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GRSG 2026 Reading Notes

Links to Murray’s online bookshop (Destination: Books) have been provided in case visitors want to purchase the book and support Murray’s addiction to blogging.

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Patina: A Profane Archaeology by Shannon Lee Dawdy

This book came about when Murray visited New Orleans last fall to catch up his daughter Cynthia who was in the Crescent City for an anthropology conference. Dawdy who is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago was a speaker at the conference. Cynthia thought I would like the book and sent it to me afterwards.

Published in 2016, Patina is centered in New Orleans where Dawdy has done much archeological work digging through layers of New Orleans history and then combining her findings with her academic musings. Here’s some of main areas of the book, which is a relatively short work (150 pages) but it is chocked full of revelations and speculations depending on your point of view. Either way it is a challenging and thought- provoking work.

Patina and Pastness Defined

In the first chapter, Dawdy defines patina in contemporary English as:

(1) ” a surface appearance of something grown beautiful esp. with age or use” (2) “an appearance or aura that is derived from association, habit or established character” and (3) “superficial covering or exterior” Patina thus has an aesthetic quality with connotations of age, is a signifier of certain social habits, and can be artificially created or fakes.”…’it is these three meanings that imply some ambivalence”

It is ambivalence and connotations about patina that acts as starting point giving Dawdy a license to riff.

One particularly redolent phrase, “Katrina Patina,” referred to the multihued encrustation that water and mold left in horizontal strata upon houses, possessions, and even the people sullied by the hard work of cleanup.” (Chapter 1)

Ruins and Heterogenous Time

IF you’re going to talk about ‘pastness’ you cannot due so without talking about time. Dawdy writes, “Time for him (Walter Benjamin) was not a series of linear strings laid end to end but a twisted knot.” She defines ‘pastness” as a quality that is sensed (not remembered not narrated) and experience filter through the flux of time.” (page 25 – page numbers represent the University of Chicago Press print edition)

Of course, some of these passages can be described–as Francis put it–as doosies:

Edmund Husserl argued that time understood as a steady sequence of linear events is a highly abstracted representation of what our consciousness experiences as a sensual flux of echoes, cycles, and retentions, akin to multipart music. In the phenomenological view, the content of experience matters more than the form of timekeeping (seconds, days, years). The phenomenological intervention of the early twentieth century marked a radical break with Western beliefs in objective and progressive time, or what Walter Benjamin called empty, homogeneous time. (Page 29)

As you can gather, Dawdy synthesizes from many sources, which is not always clear but they worth trying to comprehend. One of the more straightforward sections of this chapter is her deep dive into the House of the Rising Sun.

Certainly, all of us at a certain age can remember the Animals version of the song but did you know that the song descended from an English ballad and was recorded by folksingers in the 1830s a century earlier in Appalachia.

The hotel or house of the Rising Sun is a much sought after location for New Orleans visitors.

…the well-known folk song “House of the Rising Sun,” popularly interpreted as the lament of a fallen woman who surrendered to fate in a New Orleans bawdy house. (It’s been the ruin, of many a poor boy….don’t spend your time in sin and misery, in the house of the Risin’ Sun). This is a case of a beloved old story in search of a material home—of the satisfying verification provided by tactility. It was a yearning shared by many of my archaeological colleagues, who were disappointed with my hesitancy to authenticate the site as the House of the Rising Sun.  Page 69 (She makes a good point here, it applies to myth or song and why people wanted to find the Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, the lost city of Atlantis, and of course Noah’s Ark – Francis). 

The hotel closed between 1838 and 1840 to make substantial repairs. Given the youth of the building, but also the great weight of its four stories of brick, we can infer that the building suffered considerable subsidence due to the instability of the rotting Rising Sun Hotel debris and the soft soils upon which it was built. This would have led to sloping floors, bent door and window frames, and cracking plaster, among other problems. – Page 73

The song fits perfectly with the dens of inequity we associate with New Orleans.

A Haunted House Society

In the book we learned about why the ghost of Walt Disney and others remain a part of the city and its numerus ghost tours. (Walt Disney wanted to build Disney World in nearby Slidell, Louisiana but would not succumb to the shakedown by Louisiana politicians.)

Antique Fetishes

A couple of worthy passages about antiques:

“As cultural capital, antiquities and antiques are mobile and fungible but not necessarily available for public display. Their illicit route disqualifies them from becoming what Malinowski called “objects of parade.” Their stories cannot be told, at least not too loudly. They represent a highly rarefied form of inconspicuous consumption.” – Page 135

“For Ann and other New Orleanians, participating in the antique market is akin to attending a jazz funeral—it is a local pastime that creates a sense of community and requires local knowledge to fully appreciate. “- Page 128

Mardi Gras

Francis’ Review

We finish with another tradition Francis’ Amazon Review. (It had a lower rating, but Murray who liked the book convinced him otherwise.)

Overflowing

Karl Popper wrote that aiming at simplicity and lucidity is a moral duty of all intellectuals and that lack of clarity is a sin.  If so, Shannon Lee Dawdy’s “Patina”, has both saintliness and sin.  Her descriptions of archeologic excavations, interviews and public records are straightforward, informative and engaging.  However, her asides based on her notions of the space-time continuum, psychoanalysis and 19^th century economics baffle and befuddle.  Contravening the law of supply and demand, she cites Marx to posit that the value of a commodity can only be reliably measured by the labor-time that went into its manufacture.  In explaining physical patina, she cites Husserl, who  “…. argued that time understood as a steady sequence of linear events is a highly abstracted representation of what our consciousness experiences as a sensual flux of echoes, cycles, and retentions, akin to multipart music. In the phenomenological view, the content of experience matters more than the form of timekeeping (seconds, days, years).”   One wonders if the molecules on the oxidized surface of houses and antiques are properly acquainted with this definition.  Readers willing to dig through the crust of such academic meanderings, will be rewarded by her descriptive passages on the remains of saintly old churchyards, the sinful “House of the Rising Sun”, the devastation of Katrina, and the unextinguishable beliefs in local ghosts which provide insight into the zeitgeist of the city.   While the book has limited appeal to a general audience, those with an academic bent and a taste for extended metaphor will find it has much to like.

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The Sea Captain’s Wife: A True Story of Mutiny, Love, and Adventure at the Bottom of the World by Tilar J. Mazzeo

It seemed only natural or destined that GRSG this book because it fit so well with other books that we have read the past couple of years. For example:

• Billy Budd by Herman Melville (a short maritime novel set in mid-19th century)
• The Gales of November by John Bacon (The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald)
• Smoke and Ashes:  Opium’s Hidden Histories by Amitav Ghosh (Lots of clipper ships delivering the goods)
• Under the Eye of Power: How Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American Democracy by Colin Dickey (e.g. The Masons)
• The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann (tuberculosis was a “player” in both books)

“There are old captains and there are old captains but there aren’t old and bold captains.”

(such is the case with Joshua Patten who was bold but died young.

Combine this with her husband being stricken with tuberculosis and later meningitis and her bouts later with typhoid fever you get a fair dose of misery porn, but Francis appreciated the medical aspects of The Sea Captain’s Wife. However, Patten did not keep a diary or wrote letters to her husband so Mazzeo had to fill in the blanks the best she could relying on newspaper accounts and birth and property records. This contributed to slight lack of depth surrounding the dutiful Mary especially when compared to Louisa May Alcott of Little Women fame who wrote a book entitled Hospital Sketches (more about this in Francis’ final review later).

Fun Facts

One of the strengths of the book is Mazzeo is how she will interweave related lore to the story whether it be the origins of the word “nauseous” and the words origin pertains to sea-sickness or why women’s bare breasts often grace the bow of a ship (superstitious sailors believe “they can calm ferocious waters.)

Francis and I agree that the story about Matthew Maury who published Wind and Current Chart of the North Atlantic in 1847 soon changed the way sea captains plotted their courses across oceans. Mazzeo writes:

Matthew Maury’s charts no longer hold the public in thrall. But perhaps they should. The charts were among the most important technological and scientific advances of the nineteenth century, and, while they represent the first “big data” project in the United States, Maury’s charts quickly became, as well, an astonishing example of what crowdsourcing and citizen science could accomplish – p242

On the Downside

There is nothing particularly noteworthy about Mazzeo’s prose, but one does question how she likes to interject current thinking into history (i.e. the Maury quote about big data project and what about the census which began in 1790.) can stick out. She also expands the importance of Mary Patten’s fame in her final years and does go on and on about her son Joshua, who suffered from epilepsy and other misfortunes.

Francis’ Review

We finish with Francis’ Amazon Review. (Originally it was higher, but Murray who liked the book less convinced him to take it down a notch.)

The Austrian writer, Maria von Ebner-Eschenbach (1830-1916) wrote: “Unbending stamina and uncomplaining self-denial are the two extreme poles of human strength.”  It is possible she wrote this thinking of the grit of her contemporary, Mary Patten (1837-1861), the heroine of this book whose story made headlines across the world.   At 19 (see image), while pregnant, she faced off a mutinous first mate on board a clipper ship as her husband, its commander, was waylaid by tuberculous meningitis, and as the ship was crashing through the waves of a stupendous storm at Cape Horn, one of the most dangerous seas of the world.  She won over the crew, and with her own leadership and navigational skills, guided the ship safely to San Francisco, while tending to her deathly ill spouse.  But the gale was only the first of a series of metaphorical storms that she faced, which in rapid sequence, included icebergs, typhoid, malaria, childbirth and financial duress.  Another contemporary of hers, Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) grew up nearby in Massachusetts, and wrote: “Simple sincere people seldom speak much of their piety.  It shows itself in acts rather in words, and has more influence than homilies or protestations”, which could also have described Mary Patten, who left behind few records of her own words for historians to gauge her thoughts.  The author of this book, Tilar Mazzeo, does a remarkable job reconstructing this young woman’s life from the material available without succumbing to the temptation of embellishment.  She describes in detail, at times too much, her and her husband’s predecessors and their environs, to give readers an idea of the people and customs that shaped the development of this remarkable woman.  Nathaniel Hawthorne, a distant relative of Mary Patten’s husband even makes a cameo appearance, as a custom’s officer in London.  This approach sets the scene for her intrepid actions, which, as described by Sebastian Junger in The Perfect Storm, were almost forced upon her by seaborn circumstance. In describing the aftermath of her remarkable achievement, and the celebrity that ensued, the author suggests how it was one of many factors that contributed to society’s evolving recognition of the equality of women.  This book is ideal for people interested in learning how even those of the most unprepossessing backgrounds in 19^th century New England could surmount incredible odds and become accomplished at an early age.  Those wishing for more psychological insight into Mary Patten’s mindset may benefit by reading “Hospital Sketches” by the Louisa May Alcott, quoted above, as she describes first-hand a ship journey to Washington DC, nursing injured Civil War soldiers back to health in the Union Hotel Hospital, and surviving a bout of typhoid fever.  In any case, “The Sea Captains Wife” is a well-written account of a thrilling adventure and the challenge of living in the pre-Civil War era.  Highly recommended.

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The Forbidden Garden: The Botanists of Besieged Leningrad and Their Impossible Choice by Simon Parkin

By Simon Parkin

This book caught our attention when it was published with some acclaim in 2024. It moved  to the head of the queue because Murray wanted to evaluate the book as a possibility for his Destination: Books pop-up ( I carry many garden-related books and my customers also like history.)

Founded by world renown botanist Nikolai Vavilov, the Plant Institute of Leningrad was the flagship of seed and botany research, which began in the 1920s. Eventually it held hundreds of thousands of seeds, but when the Germans invaded Russia in June of 1941, they laid siege to Leningrad. The driving plot was “As employees of the world’s first seed bank, the botanists were the only people to have been faced with this ultimate and fundamental dilemma: to save a collection built to eradicate collective famine, or to us the collection to save themselves.”(p.155)

But there were also other thick threads that ran throughout the book, which was well-written and compelling.

Stalin

This book reminded Murray of Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010) an in depth and graphic history of how the policies of these two dictators were responsible for the mass murder of 14 million combatants. 

In The Forbidden Garden, Parkin zeroes in on how Stalin and Hitler starved and murdered the citizens of Leningrad.  

Lysenko

Trofim Denisovich Lysenko (you must learn to roll with the long Russian names in this book)  was as Francis points out – the RFK Jr. of his time.  In this assembly of quotes you can see the parallels.

Page 21; Lysenko argued that genetics, represented a waste of time and resources: one simply had to train plants to meet one’s goals, a theory he named vernalization. Lysenko’s outlier theory resonated with the country’s leader, Joseph Stalin, who approved of the idea that plants, like workers, could be transformed by an act of political will…… Page 21; Stalin also liked that, unlike Vavilov, Lysenko came from peasant stock, and that his theories did not rely on academic laboratory work. Better still, at a time when millions of Russians and Ukrainians were perishing from starvation caused, in part, by poor crop yields, Lysenko promised Stalin that he could meet the demand for improved crop varieties within three years, seven fewer than Vavilov estimated his work required to produce results. )

Page 23 Later that year, while Vavilov was away on a scientific expedition, Lysenko replaced the twenty-seven senior scientists who served on the Plant Institute’s scientific council with his own followers. One such follower was Isaak…”Prezent who coauthored articles with Lysenko and coedited the journal Vernalization, which dismissed the entire field of genetics as a “pseudoscience.” Prezent helped Lysenko organize vast experiments and publish the dubious results and crafted compelling statements designed to uplift Lysenkoism, denigrate his opponents, and propel his protégé from the sphere of science to that of politics—to each man’s mutual benefit. (Page 63)

Starvation: Eating Famous Dogs

Parkin graphically writes about how exactly people starve to death and how the body slowly eats away any fat and then when that is gone how it attacks the organs, which is fatal. Coupled with the sub-zero temperatures of the Winter of 1941-2 when temperatures reached -40 degrees Fahrenheit it is estimated that at least 649,000 had succumbed to starvation.”

In one of the more poignant examples was the degree of how dogs and cats were devoured.  “The smallest Leningrad children,” one journalist recorded, “grew up not knowing what cats and dogs were.”  The siege wiped out urbanite sentimentality toward animals. At the Physiological Institute, famished researchers ate physiologist Ivan Petrovich Pavlov’s renowned dogs.

Strong Endings

Like any good non-fiction book, Forbidden Garden ends strong with Parkin providing background on how he found source materials and his indebtedness to Ukrainian writer and academic  Mark Popovsky who began gathering materials and files on in the mid-1960s. Popovsky had the Soviet Union’s attempts to hide the truths about Stalin’s Reign of Terror and the fate of Nikolai Vavilov.

Following Parkin’s lead we finish strong with Francis’ Amazon review. Also, the book is available for purchase on the GRSG section of the Destination Books online store.

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Hubris: The Tragedy of War in the Twentieth Century by Alistair Horne

This 2015 book was the final work of British historian and academic Alistair Horne’s (1925-2017) long writing career, which included two other books that Murray had read — A Savage War of Peace: Algeria, 1954-1962 (which Murray wrote a piece about in Tropics of Meta) and The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916 his book about Verdun (which was one of Murray’s father’s favorite books). Murray first read Hubris waaaay back in 2017 and this book came up in our discussion of our previous book The Forgotten Garden about Leningrad. Germany’s invasion of Russia is central to the Leningrad, but the siege coincided with Hitler’s assault on Moscow at the same time, which is one of main campaigns highlighted in this book.

Horne defines hubris throughout the book, but one characteristic is overreach. Knowing when to stop whether it be MacArthur at the 38^th parallel in Korea, Japan invading Russia, Hitler’s invasion of Russia. Another aspect of hubris is racism. Thinking your culture and intellect is superior to others: Germans to Russians, Japanese to the Chinese, Americans over the Japanese.  Hubris coupled with complacency is a recipe for disaster.

There were five main parts to the book:

Part I: Tsushima 1905

As Horne writes:

“Have these Americans never heard of Port Arthur?” But, to the dismay of us historians, our leaders tend not to read history, or, worse, they pay no attention to its lessons……Yet it does seem extraordinary that, in 1941 with tensions rising between the United States and Japan, Franklin Delano Roosevelt did not seem aware of the dangerous precedents; after all, he himself had been assistant secretary of the navy in the First World War, only a decade after the attack on Port Arthur, and was well read in history.”

In October 1904 Russia retaliated by sending its Second Fleet from the Baltic around the Cape Horn of Africa, past the Indian Ocean towards Japan.  A miserable Christmas was spent in the wretched conditions off the Madagascan Isle of Nossi-Bé (now a leading holiday resort), with its sweaty, well-named port of Hell-ville.

The Russian fleet’s 18,000 mile seven-month voyage was so ill-fated at times it sounded comical. It was doomed from the beginning since the Russian ships were fueled by coal and thus “had to be stocked with thousands of tons of coal.” With no Russian base enroute, the whole issue of coaling was crippling. “Every spare man and officer was brought in to do the coaling; stokers often died of heart failure in the heat…the coaling filled the whole ship with dust, which penetrated even the cabins and wardrooms of the officers.”

Admiral Heihachiro Togo, who trained at Britain’s Royal Naval Academy (also his fleet made up of superior ships built by Britain), sunk nearly the entire Russian fleet in a naval battle that lasted little more than a day.

Part II: Nomonhon, 1939

 This was a land battle between the Soviet Union and Japan on the border of Manchuria and Korea held on the eve Hitler’s invasion of Poland in September, 1939 (again no one knows much of this battle).   Horne adeptly shows those seeds for this battle were planted at the turn of the 20^th century at Port Arthur. In this later campaign, the Soviets were led General Gregory Zhukov who stopped the Japanese advance in Manchuria.

Part III: Moscow, 1941

Because Stalin had spies in high place is Japan, he was able to pull his hundreds of thousands of troops early from Siberia frontier to reinforce Moscow. The spies assured Stalin that the Japanese were turning their attentions to the South Pacific (Pearl Harbor). Zhukov used the tactics he learned at Nomomahan to halt the Wehrmacht outside the gates of Moscow and later did the same in Stalingrad.

Horne gives much credit to super spy Richard Sorge, born a German but with communist sympathies that later landed him in Tokyo in 1933. Sorge fed Stalin secrets on Tokyo’s military ambitions. Incidentally according to Wikipedia, Horne was a spy for the British posing as journalist, no less)

Part IV: Midway, 1942

The U.S. Pacific Fleet halted the expansion of the Japanese in a naval battle that became known as the Miracle of Midway, which was made into two excellent war films Midway (2019) starring Patrick Wilson and Woody Harrelson and Midway (1976) starring Charleton Heston, Henry Fonda and Tashiro Mifune –the legendary Japanese actor who appeared in many Kurasawa films. The latter inclluded actual film footage of the battle spliced in. Adding to the plot, Heston’s pilot son falls in love with a Japanese woman. “Six months after Pearl Harbor, son? You have one bad sense of timing.”

Part V: Korea and Dien Bien Phu, 1950-1954

One chapter is devoted to the American Caesar General Douglas MacArthur who made a drastic miscalculation on the Korean peninsula.

MacArthur gets a lot of ink in this book – some of it good (his handling of Japan after the war, the gutsy invasion of Inchon that drove the North Koreans out of the South) and some if not so good (his drive past the 38^th parallel which triggered the Chinese to attack his exposed troops, and his insubordination of President Truman, which led to Truman becoming the most hated man when he sacked the general. Truman had an approval rating in low 20s.

 The second chapter covers the French’s resounding defeat at the hands of the Viet Minh led by Ho Chi Minh on the Laotian Vietnamese frontier – thus ending the French colonialism in Indochina and opened the door for a similar American miscalculations in the War of Southeast Asia.

This was familiar history to the GRSG, which read An Honorable Exit by Eric Vuillard in 2024. (Scroll here to read our notes.

Francis’ Amazon Review

There was some discussion about whether Francis would give it 4 or 5 stars. “I’m going to stick with 4 stars,” says Francis, ” but as long as I warn people that he isn’t too big on the details and, that the book is a bit of a morality play, calling it ‘highly recommended’ seems fair enough in that I warn off those looking for something a bit more rigorous–but that’s just me.

Pride and Arrogance:

The strength and weakness of Allistair Horne’s “Hubris: The tragedy of war in the twentieth century” lies in its unity of its stated theme.  Focusing on hubris, he covers a great deal of military history with accessible prose and simplicity, which skirts a great deal of dreary detail, but, by necessity, omits some of other critical contributing factors. Tacitus, who made the observation that  while “victory had many fathers, defeat was an orphan” recognized its intrinsic irony, in that the reverse is often more true, with multiple factors responsible for failure and rarely that of hubris alone.  Nonetheless, Horne’s approach works well, providing a unitary overview of seemingly disparate events, by showing their unexpected connections spanning conflicts spread out over 5 decades and 5 continents  He depicts multiple versions of hell on earth, beginning in 1905 at the port of “Hellville”, a coaling stop in Madagascar for Russian vessels steaming from the Baltic to rescue the embattled Pacific Russian Fleet from annihilation by the Japanese. Coaling was a brutal process, covering the ship in noxious black dust during loading with the risk of heat stroke and death for stokers as they fed boilers to the maximum to furnish mobility during battle. He ends in 1954, with a description of the battlefield of Dien Bien Phu, which was christened by the journalist Bernard B. Fall as “Hell in a Very Small Place”—and yet, all of the battlefields, including those in Korea, Manchuria, and Europe were no less nightmarish for soldiers and citizens alike, making a mythical location for Hades immaterial, as Shakespeare put it so eerily in The Tempest:  “Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”  In the Epilog, Horne reminds us that hubris is contagious, infecting the military, as well as the political leaders and the people of their countries—creating a reservoir which keeps the threat of hubris ever present.   Although skeptical of the ability of modern leaders to learn from history,  Horne is no defeatist, gamely diving into the darkness of our shared past to mine it’s valuable lessons.  His approach follows that suggested by Kant:  “Only the descent into the hell of self-knowledge can pave the way to godliness.”  One envisions Horne, along with his fellow historians, like  driven soldiers in the battles he describes, repeatedly dosing mankind with the precepts of the past, fueled by the belief that these, one day, will render mankind resistant to the scourge of hubris.  Highly recommended.

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A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush by Eric Newby

The GRSG adventures into the dangerous and distant mountains of the Hindu Kush, but rather risking life and limb we accompany Eric Newby and Hugh Carless in the 1958 travel classic A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush. Francis had read and enjoyed Newby’s Love and War in the Apennines and recommended this book. Besides set in Afghanistan and Persia/Iran, this region of the world remains in the forefront of the news. (Every time one fills up their automobile.)

The book begins with Newby leaving his job in the British fashion industry and joining his friend Hugh who is in the foreign service. The duo journeys through Turkey and Persia (Iran) to Kabul where they eventually work their way up to Nuristan to attempt to climb Mir Samir (elev. 19888′).

The book is at its best when describing the people and the mountainous region, but the maps in the book are barely adequate and the author tosses in Nuristani language words willy-nilly without clarification and the several locals who accompany them seem to blur together.

Here are a couple of good desciriptions:

“….I had done some hill walking and a certain amount of scrambling in the
Dolomites with my wife, but nowhere had we failed to encounter ladies twice our age
armed with umbrellas. – Page 12

(Newby met his wife in World War II which is chronicled in the Apennines book. She began the trip but stomach issues got the best of her)

: …..and so up the Darra to Kuh-i-Mir Samir itself. And there the last ibex took refuge on the very top. And the water followed up to the very belly of the ibex. Then it rose no more and after a while began to sink; ever since that time the belly of the ibex has been white.- Page 138

What is clear is all the suffering hunger, freezing conditions, storms, jagged rocks and ice, bad footwear, bad food, dysentery, threatening Mullah. This willingness to subject themselves to such conditions makes one wonder what motivates them (adrenalin addiction) and reminded Murray of his 2025 trip to Zermatt, Switzerland home to the Matterhorn and populated with gravestones of young plucky British explorers who died on the slopes.

As us tradition we finish with Francis’ Amazon Review

Not Short Enough  

Eric Newby’s: “Love in the Apennines” is a better read, but “A short walk in the Hindu Kush” has its own attractions.  The first few chapters are perhaps the most entertaining, and discuss, with good humor, his woefully inadequate preparation for climbing mountains;  it also describes the stultifying career which he gladly left (after making enough money with his writing to afford it) –however, this period of dull work was perhaps a much needed respite from his stressful time in WW2 escaping from German and Italian prisoner of war camps and hiding out in enemy territory in between, which he recounts in his other book mentioned above.     

Although the origin of the term “Hindu Kush” is left out of the book, Ibn Battuta, a 14^th century Islamic scholar who travelled widely and wrote about his journeys, explained the name “Hindu Kush” which can be translated as  ‘Hindu slayer’, because those who transported Hindu slaves across this mountain occasioned the death of many due to their forcible transportation. The challenges of glaciers, sustenance, cliffs, ravines, freezing cold, and falling rocks in crossing them even centuries later is made clear in Eric Newby’s book. It also manages to capture a rare calm period in the history of Afghanistan and Iran which contrasts with the political tumult and warfare which have preceded and followed it.  One of my favorite passages is a village elder who explains how the Ibex got its abdominal coloring in a “Just-So” type anecdote:  He had heard it passed down that one such animal climbed the highest peak in the Hindu Kush to escape inundation from Noah’s flood and even still the water reached so high it lapped up against its belly but no higher—and so ever since the abdomen of the ibex has been white. The books is recommended for those with an interest in mountain climbing and the history of the region of the Hindu Kush—others, however, may find that this short walk a read too long.     

Eric Newby’s: “Love in the Apennines” is a better read, but “A short walk in the Hindu Kush” has its own attractions.  The first few chapters are perhaps the most entertaining, and discuss, with good humor, his woefully inadequate preparation for climbing mountains;  it also describes the stultifying career which he gladly left (after making enough money with his writing to afford it) –however, this period of dull work was perhaps a much needed respite from his stressful time in WW2 escaping from German and Italian prisoner of war camps and hiding out in enemy territory in between, which he recounts in his other book mentioned above.