Volume 2, Issue 1: Books and Netflix
We have two valuable escapes during this strange time, books and Netflix and co. While a mixture of both is what we all need, it is an especially good time to be getting lost in the magic of books. There is an exciting and diverse set of books for you this time around. One of the reviews is written by a friend, and my fellow quarantinee, Giulia. I’ve also added two recommended long-form articles/essays at the bottom. As always, send me recommendations, send me a message to discuss any of the books I’ve shared, and share the newsletter with friends if you are enjoying the content!
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Those Who Eat Like Crocodiles, Laura Fitzgerald
This book covers the author’s journey working in Tanzania and Swaziland (now Eswatini). A midwife by training, she leaves a turbulent stint in midwifery in Tanzania to take on a program management role at an NGO that attempted to create the world’s largest male circumcision project (to curb the spread of HIV) in Swaziland. The memoir is a beautifully vulnerable reflection by an American woman in her late twenties/early thirties. The book has two major plotlines, one which follows the mercurial flow of the circumcision program’s success and failures. The other which follows Laura’s own personal prevarications about identity, meaning, and value of career vs. family. As someone who works in international development, I was intrigued by both story lines — empathizing with the realities of large scale public health programs and connecting with the conflicts of ambition and meaning. Above all, Fitzgerald is a very good writer and refreshingly honest. I would recommend it in a heartbeat if you are intrigued by either of those storylines.
Boys in the Boat, Daniel James Brown
A book that was published 6 years ago, Boys in the Boat was a New York Times bestseller and widely lauded. The story revolves around the remarkable underdog story of the University of Washington crew team that goes on to represent the United States in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. I was hesitant to read a book that a) has a predictable arch and b) covers a sport that never caught my attention. I was wrong to be hesitant. Daniel James Brown makes this is an all-consuming read both for its literary structure and for the richness of the content. A couple motifs that kept me gripped from beginning to end. Set in the 1920s and 30s in Northwest America, you get a intimately illustrative insight into the developments of the Western frontier when the state of Washington was in transition from the ‘wild west’ to a developed society. A second motif was the backdrop of the Nazi occupation under Hitler and the brutal authoritarian regime he was building leading up to the Olympics (and doing everything he could to hide it). The third and fourth motif was the story of rowing and of Joe Rantz (the main character). The technical, physical, emotional, and collaborative elements to rowing were far more complex than I could imagine. And the story of Joe grips you and makes you his biggest fan from the outset. Read it, it will pull you in and you won’t regret it. You may even start rowing like I did (I conveniently live in one of the major rowing towns in the world, but still).
Life Undercover, Amaryllis Fox
This was a Christmas present from my mother (so was Boys in the Boat — on a roll, mom). A book by a first-time author, and one that doesn’t have a lot of press, I went into this one with an open-mind, unsure of what to expect. Fox is an ex-CIA agent and in her memoir she details her precocious early years that quickly dovetail into a young and distinguished career in the most secretive appointment in the spy agency. Before college, in 1999, she heads to Burma to help refugees fleeing from the military dictatorship in their country. Still a teenager, she made her way into top-level connections in the Free Burma movement and was sent on a mission to speak with Aung San Suu Kyi (currently head of government in Burma) who was under house arrest from the military dictatorship. By the age of 22, she becomes a member of the CIA and spends her 20s in daring pursuits to curtail nuclear weapons distribution. This first-hand account of her exploits and her contemplations of her death-defying pursuits is a soberly magnetic insight into a highly covert world — and can be done comfortably from your reading chair…
Air Guitar, Dave Hickey
This one was a recommendation from a friend and loyal Book Jam follower. It opened me up to whole new genre. Hickey is an art critic, and a maverick of a critic at that. His central philosophy is tethered to an anti-establishment modus operandi. He deplores the institution of art, and how it warps the truth and the rawness of arts intention. Not only an art critic, a critic of the art institution, but a critic of critics! His book of short stories weave his experience with art as metaphors of democracy. He talks about Las Vegas as a paradoxically real place where people have not escaped reality but rather escaped a fakeness rooted in the rest of society, to enter into a reality that lets people be accepted as they want to live (aka Las Vegas). He talks about Norman Rockwell and how his portrayal of nominal, routine, and nostalgic, daily life was lambasted as parochial. His counterargument defends that the ‘normal nostalgia’ was Rockwell’s commentary on our lack of appreciation for family dinners or moments of softness, which we have normalized, and thrown away for the more sensational, and damaging, use of modern media that highlights only the worst of society. His essays can be esoteric, and at times hard to follow, but by and large his insights and passionate take on the interconnectedness between art of democratic institutions was enlightening and entertaining, all wrapped in one.
(Giulia’s Review) The Order of Time, Carlo Rovelli
If you, like me, are curious about the mysterious rules that guide the universe, The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli is the book for you. The Italian theoretical physicist succeded in combining difficult notions of physics, and the philosophical implications, in a dissertation which is accessible to the general public. Time is something that we experience in every moment of our lives, but our perception of past, present and future is actually wrong, according to Rovelli. The physics of the past century, from relativity theory to quantum mechanincs, to the more recent Loop Quantum Gravity theory (field of study of Rovelli), broke the past concept of time and revealed instead a world without time. Rovelli guides us through a journey across centuries of physics, in order to understand how the perspective of science changed and where we are now. Reading this book feels transporting back in time to 1610AD and meeting Galileo Galilei, and having him tell us that the Earth isn’t flat and it also moves around the sun! You start doubting yourself a lot!
The implications of having a world without time are numerous: from the nature of our mind, to the origin of the universe, to free will, destiny of black holes and life itself. It’s not an easy read because the topic is extremely complex, but it is written in a very simple way. After finishing it I still struggle to explain the many things I learnt, but it fascinated me and I definitely recommend it.
Long-form articles & essays
The Nuclear Family was a Mistake, David Brooks
This essay by Brooks profiles the evolution of the family unit and how the present day nuclear family (parents and children) are displaying clear statistical evidence of distress and loneliness. The extended family that flourish during the 1950s to 1965 has been replaced by a much smaller family unit that results in negative effects on lower-income families who have to assume all the responsibilities that an extended family were capable of supporting. And for high-income families they can ‘purchase’ an extended family by brining in hired help. He expands on a hopeful transition to a ‘chosen family’ that goes beyond your biological ties.
On the Use and Abuse of History for Life (1873), Nietzsche
A very philosophical essay, arguing that history should be used only to inform action. And that the use of history for other means can be dangerous — lacking any helpful utility and encumbering happiness. The more we contextual action in the face of history the more likely to be led to inaction, as we will criticize those decisions in an overtly historical frame of reference. The animal instinct of ‘unhistorical’ action can be freeing and often useful. Nietzsche argues for a balance of historical references and unhistorical inhibition. It is a very dense read, and to be honest I am only ½ way through (skimmed second half). I found it stimulating and it challenged my own mindset. From my own love of history I will sometimes rationalize my way out of a decision by reverently drawing from historical examples of cause and effect and why something may not be effective. Nietzsche’s argument would be to understand the outcomes of events from history but to take a leap and push forward with action. He references three mindsets:
1. Superhistorical — someone who is so well attuned to history that they believe we live in cycles and that progress is not relevant or that there is in fact no such thing as moving forward. Therefore as a superhistorical person you so no value in contributing to progress, and therefore view the present as an observer with no real reason to affect change.
2. Historical — You see history as a process, one that progressively evolves but is on a specific path (AIDS will be abolished, flying cars will be invented, etc..) and that historical person is very in touch with the likelihood of certain changes but is a bystander as there is no real reason to be involved — because it is an inevitability. His definition of historical is that of someone who has a false sense of superiority — one who sees the present as a point worthy of judging the past, yet unaware that the future will have the same damning assessment of one’s respective present.
3. Unhistorical — the animalistic, and natural instinct of a breathing species. Outside of few species, most animals live in the present. They make decisions not on previous knowledge but on the information in front of them. The unhistorical is an action based mindset that has no connection to previous learned behaviours.
A few excerpts from the essay below.
Thus, the person of experience and reflection writes history. Anyone who has not experienced life on a greater and higher level than everyone else will not know how to interpret the greatness and loftiness of the past. The utterance of the past is always an oracular pronouncement. You will understand it only as builders of the future and as people who know about the present. People now explain the extraordinarily deep and far-reaching effect of Delphi by the particular fact that the Delphic priests had precise knowledge about the past. It is appropriate now to understand that only the man who builds the future has a right to judge the past. In order to look ahead, set yourselves an important goal, and at the same time control that voluptuous analytical drive with which you now lay waste the present and render almost impossible all tranquillity, all peaceful growth and maturing. Draw around yourself the fence of a large and extensive hope, an optimistic striving. Create in yourselves a picture to which the future is to correspond, and forget the myth that you are epigones. You have enough to plan and to invent when you imagine that future life for yourselves. But in considering history do not ask that she show you the “How?” and the “With what?” If, however, you live your life in the history of great men, then you will learn from history the highest command: to become mature and to flee away from that paralyzing and prohibiting upbringing of the age, which sees advantages for itself in not allowing you to become mature, in order to rule and exploit you, the immature. And when you ask after biographies, then do not ask for those with the refrain “Mr. Soandso and His Age” but for those whose title page must read “A Fighter Against His Age.” Fill your souls with Plutarch, and dare to believe in yourselves when you have faith in his heroes. With a hundred people raised in such an unmodern way, that is, people who have become mature and familiar with the heroic, one could permanently silence the entire noisy pseudo-education of this age.
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Indeed, history is itself capable of deceiving the young about their most beautiful privilege, about their power to cultivate in themselves with complete conviction a great idea and to allow an even greater idea to grow forth out of it. A certain excess of history is capable of all this. We have seen it. And this is the reason: through its incessant shifting of the horizons of significance, through the elimination of a surrounding atmosphere, it no longer allows a person to perceive and to act unhistorically. He then draws himself from the infinity of his horizon back into himself, into the smallest egotistical region and there must wither away and dry up. He probably achieves cleverness in this, but never wisdom. He permits himself inner conversations, calculates, and gets along well with the facts, does not boil over, winks, and understands how to seek out his own advantage or that of his party amid the advantages and disadvantages of strangers; he forgets superfluous modesty and thus step by step becomes a “Man” and an “Old Man” on the Hartmann model. But he should become this — that is the precise sense of the cynical demand nowadays for “the complete dedication of the personality to the world process,” so far as his goal is concerned, for the sake of the redemption of the world, as that rascal E. Hartmann assures us. Now, the will and goal of these Hartmann “men” and “old men” is indeed hardly the redemption of the world. Certainly the world would be more redeemed if it were redeemed from these men and old men. For then the kingdom of youth would come.
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With the phrase “the unhistorical” I designate the art and the power of being able to forget and to enclose oneself in a horizon with borders; “super-historical” I call the powers which divert the gaze from what is developing back to what gives existence an eternal and unchanging character, to art and religion. Science (for it is science which would talk about poisons) sees in that force, in these powers opposing forces, for it maintains that only the observation of things is true and right, the scientific way of considering things, which everywhere sees what has come into being as something historical and never as something eternally living. Science lives in an inner contradiction against the eternalizing powers of art and religion just as much as it hates forgetfulness, the death of knowledge, when it seeks to remove all limitations of horizons and to hurl human beings into an infinite sea without frontiers, a sea of light waves of acknowledged becoming.
