December's Nominations

Here are three picks for December.  They are all beautifully written, coming-of-age memoirs by three men who are forced to overcome (and come to terms with) their "broken" families.  All are unforgettable.

Life On the Color Line, Greg Williams, 304 pages (1996)

Williams, the former dean of the Ohio State University College of Law, tells the affecting and absorbing story of his most unusual youth. Born to a white mother and a black father who passed for white, Williams was raised as white in Virginia until he was 10, when his mother left. His father brought his two sons back home to Muncie, Ind., in 1954 and sank further into drink. The two boys were eventually taken in by Miss Dora, a poor black widow. Williams's many anecdotes are a mixture of pain, struggle and triumph: learning "hustles" from Dad, receiving guidance from a friend's mother, facing racism from teachers and classmates, beginning a clandestine romance with a white girl he eventually married. And while his scarred, grandiloquent father was never reliable, he did instill in young Greg-though not in Greg's brother-sustaining dreams of professional success. Along the way the author decided, despite his appearance, he would proudly claim the black identity that white Muncie wouldn't let him forget. Williams ends his narrative when he reaches college; in the epilogue, he regrets that "there were too many who were unable to break the mold Muncie cast." (Publisher’s Weekly)

The Color of Water, James McBride, 294 pages (1996)

The author, a man whose mother was white and his father black, tells two stories: that of his mother and his own. Tautly written, it is a wonderful story of a bi-racial family who achieved the American dream, despite enormous societal obstacles. The author's mother was a Polish Orthodox Jew who migrated to America at the age of two with her family during the early nineteen twenties. They ultimately settled down in Virginia, where she was raised in a predominantly black neighborhood. At age nineteen, she left Virginia for New York, where she married a black man. The author tells of his childhood growing up in predominantly black neighborhoods, where his mother stood out like a sore thumb because of the color of her skin. From this narrative emerges a fascinating look at race, as well as religion. A very personal story also emerges. While the author's family was economically disadvantaged, his eccentric and independent mother was a strict disciplinarian who brooked no nonsense from her twelve children, all of whom eventually went to college. McBride’s personal story is an extraordinary one, but his relationship with and profound love for his mother dominates this beautifully written book.
(Amazon)

The Tender Bar, J.R. Moehringer, 432 pages (2006)

Take one part Charming Billy, a dash of Frank McCourt, add a shot of "Cheers," serve straight up, and you'll have the charming concoction that is The Tender Bar. J.R. Moehringer fondly reflects on his youth, however misspent, within the cooling shadows of the town's local bar.

In Manhasset, Long Island the place to go was Dickens (later renamed Publicans) on Plandome Road. Like the pubs of old, it was the place to celebrate, commiserate and pontificate. Sooner or later, everyone wound up at its door, thanks largely to its kind and commanding owner, Steve. In the mid-seventies, J.R. Moehringer was an adolescent badly in need of a father figure. His dedicated mother worked as many as three jobs to keep them on their feet. J.R.was named after his father, a radio disc jockey who has little to do with his son. Moehringer listens to his late-night radio broadcasts and refers to him only as "The Voice," a far away, unknowable being who flits in and out of his young son's life only briefly.

Poignant and heartfelt, with just the right amount of sentimentality, The Tender Bar is an absorbing read that goes down nice and easy. Moehringer skillfully recreates life at the local bar and the colorful characters inside as a sort of celebration, almost memorializing a part of American life that doesn't exist the way it used to, while also serving as a homage to the powerful love between a mother and son, struggling to get by but still managing to enjoy a "Happy Hour" now and then.
(Amazon; Bookreporter.com)

Terry Takes Us to War

Acknowledgments
How does one prepare a meal designed to showcase a book devoted to the details of modern combat?  If you're Terry, you avoid the partisan temptation of eating MRE's alongside our soldiers and instead you set your meal in the once lush valleys of Afghanistan.  On Tuesday, Terry invited us to dine on Afghan stew and a selection of middle eastern flatbreads (home-cooked by Gail, no less).  We didn't eat on the floor, using only our right hands, but we did appreciate some of the hardship faced by Afghan villagers caught in an unforgiving war between insurgents and occupiers.

Of course, there were a couple among us who had to bring their artifacts of war into Terry's demilitarized zone.  Roy showed up with a selection of bullets of various calibers, and we were duly impressed by the size of the 50 cal. rounds as well as the sniper casings.  Paul, on the other hand, came dressed as a modern-day recon grunt with an appreciation for Coppola's Apocalypse Now.  Wearing an Arab headdress and camo fatigues, and slinging a six-pack of Budweiser, Paul was ready to celebrate his distance from the front lines.

The Book
In War, Sebastian Junger plunges himself and the reader headlong into the war in Afghanistan by repeatedly embedding with a platoon of the 173rd Airborne Brigade over a 12-month span in 2007 and 2008.  Marooned on a rocky outpost in the Korengal Valley, the platoon faces (and initiates) multiple attacks with insurgents from Pakistan and elsewhere.  Junger describes the ferocity of combat and digs deeply into the relationships and attitudes of the men involved.  With Junger's story as our backdrop, we found our discussion veering again and again back to Vietnam or, in Larry's case, WWII and the legacy of his father's Japanese-American unit. 

Our reaction to War was unusual among the books we've read:  we found much to criticize in the narrative, but we forgave Junger and applauded his ability to show us the reality of combat without the customary political filter (and filler).  While Stan dismissed the book as a glorification of combat without the necessary context (this after proclaiming that he'd "read every major book about war"--Stan,  I wrote down those very words!), most of us disagreed and felt that the exhilaration of battle described by Junger was accompanied by plenty of reflection on its emotional consequences. 

With a 7.8, Junger's expose of combat in the Korengal Valley ranks high on our list of rated titles. 

Next Up
Dean's choices for next month  featured his perennial favorite, Among the Thugs.  In a deft series of parliamentary maneuvers (and, I'm sure, backroom dealings), Dean engineered a surprising upset and foisted on us Bill Buford's famous study of football hooligans, a la Manchester United.  Next month will tell us if Buford's treatise is the answer to a question no one has ever cared to ask.  (Sorry, Dean, but I couldn't resist one more jibe.)

Dean's Book Choices for November

Here are the titles proposed for our reading in November:

Among the Thugs, by Bill Buford:  Non-fiction.  

An embedded reporter goes into the underworld of the Manchester United Soccer Club’s fan base and examines the psychology behind crowd violence and mob mentality.  Newsweek Top 50 books to be read in your lifetime.  (Recommended)

The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad: Fiction. (Referenced in Dark Star Safari)
Early 1900 adventure up the Congo River by English explorers. 110 pages, Short, engaging read. One of my favorite books.

The story tells of Charles Marlow, an Englishman who took a foreign assignment from a Belgian trading company as a ferry-boat captain in Africa . Heart of Darkness exposes the myth behind colonization while exploring the three levels of darkness that the protagonist, Marlow, encounters--the darkness of the Congo wilderness, the darkness of the European's cruel treatment of the natives, and the unfathomable darkness within every human being for committing heinous acts of evil.  Although Conrad does not give the name of the river, at the time of writing the Congo Free State, the location of the large and important Congo River, was a private colony of Belgium 's King Leopold II. Marlow is employed to transport ivory downriver. However, his more pressing assignment is to return Kurtz, another ivory trader, to civilization, in a cover-up. Kurtz has a reputation throughout the region.

This symbolic story is a story within a story or frame narrative. It follows Marlow as he recounts from dusk through to late night, to a group of men aboard a ship anchored in the Thames Estuary his Congolese adventure. The passage of time and the darkening sky during the fictitious narrative-within-the-narrative parallel the atmosphere of the story.

Three Cups of Tea (One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace One School at a Time) by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin.   Non-fiction.

In Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time , Greg Mortenson, and journalist David Oliver Relin, recount the journey that led Mortenson from a failed 1993 attempt to climb Pakistan’s K2, the world’s second highest mountain, to successfully establish schools in some of the most remote regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan. By replacing guns with pencils, rhetoric with reading, Mortenson combines his unique background with his intimate knowledge of the third-world to promote peace with books, not bombs, and successfully bring education and hope to remote communities in central Asia . Three Cups of Tea is at once an unforgettable adventure and the inspiring true story of how one man really is changing the world—one school at a time.

In 1993 Mortenson was descending from his failed attempt to reach the peak of K2 . Exhausted and disoriented, he wandered away from his group into the most desolate reaches of northern Pakistan . Alone, without food, water, or shelter he stumbled into an impoverished Pakistani village where he was nursed back to health.

While recovering he observed the village’s 84 children sitting outdoors, scratching their lessons in the dirt with sticks. The village was so poor that it could not afford the $1-a-day salary to hire a teacher. When he left the village, he promised that he would return to build them a school. From that rash, heartfelt promise grew one of the most incredible humanitarian campaigns of our time.

Beat the Reaper by Josh Bazel (300 pages)

A new book and author that has not received any awards but will if he keeps going (also is a friend of a good friend of mine and met him at an Obama inauguration celebration party; might be able to have him come to the meeting); NY Times book review:

In the opening scene of “Beat the Reaper,” the former mob hit man Dr. Peter Brown pauses in the act of disabling a mugger to give readers a paragraph-length tutorial on the architecture of the human arm. Halfway through the paragraph he throws in an asterisk, and in a footnote points out that the lower leg is a lot like the forearm, only less fragile. That footnote had me worried.   Fortunately, Brown’s creator, the novelist (and doctor) Josh Bazell, is an unusually talented writer. Most of the many digressions in “Beat the Reaper,” his first book, are genuinely entertaining, and the few that don’t work — the footnotes are the most common culprit — annoy primarily because the story is so engaging that you don’t want to be yanked out of it even for the time it takes to glance at the bottom of the page.

Bazell’s protagonist, né Pietro Brnwa, used to be a contract killer for the Mafia, as mentioned. But eight years ago, following a work-­related dispute that involved throwing his best friend out a window, he had a change of heart, entered a witness-protection program and enrolled in medical school. Now he heals people instead of murdering them — although, as the incident with the mugger shows, he hasn’t entirely given up his old ways.

It will not be giving too much away to say that Brown’s old employers eventually do learn where he is. The climax of “Beat the Reaper” finds him locked in a medical freezer, waiting for his arch­nemesis to arrive and finish him off. The plan Brown concocts to save himself is the novel’s most original flourish. It is also completely outrageous, so much so that I had to stop and think about whether I could really suspend my disbelief. In the end I decided that, as with the footnotes, Bazell had more than earned my indulgence as a reader. If there’s a better recommendation for a story than that, I don’t know what it is.

--Dean

On Safari With Glenn

Acknowledgments
For those of us able to find Glenn's house in the outer reaches of Novato (Peter, how long did you drive around the block?), his hospitality was far more generous than that encountered by Theroux on his return to Africa.  Glenn thought briefly about cooking an all-Ethiopian meal, and then prudence took over.  He ordered a complete dinner from a reliably excellent Ethiopian restaurant in Oakland and brought it all the way to Marin for us to enjoy.  Starting with the Tusker beer (thanks Paul and Dan) and samosas, we then moved on to Theroux's personal favorite:  a variety of entrees (in this case, chicken, lamb, lentils, and greens) eaten with a gluten-free bread wrap called injera, which Theroux likened to the taste of a dirty bathmat.  It certainly tasted fine to us, and except for a few carpet spills and aching knees (from eating native style in the living room), our meal was utterly without complaint.

The Book
Paul Theroux's return to Africa, after a 40-year hiatus following his Peace Corps stint in Malawi, proved both eye-opening and profoundly disappointing.  In Dark Star Safari, Theroux reflects upon the Africa he once knew and a new Africa overrun with NGOs whose project-driven handouts perpetuate a legacy of dependency and false hope.

Our response to Theroux's response was equally ambivalent.  Almost everyone used the word "informative" to describe this 485-page travelogue, but thereafter our opinions diverged significantly.  The book was anecdotal, insightful, superficial, repetitive, interesting, and always crotchety.  Every last one of us found the trip through Egypt as tedious as Theroux apparently did, which is puzzling given his willingness to devote 53 pages to his trip down the Nile with a boat full of ugly westerners.

Ultimately, our 7.2 rating reflected a certain intolerance for a book that came quite close to our maximum page length and yet still failed to inspire us.  We were more impressed by Paul's and Stan's African reflections than we were by Theroux's.  In an experiment that likely won't be repeated, we did a blind vote beforehand and came up with a rating a half turn lower (6.7), which suggests that our open voting system may not be as objective as we hope.

Next Up
Terry presented us with several fine options for next month, all of which address America's military experience in Afghanistan.  Our decision:  we're going to war with Sebastian Junger!

Terry's Picks for October

Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman, Jon Krakauer

From Amazon: The bestselling author of Into the Wild, Into Thin Air, and Under the Banner of Heaven delivers a stunning, eloquent account of a remarkable young man’s haunting journey. Like the men whose epic stories Jon Krakauer has told in his previous bestsellers, Pat Tillman was an irrepressible individualist and iconoclast. In May 2002, Tillman walked away from his $3.6 million NFL contract to enlist in the United States Army. He was deeply troubled by 9/11, and he felt a strong moral obligation to join the fight against al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Two years later, he died on a desolate hillside in southeastern Afghanistan.

Though obvious to most of the two dozen soldiers on the scene that a ranger in Tillman’s own platoon had fired the fatal shots, the Army aggressively maneuvered to keep this information from Tillman’s wife, other family members, and the American public for five weeks following his death. During this time, President Bush repeatedly invoked Tillman’s name to promote his administration’s foreign policy. Long after Tillman’s nationally televised memorial service, the Army grudgingly notified his closest relatives that he had “probably” been killed by friendly fire while it continued to dissemble about the details of his death and who was responsible.

In Where Men Win Glory, Jon Krakauer draws on Tillman’s journals and letters, interviews with his wife and friends, conversations with the soldiers who served alongside him, and extensive research on the ground in Afghanistan to render an intricate mosaic of this driven, complex, and uncommonly compelling figure as well as the definitive account of the events and actions that led to his death. Before he enlisted in the army, Tillman was familiar to sports aficionados as an undersized, overachieving Arizona Cardinals safety whose virtuosity in the defensive backfield was spellbinding. With his shoulder-length hair, outspoken views, and boundless intellectual curiosity, Tillman was considered a maverick. America was fascinated when he traded the bright lights and riches of the NFL for boot camp and a buzz cut. Sent first to Iraq—a war he would openly declare was “illegal as hell” —and eventually to Afghanistan, Tillman was driven by complicated, emotionally charged, sometimes contradictory notions of duty, honor, justice, patriotism, and masculine pride, and he was determined to serve his entire three-year commitment. But on April 22, 2004, his life would end in a barrage of bullets fired by his fellow soldiers.

Krakauer chronicles Tillman’s riveting, tragic odyssey in engrossing detail highlighting his remarkable character and personality while closely examining the murky, heartbreaking circumstances of his death. Infused with the power and authenticity readers have come to expect from Krakauer’s storytelling, Where Men Win Glory exposes shattering truths about men and war.

War, Sebastian Junger

From Publishers Weekly: War is insanely exciting.... Don't underestimate the power of that revelation, warns bestselling author and Vanity Fair contributing editor Junger (The Perfect Storm). The war in Afghanistan contains brutal trauma but also transcendent purpose in this riveting combat narrative. Junger spent 14 months in 2007–2008 intermittently embedded with a platoon of the 173rd Airborne brigade in Afghanistan's Korengal Valley, one of the bloodiest corners of the conflict. The soldiers are a scruffy, warped lot, with unkempt uniforms—they sometimes do battle in shorts and flip-flops—and a ritual of administering friendly beatings to new arrivals, but Junger finds them to be superlative soldiers. Junger experiences everything they do—nerve-racking patrols, terrifying roadside bombings and ambushes, stultifying weeks in camp when they long for a firefight to relieve the tedium. Despite the stress and the grief when buddies die, the author finds war to be something of an exalted state: soldiers experience an almost sexual thrill in the excitement of a firefight—a response Junger struggles to understand—and a profound sense of commitment to subordinating their self-interests to the good of the unit. Junger mixes visceral combat scenes—raptly aware of his own fear and exhaustion—with quieter reportage and insightful discussions of the physiology, social psychology, and even genetics of soldiering. The result is an unforgettable portrait of men under fire.

In the Graveyard of Empires: Americas War in Afghanistan, Seth Jones

Various reviews:

No one understands the successes and failures of American policy in Afghanistan better than Seth Jones....If you read just one book about the Taliban, terrorism, and the United States, this is the place to start. (Jeremi Suri, Professor of history, University of Wisconsin )

[D]estined to become the standard text on America's involvement in Afghanistan. It is a timely and important work, without peer in terms of both its scholarship and the author's intimate knowledge of the country, the insurgency threatening it, and the challenges in defeating it. (Professor Bruce Hoffman, Georgetown University and author of Inside Terrorism )

A deeply researched, clearly written, and well-analyzed account of the failures of American policies in Afghanistan, In the Graveyard of Empires lays out a plan to avoid a potential quagmire. This timely book will be mandatory reading for policymakers from Washington to Kabul but it will also help to inform Americans who want to understand what is likely to be the greatest foreign policy challenge of the Obama administration. (Peter Bergen, author of Holy War, Inc. and The Osama bin Laden I Know )

Seth Jones has the answer to the million-dollar question….until Seth Jones, nobody actually sought an empirical answer. Nobody crunched the numbers. (John H. Richardson - Esquire )

I've just started reading Seth Jones's book on the war in Afghanistan, In the Graveyard of Empires, which someone told me is going to be the Fiasco of that war. (Thomas E. Ricks, bestselling author of Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, Foreign Policy )

[Jones] zero[es] in on what went awry after America’s successful routing of the Taliban in late 2001. His narrative is fleshed out with information from declassified government documents and interviews with military officers, diplomats and national security experts familiar with events on the ground in Afghanistan. (Michiko Kakutani - The New York Times )

--Terry