"Human Smuggling and Border Crossings" by Gabriella Sanchez

This short book is eye-opening for anyone interested in the issue of illegal migration into America. The author is a former police interviewer who became an anthropologist and the book is a detailed case study of border crossings in the Phoenix/Maricopa County area. This book is bound to make you think of the role of coyotes, the American southern border policy, and the process of immigration in general, both legal and illegal, differently. Its narrow focus on the act of the crossing and not the "before and after" of the lives of illegals is invaluable. 

Sanchez's research dispels the notions that most smugglers (coyotes) 1) are part of organized criminal networks 2) are always men 3) don't normally have close familial, friendship, or cultural ties with the migrants 4) don't develop reciprocal bonds with the migrants 5) have previous criminal records, either in America or Mexico 6) are career operators or do it as their primary source of income 7) don't live within the communities that they help 8) are involved in other illicit activities like prostitution or drugs 9) rely on violence to receive payment 10) make extensive profits. After expenses the typical profit is $200 per person 11) do not protect and care for the health of migrants. Many smugglers treat their charges as collaborators and not as cargo 12) have bosses or leadership that they report to or kick money up to. Instead, many coyotes work in an informal, reciprocal, horizontal, ad hoc basis, usually with family or friends to help family, friends, or those with references from migrants they previously had helped cross. 13) are not among the most respected hubs within the illegal and legal migrant community. Sanchez's book helps to sort the realities of illegal immigration on America's southern border from the myths.

“Recovery” by Helen DeWitt

This novella by DeWitt packs a lot into every line. It is serious, funny, and just a little bit strange. DeWitt takes the everyday and turns it on its head to reveal the inner weirdness inside all of us. With lines like, “when you pass a strip mall, what you’re seeing is people who imagined a whole market out there in the world of people just as pathetic as they were. Enough pathetic people so that a store catering to the needs of pathetic people could cover its overheads and turn a profit,” she invokes biting criticism of modern society, capitalist culture, and fellow humanity, all with wit. One of her characters has a cheese-fetish, along with his alcohol addiction, “of course, you could say, it’s not in the spirit of one day at a time. But see, I might be able to handle ordering $3,722 worth of cheese on one day but not be able to handle buying, you know, an 8 oz stick of Monterrey Jack on an as-needed basis daily or bi-daily or weekly for years. Maybe that single day is the only day I can count on being able to get through, you know, the shit associated with cheese acquisition.” DeWitt has the gift of making something so bizarre seem so rational. It is this taut blend between the fantastic and the mundane that makes “Recovery” such a perfect story.

“Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” by Ludwig von Wittgenstein (translated by Frank P. Ramsey)

This short book of logic was the only work of Wittgenstein’s published in his lifetime. He warns in the preface, “this book will perhaps only be understood by those who have themselves already thought the thoughts which are expressed in it.” Despite this dire warning, the book, nonetheless, does prove useful, even to those not so immersed in formal logic and philosophical conjecture. He states that the aim of his book is to “draw a limit to thinking, or rather- not to thinking, but to the expression of thoughts; for, in order to draw a limit to thinking we should have to be able to think on both sides of this limit (we should therefore have to be able to think what cannot be thought). The limit can, therefore, only be drawn in language, and what lies on the other side will simply be nonsense.” A main theme of Wittgenstein’s is to parse out the purpose and limits of language. “Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be said can be said clearly.” Furthermore, he delineates, “colloquial language is a part of the human organism and is not less complicated than it. From it it is humanly impossible to gather immediately the logic of language.” On formal logic, specifically, he states, “a logical entity cannot merely be possible. Logic treats of every possibility, and all possibilities are its facts.” Later he clarifies, “logic is not a theory but a reflexion of the world.” On theoretical reasoning, he comments, “an a priori true thought would be one whose possibility guaranteed its truth. Only if we could know a priori that a thought is true if its truth was to be recognized from the thought itself (without an object of comparison).”

Wittgenstein has quite a lot to say about the true nature of philosophy. “Most propositions and questions, that have been written about philosophical matters, are not false, but senseless. We cannot, therefore, answer questions of this kind at all, but only state their senselessness…. Philosophy is not one of the natural sciences. (The word “philosophy” must mean something which stands above or below, but not beside the natural sciences)…. Philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity. A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations. Philosophy does not result in ‘philosophical propositions’, but rather in the clarification of propositions. Without philosophy, thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and indistinct: its task is to make them clear and to give them sharp boundaries.” As was Wittgenstein’s nature, he later complicates his own thoughts, “philosophy is the discipline that deals with all those propositions that are assumed to be true without proof by the various sciences…. The inexpressible is contained- unexpressed- in the expressed…. There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.” Wittgenstein’s riddles often leave quite a handful to ponder. He ends his book with another warning, “my propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly.” Finally, Wittgenstein cautions, “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

“The Complete Patrick Melrose Novels” by Edward St. Aubyn

This is a collection of five short novels, “Never Mind”, “Bad News”, “Some Hope”, “Mother’s Milk”, and “At Last”, which together span about 860 pages. Fictionally, the books span most of the protagonist’s, Patrick Melrose’s, life. The novels track specific momentous events in Patrick’s life, each proceeding after long biographical gaps, giving vignettes of the aristocratic life of the Melrose clan, beginning when Patrick is five and ending when he buries his mother, as an adult, with two young boys of his own. In fact, each novel takes place over a single day in Patrick’s life, albeit interspersed with flashbacks. His life might be considered the focus, but the drama is seen through the eyes of multiple characters. In the meantime, there are vast sums of money spent, inheritances and disinheritances galore, bitterness, rape, pedophilia, heroin addiction, philosophy, snobbery, erudition, cults, affairs, deaths, Freudian analysis, and plenty of British humor. These books combine all I like best as an Anglophile. The humor is ironic and perverse, in a naturally British way. The character development is supreme. The characters are both relatable and so distant all at once. The plot is serious at times, but always on the threat of facetiousness. The story is gripping, but at the same time, incidental to the hilarity and morbidity of the characters. The novels were all breezy reads, but perfect little books.

“Seven Pillars of Wisdom” by T.E. Lawrence

This is a memoir of Lawrence’s part in the Arab Revolt against the Ottomans during World War I. It reads like an action novel, interspersed with penetrating insights as to the fundamental nature of man. Lawrence is a keen judge of character with a terrific eye for detail, both of his surroundings and of men in his company. This makes his prose flow in flowery, yet unpretentious, bursts. Lawrence was having the time of his life on the Arabian Peninsula and it showed. Even before the campaign started Lawrence had spent years in the Middle East, was fluent in many of the Arabic dialects, and was well versed in Bedouin and Turkish history. In Feisal, the aging Sherif of Mecca’s most competent and inspiring son, he found a face for the Arab insurrection- a modern prophet of the desert. The Bedouin were a hard, simple people given to Manichaean dichotomies and a strict code of honor, valor, and glory. 

Lawrence’s memoir makes great sociology of the Arab people in general. The outdated facts sometime still reveal the most essential character. “The Wahabis, followers of a fanatical Moslem heresy, had imposed their strict rules on easy and civilized Kasim [a town]. In Kasim there was but little coffee hospitality, much prayer and fasting, no tobacco, no artistic dalliance with women, no silk clothes, no gold and silver head-ropes or ornaments. Everything was forcibly pious or forcibly puritanical…. It was a natural phenomenon, this periodic rise at intervals of little more than a century, of ascetic creeds in Central Arabia. Always the votaries found their neighbors’ beliefs cluttered with inessential things, which became impious in the hot imagination of their preachers.” Lawrence was at his flowery best when describing the character of the men he fought with. In describing one minor sherif, “he feared his maturity as it grew upon him, with its ripe thought, its skill, its finished art; yet which lacked the poetry of boyhood to make living a full end of life.” 

Life in the desert was an adventure; one saga after another. Lawrence had studied the military strategy and tactics of Clausewitz, Jomini, and Napoleon while at Oxford, but he relied as much on improvising by the seat of his pants as grand strategy. He was often hindered by his own British command or by the predilections of his Arab charges. They liked big noises. It was no matter that machine guns were rusty, cumbersome, and not ideal for mobile desert warfare. Of more tactical use were the mines and dynamite that he lined the Hejaz Railway, linking the Turkish garrison in Medina with supplies from the outside world. His aim was to never let the Turks assemble in mass, to never create a front, and, instead, make the Turks guard multiple flanks, stretching them at all points with hit and run maneuvers. This was guerrilla warfare in the desert, with probing, raiding, and individual valor taking the place of formations and fixed battle. It was not always a brutal war, however. Lawrence admitted that, “we felt sorry always for the men of the Turkish Army. The officers, volunteer and professional, had caused the war by their ambition- almost by their existence- and we wished they could receive not merely their proportionate deserts, but all that the conscripts had to suffer through their faults.” 

Lawrence’s greatest hardships were desert rides spanning hundreds of miles on the back of a camel without food for days, in search of the next oasis to water himself and his ride. Often he would sleep in the saddle, sometimes drinking putrid water from wells poisoned by Turks, and occasionally was forced to kill one of his own mounts to eat the camel meat. Well, perhaps his greatest hardship was the time he was caught spying inside an Ottoman occupied village, had to feign being a Circassian conscript, and was brutally beaten by the Turkish officers when he did not yield to the sexual advances of the provincial Governor. For the rest of the war he was mostly able to avoid other contact with the Turks and their bullets, mainly being attacked by fleas, scorpions, and dysentery. 

Lawrence’s greatest success, with Fiesal’s help, was uniting the disparate nomadic tribes in a spirit of national Arabness. “Fiesal brought nationality to their minds in a phrase, which set them thinking of Arab history and language; then he dropped into silence for a moment: for with these illiterate masters of the tongue words were lively, and they liked to savour each, unmingled, on the palate.” By the end of the war Lawrence had been campaigning among the Bedouin for over two years and his loyalties remained divided between the British and the Arab armies. He was never at comfort amongst either. After the capture of Damascus he asked leave from General Allenby as to not be part of the British betrayal of the Arabs, foretold in the Sykes-Picott agreement. “The essence of the desert was the lonely moving individual, the son of the road, apart from the world as in a grave.”