The Motorcycle Diaries - Ernesto "Che" Guevara

Che Guevara is, to put it lightly, a polarizing figure. Though his deification on some parts of the left makes me a bit queasy given the repressions he oversaw—and to some extent directly imposed—on Cuba’s citizens, the countervailing vilification he receives from the right has always felt a little forced, as the exigencies of revolution and war seem to them acceptable, even laudable, when done by their side, and repugnant when done by others. Basically, Che is the ultimate optical illusion for political partisans: some see two faces chatting, others see a vase, but the pattern of light and shadow is in both cases identical.

But I’m not here to talk about Che Guevara the revolutionary, but Ernesto Guevara, author of a poignant memoir about his travels around South and Central America. It’s called The Motorcycle Diaries, but the eponymous motorcycle dies less than halfway through the book, and anyway it isn’t even really a motorcycle, but a regular bicycle with a jury-rigged motor attached (though come to think of it, putting a motor on a bicycle does make it a motorcycle in the most literal sense, so point to Che there, I guess).

Published nearly 30 years after his death, The Motorcycle Diaries was obviously released without Che’s knowledge, and it’s unclear to me whether he wrote his diary with the intention that anyone would ever read it. There is indeed no overwhelming impulse to apply narrative structure to the text, with passages recounting experiences episodically and often without the connective tissue of segues. A few of his letters to his parents are interspersed between entries. Yet there is undeniably a literary flourish to the work that suggests he hoped it to be read. I am always reluctant to judge the prose style of works read in translation, but I can at least say that Che utilized a surprising degree of lyricism, irony, and humour, giving depth to his more prosaic observations of life among the lower classes of South America. The humour especially surprised me, particularly its sly self-deprecation. I will remember the anecdote about the peaches for the rest of my life.

Also evident (and here the right wingers will roll their eyes and gag) was an undeniable empathy for the people he met. For nearly everyone he writes about, he does so with compassion and kindness, and there seems to be a sincere sorrow at the plight of the poorer folks he encounters. particularly the patients at one of the several leper colonies he visits. Whether this compassion was a genuine fuel for his revolutionary zeal or merely a pretense for later violence is something I’ll leave to others to debate, because frankly I don’t really care. Che was who he was and did what he did, and regardless of these things his writings show insight and talent.

Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland - Patrick Radden Keefe

I feel like I’m always forgetting where I hear about books. This is another one of those cases. I put a hold on Say Nothing at he library at some point, and by the time it came in, the specific impetus for doing so had vanished. In such cases, I tend to trust my past self’s judgement—we tend to have similar tastes—and I did so again here.

Say Nothing is a history of a large event and a mystery about a small event (small in global terms; to those involved it was devastating). The history concerns the Troubles, which roiled Northern Ireland from the late sixties until the late nineties. The mystery is what happened to a woman named Jean McConville, a widow and mother of ten who, on a night in 1972, was abducted form her home and never seen again. That she was murdered was never seriously in question, but the absence of a body was an abscess in the minds of her children, a puckered wound in their hearts that refused to close and thereby seal the certainty of their mother’s demise.

The two stories intertwine, with McConville’s disappearance a thread singled out from the broader tapestry of the Troubles. Keefe does a good job juggling both subjects, giving a brisk but thorough summary of the causes that led to the troubles, the struggles of the paramilitaries with the authorities and each other, and the eventual peace process that brought the bloodshed to a halt while undermining its meaning, a decision that caused no shortage of resentment among the IRA faithful.

Keefe’s interest is clearly with people over events, and he frames much of the history though specific stories, including those of Dolours and Marian Price, sisters whose violent exploits made them IRA darlings and media fodder; Brendan Hughes, an IRA footsoldier and gifted tactician with an uncompromising view of Irish nationalism; and Gerry Adams, one of the heads of the Provisional IRA (though never admitting as much) whose pivot to politics with Sinn Fein brought peace to Northern Ireland while leaving those who fought feeling abandoned and bitter.

The focus of the book is clearly with the nationalists, as unionist voices are relegated to villainous bit parts, but this is more due to focus than polemics. Keefe paints the IRA neither as purely cold-blooded killers or revolutionary heroes, but as normal men and women whose convictions and circumstances led them to commit unlawful and occasionally violent acts. His final weighing of the fat of Jean McConville is not a stone cold certainty, but he presents a credible argument as to who killed her and why, and helps refute the claim that her “touting (or informing) was the cause. A good book.

Son of Hamas: A Gripping Account of Terror, Betrayal, Political Intrigue, and Unthinkable Choices - Mosab Hassan Yousef

Son of Hamas tells the story of Mosab Hassan Yousef, whose father, Hassan Yousef, is the co-founder of Hamas. Though initially a proponent of jihad and intifada, the younger Yousef recanted and became a spy for the Israeli intelligence agency Shin Bet. His position made him the most valuable mole the organization had, and by his own account he was instrumental in avoiding numerous terrorist plots.

The book chronicles Yousef’s life while providing a primer on the contentious history of the land that bore him. His stance with Israel is unwavering, but his sympathy for his people is evident. He faces particular anguish when discussing his father, a man he admires greatly on a personal level, but whose endorsement of actions—tacit or otherwise—that bring death and destruction to Jews and fellow Muslims alike seems contrary to his gentle nature.

There is an element of spy thriller to the story’s second half, as Yousef chronicles the spycraft he undertook to avoid detection for nearly a decade. Primarily, though, the text is plainspoken and matter of fact, though Yousef doesn’t hide his emotion when describing traumas of his past.

Yousef is a polarizing figure in current times, and his absolutism puts off some moderates, but his book is engaging and worth a read for anyone who ants to view this complex and intractable conflict from a new angle.

Brave Two Zero - Andy McNab

“[Bravo Two Zero] actually improves with every read”

— Alan Partridge

I picked up Bravo Two Zero on recommendation by Alan Partridge. I had assumed it was a novel, but it actually purports to be the non-fiction account of a British Special Forces soldier on deployment behind enemy lines in Iraq during the Gulf War. I say purports, because several subsequent books have come out disputing some of McNab’s accounts of his time in the war, and the book apparently concedes some fictionalization. This makes it one of those strange hybrids that is difficult to categorize. I choose to consider it non-fiction, simply because the author is indeed who he says he is in the book (albeit under a pseudonym), and because the events it describes are, in broad strokes, true.

The story is told in plain, conversational prose festooned with initialisms and other military jargon. Despite having to look up a few things (I had no idea what a berken was), I found it an easy and compelling read with the pacing of a Frederick Forsythe novel. McNab begins with his team’s prep for the mission, which provides a lot of details on the process without feeling bogged down. essentially, they were instructed to comrpomise a communication line that allowed Iraq to launch SCUD missiles, crippling their ability to attack nearby targets and hastening the invasion.

From there, the book spends its second section detailing their actions in Iraq, which go awry almost immediately and involve their attempt to avoid capture. The attempt fails, and the third and longest section of the book describes McNab’s captivity in graphic detail, highlighting the torture and general abuse he (allegedly) underwent while incarcerated. There is no dramatic escape, merely a stoid endurance until the closing days of the war make a prisoner exchange more prudent than execution or outright liberation.

I can’t comment on the veracity of the story since i haven’t read the other accounts and am no expert. I can only say that the book is as enjoyable as Alan said it would be, though it may be a while before I get the chance to reread it and see if it really does improve.

The Killing of Crazy Horse - Thomas Powers

Sometimes I get on a topic and I can’t remember how I got there. So it is with the conflict between the United States and the plains Indians in the latter half of the 19th century. Usually it’s Wikipedia’s fault, but this particular rabbit hole could have come from anywhere. In this case it led to The Killing of Crazy Horse, which, as the title suggests, uses one incident as a focal point to view a much longer conflict.

Crazy Horse, a fearless Sioux warrior and gifted tactician, features prominently in the book, but more as a symbol than as a man. Part of this is due to his notoriously taciturn nature. Though he commanded much respect among his people, he said little, leaving the sermonizing to more loquacious figures like Red Cloud and Sitting Bull. His words are scarcely recorded, and there isn’t even a known picture of him. The most prominent characters in the book are therefore figures adjacent to Crazy Horse, those who fought with him and, to a greater extent, those who fought against him, notably General Crook and Lieutenant Clark. The marquee role goes to William Garnett, a half-Sioux man who served as an interpreter and had a foot in both worlds. Together, their shared experiences show Crazy Horse in bas relief, carving out the absences to reveal a picture of the man.

Descriptions of the battles are highly clinical, tracing movements with almost pedantic precision in a style common to civil war histories but that I often struggle to follow. Apart from this, the narrative is mostly about relationships, and Powers does a good and even-handed job of showing life on the plains during that period. A good book for those interested in the topic.

Under the Big Black Sun: A Personal History of L.A. Punk - Jon Doe with Tom DeSavia and Friends

X is releasing a final album and going on a farewell tour, and while final albums aren’t always final and farewell tours are almost never a farewell, I’m concerned enough they mean it to travel to Rochester on my own and see them while I still can. Buying my ticket got me in the mood to read a book I’d purchased years ago but hadn’t gotten around to until just now: Under the Big Black Sun: A Personal History of L.A. Punk.

In my experience, a book authored by musician “with” another writer is usually little more than a biography in first person, the perspective belying the obvious distance of the actual subject to what’s being written. Here, though, the “and friends” gives a better hint of what the book is about. Rather than a straight up autobiographical account of Doe’s live before, during, and after X’s heyday, Under the Big Black Sun has the patchwork feel of an oral history, with musicians, writers, and scenesters contributing their own stories and perspectives on the unique scene that emerged in late 70s LA.

Doe gets the most page time, but in a way his parts are the least narrative of the book, focusing as they do on small moments and assuming (correctly, in my case) that the reader already knows the general story of the band. Most of the other contributors take the more traditional route, charting their arrival in LA and immersion into a small but rich musical scene, though the focus is almost always on the culture rather than the specific band, furthering the anthropological sense of the book. There are a couple of missteps, but for the most part the writers feel like earnest people wistfully recollecting a difficult but formative time in their lives. Contributors namecheck bands with frequency, and I came across a few artists I’d never heard of and now adore (Nightmare City by the Alley Cats is incredible). There were also bands I knew but had never associated with the punk scene (The Go-Go’s, really?).

As befitting an anthology, the book is a grab bag of styles, and while some went more florid than others, I found the whole thing well constructed and readable, with only a couple passages that struck me as indulgent and over-written.

Overall, a solid book for those interested in a scene that, while not launching many marquee names, undoubtedly influenced American music for the rest of the century.

The Longbow, the Schooner, and the Violin: Wood and Human Achievement - Marq de Villiers

“Do you respect wood?”

— Larry David

My wife signed up for a membership to the Sutherland Quarterly and as part of a promotion they let her pick a free book from their catalogue. She chose The Longbow, the Schooner and the Violin. I respect wood (much like Larry David), so I read it.

The book wasn’t what I expected. I thought it would be a cohesive argument about the central place these three items held in human history, likely because of the similar structure of the title compared to Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel. de Villiers does lay out a rough premise to this effect in the introduction, citing these three objects as pinnacles of their genre, but in terms of influencing human history, he really only makes a convincing case for the longbow, which changed the course of warfare in the Middle Ages. The schooner had impact on trade, but was not of singular importance among similar boats. The violin, while an impressive instrument, was also not seismic in the same way.

Instead of weaving a single argument, de Villiers gives histories of these objects as pieces of cultural importance in their time, interspersing them with chapters about pretty much anything he could think of involving wood. These essays range from inspired (his taxonomy of the origin of forest was genuinely interesting) to somewhat bewildering (several pages detailing the best woods for different purposes). It feels a bit grab bag, and I wondered if these essays had been publishing previously for some sort of nature periodical (Trees Monthly?) and collected here.

de Villiers’ writing is strong, weaving eloquent description with prosaic turns of phrase to good effect. I liked the book, but it’s such an odd assortment that I’d recommend it to someone who really likes wood or else doesn’t mind taking literary detours.

The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon - David Grann

This is the first new read I’ve picked up in a while. I’ve been working my way back through Stephen King’s short story collections and didn’t have much to write about them (they’re good). I put The Lost City of Z on hold a while ago and forgot about it, sp when it came in I only roughly remembered what it was about. Fortunately, my interests are more consistent than my memory, and I usually end up enjoying the things my past self requests for me. So it was here.

The Lost City of Z is a journalistic account of the life of Percy Fawcett, one of the last Great White Explorers, a group seen much less kindly these days, but that loomed large in the British—and by extension, the global—imagination around the turn of the 19th century. Whatever you think of the European inclination to explore uncharted lands—or, indeed, to consider lands where people had lived for ten thousand years “uncharted” in the first place—Fawcett was a remarkable man, possessed of a keen mind, an unparalleled drive, and an almost inhuman constitution (he seemed never to get sick, even when everyone else in his party was half-dead with rot and fever). After several tresk through the Amazon, he became obsessed with the notion of a lost civilization paved in gold, a place commonly called El Dorado, which he referred to as Z. In his quest for Z, Fawcett disappeared along with his son and his son’s friend, his whereabouts and even ultiamte fate unknown.

Parallell to the story of Fawcett’s life and disappearance, the author David Grann details his own efforts to pick up the mystery that had consumed hundreds of others before him. What he finds isn’t something I want to spoil, but the book has an exciting conclusion that suggests Fawcett wasn’t as far off the mark as his detractors claim.

The writing is engaging journalistic prose, unadorned but full of keen detail. I enjoyed reading it.

The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure - Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt

The Coddling of the American Mind neatly summarizes its thesis in its subtitle. The authors come from different backgrounds, Lukianoff as a lawyer and first amendment activist and Haidt as a social psychologist and academic, but are united over their concern with some of the trends appearing on modern liberal arts college campuses. They chronicle a shift in belief in a university’s core mandate from challenging students to protecting them, and argue that this change harms students by leaving them fragile and unprepared for life beyond school.

The subject matter is inherently inflammatory, but Lukianoff and Haidt take great pains to avoid turning their book into a polemic. The language is calm, circumspect, and reasoned, proffering explanations for this shift that include the political and social landscape these students came of age in and avoiding broad value judgments. There’s no bandying about terms like “snowflake.” The book’s focus on cognitive behavioral therapy struck me as bizarre at first, but the authors make a convincing case that speaker bans and trigger warnings feed into the negative thoughts CBT attempts to combat.

The structure of the book betrays their background in advocacy and academia, reading like a cross between a white paper and a textbook (albeit a pared down, accessible one). Chapters end with bullet point synopses, and the authors pause on a number of occasions to reiterate what they have discussed so far and tie it back to their original argument. Overall, I found it an interesting read, especially as someone who left university just a few years before these changes took hold.

When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era - Donovan X. Ramsey

I’d wanted someone to write this book for a long time.

I’m lucky enough to have grown up in a neighbourhood more or less untouched by the crack epidemic, but I was alive during its peak, too young to understand exactly what crack was or what it did, but old enough to catch the wave of fear and disdain that emanated from its use. Mostly this filtered through hyperbolic news coverage and sappy TV plotlines, but it entered general discourse too. Kids used crackhead as a slur for a poor or mentally unwell person, and I knew a “crack baby” was a child born broken in some fundamental way. But I never understood why crack emerged so abruptly, ravaged communities so thoroughly, and why it seemed to ebb away even as I became aware of it.

Donovan X. Ramsey does a great job answering these questions, and a lot more besides. When Crack Was King takes a broad lens to the crack epidemic, reaching back to the Great Migration and Nixon’s War on Drugs to explain how the impoverished, largely Black population of America’s inner cities became uniquely vulnerable to the drug, documents the rise in cocaine’s availability that dropped the price enough for regular people to afford it, and the chemical innovations that freed cocaine from its powdered form, first through the complex and dangerous method of free base, and later through the much simpler form of crack. Ramsey meticulously discusses the policy decisions of each administration, how each party’s desire to be “touch of crime” led to an ever-tightening spiral of restrictions and harsher sentences. He also gives a simple and compelling reason for why crack petered out the way it did: its addiction was so ravaging and destructive that the kids growing up around the first generation of addicts were scared off for fear of becoming the second.

As good as Ramsey is at the wide lens, When Crack Was King is at it’s core a book about four people whose lives were touched by the crack epidemic: Elgin Swift, the son of an addict who grew up in a Yonkers neighbourhood ravaged by crack; Lennie Woodley, an addict herself who overcame an appallingly abusive childhood and years as a sex worker to become an advocate for addicts in recovery; Kurt Schmoke, the mayor of Baltimore, who fought the Tough on Crime tide in an effort to put compassion and treatment into the city’s response to the epidemic; and Shawn McCray, a basketball prodigy and ace student who sold crack and became part of an infamous Newark gang called the Zoo Crew. Ramsey’s portraits of the four are unfailingly sympathetic yet honest, not flinching from the failures and bad decisions they sometimes made—that we all make, and that those more fortunate among us can afford to make without serious consequences.

Ramsey’s prose is engaging and evocative without being flowery. He captures the mood of a troubled era in American history in an illuminating way. This book was excellent.

A Short History of Russia - Mark Galeotti

A Short History of Russia is aptly named, covering nearly 1,000 years of history across the world’s biggest country in a little over a hundred pages. The entire soviet period is summarized in less than a dozen pages. Despite the book’s brevity, Galeotti does a good job of distilling the keys points form the era, giving important context on who leaders were and how their personalities, obsessions, and flaws shaped the nation under their tenure. Each chapter ends with a paragraph of recommendations for further reading, which is helpful.

The overall thesis of Galeotti’s book is that Russia is a country without a clear, unifying thread. Sprawling across two continents and eleven time zones, it lacked for much of its history a common geography, ethnicity, culture, or language. This forced a certain obsession with national identity among the ruling class, and made Russians especially eager to define themselves as a people. I don’t know enough to speak to the accuracy of this assessment, but Galleoti argues it convincingly.

I don’t have much else to say about it, other than those looking for a quick primer on Russian history should check it out.

The Body: A Guide for Occupants - Bill Bryson (re-read)

This is my first time reading The Body since its initial release. Like all Bryson books, it’s an entertaining, funny read. Bryson’s books generally fall into two categories: travelogues, in which Bryson chronicles his journey through a particular part of the world, and researched books, in which he chooses a subject and explains it in layman’s terms. The Body, as the name suggests, is among the latter.

Bryson’s output has skewed towards research books in his later years, quite possibly because he’s less inclined to take long journeys. He is very good at both, and while the travelogues tend to be funnier (I would count his funniest book, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, among this group, even though the “travel” is through his own childhood), The Body still includes humour through bizarre anecdotes and clever turns of phrase. The overall content, however, is educational, as Bryson works his way through the human body section by section, branching off near the end into disease and medicine. The final chapter, fittingly enough, deals with death, and the process of dying. It ends a bit abruptly, but then again so does life in a lot of cases, so perhaps that’s fitting in its way.

Bryson peppers his chapters with anecdotes about figures in medicine and biology both famous and obscure, charting medical breakthroughs and quack remedy fads with equal relish. He has always had an ear for bizarre stories and seems to delight in bringing forgotten heroes a bit of posthumous fame.

There isn’t a Bill Bryson book I haven’t read at least once, and nearly all of them I’ve gone through multiple times. It saddens me to hear that he intends for The Body to be his last book, but he’s certainly earned his retirement. Nevertheless, I can’t say I’m not hoping that boredom gets the better of him and he finds his way into a new one at some point.

Note: in preparing the tags for this entry, I discovered I’ve already written about this book once before! Oh well, interesting to capture my views on it a second time.

Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin - Timothy Snyder

I came across this book after reading an article by Timothy Snyder on the history behind the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In his piece, Snyder discusses the long history of invasion experienced by Ukraine and other Eastern European nations existing in the dubious space between belligerent powers. This is an area he explored more broadly in Bloodlands, the title of which refers to a swath of land roughly contiguous with Poland, Belarus, and the Ukraine. where the vast majority of civilian death in the European theatre occurred between 1933 and 1945.

Much of this death was part of the Holocaust, but Snyder demonstrates that the Nazis were not the only genocidal force operating in that particular time and place. He provides a detailed rundown of the atrocities that the Soviets committed in these lands as well, from the imposed famine in Ukraine to the Great Terror to the purging of Polish intellectuals. He emphasizes that many of these places were subject to not just one invasion, but two or three, as the Nazis and the Soviets moved from allies to belligerents, and the Nazis from invaders to a broken, retreating army.

Of course, the Holocaust is given much focus, as its deliberate and racist intentions arouse particular loathing, but Snyder makes it clear that the Ukrainians and Poles were at times targeted almost as deliberately by the Soviets, if not with the same absolutist intention to eliminate them.

Snyder’s prose is academic but approachable, engaging and clear without much ornamentation. He had a tendency to repeat certain points, which I suspect is an effective way to ensure the general thesis is clear, though it sometimes grated a bit to hear the same fact several times. Overall, an important study of a particularly brutal stain on human history, one which it is hard to look at but must never be forgotten.

Faith, Hope and Carnage - Nick Cave and Sean O'Hagan

Last month, I was pleased to receive a copy of Faith, Hope and Carnage as a Christmas present, as I’d heard about the book but hadn’t gotten around to buying it. The book os co-authored with Sean O’Hagan, but their collaboration was not in the traditional sense of celebrity biographies (i.e., the celebrity lends his name and the partner does all the actual writing).

For one thing, the book wasn’t written in the traditional sense. Rather, it is the transcript of an extended interview with Cave, conducted through phone calls over a roughly year-long period. The start of the timeline is shortly after the first COVID lockdowns, which are to some extent an impetus (a book written by phone being an apt medium in the era of social distancing).

The pandemic is thus naturally a subject for discussion, but the biggest theme is certainly Cave’s experiences as a grieving father in the wake of his son’s death in 2015. I doubt the years lessen the pain in an absolute sense, but they do offer Cave some time in which to reflect and articulate the experience, which those without children can never understand, and those (like me) who have kids but have not lost one can sense only as a sort of vertigo. I make no claims that I can in any way truly understand the abyss the grieving parent plunges into, but since becoming a parent, I can, in contemplating such a thing, peer queasily over the edge.

Though the book deals in grief, O’Hagan’s questions never feel exploitative. He is a good interviewer, probing where he senses more could be said without driving the conversation, pushing back on some statements in a way that is not confrontational, but prompts Cave to delve a little deeper or offer a clearer sense of his meaning. This isn’t needed often, for Cave is, in my opinion, a great thinker. There is an unfortunate tendency to assume people in a creative field have an innate understanding of larger issues, but Cave has long struck me as someone who truly thinks deeply about things. He is the sort of religious person that I greatly admire. Not a zealot, because zealots are invariably shallow thinkers who don conviction as a kind of flashy armor, but one who doubts as much as they believe. One whose belief is fueled, almost paradoxically, by that doubt. As someone who struggled with belief and wound up on the other side of the equation, it is always fascinating to me to read from someone who wrestled with the same questions and reached the opposite conclusion.

Of course, Cave is known most of all as a musician, and while the book avoids the trappings of the standard music interview (when’s the new album out? What does this song mean? Who are your favourite artists?) some discussion of his work is inevitable—and much appreciated. It’s particularly intriguing to read his discussions with Sean while in the process of writing Carnage with Warren Ellis.

I loved this book, loved it’s intimacy, loved Cave’s passion that has mellowed with wisdom into a surprising optimism. I was sad when it ended. As a Cave fan, I’m certainly the target audience, but I’ve also never been huge on biographies or books about my favourite bands for their own sake. Too often, these feel more like collector’s items than works of literature. This one is different. I would recommend it to people who haven’t even heard of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. What Cave has to say cuts deeper than fandom.

Mother Land - Paul Theroux

I loved The Mosquito Coast, which is what drew me to pick up Mother Land from a book store. The book is billed as a novel, but Theroux takes pains to make it feel as autobiographical as possible: the narrator is a travel write and novelist with two sons, and many of the family members referenced in the book correspond to real people in Theroux’s life, albeit with different names.

This lends a certain queasiness to the story, as the characters are, to put it bluntly, not pleasant people to be around. And no one is more unpleasant than the titular mother of Mother Land, a vain, narcissistic woman who sees her children more as treasures of conquest than actual people. The book chronicles a period stretching most of the narrator’s (Jay, though he may as well be named Paul) life, though it focuses primarily on two points: one period in his young adulthood when he fathered a child out of wedlock, and another in his middle age when his father dies and he moves back to Cape Cod. The plot is light and episodic, focused more on the interactions between the siblings than on events. There is a certain repetitiveness to the story, and we get the sense by the last fifty pages that Jay’s mother will simply never die. That she is somehow eternal, a creature of avarice feeding off her own young.

If I’m being honest, I didn’t exactly enjoy reading Mother Land, though that’s not to say the book was boring or bad. Theroux’s writing is rich, and his characters have great psychological depth. They just aren’t very nice people. I had no trouble picking p the book to read it, but when it was over, my biggest feeling was of relief. It’s a feeling shared by the children at their mother’s death, so this sensation may be deliberate. If so, then it’s a bold literary move and one Theroux should be proud of. It takes courage to write such an ugly book, especially one that most readers will assume is about you and your family.

Too Naked for the Nazis: The True Story of Wilson, Keppel and Betty - Alan Stafford

I sometimes come across books through odd channels. In this instance, I read a review for a movie (I don’t even recall exactly which movie) that made a passing reference to the Sand Dance. Curious, I looked it up on Youtube, and found an intriguing video of two extremely thin men with fake moustaches in what likely would have bee described at the time as “oriental garb” doing a tap dance routine on a carpet of sand. After a bit more digging, I discovered the duo was really a trio, and that there was a book about them called Too Naked for the Nazis.

With a title like that, how could I resist?

As the full title suggests, the book tells the story of the vaudeville trio Wilson, Keppel and Betty, largely forgotten now but nearly a household name in Britain during their heyday. Wilson and Keppel began as a duo, but made an inspired addition of a talented young chorus girl named (or rather, stage named) Betty Knox. A young mother with a history as a runaway and a love of performing, Betty helped shape the act for over ten years before departing on good terms, lending her name to a host of other Bettys, including her own daughter.

The book chronicles the ups and downs of the troupe’s career, but the real star is Betty. We are treated to a description of her early life in much greater detail than Wilson or Keppel, and follow her in depth long after she leaves the trio. I can’t blame Stafford for this decision, as her life post-Wilson and Keppel was as intriguing as her life during her days with the troupe. Drawn almost by happenstance into journalism, she became a war correspondent, first known for her lighthearted articles on Anglo-American relations during the war, and later for her coverage of the Nuremburg trials, where her sense of justice for all, even former Nazis, earned recriminations from many in the press. To be clear, Betty was no Nazi sympathizer, but she felt that the trials of lower-level defendants lacked the rigor of true justice. She even claimed to have been writing a book to this effect, but the manuscript has sadly never been found, if it ever existed in the first place.

Stafford has a good, breezy writing style, unornate and clear. It reminds me of Irwin Chusid’s writing in Songs in the Key of Z: clearly the work of a devotee, but well researched and discussed without gushing. Too Naked for the Nazis provides a neat snapshot of a period in entertainment history far removed from what we have today, using one longstanding and widely celebrated act as a lens to view music hall as a whole. Recommended for anyone interested in such things.

The Gulag Archipelago - Aleksander Solzhenitsyn

First, I have to admit that the version of The Gulag Archipelago I read was abridged from the original three volumes down to one. I don’t read abridgements as a rule, but this was the only copy they had at the library, and it was at least authorized by the author, so I can hope the key elements were distilled.

The Gulag Archipelago is in part an autobiographical depiction of Solzhenitsyn’s time in a Gulag prison, but it also stretches much beyond that, providing a detailed examination of the Gulag system’s history and sharing stories from dozens of prisoners. The book is unflinching in its criticism, not just of the Gulag system itself, but of Stalin, Lenin, and even Khrushchev, whose “thaw” was supposed to correct the grossest injustices of Stalinist communism but instead simply buried them a bit deeper underground (though it must be admitted that he allowed a bit more criticism, at least).

The tone is so biting, so justifiably aggrieved, that I’m honestly surprised that Solzhenitsyn survived its publication, ultimately suffering expulsion from the Soviet Union rather than prison or death. That alone speaks to some small evolution on soviet punishment, though Stalin set such a lower bar that even serious human rights offences can seem liberal by comparison.

The most shocking part of the book to me was the description of interrogations. I had expected the Gulags to be miserable places, and never thought the Soviets would be averse to using torture, but the breadth and extent of it was absurd, especially because it was all so pointless. Clearly the interrogators knew that these people hadn’t done anything and didn’t have any useful information on dissidence for them. The whole thing was simply a way to meet quotas. As such, why not just round them up and cart them off to the Gulags? It’s not as if there was any actual due process going on.

Solzhenitsyn is foremost among soviet dissident writers, standing alongside Bulgakov and Akhmatova, and deserves his reputation. One day I will need to track down an unabridged translation and readthe parts I missed this time round.

The Kill Chain: Defending America in the Future of High-Tech Warfare - Christian Brose

The Kill Chain is another one of those library holds I only half-remember making. The writer, Christian Brose, was a long-time advisor to Senator John McCain, and in this book extends McCain’s vision for an evolution in military thinking better adapted to current geopolitical threats: namely China. He paints a chilling picture of China’s rapidly advancing military strength, which is due to put it on par or even above American power in the near future if great efforts aren’t made to course correct. His points are clear and well reasoned, though a bit repetitive, and I found most chapters orbiting around the same few arguments, namely:

• America’s post-Cold War military has made assumptions about its capability—namely, that it can outmaneuver and outgun its opponents and will fight exclusively on their territory—that are increasingly untrue given the rise of Russia and especially China.

• Military acquisitions focuses too much on platforms (aircraft carriers, jets, etc) that are expensive and large, rather than a modular force made up of large amounts of more expendable components.

• Communication is far too hampered between forces, limiting their ability to close kill chains effectively (a kill chain being not necessarily about killing, but the operative process of identifying information, communicating it to the right source, and acting on it).

• Artificial Intelligence will play a critical role in the future of warfare by eliminating much of the mental “grunt work” of locating targets, calculating options, etc, presenting commanders with a clear high level picture of the battlefield

While Brose spends most of the book hammering these points, he does offer a more hopeful conclusion wherein he points to how America can cope with military parity with China, and how this could in some ways actually play to our advantage. It was an interesting book, written competently. I trust Brose’ expertise, though his example of the chilling effect of modern warfare—Russia’s capture of Crimea—makes me wonder where this supposed elite fighting force disappeared to during the invasion of Ukraine.

Who By Fire - Matti Friedman

As I get older, I sometimes encounter stories that make me wonder how I could possibly have never heard about them before. In Who By Fire, Matti Friedman gives an impressionistic yet precise account of an event that should be part of the broader Rock ‘n Roll mythos alongside Elvis’ hip-shaking Ed Sullivan debut, The Beatles’ rooftop concert, and the fatal stabbing at Altamont Speedway.

In October 1973, Israel fought a brief and brutal war with Egypt and its Arab allies, waged by the latter in retaliation for an ignominious defeat in the Six Day War a few years earlier. The Israelis, careless with bravado from past victories, were caught completely by surprise, and faced the very real threat of annihilation. This conflict, launched on the eve of the Jewish Holiday Yom Kippur, drew Jews from around the world to come and defend their ancestral homeland, regardless of whether they’d once lived there or even visited (echoes of this can be seen in Ukraine today). One of these Jews, who came not to fight but to work on a kibbutz and free up a younger man for the front, was Leonard Cohen.

Cohen never saw a kibbutz. Israel knew he could serve the land he called his “myth home” better with his true gifts of poetry and song. And so he roved about the battlefields of Sinai with a contingent of musicians, playing concerts for weary troops, drifting between platoons like a phantom, leaving many who heard and saw him wondering if the encounter was even real. No footage of these concerts exists, and only a few photographs can be found.

From this material, alongside entries in Cohen’s journal and interviews with spectators, Matti Friedman pieces together a rough account of Cohen’s travels. It is solid journalism, precise when it can be an honest about its gaps when it can’t. Yet the strength of the book is not in reconstructing the minutia of a tour schedule (an impossible task; even Cohen didn’t know where exactly in Sinai he was most of the time), but in capturing the feeling of obligation and looming terror that haunted that war and all others. Indeed, Cohen isn’t even the true protagonist of this book. His concert is more a lens through which to view the lives of several young Israelis fighting for their survival and the survival of their country.

I was moved by this book in ways I didn’t expect. I feel I have a deeper knowledge of Cohen and his myth home for having read it. Though it lacks a cohesive ending, it is powerful from start to finish and adorned throughout with lovely prose. Worth a read from any Cohen fan, but even if you know his work only vaguely (as was the case for some of the soldiers he played for), this book still has a lot to offer through its timeless reflection of war and art, and the place one has in the other.

Remain In Love - Chris Frantz

I’ve been a huge fan of Talking Heads since university, so it was only a matter of time before I picked up Remain in Love. The book is not a chronicle of the band itself, but a memoir of its drummer and founding member Chris Frantz, which is actually more interesting. I’m already familiar with the contour’s of the band’s rise and untimely dissolution, and much of the popular press for the band has focused on its frontman David Byrne. I love and admire Byrne as an artist, but I was also aware going in that his relationship with the band ended on fairly sour terms, and that the responsibility for this was largely his.

Frantz is not shy about pointing this out.. He acknowledges (implicitly for the most part, but also outright in a couple of instances) how important Byrne was to the success of Talking Heads, while also emphasizing that it was never a one man show. He makes a strong case for his own contribution, and to an even greater extent that of his wife and creative partner Tina Weymouth. The assumptions of the music industry at the time were that Talking Heads was essentially a vehicle for Byrne’s genius, and the other heads were little more than musically adept side players. I must admit I’d made similar assumptions myself. Frantz sets the record straight, and rightly points to his and Weymouth’s work wtih tom Tom Club as evidence that the talent pool in Talking Heads was deep all around.

Despite recalling some less than pleasant moments of friction with Byrne, there is little bitterness in Frantz’s book, and his treatment of his former bandmate seems pretty evenhanded. There were a couple of anecdotes that I thought were petty to include (the thing about the turd on the bed was second hand and unverified, and though Frantz admits this, he shouldn’t have spread the rumor without knowing for sure it was true). For the most part though, he gives credit where credit is due.

My favourite parts of the book were naturally those describing Talking Heads’ ascent, and Frantz does not skimp here. More than half the book follows the band from its early days at CBGB to its pre-stardom tours. His discussion of how Remain In Light was made were fascinating, as were the anecdotes of the creative foment of New York in the mid 70s. It truly is mind-boggling to think that the foundation of twenty years of music were built in a few square blocks of crime-ridden Manhattan.

Frantz writes in an easy, plain-spoken, conversational way. There are no poetic flourishes, and some ocassional repetitiveness that makes it feel almost like it was dictated. This isn’t a problem, and is vastly preferable to literary overreach, which can be jarring if not done well. Frantz must have kept a tour diary, because he is able to give great detail about cities visited and sets played, though there are some moments where memories may be muddled or conflated (he has a young Damon Albarn, singer from Blur, tending bar in a London hotel during their 1977 tour, when he would have been only nine years old. I believe this happened, but probably on a later tour).

Above all, his profoung love for Tina Weymouth shines through and is a pleasure to see. As a rare celebirty couple that has stayed together since young adulthood, I’ve long admired Frantz and Weymouth. Reading about how much he loves her still warms my heart. May they Remain in Love for many more years to come.