Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead - Olga Tokarczuk

 

The Looting Machine - Tom Burgis

 

The Man Who Never Died - William Adler

 

Chronicles, Vol. 1 - Bob Dylan

 

Grant - Ron Chernow

 

The Coming Fury - Bruce Catton

 

Suttree - Cormac McCarthy

Reread, repost: Continuing my march through McCarthy's works. Suttree is surely the funniest of those I have yet read. In particular Harrogate's antics stand out - he bears similarities to Jimmy Blevins from All the Pretty Horses. Whether he is cadging change from payphones, dynamiting his way into a bank vault, or causing a small-scale prison riot, Harrogate brings a lightness and foolishness to Suttree's life which may be a tad self-important. McCarthy captures the mood of the river and the people who inhabit the margins of Knoxville. The characters come fully-formed, at once real and absurd. In this earlier work it feels like McCarthy is piloting techniques that are honed and refined in, for example, Blood Meridian and The Crossing. The book reads as episodic and its a bit unclear how each event contributes to a changing Suttree. But maybe that is the point, as a raft drifts in the river, so does Suttree drift. One of McCarthy's most enjoyable.

New insight: Suttree just escapes the bloodhound at the end. Just as he narrowly escapes...what, exactly?
 

Redwall - Brian Jacques

 A re-read from when I was a kid. I read a lot of the Redwall books and enjoyed the adventures. Still fun. So to speak.

Dead Aid - Dambisa Moyo

 

A Bend in the River - V. S. Naipaul

 

No Country for Old Men - Cormac McCarthy

Re-read, re-post: "He could think of no reason for the transponder sending unit to be in the hotel. He ruled out Moss because he thought Moss was almost certainly dead. That left the police. Or some agent of the Matacumbe Petroleum Group. Who must think that he thought that they thought that he thought they were very dumb. He thought about that."

This time through I was struck by the subtlety of Chigurh's mind and the falling-away of Bell. One of the terrifying things about Chigurh is the clarity of thought, and subsequent action, he seems to demonstrate. Rarely is he tripped-up or caught off-guard. This gives him an apparent single purpose to his actions. Bell, as he admits time and again, feels overmatched by what is coming. Ellis tells him that cannot be stopped, that you cannot get back what was lost. Bell's self-described story is one of failure. As narrator he may hold that the country has changed. Ellis suggests it has not. Its always been hard on people. We are left wondering if Bell, who seemed to model himself after his grandfather, would not have been better off paying closer heed to his father's example - who we hear little about. Perhaps. There are no clear answers.

"I knew he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there is all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up."

Cold Mountain - Charles Frazier

 

Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy

 This time through I was struck that McCarthy actually pulls his punches in terms of the violence perpetrated by the Kid. The judge speaks to this towards the book’s conclusion: how the Kid alone did not give his heart entire to the terrible mission of Glanton and his mercenaries. Yet, in a book infused terrible violent deeds, McCarthy almost entirely skips over the Kid during the more horrific scenes. Why? Are we meant to think he is any more innocent? If this is McCarthy’s intent what do we make of the judge’s verdict? No one inhabiting the battlefield is free from war.

Portfolios of the Poor - Collins et al.

 A masterful scholarly work - though accessible to non-experts - examining how the world's poor live on $2 or less per day. Using in-depth 'financial diaries' the authors reveal the world's poor (focusing on Pakistan, India, and South Africa) to have much more dynamic and fluid financial lives than the uninitiated might think. The book provides important insights into how to combat poverty, emphasizing that the poor suffer from the 'triple-whammy' of low and irregular incomes, and a lack of available financial instruments. Recommendations for microfinance and addressing systemic poverty are included. A must-read for anyone interested in leveling the economic playing field on any scale.

The Burning Shore - Wilbur Smith

A fine page-turner about a young woman's adventures in war-torn Europe and then becoming stranded on the Skeleton Coast. The most enjoyable part was her journey with the Khoe-San people she meets. Some questionable biology.
 

1984 - George Orwell

 It had been a long time since I read this - maybe even since middle school. What struck me was that the threat from Big Brother and The Party actually only seemed to affect party members, while the proles (proletariat) seem somewhat outside of the system entirely. I was struck by the insistence on the mental violence being perpetrated, which crosses over into physical violence in the later parts. I was unconvinced that power for powers sake was so encompassing. The question which struck me was: what is the purpose of ruling over people like those Winston becomes? I do not think Orwell provides a suitable answer.

Kaffir Boy - Mark Mathabane

 The memoir of a Black man growing up in the township of Soweto outside of Johannesburg in the 1960s. When read in conjunction with Giliomee's Afrikaners it reveals the shortcomings in the latter. For all of Giliomee's protestations that the governance which took place during apartheid had benefits for White and Black South Africans, he does not adequately address the human cost, in terms of the lives of individuals. Mathabane discusses the effects, not on a structural, but personal level, in terms of hunger, depression, anxiety, lack of opportunity and so forth. He does so with wit and thoughtfully.

The Road - Cormac McCarthy

A spare tale of father and son traveling through a post-apocalyptical wasteland. McCarthy seems to be inviting the reader to ask how different certain aspects really are to the world we inhabit. What do we hold closest? What will we sacrifice for? What does tolerable and intolerable loss look like? What does it mean to each of us to carry the fire?
 

The Caine Mutiny - Herman Wouk

 

A naval adventure primarily concerned with issues of duty and honor, in which there are no easy answers. The version I read referred to Queeg as perhaps the greatest ship's captain in American literature. Well, Ahab still stands head and shoulders above the rest. A quick and enjoyable read, Wouk's book is nevertheless freighted with complexity. Because we see Quueg's actions from the crew's perspective we enter the court martial trail on their side. By the end it is unclear whose side we are 'supposed' to be on. Perhaps there is no right answer.

The Afrikaners - Hermann Giliomee

Re-read, re-post (some changes): Survival. Hermann Giliomee looks at the history of a people who dominated twentieth century South Africa and sees how a heritage of marginalization and struggle led to an ever-present concern that their people and their way of life requires defending. By the last decades of the twentieth century the ruling National Party of South Africa was holding on by the only means it knew: doubling-down on separation, exacerbating formal inequality. Any other approach, any compromise, was seen as a threat to the volk. Giliomee contends that ceding power was seen as analogous to authorizing a cultural death.

Telling the story of the Dutch settlers who became Boers and then emerged as Afrikaners Giliomee recounts a people occupying an uncertain middle ground. Never Company people, nor fully accepted as part of imperial British society, nor willing to 'lower' themselves to the status of black Africans, the Boers initially defined themselves by what they were not. As their cultural identity became forged through a shared 19th century mythology the Afrikaner began to emerge as emblematic of a people and a way of life. Slagtersnek, the Great Trek, Dingaan's Day, and the Anglo-Boer War all were the foundation of a fiercely independent people who saw themselves besieged. Once the Union of South Africa was inaugurated the volk sought to ensure that they maintained control over their small corner of the world.

Yet, the prospects of survival change. As the world pressed in upon South Africa, as liberals at home and abroad, and as black South Africans increasingly found their political voice, survival of the government and survival of the volk were once again separated. The government could not stand; the volk had to find a new means of defining themselves in a composite society. The next chapter of the Afrikaners has only begun.

On a re-reading one cannot help but think that Giliomee somewhat talks around the problem. He notes that in the latter-half of the twentieth century, South Africa enjoyed unprecedented economic growth and relatively low rates of unemployment. But he does not examine what this might have looked like if the majority of population had been able to be any more than drawers of water, hewers of wood, and diggers in mines. Though he makes gestures towards the unsavory human costs of apartheid, his history makes it sound as though the end of minority rule was a concession and compromise made primarily within South Africa's white community. He emphasizes that other countries ensure minority rights in a way South Africa's post-1994 political system does not. In so doing, he risks returning to a vision of South Africa society that is primarily racial in character. There is a human cost to majority rule, as there was to apartheid. Reading Mark Mathabane's Kaffir Boy gives one a certain picture of which was worse.