Review: Holding Back the Sea: The Struggle for America's Natural Legacy on the Gulf Coast

Holding Back the Sea: The Struggle for America's Natural Legacy on the Gulf Coast by Christopher Hallowell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Hurricane Katrina was the eleventh named storm and fifth hurricane of the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season. It was the costliest natural disaster, as well as one of the five deadliest hurricanes, in the history of the United States. This book came out four years before that but warned of such a behemoth and the damage to be wrought on ineffectual levees and in the absence of shock absorbing marshes. Removing marshes for oil development and shipping traffic and ending up increasing the hurricane threat to southern Louisiana is only one of the revealing and cruel ironies in this book. One is the "TED" turtle excluder device net gaps forced on fishermen which apparently is more effective at reducing their effectiveness and thus income than in saving turtles, as also covered in Caught in the Net: The Conflict between Shrimpers and Conservationists. Also examined is how spray painting fur coats helped led to mass starvation and suffering of over-populated nutria: "Protestors may not have fully considered the effect of their actions. Not only did they weaken the fabric of the marsh; the protests and a sympathetic media and public exposed the animals to more suffering than leghold traps ever could. So prolific are nutria that their population explosions can end in either mass starvation or mass disease. That is what happened as a result of anti-fur efforts. Few sights are more pathetic that that of mud-bedraggled nutria-all skin and bones, and fur falling off in clumps-staggering to a certain death...the result of kind but misdirected hearts." PETA would also not be bullish on the Tabasco scion, author of The Alligator's Life History, who thought nothing of forcing an alligator puncture his own skull with own teeth biting into thick steel. Edward A. McIlhenny also was instrumental in spreading the marsh-destroying nutria, once a storm freed his breeding population.

A fascinating book on environmental degradation through mis-ordered priorities, neglect, and a lack of accountability and cogent vision.

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Review: Colder Than Hell: A Marine Rifle Company at Chosin Reservoir

Colder Than Hell: A Marine Rifle Company at Chosin Reservoir by Joseph R. Owen
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A crisp telling of the author's time against North Korean and Chinese troops in the bitter, below zero weather of the Korean conflict. The author recounts examples where grit and resolve and care for one's foxhold buddy overcame lack of prepartion, overwhelming odds and all too frequent dud explosives.

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Review: The Last Canadian

The Last Canadian by William C. Heine
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Born out of the Cold War and in tune with modern lit/film that sees the world wiped out by mysterious plagues. Like the "The Last Man on Earth" TV series, the supposed last man finds other rather quickly. This quickly spirals from wary encounters to surviving multiple nuclear attacks from Soviets who seek to capitalize on having wiped-out the population of the Americas with a designer plague. Main character Eugene Arnprior, an American engineer living in Montreal only just having acquired Canadian citizenship, is like a character out of a Jules Verne novel putting together random technology and resources to find solutions. The book was an easy and interesting read. It was released in the U.S. as Death Wind. With all its connections to current culture and a resurgent Soviet-like Russia, this book is ripe for a revival and maybe even truer film presentation than the 1998 movie "The Patriot".

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Review: Go Set a Watchman

Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Is it an abandoned first draft of To Kill a Mockingbird, or Harper Lee's long-desired sequel? Or is it a secret spirited away from a dim, elderly woman without protectors? There is much controversy on the publication of this novel. More controversy is made by readers seeing a beloved Atticus Finch because apparently he was co-opted by his own creator and transmogrified into a racist fiend. Reading some of those reviews, I wonder if some are more remembering the Gregory Peck silver screen depiction in a screenplay that amplified Atticus over the story of the children. Indeed, this was Scout's story, in narration and recollection, as is this work. Young Scout was misinformed, hard-headed, and self-assured in her precocious judgement. The adult Jean Louise has those aspects of her character and demands simple truths from old men confronted with a changing world as they seek to slow what they see as radical change afoot. The work is still about racism in America, like its sister volume, and still about Jean Louse. Since this adult Scout also splits her time with Maycomb and NYC it makes me feel the author's experience living in those two worlds. Crowded by internal monologues and rows with her father and uncle, there is less scope and plot here whch makes it feel like a lesser work, but still a very good read.

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Review: Food Rules: An Eater's Manual

Food Rules: An Eater's Manual by Michael Pollan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is an excellent Pollan reference, or if you don't want to dive into one of his longer works you get a summary of his recommendations. Each page is a pithy directive like "don't eat any food passed to you through a window", "eat less, mostly plants", "don't eat any cereal that change the color of milk", and "don't eat any food that is named the same in every language" (like Big Mac). After the rule, there is a paragraph or so of supporting details.

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Review: Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning

Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning by Timothy Snyder
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a fascinating approach to The Holocaust, as it is a political history more than a military one. The eventual recounting of moving fronts - not really the detail of individual battles - is focused on the Eastern Front and is the last third of the book. The morbid, if necessary and eye-opening, recounting of Holocaust atrocities individual and mass atrocities is in the last quarter, or so. If anything is less covered in content, it is the warning Snyder sees. This is a mere conclusion chapter conflating Lebensraum and stateless anarchy with issues of climate change, limited resources, and failed states from today's headlines.

What makes this work unique to those on the topic that I have read, its the deep and comparative analysis of the policy motivations of Germany, Poland, and Stalin's Russia. Germany sought to re-colonize by deportation, destruction, and destabilization of Europe's nations. "The epoch of statehood has come to an end", proclaimed German legal theorist Carl Schmitt. Poland, recovering from WWI sought a post-colonial world and thus the safety of being on in a community of nations under the rule of Law. Stalin was intra-colonial or self-colonial, redistributing the population of a greater, Soviet Russia about its vast landscape (p. 53). For Jews, only Poland had a positive impact. As part of exporting nationalism by supporting an independent Ukraine, etc. Poland actively supported such Zionist causes as The Irgun, a Zionist paramilitary organization that operated in Mandate Palestine between 1931 and 1948. Their arms were largely purchased from a willing Poland. In 1943 the Polish II Corps, release of many thousands of Poles from the Soviet Gulags, following the signing of the Polish-Russian Military Agreement on August 14, 1941, allowed for the creation of a Polish Army on Soviet soil, arrived in Palestine from Iraq. The British insisted that no Jewish units of the army be created. Eventually, many of the soldiers of Jewish origin that arrived with the army were released and allowed to stay in Palestine. One of them was Menachem Begin, whose arrival in Palestine created new-found expectations within the Irgun and the similar Betar. Begin had served as head of the Betar movement in Poland, thus Poland impetus was behind the impetus for Israel from its earliest conception as a post-Mandate reality.

Snyder also does much to explain how the memory and extremity of the Auschwitz distracts from the understanding the breadth and development of the extermination practices ("The Auschwitz Paradox"). That death camp was the third, final stage of a development from the open pit shootings in Lithuania and other mostly Eastern locales to asphyxiation from carbon monoxide fumes in trucks and fixed locations to finally Zyklon B and cremation.

It

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Review: Bat Chain Puller: Rock and Roll in the Age of Celebrity

Bat Chain Puller: Rock and Roll in the Age of Celebrity by Kurt Loder
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I want to not like this collection, just because part of me resent my teenage fixation on MTV. (Loder joined MTV in 1987 as the host of their flagship music news program, The Week in Rock. It was later expanded and renamed to MTV News in which he was an anchor and correspondent.) In these essays and interviews, most of which were originally published in Rolling Stone, MTV commentator Loder takes a look at popular culture in the 1980s, focusing on the celebrity industry and how various members of the rock culture have dealt with it. The gamut is those looking back on greater heights: Mick Jagger, Tina Turner, Cynda Lauper, Deborah Harry, and others. What I really like about this is his cogent praises on unsung heroes that deserved fame avoided, including Iggy Pop, Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart (hence the collection's title), and more. It's not just music icons here, Loder also covers artist Andy Warhol, actor Sean Connery, performance artist Laurie Anderson and even the fanzines and fans of grade-Z slasher movies. Loder defendes the purity of Bob Dylan and (against Republican co-option) Bruce Springsteen. Tina Turner then coming into mega stardom comes across with a gleam while Don Johnson still seems out of place, despite Loder's efforts. The post-fame medical woes of Ronnie Lane and the culmination of ZZ Top nicely fit in this compendium, which I have now been drawn to read twice.

Veteran and able narrators Stefan Rudnicki and Stephen Hoye take the role of interviewer and subject bringing life to the interview pieces as actual conversations.

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