And Then I Thought I Was a Fish. After a bad LSD trip, a 20-something student can’t sleep for two weeks, and as a result of the drug, the sleep deprivation, or both, he goes into psychosis. After a few months in this state, which include brief institutionalization which he ends by learning to fake recovery, he spontaneously wakes up sane one day. This is a first-hand account of the entire story, written 10 years after the fact. The author has very specific memories of what it felt like to be insane, which he’s able to share convincingly. He tells us about his friends, roommates, crushes. He interviews people who interacted with him at the time and reports their impressions.
I couldn’t put this book down. It’s very well-written and utterly fascinating.
I just finished Red Plenty by Francis Spufford, which I bought because of this review on Slate Star Codex. It was a thoroughly enjoyable and interesting mix of history and fiction about the Soviet Union in the late 1950′s and early 1960′s, when it was actually plausible to hope that politicians and scientists could get central planning right and build an economy that provided a first-world standard of living to everyone. (Spoiler alert) it doesn’t work out, and Red Plenty gives you a good look at how and why it failed.
I’m not usually a person given to intense patriotic emotions; I don’t get choked up when “The Star Spangled Banner” is played or anything. But as an interesting side effect of reading this book, I love America a lot right now. I’m in the mood of people who get off planes and kiss the ground.
Nicholas Wade’s Troublesome Inheritance: I need to write a real review, but I was mostly disappointed. He spends far too little time building the case for the pervasive influence of genes on variation in almost all human behaviors and traits, and far too much time on broad speculations about the rise of civilization, and if you’re interested in that, you’d be way better off just reading the books he’s summarizing like Pinker’s Better Angels.
Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes. Tamim Ansary is not trying to give an objective report of historic events; instead he tells stories about people and events that shaped Muslim thought. This includes episodes about Mohammed and the Quran, the reception of Greek philosophy, various rulers, and interactions with neighbouring groups and empires. The book is an easy read and gives a compact overview of the Islamic world. I recommend it for those who don’t know much about Islam and want to get an introduction into the narrative of this religion.
I’m just about done with Michael Herr’s Dispatches), a war correspondent’s view of Vietnam circa the Tet Offensive.
It’s about the opposite of objective journalism: first-person, tightly focused, episodic, vividly emotional and impressionistic. And it does that very well. I’m getting the feeling that it might have been responsible for the particular shade of hellish Kafkaesque insanity that we associate with the Vietnam War after films like Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket; in fact several episodes and characters seem to have been composited into those movies. In a modern context, unfortunately, that strips the book of some of its potential impact; if you have a passing knowledge of Vietnam in modern pop culture, it’s not going to be showing you much that you haven’t already seen.
I’d recommend it if you liked Generation Kill but are too young to have seen the 80s wave of war movies, or for people that like emotional intensity in their journalism. If you’re looking for a more historical or less conventional approach, though, this isn’t the place to find it.
Speaking of Generation Kill, I recently got done reading One Bullet Away by Nathaniel Fick, the platoon commander featured in Generation Kill, which covered many of the same events, but with a somewhat different focus (Evan Wright’s book aimed at representing the experiences of as many of the Marines he was embedded with as possible, were as Fick’s book explicitly about his experiences in particular), as well as Fick’s experiences at Officer School and in Afghanistan.
In general, Fick’s book is more sympathetic to First Recon’s leadership, and to its commander Lt. Col Ferrando in particular, saying that he suspected Ferrando of caring about his men much more than he lead them (and by extension Wright) to believe. On the other hand, Fick agrees with Wright that Bravo Company’s commander, whom Wright identifies as Encino Man and Fick just calls “the captain” or “my CO”, was dangerously incompetent. Fick also describes having a hostile relationship with the battalion’s XO (who was only briefly mentioned in GK), and writes about imagining himself fragging the XO.
Overall, I thought it was engagingly written, and a good companion piece to Wright’s book (and the HBO series).
Nonfiction Books Thread
And Then I Thought I Was a Fish. After a bad LSD trip, a 20-something student can’t sleep for two weeks, and as a result of the drug, the sleep deprivation, or both, he goes into psychosis. After a few months in this state, which include brief institutionalization which he ends by learning to fake recovery, he spontaneously wakes up sane one day. This is a first-hand account of the entire story, written 10 years after the fact. The author has very specific memories of what it felt like to be insane, which he’s able to share convincingly. He tells us about his friends, roommates, crushes. He interviews people who interacted with him at the time and reports their impressions.
I couldn’t put this book down. It’s very well-written and utterly fascinating.
I just finished Red Plenty by Francis Spufford, which I bought because of this review on Slate Star Codex. It was a thoroughly enjoyable and interesting mix of history and fiction about the Soviet Union in the late 1950′s and early 1960′s, when it was actually plausible to hope that politicians and scientists could get central planning right and build an economy that provided a first-world standard of living to everyone. (Spoiler alert) it doesn’t work out, and Red Plenty gives you a good look at how and why it failed.
I’m not usually a person given to intense patriotic emotions; I don’t get choked up when “The Star Spangled Banner” is played or anything. But as an interesting side effect of reading this book, I love America a lot right now. I’m in the mood of people who get off planes and kiss the ground.
Nicholas Wade’s Troublesome Inheritance: I need to write a real review, but I was mostly disappointed. He spends far too little time building the case for the pervasive influence of genes on variation in almost all human behaviors and traits, and far too much time on broad speculations about the rise of civilization, and if you’re interested in that, you’d be way better off just reading the books he’s summarizing like Pinker’s Better Angels.
Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes. Tamim Ansary is not trying to give an objective report of historic events; instead he tells stories about people and events that shaped Muslim thought. This includes episodes about Mohammed and the Quran, the reception of Greek philosophy, various rulers, and interactions with neighbouring groups and empires. The book is an easy read and gives a compact overview of the Islamic world. I recommend it for those who don’t know much about Islam and want to get an introduction into the narrative of this religion.
I’m just about done with Michael Herr’s Dispatches), a war correspondent’s view of Vietnam circa the Tet Offensive.
It’s about the opposite of objective journalism: first-person, tightly focused, episodic, vividly emotional and impressionistic. And it does that very well. I’m getting the feeling that it might have been responsible for the particular shade of hellish Kafkaesque insanity that we associate with the Vietnam War after films like Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket; in fact several episodes and characters seem to have been composited into those movies. In a modern context, unfortunately, that strips the book of some of its potential impact; if you have a passing knowledge of Vietnam in modern pop culture, it’s not going to be showing you much that you haven’t already seen.
I’d recommend it if you liked Generation Kill but are too young to have seen the 80s wave of war movies, or for people that like emotional intensity in their journalism. If you’re looking for a more historical or less conventional approach, though, this isn’t the place to find it.
Speaking of Generation Kill, I recently got done reading One Bullet Away by Nathaniel Fick, the platoon commander featured in Generation Kill, which covered many of the same events, but with a somewhat different focus (Evan Wright’s book aimed at representing the experiences of as many of the Marines he was embedded with as possible, were as Fick’s book explicitly about his experiences in particular), as well as Fick’s experiences at Officer School and in Afghanistan.
In general, Fick’s book is more sympathetic to First Recon’s leadership, and to its commander Lt. Col Ferrando in particular, saying that he suspected Ferrando of caring about his men much more than he lead them (and by extension Wright) to believe. On the other hand, Fick agrees with Wright that Bravo Company’s commander, whom Wright identifies as Encino Man and Fick just calls “the captain” or “my CO”, was dangerously incompetent. Fick also describes having a hostile relationship with the battalion’s XO (who was only briefly mentioned in GK), and writes about imagining himself fragging the XO.
Overall, I thought it was engagingly written, and a good companion piece to Wright’s book (and the HBO series).