John Walters

Book Review: Solo Passage: 13 Quests, 13 Questions by Glenda Goodrich

Posted on October 23, 2024 by John Walters

This memoir is Glenda Goodrich’s first book, and it is a powerful one. At the age of fifty the author began a series of wilderness quests, sometimes yearly and sometimes with gaps of several years. They would begin in a base camp with other participants and a guide or guides, but then she would go off on her own to a solo campsite, where she would fast for four days, drink lots of water, and seek answers to various questions about her life’s journey. Away from the usual accoutrements of her day to day existence, she hiked, prayed, danced, drummed, observed nature, and listened to what it had to say. On one quest she remained naked for most of the duration; on another, she deliberately broke the guidelines and brought along wine and chocolate so she could confront her feelings of guilt and fear. On yet another she ingested a tea brewed from the psychedelic plant ayahuasca; she envisioned stepping into a river of grief: hers, humankind’s, and the Earth’s. She concluded: “The answer was to let grief lead me into what is most alive in me: my art. I needed to take my broken heart and turn it into art. I needed to transform my grief into beauty and keep offering a way for others to do the same.” Each time she went out alone she would ask different questions, confront traumas from her past, and come back with new answers.

On one of the quests she asked, “Why had I waited so long to pursue what really mattered in my life?” What really mattered, in fact, was her fulfillment as an artist. Her writing is descriptive and profound, and she is also a very talented painter. In fact, the book contains an impressive color inset with several pages of her work.

Her accounts of her adventures alone in the wild leave the rest of us with no excuses. After all, as she became a grandmother and even a great grandmother, she continued to go on her spiritual journeys. What’s our excuse? I’m not saying that wilderness quests are for everyone; however, it is essential that everyone have the courage to in some way step out and confront their fears and traumas so that they can find inner peace.

As I read Solo Passage, I was reminded of times when I too made journeys into remote places in the pursuit of life-changing answers. For instance, once when I was on my first journey to South Asia, I found myself near broke in Pokhara, Nepal, unsure of what I should do next. On what I supposed was a whim I started walking alone into the Himalayas without map, sign posts, or guide. I found a tiny village where I spent the night, and the next day I continued upward until I found a remote hillock that I climbed and sat upon and contemplated my existence. I realized that I was running away from human society and all its complexities and perplexities and that I had to go back down and learn to live in harmony with my fellow beings. On my second trip to South Asia I was hitchhiking from Mumbai to Calangute in Goa but I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do when I reached my destination. I turned aside so I could spend a few days ruminating at a tiny, sparsely populated enclave on a more remote beach. On the way down to the shore, I left my belongings and even my shoes with a friendly villager and continued barefoot and without possessions. I found an abandoned grass shack at the edge of the water and spent three days there, meditating and pacing along the shoreline where the gentle waves met the sand. And once when I was staying in a cottage outside Kathmandu, Nepal, another traveler and I dropped acid at dawn; we then hiked into the foothills surrounding the city. As we were peaking on the psychedelic, we sat down on a hillside where we could see countless snow-capped peaks. For a time I even took off my contact lenses so I could explore my inner landscape.

These significant quests don’t happen often, but when they do, they can be life-changing. Even if you don’t feel that you would be up to spending days fasting in the wilderness, I recommend that you read this book. Its sincerity and commitment to truth will give you inspiration for your own life’s journey.

Posted in Book Reviews | Tagged inspiration, travel, wilderness quest | Leave a comment

Road Signs Is Now Available!

Posted on October 19, 2024 by John Walters

I’m pleased to announce that Road Signs: Tales of the Surreal and Fantastic, my thirteenth short story collection and thirty-seventh book, has just been published and is available at numerous online venues. Links to some of the major booksellers are below. Here’s what it’s about:

When a hitchhiker returning from an extended trip abroad in the early 1970s crosses the United States, he plunges into a dark, surrealistic, frightening landscape from which there seems to be no escape.

After a worldwide plague has decimated their city, four children searching for sustenance enter a seemingly deserted mansion, only to find out that its owner, a madman seeking the alchemical secret to immortality, has modeled it after an elaborate ancient torture chamber.

In the aftermath of the official cancellation of Medicare, Social Security, and other government welfare programs, a destitute senior is relegated to an internment camp for old folks. There he discovers that all is not as it seems, and the recalcitrant elders have some tricks up their sleeves that they can use to deal with the pitiless system that has banished them from its midst.

In these and other provocative, mind-bending tales you’ll find alternative realities, future battlefields, enraged poltergeists, mythological mischief-makers, and freedom fighters on a far planet.

You can find it at these and other booksellers:

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged fantasy, future, ghost story, haunted mansion, magic realism, science fiction, short stories, surreal | 2 Comments

Hitting the Pause Button Does Not End the Game

Posted on October 16, 2024 by John Walters

This afternoon during the time when I usually compose creative prose I instead took a walk. My ostensible purpose was a trip to the library, but in truth I wanted to clear my head and perhaps come up with an idea for my next writing project. As soon as I exited out of the apartment building into the clean cool fresh outside air I realized I had made the right decision. Even the heavy rainfall I encountered on my way home, sans umbrella, didn’t dampen my enthusiasm.

I have just completed a volume of memoirs and essays called Thoughts from the Aerie, the aerie being the fourth floor apartment in which I am at present ensconced. It has a magnificent view of the changing weather, and on a clear day through the trees I can even glimpse Mount Rainier in its snow-covered majesty far to the south. Sometimes, though, as I labor at my writings within my compact but comfortable domicile, I feel as if I have come to an end, that I will wander the world no more, that I have come to this place to grow old and die. When I get into this frame of mind I become depressed. After all, I have been wandering the world much of my life. When I set out on my travels in the 1970s one of the main purposes was to find my voice as a writer. If I stagnate in one place, wouldn’t the well dry up? So I muse in my darker moments. But as I walked under the overcast sky this afternoon, I realized that such was not my fate. I am a nomad. Even if the vagaries of destiny have cast me temporarily upon this shore, I remain a nomad in my heart. I don’t know where specifically I will go next, but that is beside the point. I have paused before in my meanderings, sometimes for long periods of time, but always eventually I have got up again and resumed my journey. It is not the temporary location that is at fault; it is the sedentary mindset that is my enemy. I often daydream of traveling. In fact, I wrote two novels in which I gave substance to those dreams: The Senescent Nomad Hits the Road and The Senescent Nomad Seeks a Home. (Spoiler: in the second book, as soon as the senescent nomad thinks he has found a permanent place to live, something clicks in him that causes him to want to set out on the road again.) I’ve also written memoirs about my world wanderings, and I have used my experiences living in other countries amidst other cultures to provide backgrounds and depth to my novels and short stories. It is the thought of solidification, of petrifaction in one location that thwarts and stymies and perplexes and befuddles me. For my creativity to remain fluid and dynamic I have to remember that regardless of my earthly locale I am a stranger in a strange land. We are all of us pilgrims and only temporary residents of the planet Earth, but it is imperative, for the sake of my art, that I do not forget this.

I’m a professional writer; I make my living by my words. I’m happy to share these essays with you, but at the same time, financial support makes the words possible. If you’d like to become a patron of the arts and support my work, buy a few of my available books or available stories, or support me on Patreon. Heads Up: I haven’t been keeping up with my Patreon posts recently – I have been posting here instead. If you head over there it should be for purely philanthropic motives.) Thanks!

Posted in Memoir | Tagged memoir, travel, Writing | Leave a comment

Book Review: America Fantastica by Tim O’Brien

Posted on October 12, 2024 by John Walters

Tim O’Brien is best known for his dynamic 1990 collection of linked short stories The Things They Carried, which concerns the members of a platoon of soldiers during the Vietnam War. In it, O’Brien draws from his experiences in the war; it is a devastatingly dark but deeply human look at a group of individuals attempting to cope with a hellish conflict that they do not understand. As I wrote in my review of the collection: Generally, O’Brien writes in an autobiographical tone, even using his own name when he refers to himself as a first-person character. It’s hard to know what’s fiction and what’s fact in the collection, and O’Brien alludes to that, intimating that it doesn’t matter.

In contrast, America Fantastica is obviously all made up. It’s a tall tale about a chronic liar who may or may not be named Boyd Halverson, a hero of the fake news networks who abruptly snaps, robs a bank, and kidnaps the petite teller. She turns out to be amenable to the abduction; in fact, she continually tries to seduce him and become engaged to him. In the meantime, they are pursued by her psychotic murderous ex-boyfriend, a psychotic torturer hired by Halverson’s ex-wife’s husband, and other unsavory characters. It is initially difficult to make sense of all the strange goings-on and satirical plot twists, but eventually, about two hundred pages in, everything falls into place and the book becomes very difficult to put down. At times it seems to be infectious nonsense, a comic book without pictures. In fact, it is one of the most entertaining and insightful novels I have read in a long time.

The underlying theme running through the book is America’s obsession with falsehood, a national malady that O’Brien calls mythomania, the lying disease, which at the time of the story, just before COVID shuts down the country, has reached epidemic proportions. It is promulgated in the novel by the current POTUS and by a nationwide grid of falsifiers who try to outdo each other by spreading more and more outlandish stories; it is epitomized by Halverson, who is so used to lying about everything that it becomes second nature to him. He hardly realizes what the truth is anymore.

Recently I read a book called Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator by Ryan Holiday, and it was perfect preparation for America Fantastica. The thing is, Trust Me, I’m Lying is nonfiction; it is an expose of a horrific malady flooding and overwhelming the internet of unscrupulous so-called reporters who generate clickbait stories out of their imaginations without bothering to research and find out whether they are true. O’Brien’s vision about a country inundated with falsehood, its citizens gobbling it eagerly and begging for more, is hardly even an exaggeration. This bodes ill for those who crave honesty and forthrightness as national and international standards.

Near the end of the novel, COVID strikes and the world goes into lockdown. However, this does nothing to contain the spreading and escalating of the plague of mythomania. Like COVID, it infects the vulnerable, leaving them helpless to its ravages. Some of the wild news stories that O’Brien’s fake news writers throw into the mix seem hopelessly far-fetched until I glance at current internet news feeds. I then realize that truth in the media is already in danger of extinction. O’Brien’s satirical spotlight is timely and essential. Highly recommended.

Posted in Book Reviews | Tagged COVID, mythomania, road story, road trip | Leave a comment

Hope and Grief: The Pacific Northwest Asian Experience

Posted on October 9, 2024 by John Walters

I first visited the Wing Luke Museum in Seattle’s Chinatown when I was invited to the opening of a temporary exhibit highlighting Asian science fiction and fantasy writers. The exhibit was on the main floor; it was so absorbing, and so many interesting people were there (I had a long conversation with the renowned author Ted Chiang) that I didn’t have much opportunity to explore the rest of the museum. This time, with the science fiction and fantasy section gone, I was able to focus on the museum’s core message.

On its three floors, the museum celebrates the history and art of the Pacific Northwest’s Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) community. The native son Bruce Lee is prominent, of course, in several exhibits, but there is so much more. Various rooms are dedicated to the historical experiences of South Asians, Cambodians, Vietnamese, Japanese, Chinese, and others as they immigrated to the United States and attempted to adapt to their new homeland. Fleeing for their lives and to make a better future for their children, they were often met with racism, denigration, oppression, stereotyping, and denial of access to good jobs and housing. Despite these obstacles, the new arrivals were determined to make it in this new land and opened businesses, often restaurants and laundries, raised their families, and even served in the United States armed forces.

As I perused the exhibits, it was easy for me to sense the hope that gave these people the impetus to keep struggling, despite the obstacles, to build their new lives. However, it was also easy to feel the all-but-overwhelming grief of being treated as members of a lower-class, relegated to poorer housing and infrastructure, and regarded with suspicion. For a long time the laws of the land forbade Asian immigrants from obtaining citizenship. During World War II, many Pacific Northwest Japanese Americans were interred in concentration camps. Even nowadays, Asian Americans are sometimes harassed on the streets and denied opportunities. Despite the animosity, though, the AANHPI community has persevered and even prospered.

When I first arrived at the museum, shortly after it opened, I was alone. I was able to explore the upper levels in peace and silence, for which I was thankful, but at the same time I wished that more people would become aware of and visit this amazing place. After all, apart from Native Americans, we here in the United States are all immigrants. Our parents or grandparents or great grandparents all came from other countries with similar dreams: to find a new land where they could build lives and raise their children in peace and prosperity. It is to our shame that we relegate any groups of our fellow immigrants to lower-class status; it is to their honor that they managed to succeed in spite of the irrational bad attitudes of many. Visiting Wing Luke Museum is a cultural experience, but it is also a moral and spiritual experience. It helps us realize the inestimable value of the AANHPI community to the totality of what comprises the USA.

Posted in Memoir | Tagged AANHPI, Asian American, Bruce Lee, immigrant experience, Wing Luke Museum | 1 Comment

Book Review: Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator by Ryan Holiday

Posted on October 5, 2024 by John Walters

I came across this book while searching for practical guidebooks on how to improve my website/blog. This is not that sort of book. It is, however, a fascinating look at the mindsets of people such as politicians and advertisers who seek to exploit the internet’s countless vulnerabilities to their own advantage. Holiday claims that for a long time he was as corrupt as anyone, an eager media manipulator out to make as much money as possible.

According to Holiday, there are very few people you can trust online. Almost everyone is out for themselves. News blogs are primarily after page views and clicks, and their writers care very little whether the sensational stories they upload are true or not. Better, they think, to go ahead and publish them and then – maybe – post an update if the so-called facts turn out to be untruths. The pattern is to post something, have it picked up by other news sources, and then use those sources that republish your story for verification that your story checks out. A wild sort of loop that feeds on itself. This all sounds too insane to be real, and yet Holiday, who has been deep in the trenches himself, gives multiple examples for every point he makes.

If we go by the title of the book, of course, we might conclude that we can’t trust anything Holiday says, and in fact that’s a valid argument. However, the book has intense verisimilitude. Anyone who spends any amount of time online can attest to what he writes. He claims to have written this book when he came to realize that the things he had been doing – and also witnessed many others doing – were too sordid for him to stomach. He wrote the book as an expose, and it is a much needed one.

He emphasizes that more than anything, news blog writers want their pieces to spread. That’s how they get paid. Hopelessness, despair, pity, and empathy are unhelpful in this context. What drives spreading are emotions such as “anger, fear, excitement, laughter, and outrage.” Provocation is the key, and it comes at the price of a blatant disregard for truth. This attitude not only drives sensational pseudo-news, but it also adds fuel to the present social and political polarities.

In the first half of the book, Holiday confesses his deep complicity in all this evil. The second half, he claims, which is more in the nature of a condemnation of it all, was written because his conscience bothered him too much. In a lengthy appendix added to this edition of the book, there are interviews with various other successful media manipulators. Although Holiday claims he wrote Trust Me, I’m Lying as an expose, several of the high-profile interviewees attest that they came up with some of their best and most successful ideas after reading the first edition of his book. Weird. It’s like a criminal’s confession leading to a whole swarm of copycat criminals.

As for me, the book has the opposite effect. I have no desire to emulate any of Holiday’s unscrupulous tactics. To the opposite: reading this has inspired me to be even more honest in my own essays and blogs, even if I never go viral and have only a few sincere, discerning readers. It reminds me of what Henry Miller once said, that he writes for “one true reader.” I looked up the extended quote and it goes like this: “The great work must inevitably be obscure, except to the very few, to those who like the author himself are initiated into the mysteries. Communication then is secondary: it is perpetuation which is important. For this only one good reader is necessary.”

I think that the greatest flaw in Trust Me, I’m Lying is that Holiday implies that everyone is dishonest, everyone is out for the money and for themselves, and there is no real truth to be found online. In this I think he is mistaken, and as you read, you should be on guard against this cynicism and despair. Yes, the internet is like a Wild West of mudslinging half-truths and downright lies, and it’s hard to find the gold amidst all the flung dung. But there are honest people out there sharing the truth as best they can. To find them you need discernment, wisdom, and persistence, but the search is well worth it.

Posted in Book Reviews | Tagged Internet dangers, media, media manipulation, news blogs | Leave a comment

A Visit to the Greek Festival

Posted on October 2, 2024 by John Walters

Most of the people visiting the annual Greek Festival at St. Demetrius Church in Seattle come for a brief sampling of another culture. For me, however, the event provoked nostalgia. After all, I lived in Greece for over fifteen years. My ex-wife and I raised our family there; we bought a house there; our kids went to the public schools; in summer we frequented the incomparably beautiful beaches. During the course of several conversations with people staffing the booths, I discovered that I’d spent more time in Greece than most of them. No matter. Besides the desire to stir up pleasant memories from some of the best years of my life, I was hoping to pick up some tasty Greek specialties that are all but impossible to find most times of the year.

I arrived when it opened at ten on a Saturday morning near the end of September 2024. That meant that I’d miss the music and dancing that was scheduled for later, but I’d also miss the heavy crowds, so the people running the booths had more time to chat. When they learned that I’d lived in Greece, we’d compare the locations I lived in with where their relatives were from.

The first place I wandered into was the gift shop, which sold jewelry, clothing, candles, paintings, sculpture, icons, books, and other items. I looked for Greek-language books for children but there were few, and then I realized that it didn’t make sense to buy anything for my grandson from there: at that very moment he was on vacation in Greece with his parents, and it would be much easier to find appropriate Greek-language educational products at the source. Plus, to be honest, most items were beyond my budget.

From there I wandered through the food venues. There was a room devoted to the sale of alcoholic beverages by the glass, including a wine-tasting booth. A taverna set up under a vast tent out back sold Greek cuisine such as lamb, roast chicken, moussaka, pastitsio, tiropita, spanakopita, kalamari, souvlaki, gyro, and other dishes. It was in the deli, though, where I made most of my purchases to take home and consume at my leisure. Just before Greek Easter, which occurred in May this year, I’d made a futile search for tsoureki, the special sweet Easter bread; here at the deli they had it in abundance, so I bought a loaf. I also bought some halva with almonds, some traditional holiday sweets called melomakarona and kourampiedes, some Halkidiki olives, and some feta cheese.

Later, after I had got home and broke out the goods, I was displeased with some of my purchases. The sweets and the olives were superb. However, the tsoureki bread was too dry; it crumbled when I tried to cut it. The tsoureki we’d bought in Greece when I lived there and that my ex-wife sent or my sons brought back to the States after visits was soft and easy to cut, and it pulled apart reluctantly. And the feta cheese from the festival was a bit rubbery instead of moist and crumbly. I didn’t expect the food to taste the same as the food we used to eat in Greece. Too many variables stand in the way of replicating the totality of the experience. Even so, I had supposed that the various tastes would help me recall good times thriving in Greece when my kids were young. In a video call with my ex I voiced my complaints, suggesting the possibility that they had sold me stale tsoureki. Not so, she emphasized. Tsoureki was made in two fashions, one dry and one softer and moister. It just happened that they served the dry style at the festival. As for the feta, it was made in diverse ways as well, and some people preferred the firmer version. This somewhat mitigated my irritation, but it also made me realize that to get the Greek food I remembered eating when we raised our family there, I’d probably have to pay a visit to get back to the source.

Posted in Greece: A Memoir, Memoir | Tagged festival, feta, Greece, Greek cuisine, tsoureki | Leave a comment

Book Review: Red Team Blues by Cory Doctorow

Posted on September 28, 2024 by John Walters

Not long ago I attended an author reading at which Cory Doctorow was promoting his new novel The Bezzle. It features Martin Hench, a forensic accountant with the acumen to uncover the money trails of super-rich criminals. He functions as an unusual type of private detective, recovering funds for various wealthy individuals and organizations and in return receiving a hefty percentage of the take as his reward. The Bezzle is a sequel to Red Team Blues in that Red Team Blues was published first; however, Red Team Blues is a sequel to The Bezzle in that the events in The Bezzle begin in 2006, when Hench is actively pursuing his unique freelance work, but Red Team Blues takes place in modern times, when Hench, now sixty-seven years old, is ostensibly retired and wandering California in a bus-sized RV that formerly belonged to a rock star.

Like The Bezzle, Red Team Blues is told in first person by Hench himself. He has an engaging, intelligent, dynamic voice, much like Doctorow. It’s hard to escape the feeling that the Martin Hench series is a wish fulfillment for Doctorow: if he were not a fulltime writer this is what he might be doing. Also like The Bezzle, Red Team Blues is not exactly science fiction because it does not speculate about anything that is not already happening, but it has the feeling of science fiction because it deals with cutting edge technology with which most of us are unfamiliar.

As I read, I was struck by how much Martin Hench reminded me of an elderly James Bond. He helps out an old tech friend, rescuing him from a theft that might have cost billions or even trillions of dollars. He is paid hundreds of millions for his services, and thereafter, as he eludes the criminals who want to torture and kill him, he has unlimited financial resources. So like Bond, he has cool vehicles at his disposal, he can check into the fanciest hotels and eat at the fanciest restaurants, and you get the impression that he is never really in any danger, even after he has discovered the bodies of a group of young people who have been cruelly tortured and murdered for the information that he possesses. Despite his age, he seems to have limitless strength and energy and can go all day and into the night without undue weariness. I’m seventy-one and in very good health for my age; I can tell you from experience that someone who is sixty-seven is not in his prime. At the least he would have to pace himself. Oh, and one other thing: through the course of the story he meets several wealthy, elegant, attractive women, all of whom are at least a decade younger than him; all of them are infatuated with him and he easily seduces them – or they seduce him. I share these observations not to put you off, but to explain that the novel, while blatantly unrealistic, is nevertheless highly entertaining – just as James Bond films are, if you go for those sorts of things.

One thing that I greatly enjoyed was Hench’s wandering lifestyle. He is a fulltime van dweller, and he often parks his RV overnight at Walmart parking lots, at least until he comes into his sizeable fortune and begins booking remote private campgrounds. (Walmart is renowned for allowing van dwellers to use their lots and public bathrooms.) I also liked the part in which, to avoid high-tech scrutiny, Hench is forced to go underground for days by joining the homeless on the San Francisco streets. He shuts down his electronics, pulls his meager belongings around in a “bundle buggy,” and sleeps in abandoned buildings or outside in empty lots.

All in all, Red Team Blues is an extraordinary book, Martin Hench is an engaging if unlikely hero, and Cory Doctorow is one of my new favorite authors.

Posted in Book Reviews | Tagged Cory Doctorow, Martin Hench, thriller | 1 Comment

Book Review: Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away by Annie Duke

Posted on September 21, 2024 by John Walters

We all know the old adage that “winners never quit, and quitters never win.” In this fascinating book, Duke sets out to disprove it, and for the most part she succeeds. In fact, persistence can take us so far, but if it turns out that the goal we are pursuing becomes unobtainable, we are only going to win if we quit that path and take another.

To back up her premise, Duke shares examples of sports figures, business executives, entertainers, mountaineers, and others. She also draws extensively on her own past. Poor health caused her to have to abandon her ambitions in higher education. As an alternative, she took up professional poker playing. In poker, she had to fine tune her awareness of when to quit and when to proceed – large amounts were at stake when she made these decisions.

All of this caused me to look back and see how these principles have applied to my life. And of course I could come up with numerous examples. I completed a year of college and then realized that higher education wasn’t for me; the experience and skills I needed to become a writer I could attain more efficiently by living life and reading books. I also spent several months living in Los Angeles and learning to become a screenwriter. I even had a friend who was already a successful screenwriter and was guiding me in the craft. However, I eventually decided that this was not the type of writing I wanted to do, and from there I took off on my world travels, to obtain exciting experiences and to write about my adventures. On one occasion, when I was down and out in Nepal, I took a walk into the Himalayas along an unmarked mountain trail – to see what I could see. I got up close to the snow line, but I eventually had to turn around and come back down (quit) because I was unprepared and it would have been too dangerous to go farther. At various points along my path, I’ve opted out of relationships, jobs, and other situations when I realized that they would not be beneficial in the long term. I’m sure that all of you have had similar experiences.

So I found Duke’s advice to be thought-provoking and helpful. I like it best when she focuses on personal situations; I have to admit that the book becomes slightly less interesting along some stretches in the middle when she tells prolonged stories of businesses and business leaders – something I cannot not really relate to. However, overall the lessons she imparts are sound. Sometimes in certain situations quitting is the best thing you can do. Many people don’t tend to see this, however, at least not at first, and Duke explains why. For instance, they fall for the sunk-cost effect, which makes people reluctant to abandon a project in which they have already invested considerable time and money. Or they accomplish the easy parts of a project first only to realize that the cost of accomplishing the rest of it is far too high. Or they set goals and then become myopic about seeing them through, refusing to pay heed to the warning signs all around them. Or they fall for the cult of identity, refusing to deviate from the image they have built up of themselves. Whereas if they would accept the limitations of their talents and situations, they could accomplish much more.

In closing, this is a well-researched and well-written book, and it is a worthwhile read for anyone (everyone) who has to make important decisions as they proceed upon life’s path.

Posted in Book Reviews | Tagged decision-making, goals, persistence | Leave a comment

Book Review: Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World by Anne Applebaum

Posted on September 14, 2024 by John Walters

Anne Applebaum is the author of weighty historical tomes such as Gulag: A History and Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956, both of which I have read and deeply appreciated. Gulag, the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 2004, tells of conditions in the Soviet prison camps during the Cold War. In my review of it I wondered why someone would write about such traumas and why I was reading about them; the answers, of course, have to do with remembering and honoring the survivors and hopefully learning from the ordeals they went through. Iron Curtain deals with a different type of trauma dispensed by the Soviet Union: the subjugation and crushing of the peoples of Eastern Europe after World War II. The Cold War polarized the world into opposing camps. In Autocracy, Inc., Applebaum explains that the world is once again becoming increasingly polarized, but this time into democracies and autocracies, which she also refers to as kleptocracies. Those running autocratic governments are intent on holding onto their power and obtaining riches at any cost, and they use the authority of their positions coupled with the propaganda potential of social media to make this possible.

Applebaum is well qualified to offer this profound and well-researched warning. She has been studying the history of communism and worldwide politics for decades. She speaks several languages, including English, Polish, and Russian, and she resides in Poland, from which she often conducts research and interviews in the field.

Compared to some of her earlier tomes, Autocracy, Inc. is a small, fairly short book, an overview of present political realities and the historical circumstances that have led up to them. In short, it argues that the autocratic governments of the world such as Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and others work together to destabilize the world’s democracies via propaganda and economic intrusion, and she explains in detail how this is accomplished through news networks, social media misinformation, surveillance technologies, corrupt corporations, and other means. Part of the danger, according to Applebaum, is indifference and lassitude in democratic countries, so that incursions by autocracies go unobserved and unchecked. In the end, she offers several possible means of combating global kleptocracy, but to be effective these involve the cooperation of democracies on a major scale. They include, for instance, complete transparency of international real estate transactions, the dismantling of large-scale money laundering operations, increased regulation of social media platforms, the reevaluation of global trade relationships, and a unified emphasis on freedom and the rule of law.

It is easy to become paranoid while reading this book, because it seems that those ruthlessly intent on exploiting the peoples, systems, and wealth of the world, due to their immorality and willingness to resort to any extremes to get their way, have the upper hand. Even in the United States there are powerful individuals and organizations intent upon imposing autocracy on the rest of us. However, there are solutions, as Applebaum points out, if only we care enough to implement them.