Roger Cohen

Roy Chapman Andrews was a childhood hero. For that matter, he’s still something of an adult hero. Paleontology as I worked at it involved peering at fossil brachiopods through a stereomicroscope until I went cross-eyed; Andrews lead a motorized expedition through Outer Mongolia, fending off bandit gangs with heavy machine guns mounted on his Model As while stopping now and then to pick up species new to science. (Well, I did twist my ankle once collecting in the Dolgeville Formation. And, while never encountering bandits, I did have a long conversation about property access with farmer who was repairing his manure spreader. It was hot day, too). This is a “young adult” book, picked up because it was in the $1.00 bin and I didn’t have a biography of Andrews. It does, alas, greatly exaggerate the amount of adventure involved in paleontology, but I doubt I could get the typical young adult interested in detrended correspondence analysis of Ordovician marine benthic communities or temporal variation in trilobite pygydia. I don’t have any reprints left, anyway.… (más)

Written by the NYT columnist, this rambling book traces the author's family from their native Lithuania in the late 19th century to South Africa, Israel, and England. The author interweaves his own childhood memories with historical research into his ancestors.

The book is beautifully written, though I sometimes found it a bit flowery, and prefer plainer prose. It's hard to characterize what the book is about- partly it focuses on Jewish wanderings and persecution, making the point that Jews can never really assimilate, no matter how hard they try (and Cohen himself is an atheist). But then much of the book is about his mother's Bipolar Disorder and the mental illness that courses through his family; he spends a big chunk of the latter part of the book on his Israeli cousin who also suffered from the disease.

The most moving part is Cohen's description of the impact on him and his sister, growing up with a distant father and a mother with unpredictable mood swings and little capacity to care for them.

A good read, anyway, but I think it could have been shorter and focused more on one thing or the other.… (más)

Roger Cohen's "Hearts Grown Brutal - Sagas of Sarajevo" belongs, for me, securely in that category of historical works, which includes Edmund Haller-Carr's "The Twenty Years' Crisis", which I wish fervently I had read earlier in my life, to aid with my understanding of what was going on during the 20th century.

Despite having lived half of my life during that period, and despite having had a deep interest in WWII, it was only when I read Haller-Carr's work, published in 1939, (one week before the war began), that I finally grasped the pre-programmed tragedy of the Versailles Treaty, and the series of diplomatic and strategic blunders that led to their inevitable conclusion. Cohen's exemplary and authoritative work detailing the factors leading up to, and the course of the Balkan War, was even more profoundly enlightening for me.

As a European, of course I'd "lived through" the Balkan War, albeit at a very safe distance in Germany. I had the benefits of being able to follow the proceedings on British and German Television News, and occasionally also in the printed press. However, during that period of my life, I was much occupied with other matters and experienced these images and reports as if through a train window shunting it's way at night through a goods yard. Occasionally the carriages would pass beneath a barrage of floodlights revealing scenes in alarming clarity, before trundling slowy into an enveloping shroud of greyness.
I recall passing by and seeing horrifying images transmitted into our living room, and thinking "Who's killing who now?"; seeing the shelling of Sarajevo and hearing the claims of the surrounding gunners that the bombed had in fact bombed themselves, and thinking "Who's fooling who now?". But the truth was that my doubts were only gut-feeling. I didn't know for certain, and simply didn't have the time to try to better my understanding. I just kept asking myself why nobody was helping. Why was this being allowed to happen, in the midst of Europe, within post-communist countries to which we'd recently held out the hand of welcome to our free and democratic, values-based community.
Mr Cohen's work has, for me answered all of these questions and more, including those about why Muslim lives in peril seemed to raise matters of moral relativism rather than a need to take action.
For those wishing to better their understanding of this cynical ending to a century which W H Auden may well have described as low and dishonest, as he did in "September 1, 1939" , then this book should be on your "Must Read" list.… (más)