Tony Hillerman: Seldom Disappointed (part one)

Cover of Seldom Disappointed: A Memoir

Tony Hillerman is something of an institution among contemporary Southwestern novelists, and while he was admittedly a writer of limited range, he captures the feel of Navajo country and aspects of the difficulty of living simultaneously in an ancient culture and a modern culture. He's probably best known for his "Leaphorn  and Chee" novels, eighteen books centered around two Navajo police investigators. While it isn't fair to say that if you've read one you've read them all, they mostly follow a pattern: one or more murders in Navajo Country, investigation by Leaphorn, Chee, or both, discussion of elements of Navajo culture or religion, and comments on the difficulties of living in Navajo Country. The books follow in sequence, and while there are continuing stories regarding Leaphorn's aging and retirement and Chee's love life and struggle to define himself as either a modern Navajo or a traditional Navajo, the books are not closely linked: while there are characters who recur they can typically be understood in single novels.

In addition to these Hillerman wrote a couple of novels outside the series and several nonfiction books including a memoir, Seldom Disappointed.

While I can usually read a Hillerman novel in two sittings, Seldom Disappointed is a more thoughtful, denser read. I'm only a quarter of the way through, and I'll be pleasantly surprised if I finish this book this week.

Hillerman grew up in Catholic in Oklahoma and Indian Territory during the Depression, then fought Germans in World War II in Europe, and I'm just to the point where he has shipped off for Europe. I am beginning to suspect that Hillerman's voice in his nonfiction is freer, smarter, and better than in his novels: his descriptions of frontier education between the wars, of Benedictine missions in Indian country, of what his family's Catholicism meant and implied about them, of realizing that he wasn't college material, of marginal poverty, even of the practice and perception of hitchhiking during World War II are carefully considered and surprisingly economical. His use of digression and foreshadowing is balanced and well-considered. I'm really impressed with this book, and I think it would make for good reading for anyone considering writing a memoir.

Deborah Lipstadt: Denying the Holocaust

Image via WikipediaI've been chewing on this book for two or three weeks now, and I finally finished it early this week, but I'm just now taking the time to post about it.

I've wanted to read a book called Reading the Holocaust for some time, but I haven't been able to find a copy, and even at four dollars I'm not eager to buy a copy and have it lie around the house half-read (half-read books are as welcome here as half-eaten sandwiches), so when I found this book (full title: Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory) via my local public library's website I snagged it.

I've been interested in the notion of Holocaust denial for some time, and I guess this book also falls somewhere near the perimeter of my Dave Emory fascination. This is the first book I've read about it, though. I was put off by the subtitle: the word "assault" is like the words "attack" and "crisis" a symptom that somebody's not above raising the emotional stakes to make a point. Not to mention the word "growing:" anyone who claim something is "growing" or part of a "trend" had better have some way to quantify the object of their interest. But I digress.

The book traces the history of Holocaust denial, but first tries to place it in a prewar context, suggesting that everyone involved in Holocaust denial is a fraud, a fascist, an anti-Semite, a Nazi/neo-Nazi, or some combination of the foregoing. The middle chapters deal with personalities involved in (European and/or American) Holocaust denial from the end of World War II to the 1990s, culminating in a chapter about a college newspaper controversy in roughly 1992. The last chapter is a speculative discussion of what will happen in the future, after the book's publication date (1993). The student newspaper controversy is really the center of the book, but the author sees it as part of a trend, and so doesn't explicitly set it as the centerpiece of the book.

The middle chapters of the book deal with personalities involved in Holocaust denial on both sides of the Atlantic; my shallow read of these chapters didn't show any links between most of them and the people involved in the newspaper controversy, except for the people involved in the Institute for Historical Review. They're a pretty miserable bunch, and I won't attempt to list them here. Their personal motivations aren't always clear: they move in and out of fascist groups, they're variously involved in sundry schemes, etc. Why they've got such a bug in their collective ear about the Holocaust is mostly unclear. Early on the author states what she believes are their motivations, but she doesn't really prove her point.

The reality of the Holocaust, unfortunately, lurks in the background of the book but only surfaces here and there; I'm tempted to compare it to the whale in Moby-Dick or the Entertainment in Infinite Jest, but that's just not appropriate. The author occasionally mentions the big artifacts of the Holocaust (e.g. Yad Vashem) or the apparent mania that surrounded the Final Solution, but the full horror of the Holocaust never really appears. I would have loved to have seen a chapter relatively early in the book (say between Chapter 2, about prewar anti-Semitism, and Chapter 3, about early Holocaust denial) that just laid out the facts, including mechanisms, death tolls, and subsequent scholarly revisions to the official numbers. This book is really about the dialog between history as it is written by qualified historians and revisions as they are suggested by Holocaust deniers, and without the former it's just not a very strong book. I have to believe that a good summary of what it means to revise history accurately would have put all this falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus nonsense to rest more readily than the book's approach.

This is, in short, a terrible book. The author overworks the words "obviously" and "cursory" when saying things she believes to be true. The author relies so heavily on quotes from primary sources consisting of one or two words that after a while I lost track of what was an actual quote and what was a scare quote. In many places the text reads as if it were written by someone writing in their second language, without a decent command of idiom. The whole book, slim at 235 pages, was just a slog from beginning to end.

I'm still looking for a good discussion of Holocaust denial generally. I came away from this book with as many questions as I started. Maybe I asked too much of it; maybe it's just too soon to expect a dispassionate treatment of the Holocaust itself, much less Holocaust denial. I'm not sure.

not sensible exactly

I got to ask a co-worker at lunch today if round planes made any sense in the pre-Stealth era.

I'm not in a habit of doing this, but the co-worker is actually a pilot and is good enough at physics to point out (sometimes gently) when I'm way off on my physical intuition.

Dave Emory has been on a "Nazi flying saucer" kick lately; he claims that among the awful things that are about to happen is an "invasion" by very human "space men" in very earthly flying saucers followed by a mass hysteria accompanied by mass exterminations etc. that are common in Dave Emory scare stories.

He figures that the Nazis perfected flying saucer technology toward the end of World War II, after which the technology went mostly underground, and in the meantime it's only gotten more sophisticated, etc. His theory is that the Nazis figured out how to power a spinning disc using a jet engine in the center. The problem here, as far as I can tell, is the same one that flying wings (precursors to stealth aircraft) suffered: before fly-by-wire they were unstable.

I have no idea whether an industrial grade flying saucer would be possible now (in the stealth era), but that's not the point. Not Dave's point, anyway; in Dave's world everything evil leads back to the Nazis, and while modern flying saucers might well be full of splendid blond beasts, or whatever, if they couldn't be built until the 1970s it's hard to blame the Nazis exactly.

On the other hand, underground Nazi connections to illegal drugs made this week's 10 Things; Dame Helen Mirren apparently stopped using cocaine when she discovered its connections to, among other people, Klaus Barbie.

And while I probably shouldn't bring this up again, this behavior of associating one's own behavior with its distant effects is at the heart of what Misha Glenny goes on about in McMafia. Good on ya Dame Emma, whoever you are.

There's a new Dave Emory/WFMU episode up; I'm hoping to get to it this weekend. I'm still digging out from under the pile of 1973 Jean Shepherd that accumulated while I was away. Soon oh soon.

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