This year I am breaking my book list into pieces. This piece is Best and Worst books of 2020. Each book was recommended by a friend, even the bad book.
First, my favorite book: Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War by Viet Thanh Nguyen. The author is a refugee. He and his family escaped Vietnam after the war was lost by America and by our ally South Vietnam.
The thesis of the book:
All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.
In America we call this war the Vietnam War. In Vietnam, it is the American War. In the wake of the victory of the North in 1975, the South was oppressed and the memory of its part in the war erased from the official records.
The stark differences in the views of the war between the two combatant countries are evident at the Vietnam War Memorial where every American soldier who died in the war is etched in the long black wall. More than three million Vietnamese died in the war, a fact that is not part of any remembrance of the decade-long conflict. Many of the dead were our allies. Nguyen also points out that the American wounded are not part of the memorial.
So much of the book was new for me. Although the Vietnam War defined much of my life, the book made clear that I knew little about the war and its devastating effects on both countries. Most of the senior officers and NCOs I served with on active duty between 1972 and 1979 were Vietnam War veterans. Their experience should have been the basis for fighting the wars in the Middle East in this century, but the lessons learned were quickly forgotten.
A decade ago, when I served in the Iraq War, it was clear that the failures of the Vietnam War would become the failures of the current wars. The big failures of the Iraq War are well known, but Nguyen reminded me of a lesson learned in the Vietnam War that had to be re-learned in Iraq with the loss of many lives and many limbs: armor for trucks.
Another lesson of the Vietnam War forgotten in this century is the first line of Chapter 6--On Asymmetry:
Killing is the weapon of the strong. Dying is the weapon of the weak.
The book is beautifully written and painfully true.
Next, three books that gave me a different view of Socrates and Plato. Forty years ago as an undergraduate I read Plato's Republic. What I could remember centered on the Allegory of the Cave and the Philosopher King. I knew even then that every Utopia was really an authoritarian world--perfection can't allow the mess that is freedom.
What I did not understand until this year was that Plato at the end of his life had a view of the ideal government that was nearly opposite of his mentor Socrates. Plato spent his life presenting Socrates to the world. But after Socrates took his own life before Athens put him to death, Plato ceased believing in democracy and imagined a world led by a Philosopher King that is the opposite of the Socratic, democratic ideal.
The anti-democratic, authoritarian tendency of Plato in late life is at the center of Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies.
Popper's book and Republic were the third and fourth books we discussed in the World Conquest Book Club.
Which brings up the delightful irony that I learned more about Plato by using the very Socratic method of discussing ideas among friends.
And less than a month after discussing these books, I joined the Virtual Reading Group of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. The book they were discussing and will finish this month is Arendt's The Promise of Politics. The first essay is "Socrates." Arendt says Socrates used dialogue to bring each person to clarity and harmony: It is better [for me] to be in disagreement with the whole world than' being one, to be in disagreement with myself.
Through dialogue, Socrates brought those he spoke with to see what they really believed so they could be in agreement within themselves. In this context Socrates said one reason not to be murderer is that you must live the rest of your life with a murderer.
Through reading these books and discussing them, I have become more aware I feel moments of real clarity in dialogue, clarity that I cannot find in thinking about a subject or idea by myself.
At the same time I was learning more about Socrates and dialogue, I read a book by a man whose inner dialogue must be chaotic. The book attempts to justify Evangelical Christians voting for Trump. I can imagine the author's inner dialogue would have less harmony than a half-dozen metal trash cans rolling downhill.
The worst book I read in 2020, I read at the request of a friend named Dmitri who lives part of each year in a monastery in Germany. My best friend, Cliff, has lived there since 1979, the year we both left active duty in the Army Cold War Germany. I spent the day with Dmitri and Cliff visiting the Cold War border in 2017. He has a very interesting story. Dmitri sincerely believes Trump is good for the Church, for Israel and for America. So he asked if I would read book Evangelicals at the Crossroads: Will the Church Pass the Trump Test? by Michael L. Brown. I did.
Brown is a celebrity Christian with who publishes books and articles and is all over social media and does lives interviews and Q&As. After I read the book, I wrote this on Goodreads:
In Evangelicals at the Crossroads, Michael L. Brown reminds me of the guy who sat on his own hands and rocked from side to side: he was on the one hand then on the other hand.
Toward the end of the first chapter, Brown quotes Peter Wehner at length. Wehner is an unwavering public Christian who I have heard calmly say that a man with Trump's actions could not possibly represent the Gospel. On the next page he quotes Robert Jeffress who holds rallies for Trump in his Church with patriotic music and flags followed by fireworks displays. Brown quotes these two men as having an equally valid point of view.
Which to me felt like when CNN put an immunologist and Jenny McCarthy, an anti-vaxx celebrity, next to each other as if medical school and nude modeling gave each an equal voice on vaccination.
I looked at Brown's long list of books and it screamed "propaganda."
I deeply distrust his method of presenting opinions without context because his thesis is that there are good people on both sides of the debate. I find that sort of populist equivalency false and repellent.
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Since the election Brown is less enthusiastic about Trump, while not quite admitting Trump lost. Brown's livelihood is based on stirring up fear among his followers, and he will keep doing that long after Trump is gone.
