Preoccupied with other business this week, I have barely been able to keep up with the headlines. I thought I would post my recommendations in last year’s Claremont Review of Books annual Christmas roundup, which is full of contributions by eminent scholars such as Andrew Roberts, Heather Mac Donald, Dan Mahoney, Amy Wax, and Jean Yarbrough. Slightly supplemented, this is what I had to offer.
Washington Post reporter and editor David Finkel spent eight months embedded with soldiers of the Army’s 2-16 infantry battalion in Iraq during the surge. Finkel’s devastating and widely praised The Good Soldiers (2009) is based on the time he spent with the unit in Iraq. As I write this morning, I want to add that “the good soldiers” are chewed up in the war waged on them by the terror masters in Iran. It is a book that made me rethink our war in Iraq — to rethink it again — in a different way. If we weren’t willing or able to deter Iran from supplying the munitions that mangled our men, we should have kept the soldiers home for that reason alone.
Thank You For Your Service (2013) is Finkel’s sequel to The Good Soldiers. He follows a few of the soldiers from his first book as they return home, all but effacing himself from the starkly intimate scenes to which he bears witness. Reading this utterly brilliant book, one sees in the person of Army Vice Chief of Staff Peter Chiarelli (now retired) how the Army itself has struggled to come to terms with the stress disorders that Finkel memorably brings to life. One leaves the book wanting to learn more and do right by those whom we formulaically thank for their service.
Adam Schumann, a 2-16 soldier Finkel met in Iraq, becomes one of Finkel’s protagonists in Thank You For Your Service. The Pathway Home (at the Veterans Home of California-Yountville in northern California) figures prominently as a locus of sorely needed treatment for the demons with which Schumann contends. His graduation from the program after four months toward the end of the book is full of pain and hope.
Thank You For Your Service was published in 2013. Five years later, in a tragic real-life postscript, a veteran and former Pathway Home patient took hostage and then murdered the program’s executive director, Christine Loeber, Clinical Director Dr. Jen Golick, and psychologist Dr. Jennifer Gonzales of the Department of Veterans Affairs in San Francisco. The Pathway Home lost two-thirds of its leadership team. The murderer was a recently expelled Pathway Home patient who suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder.
Everything David Garrow writes is worth reading. He is a dogged researcher and scrupulous historian. Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama (2017) is a magnificently well-researched book. Among other things, Garrow conducted more than a thousand interviews over nine years for it. His compelling narrative runs to 1078 pages of text supported by 300 pages of footnotes (even though Garrow relegates his comments on Obama’s presidency to a 50-page epilogue). The interested reader will be surprised by Garrow’s discoveries as well as the level of detail that he has achieved. The historian David Greenberg suggests the riches on offer at Politico in “Why so many critics hate the new Obama biography.” Working on the book, Garrow secured a total of eight hours of off-the-record interviews with Obama. Oh, to have been a fly on the wall.
As I write this morning, I want to add that Jean Yarbrough separately recommended the Garrow biography in her contribution to the CRB roundup:
David Garrow’s comprehensive biography of Barack Obama, Rising Star, was largely ignored when it came out in 2017 because it concluded that Obama turned out as president to be a “hollow vessel.” Even if you don’t read all of this massive tome, the last chapter on his brief Senate stint and the epilogue on Obama’s presidency are not to be missed. I’d also recommend the insightful exchange in TABLET between David Garrow and David Samuels on the meaning of Obama.
Edward Jay Epstein was my beau ideal of a journalist. As I communicated my admiration to him, we became (mostly distant) friends. He burrowed inside an improbably large number of mind-boggling stories over the course of his long career—starting with Inquest: The Warren Commission and the Establishment of Truth (1966), a best-seller he wrote as a thesis for his master’s degree from Cornell. For that book Epstein reviewed the records of the commission and interviewed every member with the exception of Earl Warren. His thesis adviser was Andrew Hacker. When Ed died in 2014, Hacker told The New York Times: “It was the only master’s thesis I know of that sold 600,000 copies.”
At age 87, Epstein finally got around to telling the story of his own life in Assume Nothing: Encounters With Assassins, Spies, Presidents, and Would-Be Masters of the Universe (2023). As one might infer from the subtitle, Ed led an intriguing life. The book is by turns engrossing and hilarious. I have only one complaint about it: its 387 pages are not enough. It’s too damn short. Assume Nothing seems to me a classic American autobiography. Ed’s death this past January leaves a vacuum that will not be filled.
