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.