MarysLibrary

Maryslibrary 10 Best Books of 2011 - Nonfiction

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Arguably by Christopher Hitchens

1493 by Charles C Mann

In the Garden of Beasts by Erik Larson

Jerusalem: The Biography by Simon Sebag Montefiori

The Storm of War by Andrew Roberts

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Maryslibrary 10 Best Books of 2011 - Fiction

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The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach

State of Wonder by Ann Patchett

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

The Stranger’s Child by Alan Hollinghurst

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

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The Storm of War

The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War by Andrew Roberts
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Every year there are another dozen books about World War II, with maybe one or two worth reading. The Storm of War is a new history, as the subtitle points out, and with large numbers of government records, oral histories, and private papers being released all the time a "new" history can bring a good deal of evidence to back up a new interpretation. Andrew Roberts' book does just that.

Another thing his book does is to put the emphasis on the eastern front that it deserves. I tend to read about the western front and pay little attention to the war in the Pacific and none at all to the horrors the Russians were undergoing for years while their allies decided whether and when to open a western front. Meanwhile the Russians lost millions a year in grim battles, many of which they "won" but at a tremendous cost.

Roberts' book has appeared on the New York Times list of the 100 best books of 2011, and deservedly so. Here's what they say about it: "In a clear, accessible account of the war in all its theaters, Roberts asks how the Wehrmacht, the best fighting force, wound up losing."

That is true, and the clarity of the prose and balance between the east, west, and Pacific makes it a good choice for someone new to the history of what is increasingly coming to be considered the second half of the Great War that began in 1914. I wish this book had been around when I was in high school and was first becoming really interested in WW II.

2011  No 135

Up from the Projects

Up from the Projects: An Autobiography by Walter E. Williams
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Books by men and women who started life with two strikes against them and managed to make something of themselves interest and inspire me. Walter Williams' memoir fits well in that category.

From the book cover:

From his lower-middle-class beginnings in a mixed but predominantly black neighborhood in West Philadelphia to his department chairmanship at George Mason University, the life of Walter E. Williams is an "only in America" story of achievement. In Up from the Projects, this nationally syndicated columnist and prolific author recalls some of the highlights and turning points of his life.

I hardly think life with a single mother in the notorious Philadelphia projects counts as middle class, not even lower. He was raised by his mother with his father nowhere in evidence. At age 10 his small family moved to North Philadelphia's violence-ridden Richard Allen housing projects (since demolished) where he was not a very dedicated student. He started college, but again, didn't particularly apply himself. He shaped up during a stint in the army and he went back to school with much more focus when he got out.

Williams earned his PhD at UCLA. He was then a self-described radical, much more in sympathy with Malcolm X than with Martin Luther King. But by the time he had finished his degree he had become a libertarian. He says now: I learned that you have to evaluate the effects of public policy as opposed to intentions.

He has taught economics at George Mason University since 1980.

2011  No 134

The Wild Life of Our Bodies

The Wild Life of Our Bodies: Predators, Parasites, and Partners That Shape Who We Are Today by Rob Dunn
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Joel Weinstock was flying somewhere over New York or Pennsylvania when he got his crazy idea. He had been studying intestinal parasites. That day he began reading about Crohn's Disease. Why, he wondered, did people who had intestinal worms not have Crohn's and people who had Crohn's never have intestinal parasites? Could it be that worms prevented Crohn's? Naw. Impossible.

But he couldn't get the idea out of his head. In the 1940s half of American children had worms. In 1980 there were something like 10 times more people with Crohn's than in 1940. This is a pretty strong correlation. Weinstock decided to see what happened when he gave whip worm eggs to people with inflammatory intestinal disease.

In March of 1999 twenty-nine well-informed and consenting patients were given Gatorade laced with whipworm eggs. And by week twenty-four of the study all but one of the patients were doing better and 22 of the remaining 25 (some, understandably, dropped out of the study) were in remission. These were patients with serious and untreatable Crohn's. And having worms made them healthier.

Deborah Wade, who had an exceedingly bad case of Crohn's disease, read about Weinstock's experiment and in 2007 she decided she wanted to try the worm treatment. So she found someone (a non-MD in an unlicensed Mexican clinic) who would give her a drink of worms. "The endeavor felt more like adopting a pet than modern medicine - a long, translucent, sucker-mouthed companion animal." Deborah Wade is not cured, but she is better. And so are other people with autoimmune diseases who have been treated with worms.

Why would "rewilding" your body, as the author calls it, keep autoimmune disease under control? How does it work? They aren't really sure but it has something to do with cells produced by chronic worm infestation that help to tamp down the excessive reactions of Lupus and asthma and Crohn's.

This is just one of the dozens of puzzling and sometimes alarming stories Rob Dunn tells in his amusing book about The Predators, Parasites, and Partners That Shape Who We Are Today. The author offers some convincing explanations for how cows domesticated humans, how lice and fleas made us naked, and the exceedingly useful role of our appendix.

Most of us who are primarily readers of fiction, ex-English majors, literature junkies, are distressingly ignorant about science. This makes reading popular science written by people like Dunn and Natalie Angier surprising and entertaining. So much is going on out there in the world of botany and astronomy and ecology. Books like The Wild Life of Our Bodies only begin to give us a hint of how much we are missing.

Read Rob Dunn's blog here.

2011  No 133

The Swerve

The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Supposing you were fluent in ancient and modern Latin as well as French, Spanish, and Italian, and of course Greek; that you had trained yourself to be focused and swift at your work and to make a minimum of errors; and further that your handwriting was acknowledged to be particularly clear and elegant.

Nowadays you would have a lengthy career in valet parking to look forward to. But in the early 15th century you might find yourself as the equivalent of senior speechwriter for the pope. This was the job of Poggio Bracciolini, until Pope John XXIII was unthroned and Poggio found himself an unemployment statistic. (Pope John XXIII is better known as Antipope John XXIII or, to some, John XXII. See Gibbon.)

Since Poggio was already in Germany for the Council of Constance, which deposed his man, he took to the road to look for old books. In 1417 there weren’t a lot of bookstores and public libraries, so he went to monasteries where he was able to find and rescue from oblivion numerous copies of ancient Greek and Latin works before the monks palimpsested them, scraped the letters off the vellum and reused it for Bibles and prayer books. One of the ancient books he found was Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things. The Swerve is about Poggio’s discovery and the effect the revival of that book and others like it had on the late medieval world, leading to what we call the Renaissance.

There are a lot of reasons to read this lengthy essay by Stephen Goldblatt, his limpid prose style for one and his short history of the decline of the Roman Empire for another. But what I most enjoyed was the explanation of what is in De Rerum Natura, atomism and the Epicurian philosophy, and how these idea led to the Renaissance and eventually to the Age of Reason.

Poggio wasn’t the only book hunter. In the mid-14th century, Petrarch was a book lover: Gold, silver, jewels, purple garments, houses built of marble, groomed estates, pious paintings, caparisoned steeds, and other things of this kind offer a mutable and superficial pleasure; books give delight to the very marrow of one’s bones. They speak to us, consult with us, and join with us in a living and intense intimacy.

Poggio tells the sad story of the decline of western civilization into the dark ages. Says Goldblatt: The other libraries of the ancient world fared no better than [the great library in, Alexandria.] A survey of Rome in the early fourth century listed twenty-eight public libraries, in addition to the unnumbered private collections in aristocratic mansions. Near the century’s end, the historian Ammianus Marcellinus complained that Romans had virtually abandoned serious reading. Ammianus was not lamenting barbarian raids or Christian fanaticism. No doubt these were at work, somewhere in the background of the phenomena that struck him. But what he observed, as the empire slowly crumbled, was a loss of cultural moorings, a descent into febrile triviality. ‘In place of the philosopher the singer is called in, and in place of the orator the teacher of stagecraft, and while the libraries are shut up forever like tombs, water-organs are manufactured and lyres as large as carriages.’ Moreover, he noted, sourly, people were driving their chariots at lunatic speed through the crowded streets.

Mutatis mutandis.

2011  No 132

Funeral Blues by W H Auden

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone.
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling in the sky the message He is Dead,
Put crêpe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever, I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun.
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

State of Fear

State of Fear by Michael Crichton
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A Facebook friend strongly recommended this book and since he doesn't often recommend books I thought I'd take a look at it. I tell people what to read all the time so it behooves me to listen to others when they tell me what I should be reading.

And I am glad I read it. I had my doubts when I found I needed to spend more than two hours reading the back matter: appendices, note from the author, sources for statistics, graphs, and illustrations, and no less than 21 pages of annotated bibliography. But once I got into the story I enjoyed it.

This is the sort of book you read for the information it imparts rather than for the plot, which was more than a bit farfetched. It reminded me in a way of Michener, whose books we used to read for the spoon-fed history rather than for the characters or fine writing. It is structured sort of like the Labors of Hercules, with the major characters facing four seemingly impossible tasks complicated by the need to figure out where these problems are going to arise. The scene changes from Iceland to Malaya to Los Angeles to Antarctica to the Arizona desert to New Guinea to . . . well, the characters move around a lot. And there are some exciting and unusual scenes that had even me holding my breath as I turned the pages.

I learned some things from Crichton’s book about climate statistics and the difficulty of creating valid computer models of anything, much less future climate change. He demonstrates the politicization of an issue that should be argued in scientific journals but instead is discussed in the media with a maximum of emotional stimulation and a minimum of reference to facts. He makes a convincing comparison of global warming to the eugenics movement of the early 20th century.

The main character, Cardboard Evans, who is a lawyer working for a wealthy philanthropist of the George Soros type, is naïve, uninformed, and stubborn. I was going to see he was too dumb and recalcitrant to be believed but in truth one encounters people like that all the time, just not as the hero of an adventure book. Also what is the likelihood that a crack team of government intelligence men would haul a brain-dead lawyer and a secretary along on their six-day mission to save the world? Ah, well, we are suspending a lot of belief here.

So why did I like the book? There are a couple of really interesting characters, like the frantic and enraged environmentalist who is clearly modeled on Ralph Nader. And the smart secretary whose bravery and ingenuity helps them out in tight spots. There is a Boris and Natasha couple that pops up a couple of times and I enjoyed watching them play their con. The Nepalese army officer was a sidekick in the classic computer-master manner. Also classic was the MIT scientist-lawyer-Indiana Jones savior of the day (obviously destined to be played by George Clooney in the movie.)

Altogether a delightful book, if you delight in books like this, and perhaps even if you don't, with a reasonably clever basis for the plot and a bit of a thrill here and there. A book I’m glad I read. But 21 pages of bibliography in a novel?

2011  No 131

The Needs of Youth

‘The young need discipline and a full bookcase.’

—Vivienne Westwood

Domination of Black by Wallace Stevens

At night, by the fire,
The colors of the bushes
And of the fallen leaves,
Repeating themselves,
Turned in the room,
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
Yes: but the color of the heavy hemlocks
Came striding.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

The colors of their tails
Were like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
In the twilight wind.
They swept over the room,
Just as they flew from the boughs of the hemlocks
Down to the ground.
I heard them cry -- the peacocks.
Was it a cry against the twilight
Or against the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
Turning as the flames
Turned in the fire,
Turning as the tails of the peacocks
Turned in the loud fire,
Loud as the hemlocks
Full of the cry of the peacocks?
Or was it a cry against the hemlocks?

Out of the window,
I saw how the planets gathered
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
I saw how the night came,
Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks
I felt afraid.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.