”Those poor bastards didn’t want a rural life. They expected an urban life in a rural setting. They tried to adapt their environment instead of adapti”Those poor bastards didn’t want a rural life. They expected an urban life in a rural setting. They tried to adapt their environment instead of adapting to it. And I really can sympathize. Who doesn’t want to break from the herd? I get why you’d want to keep the comforts of city life while leaving the city behind. Crowds, crime, filth, noise. Even in the burbs. So many rules, neighbors all up in your business. It’s kind of a catch-22, especially in the United States, a society that values freedom, when society, by nature, forces you to compromise that freedom. I get how the hyper-connectivity of Greenloop gave the illusion of zero compromise.
But that's all it was, an illusion.”
Kate and Dan Holland have bought into the Greenloop concept. The beautiful view of Mount Rainier, the superb hiking trails, the clean air, and a house that can be almost completely controlled from their iPad. If something breaks, maintenance fixes it. Their food is one click away on a grocery website. Everything they could possibly want is delivered right to their door.
Paradise.?.?
Well, all is fantabulous until Rainier’s volcano erupts bringing chaos, ash, and flowing lava with it. When the road is overwhelmed by lava, the residents of Greenloop are cut off not only from civilisation but from help. They are a dark spot on a satellite map. Barely anyone even knows they are there; that’s the point of the small community. This natural disaster form of isolation goes well beyond their comfort zones. They still have power, but the internet is out, and there is no cell service. Welcome to homesteading, folks!
No one has a large stock of food on hand. Why would they when they can buy food whenever they want? They don’t own tools, not a hammer, not a screwdriver, not a pair of pliers. I use something from my toolbox nearly every day, so not owning tools is a very foreign concept for me. I’m sure there are many people who will read this review who will tell me they exist quite fine...toolless. The people of Greenloop are, in other words, once disconnected from the internet and their phone...completely helpless. Well, humans are never helpless. That is why we have that big oversized brain sitting on our shoulders.
Charles Darwin is always associated with the statement “survival of the fittest,” but the fittest in his estimation isn’t always the strongest or the wiliest, but the people who adapt and adjust. Max Brooks explores this concept with this small band of privileged people who are stripped of the protection of their money and are forced to set aside the individualism they have always cultivated and learn how to exist as a tribe. This becomes even more important when rather large animals, pushed down the mountainside, start to invade their space.
”It was so tall, the top of its head disappeared above the doorway. And broad. I can still picture those massive shoulders, those thick, long arms. Narrow waist, like an upside-down triangle. And no neck, or maybe the neck was bent as it ran away. Same as the head. Slightly conical, and big as a watermelon.”
Well, I don’t know about you, but seeing something like that would turn my backbone to jelly and my knees to water. And let's not forget they smell like sulfur and rotten eggs, bad enough to make your eyes water. Oh yes, we might also want to mention their gigantic feet. Max Brooks has provided a nice diagram on the cover of this book just to give the reader an idea of the difference in a human foot and a Bigfoot foot. Yes, we are talking about an infestation of Sasquatch.
As if our tiny band of Greenloop survivors don’t have enough issues, but they now have to contend with a hungry predator who is stronger and faster than they are and sees humans as just another animal to fill their bellies with. ”To be someone else’s food. You’re a person. You think, you feel. And then it’s all gone, and what used to be you is now a mushy mess in something else’s stomach.”
I’ve been trying to decide how to dispose of my body once I’m finished with it. I don’t want it shot full of toxic chemicals and stuck in the earth. Maybe I need to put on the list the possibility of leaving my body out for a Sasquatch to eat?
The people are annoyingly naive, and some adapt much faster than others. ”Denial is an irrational dismissal of danger. Phobia is an irrational fear of one.” Either side of the equation can get you killed. Being in denial too long can close the open window to escape the dire circumstances, but also being paralized by an irrational fear can leave you vulnerable to a very real threat. There are a myriad of differences in reactions by the different people, and you as the reader will have ample opportunity to explore your own reactions to the situation. Who am I most like? Would I survive? Or will I be instant bloody oatmeal for Bigfoot?
This is certainly a page turner, not as deep as his book World War Z, which could very well be the most literary book ever written about zombies, but this book certainly provided me with some chilling sequence of events that kept me entertained deep into an autumn night.
”An example of presumed lack of models is provided by the U.S. today, for which belief in American exceptionalism translates into the widespread belie”An example of presumed lack of models is provided by the U.S. today, for which belief in American exceptionalism translates into the widespread belief that the U.S. has nothing to learn from Canada and Western European democracies: not even from their solutions to issues that arise for every country, such as health care, education, immigration, prisons, and security in old age--issues about which most Americans are dissatisfied with our American solutions but still refuse to learn from Canadian or Western European solutions.”
It has been a source of frustration for me that Americans have developed so many prejudices against Europe and even their North American partnerships. We do so believe in our exceptionalism that we refuse to recognize that someone else somewhere else knows how to do something better than we do. When I read about the Roman Empire, one of their strengths, that always impressed me and helped them become the most powerful nation the world has ever seen, until the United States, was their ability to recognize and assimilate good ideas from other cultures. They assimilated the very best from every culture they encountered.
As Jared Diamond points out, look at how many of the United States’ winners of Nobel Prizes were immigrants or first generation descendents from immigrants. The US may have provided the catalyst for those exceptional people to reach their full potential, but the synergy of bringing people together from different cultures,with different eyes, with different experiences, leads to amazing breakthroughs in science, economics, literature, art, etc. So is American exceptionalism really based on American ingenuity, or is it based upon the synergy of all those fatherlands/motherlands contributing to the melting pot of what makes us Americans?
What are immigrants good for? Well, it seems to me like they are essential in keeping America exceptional.
What Diamond is doing in this book is encouraging all of us to expand our view of the world and see the exceptionalism and the miscalculations that have occurred around the world in moments of crisis. He has selected 7 nations for which he has developed a particular fondness, and all of them are places he has spent a significant amount of time visiting or living in. The seven finalists for the Diamond round of analysis are Finland, Japan, Chile, Indonesia, Germany, Australia, and the United States.
I am surprised that he did not include an African country. He does talk about the population explosion in Kenya, 4% growth, but he uses it in such a way that changes my perception of how to analyze population growth. Yes, of course, it is in the best interest of Kenya to lower their reproductive rates. There are currently 50 million Kenyans and 330 million Americans. Guess how many Kenyans it takes to equal the consumption of ONE American.
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Thank goodness, the population growth of the US is nearly flat because, really, how many more Americans can we afford? For that matter, the ratio is way skewed between any first world country and any country in Africa. I feel that lowering our footprint is a duty for all of us.
The goal of the book is to analyze these countries at moments of crisis and weigh the successfulness of the decisions that were made to attempt to avert disaster.
I am pleasantly surprised that Diamond chose Finland because I know next to nothing about the history of Finland and certainly had no clear understanding of the complicated relationship they have had with Russia. In 1939, the Soviet Union attacked Finland. There is a strip of land between Russia and Finland that has geographical significance for both countries. Interestingly enough, Finland had alliances with Britain, France, and Sweden and fully hoped those nations would come to their aid.
They did not.
It was a true David and Goliath situation. The population of Finland was 3,700,000, compared to the Soviet Union’s 170 million. Now the allies were busy with a war with Germany, but still you have to think that they were looking at the mismatch of that situation and realizing that the war was over before it ever began.
They were wrong.
The Soviets threw everything at the Finns. They had modern tanks, planes, and artillery, which were nearly nonexistent for the Finns. They had 500,000 troops to use as just the first wave. It should have been over before it ever began.
One of the Finnish secret weapons turned out to be skis.
The Finns brought the Soviet advance to a screeching halt with courage, ingenuity, and superb leadership. I’d love to tell you more about how they accomplished it, but you really need to read the Diamond assessment. I will say, equally impressive has been the way that Finland has positioned itself between the West and the Russians to make it more advantageous for the Russians to let them continue to exist as a sovereign nation, rather than attempting once again to conquer and control them.
Commodore Matthew Perry sailed into Edo Bay in 1853, changing the trajectory of Japanese history forever. As Diamond weighs the evolution of Japan in world events, you will see that they had moments of brilliant decision making and some very bad ones when hubris outweighed intellect.
A coup in Chile, in 1973, led to the systematic murder of thousands of leftist leaning Chileans. Augusto Pinochet, the mild mannered, religious, psychopath who orchestrated this coup, stayed in power, of some sort, clear up to 2002. He was never prosecuted for his crimes. In fact, the Chilean economy eventually prospered because of some of the decisions he made as dictator. Diamond will sort through the blood and economic boom to analyze the Pinochet decisions that worked and those that led to genocide.
Diamond discusses the particularly unique issues that happen when a country is an island nation, like Indonesia. How do you coalesce all these isolated island cultures into one sense of nationality?
There is a lot to unpack in the recent history of Germany, and Diamond breaks down the disasters, as well as the moments of resilience, that have led Germany back to the forefront of successful nations.
I’ve always heard that Australia is desperate to increase its population. Diamond breaks down the benefits and potential pitfalls of a liberal immigration policy to increase population. When you look at the successes of small nations, like Finland, who enjoy a very high standard of living from the top to the bottom of their societies, is a larger population really the key to greater productivity?
Of course, Diamond devotes the most chapters to the United States. There are still a lot of wonderful things about being an American, and Diamond is unexpectedly hopeful that the US will begin to focus on the more important problems facing Americans, such as health care, education, our outrageously large prison system, immigration, and shoring up a system to insure comfortable retirements for our elderly. Solutions are all within our grasp, and many of them already exist with other friendly nations abroad, and even some solutions might rest with those nations right on our own doorstep. I do want us to, in fact, think more like the Romans and recognize good ideas wherever they might blossom into existence and not be afraid to apply them for the greater good of our society simply because they originated elsewhere. We need to embrace the fact that our exceptionalism isn’t the definition of being an American, but that we are an immigrant nation that provides a haven for exceptionalism from all over the world.
You may not always agree with Diamond. Believe me, he is used to dissenting opinions. He even discusses the lack of manners and civil discourse, especially online, that might eventually prove as detrimental to our society as anything else we face. It is hard to reach reasonable conclusions when you presume the people who disagree with you are inherently evil. Diamond, as always, gives me much to ponder. Highly Recommended!
I would like to thank Little, Brown for sending me a copy in exchange for an honest review.
”Catherine was small and thin and thought of herself, with a certain amount of complacency, as looking like Jane Eyre or a Victorian child whose head ”Catherine was small and thin and thought of herself, with a certain amount of complacency, as looking like Jane Eyre or a Victorian child whose head has been cropped because of scarlet fever. It was natural for her to look a little ragged and untidy; and the fashions of the day, when women in their thirties could dress like girls of twenty in the flat-heeled shoes and loose jackets, their hair apparently cut with nail scissors, suited her very well.”
Catherine Oliphant writes gossipy columns by day and reads depressing Victorian poets by night. She probably drinks too much, eats too little, and would be considered a modern woman;... after all, she lives with a man...out of wedlock. Tom Mallow is an anthropologist who has detribalized himself from the upper classes he was born to. He has that ”glamour of darkest Africa” about him that certainly sets him apart from other men his age. He has just come back from Africa and soon realizes that he wants to return as soon as possible.
Instead of racing home, as I would, for a shag and a healthy dose of Catherine’s sparkling wit, which was certainly in short supply in Africa, he stops by the anthropology department at the university, looking for some mates to go have a drink with. He has to settle for an undergraduate by the name of Deirdre Swan. She is an impressionable little thing, doe-like, the grand opposite of Catherine. ”She darted an amused look at him, and he thought how different her merry sardonic grey eyes were from Deirdre’s intense brown ones with their spaniel-like look of devotion.”
The men of the anthropology department are fascinated by Catherine and Tom’s relationship. ”It would be a reciprocal relationship--the woman giving the food and shelter and doing some typing for him and the man giving the priceless gift of himself.” Okay, so I nearly spit out a martini olive when I read that line…priceless gift of himself just slays me. I do wonder if Barbara Pym is speaking from personal experience; certainly, we have all witnessed this manifestation among our coupled friends.
There is one other fascinating character by the name of Alaric Wydgate. He is another darkest Africa gentleman, but it doesn’t make him look glamorous as much as it makes him look weird. Of course, maybe this has something to do with it: ”At the thought of Africa the expression on Alaric’s face might have been seen to soften, had his face been visible, but it was concealed under a mask of red beans and palm fibre….He often thought what a good thing it would be if the wearing of masks or animals’ heads could become customary for persons over a certain age. How restful social intercourse would be if the face did not have to assume any expression--the strained look of interest, the simulated delight or surprise, the anxious concern one didn’t really feel.” We’ve experienced this to some degree recently with the masks during COVID, but the eyes are the windows to the soul and, therefore, must reveal all. Our eyes must tell people whether we are smiling or frowning.
Catherine finds Alaric quite interesting. Maybe, it is the maudlin side that goes so well with her depressing Victorian poets. Has our odd, little three-way relationship expanded to four?
This book was published in Britain in 1955, but in the US in 1957 by Vanguard Press. The cover is quite fun, much more fun than the Dutton cover that I had to select out of the options available. Unfortunately, the book sold less than 1400 copies, so I feel very fortunate to have found one. This dismal showing kept American publishers from publishing her work again until the 1970s when there was a resurgence of interest. Barbara Pym lived her life very similarly to Catherine Oliphant. She never married, nor had kids. She did have some long-term relationships with men, but must have made it clear that she wasn’t interested in Beyoncing her finger. The dust jacket makes comparisons to Nancy Mitford and Eveyln Waugh. I agree with the Mitford reference, but not so much with the Waugh. Pym’s humor has a cutting, witty edge that is more subtle than Waugh’s humor. I found this book to be hilarious, but many reviewers I see were expecting a Waugh-type experience and, for whatever reason, could not enjoy the more out-of-the-side-of-her-mouth humor that Pym used so brilliantly to show the ridiculousness of most of our lives.
This is the second Pym book I’ve read. I also enjoyed The Sweet Dove Died, which you can read my thoughts here. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... Louise Erdrich, in her travel book Books and Islands, mentions what pleasures reading Henry James and Barbara Pym were for her. I adore Henry James and realized, the moment I read those words, that I have neglected Pym. I quickly rectified that oversight and will soon be tracking down more of her books to read.
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