My Dad is Better Than You're Dad

As some of you know I have been selected to serve on a provincial reconstruction team in Afghanistan. This was a pretty last minute assignment and I've been running around trying to get my orders completed figure out with Lisa wanted to do (she has decided to move back to Boise) am just getting ready to leave everything behind for the next 14 or so months. I am finding silver lining to this cloud, while I'm going to miss Carter's first birthday (just as it did Coryn's) and Christmas and who knows what else. I am currently dictating this post using the voice recognition software on my new laptop. While isn't perfect it does work pretty well. It's probably not faster than typing but the software is supposed to begin to recognize my voice the more I use it.

I have learned a little bit more about what I will be doing while I'm in Afghanistan and and where I will be doing it but it's pretty late right now so I think I'm going to bed now and will get a little more specific later.

So I don't know if you were aware of this or not but Senator Christopher Dodd's father was one of the chief prosecuting attorney at the Nuremberg Trials at the end of World War II. Thomas Dodd did not talk about his experiences with his children and they only found out what he had done by disobeying their parents and playing in the attic where his notes, exhibits, photos etc. were stored. After the deaths of their parents the Dodd's children found letters from their father to their mother, letters that he had written while he was away. He was in Europe for over a year and he wrote to his wife nearly every day. These letters have been compiled into a book entitled Letters From Nuremberg.

The first two (or four or something like that... I don't remember, I didn't actually read the book, I listened to it) chapters really turned me off the book and put me in a negative mindset for the rest of it. Two major things turned me off, first Sen. Dodd kept saying things like my dad did this, my dad did that. My dad was innovative in this way, or my dad came up with this. Listen, I understand that you're proud of your father, you followed in his footsteps to the Senate after all but you came off as a braggart. Then in the rest of the book he refereed to his father as "Dodd" instead of "my father." The second item that got under my skin was how partisan he made the opening chapters of the book. I really liked Hiroshima because it was such a non political presentation of the dropping of the first atomic bomb. In this book however, Sen Dodd spelled out why democrats are better than republicans and why everything FDR did was good but everything George W. bush does is bad. Many of his arguments seemed completely biased and off base.

The rest of the book was pretty hit and miss. There was a lot of great historical information presented from a firsthand point of view account, an account that had never really been told before. There was also a lot of very personal comments of longing for home, missing family, and longing for home. I was hoping for a history book but I just got a bunch of love letters.

Anyone Up For Some Climbing?

Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster is a best selling non-fiction book of Jon Krakauer who tells the story of his 1996 ascent of Mt. Everest which turned tragic when eight climbers were killed and several other stranded on the mountain during a severe storm. Different portions of Krakauer's account have been criticized and repudiated by other survivors who were there but his telling is basically a recollection of small errors and lapses of judgement that eventually snowballed into "a perfect storm" and greatly contributed to what was the deadliest year at Everest on record. 210 people have lost their lives on the mountain in the 120-odd (or 75-ish I can't really confirm which) years that people have been attempting to reach the summit. A total of 15 climbers were lost in 1996.

One of the most dramatic and well-known stories in the book is the experience of Beck Weathers. Comatose and twice left for dead by other climbers, Weathers suddenly awakened after more than 12 hours of lying in the sub-zero temperatures. In spite of horrific frostbite on his hands and face, Weathers got to his feet and staggered into camp. Every climber was shocked at his survival, and after a dangerous high-altitude helicopter rescue, Weathers made it off the mountain alive but lost one arm between the hand and elbow, and all five fingers on his other hand.

This was my first glimpse into the real, hardcore mountaineering, let alone "high altitude mountaineering" and I have to admit that while I have a lot of things I would like to do that people think are crazy, climbing Everest, or any other peak in the Himalyia region is not one of them! A commercial climb of Everest is about $35,000 - $65,000, not to mention about two months in terrible living conditions and weeks camping, yes, in tents, in freezing temperatures... and that's the affordable package!

Everest, the 1998 IMAX movie was coincidentally being filmed at the same time as the tragedy. The crew not only helped with rescue efforts but ended up giving away about 1/2 of the 50 supplemental oxygen bottles they had horded for the shoot putting their $5.5 million shoot in jeopardy.

While reading the book I also learned about the Seven Summits Mountaineering Challenge, where people try to climb the highest peak on each of the seven continents. As of press time 198 individuals have met this challenge. What really blows me away is people wanting to limb the Vinson Massif, the 16,050 foot peak on Antarctica, about 750 miles from the South Pole (which, incidentally, is claimed by Chile) and has been claimed by over 450 individuals, including Jon Krakauer, who made this climb in 2001; about five years after his Everest ascent. Aside from the Seven Summits people also track the Second Seven Summits and the Seven Volcanic summits. I'm there are more records out there too. What I find most impressive is a statistic mentioned in the book I've kind of gotten off topic from. Richard Bass and Rob Hall, both guides on Krakauer's Everest expedition who lost their lives on the mountain during the storm, completed the seven summits in under seven months!

An interesting book filled with good information and I believe about the make it onto the big screen (it apparently was already a made for TV movie not too longer after the publication of Thin Air). I found this a very interesting read about a subject I did not previously (and still don't) know a whole lot about.

There's Smart and then there's this Guy

I recently finished two books that I had no real intention to read, but thought they sounded interesting enough to get and lo and behold I found the subjects in them very interesting, even if somewhat over my head at times. I am talking about The Theory of Everything and The Universe in a Nutshell by Dr. Steven Hawking, the British theoretical physicist who is the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge. They already sound like fun reads, don’t they? To make it even more exciting, the first book, The Theory of Everything, is read by the author… and yes, I’m talking about THAT Dr. Steven Hawking!

The Theory of Everything is a collection of seven lectures delivered by Hawking in 1994 focusing on space-time vs. real or linear time, the formation of the universe, it’s continuing expansion, the theory of relativity as well as his bread and butter, black holes. It is an unauthorized publication (which I found out after I read it) and contains much of the information that formed the basis of Hawking’s 1988 best selling A Brief History of Time, which was on the London Times best sellers list for a record breaking 237 weeks. I’m no Steven Hawking but my math tells me that’s a long time… especially for a book like this. The Universe in a Nutshell, published in 2001 is generally considered a sequel to and has been written to update the public of developments since 1988.

I think I got more out of The Theory of Everything since a lot of Nutshell has similar, though updated information from Theory. I am not really going to say much else other than if you have ever thought of reading any of his work go for it. He tries to dumb it down enough for us simpletons to understand, and if you have never been inclined to read, study or think about anything even remotely like this, go to the library and you might be surprised. Both books did informed me of a few things I did not previously know. First, Hawking is a firm believer in a God and writes extensively on how all evidence points back to a singular event, the Big Bang, and how many scientists don’t like that since evidence strongly suggests that an outside force or influence caused it. Second, the boarder of a black hole is called the event horizon, something I may have known had I seen the movie by the same title. Third, for an amyotrophic lateral sclerosis stricken (Lou Gehrig’s disease) limey math nerd (and I say that in the most loving way possible), this guy is hilarious. Okay, so I learned a bit more too but I am going to leave it at that for now and revisit my last point, he really does have a good sense of humor and a positive outlook on life. At the very beginning of his first lecture in The Theory of Everything he apologizes to his students for his digitally synthesized voice’s “American” accent. He says it was designed by a friend of his who is an American and he hasn’t been able to deliver a lecture in “proper English” since.

Here is a sample of some more of Hawking’s Humor… not necessarily all from his books:

“Einstein was wrong when he said ‘God does not play dice.’ Considerations of black holes suggests, not only does God play dice, but that He sometimes confuses us by throwing them where they can’t be seen.”

“I have noticed that even people who claim that everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road.”

In response to a question about the accent of his voice synthesizer: “I find that American and Scandinavian accents work better with women.”

“Someone told me that each equation I included in my book would halve the sales. In the end, however, I did include one equation, Einstein’s famous E=mc2. I hope that will not scare off half of my potential readers.”

“My expectations were reduced to zero when I was 21(when he was diagnosed with ALS). Everything since then has been bonus.”

“To show this diagram properly I would need a four dimensional screen. However, because of government cuts, we could only manage a two dimensional screen.”

“Eternity is a very long time, especially towards the end.”

The link below is a pretty funny interview Dr. Hawking did about his appearance on The Simpsons

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=501_1191553904&p=1

Weapons of Mass Destruction

Hiroshima, originally an article written for The New Yorker by Pulitzer Prize winner John Hersey (intended to be serialized over the course of four consecutive issues but was given it's own special issue in August 1946) was later published as a stand alone novel. I had the option to read this book when I was a junior in high school but choose something else, though I couldn't tell you what I ended up reading.

Hiroshima follows the stories of six survivors from about an hour before the bombing until a year after; a Japanese Methodist minister, a German Jesuit priest, a war widow, a doctor who is the owner of a private hospital, a doctor at the local Red Cross hospital, and the clerk at a factory in the city. The book is made up of four chapters covering the moment of the blast, the devastation the city experienced immediately following the blast, the rumors about what had happened that ran rampant throughout the city as those less injured attempted to help the seriously wounded, and the weeks and months following the attack as the survivors attempt to rebuild their lives, while facing the radiation induced illnesses caused by the radiation from the bomb... apparently in books published after 1986, the forty year anniversary include an additional chapter, after Hersey returned to Hiroshima to catch up with the four survivors who were still living. My copy was from prior to this event so I'll have to see if I can find the final chapter in the not too distant future.

What I really enjoyed about this book was the authors refusal to make any overt moral judgments or political statements. He simply lets the narrative do its work, describing the terror and confusion accompanying the immediate aftermath of the air raid through some of the silver linings of a city described as rising like a phoenix from disaster, though I imagine it was a pretty hard read in 1946, just over a year after the bombing, when the American public was being exposed to the personal tragedies connecting with the ending of the war for the first time when there was no way to know the full extent of recovery that the city and the nation as a whole was to eventually make... remember, a population of about 230,000 was reduced by 100,000. There there are over 1.1 million people residing there.

A short read that is worth the time.

Hear the Words on the Page

I have recently noticed that the number of books I am reading has gone down quite a bit. Apparently the government who employs me expects me to come to work and helping to raise a growing family takes a good chunk of time too [who knew? ;)]. That all changed about three or four weeks ago when I noticed how much time I spend driving around in my car and decided to check out the books on tape (though increasing more and more are actually on CD) at the two base libraries I have access to. Since that time I have finished six books and am currently listening to number seven.

Books on tape are not a new concept to me, I recall listening to Louis L'Amour "Chick Bowdrie" stories on a post high school road trip or two with Nate and I knocked out the first four Harry Potter books as well as two of the Lord of the Rings books while traveling to Moscow from Boise to visit Lisa before we got married. While I'm on the subject I have to take a minute to say that if you get a chance to listen to the Harry Potter books on tape, take it. All seven are read by Jim Dale, who also played Dr. Terminus, the antagonist in Pete's Dragon and he created a unique voice for each and every character in the series, maintaining it for the reoccurring characters throughout. In fact, he did such a good job that he was recognized with a Grammy for the final book, The Deathly Hallows and received nominations for The Goblet of Fire and The Order of the Phoenix. He is cited twice in the Guinness Book of World Records for creating the most character voices in an audiobook (more than 200) and for voicing the first six "Top Ten" selling audiobooks of all time.

I am going to try to do little reviews of the books I read so if anybody is looking for a good read, maybe I can help.

The first three books I want to talk about would fall into the "Founding Fathers" category. The 5000 Year Leap: The 28 Great Ideas that Changed the World by W. Cleon Skousen (which Natalie gave me for Christmas so I actually used my eyes to read this one). This book takes a look at 28 principles that the Founding Fathers inserted into the constitution, how they allowed for the exponential progress experienced in the United States from its foundation, how the government has gotten away from some of these principles and how things would be if they were followed again. This book really gave me an appreciation of the importance of this great document that I have sworn to protect and defend from all enemies foreign and domestic.

Next was 1776 by David McCullough who does a very thorough job at looking at the events of the American Revolution in the year 1776 and how General Washington and his Army came to the brink of disaster various times and how General Howe and his British forces and Hessian mercenaries were unable to end the rebellion when they had the chance. This was an excellent supplement to The 5000 Year Leap, show the military actions around the time of the drafting of the Declaration of Independence.

I followed that up with John Adams, also by McCullough who has justifiably become known as one of the premiere American historians. Not really talked about too much in any of the history classes that I have taken at any level, this biography allowed me learn about the great life of arguably the most important American of his time (and considering when he lived, that's saying something), as well as the great help and influence that his wife Abigail was in his life.

If you're interested in American history, or books that "other people" might consider boring like I am than I would HIGHLY recommend all three of these great accounts from a pivital point in the birth of this nation