Elizabeth Cook, Achilles ***

Achilles retells the story of Achilles in prose that is as close to poetry as you can get. It's a small book that I (re-)read in a single sitting. It offers several beautiful passages, with the best being its account of Odysseus' visit to the underworld at the very beginning.

Cook focuses our attention on the sensual and emotional aspects of the scenes, thereby supplementing the epic narrative in the classical sources. You need to know the outline of the story already. The last third of the book drifts away from Achilles himself to consider Helen, the centaur Chiron, and, most surprisingly, the poet John Keats.

Jenny Diski, Why Didn't You Just Do What You Were Told? ***

The early essays of this collection are delightful. Diski has an insouciant style that conveys her singular personality and leads to mordantly funny insights. Many of her topics are obscurely British, like Denis Thatcher or Lillie Langtry, but I still found myself laughing at her perfectly phrased wisecracks. Her more purely personal essays made me appreciate her attraction to indolence.

Diski wrote these pieces for the London Review of Books, so many of them are nominally book reviews, often of biographies. She often notes how the biographer tries to build an enobling narrative about his or her subject but is foiled by the inevitable complexity of human lives.

The pieces are in chronological order, from 1992 to 2014. I felt like Diski lost her unique spark around the turn of the century (roughly page 160). Her essays were still pleasant, but I felt a lack of her personal voice and offbeat observations. 

I would be interested in learning more about Diski's mentorship with Doris Lessing, but she didn't write much about it until her final book In Gratitude, which came long after she lost her flair.

Alexander Douglas, Against Identity **

The introduction to this book of philosophy acknowledges the importance of one's personal identity:

Each of us is born with a deep biological urge for self-preservation. But consciously pursuing self-preservation requires some notion of what our self is. ... Some believe that we can find out by introspecting and looking within to find our true self. But ... there is no map highlighting which qualities truly define us: which are our defining traits and which our fleeting states. Nor does who you happen to be right now define who you essentially are. 

While our basic appetites are biologically determined, our desires beyond these basic appetites arise from a fundamental psychological drive for identity—a drive to be a certain sort of person.

You decide who you are, and then this determines how you want to act, what you want to possess, who you want to connect with, what you want to believe. ... In making value judgements, you define who you are, more than through any other human activity.

The author emphasizes that the existential importance of identity leads us to violence when our identity is threatened. He promises to examine the thought of three very different philosophers (Zhuangzi from ancient China, Benedict de Spinoza in the 17th-century Dutch Republic, and René Girard in 20th-century France) who counseled us to abandon our identities.

This introduction reinforces the idea that we (necessarily) construct identities to understand ourselves and fit into our social environment. How can we possibly do without them? 

In the early chapters, Douglas seems to suggest that we simply accept our internal multitudes and stay open to change. Later, it sounds like he is recommending Buddhist-style detachment. In the end, he settles on proposing "communion in a shared identitylessness. If I see that you and I are both identityless expressions of superdeterminate being then we are not simply as one in shared identity; We are one."

Douglas' descriptions of other philosophers' ideas are notably vague, and his conclusion waffles between saying we should transcend our identities through spirituality and telling us to choose better exemplary models for our identities (like Christ perhaps, or Spinoza's God). None of it provides a viable alternative to identity.

For a much better treatment of this topic, see Kwame Anthony Appiah's The Ethics of Identity. I believe that I myself have written a more insightful essay on this topic.

Laurent Binet, HHhH **** 1/2

HHhH is a historical novel about the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, founder of the Nazi SS and mastermind of the Final Solution. It charts Heydrich's rise and describes the Operation Anthropoid that led to his killing at the hands of two Czechoslovakian agents. The author also documents his struggles in writing the book, trying not to go beyond the known facts.

So, basically, the film [Patton] is about a fictional character whose life is strongly inspired by Patton's, but who clearly isn't him... Everybody finds it normal, fudging reality to make a screenplay more dramatic.

Has there ever been a biographer who did not dream of writing, "Jesus of Nazareth used to lift his left eyebrow when he was thinking"?

What Binet reveals, though, is how our understanding of any story necessarily depends on embellishing the historical record. Both the author and the reader contribute to the embellishment. For example, Binet  knows the difference between Czechs and Slovaks because of tennis. "Ivan Lendl was Czech while Miroslav Mečíř was Slovak." His sense of their playing styles informs his impression of the character of the two assassins. (He later knows one of the smaller Czech towns because the hockey goalie Dominik Hašek is from there.) He imagines the creaking of the tram outside of Jozef Gabčík's room because he has spent time in Prague.

In addition, the author inevitably shapes the story into a narrative by choosing what information to include. 

I can't tell this story the way it should be told. This whole hotchpotch of characters, events, dates, and the infinite branching of cause and effect—and these people, these real people who actually existed. I'm barely able to mention a tiny fragment of their lives, their actions, their thoughts.

Binet regularly equivocates over whether to include particular incidents, based on whether they are relevant or well-attested. Meanwhile, he quietly includes true facts that provide verisimilitude:

The Sten was concealed in a bag that Gabčík had filled with dry grass... If the police checked him, how would he explain the fact that he was walking around town with a bag full of hay? Well, actually, that's easy: all he'd have to say is that it's for the rabbit. In those days, many Czechs bred rabbits at home in order to improve their daily diet, and fed them on grass taken from the city's parks.

No matter how much we know about a person or event, we still need to apply our experiences and assumptions to make it into a compelling narrative.

Despite its dark subject matter and postmodern trappings, HHhH was entertaining and informative.

Marcus Willaschek, Kant: A Revolution in Thinking ****

I knew Immanuel Kant as "the most important philosopher of the modern era" based on his work in metaphysics (Critique of Pure Reason) and ethics (the categorical imperative). Kant: A Revolution in Thinking gave me a more complete picture of Kant, both as a person and as a thinker. I learned, for example, that more than half of Kant's published works are about natural science!

The book has a unique organization, one that is thematic rather than chronological. Willaschek starts with Kant's less well-known ideas regarding politics and history and gradually works his way toward the more abstruse metaphysics. Each chapter includes information about Kant's ideas, his life, and the contemporary context.

I was concerned when reading the first few chapters. They felt like a disorganized collection of thoughts that didn't support Kant's reputation, and the language sounded like overly literal translations from the German. As I continued, it became clear that each section was like a puzzle piece, and the big picture came into focus once I had more of the pieces in place.

Willaschek identifies three important aspects of Kant's genius.

• He found ways to reconcile seemingly contradictory positions, such as idealism/epiricism and determinism/free will
• He shifted the focus of debate about objectivity and epistemology so that it takes seriously the nature and limitations of human understanding
• He approached natural science and moral reasoning in the same way.

Sarah Bakewell, The English Dane *** 1/2

The English Dane tells the true story of Jorgen Jorgenson, a 19th-century man whose adventures intersected with some of the major currents of the times. He commanded a ship in the Napoleonic wars, helped establish the British colony in Tasmania, attracted powerful British patrons, ruled Iceland after participating in a coup, spent time in debtor's prison, got transported back to Tasmania as a convict, played a notable role in the Aboriginal clearances, and was a prolific writer on a wide range of subjects. Jorgenson was a charming man of great talents who invariably undermined himself through impulsiveness. When he lacked a clear purpose, he descended into drunken dereliction.

Jorgenson is a rich complicated character whose exploits introduce us to fascinating historical events, and Sarah Bakewell can write compelling biographies. However, this book lacks je ne sais quoi. It reads like a recitation of events, somehow missing the inherent drama. I found myself thinking "how interesting" while simultaneously pondering how to make it more gripping.

Nicholas Monsarrat, The Cruel Sea *****

The Cruel Sea is one of my all-time favorite books. It follows the crew of the corvette Compass Rose as they provide protection for merchant ship convoys during the Battle of the Atlantic in World War II. It's an impossible job, fighting against the elements and the ever-increasing threat from U-Boats.

The story rarely strays from the crew's point of view, but Monsarrat manages to include a sense of the strategic development of the conflict by filtering it through their eyes. The prose style is generally earnest and matter-of-fact, which actually enhances the emotional impact. As a war novel, it's got plenty of adventure, quiet heroism, gnarly injuries, and sudden death.

The final third of the book flags compared to the rest. Our heroes move to a larger ship where they can't possibly know their crew mates as intimately, and the business of escorting conveys settles into something like routine. The tide of the war turns in their favor. ("If I were writing the story of this contest, this is where the book would tail off, because we've reached the moment where nothing happens—we're just winning the war, and that's all there is to say.")

This one gets my highest recommendation. No fancy literary technique, just good old-fashioned immersive adventure, with some history to boot.