more reading reports

[winterbadger]

Theodore Rex by Edmund Morris (11) This is the second in Morris's trilogy about TR and completes my reading of it (since I started with the third volume). Again, it's a great read (though, once more, disappointingly, the recorded version was heavily abridged from the printed). This takes Roosevelt from his assumption of the presidency on the death of McKinley to his departure from office after his second (served) and first (elected) term as president. Partly it's the abridgement, but these few years seem to have flown by for Roosevelt. It's unusual to read the middle volume of a trilogy like this, knowing what will happen to all of the characters in the future; it reminds me of Merlin in T.H. White's The Sword in the Stone trying to describe to Wart what it's like to live backwards through time. Seeing the growth of TR's friendship with Taft (a man whom he later felt such anger and bitternes toward that they became almost enemies for many years), TR's fierce determination not to seek a third term (a principled conviction he later betrayed when he became convinced that Taft had gutted all his trademark policies), Alice Roosevelt's rise from painful reminder of a beloved but dead first wife to gorgeous socialite, charming but selfish spendthrift, and calculating hedonist--all these are fascinating, like seeing photographs of the babyhood or teenage years of someone you have only known as an adult.

The whole series leaves me with very mixed feelings about TR. He seems to have been an amazingly talented and intelligent man, possessed by inner demons that drove him to work harder, "play" harder, and accomplish more than anyone of his class or standing in perhaps a hundred years. He seems to have been, almost though not exclusively, tremendously open and generous, understanding and accepting of nearly everyone he met at whatever level--except himself. He certainly started out as quite an intellectual (a fascinating "what if" would be a history in which he followed his original plan of becoming an academic naturalist). but his progressivism came to him relatively late in life and seems to have been instinctive rather than to have grown from a set of bedrock principles. It's very hard to remember to look at him through the lenses of his own time and see hwo revolutionary some of his ideas were for someone of his class, rather than to measure him unfairly by the standards of today's liberalism and see only where ghe falls short. The TR one glimpses in Morris's work is a generous-hearted, open-handed sort of man who fights fiercely for his beliefs but who also had surprising blind spots and occasional fits of selfishness.He has admirable qualities, many of them, but plenty of faults to go with his virtues. Which makes him quite human. But, being TR, very much moreso. De-LIGHT-ful!

The Forever War by Dexter Filkins (12) This is a collection of reflections on Filkins's reporting of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Filkins is an excellent writer and a dedicated and insightful journalist, but this book left me unsatisfied. Partly because, somewhat unusually, the author himself reads the book. He is not a trained voice actor and seems to have gotten no coaching in how to perform this task, as the volume of his reading sweeps wildly up and down from quiet to inaudible with no warning whatsoever. It wasn't impossible to understand him, but it was very annoying and made it difficult to concentrate on what he was saying. Likewise, the chapters or sections of the book are arranged in what seems to be a wholly random order. Perhaps this is intended to illustrate symbolically his impression that this experince, these wars and his observation of them, were an inchoate, confused, endless muddle with no sense or structure. I would find this tiresome enough, but the transitionless formlessness of his narrative is even further exaggerated when listening to, rather than reading the book, because you never know when he starts a sentence whether it will be part of the story he's been telling you about a hospital administrator in Baghdad in 2007 or an entirely new story about exploring a devastated hotel in Kabul in 2002.

I also found it annoying that Filkins seems to have automatically accepted as completely true and genuine everything he heard from Iraqis and Afghans and treated as either mendacious or naive everything he heard from Americans. He maintains this behaviour even as he describes how, in his opinion, Iraqis always had two conversations--one with Americans in which they told them whatever lies they thought the Americans wanted to hear (and which the Americnas always accepted as the truth) and one with each other, in which they discussed reality and laughed up their sleeves at the gullible foreigners. He says, revealingly, at one point that he and the other journalists he worked with always trusted their local interpreters, aides, stringers, and drivers automatically "because you simply had to" (or words to that effect). But isn't that exactly the same sort of naivete that he's accusing the American soldiers and adminstrators of? Certainly, some of the Iraqis they worked with demonstrated tremendous bravery and self-sacrifice, putting themselves on the line again and again to help him and his colleagues report their stories. But just as certainly, some of them will have been spies and watchers for the various factions he was reporting on every day, slipped into the cadre of helpers to collect information and provide details on timetables, plans, personal life, and so forth.

Those objections aside, Filkins tells riveting stories of life in two of the most dangerous countries of the past ten or more years. His portraits of the Marines he accompanied through the battle for Fallujah, of the Iraqi politicians he interviewed in their heavily fortified Green Zone offices, of the children he met when he went running along the Euphrates, or the waiter lamenting the decline of a western nightclub in Afghanistan, or of grieving parents in America trying to come to terms with their son's death in wartime, are vivid and immediate, human and touching.

In progress

Dunkirk: Retreat to Victory by MG Julian Thompson
Games Without Rules: The Often Interrupted History of Afghanistan by Tamim Ansary
Gentlemen Volunteers: The Story of the American Ambulance Drivers in World War I by Arlen J. Hansen (Some fo COl. Roosevelt's family worked in the American Hospital in Paris, which is mentioned here.)
The Captain From Connecticut by C. S. Forrester (several chapters in; odd to read Forrester wiring about an American)
French Napoleonic Infantry Tactics, 1792-1815 by Paddy Griffith
Enter Jeeves by P.G Wodehouse
Empire of the Mind: A History of Iran by Michael Axworthy (Learning all sorts of interesting stuff about the influence of pre-Islamic Persian religion on early Christianity)
Boer Commando by Denneys Reitz
American Crisis: George Washington and the Dangerous Two Years After Yorktown, 1781-1783 by William M. Fowler, Jr.