A book which informed my entire world view, and still does. Tuchman posits the existance of folly, or the pursuit of public policy contrary to self-interest–-in other words, why nations keep shooting themselves in the foot. Certain criteria must be met for folly to exist, as follows: 1. It must have been perceived as counter-productive…
In 2009 I was asked to answer the Book Brahmins Questionnaire on Shelf Awareness. Never hard to get me talking about books I love, so I did, and here are their questions and my answers, lightly edited. On your nightstand now: The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson. I was raised in…
A book which informed my entire world view, and still does. Tuchman posits the existance of folly, or the pursuit of public policy contrary to self-interest–in other words, why nations keep shooting themselves in the foot. She uses the Trojans taking the Greek horse inside the walls of Troy as her template …the feasible alternative–that…
Read more It might be time to reread this book, but then I think it always is.
A book which informed my entire world view, and still does. Tuchman posits the existance of folly, or the pursuit of public policy contrary to self-interest–in other words, why nations keep shooting themselves in the foot. She uses the Trojans taking the Greek horse inside the walls of Troy as her template …the feasible alternative–that…
Read more A book which informed my entire world view, and still does.
Theology being the work of males, original sin was traced to the female. –Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror Read more of my favorite quotes on Goodreads here.
Folly’s appearance is independent of era or locality; it is timeless and universal, although the habits and beliefs of a particular time and place determine the form it takes. It is unrelated to type of regime: monarchy, oligarchy and democracy produce it equally. Nor is it peculiar to nation or class. The working class as…
Misgovernment is of four kinds, often in combination. They are: 1) tyranny or oppression…2) excessive ambition…3) incompetence or decadence…and finally 4) folly or perversity. This book is concerned with the last in a specific manifestation; this is, the pursuit of policy contrary to the self-interest of the constituency or state involved. To qualify as folly…
Read more Alternative title: Why Nations Keep Shooting Themselves in the Foot
Paul Fussell died in 2012. Many obituaries have been written, all worth reading (The Guardian's here and the New York Times' here).
I tend to read by subject. I'll travel to France, say, and when I get home I'm reading Lunch in Paris, The Greater Journey and My Life in France. I get home from Turkey and suddenly I've got books about Turkey backing up on the Kindle app on my iPhone, Ataturk, Birds Without Wings, The Oracle of Stamboul, A Fez of the Heart.
So when I heard the news about Paul Fussell, I was transported instantly back to that year that I was reading about World War II. Cornelius Ryan's The Longest Day, A Bridge Too Far, and The Last Battle led me to Bill Mauldin's The Brass Ring, everything by Ernie Pyle and Stilwell and the American Experience in China. (Reading really is the true perpetual motion machine.)
So today, I'm remembering Paul Fussell, who wrote about a different kind of war. The Guardian said it best:
The US writer Paul Fussell's 1975 book The Great War and Modern Memory was, according to the British military historian John Keegan, revolutionary. Fussell, in what he called "an elegaic commentary", shaped a picture of the horrors of the first world war, and the cold stupidity of its leaders, made more trenchant by his own experiences in the second world war. He also used the writings of Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon and others to show how the romanticising of the war and its heroes provided the creative spark for modernism, and the sensibility of disillusion and distrust of authority that characterised the so-called "lost generation".
(And of course after reading The Great War and Modern Memory I had to look up Rupert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon, who led me to Wilfred Owen and Randall Jarrell. You want to talk about the glory of war? Go read Jarrell's "The Death of the Ball-Turret Gunner" first.)
I'm a huge Barbara Tuchman fan, but I read Fussell before I read Tuchman, and Fussell colored my view of World War I so strongly that Tuchman's WWI books are my least favorites.
I remember particularly Fussell's Thank God for the Atom Bomb. The title essay is the grunt's eye view of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The title comes from a line from another book by another author, Goodbye, Darkness by William Manchester, another grunt's eye view of the war in the Pacific.
Sacrifice takes on a different meaning for you, when you're the sacrifice.
In a 1997 interview in The Atlantic , Fussell said
I had an abusive letter just yesterday that objected very much to my "lack of patriotism" and my willingness to traduce the United States. I don't think I do that at all. I like the United States so much that I wish it would grow up.
Me, too.
# Permanent link to Memorial Day Reads
“Theology being the work of males, original sin was traced to the female.”
I was a guest on Coffee Table on KBBI this morning, keeping company with Shady Grove Oliver and Terry Rensel as we talked about our favorite reads with people who call in. It was a blast, as always–thanks, guys!–and without further ado, here’s the books we talked about on the air. Caroline Cow Woman of…
