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One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey Tyrannical Nurse Ratched rules her ward in an Oregon State mental hospital with a strict and unbending routine, unopposed by her patients, who remain cowed by mind-numbing medication and the threat of electric shock therapy. But her regime is disrupted by the arrival of McMurphy – the swaggering, fun-loving trickster with a devilish grin who resolves to oppose her rules on behalf of his fellow inmates. His struggle is seen through the eyes of Chief Bromden, a seemingly mute half-Indian patient who understands McMurphy’s heroic attempt to do battle with the powers that keep them imprisoned. Ken Kesey’s extraordinary first novel is an exuberant, ribald and devastatingly honest portrayal of the boundaries between sanity and madness. View high resolution

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey

Tyrannical Nurse Ratched rules her ward in an Oregon State mental hospital with a strict and unbending routine, unopposed by her patients, who remain cowed by mind-numbing medication and the threat of electric shock therapy. But her regime is disrupted by the arrival of McMurphy – the swaggering, fun-loving trickster with a devilish grin who resolves to oppose her rules on behalf of his fellow inmates. His struggle is seen through the eyes of Chief Bromden, a seemingly mute half-Indian patient who understands McMurphy’s heroic attempt to do battle with the powers that keep them imprisoned. Ken Kesey’s extraordinary first novel is an exuberant, ribald and devastatingly honest portrayal of the boundaries between sanity and madness.
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The Coming Insurrection by The Invisible Committee “Thirty years of “crisis,” mass unemployment, and flagging growth, and they still want us to believe in the economy…. We have to see that the economy is itself the crisis. It’s not that there’s not enough work, it’s that there is too much of it.” The Coming Insurrection is an eloquent call to arms arising from the recent waves of social contestation in France and Europe. Written by the anonymous Invisible Committee in the vein of Guy Debord—and with comparable elegance—it has been proclaimed a manual for terrorism by the French government (who recently arrested its alleged authors). One of its members more adequately described the group as “the name given to a collective voice bent on denouncing contemporary cynicism and reality.” The Coming Insurrection is a strategic prescription for an emergent war-machine capable of “spreading anarchy and live communism.”Written in the wake of the riots that erupted throughout the Paris suburbs in the fall of 2005 and presaging more recent riots and general strikes in France and Greece, The Coming Insurrection articulates a rejection of the official Left and its reformist agenda, aligning itself instead with the younger, wilder forms of resistance that have emerged in Europe around recent struggles against immigration control and the “war on terror.”Hot-wired to the movement of ‘77 in Italy, its preferred historical reference point, The Coming Insurrection formulates an ethics that takes as its starting point theft, sabotage, the refusal to work, and the elaboration of collective, self-organized life forms. It is a philosophical statement that addresses the growing number of those—in France, in the United States, and elsewhere—who refuse the idea that theory, politics, and life are separate realms. View high resolution

The Coming Insurrection by The Invisible Committee

“Thirty years of “crisis,” mass unemployment, and flagging growth, and they still want us to believe in the economy…. We have to see that the economy is itself the crisis. It’s not that there’s not enough work, it’s that there is too much of it.”

The Coming Insurrection is an eloquent call to arms arising from the recent waves of social contestation in France and Europe. Written by the anonymous Invisible Committee in the vein of Guy Debord—and with comparable elegance—it has been proclaimed a manual for terrorism by the French government (who recently arrested its alleged authors). One of its members more adequately described the group as “the name given to a collective voice bent on denouncing contemporary cynicism and reality.” The Coming Insurrection is a strategic prescription for an emergent war-machine capable of “spreading anarchy and live communism.”Written in the wake of the riots that erupted throughout the Paris suburbs in the fall of 2005 and presaging more recent riots and general strikes in France and Greece, The Coming Insurrection articulates a rejection of the official Left and its reformist agenda, aligning itself instead with the younger, wilder forms of resistance that have emerged in Europe around recent struggles against immigration control and the “war on terror.”Hot-wired to the movement of ‘77 in Italy, its preferred historical reference point, The Coming Insurrection formulates an ethics that takes as its starting point theft, sabotage, the refusal to work, and the elaboration of collective, self-organized life forms. It is a philosophical statement that addresses the growing number of those—in France, in the United States, and elsewhere—who refuse the idea that theory, politics, and life are separate realms.

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Orientalism by Edward W. Said In this highly acclaimed work, Edward Said surveys the history and nature of Western attitudes towards the East, considering Orientalism as a powerful European ideological creation – a way for writers, philosophers and colonial administrators to deal with the ‘otherness’ of Eastern culture, customs and beliefs. He traces this view through the writings of Homer, Nerval and Flaubert, Disraeli and Kipling, whose imaginative depictions have greatly contributed to the West’s romantic and exotic picture of the Orient. In his new preface, Said examines the effect of continuing Western imperialism after recent events in Palestine, Afghanistan and Iraq. Orientalism by Edward Said is a cononical text of cultural studies in which he has challenged the concept of orientalism or the difference between east and west, as he puts it. He says that with the start of European colonization the Europeans came in contact with the lesser developed countries of the east. They found their civilization and culture very exotic, and established the science of orientalism, which was the study of the orientals or the people from these exotic civilization. Edward Said argues that the Europeans divided the world into two parts; the east and the west or the occident and the orient or the civilized and the uncivilized. This was totally an artificial boundary; and it was laid on the basis of the concept of them and us or theirs and ours. The Europeans used orientalism to define themselves. Some particular attributes were associated with the orientals, and whatever the orientals weren’t the occidents were. The Europeans defined themselves as the superior race compared to the orientals; and they justified their colonization by this concept. They said that it was their duty towards the world to civilize the uncivilized world. The main problem, however, arose when the Europeans started generalizing the attributes they associated with orientals, and started portraying these artificial characteristics associated with orientals in their western world through their scientific reports, literary work, and other media sources. What happened was that it created a certain image about the orientals in the European mind and in doing that infused a bias in the European attitude towards the orientals. This prejudice was also found in the orientalists (scientist studying the orientals); and all their scientific research and reports were under the influence of this. The generalized attributes associated with the orientals can be seen even today, for example, the Arabs are defined as uncivilized people; and Islam is seen as religion of the terrorist. “So far as the United States seems to be concerned, it is only a slight overstatement to say that Muslims and Arabs are essentially seen as either oil suppliers or potential terrorists. Very little of the detail, the human density, the passion of Arab-Moslem life has entered the awareness of even those people whose profession it is to report the Arab world. What we have instead is a series of crude, essentialized caricatures of the Islamic world presented in such a way as to make that world vulnerable to military aggression.” —Edward W. Said View high resolution

Orientalism by Edward W. Said

In this highly acclaimed work, Edward Said surveys the history and nature of Western attitudes towards the East, considering Orientalism as a powerful European ideological creation – a way for writers, philosophers and colonial administrators to deal with the ‘otherness’ of Eastern culture, customs and beliefs. He traces this view through the writings of Homer, Nerval and Flaubert, Disraeli and Kipling, whose imaginative depictions have greatly contributed to the West’s romantic and exotic picture of the Orient. In his new preface, Said examines the effect of continuing Western imperialism after recent events in Palestine, Afghanistan and Iraq.

Orientalism by Edward Said is a cononical text of cultural studies in which he has challenged the concept of orientalism or the difference between east and west, as he puts it. He says that with the start of European colonization the Europeans came in contact with the lesser developed countries of the east. They found their civilization and culture very exotic, and established the science of orientalism, which was the study of the orientals or the people from these exotic civilization.

Edward Said argues that the Europeans divided the world into two parts; the east and the west or the occident and the orient or the civilized and the uncivilized. This was totally an artificial boundary; and it was laid on the basis of the concept of them and us or theirs and ours. The Europeans used orientalism to define themselves. Some particular attributes were associated with the orientals, and whatever the orientals weren’t the occidents were. The Europeans defined themselves as the superior race compared to the orientals; and they justified their colonization by this concept. They said that it was their duty towards the world to civilize the uncivilized world. The main problem, however, arose when the Europeans started generalizing the attributes they associated with orientals, and started portraying these artificial characteristics associated with orientals in their western world through their scientific reports, literary work, and other media sources. What happened was that it created a certain image about the orientals in the European mind and in doing that infused a bias in the European attitude towards the orientals. This prejudice was also found in the orientalists (scientist studying the orientals); and all their scientific research and reports were under the influence of this. The generalized attributes associated with the orientals can be seen even today, for example, the Arabs are defined as uncivilized people; and Islam is seen as religion of the terrorist.

“So far as the United States seems to be concerned, it is only a slight overstatement to say that Muslims and Arabs are essentially seen as either oil suppliers or potential terrorists. Very little of the detail, the human density, the passion of Arab-Moslem life has entered the awareness of even those people whose profession it is to report the Arab world. What we have instead is a series of crude, essentialized caricatures of the Islamic world presented in such a way as to make that world vulnerable to military aggression.” —Edward W. Said

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John Jeremiah Sullivan on Reading

“I want to be an educated, well-read, cultured, critically thinking person but need some stuff to read,” asks an anonymous reader in the Ask The Paris Review section. The letter and the response from the Paris Review to this cry for help are bellow:

Dear Paris Review,

I live in the deep south and was raised in a religious cult.

Still with me?

Okay. I’m attempting to throw off the shackles of my religious upbringing and become an intelligent well-informed adult. My primary source of rebellion thus far has been movies. I would watch a Fellini movie and then feel suddenly superior to my friends and family because they only watched movies in their native tongue (trust me I know how pathetic this is). My main question involves my reading selections. Obviously, I have stumbled upon your publication and am aware of its status as the primary literary periodical in English. Also, I have a brand-new subscription to the New York Review of Books, since it is apparently the intellectual center of the English-speaking universe. I am not in an M.F.A. program or living in Brooklyn working on the Great American Kindle Single, I’m just a working-class guy trying to take part in the conversation that all the smart people are having. This brings me to my question: What books should I read? There are so many books out there worth reading, that I literally don’t know where to start. To give you some background info: I was not raised as a reader and was not taught any literature in the Christian high school that I attended. What kinds of books do I like? My answer to that would be movies. I’m desperate to start some kind of grand reading plan that will educate me about the world but don’t know where to start. The classics? Which ones? Modern stuff? Should I alternate one classic with one recent book? How much should I read fiction? How much should I read nonfiction? I went to college but it was for nursing, so I have never been taught anything about reading by anybody.

I realize this stuff may be outside of your comfort zone, as most of the advice questions seem to be from aspiring writers or college-educated people. Please believe me when I say that I am out of touch with the modern world because of a very specific religious cult. I want to be an educated, well-read, cultured, critically thinking person but need some stuff to read. Before I end this letter, I’ll provide an example of just how out of touch I am: you know how “Ms.” is the non-sexist way to refer to a woman, and that “Mrs.” is sexist? Yeah, I just found out about that. I’m twenty-five.

Dear DODS,

What kind of soulless freak could fail to answer your call? Your intelligence glows through your professed ignorance (as does the authenticity of “a very specific religious cult”). That sounds like an educationally less-than-ideal but, in other ways, fascinating childhood. My only piece of advice before recommending some titles would be: don’t fall for the inferiority/superiority racket. We’re not on a ladder here. We’re on a web. Right now you’re experiencing a desire to become more aware of and sensitive to its other strands. That feeling you’re having is culture. Whatever feeds that, go with it. And never forget that well-educated people pretend to know on average at least two-thirds more books than they’ve actually read.

A place to start is with Guy Davenport’s nonfiction collections, Every Force Evolves a Form, The Geography of the Imagination, and The Hunter Gracchus (with more pieces in The Death of Picasso). You’ll learn an enormous amount from these essays and sketches, but almost without realizing, because they give off the pleasure of great stories. Read the title essay in The Hunter Gracchus (about Kafka and the way symbols can take on a life of their own), and see if it isn’t as stimulating and creepy as the last good movie you saw.

Come up with a system of note-taking that you can use in your reading. It’s okay if it evolves. You can write in the margins, or keep a reading notebook (my preference) where you transcribe passages you like, with your own observations, and mark down the names of other, unfamiliar writers, books you’ve seen mentioned (Guy D. alone will give you a notebook full of these). Follow those notes to decide your next reading. That’s how you’ll create your own interior library. Now do that for the rest of your life and die knowing you’re still massively ignorant. (I wouldn’t trade it!)

Read My Ántonia, and then read everything else by Willa Cather. Inside her novels you’ll find it impossible to doubt that high enjoyment and extreme depth can go together. The most difficult art.

Read Isak Dinesen’s Seven Gothic Tales. I’m saying that randomly, because it seems right, and to approve the spirit of randomness.

If you get into a writer, go all the way and check out everything he/she has written. This summer I fell into a Defoe hole. Started with the major stuff, the best novels and the good journalism, and then read everything down to the poems and the tedious political pamphlets, since by that point I was equally interested in him as a human being and wanted to have as accurate a map of the inside of his brain as possible. His is one of the minds that helped shape the modern world—we’re literally still telling his stories—so there’s a vital interest. I read Maximilian Novak’s super-solid biography of him, Master of Fictions. That sort of questy reading ends up enriching your experience of each individual book and piece, and it lends a sense of adventure to the whole business, which after all involves a lot of lying down or sitting on your ass.

Borges and Denis Johnson—anything by either. Edith Wharton’s story “The Young Gentlemen.” (Random, random.) Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, and then his poems if you’re feeling spry. Find on the Web and buy an old paperback copy of the Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine–edited anthology Six Centuries of Great Poetry (a book for life). Read the next two things I’m going to read and then see how you like them: Grant’s Memoirs and Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle. Read Nabokov’s Speak, Memory and Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

Books that got me kick-started were the great modernist biographies, especially Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era and Richard Ellmann’s life of James Joyce. Read those two books and you’ll have a decent-size grid on which to plot the rest of your reading. I’m somehow moved to spurt out, Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World. People have been writing about Shakespeare for half a millennium, and the very best of it just happened.

Ignore all of this and read the next cool-looking book you see lying around. It’s not the where-you-start so much as the that-you-don’t-stop. I was reading Phoenix Force novels until I was like thirteen. These days a lot of people I know are into Murakami. I should have said more novels. If it’s by a Russian, read it.
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Incidentally, I use the word reader very loosely. Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader. And I shall tell you why. When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation. When we look at a painting we do not have to move our eyes in a special way even if, as in a book, the picture contains elements of depth and development. The element of time does not really enter in a first contact with a painting. In reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it. We have no physical organ (as we have the eye in regard to a painting) that takes in the whole picture and then can enjoy its details. But at a second, or third, or fourth reading we do, in a sense, behave towards a book as we do towards a painting. However, let us not confuse the physical eye, that monstrous masterpiece of evolution, with the mind, an even more monstrous achievement. A book, no matter what it is—a work of fiction or a work of science (the boundary line between the two is not as clear as is generally believed)—a book of fiction appeals first of all to the mind. The mind, the brain, the top of the tingling spine, is, or should be, the only instrument used upon a book.
— Vladimir Nabokov on what makes a good reader

(Source: dashakay, via litglutton)

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Excerpt from They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45” by Milton Mayer

“What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it. This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter. […] To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it—please try to believe me—unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.

(Source: sunrec, via sunrec)
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A Night in Arzamas

How Tolstoy’s obsession with mortality became a teachable moment.

In 1869, just after he finished War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy experienced a profound spiritual crisis as the result of an incident during a journey through the city of Arzamas, which is on the Tyosha River about 250 miles east of Moscow. As he described it in his unfinished story Notes of a Madman (so titled because Tolstoy was convinced his readers would find the tale implausible), a few hours after midnight he awakened “seized by despair, fear and terror such as [he had] never before experienced.” After asking himself what there was to be afraid of, none other than Death himself answered, “I am here.” Tolstoy, confronting the inescapability of his own death, panicked and raged against its power.

That evening stayed with Tolstoy for the rest of his life; he became permanently preoccupied with mortality. Writing his Confessions a decade later, Tolstoy would ask: “Is there any meaning in my life that will not be destroyed by my inevitably approaching death?” “He engaged in long and laborious meditations”, wrote Tolstoy’s long-suffering wife, Sonya. “Often he said his brain hurt him, some painful process was going on inside it, everything was over for him, it was time for him to die.”

Tolstoy’s “Arzamas Horror”, as the Russian dramatist Maxim Gorky called it, also served as the basis for his masterful novella, The Death of Ivan Ilych. In this slim book, a 45-year-old Russian judge realizes he is dying and acknowledges that he has wasted his life attaining comfort and status. While outwardly appearing successful, Ilych suffers from an unhappy marriage, a meaningless career and a selfish existence. “Ivan Ilych’s life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible”, reads one typically devastating Tolstoyan line.

Melancholy as this is, the most harrowing parts of the story lie in Ilych’s terror at confronting his own mortality, much as Tolstoy had years earlier in the dark morning hours in Arzamas. Perhaps nowhere else in all of world literature is the sheer horror of the fact of death laid so bare: “He would go to his study, lie down, and again remain alone with it. Face to face with it, and there was nothing to be done with it. Only look at it and go cold.”

(Source: sunrec)
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“The men as they rode turned black in the sun from the blood on their clothes and their faces and then paled slowly in the rising dust until they assumed once more the color of the land through which they passed.” If what we call “horror” can be seen as including any literature that has dark, horrific subject matter, then Blood Meridian is the best horror novel ever written. An epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America’s westward expansion, Blood Meridian brilliantly subverts the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the “wild west.” Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into the nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving.  View high resolution

“The men as they rode turned black in the sun from the blood on their clothes and their faces and then paled slowly in the rising dust until they assumed once more the color of the land through which they passed.” If what we call “horror” can be seen as including any literature that has dark, horrific subject matter, then Blood Meridian is the best horror novel ever written. An epic novel of the violence and depravity that attended America’s westward expansion, Blood Meridian brilliantly subverts the conventions of the Western novel and the mythology of the “wild west.” Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, it traces the fortunes of the Kid, a fourteen-year-old Tennesseean who stumbles into the nightmarish world where Indians are being murdered and the market for their scalps is thriving. 

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Bibliopocalypse Bullshit

If you’re a literature lover, you’ve probably grown weary of false prophets proclaiming The End of the Book. It’s easy to shake your head and smirk at the world’s December 21st doomsday preoccupations, but rumors of the publishing apocalypse have bombarded the literary world for a long time now, and such discussions still make us tense with worry.

The Four Horsemen of the Bibliopocalypse came galloping down years ago. They rode their brimstone-snorting steeds with a blazing fury, each one more frightening then the last. First there was Radio, and then came Film, TV, and finally—that fearful, ever-morphing chimera, Internet.

Suddenly the nightmarish paranoia of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit-451 became depressingly naive: who would burn books if no one even bothered to read them?

As an undergraduate searching for a job in publishing, believe me—I’m nervous. In the months before Y2K, wild-eyed neurotics (including my fairly rational parents) stockpiled jugs of water, lined their pantry shelves with SPAM, and stacked sardine tins into squat, shiny pyramids. Our family probably had enough dried bean varieties to create a full-scale modge-podge of Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.

Who can blame them? Don’t we book lovers suffer similar hysterics when we hear prophecies of the literary end-times?

If you’re panicky, like me, you just might be another juvenile, aspiring writer, terrified that you’ve missed out on the literary lifestyle you’ve idealized for the past two decades, ever since you mouthed your first intelligible word, “book.” You’re on the edge of tossing out your literary delusions and your late-night, idealism-soaked desires to write The Great American Novel. This very afternoon you’ll get serious! You’ll start submitting your sparse resumes and bland cover letters to the kind of respectable jobs your parents always wanted you to have. The kind of job that promises a stable family life and dental insurance. Imagine it, writer. You might be a lawyer. Or a banker. Or a consultant. You might be about to make yourself miserable for the rest of your life—but don’t do it. Not yet.

Then again, maybe you’re not a writer at all. Maybe you’re a reader. You won’t panic, but you’ll begin to feel nostalgia creeping over your skin, like lichen over an old gravestone. In a moment of introspection, you’ll consider how it must have felt to watch the first automobiles roll down a city street, how soon they would replace the carriages. Out of everyone, you would have been the one to miss the horses. You use to take a giddy pleasure in stroking their velvet noses, in the hot flush of their breath against your palm. One day you’ll wander into a used bookstore, if that still exists where you live, and you’ll drift through the dusty quiet. The place has the hospice-ward hush of a nursing home. You’ll say hello to the books, touch your fingertips to the papery skin of their pages, and whisper kind, soft things into their yellowed spines. The books are frail strangers, but you think you might be able to save one, take one home and treat it gently. After all, it doesn’t have long for this world.
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Richard Beeston on Spies, Lies and Foreign Correspondents FiveBooks interviews asks writers, academics, and experts to list recommended books on a given topic. // The former foreign correspondent takes us on a gloriously anecdotal ramble through the history of war reporting, espionage and journalistic half-truths, and recalls his encounters and friendship with “the third man” Kim Philby. Your first book is Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. Could this be the handbook for a budding foreign correspondent? I think it is the best description of a foreign correspondent’s career, and I doubt it will ever be bettered. It’s still very relevant to this rather ridiculous life. When I was covering the early days of the Congo, a group of us were there, maybe five or six correspondents, and somebody had a battered copy of Scoop that we passed around. It just read straight – the life we were living was hardly exaggerated. Waugh had a history in journalism, didn’t he? Yes, although he wasn’t himself a particularly good correspondent. Though his experience is why the book felt so real and believable. He went first to Ethiopia for the coronation of Haile Selassie and was then sent back to cover the Abyssinian war. Did Waugh model William Boot, aka ‘Boot of the Beast’, on anyone in particular? My editor at the Telegraph, Bill Deedes, had been a very young correspondent, 22, forThe Morning Post. When he was sent out to Abyssinia he arrived at the railway station with an amazing amount of equipment – weighing 600lb. It’s that naivety, this theme of the innocent abroad, in the book. Of course Bill Deedes has always fended off suggestions that he was the inspiration for William Boot, but the ‘Beast’ was the Daily Express. Is there much contempt from Waugh towards the characters? I don’t think it’s contempt, but he has this fantastic ability for satire. I don’t think he ever wanted to be a foreign correspondent in particular but somehow he managed to sum up the thing in a brilliant manner. One rather humorous character, a maverick correspondent called Wenlock Jakes, could write stories without being there. Waugh writes, ‘Jakes went out to cover a revolution in one of the Balkan capitals. He overslept in his carriage, woke up in the wrong station…went straight to a hotel and cabled off a thousand word story about barricades in the streets, flaming churches… They were pretty surprised getting a story like that.’ Was this common practice? There was a famous occasion when the Dalai Lama was on the run from the Chinese, and a group of journalists, including a Daily Mail correspondent, rented a plane. They flew as far as the Indian Tibetan front and were turned back by the Indian air force. Everybody was very depressed that they couldn’t get a story but this Daily Mail man wasn’t worried. He said, ‘It’s all right I’ve already written mine. I’ve seen the Dalai Lama on horseback, threading through the valleys. In the background you could see the temples ablaze.’ He’d written the whole thing before he’d even taken off! Your second book is Eastern Approaches by Fitzroy Maclean. Maclean was one of the great characters of the 20th century. He was a junior diplomat in Moscow in the late 30s and then went on to join the SAS. During the war he kidnapped a Persian general who had collaborated with the Nazis. He was also a friend of Ian Fleming and partly an inspiration for the James Bond character. His account of the Soviet Union in the 30s was quite brilliant. A lot of journalists in those days were making excuses for communism, suggesting it was a hope for the future and were putting the best possible spin on it. But his account showed the whole hopelessness of the Soviet empire – its incompetence and its evilness. He did a brilliant account of the great Stalin purge trials. The mock trials? Yes, when most of the leading communists of the day were destroyed by Stalin. That whole bleak period was brilliantly described by Maclean. He showed up the hollowness and incompetence of the whole Soviet system. This is a very carefully worded account of life in those early days after the revolution, one of the first exposés of that system. He tells one particular story when he was a young diplomat. He went to a cocktail party and had a relationship with a young Russian ballet dancer who then disappeared. He had a phone call from her mother saying she’d disappeared and that she’d never forgive him. Chilling. I met him when I was correspondent in Moscow; he was then in his late 70s and he was still writing and taking pictures. The Battle of the Bundu covers a more forgotten chapter of history. Could you shed some light on it? Miller’s book is the most accurate and detailed account of this little known part of the First World War. A fascinating epic about an amazing German general, von Lettow-Vorbeck. He was in his early 40s when he arrived in what is now Tanzania, in those days German East Africa. It’s an account of his campaign against the Allies, which lasted throughout the entire war. In fact he was still fighting after the armistice, because no one was able to get through to him there. Against some serious odds? Against amazing odds! There was no way to get reinforcements or supplies; he was surrounded by British East Africa, the Congo and the Royal Navy. With a small force of German officers and loyal native troops he managed to hold up something like a quarter of a million Allied forces. He became a hero, not only of the Germans but of the British. There was little chance of Germany being able to communicate with him, but as he got more promotions and iron crosses the British would pass this through the lines to let him know how well he was doing. It was the most extraordinary campaign. Why has this been forgotten? There was just so much going on. This was very much a small affair, compared to what was happening ­– it rather got ignored. He certainly became a famous name to all the British and South Africans who fought him. In fact in 1929 he was invited to London as a guest of honour at an anniversary dinner for British East Africa expeditionary forces. In the 30s, Hitler wanted to appoint him as German ambassador to Britain. But he decided that the Nazis were a disaster and he turned Hitler down. He was then on their blacklist and had a very hard time of it. But after that war, in 1953, he came back, aged 83 years old, to be welcomed by the British authorities and met some of his old comrades. It’s very touching. View high resolution

Richard Beeston on Spies, Lies and Foreign Correspondents

FiveBooks interviews asks writers, academics, and experts to list recommended books on a given topic. // The former foreign correspondent takes us on a gloriously anecdotal ramble through the history of war reporting, espionage and journalistic half-truths, and recalls his encounters and friendship with “the third man” Kim Philby.

Your first book is Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. Could this be the handbook for a budding foreign correspondent?

I think it is the best description of a foreign correspondent’s career, and I doubt it will ever be bettered. It’s still very relevant to this rather ridiculous life. When I was covering the early days of the Congo, a group of us were there, maybe five or six correspondents, and somebody had a battered copy of Scoop that we passed around. It just read straight – the life we were living was hardly exaggerated.

Waugh had a history in journalism, didn’t he?

Yes, although he wasn’t himself a particularly good correspondent. Though his experience is why the book felt so real and believable. He went first to Ethiopia for the coronation of Haile Selassie and was then sent back to cover the Abyssinian war.

Did Waugh model William Boot, aka ‘Boot of the Beast’, on anyone in particular?

My editor at the Telegraph, Bill Deedes, had been a very young correspondent, 22, forThe Morning Post. When he was sent out to Abyssinia he arrived at the railway station with an amazing amount of equipment – weighing 600lb. It’s that naivety, this theme of the innocent abroad, in the book. Of course Bill Deedes has always fended off suggestions that he was the inspiration for William Boot, but the ‘Beast’ was the Daily Express.

Is there much contempt from Waugh towards the characters?

I don’t think it’s contempt, but he has this fantastic ability for satire. I don’t think he ever wanted to be a foreign correspondent in particular but somehow he managed to sum up the thing in a brilliant manner.

One rather humorous character, a maverick correspondent called Wenlock Jakes, could write stories without being there. Waugh writes, ‘Jakes went out to cover a revolution in one of the Balkan capitals. He overslept in his carriage, woke up in the wrong station…went straight to a hotel and cabled off a thousand word story about barricades in the streets, flaming churches… They were pretty surprised getting a story like that.’

Was this common practice?

There was a famous occasion when the Dalai Lama was on the run from the Chinese, and a group of journalists, including a Daily Mail correspondent, rented a plane. They flew as far as the Indian Tibetan front and were turned back by the Indian air force. Everybody was very depressed that they couldn’t get a story but this Daily Mail man wasn’t worried. He said, ‘It’s all right I’ve already written mine. I’ve seen the Dalai Lama on horseback, threading through the valleys. In the background you could see the temples ablaze.’ He’d written the whole thing before he’d even taken off!

Your second book is Eastern Approaches by Fitzroy Maclean.

Maclean was one of the great characters of the 20th century. He was a junior diplomat in Moscow in the late 30s and then went on to join the SAS. During the war he kidnapped a Persian general who had collaborated with the Nazis. He was also a friend of Ian Fleming and partly an inspiration for the James Bond character. His account of the Soviet Union in the 30s was quite brilliant. A lot of journalists in those days were making excuses for communism, suggesting it was a hope for the future and were putting the best possible spin on it. But his account showed the whole hopelessness of the Soviet empire – its incompetence and its evilness. He did a brilliant account of the great Stalin purge trials.

The mock trials?

Yes, when most of the leading communists of the day were destroyed by Stalin. That whole bleak period was brilliantly described by Maclean. He showed up the hollowness and incompetence of the whole Soviet system. This is a very carefully worded account of life in those early days after the revolution, one of the first exposés of that system. He tells one particular story when he was a young diplomat. He went to a cocktail party and had a relationship with a young Russian ballet dancer who then disappeared. He had a phone call from her mother saying she’d disappeared and that she’d never forgive him. Chilling. I met him when I was correspondent in Moscow; he was then in his late 70s and he was still writing and taking pictures.

The Battle of the Bundu covers a more forgotten chapter of history. Could you shed some light on it?

Miller’s book is the most accurate and detailed account of this little known part of the First World War. A fascinating epic about an amazing German general, von Lettow-Vorbeck. He was in his early 40s when he arrived in what is now Tanzania, in those days German East Africa. It’s an account of his campaign against the Allies, which lasted throughout the entire war. In fact he was still fighting after the armistice, because no one was able to get through to him there.

Against some serious odds?

Against amazing odds! There was no way to get reinforcements or supplies; he was surrounded by British East Africa, the Congo and the Royal Navy. With a small force of German officers and loyal native troops he managed to hold up something like a quarter of a million Allied forces. He became a hero, not only of the Germans but of the British. There was little chance of Germany being able to communicate with him, but as he got more promotions and iron crosses the British would pass this through the lines to let him know how well he was doing. It was the most extraordinary campaign.

Why has this been forgotten?

There was just so much going on. This was very much a small affair, compared to what was happening ­– it rather got ignored. He certainly became a famous name to all the British and South Africans who fought him. In fact in 1929 he was invited to London as a guest of honour at an anniversary dinner for British East Africa expeditionary forces. In the 30s, Hitler wanted to appoint him as German ambassador to Britain. But he decided that the Nazis were a disaster and he turned Hitler down. He was then on their blacklist and had a very hard time of it. But after that war, in 1953, he came back, aged 83 years old, to be welcomed by the British authorities and met some of his old comrades. It’s very touching.

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Currently Reading: 

The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa

Fernando Pessoa was many writers in one. He attributed his prolific writings to a wide range of alternate selves, each of which had a distinct biography, ideology, and horoscope. When he died in 1935, Pessoa left behind a trunk filled with unfinished and unpublished writings, among which were the remarkable pages that make up his posthumous masterpiece, The Book of Disquiet, an astonishing work that, in George Steiner’s words, “gives to Lisbon the haunting spell of Joyce’s Dublin or Kafka’s Prague.” In “The Book of Disquiet,” Pessoa came as close as he ever would to autobiography. The fragments that make up “The Book of Disquiet “record in disjunct entries a vast interior landscape and daily minutiae, making for a discontinuous, gently unhinged monologue in daybook form. A self-deprecating reflection on the sheer distance between the loftiness of feelings and the humdrum reality of life, The Book of Disquiet is one of the greatest works of the twentieth century and a classic of existentialist literature.

The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene

In a rare blend of scientific insight and writing as elegant as the theories it explains, Brian Greene, one of the world’s leading string theorists, peels away the layers of mystery surrounding string theory to reveal a universe that consists of 11 dimensions where the fabric of space tears and repairs itself, and all matter-from the smallest quarks to the most gargantuan supernovas-is generated by the vibrations of microscopically tiny loops of energy. Green uses everything from an amusement park ride to ants on a garden hose to illustrate the beautiful yet bizarre realities that modern physics is unveiling. Dazzling in its brilliance, unprecedented in its ability to both illuminate and entertain, The Elegant Universe is a tour de force of science writing-a delightful, lucid voyage through modern physics that brings us closer than ever to understanding how the universe works.

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My name’s Jon and I’m one of two new coordinators for the McGill Book Fair. We’re one of the biggest book fairs in Canada, with tens of thousands of books in every imaginable category, as well as records, CDs, and even some paintings this year. All proceeds go to scholarships and bursaries—last year, we raised $75,000. The fair has a strong base of support in Montreal, but it comes mostly from the more established elements at McGill and the surrounding area, and from people who drive in from out of town—professors, staff, alumni, and book dealers and collectors. With the exception of students who walk past our signs and poke their heads in, we don’t reach a lot of younger people or people outside of academia. Basically, we don’t serve nearly as broad a cross-section of society as we could, and I’m looking to change that this year. FIRST: Come to the sale! Tell your friends to come to the sale! Join our Facebook event! There really is something for everyone here, it’s all cheap as hell, and it’s held in one of Montreal’s coolest historic buildings, Redpath Hall. The sale takes place Tuesday, October 23 (13h-21h), Wednesday, October 24 (9h-21h), and Thursday, October 25 (9h-21h). Redpath Hall is just south of the Redpath Museum, just north of the Redpath-McLennan Library, and just east of rue McTavish, across from the Shatner building on McGill’s campus. SECOND: Volunteer for the sale! We’re still looking for a few volunteers, mostly just people to work at the doors directing people, as well as a few shelvers. If you’re free those days and want to help, send me an e-mail. We’ll figure out something that works with your schedule and you’ll have our eternal gratitude. THIRD: Take our books for free! After the sale, we’re left with thousands of books that don’t sell. With a few exceptions, we don’t end up saving these for the following year, but instead give them to charities, non-profits, and essentially anyone who is using them for a good cause. r/montreal being what it is, I’m sure there’s no shortage of organisations who could use books. You can come pick up just one category, or two, or ten, or anything in between. I will ask for some proof/assurance that you are, in fact, a non-profit (legal or otherwise), but otherwise, there’s no catch. The more you pick up, the less we throw out! FOURTH: Help us spread the word! If you’re a member of other lists, forums, blogs, et cetera whose readers would want to hear about the sale, do us a huge favour and pass it on. Again, eternal gratitude. E-mail me with any questions, or call/text/page/stalk me at (203) 448-6086. View high resolution

My name’s Jon and I’m one of two new coordinators for the McGill Book Fair. We’re one of the biggest book fairs in Canada, with tens of thousands of books in every imaginable category, as well as records, CDs, and even some paintings this year. All proceeds go to scholarships and bursaries—last year, we raised $75,000.

The fair has a strong base of support in Montreal, but it comes mostly from the more established elements at McGill and the surrounding area, and from people who drive in from out of town—professors, staff, alumni, and book dealers and collectors. With the exception of students who walk past our signs and poke their heads in, we don’t reach a lot of younger people or people outside of academia. Basically, we don’t serve nearly as broad a cross-section of society as we could, and I’m looking to change that this year.

FIRST: Come to the sale! Tell your friends to come to the sale! Join our Facebook event! There really is something for everyone here, it’s all cheap as hell, and it’s held in one of Montreal’s coolest historic buildings, Redpath Hall. The sale takes place Tuesday, October 23 (13h-21h), Wednesday, October 24 (9h-21h), and Thursday, October 25 (9h-21h). Redpath Hall is just south of the Redpath Museum, just north of the Redpath-McLennan Library, and just east of rue McTavish, across from the Shatner building on McGill’s campus.

SECOND: Volunteer for the sale! We’re still looking for a few volunteers, mostly just people to work at the doors directing people, as well as a few shelvers. If you’re free those days and want to help, send me an e-mail. We’ll figure out something that works with your schedule and you’ll have our eternal gratitude.

THIRD: Take our books for free! After the sale, we’re left with thousands of books that don’t sell. With a few exceptions, we don’t end up saving these for the following year, but instead give them to charities, non-profits, and essentially anyone who is using them for a good cause. r/montreal being what it is, I’m sure there’s no shortage of organisations who could use books. You can come pick up just one category, or two, or ten, or anything in between. I will ask for some proof/assurance that you are, in fact, a non-profit (legal or otherwise), but otherwise, there’s no catch. The more you pick up, the less we throw out!

FOURTH: Help us spread the word! If you’re a member of other lists, forums, blogs, et cetera whose readers would want to hear about the sale, do us a huge favour and pass it on. Again, eternal gratitude.

E-mail me with any questions, or call/text/page/stalk me at (203) 448-6086.

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The economy’s triumph as an independent power inevitably also spells its doom, for it has unleashed forces that must eventually destroy the economic necessity that was the unchanging basis of earlier societies. Replacing that necessity by the necessity of boundless economic development can only mean replacing the satisfaction of primary human needs, now met in the most summary manner, by a ceaseless manufacture of pseudo-needs, all of which come down in the end to just one — namely, the pseudo-need for the reign of an autonomous economy to continue. Such an economy irrevocably breaks all ties with authentic needs to the precise degree that it emerges from a social unconscious that was dependent on it without knowing it. ‘Whatever is conscious wears out. Whatever is unconscious remains unalterable. Once freed, however, surely this too must fall into ruins?’ (Freud).
— Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle
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Currently Reading:

“Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil” by Hannah Arendt

While living in Argentina in 1960, Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann was kidnapped and smuggled to Israel where he was put on trial for crimes against humanity. The New Yorker magazine sent Hannah Arendt to cover the trial. While covering the technical aspects of the trial, Arendt also explored the wider themes inherent in the trial, such as the nature of justice, the behavior of the Jewish leadership during the Nazi Régime, and, most controversially, the nature of Evil itself. Far from being evil incarnate, as the prosecution painted Eichmann, Arendt maintains that he was an average man, a petty bureaucrat interested only in furthering his career, and the evil he did came from the seductive power of the totalitarian state and an unthinking adherence to the Nazi cause. Indeed, Eichmann’s only defense during the trial was “I was just following orders.” Arendt’s analysis of the seductive nature of evil is a disturbing one. We would like to think that anyone who would perpetrate such horror on the world is different from us, and that such atrocities are rarities in our world. But the history of groups such as the Jews, Kurds, Bosnians, and Native Americans, to name but a few, seems to suggest that such evil is all too commonplace. In revealing Eichmann as the pedestrian little man that he was, Arendt shows us that the veneer of civilization is a thin one indeed.

“The Origin of Species” by Charles Darwin

On December 27, 1831, the young naturalist Charles Darwin left Plymouth Harbor aboard the HMS Beagle. For the next five years, he conducted research on plants and animals from around the globe, amassing a body of evidence that would culminate in one of the greatest discoveries in the history of mankind—the theory of evolution. Darwin presented his stunning insights in a landmark book that forever altered the way human beings view themselves and the world they live in. In The Origin of Species, he convincingly demonstrates the fact of evolution: that existing animals and plants cannot have appeared separately but must have slowly transformed from ancestral creatures. Most important, the book fully explains the mechanism that effects such a transformation: natural selection, the idea that made evolution scientifically intelligible for the first time. One of the few revolutionary works of science that is engrossingly readable, The Origin of Species not only launched the science of modern biology but also has influenced virtually all subsequent literary, philosophical, and religious thinking.

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Currently Reading: “The Society of the Spectacle” by Guy Debord Originally published in France in 1967, The Society of the Spectacle has since acquired a cult status. Credited by many as being the inspiration for the ideas generated by the events of May 1968 in France, Debord’s pitiless attack on commodity fetishism and its incrustation in the practices of everyday life continues to burn brightly in today’s age of satellite television and the soundbite. At the same time it was one of the most influential theoretical works for a wide range of political and revolutionary practice in the 1960s. Today, Debord’s work continues to be in the forefront of debates about the fate of consumer society and the operation of modern social power. In a sweeping revision of Marxist categories, the notion of the spectacle takes the problem of the commodity from the sphere of economics to a point at which the commodity as an image dominates not only economic exchange but the primary communicative and symbolic activity of all modern societies. Guy Debord was one of the most important participants in the activities associated with the Situationist International in the 1960s. Also an artist and filmmaker, he is the author of Memoires and Commentaires sur la société du spectacle. View high resolution

Currently Reading: “The Society of the Spectacle” by Guy Debord

Originally published in France in 1967, The Society of the Spectacle has since acquired a cult status. Credited by many as being the inspiration for the ideas generated by the events of May 1968 in France, Debord’s pitiless attack on commodity fetishism and its incrustation in the practices of everyday life continues to burn brightly in today’s age of satellite television and the soundbite. At the same time it was one of the most influential theoretical works for a wide range of political and revolutionary practice in the 1960s. Today, Debord’s work continues to be in the forefront of debates about the fate of consumer society and the operation of modern social power. In a sweeping revision of Marxist categories, the notion of the spectacle takes the problem of the commodity from the sphere of economics to a point at which the commodity as an image dominates not only economic exchange but the primary communicative and symbolic activity of all modern societies. Guy Debord was one of the most important participants in the activities associated with the Situationist International in the 1960s. Also an artist and filmmaker, he is the author of Memoires and Commentaires sur la société du spectacle.

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