Out of the way

Book number 22:

The Spiritual Tourist. Mick Brown

Gregory gave me this. It is basically a journalist's exploration of eastern mystic religion, mostly as offered to westerners. Someone who hadn't followed the hippie trail of sandals, Kathmandu, pot, and maybe catching up with Charles Sobrahj in the early 70s has another look at it in the 90's, prompted by a couple of chance meetings. A few of the places he goes seem to engender something real - the time spent with a tibetan Lama, a spanish boy who is recognised as the reincarnation of a priest from Tibet, and a meeting with an Indian woman living in Germany. Others come in for nothing but scorn (including the Bhagwan, a figure I remember from the 80's who led a cult mostly based as far as I could tell on free sex and collecting expensive cars. At the time he was represented by a woman called Sheela, who I still remember answering a question "what can I say? Tough Titties" - although I forget the question. Apparently the guy is dead now, but his books, written under the name of "Osho", are still very widely available). But most are placed somewhere in between, with the author apparently never quite able to believe them completely, nor able to convince himself that they are simply charlatans. Like the time spent by the author that is chronicled in the book, it was an interesting diversion although it didn't lead me to any particular Nirvana.

Number 23:

A book called Street Boys (I think) by Lorenzo Someone-or-other-starting-with-C (It sounds Italian. But so does Nino Culotta, which is a pseudonym for a bloke with a very Irish name). A war novel, about a brave heroic american, a loner who is in Naples in 1943 when the Nazis decide to destroy it. And a band of kids, led by a brave 16-year-old boy trying to find his way, after his family are killed... with the help of a gutsy young woman, and her drunken father who recovers his wits enough to offer wisdom and leadership. Of course, they manage to triumph over a crack Panzer division (and blow up a fuel tanker), as the initially honourable Germans revert to their evil win-at-all-costs mentality, itself used by the amazingly clever heroes to lure them into ever more effective traps in an orgy of violence. Almost everyone ends up dead - the evil Nazis as they deserve, the noble Italian boys and girls in heroic defence of their friends, and the American in some off-stage event after everything is over.

Really, it was totally forgettable rubbish of the kind I used to read before I discovered the equally pointless, but slightly more realistic, Sven Hassel, at the age of about 13. If you aren't closely in touch with your inner schoolboy you might not find him worth reading anymore either. And if you are the responsible parent of a schoolboy you should probably steer him away from such sex-and-violence-and-profanity-laden pulp fiction to something altogether more inspriational and noble-minded. He'll find the rubbish in a library or bookshop or get it from a friend on his own. The same goes for any girls who are minded to read this stuff too - although at least "Street Boys" has mostly positive female role models, given the setting.

Number 24:

Kublai Khan, by Marco Polo. This is just extracts, like may of the great Penguin 60s series. Marco Polo describes the fabulous wealth and power of the greatest Khan, the man who as far as he can tell has no peer and never will. An interesting survey of various parts of China (and thereabouts), mostly dealing with the fabulous wealth of the Khan and the more interesting (at least to a medieval european) sexual habits in the exotic orient. Worth a read to pass the time of day, it is just under a hundred pages of reasonably large print. I would like to read the whole of what he wrote, and see how much of it rings true.

Number 25:

The Tyrannicide Brief, by Geoffrey Robertson QC. The pick of the bunch, and one of the better books of the year if not the best. Geoffrey Robertson first swam into my world as the guy running the "Hypotheticals" TV show in the 1980s. A generation later I would love to find some of those shows and see if they are still as spellbinding as they were at the time. Then, when I read some of his books on law (Crimes against Humanity and The Justice Game) I realised that he was married to Kathy Lette, who now writes serious and funny chicklit, but began with Puberty Blues - one of those books from my early adolescence that stays with me in various ways, and not all sweetness and light.

I might not be an angel, but I understand the position laid out fairly consistently by Robertson that the rule of law is extraordinarily important. He is a human rights lawyer, and more recently a judge in International Law. But this book (yes, I was writing about books I have read this year) is a biography of John Cooke, one of the men who established important principles of law that would become international. Cooke was one of the chief regicides - the men involved in trying Charles I of England, with the result that he was beheaded for crimes against his country. In a time when the king was the country this must have been a complex legal challenge - and in the end a fatal one to have taken on. But Cooke was, apparently, a highly principled and somewhat radical lawyer, prepared to take on any question and to follow it to its legal conclusion. And he was not too concerned about what that might be - not for him the show trial, although as a prosecutor he would of course mount the strongest possible case.

The book is both a biography of Cooke, telling the story of his entire life and practice, and a book about the prosecution of Charles I, as well as the prosecution of those who had taken part in it a decade later, when Charles II was invited to take up the throne. As I expect from a leading barrister, it is well constructed, interesting, and well worth the read.

Number 26:

Londonistan. Melanie Philips. Utter drivel.

Well, not quite. It is a rant against "victim culture", the political left, "Islamism" and as far as I can tell against Islam in general. It made me, more than anything, long for P.J. O'Rourke, a right-wing writer and thinker intelligent enough to be funny as well as thought-provoking. The thesis of the book is simple - that Islam is dominated by a crusade mentality seeking various ways to overthrow the world, and that the UK, the cradle of all that is good and holy, should stop pandering to the Israel-bashing terrorists and to muslims who claim to be moderate but secretly support terror, and should remind minorities of how they ought to behave.

The treatment is simplistic. The standard is generally that of a second-rate journalistic beat-up on a day where there is no real news (as in, something to provoke "shocked, of Islington" to write about how terrible things are nowadays). Frequent repetition is the major reason the book is so long. Its few redeeming features (recognising that there is a real misunderstanding of Israel and its history among many Muslims, and that an open culture needs to enforce its openness if nothing else) are thoroughly negated by its huge flaws (a blindness to the history of Israel as great as that it decries in its targets, a very prejudiced analysis of the "judaeo-christian basis of English society" that it harps on about at such length, transparently terrible logic wrapped in rhetoric that is not much better, the cavalier approach to sources that I expect of a blog not a book). This is like reading a not very well written article in the dreadful right-wing tabloid that British Midland provides as in-flight reading. Over, and over, and over. In the hands of someone who can write, the material could construct a short, thought-provoking essay. Reading it in a 300-page book is painful, and ultimately not enlightening in any positive sense.

Number 27:

Nuremberg: Evil on Trial. James Owen. This is essentially a collection of extracts from documents realted to the trial - mostly trial records themselves but also diary entries from leading players, and the like - stitched together with reasonably insightful commentary. The material is collected to suggest that while the trial did indeed represent victors' justice, it was still a massive step forward in the development of international law worthy of the name, with cases needing to be proven (much, apparently, to the distaste and surprise of both the Soviets and to the surprise of the Germans themselves, who nevertheless thought that the system was fairly biased and wondered why in many cases the court bothered with the pretense).

Nuremberg was an interesting development, with a lot of relevance to today's world. (Presumably Melanie Philips, who rants against the idea that Human Rights should somehow trump sovereignty, would have no truck with the logic, but then, she seemed to be able to dispense with logic about as easily as some of the defendants in this trial. I would therefore be interested to hear any case she might make against the whole exercise). But the insistence of the court overall on something that could stand up to (at least superfical) scrutiny as being (more or less) real justice applied was a landmark.

The book notes the disagreements of the prosecuting powers, their hypocrisy in only bringing to trial people who were on the losing side, in some cases for things which were also clearly done by the winners, and in particular the whitewash (for obvious political reasons) of the Soviet Union's period as an ally of Germany. The selection of material from a long case, and of related documents, stitched together to provide a clear narrative, makes for an interesting read and provides some insight into the importance of this history-making event, and of various problems that beset the actors, from unfair court practices (the allies lied to and withheld important documents from the defence) to domestic politics interfering (the Russians having to refer to Moscow, and to ask for help in writing a dissenting opinion since those were unknown under Stalin), and even poor performance (Jackson, the lead prosecutor for the Americans, is singled out as having made good opening and closing speeches as bookends to an apparently woeful performance as a prosecuting barrister - in stark contrast to the English lawyers, while the Continental lawyers on both sides were hampered by their unfamiliarity with an adversarial legal system).

Number 28:

The Anatomy of Courage, by Lord Moran. The first book review I wrote for myself (rather than for school or work) was a biography of Lord Moran, born Charles Wilson, and known to my grandfather (a young doctor when Moran was teaching in London) and his contemporaries as "Corkscrew Charlie". He was famous as the personal doctor of Winston Churchill, and as a leading figure in the establishemnt of the NHS - Britain's model universal health service created after the Second World War. He was also a medic in the First World War, and spent three years in the trenches of France and Belgium.

The book is about courage, and in particular courage in war. It attempts to answer the questions "what is it that enables a man to take part in a battle, and how do we know who has it and who doesn't?" Part of the thesis, developed from the author's fairly extensive experience, is that courage is something that can be drawn upon, or added to, but that it has limits in almost anyone, and further, that since a man who runs out of courage is unreliable in a battle, it is important to try and remove him while minimising the impact of his removal on those who are left to fight the next battle.

Clearly written by an Englishman from the end of the Empire, and filled with what are now clichéd assertions about the "character of the English race", it is nevertheless a fascinating insight, revealing the meditations of a very thoughtful and observant man on a problem he considers (and brought me to consider) as extremely important to a modern democratic state. It draws extensively on his diaries from the First World War, and on discussions and reflections from his work in the Second, and it is written at a time when, as the author himself says, Psychology was a science in its infancy. But although he claims that any soldier could have written, from observation, what he wrote, the thought and reflection that have gone into it would require a soldier not only with subtantial experience (as he had) but also one given to reflection, meditation, and thoughtful observation. Not at all impossible, but the quality of the book stands above what one would expect from most people.

I am not quite sure why the book, originally published in 1944 with a second edition released in the 60s, should be republished now, or whether it has simply remained in print, on an end of the bookshelf I didn't look at before. But as a book I had read about many years ago, it was a pleasure to find it, and a greater pleasure to find it as thoughtful and reflective as such a complex topic needs to be.

If you are looking for answers about the questions, they are elusive. "Good character" is the best guide, but even then a fickle one, to whether a man can stand the test of fire, while careful observation and a good understanding of the individual are necessary to have any hope of managing the store of courage available to the man, and good adminstration and leadership are required to maintain the overall morale of a group of men.

Ultimately, the only clear answer Moran provides is that personal morale is stronger than anything that might be engendered by the discipline so prized in armies, although he is less clear to what extent (certainly some, certainly not decisive in all cases) that dsicipline can engender the morale that makes a soldier effective.

And as a product of its time, and probably reflecting something of its author, the book is all about men. The only times women are considered are a mention of the comforting effect of french woman doing "normal housewife things" in First World War billets, and the negative impact that the distressed wife of a pilot who does not return can have on other pilots - along with fairly oblique references to soldiers who relax their person discipline while on leave from a war, and the psychological jarring that can occur when a man moves between family and action. I wonder if I will pick up a book that does deal with the question, applied more broadly to people who are not actually soldiers.