Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life by Jason Roberts

For most of the last 20 years, I have attended the weekly discussions of the Evolution Roundtable at Franklin and Marshall College a few blocks from my home in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The ERT reads two books each year on evolution, one each semester.  We have read books The Origin of Species, The Selfish Gene, and many other books on dinosaurs, DNA and how cells evolve. In the 1990s, before I was part of the group, Stephen Jay Gould visited one of the Monday noon sessions.

If I could recommend just one book of all those I read with the ERT, in fact any single book I read on science, it would be Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life by Jason Roberts.  I liked this book from the introduction, but the more I read it, the more I was drawn into the parallel lives of Carl Linnaeus and the Georges-Louis Leclerc Comte de Buffon.  

These men both lived and worked through much of the 18th Century. Both devoted their lives to classifying every living thing, plus rocks and minerals and even the universe beyond the earth in the case of Buffon.  Both men wrote a single work in many volumes with many revisions for their entire lives, describing every sort of life they could find. 

During their lifetimes, both were well known. Both suffered tragic and painful deaths. But that's where Roberts tale really took hold of me. He tells the story of how the ideas and reputations of the two men rose and fell after their deaths.  This story shows how much science is influenced by culture and politics and the whims of people with an agenda having nothing to do with the work of the scientist. 

 Linnaeus died in 1778 in Sweden, a country that would remain relatively stable in the centuries ahead. Buffon, a rich French aristocrat, died in 1788 on the eve of the French Revolution.  Among the excesses of the French Revolution was erasing anything aristocratic, along with murdering aristocrats.  One of the revolutionary committees decided Linnaeus was a man of the people and Buffon should be erased.  

The revolutionaries promoted Linnaeus. Buffon and his multi-volume work went into eclipse. Right now on Amazon there are 50 books on Linnaeus plus children's books. Since Linnaeus was a creationist who believed all the species were created by God in the week described in Genesis Linnaeus has a Christian home-school following. 

In the mid 19th Century, when Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species it was clear that the work of Buffon had anticipated evolution.  When genes were found to be the inner mechanism of life and reproduction, Buffon's work again seemed prophetic.  In the 21st Century with millions of species and many more more types of life that are neither plant nor animal, the Linnaean system is being supplanted. Linnaeus thought God created 40,000 species. His system is overloaded with a thousand times more. 

Why this book above every other book on evolution? Because Every Living Thing shows the reader the obsession, the rivalry, the passion, the determination of scientific discovery and then shows how history and politics can promote or ignore a lifetime of work. Real science is always changing, always affected by the culture in which it works.  

Right now uncertainty will hinder science in America, maybe leading it to flourish elsewhere.  Germany was the center of the scientific world in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Then the Nazis took over and German science never recovered. 

Chance and circumstance affect us all and science no less. 

 

 

Freedom by Sebastian Junger

 

Freedom by Sebastian Junger is first and foremost a Quest or Journey Away, an adventure leaving home.  Junger and his friends walk the railroad tracks that connect Harrisburg and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  The fast-moving narrative takes the reader northwest up the Juniata River valley beginning where it joins the Susquehanna River, then at the headwaters of the Juniata turns southwest along the freight and passenger line that passes through Altoona's Horseshoe Curve on the way to Steel City. 

As the group strides alongside the tracks, we learn about the mechanics of long-distance walking, including why the spacing of the ties makes it so difficult to walk on the wooden crossties that support the steel rails.  

Before the path along the river was railroad right of way, it was a trail used by settlers moving west and the tribes who lived on the land before them.  Junger tells us some of history of the tribes and how they fought and allied with settlers. We also learn the history of tribes and individuals far from Pennsylvania. There is a long section on the Apache on the US-Mexican border.

One of these narrative asides describes how George Washington is reputed to  have started the French and Indian War. In 1754 Washington led an attack on a French detachment at what became known as Fort Necessity. Washington won the skirmish. The French surrendered, but the Mingo tribesmen led by the warrior known as the Half King slaughtered and scalped some of the French.  What became the Seven Years War arguably began with that battle and its bloody aftermath.  

The narrative is interspersed with meditations on what it means to be free in modern America and back through the history. 

On the history of freedom versus the modern democratic world:

“For most of human history, freedom had to be at least suffered for, if not died for, and that raised its value to something almost sacred. In modern democracies, however, an ethos of public sacrifice is rarely needed because freedom and survival are more or less guaranteed. That is a great blessing but allows people to believe that any sacrifice at all--rationing water during a drought, for example--are forms of government tyranny. They are no more forms of tyranny than rationing water on a lifeboat. The idea that we can enjoy the benefits of society while owing nothing in return is literally infantile. Only children owe nothing.”

On leaders who exploit their freedom:

“But in any society, leaders who aren’t willing to make sacrifices aren’t leaders, they’re opportunists, and opportunists rarely have the common good in mind. They’re easy to spot, though: opportunists lie reflexively, blame others for failures, and are unapologetic cowards.”

Wealth erodes freedom:

“Wealth is supposed to liberate us from the dangers of dependency, but quickly becomes a dependency in its own right. The wealthier we are, the higher our standard of living and the more—not less—we depend on society for our safety and comfort.”

On the freedom of the journey at the center of Freedom:

“We walked around four hundred miles and most nights we were the only people in the world who knew where we were. There are many definitions of freedom but surely that is one of them.”

On freedom and power:

“The central problem for human freedom is that groups that are well organized enough to defend themselves against others are well organized enough to oppress their own. Power is so readily abused that one could almost say that its concentration is antithetical to freedom.”

New Friend, New List of Favorite Books

Joseph Brodsky around 1970. 

A new friend here in Panama, a cyclist, Yogi, and round-the-world-sailor named Roger, asked me for a list of books I would recommend. He is an avid reader and looking for new books he has not read.  

Roger has read all the greats of 19th Century Russian literature. Today I found out why.  Roger was an undergraduate at the University of Michigan in 1970.  He took a
semester of creative writing with Joseph Brodsky, the Russian emigre poet who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1987.  Roger won the Russian lit. professor lottery! 

I have a few books with me in Panama. Two are Blindness, the terrifying dystopian novel by Jose Saramago, and Tribe by the journalist and war correspondent Sebastian Junger. Both are excellent, so I gave them to Roger. 

Now the list. 

1. Kazuo Ishiguro. Remains of the Day and Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro are my favorites. I have read everything Ishiguro has written, most recently Klara and the Sun and seen his movie Living.  His writing is brilliant. These two books are my favorite.

2. Hannah Arendt. Philosopher and historian and one of the most influential political writers of the 20th Century. Born in 1906, a German Jew, she earned a PhD at Heidelberg in 1929 and fled Germany in 1933 just after the Nazi takeover.  She lived in France until WorldWar II began, then escaped to America in 1941. In 1951 She published The Origins of Totalitarianism, her best-known work defining the new tyranny of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.  I have read all of her books. I most admire On Revolution a book that shows why nearly all revolutions devolve into tyranny, but America did not.  I love The Human Condition for explaining living in our world.  I am such a devoted fan, I am in a weekly reading group and go to Hannah Arendt Conferences.

3. George Orwell. I have read and re-read Orwell's novels.  A decade ago I read the 1200-page volume of his collected essays, finding endless entertainment.  His essay on brewing tea shows the utter snob that still lingered inside the Democratic Socialist writer. There is no better book explaining the rise of Stalin than Animal Farm.  A decade ago, I became convinced that 1984 was not prophetic after all, until I read about life in Communist China.     

4. Mark Helprin. I have been a devoted fan of Mark Helprin since read his novel Winters Tale in 1983.  I have since read every one of his novels, most recently The Ocean and the Stars.  His Paris in the Present Tense gave me a new and lovely view of my favorite city.  I plan to read Winters Tale for the third time this year.

5. - 12.  I love big books in which one author writes the entire history of humanity as in Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari.  

Or of recorded human history as in Why the West Rules--For Now by Ian Morris or another view Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. 

Or a history of American from the view of those without power, These Truths by Jill Lepore. 

Another delightful view of the past 500 years Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson.  

I recently read Titans of History by Simon Sebag Montifiore. I plan to read his The World: A Family History of Humanity.  But I also want to read his Jerusalem.

An aside on these books is that I believe recent histories are the best. The old histories did not have access to all the new data. That perspective here.

And another aside! If you read books in translation, read the newest translation available.  The latest translation will be clearest and will correct the mistakes of predecessors.  If you read Scriptures in translation, read a translation by one person.  A committee compromises. One person may be wrong, but they won't be tepid. 

Back to the list.  

13. (for the unluckiest author on this list)  The Forgotten Soldier by Guy Sajer. Son of a German father and French mother from territory between the countries. Enlists in the German Army at 17 in 1941. Spends the entire war in Russia. Returns home. Home is now in France. He serves in the French Foreign Legion to avoid prison. A soldier under any flag can be a good soldier.  

14. The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli I re-read it for the tenth time last year, every Presidential election year since 1980.  I will read it again in 2028. Machiavelli's advice remains brilliant, relevant and chilling 500 years after he wrote it.  

15. Day of the Oprichnik by Vladimir Sorokin.  A 2006 novel that imagines Russia in 2028 as a restored Tsarist empire, complete with Oprichniks, the assassins of Ivan the Terrible. It is a crazy, funny novel, but the Russian invasion of Ukraine showed it has a dark, prophetic side. 

16. A Canticle for Liebowitz by Walter Miller Jr. shows us the world after a Soviet-American nuclear exchange kills 95% of the population.  A Catholic monastery in the ruins of Utah preserves books after the survivors of the nuclear war burn books and scientists. The irony in this book is amazing.

17. Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville.  In a nine-month trip beginning in1830, Tocqueville found the heart of American democracy and wrote a book that became the central description of America for the world--including every political scientist in America.  He said in the 1830s that the 20th Century would be defined by the conflict between Russian and America.

18. C.S. Lewis. I have read all of the 39 books he wrote in his lifetime, plus posthumous collections. His novel Till We Have Faces is so good it is one of the books I read aloud to my daughters. The central characters look at the same thing at the same time and see two entirely different things.  So much of the book looks at perception and reality in ways I have not read anywhere else. His book The Four Loves gave me a frame for seeing the different ways people express love...and reject love. 

19. Vasily Grossman. Since Roger has read about and is very interested in the Battle of Stalingrad, my first recommendation is Life and Fate the novel of the Battle of Stalingrad and it's second volume titled Stalingrad. Grossman was a Soviet war correspondent who arrived the first day of the battle and reported then entire terrible fight.

20. Leo Tolstoy. Death of Ivan Ilych by Leo Tolstoy. No book affected my view of life, death and eternity more than this one. I just re-read War and Peace, but Ivan Ilych is for me the best thing Tolstoy wrote.  

"War" by Sebastian Junger--Reading the Book 15 Years After I Saw the Movie

 

In August of 2010, eight months after I returned from Iraq, I went to see the documentary Restrepo with Jim Dao of the New York Times.*  Restrepo records the the men of 2nd Platoon of Battle Company, airborne infantry on the farthest outpost in the midst of the worst fighting in the War in Afghanistan.  The movie was filmed and directed by Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington. 

I wrote briefly about seeing the movie in 2010. War documentaries can be slow, wanting to get every detail right. Restrepo roars from one scene to the next. Hetherington and Junger captured moments when everyone around them was in a fight for their lives--they were armed only with a camera.  Even the moments of boredom had the feral, roaring feel of men waiting for a fight as if chained.  

And the candor, especially of the officers in charge of 2nd Platoon and Battle Company was amazing.  The default setting for talking to the press in the military is STFU (Shut the Fuck Up).  Most soldiers I have known hate the media. When I first served during the Vietnam War soldiers felt outright betrayed by the media.  

The officers and men said what they really thought. I would not have believed the candor if I had not seen it.  

Now fifteen years after seeing the movie, I read Junger's book War based on the same year in the Korengal Valley of Afghanistan plus follow up with the soldiers of the Restrepo outpost.  

I have not seen a more visceral or candid documentary of any war. I would recommend the movie to anyone. The book had me laughing out loud at some points and then reading page after page never able to stop in the middle of a patrol or fire fight.  Usually I like either the book or the movie better (usually the book). In the case of the HBO series Band of Brothers I much preferred the series to the book. 

By contrast, War and Restrepo they are companions. I would watch Restrepo first simply to feel the rush of the story then read War to linger on the words and the detail.   

In 2011, I volunteered to go to Afghanistan. The deployment orders fell through, certainly for the better. War was published in May 2010.  I intended to read the book after seeing the movie, but forgot about it in the rush of life after returning from Iraq. In retrospect, if I had read the book I would have better understood why I wanted to go back and why I should not.

In October of last year, I met Junger at a conference where he was a featured speaker.  He spoke about his book Tribe which is very much informed by War and Restrepo.  The conference was on Tribalism and Cosmopolitanism at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. We had lunch together and talked about the Army, deployment, Army food, and how strange it was to return to the "real world" after war. And about how funny and terrible Army jokes are. 

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*Dao was the war correspondent of the Times and in the middle of a long-term assignment covering the 10th Mountain Division on a year-long deployment to Afghanistan.  The 10th Mountain is stationed at Camp Drum, New York.  Dao's coverage of a year at war is here. 

A Review of An Immense World by Ed Yong

In the fall of 2024 I read An Immense World with the Evolution Round Table at Franklin and Marshall College, a group I have been part of for more than two decades.

It is easily the most beautifully written of all the books of more than two dozen books I have read with this group.  Rather than simply gush about it, I copied the review from The Guardian newspaper. If you read popular science this book is deeply informative and a joy to read.

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A Review of An Immense World by Ed Yong 

This magnificent book reveals the strange and mysterious ways that creatures sense their surroundings – pushing our understanding of them to the limit

Review by Killian Fox

20 Jun 2022

Scallops have eyes. Not just two eyes, like humans have, or eight, like most spiders do, but up to 200 of them, each clasped by a thin, wavy tentacle protruding from the inner edges of the corrugated shell. Considering how rudimentary a scallop’s brain is, these eyes are surprisingly sophisticated. Play a scallop a video of juicy particles drifting by in the water, as researchers at the University of South Carolina have done, and it will likely open its shell, as if to take a bite.

It’s possible, at a stretch, to say what’s going on here. The scallop’s eyes transmit visual information to its brain, which creates a picture, however fuzzy, of some juicy plankton approaching, and it springs into action. The shell opens wide, the plankton floats in, and snap! Dinner is served.

It’s a neat enough explanation, but it’s not true. The reality, as with most cases in Ed Yong’s magnificent new book on animal perception, is more complicated, more mysterious, more wondrously strange.

Yong has a knack for vivid similes, and here he invites us to think of the scallop’s brain “as a security guard watching a bank of a hundred monitors, each connected to a motion-sensing camera… The cameras may be state-of-the-art, but the images they capture are not sent to the guard.” What appears instead is a warning light for every camera that has detected something, and the guard reacts without actually visualising the prey. If this explanation is correct – and Yong is always alert to the possibility that it might not be – the scallop “doesn’t experience a movie in its head the same way we do. It sees without scenes.”

This throws up further questions, not least: why do scallops have such keen eyes if their brains can’t process the visual data? Yong doesn’t give us a conclusive answer, but the example raises a deeper point that lies at the heart of his book. We humans are so deeply embedded in our own particular way of seeing the world that we find it hard not to impose our perspective on other creatures – if indeed we bother thinking about them at all.

A British science writer based in the US, Yong is drawn to material that pushes our understanding to the limits. His first book, I Contain Multitudes, dove headlong into the world of microbes and made often punishingly complex subjects digestible to lay readers without oversimplification. While working on this follow-up, he broke off to report on Covid for the Atlantic, producing a series of deeply researched, often devastating articles that won him a Pulitzer prize.

An Immense World might be his most audacious undertaking so far. Humans, like all creatures, are trapped in sensory bubbles unique to each individual – what the Baltic-German zoologist Jakob von Uexküll referred to as our Umwelt – which means we “can only tap into a small fraction of reality’s fullness”, as Yong puts it. Our eyesight is pretty good, but it’s nowhere near as panoramic as that of a mallard, which “sees the world simultaneously moving toward it and away from it” when flying. Nor can we perceive ultraviolet colours, as most animals can, or sniff out the topography of underwater mountains and valleys, like some seabirds seem capable of doing.

We may feel like we are the masters of our planet, having mapped every inch of its landmass and stared into the guts of an atom, but when it comes to understanding what it’s like to be a songbird using the earth’s magnetic field to navigate across continents, we barely know where to start.

Yong is up for giving it his best shot, not least because he understands how damaging it can be to disregard other creatures’ perspectives. When we unthinkingly flood the world with light and sound, we wreak havoc on bird and turtle migrations and disrupt owls and orcas in their search for food. Even scientists who have spent years working with a single species can botch research by failing to fully consider their point of view. But Yong also relishes stepping into other Umwelts just for the sheer fascination of it. “We don’t have to look to aliens from other planets,” one scientist tells him. “We have animals that have a completely different interpretation of what the world is right next to us.”

She has a point: who needs sci-fi when you’ve got a blind catfish with flow-sensing teeth all over its skin, or crickets with ears on their knees, or a dolphin that can perceive your innards through echolocation? Even everyday encounters seem extraordinary through the “magic magnifying glass” that Yong holds up. The jerky movements of flies buzzing around your living room aren’t random, but a response to fluctuations in temperature too minuscule for humans to detect. The hearing of chickadees changes with the seasons, speeding up in the autumn, while large flocks are forming, and becoming more pitch-sensitive in spring, to register the subtleties of mating calls.

The book is so full of these little astonishments, beautifully rendered, that Yong occasionally risks overwhelming our sense of wonder. By the time we get to the chapter on magnetoreception – easily the most confounding of the senses, in part because no one is certain where the relevant receptors are located – it’s almost a relief when he admits that he has “no idea how to begin thinking about the Umwelt of a loggerhead turtle”.

But it’s the attempt that matters, and Yong succeeds brilliantly in shedding light on these alien worlds – worlds that drift around us every day, like plankton around a scallop, but whose richness and extravagant strangeness we rarely pause to examine. Now, thanks to this book, we have scenes to help us see.

Bilingual Books and the Challenge of Lifelong Learning

More than a decade ago in a Paris bookstore I picked up French-Greek edition of The Gospel of John, Jean Evangile: traduit du grec, preface et annote par Bernard Pautrat.  I read it in 2017 after I took three semesters of Ancient Greek with undergraduates.  Most of the Christian scripture is easier to read than histories or philosophy in Ancient Greek and much easier than poetry or drama.

The Greek is a standard late 20th century international text. The French on the facing page is a contemporary translation.  Greek is the language in which the apostles wrote, but not the language Jesus spoke. So the gospels are a combination of narrative with quotes from Jesus (and any other dialogue) that are translations of Aramaic and Hebrew.   

When I began, I read the French first. I would read a sentence or paragraph then read the Greek. When I got stuck in both languages I would refer to David Bentley Hart's translation of the Christian scripture.  He has a lot of notes. Since it is a one-man translation, a committee is not deciding on word choice or the flow of a passage. I like that better.

As I went along the Greek I took two decades ago started to come back. I know a lot of Greek grammar. As I read more, I  remembered more vocabulary.  By halfway, I was reading a Greek sentence first, then the French.  By the end, Greek paragraph or two before switching to French.   

In fact, since the Greek in John's gospel is so uncomplicated, I was more likely to puzzle over the French grammar by the end.  

As a method of learning languages, I can only recommend this method to those who want to read. I know that if I really wanted fluency, I would have to immerse myself in one language until I was fluent.  It would have been better if I started my immersion before the first grade. But reading keeps languages in my head and lets me experience a little of  what a native reader of a language enjoys all the time. 

Also, I have tried reading a dual-language text in which one of the languages is English. It is difficult not to lean on the English.  

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The Text Itself 

Of the apostles who wrote the gospels and letters of the Christian scriptures only Luke was a native speaker of Greek.  His gospel and the Acts of the Apostles, which he wrote, are much better Greek than the rest of the book.  Which also means more difficult Greek. 

Between my two readings of Jean Evangile, I joined a synagogue for the first time in my life and became a somewhat practicing Jew.  This made the end of the gospel much more vivid and disturbing.  John makes very clear the plots and intrigues of the Jewish leaders are why Jesus was crucified.  

In the words of Jesus, it is very clear that Christianity should not have and money, power, buildings, or any connection to this world except to point people to the Kingdom of God.  So the Jewish leaders represent any religious leader that has money and power.  

But for the kind of person who thinks they can read a 2000-year-old twice translated book literally (Jesus spoke Aramaic and Hebrew, John translated his words in Greek, then the Greek got translated into English.) he would not look for the universal meaning of the actions of the Jewish leaders. The literal reading looks bad.  

Israel Alone by Bernard-Henri Levy--The World Changed The Month It Was Published

 

On September 10 of the year just passed Bernard-Henri Levy published his new book Israel Alone.  I have read several of Levy's books since returning to Judaism in 2017, so I read this one eagerly.

Levy made clear that on campuses in Europe and America, Jew haters were attacking Jews with impunity. Western leaders kept saying there must be a cease fire no matter how many Jews are raped or murdered.  Israel did seem quite alone and embattled. Hezbollah attacked from the north. Iran had attacked with a barrage of missiles. The Houthis were firing ballistic missiles from Yemen. Hamas continued to hide in hospitals and use Gazans as human shields.

Israel looked quite alone. 

As I read the book, I realized the deep lament at the center of this brief book had receded somewhat.  A week after the book was published, Israel attacked Hezbollah killing and maiming thousands of its tactical leaders in the Pager Attack.  Terrorists taking a huge dose of their own medicine.  

Before the month ended Hassan Nasrallah and most of the top leaders of Hezbollah were dead in an air strike that showed how deeply Israel had penetrated the terrorist organization.  Then Israel smashed the Hezbollah rocket launchers and attack tunnels on its border.  

Israel attacked Iran and took out all of Irans air defenses.  Israel or any other of Iran's enemies with an air force could attack at will. A month later, pro-Russian/Iranian Syria collapsed.  The Russians are gone. The Iranian supply route to Lebanon is gone. 

The Trump administration takes office with Trump threatening there will be "all Hell to pay" if Hamas does not release all of the hostages from the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel.  

Among the predictions of chaos after January 20, many believe Trump will begin mass deportations.  He may.  But several of Trump's cabinet picks have plans to revoke the visas of students who are supporting Hamas and other terrorist groups.  The first deportations may be terrorist supporters on visas. There will be nomass protest of deporting those who cheer Hamas and other terrorists.

Israel is still largely alone, but since Levy's book was published, Israel has crushed several of its enemies and winners always have friends.  

Tribe by Sebastian Junger -- The Ancient Roots of Many Problems of the Modern World

In October, I went a conference on Tribalism and Cosmopolitanism.  The first and featured speaker was Sebastian Junger, author of seven books that, in part, describe the lives of modern tribes in America including soldiers, commercial fishermen, and others who risk their lives in their work.  Junger said, "The real and ancient meaning of tribe is the community that you live in, that you share resources with, that you would risk your life to defend."

He is also the co-director with Tim Hetherington of the documentary Restrepo, the record of a year with soldiers on one of the most dangerous outposts in Afghanistan. The soldiers of Battle Company, 2nd of the 503rd Infantry Regiment 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team are the definition of a tribe.

Humans as a species are tribal.  Forming tribes and living as tribes describes most of human history. In the book, Junger shows that people who live without tribes, without the community and deep connections tribes afford, are adrift and often unhappy without knowing why.  

Junger said it was a commonplace in frontier America that people who went from civilization to Native American tribal life did not come back.  Whatever civilization could offer, those who left would not return. 

As I read the book, I felt I was learning the secret code of my life--the yearning for a tribe.  I grew up in a Boston suburb in the 1950s and 60s, not connected to extended family or religion or even a sports team.  I joined the military shortly after high school graduation in 1971 and loved being part of a group with a mission. I got out after being blinded in a missile explosion, but healed completely and re-enlisted within a year.  

After three years as a tank commander on the East-West border, I got out, went to college, got a professional job, then a quarter-century later re-enlisted and deployed to Iraq for a year.  That deployment ended 15 years ago this month.   

In an odd twist, I saw Restrepo right after it was released in late June 2010 in an NYC theater, a few months after I returned from deployment.  I walked out of the theater and wanted to go to Afghanistan.  

Belonging to a tribe has been normal for we humans in all of recorded history and before.  The cosmopolitan drive in us allows great learning, great invention, modern medicine and all the wonders of the modern world, but it does satisfy our need for deep human connection.  Tribes do that. Tribe, the book, explains the history and present reality of the tribal impulse in our lives.

For the Sweep of History, Read New Books First

Asked about the five books someone should read to get a broad view of the history of the world, the historian Walter Russell Mead said we should read the Bible, Thucydides, Xenophon, other histories from the ancient world and, oddly, The Life of Lord Marlborough by Winston Churchill.  

(I have read several books by Churchill.  His book about his ancestor is the best thing I have read by him, but it seemed a strange addition to a short list. )

While I love Walter Russell Mead's take on many things, I disagree with his recommendations.

First, I strongly believe that reading ancient books in translation will leave the reader with more questions than answers.  Translation is interpretation, leaving many occasions for misunderstanding. Also, history written at the time it happens can never be comprehensive. Modern scholarship has added much the story Thucydides tells. Partly because Thucydides was a participant in the wars he wrote about, he seems to have taken Alcibiades at his word when Alcibiades was manipulating events to gain power. That story is very well told in The Peloponnesian War by Donald Kagan.   

Instead of beginning with the ancients, I recommend reading several sweeping one-volume histories of the world or a great era by historians of great reputation in the reader's own language--in my case, English. 

 

The most recent book I read in this genre is Why the West Rules for Now by Ian Morris.  A French friend told me about it. He read it in English. The book includes the parallel development of civilization in the East and the West. If I were to recommend only one book, Morris's book would be it. 

Another delightful book is The Dawn of Everything by the two Davids, Graeber and Wengrow. Much more biology than the Morris book so a wider perspective.  

In his book Prisoners of Geography Tim Marshall makes clear that where we stand in the world gives us a vastly different perspective on life and history.  I love this book and found nothing comparable in its focus.

Civilization  by Niall Ferguson covers just a half millennium from 1500 to now, but it's the one we live in so it's very important for us.  Ferguson, like Morris, explains why the plague-ridden western end of the Asian continent (Europe) rose from backwater to world dominance.  It took the Reformation and the Renaissance to break the hold of the Catholic Church on western culture and allow science to flourish freely. Ferguson then lists 29 great innovations in science between 1530 and 1789 that happened after two millennia of relative stagnation.  

These Truths by Jill Lepore traces the history of America from its discovery to the present with a focus on women and minorities. Her stories of the lives of slaves and native Americans and the first abolitionists are amazing.

Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, charts the history of the species Sapiens including highs like civilization and medicine and lows like all the misery that ensued when we left hunter gatherer lives to settle down and become the servants of wheat. (Originally written in Hebrew, Sapiens was translated into English with the author working on it.  Harari is multi-lingual and speaks and writes in English.)

Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. He says geography is the reason western culture came to dominate the world in the past half millennium, along with as the title says, guns, germs and steel. 

Finally, if you decide to take Mead's advice and read the Bible, I urge you to read a translation by one man (I will be happy to recommend a one-woman translation when one is available.) NOT a committee.  I am currently reading Robert Alter's translation of the Hebrew Scriptures. He is very thorough and his footnotes on the complexities of the Hebrew are very clear and readable.

For the Christian Scripture, I suggest David Bentley Hart.  Like Alter, his notes are brilliant. He is an Orthodox theologian who has pissed off most of Christendom with his opinions expressed in many books.  He has even said Hell does not exist to make sure he has enmity from every direction.  I read The Gospel of John and the letters of John in Greek recently. I used Hart's translation when I was stuck. Which happened a lot.  

The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort to Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self by Michael Easter

In the hopeful world of self-help books the reader is drawn into the possibility of changing her life for the better.  We  could all be thinner, more organized, better read, faster, more calm, more mindful, less wasteful and any number of personal improvements.  

Much of the advice is incremental--the steps toward the goal, not the leap.  Michael Easter gives the reader the steps toward the leap.  The central event of the book is a month-long trek with 80-pound packs through the wilderness of northern Alaska hunting caribou.  

On the way he tells us how hunger, boredom, exhaustion, cold, dirt and other forms of discomfort will make our lives happier and better.  The book is full of the latest research showing how discomfort makes us stronger, smarter, tougher and happier.  

It is also very well written.  And if you are the kind of person who exercises a lot, fasts, endures boredom and strives to live better, the book will challenge you to do something even more extreme. 

I like this book for the obvious confirmation basis that I get from it. It also added walking with a heavy pack--rucking--to things I want to do more of. 

I would love to hear how you strain toward self improvement.  

I wrote two other posts responding to the book. They were on boredom and dirt.

"Blindness" by Jose Saramago--terrifying look at society falling apart

 Blindness reached out and grabbed me from the first page.  A very ordinary scene of cars waiting for a traffic introduces the horror to come.  The car in the middle lane doesn't move when the light turns green. The driver is blind.  I was surprised and then laughed asking myself, 'Why is a blind man in the driver's seat?' 

He has gone suddenly blind.  A weird white blindness. He cannot see anything except bright whiteness.  Pedestrians and other drivers help him from the car.  One drives the afflicted man home--then steals his car. His later retribution for his theft is horrible and final. We get the feeling of the terrible events to come from the first case of blindness.  

Very soon the personal tragedy becomes a wider and wider apocalypse of white blindness.  The first victim and many others are sent to an abandoned mental hospital. At that point, the story becomes The Lord of the Flies with adults.  Adults can try to impose order and care for each other, but when that fails, adults can be far more horrible than the worst children. In addition to theft, beatings and murder, rape adds another dimension of terror. 

The novel is gripping from first page to last.  I really wanted to know what would happen to the central characters as they and the world descended further and further into chaos.  In Blindness Jose Saramago shows us what life would be like with the whole world going blind. There's no water. No one cleans. Civilization breaks down. Tribes are all that is left. 

In the military, one of the expressions used to indicate a soldier is in very deep trouble is, "You are in a world of shit." The world of Blindness really is a "world of shit." Confined blind people shit in hallways. Walking means stepping in shit. Released from confinement blind people wander the streets of the city, and the streets and buildings become latrines.  

With everyone going blind no one can deliver food--or anything else.  Saramago writes vividly about this world of terror and filth. 

I will stop here. Endings should be experienced.  If you read dystopian books, I could not recommend this book more highly. 

My favorite dystopian novel is the post-nuclear-holocaust story A Canticle for Liebowitz. Blindness is just as brilliant, just as surprising, just as terrifying.

Blindness was one of the seventeen novels published by Saramago, a total of more than thirty books including poetry essays, diaries and children's books. He received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1998 for his work. 

The Peloponnesian War by Donald Kagan

After the election in America last month, I decided to read The Peloponnesian War by Donald Kagan.  During that 30-year-long war from 431- 404 BCE Athens fell from the its place as the pre-eminent power and the leading democracy in the Eurasian world to a defeated country under a tyrannical oligarchy.  The oligarchy took over in 411 BCE.

Sparta finally won the war in 404 BCE, but allowed Athens to restore democracy.  Several years later the Spartan empire began to crumble. Athens held on to democracy for another 80 years until the region fell under the sway of Alexander the Great.  

I was interested in how Athens went from its dominant place under Pericles to defeat and ruin.  Pericles is so revered for his leadership in government and in battle that it was sad to read how his strategy of restraint early in the war lead to financial ruin, to plague by crowding people into the city walls, and to eventual defeat even at sea.  

For much of the war, both Athens and Sparta fought battles to keep their allies on their side or to punish allies that deserted them.  As I read about these shifting allegiances I thought of how rapidly the world is changing now.  

Bi-lateral alliances are the preference of tyrants. They want to make direct deals.  Only democracies make grand, durable alliances. But in a world falling into oligarchy and tyranny as we are now, grand alliances don't survive. 

Right now NATO exists and has expanded in the face of Russian invasion and tyranny.  NATO added Sweden and Finland. NATO currently includes Hungary and Turkey.  Can NATO survive with anti-democratic member states? When Syria collapses, Turkey will surely invade and try to take territory it claims as its own. Turkey will attack Syrian Kurds first. 

Kurds by their actions are our best ally in the region. We betrayed and abandoned them in 1991 and 2018. Will we do it again? 

I am currently living in Panama. In our hyper-connected world, I can watch the wars in Middle East and Ukraine on TV and my iPhone.  I can also get news from home about America's accelerating descent into oligarchy.  Rich, famous and shallow people will soon be in charge in Washington just as they were in Athens in 411 BCE when the oligarchy took over there. 

The hero of the restoration of democracy in Athens was the general Thrasybulus.  Will a great democratic leader emerge in the United States of America? Rome lost its Republic and remained under the rule of Caesars until its demise.  Either path is very possible. 

  

The Perfect Storm by Sebastian Junger: The story of a terrible storm and tragedy at sea.

 

The Perfect Storm: A True Story of Men Against the Sea by Sebastian Junger is a real page-turner story about a Gloucester-based fishing boat, the Andrea Gail, that disappeared in a historic storm in late October in 1991. There were no survivors. There was no wreckage except a few fuel drums found on the sea long after the Andrea Gail disappeared.  

Junger tells the story of the disaster from the recollections of the crew members of ships that survived the storm, from viewpoint the survivors of an ill-fated rescue attempt of another boat in the same storm, and from the perspective of the families of the survivors.  

The book opens introducing the members of the crew of the Andrea Gail and their families and friends.  Junger shows us the life of a fisherman. Swordfish boats like the Andrea Gail could make a lot of money for their crews and money was the reason most of the men took the risk of fishing.  

We learn how dangerous fishing for swordfish can be. The line used to catch the fish goes out with thousands of hooks, baited just before they enter the water.  These hooks can snag and drag a fisherman right off the boat and into the sea when the line run over the side, and is equally dangerous when the line is pulled back on board--with or without many big, angry swordfish on the line.

Junger explains the physics of flipping and sinking a boat in a storm. He also explains how differences in the placement of pilot house and other factors could affect the way the ship weathers storms.  In addition to the physics of boats, we learn about the formation of waves and the storms that toss the waves higher and higher.

As the Perfect Storm develops in the area where the Andrea Gail is lost, Junger shows how search and rescue works along the US and Canadian coasts.  The US Guard works with Air National Guard and Navy units to rescue crew members of boats in distress.  I learned a lot about how the services coordinate their different capabilities depending on the distance and scale of the disaster.  The US and Canada coordinate with each other in the disasters that involve the international waters of both countries.

In the aftermath of the storm, the families grieve and struggle with the loss of the crew of the Andrea Gail as well as the Air Force pararescue swimmer lost when a rescue helicopter went down.  

Although I've never been out to sea further than a fishing boat near Boston harbor, I am fascinated with sailing ships.  I've read all of Patrick O'Brian's Master and Commander novels and Ian Toll's histories of the war in the Pacific theater of World War II. The Perfect Storm gave me a new perspective on just how dangerous life on the sea can be, even without the ships involved firing cannons at each other.

For anyone interested in the life of the crews of fishing boats, or of fishing towns like Gloucester, Mass., or the physics of waves, ships and the weather, this book has excellent explanations wrapped in a compelling story. 

------

In 2012 Victoria Hislop of The Independent (UK) began her review of the book with the same enthusiasm I felt: 

I learned two things while I was reading this book. First, that true stories can be more exciting and extraordinary than fictional ones. And second, that the best books are the ones where you are glued to your seat. This is how it was with The Perfect Storm.

 -----

A passage on drowning that made my own terror of death in the water vivid, while explaining precisely how our bodies react as death approaches:

"The instinct not to breathe underwater is so strong that it overcomes the agony of running out of air. No matter how desperate the drowning person is, he doesn't inhale until he's on the verge of losing consciousness. At that point there's so much carbon dioxide in the blood, and so little oxygen, that chemical sensors in the brain trigger an involuntary breath whether he's underwater or not. That is called the "break point"; laboratory experiments have shown the break point to come after eighty-seven seconds. It's a sort of neurological optimism, as if the body were saying, Holding our breath is killing us, and breathing in might not kill us, so we might as well breathe in...Until the break point, a drowning person is said to be undergoing "voluntary apnea," choosing not to breathe. Lack of oxygen to the brain causes a sensation of darkness closing in from all sides, as in a camera aperture stopping down. The panic of a drowning person is mixed with an odd incredulity that this is actually happening. Having never done it before, the body--and the mind--do not know how to die gracefully. The process is filled with desperation and awkwardness. 'So this is drowning,' a drowning person might think. 'So this is how my life finally ends.'"

A Very Complex Story: The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People by Walter Russell Mead

This book is a history of the relationship between Israel and the United States.  Like so many relationships, the partners look back and rewrite their history as the years recede.  And the more they love each other, they more they tend to rewrite history into rose-tinted myth.  

I knew very well how badly America (and most of the world) acted toward Jews during the Nazi era and the Holocaust. So when I read about America's support for Israel from the first moment after Israel declared itself independent, I was ready to fill in continuous support from 1948 to now.

I was wrong.  

Walter Russell Mead showed me the actual, bumpy complex history of America's support (and not) for Israel.  

Yes. President Harry Truman recognized Israel from the moment of its founding, but he did it on condition that he get to recognize Israel before anyone else: 11 minutes after the announcement.

To his credit, Truman believed the Jews had a right to a country of their own.

But. 

Truman also set up an arms embargo on the new nation of Israel.  If the arms embargo had succeeded the Holocaust would have been repeated as six Arab armies invaded Israel. Truman's state department was more concerned about their relationship with the Arab nations than the survival of Israel.

When America let Israel  twist in the wind, a very ironic triangular relationship developed that saved Israel and led to Israel's victory over the invaders.  

Along with the US, the Soviet Union recognized Israel.  The relationship only lasted until 1953, but it was long enough to allow Israel to exist.  

In 1948, the Soviet Union needed hard currency. In February the Soviet Union took over Czechoslovakia in a Coup.  The small country was home to the Skoda works. Skoda made weapons for the Nazi army under Nazi occupation.  They had a massive inventory of German weapons.  

Also in 1948, Israel declared independence in May and future Israel Prime Minister Golda Meir began crisscrossing America raising money for the fledgling state of Israel.  That money could have bought  tons of surplus America weapons consigned to destruction, but the embargo prevented that purchase.

Instead, the money flowed back to Israel and from there to Skoda and to the Soviet Union.  When Israeli representatives visited the Skoda factory, they were delighted to find tons of weapons at bargain prices. It was also made clear that the Soviet Union was ready to circumvent the American arms embargo--for cash.

American money paid for surplus German weapons which were then smuggled by Soviets around an American embargo. Those weapons allowed Israel to defeat six Arab armies and exist as a nation.  

America continued to ignore Israel until 1967.  After the huge victory in the Six Day War, Israel suddenly looked like a regional power and America became friendly.  The new warmth was timely because the French, Israel's principle arms supplier in the 1950s and early 60s, were backing away from Israel because of internal politics.  

With the Soviets openly arming the Arabs, America started selling arms to Israel.  The relationship between the US and Israel became closer after the 1973 Arab-Israeli War.  But the first actual treaty between the two countries was made by President Ronald Reagan in 1987, almost 40 years after Israeli independence.  

The book is full of insights about the relationship between the US and Israel which I did not get from the many histories of Israel I have read.

It's an interesting book for anyone who wants to know about the complex history of the US/Israel relationship.  

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy: Beauty and Deep Irony Unlocked by Hannah Arendt

Irony can be lovely in literature. The current living master of irony in my reading is Kazuo Ishiguro especially in his book The Remains of the Day. Another sad and beautiful master of irony is Walter Miller Jr. in his book A Canticle for Liebowitz. Miller and Ishiguro intend irony.

Leo Tolstoy did not, but there is more irony at the center of War and Peace than in the biggest Soviet-era Russian steel mill.  The deep love stories that swirl through this beautiful book are set in tragedy a time of war. The story begins in the gossip and whirl of upper class city life and ends with country family life.  

At intervals throughout the book, Tolstoy interrupts the narrative to tell us with increasing stridency that great people, and all people, have no real influence on life and history.  The collective spirit of the people, and chance, and fate, and the will of God guide events.  The great people believe they are in charge, but they are merely corks bobbing on a river flowing where God and nature intend.  

While he is telling us great people have no influence, Tolstoy fills hundreds of pages of this 1,500-page book with the actions of Napoleon, Marshall Kutuzov, Emperor Alexander, as well as mayors, generals and other leaders.  To learn how great people have no influence, we learn a lot about what they do.  

My current reading of War and Peace was on a Kindle in the translation by Pevear and Volokhonsky.  In the late 80s I read the Constance Garnett standard translation.  In 2000, I read the Almyer and Louise Maude translation.    

Since 2000, I have gone to war and after returning from that war read all of the works of Hannah Arendt.  The year in Iraq showed me how deeply Tolstoy was affected by his service in the War in Crimea and how he turned that experience into art.  Reading Arendt showed me why I disagreed so completely with the philosophy that fills hundreds of pages of Tolstoy's longest novel.  

Central to Hannah Arendt's view of the human condition is natality.  She says that each person when born has the potential to influence the world.  Each new life is a new beginning.  Further, in her book titled The Human Condition Arendt divides human activity into Labor, Work and Action.  Labor is work done that leaves no trace--factory work, cleaning, cooking.  Work is creating things that endure--furniture, works of art, jewelry.  Action is influencing others.  

When we act, we influence others who have wills and ideas of their own, so we never know what will come of our words.  Leaders persuade people to act but the message strikes each individual in a different way. So what seems a mass from the outside is really individuals, each moved in their own way by the message. In fact some may hear the message and become opponents while others follow. 

Natality, in Arendt's description, brings unique possibilities into the world in the life of every individual.  After reading Arendt, reading Tolstoy's philosophy gave me the same feeling I have when reading Sam Harris and other determinists.  I understand why they believe what they do, but cannot agree.  Natality gives me billions of reasons to know that something new could come into the world begin by one person and change the world, for good or ill.   

In the first epilogue of War and Peace Tolstoy says his book is not a novel.  It's his book, so he can say whatever he wants.  But the story itself is wonderful on its own terms.  The philosophy underneath it does not affect the intricate beauty of the story Tolstoy tells.  If I read it again, I will skip the philosophy and enjoy the story.

Amerika by Franz Kafka

 

More than 40 years ago, I entered the strange world of Franz Kafka in the usual way: reading "The Metamorphosis."  This strange story of Gregor Samsa who wakes up having turned in a bug (maybe a cockroach) fascinated me. The story begins with the struggles of a big bug in a Vienna household.  Over time his family adapts to his state and eventually continues with their life--the way humans adapt to every sort of horror we face.  

In Amerika, the central character, Karl Rossmann arrives in America, abandoned by his family. He begins a series of  misadventures that are a descent--some of his problems are of his own making through pride and stubbornness, some are bad luck.  But the descent is inexorable.  

The story left me feeling pain, both empathy for Karl and for the author. Kafka's life was short, isolated and miserable.  Below is a New York Times review of the 2009 translation of Amerika, the one I read. It gives much more context than I could.  When I first read Kafka, I thought he would be one of the authors of whom I read all he wrote.  That list includes Hannah Arendt, Mark Helprin, CS Lewis, Kazuo Ishiguro, Bernard-Henri Levy, Leo Tolstoy (fiction) but not Kafka. The pain I feel as I read him makes his books a very occasional read (two in 40 years).

America, ‘Amerika’

By Adam Kirsch

Jan. 2, 2009

Most writers take years to become themselves, to transform their preoccupations and inherited mannerisms into a personal style. For Franz Kafka, who was an exception to so many rules of life and literature, it took a single night. On Sunday, Sept. 22, 1912, the day after Yom Kippur, the 29-year-old Kafka sat down at his desk and wrote “The Judgment,” his first masterpiece, in one all-night session. “Only in this way can writing be done,” he exulted, “only with such coherence, with such a complete opening out of the body and the soul.”

Everyone who reads Kafka reads “The Judgment” and the companion story he wrote less than two months later, “The Metamorphosis.” In those stories, we already find the qualities the world would come to know as “Kafkaesque”: the nonchalant intrusion of the bizarre and horrible into everyday life, the subjection of ordinary people to an inscrutable fate. But readers have never been quite as sure what to make of the third major work Kafka began writing in the fall of 1912 ­— the novel he referred to as “Der Verschollene,” “The Missing Person,” which was published in 1927, three years after his death, by his friend and executor Max Brod, under the title “Amerika.”

The translator Michael Hofmann, whose English version of the book appeared in 1996, correctly called it “the least read, the least written about and the least ‘Kafka’ ” of his three novels. Now Schocken Books, which has been the main publisher of Kafka’s works since the 1930s, hopes to reintroduce his first novel to the world with a new translation, by Mark Harman. “If approached afresh,” Harman promises in his introduction, “this book could bear out the early claim by . . . Brod that ‘precisely this novel . . . will reveal a new way of understanding Kafka.’ ”

Harman offers a compromise between Kafka’s intended title and Brod’s more familiar one by calling his version Amerika: The Missing Person ($25). And he follows previous English editions by retaining the German spelling of America, with a “k.” This lends the name, in American eyes, a more ominous and alien quality than it would have for the German reader. That “k” is hard to resist, however, and not just because readers have come to expect it. No writer has ever annexed a single letter the way Kafka did with “k.” Between the two in his own last name, Joseph K. of “The Trial” and K. of “The Castle,” the letter seems imbued with his own angular essence. Amerika is not America; it is a cipher for Kafka’s dream of a country he never visited.

The difference becomes clear in the very first paragraph, when Karl Rossmann sails into New York Harbor and sees the Statue of Liberty: “The arm with the sword now reached aloft, and about her figure blew the free winds.” The torch of liberty has metamorphosed into a punishing sword, an omen of the many chastisements in store for Kafka’s victim-hero. Indeed, America itself is a punishment for Karl, who was sent there by his parents after he got a servant girl pregnant back home. What Kafka actually writes, however, is that “a servant girl had seduced him,” and when Karl remembers the fatal episode, it is clear he was more the victim than the aggressor: She “shook him, listened to his heart, offered him her breast so that he too could listen but could not induce Karl to do so, pressed her naked belly against his body, searched between his legs with her hand — in such a revolting manner that Karl shook his head and throat out from under the quilts — then pushed her belly up against him several times; it felt as if she were part of him; hence perhaps the terrible helplessness that overcame him.”

Taking into account the fact that Karl is 17 and Johanna, the “girl,” about 35, this sounds less like seduction than rape. And it is a template for the way everyone Karl encounters in “Amerika” will ignore his desires and overpower his will.

In the first chapter, Karl tries to intercede with the ship’s captain on behalf of a stoker who has been mistreated, but his rich American uncle simply waves off his protests. Later, when Karl pays a visit to one of his uncle’s friends, Mr. Pollunder, his uncle treats it as a terrible transgression and cuts him off — even though Karl made sure to get permission beforehand. (This arbitrary rewriting of the rules looks forward to the unwritten laws of “The Trial.”)

While at Pollunder’s house, Karl is nearly raped once again, this time by a teenage wrestler named Klara. (“I won’t stop at one slap,” she threatens, “but shall go on hitting you left and right until your cheeks start swelling.”) When he escapes, he falls in with a couple of tramps, Delamarche and Robinson, who rob and bully him. He becomes an elevator boy at a luxury hotel but gets fired for crimes he didn’t commit. So it goes, humiliation after humiliation, until Karl ends up a virtual slave to Delamarche’s grotesquely obese mistress, the singer Brunelda.

It is enough to make the reader want to ask Karl what he demands of the stoker: “So why don’t you speak out? . . . Why do you put up with everything?” “Amerika” never provides a good answer to this question: Karl is simply helpless, unable to make sense of the world or get along in it. Not until the last chapter, when he finds a job in the enigmatic Theater of Oklahama (Harman preserves Kafka’s misspelling), does Karl seem to find a home in America — and even then, it’s possible that Kafka would have had other torments in store for him, if he had completed the novel.

Karl’s innocence is the main reason “Amerika” remains less persuasive a parable than “The Trial” and “The Castle.” To be sure, in his first novel Kafka lighted instinctively on many of the techniques he would later use to such great effect. So similar are all three novels in structure and mood that they can be seen as the successively widening turns of a spiral; each time, Kafka surveys the same spiritual territory, but from a more commanding height.

But the crucial innovation of the later novels, which makes their dream-worlds so convincingly uncanny, is the way Kafka’s avatars always seem to be colluding in their own punishment. In the first chapter of “The Trial,” when the officers come to arrest Joseph K., he thinks, “If he were to open the door of the next room or even the door leading to the hall, perhaps the two of them would not dare to hinder him.” But he doesn’t make a move to escape, just as, later on, he freely obeys the summons of the court and finally submits to his execution. It is his own sense of guilt, especially sexual guilt, that makes Joseph K. accept his trial.

Karl Rossmann, however, refuses to accept responsibility for his desires, and it is a mark of Kafka’s own immaturity that he allows Karl to be constantly seduced and abused, never to act as seducer or abuser. Compare Karl’s childlike description of sex with K.’s wholly knowing, wholly mutual encounter with Frieda, in “The Castle”: “She sought something and he sought something, in a fury, grimacing, they sought with their heads boring into each other’s breasts; . . . like dogs desperately pawing at the earth they pawed at each other’s bodies.”

Klaus Mann, introducing an edition of “Amerika” in 1946, wrote that Kafka “deeply and simply loves his innocent creature, his favorite dream, his heir,” Karl Rossmann. But it was not until Kafka accepted the guilt of his “creature” and “heir,” and confiscated all but the first letter of Karl’s name as punishment, that he could become the poet of the inexpungible guilt in all of us.

Adam Kirsch is a senior editor at The New Republic and the author of “Benjamin Disraeli.”

   

The Concept of History, Chapter 2 of "Between Past and Future" by Hannah Arendt

When we say history is written by the victors, we are assuming or accusing the historians of writing propaganda.  But as Hannah Arendt makes clear in the 2nd chapter of Between Past and Future history began with Homer's impartial view--writing about greatness and courage on both sides of the tragic war that lead to the founding of Rome by the defeated.  

Here is Arendt on impartiality in history in Ancient Greece:

Impartiality, and with it all true historiography, came into the world when Homer decided to sing the deeds of the Trojans no less than those of the Achaeans, and so to praise the glory of Hector no less than the greatness of Achilles. This Homeric impartiality as it is echoed by Herodotus who set out to prevent “the great and wonderful actions of the Greeks and the Barbarians from losing their due meed of glory,” is still the highest type of objectivity we know. Not only does it leave behind the common interest in one's own side and one's own people, which up to our own days characterizes almost all national historiography, but it also discards the alternative of victory or defeat which moderns have felt expresses the “objective” judgment of history itself and does not permit it to interfere with what is judged to be worthy of immortalizing praise. Somewhat later, and most magnificently expressed in Thucydides, there appears in Greek historiography still another powerful element that contributes to historical objectivity. It could come to the foreground only after long experience in polis-life, which to an incredibly large extent consisted of citizens talking with one another. In this incessant talk, the Greeks discovered that the world we have in common is usually regarded from an infinite number of different standpoints, to which correspond to the most diverse points of view. In a sheer inexhaustible flow of arguments, as the sophists presented them to the citizenry of Athens, the Greek learned to exchange his own viewpoint, his own “opinion”—in the way the world appeared and opened up to him δοκει μοι, “it appears to me,” from which comes δοξα, or “opinion”—with those of his fellow citizens. Greeks learn to understand—not to understand one another as individual persons, but to look upon the same world from one another's standpoint, to see the same in very different and frequently opposing aspects. The speeches in which Thucydides makes articulate the standpoints and interests of the warring parties, are still a living testimony to the extraordinary degree of this object activity.

The Concept of History, Chapter 2 of Between Past and Future by Hannah Arendt, pg. 51-2

I wrote about the Preface of Between Past and Future here.

Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth

 

I just finished Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth by Noa Tishby. 

The title is a promise fulfilled.  I have read a lot of Jewish history and listened to more in the dozens of episodes of "The Jewish Story" by the Rav Mike Feuer. 

Every history is selective, Tishby, by design, has to cram decades into sentences and eras into paragraph.  I like what she chose. Particularly, her description of the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in AD 70 showed how complex that disaster was.  When she describes everything the Jews did inside the walls to provoke the Romans and lose the conflict, the disaster seems inevitable.  

On the rise of Ultra Orthodox culture in Israel, she notes that their tradition and weird black hat uniform dress is a product of a 17th Century Eastern European subculture, nothing to do with Torah.  

The book was published before October 7, 2023, so it does not include the slaughter of innocents by Hamas terrorists. In a speech six months after the tragic events, Tishby was very clear in her views.

The speech us below.  I recommend this book as a brief, lucid history of Israel.  

----

This is the most challenging speech I’ve ever delivered, but it’s time the world wakes up to what the Jewish community has been saying all along. What we experienced on and since October 7 was sadly, predictable. We’ve warned of the danger of radical Islam or, more accurately, the radical Islamic Nazism that is constantly lurking at Israel’s borders. And we’ve warned of the ongoing grooming of Western civilization – through universities, the media, and social media. We warned what the phrase “from the river to the sea Palestine will be free” really looks like. It means “itbach al Yahud” – “slaughter the Jews.” This demonization of Israel is not “progressive”, it’s not peaceful and it absolutely won’t Free Palestine. It is a modern-day blood libel calculated to incite, pave the way for, and then justify - a genocide. We’ve seen it for over three and a half thousand years of Jewish “lived experience”. It’s the generational trauma that is in our bones. We understand it. That, is our “Jewish privilege.” We knew where it would lead, and we are devastated to be proven right. Israel is one of the greatest stories ever told and its vilification is one of the greatest smear campaigns in the history of the world. But we have news for you: when we say Never Again, we mean it. When you tell us you want to kill us, we believe you. And when you set out to do it in the most horrific of ways, we will defeat you. We stand shoulder to shoulder with the families of Israelis and Americans held hostage by the Hamas terrorists and demand they return the hostages now! Bring them home! Above all I am grateful that for the generations to come, the Jewish people will still live, love, and thrive and reach out a hand to the world. And Hamas will be nothing but a footnote in history, just like those who tried to exterminate us before. Am Yisrael Chai