A Great Place to Have a War, by Joshua Kurlantzick

Laos is one of my favourite countries and I've been fortunate enough to have visited twice. Being a history buff, particularly American history, I was eager to read this forthcoming book from Joshua Kurlantzick, which I received as an uncorrected proof.

I was not disappointed. A Great Place to Have a War: America in Laos and the Birth of a Military CIA is an excellent history of a tragic period of history. It traces the origins of the war and of the CIA very well, but adds in a personal dimension by telling the stories of four men who guided the war and the expansion of power undergone by the CIA during that period: Bill Lair, Tony Poe, Vang Pao, and William Sullivan.

I studied the Vietnam War in university and later learned bits and pieces during my extensive travels through Southeast Asia, and yet much of this book was new to me. Particularly in his descriptions of battles, his dealings with characters on a personal level, and his studies of declassified CIA documents, Kurlantzick has put forth a valuable and enthralling resource.

It is also, of course, highly disturbing. Anyone well-versed in the tragic history of the Vietnam War knows that atrocities occurred all the time, and a great deal of them by Americans. This book details some of those atrocities, including shocking facts:

US bombing of Laos would become so intense that it averaged one attack every eight minutes for nearly a decade.

and

In 1969 alone, the United States dropped more bombs on Laos than it did on Japan during all of World War II. By 1973, when the bombing campaign ended, America had launched over 580,000 bombinb runs in Laos.

Figures like that, and relating to the unexploded bombs that continued - and still continue - to kill innocent civilians are mindblowing. Yet they are also hard to fathom because they are so terrible. Kurlantzick, however, brings the war over in more personal terms that makes it easier to appreciate the awfulness of the U.S. actions in Laos.

He talks about how random the bombing could be, saying:

In the first months of 1970, some U.S. pilots routinely released ordnance over the kingdom without really locating any military target, simply because they could not find a target to hit in North Vietnam and they did not want to land back in Thailand still carrying their bombs.

He talks of villages wiped off the map and people gunned down in the streets for target practice. The coldness of the U.S. pilots is beyond belief. And yet these were not isolated, single events:

96 percent of the Laotian civilians surveyed had witnessed a bombing attack, and most had witnessed more than one.

He goes on to say that 60% of people had personally seen someone being killed by U.S. bombs.

Towards the end of the book Kurlantzick wraps up his story by showing how the U.S. simply withdrew, leaving Southeast Asia in a terrible mess, and how the CIA had grown during its Laos war from a spy outfit to a war machine. It is a sad read, but an important one in understanding this complicated and depressing modern world. 

Our Human Herds, by Martin Fritz

In Our Human Herds: The Philosophy of Dual Morality and a Theory of Moral Evolution, Martin Fritz says:

…what I propose… is that each and every one of us carries within us two distinct moral codes, either of which can be understood as right, depending upon our circumstances…

The two distinct moral codes have a biological origin. By switching back and forth between these two sometimes cooperating and sometimes conflicting moral patterns we discover that the things we find right in one view can be seen as wrong in the other.

It’s an interesting thought, and that’s pretty much the book in a nutshell. However, it goes on for almost a thousand pages of elucidation as the author tries to hammer home his point.

To expand, what he is saying above is that essentially while we now tend to think of our views as moral or immoral, right or wrong, these are actually fairly fluid judgments and they depend upon what is happening around us. What is right for one person in one situation is wrong for someone else. And this a biological imperative. He gives numerous examples and explanations, but it boils down to this: there is one mindset for when we have plenty, and one mindset for when we don’t. You could say today that this is the difference between liberals and conservatives. Conservatives view the world through fearful eyes, and appear cold and cruel from the liberal perspective. Liberals view the world as providing more than enough for everyone and act dangerously from the conservative perspective.

“Moral conflict,” he says, “began to take shape not as a battle between right and wrong, but a needed and necessary struggle between right and right.” What he means is that we need both the fearful, outsider-hating conservative to keep the group (or herd) on its toes, and the sympathetic, bleeding-heart liberal to make sure everyone has enough. It’s a result of evolution.

One point I found very interesting is this:

Feeling precedes logical justification. Usually, it is after we become aware how we feel that we look for logical arguments to support this emotional position.

How true that is, and it sits nicely with books I’ve read last year about psychology.

Overall, Fritz’s book was pretty interesting and certainly it’s hard to argue with his statements. It was certainly not very original, but he does acknowledge that the dual morality theory is not his own. One problem I had was that, while the concept as a whole is somewhat complex, the book tended to often become bogged down in over-simplicity - a tendency to state the obvious. It was also very repetitive, which sucked the enjoyment out of reading it. 

The Great Shark Hunt, by Hunter S. Thompson

Here’s another cheat review – this book is also a paperback, rather than a Kindle title, and one that I purchased back in Chiang Mai in a very cool place called Backstreet Books.

I was a huge fan of Hunter S. Thompson when I was younger and as such I have a tattoo of his Gonzo fist on my left forearm. Although I don’t read him much these days, I still consider him one of my primary literary influences. Perhaps I felt that, after several years of not reading his work, he was not as great as I remembered… perhaps his work was a tad childish, even.

How wrong I was. A few weeks ago, in Laos, I got stuck into The Great Shark Hunt – a collection of Thompson’s finest work before 1980. Indeed, this was his best period as a writer, when he wrote his masterpiece, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, as well as the brilliant Hell’s Angels and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72. This was Thompson at his peak, particularly documenting the counterculture of the late sixties and its subsequent demise, as well as his constant hatred for Richard Nixon.

The Great Shark Hunt chronicles the development of Gonzo, Thompson’s signature style. Although the book doesn’t follow any chronological pattern, the stories are dated, and we see him becoming increasing politicized, as well as finding his way from off-beat reporter to Gonzo journalist. His early works were short and somewhat restrained, while later they become rambling and filled with vitriol and humour.

What I found rereading Thompson’s best works was a profound sense that this is a man who understood the rhythm of speech, and that his work was to some extent intended to be read aloud. A few weeks before buying this book I watched some videos on YouTube wherein other people read his work, and I noticed for the first time just how he laughed at certain points, and how he loved to hear his words being read aloud.

In Thompson’s writing there is something – and I know he would’ve hated the comparison – Ginsbergian in the long-breath sentences. He was famous for his overuse of certain words (like doomed, swine, and atavistic) but his brilliance lay not in overstatement or shock, but in the subtle building of feeling and emotion in his sentences. There is a famous story of him typing out The Great Gatsby to get a feel for the prose, and indeed Thompson’s own work is now similarly copied by hordes of imitation Gonzo writers because he succeeded. In places, his work is as beautiful as any great American literature.

There are no weak links in this collection, although there are sometimes a few paragraphs of pages where the quality drops slightly. Yet this vast, dense volume is one of the great writers of the late twentieth century on his very best form and it is, for anyone interested in Thompson or Gonzo, an absolute must-read book. 

iGuerilla, by John Sutherland

In this mostly ridiculous book, John Sutherland details the things in this world that he hates and thinks we should all fear. That includes Muslims, Arabs, and Communists, amongst others. He tells us why these things are awful and why they’re getting worse (well, except for Communism, which is responsible for all the new bad stuff).

Sutherland's iGuerilla: Reshaping the Face of War in the 21st Century careens back and forth attempting to explain how technology is making the world a scary place, while comparing everything to the Fall of Rome or the Rise of Hitler or Pearl Harbor. Anything he doesn’t like is immediately compared to Hitler, and there is nothing bad said about that which he loves – the great countries of America and Israel.

The book is full of stupid and annoying metaphors, always completely overblown and often mixed with other imagery. His language is sneering, violent, and sensationalistic:

They are barbarous and yet tech-savvy denizens of the modern world. They resemble a schizophrenic cross between Attila the Hun and Mark Zuckerburg. (sic)

He thinks in terms of pure Good and Evil, and thinks all change is bad. In his world, the Cold War was good because at least he knew where he stood. Now everything is awful and getting worse, and it’s Russia’s fault for not being tough enough. His logic is overly simplistic, ignoring anything inconvenient.

iGuerilla is researched from Wikipedia, a number of low-brow or right-wing media outlets, and a scattering of reputable sources just for appearances. He also seems to be relying upon his fanciful memory of history class. The author seems fearful about technology and yet also largely ignorant, using ancient terminology like “cyberspace” that no self-respecting author of a book about technology would ever utter. He is vague in describing the threats that our “enemies” pose, but they involve computers.

In the end, this whole awful mess of a book is designed to instil fear in its reader. Yet, like the godawful right-wing news channels Sutherland appears to enjoy so much, his book is shallow, misleading, and woefully lacking in subtlety. Just read this abominable passage and I’m sure you’ll agree this is not a book I could in good conscience recommend:

There’s no shortage of enemies determined to strike Americans. We will face our Arminius just as Rome did...

…We no longer have the luxury of focusing on the very visible state dragon. We now face a snake pit filled with a myriad of non-state threats and their shady rogue state sponsors…

…They can attack the homeland although they aren’t an existential threat – yet. They aren’t toting nukes or superbugs – yet.

Prisoners of Geography, by Tim Marshall

I’ve recently powered through this fantastic book during my rare downtime studying a CELTA course in Thailand. I’m usually quite a slow reader, but Prisoners of Geography is so engaging that I reached the end in no time and was left wishing there was more of the world to cover.

The premise of Tim Marshall’s new book is simple: our world is governed by geography more than we know. Perhaps that seems obvious; perhaps it seems an overstatement. Yet Marshall makes a good case that our present geopolitical situation is dictated by largely the same forces that ancient nations abided.

Geography has always been a prison of sorts – one that defines what a nation is or can be, and one from which our world leaders have often struggled to break free.

He goes from Russia to China to the USA, visiting India and Pakistan, Korea and Japan, and even the Arctic, explaining why our world is shaped the way it is. References are made, fittingly, to Jared Diamond’s work, which I reviewed here last month. His observations on politics and history are astute, and his descriptions of planet’s geographical features are wonderful.

Often Marshall acknowledges the absurdity of the nation state, which is fundamentally a prison of its own, applied forcefully to the world by the European powers, and which chokes us and causes untold destruction today. One passage I loved from this book illuminates that point:

The notion that a man from a certain area could not travel across a region to see a relative from the same tribe unless he had a document, granted to him by a third man he didn’t know in a faraway town, made little sense. The idea that the document was issued because a foreigner had said the area was now two regions and had made up names for them made no sense at all and was contrary to the way in which life had been lived for centuries.

Marshall seems pre-occupied with the potential for cataclysmic global war and points out numerous places on the globe where it could happen, although he does end on a more hopeful note, looking off into space – where we are finally free of our geographic prison.

Shadows in the Work of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Baraka

Today's review will not be posted here. You can read it here at Beatdom. It concerns a newly released book about Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Amiri Baraka, and their relation to shadow imagery in the post-war era.

Anything related to the Beat Generation will be published at Beatdom and not here. 

The Men Who Stare at Goats, by Jon Ronson

Readers of this blog will know that I've been working my way through the works of Jon Ronson, pretty much going backwards from his most recent book, and now I have ended up with his most famous, 2004's now-classic The Men Who Stare at Goats.



Jon Ronson is a journalist who likes to document the weird, and he seems to come across as trustworthy enough that he can get close to the real weirdos in life. Yet this is probably his most bizarre book in a career of dealing with bizarre people. It is, as the title suggests, about men who believe they can kill goats by staring at them.

The story goes back to 1979, the US government established a team of commandos who would be tasked with developing super-human abilities like invisibility and psychic investigation. They would also be able to walk through walls and stare goats to death.

He traces the history of this movement through painstaking research. Most people would have given up, but Ronson followed the story to its weirdest extents, and details it in his own Gonzo fashion. He brings it right up into the present day (for 2004, at least) and the War on Terror.

This book is a modern classic - hilarious, informative, and unputdownable.