zenpundit.com

[by Mark Safranski a.k.a “zen”]

The Authentic Swing by Steven Pressfield 

Callie was kind enough to send me a review copy of Steven Pressfield’s new non-fiction book, The Authentic Swing. Much like the title implies, it is a book with an arc.

The Authentic Swing continues a theme Pressfield began with his excellent The War of Art, continued with Do the Work and Turning Pro of helping struggling writers, artists and others conquer their resistance and acquire the mature habits of mind to become creative, productive professionals. While the previous books were advice, The Authentic Swing is a demonstration. Pressfield breaks down for the reader the gestation and evolution of his first successful novel, The Legend of Bagger Vance and applies a granular eye to the creative process but does so without tipping his hand or writing a “cookbook”. Steve is employing all his gifts as a storyteller to lead and nudge the reader into understanding.

There are many parts in the book that I like, but the following is in my view the most important, despite being less colorful and more straightforward than others:

When Robert McKee was a young writer/director in New York, he got the chance to interview Paddy Chayefsky, the only person to have one two Academy Awards for original Screenplay (Marty and Network) Chayefsky shared this priceless nugget:

As soon as I figure out the theme of my play, I type it out in one line and scotch tape it to the front of my typewriter After that, nothing goes into the play that isn’t on-theme.

If  there is a single more powerful piece of wisdom for any writer, artist or entrepreneur, I don’t know what it is.

Theme.

Theme is everything.

Once we know the theme we know the climax, we know the protagonist, we know the antagonist, we know the supporting characters, we know the opening, we know the throughline.

I said before that I have a file in my computer titled NEW IDEAS. I have another THEME.  for each new project, I open a new file and title it THEME. I go back to this file over and over. I pile paragraph on paragraph, trying to answer the question, “What the hell is this book about?”

It’s hard.

Theme not only drives art, it drives a coherent life. It makes the disparate connected and gives actions unity. We see theme in great innovative companies, in the curriculum of our best university programs, at the core of great religions, in revolutionary political movements and a nation’s grand strategy. Charles Hill, drew on themes of classical literature to teach that very point about foreign policy. This advice is worth the price of the book alone.

The theme here is authenticity and allowing yourself to express it. Pressfield demonstrates this frequently by parable and metaphor, moving the reader toward the process of discovering authenticity without making the fact that it is a process confuse the reader with the expectation that it will be linear or easy, only natural. I don’t want to give away too much because it is fun to see how the vignettes unfold on build upon one another, obviously golf and the cultural context the sport provided for Bagger Vance is a large part of the book but that will not be a surprise. I will say that The Authentic Swing is a very elegant method of teaching.

Steve’s best non-fiction book since The War of Art.

[by J. Scott Shipman]

American Caesar, Douglas MacArthur 188-1964, by William Manchester

Often on weekends my wife allows me to tag along as she takes in area estate sales. She’s interested in vintage furniture, and I hope for a decent collection of books. A sale we visited a couple months ago had very few books, but of those few was a hardback copy of American Caesar. I purchased the copy for $1 and mentioned to my wife, “I’ll get to this again someday…” as I’d first read Manchester’s classic biography of General Douglas MacArthur in the early 1980’s while stationed on my first submarine. “Someday” started on the car ride home (she was driving), and I must admit: American Caesar was even better thirty years later. Manchester is a masterful biographer, and equal to the task of such a larger-than-life subject.

MacArthur still evokes passion among admirers and detractors. One take-away from the second reading was just how well-read MacArthur and his father were. When MacArthur the elder died, he left over 4,000 books in his library—both seemed to possess an encyclopedic knowledge of history and warfare. Highly recommended.

PS: I visited the MacArthur Memorial, in Norfolk, Virginia, recently while in town for business and would recommend as well.

[by Mark Safranski a.k.a. “zen“]

Some “new” used books I picked up from Half-Price Books this holiday weekend….

War and Anti-War by Alvin and Heidi Toffler 

The Tofflers were among the most influential and prescient of the pop futurists of the 1970’s and in War and Anti-War they took a stab at how revolutions in information and science fields were going to change warfare and peace making. Or as Alvin Toffler said:

The thesis is very simple. The way you make war is the way you make wealth. If you change the way you make wealth, you inevitably change the way you make war. And if you change the way you make war, you ought to be thinking about changing the way you make peace.

War was initiated by the agrarian revolution, or in our terminology “the first wave of change.” With the coming of the industrial revolution, particularly the French Revolution and Napoleon, you begin to get mass production, you begin to get mass conscription. You begin to get machine guns for the machine society. With mass production, you get mass destruction – industrialized warfare. And if we are now in the process of transforming the way we create wealth, from the industrial to the informational, or call it whatever you wish, there is a parallel change taking place with warfare, of which the Gulf War gives only the palest, palest little hint. The transition actually started back in the late-1970s, early-1980s, to a new form of warfare based on information superiority. It mirrors the way the economy has become information-dependent.

An important part of this will be what we call “knowledge strategies” – social knowledge strategies, national knowledge strategies, and so on. In military terms there will be attempts to coordinate all the knowledge- intensive activities of the military from education and training to high- precision weaponry to espionage to everything that involves the mind – propaganda – into coherent strategies.

Why the Germans Lose at War: The Myth of German Military Superiority by Kenneth Macksey

The book is short and focused primarily upon the 20th century German grab for European hegemony and world power and, I expect, somewhat polemical as a counterweight to Germanomania common among military history buffs. Most of the Amazon reviewers panned it.

Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power by Andrew Nagorski 

An account of American perceptions – reporters, diplomats, scholars and businessmen living in the Reich – of the Nazi movement and it’s coming to power and totalitarian rule over Germany. Useful in showing intelligent and well-informed people operating without benefit of hindsight as they attempted to assess the early stages of National Socialist Germany at a time when Fascism and Communism were popularly believed among Western intellectuals to represent the wave of the future.

Mike Royko: A Life in Print by Richard Ciccone

I grew up reading Mike Royko and the earlier part of my childhood was spent in the kind of gritty Chicago neighborhood of aspiring middle-class bungalows, dingy corner taverns and 16 inch softball leagues in Ed Kelly-run parks of the people who frequently populated Royko’s columns. I have read Boss several times and it is a classic tale of the world of big city Democratic Machine rough and tumble politics as much as  The Last Hurrah.

The Chicago Tribune, is a mere shadow of the great and independent newspaper that hired Mike Royko as a columnist after his career at the long defunct Chicago Daily News and The Chicago Sun-Times, which Royko quit the day it was purchased by Rupert Murdoch. Had Royko lived to see the Trib purchased by the exceedingly nasty Sam Zell, he’d have quit there as well.

I have a new book review up at Pragati Magazine this morning, The Strategy Bridge:Theory for Practice by Colin S. Gray which is a must read book for any serious student of strategy.

Pragati, which is a national interest and policy magazine for India is starting to turn greater attention towards the subject of strategy and is also running another article in the same issue on strategy and the Maoist insurgency and recently on Indian grand strategy.

A Bridge over Troubled Waters

The title of The Strategy Bridge is also Gray’s operative metaphor, both for the purpose of strategy and the role of the strategist himself that represents the dialectical dynamic of war and strategy-making, the latter being a shared enterprise, save for some extreme historical outliers where strategy was vested in one man, like the regimes of Napoleon and Adolf Hitler. Strategy is the ‘bridge’ that must be built between policy determined by a national leadership and the operational and tactical behaviors of the military and other arms of national power. The strategist “mans the bridge”, orchestrating all of the elements within a master strategic concept and managing the iterative relationship.

Gray writes “The function of the military strategist, his unique raison d’etre, is to ensure that policy and the military instrument are purposefully connected… The strategist must understand the whole nature of a conflict, including war and warfare if antagonism has escalated thus far, because subject to political control, he has the duty of care over the entire competitive performance of the security community… The mission of the military strategist is to decide how the enemy is to be defeated. It is his task to invent a theory of military victory. That theory has to be expressed in and revealed in plans, which are contingent predictions of an extended kind, and must be commanded by generals to whom the strategist delegates some restricted command authority. Whether or not the strategist wishes or is able to function as a general also, must vary with historical circumstances”

….The Strategy Bridge is subtitled “Theory for Practice” because it is intended as a serious work of theory, a framework for understanding enduring principles of strategy so that a practitioner can thoughtfully apply them in making strategies for the specific context in which they find themselves to provide correct guidance for the operational planners and tacticians who will execute it. Consequently, Gray has not written an introductory text for a novice student but an insightful book for the strategic practitioner of journeyman experience – field grade officers, senior intelligence and foreign policy analysts, academic strategists, think tank researchers and national security advisers to senior government officials – who have a store of knowledge of their own. Hence the repeated invocation of “the bridge” metaphor by Gray; his primary audience are the people “doing strategy” and their success or failure “manning the bridge” will help determine the degree to which government purpose remains connected to action or whether the whole business will go off the rails into a quagmire, as it too often does. 

Read the rest here.

Mussolini’s Italy:Life under the Fascist Dictatorship by by R. J. B. Bosworth 

Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott

Been busy writing a book review and a long and serious post, so here is something more lighthearted and tangible in the meantime.

Having recently purchased the Bosworth bio of Mussolini, I went back and bought his history of Italian Fascism. While doing that, I came across Scott’s Seeing Like a State, which had either been highly recommended in a discussion over at Chicago Boyz blog or perhaps in an email by one of the Chicago Boyz themselves ( maybe Lex will help me out here).

However, a long discussion by my amigo Adam Elkus on Facebook about his emerging organizational system for his books coupled with an hour long search to try and find a book I needed to cite in the review I was writing have made me realize something: I no longer have any organization to my books.

Sure, there’s still a semblance of a core – a Soviet/Russian bookcase, an antique/antiquarian bookcase for collectible editions 80-130+ years old, three shelves of strategy and war, two and half on Nazi Germany, two on Richard Nixon, an “Ummah” shelf on Islam, al Qaida, Central Asia and the Mideast but after that it starts getting messy. Once methodically organized, diplomatic history and diplo memoirs are spread across two rooms, four bookcases and three packing boxes in the garage; the Vietnam War is on two shelves in two different bookcases plus a half dozen or books so shelved at work; ancient history and classical philosophy have metastasized to occupy parts of three shelves in two different rooms; American history, European history, Japan and China,  sociology, general science, politics, biographies, neuroscience, intelligence community, economics are everywhere and anywhere. Your guess is probably almost as good as mine.

And then there are book piles randomly stacked horizontally on top of shelved books and bookcases or stacked by my computer desk or on/under/next to my nightstand. I no longer recall what books I have loaned out or to whom vice given away as gifts.

Bibliomania….A Gentle Madness …..