Don't Get Too Comfortable (your life's course is changing). Essays by David Rakoff

     David Rakoff. Don’t Get too Comfortable (2005) Rakoff died in 2012. He wrote pieces about culture, mostly about examples of excess, such as the last essay in this book, which reports on cryogenics. (A technology to freeze you so that at some point many centuries hence you can be unfrozen and resume your life. Though why people many centuries hence would want to unfreeze you is a question that apparently never occurs to the believers).
     That parenthetical remark is the kind of thinking Rakoff does, and as often as not triggers in the reader. That makes him a valuable analyst of our times. He was revered as a humourist, but he’s really a satirist. The occasional one-liners and jokes are as on-topic and often as biting as his analytic comments.
     Many of these pieces were written during the Bush years, and some refer back to Reagan. Rakoff was one of the first to recognise that the Republicans were going down a road of self-destruction. As always when a dragon self-destroys, the thrashing of its tail in its death throes causes damage around it. That’s what’s happening now.
     There I go again, thinking like Rakoff.
     He writes about food, fashion, plastic surgery, politics, flying on the Concorde, and many other topics, trivial and significant, mundane and exotic. The title applies to all of them. There’s an undertone of existential panic, a how-did-we-get-here apprehension of unknown and unexpected consequences.  You can see why I recommend this book. ****

Humankind's Most Dangerous Invention: A Short History of Progress (Wright)

   

Pithy quote

 Ronald Wright. A Short Illustrated History of Progress (2006) A paperback version of Wright’s 2004 book, with pictures, and coloured pages with pithy quotes displayed in large type. The book doesn’t need these gimmicks, it’s compulsively readable. Wright’s thesis is that civilisation is a trap. He’s an archeologist/anthropologist. He uses “civilisation” to mean a large complex culture based on the domestication of plants, animals, and human beings. A civilisation is marked by hierarchies, administrative complexity, specialisation of work, politics, etc.
     Almost every civilisation we know of has ended destroying itself. The type example of this process is Easter Island, which hosted a simple civilisation which at its peak fed around 10,000 people, but which collapsed when the people focussed on making gigantic statues. The statues which were supposed to prevent what we would now call ecological collapse. It didn’t work, and when Europeans made contact with Easter Island, there were about 1,000 nearly-starving people and a couple of hundred statues left on a treeless, rapidly eroding hunk of rock. To counter the argument that Easter Island culture wasn’t really a civilisation and so cannot stand as a warning, Wright looks at the first city-based civilisation, Sumer, which did the same damage to its ecology as the Easter Islanders did. It just took them longer. The successors to Sumer pretty well all made the same mistakes: Assyria, Babylon, etc, now exist only in clay tablets and stone statuary.
     Jared Diamond wrote a longer (and gloomier) meditation on the same themes as Wright (whose book began as a series of Ideas programs on CBC). Wright’s book is a much better read,  Diamond’s book provides more data. They both come to the same conclusion: “Civilisation” is humankind’s greatest and most dangerous invention. If we don’t learn from past experiments, we’ll destroy our civilisation, too. Because it’s a world-wide one, the collapse will entangle a larger swath of the ecosystems on which we depend, and which we persist in either ignoring, or see as an obstacle to further progress.
     Recommended. ****

L'Amour Tries Pulp Crime: The Hills of Homicide

      Louis L’Amour. The Hill of Homicide (1983) L’Amour’s authorised collection of detective stories, issued because an unauthorised edition of out-of-copyright stories was issued by another publisher. L’Amour was trying to protect his brand, but this collection doesn’t do much for it. The stories are workmanlike pulp, but that’s all. L’Amour acknowledges that his stories aren’t the same quality as those of the masters.
      Two things stand out: L’Amour likes to describe fist fights, “wicked rights” and all. The two most successful tales are about bent cops. Otherwise, it’s formula all the way, including sexy women that utter wise-crack come-ons to close off the stories. These stories are merely average.  I prefer L’Amour’s westerns. **

Great Depression Memoir (Why Shoot the Teacher, Braithwaite 1965)

   Max Braithwaite. Why Shoot the Teacher (1965) Autobiography dressed up as fiction. The names have been altered, and probably some details too, to prevent too easy identification of the people whom Max met and worked for in his first job. He detrains at “Bleke”, Saskatchewan, and avoids frostbite on the ride to the school only by running behind the wagon from time to time. A foreshadowing of his mostly depressing experiences teaching in a one room school in the middle of the Great Depression.
    His teacherage consists of two rooms partitioned off in the school basement, populated by mice. There is no human company within sight after the children go home. Nor a tree. The farmers are barely able to feed themselves and their livestock, never mind a teacher, yet they manage to eke out some entertainment and pleasure at a dance and the Christmas pageant. At the end of the school year, Max decides to leave. He notes that never once did Lyle King, the school-board chair, call him by his name. Max doesn’t mention his name either.
    The book was made into a film, available on Youtube. It reconstructs the book into a story. Braithwaite’s book is a series of extended anecdotes and musings about his job, education, the economy, the society that surrounds him, and so on. It adds up to his experience of the Depression, and has the ring of truth. Braithwaite developed a reputation as a humourist, but there’s damn little humour in this book. The title has nothing to do with the book. But it’s worth reading all the same, especially if you want to get a feel for what it was like to live through the Depression on the Prairies. **½

How toTell a Story: Massey Lectures 2003 by Thomas King

 
   Thomas King. The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative (2003 Massey Lectures) A book worth reading. My take-away:
     We are our stories. But few of us are willing to accept that, until perhaps someone we know loses their stories as they fade into dementia. But a tribe or nation also is its stories. The stories we tell each other makes us a family, a village, a tribe, a nation. The stories others tell about us impinge on, intersect with, and conflict with the stories we tell about ourselves. If we have no stories of our own, or if no one listens to our stories, the stories told by others prevent them from seeing us as we see ourselves, seeing ourselves as we are.  That’s why being heard, being able to tell our stories, matters, even though story cannot change the past, for telling our stories will affect the future. It will change how the teller and the hearer tell the stories to come.
     King begins every lecture with the story of the Earth resting on the back of a turtle. What holds up the turtle? “It’s turtles all the way down.” Then he tells stories loosely organised around a theme or topic. He ends each lecture with “But don’t say in the years to come that you’d have lived you life differently if only you had heard this story. You’ve heard it now.”
     This series of narratives is I think the seed for The Inconvenient Indian. King is one of the wisest people I have ever met. I’d like to meet him in person. Read the book. ****
     You can listen to the lectures here: 2003 Massey Lectures

Spy Caper in Nazi Germany (A Toast to Tomorrow)

     Manning Coles. A Toast to Tomorrow (1941. Republished by Bantam Books 1947) An odd book: an anti-Nazi spy story written early in the war, and reprinted by Bantam books after the war. The story is a fairly convoluted fantasy plot: A severely injured amnesiac British intelligence agent washes up on the Belgian shore in 1918. The docs at the German Naval Hospital patch him up and let him go. He builds a life for himself as a good German, rises to become Chief of Police. Eventually he recovers his memory of himself as Tommy Hambledon, and sets about saving some people from the increasing brutality of the Nazi regime, and finding the murderer of his comrade. He executes justice on the latter just before he and another agent make their way to Switzerland, and presumably from there to England.
     The story is of course preposterous. The tone of the tale is a mix of gung-ho incorruptible spy-hero with touches of irony, wit, and farce. The cover blurb invokes Wodehouse, not inappropriately. It’s a quick read. Its structure reminds me of a movie: an event narrated in some detail, then a jump to the next event. The whole is stitched together to make for a superficially plausible story in which the reader can imagine himself as the dashing hero. The swiftness of the narration (it covers about 20 years) allows one to ignore the holes in the plot.
     I think the whole was concocted much like the patriotic pro-war movies of the early war years, which both the Allies and the Germans produced in great quantity. Both sides portrayed “our boys” as paragons of virtue and noble restraint with an uncompromising sense of justice, and of course the superior brains and skills that guaranteed the defeat of the most wily opponents. An interesting historical artefact. But well written, which probably explains why Bantam chose to reprint it.
     Bantam Books was founded in 1945. The book includes a list of 122 titles, mostly current genre fiction and popular novels (some of which I recognised as movies, not books), with a smattering of classics. The books were cheap, initially 25 cents. Fairly early on, Bantam began to publish original work as well. It became the most prolific publisher of pocket books, most of them genre fiction. (The Wikipedia article is woefully incomplete). This copy is a first Bantam printing of A Toast to Tomorrow, and in pretty good shape, considering that is was printed on wood-fibre pulp. The cover has a crease in the lower right corner; I think there were several readers before me. Any collectors who come across this review may email me. I’ll keep until January next year, then it will go to a used book dealer or yard sale.
     A pretty good read, considering. **½

How Hitler Lost the War

     How Hitler Lost the War (2005) [Producer David Hoffman, writer Robert Denny] The popular myth of WW2 is that England fought heroically against the Nazi hordes until the USA came along and won the war for them. There was also something going in Eastern Europe between Germany and the Soviet Union, and in the Pacific between the Americans and the Japanese. But never mind the details, the Allies won the war.    
     In the last 30 years or so, historians have reread the details, many of which were new, and it’s clear that the Allies didn’t so much win the war as that Hitler lost it. Or, to give it a more balanced spin, that Hitler made some fatal mistakes which enabled the Allies to regroup, attack, and win. If he had not made those mistakes, the outcome for the Allies would not have been a simple victory, and could very well have been a defeat.
     This film points to several tactical and strategic errors. For example, Hitler stopped the army from capturing the defeated British and French troops at Dunkirk and sent in the air force to destroy them instead. The RAF turned out to be a much better protector than Hitler expected.
     Another tactical error was to concentrate his eastern forces on Leningrad and the Ukraine instead of on Moscow, as his army chiefs advised. But that was done within the major strategic  error of attacking the Soviet Union.
     In the Ukraine, the German forces were welcomed as liberators, but Hitler’s racist superstitions prevented him from capitalising on this. Instead, he sent in the SS to round up and eliminate undesirable elements. He wanted the Ukraine for lebensraum. So the Ukrainians formed guerilla groups to fight the Germans.
     That last point shows up Hitler’s fundamental mistake. He went to war to gain land, and failed to focus on defeating the enemy. War is always waged for political reasons, but it is a very bad mistake to focus on the political goal instead of the military one, which is to defeat the enemy. First things first: Hitler never really understood that. He also vastly overestimated his knowledge and understanding of politics and war. He had a talent for spotting and exploiting weaknesses and pressure points in his adversaries, but he had no grasp of the larger purposes which drive political and military conflict. In particular, he did not understand that sooner or later the other great powers would decide to stop him. A moderately powerful Germany that one could do business with was acceptable, no matter what the Nazis did inside the country. A self-aggrandising Germany that threatened the balance of power was not. The film does not make this an explicit point, but it’s the context of its thesis.
     Well done, with interviews with German as well as Allied veterans. A treat for the military history buff, a good general history doc for everyone else. ***