Knife: Meditations after an Attempted Murder by Salman Rushdie was my book club’s selection for November. The memoir is a gripping account of the knife attack on Rushdie as he was about to speak at Chautauqua and his subsequent long road to recovery. Some of the book is about the absurdity of the motivation for the attack, but a lot of it is about the support he received from his relatively new wife. So we also learn how they met and what their relationship is like as he heaps praise on her. While it was a fascinating book, and one that I’m sure must have been therapeutic for him to write, it seemed odd to me at times. He writes that at several crucial moments during the attack and its aftermath passages from literature came to him that, in the book, he quotes. I’m sure he’s a lot smarter than I am, but if I remember anything from things I’ve read, it’s just snippets, and I’m certainly not thinking about those snippets, or trying to remember whole passages while I’m being attacked, or while a surgeon is probing my eye. Still, if you know anything about Rushdie and his career, this is a worthwhile read.
Other Rivers: A Chinese Education by Peter Hessler is a book I was asked to review for the Peace Corps Worldwide website. I’ve read all of Hessler’s previous China books since his first one over twenty years ago, River Town, about his experience as a Peace Corps Volunteer in a Chinese university. Here, two decades later, he is teaching in China again after spending time as a journalist and author of several books. China and Chinese students have changed, he discovers, and he’s able to draw contrasts. Interestingly, he’s still in touch with his students from his Peace Corps days, so he’s also able to track what happened to them. Because Hessler’s Peace Corps experience was so similar to my own—I taught in a Korean university twenty years before he first went to China—I find a great deal that’s familiar. The book is also enlightening because he was in China during the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, and describes China’s response to it. Hessler is a terrific writer, and I enjoyed the book.
Alexander the Great: His Life and His Mysterious Death by Anthony Everitt is a biography of the man who conquered a large swath of the known world in the 4th Century BCE. While I was interested in the man and his times, I found the long accounts of the battles his army fought under his command to be tedious. He was always at the front, so these battles demonstrated his bravery (or perhaps his death wish), but the detail seemed unnecessary to understand the man. What was more interesting, in a macabre way, was the brutality with which he dealt with opposition and even seemingly minor slights. I’m glad I read it, but the book could have been half as long.
Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated from German by Michael Hoffman, is a novel that my book club is reading for January, but that I would have read anyway. Beginning in East Berlin before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the story recounts the affair of a young woman and a much older novelist. The narrative is a recollection she has of their time together after she starts going through boxes of letters and items she receives following his death, presumably from the man’s wife. Her struggles dealing with the strict regime and then the sudden freedom after reunification are fascinating, as are the tantrums the novelist throws as he deals with his obsession and jealousy.
On Freedom by Timothy Snyder was my book club’s selection for December. I had not read Snyder before, but I was struck by the way he inserted himself into a book that is essentially a philosophical treatise. He recalls his childhood and the times spent on his grandparents’ farm, his education and academic achievements as he studied Eastern European governments and history. His man personal visits to Ukraine feature prominently, as do his conversations with various East European leaders and thinkers. Ultimately, he is drawing a distinction between negative freedom and positive freedom, which is real freedom, he seems to be saying. The concluding chapter is a useful roadmap for how America might come closer to achieving positive freedom.
The Bamboo Wife by Leona Sevick is my friend Leona’s second poetry collection, this one from Trio House Press. Sevick’s poems are very personal, as she frequently writes about her family, sometimes with intimate detail. The early poems in this collection are about a visit she paid to Jeju Island in Korea, a trip that brought back memories—very different from Sevick’s—of my own visits to the island during my time in Korea.
The Last Lap by William Walker is an interesting account of the life and death of race car driver Pete Kreis, a cousin of the author. Kreis grew up in Knoxville, one of the sons of a prominent Tennessee businessman, and early on became obsessed with cars and then with racing. When he died in an accident at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in 1934, there were questions about what might have happened. Did he crash intentionally? Walker seeks to answer the question at the same time as he recounts the early history of racing in America.
