Adriatic: A Concert of Civilizations at the End of the Modern Age by Robert D. Kaplan

 

Kaplan's most personal & reflective book

I’ve read many of Robert D. Kaplan’s books, and he’s not an easy writer pigeonhole. Is he a travel writer, or a journalist, or an historian, or a geopolitical strategist, or a literary critic, or a memoirist? In different books—and sometimes all in one book—he qualifies for all of these designations. In fact, in Adriatic, we find Kaplan at his most diverse and his most personal. 

The bones of the book come from a journey (in segments) that Kaplan made that began in Rimini, Italy, and then moved onto Ravenna, Venice, and Trieste (all in Italy), then through Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro, and Albania, culminating on the Greek island of Corfu. The common theme is the ties of these cities and nations—these lands—with the Adriatic Sea; and, in a larger sense, with the Mediterranean and the diverse civilizations and regimes that have existed in proximity to the Mediterranean. Around the Adriatic, Rome, Byzantium, Venice, the Ottoman Empire, Yugoslavia, and other nations and groups have all encountered one another, along with Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Islam. 

Part of the story involves commentary and analysis from another author known as a journalist and geopolitical strategist; lots of reports of conversations with locals—politicians and government officials, academics, historians, and other writers. As one might expect, one comes away with insights into the social, economic, and political situations that Kaplan observes in these lands. All of this is worth the price of admission, but Kaplan’s observations and reporting are not what drew me to read this book twice over. (In reviewing my highlights and notes to write this review, I realized that I gobbled down the book during my first reading, and I would be wise to savor it on a second reading. My hunch proved correct.) 

In fact, several more layers in the book take its value far beyond reporting about current events in each locale. To start with, Kaplan makes his trip into a literary tour. Even before the beginning of his account of his journey, we are introduced to quotes from Italo Calvino; beginning in Rimini, he discusses the work and reputation of Ezra Pound; in Ravenna, we are treated to Dante; in Venice, he discusses Thomas Mann (Death in Venice); in Trieste, James Joyce (where Joyce wrote The Dubliners and other works) and Joseph Brodsky; and eventually on down to Corfu, where he discusses the Nobel Prize-winning Greek poet George Seferis. And in addition to these (and other) literary lights, Kaplan mentions authors most often considered “travel writers." In Corfu, for instance, it’s Lawrence Durrell; in Venice, it’s James/Jan Morris and Mary McCarthy; in Trieste, it’s Sir Richard Francis Burton (the nineteenth-century adventurer and translator) and Claudio Magris; and in (the former) Yugoslavia he cites Rebecca West and her 1941 book, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. These lists of authors are but a sampler. 

But there is another layer down in this book. For Kaplan is not a name-dropper; he’s a reader. His admiration for the authors and works that he discusses is frank (especially for historians and their histories). In fact, he rues his lack of training as a historian and linguist. But he denigrates his own experiences and reporting too much. True, those who haunt archives and who bring to life earlier ages do a great service for which they are rightly hailed. Their work brings history to life, not simply as so many tales from the past, but as a set of events and actions that reveal human intentions and projects in all their magnificent diversity. History provides crucial self-disclosure for the human race, by which we can develop the self-consciousness of our species. Kaplan, through his reading and writing, advances this project with a book like this even more than what he could do via a more formal work of history. 

Digging down another level, Kaplan reveals his own quest for self-knowledge and continuing self-criticism. While Kaplan rues that his formal education ended with an undergraduate degree, I fear that graduate school might have spoiled his taste for broad interests and first-hand knowledge. And, he proves himself a committed, life-long autodidact, which is the mark of any truly educated, cultivated person. Certainly, Kaplan has role models who are great writers who’ve not been hampered by their (relative) lack of formal education. (A favorite of Kaplan and mine is Patrick Leigh Fermor, who was kicked out of school as a young man and went on the write some of the finest English-language prose of the twentieth century, and who quoted Horace to a captive German general on Mt Aetna on Crete during WWII—a great story there.) Whether a historian, philosopher, travel writer, or journalist, to be at the top rank one must know when to adjust one’s focus, when to use the microscope and when to use the telescope as one searches for knowledge across a variety of landscapes. Kaplan does this quite well. (Another fine example of this ability is the late historian-essayist John Lukacs, whose focus could shift without blurring from the “Modern Age” to Five Days in London, May 1940.) 

The final aspect of this book is the deepest and perhaps the most rewarding. This is Kaplan writing a memoir, a confession. Kaplan notes that in writing this he was in his mid-60s, and he’d been to many of these locations before. (See his Mediterranean Winter (2004.) In this sense, this book is similar to his earlier In Europe's Shadow: Two Cold Wars and a Thirty-Year Journey Through Romania and Beyond (2016), which reviewer Timothy D. Snyder described as revealing

[T]he confident, poetical Kaplan, striving as ever in his writing for the proverbial, but also a reflective, political Kaplan, seeking at times to submerge his gift for romantic generalization in respectful attention to the ideas of others. That tension — between an aesthetic sense of wholeness and the intellectual acceptance of complexity — is the real subject of the book, both as autobiography and as geopolitics. 

So, this book: it’s as much a memoir and autobiography as it is a book of travel and political analysis. As in the earlier book, Kaplan chastises himself for his earlier support of the Iraq War, having (mistakenly) thought that it would entail the overthrow of a dictatorship along the lines of the 1989 fall of Communism in Eastern Europe. But he doesn’t dwell on this mistake or the controversy surrounding his earlier book in the Balkans (Balkan Ghosts (1993) that influenced the Clinton administration, making the President reluctant to become actively involved in stopping the Serbian genocide. (There, Kaplan was an early proponent of intervention, notwithstanding any impression taken from Balkan Ghosts by others.) 

But again, I have to emphasize that Kaplan pulls the camera out further, for a wider focus, for a wider reflection upon himself. A sampling: 

The real adventure of travel is intellectual, because the most profound journeys are interior in nature. (Location 89)

. . . . 

[I]t is the books you have read, as much as the people you have met, that constitute autobiography. (Location 95)

. . . .

Because travel is a journey of the mind, the scope of the journey is limitless, encompassing all manner of introspection and concerned with the great debates and issues of our age. (Location 96)

. . . . 

Travel is psychoanalysis that starts in a specific moment of time and space. And everything about that moment is both unique and sacred—everything. (Location 99)

. . . . 

Originality emanates from solitude: from letting your thoughts wander in alien terrain. I boarded a ferry from Pescara to Split a half century ago to feel alive thus. For this reason I am alone now in a church in Rimini in winter. The lonelier the setting, the crueler the weather, the greater the possibilities for beauty, I tell myself. Great poetry is not purple; it is severe. (Location 106)

. . . . 

The mystery of travel involves the layers revealed about yourself as you devour such knowledge. Thus, travel must lead to self-doubt. And I am full of doubts. (Location 113)

[A]s I matured and became more interested in abstract matters rather than in atmospherics—in Confucian philosophy itself rather than in merely the setting for it, in the geopolitics of Italian city-states rather than in the art they produced—[Ezra] Pound’s evocative allusions to such matters, idiosyncratic as they might be, arguably nutty and crackpot for significant stretches, kept me from altogether deserting him. (Location 347)

. . . . 

Travel leads to books, and good books lead you to other good books. And thus, I have become an obsessive reader of bibliographies. (Location 385)

. . . .

The more I learned, the more aware I became of my own ignorance and autodidacticism. Only in late middle age would I become intellectually comfortable in my own skin, confident that the truest and most revealing insights sometimes involve seeing what was right in front of your eyes as you traveled. The future, I have learned, is often prepared by what cannot be mentioned or admitted to in fine company. The future lies inside the silences. (Location 535)

. . . . 

The train is the perfect place to think and read. (Location 602)

. . . .

Even just one day of travel constitutes a moment of lucidity that breaks through the grinding gears of daily habit, so that it becomes a bit more difficult to lie to oneself. I travel in order not to be deceived. Camus writes, “I realized…that a man who’d only lived for a day could easily live for a hundred years in a prison. He’d have enough memories not to get bored.” Very overstated perhaps, but not if that one day was a day of travel. (Location 603)

. . . 

[B]ecause there is no redemption, there is only confession. (Location 629) 

Such a person, such a writer, who strives for such a degree of self-knowledge, self-understanding, who recollects opportunities realized and lost, and who engages in a such on ongoing project of genuine education--of drawing out one's self, as does Kaplan--deserves our admiration for giving voice to so much that we may pass over or have missed in ourselves. 

I hope that this gives you a sample of the many layers of this book and the reason why Kaplan would worry about how this book might be categorized in a book store! It’s many books, many styles, all in one book. It’s a terrific read; a travelogue for the mind; a reflection on many times and places. 

Thoughts 20 Dec. 2021

 

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

Economic development as we know it started with Europe’s conquest of the New World, a bonanza of found wealth. Before the conquest, European societies were politically, economically, and socially closed. But once flooded by a surge of new energy from the Americas, they began to open and develop. All the philosophies, institutions, and values characteristic of modern life, above all liberal democracy, slowly emerged. Over time, as the New World bonanza was supplemented and then supplanted by fossil fuels, economic and political development proceeded in tandem to transform the world and to create the luxuries and freedoms we enjoy today. With a return of ecological scarcity, however, what abundance has given will be taken away—to what extent and how rapidly remains to be seen, but we can hardly expect liberal democratic institutions fostered by abundance and predicated on abundance to survive in their current form.

Good Calories, Bad Calories

Gary Taubes

The science of epidemiology evolved to make sense of infectious diseases, not common chronic diseases like heart disease. Though the tools of epidemiology—comparisons of populations with and without the disease—had proved effective in establishing that a disease such as cholera is caused by the presence of micro-organisms in contaminated water, as the British physician John Snow demonstrated in 1854, it is a much more complicated endeavor to employ those same tools to elucidate the subtler causes of chronic disease. They can certainly contribute to the case against the most conspicuous determinants of noninfectious diseases—that cigarettes cause lung cancer, for example.

Still one of my favorite science books.

The Wedge

Scott Carney

Think of the macrophage—and, for that matter, the entire diverse assembly of immune cells—as a pack of friendly wolves patrolling the area inside our skin, attacking the things that might hurt us. What happens when those wolves no longer have regular prey? They go stir-crazy. They get bored. And they might turn on themselves.

Following the "wolves" metaphor, part of what I understand to be one of the lethal attributes of the (at least the original) COVID virus is the "storm" of antibodies it triggers. The wolves go too wild, in a manner of speaking. N.B. Here, Carney is referring to autoimmune diseases.

In Europe's Shadow

Robert D. Kaplan

EASTER 2013 IN BUCHAREST also illuminated the work of Patrick Leigh Fermor, that craftsman of irreducible godlike essences whose every sentence belongs in a time capsule—to call him a mere travel writer is to diminish him.

I was tipped off to Patrick Leigh Fermor at the Jaipur Literature Festival (thank you, William Dalrymple). Having read Fermor's work, and having lived in Romania, I heartily concur with Kaplan's appraisal. Great writing!

Speculum Mentis

R. G. Collingwood

The wealth of religion is a pearl of great price hidden in a field; it is wheat growing among tares. You cannot have the glory and comfort of religion without its superstition, its magic, its brutal hatreds and slavish fears. In the highest and sternest religions these elements are kept in check, but no more. They are always present at the back of the mind, always ready to break out and devastate human life. Religion is always looking forward to the day when it shall be set free from this body of death which, as its own shadow, it perpetually carries with it. That freedom is nothing but the self-revelation of thought, the discovery by the mind of its own nature as a thinking mind.

However abstract and barren may be the first-fruits of this discovery, the discovery itself is an incalculable advance in the history of man. As art and religion lift man above the level of the beasts, science lifts the civilized man above the level of the savage. The material utility of science, its service in feeding and clothing and sheltering us, carrying us from place to place and providing us with comforts, is the least part of its importance. Its real gift is simply the end of dreaming and the promise of a waking life. It sweeps aside with a ruthless hand all mythology, all symbols that are heavy with unrealized meanings and dark with the terrors of dreamland, and bids the mind face the world’s mystery armed with nothing but its five senses and the sling of its wit. What that means, no one knows who has not long and carefully weighed the debt which he owes to the scientific consciousness. But when that is done, he will hardly shrink from praising the founders of science for the gift of spiritual freedom even in the words of the ancient poet.

The Kennedy Imprisonment

Garry Wills

America, we like to think, has been specially “graced.” Set apart. The first child of the Enlightenment, it was “declared” to others as the harbinger of a new order. Yet this rationally founded nation was also deeply devotional, a redeemer nation. Reason and religion, which should have contended near our cradle, conspired instead. If we kept ourself isolated from others, it was to avoid contamination. If we engaged others, we did so from above, to bring light into their darkness. To deal with others as equals would betray our mission.

Thoughts for the Day: Sunday 28 March 2021

 

The Caretakers of the Cosmos

Gary Lachman

As Kathleen Raine put it: ‘the imagination does not see different things, it sees things differently.’

NL IV: “Feeling”

"We study history in order to see more clearly the situation in which we are called on to act. Hence the plane on which, ultimately, all problems arise is the plane of ‘real’ life: that to which they are referred for their solution is history." ---R.G. Collingwood

Collingwood's the Idea of History

Peter Johnson

First, we must look at Collingwood’s claim that what is re-enacted is past thought. Why thought? Collingwood writes that ‘to know another’s act of thought involves repeating it for oneself’ (IH 288). For Collingwood the act of thought is not solely the thought as it actually happens.

Collingwood's the Idea of History

Peter Johnson

Re-enactment, in other words, includes counter-factual discussion as well as the delineation of what actually occurred.

“Good tests kill flawed theories; we remain alive to guess again.”
— Karl Popper, one of the most influential philosophers of science of the twentieth century

%Tim Ferris

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

People are all for freedom until it provokes insecurity and disorder. Then they begin to long for security and order at all costs, and this is exactly what the would-be tyrant(s) seem to offer, often accompanied by promises to restore past greatness or crush ancient enemies.

In Europe's Shadow

Robert D. Kaplan

EASTER 2013 IN BUCHAREST also illuminated the work of Patrick Leigh Fermor, that craftsman of irreducible godlike essences whose every sentence belongs in a time capsule—to call him a mere travel writer is to diminish him.

The Age of the Unthinkable

Joshua Cooper Ramo

In sum, this would be systems-style leverage: avoid direct conflict, use the forces already at play, manipulate so quietly as to be unnoticed, know that no effort truly ends. Treat  Middle East (2 words) peace not as something to be hammered together but — to use Hayek’s idea for economies — as a garden to be tended.

The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos by Patrick Leigh Fermor

The journey concluded

Upon finishing The Broken Road: From the Iron Gates to Mount Athos by Patrick Leigh Fermor, I felt both a sense of accomplishment for having finished a trilogy of books, but also a sense of loss, for having completed this reading journey. I would be losing a delightful traveling companion. The trip was a joy; the parting, wistful.

But all readers of Fermor’s trilogy should be thankful that we have a final volume. For after publishing the second installment, Fermor was unable to write this final volume. Perhaps the Saturnalian drags of aging, such as the death of his spouse, declining energy and memory, and homesickness robbed him of the necessary vitality to complete his task. However, a fortuitous event allowed this project to go forward, with the participation of Fermor before he died in 2011 at age 96. In short, Fermor began writing about his journey in the 1960s, but he set aside this initial account that focused on the final leg of this journey. The discovery of this manuscript, along with the recovery of some of his diaries, allowed this book to be completed. The editors, Artemis Cooper and Colin Thubron, detail how the book came to publication in their Introduction. We are fortunate to have this volume, although the circumstances of its coming into existence distinguish it from its two predecessors, making it different in intriguing ways.

The account of the last leg of Paddy’s journey is different from the first two because this work is not completed by Fermor. The prose in this work isn’t as highly polished as that in the first two installments. But this lack of polish isn’t at all detrimental to the work. The narrative moves more quickly, and one gets a stronger sense of Fermor’s first impressions. For writers and curious readers, the comparison of this work with its two predecessors provides intriguing insights into Fermor’s meticulous writing, which results—when fully polished—into exquisite, almost Baroque prose. Yet this less polished gem has stands well on its own.

Of special interest to me was the fact that a great deal of this volume recounting the final leg of Fermor’s journey involves Romania and Bucharest, in particular. I was delighted to learn of Fermor’s great time in Bucharest because I am finding it a very amiable and beautiful city. Bucharest in the 1930s was lively and prosperous, and Fermor makes the most of it. He befriends both prostitutes and diplomats, deploying his usual charm and displaying his admirable ability to move easily between social classes. Of course, descriptions of Calea Victoriei (a main thoroughfare in the Bucharest), just a block away from our apartment, furthered my enjoyment of his account.

After leaving Bucharest, Paddy once again heads south across the Danube into Bulgaria, where new adventures await him. Here he recounts some of the tough times that he had, unlike most of the account  of his journey. For instance, he describes a scuffle with a friend that seems to rise out of nowhere, and he describes becoming lost and hurt as night falls along the Black Sea coastline. These unexpected dangers remind us that while Fermor enjoyed great fun and adventures along the way, his trip was not without its challenges.

Fermor’s account stops midsentence just a few days from his eventual arrival in Istanbul (or Constantinople as he insisted on calling it). The editors provide some account of his time there by use of his diary, but I feel a bit let down not having the benefit of Fermor’s full account of his initial entry and observations of this great city. But while Istanbul gets shortchanged, the reader is in for one final treat.

The editors include entries from Paddy’s diary of his trip to Mount Athos, the holy land of Greece filled with Orthodox monasteries and where no women are allowed. Fermor went there after about two weeks in Istanbul. The use of Paddy’s diary provides a less mature reflection on his surroundings and even less polish in his prose. But the sense of immediacy compensates for the reduction in reflection and polish. We only get the 20-year-old Paddy in this account, not the mature Fermor. We experience first-draft observations about the monastic traditions, icons, and people that Paddy encounters, as well as his descriptions of the natural beauty of the stony, forested land and the shining Aegean Sea. We experience Paddy’s growing comfortable in the monastic routine. I only wish he had been more forthcoming about what he thought of these cloistered men and the lives that they lead. We also learn that Paddy traveled there after famed British travel writer Robert Byron and Byron’s friend David Talbot Rice had done so in the 1920s.  Paddy notes having received a gift of Byron’s The Stations: Travels to the Holy Mountain, about Byron’s visit, given to Paddy by one of the monks described in the book and who’d received this inscribed copy from Byron. Paddy’s description of his enjoyment of Byron’s book makes me want to read it, as well.

So it ends. We might well have been stranded at the end of Between the Woods and Water, but through some good fortune and the efforts of Cooper and Thubron, we have a satisfying—surprisingly satisfying—conclusion of this marvelous journey. It has been a pleasure.

Between the Woods and the Water by Patrick Leigh Fermor

Those who’ve read my blog or who’ve been around me, know of my enthusiasm for the writing of Patrick Leigh Fermor, especially his most famous work, A Time of Gifts. After learning about this author and his work at JLF (Jaipur Literature Festival), I read A Time of Gifts. After our second visit to JLF, where I heard his biographer, Artemis Cooper and her husband, Antony Beevor, both speak about Fermor, I bought the remaining two books of this trilogy for my Kindle.

But I didn’t read them. Why not?

          For some time, if you’d have asked me I would have attributed this to my fickle reading habits—so many books, so little time—I’m like a kid in a candy shop. Plus, one enthusiasm gives way to another with changing circumstances and then I’m off down another path. All of this is true, but I don’t think it quite captures the deeper motive for my procrastination. After all, am I not too old to suffer the comparison to a kid in a candy shop? (Well, not really.) But after further reflection, I’ve come to a different conclusion. I was savoring the anticipation of the next installment, Between the Woods and the Water. I needed the right occasion, as one does for the enjoyment of a fine wine kept for years in the cellar. (Or, as our modest circumstances dictate, a pretty good wine for a couple of months in the cupboard.) I needed the right occasion to partake once again of Fermor’s enchanting—and may I say? —intoxicating prose. And this summer the right occasion arrived.

          The occasion arrived because we were moving t0 Bucharest, Romania. Not long after arriving in Bucharest, we traveled to Budapest, Hungary, returning to Bucharest by train through Transylvania, an itinerary that roughly matched that of Fermor (although he doesn’t visit Bucharest until the third and final volume of his account). The perfect occasion presented itself, and I once again could savor the superb vintage of Fermor’s prose. 

Passport photo of the dashing young vagabond

          For those that don’t know the backstory, young Patrick Leigh Fermor—Paddy to his friends—set off at age 18 to walk from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople (as he insisted on calling Istanbul). In 1977 he published the first installment of his account of that adventure, A Time of Gifts, and in 1986 he published this, the second installment, Between the Woods and the Water. (The third and final volume stalled and was published posthumously through the efforts of Artemis Cooper and Colin Thubron.) In each volume he recounts his walk, taking his time along his and the reader’s way to elucidate about the countryside, the history, and the people with whom he inevitably makes an easy but lasting bond. Paddy sleeps in elegant Budapest homes, in gypsy camps, and in old Transylvanian estate houses; in other words, with those at the pinnacle of society and those at the bottom. Paddy’s fabled charm and easygoing manner allow him to bond at every level.

The man of memory & imagination

          For us to have just recently visited the grand environs of Budapest and the dark forests and sunny valleys of Transylvania adds a unique—but not necessary—vividness to his tales. With Fermor’s graceful and vivid prose, transports the reader to his remote and enchanted world via the written word. Between the Woods and the Water is not a diary—although he kept diaries and drew upon what he had available to him so many years later—and so we have the perspective of both the young Fermor and the mature, reflective Fermor in these pages. A double treat, a two-for-the-price-of-one.

          Fermor can describe nature scenes as few others can; for instance, watching an eagle preen itself takes the better part of a page. He also details the history and architecture of the regions, cities, villages, and estates that he visits. And not least among his skills are his descriptions of the gypsies, shepherds, aristocrats, bon vivants, and beautiful women that he befriends, and his adventures with them. His powers of observation, imagination, and memory are astonishing. Perhaps his power of invention is most impressive of the three, as one doubt that anyone’s memory could be so fine as his, but no matter—the beauty of his prose patches all into one seamless cloth of beauty that disarms any quibbling about the veracity of memory.

          Except for riding horseback across the Hungarian plain and motoring around Transylvania as a part of a clandestine threesome, Paddy walked the full journey.

          Fermor also delights in language, picking up bits of Hungarian and some Romanian along his way after having earlier mastered some German. (I believe he came pre-loaded with French and Latin. The Latin, by the way, came in handy in a later adventure.) He delights in the local languages as he does the local architecture and history.

          Fermor’s book is a joy to read, even more so given my recent acquaintance with some of the lands he traverses in this installment. He ends Between the Woods and the Water with “to be concluded” similar to the “to be continued” that ended A Time of Gifts, but as you’ll learn, it almost didn’t come to pass.  

About Romania: A Review of In Europe's Shadow by Robert D. Kaplan

Kaplan's latest comes at just the right time

When my wife accepted a position to teach in Bucharest, Romania, I went online to look for books on Romania, and at the top of the list I found Robert D. Kaplan's In Europe's Shadow: Two Cold Wars and a Thirty-Year Journey Through Romania and Beyond (2016). I hadn't known about it, but I certainly knew of Kaplan. I'd read his The Coming Anarchy (2000) and Warrior Politics (2001) and thought very highly of them both. I'd also read parts of The Ends of the Earth (2001) and Monsoon (2010). What a wonderful discovery! I dove in, and part way through I recommended it to my wife as we were running errands on our e-bike around Suzhou.

"Do you know this guy?", she asked.  

"Yes, I've read his stuff. He's good. He's also written books about the Indian Ocean and India, and about China, Vietnam, and the South China Sea."  

"Is he following us?"  

"I don't know!" 

In checking the publication dates of Monsoon (2010)) and Asia's Cauldron (March 2014), I determined that we were following him. Anyone acquainted with Kaplan won't be surprised at this. He must need a new 50-page passport every couple of years just based on the published accounts of his travels. (I wonder where he vacations?) No, we're just very lucky, especially with this book.

We're especially fortunate to have this book because Kaplan hasn't just passed through Romania or considered as just another piece on the geopolitical chessboard. He's been traveling to Romania since the 1970's, and he's seen it transformed from a gray, Stalinist backwater, racked by poverty and fear, into a what is now a vibrant society that holds membership in the EU and NATO. Romania seems to have found a good place for itself. As Kaplan describes it: "History surely had not ended here, but it had for the moment become more benign." Kindle Locations 3916-3917. Kaplan displays a genuine affection for this nation, and this spurs his interest in its history and its present, as well as prompting him multiple visits to contemplate its unique place in the busy world of Eastern Europe.

Kaplan first traveled to eastern Europe as a student in the early 1970s, and then he came a bit later to Romania as a young reporter. Trips back included a stint just after the Christmas Revolution in 1989 that toppled the hated Ceausescu regime and led to the summary trial and execution of Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife, Elena. His most recent trip back was in 2014, when he observed the changes that have occurred in Romania after it has mostly-completed the transition to democracy and a market economy. This long history of personal involvement allows Kaplan to include not only his trademark travel writing, history, and geopolitical analysis, but it also serves as a bit of a memoir. For instance, his observations and assessment of the brutality and waste of the Ceaucescu regime prompted him to support the Iraq War, a judgment that he reports that he has come to regret. (A pointed reminder of the limits of historical analogy for decision-making.) As he notes, he didn't foresee the subsequent Sunni-Shia civil war that would break out after Saddam's demise.

Romania is a fascinating country, and Kaplan's draws on the distant past, the recent past, and the present to create his portrait of this country. Romania is a Westen outpost in eastern Europe. Romanian is a Romance language, closely related to Italian and Spanish (and, I'm thrilled to report, not very difficult to learn). Romania identifies with the West, yet the thread of culture passes via the Romanian Orthodox Church, anchored in the tradition of Byzantium and the cultural heritage of Orthodoxy. Also, the Ottoman, Russian, and Hapsburg empires have exerted influences on this land through which the Danube flows to reach the Black Sea. Kaplan explains that the intellectual class, including prominent figures that reached maturity in the 1930s, such as Mircea Eliade and E.M. Cioran, were attracted to the political Right, not the Left, unlike most western European intellectuals. Romania suffered the influence of the Iron Guard, a fascist movement that helped prompt Romania to ally with Hitler in the early period of war. Its authoritarian (but not truly fascist) leader, General Antonescu, both protected some Jews (Romanians) and helped ship others to the death camps. Romania committed over a half-million troops to Hitler's war against the Soviet Union. But before the end of the war, Antonescu led Romania to switch sides and aid the Soviets against the Nazi regime. All of this intrigue didn't do Antonescu much good. He was executed immediately after the war.

Through Kaplan's efforts in ancient, medieval, and modern history, we obtain a sense of the complexities of this culture and its political fortunes. His tour of the country, as well as neighboring Moldova (also Romanian speaking) and a foray into Hungary (now under a regime administering a "diet of low-calorie Putinism") gives us a further historical perspective. But also, in the tradition of great travel writing, Kaplan provides an intense sense of the present. (Among the several travel writers he mentions, Patrick Leigh Fermor gets a special mention, "that craftsman of irreducible godlike essences whose every sentence belongs in a time capsule". Kindle Locations 732-734). I've now begun Fermor's Between the Woods and the Water--just the prompt that I needed to uncork this champaign of travel writing.) From churches and monasteries to castles and homes, we get an engrossing sense of these places and the people who inhabit them. When my wife and I travel in Romania, we'll consult my Kaplan as much as our Lonely Planet.

In all, the publication date of this work (February 9, 2016) could not have been better timed or more welcome. Kaplan's complex layering of history, personal observation, and geopolitical analysis creates the perfect primer for anyone wanting to explore this fascinating nation and its environs. Or it's a treat for anyone who simply wants to enjoy the work of a master of observation and analysis. As Kaplan writes of Fermor, so I would of Kaplan: "to call him a mere travel writer is to diminish him." Id. 

Natural Born Heroes by Christopher McDougall

What do the following have in common?

·         LeBron James

·         Brazil

·         Arthur Evans

·         Patrick Leigh Fermor

·         Tom Myers

·         Fairbairn & Sykes

·         Shanghai

·         Pankration (Greek)

·         George Hebert

·         Norina Bentzel

·         Xan Fielding

·         The Minotaur

·         Wing Chun

·         Steve Maxwell

·         The Arizona desert

·         John Pendleberry

·         a glass eye

·         Fritz Schubert, a/k/a “the Turk”

·         Erwan Le Corre

·         Friedrich-Wilhelm Müller

·         Dr. Phil Maffetone

·         Dwight Howard

·         William Banting

·         Hitler

·         Churchill

·         Crete

If you had a difficult time discerning connections, don’t feel badly about it (although the last three items provide a strong indication of one topic). These topics—among dozens of other possible examples—are tied together in the two books written by Chris McDougall as one book: Natural Born Heroes: How a Daring Band of Misfits Mastered the Lost Secrets of Strength and Endurance (2015). In this book, McDougall examines the German invasion and subsequent resistance movement on Crete during WWII. British Special Operations Executive (SOE) agents aided the Cretans during the occupation. These tales provide the central core of the book. Around this central core—fascinating and cinematic in its own right--McDougall constructs a second book about human performance from ancient Minoan culture to contemporary Parkour. In lesser hands this could have resulted in a mess, but as McDougall displayed in another favorite book of mine, Born to Run, he can weave and integrate stories as a master. The end result is a delightfully fun and entertaining book. 

Christopher McDougall. Notice the bare feet

The story of the invasion of Crete and the Cretan resistance probably isn’t well known among Americans, but it includes some incredible tales. Certainly the most astonishing feat—anywhere—involved successfully kidnapping a German general. The heist was conducted by British agents, led by Patrick Leigh Fermor, and Cretan resistance-fighters (and a largely sympathetic populace). Some may recognize Fermor as among the best English prose stylists of the 20^th century. His books include an account of his walk across Europe starting in 1933 (as a teenager) as well as accounts of Greece, monastic life, and the Caribbean. But one topic that he did not write at length about (other than in official reports) was his part in successfully kidnapping the German general and getting the general off the island of Crete to Egypt. (If you think that this begs for a movie, it spawned one long ago: “Ill Met ByMoonlight” (or “Night Ambush”), starring Dirk Bogarde as Fermor. Bogarde, by the way, was a dashing British film star of his era. Billy Moss, one of Fermor’s accomplices in the exploit, wrote the book.)

The film version with Bogarde as Fermor

The actual kidnappers of General Kreipe: Georgios Tyrakis, William Stanley Moss, Leigh Fermor, Emmanouil Paterakis and Antonios Papaleonidas

 But McDougall wanted to write a book about human performance, also. And so in recounting this tale of adventure—with lots of James Bond-like suave from the Brits—he also dives into the issue of how these men, Cretans and Britons, could have mastered such as harsh terrain while eluding capture by the forces of “The Butcher”, the other German general on the island. This tale of extraordinary human performance allows McDougall to tell about Brits learning to survive in the harsh Shanghai underworld of the early 20^th century; about how the Frenchman George Hebert developed and trained people to survive and thrive using nature as a training ground; about how Erwan Le Corre resurrected Hebert’s genius and brought it into the 21^st century; about how Tom Myers revealed that the fascia (connective tissue) provides the architecture and elastic energy that powers the human body; and about how Parkour demonstrates practical application of Myers’s insights about the elastic energy of the fascia. McDougall also hunted down the reclusive Phil Maffetone to learn about how he revolutionized diet and training techniques for distance runners like Stu Mittleman along lines that Paleo/Primal adherents will recognize as kindred thinking. And McDougall relates how distance running guru Dr. Timothy Noakes, the high priest of high-carb for distance runners, underwent a conversion of Pauline-like intensity to embrace a low-carb, high-fat “Banting” diet. (“I was quite wrong. Sorry, everyone.”) 

I could go on at great length about this book because it contains so many different angles, so many intriguing side-stories. But I will stop here to and sum it all up by saying that I found the book great fun. It provided well-told stories about fascinating stuff (WWII history and human performance are among my favorite topics), but even if you don’t’ share my predilections, I believe that most readers would enjoy this book. 

Side note: Because I didn’t read Born to Run but listened to it twice, I decide to listen to Natural Born Heroes. Alas, the listening experience was not as good. Mostly because the reader attempted—rather poorly—too many accents: British, Greek, American, French, and so on. He mastered none. Perhaps you’d have to get Meryl Streep or resurrect Olivier to do it right. In addition, because there was so much information, so much learning, I bought the book for my Kindle for my second and later readings.