The Partisan's Daughter by Louis de Bernières

There’s a slow food movement; maybe we need a ‘slow read’ movement.  The idea of reading Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace’ in a few days is like flying coast-to-coast and then being asked how you liked the Grand Canyon.  And I’m sure you could read a book of poetry in a few hours, but would you have a clue what the poet was getting at?  Sometimes it takes several readings or even a lifetime to absorb all the meanings of a single poem.  Or even a song.  Did you get the lyrics of Bruce Springstein’s “Born in the USA” the first time you heard it?  Or, like Ronald Reagan during the 1984 presidential campaign, did you miss the point entirely?  (The Reagan campaign wanted to use the song[1] during campaign rallies.)  I’m convinced that we need to slow down and read with the same energy, the same intensity – or nearly so – that the author put into the book in the first place.  What was the author trying to say?  Why did he or she pick this particular topic and devote a year or more of his or her professional life to write about it? 

I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s necessary to read a book twice, once for story and once for meaning.  The story carries me along, page after page, while the meaning often remains hidden under the radar.  Once I know where the story’s going, only then am I able to search out its meaning and begin to reach the depth of understanding the author intended.  This was certainly the case with Paul Auster’s book, ‘Invisible’ (which I reviewed earlier this year.)  In fact, having completed ‘Invisible,’ one reviewer wrote that after reading the final chapter he was certain he had misread the entire book and would have to read it again!  That’s how I felt when I finished ‘The Partisan’s Daughter.’  Maybe, as I become a better “slow reader,” I can accomplish both in one pass. 

Of Course, most people are happy to be entertained, so they don’t spend much time thinking about a book once they get to the end.  “OK, that was fun; now on to something else.”  Thinking takes time and effort.  Face it; we live in a world of interruptions; the chime that says, “You got mail” or ring-tone of our cell-phone.  Most of us just don’t have the time to make the effort to read carefully – too many emails, tweets and FaceBook distractions.  Me?  I’m retired; I’ve got the time to connect with what the author was trying to say, to ferret out the hidden meaning behind the story.  It’s a luxury and a joy!   But how many of us are going to persist and reread a book to search out its hidden meaning?  And what if there is no hidden meaning? What if there’s nothing but story?  When do you know to stop?  Fortunately, that’s hardly ever the case.  

In the case of ‘A Partisan’s Daughter,’ I read it twice.

Unlike ‘Corelli’s Mandolin’ and ‘Birds without Wings,’ two of Louis de Bernières’ other books that are among my favorites, ‘The Partisan’s Daughter’ is one of the more difficult books to review since it’s a story that entangles you in the shadows of conflict and dislocation rather than in the center of it.  In ‘Corelli’ and ‘Birds,’ de Bernières immerses the reader in the lives of a vivid assortment of characters on the cusp of historic conflicts – personal, romantic, political, religious, cultural and military – in a region of the world that for centuries has existed at the nexus of east and west: Turkey and the Balkans.  (Turkey remains an important ally for this very reason.)  It is impossible not to learn a great deal of history from reading de Bernieres’ books.  Before you know it, you care a great deal about the lives of his characters and, by extension, your understanding and sympathy for those touched by that history is expanded, and you understand more about what is going on in that part of the world today.

Taking place in London during the “Winter of Discontent” (1978-79), ‘The Partisan’s Daughter’ -- much shorter than his earlier works – is both a comic and doleful story about a brief, unconsummated affair between just two people – Chris, an unhappily married and sexually frustrated English pharmaceutical salesman, who refers to his wife as the ‘Big White Loaf’ – “She reminded me of a great loaf of white bread, plumped down on a sofa with its cellophane wrapping.” – and Roza, a 26-year old Yugoslav refugee and self-described former prostitute (was she, or wasn’t she?  We’re never quite sure) living in a crumbling London squat in a neighborhood slated for demolition.  Her father is a ‘partisan’ of Tito, the former Yugoslav leader[2].

After completing his rounds as a pharmaceutical salesman in his ‘shit-coloured Allegro’, Chris passes Roza, and, mistaking her for a prostitute – not unreasonably, given her appearance; by her own account, splashed with “eau de streetwalker,” and made up “like some vamp in a French novel…” – impulsively, Chris makes a quick u-turn and stops to timidly proposition her.  But Chris is a neophyte.  Having grown tired with her own game, Roza feigns confusion, pretends to be surprised, “I called cab,” she says, in an accent Chris can’t quite place.  Chris is embarrassed and apologetic and his “ears turn red.”  Nevertheless, she opens the door and accepts a ride to her flat, where she suggests that he might return for coffee sometime.  As she gets out of his car, Roza says, “So Chris, you never been with a bad girl before?”  “No I haven’t.”  “That’s what they all say.  No one man has ever been with a bad girl before, not one.  Never never never. … When I was a bad girl, I never took less than five hundred pounds.”   At the outset, Roza felt a familiar sympathy and connection with Chris, and established a provocative, playful pattern of teasing, inadvertently planting the seed that would end up destroying their relationship.  Or, in Roza’s words, told years later, “…I regretted telling him that I was really worth five hundred pounds.  I didn’t know it at the time, but it was the most destructive thing I could have told him.”

Chris returns to visit Roza again and again, “in a house where there was wiring hanging off the wall, there were stair treads missing, the carpets were congealed with grease, and there wasn’t a proper roof…” But not for sex.  He drank coffee and listened to her stories, which she seems compelled to tell, and retell – stories at once tragic, shocking, teasing, and very possibly true.  Stories of her childhood in Serbia, of her cat, Apple; a pet linnet (bird); of a brief adolescent lesbian fling with Natalja; of a decade-older brother, Friedrich; of a horse called Russia (so called because “it was very big, a complete liability and always going where it wasn’t wanted”; of an dead man in a hayloft; of Miss Radic, a teacher who taught her about sex and love, telling her “not to get a disengaged heart… She meant I should keep them together;” of a shocking event just prior to her departure for college in Zagreb; of her Croatian college lover, Alex, and her Bosnian friend, Fatima; of her Serbian father, a proud and defeated Tito Partisan; of her divorced mother who “decided to get old as quickly as she could and … just wanted to dry out and disapprove of everything.  That was her pleasure, to disapprove of everything;” of Francis, on whose sailboat she is smuggled into England; of “Berzanzi’s Pusycat Hostess Club;” and of her imprisonment and rape by the “Big Bastard”…

I should explain this: told some twenty years later, the narration shifts between Chris to Roza, as if they are retelling a love story of regret – mutual and sad.  Chris’ retelling is infused with immense regret and guilt; tortured by his own drunken behavior and a missed opportunity to make a life with Roza – but, tellingly, he never learns her last name and, after it’s over, spends a lifetime searching and wondering what has become of her.

But Roza’s life is one full of contradictions.  We’re never quite sure who she is or if her stories are true.  In the final chapter, after she has abandoned the London squat, letters accumulate.  “This one’s for Dubrovka, and this one’s for for Josipa, and this one’s for Sacha. Well, there all Roza.  There’s one for Marija as well.”

The story Roza relates to Chris has a beginning, middle and end, and throughout we’re left to wonder what will happen when she reaches the end of her story, even if Chris doesn’t seem to have thought about it.   The arc of Chris’ life is defined by others.  Chris never acts on his desires, he listens – often, when lost in his own daydreams, admiring and fantasizing about making love to Roza – while Roza, teasingly aware of the affect she has on Chris, continues to talk, relating every lurid detail of her life, including the most intimate details of her sex-life in Yugoslavia and her life as a refugee in London.  Over the course of many weeks and many cups of coffee, served in a squalid basement apartment of a building slated for demolition, Roza draws out her story, in chapter after chapter, while Chris returns and patiently listens, dreaming of the day when she might invite him into the intimacy of his dreams.  He remains passive and makes no advances.  One wonder’s if his descriptions of his wife, the ‘Big White Loaf,’ might be a fitting description of himself.

Living upstairs is ‘The Bob Dylan,’ probably the errant son of affluent family, who sings in the style of Bob Dylan and works as a motorcycle mechanic.  While not at work, ‘TBD’ rebuilds engines in a dilapidated attic room, open to the weather.  He’s heard Roza’s stories himself; a fact that give Chris fleeting pangs of jealously, but of no lasting consequence.  Officially, for “the sake of the rent book,” everyone in this abject neighborhood has assumed the name of a previous tenant.  There’s no telling how long this has gone on.  This is the transient world of the 70s in which Chris feels too old to partake, while Roza, in her 20s, is of the generation for which the times and circumstances seem perfectly suited.

De Bernières chooses his subjects and details carefully.  The difficulty I alluded to earlier is that, in this book, the shadows cast by these two characters and their respective cultures require the reader to peer into the shadows cast by history and adjust to the darkness in order to discern the details hidden there.

On the surface, this is a love story, albeit a squirmy one that, you think, cannot end happily. 

We learn much more about Roza than we do about Chris.  But then she has so much more to tell, while Chris, driving his “shit-coloured Allegro” from one shabby doctor’s office to the next, has missed out.  At one point, Chris says, “I’ve known for a long time that I’m quite shallow, but I’m reconciled to it.  I get consolation from the thought that everyone probably is.”  Chris is a placid, passive Englishman out of step with the times, standing remote to events broiling around him; a representative of a timid, disengaged life, too old by just a dozen years not to feel he’s missed something important; while Roza’s life mirrors the turmoil that is on the verge of erupting in the Balkans.

A crucial dimension of ‘The Partisan’s Daughter’ relates to the ethnic and nationalistic tensions in the Balkans.  While her stories are full of individual Croats, Bosnians and Serbs who she has loved, Roza experiences have taught her to hate “… so many different peoples, Turks, Croats, Albanians, just about everybody else in the region.”  

Chris remembers “… a joke about Irish Alzheimer’s disease, which is when you forget everything but the grudge, and if Roza was anything to go by, … that would be a pretty good description of Bosnian Alzheimer’s too.”

(When I hear modern day Serbs going on about a 14^th Century war in Kosovo, and similar historic justifications for ethnic hatred, I too have often wondered if a collective Alzheimer’s, including the grudge, is just what is called for in many regions of the world today.)

But in Roza defense, “…in that region it isn’t ever possible not to live a hostage to history.  They’re all possessed and tormented by it.  It takes a logic and humanity out of their souls and gives them heroic stupidity.”  There’s a sentiment that describes much of the world today.

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Why did de Bernières write this book?

Is he getting at something fundamental about the histories of the UK and the Balkans, something that separates these characters, in love with each other but unable to communicate there love, one out of cautious habit, perhaps, and the other timidity?  A barrier forged by history, culture, gender, experience and language keeps Chris and Roza from communicating their affection forthrightly.  Is de Bernières intention to contrast the lives of a bored, placid, average Englishman and a young woman who grew up in a tormented region of the world?

Is this a book about the psychological imprinting left by one’s nationality? Or is it simply about the seductive power of storytelling?  One is from a region with so many stories to tell; the other, remote and detached, with nothing interesting to talk about, whose listening disguises his physical attraction and, in the end, is exposed by his own timidity and folly.

She falls in love with the listener, he with the storyteller; but once the story is told, then what?  Her need to tell stories of her past prevent her from dealing with her feelings in the present; he, seduced, believes he is in love with her, but is unable to express his feelings because his whole life depends on others taking action, of his own passivity.  He’s afraid that he’s too old for her, not hip enough, and will disappoint her.  While fascinated by her, does he becomes subconsciously aware of how completely different and, ultimately, incompatible they are?  As is so often the case, does the truth become exposed only when he becomes inebriated?

That first evening he stopped, she, at first surprised, even taken aback, presents herself to him consistent with the fantasy that she has created for herself out of boredom; young, beautiful, teasingly outrageous and seductive all at once, dressed as “a vamp from a French novel”, splashing on “eau de streetwalker”, standing in a conspicuous spot as a hooker might, cigarette in hand and, consistent with a pattern she established with him, at once, mirthful, teasing and shocking, offhandedly, jokingly – a joke he misses – tells him she charges five hundred pounds.  The tragedy for her was of never correcting this false impression, for, as she reveals to the reader, but never to Chris, “I didn’t need any money and I’d never tried getting if from streetwalking.”  But why does she compound the impression that she is a “bad girl” with her stories about “Berganzi’s Pussycat Hostess Paradise”?  It’s as though she wants him to believe two contradictory things about her.  The tragedy for Chris was that he naively believed her, perhaps assuming that her clientele was exclusive, above his station (as I imagine him expressing it to himself), in spite of the obvious contradictions posed of her living conditions.  Chris starts to save, five pounds here, ten there, gradually saving for the day when he could afford her, the only way he might be worthy of her affection.  Poor man.

So, every few days or once a week, after his rounds, Chris listens to the story of her growing up in Tito’s Yugoslavia and of the dissolution of her family, her life, her country; stories that foreshadow a time when Yugoslavia would disintegrate after Tito’s death; a time when the national unity enforced by Tito’s iron hand would unravel; when a narrative of national unity would prove to be utterly false.  

So too, this brief romance.

In defense of slow reading – whether or not I’ve uncloaked what de Bernières intended, I understand more than I would have had I simply said, “good story” and gone on to another in the pile of books accumulating at my bedside.  Thinking is the best antidote for thoughtlessness I know.

Printable version of this review  -->> print version

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[1] Link to lyrics to ‘Born in the U.S.A’ http://www.brucespringsteen.net/songs/BornInTheUSA.html

[2] see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tito

The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

P

remiering in 1972, M*A*S*H, the TV series about an emergency medical unit in the Korean War, was viewed by many as veiled commentary on the Vietnam War.  By focusing on an earlier war, the show rounded off the edges of controversy, avoiding the inevitable criticism – even censure – had the subject been Vietnam.   But at the same time, by stripping it of the emotion of now, it was easier to see clearly the futility of the war we were fighting.  Ironically, MASH, the movie, was not nearly as affective as the TV series.  The movie struck me as a much more naked display of rage – an unvarnished reflection of the national mood in 1968.  There was no question of it being a transparent indictment of the Vietnam War.  The movie captured the frustration and rage that characterized the 60s, not the post-WW II 1950s.   For me, the movie was less affective because it was too much in the moment.

What’s my point?   I wonder if we can view the war in Afghanistan more clearly by imagining a time twenty years hence; I wonder if an imagined distance in time can lend clarity to what often seems like confusing and contradictory messages, fraught with the dire predictions and forebodings that fog our vision. 

While reading the book “MATTERHORN: A Novel of the Vietnam War” (reviewed here earlier) and Tim O’Brien’s now classic “The Things They Carried,” it occurred to me that a thoughtful reexamination of an earlier war provides an opportunity to more deeply contemplate the cost of the two wars we are fighting now; especially the Afghanistan War.  It’s not that the strategies employed are the same as earlier wars, nor are the rationale and objection to fighting it the same, but reading these two books vividly spotlights the profound cost in human lives – those fighting on either side and those caught in the middle – and provide a powerful antidote for Americans’ tendency towards a cavalier attitude towards wars, particularly the Afghanistan War. 

The only responsible examination must start on the ground, with this question: What is the cost of war in lives?  Everything else is an abstraction, providing a vague and often theoretical basis for war that may or may not have any basis in fact and, at any rate, is pure speculation.  Only history can validate a war and even then, it’s debatable.

Here’s an example.  One could argue that the Korea War prevented the entire Korean peninsula from becoming a despotic dictatorship dominated by North Korea.  But we can only guess that that would have been the consequence.  History might have turned out differently had North Korea succeeded in defeating the US and SK forces.  One could argue that the continued presence of 25,000 or more US soldiers in the DMZ for almost fifty years and the existence of a hostile regime to the south provided North Korea with just the enemies it needed to sustain itself and wall itself off from the world, enabling it to successfully enslave its people and distract them from the dismal conditions there.  Had Kim Il Sung and his son, Kim Jong Il, been denied those convenient facts, history might have turned out differently.   The only thing that can be said with certainty is that thousands of allied soldiers, thousands of Korean soldiers, and a million or more of civilians died.  Everything else is conjecture.

In Vietnam the story has played itself out and the consequences are nothing like those imagined at the time.  As I pointed out in my review of “MATTERHORN,” dominos didn’t fall; China and the USSR were not the beneficiaries of our defeat.  Vietnam realized their decades-long determination to be free of colonial powers and, today, Vietnam his become one of our trading partners in SE Asia.   For most Vietnamese, the war is a distant memory.  For most of the American who fought there, it is a painful memory.

What would have happened if we had never escalated the Vietnamese War?  Who can say?  The only thing we can say with certainty is that many thousands US and allied soldiers died, thousands of North and South Vietnamese soldiers died, and a million or more of Vietnamese civilians died.  Add to this accounting the chaos and deaths in Laos and Cambodia, and the collateral damage that occurred in our own country during this time.  How many deaths might have been avoided?  No serious reexamination of that war could draw a conclusion other than that it was folly.  People died in vain.  History has pulled the rug out from under the empty platitudes that served as cover for our being there.

Thoughts like these led me to read “The Things They Carried,” a much studied and discussed novel derived from Tim O’Brien’s experiences in Vietnam, but pared in the intervening years to their essence – made-up stories refracted through a long lens of time to more perfectly reflect the truth of what he experienced; a powerful and paradoxical refutation of the assertion that truth is more powerful that fiction. 

Or, in O’Brien’s own words: 

“I want you to feel what I felt.  I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.”

Most of “The Things They Carried” is presented as Tim O’Brien’s fictional wartime memoir.  Tim O’Brien is the protagonist and the book is dedicated to his own fictional characters.  It’s deeply personal and, in some instances, painfully confessional in tone. 

It starts simply.  He introduces his characters by describing, literally, the things each member of his platoon carried; calculating the weight of each item of standard issue – the M-16, the M-79, the M-60, the canteen, the radio, the star scope – the weight of personal items that each soldier carried, and the weight of memories and dreams they bore – welcome diversions against the tedium of war or, in a flash of inattention, as lethal distractions in the line of sight of a sniper or in the startling, terrifying moments of combat.  As O’Brien puts it:

“In the field, though, the causes were immediate.  A moment of carelessness or bad judgment or plain stupidity carried consequences that lasted forever.”

In this book, O’Brien tells just a half dozen stories, but he circles back to them time and again, as if haunted by them decades later.   For example, in a later chapter, as a writer reflecting on the war twenty years later, he returns to the image of the death of his friend Kiowa in a shit-filled, swampy field, and reflects on this pivotal moment of profound change he experienced in himself. 

“[It] was hard to find any real emotion.  It simply wasn’t there.  After that long night in the rain, I’d seemed to grow cold inside, all the illusions gone, all the old ambitions and hopes for myself sucked away into the mud.  … For twenty years this field had embodied all the waste that was Vietnam, all the vulgarity and horror.”

Embedded in his stories of Vietnam is a story of how he got there, when he received his draft notice and of his own aborted flight to Canada.  As he tells it, for him, submitting to the draft was an act of cowardice – he made it all the way to the Canadian border; he just had to exit a small boat and go ashore.  But he was not brave enough to turn his back on his town, his family, his school, and all things familiar and escape into an unimagined life of exile.  While he is convinced that the war is unjust, he can’t bring himself to abandon his familiar life and be branded a draft-dodger.  So he’s drawn into the war he believes to be wrong, and experiences the death of his platoon mates and friends, of young men whose promise, conveyed sympathetically, even lovingly, is extinguished in random acts of combat and cruel acts of chance.

Page by page, O’Brien absorbs the reader into his stories, so much so that, gradually, you refuse to believe the book is a work of fiction.  I found myself wondering if O’Brien’s stories were really truth masquerading as fiction in order to provide cover for his candor and avoid hurting those with whom he fought; of blurring the lines between invention and truth, consequently, having the effect of amplifying the sense of reality.  As a reader, when you will the stories to be true, they become so.

O’Brien serves up fragments of memories, at one point saying, “What sticks to memory, often, are those odd little fragments that have no beginning or end.”  But these fragments of memory form a mosaic of detail that breaths life into his characters. 

And he serves up passages like this that are both generous, loving description and damning commentary:

“Henry Dobbins was a good man, and a superb soldier, but sophistication was not his strong suit.  The ironies went beyond him.  In many ways he was like America itself, big and strong, full of good intentions, a roll of fat jiggling at his belly, slow of foot and always plodding along, always there when you need him, a believer in the virtues of simplicity and directness and hard labor.  Like his country, too, Dobbins was drawn towards sentimentality.”

Many readers may be confused, finding this book too fragmentary, with no clear beginning, middle or end; and there’s truth in that.  But taken together, it hits you like a fragmentary grenade; full of vivid imagery that are, like scars, impossible to erase.  In that you will share something of the lives of those who fought in Vietnam, unable to shake free of the experience no matter how much time has gone by.   And you will remember lines like these:

“If it had been possible, which it wasn’t, [Norman Bowker] would have explained how his friend Kiowa slipped away that night beneath the dark swampy field.  He was folded in with the war; he was part of the waste.” 

The final pronoun, intentionally ambiguous, could describe Kiowa or Norman Bowker, who is haunted by Vietnam and his friend’s death, so much so that he ends his own live ten years later.

“The Things They Carried” was published in 1990.  Tim O’Brien was interviewed recently on the PBS NewsHour[1] on the occasion of the 35^th anniversary of the end of the war and the 20^th anniversary of the publication of his book.  What struck me during the interview is that today O’Brien’s memory of the war is as vivid and painful as ever.  When reexamining the Vietnam War, or trying to clear the fog of the war in Afghanistan, it’s worth remembering Amos Oz’s prophetic statement.

“No idea has ever been defeated by force.”

The only question that remains is this: whose idea is more potent?  That is the surest predictor of the outcome of any conflict.

Thomas Friedman, the writer and NY Times columnist recently said it best, when discussing the recent change in US military leadership in Afghanistan (NY Times 6/22/2010):

“The president can bring Ulysses S. Grant back from the dead to run the Afghan war. But when you can’t answer the simplest questions, it is a sign that you’re somewhere you don’t want to be and your only real choices are lose early, lose late, lose big or lose small.”  [Italics are mine.]

Now, imagine that it is 2030 and you are looking back on this period of our history, writing the epilogue to the war.  If you favored our continued involvement, how does that look to you now?  Would your rationale be best characterized as empty platitudes or sound reasoning?   And, if you could, what would you say to the thousands of people who died?  Would they agree it was worth it?

To help clear your head of the fog of war, add “The Things they Carried” to your list of truly important books to read.

Print version here >>Print version

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[1] see http://www.pbs.org/newshour/video/module_byid.html?s=news01n3edeqe91

Matterhorn, A Novel of the Vietnam War by Karl Marlantes

At its heart, stripped of its brutal detail and long list of characters, Matterhorn is a story of how one young Marine Corps Lieutenant, Waino Mellas, a platoon leader, is transformed by his experience in Vietnam and gradually absorbed into the permanent fabric of the Marine Corps.  Taking place during just a few short months at the beginning of his deployment, Matterhorn is a story of transformation.  Success is survival.  You play the game or die.

What emerges is a brilliant and unforgettable account of the Vietnam war and the men who fought it – a cross-section of Americans, compressed and thrown together into the most traumatic conditions imaginable to fight people they knew nothing about, in an alien, Asian jungle far from home.

As a green officer, fresh out of Quantico and assigned to lead an infantry platoon, Mellas scrambles from a helicopter under machine gun fire onto the landing zone of Matterhorn, the name the Marines call a mountain outpost in northwest Vietnam, near the DMZ and Laos border.  A Princeton graduate, clever, resourceful and savvy enough to downplay his ivy league education, Mellas slowly wins the respect of his platoon and fellow officers.  Like many officers, Mellas harbors an ambition that surfaces from time to time, but he recognizes that an overt display of ambition would be futile.  But it’s complicated.  As an officer, an instinct for survival serves ambition; the higher you rise, the further from the front you are likely to be.  And, in war, all too frequently, promotion derives from attrition, or put more plainly, the death of one’s superiors, not to be celebrated, but on the field of battle, if one is honest, secretly welcome.  Yes, it’s complicated.

The list of characters is long.  There is a helpful diagram of the chain of command in the front of the book to help keep things straight.  But not everyone is listed there; we’re only invited to get to know well the original cast, the men Mellas gets to know best.  In the early chapters of the book, the character development is thorough.  When someone dies you will feel loss.  As the book progresses, Marlantes intentionally retreats from developing fully the characters he throws into the fray.  No longer are they richly drawn, with names, backgrounds, and distinct voices.  Gradually the replacements deployed almost become faceless.  Marlantes wants you, the reader, to feel firsthand the dehumanizing effect of war, just as Lt. Mellas or any soldier[1] would have experienced it.  And, just as Mellas felt distress and guilt after his first enemy kill and, of necessity, recovers to kill again, so too does he gradually become immune to the deaths of those fighting beside him – not indifferent; their deaths just become less painful, less personal.  Eventually, the loss of a soldier becomes a tactical loss.  The natural consequence is that Mellas gradually becomes less inclined to want to get to know the green replacements beyond what is necessary to use them affectively.  This is the inhuman transformation dictated by battle.  For most, there is a profound loss of innocence; eventually replaced by a sort of euphoria of battle, as epitomized by Lt. Hawke, who can’t stand being away from the action and breaks regulations to return to Matterhorn.  This dehumanizing process can go so far as to nullify the value of ones own life – what else explains the sudden urge to stand up and run at the enemy, screaming on full-automatic, Marine and M16 both, racing head-on to a certain death?  Some celebrate it and call it valor.  I’d call it the endgame in a natural process, where life, even one’s own, ceases to have any value at all.

At first, Mellas’ platoon patrolled the jungle surrounding Matterhorn, occasionally engaging the enemy, and reinforcing a defensive perimeter, stringing barbed wire and building up bunkers with sandbags.  But Lt. Mellas also had to work at maintaining peace inside his platoon, especially between black and white Marines.  The men brought with them all of the prejudices and anger, certainty and doubts of the population at large, along with an expanding list of grievances.  This was 1969.  How could they not be affected by the chaos at home?  The doubts, the peace marches, the assassinations, the dissembling, the music and, certainly, the drugs.  To be sure, when faced with a determined enemy, there emerged a truce and a semblance of cohesion.  But between patrols and battles grievances bubbled to the surface, as certain as the ever present fog, rain and leaches that fall from the trees. 

Unlike today’s all-volunteer armed forces, in Vietnam the average age of the men (boy really) was 19.  The “old man”, Colonel Simpson, a Korean War veteran, was all of 39!  All are convincingly represented here -- black (splibs), white (chucks), navy medics (squids), short-timers, red-necks, officers, non-commissioned officers (NCOs), gung-ho enlistees, hapless draftees, lifers, literate and illiterate, men from ivy league schools (a few), others from undistinguished state colleges, laidback farmers, hardened city boys, alcoholics, drug addicts, larcenists, the addled and the sane, the humane and the murderous (“fraggers”.)   It would be amazing to think you could form a cohesive team with such men, much less fight a war.  Certainly, the goal of boot camp is to erase all vestiges of the individual, but soldiers revert quickly, given half a chance.  For most – draftees – it was count-the-days (and, for the short-timers, the hours too).  Others – lifers, NCOs, career officers – sought recognition – combat metals, promotions, a bigger command, the respect and admiration of fellow Marines.   The successful leaders, those who rise through the ranks, learn quickly that lives you command are commodities.  If you don’t push your men, you’re soft – a slacker.  Void of a credible justification, Vietnam devolved into a numbers game.  When the nightly news on TV leads with body counts, day after day, it doesn’t take long for the men on the front lines to conclude that that is the measure of success.  As body counts were reported up the chain of command, estimates of  “confirmed and probables” grew with every retelling.  Everyone looked good.  Body count was king.  When Colonel Simpson “grimly” issued an order to attack without knowing the strength of the North Vietnam Army units they was up against, Major Blakely, his executive officer, thought to himself, “If the NVA reinforced during the night, an assault by Bravo Company would surely go badly, but those were the breaks.  They were there to kill gooks.”  

As quickly as Mellas and Bravo Company took possession of Matterhorn, blasted away its top to make way for a landing zone, and constructed a perimeter, Bravo Company is ordered to abandon Matterhorn and nearby Helicopter Hill to relieve a depleted and nearly starved Charlie Company and sweep the valley and jungles to the south to interdict North Vietnamese supply lines, and destroy a suspected enemy ammo cache.  A miscalculation and bad communications back at headquarters – covered up by the officer responsible – results in days without food, water and ammunition; an error compounded further by Colonel Simpson’s insistence that Bravo Company and its commander, Lt. Fitch, were slacking off.  He stubbornly refused relief flights, resulting in the near starvation of an entire company and several deaths.  Finally, the company, or what’s left of it, is airlifted back to headquarters, where it is assigned to the “Bald Eagle-Sparrow Hawk Company” – a stand-by designation for the company sent to backup or rescue another unit at a moments notice.

Inevitable, trouble finds them.  A six-man reconnaissance team, code name “Sweet Alice”, has run into a NVA division or company (no one is quite sure) in the vicinity of Matterhorn.  Bravo Company is sent in, first to rescue them, then – in zealous pursuit of numbers and disregard for his men –ordered by Colonel Simpson to attack and reoccupy the now well-defended Matterhorn (thanks to Bravo Company’s earlier efforts).

This book includes characters at all levels of the chain of command, from privates to generals.  It is this, along with stunning dialogue and rich details that could only have come from personal experience, that lends it its authenticity.  In the officer ranks, there are officers with widely different experiences, from WWII and Korea to desk jobs at the Pentagon.  Without a clear objective, their understanding of what their mission is varies wildly and, naturally, conflicts arose.  Colonel Mulvaney, the division commander, has the most concern for the well-being of the combat Marines and little patience for Colonel Simpson and his executive officer, Major Blakely, who are prone to misuse the men under their command, caring only that a company reaches assigned checkpoints on schedule, regardless of terrain, obstacles, deprivation or hostility encountered along the way.

During the final push to retake Matterhorn, Mellas is injured by a grenade and almost loses an eye.  He is evacuated to a hospital ship where he recovers, and then, just five days later, is sent back into battle.

Throughout the book, as the war progresses, we see how the war affects Mellas, as though he’s passing through predictable stages.  Mellas starts out as a green officer, eager to engage personally with his men and win their acceptance, then passes through stages of incomprehension, reflection, frustration, rage – at one point ready to frag the battalion commander – and on to a phase of “inert, sick weariness”, knowing “with utter certainty, that the North Vietnamese would never quit”, and finally, with the simple act of assimilation that a promotion confers, arrives at a state, not of rejection, not even resignation, but of acceptance.  He is transformed into a career officer.  The most revealing dialogue comes near the end of the book, after Mellas is promoted to company executive officer.  Lt. Hawke asks,

“You still feel like killing Simpson up there”?  [As he did on Matterhorn.]

“Naw.  You know I went crazy up there.  He was just doing his job.”

Only after reading Matterhorn will you realize what an incredibly jarring statement that is.  It’s as though Mellas has passed through a wormhole, witnesses unspeakable horrors, and emerges, his blood pooled forever with the blood of his fellow soldiers.  The two officers who pose this question, Fitch and Hawke, passed through the wormhole months earlier.  In a surreal beer-stoked atmosphere of a fraternity initiation, it’s as though they are serving as the Marine Corps’ surrogate midwives, welcoming Mellas into another state of being, the fraternity of career officers.

Experienced through Lt. Mellas, Matterhorn emerges as a darkly complex story of the corrupting effects of ambition in war, and its essential role in building a military command hierarchy.  It is about how armies depend on acceptance of the legitimacy of death, by undermining its moral foundation – expelling the personal and bestowing a license to kill.  Soldiers are trained to become anonymous and interchangeable, to be used anonymously to kill an anonymous enemy.  Sentimentality is an impediment. War is utterly destructive of those who are recruited to fight it, whether they survive or not, and some even welcome this destruction.  Can they ever regain the values that they must abandon to succeed?  Only the dead have fathers, mothers, brothers or sisters.  Without a doubt, there are those who would vigorously protest this interpretation, even find it offensive.  But it’s impossible to reconcile the brutality of war otherwise.  Knowing just how morally destructive wars are, we must avoid them at all cost, and only fight when we must, with the sober acknowledgement that our own men and women are its first victims.

Why another novel about Vietnam?  We, as a nation, are still trying to come to grips with the national trauma we experienced.  And many, like Karl Marlantes, who experienced it first hand, will have to live with their memories forever.  Americans are still trying to bridge the schism it produced; those diverging historical narratives that seem harder and harder to reconcile.

As a Marine officer himself, Karl Marlantes lived it, and for 30 the years he spent writing and rewriting this book (at one stage 1600 pages), he struggled to convey that reality with military precision.  It seared his consciousness and few have written more convincingly about the lives of those who experienced Vietnam first hand.   His efforts deserve a careful reading.

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Additional thoughts on our Vietnam experience

It is over thirty-five years since images were broadcast on TVs around the world of helicopters evacuating American personnel from our embassy in Saigon and of helicopters being pushed off the decks of carriers into the sea, yet we still haven’t come to terms with the war. 

Near the end of Scott Turow’s latest novel, Innocent, its protagonist, Rusty Sabich, says, “Accepting the truth is often the hardest task human beings face.”

Turow’s quote aptly describes a nation that refused to face the many contradictions of our Vietnam misadventure.  It’s the answer to why most Americans resist facing up to the truth of Vietnam even today – that there was just no good reason for our being there.  Many who were alive back then would dispute this.   Sides were drawn; sides remain.

Things can be said about wars:

1.     The rationale and strategies that a nation employs when going to war more aptly apply to the last war, not the one its fighting.   Vietnam was not WWII; Vietnam wasn’t even a remote theater of the cold war, although we thought so at the time.

2.     The rationale for protesting a war is predicated on perceptions of the last war rather than the war we’re in.   While there might be similarities, Afghanistan is not Vietnam.  (That doesn’t mean we should be there or that it is a just war – that’s another question entirely.)

3.     Military leaders will always speak confidently about chances for success and will skew the facts to support the war, as General Westmoreland did, and the majority of public will believe them. 

4.     When emotions run high, restraining a nation from fighting is nearly impossible.  Consider the overwhelming push for going to war after 9/11 and how quickly Iraq was made part of the conflict.  Imagine the storm of recrimination, had President Obama rejected General McChrystal’s plan for Afghanistan and withdrawn our troops last year.

5.     Nations enjoy the spectacle of war as sport.

When reflecting on the Vietnam War these many decades later, the truth, clear to me now, was hardly clear to me then.  It’s hard not to express it as an indictment, but I don’t know of a gentler way to say this – It was a stupid war waged by an ignorant people too lazy to think beyond the two-word justification offered by our leaders and accepted almost universally at home: “Domino Theory.”   And, the lives of the men and woman who died were wasted or, put another way, “they died in vain.”

Let’s be honest.  Dominos didn’t fall.  Russia and China were not the beneficiaries of our defeat.  The Vietnamese would have fought as fiercely to eject them as it did to eject the French and the US.  The Vietnamese were determined to rid themselves of decades of colonial rule, period.  That was their only objective.  In retrospect, the truth seems simple.  How could we – the overwhelming majority of Americans – have missed it?  “Domino Theory” clouded our thoughts.  Easy answers always do.

The most disturbing thing was that most Americans bought it, especially those who had lived through WWII and Korea.  The famous “generation gap” of the 60’s was between those whose memories were of WWII, and those who were too young.  And, among those under 30, even among those harboring doubts, most accepted their parents’ generation’s attitude and trusted their leaders.

Inevitably, confusion reigns in the fog of war.  Dissent grows slowly, as reality set in, first by a few courageous leaders such as Senators Eugene McCarty and J. William Fulbright, then spreads, primarily among those asked to fight, especially on college campuses.  Adults (those over 30) were angered at having their worldview questioned; the youth were frustrated by the paucity of the justification for having to fight in the first place and by the increasingly empty assurances that it was going well.

What William Fulbright said, in retrospect, of President Johnson could have applied to most Americans:

“I'm sure that President Johnson would never have pursued the war in Vietnam if he'd ever had a Fulbright to Japan, or say Bangkok, or had any feeling for what these people are like and why they acted the way they did.  He was completely ignorant.” 

Amen to that.

American’s experience of Vietnam ensures that the nation remains divided.  This divide is evident even today, played out every few years during congressional and presidential campaigns.  It casts a long, dark shadow; it remains the third-rail of dinner conversations.  Summon Scot Turow.  It’s really hard to admit you were wrong.

But, our confusion back then is forgivable. Why?  Consider this: WWII, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the prospect of another world war more devastating than the last were as fresh in the minds of American’s in the early 1960s as 9/11 was in 2002 when we sent troops to Afghanistan.  Much more than al Qaeda is today, the Soviet Union with their nuclear arsenal was universally perceived to be an existential threat (as our arsenal was to the USSR.)  Was there any force that might have prevented our response to 9/11?

Before Vietnam, conditioned by the shared sacrifice and certainty of the rightness of WWII, Americans trusted their government.  The Vietnam War did great damage to the country; it broke that trust and bred a nation of cynics.  While a degree of skepticism is healthy, the degree of cynicism and rancor it unleashed may well be our undoing.

Quoting William Fulbright once more – 

“The biggest lesson I learned from Vietnam is not to trust our own government statements.  I had no idea until then that you could not rely on them.”

The selling of the Iraq war to the American public rekindled America’s distrust.  But nations run on emotions, not analysis and intellect.  Facing the truth squarely is what we expect of our leaders, but, more often than not, they are driven by the emotions of an electorate, and therein lies the danger.

Is Afghanistan this generations Vietnam?  Will it take 30 years for us to find out?

For a print copy of this review, go here>> Print version

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[1] While some Marines may object, I use the word "soldier" rather than Marine when I am speaking generally, referring collectively to Marine, Army and Naval personnel.

Silver Bay and Italia

Here's three watercolors I painted for the class I'm taking at the Sharon Arts Center in Peterborough.  The first is a scene in Perugia, Italy, the second is a path by the auditorium at Silver Bay, New York and the third is of lakeside view (imagined) of Lake George, NY.

Political Crisis in Thailand (updated 5/19/2010)

Since my son, Roy, and daughter-in-law, Jenn, have been living in Bangkok, Thailand for over a year now, we’ve been keeping a close watch on the deteriorating political situation there.  Normal life has been greatly affected.  Since tensions have reached a boiling point, Jenn’s offices have been closed for weeks and Roy has been able to go to work only sporadically.  Last weekend, after being unable or unwilling to accept the government’s offer of new elections in November, the Red shirts expanded the conflict zone.  Barricades sprang up and fires have been set outside of the central square-mile area they have occupied for the last six weeks.  The conflict zone has crept closer and closer to their neighborhood.  Late last week, a barricade appeared at the end of their street. Fearful of getting trapped, unable to get out to shop groceries or for emergencies services, Jenn and Roy decided to relocate temporarily to an unaffected part of the Bangkok.   Here’s Roy’s email telling us of their move.

We are safe, away from the action now.  We moved away from our apartment today and are in another side of Bangkok.

Didn't want to alarm you before, but here (just before the minute mark) is footage from my street, Soi Ngam Duphli, this weekend.  http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8684288.stm

We wanted to stick it out, but last night was the last straw.  Groups of thugs were not too far away erecting their stupid tire blockades, there were lots of blasts not to far away, and I was getting pretty agitated.  I went to bed with my clothes on and contacts in just in case I had to jump into action.  I was pretty jumpy and I hope Jenn forgives me for that!

This morning was quiet again, but we've had enough and the end is not visible yet.  Our apartment is safe, security-wise, but we don’t want to be in a situation where one of those tire blockades traps us indefinitely.  So we found a hotel that allows dogs, set the cat up for a few days to protect the apartment (we’ll rescue him if it goes longer then a few more days) and moved to the Thonglor area of Bangkok (Sukhumvit 55).  It’s well away from trouble.

The government might be moving into the main Red shirt camp today to clear the area.  Then again maybe they are just bluffing again.  The city is tired of the Red shirts, for the most part, and also tired of the government's constant missteps.  The army's actions haven't exactly contained the crisis, just set tensions ablaze and then have sat back as the reds went mad across the city.  Why haven't they called a curfew yet?  They planned one for yesterday but then said it might disrupt peoples’ lives.  That has got to be the line of year.

Indeed!  Of course, the news we get about the situation there comes mostly from the NY Times, NPR, the PBS News Hour, and emails other friends send us.  Our friends, Tom and Bev, spend five months of the year in Chang Mai in the north and have lots of Thai friends, so we get emails that their friends send us.  So, compared with most Americans (99.5%?), we’re fairly well-informed about the situation there.   Nevertheless, the two emails below between Roy and me provide an interesting, and perhaps instructive, illustration of how perspectives can differ.  While the impressions I’ve gained aren’t completely wrong, the “back-story” Roy presents cuts a lot closer to what is really going on than anything I’ve read or heard here. 

On Sunday, May 17^th, I wrote this:

Whatever the merits of the red shirts grievances, they're fast losing public and international support.  Public opinion seems to have shifted dramatically in favor of the government and government action.  For all of us who wish for the peaceful resolution of conflicts like these, the reality is that options quickly diminish and you're left with only one response.  Violence.   A week ago, world opinion, and perhaps even Thai opinion, was evenly divided.  Most of us greeted the government offer to dissolve parliament and hold elections in November with a sigh of relief.  Of course, we thought, the Red shirts would accept that deal; it's what they have been demanding!   Or so they said.  But, being divided, they were unable to agree.  Distrustful and wary, they could not formulate a cohesive response.  Perhaps they thought they could leverage more concessions.  Then a Red shirt general is shot in the head while being interviewed by a Times reporter.  [He died Tuesday.]  Quickly, the justification for fighting becomes perverse and devolves into shorter and shorter grievance cycles until it’s "I'm fighting because the government just shot one of our leaders," and eventually "I'm fighting because someone just shot at me!"  Since the red shirts are a mix of people with disparate agendas without strong leadership that can exercise discipline and speak for everyone, collective emotions rather than clear thinking seem to be driving the outcome.

So, again, for all of us who wish for a peaceful outcome, the reality is you're left with only one response.  Violence.  Where are the think tanks devoted to resolution conflict?  Where is Jimmy Carter?  What would a Quaker do? 

Roy’s well-reasoned response was this:

Well, to be honest, the story-line of the outside media about the Red-shirts has been very different then the one told here in Bangkok.  It was sort of odd to see international outlets fall for the Red-shirt propaganda about democracy.  It put them into a time-tested story line that didn't take much effort for whichever journalist they parachuted in to take up.  Meanwhile, people living here know the back-story.  They hear stories about how the Red-shirts have been training an 'army' and have raided army bases for weapons.  Thais know that [the Red-shirt] leaders are as corrupt as any element in Thailand.  They know the damage the Red-shirts have already done to the future of the country.  Do the Red-shirts have legitimate grievances, sure, but they have been strongly manipulated to the point of madness.  

Thaksin Shinawatra was a rich, corrupt, man, just like the leaders the Red-shirts are raging about now.  But, he was also introduced something unheard of in Thai politics: populism.  This wasn't bad in itself, but when his corruption got him into hot water, he has used this populism extremely cynically.  I don't think he realized everything that would happen, but he ignited a flame that is going to be hard to put out.  The Red-shirt leaders make a lot of promises and hand out a lot of money to their supporters.  They also poisoned the well of the current political system, creating saints and [demons].  In the end, I don't think the Red-shirts really want democracy, they want to overthrow the government -- they want the power they were promised [by Thaksin].

The elite, meanwhile, mostly in Bangkok, talk eloquently about the house that has been built here, built by the father (the king).  It’s a strong house, built for all Thais, they say.  The reds want to destroy this beautiful house.  But, in the end, it’s always been a house built for the elites to live on top, no matter how generous they thought they were being.  They are not blameless in this matter.  Thailand has to change; it has to make room for the rural areas to be able to speak out for their needs without violence.

I think the chance of a final confrontation at this point is about 50/50.  This is not China, that’s for sure.  The army is not in any rush to bring in the tanks against their own people.  They want to wait and hope the reds give up.  They are letting the Red-shirts rage on.  To me, that’s riskier –fires are being set, engulfing buildings, lawlessness is spreading, and people are caught in the crossfire.  It just delays the inevitable.  I hate to say it, but I find myself wishing the crackdown will finally come, and soon.  It’s not my country though, it’s not yours.  It isn’t our country that will have to heal after the bloodshed.  So they wait, I guess, until they absolutely have to.

So there you have it.  Events unfold hourly.  By the time this is posted, a settlement may have been reached, or the Army finally will have attacked, or, most likely, nothing will have changed, except the chaos will have spread and Roy and Jenn will have to move again.  And Americans will still have missed the story behind the story.  As news budgets continue to shrink, a dearth of reliable news will only increase.  We have no direct role in events unfolding in Thailand, so news there is only reported sporadically, if at all.  However, in those places we do play a role, the lesson is this:  Inevitably, we’ll get it wrong.  Inevitably, our involvement will just make it worse.

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Since this was posted, the Thai military has moved in and many of the Red-shirts have disbursed, but fighting has continued. Whether the conflicts spreads and becomes into a gorilla war, or takes another form remains to be seen. 



Update 2, May 19, 2010
For those who would like to delve further into the "back-story", here is a link to an excellent article about the political situation in Thailand.  It brilliant piece of political analysis and terrific writing too.  Thai article>>

A Farm Went by My Window

A farm went by my window
last night.
A fleeting window of my childhood
Framed by organic memories,
Of scents of hay, dairy cows, specked chickens,
And sun cats licking,
Where poetry springs naturally
Inspired by living things,
Just for the pleasure of it.

A farm went by my window
last night,
Slowing, frame by frame
I watch as for the first time.
It crept from the recess of my memory,
Forever imprinted there
To surface in my dreams,
Framed in a context of certainly,
Like a dormant seed that seeks the moist, warm earth,
Running through my mind
rich in living, doing, dying things.

A farm went by my window
slowly last night,
With time to reflect upon
my place,
It was a call to participate on equal terms
with other living things,
To coexist with life’s seasons,
And to be grateful for events I don’t control.

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

I had resisted reading Malcolm Gladwell until I realized that I had already read many of his articles in The New Yorker.  My prejudice was that I’m suspicious of popular nonfiction, and, unfairly or not, the reviews I read of his first bestseller, Blink, were mixed.  But when my friend John said that Outliers was an “epiphany,” or something to that effect, I picked up a copy to see what he found so compelling.  I’m glad I did.

First and foremost, Gladwell is a gifted and thoughtful reporter.  He’s really good at drilling down through what we call “common sense” to expose more revealing and occasionally startling truths.  In Outliers, Gladwell challenges the conventional notion about how successful people become successful -- uncovering some of the conditions that led to their extraordinary success and, in a few cases, spectacular failures.

He starts out simply, by examining the birthdates of the finalists in the Canadian junior hockey league playoffs.  Why is it that most of the players were born in January, February and March?  This pattern holds true not only for junior hockey but also for Canadian players in the NHL. Why?  Well, it turns out that until just a few years ago, no one noticed this pattern, much less questioned it, until a Canadian psychologist named Roger Barnsley studied this phenomenon.

The answer, by the way, is that the deadline for signing kids to play is January 1^st.  A boy whose birthday is January 2^nd could be playing along side a boy whose birthday is twelve months later, on December 29th.  Think about the difference in physical maturity of a preadolescent ten-year-old born in January and one born months later.  At ten, there is a significant developmental difference between the two, with an overwhelming advantage going to the older kid.  What sets them apart is not only their age difference when they start out, but also the accumulated advantages heaped on the older player.  Year after year, the older player has more opportunities to play and, therefore, gains experience denied the younger player.  He is more likely to be picked for the traveling teams and of being selected for the more advanced hockey leagues.  Year after year, the older kid gains more and more experience, putting distance between him and his younger peers.  This experience pays off.

This is just one of many phenomena Malcolm Gladwell examines in this entertaining and insightful book.  The genesis of this book lies in his own family history, which he describes in the epilogue.  It comes down to two critical points; the amount of time you spend developing a skills – whether it’s programming a computer, playing an instrument or practicing law – and the circumstances into which you were lucky enough to have been born – and here I don’t mean wealth.  Whether you are Bill Gates, Bill Joy or Steve Jobs, who each caught the wave of computer technology, or members of the legal profession who caught the wave of mergers and acquisition law in the early sixties, personal circumstances and timing can be more important than genius.  Would Bill Gates have founded Microsoft and become a household name were it not for the fact that he had, literally, unprecedented, unlimited access to a mainframe computer in high school at a time when students were just being introduced to hand calculators?  Bill Gates himself attributes much of his success to this unusual circumstance, luck and timing.

Outliers goes well beyond a contemplation of how successful people got their start.  He also examines cultural issues.  For example, what explains the high incidence of airplane crashes of Korean Air in the 1980s and 90s, and what happened to turn that around?  And, why is it that Chinese students do better in math tests than almost any other cultural group?  And what was the cause of feuds in the Appalachians that resulted in more deaths per capita than anywhere else in America? And what did this pattern of violence have in common with the cultures of Sicily or the Basque region of Spain?  And why is an educational program started in the Bronx, where poor students outperform students in much more privileged communities, so successful?  Gladwell examines the KIPP middle schools and uncovers the conditions that have made such a difference in the lives of students there.

Sometimes you have to work at finding the thread that weaves these stories together, but that’s what makes this such a fascinating, insightful look at things most of us have not spent much time thinking about, but should.  Employing his exceptional reportorial skills, Malcolm Gladwell delights in delivering new surprise in every chapter, and that spirit of inquiry is contagious.  I’ll look forward to reading every book he writes from now on.