Collected Miscellany

In an effort to expand my military history knowledge beyond the wars in the Twentieth Century, I decided to read Fred Anderson’s The War That Made America: A Short History of the French and Indian War. The book is an excellent summary of the French and Indian War in fewer than 300 pages.

Described by some as the first world war, the Seven Years War – or, as referred to in America, the French and Indian War – mainly pitted the British Empire against the French Empire. The book primarily focuses on the struggle between the combatants in North America with summaries of the War’s other significant events in Europe and elsewhere sprinkled throughout.

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I wanted to pass along this note from Bud Parr at MetaxuCafe:

All week long we will be covering the Pen World Voices Festival here at MetaxuCafe. In conjunction with the Words Without Borders blog, we will be covering over 30 events this week and posting at MetaxuCafe and other places around the Web. Highlights include an interview with Dubravka Ugresic (author of The Ministry of Pain) by James Marcus and photographs by Mary Reagan.

Here are the participants:

Words Without Borders blog
M.A. Orthofer, The Literary Saloon
James Marcus, House of Mirth
Levi Asher, Litkicks
Michelle Lin, NY Brain Terrain
Bud Parr, Chekhov’s Mistress
Mary Reagan, NYC Photo

Sarah Weinman will be attending on her own and sharing her thoughts on the “Taking Crime Fiction Seriously” discussion.

Be sure to check it out. And if you haven’t already Metaxu Cafe in general.

I am not the first person to note the irony, but let me say it again: if we went to war in Iraq for cheap oil we got screwed. The price for a barrel of oil just topped $72 and it doesn’t seem to be going down significantly any time soon. As a result, the price of gasoline is increasing just in time for summer vacations. Economists are worried that these high prices will slow economic growth. Throw in uncertainty surrounding Iran and things don’t look so pretty.

So who is to blame for all of this? (Besides Bush, Cheney and the rest of the Blood for Oil gang, of course!) In his book, Over the Barrel: Breaking the Middle East Oil Cartel, Raymond Learsy argues that OPEC (The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) bears a good deal of the blame and yet avoids facing the anger and frustration these prices engender. While Learsy believes there is plenty of blame to go around – including the President and his friends in the big oil companies – he saves his real ire for the powerful oil cartel. He sets out to detail the history of this powerful organization and to explain how we can work together to destroy it.

While almost everyone will find something to disagree with in terms of Learsy’s various arguments, the subject is critical and the history is fascinating and important. If you are interested in the intersection of geopolitics, business, and energy this is a book you should check out.

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In case anyone was wondering, I am not an undercover National Review marketer. They just post a lot of content that I find interesting. Case in point is this interview with Ramesh Ponnuru. I just finished reading Ponnuru’s excellent book The Party of Death: The Democrats, the Media, the Courts, and the Disregard for Human Life and will be posting my review soon. I also hope to do a Q&A with Ramesh. But since Kathryn Jean Lopez is his editor at NRO, she understandably gets first dibs.

Those who don’t already see themselves as agreeing with Ramesh might be tempted to ignore this book as simply another partisan rant. That would be a mistake. The book is remarkably evenhanded and balanced. This is not a rah rah GOP book, in spite of some of the language on the book’s cover jacket, but a serious and articulate discussion of the legal, scientific, philosophical, and political arguments surrounding “issues of life.” This is the first of a two part interview. Here are some useful snippets:

Lopez: You make clear in the book that the “party of death” in the title is not the Democratic party. Plenty of Republicans are members. But the Dems have embraced it with open arms, so aren’t they kinda sorta the party of death, or its main political manifestation?

Ponnuru: One of the stories the book tells is how abortion transformed the Democratic party from a party primarily concerned about protecting the weak to one that is more avid about defending the alleged rights of the strong. Pro-life Democrats have resisted this transformation, but it is certainly true that the Democratic party has become the party of unrestricted abortion, lethal research on human embryos, and euthanasia. The way I put it is that the party of death has largely taken over the Democratic party and has an outpost in the Republican party too.

Lopez: What do you say to people who say that conservatives are the “party of death,” since they have supported the death penalty and the Iraq war?

Ponnuru: I get that a lot from people who haven’t read the book. The most articulate defenders of abortion, some types of euthanasia, infanticide, and lethal embryo research argue for those things on the theory that the human beings they kill are not persons. My book argues against that theory and goes into the chilling implications of that view.

Articulate defenders of the death penalty and the Iraq war make very different arguments. They do not, that is, say that death-row inmates and Iraqi insurgents are “human non-persons.” Thus the death penalty and the war raise very different issues. This is not to say that the moral issues raised by the war and the death penalty are not serious. (I think the moral issues raised by the death penalty are sufficiently serious that I oppose it.) It is only to say that they are mostly distinct from the ones that come up in this book.

In an attempt to broaden my horizons, I picked up Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods, a book about Bryson’s attempt at walking the Appalachian Trail.

The book generally entails Bryson’s decision to walk the Trail, his preparations for walking it, and his adventures while on the Trail. Let me tell you, his adventures are certainly interesting. His adventures begin even before he hits the Trail – by asking a number of people if they want to join him. Nobody agrees except for one person at the last minute – Stephen Katz, a friend from years back.

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If you are looking for a fast paced plot and traditional characters then Tin God by Terese Svoboda is probably not for you. Part of the University of Nebraska Press Flyover Fiction Series, Tin God is instead a more dream like exploration of the timelessness of the earth and vagaries of human nature. Oh, and it is narrated by G-O-D. If you enjoy skillful prose used to illuminate interesting perspectives then you will enjoy Tin God.

The plot, such as it is, focuses on two stories set in the plains and separated by some five hundred years. In the first, a bumbling conquistador finds himself lost among the tall grasses and whispering natives after having fallen off his horse. Thanks to his blue eyes the natives take him for a god and send out a young virgin to try and capture his essence.

Five hundred years later in the same field we have two young men trying to find a bag of cocaine that they tossed out the window with a cop in hot pursuit. The search is complicated by the recent devastation of a tornado. Jim, who owns the land, needs to turn it over in order to get his government check. “Pork” needs to find the expensive bag of drugs before anyone else does so he can get on with his life as a male “dancer.”

The narrator god alternates between these two stories and slowly unwinds them – while musing on her interaction with humans and vice-versa – until we come to a climatic resolution of sorts. The story threads meet when Jim, digging with a back hoe and leaving his own monument to the past, uncovers traces of the conquistador’s travels.

So what to make of this short unique novel? I must say that I enjoyed it. It is unconventional and can be slow in parts, but it is also evocative and thought provoking. It isn’t the kind of book you pick up and can’t put down until you are finished, but I found it to be an enjoyable bedside table read. Below are my scattered thoughts and reactions.

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