Book Report Preview in Pictures

This year I read 50 books. I have not even started writing my 2020 book report, so I am making a preview in pictures: both a preview of the books I will be writing about and a preview of what I will be reading and discussing in the coming months.   

This first picture is the next book in several of the book discussion groups I am participating in.  Starting from the top is "The Promise of Politics" the current book in the Virtual Reading Group at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. 

Next is The Mandrake, a play by Niccolo Machiavelli, which is the next book we discuss in the World Conquest Book Club.

The next two books are part of the Writers in Residences series that is hosted by Franklin and Marshall College and local synagogues, including the one I attend: Shaarai Shomayim in Lancaster, Pa. The discussion of "Hebrew Roots, Jewish Routes" by Jeremy Benstein was a week ago. "Red Sea Spies" by Raffi Berg will be in February.

"Some Assembly Required" by Neil Shubin is the next book in the Evolution Round Table at Franklin and Marshall College.  I have been part of that group for more than a decade and a half.  Stephen Jay Gould sat in with the group when he visited the college in the 1990s.

"The Tiger's Wife" by Tea Obreht is the next book in a discussion group of ESL volunteers and others. 

"Morality" by Lord Rabbi Jonathan Sacks is the topic of a weekly discussion group at Shaarai Shomayim Synagogue. 

The photo above is the books we discussed this year in ESL Book Group mentioned above.

The books in this photo were the books we read this year in the World Conquest Book Club. 

I will say a lot more about these books in the eventual book report.  

Happy New Year!

Celebrating the 51st Anniversary of My Driver's with a 1,400-Mile, 44-Hour Trip

On Thursday morning, December 17, my daughter Lisa sent me a text saying that should would be in Chicago on Saturday, December 19.  I had said months before if she was going to be in Chicago, I would love to see her. She lives in Minneapolis, but her now-remote job is in Chicago.  

Saturday, December 19, would be the 51st anniversary of my driver's license.  What better way to celebrate than to drive to Chicago for dinner and drive back.  

At 8 pm on Friday, the 18th, Nigel and I drove west across Pennsylvania to Cleveland where we stopped for the night just before 2am.  I like driving at night. So much less traffic.  

The next morning we drove to my daughter's apartment on the north side of Chicago.  She was pretty much packed for the move. We walked along the lake shore then ordered dinner from Mr. Dumpling.

After dinner at about 7pm Nigel and I started the 700-mile journey east. We stopped outside of Cleveland again.  By 4pm we were back in Lancaster: 44 hours, 1,422 miles. The car switched to metric units with one click so the journey was also 2,288km getting using 8.5 liters per 100 kilometers traveled. 

Just a nerdy aside, but we use a measure of how far we get per gallon of gas, the metric world, which means the rest of the world except the U.S., Liberia and Myanmar, use a measure of how much fuel they use to go 100 kilometers.  Fuel costs two to three times as much in most of the world as it does in America, so the emphasis makes sense.  

I like doing two-day circle drives. Each of my last three trips in Europe and Israel has included a two-day car trip of either side of a thousand miles.  In 2017, I drove from Paris to Nice and Monaco, then Turin, Zurich and back to Paris: 47 hours, 1,203 miles.  In the fall of 2019, I drove a circle of Israel from Tel Aviv, to Eilat, to Mount Bental on the Golan Heights, back to the coast, then to Jerusalem: 750 miles, 32 hours. I also did a five country loop visiting battlefields and the Spa Francorchamps racetrack that went from Paris to Luxembourg to Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands and back to Paris: 45 hours, 900 miles.

I really am a motorhead.

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American Exceptionalism Died on Trump's Lying Lips

 

In an essay on Socrates, Hannah Arendt says Socrates wanted all of us to be at peace within ourselves: as much as possible our inner self should be in line with who we present to the world.

To Socrates, one of the problems with being a murderer is that, even if you are never caught, for the rest of your life, you are a murderer. Your inner self can never line up with your public self in a civilized place. You will never be a virtuous person.

In the same way, American exceptionalism died in the five weeks between the election and Mitch McConnell saying "It's over." We were the first successful revolution followed by an enduring democracy. Even if Joe Biden is sworn in as President and the orange liar leaves office, America is now a place in which the sitting President of the United States lied, is lying and will continue to lie about the result of the election. We did not have a peaceful transfer of power and 2018 may still be the last free and fair election in American history.

America is now no better than any broken country fighting against a would-be dictator.

And when the rest of the world laughs at us, as they should, they can point to more than 70 million voters who looked at four years of hate and lies and said, "I want more of that."

America will never again have standing to lecture another country about peaceful transfer of power and democratic norms.

Foreign policy magazine has a good summary of American Exceptionalism.

The Best Bicycle Racer I Know is the Most Humble

 

Barry Free and I when I extended my Army enlistment for the last time.

Today I went to the doctor for a routine visit. It was an hour before the snow started. I rode to the office, wearing clothes for a ride at a temperature around freezing.  Just after I arrived, about my age woman sat opposite me. She asked me how far I rode. Then she said before she retired she worked in East Petersburg and had a co-worker who rode to work every day from Lebanon, 20 miles north of their office.  

"He rode rain, shine, cold, heat, whatever," she said. "Once his wife came and picked him up because it snowed during the day. Once. In more than 20 years. I can't remember his name. I...."

"Barry," I said. "Barry Free."

"Right, that's him."  

I told her I had ridden with Barry many times over the past three decades.  And that Barry was the best racer I knew personally--he was twice the Masters National Road Racing Champion.  

"Really?" she said. "I knew he rode far. I never knew he rode fast. I never knew he raced."  

I told her some of his career highlights and that even though Barry is a full decade older than me, I was never happier than five years ago when I beat him by a few seconds in a time trial.  We were not actually racing each other, different age groups, but my time was a few seconds better. That never happened before. I was happier with knowing I could be faster than Barry than I was my place in the race.  Barry was 72 years old then.

Bicycle racers as a group are as humble as senators at a fund-raising event.  Barry is different, and now I knew how different.  A co-worker in the same office not only did not know he was a champion, she did not even know he raced.  

Barry no longer races, but at 77 years old, he is still riding.  In a world where humility is more rare than Dairy Queen stores in the Sahara Desert, Barry is the real deal. I hope we can ride again when the snow melts and old guys like us get the vaccine. 

Conventional Wisdom is not Always Wise

 

Are there phrases that cause you pain whenever you hear them?  All my life I have heard phrases taken as conventional wisdom that are blunt instruments used to beat people, to push conformity on people who actually want to think.  

In her new and very thoughtful podcast "Kelly Corrigan Wonders," Corrigan begins with four episodes that show the dark side of supposed truisms many people take for granted.  I find each of the phrases wrong as generalities and hurtful when thoughtlessly pushed on others.

The first episode is the best and the most painful.  Corrigan, a cancer survivor, interviews a woman currently dealing with cancer. Both have been told "Everything happens for a reason" by people who are healthy, thoughtless and willing to cause pain simply to have something to say or to spread their own shallow beliefs.  

Both women are believers in God, which means they have people in their lives who are more apt to say "Everything happens for a reason" or "It's all God's plan for your life" or another variant of an uncomfortable phrase that comforts only the speaker.  

The relationship of Chance, Fate, Luck, and Free Will is complex in any but the worst lives, where poverty and disease and war have so limited free will and chance that bad luck and ill fate are all one has. I have thought about fate and free will a lot in the context of war. 

After listening to this episode, I don't think anyone could say "Everything happens for a reason" without embarrassment.

The next phrase, "Never Give Up" is more sympathetic for me than the other three, but only for myself. I have pushed myself not to give up knowing how much I will suffer for my obsession.  I don't often recommend others do the same.

Over the three decades I have raced bicycles, people have told me they want to race but don't want to crash. I tell them not to race.  I have enlisted four different times over more than four decades, but I have not encouraged more than a few people to enlist. As with bicycle racing, when helmets are mandatory, the activity is dangerous. I only encourage people to race or enlist, who clearly want to do something dangerous.  

Giving up is always an option. And a good option. Someone who says "Never give up" has not lain in a ditch on the side of a road seeing inside their knees or hear the crunch and felt the agony of their own splintered bones.

In "What you don't know won't hurt you" Dani Shapiro finds out in her 50s, after her parents have passed away, that she is not her father's biological daughter. It was something she sensed all of her life, but only found out with a DNA test. She was devastated. She wanted to know from her parents.  The phrase is crazy in so many other contexts. More than a century ago, my grandfather did not listen to the news and almost died by being drafted into the Russian Army--not a good place for Jews. What he did not know--that World War I had begun--almost killed him 

In the fourth episode, Google Executive Annie Jean Baptiste talks about the pitfalls and problems of trusting your gut.  She makes an excellent case of how trusting your gut means trusting that what you already know is enough for any situation--that our own limited experience is sufficient for any whatever we might confront. The wider our world the more likely our gut will be deceived. 

The public figures famous for trusting their guts are among the more arrogant Americans who every lived:  the former President, Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh, to name a deplorable few.  

Of course, anyone with expertise can trust their gut within the area in which they are expert: pilots in aircraft, sailors in ships, chemists in labs, etc.  But put the sailor in a plane, the chemist in a ship, or a failed reality star in the White House, and the problems happen as fast as storm lightning.  

All four episodes were fascinating for me. I am going to listen to them again.  And go further in the series.  

Confident Military Walk: Apparently My Default Setting

 

So much of who we are is what we do. When I went to the hospital to visit my son Nigel the day after he was admitted, I smiled to myself when I walked into the Intensive Care Unit. I smiled about the way I walked into the ICU.

When I am in a setting that is bureaucratic, like a hospital or a corporate office or a military headquarters, my habit is to square my shoulders, look straight ahead and walk with the even pace I learned in Basic Training. I did this from the moment I stepped through the ICU doors.

In the military, I learned that everything goes more smoothly for those look and act as if they know what they are doing. I did not need to act this way. But long habit led me to walk and act in a way that said "I know what I am doing."

I was also glad to notice that despite my all of my various injuries, I can still walk straight and confident. Nigel was in the hospital for more than a week. I walked the same way every day.

Field Guide to Flying Death, Armor-Piercing Ammo

A Soviet-built tank destroyed by an armor piercing round.

The tank in the picture above was destroyed by a cannon round that had no explosive charge.  A solid shot hit the turret of this Soviet T-72 main battle tank and destroyed it, turning the approximately ten-ton-turret on its side.  

The round that destroyed the 41-ton tank was a 25mm tungsten-carbide dart fired from a 120mm smooth-bore cannon in an American M1A1 main battle tank. The 25mm round is wrapped in 120mm casing that breaks away just past the end of the gun.  Because the 25mm round is propelled with the force of a 120mm charge, the tungsten-carbide dart flies at more than a mile per second to its target.  

The round makes a small hole when it it hits, but the mile-per-second impact can punch a hole in armor more than a foot thick at a mile or more of distance.  The impact turns the armor on the inside of the tank into hot shrapnel that kills the crew and destroys the tank.  At close ranges in can flip the turret over as in the photo above or even take the turret off a tank altogether.  

When compared to firing explosive ammo at a tank, the solid-shot APDS (Armor-Piercing Discarding Sabot) round is also more accurate.  The trajectory of an APDS round is so flat that point blank for a tank firing the round is one kilometer. 

If cannon ammo was a football, the path of an APDS round is like a screen pass thrown by a strong quarterback--it flies flat and straight to the receiver. A high-explosive round flies like a 70-yard touchdown pass that rises steadily up for sixty yards before dropping into the receiver's arms.   

I was a tank commander, before electronic computers became part of armored warfare. When my gunner fired at a tank or tank-sized target less than a kilometer away, he simply had to put his crosshairs on the target and fire.