The Trigger: Hunting the Assassin Who Brought the World to War

 Like other books I've read and enjoyed by Tim Butcher, The Trigger: Hunting the Assassin Who Brought the World to War includes a long and arduous walk through difficult - and literally mined - territory interwoven with both recent and long-ago history. In this case, it's the former Yugoslavia through which Butcher hikes, particularly Bosnia and Serbia, while seeking to make sense of both Gavrilo Princip's actions leading up to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the more recent Balkans War of the 1990s, which Butcher covered as a foreign correspondent. 

As always, Butcher's writing is bright and chipper, even when his subject is dark and heavy. Case in point: "Princip may have sparked a century of turmoil, but he started out as a quiet and exemplary student from the provinces." And on and on (and I mean that in only the best way) through the century as Butcher reconstructs that ancient hostilities and the new ones, the festering sores poked and prodded by the Ottomans and then the Austrians, the long shadow of colonialism and enforced poverty. 

Trigger is an excellent read, and should be compulsory for anyone wanting to understand the origins of the origins of the origins of World War I, as well as the lingering resentments in the region.

Five stars.

Good Morning, Midnight

I have said before that I would read a treatise about sheep farming if it were beautifully written, and so it is with  Lily Brooks-Dalton's Good Morning, Midnight. The story itself - a dual narrative about the world ending, leaving only a handful of humans on a deep space mission and at an Arctic research station  - is a bit too sci-fi-esque for my taste. Passages such as "...the things you tell your colleagues when you're practicing simulated disasters and the things you think about when the world ends while you're very far away are so very different" and "even in crowded rooms, even in busy cities, even in the arms of a lover, he was alone. She recognized it in him because it was in her too" were the reason I read to the end, even though, in the midst of our own world-ending days, I could not buy what Brooks-Dalton was selling, and as a result I did not care about the characters, per se. I simply love the words, the beautiful prose spilling across each page, Brooks-Dalton's rendering of the human condition.

"He was drawn by the isolation and the punishing climate, the landscape that matched his interior. Instead of salvaging what he could, he ran away to the top of an Arctic mountain, nine degrees shy of the North Pole, and gave up. Misery followed him wherever he went. This fact didn't faze him and it certainly didn't surprise him."

Chasing the Devil: The Search for Africa's Fighting Spirit

Tim Butcher's Blood River is some of the best travel writing I've read recently, and my review of it caught his eye on Good Reads, and he reached out and suggested a couple other titles of his he thought I might enjoy. Chasing the Devil, in which he chronicles his journey, on foot, through Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Liberia, certainly did not disappoint. As with the tramp through the Congo that comprises Blood River, Butcher's West African adventure was inspired by an earlier journey, in this case that of British author Graham Greene in 1935.

What Butcher does well is to weave together the history of Greene's journey with his own hike (if a multi-week push through the jungles of three nations can be considered merely a 'hike'), along with the history, geopolitics, and especially cultural traditions of the countries through which he strides. From Chinese investment to lassa fever outbreaks, African spiritualism, to tensions between ethnic groups, Butcher covers as much ground as an author as he did on foot. And, I should add, equally competent. 

Given what he attempts to do, the sheer volume of information he seeks to impart, it would be easy for to become bogged down in the weeds. To his credit, this rarely happens, and most of the book skips along, brought to life with descriptions to the effect of "For four years the National Provisional Ruling Council junta ran Sierra Leona, although 'ran' hardly seems an appropriate description for the feuding, bloodletting, attempted coups, executions and political paralysis of this period." Not to put too fine a point on it. 

Chasing the Devil was a particular pleasure for me, as it recalled memories of my own visit to West Africa in 2019, where I experienced first hand the African rains that Butcher describes as "something extreme, aqueous bullets pummelling the ground," and so much else.

Everybody Was So Young - Gerald and Sara Murphy: A Lost Generation Love Story

 It doesn't help, I'm sure, that I read this on the heels of Jason Fagone's The Woman Who Smashed Codes, one of the best biographies I've read in ages. Sarah Murphy and Elizebeth Friedman - code-smasher extraordinaire - were contemporaries, but if they had more in common than that, I'm afraid I didn't quite get there. That's not to knock Sara Murphy, nor author Amanda Vaill, per se. Murphy was simply far, far less interesting to me, and Vaill's work far more of a traditional biography (read: deep into the weeds on every aspect of Murphy's life) to hold my attention for more than half of the book. 

That said, as I skimmed the latter half of the book, I stopped regularly to read passages of the Murphys time with the Hemingways and the Fitzgeralds; excerpts of a letter from F. Scott here or there offer the expected delight. The lines that resonated most with me were these, early, "....most unsettling, was that edge about her, that repressed wildness, that sense that..."I have no idea what she will do, or say, or propose."" Having been accused of the same, I couldn't help but laugh.

The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies

Elizebeth Friedman wrote the book, literally, on codebreaking in this country. She established the agency that was the forerunner to the NSA. She hunted Nazi spies during World War II, and bootleggers and mobsters at the height of Prohibition. She did all of this while caring for her long-depressive husband, William Friedman, whose legacy was to dear to her that she quietly allowed herself to be written out of the history of all of these things rather than risk diminishing the credit William otherwise received. 

Jason Fagone's biography of Elizebeth is fascinating, both in the context of her, as a person, and his explanations of codebreaking itself. As is so often the case, I'm in awe of the brains of those of figure this stuff out, as well as Fagone's work as an author to breathe life into what could otherwise be a highly obtuse topic. (This he does is no small part by asking, for example, that the reader consider the ways in which any two people can and do develop "codes" in how they communicate; the more intimate the communication, the more encoded it becomes.) 

Four stars.

In the Dragon's Shadow: Southeast Asia in the Chinese Century

Sebastian Strangio's In the Dragon's Shadow is, essentially, a look at the role China has played historically and currently in the affairs of Southeast Asia. Much like the smaller nations in the Americas have had to learn to live with the presence and policies of the United States, so it is for the nations of Southeast Asia in the shadow of China. The caveat, of course, is that the countries, people, and cultures have had centuries, if not millennia, to adapt. 

More than that, it's a comparison between the approach the Chinese has adopted in Southeast Asia and that of the Americans, though Strangio frequently contrasts both with the Japanese, who have arguably struck the best note the most consistently. It's also a clear-eyed look at the colonial hangover that is still felt throughout the region, as well as the arguably imperialistic designs the Chinese may have....to say nothing of providing excellent historical context for each country in the region (minus Brunei and East Timor) and the various animosities and alliances that have so impacted the region's history. 

More than once Strangio's descriptions evoked the Monroe Doctrine for me, not least in the closing pages where he quoted a historian who noted "the Americans 'have to justify being here.' The Chinese, on the other hand, 'are just here...It's their backyard." And, as with any work that deals with globalization these days, there's the ever-looming shadow of the American consumer culture, the overarching, homogenizing force that brings everything it touches into its fold by varying degrees. 

Strangio speaks to this directly, as a shared concern of the Vietnamese and Chinese, who otherwise find little common ground, but he also speaks to it obliquely, as when he notes the depth of the anxiety felt by many Burmans that their culture "could be engulfed by a flood of outsiders from the north." That such a notion is completely and utterly unfathomable to Americans - what flood of outsiders could possibly dislodge American culture - shows the extent to which said culture has taken hold around the world. (On the other hand, one could argue that those who found such solace in the previous administration did fear this very thing, treasuring, perhaps elements of "American culture" that others of us no longer see as paramount. But I digress.)

Four stars.

American Notes for General Circulation

So here's my beef with Dickens: he can be amusing, but I'm far too impatient for the payoff. I struggled mightily through the first 25 pages of this:

"About midnight we shipped a sea, which forced its way through the skylights, burst open the doors above, and came raging and roaring down into the ladies' cabin, to the unspeakable consternation of my wife and a little Scotch lady - who, by the way, had previously sent a message to the captain by the stewardess, requesting him, with her compliments, to have a steel conductor immediately attached to the top of every mast, and to the chimney, in order that the ship might not be struck by lightning." (p. 22)

That is one single sentence! The crux of which I can't even tell you. By the time I've typed the last word, I've forgotten the point. For nights descriptions such as this put me archly to sleep. And then I had a brilliant idea: skip ahead, skip ahead. Surely the story would be improved once Mr. Dickens arrived in America.

I skip ahead to find him safely arrived in Boston, his ship sea-ed or sea shipped or whatever other nautical means of arrival there may have been:

"In all of them, the unfortunate or degenerate citizens of the State are carefully instructed in their duties both to God and man; are surrounded by all reasonable means of comfort and happiness that their condition will admit of; are appealed to, as members of the great human family, however afflicted, indigent, or fallen; are ruled by the strong Heart, and not by the strong (though immeasurably weaker) Hand." (p. 63)

The sentences before and after are no clearer to me. I am remembering now as I read this, why the Wreck of the Golden Mary was such a revelation: I think it's the only Dickens I enjoyed enough to read more than once. Still, I'm nothing if not a glutton for punishment, so I decide to seek out the chapters that find Dickens in the South, where he was, if my memory served me, most appalled.

"Then, in order as the eye descends towards the water, are the sides, and doors, and windows of the state-rooms, jumbled as oddly together as though they formed a small street, built by the varying tastes of a dozen men: the whole is supported on beams and pillars resting on a dirty barge, but a few inches above the water's edge: and in the narrow space between this upper structure and this barge's deck, are the furnace fires and machinery, open at the sides to every wind that blows, and every storm of rain it drives along its path."

Uncle, uncle, uncle! Isn't there a rule against using more than one colon in a sentence? And sweet mother of God, the sentence that follows the above monstrosity is even longer:

"Passing one of these boats at night, and seeing the great body of fire, exposed as I have just described, that rages and roars beneath the frail pile of painted wood: the machinery, not warded off or guarded in any way, but doing its work in the midst of the crowd of idlers and emigrants and children, who throng the lower deck; under the management, too, of reckless men whose acquaintance with its mysteries may have been of six months' standing: one feels directly that the wonder is, not that there should be so many fatal accidents, but that the journey should be safely made." (p. 175)

I could go on. The passages on 188 and 189 are even longer - once I gave up on following the story and focused instead on the sentence structure, I found my interest waxed, though I couldn't tell you what I was reading...and then I remember: life's too short to read lousy books.

In conclusion, if this is your bedtime reading, you're a better student of literature than I.

How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

How to Hide an Empire is the bookend, if you will to James Bradley's The Imperial Cruise. From its title alone, Daniel Immerwahr's thesis is clear: yes, the United States is and has long been an empire. (This surprises exactly no one who has read such works as Lost Kingdom or Notes on a Foreign Country.) More than the outlines of the empire itself, which Immerwahr traces diligently and convincingly, what he truly sets out to explore is how so few Americans can possibly be aware of the facts of empire. Aside from the obvious answer that what passes for 'education' in this country frequently leaves much to be desired, Immerwahr points to the fact that globalization has replaced colonization, making it easier to hide an empire. And then, of course, is the deeply ingrained American belief that empire is 'bad' and that empires are, at their core, at least a little bit evil. Drawing on the example of Star Wars, Immerwahr writes that the US "even fights empires in its dreams."

Perhaps, though, it's surprising that the US empire was never larger than it was. After all, this is a country where, in 1830, fewer than 100 people called Chicago home; six decades later, more than a million residents lived in the shadows of the world's first "dense cluster of skyscrapers" - and this despite the best efforts of Mrs. O'Leary's cow. The sky was the limit, no? (And perhaps it might have been had the Americans not been late to the party. This lateness is at least partially attributable to the war for independence they had to fight from their own mother empire, Great Britain, but I digress. In any event, Cecil Rhodes was already lamenting that "the world is nearly all parcelled out, and what there is left of it is being divided up, conquered, and colonized" well before Teddy and the Rough Riders charged San Juan Hill.)

Speaking of Teddy, Immerwahr walks a fine line between awe at Teddy's exploits and exasperation at their extent, as when he notes "that the man who played such an important part in starting and expanding the war - a political appointee with no combat experience - should also become the hero of its decisive battle seems more fictional than factual. But an aura of "Wait, that really happened?" engulfed much of Theodore Roosevelt's life." It's also from Immerwahr that I learned for the first time that while campaigning for president, Roosevelt was shot in the chest and close range and preceded to speak for an hour as "blood ran from his body" before, presumably, seeking medical attention. How did we not cover *that* in school? 

Joking aside, this is a book everyone in America needs to read, for the lessons here are unfortunately entirely too timely and resonant today. One example? "Combine a republican commitment to equality with an accompanying commitment to white supremacy, and this is what you got: a rapidly expanding empire of settlers that fed on land but avoided incorporating people. Uninhabited guano islands - those were fine. But all of Mexico or Nicaragua? No." What's striking about the empire of old, though perhaps it shouldn't be, given the aforementioned, is how poorly the US ran it once it was established. As Immerwahr notes, there was a period of months - months! - when the entire territory of Alaska had not a single federal official in it. FDR's first governor of Puerto Rico "left reporters with the distinct impression that he didn't know where the island was." Mercy.

Still, as timely as this work is, it's Immerwahr's writing that makes it such a pleasure to read. Writing of the nuclear tests on Bikini atoll, Immerwahr notes, "to the proverbial Martian looking on from space, it must have appeared that humanity was for some indiscernible reason waging furious, unrelenting war on a string of sandbars in the middle of the Pacific." Or consider his description of the valor displayed by the Hawaiian regiments in World War II: " 'valor' in this case being a euphemism for an extreme disregard for personal safety in the enthusiastic service of killing Nazis," or of war itself, which Immerwahr writes is "entropy." He explains, "atoms split, buildings tumble, people die, and things fall apart. As wars go, the Second World War was the big one - a giant, planetwide entropic pulse that converted whole cities to rubble and some fifty-five million living humans into corpses." (At the risk of stating the obviously, I'll note how much more powerful - and persuasive - Immerwahr's description is as compared to the anodyne "war is hell.")

It is largely to this planetwide entropic pulse that Immerwahr attributes the fall of the old empires. Beyond the well-known impulses toward independence, Immerwahr makes the case that the efforts necessitated to win the war - the need to develop synthetics for rubber and silk and so much more that became unavailable when the colonies went offline amidst the fighting - meant that once the war was over, the empires as they had existed for centuries - as the source of raw materials - were no longer needed. The materials the colonies had long supplied could now be created with the magic of chemistry. At least in the developed world. U Thant's observation that "the truth, the central stupendous truth, about developed economies is that they can have - in anything but the shortest run - the kind and scale of resources they decide to have," rings as true today as the world clamors for supplies of a covid vaccine, as it did in the 1960s.

And so it is that science and the global economy have given the US an empire the likes of which even good Queen Vic never could have imagined. Late in the book, Immerwahr offers an example (something to do with changing the universal standard for stop signs, shortly after having set the standard) of the "stupefying privilege of the United States." He's not wrong - it's just that said privilege extends so far beyond stop signs as to beggar belief. That most of the inhabitants of this country are unaware of the fact is proof in itself. 

Five stars.

A Prayer for Owen Meany

I must have read A Prayer for Owen Meany close to 20 years ago; in the interim, the details had faded, and I remembered mainly that parts of it made me laugh harder than any book I'd read before or since. 

My memory was correct: I did laugh until my side hurt, and more than once. I also cried. But this book is so much more than that. It is, first of all, a joy to read from the standpoint of how, exactly, the story unfolds, the delicious care John Irving takes in deciding how much to reveal and when to reveal it. It is also a marvel for how expertly Irving fits an entirely fictional narrative into the cloth of historical events and (at the time it was written) current events. That the narrator, Johnny Wheelwright, is an English teacher and therefore many classics of literature also make an appearance is the icing on top.

Irving is the master of the improbable, and Owen Meany is infused with it from the opening pages (Johnny's mother being killed by an impossibly hit foul ball at a Little League game) to the closing lines (the inclusion of which, here, would spoil the story). Lest you think that only the events of the story are improbable: I assure you, the characters, too, beyond a mere mortal's imagination. 

It is, perhaps, this improbability - the impossibility - that renders the touches of wisdom so sharp. Just as the reader falls into the trap: that these people and this story is so ridiculous as to qualify as mind candy, that's the moment Irving springs one of his lines. "It's a no-win argument," he writes in the midst of describing Johnny's over-the-top cousin, "that business of what we're born with and what our environment does to us. And it's a boring argument, because it simplifies the mysteries that attend both our birth and our growth." Who among us doesn't wish to know more of said mysteries?

Owen Meany, the reader learns early, does not believe in coincidences. The notion of a coincidence is described by him as a "stupid, shallow refuge sought by stupid, shallow people who were unable to accept the fact that their lives were shaped by a terrifying and awesome design." Given the structure of Owen Meany, I think it's fair to ask whether it is John Irving who does not believe in coincidences....and whether he might be at least a little bit correct.

Five stars.

7 1/2 Lessons About the Brain

 Lisa Feldman Barrett's 7 1/2 Lessons About the Brain is a slim little volume, and timely (more on that in a minute); probably if you haven't spent the last 3-4 years reading all of the neuroscience you could get your hands on, it's more interesting and more informative that what I may make it seem because I have read so much on the brain these past few years.

That said, it's well-written, and owing to the structure (each lesson is a chapter) and clean, concise writing, it's a fairly quick read. Having been published in 2020, the science is certainly the leading edge of what neurologists and others know; I'm heartened to read that both the resiliency and plasticity of the brain are ever-greater than has been understood in the past (which was ever-greater than previously thought, which was ever-greater, and so you get the idea). 

In terms of getting the most out of plasticity, Feldman Barrett details the neurological advantages of acculturation, which is "an extreme version of plasticity." As acculturation occurs when we are thrust into unfamiliar cultures and most respond to even the most basic interactions - such as how to greet one another, or navigating personal space and hand gestures - on the fly, it's fair to say that Feldman Barrett makes the case that travel is neurologically helpful. The book does not include any studies on the brains structures of those who have experienced such acculturation as compared to those who have not - and such studies may not even exist - but it doesn't seem a bridge too far to imagine that they exist....and that such differences may further explain the challenges various groups of people have in understanding one another.

Speaking of which..... I mentioned the "timeliness" of this book: Feldman Barrett speaks to the neurological underpinning of why humans prefer to exist in an echo chamber, the advantages and disadvantages of which are only too apparent these days, but - in no small part because of how our brains are wired - increasingly difficult to escape. As Feldman Barrett notes, "your nervous system is bound up with the behavior of other humans, for better or for worse." 

It is in the closing pages that she strikes at the heart of the matter, which is the ability of the collective mind to create and shape social reality. "Social reality may be one of our greatest achievements but it's also a weapon we can wield against each other. It is vulnerable to being manipulated. Democracy itself is social reality." Truer words...

The Song of the Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinctions

I read this book years ago and loved it - it set me on the path of reading much more by David Quammen, and much more non-fiction in general. As the years have passed and I've become fuzzier on the details, I decided to reread it. My first thought, is that I am glad I read this when I was working on my dissertation and clearly had greater...patience...for the scientific aspects of the work. Which should not be taken to mean that it's entirely dry or dull - far from it. It is the case that there's more discourse around competing theories than I remembered and more hard science, but there are plenty of Quammen's own adventures, and all of it - from the hard science to the unlikely encounters - is rendered beautifully.

Interspersed with the hypotheses and journal article excerpts are the anecdotes of Quammen's own travels, the  hilariously self-deprecating stories that led me to declare a decade ago that I wanted to *be* David Quammen when I grew up. As I read about him being mugged in Rio, for example, I could not help but think, "I should not be laughing this hard," and yet also recognize he's selected his words to have just that affect upon the reader. Obviously any author who writes of his half-hearted attempts to ensure he doesn't run into one of the world's deadliest serpents in Tasmania: "I place [my feet] as carefully, anyway, as a person can who's foolish enough to be hiking through the outback at night in cheap running shoes while wearing a headlamp that isn't turned on" is strongly suggesting the reader shouldn't take him too seriously.

While the pendulum swings between hilarity and sobriety, Quammen is always deadly serious, and quietly poignant. It could hardly be otherwise when the recurrent themes are "insular evolution, for all its wondrousness, tends to be a one-way tunnel toward doom," or more succinctly, "islands are where species go to die." I was reminded more than once of Hariri's Sapiens, though Quammen was ahead of the game on the measure by which Homo sapiens were afflicting their damage on the planet by some twenty years. Quammen writes "what it has done here in Guam is precisely what Homo sapiens has done all over the planet: succeeded extravagantly at the expense of other species;" this sentiment is virtually the hypothesis around which Sapiens is written! (It's in the final pages where the parallels are most striking, though, particularly the observation that "the richness of the Earth's ecosystems might recover to previous levels within, oh, ten or twenty million years, assuming that Homo sapiens itself has meanwhile gone extinct too.") So there's the rub: to save the planet, we must eliminate ourselves. 

More than the thoughts Quammen provokes, his prose remains the crown jewel of the book. Whether in the form of a quick turn-of-phrase tucked into a longer sentence (such as the description of something as a "gloriously improbably gambit"), or writing about a scientist who continues to believe that an animal is not quite extinct, despite what Quammen terms empirical discouragement ("that's what faith is: belief that transcends data," a beautifully concise observation with applicability far beyond luckless conservation officers), Quammen's writing remains among the best I have encountered. Questioning the accuracy of one's recollection, Quammen writes "There's surely some little human detail, incidental, piercingly vivid, so poignant that even memory chooses not to remember it." That line stopped me: what in my life had fallen into that category? What tiny details had I subconsciously judged so poignant that even memory chose not to remember? 

But when the topic is the very survival of so many species - when the outcome, should we continue on the current trajectory can be only that "the world will be an emptier, lonelier place," - how can Song of the Dodo be imbued with anything other than poignancy and reflection? Whatever urgency Quammen felt as he researched and wrote this book in the 90s, that urgency is only greater today. For that reason, I find it a shame that Dodo has the heft of a doorstop: more people need to read these words, to consider what it means that "there are no hopeless cases, only people without hope and expensive cases," to weigh the value of flora and fauna against those of unrelenting development.

Where the Wild Ladies Are

I almost gave up on this book, which is described on Amazon as a "witty and exuberant collection of feminist retellings of traditional Japanese folktales." Both the wit and the exuberance build as the folktales progress, gradually linking together. Which is to say that I didn't get it at all for probably the first one-third, and then enjoyed the remainder of it well enough, though it won't be making any "best of" lists that I compile this year. That said, Aoko Matsuda's work is certainly interesting in what it represents, and there were a number of instances where I found myself laughing despite myself. (I also learned that Japanese pillows are stuffed with azuki beans - at least some of them - which is obviously why they're so amazing. I may add pillowmaking to my 2021 goals.) 

Matsuda should be lauded for the insights, too, as to the role of role of women, particularly in Japan. Most poignantly, she writes "Male employees had to pretend to be capable of doing things they couldn't do, while female employees had to pretend to be incapable of doing things they actually could do. Over the years, how many women had seen their talents magically disappear in that way?" In that sense, Where the Wild Ladies Are offers a modern-day corollary to Stranger in the Shogun's City, in which Japanese women struggle to find their place and controls their lives in the Edo era. Or, as Matsuda so succinctly puts it: how restrictive life as a functional adult is!

I am a sucker for all things Japanese, and the icing on the cake, if you will, was the late appearance of Himeji Castle, the sight of which first awed me - like so many others - from the window for the Shinkansen on my first visit to Japan. The castle tales, as well as stories of other quiet rhythms of life in Japan, was worth the wait.

Three stars. 

This Is It: and Other Essays on Zen and Spiritual Experience

 Disappointing. 

Having read and loved several other books by Alan Watts, I pushed through this one hoping that it would improve, that the humor or grace or joy which so imbue his other works would appear, to say nothing of the golden words. How could it be that the man who penned "by all outward appearances our life is a spark of light between one eternal darkness and another" (Wisdom of Insecurity) or mused that one might swim to experience the water rippling past and for the shifting net of sunlight underneath (Still the Mind) managed essay after essay of long-winded sentences such as "the apparent multiplication of psychological disorders in our technological culture is perhaps due to the fact that more and more individuals find themselves caught in these snarls - in situations which the psychiatric anthropologist Gregory Bateson has called the "double-bind" type, where the individual is required to make a decision which at the same time he cannot or must not make." Sweet mercy. (The great irony is that Watts details his experiences with LSD in this book, so one would think if anything this little volume would be as given to fun as any others: no dice.)

Oh sure, there are still bits and pieces of sage advice and insights, my favorite of which centers on the Japanese and the "compulsion which turns every craft and skill into a marathon of self-discipline." Truer words... More poignantly, Watts notes that in gazing at the night sky "we make no comparison between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations" and that "there would be no bright stars without dim stars, and, without the surrounding darkness, no stars at all." Likewise, in the final pages, Watts leaves readers with the observation, proven so true to me in this interminable year that has been 2020 that "life organized so as to be completely foolproof and secure is simply not worth living." Still, these paltry lines feel like minor compensation for the slog through This Is It.

One star.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind is as its title proclaims: a brief history of humankind. It's also a brief - and disturbing - history of humankind's impact on the planet and the other species, including those that were arguably human, that call it home. Spoiler alert: Harari minces no words in labeling Homo sapiens "ecological serial killers." It's hard to disagree. In any event, Harari manages to combine not only a general history, in which he effectively makes the case that our hunter-gatherer forebears of 10,000 years ago were happier and healthier than much of humankind today - with economic history (the origins of money and credit, the early trade routes, globalization in all its glory) and even aspects of philosophy. 

In regards to the latter, Harari in fact takes a sharp turn late in the book and goes as far as to pose the question of whether happiness depends on deluding oneself. (In case you can't tell, yes, I liked the book, and the writing, very much.) In fact, Harari's dry humor is on display from the first chapter when he declares, "Sapiens...is more like a banana republic dictator." I shouldn't have been surprised when a few dozen pages later, as he explains that the average sapien brain has actually decreased in size since we stopped having to hunt or forage our daily bread and that, in fact, the transition away from the survival lifestyle opened up "niches for imbeciles," which allowed the less....worthy?...to survive and pass on their unremarkable genes.

Time and again, Harari drives home the point that humans, excuse me, Homo sapiens, have lied, stolen, killed, and otherwise ruined things every opportunity they've had, literally from time immemorial. In the time of Hammurabi, "Superiors got all the good things in life. Commoners got what was left. Slaves got a beating if they complained." Cortes described the Spanish obsession with gold to the Aztecs succinctly as a "disease of the heart;" the Soviet experiment with the central barter system meant that "Everyone would work according to their abilities, and receive according to their needs," became "everyone would work as little as they can get away with and receive as much as they could grab." And let's not get into the scourge of religion where, for example, "over the course of...1,500 years, Christians slaughtered Christians by the millions to defend slightly different interpretations of the religion of love and compassion." (I told you, Harari's good.)

The miracle, it seems, is that we've survived to this point. Whether the species will continue to evolve for millenia more, though, is an open question. As Harari concludes, "is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don't know what they want?" 

Four stars.

...and the Rain my Drink

...and the Rain my Drink is Han Suyin's 1956 novel set during the Malayan Emergency (i.e., the Malaysian fight for independence from British rule following the centuries of colonialism). The title derives from an old Chinese ballad that the fighters sang, "I will go to the forest for justice. The wind for my garment I wear. ... and the rain my drink."

I'll dispense with the negatives first: there are simply so many characters here, and many of them with two or more names, that I sometimes found it difficult to keep up with who was who (as well as various plot points involving different characters).

In the plus column, the book is beautifully written, and provides an excellent history and context for those who wish to know more of the this time and place. Reading through those lenses, rather than reading this as a typical novel, allowed me to appreciate it ... and the Rain my Drink even when I was a bit lost in the weeds of the story itself.

Suyin's sympathies clearly lie with the jungle fighters, and how could it be otherwise when "there was no door to the future for them, save through the green mouth of the jungle." (Much later in the book, the other side of the coin is articulated clear as day: " All over South East Asia there were white men pointing out, loud and long, how bad freedom was for anyone but themselves.") For that reason alone this is a great read for anyone who wants to understand more of Southeast Asia, particularly without the distortion of European perspective.

This particular book may be fiction, but the events that underpin each page are grounded in the very real history of Malaya. Anyone seeking to understand the tensions between Malays and Chinese within Malaysia (whom Suyin describes as wielding wealth, but not power, a description which is still apt in parts of the region), where even today each ethnicity's roles and functions in society are codified into law, would do well to read this book, which provides historic background with fictional drama. (Likewise, although it was published before Singapore and Malaysia had separated, the coming chasm is well foreshadowed.)

And yet, while Suyin sympathizes with the fighters, she also recognizes the hardships for the majority who were caught in the middle: "...endured, as so many things were endured in these days between two terrors, that of the Police, and that of the People Inside." Suyin doesn't only capture the tensions of the Emergency, of those between Malay and Chinese, or between those who would fight and those who prefer to exist quietly. She also captures Malaysia - and all of Southeast Asia - in the unrelenting heat and the frequently demoralizing rains. British officers are frequently described as having "whiteskin fury," which explodes most commonly in the heat of the day, not only in Malaya, but in all the places of the Empire where "January is as July will ever be." Hot. Wet. Hotter.  

Likewise, Suyin captures a key difference between Europe and Asia, one which holds as much today as it did 65 years ago when she first penned it, and that is the notional of Europe as "staid, stay-behind and unimaginative behind the surging exaltation of Asia." (That, right there, is why 100 times out of 100 I will bet on Asia over Europe, but I digress.)

There is also quiet wisdom between these pages, the idea, for example, that "there is knowledge that is not knowledge, not in words and yet inhabits the mind, informs it with facts and events." At the time Suyin wrote ...and the Rain my Drink, Malay's future was still very much in flux and Suyin is grappling not only with the British but with questions of the changing world more broadly. Through the voice of her characters, she questions the price extracted by "that other jungle, the ravenous, stupid, loud brash jungle of money-making" and how the price life in that jungle compares to the damage inflicted on the soul by life in the literal jungle. The answers are as elusive as the People Inside.

A last piece of advice: "Remember....there is no such thing as defeat. There is only change of tactics."

Mambo in Chinatown

At 22, Charlie Wong knows little of life outside of Chinatown. The daughter of a Beijing ballerina - who never danced again after moving to America - and a noodle maker - who has raised Charlie and her younger sister, Lisa, alone following the death of his wife when Charlie was 14 - Charlie was never a stellar student and now finds herself at a bit of a deadend, working as a dishwasher in the same noodle restaurant where her father makes the noodles.

This insular world is upended when she accepts a job as the receptionist at a ballroom dance studio and slowly discovers the world beyond Chinatown, a world whose existence was largely a mystery to her. Gradually, Charlie's world separates into two parts - the life in Chinatown with her sister and father, from whom she must hide all aspects of her new life, and the new, Western life which she increasingly embraces. As her sister becomes sicker and sicker, though, and her uncle's Eastern medicine cannot restore her health, Charlie must find a way to bring together these two selves - the two ways of living and being - to help heal her sister. 

This is the first book by Jean Kwok that I've read, and I loved her voice. The settings - Chinatown and a professional dance studio - are both so particular, with such nuance, that it's clear Kwok knows of what she writes. Likewise, the infusion of eastern philosophy interspersed in otherwise very snappy (i.e., young and modern) prose, provides a unique voice - and offers sustenance such that Mambo in Chinatown moves out of the mind candy realm and feels a bit more like literature. Such food for thought, if you will, takes the form of lines like "The hardest part of making a sacrifice isn't the moment when you do it. That's the easiest. You're too busy being proud of yourself for being so noble. What's hard is the day after that and the following one and all of those days to come. It's needing to make that sacrifice over and over again, the rest of your life, while in your mind, you can still taste that which you lost. or what you think you lost." Indeed.

Four stars.

The Book of Eels: Our Enduring Fascination with the Most Mysterious Creature in the Natural World

What do we know that we do not know we know? Patrik Svensson comes as near to an answer as I have found: "maybe we subconsciously read our surroundings and come to conclusions we don't even understand ourselves."

From the first page, Svensson hooks the reader with his writing, that evocative imagery that whispers that one will learn of more than eels in these pages: "the Sargasso Sea is like a dream: you can rarely pinpoint the moment you enter or exit; all you know is that you've been there." Like the adept fisherman the reader will learn him to be, Svensson reels the line in slowly, the reader ever more gradually falling under his spell, realizing that the subject of the book is not eels at all, but life itself and the origins of life and the ever-elusive knowing that so many seek, so often without, well, knowing. 

The Book of Eels is, in fact, a treatise to make any philosopher proud. Early and often Svensson reminds the reader that life is often first and foremost about waiting; yet "time is unreliable company and no matter how slowly the seconds tick by, life is over in the blink of an eye." Also unreliable: the mind and memory; what we think we know of who we are and where we come from, our whims. How else to explain the fact that humans will go to great lengths to free ourselves from fate, sometimes even succeed, only to realize "we have no choice but to travel back to where we came from." 

Svensson is taken with the eel not only for sentimental reasons, but for the mysteries it offers; in that sense, the eel becomes a metaphor for life itself. The eel, even today, is widely accepted as one of science's last mysteries. As much as that may niggle, Svensson revels in the fact - the belief - that "even people who trust in science and an orderly natural world sometimes want to leave a small, small opening for the unknowable." It is the ambiguities that Svensson probes repeatedly, the question, for example, of where to draw the line between life and death, of needing to juxtapose the idea that "the person with patience is always awarded eventually" with the caution that "suddenly, one day, it's too late."

A friend likes to ask how much of our lives are the products of hard work, effort, and self-determination and how much is the product of pre-determination, of fate and destiny. I'm not foolish enough to attempt an answer to such a question, though I have long believed that what we need in life - whether books or ideas or people - comes to us when we need them. I heard an eerie echo of that sentiment in Svensson's own belief that "you find what you want to believe in when you need it."

My money, though, is that Svensson leans heavily toward pre-determination. Certainly, the eel's course, from the currents that will carry it to rivers and streams of Europe to the inexorable pull to return to the Sargasso, exists far beyond the eel's control. And of his father, whose work as a road paver offered a sense of fulfillment "from knowing there's a certain permanence to what you make and that other people value it," Svensson wrote, "he was a worker because something bigger and stronger than him had chosen that life for him. The course of his life was pre-determined."

Like the eel, and pre-determined or otherwise, we all must find our way in the world. We are, metaphorically speaking, each of us bound for the Sargasso Sea, each to encounter so many diversions, so many potential pitfalls, and as for the eel, time is shorter than we think. The sand must not course through the hourglass before we've embarked toward the sea. But must we go there, to this metaphorical, almost mystical, sea? Svensson argues persuasively for this outcome: "the origin of the eel and its long journey are, despite their strangeness, things we might relate to, even recognize: its protracted drifting on the ocean currents in an effort to leave home, and its even longer and more difficult way back - the things we are prepared to go through to return home."

As Svensson thinks of the scientists whose life's work was the eel - who undertook to find the needle in the haystack, even when the haystack was an entire ocean - he concludes: "Perhaps there are people who simply don't give up once they've set their minds to answering a question that arouses their curiosity, who forge ahead until they find what they seek, no matter how long it takes, how alone they are, or how hopeless things seem." It is easy to forgot whether he is speaking of scientists, for whom the search was their Sargasso, or the eels themselves. In either case, the sentiment is equal parts melancholy and hopeful, like an eel passing a century at the bottom of a well, persevering to see a thing through. 

And why would an eel spend a century in a well? Because it cannot - will not - undergo its final metamorphosis to full maturity until it is ready and able to undertake the long and arduous journey back to the Sargasso. Which begs the question Svensson asks again and again: how does the eel knows when it's time? When is the eel ready - when are we ready - for the metamorphosis from which there can be no turning back? What kind of voices tells the eel when to forsake the comforts of its muddy home for the uncertain, and often unsuccessful, journey to the sea? What kind of voice tells us when it's time for a similar departure? When life doesn't turn out the way it was supposed to, an eel can put everything on hold, and postpone dying almost indefinitely. What are our options when life looks so very different from what we had imagined?

Through the power of Svensson's pen, the eels of The Book of Eels change shape as regularly as those that ply the earth's waters. In the Basque country and Northern Ireland, in the fish shanties that dot the coast of Sweden, the eel is a cultural heritage. Later it is an endangered species, an exemplar of man's meddling with nature, a canary in the coal mine of global warming. It is a centerpiece in regional cuisines and the holy grail of scientific knowledge; the object of literature, and the center of political disputes. 

Always, though the eel is the representative of the great unknown and, by proxy, faith. No mature silver eel has ever been seen in the Sargasso, Svensson is keen to remind, but we take it as an article of faith that those waters are the spawning grounds. "When it comes to eels," Svensson writes, "not only are science and the eel itself suspect, you can't trust God either. Or God's interpreters. Or words." Svensson leaves it to the reader to infer the follow-up question: if God and words are not to be trusted in relation to the humble eel, in what other, larger circumstances can we not trust that which we think we understand?

We are, Svensson implies, more like the eel than we realize. Every eel seeks its place in the world without a guide, existentially alone. The eels may all aim for the same destination, but each journey is singularly unique. "And seeking a place in the world on one's own: Surely that is, at the end of the day, the most universal of all human experiences." On our own. We are borne into the world alone, and we are borne out of it alone and no matter how surrounded we are while we are here, our journey is also alone. 

Just as we carry in our veins the "salty stream in which the elements sodium, potassium, and calcium are combined in almost the same proportions as in sea water," though generally without knowing it is thus, or giving the fact much thought, so we are, each of us, bound for our own Sargasso Sea, wittingly or otherwise. Perhaps it is just chance that tells us when it is time to stay or to leave, or perhaps it is part of what we know that we do not know we know. Like the eel, most of us may not make it, but that some do is evidenced by the quiet beauty of works such as this. Svensson has found the Sargasso Sea; The Book of Eels is his spawn. Were that I should find mine and the outcome should be half as magnificent.

Permission to Feel: Unlocking the Power of Emotions to Help Our Kids

The mood meter inside the book jacket sucked me in immediately because of my (visceral, negative) reaction to the emotions in the "green" quadrant, which I (correctly) assumed would be presented as the emotional ideal for much of life. 

Honestly, much of the green quadrant fills me with dread. Restful? Blessed? Peaceful? Serene? Are people who regularly feel this way even fully, you know, alive? My home turf, the spot I think of as my resting pulse, is somewhere between Restless and Energized, Annoyed and Pleased. If I'm not totally red, I'm at least a shade orange.... And whatever it may say about me - as a person or a parent - kindness, sense of purpose, and the wisdom to build healthy, lasting relationships are not the skills I'm most desirous of my son possessing as he grows up. Confidence, yes, but from there Brackett and I diverge. Oh, I'm not most focused on math skills, scientific knowledge, or athletic ability, but a sense of justice; resilience, grit, and determination; and a quick wit and silver tongue take precedence over Brackett's trifecta any day of the week.

That said, once I moved beyond our philosophical differences, I quite like Brackett's methodology. The idea of using an emotional RULER (Recognizing, Understanding, Labeling, Expressing, and Regulating) is undoubtedly valuable, and although many of the emotions that I want G to be able to articulate do not appear on the mood meter, even using those that do is good practice. And what doesn't appear? The absence of the cerebral emotions feels like a loss to me, or a missed opportunity at a minimum. Where do skepticism or ambivalence fit? Feeling conflicted? Regretful? Exasperated? Aroused? Stifled? Amused? Objectified? Vindicated? The ever-popular feeling of schadenfreude? Indebted....which does also always render one grateful. 

You get the idea. Although the Mood Meters captures some 100 "moods" too much overlaps for my taste (tired and fatigued or blissful and fulfilled), particularly given that the more nuanced emotions are missing. Are despairing and despondent not the same side of the same coin? This wouldn't bother me so much if Brackett didn't regularly make the point that the richer a child's emotional vocabulary, the more successful they will be in applying the precepts of RULER and, ultimately, in regulating their emotions. Or, as the neuroscientists say, and Brackett quotes, "If you can name it, you can tame it."

I appreciate Brackett's acknowledgment of the fallacy of happiness, and specifically that the pursuit of happiness can be self-defeating. With my son I discuss the obligation all of us has to make the world somewhat better - not to litter, not to lie, to vote against bad ideas and worse policies, to consume less and appreciate more, but I'm careful never to suggest any of this should be done with an eye toward the ever-ephemeral "happiness." And, though I can't exactly put my finger on why, the cynic in me may have laughed a bit at the idea of devoting time and thought to our positive moments so that we may discover ways to extend them.

I've read enough neuroscience books the past few years to discern who can write well enough to be enjoyed by the masses, versus who I'm going to need a medical dictionary to decipher, and happily Brackett falls into the former category. I particularly enjoyed his anecdote on cultural difference in Croatia as well as the many tales out of academia. Ah, students.

In terms of Emotions at Work: I enjoyed the contrast between this and Robert Greene and would be interested in what each of them would think of the other.

Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town

Barbara Demick's Eat the Buddha is a clear-eyed look at how the situation in Tibet evolved from the early twentieth century, when Tibet was largely independent until today when 'Free Tibet' is the first thing many of us, especially in the West, think of when he hear mention of this place. (Full disclosure: the first thing I think of is that the Tibetan plateau is widely regarded as the most remote place on earth, requiring a journey of 21 days - one by car and 20 by foot - from the nearest city, Lhasa. True story, and one that I include in my urbanization lecture each semester, but I digress.) 

Like so many geopolitical issues facing the world today, we can thank the British Empire for meddling where they shouldn't have, and setting in motion the chain of events that has led to the current situation. As Demick notes, it was the euphemistically labeled "expedition" into Tibet by British colonel Francis Younghusband in 1903 which turned Chinese attention toward the strategic importance of this vast but lightly people plateau. And it's not just me blaming the British; as Demick writes, "many Tibet scholars blame Britain for the subsequent calamities that befell Tibet" (p. 20). Clearly, then, we can put this up there was the Opium Wars and the Sykes-Picot agreement. 

Brits aside, the challenge for the Tibetans, once China turned its full attention in that direction is that it lacked a major "sponsor" (such as the US or USSR) and was ruled by a teenager - the Dalai Lama. Although one can argue the damage has been done, Demick does state the obvious, lest the reader miss it: picking a successor [to the Dalai Lama, ruler of Tibet] be reincarnation is admittedly a dysfunctional system" (p. 258). Likewise, she can't help but pounce on the absurdity of the Chinese Communist Party declaring that it alone will control the selection of the next Dalai Lama, writing "the idea of these Communist technocrats weighing in on matters of reincarnation prompts much hilarity."

Although Demick's sympathies are clearly with the Tibetan people, her account comes across as balanced (she was a staff writer for the LA Times, after all), and provides a fascinating look at a little known corner of the world, particularly as she focuses her attention on the area around Ngaba, which is located in China proper, not, frankly, all that far from Sichuan and other better-known regions of that vast country. At a time when journalism frequently comes under attack, Eat the Buddha also serves as a reminder of the importance of the craft - and the run of the mill hazards journalists face under the best of circumstances (i.e., when they're not evading hostile security forces). For example, in the course of writing this book, Demick fell into an open sewage ditch. Good naturedly, she remarks that it wouldn't have been so bad, except that the water at the hotel was not working and she was unable to bathe. Journalism in Tibet is clearly not for the faint of heart for oh-so-many reasons.

In any event, Ngaba drew Demick's attention originally for the frequency of the acts of self-immolation that occurred there. (These Demick describes in detail, including the shocking, and horrifying, fact that many of those who committed the act would first consume petrol in order to burn from both the inside and the outside. On the plus side, this preparation virtually guaranteed death; as Demick explains, the only thing worse than self-immolating might be to survive such an attempt.) 

As a result of these regular acts of defiance, China cracked down on the region, and cracked down hard, such that from 2011 to 2013, it was nearly impossible to do so much as place a phone call from Ngaba to Beijing.You could forget about Internet, which was entirely unplugged, and heaven help you if you've spared so much as a thought for obtaining a passport. (Even leaving the immediate area to travel elsewhere in China can be daunting, requiring significant paperwork in a place where, not surprisingly given that much of the population still herds goats and yaks, "bureaucratic requirements were challenging for Tibetans raised in a nomadic culture that wasn't strong on paperwork." Strong on paperwork, me thinks is a euphamism about on par with Younghusband's "expedition" that left several thousand dead.)

No wonder, then, that so many Tibetans, especially young Tibetans, sought to flee, typically to India by way of Nepal. Demick follows this harrowing journey, including the necessary zip line across the roaring Sun Kosi River, whose rushing rapids comprise the border from Tibet proper to Nepal. The cost of this one way trip is $10,000 per head. Mercy. 

Eat the Buddha, whose title derives from the starving Red Army soldiers who resorted to looting the monasteries and eating the flour-and-butter religious statues, which to Tibetans, made it seem as though they were eating the Buddha, should be required reading for anyone who wants to better understand the tensions in Tibet, the history between China and Tibet, and the role outside powers, including Britain and the U.S. have played in the region over the years. More than that, though, this is an intimate look at lives lived much as they were centuries ago - men and women who herd yak and burn butter lamps, collect yak dung and caterpillar fungus, who generally want little more than to be left in peace, albeit with the same conveniences - cell phones and electricity, say - that are elevating the quality of life the world over. 

Demick's story ends on the cusp of today - the coronavirus makes an appearance in the closing pages, with Demick speculating how societal changes as a result of the public health emergency may lead to longer lasting measure even after the epidemic has passed. As she poignantly notes of those who have left Tibet - but which one could reasonably assume also applies to those who remain, "they were regular people who hoped to live normal, happy lives...without having to make impossible choices between their faith, family, and their country" (p. 273). Were that it were so simple, in Tibet and everywhere.

Stranger in the Shogun's City: A Japanese Woman and Her World

I am, of course, a sucker for all things Japanese. Even so, Amy Stanley's Stranger in the Shogun's City, the biographical account of a thrice-divorced, provincial Japanese woman who leaves her snowbound village for the big city of Edo, is a particular treat. 

By all odds, Tsuneno should have remained unknown, her life and times, loves and losses relegated to the dustbin of history, the years only deepening her anonymity. She was born in 1801, the oldest daughter of a Buddhist priest in the small village of Ishigami, destined to live a life like that of all the women before her: sweeping floors, tending the brazier, comforting the parishioners of a small temple, and above all, raising a large and numerous family. This was the lot of women in Japan - and around the world, let's face it - in 1801 (and while we're facing the music, we need to acknowledge that in much of the world, it still is today). 

Tsuneno never could reconcile herself to such a life though, cycling through husbands the way other women of her era may have cycled through kimonos. Unlikely though her story is, it is surely not singular. Perhaps most unique is the level of literacy Tsuneno attained. As the daughter of a priest, and thus in preparation for being able to provide support and assistance to a future husband in the running of another temple, such literacy was deemed critical; the letters she would later exchange with her increasingly exasperated family are the fruit of that education.

Stanley is a professor of history; that she stumbled upon Tsuneno's story is a great good fortune. As she notes early, there was nothing particularly noteworthy about the collection of correspondence assembled and maintained first by Tsuneno's father, Emon, and then her oldest brother, Giyu.The tax bills, the loan statements, the memoranda from samurai and planting records were no different than those of any other temple family. What set them apart were the letters. Letters to, from, and about Tsuneno. Ultimately, the entire archive, "rather than telling the orderly story of a family, would begin to tell a different story: hers." 

And what a story! Married off at 12 for the first time, by her mid-30s, Tsuneno had been married and divorced three times, all to men of her father's choosing. Desperate not to be married off yet again, she made a decision - the first independent and consequential decision of her life - to run off to Edo, even then one of the largest cities on earth. As Stanley writes, using Tsuneno's own penetrating, heartbreaking words, "When I wasn't brave, I got caught up in unpleasantness no matter what I did." (An echo from the past reminding all of us today of what happens when we aren't brave: reader, take note.) In Edo she marries again, her fourth husband, but the first of her choosing. Their life - her life - would not be easy, but for the first time, it would be her own.

Tsuneno is endearing; it is one of her letters (available online through the Niigata public archive) that first captured Stanley's imagination, and with which Stanley hooked me in her prologue: To mother, from Tsuneno (confidential). I'm writing with spring greetings. I went to Kanda Minagawa-cho in Edo -- quite unexpectedly -- and I ended up in so much trouble! A confidential letter from daughter to mother detailing so much trouble? Indeed. It is Stanley, though, who brings Tsuneno - and Edo - alive.

Oh Edo! Stanley's descriptions of the Shogun's city with its bannermen and maidservants, the vendors and carpenters, Nihonbashi and Shinjuku and the kabuki theaters! The fire towers, the noodle stalls, the slap of sandals and the cicadas, the temples and their festivals and sea of umbrellas to fend off the summer rains. All of this jumps from the page; it is the Edo-Tokyo museum come to life, and if Stanley's descriptions don't make you want to march backwards in time and experience Edo for yourself, well you just never quite loved Tokyo as much as I did. 

And then Stanley does the most remarkable thing. This book, which I believed wholeheartedly to be a biography of one of the masses, and an ode to Edo before Perry's ships heralded irrevocable change, becomes instead a treatise on the role of women. In hindsight, Stanley has sprinkled the clues  throughout, as when she writes bluntly, "the only goal was to move toward a life that held some hope of change, where she wouldn't be buried alive under a dying old man, in a lonely little village." That sentence took my breath away. When I think of how suffocating life in 21st century America can sometimes be, well, I'll leave it at that.

So while she could have written an engaging biography of Tsuneno and a marvelous history of Edo, Stanley goes one step further. This book becomes a record of the contributions of the countless Tsunenos. This remarkable passage appears in the closing pages:

"...if women like her hadn't come in from the countryside, Edo wouldn't have grown. If they hadn't washed floors, sold charcoal, kept the books, done laundry, and served food, its economy could not have functioned. And if they hadn't bought theater tickets, hairpins, bolts of cloth, and bowls of noodles, the shogun's great city wouldn't have been a city at all. It would have been a dusty military outpost full of men, one of a thousand, not worth all the effort. Tsuneno's legacy was the great city of Edo: her ambition, her life's work...she might have said that the experience of Edo changed her. But she also shaped the city" (p. 236, 237).

That paragraph is a testament to work and lives of women on down through time, their contributions so seldom recorded in the way that the fates captured Tsuneno's. Stranger in the Shogun's City is a phenomenal work of Japanese history, but it is an equally important work on women's history.