Reading Moby-Dick After a (Late) Life at Sea (Mostly in Books)

Few novels have the global reputation of Moby Dick. Readers around the world consider it a monument of American literature—a small ship circling the world yet always anchored in New England. I just read it for the first time. I meant to read it for decades, but never got around to it until this year. I had no idea what a great story it is.  Its reputation is long and boring, as cold as antarctic seas, but it is a vivid sea story, full of danger, humor, superstition, theology, and the daily labor of sailors. When I finished it, I found myself surprised not by its difficulty but by its vitality. It is a wonderful story. 

I am also glad I waited to read it until now--after learning to swim at 59 and reading all of the Master and Commander novels after I retired. Swimming on the shore of several continents gave me a feeling of the majesty of the ocean I did not have in my first six decades of landlocked life.

One of the most striking elements of the novel is the depth of its religious imagination. Herman Melville was steeped in the Protestant culture of nineteenth-century New England, and that background permeates the book. The narrative voice of Ishmael reflects a distinctly American Protestant sensibility—hopeful, reflective, and often shaped by a Calvinist awareness of fate and providence. The novel constantly wrestles with questions of judgment, suffering, and divine purpose.

At the same time, Melville refuses to keep religion within neat doctrinal boundaries. The sailors of the Pequod live in a world where traditional Christianity blends easily with seafaring superstition, pagan imagery, and fatalistic humor. Men who can quote Scripture in one moment may read omens in the sea the next. Sermons, prophecies, and strange coincidences all accumulate as the voyage unfolds. Melville captures something very human here: in a life filled with boredom, danger, and uncertainty, people reach for every available framework—religious, mythic, or superstitious—to make sense of their fate.

Captain Ahab stands at the center of this spiritual drama. His pursuit of the white whale becomes not just a hunt but a rebellion against the universe itself. Ahab’s obsession reflects a darker side of Calvinist theology—the sense that a hidden power governs the world and that human beings are helpless before it. Yet Ahab refuses submission. His struggle with the whale becomes a struggle with God, fate, and existence itself.

For readers unfamiliar with seafaring life, parts of Moby-Dick can seem digressive. Melville famously interrupts the narrative with long chapters describing whale biology, classification, and the equipment of a nineteenth-century whaling ship. These sections are sometimes treated as obstacles, but they are integral to the novel’s world. The Pequod is not just a stage for philosophical drama; it is a working vessel, and the reader is immersed in its tools, routines, and technologies.

In my case, those chapters were a particular pleasure rather than a burden. Having already read the twenty-one novels in the Master and Commander series by Patrick O'Brian, I had grown accustomed to detailed descriptions of ships, rigging, and maritime life. O’Brian’s world of naval warfare prepared me well for Melville’s whaling industry. Without that background, the technical discussions of whales and the equipment of the Pequod might have seemed tedious. Instead they felt immersive, part of the texture of life at sea. 

In the very good movie titled Master and Commander Captain Aubrey lures a superior French ship to its destruction by disguising the HMS Surprise as a whaling ship.

That preparation also highlights how different Melville’s project is from most sea fiction. O’Brian writes historical novels about naval officers and campaigns. Melville writes something stranger: a philosophical epic disguised as a whaling voyage. The Pequod’s journey becomes an exploration of faith, obsession, knowledge, and the limits of human understanding.

In the end, Moby Dick earns its reputation as a great American novel not because it is difficult but because it is so expansive. It contains theology, natural history, adventure, comedy, and tragedy all within a single narrative. Melville’s novel reminds readers that life—especially life lived close to danger—rarely separates these elements neatly.

"Call me Ishmael" are the opening words of the narrator who is the only survivor of the wreck of Pequod at the conclusion of the novel. For those willing to sail with Ishmael, the voyage is unforgettable. And much safer than a real-life whaling ship.....

Geography, War, and Power: Ian Morris’s Grand Argument

 

Across Why the West Rules, for Now, War! What Is It Good For?, and Geography Is Destiny, historian Ian Morris advances one of the most ambitious arguments in contemporary historical writing: geography shapes human possibilities; war accelerates political organization; and power flows toward regions best positioned to exploit both.

Each book stands alone. Together, they form a coherent trilogy about how civilizations rise, dominate, and eventually yield.

1. Why the West Rules, for Now

In Why the West Rules, for Now, Morris asks the question that animates much global history: why did Western Europe, rather than China or India, come to dominate the modern world? His answer rejects racial or cultural superiority. Instead, he proposes a measurable index of “social development,” tracking energy capture, organization, information technology, and war-making capacity over 15,000 years.

The core claim: geography determines which societies have access to the resources, domesticable plants and animals, navigable waterways, and communication networks that allow complexity to scale. For centuries, China led. Then Europe’s fragmented geography and Atlantic position created competitive pressures and maritime advantages that propelled it forward. Western dominance, in Morris’s telling, is neither destiny nor virtue. It is a phase.

The “for now” matters. The title already anticipates decline.

2. War! What Is It Good For?

If Why the West Rules maps long-term development, War! tackles a more uncomfortable thesis: large-scale warfare has historically made societies safer.

Morris does not romanticize violence. He argues that throughout history, bigger and bloodier wars have tended to create larger political units — empires and states — that suppress smaller-scale violence. The Roman Empire, the Qin and Han dynasties, early modern European state formation — all demonstrate that consolidation through war reduces the frequency of everyday killing.

The modern world’s relative safety, he suggests, rests on centuries of brutal state-building. War is not good in itself. It is good at forcing cooperation and creating Leviathans capable of imposing order.

Read alongside Why the West Rules, the logic tightens: geography creates opportunities; competition turns violent; war builds larger structures; those structures increase social development.

3. Geography Is Destiny

In Geography Is Destiny, Morris narrows his focus to Britain. The book is smaller in geographic scope but just as sweeping chronologically. Here he tests his thesis against a single case: the United Kingdom.

Britain’s island geography, he argues, made it simultaneously European and separate from Europe. The English Channel fostered political independence while proximity guaranteed entanglement. Over 8,000 years, Britain oscillated between integration and distance. Brexit, in this framework, is not a rupture but a recurring pattern.

Morris invokes what he calls “Thatcher’s Law”: Britain is part of Europe, like it or not. Geography constrains identity politics. The island does not move.

The book also revisits themes from his earlier works. Britain’s imperial ascent stemmed from geographic advantages in Atlantic trade and naval projection. Its imperial collapse followed the massive costs of industrialized war in the twentieth century. Geography enabled empire; geopolitics destroyed it.

But the final move of Geography Is Destiny expands outward. Morris argues that Brexit debates miss the larger transformation underway. The real structural shift is the rise of China. Just as Why the West Rules suggested Western dominance was temporary, Geography Is Destiny hints that the world’s center of gravity is moving back toward East Asia. China calling itself the “Middle Kingdom” is not mere poetry; it reflects long-term civilizational centrality.

The Through-Line

Taken together, the three books make a disciplined argument against short-term thinking.

• Geography shapes opportunity.

• Competition produces war.

• War builds states.

• States dominate until geography and development shift advantage elsewhere.

Morris consistently refuses cultural triumphalism. Western dominance was contingent, not permanent. Britain’s imperial power was structural, not eternal. China’s resurgence may represent reversion rather than revolution.

What makes Morris compelling is scale. He is not distracted by electoral cycles or policy squabbles. He looks at millennia. That long view is unsettling. It suggests that national debates — over Brexit, NATO, American decline — are ripples atop tectonic plates.

If Why the West Rules explains how the West rose, and War! explains the violent machinery behind state power, Geography Is Destiny asks what happens when geography shifts the balance again.

The trilogy leaves readers with a sobering possibility: the West’s “for now” may be ending, not because of moral failure alone, but because geography and development are rebalancing the world.

Morris does not celebrate this. He simply traces it.

That clarity — unsentimental, structural, and expansive — is what makes his work so compelling.

"Until August" by Gabriel García Márquez: A Review

 

Gabriel García Márquez’s Until August (En agosto nos vemos), published more than a decade after his death, is a slender, lovely final story from one of the greatest literary voices of the 20th century. Completed in its fifth draft before 2004 but left unfinished due to the onset of dementia, the novella was ultimately published in 2024 with the blessing of Márquez’s sons, who recognized that despite its incompletion, the work pulsed with the unmistakable rhythm and sensuality of their father’s voice. They were right.

Until August is the story of Ana Magdalena Bach, a married woman who travels alone each year to the island where her mother is buried, always on the same day in August. What begins as a yearly pilgrimage for remembrance soon becomes something more complicated—and more human. On these trips, she seeks out fleeting, anonymous sexual encounters with strangers, as if trying to match death’s finality with life’s immediacy.

There’s a breezy elegance to the prose, rendered here in a fluid English translation that captures Márquez’s tone of amused omniscience. The story unfolds like one of his most memorable sentences: long, winding, sensual, and deceptively simple. Though lacking the baroque sprawl of One Hundred Years of Solitude or the epic weight of Love in the Time of Cholera, this novella feels unmistakably Márquezian in its use of repetition, earthy realism, and wry eroticism. It’s a tale of aging and desire, of memory and reinvention, and perhaps above all, of the disobedient persistence of the body.

Reading Until August, I had the feeling (how could I really know) that Márquez understood women’s inner lives—how desire in his stories is never reduced to biology or scandal but portrayed instead as an assertion of freedom, of life against decay. Ana’s secret annual ritual is not framed as transgression but as a quiet rebellion against the slow death of domesticity and predictability. Her story unfolds in tones that are light, melancholic, and often laugh-out-loud funny. At one moment, Ana wonders if her husband suspects anything; at another, she is misplacing her panties on a hotel balcony with almost childlike innocence. Márquez allows her to be contradictory, self-deceiving, and utterly alive.

The circumstances of the book’s publication inevitably invite questions. Did Márquez want this released? Would he have changed the structure, added more? His sons say he lost the ability to revise due to advancing dementia, and it’s clear this is not a polished final novel. But what’s also clear is that the material hums with vitality. 

SPOILER

In the final paragraph of the novel I was convinced it was, except for polishing, a complete work.  Ana comes home from her last night on the island (no love the last year) with a sack of bones that is her mother's earthly remains. Her return to home and her husband with mom's bones in a sack echoes the floating bodies in the river beside the ship as the lover's escape at the end of Love in the Time of Cholera. 

Until August is a sharp meditation on aging, love, and autonomy. It may not be his greatest work, but it is very good, offering one final glimpse of that unmistakable magic that only García Márquez could conjure. 

Women in Their Element: Selected Women’s Contributions to the Periodic System by Annette Lykknes and Brigitte Van Tiggelen (Editors)

 

The periodic table is often presented as a clean grid of discovery—elements appearing one by one through the insight of famous chemists. Yet the real history of chemical discovery is far more complex, collaborative, and human. Women in Their Element: Selected Women’s Contributions to the Periodic System brings that complexity vividly to life. Edited by Annette Lykknes and Brigitte Van Tiggelen, the book is both a scholarly reference and an engaging collection of stories about the women who helped build modern chemistry—sometimes celebrated, often overlooked.

Rather than presenting a simple chronological list of discoveries, the editors organize the book around themes that shaped the development of the periodic system. This structure works especially well. It allows readers to see how discoveries emerged not only from individual insight but also from evolving scientific fields such as radioactivity, spectroscopy, analytical chemistry, and instrument development. By grouping the chapters around these themes, the book shows how scientific progress unfolds through networks of researchers, laboratories, and technologies.

The most famous figure in the book is, of course, Marie Curie, whose work on polonium and radium stands among the most important discoveries in modern science. Yet one of the book’s great strengths is that it moves well beyond familiar names. Readers encounter a wide range of women who contributed to identifying, isolating, measuring, or characterizing elements. Some were collaborators whose work was overshadowed by male colleagues. Others were pioneers in laboratory techniques or instrumentation that made later discoveries possible.

In many cases these women worked under conditions that limited their formal recognition. Scientific institutions in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries often barred women from academic positions, societies, and prizes. As a result, their contributions frequently appeared under the names of male supervisors or collaborators. Women in Their Element does not simply seek to “correct” the historical record by adding forgotten names; it demonstrates how scientific discovery itself is collective. Element discovery often depended on teams, assistants, and technical specialists whose work rarely appeared in headlines.

One of the pleasures of the book is its attention to the practical side of chemistry. The discovery of new elements was not only a matter of theoretical insight but also of laboratory skill and technological innovation. Instruments for detecting radioactivity, methods for separating rare earth elements, and improved analytical techniques all played decisive roles. By highlighting the women involved in developing these tools, the book expands the definition of what counts as scientific discovery.

Another delightful feature is the book’s extensive index of elements. Readers can trace where particular elements appear in the narrative, including historical placeholder names such as “eka-boron” or “eka-tantalum”—the temporary predictions used by Dmitri Mendeleev before those elements were actually discovered. The index even acknowledges the older philosophical “elements” of Aristotle—earth, air, fire, and water—reminding readers that the search for fundamental substances stretches back long before modern chemistry.

The time span of the book is impressive. The story begins in the early modern scientific world of the seventeenth century and continues through the twentieth century into the present. Along the way readers encounter changing laboratory practices, evolving theoretical frameworks, and the gradual expansion of opportunities for women in science. This long view makes clear that the history of the periodic system is not a closed chapter but an ongoing scientific project.

What makes Women in Their Element particularly satisfying is that it works on two levels. It serves as a reference work for historians of science and chemists interested in the development of their field. At the same time, it reads easily as a collection of narratives about persistence, ingenuity, and intellectual curiosity. The individual stories are engaging in their own right, yet together they form a broader picture of how the periodic table came to be.

For readers interested in chemistry, scientific history, or the hidden contributors to major discoveries, this book is both informative and enjoyable. It reminds us that the periodic table—one of the most iconic images in science—was not built by a handful of famous names alone. It emerged from the work of many minds, many laboratories, and many lives devoted to understanding the elements of the natural world.

America and the Cost of Abandoning Allies

 

Kurds in Iraq, Turkey and Syria have been 

staunch allies of the US and then we abandon them

Wars rarely begin where we think they do. They begin years earlier—in promises made, in warnings ignored, and in allies encouraged to stand up only to discover they are standing alone.

As the war with Iran unfolds, my hope—however thin—is that it may finally begin to correct a troubling pattern in American foreign policy. For decades the United States has urged allies and partners to take risks alongside us, only to hesitate when confronting the regimes that threaten them.

Again and again the result has been the same: unfinished confrontations and abandoned partners.

Since 1979 Iran’s revolutionary government has funded militant groups across the Middle East and beyond. Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis operate with Iranian support. For more than three decades Tehran has pursued nuclear capability while destabilizing the region through proxy warfare. For much of that time the world has largely tolerated these actions.

But Iran is only part of a larger pattern.

In 1991, at the end of the First Gulf War, the United States encouraged Iraqis to rise up against Saddam Hussein. Kurdish forces in the north and Shiite rebels in the south answered that call. When Saddam’s regime retaliated with overwhelming force, the United States chose not to intervene. The result was catastrophic. Tens of thousands were killed and more than a million Kurds fled toward the Turkish border in one of the largest refugee crises of the war’s aftermath.

Three years later, in 1994, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia signed the Budapest Memorandum guaranteeing Ukraine’s borders in exchange for Ukraine giving up the nuclear weapons it inherited after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was an extraordinary act of trust. Yet when Russia seized Crimea and invaded eastern Ukraine in 2014, the response from the West was limited and cautious. The guarantees proved weaker than the promises.

During the Iraq War, beginning in 2003, American forces faced devastating roadside bombs and shaped-charge explosives capable of penetrating armored vehicles. Many of these weapons were traced to Iranian supply networks. Hundreds of American soldiers were killed by devices that crossed the Iraqi border from Iran, yet the United States never directly confronted the Iranian government responsible for enabling those attacks.

When I served in Iraq in 2009 with 28th Combat Aviation Brigade, we flew troops to the Iran-Iraq border who were stopping smuggling where they could, but there was no retaliation against Iran.

The pattern repeated itself again during the war against ISIS. Beginning in 2015, Kurdish fighters in Iraq and Syria became some of the most effective partners the United States had on the ground. They fought and died alongside American forces to dismantle the Islamic State’s territorial caliphate. But in 2018 the United States withdrew support from Kurdish positions in northern Syria, leaving them exposed to Turkish military operations.

The pattern appeared again in Afghanistan. For two decades, beginning in 2001, Afghan soldiers, interpreters, and local allies worked alongside American forces against the Taliban. Thousands died fighting a common enemy. Yet when the United States withdrew in 2021, the Afghan government collapsed with stunning speed. Many Afghans who had worked closely with American forces were left scrambling to escape Taliban reprisals. Some were evacuated in dramatic scenes at Kabul’s airport, but many others were left behind. For those who had trusted American promises, the end of the war felt was abandonment.

Once again, allies who had taken risks alongside the United States were left vulnerable.

Meanwhile Iran has strengthened its partnership with Russia, supplying drones that have been used extensively against Ukrainian cities and infrastructure. Those weapons have become one of the clearest links between Tehran’s regional ambitions and Moscow’s war against Ukraine.

If the facilities producing those drones have now been destroyed, it would represent more than a tactical success. It would be one small step toward confronting a network of aggression that stretches from Tehran to Moscow.

None of this means war should ever be welcomed lightly. Those of us who have served in the Middle East know too well the cost, uncertainty, and unintended consequences that follow military conflict.

But history also teaches the cost of hesitation.

When aggressors believe the West will protest but not act, they push further.

If this conflict weakens Iran’s ability to fund terror, slows Russia’s war against Ukraine, and gives the people of Iran even a small opening against their oppressive regime, it may begin to repair a long record of half-measures and abandoned allies.

That hope may be thin.

But after decades of watching aggressors test the limits of Western resolve, it is still worth holding.

Sparks and Photons: Two Visions of an Electrical World

 

Two very different books — Daniel Keown’s The Spark in the Machine and Richard Feynman’s QED — begin from the same fascinating premise: everything is electric.

In QED, Feynman strips physics to its bones. The world, he argues, is built from the interactions of charged particles exchanging photons. Light is not mystical illumination; it is an electromagnetic messenger. Electrons repel and attract by trading quanta of energy. The solidity of matter, the chemistry of life, the warmth of the sun — all reduce to patterns of charge and exchange. Feynman’s genius is not just in explaining quantum electrodynamics, but in making it feel...solid. Redwood trees, rail cars, rhinoceroses, refrigerators, rainforests--they are all mostly empty space filled with colliding, transforming particles--look deep enough and you find electrical interaction.

Keown, approaching from a different direction, proposes that traditional Chinese acupuncture maps onto bioelectric circuitry within the human body. He argues that meridians correspond to fascial planes and conductive pathways, and that health depends on electrical coherence. Where Feynman speaks of photons and amplitudes, Keown speaks of voltage gradients and tissue conductivity. But both imagine the body not as a hydraulic system, but as a dynamic electrical field.

The commonality is not proof; it is perspective.

Both authors reject the purely mechanical metaphor of the body and the universe. In Feynman’s account, what appears solid is mostly empty space structured by electromagnetic force. In Keown’s account, what appears anatomical is animated by charge distribution and electrical signaling. The difference lies in rigor and scope. Feynman’s work rests on experimentally verified mathematics that predicts results to extraordinary precision. Keown’s framework is more interpretive, attempting to reconcile ancient medical practice with modern bioelectric research.

Yet the philosophical overlap is striking. Both books challenge the naive intuition that matter is inert. Instead, they suggest that structure arises from invisible interaction. Energy precedes form. Pattern precedes substance.

The divergence is equally important. Feynman is relentlessly empirical. His photons either match experiment or they don’t. Keown operates at the frontier between hypothesis and demonstration, where metaphor risks outrunning measurement. That tension does not invalidate the comparison; it sharpens it.

If QED teaches that the universe is electrical at its deepest level, The Spark in the Machine asks whether that same principle scales into biology in ways medicine has only begun to grasp. One book explains the microcosm of fundamental forces. The other speculates about the macrocosm of living systems.

They do not belong in the same category of certainty. But they do belong in the same intellectual conversation.

Both remind us that the world — and the body — may be less mechanical than we were taught, and more like a symphony of charge.

One represents the gold standard of physical theory. The other explores whether life’s complexity may also be grounded in electrical patterning. The books are inseparable in my mind, entwined and enmeshed in the complex reality I live in and hope to some degree to understand.

Geography Is Destiny — and Britain’s Fate Is Not What It Thinks

 

In Geography Is Destiny, historian Ian Morris returns to familiar ground for readers of Why the West Rules, for Now and War!: the long arc of history shaped not primarily by ideology or individual genius, but by geography. This time his focus narrows to Britain. The result is a sweeping, 8,000-year meditation on how the island has defined itself — and misdefined itself — in relation to Europe and the wider world.

Morris argues that Britain’s story is not one of simple insularity or simple Europeanism. It is both. Over millennia, geography made Britain part of Europe and separate from it at the same time. The English Channel is neither a moat nor a wall; it is a filter. Britain’s physical separation fostered political distinctiveness, but its proximity guaranteed entanglement. Morris invokes “Thatcher’s Law” repeatedly: Britain is part of Europe, like it or not. The island may resist Brussels, resent regulations, or vote for Brexit, but geography remains stubborn.

When Morris finished the book in 2021, Brexit was five years old. He reminds readers that Britain has “left Europe” before — politically, strategically, psychologically — only to return when reality intruded. The deeper argument is that Britain’s oscillation between European integration and distance is structural, not temporary. Brexit, in this telling, is not a revolutionary break but another turn in a very long cycle.

The book also offers a clear-eyed assessment of Britain’s imperial rise and fall. Morris shows how geography first positioned Britain advantageously at the edge of Atlantic trade networks, then enabled it to build and project maritime power on a global scale. But the same geographic realities that helped create empire could not shield it from the industrialized slaughter of the two world wars. The financial and demographic costs of those conflicts broke the imperial model. Geography opened doors; geopolitics closed them.

What makes Geography Is Destiny particularly striking is its final turn. Morris argues that Brexit debates fundamentally miss the larger strategic picture. The real challenge to British sovereignty is not Brussels. It is Beijing. In his view, China — not the European Union — will define the geopolitical landscape of the 21st century. He sees China as the likely dominant power by the end of this century, reminding readers that the name “Middle Kingdom” reflects a civilizational self-understanding of centrality. China’s long history of technological and political dynamism, combined with its demographic weight, makes its rise less anomaly than reversion.

Reading the book now, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and amid strains between America and NATO allies, Morris’s emphasis on structural forces feels even more prescient. Britain’s future will not be determined by symbolic acts of separation but by how it positions itself in a world where continental Europe, the United States, and a rising China compete and cooperate in shifting combinations.

What I admire most about Morris is his scale. He refuses to be trapped by headlines. He steps back — centuries back — and asks what geography makes likely. The result is not fatalism but clarity. Britain may debate identity endlessly. But islands do not move. And the larger tectonics of power are already shifting eastward.

This is Morris at his best: bold, unsettling, and deeply persuasive. I loved the book.