Born to Run - Christopher McDougall

Starting with the basic question, "why does my foot hurt?" Christopher McDougall travels around the world and puts his own body on the line to discover the secret of the running people: that humans may be biologically born to run. Though such a claim may ring dubious to many of us - there are many well-respected thinkers and knowledgeable people who will claim that the human body is an imperfect machine never designed to take the stress and strain of running - McDougall marshals evidence that he argues is hidden in plain sight.

Taking a broad sweep of running nutrition, competitive history, technique and maybe even a few secrets along the way, Born to Run has already cast a broad shadow over the running community and continues to find its footing deeper in the popular consciousness. Reading a bit like a modern Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the work starts off with simple premises and comfortable realms of thought (issues like training techniques, human physiology and athletic shoe construction) and slowly develops a deeper thesis: that running has made us into the people we are, that modern man (and woman) has what it takes, is outfitted like no other species on this Earth, to run and that it was this unique ability that allowed us to compete and survive for millions of years. Finally, McDougall talks about the important effects of running for each person. Beyond health and fitness, he looks to the proof he sees in some of the greatest runners he has encountered and finds that, almost without fail, the best long-distance runners are those who participate out of the sheer joy of running, the extent to which it fulfills their humanity and binds them together.

Like many other works relying upon an intuitive connection with the reader, Born to Run succeeds or fails to the extent that we are able to identify with its premises. This is my second time reading the book and I feel as though I have found even more to mull over the second time. If nothing else I find it a work that energizes me to get out there and be one of the running people; that it continues to change the way I think about running and my own well-being is, I believe, testament enough as to whether McDougall's work is successful.

In the Spirit of Crazy Horse - Peter Matthiessen

Perhaps, the things that ought to change the most never do. Growing up the historical treatment of American Indians by settlers of the Americas and subsequently by the United States government is a topic more alluded to than it is fully addressed. Throughout the pervasive attitude is one of historical inquiry only. Certainly it is terrible that our forefathers subjected millions of people to targeted attacks, forced removals, massacres, not only of men, but of women and children, and did everything in their power to cheat Indians out of the lands occupied since time out of mind, but we could safely view such duplicity as days gone by, a past that the United States has done its best to forget.

Peter Matthiessen reminds us that everything old can be made new again. Indeed, In The Spirit of Crazy Horse, gives scant attention to the saddening past of the United States relations with Indians and instead focuses more on what Matthiessen paints as an outrageous present. Though the book was first published in 1981 – after many years of legal wrangling – its story continues. Matthiessen’s primary focus is the murder of three men (two FBI agents and one Indian) during a shootout between FBI agents and an untold number of Indian men on the Pine Ridge Reservation in June of 1975. Though the FBI would do nothing to investigate the death of AIM activist Jim Stuntz, when two FBI agents are gunned down, particularly potentially in conjunction with a movement that the FBI views as a subversive, perhaps terrorist organization, we are treated to a story in which the Bureau will stop at nothing to get it’s man – guilty or not. The brunt of the government’s case was eventually to fall on Leonard Peltier – currently ineligible for parole until at least 2040. It was Peltier, the FBI would claim, that executed agents Williams and Coler at close range. Whether or not this is true may never be known, what Matthiessen does convincingly show is that, according to the letter of American justice, the manner in which Peltier was convicted hardly accords with even the barest essence of judicial fairness. Matthiessen recounts the perjuring of many witnesses, the shifting in evidence and what appears to be the blatant disregard of defense claims by judges. The list of obstacles placed before Peltier’s attorneys and supporters verges on the unbelievable, and surely Matthiessen engages in strategic remembering – he is unabashedly siding with the Indians. Yet the facts stand even today and ought to make all Americans wonder at the true motive of government.

Whatever happened outside of the Jumping Bull camp on Pine Ridge that day is saddening in the extreme, who is to blame remains elusive. What is known is the Leonard Peltier, in accordance with a long tradition of gross abuse of Indians by the United States government, remains there still. We cannot help but wonder to what extent justice is all of our concern.

Spatial Resilience of Social-Ecological Systems - Graeme S. Cumming

An introduction and overview of the necessity of including spatial components concerns to our analysis of social-ecological systems (SES), Cumming adroitly breaks down aspects of resiliency and clearly indicates the necessity of thinking in and across spatial scales when considering the functioning of complex systems. Operating under the premise that organization in complex systems is an emergent quality of a host of quantifiable variables, Cumming's focus on the SESs indicates how the nexus of human/natural interactions can be parsed in many ways and contrasted across differing scales. Throughout he has broken-down, in simple English, how properties of resilience are emergent of integrated systems of people and their surrounding environments. As the concepts continue to be elucidated throughout the work it becomes gradually apparent that Cumming is revealing a broad-sweeping critique of how we connect theory to practice in managing SESs.

Grounded in notions of network analysis, social-ecological systems are predicated upon the idea that all locations of arrival are derivative of the interactions of socio-environmental actors across scales and nested within contexts. Indeed, it can be argued that separations of people and nature are less points of departure, than they are points of arrival; SESs speak to this. By refusing to make an a priori demarcation between the social and the ecological, Cumming allows for the actors (or vertices, or nodes) to speak for themselves the only way they know how, through their relationships (or connections, or edges or articulations) with one another. In so situating himself Cumming is approaching complex issues of the natural sciences from a more dialectical point of view than is often taken. Though the work does delve into the foundations of how entities from which these systems emerge, are composed, an extrapolation of his work leads the reader to posit an inter-related world, one where components of analysis can never be understood, much less conserved, in isolation. Though he brushes upon system identity, one cannot help but wonder if Cumming would be willing to extend the emergent nature of his complex systems to the individual?

The Choice: How Clinton Won - Bob Woodward

Inside the formative months of the 1996 Presidential Campaign, the foremost Washington insider contrasts the machinations of Bob Dole's quest for the presidency with Clinton's concern of how to make his own case to the American electorate. In Woodward's recounting President Clinton had all-but assured victory before the general election began. By June the Clinton-Gore apparatus was well on its way to raising a record $180 million while Dole's campaign would battle with message and fundraising issues throughout. For Woodward this was a campaign more about communication and funding than anything else. Thus it is little surprise that Dole, the consummate senator and nuanced equivocator, could scarcely compete with Bill Clinton, the master communicator.

While few men in American public life may have been more qualified to be President than Robert J. Dole, Woodward's appraisal of Dole's character forces the question of what is required of a President besides experience? Throughout the campaign cycle Dole is frequently unable to master his organization and unable to make executive-style decisions concerning policy, message and strategy. Dole seems to be the archetype of go-along/get-along senate collegiality. In contrast, Clinton, while it is lamented that he often over-analyzes all points, has the bearing of an executive and the willingness to make decisions and soldier forward. Surely some of this difference of tenor cannot be separated  from the aura surrounding the presidency - one wonders how the two would be cast differently were Dole the incumbent and Clinton the challenger - but we are certainly left with the impression that the illusory quality of leadership inheres more in Clinton than Dole. Inasmuch as the presidency may require a sort of American father figure Clinton seems to relish this role, while Dole shrinks from it.

Though it may be apocryphal, Averell Harriman was remarked to have said that men seeking the Presidency must desire, above all else, to be President. Whether or not this is true, and whether or not it reflects well on American politics is open to debate. What is clear is that in the 1996 Presidential Election Bill Clinton desired more than anything else to retain the presidency. That Bob Dole could not give a satisfactory reason for why America should alter course appears inseparable from the portrait Woodward paints of Dole as a decent man. Perhaps he simply was not willing to sacrifice enough to be President; Woodward leaves us unsure as to whether or not this ought redound to his credit.

The Higher Learning in America - Robert Maynard Hutchins

One of the foremost thinkers of education in the twentieth century, former University of Chicago President Robert Maynard Hutchins makes an emphatic, and still timely, plea for drastic changes to higher education in the United States. To hear Hutchins tell it, the logic upon which the system of higher education rests is flawed. Schools are at once trying to train people for vocations and to maximize the life of the mind, the end result being that neither is adequately accomplished. Hutchins counters that the primary goal of educational institutions should be to provide students with a curriculum that is entirely focused upon the pursuit of truth for its own sake. Though this pursuit of truth can take on many different forms, Hutchins believes that understanding our common humanity must remain a central tenet.

Hutchins makes numerous recommendations that would rise perhaps universal ire across the education community, and it would be entirely relevant to question whether or not his recommendations are outmoded. What remains of relevance are questions surrounding the purpose of the American educational system; Hutchins opens the door to a conversation that remains glaringly unresolved.

Sandy Koufax: A Lefty's Legacy - Jane Leavy

More than just a biography of arguably the greatest pitcher of all time, Jane Leavy's work chronicles baseball as it moved into the modern game we have come to recognize. Koufax, because of his contract holdout with fellow Dodger Don Drysdale, may have played no small part in the coming age of free agency baseball, but what seems more pertinent to Koufax's career, particularly in contrast to the manner in which players are handled today, is how he was brought into the Dodger organization and how he was used early in his career. In essence, Koufax, like many other players, was left to develop and fend for himself. When revisiting his career it is important to note that Koufax was absolutely dominant for five years, but prior to that he was considered erratic at best.

And then he was gone. Inextricable from the Koufax myth is the manner in which he walked away from the game, at the peak of his powers, something virtually unprecedented at the time. Stripping away the myth, Leavy reveals the increasing levels of pain Koufax was dealing with in his left elbow and his almost super-human efforts to make every start the last two years of his career. That he was able to do so while compiling perhaps the two greatest years ever put together by a pitcher is a feat that, simply given the care with which multi-million dollar athletes are no handled, will probably not be replicated in our lifetime.

That Koufax was a great is unassailable, that his peak was all-too-short seems a bit tragic (in the classical sense of the word), that his legend continues to grow only redounds to the place of baseball, and indeed sports in general in the American psyche. Famous before sports and celebrity became entirely intertwined, Koufax was among the first generation of athletic superstars. Yet he continues to shrink away from the spotlight. One gets the sense from Leavy's book that Koufax would have been much happier to go about his work and let his on-the-field efforts have the last word. This is not to intimate that he was taciturn or closed-off, rather he remains unwilling to play the role of public commodity, and indeed sees little reason why it should be expected of him. At a time when many athletes strive to become "global brands" Koufax remains, largely because of his seeming elusiveness, to grow in our mythology. By refusing to submit himself to public ownership he has become something much bigger, a living legend.

Truman - David McCullough

When Mother Wallace, Harry Truman's mother-in-law, was invited to sleep in the Lincoln bedroom by the newly ascended President, her response was purported to be, "I'd rather sleep on the floor." Born in 1854, Mrs. Wallace was a proud daughter of the confederacy. A woman who had seen perhaps the greatest century of technological and civilized change in the world's history it was no surprise to Truman or his wife that Mrs. Wallace retained some of her olden time sensibilities and even prejudices.

Harry S Truman ascended to the Presidency in perhaps the most formative years of America's role on the world stage.Within the first four months of his residency in the White House, victory would be declared in Europe, Truman would travel to Potsdam to meet with Prime Minister Churchill and Generalissimo Stalin to discuss the eventual dividing of war-ravaged Europe, and, supported almost unanimously by his advisers, Truman would execute the orders to drop two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, thus ending the war with Japan. That these four months could be handled with such grace, determination and care by a man who may have been uniquely unqualified to the office of the President may be perhaps the greatest testament to the strength of the American political system; it certainly resounds to the credit of Harry Truman.

David McCullough's biography of the 33rd President - a title Truman hated, claiming that counting Cleveland twice was simply asinine - traces the roots and path of a man born to a world very different from the one he would have to steer in the years following World War II. A child of the plains of Missouri, as a young man Truman's ambitions scarcely surpassed those of being a local alderman. McCullough's biography traces the almost accidental nature of Truman's political career. His seemingly untainted rise through the powerful Pendergast political machine, his barnstorming senate election campaign and his seemingly incidental choice as FDR's Vice President in 1944 almost seem to convey a man who was simply lucky to be a man of character, in the right place at the right time.

Yet that he was a man of exceeding character is without question. If McCullough's biography has a glaring shortcoming it is his insistent focus on the doings and character of Truman himself, often giving short-shrift to the complexities of issues which Truman was forced to wrestle with. Yet with this singular focus the reader emerges with a view of what we would term a "late-bloomer" but of a man whose dogged determination, hard work and total dedication to ensure that government remain an instrument of the people saw him through to the highest office in the land. While perhaps a man born to another time, Truman's conviction that government existed primarily to guarantee the welfare, liberty and self-determination of the individual transcended the coming of a new technological and world order. Though he may have seen out of place sitting and the table with Stalin and Churchill, or hopelessly naive in the corridors of Washington, Truman's perseverance, drive and commitment to governance, not just within the borders of the United States, but internationally as America would become a greater player on the world stage, helped see the country and indeed the world out of the era of war and into the second half of the twentieth century.