May 24, 2013

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Review | Frozen in Time by Mitchell Zuckoff

May 16, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Frozen in Time: An Epic Story of Survival and a Modern Quest for Lost Heroes of World War IIThere was a moment when reading Mitchell Zuckoff‘s latest book, Frozen in Time: An Epic Story of Survival and a Modern Quest for Lost Heroes of World War II, that I crossed over from a mildly interested reader to a rabid page turner. I’m pretty sure it was in the first chapter, if not the first couple pages.

Frozen in Time is, as its title only slightly exaggerates, an epic tale. Spanning from World War Two until the present, it is a work of non-fiction, to be sure, but no less gripping and exciting. Set in Greenland (and not the warm part, because there isn’t one), Zuckoff tells the story of the rescue of downed airmen during the winter of 1942. What begins as the search-and-rescue of a missing cargo plane soon becomes a fight for survival as a B-17 involved in the search slams into a glacier, stranding its nine passengers on the ice. A second daring rescue by a Grumman Duck amphibious plane results in another crash, and the nine airmen are forced to wait the winter out in the remains of their destroyed plane.

Heroic efforts by both rescuers and rescued are the subject of Zuckoff’s story. There are crevices, unstable glaciers, planes landing blind on the ice, hot wired radio equipment, frostbite, dog sled teams, hypothermia, fear of polar bears, and, always, snow. Snow, snow, and more snow. Taking place in the past and the present, Zuckoff weaves in a modern story about the efforts by the U.S. Coast Guard and North South Polar to find and recover the remains of the Grumman Duck lost during the rescue effort.

After reading Lost in Shangri-La last year, I was more than impressed that Zuckoff was able to raise his game. His dedication is admirable, as well. Asked by Lou Sapienza, head of North South Polar, if Jon Krakauer (the author of Into Thin Air) wouldn’t be a better choice to write the book, Zuckoff replies with natural aplomb: you haven’t got Krakauer; you’ve got me. However, it soon becomes clear that Zuckoff’s confidence is as much hope as it is faith as the expedition to recover the Grumman Duck hits financial setbacks and Zuckoff puts expenses for the trip–about which he is writing a book–on his credit card and then on a second mortgage to his home.

It’s an investment that pays off and in grand conclusion. A modern-day treasure hunt, not for gold, but for men lost in the greatest quest–to save their fellow-man–Frozen in Time is a fast and enjoyable read, full of suspense, mystery, tragedy, and victory. I can’t wait to see what Zuckoff will write next.

[Review previously published at Attack of the Books!]

Get the book from Amazon and start reading!

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Featuring author Mitchell Zuckoff, master of the WWII rescue narrative

April 30, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Mitchell-ZuckoffTwo of the best and most interesting books I’ve read in the last year–Lost in Shangri-La and Frozen in Time –are both tales of harrowing and dangerous rescues set during World War II. Both involve the rescue of survivors of crashed airplanes–from the one of the last unexplored jungles of the world and the other from atop the ice cap in Greenland’s not so green glacial wasteland–and both are written by the same man, Mitchell Zuckoff.

Zuckoff is a professor of journalism at Boston University and a finalist for the Pulitzer prize for investigative reporting, and his books show why.  With a pen that tells a story so real and attentive to detail that it might be fiction, except that you know it’s not, Zuckoff levies seemingly exhaustive  research to build stories that put you on the edge of your seat and leave you turning pages with the speed of a novel.

Lost in Shangri-La, the first of Zuckoff’s books that I have read, tells the story of about a hidden valley high in the cloud shrouded mountains of New Guinea, where natives have never seen a western man and might as likely be cannibals as not. When a plane full of US servicemen and women crashed during a pleasure flight over the island, a daring rescue is concocted to retrieve the few survivors.

 

 

Frozen in Time, released just today, is a tale in two parts, taking place in the past and the near present. With World War II on in Europe, US airbases in Greenland provide mid-way stops for refueling as airmen and airplanes cross the Atlantic en route to the front. But flying can be treacherous, and when a C-53 goes down over the island, a rescue effort results in more loss of two more airplanes. Zuckoff overlays the story about the rescue with the effort to recover the lost airmen and their airplanes in 2012.

Both are fantastic stories, reading like a novel, complete with suspense, danger, high emotion, and life and death stakes. Zuckoff’s Frozen in Time  is out today (I read an advance copy courtesy of the publisher, and I hope to post a more full review later this week), and I hope you buy it.

Publius Online is participating in the Blogging from A to Z Challenge, a month long quest to post every day. Each day should match a letter of the alphabet. Today is the letter Z (as in Mitchell Zuckoff) and is the last post (and yes, I know–I missed quite a few letters of the alphabet).

 Get the books now, from Amazon, and start reading them this week!

 

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H is for Hit Squads from the CIA

April 9, 2013 by 5 Comments

The Way of the Knife

A new book released today takes a look at the CIA’s shifting role from that of intelligence gathering (aka “spying”) to more direct action through targeted killings, through drone strikes, hit squads, or other clandestine action. The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth by journalist Mark Mazzetti reveals a world not unlike John le Carre‘s dark universe of “scalp hunters.”

From the Amazon summary:

The most momentous change in American warfare over the past decade has taken place away from the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq, in the corners of the world where large armies can’t go. The Way of the Knife is the untold story of that shadow war: a campaign that has blurred the lines between soldiers and spies and lowered the bar for waging war across the globe. America has pursued its enemies with killer drones and special operations troops; trained privateers for assassination missions and used them to set up clandestine spying networks; and relied on mercurial dictators, untrustworthy foreign intelligence services, and proxy armies.

This new approach to war has been embraced by Washington as a lower risk, lower cost alternative to the messy wars of occupation and has been championed as a clean and surgical way of conflict. But the knife has created enemies just as it has killed them. It has fomented resentments among allies, fueled instability, and created new weapons unbound by the normal rules of accountability during wartime.

If a government that has, and uses, the power to kill in secret doesn’t give you pause, it should. As citizens of a democratic republic, allowing too much secret activity, including against our enemies, sets a dangerous precedent, and the weapon we wield today can just as easily be put at our throat tomorrow.

In an interview with NPR, Mazzetti points out that authorization for targeted killings, originally begun under the Bush Administration, has expanded under the Obama Administration:

Seal of the C.I.A. - Central Intelligence Agen...

Seal of the C.I.A. – Central Intelligence Agency of the United States Government (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The CIA has become a machine for killing in many ways. The counterterrorism center has become, in many ways, the sort of beating heart of the agency that does manhunting. And the drone operations are something that two successive White Houses have embraced. You could argue that the current administration, the Obama administration, has embraced it even more than its predecessor. And these questions of ‘Should the CIA stay in the killing business? Should they be focused on drone strikes? Or should that be something that the military should do?’ It is something that is unresolved but is certainly being discussed.

Apropos:It was initiatives like this that the peace movement protested in the second term of the Bush Administration, but those same activists are almost no where to be found today.

 

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Fear on the rise in our literature

April 6, 2013 by 4 Comments

Could we be using fewer words associated with happiness and joy and more associated with fear in recent decades?

Researchers were able to chart historical periods of positive and negative moods through literature. Values above zero indicate generally "happy" periods, and values below the zero indicate generally "sad" periods.

Researchers were able to chart historical periods of positive and negative moods through literature. Values above zero indicate generally “happy” periods, and values below the zero indicate generally “sad” periods.

With Google digitization of hundreds of years of literature, British anthropologists are mapping the rise and fall of “emotion” words through history, says an NPR story.

This effort began simply with lists of “emotion” words: 146 different words that connote anger; 92 words for fear; 224 for joy; 115 for sadness; 30 for disgust; and 41 words for surprise. All were from standardized word lists used in linguistic research.

The original idea was to have the computer program track the use of these words over time. The researchers wanted to see if certain words, at certain moments, became more popular.

 Perhaps not surprisingly, the valleys and peaks matched large, societal and international events: the “roaring” ’20s were a high point for joy, while 1941 saw sadness dominate.

What is most surprising about the study, though, is that our use of “emotion” words is decreasing, with one interesting exception.

“Generally speaking, the usage of these commonly known emotion words has been in decline over the 20th century,” Alex Bentley says [who led the researchers]. We used words that expressed our emotions less in the year 2000 than we did 100 years earlier — words about sadness and joy and anger and disgust and surprise.

Ironic, considering the rise of “openness” and transparency in our society. Reality shows follow “housewives” (in the loosest sense of the word) practice keeping up with the Jones for national audiences, while singles pursue love in game show formats. Social media like Facebook and Twitter instantly transmit our highs and lows, snark and snide, to the internet, never to disappear. And blogs, like this one, turn anyone with access to the internet into a writer.

Yet, in spite of increased sharing, our language sounds like it may be losing its emotion, except for in one area: fear.

In fact, there is only one exception that Bentley and his colleagues found: fear. “The fear-related words start to increase just before the 1980s,” he says.

I don’t know why fear in our language has increased while joy, sadness, anger, disgust and surprise have decreased, but it gives me pause. “Fear is the mind killer,” wrote Frank Herbert, while Jesus of Nazareth counseled to “Fear not; only believe.”  At a time when we as a nation face great problems–like how we deal with the mass murder of innocents like in Aurora, Colorado or Newtown, Connecticut, how we address rising costs of healthcare, and where we will find solutions to a sluggish economy and falling wages–fear is the last emotion we should let guide us.

Publius Online is participating in the Blogging from A to Z Challenge, a month-long quest to post every day. Each day should match a letter of the alphabet. Today is the letter F.

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[The Expression of Emotions in 20th Century Books]
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Review | The Emperor of all Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee

April 5, 2013 by 4 Comments

Emperor of all MaladiesIn the author’s note to The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, Siddhartha Mukherjee  notes that “Cancer is not one disease, but many diseases.” It anticipates Mukherjee’s history, a look at cancer starting in the ages and proceeding forward to the modern-day. It’s a 4,000 year history, and Mukherjee tells it well.

The tale, spun almost novel-like at points, includes doctors, chemists, children, victims, and survivors, each a story in its own weaving into the greater narrative about one of the greatest diseases to ravage our race and that has eluded cure or solution.

I owe a shout out to my good cousin Adam, but for whose gift to me of the book I might not have read it. It’s a fascinating medical history, but completely accessible to the lay reader.

Publius Online is participating in the Blogging from A to Z Challenge, a month-long quest to post every day. Each day should match a letter of the alphabet. Today is the letter E.

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Review | Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber

April 4, 2013 by 9 Comments

200px-Debt_GraeberBy all accounts, anything written by David Graeber is about as far from typical “conservative” fare that you might expect to find featured on this site. Graeber is an anthropologist and anarchist, an early member of the Occupy Wall Stree movement. He’s so “out there” that even Yale decided not to renew his contract as an assistant professor in 2005.

If he’s too liberal for Yale, then…well, you know. Probably too liberal for me, too, right?

Or maybe not.  If just to understand why the leaders of the Occupy Movement believe what they do, it might be worth the effort to read what he has written.

I heard about Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years from, of all places, a science fiction blog review (and my apologies for not remembering which one). The review described how sordid and strange certain cultures were in how they dealt with debt. It intrigued me: cultures on our own planet as foreign and strange as something that might appear in Star Trek or some other fictionally created world.

The descriptions don’t disappoint. But the strange trading rituals and bizarre debt arrangements between tribes, families, and individuals of the Australian outback, the African savanna, or the American forests that Graeber describes in his look at the last 5,000 years are just prelude. As the language of debt conflates sin, morality and finance, we come to Graeber’s central question:

What, precisely, does it mean to say that our sense of morality and justice is reduced to the language of a business deal? What does it mean when we reduce moral obligations to debts? What changes when the one turns into the other? And how do we speak about them when our language has been so shaped by the market?

English: David Graeber on a boat at Fire Island.

English: David Graeber on a boat at Fire Island. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It’s a fascinating question, and it’s hard to not sympathize with the quandary that Graeber sees in the language that we have developed to talk about debt, our capital systems, and markets. Even so, Graeber’s conclusions make straw men out of the theories underlying the modern market economy, starting with Adam Smith, dismissing them with only short thrift.

This isn’t to say that Graeber doesn’t see a place for markets. It is capitalism, as means for power and form of slavery, that Graeber despises. “It is the secret scandal of capitalism that at no point has it been organized primarily around free labor.”  For example, the conquest of the Americas is integrally connected to mass slavery, in the forms of African slavery and debt peonage. Chinese contract laborers built the North American railroad system, while “coolies” from India built South African silver mines. Peasants of Russia and Poland were free landholders through the middle ages, only becoming serfs at the dawn of capitalism.

And so on. The choice between state and market is wrong, he says, and it’s domination of political ideology over the last centuries has “made it difficult to argue about anything else.”

Capitalism requires constant consumption and destruction, Graeber argues, and for that reason has always been created by warfare and conquest, rather than as a replacement for barter as we have generally accepted (see Adam Smith).  With less and less to consume, humanity is reaching its social and ecological limits.

Graeber’s conclusions are, to say the least, a rewriting of history as we’ve been taught, to say nothing of how we view markets and capital.

I would like, then, to end by putting in a good word for the non-industrious poor. At least they aren’t hurting anyone. Insofar as the time they are taking time off from work is being spent with friends and family, enjoying and caring for those they love, they’re probably improving the world more than we acknowledge.”

English: occupy wall street

English: occupy wall street (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It’s a rosy look at people who need not work to produce because they are free from debt, and in that sense, completely free. It sounds great…but it’s rosy, and ignores human nature’s desires to create and work.

Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years  is a monster of a book, difficult even, though always fascinating. While I do not agree with the extremities to which his conclusions take him, there is something to be said for the corruption created when capital and political power are conflated. Crony capitalism is a distortion of the free market, just as political interference in the market is a distortion.

At the very least, Debt measures up as an interesting anthropological history of cultures as disparate from my western world as Vulcans or Klingons are from us. More importantly, and more to the point why I recommend you read Debt, unlike cultures created for science fiction, they are real, and that in itself is worth the read.

Publius Online is participating in the Blogging from A to Z Challenge, a month long quest to post every day. Each day should match a letter of the alphabet. Today is the letter D.

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C is for Comeback America by David Walker

April 3, 2013 by 3 Comments
unemployment-rate

The national unemployment rate.

Sometimes, I’m a cynic.

For example, I don’t trust that Democrats care as much about the Second Amendment and gun regulation, immigration reform, or gay marriage as they say (heck, I’m not even sure Republicans care as much as they say, either, but that’s another post). I think they’re, largely, cherry picking issues that they can use to pander to various demographic groups and distract from the relatively unexciting business of a slow economy which, by virtue of President Obama’s reelection, they own.  In spite of what political left may argue, little has improved in the economy since the election last year. Unemployment nationally still hovers between 7.9 and 7.7%, economic growth slowed at the end of last year, and personal income is down 2.2% this year.

So why aren’t we talking about economic growth and how to bring about an economic “comeback” for America?

A couple years back, I read an interesting book by David Walker, former Comptroller of the United States. I don’t necessarily agree with everything in it, but I think it can add to the conversation on what needs to be addressed to move our country into a more competitive position than slow growth and stagnant personal incomes.

 

Comeback America

Comeback America: Turning the Country Around and Restoring Fiscal Responsibility by David M. Walker

As the former comptroller general of the United States, Walker knows a little about the fiscal workings of the modern federal government. For fifteen years, he served under both Republican and Democratic presidents, from Reagan to Clinton to the Bushes, and had a unique opportunity to call into question the decisions that have lead to our current fiscal woes. And in Comeback America, he doesn’t hold back.  We are a great country, but we are putting ourselves in a difficult position:

We live in a great and resilient nation. For all of our problems, the United States remains a global superpower and a beacon of liberty for people around the world. We have much to be proud of and thankful for. But I am here to tell you that if we don’t find a way to get spending under control, we will put our nation’s economy and international standing at risk and bequeath to our children a world of severely diminished opportunities.

It’s not too late. But we had better act soon.

After opening the book with describing our current fiscal problems–looking at the America of 2030 if we continue our current trajectory, examining principles from our history, and spelling out the challenges that President Obama faced as he came into office–Walker lays out his recommendations in each major area of federal spending in the succeeding chapters.

Walker skips right over earmarks and discretionary spending, which account for only a very small percentage of our federal budget, and goes right to the heart of  the problem: entitlements, insufficient tax revenues, spending deficits, Defense Department inefficiency, and systemic problems. Each gets a chapter that provides context, history, and recommendations.

Beyond easy accessibility, perhaps the most important reason you should read this book is the lack of partisan taint. His approach, and recommendations, are nonpartisan, pragmatic, and worthy of consideration.  He

David Walker

approaches the problems with one consideration–what is right for America and Americans?

Walker calls for not only the reform of entitlements, review and oversight of inefficiencies in several–large–areas of government, and the reform of the tax code, but also for changes in our very elective processes and to the constitution. It isn’t enough to just change policies–we also need to change the systemic problems with how we got here and make it difficult to get here again.

In the end, Walker makes a compelling case for, in his words, not a “small government or a big government[,]” but an effective government–one that is fiscally responsible, focuses on the future, and looks out for the collective best interest of America and Americans rather than the narrow agendas of various special interests.

As one friend of mine has been known to observe–both parties are glad to spend, as long as it on the program that benefits its constituency. The right will spend on national security, and the left will spend on social programs. Both are spending, just not on the same thing. Indeed, fiscal responsibility is a claim that neither elected major national party can claim–at least not in recent memory or with any measure of integrity.

Despite the current difficulties, exacerbated by the pop of the housing bubble and the subsequent recession, America can “comeback.” Walker’s book is full of great ideas and suggestions to see that that happens. I recommend you pick up a copy soon. You might find yourself asking different questions of your elected representatives than their position on immigration. 

Publius Online is participating in the Blogging from A to Z Challenge, a month long quest to post every day. Each day should match a corresponding letter of the alphabet. Today is C.

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