that I simply ignored in favor of reading this book. 

Bart Ehrman's Did Jesus Exist: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth

I have to admit to being a Bart Ehrman fan before writing any more. As celebrity academics go, I find that he uses his celebrity both self-interestedly (selling books) but also altruistically: he wants to keep people focused on  what the historical record of early Christianity is rather than letting myth an popular faith rule the world unchallenged.  One gets the impression listening to him that, like the very best of scholars, he's a giant nerd who loves nothing so much as discussing ideas.  Another positive: he publishes both scholarly books and popular books back and forth. Most who reach his status give up the former and concentrate on the latter. But Ehrman will send one book to Oxford University Press and the next to HarperOne. That I find very impressive, indeed. 

I have read just about all of his books, and this new one strikes me as less well done than the others, only because the organization at the front of the book lacks his usual brevity.   There is a very nice section that explains what historians are looking for--multiple, independent, disinterested  sources, and how with ancient history, we must often settle for interested sources and the like.  But the first part of the book is slow, with far too much repetition of the same sources and the same arguments.  The historical case that Jesus existed is fairly straightforward: we have more independent sources about Jesus than we have on a bunch of other people, including Socrates. I think what weighs down the first part of the book may not be Ehrman's fault. He is trying to give a fair description of the arguments that Jesus did not exist, and those are arguments tend to be labored and founded on a great deal of speculation, and there's no way to present them without going into rather a lot of detail.  It may also be that of the various things Ehrman writes about, I'm most familiar with the historical Jesus and so none of his discussion is all that new.

In any case, the book is worth being patient with until you get to the last sections, which I found much more interesting than the first, and for this marvelous bit:

Jesus was inescapably and ineluctably a Jew living in first-century Palestine. He was not like us, and if we make him like us we transform the historical Jesus into a creature that we have invented for ourselves and our own purposes. 

 Jesus would not recognize himself in the preaching of most of his followers today. He knew nothing of our world.  He was not a capitalist. He did not believe in free enterprise.  He did not support the acquisition of wealth or the good things in life.  He did not believe in massive education. He had never heard of democracy.  He had nothing to do with going to church on Sunday. He knew nothing of  social security, food stamps, American exceptionalism, unemployment numbers, or immigration. He had no views on tax reform, health care (apart from wanting to heal leprosy) or the welfare state.  

The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls by Anton DiSclafani

The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girlls by Anton DiSclafani is one of those books that is making the rounds of summer reading lists. I had trouble getting into this one: I spent the first few chapters getting progressively grouchier: of course this is a young woman who has been sent from home, and there is supposedly a big mystery about the bad thing she did, and of course this will be trouble with a boy given the Depression-era time period, and these are annoying rich southern people...snore, right?

But while it's trouble with a boy, it's a lot more than that.

The writing kept me going at first; the author is an exceptional prose stylist, and the first person perspective here actually works.  Eventually, I did begin to care about his subject, a wealthy young lady who just want want what she wants, whether it's horses or boys, and who honestly does not understand why wanting is wrong.  She has plenty of edge.  There are additional layers to the mystery that involve within-family class distinctions, as well as class systems among the wealthy girls, played out against the regional hierarchies within the south. Given the Wagnerian drama wrapped up in the latter, one really can't blame any of these young women for preferring horses to people.

Finally, I don't often come across writing about horses and human-horse interaction that even gets remotely close to what riding is like for people who really like--and understand--horses. This book does, and it's worth it to to get inside the head of a young woman who really does love the act of riding.

The Great God Pan by Arthur Machen

So every so often I read a book that is so creepy that I don't really know why I read it in the first place. This was one of those. Arthur Machen was, according to Wikipedia, which knows All Things, a mystic as well as a writer, and this is a well-known novella of his published in 1890. The scene begins, as so much Victorian fiction does, with a scientist who is all arrogance and know-it-all-ness. He has raised a young woman on whom he performs an experiment designed to 'open the mind to all things.'  The scene in which he describes his 'right' to do this is appalling to a  modern reader. I wonder if it was to Victorian?  Either way, she comes out of her reverie both physically and mentally damaged. The rest of the story centers on the panic and pain that this experiment unleashed in to the world.

I can't write any more without some serious spoilers, so I'll stop, but let's just say it's all freaky and worth reading if you like things that make you lose sleep because a) wondering what the heck happened in this story and b) still being scared out of your bejeezus even though you never quite figure out (a).

The Roots of Political Philosophy: Ten Forgotten Socratic Dialogues, edited by Thomas Pangle

The Roots of Political Philosophy: Ten Forgotten Socratic  Dialogues has some hyperbole about its in the title.  I don't really think these dialogues have been forgotten, per se. They have been contested, and the point of introductory essay by Thomas Pangle. In it, he describes all the form criticism that has gone to trying to figure out if these minor dialogues really are Plato's.  He makes the sensible conclusion that ancient compilers included them in Plato's corpus, and that probably should be good enough for us.  The other bit of over-reach in the title concerns the idea that these somehow are the root of political philosophy. That's not the over-arching theme of the book; only one of the essays--the one by Christopher Bruell on The Lovers, really tries to make the connection between political philosophy as a practice and the Socratic dialogue here.  But, it's Socrates, and he's root enough for political philosophy for me.  The Table of Contents is always useful:


HIPPARCHUS translated by Steven Forde
The Political Philospher in Democratic Society: the Socratic View by Allan Bloom

MINOS translated by Thomas L Pangle
On the Minos by Leo Strauss

LOVERS translated by James Leake
On the original meaning of Political Philosophy: An interpretation of Plato's Lovers by Christopher Bruell

CLEITOPHON translated by Clifford Orwin
On the Cleitophon by Clifford Orwin

THEAGES translated by Thomas L Pangle
On the Theages by Thomas L. Pangle

LACHES translated by James H Nichols Jr
Introduction to the Laches by James H Nichols Jr

ALCIBIADES, translated by Carnes Lord
On the Alcibiades I by Steven Forde

LESSER HIPPIAS translated by James Leake
Introduction to the Lesser Hippias by James Leake

GREATER HIPPIAS translated by David R Sweet
Introduction to the Greater Hippias by David R Sweet

ION translated by Allan Bloom
An Interpretation of Platos Ion by Allan Bloom

I'm not a very well-disciplined reader of Plato; Aristotle is a huge struggle for me and I always carefully plod through, but I generally find Plato to be playful and often very funny in the way that he depicts all these characters in the dialogue, and while you are probably meant to browse and pick and choose in a book like this, I honestly couldn't tell you what to skip. I read straight through.  I found a great deal of interesting things in the Cleitophon and Clifford Orwin's discussion of it, as well as the commentaries from Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom. In fact, I found Bloom's essays so useful I'm rather tempted to read his polemic The Closing of the American Mind to see if it's more than just a standard polemic about the cannon and the various threats to it.

Pearl Harbor by Roberta Wohlstetter: Signals, Noise, Unimaginable/Improbable?, Entrepreneurship and Japanese Thinking

Originally published in the early 60s, RW accounts for the surprise of PH by the noise that overwhelms the signals. Retrospectively, all is clear. Prospectively or in actual time, all those breadcrumbs are mixed in with crumbs from seven other bakeries and a thousand passersby.

Just because something is unimaginable does not mean that it is improbable, is the message in Schelling's forward.

My take is about entrepreneurship: You have an idea, and figure that you must succeed in something like two years. You feel that if you don't pursue it, you have lost your mojo. You also know that your competitors will doom you if you don't succeed in those two years, for they might well catch up. You will make your major announcement now, for you are ready--and you tell yourself that the competitors might cede some of the market to you. But that is just telling yourself. But that uncertain longer term is not going to stop you from trying. In other words, you don't think in terms of real options.  

(Japan is the entrepreneur; the competition is US, UK, the Dutch; the idea is the Greater Asian Prosperity Sphere; the announcement is PH (albeit you have made earlier announcements, as in Manchuria, but no real competition is present then); mojo is Japanese honor and also the anti-mojo is Japan becoming a tenth-rate power, unable to follow the West's imperialist model (the UK is also a small island state); catching up is awakening the US's industrial military might; you are ready since you have extended the range of your bombers to 450 miles but really need 500 miles and hope the pilots are careful with their fuel, the torpedos have been adapted to PH's low-depth; and no one really thinks through what might follow if success does not happen in the first year, for to do so is to violate a taboo and to be dishonorable.)

If I am not reading books, I am reading articles--usually sent to me by Peter Gordon.

See my blog, http://scholarssurvival.blogger.com  for discussion of some of these.

MK

Tana French, Benjamin Black detective novels in Dublin, Irish miseries

French: I've read 2 1/4 so far of them. Set in Dublin, often with the miseries of Ireland in he background. Somehow I just keep reading, although at times skipping over longer paragraphs. The second in the series features a woman detective, with an annoying boss; the third features the boss (who is not at all annoying here) with an annoying colleague; the fourth is the colleague (who is not at all annoying here) but not yet sure who is his problem. I've not read the first.

Black: again set in Dublin, main character is a pathologist, miseries everpresent.

Lots of drink, smoking, relatives, and detailed geography in each. Marriage is rarely bearable. Poverty everpresent.

The Last Coin by James Blaylock

James Blaylock apparently has a bit of a cult following, and while I have read several of his books and enjoyed them all, I've enjoyed none as much as The Last Coin.  His stories follow a template for speculative fiction: light-hearted coastal California romps with quirky heros and heroines,  lots of animals, and some mythic goings on. In this case, we're in Seal Beach (awesome! I want to move there now!) with the 30 gold coins paid to Judas Iscariot.  These coins have a supernatural element to them; they are meant to be scattered; if they do come together, bad things happen to the world.  We have dueling senior citizens and sinister but (thankfully) not torturing evil villain, and a hero that sticks with you because he's terribly likable despite what would generally be considered pretty serious character flaws. He's financially irresponsible, pursuing one silly scheme after another; he mooches money off an aunt who lives with them and keeps too many cats in her room (there is a reason for this; she's not a crazy cat lady). He leaves much of the work on restoring the house they've turned into a boarding house to his wife, whom I would describe as long-suffering, but she doesn't appear to be suffering despite the face that she often bears the brunt of his silly schemes and does far more real work than he does.  She's almost zenlike her placidity and willingness to roll with his silly nonsense.  It's hard to capture just how charming their relationship is.

Much better for light reading than Inferno, which got boring and draggy and depressing with all its plague to save the world ish,  "I'm a genius with meanius" themes; and slogs through art museums.

Inferno by Dan Brown

By far, the best commentary I have ever read on Dan Brown came from John Scalzi, who had a book come out on the same day as Dan Brown's recent book, Inferno: 

This would be the place to say something snarky about Brown, but I have nothing snarky to say about the dude. I read one of his books; it was entertaining and I was entertained and if there was anything about the book that was supposed to be deeper than that it went right past me. Being cranky about a Dan Brown book not being high literature is like yelling at a cupcake for not being a salad; it’s really missing the point. You don’t want the cupcake? Don’t eat the cupcake. Apparently lots of people like cupcakes. They don’t care that you want them to eat salad. You eat salad, if it’s so important to you.

 This quote has gotten a lot of play around the webs as a means to take some of the stuffing out of the lit-rary snobs out there, whom I've never really met, and I've met a lot of snobs in the general sense. I once got in grave trouble saying that The DaVinci Code is a terrible book--it really is, by just about any standard of a novel. But what I assumed everybody knew (but didn't) was that it's possible for a book to have a terrific and entertaining story (which the DaVinci Code has) and still be rather an exasperating piece of writing. Dan Brown is an irritating writer: and no, it's not because I'm seething with envy over his success.  He doesn't trust his reader so you have to sit through boatloads of dull expository dialogue, lots of reminders of what happened just two, teeny tiny chapters before,  and viewpoints that shift so often you KNOW you are reading a book that is actually meant to be a movie.   The danger of all those shifting story lines is that many of them in Brown's book just aren't as interesting as you'd hope.  I didn't need to read pages upon pages about the albino zealot in DaVinci and we've got similar problems here in Inferno.

That said, Scalzi's quote  is much more apt than the 'sticking it to the lit-rary snobs' interpretation of it might suggest.  Yep, cupcakes are yummy. But a steady diet of cupcakes is really bad for you.  And the point is to know the difference between cupcakes and salads, when you can moderately consume one or the other and be a happy and indulged and also healthy and growing at the same time. It's not good to conflate salads with cupcakes just because the latter is more fun and sells better than kale. And it's not good idea to conflate an entertaining story with great literature, which challenges and changes us in addition to entertaining us.

So Inferno suffers from much of the same problems, and it has many of the same virtues, as DaVinci Code did. Virtues: I love international thrillers, and it's got lots of great scene-setting in Florence, Venice, an Constantinople. And OMG there's a proffie who is ACTUALLY THE HERO and not just a bit-player scumbag archetype who only became a professor to predate on his nubile undergrads.  Woo! Just like with DaVinci, this might get people interested in Dante's Inferno, which is all to the good in my book.  The problems are still the problems. The characters are one-dimensional super-characters--we find out his love interest has an IQ of 208 in the first 10 pages or so (I can't tell on pages; reading on iPad) and has been an acting prodigy! learns languages in a single month! and is (GASP!) a bit naughty rebel girl in her lissome athleticism! Good lord.  There is every cringe-worthy
cliche possible: there is the scary lesbian-y man-woman assassin, the Sinister Corporation doing the bidding of the wealthy and privileged worldwide, there is a mad scientist who wants to RULE THE WORLD.  Well, no. He actually just wants to wreck it and have his video shown.

Another point in its favor: one evil person is called the provost. Hee! I love evil people named after upper administrators I fear.

Anyway, all very entertaining, and I think Brown may be working with a better editor because the prose is a step above The Lost Symbol or the DaVinci Code--far less repetition and less expository dialogue (not all gone, but waaaaay less than lectures delivered in DaVinci.)  

Forgiveness by Vladimir Jankelevitch, translated by Andrew Kelley

This is a re-release of Jankelevtich's 1967 answer to Hannah Arendt on the nature of forgiveness and  memory. I'm using this for a paper I am writing on restoring political community using the ex ante exploration of political wrongs.  For such a grave topic, Jankelevitch is remarkably playful, and this translation manages to capture the wordplay we are likely to see in the original.  As one of the reviewers blurbed on the back notes, Jankelevitch's project here concerns the "inexhaustible goodness of forgiveness." (Edith Wyschogrod who has written another book I need to get my hands on--An Ethics of Remembering).

Penelope Maddy, UC Irvine professor of philosophy of science: large cardinals, and sensible philosophy of mathematics

Maddy has written some of the most sensible philosophy of science (mostly mathematics) I have ever read. She combines talking about modern set theory (a viewpoint from what is called the Cabal, sort of UCLA, UCI, and UC Berkeley mathematicians, Maddy and some others), and discussions of the axioms of set theory and the large cardinals, with reference to the usual gang of philosophical (dead white men).

Her discussions of set theory are quite wonderful, and in more recent work she has been developing a philosophy of mathematics that is much more recognizable to mathematicians, less totally influenced by too simple examples and too abstract questions. (I'm sure she would not approve this past sentence.)

Floating around in the background are attempts to settle the Continuum Hypothesis, one way or the other. Is the set of all sets of natural numbers the size of the continuum, or not. Steel of Berkeley says yes, Woodin of Berkeley says it (the set of all sets) is  much larger. I don't pretend to understand much of this. Tony Martin of UCLA is one of this group, and he has written very sensibly on the nature of mathematics.

The most curious feature of this endeavor is lies in the realm of what is called descriptive set theory. It is possible to develop a hierarchy-1 of sets (the large cardinals), and that hierarchy-1 corresponds to a hierarchy-2 of descriptions of sets that would seem to not have anything so directly paralleling hierarchy-1, but in fact they seem to follow each other precisely. What's also amazing to me is that these various large cardinals are useful for other parts of mathematics, and in Woodin's hands they lead to a claim about the Continuum Hypothesis that is not proved yet ("just" lacking a proof of the "Omega Conjecture").

I've been reading detective thrillers again...

Some recommendations:

Daniel Silva, Gabriel Allon novels
Elizabeth Ironside, A Good Death
Val McDermid, detectives are a policewoman and a profiling psychologist
Joe Nesbo, the latest Harry Hole
Benjamin Black, latest Quirke
Thomas Perry, especially the Butcher Boy books, and also Jane Whitehead books
Lawrence Block--I don't recall the title of the one with the sober policeman
Michael Connolly
David Baldacci


There's more. I read these sort of like eating Lay's Potato Chips, or as least as they advertise. During my last bout of reading these, I went to my local gun store in Culver City--very respectable--to see what  a Glock, Sig Sauer, and other such were like. Too many, and they suggested I go to a gun range and try out and see "what I liked."  I am struck by the gun details in most of these novels--models, sizes, etc. There should be a guide to guns for those reading these novels. Often, the guns are nothing ordinary, say something that the Army might use, with monster bullets, or something for elephants wearing bullet-proof vests.

In any case, I realize now that on TV they don't mention the kind of weapon they are using, the brand etc. Maybe to identify what the killers used?

The Thrill of the Chaste: The Allure of Amish Romance Novels

When I was an undergraduate, I did a minor in American Studies, and I took a great class on the romance novel.  This is an interest that hasn't waned, even though I seldom read them now.  People who don't read romance novels do not really understand just how big the sales can be for Amish romance novels, and I find this topic endlessly fascinating: I know romance novels are big business (I have friends who write them and make much better livings than everybody else I know who isn't an entertainment lawyer or real estate mogul)....I had no idea that the Amish genre was as big as it is.  From John Hopkins University Press comes   arguably the best title I've encountered in ages--The Thrill of the Chaste: the Allure of Amish Romance Novels by Valerie Weaver-Zercher.   I'm not really capable of saying anything intelligent about the critical literary analysis, but there is enough material here for the nonspecialist that  I certainly kept on reading.

 The takeaway thesis is that Amish romance novels fit beautifully in the oppositional, fundamentalist, and consumerist  Christian mindset of contemporary American evangelicals.  These novels trade in on markets serving contemporary American Protestants nicely; the romances are an antidote to the fast-moving, technology-oriented, gender-bending, hyper-sexualized mainstream where these readers feel alienated and adrift.  These romance readers are served up cherrypicked quaintness of a social and religious subgroup shorn of their details: brides and quilts and storybook farms. Skipped over  are the practices within Amish tradition that splatter up against evangelical modernity: pacifism (not extended to their animals, btw) and communism. (Yes, communism).  The effect is the superficial sharing of a counter-modern narrative that is no way based on deeper consensus about values other than the mainstream is big, scary, corrupt, distressingly cosmopolitan and decaying. The novels are written, Weaver-Zercher notes, like many others in genre fiction--for readers who are already convinced of their lifestyle and beliefs and want those mirrored back to them in wholesome, unchallenging ways.

Valerie Weaver-Zercher wrote up this essay on Bonnet-Rippers for LARB that is also worth reading. 

Two novels on aging

Two novels that I've read recently left me breathless.  One of our brilliant PhD students pointed me to The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey by Walter Mosley, and the second book I picked up was Emily, Alone by Stuart O'nan.  Here's Ptolemy Grey reviewed, to great effect, by the LA Times, and here is Emily, Alone reviewed in the New York Times, which apparently didn't review Mosley, despite his considerable stature.  Grr.

Read both books.  They squish up your heart and get deep into your blood.

One is a story about an 91 year-old black man in Los Angeles who takes an experimental drug knowing it will kill him but does it to be able to regain the cognitive ability he has lost due to dementia.  He does so to find out who killed the one person who kept him moored to the outside word--his grand-nephew Reggie. Amid the squalor and pain of Grey's life, the death provides him with a purpose and the means for his own much-desired exit.

Emily, Alone is a second novel about Emily Maxwell; I have not read the first, but I shall.  Emily is a white lady, country club member,  widow, an Indiana Republican, and much younger and healthier than Ptolemy Grey, but sharing in the gradual unmooring of her life as she faces the loss of her lifelong friend and the reality that she is the only one left who remembers 'the old days."

Both unbelievably good books by fine writers.

The Last of the Doughboys by Richard Rubin

This is a book that my husband, Andy, bought and left sitting around.  Richard Rubin did a considerable amount of work chasing down the last living American veterans of WWI, all centenarians, and as he relates in the NPR story below, it was a race against time.

The result is The Last of the Doughboys: The Forgotten Generation and Their Forgotten World War, and it is a terrific read.  This is war, up-front and personal; no drones; no watching from the comfort of a living room with the camera directing your eye.  The stories are both uplifting and heartbreaking, all the more so because all these gentlemen have subsequently died during the the time Rubin took to compile the interviews and write the manuscript.  I'm very grateful he had the chance to do this work before time silenced them.

The part that is interesting from a policy perspective concerns just why and how WWI and these men became largely 'forgotten.'  I get the sense from my students that they see WWII and the Civil War as wars with valid causes, but that the origins of the First World War are so badly explained that casual observers only remember a few points from their high school western civ class--something to do with a bunch of ill-advised treaties and an unfortunately assassinated Archduke. It's sad because you can draw a line between  the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) and WWII via the uncomfortable formation of  European and colonial nation-states, and thus learn a lot about how the national boundaries we have came to be.

Mr. Rubin appeared in NPR to talk about his book.

Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order by Charles Hill

Charles Hill was with the state department for many years, and he is now the ambassador in residence at Yale.  His thesis: you can't really understand statecraft using the reductive methods that dominate the social sciences. 

Instead, you need the big picture, and the big picture comes to us more often in literature or history than in any of the social sciences.  The arguments in the books are not well organized; I often got lost as his transitions are a little sloppy, and I was reading carefully. But it's worth the read anyway because a) I think Hill is right and b) the whole book is like being in conversation about statecraft with an erudite man who has vast experience in the subject, and who likes the same books as you do.  He made me think about Aeschylus and Xenophon in new ways.  A lovely reading experience. 

I can't quite figure out if his chapter on America is weak because I am not as well-versed as I should be on US literature, outside of the Federalist Papers, where the discussion is entirely too short, or whether the discussion is really weak.  It could be both;  Hill is one of those people who gets cranky about  he calls the dismantling of the canon, and acts like reading a book outside of the dead white males will kill you.  I have never understood this perspective.  I don't get why including more people into your reading and education, rather than fewer, makes for a better 'canon' of literature. I'm capable of reading both Mark Twain and Toni Morrison.  Thus the movement is towards inclusion rather than dismantling. 

Here is a link to the book.

And here is Charles Hill talking at the Hoover Institute about the book in a five series of videocasts.  These are well worth watching, even if I think Hill goes off the rails a bit at some points. 

Charles Hill, Part 1

Charles Hill, Part 2

Charles Hill, Part 3

Charles Hill, Part 4

Charles Hill, Part 5

Ike's Bluff by Evan Thomas, Threat Vector by Tom Clancy and ...

There has been for some time an historical literature rehabilitating Eisenhower's reputation as president. Of course, in part he looks better compared to some of his successors. In part, he is now portrayed as a military man who is quite aware of the costs of war, and unwilling to make war--but willing to have others believe he might be willing to use the atomic bomb. That's Thomas's notion of Ike's bluff. It draws on previous work a good deal.

Tom Clancy's last book was also about China as a problematic nation. Resource constraints force them to invade Siberia. In this book, in effect imitating the Japanese before and during WWII, they want to enlarge their influence on South and Southeast Asia to the edge of Australia, and the scheme here cyber invasion of US resources. Lots of hackers, lots of deniability. I can never tell how realistic are these books, and I tend to read to about p. 100 and then read pages 750-835, and sample in between. Thick and light.

Demonic possession, exorcism, and the Devil

So I have been reading Brian Levack's The Devil Within: Possession and Exorcism in the Christian West, published by Yale University Press.   I've gotten rather interested the topic, as I have been reflecting on the limits that states place on individual autonomy around issues such as refusing medical care, because of ideological or religious reasons, for children who not at the age of consent.

 Nothing perhaps pushes this idea more than exorcism.  Levack notes that exorcisms have not gone away: there's a real surge in the number of exorcisms in the late 20th and early 21st century.  Levack points out that exorcisms tend to surge during times of social change and unrest--a similar time  would be the surge of exorcisms that occurred during the Reformation.

There are celebrity exorcists! One claims to have to exorcised 70,000 people. 

Levack appeared on Tom Ashcroft's  NPR's On Point. It's very much worth a listen.

The major thesis centers around how demoniacal behavior is embedded within the culture--that is, even where there are obvious cases of mental or neurological illnesses attributed to demonic possession, many of those manifest according to lines where symptoms are culturally transgressive.

 The other interesting point: 70 to 80 percent of demoniacs are women
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------. 
PS by Martin Krieger. See the work of Moshe Sluhovsky re women....

Believe Not Every Spirit: Possession, Mysticism, & Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism [Hardcover]  and his earlier work

Moshe Sluhovsky

Moshe Sluhovsky (Author)

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Bureaucratic Politics--Allison and Zelikow, Wohlstetters. What Should We Teach?

 I am not sure we  teach our students what might be called bureaucratic politics. I have been reading the second edition of Graham Allison (and Philip Zelikow), Essence of Decision (1971, 1999).  In Allison’s terms, this would be Model III (bureaucratic politics). I know we do his Model I and given our organization and institutional analysis people, we do Model II.

 I had just read Feith’s account of Iraq in the Bush administration, War and Decision, a story that was mostly bureaucratic politics. I would imagine that students who work in government or in other corporate contexts would appreciate the stuff on bureaucratic politics.

I have also been reading Alfred Wohlstetter, the RAND guy on strategic analysis, (Nuclear Heuristics: Selected Writings of Albert and Roberta Wohlstetter)  and the Pearl Harbor book by Roberta W. Do we teach any of this sort of systems analysis? Pearl Harbor is about standard operating procedures and organizational outputs and somewhat lesser bureaucratic politics.  From what I can see International Relations does not do this. (They might do bureaucratic politics, but I don’t know.)

Henry Rowen's long discussion of the Wohlstetters in Nuclear Heuristics is terrific in its detail, its context, and its understanding.

Invisible Ink: How 100 Great Authors Disappeared

I am currently reading a book by Christopher Fowler called Invisible Ink: How 100 Great Authors Disappeared.Number 27 is Barbara Pym, and I am in a huff on her behalf. She is not forgotten. However, he also includes Dickens and R.L. Stevenson for their their lesser known works.

A quote of Barbara Pym's captures the imagination:

Only two years after her rediscovery, she succumbed to a recurrence of breast cancer. She said 'The small things of life were often so much bigger than the great things. The trivial pleasures like cooking, one's home, little poems, especially sad ones, solitary walks, funny things seen and overheard."

The book does not have a generalizable theory for why some authors, very popular in their day, fade from the public eye.  Instead, it tells individual, short bios of the authors.  The authors are all novelists, no non-fiction.

Warning: you will find A LOT more books you wish to read, and for those of us with tottering towers on the nightstand, and books stacked on the stairs, and very full backpacks, this may not be good news.

Lean in by Sheryl Sandberg

Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg is one of those books you read because it's all over the news and there's The Debate: is it feminist, can be it feminist if there's no interest in social justice whatsoever (there isn't); oh, all those arguments are specious, women are just catty towards successful women like Sandberg and that's why she's getting all this flack, yada yada.  

I am not sufficiently educated in contemporary feminist thought to comment on whether the book is a good reflection of popular feminism, other than I hope it is not. I do know that I found it to be the typical bloviating business memoir fare--and it's probably a sign of progress that a woman finally gets to be the big blowhard dispensing advice and telling long, drawn-out stories about herself that are thinly veiled brags but are intended as Valuable Lessons To All.  And that's generally what we have. She's right about the different way people perceive assertiveness in men and women, but that's been pretty well-known for some time.  The major take-away from the book is that the consequences for having people think you are pushy are less severe than the consequences of not going after what you want, and that's a pretty good message so far as it goes.

And, the advice is generally good: be assertive, ask directly for what you need, make sure you are involved in the key roles/decisions, be a part of a juggernaut company, be willing to make lateral moves if the new roles are enriching enough, expect your partner to contribute to your marriage and family, and don't expect mentors to be interested in you personally (the unstated; in the narcissistic world of upper level managers who fancy themselves great leaders, it's easier to get them to help you if you fawn over them and are generally attractive).

Again, all fine, if somewhat obvious bits of business advice. That said, to get to them you will have to sit through rather long, self-referential stories about that Thing that Happened to Me Me Me.  It's tempting, in a world whether we treat experience as knowledge, to believe that these personal stories are terribly meaningful,  and that others will benefit from them. And that can be true: you just need to  be amusing and brief, but Sandberg isn't.  The result is boring and cringe-worry when you realize you have just spent three pages reading about how, when she was placed on Forbes' most influential women list at number six above Michelle Obama,  she should have taken all the compliments she received more gracefully than she did.  All well and true, no doubt, but not the sort of situation that many of us are likely to have to fret about, and all in order to convey the point that could be summed on that internet meme with the advice-dispensing duck--"Own your successes."

I read these things so that others don't have to.

Oddly, the book's notes are well worth buying the book for. In the notes you get to avoid all the self-congratulations and in-groupy, name-droppy stories and find plenty of recent empirical studies--with tons of intelligent commentary--about the state of women in the workforce.  So if you do bychance wind up with the book,  I'd suggest taking the memoir part very lightly and go straight to the notes.

Julie Annas--An Introduction to Plato's Republic

I've become preoccupied with actor-centered theories of justice lately, and that lead me back to Plato and re-reading The Republic.  I also picked up Julia Annas' Introduction to Plato's Republic as I remember one of my undergraduate professors used a chapter in this book.  The entire book is a terrific guide through The Republic, and Annas is a marvelous writer. I did part company with her, however, towards the end; unlike me, Annas has no time for Book 10 of The Republic, whereas I love that Book.  Plato is so wonderfully playful throughout all his writings, but Book 10 is one of those places where he is both playful and somewhat mystical, and for such an analytical man who was terribly hard on poets, it's great fun to see him cutting loose with his own flight of fancy. I suspect that it's all to impressionistic for most Platonists, given the significance of his other writings.

Just as a refresher, Book 10 is where Plato develops his Myth of Er, and where Socrates turns to his friend (and Plato's brother Glaucon)  with the pronouncement that the soul is, of course, immortal! For me, I've always found the last chapter to be a delightful surprise, even if I've never been 100 percent clear on its interpretation. Annas, however, brooks no sympathy with this odd book: she refers to Book 10 and the myth as "lame" and "messy."  Nonetheless, Annas helped me out tremendously with my studies in humanism.

George Shultz: Turmoil and Triumph

I have been dipping into George Shultz's 1000 page memoir of his being Secretary of State under Reagan. He is famous for:  economists' lags are politicians' nightmares, but there is lots more. The book is Turmoil and Triumph.

As I now read it more sequentially, I am impressed by his account of his thinking, and of how he worked with Reagan, and the bureaucratic politics he had to work with. Reagan comes off better than usually portrayed. I cannot judge if Shultz is reliable or accurate in his account, but at least it is not bragging or hiding. The tone is very very different than Condolezza Rice's recent memoir, where I wish there was more thinking and more detail.

I don't know how Shultz is viewed as a Secretary of State, or more generally in his public service. What I am struck by is his recurrent attempts to make for a strategic plan for moving forward on various issues (he says it is his training as an economist), his negotiating skills (he was a labor economist and mediatory), and his willingness to admit setbacks and defeats.

What is also impressive is his account of Foreign Service Officers, their skills and talents, their imperfections and idiocies.  I could imagine wanting to become such an Officer after reading this book. Neither James Baker's nor Rice's had that effect.

I need to read memoirs by Democratic Secretaries of State, since the end of WWII.