Winter Reading: December and January

Firearms, Tao, Bookleggers, and IMPRO

Laboring under Adam’s curse as we do, it’s difficult sometimes to find the time to read. These are the books snatched during the last two months from the gaping maw of work and enjoyed in moments of leisure in the early morning hours or on airplanes here and there. I hope my notes about them might be of service to you as you decide what next to read.

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To Ride, Shoot Straight, and Speak the Truth

by Jeff Cooper

If you have a military or police background you might already recognize Jeff Cooper’s name. But if not, this the guy that formulated “Cooper’s Color Codes” for understanding the physiological states of readiness. Most folks live in white—with minimal situational awareness and preparedness to react to a threat emerging in their environment. Yellow is a state of elevated awareness in which you are scanning your environment for threats but mostly in a passive state. You’re physiological markers (heartrate, pupil dilation, breath pattern, etc) are all within a normal resting range. Red is where you are in a fight: massive adrenaline inputs with all the physiological markers…but you haven’t lost your head. You’re focused but not panicked. You can/ should only sustain this level for short periods of time as there is a physiological backlash coming. The last state is black—panic, uselessness.

A good friend of mine who is a guru about violent human conflict and how to avoid it put me on to this book in a conversation about the proper formation of young men. Cooper was a Marine officer, firearm afficionado, and hunter. The title for this book comes from Herodotus describing the formation of Persian princes who were enervated by the luxuries of the palace. “Luxury and authority are not good things for a young man, and if he enjoys such things in his adolescence he is most unlikely to develop into a man of character.” Indeed. Instead, they were sent to the frontier and apprenticed to the hard men who made their living in those unforgiving conditions.

To Ride, Shoot Straight, and Speak the Truth begins by addressing a variety of subjects relating to contemporary politics (1980s) and personal security: firearm ownership, home security, mindset, etc. This was my favorite section of the book as it contains what I would call actionable intelligence: practical ideas you can implement to increase the security you provide your loved ones. Following this are two sections on firearms. First pistols, next rifles. Cooper describes calibers, ballistics, stopping power, proper application, etc. Gun hobbyists will love this part. Those who simply use guns as tools rather than toys will be gratified by his no-nonsense approach to the utility of the tool.

The last two sections of the book are full of stories: hunting stories, then survival stories…or stories where we wish survival might have happened instead of what did. My colleagues running boys’ schools probably already know this book…but if not, it will be delightful and useful.

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Tao Te Ching

translated by Stephen Mitchell

You will probably know Stephen Mitchell’s work as a translator from his inimitable Rilke translations. I know this is heresy, but his translations of Rilke into English do not leave me wishing I could read German fluently. They are so satisfying in their own right that I imagine the German originals would be delightful but not different in kind. Not so reading his new translation of the famous Chinese text. I did wish I could read it in the original though Mitchell’s translation was still a pleasure to read. It might be that the text’s combination of paradox and simplicity invites the kind of engagement that additional context could provide.

The Tao Te Ching is wisdom literature. It reads a bit like the Bible’s proverbs. I won’t anatomize it here but simply share some of the lines that I thought beautiful. If you find yourself in the unfortunate position of having to navigate complex, sometimes antagonistic situations, the Tao Te Ching is the kind of text which might help you navigate those difficulties with some tranquility.

In dwelling, live close to the ground. 
In thinking, keep to the simple.
In conflict, be fair and generous.
In governing, don't try to control.
In work, do what you enjoy.
In family life, be completely present. 

A great nation is like a great man:
When he makes a mistake, he realizes it. 
Having realized it, he admits it.
Having admitted it, he corrects it. 
He considers those who point out his faults
as his most benevolent teachers.
He thinks of his enemy
as the shadow that he himself casts. 

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Memoirs of a Booklegger

by Jack Kahane

Do you know about the Obolus Press and Andrew Rickard? He escaped life as a certified financial planner in order to found and operate the Obolus Press, “ferrying dead authors into English and back into print.” After coming across Andrew’s work courtesy of substack, I immediately ordered a couple books—among them, the Memoirs of a Booklegger by Jack Kahane.

We were not a social enterprise, but a school of thought. We were out to smite the Philistines. We were talkative young asses, but after all what did Samson use with which to smite the Philistines?

If you’re having trouble remembering, it was the jawbone of an ass…several angles to that particular joke.

I was not previously familiar with Jack Kahane but was pleased to discover that in addition to serving in WWI and writing autobiographically about it in a voice similar to Evelyn Waugh’s in the Sword of Honor Trilogy (sometimes reality is sadder and funnier than fiction), he was also an author and publisher of risqué books that publishers in England and America would not touch. Located in Paris, where he lived with his French wife, Mr. Kahane enjoyed the relatively relaxed attitude of the French toward the delights of the bedroom and was thereby able to print and distribute the books which had been banned in their mother tongue.

If you’ve followed any of the kerfuffle about Churchill in the last half year or so (Darryl Cooper had the temerity to agree with Jack Kahane’s sentiment written nearly a hundred years ago), you’ll be interested to know that Kahane recounts a general resentment for Churchill among the troops of his unit. Kahane’s opinion about the fascist dictators? "Whitehall and Downing Street are chiefly responsible for Mussolini and Hitler, and I hope it will keep fine for them.”

And finally, while we all live in abject awe of her, it is deeply satisfying to hear someone say something obvious about Gertrude Stein: that she is a bit of a scold and a schoolmarm under cover of all that avant-garde. You’ll have to order the book to find out just what he has to say about the reverend harridan of modernist esoterica.

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IMPRO

by Keith Johnstone

I wrote a separate post about this stunning book and will simply direct you to it.

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The Revolutionary Ketamine

by Jonathan Edwards, MD

Dr. Edwards is an athlete, anesthesiologist, polyglot, and friend. His most recent book studies the role of the psychedelic drug Ketamine in treating depression and suicide. Edwards’ strategy is to remind us of the horror of suicide as he suggests this somewhat controversial approach to defeating it. In layman’s terms, here is how it works: a doctor administers clinical doses of ketamine which provide the patient some stand-off from typical patterns of thought or perspective. While under the influence of the ketamine, a therapist coaches the patient attempting to remove suicide as an option by retraining / reframing the mind.

I can barely spell the word doctor, but this is a surprisingly approachable read for a book that spends pages detailing the pharmacology of ketamine. It’s not all pharmacology of course. Every chapter offers case studies and use profiles: athletes, veterans, adolescents, first responders. Don’t forget that every success story is a suicide prevented. As Gavin de Becker writes in the forward: “Every suicide ends one life—but rolls a grenade into the lives of many others.”

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A Handful of Hard Men

by Hannes Wessels

Speaking of hand grenades…. This is a book about the war in Rhodesia chiefly from the operational and tactical level rather than from the historical and political level. As far as I can tell, the war was a nearly perfect example of superpower nations instigating, enabling, and then prolonging an otherwise mostly local conflict. China, the USSR, England, and the U.S. all played diplomatic patty-cakes with Rhodesia—or rather against Rhodesia as a polity—with some pretty tough results.

But the real delight of this book is the detailed depiction of the skill and character of the Rhodesian SAS operators. It turns out, being an experienced outdoorsman and hunter translates nicely into man-tracking and small unit tactics in this kind of war. Darrell Watt was a professional hunter before joining the SAS and turned his tracking and counter-tracking skills to devastating effect on the Soviet and Chinese trained operatives attempting to overthrow the Rhodesian government. Watt would spend months in the bush tracking opponents, setting ambushes, sabotaging enemy infrastructure, and reconnoitering larger units for later attacks. He was often without air support and was consummately courageous. It seemed that he was as at home in the bush as anywhere and despite the difficult things he had to do and see, never lost his boy-like wonder at the beauty of the country.

It turns out, even when it’s used as a listening post / observation post (LPOP), the view from a mountain top can be stunning.

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Spirit of the Rainforest

by Mark Ritchie

You might recall a book from a few months ago called Jungle Wild, written by a gentleman who lives nearby and is a game-tracker and butcher. He gave me my copy of Spirit of the Jungle after a wide ranging conversation of the sort common when cutting up a large Idaho Pasture Pig for the freezer. We covered the current state of faith in the world, how the rich and powerful are probably Nephilim waging a not so subtle war against the rest of us, and the spiritual insights he gained by having grown up among a remote and primitive tribe of native Venezuelans called the Yanomamo.

The Yanomamo are a tribe in Venezuela that have lived in remote jungles a way of life nearly untouched by modernity. An anthropologist’s dream, the Yanomamo live in villages lead by a Shaman, have had relatively little contact with the developed world, and are almost constantly at war with each other. The author of this book, Mark Ritchie, was one such anthropologist. He recounts, as closely to verbatim as possible, the story of one of the most powerful Yanomamo shamans which was told to him by the shaman himself. You can expect the prose to sound like a direct translation of the shaman’s speech with unusual constructions and observations.

The book is about two main things. 1) The arrival of “nabas” or whites in the jungles and the interaction between them and the Yanomami. 2) The spiritual drama of the Yanomami encounter with Christianity and how it affected their spirituality and culture. I’ll note that there are stories here which can be difficult to read because of their content: stories about rape and infanticide as the Yanomamo villages war with one another and as naba anthropologists and missionaries misbehave. One of the chief attributes of a strong shaman is his reputation for being able to kill the infants of another village.

It is sometimes fashionable in Western culture to think of less developed civilizations as edenic holdouts where purity and simplicity flourish. I reject the notion that tech-driven convenience necessarily makes a culture better. But in this book we hear a Yanomamo point of view which asks why so many nabas who have clothing, medicine, jurisprudence, etc think that the Yanomamo would prefer to live naked and afraid.

For me, the most intense drama of the book is the spiritual one. Each Yanomamo shaman cultivates a “shabono” or village in his chest in which a variety of spirits come to live. These spirits are task-oriented: buzzard spirit for general affliction; jaguar spirit for murder, war, and infanticide; charming spirit for the erotic; etc. The spirits both comfort and compel the shamans who interact with them on behalf of their people. All the spirits hate and fear one particular spirit called Yai Pada, a great spirit higher in the sky, who they call unfriendly and whose realm is too hot for any of them to enter. A few Christian missionaries connect the dots and encourage the people to give up their spirits in order to follow Yai Pada. The resulting drama is incredible and inspiring.