So, What Are You Reading?

Interesting follow up: Bergdahl's desertion conviction was just vacated due to a conflict of interest. The judge who oversaw the military trial was an immigration judge in the federal government (serving at the pleasure of the President?) while Trump was openly attacking Bergdahl. Unsure if he'll be retried.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jul/25/former-taliban-prisoner-bowe-bergdahl-desertion-conviction-vacated

 

Colloquia Personarum - To help me keep stay fluent in Latin

 

Frats by Dee Snider.

 

Once an Arafat Man by Tass Saada (2008) and Dean Merrill. Tass was a Palestinian refugee who grew up in Saudi Arabia and became a terrorist/freedom fighter for the PLO. His father becomes wealthy due to his connection with Saudi Arabia's King Saud. His son, Tass, uses these connections to total a series of expensive cars, attempt to kill his religion teacher and generally act like a jerk - getting himself kicked out of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Jordan. He then tries to kill the Jordanian Crown Prince. Finally, he flees to America where he works illegally until he marries a woman for a green card, and cheats on her relentlessly while he builds himself up in the restaurant business, running and then eventually owning a restaurant.

After all this, he experiences a dramatic religious conversion to Christianity. He quits the restaurant and moves to Missouri to work on a farm/ministry. Eventually he founds his own ministry. I'm glad he turned a corner and became a new person but it's hard to reconcile that with all the people he acknowledges he hurt and killed.

 

Hard to reconcile? I think it could be impossible. He might still be the same guy. Keith Richards on preaching:
“Preaching is tax free. Very little to do with God, a lot to do with money”

 

Quite a few money-grubbing hypocrites and also quite a few are zealots. Some are both. And it doesn't faze me in the least, to suggest that I'm uncharitable or intellectually dishonest. I've been both - AND the opposites, at different times. I just "don't fight the feelin'" when it occurs. One Joel Osteen, One TD Jakes, One Jack & Rexella Van Impe, One Jimmy Swaggart, one Tammy Faye and Jim Bakker --- they add up. Each one of them overshadows hundreds of well-meaning neighbourhood clergy. Each has hundreds of times the congregation of the good ministers and priests. Preachers like these are numerous -- and go way back in American history. I don't like ANY of them -- and I'm saying so. I'm with Keith on this.

I won't go on about it if it bothers you - but I'm not taking it back either.

 

Citizen Cohn (1988) by Nicholas Von Hoffman. An exhausting and exhaustive biography of Roy Cohn. He is sexist, racist, gay and homophobic, Jewish and anti-Semitic. He taught Donald Trump a lot of what he knows about not paying bills and Roger Stone how to use dirty tricks and machine politics to get what he wanted. He cared little for the law.

He survived three separate indictments but was finally disbarred shortly before his death. What a guy.

 

Indeed. During his career, his clients included Mafia bosses Fat Tony Salerno, Carmine Galante and John Gotti...
From his bio, I don't like Roy Cohn. But in the unlikely event I'm ever involved in divorce litigation - I'd look for a lawyer just like him...

 

Unfortunately it is exam time. But i do have a copy of 'Rebecca' for 'deserved' breaks

 

SAS: Rogue Heroes (2016) by Ben MacIntyre. The story of the founding of the Special Air Service, British Special Operations Forces from their founding in 1941 until its promotion to a corps in 1950.

Lots of tales of battle. Lots of death. I was most interested in learning about their training regimes but at that time it was fairly primitive. They proved themselves in the desert.

Not one I'd read again but a good read and a great reference to the early days of the unit.

 

Navy SEALs: A Complete History from World War II to the Present (2004) by Kevin Dockery

I'm not quite finished. The book is about 830 pages excluding notes and index.

Perhaps 60% of the content is reproduced interviews. In between those are more typical nonfiction description of the SEALs. Unfortunately there's a lot of overlap in the interviews that wasn't removed so you end up reading the same story from 3 or 4 different UDTs or SEALs.

Personally, the Special Forces are far more interesting to me (with their mission of training up indigenous forces and acting as a true force multiplier), but it was a good look into the Underwater Demolition Teams (UDTs) and how they evolved into the modern SEALs.

 

The Looming Tower: al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (2006) by Lawrence Wright. This book describes in exhausting detail bin Laden's life story and how he came to found al-Qaeda, and why they turned against the west.

Excellent read.

 

How to Defeat Saddam Hussein (1991) by Col (Ret.) Trevor Dupuy is a short read, 125 pages in a mass-market paperback. Taking on the role of General Schwarzkopf, Col Dupuy explains the history of Iraq and how it came to invade Kuwait before walking through what is essentially an Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield (IPB) - explaining how the US could approach the fight with Iraq from multiple perspectives, enemy likely courses of action (COA) and how the US could respond to them. What I thought was most interesting was how a series of formulas was used to compute the likelihood of defeat or success on the battlefield, literal force multipliers.

A very timely book when it came out. The foreword was written about a week after the invasion began, I assume most of the book was written around the same time. I need to learn more about the First Gulf War, so I can understand if the predictions held up.

Two especially notable things: it was a given that Saddam Hussein had and used chemical weapons recently (against the Kurds in the late 80s or early 90s and in the Iran-Iraq War that ended 1988), and that if he was not removed from power he would regroup and attack again. Interestingly, he did not again attack Kuwait or anyone else (AFAIK). It was the US who unilaterally invaded Iraq in 2003 after 9/11. (Though one can debate whether their efforts to prevent the WMD inspectors from doing their job and evading UN sanctions counts as provocation.)

Some other interesting connections:

• US troops were stationed in Saudi Arabia as a bulwark against Iraqi aggression during the First Gulf War. This was seen as an occupation by Osama Bin Laden and despite the assurance the troops would be removed they were still there 7 years later, cited as the primary reason that Bin Laden directed the bombing of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania
• In contrast to people who say that Bush invaded Iraq in 2003 to finish what his dad did, the US had planned to remove Saddam's party since 1998 when Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act, explicitly supporting and funding "regime change"

 

I'm about 75% of the way through Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald (1978) by Edward Jay Epstein. I was expecting an all-out conspiracy theory, like Nixon: Man Behind the Mask but instead what I got was a lot subtler than that. Skip the prologue, it's 50 very confused muddled pages that don't really fit there, and start with chapter 1.

The rest of the book is a straight-forward biography of Oswald starting from his birth and moving through his life as he joins the Marine Corps, serves in Japan, gets discharged, defects to the Soviet Union, gets married and "re-fects" to the United States.

Throughout, polite but persistent questions are raised about the inconsistencies in Oswald's official story and the actions of those around him. For example, Oswald's "diary" which had entries spanning the two years in the Soviet Union had anachronisms that demonstrate it couldn't have been written at the time the entries were dated, and the handwriting style suggests it was written in one or two sessions. Oswald lived like a king in Minsk, but somehow got so disillusioned with the Soviet Union that he decided to return to the US after 14 months. Russia somehow let him stay despite expelling other Americans and yet over a year later (when the Soviets had neither provided citizenship nor the Americans finished revoking Oswald's American citizenship) they let him and his new wife leave without much of a fuss at all.

At the same time, there are some weaknesses in the story. Epstein dismisses the diary by saying it was a Soviet plant used to cover up his activities, but then relies on it repeatedly as a source after having dismissed it. He relies on very shady characters for much of the gaps in the story (noting they were excluded from the Warren Commission and implying that to be deliberate attempts to hide things) without acknowledging they were excluded from the official record because of their poor credibility. Some of his sources are literal bank robbers and con men with lengthy prison records, but you won't find that in the body text - it's relegated to end notes that you have to go looking for at the end of the book.

The most interesting inconsistency is between people who say Oswald's Russian was laughably bad (those he interacted with directly in the Marine Corps and later in the Soviet Union) and those who insisted he was fluent (mostly Russian Americans back in Texas after his return to the US.) That has never been resolved.

I'm looking forward to finishing this one, this week.

 

I'm wrapping up Terrorist Hunter (2003) by Rita Katz (credited as Anonymous.)

A Jewish Iraqi who fled Iraq after one of Saddam's purges, she landed in Israel and later immigrated to America. She got a job at Steven Emerson's Investigative Project on Terrorism (unnamed in the book because she was anonymous.)

She then proceeded to go undercover as a Muslim and essentially do freelance intelligence work before forming her own private intelligence agency.

From Katz's perspective, everything she is doing is noble and important and directly responsible for saving lives. Her former employer has been called a major Islamophobe and her work ethically questionable. In many cases when she says information is unavailable to the government until she found it, I get the sense she means unavailable to non-citizens without security clearance working in the private sector.

An interesting book but the choice to anonymize it (ostensibly for her own safety despite her regularly appearing in the news and having a Wikipedia entry) really robs the reader of informed consent.

 

Success Is a Choice: Ten Steps to Overachieving in Business and Life (1998) by Rick Pitino, a successful basketball coach. Pretty standard self-help stuff. If you were short on time you could read the 2 page key summary at the end of each chapter, or even just the table of contents and you'll get the idea.

 

Shadow of the New Deal: The Victory of Public Broadcasting- Josh Sheppard

 

I recently finished Working Stiff: Two Years, 262 Bodies, and the Making of a Medical Examiner by Judy Melinek, M.D. and T.J. Mitchell. Here's a paragraph from the book's description on Goodreads:

"Just two months before the September 11 terrorist attacks, Dr. Judy Melinek began her training as a New York City forensic pathologist. With her husband T.J. and their toddler Daniel holding down the home front, Judy threw herself into the fascinating world of death investigation, performing autopsies, investigating death scenes, counseling grieving relatives. Working Stiff chronicles Judy's two years of training, taking readers behind the police tape of some of the most harrowing deaths in the Big Apple, including a firsthand account of the events of September 11, the subsequent anthrax bio-terrorism attack, and the disastrous crash of American Airlines flight 587."

The book was fascinating, but really sad at parts. You can't have a weak stomach or get grossed out easily, because she gave vivid details. The part about 9/11 came at the end of the book, and it was difficult to read. But, I made myself read it because I've avoided pretty much everything about 9/11 since it happened and felt like it was time.

 

Vanity Fair's Women on Women. Ed. Radhika Jones, with David Friend

Loved it! Twenty-two pieces, about well-known women and their accomplishments, by very perceptive female authors with oft-dazzling writing chops. Subjects included Her (late) Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II, Michelle Obama, Princess Diana, Whoopi Goldberg, Tina Turner, Lady Gaga, Hillary Clinton, Frida Kahlo, Meryl Streep...

The book finished with "In their own words" - six articles by women on various salient topics - e.g. "MeToo and Me," by Monica Lewinsky. This book is simply a great read.

Incidentally, Radhika Jones, Editor-in-Chief of Vanity Fair, is someone well worth knowing about. Attention DI fans: She holds a degree from Harvard and a PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. Who said an English degree won't get you a great job?

Wiki on Radhika here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radhika_Jones