Month: January 2021

Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead is less about strategy or tactics than it is about soldiers. It’s about the dynamics between commanders and their subordinates. The way men of different backgrounds deal with being placed together and forced to cooperate. The constant affronts to personal morality that war brings, and the way war pushes endurance and courage to their absolute limits. It’s also about power dynamics, love and lust, and of course death.

It takes a Tolstoyian effort to sandwich that many themes between the covers of one, huge albeit, book and Mailer manages to… well, not really approach Tolstoy but he manages to weigh in as a Tolstoy-light. In the best possible way. The Naked and the Dead is easier reading than War and Peace . It has far fewer characters, settings, and scope, but it still manages to explore a lot of the same ground in a meaningful and compelling way. It’s impressive, especially for a work written when Mailer was essentially just a kid.

In some sense, I’m glad Clive James wrote Cultural Amnesia in the early 2000’s. At that time, he was able to end it on an optimistic note. Despite living in a post 9/11 world, he was able to conclude the book with the feeling that if the end of history wasn’t already beginning, that it was imminent. 

It’s not.

In 2021 Cultural Amnesia feels more like a coda to the greatest hits of Western Civilization as we enter the neo-1984 era where nothing beautiful is safe from the sanctimonious purges of postmodern puritans hellbent on bleaching our meta-narratives. Where that leads us remains to be seen. I’m not optimistic.

Present context aside, this is a beautifully written book. It’s an indulgent tour of the stars of modern history who come together to form a constellation in which the imaginative reader can begin to see the shape of human achievement, both for good and for ill.

I listened to the audio version which is narrated very nicely by the author. It is, unbeknownst to me when I started it, heavily abridged. Fortunately, each chapter in the book is a self-contained vignette of a person that James found interesting and the book doesn’t need to be read in any order. I’m looking forward to finishing the chapters missing from the audiobook as I thumb through the paper version throughout the rest of of the year.

After ODing a bit on news, Twitter, and podcasts in 2020, I’m headed back to the stacks this year. I’m going to read 50 books. So far I’ve got 7 other people to join me, why don’t you?

If you have young kids or other life circumstances that make ~1 book a week unpractical, pick a number that will stretch you but not be impossible.

Also, rather than just sharing my reviews on Goodreads, I’m going to post some of them here. Time to start getting some of those sweet sweet page views again.