Reading

On the "to read" list for this fall:

One Bullet Away by Nate Fick - I've already read 2/3 of this book. Nate Fick is an ex Marine Corps officer who have done tours in both Afghanistan and Iraq. If you've seen Generation Kill you know who he is. It's a very well written book that gives the reader a good idea of what Nate Fick experienced during the war but also a look inside the Marine Corps. To me it's a book about a person who joined the armed forces because he wanted to make a difference in the world and found himself in the middle of a war nobody really thought would happen and that he didn't sign up for. It's about leadership and teamwork. And like Nate himself was told: "There are only two kinds of people in the world - those who piss in their wetsuits and those who lie about it" (I love that metaphor).

Which are you?

Continuing on the same theme:
Where Men Win Glory by Jon Krakauer - about a millionaire sports star who joined the U.S Army after 9/11 only to be killed in Afghanistan. The U.S Army tried to conceal the truth about his death: that he in fact was killed by friendly fire.

I guess war history has always interested me, history lessons about WWII got my attention while Swedish kings were immensely boring. Afghanistan and Iraq haven't quite made history yet but I think we all need to learn as much as we can about what's going on, so that we hopefully never do it again. It's is also interesting to learn more about what goes on behind the obvious and what we are shown by the press or on the news. Maby all things are not what they appear to be and we need to educate ourselves so that we can form own opinions.

I also saw a really good movie on this theme a couple of weeks ago. I stumbled upon it, due to the fact that I'm having a little bit of a Channing Tatum obssesion at the moment. Stop-Loss is about soldiers returning home from Iraq thinking they have done their duty only to be arbitrarily forced to go back by the army. Apperently this happens a lot.

I'm also going to read Richard Dawkins, both The God Delusion and The Greatest Show On Earth mainly because intelligent design and creationism kind of p-ss me of. Read more about Dawkins here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Dawkins

Finally, I'm also going to read more about something that I'm also very interested in - genocide history. Waiting in my bookshelf is the brick Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur by Ben Kiernan. In the review of the book on the webbpage for Yale University Press you can read: "Kiernan examines outbreaks of mass violence from the classical era to the present, focusing on worldwide colonial exterminations and twentieth-century case studies including the Armenian genocide, the Nazi Holocaust, Stalin’s mass murders, and the Cambodian and Rwandan genocides. He identifies connections, patterns, and features that in nearly every case gave early warning of the catastrophe to come: racism or religious prejudice, territorial expansionism, and cults of antiquity and agrarianism. The ideologies that have motivated perpetrators of mass killings in the past persist in our new century, says Kiernan. He urges that we heed the rich historical evidence with its telltale signs for predicting and preventing future genocides."

So that's my plan for this fall.