The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames. I am liking this book because it is the first I've read of the intricate CIA-based diplomacy with the PLO going on for many years prior to any official recognition or negotiations. Therefore, I'm learning a lot that I didn't know about a major geo-political event that has covered my lifetime. Ames was, apparently, the key to opening and maintaining the contact with the PLO. The PLO desperately needed legitimacy and the US was the best way to get it. They wanted their story told to the US knowing that Israel's story was constantly being told to US politicians and officials. Still, while I've not finished, I've noticed things that annoyed readers on Amazon that give it low ratings. Repetitive assertions about the awesomeness of Ames without much in the way of substance (he was a spy, so that makes some sense, in a way... but, then, how to write the book?). It borders on hagiography, therefore. I don't think it crosses the line, but the word floats up to me as I'm reading sometimes. The writing and editing is sometimes poor. Kind of shocking to me that incorrect words and tense agreement errors should sneak into published work at this level. Ames was clearly awesome in a few key ways: He was a self-taught and very scholarly Arabist, spoke Arabic fluently, understood nuances of history and culture of the area at an extraordinary level, maybe the highest of anyone in the CIA. Good, but what else? He had a key close and trusted contact, the head of security for the PLO. We were able to influence the PLO to reduce their terrorist attacks. Unfortunately, other organizations rose up in the ashes of Lebanon to take that role (Hezbollah, notably). One negative point by other reviewers that I don't agree with is that the book is pro-Arab, anti-Israel, that Ames was that way. Ames was a believer that there must be some place for the Palestinians displaced by the creation of Israel. That the path to peace in the entire region was to settle the Palestinian question. He saw the US's influence being diminished by our inability to acknowledge and work on that fact. That is not an anti-Israeli position in fact, but is made so by continual drumbeat rhetoric.
Excellent comments. I was going to add but then it's hard to without coming across as anti Israel. I hate to use the words reap and sow, so I'll just say it could have been handled better. I'll have to take a look at the book.
Impulse borrow to start the new year - The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden by Jonas Jonasson. The protagonist in Nombeko, born in the shanties of Soweto and the supervisor of an outhouse emptying operation by the age of fourteen (because everybody defecates, even poor people, so there's work to be had). She gets hit by a car and is sentenced to work for the driver, a drunken engineer in charge of the South African nuclear program. Jimmy Carter, Deng Xiaoping, PW Botha, and King Gustaf all feature if only tangentially - oh, and the Israeli Mossad. The parallel story is about a Swedish anti-royalist and his progeny. It's funny.
First Page!!! Starting in on my Christmas books: Nobody Home: Writing, Buddhism, and Living in Places, (2014) a collection of three interviews and 20 years of Correspondance between the poet Gary Snyder and South African scholar Julia Martin.
I changed the title on last year's thread, which got little play compared to past years. But I did not bump it.
I always scroll through the previous year's thread and note what strikes me as interesting and/or drew comments from multiple people, then add those to my list. That's what I would suggest.
catching up with books I read on December vacation . . . The Professor - Charlotte Brontë ”Even after the resounding triumph of Jane Eyre, she could persuade no one to publish her first novel.” Not surprising
Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë I liked this more than the first time I read it. The middle drags a bit, but the rest is first-rate. And, after all, this was her first novel.
It took me longer than usual (for a Wharton novel) to decide I wanted to read about Undine Spragg. I put it down once and started over later, but ultimately enjoyed it quite a bit.
I forgot to put in my favorite quote. “Even now, however, she was not always happy. She had everything she wanted, but she still felt, at times, that there were other things she might want if she knew about them.”
Good thing for her that she lived before the internet. A Little History: Essays and Lectures by Ammiel Alcalay, a poet, translator, and scholar whose work I really should've come across before now, who writes about poets I've read for decades along with writers I've never heard of. Which is great, like a christmas present that keeps on giving, which it was/is.
name two books that you have read all the way through in the past and that you enjoyed and the recommendations will come pouring in...
Well... You didn't give us anything to go on, so I'll recommend what I think is probably the finest story ever written, Watership Down by Richard Adams. It's about rabbits. Go figure. A ragtag group of rabbits decide to leave their warren and they create a new one. Only, since they are rabbits, they are terrified of everything. And they are not physically built for long journeys. But they persevere, and along the way, they meet one of the most terrifying creatures in literature: General Woundwort. He is scary. And as you might have guessed, he's a rabbit. When I was in the Air Force, I was the Project Warrior Officer at Dover AFB, and the purpose of Project Warrior was to try an instill a more martial mindset to our normal workaday routine of moving freight. I had to compile a reading list on military topics, great leaders, etc, and I caught some flack for putting Watership Down on that list. But the leader of rabbits, Hazel, is one of the great leaders in literature. He always makes a decision and he always takes responsibility. Sun Tzu's Art of War has been repackaged as a business manual and in an array of how to succeed at life books. Someday I want to repurpose Hazel the same way.
I didn't look closely: I thought you were recommending a bunny book to Chad after his bout with Cormac McArthy...
Getting to my Christmas reading.... Inventing Scrooge by Carlo Devito Since I famously, well, at least in my family, read A Christmas Carol every Christmas, I guess I shouldn't be surprised that I got two copies of this. This is what I am now calling a niche biography. Devito has no original research here, he's just assembled all of the vast material on Dickens with an eye towards his Christmas Carol. This is mostly a collection of anecdotes strung together -- there are over 30 chapters in this 220 page work -- and most are pretty interesting. Foremost among them, Thomas Malthus, author of An Essay on the Principle of Population, was only 23 when he wrote the book. Except that he was 33. So, I don't know what to make of some of these bon mots...
Just finished up a fun book "Jack of Spies" David Downing. First of his I've read and this is the first of a series set before and into WWI. It read to me like a historical fiction travelogue. From 1913 it starts in the German town and naval port in the Chinese city of Tsingtao. Yes he does mention the brewery. then visits every scene of conflict prior to the war. The Indians and Irish are wanting independence and home rule. The US and Mexico have a spat in Vera Cruz with just happens to be near the Mexican oil fields where Britain gets 90% of oil to run it's new battleships on and the German's are trying to sabotage it. Sail on to Japan, Hawaii, San Francisco then the luxury trains across the States to NY on to London then Dublin. Oh, did I mention his Irish/American girlfriend ..?! Then somebody shoots someone in Sarajevo. I'm waiting for the next book. "It is 1913, and those who follow the news closely can see the world is teetering on the brink of war. Jack McColl, a Scottish car salesman with an uncanny ear for languages, has always hoped to make a job for himself as a spy. As his sales calls take him from city to great city—Hong Kong to Shanghai to San Francisco to New York—he moonlights collecting intelligence for His Majesty's Navy, but British espionage is in its infancy and Jack has nothing but a shoestring budget and the very tenuous protection of a boss in far-away London. He knows, though, that a geopolitical catastrophe is brewing, and now is both the moment to prove himself and the moment his country needs him most."
Δ i second the nomination of Watership Down. if you like espionage novels Tinker, Tailor... by John Le Carre is a good read.