Book Report, Part 2, Nuclear War and a Monastery

Before I turn from war to peace, I will add one more book to the war list in which the war is seen only in its effects. That book is A Canticle for Leibowitz, which I re-read for the fourth time this year.  The book is set in the Utah desert in an Abbey hundreds of years after “The Flame Deluge” of the 1960s, a nuclear war. Most of the world was killed. Those that survived had mutant children, the misborn. 

Shortly after the nuclear holocaust, the world turned on the scientists and intellectuals who the survivors believed caused the war.  One of the scientists, before being killed, called the mob “Simpletons.” They took the name as a badge of honor, like the Breitbart followers who embraced being “Deplorables.”  They called themselves “Simpletons from Simpletown.” They burned books as well as killing the learned. They ushered in the “Age of Simplification.”

Some of the survivors started hiding books. The Church hid books in monasteries in the desert.  One of the people who hid books was a nuclear scientist named Isaac Edward Leibowitz.  He was eventually caught and martyred—hung over a burning pile of books.  The Abbey was named for Leibowitz who has been nominated for sainthood when the book opens. 

The book follows life in the Abbey from that time until civilization is reborn. This darkly ironic book is one of my favorites.  With nuclear threats in the air, mistrust of intellectuals common and Deplorables now a moniker for millions, this 1950s book seems sadly contemporary. 

Curl up and wait for the mushroom cloud.  You won’t be disappointed! The New Yorker published a long and thorough review of the book and how it came to be written.

Book Report: The 50 Books I Read in 2016, Beginning with the War Books

In 2016 I read 50 books, more than a dozen for the classes I took in in the spring and fall of the year, many more because of the reading I had done for those classes.  One of the first questions I had in making this list is how to sort it? By author? By Title? By trade category: fiction, non-fiction, etc.?

Since the list is a spreadsheet, I sorted it by the language of the writer or the subject.  With that sort method, 25 of the books are by Russians or about the Russian language, plus a biography of Vladimir Putin, which has a very Russian subject.  Next is 15 books by english-speaking writers, then four by Greek writers, two by Hermann Hesse (German), two by Italian writers, one by an Israeli and one book in French.

Another column told me 15 of the 50 books are about war--some about war itself, some about the effects of war on civilians, some about life after war.

First on the war list is Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman. As vast as Tolstoy's War and Peace, the book weaves together lives in Russia centering on the Battle for Stalingrad in 1942.  The book includes descriptions of the Holocaust more wrenching than anything I have ever read. A short book of Grossman's dispatches from Stalingrad titled "From the Front Line" shows where he did his research.

Then a completely different book I will say much more about in the next few weeks:  Grunt by Mary Roach.  This is actually a popular science book about the science of keeping soldiers alive, restoring their health, or at least learning from their deaths.  It is a darkly funny book by a brilliant writer.

Three of the four books I read by Kazuo Ishiguro are about before and after war. I wrote about those three books here. The fourth was Nocturnes, five stories of love and music set in Venice.

Returning to sad war stories, Zinky Boys about the Soviet war in Afghanistan, 1979-89.  All of the stories are first-person heart wrenching, especially the mothers.  This book should be sold with a Kleenex box.

Just a few years before the Soviet Afghan War was the Yom Kippur War in Israel in 1973.  The Lover is a dream-like tale set in the time of that war. It seems to unravel in the middle, but comes together in a very strange way at the end.

The Italian writer Primo Levi tells us about life before, during and after World War II in his native land in the book The Periodic Table. Another book covers the time Levi spent in a Nazi Concentration Camp. The saddest section is when Levi knew his fate and could not avoid it. Levi is a chemist and the chapters are elements.

Three more Russian war stories in three different eras:  A Hero of Our Time by M. Lermontov depicts life during a border war in the Caucuses in the early 19th Century. It has many similarities with the Afghan War in "Zinky Boys" and with Russia's War in Chechnya.  In the book Sin by Z. Prelepin tells us the story of his life in glimpses of his childhood, young love, his service in the Chechen War and how he lived after the war.  The book, by its many glowing reviews in Russia, tells the wrenching truth about life in 21st Century Russia. In between is a book not exactly about war, but about a Russian soldier who wanted to be a warrior and ended up a prison camp guard.  The Zone by Sergei Dovlatov, tells the story of life in a Soviet Prison Camp where the guards are not much better of than the inmates.

Finally, two war books from Ancient Greece: The Iliad and The Odyssey.  I read the first chapter and parts of several others in my spring Ancient Greek class.  The Odyssey is certainly more popular, but the Illiad is the real soldier's story.  It had been two decades since I last read Illiad. I had forgotten how well Homer knows the life and motivations of soldiers.  I read Illiad in translation.  If you read either, I suggest the translation by Richmond Lattimore.

I also used Lattimore's New Testament in the my fall Greek class. I have read a dozen translations of the Bible. Lattimore's New Testament is the best. Most Bibles are translated by a committee and all the writers sound the same. In Greek the individual writers are as different as Mark Twain, Hermann Hesse, Robert Frost and Junot Diaz. Lattimore gives the reader the writer's true voice, not a dozen writers in a blender.

Next post is the books on peace, or at least the absence of war.

Happy New Year--What a Year It Will Be!

On this first day of 2017, a new year begins and a vastly changed world.  After spending the majority of my military career as a Cold War soldier, the U.S. will be moving closer to Russia after January 20. Who knows what that means.

In good news, arguably the best living general in America, and the entire world, is the nominee for Secretary of Defense.  If General James Mattis is SECDEF, the military will change in stunning ways.

Watching Mattis in action made me sure I will continue the blog in 2017.  It will be the place I blog daily as I ride across what I am calling Russia, but what is really the former Soviet Union. I will be riding south to north primarily in former Soviet states.  Route is not yet fixed.

Another reason to continue blogging about the Army in 2017 was given to me by Google stats.  It turns out seven of the ten most-read posts since I started writing in late 2007 were written and posted during 2016.

The top of the list was a interview with Command Sergeant Major of the Army National Guard Christopher Kepner.  Also in the top ten was a flight medic with two tours in Iraq, Staff Sergeant Pamela Leggore.

Dropping to second place was the post about the trailers we lived in while we were at Camp Adder, Iraq. A post comparing Soviet and American armor during the 1973 war in Israel was the next most popular. Israel was the Cold War lab for testing NATO weapons against Warsaw Pact (Soviet) weapons.  Staying with the Cold War theme, another popular post was about the Cold War draft Army being the best of the several branches I served in.

Another Cold War post with more than 700 readers is about the Soviet War in Afghanistan.  I just posted that last week.  That terrible war helped bring down the Soviet Union at a huge cost to families in Soviet States.

In the coming year I will be writing about the military under General Mattis (assuming he is confirmed), about visiting NATO countries that were formerly Soviet states, and about being an old soldier who served in the military off and on since 1972.

Happy New Year!