Reading

Greg left Aidan with a copy of David Halberstam's The Coldest Winter, about America and the Korean War. It sat in one of our bags for a while, being a bit intimidating at 700+ pages, but I finally decided I "ought" to read it and was immediately hooked. A brilliant talent for weaving very particular stories (what happened to Platoon X on Hill Y on the night of Z) with larger scale (McArthur) and much larger scale (Truman / Mao / Stalin) themes.

Like many people, Halberstam is a big fan of Truman. My own view is that Truman was a good man in many ways but fatally weak (don't get me started on the Hiroshima decision, the published defenses of which are completely laughable special pleading), and that he has (having been underrated as a President at the time) been much overrated since. I also think the standard line on McArthur (great general, great flaws) is harder to sustain than Halberstam admits, both because his indisputably bad calls were SO numerous and SO bad, and because a case can be made that the great 'victories' (especially Inchon) were themselves examples of objectively terrible decision-making combined with incredible luck. As Halberstam says, Truman was right about one thing: democracies need to work very very hard to protect themselves from 'patriots' of this stamp - but a lot of dead men in Korea might say Truman did too little of that and far too late. It seems to me that Marshall was a far, far greater American than either of them.

Excellent book, anyway. Coincidentally, I had just finished Neal Stephenson's big, brilliant, baggy, broken-backed Cryptonomicon, a chunk of which is about McArthur and WWII. Very strange reading experience: I loved the several different WWII strands, and hated to the point of unreadability the twentieth century part, with its talkative cardboard techies based in Seattle in the 1990s and trying to make a killing in the data cable business in the Philippines. Some of the WWII writing is brilliant, including a long section relating the experiences of a Japanese character who is shipwrecked, nearly burned alive, nearly drowned, nearly eaten by sharks, and finally enslaved by New Guinea cannibals. It’s actually funny, in a way that perfectly expresses the surreal yet completely believable horror of his experiences. The book seemed to me self-indulgent and too long, yet Stevenson’s ear for that place between horror and humor (and between reality and fantasy) is remarkable.

I just bought (for one of our e-books) a couple of suspense classics from my teenage reading, Erskine Childers’ The Riddle of the Sands and John Buchan’s The Thirty Nine Steps. It will be interesting to see how they hold up.