A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 by GJ Meyer

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A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918 by GJ Meyer

Summary: A history of an incredibly tragic and costly war.

One of the things I love about reading is learning about things that I know almost nothing about.  European history is one of those areas.  So I picked up A World Undone as an audiobook during a sale late last year.  This is not a small book (816 pages or 28 hours in audio) and I split it in half, listening to the first half, then finishing a couple other books before returning to finish it.

A detailed history book like this is hard to review.  I am not adequate to evaluate the history (although it seems to be well regarded.)  There were long battle scenes that were difficult to understand (and I frequently consulted maps to see what was being talked about.)  But overall, A World Undone is a very readable overview of a huge and important war.  It did not take long for me to realize that much of my little knowledge of the war was wrong.  So what follows is really just some thoughts that I had about the book and the war.

It is incredible to me how large the standing militaries were prior to the war and how quickly (and how large) the drafts were.  Russia alone started with well over 1 million troops.  Tiny little Belgium had more than 100,000 troops before anything started.  At the height of the war individual battles had nearly 1 million troops on each side.

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Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood

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Oryx and Crake by Margaret AtwoodSummary: One of the last, maybe the last, human recounts the end of the world.

Last year I listened the audiobook of Margaret Atwood’s famous, and excellent, Handmaid’s Tale.  Oryx and Crake is also a dystopian novel, but a very different one.

Both were narrated by a single character.  Handmaid’s Tale is from a woman that is at the bottom of the power structure and trying to survive and more of a political story.

Oryx and Crake tells a story about the end of the world but it is more environmental and maybe evolutionary.  But my biggest problem with the book is that I really had no idea what was going on with the book until about halfway through the book.  The main character is describing a world and his experience of it, but we really don’t know who he is, what the world is or why everything so bad.

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Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (Book & Movie Review)

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Little Women by Louisa May Alcott is known by many to be an American classic.  The novel, which takes place during the American Civil War, is about a family of a mother and four sisters.  Because their family has fallen on hard times and their father is off fighting in the war, the story is about these young girls coping with poverty and the hardships of life with only each other and their mother there to guide them.  Beloved by many, the novel can be seen as a comedy, romance, tragedy, and drama because the story contains aspects of a number of different genres and is based on real life.

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Hobbit Lessons: A Map for Life’s Unexpected Journeys by Devin Brown

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Hobbit Lessons: A Map for Life's Unexpected JourneysThere is a lot of hidden wisdom in Tolkien’s writings, seldom explicit (he hated allegory) but usually simple and always profound. His stories are famous for being “Catholic” without being religious, per se. The worlds and plots he crafted are simply soaked in his worldview; they grew out of it organically. This is a good thing.

“Hobbit Lessons” attempts to mine and condense Tolkien’s wisdom found in The Hobbit and The Lord Of The Rings. Unfortunately, most of the insights and lessons seemed strained, forced and trite–even banal at times. I felt like one could easily extrapolate the same ideas from many other works of fiction with little editing. Obviously, that is impossible to avoid entirely (Solomon was right that there is nothing new under the sun), but this book did so to the point where the insights hardly felt uniquely tied to the source material. In the places where the analysis and application were the strongest, I had encountered them elsewhere. Methinks publishing the book made good business sense due to the concurrent films, but I found it underwhelming.

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Bruno, Chief of Police: A Novel of the French Countryside by Martin Walker

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Summary: A small town police chief in rural France must protect his community, in more ways than one.  

Seven years ago, my wife and I went to France to visit friends that live live there.  We loved France.  More than the wonder of Paris, which was incredible, we enjoyed time in the relatively small town that our friends lived in. Walking to get bread in the morning with gardens and old homes and churches on nearly every corner we felt why Europe and US are very different culturally.

Bruno feels very French.  He is interested in food and wine (and we hear quite a bit about that.)  But he is more interested in the people of his community.  This community has adopted him and he loves them.

Bruno is the police chief of a very small community in France.  There has been a vicious murder, not only the first murder in recent memory, but one that exposes some of the nasty undercurrents of the community.  Bruno has the job of not only solving the murder, but protecting the town from outsiders that have no interest in it.

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Theme Testing

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I am not much of a design guy.  I like to write my blog not tweak it.  So it has been over two years since I have had a major re-design of the blog.  A friend of mine is working on a new Theme design and needed beta testers.  So I offered to test it … Read more

Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work by Melissa Gira Grant

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Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work by Melissa Gira GrantSummary: A jungle of confused polemics.

I’m not exactly sure who the author is trying to convince in this short book. She claims to want to argue that sex work (a broad category that covers prostitution, stripping, pornography, and anything else in the skin trade) is a perfectly legitimate moral activity. Unfortunately, most of the time she simply assumes what she’s trying to prove and then moves on to secondary arguments that simply aren’t controversial if the reader grants her premises.

Of course the solution to social discrimination and inconsistent enforcement of the laws against prostitutes would be legalization–that is, assuming sex work is truly just like any other banal activity, economic or otherwise, such as nursing nanny work, hair braiding or babysitting. She makes these comparisons often, yet there’s little content here to actually explain why sex work isn’t immoral, let alone why it shouldn’t be treated like any other economic act–apart from pragmatic soundbites unlikely to gain a hearing with any but those who already share her worldview.

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The Maze Runner by James Dashner (Maze Runner #1)

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The Maze Runner by James Dashner

Summary: First in a dystopian series about a group of boys trapped in a maze.

When Thomas wakes up all he can remember is his name.  A group of teenage boys welcomes him to ‘the Glade’.

The Glade is a large open grassy area with high stone walls.  As Thomas asks questions he comes to understand that none of the boys can remember anything before the Glade.  Some have been there as long as 2 years.  The glade is in the center of a massive stone maze.  One that changes every night.

In the Maze the boys have created a functioning society.  And while there are always difficulties, this is not The Lord of the Flies.

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Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden (Book & Movie Review)

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Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur GoldenMemoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden is a fictional account of the life of a successful geisha in Gion, Japan during the early to mid 1950s.  Golden wrote this novel after interviewing Mineko Iwasaki, who is said to be the most famous geisha in Japan until her early retirement at the age of 29.  The story tells of how a girl named Chiyo, who began with very humble beginnings as a poor fisherman’s daughter, became an honored and successful geisha in Japan.  Not too many years after the girl became a geisha and acquired her geisha name, Sayuri, World War II broke out and the geisha district of Gion was closed down only to be opened again after the war ended. More importantly, the novel tells of the romantic feelings that motivated every of Chiyo’s moves from the moment that she met the Chairman to her death.

The story of this geisha is a very compelling one and left me with the feeling that when entering a geisha district of Japan that one is transported into the past or at the very least into a different world that follows a different set of rules.  Men could leave their wives and come enjoy a guilt-free night in the company of another woman, which could occasionally lead to more.  A geisha is not a prostitute but seen as an artist.  Her skills include conversation, joke telling, game playing, dancing, instrument playing, singing and all while being a master of seduction.  Similar to perhaps a cruise ship director or a hibachi chef, when in their company you may play games or receive a meal all while being entertained by your host (That’s the best comparison I can think of.  Please leave a comment if you can think of a better one).

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