zenpundit.com

My Father’s Day Gift this year, from my always thoughtful, technophile spouse,  Mrs. Zenpundit. 

I would expound at length on the wonders of The Kindle except that the package only arrived this afternoon and the device is charging on the kitchen countertop downstairs. I expect that this will a) reduce some of my book buying expenses* b) get me back into reading a whole newspaper, maybe FT.com, CSM or the NYT instead of reading random articles online, and c) be a much more convenient way to read my favorite blogs on the go than on my crackberry’s tiny interface.

The Eldest and the Son of Zenpundit gave me the following (with a little “help” from me):

The Bloody White Baron: The Extraordinary Story of the Russian Nobleman Who Became the Last Khan of Mongolia by James Palmer.

The biography of  “the Mad Baron” of the Russian civil war,  General Baron Ungern von Sternberg of the White armies, a Cossack host and eventually, the Mongols. One of the strangest warlords of the 20th century.

* some books you need to own. Others can just be read. I put most fiction in that category, along with contemporary hyperpartisan politics, business books, memoirs of the niche famous and misc. subjects.

I’ve had an upsurge in spammers hitting my old posts, so I have adjusted my filter slightly. If you leave a comment with more than one link, it will be temporarily held for moderation.

As a rule, aside from spam, I approve most everything except one or two incidents in past years that were a) wildly over the top and b) libelous and/or an illegal threat against other commenters that I thought better to remove for the sake of all concerned.

I am no Iran expert but it seems to me that the Islamist regime of Khameini and Ahmadinejad’s Pasdaran clique is soundly losing the information battle to “own” Iran’s critical cultural-political  myths, rooted in Persian history and Shia Islam, to Mousavi’s Green opposition.

Here’s a piece from an Iranian journalist at al Jazeera:

Some influential moderate clerics privately admit that Khamenei has not done “justice” to the presidential candidates and has not treated them with impartiality.

This behaviour, they believe, could jeopardise his position as leader since one of the main qualities required of the supreme leader is “justice”.

In an Iranian context, the requirement for justice in a ruler is a pre-Islamic, Persian concept known as “farr”. While somewhat ambiguous, it is akin to both the Confucian concept of a mandate of heaven and the Western notion of a social contract. I’m sure an Iranianist might quibble with me here ( please weigh in, if you are reading) but the point is that is their cultural bedrock of political legitimacy. To be “unjust” is like an American president seen to be repudiating liberty. Khameini has made himself appear as he actually is and has always been since his days as Khomeini’s political valet – a tyrannical and hypocritical partisan politician in religious robes.

Secondly, from Shia Islam comes the central idea of martydom of the virtuous. Shooting protestors, notably the young woman Neda, ramps up the sense of persecution and martyrdom that is deeply rooted in Iranian culture. Imagine the Kent State shooting on steroids.

Iran’s hardliners may or may not prevail but right now the protestors are clearly inside the regime’s OODA Loop.

My bibliomaniacal co-blogger at Chicago Boyz, Lexington Green, just created a new internet meme, with a post entitled Ten Books I Want To Read Again:

I have too little time to read, let alone re-read. But there are certain books that had an impact on me, that I think about from time to time, and that I have an urge to re-read. I suppose that re-reading, or at least wanting to re-read is a sign that a book is part of a person’s quantum library. I have more, but I will pick ten:

• Charles Norris Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture: A Study of Thought and Action from Augustus to Augustine
• Eric Rucker Eddison, The Worm Ouroboros
• Robert A Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
• Homer, The Iliad
• George Orwell, 1984
• Quentin Reynolds, They Fought for the Sky: The Dramatic Story of the First War in the Air
• Thomas Sowell, Knowledge and Decisions
• Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
• Evelyn Waugh, The Sword of Honor Trilogy

• H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds

A few years ago I re-read Starship Troopers, which had a huge impact on me when I was 11 years old. It was just about as good as I remembered it. I also re-read 1984 about five years ago. I first read 1984 when I was ten years old. I read it a couple of times afterwards. It is absolutely foundational to my thinking. In the ensuing years, I have read almost everything else by Orwell. I found that 1984 was much better than I remembered it being – So much so that I will certainly to go back to it one more time.

A Quantum Library are those books that you read repreatedly because each time you find insights that you had missed or misunderstood previously. While many classics fall into that category, it can be any book with enough pull that you spent the time to read it again. Highbrow literature is not required.

Here are my ten, no particular order:

1. History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon.

Gibbon, along with Clausewitz and Ranke contributed mightily to the development of the historical profession, with Gibbon as a great inspirationfor many others and a daunting intellectual in his time ( Benjamin Franklin unsuccessfully sought a dinner invitation with Gibbon, while a lobbyist for colonial interests in London). I last read The Decline and Fall as an undergraduate.

2. Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny by Robert Wright.

Tom Barnett brought up Wright recently, which reminded me how much I liked Wright’s influential explanation of cultural evolution as a force in the Darwinian ratchet in Nonzero.

3. Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray.

Probably the most vilified yet least read by critics book of the last thirty years.

The authors staked out an extreme hereditarian position in regard to the “g” factor of IQ, which they took great delight in juxtaposing in one chapter and one appendix section with aggregate mean demographic statistics in such a way as to rub academic PC sensibilities raw. This politically calculated gesture let them ride to the bestseller’s lists on a wave of outrage, a good part of which was self-discreditingly ignorant of psychometric testing, genetics, economics and social science methodology, which drowned out the more perceptive critics. now that the furor is long past, it would be interesting to re-read The Bell Curve in light of subsequent scientific discoveries about neurolearning and intelligence.

4. The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom.

Read it when it first came out and was carrying it into a philo gen ed class which caused my professor, a pompous ass who disliked me for some conservative opinion I once had the temerity to voice, to pause and announce “Well…at least you are reading a serious critic”. He was reading it as well.

5. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov.

Bulgakov was the anti-Soviet novelist who happened to also be Stalin’s favorite playwright ( Bulgakov was the author of The White Turbans, which Stalin delighted in repeatedly watching – a quirk of fate which saved Bulgakov’s life and freedom). An unhappy man of great imaginative powers, Bulgakov’s great novel had something like a quarter of a million or half a million words excised by Soviet censors. I’m curious if more accurate editions have been issued.

6. Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era by James M. McPherson.

One of the best single volume histories of the Civil War. A “gateway” book to other Civil War histories.

7. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger.

For anyone who was ever Holden Caulfield – or who had to teach him.

8. The Great Terror: A Reassessment by Robert Conquest.

This is a hybrid pick because I read The Great Terror and also Conquest’s Reassessment. Conquest is always worth reading, an old school man of letters of whom we will see no more of his like.

9. The Best and the Brightest by David Haberstam.

The seminal, anti-Vietnam War book by a lionized Establishment figure ( lionized now, not during the war), the title of which became a term of cultural literacy. Appropriate because the current administration seems to be too cocksure that they too are best and brghtest.

10. The Possessed (The Devils) by Fyodor Dostoyevskii.

Dostoyevskii’s psychological portrait of faddish radicalism, earnest nihilism, and incipient terrorism in a provincicial backwater in Tsarist Russia, is another classic that fits the spirit of our times. The Possessed is less ponderous and more satirical than Crime and Punishment and more cohesive than The Idiot.

What are your ten ?

Just received a review copy of Doug Stanton’s Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of US Soldiers Who Rode to Victory in Afghanistan, which is about the special operations soldiers who infiltrated Taliban held Afghanistan and who were forced to blend the ancient with the postmodern on the battlefield. Horse Soldiers is doing very well on The New York Time’s bestseller list and is up near the very top of that prestigious category.

The promotion people also included the audio book as well in a 7 hour  CD set. I’ve never listened to a “book on tape”, as they used to be called back in the day, so this might be the opportunity to give that format a try and review.

Flipping through the pages, the Horse Soldiers is not at all dry military history but action-packed narrative to which a general audience might relate. Here is an excerpt from the prologue:

Qala-i-Janghi Fortress
Mazar-i-Sharif, AfghanistanNovember 24-25, 2001Trouble came in the night, riding out of the dust and the darkness.
Trouble rolled past the refugee camp, past the tattered tents
shuddering in the moonlight, the lone cry of a baby driving high into
the sky, like a nail. Sunrise was no better; at sunrise, trouble was
still there, bristling with AKs and RPGs, engines idling, waiting to
roll into the city. Waiting.These were the baddest of the bad, the real masters of mayhem, the
death dealers with God stamped firmly in their minds. The city groaned
and shook to life. Soon everyone knew trouble had arrived at the gates
of the city.

Major Mark Mitchell heard the news at headquarters nine miles away and
thought, You’re kidding. We got bad guys at the wire?

He ran downstairs, looking for Master Sergeant Dave Betz. Maybe he
would know what was happening.

But Betz didn’t know anything. He blustered, “One of the Agency guys
came down and told us we got six hundred Taliban surrendering. Can you
believe that?”

Surrendering? Mitchell couldn’t figure out why. He thought the Taliban
had fled from the approaching forces of the Northern Alliance to
Konduz, miles away. American Special Forces and the Northern Alliance
had been beating them back for weeks, in battle after battle, rolling
up territory by coordinating airstrikes from the sky and thousands of
Northern Alliance soldiers on the ground. They now stood on the verge
of total victory. Konduz was where the war was supposed to go next.
Not here. Not in Mazar. Not at Club Mez.

Besides, these guys didn’t surrender. They fought to the death……

Hmmmmm. Note to self. If you want to sell books, write more like this and less like an academic in a dusty cubicle at an obscure think tank.:)