Since nothing earth-shaking has happened in Real Life® lately, I thought I would recommend some books. But this isn’t a “best of my bookshelf” post: the best books I own you probably already know about. Instead these are the obscure but interesting ones: not necessarily recommended for everyone, but if one does catch your interest there’s a good chance you might not already have read it.

On The Psychology of Military Incompetence by Norman F. Dixon

Analysing a number of historical military disasters to find a common psychological pattern. Dixon shows how the structure of military training and promotion systems encourages a particular set of character traits, which have a tendency to lead to disaster. From memory I don’t think he uses the term “cognitive dissonance,” but that’s a significant part of the story (the book is cited in Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me), which I also highly recommend). There are all sorts of bizarre anecdotes, that leave you wondering how these wackos were ever allowed to order other men into danger — like the commander who sent out a reconnaissance party then (presumably to avoid having to hear the bad news) moved his command post but didn’t tell anyone where he had moved it to.1 Beyond these, though, the broad conclusions the author comes to are extremely relevant for anyone who wants (or doesn’t want but feels forced) to feel cynical about modern politics.

Like a Fiery Elephant by Jonathan Coe

The biography of BS Johnson, and both man and biography are fascinating. Johnson was an avant garde novelist, playing all sorts of weird games with structure. (One novel consists of loose chapters kept in a box: the reader should read the first one first and the last one last, but may order the rest as she chooses. In another, each chapter repeats the same action from a different perspective, and position on the page exactly corresponds to the passage of time, so that in each chapter the top half of the third page describes the same event.) He was also a fairly messed-up and sometimes highly unpleasant character. He upheld honesty as the most important measure of artistic merit2 but he lived in a world of constant self-deception. (The title comes from a student description which he liked to quote. Coe points out wryly that it’s very likely, given Johnson’s figure and poor classroom relations, that the child simply misspelled “fairy”, a possibility which Johnson apparently refused to contemplate.) He had ominous mystical experiences which never come into focus in the biography: he referred to them in his private writings but always, writing for himself, with the substance of the experience taken for granted. He committed suicide, and Coe successfully makes you feel both compassion for the pain that drove him to it and fury at the stubbornness with which he brought much of that pain upon himself.

Besides the subject matter, the amazing thing about this biography is how faithful it stays to the ideals of its subject. Coe writes about Johnson, but also about the process of trying to write in a way that Johnson would approve. He is explicit about his own emotional reaction to Johnson’s various foibles, and when he admits he can’t present an unbiased picture he gives instead extracts from letters, notes, interviews and so on, with little or no comment. It is honest in the broadest sense: true to the facts about this conflicted and often unpleasant person, but rich with empathy and compassion for him as well. It is also an extended exploration of what honesty can and cannot be in writing, and an attempt to test Johnson’s own principles by putting them into practise.

The Naming of Names by Anna Pavord

You might think that a book about the ancient and medieval names for plants would be boring. You would be wrong. Firstly, the cultural history is fascinating: how what we would think of as modern, scientific standards for describing plants (mainly for their medicinal properties) have gone in and out of fashion from Ancient Greece through the medieval Islamic world to the beginnings of the modern Western scientific revolution (she ends the book with Linnaeus, since the success of his systematic taxonomy takes all the interesting variation out of the story). But what really makes this book a keeper are the illustrations. Pavord has an extensive collection of plant manuscripts, often richly illustrated, and she has got reproduction rights for many more:3 the book is packed with full-colour plates ranging from a hyper-realistic Dürer watercolour of an anonymous piece of turf to a stylised medieval mandrake complete with human-form root (although Pavord notes with approval that the artist has accurately rendered the structure of the flower heads and berries). There are so many illustrations, and many are so beautiful, that I would be tempted to buy a second copy to dismember, to frame the highlights and hang them on our wall. If that’s not a recommendation, I don’t know what is.

Notes:

  1. No details or page references because I have misplaced the book, dammit. I think this one was during the Boer war. [↪]
  2. Yes I’m oversimplifying enormously, but it does seem to have been his chief principle. [↪]
  3. The text ends on page 402, and there are 158 plates: more double-page spreads have an illustration than don’t. [↪]