Book 19

Charlie Wilson's War: The Extraordinary Story of How the Wildest Man in Congress and a Rogue CIA Agent Changed the History of Our Times
George Crile, Grove Press, NY, 2003, 550 pages.

The movie version of Charlie Wilson's War is a wildly humorous and fascinating romp. The book, too, is hilarious -- for a while -- and then downright sobering. The jokes in the movie can almost be boiled down to two simplistic images. One: watch Tom Hanks joke around in a hot tub with naked strippers. Woo-hoo. Two: put a shoulder-held anti-aircraft rocket onto a mule for a mountain Muslim and he can blow a Soviet helicopter right out of the sky. Ha ha ha. Now those pesky Russkys are finished. Actually, of course, not quite that simple.

One of the grave dangers of Hollywood movies is that they make James Bond/Bruce Willis/Will Smith/Indiana Jones/Matt Damon-Bourne operations seem so real and eye-popping. We movie-goers don't seem much inclined to admit such truths as: If just one James Bond car chase happened in a major city with multiple car wrecks and destroyed buildings and injured pedestrians and dead secret agents all out in the open on a sunny day, the resulting uproar could change international politics overnight. If just one Die Hard-style firefight actually occurred with a skyscraper destroyed by terrorists who were then all killed by some plucky renegade police detective, the result would probably be pretty much like the New York attack on 9/11. Such stuff may make exciting movies, but such realities could change the world for years to come.

In Charlie Wilson's War, the long, well-documented chronicle by George Crile, we get a lesson in covert global politics that we may not like. The book ought to be used as a text for courses on real-life governance. We see the secret but practical facts of international compromise. Here's just one: to injure the Communist Russians, the Communist Chinese sold weapons to the Afghan mujahideen through the Pakistanis -- all purchased with CIA money and matched by the Saudis, who were also giving a million dollars a month to the Contras in Nicaragua as a favor to President Reagan because Congress wouldn't let him fund a revolution with U.S. money.

This book is long for good reason; and even though it's funny, it's no joke. The events are exceedingly complex, and the network of people operating simultaneously, often on their own and around the world, can only be described and documented as a series of long involved and interlocking stories.

The deep truth is that one 24-style Jack Bauer is not saving the world single-handed. The truth is that dozens of Jack Bauers are trying to save the world -- all according to their own separate views of "the world" -- and some succeed, some fail, and a good number just interfere with each other. We usually don't know what any of it means until years later. Life is not a CSI show with clever hidden-camera movies of what-really-happened presented to clarify. Life is usually Who-killed-John-Kennedy with no answer in sight after 45 years of arguing.

So reading the 550-page explanation of the complexities and ironies and illogic and lucky and unlucky turns behind the real-life secret war in Afghanistan in the 1980s is much more than the romp in the movie.

If you read this book, you'll shake your head and laugh. You'll be amazed. You'll also think and think. If you can't stomach the thinking, don't read this book. Read this book, and you will not be able to fall back on rooting for the conservatives or the liberals, not this time.

On the final page of his account, George Crile says, "The story of Charlie Wilson and the CIA's secret war in Afghanistan is an important, missing chapter of our recent past. Ironically, neither the United States government nor the forces of Islam will want this history to be known."

I believe you will agree with him. What is more, Charlie Wilson's War itself supplies that missing chapter with great care.

I might never have heard of the book if not for the charming movie, and I almost certainly would not have read it. My fear is that this genuinely important story will soon be merely the source book for the amusing memory of a clever movie -- and then it will disappear as soon as the poster of Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts and Philip Seymour Hoffman begins to look "so yesterday."

Book 18

Chronicle of a Death Foretold
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, in Collected Novellas, tr. Gregory Rabassa, HarperCollins, Perennial Classics, 1981, 2007, paperback, pages 184-275.

This novella is what fabulous should mean: a tale full of wonders, words in strange knots, plus life lessons and gasping twists. A masterpiece of machismo, a New World blood wedding. The self-explanatory title of this riddle explains all and nothing, which is a good trick. The style of the story itself is macho, full of bizarre jokes and shrugged-shoulders facts that are incredible but treated as inevitabilities. It's as good an example of magical realism as anybody needs. In the first sentence, we know who will die. By the third paragraph, we know when and how. Then comes a 90-page show of dazzling power.