Category: Books

Justice on the Plains

(p. 71) “What are you doing here?” the judge asked again.
“I cannot talk,” Ehrlich answered, in his hybrid English-German. “This guard will stab my heart out.”
“You talk to me,” Judge Alexander told him. “Now what are you people here for? It’s the middle of the night.”
“Pit-schur.”
“What’s that? A picture?”
“Yah.”
An officer produced the picture that Ehrlich kept in his house–Kaiser Wilhelm and his family in formal pose.
“That’s a beautiful picture,” the judge said, then turned to the police. “Is that all you got against these people?”
“They’re pro-German. They’re hurting the war effort. Spies, for all we know.”
The judge turned to the Germans from the Volga. “How many of you are supporting America in the war?” All hands went up.
Ehrlich reached into his pocket and produced two hundred dollars’ worth of government stamps issued to support the war effort . A friend produced war bonds. The judge looked at the sheriff and asked him how many of his officers had war bonds or stamps. None.
(p. 72) “Take these people home,” the judge said. “If anything happens to them, I’ll hold you responsible .” They drove back in the freezing predawn darkness and released the men to their families at sunrise. A daylong party followed.

Source:
Egan, Timothy. The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006.
(Note: italics in original.)

Václav Havel Viewed America as the Natural Foe of Evil in the World

(p. C7) Havel’s personal and political philosophy can be summed up in a phrase from his 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless”: “living within the truth.” The world imposes great burdens on men, Havel argued, the first of which is a collective responsibility to be honest about the society they inhabit. In Havel’s political context, “living within the truth” meant speaking plainly about an inhuman political system–communism–and the lies and humiliating routines it forced its subjects to tell and endure. The bravest testament to this credo was Charter 77, a public appeal to the regime to respect the human rights it claimed to uphold. Havel was one of several co-authors and its main spokesman.
What drove Havel and others to sign the document was the persecution of a rock band, the Plastic People of the Universe, whose members were accused of “disturbing the peace.” Havel, who would cheekily adopt that malediction as the title for one of his books, soon followed the band to jail for similar offenses against the state. Imprisoned from 1979 to 1983, Havel was denied medical attention and endured great physical pain for his thought crimes. But the communists could not break him, and he refused an offer of early release in exchange for leaving the country. The greatest anguish the future president suffered at the hands of the sclerotic regime, which, in Mr. Zantovsky’s apt phrasing, “elevated oblivion to a method,” was the suppression of his ability to publish and speak freely.
. . .
As Czech president, Havel was a supporter of Western military intervention both in the Balkans and then, more controversially, against Saddam Hussein in 2003. At home and abroad, Havel was moved by the same humanitarian impulse: “Our indifference toward others can after all result in only one thing: the indifference of others towards us,” he said in 1993. This is what Mr. Zantovsky dubs the “Havel Doctrine” and it is rooted in Czechoslovakia’s history of being the victim of foreign invasion and occupation. “Our own historical experience,” Havel said in 1999 on the eve of NATO intervention in Kosovo, “has taught us that evil must be confronted rather than appeased.” The author hesitates to label Havel’s worldview “neoconservative,” and, at least as far as domestic politics are concerned, he is right: On most social and economic issues Havel was decidedly left of center. But Havel personally understood the role of evil in international relations and looked to America as its natural foe.

For the full review, see:
JAMES KIRCHICK. “Disturber of the Peace; Havel wrote passionately about evil, yet he abhorred confrontation.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Dec. 6, 2014): C7.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Dec. 5, 2014, and has the title “Václav Havel: Disturber of the Peace; The dissident wrote passionately about evil, yet he abhorred confrontation.”)

The book under review is:
Zantovsky, Michael. Havel: A Life. New York: Grove Press, 2014.

How the Federal Government Caused the High Plains Dust Bowl

(p. 50) People were pouring into town, taking up rooms at the Crystal Hotel– suitcase farmers who had no intention of ever settling there. They wanted only to rent out a tractor and a piece of ground for a few days, drop some winter wheat into the fresh-turned fold, and come back next summer for the payoff. It was a game of chance called “trying to hit a crop.” One suitcase farmer broke thirty-two thousand acres in southeast Kansas in 1921. Four years later, he plowed twice that amount. The banks seldom said no. After Congress passed the Federal Farm Loan Act in 1916, every town with a well and a sheriff had itself a farmland bank — an institution! — offering forty-year loans at six percent interest. Borrow five thousand dollars and payments were less than thirty-five dollars a month. Any man with a John Deere and a half-section could cover that nut. If it was hubris, or “tempting fate” as some of the church ladies said, well, the United (p. 51) States government did not see it that way. The government had already issued its official view of the rapid churning of ancient prairie sod.
“The soil is the one indestructible, immutable asset that the nation possesses,” the Federal Bureau of Soils proclaimed as the grasslands were transformed. “It is the one resource that cannot be exhausted, that cannot be used up.”

Source:
Egan, Timothy. The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006.

Ezra Pound, a Major Literary Figure of the 20th Century, “Loved the Movies of Walt Disney”

(p. C5) “Mussolini asked,” in A. David Moody ‘s retelling, “what was his aim in writing The Cantos, and Pound replied, ‘to put my ideas in order’; and Mussolini said, ‘What do you want to do that for?’ ” When the poet turned from this dismissal to economic policy, which had lately become the central obsession of his life, the dictator was unimpressed by Pound’s list of 18 proposals, alighting particularly on his assertion that “in the Fascist state taxes were no longer necessary”: “Have to think about THAT,” Mussolini said and ended the interview. To the fascist dictator, Pound, by any measure one of the 20th century’s major literary figures, merited hardly more bother than a fly.
. . .
(p. C7) . . . he was not always an elitist. He loved the movies of Walt Disney, . . .

For the full review, see:
DAVID MASON. “The Makers of Modernism; Pound’s generous spirit looms over 20th-century literature, and in the early years his megalomania seemed harmless.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Dec. 6, 2014): C5 & C7.
(Note: ellipses added; italics in original.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Dec. 5, 2014, and has the title “The Tragic Hero of Literary Modernism; Ezra Pound’s generous spirit looms over 20th-century literature, and in the early years his megalomania seemed harmless.” The first part of the title in the print version was intended to cover both the review of the Pound biography and an accompanying review of a biography of the writer and publisher James Laughlin.)

The book under review is:
Moody, A. David. Ezra Pound: Poet: Volume II: The Epic Years. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Government Encouraged the Dust Bowl of the 1930s

Timothy Egan in The Worst Hard Time helps us to understand the motives and struggles of those who suffered in the Dust Bowl of the 1930s in the Great Plains of the United States. Sometimes he also illuminates the role that the government had in encouraging ordinary people to move to a place that would soon be hell on earth.
In the next few weeks, I will quote several of the most thought-provoking passages of Egan’s book.

Book discussed:
Egan, Timothy. The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006.

Stalin Was “a People Person”

(p. 12) In “Stalin. Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928,” a masterly account that is the first of a projected three-volume study, Kotkin paints a portrait of an autodidact, an astute thinker, “a people person” with “surpassing organizational abilities; a mammoth appetite for work; a strategic mind and an unscrupulousness that recalled his master teacher, Lenin.”

For the full review, see:
JENNIFER SIEGEL. “‘Stalin,’ by Stephen Kotkin.” The New York Times Book Review (Sun., NOV. 30, 2014): 12.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date NOV. 26, 2014, and has the title “‘Stalin,’ by Stephen Kotkin.”)

The book under review is:
Kotkin, Stephen. Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928. New York: Penguin Press, 2014.

“You Don’t Reach Serendip by Plotting a Course for It”

(p. 320) As John Barth wrote in The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor, “You don’t reach Serendip by plotting a course for it. You have to set out in good faith for elsewhere and lose your bearings serendipitously.”28 The challenge for educational institutions, government policy, research centers, funding agencies, and, by extension, all modern medicine, will be how to encourage scientists to lose their bearings creatively. What they discover may just save our lives!

Source:
Meyers, Morton A. Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Modern Medical Breakthroughs. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2007.
(Note: italics in original.)

Outsiders Persevere to Pursue Breakthroughs

(p. 315) Despite all the examples given, mainstream medical research stubbornly continues to assume that new drugs and other advances will follow exclusively from a predetermined research path. Many, in fact, will. Others, if history is any indication, will not. They will come not from a committee or a research team but from an individual, a maverick who views a problem with fresh eyes. Serendipity will strike and be seized upon by a well-trained scientist or clinician who also dares to rely upon intuition, imagination, and creativity. Unbound by traditional theory, willing to suspend the usual set of beliefs, unconstrained by the requirement to obtain approval or funding for his or her pursuits, this outsider will persevere and lead the way to a dazzling breakthrough. Eventually, once the breakthrough becomes part of accepted medical wisdom, the insiders will pretend that the outsider was one of them all along.

Source:
Meyers, Morton A. Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Modern Medical Breakthroughs. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2007.

Leading Computability Expert Says Humans Can Do What Computers Cannot

(p. B4) What does Turing’s research tell us?
“There is some scientific basis for the view that humans are doing something that a machine isn’t doing–and that we don’t even want our machine to do,” says S. Barry Cooper, a mathematician at Leeds and the foremost scholar of Turing’s work.
The math behind this is deep, but here’s the short version: Humans seem to be able to decide the validity of statements that should stump us, were we strictly computers as Turing described them. And since all modern computers are of the sort Turing described, well, it seems that we’ve won the race against the machines before it’s even begun.
. . .
The future of technology isn’t about replacing humans with machines, says Prof. Cooper–it’s about figuring out the most productive way for the two to collaborate. In a real and inescapable way, our machines need us just as much as we need them.

For the full commentary, see:
Mims, Christopher. “KEYWORDS; Why Humans Needn’t Fear the Machines All Around Us; Turing’s Heirs Realize a Basic Truth: The Machines We Create Are Not, Indeed Cannot Be, Replacements for Humans.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., DEC. 1, 2014): B4.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Nov. 30, 2014, and has the title “KEYWORDS; Why We Needn’t Fear the Machines; A Basic Truth: Computers Can’t Be Replacements for Humans.”)

One of the major books by the Turing and computability expert quoted in the passages above, is:
Cooper, S. Barry. Computability Theory, Chapman Hall/CRC Mathematics Series. Boca Raton, Florida: Chapman and Hall/CRC Mathematics, 2003.

Successful Discoverers “Follow the Evidence Wherever It Leads”

(p. 314) Why are particular people able to seize on such opportunities and say, “I’ve stumbled upon a solution. What’s the problem?” Typically, such people are not constrained by an overly focused or dogmatic mindset. In contrast, those with a firmly held set of preconceptions are less likely to be distracted by an unexpected or contradictory observation, and yet it is exactly such things that lead to the blessing of serendipitous discovery.
Serendipitous discoverers have certain traits in common. They have a passionate intensity. They insist on trying to see beyond their own and others’ expectations and resist any pressure that would close off investigation. Successful medical discoverers let nothing stand in their way. They break through, sidestep, or ignore any obstacle or objection to their chosen course, which is simply to follow the evidence wherever it leads. They have no patience with dogma of any kind.
The only things successful discoverers do not dismiss out of hand are contradictory–and perhaps serendipitously valuable–facts. They painstakingly examine every aspect of uncomfortable facts until they understand how they fit with other facts. Far from being cavalier about method, serendipitous discoverers subject their evidence and suppositions to the most rigorous methods they can find. They do not run from uncertainty, but see it as the raw material from which new scientific and medical certainties can be wrought.

Source:
Meyers, Morton A. Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Modern Medical Breakthroughs. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2007.

Resilience of Ordinary People Matters Most in Early Stages of Crisis

(p. A11) Throughout “The Resilience Dividend,” Ms. Rodin pays particular attention to the influence that ordinary people can have in a crisis, especially in the early stages, when it may not be clear what has happened and the professionals haven’t had time to put a plan into place. In the minutes after Boston Marathon bombing last year, citizens rushed forward to help the injured. In New York City on 9/11, hundreds of privately owned boats carried thousands of stranded commuters off the island of Manhattan and across the Hudson River to New Jersey.

For the full review, see:
MELANIE KIRKPATRICK. “BOOKSHELF; Never Waste a Crisis; How was the city of Medellín transformed from the murder capital of South America into a thriving urban center? Escalators.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., Nov. 21, 2014): A11.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Nov. 20, 2014.)

The book being reviewed is:
Rodin, Judith. The Resilience Dividend: Being Strong in a World Where Things Go Wrong. New York: PublicAffairs, 2014.