Category: Books

I finished Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance about three weeks ago and it has taken me this long to be able to figure out what I wanted to say about the book.  I picked it up knowing full well it was about the pervasive poverty of a class of poor white people  in failing or failed industrial towns in the mid-west.  I knew the rough outline of Vance's life.  I knew that it was not about Appalachia, or at least what is today deemed as cultural Appalachia, which is limited to the southern and central regions of the range of a far larger area called Appalachia, an area that extends across eastern Kentucky and up into Southern New York.  And this region too, is different, culturally, from the areas surrounding it in many ways.   Middletown Ohio, where Vance grew up is not in Appalachia, although it is in what is called Greater Appalachia,  a term that has gained considerable currency since the publication of Colin Woodward's book, American Nation.  Woodward tracked culture based on migration patterns and thought that specific regional cultures had developed based on those migrations.  And the area called greater Appalachia was heavily populated by an influx of settlers from Northern Ireland, Northern England and the Scottish lowlands, a population that settled the area not only known culturally as Appalachia today, but up into southern Ohio, the Ozarks, and the central hill country of Texas.  I grew up in "greater Appalachia" and I can tell you there is far more cultural similarity between Texas, at least the part of central Texas in which I grew up, and East Tennessee, than there is between East Tennessee and the deep south, or even the greater Appalachian part of Texas and other regions of Texas, which Collins, I believe rightly, puts in different cultural regions.

 

But this book isn't really about Appalachia, and although Vance considers himself a hillbilly, and his family background is definitely Appalachian, even though his grandparents had moved north before his parents were born,  the book isn't really about Appalachian culture.  It is about a subset of that culture, actually about a subset of American culture, because the problems Vance describes are widespread, and affect a far larger portion of our population than we would like to admit, whether their origins are hillbilly or not.  The book is a memoir, it is Vance's memoir, and although he is young, and there are issues in this book that I do not feel he has fully reconciled, it is a book that explores a problem that plagues our country, a problem that the majority of us do not really see or understand, and it is told from the perspective of someone who has experienced both sides and chosen to share his experience with us, hoping that we might learn something from it.

 

I still believe the book is an important book about the current state of American culture, I believe it is important even if it doesn't address my segment of American culture, or yours.   Not all Appalachian families are like Vance's.  Not all working class families, or poor families are Appalachian.  But the problems Vance describes are widespread, and it is rare that we find someone who has lived through it and not only survived, but succeeded by the standards of successful America, and who is able and willing to tell the tale in a way that, much as we may not like it, we can understand.  In Vance's story of his childhood, and his struggles, we see a microcosm of the various trends that are indeed plaguing poor white American families.  Although it may not be Vance's intention, I see the point of reading this book being to open our eyes and get beyond labels and look at a problem without anger, and without blame (because although yes the government has abandoned people, and yes we have a long history of disenfranchising the poor, a history that dates back to well before this country was founded, a history that was supported by our founding fathers) because it is a problem of complex and multilayered causes with far-reaching effects, a problem that carries catastrophic implications for our country and the American Dream as we imagine it to be.

 

I can't say that Vance's experience echoes my own in any important sense, although there are definite parallels in our backgrounds and experiences.  Nor can I say that I fully understand where he is coming from, or even if there are clear answers to the many questions his story presents.  But I can say that his story has helped me understand a few things that I have encountered since I moved to Tennessee, even though his experience is in Ohio, not here.  There are aspects of the culture he talks about that Ihat I have encountered, things that I suspect are intrinsic to a specific culture or area or mind-set, attitudes and biases that I did not encounter when I lived in New York, even though I did volunteer work with economically similar segments of the population in both locations. 

 

And although Vance wants people, his people, poor white people, to accept responsibility for their own actions and the lies they tell themselves, I do not believe this is an adequate response.  It is admittedly part of the problem.  And part of that problem also comes down to blaming one's ancestry.  Genetics are only a part of who we are.  Many, if not the majority of Scots-Irish Americans, have not succumbed to the pitfalls experienced by Vance's people, but ancestry can also be a crutch and an excuse. But just as the answers do not lie completely in the hands of the poor themselves, they are also only partially the responsibility of the government.  The solution, if there is to be one,  also lies in the hands of the middle class and the wealthy, in the hands of the majority of us, the readers of this book.  We like to tell ourselves that we live in a land of opportunity, and yet a significant portion of our children have little to no access to that opportunity.  Those who have opportunity often ignore, or shield themselves, from the reality that many do not.

 

Hillbilly Elegy is an autobiography of a person who has come a long way, but who hasn't yet come to terms with everything that his journey has involved or what it all means.  He is still a young man after all, and much of his story still feels raw and unsettled.  But the book offers a sobering look at parts of our culture that we perhaps would prefer not to see.  It is easy to blame the poor, the jobless, the drug- or alcohol-addicted. It is easy to ignore them and pretend like they are irrelevant to our lives.  Except they aren't, and their children aren't.  Their children, as much as our own, are the future of our country, are our children's future.

 

How can you expect anyone to have any hope, to believe that there actually can be a better life, when all they see is decay, chaos, and despair?  How?  How can you expect children to believe in something they cannot see, that seems unimaginable compared to the world they do in fact see every single day? Can you honestly believe  that people who grow up in such circumstances will not become people consumed by anger and despair?

 

Do we want to pat ourselves on the back, relegating the idea that we live in a land of opportunity to the realm of myth?  When do we admit that there is a problem and that we are not perhaps as compassionate as we claim to be?  The poor are not the only ones who need to come to terms with their own denial.  Those of us on the other side of the fence must do the same.  We need to admit that we as a society are falling behind if a significant portion of our population is falling behind, and we need to decide if we really are a country of compassion, of opportunity, of liberty and justice for all.

 

 

 

Since my last book report, I have indulged my love of stories. 

 

First I read The Man in the Glass Booth by Robert Shaw.  Although a play is a story, or tells a story, reading a play is not like reading a novel or a short story.   I personally like reading plays, but they do require a slightly different mind set, as they are really meant to be visualized rather than read.  This particular play was difficult to read, it was probably a difficult play to watch as well, as there is much that is intentionally ambiguous.   In some ways it reminds me of a play I wrote about last fall,  Eve Ensler's Necessary Targets, not really because the story is similar, or the writing, but because both force the audience to address basic assumptions and perceived truths about themselves and society.  But I think it would be even more difficult for a modern audience.  There are significant references to art and music, references that I believe would have been familiar to the audience of the 1960s, but which are not so familiar today.  This is partly because many years have passed, but it also because of a cultural shift that has occurred in the intervening decades.  I think this play, like another book I read earlier in the year, The Dissapearance, assumes a higher level of cultural literacy.  It is a product of a type of high-toned popular culture, often called middlebrow, as it was basically a middle-class culture, but one that still believed that culture built character, and a respectable person should strive to understand the best writing and art as part of becoming a better person.   That culture still existed in the 1960s in large enough quantities that magazines and plays would be marketed to it, but doesn't really exist in any significant way today. 

 

 Still,  if you are up for it and can find a copy, I recommend reading the play as I am not sure it is performed much anymore.  It will challenge your beliefs and understanding of human nature, and intentionally so.  The play is about Arthur Goldman, a wealthy Jewish industrialist, a holocaust survivor, who is arrested and tried for being a Nazi war criminal. Goldman is outrageously irreverent in both his personas with the effect that one questions who he really is.  It is in this, Goldman's shocking tendency to play against type, to throw his accusers beliefs and assumptions back in their faces, that we find the true and unsettling strength of this play.  Goldman is aggravating, confounding, and both appalling and all too familiarly human. The play turns the reader's understanding of victimhood, responsibility, retribution, survivor guilt, and the complexities of good an evil in the human experience completely upside down, and leaves us with no easy answers, in the end causing us to question not only his guilt or innocence but our own.  I read the play nearly two months ago, and it still slinks through my mind.  It may continue to do so for some time. The play was made into a movie.  I think I will look it up sometime.

 

Next, I thought some rather light reading along the lines of a murder mystery would be entertaining for a flight, so I picked up Under the Harrow by Flynn Berry.  It is taughtly written and rather compelling although I couldn't say that it was actually very light as I found much about the story that was disturbing and the main character to be completely aggravating.  Yet I couldn't put the book down.  The story is told from the perspective of Nora, the sister of the victim, who finds the body, and it perfectly captures her jittery, haphazard, at times maddeningly obtuse and otherwise emotionally flat affect. Although I am not particularly knowledgeable of the mystery genre, I found it be a good psychological suspense story that told the story in a new and somewhat unexpected way.  The conclusion seemed a bit of an afterthought in some ways, as indeed I believe it was meant to be.  Although the story begins as a search to find a killer, and the killer is indeed found, that is not, in the end the real focus of the suspense in this story.

 

I also read Elena Ferrante's The Days of Abandonment, a book that probably deserves its own post.  But it is also a book that I can't really write about.  Nothing I put in words is as powerful as the book itself and it is not a book I would recommend to the casual reader.  It is the first book of Ferrante's I have read, and I understand that it is different from her Neapolitan novels, which I am now looking forward to reading.  I love this novel, but it is raw, and gut-wrenchingly intimate and painful.  Basically it is the story of a woman's descent into despair and loss of identity following the dissolution of her marriage.  I have no experience of divorce; it is something I hope to never experience.  And, like the grief from a death, I am sure there are similarities and differences in everyone's experience.  But I am familiar with grief, at least from the perspective of losing a spouse to death, and although death also feels like a betrayal, I can believe that divorce is a betrayal of a completely different nature.  Ferrante's prose is so beautifully rendered, so personal, that I felt drawn into Olga's misery, as if her despair was my despair, as if all the ugliness of dissolution was palpably present.  Since I read the novel, I've read some reviews that find the story overwrought and implausible.  I do not.  Ferrante touches on something, some aspect of grief and loss, of losing oneself and finding oneself again, only changed, that we all must experience at some point, something I can definitely understand, and makes it real.

 

I'll end with two books that I feel are best read slowly, perhaps as part of a daily practice of meditation.

Plain Living: A quaker Path to Simplicity was picked up for a Sunday School class, a class that I missed most of due to other obligations, but I am happy to have found the book.  The book actually does not have a narrative structure, instead consisting of a series of quotes from various writers that have been grouped according to themes by the author.   Read consecutively, I believe the author is a bit heavy-handed, but that observation does the book a disservice.  I don't believe it is meant to be read from cover to cover, and if one is so inclined, there is much wisdom to ponder here.  I would say the book is more theist than specifically Christian. Although many, if not most, Quakers do consider themselves part of the Christian tradition, this book is not limited to that mind-set but rather on the relationship of the individual to the divine, and the search for simplicity as a pathway  to finding clarity of purpose and meaning in life.

 

Listening is an Act of Love by David Isay was given to me as a birthday present.  It is a compilation of stories edited from interviews that have occurred as part of the Story Corps project.  Like the previous book, the editor has grouped the stories by theme.  Also like the previous book, I find they are best read one or two at a time.   By reading a story a day, I fond the stories powerful reminders of the importance of everyone's life and story, each revealing in their own way something of the human condition that I could relate to and be inspired by.  They do not stand up to further scrutiny however.  Read straight through one gets the sense of something missing and yearns to hear more of the interviews.

 

 

 

 

Last night I finished reading Zora O'Neill's All Strangers are Kin.  Admittedly I purchased the book because the cover caught my eye, and the title sealed the deal.  Of course, I already believe we are all related, and science seems to have confirmed the idea.  If we would treat all strangers as if they were beloved and long-lost kin, the world may become a better place, and also if we would sometimes treat our kin, to whom we occasionally do a disservice because we think we know them too well, with the courtesy which we should accord to strangers, the world would also be a good place. 

 

But this is not what the book is about. The book is really about the linquistics of Arabic, about its history and cultural relevance and the way language and culture interact in ways that define and shape each other, and how this is not really clear in the formal study of a language as opposed to the more organic path to learning a language through spoken relationship.  I'll happily admit that I enjoyed the author's exploration of the language itself, and did not find the sections of the book about language at all tedious.  But then I still possess a kernel of that girl who wanted who applied for gradutate study in linquistics.  That I didn't go is a good thing as I recognize that I am not really linquist nor scholar material, but O'Neill's joy in the language and its use is familiar, and I found the book fascinating even as I recognize that it would not appeal to everyone.

Of course, although the book is clearly about language, it explores far more than mere words.  Zora O'Neill travelled to four countries to travel and study and explore spoken Arabic, not the formal scholarly Arabic she learned in grad school, and the book is filled with her story.  It is about Zora herself, and her own journey, as much as it is about the language and the people she meets.  It is a book filled with stories, filled with humanity, filled with insight.  It is a book about listening, and about living and about the complex way language shapes our interactions and our connections and about the way our daily interactions shape our lives, and the people we become.  Zora O'Neill uses language to show us a sense of daily life in parts of the Arab world, a world most of us know nothing about.  Through language and communication she paints a portrait of people, people very much like ourselves, people who love, and dance, joke and sing, and sometimes struggle to get by.  In the beginning of the book she reminds us that the portrait we see of the middle east, through headlines and the nightly news is not normal, that "the news is, by definition, the abnormal". And she reminds of this again near the end of the book, when she is in Morocco and is asked how it feels to be an American in the Muslim world during these terrible times. But she is not aware of the terrible things going on in the news, she is simply eating, drinking, talking and studying. She is simply living, and she takes us along on her journey.  Although that journey has some fits and starts, and occasionally rambles, O'Neill is a gifted storyteller with a self-deprecating sense of humor, who in the end shows us that language, like our lives, has its inconsistencies, and humor, and that yes,  all strangers are kin.

 

 

 

Earlier in the year I had toyed with the idea of posting a reading list in stages, one list for each half of the year.  But then June had come and gone before I knew it, and my reading the first half of this year had been rather inconsistent.  There are several books that I have started and not finished, not because I don't want to finish them, but because I got distracted. 

 

Then Frances posted her list and inspired me to own up to my own scattershot reading attempts for the first half of the year. If I wrote about a book on the blog, I'll link to that post. Considering that book posts fell off, I may offer a few comments on a few other books,

 

1.    Peter C. Brown, Make It Stick

2.     J. Stevenson, Creeds, Councils, and Controversies. I picked this up as secondary reading relating to my EFM class.  It is basically a series of original source documents from the fourth through fifth centuries illustrating the development of Christian doctrine.  I actually found it fascinating.  We forget how controversial ideas that many people take for granted today were when they were new, as well as how society shapes religion as much as religion shapes society.

3.    Garrett Jones, Hive Mind: How Your Nation's IQ Matters So Much More than Your Own.

4.     Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited. Required Reading for EFM, but I found it to be quite powerful and I read it twice because it has such a huge influence on my thinking.  Highly recommended in this time of anger, hatred, and discrimination.

5.     Aja Raden, Stoned: Jewelry, Obsession and how Desire Shapes the World.

6.    Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies.

7.     Magda Kapa, All the Words.

8.     Joanne Harris, Gentlemen and Players.

9.    Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death.  A seminal book for me.  I've read it several times and I learn something new with each reading.

10.    Stephanie Spellers, The Episcopal Way.

11.     Leonard Sax, The Collapse of Parenting.  Part of a recommended reading list for a project I have been working on.  This book and the others, (later on this list and still to be read) have sometimes proved enlightening, and at other times frustrating.

12.    Patrick Rofkus, The Name of the Wind.

13.     Schlomo Sand, How I Stopped Being a Jew. Thought provoking and although it seems odd to say so, it played into some of the changes in my thoughts following reading Thurman's book.  Of course I never was a Jew.

14.      Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter.  Reread in this crazy election year.  No less thought provoking than when I read it initially.

15.     W. Stanley Moss, Ill Met by Moonlight.

16.     Genevieve Antoine Dariaux, Elegance. Reread.  Just because.

 17.     Julian Fellowes, Snobs. Loaned to me by a fellow Downton Abbey fan.  I found it disappointing.

18,.     Niall Ferguson, Kissinger: 1923 – 1968 The Idealist.

19.     James Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me.  I bought this quite a while ago in one of those Amazon sales where it was only a couple of bucks, but never read it.  I read it after my grandson shared a whopper of a lie his teachers told him at a dinner party. I said nothing at the time because I didn't want to embarrass him in front of a bunch of adults.  I intended to review the book but never got around to it even though there was very little in the book I didn't already know.  This may be the penalty of being the daughter of a historian, a historian who thought his children should know the truth, or as much truth as we know, about history.  I grew up learning that the things my teacher's told me were wrong; I remember most of those things because my dad was a fabulous story-teller, better than most of my teachers. We didn't discuss Vietnam, but I've read extensively about Vietnam in adulthood, so once again, nothing surprising.  Still, it was interesting, and worth reading if only to remind ourselves that what we know and believe is often shaped by what we want to know and believe, and that what happened is only part of the story.  What might have happened may be equally relevant.

20,     Stephen King, The Dark Half.

21.    Susan Forward, Toxic Parents. See No, 11 above. 

22.    Michael Connelly, The Gods of Guilt.

 

There you have it.  In reviewing the list I can see why I feel frustrated with my reading so far this year, simply because although there are books I loved and books I found useful, there was a dearth of fiction.  It is the fiction that feeds my soul, and there was only one or perhaps two soul-feeding books in there.  Note to self, indulge in a good story whenever possible.

 

 

It has been a while since I've done any kind of book post.  I have not stopped reading.  In all fairness however, I also have not yet read all the books that I posted as sitting on my desk, next in line.  Some of those books are still waiting patiently while I have been distracted by other words, other stories.  Recently there has been a fair amount of light reading, yes, some of it verging toward the escapist end of things.

 

I did read I am Spock by Leonard Nimoy, which had been given to me as a Christmas gift. It is not a book I would have chosen for myself, although I have long admired Nimoy as an actor and a director.  It proved to be quite an interesting read, filled with intelligent and thoughtful analysis of the role of the actor and director, discussing both aspects of building a character and the consistency of message in a dramatic work, as well as the role of drama in contemporary culture.  Of course there was plenty of the "I did this then" stuff that autobiography is all about, and about which I do not always have patience.  I also acknowledge that this is basically inconsistent seeing as I write an "I did this then" kind of blog.  Oh well.  Contradictory impulses and inconsistencies are us.

 

Having read the book, I was also interested in reacquainting myself with some of the material, especially some of the non-Spock material.  On my mom's last evening in town we watched the movie Three Men and a Baby, which was directed by Nimoy.  As I read about the making of the film, I remembered the story, remembered the film as well.  I saw both the original French film and the English remake, and remembered thinking that despite its flaws, the American version was better.  Nimoy and his team did a good job with translating the idea of the original film to something that would appeal more widely to American audiences, although there were way to many people, too many story lines, and not enough questions being asked.  Mom didn't remember watching the film when it first came out.  But she thoroughly enjoyed it now, as did I.

 

Admittedly it is very 1980's in terms of its style and cultural references, at times embarrassingly so.  But it was, at least in the first half, hysterically funny.  Neither of us could stop laughing.  I wonder if it would be equally amusing to a younger generation.  Certainly cultural mores and expectations shift with time, and I wonder if it is simply too much a piece of its own time.  I'm not certain,  although I probably won't watch it again. The ending seemed a bit of a letdown now; perhaps I felt the same way at the time, I don't remember my thoughts that well, but I'm not sure how I would end it differently without making an entirely different movie.

 

Shortly after directing Three Men and a Baby, Nimoy directed the film version of Sue Miller's The Good Mother.  I do remember that I read that book when it first came out, and I saw the movie as well.  I also remember thinking the movie was seriously flawed and not nearly as nuanced as the book in terms of characterization and layers of responsibility, caring, and emotional involvement.  That is probably not surprising.  I did enjoy Nimoy's thoughts on the story, and what he was trying to accomplish with the film, whether or not I think he was successful, or even if I agree with his perspective concerning the book.  I did, however, want to read the novel again.  I have not yet watched the movie, nor have I decided if I will or will not watch it. 

 

I requested the book from the library, and I read it this week.  It was worth reading again.  My own perspectives have shifted in 30 years, although of course, the author's perspective and the story itself has not.  But the way words transcend and burrow between the tendrils of our shifting understanding is one of the beauties of a good story.

 

It continues to be a profoundly sad story, and I am not going to write about the specifics of the book, or the ideas that are explored except to say that ideas of what constitutes good parenting are extremely culture-specific, no matter how much we hold our own beliefs as sacred.  And yet, there was a moment, a moment when Anna was meeting with the family services representative,, when she says too much and states that she and Leo had sex while her daughter, Molly, was asleep in the bed, when "her (the family services lady's) face firmed, suddenly looked younger and tougher", a moment when everything changes.  I suspect that Molly might have won based solely on the original charge, but not on this point, not in that time and place. 

 

That moment was pregnant with emotional weight.  It reminded me a recent moment, well, in the last year of George's life, a far less significant moment with far less serious repercussions. It was evening.  George had been put to bed and I was watching TV in one room and his night-time caregiver was in the adjoining room.  I was watching one of the early episodes of the HBO series Girls and there was a moment, and it was probably related to a sexual encounter, where, although she was just listening, the young woman stiffened, and sat more upright, with a small stifled gasp. It was not so much the sex that prompted the response, but something about the attitude and response of the characters in the story.  It was a moment  in which I realized I could not watch that show as long as I had caregivers in my house.  I lived in a different place than I had before, I had women taking care of my husband who had very different views of the world, and that even a simple thing like watching a television show could render our situation untenable. I could have stood on principle, that in my own home I could watch what I wanted, and I think the show had much to say that was worth watching, and yet I could not.  I could watch all the blood and guts and violence in the world, should I wish to do so, but that show alone had a powerful potential to change perceptions, and therefore harm my ability to care for George.

 

But that moment is not the entire book.  I ended up agreeing with some of Nimoy's perceptions and disagreeing with others.  The young Anna shows a certain flatness and lack of emotional depth, not due to a failure of the writer's but simply as a part of her character.  She is very inwardly-drawn and reserved, although for a brief period, during her love-affair, she opens up in different ways.  There is evidence from the beginning however that her relationship with Leo will never work, that this is not who she is, so the subsequent shutting down is not surprising.  Of course the story is also told from Anna's perspective, as a reflection on the past.  There is some small comfort in that, in this story which is a modern tragedy and in which there is no true happy ending.  Although Anna's voice is a quiet voice, there are hints, not insignificant hints, peppered throughout, that she has not completely withdrawn again, that she has in fact begun to find herself through this terrible story, and all is not completely lost.  Could things have been different?  Could Anna have stood on principle and not backed down?  Perhaps.  But that is not the story being told; although it may have been a more satisfying story, I suspect it would have also been less significant.  The reader is left, puzzling over a world that will never be the same, and not, perhaps as it could have been (I refuse to say "should"), in short, life.

 

 

 

It seems like ages since I have done a book post.  Well, truthfully it seems like I haven't really been reading at all, even though, in fact, I have.  But my approach has been scattered, as it seems much of life has been the last few weeks.  I miss that sense of focus.

 

To that end, I finally finished reading Kissinger: The Idealist 1923-1968.  It is a stunning book, and I read most of it in a concentrated and thoughtful way, at least until I got to 1968, when I put it aside.  This was not really intentional.  It was more that my life was scattered, and therefore my mind was scattered, and Kissinger simply eluded my ability to concentrate.  It was only in the last few days that I was able to return to the book and read the concluding chapters.

 

I highly recommend this book if one is at all interested in  20th century history or US foreign policy, regardless of what one may think of Kissinger himself.  It seems that he is a person about whom many people hold very strong views, opinions that often seem to veer into extremes.  It is my experience that such views often say as much, or more, about the opinion holder as about the object of said opinion.  But it is also true that we want to simplify, to make things clear and easy on our minds and consciences, and humans are rarely that simple.  So I maintain my stance.  Regardless of what you think about Kissinger, understanding his role in US foreign policy is critical in understanding who we are, as a country involved in foreign policy, today. Ferguson's aim in writing this, the first volume of Kissinger's biography, is in helping the reader understand how Henry Kissinger developed into the person he became.  And, like each of us, that process was not necessarily straightforward and was shaped by the world in which he lived and the people and events he encountered.  This book then, is not merely a biography of a man, but of a time, an age, if you will, and the beliefs, biases, and mindset that shaped and defined that age.  As such it is a book about history, about what happened, and what didn't happen, and therefore it is a book that can make us uncomfortable because, like all good history, it leads us to question our basic assumptions.

 

Darn it!  Would that we could all be simple.  Would that there could be a straightforward narrative, and we could imagine that we are marching on a steady path toward the best possible destiny.

 

 In the same way that our opinions about other people often reflect our own mindset more than anything else, so too for books.  I loved this book.  But the reasons I loved this book are probably more reflective of my own interests and biases than they are indicative of the subject matter, or the writing (which is good).  I loved this book for its sense of historicity, something very dear to my heart.  Perhaps this is simply because I am the daughter of a historian, and I did absorb something from my childhood, even though, at the time, I often rebelled at studying history.  I loved this book because of its focus on the time, on the milieu, on the idea, seemingly shared by both the author and Kissinger himself, that history is not just about facts and dates, and not just about what happened, although what happened is important.  But why something happened is also important.  What assumptions were made?  Why were certain decisions made?  What else could have happened?  Why didn't it?  History is about what happened, but like humans in general, our history is not simple.  Although what happened may be more important than what didn't happen, we need to be aware that what happened was not, usually is not, a given, and that at any given time there is usually more than one potential outcome.  Even more, the outcome that occurs may not have been the best outcome in the long-term sense, but it is the outcome that will be remembered.  If we don't understand this, we cannot understand history, and if we cannot understand history, and see our own history and accept it for all its goods and all its flaws, we cannot understand ourselves. 

 

And of course, if we do not at least attempt to understand ourselves, what hope is there?