Book Review: "Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China's Past and Present" by Peter Hessler

Oracle Bones (2006)
Peter Hessler (1969)
491 pages

Perhaps the most effective way to develop a deep understanding of another country is to live and work there for an extended period. By joining one’s neighbors and friends in their quotidian lives, one can begin to appreciate both the idiosyncrasies of a country’s culture and the impact and weight of its particular history on its people.

Just such understandings inform journalist Peter Hessler’s recollections in Oracle Bones: A Journey Between China’s Past and Present. In what he refers to as a work of “narrative non-fiction,” Hessler transforms his experiences living and working in China into an exploration of its present day cultural and political realities, and their origins in Chinese history – connecting them to both ancient and more recent events. And, reflecting what constitutes perhaps the second most important benefit of visiting a foreign country, he also turns his gaze back to his own homeland, coming to see cultural and political aspects of the US in a new light.

The book opens in May 1999, with Hessler living in Beijing after having spent two years in the Peace Corps teaching English at a school in the Chinese heartland. It covers the period through June 2002, during which time he supported himself as a clipper for American news bureaus, cutting out and filing articles of interest from foreign newspapers. Beyond his day job, however, he wrote free-lance articles, often inspired by people he met as a result of his penchant for spending much of his free time walking the streets, in Beijing as well as during his travels around China.

Particularly engaging are the letters from former students in his English classes that he weaves into his telling. Allowing their voices to color his commentary animates his prose, while also providing a convincing credibility to his observations about daily life in China. Over the years, several of them travel to the richer, coastal cities in search of work, following a path of internal immigration so common in China in recent decades. What Hessler hears from them and observes directly when he visits some of them in their new lives, offers insight into the broader challenges China has faced with this migration.

Already in his Author’s Note, Hessler hints at another topic he covers, noting that he has “used real names with one exception”: a pseudonym for a Uighur he befriends in Beijing. Through this friend, Hessler parses the history of the continuing problems for the Uighur population in China. Such an approach can run the risk of resulting in a biased, anecdotal account, but Hessler, while clearly having a point of view, seems intent on providing a largely objective account of the situation. And, by exploring the topic through the lens of a particular person caught up in it, he achieves a much more intimate portrait of the conflict than a dry history and analysis could.

While this variety of perspectives on modern China form the backbone of Hessler’s narrative, roughly halfway through the book he describes a chance encounter that triggers an additional narrative path for him, one that illuminates the social and political evolution in China over the past century. A young archaeologist he interviews about the titular Oracle Bones – ancient, prophetic inscriptions etched onto bones and turtle shells – introduces him to a book about Chinese artifacts. Hessler learns that the author, archeologist Chen Mengjia, committed suicide during the Cultural Revolution. Intrigued, he begins to investigate Chen’s story, leading him to interview those still alive who remember him, as well as others who knew of him and his work.

Similar to the way in which Hessler reveals the character of current day Chinese (and to an extent US) society through the experiences of his friends and others he meets in China, his unraveling of the threads of Chen’s life becomes a window into aspects of China’s complicated recent history. It also serves to remind readers of the challenges inherent in establishing the details of a human life from the memories of others, each of whom have their own conscious and unconscious biases, agendas, and regrets.

This last becomes startlingly clear when Hessler, after having interviewed a wide variety of people about Chen’s life, meets with an aging archaeologist who wrote a criticism of Chen during the Cultural Revolution, a text included in Chen’s book. By that point, Hessler has learned much about the complexity of Chen’s life, but this piece of criticism looms over it all, seeming to indicate cruel intent, and with his subsequent suicide, becoming even almost incriminating.

Bringing it up with the scholar who wrote it, however, Hessler notes that “the emotions that I expected to see – annoyance, defensiveness, even anger – haven’t materialized. If anything, the man just looks tired, the bags sagging heavy beneath his eyes.” (390) The scholar’s eventual reply makes evident the struggle of life under an autocratic government, in a regime based on a cult of personality, wielding loyalty tests and palpable threats of violence to force conformance to the leader’s desires. Speaking of the Cultural Revolution, the scholar explains:

It’s not difficult just for foreigners to understand, … it’s difficult for young Chinese to understand. At that time, there was a kind of pressure on us to write this sort of thing. The Institute of Archaeology asked me to write it. I was very young and I couldn’t refuse. … I didn’t want to do it …. I always regretted that article. (391)

In the discussion that follows, the sincerity of his regret rings true. For readers, and clearly for Hessler himself, it becomes a clarifying moment regarding Chen’s story, but also, more generally, about the complicity and fear present in an autocratic regime. Although Hessler wrote and published this book almost two decades ago, readers will find clear connections to the present day experiences of Republican legislators pushed out for disagreeing with their party leader or feeling the need to censor their comments for fear of violence against themselves and their families.

One moment in Hessler’s chronicle that I found fascinating, although it’s only indirectly related to Chen’s story, is a revealing vignette about China’s architectural legacy. A gentleman he interviews, Mr. Zhao, lives in a traditional style home apparently once quite common in Beijing, which is to be bulldozed to make way for a new, modern apartment complex. Hessler notes that although the Chinese have a deep cultural history,

When I saw old buildings that had actually survived the centuries, like Old Mr. Zhao’s courtyard and house, they usually consisted of materials that had been replaced over the years. His home, like the Forbidden City or any traditional Chinese temple, was built of wood, brick, and tile. In China, few buildings had been constructed of stone. Some sections of the Ming dynasty Great Wall were faced with stone, but that was a defensive structure, not a monument of a public building. Chinese structures simply weren’t designed to withstand the centuries. (184) 

Thus, although the style of older buildings may continue to reflect traditional cultural standards, the actual physical structures may not be correspondingly old. This observation recalled for me the fascinating exploration of the ways in which a place’s architecture can evolve in architect Christina del Rio Fuente’s wonderful book Palimpsestos: Las Huellas del Tiempo en la Arquitectura (Palimpsests: The Traces of Time in Architecture); my review linked to at right.

Given the increased tensions between the US and China over the past decade or so, Peter Hessler’s Oracle Bones can serve as a kind of touchstone, reminding readers of the complex population that lies behind the news generally reported by the media. We discover people busy and distracted with their day-to-day lives, and so as prone to be influenced by their government’s self-interested claims about America as Americans tend to be by our government’s self-interested characterizations of China. We come to better understand how the Chinese view both their own country and ours, and how facile misunderstandings of the other can so easily develop.

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Book Review: "Other Winds Will Blow" ("Soplarán otros vientos") by Alfonso Carvajal

Other Winds Will Blow (Soplarán otros vientos) (2019)
Alfonso Carvajal (1950)
Illustrations by Alicia Carvajal
175 pages

After retiring in 2015 as a professor from the University of Valladolid in Spain, Alfonso Carvajal returned to his hometown El Toboso, in La Mancha, southeast of Madrid – a town and a region made famous by the Miguel Cervantes novel Don Quixote. Once back, and with time on his hands, Carvajal wrote and submitted an essay to the regional newspaper. As he notes in the introduction to his collection Other Winds Will Blow (Soplarán otros vientos), “good luck did the rest” (“el buen azar hizo el resto”): the essay was accepted and published by the newspaper, and more pieces followed as he embraced this new pursuit.

Though his themes range from politics to culture to the natural world, he consistently rises above dry, esoteric observations in his essays, instead animating and enriching them with a healthy dose of his personal experiences. They fairly crackle with a sense of his broad engagement with the world and his profound passion for how we can best live our lives.

This shines through perhaps most notably in pieces that reflect on his emotional influences. In The Bars of My Town, for example, he explores the central role bars play in small towns in Spain, describing the different types typically present. But the piece really comes alive as he then goes on to explore the smells and sounds that create the unique atmosphere that brings him and others back repeatedly to their same haunts – and he celebrates the sense of community that results.

A similar emotional resonance fills The Sentimental Education, in which he provides a kind of greatest hits guide to the music, radio programs and concerts that have accompanied him from one stage of his life to the next. So much more than a personal favorites list, however, he transforms this recollection into a meditation on the central role music plays for so many of us in our lives.

Roughly half of the essays address political topics, to which Carvajal brings a sense of the fundamental importance of fairness and decency. Whether writing about ossified traditions of petty corruption that too often go unchallenged among local government officials, the thorny issue of Catalonian independence, or a globe-spanning topic such as the handling of people’s personal data, he brings a measured tone, deeply informed by his experience, learning and abiding sense of humanity.

These traits also characterize his essays on the natural world and our place in it. Here, beyond an homage to Thoreau, he engages with several challenges tied closely to the seemingly inevitable – and destructive – outcomes of our modern economic system. Thus, for example, he highlights the problems created by the privatization of water access and, in several essays, the profound impact of transportation systems on the natural world, including the months-long uncontrollable fires of vast dumps of used tires that became a major air and water quality crisis in Spain just a few years ago.

In a present-day world in which the mix of partisan divisions and social media has led to public exchanges that too often descend into toxic screaming matches, Alfonso Carvajal’s essays provide a measure of solace. Thoughtful and uplifting, they remind us of the beauty to be found in both the natural world and our relations with one another. And, when he does write of the challenges we yet face to make the world a better, more livable place, he does so with nuance and a sense of hope for the future that can inspire a reader to themselves engage in making this happen.

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Other notes and information:

The book contains a beautiful series of abstract paintings by Alicia Carvajal.

Unfortunately, these essays have not yet been translated into English.

All translations to English in this review are my own

  

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
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Book Review: "Fractal Noise" by Christopher Paolini

Fractal Noise (2023)
Christopher Paolini (1983)

286 pages

In the opening pages of Christopher Paolini’s Fractal Noise, the crew of a spaceship exploring a star system discover a mystery on one of the planets: a huge, perfectly round hole carved into the surface, from which emanates a powerful electromagnetic pulse at a regular period of just over ten seconds. Analyzing the signal, the crew discover an underlying structure: a “fractal … representation of … the Mandelbrot set,” (20) and realize that they have become the first humans to encounter evidence of an alien intelligence, although no current signs of life seem present.

The intensity of the electromagnetic pulse creates dangerous conditions near the hole for both electronics and humans, as well as a steady, strong wind that scours the surface around it. Despite these challenges, the ship’s captain sends a team to the surface, with orders to trek up to the anomaly to understand what they can about its structure, and possibly its origins.

The shuttle must necessarily land some distance away, to avoid damage from the pulse. With a several day trip ahead of them, and with the strength of the wind and intensity of the noise increasing with each step forward, a motley group of four scientists begin making their way toward the hole. The team members have volunteered for the mission, although with wildly differing motivations and levels of commitment to its success, and despite evident personal discord between several of them. As conditions worsen and challenges mount on their slog toward the hole, their differences soon lead to the unraveling of whatever minimal cohesiveness existed between them at the outset.

Two of the team have approached the mission from a purely scientific point of view – the pursuit of knowledge. The other two, however, seek to discover in the alien artifact an understanding of the meaning of existence that will deliver them from profound personal demons, a quest that becomes increasingly fanatical for both of them even as the dangers to the team mount. In the face of ever more crippling setbacks, how will the team balance the risks taken for science versus those one may be willing to accept in the dogged pursuit of deliverance from one’s existential pain?

While the story builds tension and suspense that pulls a reader forward, it feels a bit too constructed to generate deep interest in the characters. The four scientists on the mission each represent a kind of caricature: one, a pure scientist who never considers the world beyond their research; a second with a strong personal belief in a life of pleasure-seeking, and dismissive of the search for life’s meaning as a distraction; a third, deeply religious character, seeking an escape from a horrific past experience; and, in the main character, someone driven by a traumatic personal loss they struggle to move past. And from an overall story point of view, although I’m not generally one to pick on plot elements as over the top, here the many and varied moments of violence the characters withstand – from the hostile environment and each other – escalate to lethal levels that eventually overwhelm any attempt to suspend disbelief.

That said, Fractal Noise provides a thrilling read and delves into intriguing questions on both the future of religious belief in the context of human civilization spreading among the stars and the potential impact of the discovery of an alien civilization on the human psyche. While I have my quibbles, there’s enough here that I look forward to reading another of Paolini’s novels in the future.

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Book Review: "Children of Time" by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Children of Time (2015)
Adrian Tchaikovsky (1972)
600 pages

Successful novelists manage to make readers care about their characters and their characters’ experiences. The best science fiction writers, often setting their stories in distant times or places, and sometimes involving alien lifeforms, have an additional challenge: construct a society or civilization that compels and engages readers, that feels real – successfully accomplish what is referred to as world-building.

In his novel Children of Time, Adrian Tchaikovsky again demonstrates his mastery of the art of character development and world-building. Perhaps most impressively, he does so despite presenting to readers a particularly challenging set of characters for whom to elicit sympathy and empathy.

The story opens in a space station orbiting a planet in a distant star system. The planet’s surface has been terraformed to resemble Earth, and the project’s lead scientist is preparing to seed it by deploying shuttles that contain the seeds of life, including a nanovirus intended to accelerate evolutionary progress toward intelligence, reducing it from millions of years to some centuries. The goal is for a sufficiently advanced human-like intelligence to develop that can become a kind of support staff for future colonists. But even as the lead scientist gives a speech to her team in advance of the launch of the shuttles – her words and thoughts fairly dripping with wild self-aggrandizement and stunning hubris – events go sideways, with radical implications for the future of life on the planet.

When, centuries later, humans arrive again in the system, having escaped a by then dying Earth, they discover a beautiful, green gem of a world, and make plans to settle on it. To their surprise, however, they encounter already established life on the planet – a world-spanning civilization of beings that shock their sensibilities and expectations; and, more importantly, a civilization not ready to step aside for the arriving humans. Thus begins a wild ride of technological and psychological maneuvering to see who will survive a desperate battle for control of the planet.

From its first moments, through to nearly the end, the story becomes a kind of extended allegory of the old adage man plans, and God laughs. The surprise of the opening chapter, in that sense, becomes only the first of many Tchaikovsky presents to readers. Brilliantly, while these unexpected plot twists sneak up on a reader, in retrospect each has its origins in earlier events, if often only cryptically – Tchaikovsky never springs them on us out of the blue.

As I’ve written in other of my reviews, one particular enjoyment I get from reading is making connections to what I’ve read before or have been thinking about, and Children of Time triggered several of these. One such involves the intelligent life on the planet coming to consider the equivalent of the Turing test question: whether, compared to an advanced being, there is a point at which a compute device has “grown sufficiently advanced and complex [that it] would … feel the same to communicate with both?” (445) Certainly, an idea that, if in a radically different context in the novel, touches directly on the current discussions around when an Artificial Intelligence may become indistinguishable from a human being.

As a second example: sometime later in the story the intelligent life on the planet confronts the stark realization that “they are not alone in the universe, and that this is not a good thing.” (489). Precisely this theme lies at the very heart of Cixin Liu’s wonderful The Dark Forest (my review linked to at right).

It is these beings’ reaction to this knowledge, just a few pages later, that has since given me pause as I reflect back on the novel; they find that “little focuses the collective mind more decisively than the threat of utter extinction,” (512) and quickly unify to develop the means to survive. I first encountered this theme in Ursula Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven, and I’ve always found it self-evidently true – adversity brings the threatened together. More recently, however, given the events of the past decade or so, I find myself wondering whether it is indeed so obvious what would happen. Even faced with a clearly imminent existential threat, would humankind really unify to deal with it? Consider the current, divisive partisanship in the US: would a substantial portion of the US population simply dismiss such a threat as a liberal or conservative – pick your particular political bogeyman of choice – conspiracy theory, and ridicule it?

And, indeed, Tchaikovsky addresses in his story this social tendency of intelligent beings to devolve into partisanship, blindly following beliefs that have become dogma. Both the humans on the spaceship and the intelligent life on the plant end up in conflict amongst themselves, whether over seemingly parochial and arbitrary beliefs, or an inability to reach some sort of compromise with one another. At least based on a sample size of two radically different intelligent life forms, Tchaikovsky seems to imply that certain forms of socially destructive behaviors come inherently with intelligence.

In demonstrating this, he creates characters as complex entities, with a mix of destructive flaws and good intentions. A sign of his success in this regard is how difficult it is to fully root for or against any of the characters or groups in the story. There are better and worse individuals among them, certainly, but none are idealized, all have flaws they sometimes succeed in overcoming, and other times fail to.

In Children of Time, Adrian Tchaikovsky provides a brilliant and engaging, if for many readers I suspect also psychologically challenging, story of life striving to survive against powerful and often implacable odds. His extraordinary world-building capabilities shine again here, as they have in other of his works, such as, for example, Elder Race and Terrible Worlds: Revolutions (my reviews linked to at right). I look forward to diving into the second book in this trilogy soon.

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Book Review: "The Return" by Hisham Matar

The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between (2016)
Hisham Matar (1970)
243 pages

It’s frightening to think of the hours – soon distant and forgotten, yet so slow and negligible while they’re going by – during which our friends and relatives think we’re alive when in fact we are dead…. This fear isn’t for the dead … but for the living, who will later have to reconstruct those hours … that they lived through unaware their world had changed.

Javier Marías, Dark Back of Time

In the spring of 2012, writer Hisham Matar returned to Libya with his mother and brother, just months after the conclusion of the civil war that had led to the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi’s brutal regime. (And, though they could not know it at the time, during an all too brief period peace, as a second civil war broke out only two years later.) Having fled Libya in 1979 to escape the Gaddafi regime, they returned to see their homeland and visit with extended family and friends for the first time in decades.

Matar, however, arrived in Libya freighted with another, quite specific desire: to understand what had become of his father, who had been seized in 1990 by the Egyptian secret police, transferred to Libya, and taken to “Abu Salim prison in Tripoli, which was known as “The Last Stop” – the place where the regime sent those it wanted to forget.” (10)  Until 1996, his family had news of his father; but then, nothing. In The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between, Matar writes of the many years he spent haunted by the lack of closure regarding his father: “When I think of what might have happened to him, I feel an abyss open up beneath me. I am clutching at the walls.” (43)  His return to Libya in 2011 serves as a framework for his recollections of both his years as an exile and his pursuit of information about his father.

Through flashbacks, Matar tells the story of his father’s growing disillusionment in the 1970’s with the Gaddafi regime, the family’s eventual exile, and his life outside of his homeland. He recalls that

For months after we left Libya, when I was a child, I used to lie staring at the ceiling, imaging my return. I pictured how I would kiss the ground [and] embrace my cousins. (36) 

But months became years, and eventually he left Egypt to attend boarding school in England – under an assumed name for security reasons – which eventually led to university there.

During his time in England came his father’s kidnapping, imprisonment in Libya, and subsequent disappearance, leaving Matar in a kind of twilight state with respect to both his life and his connection to his homeland. He tells of his attempts to uncover what became of his father, his inability to move on from the traumatic uncertainty, and the constant sense of disconnectedness the effort of this search precipitated in his daily life and work.

His pursuit of the truth led him into contact with one of Gaddafi’s sons, who promised to provide him information. His descriptions of this engagement, in which he was strung along for years without resolution, provides a disturbing look into the cavalier disregard for people’s humanity that too often characterizes the behavior of dictators and their entourage, who feel themselves above any law.  He comes to realize that

Power must know how fatigued human nature is, and how unready we are to listen, and how willing we are to settle for lies.  Power must know that, ultimately, we would rather not know.  Power must believe, given how things proceed, that the world was better made for the perpetrator than for those who arrive after the fact, seeking justice or accountability or truth.  Power must see such attempts as pathetic, and yet the bereaved, the witness, the investigator and the chronicler cannot but try to make reason of the diabolical mess. (214)

 In The Return, Matar provides a thoughtful examination of the ties between a father and son, and between a person and their homeland. When these connections become severed, the effects can ripple on through one’s life, he makes clear, in complex and lasting ways. Perhaps most pressingly, he struggles with the question of whether and how to find peace regarding the disruptions and uncertainties that result, and how to decide when to stop trying to achieve some closure regarding what has been lost. Can we, should we, he asks himself and his readers, move on with our lives with such fundamental holes in our being? And if so, how?

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Book Review: "Die Schlacht im Teutoburger Wald" ("The Battle in Teutoburger Forest") by Reinhard Wolters

Die Schlacht im Teutoburger Wald (The Battle in Teutoburger Forest) (2008)
Reinhard Wolters
255 pages

Last year, I watched Barbarians (in the original German, Barbaren) on Netflix, which tells the story of a battle that occurred in 9 AD, in what is present-day Germany, between regional tribes under a leader named Arminius and occupying Roman Legions led by a commander named Varus. While I enjoyed the series as entertainment, I also found myself wondering how accurately it represented historical events.

On one hand, I recalled having learned that fighting did occur between tribes located in what the Romans referred to as Germania, and the Roman Legions. On the other hand, it was clear that, as historical fiction, most of the characters and their interactions would be invented. But, the main characters, the main events – how faithfully does the series represent them?

Other than a few cursory Google searches, however, I didn’t actively follow-up on my questions at the time. Then, recently, a serendipitous find brought them front of mind: I discovered historian Reinhard Wolters’s book Die Schlacht im Teutoburger Wald: Arminius, Varus und das römische Germanien (The Battle in Teutoburger Forest: Arminius, Varus and the Roman Germania) among my parents’ books. My interest peaked, I dove right in.

Perhaps not surprisingly, my questions of authenticity didn’t lend themselves to easy answers. Yes, the battle portrayed in the Barbarians series apparently happened; yes, the various tribes in Germania who participated were led by Arminius, and the Roman Legions by Varus. Beyond these basic facts, however, Wolters makes clear that significant uncertainties and conflicting opinions exist among historians, archaeologists, and the variety of scholars and laypeople who have explored the history of the event. With his book, Wolters describes his goal as being to offer:

an up-to-date, critical as well as transparent introduction to the current state of our understanding about the battle in Teutoburger Forest – to its prehistory, its course, as well as the consequences that resulted from the severe Roman defeat against the Teutons. (7)

Throughout, Wolters references the limited (and exclusively Roman) written sources that have survived to the present day – along with inscriptions on ancient monuments and memorials – from which historians have attempted to reconstruct the reality of a battle that has become the stuff of legend. He notes the challenges faced in attempting to understand these historical sources, and he carefully evaluates the variety of conclusions that have been drawn from them.

The breadth of the uncertainty quickly becomes evident, not only in attempts to clarify the backgrounds of the two protagonists, Arminius and Varus, but also the details of the battle, and even whether it is properly characterized as a battle, with sources “describing in one case an attack by Germanic fighters on a Roman military outpost, while in other cases … a treasonous ambush, set in difficult territory.” (13)

Beyond evaluating the interpretations from the ancient texts of how events played out, and of Arminius and Varus as the protagonists, Wolters provides a fascinating account of the investigation into where the battle took place. Theories and counter-theories have been put forth over the centuries, he notes, by a wide variety of interested parties:

In this debate, have participated and continue to participate not just professional archaeologists and historians; widely differing proposals have been and continue to be put forward by knowledgeable local researchers and laypeople from a wide variety of professional origins. (150)

One might assume that the battle took place in the north-central German region known as the Teutoburger Forest; however, writes Wolters, this name for the area only first appeared a few centuries ago, based on one scholarly interpretation of the ancient texts as to the location of the battle. In recent decades, new archaeological evidence has narrowed the focus to a site some dozen miles north of the Teutoburger Forest, just over a similarly forested ridge. But, as Wolters describes, even with regards to that site, significant questions and contradictory information remain.

While the specific, historical details surrounding the battle and its location make for a fascinating story, I found particularly striking Wolter’s examination of what the engagement with the history of this battle by scholars and others – from Roman times up through the present day – reveals about the process of rendering and interpreting history itself.

In his evaluation of both the historical sources and subsequent works by historians and others who have interpreted them over the centuries, Wolters provides a kind of case study for the trenchant observation of historian Eric Foner in the preface to his excellent essay Who Owns History (my review linked to at right):

Each generation rewrites history to suit its own needs. … In every country, versions of the past provide the raw materials for nationalist ideologies and patriotic sentiments.

Wolters finds this truth to apply not only to the original Roman sources, but also to the wide variety of interpretations of them that have arisen since, calling out:

the fragmentary nature of what has been passed down from, and no less the contradictions already present in, the ancient sources. These written accounts originate from different centuries and stand at different timespans from the events described: they provide information over the changing horizon of meaning already in antiquity – and this meaning was each time guided by the interests of the authors and marked by each of their specific, contemporary experiences. (14-15)

In that vein, he explores the ways in which Roman historians, as well as scholars and others up through to the present-day, have colored their interpretations of the event based on their personal outlook, including the social and political context in which they lived and worked, and with which they wished to either align themselves with or influence the direction of. This has included, in particular, a long line of German historians, writers of literary and theatrical works, and artists who have sought to present Arminius’s rising up to defeat the Roman occupiers as a defining moment in the origin of the idea of Germany as a nation, or as the original example of Germanic pursuit of freedom and independence. The result, he finds, has been centuries of often wildly varying interpretations of the event, that both exploit the conflicting information from the ancient sources and often extrapolate far beyond it, to make a particular political or social statement.

For this one dramatic event, that took place over perhaps a few days some two thousand years ago, Wolters provides a thorough and enjoyable introduction in The Battle in Teutoburger Forest. He leverages the event itself to present an understanding of the Roman state, both in terms of its inner workings, as well as its view of and engagement with the lands to the east of the Rheine that it sought to add to its empire. With that context in place, he explores the understandings historians have developed of the lives of its principal characters, Varus and Arminius, as well as the battle they fought and its aftermath.

And, beyond the instructive examination of the historical events themselves, he provides an engaging and eye-opening look at the challenges present in interpreting ancient sources colored by their authors’ eye to their particular political and social environment, as well as the way subsequent historians, too, have allowed such motivations to influence their interpretation and presentation of the event.

As ever, I suppose, with texts on history that carry a strong bias: caveat emptor…

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Other notes and information:

The translations from the original German are mine.

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Book Review: "The Trouble with Reality" by Brooke Gladstone

The Trouble with Reality (2017)
Brooke Gladstone
92 pages

As co-host of the program On the Media, Brooke Gladstone provides listeners with a wide-ranging and trenchant analysis of the media landscape, exposing the reality behind coverage too frequently filled with misleading, unsubstantiated, and facile arguments. As a particular example of this, she and her colleagues have so often had to address a variety of commonly repeated media myths and misinformation during coverage of major incidents – natural disasters, say, or mass shootings – that they have developed a series of Breaking News Consumer’s Handbooks for such events, to help listeners navigate to the reality of what has happened.

With the divisive social environment and political partisanship that has consumed the US over the past decade, however, Gladstone has shifted her gaze beyond the media, to a broader concern for the future of our republic. In her essay The Trouble with Reality, she explores what she finds to be at the heart of this dysfunction, our inability to agree on a common reality, a common set of facts.

Our challenge begins, she observes, in that each of us experiences the world differently, while at the same time struggling to comprehend how others perceive it. She describes how we each build our personal model of the world out of a set of stereotypes – simplifications that allow us to quickly make sense of what we experience. The challenge arises in that 

Stereotypes, [journalist Walter] Lippman wrote, focus and feed on what is familiar and what is exotic, exaggerating each in the process: “The slightly familiar is seen as very familiar and the somewhat strange as sharply alien.” (9)

 Thus, even as we create stereotypes out of our individual experiences, these stereotypes go on to color our views of subsequent experiences, in turn reinforcing our existing stereotypes.

The trouble arises from the tendency of this process to spiral into a fixed state, a hardened view of the world which gradually closes our minds to any new information that contradicts what we already feel certain about. Gladstone captures what we need to strive for to overcome this ossification of our thinking in an observation, and recommendation, from neuroscientist David Eagleman, one that struck a deep chord with me:

[We should accept] the idea of limited knowledge, of unobtainable information, and of unimagined possibilities. Consider the criticisms of policy, the assertions of dogma, the declarations of fact that you hear every day – and just imagine if all of these could be infused with the proper intellectual humility that comes from appreciating the amount unseen. (17) 

Developing this ability to recognize, and accept, nuance in the face of complexity could allow us to avoid the violent divisiveness that seems to accompany discussions on most, if not all, issues these days. Nuance seems to gain little traction in the debates of our day, however; as I’ve written elsewhere in this blog: one of my favorite New York Times front page headlines is Lost in Abortion Noise – Nuance, since it seems a fitting, generic headline that could be used for any fill-in-the blank topic in these days of disagreements filled with strident over-simplification.

(A related theme lies at the heart of journalist Anne Applebaum’s book Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism (my review linked to at right), in which she references the quite disturbing claim of behavioral economist Karen Stenner, “that about a third of the population in any country has … an authoritarian predisposition … people who cannot tolerate complexity.” (16, Applebaum))

As one such example of a set of stereotypes forming a personal model of the world, Gladstone points to our understanding of how democracy works, and how Donald Trump has split the country in that sense. For half the country, she notes, Trump – whether or not he has formally broken the law – has “shattered their world view … our deep-rooted belief in the infallibility of our democracy,” (21) And it was not that this half of the country necessarily believed that the democratic system was perfect; many, she notes, “knew the system was rigged … [b]ut once the bad behavior was exposed, the guilty were supposed to pay the consequences, at least in the court of public opinion.” (41) That this has not been the case seems inconceivable for that half of the population. For the other half, however, who have largely felt that our rigged system has been rigged against them, it’s unimportant that there have been no consequences; they feel the system itself must be overthrown, at whatever cost.

As she wraps up her well-crafted and engaging essay, Gladstone provides little optimism for our future. She acknowledges and accepts the difficulty in asking each of us to recognize our own, and others, personal models of the world, as well as associated stereotypes, and to be open to working to alter them. “The price is very high [and] it’s rational to conclude it is not worth the considerable trouble and time required to venture forth, to protest, to doubt, to listen, to changer others, or to be changed.” (85) But, for those willing to push back, to attempt to reestablish a new reality in their minds, and so “to repair and improve the nation,” (83) she returns to the critical idea she opens with, the need to recognize that 

[while] our facts are incomplete, our truth limited … [we need to] venture out to take in a few new sights, a few new facts, to start to figure out what’s going on out there. (81)

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Other notes and information:

Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, in their fascinating history

The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market, provide a detailed examination of how groups interested in biasing our models of the world to further their own power and wealth go about doing so. (My review linked to at right.) Oreskes has also been interviewed by Gladstone for On the Media; their discussion has been aired a couple of times, including once here.

For a completely different exploration of reality, that of the mysteries of our natural world being explored by physicists, I highly recommend Carlo Rovelli’s Reality is Not What it Seems, and Adam Becker’s What is Real?. My reviews of them linked to at right.

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf