David W. Maurer – The Big Con (1940)

Long before the con man became the second laziest trope in all of movies and television, (after the serial killer), genuine gentleman swindlers roamed the land in search of wealthy marks with “larceny in their veins” and a taste for the “sure thing”, and used elaborate big store setups to encourage them to give away their money.

Recommended: Yes. Most of all for the attention it gives to the language of the con men, which seems to have been linguist Maurer’s original motivation for talking to them. This may in fact be the only interesting book ever written by a linguist. (No? Give me a counterexample!)

Paul M. Handley – The King Never Smiles (2006)

Bhumipol Adulyadej, the King of Thailand, and the longest-serving current head of state, has cultivated an image as a dhammaraja, a ruler whose strict adherence to Buddhist virtue makes him the moral center of his country. Reality is a bit less virtous: Bhumipol is a player who interferes rarely but decisively in political life, usually preferring stern generals over chaotic democracy.

Recommended: Weakly. The subject is interesting, and can only be dealt with honestly by a foreign historian, because of Thailand’s powerful lese-majesty laws. But the book covers nearly a century in 450 pages, and eventually gets bogged down in a never-ending series of coups and generals. Handley doesn’t actually have much to say about Bhumipol at all. His image is too well protected.

Tore Rem – Sin egen herre (2009) / Født til frihet (2010)

Jens Bjørneboe has been so much to so many that it is impossible to entirely like or dislike him. He abandoned Rudolf Steiner’s bullshit mysticism, and became a passionate individualist, but a whimsical intellectual. He was open about his faults, but also a myth-maker. He got beatified as the saint of radical clichés, but that’s hardly his fault. It was a small pond. Almost forgotten now is how he was a product of a time when Norway was part of the Germanic cultural sphere. Our move to the Anglo-American sphere left a vertical cultural gap through the decades, with him on the other side, burning Disney comics. He never did “love America”, and his world is further apart from us than it seems.

Recommended: Yes. And like any good biography, it uses both the age to study the subject, and the subject to study the age.

Megan K. Stack – Every Man in this Village is a Liar (2010) / Michael J. Totten – The Road to Fatima Gate (2011)

Along with the blood and death and the pain that never goes away, one of the things all wars seem to produce is a trickle of excellent war reporting, hiding within a torrent of lies and fantasies. So also in the Middle East. It’s not worth the cost, but there it is, poetry and insight from pain.

Recommended: Yes, both. Stack for the writing, Totten for the macro insights. Their first-person observations are particularly interesting in light of the revolutions that came afterwards.

“Bush killed all those politicians because he doesn’t want peace in Lebanon.”

“Why wouldn’t Bush want peace in Lebanon?” I said.

“I don’t know!”

“Americans don’t want war in Lebanon,” I said. “It would not serve our interests or yours. Do you think Americans want chaos in Lebanon just for the heck of it?”

“We don’t hate the American people, only the government.”

“Okay,” I said. “So why then does [Hezbollah leader] Hassan Nasrallah repeatedly say ‘Death to America’?” I asked these questions in the most friendly and casual tone of voice I could muster.

“He only means death to the American government.”

“Why doesn’t he make that clear then?” I said.

“He does!”

“No, he doesn’t,” I said. “He says ‘Death to America’. What would you think if George W. Bush gave speeches where he screamed ‘Death to Lebanon’? Come on, guys. Be honest with me. I want to know what you really think.”

“I want to go to America,” the leader kid said. “I love America and I want to live in America. America is rich and free. I want to be rich and free, too.”

- Michael J. Totten, The Road to Fatima Gate (2011)

I know everything I am supposed to know. The facts that shaped the biographies of the Middle East. I see all of it in one glance, how the borders were drawn, religion swept over deserts and through empires, colonialism came and went and came again. I’ve read the books and considered the arguments. I signed up for the listservs of professors and writers who argue over Islam’s perpetual promises and America’s eternal interests. Everybody lying; everybody failing a little, then failing some more. The powerful tripping along, blinded by their own mythology, led astray by their morals. I can see all of it. I am bogged down in facts. But here I stand among the mad and maybe that’s all it’s ever been. The Middle East goes crazy and we go along with it. So many of my generation have trooped here for these latest wars – the soldiers, the sailors, the UN workers, the State Department enfant terribles, Mad Max contractors with guns strapped to beefy thighs, the writers and volunteers and freelancers and adventure-hungry travelers. We chased it all down into the Middle East and came up dry, coughing on other people’s blood.

And now, in the depths of this war, I believe that nobody will ever see this, that Israel will never really look, and America will never really look, either. This is real to nobody. This would never be real to me if I were not here.

- Megan K. Stack, Every Man in this Village is a Liar (2010)

Saudi Arabia stuck to me, followed me home and shadowed me through my days, tainting the way I perceived men and women everywhere. Back home in Cairo, the cacophony of whistles and lewd coos on the streets sent me into blind rage. I slammed doors in the faces of delivery men; cursed at Egyptian soldiers in a language they didn’t speak; kept a resentful mental tally of the Western men, especially reporters, who seemed to condone, even relish, the marginalization of women in the Arab world. [..]

People asked, always: What’s it like, being a woman [in Saudi Arabia]?

You are supposed to say that you were privileged, because you had a pass to the secret world of local sisterhood, to a place where faces showed and words were honest. You are supposed to say, in an almost mystical voice, “I could write about the women“.  [..] And then, too, the truth is not really easy to admit or articulate. You can’t admit how dirty it made you feel, the thousand ways you were slighted and how flimsy your self-assurance turned out to be, how those little battles bit at you like acid. Men who refused to shake your hand; squatting on the floors with men who refused to look at your face because you brimmed with sin, not one glance in an hour-long interview; the sneering underfed soldiers who hissed and talked about your ass when you walked past.

- Megan K. Stack, Every Man in this Village is a Liar (2010)

People who live in a dictatorship will tell you the most with awkward silences, the fear that flashes on their faces, and the implausible exclamations of rote enthusiasm. It’s what they don’t say that counts. You have to consider the negative space, to trace the air that surrounds the form to get an idea of its shape, because nobody will dare to articulate the things itself. If you accumulate everything that is unmentionable, feared, stamped out, then you have an idea of just how much terror people have swallowed over the years. You begin to grade the repression on a spectrum. Egyptian politics have been languishing in a torture cell for decades, for example, but people on the street still gripe about the government and roll their eyes at the president.

Not in Libya. The people I met in Libya were locked in the basement of an asylum. Social interaction was all nervous smiles, evasive answers, and cups of tea. Nobody wanted to talk about the Leader.

- Megan K. Stack, Every Man in this Village is a Liar (2010)

Here is the truth: It matters, what you do at war. It matters more than you ever want to know. Because countries, like people, have collective consciences and memories and souls, and the violence we deliver in the name of our nation is pooled like sickly tar at the bottom of who we are. The soldiers who don’t die for us come home again. They bring with them the killers they became on our national behalf, and sit with their polluted memories and broken emotions in our homes and schools and temples. We may wish it were not so, but actions amounts to identity. We become what we do. You can tell yourself all the stories you want, but you can’t leave your actions over there. You can’t build a wall and expect to live on the other side of memory. All of that poison seeps back into our soil.

- Megan K. Stack, Every Man in this Village is a Liar (2010)

David Runciman – Political Hypocrisy (2008)

Hypocrisy, or mask-wearing, comes in many shades, and not only can some of them, (such as politeness and pseudonymity), be beneficial to society, anti-hypocrisy can do more harm than good. Honest anti-hypocrites can be dangerously ignorant about the nature of the game they want to “clean up”, and dishonest anti-hypocrites represent an even deeper level of hypocrisy than the form they attack. In politics, you’re better off with a competent and well-meaning hypocrite than with someone who gives the appearance of perfect integrity. Even democracy itself is essentially the idea of humanizing power by dressing it up in masks.

Recommended: Strongly, but not for everyone.  Read it if you like Orwell’s writings on language and thought, (which are referenced in the most interesting chapter of the book). Longer summary of this book coming up.

Øystein Sørensen – Drømmen om det fullkomne samfunn (2010)

Communism, fascism, nazism and islamism are four variations over the same theme of totalitarian utopianism.

Read: 45 pages.

Recommended: Only if this similarity is somehow news to you, and not really even then. This is an introductory book, written in a bored academic style.

Joe Scalzi – Zoe’s Tale (2008)

It’s time to have the “it’s not you, it’s me” talk with Joe Scalzi. I’m sure this is as good as his previous yarns, but I can’t be bothered to read it. Farewell, let’s be friends, and we’ll always have Frankfurt etc etc.

Read: 60 pages.

Recommended: Possibly. Lots of people like it. Good for them!

En gang vil en av guttene i klassen vise Bjørneboe noe i et Donald-blad, men slike blader er strengt forbudt, og i klassens påsyn kaster læreren bladet i ovnen. Gutten føler seg krenket og ydmyket. Ofte i denne perioden uttaler Bjørneboe seg sterkt om denne nye sjangerens korrumperende makt. Det dreier seg om amerikanskhet, bestialitet og heslighet, men det verste er likevel at seriene virker passiviserende. “Vår materialistiske tid frembringer bare få gode leker,” hadde Steiner slått fast allerede ved århundrets begynnelse.

Bjørneboes synspunkter på tegneserier, radio og film er likevel ikke ualminnelige. De representerer kulturelitens distansering fra den vulgære massen, og en teknologiskeptisk reaksjon på hva de oppfatter som en misforstått demokratisering av kulturen. Kulturen er noe høyere, vanskeligere tilgjengelig og kvalitativt bedre enn den lettfordøyelige lektyren som nå blir servert folket.

- Tore Rem, Sin egen herre, En biografi om Jens Bjørneboe (2009) 

The most common way of thinking about hypocrisy is as a vice – that is, to take it for granted that it is always a bad thing to conceal whom one really is. But another way of thinking about hypocrisy is as a coping mechanism for the problem of vice itself, in which case it may be that hypocrisy is not a vice at all. One way to cope with vice is to seek to conceal it, or to dress it up as something it is not. This sort of act – the passing off of vice as virtue – makes it possible to consider hypocrisy in two very different lights. From one perspective the act of concealment makes things worse – it simply piles vice on top of vice, which is why hypocrites are often seen as wickeder than people who are simply, and openly, bad. But from another perspective the concealment turns out to be a form of amelioration – it is, in Rouchefoucald’s timeless phrase, “the tribute that vice pays to virtue.” Hypocrites who pretend to be better than they really are could also be said to be better than they might be, because they are at least pretending to be good.

- David Runciman, Political Hypocrisy (2008)