Walking on the Moon

David Finkel’s Thank You For Your Service shows us a cost of war that’s easy to miss or to misunderstand.  While there is an element of polemic to Service, this is a much deeper book than a simple call to arms.  Finkel is able take us into the lives of soldiers who have suffered horrifically in war but have also done so invisibly.  They are invisible because their wounds are internal.  They bear the traumas of nightmare experiences and of physical but internal brain injuries.

I’m not the writer or the journalist that Finkel is, so this review contains a lot of my conclusions from taking what he showed me and rolling it around in my head for a while.  Essentially I’m cooking in my biases and handing that information out. All readers of Service will do this. They will be able to do that because Finkel has been absorb the lives of these people and to depict them unflinchingly.  He has his biases, certainly, but his presentation is multi-faceted and nuanced.  One comes away with an understanding of the mammoth scope of the damage done, the people fighting to make it better, and the enormous and unexpected challenges facing the damaged and those trying to help.

One of the key things Finkel shows is how real the injuries of these people are.  It is difficult to explain how experiences that leave no physical marks are as debilitating and as clinical as amputations. I suspect many of you are not convinced by these sentences, which is why it’s worth reading his.  Initial skepticism – warranted though it may be – just cannot reasonably hold up against the unrelenting evidence that one sees when you follow these people for a while.  Basic functions of their brains are impaired; the evidence becomes too much to ignore. These aren’t touchy-feely or subtle injuries.  They are as clear and obvious as a severed limb once you take the time to look.  Finkel took the time to look and presents the facts in ways that cannot be ignored.

The resources being spent to fix these problems are woefully small compared to the problem.  One suspects that the people handing out the money don’t completely understand that these are real battlefield injuries, not people who are just sick of war.  In addition to having to face life damaged, the survivors are fighting to get even the smallest assistance learning to compensate for their injuries. Facing that with damaged brains only makes matters worse.

Finkel also alludes to a bigger problem.  It’s clear that even with all the money in the world we just don’t know how to help these people.  These people’s brains are damaged in ways no oone knows how to fix.  They will never have proper memory function again; we don’t know how to reset that breaker.

All of this makes this human cost more clear and tragic – there are many, many soldiers from our wars who are permanently and invisibly damaged.  Their injuries crush them, their spouses, and their friends while making it appear that they are merely irresponsible, not permanently injured.  The resources to help them are well beyond inadequate, but even with infinite resources, we don’t know what to do.

We need to stop doing this to people if we can avoid it.

All of this Finkel shows us without lecturing us.  He makes us figure it out and see it ourselves.

Strongly Recommended.

Kevin Roose’s The Unlikely Disciple was one of the most insightful and compassionate books I’ve read. Once you see a writer produce something like that, you have to give his next book a read no matter what.  Young Money is a look at entry level jobs on Wall Street and the people who took them in the middle of the biggest downturn since the Great Depression.

We start by meeting a set of new financiers who were willing to let Roose “embed” with them for a couple years of writing.  It’s clear that he was looking for a diverse lot, and does well at finding them.  He finds several women and minorities as well as people well off the Ivy League path that so often leads to these particular corridors of power. Roose connects us to these folks quickly and believably, and takes us with them on their trip into (and maybe back out of) high finance.

In addition we get a look at the combination of hazing, indoctrination, and training that is the entry level Wall Street experience.  Though Roose does his best to bring out the unique aspects of Wall Street, I was often struck by how much the young peoples’ experience resembled my graduate school experience.  Long hours, busy work, demands placed on you just to get you to demonstrate loyalty – yep, been there.  Of course, I wasn’t making $100K and living in New York, but …

All of this is well done and informative, but the key facet that Roose brings to this whole endeavour is his humanism and compassion.  The reader can tell that his biases are to dislike these folks.  He wants them to be greed-driven pirates who would run the country’s economy into the ground to gather money.  But he can’t do it.  Much as he did at Liberty University, he cannot stop seeing these story elements as young people.  He never loses their humanity.

They have their faults, and Roose puts those out there honestly.  But even when he’s relating the most boorish behavior exhibited by the most entrenched Wall Street villains – who probably did wreck the economy to make a fast buck – he can’t demonize them.  It’s a powerful skill and helps the book and the reader maintain a sense of perspective about the subject and the system.

Strongly Recommended.

I like reading Carl Hiaasen’s writing.  It’s always smooth, clear, and seasoned with perfect sentences.  His heroes are loveable rogues who wander the magical land of South Florida, savoring its beauty; his villains are short-sighted opportunists out to metaphorically strip-mine the place.  The plots are dazzling clockwork that brings these elements together in a charming dance.

The particulars always differ some, food inspectors as agents of justice, bilking Medicare instead of gouging hurricane victims, but the essential elements of a Hiaasen novel are all here.  Enjoy.  I did.

Recommended.

It is easy alarm people over the possibility of a pandemic.  The mass media does it every cold and flu season, which made me a little leery of David Quammen’s Spillover: Animal Infections And The Next Human Pandemic. I was pleasantly surprised.  This is an informative, well-reasoned and researched book about epidemiology.  Admittedly, this is a niche.

Quammen spends all of Spillover tromping the globe describing different diseases that have jumped from other species to mankind, with differing severe effects.  Outbreaks of Ebola or Hendra, frightening though they can be are usually isolated and small events; AIDS has been a widespread slow burn. Along the way he introduces us to the people who study these things and the techniques they use.

He also builds the edifice of our current understanding for the reader.  He describes how diseases can primarily live in a reservoir host for decades and why they can be more virulent when they jump species.  We also learn why diseases that have such a safe haven are harder to eradicate.  AIDS and ebola can hide in their animal reservoirs; polio and smallpox cannot.  There is much more to our understanding than that simple fact, and Spillover does a good job building up that understanding.

The writing is technical.  Quammen expects his readers to be comfortable with science and a little math, but he has a real knack for the illustrative example.  He also is good at pointing out the salient aspects of a mathematical or scientific principle, even if the reader doesn’t know the full principle.

The only thing that disappointed me about the book was that there’s no introduction that sets a road map for the book.  You have to sort of trust Quammen that he’s got a point or two and that they will emerge over the course of the lengthy text.  They do, but given the size of the tome and the occasionally daunting technical content, a goal would have helped.

Recommended.

I have nothing to add to my review of volume 1.

Darrell Knight’s memoir about flying for an airline full of DC-3’s in northern Canada sounds a little more exciting than it is to read.  There are some interesting and exciting parts about it, but mostly Knight says that he put himself in the right place; got noticed by honest, honorable people running Buffalo Airways; worked hard; and had a memorable experience.  This is a story that is easy to love in outline.

In execution, it’s a little bland.  There isn’t a lot of dramatic tension.  All of the characters are mostly likeable and decent.  It sounds like a great life and the experience of a lifetime, but told by a very modest guy.

Just to get my bias on the table, the author, Paul Suhler, is a friend of mine.  He’s a technical fellow and a fellow pilot, so he’s got the background to understand how the stealth technology of the Blackbird was created.  He’s also a meticulous researcher and a clear writer, which results in this engaging and informative book.

Suhler’s tracing the development of stealth technology and its application to what became the Blackbird through several hidden CIA projects. He’s amassed a remarkable collection of interviews and documents from an extremely secretive set of people.  The result is an enlightening view into how stealth became a priority due to competition and some government arm-twisting.  Evidently Lockheed was only minimally interested in the stealth side of things, and the CIA brought Convair in at least partially because they were ahead in that area.  Convair also had a fascinating 2-vehicle approach that contrasted with the final designs.

Through the entire narrative, Suhler focuses on the technologies and ideas in competition, rather than on the personalities of the people driving them.  The people’s personalities are mentioned when relevant, but overall the focus is on how they marshal the ideas and how the CIA evaluates and influences the designs.  It’s a look into a design process that few people get to see.  Despite putting people somewhat out of the spotlight, it makes for diverting and informative reading.

Recommended.

I haven’t read a lot of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s work, but she seems to like coming at the interesting periods of American history from interesting angles.  Her Team of Rivals was a fascinating look at Lincoln and his cabinet told in a compelling structure. The Bully Pulpit traces the careers of two of the most interesting personalities of the late 1890’s and early 1900’s looking at their relations to one another and to the expanding popular press.

The Taft/Roosevelt relationship is central to the book, but has been explored before. What Goodwin brings here is an interest in an sympathy for Taft’s position. Most of what I’ve read about these two comes from Roosevelt biographies, and those are necessarily about Teddy’s feelings and motivations.  Taft’s position worth understanding.  He seems such an odd duck in American politics.  He’s a justice who became president to make TR and his wife happy – a strange role indeed.  Having Roosevelt turn on him so harshly, essentially costing the Republicans the 1912 election, confused and saddened Taft.

Though they’ve been dissected at great length, Roosevelt’s motives in the election remain foggy.  There’s some amount of anger at Taft, some amount of concern for the nation, and some amount of sheer egotism in there, for a start. I don’t know that Roosevelt knows what compelled him entirely, but it does make for fascinating reading.  Goodwin relates it all well.

She also brings in the writers at McClure’s magazine as a character.  She argues that Roosevelt made use of reporters in new ways to set the national agenda and advance his plan for the nation when presidents had little power to do so.  Her position is that the top-notch reporting on the excesses of capitalism formed the Bully Pulpit that allowed Roosevelt to make his trust-busting and corporate regulation aspirations into legislation.  Goodwin spends time showing both the people who made that reporting happen and their relation to the White House of the time.  It’s an interesting position and well articulated and defended; it makes Roosevelt’s later turn against the profession – he basically coins the disparaging term “muckraker” – more confusing.

Overall this is a wide-ranging and compelling exploration of an interesting time in American politics and journalism, framed by larger than life characters.  Well worth one’s time.

Strongly Recommended.

I read this immediately after reading The Lifespan of a Fact, and in many ways they could not be more different books, but they touch in one fun way.  Lifespan is about how many liberties you can take with the truth when making art; Si-Cology makes it clear that Si Robertson (one of the folks on Duck Dynasty) and his co-author Mark Schlabach dealt with the same issues while making this cash-in memoir.  They say (as Si):

At my age, a few of the details are cloudy, but I’ll recollect the coming stories as best I can. Hey, just remember it isn’t a lie if you think it’s true! It’s up to you, the reader to figure out what’s truth and what’s fiction.  Best of luck with that, Jack! May the [F]orce be with you.

So, there it is.  Si Robertson, redneck from Duck Dynasty, and John D’Agata, intellectual from the core of academe, defending the same position in lying to the reader for the sake of a better story.

Si and Mark are creating a pretty straight ahead memoir spiced up with some jokes and some tall tales.  The tale of family and values goes down easy and is a lot of fun.  I laughed at some of the jokes.  It sounds like an interesting life to have lived.  Si seems like the sort of guy it would be fun to shoot the breeze with, and I think that’s what he wanted to communicate.

The bombastic quote about truth and memory captures the style well.  He’s living his life loud, though he does say nice things about his family and friends.

Good fun.

John D’Agata and Jim Fingal present The Lifespan of a Fact as an encapsulation of their lengthy struggle between fact-checker and essayist, but it’s quickly clear that most elements of Lifespan are open to interpretation.  On the surface, Lifespan is a version of an essay by D’Agata annotated by the conversation between him and Fingal as Fingal checks his facts.  But that’s not really believable.  Any conversation between author and checker is necessarily iterative, with the checker raising an issue and the author responding; this reads as though Fingal made one pass through the article with D’Agata responding at points.  So what we have is a piece of art that represents that interchange over time, which is about dissecting the same issues in an earlier essay.

That sounds pretty intellectual and abstract, but the pair do a nice job of breathing life into author and checker.  Though both have clear positions about what’s being discussed, to the point of embodying those positions on occasion, there are enough cracks in the symbolism to believe that these are people who hold positions. The interchange is generally snappy and engaging, even when arguing trivia.

But fairly quickly it becomes clear that checker and author inhabit completely different worlds.  It’s also clear that they are exemplars of their fields.   Fingal is often pointing out errors in the second or third significant figure and D’Agata is rejecting the correction of any but the most egregious errors.  Eventually there is a breaking point (conveniently at a point that makes a climax for the book) where the two have it out in a passionate and intellectual argument about relating objective facts and creating art about events that is well worth the reading.

And then we get a nice elegiac ending from Fingal, our fact-based proponent that is haunting and honest.

Underlying all this is the clear point that everything said about the essay in the book is true about the book itself.  It’s obvious that this is an interpretation of a struggle, but exactly what struggle is unclear.  Is it the struggle with a particular fact-checker? With publishing in general? A completely internal struggle in the author’s mind – or authors’ minds? No questions are answered on that front, but the point is to trust the reader to chew on it.  If you like to chew on such things, this is a powerful gateway to the issues.

Recommended.