Gordon Hesse’s Recommended Books
Updated 19 January 2008.
Arden Club, Delaware, Library Gild
Fiction
Shantaram --Gregory David Roberts --
Roberts semi-autobiographical account of his life on the run after escaping from an Australian prison. He landed in Bombay on a layover of several hours enroute to Europe and stayed more than a decade. The depiction of his personal transformation by exposure to Indian society, customs, organized crime and grassroots politics was recommended to me as having elements similar to my own resurrection from Cuba. Eventually he became a "doctor’ to the poorest of Bombay. I can’t recall a writer who better conveyed the personalities he met. After reading Joyce’s Ulysses and Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, I never thought I’d tackle books of more than 600 pages, but this one has its hooks into me.
Bill Bryson
Notes on a Small Island –
Bryson’s account of his “farewell” tour of his adopted homeland of 20 years. With backpack and maps, he walks, trains, and buses to points of nostalgia or that intrigue him. He captures the idiosyncrasies of local behaviors and the beauties of the landscape. Good humor of the human condition
A Walk in the Woods –
Upon returning to the US with wife and three daughters, Bryson felt he needed to connect to the land he had left 20 years earlier. Somehow he decided hiking the Appalachian Trail would do that. His college-era buddy Katz and the people he meets along the way provide laugh-out-loud accounts. He makes good sport of himself, yet gets some important environmental messages in a casual way.
A Short History of Nearly Everything –
Bryson confronts his greatest challenge: to understand -- and, if possible, answer -- the oldest, biggest questions we have posed about the universe and ourselves. Taking as territory everything from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization, Bryson seeks to understand how we got from there being nothing at all to there being us. He has attached himself to a host of the world’s most advanced (and often obsessed) archaeologists, anthropologists, and mathematicians. He has read (or tried to read) their books, pestered them with questions, apprenticed himself to their powerful mind.
The Life & Times of the Thunderbolt Kid -
Bryson discusses growing up in the 1950s and the changes in our world, society and culture since then, about parents and friends, and the small victories and defeats that loom so large when one is growing up.
Nautical
Demon of the Waters: The True Story of the Mutiny on the Whaleship Globe
This is about a mutiny on a whaling vessel during the Fillmore Administration. Gives a good depiction of how hard and dangerous that life was as well as an interesting account of the man who planned the mutiny before he ever left port.
Shadow Divers – Robert Kurson --
It took nearly 7 years and the lives of several “sport” divers to determine the identity of a U-boat discovered 60 mi. off of Point Pleasant, NJ. Harrowing accounts of what it is like to be running out of air at 230 ft. in depth. It is available on CD.
A Simple Courage –
About a freighter breaking up in the North Atlantic in December 1951 and the courage and skill of its skipper who remained on board for about a week after getting his crew and passengers to safety. Some interesting maritime law discussed.
Close to Shore – Michael Capuzzo --
About the shark that terrorized the Jersey Shore in pre-WWI era. It was the inspiration for Jaws.
Blind Man’s Bluff - Sherry Sontag & Christopher Drew --
An account of submarine espionage up until the 1970s. The ultimate billion dollar cat-and-mouse game.
Foreign Affairs
Bitter Fruit
is about the CIA operations to overthrow Arbenz and the connection between the Dulles brothers and the United Fruit Co. From my skimmed understanding, it was masterful and unfortunate.
Biography
John Adams - By David McCullough --
I fell in love with McCullough when he made a commencement speech at UD and consequently read the Adams biography. While most such addresses exhort the grads to follow their dream, his admonition to the Delaware graduates was nearly spiritual, "Tip the maid, ALWAYS tip the maid." I loved its humility, kindness and practicality. Up until then, I had never even thought about tipping the maid, even though I always did bartenders and waiting folks.
Edie - By Jean Stein & edited by George Plimpton --
The life of model and Warhol companion Edie Sedgwick as told from dozens of points of view. Its structure was the basis for the interviews in my book.
History & Misc.
Too Far From Home by Chris Jones --
Right now I’m pursuing books on the Apollo and Space Station programs. This is one of the best I’ve read so far. It is about the astronauts and cosmonaut “stuck” on Station after Columbia burned up. They learned to love weightlessness and Jones does a masterful job of depicting the wonders and incredible hazards that rarely are spoken of. His account of the dangers of hitting objects in orbit while on a space walk alone are worth reading the book. Did you know some of the Russian cosmonauts, still recovering from weightlessness, were almost attacked by wolves when their craft landed a thousand miles off course?
A History of the World in 6 Glasses - Tom Standage --
How civilization was affected by six manufactured beverages? Can you name them?
The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan –
Pollan makes the case that we don’t choose the plants, they choose us. It is a history of four plants: the apple, the potato, the tulip and marijuana. Covers such rarely discussed topics as Johnny Appleseed as a capitalist, tulipmania and development of disease-resistant potatoes.
Undaunted Courage by Stephen Ambrose –
A detailed account of the exploration of the Louisiana Purchase and the path to the West by the Lewis & Clark expedition. The account of their encounter with grizzly bears is worth the entire read.
Dispatches by Michael Herr –
No writer I have read has given the sense and cikd sweat fear in wartime than Herr. His style is electrifying – pointing out the irony, madness and even beauty of living on the edge and what it does to those slipping off it. He helped to write the script for “Apocalypse Now.”
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner
Reading about statistics is the last thing I will ever be accused of, but this book truly looks deeply at the facts that fall through the filters of logic. It deals with these questions: Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? Why do drug dealers still live with their moms? How much do parents really matter? How did the legalization of abortion affect the rate of violent crime?
Qualified recommendations
(Not completely read, but worthy of attention)
The Places In Between by Rory Stewart
A review in the New York Times says Stewart “recounts his journey across Afghanistan in January 2002. Even in mild weather in an Abrams tank, such a trip would be mane-whitening. But Stewart goes in the middle of winter, crossing through some territory still shakily held by the Taliban — and entirely on foot. There are some Medusa-slayingly gutsy travel writers out there — Redmond O’Hanlon, Jeffrey Tayler, Robert Young Pelton — but Stewart makes them look like Hilton sisters....
Learned but gentle, tough but humane, Stewart — a Scottish journalist who has served in both the British Army and the Foreign Office — seems hewn from 19th-century DNA, yet he’s also blessed with a 21st-century motherboard. He writes with a mystic’s appreciation of the natural world, a novelist’s sense of character and a comedian’s sense of timing.
Stewart’s travels in Afghanistan were part of a much longer journey, a walk across Iran, Pakistan, India and Nepal....While Stewart’s chapters are typically short and episodic, every one has a haiku-like intensity.
Stewart is a rarity among travel writers: he’s not much interested in telling us about himself....
Stewart clearly loves the people of Afghanistan, to whom he has partly dedicated this book. Despite sometimes being "greedy, idle, stupid, hypocritical, insensitive, mendacious, ignorant and cruel," he explains, these people never attempted "to kidnap or kill me" — even though Stewart "represented a culture that many of them hated." Thanking people for not killing you: this is defining deviancy down.
But Stewart, who speaks Persian, has no orientalist illusions; he romanticizes nothing and no one. Rather, he has written a kind of tonic to mindless Taliban-hating. He doesn’t pardon the Mullah Omars who replicated seventh-century conditions at the end of a weapon the prophet could scarcely have dreamed of, and he’s rightfully devastating on the remnants of the hard-core Taliban, describing them as "bullies with a strangled and dangerous view of God and a stupid obsession with death." But the average citizens of Afghanistan, some of whom found themselves working for or aiding the Taliban, he beholds with admirable calm.
Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace...One School at a Time by Greg Mortenson & David Oliver Rellin.
“...Mortenson’s dangerous and difficult quest to build schools in the wildest parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan is not only a thrilling read, it’s proof that one ordinary person, with the right combination of character and determination, really can change the world.” -Tom Brokaw