Moby Dick - Herman Melville

"let me look into a human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze upon God."

The pursuit of the White Whale becomes a journey into one man's monomania. Following a great typhoon the Pequod seems to have been transported into another world entirely. In this world compass needle, log and line, forward vision, and mission, all are Ahab's. As if even life and death have been inverted, to be overboard is finally to float, the heavens are pulled down to the depths, and coffins become life buoys. One man's madness, his obsession, are these enough to turn the world upside down?

To look into the eyes of men, of pride, faith, suffering, and finally madness, Melville takes us around the world and into the heart of the sea. Harpooners, mates, and crew present certain essences of human character - all are needed for the successful sailing of ship. Together they pursue one man's goal - even unto death. What strength are all of these mitigating personages in contrast to an overweening mania? Yes, Ahab is something of a tyrant, but perhaps no more so than the passions of any person. Time and again he is given chance to abandon his mission and mania. Yet revenge calls to him.

In the end it is less the overwhelming powerful forces that destroy then our ability to live peaceably alongside them. The world is what it is, so too is the Whale. Our choices are our own - they are the measure of our doom.

The Snow Leopard - Peter Matthiessen

Journeys are what we make of them. The heart, friendship, loss, memory, or love can measure the vast expanses of an undiscovered continent as surely as miles beyond miles in faraway lands. Similarly, the mind and heart can be explored and found anywhere - habits of both precede our footsteps on the road which rises up to meet us, just as we are needed to land our paces.

Matthiessen's work is a true travelogue - in that the landscape ends up evoking and reflecting the traveler's internal life. Matthiessen looks into the mountains of the Dolpo region and time and again sees himself reflected, looking back at him. Do we find it strange that Matthiessen titles his book after a most elusive creature which he will never see? We should not. This is a book about death and emptiness, about missing and longing. Matthiessen's journey is in search of himself amidst spaces of loneliness, both internal and external. To be one's own companion, or, rather, to be acquainted with the companionship of the universe - this too is the traveler's road. V. S. Naipaul famously wrote that "the world is what it is." Such a sentiment could be comfortably appended to this journey.

Frontiers - Noel Mostert

The incursion and settlement of the Cape frontier by the British and Boers transformed South Africa. As the frontier moved eastward, from Cape Town towards the Xhosa and Zulu heartland, settlers and colonials became increasingly enmeshed within the political dynamics of the indigenous people. While Mostert's is primarily a story told from the colonial perspective looking eastward, it brings the transformed Xhosa world into stark relief.

Elegant and carefully crafted, Mostert's work displays a journalistic quality. Clearly the result of painstaking historical research, Mostert's detail pulls the reader into a foreign world. His success is evident: at more than 1200 pages the story rarely loses steam and keeps the reader engaged; no mean feat. Historical characters like De Buys, Stockenstrom, Maqoma, Smith, and Sandile are resurrected and leap off the page as complicated and themselves dynamic actors. Tracing these actors' movements and machinations keeps the narrative taught and the story compelling. Part of the book's length seems to be an implicit argument by Mostert that to understand the transformation and settlement of the Cape frontier  (and thus modern South Africa) fully, one needs to become acquainted with the story in all its capaciousness. In this manner his account is convincing.

While the interactions between Xhosa and colonialist are Mostert's primary concern, the work could have given more space to the transformations along the Xhosa's eastern frontier with the Zulu. Beyond the British-Xhosa frontier, too often the Xhosa-Zulu heartland resembles a homogeneous unit. How the Xhosa were impinged upon by Zulu power and the mfecane (or whatever historical variation we accept of it) might have provided a more complete understanding of Xhosa actions during the period. This is meant less as a criticism and more as a suggestion for further research.

One of Mostert's signal successes herein is the majesty and mystery with which he treats the African landscape. As the narrative unfolds the darkness of the African map is slowly filled in and the mists of mystery role away. This is, of course, bound to the perspective of the explorer, colonizer, and settler, yet it brings the reader along as though they too are uncovering this new world and witnessing as it is made and remade throughout the 19th century.

For Whom the Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemingway

"The world is a fine place and worth fighting for..."

Hemingway's world consists of people and relationships. Of men: their origins tethering them to cultures of pride, discouragement, complications, and characters. Their lives are both lived within themselves as members of, though also slightly transcendent of, their circumstance. Each is of a time and place - though never fully constrained by nor defined by it. National character, culture, circumstance, only carry one so far. We are all slightly surprising to ourselves and others. Yet the wheel of the self spins and we are brought circling back to those repeating aspects by which the self is known to itself and others. In this way the individual is simultaneously bound and free - both predictable and utterly perplexing. Unique entity.

So too is human exchange anchored and uncertain. Our means and modes of interaction ring familiar notes; yet each tune stands apart. The structures of relationships - between friends, or fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, superior and subordinate, or between lovers - provide certain norms and folkways, certain ways of being in exchange. Yet each instance is its own. The tension of sameness and novelty pervades relations.

Life and the world can thus be viewed through a microcosm. But each microcosm is necessarily incomplete. A map with a perfect fidelity to reality is nothing less than the world entire. Three days may be sufficient to know the world. In this, our own microcosm, sameness and novelty contest. We are grounded and chained and set free.

Team of Rivals - Doris Kearns Goodwin

What are the factors which make a person? The question contains two parts. First is character: how is it that each of us becomes what we are? Second is the manner in which each of us are known: how we are understood, conceived to be by the world around us. In this latter account we are of our time, and, to the extent that we are remembered and reconceived in the minds of others, of other times as well. In this second estimation each is fully of the world. Of the first, that of character, similarly each seems shaped by their environment. Yet, the individual is somewhat transcendent of it - unique in a way that we have not learned to account for. Such transcendence is manifest in the somewhat surprising actions of people. Sometimes an individual's transcendence - their personality - moves beyond their small circle of associates to the wider world. Yet, to be thrust forward to the precipice of eternity requires the even less understood vagaries of the world and the forces that call certain generations to grapple with the problems of the ages. Then the transcendence of the individual may stand athwart opposing forces and forever leave its stamp. Abraham Lincoln was, by any measure, among the greatest of American personages. That he has become so is surely due to his character and the environments that shaped him, but it was also due to that great societal conflict, the Civil War, that Lincoln was able to forcefully leave his stamp on history.

Doris Kearns Goodwin's work traces the rise of Lincoln and his adversaries for the 1860 Republican Presidential Nomination. As an exercise in comparative biography Kearns Goodwin strives to show us how Lincoln and his rivals were men of their time; forged by riding the circuit, public service, negotiating positions on America's "peculiar institution," and their lust for power. In each man's rise we see the tenuous years of Antebellum America and how each negotiated their lives within it. Kearns Goodwin is masterful in drawing portraits of character; we feel that we have seen the essence of Lincoln, Seward, and Chase. Yet the work is somewhat uneven in balancing the genius of Lincoln's politics with the personal and social lives of he and his rivals. We are often left under-informed about the contexts of the political difficulties that Lincoln so tactfully threaded. While the force of his personality, in particular his capacity for forgiveness and magnanimity seemed to know no bounds, his politics was also eminently practical. Yet, the full situating and the subsequent implications of this practicality could stand a more thorough treatment.

More than anything this is a work of character exposition. That Lincoln's character was demanded by the historical moment is made manifest and how this was forged is accounted for carefully and brilliantly. As an historical analysis of politics the picture is less clear and forceful. Perhaps this is the legacy of Lincoln: it is the man who shines out from history.

A History of South Africa: Social and Economic - CW De Kiewiet

Land, climate, and conflicting peoples: these have been the foundations of South African social and economic life. CW De Kiewiet's history, first published in 1941, recounts attempted, imposed, but ultimately unattainable separations within South Africa. Early colonization sought to make the Cape a way-station for trade between Europe and Asia - seeking to abstract this outpost of economy from its environs. Later Dutch settlers wished to remain at a distance from Cape colonial administrative strictures. As the Boers headed to the hinterlands they wished to found their own society, free of natives and imperial requirements. The Transvaal and the Orange Free State wanted independence; liberty to govern themselves and the natives. The Boers did not, however, wish to shake themselves loose of the land, but to inhabit it and dispose of it as they saw fit. Had the lands which were later to be united as South Africa remained so resource-poor the Boers may have gotten their wish.

Whether for good or for ill gold was discovered on the Witwatersrand in surpassing abundance in 1886. This was not California gold - the kind available to the solitary miner with his pan in a stream. The gold of the rand ran in deep, diffuse veins. Vast economies of scale, huge labor forces, and uncountable tons of dynamite, shovels, pickaxes, trolleys, and beams were needed to extract the gold and make it pay. In hordes they came to work the fields, both black and white. The Tshona, the Zulu, the Khoi and the Xhosa; Boers, British, Germans, Australians, and Americans. Soon these latter ones, foreign whites, the Uitlanders, outnumbered Boer citizens, but remained devoid of political rights. Who was to be responsible for these Uitlanders, and who would ensure their rights? The companies? The Cape? The republics of the Transvaal and Orange Free State? The Boers were adamantly defensive of their culture and livelihoods - to grant equality to the Uitlanders would be to lose their identity. There was no question of the natives.

Witwatersrand would prove to be the richest gold field in the world, bringing the world to South Africa. Economy brought together all of that which had been previously kept asunder. With the invasion of the world new environments and new communities were built. The contact of men with one another, between people and the soil, and the slow collision of different communities in regards to the land and their neighbors composes the early history of South Africa. The story of one comprises the story of many.

March Up Country (Anabasis) - Xenophon

Though for their part victorious at Cunaxa, the death of Cyrus left the Ten Thousand Hellenes deep in Persia, with few prospects. Without supplies and soon-to-be leaderless, the Hellenic mercenaries would turn to Xenophon, something of an aide-de-camp who was along primarily for the adventure.

Anabasis ("going up") is the story of how the Ten Thousand Hellenes survived and made it ever-closer to Greece, through hostile Persian territory. Xenophon's prose is straight-forward, even somewhat terse. Though he can clearly deliver a stirring oration with the best, when it comes to relating an army's actions or the account of a march, Xenophon is all economy. One gets the sense that, while the settings and challenges are to be accounted for, what matters most is the right way to respond. Settings, particularities: these change. Right thinking and action transcend.

Xenophon makes a different kind of protagonist: he answers to what the world gives him. He is a marked departure from the mythological basileus; a very classical Greek hero. Achilles was all rage, destruction, petulance, and mayhem. Odysseus was the man of many talents, the skilled and learned, crafty and able. Xenophon is the honorable, the right-thinking, the philosopher-soldier. He provides a new kind of Greek ideal.

Xenophon's influence redounds. It is said that Alexander the Great carried the Anabasis as a field manual. Christiaan de Wet had a copy always at hand as he rode and hid in the veld during the Boer War. Xenophon espouses a particular philosophy of leadership: a transparency, a straight-forward practicality, a soldier's ethic. One wonders what it would mean to adopt it beyond the campaign. Maybe there is nothing beyond it. Much as the Ten Thousand seek a way home, we too wish to lay our burden down. Maybe there is no rest.

"thálatta, thálatta"