The end of another year—and not too shabby for reading, considering how much of the year I struggled with being productive. Not as bad as I feared while still leaving me with knowledge and room for improvement going forward. My attempt to get back into fiction as opposed to being pretty strictly non-fiction is ongoing—I didn't realize just how much my reading habits had changed until I glanced at my unread stacks and realized that I had six or seven non-fiction to one of fiction. It really can feel like a breath of fresh air to pick up fiction after finishing a real door-stopper like, say, Cromwell.
Cromwell, while a good overview of the man (if light on his atrocities, particularly toward the Irish), required some outside sources to really grasp. I read it around the time of John Milton, hoping to do a sort of comparative review of the two men in their time. This, obviously, did not work out, but it did inspire a comment regarding fruitless copulation and the charging of interest in Judeo-Christian ethics I mentioned in my post about Peter Green last year.
Speaking of Fleetwood Mac, Uncultured ranks among one of the most powerful—but troubling—books of the year. And that skeevy little pervert Jeremy Spencer, well, he's much, much worse than I ever imagined after reading this. When I post about the Children of God, I will go into more depth about the overlapping details like his British accent or tendency to impersonate Elvis (one of his showstoppers as a member of the Mac was his Elvis impersonation), but: there is no doubt in my mind that I can identify which "Uncle" Spencer was in the cult.
Others might also know the Children of God as the cult Joaquin Phoenix's parents were members of. The Children of God are, as Mestyanek Young mentioned in one podcast interview, not often written about. Publishers struggle to sell books about them because readers find the content too disturbing. I understand why after reading. That having been said, it reinforces the value of reading such a book.
As difficult as it is to read, Mestyanek Young's talent as a writer and teacher shine through. The other chunk of her book discusses her time after departing from the childhood cult and joining the military—where she noticed similar, cultish traits. She even spots troublesome behavior in her ex-husband and, well, wouldn't you know this woman just has a talent, an ability, for insight and catching things others miss.
The Army wants to kick out an avowed white supremacist officer, but they won’t admit it
Her ex-husband, one William Jeffrey Poole, first comes across as a kinda amorphous figure, then a skeevy, manipulative guy but bog-standard toxic masculine douchebag—and then you find out he's an extremist and has posted on Reddit about things like plans to frag his military superiors and trying to attack US infrastructure and overthrow the government. All the big strong men in the army decided spinelessness was the best punishment for him and, well, something tells me a guy like Poole is right up the alley of the kind of scumbag the incoming administration just loves.
It's a real shame considering how Mestyanek Young got screwed over by the military time and again despite being an upstanding person. These incidents include the time Poole tried to end her career by inventing a false affair claim or her attempt to protect a victim being interpreted as persecuting them by supervisors and them being mule-headed in refusing to investigate properly..
Cause her insight isn't limited to seeing through shitheels like Poole: on the battlefield, she was instrumental in working to get women into combat roles. She met Obama as a result—played a bit of a prank on him for seeming to assume she was a lesbian—but more importantly: she also kept her entire unit alive once by volunteering to go out with them, noticing something was awry, and preventing them from walking blind over a hidden IED. Anyway, as Mestyanek Young discussed in the podcast: books about the Children of God and books about women in the military don't tend to sell well. So she wrote a book about both. And it is more than worth reading.
Reading about abuse of power, well, it should come as no surprise that I found Jean Edward Smith's biography of John Marshall fascinating, and the same goes for the lecture on him I watched around the same time. Gregarious and charming as a man, Marshall's true brilliance lay in building the bulwark of the Supreme Court, and by extension the Judicial Branch, from an afterthought not even considered in DC's original plans (they had to borrow a room from Congress—which, grudgingly, obliged) to being a major focus the last several decades.
Unfortunately, with the current conservative Supreme Court and politicization of the court, Trump v. United States effectively wrecked that. All that "no one is above the law" stuff gets kinda chucked out the window when the Supreme Court decides you can, say, incite a terrorist attack on the nation's Capitol, call it an official act, and get absolute immunity. Franklin's warning comes to mind a bit too late, now that we've strapped dynamite to the foundations of separation of powers and coequal branches: "A republic... if you can keep it."
Character Limit, well, I already discussed it a bit and could go on, but: I think a lot of the problems I highlighted there are relevant here, given the ongoing symbiosis of president elon and VP donnie. This is not the only book I have discussed already, as Mandela, Mobutu, and Me also ranks among the more informative books of the year, contextualizing helped along by reading Meredith's The State of Africa in 2023.
Despite my tendency to cannonball into the deep end and test my luck dog paddling, more often going from a broad outline is helpful background to diving into more specific studies on a subject. This year's history of Russia and 2023's history of China provide two more examples of huge blind spots in my education I needed to get a rudimentary grounding on and I intend to build on that foundation going forward.
And for a dishonorable shoutout: The Riverman. Written before Ridgway was caught, there's no real conclusion there and some of the confessions from Bundy, well, they're just as disgusting as you'd expect. But this is probably the only chance I have to make the remark that it did not, in fact, turn out to be like a really warped real-life version of Silence of the Lambs. Bundy's discussion of motivations and suggestions about the Green River Killer's behaviors end up being more a reflection of Bundy's own twisted psyche, obsession with control, and disgusting fixations. Ann Rule remains my recommendation for Bundy and Ridgway both, if true crime is up your alley.
On that note, All Good People Here, Crime Junkie host Ashley Flowers' debut novel, is a great page-turner that I got to a bit late after release. Looks like her next book is coming out in 2025, which I feel confident going into with high hopes.
I also had the privilege of encountering some books I otherwise might not have while I was in the local book club. Carnegie's Maid and The Mountains Sing come to mind. The latter of the pair draws on oral and other sources to provde a fictional slice-of-life about life for the Vietnamese during the Vietnam War. While, again, fictional, the basis in real accounts and roman a clef nature still makes it a worthwhile read. And the treatment experienced there does provide a Vietnamese perspective that mirrors the atrocities noted by antiwar liberals like John Kerry, who discusses his time in Vietnam in Every Day Is Extra.
On the not so bright side, Geraldine Brooks' Horse. I've heard enough good things about Brooks I'm not willing to dismiss her as a writer without another try but, uh, let's just say I didn't get into it. Maybe it was because I'd read The Paleontologist around the same time and the antagonist of that book had an unfortunate overlap with the protagonist of Horse in being obsessed with dead things and bones. Then you've got the very stiff and awkwardly crammed in racial aspects of the book—would a comparison to the character of Dr. Nira Cain-N'Degeocello in Who Is America? be appropriate? Most apt comparison I can think of.
A hamfisted commentary on racial relations with all the subtlety of Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots crammed full of firecrackers that seems like it was designed to be a parody of what conservatives think whacko airhead liberals are. Maybe I'm harsh and should've left it at "I was not fond."
Violeta was a long-delayed return to Allende, as well, and I was delighted to find a link between The House of Spirits and it in the form of an allusion to the dog Barrabas. Well, I guess it's an allusion to the del Valle family, but when Allende mentions a giant black dog "the size of a camel" I believe, well, that terminology and her immediately triggered, "I've heard about this fella before, let me go double-check, I've got the book just upstairs..." (My freshman Spanish teacher was named del Valle—"Mr. Of-the-Valley," he'd say to translate. Nice guy even if he made it very clear he meant it when he said, "I only came out of retirement for spending money. My wife and I are going on a cruise this summer.").
Poetry, along with fiction, is something I haven't and don't read enough of—so, in 2023, I began working to fix that and last year, I continued the trend. Sappho's fragments in If Not, Winter were, unfortunately, fragments, but given the contextualization and introductory remarks: you can tell she was talented and the fragments have an entrancing ability of making less more when your mind fills in the gaps for itself.
Rupi Kaur's poetry, as well as her backstory and how she got herself published: good writing, and I always respect an underdog turning shit they're dealing with into a victory. Mary Oliver was another poet I found interesting—and apparently one of the best-selling poets in the US before she passed. Very enjoyable, too, though there's a twisted part of me that likes to contrast her writing with that crass earthiness of Bukowski and imagine the pair in a dialogue and how much of a glorious trainwreck that'd be. Leonard Cohen, more known as a singer, also stands out as an outstanding poet with a unique voice.
There are, of course, the lemons, most prominently that book about Blavatsky by Blondie's bassist, which leaves one with only one reliable takeaway: rockstars really do get some next-level drugs.
There's something to be said about all of last year's reading, frankly, but I could digress all day.
I finished the year with a biography of Edward Teller, a man hugely influential when it comes to the military-industrial complex—and by "influential" I mean Eisenhower was talking about Edward Teller and Wernher von Braun in his famous military-industrial complex speech—and the development of nuclear weapons. In particular, Teller was arguably one inspiration for Dr. Strangelove and his fascination with nuclear weapons led to the "Super" or a hydrogen/thermonuclear bomb. Here's a sample video to give a concept of the size.
A weapon so powerful that it eclipses the hellish weapons used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki by an order of magnitude. And let's discuss some of those horrors, quoted on page 108:
"I just could not understand why our surroundings had changed so greatly in one instant... I thought it might have been something which had nothing to do with the war—the collapse of the earth which it is said would take place at the end of the world, and which I had read about as a child..."
"There were dead bodies everywhere. There was practically no room for me to put my feet on the floor. At that time I couldn't figure out the reason why all these people were suffering or what illness it was that had struck them down... There was no light at all, and we were just like sleep walkers..."
"My immediate thought was that this was like the hell I had always read about. I had never seen anything which resembled it before. But I thought that should there be a hell, this was it."
When we first tested the hydrogen bomb and the results were reported to the president, Eisenhower "visibly paled" when told, "The island of Elugelab is missing."
But that wasn't good enough for Teller!
He wanted to nuclear bomb Alaska to create an effectively worthless port. To use nuclear weapons to basically try to 'sculpt' the earth as we so desired. Ultimately, he was heavily involved in 'Star Wars'—what's that 30 Rock joke, "Not the space opera—the Strategic Defense Initiative." The whole idea was more or less based on shoddy/bullshit evidence, reflecting and refracting light in space to target nuclear strikes both for our own strikes and to deflect enemies. With Teller's promotion, combined with Reagan's bellicose tone and intransigence on nuclear disarmament, it almost caused the USSR to launch a preemptive strike in the eighties.
And it was built on bullshit, wishes, and dreams.[, and really, really good drugs.]
Anyway, I got a whole thing I'm working on there. But I'll end on some of the thoughts I have as I work my way through related reading: Carl Sagan* in The Demon-Haunted World speaks of Teller as a scientist who knew sin. This is a paraphrase of Oppenheimer—who, like many scientists, had moral questions about the bomb and was called a commie for the crime of having a conscience—and one that Teller responded to in life: Teller claimed scientists had not known sin but "have known power."
"Power corrupts. And absolute power corrupts absolutely," is well-known enough, isn't it?
I suppose, on reflection: that's been a recurrent theme of my reading, and my personal experiences, this year.
—
*In the interests of being fair here: this was not a good time to find out about the Order of the Dolphin and Sagan's connections to totally credible and highly respected Dr. John C Lilly, who is known for such scientific milestones as getting absolutely sky high on amphetamines and writing a book about interspecies communication with dolphins in a weekend. Then trying to put this into action by making his home semi-aquatic and hiring a scientist to, uh, "teach a dolphin English" while he kicked it overhead on his drugs of choice in a sensory deprivation tank.
I believe in Russia, North Korea, and parts of the South, such "experiments" are still considered "science."
What's that old McCartney and Wings song? "Let's go, let's go, let's go, let's go/Down to Pinyan's Farm..."
The results? We did not get communication. But the dolphins did get sexual gratification. So, basically, we got zilch on the communication but Peter the Dolphin's still in some sleezy underwater bar bragging about how easy it is to con humans into putting out. So we did prove that they're clever little bastards, if nothing else.
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