Oh, there's more (as well as forays into other areas of reading), but here in alphabetical order are volumes in the library, some having gathered dust for years, having been picked off the thrift store shelf for $0.95 years ago and set aside, some purchased new through Amazon and fearsome in their physical beauty--cover art, paper, typography--some, also through Amazon, found used in the hands of other vendors and affordable as first editions.
If a man should live as well as to have a library, a garden, and a woman, count him lucky indeed!
Demaris, Ovid. Brothers in Blood: the International Terrorist Network. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1977.
Ovid Demaris classic history covers terrorist history in a manner impartial to ethnic, ideological, or religious motivation. In fact, and I think most clearly, anarchic bids for power through violence for the hell of it as well as so many atrocities committed in the name of the good cause receive equal play.
Eck, Matthew. The Farther Shore. Milkweed Editions, 2007.
Matthew Eck's novel ranks among the first (although I can't yet tell you what the second might be) of fictions to come out of the conflict model developed in a Somlia-like country. Along with "war is personal"--I'll have more to say about that in a moment--I have found through media, including these books, that it creates a playground, whimsical and torturous by turns, of odd events and displaced people and things. In his book, Eck's characters move through environments devoid of front-page politics and defined by tactics and experiences reduced to the want of survival. The author's first book turns out a fine one.
Gilbertson, Ashley. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot: A Photographer's Chronicle of the Iraq War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
I have mentioned and reviewed this volume elsewhere on this blog. For a short note, call it a young man's odyssey through the odd and strange with a side trip into the horrific.
Hirsi Ali, Ayaan. Infidel. New York: Free Press, 2007.
Native Somalian Ayaan Hirsi Ali cum Dutch citizen and first-rate fellow at the American Enterprise Institute tells of crossing the bridge to the west while fairly burning it behind her, and that not without cause.
Hisham, Matar. In The Country of Men. New York: The Dial Press, 2006.
In this novel set in an authoritarian arab country, the life of secrets becomes a boy's experience of the mysterious and dangerous environment swirling around the lives of his family and those of friends.
Hitchens, Christopher. god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. New York: Hachette Book Group USA, 2007.
Less an argument for athiesm, I think, then for temperance and tolerance among all, Hitchens dredges up the unholy dirt that has come out of the history of cultures and political systems as a direct result of ideological as well as religious fanatacism.
Well, how hard both "temperance and tolerance" are to install in our hearts.
Around here, to be personal about it, I throw out Hitchens and she throws back Collins or C.S. Lewis, Christian advocates both.
As many a secular Jew before me, I'm on the agnostic universalist's track and have found in Hitchens good company for setting aside the divine (as a source of autodidactic intellectual amusement) in favor of looking more closely at all of existence, its many wonders, and its common principles.
Hosseini, Khaled. A Thousand Splendid Suns. New York: Riverhead Books, 2007.
Another Small Islamic War fiction, this one sings quite differently from Eck's tale of three soldiers in retreat: Hosseini, far more political and emphatic about it, inclines through caricature and character to illustrate life among those who could have cared so much less about politics. In his rendering of Afghanistan before the Taliban, during, and after, death visits the innocent and unsuspecting with sudden and monstrous ferocity.
Keegan, John. A History of Warfare. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993.
The medical classes have long treated guns and wars alike as elements in epidemiology. There are days here when I'm inclined to see war as an infernal force in nature, an irresistable urge among men, usually, to "bring it on" under the cover of every excuse under the sun. Keegan's work does nothing to allay that view and much to underscore it as it winds through the evolution of barbarians, brigands, and brigades.
Laquer, Walter. Guerrilla: a historical and critical study. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1976.
While Laquer covered the conditions and tactics amenable to the pursuit of guerrilla warfare, his book today may stand as a signal to all that, and this today if not tomorrow, the world knows few, if any, conventional conflicts. In fact, the failure, so far, of guerrilla practitioners to convert their efforts from small raids to, say, territory denied by barbed wire and tanks, strangely accounts for the contemporary persistence of warfare in human affairs. The states with much at stake plain don't want to launch their ships or, if the U.S., fight long for conquest outright, if at that at all, while much smaller political cabal and movements (and criminal enterprises if, say, in Columbia or Mexico) keep the national armies busy. All of today's hot zones, from Sudan to Iraq to the mountains of Pakistan, may be characterized as hosting internal guerrilla efforts representing, largely, localized civil disputes.
+Mahdi, Muhsin, Editor. The Arabian Nights. Husain Haddawy, Translator. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992.
I have listed The Arabian Nights as it has gone up on the shelves with some sensible company. Truth to tell, I read the entire volume out loud to a lover some years ago, and what a wonderful thing to discover these ancient mirrors that have survived through eventual transcription.
Malraux, Andre. Man's Fate. New York: Random House, 1984.
Taking up the cause of cause, identity, and personality with violence expressive of confusion, existence, love, and sacrifice may help keep this novel a classic among political tales. Although the work finds its mise en scene in an urban part of China's revolution, its appeal to the individual want of rightness in the way of things may find its corollary in similar violence involving the want of the authentic and ideal as well as not a little revenge on circumstances and events imposed by the powers of the day.
Patai, Raphael. The Arab Mind. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1973.
Patai's ethnography starts out in admiration and praise while winding up, despite its author's enthusiasms, in criticisms that might seem insufficiently challenged in today's Middle East. Big talk, disinterest in introspection, tribal chauvinism, cultural myopia--all the hallmarks of the trite caricature are there. Missing after 35 years: the Arab mind in Great Britain, Canada, and the United States. With due regard to the cautions of The Middle East Forum in regard to Islam, as often on as not on the Arab part (as opposed to, say, the Turkish), one hopes the virtues of the West have not been lost on those who have found their new space in it.
Despite its ageing, however, Patai's book, and much because of who he was as a friend and scholar cultivating knowledge and relationships across the changing borders around Jerusalem, remains a most generous and readable introduction for westerners to Arab culture.
Of today's states of affairs, one might say, "if we apprehend, we may misjudge; if we judge, we may misapprehend."
It helps to have a primer.
Watson, Paul. Where War Lives. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart Ltd., 2007.
I don't think Paul Watson ever says in his book that "war is personal", but it's from this book, and from his description of so many involvements, including photographing the body of a Marine sargeant being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu--his Pulitzer prize-winning moment, that event--that violence and its extension through war fairly alter and define lives.
Most stunning: Watson's retelling of the account of two girls raped at an Afghani warlord's checkpoint and the revenge taken by a local cleric who had drummed up a war party for the purpose and gone on into Pakistan to form up the Taliban that was to rid Afghanistan of such thugs.
"War is personal" is my mantra: Paul Watson's memoir provides plenty of inspiration for repeating it.
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