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Book Review: {The Quiet American} by Graham Greene

9/10/2014

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The Quiet American by Graham Greene is an emotionally complicated anti-war novel exploring the dangers of being innocent and idealistic. Thomas Fowler is a reporter on the French war in Vietnam; despite being a seasoned and hardened journalist and insisting that he does not take sides, Fowler becomes knowingly involved in the death of Alden Pyle, a young American CIA agent who does not understand the complexities, dangers, and consequences of the time and place. Fowler’s good intentions to stop Pyle’s good intentions are further muddied by the fact that Pyle has stolen Fowler’s mistress, Phuong.

Greene’s style of writing is eminently readable, with realistic prose and fast-moving scenes of high tension and mystery. Many aspects of Fowler’s life correspond to Graham Greene’s: Greene worked as a war correspondent in French Indochina for two newspapers, from March 1951 to June 1955, he didn’t have a high opinion of the French, he had a longstanding relationship with a mistress, as well as with many prostitutes, he questioned the existence of God, and he had a wife whose Catholicism influenced her to deny him a divorce despite their long separation. While I am careful to separate author from narrator (correlation does not equal causation), it is clear that Greene’s life experiences influenced this work.

I have seen myself, as a spouse in a U.S. Foreign Service family, the effects of idealism in developing countries where an American’s desires, goals, and potential to influence are similar to those of Alden Pyle. The pursuit of a utopian ideal often supersedes taking the time to step out of one’s cultural frame of reference and examine what is best for the native people rather than enforce the imposition of high-minded principles—many of which simply do not translate to the local culture.

At the same time, having been—and perhaps still being—very idealistic myself, I recognize the fundamentally good desire to relieve suffering. How that is accomplished, however, and the dangers inherent in trying to exert control over another culture, is addressed magnificently in The Quiet American and is still a pertinent discussion for anyone volunteering for or wanting to contribute to a foreign country.


Greene, Graham. The Quiet American. New York: Penguin, 2004.


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Book Review: {Red Water} by Judith Freeman

7/17/2014

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This book is intense, particularly if you have connections to Mormonism. Makes you look at the Mountain Meadows Massacre from a different angle—three different angles, in fact, from the perspective of three different wives of John D. Lee (three of the nineteen wives, although eleven of them left him before he was shot by a firing squad as the scapegoat of the massacre).

I grew up in Utah as a Mormon and heard about the Mountain Meadows Massacre (even visited the monument there once, when I was younger!), but I dismissed the whole affair as evil folks perverting the Gospel. Turns out that it wasn't quite like that. Freeman's book gives a possible fictional example of the complexities and genuine atrocities involved. Brigham Young's Blood Atonement doctrine was frightening.


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Book Review: {Ship Fever} by Andrea Barrett

7/3/2014

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Straddling the world of science and literary fiction—without falling into the abyss that is science fiction, which seems at times so noxious to the literary elite (I like science fiction)—is no easy feat. Andrea Barrett has been my foundational bridge in combining the two worlds. In Ship Fever (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1996), which won the National Book Award, Barrett dips into the lives of scientists and their families and friends, and with the solid historical facts about famous, infamous, and obscure scientists and the metaphysical world of the imagination and fictional narrative, Barrett becomes an alchemist and transforms the two disparate fields of science and literary fiction into an informative, enjoyable experience.


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Recipe for Disaster: Study of {Oryx and Crake} and {The Handmaid's Tale} by Margaret Atwood

5/2/2014

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I believe I’ve come up with the recipe for dystopic fiction. Flavor: Atwood.

Step 1. Create cutesy, innocent-sounding names like ChickiNobs Bucket O’Nubbins, a chicken product made from genetically engineered biological monstrosities, or BlyssPluss, the ultimate Viagra pill that (spoiler alert!) kills everyone in Oryx and Crake. Margaret Atwood also named the Compounds where the upper-class scientists live: HelthWyzer Compound, AnooYoo, CryoJeenyus, RejoovenEsense. These infantile names serve to heighten the horror of their true purposes.


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On Proceeding with Caution: Book Review of Michael Shermer's {Why People Believe Weird Things}

4/18/2014

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In 1997 (updated and expanded in 2002), Michael Shermer wrote Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time, a non-fiction plea for people to take a step back to reason before jumping into bed with the latest craze.

Remarkably, many “weird things” are still going strong, others resurging, others dwindling: 2012 millenarianism, astrology, moon landing conspiracy theories, crystal healing, acupuncture, urine therapy, magnet therapy, channeling, ESP, rumpology (not joking!), Holocaust denial, Creationist cosmologies (that the earth is 7,000 years old and that geology can be explained by a global flood), alien abductions, Scientology’s Dianetics, anti-aging creams, even modern flat Earth beliefs.

Wow. (Click here for a more comprehensive list.)


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Book Review: {Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots} by Deborah Feldman

3/11/2014

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Deborah Feldman’s personal memoir Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots (Simon & Schuster), a New York Times bestseller, was an instant success when it hit the shelves in October 2012. In detailing her Hasidic childhood and her transition into married life (the marriage being arranged when she was seventeen, to a boy she had spoken with for thirty minutes prior to the wedding), Feldman speaks honestly—which sometimes means harshly—of her people and the repressive rules they follow, and the sad consequences of such rigid theology and practices.


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Repost: Words FSOs Should Know

1/27/2014

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Reposted from the now-private blog Zvirzdins at Large, originally posted 21 January 2011.

Reposted to show that the interest in reading dictionaries is neither a new thing for me nor a singularly unique activity among mortals . . .


In December [2010] I read Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages by Ammon Shea. It was highly enjoyable and I laughed aloud frequently (the word fard sent me screeching). As I read I thought how very pertinent many of the hardly-used-but-highly-useful words were to the Foreign Service. As in:


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