Life on the Mississippi

Life on the Mississippi - Mark Twain

It winds its way, serpentine, through song and story, history and culture. 4,300 crooked and bent miles, a watery artery that cuts through the heart of a continent - directly into American life. "Too thick to drink, too thin to plow" is how Mark Twain describes the Mississipi River.

I'm not sure why the Mississippi seems to capture something in me. I've only seen it once, peering at it through an 12-year old's eyes out the windows of our station wagon as we sped south to an orange-scented Florida. To a twelve-year old, it was just another river crossing, albeit a bit wider then most, notable only in that it set my father humming CCR tunes for the next hundred miles (that's Creedance Clearwater Revival for the ignorant). Yet...it intrigues.

Mark Twain is possibly the most "American" of novelists, catching with his journalist's eye, the culture and life along "The Big Muddy", evoking in a way, the spirit of the place, better then any other writer. Though countless generations of students have waded through Huckleberry Finn, comparatively few crack open Life on the Mississipi, Twains' non-fiction "history" of the Mississippi and his evocation of the lost era of the steamboat and the untamed river, with its ever changing banks and shoals.

Life on the Mississippi is an intensely personal account, as Twain was a steamboat pilot and knew the river, snags,sand-bars, channels and river life as only a steamboat pilot can - intimately and minutely.

"Now when I had mastered the language of this water, and had come to know every trifling features that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something too. I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry, had gone out of the majestic river!....All the value any feature of it had for me now was the amount of usefulness it could furnish toward compassing the safe piloting of a steamboat. Since those days, I have pitied doctors from my heart. What does the lovely flush in a beauty's cheek mean to a doctor but a "break" that ripples above some deadly disease?...doesn't he sometimes wonder whether he has gained most or lost most by learning his trade?"

Twain sketches the history of the river generally, but lightly, from LaSalle's initial foreys, touching on the physical vageries of the river, to the steamboat pilot's life and training, steamboat racing (S.S. Sultana, New Orleans to Natchez, 268 miles in 19 hours, 45 minutes in 1844), the impact of the Civil War, folktales, stories and legendary incidents,and the everyday life of the river community. Twain captures the cadance and rhythm of the river and the people and personalities who populated the Mississippi valley - those who worked it, cursed it, dreamed on it...

Now the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers has lassoed the river, tamed it with dikes and dredges...but Twain will tell you that the river is patient and one day it will, despite all we do to contain it, loose its shackles. They don't call it the Father of Waters for nothing.

There are any number of terrific sites on Twain, his legacy and his writings online. Check out this one for a good collection of background info and links, or this one for online versions of his works (I recommend his cuttingly sarcastic and funny assault on James Fenimore Cooper found here). PBS offers a great "interactive" scrapbook for Mark Twain here. Yes, Life on the Mississippi is also available online - you can find it here.

Check out the Father of Waters itself here, here and here. For some sense of the vital cultural impact that the river has, check out PBS's River of Song site. or cruise the river yourself in an old-fashioned paddle-wheeler.

Thanks for reading BookLinker! Comments and feedback are always welcome! (As are purchases - so buy a book today!)

Ignorant Armies

Ignorant Armies: Sliding into War in Iraq - Gwynne Dyer

"If historical ingratitude were a crime, the chattering classes of the West would be facing life sentences at hard labour. The luckiest generation in history, the people who got their future back because the Third World War was cancelled, think that the world has changed forever just because a few terrorists have chosen them as targets."

Watching the post 9-11 events play out over the last two years have left me with an astonishing contempt for a significant portion of the news media, particularly CNN and some of the other cable news channels (notably Fox, which, frankly, isn't news, just sensationalism repackaged with pretty graphics, attitude and aseriously skewed agenda). It is significant that you won't find Gwynne Dyer on any U.S. network. It may be because he is intelligent, incisive, plain-spoken, thoughtful, not given to simplistic soundbites and - uncharacteristically for a journalist - well-grounded on his subject of expertise.

His area of expertise is war. Dyer is a Canadian journalist and filmmaker. He has a PhD in Miilitary and Middle Eastern History from the University of London, has served in the Canadian, British and American navies, taught military history at the Canadian Forces College and the Royal Military Academy in Sandhurst before beginning a career as a freelance journalist and filmmaker. Co-producer of a seven-part documentary television series "War" (nominated for an Oscar for one episode), his print column on international affairs now appears in more than 200 newspapers and more than 40 countries around the world.

The reason I delve so deep into his bio is that Ignorant Armies, written and published just prior to the start of the Iraq War, offers up, with astonishing clarity and insight, the single best examination of the motives, circumstances and driving forces behind the war with Iraq that I have yet found. This is no Noam Chomsky, anti-war peacenik or partisan conspiracy nut. Dyer is articulate, intelligent and thought-provoking, cutting through much of the agenda-laden drivel that the majority of the news media has been substituting for analysis recently. As Dyer himself memorably put it in one interview ""If you like being treated like an idiot child by your leaders and your media, you are living at the right time".

Ignorant Armies offers up a solid strategic analysis of the international political situation, examining the motivations of al Quada, Saddam Hussein, Bin Laden, George W. Bush and the current administration, looking sharply at the reasoning behind the scene. It is a refreshingly candid and non-partisan tome, well-written and accessible even for people with no prior background on the subject area. Of particular note is Dyer's scathing analysis of the administration's "Weapons of Mass Destruction" excuse for the war, an excuse he readily demolishes.

If 9-11 and Iraq have you baffled, or even if you are sure you know all the answers, Ignorant Armies is a must-read.

Interested in finding out more about what's going on in Iraq? Check out Dear Raed, an anonomous Iraqi blogger whose been posting since before the war.

For a look from "our side of the fence" (so to speak), check out LT. Smash's blog, Back to Iraq 2.0, and Warblogs.

A fair number of Gywnn Dyer's various articles and columns are available online, just pop by Google and take a look.

Comments are always welcome.

Fast Food Nation

Fast Food Nation - Eric Schlosser

Fast Food Nation has that greasy, delicious taste of muckraker ambience, but it is just too well written, too comprehensive, and too well researched to be tarred lightly with that label.

Eric Schlosser delves deep into the history, practices and culture of America's love-affair with fast food, and the lasting impact (both economic and otherwise) that the obsession creates. Schlosser's pen is wide ranging, from the cattle farms, feedlots and agribusiness of yesterday, today and tomorrow to fast-food's impact on labor practices and the meat-packing industry (guaranteed to make you view vegetarianism with a more sympathetic eye). His comprehensive tome examines the history and development of fast-food, including such varied and little known subtopics such as the taste-enhancing chemists (housed quietly in the New Jersey industrial strip) that add the final filip to the industry's special sauces. Very little escapes his gaze, including elegant factoids such as the profit margins on soft drinks (very, very high, particularly when you "supersize" your drink) to internal McDonalds' discussions on the brand merit of keeping the golden arches (The gist is that they resemble female breasts (there is a serious brand Oedipal thing going on there, trust me..)).

Like so many other people, I spent my time in the fast food industry - both as a customer and as a teenage burger flipper, so reading Fast Food Nation, I found I could identify and recognize quite readily many of the labor practices and processes that Schlosser examines. I still recall with a bit of a shudder the time one of the fry handlers pulled a full basket out of the boiling shortening without allowing the excess oil to run off. I just happened to be cleaning the small freezer below when he lifted the dripping, steaming basket over my head and bare arms, liberally pouring hot oil on me. I ended up with only painful but light burns on my arms but it was the manager's callous disregard for the accident that stuck in my mind. He wanted me to finish my shift...

Schlosser's horrifying and telling examination of the meat-packing industry culminates Fast Food Nation, looking at the industrialization of the meat industry, the severe economic and health impacts on society, and the labor practices and the ever-increasing pace of work on "the Killing Floor". This is great investigative journalism, well-written and uniformly fascinating.

Fast Food Nation is a book that, very probably, the MacDonald's and Taco Bell's of the world, do not want you to read. It makes you think too much about the real social cost of your Happy Meal. You will never eat a burger again without wondering, so if you really, really love your Big Mac, maybe you should skip this book.

Schlosser is also the author of the recently published Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market. I liked Fast Food Nation so much, I immediately went out and grabbed Reefer Madness but it was, by comparison, disappointing. Reefer Madness examines, much more lightly, aspects of the U.S. underground economy, namely the current war on marijuana, the pornography industry and the illegal migrant worker industry in the strawberry fields. None of these topics are examined in the same comprehensive detail as Schlosser exhibited in Fast Food Nation. Although Reefer Madness is well-written and offers some of the same tantalizing facts and information snippets, the effort falls short, mainly as each of the topics deserve a much more in-depth and wider look - in short a book of their own.

Here's some more fast food facts on the healthiness of that burger and fries you just tucked away...

Want to know more about McDonalds? You can check out their corporate site here, or for a look at the Anti-McDonalds forces (McDonalds has become a prime target of the worldwide anti-globalization movement), check out this site. Of particular interst is the infamous "McLibal" case in the United Kingdom which is written up on the site.

My particular favorite McDonalds story (courtesy of the 60 Minutes news show), was when McDonald's in the UK sent a letter to small fine dining establishment in the wilds of the Scottish Highlands, demanding that the restaurant stop using the name McDonalds. The owner and operator happened to be the Laird of the McDonald Clan...who evoked Clan privilage and demanded in turn that McDonalds' cease using the name without the express permission of the Clan. Pu' tha in yer sporran, ye bluddy wee haggis!

Comments and feedback are always welcome.

Diplomatic Immunity

Diplomatic Immunity - Lois Bujold

Good science fiction comes in many different forms and genres. You have hard science fiction (bouyed by speculation and imagination, but grounded in hard-core science), fantesy, cyberpunk and more...and you have Space Opera. Space opera is not concerned overly with building its worlds or concepts on scientific fact (or if it does, it clothes itself rather loosely in the robes of scientific fact) but with ideas, characters, and grand situations. For example, Star Wars is the classic space opera movie.

Diplomatic Immunity by Lois Bujold is space opera at its best, but in good conscience I cannot recommend you read it...without reading at least some of the prior books in the series. They are all damn fine reads.

Diplomatic Immunity is the latest in the Miles Vorkosigan saga. The plotline drags newly married, honeymooning Bayarran Imperial Auditor Miles Vorkosigan ("The Emperor's Voice"), now retired from active service due to (repeated) injury, headlong into yet another fray, negotiating a diplomatic dispute at an isolated space station that rapidly escalates into attempted assassination, consipiracy and murder.

Filled with Bujold's usual combination of intricate plot, action, humor social commentary, Diplomatic Immunity is, like the other books in the series, hugely, entirely character-driven. The science in this science fiction is just the window-dressing for a terrific character. Miles Vorkosigan is one of the best characters that any author could hope to create - namely one that springs fullblown out of the page right at you. Miles, crippled at birth by an "invitro" assassination attempt, is physically constrained by both brittle bones and a dwarvish stature, but compensates by being brilliant, energetic (almost maniacal at points), duty-driven and almost psychotically determined. As one character aptly describes: "He's not short. He's...concentrated." For sheer personality, Miles is fabulous. Throw in a well-plotted set of devious foes (both foreign and domestic) into the universe, stir well...and you have one great space opera.

The next time your quest for good reading takes you into the giant mega-book superstore, walk right by the row upon row of Star Trek and Star Wars junk that pollutes the store shelves and dive into some good space opera for a change with Lois Bujold. I'm not saying this to slight the Star Wars and Star Trek books, but let's face it: they churn out new one's each month like Harlequin romances and few, if any are particularly good (J. Ford's The Final Reflection is excepted, along with one or two other authors). Don't read Diplomatic Immunity first. Grab a couple of her earlier works (some of the Miles Vorkosigan stories are now available in collections) to get yourself well and hooked on the character. Now go forth and read...

For more on Miles and Lois Bujold, visit the author's site (and home of the The Dendarii Free Mercenaries) here.

Here's another old space opera hero- Flash Gordon himself! Interested in old pulp fiction, Astounding stories etc? Check out this site and this one. To keep up with the sci-fi news, visit Sci-Fi Weekly. You can also get Analog online.

Interested in getting into space? You can do it...and make money to boot. Check out the X-Prize today.

"It was a dark and stormy night"

"It was a dark and stormy night" - Edward George Bulwer-Lytton

The results of the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest for 2003 are now out and, in the interest of preserving the best of purple prose everywhere, here are several of the winning entries:

Grand Prize:

"They had but one last remaining night together, so they embraced each other as tightly as that two-flavor entwined

string cheese that is orange and yellowish-white, the orange probably being a bland Cheddar and the white . . .

Mozzarella, although it could possibly be Provolone or just plain American, as it really doesn't taste distinctly dissimilar

from the orange, yet they would have you believe it does by coloring it differently" - Ms. Mariann Simms, Wetumpka, AL

Runner-up:

"The flock of geese flew overhead in a "V" formation - not in an old-fashioned-looking Times New Roman kind of a "V", branched out slightly at the two opposite arms at the top of the "V", nor in a more modern-looking, straight and crisp, linear Arial sort of "V" (although since they were flying, Arial might have been appropriate), but in a slightly asymmetric, tilting off-to-one-side sort of italicized Courier New-like "V" - and LaFonte knew that he was just the type of man to know the difference. " -John Dotson (U.S. Naval Officer), Arlington, VA

My personal favorite:

"They say she carried her own warmth around with her, like one of those thermoregulating arctic mammals, say, a polar bear, or a baby harp seal (though not a penguin, which is antarctic, anyway, and not a mammal, but a bird), but she wasn't fat or blubbery, which makes it all the more unbelievable why anyone would have wanted to club her to death for her fur coat, which wasn't even white, I'm told, but black."- Harry H. Buerkett, Urbana, IL

Bravo, bravo! For more check out the full contest results at the Bulwer-Lytton site.

In the Heart of the Sea

In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex - Nathaniel Philbrick

"From the ship's bows, nearly all the seamen now hung inactive; hammers, bits of plank, lances, and harpoons, mechanically retained in their hands, just as they had darted from their various employments; all their enchanted eyes intent upon the whale, which from side to side strangely vibrating his predestinating head, sent a broad band of overspreading semicircular foam before him as he rushed. Retribution, swift vengeance, eternal malice were in his whole aspect, and spite of all that mortal man could do, the solid white buttress of his forehead smote the ship's starboard bow, till men and timbers reeled. Some fell flat upon their faces. Like dislodged trucks, the heads of the harpooneers aloft shook on their bull-like necks. Through the breach, they heard the waters pour, as mountain torrents down a flume. " - Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

As sea tales go, In the Heart of the Sea covers the gamut.

Written by Nathanial Philbrick, In the Heart of the Sea tells the true tale of the whaleship Essex, which provided the grist for Melville's famous salty yarn quoted above. The Essex was a 238-ton Nantucket whaler that set sail in 1819 to hunt sperm whales in the South Pacific in a newly discovered whaling region called the Offshore Ground. In an extraordinary turn of events, the Essex was rammed and sunk by an eighty-five foot sperm whale, sending the ship to the bottom and its 20 crew members on a 3,000-mile dark and epic battle for survival across the empty expanse of the Pacific. Only eight eventually made it back to civilization, and their passage was one marked by terrible tribulation, death and cannibalism.

Philbrick has put together a wrenchingly vivid story that brings to life both the participants and the whaling culture of Nantucket. Loaded with sharp gems of information and observation on topics from whale behavior, the hunting process, the whaling economy, Quakerism, Nantucket culture, the racial make-up of the Essex's crew (7 were African-American, 1/3 of the crew), the history and usage of the infamous "custom of the sea" (or cannibalism as you or I would have it) and many other topics. One of the facts that stuck in my mind was the description of the "trying out" process, of cooking the blubber to extract the whale oil, and how often, when the fetid and noxious process was well underway, the only safe way to move across the oily, slippery deck was to slide on the seat of your pants.

In the Heart of the Sea is an extraordinary and horrific sea tale, but Philbrick's careful research and excellent prose raise it well above the average in both the telling and in the content. Highly recommended.

Here's a Nantucket toast quoted from In the Heart of the Sea which I thought weirdly captured the strange dicotomy between Nantucket's highly religious Quaker roots, and the bloody labor on the waves that kept it's people employed...

" Death to the living
Long Life to the killers,
Success to sailors wives
And greasy luck to whalers."

For more on the Essex, check out the first-hand accounts of The Wreck of the Whaleship Essex by Owen Chase (who was the First Mate on the Essex) and The Loss of the Ship Essex, Sunk by a Whale by Thomas Nickerson (the Essex's then 15-year old cabin boy). Another read recommended by the author is Stove by a Whale by Thomas Farel Heffernan (the author of Mutiny on the Globe , also reviewed on this site).

If you are interested. Herman Melville's epic (if lengthy) story of obsession, death and the White Whale is available free on-line here. Melville based his tale upon the story of the Essex but politely ended his story with the sinking of the ship rather then dwelling on the darker tale of survival at sea...

For more information on Nantucket and its history of whaling, check out the Nantucket Historical Association. Also good is the New Bedford Whaling Museum.

For more on whale conservation check out The Ocean Alliance and the American Cetacean Society.

Not a believer in whale conservation? - here's some whale recipes for your gastronomical enjoyment (although on the whole I'd rather eat broccali...and I really hate broccali.).

Comments are always welcome.  

Thanks!

Killing Pablo

Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World's Greatest Outlaw - Mark Bowden

Somewhere, probably in some dusty back-alley private house in Pesawar or Quetta or some country farmhouse, is a quiet team of Delta Force operatives, patiently and relentlessly running the hunt for Osama Bin Ladin.

You see, they've done it before...

Killing Pablo is not about Bin Ladin, but outlines a very similar hunt for another of world's greatest outlaws. The target was Pablo Escobar, the head of the Medellin drug cartel and in Killing Pablo, Mark Bowden offers a chilling, gripping and fascinating glimpse into the long and difficult hunt to eliminate Escobar.

Killing Pablo outlines Escobar's rise from a petty car thief in the slums of Medellin to his absolute control over the Colombian cocaine trade, and consequently his eventual rise to becoming an active threat to the fragile stability of Colombia. Bowden paints a disquieting (if fascinating) potrait of Pablo Escobar: By turns Escobar is vicious, charming, cunning, delusional, pedophiliac, a habitual marijuana-user and an indifferent businessman at best who made up for his entreprenuerial shortcomings by being utterly ruthless and coldly practical in the application of violence.

Bowden has penned a well-written, highly readable book, if somewhat disturbing, as it is essentially the tale of the efforts to find and kill one man, albeit one man who had destablized and crippled the government of Colombia and the Colombian justice system (Colombian jurists, police and prosecutors were generally offered one choice: gold or lead - referring to accepting a bribe or a shot in the head. One hell of a lot of them ended up dead....).

The book outlines the extensive involvement of the U.S. government and its most secret assets that were used to help track and hunt down Escobar. It also touches on the highly secretative involvement of the U.S. anti-terrorism unit Delta Force. Bowden, who previously won the Pulitzer (very deservedly, I might add) for his excellent book Black Hawk Down, hints at Delta Force's involvement in the killing of Pablo Escobar and in their involvement in the extra-legal vigilante groups that targeted Escobar's associates, partners and family. Think what you will about the relative paucity of hard evidence supporting the author's theory, but as a result of Black Hawk Down Bowden knows the Special Forces community quite well. Read the book and judge for yourself.

Overall, an excellent read. The only quibble I had was with the cover, which was a photograph of the dead Pablo Escobar flanked by his hunters (Colombian police and, interestingly enough, a CIA guy). I was never able to leave the book lying around anywhere in my house where my five-year wouldn't get a look at that disturbing image, so as a result the book has been shovelled into a storage box instead of gracing my bookshelf....

If you are interested, the Philidelphia Inquirer (the paper that Bowden writes for) has available online copies of the series of articles by Bowden that eventually became the book (they did something similar for Black Hawk Down). Check it out here.

For more about international drug trafficking, check out the DEA. For more on the war on drugs, check out Frontline's Drugwars.

Remember these guys?

Comments are always welcome!

Thanks!