The Trigger: Hunting the Assassin Who Brought the World to War

 Like other books I've read and enjoyed by Tim Butcher, The Trigger: Hunting the Assassin Who Brought the World to War includes a long and arduous walk through difficult - and literally mined - territory interwoven with both recent and long-ago history. In this case, it's the former Yugoslavia through which Butcher hikes, particularly Bosnia and Serbia, while seeking to make sense of both Gavrilo Princip's actions leading up to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the more recent Balkans War of the 1990s, which Butcher covered as a foreign correspondent. 

As always, Butcher's writing is bright and chipper, even when his subject is dark and heavy. Case in point: "Princip may have sparked a century of turmoil, but he started out as a quiet and exemplary student from the provinces." And on and on (and I mean that in only the best way) through the century as Butcher reconstructs that ancient hostilities and the new ones, the festering sores poked and prodded by the Ottomans and then the Austrians, the long shadow of colonialism and enforced poverty. 

Trigger is an excellent read, and should be compulsory for anyone wanting to understand the origins of the origins of the origins of World War I, as well as the lingering resentments in the region.

Five stars.

Good Morning, Midnight

I have said before that I would read a treatise about sheep farming if it were beautifully written, and so it is with  Lily Brooks-Dalton's Good Morning, Midnight. The story itself - a dual narrative about the world ending, leaving only a handful of humans on a deep space mission and at an Arctic research station  - is a bit too sci-fi-esque for my taste. Passages such as "...the things you tell your colleagues when you're practicing simulated disasters and the things you think about when the world ends while you're very far away are so very different" and "even in crowded rooms, even in busy cities, even in the arms of a lover, he was alone. She recognized it in him because it was in her too" were the reason I read to the end, even though, in the midst of our own world-ending days, I could not buy what Brooks-Dalton was selling, and as a result I did not care about the characters, per se. I simply love the words, the beautiful prose spilling across each page, Brooks-Dalton's rendering of the human condition.

"He was drawn by the isolation and the punishing climate, the landscape that matched his interior. Instead of salvaging what he could, he ran away to the top of an Arctic mountain, nine degrees shy of the North Pole, and gave up. Misery followed him wherever he went. This fact didn't faze him and it certainly didn't surprise him."

Chasing the Devil: The Search for Africa's Fighting Spirit

Tim Butcher's Blood River is some of the best travel writing I've read recently, and my review of it caught his eye on Good Reads, and he reached out and suggested a couple other titles of his he thought I might enjoy. Chasing the Devil, in which he chronicles his journey, on foot, through Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Liberia, certainly did not disappoint. As with the tramp through the Congo that comprises Blood River, Butcher's West African adventure was inspired by an earlier journey, in this case that of British author Graham Greene in 1935.

What Butcher does well is to weave together the history of Greene's journey with his own hike (if a multi-week push through the jungles of three nations can be considered merely a 'hike'), along with the history, geopolitics, and especially cultural traditions of the countries through which he strides. From Chinese investment to lassa fever outbreaks, African spiritualism, to tensions between ethnic groups, Butcher covers as much ground as an author as he did on foot. And, I should add, equally competent. 

Given what he attempts to do, the sheer volume of information he seeks to impart, it would be easy for to become bogged down in the weeds. To his credit, this rarely happens, and most of the book skips along, brought to life with descriptions to the effect of "For four years the National Provisional Ruling Council junta ran Sierra Leona, although 'ran' hardly seems an appropriate description for the feuding, bloodletting, attempted coups, executions and political paralysis of this period." Not to put too fine a point on it. 

Chasing the Devil was a particular pleasure for me, as it recalled memories of my own visit to West Africa in 2019, where I experienced first hand the African rains that Butcher describes as "something extreme, aqueous bullets pummelling the ground," and so much else.

Everybody Was So Young - Gerald and Sara Murphy: A Lost Generation Love Story

 It doesn't help, I'm sure, that I read this on the heels of Jason Fagone's The Woman Who Smashed Codes, one of the best biographies I've read in ages. Sarah Murphy and Elizebeth Friedman - code-smasher extraordinaire - were contemporaries, but if they had more in common than that, I'm afraid I didn't quite get there. That's not to knock Sara Murphy, nor author Amanda Vaill, per se. Murphy was simply far, far less interesting to me, and Vaill's work far more of a traditional biography (read: deep into the weeds on every aspect of Murphy's life) to hold my attention for more than half of the book. 

That said, as I skimmed the latter half of the book, I stopped regularly to read passages of the Murphys time with the Hemingways and the Fitzgeralds; excerpts of a letter from F. Scott here or there offer the expected delight. The lines that resonated most with me were these, early, "....most unsettling, was that edge about her, that repressed wildness, that sense that..."I have no idea what she will do, or say, or propose."" Having been accused of the same, I couldn't help but laugh.

The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies

Elizebeth Friedman wrote the book, literally, on codebreaking in this country. She established the agency that was the forerunner to the NSA. She hunted Nazi spies during World War II, and bootleggers and mobsters at the height of Prohibition. She did all of this while caring for her long-depressive husband, William Friedman, whose legacy was to dear to her that she quietly allowed herself to be written out of the history of all of these things rather than risk diminishing the credit William otherwise received. 

Jason Fagone's biography of Elizebeth is fascinating, both in the context of her, as a person, and his explanations of codebreaking itself. As is so often the case, I'm in awe of the brains of those of figure this stuff out, as well as Fagone's work as an author to breathe life into what could otherwise be a highly obtuse topic. (This he does is no small part by asking, for example, that the reader consider the ways in which any two people can and do develop "codes" in how they communicate; the more intimate the communication, the more encoded it becomes.) 

Four stars.

In the Dragon's Shadow: Southeast Asia in the Chinese Century

Sebastian Strangio's In the Dragon's Shadow is, essentially, a look at the role China has played historically and currently in the affairs of Southeast Asia. Much like the smaller nations in the Americas have had to learn to live with the presence and policies of the United States, so it is for the nations of Southeast Asia in the shadow of China. The caveat, of course, is that the countries, people, and cultures have had centuries, if not millennia, to adapt. 

More than that, it's a comparison between the approach the Chinese has adopted in Southeast Asia and that of the Americans, though Strangio frequently contrasts both with the Japanese, who have arguably struck the best note the most consistently. It's also a clear-eyed look at the colonial hangover that is still felt throughout the region, as well as the arguably imperialistic designs the Chinese may have....to say nothing of providing excellent historical context for each country in the region (minus Brunei and East Timor) and the various animosities and alliances that have so impacted the region's history. 

More than once Strangio's descriptions evoked the Monroe Doctrine for me, not least in the closing pages where he quoted a historian who noted "the Americans 'have to justify being here.' The Chinese, on the other hand, 'are just here...It's their backyard." And, as with any work that deals with globalization these days, there's the ever-looming shadow of the American consumer culture, the overarching, homogenizing force that brings everything it touches into its fold by varying degrees. 

Strangio speaks to this directly, as a shared concern of the Vietnamese and Chinese, who otherwise find little common ground, but he also speaks to it obliquely, as when he notes the depth of the anxiety felt by many Burmans that their culture "could be engulfed by a flood of outsiders from the north." That such a notion is completely and utterly unfathomable to Americans - what flood of outsiders could possibly dislodge American culture - shows the extent to which said culture has taken hold around the world. (On the other hand, one could argue that those who found such solace in the previous administration did fear this very thing, treasuring, perhaps elements of "American culture" that others of us no longer see as paramount. But I digress.)

Four stars.

American Notes for General Circulation

So here's my beef with Dickens: he can be amusing, but I'm far too impatient for the payoff. I struggled mightily through the first 25 pages of this:

"About midnight we shipped a sea, which forced its way through the skylights, burst open the doors above, and came raging and roaring down into the ladies' cabin, to the unspeakable consternation of my wife and a little Scotch lady - who, by the way, had previously sent a message to the captain by the stewardess, requesting him, with her compliments, to have a steel conductor immediately attached to the top of every mast, and to the chimney, in order that the ship might not be struck by lightning." (p. 22)

That is one single sentence! The crux of which I can't even tell you. By the time I've typed the last word, I've forgotten the point. For nights descriptions such as this put me archly to sleep. And then I had a brilliant idea: skip ahead, skip ahead. Surely the story would be improved once Mr. Dickens arrived in America.

I skip ahead to find him safely arrived in Boston, his ship sea-ed or sea shipped or whatever other nautical means of arrival there may have been:

"In all of them, the unfortunate or degenerate citizens of the State are carefully instructed in their duties both to God and man; are surrounded by all reasonable means of comfort and happiness that their condition will admit of; are appealed to, as members of the great human family, however afflicted, indigent, or fallen; are ruled by the strong Heart, and not by the strong (though immeasurably weaker) Hand." (p. 63)

The sentences before and after are no clearer to me. I am remembering now as I read this, why the Wreck of the Golden Mary was such a revelation: I think it's the only Dickens I enjoyed enough to read more than once. Still, I'm nothing if not a glutton for punishment, so I decide to seek out the chapters that find Dickens in the South, where he was, if my memory served me, most appalled.

"Then, in order as the eye descends towards the water, are the sides, and doors, and windows of the state-rooms, jumbled as oddly together as though they formed a small street, built by the varying tastes of a dozen men: the whole is supported on beams and pillars resting on a dirty barge, but a few inches above the water's edge: and in the narrow space between this upper structure and this barge's deck, are the furnace fires and machinery, open at the sides to every wind that blows, and every storm of rain it drives along its path."

Uncle, uncle, uncle! Isn't there a rule against using more than one colon in a sentence? And sweet mother of God, the sentence that follows the above monstrosity is even longer:

"Passing one of these boats at night, and seeing the great body of fire, exposed as I have just described, that rages and roars beneath the frail pile of painted wood: the machinery, not warded off or guarded in any way, but doing its work in the midst of the crowd of idlers and emigrants and children, who throng the lower deck; under the management, too, of reckless men whose acquaintance with its mysteries may have been of six months' standing: one feels directly that the wonder is, not that there should be so many fatal accidents, but that the journey should be safely made." (p. 175)

I could go on. The passages on 188 and 189 are even longer - once I gave up on following the story and focused instead on the sentence structure, I found my interest waxed, though I couldn't tell you what I was reading...and then I remember: life's too short to read lousy books.

In conclusion, if this is your bedtime reading, you're a better student of literature than I.