Michael Crichton's African adventure novel follows a team of mercenaries, scientists, and a talking gorilla as they journey into the heart of the Congo to find the lost city of Zinj. The novel is a direct homage to H. Rider Haggard's classic adventure yarn, ​King Solomon's Mines, updated with a fascinating infusion of high-tech electronics and 21st century understanding of primates' capacity for language. As the team navigate each other's own conflicting motives for joining the expedition, they also encounter killer hippos, cannibals, volcanos, and potentially a new species of jungle gorilla. My favorite element was Amy, the talking gorilla, who uses sign language to access and share her earliest memories of the alleged jungle city's location. 🙈 [JG]
​

Michael Crichton (1942-2008) remains the only writer to have a #1 book, movie, and TV show in the same year in the USA. His novels include Sphere, The Lost World, Eaters of the Dead, State of Fear, and Dragon Teeth among others. Collectively his works have sold over 200 million copies worldwide, been translated into thirty-eight languages, and provided the basis for fifteen films. He was also the director of Westworld, The Great Train Robbery, and Looker. ​​Steven Spielberg, who adapted Crichton's Jurassic Park and The Lost World to the silver screen, called the writer "The High King of High Concept" for his ability to create stories that grab an audience's imagination and keep them turning the page. Crichton appeared on The Charlie Rose Show several times in the '90s and early 2000s. I continue to enjoy those interviews as Crichton discusses his various interests in science, medicine, psychology, biology, and computers. Crichton strikes me as a deeply skeptical yet voraciously curious, private yet warm person. 

"I have more faith in Hitler than [God]. He alone has kept his promises, all his promises, to the Jewish people." 

​— "A faithless neighbor" of Elie Weisel, Night
​

"Work of crematorium—the choice is yours," said the German SS Officer to a freshly shaved and tattooed group inside the gates of Auschwitz. Elie Wiesel, a fifteen year old Hungarian Jew, was among them. He stood with his father. His mother and sister had already been separated with the other women. Later, he would learn that they were given no choice, killed that first day in the gas chambers. "Not far from us, prisoners were at work. Some were digging holes, others were carrying sand. None as much as glanced at us. We were withered trees in the heart of the desert." 

Elie Wiesel would survive another 500 days or so in four different concentration camps, until American forces liberated Buchenwald in Weimar, Germany. Until then, "the stomach alone was measuring time," and his endless days were filled with night. To survive he would master a dangerous and dark calculus of making deals, moves, and lies to avoid attention, scrutiny, and punishment—from both Nazis and Jews—and his own determination to endure. 

Night is Wiesel's memoir of his experience in the Holocaust and the author of 56 other books. He died in 2016 at the age of 87 and survived by his wife and translator Marion Wiesel and son Shlomo Elisha Wiesel, named after his father. 
​

Circled in red is Elie Wiesel two days after Americans liberated the Buchenwald in Weimar, Germany. Elie's father had died just four months earlier. 

"That evening I sat on my driftwood pile admiring my cabin. Pale blue wood smoke rose up through the dark boughs of the spruce, and beyond, looking huge and majestic, the jagged peak of Crag Mountain. The cabin was complete now except for the fireplace and, maybe later on, a cache up on poles. It was a good feeling just sitting and reflecting, a proud inner feeling of something I had created with my own hands. I don't think I have ever accomplished anything as satisfying in my entire life."
​
— Richard Proenneke, One Man's Wilderness
​

Richard Louis Proenneke (pronounced Pren-uh-key) lived alone for thirty years in Twin Lakes, Alaska. This is his journal covering the first 18 months of the odyssey.

Originally from Iowa, Proenneke served in World War II as a carpenter in the U.S. Navy and later became a master mechanic. Trading in his tool belt for a time, he moved to Oregon, working as a sheep camp tender on a ranch for several seasons. In 1950, at the age of thirty-four, he went north to Alaska. There he stared a cattle ranch venture with a friend on Shuyak Island. It failed, but he rebounded nicely into commercial salmon fishing for a time, before setting out once again to the sticks. Finding a specially secluded bight of Twin Lakes, Proenneke picked up his tool belt once more to start on a cabin.  

Dick's journal entries track his progress, from cutting beams and notching logs to meeting many woodland friends and foes as well as testing mouth-watering recipes. "For supper, I cut the trout into small chunks, dipped them into beaten egg, and rolled them in cornmeal. They browned nicely in the bacon fat, and my tender crusted sourdough did justice to the first fish fry of the season." The only help Proenneke accepted were food and mail deliveries from a float place piloted by his friend Babe twice a month. That and some tar paper and polyethylene for the cabin roof so it wouldn't leak. 

Twin Lakes offered Proenneke the seclusion from people he that we wanted and demanded from him an incredible degree of self-sufficiency. He hunted, gathered, gardened, expanded his homestead to include a stone chimney, food cache on stilts (pictured below), some gravel trails, and a canoe. He trekked his backyard, clocking-in thousands of miles in the first 18 months alone, and 3,000 feet of Kodiak 8mm and 16mm footage. He chased of mischievous squirrels, rescued a caribou calf from a bear, and shot a mountain ram cleanly with his ought-six rifle. 

I loved the journal format of One Man's Wilderness and can't wait to go visit Twin Lakes for myself and stop into Dick's cabin, which is now a National historic site. Proenneke passed away in 2003 in Hemet, CA. Reading just some of the highlights of his modern, wilderness odyssey has whetted my appetite to venture out farther than the safe, popular trailheads and tamed parks I'm accustomed to. ​[JG]

"When a man climbs high it always seems an amazement, as he starts down, to realize the distance he has covered." 

​— Richard Proenneke, One Man's Wilderness
​​

​— Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game

I finally took the plunge into Ender's Game. The classic sci-fi novel has been recommended to me since the 7th grade by friends who loved—and hated—to read. The premise is that aliens have attacked Earth twice now and nearly destroyed the entire human race. The remaining world governments, in a last ditch effort, have begun breeding military geniuses and inculcating them into a Spartan-esque training on the art of war in a space station. The main game is low-gravity laser tag involving battle suits, geometric obstacles, and a capture-the-flag type objective. Ender Wiggin is the best. Game after game he out-smarts and out-maneuvers new and veteran players alike. He even overcomes the massive handicaps placed on him by commanders—no sleep between matches, 5-minute slow-starts, reduced team sizes, etc. The ultra-competitive training is depicted though as brutal brainwashing that destroys the children bit by bit as they race in the space station to intercept the third wave of aliens en-route to kill Earth.

Equally interesting is the side-story back home. Ender's two siblings, Peter and Valentine, are also both geniuses, but not quite up to Ender's level of ability. Thus, they didn't make the cut. Peter resents this and channels his skills to manipulating, bullying, and eventually even world politics. Valentine is empathetic and caring—the foil to Peter—and a constant check against her older brother, working to keep Peter's ambitions from actualizing his motive for political power. This manifests in their dueling media columns on Earth, which they write under the pseudonyms Demosthenes (Peter) and Locke (Valentine). Their essays on the alien invasion duel for the soul of the planet. I really enjoyed this aspect of the story and imagine it's sowing the seeds for the rest of the Ender's five-book series. Although written in 1977, just two years after the official end of the Vietnam War, this exploration of media manipulation and the intellectual fronts back home struck me as relevant to today's state of modern journalism and representations of 'the other' in times of war. 

Lastly, I really appreciated the fast pace and bare-minimum approach to world-building in Ender's Game. [JG]

— Ted Kaczynski, 1998, quoted in Alston Chase's Harvard and the Unabomber

Between 1978 and 1995, Harvard-graduate and former math professor, Ted Kaczynski, mailed or planted a series of increasingly sophisticated homemade bombs to science labs and government offices across the USA. All told, he killed 3 people and injured 23 others. 16 bombs were ultimately attributed to him. His 35,000 word manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future, was published in part by The Washington Post and The New York Times in 1995 under the promise of him "desisting" from future bombings. A writer of The New Yorker called the manifesto a "carefully reasoned, artfully written paper..." The manhunt for Kaczynski, then known only as "the Unabomber," was the longest and most expensive in FBI history. It probably would have continued for years—as would have the bombing, but came to an end when Kaczynski's brother shared his whereabouts with law enforcement: a remote cabin in Montana. Inside were various pipe bombs waiting for postage, bookshelves of philosophy, literature, and diaries written in secret code, and an unkempt hermit-like psychopath. 

In Harvard and the Unabomber (2003) author Alston Chase offers an exhaustively researched and distinctively new interpretation of the America's worst homegrown terrorist. Far from being a deranged, lustful serial killer or a radical Luddite as the media portrayed him, Chase argues that Kaczynski embodied the ideas and psychology of the Silent Generation of the '50s and, ultimately, the activism of the counter-cultural '60s. Kaczynski was radically average; his future actions chillingly mirrored the intellectual diet of his Harvard education and the isolation felt by young, bright minds of the 20th century. Upon examination of the student life at Harvard—and America en masse—Chase finds a dangerous concoction for anti-technological and morally neutral sentiments on campuses. As the Cold War raged, "General Education [courses] delivered," Chase writes, "a double whammy of pessimism. From humanists we learned that science threatens civilization. From the scientists we learned that science cannot be stopped. Taken together, they implied there is no hope. Gen Ed had created what would become a permanent fixture at Harvard, and indeed throughout academe: the culture of despair." This despair included moral subjectivism, summed up in then-Harvard President, Derek Bok's view that "ethical neutrality is the guiding rule for the historian or scholar." 

Perhaps, worst of all, Kaczyinski's manifesto was read sympathetically by radical environmentalists and Marxist professors, yes, but also by many Americans concerned about swift technological progress and growing government control. "The Unabomber episode...is a demonstration of how ill prepared modern society is for new, unfamiliar confrontations...the awkward denials and embarrassed cringing...all flow from a central fear that modernity is not up to the argument [to refute Kaczynski]," Chase writes. If Kaczynski's views have sympathy, do his methods? For anarchists and anti-globalists who write him in prison and eco-saboteurs and terrorists of the 21st century, yes. What say the rest of us? It's tragically  too quiet, and as Chase shows through Kaczynski's upbringing and Ivy League education, ideas—and the lack of good ones--have consequences. [JG]
​

Alston Chase is a writer and independent scholar who has spent a career specializing on intellectual history. He is the author of six books, including Playing God in Yellowstone: The Destruction of America's First National Park, and In a Dark Wood: The Fight Over Forest and the Rising Tyranny of Ecology. Chase lives in Paradise Valley, Montana. ​
​

— Alston Chase, Harvard and the Unabomber