Fifty Books for 2019: 50/50 Learning and Entertainment

The first of 20 books in the Master and Commander series

Every year begins with a list of books and a stack of books I want to read and every year ends carrying much of that list and stack into next year, because I discovered something new and delightful and went off in another direction.  The last book in this list predicts I would do that.

The best example of seeing something new and changing my reading happened this year with the "Master and Commander" series by Patrick O'Brien. I watched the movie based on the books more than a decade ago. I liked the movie. This year I watched the movie again, mentioned it to a friend who said he really liked the books. So I bought Book 1 in June.

Russell Crowe stars as Captain Jack Aubrey in the movie

Master and Commander

A few days ago, I finished book 12 in the series and will keep reading about the adventures of Captain Jack Aubrey and Dr. Steven Mathurin next year. There are 20 books in the series, so I have lots more sailing ahead. I have learned so much about sailing ships during the Napoleonic Wars and about the British Navy.  The books are not only letter perfect about the details of sailing, but show how friendship develops between men and how that friendship grows over time. The movie couldn't possibly do more than give the sense of the books, but it is a very good movie and very true to the characters of Aubrey and Mathurin.

Jewish American Novels
The next group of books is part of a list I asked for from Danny Anderson, a literature professor who specializes in Jewish-American fiction in the 20th Century. He gave me a list of ten books. I have read four this year, after reading three last year:

Herzog by Saul Bellow
Foreign Bodies by Cynthia Ozick
All Other Nights by Dara Horn
The Plot Against America by Philip Roth

I really loved "All Other Nights" and "The Plot Against America." "Foreign Bodies" was good.  "Herzog" was not for me.

Books About or Inspiring Video
Another small group is connected to video. I read "Catch-22" after watching the new series on Hulu.  I read "All the Pieces Matter" about the making of "The Wire." After watching the video series and not liking it, I read "The Man in the High Castle." I really liked the book, but after reading it, I have a hard time thinking the book and the video are related.  The book is so clear. The video is murky.

In the Plus-Size category were two books:
"Stalingrad" by Vasily Grossman at 1063 pages
Stalingrad is the first volume of a 2-Volume 1,943-page novel about the battle for Stalingrad.  It is "War and Peace" set in the most important battle of World War II--it was the first major defeat of the German Army and the turning point of the war. While "Stalingrad" has great moments, particularly the German air attack that started the battle and the battle for the Railway Station that marked the limit of the German advance, the second volume "Life and Fate" is a much more compelling story. Even though it is 880 pages it has a rapid pace.
"A Tale of Love and Darkness" a memoir by Amos Oz

I have only read one other short book by Oz, but I wanted to read his life which wove through so much of 20th Century Israeli history.  It's a good memoir.  It would also be a good memoir at 250 pages, but worth reading.  

Philosophy and Politics form a group of three books. I reread "The Origins of Totalitarianism" by Hannah Arendt and "On Tyranny" by Timothy Snyder. I also read "How Fascism Works" by Jason Stanley.  I heard both Stanley and Snyder speak last year and went to a conference on anti-Semitism at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College this year.  All three books point with dread to authoritarian governments.

Four more novels that don't fit in the categories above:

Quichotte by Salman Rushdie--the first book I read by him. It's very sadly funny and a good homage to the original. I read the unabridged Don Quixote in 2005 and was delighted. 

"Slowness" is the third novel I read by Milan Kundera and my least favorite. "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" and "Identity" were brilliant. "Slowness" lived up to its name.

I re-read my two favorite novels by Mark Helprin "Paris in the Present Tense" and "Winters Tale." I have read everything Helprin has written. Re-reading Paris before I returned to the City of Light was pure delight. I love the story. Re-reading "Winters Tale" was more vivid because I have read more Magical Realism.  When I first read "Winters Tale" 30years ago, I did not even know it was in this category but loved it for its crazy imagery and blurred time.  Now it is even more vivid. 

I read five books loosely under language including a couple of Hebrew textbooks, an abridged "D'Artagnan" in French, a Russian verb prefix book, and a memoir about French immersion by a 50-year-old student. I also read a dual-language book in Greek and English of some of the best passages of Thucydides on War.  

Two memoirs of war:

"Pumpkinflowers" by Matti Friedman, an Israeli soldier about the war in Lebanon.

"The Forgotten Soldier" by Guy Sajer a French teenager from Alsace who fought in the German Army for the entire war on the Easter Front. For anyone who doubts how terrible war can be, this memoir says war is Hell more clearly than any other I have read.

I re-read "Sapiens" by Yuval Noah Hariri just because it is so good.  

Finally, I read a book called "The Sacred Enneagram" that explains the concept of the Enneagram. I have taken Meyers Briggs and Strengths Finders as part of two of my jobs, but the Enneagram I read on the recommendation of a friend. 

The Enneagram looks at personality in a more integrated way than the other methods I used.  Whether it works for everyone, I could see myself in a painfully clear way as an Enneagram Type 7--an enthusiast. So I delight in making plans, or lists of books, then see something new and changing the plans or lists.  I am going to read another book about it next year. 

Can Faith Wield Power and Remain Faith?

Captain Jack Aubrey from the movie 

"Master and Commander: Far Side of the World" 

leading a boarding party.

Should Chaplains be part of the military? The question brings up the larger question of what place religion has in a state.

As commissioned officers, chaplains represent their faith, but they also represent a state claim to spiritual power, a power that the state wants on its side, on the state’s terms.

When I read Captain Aubrey’s musings on Chaplains in the Royal Navy (more below) in the “Master and Commander” books, I thought, ‘Yes! This is what bothers me about faith and power.’   

Specifically, I believe faith in the service of power is always evil.  Always.

But Aubrey does not think in universals, he simply does not like Chaplains on his ship. He believes they are bad luck. He sees the contradiction of having services on board the ship.  Aubrey drills and trains his gun crews to “smash enemy ships to splinters.” 

When necessary, Aubrey loads his guns with grape shot—a shotgun blast from a cannon with hundreds of pieces of metal and chain—and slaughters the enemy crew while they are on deck manning the guns and the rigging.  He has watched blood pour off the deck scuttles (drains) from the slaughter of a dozen cannons firing grape shot. 

When Aubrey leads his men on a boarding party, they carry pikes and axes and swords and pistols. They kill everyone in front of them as they swing from their ship to the enemy ship, firing, cutting and stabbing.

In a moment of reflection, Aubrey thinks about the deep contradiction when he has a Chaplain on board. On long voyages, a Chaplain will give weekly sermons, exhorting the men to love their neighbor, love their enemy, and any number of things that Captain Aubrey has trained out of his men.  They can’t really love their neighbor in the French frigate and pound his wooden ship to splinters with 24-pound cannonballs, then jump onto the enemy ship as they crash together and impale his neighbor on an 8-foot-long pike or split his skull with an axe. 

Which brings me back to this issue of faith and power.  In defending their own Holy Lands, a Muslim or a Jew split an enemy’s skull or run them through with a pike. Islam and Judaism have a territorial imperative.

But Christianity can never take power and be true to itself. Jesus had every opportunity for money, power and glory and pushed it away.  Based on the words of Jesus, no one could raise an army, conquer a foreign land, kill an enemy or run a government, which means having exclusive control of the means of violence.  The horrors of the Crusades, the conquest of the New World, African Slavery, the Hundred Years War, and every conflict waged with a Christian label is simply wrong.  There has never been a Christian nation based on the words of Jesus. It is always Moses, twisted into theological pretzel.

As an officer in what he considers a Christian nation, Captain Aubrey is fine with religion away from his ship and nods his hat to Christian morality as he sees it, but he is clear-eyed enough to know that his duty for that Christian nation is a flat contradiction of what a Chaplain tells his men. 

In another passage I quoted at length, Aubrey’s great friend Dr. Maturin muses on how power corrupts the men who pursue it. 

Jews ached for and prayed to return to Israel for two millennia until seventy years ago when a Jewish state came into being in 1948: including Jerusalem, the spiritual center of the Land of Israel and Judaism. Even before they had a state, Jews developed a pioneer army that became one of the toughest of all the armies on earth.  Protecting Israel means fighting when necessary.

Islam has holy sites and the promise of a Caliphate. The Koran describes the sites and the land. Conquest and holding an empire is consistent with Islam.

Buddhism, from what I have learned about it, has a very uneasy relationship with this world, power, territory and all that makes a state.  A Buddhist state seems to me to have the same inherent contradiction is a Christian state. Buddha, like Jesus, said nothing that could be construed as encouraging the taking and wielding of power.

Christianity goes completely wrong every time and in every way when it takes power.  The concept of a Christian nation is so foreign to the words of Jesus, that it seems to me as crazy as a Vegan hog butcher.  Every institution with a Christian label that takes power contradicts Jesus. Every one. And the hypocrisy is evident to those inside and outside the Church. Every Church that has become a state Church has thrown away the Gospel in pursuit of power.

Ever since I first believed, after being a vaguely agnostic nominally Jewish teenager, I have thought power was antithetical to faith. The Jewish state must protect itself so it can only exist by wielding power. But the dangers of the pursuit of power are just as real for those who rise through the ranks of the Israeli Army as any other Army.

There is no territorial imperative in Christianity.  There are no words of Jesus say take earthly power, hold earthly territory, and conquer in His name.  Nothing.

I truly believe that Christianity plus power equals evil.  Always.

White Evangelical America will collapse under the weight of its lust for power just as every nation that has conquered in the name of Jesus in the last 1,500 years. And every expression of Christianity that aligns with the pathetic pandering of the Evangelical majority will be tarred with the same brush as the Crusaders and post-Reformation wars of religion.

In the 1970s, I remember a prominent Baptist talking about sending missionaries to the “spiritual wasteland” of Europe.  Well there was a project that failed.  He confidently said secularism and 19^th Century philosophy had made Europe secular and resistant to faith. 

He never once mentioned that the churches in Germany expelled Jews who were confessing members in 1935, just two years after Hitler took power. Nearly all of those believers were killed in the Holocaust. Churches of every kind across Europe embraced or fell in line with Nazi rule. In his history of the Holocaust “Black Earth” Timothy Snyder said that churches across Europe utterly failed as protectors of the weak and persecuted.  And now the American Evangelical Church is following that well-worn path of pandering for power.  In his book “The Immoral Majority” Ben Howe says 68% of Evangelical Christians in America believe they have no responsibility for refugees. The people who are supposed to show God’s love to the world are the worst group in America for “caring for the least of these.”

Captain Aubrey is a man of action, not philosophy. Soon after his deep reflections on the paradox of power and faith, he joined the boarding party on a ship on which he was a passenger. With his injured right arm tied to his side, he swung a cutlass left handed and led a party of men jumping onto the enemy ship, fighting hand to hand. 

But the conflict in his mind will not leave my mind.  Real faith and pursuit of power will always be in conflict and deep contradiction. 

The Price of Leadership: An excerpt from "Master and Commander"

In Patrick O’Brian’s book“Master and Commander” the sixth chapter begins with the ship’s doctor on land thinking about how men age.  After college, in my early 30s, I decided that the price of taking power was far too high, so I determined to be a journeyman at writing rather than a leader.  Dr. Mathurin’s reflections fit my own experience and make me glad of my choice.  Mathurin is thinking about what happens to men as they age and become absorbed by their profession and set on a path by the cumulative effect of their choices. He sees middle age, around 40, as where the line is crossed and is talking specifically about a mid-career Lieutenant, James Dillon:

“It appears to me a critical time for him…a time that will settle him in that particular course he will never leave again, but will persevere in for the rest of his life.  It has often seemed to me that towards this period [middle age] … men strike out their permanent characters; or have those characters struck into them. Merriment, roaring high spirits before this: then some chance concatenation, or some hidden predilection (or rather inherent bias) working through, and the man is in the road he cannot leave but must go on, making it deeper and deeper (a groove or channel), until he is lost in his mere character—persona—no longer human, but an accretion of qualities belonging to this character.  

James Dillon was a delightful being. Now he is closing in. It is odd—will I say hear-breaking?—how cheerfulness goes: gaiety of mind, natural free-springing joy. Authority is the great enemy—the assumption of authority. I know few men over fifty that seem to me entirely human: virtually none who has long exercised authority. The senior post-captains here…Shriveled men (shriveled in essence: not, alas, in belly). Pomp, an unwholesome diet…pleasure…at too high a price, like lying with a peppered paramour. Yet Lord Nelson, by (Captain) Jack Aubrey’s account, is as direct and unaffected and amiable a man as could be wished. So, indeed, in most ways is Jack Aubrey himself; though a certain careless arrogancy of power appears at times. His cheerfulness at all events is still with him.  

How long will it last? What woman, political cause, disappointment, wound, disease, untoward child, defeat, what strange surprising accident will take it all away? But I am concerned for James Dillon: he is as mercurial as he ever was—moreso—only now it is all ten octaves lower and in a darker key; and sometimes I am afraid in a black humour he will do himself a mischief. – page 202-3.

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