Dark Star Safari

This is the first time I've read Theroux. It will not be the last.

I think the sheer audacity of the trip Theroux proposes--from Cairo to Cape Town over land--is the most attractive aspect of the book, to me. I'd love to do something that foolhardy, that crazy, but I couldn't possibly leave my wife and family and go off to do that and not feel guilty about it every single day. Theroux has been doing it for decades.

After reading, what stays with me though is not just the fact of this absurd journey, but the imagery Theroux uses. I was completely taken with his writing, his use of the language, and throughout regardless of how I felt about his commentaries on various things the writing was just wonderful.

The trip is certainly worth taking. Theroux visits parts of Africa few Westerners ever visit, and does so via means rarely if ever taken by outsiders; I was reminded of Jeffery Tayler's canoe trip down the Congo when Theroux decided to take a boat downriver from Malawi into Mozambique; who does these things? I want to talk to these people; where do they get such a crazy notion and why is there no one around to talk them out of it?

The book, perhaps the traveller himself, is strongest when he is able to be with someone strong enough to strike up an actual relationship, however brief. In Ethiopia, Uganda, Malawi, and elsewhere Theroux spends several days with one person or a group of people and it is here that we get the best insight into Africans themselves; other conversations with former political prisoners--Theroux notes that a great many men of a certain age in Africa have been in prison, often for a fairly long time, a comment I'd heard in Djibouti but never considered--are equally illuminating. Theroux by himself tends to fall into a Brysonesque tendency to pick on people, though in fairness in Egypt he's picking on people who probably deserve it.

The book has received some press coverage and commentary for Theroux's strong comments about the international aid effort in Africa. Some of his complaints are petty and I think personal--he consistently complains that aid workers in their shiny new Land Rovers never stop to pick him up when he's looking for a ride; yet at the same time he knows full well how dangerous the areas he's going through are, and why should an aid worker believe his story and give him a ride when there are no doubt dozens of Africans who'd like the same favor? Theroux never considers that or, if he does, he doesn't write about it. Seems petty and I was a little annoyed with it by the sixth or seventh time he complained about it.

Theroux's main argument about aid is that the Aid For Africa industry--and it is an industry--has done nothing to improve the lives of everyday Africans, employs no Africans, involves no Africans in its decision-making, and works almost entirely to further the goals of other nations and the careers of the aid agencies themselves. Some of those criticisms are certainly fair, not the least of which is that all the millions or billions of dollars spent in Africa by aid agencies over the years has led to precisely zero improvement in the lives of Africans; things are indeed worse than ever. And a lot of aid programs are tied to requirements from the home country--the project must use a certain contractor or purchase materials from certain places, instead of everything being done in Africa by African suppliers and companies. Part of the reason there's no corporate infrastructure in Africa to speak of is that most government budgets are aid, and most aid requires projects to use international contractors, so local contractors can't even get work from their own governments and thus cannot build local wealth.

But a lot of aid work is done by Africans, and there is a glaring problem with Theroux's anti-aid bias: he never talks to an aid agency. He talks to a couple of Catholic nuns, and a handful of teachers, but not to anyone in a leadership capacity; indeed, he'd rather sneer at the people driving the Land Rovers than try to engage them, although in fairness they don't seem interested in engaging him.
There are people more learned than I about the topic who have criticized Theroux's statements, and I'll let you look those up if you're interested; a good bit of the criticism seems to be picking nits, though, and most impartial observers are coming to agree that there is something fundamentally wrong with the international aid is handled in Africa. Whether he's right in all the details, Theroux's complaints about aid are not unique and certainly should be food for thought.

Controversy aside, the book is a wonderful read, and there's just not anything else out there like it. Travel writing about Africa tends to be either limited in scope or of poor quality in general; this book is certainly neither of those. Now if there was just something of this quality about west Africa...

Six Short Book Reviews

I've been meaning to review these books forever and haven't got round to it and at this rate I won't for ages. So here's the abbreviated version in order of the first read. As always any of these are available for checkout from the Smitty Library.

1. An Embarrassment of Mangoes, by Ann Vanderhoof.
Wonderful book. Enjoyable to read, will whet your appetite for a Caribbean vacation. Great recipes, although we haven't actually tried any of them yet (but I really want to, especially now I know the DeKalb Farmer's Market in Atlanta has callaloo). Ann Vanderhoof has done what we all want to do--leave the rat race behind and take a vacation forever (or a year, in her case)--so obviously she has more money than the rest of us, but she never ever writes like it, and the book is just a pleasure. Highly recommended.

2. The Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson.
A reread. I love Snow Crash and, the last time I read it, I still loved it. I like this book a great deal, but it runs out of steam 3/4 of the way through and enters a territory of great weirdness where it starts to get difficult to follow and even, frankly, to suspend disbelief for. Still contains wonderful moments of philosophy and lots of solid factual grounding, and still mostly a very fun read. But not as much fun as I remembered. Definitely worth looking at, but it shows the direction Stephenson has taken generally (i.e. increasingly hard to read).

3. Whatever You Do, Don't Run, by Peter Allison.
Subtitled "True Tales of a Botswana Safari Guide." Lots of fun. Not quite as funny as you might expect from the cover blurbs and actually surprisingly touching at times, nonetheless a light, quick read, perfect for a bedside book as it consists of a collection of short episodes. I greatly enjoyed this book, and I don't think you need to have gone on safari to enjoy it yourself. It may make you want to pick up and go, though. I suspect Mr. Allison has three or four more books of stories in him and he is a fine storyteller. Smittywife needs to read this before it goes into the lending library circulation.

4. Airline/Transport Pilot Oral Exam Guide
Technical book of very limited interest. Will be out of date soon anyway, and since none of the airlines are actually hiring I won't need to take the test. Useful for brushing up on things before my interview, though.

5. Emergency Sex, by Kenneth Cain, Heidi Postlewait, and Andrew Thomson.
Absolutely my highest recommendation; the best book I've read this year. The authors were UN Peacekeepers during the 1990s and into the early 2000s and these are their tales. If you are at all aware of the existence of other countries you should read this book. If you are a firebreathing conservative and think the UN should be shut down, you should read this book. If you are bleeding-heart liberal and think the UN should take over the world, you should read this book. If you think it matters at all how the US is viewed in the other countries, you should read this book. If you don't think it matters how the US is viewed in other countries but are aware that other people have opinions, you should read this book.
You should read this book. It is gripping. It is well-written. It matters.

6. The Power and the Glory, by Graham Greene.
Interesting. On a lot of "Best Books" lists, which is why I read it. I will pick up The Quiet American and The Comedians on the basis of this, but I can't say I was exactly swept up in it or transfixed by its brilliance. Greene knows how to build a novel and is a good writer; if the subject matter, faith (in particular Catholicism) and keeping faith when there is no Earthly reason to do so, is of remote interest to you, this is one of few novels on the subject that doesn't preach to you (there's plenty of preachy junk out there for you if you want that). But it never really answers any questions, for the protagonist or for the reader. Valuable, but not one you need to put at the top of your list.

Until Proven Innocent

There is a lot to think about in this book. It is far from perfect, quite far. But it is fascinating, it is exceptionally well-researched, it makes an effort to include every known and provable fact about the case, and it certainly leaves no question as to who the real criminals were in the much-publicized case. Read more after the jump.

The case, of course, is the infamous Duke University lacrosse team gang-rape case of 2006. You remember when this was all over the news last spring and summer, when every news show had the faces of these rich, white Duke lacrosse players who had gang-raped and shouted racial slurs at an innocent black single mother who was studying for her degree at a nearby historically black college.

You may or may not remember what actually turned out to be the truth: there was no rape, no crime, the "victim" was lying, the prosecutor knew it, the prosecutor sought to put the three "rapists" in jail to help him win an election even though he knew they were innocent. The prosecutor actually engaged in a conspiracy to cover up exculpatory evidence, failed to actually interview the "victim" for over six months after the crime, and deliberately sought ways to make the lacrosse players seem guilty in the media before he ever made a single charge and despite multiple police interviews and DNA tests that showed they were innocent.

It was one of the worst cases of prosecutorial misconduct in recent memory, certainly the most public (which is sad, because the misconduct only really came out because the accused had good lawyers; poorer folks could easily have been sent to rot in jail to further this DA's political career). Worse, it was rather damning evidence that the mid-1990's spate of extreme political correctness on college campuses nationwide (remember the "water buffalo" incident?) hasn't gone away, as dozens of Duke University professors and much of the administration took a position that the lacrosse players were guilty without ever hearing a single piece of evidence.

This is one of those books that will make you mad. It made me mad. I couldn't read more than a chapter or so at a time before I had to put it down and walk away for a while. The only reason you can get through it at all is that you already know how it ends: you know the guys get off in the end, they're proven innocent. You know Nifong is in trouble. You know that. But it doesn't make reading about the intervening months especially easy.

Of course as I said the book has flaws. It needs a copyedit, badly. Very badly. One of the authors, KC Johnson, a professor at Brooklyn College, is a noted blogger, and the book reads at times like a blog entry, very informal. That's fine, but the copyediting is blog-like, too--which is to say, there hasn't been any. Words repeat, are misspelled, there are words missing, punctuation is missing or inappropriate... it isn't awful, it's not on every page, but it's blatant (I'm not talking about "it's" v "its", I'm talking about leaving the e off the end of the word 'are') and distracting and takes away from the book's power.

Similarly, the authors are both guilty of using the same sort of loaded language against the professors, the DA, and the administration, as they accuse those actors of using against the team members. The lacrosse players were 'trashed' in the media. The assertions of the professors were 'outrageous.' Loaded words like that are thrown around on almost every page, and while as I was reading they fit right in with the narrative, they're a problem. Quite simply, they make the book an easy target as being "biased." It seems like the authors have an agenda (which they clearly do and admit to in the last three chapters), but the story stands on its own merits. You'd be plenty outraged by the facts as they exist without the additional hyperbole. The beast is cooked by the facts; there's no need to continue stabbing it with language.

All is not lost; the authors are not some wild-eyed arch-conservatives. Stuart Taylor, Jr., is a fellow at the non-partisan and centrist Brookings Institute (if you think Brookings is conservative, bear in mind an equal number of people think it's liberal; that's how we know it's centrist), a lawyer, and a legal reporter for a number of media outlets (almost entirely on the left of the political spectrum); KC Johnson is a history professor who's scholarly output focuses on American progressives and their role as dissenters from American foreign policy, a registered Democrat and public supporter of Barack Obama's presidential campaign. These are not raving right-wingers. Johnson was once denied tenure for having the temerity to question whether a panel set up by CUNY to discuss the 9/11 attacks should maybe have at least one person who didn't think American foreign policy was the proximate and only cause of the attack. The very last chapter of the book is clearly Johnson's axe-grinding; two chapters before looks to have been Taylor's work, an attack on the grand-jury process and the inadequacies of the justice system to guarantee defendant's rights and prevent the innocent from being convicted.

It would be easy to write this book off as a right-wing attack on left-wing academia, and no doubt a number of the academics mentioned in its pages (disparagingly, for the most part) have said just that. Unfortunately for that story, the facts don't bear it out. In any other book, chapter 23, a plea for the rights of the accused in criminal cases, would be taken as so much left-wing hand-wringing when we should really be focused on victim's rights. Both authors actually appear to be somewhat to the left on the political spectrum--though to those on the farthest fringes of the left, moderate liberals are often seen as conservative (exactly the same phenomenon occurs on the far right; note the number of conservative politicians labelled "RINO" (Republican In Name Only) by the far fringe).

This is a story that needs to be told. This book was much needed, as a historical work, as an attempt to force the named parties to come to grips with the truth of what they did, as an effort to provide public proof that the three accused men were indeed innocent of any crime and should never have been treated as they were by the police, the press, the DA, and their own university faculty and administration. It is precisely because the book was so needed that it's glaring problems are so bad--an important historical work that seeks (and needs) to be taken seriously should take itself seriously; another two weeks at the editing desk would have cleared up the copy problems, and a two-week rewrite could have neutralized the language. Then we'd have had a book that would have to be taken seriously; this one compares to much to a blog, and that's a shame. The last line of the book states that "it's the facts that matter," and that's true, but in such a political atmosphere as this book and this case play out, style goes a long way to getting people to pay attention to the facts.

It's a good read, a rather ripping yarn, and an important book; but it's not what it needed to be.

Understanding Iraq

I bought Understanding Iraq, by William Polk, at the beginning of this year when I expected to deploy there. That deployment fell through, and there is no Understanding Djibouti. So I read this book instead. We could all use a little understanding.

Unfortunately, I can't review this book and adhere to my "no political content" policy, so I won't try. The book is interesting; it is slim and well-paced and written by an old hand with no need to prove his academic credentials to anyone, so it's easy to read. That said, the author, a trained historian, has very well-defined political opinions, and it is hard not to see that from the first section of the book, on ancient Iraq. It's tempting to say his opinions are formed by years of study, and of course to some degree they must be—and the author has spent a significant amount of time living and working in Iraq and so knows the place well apart from his study—but two people can look at the same set of facts and draw different conclusions. Readers inclined to Mr. Polk's point of view will find this book a quick read and a useful resource in discussions of the topic. Readers on the other side of the aisle will not be so inclined.

Expanding the reading list

I didn't want to have to drop some of the books off the end of my "Recent Reads" list, so I've expanded it to ten. I put Frankenstein and the Martian Chronicles down at the bottom even though I read them after numbers 7 and 8. But since I've already mentioned them on the blog, I figure it will be no great loss if they drop off the list first.

But maybe you're curious about some of the other things on the list.

Number 8 there is Life of Pi, by Yann Martel. I read this on my last deployment, and I loved it. It is a terrific story, entertaining and sometimes funny, and it always makes you think. Martel is a lyrical writer, almost as good as Michael Chabon, and it's a pleasure to read his words. The story, of course, is somewhat fanciful--at least, it might be. The ambiguity of its reality is part of the fun. Of the fiction books on this list, I would give this my top recommendation for all my readers.

Number 7 is Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein. It's the first Heinlein book I've read; this is the "uncut original version" and I'm not sure how the abridged version would read. This is certainly an interesting book. Heinlein's views on sexuality and religion are...different. But certainly of some interest. This is an absolute classic of the genre so any sci-fi fans who haven't read it would be encouraged to do so... but bear in mind that the subject matter is a bit out of the ordinary.

Number 6 is A Court Divided, by Mark Tushnet. Tushnet is a law professor and Supreme Court scholar. His book is about the Rehnquist Court, and the various factions thereon and how they've affected the conservative legal agenda--namely, it's been variously thwarted in some circumstances (property rights) and moved forward in others (religion in the public sector). This is an interesting study, especially combined with the fourth book on the list, but would be of interest mostly to people already interested in legal issues.

Number 5 is Age and Guile beat Youth, Innocence, and Bad Haircut, by P.J. O'Rourke. O'Rourke is one of my very favorite writers; he practices what you could call gonzo journalism," though he's not quite so ridiculous about it as Hunter Thompson was (though Thompson is fun to read anyway). This is a book of some of his older pieces, the type of thing that you publish after you've published a lot of other books, which O'Rourke has. It's not his best, but it is entertaining.

Number 4 is The Supreme Court, by Chief Justice William Rehnquist. This is one of the classic popular studies of the Court's history and function, and is far and away the most strongly recommended book on this list for every reader.

Number 3 is O'Rourke's All the Trouble in the World. This is one of his best, maybe his very best, but it's hard to say. Chapters include Plague, Poverty, the Environment, Famine, Overpopulation, and the various other of the world's ills, and O'Rourke travels to countries around the world to report on what causes those ills, what they look like first-hand, and what is and can be done about them. I love this book; this was probably my fourth reading of it. It would be really cool to follow in O'Rourke's footsteps but, oh well, guess that ship has sailed.

Number 2 is poo. But book number 2 on this list is the Count of Monte Cristo, which I've already discussed. Read it, it's good.

Number 1 I just finished last night, O'Rourke's Eat the Rich. This was his next book after Trouble and, if you read them in order, you can see how he gets from one to the next. After visiting Haiti (Plague) in the previous book and discovering that the plague there was secondary to the crippling poverty and governmental mismanagement, he wrote that the real solution to Haiti's plague was to make the Haitians rich. In Eat the Rich, O'Rourke travels to such places as Wall Street, Sweden, Cuba, and 1997 Albania (after the pyramid schemes collapsed) to look at what makes wealth, what wrecks it, and how to go about making everybody in the world rich.

P.J. O'Rourke was once a self-described conservative, but in the last 5 years he's been working as a fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute and preaching some degree of the libertarian gospel. What would make him unusual as a conservative Republican is the desire to see everybody in the world get rich. A lot of conservatives (casting aspersions here, but conservatives do it to liberals all the time) seem not to be terribly concerned about getting the rest of the world--or even the poorer parts of our country--rich. Of course, a lot of traditional lefties feel the same way. Wanting everybody to get rich is definitely a libertarian ethic, and O'Rourke sells that gospel very well.

So there you have it, my recent reading list. I'll discuss the other books as I finish them.