Knight's Reading List VII: July 2007

Knight’s Reading List VII: July 2007

Now that I’ve posted a reading list – see “Knight’s Reading List VI: June 2007” posted October 6, 2008 – I keep thinking how long ago I read those books. I feel the need to bring things closer to the present, to my present concerns and what I’ve been reading lately. In part, I think this may be helpful to those who read my other contributions to this blog, by letting them know more about my sources and inspirations.

In July 2007 I finished seven books. One of them had been “in the works” for a couple of years. Several were books about Al-Qaeda and the war in Iraq that I read while traveling in the Pacific Northwest. One was a mediocre historical novel set in Byzantium. This was, perhaps, an odd mix.

1 July: Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, translated by Donald Frame. 1958. xxiii + 883 pages, including Index. I began reading this book in 2004 or early 2005, and started up again in July 2005. It took me an incredibly long time to read Montaigne, particularly as I enjoyed the essays greatly while reading them. The very richness of the essays was part of the problem I had; the classical allusions alone in some of the essays would give me material for reflection for days. Montaigne sends one scurrying off to Ovid’s Metamorphoses or Plutarch’s Lives, just to find out the meaning of some intriguing passage. There is in these essays a model for the would-be essayist, as well as reflections upon many affairs of interest. The man was his work, and the work is the man, and many will find Montaigne a good companion.

4 July: H. N. Turtletaub, Justinian. 1998. 511 pages. I began reading on 12 May 2008. I had read a number of books by Harry Turtledove, who writes alternate universe science fiction. He is workmanlike, but he is, if anything, too prolific. He spreads himself and his subject matter a bit thin at times. This historical novel was readable. Compared to Gore Vidal, however, Turtletaub is crude and amateurish at his task.

7 July: Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower. 2006. 470 pages. I began reading it on 7 June 2008. This is a sinister book. It starts with Said Qutb, the Egyptian Islamist who visited the United States back in the 1950s, and went back to Cairo determined to reject the materialist ways of the West. It picks up with the Egyptian Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, and it comes, eventually, to Osama bin Laden himself. Part biography, part the history of a political movement, The Looming Tower doesn’t really explain why bin Laden became the head of Al Qaeda, or how it works, but it provides a lot of interesting insights into the revolutionary as capitalist manqué. I found that my concept of how the U.S. and the West could deal with the challenge of Islam challenged by the complex implications of Wright’s description of this multi-faceted movement.

13 July: Thomas Ricks, Fiasco. 2006. xiv + 482 pages, including Notes, Acknowledgements and Index. I began this one on 2 July 2007. As you can tell, Fiasco was a pretty fast read. Ricks is a reporter for the Washington Post, and he got to meet a lot of people, both in Washington and in Iraq. This is almost as high-level as Bob Woodward’s book, and gives one the same sense that a lot of the people charged with setting Iraq policy either didn’t know what they were doing, are were so encumbered by ideological blinders that they couldn’t bring themselves to do what needed to be done. I have the feeling that instant history of this sort will be supplanted, one day, by more thoughtful histories, which may, however, lose a lot of the atmosphere.

15 July: Bob Woodward, State of Denial. 2006. xiv + 560 pages, including Sources and Index. I began reading this on 4 July 2007. This is the third of Woodward’s books on the post 911 military actions of the U.S. Government. I intentionally read the first two – Bush at War and Plan of Attack before tackling State of Denial. My main reason for that choice was that I read in many reviews, favorable and unfavorable, from the right and from the left, that Woodward in this book “turned on” George W. Bush. (I finished Bush at War in October 2006, and Plan of Attack in November, so it took me a while to execute my program.) I don’t think Woodward changed at all. A lot of comments in the earlier books sounded like compliments as long as everything was going well; once the war turned sour, the same kinds of comments seemed uncomplimentary. Woodward’s technique is much like Ricks’, or any good reporter: He talks to a lot of people, records what they say, and then collates all of these interviews into a picture. That picture becomes grimmer and grimmer in the course of State of Denial, but I don’t think that Woodward was cooking the books. Like a good camera, he was presenting what he saw, and what he saw no longer made the White House look good.

19 July: Deborah J. Bennett, Logic Made Easy. 2004. 256 pages, including Notes, References and Index. I began this book on 4 July 2007. I’ve read quite a few books on logic, some more academic than others. I’m not sure where Deborah J. Bennett goes wrong, but this is less engaging than the ultimate dry logic book, W. V. Quine’s Elementary Logic. I don’t recommend this one. Not at all. Nope.

24 July: Rajiv Chandrasekaran, Imperial Life in the Emerald City. 2006. 320 pages. I started reading this on 10 July 2007. This is most enjoyable of the several Iraq books I read during this period. The “emerald city” of the title is a play on the “Green Zone” in Baghdad, and the resemblance to Oz is not accidental. An American outpost in a Muslim country where pork chops, bacon, ham, and hot dogs were served in huge quantities by the Muslim kitchen staff, the Green Zone had very little connection to the real world, and most of the people there treated it entirely as a way station en route to their next assignment in the States. Chandrasekaran, who, like Dexter Filkins of the New York Times, lived outside the Green Zone, tries to focus on the contrast between what was happening in the real Iraq, and the perceptions inside the hothouse atmosphere of the Pentagon’s Middle Eastern branch.