Category: Books

Donovan Webster’s The Burma Road: The Epic Story of the China – Burma – India Theater in World War II is a gripping account of the enormous battles and personal sacrifice in what ultimately came to be (barely) remembered as something of a backwater in World War II.

In the beginning of the war between the Allies and Japan, the Allies pursued a two-prong strategy: island hopping in the Pacific on one front and on the other pushing in towards Japan from mainland China. The latter required the Allies to keep China in the war by supplying the nationalist army under the command of the apparently incompetent and corrupt Chiang Kai-shek.

The man responsible for pulling off this impossible task was American general Joseph Stilwell, whose main mission was to reopen the Burma Road that ran from India to China and which would allow the Allies to provide provisions to the Chinese.

Though Webster focuses on Stilwell’s efforts, both military and bureaucratic, to drive the Japanese out of Burma and away from India so that the road could be rebuilt and reopened, the book ranges widely, recounting the exploits of the British Chindit brigades, Merrill’s Marauders, the hump pilots who flew the airlift missions over the Himalayas into China, the Flying Tiger squadrons and the day-to-day lives of the men in the field. It’s a testament to Webster’s storytelling abilities that he is able to bring all of this together into a narrative that is both concise and detailed.

Webster’s greatest achievement here is his depiction of the terrible conditions under which men fought and died, often as much from starvation and disease as from combat. He moves nicely from battlefield heroics and tragedies to the tactical details of the military campaign, ultimately presenting a picture of the CBI Theater from multiple perspectives from soldiers on the ground to the lines of the generals’ maps.

The Burma Road is a well-researched and engaging work of popular history that is definitely worth the time of anyone wondering how China managed to stay in the war and how the Japanese were ultimately pushed out of south Asia.

I just finished reading a book about nothing. Actually it’s about everything, which is of course the flip side of nothing. More specifically, I’ve been reading Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea by Charles Seife. The book is an interesting and insightful exploration of the history of this troubling and important number that we so easily take for granted.

Seife traces zero’s roots from a placeholder in the Babylonian number system all the way up to the problems it causes in modern physics whether deep in the gravity wells of black holes or in the subatomic orbits of electrons.

My favorite thing about reading this was the historical aspects of the tale. Zero was considered heresy in early Christian Europe because it represented the void and brought up issues surrounding the infinite, both of which clashed with the Aristotelian theology at the heart of the early church. Without zero, though, European math would be trapped forever within the perimeters of geometry.

Seife relates the stories of sometimes clandestine efforts of mathematicians who worked with the Eastern algebra and its conception of zero, combining it with geometry and developing trigonometry and finally calculus. Along the way they discovered irrational numbers, negative numbers, and my favorite from high school – imaginary numbers, a concept that still blows my mind just as it did back then.

When I took Calculus back in high school, I didn’t understand why it existed or what you could do with it. It was just problems I couldn’t figure out how to work. Without getting too mathematical, Seife articulately explains what calculus is for and why it’s needed. In essence it’s the language of change and motion, the language of physics, without which science as we know it could not have developed. And calculus couldn’t have developed without an understanding of the mathematical properties of zero and infinity. Perhaps it would have been more interesting back then if I had understood its purpose.

Seife finally moves from a history of math to an overview of the great mysteries surrounding modern physics such as the big bang and black holes (zeros in relativity), electrons (zeros in quantum mechanics) and finally a quick take on the efforts of string theorists to remove those zeros that cause breakdowns in the laws of physics. String theory is briefly explained as a primarily mathematical attempt to unify relativity with quantum mechanics in a quantum theory of gravity or better yet, a theory of everything. He wraps the book up with thoughts about the beginning and end of the universe, literally going from nothing to everything.

In the Talking Heads song “Heaven” David Byrne sings, “It’s hard to imagine that nothing at all could be so exciting, could be so much fun.” It’s a beautiful song and one that may or may not capture the essence of Heaven, but certainly describes the experience of reading Zero, a book about nothing at all, and yet so much fun.

I suppose it has to do with growing up on and around Navy bases where I was always near the ocean, but I love reading about life at sea. Living in central Texas, the ocean isn’t exactly close by. There’s the Gulf of Mexico, but even that’s several hours drive away and as nice at it is to drink Coronas and watch the waves and gulls while sitting in bars along Seawall in Galveston, it’s not excatly majestic. So I miss the ocean and read about it as much as possible.

I picked up William Langewiesche’s The Outlaw Sea a few days ago after having thought about buying it for several years. I realize that I’d already heard or read much of it. Large sections of the short book had previously appeared in Atlantic Monthly, particularly the vivid account of the ferry Estonia’s ill-fated trip across the Baltic Sea in 1994. I had read that feature a few years ago with great interest and was pleased to see that he expanded on the account for the book.

I believe some of this book was also used as source material for the high school debate topic a few years ago and my debaters must have found it because I remember pieces of the text being cited as evidence while I listened to them practice their speeches. All of this made the book a fascinating read filled with the kind of external associations that make reading so pleasurable.

The book is subtitled “A World of Freedom, Chaos, and Crime” and the first part of the book was the most fascinating for me. This was where Langewiesche described the modern form of piracy, which is a far cry from the romance of Jimmy Buffett songs. I was stunned to learn that whole freighters are sometimes taken. The stunning part is the lack of coverage, I suppose. But then the people who typically crew these ships are often the poorest members of the poorest societies. Not exactly the kind of people the American media tends to cover. The description of pirate activities in and around the South China Sea (where I swam as a kid – another association) and one particular incident of a ship being stolen is absolutley riveting.

Langewiesche focuses not just on piracy, but its cousin maritime terrorism (he mentions the so-called Al-Queda navy) as well as the regulatory confusion caused by flags of convenience, a troublesome issue that lies at or near the bottom of many of the problems he describes. I can’t say I learned much that I didn’t already know about issues on the high seas, but I did enjoy his style and his very well documented accounts of the various maritime disasters he describes.

It’s a good read, but drinking beer and eating shrimp while watching a calm gulf lap at the shores suddenly seems like a very nice way to appreciate the ocean.

I keep hearing about the “controversy” surrounding James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces. I just don’t get it. I first heard about this at the Kathy Griffin show that I posted about last week when she mentioned Frey getting chewed out by Oprah. The next day it was in the paper. What I don’t get is why this should be such a big deal. Many people (not me, I haven’t read it) seem to feel betrayed because they read and liked the book only to find out that it was – gasp! – made up.

Why should this bother anyone? We aren’t talking about historical events, scientific discoveries, how to safely dismantle a bomb, or anything that’s really important. It’s about one guy’s drug problems. Does the book’s veracity really change whether or not a person enjoyed reading it or learned something from it? I suppose for some people it must, but for me it seems sort of irrelevant.

This reminds me a friend who claims that Jesus never existed and never said all the things he is supposed to have said so therefore we should just disregard the Bible altogether. Putting all the obvious problems with disregarding an ancient and influential book like the Bible aside and accepting his claim that there was no Jesus, we’re still left with the fact that somebody somewhere had to write the Gospels and make all that stuff up. It’s quite a feat and still gives one much to think about, whether it’s literally true or not. I wish I had the talent to invent dialog such as Jesus had with his detractors.

I don’t suppose anyone will be L Ron Hubbardizing Frey any time soon, but it seems that a reader’s interaction with a text shouldn’t necessarily depend on whether or not it really happened as stated. This leads to Oprah’s choice to replace Frey’s memoir with another memoir: Night by Elie Wiesel. If it came out tomorrow that Wiesel never experienced the horrors he so eloquently describes and instead spent World War II living in a Manhattan penthouse, he would certainly lose credibility as a witness to the Holocaust, but Night would not be diminished one bit for me, and I would still have my students read it.

I do think Frey should have presented his work as fiction, and the marketeers who have helped him sell it have a right to be mad that their work, the image they so carefully crafted – or dare I say, made up? – is now shot, but I suspect that had he tried to sell it as fiction he would probably still be trying to sell it.

UPDATE 2-3-06: This discussion is also going on at Dem Soldier’s blog where you can see some truly beautiful photography as well. I was commenting there as I was working up this post, so links seem appropriate if a bit belated.

Football elation can’t last forever, so this blog now returns to its usual grey for a post about a book. (Perhaps we’ll try yellow when Lance wins his next Tour de France.)

When I taught high school debate I always wished I had a book to share with my students that would provide a fun and easy introduction to philosophy and that would hold the interest of kids ranging from freshmen to seniors. Apparently, a Norwegian high school philosophy teacher named Jostein Gaarder thought the same thing, so he wrote Sophie’s World.

This has been on my bookshelf for several years (so, as my wife points out, I did have it while I was teaching debate) but I’ve only just now found the time to read it, and I loved it! The book tells the story of a fourteen-year-old girl who begins receiving cryptic letters in her mailbox. She soon finds herself enrolled in a correspondence course with a mysterious philosopher.

Gaarder does an excellent job presenting the history of human thought about existence from the early myths to philosophy to modern science in a whimsical and good-natured mystery wherein Sophie’s philosophy lessons become the clues to solving the mysteries in her own life. The story takes strange twists and turns that mirror the thinking of the various philosophers Sophie studies and ultimately each turn provides some kind of contextual example of the ideas Gaarder is trying to illuminate.

It’s clear Gaarder has a specific audience in mind – young people being introduced to philosophy – but I think even one well educated in philosophy would enjoy this simply because Gaarder manages to capture the wonder and thrill of learning for the first time about big ideas that sadly gets beaten out of so many of us. The book is never pedantic, always charming, and provides many jumping off points for thought-games and other mental excursions into the nature of both storytelling and reality itself. Sophie’s World never takes itself too seriously and reminds the reader just how much fun it can be to play with ideas.

I’ve recently finished “reading” a second audiobook as a distraction from rush hour traffic. The tape-tome loaned to me by my parents was Pepys’ Diary, by Samuel Pepys (read by Kenneth Branagh).

For the most part, Pepys briskly chronicles the ordinary day-to-day events of his life as a Royal Navy administrator in seventeenth century London, and the events are as ordinary as one might expect:

Up and I to the office by water, then home to my wife for dinner, back to the office until dark, and then home and so to bed.

Okay, I’m paraphrasing, but you get the idea. Listening to this, my mind drifted in and out as his ordinary experiences intermingled with mine, the exception being his description of The Great Fire of London (1666), which commands the listener’s undivided attention as Pepys laments the destruction and describes his efforts to save his home and property.

Apart from the fire and his business dealings, much of the drama comes from the fact that Pepys was a man with an eye for the ladies. Amusingly, he tends to veer off into a strange Spanglish (with perhaps a bit of French thrown in) whenever he describes his extramarital affairs. I don’t know if this is an unwillingness to openly acknowledge what he was doing, since he seemed to feel somewhat guilty about it (at times) or simply a code to prevent his wife from reading it if she should find his diary. Perhaps both.

He discontinued his diary in mid-1669 out of concern for his failing eyesight, but it seems a great source of information for anyone interested in English life during this period. I’m not sure I would have picked this up and read it in book form, but it made for fascinating listening and would probably be a good read (in the traditional sense) as well.

Overall, an interesting window into life in seventeenth century London juxtaposed by life in twenty-first century Texas crawling slowly along outside my car windows. And so I home, and to bed.