It’s been a rollercoaster of a ride, to say the least. Many of us wondered if the chaos and uncertainty would ever end. But it did. At long last, Shedeur Sanders was finally drafted in the fifth round by the Cleveland Browns. Not that I was worried—after all, every dog has his day.
Which reminds me of a new book by Mark Rowlands, The Word of Dog: What Our Canine Companions Can Teach Us About Living a Good Life. New Weekend Beacon contributor Kristen Soltis Anderson gives us a review.
“Rowlands identifies part of the reason humans may find simple bliss harder to achieve is our penchant for reflection, for making ourselves the focus of our own thinking. ‘Reflection, most fundamentally, is a wound that cannot be healed. It neatly severs us in two, and has left us uneasy, troubled creatures,’ he writes, describing the reflective person as both actor and observer. But much as Sophie Amundsen thinks her cat is unlikely to contemplate its own role in our universe, Rowlands too suggests the dogs who are our companions are ‘like us in many ways … but whose capacity for reflection is, compared with ours, nascent at best.’ In this, Rowlands writes, perhaps we have something to learn.
“I am not sure my beloved Wally did a great deal of deep thinking about himself or his place in the universe. There’s a reason for a delightful subreddit called r/onegoldenbraincell. Frequently, Golden Retrievers often behave as if that’s all they’ve got going upstairs. Yet Wally was clever when he needed to be, sneaking unsecured food and opening lever-handled doors like a velociraptor. The look of pride on Wally’s face after breaking out of a hotel room or swiping a pie convinced me he was surely closer to a human in his experience of the world than a fish or a bird.”
“We generally seem to think reflecting on ourselves and our thoughts is something to be celebrated. A wide range of data points suggest we are increasingly interested in the subject of understanding ourselves. And yet, is more self-reflection and self-analysis really what we need? Even as more people report going to therapy than 20 years ago, we also see more and more people reporting mental health challenges, feelings of anxiety and depression and more. As Rowlands notes, ‘the general human consensus is that reflection is a good thing … [but] any capacity, especially when it is excessively exercised, will have its costs as well as its benefits, and reflection is no exception.’
“In Ted Lasso, the eponymous coach encourages one of his players to shake off a bad practice and ‘be a goldfish.’ He argues that having a brain capable of holding memories for only 10 seconds is what makes it the happiest of the animals. But happiness is not the same as meaning. But there is, of course, obviously value in our ability to think deeply, to feel deeply. Rowlands finds clear meaning in the memories of his beloved dogs who have passed, as I do the memory of my beloved Wally.”
Unfortunately reflecting on the state of the world won’t make you feel any better. Michael M. Rosen explains in his review of Robert Kaplan’s Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis.
“Kaplan likens the intensifying cold war between Beijing and Washington to the Cuban Missile Crisis. ‘The globe,’ he proclaims, ‘is becoming the worst of both worlds: a unified theater of conflict, but one where each far-flung extremity of that theater can tweak the other end thousands of miles away and cause an eruption.’ We also can’t discount the mischief that even a declining Moscow has fomented.
“Technology has supercharged the debate, too. ‘Because of digital communications, intercontinental missiles, jet travel, space satellites, and so much else,’ Kaplan argues, ‘different parts of the globe now affect each other as intimately as different parts of Germany affected each other in the 1920s and early 1930s.’ For instance, transnational post-liberal movements on both the right and the left—and the splintered, ideologically extreme media that empowers them—can now easily attract millions of adherents whose inextricably connected handheld devices render actual mass rallies utterly unnecessary.
“The global movement toward urbanization, too, has contributed to the chaos. Invoking the likes of Oswald Spengler, Jane Jacobs, and even Ibn Khaldun, Kaplan condemns the concentration of wealth and inequality in contemporary conurbations the world over. But more than anyone else, T.S. Eliot—and his epic, rambling, and disorienting poem after which Kaplan’s book is titled—nailed the sense of unraveling even a century after The Waste Land first appeared. ‘The cities,’ Kaplan writes, ‘because of their crowded conditions are an intensification of existence and therefore of politics,’ which ‘should at least make you nervous given the demographics of the 21st century.’ Crowds, mobs, and rabbles embody the most powerful and often negative impulses of society, whether in Minneapolis, Tehran, or Dhaka.
“Not everything is dark, however. ‘More and more people live fuller and richer lives,’ Kaplan acknowledges, ‘and have more and better ways to communicate their feelings.’ But with improving prospects come heightened expectations, which authoritarian regimes seek to temper, sparking conflict both within and between states. ‘The faster the enlightenment of the population,’ the celebrated political scientist Samuel P. Huntington wrote in 1968, ‘the more frequent the overthrow of the government.'”
Huntington’s sentiment can apply to China. But is it wishful thinking? Melik Kaylan reviews Jerome Cohen’s memoir, Eastward, Westward: A Life in Law.
“I did know that Jerome Cohen had clerked for two separate chief justices, and that he’d headed the highly influential East Asian Law Department at Harvard and was a widely respected expert on the region. More vaguely I knew he’d somehow enabled the Kissinger overture to China, had taught various students who went on to become influential there, and, leaning on his contacts, had often fought for human rights in those climes. But I didn’t know that, behind the scenes, he’d led a life of extraordinary influence on global affairs, indeed on the course of history. He is now 94 and is suddenly faced with the unscrambling of the extensive ties he painstakingly helped build between America and the Far East, not least China.
“And so, reading this book was not unlike realizing you’ve been intermittently dining with Clark Kent all these years. For the average reader of Eastward, Westward, a similar surprise awaits because few people suspect that lawyers who wrestle with the intricate penetralia of legal codes in foreign cultures, helping to align them with Western standards, are disproportionately consequential. Politicians and diplomats get all the limelight, but the hands-on experience and powerful leverage accrue to those implementing détentes on the ground. That’s the central pivot the author often occupied in Far Eastern affairs to great effect but little public notoriety.”
“Where many others might fail, the author’s can-do optimism, of a kind then considered particularly American, overcomes apparently insuperable obstacles. How to research the legal system of a hermetically sealed country? He asks the Hong Kong police to bring him escapees from the mainland, even those floating alive in the harbor, to interview in person. He becomes arguably the world’s leading expert on Chinese criminal law by his mid-30s. He arrives at Harvard Law School as a professor in 1964 and within a few years is grappling with Vietnam war campus protests. About the student violence he says it ‘was a major infringement of university rules and academic freedom,’ strong words for a lifelong Democrat. Among the book’s many blessings, bestowed by a life astutely steered, are vivid snapshots of time and place around the globe just as history erupts—and the light they throw on the present.”
From Red China to the Red River Valley, John Wilson returns with a review of Marcie Rendon’s latest novel, Broken Fields: A Cash Blackbear Mystery.
“Marcie Rendon was in her mid-60s when her first novel, Murder on the Red River, was published in 2017. She had written for the theater, plus a couple of children’s books, and her bio line also describes her as a ‘community arts activist,’ but nothing she’d done up to that point would have suggested she was about to embark on what Louise Erdrich—the doyenne of Native American novelists—has described as an ‘addictive and authentically Native crime series propelled by the irresistible Cash Blackbear, a warm, sad, funny, and intuitive Ojibwe woman.’
“Murder on the Red River was followed by Girl Gone Missing (2019), Sinister Graves (2022), and—just out—Broken Fields. ‘I want a shelf of Cash Blackbear novels,’ Erdrich wrote, and her wish is being fulfilled. In addition, When We Last Saw Her—a novel not part of the series—was published last year. If, like me, you routinely read a lot of crime fiction and a slew of books having to do with Native Americans, you should check out Murder on the Red River at the earliest opportunity. If you find yourself zipping through it, as I did, you will relish the series as a whole, as I do; if not, not.”
“Rendon’s ability to evoke the fields and the towns, the pool joints and the long highways of the Red River Valley, gives Broken Fields a grounding in the everyday real. Less persuasive is her rendering of the novel’s heart of darkness, a prim white church lady who is not only lubricious, but also a killer with a psychotic streak. Who knew? (Cash did. ‘Never know what these church ladies are capable of,’ she observes early on.) The odious county social worker, Miss Dackson, is the same one who was on the job when Cash entered the system as a toddler after her mother’s death.”
And on that happy note…
Read the full article here
