Category: Uncategorized

History gets written to react to the present.

So when Juan Cole, a professor at Michigan wanted a new way to comment on the Middle East (beyond his blog), he wrote a book.

Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East chronicles the French attack and occupation in 1799-1800. Napoleon was smart enough to scoot back to France, leaving his troops mired in a war that was neither lost nor won. Cole connects the two Western invasions as direct parallels. I’ve read a lot about the Napoleonic era, so I picked up this book…but the overbearing overlay of America in Iraq dampened my enthusiasm. Cole isn’t wrong, but he’s heavy-handed. I hadn’t read his blog before, and I’m not starting now.

Cole’s blog about the book offers some of the original sources, which I applaud.

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.

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.

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.

This neglected blog (damn you, Twitter!) reached its sixth birthday today. This is the 1,435th post, but the pace has definitely slowed.

I’m glad to say that my birthday mile has not. Yet.

5:22 for the 4 loops (1:20 / 1:22 / 1:21 / 1:18) around Kezar is a second faster than 2008 and 2007.

I know it’s only a holding pattern in a “race” I’m going to lose, but still feels good.

Past birthday blog posts: 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, and 2003.

Waltz with Bashir made for an eye-opening Tuesday night. One man’s animated (literally) attempt to reconstruct his role in the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, Waltz with Bashir uses comic book techniques to tell a tale of young men at a war and a massacre perpetrated during that invasion. What little I know of the Lebanon war comes from reading Robert Fisk, but the outline of events only frame the author’s personal recapturing of memories he’s buried deep in his head. The few breaks from animation are jarring, visually and emotionally. This is, truly, “based on actual events.”

I’m not running with Metacritic here, which measures 90 for “universal acclaim” — but it’s a very good film. Waltz with Bashir earned an Oscar nomination this year.

I’m a week late on this, but I started Super Bowl Sunday (February 1, 2009) in my traditional way, with a race in Golden Gate Park. I finished the 5K 10th overall with an 18:44, for 6:03 miles, if distances are accurate.

One of the two runners right behind me had a GPS on his watch, and said the course is actually 3.27 miles long, beyond the official 3.10. It felt a bit long, given the smooth downhill slope of the last two miles. I began the morning pretty beat after a long bike ride the day before, but ended a hard week with a good race. (Been resting/recovering most of this week.)

Not consistent courses, but here’s my history. Before looking at this, I was happier with my time!

• 2008: Raced on the bike at Early Bird Criterium instead.
• 2007: 18:37
• 2006: 18:28
• 2005: 18:58
• 2004: 18:34

The trailers for Gran Torino menace, and the film darkens your spirit from time to time. A retired auto worker buries his wife, and then faces the changes in his neighborhood with the same coldness (at first) he shows his less-than-agreeable children.

But any gloom in Clint Eastwood’s new movie is lifted by simple moments and insights, and a touch of humor. The caricature of grumpy old man suits Eastwood here; he must have enjoyed substituting growling for dialogue as a blunt marker of his character’s dissatisfaction with his family, neighborhood, and life. When Eastwood’s character does speak, it’s blunt, unfiltered, and unambiguously racist. The slow thaw in his relations with Asian neighbors is foreseeable, but not rushed. You can almost imagine his transformation being real, and his later sacrifice is contextual, if still surprising.

The gloom and grit of suburban Detroit are, strikingly, always portrayed in sunny summer weather. Any decay is presented in bright sunshine. The contrast underlined the point, rather than hiding it.

Only 72 from Metacritic? Bahhhh…too low. I missed dinner beforehand, and didn’t even mind being hungry for this one.

Still reeling after stretching my brain, I wafted my way through John Grisham’s last-but-one, The Appeal. I suppose I’ve read a half-dozen or more of Grisham’s 22 books, with general satisfaction.

The Appeal is a quick, reasonable read. The writing is clear and more than competent. But the ending bugged me. Grisham doesn’t write the Hollywood ending, which felt strange given the arc of the story. The Appeal is a morality play without a comeuppance for the villains. That may be real life all too often, but the pace and direction of his characters point in one direction. When the climax and denouement go in another, I felt like the author tried too hard to avoid the tidy conclusion. Since the rest of the story is told smoothly, the visible effort broke the spell.