Watership Down began as a story told by a father to his two daughters on a long car ride through the English countryside. Riveted by the adventures of a band of desperate, heroic rabbits trying to survive, the daughters convinced their father to finish it. Richard Adams did two years later. Three publishers turned it down, but the fourth, Rex Collings, took a chance on the mythological, anthropomorphic tale, despite the genre having fallen out of fashion by the early seventies. Within three years though, it had sold over a million copies worldwide. Nearly fifty years later, it remains a bestseller. 
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I first cracked open this book in Mrs. White's 8th Grade English class at Stetson Middle School in West Chester, PA. I loved Bigwig's bluntness, Dandelion's nighttime stories, and Hazel's leadership then. And now, sixteen years later and 3000 miles westward, I still bemoaned Fiver's seizure-visions, excitedly devoured the hero-myths of El-ahrairah, the cleverest rabbit of them all, and nail-bit my way through General Woundwart's orderly, yet dystoican vision of the world. 

Far from merely childish or escapist fantasy, Watership Down with its cast of creatures explores the universal needs, desires, and fears of humans, and spotlights them with a fresh, heightened sense of wonder. The friendship of Bigwig and Hazel, the terrifying danger of a black cat in the night or a group of men with a bulldozer, the gathering and telling of old stories to face the storm outside, the longing for a distant dream and the discipline to reach it, the mysteries of death and the afterlife—all these events and themes stitch together this beloved odyssey of rabbits and help map our own. ​[JG]
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{*} "The scent of apple blossom was plain enough. Then he picked up the fainter smells of buttercups and horses. Mingled with those came another. Although it made him uneasy, he could not tell for some moments what it was. A dangerous smell, an unpleasant smell—a totally unnatural smell—quite close outside: a smoke smell—something was burning. Then he remembered how Bigwig, after his reconnaissance on the previous day, had spoken of the little white sticks in the grass. That was  it. A man had been walking over the ground outside." 

{*} "By early afternoon, there was a stillness of hear, and a head of cows from the higher fields slowly grazed their was down into the shade." 

{*} "Love the animals. God has given them rudiments of thought and joy untroubled. Don't trouble it, don't narrow them, don't deprive them of their happiness, don't work against God's intent." — Dostoyevsky, The Brother's Karamazov

{*} "A great hrududu (car) came into the field from the lane. It wasn't the one the men came in. It was very noisy and it was yellow—as yellow as charlock: and in front there was a great silver, shining thing that it held in its huge front paws. I don't know how to describe it to you. It look like Inle (death), but it was broad and not so bright. And this things—how can I tell you— it tore the fields to bits. It destroyed the field." 

{*} "The Black Rabbit spoke with the voice of water that falls into pools in echoing places in the dark." 
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In most parts of Africa, rogue elephants are shot.

So when Lawrence Anthony was asked to take in an entire herd of rogues in 1999, he knew his answer meant a life or death sentence to the pachyderms. Even if he did adopt the elephants, Anthony and his team would have to overcome great obstacles to safeguard them. They would have to fight off desperate poachers, build electric fences from scratch, fend off other animals on the reserve, treat various sicknesses; most importantly, Anthony would have to do what few humans have ever have with damaged elephants: heal their trust in humans. Or else. 

Thula Thula, Anthony's game reserve, means "peace and tranquility," but it was a flurry of activity and worry in the two weeks leading up to the drop-off. Helicopter herding, not-strong-enough-tranquilizer guns, trucks breaking down in knee-high mud, infiltrating poachers and sellout-staff-members, electric power outages, stampeding matriarchs—the early months were rough-going. But there on the plains of South Africa, over the course of twelve years, Anthony slowly earned the trust of Frankie, Nana, Mnumzane, and the others. In The Elephant Whisperer, Lawrence Anthony recounts: 
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• The time the daughter elephant of the previously killed Matriarch, Frankie, nearly killed Anthony on a quad bike out of fear; a year later she was parading her healthy calf to him outside his home.
  
  
• The herds' curiosity with metal texture, especially on cars. They pull on antennas, slobber on windshields, and run their trunks over the brushed smooth Jeep hoods.
  
  
• How Anthony's 5 oz. newborn kitten chased the herd away from the fence; only to then be charged herself, sniffed, and fanned by flapping ears. 
  
  
• When fires threaten the entire reserve and man, dog, elephant, and crocodile alike bond at the river together. 
  
  
• The disturbing tendencies of bullying and power-maneuvers amongst elephants, alongside the familial loyalty and commitment. 

The Elephant Whisperer recounts these harrowing and uplifting experiences and others via a page-turning, afternoon-sized commitment that left me daydreaming about my own African adventure and browsing for flights. [JG]

Originally published in the fall of 1988 through early '89 via a series of ten black-and-white episodes, V For Vendetta has been reborn since then in brilliant full color—and eventually onto the silver screen. The anarchist hero, V, gracing his iconic Guy Fawkes mask has become a familiar face in pop culture's pantheon.

Since the early 2000s, they've also been worn not just on Halloween but at countless political protests cross the globe by individuals on both the left and the right. The mask, I think to most people, represents rebellion against real or perceived oppressions—with a dash of theatrics and sinisterness mixed in. I've always found this fascinating—that it's adopted by so many different crusaders. And so, I wanted to meet the man behind the mask. 

Reading V's legend written by  Alan Moore (Watchmen, Miracle Man, The Swamp Thing) and brought to life with the gritty, stylized visuals of David Lloyd was surprisingly philosophical; much more so than the movie adaptation made it out to be. Darker too. The dystopian world V is plotting to bring down—a fascist England that has criminalized various "deviant" behavior and watches everyone via its network of cameras, bugged phones, and patrolling finger-men—was probably my favorite aspect. The villain was embodied via the Supreme Leader and his henchmen, but the power of the system was oozing from every page, on every dimly-lit street corner and in every home's telephone and TV. The sense of dread, not knowing who to trust, if you're being watched, how you'll ever have a private moment or conversation or differing opinion, and the feeling that it was all inescapable—or worse, that people stopped seeing it after a while—was fantastic characterization of the landscape. By building up the system, V's mask shines that much brighter, promising to get the last smile. [JG]

"The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing."

— Archilochus
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Yale Professor and Cold War expert John Lewis Gaddis' On Grand Strategy is a masterclass in leadership. Organized into ten self-contained, tightly-bound chapters, the book serves as a primer on grand strategy with historical examples from ancient China, Greece, Persia, and Rome, up through medieval Europe, Elizabethan England, Napoleon's Europe, Lincoln's Union, and leaders of the 20th Century. With spectacular flourishes, Gaddis weaves together the war meditations of Clausewitz and Sun Tzu with Machiavelli's discourses on statecraft, FDR's geo-political maneuvering, and Tolstoy's employment of interconnected narratives, mapping the mindset needed to achieve great ends. 

This mindset, the author contends, has perhaps already best been laid out, with Aesopian brevity, in a fragment from the Greek poet, Archilochus: "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." Only by marrying the lofty ideal goal with the solid reality can a strategy succeed. Time, space, and resources must be employed neither solely in lock-step hegemony ("hedgehog") nor directionless bounding ("fox"). Xerxes' famous hedgehog-ing during his invasion of Greece led to his end at first delayed by the Hellespont river, delayed further by the Spartans at Thermopylae, and then disintegrated by his lack of supply chains and naval tactics. 

"This is a book," Gaddis writes, "about the mental Hellesponts that divide such leadership, on one shore, from common sense, on the other. There ought to be free and frequent crossings between them, for it's only with such exchanges that grand strategies—alignments of means with ends—become possible. But the currents are swift, the winds are untrustworthy, and the bridges are fragile."

On Grand Strategy is a semester's worth of seminars from antiquity, that we can attend in order to create out our plans "...informed by the past, linked to the present, for achieving some future goal." [JG]
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