Review: Persians, by Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones

Persians: The Age of the Great Kings by Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book begins with a great promise: to correct the distorted view that so many of us have of the Persian Empire. This distortion comes from two quite different directions.

In the West, our view of the Persian Empire has largely been filtered through Greek sources, Herodotus above all. This is nearly unavoidable, as the Greeks wrote long and engaging narrative histories of these times, while the Persians—although literate—did not leave anything remotely comparable. Yet the Greeks were sworn enemies of the Persians, and thus their picture of this empire is hugely distorted. Taking them at their word would be like writing a history of the U.S.S.R. purely from depictions in American news media.

The other source of bias is from within Iran itself. Starting with Ferdowsi, who depicts the Persian kings as a kind of mythological origin of the Persian people, the ruins of this great empire have been used to contrast native Persian culture from the language, religion, and traditions imported by the Muslim conquest. In more recent times, Cyrus the Great has become a symbol of the lost monarchy, a kind of secular saint—a tolerant ruler, who even originated the idea of human rights. This purely fictitious view is, at bottom, a kind of protest against the current oppressive theocracy.

But this book does not live up to its promise. To give the author credit, however, I should note that the middle section of the book—on the culture, bureaucracy, and daily life of the empire—is quite strong. Here, one feels that Llewellyn-Jones is relying on archaeological evidence and is escaping from the old stereotypes. The epilogue is also a worthwhile read, detailing the ways that subsequent generations have used (and abused) the history of this ancient power.

Yet the book falters in the chapters of narrative history. Here, Llewellyn-Jones is forced to rely on the Greek sources, and as a result many sections feel like weak retellings of Herodotus, with a bit of added historical context. Even worse, there are several parts in which I think he is not nearly skeptical enough regarding the stories in these Greek authors. At one point, for example, he retells the story of Xerxes’s passionate love affair with the princess Artaynte—a story taken straight out of Herodotus, and which has all of the hallmarks of a legend. That Llewellyn-Jones decides to treat this story as a fact, and does not even gesture towards its source, is I think an odd display of credulity in a professional historian.

The irony is that the final section of the book—full of scandalous tales taken out of Greek authors, depicting the decadence and depravity of the Persian court—only reinforces the very stereotypes that Llewellyn-Jones sets out to destroy. The really odd thing, in my opinion, is that there are no footnotes or even a section on his sources, so the reader must take him at his word—or not. I suspect this omission is to cover up the embarrassing fact that he relied so heavily on Herodotus.

This is a shame, as the Persian Empire does deserve the kind of reevaluation he proposes. It is fascinating on its own terms, and not just as a foil to the noble Greek freedom-fighters. Still, I think this book is a decent starting point for anyone interested in the subject. One must only read it with a skeptical eye.

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Review: New Art of Cookery

New Art of Cookery: A Spanish Friar’s Kitchen Notebook by Juan Altamiras by Vicky Hayward

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I did not expect to be going to a book event during my last weekend in Madrid. But when I learned that an author was going to be talking about a historic Spanish cookbook at my favorite bookstore in the city, I decided that I had to make time for it.

I was transfixed from the start. The history of food is, I think, often overlooked—even by history buffs; and yet it provides a fascinating lens through which to learn about the past. In daily life, we are often apt to think of traditional dishes as things that have existed since time immemorial. But this often isn’t the case. In this cookbook, originally published in 1745, you will not find potato omelette, or paella, or croquetas, or cocido, or gazpacho…

Wait, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me describe what this book is, first. Nuevo arte de la cocina is a cookbook published under the name Juan de Altamiras (a pseudonym) in 1745. It proved to be immensely popular, remaining a bestseller well into the next century. The book’s author—whose real name was Raimundo Gómez—was a Franciscan friar, who grew up and spent much of his life in rural Aragón. This book is a contextualized translation by the English author Vicky Hayward. Throughout the book, she adds a great deal of fascinating historical context, as well as modernized versions of each of the over 200 recipes here.

As you might expect, the book is organized along religious lines, with food for meatless and meat days. Back then, something like a third of the year consisted of meatless days; and during Lent, the pious were supposed to be basically vegan. This makes the book a surprisingly good resource for vegetarian cooking. Yet what made it so innovative in its time was that, unlike so many previous cookbooks, Altamiras wrote for ordinary Spaniards—not courtly chefs. The recipes here are simple home cooking at its finest, requiring basic ingredients and straightforward technique. This was revolutionary at the time.

And to return to my previous point, much of the cooking can seem surprisingly exotic. Altamiras uses sauces made from hazlenuts, almond milk, and pomegranate juice. He mixes citrus, saffron, and tomato, and loves to add cloves and cinnamon to his savory dishes. Hayward was good enough to cook samples for the audience at the book event—several of which made me think of Iranian food. According to Hayward, this is because the Morisco influence (Muslims who had converted to Christianity in the 15th century) was still alive and well in Altamiras’s childhood.

I was also surprised at the wealth of ingredients available to Altamiras. He calls on a wide range of fruits and vegetables, as well as fresh fish—despite not living near the coast. He had eggs aplenty and endless ham and lamb, not to mention nuts, legumes, and spices. Saffron grew locally in his day, and salt cod was a staple (though including such a humble ingredient as salt cod was innovative). Most surprising of all, he made iced lemon slushies by using the snow in the nearby mountains. This was a rich and varied diet.

Hayward has fascinating things to say about all of this—the cooking techniques, the sources for ingredients, the role of religion, the Muslims influence, and so much more. More than so many other history books, this one made me feel transported back in time. And a delicious time it was.

Now, one would think that there could be nothing more innocuous than a translation of an 18th century Spanish cookbook. And yet, the event I went to last month was the first event held in honor of the book—eight years after its initial publication! According to Hayward, this is because her book attracted the ire of the Aragonese government, who were offended that a foreigner had beaten them to the punch in bringing their native son to a wider audience. She reports being attacked left and right by Spanish academics. If this is true, it is very silly.

I left the event in a buoyant mood, glad that I could still be so surprised by Spanish history after so many years. And I celebrated, appropriately, by the orgy of food that is Tapapiés—Madrid’s annual tapa festival, held in the Lavapiés neighborhood. It was a wonderful way to spend my last Friday in the city.

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Review: Stray Cats

Stray Cats: Life in Madrid Through 17 Voices by John Dapolito

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I met John Dapolito at the Antón Martín metro stop on a cold autumn night. He was smoking a cigarette and scanning the crowd, and when he recognized me he told me to follow him to a nearby bar. I was nervous, as this was a kind of interview. He was looking for writers to contribute to a new volume, a collection of mini-memoirs of people who have moved to Madrid from elsewhere. He wanted them to answer three questions: How has Madrid changed since you moved here? How have you changed? And how has Madrid changed you?

“Nine years?” he said, mulling over my time in Madrid. “Nine years…” his voice trailing off. To many Americans in Madrid, this is quite a long time. But compared to John’s twenty-five, it seemed rather paltry. So we talked about how I could write my essay, what angle I could take, what I could emphasize about my experience to differentiate from everyone else’s. The next day, I started writing a draft of my essay long-hand, in a notebook—something I seldom do—and now it is a pleasure to see it in print in this collection.

Ironically, in the months since I sent off the final draft to John, I’ve grown to love Madrid more than ever. While I used to feel the need to escape into the sierra every couple of weeks, craving a bit of nature, lately I’ve been content to just stroll around the city, exploring its nooks and crannies, and getting ever-more integrated into its peculiar form of life. In short, now that my nine years are nearing ten, I am finally beginning to feel like a proper madrileño, fully at home in this great Spanish metropolis. And now that I have my story of Madrid in print, I feel now more than ever that I’ve really made a home here.

The stories in this volume have many common themes: learning the language, enjoying the nightlife, resenting the gentrification, and so on—themes that would have appeared had this book been written about Budapest or Bangkok. But beneath these superficial commonalities are what make the essays worth reading—insights into Madrid and, more often, into the person writing about it. And these essays are illustrated by black-and-white photos by the editor, John. I remember him opening a binder of them at the bar, during our first meeting, and admiring their atmosphere, how they really captured an aspect of the beauty of this city. And I thought to myself: “I want to be a part of this project.”

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Review: Times Square Red, Times Square Blue

Times Square Red, Times Square Blue by Samuel R. Delany

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

When I was an undergraduate, having rashly and unwisely switched my major from chemistry to anthropology, I met with my academic advisor. He asked me: What do I hope to learn as an anthropologist? To this, I gave the answer: I want to walk through Time Square and understand why it is the way it is. Yes, grandiose and pretentious, but it did capture something—the urge to figure out why the world is filled with so much soulless, commercial crap.

I am now suffering the financial consequences of studying anthropology, and not much closer to enlightenment. Thanks to this book, however, I do feel closer to understanding that mecca of American consumerism: Times Square.

This is a highly unusual book. Delany, who usually writes science fiction, set out to write a work of urban studies. And yet it is just as much a memoir as an academic analysis, and it comes to its point in a very roundabout way. Even so, it is easily among the best books about New York City I have ever read.

The book is divided into two essays, originally published independently. The first, “Times Square Blue,” recounts Delany’s experience of the old, seedy Times Square—the Times Square of peep shows, prostitutes, drugs, and sex shops. Specifically, it focuses on the porn theaters, places which became gay cruising grounds, despite showing almost exclusively straight porn. Delany spent decades visiting these theaters and paints a memorable portrait of this now unimaginable Times Square.

Yet this part of the book is not prurient. Delany doesn’t write to titillate the reader, or even to mourn a part of the city that has disappeared. He writes, instead, to illustrate an idea about what makes cities work. It is really an expansion of what Jane Jacobs said in her classic book on the subject: that cities need to foster contact between different sorts of people. Delany merely adds a sexual dimension to this analysis, and he shows how his own search for men threw him into contact with all sorts of people whom he would never have met through work or other socializing.

Part Two, “… Three, Two, One Contact: Times Square Red” expands this observation into a theory. Delany contrasts “contact”—the kind of random meeting of a stranger, such as in line at a grocery store—with “networking,” which is a more formalized way of meeting people, such as at a book convention. An important difference between the two is that, in the former, it is common to meet people of different backgrounds and socio-economic classes, while the latter usually restricted to members of the same class.

Delany asserts that much of the modern world is intentionally created to promote networking and to discourage contact. And the redevelopment of Times Square is a case in point. Whereas it was possible to go to the old Times Square and meet all sorts of people, in the Times Square as it exists today there are simply tourists and people trying to make money off of tourists. And very few people who visit Times Square now, I reckon, meet anyone at all.

There are further aspects of Delany’s analysis—much of it in a Marxist vein—but to me the pleasure of this book was simply in the love of city life that he exudes. On every page, the reader can feel that he simply enjoys meeting people of different sorts, and finds that it enriches his life. It is a wonderful antidote to the sometimes suffocating loneliness that big cities can engender—the feeling of being surrounded by people, and yet completely ignored. While reading this book on the metro, I suddenly became aware of everyone else on the train as individuals and not faceless mannequins. It made the ride far more pleasant.

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2024 in Books

2024 on Goodreads by Various

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I seem to be slowing down in my old age. About a decade ago, I was reading well over 100 books a year. Since then, my total book count has steadily gone downward, a dismal sign of adult responsibilities encroaching on my free time. But I still managed to finish some excellent books.

In election years, I tend to get swept up in the frantic political mood, but this year somehow I managed to maintain calm. My big election read was What It Takes, Richard Ben Cramer’s monumental account of the 1988 election. It was a thorough reminder of how much American politics have decayed during my lifetime. This was complemented by Robert Caro’s Master of the Senate, a monumental exploration of how power operates on a national scale. The attempted Trump assassination also prompted me to read the Warren Commission Report and to finally learn all of the gory and suspicious details of the JFK assassination.

But the major theme of the year was, broadly speaking, the 1920s, 30s, and 40s in America. I’m fascinated by this period because it seems to separate the past from the present—a historical crisis that birthed the modern world. The best general overview of the period I know is David M. Kennedy’s Freedom From Fear, but I supplemented this with Studs Terkel’s books on the Great Depression and World War II, Frederick Lewis Allen’s books on the 1920s and 30s, two volumes of Churchill’s WWII memoirs, and two books on the Dust Bowl. I admit that it was reassuring to be reminded that the United States has already survived crises of extraordinary proportions as we face a second Trump term.

But many other valuable books just came my way. Among these were Mozart’s letters—a thoroughly charming self-portrait—and Bianca Bosker’s wonderful book on the contemporary art scene, which illuminated a world that had previously been a complete conundrum to me. This also included Jon Krakauer’s two most famous books—about Chris McCandless and the 1996 Mount Everest Disaster—which deserve their fame. Sei Shonagan’s classic of Heian Japan, The Pillow Book, made a lasting impression on me; but the most unexpectedly good read was The Ethical Slut, a manual of polyamory which has much to teach prudes such as myself.

Like last year, this one has been rather light on literature. I read some good plays—a couple of Brecht plays, and Tom Stoppard’s postmodern Shakespeare sendup—and two novels by Sinclair Lewis. Yet the most beautiful piece of writing I encountered was James Agee’s sui generis Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a book worth reading for the quality of the prose alone.

As always, I heartily thank the Goodreads community for allowing me to express my thoughts and to learn from yours. In the new world of AI, this platform seems to be stuck in time, and I’m not complaining.

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Review: Into the Wild

Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Jon Krakauer’s two most famous books, Into the Wild and Into Thin Air, are both stories of failures to survive in harsh environments. One would think that such stories, though thrilling, would leave little room for controversy; but somehow that is not the case. His account of the Everest disaster attracted criticism because his version of events—his apportioning of praise and blame—did not always match other survivors’. This book, meanwhile, was criticized for two principal reasons: first, Krakauer’s story of McCandless final weeks in Alaska may go beyond the evidence; and second, he portrayed McCandless in a highly favorable light.

I’ll take them in reverse order. A fervid outdoorsman himself, Krakauer obviously sympathized deeply with Chris McCandless, and this book shows the young man as a kind of flawed hero. Many readers feel quite differently, seeing him as an arrogant, naïve, and misguided young man whose stubbornness unnecessarily put his family through hell. As Krakauer notes, however, the deep antipathy that some readers feel for McCandless seems a bit excessive. After all, if he was misguided, he certainly paid the price for it. And among all of the misdeed of our sorry species, going unprepared into the bush hardly seems like the worst sin.

In any case, one hardly needs to admire McCandless to find his story worthwhile. Indeed, I think this book is most valuable when read as a case study of a certain psychological type. It is a mindset most prevalent among young men, though hardly exclusive to them. At his age, I remember being a toned-down version of McCandless myself: reading Tolstoy and Thoreau and feeling superior to everyone, wanting nothing more than to explore, seeing no value in being tied down in a relationship or a job when a world of experiences awaited me.

Many people, I suspect, go through a phase like this, even if they don’t take it as far as McCandless. And most of us come out the other side learning why life can’t just be wandering and rhapsodizing. This is what happened to Krakauer, and what happened to me, and maybe what happened to you. It might have happened to McCandless, had he lived.

Indeed, I think many of us are apt to look back on our ideological young selves with a mixture of horror and embarrassment. How could I ever think that Dostoyevsky would solve all my problems? How could I have been stupid enough to go hitchhiking in a foreign country? And so on. But I suspect that some of the pain that these reflections cause is the recognition that we became the very thing we abhorred. Growing up almost inevitably means compromising our values, and settling into our little corner of the world, wherever that happens to be.

What I’m trying to say, I suppose, is that the pure and idealistic vision of so many young people is not invalid, it’s just too demanding. In other words, though we gain the ability to have rewarding lives as functioning members of society when we settle down, we do lose that sense of wonder—the feeling that all we need are words, ideas, and experiences.

And it should be said that many people in this mold have contributed mightily to society. Tolstoy and Thoreau are two obvious examples, and they are widely admired. Had McCandless lived, maybe he would have written a celebrated book, too. Celebrated or not, it is worth noting that even these great figures have their share of the pathetic. Thoreau was a brilliant writer and an original thinker; he also camped out in what was effectively Emerson’s backyard. I’m sure, for example, that if you met someone living in a small cottage on the edge of town as preachy and as self-obsessed as Thoreau, you’d likely find very little to admire.

Whether we view these people as heroes or kooks largely depends on how they’re framed. Krakauer chooses to see McCandless as heroic in his straining to live on his own terms. But for the other side of the coin, watch Herzog’s documentary Grizzly Man, the story of Timothy Treadwell, another man killed in the Alaskan wilderness. Herzog’s portrayal of Treadwell shows him to be wildly irresponsible and hopelessly deluded, perhaps not even fully sane. And I think both perspectives are true. McCandless was both heroic and pathetic, both admirable and irresponsible, both clear-eyed and deluded. In the end, it is the old story of Don Quixote, who is simultaneously morally superior to everyone around him, and undeniably out of touch with reality.

Anyway, that’s my take on the question of whether McCandless is admirable. This only leaves the second question of whether Krakauer’s account of McCandless’s final days goes beyond the available evidence.

The main source of evidence of McCandless’s stay in Alaska is the journal he kept. However, the entries are extremely short, often just a word or two, and are mainly a record of the animals he killed and ate. To flesh out the story, Krakauer often had to guess what a journal entry might mean. To give just one example, on Day 69 McCandless wrote “Rained in. River look impossible. Lonely, scared.” Krakauer supposes that McCandless had decided to head back toward civilization, but was stopped by the Teklanika River, which was swollen by the snowmelt.

Some publications, such as the Anchorage Daily News, take Krakauer to task for this and the many other assumptions he makes while interpreting this diary. On Day 92, for example, the entry simply reads “Dr Zhivago,” which Krakauer announces is the last book McCandless ever finished. But of course, we can’t really know that. As a result, Krakauer has been accused of writing a kind of fiction rather than journalism, at least in this section. For my part, however, I think his interpretations of the diary entries are quite reasonable, even if we can never know for sure if they are correct.

Krakauer is particularly vexed as to the question of what killed McCandless. On day 94 it says: “Extremely weak. Fault of pot. seeds. Much trouble just to stand up. Starving. Great jeopardy.” In the book, Krakauer proposes that McCandless had eaten the seeds of the so-called Eskimo potato plant, which contained toxic alkaloids. Subsequent testing later refuted this hypothesis. Unwilling to let it go, Krakauer recruited scientists and even co-authored a scientific paper, in which they report that the seeds actually contain a toxic amino acid. He believes this is what killed McCandless.

However, unremarked upon in this book—and it is a notable omission—is the entry on day 89, which says “DREAM” in giant letters. Arrows point from this word to “many mushrooms,” and underneath it is a garbled entry that reads “2 infinity holes, 1 at the belt, 1 at the foot, gives frequency.” This strange entry would seem to indicate that he had taken hallucinogenic mushrooms and had a psychedelic experience. And if McCandless was eating mushrooms, it is easy to conclude that he inadvertently ate a poisonous variety. After all, telling mushroom species apart is notoriously difficult.

But why does this matter? Well, it seems obvious that Krakauer wants to believe that the potato seeds, not mushrooms, were the culprit. This is because the toxicity of wild potato seeds was not well-known, while eating unidentified mushrooms is obviously a dangerous idea. In other words, if the potato plant did Chris in, it would mean that he was less reckless and unprepared than many think. I must admit, however, that the omission of any reference to the DREAM entry is hard to justify.

In the end, I think this is a story about being young, idealistic, and rash. When I was about Chris’s age, I quit my Ph.D. and moved to Spain, spending all my savings in order to traipse around the country. My future was inconceivable, and the idea of real consequences—much less death—too abstract to contemplate. Now, nearly ten years later, I have a steady job and a relationship, and feel far less wanderlust. I’ve come to appreciate, like I never could then, that the small joys of being around people you love, in a community where you feel at home, are just as valuable and as uplifting as the any brilliant book or beautiful landscape. It’s quite possible that Chris would have come to the same conclusion. Now, his life stands as a monument to what most of us leave behind.

Cover photo by Erikhalfacre – CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=13274101

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Review: Moral y civilización

Moral y civilización. Una historia by Juan Antonio Rivera

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book was given to me as a birthday present by my friend, Carlos Gómez, who went to university with the author. Not long thereafter, Juan Antonio Rivera passed away unexpectedly, leaving this book as his final work. Carlos, naturally, was distraught at the news. The last time we spoke, I asked Carlos about Juan’s life. Juan was a highly independent man, who lived surrounded by books—thousands and thousands of books, on every subject and in every genre. Carlos recalls entering his home and being unable to sit down for the sheer quantity of reading material.

Naturally, I can only respect someone so singularly dedicated to the life of the mind. I read this work, therefore, as a kind of homage to this thinker whom I never had the opportunity to meet.

As it happens, I was well-prepared to tackle this work. With the exception of Friedrich Hayek, I was familiar with all the thinkers most often cited: Charles Darwin, Steven Pinker, Jonathan Haidt, David Graeber, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Kahneman, and Jared Diamond, among others. If you are familiar with these writers, you may notice that none of them are philosophers. And, indeed, this book is not really a work of moral philosophy in the strict sense. Rivera is not concerned with the old question of ethics—how an individual might make a moral choice. He is concerned, rather, with how morality evolved over time, and how it operates now.

In a book that begins with the evolution of altruistic behaviors and ends with a defense of classical liberalism, a lot of intellectual ground is covered. It is not easy to summarize it all. The pithiest way that I can encapsulate Rivera’s view is that he is extremely suspicious of rationality. By this, I mean that he distrusts individual decision-making, even—or especially—when it is guided by conscious, logical thought. He thinks it is impossible for one person to have it all figured out.

This will be clearer if I give examples. People are moral, he thinks, when they are guided by a combination of biology and custom—that is, when they act as programmed. But when they strive to create an explicit morality, they create ideologically extreme systems like communism or religious fundamentalism, and seek to subject everyone to their vision. To give another example, he thinks that societies are pushed forward, not by individual geniuses, but by collective intelligence—the ability to subdivide work, to find inspiration in others’ ideas, to find new uses for other’ inventions. Both in natural selection and the free market, he sees the operation of an intelligence that far exceeds any given person’s, and he trusts these processes for their very impersonality.

Perhaps I am making this sound unreasonable, but there is a strong logic to his argument. After all, it is true that evolution has given rise to miracles of engineering that far exceed what humanity has accomplished, and that even our own engineering marvels are often a result of a slow accumulation of collective insight. Arguably, most people act reasonably moral without ever pausing to reflect on the basis of their ethical system. Even AI works, not through high-powered logic, but by being trained with masses of data. You might say his philosophy is trial and error elevated to a principle.

For about the first three-quarters of the book, Rivera examines how different sorts of trial-and-error processes gave rise to the modern concept of morality. He begins with Darwinian selection, using the oft-cited prisoner’s dilemma to show how altruistic behavior can evolve. Then he shows how the human brain, shaped by evolution and then culture, subconsciously guides our actions. He discusses how the rise of agriculture led to a kind of self-domestication by the human species, how the Catholic church led to a rise in individualism in Europe, and finally how a rise in material prosperity led to a decline in violence.

In short, Rivera marshals principles of psychology, sociology, and history in order to demonstrate that morality is the by-product of non-rational, evolutionary processes. And all of this leads up, somewhat unexpectedly, to an endorsement of liberalism. Rivera sees a society that strongly emphasizes individual rights as the one most likely to be morally advanced—partly, because it benefits from a diversity of skills and insights, and partly because it forces its members to develop an ethic of tolerance and respect.

Indeed, this last point is captured by one of Rivera’s coinages: “cold morality” vs. “warm morality.” A warm morality is one based on familial ties—in other words, an ethic of collectivism. While such an ethic might work very well for a small group of hunter-gatherers, Rivera says, the familial ethic cannot be scaled up to work on a societal scale. It is simply impossible for me to care about a stranger on the street the way I care about my brother. This is why he endorses a “cold morality,” which involves little more than leaving people alone to do what they think best. As he says, it is the negative version of the golden rule—don’t do unto others what you wouldn’t have them do unto you—rather than the positive version.

Both in his politics, then, and in his philosophical views, he is extremely skeptical of others—their conclusions, their reasoning, and their values. His defense of liberalism is thus rooted in the idea that nobody can have it all figured out, so we ought to just leave each other alone.

Certainly, there is a great deal to recommend this view. Believe me: I am not going to argue in this review that we ought not to have individual rights. Nevertheless, I was not fully satisfied by the way that Rivera set about arguing his conclusions. His rejection of utopian thinking and embrace of liberalism largely rests on his perception that the former has failed and the latter has succeeded in practice. That may be true, though there are many factors which influence the success or failure of a political system. Further, in the earlier sections of the book, I felt as if he were taking concepts from works of popular science and combining them rather too freely—like the puzzle-pieces of a foregone conclusion.

I should also mention the unacknowledged irony of an tome such as this arguing against the preeminence of the intellect. It seems self-defeating to spend a great deal of intellectual energy arguing that thinkers ought not to try to find a universal set of morals. Morality may be a product of natural and social evolution, and moral reasoning may be subconscious most of the time, but I still think the question of what is right or wrong cannot be entirely sidestepped. Virtually everyone is confronted, from time to time, with a moral conundrum, when it seems entirely unclear what the right thing to do is. Rivera admits that these situations exist, though his book doesn’t provide any guideposts for navigating difficult terrain.

Nevertheless, I think this is an impressive book. Rivera is obscenely well-read and combines insights from many different fields. More than that, he is able to make his philosophy readable. Going back to José Ortega y Gasset, Spain has a strong tradition of popular philosophy—of original philosophical works written in a charming and accessible style. Rivera’s book is a worthy contribution to this tradition, as it is learned without being pedantic. It is a shame that we cannot look forward to more works by this thinker.

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Review: Into Thin Air

Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster by Jon Krakauer

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The tallest mountain I have ever climbed is Peñalara, the highest peak of the Guadarrama range. Standing at 2,428 meters above sea level, it is not even a third as high as Everest. With a train station that transports visitors most of the way up, and no steep cliffs or otherwise difficult terrain, for most of the year it requires no special skill or equipment to climb to the top.

And yet even this seemingly harmless mountain can be dangerous under the right conditions. I discovered this when I decided to visit one day in March, some years ago, during a cold snap that covered the mountain with snow—probably for the last time of the season. Wearing two pairs of pants, two undershirts, a hoodie, and my winter jacket, I ascended up the main route from the Puerto de Cotos.

The going was relatively easy until I got above the tree line. There, wind blew blasts of snow into my face, making it difficult to see. The air was so cold that I put on the feeble mask I had in my pocket from COVID times, just to protect my nose. The ground was covered in a layer of ice, requiring me sometimes to stomp through it, as I was just wearing hiking boots and had no crampons.

Even so, I made it to the top without too much trouble, and quickly turned to descend. Yet when I got halfway down, I decided that it was still relatively early; I wanted to do a little more exploring. I knew that there was a little lake somewhere on the mountain and I decided that I’d pay it a visit on my way to the train. A fork in the path took me to the Refugio Zabala, an emergency shelter built in 1927. There, I saw a path leading through the icy snow, down into a valley below. For some reason, I figured that this led to the lake.

But the path quickly grew too steep to walk down on the icy ground. Rather than turn back, however, I made the stupidest decision of the day, and slid down the icy surface on my butt all the way to the bottom, digging into the surface with my bare hands to slow myself down. When I skidded to a stop, I figured the path would continue. I was flummoxed, then, when it diverged into several directions. The air was foggy and a light wisp of snow was falling, making it impossible to see where the different paths led. To make matters worse, my phone didn’t have any data, and I had no offline maps.

Choosing what struck me as the most likely direction, I started walking, and soon found myself stumbling over icy rocks on the side of a steep hill. One mistep and I could easily have gone tumbling. After about ten minutes of slipping and sliding, the path petered out, leaving me at the base of a large icy slope. I sat down on the ice and contemplated trying to claw my way to the top of the hill, but I decided it was too risky. Besides, I had no idea if I was even going the right direction.

So I retraced my steps, tripping over the rocky path until I reached the bottom of the hill that I had so unwisely slid down. It was manifestly impossible to go back up the slope, as the ground was frozen solid. To make matters worse, a storm seemed to be blowing in, reducing visibility to a minimum. Lost in a sea of white fog, I began to panic. The temperature was well below zero and would likely get much colder. What would happen if I twisted my ankle or fell and hit my head? Could I survive a night exposed to the elements?

Just then, I heard a dog barking, and then voices in the distance. Without hesitating, I headed straight for the noise, even though the route took me off the paths and sent me scurrying over piles of slick boulders. I emerged onto a wooden path, where a group of hikers were chatting. They were well-prepared for the weather, each one sporting an impermeable jacket, crampons, and walking sticks.

Suddenly embarrassed, I asked them, as nonchalantly as I could, if this was the path to the train station. “Yes,” they assured me. “Are you lost? Want to come with us?” “Oh no, I’m fine,” I said, and walked as fast as I could down the walkway. Sure enough, in about an hour I was back in civilization, cradling a cup of hot chocolate from the station café.

It is obvious from this story that I had to make a lot of stupid decisions in a row to put myself in such a precarious situation. Even so, this modest experience also shows how unforgiving a mountain can be. After all, this was a peak I had climbed many times before—a national park frequented by tens of thousands of visitors. The idea that I could be in any danger struck me as silly. But all it took was a bit of fog and ice for me to get completely lost. A single slip could have been fatal.

I’ve elected to tell this anecdote because I have very little else to say about this book. It is absolutely gripping and made me think about cold, altitude, oxygen, and the strange impulse to defy death and challenge nature. I will only add that, if Krakauer hoped to combat the commercialization of Everest by telling this story, he did not succeed. Everest is now growing dangerously crowded. You can look up recent videos of dozens of climbers waiting in queues to stand on the summit. I can’t say I get the appeal.

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Review: Bird by Bird

Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

There is a peculiar pleasure in reading books about writing. It is the only craft in which the manual to do it is an example of the craft itself. And since writers tend to be on the eloquent side, they are very good at making their particular pursuit sound interesting and admirable and arduous. Have you heard musicians talk about music? Poor fellows. Either they use the jargon of theory, or are reduced to the blandest platitudes.

Nevertheless, while writers may be in an excellent position to beautify and dramatize their profession, they are in a poor position to teach it. Writing simply cannot be broken down in the way that music can, into notes, scales, chords, etc. You cannot sit down and practice writing by typing the alphabet. Indeed, anyone who tries to teach writing in any capacity will quickly find that it involves so many subtle skills—from basic grammar, to the conventions of spelling and punctuation, to literary sensibility and aesthetic taste—that it resists being broken down into a set of teachable skills. Either it’s all working together, or it’s not.

Lamott begins on solid ground, by reiterating the advice given to all aspiring writers. Start small, write what you know, chuck perfectionism, give yourself permission to write bad first drafts. Nobody pretends that this advice is original, but it bears repeating, and often, since writers for some reason seem particularly prone to crippling self-doubt. I suppose it’s because writing, unlike playing guitar or painting a watercolor, is not particularly fun in itself. There is no sensory or physical feeling to enjoy. And writing being such a solitary pursuit, there is not even a social element. It is just you and the content of your words, and it can be a lot to bear.

Yet Lamott adds quite a bit to this basic, timeworn advice; and unfortunately for me, much of it rubbed me the wrong way. The rest of this review will thus seem unduly negative. So before I move on, I should say that any book that encourages people to read or to write is, for me, a good book. And this one has done a lot of encouraging.

The quickest way I can summarize what I felt was lacking in Lamott’s book is this: she does not pay enough attention to aesthetics. Put another way, I think her approach to writing is overly confessional. Lamott is concerned, above all, with expressing truth—not scientific truth, but personal, emotional, or even spiritual truth. There are times when this approach can be powerful. There are others when it can be horrifically boring.

Here is what I mean. She advises writers to carry around index cards and write down passing thoughts or overheard remarks. She encourages her students to write about their childhoods and to use their traumas. She gives careful advice about how to avoid libel by changing key details about the people in your life you intend to write about. Every story she tells about writing one of her books starts with an experience in her life that she wants to turn into fiction. And this book is peppered—“littered” is perhaps a better word—with anecdotes from her own life.

This is a recipe for thinly veiled autobiographical fiction (which seems to be the exact kind of fiction she herself writes). And the risk of writing such fiction is that it can easily become self-indulgent. It does not take an extraordinary narcissist to overestimate how interesting her life is to others. Most of us already torture our friends with long, boring stories about our days. Let’s not torture our readers the same way.

Of course, our experiences must inform our writing; and of course, most writers do want to express the truth as they see it. But what makes writing pleasurable and memorable, for me, is not that it tells the unvarnished truth about our various traumas, but that it transforms our experience into, well, literature. And this requires just the skills that Lamott neglects in this book.

For example, her chapter on plot counsels the writer to base the story on what her characters would plausibly do next. This strikes me as highly incomplete advice. Though some aspects of a story do grow organically from a character’s personality, most of the famous plots I know have a larger structural integrity. From the white whale to the ghost of Hamlet’s father, stories often contain elements that propel their characters into new situations, rather than vice versa. In the best stories, I think, a perfect balance is achieved between external events and internal turmoil. Thus the Greek tragedies.

This is a quibble, I suppose. More glaring is a complete absence of even a mention of different genres. One would never suspect, from reading this, that there are writers who wish to set their stories in the future or the past, in outer space or a fantastical dimension. One would also not suspect that many writers, rather than taking their inspiration directly from lived experience, are responding mainly to other books. Borges comes to mind as an obvious example, but I think most successful writers do their work in conversation with other authors, living or dead.

A good novel, after all, is not good because it captures something the author felt or thought or lived through. One can read all of Henry James’s books and learn very little about the man. The same can be said for authors as diverse as Shakespeare and Agatha Christie. A novel, once born, should stand on its own, and not serve as a window into the life of its author. This is what separates literature from confession.

Perhaps the most telling thing I can say about this book is that it reads more like a spiritual self-help book than a writing guide. And considering that Lamott seems to have achieved far more success with her series of spiritual self-help guides (she’s a proud Christian) than her fiction, this should perhaps come as no surprise. Indeed, I found this book most moving and powerful when she discussed how writing has helped her get through hard times. It may not be great advice for a novel, but it is not bad advice as far as life is concerned.

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Review: The Worst Hard Time

The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Dust Bowl has always been a somewhat vague disaster in my mind. It occurred during the Great Depression, and the images it generated helped to define the misery of the period. But the question has always lingered in my mind: was it simply chance that the two coincided? Or did one cause the other? Like many people, my primary touchstone for the event is The Grapes of Wrath; but that novel is mainly about people escaping the Dust Bowl, not what it was like to be in it. In short, for such an important event, I had only a vague notion of the Dust Bowl.

This book remedied the problem; and for that, Timothy Egan deserves a great deal of credit. The Worst Hard Time traces the disaster from its historical origins to its conclusion, and provides harrowing descriptions of what it was like to live through the dusters—or die trying.

I have never experienced a dust storm. The closest I’ve come was a few years back, when strong winds deposited sand from the Saharan Desert in Madrid, a climatic event called la calima in Spanish. It was unsettling. The air had a rust-colored hue, with visibility at a minimum. Rain drops fell and left dirty stains on your clothes. I was teaching physical education at the time, and we instructed the kids to use the face masks (which they still had, thanks to the pandemic) when we exercised outside. The only other relevant experience I’ve had was a few summers back, when the huge forest fires in Canada sent haze down to my town in New York. I tried to go on a run in the gray air and ended up with a persistent cough.

These experiences are mild to the point of triviality compared with the dusters of the 1930s. Visibility would drop to zero, pitch blackness. Dust would block roads and bury equipment. Any vegetation would be drowned or stripped bare. Anyone exposed to the dust would develop a cough that could become a fatal case of “dust pneumonia.” Most surprising of all, the dusters would generate enormous amounts of static electricity which would discharge painfully if an unwary victim touched anything conductive.

As to the question of why this happened, the answer seems to be quite complicated. Regardless of human activity, the Great Plains undergo long periods of rainfall followed by drought; and it just so happened that they were populated when the climate was more benevolent. But the 1930s were a time of extreme drought on the plains. Yet human activity had prepared the way for crisis. First, the peoples of the plain—the Apache and Comanche—were pushed off their land, and the buffalo, upon which they depended, were hunted to oblivion. The federal government encouraged farmers to take up residence by simply giving away land. The combination of the increased demand of the First World War and the Russian Revolution—which took the biggest grain supplier out of commission—prompted farmers to increase yield, plowing up as much topsoil as they could.

Like the Great Depression, then, the Dust Bowl seems to have not been the cause of one simple error, but a kind of perfect storm created by many contributing factors. And like the Great Depression—which was partly provoked by a massive trade imbalance, caused by WWI—the Dust Bowl as a kind of delayed hangover of the Great War.

Once again, Egan deserves a great deal of credit for writing such an informative book about a topic simultaneously so well-known and so poorly understood. That being said, I don’t have warm feelings about The Worst Hard Time. Though it is not an especially long book, it feels bloated and repetitious; and I think this is due to the prose, which was heavy-handed and inflated with a kind of false melodrama. This was frustrating, since the story of Dust Bowl contains more than enough drama to stand on its own.

The first lines give some idea of the tone:

On those days when the wind stops blowing across the face of the southern planes, the land falls into a silence that scares people in the way that a big house can haunt after the lights go out and no one else is there. It scares them because the land is too much, too empty, claustrophobic in its intensity. It scares them because they feel lost, with nothing to cling to, disoriented. Not a tree, anywhere. Not a slice of shade. Not a river dancing away, life in its blood.

I don’t know about you, but I find this ponderous and dull. And it irritates me especially because I don’t think this is Egan’s true voice. It is like he is putting on a persona (a quality of much irritating prose, I find). Mostly, it is extremely redundant—we get it, it’s scary—which is why the book feels so long.

This is just one of the faults of style I thought the book suffered from. However, I don’t want to harp on stylistic shortcomings too much. After all, I didn’t pick up this book to be blown over by the prose, but to learn about the Dust Bowl; and that, I certainly did. Even if it is irritating to read, then, The Worst Hard Time comes close to being the definitive work on the subject.