The Power of the Dog by Don Winslow
The Power of the Dog is a look at the cartel wars along the Mexican border. It is a hip, nasty little tale of betrayls, double-crosses, and small-arms skirmishes. There are a few clichés here (hooker with a heart of gold, for example), but generally, it’s a fast paced, savage look at border intrigue and politics from the early nineties. Quite cool.

Licensed to Kill by Robert Young Pelton

Subtitled “Hired Guns in the War on Terror.” Pelton is an travel-adventure-journalist better known for his series on “The World’s Most Dangerous Places.” In this illuminating bit of journalism on the rise of private mercenary armies, like Blackwater, Executive Outcomes, or Triple Canopy, Pelton explores the world of the private military contractor, from Baghdad to Central Africa.

Some fascinating details: Contractors, primarily made up of former special forces, SAS, or police officers, are usually hired by private firms to provide security in guarding fixed position installations (offices, etc.) or security for transporting goods. These guys are armed to the teeth, paid well, and subject to virtually no governmental oversight. As a result, there are likely as many as 100,000 private mercenary soldiers at large in the world, who report only to the highest bidder. Some companies, like Eric Prince’s Blackwater, operate hand-in-hand with the US Federal Government. Others, like Sandline or Executive Outcomes can be employed for far more nefarious purposes, like overthrowing governments in Equatorial Guinea, or seizing diamond mines in Sierra Leone. In this shadowy world, civilian deaths are common (particularly in Africa and Iraq) and contractors are held to no legal standards, and no moral standards but whatever they bring in with them. It’s a fascinating brave-new-world of steroid monkies and ex-cops toting automatic weapons, armored vehicles, and private gunships in some of the world’s least stable places for fantastic sums of money.

Pelton does a good job of keeping relatively neutral on the topic, neither condemning nor deifying the cowboy contractors. He poses thoughtful questions about the role of such large corporate armies in nation building. Interesting book.

Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone

Stone chronicles the depressing collapse of the sixties and the morally bankrupt characters in his novels always remind me of lost children wandering around the remains of a birthday party that ended hours ago because their parents never came to pick them up.

Dog Soldiers tells the tale of a heroin smuggling deal orchestrated by two former marines still living in Vietnam. They return to the US with more smack than is good for anyone, and they draw a collection of their former lovers and friends into the messy deal, which ends in ruin for almost everyone. This is all set in California, the canyons of LA, the mean streets of Oakland in about 1973. Peace and love have died, and only sex and drugs are left. There’s a sense of intense paranoia, as if everyone might be running a number of some kind. (And most people are.) Our characters are all awash in philosophies, from zen to… weirder stuff. But none of them are able to really pursue enlightenment of any kind, because they are all too drug addled.

Ultimately, this is Stone’s message in Dog Soldiers: That the movement(s) of the sixties got sidetracked, trying to take shortcuts, or becoming wrapped up in hedonism, and ended up missing the more high minded, spiritual targets they initially sought in the communes and San Francisco gatherings of the mid to late sixties. What remains is a sticky criminal residue of paranoia, psychosis, and social fragment. It’s a message we hear at the end of Easy Rider; (“We blew it.”) and hear echoed in A Scanner Darkly.

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Vonnegut’s sad funny little tale about the firebombing of Dresden is a fast tragic-comic romp which is still probably the best example of his writing. I read it back in high school and enjoyed it immensely, and again in the early part of this summer in South Austin with no less love. I’d love to grab it and include a quote here, perhaps from the beautiful image in which time reverses so that the buildings all grow back together and the bombs fly up into the air where the airplane hanger doors shut quietly, and the planes fly backwards to land in reverse on the runway and the pilots and crew all walk backwards down the tarmac and return on boats to their homes in America and the bombs are disassembled in reverse and their dangerous chemicals returned to elements and carried backwards into the mines beneath the earth where they can never hurt anyone again.

But alas, we’ve moved from the library on Mosquero into an apartment near the Arboretum. So like almost every other book I own, Slaughterhouse Five now lives in storage, awaiting the return of a new gilded age when it will be able to go back on a shelf where it belongs in some new library somewhere else.

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

Hosseini’s followup to The Kite Runner takes us back to Kabul for another closeup look at the Taliban’s evil. This time our narrator is a poor village woman, the bastard daughter of a wealthy merchant. She’s married off young to a creep from Kabul who abuses her and his second wife terribly. Things proceed from here, and we end up with a well written version of “Sleeping With the Enemy in Kabul.”

The prose is good, though not great. (But far better than my Pushtun or Urdu, so really, we should just be saluting Hosseini, and not worry about being too critical on this front.) The plotting is stronger than in the Kite Runner.

I enjoyed learning more about poor benighted Afghanistan and about some of the simple kindnesses and beauty that can help bring color and happiness to even the most unfortunate of lives.

Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi

Nafasi writes a beautiful memoir of her time in Iran during and after the revolution. As we all know, things went from bad to worse for intellictuals once the Shah was overthrown. And for women, things got worse still. Throughout this period, Nafisi and her students undertook a clandestine study of several of the masterworks of Western literature.

I’m fascinated by Iran, and the Muslim world as a whole. I see in Nafisi’s story a microcosm of some important broad questions about how education, freedom, and the role of women can co-exist with some of the particularly virulent strains of Islamo-fascism that currently hold sway in the middle east.

My only complaint here would be that there’s slightly too much navel gazing on occasion, surrounding what it felt like to look at a certain tree, etc. But overall, this is a fascinating glipse into a world that as an American, as a male, I could never otherwise peek inside. And it’s a world in which scholars are heroic; risking everything in order to teach and acquire knowledge.

This book describes the kind of quiet bravery that I wish we could hear more about from the Muslim world.

The Forever War by Joe Haldeman

Cool little sci-fi novel. Bit of a classic, I suppose. Haldeman, who clearly served in Vietnam, writes the first half of his soldier’s story with a real ear for grunt dialog. Things get a bit steamy as he fantasizes about a free-love co-ed army. Then, once we delve into the meat of the tale, which addresses the social implications of faster-than-light travel, things start to get really interesting.

Our protagonist goes on several missions, one of which strands him in a galactic backwater. When he returns from each of these missions, some really significant periods of time have passed for Earth. The social and inter-personal revelations which unfold are fascinating and occasionally touching. Dan Simmons had clearly read Haldeman’s novel when writing a few of the tales in Hyperion.

The Beardless Warriors by Richard Matheson

Apparently Matheson was drafted and entered World War II in the European theater in 1944. This story is largely an autobiohraphical bit mixed with a high adventure story. If anything, it seems too... happy. It is also the most straightforward novel about WWII I've ever read. Comparisons to Norman Mailer's 'The Naked and the Dead' and Remerque's "All Quiet On the Western Front" and Slaughterhouse Five and Catch-22 are inevitable. Matheson's novel has none of the cynicism of Heller, none of the post-modern stylings of Vonnegut. He gives a very personal play-by-play account of a young man's introduction to an infantry squad and the ten days that follow. The action seqeunces (which comprise at least 80% of the book) are well narrated. It is no wonder that Matheson is such a hollywood favorite; his descriptions of physical spaces, characteristics, and stage direction are precise. The emotional depth in his characters is no deeper than the puddles gathering outside on First street. From the gruff sarge with the heart of gold (the cliche-ness of which one of his characters even comments on) to the numb protaganist, these characters are almost all stock.

If all this sounds like I didn't enjoy this book, I've given the wrong impression. It is an exciting account of an infantry unit whose members learn to work together to overcome the horrors of war. It reads like a John Wayne movie, or an episode of Band of Brothers. Yes, it's a little bit obvious and makes you feel a bit guilty, but it's still damn entertaining and well executed.