Early Summer Reads

Books with a Positive Outlook

Hello from Maine – For fifteen summers, Kay and I have served St. Peter’s By-the-Sea in Cape Neddick, Maine.  We spend the entire month of June in this paradisical place amongst beautiful, gracious people we’ve come to love a great deal.  Kay and I drove here from San Antonio for the first time – a benefit of retirement – visiting good friends along the way. 

I will get back to our study of Isaiah in due course, but please enjoy this Early Summer Book Edition.  The three books I review, while quite different from one another, all express optimistic messages for the world and humanity as opposed to the pessimistic news that daily pelts us. Bright, can-do voices surround us.  We just need to tune in to the right frequency.  Patrick+

St. Peter’s By-the-Sea, Cape Neddick, ME

Grandson Grant in the front “yard” of the St. Peter’s rectory

Full Tilt: Ireland to India on a Bicycle, by Dervla Murphy

The first thing that hits the reader about Dervla Murphy’s Full Tilt is the subtitle – Ireland to India on a Bicycle.  The second is the author’s dedication: To the peoples of Afghanistan and Pakistan for their hospitality with admiration for their principles and with affection for those who befriended me. 

About the first, Murphy is thirty-two years old in 1963 when she arrives on the European continent with her bicycle and little else.  In the six months that follow, she bikes alone through France, Italy, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Iran, Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and finally completes her journey in Delhi, India.  In all, she peddles 3,000 miles on her single-speed Armstrong Cadet bicycle Roz, aptly named for Rosinante, Don Quixote’s steed.  She does not pack a tent, but instead sleeps in the open under a single blanket when no lodging is available.  Public inns are often infested with bedbugs and bedecked with dirty linen. The rooms rarely have door locks and to her initial surprise designated for multiple occupancy.  Waking up with bearded men snoring all around her is not uncommon.  The fact that she bikes seventy-five to one hundred miles most days means she sleeps soundly regardless of the unconventional rooming arrangements. 

Because Murphy planned this adventure for twenty-three years, nothing subdues her enthusiasm.  She first dreams of biking from Ireland to India at age ten.  She did not know then that she would be forced to drop out of school after eighth grade to care for her invalid mother until her death in 1962.  Murphy wastes no time.  Less than a year after burying her mother, she carts Roz across the English Channel to begin their adventure.  (Murphy always uses the collective pronouns “we” and “our” in her writing, as if Roz is a sentient being.)

Regarding her affectionate dedication to the people of Afghanistan and Pakistan, she explains that her journey did not truly begin until she peddles through those two remote countries.  Reading the book, her admission is understandable.  She travels through Eastern Europe and Turkey during the coldest winter in decades.  In Bulgaria, she gets caught in the beginning of the spring thaw, and she is swept up in waist-deep frigid water for days.  Her fear of developing pneumonia amplifies and yet she can find no exit from the flooded roads on her route.  Murphy crosses the border into Yugoslavia during the thirty-five year rule of the iron-fisted socialist dictator, Josip Broz “Tito,” who only allows tourists to lodge in special international hotels, of which there are few. Racing through the inhospitable country, she is attacked by a pack of wolves, which she dispatches after shooting one of them with her .25 automatic pistol.  In Azerbaijan, Murphy fires her pistol for a second time at a Kurd who attempts to rape her.  Azerbaijan, where our youngest son John taught for five years, remains the one country of the thirty Murphy traverses, that she never wishes to visit again.

When Murphy enters Afghanistan, she says it is like being dropped into an earlier century.  The roads are so rutted that Roz suffers a series of mishaps, and Murphy’s meagre clothing is hardly adequate as she negotiates frigid mountain passes.  Nevertheless, she writes ecstatically about the majesty of Afghanistan, “Cycling day after day beneath a sky of intense blue, through wild mountains whose solitude and beauty surpasses anything I had been able to imagine.”

Pakistan’s heat proves to be Murphy’s greatest physical challenge.  Some days the mercury climbs to 115°, and she peddles no more than fifteen miles at a time, a reduction of fifty miles per day.  If a river or stream is available at her frequent stops, she strips off all her clothes and submerges herself in the water to bring down her body temperature.  Toting her bicycle on her shoulders along mountain paths in the triple-digit heat, she succumbs to heat exhaustion and is unable to eat for the better part of a week – necessitating the purchase of some smaller sized pants.  Nevertheless, Murphy loves the Pakistani people.  No matter how impoverished the village, no shopkeeper or tearoom proprietor accepts payment from her – such is their chivalrous code of hospitality.

Ashly Giordano, a modern long-distance cyclist reflected, “The pages of Full Tilt provide an insight into Afghanistan before the Soviet invasion of 1979, when the east strived to meet the west. There, a young woman from Ireland arrived in a remote valley, surrounded by villagers staring in wonder and fear; she smiled and offered, ‘Salaam alaikum’ – Peace be with you.”

Young Dervla Murphy astride the mighty “Roz” in Western Europe

The entire text of Full Tilt consists of Murphy’s extensive letters to her friends back in Ireland as she peddles 3,000 miles across Western and Eastern Europe, a portion of the Caucuses, Asia Minor, Iran, and Asia.  The letters needed little editing.  That’s laudable for a lady with only an eighth-grade education.  She goes on to write twenty-three more acclaimed travel books.  She crosses the Andes, circumnavigates Madagascar, explores the Urals, slogs her way through Siberia with an injured knee, visits Rwanda after its terrifying genocide, winds her way about Ethiopia, and hikes all through Cuba with her daughter and granddaughter.  Full Tilt, published in 1965, was Murphy’s first book.  I recommend that interested readers begin with her 1979 autobiography, Wheels Within Wheels to understand what drove this remarkable woman to risk her many solo journeys across underdeveloped countries and regions.

Finally, at age eighty-three, Murphy spends a month in the Gaza Strip, an area only twice the size of Washington, DC with a suffocating population of 2.3 million.  There, as with all the places Roz and she ventured, she sought to understand the people, embrace their pain, and bring their stories into the light of day.

Longpath: Becoming the Great Ancestors Our Future Needs, by Ari Wallach

Longpath is the first book I’ve read that has a second subtitle: An Antidote for Short-Termism. Wallach’s crusade is to remove humanity’s grim shortsightedness and replace it with an optimistic far-reaching vision.  To go from short to long-sightedness is a sizeable leap because we’ve become inured and invested in the way things are.  Therefore, to see how the old world can give way to the new, Wallach asks his readers to imagine we are standing on a beach with our feet barely submerged in the surf.  The tide is in, so our feet are temporarily covered.  When the tide goes out, our two feet are no longer submerged in seawater; although, we have not moved.  This ground that is covered in water some of the time and other times is not, is known as an intertidal.  Because the ecosystem of an intertidal changes radically, it is a place that fosters both accelerated creativity and extreme danger for the creatures living there.  For example, barnacles and mussels, while perceived as inert, are amongst the most adaptive organisms on the planet.

Humanity is experiencing an intertidal period.  The tide of what we have long known and to which we’ve become accustomed is leaving us high and dry. A new tide of possibility is washing over us.  We can either adapt and be part of the advancement of creation or futilely try to arrest the change.  The dam will not hold for long, however.  When asked what good comes out of an intertidal, Wallach answers, “the printing press, the Model-T, civil rights, the crumbling of the Berlin Wall, and the internet.”  The succession of intertidals is like successive waves crashing on the seashore.  12,000 years ago, the Agricultural Age began.  Our ancestors abandoned their ceaseless nomadic hunter-gatherer life to settle in areas and cultivate farms. This was the nascent beginning of civilization. Then, 2,900 years ago, the Classical Agegave birth to city states, collective governments, philosophies, and enduring architecture and art. Over 1,500 years ago, the next wave rolled in as the bewildering years of the Middle Ages or the Medieval Period.  While it looked like the rug had been pulled out from beneath shared governance and community advancement, it was a time of pronounced progress in building design and engineering, precise mechanical instrumentation, and irrigation.  800 years ago, was the onset of the Renaissance, which rekindled classical learning and philosophy, inductive reasoning, and a groundswell of artistry.  About 400 years ago, the Enlightenment captivated the Western World and, among other developments, brought about the founding of our nation.  The Scientific Method was developed during this time, which became the catalyst of democracy, such that the light of empirical truth must continually examine governments.  Hereditary rule, when held up to the light of science, was incongruent with fair, productive, creative governance.  Also, theocracies were replaced with republics granting broad religious freedoms.  The Industrial Revolution naturally coincides with the Enlightenment.  Advances in science and reasoning moved the world from cottage industries to industrial manufacturing, pulling millions out of poverty.  These successive ages were “revolutions” in their own way, and those living through them would have found them, at the same time, painful and invigorating.  That is the nature of intertidals.  Revolutions are necessarily chaotic.

We are now living amidst a technological, informational, and multi-cultural revolution.  For example, when I entered the military forty-seven years ago, I depended on landline telephones and cumbersome radios, handheld compasses, and binoculars.  Today, an infantry officer uses satellite phones, GPS, and drones.  If I was still in command, the learning curve for me would be steep, yet wanting the best for my men and my country, I would apply myself to learn these radically new methods.  One aspect of my military experience predicted this intertidal period – multiculturalism.  Most of my men were Black or Latino, with a smattering of Anglos.  All of us had left our homogenous neighborhoods dotted throughout the country for a far more collective, diverse culture.

In this new intertidal, we must learn to use our new tools to advance humanity and heal creation.  We must open our eyes to perceive that people are on the move as never before.  According to the United Nations, 228 million people are migrating around the world.  That’s 3.5% of the earth’s population.  In the United States, 2.8 million people are legally immigrating each year.  In 2022, about 14% of Americans were foreign born, making us 60% White; 18% Hispanic; 12% Black; 6% Asian; 3% multiple race persons, and less than 1% Native American. E pluribus unum, Latin for "Out of many, one,” is the motto of our nation, adopted by Congress in 1782.  Our leaders in those early years were honest about who we were and what we’d become.

Just as our founders lived in the Enlightenment intertidal and were truthful about the tensions inherent in the shifting sands of their day, we too must get honest about our present intertidal chapter.  Once we do, Wallach insists that we must take the following steps: 1. Think about our present challenges in new, creative ways; 2. Deep-six short-term goals that profit a few for long-term ones that will benefit many and will enhance the lives of future generations; 3. Cultivate transgenerational empathy – especially since by 2050, twenty-six years from now, 16% of the world’s population will be over age sixty-five; 4. Dispense with “official” predictions of the future and build a new, creative, optimistic model; 5.Finally, if we are to be the “ancestors our future needs,” we must cooperate with one another and build a promising future.

The political implications for our country and others are implicit in Wallach’s five points. Regarding the first, autocratic leaders and upstarts across the world prey on our fears instead of fostering creative solutions.  Their message is the same whether they speak Turkish, French, German, Hungarian, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, or English, “Be afraid because bad people who are not like you are coming to take your stuff, poison your culture, and stifle your religion.”  Furthermore, autocrats and dictators, in direct opposition with Enlightenment principles, work to squelch the free flow of honest information or manipulate it to their own ends.  Their self-serving machinations are rarely held up to the light.  When they are, they denounce the revelations as “fake news,” and their followers concede like lemmings numbly marching off a cliff. 

Wallach’s second point invites us to exchange our short-term goals for long-term ones.  To do this, we must transcend sectarian and purely national interests.  Our long-term vision must be for overall human flourishing.  Let’s take the “seven seas” for example, the Arctic, North Atlantic, South Atlantic, North Pacific, South Pacific, Indian, and Southern oceans.  To be clear, we only have one ocean consisting of these seven regions.  The United States has over 12,000 miles of ocean shoreline – shared equally amongst “Red” and “Blue” States.  That sounds like a lot until we realize the earth has a total of 221,000 miles of ocean coastline.  We share the seven seas with the rest of humanity.  Poisons, plastic, and petrochemicals we cast into the ocean, end up on the beaches, in the soil, and in the wildlife of Brazil, France, Thailand, Tanzania, New Zealand, and a host of other coastal nations.  Long-term policies to clean-up our oceans benefit the entire world and the generations who follow us.

Transgenerational empathy, Wallach’s third point, could be a rare area of cooperative agreement between China and the U.S.  The United Nations predicts that by 2050, merely twenty-six years from now, China’s over 65 population will increase from 12% to 26%. That’s 122 million people.  Over the same period in the U.S., the rise will be from 13% to 23% – or 82 million people. Already, 29.1% of the much smaller nation of Japan is over 65, for a total of 36 million people.  One of every ten persons in Japan is over the age of 80.  A surge in our elder population is an immense global demographic challenge.  How we address it is a worldwide challenge much more worthy of our efforts than waging the seemingly endless proxy wars we devise against one another.

Wallach’s fourth point is to dispense with official predictions of the future and fashion a new optimistic, forward-looking model.  Across the world politicians and their propaganda flunkies inhibit creative thinking and planning by fearmongering and promises of a return to a mythical golden age.  Not only are these promises laced with plans to restrict the freedoms of many – especially women and minorities, but their promises are regressive.  A future cannot be built on the shoulders of nostalgia.  At the same time, progressive politicians and their mouthpieces can echo their own version of “the sky is falling.”  We must transcend these dour narratives and build a bigger and brighter future.  If medieval European towns, in which an average of 45% of the population perished in the Black Death, could dare conceive of and build their cavernous, magnificent cathedrals, which could accommodate far more than their village polpulace, we can certainly plan and build a future big enough for the worldwide community.

Wallach’s fifth point is that to be the ancestors our future needs we must cooperate with one another.  My wife, who spent 48 years as a registered nurse, most serving in critical care units, repeatedly says, “Human beings are evolving beyond war.”  In enormous hospitals, like Brooke Army Hospital in our city and in VA hospitals across the nations, soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen are returning from combat with irreparable post-traumatic injuries. 10% of Russia’s draft-eligible males have fled the country.  Fiercely patriotic Ukraine is experiencing the loss of men and women who have absconded rather than return to combat. I do not know if Kay is right, yet I do know that cooperation is far saner and far cheaper than armed conflict.  To be clear, I do believe Ukraine should defend itself from the despotic, totalitarian tyrant Vladimir Putin, but the loss of young life, destruction of communities, and insurmountable expenses are monstrous.  We must forge a different path.  The national defense budget of the U.S. is 820 billion dollars per annum, 13.3% of our domestic budget.  Just think what would happen if we, China, Russia, Iran, Israel, the European Union, and every other nation took the Prophet Isaiah’s advice and “beat our swords into plowshares.”  What advances in medical care, manufacturing, affordable housing, education, and ecology could be made.  “Call me a dreamer,” as John Lennon lamented, but just “imagine” what would happen if cooperation replaced armed conflict.  Our grandchildren deserve a future like that rather than the one we are ceding them. 

Author Ari Wallach and family

Longpath is a broad summary of Wallach’s expansive strategies for long-termism.  For a more detailed account of his work, I commend Wallach’s six-part PBS series, A Brief History of the Future. The episodes are rife with unusually brave people who are refusing to concede the future to the short-term pessimists.  Some of the people are quite odd, but we need break-out-of-the-box, valiant, original thinkers and doers during this intertidal period we inhabit.  Wallach’s interviews will leave you with a smile on your face because across the world individuals are refusing to roll over and yield to the bleak future cast for us.

Mr. Texas, by Lawrence Wright

I had my first brush with satire when I was a high school sophomore.  At the end of class one day, our teacher gave each of us a blue mimeographed copy of an essay we were to read for homework.  As we raced out the door for lunch, she held up the remaining copies and said, “Read it carefully.  There will be a quiz on this tomorrow.”  The antiquated title alone, A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from Being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick, was a forewarning that all 3,300 words of the piece would be tortuously boring.  I was wrong.  The essay, first published as a political pamphlet, is best known by its abbreviated title, A Modest Proposal, and it is not boring; it’s horrifying. 

Writing in 1729, Jonathan Swift, an Irish Anglican clergyman and author of Gulliver’s Travels, crafted his pamphlet to appear as an earnest suggestion to the English Parliament and the English colonial government in Ireland on how to deal with the baby boom amongst poor Roman Catholic families in Ireland, accounting for some 125,000 births per year.  The parliament reflected the general anti-Catholic sentiment widespread amongst the English people at the time.  Swift’s essay commences predictably until he matter-of-factly recommends that Irish babies be sold as gourmet food for the wealthy English and Irish citizens. "A young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout." Swift’s bland humor disarms readers such that they see the barbarism of their inaction on behalf of Irish infants. Satire’s verbal power is that it moves us from laughter and shock to the truth.

Swift was a master of satire during the United Kingdom’s Georgian era, as was our own Mark Twain during the Civil War era.  Lawrence Wright, seasoned Texas journalist, novelist, and playwright, demonstrates he belongs in that company of strangely hilarious truth-telling writers. Mr. Texas, his satirical novel about the present malaise in Lone Star politics, had me laughing uproariously as it discloses the stranger-than-fiction maneuverings of my state’s government.  Several nights while I was propped up next to Kay in bed reading, I laughed so hard that tears were streaming down my face.  Kay admonished me to “hush,” for she feared I would wake our downstairs’ neighbor.  One literary critic seconded my emotion, “I just wish Larry McMurtry and Molly Ivins were alive to laugh out loud with the rest of us readers.”

The novel opens in a windswept, grassless West Texas cemetery.  Walter Dunne, the longtime Democratic representative for District 74 has died and a suitable Republican replacement must be recruited to take the seat.  Present at the funeral is L.D. Sparks, a powerful lobbyist in Austin.  In his perfectly cut western-style suit and thousand-dollar boots, Sparks is an oily political tool of powerful petroleum interests.  He must find a “yes man” in Presidio County to do his bosses’ bidding.  Wright’s description of Sparks hits home, “If Sparks were something other than a politician, he might have been a perfectly nice man, but nice men don’t hold the reins of power in Texas. The higher they go up the totem pole in Texas, the more they are stripped of humanity and compassion.”

Sparks is clueless where to look in an area where the population density is only 1.6 persons per square mile, and it can take you half the afternoon to get from one homestead to another.  Then lightning strikes – for real.  During a West Texas thunderstorm, a rancher’s barn catches fire, and Sonny Lamb – war veteran, recovering addict, failed rancher, and volunteer fireman – races into the burning building twice to fetch both a horse and a little girl who loved the horse.  Lamb is an instant celebrity, and Sparks has his man.  The fact that Lamb has never voted in an election does not bother Sparks. In fact, it is another indication that Lamb will be easy to manipulate in the statehouse. 

Lightning will strike again once Lamb finds his footing in Austin, for he is undeterred in his pursuit to begin desalination of ground water in his district.  Fracking has fouled water to such an extent that both irrigation and drinking water are dangerously depleted.  Sparks’ bosses strike back by greenlighting New York City sewage transports to Presidio County and hoodwinking Lamb to vote for it.  To get Lamb unseated, they fill the press will news of the “Poo-Poo Choo-Choo.” Their plan backfires when Lamb admits his mistake, but, at the same time, insists that the sewage will help replenish the overworked soil in the district. 

The novel proceeds along the plot of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, the 1939 film starring Jimmy Stewart that garnered five Academy Awards.  Mr. Smith, played by Stewart, is handpicked by Montana’s financial magnates to do their bidding.  Once he awakens to his duty on behalf of his constituents, especially the children of his state, they cannot mute his voice.  Lamb is cut from the same cloth. He will bring hope home to his fellow ranchers. Both lawmakers remind us that the United States was founded on the premise of citizen statesmen – not career politicians, party denizens, and opportunists.  Towards the end of the novel, a crusty, long-serving representative tells Lamb, “You’re a real screw-up, but you’ve got talent. And you care.  We don’t have enough of that combination ‘round here.”

Lawrence Wright’s books should be a staple for Texans.  He loves his adopted state and yet loves it enough to point out its failings.  The best snapshot of Wright’s work can be found in his essay for The New Yorker, The Future is Texas. Earlier I reviewed his panoramic examination of Texas in his God Save Texas: A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State.  Wright won the Pulitzer Prize for his exhaustive work detailing the rise of Al-Qaeda in The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. Finally, I urge individuals to read The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid before casting your vote in November.