50books09: more catching up
Jul. 29th, 2009 03:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
winterbadgerShort summaries of a few more books I've read lately.
29/50 A Monstrous Regiment of Women
30/50 A Letter of Mary
31/50 The Moor
Three more of Laurie King's Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes books. The second time of reading for me. Monstrous Regiment features Mary going undercover in a religious charity run by a charismatic woman who seeks to build political power as well as create social and economic justice for women, but who may have a darker side. Letter sees Mary and Holmes working jointly but apart to investigate the death of an old friend who left Mary a puzzle of great significance for the history of religion. The Moor is not, as I had hoped, an excursion to southern Spain :-) but Holmes's return to Dartmoor to solve another deadly mystery involving a glowing hound. As always, I like the characters and don't much mind that these aren't Conan Doyle mysteries--there's no way for the reader to puzzle it out along with the detectives. But that's OK--they're still good reading.
32/50 Last Laugh, Mr Moto
One of a series (I have one other--I really ought to get the remaining titles some day) by a notable but nowadays little known Boston writer of the 1930s. Wikipedia describes his espionage novels as formulaic, and perhaps they are. But they have a classic, almost film noir-ish feel to them, and I enjoy them nonetheless. In this, a US naval officer who's jettisoned his career after being passed over for promotion and is drinking his way around the Caribbean gets involved with some very seedy characters who want to charter his sailboat.
33/50 They Marched Into Sunlight
I finally finished this book, which I'd been reading on and off for some time. Not because it wasn't good, but because I kept getting distracted. It's the story of a firefight in Vietnam and an antiwar protest in Wisconsin that end up taking place on the same day in 1967. I found it quite fascinating, dealing as it does with a host of different characters connected to the two events (a few of them, in odd ways, connected with both). It deals very matter of factly with both its subjects and gives (I feel) a very good picture of what it felt like to be in the middle of events that were both ordinary (for their time and place) and very extraordinary indeed.
34/50 Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War
This was another book I listened to on CD. This I dawdled over too, and not just because I got distracted. Partly, it's a difficult book to take because it's a thorough catalogue of how horrifically the US has screwed up what was a suffering country to begin with. Anthony Shahdid, the author, draws together the voices of many different Iraqis to show how crushing the war and the occupation have been for average citizens and how their anger and frustration, never properly addressed, has built to something that it may be impossible to assuage. I felt he was a little too credulous, especially in his seeming to accept at face value the popular belief that the forces that seized Fallujah in 2004 were simply outraged local citizens (as opposed to the radical Islamic terrorist supported by foreign fighters that they in fact were), but he brings the reader close to a huge variety of people from all walks of life and all sorts of factions. It's a terrifically enlightening book.
There's no question that Iraq is, at the best of times, a terrifically difficult country to govern. Many of the people Shadid interviewed had what seemed to me like wildly unrealistic expectations: of what governments can achieve, of how much power and influence their faction should have over all others, of how much stability and normalcy can be maintained in a society where everyone everyone is heavily armed and feels it perfectly acceptable to resort to brute force to get what they want. That's one strong impression I've taken away from both Shadid's book and other things I've read about Iraq: that many Iraqis are happy to take what they want by force, and only when they come up against someone stronger do they suddenly turn around and cry foul, demanding "justice" and "fair dealing" and "respect".
In other words, I get the impression that decades of rule by the Ba'athists not only kept the lid on a tempestuous and violently self-centered society, but probably fostered the sociopathic fracturing of that society. In a country where the only people who survived and prospered were those who (like Saddam) took what they wanted with a gun or those who served a capricious and irrational overlord, it's easy to see how "every man for himself" could become deeply ingrained in the collective psyche. Follow this with a period of lawlessness like that at the end of the war, where the invading Americans, guided by Rumsfeld and Cheney, expected everyone to go back about their business like good little Germans or Japanese, and it's not hard to see how the total descent into a Hobbesian "bellum omnium contra omnes" would be well night inevitable.
In short, yes, the US inflicted serious damage on Iraq in the war. Yes, the US was totally unprepared to deal with properly rebuilding Iraq's infrastructure, which was in much worse shape *before* we began bombing it than we had realised. Yes, we were totally unprepared for the complete outbreak of anarchy that followed. Yes, by using combat troops in roles that really needed military or civilian police, and by not having anywhere near enough people on the ground who understood the language or society they were dealing with, we ended up using a counterproductive level of violence in trying to halt unrest. But I am left with the feeling that the only way the US could have created and maintained order after the war was by using even *more* deadly violence, by being even *more* uncompromising. We would still have needed to listen to the population better than we did, and not rely on the self-serving, largely corrupt emigre leaders who have been such broken reeds, but those steps would not have prevented our being hated and scorned, not if we really wanted to keep the peace. My impression is that Iraqis--at least after all they have lived with for the last 30 years--are so far from being able to live in a peaceful, democratic, egalitarian state that conflict under any circumstances, let alone under foreign, Christian, short-sighted, and culturally inept occupation, was inevitable.
As a footnote, Shadid's reading of his own book poses an interesting question. Which is worse, having a book read by a trained actor who has no idea how to pronounce any words or phrases out of the ordinary, or having a book read by the author who is more familiar with the material but who has no ability to read text? Shadid varies between a monotone and a constantly rising tone that leads towards a crescendo it never fulfills. He also mispronounces, not Arabic names, but several rather ordinary English words. Yes, he's of Lebanese descent, but he was born and brought up on Oklahoma and has worked for decades for the AP, the Globe, and the Post. He just flubs a couple of not-terribly-SAT-calibre words, and it's surprising and distracting.
29/50 A Monstrous Regiment of Women
30/50 A Letter of Mary
31/50 The Moor
Three more of Laurie King's Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes books. The second time of reading for me. Monstrous Regiment features Mary going undercover in a religious charity run by a charismatic woman who seeks to build political power as well as create social and economic justice for women, but who may have a darker side. Letter sees Mary and Holmes working jointly but apart to investigate the death of an old friend who left Mary a puzzle of great significance for the history of religion. The Moor is not, as I had hoped, an excursion to southern Spain :-) but Holmes's return to Dartmoor to solve another deadly mystery involving a glowing hound. As always, I like the characters and don't much mind that these aren't Conan Doyle mysteries--there's no way for the reader to puzzle it out along with the detectives. But that's OK--they're still good reading.
32/50 Last Laugh, Mr Moto
One of a series (I have one other--I really ought to get the remaining titles some day) by a notable but nowadays little known Boston writer of the 1930s. Wikipedia describes his espionage novels as formulaic, and perhaps they are. But they have a classic, almost film noir-ish feel to them, and I enjoy them nonetheless. In this, a US naval officer who's jettisoned his career after being passed over for promotion and is drinking his way around the Caribbean gets involved with some very seedy characters who want to charter his sailboat.
33/50 They Marched Into Sunlight
I finally finished this book, which I'd been reading on and off for some time. Not because it wasn't good, but because I kept getting distracted. It's the story of a firefight in Vietnam and an antiwar protest in Wisconsin that end up taking place on the same day in 1967. I found it quite fascinating, dealing as it does with a host of different characters connected to the two events (a few of them, in odd ways, connected with both). It deals very matter of factly with both its subjects and gives (I feel) a very good picture of what it felt like to be in the middle of events that were both ordinary (for their time and place) and very extraordinary indeed.
34/50 Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War
This was another book I listened to on CD. This I dawdled over too, and not just because I got distracted. Partly, it's a difficult book to take because it's a thorough catalogue of how horrifically the US has screwed up what was a suffering country to begin with. Anthony Shahdid, the author, draws together the voices of many different Iraqis to show how crushing the war and the occupation have been for average citizens and how their anger and frustration, never properly addressed, has built to something that it may be impossible to assuage. I felt he was a little too credulous, especially in his seeming to accept at face value the popular belief that the forces that seized Fallujah in 2004 were simply outraged local citizens (as opposed to the radical Islamic terrorist supported by foreign fighters that they in fact were), but he brings the reader close to a huge variety of people from all walks of life and all sorts of factions. It's a terrifically enlightening book.
There's no question that Iraq is, at the best of times, a terrifically difficult country to govern. Many of the people Shadid interviewed had what seemed to me like wildly unrealistic expectations: of what governments can achieve, of how much power and influence their faction should have over all others, of how much stability and normalcy can be maintained in a society where everyone everyone is heavily armed and feels it perfectly acceptable to resort to brute force to get what they want. That's one strong impression I've taken away from both Shadid's book and other things I've read about Iraq: that many Iraqis are happy to take what they want by force, and only when they come up against someone stronger do they suddenly turn around and cry foul, demanding "justice" and "fair dealing" and "respect".
In other words, I get the impression that decades of rule by the Ba'athists not only kept the lid on a tempestuous and violently self-centered society, but probably fostered the sociopathic fracturing of that society. In a country where the only people who survived and prospered were those who (like Saddam) took what they wanted with a gun or those who served a capricious and irrational overlord, it's easy to see how "every man for himself" could become deeply ingrained in the collective psyche. Follow this with a period of lawlessness like that at the end of the war, where the invading Americans, guided by Rumsfeld and Cheney, expected everyone to go back about their business like good little Germans or Japanese, and it's not hard to see how the total descent into a Hobbesian "bellum omnium contra omnes" would be well night inevitable.
In short, yes, the US inflicted serious damage on Iraq in the war. Yes, the US was totally unprepared to deal with properly rebuilding Iraq's infrastructure, which was in much worse shape *before* we began bombing it than we had realised. Yes, we were totally unprepared for the complete outbreak of anarchy that followed. Yes, by using combat troops in roles that really needed military or civilian police, and by not having anywhere near enough people on the ground who understood the language or society they were dealing with, we ended up using a counterproductive level of violence in trying to halt unrest. But I am left with the feeling that the only way the US could have created and maintained order after the war was by using even *more* deadly violence, by being even *more* uncompromising. We would still have needed to listen to the population better than we did, and not rely on the self-serving, largely corrupt emigre leaders who have been such broken reeds, but those steps would not have prevented our being hated and scorned, not if we really wanted to keep the peace. My impression is that Iraqis--at least after all they have lived with for the last 30 years--are so far from being able to live in a peaceful, democratic, egalitarian state that conflict under any circumstances, let alone under foreign, Christian, short-sighted, and culturally inept occupation, was inevitable.
As a footnote, Shadid's reading of his own book poses an interesting question. Which is worse, having a book read by a trained actor who has no idea how to pronounce any words or phrases out of the ordinary, or having a book read by the author who is more familiar with the material but who has no ability to read text? Shadid varies between a monotone and a constantly rising tone that leads towards a crescendo it never fulfills. He also mispronounces, not Arabic names, but several rather ordinary English words. Yes, he's of Lebanese descent, but he was born and brought up on Oklahoma and has worked for decades for the AP, the Globe, and the Post. He just flubs a couple of not-terribly-SAT-calibre words, and it's surprising and distracting.
