For whatever reason, I’m just now, in my sixty-fifth year, getting around to reading this novel that was first published on my eighteenth birthday, baFor whatever reason, I’m just now, in my sixty-fifth year, getting around to reading this novel that was first published on my eighteenth birthday, back when I read even more than I do today. I also missed the TV series, but that’s easier to explain because I lived without a television for a large swath of my early adult life (too poor). The most sorrowful, soul-crushing thing about reading this novel is I/we already know how the story goes and worse, how it ends, although it hasn’t ended. It seems like my country is pretty fucking far from resolving our problems of race.
Having live almost two decades outside of the USA, I find it horrifying that we’re still so far from coming to grips with racism and acceptance. There is racism where I now live, but for whatever reasons, it isn’t so toxic as it is in so many places in America. The race issue in the USA if much like the Palestine-Israel conflict: we could solve it with money.
“All men are created equal.” I’ve always felt those to be the most powerful five words in human history. So, how did we fuck them up so utterly? 247 years after the Declaration of Independence, we still haven’t really lived up to those simple words.
Anyway, back to the book. He almost lost me on the first part in Africa, trying to romanticize life in Kunta’s native village. I don’t know what I expected or what even can be written about this history as there is so little history to go on, and none of if written down. My next reading challenge will be to cover African history of this era. The story picked up with his capture and the horrors of the Middle Passage, a term he doesn’t explain or even mention in the novel and one I had to google. I knew it meant the shipment of slaves from Africa across the Atlantic, but I didn’t know why it was called this. My ignorance stopped here with this definition from Britannica:
Middle Passage, the forced voyage of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to the New World. It was one leg of the triangular trade route that took goods (such as knives, guns, ammunition, cotton cloth, tools, and brass dishes) from Europe to Africa, Africans to work as slaves in the Americas and West Indies, and items, mostly raw materials, produced on the plantations (sugar, rice, tobacco, indigo, rum, and cotton) back to Europe. From about 1518 to the mid-19th century, millions of African men, women, and children made the 21-to-90-day voyage aboard grossly overcrowded sailing ships manned by crews mostly from Great Britain, the Netherlands, Portugal, and France.
He makes too much out of Kunta’s piousness and how he never eats pig. Question: what the hell is wrong with pork? Pigs are no dirtier than any other animal, and the only reason this meat is forbidden in the Quran is because that book plagiarized the Hebrew bible and why they proscribe pork is because they were too stupid to figure out how to side-step trichinosis. I live in Spain and take it from me, pig is good.
There is nothing along the lines of enthralling storytelling in this novel, and that’s sort of a bummer because at over 800 pages, it is a true saga so a bit more entertainment would have been welcomed. With that said, I still give it five stars because I think it's something Americans should read....more
I can't believe that I didn't read this years and years ago, but better late than never. I think we are undergoing yet another look at our shameful anI can't believe that I didn't read this years and years ago, but better late than never. I think we are undergoing yet another look at our shameful and inexcusable past in America, so I suppose that now is as good as any time to discover this bit of literature dealing with racism and slavery, and post slavery.
I came upon an audio version of this narrated by the author. Never before have I felt such a need for a narrator while reading a book as I think that trying to get the voices right in my head from the printed word would have been difficult if not impossible, perhaps even racist. I often thought while listening to this that Alice Walker's computer probably blew up a couple of times from the spell-check going haywire....more
I served in the American military, a single enlistment, and I’ve opposed every single military campaign since I was a child watching the horrors of ViI served in the American military, a single enlistment, and I’ve opposed every single military campaign since I was a child watching the horrors of Viet Nam on black and white TV. This should be required reading for everyone, everywhere. Period. War is an insane response to any sort of problem or conflict and it’s never the answer.
I remember marching in Seattle just prior to the US invasion of Iraq in early 2003. More than anything, I was hugely disappointed in how few people showed up. There were fewer than 50,000 demonstrators in a city considered liberal by American standards, yet in cities across Europe, millions had come out against killing. I almost found myself in a fistfight in a Seattle cocktail bar with some folks who were cheerleading in favor of the coming invasion. I asked them if they knew the difference between Sunnis and Shias in Islam. They didn’t, of course. I told them they soon would.
After reading this, I can only think that I should have done more, worked harder to show my opposition to the wars. I felt powerless, just as I had when Bush senior invaded Iraq the first time.
I feel the two biggest issues facing the USA are the ever-widening income gap between the billionaires and the rest of us, and our insane defense budget that keeps growing and is the sacred cow of our government. We can’t even talk about slowing the rise in defense spending, let alone doing something to drastically reduce it....more
I wish that I could have come up with this line from Newjack where he quotes a coworker describing their life as prison guards, “…a life sentence in eight-hour shifts.”
This isn’t a novel. We’ve all read books and seen movies about cooler scenes in prison, but that stuff is fiction. This writer made a serious commitment to a story, like something Zola would have done back in his day. As his bio states, Ted Conover, is a "master of experience-based narrative nonfiction.” I am officially a huge fan of Ted Conover and plan to make my way through his entire bibliography.
The takeaway from this book is that the USA needs to stop putting motherfuckers in prison for bullshit, things like minor drug charges, and non-violent crimes in general. We have other ways of punishing people. Take away their driving privileges. Make them do community work. Force people to take adult education. Because once someone goes to jail, their life is taking a turn for the worse. Period.
Rehabilitation isn't even on the table in the prison system. It's mostly just warehousing young Black men who are much more likely to be arrested and sentenced to prison than Whites....more
“The struggle of any civilization is balancing order and liberty.”*
This was the epigraph from The Story of England: The Age of Chivalry by Arthur Bry“The struggle of any civilization is balancing order and liberty.”*
This was the epigraph from The Story of England: The Age of Chivalry by Arthur Bryant. While I have long forgotten most of the contents to the book, that little aphorism has stayed with me and seems at the heart of Junger’s excellent essay.
*I can’t remember the source or the verbatim quote. I no longer have the book as I lost it in one of my moves. If someone has it, could you please send me the exact quote. Thanks.
A lot of reviewers here said they didn't "get" this book. Why would a guy and a few pals take off walking along the rail lines cutting through rural Pennsylvania? A better question would be why the fuck not? Why aren't you doing something like that? A better question is why don’t I do it today? We should all be packing right now. It reminds me of something I wrote a long time ago:
Like many people, I often ask myself whether I’m taking enough chances in life, or if I’m avoiding risk at all cost. There must be a middle ground between just going with the flow and the police having to identify your remains by examining dental records.
That’s the first line of my memoir, or one of them, an unpublished account on why I live where I now live. I thought a lot about those lines while reading this book and thinking about freedom.
Freedom by Sebastian Junger is sort of a better-written and hipper update of Civilization and Its Discontents by Sigmund Freud. A lot of reviews here seem confused by the book and its message. I didn’t have that problem, not at all. I got what he was saying from start to finish. Think of it as Walden except written by a much cooler, better-adjusted male.
He takes a lot of veiled jabs at conservatives and many of their indefensibly silly ideas. They are the ones who go on and on about “our freedoms” and how they are somehow being eroded because of taxes and gun control (really?) and the “government.” Junger points out that we sacrificed most of our freedom for comfort, whether we want to admit that or not. If you don’t like that, head out for the territories or shut up. No amount of guns will make you free.
We called our trip “the Last Patrol,” and it seemed like a long hard weird thing to do until we were actually out there.
We all need to be “out there,” at least once in a while. It’s been a while for me.
I don’t know what book people are reading who rate this book poorly. Just this nugget of wisdom is enough to rate five stars in my book:
“…allows people to believe that any sacrifice at all—rationing water during a drought, for example—are forms of government tyranny. They are no more forms of tyranny than rationing water on a lifeboat.”
This next bit almost stopped me dead in my tracks (I mean that figuratively as I was already sitting on my ass reading):
“One night we were cooking dinner and a freight train thundered by with so much noise and power that I tossed out what I thought was an unanswerable question: What would it take to stop something like that instantaneously? I imagined some kind of massive wall, but the answer was more obvious: another train going just as fast in the opposite direction. America could seem like that as well, a country moving so fast and with so much weight that only a head-on collision with itself could make it stop. ”
I like this bit, and I hope that I would perform like a Marine or an elite athlete:
A study from 2012 put three groups—U.S. Marines, elite athletes, and “ordinary” people—into MRIs and gradually reduced their oxygen supply. While this was happening, the subjects performed cognitive tests. MRIs are loud, intimidating machines that often trigger claustrophobia, and having one’s air supply reduced in such a situation would add enormously to the stress. As expected, the control group performed worse on the cognitive tests as their air supply dwindled, but the Marines and elite athletes performed better.”
From this short passage, it’s obvious he read Hemingway and Cormac McCarthy, two other “manly” writers.
We’d moved forty miles in forty hours and felt like wolves. We ordered coffees and a plateful of whatever pastries they had and bagels with cream cheese toasted and wrapped in wax paper and when we couldn’t eat any more we stood ourselves back up on leg muscles that had already set like concrete and hoisted our packs and moved on.
And this:
The surplus of young men, widespread bachelorhood, sensitivity about honor, racial hostility, heavy drinking, religious indifference, group indulgence in vice, ubiquitous armament and inadequate law enforcement were concentrated on the frontier.
This explains most of the world’s problems: the lack of female companionship. Everything on that list boils down to lack of sex.
If you can’t run a mile with all your gear, you’ve got too much gear.
I wrote in a humor essay on travel that if you can't outrun the average cop while wearing your pack, then you have too much gear.
The essence of the book, I repeat, is about the real dangers to our freedom in American society.
The central problem for human freedom is that groups that are well organized enough to defend themselves against others are well organized enough to oppress their own.
And then:
Power is so readily abused that one could almost say that its concentration is antithetical to freedom.
If you can’t see that Republicans actively lobbying to deny voting access is a threat to what freedoms we may still enjoy, you definitely need to read this book and head out on a long, contemplative walk.
I have lambasted some of Malcolm Gladwell’s books here, but I find that Gladwell and Junger have a very similar story-telling style and they both do it very well. They take other great stories from history and make them their own. I think the true talent is finding the right stories to retell. Where Gladwell often goes off the rails, in my opinion, is when he tries to shoe-horn these stories to fit some kooky theory he has hatched. Freedom isn’t abut a theory, it’s about an essential aspect of our existence....more
“If you only read one book on the American Revolution, read 1776 by David McCullough.”
I’m sure that someone, somewhere has made this declaration. I’m“If you only read one book on the American Revolution, read 1776 by David McCullough.”
I’m sure that someone, somewhere has made this declaration. I’m not sure if this has any validity because this is, in fact, the only book I’ve read on the subject. I can now say that is it the best book I’ve read on the war, and I had a lot of fun reading it. It’s a thrilling story from start to finish, especially told by such a masterful writer and historian.
It’s a perfect book for folks like me who know little about the conflict. My previous knowledge was like a very rough sketch. This book help shade in a few of the major events and bring it all into a coherent and superbly entertaining narrative.
The result of the Battle of Trenton when Washington crossed the Delaware River is catalogued here in words that would seem jinjoistic and bragging if they weren’t what we know to be the truth (more lies have been written about battles than any other human endeavor, even sex). A proud moment in American history and one of the building blocks in the American myth:
It had all happened in forty-five minutes or less. Twenty-one Hessians had been killed, 90 wounded. The prisoners taken numbered approximately 900. Another 500 had managed to escape, most of them by the bridge over Assunpink Creek.
Incredibly, in a battle of such extreme savagery, only four Americans had been wounded, including Captain Washington and Lieutenant Monroe, and not one American had been killed....more
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