Stalingrad: War and Peace for the Twentieth Century

Vasily Grossman’s Stalingrad is an ambitious novel, and remarkably, it succeeds in its vast ambition. When Grossman set out to tell the story of the Soviet Union’s struggle against Nazi Germany, he was consciously writing in the shadow of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. His goal was to create a twentieth-century epic that captured an entire society confronting war, suffering, sacrifice, and history. I first read this novel a decade ago and now rereading it, I am convinced that Grossman came as close as anyone ever has to achieving that goal.

Like Tolstoy, Grossman moves effortlessly between generals and laborers, scientists and soldiers, mothers and bureaucrats. The coming battle for Stalingrad forms the center of gravity for the novel, but the book is about far more than military operations. Grossman is interested in how ordinary people endure extraordinary circumstances. His characters argue, fall in love, worry about their children, struggle with political loyalty, and attempt to preserve their humanity as the machinery of war closes around them.

One of the great strengths of Stalingrad is that Grossman never loses sight of the immense scale of the conflict while maintaining his focus on individual lives. The Battle of Stalingrad was one of history’s decisive military engagements, but Grossman understands that history is ultimately experienced one person at a time. His achievement lies in making readers care about those individuals while never forgetting the larger forces that shape their lives.

Reading the novel today, however, is a different experience than it was ten years ago. The Russian invasion of Ukraine casts a long shadow over every page. Grossman himself was born in what is now Ukraine, and the Soviet Army he describes was an army composed of Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Georgians, and dozens of other nationalities united against a common enemy. Throughout the novel, Russians and Ukrainians fight side by side against the Nazi invasion, sharing hardships, losses, and victories. Knowing that their descendants now face one another across battlefields is profoundly sad.

The novel also offers insight into the current war. Grossman’s depiction of Soviet resistance reminds readers of the extraordinary capacity for suffering displayed by both Russians and Ukrainians during the Second World War. The people he portrays endure losses that are almost unimaginable, yet continue fighting. Reading Stalingrad today makes it difficult to believe that either side in the current conflict will simply collapse from exhaustion or casualties. The historical memory of sacrifice runs too deep.

Yet Grossman is no simple patriot. Even within the constraints of Soviet censorship, he reveals the tensions and contradictions within Stalin’s state. The seeds of the more daring and devastating second novel Life and Fate are already present. The themes that would later define that masterpiece—freedom, tyranny, courage, and moral responsibility—can be seen emerging beneath the surface of Stalingrad.

As a historical novel, Stalingrad is magnificent. As a portrait of a society at war, it is unmatched. And as a reminder of both the resilience and tragedy of the peoples of Russia and Ukraine, it feels more relevant today than when Grossman first wrote it. Few novels better capture the human cost of war, and fewer still achieve it on such an epic scale.

Now I will reread Life and Fate.

-----

In 2019 I read Stalingrad and wrote about it here.

Everything Must Go: A Review

Dorian Lynskey’s Everything Must Go is a fascinating tour through humanity’s long obsession with the end of the world. Part literary history, part cultural criticism, and part catalog of catastrophe, the book explores how people have imagined apocalypse across centuries of novels, films, religious movements, political ideologies, and scientific speculation.

The scope of Lynskey’s research is astonishing. He moves effortlessly from the Book of Revelation to nuclear war fiction, from H.G. Wells and Mary Shelley to Hollywood disaster movies and modern climate-change narratives. Along the way, he introduces a seemingly endless parade of prophets, novelists, filmmakers, cult leaders, scientists, and doomsayers who have tried to explain how the world might end—and what that ending would reveal about humanity itself.

What emerges is less a history of apocalypse than a history of human fears. Every era imagines destruction in its own image. Religious societies envision divine judgment. The Cold War generated visions of nuclear annihilation. Today, environmental collapse, pandemics, artificial intelligence, and technological disruption occupy the place once held by biblical horsemen. The details change, but the fascination remains remarkably constant.

One of the book’s strengths is Lynskey’s ability to treat these visions seriously without surrendering to them. He understands that apocalyptic stories are rarely just about destruction. They are often expressions of hope, warning, wish fulfillment, or moral judgment. The end of the world becomes a way of talking about the world we currently inhabit.

At times, however, the book can feel almost too comprehensive. The sheer number of books, films, historical episodes, and personalities discussed occasionally creates the feeling of reading an encyclopedia of apocalypse rather than a single sustained argument. Readers looking for a strong central thesis may find themselves overwhelmed by the abundance of examples.

Yet that abundance is also the book’s achievement. Lynskey has assembled what is likely the most exhaustive survey of end-of-the-world imagination available in a single volume. Even when the discussion wanders, it remains engaging because the subject itself is so endlessly inventive.

In the end, Everything Must Go demonstrates that humanity has spent centuries imagining its own extinction. The details differ, but the impulse is universal. We seem unable to stop asking how the story ends—and what that ending might say about who we are. 

Mittelbau Dora--The Death Camp That Made V-2 Rockets

 Mittelbau-Dora, located near Nordhausen in central Germany, was one of the most brutal and technically driven camps in the Nazi system. Established in late 1943 as a subcamp of Buchenwald, it became an independent concentration camp in October 1944. Its creation was tied directly to Germany’s desperation in the later years of World War II, as Allied bombing made above-ground weapons production increasingly vulnerable.

The camp’s central purpose was the underground manufacture of V-2 rockets, the so-called “vengeance weapons” developed under Wernher von Braun’s program. Production was moved into a vast network of tunnels carved into the Kohnstein mountain. Prisoners—drawn from across occupied Europe—were forced to excavate, expand, and work within these tunnels under horrific conditions. Unlike camps designed primarily for extermination, Mittelbau-Dora was a labor camp, but the distinction is misleading. The labor itself became a method of mass death.

In its early phase, prisoners were not even housed in barracks. They lived and slept inside the tunnels where they worked, without sunlight, adequate ventilation, sanitation, or sufficient food. The air was thick with dust, chemicals, and smoke. Disease spread quickly. Exhaustion was constant. Those who could not keep up—through illness, injury, or simple collapse—were beaten, executed, or sent to other camps to die.

By the time the camp was liberated in April 1945, more than 60,000 prisoners had passed through the Mittelbau system, including its many subcamps. An estimated 20,000 died. Many were Soviet prisoners of war, along with Poles, French, Dutch, and other European detainees, as well as political prisoners and resistance members. Jews were also among the victims, though the camp’s population was more mixed than extermination camps like Auschwitz.

The irony at Mittelbau-Dora is stark and enduring. The V-2 rockets produced there represented one of the most advanced technological achievements of the war—an early step toward spaceflight. Yet they were built through conditions of almost unimaginable human degradation. More people died constructing the rockets than were killed by their use.

When American forces approached, the SS evacuated much of the camp, sending prisoners on death marches. Those who remained were liberated on April 11, 1945.

Mittelbau-Dora stands as a reminder that the Nazi system was not only about ideology and extermination, but also about the ruthless exploitation of human beings in service of technological ambition. It is a place where modernity and barbarism existed side by side—indistinguishable in practice.

Another sad example of Nazis making money on slave labor is Flossenburg.

A Most Elegant Equation: Euler's Formula and the Beauty of Mathematics by David Stipp: The Joy of Understanding!

 

A Most Elegant Equation by David Stipp is a small book about a large idea: that mathematics, at its deepest level, is not a collection of separate tools but a unified language capable of describing the universe with astonishing precision. Centered on Euler’s identity—often called the most beautiful equation in mathematics—the book shows how seemingly unrelated parts of math come together in a single, elegant statement.

As someone whose formal math education stopped at Calculus II, I found the book both accessible and intriguing. It does not require advanced training to appreciate the central insight: that numbers, functions, and constants that appear to belong to entirely different domains—imaginary numbers, exponential growth, circular motion—can be woven together into a relationship that is both exact and profound. The equation itself feels almost like a coincidence at first glance, but the book patiently reveals the deeper structure behind it.

What makes the book especially compelling is its ability to convey why this matters beyond mathematics. The same abstract relationships that produce Euler’s identity also underlie the physical world—waves, oscillations, and the geometry of space. It is a reminder that mathematics is not just invented, but discovered, uncovering patterns that seem to exist independent of us.

At times, the explanations push the edge of what a non-specialist can easily follow, and some readers may find themselves rereading sections to fully grasp the connections. But that effort is part of the experience. The reward is a clearer sense of how disparate ideas—real and imaginary numbers, algebra and geometry—fit together into a coherent whole.

In the end, A Most Elegant Equation succeeds not by teaching advanced mathematics, but by revealing its unity. It leaves the reader with a renewed sense of wonder at how something so abstract can so precisely describe the world we live in.

Lincoln at Gettysburg by Garry Wills--The Gettysburg Address Moved America from Constitutional Compromise to Aspiration

 

Garry Wills’s Lincoln at Gettysburg is a short book with a large argument: that Abraham Lincoln, in just 272 words, redefined the meaning of the American republic. Wills’s central claim: the Gettysburg Address does not look to the Constitution as the nation’s founding document, but to the Declaration of Independence. In this address, Lincoln shifted the moral center of the United States from a framework of compromise to one of aspiration.

The Constitution, as Wills reminds us, is a document forged through political necessity—one that accommodated slavery in order to secure union. The Declaration, by contrast, proclaims a principle: that all men are created equal. Lincoln’s genius at Gettysburg was to elevate that principle above the compromises of 1787 and to present it as the true foundation of the nation. “Four score and seven years ago” reaches back not to the Constitution’s ratification, but to 1776, reframing the Civil War as a test of whether a nation dedicated to equality can endure.

Wills shows that this was not rhetorical flourish but the culmination of Lincoln’s evolving thought. Over the course of his career, Lincoln moved from a position of containing slavery to one of confronting its moral incompatibility with the nation’s founding ideals. Yet he never abandoned his primary objective: preserving the Union. In Lincoln’s mind, the Union and the principle of equality were not separate goals but intertwined ones. The Union gave political life to the Declaration’s promise; without it, the principle would remain abstract.

One of the book’s most compelling insights is Lincoln’s refusal to treat the Confederacy as a separate nation. Even in the midst of a brutal war, Lincoln spoke and acted as the president of all Americans. Southerners were not foreigners but citizens engaged in rebellion—participants in what he viewed as an unlawful act against a legitimate government. This stance shaped both his wartime policies and the tone of the Gettysburg Address, which avoids vindictiveness and instead calls for “a new birth of freedom” that would bind the nation together more fully than before.

Wills also situates the address within its intellectual and cultural context, contrasting Lincoln’s spare, biblical language with the ornate oratory of his contemporaries. The result is a speech that feels both timeless and radical, quietly overturning the assumptions on which the nation had been built.

Lincoln at Gettysburg is ultimately a study in how ideas shape history. Wills demonstrates that Lincoln did not merely commemorate the dead at Gettysburg—he reinterpreted the American experiment itself, grounding it not in compromise, but in a moral vision that continues to define the country’s aspirations.

Beautiful, Suggestive, and Not Quite Convincing: A review of The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth

 Zoë Schlanger’s The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth is an elegant, curious, and ultimately frustrating book. It sits at the intersection of science writing and philosophical speculation, and while it succeeds admirably at the former, it strains credibility in the latter.

Schlanger is at her best when she is simply observing. Her reporting on plant behavior—root systems exchanging chemical signals, leaves responding to touch, forests linked through underground fungal networks—is vivid and often mesmerizing. She has a gift for rendering the slow, silent life of plants into something legible and even dramatic. You come away with a sharpened sense that plants are not passive background but active participants in the ecosystems we barely notice.

Where the book begins to wobble is in its central claim: that these behaviors amount to something like intelligence. Schlanger builds her case through anecdotes and emerging research, but the leap from responsiveness to cognition is never fully justified. The evidence feels suggestive rather than conclusive, and at times the argument seems to run ahead of the science, leaning on metaphor where demonstration would be required.

That tension defines the book. It is never dull—far from it—but it leaves you unconvinced. You learn a great deal about how plants live, communicate, and adapt, yet the larger thesis remains just out of reach, more poetic than proven.

In the end, The Light Eaters is best read not as a definitive account of plant intelligence, but as an invitation to rethink how we define life and awareness. It opens a door, but it does not quite walk you through it.

Einstein's Cosmos by Michio Kaku

 

Michio Kaku’s Einstein’s Cosmos is a lively, accessible tribute to the great physicist that mixes biography with clear explanations of the physics that made Einstein’s name synonymous with modern science. As a first-time Kaku reader, I appreciated his engaging, conversational voice—brisk storytelling, vivid analogies, and just enough technical detail to illuminate without bogging the reader down.

A central theme of the book is how many of Einstein’s most daring ideas anticipated discoveries that wouldn’t be confirmed until decades after his death. Kaku does an excellent job highlighting those prescient insights and the ways Einstein’s intuition outpaced the experimental technology of his era.

Gravitational waves are a standout example. Einstein’s general relativity mathematically admits ripples in spacetime, but the notion of real, detectable waves was controversial and even confusing in his lifetime; Einstein himself wavered on their physical reality. Kaku traces the theory’s development and the long experimental road that ended with LIGO’s 2015 detection—an observation Einstein could not have witnessed, yet one that vindicated a fundamental prediction of his theory.

Black holes are another major case. The Schwarzschild solution to Einstein’s equations appeared within a year of general relativity, but the idea of a physically real object from which not even light can escape seemed almost science-fictional then. Einstein resisted the notion of singularities and collapsed stars; still, his equations implied them. Kaku shows how later theoretical work and astronomical observations—accretion disks, X-ray binaries, and the imaging of a black hole’s shadow—confirmed what the mathematics had already suggested.

Kaku also explores gravitational lensing and gravitational redshift—phenomena predicted by general relativity that were difficult to test with early 20th-century instruments. The 1919 Eddington expedition began confirming light-bending, but precise, wide-ranging confirmations came much later, and precise applications (like GPS time corrections) are entirely post‑Einstein technologies. Kaku frames these developments as part of a pattern: Einstein supplied a conceptual framework so profound that it required future generations and instruments to fully validate and exploit it.

Throughout, Kaku emphasizes Einstein’s creative process—thought experiments, stubborn skepticism, and a willingness to challenge received wisdom. The book blends human detail with scientific exposition in a way that makes complex ideas feel graspable.

If you’re looking for an approachable, well-written account that honors both Einstein’s genius and the later triumphs his theories enabled, Kaku’s Einstein’s Cosmos is a rewarding read.

My Mascot Life

 

I just gave away the tuxedo I bought in 2004. I hadn’t worn it since 2013, so it felt like time to let it go to a better home. Over the years I used it several times a year for black‑tie award ceremonies at the museum where I worked. But its best use came in 2007, when I became the mascot for two weeks during the longest championship run for the girls basketball team in Lancaster Country Day School (LCDS) history.

Why was a 54‑year‑old dad the team mascot? Because I showed up to the first round of the championship wearing a tuxedo. I had planned to go straight to a black‑tie awards event in Philadelphia after the game, so I went to the gym dressed for the evening. The team—my two daughters included, both guards (Lauren a senior, Lisa a sophomore)—won that first round. As soon as the game ended, the whole squad ran up and insisted I wear the tuxedo to the next round because I was “good luck.”

From that moment on, the tux became my game uniform. LCDS won the next three rounds and became district champions, earning a trip to the state tournament. We traveled to central Pennsylvania to play Mansfield—a perennial powerhouse from a school with graduating classes of over 250, compared with LCDS’s 40. Whatever luck the tuxedo had ran out on Mansfield; the final was a rout. Still, making it to states was a victory in itself.

Maybe my tux will bring someone else luck someday. For me, it will always be the suit that cheered my daughters on during their team's greatest season.

Carl Lutz, Visas for Life, and Eric Saul

Eric Saul (tall man in the middle) at Arch Street Friends Meeting House

At the end of March I went to a presentation titled:

Visas For Life: The Righteous and Honorable Diplomats

held at the Arch Street Friends Meeting House.  The event focused on Carl Lutz, a Swiss diplomat in Budapest who rescued 62,000 Jews from the Holocaust. At the center of research and publication of work about Lutz and other diplomats who rescued Jews is Eric Saul, one of the speakers at the event.

I was not aware that anyone had rescued that many Jews from Hitler and his horrible minions.  And I think of Budapest as one of the worst sites in the tragedy of that is The Holocaust.  In just a few months in the middle of 1944, more than 400,000 Jews were deported from Budapest to Auschwitz and other death camps.  Adolph Eichmann reached his peak of evil efficiency in Budapest in 1944.  It was happily stunning to find that an epic rescue was going on at the same. 

I will be writing more about this program and about Saul later in the year.  At this time of the year when the world marks the end of the Holocaust and of World War II in Europe, I was delighted to learn about a heroic action I had not previously been aware of.  

 

Yiyang Zhuge: Translating Hannah Arendt Across Worlds

 

Yiyang Zhuge translator of Hannah Arendt and Plutarch

At a recent conversation hosted by the Hannah Arendt Center in New York City, Roger Berkowitz interviewed Yiyang Zhuge. Her work represents a remarkable intellectual bridge between languages, traditions, and political worlds. Still a graduate student at Boston College, Zhuge has already emerged as a significant figure in bringing Western political thought—especially the work of Hannah Arendt—to contemporary Chinese readers.

Roger Berkowitz and Yiyang Zhuge

Zhuge’s recent translation of The Human Condition into Mandarin, published this year in China, has already sold 15,000 copies—an impressive number for a dense philosophical text. The year before, her translation of Plutarch’s Moralia reached an even wider audience, with 36,000 copies sold. These numbers suggest not only the quality of her work but also a growing appetite among Chinese readers for classical and modern texts that explore politics, ethics, and the human condition.

Plutrach's Moralia translated from Greek to Mandarin by Yiyang Zhuge

What makes Zhuge’s work even more striking is the path that led her there. She came to the United States at the age of fifteen and attended a private high  school with little knowledge of English. In an environment where she faced social difficulties, language itself became both refuge and passion. She immersed herself in study, mastering not only English but also Greek, Latin, and German. That linguistic range enabled her to translate Arendt not from English but from German.  Arendt wrote her major works in both English and German. Zhuge and Berkowitz mentioned some of the differences between the German and English version of The Human Condition including Arendt’s quotations of German poetry in the edition she wrote in German. 

The Human Condition translated from German to Mandarin by Yiyang Zhuge

Zhuge’s work is not limited to translation. She has built a substantial following through a Mandarin-language YouTube channel where she discusses politics and feminism. In doing so, she participates in a broader intellectual project: creating a space for political thought that crosses cultural and linguistic boundaries. Her translations and public engagement bring thinkers like Arendt into conversation with contemporary Chinese audiences, where questions of authority, freedom, and public life carry particular urgency.

Zhuge's translation of Men in Dark Times will be published later in 2026 

Her current effort to publish a Mandarin translation of Men in Dark Times highlights the challenges of that project. The text, with its reflections on individuals who maintained moral clarity under oppressive conditions, must pass through China’s censorship process. That negotiation itself underscores the stakes of Zhuge’s work. Translation under censorship is not only an intellectual exercise but also a political act.

Zhuge’s story highlights language as a form of freedom. From a teenager struggling to find her place in a new country to a scholar translating some political philosophy from the 20h century and the ancient world, she has turned linguistic mastery into a means of connection and influence. In bringing Arendt into Mandarin, she is not only translating words but opening a space for thought—one that, like Arendt’s own work, insists on the importance of thinking in difficult times.

Hoping Against Facts: Belief in Progress

 

The end of the Cold War seemed, for a brief moment, to vindicate the modern belief in progress. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, many observers concluded that liberal democracy had triumphed not only politically but historically. Communist regimes fell across Eastern Europe, democratic institutions spread, and markets opened. It appeared that history itself was moving in a clear direction. The twentieth century’s ideological struggle had ended, and democracy had won.

Yet the decades that followed quickly complicated that confidence. Events after the Cold War increasingly suggested that the belief in inevitable progress—so sharply criticized by Hannah Arendt—rested on far shakier ground than many assumed.

One of the earliest signs appeared in Russia itself. After the Soviet collapse, many hoped the country would evolve toward stable democracy. Instead, the brutal First Chechen War revealed how fragile the new order was. Violence, corruption, and political instability quickly undermined the democratic experiment. Within a decade, Russia had moved toward the centralized authoritarianism that defines it today.

China offered another early warning. While Western observers sometimes hoped that economic liberalization would eventually lead to political openness, the Chinese Communist Party made its intentions unmistakably clear during the Tiananmen Square protests and massacre. The violent suppression of democratic protests demonstrated that economic modernization did not necessarily produce political freedom. China would grow richer and more powerful, but not more democratic.

The optimism of the early 1990s suffered another blow with the terrorist attacks of September 11 attacks. The attacks revealed that ideological conflict had not disappeared with the Cold War. Instead, new forms of global struggle—rooted in religious extremism and geopolitical instability—had emerged. The wars that followed reshaped global politics and exposed the limits of American power to shape political outcomes abroad.

The Middle East seemed briefly to challenge this pessimism during the Arab Spring. Mass protests toppled dictators in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, raising hopes that democratic reform might finally take root across the region. Yet those hopes proved fragile. In many countries the uprisings gave way to civil war, renewed authoritarianism, or political chaos. The dream of a democratic Middle East faded almost as quickly as it appeared.

Even within established democracies, confidence in steady progress began to erode. By the mid-2010s, political polarization, populist movements, and declining trust in institutions signaled growing strain within democratic systems themselves. In countries long considered stable, including the United States, political norms that once seemed secure began to look more vulnerable.

Taken together, these developments illustrate a central insight of Arendt’s political thought. In works such as On Violence and The Human Condition, she warned against the comforting belief that history moves automatically toward improvement. Scientific and technological progress may advance steadily, but political life does not follow the same pattern. Human institutions remain fragile because they depend on human action—choices made by citizens, leaders, and societies.

The events of the past three decades underscore her point. Moments that seemed to confirm the triumph of democracy turned out to be temporary openings rather than permanent transformations. Progress, if it exists at all, must be continually defended and renewed.

Arendt did not deny the possibility of improvement. She believed that human beings possess the capacity to create new political beginnings through collective action. But she insisted that such achievements are never guaranteed. Freedom and democratic institutions survive only when people actively sustain them.

The decades since the Cold War have shown how quickly optimism about historical progress can fade. They have also reminded us of Arendt’s deeper lesson: history does not move forward by necessity. Its direction remains open, shaped by the decisions people make in their own time.

War! What Is It Good For? by Ian Morris

War! What Is It Good For? by Ian Morris is alone among thousands of books on war written in recent decades—not because it celebrates or justifies war, but because it refuses to simplify it. Morris is not pro-war. He is a historian trying to understand what war has actually done to human societies over 15,000 years.

His central argument: over the long sweep of history, war has often made societies safer, larger, and more organized, even as it inflicted immense suffering. Early human societies were extraordinarily violent, with high rates of death from raids and small-scale conflict. As war forced the creation of larger states and stronger governments, those same structures reduced internal violence and enabled economic growth.  In Morris’s formulation, war is history’s great paradox: destructive in the short term, but sometimes stabilizing in the long term.

This is not a comforting thesis, and Morris does not present it as one. He is clear that war is horrific and that modern weapons could destroy everything humanity has built. But he insists that if we want to understand how we arrived at a relatively less violent world—where fewer people die violently today than in premodern societies—we must confront the role war has played in creating large, internally peaceful states. 

The strength of the book lies in its scope. Morris moves from prehistoric tribal warfare to modern industrial conflict, drawing on archaeology, history, and social science. He shows how war drives state formation, taxation systems, infrastructure, and even ideas about citizenship. In this sense, war is not just a series of battles; it is a force that shapes institutions and social order.

Yet this sweeping perspective can also be misread—especially in today’s political climate. Morris helps clarify an essential distinction that is often blurred: the difference between wars of choice and wars of necessity.

Wars of necessity—such as Ukraine defending itself against Russian invasion—fit more easily into Morris’s historical pattern. When a society defends itself against invasion, it mobilizes, strengthens institutions, and often deepens internal cohesion. These are the kinds of wars that historically have contributed to state-building and, paradoxically, to longer-term stability.

Wars of choice are different. A hypothetical example—such as a powerful nation attacking another without provocation—falls outside the logic Morris describes. These wars do not arise from existential threats or defensive necessity; they are discretionary. Historically, such conflicts often weaken institutions, drain resources, and create instability rather than order. Morris’s argument does not justify them. If anything, it exposes their danger: they attempt to harness the state-building effects of war without the unifying force of genuine necessity.

This distinction matters. Morris’s book is not a moral defense of war but a historical analysis of its consequences. It challenges readers to hold two truths at once: war has been one of the primary engines of social development, and it remains one of humanity’s greatest sources of suffering.

In the end, War! What Is It Good For? forces readers into uncomfortable territory. It rejects both naïve pacifism and easy militarism. Instead, Morris offers a harder lesson: if we want a world with less war, we must first understand the role war has played in creating the world we live in.

Last month I wrote about three of Morris's books I read, including War! But the expanding war America started in the Middle East made me think War! should be separate from the others. 

Review: Organic Nomenclature and the Discipline of Naming

 

There are few books more practical—or more quietly transformative—than Organic Nomenclature by James G. Traynham. It is not a glamorous book. It does not promise sweeping insights or theoretical breakthroughs. Instead, it offers something more fundamental: a disciplined way to bring order to the sprawling, often bewildering world of organic chemistry.

I first encountered Traynham’s book in 1994, under circumstances far removed from a university classroom. I was working as a writer at an advertising agency when we took on a new client: Atofina, a French chemical company expanding its American operations. Their U.S. headquarters was in Philadelphia, and I began commuting from Lancaster several times a week. On those train rides, I opened an organic chemistry textbook and worked steadily through Traynham’s exercises.

That decision changed the way I approached my work. Organic nomenclature is, at its core, a language. Without it, the world of organic chemistry remains opaque—filled with unfamiliar names that conceal more than they reveal. With it, structure begins to emerge. Chains, branches, functional groups, and substituents all fall into place. What once looked like chaos becomes readable.

Traynham’s book excels because it treats nomenclature as a skill to be practiced, not merely understood. The exercises are incremental and cumulative, forcing the reader to engage actively with the material. There is no shortcut. Mastery comes only through repetition—naming compounds, checking answers, and learning from mistakes. Over time, patterns begin to stick. The logic of the system becomes internal rather than memorized.

For me, this practical mastery had immediate value. It allowed me to speak more confidently with chemists and researchers, to understand the products and processes I was writing about, and to translate technical information for colleagues and customers who did not share that background. The book did not make me a chemist, but it gave me access to the language of chemistry—and that made all the difference.

Recently, I returned to Traynham’s exercises, working through them again decades later. The experience was both humbling and satisfying. Some concepts came back quickly; others required renewed effort. But by the end, I felt once again that sense of order—the ability to look at a compound and name it with confidence. Even the modern world seemed to respond: my online feeds began offering organic chemistry quizzes and resources, as if the discipline had reawakened a dormant part of my thinking.

Organic Nomenclature remains what it always was: a workbook. It rewards patience, persistence, and attention to detail. For anyone who wants to make sense of organic chemistry—whether as a student, professional, or curious outsider—it offers something rare: clarity earned through practice.

Hannah Arendt and the Illusion of Progress

"On Violence" is one of the essays in the book

Crises of the Republic by Hannah Arendt

 

In her essay On Violence, Hannah Arendt offers a lucid critique of the modern belief in historical progress. Writing in the late 1960s amid political upheaval, student revolts, and widespread violence in American cities, Arendt challenges the idea—deeply embedded in modern Western thought—that history moves steadily toward moral or political improvement. For Arendt, this belief is not an ancient insight but a relatively recent intellectual construction.

She traces the idea historically. In the seventeenth century, she notes, the concept of inevitable progress was largely unknown. Early modern thinkers saw human affairs as cyclical or contingent rather than steadily improving. 

Ancient Greeks looked back to a Golden Age.

Romans looked back to the founding of Rome from the ashes of Troy.

Jews and Christians look back to Eden and a march of sin only to be relieved by the Messiah.

The Enlightenment of the eighteenth century began to change this perspective. Philosophers increasingly believed that reason, science, and education could gradually improve human society. By the nineteenth century, the idea of progress had hardened into something close to certainty. Scientific and technological breakthroughs seemed to demonstrate that human knowledge advanced continuously. Many thinkers then assumed that moral and political life must be advancing as well.

Arendt rejects this leap. In On Violence, she argues that technological progress does not imply moral progress. The twentieth century, in her view, destroyed that illusion. Two world wars, the rise of totalitarian regimes, and the development of weapons capable of annihilating humanity demonstrated that increased scientific capability can coexist with unprecedented brutality. Indeed, modern technology often magnifies violence rather than restrains it. For Arendt, the assumption that history inevitably turns toward improvement is therefore a philosophical error—an unsupported faith rather than a proven truth.

The arc of history occasionally bends toward justice, but can just as easily snap back toward patriarchal tyranny. 

Yet Arendt’s critique of progress does not amount to pure pessimism. Her earlier work The Human Condition offers a more subtle view of human development. In that book she analyzes the fundamental activities of human life—labor, work, and action—and explores how modern society has transformed them. Although she does not embrace the Enlightenment narrative of inevitable progress, she does acknowledge that human beings continuously reshape their world. Through “work,” humans build durable structures, institutions, and technologies that alter the conditions of life on earth. Through “action,” they create new political possibilities through persuasion.

In this sense, Arendt recognizes change and improvement, but she refuses to call it progress in the philosophical sense. Progress implies a predictable direction, a historical law guaranteeing advancement. Arendt insists that no such law exists. Human achievements remain fragile and reversible because they depend on political judgment and collective responsibility. Civilization can advance, but it can also collapse.

Another striking element of The Human Condition reinforces this position: Arendt assumes that humanity’s future will remain on earth. Writing during the early space age, she reacts skeptically to fantasies of escaping the human condition through technological mastery. Even as science expands human power, our political and moral challenges remain rooted in the earthly world we share.

Taken together, On Violence and The Human Condition reveal Arendt’s distinctive position. She rejects the comforting belief that history inevitably moves toward improvement. The catastrophes of the twentieth century demonstrate that progress is not guaranteed. Yet she does not deny human creativity or the possibility of building better institutions. What she rejects is the illusion that improvement will occur automatically.

For Arendt, the future is not secured by historical progress but shaped by human action. Whether societies become more just or more violent depends not on the momentum of history but on the choices people make.

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.