Pete Seeger died last Monday, January 27, 2014 - a giant figure in American history and culture over the last 70 years, yet a modest, unpretentious, and extremely likable person.  A great, quick sketch of Seeger was reviewed here previously - one particularly memorable chapter in the book describes Seeger's honest, brave, and wholly admirable refusal to answer HUAC's questions about his beliefs or loyalty to the United States - a black chapter in our history, thrown into relief by Seeger's humanity and courage.   Seeger was one of my heroes (along with Nelson Mandela and Abe Lincoln) and, although he lived a full, rich, and happy life, it's still sad to experience his passing.

An Edible History of Humanity - Tom Standage

An Edible History of Humanity was sort of entertaining, as it contains lots of colorful anecdotes, but much of it felt like a less substantive (and very derivative) version of Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemna (cf the discussion of corn). Moreover, I came away feeling like behind his pseudo-intellectualism, Standage is either really ignorant, or sort of a schmuck. His political beliefs, when they show through, are disturbing.

For example, Standage describes several instances of famines in which the native community starved, while exporting their food for consumption by wealthy foreigners.* However, evidently without realizing the irony in his position, Standage remains shockingly, unabashedly colonialist - he explains the danger of the current popularity of "local food" by stating that, "an exclusive focus on local foods would harm the prospects of farmers in developing countries who grow high-value crops for export to foreign markets. To argue that they should concentrate on growing staple foods for themselves, rather than more valuable crops for wealthy farmers, is tantamount to denying them the opportunity for economic development." I was dumbfounded when I read this... Below I have excerpted only 2 of several passages where Standage plainly describes the misery that results when poor farmers grow crops for wealthy foreigners, but this does not seem to have shaken his ideology.

He also extensively lauds the virtues of nitrogen farming while devoting exactly 1 paragraph to its dangers, trivializes the organic movement, and is a bit over-the-top in his rah-rah Capitalist, anti-Communist jingoism ("Is it a coincidence that the worst famine in history occurred in a Communist state?"). He's the business editor at the Economist, so maybe that explains it?

Anyway, I wish he would take some time out from copying Pollan's rhetoric to read a little Chomsky.

Sigh!

* On p.135, he states that "by the early 1840s, imports from Ireland were supplying one sixth of England's food. This food was produced by men who worked on the best, most easily cultivated land and were typically given small patches of inferior land on which they grew potatoes to support themselves and their families. The English could only keep eating bread, in short, because the Irish were eating potatoes." He later describes, on p.188, how under Mao in China, "the main cause of the famine was not inadequate food production so much as the farmers' lack of entitlement to it. The food they produced went to feed people in the cities, Party officials, and foreigners."

The Prince and the Pauper

This is one of Twain's "softer" books - although there is some social criticism and a few sad episodes, by and large this is a delightful story with many humorous incidents.  And the overall theme of the book is a paean to mercy - sympathy for one's fellow man and a willingness to help.  The device of virtual twins, one from the highest and one from the lowest station of life underscores that, as the Phil Ochs folksong says, "there but for fortune go you or I".  And Twain is a masterful storyteller with a powerful ability to build a mood and then demolish it suddenly with a piercing incident (no spoiler quote to follow!)  Very highly recommended.

The Teachings of Don Juan - Carlos Castaneda

Tonight I read Carlos Castaneda's "The Teachings of Don Juan" in a single sitting (I skipped part 2, his structural analysis of the teachings, which does not interest me). I became interested in this book in a sort of roundabout way - one part of Levack's Witch-Hunt that keenly aroused my interest was the offhand reference to the hallucinogenic "flying unguents" purportedly used by medieval witches, which may (in some cases) have inspired the visions of flying to the witches' sabbath. These ointments contained plants such as atropa belladona and datura, and in my online research into their effects, I came across the following passage from Castaneda:

"There was a question I wanted to ask him. I knew he was going to evade it, so I waited for him to mention the subject. I waited all day. Finally, before I left that evening, I had to ask him, "Did I really fly?," don Juan?"

"That is what you told me. Didn't you?"

"I know, don Juan. I mean, did my body fly? Did I take off like a bird?"

"You always ask me questions I cannot answer. You flew. That is what the second portion of the devil's weed is for. As you take more of it, you will learn how to fly perfectly. It is not a simple matter. A man flies with the help of the second portion of the devil's weed. That is all I can tell you. What you want to know makes no sense. Birds fly like birds and a man who has taken the devil's weed flies as such [el enyerbado vuela asi]."

"As birds do? [Asi como los pajaros?]."

"No, he flies as a man who has taken the weed [No, asi como los enyerbados]."

"Then I didn't really fly, don Juan. I flew in my imagination, in my mind alone. Where was my body?"

"In the bushes," he replied cuttingly, but immediately broke into laughter again. "The trouble with you is that you understand things in only one way. You don't think a man flies; and yet a brujo can move a thousand miles in one second to see what is going on. He can deliver a blow to his enemies long distances away. So, does he or doesn't he fly?"

Although I am disappointed that Don Juan the man appears to have been a fiction, I still find this passage very powerful, and am still intrigued by some of the arguments Castaneda attributes to him, such as his rejection of there being only one way to understand our physical relationship with the world.

Regardless of whether you want to take it or leave it as spiritually valid, certainly no one could deny that Castaneda is a powerful storyteller, and the concluding episode was so wild and gripping I forgot I was even reading a book until it was over. A powerful "state of nonordinary reality" induced by reading!

The wise Dad Juan

The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe - Brian P. Levack

Levack's work is a overview of the legal, political, economic, religious, and epidemic circumstances which he argues enabled the great witch-hunts of early modern Europe. Although witches have been a lifelong interest for me, and I was eagerly anticipating reading this book, I found it kind of disappointing, to be honest.

The scope feels too broad - Levack seldom dives deeply into the particulars of any given hunt, preferring to treat the issue in very general terms. The book is surprisingly dry and even boring, which seems nearly impossible, treating as it does the lurid topics of torture, naked dancing, and burning at the stake, which in this book are described in the most clinical, repetitious passages. Levack also almost never includes direct quotes from contemporaries, which would have spiced it up considerably.

I did learn a few things, but the book could have been a third as long and 10 times more exciting. Especially on the heals of Erickson's riveting historical drama about Mary Tudor, this was pretty dull. Would not recommend.

The Box of Delights

The Box of Delights is a sequel to The Midnight Folk (reviewed earlier) by John Masefield, the longtime poet laureate of England (I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky...)   Kay Harker is older now and returning home from school for the Christmas holidays.   He encounters an old, and rather odd, Punch and Judy man, who warns him that The Wolves are Running.  Commanding the Wolves and other servants of evil is Kay's old enemy, the wizard Abner Brown.  The illustrations in this lovely Folio edition are magical - and some of the story is also quite nice, though, like most sequels, this is not equal to the original in charm and adventure, though the language is still a pleasure.  Here's one nice quote, describing some truly odious pirates:

all bronzed with tropical suns, purple with drink, scarlet with battle, and bloated from evil living

Little Green

Like the previous Easy Rawlins mysteries, this is a lively and pleasurable read. The characters are fascinating, the dialog is vivid and often humorous, and the subtext always includes racial tension.  One of the more colorful character's is Easy's likable but extremely violent friend, Mouse.  In this book, for example, Easy is recovering from a near fatal auto accident - Mouse actually found and saved him - and after he has regained consciousness, Mouse takes Easy to his old apartment, which, they find, is now occupied by Jeffrey, who initially refuses to let them in.  Mouse takes out his long-barreled .41 and hits Jeffrey "in the center of his vast forehead."  Mouse again asks Jeffrey what he's doing here and he answers:

"I live here!  The man who owned this place died and I......I homesteaded it".

There was blood coming from Jeffrey's forehead, but we all knew that was the least of his problems."

 Well, in addition to the outlandish incidents, the social commentary is very interesting.  The events of Little Green are set within the hippie community of LA in the '60s and a recurrent observation of Easy's is how the hippies take a much more inclusive view of diversity - and that maybe this holds some hope for future relationships between black and white men. An interesting and entertaining read!

Bloody Mary: The Life of Mary Tudor

I am a member of goodreads.com (check out my profile here) and was dismayed to realize I only read 13 books in 2013. I have set myself a slightly more ambitious goal of 65 books for 2014, and am happy to say that it's a week into the new year and I just finished my second!

Carolly Erickson's Bloody Mary is a history that reads like an action adventure. This book was thoroughly engaging and immensely interesting.

Adored and publicly admired by her father as a young child, Mary's peaceful home life was destroyed when her father, always flirtatious, suddenly decided to pursue his love affair with Anne Boleyn beyond the bedroom, and with cold indifference and evident scorn cast aside his former wife, daughter, and religion. Mary was stripped of the title "Princess" and of all her fine clothes and possessions, tormented by Anne and her courtiers, denied medical treatment when sick, and kept for years as a veritable prisoner in a run-down and drafty old house.

Although Mary rose above seemingly insurmountable obstacles to become Queen, and was an impressive scholar who spoke excellent Latin and ruled with wisdom and moderation, and even compassion and clemency (by the standards of the day), she was never accorded the respect she deserved while she was alive, due to the "imbecility of her sex," and was later condemned in the public memory as a bloody tyrant.

This book illustrates the flavor of life during the period very colorfully, and portrays Queen Mary with perhaps greater subtlety and nuance than has been accorded her in the past.

Highly recommend!

Plagues and Peoples - William McNeil

This book by William McNeil offers an interesting interpretation of the way that epidemic disease has shaped the course of world history from ancient times to the present day, a topic that the author asserts has been neglected in traditional historical accounts. The book is written in a charmingly old-fashioned style which is pleasant to read, although it is at times a bit tediously wordy and the citations are sparser than I would like.

Nevertheless, here is one passage from the Introduction that I think provides a good example of the interesting theories underpinning this book:

Disease and parasitism play a pervasive role in all life. A successful search for food on the part of one organism becomes for its host a nasty infection or disease. All animals depend on other living things for food, and human beings are no exception. Problems of finding food and the changing ways human communities have done so are familiar enough in economic histories. The problems of avoiding becoming food for some other organism are less familiar, largely because from very early times human beings have ceased to have much to fear from large-bodied animal predators like lions or wolves. Nevertheless, one can properly think of most human lives as caught in a precarious equilibrium between the microparasitism of disease organisms and the macroparasitism of large-bodied predators, chief among which have been other human beings.

Originally published in 1977, parts are noticeably antiquated, but it remains an interesting and thought-provoking work which has sparked my interest in learning much more about the bubonic plague and the medieval period. 

S.A.S. Survival Handbook

Thank you very much, Mark, for this wonderful Christmas present! I had read about this some time ago as being the "definitive guide" to wilderness survival, a topic of great interest to me. This book is fantastic - based on a lifetime serving in the Special Air Service (SAS), an elite British army unit, Wiseman packs this invaluable book full of comprehensive, clear, practical information about building shelter, finding food and water, and staying safe and healthy in all emergency scenarios and situations. The diagrams are very clear, and his writing style is quaint. Very enjoyable to read, and who knows, one day it could save your life!!

On a related note, check out the CDC's fun and educational illustrated narrative on emergency preparedness, zombie style.

Understanding Power - Noam Chomsky

My book group's most recent selection (at my suggestion) was Chomsky's "Understanding Power." My friend Dan had urged me to read this book many times and I kept putting it off, thinking it would be boring and difficult. Nothing could be farther from the truth! This gripping book, although shocking and disturbing at times, was extremely interesting and readable. It is an edited transcript of Chomsky's various talks, and his style is clear and persuasive. I found this book to be profoundly eye-opening and unsettling regarding American politics and media censorship, and while I felt very disillusioned, it was important for me to have a better understanding of power and oppression in our nation. A must-read for everyone, I think!

Footnotes to the text are available here.