The Two Minds of Robert Gates

At the end of his remarkable memoir on his time as Secretary of Defense, Bob Gates poses a question for himself:

Treated better for longer than almost anyone in a senior position I could remember during the eight presidencies in which I served, why did I feel I was constantly at war with everybody, as I have detailed in these pages? Why was I so often so angry? Why did I so dislike being back in government and in Washington?

--Gates, Robert M (2014-01-14). Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War (Kindle Locations 10314-10317). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

Gates offers his own answer: "It was because, despite everyone being 'nice,' getting anything of consequence done was so damnably difficult even in the midst of two wars."  Fair enough, although I can offer him a consolation: however "damnably difficult" these encounters may have been to live through, still the recounting of them is precisely what makes his memoir so fascinating.  Yet, while I don't reject his own analysis, I think I can offer a further explanation: I think one reason he found it all so "damnably difficult" is that he was constantly at war with himself.

Review the evidence.  On any soundbyte divide between hawks and doves, Gates counts as a hawk.   He thought it important to "stay the course" (ugh) in both Afghanistan and Iraq: he felt certain that we had a constructive role to play in rebuilding each country (which we, one might add, had played so great a role in destroying in the first place).  He admires and largely trusts the military leadership.  And presses more than once his view that both  that both Bush and Obama got the big decisions right.

Yet he is the most cautious of hawks.  He's concerned almost to the point of obsession with the well-being of the troops: he takes almost every casualty as his personal responsibility.  Repeatedly he raises the question of what will happen next?  Can we do this?  Can afford not to do it?  Are we doing it in the right way?

After a while, you begin to see a larger theme.  Gates does say he feels that Obama didn't have his heart in the Afghan War (indeed, this is about the only thing that most reviewers want to quote).  Yet in time, you can see that Gates is at best ambivalent about it himself.   He doesn't want us to leave Afghanistan until he has done what we can to establish a secure an orderly nation.  Yet here is Gates himself, writing on what he saw in 2010 in the runup to the Afghan elections: 

Embassy polling showed that in 2005 about 80 percent of Afghans saw us as allies and partners; by summer 2009, after nearly eight years of war, that was down to 60 percent. As I thought about the tipping point, it seemed to me we had several vulnerabilities with the Afghan population. One was civilian casualties; every incident was a strategic defeat, often caused and always manipulated by the Taliban and then magnified by Karzai. Another was our thoughtless treatment of the Afghans in routine encounters, including U.S. and coalition military vehicles barreling down the roads scattering animals and scaring people. We often disrespected their culture or Islam and failed to cultivate their elders. We collaborated with Afghan officials who were ripping off ordinary citizens. In Kabul and all over the country, we and our coalition partners, as well as nongovernmental organizations, far too routinely decided what development projects to undertake without consulting the Afghans, much less working with or through them on what they wanted and needed. Was it any wonder that Karzai and others complained they had no authority in their own country? Or that even reasonably honest and competent Afghan officials got no respect from their fellow citizens? For all our hand-wringing and hectoring about corruption, we seemed oblivious to how much we were contributing to it, and on a scale that dwarfed the drug trade. Tens of billions of dollars were flooding into Afghanistan from the United States and our partners, and we turned a blind eye or simply were ignorant of how regularly some portion was going to payoffs, bribes, and bank accounts in Dubai. Our own inspectors identified how lousy— or nonexistent— U.S. government controls were. From Karzai on down, Afghans had to shake their heads at our complaints about their corruption when elements of the American government (and almost certainly a number of our closest allies) were paying off them and their relatives as agents and to secure their cooperation. Hillary Clinton and I repeatedly objected to this contradictory behavior by the United States, but to no avail.

Gates, Robert M (2014-01-14). Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War (Kindle Locations 6513-6522). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

This is a damning indictment, not so?  And it is really nothing new, yes?  Gates (channeling Fred Kagan)  makes a point of insisting that "We're Not the Soviets in Afghanistan."  That is probably true; it is equally true that we aren't the Japanese Imperial Army in Nanking.  We're full of good intentions.  Yet at least since Vietnam and certainly since Iraq, we've piled up an abundance of evidence to tell us that we really don't know how to play this game--that, despite the best efforts of the best military leadership, we wind up wreaking the same kind of havoc and generating the same kinds of resentments that we tell ourselves we want to avoid.

Update:  moments after hitting "post," I ran across this.

Bedtime Reading: When all else Fails ...

When all else fails, try the Duc de Saint-Simon.  There's nothing quite so cozy as tucking down with the Court of the Sun King.  It might even put you to sleep, but with luck, you'll come across something really entertaining along the way:

Chamillart was appointed in the place of Barbezieux, as Secretary of State; and wanted to give up the Finance, but the King, remembering the disputes of Louvois and Colbert, insisted on his occupying both posts. Chamillart was a very worthy man, with clean hands and the best intentions; polite, patient, obliging, a good friend, and a moderate enemy, loving his country, but his King better; and on very good terms with him and Madame de Maintenon. His mind was limited and; like all persons of little wit and knowledge, he was obstinate and pig-headed— smiling affectedly with a gentle compassion on whoever opposed reasons to his, but utterly incapable of understanding them—consequently a dupe in friendship, in business, in everything; governed by all who could manage to win his admiration, or on very slight grounds could claim his affection. His capacity was small, and yet he believed he knew everything, which was the more pitiable, as all this came to him with his places, and arose more from stupidity than presumption—not at all from vanity, of which he was divested. The most remarkable thing is that the chief origin of the King's tender regard for him was this very incapacity.

Duc de Saint-Simon (2012-05-16). Memoirs of Louis XIV and His Court and of the Regency - Complete (Kindle Locations 3226-3234).  . Kindle Edition.   Who--Andre Gide?--said that the less we respect Saint-Simon as an historian, the more we admire him as a novelist?

Slow Boring of Hard Boards: Gates, Shultz, Acheson And the Art of the Political Memoir

I'm barreling through Robert Gates' much-hyped memoir of his tour as secretary of defense under two Presidents and they are right, it is a delight--one of the very best memoirs of actual governing that I've ever read (although maybe I need to read more such).    It is also, be it said, not remotely that farrago of political gamesmanship that the prince of courtiers, Bob Woodward, described in his first-out-of-the-box Washington Post review a couple of weeks back--why anybody still takes that guy seriously is beyond me.

It is, as many have noted, a remarkably unbuttoned affair, with a lot more blunt judgments than you usually get in this king of book.   I'd guess, following  Fred Kaplan, that it sounds a lot like an insurance policy by a guy who wants to guarantee that no one will ever invite him back into pubic office again.  Yet cherry-picking can give a sadly distorted impression.  Really, the thrust, the heft of the book lie not so much in the sharp judgments but in the rich and densely textured account of what it is to be a cabinet secretary, juggling a trunk full of hot knives every day for something like four years.  And even as he pitches his barbs, he restrains himself from adding any that aren't necessary to his story.    He makes it clear, for example, that he felt the "occupation phase" of the Iraq war was a major policy error, and that he has little or no use for the Obama domestic agenda. But neither is central to his story here so he doesn't waste any ink on them.   It is, in any event, the kind of book you would want every one to read before they took up a position of such trust and responsibility--except that if you did, the chances are that all the people you really want on the job would run yelping for the door.  As homework for the beginning office holder, I'd rank it pretty close to  what I suspect is the most instructive  book I read in the last year--James Q. Wilson's Bureaucracy.  Taken together, they provide a chastening lesson in what you are up against when you try to accomplish anything in public administration.   Or perhaps it is the a bare third behind The Power Broker, Robert    massive (perhaps overlong) biography of Robert Moses.  Either way, that's tough company.

Reading Gates' book did set me to thinking: exactly how many public-service memoirs actually teach you anything, as distinct from just presenting a facade of self-justification, together with the settling of old scores?  My search set may be small, but I can think of only two others: one, George Shultz' Turmoil and Triumph about his years in the Reagan administration. There is a slight air of special pleading in the Shultz book.  Which is no wonder: after the train wreck that was Iran contra, there was enough finger-pointing and blame shifting to fill a fairly large battleship.  Shultz wants us to know it wasn't his idea and I am pretty sure he wins that argument. But win or lose, there is so much more of "what we did and how we did it" that it belongs on anyone's list.  Side note: Gates plays a walk-on role in Shultz's memoir, in his avatar as presenter of the CIA view on the Soviet Union; Shultz wasn't impressed.  I suppose there is more on this in an earlier Gates book about the CIA, which I haven't read.

The other belongs almost on a  list by itself: Dean Acheson's Present at the Creation. To call it a memoir almost obscures  its real virtue: as the title suggests, Acheson really was present at the creation of the post-World-War-II world: it is no exaggeration to say he wrote the first great history of the Cold War.   It's also a joy as a piece of prose exposition in a way that Shultz and Gates really are not. Both Shultz and Gates are clear, concise and carefully argued. Acheson is all of these but he is also saturnine, elegant and funny.  Seems we don't get that any more.

Which reminds me of one other item that might qualify for this list, although it isn't quite on topic. I mean the Autobiography of Abba Eban, in which he gives his unforgettable account of the founding of the State of Israel, which he saw from his peculiar vantage point as Israel's face in the United Nations.   Even more than Acheson, Eban is both writer and actor: I think it's fair to say that Eban's presentation determined for a generation the public view of Israel.   Gates can't claim that kind of distinction, partly because that was never his job.  He very likely was, however, for good or ill the most effective Secretary of Defense ever,  and he's written a book that proves it.

Followup:  For an interesting contrary view, go here.  For a full-scale bill of particulars, go here.  Both of these pieces aim their heaviest fire at Gates' earlier career and his misguided appraisal of the Soviet Union. I think Cole overdoes it

Weekend Reading

Long day at San Francisco Airport yesterday, so a chance to do a lot of reading.  I ingested a large chunk of a really cool book about which I'll have something to say latter. And also, among others:

And you think our bankers are stupid greedy incompetent not so hot: compare. (in fairness, it's not just people with five-o'clock shadow).

All in the mind.  This guy needs to read more Stendahl.

"The walls are painted but you can wallpaper them if you so desire."  Former zillionaire learns to cope with the Gulag.

"F*ck Jared Diamond!"

McKinsey! (with a potted retrospective of Alfred Chandler).

Type II error! 

.Jellyfish!

Bedtime Reading (Not)

It has pleased fortune  these past few months to wake me up about two am and then leave me to languish and and beguile sleep until four, maybe five.

This is actually not as disagreeable as it may sound.  I don't have many adult commitments so I am free to nap more or less as the situation demands any time during the day.  And perhaps more important, I'm totally cool with reading in bed.  You could say I've probably got a lot more accomplished this way than if I tried to crowd in that sort of quality time during the middle of the day.

But I have learned one thing,.  That is: there are some books which, no matter how great their intrinsic merit, you just don't want to tuck down with when you are alone in the dark.

Let's skip the obvious choices like "The Tell-tale Heart."  Consider instead something like Elizabeth Pisani's The Wisdom of Whores.  It's a funny, gnarly, serious book about a serious subject (the subtitle is "Bureaucrats, Brothels, and the Business of AIDS").    It's also full of driven, haunted, desperate people hellbent on screwing (pardon) up their lives.   Not the sort of thing that is going to waft you off to dreamland.   Or how about Ioan Grillo's El Narco, a superb account of the Mexican drug wars, great reading on its own account but believe me, watching reruns of The Sopranos can be more consoling.  Or even--this one sort of surprised me--Cynthia Freeland's justly admired The Plutocrats about the world-wide, world-class superrich:  you might think it is tame enough, but have you any idea just how crabby and disagreeable all these cosseted brats can be?

Other things can be positively consoling, in ways which can themselves surprise.  Books about the financial crisis are actually fairly easy to handle--gives you something intricate to get your mind around but in the end hey, it's only money.  Books about the (19) 30s and 40s can be just the ticket, at least if you skip the heavy-duty carnage of the war: this is my childhood we're talking about and at least I know how it turns out.   But do remind me to turn on the nightlight.  And while I think of it, just where did I leave my copy of Goodnight, Moon?

Apprecation: Tyndal, Mantel

Mr. and Mrs.Buce do not often read the identical stuff but sometimes we operate in parallel.  Case in point: just now she is awash in Hilary Mantel's paired novels set in the time of Henry VIII (link, link).  Meanwhile I just finished David Teems' biography of William Tyndale.  We agree on at least two things: one, Tyndale is way, way underappreciated, and two, Thomas More really enjoyed sending people out for torture.

Attention All English Majors

And there is no educated human being less likely to know business worse placed for knowing business than a young lord. Business is really more agreeable than pleasure;  it interests the whole mind, the aggregate nature of man more continuously,  and more deeply.

 --Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution 161 (Dolphin Paperback ed.)

Weekend Reading

  Not a long list, but  some really good stuff:

• Your one-stop shop for understanding tax deal.
• And why you might still be mad.
• Will Wilkinson reads Larry Bartels' Unequal Democracy, and Bartels responds.  For related links go here.

Adultery in the Pre-Pill Era

Mr Quayne falls from marital grace:

At the end of the party Mr Quayne all in a daze already saw her back in a taxi to Notting Hill Gate and was asked in for some Horlicks.  No one knows what happened--still less of course, why  it did.  But from that evening on, Thomas's father lost his head completely.  ... I often think of those dawns in Notting Hill Gate, with Irene up leaking tears and looking for hairpins and Mr Quayne sitting up denouncing himself.  His wife was much too nice to have pretty ways but I daresay Irene had plenty--if that is how you like them.  I've no doubt she made the most fussy capitulations; she would make him feel she had never fallen before--and I should think it's likely she never had.  She would not be everyone's money.  You may be sure that she let Mr Quayne know that her little life was from now on entirely in his hands.  By the end of those ten days he cannot have known himself whether he was a big brute or St George.

--Elizabeth Bowen The Death of the Heart 18 (1938; Penguin 1966)

Mmm, Horlicks.

Postmodern Reads

Jacket Copy, the LA Times' book blog, offers up a list of "61 essential postmodern reads." Based on the title alone, my guess was that I hadn't read any of them; my tastes are pretty conservative. But since the category is capacious enough to include "Hamlet," I suppose I am not surprised to find that I've actually read a dozen--with a heavy tilt towards "postmodernists" long dead.

I suppose the purpose of a list like this is to provoke quarrels over the choices. If Hamlet," why not the much more modernist"Don Quixote"--? Or the still-more nonlinear "Gargantua and Pantagruel"--? Is Burton really more "postmodern" than Montaigne? If "Tristiam Shandy" makes the list, how about the French competitor so much admired by Kundera, "Jacques le Fataliste"--? If Kafka, why not Waller? If Faulkner, why not pass the (fairly conventional) "Absalom! Absalom!" for the far more innovative "Sound and the Fury" or "As I Lay Dying"--? Is it sheer inattention that overlooks Adolfo Bioy Casares, Blaise Cendrars, Henri Michaux, Raymond Queneau? And is there anything "postmodern" about "Dispatches" except the war itself? And for making war "postmodern," how about David Jones' "In Parenthesis"--? And where, frevvins sakes, is "Finnegans Wake"--?

I guess I am more torn than I thought. I have always regarded most of what passes for "postmodern" as a big yawn. Although I admit that of the ones I have read, I have enjoyed every one. Although oddly, in several cases, I prefer other works by the same authors: "Invisible Cities," much better than "If On a Winter's Night a Traveller;" "Unbearable Lightness of Being" over "Book of Laughter and Forgetting;" several Faulkners better than "Absalom!" I admit I really have no strong impulse to read many of the others on the list, although a copy of Flann O'Brien's "At Swim-Two-Birds" is on the bedside table as we speak.

I append a list of those that I have actually read, along with the crib-chart from the LA Times blog. The full list is here.

Jorge Luis Borges' "Labyrinths"
Robert Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy"
Italo Calvino's "If on a Winter's Night a Traveler"
William Faulkner's "Absalom! Absalom!"
Michael Herr's "Dispatches"
Franz Kafka's "Metamorphosis"
Milan Kundera's "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting"
Vladimir Nabokov's "Pale Fire"
Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried"
W.G. Sebald's "The Rings of Saturn"
William Shakespeare's "Hamlet"
Art Spiegelman's Maus I & II
Laurence Stern's "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy"

Debriefing Memo: Tunisia #2 (Tunisia Reading)

I usually try to read up on a country before I visit there, but on Tunisia, I didn't do so well. Okay, so I was grading exams. But more than that--I simply couldn't find enough stuff that caught my fancy. Amazon does offer a biography of Tunisia's great postwar leader under the title of Habib Bourguiba: The Tragedy of Longevity (used copies starting at $65) but it is just not the sort of tagline that thrills the blood. I did read one academic study on the lives of Tunisian women--interesting as a powers-of-the-weak yarn about how women in a man's world use cunning and the advantage of interior line to outwit their overlords. I also read one so-bad-it-was-good travelogue by that very model of British Imperial arrogance and presumption, Norman Douglas. Douglas never met an off-white-person whom he didn't find scheming, shifty and gullible, but he's fascinating as an example of his kind, and actually kind of fun when he reports on sites that I walk over myself.

Beyond that, my main efforts went into expanding my knowledge (or perhaps just reducing my ignorance) about the Arab world more generally. And this line of inquiry led me to one of the most extraordinary finds since I don't know when: The Muqaddimah, by Ibn Khaldûn. The cover of the paperback bills it as "The Classic Islamic History of the World." A literate Tunisian acquaintance describes the author as "the first sociologist." Either of these is at least minimally adequate, but neither is enough. The fact is, Ibn Khaldûn is one of the world's great polymaths: he seems to have learned everything available in his world (14th Century). More, he seems to have fashioned an informed judgment on everything, characteristically supported with reasons, many of which survive the test of time (example: at the very beginning, he offers his account of why the Biblical story of Moses cannot possibly be true--his reasoning would do credit to an academic archaeologist in the 21th Century).

Ibn Khaldûn made most of his career outside of Tunisia (he traveled a lot) but he was born in Tunis, and there is a statue of him on the edge of the New Town, just outside the Souq. A cynic would identify it as proof that the Tunisians don't have much else to brag about. But that is unkind; Ibn Khaldûn is a force of nature, and I can't imagine why I never heard of him before.

More modest but worthwhile in different ways are two books by modern scribblers. The more polished and professional is Hugh Kennedy The Great Arab Conquests, about the Seventh-Century explosion that catapulted Muslims from obscurity in the desert onto the center of the world stage. Kennedy is a total pro, but in a way that's the problem. He spends perhaps a third of the book lamenting the inadequacy of the sources. This is intellectually honest, but it means he has less of a story to tell than he, or we, would want. Still, shorter Hugh Kennedy: it's not so much that the Arabs "won" as that their opponents had "lost." Plague had decimated the Mediterranean world just a century or so before, and old, corrupt, inefficient governments were tottering everywhere.

Tamim Ansary's Destiny Disrupted has the opposite problem. Seeing as how it bears the subtitle of "A History of the World through Islamic Eyes," I suppose I could hardly expect to find it anything except incomplete and superficial. But that is quite the problem. Any story can be told in 10 pages or 10 million pages, depending on how you choose your level of abstration. The trouble here is that Ansary doesn't seem to understand his own limitations or, worse, assumes that the reader will not. So it is an irritating read; nevertheless, I stuck it out, for her did tell me a bit I didn't know, and did bring together a number of disparate threads into a (mostly) coherent narrative.

[Idle afterthought: as proof that ambition in scope is no excuse, compare (invidiously) Ansary to Ibn Khaldûn, supra.]

That about does it for my Tunisia reading so far. I realize in retrospect that I might have broadened the search set if I had understood that what I was studying was not Tunisia so much as Carthage--the remnants of the old pre-Roman (and, later, the Roman) civilization. This would have opened me up to, e.g., biographies of Hannibal, or chunks of Livy. Or perhaps Sallust, of whom, I admit, I had only the vaguest knowledge before (can you say "Jugurthine"? No? Well, neither could I until last week). Ah well, it may not be too late; a copy of Susan Raven's Rome in Africa is winging its way to me even now as we speak. More anon.

Afterthought: It isn't quite my primary interest, but I note that there is also a fair amount of Wold War II history in Tunisia--not least the Kasserine Pass, venue for the first great encounter between American forces and Rommel's Panzers. Apparently there is quite a literature on this topic alone including, not least, Rick Atkinson's An Army at Dawn. Okay, it goes onto the list.

Must-reads

Two weekend must-reads:

• Axel Leijonhufvud's overview (excerpted here by Yves Smith) has got to be the best all-round summary of the current uproar.

• Epicurean Capitalist has a bit on the psychopathology of capitalist buccaneers which may sound like snark, but in truth hits pretty close to home (H/T Kedrosky).
  

Learning the New Ways

Il Teatro Buce last night featured a showing of The Duchess of Langeais, a sort of a French Mawsterpiece Theatre costume drama drawn from a Balzac novella. It was okay, a bit slow, not nearly as bad as the Observer reviewer thought, nor as good as the New York Times'.

But we're Balzac fans and we decided it might be fun to read the story aloud in the original. A quick check of Palookaville's excellent second-hand bookshop turned up no copies, but then it occurred to us--online?

Sure enough. A momentary search turns up more than one version, including this Adobe file in which you can adjust the type size. So it looks like a Mr. and Mrs. Buce Readaloud first: a book to be read from a computer screen (yes, I know I could print it out, but why bother?). So it's in the queue. Behind some other stuff, but we'll keep you posted.

Summer Reading Notes

Some summer reading notes: I read Steven Mithen, After the Ice (2003), by mistake. Somehow I thought it was about the development of the human species (homo this and homo that). Silly me: the development of the species takes place before the ice, while Mithen covers the period from about 20,000 to about 5,000 B.C. I particularly enjoyed the stuff about Western Asia, where I hope to spend some time later this Autumn, and in particular about Çatalhöyük in Turkey—a chilling story about a place . Mithen also introduced me to the “Younger Dryas,” a concept I had never heard of before. Prodigious piece of research, smoothly presented.

The read-aloud book for the summer at Chez Buce is T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, (Anchor Reissue 1991) supplemented by John J. Mack’s A Prince of Our Disorder (Harvard UP Paperback 1998), a superb biography of Lawrence, worthwhile in its own right. I still can’t make up my mind about Lawrence: he is obviously some kind of head case, but it’s hard to put your finger on just what kind of head case it might be. Perhaps the best way to read it is as a study in leadership, and also on popular conceptions of the hero; Mack’s treatment of the “heroism” issue is particularly fine. Caution: Lawrence does wander on a bit. The style is a kind of mannered Edwardian, and there is at least one passage of really gruesome torture.

I also reread (or so I thought) David Fromkin’s A Peace to End All Peace (2d Reprint ed. 2001), about the Middle East and the Imperial Powers during and after World War I. I said “so I thought,” because I’m sure I read this book back around that fabled trip to Turkey 15 years ago—but an awful lot of it seems brand new this time. Perhaps the dominant theme here is the ignorant arrogance and presumption of the British, focused around the notion that the Arabs would just naturally welcome British rule. Not least interesting of many fascinating points is the insight on the relationship between T.E. Lawrence (again) and Winston Churchill. It has eerie resonance with the relationship in World War II between Churchill and the Scottish adventurer, Fitzroy MacLean. MacLean's Eastern Approaches (Reprint ed. 2003) is another imperial swashbuckler, fit to be bracketed with (but really not at all like) Seven Pillars.

I bought and started, and lost, and promptly bought again, Nicholas Oster’s extraordinary Empires of the World: A Language History of the World (2005). The jacket says that Ostler has “a working knowledge of twenty-six languages” along with “degrees from Oxford in University in Greek, Latin, philosophy and economics.” Aside from the sheer quiz-kid aspect, the practical relevance is that Ostler does better than anybody I ever knew in relating language and power: showing low language patterns shift, or do not shift, with patterns of politics.

My own language skills are derisory by comparison but I try to hack away at them. This summer I read Simenon’s Coup de Lune (2003) in French, and Silone’s Fontamara (Manchester UP n.d.) in Italian. In each case, the point is that the language is pretty simple (my copy of Fontamara is a school edition with nice notes). My late friend John, may he rest in peace, used to say that the problem with Simenon is that there is too much outmoded gangster argot. Could be: my French is weak enough I wouldn’t know.

For the exercise bike, I have a copy of the Joint Association of Classical Teachers New Testament Greek: A Reader, (2001). Once again, this is not as challenging as it might sound. The whole point of New Testament Greek is that it is easier than Classical Greek. And JACT has a ton of vocab notes. So I can limp through a good deal of with at least minimal success. I do keep a $10 King James Bible at the ready, and I must say it turns out to be a pretty serviceable trot. Got to be careful about flashing this stuff in coffee shops, though: can lead to unwanted conversations.

I’m not sure it counts as “reading” or not, but I must say I have been mesmerized by Will Eisner’s A Contract With God (2000), the hard-bound comic book epic of life in the Bronx in the 1930s. The pictures are riveting. I knew virtually nothing about comics before, but I can see why this guy is recognized as a master.

[My Amazon ad links at the moment include two other books I don’t discuss here: Van Creveld’s Rise and Decline of the State (1999), and Hammes’ Sling and the Stone (2004). They aren’t summertime reading because I read them last Spring. I’m hoping to pull together some thoughts on them for a separate post.]