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saavedra77On balance, 2005 involved more losses than gains for me, and global events weren't particularly cheering, either. I did however come across some really fascinating books, during those 365 days. My top 10:
1) The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq, by George Packer. I knew from interviews that Packer had been an early supporter of the Bush's invasion of Iraq, but his book caught my interest because of Nancy Pearl's ringing endorsement. As it happened, Packer's support for the war stemmed not from the Administration's dubious prewar claims about weapons of mass destruction, but because of his friendship with an idealistic Iraqi exile, Kanan Makiya, author of Republic of Fear. Packer believed in Iraqi regime change for the same reason that he backed U.S. interventions in the Balkans during the 1990s: if NATO's campaigns in Bosnia and Kosovo came in response to ongoing atrocities, Packer argues that every day under Saddam Hussein was a theater of atrocity. However, The Assassins' Gate chronicles Packer's increasing disenchantment with a self-righteous U.S. government that failed to adequately plan for the aftermath of Saddam's fall or to appreciate the impact that the postwar chaos would have on ordinary Iraqis. Packer still harbors hopes for self-government in post-Saddam Iraq, but those hopes are tempered by close observation of the country's deep sectarian and ethnic divisions and of Sunni Arab and Shi'ite communities terrorized by a "harsh social code enforced by vigilante rule."
2) The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design, by Richard Dawkins. Written in 1987, Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker presents a systematic refutation of the intelligent design hypothesis--one written years before modern opponents of evolution adopted this slogan. As Dawkins points out, the argument that nature's complexity can only be explained by "intelligent design" actually predates Darwin--going back at least to the eighteenth-century British theologian William Paley, who likened the anatomy of the human eye to a well-designed watch. In fact, Dawkins argues that Darwin's theory of natural selection represented the first really convincing secular explanation for the development of complex organisms ("Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.") Dawkins focuses on what remain anti-evolutionists' key fallacy: the confusion of natural selection with "random accident." "Mutation," he explains, "is random"; but natural selection--the process that determines which mutations survive to pass on their DNA--"is the very opposite of random."
Apropos of LJ, I believe that it was Dawkins who first coined the term "meme" in his earlier book, The Selfish Gene: a meme being a unit of information analagous to a gene, but transmitted culturally rather than via biological reproduction. Am I remembering that right ...?
3) The Coming of the Third Reich, by Richard J. Evans. I read this first book of Evans' planned three-volume history of Hitler's Gemany while traveling for business, earlier this year. Unfortunately, its presence in my briefcase attracted exactly the wrong kind of attention from a TSA agent during a random search at the Dallas airport: "So why are you reading this?" (Significant look, eyebrow raised.) I then proceeded to explain that Evans' book was a new scholarly study of the period, which showed impressive attention to the historical and political roots of National Socialism, going back to the authoritarian nationalism and antimodernism of Bismarck's "Second Reich."
(All the while I'm thinking: Am I managing to NOT sound like a Nazi while I'm explaining this ...?)
4) Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, by Jared Diamond. Another book that I finally got around to, this year. Guns, Germs, and Steel seeks to answer the question: "why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents?" Why did Eurasians in particular enter the modern world with comparative advantages in food production, technological specialization, and even hereditary immunities? Diamond's answer is rooted in the archaelogical record of human geographic dispersion and the different conditions that humans found and created on different contintents. At base, Diamond argues, Eurasians had the advantage of the longest east-west land axis of any continental land mass, permitting the easiest dispersion of new agricultual methods--not to mention new microbes and immunities--across stable climate conditions. Additionally, Diamond notes that natives of sub-Saharan Africa, the Americas, and the Antipodes suffered from another key disadvantage: a dearth of indigenous domesticable megafauna. (In sub-Saharan Africa, indigenous megafauna abounded, but humans have to this day yet to domesticate any of them; the Americas and Antipodes both suffered from mass extinctions of indigenous megafauna not long after humans first migrated to those continents.)
Now I need to read Diamond's Collapse, which examines why some (relatively) recent human societies have failed to survive ...
5) The March, by E.L. Doctorow. A specialist in historical novels, Doctorow's latest work is a Civil War epic tracing the path of Sherman's 1864-1865 scorched earth campaign from Georgia to North Carolina. The narrative occasionally ventures into the general's own moody, eccentric mind, but most of Doctorow's attention is dedicated to less exalted characters: an ensemble of soldiers--Union and Confederate, officers and enlisted--and camp followers who include both liberated slaves and abruptly dispossessed whites. Of these, the most interesting is Pearl, the light-skinned daughter of a white planter father and a slave mother who can, among strangers, "pass" for white. Following the destruction of her home plantation, Pearl is intoxicated to find Union soldiers treating her like a white woman. When that initial intoxication passes, however, Pearl finds herself asking: "If I live white, how free am I?"
This exchange reminded me of conversations I've had with relatives on my father's side about what those of us who could "pass" would have done if we lived back in the '50s or earlier. Would you change that Spanish surname and move someplace where no one knew your family background? Would you cut off relatives who looked a lot or even just a little darker? Or would you accept the possible consequences of people knowing that (appearances notwithstanding) you weren't lily-white?
6) The Plot Against America, by Philip Roth. When I read The Plot, way back in January, I was so stirred up that I felt the need to write a formal book review! And while I did have one or two complaints about how Roth developed his alternate history of the 1940s, there's no denying that this is an affecting, memorable, thought-provoking story.
7) Shalimar the Clown, by Salman Rushdie. Shalimar is, hands down, the best novel I read all year, and certainly the most coherent and gripping novel Rushdie has written since The Satanic Verses. I often find Rushdie's fiction too digressive, his characterizations inconsistent (as in The Moor's Last Sigh) or shallow (as in Fury), his plotting rather makeshift (as in both of the cited earlier novels). By contrast, Shalimar's strengths are its tightly-wound plot, handful of vividly-drawn characters, and strikingly-rendered locales: Alsace-Lorraine in the early 1940s, Kashmir in the 1960s, and L.A. in the 1990s. Rushdie's protagonist, India (a.k.a. "Kashmira") Ophuls, might be my favorite of his characters, to date. I literally devoted every free moment to this book for three days; I couldn't put it down until I got to the end--and let's just say the end is really something! Highly recommened.
8) Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith, by Jon Krakauer. My niece April gave me Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven for Christmas in 2004, and so this was one of the first books I read in 2005. In it, Krakauer examines the intersection of faith and various kinds of violence in the microcosm of Mormon--and, especially, Mormon fundamentalist history. More particularly, he dwells on the tension between "the tyranny of intransigent belief," of unquestioned certainties, and the importance of open-minded uncertainty to education, to science, and to the very idea of an open society.
9) A Vanished World: Medieval Spain's Golden Age of Enlightenment, by Chris Lowney. One of the most interesting books I read in 2004 was Maria Rosa Menocal's The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain, which prompted a still-ongoing, self-directed course of reading on the subject of medieval Spain. Of the half-dozen or so such books I read this year, the most interesting turned out to be Lowney's A Vanished World.
Of course, as some of you no doubt already noticed, Lowney's narrative of over seven centuries of Spanish history begins with one giant black mark against it: a frankly misleading subtitle--one so much at odds with the text that I suspect it was chosen by the publisher, rather than the author. "Golden ages" are of course always retrospective, nostalgic, properly belonging to the rhetoric of myth, not history. And "enlightenment" conjures up a spirit of rationalism wholly alien to medieval Iberia's environment of multiple faiths. Really, the book ought to be called A Vanished World: Medieval Spain's Seven Centuries of Uneasy Coexistence--or, using a medieval Spanish term for "coexistence," Seven Centuries of Convivencia.
On the other hand, how could medieval Iberia's long periods of coexistence among Catholics, Jews, and Muslims not seem "enlightened," compared to early modern Spain and Portugal's book-burnings, torture, and expulsions? As Lowney, Menocal, and others have pointed out, medieval Iberia actually was something special: a period during which the three Abrahamic religions often did coexist, and even influence one another. And these centuries threw up some fascinating historical characters: the fugitive Umayyad prince Abd al-Rahman, who carved out an independent Muslim polity in 8th-century Iberia (what the Muslims would call "Al Andalus"); Samuel ha-Nagid, the 11th-century Granadan Jewish warrior-poet who boasted "I am the David of my age!"; Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, the mercenary general known by the title "El Cid"--a corruption of the Arabic honorific "al sayyid"--who by turns served Catholic and Muslim masters (and, wherever possible, himself), but who later generations would reinvent as a Catholic crusader; El Cid's sometime sponsor, Alfonso VI of Castille, the self-styled "Emperor of the Two Religions"; the 12th-century Aristotelian philosopher Ibn Rushd ("Averroes"); his contemporary, Musa Ibn Maymun ("Moses Maimonides," "the Second Moses"), the author of the Mishneh Torah; the 14th-century Kabbalist Moses of Léon; etc.
Menocal's book still strikes me as the most writerly account of the period--an eloquent series of essays on medieval Iberian culture--its languages, architecture, music, poetry--along with some historical context. But Lowney provides a more linear history, devoting as much time to social, political, and religious factors as to cultural ones. If you need linearity, you might want to start with Lowney; if you're looking for cultural insight and simply beautiful writing, Menocal might suit you better.
10) What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, by Thomas Frank. So much has been written about this book, an account of one front in America's ongoing kulturkampf which has itself become a battlefield in that conflict. However, having had a number of months to digest Frank's narrative, I remain impressed by his account of the rhetorical strategies that conservative activists have used to win over working-class Kansans during the past generation. There is still something extremely striking about the way in which Kansas, once the hotbed of left-wing populism, has more recently become a redoubt of the right-wing variety. Frank raises the possibility that Kansans' concerns and values--cultural conservatism, economic discontent--may not have changed so much as the subject of political discussion has, to the advantage of conservatives.
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Date: 2006-01-09 03:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-09 06:09 pm (UTC)Looking over the reviews of Kay's novel on Amazon, I gather that "al-Rassan" is al-Andalus, its political breakup reflects the 11th- & 12th-century disintegration of al-Andalus into warring taifa (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taifa) kingdoms, and the "Jaddites" would be the equivalent of Catholics engaged in the reconquista?
I'd be interested to see how Kay re-imagines all this ...
no subject
Date: 2006-01-09 06:25 am (UTC)Right now, I am reading all things Romantic, in the hopes of deciding on specific texts to be used for my thesis. Have you read Norman Davies' _Europe_? It's real good. Anyway, I am reading the chapter on the Romantic period ("Revolutio"). It's kind of cool to see all these names and references and be able to make the connection.
Anyway, hope you get to read all the books you are interested in, in 2006!
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Date: 2006-01-09 06:15 pm (UTC)And, no, I haven't read Davies--but his Europe (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060974680/qid=1136830390/sr=2-2/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_2/002-0562654-4836863?s=books&v=glance&n=283155) sounds breathtakingly ambitious!
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Date: 2006-01-09 08:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-09 08:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-09 09:32 pm (UTC)http://www.livejournal.com/community/pixelbee/
(The "claudiuswhoa" icon is from June 9, 2005--near the bottom of the page.) Pixelbee will let you download icons from this page to your hearts' content, as long as you leave a comment to the journal entry debuting the image and credit her in your journal's icon keywords when you upload it.
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Date: 2006-01-09 10:05 pm (UTC)Veree expensive, but I guess worth it. Will check out the icons.
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Date: 2006-01-09 11:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-09 08:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-01-09 09:35 pm (UTC)Meme
Date: 2006-07-17 05:14 pm (UTC)