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. 

My Life in Travel--the Trend is More!

It's the end of the second decade in this century. But that not-so-profound insight did not occur to me until about a week ago.  I was getting ready to write about the books I read this year, and realized I could also write about the books I read this decade, this century.  I have been keeping a spreadsheet of books I read since 2001.  

I started a spreadsheet about places I traveled to. First it was just the country and continent, then I added columns about where I rode, drove, flew, and took trains.  Then I added more columns about when I was there, which decade, on business or just traveling.  

The result is an exponential curve.  When I enlisted in January of 1972, the flight to basic training was my first plane ride.  Before that flight to San Antonio I had traveled no further west than Cleveland and no further south than Erie, Pa.  One trip to Cleveland was in a train, the other trips were in cars.  

By the end of the 1970s, I had lived in Texas, Colorado, Kentucky, Utah and Wiesbaden, West Germany.  I also had made brief trips to France and Switzerland. The trip to France was in a Huey Helicopter with my legs hanging off the side for more than 100 miles.  

By my 40th birthday, I had been to only five countries, including America, but I had been to more than half of the US states as well as several Canadian provinces.  

Travel really began for me when I took a job at Millennium Inorganic Chemicals in April of 1998. By the time the new Century/Millennium began in 2000 I had been to ten more countries on four continents.  In 2000 I went to four more countries including Brazil and Argentina, so I had been to five of the six inhabited continents and more than 20 countries.  

More importantly, when I traveled, I took my bike. I had not only flown on five continents, I had ridden on five continents.  

In the 2000s I visited a few more countries in Europe on business and went back to France, Germany, Belgium and the UK several times.  The decade that began with business class flights to Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia and Sao Paulo ended with flying into Camp Adder, Iraq, to Baghdad and Al Kut in a Blackhawk helicopter.  

After Iraq, overseas travel for business or the Army ended for me.  I was supposed to go to Afghanistan and Latvia with the Army, but both trips were cancelled.  My wife and I went to Haiti in 2011 to look into adopting a teenage boy. It did not work out for a variety of reasons. But after visiting and living in 30 countries, the trip to Haiti was the first one that was not business or military.  

I made a few more business trips in the US, but did not leave the country again until 2017.  Just as the decade of the 1990s began with a one trip to Canada and ended with tripling the number of countries I traveled to in just a couple of years, the current decade began with me leaving Iraq and staying in North America for seven years ended with several trips in which I visited more than thirty countries including twenty I visited for the first time.  

The first of these trips was in 2017.  For several years I had planned to ride from Odessa, Ukraine, to Helsinki by way of St. Petersburg, Russia.  The 1,300-mile trip would more or less follow the route my grandfather walked 100 years ago to escape the Tsar's Army and certain death.  

But in 2016, America elected a loud, proud racist as President who gave the head of Breitbart News an office in the White House and had high-level staffers with ties to white supremacists groups.  Instead of riding across Russia, I decided to ride to Holocaust sites and memorials to learn more about what happens when anti-Semitism is at its worst.  

I rode from Belgrade, Serbia, to Lviv, Ukraine, stopping at Auschwitz and Birkenau along the nearly 1,000-mile route.  Because I looped through the Balkan states, the site of so much suffering both during World War II and in the 1990s, I rode in a lot of countries.  

Then in 2018 I went to a history conference in the UK.  This year I was in at a conference in Bahrain and Cairo--by visiting Egypt I finally visited Africa--then was in ten more countries in October and November of this year.  

The next Year/Decade will begin with a trip to Israel, Europe and Africa. 

Of the 50 countries I have visited or lived in I have:

Ridden a bicycle in 35 on five continents--I still need to ride in Africa.

Flown to or within 32 countries on all six continents in planes and helicopters.

Driven in 24 countries on three continents--North America, Europe and Asia.

Ridden in trains in 16 countries on the same three continents I have driven in. 

So far, no trains or automobiles in the southern hemisphere. If I go to Rwanda on the next trip and both drive and ride a bike it will be the first time for both in Africa and in the southern hemisphere.  

Visit to the Buchenwald Concentration Camp

Weimar, Germany

The day that I visited Buchenwald, I was sad and angry. I was more sad and more angry as the day progressed.  But the anger stayed with me. The anger was worst a few hours after I left the Buchenwald when I visited the castle at Marburg.  

Clearly, I should not have visited Marburg the same day as Buchenwald, but I did not know that when the day began.  

This motto is on the Buchenwald gate.

Jedem das seine: To each his own or To each as he deserves

  the literal German translation of the Latin suum cuique. 

Cruelty and cruel jokes are part of the Nazi belief in their superiority. 

Buchenwald is the first large concentration camp. Mass shootings were the primary means of execution, although more prisoners were worked to death than killed by shooting.  The bodies were disposed of by cremation in ovens, but there was no gas chamber at Buchenwald.  There were hideous medical experiments that killed thousands of the 54,000 killed at the camp.

All of this is numbing when visiting the camps: clean, orderly displays of artifacts can never convey the reality--the terror, the smell, the hate, that permeated every moment in Buchenwald.  

I felt so sad trying to imagine the terror of the victims, and so angry imaging the guards who tormented and killed the prisoners.  

Memorial to murdered Russian POWs

Around the grounds and in the museum were monuments to the various groups tortured and murdered. In addition to the Jews, the Roma people, homosexuals, Russian Prisoners of War, and political prisoners were victims of systematic murder.

Tabulation of deaths

Even the location of the this camp was hateful. It is on a hill above the city of Weimar. The camp could be seen, smelled and heard in the town below.  The location is to literally shove the stinking reality of Nazism in the face of the place where the last democratic government of Germany was set up before the Nazis took over.  As with the horrible joke on the gate: 

Jedem das seine: To each his own. 

Cruelty and cruel jokes are part of the Nazi belief in their own superiority.  Torment, torture, it's all part of being a Nazi. 

Equipment from American liberators of the camp

Inmate uniforms

After seeing the markers, the memorials, the displays, the clear evidence that everyone in Weimar knew what the camp was and what happened in it, I felt rising anger.  I knew that the Nazis would kill anyone who opposed them and that most of the people of Weimar were just hoping to stay alive, but one third of Germany voted for the racist wretch who would lay waste their country.

It was for them, the Hitler voters, the Hitler supporters, the people who cheered at the Nuremberg rallies, they were the focus of my anger.  Hitler's supporters in 1932 did not know their country would be razed and ruined and a smoking pile of rubble before they would vote again.

And my anger was compounded by thinking of the Americans who voted for Trump knowing exactly the sort of racist scum he is.  They saw more danger from Hillary Clinton.  What a joke that is now. Whatever Clinton's faults, she did not want to be a tyrant.

It will be the cruelest irony if the country that liberated the death camps and defeated the Nazis falls into tyranny by voting for a racist pig.  I have offered to bet more than one Trump supporter he will not leave office if defeated. No one has taken the bet.

And then my feelings were worse at Marburg Castle. The tour guide said Marburg is one of the best German castles and the home of St. Elizabeth, a saint so true to the Gospel she was canonized in record time.  I lost it at that point. The last thing I wanted to hear about was one German who actually lived according to the Gospel 800 years ago whose distant countrymen expelled Believers who were Jewish by birth from their Churches in 1935. Nearly all of them were killed.

Forty years ago when I walked the streets of Wiesbaden in 1976, I would look at people who were in their 60s or older and wonder, 'What did you do when the Jews were rounded up, turn your back or shove them in the rail cars.' I was not angry in 1976 and really enjoyed living in Germany, but this trip, I was angry.

Of course, in 1976, no American leader would ever call Nazis "fine people." Democracy is under attack everywhere, but in America the attack is personal. I defended this country. I did not enlist to support tyranny.

In 1976, I was forty years closer to the Holocaust in time, but I saw it as horrible history.  Now I see it as looming threat.