Month: April 2009

The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War by David Halberstam might also have been subtitled “the forgotten war.” Vietnam dominates modern political and military history in this country. Our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan elicit comparisons to Vietnam time and again. But Korea provided an earlier example of what happens when political and military goals are not aligned and coordinated. For all the discussion about troop withdrawals from our current engagements, let’s not forget the thousands of American troops still in Korea today, 50 years after our entry into the peninsula.

Halberstam’s book focuses on the follies of MacArthur, and the political battles fought between the general and the political leaders from President Truman on down. The military battles command attention, and a few are fully documented, to chilling (literally) effect. But it’s the political back-and-forth domestically which drives us into war, and then — sadly — makes ending the fighting so damn hard.

I learned a lot from this history, even when I wondered how much information came from secondary sources rather than primary sources. Enjoy a few pages with Google Books. The numerous maps helped, too.

Katherine Neville wrote The Eight more than 20 years ago. Thanks to The Da Vinci Code, this form of modern-day treasure hunt for mythical historical artifacts found a new audience (its first?). Neville’s book was reprinted and can be easily found in bookstores.

I picked it up on the way to Hawaii in February, and read The Eight on the plane and at the beach. And I left it in the rental house. (My apologies to the next poor soul drawn in by the jacket.) Generally, schlock. The historical vignettes brim on enjoyable at times, but the modern (1970s) characters don’t even approach interesting.

Learn from my mistake and avoid the hype here.

In contrast to Murakami, I’ve read most of Wallace Stegner’s fiction, and embraced his non-fiction, too.

So, finding a new-to-me slim 1987 volume of three lectures thrilled. The American West as Living Space at its heart explores how water — and its absence, often enough — defines the region.

We’ve endured our third dry winter in a row in California. Pleasant enough to “endure” at the time, but the state needs the rain. Drought fills the news, including this article published while I was reading these essays in February. I live in a city whose very existence depends on shipping water nearly 200 miles from its source. Stegner blitzes by this fact in one sentence.

San Francisco drowned the Hetchy Hetchy Valley, which many thought as beautiful as Yosemite itself, to ensure its future water supply. (p.50)

In a light, skipping survey of a topic he knows so well, Stegner captures the environmental risks in trying to overcome the region’s inherent arid nature.

It’s a gloomy view, overall, but even when Stegner admonishes, he can’t help but notice the defiant optimism which shapes so much of the region. Convinced it can’t last, Stegner still understood the attraction of the West, in myth and reality.

The brief bibliography points to a few dozen sources, including his own biography of John Wesley Powell, Powell’s own report of his surveys, and Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert. I look forward to following up on these trails.

I haven’t read a word of the fiction that makes Haruki Murakami famous. What I Talk About When I Talk About Running logs the author’s real-world training for the New York City Marathon. The structure of the training journal doesn’t bound the words or topics, though. Subtitled “A Memoir,” the book explains the start of Murakami’s running, and tries to illuminate why the sport (and the related one of triathlons) still offers him so much.

I only captured one quote when I read the book back in mid-February (!). Twitter would actually be good for capturing the quotes in the moment… have to try that more often.

Flipping through the small volume again now, I enjoy for a second time the simple, direct prose on a topic I know very well: running. I don’t share my thoughts with such eloquence or even such consideration. Yet I see the different motivations which keep Murakami putting one foot in front of another are not so different from some of my own.

Reminders of the common pace and similar “race” we all share improved this memoir notably. I haven’t made the (full) transition to acceptance of my athletic decline yet. But Murakami’s thoughts on why he runs when each year gets slower and harder are not unknown to me.

This one will stay on the shelf for future re-readings.