Category: Books

A good read, filled with an obligingly weird cast of characters. There is something deeply appealing about a bruising, trash-talking pro tour for Scrabble heads. The author, Stefan Fatsis, goes native and eventually becomes an expert player himself as he tells his story. I like the part where he’s talking to the former world champ, Joel Sherman, who’s complaining that Scrabble should be more popular than chess, because it’s more accessible. Millions of people could watch, he whines. “Watch what?” replies Fatsis, “watch you play TREHALA, and then run for their dictionaries?” (Rambles reference: April 27, 2002)

Hard to believe now, but the French army was widely considered the greatest in the world at the beginning of 1940. It is painful and eye-opening to see how quickly it was punctured, deflated, and slashed to ribbons by a smaller but infinitely better armed and trained German force in May and June of that year. This book paints an excellent picture of how inferior doctrine (static defense as opposed to fast-moving armor attacks) can absolutely wreck an army. Poor France. She lost so many men in World War I and then learned all the wrong lessons as a result.

Given America’s problematic relationship with Muslims, I wanted to learn more about Islam. Karen Armstrong’s book filled the bill nicely. It’s a readable and sympathetic view of Islam. Armstrong goes out of her way to correct many of the negative biases that Western readers bring to the topic. She points out that fundamentalism, for example, shows up in every religion, and is almost everywhere violent and a distortion of the basic faith. She also does a good job describing the rise of secular society in the West as a slow and thoroughly disruptive process (think of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation). Secularism was later forced onto colonies of the West at breakneck speed in a superficial way. Backlash was inevitable… and is obviously still ongoing. I appreciated the altitude she gave to the topic; it’s helped me view current events in a more historical light.

Naipaul writes unflinching and often unflattering stories about his travels in Iran, Pakistan, Malaysia, and Indonesia. This book was written in the late 1970s, around the time the Shah was deposed and the American embassy in Tehran was overrun by student radicals. Despite its age, the book feels like it could have been written last year. Naipaul’s directness on this thorny topic is refreshing: he describes a populist Islam that is unsurpassed at seduction but weak at construction. Again and again he hears magical faith being prescribed as the cure for all ills, particularly those imposed by external forces of Westernization. Since Islam defines itself as a religion that also encompasses politics, economics, and law, its cultural scope in an Islamic country is almost boundless.

Peter Hopkirk’s book describes the back-and-forth intrigue between Russia and Great Britain in the cold war for Central Asia. The parallels between this 19th century power struggle and the 20th century battle between the Soviet Union and the US are uncanny. In both cases, Afghanistan functions as the “roundabout” of Asia, gating the flow of goods and peoples from Europe and the Middle East to India and China. In both cases, proud superpowers, in their fixation on each other, step on and generally infuriate the natives and nobody seems to win. In both cases, against expectation, the small country of Afghanistan brings down the mighty and sows the seeds of decades of misery.

We hear often of the great adventures but not the flawed ones. We know of Shackleton’s astonishing second voyage to the Antarctic but not his fatal, aimless third. The French entrepreneur Ferdinand de Lesseps attempted to build two great canals. He succeeded wildly with Suez and failed utterly with Panama. In this excellent book, David McCullough tells the story of the spanning of the isthmus, starting with de Lesseps. The book is a wonderful characterization of big idea men. Lesseps thought big all the time. His grandiose vision served him well in Suez and ruined him in Panama, where he insisted, against a growing mountain of evidence, that the canal must be cut straight across at sea level. Panama was ultimately conquered by the industrious Teddy Roosevelt and his swarms of well-organized industrious yankees. One interesting observation that comes out in this book: the Panama canal could not be built any faster today than it was back in 1914.

How could James Joyce have such penetrating insight into the nature of mankind and still be such an insufferable bore? Did his muse require him to throw away money as fast as he got it, keeping his family impoverished, or was that merely an unfortunate coincidence? We always forgive our geniuses, and he was the great genius of the age. But it must have worn thin at times to those around him. A friend in Paris said of him “He had not taste, only genius.” Ellmann tells the often bleak story of Joyce’s Ulysses-like wanderings around Europe, picking fights and drinking away his funds. I was constantly veering between feeling bad for Joyce and wanting to throttle him. Also, I hadn’t realized how important Ezra Pound was in taking him from anonymity to great fame.

One of the better books on alchemy. It contains one of my favorite quotes of all time. The eighteenth century Dutch chemist Boerhaave, who on being asked his opinion of alchemy replied:

Wherever I understand the alchemists, I find they describe the truth in the most simple and naked terms, without deceiving us, or being deceived themselves. When therefore I come to places, where I do not comprehend the meaning; why should I charge them with falsehood, who have shown themselves so much better skill’d in the art than myself? I therefore rather lay the blame on my own ignorance than on their vanity. Thus much I have long ago had a mind to say, concerning the knowledge of the true alchemists in physics; lest such skilful artists should be condemn’d by incompetent judges…. Credulity is hurtful, so is incredulity: the business therefore of a wise man is to try all things, hold fast what is approv’d, never limit the power of God, nor assign bounds to nature.

The Arcanum: The Extraordinary True Story
Francis Bacon (1561-1626), though critical of alchemy, compared alchemists to the father who, on his deathbed, told his lazy sons of a sum of money hidden underground in his garden. After his death they began digging in hopes of finding the treasure. They found none, because (as the father knew) there was none, yet they enriched themselves with a large crop that their inadvertant plowing made possible. A cute little story, but this book is the story of Bacon’s anecdote come true. In trying to create gold alchemically, a brilliant proto-chemist invents porcelain. Or rather, re-invents it, since the Chinese had been doing just fine making porcelain for hundreds of years before.