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The war to end all wars …

I’ve been fascinated with the First World War for a long time, probably working backward from post-war literature to find out more about this event that tore the very core of Western man’s belief in humanity and God. So when NPR’s “You Must Read This” segment featured R.L. Stine raving about “A Long Long Way,” I added it to my list.

What an incredible book. The protagonist, Willie Dunne, is an Irish kid who gets sucked into the mess that is World War I in 1914. Irish nationalism falls into the mix, making for a conflicted experience that has eerie overtones of the American experience in Vietnam (in particular, an incident where Irish nationalist kids spit on Willie for wearing a uniform when he’s back in Dublin on leave).

It’s tough to describe how disturbing this novel is as it records civilization being blown to smithereens in the trenches of Belgium. Sebastian Barry’s writing is spare, his similes startling. Witness this scene toward the end of the novel, when Willie once again is up to his knees in mud, gore and violence:

“Two days they suffered there, with water up to their knees, and not a bite came up behind them, not a scanty suggestion of fresh water, nothing. And always the ruckus of the shells, the machine-guns, the evil stenches. Even in the walls of the trenches hung the sad bones and fleshy remnants of other souls, as if some crazy farmer had sown them there, expecting in the spring a harvest of of babies.”

Indeed, you must read this …

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Books

Hail Caesar

CaesarI just finished Caesar: Life of a Colossus. I think my interest in things Roman dates back to St. Anselm Catholic school, where I survived two years of Latin (nomen mihi est Robertus) and stumbled across the Robert Graves masterpiece I, Claudius. In “Life of a Colossus,” Adrian Goldsworthy does an admirable job of breathing life into his subject. It’s pretty clear his writing is steeped in tons of academic research, but it doesn’t read like a doctoral dissertation.

A few points/observations:

  • The early part of the book is a bit of a slog as Goldsworthy goes into detail about the political machinations swirling around Caesar during his rise. It’s not awful, but it doesn’t move at the same clip as the portions of the book that describe his military campaigns.
  • After reading a lot of romanticized notions of the Republic, it’s great to see details on what a nasty, bleeding mess it really was. In some ways, a benevolent dictatorship would have been a vast improvement on the mess that was Rome in the first century BCE.
  • Caesar was ruthless, but there usually was method to his menace and he didn’t succumb to death and destruction for the sake of mayhem. “Caesar was entirely pragmatic — effectively amoral — in his use of clemency or massacre and atrocity,” Goldsworthy writes.
  • In a similar vein, it’s not really clear that absolute, tyrannical rule was his real end game.
  • Rome’s gift to us: “Roman laws tended to be long and complex — one of Rome’s most enduring legacies to the world is tortuous legal prose.” Thanks, Rome.
  • As a young man, Caesar was rumored to have been King Nicomedes of Bithynia’s lover, and those rumors dogged him throughout his life. Goldworthy presents a credible case that the rumors might have been true, though he refrains from drawing conclusions. It’s clear that these accusations where the one thing that could wound Caesar’s immense pride.
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    Books Prankster Bob

    Getting Stoned

    I had never heard of Robert Stone. I’m not sure how I missed him given my interest in the Beats, the Pranksters and other assorted distortions in the literary canon that occurred in the ’50s and ’60s, but I finally stumbled across him via his memoir of the era, “Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties.”

    A few things popped at me as I read the book:

    • Stone is a great writer. He can turn a phrase. He can take you there. So much so that I vowed to venture into his fiction, starting with “A Hall of Mirrors.”
    • I really like the fact that Prime Green doesn’t obsess about the Prankster/Kesey/Kerouac aspect of the era. When he’s there, it’s not really romanticized. And some of the most interesting parts of the book are far removed from that scene. Stone writes about his time in the Navy in an America that hadn’t yet succumbed to the leveling effect of always-on mass media, a time when kids from vastly different regions of the country were tossed together on a Navy ship to be astounded by the fact that they all lived in the same country.
    • I loved his stories from the times he worked for supermarket tabloids like the “National Thunder” in New York, where he toils beside a