2021 Readings

Youngblood Hawke - Herman Wouk

Hawke at last said,  "Karl, didn't the stag ever outrun his pursuers and live to a ripe and royal old age"

"I don't know anything about stag hunting. I believe he occasionally did. But, you won't, Youngblood Hawke"

This is Wouk's evergreen American novel about a young artist leaving the coal country of Kentucky for New York City to make his mark and fortune as a novelist and story-teller. In what other country, place, or time does such raw outsized ambition exist and also a career-casino like New York to try your luck? Youngblood Hawke is a beautiful and emotional ride through this character's life. Hawke is a strong man with boundless energy and discipline to write without end. He meets up early in the book with a young editor, Jeanne Green, who turns his scribbles into stories and becomes the love of his life. She's also the firm steady anchor who can keep a healthy distance from the bull-shit of the New York aristocracy and art scene. But, Hawke, vibrant and sure, engages with the poisonous world of the wealthy and powerful that doesn't care about bringing his art to life but wants to use him. For a while, he wants to be used and wants a taste of the wealth also. The foreshadowing of the novel's end comes a few chapters in while Hawke is at a swanky New Year's party being feted as a great novelist despite just having his first book get picked up. Everyone wants to be near him but Karl Fry, an older writer whose career has run its course, jealously ridicules Hawke in front of everyone by comparing him to the big young male stag of John Davidson poem, A Runnable Stag. Karl's point is that, for sport, rich men and women will chase the stag for days and nights. The young stag with boundless strength and energy will run itself to death, all for the entertainment of the wealthy. And so to, Wouk tells us, will the young artist, Hawke, be run to death by the wealthy men and women of Manhattan and Hollywood.  

 

Open - Andre Agassi

 In following tennis religiously in the early 90s, I loved watching Lendel, Becker, Connors, McEnroe, Everett, Navratilova, Graf, and many others on ESPN. It felt like an exciting time in the sport, plus I discovered that I enjoyed playing. But, I can't for the life of me remember Agassi. He was around then and playing well, but he didn't make an impression on me, good or bad. I find that odd now considering how immensely popular he was and how his brash outsized manic personality impacted the sport. Why pick up his autobiography then? In thinking about writing and keeping an eye open for good writing and recommendations of good writing, Open consistently popped up at one of the best sports autobiographies of all time. It didn't disappoint. No doubt Agassi left many sins and regretful episodes out of this book because someday his kids would read it. And he penned it while he was the father of young children. No doubt that made him pause a bit. Still, I was surprised at how vulnerable and, well, open, he was. But, confessed weakness often makes one stronger. It's painful to read about his youth and upbringing and how much he struggled to find his sources of strength and his purpose. For a guy who hated tennis and was on an early path of self-destruction, it's beautiful how he played professionally for over 20 years and played some of the most inconsistent yet beautiful tennis ever. The highs were Mt. Everest high, and the lows were ocean-bottom low, and while Agassi came out the other end bruised and battered, he found peace and found himself. 

 

Slouching Towards Bethehem - Joan Didion

I don't exactly know how I felt about Slouching Towards Bethlehem. I'd heard of Joan Didion as the writer, journalist, and essayist with a pen and whit as sharp as Christopher Hitchens'. But, I left wondering if she'd still be read 10, 20, 50 years from now. In fact, I couldn't help but think of Dead Poets Society and the first day in Mr. Keatings' classroom when he tells his boys to tear out Dr. J. Evans Pritchard's essay on how to measure poetry. Dr. Pitchard sin, according to Keating, is to offer a formulaic way of valuing poetry by thinking of two axis; one measuring the art and style of a poem and the other its importance or the weight of the topic. When I think of the collection of essays in Slouching, I have to ask what is infinity times zero? Didion's mastery of language is peerless, truly impressive. The subjects of her 1960s essays though? Meh. They're mostly about California culture. Interesting, for sure, but I'm not sure they're intelligible to most people. Some of the pieces, her personal essays, for sure, might endure. At the very least, her essays serve as examples of what a master wordsmith can do. 

 

A Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood

This just wasn't a well written book. I'm starting to sour on fantasy, sci-fi, and futuristic dystopian novels now after attempting Asimov and now Atwood. I was partly interested in reading this novel to understand why pro-abortion activists keep donning the red costume of Atwood's world and what they try to signal when they do so. The voice of the novel is of an unnamed handmaid and her experience as a slave-like breeding tool. There were some genuine moments in the novel when she remembers her lost daughter or husband and teeters between hope and memory on the one hand and self-preservation on the other. Those parts are particularly strong emotionally, but the rest of the story felt mechanical. 

I realize this novel is a cri de coure for people who believe that religion or the state are trying to control their bodies, particularly their reproductive functions. That makes sense. But, A Handmaid's Tale is also about human's finding themselves one step away from the edge of extinction and our interdependence becoming stark and raw. Of course, liberty, freedom, and individuality are erased in those circumstances and a cover story, usually god(s), is concocted in order to assign and enforce roles to every member. If we found ourselves in a 200 person tribe in the the Hindu Kush or in a 500 person mission to colonize space, the the sparse amount of liberty and freedom in The Handmaid's Tale would be on par with what human society would resemble in the mountains or on Mars.  

 

Dune - Frank Herbert

"we can say that Maud'Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It is shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult."

"Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past me I will turn to see fear's path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain."

I'm glad I read Dune although I have to admit that I almost didn't finish. It is an exciting and fantastic story and in the richest tradition of science fiction. It's also a philosophic novel. I wanted to read Dune because of the newest movie adaptation but I doubt that I'll read the subsequent novels. I do have to tip my cap to Herbert. He's constructed an intricate and layered futuristic desert world that is truly fascinating. It's as detailed and textured a story as Lord of the Rings and deserves its place in the pantheon of great science fiction, maybe literature.  

 

The Lying Life of Adults - Elena Ferrante

The best way I can describe this story is perhaps as a feminist Catcher in the Rye. I hate writing that because every serious novel deserves to stand on its own. Every reader, and of course, every writer, brings to a novel a whole life-bag stuffed with their own experiences, and books read, and books written. All that to say, an Italian girl awakens to another reality and sees behind the facade adults erect. This flimsy curtain hides their true selfish nature. On stage we see the cultivated manners and the proper accents and manners, while behind the curtain the adults are acting and reacting with each other on a more base level. Giovanna, the Neapolitan teenage protagonist of the novel, discovers, by accident, this well orchestrated world of adults masks their duplicitous behavior. She discovers the lies they tell themselves and rationalizations for their betrayal and feels the undertow of those feelings herself. In some form or another the adults return to the unforgettable self-justification from Woody Allen's Annie Hall, "The heart wants what it wants." The Lying Life of Adults is an uneven story and not Ferrante's most impressive work, but she goes deep into the well of humanity and comes back up with something ignoble, to put it charitably. Maybe it's a truth we should all confront at least once in our lives. 

 

The Aeneid - Vergil (Translated by Shadi Bartsch)

"Wait", says the astute De Todo reader! "Didn't you already read and review The Aeneid?" Yes, but not this translation. Inspired by Shadi Bartsch's interview on Conversations with Tyler. I ended up penning a book review for DoDReads. There is a lot for military leaders in The Aeneid and Bartsch's translation brings it out. It's really well done. Her work sails through the narrow straits of classical translations, never crashing on the rocks of snobbery nor running aground in the shallows of superficiality.

 

Moral Imperative: 1972, Combat Rescue, and the End of America’s War in Vietnam - Darrel D. Whitcomb

As a former helicopter pilot, I was drawn to Whitcomb's latest because combat rescue is a major part of our ethos and history. Airplanes are great but they need runways to land and therefore cannot usually pick up survivors. Tanks and trucks are great, too, but they also cannot drive up a mountainside to pick up survivors. Helicopters can. They also can easily get shot down or crash in challenging weather conditions. The book has loads of great rescue stories from South East Asia but I was struck about how challenging 1972 was for the U.S. military. For an administration that was trying everything it could to get out of Vietnam, American service members took on a tremendous amount of risk and paid the price. The moral imperative, that we wouldn't leave anyone behind, became the last thing keeping it all together. I wrote a short book review for Strategic Studies Quarterly. 

 

Station Eleven - Emily St. John Mandel

A little too clever by half. It was useful to think, while the US was coming out of the COVID 19 pandemic (or thought we were), how bad a pandemic could be and how upended our way of life could have been. St John Mandel did a masterful job of weaving several character's stories together and going back and forth between life before the pandemic and afterwards. From a structure standpoint, Brava!! The characters just didn't grab me nor did the story.

 

Twenty Years of Service: The Politics of Military Pension Policy and the Long Road to Reform-Brandon J. Archuleta

I wish I could have written this book. It's wonky. It's public choice economics. It's about military personnel policy. But, to Archuleta's credit, it is also highly readable. There is a story behind everything and the story behind how the U.S. government funds military pensions is fascinating. He inspired me to write a review for The Strategy Bridge in the hopes that others will find this important work.

 

Proxy War: The Least Bad Option - Tyrone Groh

 For an academic book, I loved what Groh tried to do; he offered practical advice. Yes, there is lots of theory but he also illustrates his points with great examples, many of which I'd never heard of. This is honestly a how-to book except it is about a narrow policy tool not building a deck or fixing a car. Using a non-state actor to do your dirty business is not a cheap and riskless enterprise. There are ways to do it well and ways it all can blow up in one's face. I wrote a book review for National Defense University's Joint Forces Quarterly.

 

Aim High - Deborah Lee James

I had the honor to speak with former Secretary of the Air Force James twice this year. The book was impressive in that she's very open and forthcoming about her personal life, warts and all. It's not a memoir but she does pull from her past to share her leadership and professional advice. I had low expectations but I honestly learned quite a bit. Jame is no born-on-third-base-thinking-she-hit-a-triple kind of elitist leader. She had some very humble beginnings, did not attend fancy schools, but worked her way up the ladder with plenty of family drama and baggage along the way. I ended up respecting her even more after reading this. 

On War and Writing - Samuel Hynes

 This was great through the first half. It is a collection of Hynes' essays about war and literature, how war was remembered or written about versus how it actually was. I loved the chapter on Yeats but afterwards it became labored and fell into academic literary criticism and I didn't finish.

Charlotte's Web - E.B. White

I read this to my second daughter, age 8. A beautiful story of friendship and love. A classic that's always in season.