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Monthly book roundup – August

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Books finished in August:
(Warning: reviews are unpolished and quickly written.)

Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam by Nick Turse. Demands a review of its own. Recommended. 

It’s Game Time Somewhere; How One Year, 100 Events, and 50 Different Sports Changed My Life, by Tim Forbes. It’s Game Time Somewhere is the story of how a sports junkie got his dream of working in sports fulfilled, lost interest in sports, then found it again. Tim Forbes gives up his well-paying consultant job to get a foot into working in golf, then rises through the ranks there to become an ad-man and event manager. Along the way, however, he loses his passion for sports, and sets out to rekindle it through watching 100 events of 50 different sports. Things do not go as planned, unfortunately, as there is always something missing. He rants about ill-behaved superstars and an obsession with advertisement. In the end he realizes that what brings the good experiences is being part of a community is important, but what proves to be most powerful is participating oneself. To facilitate participation in any way becomes his advice to arrangers of sports events.

If this book had been 1/3 as long and with 85% fewer jokes, it would have been an interesting and fresh look on something that means a lot to a lot of people. As it is, it becomes tedious and only occasionally entertaining.

Republic of Outsiders: The Power of Amateurs, Dreamers and Rebels by Alissa Quart. Innovations often come from outsiders. But often outsiders also come up with gibberish, and though Quart mentions that tension explicitly, she did not elighten me about it. To be fair, I do not think she promises to.

How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia: A Novel by Mohsin Hamid. The opportunities, challenges and choices involved in being an entrepreneur in the third world, half-parodically clothed as a self help book. We meet a You that is guided through how to succeed moneywise, which also carries with it successes and failures of other kinds. Recommended.

Why I Am a Buddhist: No-Nonsense Buddhism with Red Meat and Whiskey by Stephen T. Asma. Ok.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John Le Carre. Although usually not a fan of spy novels, I must confess I thoroughly enjoyed this classic.

The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Your Skills by Daniel Coyle. Nice little book with tips from Coyle’s experience and research. Seems very good to look at before trying to teach kids, but also in general. Most of the tips are in my librarything review.

Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber. Interesting chapter on the economics myth of ancient truck and barter, but the book jumped around too much and was too long for me to be able to keep the thread, I put it down halfway. Excellent reviews by Henry and others at the Crooked Timber seminar on the book.

Ratings and additional books are in the library.

Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, by Nick Turse

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(Warning: reviews are unpolished and quickly written.)

Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam by Nick Turse.

Kill Anything That Moves is based on previously unused archival material and interviews, and tells the tale of American systematic disregard for Vietnamese lives and the atrocities that were committed during the Vietnam war.

In some of the first pages, Turse recounts the well known story of the My Lai massacre from 1964, in which American soldiers murdered around 400 unarmed South Vietnamese civilians, both men, women-many of whom were raped, children and infants. Only one soldier, Second Lieutenant William Calley, was convicted, and he ended up servicing only a few years under house arrest. Contrary to what is oftentimes thought today, however, the My Lai massacre was the rule of American warfare in Vietnam, and not an abhorrent exception. The rest of the book reads a descent into more and more indiscriminate violence and successively increasing depravity. Although the book at times becomes a catalogue of violence and horror, we are never brought out of context.

Turse traces the various factors that contributed this culture. He starts with boot camp, which consciously dehumanized the soldiers and taught that obedience was paramount. Illegal orders were common, and soldiers, who did not have extensive training in the legality of war, often had to be uncertain about how to respond. Often those who gave the orders did not themselves know what was legal and not.

“Body count”- enemies killed, is term that runs through the book. The ubiquitous focus on body counts seems to have been partly an effect of the system’s priorities, but became also a driver itself, since both honor and more tangible rewards were distributed on the basis of that measure. This lead to a practice in which any killed civilian (or even water buffalo) was labelled as Viet Cong, and also incentivized the killing of those civilians. A part of this was Pentagon pursuit of the “crossover point”, at which enemies were killed faster than they were replaced. The “mere gook rule” said killings of Vietnamese were nothing to worry about.

“Free fire zones,” special areas of dubious legality in which everyone could be killed, were instituted.

A number of actions by the US army served only to alienate the Vietnamese population: people were driven away from their homes, villages, hamlets and crops were burnt, animals were killed, people were shot at, collective punishment enforced, corpses were mutilated. Sometimes the population starved and raided the garbage of the soldiers for food. Some soldiers started making adornment of their victims, e.g. ears on cords.

In the chapter on torture, the practices initially described bears a sinister resemblance to the revelations of the maltreatment of prisoners that occurred in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in the early 2000’s: Electricity to body parts, water torture, beatings, humiliations. The torture was not restricted to these practices, though, Turse goes on to list among other things, hanging people upside down, inserting needles under fingernails, ripping out nails, shackling people tightly in tiny “tiger cells”, severe beatings, and free reign being given to Vietnamese interrogators, and claims that all this was widespread. Even applied to the enemy, these practices are controversial, to say the least. In a context were those in the field had huge discretion, soldiers often did not know who were the enemy and were constantly in danger, and proper trials were not held, a large number of innocents had to be harmed.

A chilling question is whether also the graver torture that is documented for the Vietnam war have occurred in recent wars, in particular in Afghanistan and Iraq. Given the similarity of at least some of the practices, there is perhaps no good reason not to suspect that there may be more.

Turse allocates much time to “Speedy Express,” an operation that took place in a few months from December 1968 to May 1969. This operation condoned massive deadly force on a previously unseen scale, with possibly thousands of civilians killed.

A bipartisan delegation visited, two members saw some mistreatment, etc. and reported on it, but were suppressed in the final report. Whistle blowers were not listened to.

In general resistance to the war not in the news to begin with. A little more after a while, much with My Lai, then more. Veterans started to come forward and make the atrocities known. These were often harassed. Daniel Ellsberg leaked “the pentagon papers,” partly about American disregard for Vietnam lives, etc. Pentagon fought against publication. Conference in Oslo just a week after publication of the pentagon papers, about warfare in Indo-China. Damning statement from commission.

Turse does not offer any quick fixes for current or future war-makers to avoid the atrocities of Vietnam, he seems content to document how bad the war really was. It is a worthwhile endeavor.

Monthly book roundup

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Books finished in July:
(Warning: reviews are unpolished and quickly written.)

  • From Fatwa to Jihad: The Rushdie Affair and Its Aftermath by Kenan Malik. Malik, a psychologist and writer living in Britain, son of an Indian Hindu-Muslim couple, was shocked by the burning of Salman Rushdie’s book The Satanic Verses in Bradford in 1989, and it is never any doubt that his sympathy is with the freedom of speech and against making exceptions to that, to any religious or political side. He makes several good points:
    -Rushdie early on an outspoken anti-racism, anti-imperialism voice.
    -multiculturalism in Britain imposed from above, not broadly demanded from below.
    -multiculturalism restraining youth to live within boundaries and rules the British society had in many cases discarded.
    -diversity of views within communities, evidence from surveys. Mullahs, etc often not representative.
    -militants often have little knowledge. In fact, Malik views them more as generic protesters/rebels than moved by religious, fairness, or other intellectual motives.
    -Malik got article with an analogy between Rushdie and the freethinker Thomas Paine (1737-1809) rejected by the Independent, and is worried about possible increasing self-censorship.
    -cartoons etc published many times without controversy, then some people were able to make them light fire. This shows that the context is crucial. Perhaps there is some hope in this, in that controversy does not necessarily run deep.
  • Ava’s Man, by Rick Bragg. Nostalgic about Charlie Bundrum, an all-beloved family- and handyman living in the South during the great depression. Not without faults, but revered by everyone. Worked as carpenter, (bootleg) whisky-maker, and fisherman. A bygone time that was not long ago.
  • Two Caravans, by Marina Lewycka. Ok.
  • The Prodigy: A Biography of William James Sidis, America’s Greatest Child Prodigy by Amy Wallace. The life of William James Sidis (1898-1944), wizard of mathematics, languages and much else. Probably well endowed naturally, and was taught to love learning and reasoning by his parents. It is striking how much of this upbringing is regarded as standard in many environments today: Answering children’s question seriously, talking to them as adults, learn them reasoning and principles rather than isolated facts and rigid rules. The author makes that case that WJS suffered from a dysfunctional relationship between his parents, having to be socially together with older others, and above all from being hunted on by the tabloid press. Made substantial contributions to mathematical physics, but eventually he retreated into anonymity and menial jobs, although still an intellectual firework in the areas that he did not leave behind, like politics and the collection of streetcar transfers(!). Although eccentric he did not appear bitter. The moral is nevertheless to treat children seriously as learners, but let them be children.
  • Up from Slavery by Booker T. Washington. Booker T. Washington was born into slavery in 1856. He lived as a slave until the end of the civil war in 1865, when his family was freed. He was determined to learn how to read and managed to obtain an education at the Hampton Institute, Virginia. A strong advocate of the importance of education for the black race. Apparently there were tensions between this approach and the more confrontational tone of many others in the black political community, but this is not something that is mentioned specifically in the book. Washington stressed the importance of learning a trade to become an integrated and valued member of society, and worked as an educator for most of his life, heading the Tuskegee Institute, Alabama, from 1881 until his death in 1915.
  • Revolt in the Desert: The Authorised Abridged Edition of “Seven Pillars of Wisdom” by T. E. Lawrence. Unnuanced generalizations about nations, peoples, etc. Not engaging.

Ratings and additional books are in the library.