Seutonius

All of those who say the private lives of political leaders should remain private, and all who believe that concern over private morals is a modern right-wing issue should read Seutonius’ The Twelve Caesars.

For a history over a thousand years old, it’s surprisingly gossipy and opinionated and fun. It won’t exactly sell you on the Roman Empire being the height of civilization and decency, but it’s likely to challenge you if you’re interested in politics and morality.

Bernard Shaw

Should someone who’s life work is helping people recover from alcohol addiction and violence accept money from alcohol and weapons manufacturers? Should society mandate education and curtail freedom of expression in the hope of increasing social equality? Should love of an individual have priority over love of a country?

They’re tough questions. Good questions.

So here’s an idea: rather than look for an answer, let’s just make fun of everyone involved with the questions. Salvation Army workers? Mock them. Alcoholics? Mock. Weapons manufacturers? Mock. Anyone who tries to do something worthwhile and doesn’t make the world perfect? Mock. Mock. Mock.

Bernard Shaw mocks well. He has the cleverness of Oscar Wilde with a lot more bitter attitude, and a worldview that makes every hero fairly despicable and every villain a clown.

When I read Major Barbara (the Salvation Army vs. Big Booze play), I was amazed by the wordplay and timing. Sure, it left me depressed, but the language was amazing.

Moved to Pygmallion next, and my amazement at his language and discouragement at its use both increased.

And then Arms and The Man, throwing in the same types of characters but with comic subjects like romance and heroism.

And I took a break.

I thought it would only last a few months. After all, I had enjoyed each book while reading it, and he had a lot of others, and I was getting into plays.

But I found other authors, including Shaw’s nemesis, Chesterton, and the break has now lasted a happy few decades.

Peter Oliver

Revisionist histories are constant sources of debate. But there are revisionists, and then there are eyewitnesses who had a different point of view. Peter Oliver’s, The Origin and Progress of the American Rebellion, falls in the second category. He lived in the colonies, loved England, and hated the semi-literate thugs that tortured His Majesty’s servants, trampled His Majesty’s degrees, and ended up forming a new country.

He’s blustery, and pedantic, and self-righteous, and generally a bore. But I don’t know of many other places you’ll find better documentation that the start of the United States and the start of the kingdom of heaven didn’t coincide.

Jack Schaeffer

A student once remarked that Shakespeare’s plays were basically just a bunch of famous quotations strung together.

A similar criticism could be made of Jack Schaeffer’s Shane. How many clichés, of words characters, or metaphors, can be held in one coming of age story on the American frontier in a sodbusting family when a mysterious gunslinger dressed as a teacher but who’s a real workhorse and man’s man comes to town and turns all the women’s heads?

The big difference between Shakespeare and Schaeffer, of course, is that Shakespeare’s lines weren’t all cliches before he wrote them, and Schaeffer’s were.

But the thing is, they work. I read the book so often that by the time I was ten I could spend twenty minutes telling all the ways the movie didn’t measure up. I loved it. Sigh.

Ninh Bao

“Sir, sir, you want postcards? Souvenirs? Look, here, The Sorrow of War, a very good book. It is illegal here, sir. But I have it. Very good book.”

Every sidewalk salesman in Hanoi had a copy. The cheap paper and poor gluing verified that the copies weren’t being distributed by a major publisher, but most were poorly translated versions of the edited edition.

Hanoi had a problem with the book. The Sorrow of War is fairly typical as war literature goes: stock characters, moral quandaries, lack of clarity regarding right and wrong, etc. It wouldn’t have been a problem if it had merely presented Americans as bad guys. The radical thing was that it portrayed Vietnamese soldiers as fallible, brutal, and cowardly as well. There are no wonderfully honorable characters in the book.

The book lives up to its title. Whether examined for its depiction of soldiers, politics, coming of age, or romance, it’s a sad book.

I’d recommend it for those interested in southeast Asian authors, but it probably won’t change your life otherwise.

Stephen Ambrose

Undaunted Courage came at a great time for me. I’d just spent several years in social histories and political analyses, and I was starting to get depressed by the power of critics to strip away glory. Stephen Ambrose’s account of Lewis’ and Clark’s journey may be unfashionably patriotic and heroic, but it’s awed and awe-inspiring, and I needed it.

I picked up Citizen Soldiers shortly afterwards, and was again amazed. Ambrose’s fascination with heroism led him to interview thousands of G.I.s involved in the Normandy invasion and end of World War II. He occasionally employs social or economic analyses, but always trumps these interpretations with words of the G.I.s, often expressed in as direct quotations with little obvious editing. I’m not a World War II buff, but this book almost made me one. (For what it’s worth, many of the anecdotes he recorded appear in the film Saving Private Ryan. Ambrose doesn’t, however, imply that all of these anecdotes happened to a single group of super-soldiers.)

Americans at War is another strong work, with eloquent and passionate essays on soldiers from Little Bighorn to Mai Lai. His political biases come out more strongly in this collection than in the other books, but they aren’t distracting.

With Nothing Like It In The World, my fascination faded, but it’s not Ambrose’s fault. I’ve never really cared about trains. The whole romance is lost on me. My reading a book about the transcontinental railroad by a devotee was as doomed as a deaf person’s reading a book about hand-crafting violins. I can appreciate his research and storytelling technique, but it didn’t grab me. And it left me wondering… considering the breadth of his interests (he also wrote a multi-volume biography of Eisenhower, which I haven’t read, and supposedly has time to teach college classes), how does he manage to know all of this?

The answer to that question came when I started reading another of his books on World War II, which was published after Citizen Soldiers and includes entire paragraphs copied and pasted from the previous book without so much as a self-citation. I put it aside to avoid the page-by-page deja-vu.

Ambrose deserves applause for several of his books, but he lost me as a fan when I felt that I was reading amusingly retold snippets of a committee report instead of a human voice. Lots of other famous writers, Dumas and Michener, employed huge numbers of assistants to research their books. I don’t really like Dumas and Michener either.

Jonathan Riley-Smith

            Jonathan Riley-Smith is an excellent historian. In The Crusades, he de-romanticizes his topic to the point of boredom.

            I fully respect his research, and he supports his conclusions well.

            But it’s more fun to read the romanticized versions.

Augustine

I can’t think of certain books apart from the place in which I read them. The City of God, an attempt to see the hand of God in the destruction of a Christianized Rome at what was thought to be nearly the end of history… I associate that with a gas station coffee shop in a Minnesotan prairie town.

My wife had been stationed there for a few months for her medical work, and I’d just returned from a stint abroad and had a few weeks off. The gas station was the town’s only coffee shop.

And the book was amazing.

Augustine’s wordy and cumbersome, but the ideas hit me as amazingly relevant, even there. The gas station attendant gossiped with a farmer about the rape of a girl in their church as I read Augustine’s consolation to men and boys who had been raped in the sacking of Rome.

A couple farmers and the owner of the egg-processing plant (the town’s only industry) met every Tuesday and Thursday to discuss the inevitable fall of the U.S. due to its godlessness as evidenced by Hollywood, while I read Augustine’s critique of the theater and the way in which God may have saved the Romans by destroying the Coliseum.

I found myself arguing with a lot of the book, but it seemed far more insightful an analysis of late-20^th-century society than any of the modern religious pundits.

I wouldn’t have said the same the first time I read The Confessions. It struck me as pretentious. But I’ve re-read it twice since reading The City of God, and I’ve liked it more each time.

Mark Bowden

As I was in the process of reading Blackhawk Down, I gave a simple writing assignment to my immigrant students: “Describe the house you grew up in.”

            The next day, with Blackhawk sitting on my shelf, a bookmark only 50 pages into it, I picked up the first of the essays. The young man described the orange trees, and the tan wall, and the bright dresses of the women who walked in front of his house, across the street from the Olympic Hotel in Mogadishu, before “all of it” happened.

            For those who have not read Blackhawk Down, “all of it” refers to the killing of hundreds of Somali men, women, and children, during an ill-conceived attempt to remove a warlord from the Olympic Hotel neighborhood of Mogadishu.

            There is no way I can describe how intensely that book moved me. Granted, I had a more personal link to the text than most of the readers, but most other readers I’ve met have liked it as well.

            Out of respect for my students, I didn’t see the film, which they described as an attempt to make the deaths of hundreds of their friends and family into the story of a few white Americans who made some bad choices. The book, though, does an exceptional job of presenting all of the people as real—and Bowden did excellent work in capturing the point of view of many of the Somalis involved.

            I’d love to read more of his books.

Denis Johnson

            It was totally unfair to the author, but I had a plane to catch. I read, Already Dead, The Name of the World, and Resuscitation of a Hanged Man in less than two weeks. Then I left the country.

            I don’t know of any author of Denis Johnson’s generation who deals with history, truth, and life so seriously.

The Name of the World had the feel of one of those fictionalized memoirs novelists write when they get famous and bored, but the others … I’d love to read them again. His writing deserves far more time than I was able to give in the first round.