Saturday, December 07, 2013

The Long Walk

In eighth grade at Kaysville Junior High, a rather unpopular teacher named Mr. Rice showed us Escape from Sobibor, a movie that tells the story of an uprising in a German concentration camp.  I remember sleeping through some of it, but I also remember being intrigued by it, having learned much earlier about Anne Frank and the underground activity she and her family were involved in.  Later, I learned about the Soviet prison camps, the Gulag.  As with the story behind the movie I saw in junior high, the idea of escape from a vast system, stereotypically cruel and secure in most people's minds, has always been intriguing.  (To be completely honest, escapes from modern-day prisons are pretty intriguing.)  There is something redeeming and inspiring in hearing of people who were willing to sacrifice their lives for the chance — not necessarily freedom itself — just the chance of freedom.

Book cover.In The Long Walk: The True Story of a Trek to Freedom (ISBN: 978-1-59921-975-2) by Sławomir Rawicz, one can read about just such an escape and one that combines World War II history, the Gulag, and adventure travel into one.  Billed as a true story, the reader follows Rawicz, a Polish cavalry officer, from Moscow's notorious Lubyanka to the a small outpost of a prison camp in northern Siberia, and then about 4,000 miles south, to India, after his escape.  The escape itself is one of the few truly exciting scenes in the book, as the rest reads much like a travelogue, but it is all adventure after adventure as the small party of fugitives walks through Russia and then the wastelands of Mongolia and China.  They pick up a fellow escapee near Lake Baikal and experience Oriental hospitality over and over again in their travels through the deserts and mountains of western East Asia.  These usually touching, sometimes comical, visits are a major reason the travelers made it to India alive.  As is to be expected, they lose a few of the party along the way to starvation and exhaustion.  In the end, though, their desire to be free is triumphant, as they walk out of the hills and into the arms of a British Indian patrol.

I enjoyed the book, which reads like a novel.  The story was exciting, intriguing, and exhilarating.  It was interesting to read the story of torture at the hands of the Russians, the hardships experienced by the prisoners during the prisoner transfer operation across the vast expanses of Russia, and the way the labor camp was organized.  The escape and the adventures that laid therein were also fun to read about and did give off the sense of the indomitable human spirit.  The only thing that may be a bit of a negative about the book (aside from some mild strong language typical of Englishmen (Rawicz settled in England after the war)) is that it likely doesn't live up to its billing as being a true story.  The epic adventure has gone under the microscope of investigators and researchers a few different times.  Since the author lived in England, the BBC did a bit of research, as well as an American woman who wrote a book about her efforts and her inconclusive results.  The one thing that has been established is that Rawicz likely did not make the trek.  After that, one is left to make one's own conclusions including a number of possibilities ranging from him doing part of it to others completing the year-long hike and from the story being a compilation of others' adventures to it simply being a prisoners' tale that became, thanks to the horrors of war and the Gulag, impressed so strongly in people's minds that they genuinely believed the story was theirs or their acquaintances'.  I am personally partial to the latter two ideas, but think that the book was a great story regardless of veracity and even though I went into my reading of the book knowing about the controversy, and therefore approaching it as fiction, it does cause one to think about freedom, liberty, and the indomitable human spirit.

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Sunday, September 15, 2013

От первого лица: Разговоры с Владимиром Путиным

People like to say that Russia is a big country and by so saying, infer that its physical size somehow influences the large amount of interesting things emanating from that country.  I am not convinced that is really how it works, but I do know that Russia is a fascinating country.  Before I went on my mission to Russia, I followed Russian politics the way most Americans did: I heard about it through the filter of American news organizations.  I knew Russia was the enemy, ideologically and militarily.  I also knew their athletes wore CCCP on their jerseys, and I just couldn’t figure out how in the world those letters stood for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.  On my mission I solved the mystery of CCCP thanks to learning the Russian alphabet; I didn’t increase my knowledge of politics much, though, largely since that wasn’t something missionaries were supposed to be doing (and for good reason as there’s only so much time you have to be a missionary; politics can wait).  I did, though, begin my acquaintance with Vladimir Putin, easily Russia’s most powerful man.  On December 31st, 1999, I was with three other missionaries at a Church member family’s house to celebrate New Year’s Eve.  I mostly remember two things.  First, the Russian take on head cheese, kholodets, was pretty nasty.  Second, we watched on TV as Boris Yeltsin resigned and turned the country’s reigns over to Putin.

Book cover.От первого лица: Разговоры с Владимиром Путиным (ISBN: 5-264-00257-6), or First Person: Discussions with Vladimir Putin (my translation), by Nataliya Gevorkyan, Natalya Timakova, and Andrei Kolesnikov is a book that consists of not much more than a series of interviews with Vladimir Putin.  There were sections in which old friends, his ex-wife, an old teacher, and even his daughters made some comments, but it was mostly just transcripts of Putin talking to the three reporters.  Putin talked about his childhood, his schooling, his career ambitions, his family, his time in Germany, his athletic endeavors, and his meteoric rise from unknown in St. Petersburg to the heights of power in Moscow.  Putin went into quite a bit of detail about his childhood, schooling, judo exploits, and even talked quite a bit about his courtship of his ex-wife (they were still married when the book was written).  He also talked a lot about the early days of real, democratic politics in St. Petersburg, which was the springboard for his political career.  Finally, the reporters asked a lot of questions about the Russian issues of day, most of which had to do with Chechnya.  Putin explained why he chose the positions he did on Chechnya and how he figured it made Russia a more secure country.

The book was an interesting read because of the biographical feel to it.  I enjoyed reading about Putin’s early years.  The section about St. Petersburg politics was a little dry, but I did understand that it was key to Putin’s rise to power.  I found that Putin approached the interviews the same way he does all of his other public appearances: kind of dry and with a self-effacing element to it.  Other than a few of the answers to the Chechnya-related questions, he was pretty open and ready to share details.  With Chechnya and a couple internal Russian political affairs questions, the answers seemed a little more short and pointed.  The biggest drawback of the book is one that is not really anyone’s fault: it was written during Putin’s first term as Russia’s president.  Now that he’s in his third term, the book is quite out of date.  To be fair, I don’t think an updated book would be much different.  Any insight to one of post-Soviet Russia’s most intriguing figures is interesting, and this was no exception.

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Monday, July 29, 2013

The Swiss Family Robinson

As a young boy, I enjoyed watching Disney’s Swiss Family Robinson.  What is maybe kind of weird is that I remember the family singing “O, Christmas Tree” more than any other part of the movie.  Like any true boy, the idea of fighting pirates on a deserted, tropical island easily captured my imagination, as did the concept of actually living in a tree house.  Could it get any better?  With my own children now getting to the point where they appreciate movies above and beyond Disney princesses, I have turned to the great movies of my childhood.  These clean, fun movies beat just about anything the movie studios have to offer us today.  For the economically-minded like myself, buying a DVD for $10.00 online also beats going to the movie theater, where you pay at least that for one ticket alone.  Anyway, I recently got to relive some childhood excitement when we watched the classic Disney movie.  It got me wondering, though, where they got their story from.

Book cover.The answer is The Swiss Family Robinson by Johann Wyss (ISBN: 978-0-14-310499-5), but with all movies, the book was only a starting point, and then the screenwriters went from there.  (It’s worth noting that the original story hasn’t been in print much since its 1812 printing and that most people have read a French translator’s version that abridged the original and then added a new storyline halfway through.)    Then again, it’s only fair to note that it seems Wyss was highly influenced by Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.  The story follows a Swiss pastor and his family (his wife and four boys) as they venture off to the colonies to start a new life.  Their well-equipped ship is wrecked, but somehow all the articles and the ship itself is rather well preserved while all the passengers and crew die except the family.  They make a raft and alight on the island that is to become their home.  The family, through resourcefulness and through an expansive knowledge of the natural sciences, is able to get along rather impressively in their new jungle home.  They’re constantly making trips along the beaches and into the interior of the island in an effort to find out all they can about their new home and to discover new natural resources such as plants and animals they can use to make their life a bit more comfortable and pleasant.  Most trips result in a success of one form or another, and soon the family has a couple places to live, orchards, fields, and an abundant number of livestock and beasts of burden of all various types.  There are some adventures along the way with wild animals, explosives, and the rigors of life under the open skies.  The family’s chance for rescue and a return to society is foiled by rough weather, and they must await another such rare opportunity to come, but such opportunities and the adventures in the meantime are left to the reader to invent for himself.

The story was an interesting one and while overall an enjoyable one, not quite the page turner one would expect having seen the Disney movie.  There are no pirates and no romances to be found in Wyss’s novel.  In fact, he intended it mostly as a tale, cautionary in part, for his own sons.  Therefore, there is a somewhat formal feel to it, and not just because of the old-fashioned language or old-fashioned customs.  Those are, often, to be lamented since modern society does not embrace them, including reverence and gratitude before God, respect for one’s fellow man shown through respectful social interaction, respect for women, and respect for parents.  Like all fiction involving juveniles, the young men and boys of the family seem to be able to do much more and know infinitely more than people of their age really would, but maybe young men of the early 1800s really were just that much more ready to enter the adult world than boys of our times.  I also found it a little less interesting than it could’ve been because success was so forthcoming and because the characters, especially the father, seemed to have unlimited knowledge concerning wildlife, animal husbandry, agriculture, seamanship, and a myriad of other subjects.  Again, I realize the everyday man of the 1800s was more knowledgeable about these than most are today, but it seemed just a little too far fetched in the story.  Still, some dry passages notwithstanding, the book was enjoyable in most parts, is certainly not “children’s literature” as it was originally billed (mature teenagers at the earliest), and probably succeeded in its mission of inspiring the reader to be better since I came away wondering if it wouldn’t be possible to incorporate just a little more knowledge about the natural and mechanical worlds around me into my life.

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Saturday, June 15, 2013

Мормоны в России

After returning from serving my mission in St. Petersburg, Russia, I have followed what I refer to as the “Russian news” (news about Russia, not necessarily in Russian) closer than I ever did before.  The people I came to understand and appreciate and the places I shed tears over as the plane took off as I departed St. Petersburg meant a great deal to me and I wondered how their great yet still somewhat mysterious country was doing.  Just as I didn’t follow Russia much in the news before I left on my mission, I rarely followed what was happening with the Church in the news before my mission.  We always got the Church News in the Deseret News, but I rarely cracked it.  There was a feature on the back page that typically told a little story like the stories in the back of the Ensign, and I read it sometimes, but that was it, and that feature hardly qualified as news.  I tend to pay a little more attention to the news of the Church nowadays.  It is not much of a stretch to think that just as my mission made Russia more important to me, it made the Church more important to me.

Book.In Мормоны в России: Путь длиной в столетие (ISBN: 9-785-91189-005-6), or Mormons in Russia: A Century-long Path (my translation), by Sergei Antonenko, these two newer interests of mine are brought together in an academic, historical essay on the Church in Russia.  Antonenko gives a brief history of the Church, including its founding, Brigham Young leading the Saints to Utah, and its relative stability and growth since that time.  He also discusses in rather finite detail the theology of the Church.  The next big portion of the work is dedicated to what various pre-Soviet writers and intellectuals in the imperial Russia wrote and thought about the Church.  Dostoevsky and Tolstoy get specific mention.  Finally, the history of the Church in post-Soviet Russia is discussed.  Since this includes the late 1980s when missionaries traveled to the Soviet Union from Finland for the weekend only, it might be slightly inaccurate to say “post-Soviet Russia.”  As with the rest of the book, the writing about the Church in Russia has less to do with specific incidents such as organizational changes, legal registrations, or sensational events like missionaries being kidnapped, and more to do with how the Church has fit or not fit into Russian society and the general Russian consciousness.  It is, in places, a fascinating look into the perceptions — and souls — of Russia’s great people.

Overall, I thought the book was good.  I appreciated Antonenko’s even-handedness.  Discussions of Mormon doctrine can be fraught with misconceptions and sometimes outright lies when done by one who isn’t a member of the Church.  While Antonenko’s presentation wasn’t 100% doctrinally sound, it was very close.  I also found his pointing out of parallels in other world religions or in the scriptures to be refreshing.  His point over and over seemed to be that although Mormons have a bad reputation for believing some rather outlandish things, a person who is truly a student of religion would know that those things really aren’t that outlandish and are often rather mainstream thinking within certain groups or at certain times in the world’s history.  Antonenko is a religious studies expert and personally involved in multi-denominational cooperation efforts, which only adds to the respectability and sincerity of his presentation.  At one point he went so far as to note that he wondered why Mormons take so much heat from fellow Christians.  In fact, he couldn’t find anything wrong in being a Mormon and living a clean life free of alcohol and full of hard work, health, and effort toward strong family relations; it’s even better, he said, than claiming to be orthodox and being a drunkard, unhealthy, and having poor relationships with one’s family.  There were, of course, some things I thought could’ve been improved upon.  One, for example, was that I hoped the book would spend more time on actual members of the Church or the Church organization in Russia instead of so much discussion of Mormon doctrine and pre-October Revolution press about the Church.  Another would be the typical fascination with polygamy and other aspects of the Mormon Church that, although presented fairly and almost completely accurately, are secondary in a discussion of what constitutes Church doctrine.  More ink could’ve been spent on eternal families and the all-encompassing atonement of Jesus Christ.  Finally, I would’ve liked the book more had it been less philosophical and geared toward understanding the Russian psyche and more about the specific people and incidents that have given rise to two stakes of Zion in Russia.

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Tuesday, June 04, 2013

Bosnia: In the Footsteps of Gavrilo Princip

As a young boy — and to be honest, still today — World War I aircraft fascinated me.  Biplanes and triplanes seemed so exotic and were firmly a part of the romantic age of flying.  The appearance on the scene of monoplanes as the war drew to a close always seemed rather anti-climatic to me and even somewhat disappointing.  Thanks to a bit of help from my dad, I once even presented a special, extra-curricular report in school on WWI aircraft.  Only later did I learn of the stalemate trench warfare that was such a hallmark of WWI.  It was even later, probably in high school, that I was told that one man, then termed a revolutionary, now termed a terrorist, essentially started WWI through his actions alone.  When a Serbian assassin killed Franz Ferdinand of the ruling Hapsburg family, WWI was set in motion.  The high school teachers and textbooks forget that it was really wasn’t that simple, but the assassin, Gavrilo Princip, remained an interesting figure from an interesting part of the world.

Book cover.Bosnia: In the Footsteps of Gavrilo Princip by Tony Fabijančić (ISBN: 978-0-88864-519-7) is a travelogue that traces the route of Gavrilo Princip’s travels through the former Yugoslavia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  Set largely in the modern-day Balkans, the book uses Princip and his story as a way to understand the region’s complicated history and its rather sticky present through observation, interviews, and referencing historical sources.  The author, rather sympathetic to Princip before undertaking his research and travels, was also optimistic at the outset about the chances for the various ethnic and religious groups of the former Yugoslavia to mend things up a little bit.  By the end of his efforts and the end of the book, after traveling through thick forests, high alps, Mediterranean coastline, and the smog of big cities, he has changed his tune on both counts, considering Princip to have misjudged the impact of his actions, and not just misjudged, but having brought about more harm than good as well as coming to the realization that the peoples of the region, harboring some of the same prejudices and stereotypes as those held about 100 years ago as WWI broke out, aren’t breaking out of those molds any time soon. 

Tracing the life and travels of Princip proved an interesting motif and an interesting background to the pictures of the people and places of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, and Croatia.  I was most struck by the fact that in the larger cities, much had been repaired or rebuilt when it came to buildings or infrastructure, but when it came to people’s feelings, most of those whom the author spoke with had experienced no rebuilding at all since the fall of Communist Yugoslavia.  The author, partially of Croatian descent himself, seemed to think that, much like Communist Russia’s experience, the ethnic harmony of the Communist time in Yugoslavia was not genuine.  While the Left likes to play this type of ethnic and racial strife up in America, I am of the opinion that very little of these types of feelings exist in America, and I think it is because of this that Americans, myself included, have such a hard time understanding an sympathizing with the people of the Balkans.  We’d rather worry about our own families’s welfare, our jobs, and our favorite sports teams than whether or not we should hate the people next door because they say a few words differently than we do, have a different last name, or belong to a different church.  The book was an interesting, although not gripping read, and there are better works out there if one is after pure history, but this provided a slightly lighter approach to both the history and the state of current affairs.

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Monday, June 03, 2013

The Three Musketeers

I have always been a firm believer in reading the book before I see the movie.  I guess there are a few reasons for this, but one is that I prefer to not have a movie’s set, costumes, actors, and incomplete story line influence my reading.  I find that my mind’s eye can usually come up with better scenery, more vivid characters, and increased excitement, passion, and other feelings than any movie can.  I also enjoy the fuller plots, characters that are explored in greater detail, and being able to catch the intangibles that just don’t port over from an original work to a reinterpretation, no matter how true to the original the copy is.  While there have been multiple theatrical releases of Dumas’ famous work, The Three Musketeers, during my lifetime, I have never watched a single one.  My general lack of interest in movies contributed to this, but I also wanted to read the book first.

Book cover.As those more in tune with pop culture than me know, The Three Musketeers (ISBN: 0-679-60332-8) by Alexandre Dumas tells the story of the young d’Artagnan and his three protectors and friends, the eponymous three Musketeers, who go by their pseudonyms, Athos, Aramis, and Porthos.  Duelling brings d’Artagnan and the Musketeers together, and from there they fight duels and more serious battles together, continually looking out for each other.  They manage to get themselves mixed up in high-level intrigue as the queen of France, Cardinal Richelieu, the king of France, and the Duke of Buckingham play out their political ambitions, romantic interests, and personal aspirations in Paris’s parlors, on battlefields, and through behind-the-scenes intrigues involving soldiers, churchmen, and criminals.  There is a decent bit of action with horse rides, pistol fights, sword fights, battles between armies and between minds, and seduction.  In the end, the bad guys get what is coming to them, and in what seems to be a bit of a pattern for Dumas, not all of the good guys make it out alive.  D’Artagnan and his friends are more or less unscathed and have lived up to their immortal motto, “All for one, one for all!”

I, obviously, cannot compare the book to the unseen movies, but standing on its own, I enjoyed the book.  I was not sure what to expect after being slightly disappointed by The Count of Monte Cristo.  I thought there was a good mix of action, strategy, and romance.  I enjoyed the lack of philosophizing by the main characters.  The storyline flowed and was more or less believable (maybe this shouldn’t be a requirement for fiction, but the Count’s inhuman abilities to remember things as well as his supposedly oriental medicinal abilities were part of my underwhelming read of that other immortal Dumas story).  I thought the story was fun and easy to read, which cannot be said of all classics, but probably help make and keep this story a classic.

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Saturday, April 13, 2013

Balkan Ghosts

“So foul a sky clears not without a storm.”
— Shakespeare, The Life and Death of King John, 4.2.108

My childhood featured a couple major actions by U.S. armed forces: the Gulf War and the U.S.-led NATO involvement in the Bosnian War.  The former was broadcast into our living rooms, and I remember watching live footage of bombs hitting Baghdad while preparing for my dad's birthday celebrations.  The second was a smaller operation and much less well understood in the U.S.  As a teenager, I know I certainly didn’t get it.  What probably brought that war home for Americans was when Capt. Scott O'Grady was shot down, survived for a few days on bugs and other gross stuff like that, and was rescued by marines.  It was nothing short of miraculous that the story had a happy ending.  It also made people, myself included, pay more attention to a little-known and little-understood part of the world.

Book cover.Balkan Ghosts by Robert D. Kaplan (ISBN: 978-0-312-42493-0), is self-styled as a travelogue, but is more akin to a feature story in a national magazine on current affairs.  Kaplan weaves his extensive travels and living experience in the region and the accompanying interviews and everyday events with historical perspective and the relevant biographical information pertaining to the important figures in the Balkans’ history, his “ghosts.”  Kaplan’s definition of the Balkans is a bit wider than most Americans’, so not only the former Yugoslavia, but Romania, Bulgaria, and Greece, too, are included in the discussion of this fascinating geographical region.  Each country and each nation (ethnic group) has a few figures in its past who lived in such a way and made decisions in such a way as to continue to influence the way things are done and the way people think.  With the exception of Greece, the Balkans also deal with a specter of a different type, the continued need to deal with the harsh consequences of communist dictatorships that broke people and destroyed countries immediately after the Nazis and fascism gave the same thing a whirl.  It’s worth noting that the Nazis followed right on the heels of the Hapsburgs, who were, in most people’s estimation, better rulers than the succeeding ones, but on occasion no less ruthless.  The great figures and great histories of the various peoples are presented with all the raw emotion that is associated with Balkanization, and Kaplan points out that since the histories are great, the people pick those moments when their histories were at an apex and claim that cultural, linguistic, and territorial summit as the way things should be now before any other discussions can be had.  It puts them all in a hard place, but Kaplan argues that considering all the things these groups of people and these countries have been through, there’s really no way but up, although, as his reference to Shakespeare alludes to, it might be a painful process.

I thought the book was a good read, although I was slightly disappointed by a couple things.  One was that the book had received so much press, I thought it was going to blow my socks off, and it didn’t.  The other was that although Kaplan makes a convincing argument for including Romania, Bulgaria, and Greece in his book because of their obvious geographical location but also because of their similar historical paths and current problems, I was hoping for something that focused more on the American definition of the Balkans, the former Yugoslavia.  Still, I think I came away with a little more understanding of the region currrently and a much better understanding of its history.  Like all people European and Asian, the Slavs of southeastern Europe know and appreciate their history.  The troubles in the Balkans are one of those cases where that appreciation goes too far.  There are endless debates about European and American culture and which is better.  I typically fall on both sides of the debate, preferring to pick and choose what I like from both.  Americans’ propensity to not worry so much about the past and get on with today is something the Balkan nations could learn from.  In the meantime, Kaplan has opened the door and illuminated a few feet beyond the threshold of an exotic and unexplored (at least, by me) world that is only barely removed from the Europe and Russia that I know.

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Sunday, March 24, 2013

God Wants a Powerful People


As a kid, like just about every kid, I spent hours and hours chucking a basketball up at the hoop after drawing up an elaborate scenario in my head in which the team I was playing on (usually BYU or the Utah Jazz) was down a point or two with only four or five seconds to go in a championship game.  If I made it, my teammates and the fans went wild and I went on to fame and forture.  (If I missed, I was fouled or there was a problem with the clock or something else bizarre happened which allowed me to try again for that game-winning shot.)  I mention fame and forture only because that is a common thread in most people’s dreams as a kid.  I think that as people grow older and realize that they’d probably be happier with the fortune if it didn’t come with fame and even the forture part is not a necessary condition for happiness, those ideas fade a bit.  On the other hand, it’s not just kids that look up to people they consider to be heroes, and good examples in famous people, thought hard to come by, can lead to a lot of good.  I think of that in connection with Church leaders because some of them achieve a certain degree of celebrity status, especially in the Mormon Corridor.  President Hinckley may be the best example of this, but there are certainly others.

Book cover.Sheri Dew was one of the Church leaders who reached a rather high level of celebrity status in the Church, and maybe even a little out of it, largely because of her supposed novelty: a never-married member of the Relief Society presidency.  She, like many other Church leaders who have become celebrities in their own right, used that increased ability to get a message out by writing a few books.  God Wants a Powerful People (ISBN: 978-1-59038-813-6) is one of them.  The premise of the book is simple.  God is generous and is willing to make His children powerful people, people who can accomplish a lot, help a lot of other people, and in general make the world a better place.  God wants to bless us.  When we do certain things, like striving to be righteous, the blessings flow, and by taking advantage of them, we become powerful people, changing not only our own lives, but the lives of those around us.  The book includes examples from everyday life on how we can go about becoming on of these powerful people, scriptures, ideas from Church leaders, and some common sense thrown in, too.  As with anything in the gospel, the biggest keys are probably putting words and ideas into action and relying on Jesus Christ in all of our efforts to improve and to help others.

As I have mentioned before, I am typically quite skeptical of these types of Church-related books.  I love the Church’s manuals, other official publications, and, of course, the scriptures.  Sometimes I think of these books as self-help lite, and the self-help genre is lite to begin with.  The trouble is, the gospel message is true, really no matter how it’s delivered, so in the end, I can rarely come down on these books.  They are not great literature, but there are often things that stand out to me and make me think about the way I live my life and about the things I can change to make myself better.  Unlike the self-help books, which are rarely, if ever, based on eternal truths, the ideas in Sister Dew’s book were concrete and real.  The discussion of the priesthood and the power that it holds if wielded by a righteous man was impressive.  The requirements for being righteous aren’t complicated or arcane; they simply need doing.  I was also impressed by the counsel to do things early — everything from getting up the morning to applying gospel principles to ourselves and our lives should be done early.  Early adopters of all things gospel will be powerful earlier, too, thereby bringing about the greatest good in their own lives and the lives of other people.

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Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Russia’s Revolution: Essays, 1989–2006

Russia is a fascinating country.  I am not sure when I really started to think that.  It was probably when I was very, very young.  I remember getting glimpses of the winter Olympics in 1988 (I admit that my memory is fuzzy on this one, and it might’ve actually been 1984) on an old black and white TV perched precariously on a bookshelf in the family living room and wondering why the Russians wore hockey jerseys that had “CCCP” emblazoned across the front.  What could that possibly mean?  I mean, everyone knew how you spelled Russia.  Even the abbreviation of the unweildy official name of the country — USSR — didn’t match up with CCCP.  Only later did it process in my head that they spoke Russian in Russia and it wasn’t until even later that I learned they used the Cyrillic alphabet.  Early Olympic viewing was mixed with coming to understand that in Soviet Russia, one didn’t get to choose one’s profession (this was, of course, an oversimplification, but sometimes such statements still do an adequate job of explaining things).  My young mind imagined a country full of people assigned to do household chore-style jobs (those were really the only jobs I was familiar with) from the time they graduated from high school until the end of their lives.  I felt especially bad for the guy stuck with emptying the garbage cans day in and day out.

Book cover.Leon Aron, author of Russia’s Revolution: Essays, 1989–2006 (ISBN: 978-0-8447-4242-7), was always interested in Russia because he was born in the USSR.  Although he emigrated and came to America after the Soviets started letting Jews leave, he remained interested in his homeland and became a respected commentator and scholar on the land of Peter the Great, Ivan the Terrible, Stalin, and now Vladimir Putin.  Aron has written extensively on all things Russia, and in this book, he compiled essays that take the reader through life in Russia from the early days of Boris Yeltsin through the middle years of Putin’s first term in office as Russia’s president.  Aron describes Yeltsin and his democratization efforts.  He is quite a fan of Yeltsin, praising his statesmanship and ability to hold together a country that had partially fallen apart and threated to completely implode on a daily basis.  Aron touches on every aspect of Russia reborn, including food, oil, politics, oligarchs, literature, the military, and international relations.  All of these vastly different aspects of life in the post-Soviet Russia give an idea of what was happening in the country at the time the essay was written.  Aron finishes up his compilation with discussions of Putin, a — to put it mildly — controversial figure and one of Russia’s largest struggles during the 1990s, Chechnya.  Aron’s point, even with the various negatives that Putin and Chechnya seemed to usher in, was that much good has happened since the Soviet Union fell apart in Russia and even though there have been and continue to be bumps in the road (and they’re often big bumps), things are probably going in the right direction, but the only way to tell is to wait and see.  The West didn’t get to its heights in 20 years, and Russia won’t either.

I wasn’t quite sure how relevant a book of essays about some stuff that took place over twenty years ago would be.  As I read through the first half to two-thirds of the book I was even a little put off because the author came across as so excited about the prospects of Russia’s future.  Even during Yeltsin’s presidency, I wasn’t overly impressed with the direction Russia was going.  The discussions of food and literature were interesting and showed Aron’s skill in writing about a wide variety of subjects, but I found the discussions of the oligarchs, Putin’s so-called reforms, and the failings of Russia’s military to be the most relevant to today’s situation.  I thought the writing was very solid, but I liked the overarching point of the work, too.  I have always been a proponent of the idea of giving democracy and capitalism in the ex-Soviet space a lot of time before they take hold, let alone blossom.  Aron takes that long-term view, too.  The only depressing thing about the view is that Aron directs his commentary to the West in a hope to convince both everyman and policymakers that the typical view of a Russia ready to implode and bring the world down with it isn’t quite true, but it’s not really Americans or western Europeans that need to adopt this long-term view.  Regular, everyday Russians need to be more patient than they probably are.  (Not just Russians, but most people in the post-Communist world.)  There are going to be problems as Russia tries to emerge from its past, but it’s going to take a lot of time and multiple generations before things are at the same level as the West (and to be honest, the West is digressing, but that’s a story for a different day).  Average Russians need to be patient and keep working to make things change before they decide that the new order of things is a failure and that the old methods of authoritarianism, top-down control of the economy, and a lack of many basic freedoms were better for whatever reason.

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This work, including all text, photographs, and other original work, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives 3.0 License and is copyrighted © MMXI John Pruess.

Thursday, February 14, 2013

The Count of Monte Cristo

Back in high school, at the end of a year of AP calculus, the teachers decided the best way to use the legally mandated seat time was by showing us movies.  While this would be a great time to jump off on a tangent regarding the follies of state-run schooling, I will refrain, and I could go off on wasted tax monies, but, that, too, must wait for a different place and time.  One of the movies that many of my classmates were very excited about was called the Count of Monte Cristo.  Not having anywhere near the level of pop-culture exposure as my peers, I didn’t get what all the rage was about and ended up sleeping through most of the movie.  Still, my curiosity was piqued, and I have always wondered what caused such commotion.  Almost twenty years later, I’m still not much for movies, especially if they've been made since about 1980, but I have come to appreciate classic literature much more than AP English could ever have hoped to instill (there's something to be said for reading something of one's own volition and being forced to read something).  A good adventure story makes a book that much more appealing.

Book cover.The prolific French writer Alexandre Dumas’s epic adventure, The Count of Monte Cristo (ISBN: 0-679-60199-6), tells an intricately woven tale of injustice, revenge, hope, mercy, and even forgiveness.  The first part of the book gives the reader no indications whatsoever of the impending treachery and troubles as one is acquainted with the hero, Edmond Dantès, a dashing, honest, and hard-working sailor about to fulfill a few of his life's dreams.  A jealous neighbor, a competitor for the affections of his love, and colleague who couldn't bear seeing Dantès promoted before himself stop those plans, though, and send the main character's life in a totally different direction.  Prison, though, affords us with our first adventure: sneaking out of prison in another prisoner's body bag.  After that, there are many adventures to be had with Dantès on ships, with smugglers, and finally, in Paris as he exacts revenge on those who put him in prison and deprived him of his father, his beloved, and his desired job.  In Paris, the rich Count of Monte Cristo wows the elites, works his way into their lives, and manages to bring those lives to screeching halts, usually through ignominious deaths.  Although Dantès exacts his revenge, he starts to realize that maybe it's not all about justice, especially as he sees his former girlfriend reduced to a thoroughly depressed and unhappy state.  His shows mercy almost to a fault toward those who were once nice to him, but eventually even to one of his avowed enemies.

The book was an enjoyable read, but toward the end, I mostly felt sad for the main character and wished that the book could have included a stronger redemptive message.  It seems that Dantès's final act of forgiveness and ability to again find love were afterthoughts by Dumas.  They didn't make up for 1,000 pages of a man spending all his time and energy on finding ways to be smarter, stronger, and better prepared than one's avowed enemies so one could more fully destroy them.  Dantès's confusion of God's justice with his desire for revenge was also somewhat distracting from the story.  Finally, while I turned page after page as quickly as possible, and enjoyed the story, I realized that the vast majority of the story took place in the parlors of the Parisian elite.  It was adventure minus swords, guns, ships, armies, and other, more traditional forms of daring.  Still, the intriguing web of characters, storyline that was complex at times, and quick-moving events make for a good read and it is understandable why the Count of Monte Cristo is such a fixture in western culture.  It is also worth noting that as I read the book I found myself thinking a lot of the Princess Bride and figured that the author of that book and (later) screenplay must've been intimately acquainted with the Count of Monte Cristo.  It’s a very long book, but the unabridged version is really the only way to go since it provides the richest character development, deeper understanding of the plot lines, and a more complete picture of the settings, motives, and world views of the characters, all of which makes the reader more easily drawn into the world of the characters — one full of faraway places, exotic people, intigue, crime, high society, petty theft, politics, and human foibles and emotions.

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This work, including all text, photographs, and other original work, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives 3.0 License and is copyrighted © MMXI John Pruess.