Highs and lows

We train young journalists to stay mostly low on the “ladder of abstraction,” using specific detail rather than lofty rhetoric: It’s important to go high sometimes to explain a theory, but the goal is quickly to go low once again. That also works for me in books.

Many academics write tomes about Vladimir Putin, but Ben Judah’s Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In and Out of Love with Vladimir Putin (Yale University Press, 2013) colorfully records his travels “to places where most Western journalists never go: catching rides in the trucks of wild gold miners on the ice road between Yakutsk and Magadan. … I tried to spend as much time as possible with ordinary Russians in unglamorous places, from the grease-bars of Kaliningrad to the roadside cafeterias on Nizhny Tagil and the mini markets of Khabarovsk.”

Judah’s street-level findings: Russia is in trouble. Marcel H. Van Herpen concludes the same in the second edition of Putin’s Wars: The Rise of Russia’s New Imperialism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), but he also sees the U.S. in trouble because of “Obama’s self-confidence in the field of foreign affairs.” Van Herpen examines the specific detail of military plotting based in Putin’s mix of “populism, nineteenth-century Bonapartism, and Italian fascism,” topped with an appeal to “traditional values” that has even hornswoggled a few American conservatives.

Walter Laqueur’s Putinism: Russia and Its Future with the West (St. Martin’s Press, 2015) has extended musing but lacks a clear thesis and tends to sit high on the ladder. Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy’s Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin (Brookings, 2013) shows how Putin has six personalities: The Statist, The History Man, The Survivalist, The Outsider, The Free Marketeer, and The Case Officer. Both books show Putin on foreign policy using blackmail, intimidation, and blatant distortion in the defense of Russia, domestically using Russian history as a tool, and in both realms relying on exploiting the vulnerabilities of others.

Other examples of measuring books not by their covers but by their spots on the ladder of abstraction: Michael Oren’s Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide (Random House, 2015) is boldly low, and Raymond Baker’s One Islam, Many Muslim Worlds (Oxford University Press, 2015) is obnoxiously high.

Oren grew up in New Jersey but became an Israeli paratrooper, and his thoughtful and enjoyable memoir jumps into his four years as Israel’s ambassador to the United States during President Barack Obama’s first term. There he dealt with the White House tendency to kiss up to Muslims who wanted to annihilate Israel, but also soothed congressional complaints about Israeli trade restrictions that denied Promised Land entry to 400,000 pounds of frozen Illinois carp.

Trinity College professor Baker, on the other hand, tells us that “Islam is telling an epochal story … of the cosmic human struggle for justice in the face of evil [as] Muslims stand with all other human beings in their dreams and highest aspirations.” Should we search for specifics, we’ll learn that “a river wends its way through this book. The river is Islam, the ‘River of Life.’ Its waters bring extraordinary generative powers. Midstream Islamic intellectuals report on the progress of the river, as it cuts innumerous channels through Islamic lands and to territories beyond.”

Short stops

The Encyclopedia of Ancient Christianity, edited by Angelo Di Berardino, Tom Oden, Joel Elowsky, and James Hoover (IVP, 2014) is an awesome work that libraries should have. Its 3,000-plus articles about the first seven centuries of Christianity show the breadth of the faith as it grew in Asia, Europe, and North Africa, and its depth: We can learn about depictions of Aaron and Abaddon, study how early Christians dealt with abandoned children and abortion, find out basic information about Abibus Dolichenus and other little-remembered early bishops—and I’ve only gone through AB in the first of three volumes that total close to 3,000 pages. I hope the Encyclopedia is available in heaven. —M.O.