Book Reviews

Of course, the weather comes first! We're in another cold snap with light snow falling - a beautiful view out my study window. I think I am about over my long drawn out cold and the energy level is creeping up - I'm almost back to my full swimming routine. Also, I've got most of my volunteer work up to date except for checking last month's treasurer reports for the Library Foundation - I always put that last - so I though I'd head to the blog and delay it further.

My cold provided a lot of reading time during the recovery and I've read several interesting books of different types. They all have something to recommend in them. Big Citizenship is an upbeat account of the founding of City Year, a volunteer NGO that now works in city schools around the country and in London and South Africa. Alan Khazei, the co-founder, is a SPS grad and former student of mine. He was instrumental in getting the new public service law thru the Congress. The book isn't particularly well written and there is a good bit of name dropping - illustrating the power of networking in achieving goals. In spite of these drawbacks it is a tribute to what an individaul with an idea can achieve.

The Places in Between by Rory Stewart is a Scot's account of walking, basically alone, across Afghanistan in 2002 after the invasion. He describes the different tribal groups, the snow (it was winter!), the beauty of the country, and one individual's persoanl journey to get to know the people of the region. Stewart is now a member of the British Parliament and was knighted for work done in Iraq. It is well worth reading if you have any interest in what goes on behind the headlines in Afghanistan. I found it fascinating and wish I had read it several years ago, It should be required reading, together with Mortenson's Stones into Schools and Three Cups of Tea, for every soldier in Afghanistan and especially the US leadership.

Another perspective on travel is given in The Routes of Man by Ted Conover. He describes six different journeys on "roads" from icy tarils along frozen rivers in Ladakh (next to Kashmir in the Himalayas) joining a group of high school kids leaving home for boarding school, to 'road clubs' that travel the new highways of China as tourists in their new, fancy cars, to traveling with truckers in East Africa along the route that brought AIDS out of Central Africa to the world. His travel descriptions are very well done but he avoids any judgements or opinated conclusions about how roads are chinging the world - the sub title. The other three roads traveled are in the city of Logos ( a mess,) over the Peruvian Andes with rain forest maghony headed for NYC, and in Palestine ("a war you can commute to.") I learned a lot of interesting bits but missed the analytical side that asks, 'so what?'

I'm almost finished Journey to Ladakh, a book I bought in the 1980s when I was going to Ladakh - I chickend out when the monsoon came early and mud slides took out some stretches of the road. The story is one man, Andrew Harvey's, journey to this isolated and beautiful area, a Tibetan Buddhist region in the Himalayas bordering Tibet and now part of India. It was still quite untouched in the early 1980s. He describes the country with its light and mountains, its crumbling monasteries, streams and rivers, and I can relate to it having been close to Ladakh and in Bhutan and Tibet, and, of course, in the Colorado mountains. The author was interested in Buddhism and he describes his personal meeting with a Rinpoche and how it opened new vistas for his life. Another fulfiling story of journeying.

For total relaxation I read Dick and Felix Francis's mystery/murder story, Dead Heat. Besides the horses, the setting is the restaurant business. It moves fast and is well done - a bit more sex in this one than when Dick was writing with his wife rather than his son!

I think my next book is going to be on Palestine. We had dinner with a very interesting and attractive woman from Palestine last week and several books came up in the conversation. It will have a connection to her visit and a chapter in the Routes of Man. I must say I am enjoying this non-fiction reading spree.