Cuban Missile Crisis Anniversary, Jonathan Glover reckons with the 20th Century.

Jonathan Glover takes on the horrors of the 20th century in this thought provoking book.

Next month will mark 47 years since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

For 15 tense days, the world waited to see how the potentially nuclear showdown between the United States, led by the youthful John F. Kennedy, and the Soviet Union, headed by Nikita Khrushchev, would end.

Eventually, the Soviet leader turned his subs around, leaving the American seemingly with a clear victory and the world intact.

The truth, according to ethicist and philosopher Jonathan Glover, is more complicated, and could hold the key to resolving some of the many other bloody conflicts around the globe.

Glover reckons with the past century’s disturbingly violent history in Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century, an engaging and thought provoking, if inexhaustive book.

Glover opens the work by talking about philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and how leaders and their followers have taken and applied certain elements of his philosophy with destructive results.

The book surveys much, but far from all, of the brutal carnage that accrued due to human action during the past century.  He includes discussions of trench warfare, the Nazis, the bombing and starving of civilians during World Wars I and II, the genocide in Rwanda, the slaughter in Bosnia, and the regimes of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, among others.

Humanity, in short, is not a book for the proverbial faint of heart. 

The book is replete with stomach-turning, sleep disturbing details of people’s inhumanity to each other.  I found the description of the terror induced in the former Soviet Union during the Stalin era particularly chilling, particularly in its erosion of objective truth and the search for it, and each reader can make her own judgment there.

Glover is not a historian, and readers looking for either ground breaking revelations about the events during each of these historical moments or a comprehensive list of atrocities are likely to be disappointed.  The book’s strength lies in its discussion of moral resources, a sense of human connection to each other, and how these elements are either fostered or broken by the various regimes.

In addition to his discussion of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which he contrasts with the behavior of European leaders at the onset of World War I, Glover also talks about painfully small moments in which a “Live and let live” philosophy prevailed. 

One such example is during the famous Christmases truces of the First World War, during the first of which German and British troops left their trenches and played soccer against each other.  This kicked off a few days of comity before the destruction resumed. 

Glover also talks about how Kennedy left Khrushchev with an opening, heeding one of his adviser’s citation of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, while the Soviet leader, toward the crisis’ highest point, wrote in more conciliatory language about the devastating effects of war.

His discussion of hawks and doves during this period is particularly intriguing.  Glover notes that many of the hawks overestimated the Soviets’ rational behavior, and instead proposes a model of ordinary and flawed people trying to use their emotions, information and judgment to make decisions of almost unimaginable import and impact. 

The model may not be uplifting, and it may be an accurate description of what we have.   Beyond this, Glover suggests trying to cultivate moral responses and retain human connection through political measures, but to work on a psychological level, too. 

A positive outcome is far from certain, and certainly plenty of conflicts continue, with the possibility of others never far away.  Still, the combination of erudition and the spirit behind the Zulu word, ‘ubuntu,’  or interdependence, radiates throughout Glover’s work, leaving this reader with plenty to ponder and a sense of faint, but possible hope.

Amitav Ghosh shows us the world’s Incendiary Circumstances.

The September 11 terror attacks are just one of the many events Amitav Ghosh discusses in this worthwhile collection.

The new century is not even a decade old, but already has seen catacylsmic events and inspiring struggles for justice.

The September 11 terrorist attacks.  The tsunami that swept across close to a dozen countries, leaving an unimaginable path of devastation and wreckage in its wake.  The continuing struggle of the people of Myanmar to gain their freedom.  The war in Iraq that began in March 2003 and has also led to practically incalculable damage.

While these happenings may not seem to have much in common, they are linked by being witnessed and/or commented on by Amitav Ghosh.   His fantastic collection of essays, Incendiary Circumstances, covers his travels, experiences, reflections and meditations during a period of nearly 20 years.

Many thanks to dear friend and reader Evan Kaplan for yet another wonderful gift.  

Evan, his wife Susan, who Dunreith met in pre-school, and their two daughters are spending the day with us in Rockport. 

The essays largely move back in time, and Ghosh, who earned a doctorate in social anthropology from Oxford and is also a highly accomplished novelist, brings his keen eye and profound insights to all of them.

Whether talking about the Western novels his Indian grandfather collected and his uncle read-the collection was particularly deep in Nobel Prize winners-talking about being in India during the massacre of Sikhs by Hindu extremists after Indira Gandhi’s assassination, or writing about the events mentioned above, Ghosh shows a commitment to truth, a facility and elegance of language and, at times, a wickedly funny sense of humor.

Evan particularly enjoyed the piece about imprisoned freedom fighter Aung San Suu Kyi. 

Although it was not my favorite, I learned from Ghosh’s depiction of her emergence from an academic living in exile in England in the early 80s to becoming the voice of her people in the late 80s, when she returned home following the death of her father, a famous general, to navigating the uneasy terrain of being out of house arrest.

Three of my favorites were Ghosh’s essay about meeting Pol Pot’s brother and sister-in-law in Cambodia, popular response in Egypt when Naghib Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize and a description of the community of Egyptian emigres in Iraq.

While there were a couple of pieces I did not like quite as much as the others, I still maintain that this is indispensable reading from a gifted chronicler of the world’s many troubles during the past 20 years. I look forward to his novels and to other similar essays he produces in the future.