Back to my Old Self

Finished a book in two days, amongst all the other pre-holiday duties:  The Doomsday Machine by Daniel Ellsberg.

There are many things a like about the book, some things I am really not engaged with, and probably have a way different reason for reading it than he had for writing it.

It begins with an admission that he copied way more top secret documents than just those having to do with the Vietnam War, information that he analyzed in his position at RAND which he obtained as an expert in decision making theories which evolved into questions about how would someone react to unknown unknowns and was there a chance that someone would drop an atomic bomb absent clear orders to do so.  Interesting hypothesis and exhaustive research concludes that such a risk was quite likely due to military delegation of authority and military bravado that they knew much more than their civilian chain of command.

I firmly believe Americans have the right to have this information and analysis and for the most part, Ellsberg seems neutrally competent in disclosing it notwithstanding his being forbidden to do such.  It's when he aligns his actions with the more recent ones of Snowden and Manning that I chagrin ... Snowden even writes an endorsement blurb on the back of the book.

As someone deep in the bowels of RAND, his premise of the need to completely disable the US and Russian computerized systems to launch lacks an implementation plan; he fully cites examples of presidential gains from taking an I will launch stance but does not opine as to what would take the place of that position of strength.

While he strongly articulates the end to the world that ensues if not from bombs themselves but from the nuclear winter that follows, it does not come across as hysteria, nor does it seem inevitable.  I only hope there are Ellsberg like staff in think tanks now that can not only interpret information but induce the powers to act upon those facts.

End of the Year Reconciliation

I went silent, didn't I?  I can pretend it was because I wrote too much at work that I didn't want to come home and write more.  Or I can say that since I was reading intertwined biographies, I couldn't truly assess one until I completed all.  But these excuses are camouflage.

But other things impinged on my dedication to keeping the blog up to date.  Most are now resolved, others have become the new reality, the most prominent being that I am now retired three weeks.  Time to read all day long if I feel like it, just have to feel more like writing summaries of those efforts.

So rather than trying to compose something unique and insightful for each book I have plowed through these past several months, let me write about them in a more comprehensive compare and contrast essay, like school.

I don't remember which Hollywood actor said when questioned about the President responded "read history."  That's what I have been doing in order to accrue some perspective on presidential talents, or lack thereof, and also other biographies that illustrate the characteristics of leadership.

After reading Chernow's Hamilton, I read his two books Titan on J D Rockefeller and House of Morgan on JP.  Titan was the more interesting of the two.  JD, especially in his earlier years, was a perfect example of an entrepreneur before that was a common term.  Chernow focuses on his upbringing, family tensions, and religious beliefs to explain later corporate and charitable actions.  On balance, he does not seems as diabolical, money-grubbing and nasty as common lore portrays him.

JP Morgan is personally not as interesting as Rockefeller.  I read that book in part because one of my employees worked for years at Morgan and as a history of an organization and the American financial markets, it was superb.  Finance was of course Chernow's crucible.

After hearing him speak in Chancellor's Hall where he announced to the audience his next book would be on Grant, I patiently awaited until Amazon let me pre-order and then plowed through another of his tomes.  Like with Rockefeller, Chernow shows Grant as the outgrowth of his family and his early failures.  Those constraints and determinants make his successes in battle all the more superhuman.  They also are the basis with which Chernow attributes the bad decisions he made when choosing advisers when President: the naive belief that his chosen friends were all honest and that those relationships would never be used for personal gain.

Because I enjoyed the descriptions of the Civil War in Grant so much, I read Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals about Lincoln and his cabinet members.  Goodwin's writing style makes Chernow seem stiff and aloof.  Her interpretation of the events and people around the Civil War are a wonderful contrast of perspective and preferences.  I ended up liking the book more than I thought I would given its Torah like reverence in the last administration but these definitely are two books that a graduate history professor would make back to back required reading for such a compare and contrast exercise.

Now we arrive at the end of November, Thanksgiving week, when my daughter-in-law is here from Texas and buys me two of the three Edmund Morris tomes on Teddy Roosevelt.  So even though I feel like I am preparing for a final exam on American presidents, TR would not have been next in my queue but for Emily.  Thank you thank you.  Volume one is a page burner.  This is the book that makes me want to sit and read all day long.  When I get up every now and then, I report out that I am now with him in the State Capitol, on San Juan Hill, in Saratoga.

Unfortunately, Em got volume 1 and 3 and I am dead in the water waiting for Theodore Rex to arrive in the mail, having ended volume 1 with his election to the presidency.  I was forced last night to pick up a cast off volume on President Jackson, American Lion, which reads like an Austen novel of social status and gaffes.  I needed to backtrack to answer the question, Who the hell was Margaret Eaton and why did all of DC care?  This book does not read like the others, a reprise of government, politics and economics over a powerful man's lifetime.  It reads like a 19th century novel on village sexual foibles.  Why would Trump say he wants to be remembered as Jacksonian?  I'd rather be measured against TR's 38 published books rather than Trump's 38,000 tweets.

Let me say a bit more about what I unexpectedly have come to like and envy about Teddy.  It all comes down to his hyper drive, his perpetual motion, energy and brains.  It seems impossible to fill in each day with such meaningful, productive and insightful actions as he did daily.  His prodigious literary output has been probably my motivation to write this morning.

My preliminary conclusions after this self-directed course in the American Presidency is that the country had in at least these instances the man of the hour, the right person in the office.  (The sidebars especially in TR about his opinions of Cleveland and McKinley remind me that they were not all giants.)  The pachinko machine that sorts out leadership in high office is still blinking for the current incumbent; we've really had a string of "tilts" and "do-overs" lately, haven't we

An Incomplete Book Review, or Two or Three

I really struck out at the library earlier this month and will return the following three books without the diligence but with the good sense not to complete them:

Two who done it or spy novels by William F. Buckley Jr ... The Rake and Getting It Right.  I took out both after reading A Man and His Presidents thinking that his fiction would bear the imprint of his political philosophy.  He is no Dick Francis.

Lightning Man, The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse.  Got through 210 pages but the author Kenneth Silverman cannot get a reader engaged in the mean-spiritedness and aloofness of "Finley."

Let Me Count the Poisonous Ways

OK I admit this is sick  buying a book to match the theme decor of my new guest room, which is supposed to look like an upstairs garden bower, all summer greens and yellows.  So I bought the small, lime green bound book Wicked Plants by Amy Stewart and illustrated by Briony Morrow-Cribbs, the author and artist of The Drunken Botanist which I bought at the Harvard museum when I dragged the "kids" to see the glass flowers a couple of summers ago, pre-Red Sox game, the real reason for the journey to Boston.

I love these two books.  The essentially are encyclopedic reference books, full of history and anecdotes and marvelous humor.  I also feel a sense of complicit witchery in the topic.  So without further ado, let me cite all the wicked plants I intentionally cultivate in my yard, or use for decoration for various seasons, or buy from the local florist with a wry sense of doom:

English Ivy (how apropos that this one comes first)
Pencil Cactus (I may use a computer, but the urge to write in graphite continues, yes?)
Rhubarb
Elderberry
Mulberry
Juniper
Celery
Limes
Periwinkle
Azalea
Rhododendron
Foxglove
Hydrangea
Hellebore
Lily of the Valley
Bleeding Heart
Tulip
Hyacinth
Morning Glory
Aloe
and last but not least, the plant that almost did me in Yew, the source of the dreaded cancer drug Taxol

Maybe I should consult The Drunken Botanist and make a similar list of all the plant fragranced beverage I have imbibed.

History I Know All Too Well

The past few weeks also saw me finishing Failed State by Seymour Lachman, a former NYS Senator, his sequel to Three Men in a Room.  Here is local "history" I know almost too well.  Lachman seems to be using this reprise as his best argument for a State constitutional convention, something that goes to the voters as an option to change every twenty years.  2017, I believe, it should be on the ballot.  I can already predict the vested interests of profiting from political positions will do every thing they can to preserve the status quo, where the chance to profit is preserved.  I assume the major argument will be that a convention is too expensive.

Reading this update to Three Men counterpoints Flaubert's claim that had the public understood Sentimental Education, there would not have been the events in the Terrible Year of 1871.  Had the public read Three Men, would New York as a Failed State go on unabated?

Ironically, "another chapter" in history has made even this sequel out of date ... one of the three men had is conviction reversed on appeal, the second is probably finished drafting his appeal on a corruption/kick back scheme.  The third man eludes.

I also read A Man and His Presidents by Alvin Felzenberg, a biography of William F. Buckley Jr.  I found it one to far removed from the man.  I've read God and Man and other books by Buckley and I missed his active presence and voice.  His one liners still zing as opposed to the Dick and Jane doggerel of current leaders.  Buckley was a mandarin (politics need more of them).  He might have been the author of a play who also doubles as the guy holding up the cue cards ... he knew he wanted a strong national voice not for the status quo but for the return to basic universal principles of humanity and governing, but he also was often able to put the right words as ventriloquist to several key elected officers.

I love the persona of "a thorn in the side" people, especially those who can see the good and the humor in a given course of rule.  Felzenberg lets that characteristic seep into the biography.  Such self-deprecation is sorely missing in Lachman, and in politics large.

I think to close the loop on this brief linked series of history, I will switch to Buckley's novels.  I'd like to see his marriage of positive outlook against recent world issues, should that really be evidenced and interpretative in his fiction.  Signing off to reserve a couple.

The Best Read of Summer, So Far, Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris

Now why would I pick up a book with a title like this?  Am I falling back into that previous theme of minor books by major French authors?  No, after putting the final pieces on the new guest room and having no puzzles in house to divert my attention, I finally went to the library, and, taking the slacker approach to selecting a book, checked out what was hanging on the new non-fiction wall.

This book is the best fiction review I've read.  Period,  Not even trying to remember if there might have been something just as enjoyable in college.  Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris by Peter Brooks focuses primarily on Sentimental Education, a novel Flaubert considered his masterpiece but the public, a flop.  But beyond being literary criticism, Brooks firmly places it in its historical/current events context, a book of deep personal friendship, bloody uprisings, and twin birth of the historical novel genre and modern France.

May 1871, solidly in the Terrible Year, that saw Paris actually burning, and the rise and fall of the Communard.  Flaubert posited that this was not an inevitable crisis, being so self-centered as to say if readers understood Sentimental Education, none of this would have happened.  Which triggered Brooks to analyze the novel as an example of its historical setting as being more important than the main characters ... a new style that seems to me to set the stage for Waiting for Godot and all such opining that finds the main story to be one where the backdrop of place and time fails to go analyzed by the hero.

A thoughtful analysis.  Playing to my need to context from what I perceive to be the overreaction of the press and the public to le temps et le mores.  Should I say at least people are listening or are they merely bombarded with predigested opinion.  Brooks sees Flaubert as placing the protagonist in a turbulent time, sometimes oblivious to what's happening, more often simply carried along, ultimately impacted drastically if not consciously by the events of the larger stage of the drama man calls war, disaster and power.

Rather than a sentimental education, I am looking for a moral education, a calming rationale against which to measure my current events:  failing political institutions, bizarre weather conditions, instant "news" and accusational attempts to set blame rather than find a new course of action.  Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris gave me some breathing space this month ... D C is not burning ... there is still some discourse.  Reading about Annee Terrible of 1871 sets a baseline for defining disaster, causes, for ultimate historical trends both in human evolution and in literature.

Brooks counterpoints his analysis with the letters between Flaubert and his friends, mainly George Sand, a woman whose political perspective differed from his, but who kept their correspondence alive with a Simple Heart.

This book makes me think about having the quiet time to think about what's happening in the world today.  Am I hearing it like Flaubert's characters as just noise around the corner, or can I understand the context is has in my life?  How can I sort out what is truly important, that will end up changing history?

Last Blog to Get Caught Up in Finished Books

Hip hip hurray.  For those of you that don't know my annual emotional cycle, I am completely unfriendly from say mid February to 4/15 every year as I procrastinate over taxes.  I was not always like this.  Decades ago I actually got refunds, even after we were married.,  Alas for years and years, we are either supporting a dependent family of six or as I would prefer to view it, helping defend the world from terrorists.  So now, post filing, I can clear the decks of all the books I have read as evasion tactics from dealing with the IRS.  This year, I am so fed up, I am coming over to the value added side.

But for this weekend's book.  I believe it was recommended by the NY Post (as I refuse to buy the Sunday NYT's and only get week day versions when I have time during lunch at my desk to do the crossword puzzle).  The book is To Be a Machine by Mark O'Connell and I will see if the library has any other of his books because this guy can write.  OK OK I acknowledge my bias towards Irish writers and their gifts of gab.

In a way, O'Connell reminds me of A J Jacobs and his Mr Know It All, reading the entire encyclopedia Britannica or his other book about trying every diet known the man.  It is loaded with healthy skepticism and subtle mockery.  O'Connell here chooses to explore the world of transhumanism, a religion/philosophy/at least a movement that human brains can be coded and upload to other platforms and thereby obtain immortality.

At its essence, this posits that human life is entirely about problem solving and the brain is ultimately hierarchical above the body.  O'Connell knows his literature, religions and philosophy and debunks this movement as something new, comparing it to many other eternal quests to deny animal death of our "meat" and live forever.  He also slants his research to show it is a movement of West Coast geeks who define men as CPUs (I guess because they are all like characters on The Big Bang and cannot deal with their sexuality and other human/mammal emotions.

O'Connell mentions his young son and who his emotions and view of life changed with his birth.  He is less obvious in itemizing the non-intellectual joys of every day life.  What intellectual reward do I get from trimming bushes, chopping salad ingredients, god forbid dusting?  Simple daily pleasures and the fulfillment of family or career related tasks do not factor into transhumanism.  A disembodied brain does not have to go to the grocery store, listen to a concert or enjoy breaking the speed limit ... it has to make routine machine like decisions and of course a computer can do that better and perpetuate a person's algorithms.

He describes the key followers/leaders of this front as white male geeks and the multimillionaire computer company founders who support them, men who think machines are the evolutionary next step to humanity.  So who are they SysOps?  Who controls the maintenance and update cycles?  Who deals with power outages?  If my immortality and memory for my scions relied on on techies similarly talented to those I have today, I would not want my endless life dependent on reboots or bad system code.

Strangely, this book might drive me back to finish my book on Egyptian hieroglyphics, a book that tried to instruct humans centuries ago how to expect to live forever through being embalmed, entombed and cast to the heavens.  Alas, We Are Stardust, We Are Golden and the way back to the Garden isn't in bits of zeroes and ones.